Gareth Markobi, who bears distinction as the father of the Utinselist movement that began and flourished in Montreal for at least three decades, died quietly today at his home in Menarch after an apparent incident involving bobcats. Having recently endured a very heroic courageous bout with retrostatic anal-nasal reptilian nipple herpes, the artist, poet, writer, drive-by hit-and-run social media troll, noteworthy bigamist, Braille poet, balloon organizer, bobcat activist, notary public, mud farmer, and standby acrobat was found motionless and not responding to stimuli as if for the last time. The cats involved apparently fled the scene before authorities arrived. Markobi was 98.
When the Hades agent finally arrived to return Markobi’s suit-coat, Il Coltello da Burro, as the artist was known to acquaintances, muffled on his master’s voice, chose to hide from death, and ran away in a jagged stitch as he was taught by his trickster mentor, Señor Venusitano Gustav Chagón, in order to swerve off bullets. The redeemer quickly plucked him back down and took him greedily where he belongs through the terroristic medium of a displaced bobcat pride.
Life and times for Markobi were not all rosy farm-and-guzzle streams in the Canadian countryside. Many nights saw the man, who was also sometimes referred to as The English Witch-Toad, toiling away at his work with a tire iron, yelling in unheard of rancor, obscene and storied garble that ran the gamut as to what is considered unsavory to every orifice or falling short on tines while sometimes he’d slap a cook for fabricated reasons and chuckle gracelessly. There was usually a mix up with the indentured crew of his elaborate and world-class productions involving only the finest silverware in the world but, as Tobar Vasucci famously said, the Markobi collection contains “the finest silverware traded with the lowest merchants known to man or beast”. Most of the Markobi’s raw materials, in fact, were stolen from Soviet underground bankers in the mid 1920’s one or two pieces at a time.
The profane go-about and his needy cousin the average working class schlub were hardly aware of how the person who once lived on an avocado orchard suffered just to get up in the morning because the rumor magazines had no use for him so most people just assume he sat munching guacamole and crumpets with mineral tea on a park bench with ravens gathered and perched on his raincoat while a carriage would roll by, as if society were indifferent, Markobi would shiv the driver with a shard of glass he found while he was out on his daily window breaking rounds that were considered by most townspeople to be intolerable if not fundamental breaches of sane character and decency, the giant himself admitting it was related to a homage for national socialist bravado, barely aware, costing millions of Pesos annually. All of this proved that no human being, especially not the police, the military, or even shadow alien mercenaries operating from a base in the stratosphere, could ever stop El Diablo Delicatamente from doing anything he wanted. It seems only Markobi was happy with the arrangement, and that suited him just as well.
Markobi bought chopsticks from foreign alliances that he forged through sweat and tears and many sleepless nights where he served rich businessmen his coital passions for the price of an audience with the biggest dealers in Peking. Considered to be a one-man street gang, Markobi began to get a reputation as an odd person who seemed to have no interests outside of below-the-belt violence and was otherwise particularly bland during gatherings.
“He never uttered a single word when I first met Gareth. Although, the man spoke fluently with his fists. He would spend most of his time completely silent but keenly watching the goings-on, of I don’t know what now, or remember, or care, but he just got under your skin and crawled there even in sunlight. His face looked like he was doing something that you didn’t know what it was but whatever it was, you just knew it was not something savory if you will or can venture that far from an ordinary park bench,” reported Saliphia Bolrobspree in a piece for Second Magazine in 2004, finishing, “he was the picture of what unchaste hipsters used to call The Bad Samaritan”.
“As long as I knew Gareth, he never said a word to me,” said his sister Margeret Dunwellagain-Smetana in her wedding gown, “he was particularly silent and glaring during very upbeat times and places as if his very presence might upset everyone who saw him lurking in the shadows at any dinner party in town, but the hostesses had to keep inviting him because he was not one to take no or even principle-based squabbling when it came to being included. Oh, look, there he is, and he’s frowning at a beautiful young man in line for cake,” Margaret pointed towards Gareth, who was still alive then, and he was doing just as she said he was: displaying an awful disposition towards someone who otherwise would be enjoying the party.
Gareth persisted at his vow of silence until his 45th mid-year birthday when he made an expression that he had never made before and just decided to begin speaking for the very first time. His mother, who was said to have been present, was so shocked that she never spoke again except to express her chagrin at the changing times.
Gareth, for his part, started bopping and booping his way to gibberish speak, and that is when he started to expand his art into the spoken phraseology of speaking people once he began to form word ideograms to please workmen who often came to his home demanding to be paid for the work they were doing. Most of them were never paid and that was the scam of it really, although quite many of them left without all of their limbs or at the very least worse for the wear. Therefore, the ones who left intact have nothing to complain about, in my fine judgment.
