scruta

An old friend’s pet parrot,

Sid,

This cantankerous, eyeballing, cage-locked, grey-feathered fiend,

Speech mimicker, mood shifter, and small sum reckoner

Amused me most with his eating.

Chuckling at his splatters,

His vainglorious, ruffled attempts at dignity

While lacking opposeable thumbs

And the ability to make handtools (or nuclear weapons),

I watched him fling bits of seed shells,

Regurgitates of fruit skins,

Hawked up hunks of corn

Upon the newspaper thoughtfully laid out before him

To make the cesspool of his excrement and food shavings

Easier for disposal.

He, no doubt, would have termed it ”abstract expressionism”

If you said around him enough.

I, for one, have been cawing the term for many years

And frequently find myself staggering in consumptive filth:

Saliva covered mawings and the stench of sopped up sewers,

Baking on a humid October night in the northern hemisphere.

I realize rather late

My superciliousness was misguided.

Let Sid ruffle his molted mantle in pride.

These opposable thumbs have got to stretch a lot of newsprint.

[New Fame and Ferret sit eating at a newly opened, swanky restaurant.]

New Fame

So what do you think of the food?

Ferret

It’s okay, I guess. I’m not blown away.

New Fame

Yeah, everything about this place is good not great.

Ferret

Hmm. What do you think of the pictures on the wall?

New Fame

The photographs?

Ferret

Yeah.

New Fame

I don’t know.

Ferret

I really don’t like them. I mean, they’re all pictures of these kids pouting or smiling. In a way, I think they’re very interesting. The compositions are great. They certainly have character, but would you want them gawking at you in your home, or while you’re eating?

New Fame

No, it’s true. I absolutely agree with you. There’s something about photographs-

Ferret

The closeness to reality?

New Fame

Exactly. There’s something about looking at a photograph. The resemblance to reality is offputting, especially when you’re dealing with a person.

Ferret

With paintings it’s completely different. There’s more distance there. You feel as if there’s the painter that sits between you and the object. The way they squiggle too much here or there. It’s distortion really. You need that.

New Fame

But why?

Ferret

I don’t know. I mean, there’s something to be said for trying to confront the world absolutely. And to be fair, when you really get down to it, photography fails at this too. Any photographer will tell you that the camera can be altered in just as endless an array just as any painter’s brush. Light can be refracted and twisted in ways that our eyes just can’t mimic.

New Fame

But photographs get closer than paintings.

Ferret

To commit that terrible faux pas of generalization, I’ll agree with you and say that they do.

New Fame

So what then?

Ferret

What about what?

New Fame

Why paintings over photographs?

Ferret

I see it this way. Let’s say you were able to record every conversation that you ever had, and then play it back on command. You’d just say, “Let’s listen to the conversation that I had yesterday at dinner.” And you could play it back, fast forward, rewind, etc.

New Fame

Like an endless Tivo for conversations?

Ferret

Exactly. So let’s say you had this. When that conversation came up in another conversation, would you want to use it every time?

New Fame

No.

Ferret

Well, why not?

New Fame

First of all, it’d get too damn boring.

Ferret

I agree. If all of your conversations were just clips of old conversations, then any new conversation could easily end up being a place for exchanging clips. Like swapping trading cards. No human interaction at all except the very basic, show me yours and I’ll show you mine.

New Fame

But it’s more than just that, right?

Ferret

I don’t know. I mean, what happens when you try to recall something that happened before?

New Fame

You end up embellishing it, or leaving details out. Distorting it like we were saying.

Ferret

That’s true. But what is it about that distortion that’s comforting?

New Fame

I guess it’s the fact that it serves to remind us that someone created the thing. But not only that, at least with the case of the conversations, the retelling tells something about the moment in which it was told. Maybe I’m trying to describe what my friend was buying, but I forget. So I start talking about him buying photographs because that’s what I’m seeing right now.

Ferret

And then the conversation is really living before you, interacting with you. That spontaneous act of the conversationg lives again!

New Fame

Pretty cool.

Ferret

Of course, there’s something terribly wrong here.

New Fame

What’s that?

Ferret

By analogy, we should say that now paintings resemble reality more than photographs.

New Fame

Shit.

Ferret

Ah well, I suppose there’s something to all of this.

New Fame

Maybe you should tell somebody about this conversation.

Ferret

Yeah, maybe I should.

