jazz man

Jeff bought a trumpet player when he was in Florida. He told me about it, and said he’d arranged to have it shipped here, but that was three weeks ago and I’d been wondering whether I’d gotten the accurate story, or whether details had fallen through the cracks like forgotten phone numbers, or the specifics of how locks are rekeyed.

He came today. In a big old taped up UPS’d box that set the dog berzerk and occupied way too much space on the kitchen floor. I knifed through box #1, then box #2, then finally breached box #3 sans knife after entreating Jeff not to lift anything but the payload out of box #1 lest styrofoam peanuts overrun the house.

He was mummified in plastic wrap and tape, so I carefully clipped him free. I was struck by three things: his lovely face and hands, that he only existed from the waist up, and that parts of what there was of him appeared to have been eaten away by alien flesh-eating nano-bots from outer space.

This was disconcerting and unexpected, but I resolved to focus on the positive space, rather than negative, and we set him on the piano as a sort of traumatized musical muse.

When Olivia got home from track practice we made her look. She gazed in momentary wonderment, then said ”This is relatively disturbing...I mean I like, it, but it reminds me of a horror movie I saw where this woman kills people and turns them into puppets. This part (she said, indicating the roughened, hollowed-out cavity where our trumpeter was missing part of an elbow) reminds me of the inside of one of the victims’ heads.”

Clearly we were in need of another opinion, so we pried Gabe out of the computer room to have a look. ”Heh...” (said Gabe.) ”It looks like something ripped the top half of his body off...cool.”

Nonetheless, he remains on the piano. His face is enchanting, his hands and arms, rippled with the veins of a lean musician, are inviting to caress. Perhaps we will adapt to the missing chunks. I think I can imagine what the artist had in mind. Sometimes a chalk portrait will fade out into jagged edges...and it works in 2D. But in 3...well...there’s a juxtaposition here between photographic realism and abstraction that is simply playing tricks with our imaginations. Still, we do not discriminate here against people who are gradually disappearing, whether it be to nano-bots or to other sorts of degeneration, do we?