Desperate times call for desperate sweaters.

Another found scene: Disembodied clothing contemplates the McMillan Reservoir, around the block from Intangible HQ.

I'm just emerging from another magazine deadline today, and my brain is a pickled punk. Thus, no beautiful prose, no neighborhood news. Not yet.

But I had to post the Desperate Sweater image to show that we ARE still alive.

And, it would seem, there is a filthy cotton ghost gripping the reservoir fence like a classic Cosby sweater run amok, slaughtering the Canada Geese that lounge in there, stuffing their bloated bodies down its ragged, woven neck-hole in a terrible feeding frenzy. Beware that sweater. It obviously has "issues" to work out.

It is wise to have a camera handy at all times.

Targetnacht

It was a hypnotic time in Washington DC today, particularly for those of us that live in the Columbia Heights neighborhood.

The blogs were buzzing with DC-USA's grand opening of its flagship retailer, Target. Other than Lane Bryant, Target was the only tenant open for business at this point, but the local media were determined to chew this cud repeatedly until it became a fine, milky paste that glazed over us, causing us to fall into a mad shopping coma, dribbling credit cards and mumbling about kitchen appliances...

I was determined to keep my cool, stay away for a few days, and let the other bloggers tackle it first. The City Paper's blog ran several posts about it. Prince of Petworth landed a coveted spot at Target's pre-opening party, thus robbing me of that competitive first sprint for the bulk tube-socks. But that's cool.

I find shopping malls and big-box stores deeply troubling.

That doesn't come from some high-minded concept about macro-economics or sweatshop labor or whatnot: Just the simple experience of walking into those places, as a human being, to get a thing done: They are creepy as hell. I slip into an annoyed, melancholy state where the human race becomes a suicidal zombie mob, with their colorful boxes of frosted sugar-bombs and plastic trinkets and vacant, medicated stares...

So whenever I need to hit these places, it's like a military operation: Get in, do the job, get the hell OUT. And now one of those places is here in the 'Heights.

It doesn't seem that long ago that I was living around the corner from the site. There was no Metro stop then, and this DC-USA place wasn't even a dream yet. The Tivoli theater was still slumbering in a bed of barbed-wire fences and decay. So I'm not idealizing the "good old days" here: there was a deeply real neighborhood spirit but after dark, it was a no-man's land.

And that is why the DC-USA development inspires a bittersweet confusion. Sure it's good for the neighborhood, the local economy, jobs, all that. And it IS a rare treat to walk ten minutes to get things I'd normally schlep out to the suburbs for.

Anyway.

I was lulled by all the media attention and decided, screw it. I might as well go after work and just see the freaking place. I had nothing in mind to buy. But yet I found myself going inside. Just...to see...


I saw scores of people milling around in a daze, probably like I was... One couple (white, young, affluent) wandered onto Target's escalator, simultaneously mouthing an obvious *W*O*W* as they gazed around them at the interior of....a Target store.

Now, uh, Target is a fixture of every suburb in this country, right? I don't understand the wonder and amazement. I was reminded of the old Mondo Cane footage of the cargo cults: a distant tribal society that, upon seeing large cargo planes for the first time, formed the logical conclusion that they were giant, god-like birds from heaven.

*W*O*W*...

People wandered around the aisles of Target, touching things with gentle fingers, bumping into each other, talking in whispers as if they were in church during a High Mass...

I was crawling insane by this point, so I grabbed the most logical thing I could think of, a Magical First Purchase, to commemorate this great occasion:


Gomez adored the smell as they cooked. Marian and I munched our chicken corn dogs in reverential silence, contemplating the wicked, wonderful place that delivered them to us.

And now I am left with this gigantic building a few blocks away, sitting there, mocking me. It's just a complicated relationship. Perhaps it'll be better once the gym opens. We'll work it out.

Cthulhu in '08: It's official.

In what will be hailed as the Final Triumph of Democracy, Great Cthulhu has won the coveted spot of Supreme Commander of these United States.

The poll conducted here at IntangibleArts was a basic off-the-rack Blogger widget, added to the page in an intoxicated spasm of patriotic craziness. The poll's headline was SELECT YOUR NEXT PRESIDENT and it remained on the site for two weeks, slowly collecting votes.

But why such a collection of oddballs? Because honestly, the current race for the White House is doomed to mimic all the others: The fascist madman or the "mostly harmless" one. The best we can hope for is an alternating pattern between fascism and mostly-harmless-ism, to even out the damage, if you dig...

So this was a race I could get behind, worthy of the great IntangibleArts name.

Voter turnout was a bit on the light side: some 0.0084% of those who visited this site during the poll actually voted. But that's GOT to be higher than the turnout during the Reagan/Mondale race of '84, I'd say.



