Devotion

SHIRO KURAMATA, GLASS CHAIR, 1976

'I'm just going to the loo' says Kylie. 
     She walks wobblily into the bathroom and sits down on the toilet, balloon in one hand, canister in the other. While taking a piss, she fixes up a double balloon and sucks the whole thing into her lungs. Her mind, sight and hearing all throb as she inhales, and she forgets where she is. It is ecstasy.

     Letting the flaccid and empty balloon slip through her fingers and fall to the floor, she tilts her back against the wall and puts a cigarette between her wet lips. She clicks open the lighter and her head blows up.

     Twenty minutes pass, and Jason is prostrated on top of the black satin sheets wondering where Kylie is. Wet trusses of bleached white hair dangle before his sunny blue eyes. He rises from the bed, slips on a pair of black jeans and picks up the silver revolver before stumbling to the bathroom. 

     He finds her limp, naked and headless body slumped over the toilet, but still sitting relatively upright against the wall. Blood and grey matter squish between his toes as he edges tentatively further into the room. He affords his eyes time to ruefully peruse the scene before offering his verbal assessment of the situation. 

     'Deep,' is the lengthily uttered conclusion.

     He looks about him surreptitiously. He really needs to go himself but cannot bear the thought of touching the body. No one is about, no would know, so why not? With this in mind, he unzips and starts to piss, and a golden rainbow of urine glitters as it cascades between Kylie's legs into the bowl, shattering the silence of death in the room like a bullet through a sheet of ice. 

     A wasp watches Jason voyeuristically from his perch on the window. This precious moment is their secret. It is their single, shared, fleeting snippet of irrevocable solace before the advent of a new dawn of pain for both of them. 

    Jason looks about again. Again, no one would know. Justifying his actions as a lover's gift, he points upwards slightly so that the last drops fall onto Kylie's stomach, before shaking, swatting the wasp, calling the ambulance, putting the nozzle of the gun into his mouth and firing. 

FOSCO FAVALLI

Famous Paintings Explained

Beato Angelico - Annunciation, c.1436-45

This is the fresco that really put the 'beat' in Beato Angelico, and this aural accompaniment is strongly recommended forthwith. One of many reproductions of the annunciation that Fra Angelico completed in his lifetime, this is one of the most important to art historians today for not only does it prove that disco has been alive and well for two millennia, it also is highly controversial in that it contests the theory of immaculate conception. 

Followed by party-goers in the top left-hand corner of the painting, the angel Gabriel is depicted having just arrived to the party that the Virgin has thrown in honour of a new wardrobe that Joseph has just been commissioned to make for a wealthy local landowner. Note the disco lights on the ceiling, the portable mini Casio tape player on Mary's lap, and most importantly the dance moves - the Virgin demonstrates the classic Macarena, whilst Gabriel shakes his fingers as he gets down to the beat. 


The painting's controversial element comes in the small inscription that used to be in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting (before it was defaced by pious monks in the eighteenth century). The inscription claimed that there was in fact no immaculate conception, but conversely that at some point during the festivities frankincense was slipped into Mary's drink, leading her to think later that Jesus was the product of a virgin birth, and not the outcome of date-rape as Fra Angelico believed.

Vada Scoparti's Diary

ANSELM KIEFER - LOT'S WIFE, 1989

Sorry I haven't been in touch for a while. I've been busy with work, busy with partying and busy with getting busy. LOL. So I met a new guy. At first I was somewhat hesitant, because he is like, black, but actually he's quite a nice guy. And the rumours are true.* 

So anyway, we met at Baa Bar, and he started daggering me to that Kid Cudi tune. Turns out he's on my course, I know, right? Weird, cos there's only three black guys on the course so I'm surprised he hasn't noticed me before. Back to Baa Bar though, I think the clincher was that he had some fucking mega meow meow. 


*He's fucking hung.