Idol Flocking - Bibblings| David Scribner's journal for thought, ideas, commentary, images, fiction observed and imagined

Idol Flocking

By David Scribner

Last summer, my town became a city of sheep. It always had been, of course, but it was gratifying, really, for Pittsfield to fess up. Here's how it went down. Desperate to create some foot traffic - any foot traffic, any reason at all for people to come downtown, other than to obtain heroin or crack, and there's plenty of that commerce - an "artscape" committee came up with a brilliant idea. Actually, it wasn't their idea; it was an old and tired idea that had been thoroughly test-driven in other places. The committee decided to pay a lot of money to a Chicago company to produce nearly life-sized fiberglass forms of Merino sheep - the big fat kind with the sort of Egyptian looking heads draped in dreadlocks. The woolen industry was a staple of the Berkshires centuries ago, the committee reasoned, and there's not much industry around here to talk about nowadays, unless they considered the shapes of Trident missile warheads or PCB molecules. So, they settled on sheep, a good safe innocuous, uninspired choice - and they contain plastic, and Pittsfield loves plastic. The committee invited artists to decorate the creatures, and by the beginning of June, sure enough, a flock of 75 colorful Merino sheep was bolted into the concrete around town. The display was supposed to bring a lot of curious tourists and indeed many did come, diluting, temporarily at least, the concentration of drug dealers and drug runners. And for a few summer months, to be sure, there was a pleasant mood around town that things were looking up. People began identifying with "our" sheep. I myself had pitched a concept for one of the plastic sheep. It was to be a performance art production; I called it "Frankensheep." I wanted to drop one of the sheep off a tall building, and have it smash to smithereens. I proposed to videotape its descent and explosive destruction on the pavement. Then, I'd use a building wall to project the tape backwards in a slow-motion loop, so that the sheep was always being put back together over and over again. In front of the projection would be the poor sheep itself, held together with duct tape, staples, nails, rods, screws and bolts. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the committee to release a sheep. Now, the sheep are gone, sold off in an auction that raised thousands of dollars for more cityscape art projects. That money must be the reason that in place of the Merinos the strangest objects have been showing up in alleys, courtyards and sidewalks - what one puzzled observer described as "clearance sale art." Upstreet, outside a coffee shop, on the site where the first collegiate baseball game was played, there's a tangle of rusted metal rods depicting the gaping jaws of three menacing jackals; in a mall leading to City Hall there's vertical rock fragment whose piece of embedded blue glass makes it look like a dead fish dredged up from the banks of Silver Lake; and on the town square that's an oval there's a sheet of rusty Corten steel with vaguely human shapes cut out of it. But the most striking addition to the urban landscape is the helmeted silver metal figure in front of the new intermodal transportation center which itself resembles a beached whale. The shining statue (see accompanying photo) is called "Totem for a Viking" but it looks for all the world like an image of Satan. And in fact, an officer of the Juvenile Court across the street from the sculpture tells me that he often watches Goth-dressed teenagers, in their black baggy pants and tunics, bedecked with silver chains, their faces dripping with metal ornaments, praying in front of the Totem Viking. Which means, I guess, that the city has finally done something for its youth, something that will keep them occupied, something that will encourage spiritual values, and something that might, who knows, persuade them to stay around: The city has given them an idol to worship.

It's low tide for WAVE systems, the Lee, Massachusetts, software company that's managed over the past sixteen years to raise millions and millions from naÔve investors without earning a dime in profit. It's trading on the NYSE at around 81 cents a share. And this time, the surf may not come back. A company source informs me WAVE has far less than a million dollars in the bank as of November 1, with a monthly burn rate of $1.2 million. WAVE's Web site boasts of "trusted computing software solutions." Tell that to the investors, including playwright and actor Jonathan Mirin, who lost their shirts believing in "trusted computing." While the gullible were going broke, the principals of WAVE, were living high off the hog in Lenox and Stockbridge, giving out multimillion dollar loans to themselves, then having the board of directors forgive them. It's a quintessential tale, actually, of the Berkshire aristocracy. WAVE's practices - and other irregularities - have caught the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission - and they also became the subject of "Riding the Wave," a one-man play by Mirin (take a look at www.Riding-the-Wave.com) that was originally part of the New York International Fringe Festival and several weeks ago was performed at Harvard Business School. The show depicts how Mirin, a stock market greenhorn, was fooled into pouring his limited funds into WAVE, and went bankrupt.

A WAVE-like rapture may have swamped whatever common sense there is over at City Hall the other day when Pittsfield city councilors fell over themselves to hand out three quarters of a million smackers from the General Electric PCB settlement fund to a Connecticut online company hawking music lessons over the Web. The company is promising 200 new jobs. Anyone remember the 1,000 jobs pledged by a fuel-cell powered bus manufacturing company? Even Congressman John Olver fell for that one - and continues to do so. In any case, the online music instruction outfit, WorkshopLive, will get 50 grand to start with if it just signs a lease for office space in town. That money may well go to the Berkshire Eagle, because the firm is likely to set up shop at the paper's Clocktower complex, continuing the cozy financial relationship between the city and the newspaper.

Just as there are those who smugly send others off to kill and die, there are others who display largely unheralded acts of courage in defense of the sanctity of life, defying the odds and not, as Dylan Thomas wrote, going gentle. On a train to New York last weekend I ran into Lenoxian Marc Usow, an anesthesiologist at Albany Med, and John Toole, an insurance executive from Lee, who were on their way to take part in the New York City Marathon. This run had a special meaning for them. A friend of theirs and fellow runner, Brock Wilkerson of Stockbridge, was in the marathon too, despite having been diagnosed with stage four lung cancer last year. John Toole told me the other day that Wilkerson finished the race, running through pain in his Achilles tendon. "His lungs didn't bother him," Toole said. "It was the most wonderful race. It was like running through the world, with crowds from every country cheering us on. And Brock had two friends from his hometown in Kansas and his brother and their spouses running together with him." Wilkerson is in treatment at Dana Farber in Boston and at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield.

I'm really sick and tired, aren't you, of seeing those sentimental vinyl yellow ribbons on cars proclaiming "support our troops"? How blind can people be? Why isn't there an insignia saying, "Get them home."

Ever met a plant that you just can't seem to get along with? For me, it's bamboo. No matter how many friendship stalks I tie together, whether I ignore them or coddle them, they die. Any advice?

The strip clubs are coming; the strip clubs are coming to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the heart of America's Premier Cultural Resort. I say, it's about time. At last, entertainment that doesn't pretend to be culturally enriched. Bring it on. And who's the ballsy entrepreneur game enough to breach the girdle of Yankee propriety? None other than former Pittsfield Mayor Gerry Doyle, a breacher of long standing and point person for an organization that operates five strip joints in Springfield and sees opportunity in the Berkshires. It would be just the sort of tourist attraction that could work in Pittsfield. "Gerry's talent is meet and greet," my source says, "and you don't spend 20 years in public life, as he did, without making contacts." What networking! Thank God for the kind of contact you'd expect of a local public official. Wonder if he'll ask for GE economic development money. Wonder if he'll get it.

Next week: "Fair Ball," a fable for our time, plus news you won't find in the newspaper. Send your queries and comments to bibblings@scribbyworld.com, or stop by Digital Blend. For more irreverence, go to www.bimbopolitics.com, where Juliane Glantz, Jacuzzi and Peaches hold court.