Win On Diagonals

There will be a glueoff on Staten Island tonight. We are supposed to be gluing bridges made of balsam wood. Everyone is supposed to have a different glue product to use. I have this stuff called ‘Almost the best glue 2.’ No one has any idea if there was a one. I find Gorilla glue is effective, but is sarcastic glue that doesn’t want hold shit together when the heat is on. My shop teacher in seventh grade had a missing thumb. He was a short guy named Mr. Ephraim. If there was a human being that could turn into a pile of glue while sleeping inside, it was him. Enjoy the weekend. 

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this is what they crack it up to be….. sweet space butterblack toast

The M Shanghai String band playing under the protection of the Sidney Jonas Band Shell.  The date was 19 of August 2007; the last of ‘A Fugitive Baton Summer’ performance festival had come.  Late Coney Island rain fell on the Hennessey Triangle making relay races impractical.  I had defeated my brother (Carlo Maltempi) in the first leg of team El Alto’s race against ‘The sons of….’  Brother had me beat by a two to three strides as he always did… I had retained some reserve energy for the last length of the race as we fought for precious lane space.  Alas, my endurance proved to be my late savoir, my brother’s body battering vices robbing him of his lead. El Alto would go on to lose this race, but not without a somewhat heroic effort by MC for the festival: Evan Kreeger.  Evan ran anchor for us.  He was handed off baton with opposing team up at least 75 yards.  Evan’s opposition was from a fella who happened to be a track star at some point in life, and came to our festival not even knowing music was on agenda!  He just came to race.  Another team (The Late Entries?) also raced, but not with winning as any type objective.  They did have fun.  Investigations into possible amateur race doping violations are just germinating, and might reverse the grand trophy going to ‘The Sons.’ 

Mike Quoma of El Alto did receive a trophy (purchased somewhere on Jamaica Ave,) for ‘most graceful handoff.’  

The day was full of joyous music from Carlico and L’ultima.  Calro as voice of the usually irascible Tan, delighted all.  Balthrop, Alabama wooed the small but doughty spirited crowd with their elliptically buoyant musical creations and stage sweetness.  El Alto invited bedraggled listeners to the side of the covered bandshell, where we played our first ever rain concert, facing a few children (including my unstoppably beautiful 3 year old girl running in concentric mud circles with an effulgent blue or green baton held aloft in her hand.) Our faithful listeners sat or stood on the concrete enjoying a set that was full of zest and thunder, including a sensational showcasing of a tune to be on the near future album to be named ‘Grippo.’  

As I mentioned earlier on, M’Shanghi String band played in the back of the band shell with their various cheerful members performing blue grass songs that landed in our seated dry laps as pearls and silky husks.  It was a fantastic performance by the group, broken G string on the stand up bass be damned.  

 I will look back on this day’s events with something akin to the ethereal yet so real magic blanket shade shine dancing off from the enlarged pages of a powerful book of narratives that will walk wherever they feel like.  They end up crouching down in an auditorium full of kids unwrapping sandwiches without much talk during an endless recess, misty air cool and wet on a window you might look out to with a special friend making a wordless pact or confirming that things are great the way they are when you……….. 

I feel as hungover as a confused 7th grade math teacher still touched with the immediate acid of a tumultuous divorce.  I feel as elated as a man who tells his crook of a watch repairman to ‘go to hell,’ in a sudden and unbarbed manner.

Then you are alone in that house…Mountainville, NY.  You are being interrogated by a piece of sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, you haphazerdly trip upon a description of an Agnnes Martin Painting…. You have an urge to travel to Flagstaff… You still have an intense…intestinal disgust for the trappings of knick knack art poopoo, love for knock off coglones as they are reflected in a bathroom mirror not really worthy of having an attendent.  I don’t know where i’m going.  I want to run away for a month and a half.  I want to be someone else today-tomorrow whatever…estranged from my recorded voice…..hailing a cab in my sleep, trying to escape from a pair of ex-con piano teachers named Helbert and Kroxie.

As my old Polish liquor salesman in Queens used to say in his mock Rennaisance accent: “Have fun with this.”

baton relay races with live music
sunday august 19, 2007 noon til 5pm
at asser levy park in coney island, brooklyn

Your mother is not your mother.  Her hair is always wet and new and red, opal towel wrapped creatively over portions of it.  You are almost paranoid, trying to find the pedals of that bike with flailing feet. You just barley remember you were on this 2 speeder as rail road crossing arm cuts the air in all it’s Lemon Green diagonal striped splendor with legs that have abandoned you.  

New mother wants to know if you have been affected by the recent woes of Frankfurt’s DAX 30.  Well, well, you see…..I’m well mixed with that, sector…. I know which one… 

 She childishly pulls your face with sing song repetitions: DAX, DAX, Oh Dax 30 Wimps, 30 WIMPS at SEA trying to make love to a sliding whore, financial expert, rough fantasy side jobs pay for the four bedrooms in Croatia….did you need that salty view honey? 

 Anway, you try to get to the B52′s concert to do a little promotion for your own show, because they happened to be playing at ASSER LEVY PARK (8-9-07) but the traffic is so bad, you end up enjoying a few minutes of precious night cold August breeze in strip mall, buying subway sandwiches, and renting a movie about three Irish girls thrown into Nun laundry Profit Center Slave-Christ camp.  The film is called ‘The Magdalene Sisters,’ it was excellently shot, couldn’t help but enjoy almost all performances from the grim reaper with fury fangs MSuperior, to the three young women tossed away to this horrible military type Catholic slave-labor camp for supposed transgressions against their own chastity, and unwed undefilment.  One leaves this film with a rejuvenated contempt and violent hatred for the idea of the old medusa hid in a habit nun of this era/place/ et cetera. These young girls had been in some cases abandoned by their family after being raped by a man… (Yes…that unthinkable Neolithic idea that women forced into sex has become unpure and must be vanished from home/village…et cetera…. anyway. 

\dm