 |
| Ain't no game here, the title of this thing is, Property. |
If you write furiously and scream into a telephone, you will get a fish. If you shout at the wall and melt your crayons, you will get a fish. If you reduce the heat and simmer until thick, you will get a fish. So what has to happen if I really want a bicycle...
Above all to see, this is where our culture goes forth from its rails and this is where it gets its broad strokes and its cathartic pass on almost everything it is. Here's where our ability for pattern recognition does not serve the self which is our best. Our rationality becomes beltless and it feels cumbersome rather than fresh. This is when it tugs at our trousers, here in the face of the rain and every time it seems new.
Somewhere past the stars beyond the vast range of space is a final chunk of measurable vacuum that's plummeting swiftly into a more perfect distance. There are villains working there in the math between that place and here. These are the times of their day and these days are narrow enough as they go. Today is already more short in its morning than most. After breakfast seems overfull with other people and their blank slates and all of their sordid lists with their sordid plans for their copious dates and limited time offers. Now Marcus can add rain to the top of his list. On the way here the streets begin to bulge with black warnings for cover. The storm, the storm it is coming, sayeth someone say.
There's no pennant blooming in the midst of this. There's no sartorial plumage. No, the light straying from those distant disco balls is a ceaseless and very dim light that's measured on a scale wrapped within deep deep violets. It's awful out there Teeny, I didn't know where to go. I left my boxes at the station. I had to. But the livery should drop them off later. Early is what I told the red cap. But then I elaborated, I added, not too early. You don't mind do you...
My sofa is yours, She lifts up the phone's curved receiver and dials out to the receptionist. The prime numbers make sharp quarter tones that sound like beep. Do you want any coffee...
I shake my head. My ears feel as wet as my shoes. Lets jump to it, I suggest. Let's say the matter of who defines our value and what the metric of its quality is lingers at the edges of many contemporary cultural appraisals and it remains there inextricably intertwined with a sheepish dependence on ignorance. Can we agree on that... We're sex, I continue. This is what the umper-kunsts keep saying to us. That we're all so sexy sexy sexy. It's Tuesday so I must be as wet as roses down there. But what they need to be telling us, complexity isn't necessarily entropy. That appropriation and disruption are strategies rather than goals that will coalesce in value. Can I smoke in here...
Teeny points at the bright resin ashtray on the mirrored table top. Really, I was going to make more of those. I have a shelf full of these messed up little pieces, I wink at her. My cigarette case is a dented thing. Once it was handsome chrome with an embossed eagle on it's face. Now the eagle's been replaced by an embarrassing attempt to recreate an anarchy symbol with hunter orange nail polish. My only defense is that I spend too much of my time with my niece when I'm underemployed. Anyway Teeny, we're in deep and it's going to be rough teasing out any real conclusions from all of this gilded fray, I add.
So we've been a little permissive, She looks over at me from the bench. I think she's trying to make up her mind about something but then she smiles. The Moody Blues are playing in the main office right behind her. Some of the younger interns that are arriving look soaked. I'm glad they made it at all. My old apartment is across town and I never would have gotten through this.
That's the thing Teeny. I don't need more help. I need time and options. I'm sick of working from this script. I want to wing it again. I want to right now, this very minute. I want this to be wunged.
Stop being so so, The coffee arrives. The tall woman puts a white mug on the table beside the resin ashtray. The receptionist bows/curtsies/ducks in a clunky kabuki kinda way. Teeny laughs, So apprehensive. So calamitous. So wet that's what I wanted to say Marcus. Stop being so wet.
I put my cigarette case back and smile as the pointy kabuki human turns around again. I don't like feeling late. Right now I'm late and wet. I flick ash into the big polygon. I'm not writing a book here Teeny. I'm not even making long sentences. I'm only here for the weekends and the take-out is crappy.
It might be gender inappropriate to say this to you but you look like you can take it. They're only middle-men Marcus. They're in their middle-grounds. All they've got are middle-secrets that they're selling and that's it. The Umper-Kunsts don't invent this shit, Teeny says. I'm not talking about the white walls and bright lights. Her penny sized ballet shoes are pulled up underneath her on the red cushions.
It's got to happen Teeny. If all they want is this middle truth then I don't know. The experience of mucking around isn't a new one to me. I can't middle-earth it here for the ribbon and steak crowd looking for Gondolin.
