I think this is the picture that sparked something:

This pin-up – entitled “Ray And Maggie Down At Leo’s” as you’ll note at the bottom – or, rather, its trace signature of grin, posture, shit-faced gaze, and the harsh pop of black against white, is what would come to mind whenever Jaime Hernandez or, more likely, Love And Rockets (not yet having the knowledge to differentiate between Los Bros. themselves or the title to which they were attached) was mentioned. It’s what piqued my interest, the first cheap fix that’ll bring you back for more. I can’t say where I first saw it – it flashed by quickly and it stuck, not as an epiphany or a cause for pause, just another bit of sound and vision I grabbed and made a bit of my own internal environment when I was In Love With The Modern World, if not quite a part of it.

I don’t plan on making this a Proustian promenade of my past, but they have been on my mind, those shiny bits of pop that made life bearable for late-teens/early-twenties Me – Faye Wong reflected in the walkway glass, the opening clang of “Pyjamarama”, the title sequence to Band Of Outsiders, and a few dozen others; moments of pure possibility that never failed for a contact high. A lot of it has kept its thrill but, as I’m no longer prone to inveterate romanticization, what I’m left wondering is how they worked. This image in particular – devoid of tension, yet always eagerly summoned up; a depiction of a moment that seems to continually unfold but never quite reveal itself, Zeno’s Paradox-style.

So bear with me as I burn holes into it with my eyes.

Well, bluntly, it’s a nice slab of beauty; this being Jaime, any discussion of the picture’s quality can be handily dismissed in a barrage of superlatives. You can find it echoed, along with a less vivid and more typical drawing of Ray, in the story “Ninety-three Million Miles From The Sun…And Counting” (page 15, panel 2, true believers), though you can’t slot “Ray And Maggie…” in there as, say, a documented moment seen from another angle – should questions of continuity bother you, you can probably peg it as occurring a little before then; regardless, it’s self-sufficient, the association of a many-volumed opus notwithstanding. Mind you, it’s not divorced from narrative – there’s the fun gag-strip ploy of that sign being flouted by our man of inaction, but the real storytelling qualities to be found aren’t those typical of a comic.

You could, of course, easily reduce the image to a preset function – a couple’s portrait, with “leisure” and “contentment” damn close to the center of its web of associations – and let that iconography dictate our reading, aesthetic effect flattened out for the sake of a message. But we don’t have to stop there; we can, if not willfully ignore, then proceed from that premise, deem this image discussion-worthy by virtue of its considerable cultural cache, not unlike an auteurist faced with a minor film in a director’s canon – it’s Jaime, why not? Or we could view it as I first did – as something isolated, absent any “modern master” context, an object which, by simply existing, means to fight for your attention; something made it stick out, at least for me – a disjunction, a feeling of lives in motion rather than a single note, played very nicely.

If you’d care to cast a glance back at Jaime, compare and contrast, you’d probably pick up a certain emphasis on realism here rather than generalization, a clarity, that harsh pop I mentioned before; this would probably be explainable by the pin-point focus demanded by a stand-alone image, free from sequential constraints – seen in an average Jaime story, the strip would stop stone dead on this panel, the storytelling momentum never to be recovered. But it’s an oddly lopsided realism – the setting around them spare and precise, we see Maggie pretty close to her page-bound presence, but Ray is worked over with detail: the very fine layers of hatching on his jeans, the folds on his t-shirt (worthy of an hour or two of art class discussion), his stubbled double chin above which you’ll see a plain ideal of alcohol-induced contentment.   

So there’s no surprise that, at a first glance, he’s the one who dominates our attention; despite the presence of cutie-pie Maggie, Ray’s the visceral punch of the piece, his very demeanor an event, an instance of complete ease and the airiness that arises from that ease. He’s pretty buzzed, only vaguely conscious that he’s on display, his focus more to his right – probably a friend in a comparable state – the bottle in his hand the third of the evening at least; he’s nowhere near us. Much closer is Maggie. If Ray is in thrall to circumstance, Maggie is creating hers and clearly having a ball doing so, hamming it up as Betty or Veronica to Ray’s oblivious Archie for an onlooker, an almost certain photographer.  

It’s an easy contrast between the two, but you’ll find little push and pull, their visual relationship being more complementary: spontaneity to poise, naturalism to artifice. Maggie throws Ray into relief, ensuring that his off-hand exuberance doesn’t exist in a void, nor does it annihilate everything else in the picture, and vice-versa. Take one of those elements out and you’re left with an ad, or something very close to one, a free-floating gesture which would come with both a single point to make and a definite barrier between us and the picture, one we might surmount only by a literal transaction. As is, though, there’s nothing to upend the image either way, as buoyant or alluring as we’d care to interpret it; it only means what it says – Ray and Maggie down at Leo’s.

Which means what we can see clearly is two ends of a spectrum of being, ably defined – and from that perception a moment is conjured up, and the possibility we feel within that moment. This is the key juxtaposition, because it alludes to every state in between, leaving us, the spectators, to cross the vast gulf linking the expression on Ray’s face and the one on Maggie’s, to define the stations you’ll find however you wish.

That could be the real appeal of spontaneity, Ray’s or anyone’s, when we encounter it in art – the actions on view are secondary, what matters is what they represent: a sensation of time suspended when nothing is happening and, as nature abhors a vacuum, everything comes rushing in to fill that empty space, the action ready to swing any which way you feel appropriate – choose your own adventure. They’re rare enough. Narratives – comics, movies, books, whatever – have the burden of hampering them with consequence, something to put the moment in its place, to label it as either positive or negative, a plot necessity or a waste of time. As autonomous objects, as a song or, as here, an image, they become nice engines which set the mind humming, replayable.

That simple juxtaposition may be its substance, but it’s not the whole of the image – what keyed us into it? There’s no mystery in this picture – the states depicted are, while not banal, fairly common. I’ve been on both sides of this camera and there’s a good chance you have too.

Well, there is that camera – the onlooker, the one personally privy to this moment, whose vision we view it through. You could reject this claim, say it’s only circumstance playing its part – Jaime’s whim of drawing this picture, at this spot, a wispy bit of artifice concerning people he’s portrayed so many times before and after; beauty needs no justification.

Of course it doesn’t. But if we’ve agreed that iconography won’t override their identities, to treat them as more than a vague notion of a pretty girl and some drunk dude and let them exist as full-bodied ideas, of significance (as is the Jaime way!), to let them affect us, then nothing about Ray and Maggie can be taken for granted here; everything we see demands a purpose. They don’t point toward themselves or each other, really, but outwards: Ray to that bit of distraction to his right and Maggie’s glance, her pose, her smirk, directed our way, at an onlooker, someone with enough presence to make her aware of the sliver of time she occupies, someone with the means to capture it.

But audience identification, our role as a witness, probably isn’t where the real potency resides here – any image which addresses us directly, should we choose to acknowledge it in return, accrues no small amount of realism; and with the playing field between us and that object instantly leveled comes an implicit suspension of disbelief. Plenty of those are around and this is no exception. What girds this image, I suspect, makes it seem less like a plain depiction of a night that once happened and more like an invitation to an existing moment, may be how we see it, the odd and very physical place we see it from.

And so it becomes peculiar – seeing immediacy, randomness, depicted with such clear deliberation. The composition suggests a tripod and enough careful preparation to seem illogical – a sense of patience, as if waiting all along for reality to orchestrate this precise moment. A more practical and less pictorially-driven point of view – a little higher, less like a frame from an Ozu film, further back for the sake of ease, off-balance enough to imply something casually grabbed and more attuned to the prevalent mood, take your pick – and that iconographic pretext (a boy, a girl, good times) would run roughshod over our perception, place us at a discreet distance; a lovely glimpse, like many. Instead what we have is a freedom of vision we might ascribe to an all-seeing eye or, as we definitely know to be the case, an artist’s preconceived vision – yet, thanks to Maggie’s glance and Ray’s lack of self-consciousness, we’re bound to that narrative trap, taking this image at its word.

And that is what I think implicates us as a part of the picture, creates a space we can inhabit and to feel everything which follows when we’re there. It’s why I can’t shake it, bound as I am to see omens in the clouds and patterns in the pavement. I have no idea if Jaime intended it, if I’ve just created a bridge of rickety conditional clauses from me to this image. Could be. It may not look safe but, if you care to cross, you’ll be welcomed on the other side.

Daredevil, Vol. Whatever, #5: Written by Mark Waid, Art by Marcos Martin, Color by Javier Rodriguez

A tour-de-force of art, obv., but what’s especially neat is how it forgoes the overt set pieces of, say, everything J.H. Williams or Martin’s own recent board-game prone double-page splashes in Amazing Spider-Man and opts for a more disciplined ingenuity, akin to Quitely, with the effects mostly enfolded into the panels themselves: SFX as actual palpable punctuation on the page (rather than bombastic clutter), Matt’s precise body language all throughout, etc. Martin can seemingly divine the storytelling momentum of any page, even plain exposition, so that your eye bounces from one precise detail to the next, like a trap. Cool.  

The Flash #2: Written by Francis Manapul & Brian Buccellato, Art by Francis Manapul, Colors by Brian Buccellato

Also in the Art-driven superheroics dept.:

If Martin and Waid manage a cool coherence, story and art in a no-fuss tandem like the chain/sprockets on a bike, Manapul and Buccellato can’t quite meet that standard, but they do alright. Thus far, it’s been ambitious and disjointed – the script is decent, if inclined to jutting out at odd moments, with motivations elided and too-sudden scene shifts, but the dots do connect. Art-wise, Manapul’s chutzpah pushes him ahead into the above-average league – clumsy yet impressive moments (Barry parsing the implications of one instant, etc.) coasting into “pretty good” via sheer striving, really.

35 Shots Of Rum (D: Claire Denis, 2009)

Very much like an Ozu film, with 70% of the movie keyed into an everyday rhythm (work-school-home), an anxiety about a soon-to-change status quo of a father-daughter family unit, repeated (albeit nowhere near as rigid) visual motifs in domestic settings plus, of course, a bar scene. All the characters and subplots reflect that conflict: the ambivalent suitor and his dead parents, the neighbor eager to play mother, the lonely desperate retiree, the restaurant owner and her nephew. Denis’ signature tactility breaks loose during the “aborted concert” sequence, a mélange of shoulder blades, glances, and close faces that conveys tremendous eroticism.

Uncle Boonmee Who Remembers His Past Lives (D: Apichatpong Weerasethakul [aka “JOE”], 2010)

CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT:

How the commonplace intermingles with the unreal, each quality quantifiable/casual, sans genre to skew emphasis.

CONSTANT READJUSTMENT OF THEMATIC FOCUS:

Grounded set-up (sister-in-law visiting dying Boonmee), followed by the return of his dead wife and long-lost son (now a monkey man); a shift into doc aesthetics (RE: fruit-picking, beekeeping); a princess’s affair with a catfish spirit (past life?); etc.

UPPING THE ANTE:

Possible extratextual rupture: still images of dudes in fatigues leading around a monkey-suited guy – the movie’s earlier solemn elements now plain artifice – juxtaposed against Boonmee’s dying speech; the film’s unreality embedded within itself.

LATER:

Time bifurcates.

DISCUSS.

This is an odd thing to see stateside, a French comic strip anthology of basic rock history. It has a pretty simple format – one band to one cartoonist, the bands all well within the pantheon: Sex Pistols, Beatles, The Clash, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Nirvana, and a variety of others probably equally familiar, with, let’s say, LCD Soundsystem and (maybe) The Stranglers as outliers. With that in mind, it probably isn’t too surprising to learn that most of the stories hew close to the myths there to be found – most musicians viewed during their heroic phase, the faces all youthful enough so that the sneers don’t seem stagnant. (Notable exception: Ruppert & Mulot’s take on Elvis, 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.) And even when the content escapes that status quo of “glorification”, there’s always the two pages of big honking prose from editor Vincent Brunner attached to each strip, replete with a recommended discography, just to ensure the pre-set history of ROCK is unavoidable.

As I started off with, it’s just… weird to encounter this, a European comic so determinedly aimed at the mainstream, or rather a mainstream of the meat and potatoes variety, with a pungency of conservative rockist nostalgia expected to overcome, for the curious passerby, all the mostly unfamiliar names contained herein – a book seemingly bent on the Film/TV/Music section of your local big box bookstore, a few feet from Leonard Maltin. I’m not complaining of course; I realize that, by broaching the subject, I risk the lack of any further similar publishing ventures crossing over to these not-so-welcoming shores, and maybe even the entirety of Eurocomics just disappearing in a puff, the fates willing foreign language comics (and maybe even Europe itself!) into a dream or a rumor that never was, rendered non-existent in the span of a blink by one lowly blogger’s doubt. Anyway, Killoffer is always welcome and, hey, there’s an actual Jean-Christophe Menu comic on ready display, not just another view of him from afar as the preferred villain in the bande dessinee scene at the moment.

