A certain ersatz a verbal sketch, by J.B. Pravda (c) 2011

1. A certain ersatza verbal sketch, by J.B. Pravda (c) 2011 • “What purs-ed lips are these, like the antiquarian royal’s purse of oriental silk, bejewelled with the shimmerings of rarest gilded bedclothes, envied by the Sun?!” • ============================================================================= • The dead poet department of his brain both admires (if only for a second)and critiques the magazine advert for covert sensuality......in a lip gloss. • The rag is a flimsier, almost moribund distant relation to its avuncular forbear, the sort with a buxsome Marilyn on the cover---shiny, heavier stock paper...almost photographic grade....a panoramic flexible tome his uncle would show him when Sam was a young lad, his grinningly puerile sideways father, so culturally proud, before there was any such thing as lip gloss, or the employment of desperate purple poets in its promotion. • He withdraws from that part of his interest-bearing memory bank account a long-ago deposit that reminds him that Cleopatra was reputed to have used some sort of asp-derived toxin to redden her infamous lips in the seduction of various prominent Romans, needing neither poet nor their pulpy promises of two dimensional bliss within some glossed over inadequate lips’ kiss. From the Edenic asp’s voluptuous venom to some brown cow’s botox---that was the full measure of our cultural tumble. • ‘Empty, these.....hollow men’ Sam editorializes on his skull’s presses, almost whimpering in, this, his P.S. To T.S.’s paeon-filled poem lamenting modernity, foretelling even fainter post-modernity.

2. Page Two • The ‘real’he realizes, has for some time realized, is, somehow, no longer on the map of his or any active psyche, consigned to the corner of Baudrillard & Derida. • Sam’s faculty advisor is waiting patiently as he trundles into the lecture hall, late. • “Sorry, missed my stop” Sam groans, deciding to not mention the fakey lipstick (he prefers his Uncle’s word for inviting redness) ad which had wasted his time and sent him into denial, along with Cleo and her real lips. • “Not to worry” Prof. Swanson consoles Sam. “I was reading about your flaky Czech....um, photographer” he needles. • “Why do German words capture states of mind.....so damned well?” Sam riddles. • “Well, they are usually pretty long polysyllabics---that alone makes even the average German think, alot” Swanson smirk-speaks. • See the thought bubble beside Sam’s cynical head, positing in lipstick red script: Polysyll.... Those who can’t, teach...

3. Page 3 • “So, you approve of my thesis title, ‘Freak’s the New Mystique: When Art’s Just A Nickname for Some Slob Named Arthur Ersatz’----not too put-on?” Sam likes German for its sad certainty about people/places/things. • “Nope, I’m convinced it’s how Nietzsche was so well-equipped for philosophizing: with those German hammers!” the academic nerdily exclaimed. “You’re grant is funded, young man.” • Sam recites his fave Freidrich nail-pounder: “ God is a comedian performing before an audience too frightened to laugh!” Bam, straight into those vertical zombies’ coffins. • ‘That misunderstood mighty hammerer owns the ultimate punctuator’ Sam thinks, ashamed of the English aversion to that side-view of a hammer, realizing, for the first time, that he’d never literally seen it that way, the German way, before. • ============================================================================ • ‘TICHY, MIRASLOV, DERELICT’----that was the moniker the Soviets had slapped on him; he slapped back by breaking their stupid rules, especially the one about property being theft, while they created the world’s most secretive kleptocratic paradise. So he doesn’t need property, like the cool Japanese cameras the apparatchiks can get him for an ‘unimportant’ price. He makes cameras from junk. ‘ARTifice’ he smilingly calls his grungy artform. ‘Smells like teen spirit’ Sam hums in grunge admiration. • And he cares only to snap shots of women, and their butts, legs, thighs, their very feminine knowing, ‘written’ all over them, there in plain sight, the Earth goddesses, so far in essence from a brutish state’s clownish virility, yet right there, in its pot belly, refusing to be digested.

