I’m In Love (Part 3)

(Parts One and Two there to be glanced at.)

7. “Roadrunner #2” (not to be confused with “Roadrunner (Twice)”)

“Roadrunner #2” is also off The Original Modern Lovers, recorded by Fowley in 1973, the album’s final track, as I mentioned earlier. It’s the shortest version I know of, not quite breaking the three minute mark.

“#2” doesn’t even bother with the “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6”, beginning straight away with the dominant riff, which is played by the band, whoever the Modern Lovers were at that moment (Richman claims, in the liner notes, that Mars Bonfire (i.e. the dude who wrote “Born To Be Wild”, apparently) played guitar on this version, instead of him), as tightly as it can conceivably be played, so it emerges into view machinelike, an engine already in motion. If “#1” veered in and out of its set path, reckless on its own energy, “#2”, like “(Once)”, has a beat close to an unwavering metronome, a gallop which never wavers. We enter in medias res and our job is to keep up.

“Roadrunner”s #1 and #2 share the same brand of you-are-there energy, the inimitable intimacy that can only be engendered by some shitty overworked amps in a controlled setting (Fowley’s is a specific brand of non-production); what really distinguishes one from the other might be this tension, the feeling of being a step or two behind. And apparently, Richman feels it too, at least during the first few seconds, hollering his roadrunners as he tries to assert himself in the opening verse. Unlike us, he manages it soon enough, getting a foothold into the groove when he states “I’m in love with my own loneliness”. Its presence is especially notable as it takes the place of the more typical “I’m in love with the modern world”, a line which will come later, blurted in the final climactic “Radio On” frenzy.

(And, Christ, can you imagine anyone else singing that line, singing it outside of the template set down by Richman? As a self-sufficient sentiment, divorced from context, it has, no doubt, launched a hundred thousand bad songs, valentines to entitled self-pity sung with either a lazy sneer or ponderous self-regard. They don’t say “I’m in love with my own loneliness” but by God they mean it, loneliness cultivated for effect and as affect, the emphasis on the “I”, “I” having no real interest in meeting up with you, sharing anything really, the sole reason for the song being “I”’s satisfaction in your willingness to cross that distance and so validate the presence of “I”.

How Richman makes that otherwise isn’t quite alchemy but, hell, it’s probably close, by which I mean he’s just Richman, i.e. his voice has the quality of meeting the listener face to face – it’s a piece of crude simplicity which he points in one way or another to get the job done, all purpose, all intimacy, no fuss.)

As the song proceeds, Richman returns to this, mentioning his loneliness, being alone, lonely, not having a girlfriend (“…but I don’t mind”), every statement emphatic or made so by the rapid succession dictated by the song’s short length, so that first mention can’t help but stand tall. It’s been embedded in the song all along – why else embrace the cold loneliness but the lack of any other embrace? – but here it feels foregrounded, given full vent.

In a neat and probably unintended bit of sequencing on The Original Modern Lovers, “#2” follows “Girlfren” (the name given on the back of the album but known everywhere else as “Girlfriend”, true believers), a song not so much preoccupied as in helpless thrall to that feeling. It’s one of the more pensive early Modern Lovers tracks, a quiet cracked voice confession of vulnerability set to a country-blues-ish guitar twang; Richman wanders around Boston, to the Museum Of Fine Art to look at the Cezannes, to Fenway Park – social places, places of comfort and consolation, things he wouldn’t need to search out if he had a girlfriend.* That’s the essence of the song, Richman full-on indulging in one of the most likeable forms of female objectification: the idea of a girlfriend, the mid-to-late adolescent male (mostly) longing for that idea, the conceptual girlfriend who’s less than a salve for lust than a salve for (yup) loneliness; someone who’s a vague ache throughout the day and a distinct absence – the hand that you’re not holding – when you’re idle.

Instead you just hold your heart in your hands and hope someone will notice – thanks to the juxtaposition, it’s easy to imagine Richman carrying it from one song to the next, his voice still cracking, no longer crying but with his tear stains visible in the night, lust and frustration sure to carry this Roadrunner along well after the fuel gauge hits E. You can chart the songs in relation to each other beyond this anecdotal progression – we might peg “Girlfren” as “loneliness as a stark burden” and “Roadrunner” as “loneliness as a strength”. Or, more elegantly: “loneliness defining Richman vs. Richman defining loneliness”, passive versus active.

Correspondences of that sort in Richman’s early work, the songs that lean angsty and introspective, are a given. They don’t so much sprawl into a web of connections as form a straight line of continuity, 90% of that catalogue comprising a before-and-after scenario, two different kinds of frustration: the pure naïve longing for a girlfriend, lust and intimacy intertwined as they often are in real life (“Girlfriend”, “Astral Plane”, “I Wanna Sleep In Your Arms”, “Someone I Care About”, etc.) and the messy actuality of having made that connection (“I’m Straight”, “She Cracked”, “Hospital”, “Dignified And Old”, etc.).* (From the way this latter category often boils down to desperate pleading for the other party to come to her senses, realize herself, and change her ways, evidently Richman was fond of self-destructive ladies.) “Roadrunner” works as something like a bridge between these two, a makeshift one – Richman’s still lonely, still without a girlfriend, but “the highway is your girlfriend” and he’s in love with his own loneliness. Straddling those categories, a song which stands as a consummation, an expression of absolute satisfaction, without want – there’s only Richman, the music, and the world.**

“Roadrunner #2” isn’t the exception which proves that rule, but of all the versions it may come closest; if the song is a race, here you can get an idea of what’s to be outrun.

