Lunar Follies (6 page)

JOLIOT-CURIE

In letters of purest jade: MY LINGERIE IS WORTH MORE THAN YOUR CAR; of shocking pink neon: WOMAN, WOOGIE OR BOOGIE?; of rarest lapis lazuli: ART IS GOOD BUSINESS; of pale bauxite: THERE ARE NO MASTERPIECES; of matte beryllium: I SMELL LIKE A DOITY SKOIT; of Hungarian chalcedony: BIG LOFTS ARE BIG FUN; of scarlet aluminum: DON’T CELEBRATE YESTERDAY; of rhinestone bakelite: CHE BABA CHE BABA CHE BABA; of salsified pearlite: FUCK EL GRECO; of lodestone ebony: MEN ARE PISSERS. Barbrah Joliot-Curie’s conflicting and intrusive MESSAGES, all of which tend toward the metaphysical noise that may be termed the emblematic substitute for what was once mistakenly valorized as a value-based system of so-called “high art,” implicate and suggest a complex, actually, of shifting signs, arranged so as to transgressively subvert modes of corporate anti-colonialist, pre-magicorealist inscription. This gesture is never enough to make one embrace the rebarbative, as Benjamin implies, and rush, metaphorically, to Dom’s Heroes for one of his famous “hoagies,” and yet it is
almost
enough. In point of fact, Dom’s Extra-Special Hoagie may be culturally indexed as an authentic work of petit-bourgeois, working-class art, and, as such, asserts itself as a proletarian icon whose task it is to displace the various capitalist icons of nonrepresentational complicity. “Hoagies, A Meal in Itself,” as Dom’s shrewdly hand-lettered sign states—the grammatical paradigm carefully distorted so as to render the normative plural singular—boldly insists on the labile, collapsing the symbolic into nothing more than an aporia. And the naïve injunction, EAT MY SANDWICHES, IT’S DELICIOUS!, in glossy black on white cardboard, becomes, then, a radically salutary act of cultural infringement.

JULES VERNE

A cluster (bunch) of disparate items (things) some of them words, and nothing else but words, HUDDLE(S) in the corner LIKE smokers outside a building. So crack (expert) JOURNALISTS often (more times than you can shake a stick at) WRITE. The things (items) pretend to be art, but they are, essentially, a bunch (cluster) of shit (crap). “We’ll see about that!” one thing (smoker) notes, apparently from among (amid) the disparate items (buildings), for all (everybody else) to see.

Jules Verne,
Les aventures du Capitaine Maison,
1864

JURA MOUNTAINS

A staggered pile, something like a perverted, tortured ziggurat in shape, of fawn-colored bricks, many bricks, much too many to be counted, sprawls across the floor of the Kansas Jura Gallery. The whole is transgressive of something, even subversive, but of what? The piece might be a static representation of an early Stones tune married, gloriously, with a “drone-and-squeal” sound project by the Lombardo Collaborative. The bricks, in their essential posture of gestural, defiant decrepitude, manifest a core transgressive spirit (if “spirit” is not too grandiose a word, and if Jamón is to be given any credence, it is not), one that is rigorously detached from the paradigmatic pieties of the fading Zeitgeist and the late phallo-millennium. The occasional fly that settles on the bricks serves to recall their primary significatory duties, as if these everyday
objets
are, indeed, no more than horseshit, even though that may be their
nominative
potential, rather than their constative one. In any event, as signifiers, they gesture toward the salutary emptiness that one discovers in the spaces of a poem by Mallarmé, and never in the words themselves. It is, then, Mallarmé to whom we must turn in order to permit this haunting, oddly rhomboidal construct to assert its cone-like, cubist, empty qualities, qualities which are, at once, always terrible, absent, yet eerily sublime, and, perhaps most movingly, qualities that insist on the absence that is within the implied absence of the brick pile itself. The sun which slants in through the quite perfectly grimy skylight touches the work with the poignancy of nature forgotten if not nature betrayed, nature ignored if not nature assaulted. The silent and somehow disheveled construct seems to emerge, at such times, from the very earth itself, and its stillness is that of the greatest, or, at least, the pleasantly mediocre, works of art.

