PRELUDE
OPERA 1 - DESCENT OF THE AVATAR
ROCKET SCIENCE (panoply of regenbogen light and angelic harping)
You know who I am but you can't bear to hear it. I know the stress fracture structure of the World Trade Centre like the back of my hand. I know the timetable of the planes from Palo Alto. I am the ghost in the machine. I am the bread and the butter also. I am the toothbrush moustache that lapped up just so much of Judy Garland's love juice. I am an Empresses dildo. (I am the Queen Dido.) I am the decimated atoms that Democritus saw. I am Anaxamander. I am Heraclitus. I am Parmenides. I am a whole army of pre-Socratics and we are coming to your McDonalds to wear Ronald McDonald suits, to dance for you. I am the light of 10,000 suns. I am become death destroyer of worlds. I am 50 million, skulls, skeletons, various rhizomes. I am the Hair Bears. I am the Banana Splits. I am the funky chicken. I am real ash on the carpet. I bore the banner before Alexander. I was there when Soddom and Gommorah fell. I sat before the Throne of the Great Distributor. I am Jesus. I am Krishna. I am Lazarus, come back to tell you all... I am the Word. I am alive in death alive in dreams dreaming of death.
Opera prelude - The Vampyr Schaden
Chorus: Emmendingen's a nuthouse, Freiburg's a gaol, Germany is the corridor leading into it and the whole world is its portal.
and the chief nut in the nut hatch is Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, a coalminer's son from the Ruhrgebiet masquerading as a genius. Crappenscheiss is the name of his first book, an imitation of Italianate models brought by lackeys on the journey to Italy he never made. Fuckwit is the name of his wife, a blousy bitch with huge tits and an insatiable appetite for bonking. The Head of the Nuthatch is Professor Dogsdirt from the University of Feltch, an expert on head bumps and a dead cert to become Vice Chancellor of the University after he knocks off the rules one by one in his sinister laboratory, full of foaming chemicals, human engineering and jars stuffed with embryos, brains, organs of various refugees who have regularly poured through his fiefdom in the hope of asylum but not organ donation. When one day a travelling minstrel passes by and sets off an atom bomb thus immolating everyone and everything in the vicinity. Word eventually reaches Dogsdirt as he passes out somewhere near the eventual urn in which his putrid maw will sit for eternity (the next 5 minutes). Never setting out the working principles of freedom, since each word he received became a massive turd heaved in every direction (but actually caught and heaved back with aplomb), boom, boom...
SCENE 1: AT THE OPERA HOUSE
'I want to speak to you.'
'What is it?'
'I want you to construct a wave machine - there (points) cut to the usual dimensions but with a golden Cupidon perched at the centre. Two days (laughs)....
There wasn't very much I could do that evening but in the morning I returned and set about my work, 7 tiers of waves with rotating handles.
'What is it?', I said
I was cutting a length of wood. In the background footsteps and then silence.
(A feeling of tension and fear.)
Sometime later I woke with a sudden, incredible banging but it was only the door and the opera manager. He picked me up and started to slap me gently in the face.
‘I was attacked.’
‘By whom? Are you sure, you have no injuries?’
Later that evening my attacker made himself known to me as Wolfgang Schaden. He had cut deeply into my arteries, draining my blood . I sat draining cup after cup of wine, nibbling on a little bread. Time and time again I vomited, my stomach aching, throat lacerated and stinging. Sitting in front of me wearing a tiara he found in the costume cupboard. Occasionally giggling, his conversation was peppered with bad jokes he said he picked up from a Russian merchant he ate the week before.
‘Did I tell you the one about the Georgian whore?’
‘I don’t think so, tell me it?’
‘What do you find on top of a naked woman?’
‘A naked man?’
What do you find on top of a naked Georgian whore?’
The cup fell from my hand, Schaden was at my throat again. Fingers fluttered gently around my neck, he held my collar.
‘I wanted to be a librettist, you see, but no one would employ me.’
‘Really?’
‘So I became a carpenter.’
