[This a quick narrative based on a painting by my friend Saint, as well as some of the characters from his comic BABYLON. Check out more of his kick-ass future-urban artwork on phantomelectrik.blogspot.com. / Enjoy.]
FREE FORM NARRATIVE BY STB
BASED ON A PAINTING OF MONKS BY SAINT
Zibbidy-zin.
Don’t look at me u fuks. Goddamn! Hate this ragga-electro-jazz shit they pipe
in through the streetlights! Zin!
Will u control your
drug rage, dammit? What is it you’re even on? I mean, shit, I didn’t even see u take anything. Is this just your natural state? Don’t u
lie to me.
Don’t u dare zibbidy
me for zibbidying this muzik just cuz the shit is all over the zibbidy place
and sounds like they put Brazil and Russia in a blender and autoarranged an
ironic zibbidy mess. Muzik is no longer a thing. Your mouse is a saxophone!
[The city exists in
the background. It’s a green screen and what’s immediately noticeable is the
cheapness of the electronic editing. You can literally see those fuzzy lines
around the edges of everyone that lets you know they’re not actually where it
seems like they are. Like, are they in the city or not? If there was a camera,
it would zoom up from the two people implied to be having a conversation in these
opening paragraphs (a black dude and an asian chick, and everyone who passes by
them is reminded of that weird forced diversity a la public education math and
science textbooks with lots of different hands of different skin colors all
working on the same visual aide experiment of turning a lightbulb on with a
potato, or just a group of incredibly different-looking people standing in a
group, smiling, getting along great despite the obvious tension) and this
hypothetical camera would sweep upwards satellite imaging-style, moving
machine-clean to a spot half a mile further down the blvd they’re standing on
to show an incoming procession of hre krsnas, robed in orange, a gang of shaved
heads bobbing beatlessly except for the shit-ass ragga-electro-jazz muzik
mentioned earlier leaking from the streetlights in the form of spinning red
lace. The hre krsnas are fifty deep, blocking traffic by taking up the width of
the blvd. They carry with them visual force. They’re chanting individually,
each something different, creating a hectic white noise of eastern-sounding
mysteria, but it’s not actual words—they speak gibberish. They reek of
spirituality and deep deep deep down hopeless defiance of something that it’s
probably totally useless to defy. Red lace slithering from a streetlight,
spiking like an EKG line in time with steel drum beats. Return to
aforementioned dude and chick. A cadre of conspicuously fossil-burning bikes
burpsnapripples past on a street obviously nearby, but not on the blvd of their
current location.]
Let’s let it all
flow out into a meaningful ’logue. U know u babble?
U smell like
packaged food.
I was hungry and that’s beside the point. Where were we even
headed?
Destinations mean
journey, story, narrative. Conflict and zibbidy like at. Is this nihilistic
drug wandering, yo?
U know how I just
said u babble… ?
Are we an
illustration of futuristic interconnectedness between environment and
individual, or is it just off-tha-cuff expression brought about by—
—shut uuuuuuuuuuuuup. Damn. I really hope you’re on drugs. U sign in 2 the
region yet?
In a moment. I’m
trying to decide what form our obligatory pervasive computing should take. Will
it be electronic contact lenses controlled by electroencephalography,
physically controlled holographic projections achieved by vast networks of
phased-array optics, or your standard minute handheld device? And, by the way—
? I mean, just sayin— ? You’re drunk— ? I’m not the only one— ?
[The asian chick
does happen to be wearing electrolenses controlled electroencephalographically
and, unbeknownst to her black dude (for it’s obvious they’re lovers, thus the
possessive her black dude rather
than the indefinite and more neutral a black dude), and additionally unbeknownst to anybody, she is cycling through various vision filters that
automatically apply pre-set stylistic changes to her sight, for instance
“old-timey,” or “line-drawn,” or “negative exposure,” and finally she lands on
the “cartoon” filter, which instantaneously encodes her eye " brain signals to see the city in dramatic graphic
novel splendor, her black dude exploding into a muscular, befro’d, and
ink-washed character. She gives no outward sign of this change.]
Okay, she says, I
actually do remember where we were going now before all that fucking business
at the bar.
Ooh! Tell me! Tell
me!
And then all this
confusing meta argument business and the swearing and the drugs and the music
criticism.
Well zibbidy-zin,
girl!
Robo-sushi joint.
Huh. So that’s why I’m so hungry. What’s that noise?
