Filler By Proxy LXV: Pianomania! (Get a handle,.nous,Charlie, chanterons sans l’été chaud)

Thursday 23 October 2008

Are you crazy about pianos? If you aren’t crazy about pianos, are you crazy about classic cars? You should meet raymanboy: he sells pianos and the occasional car on eBay, and he certainly seems pretty crazy.
Firstly, his listed prices for items change at random intervals, either up or down, by as much as £10,000. Then there’s his notoriety amongst piano and car afficionados. The listings themselves are typically illustrated with multiple photographs of what is presumably the object for sale rotated at various angles, inexplicably collaged in with pictures of airplanes, drawings of Mata Hari, and blurry photographs taken of a TV showing wedding videos and Gwyneth Paltrow.
The real giveaway, however, are his product descriptions. If you hurry, you can still make an offer for his VIDO. RED ROSENDORFER WHITE BARON RICHTOFEN GRAND PIANO. If you’re not a musician, don’t worry: that description doesn’t make sense to anyone, except maybe raymanboy himself.
Perhaps the detailed description will clarify things:
The offers can be discussed before you place them – there is no reserve – treat the £20,000 as a joke if it bothers you – I do, two failed marriages one near miss and a funeral and if I ever catch up with him I won’t marry him for a third time the funeral was the Steinway the Serenade in G on the guitar – it only explains the giref glue and research that went into it although but for posterity and your future offspring like my cat it won’t bother either one of you..
£20,000 The doll was a temptation but you knew the true American would always wait for the end of the pier show or lose the chance.
And it goes on, for another 8,000 words of quotations, word association football and meandering streams of semi-consciousness, all in a variety of fonts that arbitrarily change colour, size, and style. He obviously puts a lot of effort into these things; this particular item has been revised 13 times in six days. Towards the end he sounds like the love-child of Gertrude Stein and Christopher Knowles:

Otherwise strutted like the wings of an aeroplane that all rhymes curiosly previous reaons fly out and away and sound and symphony be one together. Hers or his more is more the confusion. This may grow like the piano into a form of anything born of a love and any construction. The greatest of these I find hard to contain; that which on pne hand you at the time deny or hide and detain by “etiquette” for those around. That it may be by this piano you may have experience. A future I only dream but do not have. The premise as heavenly I knew from just one meeting. And in another place than this piano that was the same to those sounds and attitudes which she displayed upon that. Attitude as it changed in one meeting is like a Flying Circus by force of surprise. That to have been at that greater stage of life wherefore I would wish to be again – as one viewer stated to experience beneath the mountain to stand with her alone. It is now as if I I have recoil I was as if I am still there. And there you to find I know to look upon this piano his and hers be there and their kingdon shine. Most time for the buyers of commodity there are two accounts for one crash. His account the real angel of whom we speak you are told is “The Red Baron” was not but he was bar-ren.

Et cetera. They seem to always end up being about the Red Baron. It’s a mystery that he manages to sell anything, let alone have a high customer rating.