Sunday, March 30, 2008

The Rock and Roll Monster (David Byrne)

Here it comes from around the corner. It's twisting and turning, snaking down the central aisle, like a giant serpent. It seems to be an endless tube of clear plastic, about four feet in diameter, and filled with giant versions of either those translucent cups you get at a water cooler, or the ones you get when giving a urine sample. Only these cups are so large they almost fill the writhing plastic tube, arrayed one behind the other. It's as if it is some weird, enormous intestine made for a school science project, but on a too-large scale. It has that homemade, ad hoc, do it yourself vibe. But it wriggles and slithers as if it is alive.


I think Byrne and I must tune into the same station when we dream. One of my last dreams involved giant airborne amoeba -- yellow and oddly grainy-looking, like a stain on an old photograph -- that persistently tried to encapsulate my head. When it did, I felt a distinct sense of strangeness, indescribable in words. Of course, no one could see it but me. The dream took place inside some timeless building that might have been a museum or a church or a mortuary. Images covered the walls: demented bric-a-brac, the leavings of psychical vagrants.

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