8. About a decade ago, when I was in school, I listened to “Roadrunner #1” constantly, at least once a day for roughly a year, more or less (maybe less, probably more). As far as obsessions go, obsessions with a pop song are the least debilitating, the most common, fixations which fit easily into most daily routines, so I like to think I was alright. My first exposure to the song was inauspicious: it was good, probably great – not quite a fully immersive experience, a stop-everything-for-the-next-few-hours epiphany like say “Heart Of Glass” or “You Got What You Got”, but, like most songs I like, a notable event with a few lingering sensations, stray bits of resonance I’d happily return to.

I got stuck on it via a cognitive leap or two. “I’m in the modern world”… It’s a wonder of a phrase. bold and stupid and brilliant, multivalent enough to mean anything. Like much of the song’s ever-changing lyrics, it feels like something spoken in the heat of the moment,  with conviction but without much forethought – a declaration of love like you see in the third acts of movies, the kind which, if it had been spoken earlier, would have saved our lovers a lot of trouble. But here it’s, more often than not, spoken well before the first verse ends, so you’re stuck with it. “Roadrunner” is full of a whole lotta love, “the modern world” being just one of a collect-‘em’-all set, but, as I said earlier, if there’s any phrase remembered in its wake, this is it.

As it is, it’s one of the finer “fuck you”s to uncertainty you’ll find, really, attractive enough that you wanna hold tight to it. Or at least you do if you’re twenty-one and you’re lonely and you’re half convinced that you’re doomed and half convinced that you can make up the rules of the game as you go along, no sweat. What it really means, who can say? The only way to vouch for it is to say it out loud and taste the conviction as it exits your mouth.

To Richman, it probably means nothing more than the world outside the windshield, “…the modern suburban bleakness” as he calls it in “Roadrunner #2″, with a lot of rough equivalents besides – Massachusetts when it’d dark outside, etc. (the lyrics change alot, man) – to cover its ass interpretation-wise; this isn’t Broadcast or mid-period Scott Walker or “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window”, y’know? Richman’s songs mean what they say and say what they mean; they’re about crushes on bank tellers, wanting a girlfriend, Vincent Van Gogh, the undue social weight of “marriage” versus love and fidelity, about feeling more alive than you’ve ever felt before.

“Roadrunner” is a grasp at the sublime, putting it in modern suburban bleakness terms – a direct statement like the rest, but also an invocation of something else, a listing of a set of conditions surrounding an inherently undefinable state. So maybe it’s okay to stew in this love for the modern world, let it fall from the song as a payload of ambiguity.

Carrying the line around with me like charm, I’d dwell on it and, naturally, it would haul the rest of the song along with it. You don’t need the ability to write a song as brilliant as “Roadrunner” to get as drunk on your surroundings, to stand properly in awe of the vague all-encompassing generalization of stuff, as Richman is – not to be too on the nose, but I had my own love for the modern world, albeit one a bit more solipsistic, aestheticized.  Like the song, I’d let music serve as the soundtrack to what I saw outside my (passenger seat) car window, with the buildings and road signs outside the glass there as patterns of circumstance, an accompanying rhythm. Sometimes (frequently) I swooned to people in hallways, moving in every direction, obeying their own rhythm, people being only themselves, pursuing their own plot – a perfectly coordinated chaos worth contemplating, with no overarching occasion to bind them in this panorama of motion beyond, let’s say, a Thursday afternoon in early June. Or, at the party I was at last week, seeing tree leaves glistening under a fluorescent street light from a light constant rain at 5:30 AM, not so much reflecting as absorbing the light into themselves as a weak pulse aglow against the violet sky, with excess light dripping onto the ground. There were plenty of situations like that, mysteries in the capital-M sense which dot the day. You fall out of sync with things and you get a glimpse of something else.

These little things, they were always there – the song came amidst them, giving things a name, an encapsulating phrase. I’d listen to “Roadrunner #1” and “#2” in frequent proximity, as the bookends they made on the Bomp comp or just as random components of whatever today’s soundtrack was, so a love for the modern world and a love for your own loneliness – lines which jut out easy after way too many replays have worn most of the other details down to barely perceptible nubs – bound together in my head. As I perceived them, they weren’t interchangeable but connected, parts of the song’s private equation, being in love with your own loneliness the likely flipside to upending your reality to the rhythm of the radio or, more precisely in my case, the next song playing on the mix in my headphones – the solitude which is a precondition of that freedom.

In that light, it bears stating: these buildings, these people, these glowing leaves seen when I was near exhaustion from dancing for five hours straight, don’t exist as beauty without me, the gilded frame of perception I can’t help but tote around wherever I go (even the bathroom!). It’s not too hard to shift the song like a kaleidoscope and read it from this angle – the music, the world, this love for whatever, as a pretext for exuberance in the void, getting lost in yourself, a reverie about venturing out into the familiar and find yourself lost in the hall of mirrors. (Somewhere between the earthbound and ethereal associations the song conjured up was a little realization: to declare your love for something is simply a way of saying you’re not a part of it.) Following this trail of thought (half-thought, really), you’d fall – or just dive – down a trapdoor into the comfy chasm of solipsism, uncovering that beneath this love for the commonplace beauty of chance (or something) was, one supposes, an assertion of the self. Was that “this modern feeling”? Weighing yourself and teeming miraculous horrible reality on the scales and finding the two balanced? Is that why so many of the lines leave Richman’s lips as epiphanies realized the instant he says them?

