Lunar Follies (3 page)

CAUCASUS MOUNTAINS

The Odradek, the first one to be placed on public view in the United States in more than a century, has been, we are told in the helpful catalogue, prepared by Tobias Blumfeld for the Prague Zoological Society and Marching Band, “preserved … in what analysis shows to be a solution of equal parts hydrogen peroxide, lemon juice, and triple-distilled 160 proof Ukrainian vodka.” Discovered three years ago in a grotto in the Caucasus, the small creature has been seen, and marveled at, in museums the world over, before his arrival in this country earlier in the year. From here, the Odradek will travel back to what will be his permanent home in Azerbaijan’s National Wool Museum. Although the bits and pieces of thread, tangled together, as always, that are wound about the little creature are varied in color, as we have come to expect, these threads seem remarkably
new;
that is to say, one expects, somehow, the Odradek to display “raiment” that is as old as himself—and star-scholars agree that this particular specimen is between 800 and 1,100 years old. For the Odradek to flaunt threads newly manufactured when
he
was already centuries old diminishes the little being’s “presence,” of course. One hastens to add, however, that this diminishment is neither profound nor, finally, important. As a matter of fact, the colors of the threads (azure, rose, chartreuse, burnt orange, alabaster, pearl grey, butter, and lavender) are so striking as to constitute an authentic, enduring beauty as they flutter against the matte, off-black contours of the Odradek’s five-pointed body, and the dull mahogany of his crossbar with its cunningly attached rod. The little creature stands upright and utterly still on his wooden rod and one of his star points or “legs,” although it is apparently possible for him to heave himself onto his dorsal surface, despite the fact that no one has ever seen him do so; nor has anyone ever seen the little fellow resting in what may be thought of as a supine position. Viewers gaze long upon the Odradek, fascinated by his curious, modest charm. Most, when queried, admit that they are beginning to hear him speak; according to mountain legend, the Odradek’s lightest word is able to change his hearers’ lives forever.

CLAVIUS

Rejected Works: Otto Clavius Contemporaries

“Slightly Menacing Shadows,” Jeanne Souze; “Luminous White Dresses,” Emiliano Soreau; “The Snowman, His Tiny Eyes Glittering,” Isidor Martin; “A Wife, or Was She a Whore?,” Donald Chainville; “Blue Enamel Bulb,” Ann Jenn; “Barely Moving On,” Russell Cuiper; “Cigarette Hysteria,” Emilia Sladky; “Lost Items of Clothing,” Bill Juillard; “Depraved Scenes of Village Life,” Leonard Bacon; “Amid a Cloud of White,” Ronald LeFlave; “The Holocaust of Books,” Edward Carmichael; “Refinements of the Baroque,” Stephen Alcott; “The Far Side of the Lake,” Isabella Stella; “Freak Cartoons,” Ivan Hounsfield; “The Blue Hamper,” Jonathan Tancred; “The Distinguished Publisher,” Ström Owns; “Fragments of Malarkey,” J. Branch Bex; “Evidence of Pain and Anger,” Ramp St. James; “Life-Sized Doll,” Harlow Warbucks; “Molten Blue Metal,” Jed Whag; “Tin Pig Behind the Door,” Frank Hector; “Cuisine Noire,” Cassandra Ballesteros; “Wading in the Shallows,” Sandor Skariofszky; “The Carnal Jitters,” Bridget Agostin; “Her Fiancé’s Mother and Two Older Sisters,” Sydelle Lelgach; “Translucent Spheroids,” Marcus Tommie; “Distant Female Figures in White,” Gregory Balbet; “The Maddening Cassandra,” Bart Ballesteros; “The Long Bitter Night Was a Snowy One,” Olga Chervonen; “The Delights of Housework,” Claudia Bedu; “Myrna Felt Like Undressing for the Conductor,” Yolanda Philippo; “The Meaning of the Past,” Claude Urbane; “Wife of an Adulterous Banker,” Claire Hounsfield; “The Storage of Gardening Equipment,” Moko; “The Great Sculptor,” Archibald Fuxer; “Closed Door of Thick Blue Steel,” Joshua Bex; “A Pathetic Attempt at Comedy,” Barbara Frietchie; “Two Spectral White Trees,” Robert Bedu; “Maddened, Quarreling, Screaming Crowd,” Claude Luxo; “Sweet Guilt,” Norman Bob; “Three Determined Strokes of Cadmium White,” John Cerjet; “World of Chips,” Sheldon Marius; “Glossy Black Chinese Teapot,” Caleb Bex; “Onrush of Twilight,” Solange McCarty; “Unwanted Reflections,” Hubert-Allen Zipp; “Jaded Desk Clerk,” Lafcadio Bob; “Bottle of Worcestershire Sauce,” Raoul; “The Brilliance of the Moon,” Luigi Borsalino; “The Murky Stage of His Recollections,” Corporal Hitler; “Clothed in Gleaming White,” Theodore Rosa-Rose; “Three Young Women of About Seventeen,” Alex Found; “A Flash of White,” Ursula Grüntéd; “A Panel of Christian Experts,” Senator Weep; “Navy Blue Melton Overcoat,” Emilie Bex; “Girl in the Cellar,” Rondee; “Helga, the Hermit Ghost,” Benno DeLux; “Too Good to Be True,” Gain Doyle; “Three Women in Newspaper Hats,” Ford Hills; “This Vast Desire,” Willis Took.

