“Eh, I don’t know about all that. Maybe things go haywire, maybe not. The universe is a very large place, maybe the biggest, and perhaps a butterfly flapping its wings in Havana can eventually cause a supernova in the Andromeda galaxy. Who knows? Not me.”
His most notorious painting, “Naked Business Woman Descending Upon an Escalator,” raised quite a few eyebrows, particularly because it looked like a time-lapsed film of a naked woman on an escalator, but all the frames of the film were superimposed atop one another, so you couldn’t really tell what it was. But if you looked closely (perhaps like those pictures where if you stare at it just the right way you might see something) you could see that the woman was in fact flipping off Gill Bates, the billionaire behind the Macrohard software behemoth.
His most controversial sculpture—a tipped-over, portable outhouse with “American Standard (Capsized)” spray painted in gold color on the door—garnered kudos from the underground “low-brow” art crowd, while causing the pompous New York art “establishment” to hold their noses, most likely because he had used a quite uncleaned outhouse for the show.
When not painting or sculpting, he would be found schooling someone in a round of chess and saying, “thank you very much for a pleasant game” after check mate.
Chuck the “Born Again Poet” recited his eclectic rants and guttural takes on reality, the universe, God, freedom, booze, drugs, women, cash, technology, and dog racing; many times decipherable only between his rusty and roaring fits of cigarette induced coughing and powerful and violent bouts of 99-cent-store-wine-provoked projectile vomiting.
The sultry and bosom-heavy Lustra Love-Joy caused uncontrollable “libido-sensitive epileptic seizures” in all of the male and some of the female portion of the audience upon each showing of her ever-evolving, quite suggestive and hyper-erotic performance art she entitled “the OM”(Orgasmic Movements).
This is the way it went for about a year. None of us considered for a moment the highly intelligent Moroni to be dangerous. His speeches had an entrancing manner; the impassioned yet inane dictums mesmerized the group as though a mass hypnosis were occurring. I began to take notice that all of us would inject Moroni’s pronouncements thematically into each of our respective works—as though he were the storm cloud and our artworks the raindrops manifested therefrom.
“I am the planet of ideas, and you are all my satellites.”
“The world is in a state of fever. I am the doctor and you are all my orderlies.”
“People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. I am the top dog. Fight for a few underdogs anyway.”
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page. You all are my pages.”
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing you.”
“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cannonball into the pool and cause many ripples. You all are my ripples.”
He encouraged us to go out and sell, display, perform and present our respective forms of art, “because, you see—not even thoughts, anymore, are free.” Our transient troupe trekked to various towns and cities around the region—a traveling low-brow hobo show—presenting, performing, displaying and selling to anyone who had the time and wherewithal to oblige us…. It was a pretty decent set up.
I FILLED up a number of notebooks with material during my twelve-month stint with the “troupe.” In my mind, Moroni was a man whose imagination dwarfed his rationale, but an inspirational force to “we the wretchedly refused.” He motivated us to be more than just bums, which is what we were.
The man had passion.His fervor insinuated itself in us.
We called ourselves “Free Thought and Will Champions. ” We had turned into a viable band, surviving off the hospitality and donations from philanthropic hosts
His most notorious painting, “Naked Business Woman Descending Upon an Escalator,” raised quite a few eyebrows, particularly because it looked like a time-lapsed film of a naked woman on an escalator, but all the frames of the film were superimposed atop one another, so you couldn’t really tell what it was. But if you looked closely (perhaps like those pictures where if you stare at it just the right way you might see something) you could see that the woman was in fact flipping off Gill Bates, the billionaire behind the Macrohard software behemoth.
His most controversial sculpture—a tipped-over, portable outhouse with “American Standard (Capsized)” spray painted in gold color on the door—garnered kudos from the underground “low-brow” art crowd, while causing the pompous New York art “establishment” to hold their noses, most likely because he had used a quite uncleaned outhouse for the show.
When not painting or sculpting, he would be found schooling someone in a round of chess and saying, “thank you very much for a pleasant game” after check mate.
Chuck the “Born Again Poet” recited his eclectic rants and guttural takes on reality, the universe, God, freedom, booze, drugs, women, cash, technology, and dog racing; many times decipherable only between his rusty and roaring fits of cigarette induced coughing and powerful and violent bouts of 99-cent-store-wine-provoked projectile vomiting.
The sultry and bosom-heavy Lustra Love-Joy caused uncontrollable “libido-sensitive epileptic seizures” in all of the male and some of the female portion of the audience upon each showing of her ever-evolving, quite suggestive and hyper-erotic performance art she entitled “the OM”(Orgasmic Movements).
This is the way it went for about a year. None of us considered for a moment the highly intelligent Moroni to be dangerous. His speeches had an entrancing manner; the impassioned yet inane dictums mesmerized the group as though a mass hypnosis were occurring. I began to take notice that all of us would inject Moroni’s pronouncements thematically into each of our respective works—as though he were the storm cloud and our artworks the raindrops manifested therefrom.
“I am the planet of ideas, and you are all my satellites.”
“The world is in a state of fever. I am the doctor and you are all my orderlies.”
“People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. I am the top dog. Fight for a few underdogs anyway.”
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page. You all are my pages.”
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing you.”
“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cannonball into the pool and cause many ripples. You all are my ripples.”
He encouraged us to go out and sell, display, perform and present our respective forms of art, “because, you see—not even thoughts, anymore, are free.” Our transient troupe trekked to various towns and cities around the region—a traveling low-brow hobo show—presenting, performing, displaying and selling to anyone who had the time and wherewithal to oblige us…. It was a pretty decent set up.
I FILLED up a number of notebooks with material during my twelve-month stint with the “troupe.” In my mind, Moroni was a man whose imagination dwarfed his rationale, but an inspirational force to “we the wretchedly refused.” He motivated us to be more than just bums, which is what we were.
The man had passion.His fervor insinuated itself in us.
We called ourselves “Free Thought and Will Champions. ” We had turned into a viable band, surviving off the hospitality and donations from philanthropic hosts
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