1001 WAYS TO BE A FASHIONABLE ARTIST
(Notes)
At a gruesomely historic benefits party thrown up at Culture Castle, a shirtless, ticketless, legless young Noname is doomed to spurt unto the universe a boggling picture of itself never before imagined - knocked out in cheap oils, signed across its breadth, crammed into a handy frame.
On his journey to the great unveiling the future master of Artyfarty World would meet two mates; one in a dirty great limo, one in a dirty great pit.
But way back there in the beginning, in his weedy hovel beneath Waterloo Railway Station, Noname's existence was suspected only among his two enormous brothers, Bigbeard Hammer and Littlebeard Sneak. Risen from the urban bog, these towering symbols of Ego and Bull were irresistible to stick-shaped women and bendy, oily, voyeuristic men. Both were ugly and mad as the hats they wore. Corrupt, ruthless and inseparable, but above all fashionable, they were the original Wonderlads. And praise the King and Jesus, his destiny at last over-filled, Noname would be the last!
Time jump #17 (of 300)
Big brother Bigbeard had once been a headstone-mason. A self-made local hero, he was also the live chicken-devouring mascot of The Early Worm pub. During a headstone flinging tournament (a sport of his own invention) he propositioned the ugliest daughter of a wealthy cockney, with a mind to do them out of an already tainted fortune. The matrimonial deal was struck upon the Father-in-law-to-be's return from a business trip during which he had suffered two heart-attacks, been shot in both thumbs at a boxing match and, significantly, inherited from an old pal the deepest black marble quarry ever bashed out of the planet. After Dad's unexpected demise, Bigbeard's first wife shortly capitulated. Upon wooing and wedding the remaining ugly daughters, one atop the other in rapid romantic fashion, Bigbeard Hammer soon occupied a manor all of his own. The parties quickly grew infamous...
Time jump #202
The confession of the narrowest life-history in history is rudely interrupted by the arrest of the only survivor of the most popular case of mass-murder to have awoken a media normally concerned with slimming celebrity prostitutes for many a month. Now, kneeling in his late brother's luxury jail cell, eyebrows glued to the leather-padded writing desk, Noname's head never-the-less spins around twice before the real penny drops...
...evidence being assembled...
...evidence being assembled...
Time jump #298
From this awful moment until the last awful moment of his inexplicable existence, Noname sees his life paraded jerkily across the tilted horizon as a series of smudgy Polaroid snaps taken within a recurring nightmare, with no fully wakeful periods in-between. Conditions improve however - until the dope wears off. Far too late he remembers the vital, sumptuous, fateful half-hour edited from his brain by that undercover Judas who had knocked up, and pulled off, The Big Frame...
"So fret not, like an idle girl,
That life is dash'd with flecks of sin.
Abide: thy wealth is gather'd in,
When Time hath sunder'd shell from pearl."
TENNYSON
"Pretty as a poke among damsels!"
WALLYWOODS AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT
(Once he was an architect, though he never built a building. He used to screw together models from collected junk, paint them, fill them with flowers and donate them to his poor family; and they were grateful. They loved these gifts, yes, but they hated them more. He stopped building and stepped out one evening to a blues concert where his soul broke down before a vision. He was blinded for a while until his vision realised itself before him. His creation was bright and beautiful in his mind's eye, and quite possibly in God's too, but every light has its shadow, and into the shadow of his creation everything and everybody else now faded.
He had written a manifesto called 'The Wind Never Blows' so he knew his scribblings were nonsense. The manifesto had predicted The Peak, and they had laughed and proved him paranoid. He had written it in pictures as a comic book:)
"Who is King of Culture Castle?"
"At this late hour the ham-slicing sculptor, Bigbeard Favourite. Vocal, jovial; famously indiscreet within those cider-keg trousers of his own invention."
"Who is the Court-photographer?"
"His gigantuous baby brother Rabbit, of course. Fresh out of prison once again. A living landmark. He could pass for a lump of his brothers best work - if he could just remain still long enough.
If one knows any two legends whatever, one knows that pair."
