The reason it sometimes has been called conquest is not because it necessitates an act of domination, at least not exactly; the allusion is not to Napoleon but to Cook, to Amundsen — to those brave, blatantly pointless men who charted the unknown of our earth back when it couldn't simply be said, "it is known", and in so doing excuse our personal responsibilities to know it. The female body, to the masculine mind, is a landscape far more mysterious than the tundra or the steppe, and more interesting not in its exaggerated variety but in the infinite inexplicable subtlety of its variations. This thirst to know her, to know all the hers, so flatly parallels the line of Human Progress, that with a start we must realize that it is of course not a microcosm of that grand struggle but a precursor. If man thirsts for knowledge it is only through abstraction of the carnal thirst, the urge to continue through physical acts of spirituality, through the only one thing we have always known with utter conviction to be true. To not recognize these facts of thought, the truths embodied in our collective earnest anecdata, and to nonetheless proclaim a revolution, a Philosophy, a system of thought for the relegation of human experience without the input of human experience — it is folly.
Strange, isn't it, that our homunculi so reliably take form as some sort of troll, a weak foetal presence, incurious and turned inward, fat-faced and defiant. And how revealing it is. These little men, these representatives of the corporeal, ever-underfoot and loud and insistent in that irritating yet undeniable way, crammed into the space of our minds, crippled like lotus feet, incapable, we are sure, of life in the world that lies outside the mind. And, we suppose like so many representatives in more noble times, such a pale image in the face of the serene authority on whose behalf they speak: and how sad, that the body, such a perfect and unimpeachable thing in this so thoroughly impeachable world, a thing so heavenly we needed only to collect its best specimens and graft the wings of birds to them to create a convincing representative of Divinity, a thing which can walk through the world of God proud, so proud it need not walk at all, as it has no need for the reassurance of earth beneath feet — that such a thing can be so debased, be made so crippled and weak and unadmirable, by a cage so complex and yet so simple in its purity of implication as the mind.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
LTIG unspecified #1
4,
Nobody believed me when I said the flood was coming, least of all you, because you hadn't talked to me in a year or so and I can understand why you were shocked by my behavior, and maybe concerned. Even more so when you came to check on me and found me sandbagging my house, attaching water wings to my cats and praying the rosary. I warned you, a biblical flood is going to drown this neighborhood. But you didn't believe me, even considering the vorpal effect of my sunglasses was rapidly getting to you. An old friend from the shadowland with a grocery bag of cigarettes carefully ziplocked against the imminent rain. Afraid of heights you were watching me unsure if this was some sort of joke or scheme, a longtermer like I've been known to pull, but it wasn't. I saw all the bloated gentle dead facedown at a level roughly below my roof. And so I planned. Even though you were concerned, or appeared to be concerned, I noted that you had time to put on a sundress and perfume. I myself was too busy preparing. The decongestants in your purse rattled like bone dice, auguring black water, but you didn't listen. And here you are imagining I'm trying to fuck you while a truck dumps a ton of sand on my front lawn and the clouds overhead turning vindictive Olympian black. Ha! You followed me onto the roof and I was raving about mold and property damage and bereavement, not really listening because you wanted to peek in my room and see if any other girls had left their stuff there, and also to try and steal my blueprints for the Navel Stone. I told you, even though we discovered the capabilities of the Navel Stone together, I made the sacrifice and therefore the psychic data it collected belongs to me. It is proprietary information. That's how I knew about the flood, because the Flinski gauge on it noted a drastic rise in bedwettings over the week. Also when I went to get black beans from Joe's on Friday they were sold out. On Tuesday there were four cans. You should have known the significance of such subconscious hoarding. And you should have known when you asked me if I wanted to go to Manning's with you and I refused the flood was deadly, presidentially serious. The Navel Stone doesn't lie. Maybe you wanted to catch up but my cats can't swim and moving the Navel Stone all the way to the roof, and then recalibrating it to search for pretty brunette survivors was a labor of hours and I just didn't have the time to waste swilling vodka and making secret references to new sex friends. Rain had started to fall, and you left.
Fifteen minutes ago I saw you float past, Opheliac and sadly dead. All I have on this roof are some soggy Camel Filters, two perturbed cats, and our Navel Stone, stolen so carefully and piecemeal from your father's laboratory. He's going to pissed when I deliver the news.
Regretfully (but happy the Navel Stone was correct and not a shared delusion), J.
