Free Lunar Follies by Gilbert Sorrentino

“in thrall,” as a boyhood friend, on condition of anonymity, put it, “to Greta Garbo’s pants.” “Erotica” is the title of the last section of the exhibit, and a video loop, XXXyco, is erratically projected on the ceiling in a series of spasmodic flickerings based upon the orgasmic patterns of “several film stars.” The video, which leaves nothing to the imagination, displays cleverly animated representations of Marilyn Monroe, Virginia Woolf, Igor Stravinsky, and many others, in, as Barbara Kruger’s sublimely and hypnotically monotonous voice intones, “THE UNABASHED ACTION OF TRUE ART.” In the long corridor that leads to the quiet refreshment garden, a dozen lightly clad young women smear themselves with excrement gathered from homeless shelters, and a sign that runs the entire length of the corridor proclaims, in the best seriocomic Krugeresque fashion, SHIT IS NOT CHOCOLATE. The warm bludgers at the garden exit gate are complimentary, and are made, we are told, from a recipe found among the papers of Leonard Bernstein, who may make an appearance on the exhibition’s final day, according to Michael Ovitz and others.

RICCIOLI
    Buffalo gals in deerskin doublets edged with lace doubloons, old dog Tray pissing up a rope, sweet Betsy from Pike doing the dirty dongola as only she can do it, waiting to come while her love lies dreaming. “Oh, happy day,” proclaims the balloon afloat above the iconic scene. The three kings of the Orient waltzing ’round the mulberry bush, nearer, or so they seem to holler in their barbaric tongue, their God to something. The banners proclaim HOLY! HOLY! HOLY! LORD GOD ALMIGHTY!, and Maryland my Maryland, Christ knows why. The vacant chair, direct from Killarney, that wee broth of a skibberreen o’rooney darraghmaight, is here too, upon which rests an authentic McChughrghaighch who looks a good deal like Johnny Schmoker, the idiot savant inventor of the Sweet ’n’ Low brassiere (“Make His Eyes Pop the Fuck Out!”). Dixie, while pining away in the midst of a magnolia morass for the dumbo Johnny, is being ogled by old black Joe, who not only saw sweet Nellie home, but threw her one, yet it’s never enough, is it?, never, never enough for the dark secret blood bubblin’ an’ boilin’, like animals!, half-African and a yard long! Good to know that vacant Johnny will pen a note that begins “Just before the battle, Mother,” so the foxed diary here exhibited proveth, testament to the fact that he’d probably forgotten, blessedly, old Joe’s hot, bloodshot eyes glued to his snow-white Dixie’s delectable diddles, all p-proud and unashamed in their noble nakedness. A beautiful dreamer was young Mr. Schmoker, thus his ass got blowed off by a can of goober peas used in lieu of grapeshot by General La Paloma, the scourge of the upper Potomac, the lower Potawotamie, the Elysian Fields, and the Dakota Breaks. And here, by jinkies, is the “Iron Dove” hisse’f, tenting on the old campground, in a rather shockingly frank sepia study. Who woulda thunk that “the old brown church” was army slang for reckless poguing, much of it having to do with manly yet lissome young recruits from fabled Texas, land of arroyos and coños? Who? (The catalogue, usually explicit, does not hint at what “dry bones” refers to; nor does it suggest a possible reading of the barracks activity referred to as “the ould sod shuffle.”) Sweet Genevieve Muldoon, in her best whorehouse finery, is depicted pissing into a little brown jug, as a participant in a famed contest held each year in the midst of the Vienna woods, under the auspices of “whispering hope” Schutz, who is depicted, in a series of linoleum acid-stencil “renderings,” costumed as Romeo and Juliet, Reuben and Rachel, Liza Jane Patkowitz, the Fisk Singers, Frankie and Johnny California, Amos and Andy, Joe DiMaggio, and Fiorenza Ziegfeld. These were taken, from the life, as they say, during various stages of Miss