Essay #109 for Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar


	The Essay
Show #109 Furbletterplatz und Solstits
	David Gunn

Just beyond the purview of this radiophonic broadcast signal lies an unincorporated town of indeterminate dimensions and ill-defined composition, which itself exists as an affront to reality. The town, whose name is best left to chance, consists of a single street, Furbletterplatz which, when viewed from below, appears to extend perpendicular to itself to a point visible primarily in the red light spectrum. When viewed from above, the street disappears altogether. While devoid of sentient life, Furbletterplatz nevertheless supports a booming paramutual system of government whose laws apply to only one side of the street, which is incorporated. The embossed lettering on the sole manhole cover in the street -- that is, when viewed from below -- is the spittooning image of the Bimbingens Company corporate seal, a fact of no other significance. The administrators of the street who dispense currency and the bureaucrats who continually rewrite the laws governing its disposal resemble red spectrum bacteria in size and demeanor. Reasonable discussions between the many political factions can best be described as chaotic (discussion follows). Four times a year, when the sun rises from the north and sets at an angle of 23.5 degrees longitude, Furbletterplatz appears to the casual onlooker to spin on its axis, thereby refuting the laws of physics, gravity, and traffic. Radio transmissions such as this one get sucked into the resultant equinoxic vortex, draining most of the life out of the broadcastic waves and any ancillary radiophonical hosts. A black hole appears, both in the time space continuum and in a dank, ivied ghetto in southernmost Calcutta, whence distorted nuclei gambol to freedom, further contradicting basic scientific principles of motion. Due to the arrival of the hole's harmonic convergence, the unincorporated side of Furbletterplatz is sponge-bathed in darkness. The attention spans of chemical reactions are temporarily suspended, zippers malfunction, pole beans grow mustaches, celestial mechanics from the Andromedan Body Shop are laid off in droves, and the Bimbingen Company corporate seal appears in a dream simultaneously to thousands of left-handed keglers. Chaos reigns.

Fortunately, this equinoxic counterflux doesn't last long. Within minutes of its onset, gravitational traffic begins to move normally, mechanics are rehired, zippers again slide smoothly on their tracks, the Bimbingen name fades from memory -- just as the enigmatic le flambeau oriange returns to haunt one and all -- and the sun falls back into the sea. On the unincorporated side of the street, it is a time for that frank discussion of casaba and cantaloupe known as the Furbletterplatz Melondrama. It is a time to celebrate a return to symmetry and coherence, though not necessarily in that order, and certainly not during the next two hours, a time reserved for Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar which, since it lies somewhere between the cusps of order and disorder, makes this 109th episode bicuspid in the best sense of the word.

Furbletter or for worse, then, we shall on this radio show, attempt to pick the musical pockets of celestial zippers and spittooning Calcuttans, of perpendicular realities and red light bureaucrats, of attentive moustaches and gamboling manholes, all the while seeding the minds of our listening audients with an alternative reality of sound, gravity and traffic. So keep those hands and ears where we can see them; Kalvos has you covered.