Lunar Follies

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  Good-natured Jackie the Pipe, who says he can get Armanis for like a yard apiece, Armani his ass.

  Fierce Papa Gigio, who kissed the ground his wife of forty-six years walked on, Rose.

  Scheming Tony Candy, who says he heard that they don’t put no tomatoes or mozzarell’ in Domino’s pizza that tastes like fuckin’ shit.

  Strident Jerry the Barber, whose three daughters, Robin, Erin, and Tiffany, all married American boys who went to college and don’t know the difference between a cassata and a lupara.

  Radiant Googie the Jump, whose sister went to the convent after that rat basted Polack George fuckin’ something left her high and dry which was good news for the emergency room, right?

  Neighborly Nuzz’, whose little candy store on Eighteenth Avenue clears maybe 300 grand a year, God bless him.

  Merciless Mario, whose wife of eighteen years still looks, madonn’, like the gorgeous chorus girl he married, even though she’s not even Italian.

  Shifty Nicky Chicago, who always wears porkpie hats like some kind of a cetrul’ black guy.

  Tasteless Corrado, who never picked a horse right in his whole miserable fuckin’ life.

  Sunny Ralphie, who drives nothing but Cadillacs, fuck you with the German cars, he says.

  Sociable Tommy Mouse, who they don’t let into Atlantic City even to take a piss anymore.

  Murderous Enzo, who says he never knew the guys who got popped over on Ralph Avenue, what balls.

  Unscrupulous Harry the Painter, who lets his wife buy anything she wants in Miami Beach, which she says is full of nothing but spics from Cuba over there nowadays.

  MORE PHOTOGRAPHS OF THESE IRREPRESSIBLE AND HARDWORKING AMERICANS, WHO HAVE HELPED TO BUILD OUR GREAT NATION, OR SO THEY SAY, ON THE SECOND FLOOR, REAR GALLERY.

  GASSENDI

  Banville Teddie: Late Works

  This small, exquisitely mounted exhibition shows works from the Gassendi Foundation’s collection of Teddie’s last miniatures. It is provocatively, if somewhat inaccurately presented under the title “In the Months of Love,” a phrase from the juvenilia of Ingelow MacGonagall, a Scottish poet much admired by Teddie, and comprises a group of late paintings from the mysterious “Primavera” series. They are hopefully dreamy, their microscopically gestural bravura “in love,” so to say, with the notion of ideal beauty, their colors almost vengefully Parnassian. And yet, this dreaminess is quite proper, perhaps, to aesthetes, while not yet quite so to poets, to whom, en masse—as we know from Teddie’s recently discovered diaries—these delicate miniatures were dedicated, and for whom they were most certainly executed. This dreamy quality of Teddie’s work is often thought of as a flaw, and yet one cannot remotely conceive of the paintings otherwise. Teddie increasingly thought of himself as a poet, and of his colors as words, his forms, as he once put it, “[as] a shifting syntax, of sorts,” and his canvases as his “well-thumbed, scratched over, blotted” manuscripts, all brushed by the hand of the Muse, “yet no more than her hand, no more, no more.” The canvases, one must declare, are much smaller, even, than miniatures, and are each dominated by a cool, sherbet-like color, although other colors, tints, shades, tones, and highlights, lurk everywhere. These are, perhaps, after all, “the months of love.” Perhaps not. The pictures, so small as to be made out with no little difficulty, are madly ambitious, a kind of paean to a strange Teddiean spring, to his beloved primavera, and to the sun, the sun of the artist’s cherished Ringo Chingado Flats, the site of his last isolated studio; and, of course, to flesh, the flesh of his fellow humans, mostly women, that he honored and adored, even as he exploited, brutalized, and despised it.