Markobi at the time refused to learn any known languages and instead decided to go his own way, which explains why no one ever understood the exact meaning of what he said in those early sketches of his life. Around that time he met his mentor, Señor Venusitano Gustav Chagón at a human being auction in Pittsburgh, who advised him that he should, one, purchase his human beings wholesale but always be sure to retain publishing rights, and two, speak in an established language to better facilitate the process of conversation with others. Markobi enumerated the top 6 languages and then rolled a single die that landed on 3, which in his system represented the language known as English. As a matter of fact, you are reading in English now whether you realize it or not.
“He was good at the spoken word,” said Brad Little-Archfungus in his memoir Once, Twice: On Loan From the Library of Quit Again – Payment Due On Demand, “Once he started speaking, all of his friends began to find him tolerable somewhat, although, many, such as me, also found him even worse than before armed with a voice in his tenor pocket, where he often lamented, serialized, stalked, upshot, overshot, and vulgarized the scene. He would shame a soldier’s widow for standing in the empty doorway of her husband’s wake without, I think anyway, even a shade of irony. Empathy was foreign to Gareth’s character. He was as dry as Hitchcock folding bed sheets on a crisp winter’s night in the Atacama Desert, and I positively could not stand that man’s moxy whenever it came to anything at all – snide as a roaster hen roiling, chuckling on it’s back at a bobcat farm during the times in the distant past when bobcat farms looked the other way on these sort of widespread practices widely considered to be taboo but honorable ceremonies.”
“He knew everything, and if he didn’t know it,” said his brother Charlie while messily eating a meatball sandwich, “he would never admit that. God forbid. He said he knew everything, and if you disagreed with that, he would say that you must be wrong.”
“Wash your hands first,” I warned him after the interview was over and he was starting to repack his briefcase.
“In a disagreement, Gareth always insinuated you must be wrong because elsewise, why would you disagree with him?” shared Marpin Obocaltolman over a dinner-breakfast held for Markobi’s memorial ceremony, “he could be violent. I remember his violent temper was an issue once, he smashed the church window with a tire iron. The way he would just basically attempt to maul anyone who so much as raised an eyebrow when he began to speak was considered not well liked. I would pucker my lips, and he would usually put me in the hospital without work for ten months. I would recover and find out I was homeless, and usually all my most dedicated wives had left me for him. Back then, you could always find a job at the bobcat farm but I hated that. Too many divas. His violent attacks are what I remember as the worst part of our friendship. I called him Gary one time and he severed my big toe, sowed it to my nose, and made me do cocaine as he mocked that I was ‘toeing the line’. It was so doggone humiliating! For the record, that is what happened to my beak, this is not foreskin.”
“I was down with Marbin,” said Harry Bengammon, fop entrepreneur from Sweitgart, grappling the controls of a fifty megaton super crane while carefully landing a 200-ton levy breaker into place in the outskirts of the Danube Ocean with countless crewman scattering on deck waiting to become blood pancakes any second, “we went to the same church, what’s-it-called. What’s his name, I can’t think of it, Marpin O? we called him I believe but certainty has never been my forte. You’ll know him, the guy has an odd-shaped beak. His doctor cut off his baker and sowed it over the hole in his face. Hey, it saved his life. I remember just said, “I’ll see you later, Gary,” and Gareth, you know Gareth by now, he went off the deep end, took out Marbie’s nose with a long shard of glass. He always carried around glass like that, he said it was for good luck but we knew it meant he’d ruin your life for any reason and he was just advertising that.
"Ol' Man Markobi also used those same shards as a notary public to stamp his documents, usually right while a man was signing it. They'd come back without a ring finger more than a few times. Marbie, that poor sonofacunt, you know what? When he lies he gets a wonker! The good thing was his birmingham was the same size as his nose, plus the curlies made a clever mustache, so it was almost a perfect fit except you could tell it was a cruz piece when piss come out the nostril into your vodka tonic all the sudden.”
“I’ll ask you to stop swearing” I asked Harry, politely, “and please keep your hands out of my jean pocket if you would be so kind.”
“Broads,” Harry said, and next I threw him out of his wheelchair and kicked the crap out of him. Down below, a loud crash was heard amid general chaos as beams began to rain out of the levy breaker onto the diligent deck stalkers.
