Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock by Matthew Quick

If you are boring, nice, and normal-like I used to be-you will definitely fail your high school art class and be a subpar artist for life. My murder-suicide will make Breakfast of a Teenage Killer 3 a priceless masterpiece because people want artists to be unlike them in every way. Thompson, or being dressed up as a little girl by his mother like Hemingway, or wearing a dress made of raw meat like Lady Gaga, or having unspeakable things done to him so he kills a classmate and puts a bullet in his own head like I will do later today. 2Īrt value always goes up once the artist's associated with fucked-up things such as cutting off his own ear like Van Gogh, or marrying his teenage cousin like Poe, or having his minions murder a celebrity like Manson, or shooting his postsuicide ashes out of a huge cannon like Hunter S. They'll make my modern artwork instantly famous.Įspecially after I actually kill Asher Beal and off myself. The art and news worlds will love it, I bet. They can call it Breakfast of a Teenage Killer or something ridiculous and shocking like that. Maybe they'll hang my iPhone in the Philadelphia Museum of Art with the oatmeal Nazi gun pic displayed. So here I am making modern art before I die. I have to admit it was a cool, artsy retort because it was true. I once told Herr 1 Silverman about that red-line painting, saying I could easily do it myself, and he said in this superconfident voice, 'But you didn't.' I've seen worse on display at real art museums, like an all-white canvas with a single red pinstripe through it. I mean, a bowl of oatmeal and a P-38 set next to it like a spoon-that arrangement photographed can be modern art, right? Then I laugh my ass off looking at it on the miniscreen, because modern art is such bullshit. I take a photo of my place setting with my iPhone, thinking it could be both evidence and modern art.

But if you look very closely just above the handle you can see the tiny stamped swastika and the eagle perched on top, which is real as hell. It's like some weird steampunk utensil anachronism. The P-38 WWII Nazi handgun looks comical lying on the breakfast table next to a bowl of oatmeal.

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock by Matthew Quick