Lunar Follies

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  LANGRENUS

  What, precisely, was it about Claude Langrenus, often called the King of Transgression, the Broom King, the Emperor of Mustard, Royal Claudie, and, most usually, simply the King, that prompted so many distinguished photographers of the San Francisco Bay Area to take, conservatively speaking, thousands upon thousands of photographs of Kingorooney, as he was known to many, photographs of him in the performance of everyday tasks, tasks that one might think too trivial to occupy, even for a moment, the King of Ideas and Theatre, as he was occasionally dubbed? The “scholarship of the image,” to which we owe so much, has collectively determined that there are presumed to be, roughly, some 43,976 images of Lord Faucet, as he was known to close friends, and, remarkably, that those images represent the King of Canned Tomatoes, as that legendary figure was called by the beloved street urchins of San Francisco, city of fogs and food, of hills and highways, of crystal air and cable cars, of art, art, and ever more art; and that the “tomato monarch” may well be Langrenus himself, shown in a number of mundane activities and things that appeal to the sophisticated citizens of” Kansas on the Bay,” as The City is known to its oldest residents, some of whom were last seen in Noe Valley looking for signs of life on the quiet streets. Langrenus, or the King of Tomatoes, or “Larry,” is seen admiring an organ grinder’s monkey, and, in a few cases, an organ grinder; running in terror from a bear who is attacking a youthful companion; laughingly strapping on a “lady’s helper”; being cheated by a three-card monte dealer while he smirks the smirk of chumps everywhere; fleeing in panic from a Pekingese who is chewing on an old woman’s knee; buying a deluxe edition of Théâtre Epinal by “Chet”; pissing up a rope. Just who was Claude Langrenus? Prize-winning chemist, multimillionaire inventor, hack novelist, wretched playwright, furniture designer, fashion plate, and much-loved lecturer on the horror of phallocentrism in the rest room, yes, yet happy to be thought of as, simply, King Corn Flakes. These remarkable photographs, a mere sampling of the rich treasures stored in the vaults of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor Annex, will not tell us. Sadly, the King of Oxycetabutylinase, as he was teasingly called by the hobos, rakes, and ladies of the evening of Russian Hill, remains a mystery to all—still another mystery shrouded in the fogs and mists of the brooding Bay Area that many call home!

  LONGOMONTANUS

  Corporal Wing is chopping celery in the company mess and in the meantime Chinese mortars are laying down elegant patterns of death with lazy, terrible precision, the gooks, as they are called on this wall placard (hereon “Gooks”), can put a fucking round right up your ass if you’re unfortunate enough to bend over. It’s an inspiring collage, now you see him, now you see him as little chunks of seared flesh and splintered bone whizzing through the air. In full color. One magazine, ball ammunition, lock and load. And setting off the stirring photos of soldiers going about their everyday business is a wonderfully honest shot of Second Lieutenant Arthur M. Codgille crisply saluting the First Sergeant, Robert Swanson, with his left hand, it’s adorable, the picture nicely set off with a border of OCS patches. A comic-strip balloon, in, as someone once mysteriously said, “lonely majesty,” contains a message, to wit: THEY TOLD US WE WAS EE-FECTING A STRATEGIC WITHDRAWL, BUT ACKSHULLY WE WAS FLEEING IN WILD DISORDER. And here’s an authentic mess hall sign: Salusbury steak au juice, mash potatos, string beans, apple sause, mix salad, bread and butter, milk, coffee, ice cream. Ready on the right. Take all you want, you pussies. Ready on the left. Eat all you take, you cunts. And here is what seems to be a deposition by one Corporal John Roy Whitfield, Infantry, an astigmatic and slow-witted machine-gunner. Ready on the firing line. Corporal Whitfield’s complaint stipulates that various (and numerous) members of his platoon pissed on him throughout a long night during which he slept drunkenly in the urinal trough of the second platoon’s barracks latrine. The flag is up. No fucking way. The flag is waving. To treat a fucking noncommissioned officer. The flag is down. In the fucking United States Army. Commence firing. And a swell line drawing, delicate as all get out, left as a farewell note by a man whom the hogs ate soon after he went to shit, a diagram, actually, of how to string empty beer cans, each containing a few pebbles, on concertina wire. The whimsical caption reads: “When the clinkety-clink of the pebbles against the interiors of the cans is heard by the alert gunners, they can fire with the reasonable assurance that they are going to blow apart any fucking gook unlucky enough to be part of an initial assault, oh yes.” Stand at ease, soldier! How long have you been in the Army? The walls are brilliantly yet soberly painted in shades of khaki and olive drab.

