Speak and Spell - 'The Con'
Post date: Aug 29, 2013 9:18:18 PM
Photo from Rob Bass' 'We Are All Supergods' article, Bleeding Cool
'The Con' was a one-off spoken word performance delivered by Grant Morrison (and musical collaborators Gerard Way and James Jean of My Chemical Romance) on the opening night of Morrisoncon at the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel on September 28th 2012. "Part short story, part history, part occult ritual", 'The Con' told the tale of celebrated aviator and world-class recluse Howard Hughes' duel to the death against foppish King of Schmaltz Liberace, "for the soul of Las Vegas".
I've spent the best part of a week listening to an audience recording of 'The Con' from YouTube and trying to transcribe it as best I can. It's almost there but if anyone has any ideas of what the few missing words might be (indicated in the text with a ??), please do get in touch and let me know. Similarly if you have any better ideas for some of the bits I'm not sure about (the parts that are underlined) I'd love to hear them. And I'd especially like to hear from you if you were one of the lucky folks who walked away on the night with a page from Morrison's discarded script.
'The Con' is brilliant - one of the finest pieces Morrison has written in a long time. Drawing variously on Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson and Shea and Wilson's Illuminatus!, I can imagine that a lot of its complexities went totally over the heads of most of the audience who were there to see it, partly because of Americans' well-documented troubles understanding the Scots accent and partly because it's so dense and reference-laden that it's almost impossible to go into it cold and make any sense of large portions of it.
Just as a heads up before you dive in, it's probably worth knowing that Liberace was born 'Vladziu Valentino Liberace', though he was also known variously as 'Walter' (to his family) and 'Lee' (to his friends); and that 'Montecore' was the name of one of Siegried & Roy's white tigers, who famously and abruptly ended their long running Vegas show in 2003 by mauling Roy Horn.
Obviously as far as the grammar and formatting go I've just had to make it up on the fly to try and ham-fistedly recreate the rhythm of the performance. If you have any issues with it, why not try transcribing it yourself you ungrateful wretch? :)