Nobody believed me when I said the flood was coming, least of all you, because you hadn't talked to me in a year or so and I can understand why you were shocked by my behavior, and maybe concerned. Even more so when you came to check on me and found me sandbagging my house, attaching water wings to my cats and praying the rosary. I warned you, a biblical flood is going to drown this neighborhood. But you didn't believe me, even considering the vorpal effect of my sunglasses was rapidly getting to you. An old friend from the shadowland with a grocery bag of cigarettes carefully ziplocked against the imminent rain. Afraid of heights you were watching me unsure if this was some sort of joke or scheme, a longtermer like I've been known to pull, but it wasn't. I saw all the bloated gentle dead facedown at a level roughly below my roof. And so I planned. Even though you were concerned, or appeared to be concerned, I noted that you had time to put on a sundress and perfume. I myself was too busy preparing. The decongestants in your purse rattled like bone dice, auguring black water, but you didn't listen. And here you are imagining I'm trying to fuck you while a truck dumps a ton of sand on my front lawn and the clouds overhead turning vindictive Olympian black. Ha! You followed me onto the roof and I was raving about mold and property damage and bereavement, not really listening because you wanted to peek in my room and see if any other girls had left their stuff there, and also to try and steal my blueprints for the Navel Stone. I told you, even though we discovered the capabilities of the Navel Stone together, I made the sacrifice and therefore the psychic data it collected belongs to me. It is proprietary information. That's how I knew about the flood, because the Flinski gauge on it noted a drastic rise in bedwettings over the week. Also when I went to get black beans from Joe's on Friday they were sold out. On Tuesday there were four cans. You should have known the significance of such subconscious hoarding. And you should have known when you asked me if I wanted to go to Manning's with you and I refused the flood was deadly, presidentially serious. The Navel Stone doesn't lie. Maybe you wanted to catch up but my cats can't swim and moving the Navel Stone all the way to the roof, and then recalibrating it to search for pretty brunette survivors was a labor of hours and I just didn't have the time to waste swilling vodka and making secret references to new sex friends. Rain had started to fall, and you left.
Fifteen minutes ago I saw you float past, Opheliac and sadly dead. All I have on this roof are some soggy Camel Filters, two perturbed cats, and our Navel Stone, stolen so carefully and piecemeal from your father's laboratory. He's going to pissed when I deliver the news.
Regretfully (but happy the Navel Stone was correct and not a shared delusion), J.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
"
Blogs like Daily Apocalypse and Retro '90s MADNESS remind me of my mother's best friend. My godmother. She'd discuss publically and voluably the present condition of her reproductive organs, bowel movements, the metric weight of snot she'd wrung from her hankerchief (result of dander allergies, number of cats in her household exceeding that allowable in Emily County building code) erotically-inclined mailman fantasies, envies and other sins venial or otherwise. She'd hit as many as five of the Big Seven during the brief ride from my elementary school to her house. Husband either in jail or otherwise engaged. If I had to live with choral mewing and a broadband connection into my supposed better half's Inner Monologue I'd also find re-shingling houses more interesting than home. Hardly connubial bliss. Even a little bit, no. He was vaguely Mexican and had erectile difficulty after X amount of cervezas. She'd always have 2 less than X in the fridge at any given time. Tetchily admitting she couldn't control his cerveza guzzling anywhere but her (very ominous smelling) fridge, a point she often shook her feathered hair and scowled to punctuate. I am reading a Goosebumps for Book-it and overhearing a basic equation for boning. Tell me this wouldn't damage you. Danielle Steel as far as the eye can see on the bookshelves but not one volume of Dr. Spock, or even any doctor. I was turning twelve in December. You really can't appreciate the indignities inflicted upon you in childhood until you pass the buck to the next generation. She was gainfully employed in technology or wore a headset or both. Eighty-five lbs of Meow Mix a week is a financial strain on a household, as is Negra Modelo, when you can't get a bulk discount because you can only buy enough at once to keep but not exceed (hacks, empatically stabs at record button with finger) ... but yeah Meow Mix is expensive, as are frequent OB-GYN consultations that even to this day keep me at an junior high understanding of women's sexuality for fear that learning more could birth a Biblicly punishing repressed memory. One so bad it would get an article in a journal or become a popular Wikipedia destination. These and frankly inappropriate updates on the advance of her father's cancer drove me into the living room for Fox 9's syndication of The Simpsons at 4 and 4:30 almost daily. I was sick at her house one afternoon because my mom had work, and I was watching Total Request Live. She walked in and made a noise indeterminate to an 11- or 12-year old's ears. She said, "Attractive people being mediocre. I could do that. How am I different from them?"
So that is sort of how I feel about blogs like Underwear Mattress and Last Night's Drug Abuse and White Privilege Irony.