  GRIMALDI

  In an unprecedented outpouring of affection and respect for Anastasia Humboldt-Grimaldi’s championing of risky art, her trenchant yet unfailingly generous critical writing, and her unwavering support of contemporary exhibit spaces, the Dimension Matrix Galerie (recently relocated in the basement of the newly Re-Reformed Gospel New Disciples Church of Self-Love in Bayside, Queens) presented a one-night vernissage of new works by thirty-four of today’s most highly acclaimed new artists. All of the works, including “Heinz Beppo’s Marsalis Dream,” by McClark Lott, an installation especially erected for Ms. Humboldt-Grimaldi, are dedicated to her on the occasion of her retirement as chief art-and-cinema critic for Ici. Yet just who is Anastasia Humboldt-Grimaldi? Is she every man’s girlfriend, the girlfriend of the whirling dervish, the girl from Ipanema, the girl in expensive tights, the girl that somebody left behind, the “shadow dance” girl, the girl that somebody loved in sunny Tennessee, the girl in the Alice blue gown, the girl in the crinoline gown, the girl with the big thing in her, the girl of the Moravian peasant factory, the girl who proudly blows the trumpet, the girl who is you, the girl who is like you, the girl who is like another girl, the girl of somebody’s feverish dreams, the girl who is an occasion of sin, the girl of Pi Beta Phi, the girl on the magazine cover, the girl who paid $ 84 for a T-shirt, the girl on Happening!, the girl who was compromised in the stock room, the girl that somebody marries, the girl that somebody wants to marry, the girl in the closet, the girl with a brogue, the girl with the golden braids, the girl who threw up at a party for a famous person, the girl who was the sweetheart of the whole battalion, the girl whom lust made free, the girl who rewrote the “Dear John” letter, the girl with the fake Rolex watch, the girl for whom “it” is not about money, the girl who eats and eats, or—is she simply WOMAN? Whatever she is, was, or will be in the exciting aesthetic future, she’s still got terrific legs, and the edgy and vibrant art world would agree with Jefty Vogel’s characterization of Ms. Humoldt-Grimaldi as “a round-tripper homer slugger like Kent Griffin [sic].”

  HUMBOLDT

  Arrttbbeatt Chelsea

  The first chalice holds a glorious naked girl, perfect in all ways, gentle, beautifully proportioned, and, as the artist’s notes inform us, “modest in public and lascivious beyond telling” at home. The small room is dark and the only sounds audible are those from the vintage Wurlitzer jukebox that plays “And the Angels Sing” repeatedly. The moon looks down, the night grows deep, the sky over the bay turns a profound black as the moon “takes a powder.” The girl may well be locked into her own personally invented and meticulously nourished misery, and soon enough. The second chalice holds nothing, as do the third and fourth chalices. These are not true chalices, but grape-jelly jars, although this matters little, since “this” is not about money! A hat rack completes the installation. When queried, the artist, Benjie Kooba, whose “Semen Dreamin’” piece at the Smith Street Atelier last spring was criticized by the Purity Commission as the cause of wholesale nocturnal improprieties among morally susceptible citizens, remarks: “Don’t ask me!” He is wearing loose-fitting trousers of unbleached linen, well-worn sandals, and a black T-shirt, the very picture of the hot young artist. He is just adorable, despite his snaggle tooth and things.

  HYGINUS RILLE

  The annual Groundbreakers exhibit consists primarily of the “Effete,” as the useful if not especially knowledgeable catalogue insists on calling the various imagings that comprise this year’s show. Debbie Danfort, the curator of the exhibition, is, not to put too fine a point on it, a “dumb broad,” as they say in the meatpacking district’s hippest and hottest diners, even though she occasionally reviews—you’ll pardon the expression—new fiction, whatever that may be, for The New York Times Book Review. In any event, this year we have wild maladies of the sky, green shades, the radiance, the radiance, the stars’ bliss in blissful heaven, seasons in the evening, and a green beast, a bloated beast, a beast serene in the purple shade of a copse called “Satan’s Ear,” and a sleepy, mildewed, fat beast to, as they like to say, boot; then there is a startling display of summer, broiling, humid, stinking, rotting, with its moisture, its heat, its sticky sidewalks, madness, crime, murder, lust, and noise, rank blooms, sagging trees, overgrown gardens, tough jays and dusty grackles and boss crows, the sweet virtuosic reperto
ire of grey mockingbirds on the evening air, from black trees, from rose skies, from beyond the blue hydrangeas, next to which stands an authentic honest-to-God young virgin in white linen dress, white stockings, white shoes, her hair tied back in a chignon with a white silk ribbon, it’s too good to be true, her hand extended toward one of the massive nodding blooms. All this has been managed so as to arouse the brittle laughter of the cruel, the stupid, the shambling half-dead in putrefyingly expensive clothes; whose seams gap and tear; whose seams pop open or rip immediately upon wearing; “who may die before their time, Deo volente,” some bitter and unpleasant person says on an elevator.