Within those parameters, you don’t necessarily need to set course down Route 128 or any hallways of happenstance. Whatever the “modern feeling” was, I’m pretty sure I mainlined it daily way back when, carrying my modern world around with me, a place which for the sake of this ramble I’m imagining as a lot like one of those scenic painted backgrounds which were pedaled into motion for amusement back in ye olden times. It was (and is) a place not so much constructed as curated, culled from books, movies, music, everything I could find, past and present there to plunder for salient pieces, “Roadrunner” among them, to form its impromptu pattern. When I first heard the song (and maybe forever) that was me; I may have worked at a movie theater or a bookstore, but my real job was being the most active passive receptacle I could be. Which isn’t to say I lived in denial of the world, receding into my little shell of obsession and reducing my interaction with folks to three or four trivial and increasingly irritating topics of conversation – no, my disconnect was probably more minor: drifting along, playing the expected role of “student in his early twenties”, but rationalizing everything outside of my head within some ingenious and delusional precept of “change thyself and the world will follow”. Maybe you can relate? I didn’t pin the sacred objects of my taste like butterflies to a board as gather details from the margins – “Ray And Maggie Down At Leo’s”, Rosalind Russell pulling the image toward her while speaking on the phone amongst an audience of character actor reporters in His Girl Friday, the sudden wall-of-sound intro to Belle & Sebastian’s “Dirty Dream #2”, time portrayed in basic sequential motion and as stuttering  movement by the strobe light cars at the intersection in Happy Together, etc. ad infinitum – to form “chains of rapport and intimate knowledge”, to quote Manny Farber, a very mutable environment made up of intuitive links and correspondences; most importantly, it was a place to be, ever-shifting but always fitted to suit. “Roadrunner” stood as something like a synecdoche of that life, giving myself a glimpse of my own turtle-like way of living inside my own head, when maneuvering through each day often seemed like a little lonesome reverie – a part representative of the whole.

But enough. That trail of association can go on for a while. Plainly, I listened again and again and again, to see if this swirl of detail meant the same thing this time as it did when I heard it last. If I did drive, the song would have accompanied me wherever I went and I imagine every day would be a closed system, listening to a song about listening to music while driving while driving***; instead I rode the bus (with a set of headphones welded on tight), so it was an imperfect one, but pretty damn potent in broad strokes.

Footnotes

*“Roadrunner”, content-wise, is apiece with “Girlfriend”, “Walk Up The Street”, and maybe a few other songs I’ve forgotten about, all of which boil down, in terms of content, to “wandering around, being lonely”; “Walk Up The Street” is about roaming around your neighborhood and nearby environs when you have nothing else to do, making a base effort to escape boredom and loneliness. It’s not especially interesting – a bit of perfunctory punk which won’t wreck the atmosphere, something best heard between two better songs.

**This paradigm ignores a few songs. “Modern World” and “Old World”, earlier mentioned, are both appreciation pieces, off-hand manifestoes about a love for the day to day in its totality. The glorious “Government Center”, included as the final track on later editions of The Modern Lovers, puts those manifestoes into action, i.e. it feels like it was smuggled in from Richman’s post-75 period. It’s a song about putting on a show for a bunch of hardworking office drones stuck at the government center, making them feel alright with the power of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s short, sweet, and awesome.

***Classic rock, after all, exists for a reason. It may have once, and probably briefly, referred to the popular standard of rock, but that notion has long been superseded by a specific use – it is music convenient for driving. You can have a fine time with any music (especially “Roadrunner”) on while driving, but this is music which serves that exact purpose, music which is subordinate and functional, ala Erik Satie and muzak; it doesn’t demand one’s attention and, as of now, is there to only enhance the driving experience, fitting itself into the rhythms of the road. No one has listened to a Foghat song outside of a car since December 3, 1987.

Click here to head on over to the far less autobiographical and far more conclusive Part 4, because why not?

I’m In Love (Part 2)

(Why not take a gander at Part 1, should you be so inclined?)

6. “Roadrunner #1” (not to be confused with “Roadrunner (Once)”)

“Roadrunner #1” was released on The Original Modern Lovers – not the first “official” album, but a hodgepodge compilation put out by Bomp of two Kim Fowley sessions from ’72 and ’73 (the “original” in the title is dubious, or so Richman claims in the liner notes). Fowley’s production, here at least, is in the punk/garage tradition of “as long as there’s not too much hiss, stay the fuck out of the way” which might go a way toward explaining why it’s my favorite version – it sounds nice and harsh, as if its ideal format isn’t a CD but a mix tape, something I recorded off the radio, its proper place sandwiched between “Soldier Boy” by The Shirelles and “Said Serial” by Unwound. A more obvious reason for my bias: it was the first version I heard, and so it’s the real Secret Origin of this essay, anecdotal points of entry be damned.