"
-pgs. 2 and 7, "WATCH ME: CONVERSATIONS WITH MARTIN SNAPPLE," Martin Snapple, Gumshoe Press 2014
Blogs like Daily Apocalypse and Retro '90s MADNESS remind me of my mother's best friend. My godmother. She'd discuss publically and voluably the present condition of her reproductive organs, bowel movements, the metric weight of snot she'd wrung from her hankerchief (result of dander allergies, number of cats in her household exceeding that allowable in Emily County building code) erotically-inclined mailman fantasies, envies and other sins venial or otherwise. She'd hit as many as five of the Big Seven during the brief ride from my elementary school to her house. Husband either in jail or otherwise engaged. If I had to live with choral mewing and a broadband connection into my supposed better half's Inner Monologue I'd also find re-shingling houses more interesting than home. Hardly connubial bliss. Even a little bit, no. He was vaguely Mexican and had erectile difficulty after X amount of cervezas. She'd always have 2 less than X in the fridge at any given time. Tetchily admitting she couldn't control his cerveza guzzling anywhere but her (very ominous smelling) fridge, a point she often shook her feathered hair and scowled to punctuate. I am reading a Goosebumps for Book-it and overhearing a basic equation for boning. Tell me this wouldn't damage you. Danielle Steel as far as the eye can see on the bookshelves but not one volume of Dr. Spock, or even any doctor. I was turning twelve in December. You really can't appreciate the indignities inflicted upon you in childhood until you pass the buck to the next generation. She was gainfully employed in technology or wore a headset or both. Eighty-five lbs of Meow Mix a week is a financial strain on a household, as is Negra Modelo, when you can't get a bulk discount because you can only buy enough at once to keep but not exceed (hacks, empatically stabs at record button with finger) ... but yeah Meow Mix is expensive, as are frequent OB-GYN consultations that even to this day keep me at an junior high understanding of women's sexuality for fear that learning more could birth a Biblicly punishing repressed memory. One so bad it would get an article in a journal or become a popular Wikipedia destination. These and frankly inappropriate updates on the advance of her father's cancer drove me into the living room for Fox 9's syndication of The Simpsons at 4 and 4:30 almost daily. I was sick at her house one afternoon because my mom had work, and I was watching Total Request Live. She walked in and made a noise indeterminate to an 11- or 12-year old's ears. She said, "Attractive people being mediocre. I could do that. How am I different from them?"
So that is sort of how I feel about blogs like Underwear Mattress and Last Night's Drug Abuse and White Privilege Irony.
"
-pgs. 2 and 7, "WATCH ME: CONVERSATIONS WITH MARTIN SNAPPLE," Martin Snapple, Gumshoe Press 2014
Monday, December 27, 2010
This is where I grew up.
The artless fools who took the photos and wrote the ad of course know nothing about the beauty of this place. It is an untouched corner of our country, the same place the indians knew. Every moment of my childhood which I remember was spent in these trees, bridging the streams and building cathedrals from logs and stones; sitting on the great boulder, big around as I was tall, which rests resplendent in the pine-filtered light, left there by the Wisconsin glaciation. That other stone, the great sheared surface hidden in the tall grass. The one where my sister and I would sit and play when it was warm with sunlight in the summer months, and the tiny little jumping crickets, the color of grass seed, filled the first few feet of air like dust motes. Fishing, with my father, when after several hours our dog would swim to the middle of the lake to join us for awhile, before swimming off again to the far shore to stalk birds or rabbits or do whatever it is that dogs do when left to their own devices. Maybe he just sat at the top of the ridge and listened to the wind in the quaking aspen, like me. I passed hours walking the well-learned trails through those trees, most of which were forged by the deer and the foxes, probably the same trails they walked since the lay of the land last changed; probably the same trails they've walked since that great stone was laid. I walked those trails, hunting for mushrooms, and for burial mounds, and I understood what it would be to die there. Sometimes, a holler would call me back. Sometimes it wouldn't.
And now it's on the market for a cool million, someone who doesn't know the half of it struggling for words and giving into defeat with "YA JUST GOTTA BE THERE." You do, I suppose, but I hope you won't — I hope it languishes in these Difficult Economic Times, and is overgrown to the extent further possible, and forgotten by time once again. Then I will return, and it will be mine and mine only, once again, like it was back then when I was naive enough to not know all the ways in which it wasn't. My cynicism drives me, it is true, but I cannot escape this conviction that something awful will happen to this place, like happens to all the other places; some keen businessman will write that cool million in his ledger and in three summers there will be groves of vinyl siding sprouting from the soil, forty feet apart exactly, and they will sit there for a few more summers, losing fifty percent of the little value they had to start with. Then some desperate souls will file in, as this sad modern affair with which we debase the term urbanism encroaches a little further, and these people who had been living something they understood need to move a little further away. The place they knew will be paved over with a new version, which comes with all the usual promises but is so deficient in all the ways not easily marketed, and so as the dependence of these souls on this new promise is cemented, their hearts will fill, more rapidly every day, with the desire for escape.
