I just returned from an art showing at a local art gallery where they had displayed the work of Picasso, Chagall, Miró, and others (above is the invitation). What was unique about these works were that they weren’t paintings, but prints. That is to say they were printed in a limited quantity using materials that the artists etched themselves—polished stone for lithographs, copper plates, linoleum, or other mediums. This means there is no original. The “original” is the plate itself, which is destroyed after the printing is done to insure that no more pieces are created from the master plate. Then the 50 or so copies are truly limited additions.

The gallery invited Professor David Driesbach to speak about the art of printmaking. He spent some time in Paris making prints where he learned the techniques thet were used in the works I saw tonight. Hipster/shaman Ray and I spoke to the professor about his own work. Ray was able to get his business card and we were offered a chance to bring some friends and to see his workshop and some original prints!

After my backstage tour of the Civic Opera House, I decided to visit the city’s old library. That is to say, it used to be a library, now it’s used mostly for free-to-the-public art and cultural events. Generally exhibitions of uniform boxes of sand posing as fine art and the like.

Well, as it turns out, I was walking up the stairs and I heard music. Tango music! I entered the ballroom and saw the dance floor packed with couples cheek to cheek and nose to nose.

Visit here to listen to some wonderful tango music. One may dance if one wishes. Recommended: Espresso—track 2

You may be happy to find out that during my backstage tour of the Opera House, I did happen to encounter Mr. Samuel Ramey—or at least his head. I mentioned in an earlier post that each wig is custom-made for the actor. But to avoid bringing the actor in everytime there is to be a fitting for a new role, a facsimile of the actor’s head is created. The wig makers were proud to show off Sam Ramey’s head. He was a big hit.

It turns out that at the Opera House, actors who regularly appear in the season’s productions are provided with their own private dressing room. During the tour we weren’t allowed in them, of course. Throughout the duration of the tour, I kept an eye out for Mr. Samuel Ramey. A longshot, I know, but I was thrilled to have found his dressing room. I snapped a hasty picture and dashed to the elevator to catch up with my tour group. It wasn’t until I got the film back that I discovered that 108 was not Mr. Ramey’s room, but one Mr. Ramsay—whoever he is.

We interrupt the tour of the opera for this late-breaking bulletin: I was informed today that I’ve gotten a new niece! She was born at 9:26 this morning. She is 18 inches long, and I don’t remember how much she weighs, but I’m told she has curly blonde hair just like her mother.

While at the Opera House, one of the places I got to tour was the armory, which is where all the weapons and armor are kept. Dulled swords, daggers that drip blood, pistols—I even got to see the anvil that Wagner’s Siegfried cleaves in two.

I also met this gentleman pictured to the left. He was a quiet and likeable fellow, but I think he had a phobia about being touched. As if the armor wasn’t deterrent enough. Perhaps he has a fear of intimacy.

Another department I was able to see at the Opera House was the wig department. Costumes can be worn by many different actors, but wigs must be personalized to custom fit each actor’s head. In the labyrinthian rooms of the wig department one could see shelves and shelves of styrofoam heads bedecked with the traditional Chinese black wigs of Madame Butterfly. One wall was filled with the long hair, curled moustaches, and beaded beards of an entire crew of seafaring buccaneers. Above one may see the wig of the incomparable Michele Giangiacomo, which she wears currently in Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance.

Another thing that I learned during my tour of the Opera House was that costumes for shows tend to travel with the shows. Which is to say, if one of the directors at the theatre wants to direct, say, Bizet’s Carmen—the director can look for other opera companies that have performed “Carmen”, and rent their costumes and sets. It saves opera companies quite a bit of money doing things that way. And in fact, an opera company may also decide to rent out their own stagings. Now the actors don’t necessarily follow the shows. The director will do his or her own casting, and the borrowed costumes will be fitted to the local actor. Lots of costumes are made so they can be worn by multiple actors of disparate sizes. And to stave off wear-and-tear, most costumes are made with durable upholstery fabrics.

I recently was able to take a backstage tour of the Civic Opera House. While the tour moved along at a brisk pace, there was so much to see that it took over two hours! We made our way through the many departments and learned some of the tricks of the trade. Our first stop was the prop room where all kinds of things are kept—boxes of snow, banquet tables fully set for a feast, musical instruments that make no sound, and an antique, fully-functional wind machine from 1916. The prop master told us a secret: if it is raining onstage during a performance, theatres generally don’t use water—they use rice! It falls like rain, it sounds like rain when it hits, and bounces just right like a splash in a puddle. And it cleans up easily and saves on paper towels.

Language is a virus from outer space.
—William S. Burroughs

The movie starts. The screen is black, with a hazy spiral of smoke(?) writhing in the lower left-hand corner. Superimposed on the spiral is a message for the viewers:

This movie is a virus.

You will not be able to look away.

This is the last movie you will ever see.

As the viewer reads the last word, the spiral uncoils and “zaps” the viewer. Something like a transfer has occured. The audience now knows with all certainty that they cannot look away from the screen no matter how hard they try, and that when the movie ends, they will all die.