That this version feels like Ground Zero doesn’t hurt. It was recorded in the summer of ’72, after “Roadrunner (Twice)”, so it isn’t a “first” anymore than “(Once)” is a “finally”, but the raw power on display makes it feel like a song with something to prove, the kind of challenge only a white and unsullied canvas can provide. Listening to it is a lot like watching an unskilled but talented and eager rookie cross the football field, ball in hand, certain of only two things: a. the goal to be reached, and b. that moving is the only way to get there, so it just moves moves moves helplessly, all antsy clatter as it rushes and stumbles its way toward its conclusion. Most versions fit as “raw and unkempt”, but “#1” feels more singular, a spilling over of nervous energy.

That was my first impression of the song: a necessary ceaseless movement which begins by counting down to that movement and ends with saying goodbye to it. Everything in between those two actions is a whirlpool of association, one detail frequently indiscernible from the next – something about “love” and “Boston” and “faster”, a matrix of key words bouncing off each other. The only bits of stability we can seize onto in that tumult are Richman’s speed through the Massachusetts night and a statement indelibly phrased: “I’m in love with the modern world.”

That last one really sticks (and stuck, but more on that later) and it’s spoken as an honest affirmative, at that; there’s simply no space for posturing or an ironic sneer, no room to properly wield those big cudgels of sophistication – our only imperative is to move forward, to say what we mean! Had I heard the song in the context of the first Modern Lovers album (i.e. had Hogwild Records had it in stock), with the speedy but more coherent “Roadrunner (Twice)”, things might be a lot more convenient – I might have assumed this beloved modern world was apiece with the “modern world” described in the song “Modern World”, both of which were apparently opposed to the old world mentioned in, well, “Old World”, and every world named absolutely embraced by Richman. As it was, all I had was another version of “Roadrunner” at the end of the CD for comparison (consider those two in constant proximity and this essay seems inevitable).

Right now, though, there’s only this segment of time to go by, four-and-a-half minutes which pass in roughly fifteen seconds, an instant too dense for proper reflection; you grasp onto what you can, not quite certain what it is. We reach the climax, with Richman’s voice trying to outpace the song’s speed, losing and finding and losing himself as he more freely associates to the Modern Lover’s reliable shouts of “Radio On”, skillfully using them as punctuation or tripping over them haplessly; it’s a chaos which hasn’t so much been built up to as finally released, having been held in check since the first second, so the song is essentially all dramatic climax, a double splash page of a thing, thoughtless and confident.

This version, at least.

Click here for Part 3.

I’m In Love (Part 1)

1. In part, this began a few years back, when I was hanging out with a friend, listening to music. Or rather, singing and dancing ridiculously to music, because playing it cool in most contexts, music foremost, isn’t our style. I put “Roadrunner” on, probably “Roadrunner #1” – thankfully we both knew it well, so our silly singing and silly dancing were executed with confidence, which may or may not have been more entertaining, but it was certainly something.

After it ended and before we could begin another furious round of singing and dancing to whatever song came on next, she asked me a question:

“Who played that?”

2. Another seed was planted when I read Lipstick Traces last year. Greil Marcus opens his section on “Roadrunner” with this: “As Richman finally recorded it, ‘Roadrunner’ was the most obvious song in the world, and the strangest.”

Well who doesn’t love a bit of hyperbole, especially as delivered by Monsieur Marcus? Before you’re halfway through reading it, you’re already immersed in the slight echo the sentence makes as it resonates, steady and unwavering, through a large and dimly lit lecture hall. And who am I to disagree? The anecdote I relayed above certainly testifies to the song’s “obviousness”. The “strangeness” fits as well, but I’ll come back to that in a bit.

If anything in that statement irks, it may be that “finally”. It implies cause and effect, as if the song’s distinction resides in a specific gesture or a last dab of paint, the x-element common to the heroic narrative of the artist which transforms a pop song into “the most obvious song in the world, and the strangest.” One can somewhat understand Marcus’s position – it simplifies the essayist’s job tremendously to state at the onset that this is a closed matter, that the aesthetic object at hand is a concrete thing; the man has an underlying thesis and Jonathan Richman and “Roadrunner” are only stepping stones there – that “finally” obliterates any number of pesky footnotes.*

3. “Roadrunner” isn’t quite as stable as Marcus makes it out to be. You can, like my friend, let the song’s exuberance carry along, fully partake in that “obviousness” and “strangeness” without having heard “Roadrunner (Once)” – the common title for the version Marcus speaks of, a title which highlights itself as a creature of circumstance – or any of the other versions Richman recorded between 1969 and 1975, when the song was still a going concern for him. She knew it from covers, live performances, as a standard among punk and garage bands, as a song you could love for itself, something shared rather than fetishized, as perhaps befitting Richman’s own Statue-Of-Liberty-like generosity.

4. But if – like me, like Marcus – you can’t help but follow a trail back to a presumable point of origin – some easy signifier of authenticity, recording-wise – the path quickly becomes diffuse. There are, let’s say, eight versions direct from the source, all recognizable relations to each other, each a subtle or grand shifting of the song’s emphases – the road markers along the song’s path are identical, but a constant flux marks the lyrics and speed. They’re distinct enough that the term “version” seems more apt than the more hierarchical “variant”; none of them quite override each other – like any song, the best version is the one you like.