So they move out to my eden, but they bring all those awful things they are running from with them, because they don't know better. And thus their fumbling hands crush the beautiful as they try to embrace it. I don't expect these refugees to damage beyond repair, because I know their intent is not malice, though they depend on so many who rejected their responsibility for good or bad long ago. I expect them to despoil, in their naive way, in a way not unlike the naivety with which I soaked this landscape into my bones. And then it will be finished, it's fate sealed when those new addresses are amended to the books, the ever-advancing Frontier advanced a few Standard City Blocks further, and regardless of what value is impregnated in it, if any, a wild place will never be wild again. I want to scream and throw fire, at these innocent hoards advancing down the line, advancing twenty or fifty years hence, advancing with greater speed and the same inevitability as the glaciations. I want to write letters to them, I want to listen to their stories and explain all the holes they contain, and explain how trespassing on my lost birthright will not fill them. And yet also I want them to inherit that splendor, which I tended to once and so long ago, and to know it like I knew. I want them to know, in that innocent way which you are certain is right, because you felt it even before you learned the rules of right and wrong. But they are human, they are old, they are defeated and resigned in countless ways. They are ignorant and beautiful, and this place is good enough for them, but they are not convinced, and never will be. They will be happy with the shreds which remain; not happy, exactly, but close enough. A forgotten memory will tell them, sometimes, when alone or troubled, driving in the car, that the feeling of wholeness sometimes accompanying the act of love used to be, could be, all around.They will feel that lack of completion, the missing something, undefinable. But that definition will elude them, because so few are bothering to define it, and so they will try to be good; they will try to respect what meant so much to me. But they will be incapable.
The artless fools who took the photos and wrote the ad of course know nothing about the beauty of this place. It is an untouched corner of our country, the same place the indians knew. Every moment of my childhood which I remember was spent in these trees, bridging the streams and building cathedrals from logs and stones; sitting on the great boulder, big around as I was tall, which rests resplendent in the pine-filtered light, left there by the Wisconsin glaciation. That other stone, the great sheared surface hidden in the tall grass. The one where my sister and I would sit and play when it was warm with sunlight in the summer months, and the tiny little jumping crickets, the color of grass seed, filled the first few feet of air like dust motes. Fishing, with my father, when after several hours our dog would swim to the middle of the lake to join us for awhile, before swimming off again to the far shore to stalk birds or rabbits or do whatever it is that dogs do when left to their own devices. Maybe he just sat at the top of the ridge and listened to the wind in the quaking aspen, like me. I passed hours walking the well-learned trails through those trees, most of which were forged by the deer and the foxes, probably the same trails they walked since the lay of the land last changed; probably the same trails they've walked since that great stone was laid. I walked those trails, hunting for mushrooms, and for burial mounds, and I understood what it would be to die there. Sometimes, a holler would call me back. Sometimes it wouldn't.
And now it's on the market for a cool million, someone who doesn't know the half of it struggling for words and giving into defeat with "YA JUST GOTTA BE THERE." You do, I suppose, but I hope you won't — I hope it languishes in these Difficult Economic Times, and is overgrown to the extent further possible, and forgotten by time once again. Then I will return, and it will be mine and mine only, once again, like it was back then when I was naive enough to not know all the ways in which it wasn't. My cynicism drives me, it is true, but I cannot escape this conviction that something awful will happen to this place, like happens to all the other places; some keen businessman will write that cool million in his ledger and in three summers there will be groves of vinyl siding sprouting from the soil, forty feet apart exactly, and they will sit there for a few more summers, losing fifty percent of the little value they had to start with. Then some desperate souls will file in, as this sad modern affair with which we debase the term urbanism encroaches a little further, and these people who had been living something they understood need to move a little further away. The place they knew will be paved over with a new version, which comes with all the usual promises but is so deficient in all the ways not easily marketed, and so as the dependence of these souls on this new promise is cemented, their hearts will fill, more rapidly every day, with the desire for escape.
So they move out to my eden, but they bring all those awful things they are running from with them, because they don't know better. And thus their fumbling hands crush the beautiful as they try to embrace it. I don't expect these refugees to damage beyond repair, because I know their intent is not malice, though they depend on so many who rejected their responsibility for good or bad long ago. I expect them to despoil, in their naive way, in a way not unlike the naivety with which I soaked this landscape into my bones. And then it will be finished, it's fate sealed when those new addresses are amended to the books, the ever-advancing Frontier advanced a few Standard City Blocks further, and regardless of what value is impregnated in it, if any, a wild place will never be wild again. I want to scream and throw fire, at these innocent hoards advancing down the line, advancing twenty or fifty years hence, advancing with greater speed and the same inevitability as the glaciations. I want to write letters to them, I want to listen to their stories and explain all the holes they contain, and explain how trespassing on my lost birthright will not fill them. And yet also I want them to inherit that splendor, which I tended to once and so long ago, and to know it like I knew. I want them to know, in that innocent way which you are certain is right, because you felt it even before you learned the rules of right and wrong. But they are human, they are old, they are defeated and resigned in countless ways. They are ignorant and beautiful, and this place is good enough for them, but they are not convinced, and never will be. They will be happy with the shreds which remain; not happy, exactly, but close enough. A forgotten memory will tell them, sometimes, when alone or troubled, driving in the car, that the feeling of wholeness sometimes accompanying the act of love used to be, could be, all around.They will feel that lack of completion, the missing something, undefinable. But that definition will elude them, because so few are bothering to define it, and so they will try to be good; they will try to respect what meant so much to me. But they will be incapable.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
"The colonization of Como girls was not a project for the weak-hearted, and didn't really ever pay off, but the soreness from walking late and slow and the trepidation of waiting seems to be very golden, as if I were snowblind, in those early days before I understood how to act and cared enough, as every year passes.
Here I learned Condé, Beckett, Vandermeer; the Velvets, sweatband pedal heroes, Stax; Punto, Crain, Thome; Apatow, Carpenter, Brakhage; bourbon, Grain Belt, Franzia. But the best lesson there was to always allow every idea to gasp a little and die a quiet cradle death, under that big dry moon. "
-pg. 58, "The Navel Stone Handbook Vol. One" Martin Snapple, 2028 (Gumshoe Press)
Here I learned Condé, Beckett, Vandermeer; the Velvets, sweatband pedal heroes, Stax; Punto, Crain, Thome; Apatow, Carpenter, Brakhage; bourbon, Grain Belt, Franzia. But the best lesson there was to always allow every idea to gasp a little and die a quiet cradle death, under that big dry moon. "
-pg. 58, "The Navel Stone Handbook Vol. One" Martin Snapple, 2028 (Gumshoe Press)
Monday, October 11, 2010
A person built a city, tenderly, a daydream city, a block and ten minutes between classes at a time. First they materialized a field, and stood-while-not-standing-actually on the field, made an inferno and leveled it. A firestorm of white sulked and the person watched until their phone rang and then a person left the whiteness for their actual location, which was a room, which wasn’t near the field. Then they forgot about the bonflower until they caught the bus, which purred or waited.
The bus was full of strangers. A person looked out of the window, was borne back to the charred and buttery space by the thrum and hob of the bus, the animal and bent mustard diabetic smell of perfume and bodies. Charred from the fire, buttery from the butterflies a person popped into existence while imagining what the strangers they saw from the bus liked about themselves. The butterflies collapsed from the smoke. A person reached their destination,
And a person left the bus and a person dreamt roads on the field, in squares first, which wasn’t right, and then in circles, which also wasn’t right, so a person made his streets tessellated and rose half of the field to a hill, for contrast. A person likes contrasts. Sometimes contrasts are nice.
A person dreamt museums and libraries and people, bars, bicycles, willow trees. The people became planets, pregnant barren planets with their own gravity & some offered more comfort to life than others. Some planets vacuumed others in with their compulsive gravity and filled their lungs and arteries with poisonous gases. The alphabet died. A person could do that, walking home in the sunshine. Eliminate comma fevers, clause sicknesses, language. They didn’t have to be there. They could be corrected. A person, drinking coffee in their yard, could imagine a system of broadcasts where no language was necessary. In this play epoch of daydream everyone understood through morphic resonance.
A person dreamt this place inside their carriage of terror every once in a while. Sometimes it was a field of vegetables, or a BMX track, or ribbons of beauty. A person had to sleep, eventually. A person wondered if that this field was renewed in sleep; if the planets and fantasies and resentments became a garden of skulls and time to compost for the next day, every one an epoch, all forgotten but the soil rich for new flight.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
The Damnation of Party-Faust
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Party-Mephisto: A young white man, slim, sort of a fish-belly pale Italian club-rat, with narrow features and an irritating little beard, like carefully-groomed rumpled stubble (utterly contrived), and perfect oily hair, and thin lips and beady black eyes that he swings around like a laze-beam. Perfect white slacks around pipecleaner legs, white leather shoes w/ upturned toes, impossibly black T-shirt, white leather jacket. He is always smiling.