“Please remember,” said Marbin, “you gotta remember – this is the thing – bobcat farms were enormously popular that time, them days. I feel like I should be stressing that information as it is important to the telling of the story. When the bobcat farms started closing down, society closed down with them and left them bobcats homeless until they moved next door and ate the family that lived there, the Fickleson’s. But where does that leave us? Thumbing for a kitsch? Now they want to take down the bobcat statues! Godgummit. Hey, that’s my heritage liberal shylock soup-taking cabbage-eating dago greaseball darkie nigger queer.”
Marbin’s nose expanded enough to cause my crew to become noticeably uncomfortable for a strangely long period of time.
“Markobi barely raised the needle on gaydar,” longtime ally Frandella Holds shared casually, “but the signal was there, that is for sure. He preferred to be with men in bed but I guess that is just the definition of being a man who sleeps with men if I’m being honest.”
Markobi’s sexual line of demarcation was further blurred when, on the heels of retirement and quickly going broke, he wrote a how-to titled How to Catch Broads that caused a controversy and spectacle that made headlines across the globe because the work itself comprised 123 pages filled from cover-to-cover with photographs of erect penises under bad lighting (sometimes taken next to beer cans for dimensional comparison). When commenting on the poor production quality of the over 800 glossy penis shots, Markobi later famously declared that his sense of right and wrong had become “tainted” from too many people bothering him about his book, and that if it were to continue, he would likely upset more people next time. His comment at the time was not considered a rational explanation for the criticism the eccentric artist was receiving but no one held him to it or challenged his statement and the answer stood the test of time, even being later considered perhaps ahead of its time in ways that no one could even begin to understand. Such was the coping of the Markobi-istas who by this time began to dominate the international art scene.
For instance, Karlo Norstumpt, who was discovered while performing at the Geno Valley Bobcat Farm, an act that he perfected where he would pretend to be having a show but then he wouldn’t be having a show so that people would leave asking the question, “was that a show we just watched?” and “can this be considered a show if the actor is now telling us it ain’t a show?” and “what is the definition of a show?” and “if this can happen, what else is next?” and “does this mean nothing matters?” and “if nothing matters, then how will we know who should do society’s heavy lifting?” and “is this the end of the show and the audience with it?”. Answers would not help and nothing changed until later, when other things happened and new venues and points-of-view began to emerge, leading to the great Bobcat Strike and subsequent breakdown of bobcat-related entertainment that once represented a tour de force in performance art. But, when change did come, it came well enough and people who experienced it confided to being indifferent to both the old and new ways.
Utinselism tries to re-imagine cutlery in unexpected ways. The style, developed in the Montreal soup trader scene by Markobi around the time of The Great Regression, is adaptable to just about any media (except, as you might already be thinking yourself, papier mâché and/or piñatas).
Utinselism endeavors to meet the gap between the eater and what is being eaten by using common kitchenware in delicately weaved patterns of intriguing volleys and counter-vollies. Repetition, repetition, repetition, fulcrum, repetition, and an oeuvre-based ideograph, would be achieved by employing never thought of juxtapositions such as a bent fork combined auspiciously with a spoon that is perfectly normal. All of this would be appropriately placed within a diorama collage of mostly place-mats and various bric-a-brac like antique teething rings. This visual cornucopia was achieved using what Markobi called “the dinner mind”.
Utinsilism artwork is not seen, it is eaten by the audience. The audience is expected to “devour the work of art with their mind’s mouth, chew it with their mind’s teeth, swallow it with their mind’s throat, and to then digest it in their mind’s stomach”. It is to be smelled and eaten and anyone caught not doing so, just looking at it for instance, or someone who just walks by a Utinselist piece and says casually to a friend, “oh, look at this, isn’t this interesting?” and the friend says “oh, yes, wow, you know, what? It is very interesting, as you said, what a good observation you’ve made, thank you Richard” would be considered gauche. The second person is being sarcastic, but even exchanges such as this example are still importantly not related to true or purest Utinsilism that requires “salivation to achieve salutations” upon reading or even dancing to a Markobi setting in the nude with soft parts protected safely under paraffin wax like Odysseus’s ears that time.
The dinner mind, to Markobi, was an attempt to fasten a bit of real olfactory indulgence in a spoil-proof absence of all food. Utinselism was the venue of the starving artist, it was him psycho-documenting her dinner at a time when Instagram only came out on Polaroid, waving for likes. Every once in a while, someone would stick a napkin ring into the mix to source “out of spice”, causing “utensil tasters”, as Utensilist aficionados were called, to faint away and usually mess themselves much to the dismay of museum cleanup staff who were famously underpaid. Utensil peripherals like plates and saucers were considered risque, and somewhat avant-garde, but, nonetheless, they were employed in Utinselist sculptures on rare occasion as a homage to the decadent, reverse-fortune playing field that erupted in post-apocalyptic Montreal during the Spring of Water.