[It’s morning. ZHOU walks into the office. He is late, and noticeably flustered.]

LI

You’re late. What’s going on?

ZHOU

Did you see the crowd outside?

LI

No. [Looks outside the window.] God! What’s going on out there?

ZHOU

There was an accident. Some girl on her scooter got hit by a truck. She’s pinned by her legs. They don’t know what’s going to happen.

LI

Is she alright?

ZHOU

She’s lost a lot of blood. There’s a doctor there. I heard him say that she’s going to lose her legs.

LI

God.

ZHOU

She’s beautiful too. Her boyfriend is there now. I heard him crying that she was only 19.

LI

What will she do?

ZHOU

I don’t know. [Sighs.] So what’s new today?

LI

Well. [Hesitates.] No—

ZHOU

No? What is it?

LI

[Walks over to his desk, and reads.] “During a routine traffic stop in Chongqing Municipality, police officers discovered a man driving without a license… and his legs. The paraplegic gentleman had rigged a number of hand controls to the clutch, accelerator, and breakpedals to allow him to drive. In a country where cars are becoming more and more prevalent, the number of physically challenged drivers continues to grow. Another legless Chongqing man was stopped recently for driving 153 km/hr. Two legless men in Nanjing and Harbin respectively, were stopped for operating illegal taxis.”

ZHOU

They can’t publish that.

LI

I know. The limitations of the Chinese legal system with regards to the disabled are restricted.

ZHOU

Correct.

LI

I read in the official media that they’re planning to redress the situation.

ZHOU

So did I.

[ZHOU distractedly shuffles through the papers on his desk, and turns on his computer.]

LI

153km/hr! He was certainly going fast.

ZHOU

[Curtly. Sternly.] If you couldn’t walk, wouldn’t you?

LI

Yeah, I guess you’re right.

ZHOU

Excuse me.

LI

It’s alright.

[They work in silence for a moment.]

ZHOU

[Looking at the computer screen, almost to himself.] I keep seeing her ending up like one of those beggars on the street floundering at knee level on a cart with Styrofoam padding on her hands, her teeth rotting, waving a cup at my hand.

LI

You don’t know that.

ZHOU

If her family has no money, what else is there for her?

LI

There will be something. They can help her.

ZHOU

You know, I want to believe that things in China are changing. That people’s lives are getting better.

LI

They are. You know that.

ZHOU

But how fast will they change?

LI

As fast as they can.

ZHOU

Not all things. Sometimes we need to push. Things are changing too fast for them to keep up.

LI

Them?

ZHOU

You know, our employer.

You invented a box to delight and reshuffle your tracks,

Tap-lit buttons you gridded in bright, oh my! orangey arrays.

There weren’t records that spun, or the token fly-wheels

Of faux spinners still lost in the age of two tastes.

It’s your labyrinthine machine that sings in a myriad voice,

That can speak the swift babble of billions of tongues,

A new cascade of sounds that feed sounds, a wide sonic mix hall

Of reflections of reflections to pops and re-bubbled beat blends.

They remind our perked ears of the never-a-stop pace of life

That we humans have cleft from the soil – reinvent! reinvent!

May you fop upon keys with inscrutable methods of mash

So we hear, and we see, and we gawk, and we blush,

That our bodies all wag in assent, and we learn to re-live

As the sounds you have served before us.

Listen! Listen! Listen!

Haphazardly, I wandered through the industrial outcrops of the city,

Strange avenues of weaved concrete binding hovels and factories,

Racing motor-machines, harbingers of this world in violent transition.

Then this long, pedestrian underpass, maybe just a place the planners forgot.

Women walk their infants here, far from the roar of scooters and clinky-clank bicycles muscling for a space between giant rigs and huff-and-puff taxis.

Is this the peace they hoped for? That they were promised so many times? This palisade in a jungle of concrete?

Under the belly of the overpass, rows of billiard tables lie dormant, tended by a lowly refuse wheeler, stacking his newest crop of waste sky high.

I stop to look, and so does he.

I’m too embarrassed to ask if my camera offends him.

He’s too confused to tell me that it does.

When you see an alien on the moon, you don’t question his motives.

Some club somewhere is being opened or shut.

A bunch of intrepid souls who framed their ideas of decadence in fuzzy, feathered sofas with oversized backings. Angel Bar. Heaven. Paradise. Club Fur. Dreamzone.

