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This
was back in the day in Phrygia,
A groovy little ungated
community of free-range satyrs and
flippin' nymphs.
You had oreads, naiads,
hamadryads and dripdryads makin' the
scene,
Which swung like Poppa Sun,
rockin' steady in his chopped and
channeled chariot every phoenix-chirpin',
retsina-slurpin'
and olive-burpin' morning at 5 in the a.m.
There were fauns
on the lawns and goats in the groves and
centaurs horny as a brass band on
a one-night stand in Nymph
City hip-hoppin' on all the hills,
Cruising for
Muses who used to drop in to gig at the Made in
the Glade Cafe or the Blotto
in the Grotto Bistro.
The great Greek poets and the noble Roman poets have
all blown
odes about it,
But you hadda be there.
Now
Marsyas, the subject of our story, was there.
Marsyas (no relation to Wynton
or Bradford) was a skinny little
hairy old hipster who was good-lookin' as
Chet Baker from the
waist up and totally goat below.
He was a crazy satyr
who truly dug the pre-Hellenic
hallucinogenic and metempsychotic bebop of the
scene,
Especially those high-flyin', primal-cryin', utterly trans-
mogrifyin'
rhythms of the Gods,
Which gave new meaning to the phrase, making the changes.
When
Apollo, for instance, whipped out his Gibson kithara with
the liongut strings
and laid a stiff riff on Daphne,
The sweet soft skin of the nymph got knotty
and her hands turned
into branches;
That's because Apollo could make the
changes.
Marsyas, however, was no Apollo; moreover, he lacked an axe.
He
wanted nothing more than to blow in the chorus of Gods, demi-
gods, and even
hemisemidemigods;
But without an axe to blow, he was just another goat-ass
in the
grass.
So one fine Phrygian day, after
some stress-free messin' with a
herd of cross-dressin' centaurs,
Marsyas
was boppin' to the pond to see if he could boogie with a
wood nymph when something
glinting in a thicket, flimmering at
the periphery of his vision, caught his
hairy eye.
The item in question was a shinbone, with round holes bored into
it
at diggable intervals:
"Groovy, it's a flute," said the caprine chappy.
"I got me an axe
at last."
Now in
some sectors of the ancient Greek scene, golden fleece
and golden cheese and
golden apples and golden grapes and maybe
even an occasional golden gyro grew
on trees,
But shinbone flutes did not.
And in truth, this was no ordinary
axe:
Athena, she of the high dome and the great grey penetrating gaze,
had
ditched it in said thicket because, vain babe that she was,
the flute had screwed
up the fine, fine features of her
incorruptible face whenever she tried to
blow it;
She was bugged for sure by the embouchure.
Scoot, flute, she decreed
in her deathless petulance, and flung
the offending object from her lemon-scented
penthouse on Mount
Olympus into the Phrygian thicket far below.
So
this flute, cluelessly and fortuitously found by my main half-
man Marsyas,
was indeed no earthly axe, but a discarded device
of the highmost holy and
triply hip goddess, with properties
commensurate to its provenance.
I mean,
a woodchuck with a buck tooth in West Bumfuck coulda made
music on this flute;
a sorry calamari coulda dragged its bent
tentacles over the holes and come
up with a Top 40
threnody.
But Marsyas, you dig, when he began to lip the
shinbone and a
sound like nothin' no hairy, hopped-up hipster ever heard from
here
to Halicarnassus popped out ˜
Maryas didn't think, Man, this is one doubly
wondrous, triply
dipped, quadruply groovy and possibly supernatural flute I
got
here, Bubba!
Uh-uh! Instead, the cat said, Io! dig me! Dig this profound
and
crazy sound that I, Marsyas, am makin', baby!
So infatuated was he with
what he perceived to be his own
virtuosity, that he hopped and bopped and bounded
around all
over the antique scene, blowin' his axe in every nook and
cranny
of the classical landscape,
Cryin' all the while, Dig me, you scrawny-ass fauns
and enervated
satyrs, you unhep shepherds and limp nymphs! I, Marsyas, am the
baddest
blowin', grooviest tootin', most far-out flautist in
all of Phrygia!
I,
Marsyas, am the hippest musician of them all!