His brothers! They will be extra-large in the public eye tonight, together upon the glossy Peak. Reunited at a high-flying EVENT, as Bigbeard himself, legs astride in a pose of welcome, lowers his drawbridge and a limousine-clad Brother Rabbit pulls in. Re-delivered thus, ahead of the convoy, unto the bosom of elite culture-designersthe Favrit Harem of Stick-insect Mistresses, one might bother to ask, "And what will the King, the brother Spy, and their one thousand made-up guests be in aid of tonight?"
Briefly (and genuinely); poor artists.
An AIDs scale benifit he most popular charity up there on the jewel-studded Peak (harem attached);
the Charity for Really Atrociously Poor Artists - for rumour has it that times down there are very thin indeed...
Stoop, if you are able, and peer down, down...
Cast a reluctant eye deep into the oily bottom of the Barrel of Flagging Spirits.
The very thinnest of those CRAP artists, (we must call him Noname, for he has none), is youngest brother to the above mentioned Favrites. Long-since dislodged from the gilded nest, he has only one credit in the world to his... credit:
A picture. His first and only masterpiece, entitled:
"the Soul of the Artist."
A two-meter square canvas with not much paint on it due to the cost of oils.
Now, because he has never been invited to a do on the Peak, Noname knows nothing of tonights do on the Peak: until his brothers mention it to one another on a soft-talk show, performed within the fat-spattered carcuss of the t.v. set hung above the bed in the artists studio-kitchen-toilet.
Noname has hit the boards at the bottom of his barrel. Whilst those wide, icon faces jam every channel, he has but a single, dented lucky penny with which to purchase alcohol and a loan from a pin-striped shark with which to pay off back-rent.
His true fate, however, is decided upon the conjunction of atoms within a mean dish of red-cabbage soup, bobbing as it always does, upon a mean sea of red-cabbage-stained sheets. With this vital liquid the artist has been topping himself up for nine months; and upon this night of nights, Nonames magnetized blood finally curdles in revolt.
With nothing quite fitting in the fat-spattered wardrobe, he throws on his fat-spattered painting-anorak and manages to exit via the fire-escape clutching "the Soul of the Artist" and a doomed determination to prostrate himself and his life's work, in all their humble, fat-spattered glory, before the beautiful brains of Fashionable Society.
Saturated in an aptly-risen storm, a least likely Favourite gets his first lift half way up Hangperson's Hill: in a proposterous limousine.
"I recognised you, young Noname! Who would have thought it?"
The King's chauffeur is chirpy.
"I thought I'd brought up the last of 'em! I'd surely have seen you on the holy CRAP-list. Misread you probably. Took you for a foot-note, no doubt! Ha! Ha! Missed the hors d'oeuvres in any case. Here! Put some of that in your neck; and sniff some of this!"
On the Threshold of the Peak, swaying counter to the lashing winds, Noname slings his anorak down to the mud, despite a wicked bout of sneezing. His first and last intercourse with Society shall be a statement of frank purity. He will enter the hallowed halls bearing nothing but "the Soul of the Artist" thrust out before him like an underweight sacrificial goat.
"In the likely event of your dizzying from all that aquaintance," nudges the chauffeur, tipping Noname with practised ti9ming into the adjacent sick-bush, "you are bound to find me in the pantry among the serving-maids..."
Prancing naked as a babe through the spangled womb that is at once the Fashionable Event, and generous teet to all its fashionable appendages, Noname passes completely unnoticed, for two reasons:
His nakedness. The hour is late, and the loyal guests have adhered feverishly to Peak customs. At the drooping of the kings mason's-malet, five-hundred penguin costumes and five-hundred kitten costumes have been flung down to the polished, black marble floor. One-thousand (and on reflection, two-thousand) bared arses stuffed with art and drunk on incestuous intercourse, can only fail to be ignited by the apparition of one or two arses more. And such slight ones at that.
As for Nonames Work (the sacrificed goat), it is indeed a masterpeice. Spectacular in its accomplishment: a quite indecent map of every busted nerve and collapsed cell in the spirit of the artist present. A perfect duplicate. It is therefore quite overseen, too, and they are doubly ignored.
Dizzy from the night's abortion, searching out a puke-palm, Noname and his picture slide for the moment right out of the frame. After floating headlong through countless caviar-jellies and black-marble chandeliers, they are carried together for one marvelous instant upon a flock of subtle, white hands: then rolled for a disturbing eternity along a daisy-chain of excruciatingly pretty serving-maids wearing nothing but silly caps...
