Lunar Follies

CLEOMEDES

These are portraits and busts of Cleomedes, “Eddie C,” created from imagination, fantasy, sketchy and unsatisfactory biographies, and forged records, not to mention suspect memories and poorly written yet loathsomely reverent memoirs (which recall Céline’s dry remark, “every virtue has its contemptible literature”), and the anecdotes of friends and enemies, all of whom are rather sweatily trying, as they say, to look their best. So then, whatever his true visage, it will not be found here, that seems certain. More interesting, at least to some, is that in about the year 125, we are told, Cleomedes had the radical idea that the earth is round and that the moon, when full, is actually the face of a bloated, imbecilic, and acne-scarred God. His inability to explain the moon’s weird shapes in its other “phases” made him, or so a contemporary memoir suggests, a “figure of fun.” Cleomedes also worked as a creative consultant on such songs as “Carolina Moon,” “The Moon Is Blue,” “Moonlight Serenade,” “Moon River,” “On Moonlight Bay,” “Moon Love,” “Moonglow,” “Moon Over Miami,” “Moonlight Becomes You,” “The Moon of Manakoora,” “Alabama Song,” “Moonlight on the Ganges,” “Moonlight and Roses,” “The Moon Was Yellow,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” “Moonlight Cocktail,” “Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me,” “The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady,” and “Why Do They All Take the Night Boat to Albany?”. The smallest of eleven busts, hammered out of a matte-nickel alloy, shows him smiling somewhat sardonically, if not cruelly. Most neo-historicist theorists as well as critics of trenchant opinions agree that this unassuming piece is as close as we are likely to come to an accurate depiction of “Eddie C,” for it has been generally accepted that the figure shown is caught in the moment before singing, or, perhaps, chanting, “O moon of Alabama, we now must say goodbye.” At the very least, this essentially pedestrian exhibition allows the patient visitor a chance to appreciate the “home truths” and mending walls, so to speak, behind the bias of the structuralist radicalization of representational male iconography, no small feat, especially when it is realized that there is but one bathroom on the floor and that one “Out Of Order.”