A Prayer for the Significant Look of Period Drama

It is just as well we release the hounds, otherwise your majesty will not understand. I don a two pointed hat indoors, each pointing to another kind of trickery. The oath must be adhered to; a word is a kind of bondage. Someone is hiding in the horse closet. Beware, a spy like a trusted ally can shave off his chest hair. The eyes shrink in beady comprehension as the Archduke somehow morphs into a snake bearing a fruit. King James all up in this piece, you stupid fucking Europeans. The commoners wear furs and brandish pikes, trendy bangs I mean bags, the Mightye Beardes of Bosh-Wycke. Yes, my lord, I believe I can bring you what you want. Now, good, squint a little, stare mid-distance mouth at least partially gaped. Great. This reads better in cockney. Or transmitted on BBC America. This is a most holy crusade. Usually, you will find that the Pope is corrupt in some significant way, but of course— and as a pre-emptive defense against the inevitable backlash of the Catholic community— I point out that by “the Pope” I mean “the man” playing “the Pope” in this period drama. That “man” is a representative of “the Church” on TV. Somehow, this was supposed to be where I insert levity into the historical period thusly evoked, instead I give you this:

Because nothing stops ingenuity from over five hundred hours ago. This is how to sew the head of a pig onto a turkey’s body. It is good for roasting, downed with ale, and like dancing in a circle. Fife this while you are baiting heretics. And my, what bleach white teeth you have, gnave. What a sweet smell. Please sit here, your highness, sit here.

-Mark Gurarie

Gluten Free Killing Spree

 

It is detrimental to your diet.

Products for Aging Gracefully

This has happened before. This will not stop happening before. This has happened to before. This is not going to stop happening before this has happened. This is before happening again. This has happened and is happening before this is not the way this has happened before. Before it is happening this is the before of happening. The this will not happen before the this is the DNA happening before. And again this has happened before. This is the happening before the Blonde Redhead, remember this has happened before. It is this thing we’ve megapixeled this that and that this has happened and before this is unlikely to unhappen. This will not stop happening. Before this happening again this before. This used to happen before. This has happened and before. For every Blonde Redhead a DNA. For every cult an object fetish. This has already happened before this happening this happens to be happening again.

-Mark Gurarie

“Chahlie Sheen! Come Foath From the Dah-k”

We will need protection from the celluloid energies in the South, from the Archangel Boston in the East, and from the West there is a meltdown in an expensive motor vehicle awaiting all of us in the dark and with the headlights off but the wipers for some reason on, and yes, so that you be unbound forever from your own curse, we ask that you open your surgically enhanced blue eyes to a brand new day, if those are in fact blue eyes and if in fact you are Chahlie Sheen and if you could just come foath, emerge among us no longer a Tao Lin shaped darkness, this is protection, this is the combination of the will of our spirits, our outpouring this circle is open but not broken, and thank you Christian Day for your hairspray points, for Robert the Skull, the worlds of media and entertainment show gratitude in their individualized ways, incredulous though its people may be when they are thusly affronted, when the fall from grace can be understood as a kind of entrance into the dark, in this case better understood as the surreptitious substitution of Coke Zero with Diet in a “World in Which a Chah-lie Will Always be a Sheen“ © “Top Gunnin’” © for the jugular of your heart strings, his at least beats like one and a half  of your everyday nobody hearts, there are pictures to be evoked in your ceremony but they are not as clear as the pictures thereof, and Chahlie himself has seen the Sun be swallowed and on some primordial level he screams every time this happens,  unsure if the star will rise the lit star, the Tao Lin star that embodies jealousy in a tarot deck, or maybe just Bicycle, a card, then, a mad jack of diamonds in aviator sunglasses that will rant again will reign again, will challenge the spirits be they numerous or be they not.

 

-Mark Gurarie

A Small Stiff Angled Brush

What does a skull laugh at if not the psycho? If you are psycho than how American is your checking account balance? In the accounting error find instead an admixture: the sugar we can’t take with us to the underworld, I mean, the stacks that cannot bury anyone improperly. Put this picture in that kind of a box. Dig. This has been painted before and better and before there could have been any idea about better. Older than this contagion then, we are as zombies are meant to be, inscribed into the brains we seek and that do not outwardly resemble our own. We are carting with us the obvious antidote, except this is not about that kind of poison. Who are the Misfits without Glenn? one of us asks quivering gray lips. American. Psycho, the Bateman is not inside of us just yet, but somewhere in the glass vestibule that cannot be crossed by attitude alone. The calling card is not of our own devising, though it serves as a kind of reminder. Do not fear the success-ocracy that has interrupted this broadcast. The momentary lapses of attention are somehow and inexplicably synchronized. I am this close to the trench-coat schizophrenic street philosopher of our collective and projected city which is to say I am rambling and crystallized in thought. The most scenic way to travel 6 feet under, the conventional wisdom goes, is to paint your face.

-Mark Gurarie