  [EXHIBITION CONTINUES ON SECOND FLOOR]

  MOSCOW SEA

  And here at last is Sir Banjo Hyde-Morrissey’s private collection of erotica. The titles of the drawings, prints, mezzotints, gouaches, woodcuts, and watercolors on display follow: Bagpipes in the Boudoir; Eating La Musette; The Burgemote Horns and Their Doxies; Presentation of the Giant Champion Bugle to the Young Queen; Blowing the Massive Horns of Westminster; Shock Tactics and French Ticklers; The Depraved Trumpeter at St. Anne’s Nunnery; Lifelong Companions, or, Asshole Chums; Queers at Table, with Gewgaws; Warriors Blushingly Confess; Albanian Musician Discovering Yorkshire Pussy; Young Ladies, in Deshabille, Fleeing Albanian Janitors; Serbs Humping Albanian Janitors, or Anybody; African Women Doing Dirty Things with Their Colonialist Oppressors; Burmese Musicians and a Popular Sponge; Apollo, with Harp and Hard-On; David Playing the Harp with Hard-On; Bellhop, with Hard-On and Pears; Woman Gazing at Hard-On in Window; Corinthian Kate in Cellophane Underwear; Harp and Details of Harp, with Hard-On and Apples in Shadow; Jeune Demoiselle Touchant “La Harpe”; Lady Playing Harpsichord, with Self-Abusing Boy in Doorway, and Daffodils; Politician with Organ-Grinder’s Monkey, with Banana, in Naples; An Increasing Nuisance Concerning a Lady’s Privates; A Band of Savoyards at Orgy, with Stuffed Kestrel; College Professors Liven Up Another Meeting, with Scattered Papers; University Don with Old Lecture Notes and Hard-On; Grotesque Scenes of Deviltry with Monkeys, on Windy Moor; Norwegian Lutherans Disrobe After Barn-Raising, with Lutefisk and Lingonberries; The Celebrated American Pianist, Bellowman, Mounting His Steinway, with Peaches and Onions; Mother and Dad Beneath the Chifferobe; Violin Hump; Lady Mary Campbell Tries a “Rubbing” with Dr. Joseph Hollman, the Old Viennese Prongmaster; Dr. Joseph Hollman Fiddles While Lady Campbell Pollutes Herself; Dr. Hollman Dons Lady Campbell’s Intimate Garments, with Zucchini; The Garden Fairy Orchestra of Canterbury Tuning Their Dildoes; Dildoes in Action, with Quince and Rutabaga; Lady Mary Campbell Brings Joy to the Garden Fairy Orchestra; Hungarians Frigging Dr. Joseph Hollman, in Legumes and Forage Crops; Hungarians Frigging Lady Mary Campbell; Hungarians Mounting Borrowed Lutefisk; African Women, with Pears and Hungarians; Albanian Janitor with Head Under Corinthian Kate’s Skirts; The Boys of St. Bart’s and Lady Mary Campbell Playing “Lost in the Gorse”; Old Waitresses in Love with Grotesque Monkeys; Waitress with Ass in Skillet; The Chef Examines His All-Girl Staff; Lady Diner Admiring Sommelier’s Tight Trousers; Diner with Hard-On Sampling Ferret Paté; Young Woman Smiling at Filthy Thought; College Professors Touching Thighs on Dais, with Name Tags and Bow Ties; Woman in Kitchen Watching Monkey Humping Casserole; Leather Madness Bewitches Waitress; Romberg’s Symphony Orchestra in Carnal Frenzy, with Toys and Language Poetry Manifesto; Lady Mary Campbell and Her Vibrating Oboe; SS Einsatzgruppenführer Discovering Louisville Slugger in Rectum; Quartet Party in Nude Frolic on Lawn, with Dried Leaves and Canned Peas; Henry Norman Surprised Anew in the Boys’ Room; The Famous Vienna Lady Orchestra Let Themselves Go; A Morning Ride, or, Unnatural Congress Between Lady Julia Pemberton and Her Stallion, “Lucifer”; Jenny Lind and Max, the Polish Tenor, with Charlotte Russe, Gourd, and Corsets; Miss Lind in the Puttit Inn Motel, with Ham on Rye; Madame Nellie Melba and Father Dirk Scucciamenza Between the Pews; North Dakotan Monkeys and Lotte Peschjka-Leutner with Her Sister, Candi Brittnee, in Bondage Frolic; A Musical Doctor Alone with a Prized Student’s Skirt; The Villag
e Choir at It Again, with Lawn Jockey; Wandering Minstrels with Lutes and Exposed Privates; Mabel A. Royds Corrupting Altar Boys, with Missals; The Delaware Minstrels Discover the Joy and Warmth, Courage and Heartbreak of Gay Life; and, perhaps the most remarkable item, a rare and perfect dry-platinum-and-alum-process linoleum blocking of Cleveland and Billy Hill in their Great Double Song, Dance, and Buggery Act, with Banjos and Trombones, Cricket Bats, and Hand-Colored Daguerrotypes of Lady Edith Tyne-Fforke and Lady Martha Barley-Headde, Aspiring Pilots Both, Legs Akimbo, Sweating and Moaning Beneath a Perfect Replica of the Tattered Union Jack Flown by Lord Nelson at Trafalgar and the Second Battle of the Nile.

