CXXIX

                                      

When bad signifiers get wus

 

If poverty is sickness, wealth is death

 

If Frick were alive today, would he frack?

 

Fragonard (at the Frick): impossible nature

 

Frick in a frock, what a shock – all coked up

 

Alexander Berkman’s just-pre-Ragtime band

 

 

About which the exhibit card says, in part: The work suggests Houdon’s engagement with the legend of Zeuxis, the ancient Greek artist whose convincing depiction of grapes attracted hungry birds, as well as the sculptor’s ambition to rival the illusionistic possibilities of painting.

 

And to complement Thanatos comes Eros:

At the Met, you and K. draw a Greek-ish terracotta statuette. The title card says she could be Aphrodite, or Fortune. You both take reference photos. When you get home and download, something strange becomes clear: there’s a little fellow tucked in at the bottom of goddess’s skirt. Who is he? And how come neither of you noticed him when drawing? Weirder still, why does he show up only on K. photo and not yours?

When you return to the scene – to verify what? – it doesn’t take you long to puzzle out the mystery. The figure in the folds isn’t strictly speaking there. He’s a roughly contemporary statuette of Dionysus, and he lives in his own display case, diagonally across the room caught in reflection on Fortuna’s glass – shrunk in the distance between there and here – and making himself at home in the “illusionistic possibilities” of seeing.

 

 

 

Maintenant serving illusions à tout le monde – grandes et p’tites – au bon prix!

 

On a temperate day you can wear your Berkmanstocks to the Frick Collection and then walk through the park to the Goldman Bandshell…

No, not that Goldman!

 

In the papers, the streets, the cafés, you smell fear

 

Collar the Wild

 

Tr[i]ump[h]

 

And who says dinosaurs are extinct?

 

Roxy Rothafel – that name mean anything to you, kid?

What’s happening at the Roxy?

I’ll tell you what’s happening at the Roxy:

Moxie, (un-or-ortho)doxy, (e)poxy, Biloxi, and don’t forget to slice the loxy (and I don’t mean approxy)…

 

OMG, it’s the lumpen bourgeoisie

 

More tea, vicar?

 

I’d be rich as Rothafellea

 

So loco por ti, América

Soy loco por ti de amores

 

Coming home early weekday evening. Everyone on the uptown C-train, even the handsome and or stylish ones look sullen and resentful. Like a carful of folks who’ve been voted off the island… tho neither the C nor the A venture north of Manhattan.

 

The faded herbivores

 

Talk about the dawg from New Yawk City

 

SOS! It’s the gumby apocalypse!

 

On this planet Stupor Mundi is cotemporal with Super Tuesday

 

Racinatin’ rhythm

 

I’m no mathematician, but…

I’m no metaphysician, but…

I’m no billygoat, butt…

 

I’m just sayn’

Just sane

How similar-sounding words shade into meaning one another

Watercolor brain

 

A van nearly clips your handlebar and you think (for perhaps the thousandth time): What’s the point of all this hurtling about in metal cocoons?

 

Flight OMG preparing to land at Rome’s Catullus Airport

 

Beguiner’s mind

Rolling and open

 

Beguine, as in “Begin the…”: a kind of slow rhumba emanating, it is said, c. 1930, from Martinique and Guadalupe. The name derives from the Creole Beke or begue, meaning a white person in the female form.

 

Still, beguine again, Finnegan

 

Cole Porter, was he a closet, or crypto, colporteur?

 

And so’s your aunt Tilly’s…

 

Pass the passe-partout

And praise the (p)remonition

 

Praise the lard and pass the cold porker

 

Chinnigan!