Party-Faust: A young white man in faded black chords, beat red sneakers, yellow T-shirt w/ a big black star on the chest, shiny golden blazer thrown over his shoulder, held the way MJ holds his jacket in Billy Jean. Cleanshaven oval face drawn tight like he recently lost a lot of weight, large green eyes and perfectly orthodonted teeth (except for one little snaggle on the lower left that he worries compulsively with a fingernail). He looks dehydrated & dreamy & is extremely full of himself.
Party Guests: A large group of typical human beings, men and women, young and happy
ACT I
(A wild party in a vague space—drink, music etc. PARTY-FAUST doesn’t live here but he’s still the host. He and PARTY-MEPHISTO stand slightly apart from the crowd. PF looks tense and depressed and PM looks pretty pleased about that)
PM: Jesus Christ Party-Faust you sure do get down.
PF: Alas that I cannot party with the gods. I am naught but a lowly worm who can barely turn a mother out. No matter what party-heights my party-art can raise me to, ne’er shall I taste the wine of the party-sublime, nor glimpse the visiage of party-providence.
PM: Alright Party-Faust I can tell you’re just bursting with despair over there and this bash is gonna flounder without its motor (that’s you, big guy), so I’ma lay it on the line for you: (produces a little golden bottle from nowhere) do four shots of this demon-tequila with me and you will party like no man before or since.
PF: Nay, damned party-spirit, assail not mine ears with such sweet lies, for what hope can I, a lowly mortal party-beast, have of reaching the plane of such eternal party-starters as Party-Aristotle, or that holy Party-Plato with the light in his baby blues and all the best drugs.
PM: Those chuckleheads got nothin’ on me, Herr Fest-Faustus. Put that pout on ice and dig this for a minute.
(PM puts two fingers to his lips and whistles a whistle that rings out over the thump of the techno and shakes the ice in all the glasses and the bricks on the mantle, the fireplace erupts in red flame and a dozen baying black party-poodles bound out of the inferno, they pull down a fat guy and rip him to pieces while the crowd circles round and cheers and claps)
PF: (a little shaken but excited) Stay this madness, party-demon! That guy owned me 8 bucks.
(PM lights a Pell Mell, takes a drag and exhales an impossibly dense nimbus that engulfs the entire party besides PF and himself, the clapping and the techno die out, replaced by at-first quiet but sustained & ever-crescendoed chords on an unseen pipe organ. PM holds out the pack and PF takes one and lights it w/ an entire book of matches, holds it in his mouth and eyes the cloud hungrily as he pulls on his jacket and picks his snaggletooth and rubs his belly under his T-shirt. As the smoke cloud clears—the blood and dogs are gone, the guests seem gaunter and much more made-up—PF hops nimbly atop a nearby minifridge and turns to address the crowd, Pell Mell in hand so he can gesture w/ the cherry and take a drag when he holds for applause. PM melts against the wall in shadow to smoke, jacket at his feet, eyes on flicker between PF and the crowd)
PF: Friends! Rats! Drunken scum! Stay your tongues, grab a handful of ass if it’ll shut you up, and listen for a minute to your humble haggard host, me, your Party-Faust.
(deep bow w/ cig held high to a general whoop of shit-faced approval)
PF: Cram it, Janet!
(the crowd crams it)
PF: (heartfelt, brooding) The body before you is bruised and broken, the soul ratty and careworn, the belly full of iron, the liver curdled, the lungs like blackened porterhouses. A pack and a half could not stay these shakes. Yet here I stand before you monsters, here I smoke and chatter needlessly. How can this be? What force of man or god could sustain so wretched a creature? The answer is easy:
(he kicks open the door of his minifridge soapbox with a flourish, revealing more handles of liquor than it can possibly hold, great cheers, a bucket line forms and soon the booze has spread among the crowd)
The best of friends! Whisky, rum! Those who never let you down! Vodka, scotch! Oil of conversation, liquid courage, the unbroken cure for all that ails! Tequila, moonshine, beer
& wine! There is a balm in Gilead, and he can help us to forget, for a single endless instant, the shit and mud and deep dark holes inside us all…light the fires, with blood and puke and pelvic hammering! Join me in an incantation, a witching-ritual to seal this night away from the closing dark! Ready your drink and heed my words!
(shots are poured with a collective gentle gurgle, PM oozes up and pours a pair of healthy slugs from a golden bottle pulled from nowhere, then joins the crowd front and center)
(the bottle wears a tiny gold sombrero)
(all eyes are on Party-Faust as he raises his shimmering shot and lowers his cig hand until the palm grips his skull, ashes tumble in his hair)
This head…this black head throbs with the thumping bassline of the underworld, the Olympian subwoofer of Vulcan’s forge. My sputum swims with cerebral cortex! I close my eyes to nightmares of astronomy and nesting spheres! The music sears my synapses! Let us forget the head!