You can see the halfway halls are already dull. They're muddy enough without any more dipso calamities. I get it and I'm on your side, Teeny tries to sound soothing even a little matronly while she pulls at the wide straps on her bag. Things never looked more wreaked for being as indecent as this seems. But all of that can change Marcus. We have a chance to switch this up and really turn out the glitches. The thought that they approached you at all. They walked right up and set aside their wet umbrellas and caps. They said to you, your brother's got to go. I can see the incredulity playing at the edges of your smile Marcus. I can.
Parrot or priest is what I asked them Teeny. Then they said, Today we'd like for you to replace some your brother's work. The bronze in our library is certainly a marvel. It's certainly harmonious in its repose but sadly its much too upsetting. Frankly our wives are being distracted. We're hoping you might consider undertaking what your brother started.
You want me to alter his work, That's what I asked that ham faced dick in the wet suit.
Not as such, He said. You see we've talked about it and we want to subscribe to you.
Teeny listens as she pulls a small glass pipe from her bag. A deep velvet pouch with a gold drawstring that was secreted somewhere nearby. She sits the pipe on the cushion and opens the pouch again. Then she pulls out some tiny milled pieces of metal and a pile of doughy rubber seals. After digging around again she also finds a green wrench and a butane lighter.
Don't stop please. It occurred to me last night that it's been a whole year since I did this last. Her hair falls into her eyes. Disparage in the soup makes the cabbage bittah, she laughs at her little joke as she starts assembling pieces and parts.
Back in the sixties, I start again. When everyone was on TV and getting high together for the first time Spider-Man would say say that our best chance for escape was going to be through that door right there. Then he would quickly add, Culture has no moral equivalency kids. Culture can neither be good nor bad it can only just continue. You see, culture is a rudderless ship on a slime sea.
I think that he also said in his spritely Spidey voice, No we can not balance the fear of our fears against more fear and we will not confront the unintelligible relational math of it all until we release our debts into a space of shared capacities for wisdom restraint and equality. Our future if there's going to be one will be composed of the soft and effusive quality of color that's being seen with all of the eye's ever. Afterward he might blink his own orb like eyes.
It's an incurious backstory here, one that's wielded to such terrible extremes of kitsch, Marcus. It grabs you but then it's the quiet grinding hand of the umper-kunst that's going to confine you and wear you down. Or so it seems from all of the bright marquees on the street lately. There's talk enough about the amends to be made for resentment disenfranchisement and wanton violence as if amends were merely symptomatic of a more strong desire to sell us a more enviable or a more pragmatic state. Which it's not.
Culture isn't expressed in terms of being an unrelenting tidal force of thing, with it's accreted fleshy composites and granulated aggregates haphazardly coexisting in a neutral space that's defined by complex covalent rituals and chewing gum. Despite the many atrocities of late stage capitalism, it's culture, which is branded here as a fashionable and entirely hedonic experience that's divorced from all of that. All of us? Some artists will confuse culture for a being that's nearly physical, it's morally superior, and it can forecast its secret intentions via super subtle mind-waves rather than for what it is. Culture is an accretion of unknowing sediments rolling along like a slow and giant ball that's being challenged and consumed by many billions of eyes, fingers, and toes simultaneously. That culture can be manipulated by both moral and ethical forces which are themselves responsible for our concrete or physical distillations of social agency would seem to be a surprise to many of them that would argue, culture is immutable and it is a righteous thing with legs to walk with. To them any transference of the onus of responsible and thoughtful engagement from the agent to those perceiving it's effects is nadir of appraisal and critical reflection. It's this lark of indeterminacy that sings such a lusty song.
We're supposed to fly to Barcelona next week. We'll drink missouri-mules instead of margaritas. We'll discuss salt mining and our shared admiration for solid food. We'll talk about blue because Teeny likes Yves Klein. The small matchbook sized collection of chits that were bound as a catalog in '54. She thinks that's the most brilliant if small contribution to the enrichment of our shared human experience, evah. Teeny says that she, found this masterpiece of words to be a clay camera. It's been folded into a paper shape that reveals the boring stars through its cold pretend.
It's owing to our given angels that we even feel or fail at all Teeny. An old friend used to tell me, If you can't be the soup then you should really enjoy the meal. She wasn't trying to be funny but I think she might have nailed it, cabbage and all.
Well an old friend of mine told me, To include a beautiful woman with raven locks and porcelain skin, preferably quite young, and let her die tragically of some unknown ailment before the end of the first act. Oh wait that sounded self conscious didn't it...
It's okay because,
I knew a girl from GhentThat was loaded, She upends her bag again.
She ran up a pole for gents
While her hiny was shiny
Her dollars were grimy
From the lecherous pricks in there tents
Marcus mugs for her, I curvz the cornerz Teeny and the angles too.
Comments