[The eye in the sky
reveals that the hre krsnas have made significant progress down the blvd, and
maybe it’s just the fact that this far down the buildings are bigger and packed
together denser than a buncha them chinee in an ascending elevator to a
soulless job, but their robe count seems to be well above fifty now,
approaching maybe seventy. It’s hard to tell. The incoming procession, from the
distance of the black dude and asian chick, appears as a march of orange
tic-tacs. Their eastern gibberish grows in volume. Asian chick can’t tell
whether it’s just because she’s seeing in “cartoon,” but the portion of the
city behind the krsnas is distorted and seems to maybe be… swirling? Or it could just be the strands of slithering red lace
from the ragga-electro-jazz-playing streetlights, EKG spiking in the air to the
beat still like the aqueous serpents of pre-pollution devastation. Is there
even undeveloped land outside this city? Where are they, geographically? How
many days since the last instance of sleep and sobriety? Numbers might not
extend that far. For those who’ve never used electrolenses before, it’s quite a
fuckin trip to be spin-grade drunk and then have your eye " brain signals recoded so you’re seeing everything in
delicate inkstrokes. But no, seriously, what is that distortion? The sound of
fossil-burning bikes returns, this time closer.]
U see that? she
asks.
Black dude can’t
even answer cause he was mingling with kites even before the krsnas came into view, nevermind this shit.
I think robo-sushi
might have to be put on hold.
[Which what a
shame—they’re ever so hungry.]
Ohmygod, black dude
shouts, regaining composure, we’re about to be observers!
[That’s true, they
are. It was inevitable that the bikes would eventually come into view, and now
here they are, the gang, dozens of helmets sitting like hood ornaments atop
chemistry-changing female bodies hugged parasitically by brand name leather
riding suits, brands that would purchase their curvatures if at all possible,
sex up every last crevice and slope until the very DNA is inseminated and mere
utterances of company glottals and vowels might cause erections of the brain,
tear-assing around the corner of the blvd to be halted by the force of orange
robes and chanting delirium, red lace everywhere. The shit-ass
ragga-electro-jazz suddenly doesn’t seem quite as shit-ass as it did
previously. The events of the world, unfolding presently, seem to have
illuminated its purpose. Before—before it was simply understatement—much the
way first-hand accounts of genocide or paintings of battlefields or 5Ks for
cancer funding often come across as understatement because some things can’t be
encompassed by art, scar tissue, permanently emblazoned shadows, museums, or
agonized skulls preserved with lime. Some things are so real they’re not real.
They’re so terrible we can’t even fear them properly. They’re so simple we
can’t grasp their complexity. The music, piped through the streetlights, has
now invited us—plus the black dude and asian chick, who are actually there—to
contemplate these things and accentuate our roles as observers. (Indeed, they
seem to share consciousness for a brief second when they make eye contact and
silently say in eye language, “Wander out for a little robo-sushi and what do u
get but a biker/krsna standoff in an unrecognizable neighborhood…”) The krsnas
are some weird mixture of Burmese, Cambodian, Japanese, and even a few white
dudes who look sincere enough but can’t quite escape that whole displaced
university dark beer look, though they’re bobbing their heads and ranting the
gibberish just as fervently as their shorter counterparts so it’s hard to
question the commitment. The biker/krsna standoff isn’t really a standoff at
all because the bikers are clearly afraid. The approaching orange enclave
leaves a flowing wake of distortion behind it, buildings bending, people
floating spirits, streetlights uprooted and unwieldy, air TV static, one dog
with leash dangling and comical expression, all slowly melding with the kind of
force so powerful it has no concern for speed. The gibberish sounds like a
whole separate feed of percussion that feels like rolling downhill, not
physically but tonally, and will not quit. Asian chick takes this all in in
“cartoon” mode, plus drunk. Black dude’s high takes a not quite total turn from
sheer irreverence into detached and timeless wisdomville. Just their faces
alone tempt the easily distracted wordsmith with description. The bikers are
swearing and jabbering and still flaunting sexuality even in the wake of what’s
becoming a clear phenomenon, a perceptual incantation maybe, or a variety of
mass hypnosis, some kind of devilish mindfuck, that behind the krsnas, behind
the distortion, the city is DISAPPEARING—disappearing into that distorted swirl
like the flushing of debris down a cosmic toilet—goodbye!—and in its place what
is left is virgin land underneath blue sky, erratic scrub dotting the hills
like the sexy freckles that it turns out have been dotting the long-obscured
face of a muslim woman all along, a sight unspeakable, accompanied by electric
brain surges, and here they come, approaching, the Orange Procession, bringing
with them an end to our green screen city, parking placards ripped up like
weeds from a driveway, bookstores and geometrical food shops dismembered, and
the chanting from the monks through the eyes of the asian chick, currently
seeing in “cartoon” filter, are now close enough to have their own speech
bubbles, and what they say is that the only form of peaceful surrender allowed
here today will be total erasure, and the last thing our lovers and impromptu
observers seem to know is the smell of a gust of wind thick with the smell of
grass and fresh manure and human death.]
