Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Letter from the Recently Indoctrinated, Part I

Dear Grandma Moses--

Summer bookstore camp is going great! The six corners (Milwaukee, Damen, North) are awash in art-school thunder. On Sunday night, Jon and I heard an advance recon of the Flat Iron Building Hair Cavalry banging on pots and pans and shouting slogans about their culturally isolated critical responses re: consumerism and low-wattage energy alternatives (we think) through old traffic cones. It lasted several hours, wafting into our open front door for a timeframe the stoned organ grinder drone kidz next door to Swank Frank (working the fertile fields for Sister Ray and Waldo Jeffers) can't usually muster, at least when it comes to the copious enthusiasm blasts needed for truly convincing bouts of on-the-street-freakery.

Regardless, we fought back with barrage after roaring barrage of the 1975 vintage John Tchicai/ Irene Schweizer Group Willie the Pig jazz missle system, but for naught. They out-hippied us by ,frankly, a rather daunting margin. They were probably drugged, and we were "working", making do with cans of Safeway Strawberry Pop and self-administered Cream Soda enemas. Summit meetings are being arranged via backchannel with Gene Gene the Dancing/Performance Art Machine (surprisingly normal and far less than annoying in one on one conversation than presupposed, star of Time Out: Chicago article a few weeks ago, drinks gallons of our iced coffee in the early evening, self-admittedly "obsessed" with some orange Calvin Klein boat shoes he saw at some dept. store downtown) in order to establish effective counter-insurgency techniques. Dean Rusk has the point on that one, as soon as we can agree on the table shape. Anyway, I spent most of the rest of the shift oogling a new book we just got about Winslow Homer, thinking that his sea scapes and studies of fishermen and duck hunters are incredibly boss. And his mother? I'd do her.

Next, I'll be picking my fire targets by throwing darts blindfolded at Frederic Remington prints clipped from Old West books, trying to hit the extremities of the cowpokes and ranch hands he painted incidentally, pointing toward lightning forks splitting seaweed green skies over the rained out Colorado plains, cattle spooked by mother nature running hither-skither akimbo. Art that serves the national design hasn't always been so manifestly destined. Although Aaron Copeland IS a ham, and Van Cliburn, after 1960, sounds like he has icicles for fingers.

I think I'll walk many blocks to a mediocre thrift store now.

Yours (hopefully) beneficially,
The Greasy Eminence




(<$BlogItemCommentCount$>) comments


No comments: