Monday, January 14, 2019

A Gorgeously Liberal Infinite Art



.
[Prose & rhyme (mostly prose) which makes flagrant mention of discarded pizza slices and artist and friend Adam Kurtzman, and the uses to which all the above might be put.]
.
There were a number of such slices of pizza as this
strewn about the sidewalk and street on the lowest stretch
(just above Houston) of First Avenue this morning –
I envisioned pizza slices like ammo shooting out the door,
.
flung by someone who’d flipped out in a high drama LES snit
in L’il Frankie’s at 3 a.m.- anyway I quick-shot a pic of
a particularly representative slice a moment before one
of those big noisy street sweepers on rollers scarfed it up,
.
because it seemed to me it would be wonderful as the model
for the prototype of a ceramic pizza slice - I could show it
to Adam Kurtzman so he could make and multiply it into
triangles that might profitably be featured, say, between
.
and among Wegman’s glittering mosaic Weimaraners
at the 6th ave 23rd Street Subway Station. It further struck me
as an accomplished phenom that pizza had become
the Food Most Turned To By Reflex in New York (influenced
.
by shops for 99 cent pizza which, by the by, is helping to keep
untold numbers of hungry people alive) - it has long outrun
bagels and Nathan’s hot dogs as the iconic comestible most
now to be associated with New York City.  I think therefore

it ought to be on New York City municipal flags and notices
and stationery and official mayor’s office reports and every last
little civic bit of what the city proclaims it is, wants, does
and will do. And then some chic civic food artisan can come up

with an edible morass of Oedipal PizzaApplePizzaApple
and serve it all the time, gratis, everywhere to everyone and
maybe, finally, at just the moment the first somebody slurps
up a spoon of it, the shift we’ve awaited to a new paradigm

will slip into gear as effortlessly as Helvetica seemed overnight
to conquer any notion that there could be any more quintessential
American font for Volkswagen and Barbie Dolls: something
unlooked-for in the looked-for thing you found would once again
.
become our Arbiter. But as nothing ever had and nothing ever
would, it couldn’t succeed in swaying us into identically nervous
marionettes, were it even to want to do so: no, the Apollonian
rod up our ass would always split and divide simultaneously

with great clouds of gas catastrophically whooshing forth
randomly (not seemingly randomly) from that ass
to obscure the whole business, erase every finely
etched line and then there’d be time for rhyme,
.
and all would therefore be well
when the certainties got back
to looking like certainties –
which let them get out of Hell
.
to regale us, to detail the features
Of Kurtzman’s jeweled pizzas:
an opaline prism and jism parade.
Bodies and souls may be made
.
and behave, if you like, like a fart
but in fact, both in toto and part,
they’re the product and source, 
and the end and the start
.
of a gorgeously infinite liberal art.

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adam kurtzman, opaline glass pieces for lamp shade
Instagram image

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