Essay #65 for Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar


	The Essay
Show #65 Jonny of Yogyakarta
	David Gunn

The year is 1958; the time, 7pm; the place, a backwater cantina named the Jinsee Prahn in Tulungagung, a small burg 120 rutted road miles south of Surabaya, in Indonesia. Two men and one woman are seated at a booth in the corner of the room. They are dressed in traditional ethnic garb: shimmering green one-piece suits of lexan with red neckerchiefs of monofilament. Their shoes are inflatable, and squeak when they tap their feet on the floor, which they do with vexing regularity. The men are clean-shaven; the woman sports pelage on her cheek, a sign of nobility. She is also the only one wearing a nametag. It reads Namcha Pik. I would like to report that they were engaged in a heated game of whiskers six-draw -- since that oddly chimerical game of chance seems to form a recurrent theme in these sesquintros -- but they were not. Instead, the two men, who obviously regarded the woman with veneration, were scooping up glutinous pellets from a narrow trough on the table in front of them and popping them into her mouth. The woman didn't swallow, but rather hawked the morsels into a spattoon at the other end of the room. If her manner seemed a trifle vulgar, it was nonetheless unerringly accurate. When the spattoon was filled to the brim, the barkeep strode over from his electric tap and bent over to retrieve the dampened goods, presumably to use at the sedentary doris ritual later that evening. The aroma wafting from the spattoon momentarily dazzled him, and he staggered into the barpost, knocking off his klinglehat and revealing a fresh thatch of tundra on his pate. The significance of this discovery was not lost on the two men as they quietly clamored for thirst-quencher. The barkeep, klinglehat firmly reattached, sidled up to the booth. "Yer gentlemen’s pleasure?" he queried, with an undercurrent of unease in his voice. The woman, her mouth still agape, ventrilloquized "Your name, barkeep." At first startled, the klinglehatted subservient quickly recovered, "I am called Jonny, son of Uxor Vigilantium of Yogyakarta, a village due west of here noted for its grain auctions, Mayan temples and pleasant Mediterranean climate. The population fluctuates wildly, depending on the number of people abducted by aliens at any given time. My mother freed herself from gravitational limitations on one such extraterrestrial holiday. Since then, she tours and frequently performs with the Blue Angels of America." The barkeep lapsed into silence. One of the men at last spoke. "I'll have a pint of bammelsporn, then, my good man!" The woman nodded, launching one final pellet spattoonward. "Make that three, then." The barkeep bowed and edged away. The woman leaned toward the two men, who quickly followed suit, lexan notwithstanding, and they loudly bonked heads. The resonant sound boomed through the cantina, causing sympathetic vibrations in the bamboo chandelier. The barkeep, bammelsporn in hand, turned around suddenly and collided with an official from the experimental House-on-a-Stilt project. Their heads, too, bonked. Again the chandelier jingled in response. Other patrons, their cognition perhaps a bit clouded by excessive amounts of bammelsporn of their own, began to engage in head bonking of their own. This activity continued into the wee hours of the Indonesian night, interrupted only by pauses for Excedrin.

And thus did a small but representative fraction of Indonesian villagers celebrate their country's 11th year of independence, or le flambeau oriange, from the Romulans. Those very bonking sounds, by the way, may be heard in cascadingly rhythmic pandemonium in the closing minutes of last Tuesday's "Circular Screaming" soundtrack, now available on Malted Media cassettes and DATs.

And here to tell you more about Malted Media's selection of wares and whyevers is the spokesman for Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, is himself, Kalvos the Shopkeeper.