bodies as it has the bodies of popular entertainers since the time
of Swing. (Was it really the chaste embraces of the love-struck that
Gene Krupa’s tribal pounding and the raspy braying of trumpets
were supposed to evoke with every performance of the Glenn Miller
1935 classic “Sing, Sing, Sing,” for example, as primal an arrangement
of sounds in its own way as Part I of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring,
premiered for a stuffier crowd two decades earlier?)
Consequently, the dark tees and tops are almost always emblazoned
with screen-printed images of decomposing corpses, fetid vegetable
matter, ciliated insect parts, miscreants of nature, or the ghoulish
“undead” and just about anything else bound to repulse residents of
the cheerier world of sunlight and color that thrives above ground.
The exaggerated contours of my daughter’s makeup, at times inspired,
some might guess, by the vintage TV faces of Morticia Addams or Lilly
Munster, heighten the effect, as do the vine-like tattoos favoring the
macabre that seem gradually to have overtaken her brother’s exposed
parts. (“Kultic Kudzu,” I’ve taken to calling it.)
It’s their ear lobes, though, that are the real attention-getters.
Stretched like slivers of undercooked calamari over rings the size
of hula-hoops, they are an endless source of fascination among the
young children and persnickety old ladies ever-present in checkout
lines and dumbfounded by the sheer elasticity of human flesh that
makes it possible to peer through part of another person’s head,
keyhole-style, instead of around it.
For reasons known only to them, my children have rejected the comfort
and predictability of their middle-class upbringing for a murkier realm
of self-discovery hidden amid the shadows. Their fascination lies in all
things subterranean, a less sanitized version of the infatuation with
zombies and vampires that has seized the country’s youth culture
recently, with a liberal admixture of Norse mythology and post-
adolescent rebellion thrown in for good measure.
They seem as much at home “among the tombs” (cata tumbas) as
were those bands of early Christians who slipped beneath the streets
of Rome to sing their dead into eternal bliss by the flickering light of
torches. This is fitting, somehow, given the incensed-infused surname
with which they’ve been saddled since birt h, a patronym straight out
of the old Missale Romanum and its lovely texts for the feast of All
Saints (Proprium Missarum de Sanctis).
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