Field Hymns

Larry Wish – ‘How More Can You Need?’ $7
The robot that makes the music for the claymation children’s public access shows since the 1970’s is pondering its future and slowly going mad. These days bring infrequent uses for a once wondrous machine: the robust glowing tubes that fueled its warm orange halo are dulled and less insistent. Perhaps inefficiency and glazing is precipitating this lack of clarity of self-purpose and intent. Over the years, our glorious robot has inched closer and closer to the tiny storeroom window and for the past five years has watched the small garden below the tv studio, a flower plot tended to by the maintenance man and his tiny, jolly wife. Now, with no purpose left in this cold, digital future, he still does according to his function, and through the floating dust motes, scores the scene outside. A day will go by and it will have only a stanza done, a line of code/music that keeps slipping, in pitch and in tempo. It fears the future, but it also fears futility, obsolescence, and being alone at the end of its days. In the past all these things have been anathema to the robot but in these last final years, as one force becomes cloudy, the other becomes clarity. It will go on, and there will be another spring. The suite must be done. And the bees still buzz.

Lips and Ribs – ‘Battle in Nagoya’ $7
The pounding of war drums never felt so warm, glamorous, and oddly enough, orange. By the time we reached Level Four to face the big boss, the team had stripped their DayGlo Body Glove war suits in favor of leather boxers and multi-scale camouflage torso paint, and blended in perfectly between the decay of the large appliance salvage yard and the borderlands of the forest. As the first salvo rained down upon us from on high, Team Leader Count Lips discharged a paint cannon, occluding a great deal of the large robots single eye, allowing us to quickly slip between its legs unchallenged and attack from the rear with our grenades and electro-pulse charges. With the last obstacle behind us, we finally lay sight upon our ancestral homeland, unseen by most of our team, green and verdant, stretching to the horizon behind the big boss like a undulating turquoise sea. Wordlessly charging in unison towards our destiny and perhaps glorious death, we feel the future on our faces like warm rain and the tides of history behind us, filling our footsteps with dark stars.

Oxykitten – ‘Gleeking the Cube’ $7
As Martina goes out to fetch the post, a small glowing orb glides in behind her, slowly picking up speed as it starts to circumnavigate the room. Still occupied with the stack of circulars, she does not notice as this curious floating pinball picks up speed, softly caroming off walls in a mostly silent tattoo, like a turbocharged housefly with some intelligent and deadly purpose. Round and round, in increased figure eight patterns from top to bottom, it weaves itself an increasingly tangled & tight pattern until, almost too quick to see, it finally finds (sees) the small door to the second landing and fires at rifle speed up the stairs, suddenly expanding exponentially into a flat disk that from the time it hits the top of the landing and rockets upward, has become the width of a small sitting room. The disk (room), aided by its velocity and strength, hits the ceiling with such force it explodes the roof clean off its moorings and into the sky. Flabbergasted neighbors later said that the roof flew straight up completely intact, unvarying in its ascent and speed until disappearing into the bright noon sun somewhere above Manchester.

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