...to the castle sauna, (or is it the pantry?)
Wherein the chauffeur is met, brush in hand, at work on the Madonna of all serving-maids sucking on a ham sandwich.
"That's right dear, don't eat it whatever you do! Lubrication and motivation, young Noname! Are you up for it?"
"...mumble, heave..."
"Put your precious 'Soul' down for a bit. That's right, do us all a favour and LET IT GO! (You know what that needs, don't you? A frame of gilt. There's a humdinger of one around here, someplace). Now put your feet up here and get some blood in yer brain."
"...mumble... They saw right through us! My life! My Work! ...heave..."
"Never mind that! One cannot force ones-self down stiff throats! Lubrication and motivation... hold it up, dear... Now there's the key to the door! Now, look here, swallow this. And sniff some of that. And do have a ham sandwich: just look at the size of that platter!"
From now until the last moment of his inexplicable existance, Noname sees his life paraded jerkily across the tilted horizon as a series of smudgy poloroid-snaps taken within a recurring nightmare - with no fully wakeful periods inbetween. In scene one, jack-booted Dalian scissors leap two meters in a dance, while a thousand pieces of his soul are clamped face down into ham between a thousand white-bread triangles. As an accompanyment to the sandwich-dance the chauffeur narrates, in a crackly newsrell drole, the too-well documented history of Brothers Bigbeard and Rabbits' ascentions to power...
Big brother Bigbeard, then a headstone-mason (already a character in the villiage pub) married the ugliest daughter of an cockney brothel owner. The union was forged at the end of a week in which that brothel owner had suffered two heart-attacks, been shot in both thumbs at a boxing match and (more significantly) inherited the largest black-marble quarry on the continent from an old drinking buddy, the train-robber, Slackjaw Wildo. A notorious ex-patriot. Semi-let for use as a cemetary, the quary had gone bust as the Wildos, who supposedly mined it, were one after the other shot dead during a state-initiated feud. With the last mourning periods over, Bigbeard turned his full attention to his prize: a deep black pit.
Father of the crudest of brilliant plans, he began to sell off loose bits of marble as bloodbath souvineers which he knocked about a bit with a gravestone-malet. After chiselling his initials into a prominent facet (during an early Bigbeard charity event) their collectable values mystically increased thirty-fold and this was pleasing. He hacked the ample bust of a floozy out of an obelisk (during another Bigbeard charity event) and recieving enough payment for it by a junior minister of culture he took the natural plunge into full-blown nudes.
Becoming fashionable, he set about work on nakedness of a string of well-situated ladyfriends, until, way above it all now, a certain Important Lady requested herself hewn into a thing of larger proportions than the grafitti-clad bronze of her famous husband. The result was historic. Bigbeard was made. Then he made himself again in the shape of a great black marble monolith planted at the bottom of his rolling gardens.
The former grave-digger now manufactured Artifacts of Importance, and at the end of his last unveiling, for he will die, shortly, decided to invest all the time left to him in acheiving immortality.
He envisioned a sheer and hollow red-veined, black-marble Peak (a spearehead rising above the earth) crowned with a shear and hollow gold-marble fortress. This grotesque memorial, this fantasy, should merge Bigbeard with his myth. The place, if it were to exist, would make an ideal and massive party venue for art-playboys, groupies and anyone connected to the Art Media Mafia. Bigbeard was not paranoid. He was a brilliant businessman and had much success with women. He was honest looking but rough and the Ladies crowded at his knees.
(...)
It was upon the bright and blustery day of completion, therefore, that the shadow of a new reign of elite was cast across the land, eclipsing the lives of the artless masses with which it was infested. For their own benifits, needless to say, as indeed for all who struggle within, or bask astride, a healthily structured model Society.
Now, the highlights of this last almost royal unveiling were recorded, as tradition would have it (as with the high and lowlights of all Bigbeard unveilings) through the gritty lense of second-brother Rabbit's poloroid camera. As tradition would also have it, the prints, still tacky with chemical ooze, were hastily touched-up to accomodate quite another version of events.