So you can generalize “Roadrunner” quite easily into “music and the road and the night” – key ingredients to plenty of good songs (“music and the road and the night” – both the title of a poem and the poem itself) – along with many an attendant theme for the listener to latch on to: rebellion, escape, lust, alienation, teenage kicks, [insert subject here]; those work within it, some quite well, but the song isn’t reducible to them. “Music and the road and the night” is really what the song is about entirely, detail compounded upon detail – nothing more than the grandeur of the world seen on a freezing night from behind a steering wheel travelling down Route 128 with the AM radio as your personal soundtrack. Even when the song reaches beyond those specifics, when Richman declares his love for something, something concrete or abstract, indeterminate, but absolutely in love – with the modern world, with loneliness, with Massachusetts, with whatever – it’s something which refers back to this hermetic state, as he drives for the sake of driving alone in the night. From performance to performance, “Roadrunner” feels out that exact moment, sees how much weight it can carry, and relays it to the listener as a concentrated burst, an anecdote elaborated upon at length, or some form in between. Nostalgia is too weak a term – better to invoke Proust and describe it as Time Regained.

The song is a memory continually unfolding.

5. Fittingly, “Roadrunner” made its verifiable Billboard-approved mark on the culture as a thing dispersed, with two of those versions – “Roadrunner (Once)” b/w “Roadrunner (Twice)” – released on a seven-inch which hit #11 on the UK charts back in 1977 (Holy Moley! Top Of The Pops! Dancing ladies!).

“Roadrunner (Once)” was recorded (“finally”, perhaps) in 1974 and first released as a split seven-inch with Earth Quake, “Friday On My Mind” being their contribution. The song next appeared on the Beserkley Chartbusters Vol. 1 compilation before ascending to said seven-inch glory a few years later as a UK-only release. As it is, it’s a perfectly formed piece of pop, with all its energy pointed inward, an unfussy exercise not in adrenaline but in effect, a full flexing of the charm and exhilaration implicit in the song, clean and deliberate. This is the version with the Greil Marcus Seal O’ Approval and there’s little to add to his own excellent analysis in Lipstick Traces. It may be the only version of the song you’ll find not intended as a demo or originally recorded live, something maybe intended as a final draft, though who knows? The only other version of “Roadrunner” with such production value is probably a cover of “Roadrunner”. 

“Roadrunner (Twice)”, the flipside, may be the earliest version recorded, originating as a demo produced by John Cale in 1972, making it the possible alpha to “(Once)”’s omega. It arrives in the ears fully formed, in no way a rough draft, but how could it be otherwise? For many, this is the definitive “Roadrunner”, labeled as such, no numeral nomenclature attached, as the opening track on The Modern Lovers album, a collection of those Cale-produced demos along with extant tracks – the first LP and so the bearer of a not-insignificant amount of authorial weight. This, pre-internet, was the version most readily available, the one you’d find at your friendly local independent record store, the first remastered for CD. It’s perfectly fine on its own – one can imagine the joy of discovering it after “(Once)”, the raw and unkempt counterpoint to the completely calibrated a-side – but relative to the other versions it feels muffled under a thin layer of gauze, the immediacy and intimacy embodied in varying degrees elsewhere present here only theoretically.

The other versions soon followed – bootlegs quick to become official releases, live recordings assigned places on b-sides – all emerging after the fact. Well before the song had made mass impact Richman had put it to bed, playing it (along with pretty much every song he’d written up to then) infrequently, if at all. He’d written it in 1969 and played it, one can presume, as the certain set piece for every Modern Lovers show from then until the mid-seventies. Had it remained a regular bit of repertoire, it might have settled down, stayed in place like your more typical monuments, weighed to the earth by the burden of a pedestal. As it is, it’s a thing in motion.

*This essay can be read as that series of footnotes.

Click here to read Part 2…

In the middle of the world’s highway

A brief excerpt from my current project - an autobio/travelogue piece about a day, a night, and another day - put here with a view toward this site not lying fallow for too long. There’s more non-memoiristic critical musings galore sometime soon, should you be one of, oh, three people who long to hear my thoughts on That Comic About The Guy or “That Song I Really Like” (both actual projects).

On the way off (waaay off) chance that there is something like a clamor for more of this piece (ha) – or I simply become bored enough that I convince myself that the world needs a glimpse of me conferrin’ with the flowers and consultin’ with the rain – I may put the rest up.

Maybe.

The moment I exited the bus station, it began to rain.

A few days later, when there’s enough distance for these events to recede into narrative, a closed system with something like internal consistency and a happy ending, I play with the idea that this drizzle is just my anxiety made manifest. Befitting that anxiety, it was only a small rain, my anxiety being surprisingly low considering the fact that I was (sort of) throwing myself to the elements: I’d ventured to Austin via bus, no car, no phone, and, hey, no umbrella. My contacts in the city at this point in time had either moved or fallen away over the previous year or so, so there was no one to rely on for company or, more importantly, a couch on which to crash. The only set points on the itinerary I set were to arrive and to depart sometime on the next day – everything else was a series of question marks, to be made up as I went along.

This foolhardiness may be thrown into relief by the past month, a lost month effectively. I had spent two weeks of it as ill as I’ve ever been in my life – for much of that time my existence was reduced to the ten feet between my bed and the bathroom, my time taken up largely by chronic diarrhea punctuated, for the sake of novelty, by occasional bouts of vomiting. Otherwise I just lay in that bed as an inert lump, feverish and weak, killing the hours with the only thought that arose without effort: a desire for sleep. I never bothered to learn what virus struck me down, nor whether it was a “virus” – like a hardliner in a fifties b-movie, the mere fact of an alien presence, something to be rid of, was all that concerned me. I think I left that bed ten pounds lighter, let’s say, and just in time to slog through finals. Cadging notes from passing acquaintances, I rigged up a vague idea of the classes I’d missed, something to scour that I hoped resembled Topics Discussed; I could only aspire to mediocrity. And so, having weathered these plagues, I awake one sunny Saturday morning with a single thought: Out. Austin, a seventeen dollar bus ride away, is a logical choice.