The better pieces tend to be nice and blunt first person pieces, like Charles Berberian’s (one half of Monsieur Jean fame) take on Elton John, here done in his casually anecdotal style, expressive scratches against a page more blank than not; it’s also probably the only strip which crosses over into something like criticism (said criticism consisting of “Ignore Elton John after 1975”). Olivier Josso’s strip on The Clash is pretty swell as well, a personal memoir with an emphasis on the intersection of the band with his life. Luz delivers something similar with his take on LCD Soundsystem, but his approach is less intellectual and far more in the key of “unconstrained fanboy” – he’s actually friends with James Murphy, so whatever mythmaking is absent from Brunner’s synopsis you’ll certainly find present in the strip which follows it. (Murphy‘s jolly misadventures in semi-homelessness! Murphy’s love for his dog Petunia! Actual quote describing Mr. Murphy: “With any more integrity, you’d be the Mother Theresa of groove!”) It’s fun and giddy, livelier than most.

At the other end of the conceptual spectrum you’ll find Jochen Gerner’s Pixies piece, a work-intensive six-page catalog of every damn concept, situation, meaningless hoot from Frank Black’s voice, whatever, found in a Pixies song and rendered in ideogram form; it reads a lot like one of Mark Newgarden’s Meet The Cast strips, except not funny. Also in a similar “fuck narrative” sense is Killoffer’s piece on Led Zeppelin, which isn’t so much a strip as a very busy bit of design layout in search of an album cover or an article, a frictionless explosion of symbols and fun w/ lettering.

Neither of those are especially grabbing, but they do buck the trend of this book, which is to mount a hazy one note altar to the band in question, simultaneously  overly earnest and lazy – a wordless Beatles piece with goony psychedelic avatars floating around a recording session, an Alice In Wonderland pastiche featuring funny animal Iggy and The Stooges (‘cause “Fun House” is a lot like “Wonderland” or something), a wake for Ziggy Stardust in the light of his Rock N’ Roll Suicide, followed by a Rock N’ Roll Rebirth with an attendant new Bowie persona, Nick Drake in a pastoral landscape and then the complete lyrics to “Time Of No Reply”, et cetera. They either plod there, inert, or suffer from conceptual strain, the first few panels far too much heavy lifting so the artist can ensure whatever pretext he’s chosen meets up with the musician(s) in question.

The best strip is, almost certainly, Sebastien Lumineau’s take on The Ramones and this is the best page from it:

It’s the opening page, two stark images which work at a gut level – it may not easier to ignore them than otherwise, to paraphrase that Wally Wood anecdote about Nancy, but it is close. Context may play a part – relative to most of the strips in the book, the immediacy of this page is exhilarating.

It’s a simple premise – a distillation of the Ramones’ mid-to-late-70s touring experience into nice basic images, a thousand shows in six pages. The visual logic of these first two Stations Of The Cross is pretty clear – a shift from immensity to intimacy, vast white scale to dark cramped interior, this opposition bound by a wide angle sense of perspective, a tactic which, notably, only appears on this page and nowhere else in the story. The first panel is dominated by a sky as wide as can be and the land equally flat, the van a degree or two above a speck, just off center, with the smoke emitted a nice touch. It’s very studied – the Middle of Nowhere, U. S. A., cut through by that inexorable piece of logic known as The Road; a place that’s only a place between a place and another place. Absent any context, it’s a nice depiction of an archetype – that vision of America which cultural criticism dictates may drive the unwary to either madness or serenity, an unkind expanse and an unspeaking God (courtesy of those clouds) your only points of reference.

In the second panel you’ll find, naturally, the Ramones. They’re stuck in that van, heading to the next show, a ritual they’ve experienced before and will experience again. As packed in as they are, each is clearly bearing a bubble of isolation, guarding it as best they can; judging by their demeanor, we can guess that they are, if not sick of each other, content to keep quiet, aware that, by this stage of the tour, any attempt at conversation will just be repetition and irritation. Funny ‘cause it’s true, y’know? This image comes with its own baggage of iconography and artifice – if it seems familiar, that’s because the character placement of our Blitzkrieg Boppers is taken from the cover of their first album (l-r: Johnny, Tommy, Joey, and Dee Dee). The canned-sardine sense of tension and expectancy works well enough that you’re willing to forgive the lapses of logic: Who’s driving? Bands that play shows ground level to the audience – as per Lumineau’s vision – at clubs called Mondo Bizarro are more inclined to drive themselves around than not. A van with that seat would possibly (maaaaaybe) have room enough to hold the instruments, but where the hell would you put the amps?

Still the show must go on, and it does, for another twelve panels over five more pages. From here we head to the backstage of a club for a pre-show beer surrounded by flirty girls and scenesters, and then the show itself, the strip climaxing here with the opening 1-2-3-4 battle cry and actual panel-to-panel movement, followed by a coda of the band separated into various post-show jollies: Johnny watching tv in his motel room with cookies and milk, Joey chatting up some girl, etc. Lumineau’s naturalism takes its cue more from the photographic instant than photorealism proper, the odd aura that accrues over stray moments captured in media res; he seems to have digested as many Ramones performance photos as possible and then conjured up this. And of course there’s the drabness and amiable cracked-wall decay of an average rock club, which gets nice and precise portrayal here, DIY ambiance being an international language.

The strip probably makes the top five of an unlikely “band on the road” comics pantheon, with Jaime Hernandez’s “Jersualem Crickets” an obvious number one. It’s easy to think that Lumineau took inspiration from the songs themselves – after all, the band did write some of the better tunes about touring, which view the process through neither an entitled or ennobling point of view, just songs about one soul being put through the ringer; “I Wanna Be Sedated” and “Danny Says” are the songs I’m thinking about.

Not much need be said about “Sedated” – sometime in the next week or so, it’ll probably be static in the background while you find yourself preoccupied with something else. It manages to stick, maybe thanks to the compressed intensity of the song’s first person scenario, which seems fitted to suit the group’s de facto energy, never mind the all-powerful tool of identification: not everyone has the threat of psychotherapy hanging over their head, but there’s a good chance you’ve recently been run ragged enough by the world that temporary oblivion sounds appealing – many weekends are guided by this internal mandate.

If that song is about the exhaustion and breakdown touring can induce, “Danny Says” is more mundane approach to same, without any implied exclamation marks, just a catalogue of little details, everyday loneliness – being stuck in your hotel room with nothing to do but watch old tv shows, hustling for promotion to the night’s show, the bits of displacement that shouldn’t affect you so strongly but do. It’s one of the few songs to survive Phil Spector’s shellacking on End Of The Century, which, by then (the late seventies), had receded from the sixties exuberance into a mere bag of tricks, bells and whistles that now only sounded like bells and whistles. Spector’s presence here is very careful to emphasize the song’s dramatic structure, a lullaby which grows into reverb and noise while still, weirdly but undoubtedly, remaining a lullaby. It’s quite nice, wonderful really, but it may be best viewed as a clever remix of the demo, which, natch, sticks to the tried and true Ramones template. Here the song isn’t an event, just a song, its shifts less theatrical but still there – you take more notice of them when you’re not being led by Spector’s hand, the song’s melancholy more resonant when you have to dive into that familiar sea of fuzz for it. 

No matter how far you venture, it’s always good to have a place to return to.

[This was originally published on the web on FA Online, via the good graces of the late great Martin Skidmore. As it has since seemingly fallen into oblivion (and I'm quite fond of it - indulge me), I've decided to reprint it here.]

Appropriately, we’ll begin at the beginning.

Up above is the first page proper of Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of Richard Stark’s Parker: The Outfit and a fine page it is. It quite befits the tale to follow, grabbing you, poor reader, by the lapels and shoving you into a slowly moving black car headed toward some unknown and isolated location a few miles outside city limits. It has, as they say, “chops”.

To begin with, there’s the obvious focal point: the eruption from the pillow. There’s plenty of details compelling your eye there – the blue shade of watercolor slanting from the left edge of the page downwards which delineates the black above from everything below, the woman’s right arm which angles you directly towards it, her leg beneath the sheets poised like a pinball paddle to kick your attention back up should you by chance stray. The trajectory of the explosion is an exclamation mark which more than counterbalances Westlake’s ever understated prose and the stunning little grace note of those three feathers floating above make an especially lovely set of ellipses.*

If the image is likely to deliver the opening wallop, that caption throws it into further relief, calling your attention to the sheet’s movement below the pillow – it’d be easy without any further context to label it the vagaries of a bullet in a bed, but the narration leaves no doubt that there’s another force at play causing movement in the scene, just beyond the right edge of the panel and you, reader, must turn the page (now!) to glimpse what’s to come. The page gets a great deal of its cumulative impact by what isn’t there, a very fine bit of cartoonist’s sleight of hand that makes you fully feel the impact of the absent figures – the acting figure and the reacting figure, both unseen but completely felt within a very discrete space.

And beyond the internal workings of this piece (thankfully, I doubt my powers of perception are keen enough to wreck anyone’s enjoyment), there’s the actual substance. The image, as is, is of unbalance: we’re afforded a symmetrical view of a setting – picture, cabinets, bed – which frames a scene of turmoil, with the harsh off-kilter light emanating from the left edge of the page leaving everything within those very orderly parameters in flux and the bed set in disarray. Every detail points up the central fact of the scene – stability has been disrupted.

Mind you, stability rarely reigns when a bed is nearby in a Parker novel – more often than not a scene in a bedroom will soon mean trouble for whoever resides there, a fate often ushered in by Parker himself, a man with no bed but many beds, all ephemeral and ready to be abandoned. Parker is, very simply, a professional thief, with an emphasis on the adjective; he exists for the reader only in action and beyond his appetites, occasionally alluded to but rarely glanced upon – women and nice temporary five-star backgrounds to accompany those women – his inner life revolves entirely around the goal at hand, the prize to be won or the prey to be stalked.

A great deal of the pleasure of Donald Westlake’s Parker books (written under the nom de plume of Richard Stark, as the unwieldly IDW titles are careful to remind us) comes from watching a man who knows what he’s doing do what he does. It’s no accident that those who stand in Parker’s path are immediately associated with recreation – sex, of course, but also the fink dispatched at his poker game, the head of the outfit first seen engaged in a game of Monopoly (insert capitalist subtext here) with his bodyguards, the second-in-command practicing his golf game. And all the while Parker works works works – methodically taking notes, watching for patterns, and setting his traps; the heart of The Outfit is embodied in those scenes where Parker does just that, with two set pieces near the beginning and the end, Cooke’s pages laid out with terse panels of tiny observations, meaningless when seen out of context but each an element ready to be placed in an equation for our ubercompetent superthief to solve. Never let it be said that there’s no place for the work ethic in the crime genre!

And with no small ambition to guide that ethic along:

He’d… write letters to every man he’d ever worked with. He’d tell them the Outfit hit him for forty-five G’s – do him a favor and hit them back when you get the chance.

At least half these men were just like Parker – they already had an Outfit job cased. All they needed was an excuse to go take it.

Those are quotes from Cooke’s earlier adaptation, The Hunter, and they serve as a nice summary for The Outfit, the plan Parker puts into action when the Outfit comes a callin’, courtesy of that moment posted above – the fuse lit in one book exploding into all sorts of hi-jinks in the next. As such, the books work quite well in tandem, although Westlake’s original sequence of publication differed somewhat – when Parker first laid his eyes on the prize of pulp stardom, both books were bridged by another title, The Man With The Getaway Face; that book, for the purposes of plot (i.e. Parker being the titular “man”, with a new surgically-gotten face designed to evade any unwanted consequences from his shenanigans in The Hunter), is enfolded into this version of The Outfit as prologue, boiled down to a bare bones essence of thirty some pages, a good chunk of which are silent.

On the evidence given, it’s not too difficult to see the appeal of Cooke’s abridgement, beyond plot mechanics and Cooke’s own cheery admission of just liking The Outfit a whole lot more. If The Man With The Getaway Face is, at bottom, a basic tale of a heist gone awry (replete with that always helpful moral, reiterated from The Hunter, of “Never trust a woman”), a more rarefied air flows between The Hunter and The Outfit, one of maneuvers and counter-maneuvers, take-downs and negotiations. As a duo, they’re only incidentally crime books, more often showcases for how one small independent businessman can take a bloated conglomerate (the eponymous “Outfit”) down a notch, with crime being their common trade. Jurisprudence, that structural necessity of the genre, is virtually nonexistent in this war between the good capitalists who get their hands dirty and the bad capitalists who indolently play games – it makes a perfunctory appearance via the jail square on that Monopoly board and is never again acknowledged.

Or perhaps I’m just interpretation-happy. The Outfit is, more obviously, a well-tuned piece of pulp, a highly-regulated hunk of invisible craftsmanship on Westlake’s part designed to be gulped down in as minimal an amount of sittings as possible. And, in bringing it to the current format, Cooke remains who he is – if you had little patience for the retro-aesthetics or storyboarding tics for which our interpreter is synonymous, well, there’s the door, pal.

