The following is a transcript from a Lake Ivan improvisation on 2/26/05.

This text was then used as the script for Mike Kuchar‘s video “The Dreamer’s Tale.”

JM: Saint Sebastian thundering messages
Sit down quietly and allow the saint to infuse your desires

DF: My statuesque ability to withstand the slings and arrows which rain down on me from all sides comes from my inherent nobility, which allows me to transform arrows, as they glance off the sides of my face, into tears.

JM: Blue shaded Mediterranean teardrops
Washing away the sinful grime of mercantile interests

DF: I agree that when they installed the tear-shaped swimming pool on the terrace in their Sonoma County palace, that it added a certain sense of righteous power.

JM: The rivers of Avalon flow through the muddy northern California climes.

DF: Once again my children and I come down from the hills to inspect the rich vineyard owners, and see if they are living up to the standards of the mountain gods.

JM: The kids will gather every Friday night after school to envelope the mercantile powers and pray on their weakened and battered knees for the same torturous injuries and wounds that their knees have sustained over the period of minimum wage servitude.

DF: Gods spring up!
Spring up, lightly, lightly on the precipice!
And their arrow
On the string
On the ready
On the bow
Pull ever so lightly and aim precisely into the heart of the intended victim.

JM: Paragons of virtue?
Screaming their blood-curdling cries.
Fortune
Daftness and incredulity
Daffy ducks spends his last morsel of food on you

DF: Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic children. Love hurts. Love always hurts. Do you think you’d get away pain-free?

JM: The ribbon of gratitude
connecting us over miles and miles of
swimmingly good fun

DF: Do you think, by the way, that if I weren’t to actually plunge into the pool itself, but just kind of dip my toe into it and wade into it slightly, that some of those vineyard boys might untwine themselves from around the grape vines and serve me a glass of Chablis?

JM: It’s out of the question. We can’t change the rules of our exquisite society in order to please your whims. We have leather couches. We have ruffled up rugs that the people can vacuum every afternoon. Your cigar smoke and your incredibly bad taste jokes fall like ashes.

DF: I see. I see. It is as if you hunted through the markets of Marrakesh to find the most expensive, the most exquisitely hand-crafted carpets so that everything could be substantially swept underneath them.

JM: It’s a miracle, what we’ve come up with. Dacron fortitude, insulon macrame. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s greatest blissful hope inculcated in our fabric, the fabric of our lives, the rug beneath our feet. We glide upon it. We glide out the door, as if we’ve just been elected president of the board.

DF: The synthetic pan-pipes brought a wonderfully synthesized Dyionysian flavor, in which all you have to do is flick a switch and the celebration went on below, on the terrace, automatically, as it were.

JM: Mr. Johannes Brahams wafting in. He brings his breakfast. He digests it immediately and it becomes a sonata of the most fantastic fortitude and glorious radiance.

DF: Dark-winged creature! Dark-winged creature that enters through the open french doors! Marvelously, marvelously spinning and flying around the dining room, and cursing us with your dark feathers!

JM: Saint Peter, roll on, roll on and play the washboard as if a symphony. The angels redound to your benefit. When you grab hold of your waist, you grab hold of your guts and say: “Take a look. This is all I have to give.”

DF: The children and I, by a strange coincidence, found ourselves all coalescing and converging on the sub-basement at the same time, and lifting up some of the wicker baskets in which old sets of china that are never used are stored, because we wanted to see if the patterns were better than Mama’s.

JM: The Italian woman who sang last night
Our song, our appetizer, our vinigraitte.

DF: I must say, I’ve always been moved, almost to the point of tears, by the unspeakable nobility of the peasant classes.

JM: Hark! Outside the servants’ room!

DF: Yes.

JM: They speak, do they not?

DF: Yes.

JM: They whisper, do they not?

DF: They’ve come in the night, the children, the black-winged butterflies, the black and silver-winged butterflies that stir up the air and bring new twisted, evil forms of celebration to vibrant life!

JM: Cinnamon wings, cinnamon snatches of chemicals

DF: The inspectors, the inspectors flew open, they flew through the doors open, and flew into, and they inspected the exact chemical makeup of the effluent and the things that swerved swiftly through the sluices and the said: “Excellent. Excellent. The exact measure of toxicity is precise.”

JM: Billy Bigelow calling
Merry-go-round happiness at your fingertips.
Reach out, reach out,
Touch the metal
Touch the wood as it glides by!

DF: Ah! The parakeet, the parakeet, the beloved parakeet, that swings round and round its cage and says: “Let me be free, let me be free, because my song, my beautiful song is a lament.”

JM: Slithering like a salamander through the wiggly thoughts and wiggly down-hearted influences, the casting of the debt, the debt that used to be mine, it’s now become millions of poor men’s dollars, poor men’s dollars…

DF: Really, Reginald, when I stood at the top of the stairwell, and I saw that ancient, evil-looking snakes were slithering up and down, up and down, on the well-trod stairs, I thought “this time she has gone too far in her avant-garde sense of decor.”

JM: The regularity you’ll find in the beats, the speeches, the marked time, the wickedness that’s enveloped in each phrase, it dominates, and then wiggles in, trying to get a profit, a profit where none should be given. Can you abide this, or must you revolt?

DF: Actually, what I was thinking of doing was opening a small, little door, kind of like the door that’s in an advent calendar, and just peeping out to see if the guests had gotten so nervous they decided to go home on their own.

JM: I’ll wager you’ve not invested enough time to learn the secrets that are implanted in every plant and every crop that we have in our vast, vast array of farmlands.