On The Passage Of One Man Through A Brief Moment In Time

                                    

“Getting Dead” by David Collier

The only thing of consequence to occur in David Collier’s “Getting Dead” is just that, the death of Richard Collier – David’s grandfather and the subject/protagonist of the strip – and it’s a done deal by the end of the first page, if not quite an on-panel event then stated there as a fact, immutable. With his life established as something limited, complete, the next few pages go on to give the reader a glimpse of the circumstances of Richard’s last years: his suffering, sure, but how he lived as well, his home life with his daughter Muriel and son-in-law Hugh, his habits and daily rituals. Eventually the strip settles into a proper sequence, if not a story then a scenario: Richard heads off to the city to visit his son Trevor and his family, walks around the neighborhood, eats dinner, and a day later rides with Trevor to a farm Trevor is fixing up.

It took me a few readings to realize that this is all that really “happens” in the story’s 34 pages; the strip never puts too fine a point on anything of event, but it doesn’t really need to. It’s all just foundation for the real substance of the strip, Richard’s life, Richard’s memories rushing in, in no particular order, to fill in that rhythmic lull: Richard breaking his leg as a boy, the death of Richard’s wife Maude, Richard enlisting in the Royal Marines during WWI, and so on, all fragments of memory which come loose thanks to happenstance, stray association, and eventually become a ceaseless tumult that, by the strip’s end, adds up to the sum of one man’s life, more or less. Flashbacks occur within flashbacks, memory shifts sideways to entertaining  and irrelevant anecdotes, allusions to other stories pass quick and unexplained – all of which is to say the story is a make-no-mistake ramble, at once urgent (in purpose) and willing to move only at its own pace, stopping and starting as it wants to.

That’s the jolly irony the strip exults in – how, despite the never-too-emphasized action, it just barrels along as a nigh-unbroken flexing of storytelling muscle, a momentum which doesn’t slacken from one panel to the next, guided along by the thread of continuity provided largely by Richard Collier’s gregarious voice. It’s a heck of a ride!

The present around all that may not be our focus but it is deliberate, a frame rife with finicky detail. Wanna know the route Richard walked between arriving at Trevor’s house and dinner? You’ve lucked out because Collier’s drawn a map. And what was the length of the distance he traversed? About five miles. At one point, Richard finds himself walking through a gay neighborhood and passes two women, one of whom is topless; it may or may not be a moment of interest for the reader, but it’s not for Richard, passing by, nor is it for David, who presents it incidentally, no overtones.

But it is there. That the present tense – this brief and not especially noteworthy segment of time – isn’t simply a springboard for Richard’s reverie but is as textured as can be gets at what’s unusual about “Getting Dead”, if only in relation to the stories surrounding it in Portraits From Life. Those strips all fall within a familiar template: Collier encountering a life, often some figure currently residing in footnotes (the Women’s High Jump gold medalist in the 1928 Olympics, the man who coined the term “psychedelic”) and recounting it mainly in broad strokes – experience and decisive actions, epiphanies, notable events, etc. Like Eddie Campbell (an artist Collier bears no small resemblance to), to depict reality means acknowledging the perspective from which it is seen, a notable degree of authorial presence, so a nice chunk of any given strip is made up of Collier researching, Collier discovering, Collier regaling. Collier gets a lot of formal play with this (e.g. juxtaposing his own story with that of the wrongly convicted David Milgaard in “Surviving Sasketchewan”, a diptych which can be read separately or in tandem, their corresponding page layouts roughly matching up) but the basic structure is very much set: the life seen and the observer, typically David, taking note of it – a strict sense of outside/inside.

“Getting Dead” is a bit more slippery. It begins as another iteration of that formula, if a little more freewheeling, throwing the reader into the deep end of its subject’s story – nonetheless Collier’s there as the reliable scene setter, partially as an on-stage presence but mainly as the dominant narrative voice, his familiar first-person guiding us along for those first few pages. Quickly enough though, he recedes waaay into the margins, subsumed – beyond the occasional digression or cameo – in the torrent of his grandfather’s life, his voice. From thereon, we’re left with Richard Collier, bound tight to the POV of a man who is both the story’s text and its interpreter, navigating each moment as it comes.

It’s not simply that the comfortable distance vanishes, that the narrative onus shifts from the author to the subject – the playing field of the strip has changed as well. What is, like the majority of comics, a story illustrated by time, time manipulated to give shape to an overall plan, also becomes something like an illustration of time. Or just one man’s perception of it, “it” being a moment both arbitrary and thoroughly delineated, sectioned off, something with no more significance than a set of footsteps which begin at one place (a train station) and end somewhere else (a farm) – we know what we’re seeing because we’ve already seen, in those earlier Collier-heavy pages, what it is not.

And what it is is not a story but many stories, enough to take measure of a man. That there’s not much in the way of a climax pressing upon us as we proceed – that things simply are – means that every moment seen holds the same rough value and, bouncing back and forth between the “then” and the “now” of one man’s life, time is not only a sequence but an environment, a field of play, somewhere where the reader can find herself suspended between every panel, every instance felt completely.

The sense of one man’s life has compressed to become, well, one man’s life and however large the past may loom, life is still happening, and it’s happening in the most obvious ways – morning exercises, rides across town, conversations over dinner; for two panels, the story gives way to a lesson on the proper way to hang toilet paper (with hanging strip toward the wall, not away from it).

But, of course, this is how Collier knew Richard – not as a set of texts excavated from the stacks, microfiche there to be mined, but as a man who had opinions on toilet paper, smoking (anti-), masturbation (pro-), and the best way to get rid of a blister, a very present old man happy to haul his history with him wherever he went. This is a life seen from the inside, a life speaking to itself as it’s being lived, fully inhabited on every front, the bold bulletpoints of the past and daily minutia of the present intertwined, everything of equal consequence as it probably would be to a man in his eighties or nineties, or at least to a man like Richard Collier, who at that age still very much partakes of whatever life will allow.

How could it be otherwise? From the first page, we’ve known how this story (if not the strip) would end – with Richard Collier repeating “Help me, Lord!” on a hospital bed – and everything else, as the title bluntly states, is simply a matter of getting there. From that vantage point, there’s no difference between the moment Richard displays the shrapnel lodged in his arm to one of his granddaughter’s friends at Trevor’s farm and the moment he receives that shrapnel, more than sixty years earlier in the disastrous raid on Zeebrugge in The Great War, the last memory Richard alights upon here, where he witnessed the slaughter of many of the men in his company and heard his commanding officer cry “Mother” as he died. It’s all past, all equal – at some point a voice spoke and someone, David or Richard, heard it and, later, repeated it.

May, 2004 (One Night Stranded In Another Town)

This is from a longer autobiographical piece, an earlier excerpt of which can be found here.

Austin. Late. Saturday night or Sunday morning.