  NEPER

  A legerdemain icon, carefully handcrafted in the ancient and sadly anachronistic “tile mills” of Tynemouth-Bourne-Stetson on Palseyshire, broods, as it were, monochromatically, above the grime-streaked window that looks out on the rain-darkened street below. The difficult configurations of the disconcerting “construction” remind some visitors, paradoxically, of the hand-colored wood engraving of the assassination of Abraham (“Abe”) B. Lincoln at Ford’s Famous Theater and Emporium (such a realization is invariably chilling, and has made more than one person quite literally sick); still, the “moral intrusiveness,” as Michelle Caccatanto has trenchantly put it in one of her dazzling occasional essays on popular culture—which is, as she has noted, “so much more than popular culture”—of “La Folie au Monde,” the title by which the work is commonly known, has convinced an equal number of viewers to see in it a classic Dutch street fair with traveling stage and performers—the latter joyously akimbo in the whirl of a traditional Dutch Sunday in Neper. Such, then, is the power of the ancient Tynemouth craftsmen and the products of their time-tested thunking, gathering, carding, wooling, ratcheting, and blooring, made, as they have always been made, in the mist-shrouded valleys of the lower-central-midlands of the verdant Cotswolds and their crystalline lakes, aromatic fens, and glowing heaps of tossed midden, not to mention the acres of dead-grey gorse that say “home!” “La Folie,” as it is familiarly known to its many devotees, can be, as Ms. Caccatanto has noted, “many things to many persons,” yet it always gently insists on its “grave, brooding humanity” and its “true message” of steadfastness and “courage.” A few commentators have suggested that Ms. Caccatanto’s deeply respectful essay quietly suggests her hidden sense of herself, in the presence of so immortal an icon as “La Folie,” as a deluded purveyor of empty blather, the very picture of the impotent and self-deluded cultural critic; but they, as one of her defenders smilingly remarks, “don’t make half her salary.” The sunlight, by the by, brings the obscurest recesses of the object to sudden, startling life.

  OCEAN OF STORMS

  A number of large television sets—seven, to be precise—show, continuously, the same film, variously titled The Past, Rock Island Rock, or Celebrity Toodle-oo. Each is played, if that’s the word, at a different speed, if that’s the word, so that the imagery, as well as the narrative, such as it is, in each film is identical, the differing speeds at which this imagery and narrative are deployed, if that’s the word, enforcing the sense or idea that the viewer, the ideal viewer, is being presented with seven different films. This is posolutely correct, a construction facilitator notes, using a whimsical coinage, if that’s the word, said to be invented by Joe Penner or Ed Wynn on the old vaudeville circuit. They, and others, often played the Palace, nicely named, since playing the Palace was thought of as making it big, getting the big break, making the big time, hitting it big, and grabbing the brass ring. Betty Grable, Alice Faye, Ginger Rogers, Ruby Keeler, and Jeanette MacDonald all hit the big time and got the big break in cinematic representations of vaudeville days, those glorious days that will come no more. Whatever, by God, happened to the melted snows? One of the most famous of the cinematic versions of vaudeville stars’ lives and times was played, if that’s the word, quite improbably, by Esther Williams, or so they say. Miss Williams, on loan from one of her ocean-liner-Palm Beach-Sun Valley-Rio movies, the latter group nicely augmented by such reliable plodders as Xavier Cugat, José Iturbi, Ethel Smith, and Danny Kaye—not to mention Virginia Mayo, Jane Powell, and Kathryn Grayson and her technicolor bust—was uncommonly fetching, if not flagrantly erotic, in black tights and rhinestone tiara. Her rendition of “Waiting at the Church,” in a game albeit pathetic Cockney accent was universally greeted by awed silence. The title of this film, which told, not too courageously, the story of Grace DesMoines, was Rock Island Waltz. As intelligence concerning these facts permeates the viewing room, the television sets, one at a time, display, on their glistening blue ponds of screens, snow, and nothing but snow, which is understood by all to be unreal, i.e., it is not snow in any way, shape, or form. It is but a manifestation of interference, if that’s the word, and its grey, black, and white, nervously mobile horizontal lines remind the viewer of the lost snows of something or other. Say, vaudeville.

