Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"Beneath the snow, there was a conical piece of rip-edged flesh with a coded message (D679 BBY) branded upon it. It was never discovered, so nobody would have to face such mystery; nobody would need to explain how a dream could leave bits of itself in the real world. Whatever the case, no party admitted responsibility."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

Thanks, GSC! :-)
Today, whilst renovating a bit of the Weirdmonger Wheel, I surprisingly found another cone in my own work (a fanblade fable) that I'd forgotten about:
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/fanblade_fable_3.htm


Edited to change link.

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"I bowed down, as if I were on a stage. Only to hinge right back as Angelica Braharniss took advantage of this momentary lack of concentration on my part, with a huge upsurge of energy from the pits of her many stomachs. Cowntess Immaculate milked me so dry that I found myself back in that original cot (or imagined I did) where I once yearned so desperately for a mother’s ripened nipple. Arching my baby’s back and neck so that the lips of my toothless mouth coned up for the feed that wasn’t there. Wet-nurses were few and far between those days. And the doctor who thought he so kindly suffocated me had a monocle and black cape, except everything was in negative, and the cape was as deceptively white as an angel’s in Heaven. But he also croaked and clapped like a seaside circus act."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

She had a jar by her bed – to catch the dreams, she said.

I was a neutral scanner. I was once her sinner, but now her sin-eater. I did not know her name, although I seemed to know everything else about her. Her scanty future. Her even scantier past. Her childhood. Her shadowy parents and those other shadowy figures and less shadowy figures that populated her life. Some were friends, some enemies. Many were neither.

I never guessed that I was one of her dreams - a dream that the jar could never catch, because the emptiness it held and used as bait to catch her dreams did not entice me as much as other dreams.

The others were caught by the jar.

And their punishment? To form the emptiness again … become no more.

Dreams were nightmares. Every dream, even nice ones, became nightmares in the end. The jar caught them and neutralised them. Except me. I was already neutral – that's why the emptiness could not entice me.

The figures were white – and she knew she was right.

The shadowy figures that populated her real life I – as her scanner - left her side to follow.

I took advantage of the time she was in deep dreamless slumber to leave off guarding her and followed shadowy figures that had populated her waking hours. These were her many exes. Those who had loved and left and broken her heart. These shadowy figures were white, a fact that was disguised by the shadows that covered them like religious veils.

The shadows themselves were white. Therefore I had to recognise them as real shadows from their aura.

When I was gone – she snored along.

Despite hating them all, there was one among the shadowy figures who really tried to dig deep beneath my veneer of ordinary hate to turn it into extraordinary hate. He was a cheat. A cad. A blackguard. Worse than I'd ever been. His wispy drapes were more like embedded china clay than shattered shadow.

He hid himself beneath a white frozen mould of misshapen humanity, a pipe stuck in his mouth as a disguise, and eyes that had once been spent as shillings. I followed him in earnest. I wanted to spend my misspent youth in stealing his age or experience (once filtered of its evil) to give myself back some semblance of life or of provenance. Then I could truly love her as she deserved to be loved, once woken into the snowlit world that surrounded the house she slept within. She would then refill the jar with emptiness and sleep again, a peaceful sleep of the innocent, with me inside her bed, instead of out. That was an innocent ambition with which even one like me beset by the diversion of extraordinary hate could foster.

She stirred – what she heard?

I had lost track of my prey amid the other shadowy figures that innocently acted as subterfuge or decoy for that dire cad's own re-tracking to the room where she slept, without me knowing. The forest of night was cliffed with sheer wastes of frosty smoothness. I drifted amid the wide white beacons of shadow, seeking the one I wished to strangle with my own bare and frozen hands to rescue my heroine.

The jar was not just empty, it was no jar at all but Cone Zero.

She had awoken out of it – herself become her own special hero.

I crept away from him, not wishing to interfere with a bad love poem – especially with my extraordinary hate recognised as motiveless madness too late.

I had not even been a good scanner, judging by the forced half-rhyme with sinner. Not even an excuse for alexandrine or assonance. No-man, snowman. Even I couldn’t strangle sense from nonsense.

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"In the old days, children were delighted by the merest stockingful of fruit and coal, and Christmas plum pudding could be sown with any loose shrapnel like threepenny bits or tanners." Rachel Mildeyes (THE GOOD OLD DAYS vol viii. Cone Zero)

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

The cameras rolled, and I was lucky enough to be in the live audience. Lucky, despite the cold opening. With the prospect, however, of warming up when...

The front man strode to the front. He was the 77 year old Piero Lopez – a touch of class, free and easy, still swinging it like a 21 year old with the whole of his life in front of him.

The crowd began eagerly clapping along with the music. Each piece contained the blowing of numbered cones, the flicking of projector propellers, the opening / shutting of lens filters, the slamming of fridge doors, the ratcheting of loft ladders, the clatter of manholes, the clamping of wheels, the wild alarums of fire and the clunking of ice-cold cocktails.

