Zombie Rock

I don’t subscribe to postmodern, neostructural, impressionistic deconstructionism. No, when it comes to art, I adhere to the Neo-Modern School of Carnival T-Shirts, whose adage — “Beauty is in the eye of the Beerholder” — could teach us all a thing or two about presurrealist dadaism.

But some art can be riveting, emotional and life-changing. And when art and music are inbred like Ozark cousins, it makes the experience that much purtier.

Alas, beauty wasn’t mine to behold. I was sober when I arrived at the Paragraph art gallery on 12th Street for the Urban Culture Project’s Music Fest, specifically the “Thanks for Not Being a Zombie” installment.

Strangely enough, an art gallery in downtown Kansas City is the first place I’d look for roving packs of flesh-eating undead. As soon as the sun goes down, the downtown grid becomes sort of like Night of the Living Dead, only more Night of the Living Fled to-the-Suburbs-to-Avoid-Panhandlers-Black-People-and-General-Urban-Decay.

According to its organizers, the Zombie series aims to “offer a portrait of our culture’s attempts to sanitize the gruesome details of death, horror and mutilation, while at the same time tantalizing the body politic by marketing to its desire to understand the insides of its own fetid viscera.”

What the hell. I was game.

The art inside Paragraph probably said something about life and death, good and evil, Donnie and Mark Wahlberg, but mostly it was saying that Peanuts comics are pure, unadulterated hell-spawn. One wall held a huge sketch of Sally drawing a savage ghoul. Another depicted Snoopy as Cujo.

The typical meandering herds of malnourished malcontents milled about, sipping cans of Milwaukee’s Best.

I plopped on the floor next to a “piece” made to look like a homeless man. The dummy was dressed like a Seattle rock star circa 1992 with a big, silver ZZ Top beard. A sword pierced his chest, which didn’t prevent him from holding a cardboard sign championing the rule of art that says “Write your message in a foreign language so people don’t know what the fuck it means.” The sign said: Wer war der thor wer ob weiser bettler oder kaiser? Arm ob reich in tode gleich?

Oh yeah? Well … du. Du hast. Du hast mich.

The first “band” was Invisible Claws, a group of locals who crawled on the concrete floor twiddling knobs, smashing glass, shaking rattles, drumming on plastic cups and causing a skittering, scraping cacophony of stabbing reverb and undulating noise that sounded kind of like a Star Wars light-saber battle in a grain silo.

Then came Magic Merkin. He sat at a makeshift desk, drank beer and fiddled with his laptop so — as the press release had promised — he could “conjure formless forces in the name of benevolence and mercy.”

Sweet Jesus.

I’ve been known to play “Magic Merkin” on a computer myself. But it usually involves a box of Kleenex, a jar of Vicks VapoRub and a high-speed Internet connection. Magic Merkin conjured crickets chirping, wolves howling, whales humping, ghosts moaning and that noise you hear whenever Jason is about to carve up some perky-breasted blonde in Friday the 13th.

The crowd clapped awkwardly. Nobody knew what the hell was going on.

But the main event was Nautical Almanac — an actual group on an actual national tour to support an actual album called Rooting for Microbes. The performance mostly consisted of Twig Harper, a lanky dude with killer mutton chops who wore what looked like lederhosen, writhing barefoot and whimpering and shrieking into a small microphone inside his mouth as he turned knobs, banged drum sticks and dragged a bunch of tin cans and chains. Carly Ptak screamed and moaned and elicited a throbbing electronic beat from assorted samplers, synthesizers and squawk boxes.

Typical.

“What I was trying to do,” Ptak explained during a song break, “was to fondle your energy.”

Um … shouldn’t you at least buy me dinner first?

It was easy to get sucked in. The longer you face the absurd, the more acclimated you become to absurdity. You have to remind yourself that a nut job banging on a garbage-can lid isn’t necessarily making music. But they were expanding minds. Thinking outside the box. Challenging people. Besides, I’m sure they’ve already heard their share of grief. The collective lunch money lost in that room could have easily matched the GDP of Belarus.

Nah, I won’t fault them for trying. Go ahead, do what you do, playa.