Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Moon Winx

An Essay on the X

It is the Moon Winx Lodge. That x does a lot of work. There is the x that visually represents a cartoon wink. The eyes are x'ed out in death or drunkenness, the unconscious x that mimics the XXX labeling the jug of moonshine. At night when the kinetic neon of the sign blinks and winks, what flutters on and off is an X of braided tubes. The man in the moon x's out for a moment, then snaps awake again. And why that knowing wink? The X of the unknown or, more precisely, the X of the not wanting to know, the hidden, the disguised, the censored. x'ed out. It is the X of sex, of course, the ultimate rating. The excesses of sex. Or the string of drunken kisses. XXX. The cheesy lodge is a testimonial for itself: The Notell Motel. X marks this spot. It now is X-rated. Winx is a kind of poem. It multiplies its meanings. X times X. It's the cross-hatching of a switch, a toggle. It is the map of the crossroads. One does both in bed. Sleep. Sex. Sleep. Sex. This double cross. These eyes closing in sleep and closing in pleasure. These I's leaning in toward each other, crossed and crossing. X-tasy. X-scape. X-tra marital. "Get it?" the sign says, "Get it?" The sign winxs, and you do, you do get it.

An Essay on Astronomy

One can watch the moon rise above this moon. And people do, parked in the empty Moon Winx Lodge parking lot, arrayed in a drive-in movie semicircle of cars, the pattern shadowing the crescent of the crescent moon floating a few feet above them. People come to just watch this moonlight of the moon sign. This moon lights up at dusk, begins to wink, the stuttering spark, the rippled strobing of the inert gases in the tubes. The road runs east and west here, a transcribed latitude the Moon Winx moon intersects and the real moon traces in its courses. If one's lucky the other moon rises above the pines in the distance and then the buildings next door. The moon rises over the shoulder of, balances on the edge of, the blinking simulacrum of the moon. The sign becomes a kind of instrument-a sextant, an astrolabe, or the simple arc of a protractor and plumb line. One closes one eye and takes aim at the phenomena of this asphalted heaven. One shoots the moon as it moves through the night above Tuscaloosa. The moon is in transit across the moon. The sign's single eye eyes the moon's track, tracking the moon. Its cratered eye peeled and rolling up into its blinking lid. The moons are eye to eye. And the two o's of the "Moon" seem to ogle the rising moon. The real moon turns white like some kind of fluorescent bulb itself. "Oh!" the o says and "Oh!" again the other o echoes. This is glacial fireworks. One "oohs" and "ahs" as the moon inserts itself above the moon. Oh, strange cell division! Then, one can do it all again. Orbit the sign and set up station on its far side. There, watch the moon set below the arching outline of the moon, watch the lozenge of the moon slip behind the moon, swallowed then by the open mouth of the moon, a moon within the moon.

An Essay on the Neighborhood of Neon

The Moon Winx Lodge is in a neighborhood of neon on the east side of Tuscaloosa. The "Flora Signs" sign, exfoliating ever expanding petals of neon filigree, tops the hill above the Moon Winx. I imagine that company has something to do with this precinct of light twinkling along the street. The Bel Aire Motel's sign, a sapphire waterfall, is within sight of the Moon Winx. A block or two farther west, leading farther into Tuscaloosa, is Leland Center, whose asymmetrical cacophony of neonencrusted signage disappeared in a recent beautification effort of the Alberta City suburb. The light sparked and flashed but the sign itself, the underlying skeleton, cantilevered and jointed, was framed with contrasting shapes, organic and industrial. Nearby a Mason's lodge in a loft is identified with a second story-hanging pendant of neon, the proprietary compass of the order outlined in pulsing green. A tattoo parlor is tattooed with a blood red statement, "Tattoo," rendered in a corduroy effect of letter within letter, a vibration, tiered in a way that recedes inward or, if you look at it the other way, back outwards. And off in the distance on the other side of the parking lot is the Leland Bowling Lanes, faced with its three-story wobbling pin and planet-sized bowling ball, pockmarked with finger holes and outfitted with rings of neon in concentric circles, a target, that, at night, lights up the illusion of depth and distance as the ball rolls away in ever-shrinking halos until, suddenly, it reappears, massive black and back, the big bang, at the starting point, a warp of time, a crazed loop looping. A new arrival is a Sonic drive-in, one of the chain of identical boxes, the building and awnings clad in endless wirings of light, an architectural "quotation" quoting the past that is still present all around it here. It sits there, self-consciously, I think. It is all neon and all about neon. Neon for neon's sake. Its tubes are not bent to animate or to make a gesture toward the gestures of objects we are meant to desire. Nothing appears or disappears, the old urban hypnosis. Not that. The Sonic is transparently illuminated. Sometimes the tubes of light are just tubes of light.