The music’s own in-built clapping grew louder then muted then even louder as it merged with the audience’s own applause proper and returned to the instinctive accompaniment of any music allowed to be heard between the slapping of bottoms and the cresting of tone-deaf tops, thirds and piping trebles followed by the lowing of low brass as it burgeoned amid snort and snicker.

Like the words used in description, it was a wild, hip-sweaty scene in a cold cold climate, a whole razzamatazz surrounding the regimented audience that the crowd (mob?) often mimicked in civilised attention to a supposed entertainment. The audience and entertainment together were a single variety show: a cornucopia of escapist skill rather than a chaotic fandango of lost Hollywood dreams.

The absurd abrasions of mind-upon-matter were what all this would soon become when the audience eventually imagined they were watching something on a screen and not a wild indulgence of a live stage-show.

I climbed down from the trip-easies of word and sound. I was a member of those clapping monkeys, or audience as I began to assume it surely always was, gazing at old Piero Lopez's antics on the stage as he directed the jazz rhythms into clearer and clearer contexts of civilisation's near collapse. A catharsis of wanting a catharsis even if that very catharsis was its own destruction. Freak and easy. The words were far too easy. Meaningless and meaningful.

Mean and cruel. Without being as harsh as the winter was quickly becoming outside the concert hall … even as we were shook and shaken to the cavortings of the brass and woodwind and cool percussion. I clapped my own hands more for heat than in appreciation. I'd never liked jazz at the best of times, and this was the worst of times, believe me, despite the enjoyment.

Jazz was really part and parcel of the dire straits we all found ourselves in. During the past, when I was genuinely happy, even the best Jazz Singer had seemed to deplete such happiness; but today the music actually created happiness from a sadness that had earlier contained no happiness at all - despite the white streets outside and despite the white faces inside (whatever their original colour under the make-up).

Piero Lopez was the essence of metaphorical warmth as he was seen to change brass for silver, and vice versa, as this his flute-and-trumpet market held snorting sway amid the increasing swathes of misty breath that the concert hall was seen to contain. A trading arena where nobody now understood what was valuable and what was not. Freezer burns at every turn, as that percussive scorching of the music ballooned in frosty frenzy.

I turned to my side to see if Anabel was also smacking her palms together in desperate pleas for heat to materialise from the braying bells and horns of the instrumentalists on the stage. She was sobbing. We knew as a unit of both of us – knew better than what each of us could possibly know without the other – that this was fiddling with friction whilst Rome froze over.

Piero Lopez held up his hand. I remarked it was gloved. This seemed wrong. Only high fashion ladies in the thirties wore gloves in public. Glove-puppets. Mittens maybe. But not gloves. I stifled my own shouts of recrimination with my decorative scarf. More a Dr Who scarf than a means to keep myself warm. Though it now served both purposes. I was in the audience. I was the paying customer. I could wear what I liked. The band in overcoats however seemed to be cheating some unspoken law of entertainment. But Piero's upraised hand – gloved or not – halted the jazz to the mere grumbling stutter of a single randy sax.

"I woke up this morning at four eh em," he announced into the microphone. Even at the age of 77, he could hold an audience – even an unruly one – in the palm of his hand. And this audience was not only unruly with drink and funny fags, it was now in extremis with a cold coming of it like the three Magi at Christmas and another cold coming from their noses like a tuneless brass band of snorts and brays, including Anabel and me: both of us keeping time with countless other couples in permutations of love and lovelessness, same sex and unsame sex, till the whole world audience clapped their cupped hands to their mouths and horned a desperate call to the wild wild.

Free and easy. The music resumed with the swaying rhythms accompanying an elegant Eartha Kitt in high fashion gloves – as we all approached the thankfully hotter climes we could sense awaited us amid the ring of near death. Even Piero looked baked sooty. Only sound and colour were missing in the silence, as filming disinvented itself by piecemeal time-travel. The coated film of silent unsound dreams with Al Jolson as the chief minstrel entering Cone Zero.

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

I hope that everybody who puts on a red nose today will find that it has become their real nose when they come to take it off.

I must not have these nasty thoughts: but how can I help it when they keep slipping unbidden into my mind? Only yesterday, I sat in my garden, concentrating hard, with brows creased over my eyes, literally willing all cars with red dingdongs on their radiator grills, by some cosmic mischance, being on the same motorway system nose to tail, the clown driving at the head of the convoy suddenly braking and creating the biggest snarl-up in the world that even those who compile that Irish Stout book concerned with world records would not believe their eyes when they saw the results of the eventual concertina shunt slowly crocodiling up and down the length of Lesser Britain.

But as soon as I had the thought, I regretted it. I've a heart of gold really, if not a nose of red.

[My next campaign is ridding the world of traffic cones. Chimneys with a sense of humour will have to come later, when I'll likely strip 'em bare of aerials...]

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"Unknown to both – an electric ice-cream van had drawn up beside the kerb. Raspberry rippling ... and Magnums making melted chocolate sculptures between the two cones of the gurgling lady with the wafers."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"The clouds are churning around the cone of Mount Catanak, with clutches of overlapping lightning sparking continuously within the roiling masses."

Re: Cones in Art & Literature
 

"The blue one's getting closer! But wait is that a brown cone I see coming?"