Art Cont.

Soybean Island City: Public Art: Sculpture: Art?

Yes, I continue my expose on the artworks that sit like frozen lumps of calcite upon the urban landscape of this un-urban island. The works are scattered about, mostly correlating with downtown areas in SIC and Cornana. I have seen no artworks in Ste. Abattoir des Chevres Pres de le Mer. Yes, there are artworks in the open at the University of Soybean Island, but not so much in Snailtown; I do recall seeing some open-air art in Academic Economic Zone #2, however. Of course the homesteads have no use for art, only farm implements.

Anyway, nonetheless, whathaveyou and whocares, this is stuff from downtown SIC (sic):

Here we have what amounts to a statue of a giant tick.

Ticks are fearsome and feared creatures on this island, except when they are a food source for the many starving children. Hence, this statue gives off, paradoxically, a feeling of revulsion and salivation. Abhorrence and hunger. And, tri-doxically, one of great fear. And, quad-doxically, respect.

A snail would have been a safer subject, so I give the artist credit to go for this rusting hulking image of a tick.


Now, here we have what looks to be a soccer ball:

But, is it?

No, it is not:

Because if you look closely into the soft tootsie-pop center of this work, you will see that it is a bomb!

I have no idea how the artist--if he/she is still alive or not in a torture chamber--got this past the censors of The Apparatus. But this is indeed a (soccer ball) bomb just beginning its explosion . . . At least I think so . . . And if I think so, well . . . Draw your own confusion (as if "you" even existed) . . .

But this is what the bomb would do if it really was a bomb and not a hollow piece of artwork depicting a bomb disguised as a soccer ball:

Maybe.


Onward:

The above is a rather snaily piece. Quite safe and popular in its snailyness.

Nice.

And here we have some ersatz blue accordion. A metallic squeezebox. Or, one could potentially see, a caterpillar of enormous size and durability. Or, one could if one wished to see, a stairway leading down to the depths of hell which would be Soybean Island. Yes. Yes. That is what I see . . .

This next work is difficult to discern:

It just is.

I think we can leave it at that.

More:

The above is entitled: Wishing You Well


The below is entitled: X Marks The Spot With A Line In It

And this one: Extra Concrete That We Didn't Know What Else To Do With

And here we have one of my favorites:

Yellow Pointless Box


And of course an old standard from the island:

Visit Soybean Island

Plastic Flag on Wire Stick with Accompanying Red Line


Wonderful.


And that's it. I think I will try and get to Cornana next for my continuous exploration of open-air artwork on the island. I do not think there is anything in Stalag Ranville--though one would think the many prisoners and the poor souls who tend to the prisoners would need--much need-to create works of art. But I do not think I dare take another trip to that forbidden town. No. No. Maybe.


Until next time if there is a next time:

Goodbye from Soybean Island

Goat Skeleton Park

My plans were to visit some outdoor artwork in Soybean Island City, but as I neared my chosen destination I spied a sign that led me to another new-to-me park.

Yes.

Goat Skeleton Park:

My, my . . .

It is a small park half-hidden in the half-hidden underbelly of downtown. My understanding is that it is named after the many long-ago deceased goats that used to inhabit this island. Goats that the ancient Eye-Nye-Hab race used to tend and survive off of, who put them to use for milk and cheese and undergarments and, eventually, meat on the spit.

That is until the current race of corporatists came and systematically slaughtered all the goats, making room for the many many soybean, corn and rutabaga fields.

What can one say about Goat Skeleton Park?

Well, it has the proper display of drainage:

(Look at those pipes! What rapture!)

(Here, a diving board! Jump into the drainage, dear fellow. Enjoy! . . . Or, possibly, this is where they made the goats walk the plank to their carnivorous deaths.)

(Ah. Truncated nature doing its best to reclaim what Islanders have wrought.)

The park also has flowers:

And fences:

And shrubs surrounded by chopped and mutilated shrubs:

True.

What I think is not true--or at least, perhaps, curious--is that there are no goat skeletons. And why is that? Because, I believe, this is not where the goats were murdered. Excuse me, eradicated. I mean, harvested for their own good . . .

Yes, because everyone knows--well, what you can know in this mind-controlled, thought-regulated, informationless cesspool of a place--is that the goats were rounded up and herded and trucked and railroaded down to what is now known as the town of Ste Abattoir des Chevres Pres de la Mer.

That is where the goats were killed and where the many tract houses and strip malls and straight-curbed roads were constructed atop the littered bones and blood of the once native goats.

(And, quite likely, upon the bones and blood of the slaughtered Ancient Eye-Nye-Habs!)

So I think Goat Skeleton Park, in all its shabby and trivial banal beauty, is really but a distraction. A false flag. An erasure of what even a portion of the witless locals know to be really true. It should be named Diversion Park, perhaps.

Oh well. Someday I will be gone from this wretched isle--whether on my own secret volition and locomotion, or by the will of the powers that control me, or in a pine box or urn. That remains to be seen. But I will be gone and then such issues as wrong names and false history or lack of history will no longer compel me to write stuff like I am writing right now. This very sentence . . . Perhaps, in the end, sanity will prevail. At least, one hopes, where my individual brain is concerned . . .