Seen and Unseen
The movie, by and large, is dark. It is fuzzy, indistinct in some places. It seems to have no plot, although characters are immediately empathetic when they appear. This may be a result of the fact that this will be the last experience of the viewer’s lives. In their last hours they live as fully as they can through the characters projected through celluloid. The movie is experimental. Sometimes ideas are represented by shapes, colors, sounds, or symbols previously unseen—yet immediately recognized. The movie is libertine. It is saucy. Although there seems to be nothing within the images of the film that can be pointed to as dirty. The movie has no title. None at all. Perhaps the movie is a cypher, in which the viewers project their own images, or there is a communication occuring between the images on screen and the viral receiver implanted in the brain by the twitching ghost spiral…

I was introduced to the film by an old acquaintance of mine. He was a seedy sort of individual, the type who would bring sex toys to a Christmas gift exchange. He was a possessor of the infamous “Ultraviolet Porno” tape. It is exceedingly rare, and was allegedly filmed on ulraviolet film. It was very strange and alternately beautiful and repulsive, but when it finished we saw his screen door was covered with moths. But I digress.

This acquaintance—along with others besides myself—was standing outside a small makeshift theatre which only played underground films. He was telling us how great the film was, and that it had gotten incredible reviews. Indeed, he said, the movie would become a phenomenon like the world had never seen.

The Human Compulsion
The helpless attendees were mostly the young, cutting edge, avant-garde, or really, those who wanted to be thought of as such. Though everyone’s eyes were glued to the screen, during the quieter parts, their minds wandered. They longed for their partner next to them they could never see again, cursed themselves over the money they hadn’t had a chance to spend, or became obsessed with the cotton contours of the tank tops worn by the group of young girls in the front row. The sweat of desperation hung in the hot theatre like a human cloud.

Why would theatre owners show a film that would cause everyone in the audience to die? Money may have been the answer. The word-of-mouth was bringing everyone to see it. And owners got a big cut of the merchandising sales. The deaths, allegedly, weren’t messy at all. Sort of a quick dissolution. There was nothing to clean up afterward, only a lingering smell of ozone. Just fill the seats with more paying customers and count the cash. Or, perhaps they were compelled by the same unseen force that held the doomed audience captive.

The foyer of the theatre had been converted into a boutique, full of product found only in the film. Brightly colored bracelets, baby tees, sweatshirts, lip gloss were sold—and also more expensive items, like perfumes and colognes made from pure human hormone. All “must-haves”. Through a burgundy colored velvet curtain which hung behind a small doorway, its moulding peeling paint, impromptu lovers would wander back to catch some last grunting emotion before the end…

The Plot Thickens
But was there an intermission? Why didn’t people try to escape? Was this a memory of something that happened before the movie? If so, how did they know they were going to die? Or were they just reacting to an insistent human need? And was there a sinister force that kept them from thinking of things outside the confines of the theatre?

This, among other unanswerables, was discussed in the boutique—mostly by people trying to impress one another long enough to get them through the curtain. William Burroughs suggested the idea that Language itself was a virus. Terence McKenna believed that the information that leads the human brain to higher levels of complex consciousness was stored in certain fungi. The ingestion of these plants would transfer the information to the new host, much like reading a book or a website.

Plan 9 From Outer Space
Another outlandish rumor—straight out of an old, bad movie—was that beings from outer space had created this movie to murder the population and take over the planet. How else to explain the strange technology that held us to our seats, implanted wordless messages in our brains, and shifted time and memory so easily? Others said that they may be from inner space. That is to say, they came from somewhere far inside the source of our subconscious, and are manipulating our lives for some unknown eschatological horror. Perhaps they are in the boutique with us now, disguised as us. With a glance, a touch, a witty turn of phrase, they are coaxing us inexorably toward the laboratory of flesh that could lie behind the velvet curtain.

There was a very noticable man in the boutique (or was he in the movie?) he was taller than the rest. He wore a buttoned vest with a pattern of wings and eyes that glinted with gold threads. He was bald with piercing eyes, and resembled the actor Sir Ben Kingsley. He brought up the idea that perhaps this show was symbolic of physical life itself. We are all riveted to this reality, mostly as observers, sometimes as participants. Our mind wanders when we dream, but are still “in our seats”. We cannot leave, and in the end we die with things undone. Our lives are limited only to the theatre, never knowing what lies beyond. “But must the ending be thought of as sinister?” he asked charmingly. Smiling, he excused himself and ushered a lip-glossed girl in a tank top toward the curtain.

The Samsara Hypothesis
While my acquaintances and I were standing outside the theatre discussing these ideas while waiting to go in, I thought to myself, ‘haven’t I seen this movie before—three, four, hundreds, maybe thousands of times? And if I have, what was it about? How did it end? Surely I didn’t die? Were some people naturally immune to the deadly effects of the virus from outer space? Had the alien invasion been routed? Or did they continue to herd us into the movie unseen, time after time, to keep us occupied until they could develop an even deadlier strain?’

Or was this all, too, still part of the movie?

It seemed as though it was a colder winter than we’ve had in a while at the Mercuriosity Shop. Although it would warm up long enough to snow. So lots of snow and lots of cold. I usually get more creative work done during that time, but I don’t feel like I got as much done as I would have liked.

It looks like the weather has turned the corner. And it’s possible that it will snow again in the next month, for now it seems to be warming up.