With a view toward all this, the tiny tempest which greeted me may have been an acknowledgment, a welcome back to the world. Every story needs a deus ex machina – this one just happens to come at the beginning; if I had the sense of this moment as a moment rather than just another moment, I’d have stuck my tongue out and I’d be able to describe here what a punchline tastes like. But playing spectator felt pretty redundant at that moment, seeing as I’d just spent three hours on a bus doing just that, staring at the passing landscape and wondering what I was doing, at what I had done without hesitation.

It was about two o’clock, “about” because I’d also neglected to bring a watch – I’d conspired against myself effectively. If freedom was foremost in my mind in the morning, a notion I clung tighter and tighter to with each passing mile away from San Antonio and up I-35, I then hit upon what some watching my actions might have surmised the moment I purchased my ticket: I’ve come to test myself, to see if I can extend that shitty month by two days. Whatever reason I was really there, grimacing at the rain, it wasn’t “escape”; losing yourself in these circumstances isn’t an option. I’m obliged to be present for every moment, to see that my feet keep moving forward, to earn the copious perspiration which will accumulate on my skin in May in South Texas, when summer has already staked a claim. After you’ve shitted liquid into the toilet forty times a day for four days in a row, regularly found yourself incapacitated by the effort of speaking, and undergone a week of waking up to hallucinations at 3 AM, you may need to assume some power, to endure in another, more controlled, set of circumstances.

But this may be overstating things. Austin is only a minor obstacle course, its “weird”-ness entirely appropriate for a bumper sticker, fit for the like-minded and left-leaning mass rather than the individual and eccentric. It won’t be difficult to manage a lifeline should the unassuming urban elements therein prove too much – a friend or a relative, their voice exasperated in response to me explaining my stupid-ass predicament over the phone, which may either be a pay phone or one I managed to borrow from some hapless passer-by. “There’s always a way,” as my hero Superman likes to say. I won’t find my preferred last-two-acts-of-After-Hours experience here, much less the maximum security prison New York of 1997 I navigate in my dreams. Passing through it for the sake of a night out has the feel of a board game, an environment where it’s hard to get lost, a course you can follow with every location reliable and lively; if San Antonio comes and (more often) goes, its tiny corners of excitement fading as quickly as they flare up, Austin – or, at least, the Austin you encounter in passing – is a hub or incident and event, a place you can wander through and find yourself entangled in some larger scheme.

Slacker leaps to mind for a few reasons as I write this, partly because it’s a movie dedicated to Austin as an environment – not many movies give you that sense of covering ground, large swaths of continuous movement over a given area, unless you’re wandering hallowed ground in Russia, ala the Zone in Stalker or the Hermitage in Russian Ark; our movements intersect a few times, most obviously at our beginnings, our adventures starting at the same bus station. Another Richard – Linklater, the director – stars in the film’s first sustained scene; he takes a taxi from the depot to a friend’s house and considers aloud to the indifferent cabbie how every alternate method of departure and path he may have taken just now, including hoofing it and taking a regular bus, creates its own possible universe, possibility breeding possibility, most in fact preferable because he’s low on funds and taxis are a luxury. Me, I’m equally broke but thoroughly secure in my place in my universe, having had the common sense to print out a Cap Metro map (public transportation, natch) before I left: I know how I’ll get there, though “there” is always changing. What makes the movie really mesh with my own wacky sojourn as a bum for a day is the movie’s form, insofar as the typical random Austin scene you encounter – or, at least, any random scene you encounter should you follow the chains of connection designated as “youth culture” – tends to feel like a “scene”, everyone you see starring in their own little movie, their every action you glimpse none too far from its intended purpose; you can include (off the top of my head) Brandon Graham’s King City and Tati’s Playtime in that list as well, very different works which play with democratized space, their narratives exhaling every now and then to allow certain moments to serve as series of moments. And maybe that’s why I tend to write about Austin – every time I enter I suspect I’m wandering into story space, as evidenced by that the right-on-cue rain, reflective of something or nothing.

A further compare and contrast with Slacker is probably irrelevant, a tale of two Austins, and not this Austin and the Austin of 1990 but Linklater’s little dream of Austin 1990, a reflection of a brief mood preserved on a Criterion two-dvd set, and the Austin which lay before me, a place rife less with “characters” than self-consciousness. There’s less a sense of the people you encounter creating themselves than aspiring to a set niche, a spot allotted everyone, whatever your subculture or lifestyle (except maybe the mole men), a state probably right in step with the early twenty-first century when most subcultures aren’t as sub- as they once were, the market none too keen on neglecting any consumer base. (Except those mole men – they can go fuck themselves.)

Anyway, there are no schedules attached to my Cap Metro map, just a handy-dandy series of numbers repeating across an image of the city – Austin, as ever, looks like a pork chop. After orienting myself so that my eyes resist the urge to slide off the page, I wander in the rain a few blocks in the general direction of a spot where five or six of the numbers meet up. I find the bus stop soon enough, benches and a canopy all occupied by families and groups of teenagers, a cross-section of the weekend patrons  of your average mall, your average mall a glass monolith in the background about three hundred feet away.