And yes, the styles do mesh, as every commentator is required to note when speaking of this merger – Cooke’s perpetual project of zeroing in on the essence of midcentury pop finds a completely apposite milieu in the Parker novels. Which isn’t to say that certain caveats don’t apply; there’s always the danger of an interpreter shellac-ing the source material in their sensibility, the vulnerable pre-existing text refitted with an unnecessary frame more ornamental than functional and occasionally at cross-purposes with the original. That gets skirted here, but the tendency does make itself known; Cooke’s glee is palpable when rendering the precise designs of the late fifties and early sixties, whether rigging up his own bar signs or nailing the font on a Timex watch in its pared down minimalism – his occasional indulgence culminating in a page which consists of nothing but lovingly drawn road signs for inns and gas stations all of which nearly crowd out the narrative caption at the left hand side of the page.

Yet it’s a happy marriage for the most part, with nothing else as oppressive in terms of mannerism; Cooke dives into the book and reacts to the text with the instincts of a cartoonist, divining motifs and thinking through the storytelling logic of each moment. The format and design from The Hunter are repeated here (natch) – both works shaded different tints of muted blue, as if in reflection of the cold unyielding anger that Westlake saw in Parker, and the negative space on each panel bleeding out into the white edge of the page. It is a gorgeous thing, rife with Cooke’s preferred four-tiered layouts, each tier, more often than not, devoted to a single sequence, gesture, or visual motif. It’s not uncommon among cartoonists, but it really pops out here, the logic of the page on display and nary a muddling of the narrative. It may be a holdover from his time in animation, but there’s something especially amazing about the three-panel-to-a-tier sequences that Cooke is prone to every few pages, specifically those of equal size, with the rhythm of the actions portrayed played out at a metronomic beat which sticks in the memory: it’s there on page 42 when Parker dispatches the woman escaping from her vehicle; on page 132, when the POV pans back from the bound driver; and there’s a wonderful Eisnerian variation of it on page 62, as the light from a bar door opening in the first frame flows into the discontinuous next panel of an overhead shot of the bar.

But no matter what finesse an artist brings to it, transition from one medium to another is always bumpy, and one of the neat characteristics of Cooke’s adaptations is how, occasionally, the seams show in the end product – in both books, the give and take inherent in the process results, every twenty pages or so, in neatly designed splash pages which compress as much information as you need to get by – the decoded/annotated letter from an associate telling of a further venture, Parker’s movement across the east coast depicted via an Esso travel map, and many another – sudden disruptions in Cooke’s progress that make you crane your neck back at the original Westlake/Stark text. Cooke, however, remains the man with the plan with the turn-the-page momentum of the book undisturbed.

It’s not too difficult to see these overt bits of formalism as precursors, semi-conscious or otherwise, of The Outfit‘s third (but not final) act, a rapid array of stylistic shifts depicting Parker’s cohorts in crime descending en masse upon the Outfit’s operations. They’re great little set pieces, each immersing you in a process – how the well-oiled mechanisms of organized crime work – and then showing you how it gets destabilized by some blue collar thief with a little ambition; here, with our central character largely absent, Cooke casts aside his default naturalism in favor of a scene-specific style: storybook illustration, a text-dominant tabloid format (font and everything!) et al., every few pages another fireworks display for Cooke to set off, a different set of stage directions to frame around huge dollops of Westlake’s prose. It’s a sight to behold, gimmicky in description but a bravura performance in each case, all with attendant punch lines as dry as fine wine.**

And finally, we return to Parker on the prowl, his objective within sight. Spoilers obviously, but any such story firmly set in the purgatory of popular serialization will conclude as all such stories must – the antagonist defeated and the forces set against our hero quelled, if only for the time being. The final page, like the first, is a splash: Parker, his vengeance sated, walking away from the reader, his destination another hotel, another luxury suite, another comfortable bit of symmetry ready to be thrown off balance.

FOOTNOTES

*I’d say having the explosion pointing directly at the fedora of its intended target is probably a bit too cutesy, a bit of unnecessary symbolism distracting from the pure action of the page, with the snifter opposite another bit of clutter for the sake of equilibrium. But, overall, it works.

**In the broader context of pop culture, it’s not too difficult to see it all within a wider tradition, the Parker novels as a consistent beacon for formalists – Darwyn Cooke in good company with Jean Luc Godard and the guy who made Zardoz (Made In USA (1966, adap. of The Jugger) and Point Blank (1967, adap. of The Hunter), respectively).

So:

First off, it’s Dia de los Muertos, and not, en ingles, the Day of the Dead, and this is not merely due to the dominant cultural associations attached. Very simply, it sounds better: an elongated phrase with a ready plural as opposed to two flat atonal thuds, those extra syllables traded in for a bland bit of ambiguity – let’s leave that name to the news anchors and zombies.

As with most of the better holidays, it’s built upon an absolute – Cupid’s arrow may never strike true, but death, like the solstices and Lincoln’s birthday, can’t be avoided. Barring the transcendence of our earthly selves into the digital Elysian Fields of the Singularity, it’s coming for us all; the cigarette I just smoked tells me that if most are sauntering down the sidewalk of existence, I’m inclined to the occasional hopscotch. It’s the day (or rather three) when, like those damn zombies, the dead come back; where our dead differ though, is that when we greet them, they’re always sure to wear a smile. You know the image – the joyful skeletons, at the center of the festivities, completely at ease in the setting. And why wouldn’t they smile? Rarely are they welcomed back so eagerly.

More typically, the dead’s presence will elicit some trepidation. I mean, what if they’re actually and bluntly present, Ouija board-style? Spooky. Not too long ago, I was coffeeing it up with some friends and the topic arose – the unexpected encounter, the hairs raised at the back of the neck. Someone ventured a tale and, as with many “this really happened” tales of the beyond, it was a game of telephone involving a sibling, a friend of a friend, a foreign land, and a location of some significance – a hotel in Germany that had seen catastrophe in World War II, and had since known unusual happenings, complaints by the guests, and so on.

Most ghost stories are like this and every time I encounter one, I get irritated. From a God’s eye view, one death is no different from another – a stillborn child and my mother’s mother and the soul(s) who may or may not haunt that hotel and FDR are all equally dead; maybe they do, at times, come back, but I refuse to believe they are privileged or damned, however you want to read it, to return according to a ready framework of myth or melodrama, a battle or some full-blown turmoil or a murder, much less the greatest war of the last century. All moments are fair game, even the smaller ones that few know - it’s hubris to claim the dead deem as relevant the same values we do. Not when there are so many more of them than there are of us.

Death probably made itself known not too far from where you’re reading this, history’s chalk outline so extensive as to possibly blot out all the inhabitable areas of the earth. And that’s only taking space into account – consider the seven people who died in the time it took you to read this sentence. All one’s powers of ignorance can’t discount it. The dead – they’re everywhere.

Right now it’s probably accessible on a television screen near you: death as a designated rupture in reality, there to be amended. The status quo is interrupted and the culprit is there to be captured, sentenced, or repaid in kind –Law And Order may be your drug of choice, though you’ve got plenty of options. Or else it’s a battlefield, and the theater of war is an actual theater, with one man, one battalion, placed in its spotlight; death, which in this domain is not a disturbance but a daily statistic, gains value by virtue of our having witnessed it. And numerous other genres, with their own careworn scenarios and specific harbingers of doom: the aliens intent upon conquest and genocide, the serial killer racking up a kill count dictated by his own private logic, et cetera…

All those made-to-order victims stand in stark contrast to the far greater likelihood awaiting we, the contentedly industrialized – the dominant point-of-view from an adjustable bed, all the actions in your last weeks or months dictated by a hospital schedule of necessary routines and pre-planned visits and the coup de grace, the winding down rhythm of EKG beeps to regulate your final moment. That may be the point: entertainment not only as escapism, but consolation. If the end must come, than let’s imagine it writ large, an absence from the world which must be remedied, or at least acknowledged, rather than a quiet fade.

From this point of view, Dia de los Muertos is a brief respite from our instincts: we, the living, greet the dead not through a mandated veil of mourning, nor as specters bent upon regaining their moment past or as reflections of our limited selves, the desired culmination and climax to the story we unknowingly repeat to ourselves every day – who we are and who we want to be. No, we get to put those aside on this day and we build our own place for that absence. 

From the outside it may look like a stern-faced repetition of Halloween, with a creepy crawly trope or two gussied up in formal wear and pushed from night to day; a self-serious sequel, with sugar skulls in lieu of inedible candy corn. If you wish to draw a relationship, consider them counterparts: freedom and fate, hand in hand. If Halloween is given to masquerade and the mutability of identity, becoming who we wish to be by mere virtue of saying so, then Dia de los Muertos declares that everything is what it is, but even more so; the past is there, in the form of the homage we pay to those whom we remember fondly and will only ever know us as we were, and so is the future, as we don the guise of what we will become, the face we’ll wear when we reach the absolute boundary of ourselves and may move no further – you can’t call it pretending if it’s true.

We define those extremes and, with little fuss, we collapse them into now. Death is revealed not as the ultimate Other - always where we are not, but for the grace of god – but where it always was: at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So we’ll make the dead their favorite food, give toys to unseen children, and share beers with friends and relatives, past and present. We’ll make them at home inside or we’ll go out and visit them at the cemetery, turning it into a picnic, a playground, all the while acclimating ourselves to where we’ll spend eternity. The dead don’t respond, they don’t give thanks, but that’s okay – they don’t need to.

Not when they’re so eager to smile.

A dwarf drifts unconscious down a black river and dreams himself at the center of a pagan bacchanalia, where he is feted by all the participants – worshippers in masquerade and makeshift creatures composed of rags and cardboard boxes – with pigs and humans among the feast’s main courses; perhaps befitting the dream state, everyone is drawn in a single color against a fully colored background. Having sated himself into a stupor, the dwarf is then placed within a box-like wooden mold and is sodomized by the King Of The Forest (a green Hulk-like fellow, and the only character in this story drawn in full color – he does actually look like Lou Ferrigno), whereupon he is transformed into a flying beast, galloping skyward in triumph with the King his rider, Destination: Moon.

It’s an affecting little story, nice and exhilarating, and probably the most traditional piece you’ll find here, thanks to a) an easy audience surrogate at its center and b) the entire narrative tailored to the self-conscious framework of a dream; sure, dream-logic is predominant within The Troll King, but more often presented in a matter-of-fact manner. Neither is anything else quite as eldritch or silent-movie sinister, what with the costumes and cannibalism – more typically, things tend toward the hermetic and, y’know, damn weird: a carrot man goes for a dive in a pool and grows into a mighty tree and, in a later story, the flowers which sprout from his form breed whole new batch of carrot men, one of which serves as a vessel for a creature akin to the aforementioned jolly green monarch, etc. (As the key blurb you’ll find on the back cover points out, it does call to mind Miyazaki, specifically Princess Mononoke .)

There’s also stray bits of surrealism as a condiment to this main course – the dreamscape of “Sleeping…” isn’t a forest, but a series of rooms in the David Lynch manner (replete with wall sockets), with trees growing within and the walls a painted backdrop of black mountains outlined against a blood-red sky, never mind the brief genre switch-up, probably the book’s only definitive narrative rupture, where one of the Hulk fellas, after having been planted, Swamp Thing-like, in the earth, announces his rise to consciousness by telling his caretakers “HERE COMES THE WILD WEST!” Therein follows a series of scenes, in the revisionist western manner of, say, El Topo: a cowboy having his limbs pulled off, a showdown against a fake Hollywood backdrop, a headless prostitute; stuff like that.

Altogether, it adds up to one of those works, a personal mythology of interconnected sketches in the insular “you can tag along if you want” fashion. Or, probably better stated, world-building premised not on a message but on compulsion; the medium is certainly amenable to this approach, being itself never too far from a slightly more elaborate version of a ten year-old’s notebook of imaginary creatures. The cumulative effect is a catalogue of odd rites of spring, or maybe just a vast one, glimpsed in parts – a frequent interplay of twin motifs, forest creatures and wood gods that adds up to, one imagines, an unending cycle.

It’s not too hard to parse, assuming you’re paying a little attention. Karlsson’s style is a wondrous bit of simplicity – all flat simple images that mean what they say and say what they mean, with a basic day-glo color palate which shows he knows his way around a Crayola 24-pack, and a typical panel layout of two images per page, one above and one below, just a notch above a straight-up storybook (SEE ALSO: Panter’s Cola Madnes). It’s little surprise to learn from the author’s bio that Karlsson recently adapted the book into an animated short*, given that many of the works here are silent pieces, each image a nice rectangle more often than not depicting a discreet action, very much ready to be mistaken for a cartoon cel. (In fact, you can see the story summarized up above in fancy pants moving picture form here – just skip to 1:28 for the sake of convenience).

Comics or otherwise, worth a gander, natch.

* UPDATE: From the good Mr. Karlsson, via twitter:

“That was actually a bit of confusion with the film. Only Sleeping and dreaming of food was ever animated, sadly.”