An Essay on Film

Students set up their cameras in the parking lot of the Moon Winx Lodge. Scenes have been written to be staged beneath the sign. Actors act, play out their domestic dramas with the goofy sign walleyed in the middle distance. Or at night, the sign provides the only available light, exposes the shadows with its backlighting. The sound of its humming neon, a kind of snoring, has been collected on endless spools of magnetic tape or nowbottomless bits of digital memory. The metronome of its switching valences keeps time, ambient meter pulses beneath the pingpong dialogue of the backlit principles. I like the sign best when it is out of focus, smeared illegible in the background until it is pulled into view, etched in the inky night, a dissolve that resolves the scene, an establishing shot that materializes out of the soft cloud of hovering light. The moviemakers are attracted to the Moon Winx like the moths who can't help themselves. The cameras roll, recording this epic-insect invaders of the moon. It is all so damned atmospheric, this moon. So suggestive. A moody moon. The film crews hose down the empty blacktop, hoping to capture the moon's eel-like reflection in the shimmering pools, the pools already steaming in the hot southern night.

An Essay on Lunatics

She is one of many who walk the streets of Tuscaloosa. They are mainstreamed now from the city's half-dozen asylums. The old railroad tracks curve along the fence line of Bryce Hospital, past the front gate, and then cut through the university next door. A joke often repeated is that a passenger getting off here would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the two state institutions. She follows the old rights of way, her marching cadence matching the verses she shouts. A flock of spondees circles her. She walks each day from one side of the city to the other. As I pass her in the car or as I am walking by, I hear snatches of her ambulatory sermon-a patchwork of damnations, rhetorical questions, ecstatic description, gothic tableaus. Other patients are roped together, mountaineering the arching viaduct, spelunking the underpasses. A city animated by cadres of distracted constitutionals. Old men wander Fifteenth Street, bindle stiffed and muttering, giving directions to themselves and each other while even older men wobble on ancient bicycles, collect crushed cans from the gutters, filling saddle bags made from plastic store sacks. I saw her as I was driving down University. There she was, stopped in her tracks, gesticulating, staring at the smiling moon of the Moon Winx Lodge, silent for once. I watched her in the rear view mirror reversed. The writing on the sign all backwards, her face turned up, trying to think of what to say to that beneficent expression looking down at her.

A Note on Blackbirds as Notes

A blackbird sits on the topmost tip of the crescent moon. Another blackbird perches on the curving point below the bemused cartoon profile of the man in the moon, a bas-relief rookery. A passing horn startles both from their roosts. They become airborne punctuation: a semicolon. For a moment, they form that formation, exponent suspended, the final stroke: a bass clef.

An Essay on Dreams

I like the new evolutionary theory of dreams, of why we dream. An animal more likely to survive is one who can stay still, and sleep keeps one still. Dreams evolved, so the theory goes, to keep the mind busy while the body sleeps. Dreams take the mind's mind off waking, make the mind mind. This sign is a dream itself, a dream of itself-with its flying buttress of articulation, its squareless expressionism askewing every angle, askance glance. In the dark, its various shapes unhinge and float, solid matte slabs behind the wired light, a mobile of rhomboid shadows, polyhedral swatches, interrupted radii. The sign is a dream. The sign is a sign signifying "dream."