I am a regiment composed entirely of skulls, skeletons. I have 7000 limbs, each of them is squeezing the universe 'til it pops. I consist of evacuations, eviscerations, various rhizomes, roots, bindings. I have no centre. I know that I hear the awakening of difference.
I am the wanderer. I like a great deal that is out-of-date and unfashionable.
SONG (according to the book of Genesis)
For Johnny Algebra, Roy the Log, Max the Planck, Albert who got lost in Bern, and all the rest of the escapees…
MR ONESTONE GOES TO BERN
Albert: “I am only a Patent Clerk, my love, but when I look in your eyes…”
“You’re the deputy controller of instrumentation..”
“Exactly.”
The chorus strikes up
He’s only a Patent Clerk
Only a Patent Clerk
Patent Clerk
Patent Clerk
But when he looks in her eyes
Her eyes
Her eyes
He’s the deputy controller of instrumentation…
Tation
Tation
ion
AT THE MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE
“Albert why do you do a job as a Patent Clerk, when you could be…”
“Professor at the Max Planck Institute?”
“I suppose…”
“I’d have to join the Nazi Party, in any case, I’m a Jew, but I really think that that wouldn’t matter...”
“If you could build a nuclear bomb?”
“Of course, Anti-Semitism is only for those who are unlucky enough to be poor and not…”
“Physicists?”
Song
He’s poor and he can’t think of a weapon of mass destruction as fast as the Fuhrer can say Apfelstrudel.
We all know that the middle word
in life is ‘polyphiloprogenitive’
My love, for you
I crossed the Universe
the sun also rises
I saw Berlin backwards
Through the optic nerve
It jars you know
That I am here, so far from you
That Berlin is falling not rising
For your love
Your love
Lo
L
REHAB WOMAN - AN OPERA IN FIVE ACTS
OPERA PRELUDE
rehab women lurking in every corner of your mind
rehab woman, in your dreams
rehab woman lying in a pool of vomit
rehab woman eating another rehab woman
rehab woman enjoying quiche
rehab woman
rehab wom
rehab wo
rehab w
ACT 1
In the rehab clinic, Simon, a naive yet enthusiastic volunteer, depicts his seminal belief in altruism to a group of likewise philanphropists.
Aria 1
Simon tells of his readings in Benjamin, Adorno, Bloch, Brecht and other important members of the Frankfurt School of philosophy.
Simon:
I tell you the day I read Walter Benjamin
examining the state of the narrow wheel gauge at Portbou
the change from Europe to somewhere
neither European nor African
heat and light, the Spanish graiffiti
all the tourists, visitors, mere spectators,
of this dream, made me dwell on a variety
of wheel gauges scattered in desolate train stations
from Murmansk in the north to Algeciras in the south.
I recall the trip to Barcelona he never made
and examine the state of my soul.
have you ever read
the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production?
a very important seminal text and worth
considering on a seminal trip to a seminal place.
Go to Parc Guell, smoke a joint, play chess and do Tai Chi
With a variety of American tourists.
in the gardens overlooking la Sagrada Familia
where we sat all night watching the flaming fire flies
tongues of Spanish gargoyles lacerating spittle
down upon the heads of American tourists.
RIDDLE
One things for sure the price of a packet of sugar snaps never changes, no ambiguity, no confusion.
TMA1
So, these are the processes of deduction I have shown you. Call me Sherlock Holmes, Dupin, Marlowe, private eye, detective, logician, super-philosopher, deducer of old secrets, searcher in tombs, liberator of old mummy caskets, enbalmer of Aztec God Kings. I know the ENIGMA code, I am the Enigma code (O no not that riddle again), I've read - yes I can read - I hold in the palm of my hand the encoded atoms - the remnants of Troy, the Palace of Agammemnon, the golden grave mask of Achilles.
HAL 9000 COMPUTER
eins in a wearywide field there was einen mooksie. Diese mooksie war gross und strong, Jebelzbell artichokes darkened heart unfolding leaves. Ate. Sat. Nr bellplant mit heartrent crying petals und semtex stems. Roar, Rain.