At one point, sitting at Mojo’s and contemplating the evening’s next stepping stone – a critical one, as courses of action pursued after two a.m. tends to be – a guy (tall, white) came in and sat in a chair a few feet away from me. If this were a novel written before, say, 1920, I’d have introduced him as “a rather curious fellow” and what aroused my curiosity was the small show he made of sitting: slouching as low as he could in the seat before his center of gravity would have forced him to the ground; the chair wasn’t just a place to sit – it was a place with a specific purpose, a place to be. It implied that he was someone living out his own narrative, with maybe his own considerable, possibly day-long, journey of which the chair may either be an endpoint or a way station.

Just as curiously, he gazed about the room and then looked directly at me, taking care to give a big old smirk when he saw he’d caught my attention, as if we had just shared an inside joke. He was lanky and pale, with short-ish blonde hair that split the difference between stylishly messy and just messy, and somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties – maybe just late twenties but he might have earned a few years somewhere along the way. He may have been, if not drunk, then under the influence of a can or two.

Still smiling (perpetually bemused really), he said, “Well, it sure is surprising to see everyone out tonight.”

He said it familiarly and mostly to me, not too loudly but loud enough to suggest he was holding court over this little back patch of the coffeehouse. The girl opposite me reading, just to my left – about twenty or twenty-one, Hispanic, cute, a perfectly normal person you wouldn’t expect to see reading alone in the middle of the night at a coffeehouse so you imagine she was probably waiting for a friend – also couldn’t help but take notice.

I responded. “Well, I don’t think it’s too surprising.” Not quite as surprising as being spoken to in a cozily informal manner by a complete stranger without the faintest trace of an introduction, like this was a 1937 movie and he was William Powell and you were, I dunno, William Powell’s co-star. I played along, trying not to miss a beat because I wanted to see where this would go. “The semester’s just ended, so everyone’s probably blowing off steam. People gotta escape finals.”

“Seems right. But still, it’s about two-something and seemingly everyone’s awake.”

I think I got his point, assuming he had one. Most people up way after midnight are up for some reason and, from the evidence on display, we are not those people – we are neither partying, working, or travelling, but just hanging out, living out a privileged state at an utterly impractical time.

The girl across from me joined in. “It is weird. How long do you think people can go without sleep?”

He paused. “Depends, I guess. The right substances can certainly do the job, but for the sake of just keeping going… probably a few days.”

I spoke. “Yep. I tend to think of it as mind over matter – that your body can follow some directive you set if you will it. For finals, two years back, I came up against a crunch – I looked at my schedule and realized I’d probably have to stay up for about three days in order to best study my ass off and go to work at the same time, everything that needed to be done.”

“Shit,” the guy says, grinning.

“Heh. Yeah, so I prepared myself, coffee [holding up my mug] and everything. I made out a schedule, deciding when and where I could take little naps, two or three times each day maybe, a half-hour here and an hour there; some vague hope of rest, y’know? But when I got to it, I just couldn’t sleep – every time I closed my eyes, nothing came. I couldn’t get there. I was tired, sure, but I wasn’t exhausted or near collapse when I probably should have been. I drooled alot. I just had stores of energy, enough to keep me alert, keep me going. I remember when I finished that last final, on that last day, I had one final thing to do – to pick up my check at the bookstore I worked at. I had the day off so after that I was gonna go home and crash, as anyone would. When I went up to my boss, she was so happy to see me – she told me she was glad that I got the message she left on my phone, that someone had called in and she needed me for the evening. Sure. Six hours later, I walked the two miles from work to home (which I can’t remember at all), went straight to my bed and slept for the next seventeen hours.”

“Seventeen hours,” he says. “That sounds about right.”

It was about then that we introduced ourselves – she’s Melissa, he’s Steve, I’m Richard. When me and Steve told each other our names, Melissa was surprised. “You mean you two don’t know each other? I thought you two were already friends!”

And while I had this willing audience, it’s tempting to wonder what they made of me – I wasn’t wanting for content – but I didn’t speak much about myself. The notion that I didn’t need to – that I wasn’t too hard read, much like I read or misread Steve, with a trail of footsteps discernible beneath me to anyone paying a little attention – was appealing; it’s just half a day, a jolly wearying jaunt, far from transformative, but I probably do bear some evidence of it on me, an invisible tell-tale layer of sweat, a stink I wear with confidence, a stink I can only wear with confidence, stuck as I am with it until I cross two counties, all the while brandishing a wry smirk I wear on a head which is always tilted somewhat askew. It’s the kind of weariness which contains the exhilaration which bred it, the kind you might have after you’ve exerted yourself to your limit simply for the sake of doing so, at no one’s behest, without frustration or pressure. This stillness, this inner certainty, is something I happen upon typically after a nice two or three hours spent dancing – it’s what you’re left with after you’ve reached the furthest edge of today, all it can provide, and, by extension, the furthest edge of yourself in that brief span. And so the world becomes easy, the world such as it is at three or four a.m., when you’re protected by the past eighteen or twenty hours like a suit of armor, a portion of experience which will inform you and any actions you pursue from then on until sleep comes and hits the reset button.

But I could have been more direct – I could have said why I had forsaken sleep on this night rather than a few nights some years past, why I was there, that my presence at Mojo’s at two a.m., two-thirty, wasn’t casual, all the story I’d accumulated in the past twelve hours on my way to being slumped on this couch, of which a whole bunch of walking may not be necessarily interesting but the premise may compel, my sickness and my exhaustion and, should I be disarmed by the caffeine and this instance of human contact, the breakdown I could feel lurking at home, a breakdown which may be either a distinct event awaiting me or a currently ongoing process, which I hoped to avoid or maybe just stall by traveling the path which lead me here, that however lax I may seem smiling on this couch, animated by coffee and coffee-related drinks (a year away from discovering alcohol), this is an earned state, a rest I’m taking from the world in a pleasant pocket of late-night activity in another town, it didn’t have to be Austin but Austin’s convenient, a very cozy Elsewhere, my presence here as luck, better than some IHOP or Denny’s, wondering how I’d maneuver my way through the next seven or eight hours in a bland booth under headache-inducing fluorescence, instead I’m here, on a couch, before you, in a place which didn’t feel so much like shelter from the outside, a discrete space, as a segment of the outside which decided to come in, if that makes any sense, a place where I can feel the wind flowing through the open windows, a zone outside of reality rather than in a booth segregated from casual contact with the wait staff lurking about, always intruding.

I probably wouldn’t have gone into such detail, obviously – to describe it so wouldn’t be fiction but it would be false, as I’d be left waiting a few days before it occurred to me why I did what I did. And it would veer close to a patter – hear my story, ye passers-by – and that would ruin everything; I want nothing from these people, nothing but what I have right now, these moments they’ll spare, time I’m glad to get rid of and they may or may not set a greater value to. We’re all just hanging out, a random set of folks on couches in some place, with only the rhythm of our speech as it bounces off each other setting anything like a standard – probably not a high standard but we managed to keep each other amused.

Back outside the whirlpool of self, in the realm of action, the conversation continued on for a bit. Eventually Steve decided to go outside for a cigarette on the patio. I decided to join him. I imagine I left Melissa with a cheery “See ya in a bit!”