Open 24 Hours, Through December 18th, No Photos!

CLEOMEDES

These are portraits and busts of Cleomedes, “Eddie C,” created from imagination, fantasy, sketchy and unsatisfactory biographies, and forged records, not to mention suspect memories and poorly written yet loathsomely reverent memoirs (which recall Céline’s dry remark, “every virtue has its contemptible literature”), and the anecdotes of friends and enemies, all of whom are rather sweatily trying, as they say, to look their best. So then, whatever his true visage, it will not be found here, that seems certain. More interesting, at least to some, is that in about the year 125, we are told, Cleomedes had the radical idea that the earth is round and that the moon, when full, is actually the face of a bloated, imbecilic, and acne-scarred God. His inability to explain the moon’s weird shapes in its other “phases” made him, or so a contemporary memoir suggests, a “figure of fun.” Cleomedes also worked as a creative consultant on such songs as “Carolina Moon,” “The Moon Is Blue,” “Moonlight Serenade,” “Moon River,” “On Moonlight Bay,” “Moon Love,” “Moonglow,” “Moon Over Miami,” “Moonlight Becomes You,” “The Moon of Manakoora,” “Alabama Song,” “Moonlight on the Ganges,” “Moonlight and Roses,” “The Moon Was Yellow,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” “Moonlight Cocktail,” “Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me,” “The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady,” and “Why Do They All Take the Night Boat to Albany?”. The smallest of eleven busts, hammered out of a matte-nickel alloy, shows him smiling somewhat sardonically, if not cruelly. Most neo-historicist theorists as well as critics of trenchant opinions agree that this unassuming piece is as close as we are likely to come to an accurate depiction of “Eddie C,” for it has been generally accepted that the figure shown is caught in the moment before singing, or, perhaps, chanting, “O moon of Alabama, we now must say goodbye.” At the very least, this essentially pedestrian exhibition allows the patient visitor a chance to appreciate the “home truths” and mending walls, so to speak, behind the bias of the structuralist radicalization of representational male iconography, no small feat, especially when it is realized that there is but one bathroom on the floor and that one “Out Of Order.”

COPERNICUS

A Collage

On a kind of moor, as it is called in England, there sits a castle, much the worse for the neglect of centuries, within which a small band of elderly men regularly discuss the elements of natural philosophy, while toying each with his soap-bubble set. These sets are unusual, to say the least, configured, as each is, of a glass ball and a star game, the latter secretly manufactured, or so it is rumored, in either the Palace Hotel or the Golden Key Hotel, both located in Jersey City, New Jersey, a city which Max Ernst (or perhaps Tristan Tzara) called a “surrealist box,” an odd cognomen for a city best known for its extraordinarily lascivious, not to say obscene portraits of the lewd twins, Ondine and Rose Hobart. Some of the elderly men occasionally mutter of the lost bookstalls of Fourth Avenue in Old Manahatta, which, some aver, they frequented every night with, as one likes to shout in a cracked, phlegmy voice, “torch and spear!” Another, almost invariably, begins, at this precise moment, to read, for the first of three or four times,
The Children’s Party,
a “compelling, compulsively readable” memoir of a man who humped not only his sister and his mother, but did so as a practicing, militant homosexual, a member of the Republican Party of Alabama, and a storied bore.

“A Legend for Fountains,” a portrait of the castle’s original tenant, Sir Joshua Nymphlight, has been well-nigh obliterated by the dirt, soot, and smoke of centuries, which may be, or so the jape goes, all to the good, seeing that Sir Joshua dreamed the forbidden aviary dream, that fearsome dream sometimes known as “the green dream,” “the fairy dream,” or, most often, here on the windswept moor, “Jack’s dream.” There are stories still told by rosy, and, of needs, dancing fireplace light, of the riotous midnights, the hearts on velvet sleeves, and the unspeakable services rendered Sir Joshua and his rakehell friends by Tilly Losch, one of the famous whores of indeterminate sex of that corrupt era we now call by the simple yet ominous term, the “Object Era.” Pharmacies, or what we now know as pharmacies, but which were then simple “egypts,” did a stupendously lucrative business when the crazed whoremongers and their bawds and morphodites—under contract to Mrs. Losch—spilled forth from Sir Joshua’s chambers of sin and perversion to avail themselves of salves and poultices to still the burning of the “codpiece fever,” as Ben Jonson termed it, that consumed them. These revelers christened the castle the Pink Palace, and in later years, the sounds of timbrel and calliope, of lute and viola da scuccia and bonzophone emanating from the fabled pile in the rendition of such airs as “Follow Thy Faire Sunne,” “Baby Marie,” and “Oh You Beautiful Doll” drove the livestock, for miles around, into that special frenzy peculiar to England and all things English, from their crown jewels and greasy bangers to their derby days and dumb Irish jokes.

