Thursday, January 17, 2013

Bob Dylan: the rise and fall






They’re selling postcards of the hanging

They’re painting the passports brown

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors

The circus is in town




Here comes the blind commissioner

They’ve got him in a trance

One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker

The other is in his pants




And the riot squad they’re restless

They need somewhere to go

As Lady and I look out tonight

From Desolation Row




Cinderella, she seems so easy

“It takes one to know one,” she smiles

And puts her hands in her back pockets

Bette Davis style




And in comes Romeo, he’s moaning

“You Belong to Me I Believe”

And someone says, “You’re in the wrong place 

my friend

You better leave”




And the only sound that’s left

After the ambulances go

Is Cinderella sweeping up

On Desolation Row




Now the moon is almost hidden

The stars are beginning to hide




The fortune-telling lady

Has even taken all her things inside

All except for Cain and Abel

And the hunchback of Notre Dame

Everybody is making love

Or else expecting rain




And the Good Samaritan, he’s dressing

He’s getting ready for the show

He’s going to the carnival tonight

On Desolation Row




Now Ophelia, she’s ’neath the window

For her I feel so afraid

On her twenty-second birthday

She already is an old maid

To her, death is quite romantic

She wears an iron vest

Her profession’s her religion

Her sin is her lifelessness




And though her eyes are fixed upon

Noah’s great rainbow

She spends her time peeking

Into Desolation Row




Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood

With his memories in a trunk

Passed this way an hour ago

With his friend, a jealous monk




He looked so immaculately frightful

As he bummed a cigarette

Then he went off sniffing drainpipes

And reciting the alphabet




Now you would not think to look at him

But he was famous long ago

For playing the electric violin

On Desolation Row




Dr. Filth, he keeps his world

Inside of a leather cup

But all his sexless patients

They’re trying to blow it up

Now his nurse, some local loser

She’s in charge of the cyanide hole

And she also keeps the cards that read

“Have Mercy on His Soul”




They all play on pennywhistles

You can hear them blow

If you lean your head out far enough

From Desolation Row




Across the street they’ve nailed the curtains

They’re getting ready for the feast

The Phantom of the Opera

A perfect image of a priest




They’re spoonfeeding Casanova

To get him to feel more assured

Then they’ll kill him with self-confidence

After poisoning him with words



And the Phantom’s shouting to skinny girls

“Get Outa Here If You Don’t Know

Casanova is just being punished for going

To Desolation Row”




Now at midnight all the agents

And the superhuman crew

Come out and round up everyone

That knows more than they do




Then they bring them to the factory

Where the heart-attack machine

Is strapped across their shoulders

And then the kerosene




Is brought down from the castles

By insurance men who go

Check to see that nobody is escaping

To Desolation Row




Praise be to Nero’s Neptune

The Titanic sails at dawn

And everybody’s shouting

“Which Side Are You On?”




And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot

Fighting in the captain’s tower

While calypso singers laugh at them

And fishermen hold flowers




Between the windows of the sea

Where lovely mermaids flow

And nobody has to think too much

About Desolation Row




Yes, I received your letter yesterday

(About the time the doorknob broke)

When you asked how I was doing

Was that some kind of joke?




All these people that you mention

Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame

I had to rearrange their faces

And give them all another name




Right now I can’t read too good

Don’t send me no more letters, no

Not unless you mail them

From Desolation Row




Bob Dylan
Desolation Row
with some help from
Lotte Lenya:
Alabama Song
from 
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Oscar Levant's Ghost: Mind Pizza




"Here, kitty, kitty": when taxidermy goes terribly wrong




I don't know how I stumble onto these things. What was I looking for? Not THIS. Not this "what-is-it", unidentifiable: maybe an otter with the mumps. 

There is a whole art form out there - in fact, you may have seen some of it in old museums (reminding me of Dylan Thomas and his "museum that should have been in a museum"). In those days, "lifelike" expressions mattered more than anatomical accuracy, often with truly hideous results.

There are sooooooooooooooooooo many of these photos out now, probably due to a Facebook page called Taxidermy Gone Wrong. Now it has mushroomed like amanita, blossomed like a patch of lethal bacteria on a petri dish. Bad taxidermy: it's everywhere!




I think Norman Bates was the gold standard of taxidermy, posing his owls and other predatory birds in such realistic ways that it made your scalp prickle. One pictures him sitting there with his little needle and thread, and that stuffing that my mother used to call "cott'n batt'n". And, of course, scissors and a knife

Killing and gutting the birds doesn't bear thinking about.




But bad taxidermy (not the meticulous kind Norman practiced in the Bates Motel) is now a kind of found art. There are lots of cutesy poses where squirrels fire six-guns and rats pose as the Pope, but I'm not too fond of them because they're obviously supposed to be kitschy and bad. Some of these examples look like earnest attempts, which only adds to their horror. Pets are the worst. Did someone actually pay for this, to have Fido or Fluffy rendered Satanic for all time?







Somebody must have had the thought, somewhere, sometime, that this was a good way to stuff a dead pet. It may have been someone's idea of human-looking eyes. Fine, if your favorite human is a raving lunatic! That second one looks like he had one too many caramel macchiattos at Starbuck's.









As with the Royal Family, some of these cats should have been strangled at birth. With their deranged expression and eyes set too close together, they're obviously as inbred as the Hapsburgs. In fact, the puma (above) looks like he's about to go marry his favorite niece.








Oh Lor', oh Lor'. . . a polar bear with a hangover, a prehistoric Muppet, a tubular moose. . . Did this taxidermist ever SEE a moose, did he have any idea what one looked like?








.  The shrivelled, sunken, dessicated, dusty, shabby, moth-eaten, mummified look of
 bad taxidermy is awful enough without these demonic leers.




Taxidermy slippers! These were either made from the world's biggest moles, 
or meant to fit a Chinese woman in the 17th century.




Another "what-is-it?". Don't know what happened to its nose.




My personal favorite. It's easy to see how it died, but. . .