Up front, the world outside seemed much the same as when I left it earlier – lights, cars, people, stuff. The party across the street still hadn’t run out of Rohypnol. Me and Steve smoked and talked, largely about what there was to see around us, more talking in the dark about how strange it was to be talking in the dark. At one point, Steve mentioned that he’d been diagnosed as schizophrenic. He’d been stable for a few months, he said. “Keepin’ in there.”

It’s not a conversation stopper but the next bit did its best to be. Steve gestured at the Fourth Floor Frat Fiesta across the street.

“You see those people? They’re not gonna do much. They just party and go to school and work and not think about much – they’re alright, but they’re doing what they’re expected to. The only thing they know how to do.

“But, man, there’s something about you. The way you talk and the way you look at things. I think you’re an interesting fella – you might be a politician or something. You’ve got an air about you, something that tells me you’re gonna be someone in the world. I think you’re gonna do what he wants to, no matter what.”

Sure! Why not? That’s why you abandon yourself in other cities for a day – to meet people who will call you brilliant, an exemplar of humanity at its finest, after knowing you for twenty minutes. The real point of travel is to reach a spot where you can see the universe give you a nice coy wink. And it only cost me about sixty bucks altogether, Greyhound fare included.

The natural response to all this was to say “Aw shucks,” shrug it off and try to continue the conversation, which is what I did. Soon thereafter, Steve said he’d be heading off. We shook hands. He told me to wish Melissa all the best for him; there was an odd go-get-em undertone there, as if he expected me to make some kind of play for her – another misjudgment on his part. Bye, Steve. Where ever you are now, I hope you’re alright – you’re a good guy.

Inside, Melissa had disappeared, probably for the best – no one’s ideal of late night company includes a dilettante vagabond and a schizophrenic. Bye, Melissa! Good luck on everything I didn’t learn about you. You seemed nice.

Now returned to my comfy solitude, I just settled back on that couch and wondered about what had just happened. I was quick shift into my earlier neutral state, content with the coffee, the night through the windows, the dim lights up above. A half-hour of this and I decide not to wear out my welcome. So goodbye to Mojo’s as well. The September after this trip you closed (And at what time? Midnight? 6 a.m.?) and now you are a hookah bar, one with a list of daily hours on, no doubt, a front door which locks. The Big Black Table 3000 is on an eternal eBay roundelay, from one buyer to the next while the restroom doors were certainly the first thing to be painted over. I miss you terribly.

I like to believe I wandered into the night heedlessly, as secure in my naiveté as when I hopped on the Austin-bound Greyhound earlier – and this may in fact be the case – but I suspect I mentally bookmarked my next destination when I was roaming about earlier in the evening. What I remember is walking three or four blocks south in near complete darkness, a few lights in the distance, and then seeing an all-night diner, local, without the taint of a franchise, and deciding that breakfast seemed a good idea, or whatever you call a meal appropriate to 3:30 a.m.

So: pancakes, bacon, more coffee. The place was busy. I may have been the only table-for-one there as well as at the last one available – surrounding me were groups of people, couples, families (?), all pleasant, all chatting, none of the expected drunks, just everyone winding down from their splendid Saturday night. I made a go at the stack of pancakes on my plate but they beat me – they looked delicious and may have been so, but all I could taste was the saliva in my mouth. I ate maybe half, drooled into the rest, and mainly just stared at them, or rather, the space between my eyes and the pancakes. I didn’t hit a wall but I could touch it – I was tired. Coffee’s only diminishing returns and Mojo’s already felt like a sepia-toned memory. I couldn’t stand outside of myself as I’d been doing all evening – my body became irrefutable, something to be obeyed, its commands at that moment being staring and drooling. It wasn’t simply the lack of sleep – those three days awake may have been noteworthy, but they weren’t an anomaly – but also the miles I’d crossed on foot and the fact that I’d spent most of this day without the safety net of routine or company or, most importantly, an environment I could take for granted. There’s a plan, sure, but “go there; come back” is a plan in much the same way as “I woke up in the morning and went to sleep at night” is a description of a day. There’s a lot of distance between a) and b) and I have to think through every inch of it, an ongoing conversation with myself as to how I would waste these fifteen minutes and the fifteen minutes after that and the fifteen minutes after that and so on… each increment of time a responsibility and each responsibility of a little more import than the last as my energy reserves dwindle and possibilities drop off (no seeing that movie now!) and the night grows less certain and less familiar until, with quite a few fifteen minute increments still ahead of you, each awaiting their turn, your fatigue leads you to staring and drooling on pancakes in some restaurant.

All of which is just an elaborate way of saying I’d grown sick of myself, a state which kicked that cushion of exhilaration out from under me. Mind you, if it were only this malaise, I could probably sit it out, go into neutral and expect a return to stability soon enough. But there’s also this restaurant, a thoroughly decent place which is bright, pleasant, quite bustling. And when you’re sick of your own presence amidst a bright and pleasant bustle, it only throws you into relief as someone who can’t share in it, someone alone, lonely, someone who’d been lonely for a long time. Who the fuck feels compelled to walk around a city to make himself feel something? A lonely person, that’s who, someone who has instantly convinced himself that he had never been as happy, as casually happy, as the people around him. In comparison to them I felt sad and seedy, a sad and seedy person who’d lead a life he retroactively declared as sad and seedy, ready to join the ranks of sad folk you pass on the street, people who’d grown accustomed to a life synonymous with exhaustion, people who became sad and seedy because dignity gets so easily tossed when your life consists of exhaustion, an exhaustion you live with daily and whose only reward is another day alive with exhaustion, for whom sleep was only an interruption of exhaustion and not its resolution, whose maturity meant becoming not acclimated to life but to exhaustion, who railed against exhaustion on Friday night and woke up on Saturday morning more exhausted – people who wore semi-permanent half-smiles and whose skin around their eyes seemed to have sunk into their skull, with the curves of those eyes showing all too well from within. The four, five, six hours I’d yet to experience but knew I’d have to (I sensed) won’t just be a burden to add to all the rest – they’d be a repetition of this moment, with my eyes focusing and unfocusing before these pac-man shaped pancakes (adorned with sliced strawberries and that always-neat ice cream scoop of butter) while the background noise of laughter and shouting rang loud as judgment. My original intent – to waste an hour and a half or so with this meal, the better to carry me comfortably close to when the bus I pegged as the first step back home began its early morning route – was tossed. After forty-five minutes I paid my bill, tipped generously, and left.

Back outside, I navigated streets I’d never walked through and whose names I’ve now forgotten, something I did confidently, with resolve – I think I assumed this guise of competence because my only real desire was to curl into the fetal position in the middle of a convenient patch of pavement, preferably a patch of pavement regularly used by traffic. I managed to escape that funk soon enough – maybe it was this sudden sense of focus or a small burst of adrenaline, probably both. Despite the fact that it’s all ghosts and cars passing at ten-minute intervals, the world seemed real once again: I was just someone like anyone else, someone making my way. I found the bus stop where I needed to be and sat for an hour, maybe an hour and a half.

