Lunar Follies

by Sorrentino, Gilbert

  PTOLEMAEUS

  The histrionic and lyric firmament—brilliantly spangled with tinsel stars—hangs above the rose-tinted photo-collage of scenes from the Cincinnati Opera Festival’s celebrated production of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. A letter from Jacques Offenbach, attesting to his fondness for Gay’s masterpiece, is quite beautifully yet simply framed in gentian eucalyptus, a wood known for its lustrous qualities and astonishing durability. Jenny Lind sang the wood’s praises in a lost aria from I Puritani, an unjustly neglected operetta by Anna Bolena, performed, for the first and only time, for Henry Ford, Ed Rafferty, and Grover Cleveland Alexander. Scenes from La Gioconda, digitally altered to include portrayals of Brünnhilde in unnatural congress with her stallion, Fritz, temper the dazzling (to some almost painfully so) light from the glowing firmament. Although some Christian Fundamentalist visitors are distressed, even appalled, by the activities of the Wagnerian heroine and her beloved charger, others—happily, the great majority—know that art’s function is to disturb, to question, to disgust, to bore, to nauseate, to make what General Tod Burlingame, Air Force, Retired, called “the big green.” The classic American diner booth, ca. 1949, that asserts its vinyl presence within a shallow alcove at a sudden turning of the wall, is flooded with a penetratingly vulgar orange light, and invites a bittersweet nostalgia in its contrast with the shifting of the erotic tableaux of the La Gioconda display. The whole diner “thing” permits one to recall a purer, more innocent era: of Stalingrad, Iwo Jima, Monte Cassino, Tarawa, Dresden, Hiroshima, and, of course, Auschwitz—“the good old days,” as they are wistfully called. The refreshments—cheeseburgers, French fries, bow ties, Mae Wests, and weak coffee—that crowd the formica-topped table of the diner booth are marvelously crafted of high-impact plastic, and look quite real. At precisely eighteen minutes past the hour, every hour, the pop hit made famous by Andy Warhol and his “gang,” “Bobino Josephine,” in the Boston Pops-Carly Simon version, is piped into the room, an aural complement to the “spectacle” of late-night variety show outtakes. Media critics, as well as their highbrow art-critic cousins, characterize the whole presentation as a profound example of “people’s art.”

  PURBACH

  New Departures, New Arrivals, Old Masters

  The quick wit and twisted imagery of Johnstone Sanderson’s “Nancy” poempix; the unexpurgated love letters, chock full of uninhibited and shimmery filth, of Sanderson William; William MacLise’s generous doses—several in number—of delirious “steel prose”; MacLise Brown’s August ice-cream gouaches, disgustingly compelling; fucking “discourse” and fucking “tropes” and the like, by Brown Forster; the Clitoris Commando Series by the newly notorious, self-styled “Cunt Mama,” Forster John; John Charles’s frothy bubbles (or froth and bubbles) of burgeoning narrative; embedded tautology atop disinterred ontology created in vacuo by Charles Angela, the veteran assemblagist; the sheer vivacity, exuberance, and extravagance of Angela Collins’s “Sheer” portfolio; Collins Anna’s moving photographs of homeless street poets honing their craft; exciting stools of the famous, collected and bronzed by Anna Wilkie of the Atelier de Zotz group; adored meaning, conceived and represented by Wilkie Wendell; Wendell & Warren’s Colorado photos of young people thirsty for art and fun; reconstructions in miniature of charming, friendly, and badly stocked neighborhood bookstores, by Lemon Burdette; Burdette Jones’s glitzy, edgy objects full of elusive racial overtones; a razzberry from el Bronx by Dawn Wasserman’s Gun Hill Road Gang of Gay Girls; Brooklyn boogie, boogie woogie, and woogie wonderland, created by Wasserman Harrison Associates; Harrison Blacke’s little church upon the corner; a cluster of symbolic pens by Blacke White; breathtaking plot-divagation charts, in twenty colors, by White Thorne; distant piles of strangely aloof “stuff” by Thorne Warhol; Warhol Pure’s compelling and really good first book of Berriganesque poetry; the haunting streets of haunting Paris as recreated in West New York, by P.A.P. (Perfect American Products, Inc.).

