Speak and Spell - Old Fox Dreaming, Sydney Graphic Festival 2013

OLD FOX DREAMING

Originally performed at Sydney Graphic Festival, Sydney Opera House, October 5th 2013, Transcribed by Deep Space Transmissions.

"En route to the secret city, the Old Fox submitted his final bid for a controlling share in Logos International, then eased back in his leather chair like silt settling. For the last eighteen months, Logos International had been quietly snapping up rights to every term and derivative in the English Dictionary and, naturally, the Old Fox wanted in on the action.

Control the word, control the world.

Soon, only the wealthiest writers could afford to splash out on a pricey million dollar vocabulary. The snooty titans of literature would bow down to economics and public demand. Sticking to a lean, hard lexicon of 1,500 kick-ass power terms; 'Sexy'. 'Cool'. 'Murder'. 'Tits'. 'Me'.

Soon all of the show-offy, unmarketable words would be gone, exit stage left like the tammar wallaby and the Tasmanian tiger. Victims of market forces, linguistic Darwinism, the power of the press. Everyday, Logos International employees discreetly and delicately prune numerous unprofitable words from the glossary; 'colloquial', 'efflorescence', 'mellifluous', 'scintillating', 'capitulate'. Polysyllabic jetsam, that no-one would ever need to use or choose to buy.

The Old Fox was nothing if not ruthlessly egalitarian after all. Logos International's goal was to establish a global pidgin, a utilitarian Lingua Franca that can be bought and sold and understood by everyone (even some gifted parrots). Post-Logos International, every human experience would be best expressed as a punchy headline. Intense grief conveyed via t-shirt slogans. A heartbreaking love affair distilled to a pitch for an ad campaign...

And if it couldn't be Tweeted, was it seriously worth saying in the first place?

All things being equal, let the whole world communicate on a level playing field. For the 769^th time that day, the Old Fox wholeheartedly agreed with himself, and the chopper came sulking in to land; folding it's rotors in a huff, going quiet and still in a steaming, seductive science garden improbably situated in the blistering red heart of the Northern Territory. A lost technoasis in the overlooked blood-coloured dirt beyond the Black Stone, __ in the hidden valley, a genetically engineered daughter __ secret system. Nurtured by genius, art and technology, then abandoned to rot and rampage. Clipped lawns and eucalyptus groves, swollen into DayGlo wilderness sprawl; where cybernetic flowers unroll transparent foil petals of cellulose and carbon fibre in a psychedelic efflorescence of petrol rainbow lights. Nearby, a bright green dingo, squatting on bony heels to twerk out a shit, shooting him a half-apologetic glance that seems to say, “Welcome home boss,”.

Half-light of dawn. Tired, weathered, made a gargoyle by that grim and unskilled sculptor Time, the Old Fox stomped across hot, soft airstrip tarmac, beneath the cool wingspan shade of Comets I and II. Super planes left to rust in the day's fly-hot stupor. Anti-gravity motors c-sectioned from their bellies and sold for scrap. Comet II once made 3 hours, Sydney to Bangkok, but only Jet Fury - the heroic super pilot who knocked the crates together in the first place - could ever make them sail like planes, hover like helicopters and pose like super models. It seems appropriate that Jet Fury, a modern Icarus, had been the first of his kind to take a tumble. It helped of course that Fury was secretly priapic socialite Randolph 'Randy' Gray, and his girlfriend was a reporter on the Evening Star newspaper, one of the Old Fox's earliest acquisitions. The headline betraying the airman's alter ego to the world had practically written itself -

“WHY IS RANDY GRAY JET FURIOUS?”

Chortling, the Old Fox twisted the atomic key in it's lock, and with a brief splash of blinding light, an exchange of fused electrons, the massive bank-vault doors of the Voltara laboratory complex unsealed; more easily than usual, as if the hinges had been oiled. Sighing museum breath of chill and papery dust. Leaning on a staff, he lurched his way down twilit corridors, a shaved, corrupted Gandalf, as weathered and gouged as the sandstone inside, skin like arkose and conglomerate, formed in the Alice Springs Orogeny 450 billion years ago, when Australia broke off it's torrid love affair with Antarctica.

