Telma muskwa from Telma muskwa by The Famous Sandhogs
Telma muskwa
Len Novak first heard of Gregor Kiszynsky in the newspapers – the Beausejour Times and the Winnipeg Free Press – where it was reported that he had killed himself using one of his enormous concrete sculptures. Gregor, it turned out, was an artist – not an especially talented artist, nor an especially well known artist; but that was how he was described in the papers: as an artist – an artist who specialized (if that was the right word to describe an amateur) in sculpture. And further, as it also turned out, the artist lived not far from Beausejour; Gregor’s home – which in the papers looked like an outrageous cemetery littered with concrete gorillas, naked women riding dinosaurs, and devils – was in Molson, Manitoba.
What was not in the papers, and instead circulated throughout the high school, was that Gregor Kiszynsky’s suicide was filmed. Peter, whose father wrote the story that Len read, said that the police let the reporter watch the film, which was recorded on an 8mm reel to reel. Peter said that his father said the sculpture was like a giant guillotine in the shape of a tree, that Gregor’s head was attached to a tension rope, and that when the concrete blade fell – and here he said that the blade was tipped with a row of grinded rebar – Gregor’s head was pulled up and out of frame by the self-coiling rope.
A lot of what Peter said Len couldn’t believe; it had an aura of mythologizing to it, like how stories changed the more it was told; plus, there was the fact that Peter was fond of attention and everything about the story fed into his self-importance.
But Len was intrigued. Why would Gregor kill himself? Why did he go to such lengths to kill himself? Why couldn’t he have just shot himself in the head just like everybody else? And why film it?
“But that’s not the strangest part,” said Peter, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “The strangest part is that the police never found his head. They still haven’t found it. My dad wanted to put that in the paper, but the police said no, it’d compromise the investigation.”
At which point, Peter’s audience, which included Len, came up with a long list of possibilities on where the head ended up: the most logical was that an animal found it; the least logical, at least to Len, was that the air force at Milner Ridge were conducting mind control experiments by injecting alien lifeforms into unsuspecting citizens, and Gregor had cut off his head to stop the alien from growing and infecting others, and the air force took back the head to study what went wrong.
But no matter how many explanations they came up with, and no matter how ridiculous they seemed, none were satisfying enough for Len. And so several months later – after the investigations had ended, after Len could get no other information from Peter, in which Peter could get no other information from his father – Len decided he would go to the Kiszynsky home. Gregor’s sculptures were solid concrete, hundreds of tonnes; there’d be no way to remove them as evidence – the police said it was a suicide, so what more could be done?
And so one day, without telling anyone, Len skipped school and hitchhiked down highway #44 to Molson.
Tracklist
| 5. | Telma muskwa | 2:10 |
Lyrics
Len Novak heard of Gregor when he read the artist lived in Molson;
an amateur concrete sculptor freak who sculped a tree with a guillotine.
His suicide in the Beausejour Times, the neighbours saw his body, said he did it in the night.
And the blade came crashing down as he laid beneath the tree, and the guillotine kissed his neck.
Why kill yourself? Why not a gun like everyone else?
Pete's dad said there's a videotape, that his head was pulled up out of frame.
"Odder yet," Pete whispering, "Kiszynski's head is still missing!"
Len thought it was an animal because everything else was ridiculous.
But none ever satisfied Len, so he would see for himself instead.
He'd go to Gregor's home in Molson, Manitoba instead of going to school.
Credits
Features: Midnight Review Presents... on drums.
