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• • • Country Clubbing The pig had been cooking on a bed frame since midnight, its 250 sauce-red pounds suspended over a pit. Biggest porker 8BC had had in three years of Pig Phests. During last night's Tarzan performance , actors had carried the pig out of the club, trailed by the entire audience. Trussed in Reynolds Wrap, it began cooking in the fire-lit vacant lot as part of "Tarzan's" plot. Seems the pig had been gentrified. The club was the jungle, decorated in garbage bag vines. And the neighborhood was Africa. As the villain put it to another victim of the real estate boom, Tarzan's mother: "We're evicting you! Africa 's getting nice!" Now the pig still needed a few hours of fire time in the gunpowdery air of a July 4 afternoon. But the miniature golf could begin. Back in the tough flora and cracked fauna behind the club, facing 9th Street, a demented vision of suburban leisure had materialized in ten holes of art golf. So the ironies could begin too. Pig Phests and theoretical golf greens can make a neighborhood in ruins so charming, so newly valuable, so far from what the artists wanted it to become. 8BC had just made Vogue along with the rest of the East Village "scene." But what they intended was to celebrate a disappearing Loisaida with their third annual pigroast , inviting both the clubgoers and the folks from the block to bring a covered dish. 8BC's Cornelius Conboy, Phest organizer, walked through the "green" with me, marveling that almost every club, gallery, or artist who'd promised to build a hole had really come through, for no reward except a good time. Sure, he said, there was rivalry among the clubs. But they were also a community. He hoped he didn't sound like the Kiwanis. That transvestite-from-outer-space mannequin was the Pyr- 58 UNDERGROUND amid Club. That loop-the-Ioop tire and carpet construction was the Life Cafe. And the sonic golf hole-where a ball went up a ramp, into a wok, through a vacuum cleaner hose and pipe, over a xylophone, into a kiddie pool full of silver bowls-that came from P.S. 122. Player after player tried it, lofting balls everywhere but up the ramp, while Cornelius began drawing up a scorecard, a list of par whatevers. Soon he tossed it away-what with the distractions and the realization that a lot of these holes were at par 1,000: unplayable. Carmelita Tropicana, the performer who reigns as "Miss Loisaida," pointed out, for example, that the wow Cafe's little roller coaster of pink and green tubing and orange stairways had a wiffle ball stuck to the cup, making all putts impossible. She proclaimed it a rhetorical hole. Holly Hughes, its architect, said she realized it was all pretty tasteful for her, but she'd decided there was already "enough doll mutilation ." A reference, I guess, to the adjacent Club Chandalier fairway, where a baby doll sat in a little blue swimming pool, red liquid pumping out of a hole in her head. "Look! Blood!" squealed a couple of neighborhood kids who ran over to scoop some into their hands. With a satisfied look at someone using a putter made from a fly-fishing rod and a piece of spray-painted cardboard, Hughes continued, "It's the Lower East Side's first country club." Cornelius hadn't provided any golf clubs. Because what if someone wanted to use a basketball instead of a golf ball? There were no rules here! (Spirit of the East Village and all that.) Back at the hole constructed by Carol Black and Julie Hair of the band Bite Like a Kitty, a neighborhood artist tried pushing the ball over a blue bone and into a tiny coffin, using the club they'd provided-a cardboard skull stuck to a stick. "Too much like croquet," he muttered. Everyone had come to play. Or to get what they could get. A panhandler on a crutch waved a fur hat full of small change at Cornelius, who told him, "Come back in an hour. You'll get a free dinner." The guy wearing a huge Hershey Kiss over his baseball hat said he was looking to get noticed and had brought his fur-covered BMW Isetta to the "car art" show over on the 8th Street side of the sizzling pig. Sure, this was his everyday car...

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