“Seems like only yesterday”, he thought.

And all around, drowsy cellular lights remembered the sole purpose of their existence, fluorescing to attention one by one to display the length of the corridor. Welcoming their master with tinny little voices, even as they illuminated a vast and cavernous trophy room at the far end of the moving walkway. A space dominated by relics in upright display cases arranged in perspective. Chief among the artefacts was the dramatic jet-engine silhouette of Captain Power's ray projector. Slung from a giant overhead boom, the fortifying lens occulted and sticky with drips of spider-web and dander.

This ray device, once capable of rendering the human body invulnerable to harm, wasn't worth shit these days, except maybe as sculpture, or scrap. It's young inventor, John 'Skipper' Grant by name, had elected to destroy his miraculous machine after petulantly declaring humankind 'too greedy and too, too hateful' to benefit from such an invention, though not before he used it to endow himself, his troubled younger brother and his brother's flighty blonde wife with physical indestructibility and super-human strength of course. Elitist bastards, Equipped with jet packs, x-ray goggles, anti-gravity belts and atomic pistols, they'd taken it upon themselves to ruin the lives of various alleged super-criminals.

The Old Fox lifted a gamma-ray gun from it's rack and, taking aim at a front page photo of the smug trio, recalled with a inward lizard chuckle how he'd finished off the handsome, brilliant Captain Power once and for all. For all his supernatural strength, the Captain was vulnerable to the same thing as every other arsehole on the planet: scandal. Hacking the heroes personal super-computer yielded spectacular results when it turned out Captain Power had managed to conceal a mind-bending three-way affair involving his sister in law and a remarkable semi-sentient aircraft he'd christened Miss Hotshot; an obliging all-terrain, all-element omni-vehicle with the brain of a randy bonobo.

While innocent Tommy Grant slept and dreamed of a world without crime, his atom-powered wife and amoral genius brother were hard at work, redefining the sweaty, oily boundaries of man-machine fusion with a jet plane in fishnets. Before that blew the family apart, cuckolded Tommy Grant, a.k.a.. Atommy, dropped his bundle and farted himself into outer space, propelled on a blast wave of shame. He was never seen again, although radio hams have claimed that his mournful, undying cosmic howls of dissolution can still be heard on frequencies in the 200 to 300 kilohertz range. His wife, the young heiress who called herself Lynn the Atom Girl, lost her inheritance, turned to uranium abuse, and was last seen selling her sordid story to the News of the Sun.

“Gotcha!”

The Old Fox sniggered, miming a shot. He'd got them all in the end. Well... almost all.

Every exhibit, carefully maintained in it's own glass cabinet, triggered a fresh acid-reflux of sour nostalgia. He'd preserved a poignant relic of every encounter, every campaign, every smackdown. All that remained was pop-art memorabilia – here a blood-stained flag of three primary colours, there an art-deco coat of arms of wings and lightning bolts. A stuffed and mounted yowie, the misshapen skull of a bunyip, the disembodied head of Zane the Metal Man with his mournful fire-hydrant face.

Every last hero and monster come a cropper. Brought low, humiliated twice over in public. Flame Man? Coal addict. Captain Justice? Tax evader. Captain Buck? Bigamist. Captain Katseye? Back-door bandit... Captain this and captain that, self appointed officers in whose bloody army? Whose navy? And yet, with nothing but simple down to earth words as his weapons, the Old Fox had put paid to the whole tawdry carnival crew.

“COMETMAN ATE MY HUSBAND”

That classic banner had swiftly ended the fin-headed vigilante's so-called career and earned him a well-deserved 30 year stretch in the Violent Offenders Wing at Long Bay. Happy days.