At
that, there was a thunderclap,
And Apollo, he of the sun-kissed wig and toasty
lobes, was
standing to the right of Marsyas and blinding the goat-boy's
gaze.
Now,
if Marsyas could actually have dug the Sun God's mug from
behind all those
waves of cascading flame that emanated from
the cat's Afro,
He would have
dug that the stud was pissed;
But never mind ˜ a strip of marble flypaper coulda
caught the
vibe.
So, bro, Apollo smiled (and
let me hip you jocks to the paradox
here ˜ there's nothing colder in heaven,
Hades or Hoboken than
the blinding smile of the Sun Stud),
So, bro, the
Muses clue me that you be the hippest musician of
them all ˜ is that a fact,
or am I just a day-old platter of
chopped moussaka?
Well, replied Marsyas,
who by now had recovered the use of his
peepers, not to mention his poise,
Well, man, not to dis your
Blissfully Shimmering Shininess, or your Mythically
Unsmirch-
able and Cosmic Virtuosity, but if you ain't, then you're a
faded
amphora full of rock-solid olive oil on the way there,
dig?
Mock'st thou
the Sun Stud, thou feeble, fobbing, folly-fallen,
filth-maundering faun? expostulated
Apollo, reverting to the
King James diction of the highmost holy and triply
hip
Olympians;
Mock'st thou the God of Music, the Grandmaster of Melody,
the
Star of Harmony, the Ipsissimus of Rhythm and the Twitchin'
Prince of
Perfect Pitch?
For this hubris, Apollo thundered, It's you and me behind the
tree,
two flutes, mano a mano!
So Marsyas, that skinny
little hipster, follows Apollo into
a gorgeous chorus of laurels, where the
Sun Stud parks his
chariot and chooses all nine of the Muses to judge the flute
fight.
And
then, as the faun's furry fingers begin to fidget over the
shinbone, Apollo
unpacks his axe: a nine-foot number cut from
the dick-bone of an uptight Titan
who was 86'd when the god
conked him on 93 of his 94 noggins.
It was the
grooviest tube you ever laid eyes on, with classy
Parnassian transverse action
and gold-plating the entire length
of the whole sweet scintillating cylinder ˜ I mean, there was
even gold-plating on the holes in the fingerholes!
Zeus
have mercy, said a totally snowed Marsyas, glimming Apollo's
axe, I'm as screwed
as the stoner who tried to seduce Medusa.
Let
the cutting contest begin, sang the Muses, and Apollo, by
divine right, kicked
off.
The Sun Stud blew a riff so lushly and lusciously, so lovingly
and
far-above-ingly hovering, that all the flowers in a five-
mile radius simply
flipped their pistils, while every grape
within range of the riff yelled I
SURRENDER!, deliciously
capitulating and squeezing itself into wine.
And
dig it ˜ the Sun Stud was just noodlin'!
But Marsyas had hubris with a capital
HU, so he picked up the
shinbone and blew a harsh, flat, deeeaaatt, dee-at-du-at ˜
two bars, and both of them closed on Sunday.
The Muses were not amused.
Euterpe
in particular got testy, saying Hey, man, you gonna lay
down a sound, or goat-shag
around?
But wait: the satyr had more to say.
He followed up with a phrase
so raw and caustic, so scraped and
abraded, so funked up and hunkered down
that even the rocks on
the mountain started bouncin', saying, Yeah, man, we
can dance
to that, let's Lindy-hop atop the tip of the pinnacle and bop into
a
avalanche on Parnassus!
Not bad, said Apollo,
who had slipped on a pair of shades as
dark as Hades, not bad for a sad-ass,
grape-shot, shook-up and
unshaven satyr ˜ but here's what you left out:
And
so saying the Sun Stud blew an impossibly groovy super-
structure over the
now-dessicated echoes of the previous
phrase, climbing up the sky like a fiery
dynamo all the way
up to the hatbrim of Helios, blazing and blaring and flaring
and
flaming and flipping the wig of the Sun itself!
I GIVE IT A TEN! cried Clio,
kissin' her scorecard.
TEN MORE! cried Terpsichore.