LAKE OF DREAMS

Film Loop

A man talks to a woman who turns out to be his wife, since she has always been his wife, although, at present, she is slightly different, or perhaps it is that she was slightly different in the past. She is wearing the grey, fitted suit that he has always liked, black patent leather pumps, and sheer, off-black nylon stockings. The drinks at the bar, for they are in a dim and quiet cocktail lounge, which await the man and his beautifully dressed wife, for she is, he admits, his wife, are on a tray, and yet no waiter is present; for that matter, no barman is in sight. Charles seems to be his name, or so he said. The drinks are four—two in champagne flutes and two in cocktail glasses. Those in the champagne flutes are of the palest steel blue, a blue so utterly pale that it verges on the colorless; it is the color which gave to gin the beautiful name,
blue ruin.
Those drinks in the cocktail glasses are cerulean blue, the blue of Apollinaire’s fake Texas skies. He calmly says, “Blue ruin is a beautiful name,” and looks down at the cocktail lounge from a stingily appointed office, one of whose walls is glass from floor to ceiling. It is through this glass wall that he looks to see his wife, now sitting at a different table, and dressed in a navy blue suit, her legs crossed so that her thighs are discreetly yet provocatively exposed. “Your skirt,” he says to her, but she cannot hear him, of course. Who is the relentless person behind him, who is talking, talking, talking to him as he tries to think of a way back to the cocktail lounge, to the woman who is his wife, to the glamorous and unearthly drinks, to his youth and her young womanhood? To scotch and the clean whiteness of their belated wedding day, lovely and dreamily out of focus? Who, for Christ’s sake,
is
this mother fucking bastard? Some homeless lout who should have died in the gutter yesterday? The man who speaks gibberish from out of the moon? Some kind of mastermind?

LANGRENUS

What, precisely, was it about Claude Langrenus, often called the King of Transgression, the Broom King, the Emperor of Mustard, Royal Claudie, and, most usually, simply the King, that prompted so many distinguished photographers of the San Francisco Bay Area to take, conservatively speaking, thousands upon thousands of photographs of Kingorooney, as he was known to many, photographs of him in the performance of everyday tasks, tasks that one might think too trivial to occupy, even for a moment, the King of Ideas and Theatre, as he was occasionally dubbed? The “scholarship of the image,” to which we owe so much, has collectively determined that there are presumed to be, roughly, some 43,976 images of Lord Faucet, as he was known to close friends, and, remarkably, that those images represent the King of Canned Tomatoes, as that legendary figure was called by the beloved street urchins of San Francisco, city of fogs and food, of hills and highways, of crystal air and cable cars, of art, art, and ever more art; and that the “tomato monarch” may well be Langrenus himself, shown in a number of mundane activities and things that appeal to the sophisticated citizens of” Kansas on the Bay,” as The City is known to its oldest residents, some of whom were last seen in Noe Valley looking for signs of life on the quiet streets. Langrenus, or the King of Tomatoes, or “Larry,” is seen admiring an organ grinder’s monkey, and, in a few cases, an organ grinder; running in terror from a bear who is attacking a youthful companion; laughingly strapping on a “lady’s helper”; being cheated by a three-card monte dealer while he smirks the smirk of chumps everywhere; fleeing in panic from a Pekingese who is chewing on an old woman’s knee; buying a deluxe edition of
Théâtre Epinal
by “Chet”; pissing up a rope. Just who
was
Claude Langrenus? Prize-winning chemist, multimillionaire inventor, hack novelist, wretched playwright, furniture designer, fashion plate, and much-loved lecturer on the horror of phallocentrism in the rest room, yes, yet happy to be thought of as, simply, King Corn Flakes. These remarkable photographs, a mere sampling of the rich treasures stored in the vaults of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor Annex, will not tell us. Sadly, the King of Oxycetabutylinase, as he was teasingly called by the hobos, rakes, and ladies of the evening of Russian Hill, remains a mystery to all—still
another
mystery shrouded in the fogs and mists of the brooding Bay Area that many call home!