And there was the featureless hood, once worn by the enigmatic Mask himself.

“MAN OF MANY FACES – ALL GUILTY”

And the old man's personal favourite;

“MOLO CAUGHT PLAYING WITH HIS WILLY WILLY”

Beneath his crust of worldly sophistication, the Old Fox liked the stupid dirty ones best. Builders jokes, rugby humour. And that particular gag had an unfortunate pun-slinging ending when the mighty Zotian's suspect relationship with Willy Willy, the young Aborigine boy who'd risked his own safety to nurse the massive Zotian warrior back to super-human health, turned out to be entirely without foundation. When Molo took his own life, by first removing the headband that supplied his alien powers then walking face-first into a speeding bus, it was no more nor less than death by headline. The deadly equivalent of the pointing bone.

Still, sometimes you have to break a few eggs, if you like the look of smashed egg up and down the walls... As his father used to say.

Born and reared like spiky spinifex in a land with no room for heroes, the Old Fox had gone on and struggled hard to rid his world of stuck-up, holier-than-thou bastards. And if that made him a master villain in the eyes of some, so be it. He'd earned the travelled-in lines of his face, the laden saddlebags beneath his eyes, the Blofeld lifestyle, the orbiting satellites and the corporate grip on the balls of nations. One day, the great work would be accomplished. One day, this land born in spunk and fire and rum would be free of all it's traces of heroism. One day, everybody would be equally famous, and exactly the same. Fair goes, we're all in this together. Heroes, and especially super-heroes, threaten that fundamental rule. The Old Fox never could stand a show-off. One by one he brought them low, buried them, and __. All except one.

Stark, beneath a harsh spotlight was a fancy yellow Bakelite crown, mounted like a trophy head. Close-up, the subject's layers were cracked into a thousand tiny lines. The Old Fox wrinkled his nose to peer at the prominent 'A' on the brow. A stark, black letter framed in a juicy red atomic star burst. The one that got away.

Captain Atom. “The Atomic Warrior”, “The Atom Man”. He used to chant some magic word and swap places with his quantum-entangled super-powered brother. Years ago now. What was that word again? Excelsior? Exeter? Evita? How could he presume to be owner of every word in the dictionary if he was lost for words, the Old Fox wondered. The irony was thick enough to choke on.

Now he promised Tony Abbott a gift from his collection. But there was no way the Old Fox could be conned into handing his pet PM a priceless invisibility belt or functioning jetpack. The purely decorative but otherwise useless Captain Atom headgear was a neat and appropriate compromise. As he reached out to take the helmet from the case, the Old Fox felt the hairs of his neck prickle to attention. Then, an unexpected hand alighted on his shoulder like a heavy bird on a fragile branch.

A sideways glance revealed a flash of jewellery. Burnished silver, a bas relief head, tiny rubies in the eye sockets of the embossed face, framed by an all-too familiar modernist crown. Captain Atom's magic ring. Irony and coincidence. What are the chances.

“Agent Larry Lockhart, FBI,” a man's voice interrupted. “You and I need to talk”

“I wouldn't say another word unless you can afford it”, the Old Fox warned without turning,

“As of today, I own the dictionary, which means anything you have to say belongs to me. And this is private property.”

“Funny, it looks like my property” the voice insisted. Well, that was all he needed to hear.

The Old Fox spun on his axis, squeezing the button trigger of the atomic pistol to describe a neatly cauterized hole through the ribcage of the startled Fed. But it was too late. Larry Lockhart's final exhalation came in the form of a word found in no known dictionary. Three syllables, beyond the power of the Old Fox to commodify – Ex-En-Or.

In the crash bang wallop of the ensuing ground burst, Larry Lockhart was edited from the known universe and replaced by his monstrous, magnificent, atom-powered brother.

Captain bloody Atom.

