Tipi Khan is behind the wheel of the taxi cab as we’re stalled in mid-morning traffic at the entrance to the Midtown tunnel en route to LaGuardia, where I’ll board a Northwest flight destined for Boise. If it had been a shorter distance safely within the boundaries of Manhattan during a later, inebriated ride, I might have engaged him in a conversation about the dark stain his namesake left on European history, but now I am tensely quiet as I think about my impending familial visitat. It’s a prodigal-son return without the chastened spirit, one I’ve been dreading for almost three years. I don’t know what I fear more, fulfilling a promise I made to my mother to sit through a Mary Kay demonstration, knowing she wants to use me to capture the New York cosmetic market, or helping her sift through four recently unearthed boxes of papers, journals, and memorabilia from my youth.

As it turns out, the Idaho trip is remarkably relaxed and devoid of the expected anxiety. Mercifully, the Mary Kay demonstration never happens and is only mentioned the morning of my departure, and the archeological excavation of my past proves to be one of the highlights of my stay there.

One of the more recent journals from my college days I recognized instantly from the exposed the title page where I’d artfully written, “Agony’s Discreet Target: Collected Thoughts.” Flipping through ferocious lines of dark and violent poetry, my mother watching me intently, I stop to read an angry bit of poetry I had written during my post-Campus-Crusade-for-Christ-earnestly-searching-for-a-global-cause days. As a recent convert to apostasy and the humanities, I had used poetry to try to muster up some metaphysical credibility on campus. I ask my mom if she recalls my trying to derail the holidays with a dramatic reading of my fur protest poem “Mink on Mink” during the ceremonial unwrapping of the gifts. She does, and we both laugh after I offer a fresh reading, mocking the original that took place in my parents’ festive living room. Christmas morning, 1991.

God, did my mother ever like to deck those halls. Festooned with a dizzying array of twinkling lights, folksy manger scenes, Kewpie-doll harp-bearing angels floating on fluffy clouds, the entire house was transformed so that barely an inch of non-seasonal wall space was spared her suffocating yuletide treatment. But this kaleidoscopic frenzy of holiday cheer, so desperate in its desire to please and distract, only reminded me of how synthetically empty it all seemed. I was starting to resent the holidays, and found it increasingly difficult to contain my anti-Christmas spirit.

Each year at this time we were trapped in a routine and expected to play our parts: my brother and I would roll out of bed an hour or two after my parents woke, listen to the Biblical story of Jesus’ birth as interpreted by an anonymous author in Luke, and then ravenously tear open gifts with hearts outpouring with gratitude that would shift to awe when my mother was presented with an expensive gift from my father. Every year she’d mitigate her rejoicing with feigned surprise at how she thought they’d agreed not to get anything for each other this year. After the frenzy died down, my father would go virtually unnoticed the rest of the day.

But this year my mother was given a fur coat, and I just happened to be poetically armed with the perfect weapon for the realization of my holiday Schadenfreude. My poetical remonstration was a howl into the bemused gaze of my unenlightened family, my political and philosophical nemesis. I wanted to give them a taste of my new morality, a new worldly consciousness I was developing to replace their evangelical influence. They were a cellular representation of wanton consumerism and greed, and I read each line of the poem with a powerful earnestness that must have made the expression seem more like self-parody than moral outrage to them.

Society’s saints,
They touch the ground but once
And grace the world with their cruel beauty;
Their screaming carrion coats drip with warm blood.
I shift in my shackles;
Resist in silence
As vicious perpetrators run free.

Mink on Mink. A Divine Composure.

Will I violate that bloodthirsty cult
Choking life for fashion’s sake?

Clutching his newly-prized shirts and matching ties, my father saw my capitalist nature showing through the bohemian holes in my thrift store sweater when he uttered, “So I guess you won’t be accepting your gifts, then?” He used the playful, dismissive tone he usually saved for snobs, Vietnam war protesters, and those who used offensive language.

But I held on to my gifts and received them each holiday season with diminishing fervor. Sheepishly, I accepted them as if they were my reward for suffering through a dreaded game I no longer knew how to play. It finally exploded in my face during the holiday visit I made to Idaho three years ago. That visit ended with my mother distraught as I gave her the silent treatment until proclaiming that I’d destroyed their Christmas check in righteous indignation.

Call me Ebenezer. I don’t really do Christmas anymore and my parents have given up on my participation in the whole affair. This late summer visit — my concession in the protracted rapprochement — was a compromise made to assuage these holiday expectations.

Recoiling from the Comfort-and-Joy-Messiah-land spectacles, I’ll greet the season in my own downtown dissolute way. I’ll admire my “day of the dead” decorations as we listen to Brian Wilson’s “Smile” with perhaps a Beethoven ditty sprinkled on top (absolutely no Handel or Tchaikovsky). Holding my breath until Boxing Day, I’ll surface from my holiday hibernaculum to sip champagne or whatever intoxicating beverage happens to be circulating at the time. Who knows, I may even rediscover my Christmas spirit by writing poetry and taking up causes again. PETA, do you hear what I hear? •

Living in Prague a few years ago having only a rudimentary grasp of the Czech language, I was faced with the constant challenge of finding a film that didn’t require the reading of daunting Czech subtitles. This often left me with the dismal choice of mainstream American films that monopolized the cinemas of Prague. When the blockbuster Titanic opened during an usually severe famine of engaging film, I grudgingly paid to see it, but not before reconsidering and retreating from the box office queue three times. So when a festival of Peter Greenaway opened in the city, I coerced my German boyfriend to see an early work, one of the few films on the program alien to me.

