(continued from)
To continue with the “Head Brains” analysis… instead of resting his hand on the back of the brown cow, Davy Jones clutches the edges of a superimposed spool table. Zappa perches at the top, a dark twelve o’clock figure. A large finger emerges from its center pointing directly to Frank, which I happen to know is a middle finger. The figurative bird that Zappa may be giving Davy at this point in the movie (“…your song’s pretty white,” etc.) seems to manifest for real in the collage. But, if so, the finger is actually pointing at us, the viewers. Hmmm. Jones stares right at it, perhaps aware of the context.
However, in looking at it closer, the finger is not pointing directly to 12 if the round spool table translates into a clock (and the finger the hour hand of a clock). The pointing is slightly askew to the right. I think this might represent the clock time 12:01, which can be rewritten as 11 hours and 61 seconds, or 11:66. Let’s keep that in mind to see if more evidence appears later on in the collage series.
Finally we have the transparent giant head of Subgenius prophet Bob Dobbs in the background, his visible eye perhaps fixated on the finger. Zappa was known to be something of an admirer of the Subgenius religion. And that’s another reference to “Head”.
In “Head Brains” we have another clear reference to the Bigfoot art event. One of the fixtures of that event, just recently completed of course, is a spool table, found at the Plateau of Raw Art and then rolled down the hill through the 4 roads territory to be placed beside Bigfeet Swamp and act as a centerpiece. I’ve already speculated an association with the name Brian Head, perhaps itself derived from “Brain Head” and thus directly related to the title of the present collage. I was aware in making this association that the “Head” of “Head Trip” is symbolically white or yang, which makes the complementary, circular iron smelting plant beside it in the Bigfoot event black or yin in energy, linking to the “Trip” part of the audiovisual synchronicity’s name. Let’s leave it at that for now.
In collage 08, called “When Wheels Went Round”, the spool table returns as a dominating image, or at least the top of one. Now it becomes directly linked to the central Nautilus City location called The Citadel, created on a circular plateau raised about 40 meters above the rest of the otherwise quite flat island-city (save one higher hill to the west). The wall encircling the plateau remains in the collage. However, the top portion with the roads and such has been removed, replaced by the top of a spool table image I found online. The golf iron extending toward this modified Citadel from the foreground is culled from a Bigfoot photo — it’s the original “iron” of the city, found by me prior to the event. That’s my hand holding it, then. In “When Wheels Went Round”, the *head* of the golf iron rests against the bottom of The Citadel wall.
The collage is actually a 2 part animation, where the whole Citadel appears to rotate round and round, or at least that’s the effect I was going for. This reinforces the association with a clock, once more. The Oz wheeler first seen in “Simpsons Road Bloch” a couple of collages back reappears on the edge of the spool table, remaining steady as the table revolves below him — a fixed point. He seems to stare into the central hole of the table, which duplicates an actual hole in the middle of The Citadel. I suppose showing the base snapshot I used for the collage is appropriate here to understand this…
That’s my Fal Mouth Moon gallery at the bottom of the photo, which remains in the collage. The iron and my hand holding it have the same kind of sepia tint to them as the gallery, a color scheme that will resurface later in “Comparative Heights” (collage 24 of the series). Like everything else in the collage *save* the spool table and accompaning wall, the iron remains the same in both parts of the animation. Only the transformed Citadel changes, with its perpetual whirling.
So what is the meaning of all this? The Wheeler is obviously associable with a wheel, per the collage’s title. Wheels go ’round and ’round. I return to the idea of a clock, with the iron perhaps acting as another type of clock hand, or an indicator of a specific time. Will the giant finger reappear from the central hole when the clock strikes twelve (whatever that means)? The ribbed wall brings to mind clock gears.
Let’s push on…