An Essay on Attractive Nuisance

There is a ladder leaning against the Moon Winx Lodge sign. It casts its hard-edged repeating shadow on the underlying French curves of the sign's design, striping the moon, a kind of dazzleflage. No one's around. Perhaps this is evidence of routine maintenance. Paint needed to be scraped and touched up. Rust removed with some steel wool. Some glass tubing replaced or reconnected. A bird's nest in a dimpled cranny on the moon's cheek knocked down. The perspective of the ladder is inviting. Sighting up, it seems the side rails slant inward, that somewhere way overhead they will meet, a vanishing point within reach. But the ladder leads only up to the moon. I am reminded of the Italo Calvino fable involving ladders, the moon, and lost love. There are times when the moon seems that close, close enough to climb to, to clamor on. But that is always an illusion, a trick of light, the deficiency of our own limited sensing apparatus. There is delight, though, in possibility. The first rung is beneath your feet.

An Essay on Signs of Signs

I wonder who owns the Moon Winx Lodge sign. Probably the same person who owns the Moon Winx Lodge. The motel itself, brick colonial barracks arrayed on terraces behind the office hut, is worse for wear. A few rooms appear occupied, even lived in, the accommodations now week to week. The place has gone to seed, gone way past seedy. Now, no hourly rates offered for trysts or assignation. No, the house here has the air of flop-buckets with old-style mops and those extruded resin chairs, mismatched, on the shattered cement porches. The owner's let the place go. But the sign out front is another story. It's funny because the instrument for attracting the trade is now the attraction. The crescent moon curls inward, its horns pointing over to the ruined venue. Check it out, the moon urges. It has checked out. But you can't take your eyes off the sign. It looks brand new or, more exactly, brand old, an obvious relic of some pre-interstate motoring past, a past when air conditioning was a selling point, not simply a given. The lights all light. The paint is fresh. From the look of the sign, you would think this is a going concern instead of a place that is long gone. When did this happen? One day the owner awoke from a night of troubled dreams to discover the sign was the principal investment, was worth saving even as the rest of the property decays. Actual kudzu grows up the walls of one of the wings. The pool is fenced and filled in. The sign generates no cash that I can see, and yet it is maintained pristine. Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the South, maybe the whole country is fond of those cast-iron markers. The ones that are erected on historical sites, the ones that preserve memory, the ones that denote some significance. I can't wait for a sign commemorating the Moon Winx Lodge sign to be dedicated next to the Moon Winx Lodge sign. Not in the place where it once stood but right next to it. Perhaps the owner already dreams of this, is not waiting for a committee somewhere to act. The sign has already transubstantiated. It is an existential sign. It is itself. It stands for itself. It is its own memorial.

An Essay on Atmosphere

The novel Write Your Heart Out: Advice from the Moon Winx Motel was written by Geoff Schmitt and published in 2000 by Small Mouth Press. It is in the form of a writing how-to manual with insider tips, exercises, and prompts, but the story of its fictional author, down on his luck, bleeds through in a patchwork narrative. The picture of the sign on the cover of the book has been tinkered with. Lodge replaced by Motel. I suppose the revision was poetic. Motel seems the natural appellation, alliterative with Moon. But in the history of the Moon Winx Lodge, using "lodge" averted ones attention from "motel," its bad rap and rep. For a while the Moon Winx itself was associated with the Quality Courts, a loose cooperative of motels trying to spin the image. This is a classy joint, Quality said. There is something poignant and classic and very noir with the book's whole setup. The writer struggles with his work at a cheap desk in a crummy unkempt room while an oversized neon sign flashes hypnotically just outside the window, the window frame reframing the words, scrabbling the meaning. Geoff Schmitt went to writing school up the road at the university. I imagine him contemplating the sign just as his main character does, absorbing its aesthetic radiation, its atmospheric juice. Me too. That's me looking at the moon. A big chunk of that oversized moon fills my window as well. Its smiling bright-eye stare stares back at me. Then blinks.

