Lunar Follies (9 page)

[MONTAGES ARRANGED ACCORDING TO BURLOWSKI’S “THEORY OF CHANCE ALIGNMENTS”]

ROOK MOUNTAINS

MODA MILLENNIUMA FOR SPRING: La Verne’s new glittering array of silk shirts in vibrant, slambang colors, boldly inspired by the works of famed abstract painter, Mark Rothko, whom La Verne says that she has “just adored” since she first encountered his thrillingly pulsing blob-like shapes; Chic Keaton’s profligate dazzle of skirt stylings, sexy and marvelous drapes patterned directly on the “wonderful architecture” of famed abstract painter Piet Mondrian’s “Manhattan” pictures; famed abstract painter Jackson Pollock’s tragic yet inspiring representations of his teeming tragic emotions and repressed homo-eroticism are brought to tingling life in the hipper, “less unfriendly” versions to be discovered in the “urbopolitan” bedding designs of Percy de Abramowicze; the primal, deeply honest, abidingly tough, slashingly calligraphic strokes of famed abstract painter Franz Kline’s
hommages
to unknown Japanese masters, as well as to his Polish-German coal-miner parents, discover a new, quietly content life in the warmly masculine and chastely acerbic spring loungewear collection by Renatita Iglioni, the “queen of the pointed tongue” turned fashion giantess; the unlikely and even somewhat disturbing stylistic marriage of famed abstract painters Willem de Kooning and Jasper Johns, astonishingly breathes forth jagged yet strangely beautiful designs for beachwear, cruise togs, and lingerie, whose strong hints of unbridled fetishism will surely renovate the slightly faded glamour of ChiChi Van de Conte, justly notorious for his “Tiny Tits” swimsuits for serious dieters; although famed abstract painter Andy Warhol has been, by rag-trade consensus, “fucking worn out already,” his mythical Campbell and Brillo forms, seen through the immaculate eyes of Alameda de Las Pulgas, become brilliant motifs for her line of lushly tinted boxer shorts and T-shirts, which permit us to “like question the nature of art and talent anew,” and “ditto,” says Ms. de Las Pulgas, for famed abstract painter Pablo Picasso, and his masturbatory obsessions; and, finally, there is what can only be called the stone-bitchin’ hottest of the spring shoe stylings, the Guston Klunkers, as Sueda Vochsse, marketing director for Bruttafigura of Milano, has slyly dubbed them. “We’re virtually certain that these shoes, boldly based on forms first developed by famed abstract painter Philip Guston, will be the most sought-after fashion statement of the season. It’s quite humbling to realize that craftsmen bootmakers, like those at Bruttafigura, can make great, inspired art even greater and more inspired by means of vision and world-class craft and persistence and Old World devotion to excellence, all linked to a first-class marketing campaign and a few blow jobs in the right place and at the right time—only kidding!” The Klunkers will be suitable for walking, sitting around, and power napping, Ms. Vochsse notes.

SEA OF CLOUDS

Black-light lamps, placed carefully around the room, and selected, as you surely know, with the sneer that passes for witty irony in this sophisticated time of the businessman-comedian-writer-host-actor, illuminate found objects—salutes to the gauche past—that clutter the place: Regrets and mercies, taxes and napalm, sex and marriage, installment plans and out-of-tune pianos and cauliflower, the end of the road, the end of the game, the end of the party, and four o’clock in the rainy morning; gravestones in Brooklyn, bitter-cold funerals, wet black trees, rubber soles in hospital corridors, oxygen tents; the sun on the beach and on that beach and on the other beach; the smell of clean hair, awed love, thighs and bathing suits, dumb lust; whatnots, snots and sneezes and coughs and dark-brown blood; c-rations, lustrous carbines smelling of gun oil, combat boots and smudged brass and the snap and whine of 0.50 caliber slugs overhead, canned fruit salad on the mashed potatoes; old photos, yellowed lace, a black mantilla, spatulas, cooking spoons, wood-handled forks, cast-iron skillets with black silken innards; cannoli, cassata, oil and garlic on the fusilli and a bright drift of parsley; gas refrigerators, wooden potato mashers, long dark hallways and musty hampers, leg of lamb, string beans, boiled potatoes, green mint green jelly green, a two-way stretch girdle and Evening in Paris; the sun on Sheepshead Bay; lanolin wild root brylcreem vitalis vaseline and torn underwear, smiling mouths, straw boaters, creamy vests, Packards, DeSotos, Hudsons, LaSalles, and flat packs of English Ovals; whiteness of Twenty Grands, Sweet Caporals, Wings, Herbert Tareytons, Virginia Rounds, not to mention heartbreak loneliness and despair; lies and self-pity, questions and sobs and wails and regrets and death; flowers, recriminations; priests in black and gold and crepuscular churches, candles and incense and the gleaming monstrance, censers and Jesus Christ Almighty and Sister Veronica; sweet perfume and sweat, sweet odor of thighs and breasts, of young women in flat straw hats and spring coats, of virginity; the wind come up off the Narrows, fish and salt, clean, remote, sound of buoys distant, and the bridge, a drawing in the haze and fog, and the barely recalled laughter of dead women. “Don’t see nothin’ too goddamn funny
here.”

