September 7, 2003 - 12:31pm -- hydrarchist
hydrarchist submits:
Dean Martin Had a Hard-on
By Wu Ming 1
Confusion is the only thing left which makes any sense.
Lester Bangs.
-1-
“So then, here we need a brainstorm to write a story to stick into Flavio’s catalogue, and the idea’s that of a slightly lysergic conversation while looking at one of his paintings...”
This was the first line of my speech. All I remembered when the nurses managed to wake me up with cardiac massages, electric shocks and a shot of adrenaline - “Where am I?” I murmured.
Then the ceiling began to shift as it did in the last scene of Carlito’s Way. An IV needle was pushed into the fold of my left arm shoving God-knows-what into my body.
A hand held my right hand. Wheels were running along under me. Excited voices: “We’ve got to talk to him! It’s a question of life or death!” And other voices that answered, “You can’t now, come back tomorrow!”
I couldn’t feel my legs. I thought, “This time our brainstorm’s gone a bit too far. It had to happen sooner or later. We asked too much of ourselves.”
They took me into a room. Someone said, “He’s a writer, one of the Nameless Group, those who wrote Uh!, Tomahawk and 666.”
“I liked Uh; 666 seemed a bit over the top though...” someone answered.
“Did you read Mater semper certa est pater numquam by Valeriano Apostoli? It’s the new episode in the Limerick series” someone else asked.
“This really isn’t the right time. Call doctor Twain, tomorrow he’ll have to operate on his brain.”
“Shit, it even rhymes! How do you always manage to be so brill...”
The sound of a smack disturbed something; it was as though a necromancer’s hand had fumbled among the neurones, digging out beams of memories.
Two months earlier, Flavio De Marquez, a lanky painter from Apulia, had asked us to write some text for the catalogue for his show.