There I was greeted by nothing and more nothing, continually. Nothing times nothing equals nothing, elementary school math. I imagined some passing tumbleweeds to amuse myself, but the idea of movement fell off the scene frictionlessly. You fall into this mood like a river and you get carried along; story and association were quick to fall away, leaving behind a Man, a Street, a Bus Stop, and the Early Morning in the steady process of becoming Day. The Sun, a perfect thing which can only be itself and can only ever refer to itself, would soon arrive and bring with it distinction and definition. So I watched everything in the world gradually become more and more beautiful. Actually there was no accumulation in beauty – the difference between the way things were at 4:58 and 4:59 or 4:43 and 5:12 wasn’t a matter of degree but a sense of each moment in of itself; as if compensating for the happy vacuum surrounding, the smallest increments of time take on their own texture and character, each one quick to exit the stage for another. You don’t need to go somewhere else for that epiphany, just pay a little attention.

Down the street, where my eyes were always angled for the bus due to arrive in an hour and then x amount of minutes, there’s a series of shops, a storefront, a very pleasant trail of perspective that led to the horizon. I mention it for the same reason I mention every other detail in this story – it was there and I saw it. One day, I’ll go back to that spot before dawn breaks and walk down the sidewalk in front of that storefront; maybe I’ll see myself waiting at the bus stop a few blocks away. And I’ll bring along a reasonably sized ladder and a bottle of Windex as well, to wipe away the drab and murky blue light up in the sky which appeared in the ten or fifteen minute gap between the stars bowing out and the first tinge of yellow. It doesn’t wreck my mood or anything; I just want to see what lies beyond it.

The bus came and that led to another bus stop and then another, a regular routine of waiting and movement as I closed in on the bus station where I began this story. Day became Sunday, the sky became absolutely blue, and on the buses were people heading to church or to work or, like me, just heading somewhere. During one of these rides, a guy in maybe his early twenties, probably Hispanic, popped up a few rows ahead of me, in one of the seats up front which face sideways so I could see him in profile. His wardrobe was stylish but rumpled, a long sleeve yellow dress shirt, blue jeans, and sunglasses; he didn’t move at all, just sat slumped, still, with his mouth open to the extent that he was asleep or maybe stuck in that bedraggled state which is very close to sleep but provides no rest. All the signs pointed to a more conventional version of my night, with alcohol as a prime component in one or more of the expected settings (a club, a bar, a party, a friend’s house, etc.). Whatever couch he departed twenty minutes ago didn’t provide him with anything like the needed rest, and here he was dipping in and out of himself, skipping between nothing and brief glimpses of nothing. Looking at him, I think I saw what others must have seen when they looked at me: an escapee from the previous day, a straggler who was taking his time catching up with everyone else.

I spent maybe two hours like this, Sunday being a lax day for public transportation and Sunday morning doubly so. Eventually I got off… somewhere. It was close to the western edge of the city – one of those hinterland districts inhabited by nothing but office suites for contractors and storehouses for machinery, 2x4s and sheet metal, an environment whose appearance is divided roughly between the desolate and the functionally pleasant/utilitarian. Your concentration just slides off every detail; it’s a good place to find yourself when you’ve crossed over into another day awake and can’t be bothered about where you are – it doesn’t care either. I jaywalked across the wide empty street and walked maybe half a mile in search of a bus stop. When I made contact, it occurred to me that I didn’t know if the route I wanted had Sunday service. I spent the next forty-five minutes in this state of uncertainty, with only the will to stand and stare vacantly at the air in front of me.

Or not. My memory of these events is at best approximate – there’s the distance of time, and nowhere is that distance felt more than right here, as the comfy tattered mattress awaiting me eighty miles away was both very near and very far, the obvious end of this circle. By now the standing and staring are the actions of a stranger, someone named “Richard Baez”. I’m closer than anyone else to him right now, but still a bit further off so everything I’m describing is second-hand. I imagine this feeling of detachment applied just as well to my state at that moment, so “Richard Baez” was there and his uncertainty was a real thing, a real thing much in the same way that the street he had just crossed was real – undeniable – but something to be interacted with or just observed, however he chose. By then I (or he) was just a cog in my own story, following a script automatically, and everything’s a prop, to be used to reach the end of this last act.

The bus did arrive, of course. But then the response to any outcome would be “of course”, every possible reality awaiting me equally inevitable. Marcus Aurelius reflected that 10,000 years of life would add little novelty to that of the average length of existence, that time and experience would repeat with only modest variations, making the distance between these two extremes negligible; there’s not so much a moral (be happy with what you get, quantity vs. quality) as a stoic philosophical precept buried there: that existence is a limited thing, or, at least, the existence we can only confront with our little consciousness, our flickering perception. At this stage, it’s something I understood plainly, without thought, an observation I’m tempted to emend from a lifespan to a single day, when you’ve crossed the threshold of comprehension and the hours have begun to snowball, when whatever will happen will seem equally likely, none of it especially worthy of a reaction.

It’s all happening and it’s all happening at once and even if it’s not really happening, it may as well be. Which is to say that nothing happened. My footsteps laid down roots, with the ground clinging to my blood-stained shoes, shoring up my attempts at progress. Conversely, time kept skipping forward when I blinked, so I’m on a bus, at a depot, on a comfy seat; outside of the window there’s an environment which moves at a dizzying speed. I’ve lost sight of myself – hummingbirds had plucked my eyes from their sockets, removed me from my view, dropped them off somewhere, probably San Marcos – and this is my reward…

The Whole World Wants To Know

“Our Tune” by The Dolly Mixture

This is my favorite song in the world right now, with an emphasis on “right now”. The stupidly obvious meaning of life is whatever song you’re preoccupied with at any given moment.

As evidenced by the title, it’s a song about another sort of song, “Our Tune”, i.e. the replayable bit of bliss which becomes hopelessly entangled with a relationship at some formative moment and so stands as a neat signifier of that connection and all the possibilities it may engender; more specifically, it’s about that song after the fact, when it becomes a nexus of association too weighty to bear and you can hear the excitement and the disappointment it eventually led to within a single instant, as is the casual power of a pop song.

It’s quick and bare bones, two minutes and twenty-one seconds about being stuck in that groove. That’s the whole of it – an easy and relatively expansive verse, abetted in its momentum by cooing harmonies and a bright ascending guitar, that trails off into a chorus which feels like a rut, everything disappearing except flat inexpressive vocals against a stark rhythm section circling around in an uncertain stalemate. Repeat.

Lyrically, it sticks to that arc of descent, distantly at first, with the path of a relationship – infatuation and heartbreak – safely filtered by a second-person POV. It stands as a depiction of breaking up rather than a straight-up break up song; if you’re looking for a more appropriate weep-into-the-shot-glass song of that sort, with enough in the way of accusations and human messiness to latch onto and direct at whoever last did you wrong, you’re better off with “Now When I Count”, another Dolly Mixture song from around the same period. Heartbreak is, as ever, a helluva muse.