No one’s gonna begrudge you ignorance of his actual comics, considering how few of them are currently collected and in print – at the moment, you can fish around, with some likely profit, for Temptation (Active Images), Abe: Wrong For All The Right Reasons (Top Shelf), and, with Phil Elliott, The Rockpool Files (Slave Labor Graphics), with the rest of his corpus waifs and strays haunting basements, forlorn long boxes, and the fourth dimension, presumably. For much of the current millennium, his focus has been less on cartooning and more on television writing (he’s partially responsible for the hours of enjoyment me and my nephews have spent watching Shaun The Sheep) and media tie-ins, along with his very recent Candle Man series of children’s books; may success greet him in his attempts to usurp Rowling’s throne.

Among that bunch, I recently got my hands on (courtesy of the wonders of the interlibrary loan system) Temptation. It’s a fine piece of work – Krazy Kat is invoked by both Campbell (in his introduction) and Stan Lee (blurb-wise) and it’s certainly prominent in the strip’s DNA (or at least the Sunday Funday full-page format that probably cues up in your mind whenever anyone brings it up), with each installment another variation on a basic conflict – the Man, the Devil, the Man’s soul which the Devil craves – played against a barren oft-mutable environment. Although strong enough to be immediately noticeable at a glance, it’s a comparison which only goes so far – there are no linguophilic phits of phrenzy nor is Dakin inclined to make each instance a connect-the-dots event of physical movement and off-center design, much less the synaesthetic fever dream of the Kat’s later years (Temptation, in book form, being strictly black & white beyond the strip included on the back cover). No, Temptation’s layout rhythm is a more stately saunter and its verbal sophistication, while lively, not quite as singular – it owes as much to Herriman as it does to the dialogue-dialogue-punchline structure of the typical mid-century syndicated strip ala Johnny Hart’s B. C. and it’s ilk. (I cite B. C. not from personal knowledge but because Dakin himself mentions it in a brief introductory note.)

But Herriman is a cruel standard to impose – it’s hard to imagine how Temptation’s spare premise would mesh with that idiosyncratic graphic vocabulary. As a story foundation, though, it’s plenty solid, with each page a reliable dose of witty off-hand morality, our central characters both specific enough to ensure each comedic punch hits proper and easy to generalize into a grand unending battle of wills, the lone Man vs. the wily Devil, their backdrop elastic enough to be either the mythic Then or the relevant Now. Campbell notes that the strip was initially pegged as “most likely to succeed” by those in the know, so appealing and user-friendly it seemed, with something like a hypothetical regular weekly slot and a ready rhythm of collections as its final reward. Instead, Temptation proved a series of false starts, appearing sporadically throughout the eighties and nineties, jumping from one small-press haven to another, before inevitably petering out, with this collection, released a decade after its heyday, all that remains. (Although, quite recently, Dakin did break it out again for the Spirit Of Hope anthology, to benefit victims of the Japanese earthquake.)

But if you want your source of Dakin as pure as can be, without the market-ready constraints of a single page premise or a kid-lit tome, your best bet is Abe: Wrong For All The Right Reasons. A few months back I hunted a copy down from one of my discount sources and another few weeks after that, located another one in the clearance shelves for three dollars, so keep those eyes wide and may fortune guide your step.

It’s a collection of Dakin’s “Abe” strips, natch, your source for proper personal expression in the unfiltered-lens-capital-A-artist sense; Warren Ellis, in a nice bit of hyperbole, described Dakin’s work as “…comics that sounded like the best bedroom indie you ever heard…” and this, almost certainly, is the work to which he’s referring. You don’t put a cover of your protagonist standing upon a grassy precipice before the becalmed splendor of the sea – contemplating the boundary he’s treading, with nature in front of him and the world behind, or simply gazing into blank space, the silent vista before him a ready canvas for his thoughts – as anything other than a statement of sincere intent, singer-songwriter album cover style. You can rest easy knowing that, in this book, it’s an image that won’t steer you wrong.

Well, mostly.

“Abe”, y’see, first began as “Captain Oblivion”, a decidedly understated approach to superheroics. It’s an appropriation of genre sans convention; close-ups, splash pages, a backdrop of “realism” against which our Supergod may stand all the more mighty, and so on – those are all non-issues. Like all of Dakin’s work I’ve seen, it proceeds from the physical base of the early twentieth-century daily newspaper strip (Gasoline Alley; Thimble Theater; Herriman, obv.), its panels nice and tight, with an implicit proscenium arch up above so as to render all characters in equal proportion within its space – a form fitting for its central character, the most unassuming of superheroes.

It’s little surprise to learn it began in Dakin’s adolescence, what with the brashness of juxtapositing the word “oblivion” with this indubitably mild man of mystery; that may be a tell. And perhaps Dakin gave Captain Oblivion an actual secret origin, but it’s one that remains secret, away from our eyes in some notebook or zine (like many of his adventures, one imagines), all-around irrelevant before the image which prevails, one of a reasonably normal fellow, probably not unlike you or me, with a cape, tights, and the typical template of extranormal abilities to justify those ridiculous pieces of clothing. Oh, and he’s in the 25^th century. In light of Douglas Wolk’s claim of the superhero genre as the last bastion of the “novel of ideas”, you’d be wise to notice the undercurrent of ideology all throughout, esp. w/r/t the rogues gallery the Captain found himself up against (when he’s taking on villains at all) – a series of smooth-talking charismatic types intent upon remaking messy, unpredictable reality (which amounts, in these stories, to the community, the neighborhood) into a corporate model of logic and efficiency, and thus, at bottom, dehumanization. But all within the context of gentle satire – bemused glances at how outside forces (sometimes malevolently, sometimes misguidedly) may intrude upon private space, set well within the context of the humdrum world.

And any time the concepts of “superhero” and “satire” come within contact of each other, there will invariably be a few jabs at the genre itself;  you’ll find a few here, but superheroics function primarily as a convenient tool for use, with no real qualms. Violence is largely eschewed, with Captain Oblivion positing himself not as a force of will, with all its attendant ethical complications, but more as an example for all who offers the occasional helping hand. Or at least from our privileged extra-textual POV – there’s a running joke of our hero refusing that more imposing role and being pegged as such anyway; an old premise, but one that rarely fails. He’s already a marginal figure in his stories by the time the book begins, with Abe the clear dominant force – plenty of the earlier stories here bear the “Captain Oblivion” title and feature no hint of the character, just plain Abe and his adventures in introspection. Frequently they’ll be writ large through the use of fabulist tropes (Abe encountering Poseidon and birthing a new idea, Abe inheriting the moon, and so on), but they’re just as likely to see our hero navigating the social swirl in romantic comedy mode – whatever suited Dakin’s fancy.

And so, about a fourth of the way through, the good Captain is sent on his way. It’s not a decisive break – he returned in a nice one-off later in the book – but, from then on, Abe remained mere Abe, his cape cast aside and his mild-mannered lenses thoroughly in place, the Captain Oblivion persona traded in so as to better stand in for the man wielding the pen, with his surrounding World Of Tomorrow following suit, more closely resembling our own (which it pretty much always was, minus the odd spire and antenna). Dakin even gave him a nice epitaph:

You could draw a comparison to Jaime Hernandez, considering the similar trajectory both Abe and Locas follow – a cycle of stories setting out into publication with genre training wheels before finding a surer footing when they untethered themselves from that context, with that later blossoming somewhat visible in the earlier work. But if the quality soared once Jaime jettisoned the Rockets and gave the Love his full attention, the learning curve isn’t too steep for Dakin’s “Captain Oblivion”; they’re swell reads, with no anxiety of influence or stake in the genre to throw the writing or art off its course.

With no man of mystery, the strip went from being a celebration of the idiosyncratic meandering life to a depiction of it. Dakin’s penchant for the fable remains, so genre may be gone but the fantastical is never entirely absent – regardless, all dues have been paid and Dakin then hits upon a groove which doesn’t let up for the rest of the book.

Autobiography does become predominant and, considering the close connection, it would be easy to peg Campbell as an influence on this shift, what with the occasional use of the illustration-with-caption-up-above format in Abe, a Campbell trademark by the force of will imposed by 700-some pages, omnibus style, never mind the transparent alter-ego. Perhaps he was an impetus (Campbell, in How To Be An Artist, implies (and only implies, hence this paragraph) they were both plowing the same field before they’d met), but Campbell’s work is that of an inveterate storyteller and a canny operator, his own handmade style one of literary stylistics transformed via some unknown alchemy into pure comics, with even the most incidental narratives allotted a place in an arc, along with running motifs ingenious enough to induce whiplash and a dry-as-the-Gobi sense of dramatic irony.**

Dakin, in Abe, is a far more instinctive beast (note “The Demon Cartoonist”, his chosen nickname), a termite to Campbell’s white elephant. There’s no whiff of memoir here and the tendrils of continuity never coil too tight. Abe will frequently prove to be less an onstage character and simply a more porous filter, a handy P.O.V Dakin wields whenever apposite. Thus the longest piece here, a travelogue through northern Europe which runs to fourteen pages of Abe contentedly drifting from one observation to the next, with circumstance his preeminent guide, takes its place next to a jolly sketch of Abe interviewing a mopey but stoic Hiawatha. Very often, a strip will proceed with not so much a story as a subject of inquiry, a question asked or a topic introduced. Take “At the End of the Rainbow”, which begins as a glance at nostalgia and becomes a monologue on uncertainty. From there, the strip makes its own wayward promenade across six pages: a blunt lesson on survival from a tree is learned and a parable about two ninjas is recounted, along with images from Doctor Who and a scene from D. H. Lawrence’s Women In Love among many an et cetera; every few panels a new motif, some evoking the titular rainbow - the treasure at its end which may never be reached - and some only tangential to the theme, if that. In the end, the strip climaxes with an evocation of pastoral bliss in poem form.  

Such is this book’s m. o. You’ll find a smattering of proper narratives, but it soon becomes clear that stories are no longer the book’s central concern – the focus isn’t on the life lived, its dramatic moments of note dutifully tallied off. Dakin’s preoccupation isn’t with narrative, only the moment, both the moment captured – the fleeting observations and, occasionally, epiphanies that can be experienced anywhere, on a night out or staring out into space when you’ve got work to do – and the moment he’s absorbed in right now, the speed of thought as he’s moves from association to association across the page; various strips are cut-and-paste affairs, making that sense of performance just a little more immediate. But the spotlight here is never pointed at process – for all his frequent play and experimentation, Dakin’s not a formalist; each action is devoted to getting the idea, this mood, this odd nexus of ideas, its own space, before it fades.

There are songs, poems, stuff that probably happened and stuff that most certainly did not – as you might have gathered, nothing here is defined too concretely; modes will frequently shift from one to the next, ever mutable, each piece thoroughly reveling in its status as pictures on a page. A quick flip through the book will see the plot-happy foundation of tiny dense panels to which we’ve grown accustomed more likely to dissolve and break apart, its once-dense flow of information now sparser and the statements often as self-sufficient as koans. It’s all confidence and no strain, scratchy, sloppy, and crystal clear in terms of linework and storytelling, achieving a simplicity so off-handedly assured as to suggest years of study, a keen foundation of discipline (esp. considering Dakin’s age when he produced these – from his early twenties to his early thirties). Very often they seem to have coalesced on the page by sheer happenstance, Dakin’s loose lines floating together to form a wispy vignette, the frequent lack of panel borders leaving the image’s negative space to trail off into the edges of the page. Nothing is irrelevant; everything is of a piece, resoundingly whole under Dakin’s all-powerful sensibility.

Dakin probably drew them the way Frank O’Hara wrote poems, on the fly, the strip he’d be working on something that needed to escape his nervous system, with his mind already intent on both the strip he’d work on tomorrow and the strip he’d start while he buses it to a friend’s place later in the evening. It’s not a unique approach, but it’s palpable when you look at the pages, a restlessness unhindered by perfectionism, the need to move move move, onto the next panel, the next idea. Even the quietest strip suggests a relentlessly mobile pen, a poem jotted down while the inspiration remains. Territory needs to be covered!

And like O’Hara, there’s a sense of intimacy which ensures none of it is precious. In a less talented cartoonist, these strips would veer either toward insufferability - an adolescent’s notebook of poems put on display – or gnomic abstraction, a hazy work-intensive plod through half-digested ideas. Here you’ll find no barrier between you and the artist, only generosity; they read like letters from a good friend, a friend who can’t help but take in the joy and sadness of being alive and will compulsively share them with you every few weeks, another email about what the world is like at this holy moment.

This may be stretching, but, if I squint hard enough, I think I can see one more comparison (as is my m. o.) – indulge me. If you or I were to make a go of writing our own version of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book Of Disquiet, cataloguing our own solipsism, the extent to which we’re out of sync with the rhythm of the world around us, it would probably be pretty close to Abe, except nowhere near as good. Abe/Dakin – social, charming, ceaselessly peripatetic – is far from Pessoa’s hermit – recoiling from the world, preaching inaction and reclusion, defining the entirety of his universe as four walls, a bed, and a great many books – but the books do share one obvious point of congruence – each being a document of notes, sketches, figments, and monologues dictated directly from the deep interior of one man – along with some nice glib ones: you can flip randomly to any page of each and uncover an able epigram; both are, at bottom, manifestos for slackers. There’s no missing the exuberance in Abe, but you’d be hardpressed to neglect what it shares with the Book Of Disquiet:  a sense of disconnection, an unmistakable dissatisfaction with a standard of measurement that is axiomatic with society. Abe at no time approaches Pessoa’s full-on nihilism (plenty do, but often the only testament to their beliefs they leave for posterity are suicide notes); he’s just a man who knows his own definitions of freedom – mystery, chance, stillness – stand in direct contrast to a life that demands practicality as a necessity, which requires set goals, a pre-programmed sense of progress. It may be a losing game – the subtitle of the book doesn’t deny it.

