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Vice Blog

SHINY BLUE GODS

There is a singular excitement as the audience claps, our hands moving in perfect synchrony, driven by our unbridled lust for the gift we are about to receive. A numinous gift, debased by the constraints of human language. Front row, center, in my plastic splash resistant poncho, I have begun to drench myself with anticipatory sweat. The audience, predominantly children, scream in unison, "WE WANT BLUE MAN" followed by five claps and then again "WE WANT BLUE MAN." But I don't want blue man. No, I will not settle for just one. I want blue men--I want a group of them.

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To hold the hand of a dying man, to see the wonder in an infant's eye as he grasps your finger, to fell a tree, and with that lumber build your family a home--these are impotent comparisons unable to convey the power of BMG. To understand BMG is to see it as a theater of antipodes. As I watch the blue men drumming shallow pools of colored paint I am dying--yet I have never been so alive. While one blue man fills his mouth with no less than 26 marshmallows I feel something no English word can describe, among the Inuit it is known as "pibloktoq"--a condition in which the peristaltic reflex is reversed and one begins to defecate from their mouth. As this stercoraceous vomit falls into my cupped and trembling hands, I turn my face away from the stage in abject shame. The Blue Men just smile. They smile with an unbearable compassion and begin drumming even harder. They drum so hard that the fourth wall is shattered--audience becomes performer and performer audience, all the kings horses and all the kings men can never--and will never--put it back together again. I have been electrocuted, lobotomized. I have drunk of the Elusinian kykeon and been born anew with wet placenta clinging to my nude and vulnerable body.

And I laugh. At times I laugh so hard that I quite seriously fear I will die. There are 43 muscles in the face and I feel each of them contracting simultaneously in tetanized agony. Eyes bulging, hot tears streaming down my cheeks, choking, pyrexial. I gasp for air but my lungs have ceased to oxygenate my blood. Time stops, a mallet is poised in the hand of one blue man while another is doing some weird thing with a pipe. I am alone in a vacuum, alone with three blue men. The same terrified joy one feels as they strangle themselves with a belt until they are reduced to a mere kernel of being--biting a lemon at the moment of orgasm in order to shock the senses--then the mallet strikes the drum skin and back to life I return, defibrillated by the rhythm. Laughing at the universe, mydriatic, shivering, frozen insects crawling underneath my skin.

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If I were to die right now, at this very moment, I could say with complete honesty that I have no regrets. That I have reached the highest summit of human experience as well as the most harrowing valleys of despair and from this I have emerged whole, electrified by my unparalleled adoration for this group of blue men.

At one point they catapult a Jell-O mold into the audience, it strikes me in the head and rebounds into the hands of a child in an adjacent seat. To simply say that this gave me an orgasm would be to say that Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was the work of a schoolboy. It was as if my orgasm had an orgasm. It was an injaculatory metaorgasm of such ferocity that the entire contents of the room were sucked into my scrotum, only for me to re-ejaculate each smiling child and Blue Man without missing a single breath. And through this I understood that all humans are united by one thing and one thing only. Rhythm. The pounding musculature of the heart, the diastolic moment between two systolic expanses of vacuous eternity. For I am a Balinese shadow puppet, a twilight candelabra, a lawn chair, an orb of spherical lightening.

An overweight woman in a poncho sitting in front of me repeatedly shushes the children around us as BMG covers Whip It on a series of PVC pipes. I am so overcome I tear off my clothes and begin to dance. I dance with wild abandon, whirling about the isles screaming in the primal tongue of the animal body. Laughing myself into one thousand origami cranes which I shower upon the audience, thanking them in one thousand different languages. Naked in front of the world with nothing to be ashamed of because everything--our hopes, dreams, and deepest fears--are known by these blue men who smile and drum shallow pools of colored paint. I weep tears of gratitude. Prostrate, I wash their feet with my hair. I offer to give them anything and this they know--so they ask of me nothing.

Namaste.

Blue Man Group
434 Lafayette Street
$25.00

HAMILTON MORRIS