LONGOMONTANUS

Corporal Wing is chopping celery in the company mess and in the meantime Chinese mortars are laying down elegant patterns of death with lazy, terrible precision, the gooks, as they are called on this wall placard (hereon “Gooks”), can put a fucking round right up your ass if you’re unfortunate enough to bend over. It’s an inspiring collage, now you see him, now you see him as little chunks of seared flesh and splintered bone whizzing through the air. In full color. One magazine, ball ammunition, lock and load. And setting off the stirring photos of soldiers going about their everyday business is a wonderfully
honest
shot of Second Lieutenant Arthur M. Codgille crisply saluting the First Sergeant, Robert Swanson, with his left hand, it’s adorable, the picture nicely set off with a border of OCS patches. A comic-strip balloon, in, as someone once mysteriously said, “lonely majesty,” contains a message, to wit: THEY TOLD US WE WAS EE-FECTING A STRATEGIC WITHDRAWL, BUT ACKSHULLY WE WAS FLEEING IN WILD DISORDER. And here’s an authentic mess hall sign: Salusbury steak au juice, mash potatos, string beans, apple sause, mix salad, bread and butter, milk, coffee, ice cream. Ready on the right. Take all you want, you pussies. Ready on the left. Eat all you take, you cunts. And here is what seems to be a deposition by one Corporal John Roy Whitfield, Infantry, an astigmatic and slow-witted machine-gunner. Ready on the firing line. Corporal Whitfield’s complaint stipulates that various (and numerous) members of his platoon pissed on him throughout a long night during which he slept drunkenly in the urinal trough of the second platoon’s barracks latrine. The flag is up. No fucking
way.
The flag is waving. To treat a fucking noncommissioned officer. The flag is down. In the fucking United States Army. Commence firing. And a swell line drawing, delicate as all get out, left as a farewell note by a man whom the hogs ate soon after he went to shit, a diagram, actually, of how to string empty beer cans, each containing a few pebbles, on concertina wire. The whimsical caption reads: “When the clinkety-clink of the pebbles against the interiors of the cans is heard by the alert gunners, they can fire with the reasonable assurance that they are going to blow apart any fucking gook unlucky enough to be part of an initial assault, oh yes.” Stand at ease, soldier! How long have you been
in
the Army? The walls are brilliantly yet soberly painted in shades of khaki and olive drab.

[EXHIBITION CONTINUES ON SECOND FLOOR]