The Spring of Water, as it is known, occurred between March and June of 2019 when rejected art colony leaders from around the globe all came to Montreal to discuss the secrets of their crafts. Markobi, grasping an almost sociopathic finger on the moment, got himself booked to give a free public seminar about his art, and was later disgraced by the announcement of a dissident Utensilist that Markobi’s genre was actually created by Gandel Shantleford, the old-time radio producer from Pennhickey, Ontario.
Shatleford later confessed he made up the story, and he was disgraced. To give you an idea of how bad it was, Shantleford was given 90 days to leave Pennhickey, Ontario, which is a terrible city that is famously always 18 minutes late to everything. His flatware set was later demolished under a 27-ton flat-rolling road surface wheel by urgent order of the state police.
The problem was, Markobi did not have any proof of concept until one night while he was sitting in a park fountain after passing out from too much bliss. As he was coming to, Markobi began to believe he was being somehow guided by “those everyday batons that you hold while you’re eating your biscuits,” as Markobi was quoted in his autobiography Me.
In retaliation against who he believed must be a clock-watching God who is only toying with his emotions so callously, Markobi took a steak knife and twirled it into a ball. Without much planning it seems, he brought the impromptu sculpture to the event, with blood pouring from a fresh wound that he gave himself trying to handle the cutting edge. Using only his bleeding hand as a pedestal, Markobi caused a stir among the aristocrats in the crowd. Some patrons were so distraught over what he might be doing that they did themselves in that very evening while others fed unwanted babies to the bobcats.
Either that or they were stabbed by the monstrosity knife and the babies were growing up to be messiahs, not like the last ones, but this time real messiahs who really do a good job and don’t just say they couldn’t help because of elusive “mysterious ways” – but the mother of history is holding her tongue on that turn of events. For his part, Markobi could not beat that woman while she did a fairly decent job of whipping his ass every chance she got. No one present ever spoke of the knife show – not once, not ever. One college student was asked about it at an ice cream social and he asked his wife to bring him a thousand volts through the windpipe in response.
However, just like all gimmicks, this one really worked. The art community was enthralled, enamored, and entranced by the little big man from way out in the sticks of Canada. They were delighted that art had finally achieved an amount of genocide to add to its arsenal. They considered that most genocides of the past actually targeted poets and artists – well now it was their turn to do a little payback and they made a strong ally with the free-range bobcats of the day whose handlers were already beginning to complain about low wages and unsafe working conditions.
It was at this time in Markobi’s journey to Hades that the man who once swam idly and informed that he was “just doing his laps” in front of a Chinese aircraft carrier learned the subtle art of the passive aggressive. That random discovery did not stop him from using violence quite often, but it just added another layer to his arsenal of what he labeled “destructive obstructionism”.
“We were having lunch with some old friends,” half-sister Agathall Markobi-Bennupta relates, “and the check came. Using his impassive body language, Gareth of course demanded that someone else pay all of it. He refused to chip in despite the fact he had 5 courses of lamb and crumpets along with a good amount of apple cider. Remember this was when you couldn’t get apple cider at a bobcat farm because it irritated the bobcats, but we had it shipped from the south United States at great expense just for his benefit.”
“Well, no one at the table could afford to pay Gareth’s part of the bill,” she continued after blowing her nose almost sadistically and I asked her to please wash her hands, “You will excuse me. Now, where was I? Yes, no one could pay for what Gareth had ordered. There was an assumption among us that Gareth was about to execute one of the in-laws and most of us were posturing our husbands away from such a fate.”
“What knives there were on the table were casually sent back to the kitchen in preparation,” says David Welshman, making every effort to touch my body, “I was making my peace with Olympus when something very strange happened.”
“What was that?” I asked casually.
“I don’t remember,” the former heavyweight hockey star said, “what were we talking about?”
“You were telling me about Gareth Markobi, your brother-in-law,” I reminded him.
“What the blazes? I don’t want to talk about that fool with no chink muckraker,” Welshman continued, “all I know is the bobcats got him and I was glad they done it.”
Markobi, for his part, turned back alive and announced, after his first coincidence with death (which he considered “overwhelming and traumatic”) he will no longer pursue projects related to Utinselism any time soon, but remarked that he “might do something with bobcats” once he sorts out all the postmortem slander that hit the shelves when many thought it was safe to tell their stories about him.
Markobi left behind a legacy of spoon-and-fork genius, known as the best kind of insight, that affords the audience a chance to live vicariously in the mind of a folded napkin while they waste away and never care about anything that really matters.
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