  [A spokeswoman for P.A.P. notes that those who would like to see where “The Haunting Streets” was designed and crafted are welcome to visit the workshop, but she warns that West New York is “actually in New Jersey, which, like, we love it.”]

  PYTHAGORAS

  A large sunlit wall dominates the top floor of the new Iconocult Museum, the much-visited and remarked-upon New York Times Arts & Leisure wall. We see, just inside the south entrance, and to the left, various manifestations, images, and reproductions of duplications, as well as duplicate reproductions that celebrate, among others, Clint Eastwood, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Philip Glass, Jerome Robbins, and—at long last!—the Kronos Quartet, all against a celebrated background of bakhti, rushdie, bezant, and cold-pressed colluvium. This astounding juxtaposition of material and memoir prepares us for the disparate materials on Igor Stravinsky, Wynton Marsalis, Steve Martin, Leonard Bernstein (and the poetry of Carousel and West Side Story), along with a heavily annotated and revised typescript of an essay by Woody Allen on the “poetry of David Mamet’s dialogue” and the lore of the clarinet. Just beyond these joyously eclectic “heapings,” the Public Broadcasting System offers a film of crusty Cornish farmers and their heroic struggles with ovine AIDS, set amid the green hills of Bandore and Deodar. The families, as seen in photographic chronologies, of Steven (“the genius”) Spielberg, Arthur Miller, and Woody (“the shy genius”) Allen, inhabit a quietly hip corner, wherein a subtle democracy of good taste prevails. A film loop of the greatest scenes from Robert Altman’s The Big Sleep plays continuously on the ceiling. On a field of semi-conceptualized phosgene waste are “home-movie” stills of Leonard Bernstein, Sting, and Carly Simon, each of them warmly greeting and entertaining Wynton Marsalis and his New Casa Loma Orchestra, and in one playful image, we see, if we look closely, Leonard Bernstein greeting himself! Next, we encounter a jazz collage, detailing the history of jazz from the days of Buddy Bolden, the New Orleans legend, to giants such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Wynton Marsalis, along with a handful of others who have made jazz America’s music. A consistently interesting section of wall near the jazz exhibit proffers small cards upon which are printed the effusive comments of celebrities of the arts on their relationship to and love of jazz: among them are Marilyn Monroe, Beverly Sills, the managerial team of the Met, the Modern, and the Whitney, Jim Carrey, Leonard Bernstein, and many others, not least of whom is Norman Mailer. Symphony Sid’s ticket stubs for a production of West Side Story are mounted next to a glassine portrait of W. A. Mozart, of whom much too little has been written of late. The short film depicting Paul McCartney sitting for a portrait by Andy Warhol, the Warholian atelier one that is rife with artificial beguines, freshens the palate, so to speak, and the viewer is ready to confront the posters, designed by David Hockney, from an idea by Eddie Murphy, for the new PBS Mystery series, A Dying in Tartonburyshire, a brilliant, dark film based on a novel by E. M. Forster, Howard’s Journey. Anglophilia is also quietly represented by Twyla Tharp’s dance to the music of Leonard Bernstein’s Paris Gypsy, a subtle hommage to Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Virgil Thomson. There is, most definitely, a shock in store for the assiduous viewer, as he moves from the staid and classically adventurous to the next exhibit, a brilliant montage of outtakes from the sizzling “underground” film made by Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, and Kenneth Anger, Blond Pussy, starring Anita Ekberg, Diana Dors, and Jayne Mansfield, each of whom plays Marilyn Monroe mimicking Louise Brooks. Lost for years, Pussymust have been a playful romp, one that permits and even encourages art to satirize sex, sex to satirize art, dance to satirize our current moment, and sex to satirize love. In its one screening, it all but silenced the savage gallery of critics at Cannes. Its sole print was purchased by Pablo Picasso, and was last rumored to be in the collection of J. D. Salinger. Speaking of Picasso reminds one, of course, of Henri Matisse, and then, surely, of Roy Lichtenstein: Picasso, Matisse, Lichtenstein—which is greatest, and can we ever know? Miniature reproductions of some of the