  PETAVIUS

  The New Cincinnati Opera House in New Petavius, Bingo County, presents the citizens of Viejo Laredo, Gulf City of Southern Texas, in a series of tasteful romantic tableaux, staged in a replica of the Grand Ballroom of the Walnut Street Theatre, the last true bastion of Philadelphia’s stinking rich. The cast will be ably assisted by the clientele of San Francisco’s newly chic Bagel Atelier, each person of which will represent a “humor” or “sight” or “odor,” as these are traditionally portrayed on the stages of the fabled Komische Oper in Wien, the Old Bouwerie in New York, and the Oakland Melodeon, previously the Royal Chinese Theater in San Francisco, which wonderful old house slid into the bay during last winter’s refreshing rains. The staged reading of “Burning of the Brooklyn Theatre at the Washington Street Entrance,” justly admired for its celebration of general priapism among the British aristocracy, will be the coda to the Opera House’s first “act”; it will be followed, after a brief intermission for refreshments—among which will be, of course, Ohio’s inimitable chocolate-mushroom casserole bites and autumn straw-juice—by an offering of improvisational sketches based on themes drawn from “Scenes from Bismarck, North Dakota,” and “Exhalations of the Evening Sky above the Wall where Marcellus Expired,” two compelling scenarios of love, lust, and desire, passion and the wheat harvest: primeval and undeniable forces that “urge us,” as Captain William Westie wrote so pungently, “to get one’s still-warm ashes hauled but good.”

  [Photographs, bibelots, postcards, blotters, bricks, posters, mugs, lanterns, pens, pencils, letter openers, baseball caps, tents, sweatshirts, and genuine mahogany veneer wall plaques with gold-leaf trim that bear the likenesses of Picasso, Virginia Woolf, Barbra Streisand, Rimbaud, Einstein, and Leonard Bernstein chatting with Woody Allen will be on sale in the lobby and in selected fine-foods markets throughout Cincinnati, and in midwestern states to be named.]

  PLATO

  “The enormity of the old tableau’s collapse cannot prepare us for that which will happen sometime next month.” So reads the entire text. The nicely designed placard informs us of other “things to come” as well, including the imminent arrival of Carter the Great, the World’s Weird Wonderful Wizard. The visitors, who may purchase logo ties and sweatshirts, as well as souvenir cups and other items that would seem to be nameless, are part of the missing tableau. Words not only make statements, but when tossed about on the page, make more, much more, than mere statements. Observe these words and their potential for scattering. One is tempted to inquire, and be done with it at last, “performance art?” But we will never, it appears, be done with that. There is one word in the corner of the placard, just blinking on, with the sense of total aliveness that it may soon have! (Scissors are available at the logo desk.)These words make a statement, of that there can be little doubt; oh, not the usual stale conceptualizations, but the usual stale reconceptualizations, or “the ticket.” Two of them, as a matter of fact, are at the far edge of another placard, over there. Dislodged from the shackles of the diachronic, if “dislodged”
is the word, or, for that matter, a word, the letters may be readjusted to suggest, as they are currently being readjusted to suggest, up there near the ceiling, or what we have agreed to call the “ceiling,” as the glittering new millennium lurches into being: 1937: GERMANY’S FESTIVAL YEAR. It’s just a little too close, however, to the air duct, to be wholly satisfactory. And yet, and yet: the plain, functional duct seems, quite marvelously, to be.

  POSIDONIUS

  Maximus Valerius Posidonius, all of whose writings have been lost, yet whose theories of solar vital forces and rock-removal as a methodology for the prediction of the movements of large bodies of infantry, prefigured the contemporary strategies concerning the deployment of conscripted troops as assistants of various types in the preparation and serving of food, i.e., hot meals, and the maintenance of dining areas within the larger system of the order of battle, is thought to have conceived the notion of cosmic sympathy, and the employment of certain elements of post-Attic Stoicism, to hoist petards and launch Greek fire, shine Phoenician brass, and find the direction whence come and whither go sunbeams during extended thunderstorms, so as to better answer the questions of often surly travelers, stuffed, even bloated, with pita bread and roast lamb—at that time (ca. 94 BC) the only food available in the vast wastes of a particularly arid Syria (known, at that time, as “the Congo”)—is also thought to have taught his students the secrets of grinding eggshells for use as the basic component of a particularly fine spackle, corn flakes, ink, and heroin, secrets improbably locked into number theory and its attentions to the special properties of the integers, e.g.: unique factorization, primes, equations with integer coefficients, (biophantine equations), and congruences; and although earlier thinkers (Galen, Dombrowski, Galento, Fitts-Couggh, Gavilan) laid the groundwork for such discoveries with their invention of algebra, Posidonius’s work has about it a certain furtive elegance, an elegance much apparent in the exhibition of his astonishing solar-storm drypoints. The exhibition has, unfortunately, unexpectedly and abruptly closed, and its contents subsequently lost or destroyed.