February 23, 2015
The tutor sketches her as she poses next to the trophy case, spread across the tarnished scores, the forgotten pride of students long since dead. Stumbling fingers dance across a canvas propped up by textbooks. Her pose is one meant for sunshine and vinyl appliques, not the dusk of after-hours school and the cool light thereof.
She is as a wolf, hunting for what she needs from a mankind that owes her a livelihood, and the tutor’s sketches are her first kill.
June 13, 2014
So, as many a starving artist has done in their darkest hours, I went into the sketchy part of town looking for sketchy girls.
“Hey there, sailor,” said one, who was nothing more than circles drawn over a rough framework below the waist, only partly detailed and colored. “Wanna finish me?”
March 9, 2014
Art Huck–and, for that matter, his moll June, 24 years his junior–always seemed a little schizoid, arguing with themselves about decisions with any sort of ramifications. That was in full swing right now, with Art riposting with himself while riding bitch on Captain Ramirez’s motorcycle about the merits of opening fire on the fleeing forms of Rosie the robot hooker and her captive paramour Rich “The Bitch” Bichovic (LAPD badge number 1138) over one shoulder and Lawrence Wong, a Buddhist clergyman, over her other.
“Shoot her in the head, I invented her and it’ll slow her down! No, no. Just wing the Bitch and it’ll slow her down even better. No, we don’t want to hit him. But we don’t want to hit her either. Damn!”
Ramirez, wondering how the meaty slab of a passenger–and a known pimp at that–had goaded him into a ride-along in the sidecar of his ’28 Indian Chief cycle, snapped back: “I’m not shooting at anything! Say your stop word like you promised.”
As any good part-time mad scientist with a gynoid automaton should, Art had programmed Rosie’s difference engine to stop at the utterance of a specific word. But Art was also determined to see Rosie undamaged and her passenger–and his attempted murderer–laid out on a slab. He fumbled in his vest pocket for the .32 Iver Johnson break-action revolver, loaded with armor-piercing slugs, that he always kept on hand.
For her part, when Rosie had abandoned the bus to Reno after the police had blown out its tire on the side of the road, she’d had nothing on her mind but matrimony with a side of escape. With her beau in one hand and a priest in the other, all she needed was the rest of the wedding party. It was, after all, her day. But when she saw a roadside Woolworth’s, though, Rosie the Riveting made a sudden, and sharp, turn. Woolworth’s had everything, after all, including everything you needed for an impromptu wedding.
Captain Ramirez, shaken by the report of a pistol right next to his good ear, shouted at the small-time pimp and part-time mad scientist riding bitch in his sidecar to drop his weapon. Art argued with himself about it, but was largely drowned out by the roar of a Dusenberg V12 alongside–his wife, June Huck, behind the wheel. She’d caught up with her husband by stealing his car, and was shouting something about a safety deposit box. The bitch had been trying to get into it, to make off with Art’s nest egg, since he’d met her.
That was enough for him. He shouted out the safe word.
Rosie’s mainspring unwound, and her storage compartment–with a door located about where you would expect on a hooker automaton–sprang open. Every little thing Art had ever used her to hide, from weapons to diamonds to oil, splurted out. All at once.
The massive pile-up accident that followed went pretty much like one would expect.
Inspired by Fiasco by Bully Pulpit Games, specifically the Los Angeles 1936 playset.
January 21, 2013
As with any form of human expression, graffiti has undergone the full spectrum of reactions from proscription to embrace by the avant-garde. From the crude tags put up by amateur vandals to the sophisticated pictures that enthusiasts proclaim as “street art,” it is in the public eye as never before. Once might even argue that, with the international success and recognition of graffiti artists like Banksy and Invader, that the form has become respectable, even passé.
Well, it’s at least as true that whenever a form of human expression seems to have said all it can say, when it’s become too comfortable, someone will shake it up.
Urban explorers poking through Detroit’s Michigan Central Station found a sumptuous graffiti tableaux featuring an infant held in an unfolding flower bud. Text ringed it like a picture frame: they were born into a world overgrown/of crumbled walls the rats called home/but beauty springs from any soil/of its own but often with toil. Next to it was another painting, this one an almost photo-realistic picture of a blank wall in a decaying building.
The explorers, struck by what they saw, documented the find online and appealed for help in identifying the location. They soon established that it was the nearby Roosevelt Warehouse, also in Detroit; upon locating the wall depicted in the previous graffiti, they found it bedecked with another painting. This one depicted a small child of ambiguous gender and race wandering through weed-choked ruins and beholding a luminous golden keyhole bedecked with jewels and, impossibly, golden wings.
Its accompanying text: potential is there, in they and you and me/all that’s needed to unlock is the key/but though we know where the keyhole be found/where might a key be when falsehoods abound.
Another near-photographic scene accompanied it, a breadcrumb to the next stage of the story. Before long, the secret had spread well beyond the tiny community of urban explorers in Detroit to encompass a website, where enthusiasts cataloged the location of each new stage of the story and collaborated to decipher the clues as to the next location of the art.
All this independent of the artist, who remained anonymous and unnamed. By the apparent conclusion of their first “story,” fans had taken to calling the artist Breadcrumbs.
January 15, 2013
The acclaimed songwriter behind the 1970s pop ballad “My Dear Lovely One” is another example. Stanley McManus had been an art student at the University of Leeds and roomates with Herbert Tretheway, better known by his later stage name “Cordoba.” Cordoba was in the process of assembling his first musical group, and had approached McManus to draw posters for them. The young student had done so and, in gratitude, Cordoba and his band gave him a blanket pass to their engagements.