se masters’ representative works go a long way toward helping the viewer to a decision. Representative action figures from a myriad of lead-based nauridium renderings show Picasso and Matisse gazing at the only known photograph—a sepia masterpiece!—of the two canny masters at a baseball game at Chicago’s Wrigley Field. (Photo on loan from the family of Al Capone.) The artists’ Continental mouths are stuffed with a Chicago delicacy, rutabaga sausage, and their eyes are filled with the sadness known only to those who follow the Cubs. Abstract Expressionism is here, too, embodied, so to speak, in an amorphous splash of color, two unevenly matched bilbos, and a 1940 treatise on exology, reputedly an early work by Leonard Bernstein, one that he famously characterized as a “bibelot,” and that became, so rumor has it, the basis for his precedent-shattering Showboat Story. This remark, in and of itself, may possibly be an inside joke by Al Pacino, a quiet balletomane, here shown in a candid photo as “Mister Hollywood, USA,” a refreshing jape, indeed. The New York City Ballet is clustered in a compact haze of sweat, powder, and resin at the far end of the PBS “side” of the wall, catching its collective breath after a thrilling performance of Mozart’s “La Bregmata” (K. 12493776529.7) in a new version by Jerome Robbins, George Balanchine, and Sting, with the assistance of Twyla Tharp and in a “black concerto” orchestration by Wynton Marsalis. It is here that visitors like to rest a moment before going on to the exhibits that feature Carol Burnett, Carol Channing, and Ethel Merman, “geniuses of comedy.” Arthur Miller, George Lucas, and Robert Altman smile from the midst of a massive three-dimensional collage, “The Holocaust: Years of Hope,” that hangs from the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired ceiling, and that twists, sways, and turns above a series of jagged colporteurs; the sight is, arguably, enough to “make a believer out of just anyone,” as Zubin Mehta, David Mamet, and Leonard Bernstein insist. A creased and somewhat faded snapshot of Herbert Von Karajan, in SS dress blacks, leading a small kazoo band of Hitler Youth in a rendition of “We’ll Meet Again,” for the Führer, has a disturbing sweetness about it, a “boys’ vacation” aura, one that successfully tempers the faux daguerrotype of a thoughtfully scowling Ayn Rand, her Mont Blanc “Aristocrat” pen in one hand and her bailey in the other. A balloon above the famed author-philosopher’s head contains the cryptic message, “WHITHER FREEDOM?” The words become ever more mysterious when we learn from an accompanying wall plaque that they were added to the photograph by J. D. Salinger, when he was but thirteen, and “in thrall,” as a boyhood friend, on condition of anonymity, put it, “to Greta Garbo’s pants.” “Erotica” is the title of the last section of the exhibit, and a video loop, XXXyco, is erratically projected on the ceiling in a series of spasmodic flickerings based upon the orgasmic patterns of “several film stars.” The video, which leaves nothing to the imagination, displays cleverly animated representations of Marilyn Monroe, Virginia Woolf, Igor Stravinsky, and many others, in, as Barbara Kruger’s sublimely and hypnotically monotonous voice intones, “THE UNABASHED ACTION OF TRUE ART.” In the long corridor that leads to the quiet refreshment garden, a dozen lightly clad young women smear themselves with excrement gathered from homeless shelters, and a sign that runs the entire length of the corridor proclaims, in the best seriocomic Krugeresque fashion, SHIT IS NOT CHOCOLATE. The warm bludgers at the garden exit gate are complimentary, and are made, we are told, from a recipe found among the papers of Leonard Bernstein, who may make an appearance on the exhibition’s final day, according to Michael Ovitz and others.