EYE OF JAPETUS
Nice views of Narcissus flowers. Condemned to a pre-Christian Hell. In the morning Narcissus, in the afternoon Sisyphus, in the evening Tantalus.
STAR-CHILD
Lord of the Rings - porn version -
walk into the bedroom, open a wardrobe. A rubber blow-up, inflatable - the one with the leatherette bootkins - Nazgul falls out, fills the room. Orgies of Goblins and Orcs. A 12 man circle jerk at Lothlorien. O Galadriel, I always knew you'd be the best...
Lord of the Unlit Toilet!
Woolfie, Woolfie (who is this Woofie)
(book bit)
He had returned in time to the space that man call real. Down below on the glittering globe the great tracking telescopes
in a sudden efflorescence of death
to his will and in moments
History as men knew it would be drawing to an end.
'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape.' - Stephen Daedelus ('Ulysses')
'History repeats itself once as tragedy twice as farce.' - Karl Marx
'History is Bunk.' - Henry Ford
Psychobilly death star, raunchy non-leather trunks, Lenin boots.
all the products of our Grossenwahn - money. The next Grossenwahn - upsidedown terpsichorean rotating mechanical alligator - I seek money now for this project.
Troy but a heap of frozen poultry. Anaxiforminges!
Cyclopian drinks waiter the interminable cackling of Harpies
shield ring hoofy iron ring, occluded Ionian night
can't you hear their hoof beats, at my window
The daughters of Odin will ride this day, bloody their lances, tonight we will eat and sup in Valhalla. (in a Brooklyn accent)
Karl is feeding the sheep, Martha is forking the mist, Schweinimaus is bounding towards me over the turf...
Those surrealism tablets have changed me into a cold unfeeling reptile and, quite frankly, I'm sick of it.
THE MARRIAGE OF merkin muffley TO FRAU SCHWEINIMAUS
It's a dog-shaped world, a dog-shaped world including N.Ireland and Bavaria.
These are the lips that will kiss you, this is the puff adder snake that will sting you.
How you remind me of Picasso's portrait of Dora Mar. From beast to woman, from woman to beast.
ROCKET SCIENCE (panoply of regenbogen light and angelic harping)
You know who I am but you can't bear to hear it. I know the stress fracture structure of the World Trade Centre like the back of my hand. I know the timetable of the planes from Palo Alto. I am the ghost in the machine. I am the bread and the butter also. I am the toothbrush moustache that lapped up just so much of Judy Garland's love juice. I am an Empresses dildo. (I am the Queen Dido.) I am the decimated atoms that Democritus saw. I am Anaxamander. I am Heraclitus. I am Parmenides. I am a whole army of pre-Socratics and we are coming to your McDonalds to wear Ronald McDonald suits, to dance for you. I am the light of 10,000 suns. I am become death destroyer of worlds. I am 50 million, skulls, skeletons, various rhizomes. I am the Hair Bears. I am the Banana Splits. I am the funky chicken. I am real ash on the carpet. I bore the banner before Alexander. I was there when Soddom and Gommorah fell. I sat before the Throne of the Great Distributor. I am Jesus. I am Krishna. I am Lazarus, come back to tell you all... I am the Word. I am alive in death alive in dreams dreaming of death.
Opera prelude - The Vampyr Schaden
Chorus: Emmendingen's a nuthouse, Freiburg's a gaol, Germany is the corridor leading into it and the whole world is its portal.
and the chief nut in the nut hatch is Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, a coalminer's son from the Ruhrgebiet masquerading as a genius. Crappenscheiss is the name of his first book, an imitation of Italianate models brought by lackeys on the journey to Italy he never made. Fuckwit is the name of his wife, a blousy bitch with huge tits and an insatiable appetite for bonking. The Head of the Nuthatch is Professor Dogsdirt from the University of Feltch, an expert on head bumps and a dead cert to become Vice Chancellor of the University after he knocks off the rules one by one in his sinister laboratory, full of foaming chemicals, human engineering and jars stuffed with embryos, brains, organs of various refugees who have regularly poured through his fiefdom in the hope of asylum but not organ donation. When one day a travelling minstrel passes by and sets off an atom bomb thus immolating everyone and everything in the vicinity. Word eventually reaches Dogsdirt as he passes out somewhere near the eventual urn in which his putrid maw will sit for eternity (the next 5 minutes). Never setting out the working principles of freedom, since each word he received became a massive turd heaved in every direction (but actually caught and heaved back with aplomb), boom, boom...
