Show Review

Here’s my two-year employment history I said to the old breather pipe. What I told my holiday family to save face was that I was put on the spot one too many times and that’s the reason why I quit, but really I was just looking for a way to get down to the Rubber Glove and see Moth Cocks hit the stage.

Some breathing was going on in the glove. Signs of life well above sugarcane and datura. Well beyond the beyond and even beyond what was well before the beyond or well before the before and even well before that. Past the living, past the dead, past the living dead, a quick sort of quick, a quick sort of quick dead quick. Glove time. Coursing, susurrant to roaring, so I place my order quick sort of quick before someone in the encampment barks at my back for damming up the line to the cashier.

This was hustle bustle boom time Texas. Not the languid shores of Jersey that I was used to. In those early days of 2022, time was time and money was money and money was all we had left, loads of it. Money makes money so we were doing okay, even if time was not on the dial. Time, after all, was for the dead dingers of the other empire.

It was the sort of situation where money made money and money was art, and art made music, and music pretended to make money, or when music read the room correctly it pretended to smile in order to make money, or to avoid evisceration. Then music saved the world by circumventing art and money, using a navigational system of reflections, overlaps and Nyquist daytime formula in the castle of bounce, until all cancelled all out and then we had a different prismatic view, until all cancelled all out, then we grew ponderous, until we cancelled one another out, and Pat Modugno pulled out a nesting doll made from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene from his pocket. The time for pleasantries was over.

Doug Gent raised his macuahuitl and pointed toward the screen. ‘The Mothcock. Mythological beast. A hybrid creature. Dangerous. Steely. Khaki. A rooster with wings.’ His punctuations rolled over us like wise old pebbles. Pat continued to unnest and further reveal strange plastic assemblages. Did I detect a smile in the corner pocket?

No, it was a frown. Teddy Two Hats swaggered in and I had to stoop. A blue norther rolled in. Devils were cloud riding. Their horses were beggars, pleading with the audience to remove the barbed bits from their mouths. Fell on deaf ears. This was carcass country.

Gent had moved to the left of the stage now; he squinted into some infinite source unseen. Modugno picked up a long thread and made a lovely silk cabin, durable yet delicate. An open concept space.

Then there was the music. I didn’t catch a lick of it, ‘cause old Teddy Hats had turned coats and turned me into the locals. They hauled all of me away except for my ears, which were discovered months later on November 9 and immediately uploaded to streaming services. This is exactly what my ears heard.

-Jersey Slade