It’s all on hold now. Welcome to the Sidewalk Lounge.

A dirt road leading to another part of the city.

Monoliths radiating a sense of progress, renaissance, prosperity. The future.

I follow the road instinctively, as if someone had whispered the way in my dreams.

A slagheap comes into vision on the right. Junked car parts. Gritty slips of plastic sheeting. Eviscerated wrappers.

Reeds from a curdling estuary frame it. Taunt it with unhesitating passivity. As if desperately trying to overcome it with a whisper. Finding it unwilling to budge.

The wall nearby is riddled with numbers scrawled in desperate commerce. The vestiges of people on the road to progress, waylaid by the necessity of achieving their visions, leaving only refuse in their wake.

Another heap on the left. More masonry in the mix of insulation, carpet, and rubber tubing swirled in a conglomeration warped by myopic motives. Like a movie fashioned by advertising executives looking for exposure, but forgetting forethought, forgetting art. Self-serving garbage.

Above the walls of ivy leaves, cranes are busy hoisting new heights of concrete and reenforced steel to this land near the end of the road. A vision of order that rose from the junkyard. Or is going there.

Looking back from the cranes towards the road to the skyscrapers, there’s a sudden thought that maybe I’ve gotten time all wrong.

The future’s here with flotsam. Skyscrapers are dreams of the past.

LI

Zhou, do you know what a Scooby Doo is?

ZHOU

I don’t know. Like shit? Like doo-doo?

LI

It looks like it’s some kind of dog.

ZHOU

A dog?

LI

Yeah, a dog. Apparently he goes around with a bunch of teenagers and they solve mysteries. Old men dress up like ghosts and scare people away so they can commit real estate fraud, and then they catch them. It’s a children’s show.

ZHOU

Real estate fraud for children? Strange.

LI

It’s even stranger that many people say that this Scooby Doo likes to smoke marijuana. Gosh, there so many websites on this Scooby Doo and someone called Shaggy.

ZHOU

Shaggy? Is that another dog?

LI

No. It’s a man. This website claims that he is “the most righteous stoner in search of munchies who ever shat on the earth.”

ZHOU

See! Shat on the earth! I told you it was about shit. Scooby Doo.

LI

No, that just means he’s cool.

ZHOU

Shitting on the ground is cool?

LI

I guess. I don’t quite understand it, but I heard that somewhere before.

ZHOU

Okay. So this Shaggy is cool, but what’s that about stoning people? Read it again.

LI

“The most righteous stoner in search of munchies who ever shat on the earth.”

ZHOU

Scooby Doo hangs out with a man who stones people to death and then eats them? Munchies?

LI

I don’t know. I don’t think so. It has something to do with marijuana again.

ZHOU

Why do we care about this Scooby Doo, anyway?

LI

That crazy advertising paper in Shanghai again. [Reads.] It’s right out of a plot from Scooby Doo. Mr Lin, an operator of a fishpond in southwest China worried over the liability of allowing local children to swim in his pond after hearing a neighbor was ordered to pay ¥300,000 in compensation when someone drowned in his reservoir. In order to shy the children away, Mr. Lin began to perpetuate a series of ghost stories by erecting creepy scarecrows and writing “Beware of Ghosts!” on his walls. The scheme has worked, and the children have stopped swimming in his pond.

ZHOU

Ghosts. We don’t do ghosts. Censor it. Plus it makes the farmer look like a man committing insurance fraud and the children like marijuana toaking cannibals.

LI

But he wasn’t committing a crime. He helped protect those children, and maintain order on his property.

ZHOU

Are you saying that China needs ghostmakers?

LI

Maybe a bit. I don’t know. Without the scarecrows and the signs on the wall, the children could drown. Sometimes order requires lies, don’t you think?

ZHOU

True. I mean, that’s sort of our job, right?

LI

Yeah, you and I. The scarecrow men. [A brief pause as they take this in.] It’s funny though.

ZHOU

Eh?

LI

I just don’t know which ones are good lies and which ones are bad.

ZHOU

Well, we try as much as we can. If not, we must accept the Scooby Doo, slobbering along on drugs with that stoning man, looking to upset the order of everything. He reveals the truth to the children.

LI

I worry that sometimes Scooby Doo is right.

ZHOU

The children should drown?

LI

The children should know the truth.