  J. HERSCHEL

  Visions of a Visionary: J. Herschel and His Times

  Photographs and Memorabilia from the J. Herschel Collection

  J. Herschel with a letter to his mother; J. Herschel with a bouquet of moss roses; J. Herschel where his love lies dreaming; J. Herschel and the fifth Mrs. Herschel having their “morning ride” at Rancho Seymour; J. Herschel posing with a letter from his mother; J. Herschel and Harry Norman pore over Norman’s collection of musical gems; J. Herschel in pursuit of the young ladies of the Slocum Musical Society; J. Herschel arguing for “social restraint” in the well of the House of Representatives; J. Herschel playing a bunting horn; J. Herschel and an unidentified woman in the bath; J. Herschel throwing nickels and dimes to a group of freshly washed homeless people; J. Herschel studying one of his 412 dubious Picassos; J. Herschel playing “Jealousy” on an electrified accordion; J. Herschel beating out some hot jive on a fourteen-karat gold tambourine; J. Herschel playing with himself and others at Ascot; J. Herschel under the piano with a young maid dressed in his fourth wife’s clothes; J. Herschel giving his celebrated talk, “Let’s Read a Lot,” to members of the Stanford University English Department; J. Herschel and Mr. Carney Grain dressed as Sisters of Charity; J. Herschel and the “mighty drum major,” Julian Scott, enjoying a few Super Bowl heroes; J. Herschel lunching on nuts and weeds at the Wallace Stegner Foothills Cottage; J. Herschel dressed as Doctor Music; J. Herschel claiming that some of his best friends are Jews; J. Herschel on a quiet evening in the library with Reinhard Heydrich’s souvenir photo album, “Poland”; J. Herschel abusing himself to the point of madness to photos of Jenny Lind in her corsets; J. Herschel and Mabel A. Royds, the “choir boy”; J. Herschel at the Grand Opening of Cleveland’s Blackamoor Minstrels in Washington, D.C.; J. Herschel and the Reverend Branford Christy, the devout embezzler, chuckling at the Rolling Stones lying in vomit; J. Herschel and Mrs. Christy doing something for which there is no name on the beach at Rio; J. Herschel with the original “lost” draft of Gilbert and Sullivan’s shocking joint confession; J. Herschel inventing the computer program, Pan Urge; J. Herschel and the Bohemian Club of San Francisco making water amid the majestic redwoods; J. Herschel buying Southward Fair; J. Herschel buying the Prado; J. Herschel buying Topeka, Kansas; J. Herschel fainting at the beauty and charm of the fine restaurants of Palo Alto, California, “where dining is a skill”; J. Herschel masquerading as Albert Speer on the last day of Oktoberfest; J. Herschel demonstrating the correct way to eat spaghetti to the ignorant Neapolitans; J. Herschel and Louise Bathy, “Venus’s contortionist,” eating soup off each other’s heads; J. Herschel getting an injection of penicillin for what he often called “the old Joe”; J. Herschel somberly displaying the toilet seat that infected him with the AIDS virus; J. Herschel dancing the rhubarb dance with Moravian peasants in his “return to my roots” excursion; J. Herschel lecturing on the errors made by Captain Cook on his ninth voyage to Sandy Hook; J. Herschel in his Female Blondin costume; J. Herschel cavorting with Mrs. Grandwill and her Company of Sluts; J. Herschel with some of his best friends, none of whom look Jewish; J. Herschel finding God and peace and serenity and regretting his ruthless, selfish, corrupt life; J. Herschel screaming as he is whisked to hell by three demons, all of whom seem pleased with the assignment, jaded though they may be.

  JOLIOT-CURIE

  In letters of purest jade: MY LINGERIE IS WORTH MORE THAN YOUR CAR; of shocking pink neon: WOMAN, WOOGIE OR BOOGIE?; of rarest lapis lazuli: ART IS GOOD BUSINESS; of pale bauxite: THERE ARE NO MASTERPIECES; of matte beryllium: I SMELL LIKE A DOITY SKOIT; of Hungarian chalcedony: BIG LOFTS ARE BIG FUN; of scarlet aluminum: DON’T CELEBRATE YESTERDAY; of rhinestone bakelite: CHE BABA CHE BABA CHE BABA; of salsified pearlite: FUCK EL GRECO; of lodestone ebony: MEN ARE PISSERS. Barbrah Joliot-Curie’s conflicting and intrusive MESSAGES, all of which tend toward the metaphysical noise that may be termed the emblematic substitute for what was once mistakenly valorized as a value-based system of so-called “high art,” implicate and suggest a complex, actually, of shifting signs, arranged so as to transgressively subvert modes of corporate anti-colonialist, pre-magicorealist inscription. This gesture is never enough to make one embrace the rebarbative, as Benjamin implies, and rush, metaphorically, to Dom’s Heroes for one of his famous “hoagies,” and yet it is almost enough. In point of fact, Dom’s Extra-Special Hoagie may be culturally indexed as an authentic work of petit-bourgeois, working-class art, and, as such, asserts itself as a proletarian icon whose task it is to displace the various capitalist icons of nonrepresentational complicity. “Hoagies, A Meal in Itself,” as Dom’s shrewdly hand-lettered sign states—the grammatical paradigm carefully distorted so as to render the normative plural singular—boldly insists on the labile, collapsing the symbolic into nothing more than an aporia. And the naïve injunction, EAT MY SANDWICHES, IT’S DELICIOUS!, in glossy black on white cardboard, becomes, then, a radically salutary act of cultural infringement.

