These are Jim's "programme notes" that we'd like to get printed on cocktail napkins for the performance next week. Sorry I couldn't figure out how to include the accompanying illustrations.
1. The Instrument Room is dominated by an ominous moaning, growling sound coming from a large metallic cone, shaped like a flower bell. Discarded instruments litter the floor and shelves. Some are rusty and bent, some new and brazen. It’s dark, dusky in here. The whole room kind of vibrates dully. Your palms get sweaty, but you’re smiling like an idiot as you seat yourself at the drum kit and start swinging. The windows are covered by a uniform coat of grime through which you can barely make out a red cardinal in a yew tree.
2. The Mourning Room alternates black and white tiles. The walls are bare. The cupboards closed. There’s a phone but no one calls. There’s a slat for memories in the floor. You put them in there and they leave you alone. The window opens on the sea, dark and still. You see a very long way to the horizon.
3. The Show Room has always a little more air being sucked out of it than comes in. They do it carefully so you don’t suffocate right away. You expect to meet your friends here and sometimes you do. This is where you try not to talk about what you really want. And fail. You want to be here until you get here.
4. The Fast Fun Room – talk about a good time! There’s food and smoke and beer and music and everyone’s talking loud and laughing hard. Your pulse is racing and there are some wild ideas in back of your eyes. Everything’s accelerating until you pass out. When you wake up it’s empty, you smell bad and hurt. You struggle to remember what you told whom. You vaguely remember something you promised or threatened. One by one your friends awake and drag themselves out from under the furniture. They look much better than you feel but still pretty bad. Can’t stand seeing each other.
5. The Temple Room is where you worship temptation. Here you gravely measure and confine the full extent of your desires. It’s a small room without a ceiling. There’s no door but you find it difficult to enter, which you do with breath held and an obsequious tilt to your body. Start here by thinking about everything you can’t have, can’t do, don’t want until your spirit rises above and beyond the limits of the room to encompass the vast reaches of the unknowable.
6. The Room of Dregs is where you’ll find everything you've thrown away and discarded. They collect it at the recycling center and make installation art of it. When they've got enough they bring it home to you and put it right here.
7. The Cameroum is like a foreign country. Everybody’s talking but what are they saying? Everything’s familiar but slightly different. Everybody seems friendly, but what are they laughing at? You’d like something to eat but are afraid you’ll get sick. It’s frustrating but nice – nobody knows you here.
1 comment:
The other night I went over to my friend's apartment to help him get his dinner. He's blind and disabled and is recovering from heart surgery and lives in a very international subsidized building. I parked my car (the blue one) and started walking across the parking lot when I came upon a group of two Ethiopian men and a woman who were fiddling with two cars and some jumper cables. There seemed to be some difficulty, so I asked them if they were getting it. They said "no", and were glad to hand me the cables and let me try it out. I told the woman to start the functioning car and hooked up the cables to the battery. Then I hooked up the negative cable to the dead battery, but when I started to hook up the positive, a loud alarm almost made me jump out of my skin. They all laughed, and said "Yes, that happened to us, too." I told the fellow that it was his car alarm, and he needed to unlock the dead car to disarm it before we applied the electricity. He unlocked the car, then I hooked up the cables and the car started, to much happiness. We all said "Salaam" and "Amasikanaloo", and I went off to heat up some spaghetti for my friend. Loud, happy peals of Ethiopian laughter rang across the parking lot as they repeatedly remembered the excitement of having a car alarm go off in all of our ears, for no apparent reason, with electrical cables in our hands. Perhaps it was the look on my face that had amused them, but it really seemed that the whole experience was perhaps the most hilarious thing that they ever could have imagined.
It is always nice to take a trip to the Cameroum nefore dinner.
Post a Comment