Note: For Episode 78 of I Don’t Even Own A Television, I recorded four remote segments. This is the one that was too beautiful for them to use.
Some years ago, Insane Clown Posse was performing a show in Minneapolis, in a parking lot between a biker bar and the bar that once replaced their marquee with the words “FUCK DANZIG”. Being an outdoor show, the concert area was wrapped in temporary fencing, and from East to West, there was a stage which would hold people pretending to be rappers, then an audience who was there because they were interested in such a thing, then a fence, then, among 40 or so hipsters with similar intent, my friends and I stood on the sidewalk, watching the people who wanted to watch an Insane Clown Posse show.
As Entry of the Gladiators played, the two men dressed as clowns cosplaying as rappers took to the stage, surrounded by about a dozen tiny men also wearing clown makeup. They rapped songs mostly about being clowns and drinking the off-brand soda Faygo. And then, as a matter of performance, they shook up, opened, and sprayed bottles of this self same soda on the audience.
There is a series of gestures that takes place when one sprays down an audience with Faygo, starting with the fact that this particular soda comes in 3 liter bottles for better customer value. The bottles are thus heavier and squatter than usual, but with the same size screw cap, which then seems smaller by comparison. The bottles have to be shaken with considerable force and then the lids unscrewed. The cheap soda (they use exclusively diet soda, a fact I once learned) must be ejected efficiently, with a coverage that doesn’t leave anyone feeling left out and then, in what might be the critical fact, they dispose of the bottle and go back for more. This soda is purchased by the truckload, sprayed by the pallette.
There’s a majesty and poetry to the way that these two greasepainted men in their 40s open up bottles of cheap soda; a transcendent beauty which, like all beauty, is unexpected yet impeccable. Were you tasked with spraying Faygo on an audience, you would probably get the job done, but not with the sophistication of those two fathers who wrote “Bugz On My Nutz”. The shaking of the bottle is fluid, with all the movement back in the elbow. In two long smooth shakes the arrow is nocked. These 3 liter bottles will lose their fluid, but not all of it, and these two multimillionaires are aware of this. A few maintenance strokes to continue the carbonation effect and the bottles are disposed at their proper time, rendered useless and added to the growing piles of garbage, but they’re already onto the next bottle, and it’s already spraying.
They have stagehands of course, and the stagehands have clearly practiced this behavior, but their actions seem vulgar and forced. They added to the volume, but they didn’t understand the art. Every time I break the seal on a bottle of Schweppes I delight in knowing that everyone can have a craft.
