Text by Allan Graubard
Images by Rik Lina, Gregg Simpson and John Welson
| The collective art making project, Cornucopia,
began in 2010 when artists Rik Lina (Netherlands), Gregg Simpson (Canada) and John Welson (Wales) began mailing each other works, an invitation to the next artist to contribute to the finished piece. I have always thought of this collective as akin to a free jazz trio, which is my background as a jazz drummer and Rik and John as avid listeners for decades. I see Rik, especially with his swooping ink lines, as the saxophone, John with his rolling earthy forms as the bass and myself adding percussive color and texture. In this case writer Allan Graubard, our guest 'vocalist', has written text for a select group oif images by Cornucopia from past years. His writing keys in to the vivid imagery, but he insists his singing is always off key! If that's that case, let atonality reign supreme. -Gregg Simpson, 2022 |
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| Dream State But how did it happen? Many of us have asked
the question, and still it remains: the basement woven from coiled hair;
a dusty late 19th century telegraph key; miniature petrified slaloms; stiff
yellow newspapers whose ink has blurred, the words now barely readable;
the grey skeleton of a dog whose teeth, filed sharp, can draw blood if handled
carelessly; a crushed tin for chewing tobacco stamped with a tiny gilt-edged
eagle from whose empty eyes leak accents of rust; a baseball with the stitching
gnawed off by rats (circa 1920s); and several other ludic routes to an empty
street shaded by trees whose leaves are prisms and whose trunks, reverberating
in deep slow beats, compose for ghost pedestrians ephemeral memories that
rise and vanish all too quickly.
Obscure facades listing portside entrain peacocks feather light, and factotum shanties, mud born, glisten in the early morning air here on Kiki’s isle at low tide; those quick few hours for crabs to mimic flamenco turbines. The dream state … even when we’re awake … |
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Cornucopia 130
Following the title card with letters askew and fluoride borders, as if in ecdysis, shedding their luminous primrose, she appears: on a shadowy background stair that enlarges as it approaches. A suggestion of hair flowers into sleek minarets, clear green eyes percolate into senescent flares sensitive to each fluctuation of a thunderstorm that catalyzes, in one final hubristic flash, a human heart with white nipples and red Sargasso owls as tiny as stars are distant. Then, because rivalries have twisted clock hands into subtle caduceus’s, each limned with eclectic fog and fragile etudes, her face emerges, oblong eyes choled with glitter, and from her lips, sweet and luscious, the tip of her tongue slips through. So compelled are we by these shotgun visions, one merging into the next before they shudder still, that we lose sense of who we are. And drifting through the sprocketed silence, the horizon flickering with filial mementos, conjectures dismissed, patience contused, speed inchoate, we shift and sway in two-step parodies of mummies drunk on hybridized lemon juice. In the next scene, conjured from what museums I cannot say, the apparition foliates turquoise scales that climb from her feet to the top of her head. By scene three, she has fucked her way to the aerial penthouse where we, her servants, judge our consent by the way we braid our hands into one selfless convection that leaves us breathless, arachnid, digitized, dredged from porcine vowels; as if in Crimean quicksand, we discovered our twin destinies in black manta wings flapping, with triumphant ease, from here to there, then to now. In the dream state ice cream is a toy soldier in faded Edwardian lead speckled with archaic, imperial crests from 3rd century Tashkent. You just have to lick them to be absolutely certain they are there. |
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Cornucopia 11
A punk private dick cross-dresses. Why? To seduce a cryptogram consumed by a conductor on a cable car. It’s 1947, San Francisco, and the streets are teeming with roustabouts, gents and their gals, shop owners, cabbies, vegetable cart barkers and the usual high-fashion golden boys who would rather buy rich and pay later than suffer the slings of outmoded fortune. It’s near noon and the sky, that blue promise, shimmers into distant goodbyes. I can’t tell you how wonderful it feels to be here playing my violin with its moose hair strings stretched taut for just that right resonant glissando. Last night, well, last night we climbed the moon ladder and swung out over the bay as if we were buoys left by the giant basilisk whose watery bones flicker through these words. It’s enough at times to sense it’s there to keep the wheels oiled, the turbines spinning, the arc lights sizzling, and those marvelous bare-chested circus acrobats tumbling fifty feet high. And that’s the way of it in this turnstile town with its red ship timber boardwalks and rusted Windjammer anchors and wan Chinese opium addicts and rollicking gun runner festivals that pop up in odd months without any promotion whatsoever and draw, despite all, as many pelicans as there are Sunday pier fisherman who have nothing better to do and love every minute of it. Did I ever tell you about the … Yes, perhaps I did. Forgetting leaves no mark other than embarrassment, which, I must add, I rarely suffer. So here it is anyway, and if I did tell you this before, listen to it again. It’s worth it. A punk private eye, newly christened by routine, suddenly had an idea that would change his game. He’d cross dress, take a pseudonym, and tour the low-life sailor bars south of downtown to gain the advantage -- as much over his competitors as over himself. Older whores down on their game were ever able to elicit information from those they met, drink to drink. Their past made them affable and, no longer selling, the questions they asked seemed crazy enough. From this tale and that rumor, this clam up and that bamboozler, fellow drinkers all, they’d build up a scenario that had all the earmarks of evidence but none of the things that make evidence evidentiary. Oddly enough, it worked. In more than less cases, it helped clarify the cause, the means and manner, potential culprits and their sideline stage hands. Then, ditching the disguise, the dick returned to the same sorry dives to clinch the catch. If it failed, so what. One success was enough to shadow three stumps, with very few the wiser and fewer yet able to figure out just how he did it. So the next time you’re on that cable car and an odd, high-heeled lady in a hand-me-down dress asks for your seat, give it to her and be glad you did. It isn’t every day that you meet a legal gleaner armed with a 45 in an oversize purse. And hopefully for your sake it won’t be the last. For who is to say what makes this rotten world tick other than criminals and those paid to get them whenever the reason is enough, or just “just” enough … |