I had become a fervent Peter Greenaway fan upon my initial introduction in college to his commercially successful cult favorite, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. After seeing many of the auteur’s ambitious projects — Prospero’s Books, Zed and Two Naughts, and his numerological masterpiece Drowning By Numbers — I marveled at his power to elevate the bizarre and the grotesque. But these films barely prepared me for his modest 1976 effort, Vertical Features Remake.

VFR falls into the category of parody in the form of mock documentary. The film, a tedious practical joke at the expense of academics involved in esoteric criticism, wryly exposes the poststructualist inclination toward historical revisionism. Lasting a monotonous forty-five minutes, the film presents three similar reconstructions by a disputing lot of academics of an incomplete film by the fictitious filmmaker Tulse Luper (also the titular character of Greenaway’s Cannes contribution this year).

Tulse Luper’s concept is merely a visual presentation of 121 vertical objects that fall within a square-kilometer graph of natural landscape. Each remake is really just an exercise in re-editing as new information is unearthed, purportedly revealing a different mathematical structure that affects the way in which the vertical objects — such static things as trees, fence-posts, etc. — are captured on film. Vertical Features Remake is closely aligned with the faux literary criticism of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire in that it is self-involved in the argument to the exclusion of the audience’s interest in the subject. Like Nabokov, Greenaway delights in this devious game of baffling the audience with a protracted presentation of arcana and irrelevant information.

As I stumbled over a feeble explanation to my bemused boyfriend over post-cinematic drinks, the discussion of Greenaway’s film became a springboard for my defense of an artist’s right to manipulate the audience’s experience of his work by brazenly using the form to undermine their expectations. I had been toying with the exploitative possibilities of expression as practical joke for a while, but I had always seemed to get mired in the issues of merit and quality. My desire to trick my audience for my own amusement was tempered by the ridiculous notion of artistic integrity. But now I had faith in a manipulation that would craftily reference the joke in the form itself. Its integrity is protected through the artist’s free exposure of the exploitation. It’s pulling the wool over their eyes by using the sheep.

Now, a few years later, I’ve distilled these ideas into my own visual artistic movement called Post-painterly Projectivist Primitivism (3Pee for short), in which the only condition is that a piece of art has to be created in forty-five seconds or less. This became a convenient way to create original works of art without having to expend a lot of effort in the process. Easy to assemble, not to mention cost-effective, they are perfect gifts for friends, and every one is a hundred percent art-worthy under the regulations of 3Pee. One could argue that my movement was born of extreme laziness, but I prefer to see its products as beautiful expressions of concentrated, spontaneous moments of inspiration, and I am prepared to offer up an exhausting analytical defense of my work until I bore you into acceptance. •

A verbatim transcription of an online “conversation”:

VillageBoy: I like your Manhunt profile, and you have a pretty intriguing handle, Waxkafka. How’d you come up with that?

Waxkafka: Well, I thought it had a better ring to it than Waxheidegger.

VillageBoy: I see. Seems like you have an affinity for German literature.

Waxkafka: Das ist wahr. Actually, this is from a series of mantras I created in college after reading Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis for a compulsory freshman comp class. They were esoteric expressions of an inner struggle between the forces of Classicism and Romanticism, self-deception and self-realization, stultification and transcendence.

VillageBoy: All of this from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, huh? There’s nothing in your profile that suggests you’ve undergone an insectile transformation.

Waxkafka: I didn’t wake up one morning to find myself trapped within the carapace of a dung beetle, but there was a revolution gathering momentum in my life at the time. Reading Kafka’s story of existential alienation seemed to unlock a door — a heavy, imposing door — to self-exploration that would have dramatic repercussions. For the first time in my life I had read something that informed my own existence.
In high school I had suffered through English classes led by teachers who either knew nothing of European literature or were so enamored of John Steinbeck that it precluded an interest in twentieth-century European literature. They were a menacing gaggle of matronly rumor-mongers with badly-permed hair and an understanding of literature limited to The Pearl. So I threw myself into the sciences and declared myself a biology major when I entered college.

But Kafka’s story seemed to unlock concealed regions of my mind; I felt I had discovered for the first time in my life a literary voice.

As I began work on the assignment, a critical essay about Kafka’s story, I unwittingly began to examine my own life and the governing forces I felt I had no control over. All of my life’s cues had been dictated to me and all of my actions had been considered in an attempt to please an established order. I had an existential compatriot in Franz Kafka.

I was the pitiful, reviled Gregor Samsa.

VillageBoy: That sounds like quite a metamorphosis, Waxkafka.

Waxkafka: And I owe it all to Kafka. I’ve been waxing Kafkaesque ever since.

VillageBoy: Does this carry over into the bedroom?

Waxkafka: Well, I sometimes coerce my lovers into a specially-designed apparatus of torture, starve them for an extended period of time, and force them to listen to a dramatic recitation of my gloomy poetry from my college years.

VillageBoy: Sounds hot, when can we meet? •