4. Page 4 • “Ersatz?” Sam almost yells. “The dude’s Churchillian---a riddle, inside a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, or, something” Sam muses aloud to Swanson. • “That ‘something’s’ the bardic rub, and worth pursuing; lots of luck, kid” and Sam was back in his Uncle’s company. • Sam’s smile beams, as if he is the poetic inventor of lip gloss. • Subatomic processes now conspire to boost his energy levels to quantum status; he WILL collide with and smash the in-bred modern art world’s patina of sophistication---he spells it ‘w-h-i-r-l-e-d’, as if the alphabetic symbols were the resulting ephemeral remnants photographed in a nanosecond by his focused mental.......hammer. • ============================================================================= • Sam daydreams on the plane carrying him to the coolest country in that world, this time, spelled as usual, the one whose very name phonetically mimics his favorite mail, and, the only one where the President had been a very electable poet/playwright, and not the kind pushing womens overpriced cosmetics. This demigod had actually seriously wanted to appoint Frank Zappa as Minister of Culture. C’mon! Zappa, telling the ‘whirled’ it was full-a-crappa....it’s freakin hammer time!!!!!!!! • Even their revolution had been classy: The Velvet Revolution, singing like some classical velvetine underground’s leader the Whitmanesque song of himself, the mellifluous salvos comprised of that luxurious fabric’s poetic adornment versus those cloaked in the merest false corduroy of Soviet overlording.

5. Page 5 • Hours later Sam awakens to the hot-toweled realization that where he’s headed---a Czech village so poor their dirt is on loan----is doubtless a sister city to Bumfuck, Egypt. This thought needs punctuation even the Germans can’t provide, so, another thought bubble, near bursting:

6. Page 6 • The driver at Prague airport holds a hand-written sign: • UNKLE SAM, HEAR • In fairness to his Czech greeter/guide (who is actually Slovak)Sam’s last name IS ‘Kelun’, and, in a country still reeling from a mentally exhausting revolution and recent divorce where both parties share the same house, forever, slack was liberally cut. • As it happened, HIS name was Slovak for ‘almost’ and, well, how poetic it seemed on his otherwise glossless chapped lips. • Sam fondly remembers his last trip abroad, as an undergrad, when the pornography seemed, somehow, more.....adult, ther term whose use in the U.S. • seemed boyishly evasive. • And that was how, in mind and eye, he viewed Tichy’s photos. • ‘ADULT’, period. • Not salacious, or scatalogical like in the West, not his purpose, Sam was certain, in an uncertain way, that way an underage person first looks at nude pictures. • They seemed sincere, not faked, or pseudo-artistic---more like autistic---but were they ARTY-ficial, Sam pictures atop these attention-getting photos of Tichy’s his thesis title, scrawled, with a ‘?’. • Isn’t that the whole point......of his thesis: is it like Jagger proposed, ‘the singer, not the song’?

7. Page 7 • Or, did Bob Zimmerman, that midwestern poet/singer, nail it (without ‘nail gloss’ Sam wearily jested privately)with regionally proud common folk wisdom: “...all ya really need’s a wet finger upta that there blowing breeze”. Twang. • Sam went on, jacking up his three pint processor: ‘Maybe Tichy’s the wind, all natural, plain and simple and, and....I’m the finger, that truthful Dylanesque digit, doubly useful, in a certain universal hand gesture he was pretty sure had something to do with German Celts; where was he? Oh, yeah....that finger aimed right back @ the art whirled’s “listen to ME-Teorologists”. • It’s windy, cloudy when Sam arrives, and his driver, ‘almost’, says he’s lost. • “My sister’s mother-in-law, she say he, he founded hear”, his finger pointing loosely in one of the four cardinal directions. At the extreme end of an invisible extension of that stubby, soiled middle member (he was missing his index version, and not just in the ‘can’t be found’ sense, or the sentimental...you get the idea) appears a man dressed like a........Cardinal, not the bird kind, either, although such persons usually evoked that German Celtic gesture in Sam’s pineal gland of a hand. Score one for ‘almost’s’ finger’s sense of humor if not direction.