And, perhaps incidentally, both books seem infinite. Abe is only 174 pages but it has all the density of a white star. There are strips here, some lasting one, two, or three pages – each a simple flow of near-calligraphic images dredged up from somewhere, with not much in the way of motion or movement forward – which, in my mind, never seem to stop; I continually play them like pop songs, easy and abstract. The connections they make are vast, continually expanding, and the mysteries (or is it just one? I return to that word ridiculously often in this essay, but there’s no more perfect word) contained therein always beckoning. There aren’t many books like this, with so many landscapes at play, unknown vistas. You might be obliged to take a cue from Ignatz in the image up above, nodding in quiescent siesta before that moon, immutable, ineffable.

Or you can find a spot on a proper precipice and then, as is natural, stand and stare.

FOOTNOTES

*It runs both ways – Eddie (along with his daughter, future Comics Journal contributor Hayley Campbell) makes an appearance in the strip “Abe In Australia”, collected in Abe. 

**If you can see some trace of Campbell in Abe, then Campbell himself claims Dakin as a direct influence, specifically on Graffiti Kitchen, arguably the least illustrative of the Alec books, with each image reliant more upon a scrawled spontaneity and less on pictorial effect.

“The Octopus Project – oh yeah, I know them! They’re great. One of the band members once hit on my sister at a show.” – Natasha Hernandez, in conversation with me when I brought up the subject

So you know what I really need right now? This song. It’s the opening number off an album I don’t own in any format – The House Of Apples And Eyeballs – and it fulfills the function of a proper opening number, i.e. hitting and running the prospective listener with a big blast of hyperbole that amounts to the simple message of “Listen up”, thus setting expectations high for what’s to follow. The rest could very well fall flat – I like to be surprised.

But good golly, it is a fine piece of work, a quick build-up – chiming synths, squeaky beats, and guitars – which gives way to a breakbeat and then that squalling climax, a sound so immediate it renders the forty seconds that came before almost perfunctory, if structurally necessary. You’ll know it when you hear it. It sounds like a siren signaling both alarm and euphoria – everything is up in the air, suspended, and who knows where we’ll land. It’s hard, but not aggressive – just immense, oddly inevitable; everything can happen and it can only happen now, to quote somebody, probably, which is the only palpable moment I can grasp when I hear it: Now. There’s catastrophe and frenzy there, the sense of something emerging – who knows? The song hits another valley, with distortion as an extra flavor, and then ascends back to the same heights, somewhat; this time it echoes off of itself, stuttering, unsustainable – it can only break itself into pieces within those parameters. In the end, that moment just stops, the song trailing off with a simple synth line to lead us out, its point made.

(If I’m honest, I’ll admit that my confidence w/r/t instrumentation is pretty damn hazy: I think I can identify that beat as a breakbeat and everything beyond that – geetars, bass, synths, whatever – all meld into various blissful shades of red against a black background according to my synaesthesia.)

Use this to choreograph your next action sequence or sugar rush or something. Repeat.  

You can download it, along with many other fine tunes (another few recommendations: “I Saw The Bright Shinies” and “The Way Things Go”, though it’s all swell) off The Octopus Project’s website. Enjoy.

Wimbledon Green (Drawn And Quarterly, 2005) by Seth

My knowledge of Seth is fairly small, having only read George Sprott (1894 – 1975), which I recall enjoying: a character study of the flawed-white-man variety common to the literary midlist, familiar but well executed – a big book about a small man who wanted to be big. So I picked up this earlier work, the hosannas delivered in various Best-Of-2005 lists in The Comics Journal echoing in my mind. And it was cheap – four bucks.

The similarities between the two are strong, the later book seemingly a strenuous workout of the muscles first flexed here; “seemingly”, I say, due to my ignorance of the rest of Seth’s corpus – it could be a thing. The template for both is a character study done in a talking head semi-documentary format, with associates, enemies, renowned authorities and the like all connecting dots and adding textures to the blank canvas of the eponymous character – the Citizen Kane mold in essence, but with both central figures enmeshed in marginal realms which probably loom quite large in Seth’s own personal mythology – comic book collecting in Wimbledon Green, the lost world of local television in the later book – and are fading quickly in the glare of whatever portable screen you’re probably reading this on.

But a quick glance at surface elements gives away the contrasts: George Sprott’s unwieldy size pretty much telling you the entire story before you crack it open, with a cover more fitting for a concrete mausoleum door, and the po-faced black, gray, and blue tones wearing down the reader well before you can actually study the content. And there’s Wimbledon Green – a wee book of all earth hues, with the title character standing proudly on the title cover, rays of glorious bombast emitting from him so as to frame his name for the sake of the title.

It’s a fun jaunt, involving many self-serious men who collect comics, a chase through the countryside, the idolization of the itinerant lifestyle, and buttered toast. Not much to say myself – that Seth sure knows his way around pages gridded to the extent that you can do your geometry homework on them, should the need arise.

(I wrote this some weeks back, but I’d feel remiss if I neglected to point your way to Matt Seneca’s far better review of the same work, posted a week or so ago. He doesn’t glibly dally with the surface elements, as I do here, but takes a full on dive, all the while seemingly working on a rough draft for a manifesto. It’s swell.)

The Protectors Vol. 1, #1 (New York Comics, 1986) by Brett Axel, Spencer Bernard, and Fred Thornton Jr.

What resonates especially in Wimbledon Green, at least from my own limited years-in-the-trenches viewpoint, is the social context it creates around an almost exclusively solitary pursuit – bin-diving. In there, it escapes subculture in the marketing demographic sense and is depicted as a genuine subculture, emphasis on culture, with attendant cliques, clubs, meetings, rogues, greedy bullies, gallant heroes, and the designated alpha males. (And only males, obviously, because you can only take whimsy so far.) Everyone has their big score, prizes that slipped, eel-like, out of their grasp at that last moment, glimpses of glory that proved to be mirages, lengths traversed, scars they’ve earned over the years brandished like medals, etc.

It’s a helluva hook, at least for those of us intimate with the impulse to scour, i.e. the damned. Saturday afternoons spent digging digging digging, on or (if you’re wise) under tables, among a few dozen off-white long boxes, your pulse gaining a few beats whenever you encounter, from your god’s eye POV, paper in a certain tight spectrum of yellow-to-brown – surely, it can’t be a coincidence it shares the same hues as gold?

Sure, nostalgia is the catalyst for it, but that’s a given with plenty of passions. Keep it up and you can get a taste for recapturing moments, not just those you can tag as officially “yours” – any book can be a time machine, all the more effective its ragged paper and rusty staples. Hell, even inertia can be a virtue – an object which aspires to the barest standard of quality and falls short can communicate itself with a far greater clarity than most, its plastic qualities none too pliable.

Which goes a little way toward explaining why I grabbed this when I saw it:

It served its purpose well. Benjamin Marra – steal this cover layout.

It was released in 1986. The traditional heroic narrative of the English-language comics scene at that time, or at least the one trotted out whenever anyone asks, is of the medium reaching something like maturity, the resurrection of the underground dovetailing with the rise of soiled superheroics: Maus, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, Love & Rockets, you know the list. It’s a saga that comes with a convenient flipside: the simultaneous B&W boom, premised not on any notions of progress or Pulitzers but on the joyous celebration of capitalism – “Gold in them thar hills!”, etc. – Eastman & Laird’s success story with the Ninja Turtles provoking a few thousand journeymen, amateurs, and opportunists into trying their hand at this comics game, the dollar signs in their eyes too often obstructing their view of the comics they were crafting, judging by the frequently frail results. The Protectors is an easy snapshot of those days of being wild.

Appropriate for a first issue, it’s the Protectors’ origin, who they are and how they came to be, “they” being some dude, his wife, his psychic detective sister or something, and some girl wearing a shirt as skin-tight as you can imagine bearing the phrase “SOME LIKE IT HOT!” – so tight that I suspect she’s really not wearing a shirt at all, just that phrase tattooed across her chest along with a circular collar design around her neck. Either way, I think the audience may infer that A) she’s a man in drag OR B) she’s a Buster Pointdexter fan; they may not be mutually exclusive. Anyway, they all get entangled in some supervillain henchmen type guys – with matching outfits and masks and lasers and stuff – kidnapping girls for an underdeveloped enslavement program, making it a lot like The Slavers storyline in Punisher MAX, except with dudes from the undersea kingdom of Englas or something instead of Eastern European badass ex-paramilitary types as the ultimate villains. And in the epilogue, they’re all hanging on someone’s couch, like you do after you just got back from The Limelight and you’re at someone’s place hoping to dear god your ride home isn’t too drunk, and someone says hey, let’s become a superhero team, which is another common Friday night-3AM scenario except this character doesn’t pass out soon thereafter. And that’s their Avengers-style beginnings – drink responsibly, folks.

That’s not all, though. As the book was drawn (pencils by Spencer Bernard, inks by Fred Thornton Jr.) on nonstandard 11” x 17” paper, with room to spare when placed within the proper floppy format, you get bonus behind-the-scenes commentary at the bottom of each story page, making it a lot like Casanova, except with no mention of Bowie lyrics or alcoholism. And, if Fraction was at the helm, you can bet it would be a New York Dolls reference on that girl’s chest. Axel displays some wary enthusiasm in those margins, seemingly aware of the unprepossessing object in our hands (Bernard being his wife’s teenage cousin), but full of promise for future issues of the series – four completed scripts and fifty fully formed plots just waiting to be realized – which Axel claims will bring with them both new artists and possible controversy, his work potent enough to place him in the crosshairs of both the CIA and lynch mobs; that’s the kind of bombast to do Stan proud, but you suspect Axel isn’t joking.

Beyond The Protectors, Axel reels off an assortment of other concepts in the works from New York Comics (Axel), among them parodies of both Watchmen (down to the house ad – gotta respect that) and (you betcha) the Ninja Turtles. (“The Unborn Nuclear Wasted Punk Rock Fetuses” – Axel also expresses concern over the political fervor this may rile up; I suspect it’s a Takashi Nemoto joint by now.) Breathe in these pages and the quarter-decade between then and now just falls away…

As a thirty-two page consumer object, yeah, it’s pretty miserable. Experienced in one hole-in-the-Old-Milwaukee-can dose, it’s a black hole of a thing, each page fading from memory mid-read, the prose bits below perhaps more articulate as a long series of sighs, abounding with undercurrents of disappointment, anxiety, and paranoia.

In controlled intermittent doses, pecking at it every now and again, certain charms do arise. There’s no avoiding that art, all its shabby desperate energy, with nearly every action stark against a vacuum – backgrounds almost moot, because any pretense to reality would be a pointless distraction. Whatever ineptitude one wishes to ascribe to it, there’s no lack of immediacy, every frame a decisive exclamation point, the scenario it’s illustrating lagging far far behind in urgency.

Of course, you’d be stretching (tremendously) to consider it as a visceral primitivist bit of ingenuity or heta-uma posturing to provoke the prevailing sense of propriety. No, it’s all adolescent energy, raw power in lieu of talent, a boy wielding a meager pencil to kick your ass, and who can’t respect that? It’s disheartening to see it constrained by Axel’s limp and hazy kinda-sorta superhero framework – what this fucker really needs is an imagination to match, one both impoverished and frenzied, maybe with a livewire background of loose leaf blue lines as a the back ground. Bernard, appropriately, abandoned The Protectors after this premiere issue, following his own muse of with a book called Dragon World – however passionately wrought that comic was, I don’t think it ever saw print. But hey, as the opening chapters of Brian Chippendale’s Ninja can attest to, wondrous eldritch fruit can be borne from such adolescent exuberance. Are you reading this, Picture Box?

New York Comics (and, ergo, Axel) went on to produce two more comics: The Protectors #2 (art by Steve Bloomenthal, according to Axel in that commentary; I can’t verify it) and Washmen (with Alan White). And that was that. Maybe, the world did come down on Axel, that second issue’s provocative subject matter (per Axel: “…another possible story to the Libian [sic] crisis, one which shows Ron Reagan in a most unattractive light…”) deemed too subversive to let pass. Or, far more likely, New York Comics ended up another company whose ambitions were trounced by a lack of funding, talent, and/or market demand. Either way, we were left with a few more artifacts from the distant and strange land of the past.

“The Last Of The Summer Wine” from Doing The Islands With Bacchus (Eddie Campbell Comics) by Eddie Campbell

(For Joe “The Tank” McCulloch)

But comics that aren’t about comics. Those exist, right?

