Wednesday, November 23, 2005

The Year That Almost Was

R&M Trucking, leading by three runs with two outs and the bases empty in the bottom of the seventh and final inning of the title game for the 1995 Chicago Park District Margate Park Co-Rec Monday Night Softball Championship; lose by the score of 7 to 6 to the reigning champions and perennial powerhouse Simon’s Tavern formerly K-Dugouts when a hard liner is deflected into short leftfield allowing the winning run to cross homeplate.

Further color analysis after the postgame.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Notes within my seldomly used living room

Cloisonned gold interlaced, wraps around his neck just below the larynx, a dangerous knotted scarf that Von Ryan twists violently as steady, even pressure strangles each Nazi guard, all seated abreast like ducks on the pond. It is red dawn and his successors, streamlined mainstream knockoffs effusing angst, are boys lost. Frankenstein whose bellowing voice disrupts the radar screen full of commercial jet liners in holding patterns, frightens away the captive audience, reciting dense Brechtian monologues. Eyebrows raised and jaws dropped because the pitch is out of the strike zone again.

In the flowered bowl sitting atop the black-stained circular endtable, three satin mushrooms-one deep pink, one cerulean blue, one flaming orange, wrestle for the rite of passage of a nuclear family formally looking on, posing relaxed. Heads do roll after a tumble and tuck. But the young boy appears to be crippled, his red cane an optical illusion fading away in purple. Again two right hands offset biometric logic but how fragile is a frayed nerve? An acoustic guitar sits in the nooked corner, a lonely wallflower dwarfed by the imitation rehabbed curio cabinet. Hidden inside are a band of artists content to wait out the Trojan war, making innocuous trinkets to pad the coiffers at the expense of silkened pillows, barefoot and pregnant.

The Art God is well represented in the yellowed space.

Monday, November 14, 2005

A fantastic voyage sedated

Endless miles of plastic highways swerve underground deeply into encrusted tunnels, an arterial labyrinth to be navigated by a microscopic submarine armed with laser beams. The theater of operations is antiseptically sterile as white jumpsuited technicians wearing safety yellow hardhats sidestep one another checking the numerous lighted gadgetry beeping irregularly. Uniformed men peer from behind open Venetian blinds covering thick glass window, ready at the last moment to abort. And an automated voice can be heard throughout the complex mechanically counting down the remaining seconds until ignition.

The tough, old coot lies jaundiced, awaiting Armageddon. Every so often, furled brows reluctantly Morse code short dots and long dashes of convulsions, spasms that belie an intestinal fortitude. Memories like his cherished boat float adrift morphined dreams chasing both King and Queen squarely ahead and well within sight. Soon he will digest a liquid concoction dyed for easier visibility.

Twice removed, the point of this exercise then is to build double indemnity before the shrunken crew leaves the triple airlock to release a huge weather ballon as all converge upon the alien intruder. Around his spleen, glowing radioactive pus choke off his own climate control usually synchronized to an atomic clock. The battle itself remembers the Alamo because the handful of Davids stave off wave after wave of Goliaths disguised as renegade antibiotics in attack formation. It is the art of war, constantly struggling to attain medicated bliss.

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

A domestic exercise of the democratic process as curatorial practice

Blinds drawn, a silver puff of opium smoke obscures intermittent white noise from broken static emitted by a massive equipment shutdown. The minions so scrubbed-faced do scramble, an ad hoc exodus that violates celestial hierarchy. Ghosts of disarmed MIGs do fly by as a matter of encounter versus displacement.

Unbeknownst to him, though, Tony Randall materializes speaking in tongues, his long wizened whiskers trailing behind entangled tumbleweed. A pair of slanted eyes, prosthetically applied, smiles an effeminate yellow face at Sybil whose seven faces alternate between Pan, half-man, half-goat and the Abominable Snowman. Meanwhile, Medusa awaits for Apollonius to arrive but his flight is delayed by great flying serpents in the sky. Where is the egress?

But the air suddenly clears and history repeats itself, fondly recalling kinships lost, ideas milked and theories impossibly collided. The lack of preparation fuels a stream-of-consciousness, wildly extrapolating anecdote as legitimate artform. Hench, a day in the life of over three thousand miles of undetected crime compressed as Powerpoint wears many hats in a parallel universe.

The performance per se is quite performative though snickers can be heard above bored snores. Truer words may never be spoken.