During the long evenings and longer nights of droning argument and wayward discussion among the elderly sages, bumpkins, reprobates, drunks, and others who comprised “the Group,” as the castle’s devotees of unabashed sloth were thought of by the bemused if essentially moronic townspeople, Paul and Virginia often frequented one of the small shire’s penny arcades, the one, incidentally, that featured—proudly—three vaguely perverse portraits of Lauren Bacall in her salad days: one as a Medici princess, one as a Medici prince, and one as a Medici commoner. The background, in each of these depictions of the famed star, was, so the portraitist was supposedly heard to say, the Hôtel du Cygne in Paris, the deluxe establishment that had been the dream and triumph of Mrs. Spyros Apollinaris, and that patterned the configurations of its rooms and suites on that lady’s manipulations of her specially designed “solar set,” a kind of ultra-sophisticated ouija board that was the final creation of Rose des Vents, the celebrated fundraiser, artisan, marathon runner, and secret cocksucker to the stars, who was, to one and all in the demimonde, Mademoiselle Cassiopeia.

Paul and Virginia almost always found themselves, toward dawn, in the corner of the penny arcade known as the Grand Owl Habitat, a curious name for what was, in essence, a shooting gallery that had been rescued from the ruins of the Hotel Eden, a rambling apartment hotel designed, for some reason, now lost to students of the faux baroque, to look like the Pink Palace. The curious targets in the gallery were somewhat crude depictions, almost caricatures, of Juan Gris and his parrot, Griselda; the Grand Hotel Semiramis (where Jean Cocteau is said to have been surreptitiously “born again” into heterosexuality); and a miniature model of the Blue Peninsula, complete with its legendary corks and narcotic newspaper prose. Virginia almost always tried to hit each kind of target, the prize for success in this endeavor a cheap rhinestone tiara that had once belonged to Missy Vanessa, the “whore princess” of Omaha, or a hand-colored plate, imaging, in amateurish bas-relief, some sort of unrecognizable animal surrounded by infirm representations of a spavined horse, a sinking schooner, and a Chinese bottle with a dancing grasshopper inside its narrow fastness. “The Mooch,” who managed the arcade, a man known to many as the Ice Traveler, would show Virginia, and Paul as well, after Virginia’s inevitable, one might say predictable failure of marksmanship, a thimble forest with beehive, as perhaps, a consolation prize, and smilingly, or, as Paul thought, leeringly, call her the “Snow Maiden.” “Where’s the book with the marble,” Paul would ask, almost as if instructed to do so, “John Donne’s keepsake?” But there was, of course, no “book with the marble,” as Paul well knew. The Mooch, who greatly disliked Paul because of the young man’s obvious intimacy with Virginia, would offer him, in lieu of this imaginary “book,” a book with a
window,
a dressing-room for exhibitionists, a pantry ballet, and Jacques Offenbach’s last cheese carton, one made of wood and perfect for holding scores of baseball cards. Strained laughter ensued.

As this nocturnal adventure ran its course, as it did on many evenings, within the confines of the penny arcade, the elders in the castle set their gaming tables in preparation for an evening of Black Hunter, a version of the Korean board game of great antiquity, Box with Corks and Other Corks. The winner of the previous month’s marathon match would dress himself in the clothing which closely imitated that worn by Rose Castle, the semi-mythical madam of the brothel known, as far back as the Crusades, as Taglioni’s Jewel Casket; and a romantic ballet, homophobically yet courageously perverse in its brutal choreography, would be performed by “Rose Castle” atop a souvenir case wheeled in by the masked men affectionately called “The Little Mysteries.” This band of assistants had been in charge of wheeling the souvenir case here and there, whenever and wherever required, for as long as anyone could remember, as far back, as a matter of fact, as the castle’s moldering records went. Then the game began, its opening always the same, the traditional, staid, yet excruciatingly impenetrable and inexplicable move that had been christened, by Mad King Ludwig and The Three Musketeers, “Glass in Naples.” As the game progressed, a parlor constellation, with both rattle and music box, was softly illuminated by two beautiful maids who were always known as Emily One and Emily Two. The Emilys would, at times, at the direction of a particularly playful elder, add a sand fountain that had graced Apollinaire’s Cuban mansion to the display, and sometimes, too, a slot machine that was believed by some to be the handiwork of the beautiful Caravaggio.