Another item I recently picked up was Immortality Isn’t Forever, the first Bacchus collection. Bacchus (or Deadface, as the series was originally titled, the better presumably to make no waves in that milieu) was also an attempt to ride that B&W boom, though this I purchased in good faith, with no anthropological jollies to be satisfied. You can sense a wee bit of that in the first few issues, at least if you’re addicted to connecting works to their original context, the stories sparer and more rough and tumble, with a minimum quotient of thrillpower inserted in the hopes of sustaining a regular money maker. Campbell seemed to settle into a nice groove as the issues kept coming, his already present sensibility becoming more pronounced. In the next trade, The Gods Of Business, there’s a story which stands out as a personal favorite, the Stygian Leech episode, which uses the willfully silly motif of fourth-wall-breaking inanimate objects to build up to a rollicking action climax, etc.; it’s the joy of seeing a creator so confident in his storytelling and set up that he can move forward in the most ridiculous manner possible – I’d discuss it further, but that collection is in storage at the moment, far from my longing eyes. Bacchus would prove quite mutable thereon, the iffy approach to genre of the early books giving way to twee Jack Kirby (see: Hermes Vs. The Eyeball Kid; I’ve filched that indelible phrase from Craig Fischer, sorta) and the raucous pastiche of King Bacchus (Vol. 9; like those comic parodies which persistently pop up in Cerebus, but actually funny), among others.

Tonal shifts notwithstanding, Campbell remained Campbell, with a casual and distanced take on the fantastic, melodrama continually deflected into wry understatement – no prefab models of escapism to be found here. Humor, as ever, was rarely far off and sometimes even poignancy as well; a sense of play-acting seemed to permeate the stories, rarely going so far as direct metafiction (though Campbell occasionally tosses off a direct address to the readers, ala the Stygian Leech among others), but more like role-playing, a willingness for most of the characters to embrace their two-dimensionality, wallow in it. It’s a narrative style which reached something like an apex in one of Campbell’s more recent works, The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard.  

Both the story at hand and the volume it comes from – Doing The Islands With Bacchus – stand apart especially. Having only read about half of the catalog, Doing The Islands is probably the quietest of the bunch, standing apart from the more-or-less plot-oriented volumes which surround it, no Mr. Dry or Eyeball Kid to butt up against. The book is a self-sufficient cycle of stories with only the most perfunctory acknowledgement of a plot – just Bacchus, his pal and devotee Simpson, and, on occasion, Hermes, sailing around the Mediterranean for some vague overall purpose. Within it, you’ll find inquiries into the history of fashion, the art of distilling wine, various forays into actual Greek mythology intermingled with some quite clever fictions on Campbell’s part, an orgy, theological musings, et cetera. At moments it seems very nearly an Alec book, albeit an Alec book displaced onto a bemused, weary, and wandering god. My pre-owned (natch) copy came soiled in some kind of liquid: coffee or piss or, hell, maybe even some alcohol, as if the previous owner felt such a gesture would prove a fitting bit of extratextual commentary, his or her own singular ex libris, one appropriate for the God of Carousing. Unlike the flop sweat The Protectors comes drenched in, this book wears its stains proudly.

And, among its contents, “The Last Of The Summer Wine” is the story with the most surface resemblance to Campbell’s other vast narrative body, every page holding tight to the nine panel grid with the captions above the images as the engine of the story, the panel-to-panel relationship defined less by action and more by association. To reiterate, nothing much happens – Bacchus and Hermes shoot the shit while Simpson glances at his own personal history and muses on the Greece of yore, its mythos and its men of knowledge, among sundry other topics. It’s not too hard to filter its scenario through Alec, particularly the chronologically earlier work, with Bacchus in lieu of Danny Grey, an older and less wild Danny but, as ever, pretty good for a story, and Simpson in the role of Campbell’s Alec on the sidelines, his thoughts elsewhere.

If most of the volume is driven by Campbell’s entertaining didactic impulse – a topic introduced and then elaborated upon via anecdote and/or direct example – “The Last Of The Summer Wine”, no less informative, foregoes that, opting for a more wide ranging discourse, leaping from idea to idea, reeling off lists and letting the images interplay with the prose. Simpson is our controlling consciousness here, the images his direct unfiltered thought and the prose his plain description. The arguable centerpiece is Simpson’s guided tour of the Greek pantheon, the main gods appearing on one page as a series of framed portraits – Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, et al. – the spotlight of posterity reinforced by the page’s punchline, the museum goers and a security guard revealed at the page’s bottom as the god’s current audience; this line of thought continues on to the next page: the lesser known gods stuck in the storage room, unseen heaps of haphazard canvases, supporting characters and footnotes for specialists. It’s a remarkable set piece in the matter-of-fact Campbell style, a promenade through the curios of the past which takes a sideways move into naturalism. And there are others catalogues of this sort, each with their own specific internal logic, if not quite as elaborate in their formal gamesmanship – the numerological weight of the number twelve, the Greek men of knowledge and renown, etc. There’s a flood of notions in these twenty-four pages, all those connections, sometimes obvious and sometimes curious, insidiously working their way into the reader’s mind and maybe lingering about for a bit. (Why is Anaxagoras represented by a gallon of milk?, etc.)

Of course, Simpson’s self-serious internal monologue gets a nice counterpoint courtesy of Bacchus at the story’s margins – his cheerful anecdotes of real-life moments when tragedy decided to don its comedy mask and his own appreciation of graven images of the gods unhindered by any rarefied atmosphere, via a tourist souvenir of himself ejaculating ouzo out of its erect penis.

The story is essayistic, but more expansive than the immediate definition which leaps to mind – the essay, when labeled as such, codified as a focused bit of pondering on a single topic. Here, the “I” and its attendant personality are very much at the forefront, making it more akin to (among others) W. G. Sebald, Chris Marker, or Montaigne, with both the rambling and digressive instincts thoroughly intact, so that a piece entitled “On Love” will encompass mostly love, but with horses, the Iliad, the fate of Mercutio in Romeo And Juliet, and whatever other topics crossed Montaigne’s mind as his pen dipped from inkstand to paper, up for discussion – don’t hold me to those specifics.

By the end it all accumulates into a song of mourning – just look at the title. The season of Greece has passed and what little of it remains will soon be wiped clean, with Bacchus nearing the end of his days (Immortality Isn’t Forever, natch) and Simpson, the self-appointed guardian of its memory, approaching death as well. But, for the moment, there’s still a bit of its taste to savor, as the final page attests to: our gang’s ship suddenly festooned with Bacchus’ vine leaves as it sails toward Naxos on a wine dark sea.

The Mohawk
 
Presumably the name’s a holdover from some decades back – there’s very little that’s punk about tonight’s crowd; the iPods of all in attendance runneth over with Animal Collective songs and at least one band with the word “deer” in its name.
 
We’re outside and a brief phone call later, the lovely Natasha, looking like Penelope Cruz’s lil’ sis, comes out to greet us and give me and Ignacio our tickets (we paid in advance). We head in; the club is divided into two sections, indoor (meek, boozy) and outdoor (dominant, lively), with their respective stages for performance. We’re outdoors – the main stage; we make our way to the second floor, where await, at a table in the middle of a large open space where the only lighting comes from a street light forty feet away, Mari (Natasha’s sister), Travis (Mari’s significant other), and Natasha’s mother (a splendid woman whose name remains a mystery to me, despite having met her on at least two prior occasions).
 
I’ve known Natasha since 2007; she’s just shy of five feet tall but claims that mentally she’s 5′ 1, is arguably the most beautiful girl within a three-mile radius of wherever she stands (sorry, Ellie!), and can power London for a week with the energy she displays during any given hour. She’s swell. 
 
Mari, her older sister, is a cool contrast - also beautiful, but taller and all angles, not unlike a flamingo; low key, with a passive aggression she wields mightily when compelled to call someone on their bullshit. Travis, Mari’s fella, keeps to himself; a cipher but quite nice. Natasha’s mother, I will keep apologizing for not knowing your name – she’s a splendid woman who matches Natasha for energy and beauty and is clearly able to run circles around those of us somewhat younger.
 
It’s about 9:30 or 10:00, I can’t tell, the moments swell or shrink based upon my nervous system’s say-so; time flies because I threw it out the window. At the table, with voices barely audible above the opening act (quite good, forgot the name), we all shout our salutations at each other; actually this will continue for a few more hours, until Stereo Total play their final encore, so even the most minor comment anyone makes to anyone else comes appended with a trail of exclamation marks. Confusion’s a factor in every interaction and no one seems to mind. 
 
Things begin for me with an uncommon scenario: being surrounded by beautiful women who can’t stop talking about comic books at a rock ‘n’ roll club. Natasha is telling me about the cheap Julie Doucet back issues she recently uncovered, while Mari brings up her obsession with David B. (I seize the opportunity to recommend Killoffer); even the glorious matriarch of the Hernandez clan brings up her ongoing search for some prime Gilbert Shelton.
 
It gets a bit more unusual when Sierra, Ellie, and Eddie join us, completing the group. Eddie soon loses himself in the Negative Zone and there’s me and Ellie chatting (shouting) again. She’s deaf in her left ear, the ear closest to me, so she’s constantly tilting her head my way so I can press my mouth up close to her other ear and be heard above the unending noise. It’s tempting to describe this as a bit of inadvertent intimacy, akin to those hands that are always accidentally touching when the two principles of the story – fated to amorously embrace at the climax of Act III - exist in a state of romantic uncertainty, but really it’s just funny. Often I’ll have to cup my hand over my mouth when speaking and it looks like I’m shouting secrets into some poor girl’s ear.
 
At one point, I’m telling her that I can’t decide whether to buy a beer – does the one can I’ve consumed so far want companionship or solitude? She recommends I go for it. I get semigrandiose and declare that I’ll leave the decision up to fortune, via my personal “ode to irrationality” – a Snapple bottle cap I keep handy for such emergencies. She’s intrigued - I explain: it popped up before me when I was completely isolated at a bench, with no one within, oh, a thirty foot distance; I turn my head for a few seconds only to hear a metallic plonk and look down to see it roll and settle at my feet. Naturally there’s a logical reason why circumstance might place this item in my path, but my imagination falters in this respect; hence, this talisman of irrationality (lucky charm, though I avoid that because I’m a real man and I create my old luck like the men who strode the earth in days of yore). She’s amused.
 
“What’s the cap say?”
 
I quote it, paraphrasing here: “We don’t sneeze in our sleep because the muscles that cause sneezing are also resting.”
 
Her memory contests modern science in this regard; she’s pretty sure she’s had the occasional adventure in slumberland come to an abrupt end courtesy of a sneeze. I see an opening for it and tell her about a dream I had last year, one of the very few dream stories that doesn’t bore because it’s all punchline; the only detail of it I remember is the line I said right before I awoke. That phrase?
 
“‘Gondolier, take us to the waterslide.’” 
 
“Wow… you should use that as the name of a song.”
 
“Yeah - it’ll be twelve minutes long and really noodley.”

Tonight, I expected to be an amiable nonentity perched at the periphery of things, nothing more. Such a plan of action proves unfeasible when you find yourself in an ongoing semi-flirtation with a girl who resembles Maggie Gyllenhaal with a Jean Seberg haircut.

And I did flip that bottle-cap; not just yet.
 
From there until the opening act’s* final tune, my perception skips across the everything happening like a stone across a pond: there’s Mari raving about a mix CD I made Tash back in 2007; Ignacio’s speedy gallop through all the stages of intoxication, me taking note of his rapid progress (or descent, should that suit your point of view) whenever he re-enters the scene; and at one point I turn my head and see Ellie standing with Eddie (hey – he’s back) – she’s lighting a cigarette and begins to blow rhythmic puffs of smoke straight up into the night sky.
 
Choo choo.   

*Masonic.

9/4 – Stereo Total, LIVE AT THE MOHAWK
 
We park ourselves at the front and to the right of the stage, in front of an amp that looks large enough to crush Tash, should the power of Euro synth-pop compel it. Sure, Tash doesn’t want to die, but she’d be the first to appreciate the notion.
 
After a few minutes, Stereo Total show up on stage. They’re a duo – a fellow, probably in his forties but looking indeterminately younger and dressed so as to get unwelcome attention from letter-jacketed jocks in 1982: tight tight black pants, an untucked deliberately torn white dress shirt with a loosened tie flailing about from the collar, and appropriately off kilter footwear. The other half is a red-headed woman in her forties – she’s every much showing her age, flaunting it really, but from the way she carries herself, here on stage, fiddling about and conversing with her partner and later, when I’ll see her chatting with the merch guy and walking among the crowd, I gather she’s completely comfortable in her identity, and can view time’s progress across her body as merely another accessory to be adorned. Her wardrobe tonight is, and my memory may be fallible here, a matching dark green jacket-and-pants combo (maybe velvet, but I know nothing of fabric) over a black dress shirt and green tie. 
 
And so the show begins, with the male half, German, going into full “are you ready to be rocked?” mode and his cohort - French – joining in to get everyone hyped for the explosion of synthy beats just seconds away.
 