MOSCOW SEA

And here at last is Sir Banjo Hyde-Morrissey’s private collection of erotica. The titles of the drawings, prints, mezzotints, gouaches, woodcuts, and watercolors on display follow: Bagpipes in the Boudoir; Eating La Musette; The Burgemote Horns and Their Doxies; Presentation of the Giant Champion Bugle to the Young Queen; Blowing the Massive Horns of Westminster; Shock Tactics and French Ticklers; The Depraved Trumpeter at St. Anne’s Nunnery; Lifelong Companions, or, Asshole Chums; Queers at Table, with Gewgaws; Warriors Blushingly Confess; Albanian Musician Discovering Yorkshire Pussy; Young Ladies, in Deshabille, Fleeing Albanian Janitors; Serbs Humping Albanian Janitors, or Anybody; African Women Doing Dirty Things with Their Colonialist Oppressors; Burmese Musicians and a Popular Sponge; Apollo, with Harp and Hard-On; David Playing the Harp with Hard-On; Bellhop, with Hard-On and Pears; Woman Gazing at Hard-On in Window; Corinthian Kate in Cellophane Underwear; Harp and Details of Harp, with Hard-On and Apples in Shadow; Jeune Demoiselle Touchant “La Harpe”; Lady Playing Harpsichord, with Self-Abusing Boy in Doorway, and Daffodils; Politician with Organ-Grinder’s Monkey, with Banana, in Naples; An Increasing Nuisance Concerning a Lady’s Privates; A Band of Savoyards at Orgy, with Stuffed Kestrel; College Professors Liven Up Another Meeting, with Scattered Papers; University Don with Old Lecture Notes and Hard-On; Grotesque Scenes of Deviltry with Monkeys, on Windy Moor; Norwegian Lutherans Disrobe After Barn-Raising, with Lutefisk and Lingonberries; The Celebrated American Pianist, Bellowman, Mounting His Steinway, with Peaches and Onions; Mother and Dad Beneath the Chifferobe; Violin Hump; Lady Mary Campbell Tries a “Rubbing” with Dr. Joseph Hollman, the Old Viennese Prongmaster; Dr. Joseph Hollman Fiddles While Lady Campbell Pollutes Herself; Dr. Hollman Dons Lady Campbell’s Intimate Garments, with Zucchini; The Garden Fairy Orchestra of Canterbury Tuning Their Dildoes; Dildoes in Action, with Quince and Rutabaga; Lady Mary Campbell Brings Joy to the Garden Fairy Orchestra; Hungarians Frigging Dr. Joseph Hollman, in Legumes and Forage Crops; Hungarians Frigging Lady Mary Campbell; Hungarians Mounting Borrowed Lutefisk; African Women, with Pears and Hungarians; Albanian Janitor with Head Under Corinthian Kate’s Skirts; The Boys of St. Bart’s and Lady Mary Campbell Playing “Lost in the Gorse”; Old Waitresses in Love with Grotesque Monkeys; Waitress with Ass in Skillet; The Chef Examines His All-Girl Staff; Lady Diner Admiring Sommelier’s Tight Trousers; Diner with Hard-On Sampling Ferret Paté; Young Woman Smiling at Filthy Thought; College Professors Touching Thighs on Dais, with Name Tags and Bow Ties; Woman in Kitchen Watching Monkey Humping Casserole; Leather Madness Bewitches Waitress; Romberg’s Symphony Orchestra in Carnal Frenzy, with Toys and Language Poetry Manifesto; Lady Mary Campbell and Her Vibrating Oboe; SS Einsatzgruppenführer Discovering Louisville Slugger in Rectum; Quartet Party in Nude Frolic on Lawn, with Dried Leaves and Canned Peas; Henry Norman Surprised Anew in the Boys’ Room; The Famous Vienna Lady Orchestra Let Themselves Go; A Morning Ride, or, Unnatural Congress Between Lady Julia Pemberton and Her Stallion, “Lucifer”; Jenny Lind and Max, the Polish Tenor, with Charlotte Russe, Gourd, and Corsets; Miss Lind in the Puttit Inn Motel, with Ham on Rye; Madame Nellie Melba and Father Dirk Scucciamenza Between the Pews; North Dakotan Monkeys and Lotte Peschjka-Leutner with Her Sister, Candi Brittnee, in Bondage Frolic; A Musical Doctor Alone with a Prized Student’s Skirt; The Village Choir at It Again, with Lawn Jockey; Wandering Minstrels with Lutes and Exposed Privates; Mabel A. Royds Corrupting Altar Boys, with Missals; The Delaware Minstrels Discover the Joy and Warmth, Courage and Heartbreak of Gay Life; and, perhaps the most remarkable item, a rare and perfect dry-platinum-and-alum-process linoleum blocking of Cleveland and Billy Hill in their Great Double Song, Dance, and Buggery Act, with Banjos and Trombones, Cricket Bats, and Hand-Colored Daguerrotypes of Lady Edith Tyne-Fforke and Lady Martha Barley-Headde, Aspiring Pilots Both, Legs Akimbo, Sweating and Moaning Beneath a Perfect Replica of the Tattered Union Jack Flown by Lord Nelson at Trafalgar and the Second Battle of the Nile.