SCENE 1: AT THE OPERA HOUSE
'I want to speak to you.'
'What is it?'
'I want you to construct a wave machine - there (points) cut to the usual dimensions but with a golden Cupidon perched at the centre. Two days (laughs)....
There wasn't very much I could do that evening but in the morning I returned and set about my work, 7 tiers of waves with rotating handles.
'What is it?', I said
I was cutting a length of wood. In the background footsteps and then silence.
(A feeling of tension and fear.)
Sometime later I woke with a sudden, incredible banging but it was only the door and the opera manager. He picked me up and started to slap me gently in the face.
‘I was attacked.’
‘By whom? Are you sure, you have no injuries?’
Later that evening my attacker made himself known to me as Wolfgang Schaden. He had cut deeply into my arteries, draining my blood . I sat draining cup after cup of wine, nibbling on a little bread. Time and time again I vomited, my stomach aching, throat lacerated and stinging. Sitting in front of me wearing a tiara he found in the costume cupboard. Occasionally giggling, his conversation was peppered with bad jokes he said he picked up from a Russian merchant he ate the week before.
‘Did I tell you the one about the Georgian whore?’
‘I don’t think so, tell me it?’
‘What do you find on top of a naked woman?’
‘A naked man?’
What do you find on top of a naked Georgian whore?’
The cup fell from my hand, Schaden was at my throat again. Fingers fluttered gently around my neck, he held my collar.
‘I wanted to be a librettist, you see, but no one would employ me.’
‘Really?’
‘So I became a carpenter.’
I am a regiment composed entirely of skulls, skeletons. I have 7000 limbs, each of them is squeezing the universe 'til it pops. I consist of evacuations, eviscerations, various rhizomes, roots, bindings. I have no centre. I know that I hear the awakening of difference.
I am the wanderer. I like a great deal that is out-of-date and unfashionable.
SONG (according to the book of Genesis)
For Johnny Algebra, Roy the Log, Max the Planck, Albert who got lost in Bern, and all the rest of the escapees…
MR ONESTONE GOES TO BERN
Albert: “I am only a Patent Clerk, my love, but when I look in your eyes…”
“You’re the deputy controller of instrumentation..”
“Exactly.”
The chorus strikes up
He’s only a Patent Clerk
Only a Patent Clerk
Patent Clerk
Patent Clerk
But when he looks in her eyes
Her eyes
Her eyes
He’s the deputy controller of instrumentation…
Tation
Tation
ion
AT THE MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE
“Albert why do you do a job as a Patent Clerk, when you could be…”
“Professor at the Max Planck Institute?”
“I suppose…”
“I’d have to join the Nazi Party, in any case, I’m a Jew, but I really think that that wouldn’t matter...”
“If you could build a nuclear bomb?”
“Of course, Anti-Semitism is only for those who are unlucky enough to be poor and not…”
“Physicists?”
Song
He’s poor and he can’t think of a weapon of mass destruction as fast as the Fuhrer can say Apfelstrudel.
We all know that the middle word
in life is ‘polyphiloprogenitive’
My love, for you
I crossed the Universe
the sun also rises
I saw Berlin backwards
Through the optic nerve
It jars you know
That I am here, so far from you
That Berlin is falling not rising
For your love
Your love
Lo
L
REHAB WOMAN - AN OPERA IN FIVE ACTS
OPERA PRELUDE
rehab women lurking in every corner of your mind
rehab woman, in your dreams
rehab woman lying in a pool of vomit
rehab woman eating another rehab woman
rehab woman enjoying quiche
rehab woman
rehab wom
rehab wo
rehab w
ACT 1
In the rehab clinic, Simon, a naive yet enthusiastic volunteer, depicts his seminal belief in altruism to a group of likewise philanphropists.
