Evan Fleischer - Greetings From An American Balzac. lyrics

Published

0 143 0

Evan Fleischer - Greetings From An American Balzac. lyrics

Instead of going from audition to audition in the Los Angeles weather that wore its ease like a name tag stuck to a Hawaii shirt that was handed out at a convention shirt and all and reciting a few lines from The Pillowman and hoping for the best, Darryl Whistlebinkie liked to pull up video footage of live car chases and improvise a monologue on his own, and, thankfully, there was one happening that day, a slightly overcast Wednesday in the middle of January, the audition being held in what once was an old bank that looked like a Bauhaus attempt at a castle but instead struck Darryl heading in from the parking lot as a giant air-conditioner. Hail, fellow, he muttered on his bounding way up the steps. The producers blinked and obliged and blinked some more. A television was wheeled in. Darryl felt drawn that day, a taut canvas looking for a sinkhole of paint to whirlpool him down and away, down and deep into a hive of throbbing ba** drums. The world was without a beat. He knew he wouldn't get there in improvising away, but he wanted to be an actor, and – like other actors that had come before him – he was giving himself until 30 before he pulled the cord and ejected himself in a soaring, sail away fashion towards another land of another white canvas left to gather dust in a painting studio he couldn't quite name. Curled fist to mouth. A cough. The car, a Delage Torpedo, swerved off of Sunset and pa**ed a basketball court and, Aw, yo – you see that? That ain't my taxi. That's for sure. Uber's really trying to pull some competitive sh**, man. That's some seriously preemptive Ubering going on. Some day I want my children to remember me as the back of a head in an online lecture video course at Harvar – yo, what the hell are you talking about, man? We're talking about a car chase and suddenly you're just – I mean – I just – and the ocean will roll and the ocean will hum and the palm trees will stand as lone, singular objects in the sky, as radiant gradients, even, and the car swerved through Sherman Oaks by the green strip of light that ran along the roof of Tochal Market and hung above a native Angelino trying to explain Google's Calico to his friend and how they were interested in figuring out the science of aging and prolonging life and how his friend responded in teasing turn by saying, Zahr ee maar and the friend saying, No! No! I'm not kidding around and the friend threw up his hands and said, Well – so much for my old copy of Tashrih al-badan, then. Has anyone ever told you that the palm trees here sometimes look like little hamzas? Well, ahlan wa sahlan to Los Angeles, brother. Ahlan bika. And the driver? Is he capable of doing a quick order of magnitude calculation in his head where he can game out the possibilities of what's to come? and it's seven police cars giving chase now, fourteen officers, one with their radio accidentally set to “You Are Listening To Los Angeles,” a website that sets police scanners to ambient music and he was trying to figure out how to switch it back as his partner turned a corner and a kid walking his bike toward the self-same corner made a quick ‘Yeah, nope' U-turn on foot and headed back by a local YMCA that was throwing a garage sale and had hung up shirts and dresses along the black metal fence that lined their walls with dingy little neon tags that flapped with helpless fritterings in the wind, and the car drove through an open-air cafe and overhear people working on their ideas for their scripts and reciting lines out loud, like, I am the man who makes wigs for Philip Larkin, or, Could you imagine if the Mitford sisters had heralded from Mexico instead? or the sheer, unalloyed gossip, like: you know, I met someone last week – they came up to me at a party and said, ‘I work in claymation – and p**n. I work in the claymation p**n industry. I'm the only person who works in the claymation p**n industry.' Do you think LA has a claymation p**n industry? I don't know. Dude gave me the creeps. He literally handed me a box that said, ‘Creeps,' saying, ‘I'm sorry for giving you the creeps.' Oh my god. Whoever invented the concept of ‘meta' – Greeks or not – I swear to god … The front of the foot flicking sand backwards in the middle of a morning beach jog. To dream of Americana with a vocal bounce and vocal energy not entirely dissimilar to Sleater-Kinney's “New Wave” while spending the time with a Scottish woman who was so fond of glitter she'd taken to coining fake episodes of Scottish history to coincide with her glitter-fondness and glitter-love, i.e., that the Border Reivers not only helped coin the word “blackmail,” but “glitter bomb,” too, replete with musicians from that selfsame swath of time doing their best to anachronistically buzz the air with a thumping ba**, too, glow worms harvested and handed out instead of glows sticks – because who doesn't love heading to the club to shake a bunch of worms in the air? – and so on, her eyebrows bouncing twice in a “Yeah, dude” triumph of inner-panache and inner-sauce as she related it at the end of the jog, the two of them collapsed in the sand, he a fit of giggles, an arch of arms bridging one to the other, and is it okay if I age? Dude! she replied. Dudette! he shouted in return, and he quietly started to plot out a point in the future where the slough of his future hanging hammock of a neck would sharpen back into a chiseled jaw that she could run her hand over and quietly wonder how much weight it could hold – to go from a swelling Christmas goose to a decapitated Roman statute, and wouldn't you believe it. To return to this. Time be damned. There was always a way out. She started flicking sand at him in quiet reply and there was a screech, the Torpedo taking a curve, and is any of this true? the producers asked. I mean – this is great and wonderful and all, but you know this is for a bit part, right? You play a podiatrist with a cough. Right, Darryl said. The eggshells rea**embled themselves into perfect ovoids. The dog returned to its kennel. Philip Larkin remained bald. Wallace and Gromit had less s**. Decca Mitford removed a sombrero from her head and got back to the proper business of writing about funerals. A cough.