RE: RAT Slow Dog to Memphis

["Sylvain, John" <jsylvain@station.sony.com>]

Thank you.

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	josh@whirl-i-gig.com [SMTP:josh@whirl-i-gig.com]
> Sent:	Friday, July 16, 1999 9:25 AM
> To:	rat-list@ratconference.com
> Subject:	RAT Slow Dog to Memphis
> 
> 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