Blog
May 15
Yesterday I snuck into a very large and nice house posing as a waiter. The owner of the house and host of the dinner party was none other than M. Brenclaust, the renowned reclusive art collector whose collection includes most if not all of the later works of Giovanni Devoer, who is my favorite artist. I followed the other waiters closely, copying their movements just imperfectly enough as to make us appear larger and more in control, like a swarm of minnows. I flowed into the biergarten with a white napkin waterfalling down my forearm held in front of me, delivering drinks to guests wearing suits and scarves and summer dresses and tall shoes. I caught my first glimpse of a Devoer painting through the window into the first floor reading room. It was framed mightily in mahogany and I instantly knew it was not one that I had seen before. This one looked like the map of the inside of a fertilized egg. It made my sinuses flush and pucker until I remembered I had forgotten to not breathe out when eating the horseradish. Foolish!
Seated in the eighth spot to the left and fifteenth from the right, on the eastwise side of the third table in the dinner room I looked around and couldn’t help but find my eyes fluttering between the two prints on the wall directly across from me. These had a distinctive reverse tan from where the girder pinched the sunlight across around twelve or so inches from the top of the frames, creating a harsh gradient from tan to khaki on the aged paper. I thought that this two-tonededness complimented the rich sweet inks that I know Devoer used in eighty four and eighty five, before the ban.
My digression was sucked out of the room by the stereo madness of the four dinner bells positioned kitty corner to the centers of the four main windows on each wall, high above and at an angle. Forty five young men and women wearing black and white marched with conviction into the room carrying the finest thick porcelain dinner plates this side of everywhere, one for each seated guest. The standing guests in the overflow room and listening over the radio were to not understand this part. The waiters carefully stepped into the allotted space to the left of each seat, carrying the plates with both hands, shoulders firm and pointed towards their elbows, which were held at a taut thirty six degrees from straight ahead. Then all at once they dropped the plates from about two feet above the table. The synchronized shatter was unlike anything I had heard before or since. The guests either gasped or held silent, but the breath in the room was heavy. I tried to take it all in this time for real. Just as quickly as the plates had fallen each waiter had reached up to the corresponding beaded string hanging from the ceiling, and at the sharp inhale of who I had identified as the senior waitress all flexed their wrists, pulling the cord as if turning on forty five light bulbs and trying to confuse the electricity, which light will get which light? Instead of confused lights or any light at all other than the five chandeliers and candles on the southernly wall, or the last embers of the sun coming in with a bluish hue, we got raw beef. From seemingly nowhere a second set of forty five waiters on the catwalk up above had dropped our raw steaks onto our cracked dinner plates. The wet smacking was less synchronized. Then Brenclaust steps into the room, holding what I initially thought to be a brick of glass.
It was not a brick of glass but a large salt crystal that he held against his upper belly with his fingers pointed towards the ceiling, stowed as if he was going to run with it like a football. He started at the first guest on my left side of the first table. Two waiters fell into step behind him on his short walk to the first guest. The taller one pulled out a small tack hammer out of his apron, and the shorter pulled a chisel. Together, with Brenclaust holding the salt brick with two hands, they knocked off six small but visible shards of salt, along with innumerable particles of salt dust. Brenclaust took the salt and sprinkled it with force onto the raw steak of the guest in the first chair, with the waiters rearranging the crystals onto the meat for the desired effect. They repeated this arduous process forty four more times. By my turn the sky in the windows had already gone through its purpleness and ended up black. Brenclaust, upon making sure the waiters had satisfactorily arranged the salt onto the forty fifth steak, used heavy steps to get up to the raised area in the northeasternly corner of the room, where a luxurious stool had been brought in to replace a drinks cart. He began scolding us. I will do my best to reconstruct all of what was said, but my emotional response to it all may have gotten things a little twisted.
He began, “This is wonderful because we get to eat the beef, and the beef is the man, and the man is the city, and the salt is you and you are the city”
He continued, “You will eat this beef but you are not better than the man, the city, or the meat. The salt is on the city and so is the plate beneath it. You will find yourself hungry for these porcelains, but know that they will upset your stomach like no other!” (this got a laugh) “Do not forget that the city is what you make it, and the roads are like the gristle, and the marbling is like the way the world is now, your teeth on this beef will be as large as you let them”
He concluded, “Thank you all for joining me tonight on this evening of recollection and horizon-staring, please join me in the library for a special viewing”
I knew what this meant, this was the whole reason I had gone through all the hassle of coming here in the first place. Against the only undecorated wall in the ornate library, the unfocused light of the projector shined. Next to it the stack of tube televisions crackled and burped. Once the waiters had gotten all the technical issues sorted out, they pressed play and we were able to see three broadcast camera views and one sixteen millimeter angle of Devoer on October eighteenth, nineteen eighty nine, strapped to the side of one of space shuttle Atlantis’s booster rockets with ratchet straps and duct tape. Some of his artist friends claimed he had also swallowed a large amount of rare earth magnets to help with his adhesion, but this is still debated. The broadcast begins immediately with liftoff. Camera shake, steam, smoke and debris block the view for the first few hundred seconds, before the view clears up and we see Devoer’s limp body being pulled in various directions by the force of air. He seems to regain consciousness and makes eye contact with broadcast camera two. He doesn’t look away for a couple of minutes.
Stage Separation: The rocket rolls, yaws and tumbles in slow motion. We can see Atlantis gently floating away every time the rotation lines up with its path of ascent. Devoer has locked his eyes with broadcast camera two again. The tumbling speeds up over the course of several minutes blue and blue and brown and blue again, increasingly blurry. Broadcast Camera three is torn from its bolts, and begins to spin very fast, disrupting the feed and creating some beautiful shapes and colors in the bottom tube television. Unfortunately, the sixteen millimeter camera runs out of film just before Devoer’s body begins to disintegrate. It is a miracle the shielded reel was recovered and developed anyway, we are so lucky.
His eyes are suddenly not locked onto broadcast camera two and it becomes ambiguous where his eyes are anymore. It happened much more quickly than I had imagined when I had read about the broadcast the first time early on in college. The only tape that had not been destroyed by the US government was one recoded by a Canadian high strength, weak signal broadcasting/receiving center, where Brenclaust happened to be working in October of nineteen eighty nine.
I did not expect it to be graphic, and it wasn’t really, but it feels like it is burnt into my brain now. In one of the last frames before broadcast camera two cuts out, there is some kind of figural shape an unrecognizable distance away from the camera. It is basically impossible that Devoer was still alive at this point, but I like to think that in that moment, as his body got ripped apart by air and spinning, floating alone in a cylinder of blue, he became the last person to experience something wholly originala.