This is the sequel to an earlier story, “Smoking, beggar orchestras and old men who feed ducks”, so if you haven’t read that, this should get you caught up!

https://philipballerscheff.wordpress.com/2016/10/26/smoking-beggar-orchestras-and-old-men-who-feed-ducks/

Hugo stood in the brightly lit exhibit, listening to the tinny narration issuing from the headset. The narrator was explaining how the seemingly random spatters of paint on the canvas before him made a bold avant-garde statement, making him feel uncultured for not sharing Marc’s enthusiasm. He thought back to when, as a child, his parents would take him to art galleries and gush about the excellent brushwork of paintings composed of one color in voices that were just waiting for an opportunity to explain why he should be gushing too. He preferred Monet to Braque, though he didn’t mind Braque much. At least he could still piece together a violin and a candlestick from the mosaic-like shards of the image, like he had his mother’s china teapot after it had broken on the way back from the store. The Avant-garde gave him no bearings, nothing he could latch on to and slowly make his way through the labyrinth with, feeling like an Ariadne-less Theseus grasping at straws in the absence of her string.

He looked up to find Marc and rejoin him. Marc was ogling Cezanne’s “Seven Bathers”, his eyes sweeping over the androgynously rendered men, their features ill-defined and dough-like. It was a print; that much was obvious even from far away, though a high-quality one that the gallery must have paid for by pushing a great many keychains and other merchandise that Hugo was hoping to inspect later for their kitsch value. Something about the crass commerciality and tastelessness of buying shoddily-made coffee cups with lame art puns gave him a sort of vengeful satisfaction by using his ignorance of art against Marc for winning the tickets in an office raffle. Hugo’s parsimony had forced him to come along and his boredom gave him cause and time for planning vengeances so petty that Marc wouldn’t notice them; He wanted to express his boredom without consequences like hurting Marc’s feelings, not only because he didn’t want to deal with that, but also because his vengeance was entirely centered around the expression of his boredom, not Schadenfreude. Plus it would help support this place, which would balance him out karmically for having taken vengeance.

Hugo walked over to Marc, which he took as his cue to explain why he should like the painting. This wasn’t necessarily untrue, but Hugo enjoyed the twinkle in his eyes when he shared his passion with others and communed with dead artists through the paintings he tried imitating in his own work more than what he said. The same hands whose imitations of Cezanne had been still lifes of shaving razors, cigarettes, and a dried-up magnolia from the welcome basket a neighbor had given them now animatedly described the bathers. Going from room to room, he pointed out things of interest, like a sculpture made of recycled plastic, or a urinal that had been taken from the gallery’s bathroom and signed “R. Mutt” with a felt-tipped pen.

They eventually stopped to sit and watch something called Chicken/Lobster in the film wing, a stop-motion short about a reanimated chicken putting itself back together. They sat and watched its disembodied head roll across the floor and against a plastic trash can from whose lip a decapitated lobster fell. The lobster’s head heard its body clatter on the floor and noticed the invader, though it couldn’t do anything about it without its claws and was cornered. The chicken’s beak had no weight behind it and was left to fall beak-first on the defenseless lobster again and again, while it whipped its antennae about, thrashing desperately. Marc turned to Hugo, who was engrossed in the blood sport before him. Given a tunic and the chance, Marc imagined Hugo would have loved watching gladiator fights in the Coliseum. The chicken picked up the lobster and set it on its side, its eyes no longer protected by the frontmost tip of the carapace, the rostrum. The chicken head descended like a guillotine onto the black eye, stabbing and popping it like a blackberry drupelet, spattering its feathers with its juices. Settling into the shell proved remarkably easy for the chicken, being different species, Marc thought. Two more rolls against the trashcan made it disgorge the chicken’s legs, which the chicken reattached at the lobster’s tail end. It waddled about like this, rigidly holding its claws like two broken arms in casts, walking stiffly as if on stilts, until the screen froze and the director’s name rolled across the screen.

Making their way to the gift shop, they discussed the film as best they could, trying to pin down their feelings in a medium neither was used to describing, though Marc could crib some words from his art theory classes. Film was just as much about images as art, you just looked at each frame faster and in bundles they made scenes. You didn’t think about each frame, but about each bundle. He imagined triptychs, paintings divided into three sections, one for each beat of the film:

Chicken rises from the trash can. Chicken kills the lobster. Chicken attaches the defeated lobster’s shell to itself.

Hugo had a similar idea, but with comic book panels, taking inspiration from the Tintin books of his youth.

Far from missing his sense of authority and confidence that came with the familiar territory of paintings, however, Marc also relished being on equal footing with Hugo for once, talking to him like they were two explorers comparing notes on an alien continent. Marc thought that two animals had both been eaten, reanimated and had then fought definitely gave it a theme of death in modern society. He asked Hugo whether he thought the chicken merging with the dead lobster was a reference to an inter-species Frankenstein, reborn as a violation of nature. Hugo nodded and expanded on the idea of rebirth, saying that the chicken had also been symbolically born again during its baptism in the lobster’s juices. They agreed the effects had been good, and continued talking until they arrived at the gift shop and Hugo excused himself to go browse.

Hugo appraised the coffee cups on a shelf like how he imagined a babushka would inspect fruit at a market, squinting and dragging his finger under each one to read their puns. He liked the white one with a picture of a smiling boxer saying “Let’s Van Gogh!” more than “Monet Cash Hoes”, but another shelf promised two cups for the price of one. Marc didn’t think less of Hugo for going over to the merchandise. It had been clear to him from Hugo’s refusal to waste his ticket and his lack of enthusiasm for the paintings that he’d born the boredom to spend time with him and not spoil his fun. Buying a coffee cup as a rebellion against his taste didn’t bother Marc either; partly because the kitsch itself was only something he ribbed Hugo for, partly because their enjoyment of the film and spending time with each other had taken all the symbolic significance out of it. Now the coffee cup wasn’t an attack on good taste and Marc, but just another knickknack Hugo liked to have.

Hugo decided on the Van Gogh cup and suggested they stretch their legs by the boardwalk. They did so, continuing their discussion from before until Hugo spotted a street-artist doing caricatures. Marc helped Hugo up onto a stool with one arm, paying with the other. Then he produced a lighter and a cigarette from his pockets, the latter of which he put into his mouth and lit as the artist began sketching. The light headwind blew the smoke backwards, obscuring his lower jaw in a cloud from which the red bobbing eye of the cigarette glowed. When the artist said it was done, they took the sketch and continued their walk, self-consciously wanting to look at it in private, as if the artist hadn’t imagined and drawn it himself. The artist had made Marc a beard out of his billowing smoke, the movement of the cigarette’s roving eye represented by a blurry arc that ended at the cigarette itself, held between his fingers in the same way he had indicated to the Algerian that he wanted two pictures. Hugo’s slight hunch had been turned into that of a beggar too shy to look at the people he was begging from, his hands clasped demurely around his cup. The two of them walked off into the fog, laughing at their exaggerated selves by the light of the lemon-shaped streetlamps.

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