I’d feel dishonest if I went into detail as to the set list or the individual performances or, I suppose, any of the other bullet points you’d find in a concert review - what I can say is that for about an hour and a half it was loud and I moved, my main focus being every beat as it came and whatever automatic response my body would take to it. A large amount of the time I imagine I resembled a jack in the box that, impossibly, won’t stop moving once you’ve rotated that handle to see it emerge, both of us sharing the same stiff back and forth movements and silly grins on our faces.

There are some moments I salvaged from that ninety minute blur - me, Tash, and Ignacio dancing in a semicircle, arms over each other’s shoulders; me nearly crashing into that amp I mentioned above; and Ignacio, on impulse, reaching and unbuttoning two buttons on my beige polo shirt – a shirt, drenched in my sweat and maybe that of others as well, I’d remove and drape over my left shoulder three-quarters of the way through the show, where it will remain for the rest of the night (I never leave the house without an undershirt). A few days later, when I do my laundry, pink sweat stains at the pits of the shirt will appear; those marks may be as valid as a testament to that evening as this story, perhaps even more so. 

Helium

Tash: I’ve been to a thousand of these shows! Your hearing will be weird for a while, but you’ll be fine!
 
Me: What!?!?
 
Our group is quick to disperse when the band officially delivers their final “Merci, Austin!”, off to the restroom or to get a drink or, in Ignacio’s case, to hang out with the band on stage, probably delivering slurred and enthusiastic hosannas.
 
For a few minutes, I’m alone. I expect to find myself in a sea of voices, with the few hundred strangers around me recuperating or planning their next move, y’know, with female tones dominant - something similar to a high school cafeteria or the opening thirty seconds of “Remake/Remodel”. But it’s all muted. I test my voice and it’s present, but apparently there’s been a helium leak and the management is keeping it - and the crowd - very hush-hush. I run into Tash and, when I manage to invade her personal space enough to get a rough approximation of what’s exiting her mouth, I discover she’s also been exposed and soon everyone is speaking to me in voices pitched for children’s television. My sensory status quo takes a while coming: my hearing returns after fifteen minutes, not with a satisfying pop but a few sudden notches on the volume display, all the better for me to enjoy everyone’s squeaky vocal inflections, tones which will resound until the next morning.
 
We eventually regroup and then depart – most of us off to Jenny’s and whatever lies thereafter and Mari and Travis headed out of this story for the confines of hearth and home; take a bow. There’s a book still waiting for you, Mari, but it’s by Peter Blegvad, not Killoffer.

Back To Jenny’s!
 
Another cab with the same cast as earlier: me, Ignacio, and Jenny; Ignacio tips the Pakistani behind the wheel ten dollars. If I remember correctly, a cab carrying Eddie and Ellie came next, followed ten minutes later by Natasha, her mother, and Sierra. And I think, being the first three to arrive, we found ourselves breaking into the house, Jenny having left her keys inside and Sierra seven dollars in cab fare away, a detail I’d forgotten until typing this up.
 
This is empty space between the show and the party – the still center of the evening. People are idling or racing from one room to another, inside and outside the house, for reasons I can’t fathom. My info of what’s going on is hazy – something is anticipated but I’m not quite sure what.
 
Soon, Ignacio begins dissolving before everyone’s eyes, a black-and-white atomic age experiment gone horribly awry; the National Guard will have to be called in. He does a hot-dog-chasing-the-donut routine with Tash, proclaiming his long-suppressed love for her in slurred soap opera fashion on the front porch and then pleading his case while chasing her into the backyard and throughout the neighborhood. I suspect it’s a common occurrence, another nearby girl a sudden blip on his radar screen whenever his blood alcohol level crosses a certain threshold, the same boozy melodramatic act ready to be performed every time; adolescent exposure to such weekend ridiculousness can keep you away from alcohol for the first twenty-four years of your life. Natasha’s fine, just so you know – she will brook no stale gestures.

Another fragment a little down the line: me and Ellie and someone else (memory leaves them a blank) are on the patio, with more chatting in medias res. Let’s hope I’m a person of interest to some vast government bureaucracy – with luck I’ll be able to get a hold of some transcripts of the evening for the sake of verisimilitude. 
 
For some reason the topic of names comes up. I ask Ellie whether she’s ever met anyone named Jack; it’s my observation that, for a name so common in the mass culture, you will rarely meet anyone who claims it as their own in everyday encounters.
 
“No…I don’t think I have, actually.”
 
“I know! It’s weird, right?”
 
“And it’s kind of everywhere, too. But I don’t think I have.”
 
“I think it’s an ‘alpha male only’ thing. You probably have to beat up a rabid gorilla or something to earn the right to be called ‘Jack’. That’s probably a thing they do at corporate retreats.”
 
“We should do something about that.”
 
“Yeah – maybe a character or something. Like the archeologist guy with the whip and the fedora. He’ll be larger than life.”
 
“He needs a name, y’know? Something aside from ‘Jack’. Something big.”
 
“Yeah, and maybe a title. Captain Jack…Harness.”
 
(I clearly know my recent Doctor Who – I was betting she wouldn’t be geeky enough to catch it.)
 
“That’s cool.”
 
“Maybe Captain Jack Dominguez-Harness. Something like that.”
 
“He’ll be adventurous. You should write that.”
 
“Oh, of course. I could maybe pull that off. I am, after all, larger than life.”
 
“That’s true.”
 
“Well, now we have a plan of action.” 
 
“But he needs something to wear, some kind of hat that’s not a fedora. Something distinctive.”
 
“Hm. That’s good…”
 
A few beats – the inevtiable awkward pause.
 
“A beret!”
 
“A beret?”
 
“Yeah! The beret’s perfect. Berets are completely uncool. And we’ll make them cool.”
 
“I think that’ll work.”
 
“I mean – do you think berets are cool?”
 
“No, not really.”
 
“And, I don’t think berets are cool. But with our ridiculous character, we’ll make them cool!”
 
“You should send it to me when you’ve got something.”
 
“Okay.”
 
“Yeah. Send it to me.”
 
Well, that’s a hint. And when she says it both times, she’s giving me a sideways look that I’m very tempted to read as “knowing”, replete with a faint smirk, her head slightly tilted as she slouches a bit in her chair. For a few days after the end of this story, she’d linger in my mind as more of a concept than anything else - a private joke shared with a pretty girl – with everything concrete about her right outside my grasp; for all intents and purposes, she is that elation, and the few of her physical characteristics I could muster trail behind it like the tail of a kite. It will remain so until an arbitrary moment on Wednesday during my lunch break, when I manage to dredge up that look, the pupils at the corners of her eyes staring at me, and, with that detail regained, contour and substance break on through: the roundness of her cheeks, her voice, her laugh, and everything else waiting to be found in my memory, whole and undamaged. X marks the spot.
 
Yes, there was a pregnant pause. I let it pass, because I am a hesitant fool. And here’s where the ”coulda, woulda, and shoulda”s all begin to hover over my head like a cartoon storm cloud. Seeing as to how there was a third party present (Sierra, probably on her phone? Ignacio, 20,000 leagues under the sea?), my reasoning was probably “loose lips sink ships” and that another moment will soon come, a moment where I might ask a girl with a dull boyfriend for her contact information, or even her last name, with complete ease. I’ll press fate’s pause button and all action will be stilled for that necessary moment.

Just you wait.

“I CAN CHANGE”
 
En route to the party, we crowd into someone’s (probably Jenny’s) PT Cruiser, six of us, clown-car style. (Ellie and Eddie take their chances walking – the original plan of action for everyone, the location being theoretically walkable, until we all come down with a case of common sense and realizes it’s 1:30 in the morning.) I sing along with the LCD Soundsystem song coming from the stereo (“I can change, I can change, I can change/ If it helps you fall in love”) and manage to effectively flirt with the entire car.
 
James, His Party
 
Jenny and Sierra have been referring to it as the after show party all evening, repeating it so often that “after show” becomes weighted with any number of significations, all extreme and contradictory. By the time you arrive, you half-expect the scene to resemble a photograph of a party at Warhol’s Factory, circa 1967, come to life, with a crowd dwarfing the people in actual attendance at the show – there will be an orgy room, a forsaken corner where some people are trying to summon the spirit of James Brown via Ouija board, an elephant, and maybe Bill Murray. 

Of course, you get there and it’s just a party - on every block of the city this exact same party is happening: about thirty to forty people with an average age of 25 getting drunk in a backyard, with regular beelines to the restroom at two minute intervals. The moment you make your entrance there will invariably some guy “woo!”-ing enthusiastically for no damn good reason – good for him.
 
Eddie and Ellie arrive an hour after us, having stopped at one of those parties I just mentioned, this one a few blocks away – weirdly, they’re both bearing big green cloth bags full of party souvenirs or candy or something. Maybe actual question marks, big foam ones. No green bags at this party. What it does have is a digital projection of an episode of “Soul Train” playing against incongruous music (why not?) on the back wall of the house and lots of beer, all courtesy of James.
 
James: tall, skinny, and cheerfully drunk. When we first see him, he’s holding two beers – one in his right hand wholly for recreation, the other jammed up under his armpit and cooling the reddened knuckles of his left hand; he has just played the hands-on host, ejecting, through fisticuffs, some unruly attendees scant moments before our arrival. Despite this, his demeanor greeting us mostly strangers is as open and jovial as is imaginable, inviting us to do whatever we want to have a good time at his house. There’s something to pursue: an innate sense of how to balance the situation at any given instant; an easygoing grace. Weirdly enough, from the minute we meet, he singles me out; later, a giddy exclamation mark will pop up whenever our paths cross (“Richard!”) before I’m introduced to whoever he’s nearest as someone worth knowing. 
 
Don’t question these things.

The Coin I Found At The Bus Stop
 
Spend your life primarily inside your head and everything becomes mythology; not grandiose one-to-one correspondences, but closer to a more shifting and multivalent Campbellian manner (Joseph, not Eddie), with a single event or evening, completely isolated, perfectly willing to serve as a microcosm for whatever. It’s vague and haphazard, slippery – with new emphases every time I go over it.
 
What sticks in place, refusing to budge when I review the evening, is the coin, placed by some narrator or fourth-dimensional imp at the precise onset of everything, at the bus stop bench in front of The Mix, just as I’m about to await Ignacio’s arrival. The writing on it looks Central Asian – Indian, I’d guess, but it could be Pakistani or Uzbek or something. In terms of size and color, it can be easily mistaken for a nickel. It follows the currency template that I suspect may be one of the very few genuinely pancultural phenomenons, maybe even prevalent across the millennia, the legacy of Babylon in the back pocket of the guy in front of you at the Valero: a national leader on one side, cultural monument on the other. On one side, the figurehead: he’s bearing a neatly shorn, short-back-and-sides coif, with glasses and pursed lips that have never learned how to smile; from what we may see of his outfit, he wears a dappled jacket over a collarless shirt buttoned to the very top. My overall impression, from a very culturally limited viewpoint, is of a caricature of an IRS agent quite keen on The White Album. The opposite side portrays, in the foreground, some unfamiliar impressive building redolent of glorious times past; in the background, obscured by the very dominant foreground, a metropolitan skyline. An obvious message: progressing into modernity with our cultural identity intact. 
 
There’s a narrative neatness to finding it the moment my trip is about to begin, and so the interpretations can’t help but tumble out. What metaphorical slots can I insert my wee funny non-nickel into?:
 
a) A coin swept by the gale of odd circumstance from its original context, whatever far-flung cash registers it may have once claimed temporary residence, still has value – as fortune’s medium, heads or tails, a convenient guide to any situation before you.
 
b) Or maybe it’s a metaphor for me, a very self-aggrandizing metaphor, one that I’m not proud to say came to mind within a moment of picking it up: me as someone perpetually in possession of useless currency – there’s more there, but I’ll stop short to spare myself any further embarrassment. Rest assured though, my grudge against the world will find a better medium… IN BLOOD!
 
c) Another way to go: open up our much-abused Robert Graves and see if anything pops up. Well, the gods don’t truck much with gold and silver, content to recognize such a value system as beneath them, wholly the domain of men; intercourse between the divine and the earthbound most often takes the form of good ol’ sacrifice, wherein the part is ceremoniously exchanged for the sake of the whole or, well, intercourse, as frequently seen in both Ovid and, once upon a time, channel 99. But there is one viable role brass ‘n’ copper economics plays in all the stories, a necessary rite in every heroic journey, including your own(!!): as payment for passage into the Underworld. And thus, the protagonist may meet the next chapter of his story head on (see – Joseph Campbell!).
 
There’s plenty more there, fun to muse on. Stubbornly the coin will remain only a coin, greeting anyone who cares to look with either an unfamiliar face or the architecture of a distant land, depending on which way you hold it.
 
It’s About 3 A.M.  
 
Things begin winding down an hour, maybe an hour-and-a-half, into the party, at least for the group I’m inextricably bound to if I want a couch to crash on and not spend seventeen dollars bussing it back home. (ROLL CALL!: Natasha, Natasha’s mother (many compliments about my dancing), Ignacio (barely visible beyond the cartoon haze of “drunk” bubbles that endlessly emit from him), Eddie (actually “Eduardo”), Ellie, Jenny, Sierra, me.)