Cthulu The Great, The Candidate Who Cannot Be Described and Whose Visage Inspires Unspeakable Fear and Torment, captured a majority vote of 46%.

Boyd Rice, legendary noise musician, social darwinist and tiki-bar enthusiast, came in second at 23%.

The Silver Surfer and eternal DC mayoral underdog Faith tied for third at 15%.

And poor Vermin Supreme received no votes at all, which is shocking. His public relations engine was mighty, and clearly he was a Man of the People. Or a Person of the Man. Or something.


PHOTO: Great Cthulu rests in Lafayette Park, gazing across Pennsylvania Avenue at the Very Big White House he will inhabit soon.


The Silver Surfer succeeded in mobilizing the youth vote, but it simply wasn't enough to compete with the unspeakable fear of having one's soul eaten.

Now, the stage is set for Cthulhu to lead (and ultimately consume) this land with Boyd Rice as his second in command. With Cthulhu's grisly image and Boyd Rice's public speaking skills, they are destined to be a strong team. An unstoppable force.

After the poll closed, a mighty parade of Cthulhu and Rice supporters thundered down Pennsylvania Avenue, chanting Rice's "TOTAL WAR" anthem, while symbolically swallowing the souls of cab-drivers and tourists as they passed. They marched aggressively to Martin Denny's polynesian lounge music and waved huge banners that read:

CTHULHU and RICE:
MORE THAN A COMPLETE PROTEIN.

When it was all over, Freedom Plaza and the White House lay in ruins. Cthulhu paused for a moment, picking his teeth with a human thigh-bone and contemplated his victory.

"Yeh" he said, "this one beat the HELL outta Reagan/Mondale..."

Reality will be shattered quite soon.

How to destroy reality in three easy steps:

1. Write a post here at IntangibleArts (this very one, in fact), which links (right here, in fact) to a guest post I've written on the very awesome Prince of Petworth blog. (Many thanks to the good Prince, by the way.)

2. Above-mentioned guest post at PoP links back to IntangibleArts.

3. Follow the path of intersecting links and wait for the inevitable black hole, and/or gash to develop in the fabric of space/time. Have a cup of tea and enjoy the apocalypse.

It's been a good run, reality. I've enjoyed at least some of it. See you on the other side...

Of Mud-Men and Feathered Booty: DC Caribbean Carnival 2007

Saturday, 23june07:

We left the house in the cool morning and headed up Georgia Avenue to claim a few feet of curb-space, anticipating quite a parade. It was the dawn of the 15th annual DC Caribbean Carnival, and Georgia Avenue would soon host a throbbing mash of some 250,000 spectators, 25 dance troupes, costumed revelers, bands, DJs, and random mud-covered pranksters, all leaping and freaking like dervishes reeling with seizures of ecstasy...

The parade covers a stretch of 35 blocks from Missouri Avenue in Brightwood to Barry Place at Howard University. It’s quite a haul in the summer heat for those dragging costumes with heavy wood frames and plumed wings that reach into the sky. These folks are true champions. But all that was still to come.


It was sometime after 1pm when the first float crept by our roost near the Petworth Metro, and by that time, the street was filled with spectators. The syncopated stomp of the first PA truck followed and within minutes, the cyclone was upon us:

Scores of people rolled down the avenue in a gyrating thundercloud; all manner of shapes, sizes and colored costumes, and throwing around all kinds of mad flesh. The spectators pressed in to snap photos as the dancers grinned at the sky, laughing into the music which seemed loud enough to shatter the bones of the pigeons which flew nervously overhead...

DC Mayor Adrian Fenty and his entourage marched by, tossing beads into the crowd and pausing to mingle and shake hands. Ward One councilmember Jim Graham was there as well, without his trademark bow-tie but brandishing an armload of beads, making sure he nailed anybody Fenty missed.


The music was a chaotic mix of traditional Carnival fare and modern fusions of Caribbean with the distinctive analog tweak of acid-house. In all cases, the tempo was hyper-frenetic, bordering on total madness. For my money, the place to be was in the space between the music trucks, where one PA mixed with another and vomited a jittering moire of noise into the air. THAT's the stuff.

Too much! Too much! We slipped into Morgan’s for some takeout seafood, then dove through an alley to find home, and eat in relative peace.

By the time we hit the streets again, the crowd had turned into a clotted mob of bodies, armpit to armpit from one curb to the other. It took about 20 minutes to creep down a single block. We looked at each other and whispered sweetly, "...we are about to die..."