Six foot six. Wrapped in crackling stars and decaying cosmic matter. Cloaked in a searing scarlet bodysuit that accentuated the contours of each shifting mass of muscle group. The wavelength of the colour, the retina scorching danger signal of the suit, barely relieved by acidic yellow gauntlets, belt and boot cuffs. Accelerated __, heart rate and blood pressure, like a triple shot of espresso.

The baritone seemed treated, filtered., as though more than one man was talking

“Type One string theory needs one dimension of space and nine of time to make it work. So I've been collaborating with a team of indigenous lawmen to re-establish Australia's original nine dimensions of time, to go with the three of space we already have.”

“Basically Fox, you're fucked.”

The air got hotter as the Captain retrieved his hemet and slid it into place. Draining his unnaturally handsome face as he accelerated the atoms around his body, as he freed time from it's chains, and then shredded it into all directions at once, like dry ice released from a canister.

The Old Fox shut his eyes.

“Gotcha” said Captain Atom. And the whole can of worms went proppo.

The Old Fox blinks. An eternal present tense on the surface of the moon, where wire frame men, their fluid limbs picked out by neon dots and lines, are dancing through stark, white clouds kicked into life by neon naked feet. All upside down like bats in luminous Mo-Cap suits of all the Earth's turquoise immensity.

Where Australia floats, a scorched __. Tiny flashing quartz cystal oscillators can be seen through matte black skin, sucking in __ from all points in time and space. Piezo electrical charge accumulating bone DNA, jazzing up protein structures. Where fabulous bright __. Where blood drips from nail-less fingers to leave vivid garnet pixels in the bonedust.

The clever men chant words he neither understands nor owns...

Zalam!

Shazam!

Cei-u!

Taaru!

Kimota!

Exenor!

Kaji-Da!

Angelic Tourettes. Enochian abracadabras.

The old fox tries to run, tripping on a stair 252,000 feet deep to fetch up outside the Opera House, disarmed and delerious. Half-built, it's a blueprint, a ruin, and all at once a kaleidoscopic tortoise gang bang, where a barbarously accented voice barks twelve-dimensional jibber jabber. Where lightning brothers wrestle across the rooftops of New Arnhem in the drifting millenal firework smoke.

Where spectral ships of the first fleet unload a cargo of aggressive smallpox. Linear time, horny rabbits, post traumatic convicts and their shock-eyed jailers. The world's end and it's first beginning, twining into knots like a barrel of singing rainbow snakes, as William Buckley staggers from the bush and surrenders himself to Max Rockatansky and Barry McKenzie. Beyond Chunderdome.

And Flora waltzes with Wolverine on the road to Gallipoli. Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, dragged up like Tina Turner, sings “I am what I aaam...”, and leads the savage charge of the Cars That Ate Paris down the Quarry Street tarmac, nothing left but bones and air, three to one favourite in the apocalypse sweepstakes,

The Flying Doctor leading sightseeing tours to see stripped off schoolgirls in the billabong. To witness dreamy Boticelli angels, vanishing into the heat haze at Hanging Rock

Steve Irwin hunts Crocodile Dundee through blazing Martian fields under Botox skies. Tingha, Tucker and Auntie Jean sing us all home across the wibbly wobbly Milky Way. The whole kaleidoscopic mash-up directed by Baz Luhrmann to a catastrophic soundtrack of bullroarers, car horns, __ and the voice of thunder yelling 'All Over Red Rover' 'til the sky falls in.

And this too must pass.

And all this will pass.

And it will never end...

Nine dimensional time is like that.

Reciting the cricket scores as a protective mantra, the Old Fox drops to his knees, gathers up torn and yellowed newspapers that announce his birth, his marriages, his alliances, and also his obituary. They tell him he's been dead for years, but not yet born.

The super-heroes rise from their graves of newsprint and form a team; a Justice Squad to face the villain down.

The Old Fox opens his mouth but, lost for words, no sound comes out.

The fists of retribution fall. The Great Return begins!"