Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
Neostalgia
Friday, July 25th, 2008
That summer, the fad was gamelan orchestras — steam-driven gamelan orchestras. You heard them clanging in corners of beer gardens half the night. You couldn’t take a walk the next morning without passing crank-wound tabletop models tinkling in sidewalk cafes and their circular melodies would chase around the inside of your skull the rest of the day.
Joe the Wrench knew what was next and vowed he’d be the first to get where the fad was going. His first girlfriend’s father was Balinese; he’d whistled some of those unshakable tunes. And he’d told them stories of what that music had accompanied. So Joe rolled his barrel of tools to the burned-out terrace where a beer garden had been, and set to work on the remnants of the gamelan engine.
He brought in scraps of a walking machine in vogue two summer’s back. He lugged discarded, discolored hides from the tannery, struck deals with the least mad of the sidewalk chalk artists and the least reclusive of the seamtresses’ guildswomen. He hung canvas, strung lines of the thinnest, strongest cord he could find, and stockpiled cylinders of light-lime.
Word got around. His ex-girlfriend’s father started dropping by late afternoons. He said he was glad she’d married that bank clerk fellow who kept getting promoted — no offense, he admired Joe’s energy, and his skill, but he sometimes doubted his direction. The doubts weren’t strong enough that he wouldn’t hang around to see how it all turned out.
He told stories and Joe listened as he assembled, as his machine rose and sprawled along the beer garden’s back wall. He told the old stories he’d seen performed, seas and years away, performances he barely remembered, four decades gone. Weddings and battles and games of dice and castles of fire. Demons and monkey-princes. Joe the Wrench nodded, posed occasional questions, spent evenings listening while he punched miles of spliced-together piano roll.
Then opening night: Joe stoking the engine, leveling pressure, lighting the lights and loosing the catches. From charred benches, the audience watched shadows stream across backlit canvas, puppet silhouettes driven as much by the music as by gears and steam.
Demon weddings. The histories of fire-monkey dynasties. Games of dice.
His ex-girlfriend’s father stared, smile wide, eyes sad. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “That’s not the way it was at all.”
After Babel
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
After the Confusion and the Scattering, Gether son of Aram remained a farmer in the plains of Shinar in spite of the hardships:
* First, there was always having to mime everything because, no matter how loudly you shouted, no one understood anything you said.
* Then, there was the soil. The earth had been stripped to bedrock to make bricks for the tower, so Gether and his sons plowed narrow bands of silt either side of the river.
* Now that Nimrod had scarpered off to found other cities, there was no royal treasury to disburse subsidies to those farming in the tower’s shadow.
* Also, when Nimrod had been around, mighty hunter he was, lions had been scarce. Now it was Gether’s goats who were scarce.
* Finally (and this annoyed Gether so much that he tugged the curl right out of his beard) the tower was full of noisy ghosts who chattered all the time in that language that had once seemed as natural to Gether as thought, but was now as unintelligible as the hooting of baboons — and far more depressing. What with the lions, however, the tower was the only place to live.
Gether called his sons together, and they debated over cups of weak wine. The more they drank, the harder it was to interpret each others’ miming. He tried to convince them that it was time to round up the last couple goats and move to Ninevah, and they finally seemed to get it. They packed up their belongings at met Gether at dawn.
To his chagrin, they didn’t follow him out, but began climbing the vast spiral stair that led around the outside of the tower. He hurried after them through the overgrown remnants of the hanging gardens. His sons’ gestures made no more sense than their words.
They climbed. As they approached the summit, he readied himself for a smiting from above. When his sons picked up discarded tools, he seized his beard with both hands in panic.
One son whacked bricks loose from the topmost wall; the other shoveled them over the edge. Still no smiting, and the too-near sun seemed to beat a little less harshly on Gether’s head.
One of his sons said something nearly intelligible, and Gether picked up a pry-bar to help with the deconstruction.
After that, the ghosts made a little more sense every day.