"Harlan Ellison - Spider Kiss" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

Granted his material was that semiobscene and witless conglomerate of
rhythmics known as rockabilly.half thump-thump of rockтАЩnтАЩroll, half twang and
formalized beat of hillbilly.he moved his people with it. His voice was low
and strong, sure on the subterranean notes that bespoke passion, winging on
the sharp, high notes demanding gentleness. His was a good voice, free from
affectation, based solidly in the sounds of the delta, the back hills, the
wanderlusts of the people. It came through. And they listened. Until he was
sure he had wrung everything from the song; then he finished. A soft rise to
a lingering C-sharp, held till it was flensed clean, and a final chord. Then
silence. A quickphrased reporter from Time had once compared the hushed
silence following the song to the silence when Lincoln completed his
Gettysburg Address. Compared it and found it wanting, diseased, laughable,
sexually stimulating, dangerous. Nonetheless, there it was. A long instant
without time or tempo. Deepest silence. The silence of a limestone cave, the
silence of deafness, the silence of the floor of the Maracot Deep. No one
spoke, no one screamed, and if there was a girl in that audience who
breathed.she did it selfconsciously, inadvertently, quietly. It lasted a
score of heartbeats, while he stood in the spotlight, head down, wasted,
empty, humble. Then the holocaust broke once more. Spider Kiss by Harlan
Ellison 11 The realization that they had actually felt honest emotion burst
upon the constantly self-conscious teen-agers, and they quickly covered their
embarrassment with the protective cloak of crowd behavior. They screamed.
The sound rose up again, a cyclonic twisting outward, reaching even those
beyond the sight of the stage (where the most demonstrative always
clustered), sweeping all sanity before it. Carrying its incoherent message of
attack and depravity with it like a crimson banner. The noise lasted only
until he struck the first four notes of the next song. Then ... the
somnambulistic state once more. He sang. Sang for the better part of an hour
and a half, ranging widely in interpretation, though restricted by
arrangement and subject matter and the idiom of his music. His songs were
the tormented and feeble pleadings of the confused teen-ager for
understanding in a time when understanding is the one commodity that cannot
be found pre-packed in aluminum foil. His songs were not honest, nor were
they particularly meaningful, but they mirrored the frustrations of that
alien community known as the teens. There was identification, if nothing
else. The lean boy with the auburn hair, gently moving his hips in rhythm to
his own music, unaided by the full string orchestra in the pit, unaided by
the lush trappings of The Palace, was spellbinding the third largest audience
in the theatreтАЩs history. Spider Kiss by Harlan Ellison 12 Here he was,
a twenty-two-year-old singer with a faint Kentucky accent, dictator of
emotions to a horde of worshipful post-adolescents. Humble, handsome, heroic
in fact. He did nothing but sing, step about the stage with little relation
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to terpsichory, and strum a Gibson guitar with steel strings. Yet he ruled.
Unquestionably, his was a magnetism not easily denied. His singing was clear
and strong, and he reached. He held them. Tightly, passionately, expertly.
Stag Preston was doing the one thing in this world he could do in public.