We were behind much of the parade at this point and headed for Banneker Center, the apex of all this craziness. The music was still with us, pounding overhead and underfoot, and we began to spot victims of heat and fatigue. The scent of sweat, dope, and Hennessey was thick and we retreated to the grassy hill at Howard University, to look over the raging mob and get a little perspective.


One of the mud-men observed everything from his perch on the wall, looking for all his stillness like a drunken gargoyle...

After a pause there, we paid our $10 and joined the fray inside Banneker, where more music, food, and incense vendors awaited. And that was the most intensely crowded spot of all. The crowd was isolated to the fenced-in running track around the field, which meant the sheer density of bodies was FAR beyond capacity. Why the hell not open it up to the whole field? Eh?


Meanwhile, DC’s finest looked on, dreaming that this whole damned thing would be over soon, so they could get back to their cherished Segways. The horses seemed unimpressed.

...and then we retreated, stumbling north towards 14th Street, bleary with sunburn and an all-consuming need for a good brown ale in a quiet pub.

It was a good day, rite...more pix here.

Fear and Loathing on the back deck

Gomez.....where did daddy's peyote disappear to?

............Gomez?

City of broken people

On the evening of Easter Sunday, I accompanied a friend to Washington Hospital Center's emergency room. She could certainly use the company, and I had nothing better to do but sleep. A wise man once said "Sleep is for animals and children..." So what the hell. It was about 11:00pm.

It's a very surreal thing, dialing those three numbers: NINE, ONE, ONE... Once that last "ONE" is punched, you cross over into a world that is completely out of your control. Down the rabbit-hole you go.

Ten minutes later, my friend is being helped into the back of an ambulance and I climb into the front seat. Red strobe-lights are punching electric holes in the neighbor's bedroom windows and the idling diesel thrums like a huge beast, purring in its sleep. The ambulance driver pulls his nest of dreadlocks in behind him and takes the wheel. What is it, I wonder, about dreads that make a fellow seem so damned CALM and friggin' WELL ADJUSTED?

Baah, that's beside the point. Arriving at hospital now.

Entering the Emergency Room behind the gurney pushes my surreal trance into hyperdrive. When you walk through these doors, you enter a plane of reality that for most people, only exists as a TV drama. ER, House, etc. You can't help but compare every detail to some scene in a prime-time medical show.

We part the swinging inner doors and enter the ER just in time to witness an elderly woman hurling an unbelievable amount of vomit onto the floor, over the side of her elevated gurney. Others are moaning inside. There's a gridlock of gurneys in here, and nobody knows what to do about the sick patient, who has another go at the floor. And another. One orderly shrugs as he walks by: "At least this time, it smells like food..."

The overhead speakers are crooning "Reunited" by Peaches & Herb. I was twelve years old when that song hit no.1 and infected every radio in the country. The "couples' song" at the roller rink in Laurel was always friggin' Reunited. And some Andy Gibb tune. What was that song...?

At first it sounds like someone is singing along, but turns out to be another patient groaning in her pain. She's quite old, and the pain is deep inside her head. "I have double-vision and my head......my HEAD.....ohh GOD......"

there's one perfect fit
and sugar, this one is it
we both are so excited
cuz we're
re-u-ni-ted
hey, hey........

Behind us, there's a guy who broke his foot in a football game. There's a young woman sobbing on a cellphone about her mother, who is in here, somewhere. Obese man snoring in a chair, pants falling down. Two people sit quietly nearby, nursing private concerns, hardly moving. Red disco-lites at the windows: another ambulance is here.

"S'cuse me, docta....she ain't breathin'...she ain't breathin' no more." Three young folks in scrubs whisk the patient away. I wasn't sure if it was double-vision woman or hurling woman.

My head is spinning at this point, the rabbit hole is quite deep this time.

Emergency Rooms are nightmare chambers. Everyone's most desperate tragedies are exposed here, competing for attention. It's a circus of despair. There is no privacy, as everyone's pain is vented freely. We feel like idiots in the middle of all this terror. My friend's complaint was relatively minor, compared with all of this.

Eventually, a doctor arrives who seems a bit too handsome to be believed (perhaps this IS a TV show after all?). I take this as my cue to stumble home, just a few blocks away.

The air is cold and raw; unseasonably so, for springtime. The chorus of Peaches & Herb's greatest hit mingle with the wail of ambulances and the mumble of geese over the McMillan Reservoir....and the cellphones and the crying.

Easter Sunday in Washington DC. It was a very strange evening.

DisneyWeird 3: Freakout on the Teacups, with After-Effects

DisneyWorld in its original form (The Magic Kingdom) opened to the public on a bright Florida morning in 1971. I was three years old at the time, and completely unaware of the event. Honestly, I wasn't aware of much in those days. Sesame Street was in its second season, and I was content. Oscar the Grouch was my hero. Perhaps he still is.