  JULES VERNE

  A cluster (bunch) of disparate items (things) some of them words, and nothing else but words, HUDDLE(S) in the corner LIKE smokers outside a building. So crack (expert) JOURNALISTS often (more times than you can shake a stick at) WRITE. The things (items) pretend to be art, but they are, essentially, a bunch (cluster) of shit (crap). “We’ll see about that!” one thing (smoker) notes, apparently from among (amid) the disparate items (buildings), for all (everybody else) to see.

  Jules Verne, Les aventures du Capitaine Maison, 1864

  JURA MOUNTAINS

  A staggered pile, something like a perverted, tortured ziggurat in shape, of fawn-colored bricks, many bricks, much too many to be counted, sprawls across the floor of the Kansas Jura Gallery. The whole is transgressive of something, even subversive, but of what? The piece might be a static representation of an early Stones tune married, gloriously, with a “drone-and-squeal” sound project by the Lombardo Collaborative. The bricks, in their essential posture of gestural, defiant decrepitude, manifest a core transgressive spirit (if “spirit” is not too grandiose a word, and if Jamón is to be given any credence, it is not), one that is rigorously detached from the paradigmatic pieties of the fading Zeitgeist and the late phallo-millennium. The occasional fly that settles on the bricks serves to recall their primary significatory duties, as if these everyday objets are, indeed, no more than horseshit, even though that may be their nominative potential, rather than their constative one. In any event, as signifiers, they gesture toward the salutary emptiness that one discovers in the spaces of a poem by Mallarmé, and never in the words themselves. It is, then, Mallarmé to whom we must turn in order to permit this haunting, oddly rhomboidal construct to assert its cone-like, cubist, empty qualities, qualities which are, at once, always terrible, absent, yet eerily sublime, and, perhaps most movingly, qualities that insist on the absence that is within the implied absence of the brick pile itself. The sun which slants in through the quite perfectly grimy skylight touches the work with the poignancy of nature forgotten if not nature betrayed, nature ignored if not nature assaulted. The silent and somehow disheveled construct seems to emerge, at such times, from the very earth itself, and its stillness is that of the greatest, or, at least, the pleasantly mediocre, works of art.

  LAKE OF DREAMS

  Film Loop

  A man talks to a woman who turns o
ut to be his wife, since she has always been his wife, although, at present, she is slightly different, or perhaps it is that she was slightly different in the past. She is wearing the grey, fitted suit that he has always liked, black patent leather pumps, and sheer, off-black nylon stockings. The drinks at the bar, for they are in a dim and quiet cocktail lounge, which await the man and his beautifully dressed wife, for she is, he admits, his wife, are on a tray, and yet no waiter is present; for that matter, no barman is in sight. Charles seems to be his name, or so he said. The drinks are four—two in champagne flutes and two in cocktail glasses. Those in the champagne flutes are of the palest steel blue, a blue so utterly pale that it verges on the colorless; it is the color which gave to gin the beautiful name, blue ruin. Those drinks in the cocktail glasses are cerulean blue, the blue of Apollinaire’s fake Texas skies. He calmly says, “Blue ruin is a beautiful name,” and looks down at the cocktail lounge from a stingily appointed office, one of whose walls is glass from floor to ceiling. It is through this glass wall that he looks to see his wife, now sitting at a different table, and dressed in a navy blue suit, her legs crossed so that her thighs are discreetly yet provocatively exposed. “Your skirt,” he says to her, but she cannot hear him, of course. Who is the relentless person behind him, who is talking, talking, talking to him as he tries to think of a way back to the cocktail lounge, to the woman who is his wife, to the glamorous and unearthly drinks, to his youth and her young womanhood? To scotch and the clean whiteness of their belated wedding day, lovely and dreamily out of focus? Who, for Christ’s sake, is this mother fucking bastard? Some homeless lout who should have died in the gutter yesterday? The man who speaks gibberish from out of the moon? Some kind of mastermind?