TEN AGAIN! cried Calliope,
and so on down the line, every one
of those nine fine sisters layin' the grooviest
of kudos on
the Sun Stud.
Lost in the applause
and the general commotion of Apollonian
stroke-stroke was pitiful little Marsyas
and his tinhorn of a
shinbone;
But presently, he got his room-sized remnant
of a goat-ass
together and said:
Yeah, well, I don't wanna cloud your soaringly
laurelled brow,
or bring down the high vibe of the smokin' overture to your
Olympian
symphony, but the gig ain't over till the fat Fate
sings.
And with that,
he put a hairy lip to the shinbone, and for the
first time Marsyas tried blowin'
from the soul instead of from
his greedy, needy, bursting-at-the-seams and
me-first ego;
But the cat had been blowin' himself without knowin' himself
for
so long, he couldn't but manage one-half of a feeble tweet, an
off-key
squawk that pushed up a daisy but left the rest of the
meadow unmolested.
I
GIVE IT A ONE, yawned Euterpe.
ONE LESS, Urania wailed.
There's gonna be
one less, 'cause you just messed with your last
Maestro, Marysas, intoned Apollo,
who was switchin' instruments
from flute to shiv.
After all, added the Sun
Stud, smiling, We didn't call this a
cuttin' contest for nuthin'!
In
a trice, Marsyas found himself all trussed up in some S/M rig,
upside-down
in the crotch of a tree.
And man, that sorry satyr began to wail:
Pleeease,
Lord Apollo of the high-shinin' dome and stainless
radiance, pleeease Mr. Sun
Stud of the grooviest music in
perpetuity!
I never meant to dis your blissful
beatitude or drag your
dazzling chariot or knock any gems from the crown of
your
outtatown sound;
All I ever humbly wanted to do, just for one sweet
flick in the
flux we call existence, was to ˜ swing with the infinite!
Now
truth be told, the Sun Stud was not entirely a celestial
scumbag.
Ovid and
the Latin cats gave Apollo a bad rep, but there was
more to the dude than is
generally construed by the moth-eaten
academic myth-wigs who specialize in
myth-interpretation.
Anyway, Apollo dug where the satyr was coming from, or
at any
rate where he wanted to be coming from.
So placing his face to the
faun's, he swung: Dig me, Marsyas, I
am the Sun Stud within you.
You wanna
blow somethin' real, somethin' with real feelin',
somethin' from a place as
deep as Delphi, somethin' that blows
the minds of gods and goddesses, demigods
and demigoddesses,
men and women and androgynous composites and all the wailin'
shades
in Hades up the River Styx without a paddle ˜
Then you gotta summon me from
your gut, Bubba, you gotta praise
Jove and can the jive.
You wanna get to
the good stuff, we ˜ meanin' you and me, the
God Within, dig? ˜ gotta strip
away all that pseudo-hipster
shit.
And that, concluded Apollo, flippin'
the shiv, is precisely what
this little surgical procedure, this triple-hipster
bypass, is
all about.
Uh, is it gonna hurt? winced Marysas, shook to the
hooves.
Like a Great Motherfucker, said Apollo.
And as the Sun Stud exquisitely
stuck that shiv into the
quivering shinbone of Marsyas, and peeled off fluted
scrolls
of goateed skin,
The satyr wailed amazing jazz from a sacred place
inside himself
˜ best he'd ever blown ˜ and the flood of his tears brought
forth
a limpid river, the coollest and clearest and dearest
flow in all of ancient
Phrygia.
So all you cats of a latter day,
You
saunterin' fauns and scintillant nymphs in the post-
postmodern aftermath of
myth,
You can have your sweet fun swingin' away in cyberspace,
Your good
times groovin' on the bad jazz of Kenny G,
Your high times chompin' on mellow
portobellos with melted brie,
But when the God Within says, Gimme some skin,
Jim,
You got two possible modes of reply:
You can sputter, in defiance and
denial, Gimme some thumb, chum,
you ain't so dumb;
Or you can say, Hey,
baby ˜ it may be painful, but since every-
thing else is extraneous, let's
get subcutaneous.
And by layin' some skin on the God Within,
You'll find
the true you is groovy, blue, in tune with the Muses
and lucid as roses, and
solid as marble the whole way through.
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