In the case of DisneyWorld, it seems odd that this theme park that would come to represent all the dreamy excess of the American Empire is only 35 years old. Wasn't it.....always there? It contains some of the great legends of our civilization: Cinderella's Castle, Space Mountain, and that bloody Teacup ride. These are the Great Artifacts of our culture, our fingerprint upon the earth. DisneyWorld has become a vast cathedral to Dreams, as only Americans are permitted to dream.

It's a sobering reminder of how fresh and new this Empire is. America doesn't have the strength of Real History. It doesn't have roots. Its flesh is only as deep as the glittery surface of Disney's fantasy props. We could vanish tomorrow, and the surviving nations of Earth would be left to clean up our star-spangled wreckage. The United States of America would enter the history books as a fragile experiment in mass gluttony gone horribly wrong.

But that's tomorrow...or the day after tomorrow! We live for NOW, baby, and with reckless abandon! To prove it, we will get on that teacup ride and turn ourselves inside out with spinning sickness!

The legendary Teacup ride is a great lesson in the physics of motion. The floor is split into an interweaving pattern of circular templates which turn at roughly the same rate. One teacup per circle. The whole business is mounted on a giant carousel turntable, so each teacup is spinning AND rotating at the same time. Additionally, each teacup is mobile by being freely mounted on a spindle and can be spun at will, if the rider grips the wheel and heaves in one direction.

So our mission was simple: We would claim our teacup and haul that bastard as fast as possible, for as long as possible. And we did. When the music started, we took control and rode that Fat Dragon into the heart of madness.

The world was a smear of warping space, a glittering, mercury-tinted photograph streaked with razors across a sphere of glass, roaring into the eyes and down the spinal cord like a Mother's Milk of pure, desperate motion: a primal, tumbling circus which packed all bodily fluids against the outer walls of flesh... This was the last great Spin Cycle of the Cosmos and it was happening NOW, NOW, NOW, laughing up the very dream-soaked Towels of God from our throats...

And it was over. We had been hauling at the wheel like speedfreak truckers, and it was now time to WALK amongst normal people.

Recovery was easy, but the brain still churned with delirium. We were hungry, and stumbled like zombies towards what looked like an ordinary food court.

We entered, smelled cheap pizza, and I saw THE BEAST.

It was a hideous lizard creature. Man-sized with the cruel beak of a carrion-bird and the calculating eyes of an alien genius...and it was seated at a keyboard, making some kind of lounge music. Amongst us weary travelers, the analysis went something like this:

CHESTER: "holy [bleep], does anybody else see that....or is it just me?"

JAY: "no...... i mean, yes. That appears to be really there."

TERRY: "this IS the holy [bleep] of restaurants."

JAY: "um, is anybody else vaguely disturbed by its legs?"

CHESTER: "dear sweet jesus, it has Fat Banker's Legs!"

go to Part 4.

DisneyWeird 2: An Orgy of Bacon in the Land of Magic

There's no pain in the world; no suffering, no trauma, no emotional distress, that a pound of bacon won't cure.

We found ourselves at the scene of what those in the Disney trade call a "character breakfast" and it promised to be the most intense thrill-ride of them all: a total psychic cleansing, a bloodbath of the psyche that would leave even the strongest cynics on their knees and weeping on the day-glo carpet.

The Character Breakfast is an intense experience, a cafeteria restaurant on LSD. The decor is a hyper frenzy of color, and the scent of bacon is stronger than the incense at a Catholic high mass.

And it was a rather religious scene: Sixteen million children ran about like crazed worshippers, falling about the heels of the seven-foot Disney creatures that visited each table. The characters pranced and strutted about behind their white plastic eyes, but it was their silence that seemed the most creepy. In cartoons, these critters always talk too much, but here, they've become enormous mute puppets.

The "characters" traveled in a very precise circuit around the restaurant, visiting each table in turn and never deviating from the path. There was a sense of military order about Disney in general, but it was more obvious here. The visitation route was designed to expose each table to one set of characters before the next wave of customers came in. Disney's grasp on people-moving is impressive.

We tried like hell to interrupt their route, to divert Minnie Mouse to our table and offer her a bit of bacon and flirtatious fun.

Wink-wink. Hang with us...we're the fun people.

She would have none of it. It was like laying sticks down in the middle of a line of army ants: they will ignore the obstacle and proceed as planned.

The Boss must have seen what we were up to, and came over to investigate (photo, above). We were released after a firm lecture about wishes coming true, believing in magic, and keeping our goddamn hands off Minnie Mouse.

go to Part 3.