I debated whether to run in quick to use the restroom, restrooms being an important part of any prolonged passage through an unknown environment, to be used at every opportunity regardless of need – and all the better if, like mine, your bladder is tiny and inexhaustible. Every area is a façade for a restroom – regardless of whatever identity a place may assume, there must be a space which tethers it to necessity, acknowledges humanity at its most absolute. As such, you can leave whatever plot you’re immersed in at the restroom door; from thereon, everything is defined as utilitarian, starting with you, now reduced to the status of the faceless icon often there to greet you as you enter, your actions a functional series of steps to be executed. It’s a biological rite which frees up your higher functions nicely, all the better to plan the next move on your mental map (or my literal map). (It’s a wonder I didn’t return home to collapse on my bed from another unknown illness contracted from the many I visited – hell, maybe the same illness, come back in defiance of my immune system to finish me off.)

As I made a few tentative steps toward the mall parking lot, ready to inaugurate this trip with an affirmative stated on behalf of the human race, my bus arrived. The sun took care to arrive with it, popping up seemingly within seconds of me entering inside; we keep missing each other, like characters in a drawing room comedy…

REVIEW QUESTIONS:

WILL THERE BE ANY MORE ESSAYISTIC MUSINGS ON RESTROOMS???

WILL THERE BE AN ACTUAL CAMEO BY RICHARD LINKLATER HIMSELF IN THIS STORY??? (HE’S LIKE IN AUSTIN? I THINK? IT COULD HAPPEN!)

WHAT PIECE OF FOOD DOES YOUR [CITY/TOWN/VILLAGE/PRIVATELY OWNED ISLAND] LOOK LIKE ON A MAP???

EXCELSIOR, ETC.!

House Of Cards

The Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred #5 by Shaky Kane and David Hine 

The Bulletproof Coffin’s shift from narrative to all-around general whatsit continues apace! Even before the latest two issues, it seemed a thoroughly hyperlinked work, its images and details easy exits and entrances for the reader to another moment in “Our ‘story’, so far…” The key novelty of Disinterred #4 – 84 different moments that both invited and rejected the urge to place themselves within a whole, each instance fertile, multivalent, and pointing to some slippery, maybe nonexistent, association, with the firing of the reader’s synapses intended to echo the formal fireworks on the page – may be the plain way it made that interactivity explicit.

As such, it seems natural the issue following would be a 180-turn – if the earlier issue cast we helpless readers everywhere and nowhere along a sea of images, #5 of Disinterred may be the series at it’s most blunt and direct. Well, for one thing, these images come with numbers, making it a sequential narrative which wears its sequence openly, a comfy converybelt of a comic just like the funnybooks of yore. Reinforcing this is the issue’s illustrative quality, each page a single panel depicting few “moments” but many definite situations, so there’s always the sense of time subtly manipulated, nudged a bit to get all the necessary information across, with all the words refused entry, made to linger below the image. Which is just a way of saying it’s a comic skewed more than most toward a storybook aesthetic, an appropriate style given that it positions itself as a set of bubblegum cards.

Bring on the pop pastiche! This series of trading cards – The Hateful Dead – comes with the Mars Attacks!-type can’t-miss premise of zombie soldiers in Vietnam and you can bet that a good portion of the images which just flooded your head at the mention of that idea are present in this issue. (ALSO: “’Nam-bies!” Jinx.) And when you’ve got a stupidly awesome idea like this – so close to fanboy pandering but for the fact that it feels so right – you’re obliged to run run run with it, which makes this issue a mighty showcase for visceral effect – something you can, in good faith, pass along to someone not in the know (but with an appetite for carnage). Heads mounted on pikes! The zombie immune to the flames which gush from his beloved flame thrower, his flesh now roasted meat! Eyeballs as a spoil of war, decorations fit only for the hardier grunts! And many similar blood-soaked antics under the East Asian sun. Yeah!

The more typical pleasures of the series – the constant metatextual concerns; the ever-unfolding central plotline – lay in wait for those, like me, who can’t help but stare too hard. The issue concludes with The Hateful Dead exiting through a portal toward a post-apocalyptic landscape; veteran Coffinauts have a good idea where they’ll end up – in issue #3 of the original series, ready to do battle with Steve Newman and Ramona, Queen Of The Jungle. Or maybe not – this sea we’re in is tumultuous, always shifting, and we can’t play Ismael with this Coffin; who knows what story down there awaits its end? What we can cling to is the backmatter of that earlier issue, which presented a summary of their rise-and-fall “original” context, the uproar which ensued when these good n’ gory cards first came into contact with children. The layering of fictions is charming, but more interesting is the fact that more than half the images in the current issue derive from those two pages, the cards laid out around the article’s text, often just redrawn with little variation.

On one level, it’s another aspect of the conceptual brio which has overtaken this here series – the issue reveals itself, to no small extent, as an exercise in reappropriation, with marginal elements already present made more potent through a modest recontextualization. More concretely, it ties into the structural conceit which announced itself on the first page: the cover of a collector’s album book specifically intended to hold these precious relics (collect ‘em all!) – this one belongs to Timmy, the boy seen playing with his tuff tuff toys a few issues prior. It’s something of a return to the first series’ approach: a deliberate remove, a fiction within a fiction, a collection of Hateful Dead cards. What makes it stand out is that last bit – it isn’t simply a set of images but a set of images collected; an object.