Having served a term for eloping with the thirteen year old daughter of a respected porno-film producer, Rabbit cleverly persuaded an old boarding-school-chum, the then well-mannered and widely disliked editor of Readers Digest, to print the honeymoon snaps, nuptuals and all. This, for the sake of an eternally dwindling readership, and in consideration of past favours. The chum was quite rightly sent down. Amid the resulting boom in sales, Rabbit's un-ignorable application to fill the vacant seat just happened to be the only application, and was ironically accepted by the nobs at Digest. His work, or perhaps his mission, now began with the publication of an album of photographs taken at weekends within the sightless walls of their old boarding school...
As the mogel's career exploded and the measurements of his purple pin-striped suits rocketed, enemy-media-instigated public nosiness into every dirt-filled cranny of his life positively cluster-bombed out of news stands throughout the land.
From his sworn vocation to expose if not the whole truth, then at least the gorgeous secrets of all who flinched from or clammered to be immortalised in his penthouse dark-room, Rabbit was only occasionally arrested. However, during the dry periods, absent only in body from the new Rabbit's Digest H.Q., a heady hit-list of plots and scandals could be hatched and sent forth with from the high-tech warren of a wing in the realm's most exclusive prison...
A shrouded figure emerges from the ridiculous limousine which has pulled up outside the pub in which Noname has spent the last few days chewing upon the wood of a coctail-stick, but actually starving close to death. Forehead glued to the reeking bar, lapping up spilt alcohol; abstractly hallucinating magnificent works of sub-realism: above all, accutely mourning the foggy disappearance of "the Soul of the Artist"...
"In a word: your own life history if you please!"
The Rabbits Oracle spy is chirpy, but not understood.
"Money for it, and more than a bent penny, too! While we have the chance, now, Mr... erm... Before they pick you up. Satchels of it! Let's get down to it shall we? Mr Erm?
The agent explains without moving his lips, through a shifting chequered suit, swirling cigar-mist and beer-jammed ears, that since Nonames 'coming out' up on the Peak, the Brothers Favourite and one thousand members of the Social Cream Club have died agonisingly in an hysterical plague of constapation.
Foul play is suspected.
The first autopsy has given birth to a sandwich-sized triangle of canvas on which the unreadable initials of the murderer has been daubed in uncomplimentary hues of a small amount of cheap oil paint.
A pair of blunt scissors have been removed from the scen for fingerprinting.
"Great wind-bags are a-gathering!" jabs the journalist with easy sympathy.
Nonames... existance hangs at last on the tips of quick tongues.
"You are about to hit the fan, Mr Erm. Evidence is being assembled.
Still, not to worry! Get some of that into you. And sniff some of this. Listen. Only the chauffeur recognised you, but no worries on that score. He and I go a long ways back. Hatched a few good-uns in our time. Our lips are sealed with the same lining, if you follow me. His advice: 'keep your head down 'til yer up for it'.
Now roll your eyes this way and have a poke in this satchel..."
The confession of the narrowest life-history in history is promptly interupted by the arrest of the only living suspect in the most popular case of mass-murder to have made it in the media for many a month.
Kneeling in his late brother's cell, eyebrows glued to the leather-padded writing desk, Nonames head manages to spin:
"...evidence being assembled...evidence being assembled..."
That evidence is assembled soon enough, in the spot-lit presence of celebrity judges, celebrity jury and top-buck media celebrities, on the first and last day of the trial, in the land's highest court. It arrives with pomp during a collective gasp in the shape of one-thousand triangular rags, surgically-stitched together to re-create a two-meter square photofit of the suspect's tortured "Soul".
"Officer! Be so good as to remove the head of the accused from the bar.
Now, once again for those at the back, speak up man! Is that work of yours?"
"Yes, your... It's a self-portrait of my soul, your... erm. A reflection, if you like(?)"
(Polite applause, instigated from the front row by the agent in the fast-flannel suit, supported by a gaggle of serving-maids hoisting their caps).
"Magnificent!"
"SILENCE!" (and hammering), "And the VERDICT if you will."
The dead King's chauffeur, well recovered from his loss, is entitled today to be speaker for the jury:
"We, the chosen ones, declare the evidence a first rate Soul of the Artist..."
(Pause)
"And the accused..."
(Long pause)
"...the genius responsible! Quite remarkable. Absolutely GUILTY!"
(Regard the legendary...)