(cheers, shot, pour another)
(PF spreads his fingers wide before him, barely holding his glass and cig)
These hands have lifted ten thousand skirts and gripped twice as many creamy hamstrings, knocked teeth from big mouths and holes in shoddy plaster, pressed together in mad prayer to Bacchus for bail money and miracle beer. My knuckles ache! Fingers scrabble on white-hot prison walls! Let us forget the hands!
(cheers, shot, pour another)
(PF drops his arms to his side and looks at the floor)
And this demonic health, my indestructible constitution, that granite troll no drink can drown, no vapor choke, no endless bender blot out for good—damn the motor that turns this party! Damn the platelets and the macrophages! Let us forget our health!
(cheers, shot, pour another)
(PF holds his hands to his chest, and looks out, imploring)
Finally this heart…this heart is broken in a thousand places. The fractures run from my beat brown soles to the tip-top of the party-firmament, where the moon gives black light and the stars go strobe when God claps twice. I am torn in two, betwixt the instant and eternity, the Asian and the Blonde, betwixt parties past and parties yet to come, betwixt myself and all of you. If I…
(a beat of silence)
(suddenly profound, thousand-mile stare) If I could taste the One True Party, if I could be there when the lights come up and the vesicles empty and the world ends, if I could throw the bash that justified the whole and worthless human race, why…
(a beat of silence)
I’d sell my soul.
(two beats)
(remembers himself, turns back to the crowd, with deepest contempt) And all of you with it! Here’s to Hell and a black sun rising!
(huge cheers, shot, resounding cheers, resumption of dancing with yet wilder abandon, thin glass bottle bottoms rising from time to time above the crowd, towards the ceiling. PF hops down and shakes himself out, motions offstage with a nod to PM, who has already donned his jacket and lit two more Pell Mells, one of which he wordlessly hands over)
PF: Come, black imp, and summon my party-familiar. We’ve got a bar or two to barnstorm. If I just sold what I think I did then this ought to be one hell of a night.
exeunt Party-Faust and Party-Mephisto, lock the doors and burn down the theatre
Party-Mephisto: A young white man, slim, sort of a fish-belly pale Italian club-rat, with narrow features and an irritating little beard, like carefully-groomed rumpled stubble (utterly contrived), and perfect oily hair, and thin lips and beady black eyes that he swings around like a laze-beam. Perfect white slacks around pipecleaner legs, white leather shoes w/ upturned toes, impossibly black T-shirt, white leather jacket. He is always smiling.
Party-Faust: A young white man in faded black chords, beat red sneakers, yellow T-shirt w/ a big black star on the chest, shiny golden blazer thrown over his shoulder, held the way MJ holds his jacket in Billy Jean. Cleanshaven oval face drawn tight like he recently lost a lot of weight, large green eyes and perfectly orthodonted teeth (except for one little snaggle on the lower left that he worries compulsively with a fingernail). He looks dehydrated & dreamy & is extremely full of himself.
Party Guests: A large group of typical human beings, men and women, young and happy
ACT I
(A wild party in a vague space—drink, music etc. PARTY-FAUST doesn’t live here but he’s still the host. He and PARTY-MEPHISTO stand slightly apart from the crowd. PF looks tense and depressed and PM looks pretty pleased about that)
PM: Jesus Christ Party-Faust you sure do get down.
PF: Alas that I cannot party with the gods. I am naught but a lowly worm who can barely turn a mother out. No matter what party-heights my party-art can raise me to, ne’er shall I taste the wine of the party-sublime, nor glimpse the visiage of party-providence.
PM: Alright Party-Faust I can tell you’re just bursting with despair over there and this bash is gonna flounder without its motor (that’s you, big guy), so I’ma lay it on the line for you: (produces a little golden bottle from nowhere) do four shots of this demon-tequila with me and you will party like no man before or since.
PF: Nay, damned party-spirit, assail not mine ears with such sweet lies, for what hope can I, a lowly mortal party-beast, have of reaching the plane of such eternal party-starters as Party-Aristotle, or that holy Party-Plato with the light in his baby blues and all the best drugs.
PM: Those chuckleheads got nothin’ on me, Herr Fest-Faustus. Put that pout on ice and dig this for a minute.
(PM puts two fingers to his lips and whistles a whistle that rings out over the thump of the techno and shakes the ice in all the glasses and the bricks on the mantle, the fireplace erupts in red flame and a dozen baying black party-poodles bound out of the inferno, they pull down a fat guy and rip him to pieces while the crowd circles round and cheers and claps)
PF: (a little shaken but excited) Stay this madness, party-demon! That guy owned me 8 bucks.
