I realized upon waking up recently that I had forgotten a birthday- my own.
I somehow had forgotten my age for the last three months or so,
and have been telling people automatically
that I am a year younger than I truly am.
It couldn’t be that I’m just in denial
that I am a quarter of a century in age now-
or could it be- that insidious Orson Welles complex
creeping up through my cerebral cortex?
How extremely odd.

There is a crooked man
who walks a crooked mile
just to see my smile.
Really, he does though..
His bones are bent and twisted
and he ambles along in a zig-zag way.
He touches my hand and calls me scalawag.
I have always seen him getting by
with his cane and his hat
and always smiled at him
when whizzing by on my bicycle.
And now I know his name
and he is my friend.

Another man came calling
into the shop right after-
this one had no hearing, no words..
Long ago one would say deaf and dumb,
but perhaps I am the dumb one-
as I do not know how to speak his way- with hands.
He uses the universal language of gestures
to indicate to me that he once knew
Ruthie the Duck Girl,
and how her ducks would follow her everywhere
and oh how he loved her.
He also points out that fortune telling
is for the birds.

I have a tendency to fall in love with
strangers on the street, acrobats, buggy-drivers,
choirboys, gypsy girls and beggars.
The faces that you see once,
and then never again.

Many things are just subtly awry at the moment,
and the drizzle and shiver of wet weather
weights down my heart
and makes me sing lovelorn
songs in stairwells.
If there were bones to consult now, I would-
or a sphinx, the southern oracle, various entrails..
But the drear will pass, dear,
and in the meantime..

I ask you-
What comes between a man and a woman
but allows everything?

Propaganda designed by

CABARET REVOLTAIRE – DADA BALL
Z’otz Collective Presents
An Interactive Chaos Salon
Surrealist Art Opening
and Experimental Extravaganza

Cabaret Revoltaire is a revival of Dada and Surrealist art,
and an interactive happening featuring static,
visual and performance art,
live music and installation, invisible theater,
inexplicable fashion, participatory painting,
and curiosities of all sorts.

Featuring
Baby Rosebud
DJ OSTIA
El Radio Fantastique
MISSMASSDESTRUCTION
Nico – Our Lady of the Chelsea Girls Choir
HI RED HOWLPOP
Ratty Scurvics Singularity
SCARYMARY AND THE PUSSYBONES
Pulvis Opii – Church of Anexia
LIVE DADA TRANSMISSIONS
Ta Mere Toujours
– and many more –

Saturday – March 27th, 1904 – 9:07pm – ’til..?

at Cleopatra’s Old Alamo – 538 N. Rampart and Toulouse

Inspired by the Dada and Surrealist movements,
our goals are to revive and expand on the tropes of yore-
to achieve consciousness expansion, orgone stimulation,
creation of collaborative art, and to provide a space for
an interactive (rather than passive) social experiment.

If you are interested in participating, go here-

CABARET REVOLTAIRE

In preparing for the first performance of the
 – Nico our Lady of Chelsea Girls Choir –
for the Dada Ball, I was reminded of
this helpful mantra for moving through
the Seven Stations of The Nico.

I am not afraid of my inner Nico.

I am afraid of my inner Nico.

Liebes kleines Mütterlein
Nun darf ich endlich bei Dir sein
Die Sehnsucht und die Einsamkeit
Erlösen sich in Seeligkeit.

If you enjoy subjecting yourself to emotional blitzkrieg,
please consider viewing Capturing the Friedmans .

For those who prefer physical violence
(with lots of jouncing cleavages)
Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill
featuring the fascinating Haji..

Infants like me.
One put her little starfish hands
in my mouth today and tried
to pull my teeth out.

Incidentally, I met Lawrence Fishburne yesterday
in the Bicycle Repair Shop.
We discussed the virtues of various local banks,
and the pitfalls of extortionist automatic tellers.
He seemed like a nice enough guy, I suppose.