Which isn’t to say that it’s all detachment. At about the 1:15 mark, the song, having passed the checkpoint of the first chorus, swells to a wondrous height, a quick crest before crashing back and returning to it, while the lyrics assume a sudden first person voice – present tense, immediate – to make a very brief statement of pain and helplessness. The rest of the song could be seen as a buffer for this moment, the distance all throughout allowing a safe place where you can give full vent to vulnerability, make explicit what’s implicit.

It’s a very simple gesture in a very simple song and it’s what keeps me coming back.

Ian Curtis on stage is really something to see.

So says I.

In Joy Division (D: Grant Gee, 2008), you don’t see much (if any) footage of him off stage, without a spotlight attached, and virtually every photo of him presented connects him to the band (press photos, concert stills, stuff captured during rehearsal, etc.), so there’s really no way of saying whether he was something to see in a more mundane context – Ian Curtis is always “Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division” and so inseparable from the story, a character, nearly a myth if you know how his story ends (which, if you’re watching the movie, you probably do). The rest of the band (the future New Order, a band I’m actually far more fond of) being, well, alive, escape this fate; they’re human after all, very real, present before us as either a series of regularly appearing close-ups – there to tell the tale – or in the live performances from the archives, where they do just that: perform, playing their parts both musically and as components contributing to the scene, figures filling out a “live show” template. (Peter Hook, probably the most earthbound figure here, highlights this functionality at one point (and I’m paraphrasing here, all apologies): ”When we were live, my only goal was that we sounded as good as we did in rehearsal.”)

If at those moments they’re fulfilling a role, Curtis, up front and center stage, is doing something else. Objectively he fulfills the requirement of a performance – Curtis vocalizes, attunes himself to the music, lets it guide his rhythm – but that’s the only visible seam in the experience presented, the necessary trace of affect. He never really interacts with anything else on screen though, nor does he seem capable of the awareness that would allow such interaction; his attention seems to extend, at most, three millimeters outside of himself, so the audience before him, the band behind him, and the camera directed his way may as well be lucky bits of circumstance, equivalent to furniture or the weather.

This feels apt – as a figure, “charisma” and “presence” are simultaneously appropriate and too weak to describe Curtis on stage. From the instant we see him in motion, he’s not so much a component of the scene as apiece with it, leaving everything else indistinct, furniture and weather notwithstanding. He’s not in the moment, engaged in the scene, but rather he carries the scene with him; the field of interest established doesn’t wax or wane according to anything that “happens”, but is defined exclusively by Curtis’ body, a body whose actions never refer to anything but itself.

“Nervous energy” is probably a faulty description – that phrase implies impulse, a chaotic swirl which can explode into exuberance as easily as it subsides into listlessness. Curtis’ movements are whole, sustained, both unrehearsed and certain; witnessing them, we suspect they can’t be executed otherwise, as if they were dictated from a trance (a comparison heard often in the movie), the actor picking up on some distant frequency.

“Trance” is pretty on the nose – from there you can no doubt (and “no duh”) extrapolate a connection between Curtis on-screen and off, specifically his battle with epilepsy. At its most elaborate, his body resembles the end point of an equation, a set of clearly delineated values of chaos and control interacting repeatedly in the vain hope of reaching stasis, cancelling out the remainder: his head still (near rigid) as can be above arms and torso in a state of stick figure frenzy, a jittery disconnect between limbs enacting actions which never flow from one to the next so much as shift into three or four different configurations per second (hit pause and every pose is easily measurable via protractor), while his legs twitch a precise unwavering line across the stage. As pure movement, it’s a drama unto itself, endlessly replayable, with release, catharsis, continually suspended for the sake of friction, a tension too tough to shake. This may be the most emblematic instance of Curtis on stage but, funny enough, it doesn’t feel climactic. This frenzy, we suspect, isn’t potential made fully manifest, just another expression of what was already there – as he sways choppily behind the mic or grasps it tight to his lips, intoning the lyrics while his body accommodates the beat as a gentle but definite pulse – the most kinetic end of a spectrum of motion. Whatever we perceive from Curtis, it’s plain at any given instant, however the variables shift, however it presents itself.

A more conventional performer par excellence, the kind keyed toward rapture (James Brown, for example, though feel free to insert your own fave), may serve as a neat contrast, i.e. someone intent upon leading the audience to a state of transcendence, the aforementioned release, giving a communal vent to emotions that have no conventional outlet beyond, say, sex. Curtis does something similar, but what is made manifest isn’t so much passion as interiority – he’s not projecting outward but giving us a view of something concentrated, something of undoubted and unknown significance conveyed through a vocabulary of (let’s call them) private gestures. To reframe this comparison, if the preacher is the working model for most pop performers, the tools of the trade being seduction, acceptance, communion, then Curtis’ stagebound qualities peg him as more akin to a shaman, who doesn’t spread the word so much as embody it.

What I’ll reach for to describe this is terribilita*, a bit rarefied but suitable; it translates into the all-too-loaded “terribleness” and might be generally defined as “awe-inspiring”. More exactly, it implies a brush with an ideal, the uncanny sensation which results from encountering something wholly and completely itself, an absolute. Regardless of your familiarity with the terminology**, you probably have your own points of reference w/r/t this quality: some proper Bressonian moment of ineffable stillness, a thrill-power throttled Jack Kirby double-splash page, whatever. What leaps to my mind is the titular figure (as portrayed by Aleksandr Kaidanovsky) in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, standing at the threshold of the Zone a third of the way through the movie (click here and go to the 59 minute mark; unless you’re versed in Russian, don’t forget the closed captions); he’s a believer standing in a place which, to him, may as well be a footprint showing God’s passing, somewhere which is both Heaven and Hell, a man who’s witnessed more terribilita than he knows what to do with and so can’t help but be infected by it, and never moreso than then, as he – ecstatic and anguished and low-key all at once – tries to communicate this miracle to two doubtful dilettantes. Burdened by knowing the only thing worth knowing, he, at this moment, exists at the very edge of himself, aware that implicit in this state, haranguing these men, is every action he’s taken in his life thus far.

Naturally, moments like that are rare***, even in a Tarkovsky movie (though if there is a shortlist of artists who could possibly offer the absolute a comfortable and accommodating frame, he’s on it). Grant Gee and writer Jon Savage bring a whole mess of essayistic intent to Joy Division – documenting the band’s rise and abrupt fall (due to Curtis’ suicide) the better to view them as a cultural signifier of the threshold through which the past becomes whatever we call “the modern” in the early 21^st century and, heaped onto that, of said progress reflected specifically in their hometown of Manchester (this latter bit means footage of lots o’ pretty cityscapes) – and there’s some (very loose) validity there, insofar as much of the music remains good ‘n’ potent; gauging the expiration date on art is probably a shell game, but I doubt the cultural moment for a song like “Ceremony” has passed yet. It’s all nice notions, kinda diffuse – Curtis, his presence, destabilizes everything, enough so that what’s left in his wake is a decent rote rock doc, albeit one that’s very lovely to look at. He justifies himself without a foundation of talking head testimony or the scaffolding of a dramatic arc; better to just stitch together performances and end up with a nice package of undivided moments – the pure stuff.

