KHLOARIS on Night Flight Plus and at a Special Bronx Screening, and New Prose from New York and Naples
Oh My! It's The Athenian Mercury, Volume Five!
Thanks for reading this very special 5th edition of the Athenian Mercury! We’re getting slightly more regular with these things, and another one should be forthcoming soon. Feel free to contribute!
Tomorrow night, the KHLOARIS Production of “Holy Wound” will be among the films playing at the Bronx Filmmakers’ Collective’s screening Our Gaze: Bronx Pride Week LGBTQ+ Short Films Screening, which was programmed by none other than “Holy Wound” director Josafat Concepcion, who’s not only a fine artist, but one of the loveliest human beings we know. We shot “Holy Wound” in Washington Heights, Inwood and the Bronx. Come out and support uptown and Bronx artists and filmmakers.
Details below, and you can click through to RSVP. The event is free, and we have it on good word that empanadas will be served.
Josa also did this a nice interview with the BronxNet folks, where he discusses the event and the film, that you can watch below. You can follow Josafat on Instagram at @josafat.concepcion.
We’re beyond super-psyched to have the KHLOARIS production of Dylan Mars Greenberg’s film “The Bathtub” now available for screening Night Flight Plus. We at KHLOARIS have fond memories of watching music videos late at night as kids on the original Night Flight, and seeing the seminal punk documentary Another State of Mind for the first time on VHS, taped off directly off of Night Flight, complete with commercials, was a formative experience for us in our early teen years.
Check out the trailer for “The Bathtub” below, and watch the movie on Night Flight Plus here. It requires a membership, but it’s worth it — they have a lot of great weird underground stuff — and it’s nice to support the non-corporate behemoth streaming.
We also have an excerpt of “Bathtub” director Dylan’s new novel Great White Shark below, as well as the first part of “Invisible City, a pamphlet, with short stories, novellas and sarcastic reflections of city of Naples, trying to speak to the Neapolitans from a Neapolitan with an external eye” by Giuseppe Ruffo.
Dylan is a frequent collaborator and friend of KHLOARIS, and we always support and enjoy her work, and Giuseppe Rufo is someone we’ve never met in person, but connected with on social media, and have discussed collaborating for some time. We’re glad to present some of Giuseppe’s work here, and it’s nice when social media works in positive ways.
We’re enjoying the odd directions this newsletter is taking and we hope you will too. Feel free to share it.
Until next time,
-Kenneth Soothing Energy Beam, Editor-in-Chief, The Athenian Mercury
Great White Shark
An Excerpt from a New Novel
By Dylan Mars Greenberg
“I feel like my worst nightmare is my clone rejecting me.” So sexually was that stated by the Dickless Twit himself, and in his smartest Porky Pig Pajamas he waltzed casually into the ballroom with a ladder, as not to arouse suspicion. Alas, his presence caused the ballroom to burst into flames with everyone in it.
“Or so he said.”
“Or so he said.”
He gets up, amongst the flames, onto a podium. Yes, the Dickless Twit indeed passes through the flames as a God. He snaps his fingers impatiently, and the flames die down. The panicked, half burned attendees suddenly turn their attention to the slender, malnourished figure in the PPPJs.
“When a machine does what I like it to do, I say ‘Awww, awesome! YESSSS!’ I say that because it’s doing the thing that I wanted, and what it was built for. It’s helping me do what I wanted to do faster, so my response is positive as well as - well, enthusiastic!”
One member of his captive audience raises its hand.
“Yes? You over there - with the burned tuxedo.”
“What do you do or—, what do you say, or do, when a machine doesn’t do what you want it to do? Is the response the same?”
“Not at all,” replies the Twit. “Not the same at all. I say ‘OOOOH NOOO!!! FUCK, NOOOO!!! AWWWWW!!!’. I say that because it’s not doing what I want, it’s doing what I don’t want.”
“Can we apply this to our own lives, our daily lives?” asks another audience member.
“Excuse me, I didn’t call on you. You have to, um, you have to raise your hand for me to call on you. You have to raise your hand for you to speak.”
