So you loved the emperor's new clothes
Madonna made corsets famous in the early 90s, didn't she?
Talking about honesty
When I was eight
Elsinore
Viking station
So you loved the emperor's new clothes
(golden color, calm color)
Yesterday I went to see a play. It was a friend’s fault: He assured me that it was an avant-garde dance piece. For a start, turns out all the audience members had to stand. What a pain! A food truck enters the hall, a woman and two guys get out (a virgin mary and two christs schlepping the cross), with repeating techno music as they guffaw, “NGOs hand out junk food,” and begin cutting off each others’ clothes with scissors. I glance at the audience, mostly hipsters, and so serious, we might have all been at mass. Everything seemed capricious, gratuitous: if, instead of cutting clothes with scissors they’d started a threesome, the hipsters would have admired it too. I was tempted to start screaming, or invoke Satan, because I was sure that the hipsters, all of them, would have thought I was part of the show but I was afraid of breaking something by doing that, a sort of one-of-a-kind sacred ceremony (or end up getting pummeled). In the second act, the two male actors come out naked, and one of them, the black one, was much more well endowed than the white one, which seemed to me to be the height of political incorrectness for a show like this. The show went on, with her painting the two men, dressed again, with a brush covered in red pain, why is she painting them, instead of throwing, and this is just a suggestion, a ham hock with sauerkraut over their heads? No fucking idea. With that dish, at least, one could have critically read it, who knows, connect it to the initial message, or as a condemnation of German centralism in the European Union. Afterwards, the three actors were laying without moving while Renaissance music played that aimed to be comic? And the audience was there, very serious, thoughtful: They're making it clear they understood the message. But, seriously, hipsters of God, critics of nursery schools, wasn't it assumed that you knew, you did, what this was about? How could it be that, you of all people, didn’t know that the fucking show wasn't over?: it had to be the cleaning lady, carrying some buckets, and wearing a gold and silk cingulum, who had to go down to clap first.
Madonna made corsets famous in the early 90s, didn't she?
The Earth withered circa 2007, a year that will go down in History because it strung together several falls back to back. Budgetary stability, they called it back then. Neoliberalism to defray at the neckline too. How to escape if everything is a prison? Through all of those falls it never rained, and the extreme temperatures struck the ventriloquists dumb: there were dozens of them: they stayed young forever. 2007 was followed by 1929, which would end, thanks to a complex combination of dice and squares, giving late rise to the black milk of dawn*, which is paradoxical if you keep in mind that the sun finally did come out, maybe a total of twice, and there was gloom around a hundred, thousand days. No more mass: that’s superstition. There were pajamas everywhere, up and down Central Park (and there are pictorial records of it). Were some of the pictures agreed on? Maybe. The now heavy snowfalls even froze, then and as a family, the smiles of the ventriloquists: they didn't grow anymore but their bodies did (do you recall Barthelme's The Dead Father?), probably giving rise to an extremely strange image as a whole. These ventriloquists, their minimal smiles, decided to work in extremely meticulous trades, to the light of torches, like attempting to decipher nefarious previous games of magic, or hunt; to record too all of the suicides (they happened in mass from the very beginning) with all the gritty details or to try to parametrize those figures based on e.g. logarithms, or to the Riemann hypothesis on prime numbers: all after finishing an infinite casino.
is a bit tricky, when you’re dealing with fiction. Another issue: I don't know why as the ideas get more powerful, novels tend to get worse, or at least get less interesting (to me at least). Back to the topic on hand, any writing is narrative and any narrative is fictional. Even the so-called autobiography. Regardless of how true the facts you have are, just by choosing them you're taking sides, aren't you? Your point of view will never be objective but then again, who wants to live forever? Who wants objectivity when they're reading a novel?
I asked myself what I'd feel if I hadn't been me (the one “on the inside”) and my internal me had gone to another person. I asked myself what had made me land in this body (and not another one). I also asked myself if the things in my house would still be there, when we all left. What meaning do things that no one sees have? I remember a day, in one of those big department stores: they were going to buy me a suit for my first communion and I couldn’t stop thinking about that, buying clothes was absurd since we were all going to die in the end. I felt it was The Biggest Foolishness. I mean: Even from a young age, it turns out there’s no one there (steering). A hundred percent. Or much, much more even.
This morning I had to go to the World Mobile Congress for work. All of my customers canceled with no prior notice so I decided, because it was that day of the year, to go to the cemetery. While I was waiting at the bus stop, a guy with a speaker was talking to himself, trying to thumb a ride (in the middle of Barcelona!). A few minutes after arriving at the cemetery everyone left. It was a small cemetery and the flowers not faded they're all made of plastic. I repeat: there was no one else there. I started to read Hamlet in my family's mausoleum. A cellphone close by, very close by, started ringing. It wasn't mine. It was on the ground, not far away. I thought about answering it but I didn’t. It was still ringing. I picked it up and threw it into the dead flowers trash can. It kept ringing. When it stopped ringing, I decided to go home but when I got to the gate, it was closed (and the telephone was ringing again). I don't think I’ve ever felt more sad, more ridiculous, or more alone in my entire life. I kicked the gate open: I got out of there like a man abandoning the scene of the crime. When I got off at my stop, I ran into the hitchhiker again, throwing away the speaker, seemingly with a transit pass in hand. Fucking crazy life.
(covered by full insurance):
tequila is good company too, catalyzing the bet, at the same time as the verb. In this, our next excess, the snow (fantasy) we’ll have to create, eventually, delayed, radical, skies of melted iron: the hawker of shocks, for a few pesos, distributes electricity.
TS Hidalgo (45) holds a BBA (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), a MBA (IE Business School), a MA in Creative Writing (Hotel Kafka) and a Certificate in Management and the Arts (New York University). His works have been published in magazines in the USA, Canada, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Germany, UK, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, South Africa, Nigeria, Botswana, India and Australia, and he has been the winner of prizes like the Criaturas feroces (Editorial Destino) in short story and a finalist at Festival Eñe in the novel category. He is currently in finance and stock-market.