My life will be changing somewhat drastically
in a matter of months. All in all, I feel
relatively calm about this.
That may not be so
when it all comes to pass-
but I can only wait and see.
It may be better for me to revert
to a more natural state of solitude,
of private space, and individual freedom.
That being said,
I may also be pulling out a hidden cache
of sad country music for the lonesome prairie,
for a spell or so..

A little dappled faun and a similarly dappled
baby bunny have been abandoned by veterinary science
because it is believed that they
are too injured to be saved.
I gather them up in my arms and take them home.
They nestle on my kitchen floor,
and seem responsive to touch
even though the little deer’s entrails
are hanging out.
Later the fawn seems to get better
and follows me around the kitchen,
nuzzling me with a pointy snout-
having worked up an appetite, I suppose.
On spindly, unstable legs he
wobbles and bites at my hands-
tiny hooves beating into my chest
and the solid molars of a dinosaur
are hurting my fingers.
I had felt pity and adoration for
this hurt creature before-
Now I feel only fear, and repulsion.
The bright lights of police cars
draw us out into the alley alongside the house.
We walk down to the gas station and purchase
beer and chocolate popsicles.
The owners of the store are Laotian
and running a betting operation and
Temple of the Dead.
You can simultaneously buy pickles,
bet on a cockfight, and light candles
for your deceased loved ones..
As we leave, we notice a crazed
homeless amputee waving a gasoline-soaked rag
and matches near dangerously near
a cadre of propane trucks filling up their tanks.
We run across the highway to the overpass
and dive facedown in the grass
and wait for the explosion.
We walk until dawn and find an
abandoned supermarket still filled
with a multitude of products-
every single one made out of some form of soybean.
The clothing, books, toys
somehow even canned oysters and lentils
and vegetables were not what they were
but really soybeans instead.
We have free reign of the store,
so we try on soy nightgowns and trousers
until we see an ominous clown making his way
across the empty parking lot.
He is suddenly standing there,
wrapped in polka-dots and pink feathers
and we are terrifed.
In the produce section, there is mainly
canned food- the tins are as big as
toxic waste drums, and their labelling
is delightfully old fashioned-
40’s Americana graphics and style.
There are other gathered, a rough band of refugees
and I am distraught because we can never leave this store again.
I will never see another ribbon or poundcake
that is not made out of soybeans.
I am sobbing into a heap of cabbages and snow peas
and my sons bring me a whole rack of iridescent ribbons
but there is something even more shady going on here..
Some kind of army is being formed
and I need to get out of here,
I’m trying to get to Europe
but I can only go for one day,
and it’s impossible.
My frog Yaroslava is alive,
but Gustav is ill
and I accidentally pull off his
little hand trying to move a branch for him.
I feel very guilty about this,
but I still have Yaroslava, at least.
All these sick and dying animals.
I can’t say I understand.

Black ghosts in my peripheral
elusive shadows my vision tracks
across glinting coronas,
streetlights and sundogs.
Optical ghosts born by scars
in the cornea- floaters, they say.
A parade can be dangerous.
Aside from getting shot, of course,
one has to protect one’s eyeballs
from flying objects hurled from
elaborately gilded satirical floats.
I’ll go again tomorrow, though-
just to listen to the marching bands
play below the underpass all flash
and bright brass, big drums that
make your back shake and the
dancing girls with batons awhirl..

I am beseeching the Heavenly Benefactress of Carnivale
to withold her tempests on Mardi Gras Day.
Please oh please no rain, okay?

And now I will attempt to relate a horrible dream I had.
If you possess an overly sensitive nature,
or would find yourself disturbed
by an excess of information-

I am flying in a small, silent biplane
over gray grassy hills, over silver dales
dotted with creaky farmhouses and leafless orchards.

I am in a swimming pool with a gaggle
of middle-aged asian women.
They are offering me the same golden beetle-green
eyepaint that tantalized me when I was eight.
My cat is underwater, with a plastic bucket tied
to his leg to keep him afloat.
I dive under and grab him,
and resucitate him until he coughs up
a small amount of water.
I am very upset by all of this.