Or you could just watch this:

*”Transfiguration” is another good term, though a bit too weighty for me to wield at the moment.

**Originally gleaned from Alberto Manguel in Reading Pictures and gleaned by Manguel from Vasari’s Lives Of The Artists, where Vasari uses it as a key descriptor of the work of Michelangelo. So there.

***Though the last five minutes are a good contender as well.

Corrupted!

This was originally “published” in FA Online back in March 2011 via the good graces of the late great Martin Skidmore.

Comic Book Comics #5 (Evil Twin) by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey

Pedagogical comics! I approve! Comics can’t all be syringes and scalpels about to be plunged into eyes, you know? I mean, those are my favorite – when, at the moment the number of exclamation marks on the page is at its most vigorous competition with the dollops of red coloring to be seen, our tale of terror gives way to a robed and snaggle-toothed framing device delivering some glorious self-cancelling moral replete with a pun groan-inducing enough to ensure that the occasional giggle punctuates my screams during the ensuing nightmares. But when whatever good graces I possess prevail, I’m bound toward my well-worn and near crumbling set of Rosary beads for a few dozen frenzied rounds of supplication and then the time-tested edu-tainment of a Larry Gonick tome as penance. Yes, Larry Gonick, he of the multi-volume Cartoon History Of The Universe and sundry related books – let’s accompany him as he glides with ease through the dense quagmire of millennia foregone; once a week you’ll hear me exclaim “Oh boy, Sumerians!” with the wide-eyed wonder of a now reclaimed innocence. “Do you not feel better, my child?” the Virgin Mary will say as her index finger, no doubt bearing a perpetual anointment of holy water, guides my eye’s passage from panel to panel. “Yes, Mother of God. Yes, I do.” Until the next cycle…

Alas, my own everyday existence, however mundane it may appear, is just dozens of these complex and overlapping rituals of pleasure, remorse, and redemption, whether they involve ghastly glee writ in four-color glory or certain other lonely rites which entail a locked closet with a towel shoved at the base of the door so that no light may penetrate and even I may presume not to know my own sin. Catholicism and it’s unending round of prostration – that’s a man’s life!

But worlds do collide, after all, and sometimes the easy equations falter. I’m thinking in particular of my first encounter with Comic Book Comics (issue three, specifically) – a tricky proposition. A glance revealed a familiar feel to the terrain – the anecdotal trod through a subsection of history (comics, natch): Julie Schwartz; Jack Kirby; Frank Gorshin and Adam West at an orgy – the classics! Reading a bit further and then it hit. There on the page: the EC Comics saga! William Gaines sabotaging himself before the Senate Subcommittee! Arch-villain Fred Wertham as something other than stern-faced party pooper! The only bit of Un Chien Andelou that anyone remembers ready to be enacted there on the page! My edification – a sacred rite corrupted! The intermingling of illicit pleasure and remorse looping in on itself – a mobius strip from which escape could prove well nigh impossible! I grasped for my rosary beads but they came unloosed from their tether – thrown into entropy like those on Martha Wayne’s necklace on that fateful night in Gotham! Such cognitive dissonance undermined the ramshackle foundation of my self… nay, my soul, dear reader! Like the black t-shirt of a snake coiled around a crucifix that the roadie was wearing at the show! And then to greet those old pals: the fetal position and liquid foods.

I got better, as the superheroes say.

Comic Book Comics is the second act of Van Lente and Dunlavey’s thoroughly entertaining promenade through the humanities, preceded by the very fine Action Philosophers (“Epictetus”, in case you didn’t know, is a synonym for “awesome”) and to be followed by Action Presidents, so you have that inevitable William Henry Harrison punch line to look forward to. The purview of the current series is the American comics industry – the mythos which it has accrued from its evolution from the pulps to its presence in the future, if the glimpse at the cover of the next issue it to be believed. BEHOLD – Simon & Kirby, Siegel & Shuster, Lee & Kirby, my fetishized EC Comics and its inquisitorial end begetting MAD Magazine, the rise of the ‘60s Underground, along with some subjects covered entirely at the whims of its creators (Pop Art gets an entertaining drubbing for some reason and Herge is always a welcome presence) – most things relative to the rise of that once-durable but now-precarious engine of the industry, the 32-page floppy. Tellingly, it is called “Comic Book” Comics, not Comics Comics – that’s taken (albeit, as of this moment, out of commission). So there’s nary a trace of Schulz or Gould or Herriman or McKay or King to be seen; that, I suppose, would entail another series (Comic Strip Comics?). So, in this case, history is a nightmare from which Little Nemo has yet to awake.

(Mind you, I could be talking out of my ass; I’m afraid I was late to this party, with the first and second issues, their specific contents unknown, either awaiting me in some golden-ticket back issue bin some time in my near future or, more likely, the subject of an avid perusal when the trade heads our way sometime in 2012.)

The cover promises an “All-Lawsuit Issue” and as such we are made privy to the various adventures in litigation, with an emphasis on the two most mythic – Kirby v. Marvel and Siegel v. DC, along with further members of this parade of the damned, all creators marching to nail their subpoenas to the doors of the DC or Marvel and getting quashed, for the most part, in the process. There’s also the tale of the underground cartoonist collective the Air Pirates and their not entirely sane attempts at stealing the copyright for Disney’s characters right under the all-seeing eye of the Mouse – calamity ensues, of the comedic kind. It concludes with comic’s own hallowed “Jarndyce v. Jarndyce”, the Everyone v. Everyone of the Marvelman/Miracleman saga, which, fittingly, spans time, space, and two continents, and leaves a wake of carnage akin to Kid Miracleman’s takedown of London. Litigation as entertainment: it’s this age’s sadistic eye injury!

Van Lente delivers these funnybook follies in a breezy manner, working within tightly structured pages which barely break the double digits to get all the pertinent information across. Dunlavey, on the art, is one of the more underrated cartoonists around; his skills as an imitator are formidable – I imagine his John Stuart Mill via Peanuts in Action Philosophers is cemented in the memories of most readers – but his work in CBC foregoes that, understandably considering the various personality-by-personality change-ups the earlier series demanded. He’s stricter here, sticking more for a direct symbolic pastiche as depicted in his own personal cartoony style, a blocky shorthand that nails the message precisely; as busy and worked over as they are, there’s no clutter. Like AP, the panels offer less for straight-up illustration and more for representation/further commentary of Van Lente’s accompanying text, with the ready-at-hand iconography (Mickey Mouse, Milt Glaser’s much missed DC logo, Spider-Man, everyone ever) appropriated for that extra punch of immediacy, ensuring that the copyright page is an easy match for the on-line bibliography in terms of size. Which means that you’ll encounter Mike Hammer shooting Captain Marvel Jr. in the back and Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore at sea, intent upon harpooning a Moby Dick which bears Rorschach’s very trademarked mask and fedora – and there’s no way a book so keen on broad strokes would skip over the “Watchmen as white whale” metaphor – among the cavalcade of images. First and foremost, these are lively comics, with no place for moribund panels.

