The Purple Decades Read Online Free PDF Page B

juice, then chopped meat, chopped liver or something, raw liver, red and runny, all hitting the old bud face there or going straight down the gullet. Only they keep smiling. Then the whole thing goes in
reverse and all the stuff comes back up out of their mouths, like they’re vomiting, only they’re smiling out of these pretty faces the whole time.
    On the center screen, all this time, in black and white—nobody can tell what the hell is going on at first. There are these sort of, well, abstract shapes, some fissures, folds, creases, apertures, some kind of rim, and some liquid that comes from somewhere. But it doesn’t add up to anything. Of course, it could be some of the abstract forms that Stan Brakhage uses in his films, or—but then, after about fifteen minutes, while Black-haired Beauty on the left waffles in the shower and the Open-jawed Beauties on the right grin into eternal ingestion, it adds up—the girl who was sitting on the rim gets up, and then some large testicles lower into view, and then the organism begins to defecate. The film has somehow been made by slicing off the bottom of a toilet bowl and putting a glass shield in place and photographing straight up from inside the bowl. Black-haired Beauty pivots in the shower, luxuriating in oil, Strawberry Beauty smiles and luxuriates in chopped liver.
    And here, descending head-on into the faces of the 200 celebrities, artists, columnists, editors … is an enormous human turd.
    Marvelous! The lights go on. All these illuminati are sitting here in their tuxedos and mini-evening dresses at the Top o’ the Fair above grand old Nighttime City Lights New York City, above the frozen city-dump silhouette of the New York World’s Fair, like an assembly of poleaxed lambs.
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    Walter De Maria! Walter De Maria is on the drums, high up on the Tropicana bandstand, snares, brushes, blond wood, those sturdy five-story loft walkup arms going like hell—Walter De Maria is on the rise. Bob Scull patronized him, helped him out, and De Maria is now among the rising young sculptors. Blam! He beats the hell out of the drums. On the dance floor they’ve seized all the equipment at the Top o’ the Fair, the artists. The band looks on from the side. Walter De Maria has the drums, Claes Oldenburg has a tambourine, his wife Pat, in the silver dress, has a microphone, and Rauschenberg has a microphone. Rauschenberg’s friend Steve Paxton, the dancer, is dancing, waffling, by himself. Rauschenberg and Pat Oldenburg are both ululating into the microphones, wild loon wails— Sloopy! —filling up this whole mushroom-head glass building overlooking frozen Queens. Where are the poleaxed lambs? They have been drifting off. The Campus Coach Line buses have been leaving every half hour, like a bus route. The pop artists, the op artists, the primary artists, have the place: De Maria, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Segal, Poons, Oldenburg,
they have the Top o’ the Fair. Larry Poons pulls off his shark terry cloth Hawaiian shirt and strips down to his Ford Motor Company Cobra T-shirt, with the word COBRA stacked up the front about eight times. Poons waffles about on the edge of the dance floor, with his head down but grinning.
    Bob Scull beams. Spike is delighted. Her voice penetrates—yes!
    â€œLook at Poonsy! When I see that boy smile, I really enjoy it, I’m telling you!”
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    Bob Scull sits at a table on the edge of the dance floor, beaming. Rauschenberg and Pat Oldenburg go into ululation, mimicking rock ‘n’ roll singers, and then somebody there says, “Sing the dirty song!” Just as if she knows what he means, Pat Oldenburg starts singing the Dirty Song. She has the microphone in that Show Biz grip and her legs roil around in her silver mini-gown and she sings.
    â€œYou got a dirty ceiling, you got a dirty floor, you got a dirty window, you got a dirty door, oh dirty dirty, dirty dirty dirty, oh