NOTES on #114
A piece of flash fiction has to be less than 2000 words, so perhaps this piece is a combination of five of them? I consider it an epic prose poem because there were so many different synchronicities, once again, in my reality at the time, it's almost like it wrote itself.
& I do not watch football, and I don't understand it really, but this is the best version of the national anthem I've ever heard:
& I love Gladys Knight, how could you not, so this poem just had to be longer than others. The fact that she had male backup singers makes Gladys Knight and the Pips even more amazing to me. This clip from The Richard Pryor Show cracks me up:
& Knight is considered the Empress of Soul. Are you an old soul or a young soul? Has the soul become obsolete?
& Gladys Knight allows only one "night" pun outside her album on TMS, so I knew the idea of night and light was going to be prominent, especially with the bright stars in the closing. "Everybody is a Star," is a song covered by the Pips and the Empress.
& The roof of the theatre is an issue in this episode, which calls back to Dudley Moore's episode. In Season 5, I find myself asking how can I "use my imagination" and think outside of the outside of a box? Certainly outside all of our boxes, the ozone is dissipating.
& Knight has two songs regarding a train. From train to plane, metal has grown like a vine, and what if the grapevine's feed are lies from a man? What needs to be taken into the shop for repair? Luckily, the Muppets put on their green scrubs for a hospital sketch in this episode.
& I've always loved the song, "God Bless the Child." I suppose that's the center force for this poem, though examined from another angle.
& There are no direct references to the film, Claudine, in this piece. Only the name is used. Another soundtrack Knight made was for Pipe Dreams from 1976.
& "Neither One of Us" is directly referenced to Knight's songbook at the end of this piece. It was her last single before moving on from Motown to Buddha.
& One of the synchronicities of this piece is that I was investigating Leonardo da Vinci's interest in mysticism and discovered there are hidden numbers and letters in the famous portrait behind her eyes. I then visited the Jim Henson exhibit at the MOMI in Queens, and took some shots of Henson's Timepiece. Looking through them later, I discovered a still that he used where a crack in glass occurs over Mona Lisa's eye. I later discovered while researching Gladys Knight, that apparently (I still have not seen the episode), Knight starred in an episode of Desperado playing Mona Lisa!
TRIP OUT OVER
in COUNTERCLOCK