  RICCIOLI

  Buffalo gals in deerskin doublets edged with lace doubloons, old dog Tray pissing up a rope, sweet Betsy from Pike doing the dirty dongola as only she can do it, waiting to come while her love lies dreaming. “Oh, happy day,” proclaims the balloon afloat above the iconic scene. The three kings of the Orient waltzing ’round the mulberry bush, nearer, or so they seem to holler in their barbaric tongue, their God to something. The banners proclaim HOLY! HOLY! HOLY! LORD GOD ALMIGHTY!, and Maryland my Maryland, Christ knows why. The vacant chair, direct from Killarney, that wee broth of a skibberreen o’rooney darraghmaight, is here too, upon which rests an authentic McChughrghaighch who looks a good deal like Johnny Schmoker, the idiot savant inventor of the Sweet ’n’ Low brassiere (“Make His Eyes Pop the Fuck Out!”). Dixie, while pining away in the midst of a magnolia morass for the dumbo Johnny, is being ogled by old black Joe, who not only saw sweet Nellie home, but threw her one, yet it’s never enough, is it?, never, never enough for the dark secret blood bubblin’ an’ boilin’, like animals!, half-African and a yard long! Good to know that vacant Johnny will pen a note that begins “Just before the battle, Mother,” so the foxed diary here exhibited proveth, testament to the fact that he’d probably forgotten, blessedly, old Joe’s hot, bloodshot eyes glued to his snow-white Dixie’s delectable diddles, all p-proud and unashamed in their noble nakedness. A beautiful dreamer was young Mr. Schmoker, thus his ass got blowed off by a can of goober peas used in lieu of grapeshot by General La Paloma, the scourge of the upper Potomac, the lower Potawotamie, the Elysian Fields, and the Dakota Breaks. And here, by jinkies, is the “Iron Dove” hisse’f, tenting on the old campground, in a rather shockingly frank sepia study. Who woulda thunk that “the old brown church” was army slang for reckless poguing, much of it having to do with manly yet lissome young recruits from fabled Texas, land of arroyos and coños? Who? (The catalogue, usually explicit, does not hint at what “dry bones” refers to; nor does it suggest a possible reading of the barracks activity referred to as “the ould sod shuffle.”) Sweet Genevieve Muldoon, in her best whorehouse finery, is depicted pissing into a little brown jug, as a participant in a famed contest held each year in the midst of the Vienna woods, under the auspices of “whispering hope” Schutz, who is depicted, in a series of linoleum acid-stencil “renderings,” costumed as Romeo and Juliet, Reuben and Rachel, Liza Jane Patkowitz, the Fisk Singers, Frankie and Johnny California, Amos and Andy, Joe DiMaggio, and Fiorenza Ziegfeld. These were taken, from the life, as they say, during various stages of Miss Schutz’s exhilarating career of bump, tickle, slap, grind, frig, suck, hump, and bugger. For some as yet unexplained reason, the disturbingly graphic images of Miss Schutz “in action” are collectively entitled “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” In the second gallery, a bartered bride, clad in nothing but black silk stockings, blue garters, and pink satin pumps is performing a “John Henry” on the entire Mulligan Guard, two or three at a time already! “Silver Threads among the Gold” is its wholly opaque title, and tells us nothing of the bride’s feelings; although one might surmise that she hankers for the life of the carefree cafonella, the Vienna woods be damned! She is, as some wag once noted, home on the range in these captured moments of sweaty bliss, that is, quoth the sly dog, “heating up a fellow’s dinner is her constant delight.” And even grandfather’s clock rang its ancient chimes at the sight of the flushed bride in her gentle squirm atop the stove. “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen,” for this was Miss S.’s handle, was the astonished cry of the libido-frenzied youths, each wearing the hats their fathers wore, each with a rose of Killarney in his buttonhole, each lost in impure fantasies in the gloaming. “What a friend we have in Jesus,” a muscular fellow unaccountably murmured, and was immediately set upon by a chopsticks-wielding Oriental lad, who crooned, during the attack, something that sounded like “aloha oe, aloha oe,” later translated by the captain of the H.M.S. Pinafore as “where [was] Moses [when the] lights [went] out?” Nearby this fascinating and instructional panorama, we may descry a curious figure, jocularly called Little Buttercup, a lad of progressive secular tastes for his time, and one highly conversant with the contents of The New York Times Book Review (known in the review industry as “The Skidmore Fancy Ball”), and The New Yorker (smiled upon as “Songs My Mother Taught Me and Taught Me and Taught Me”). Little Buttercup, when he was but a tyke, along with some of the other “babies” on the block, wore golden slippers, and in the evening by the moonlight heard, oh heard dem bells! (D