We all know the next act but no one’s ready for the curtain to draw on this one just yet. The party’s still going on in the backyard, with every group exiting seemingly matched by another making an entrance. This is what I imagine most cities become when Saturday night and Sunday morning get to blending together in a kaleidoscopic mish-mash: one large informal shindig, with pockets of activity as common as gas stations, the revelers stumbling or racing from one to another, equally welcome at all. You get science fiction stories like that, a tiny sub-genre that I’m identifying at this moment, where assorted figures gleaned willy-nilly across time and space and dimension, Abe Lincoln (well obviously) and Daffy Duck and Piltdown Man and the great thunder-lizards and everyone everywhere gather for a grand hurrah, most often as time is about to tick its last seconds off and reality will fold itself up like an infinitely receding origami flower or a Scrabble board to make way as the fuse is lit for whatever comes next.
 
In this setting, when the universe isn’t quite imploding but time does loom, a nearly physical presence right beyond the edge of everyone’s vision, people start to cash in the social chips they’ve earned over the evening or make desperate dashes for unlikely goals or just get really, really drunk because there’s not much leeway in getting really, really drunk at any other time of the week than when Sunday morning is rapidly approaching. Everyone plays their part, including me in my own meek and half-assed way: making the occasional furtive glance at Ellie, trying to summon up the few moments we shared earlier in the evening across a distance of twenty feet or so – probably not succeeding, but I can’t say. At the very least I want to count her email address and possibly phone number among the souvenirs I carry with me at evening’s end, along with the eerie pink pit-stains on the shirt draped over my shoulder and the coin of uncertain origin in my pocket.* Any moral dilemma I may have about pursuing someone’s girlfriend can arise when that slip of paper is pressed tight between my fingers and palm or when the tipsiness wears off. As she’s near Eddie whenever I see her, it’s a nonissue.  

And maybe there’s nothing there – maybe the glint in her eyes was just the reflection of my glasses and whatever playful insinuation I read in her voice a wishful delusion. It could be a fiction, an interpretation as ridiculous as the bits of whimsy which were quick to attach to themselves to that innocuous coin. With the night readily revealing beautiful women and silver from unknown lands – ready elements for a saga or most any boy’s own adventure – wouldn’t your imagination see those as convenient impetuses for fantasy? Could it even be resisted? If so, I’m bound tight in this narrative: all along, unseen tentacles have been coiling around me, with every detail careful to delineate itself clearly in my presence, and patterns keep popping up that only know themselves because there’s someone - me – with eyes to see. And yes, egomania – I could feel my own eyes gazing at me all evening, not self-consciously as you’d expect, but squinting at me through an illuminated screen, trying to delicately unpack all of it onto a word document he’ll name “Valerie” (the Broadcast song playing when he has to come up with a file name), because right now on September 4th or 5^th at Jenny’s and at the show and at this party with the moments flowing into each other so rapidly, I’m slapping a ”FRAGILE” in big red letters and exclamation marks on everything around me. So keep up, Baez.**  
 
So here we are, outside of my head, cheerfully filling the vacuum between now and then with isolated gestures. There’s me and Tash arm in arm against a fence watching everyone else party, a very easy and innocent intimacy between us because we’re both giddy and sort of drunk and we’ve known each other for three-hundred-and-eighty-four years. A little later, in a restroom without a lock, calamity is averted when a girl wearing a cheongsam (ala Maggie Cheung in In The Mood For Love) bursts in the moment I finish using the facilities. And, when I’m back outside, I find some beads in the grass, beads which get to remain beads, no mental back flips or notions of the unseen hand of fate to muck up their presence.
 
(Actually, no, I’m not drunk, just tipsy. The entire night I’ve been conducting a relay race from one can to the next, letting each beer sprint through my system to the point of near fatal exhaustion, the sensation it provides savored as much as will be allowed, and, when it looks ready to crash land at the bottom of the performance bell curve, letting it pass off its baton to the next available alcoholic beverage. It probably runs counter to the way most go about drinking, snowballing from one to the next in a quick accumulation, with the goal of a comfortable and temporary derangement of the senses – that can be appealing but my instincts have laid down the directive “not tonight”. So, yes, like I said, tipsy – socially lubricated, coherent enough to make jokes about rabid gorillas, but always with a firm grip on the railings whenever a staircase presents itself.)

I blink and we’re all in the front lawn. Natasha and her mother have called a taxi to take them to Mari’s place and, as it is a Saturday night, they’ll be waiting a while. In the back, the party arrogantly continues on despite our absence. Ignacio is lying down on the patio content to concentrate on the ceiling; on the steps in front of him, Jenny and Sierra sit, holding conversations about people and events for which I have no context. Me and Natasha and Eddie and Ellie idle about on the grass like we’re six year-olds to whom grass stains are irrelevant (a bit of commendable nonchalance on their part as they’re all wearing outfits clearly labeled “dry clean only”). This theme continues when Ellie comes over and grabs the beads I’m carrying, doing so in a way that suggests I’m a child who’s got a hold of something he oughtn’t; returning to the ground, she begins a game of cat’s cradle with them which Tash soon joins in on. A little later, Tash lays her head on one of my legs and, because she demands it, we both sing songs – from what I can remember, it was a repertoire largely of Jonathan Richman and Voxtrot (our rendition of “The Start Of Something” is the mutually agreed upon highpoint, despite the fact that we fuck up around the bridge), along with a few other tunes.

The taxi eventually makes its appearance. James, master of ceremonies and man among men, comes out front to bid us all a farewell. Me and Tash make drunken promises to meet up with him again, though I have no idea how. Others know - people know people, lines of communication have been established outside of my very limited presence, smoke will signal across counties, and so forth. It’s all very common, not to me, of course, but this is the way peer groups have always conducted themselves, a rhythm I’m taking notes on. (For example: this story.) Tash asks if I need a place to crash, Mari proving amenable to my presence on a spare mattress. I have to say no; I’m cool at Jenny’s place and also I’ve left some items (books!) in Ignacio’s truck – all true, but really I decline because wherever Ellie is headed, I’m headed too. The runways of 2012 will need our berets…

*TIP FOR THE SOCIALLY UNCERTAIN:

Should you find yourself in a situation of some ambivalence, the gal or fella opposite you giving off mixed pheromones, the email address is a safe way to go.
 
If the object of your affections is positively responding to your displays of tropism, the request for their email address – a reasonably neutral medium of communication – will invariably be an affirmative, followed by “Oh and here’s my number.” With this opening salvo in the battle between you and them concluded, you being declared the clear victor, and never mind them with their genes too differently lettered to even contemplate, and your unending war with your crippling self-doubt being, for maybe the next thirty minutes (if you’re lucky), actually in your favor, you must now make your exit into a sunny metropolitan scene (a set designer’s artful amalgam of Chicago and New York – gray, imposing, welcoming). The moment the sunlight hits your bright blue suit, the only viable option is to leap into the air and kick your heels together, as often seen in comic strips. Whatever doubts you may have towards the actual physical possibility of such movement, rest assured that physics will be on your side, as certain as the hot dog vendor down the street will give you a hearty wink upon seeing your gleaming countenance headed his way. That accomplished, within two seconds the strings will come in, playing a melody wholly suited to the sweet tenor tones about to emerge from your mouth…
 
And if he or she merely acquiesces to your email request and nothing else, you can always take advantage of the Missed Connections section on Craigslist after the next few weeks of unanswered and quite desperate pleas.

**RIP Trish Keenan. I could mine Broadcast into its own separate memoir/essay and I think one day I will.

Jenny’s, Once Again
 
With Tash and her mother off, the rest of us clown-car it back to Jenny’s, with Eddie and Ellie in tow along with Sierra’s boyfriend (appearing when I had my back turned, apparently), whose name I either never learned or have forgotten.
 
The tempo is set to slow from then on. When we arrive at Jenny’s, Ignacio immediately follows his own stumbling path from the Cruiser to Jenny’s bed, an overly complicated trail that resembles a Sunday Family Circus; this display of entitlement doesn’t please Jenny – some drama ensues. Otherwise, decompress. The rest chat - I just sit down on the couch and ponder or whatever the hell I do.

A running theme: me as a siren, my tuneless warble apparently a compelling social tactic (however inadvertent). The tune is “When I’m With You” by Best Coast, playing from Jenny’s laptop in the kitchen and there I am, back on that couch, still being entertained, but this time I get to sing along and it’s a bother to no one, the dialogue is sparser now but their stories still haven’t ended, the odd looks I’d typically receive are nowhere to be noticed. Familiarity and near-exhaustion have made everyone more permissive; after all, you’ve spent the whole night with these charming strangers. I’m doing it absent-mindedly, on a whim, maybe the exhilaration of flirtation or maybe Natasha sparked it and, even in her absence, I can’t help myself. Earlier I sang “I can change” and an entire car blushed, so the only viable theory I have at hand is of charisma being transmitted to my meek soul from Dimension X. Bring it on.

Hell, Eddie takes this as his odd cue to say hello, the first time we’ve spoken one-to-one all evening. Responding to my siren’s song, he asks me if I’m into music, one of those silly questions that we, every one of us, has asked or been asked – chances are you’ll have it aimed at you or exiting from your mouth, you silly silly person reading this, soon. “Sure,” I respond. A few moments later I’ll find myself describing Godard’s Les Carabiniers in scene-by-scene detail to him; juxtapose that with the fact that I was doing it at 4:15 in the morning and you’ve got what suspiciously sounds like an interesting scene on your hands. It was not.
 
From my own limited experience, Eddie is an amiable, decent sort – as my own personal Ralph Bellamy, he’s played his part well. He’s reasonably handsome in a forgettable way, with a brand of unruly hair specific to the below-thirty Austin male population (no stubble on him though, wrecking the stereotype) – far from fat but with a paunch noticeable through his white dress shirt. Marring this bland and pleasant uniformity are his eyes, which seem familiar to me from certain wayward souls – addicts, schizophrenics – I’ve encountered on my many adventures in public transportation: wide in spite of themselves, as if vainly trying to surpass the natural boundaries of peripheral vision, with an autopilot intensity at cross purposes with whatever emotion dominates the rest of their face; of course they blink, but they do so warily, keenly aware that such a natural function is just a showcase for vulnerability. That’s just a tangent though; really he’s nice – clear-headed, predictable, and quiet, regardless of whatever impression his eyes give off. These are the qualities I’m forced to extrapolate, the quick assessments of him my mind has been whirring away at a good chunk of the evening because I’ve got my crosshairs on his girlfriend. 
  
And soon thereafter, everything stops. Eddie and Ellie decide it’s time to depart. Me and Ellie share a big hug; I can feel those found beads on my shoulder, now wrapped around her arm – her souvenir from me or maybe just her souvenir from the evening. My moment passed, probably some hours back, and now beret aficionados may have to wait a while longer before they can parade their preferred headwear with impunity in the bright and indifferent sun – a sun set to rise in about ninety minutes. Everyone says goodnight instead of good morning anyway.
 
From there, Sierra and her boyfriend head for her bedroom, while Jenny goes to her own, intent upon getting Ignacio out. I lay my frame down on the living room couch, a pillow and sheet thoughtfully provided by my hosts, make a prayer to all the gods of atheism and try to rest. In Jenny’s room, five feet away, the emotional pendulum swings in the opposite direction, irritation and anger giving way to passion. Or maybe just release – the anger and resentment are still there but someone’s decided to put them aside and the other person conceded, this night has to end in some sort of release, even if it’ll only make things right for the moment – accounts have to be balanced. When you’re there, the moment is the only thing you know. So while Ignacio and Jenny’s very audible lust (cartoon chipmunks in heat to my ears) plays in the background, I lie there, faintly annoyed. Of course it doesn’t prove quite as bad as the cramps and contortions which promptly overtake my feet when their moans subside.

Fuck.
 
Afterwards
 
I’m up at nine, far before anyone else. I bear all the scents of an evening well spent. There is absolutely nothing else in the neighborhood, city, or world happening aside from the sun making its slow and continuous promenade across a very blue sky.
 
Beyond the Crasher’s Code Of Conduct – the kitchen, the dishes, the counters, what you can – the next few hours are a series of blank ellipses. Existence has shrunk down to a living room, a kitchen, and a patio – beyond carefully examining, and then wiping clean, the map of last night’s vices laid out on the patio, there’s nothing but stillness within those parameters. So I make my peace with a world that refuses to move and then I wait.
 
At noon, the world catches up with me. Ignacio and Jenny wake up and, with as little fuss as possible, we’re off. From Ignacio’s truck, everything is expanded – the sky wide and the road as long as one care’s to imagine. It never stops. I’m mentally sequencing a mix CD for a girl whose last name is a blank (Will I see her again? “OUTLOOK UNCLEAR”) and I’m sure Ignacio can imagine himself eighty miles away, sitting before an endless row of mimosas he’ll never drink. And twenty miles out, I think I can see myself, collapsed on the side of an access road: my skin scarlet under a noonday sun, still intent upon a futile destination.