RAT Slow Dog to Memphis

[josh@whirl-i-gig.com]

New York City

Having been to the isle of mad saints and black beer, where I rummaged in vain for some scrap of song that resonated (instead, finding only drunken Danny Boys and a culture in dry heaves, selling its soul to the tourists for the price of a couple 'a pints), and having returned empty handed from her luv'ly hills and vales, I'm now in New York, catching cold from the air conditioner.  Two weeks in this place, and I want out again.  New York claims it's really real, but it's so busy proving so that you never get down to it.  In Ireland, I found trinkets and sickly sweet riverdances, but there was always some raving drunkard down the street reminding me where I was; in  New York, even the homeless have an ego they're protecting-in New York, everybody's fronting.

And the state of the theatre is just as bad as anything else in this town.  Broadway's doing Danny Boy, because everyone knows that only the Irish and the Russians can write.  Off-broadway's staging made for tv movies that were topical five or six years ago.  And Downtown, the consensus is that experimental means live action episodes of Lost in Space.  All of them are claiming in their precious way that they're creating daring works in the name of "art." I want to say to them "Art is a friend of mine and if he were here, he'd say that you're just displaying your trappings. The only thing you're saying to people is THIS IS ART but if it were really art, you'd be saying something else-anything else.  You'd have nothing to prove-instead you'd communicate.  But art isn't here in New York City.  And soon I won't be either.  I'm off on a quest for the real.  I'm headed west.  To LA.  The least likely place is always the best place to start.

I-80: somewhere In Pennsylvania

No one takes the bus anymore. There are ten of us headed toward Cleveland: 2 French tourists on an Ameripass; a Korean family clinging to the very front seat; a fifty-ish Russian immigrant who knows not a lick of english; a couple of African men who seem to have teleported in from the fifties (they gaze out the windows mystified, I imagine overwhelmed, yet disappointed); and a flabby platinum blond guy with-no lie-a homemade tattoo that cries MOM on his left bicep-the walls he's got up are as thick as the ones he just escaped from.  Six hours out of NYC and still no one's said a word.  Is the landscape that interesting?  It couldn't be, half of it's been New Jersey….  Or is it that other people, their stories, their lives have become so cliché that we're bored with each other before we even say hello?

Columbus, OH

Revision: no one takes the bus anymore except people in Ohio.  It's 1:00am and there's not an empty seat.  I'm stuck next to, go figure, the one theatre person on the bus: Hair caked in gel and combed back in a swoop, a split tone canary yellow/powder blue polo shirt, and I think they're called ice washed (frosted?) jeans.  He too has a tattoo, a big multi-colored rendering of the theatre masks on his forearm.  I'm petrified that any minute now, he's going to launch into "Nothing Like a Dame."  Why is it that every time I set foot in Ohio something horrible happens to me?  If there's one place in the country where absolutely nothing is real, this is it.

Louisville, KY

Disturbing dreams: My face has been erased.  Cosmetic surgeons circle me arguing with each other about how to reconstruct me.  They keep shoving sharpies at me, drawing eyes and mouths and then rubbing them out again with a marker-board eraser.  They get feisty over where to place my mole, poking and poking me, their magic markers drawing blood.  

In the meantime, my pocket is being picked.

I wake up with my head between my knees, shivering.  This bus is cold.  This bus is so cold.

Paduka, KY

Southerners scare me.  I can't help it, I'm a Jew.  So I'm hiding my nose in the New Yorker (That'll throw them off), reading an article about a guy named Alex Shear.  He's been collecting random stuff-alarm clocks shaped like cans of Mr. Pibb, for instance-for the past thirty years. Now he's got about three barns full of the stuff and there's a growing belief among "American Studies" scholars that his collection holds a great secret about our country.  Somehow, all this trash, all these tchochkes, when taken together, communicate a deep sadness, a nostalgia for the hope that the products once contained.  It's interesting that this stuff that was only ever meant to be junk ends up more intellectually valuable and more expressive of how we live and what we care about than any high art in recent memory.  It is what it is pure and simple.

Memphis, TN

There's this homeless guy here all dressed up like Elvis. There's another guy dressed up like Elvis here who drives his girls around in a maroon hearse with "pimp til you die" stenciled on its side.  I hitched a ride outside the pyramid, and now I'm in this vehicle shaped like a rat being driven westward by third guy dressed up like Elvis.  I think I'm getting closer.  Isn't Elvis the biggest tchochke of all.

The Irish Jew

PS. The RatMobile PR machine broke down yesterday, but we're working out the kinks...

www.manwithvan.com