The audience member raises its hand.
“Yes?”
“Can we apply this to our own lives, our daily lives?”
The Dickless Twit snaps its fingers and the entire building burns to ashes.
“You’re not a slam man!” screams the Dickless Twit as the skin melts off his body. (In this case, “you” refers to everyone in the room; but don’t tell him that.) “Don’t say you’re a slamster unless you ate a dozen hamburgers, promising to pay for them on a day that is not today! You imp, you troglodyte, you pious sack of filth!” It is at this point he is unable to continue, for obvious reasons.
A professor walks into a wealthy older gentleman’s house. He is wearing a tuxedo. The gentleman is wearing a tuxedo as well. “Sir, I have heard that you’re a count, is this true?” asks the professor.
“Why yes, I am a count,” replies the gentleman, who is wearing a three piece tuxedo.
“My friend, do you have access to a firehose?” Asks the professor.
“Why yes I do,” says the count. “Would you like me to fetch it?”
“Yes, that would be splendid”, says the tuxedo clad professor.
The count returns with a firehose.
“Will this do?” asks the count.
“I’m afraid I will need you to turn on the water,” requests the professor.
“I see. Give me a few moments.”
The count turns on the water, and the powerful hose blasts water throughout the count’s living room. When he returns he sees his quarters are drenched.
“My word!” exclaims the count. “Why have you turned the hose on my property?”
“My friend”, explains the professor, “Think not of the hose. For regardless, it is Raining Inside.”
FOLLOW DYLAN ON IG:
the INVISIBLE CITY (Part I)
the beauty of Naples lies in its memory
By Giuseppe Ruffo, Naples, 2020 (Illustrations: Erk14, Translation: Lucy Mae Humphries)
NAPLES RED
Often in Naples my pace reaches a standstill, and there I am, watching the sea. The gulf stretches out before me, an expanse of blue, a blue which fills the eyes, a blue of an intensity only found in the Mediterranean. After a while my attention is drawn to a certain spot, a spot exactly between Campanella bluff and the island of Capri.
The myth tells that harpies, creatures with bodies half bird and half woman, could be found at that precise point.
The harpies would take up their seat upon the rocks along the headland, and with their song enchant the sailors who ferried its waters, and drag them to their ruin.
Only eleven souls escaped this chorus unharmed, and these were Odysseus with his crew of sailors, and Jason and the Argonauts. My imagination encourages me to believe still further: in the existence of another harpy, a different creature from all the rest, whose body was half fish and half woman.
She patronized the waters directly on the opposite side of Capri and Campanella. Rumour has it that she was the daughter of a sailor and one of the three harpies. While her origins remain unclear, one of the stories goes that an egg once fell into the sea and thanks to the currents was carried to a sun-kissed hollow.
This place, besides its astounding beauty, also boasted of a spring of magic waters, a spring conceived in the conflict of two rival volcanoes: Mt Vesuvius and the supervolcano of the Phlegraean fields.
The bay was composed of yellow-coloured rock, interrupted at a certain point to cede place to a thick fold of vegetation of an intense green, of a shade so vibrant as to be unmistakably and exclusively that of the Mediterranean.
Every time the mermaid swam in this bay it was a marvel, an homage to the created world: the birds, the sea waves, the fish and the wind were in complete harmony with one another, and bestowed unto the air a special melody, sweet enough to bewitch even the gods themselves.
The mermaid drew nourishment from the bay’s mineral water spring, whose unique waters are comparable only to those of the Nile. It was these waters which gave the nymph’s hair its radiant colour, resplendent as a ruby and intense as the lava running beneath the city’s gulf.
It is said that her eyes could send forth a beam of penetrating light, a combination of yellow, green, blue, with a touch of brown, a shade not unlike that of the surrounding wet volcanic stone.
For reasons still unknown, all of a sudden the spring ceased to be, and with it disappeared any traces of the mermaid.