Except for the final panel – a literally moribund image of Van Lente having hung himself in despair, his frustration at having to comprehend the damn zigs and zags his comics narrative has taken getting the best of him. I can relate. Comics – fuck ‘em. Let them serve neither as sin nor salvation – just let them be.

At least until the next issue – the next cycle.

The Moralists

Barrel Of Monkeys by Ruppert and Mulot

The first time I mentioned Ruppert and Mulot on this site was about a year ago, in a review of the Tunes rock ‘n roll comics anthology. Amidst a collection of strips predisposed to fawning homage toward their subjects, their “Elvis” contribution stuck out as

“… a plain middle finger extended to the artist or America or both, which alternates between Elvis’ ignominious end on the toilet and a giant Elvis climbing atop various skyscrapers in the New York landscape, with possible allusions to King Kong or 9/11 – it’s hard to parse; either way, our final image is that of the King expiring on his restroom floor, pants down and strewn in vomit.”

To judge by Barrel Of Monkeys – the first English language collection of strips by the artists, ferried to our shores by the good graces of Rebus Books – my wary observation was on the mark. Such easy knocks at celebrity iconography are absent, but there’s no mistaking the comics contained herein as anything other than a systematic series of “fuck you”s, with, say, Johnny Ryan (per Joe McCulloch) or Takashi Nemoto as good points of reference. (Describing the book seems to bring out the best in its champions; blurb-wise, Dash Shaw refers to it as “evil and mean-spirited” and, from Lilli Carre, “an enjoyable slap to the face”.) Like those Veterans O’ Vile, Ruppert and Mulot specialize in provocations, spits in the face of propriety; there’s nothing perverse about the strips, insofar as there’s no private logic being obeyed, no fundamental compulsive innocence guiding the artistic soul, Darger-style – a spit in the face is meant to be felt as such.

More specifically, the typical strip here looks a lot like what would happen if you removed the two blithe sociopaths in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games from their metatextual context and put them in a world fitted to suit. It only occasionally reaches those horror show heights, but the same coy smirk (hi-jinks!) accompanies every bit of misanthropy which promenades across the page, with the two aforementioned male figures, near-ubiquitous all throughout, recognizable as obvious authorial surrogates, signatures too difficult to ignore. Narratives aren’t a priority here, just contrived situations where wafer-thin and damn near homogenous characters do awful things or watch awful things happen. Children are slapped and humiliated, bestiality is a frequent punchline, disabled folks are mocked and objectified, prostitutes are mutilated, etc. – all stuff which might give presumable customs agents cause for pause, their red red red stamp ready to brand (a proper seal of approval), were they willing to press on beyond the layers of deadpan formalism and distancing surrounding every strip’s sweet center.

Any notion of cackling jollies and excess is pretty much defused on first contact; Ruppert and Mulot overlay a neat willfully artificial aesthetic over everything, far from Ryan’s default Klassic Kartoonist Karicature or Nemoto’s Grimy Grotesquerie, one of scratchily rendered figures – all bearing semi-expressive but mostly mask-like angles on their face in lieu of features – framed by a rigorously maintained proscenium arch and performing their actions against nondescript backdrops within a mise en scene best described as “perfunctory”. Once a panel has been read, it’s been read – there’s beauty here to be sure, of the “stark and elegant” variety, but you never luxuriate in an image or consider the figures and objects in relation to each other; whatever your reaction to the stuff, the artists have indisputably conjured up a new and singularly elaborate approximation of Stick Figure Theater.

From that stylistic monotone often hangs a play on images, a blatant story-specific gimmick, thematically apiece with the content but sectioned off from the surrounding naturalism, a cool (as in cold) and ornate package which gathers the most overtly transgressive elements at play for the sake of a proper presentation – the punchline, basically.

They’re impressive set pieces which prod the reader along into a little extracurricular work, activities of interpreting, deciphering. Dialogue, in one story, is conveyed to the reader entirely in sign language, with a helpful key below each panel. Another, the story which frames the book, comes with a set of distorted images depicting sexual congress between an elephant and a woman (women?), replete with a series of steps on how to fold the picture in such a way as to perceive it properly, making it something like an unwieldly Al Jaffee affair. In “Phenakistoscopes With Dad”, one of the crueler strips here, the story in whole is made up of instructions on constructing the eponymous devices – simple optical devices which present animated images via a revolving paper wheel and a mirror – as relayed by a father to his son with verbal abuse in the vein of “Listen to what I’m fucking saying, you fucking moron; why the fuck are you crying?” punctuated by smacks to the head; the phenakistoscopes themselves, there to be cut out by the enterprising reader (or here, if you don’t want to damage your copy) are, naturally, patterns of motion illustrating idealized images of paternal love.

This “you can play along at home, kids – just follow the directions!” notion isn’t novel, but, more than most artists, you can feel a debt to Chris Ware in Ruppert and Mulot’s work : the artists giving these ancillary devices enough weight so that they’re integral to what surrounds, widening  the field of play beyond the basic sequential grammar of images to achieve a desired effect.

A set of scissors may not always be necessary, but this aspect of participation, crossing some not-considerable but nonetheless certain distance to meet the story on its terms, is consistent. These puzzles tend to tax the reader about much as a connect-the-dots page in a coloring book, but they assure some degree of self-conscious engagement, the reader more aware of him or herself as a reader and so, on some level, complicit in the book’s panorama of unpleasantness; as much of the work has roughly the depth of a Bazooka Joe strip (R. I. P.), there’s nothing too distressing about this state. That’s the common denominator though: the silly mean shit all throughout never happens in a vacuum, for its own sake ala a gag strip, but is instead a factor in a relationship between observer and observed, performer and audience; virtually every moment is premised on a foundation of “watching”, seeing as an explicit or implicit action.

Consider “The Portraitists”, the book’s key recurring strip. The titular figures are, as expected, two males and the purpose they serve is in their title – to photograph portraits, ensure that pictures get captured. Most of the stories are concerned with the commissions they undertake – their subjects and the circumstances under which they wish to be photographed, where and how they want to be seen in the picture – though sometimes they get creative, pursuing their own visions, much like their creators. In any case, stuff does happen – the world intrudes, wackiness ensues – but our portraitists stay outside the scene and focused, seeing everything to completion; they’re there to look, and to make certain that their looking produces results.

What emerges at the conclusion of every “Portraitists” story isn’t a visual hook or a bit of cleverness to be maneuvered through, but a still image – a man beheaded by a boomerang, a child dressed in a suit of armor which doesn’t cover key lower parts of his body, a prostitute bound on a bed with a rat shoved down her throat, a man bleeding on a floor, a man standing proud and victorious with a female sword-swallower chained to his belt serving as the sheath for his sword, etc. – with a frame around it. Removed from time, it is now something which exists entirely to be seen, the endpoint of a process of objectification or, less politely, dehumanization. It has become a portrait – something mobile, there to be possessed, sold, or discarded.

I’m In Love (Part 4)

(And how we got here: UNO, DOS, TRES. Should this suit your fancy, those may be worth a look as well.)