ey be old black Joe’s bells.) This was, of course, long before Buttercup hit the old Chisholm Trail and discovered that the notion that there was but one mo’ ribber to cross ‘fore Loch Lomond, Californiay, hove into view, was no more than a canard, a fib, a runaround, an editor’s rejection letter, a “Norwegian steam engine,” and a shocking lie. Yet Buttercup pressed on, as numerous photographs show us, dressed now as a Spanish cavalier, now as an estudiantina, now as Stéphanie Gavotte, “La Pajera.” “Goodbye, my love, goodbye!” someone supposedly sobbed, while the passionate crowd threw sweet violets, Nellie’s blue eyes, voices of spring, a pansy blossom or two, and a handful of earth from Mother’s Grave (this last but a figure of speech known as a “clementine”). Climbing up the golden stairs to the third and most breathtaking gallery, the viewer is immediately struck by a tableau showing—to the life—Polly Doodle strolling through the park one day on white wings, so to speak, heading toward a big rock candy mountain because of what the catalogue notes term “the letter that never came.” A muscular gladiator follows Miss Doodle like a swan in España, or like Little Annie Rooney, or perhaps like Scheherazade, his eyes flashing the message, “if you love me, darling, tell me with your eyes.” He guessed, surely, in his bursting Eyetalian heart, that love would find a way like a big pizza pie finds its ineffable way down Santo’s t’roat, hey! Sadly, the way, for him, was long and over the waves. Semper fidelis was the brawny rogue’s motto, credo, dado, and blitzen, along with his favorite question to the fair sex, one that clings perpetually to his lips: “Where did you get that hat?” He was a reg’lar down-west McGinty. Next to the winsome and somewhat sad tale of Miss Doodle and her doughty admirer, is a small epic, housed in a glass-topped case, and entitled, rather puzzlingly, “The Thunderer.” Here is a photograph of Jimmy “Throw ‘im Down” McTater, doing a Polovetsian dance in the garb of his native Bowery, with a denizen of that infamous purlieu, Molly O—short for O’Spud. This is the notorious photo concerning which a pardon came too late to spare the lensman, little “Boy” Blue, from being trampled to death by the march of the raging dwarfs. Another image from that era of loose morals, tight trousers, and see-through skirts shows McTater and Molly as two little girls in blue, both wearing flattering huckleberry “do’s.” When the roll is called up yonder, so Vesti LaGiubba cracked, they’ll be admitted as the waltz of the flowers—“one a peach and the other a pansy.” The final presentation, a photocollage, recreates the frenzied world of Dunderbeck, Texas, home of the honeymoon march, sometimes called the humoresque halfstep, or, more crudely, the pull-me-off-in-Buffalo. Shown are women whose lovely hair is hanging down their lovely backs, each protected, in a manner of speaking, by the pseudonym, “Margery Daw.” One is revealed in shamefully demeaning acts of routine housework, much of it in the kitchen with Dinah (whose Rastus is, yassuh!, usually on parade). The streets of filthy Cairo saw no harsher labor, the sunshine of noisome Paradise Alley illumined faces no sweatier or grimier, not even, for goodness’ sake, on Poverty Row. There were, clearly, no creatures more badly used than the poor sluts and pot-wallopers who slaved as “Margery Daw,” each and every one. America, beautiful America, is what they yearned to see, or to but hear the bells and ogle the belles of Avenue A; but “King” Cotton March, a vile lecher and taskmaster, urged them to backbreaking labor. “Your sweetheart,” he would mock, “your only sweetheart’s the man in the moon, you little pussies,” he would bellow at each exhausted girl as he mounted her, while she continued her labors. It is quite obvious from these disturbing images that nothing was done to assist these young women, for one can see, if one looks closely at the last photograph of the series, a group of sullen musicians herded together for the monthly Dunderbeck football-and-strawberry social, directed by one Cotton March, Esquire. And the band played on.