8. Page 8 • ‘Almost’ asks the sober-looking gent the whereabouts of Tichy. • The cardinal dude simply points to his own nose, and departs without a word spoken, so quickly that his oversized crucifix seems to Sam to feature a truly still-alive Christ. Sam being half-Jewish thinks how the now scurrying cleric • might have been mocking Sam’s oversized schnoz (he liked that Yiddish garbling of the German), the seeming writhings of the young, somehow miniaturized rabbi round the cleric’s neck betraying this in-bred childhood ethnic fear as, well, gospel. • As that paranoia was half as strong in Sam as in ‘whole’ Jews, he refocused on ‘almost’, whose nostrils now flared like some Tichyometer, inasmuch as the thesis’ subject was, as noted, hygenically challenged. • Sam, growing wearier, imagines ‘almost’ as the human version of the Tachometer on his careless teenage years’ muscle car, idling in neutral, his needle-middle finger now aimed at Tichy himself, nearby, with his camera du jour. • ========================================================================== • Sam learns from his deep researches that photography’s basics are well-understood long ago, what with camera obscura and perspective painters. This knowledge makes Sam obsessively wonder, especially when disappointed by second rate cosmetic models in full color and air-brushed. • Just how many drop-dead gorgeous humans had lived and died without the opportunity to show up these wannabe modern models, not to mention the stress caused by the disproportionate burden consequently thrust upon even great wordsmithing poets.

9. Page 9 • Sam wonders if this might have really caused Keats to die so prematurely, around his own age. He thinks, germanically: ‘C’mon, beauty, truth, all ye need to know, on Earth!!!!’ Grecian urns notwithstanding, it breaks even a Germanic heart, especially when the 1000:1 word to picture ratio’s adjusted for eons of inflationary pressure........Sam finds he needs hammers: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! • Why all those clever alchemists never took a break from the whole gold-from-dross techno-trials, Sam angrily ponders, conjuring (here, he mockingly uses their argot) a chain of photo kiosks so profitable they could make Mona Lisa moan; sorry, but, !!!!!!!!!!!!! • ‘There, I’m feeling better’ Sam deludes himself on these, now, more frequent occasions. ‘Do not forget your dead poets’ he implores, sans hammer. • ============================================================================== • “You smell somesing?” Tichy asks no one in particular, as they approach him. • “No” Sam lies, reasoning that lies are as good as truth in the land of Soviet blinded. • “Me neither; you Jewish?” • Sam is half taken back; “I am Jewish.....I am....Spartacus......” Tichy’s lips part forming a tortured smile. • “I am old art student---you know this? Come, want to see?”

10. Page 10 • He leads the way to what might have been the rejected welcome center model for that village in Egypt where everyone in the States seems to have admitted to having visited while lost. It’s frozen in time and space, with the smell of an old freezer. “Painted zis one in dat school” Tichy points to a picture of Spartacus in some Roman tribune’s lineup----here, I’ll show you, I took a picture with his camera. The Roman version is lost to history, largely because those imperial bastards avoided photography (c’mon, they invented concrete, for graffiti, so, go figure)fearing that the already lazy slave population would waste more time queing up at photo kiosks; you know the rest, see the alchemist-bashing above).

11. Page 11 • “Forgot had slave tatoo, schmuck; this why am Spartacus, got freaking kick me sign from Commie Russkis”. ‘Spartacus, a schmuck, wait’ll Kirk Douglas hears about this, and that West guy’ Sam’s brain smirks. • Sam feels a certain kinship for Tichy, and it’s not because in a later drinking jag he tells Sam to pronounce his name ‘tushy’. Neither was it Tichy’s sizeable schnoz; it was his love of women. This was his simple secret: ‘Screw it.......well, later, anyway; they’re stronger, smarter, sexier for a reason----can orgasm up to 15 minutes, Jesus the rabbi’ he had wisely mumbled during their third bottle of something. These were his personal cave paintings, leaving to others the rest of the animal kingdom, preferring this queendom. ‘Nothing ‘dumb’ about it’ Sam realized. • And, as they sat and drank, surveying the variously encrusted, pissed-on looking images of this paradoxical virile femininity, Sam knew that his thesis could wait, maybe forever; only academics would read it, and they can’t constitutionally get laid. What he could envision, as clearly as inebriation would permit was a chain of simple kiosks, with simple hand-made ‘green’ cameras that he and his Jewish-Spartacan 1/2 partner would create, for a virtual song, using toilet paper tubes, etc., relieving the overflowing landfills, and bringing pictorial joy: ‘AL KHEMY’S ERSATZ EMPORIA’ they’d be called------pure poetry, no gloss, not even for lips, needed.