A SURREPTITIOUS VALPARAISO : an abstract - 'IT WAS A PETER TOLENDINO MOMENT'

131. A SURREPTITIOUS VALPARAISO - an abstract - 'IT WAS A PETER TOLENDINO MOMENT' (I don't wish to say any more):

Said with certainty - ask anyone - things mean more than they really are : the ponderous drawbridge of circumstance and occurrence the little items with which we mark destiny and days and time - listening hard to Beethoven while deconstructing a Bagatelle Fur Elise just to see what makes it tick - different tempos within speeded up slowed down and stopped the topsy-turvy over and around of the lead melody (right hand) while all that other stuff is underneath (left hand) and then they mesh uproariously together in some glissendo of speeded-up rage or glory (don't know) and all the while the regularity of it all brings a certain welcome peace or some reticent background ease to the entire thing and from experience I know it can really be played a hundred ways but only one's right (is that correct?) and that means all the others are wrong (is THAT correct?) - oh well who knows anything for certain - incendiary meltdown here I come and just like this fellow I once knew Peter Tolendino who spent many months reading 'God Is My Co-Pilot' and 'Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo' as if gospel truth were being dispensed (what grandiosities what great pictures must have been drawn in that obsessive young mind but no more than mine and no more than thine) and in like the blink of an eye they had robed the Emperor for blast-off sent him flying through the sky for 'one God's as good as another God' it seems and if you can make the nation-state secure with the Emperor no more then by any means TURN HIM LOOSE set him free point him into the sky and fire let him fly make a God out of that guy and then write his stories in the flashback tense - 'the bombs were falling the city was scorched we were young and very frightened and we ran to him as our parents died and soon there was nothing left so little to eat and even the pigs then were running free again chasing chickens and somehow all these animals had survived when so many people had not' and even the palace of the Emperor (whom they'd just made a God) took a hit : and when the new walls do come tumbling down they'll still be handing out Spanish menus at the corner of 14th Street and 2nd Ave and the days of wine and roses will have left town and by then all the grand painters of old (color tint perspective and the rest) Giotto Tintoretto Caravaggio and DaVinci too (more to come on him later) will have created their own Giacometti and Rauschenberg and 'the other painters in the field will be left in places making postcards sketching lilies and making sure the tomb is sealed.'