Aria 1
Simon tells of his readings in Benjamin, Adorno, Bloch, Brecht and other important members of the Frankfurt School of philosophy.
Simon:
I tell you the day I read Walter Benjamin
examining the state of the narrow wheel gauge at Portbou
the change from Europe to somewhere
neither European nor African
heat and light, the Spanish graiffiti
all the tourists, visitors, mere spectators,
of this dream, made me dwell on a variety
of wheel gauges scattered in desolate train stations
from Murmansk in the north to Algeciras in the south.
I recall the trip to Barcelona he never made
and examine the state of my soul.
have you ever read
the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production?
a very important seminal text and worth
considering on a seminal trip to a seminal place.
Go to Parc Guell, smoke a joint, play chess and do Tai Chi
With a variety of American tourists.
in the gardens overlooking la Sagrada Familia
where we sat all night watching the flaming fire flies
tongues of Spanish gargoyles lacerating spittle
down upon the heads of American tourists.
RIDDLE
One things for sure the price of a packet of sugar snaps never changes, no ambiguity, no confusion.
TMA1
So, these are the processes of deduction I have shown you. Call me Sherlock Holmes, Dupin, Marlowe, private eye, detective, logician, super-philosopher, deducer of old secrets, searcher in tombs, liberator of old mummy caskets, enbalmer of Aztec God Kings. I know the ENIGMA code, I am the Enigma code (O no not that riddle again), I've read - yes I can read - I hold in the palm of my hand the encoded atoms - the remnants of Troy, the Palace of Agammemnon, the golden grave mask of Achilles.
HAL 9000 COMPUTER
eins in a wearywide field there was einen mooksie. Diese mooksie war gross und strong, Jebelzbell artichokes darkened heart unfolding leaves. Ate. Sat. Nr bellplant mit heartrent crying petals und semtex stems. Roar, Rain.
EYE OF JAPETUS
Nice views of Narcissus flowers. Condemned to a pre-Christian Hell. In the morning Narcissus, in the afternoon Sisyphus, in the evening Tantalus.
STAR-CHILD
Lord of the Rings - porn version -
walk into the bedroom, open a wardrobe. A rubber blow-up, inflatable - the one with the leatherette bootkins - Nazgul falls out, fills the room. Orgies of Goblins and Orcs. A 12 man circle jerk at Lothlorien. O Galadriel, I always knew you'd be the best...
Lord of the Unlit Toilet!
Woolfie, Woolfie (who is this Woofie)
(book bit)
He had returned in time to the space that man call real. Down below on the glittering globe the great tracking telescopes
in a sudden efflorescence of death
to his will and in moments
History as men knew it would be drawing to an end.
'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape.' - Stephen Daedelus ('Ulysses')
'History repeats itself once as tragedy twice as farce.' - Karl Marx
'History is Bunk.' - Henry Ford
Psychobilly death star, raunchy non-leather trunks, Lenin boots.
all the products of our Grossenwahn - money. The next Grossenwahn - upsidedown terpsichorean rotating mechanical alligator - I seek money now for this project.
Troy but a heap of frozen poultry. Anaxiforminges!
Cyclopian drinks waiter the interminable cackling of Harpies
shield ring hoofy iron ring, occluded Ionian night
can't you hear their hoof beats, at my window
The daughters of Odin will ride this day, bloody their lances, tonight we will eat and sup in Valhalla. (in a Brooklyn accent)
Karl is feeding the sheep, Martha is forking the mist, Schweinimaus is bounding towards me over the turf...
Those surrealism tablets have changed me into a cold unfeeling reptile and, quite frankly, I'm sick of it.
THE MARRIAGE OF merkin muffley TO FRAU SCHWEINIMAUS
It's a dog-shaped world, a dog-shaped world including N.Ireland and Bavaria.
These are the lips that will kiss you, this is the puff adder snake that will sting you.
How you remind me of Picasso's portrait of Dora Mar. From beast to woman, from woman to beast.
posted by Paul Murphy at
October 11, 2007
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