Things THE AFTERNOON SUN ON THE WINDOWPANES AN ELM TREE THAT EXPLODES INTO FLAMES and crying as its heard on a desolate landscape of train tracks and sighs wrung out along a mid Saturdays long drawn loneliness and things Like bottles like books on a shelf pictures on a wall an enlarged detail of a book its numbered pages crossed out and then handwritten the labor of a dysfunctional teen. a thrift store lamp on a typesetters table arranged the way things are set in thrift stores A pair of platform shoes from the 1970s their soles worn thin with the memories of an era of glitter and glamor….. ’My Someone or Other’ scrawled on a yellow post it note and scotch taped to the tabletop The ceiling held up by fireproof columns thick as redwood trees the way canvas is stretched taut across stretcher bars on paintings where incredible heights are rendered an album cover by the great Van Morrison atop the lampshade colored curled edges in corners and shapes.... the burly shadows of men on staggered planes recollections of a dust bowl era where tramps stepped tenderly alongside some feminine thing..... some things of ours and then slipped into the rays of a by-gone era. long gone eras of grand rooms where fabulous lines formed where beautiful women shifted their weights from one shapely leg to another along rows of marble statues resisting the irresistible urge to pressing an instep of one aching pale foot on top of the other.... faint with fatigue and hunger in Moscow or Mexico City Bosnia towards the end of the 20th century Chicago is Madison street and an immense public space where birds swoop and the wind rattling a crushed can of grape Fanta. where blind and legless men sing the delta blues and custodians sway the braided locks of mop heads Figure eights on the floorboards nights without women or champagne when the city celebrates three peats of whoop and hoop victories framed inside a gilded Rococo frame. Painting that is color coded, dated defined and labeled Some simple things a mirror candles objects that have been developing since before The Expulsion and that have since become outdated, thus painted over or moved to the edges of the canvas and over time out of the picture entirely until they are lost to us forever. Some other beautiful things, then ….NEWER more desirable things illuminated to look like what things illuminated inside a frozen igloo look like. something small man made perhaps an ice cube. Living things freeze dried flowers and plants. Enamel painted statues of saints. Picture- postcards photos and nickel-plated pillboxes with capsules for our anxieties and any ancient Chinese secrets that remain choose a pretty bi-colored capsule from the pill box of tiny time released miracles for what ails us our anxieties photographed stacked one atop another like skyscrapers every hour a hand flips through the tower one by one so that the top photo of one becomes the base of another then the top again until everyone tastes the terror there for a moment. Everything covered in a thin film of blue that looks like its’ been tapped by a spoon at just the right moment. the way icing is cracked on cakes by the French Ice clouded with impurities tap water in spurts streaking unnaturally from rusted faucets. Color coded water in yellow, red and orange vats. Avoiding the red water. Gurgling rock strewn streams of artesian water from god’s country before those streams choked. Immense slabs of mountain ranges oozing with rivers of iron-ore rising from atop rows of beat up file cabinets. A decade of calendars the months of September October illustrated with clans in Tyrolean costume. Old men with emphysema, gazing at Tyrolean peaks yodeling hell.... choking gasping for breath drinking the red water then and dying. Death illustrated on calendars as El Dia de Los Muertos Death is an enlarged photo held on slabs of walls with colored push-pins Death is a collection of unrelated ink-jet photos of humanity alongside images of bunched and soiled socks arranged on some carpeted corner of a copy shop by anorexic curators from some contemporary third world sections in museums. Walls that appear to have been scooped with a spoon and then plastered with the side of a bad complexioned face. The surface of the picture appears to have been carved with a knife thus the resemblance to the rococo. The way the paint adheres to the canvas The illusion of walls of books and bottles shelves and tabletops …all things alluding to US we there crammed into corners of rooms when someone says “SMILE … SAY CHEESE.” or here as Intentionally blurred images mementos you there Dear One who once stood knee deep in streams of cold December waters dead, all the Day long Dead holding taxidermy fish. fishing Pike Bass Muskie garnished finger-food like pate spread or sushi passed on platters around us. Positioned so that we can say as we lean an arthritic elbow casually upon the mantel “ ..... 'You remember so and so … ' .......PLOP ….. a stone tossed into a lake, and the rings obscuring the image…. things like perfume bottles and her powder puffs lotions in jumbo sized plastic tubes placed upside down on their large white caps his collection of plastic decorated milk jugs with dolls heads something of the vernacular the idea of possessing a peculiar collection of Still More Things A small reclining statue with a note scotch taped to it with handwriting that could have passed for any of the marks we made. The Container Store in Lincoln Park where two figures rose like trophies atop chairs barely speaking to one another or listening unresolved if ever they meant anything at all to one another or care if they did or did not waited and wanted only to be let loose in the world so that they could whisper again “ Do you love me… " " Watch dirty movies..." "how MUCH do you love me….................Is it a Blockbuster night …. ....lovers of dentists and lawyers… ............HOW MUCH IS THIS BY THE POUND … how much mileage…..” But how much they meant to each other how some simple thing is depicted in pictures through things, is an indication to how deep our lives our loves run and did we live profoundly IN OUR TIME large block numbers that look as if it they were baked onto the picture along the top as the train passed. arranged in the manner of telephone directories. throughout, the picture, meant to hang on a wall IS the wall in the way a move to Birmingham, a woman,chair,shelf, window, leaving a loved one, and a reclining statue on the floor ends up on a shelf at the Salvation Army IS SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY. Bottles on the floor Pictures on the wall Books on a shelf maybe there is more perhaps there are your things to consider but there is not much more to us then this From “The End of the Twentieth Century” Baltazar Castillo work in progress Copyright 1999 |