(PM lights a Pell Mell, takes a drag and exhales an impossibly dense nimbus that engulfs the entire party besides PF and himself, the clapping and the techno die out, replaced by at-first quiet but sustained & ever-crescendoed chords on an unseen pipe organ. PM holds out the pack and PF takes one and lights it w/ an entire book of matches, holds it in his mouth and eyes the cloud hungrily as he pulls on his jacket and picks his snaggletooth and rubs his belly under his T-shirt. As the smoke cloud clears—the blood and dogs are gone, the guests seem gaunter and much more made-up—PF hops nimbly atop a nearby minifridge and turns to address the crowd, Pell Mell in hand so he can gesture w/ the cherry and take a drag when he holds for applause. PM melts against the wall in shadow to smoke, jacket at his feet, eyes on flicker between PF and the crowd)
PF: Friends! Rats! Drunken scum! Stay your tongues, grab a handful of ass if it’ll shut you up, and listen for a minute to your humble haggard host, me, your Party-Faust.
(deep bow w/ cig held high to a general whoop of shit-faced approval)
PF: Cram it, Janet!
(the crowd crams it)
PF: (heartfelt, brooding) The body before you is bruised and broken, the soul ratty and careworn, the belly full of iron, the liver curdled, the lungs like blackened porterhouses. A pack and a half could not stay these shakes. Yet here I stand before you monsters, here I smoke and chatter needlessly. How can this be? What force of man or god could sustain so wretched a creature? The answer is easy:
(he kicks open the door of his minifridge soapbox with a flourish, revealing more handles of liquor than it can possibly hold, great cheers, a bucket line forms and soon the booze has spread among the crowd)
The best of friends! Whisky, rum! Those who never let you down! Vodka, scotch! Oil of conversation, liquid courage, the unbroken cure for all that ails! Tequila, moonshine, beer
& wine! There is a balm in Gilead, and he can help us to forget, for a single endless instant, the shit and mud and deep dark holes inside us all…light the fires, with blood and puke and pelvic hammering! Join me in an incantation, a witching-ritual to seal this night away from the closing dark! Ready your drink and heed my words!
(shots are poured with a collective gentle gurgle, PM oozes up and pours a pair of healthy slugs from a golden bottle pulled from nowhere, then joins the crowd front and center)
(the bottle wears a tiny gold sombrero)
(all eyes are on Party-Faust as he raises his shimmering shot and lowers his cig hand until the palm grips his skull, ashes tumble in his hair)
This head…this black head throbs with the thumping bassline of the underworld, the Olympian subwoofer of Vulcan’s forge. My sputum swims with cerebral cortex! I close my eyes to nightmares of astronomy and nesting spheres! The music sears my synapses! Let us forget the head!
(cheers, shot, pour another)
(PF spreads his fingers wide before him, barely holding his glass and cig)
These hands have lifted ten thousand skirts and gripped twice as many creamy hamstrings, knocked teeth from big mouths and holes in shoddy plaster, pressed together in mad prayer to Bacchus for bail money and miracle beer. My knuckles ache! Fingers scrabble on white-hot prison walls! Let us forget the hands!
(cheers, shot, pour another)
(PF drops his arms to his side and looks at the floor)
And this demonic health, my indestructible constitution, that granite troll no drink can drown, no vapor choke, no endless bender blot out for good—damn the motor that turns this party! Damn the platelets and the macrophages! Let us forget our health!
(cheers, shot, pour another)
(PF holds his hands to his chest, and looks out, imploring)
Finally this heart…this heart is broken in a thousand places. The fractures run from my beat brown soles to the tip-top of the party-firmament, where the moon gives black light and the stars go strobe when God claps twice. I am torn in two, betwixt the instant and eternity, the Asian and the Blonde, betwixt parties past and parties yet to come, betwixt myself and all of you. If I…
(a beat of silence)
(suddenly profound, thousand-mile stare) If I could taste the One True Party, if I could be there when the lights come up and the vesicles empty and the world ends, if I could throw the bash that justified the whole and worthless human race, why…
(a beat of silence)
I’d sell my soul.
(two beats)
(remembers himself, turns back to the crowd, with deepest contempt) And all of you with it! Here’s to Hell and a black sun rising!
(huge cheers, shot, resounding cheers, resumption of dancing with yet wilder abandon, thin glass bottle bottoms rising from time to time above the crowd, towards the ceiling. PF hops down and shakes himself out, motions offstage with a nod to PM, who has already donned his jacket and lit two more Pell Mells, one of which he wordlessly hands over)
PF: Come, black imp, and summon my party-familiar. We’ve got a bar or two to barnstorm. If I just sold what I think I did then this ought to be one hell of a night.
exeunt Party-Faust and Party-Mephisto, lock the doors and burn down the theatre
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