Look!

A roundish object:

And a tunnel:

 (Of sorts.)


And what a view of downtown Soybean Island City:

And such a vista wouldn't be complete without a spy tower:

Yes, The Apparatus is alive and well . . .


This is all I have to report. Oneninefiveseven, over and done with:


Goodbye from Soybean Island

Weeds Are Not Pretty

I have frightened myself once again, this time simply by going to Lake Bellobrutto.

The lake itself does not scare me. It is not even really a lake. No, what frightens me is the fact that I went there yet again and have come to admire certain aspects of it. That is, my fear emanates from acceptance. Acceptance of Lake Bellobrutto. Acceptance of my fate.

Have I become inured to this despicable isle of the damned? Have I become complacent in my heart? My soul? My mind? My pancreas?

Can I write something that does not end in a question mark?

Yes. I can and I contemplated and I felt as though I have become one of the locals in the sense that I came and I contemplated and did not find myself in contempt.

After all, this non-lake was as ugly as ever. In fact, they--They being the powers that control all aspects of life upon this non-nation in the sea--have managed to make it even uglier.

With the magic of asphalt and concrete and pressed-gravel and the buzz-saw of the chainsaw, they--excuse me, They--have reduced the place to but an oval track with a body of muddy algae-infested water inside of it.

How attractive!

And yet, I hardly noticed.

I have become so accepting of this place, this fake lake park, that it scarcely registered. Instead I found myself admiring--yes, I said ADMIRING!--the flowering weeds.

Wow!

Why these are weeds and not flowers, I do not know. It is more than just a matter of semantics, I imagine. No doubt it has something to do with agriculture and dominion of the land and a sense of what is what and who says what is what. It is why we are humans and not rodents yet we breath the same air and eat the same comestibles and pee in the same cup.

Yet, at that moment, I was not thinking "weeds" or really even "flowers". I was blissfully mindless other than my visual appreciation.

But then came along a woman and a child. The child, a little girl, stopped somewhat near to me--no doubt to the consternation of the mother. (I assumed it was her mother, though I could also assume that she was quite lost, bringing her child to Lake Bellobrutto in the brutish daylight and near a prisoner-person like me--normally, almost all the denizens avoid me, as I avoid them.)

"Look," the girl said, eyeing the same wild grouping of blossoms I had just viewed. "How pretty!"

"Weeds are not pretty," the mother said and grasped the child's frail hand and led her down the newly-minted asphalt path where they could properly admire fencing and posts and drains.

That is when I became conscious that what I was looking at were weeds. When I became self-conscious of my consciousness, or lack of conscious, that here I was at Lake Bellobrutto once again, acting like any other zombieish-humanoid upon this agricultural/human-remanded isle.


Ah.


Look!

Here are some pretty flowers for you:

And here is a butterfly--or a moth; whichever you prefer:

And here is a dead butterfly or moth:

And there you have it.

Goodbye from Soybean Island

Longnarrow Park

I have found yet another new park to visit. New to me, at least. And now visited:

Longnarrow Park is located in Soybean Island City, west and a jog north of downtown.

I'd like to report that it is a park named after H. Wadsworth Longnarrow, a literary figure from this island. But, alas, that is impossible. There are no literary figures from this place. There are Elite Elders and Businessmen and Corporate Heads who are much revered within this cloistered society, but you will never know their names. Certainly not publicly. No. Here on Soybean Island, names are not used to name. There is no history here. Only secrecy.

But, the park . . .

Really, not much to see here:

Grass. Pavement. Trees. Boredom.

But of course, my intrepid eye finds the things that need to be found.

Found and documented and reported upon.

Such as this:

And this:

And thus:

Well, perhaps those are not the best examples . . .

But here. Look. What park on this forsaken isle would be complete without some blaring-orange plastic fencing? Some object of capture and control?

And not just that, but to have a bench placed so that one can view--up close and personal--the fencing.

A front row seat!

I remain amazed.


But, for me, I would rather investigate the trees:

Though certainly you can see for yourself without comment what I see nonetheless I will comment anyway.

Yes.

The violence visited upon these arboreal subjects is obvious. Some are recent scars, most scars are of long ago, no doubt inflicted upon them when they were young and innocent.

How sad.

Perhaps I had better show you a couple of images that are not quite so disturbing, to take the sour stinging taste out of your silent mouths:

There. That's better? Is it? Huh?

Does it suit you to a:

?



But of course, on Soybean Island, even in a seemingly innocuous place like Longnarrow Park, one is always reminded what is really going on:

Industry

and Poverty.

No doubt within the thin walls of the factory slave laborers toil for slavish consumer products.

And no doubt within the decrepit walls of the termite-ridden house, the cadaverous bodies of the workers huddle together in fitful fists of hungry sleep between the long shifts at the factory.

No doubt.

It should make me be a smidgen grateful for my position as An Object of Curiosity. It should bring a mouthful of shame to my very being that at least I get to wander with a modicum of freedom and self-determination upon this prisoner isle. Yes, it should.

But it doesn't.


Longnarrow Park--no more to report.

Oneninefiveseven over and out and Goodbye from Soybean Island