| LANDLUBBER | SEPTEMBER, 2000 |
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The party I went to last New Year's Eve was all right. There were about twenty people. It was a mingle-around-and-talk party with lots of food--nothing crazy. Right before midnight they got Dick Clark on the teevee, and after the ball dropped, people sang "Auld Lang Syne." Then some of us went outside and a guy pulled a helium tank out of his vehicle. He filled three clearish-white balloons, which were three to four feet in diameter when inflated. He had put a glow-stick in each one. Two balloons each had one green stick, and one balloon had three purple sticks. The last one was too heavy to float, but when he tied the three balloons together the other two were able to carry the third. He released them and they rose up and away, narrowly missing getting tangled in a tall tree in the yard. We watched them float gently to the west. Who knows where they are now or if anyone called in any UFO sightings. We agreed that we need to do that again sometime, next time with more balloons. We went inside and some people left. Then the host stood in the middle of the living room and proceeded to read us four pages of humor he had printed off from a Scottish web site. Actually, some of it was pretty funny. As soon as he was finished, the rest of us took off. At first I thought the guy was just spazzing out (I hardly know him but he seems like a sincere guy), but as I write this I'm thinking that maybe it was really a clever ploy to clear the house.
On the first Thursday of February, I went to an event called Fire and Ice, sponsored by the organization "Living Arts." The event was at somebody's house in a small town in a northwest part of the city that I didn't even know existed. When I was driving into the town, it looked like a total rednecks-ville. The most exciting thing there was the giant grocery store and video store. When I got to the house, it was dark. I saw some people in the back yard, so I went back there. This was in a neighborhood of houses, but these people had a few acres of land in their backyard. I wandered around a little, and when I was on the back porch, a middle-aged blonde introduced herself to me. She told me this was her house and they like living there because the people don't make laws to stop you from doing what you want with your property. Or something like that. I said cool, that's great, that's how it should be. They had a nice house and a nice pond in the back. She told me four artists were presenting pieces.
After a little while, it started. The first piece centered on a wooden structure consisting of an open cube supported by four poles. Ropes suspended a basket inside the cube, and the basket held a single lit candle. A bottle sat in the center of the bottom edge of each side of the cube. The artist wore black pants, a white shirt, and a black hood and cape. He slowly walked up to the structure, took a bottle, walked back a few feet, sat on a stool, opened the bottle, and took a drink. He paused for a while and then slowly took another drink. He continued like this until he finished the bottle. After a pause, he got up and put the bottle back. He pulled a candle out of a pocket and lit it from the candle in the basket. Then he bent over and lit a long fuse on the ground that burned for several seconds before it ignited a smoke bomb that sent a cloud of smoke up through the structure. He then set the candle in the empty bottle he had just drunk from and sat down for a while. Then he went to the structure, got another bottle, sat down, opened it, took a slow drink, and continued as he did before, smoke bombs and all, until he had lit three candles, but not four, in the bottles on the bottom edges of the cube. This went for probably an hour. Finally, after a long pause, he slowly walked off. The audience stayed there for a while waiting, and in my case relaxing as well, until another artist started his piece several yards behind us. It impressed me that the artist did everything slowly and gradually with no hurry at all. My writing doesn't do it justice. Everything happened at its proper time with no rush. Although the piece consisted mostly of long pauses between actions, I was never bored. It was very peaceful. It made me feel the hurry of my thoughts and it made me slow down and relax. I thought this piece would have been good out in a field in the middle of nowhere with nothing (no civilization anyway) around us and we could just sit for a long time and watch and slow down.
The second artist did her piece during the first artist's. I had seen her out there beforehand laying charcoals on the ground in a square or a grid formation. Now she lit them all. The only reason I saw any of it was that during one of the first artist's pauses, I noticed a bright light back behind me a ways. She was back there with another person, just the two figures in the distance with a raging flat square fire in front of them, lighting up the night.
The third artist did something I've never seen or heard of before--something I now would like to try. Beforehand, he had gotten some bags of ice and poured out seven evenly-spaced mounds of ice cubes in a straight row. He formed them into short, wide-base cones so that they were like round pyramids, then he had put a flare standing straight up in the middle of each one. When I got there, he was lighting them. The flares rose above the tops of the cones and the light of the red flames was reflected from the ice. Soon, the flares burned down to where the flames were within the ice mounds. At this point, they looked like ice volcanoes because the ice was entirely glowing red and water vapor was constantly rising out of the top. As the flares began dying, they would alternate between red and white, and they flickered making the volcanoes into flashing lights. And nothing could stop the burning of the flares until they reached their end.
The final artist did a short play on a little stage he had set up. He was wearing a costume that made him look muscled-up like Rambo. He started by carrying bags of ice one by one to the top of a step ladder, breaking them open, and pouring the ice down onto the stage in front of a round metal thing. Throughout the play, he was saying a bunch of lines about love and lovers. "Advice doesn't help lovers! They're not the kind of mountain stream you can build a dam across." "An intellectual doesn't know what the drunk is feeling!" "Don't try to figure what those lost inside love will do next!" When he was finished pouring the ice onto the stage, he went to the metal thing. It was hooked up to a tank of propane or some kind of gas. He lit a match in front of the round thing and turned on the gas and a big flame started blowing into the top of his pile of ice. He did a variety of things amongst his proclamations about love. One neat effect he did was pick up some ice, get really close to the fire, and blow over the ice, and you could see the vapor from his breath. Another thing he said was, "Life freezes if it doesn't get a taste of this almond cake." Then he suddenly ran off. I was cracking up; what does almond cake have to do with anything? It was the best laugh I had in a long time. Then he returned with--guess what--a box of almond cake, plates, napkins, and plastic utensils and started giving everyone a piece of cake. After that, he climbed to the top of the ladder and said, "God picks up the reed-flute world and blows. Each note is a need coming through one of us, a passion, a longing-pain. Remember the lips where the wind-breath originated, and let your note be clear. Don't try to end it. Be your note." Then he threw pens and pieces of paper to everyone and told us to write notes to our lovers. Finally, he took an acoustic guitar up the ladder and said, "Go up on the roof at night in this city of the soul. Let everyone climb on their roofs and sing their notes!" Then he strummed a single chord and sang a single sentence: "This magic moment." When he was finished, the first artist was back at his wooden structure. Now he was drinking from the fourth bottle and then finally lighting the fourth candle, so that the structure was now complete.
The following Thursday, an exhibit opened at the Living Arts gallery downtown, featuring pictures and videos of the performances and some artifacts from some of them. I went and checked it out. A drunk woman, somewhat attractive yet messed up, came in and wandered around and talked to people and looked at things and talked to herself. After a while, people weren't paying attention to her and she went to the front window of the gallery and proceeded to change her clothes. People noticed her again then. I don't know if she had had her pants off or what, because she had been wearing jeans and a blouse, but now she was facing out of the window toward the street totally topless putting a bra and a dress on. She didn't turn around though until she had the dress on. Then, she pointed at a dance club across the street and said "those people over there won't let me change in their restrooms, can you believe that?" People kind of went back to what they were doing, and she went outside to smoke for a little while. She came back in and started walking around with her lit cigarette. Then the guy who ran the place said "Ma'am, I'm gonna have to ask you to leave, you know we don't allow smoking in the building." When she was stripping in the front window where anyone on the street could see, they didn't throw her out, but when she was smoking indoors, then they threw her out.
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| --E.J. Koonpa |