I am in the back of a station wagon.
I am a pre-teen avatar of the virgin
for a cult religion headed by my father.
Apparently, it’s some sort of Heaven’s Gate
Angel Moroni Holy Baptist Branch Davidian Moonie Church.
I think that’s the name of it.
Anyway, they tell me apocalypse is nigh
and that if I don’t bear children by my father,
our royal holy family line will disappear for all eternity.
So, I’m probably fifteen or thereabouts
and it’s cold and raining
and I’m in the back of this Datsun station wagon
with my dad, the cult leader, who is crying
and handing me a palmful of holy seed,
which I’m supposed to insert into my sacred virgin vessel.
I’m concentrating intently on the world reflected
upside down in the droplets on the windshield now.
Feeling horrible and sick and afraid,
I go into the nastiest gas-station bathroom ever.
Inside, there are two manky toilets,
one of which is being used by a scary junkie girl.
She is scooping up pinkish-beige chunks
of foamy vomit out of the toilet and eating it.
This is incredibly disgusting, and I tell her as much-
but she responds by informing me that what she is eating
is chock-full of expensive tranquilizers,
which she can’t afford to waste.

I go back to the station wagon
and wait for my dad, the cult leader,
to come back from buying slim jims
and boston baked beans.
A frightening apparition of a little girl
appears in the backseat.
She has long white hair
and circles under her eyes.
She looks like the poltergeist child,
but I know her name and who sent her.
Her name is Ataxia, and she was sent by my brother.
I am screaming for my father to step on the gas
and just drive, drive- but he can’t see that
she’s a ghost and wants to give her a ride
since she’s just a kid.
I kick her in her demon-face and she evaporates.

I am in a high school where paranormal activity
has been reported. Some students have been given
my brother’s notebooks, intentionally,
in hopes that they will wreak havoc
with their black magic.
People are becoming possessed by demons
right and left, and I feel like I can trust no one.
I look at the spells he gave them-
black tornadoes and spirals of words
in black warrior pencil on notebook paper.

I am winding and winding the gold chain
on the cameo locket my sister gave me.
It has her picture, and a lock of her hair inside.
The gold chain turns into a long piece of his hair,
bright red and sinister, but I can’t stop winding it
around and around the locket,
even though it doesn’t belong inside.

I am sitting outside a library,
the day is sunny and warm
and I’m watching the light bounce off of
the complicated metal brace worn by
a woman painfully making her way
up the stairs. She looks like
a robot, or some sort of J.G Ballard fantasy
as she grunts in pain and hefts her silver.
Finally, I go over to help her
and see that it is Magenta, the Maori woman
who sings low and deep in the square.
She has been through radical surgery
and is and showing me her scarred body,
like the brown twisted hull of an old boat,
and shaking her head
telling me what bad things
she’s been through.

This thing went on all night. I’d wake myself up from it,
hoping to escape into something more pleasant, to no avail.
I think it may be the worst one I’ve ever had.
It just got under my skin, and stayed there for a few days.
I never got the chance to tell it to anyone yet.
I didn’t really intend to post it here,
but I had to write it down, exorcise it.
I usually appreciate my nightmares more,
if I ever have them, which is rare.
I can’t imagine what it would be like
not to dream.
 

This is a picture of my father, (not taxidermy)
my pop, my dear old dad in his heyday.
It was one I had never seen before,
and has now become my favorite photograph of him.
He was playing music at
some sort of Dickensian Hootenanny.
I have reason to believe that he was under
the influence of hallucinogens
when this picture was taken.
If you look closely, you can see that
the word “REVELRY” is printed on his hand.
That banjo is his “Whyte Ladie”
and he still plays it all the time.
She’s a pretty one.
I need to get him to send me my banjo soon.
Then I can sit on the balcony and serenade
the dogs and people waiting for the bus.

A most unusual and rare relic from the past-
 an eight legged hermaphrodite piglet!

