- 40 years old this month.
- Permanent seat, My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, first Pere Ubu album I heard, started it.
- Click that link line above for lots more.
- Just two months ago. They canceled the West Coast tour soon after, David Thomas fallen ill.
- @ubuprojex tweeted out a Facebook post a week or so ago saying Thomas still recovering, but worse is over, so yay.
- The list of things I write about but cannot post here grows. This is going to be a long six months.
- Pere Ubu's 2017's 20 Years in a Mountain Missile Silo, is fresh, important, go, find.
TRIPTYCH FOR BEGINNERS
Richard Tagett
I
Hung up on body parts in the particulate
daylight, you step out of a Beckett play to find yourself in a memory
resisting itself, as meat hits the fan so to speak against the white
blanket of the grainy void. You never know where it’s going, the body,
the boy swathed in bullets with those black eyes pissing a letter-opener
in the desert mud near a disabled Mercedes. When things enter the room
you think bazooka and check your hat. A puddle of warm ice-cream in
anticipation. Here’s where Coney Island drops like a discarded napkin
and you can’t go home again. Mucous brimming the banks, a cake of dust
in the shape of a rocking chair ticking away. But soon it will snow as
exquisite dogs languish from inside a sandwich tied to a parachute. No
time for ballads, the table is set.
II
Light solidifies in cells, the keeper of
lost keys. They don’t belong to anyone, the keys. Playing the game
backwards reveals nothing a blind child could not guess by the hairs on
his arm. The lips on old men are lockboxes in the terminal of no-knowing
without gratitude for the despair of angels. You have to suffer, you
have to fill up in order to implode, to be recognized for the
necessities of commerce. They unhinge, finally, the doors you walk
through into phantom stairwells in telephonic hum smelling of wet coal
and doll’s hair. Precipitous adjectives gush from a cracked faucet in
the chancellery restroom. Someone is stifling laughter from underneath a
card table where an electric utility had fallen from his sleeve. They
say that trussed birds derive no pleasure from the music of mangled
wagons and that gas seeps like a well-kept secret imperiling dust mites
in the spleens of hooded maidens locked away from the light. Everything
is descending, even the scholarship of the ancient adverbs. Mouths twist
into almonds and you wonder how the noise can drown itself out with
nothing but nouns and dinner plates and gallows, with history a hiccup
waiting to happen.
III
The music is an absence of colliding
masses. You can cut your feet on the proverbial and be too close to hear
it, the other music, the suffocation of things that can’t fly. A
beautiful cacophony flutters in the brightness of dead calm as true
objects lost in the politeness of daylight fill the grail of a new
primitive. You choke on little candles and all through the night your
legs cramp in the sweat of the moonlight. For no good reason a
tenderness of geese is billowing in the curtains, as holes in the face
open and close and paper scorches sky with futile encryption. Those
armchairs foundering in the scum of the surf. Deafness craving disaster
green in the spine, knowing the cocktail party’s over. Now it’s all red
and your lips are trembling in believability, but it’s only a flickering
image in the dark quadrant of your eye bending the light as they mow
the daisies under the stars, for no good reason.