Even today, as I watch over the bay, I can’t help but imagine her lying there on the rocks. The colours of the sea, of the stone, and its flora can only remind me of her beauty, the beauty which gave life to the eternal magic and myth of the city of Naples.
TRAILS, TRACKS AND TRAMS: GHOSTS OF THE BELLE ÉPOQUE
The streets of Naples, especially those of its historic centre, are composed in the most part by flagstones of volcanic rock: rectangular in shape, grey in colour, rich in flint, commonly called basolato. Many of its other streets are instead composed of cobblestones, smaller than the first, almost square in shape, which give a certain linearity to the flooring. Lastly, there is a third type of flooring, one covered in asphalt and largely composed of your standard bitumen.
Why am I telling you all this? As I was taking a stroll one day I thought I’d noticed a peculiarity; I realised that some streets bore the signs of having once been tracks. You might ask: what’s so odd about that? And the oddity, to my mind, is in the fact that many of these rails are without their vehicles, that is, without the trams that should run along them.
If one pays attention, the tracks can be found in many different parts of the city, from east to west, from south to north. Sometimes interrupted by hasty asphalt surfacing, they then re-emerge a few miles further on.
These are the tracks that belong to a historic tramway line, one that ran along a great cross-section of the city, the emblem of the modernity of Naples and its Belle Èpoque.
Today they appear as little more than ghost tracks: ghost tracks for ghost trains.
There are some who claim to have heard strange noises coming from the rails, and of having been blinded by mysterious lights. It’s not difficult to mistake car headlights for these ghostly beams. Others instead claim to have seen, on more than one occasion, a curious vehicle shoot by, one not unlike a tram.
Many of these reported sightings were made near the Chiaia seafront, where the tram in its day used to ferry people back and forth along the stretch of Real Passeggio, today’s Villa Comunale.
This innovative system is also described in great detail by the writer Joseph Conrad in his brief account on Naples, Il Conde, where he gives an excellent image of the public transport of his era, and of the trams which darted along continuously along this city’s streets.
Personally, I can’t help but feel that the tales of ghost trams are more than mere products of the imagination: aren’t the remnant trails a tangible reminder of their concrete existence, of daily commutes and the people it ferried across?
Perhaps its last run will be completed when the trumpets of newspaper manifestoes and news bulletins will have stopped sounding, and the applause of critics faded into nothing. And so the curtain will fall on the indolent actors of this historical drama, this fanciful tragicomedy.
PARCHED FOUNTAINS
I recently came across the definition of the word ‘fountain’, and it went something like this: ‘copious water source created artificially for public convenience or decoration.’
There are those who sustain that in order to understand a concept well, one must first discover the etymology of the word.
At this point I asked myself: what is then the function of a parched fountain?
I know a city in Italy, characterised by its monumental marble fountains, of magmatic piperno stone, devised by great artists and architects.
Fountains as symbols of an illustrious past, the aesthetic expression of the melting pot of European and Mediterranean cultures, fountains as part of a universal patrimony, of everybody’s Unesco, let’s say.
Lamentably, unlike other cities, Naples’ fountains are bereft of water: they lie abandoned, offended, vandalised, wounded, its statues maimed and decapitated.
How can their true beauty be expressed and represented in such an indolent city? How long will this blindness last?
Giuseppe Ruffo is an independent curator and writer, lives and works in Naples and is the founder of the Art Turm and GR Contemporary Art project. He has curated exhibitions in Naples, Berlin, New York and Seoul.
FOLLOW GIUSEPPE ON IG:
@grcontemporaryart
The remainder of INVISIBLE CITY will be published in The Athenian Mercury, Vol. 6.
(To contact the KHLOARIS universal remote control, do so at production@khloaris.com. To follow us on suspiciously suspicious social media, we're @KHLOARIS everywhere, but most active on Instagram, very occasionally on Twitter, and incredibly rarely even on Facebook. Watch some KHLOARIS content on our Vimeo page. Visit the KHLOARIS Spotify to hear KHLOARIS playlists here. Our website, for those who remember what those are, is at www.khloaris.com.)