American Fez

Easter Parade

Briefly imprisoned in a jazz brunch this past Easter weekend, I made short work of a benedictinized egg while staring balefully at the musical trio wedged into a corner beside the buffet.

"Keyboard" balanced on a foldable stand, double bass and an apparently double-jointed singer: Here's one you might remember, the singer mumbles. It's only a Paper Moon.

Paper Moon? A song I might remember? I'm not a thousand years old ... unlike the blueberries in this fruit salad melange thing.

"That's Frankie Lomax there on the double bass."  Bom, bom, bom, bom-bom, bom, bom, bom-bom.

Oh for Chrissakes. Where's that bloody mimosa I ordered?

Infer? No.

At this point of my blog, I found myself composing a gloomy post, led astray from simple sentences into a dense and overly semi-colon'd paragraph. How I arrived at such a mountain of nonsense I know not, and I haven't e'en got to the prowling leopard part yet. 

Seeking solace, I Google'd "Virgil" and found a link to Virgil's, New York's premier Southern-Style Barbeque restaurant. Virgil sells bottles of Extra Hot Sauce on his online gift shop for $18 per bottle and I considered buying a sample and writing about the experience. Alas, Virgil doesn't call this product 'Hell Sauce' as other BBQ sauce makers do, because that would work nicely with my Dante theme. 

Consequently I'm still wandering around lost in a thicket of pointless words.

Who Will Buy?

My mind is like a flea-market shopaholic: it wanders idly from out-of-print book fallen down the back of a shelf to neglected landscape painting hung high in the atrium, brain-coins burning a hole in its pockets, picking through the bargain bins full of yesteryear's cultural assortment.

Alas, as happened with View of Lake Duhl from the Nuronne Plateau, my mind often makes an impulse purchase it quickly regrets. Autobiography of a Ruritanian Gentleman? No need for that, either. The cerebellum gradually begins to overflow with such worthless bric-a-brac and I forget to do my taxes.

It's a pity the buttocks don't function as the mind's basement; a place to store all the worthless knowledge I accumulate in old books and museums; a place where I could sit on it, so to speak, until it either fades from memory or I can sell it back to some other idiot and make a synapse profit. 

Funny Hmm Hmm

A comedian tells a joke requiring knowledge of Keynesian economics and quantum mechanics. Of course, most of his audience do not understand such complex jokes. Its sophisticated punchline evaporates in a spotlight of genial incomprehension, but fortunately a larger puddle of generic comedy still remains on the stage.

And so the audience laugh at the comedian's zany voices instead of his jokes. They applaud his facial tics and whoop at his melodramatic body language. The performance of humor is appreciated if not the actual humor itself. But, really, these people might just as well be watching Marcel Marceau. 

I often think this is how the world works.