Clapping Between the MOVEMENTS

Clapping Between the Movements is a multimedia work for speaking/singing percussionist featuring spoken word, body percussion, ASL (American Sign Language), and air drumming.

The work serves as a visual diary of enteries focusing on primary topics of anxiety, stuttering, and Los Angeles.

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Clapping Between the Movements

Tyler Eschendal

2018-2020 — Los Angeles

I. Street King

Drenched in romanticism, an un-seeable jester controls the swivel of each and every street-dwelling styrofoam cup, always spelling the most circular of plastic whatevers. A swift jingle of the wrist signals a sprinkler to erupt from the verge, a jeté allows for children’s boots lounging in a stroller to come forth and scrape the rust off your gate. The bystander is always wrong, they move with him. Conjoined at the chakra, a Siamese eyebrow. Squiggling not unlike the signature you sign to your landlord. A word in which itself is drenched in renaissance-ical guck, sludged somewhere between what an avalanche can offer a junkyard: very little of anything at all.

I imagine it’s like keeping a chainsaw in the glove compartment or whistling through a grave yard of flattened iguanas and tire skids and firework droppings and sun-dried Barbie dolls and roach hammocks and lemons and limes and spray-on gang jargon and garbage picking ghouls as game for the street king to flick at like scabs on his amulet. Either that or a bullet. Whizzing by dubious rows of hammock-hut-tarp-coffins, splashed and glued together from antique bus tickets and half-used balloon sacks like the nomadic butterfly straitjackets that inhabit them. The anatomy of the aboveground underground. The rotting rib cage of the skeleton of the city.

Lips dripping with rum and breakfast cereal, watching you trade tongues with the Dominican moon under the warm magnetic hiss of the deity’s tilted lantern like cactus at the snap of a finger. You’re back in dreamland.

But this time it’s loud. This time has nails in the clock. The street king must have slept in. This time it’s wheezing, it’s nervous, it’s in an alien time signature. It’s ticking, and it’s split, and it’s sore, and it’s numb, and it’s heavy, and it’s stuck, and it’s loud, and it’s in route, barreling towards your destination.

II. Ice Cream Man’s Siren

Personally dismantling the ice cream man’s siren. An act driven by the same reckless spontaneity held within an ounce of that 3 a.m. animal-sex with whomever you’re rolling over to at the time. A pile of verbs and postures you intrinsically crave more than any double scoop bellowed by the mechanical whistle on wheels. A detuned, mobile, sugar-filled azan. Doppler’d Joplin will have to do; serving as the fuel to this ceremonial ripping of the chords. The inevitable choking of the next word, dipping it in chocolate, and slurping up a half-melted empty gulp. Scrapping a smile out of the custard bin. Twitching thoughts like anthropromorphic eyes guiding through momentary hell as the runt of the lag stares directly into the receiver of the pause, stop, please fucking play. Scenes of lips and legs and rouge piercing and undiscovered positions looping back to the frosted cone’s vertex, the point, the stutter. Ritualistically rubbing one off and pulling out cotton candy teeth the color of babbon’s ass up browsing coloring books and popsicle wrapper ingredients, stepped on too many times like the sweaty impatience of this preschool acid trip. Now ice cream truck as zebra carcass, spilling lines from Schaefer’s diary: like a child who has taken the growl out of his teddy bear, pulled out his dolly’s eyes, and smashed his clockwork train.

But if you have money, purchase the alternate takes. The urge to wave the orchestra off. The urge to soak in the sound of nothing. So quiet you can hear your bones click.

I imagine it’s like the anticipatory crackling after the needle drops, thinking before it sounds, a physical buffer. On the edge, a pre-time, the antecedent, seconds before she opens her eyes, and the shit that exists before the symphony.

Considered by many to take up space on the clock, this fragment scrapping its flesh across the trigger does not exist to the vinyl hoop that it inhabits. It just is. Nobody really wakes you up in the morning, the active needle traces your eyelids and the old hippie that pressed the button in the first-place hovers away, unamused as the hallucinogens hit the terrestrialbloodstream. Funny how you only hear about the terrestrial when they’re extras, whom consciously freeze the mundane under a magnifying glass like a couple of hairy ants. Furiously scribbling notes about discovering the perfectly crafted skipping stone to balance the table at the last booth or memorizing the pattern of a lonely spinning top on the counter at a 50’s Diner. There’s something about themed restaurants that scares the shit out of you.

Interlude I: The Easy Way to Learn English for Hungarians

III. K-Town

Avant-puppets against white square. They drop their keys for you to pick up. Clumsy and horny,desperate caricatures of their own preference, swiping away the smog as they stumble around K-Town to catch a quick boof.

It’s sort of like street corn wrapped in a handkerchief the color of light pollution, of burnt kimchi,of gut infested pop-up lagoon in the off hours, of time-lapsed pull-focus on urchin-skinsand their trusty strayaway shopping carts, on the incline, exchanging the waisted economy, of sticky-little waif tokens, of sun-squeezed condoms, of shoes on spendthrifers, drowning near, if not already in route to the silver platter.