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False Prophet
He lifted the gun, took aim and shot her through the heart. The bullet tore through the left ventricle and exited from the back. She lifted her hands to the charred hole in her chest, closed her eyes and crumpled to the grass. The improbability of the act had stunned her, especially because he, her husband, just returned from an expedition to Antarctica, was happy at last to be home after six months of diligent work; analyzing ice cores for signs of reidite, the mineral created by a meteor strike. Lofted into the upper atmosphere by the blast wave, winds carried the mineral for thousands of miles before it rained down. She lay there until she realized she wasn’t dead. Her breathing, so suddenly stuttered by the shock, calmed. When she opened her eyes and lifted herself onto her elbows, he was gone. The gun, which he dropped out of fear, disgust or disinterest – who could tell, including his motivation – remained. From its muzzle snaked the rancid, iron oxide scent of an explosion. Did she understand why or how it happened? No. She recalled a moment in childhood; a memory she clung to whenever she eluded an attack: physical, psychological, economic – you name it. She was four, up to her knees in muddy swamp water, sinking into the soft black bottom ooze. Dragon flies with multicolored wings circled her. In strident mimicry, cicadas cut through the thick tropical air. A Mockingbird, picking up the pace, trilled. Towering white clouds, reflected on the surface of the water, drifted west as Daddy long-legs skimmed across them. She knew that if she didn’t lift one foot then another from the suck of the mud, she soon might not be able to. It didn’t bother her in the least. Her mother, though, if she were nearby, which she wasn’t, would have rescued her -- lifting her up and carring her to shore. So as young girls do when alone, she did as her mother, pulling her right foot up then her left foot and taking those first few delicious steps to a pebbled bank firm enough to support her. In one sense she felt revived. In another sense, become a target, she knew she’d refuse the invitation, leaving the gun where it was. “Enough,” she thought. “He’s done.” The end of a beginning that stretched nine years back when chance brought them together that hot, humid July afternoon on an empty St. Charles streetcar in New Orleans. And what came after – the emotional effervescence, that sweet sexual embrace they couldn’t do without, their compulsion to stay together amidst all their other distractions – family, work, friends and enemies, the daily dance to keep on keeping on – vanished. The hole in her heart had finally healed her. Three years on he dropped dead from a massive coronary. When she found out -- from a brief obit in the local paper – they’d not been in touch -- she sent a memorial note to his mother. She signed it with an “X,” figuring the old bag would get it. And that was that in the splendid eternity she’d made of her life since. |
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Holy Smoke
That night, when a large red praying mantis landed on her bedroom window with a soft thud, the window before the desk where she was writing, she lifted her head up and smiled. Nothing could be so vulgar, she thought, than this creature who, because of its cunning, mastery of camouflage, and sharp powerful tearing spines claimed the world it inhabited. For her, of course, vulgarity was a prize. The more vulgar a creature was to her – human, animal, fish, bird or insect – the greater its power. She used the term as well from its root: tawdry, flamboyant, garish, brash, loutish, crude, brassy, rude and as common as possible. A perfect amalgam to paste together her curious tales into a medium that the cheapest lowlife enjoyed. So they did, and the prizes and checks and film offers came, one after another, two at a time, until she didn’t give a damn who made them or how well or how poorly they did for a public she evaded, preferring her solitude above all else in this make believe vicious whirlwind she conducted as if her life depended on it – which, no “as ifs” needed, it did. |
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The Table Is Set
Field agent’s B16 report, initially filed per directive at his local office, quickly found its way to the national director. He read it, wrote up the affidavit for a search warrant and sent it on to a judge. After due process, the judge approved it. The director ordered the special squad to suit up and get to it. At stake was nothing less than the ability to breathe, bite, breaststroke, battle and belittle. That the latter had less to do with the former than a frog does with a bottle of milk had nothing to do with it. Since the evening of the 12th when laughter replaced cognition and water balloons exploded on the street, moonglow dousing us all, everything was in flux. This included every prevarication sewn into a leafy flower, each busted safety valve worth saving, two or three aural visions and walking upside down. Enumerative, exhausting, eruptive? Quite. They’d done whatever they wanted to, those bipedal harems, living in red brick row houses stained with coal smoke. Ah, that coal smoke … Thereafter the lexicon unraveled, uproarious, horizontal, striking its own match to the torch that seared a name across the case: Agamemnon. So that was it. Murder, murder and judgement. Neither the national director nor any of his assistants testified. They didn’t have to. The lawyers argued over the instrument but blood tells all. Even deer licking a twilight barbecue cued up, hooves hot to applaud. And when it came down, the heavens parted and great sassafras babies with thick chocolate lashes stirred the witchy soup that feeds us ... |
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