Norman Groombridge-Moat's Introduction A specious introduction to my reading, delivered in 2003, at Three Lives Books in New York City, by Webster Yaunce. [Introducing Mr. Lennon today will be noted media critic Norman Groombridge-Moat. Mr. Groombridge-Moat is the author of several books of media criticism, including The Extra-Large Medium; Parents, Pederasts, and Paranoia; and Why You’ve Never Heard of Norman Groombridge-Moat. He is also a regular commentator on Weekend, with Ross Lehane and a columnist for Media Dispatch. Please welcome Norman Groombridge-Moat.] Good evening, and thank you. I’d like to be able to say that J. Robert Lennon needs no introduction, but unfortunately it is a fact in today’s media culture that everyone needs an introduction, because the context for perceiving the relative importance of public figures with which this country was once blessed, is gone forever, and we, as consumers of information, now exist in a vast, swirling wasteland of airborne particulate horseshit. But I can say with confidence that if there were any justice in the world, justice itself being a completely subjective term, there would be no point in listening to anyone introduce J. Robert Lennon, and I would be out of work. Most of you may know Mr. Lennon from his novels and short stories—after all, this is a bookstore—but my first contact with him was in the late 1980’s, when he was best known on the performance-art circuit, where he went by the name Johnny Despondent. Lennon’s adventures in avant-garde performance were centered in Chelsea—and, mind you, this was before Chelsea was Soho, and Soho was the Upper West Side—where he pioneered the conversion of warehouse space into art space. His best-loved piece, Job, was in fact performed in a working warehouse—Lennon applied for, and secured, a job unloading pallets of pipe fittings from trucks, and during the next two weeks got drunk over lunch, slept with his boss’s fifteen-year-old daughter, stole thirty bucks from the petty cash can, called in sick and went to a Yankees game, and got fired for urinating on the sidewalk, all before an unsuspecting audience of random passersby. One of these passersby, however, was ArtForum critic Juanita McElhone, who hailed Johnny Despondent as a revelatory dramatizer of working-class angst. It wasn’t long, however, before Lennon’s burgeoning mojo strained against the confines of the New York art world, and so he moved to Manitoba and opened a clandestine brewery. Though the beers you’ll be drinking too many of tonight will be steeped, as it were, in Lennon’s influence, you probably never got to have one of the glorious concoctions he whipped up in the early nineties, which were created exclusively in five-gallon batches, poured into six-packs of IBC Cream Soda bottles which Lennon had emptied into the sink, and surreptitiously replaced in the soft drink sections of Canadian grocery stores. His innovations included the first-ever chamomile pilsener, the first self-replicating hefeweisen, and the introduction of brewer’s yeast genetically engineered to produce serotonin-reuptake inhibitors. In addition, he created a so-called “smart” lambic which tailors itself to the drinker’s physio-chemical profile for hangover-free intoxication. Most artists might quit while they were ahead, but in 1995 Lennon moved on to his next conquest, microtonal music, which he employed only briefly in his monumental Thirty-Seven Notes, a piece still performed today in hospitals worldwide. 1997 was spent chopping firewood, resulting in the invention of the Hatch-Catch, which last year was, for the third year in a row, the best-selling non-hammer tool in America, with sales topping four million units. In 1998 Lennon opened his chain of fitness centers, which remain the only ones to employ electroshock as a means of physique enhancement, and by 2000 he had been elected governor of Nebraska by a landslide. His legislation requiring all baby strollers to feature drink holders revolutionized parenting, and by the time of his resignation in 2002, he had already begun his dark masterpiece of the tanner’s art, Mourning Pelt. At present, J. Robert Lennon is firing on all cylinders. He is hard at work designing a proposed bridge that will connect, at long last, Maspeth to North Bergen; a self-filleting mahi mahi; and a new type of maraca. The winner of the Frotteurs’ Society Lifetime Achievement Award, he is also the grower of several beards of distinction, including a ventilated Franz-Josef from 1987, a Petit Goatee with Monobrow from 1992, a modified Hulihee with Chin Puff from 1998, and last year’s Souvarov/French Fork hybrid, which won him the coveted Friendly Face Prize. He is having three affairs and lives in a magical tree in an enchanted forest somewhere upstate. Please join me in welcoming J. Robert Lennon. c2003 by J. Robert Lennon.