a "review" of a recent birdleg show:
August Sixteenth Remember It Will Never Be That Day Again
for birdleg
VIEW FROM THE MIDWAY
This place this carnival it is thrusting and curvaceous guarded by eagle-eyed jazz musicians.
No one’s talking everyone’s listening can you blame them? The Biggest Moog in the World
is the main attraction in the Museum of Oddities. It can smoke from a pipe and drink
bourbon at the same time it’s breathtaking. A medieval knight educated by aurally-advanced
space aliens is the bandstand drummer. He is either on a basketful of amphetamines or none
at all. There are coquettishly rising and falling walls of watery, echoing sound in the Fun
House, and the sweetest whirly-gig hooks anyone could hope to buy in the souvenir shop.
No personalized novelty key chains. No posters of unicorns, for godsakes stop gawking for
the knock-em-down milk bottle game it’s a cheat. Settle in now.
CONSIDER
You’re standing there and there’s just so much shit to look at and feel that you start to think
about how you could reorganize your life and follow the carnival. Push around some
calendar pages. Fuck obligations fuck responsibilities fuck anything that doesn’t feel like this.
CONSIDER THAT YOU ARE NOT PREPARED FOR THIS
If you could, you would go phone your ma at the pay phone by the gas station down the
road and tell her, I met the carnival I’m going to marry. You would ask for your grandmother’s
ring and your grandfather’s wedding day ascot. And then she would ask you, Don’t you think
this is all happening a little too fast? Maybe you’d hang up on her in your excitement, not wanting
to miss any more. Maybe you’d walk back down the road just imagining the carnival’s
flashing eyes, which aren’t eyes at all but millions of tiny metal ball bearings rolling in an arch
akimbo as the Pirate Ship swings up and over its bar and all the sound all the sound stops
for one single open-meadow/throat-throttling moment and then the bearings fall and the
carnival is making it rain.
DID YOU EVER THINK IT WOULD REALLY LAST?
Oh what you get for your starry eyes is back down the road there’s the last of the closed-up
carnival shaking a leg by caravan rollin’ away wagon wheels oh unicycles. Then you’re sitting
in the spot where the vibrating Tunnel of Love used to be, covered in cooling sweat, with an
empty stomach and your balls shriveled up like you were standing in the coldest ocean
known to man lamenting your sorry state: alone again at the end of the world. Then like a
sober mercy fuck, the tender waaaah of a guitar swims by you on the breeze, then a basso
twang. Then, you’re smiling like a fool on the side of a dead country road that nobody uses
anymore since the highway was built. You’re smiling now until your cheeks hurt, walking a
little and chuckling too all the goddamn way back your old whistle-stop town that will never
look the same after this, because now, now and forever and finally, you have faith in people
in people who made the carnival in space aliens in getting lost in saying fuck it in music, in
music, in music.
by Amanda Goldblatt
"Oooo You cannot reach me now, Oooo No matter how you try. Goodbye cruel world, it's over. Walk on by. Sitting in a bunker, Here behind my wall, Waiting for the worms to come. In perfect isolation, Here behind my wall, Waiting for the worms to come. Waiting, to cut out the deadwood. Waiting, to clean up the city. Waiting, to follow the worms. Waiting, to put on a black shirt. Waiting, to weed out the weaklings. Waiting, to smash in their windows and kick in their doors. Waiting, for the final solution to strengthen the strain. Waiting, to follow the worms. Waiting, to turn on the showers and fire the ovens. Waiting, for the queers and the coons and the Reds and the Jews. Waiting, to follow the worms. Would you like to see Britannia, Rule again, my friend? All you have to do is follow the worms. Would you like to send our colored cousins, Home again, my friend? All you need to do is follow the worms."