A very nice ring-tailed lemur

Badger & Polecat Enlarged

Stock Number: 542

An outstanding case by Hutchings of Aberystwyth 1860-1942. Large snarling badger with hackles raised looking down over a rocky ledge at a surprised Polecat in turn with baby Rabbit as prey, amongst much rockwork and cleverly modelled roots. This is undoubtedly one of the finest Badger cases by this highly regarded taxidermy firm, in mint condition having retained its full colour. Priced accordingly.

The word taxidermy comes from the Greek meaning ‘to arrange skin’. This might include leatherwork or the preservation of mummies by the ancient Egyptians, but today the term has come to refer specifically to the arrangement of skins in life like form.

Due to circumstances entirely beyond our control, The Victorian Taxidermy Company Limited is not moving as previously announced to Spicer?s Yard, Leamington Spa. Instead we have set up our show rooms at 19 Gaydon Road, Bishops Itchington. For convenience all of our fish cases have been entered into auction due to a temporary lack of space (see fish section).

Hello. Above is a picture I drew of two Fiji Mermaids who are obviously smitten with one another. Below is myself and my beloved P. before entering the mad fray that was Saint Valentine’s Day. Note her arrow wound- I think it’s gotten pretty infected. Damn those cupids.

And this was written by a friend and sent to me yesterday. I found it charming, and perhaps you will too. 

GRAPEFRUIT

There is something rather nice about having
half a pink grapefruit for breakfast in the sunshine,
privately, under the wisteria
There is something so awfully nice about it
I cannot bring myself to begin
I drag my fingertip over its meshed translucent nodules
I test it with my tongue
We would have beautiful children
Half-poet, half-grapefruit
Our children would not only be beautiful,
they would also be intelligent, aromatic, juicy,
sensitive and politically aware,
standing up for fundamental rights
in the context of a culture profoundly fruitist and poetist
They would say things like
‘Speaking as a victim of agribusiness’
and ‘My ancestors have known the Spoon’
They would side with the grapefruit relatives
and refuse to speak to my mother
who would in any case disapprove of them
They would blame me
We would have a deathbed reconciliation,
they would say,
‘You may have the intellect of a poet
but you have the soul of a grapefruit’
They would marry unremarkable
but actually rather nice spouses,
and their own children would carry briefcases
and work for banking corporations,
and be embarrassed by the whole business
‘What grapefruit?’
‘What poet?’
they very likely would remark
The sun shifts
The petals drop
How little is left of our breakfast romance
Our flesh our juice our pith our skin our zest  

-Jonathan Tel

Check this out quick, it won’t be up long.

Bunk or no, it’s definitely worth the read.

Dybbuk Haunted Wine Cabinet

I do enjoy the peculiar sense of synchronicity and coincidence that I seem to encounter almost daily.

This morning when I came in to work, I found a cut-out article from the Times-Picayune (Incidentally, weren’t Picayunes what Holly Golightly smoked? I found them in New York once, and they were just dreadful.)

The theives were found, or at least their hide-out, filled with all sorts of purloined archictural sweetmeats- including five Italian marble mantelpieces. I know it’s them.

Anyhow, the article is here, if you’d like to read it:

Stolen archictectural items recovered

In other news, miss abaratus  reminded of of this today-

I’ve always wondered about the whys and wherefores regarding
The Great Molasses Flood..
There are rumours that there was once one here,
but it might just be misinformed gossip..
Still, it’s a great song,
and I do love the smell of blackstrap molasses!

More on that..

Also, we held the second Cabaret Revoltaire meeting
in the laundrette, due to the downpour and dampness..
Things seem to be moving at a fair clip,
and I am excited about the Dada/Hugo/Ball in March.
If any of you performers or artists or whatnot
have an interest in reviving the Dada/Surrealist movements
and visiting New Orleans, than by all means-
go here:
CABARET REVOLTAIRE

And..

Here’s a Valentine.

Just ’cause yer so durn purty.