SEA OF COLD

Death loves a mystery. Death can’t get started. Death in high heels. Death makes the world go ’round. Death in a Class A uniform. Death at the Dakota. Death your magic spell is everywhere. Death is here to stay. Death goes to the movies. Death is marching on. Death travels to Samarra. Death and his pal, Destruction. Death loves to kiss you good night. Death makes the heart grow fonder. Death dislikes magazines. Death only has eyes for you. Death is back in town. Whatever Death wants, Death gets. Death is where you find it. Death in the rain, Death in a blue dress, Death in Havana. Death on the golden sands. Death says “hi” to Bunky. Death and taxes, Death and taters, Death in Texas. Death to intelligence. Death to bad art. Death is a little bit of heaven. Death in Venice. Death in Des Moines. Death makes a deal. Death is a bitch. Death is a bastard. Death makes a lot of sense. Death fears no man. Death is a consumer, a sap, and a sucker. Death goes along singing a song. Death on a pale horse. Death hates all religions. Death don’t like ugly. Death can’t run in the mud. Death laughs at life. Death bes not proud. Death likes to hone his craft. Death walked right in. Death gets that old feeling. Death don’t want no peas and rice and coconut oil. Death he’s got no bananas. Death eats antipasto twice. Death needs killin’. Death and modern English usage make a great team. Death sends a little gift of roses. Death couldn’t have done it without the guys. Death and the end of the novel in love. Death and history, Death and love, and fun at the county fair. Death goes to the country. Death don’t get around much anymore. Death takes a course in creative writing. Death walks the dog and rocks the cradle. Death in grey flannel. Death marching marching on the burning sands. Death in Central Park. Death in love with love. Death gazes long into the mirror. Death bids farewell to the old gang. Death enters the sweepstakes, plays the lottery, bets a saw on a long shot, draws to an inside straight, and craps out over and over again. Death is pissed off. Death loses all the time. Death boils bagels. Death fries eggs. Death discovers girls. Death discovers boys. Death will hump anything. Death is gay sort of. Death at the end of the tunnel. Death saw you last night. Death scrambles eggs. Death in Glocca Morra. Death invents a couple of new diseases. Death loves to tango. Death returns to the South. Death in the French Quarter, in Brownsville, in Dyker Heights, in Ozone Park, in Tottenville, in the pool and ocean, river and creek. Death takes away the sweet. Death plays a kazoo. Death chewin’ on a cracker. Death don’t give a fuck about you or me or anybody else, or all arrogance of earthen riches.