An Essay on Night and Day

Glen House Sr. designed the Moon Winx Lodge sign in 1957, added the crowning touch of the crescent moon to the preexisting crossword of the Moon Winx Lodge. He told Rick Stoddart, an architectural writer, that it wasn't so much the medium of neon that excited him but the new Day-Glo paint he had on hand. The Moon Winx sign is really two signs. Night and day. The paint-bright yellow for the moon and pastel green for the placards with the cream-colored lettering-has its own charm. At night, the outlining neon in warm oranges and reds also interacts with the reactive paint. The cooler color tubes spelling out the name, announcing the restaurant (in a different font), the telephones, and the air conditioning, look, in the reflected illumination, as if they have been both burnished and embossed. The sign is scaffold shaped, with Moon Winx running horizontally at the top and Lodge a vertical slash, narrowing where it hits the scalloped base with "Restaurant" and "Air Conditioned" and "Telephones" footnoted there. The moon seems suspended from the craning sign. Its face is a sublime one with pronounced cheeks and chin, nose pugged, arched eyebrows, and a smile positively puckered, a Moon a Lisa. The profile works as the moon's topography, as the ragged shadow cast on a rough surface, a pimpled penumbra. The moon faces away from the road that was the main highway to Birmingham when the sign first went up. The moon then casts a coy eye over its shoulder. A come hither. The moon moons the highway, turning its back on the traffic, both shy and an exhibition. The contrasts are most striking. Day and night. Hot and cold color. The severe angular geometric alphabet wedged next to the sweeping free-hand sine curve of the animated moon.

An Essay on Auditing

The night auditor sits in the office of the Moon Winx Lodge. He can see, out the window, the famous neon sign of the motel, a two-story crescent moon, its man in the moon face outfitted with a winking eye. From where the night auditor sits, he sees the moon head on, the narrow leading edge of the contraption, its wide sides displayed to the cars passing on the street out front. He sees more of a line, a thick slice, the intricate cutouts and struts of the sign all flattened. There is little to do. The vacancy sign in the office window, so understated in comparison, is always lit. The books he keeps have been kept. The figures he adds to the folios have been summed up. Next to the desk is a small electrical box with the switches and breakers for the sign. One switch turns the neon lights off and on. The other controls the circuit that opens and closes the moon's electric eyes. The night auditor amuses himself through the endless night, turning the winking circuit off and on, off and on, off and on. It is a wink inside a wink. When the wink is on, the sign cycles through opening and closing its eye. But the night auditor can make the sign wink just by turning the eye on or off. Sometimes he fixes it so the eye stays closed. Sometimes he leaves the eye open, an insomniac moon. Or so you think as you drive past the Moon Winx Lodge. Who, you ask yourself, is operating this moon? It sometimes sleeps. Other times it is wide awake. And still other times its lids flutters as you drive by, both coming and going. The moon is dreaming. Rapid eye movement. It is a mystery and a gift as you commute.

An Essay on Folly

Call it a folly, a useless edifice where art meets architecture, where structure meets sculpture. The Moon Winx Lodge sign. The architect Frank Gehry's follies always incorporate an image of a flopping fish. The concrete lawn deer, the pink plastic flamingo are ready-made follies. A bowling ball in a garden. Follies are buildings-well not buildings-but built things that are built for no other reason than to say they can be built. They are interesting as things in a context. They are things, and they define the thingness of things. And the places where we find these constructed things gain too. Follies are foci of place. I think of the Moon Winx sign as a folly. It has evolved to a constructed "natural" wonder like a waterfall or more like a geyser. It is an Old Faithful of light and color and on its own clock. I have seen people just stop and look at it, regard it, contemplate it. In Japan today pilgrims are retracing the journey the poet Basho took centuries ago to the North Country. As he traveled he wrote poems. A cherry tree Basho commemorated is believed to survive today amid the modern urban landscape, on a pedestrian island in the middle of a busy highway. It does not matter when one looks. The folly expands. The folly defines. A folly is foolishness and it fools you. Move along. There is nothing to see here. There is nothing to read here. There is nothing but this compelling nothing.