I imagine it’s like the character arc of man who involuntarily orgasms at every car horn in the city. Except they like it.

IV. Underground Cathedral

Currency in the form of every overwhelmingly high backseat think-tank. These days it feels like a stranger’s window is your therapist. Withdrawing wormholes and stuffing them under the mattress. A keepsake of sorts. Embezzling the rest to an off-shore vertigo, sludged somewhere between the distortions calling from Zebulon and wherever the fuck that fish store is in Mid-City.

Practicing mindful ignorance. A mediation of sorts, nowhere near mastering the religion that is public transportation. A cyclical procedure as the daily sacrifice to your wallet. The platform as alter, alter boys dressed as beggars, filling junk-kneelers with soupy eyes. Sometimes they don’t make it. Flickering simulations of mass, liturgy stuck to the bottom of your shoe, gum- spirit, roach-wax, preached from the speakers above, bouncing around the underground cathedral.

Plugged into personal psalms, wires and mysterious cans hang from your ears like sacred garb. Individually reading our verses when he announces that it is here. The sardine salvation—let it squeeze you like a fossilized orange barreling towards your destination. Stopping only at the designated light, between the pink stain nearest the shadow, only guessing what creatures lay behind door number 2. I imagine it’s like the childish urge to leave your seat in the balcony and squirm around in the secular, but your salary says otherwise.

Misshapen, zombie’d arms drop to their vagabond pockets, methodically releasing snot rags and gum balls and tickets and nickels and assorted fuzz dumplings, flowering the tract like a trash Zamboni on strike. A ghostly gaze behind the wheel, levitating past the piles. The rancid braid mumble singing “Joy…….Shout.….Shout….Shout….Joy” along an alien time signature only a true believer shall ever wish to subdivide.

Interlude II: Drum Battle

V. City Ghost

The slugs come out when it rains. Slurping up half-opened cans of ravioli with deceased eyes glued to the back of their skull, watching the world burn. Their toes bolted to the fly trap, traveling backwards, calling out for their Juliet, forcefully listening to the schizophrenic human radio and unattended glass bottle, traveling forwards, syncing to its momentarily free movement, the true telescope of our longstockings.

Drop in a quarter to continue the séance.

The 7th street ghost appears to your immediate north, complete with swigging violin and barf bag. Batteries areincluded, but there’s no need, the game plays on its own. An explosive derelict of a garbage piñata with piss-soaked shoes for a necklace. Fossilized worm tunnels where eye sockets used to rest. An amateur ‘s wall squiggles truly come to life. Buzzards pick at its brain like harp excerpts skipping when you slam the dresser.

The menu screen never shows up, but the unfortunate scent clenches on tight.

Hastefully shoved into some sort of “level 2”. Drenched in reverberant pixels. Sludged somewhere between the apparent lack of grey matter in your left frontal gyrus and the mirrored cities inked in bold on the back of your neck. A quick stretch for a centipede, but an even quicker trip for the neurons snapping images of lips and legs and (skin under a thin strap and rings and heels) ghosts(?) and scarves wrapped in cold ivory air to your in-house kodachrome like a haunted view-master that knows too much. Shut it off, it’s time to shower under the warm magnetic hiss of the claw machine. No Rugs, No Pillows, No Shoes. Laundry cart as Speed Queen, your beeps tell me what to do. A flagrantly quaint metronome, dropping organized piles of imaginative goop behind every guilt trip, and bidding the last farewell to the tamale kings of that carnival(-ass)-spray-on-telemundo-mud-hut-(looking-)coin-filled-catalyst.

Wish for the ghost and it shall appear, popping bedsprings and melting away the piss colored wall paper. Desperate for some-thing to move, frozen in time like deja-vu’s ugly sister. Comparatively as eerie as watching aerial footage of your daily route through the city as screen saver in Den Haag.

In that moment, there is no city. There are no bus stops. No melted garbage cans, no couch jugglers, no bike thieves, no frond piles. No honking circus, no cactus gallows, no pan dulce, no yard coughing. No lightbulb whoopie cushions, no attendant booths, no lamppost hagglers, no castle tombs. No record surplus, no missing stops, no cupcake sky, no midnight hot pot. No smash crickets, no porch lions, no citrus high, no ash sprinkles, no sand puffs, no lemons, no limes, no blood circles, no paper cranes, no selling bones, no lighting up, no visiting Busk-Oz.

The concrete apparition quietly clapping between the movements. It’s tidal contribution displaying two halves of an acidic paper-scrap memory and sensitive hallucination of the current. Her waves tracing the tattoo’d geometry under your pocket. Keeping the light of the console afloat and spelling out: upon your return, the park is always open. One step and Dreamland resumes. I imagine it’s like stepping on a pigeon, or erasing a ghost from the chalkboard.