Art from the Transcontinental Traveling AIDS Project

SEA OF CRISES

A Film

Black night, black rain falling outside the windows of a brightly lighted room, within which a meeting has come to a barely discernible order. “A meeting about what?” A man, obviously a real-estate agent by the look of his too-expensive tie and shoes, not to mention the Mont Blanc pen in his shirt pocket, rises to address the people in attendance, who shout at him despite a pinched-face, cadaverous woman’s call for order and decorum for God’s sake. What is her name? And what gruesome diet has she embraced to make her resemble a handful of broken straws, to make her legs so pitifully thin that her stockings bag and wrinkle at knees and ankles? The Auschwitz diet? And what is the real-estate agent’s name? “I don’t understand this part of the picture, especially the fat man who has appeared in the doorway on the right?” The starved woman looks at the fat man, not understanding his presence in the doorway. Has not this door always been closed? “Are these horrible people supposed to be
tenants?”
The real-estate agent has removed his tie and shoes, and plans, or so it would seem, to speak. The tenants rise and begin to dance. “Did they dance like
that
back in the old days?” What old days? There is a sign on the wall (seen for the first time) that notes, in large black letters, NO VACANCIES. Where is it stated, in what contract or its bylaws, that such signs are even permitted in impromptu meetings such as this one? “Stated?” Black night now enters the room at last, preceded by black rain and the usual bitter cold. “Ain’t California, man.” The tenants have left. The real-estate agent gives his skeletal assistant a kiss as she reads from a book of mediocre feminist poems,
Purple Gentian.
“Who is the author of this lousy book?” Fake soldiers in Class B khakis enter the room, their brass dull and smudged, their patches and chevrons sewn on crookedly, their shoes scuffed and spotted with what looks to be dried vomit and Christ only knows what else. “These guys are
soldiers? ”
They stand out starkly against the black night, starkly and a little artily. The room is, let us be clear about it, a freight elevator, in which the skinny woman, her lips swollen with sexual excitement, gazes at her boss, who is now a different man altogether, one who pretends that his name is not Arthur, the name that his amorous assistant calls him by. “Is this guy the same guy as the guy before with the tie?” Thus the indispensable magic of cutting-edge cinema, so they buzz, buzz and trumpet. “Buzz and—wotthefuck?—trumpet?” The elevator stops at the sub-sub-basement and the doors open onto an
echoing and dimly lighted parking garage.
NO VACANCIES trumpets the sign on the wall, a sign that may well have been transported from an earlier place, or scene. And yet, the garage, echoing and dim, is virtually empty of automobiles, another mysterious image, or at least symbol. “For like, life?”The tenants, however, have all gathered here, and they are once again shouting at Arthur in a language that is not comprehensible, even though it is clear that Arthur and his flushed assistant, who has quite shamelessly removed most of her clothing, not only understand it, but are repelled by it. The fat man, it is now apparent, is the tenants’ leader, although he pretends to be raptly studying a diagram of the sub-sub-basement, whose only legible words, at this distance, read:
You Are Here.
“Is that the name of the movie?” The real-estate agent is speaking quietly to his gal Friday, whom the fat man is ogling. “Maybe she’s the real-estate guy’s wife.” Wife or no, Arthur seems to think that she is some dish, as does the fat man, bony though she may be. “It’s always the way.” the parking garage is now filled with cars, and the NO VACANCIES sign at last makes sense, even though there may well be
some
vacancies. At least the shiny machines look like cars, but you never know, you never know. In any event, they are not, as Arthur’s eager enamorata attests,
art!
Despite the stares of the tenants and the fat man, she is, as the phrase has it, all over Arthur, and dizzy with lust. How she’d rather be in her favorite Village “pub,” sitting across from Arthur, their eyes locked above their tomato martinis, speaking of art and life and love, and, well, serious things in general. Love, sizzling love, would follow, in due course. “Is this, I mean this whole thing like, art?” Black night absorbs the entire shebang.

SEA OF FERTILITY

The garden exhibition that opened at the T. C. Andrews galleries on Saturday arrives here from Los Angeles and Houston, and it is well worth waiting for. Occupying the South Patio and Mower Gardens of the ground-floor gallery, it is a delight to the eye. Glossy-black Orient dew, surrounded by a pale-golden halo of rare, Sacred dew, suggests the moon’s bosom, bared, all unashamedly, to avid blowing roses of variegated colors and lush, foreign-bred, purple flowers. Sweet leaves and green blossoms inform a grassy slope, brilliant under lights especially designed for this exhibition by Garden Glows of London and Manchester. It is as if the gallery has been given over to an eternal spring, one which enamels all its contiguous elements, one which, in effect, “enamels everything,” as someone, with a gesture toward elegant panache, once remarked. There are also in attendance, so to speak, bright oranges in at least a dozen varieties, gleaming like so many golden lamps in the subtle yet spectacular lighting, a magical illumination that, in this breathtaking corner of the garden, creates what seems an uncanny green night. Figs, real or made of the most exquisitely fragile Baccarat crystal, seem to be at our mouths everywhere, as we move through the gorgeous displays; and melons—golden, orange, mauve, cerise, azure, brilliant yellow—crowd together at our feet in profligate and splendid profusion. Apples, cedars, the huge pomegranates called “Chinese honeymoons,” each bursting with jewels, awaken a kind of vegetable love in the viewer, and cool fountains contrast their silvery sprays with deep green shadows. There is Venus, in her pearly boat, redolent of strange perfumes, beautiful and regal as the Marvel of Peru, the legendary tulip (one of which was valued at the cost of a thousand prize sheep and a famed actor); and dazzling daffodils, arranged in careless garlands of repose, charm and soothe the eye. And at the far wall is a lavish collage—the curious peach, by the hundreds, amid its delicate and delicious aroma, strewn amid the shadows of countless roses and indigo violets. Every element—form, color, arrangement, scent—of this marvelous exhibition takes its place in an equally marvelous prospect of fruits, of grasses, and of flowers.