8. “Roadrunner” (Live 1973)

If both versions off The Original Modern Lovers would seem to come with the immediacy and energy of a live performance, this one genuinely is live, and the difference makes itself known pretty quickly. Which is understandable; even the most haphazard recording session comes with an implicit layer of self-consciousness – the performer aware, more than usual, of the song as a text and reacting accordingly. It’s close to yet not quite perfectionism (which is probably antithetical to “Roadrunner”), but there is a certain tidiness from the listener’s POV, each version a concentrated attempt to get something right.

Whatever it is, it’s notably absent here. It works within the general standards of classification which arise as I go about essayin’ and assayin’, cataloguing, putting things on display and all in a row, i.e. it’s early and noisy. But relative to the versions which surround it, it speaks only to its own moment, a moment which lasts exactly four minutes and fifty-five seconds.

For one thing, the tempo is slower than usual, slow enough that, as one Youtube commenter notes, it’s easy to hear the seedy endless glory of “Sister Ray” underneath, the Velvet Underground song from which Richman filched “Roadrunner”’s main chords. Even when we’re past the Stop-N-Shop and well down Route 128, et cetera, you half-suspect the song could, in fact, turn into “Sister Ray”, no big deal – why not?

It’s that kind of performance, by which I mean it’s a performance which largely deflects drama and tension, the lynchpins of every other version. With not much velocity, the song, like “Sister Ray”, becomes an exercise not in movement but in repetition – the lyrics come in quick steady bursts, with enough space between them to stall momentum so each line seems a self-sufficient event, disconnected phrases spoken with intensity but no urgency. Compound this with Richman not so much venturing way outside the song’s stock lyrical motifs (a first impression) as twisting them, gleefully fucking around, and you’re left with a funny state which makes the vocals register to the ear as all upper-case but without exclamation marks, each one a near-non sequitur-ish placard: “HEY KIDS, DON’T YOU LOVE THE DARK?”; ”WE THINK LIKE ROADRUNNERS”; “AND WE LOVE GOD’S WORLD”; etc.

The pace encourages you to sing along, “Louie Louie”-style, which you would – with time-travel-assisted first hand exposure and maybe a little alcohol in your system – if anyone could sing along to “Roadrunner” beyond the first verse and the punctuating shouts of “Radio On”. Even Richman can’t escape that heavy sway, not giving much of the typical push and pull in the closing climax – he’s just sputtering phrases, and then near-random syllables, against it, the obvious loser in this bout.

None of which really leads anywhere or at least anywhere of overt significance – lyrically, there’s no “x marks the spot”, no bumps to slow us down, the textual concerns here happily tossed to the elements, the elements being tonight’s audience, whatever chemistry has been established between them and the band so far, the adrenaline that’s accrued as the songs on the playlist have been checked off, et cetera. Why should the song go anywhere when we’re clearly somewhere already, locked in a nice vortex of a groove, a force strong enough that the song becomes a joyous expenditure of energy, running on its own fumes. We’re all in this together!

So naturally you wanna move, or at least bob your head a bit.

9. “Roadrunner (Thrice)”

This was released as the flipside to “The Morning Of Our Lives” single by Beserkley back in 1977. It’s another live performance, though quite different from the last; less a ramshackle bit of circumstance than a complete statement, something cohesive, thought through.

I don’t know when exactly it was recorded, but it feels like a definite notch on the timeline, ’74 or ‘75; various details – the coming shift Richman’s music would take in the mid-seventies and his consequent dismissal of his earlier catalogue (“Roadrunner” being the obvious emblem of that catalogue), this version’s eight-and-a-half minute length (the longest readily available; there may be longer ones, but I’ll leave those to bootleg collectors keeping the faith, wily torrentors, and anyone with patience enough to venture far into all those double-digit Youtube pages), the overall wistful mood (of which, see below) – conspire to make “(Thrice)” feel valedictory. It wouldn’t be the last time Richman would play the song but, relative to the other versions, it feels conclusive, the probable endpoint not of the song, but of Richman’s relationship to the song.

It’s a curious “epic”, insofar as you’re required to call it one by virtue of duration, eight-and-a-half minutes being just a slight violation of the common boundary of “pop song” and a footstep past the threshold of “imposing bit of reality”. It’s not that Sigur Ros song that played on my college radio station for three years straight or “I Am The Resurrection” – there’s no striving for effect, no presumption of effort on the part of the listener or the performer. It’s very much “Roadrunner” in its everyday ambition, the familiar dramatic structure of countdown, acceleration, bridge, and culminating chorus – the song isn’t built for flourishes. Or, rather, the song is a flexible and durable machine built precisely for flourishes, but not for excess. It can carry all the weight you, I, or Richman care to place, which is why that “finally” seems so false, why I’m writing this silly self-evident essay.

More specifically, “(Thrice)” is close tonally to “Roadrunner (Once)”, beginning with calm certainty (“Well here we go…”) and proceeding very simply from there; Richman’s voice takes a spot a few feet above the music, absolutely secure there, devoid of any tension, making sure to pull both the sound and us along with him as he journeys through the Boston outskirts. About two-and-a-half minutes in, just beyond the opening verses, the speed of the music subsides, slowing to a basic necessary movement; the song then unfurls into a catalogue of sensation, Richman patiently surveying what there is to see and feel, letting the memory at the song’s center decompress and expand so that the landscape comes anew. It’s salient to “Roadrunner” but it can get lost as we (or rather, I) listen to it repeatedly, as it becomes just another pop song, the perfect opening track on a playlist or a mix cd, a thing-for-use with a generalized meaning which has slowly and subtly overtaken what it actually is: an exploration without a pressing goal, only intent upon seeing what there is to see.

And everything there is to see elicits a quiet astonishment, these places taking care to reveal themselves to us while time blinks by in the freezing night. The song is always a present tense affair but here you can feel it receding into the past, when the urgency and haste have dropped away and all that remains is the world, uncluttered with notion or purpose, this place or that place as it was at the moment when it crossed the eye for a few seconds and let itself be seen. Across versions, this is the narrative we can read, one not of progression – the song remains its ineffable self however you play it – but of approach: the rush through the night slowing so that a world of lights and pulsing abstraction becomes one of stark beauty.

It’s a full meal, covering its chosen space meticulously, enough so that you could use the song as a handy travelogue, which is exactly what Laura Barton did in a very fine essay for The Guardian. The aforementioned objects of his affection – loneliness, the modern world, whatever – are present, but what’s inescapable is the literal terrain; by the time he states “I’m in love with the land where I grew up”, he’s being redundant. All my preoccupation with solipsism, the self, perception, and so forth slides easy, frictionlessly, off “(Thrice)” – I can say no more than the song says.

When the climactic round of “Radio On” comes, there’s the expected surge of energy, the song returning to its default mode, but Richman doesn’t lose himself in its frenzy (as is typical in every other version) – his stance is controlled; he’s still there, pointing our way toward the exit as ever, but just a little more distant from the moment, the better, maybe, to savor it and not let it swallow him whole. Whatever release was there came earlier if you were paying attention; it’s enough that the song snaps back into shape, that the momentum returns to see us off.