McManus, shy and retiring, attended out of a sens of obligation even though he had no real regard for the music. He would bring sheafs of paper with him to doodle on and often composed small poems to women in the audience–things he regarded as doggerel and never actually delivered. After one performance, McManus forgot a stack of poems and Cordoba found them. Intending to return them to his friend, he read them and was inspired to use them as lyrics in a song that the group sang as an encore.
The reaction in the dingy club was ecstatic, and within a month the song was getting local airplay. Cordoba and his bandmates were careful to credit McManus as songwriter and when they were signed by EMI for a self-titled debut album, they signed away a portion of their royalties to him. “My Dear Lovely One” went on to become an international smash, charting at #2 in the UK and #1 in the USA, and McManus was quickly overwhelmed with offers to write songs.
For his part, McManus bitterly resented the circumstance. He regarded himself, first and foremost, as a visual artist and dismissed his poems and other writing as worthless. The notoriety made it impossible for him to sell his artworks or to find a career as a commercial artist after graduation, as prospective employers were all convinced that a “songwriter” couldn’t possibly have the artistic chops they sought.
Though he cashed the royalty checks, and didn’t deign to sue when Cordoba turned more of his poems into hit songs (though once again fully crediting and compensating him), McManus eventually withdrew from the world. He purchased a large country home with his royalties and set out to paint on his own terms. But even there he wasn’t truly isolated: throughout the tumultuous rise and drug-addled fall of Cordoba and his various groups, there was no shortage of fans and aspirant musicians to seek out the “lyrical genius” behind Cordoba’s earliest and best-regarded songs. Even after McManus disconnected his telephone, admirers still found their way onto his property.
An intruder who climbed through his bedroom window in 1987 was apparently the last straw for McManus; he overdosed on sleeping pills and died in his home. Cordoba, long past his prime and mired in a cycle of addictions that would take his own life in June 1990, paid for the funeral and a lavish headstone from his already dwindling funds.
September 1, 2012
ArtCity One was the ultimate extension of the expensive, popular, and uncharacteristically honestly-titled Let’s Put Stuff In Space To See What Happens program. The United States Aeronautics and Space Administration constructed, at taxpayer expense, a huge titanium sphere designed to rotate in such a way as to provide gravity in some areas and none in others and filled it with 10,000 artists. Every shape and form of art was represented, from writing to sculpture to bizarre outsiders who worked in mediums like spider pee and bat earwax.
A committee of USASA bigwigs chose the artists from a stack of applications. They were accused of stuffing ArtCity One with weirdoes and gadflies the government would prefer to have on the other side of a few million miles of hard vacuum, but in fact the only thing the artists had in common was that their best work was apparently ahead of them. No established or high-profile figures were included, though a few did try to bully themselves onboard.
With great fanfare, ArtCity One was launched ten years to the day after construction began, borne skyward by 1500 surplus Saturn V rockets. As part of the agreed-upon plan, there was no communication between USASA mission control and ArtCity; the artists were left to do as they would while USASA monitored the sphere’s automatic systems. They planned for numerous contingencies, keeping a rocket with a rescue crew on 24/7 standby.
The only thing USASA didn’t plan on was a budget cut.
After an election, the new president made the controversial decision to divert the Let’s Put Stuff In Space To See What Happens program’s $200 trillion budget into a new program. Its reputation, they claimed, had been inevitably tarnished by such fiascoes as Operation Pork Lift, the Mucus Orbiter, and of course the notorious Unstable Radioactive Isotopes In Rapidly Decaying Orbits initiative. The president transferred the funds to the new Let’s Give Money to Various Voting Blocs program, and ArtCity One was left to its own devices after a message asking the crew if they would like to be retrieved received no response.
Eight years afterward, the president left office and $100,000 was allocated by their successor to the Let’s See What Happened to ArtCity One So Their Relatives Will Leave Us Alone initiative. The two-man crew, made up of astronauts previously dismissed from the program for substance abuse problems or trying to murder their ex, rendezvoused with ArtCity One in a secondhand Soyuz capsule that the Russians had put on the “free” table at their national garage sale.
The first transmission was garbled; the USASA Relief Mission Control Team (normally assigned to supervise space junk in near earth orbit) could barely understand any of it. The only clear words were “massive,” “gazebo,” decoupage,” and “hive-mind.”
February 5, 2012
Tellytaxt Gallery, 115 E. Main, 11:47am.
“Tellytaxt? What’s that mean–name of the founder?”
“Oh no, heavens no. The gallery was founded by Emile Delecroix and Pierre Richat in 1948. They came up with the name as a nonce word that was free of overt philological baggage.”
“Doesn’t sound baggage-free to me. What would you say, Smitty? A tax on limey televisions?”
“A text on Telly Savalas.”
“Maybe a jelly used in taxidermy.”
“That’s quite enough, officers. Do you want to see the break-in, or are you content to play your childish games with concepts you don’t fully grasp?”
December 17, 2011
They made their way through the “edutitaL” exhibit, with Roger reading the artist’s description from the book as Laurie looked at each artwork.
“What about the empty syringes floating in a bathtub full of urine?” Laurie said.
Roger flipped to the proper page in the exhibit guide. “An indictment of the totalitarianism inherent in unregulated commercial broadcasting.”
“The pile of dead flies on an old record covered in plastic wrap?”
“An attempt to capture the zeitgeist of a morally bankrupt age in its most luxurious form.” Roger said. “Based on a true story.”
Laurie walked to the next one. “The mounted cat skeleton stuffed with gummy worms?”
“Meta-commentary on the failure of the ‘postmodern’ in the face of intercontinental commercialism,” Roger said. “Pretty straightforward, really.”
Excerpts From Nonexistent Books 