And so, it defines itself as something of independent value, or at least gestures at it (insofar as a comic entrenched in the floppy format can gesture at another medium, grasping at whatever faithfulness it can get by effectively destroying it, reformatting its front and back, image and caption, within a single page*). Regardless, we have only the text to go by, a text which premises its existence before our eyes upon its status as something pre-loved, an assemblage borne into being thanks to a collector’s passion, circumstances which make it the most elegant iteration yet of the series’ materialist concerns: the joyous junk which clutters its contents and the skein of uncanny associations which come attached to them – a lure which leads to a trap – here rendered equivalent in depiction and expression.

The Bulletproof Coffin has always had its eye on this notion: making its format an ongoing event, with all the ancillary elements of the traditional floppy tied into Coffin’s central narrative, everything allotted some space within the roomy collective copyright symbol of David Hine and Shaky Kane (beyond the back interior cover, typically an Elephantmen ad), making it alot like, say, 1963 by Alan Moore ‘n Pals, along with sundry other titles. The series manages more postmodern heft with this device though – a device which which reaches its greatest resonance in this issue – thanks to the above-mentioned ever-present ambivalent materialism, every installment a casual affirmation of the medium-as-the-message.

The series may exist best in single issue form, its most vulnerable and porous state, the one it greets the surrounding culture with before it crosses the threshold of approval and gains the robust weight of bonus material, a sturdy spine for support, and an armor of blurbs for protection – fragile, disposable, and thus more ready to accrue whatever value said culture wishes to impose, whether it be the (very unlikely) value of monetary investment (mint/near mint or bust) or the ability to fulfill the function I value, its readability, as represented by the basic care I take as I cart this issue around for the purpose of writing about it, placing it in a bag-and-board prison cell lest it become smushed or torn by the other items in my bag, where it sits not three inches away from me, itching for freedom (and, perhaps, vengeance) as I jot down these notes during my lunch break.

There – I’ve had my say. You can take or leave it as you’re so inclined. What we do know is that you owe me a Coke.

* And, of course, I’m discussing the destruction of a hypothetical object. Looking for love in the hall of mirrors…

That Old Dream That Moves

A few notes about The Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred by Shaky Kane and David Hine, with a special emphasis on the issues 3 and 4. SPOILERS: yup. 

(Originally to have been posted a proper amount of days before issue five’s release. I beg your indulgence, obv.)*

One of the better moments in the past few months of serialized comics occurs a few pages into The Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred #3. Below is its first image, a splash page with a boy at its center, our vision angled down the better to see him as he is at this moment: in his room, surrounded by his toys, objects of which he is the absolute master. He’s playing the way you tend to play, grabbing at all the items in the box, staging crossover events between Transformers and Power Rangers against a Hot Wheels backdrop, with green army men as innocent bystanders; these are no doubt dated points of reference – sorry kids! – but you get the principle. What matters is the intensity of it all, which we can see in the boy’s gaze, maybe the most ferocious look you’ll see on a face in comics this year. Playing is not fucking around, not when you’re so engulfed – this may be his dominion, but he’s also nearly trapped, at least by the composition; we just need the black bar on that Radio Flyer wagon to fall forward and we’d have a complete enclosure on display.

Following this is a double splash page extravaganza, impossible to scan by the meager bits of tech I have readily at hand; here’s a link, sans dialogue (UNFORGIVING EYE: “Curse this rush hour traffic! We can’t let anything stand in our path! ACTIVATE TURBO-DRIVE!”). Why bother with any anecdotal visual analysis here? We can point out the spatial contrast between the two images, the earlier picture’s sense of claustrophobia, a feel now retroactively conferred onto its relatively smaller size, with panel borders akin to prison bars – everything aligning to hem the image in, all thanks to the release embodied by the two pages following. Its premise is self-explanatory – the boy’s imagination coming alive for our eyes, plowing over every obstacle as the resident heroes of The Bulletproof Coffin tend to, figures less tethered to any ideal of heroism than forces of will which move through an environment fitted to suit, an environment which can only join us as we look on in wonder. The issue is composed mainly of this – the boy playing and his actions then seen in Jolly Jack and Smilin’ Stan style; this is the most emblematic instance, as you may have guessed from the proportions allotted each image and its rhythmic one-two punch – three pages devoted to a single gesture. 

The sequence becomes even more interesting when you realize it’s more than just an especially neat sugar rush, place it in the wider context of the series thus far. The Adventures of Coffin Fly And The Unforgiving Eye portrayed in the boy’s playtime reverie is the reenactment/continuation/possible genesis of the opening scene of the first issue of Disinterred – Unforgiving Eye calling Coffin Fly back from every superhero’s required annual two week vacation period – aka Death – because evil’s afoot, Mister, no time to explain! This peculiar phenomenon, the whims of a child guiding or being guided by another scenario, gets some explanation: an x-factor object among the boy’s play things, a golden bejeweled zippo – possible bearer of some unknown, unearthly power – given to the boy by his uncle. The situation escalates, as you’d expect from a child playing with fire, into grim Twilight Zone-ish implications by issue’s end, the final page closing with a question mark before a fuse is lit.

But the friction generated by those first two images, two distinct worlds apparently one, implies some instability, enough leeway for we witnesses to hesitate before reducing it all to pop morality play – besides there are three issues after this. We can consider how the boy got the lighter, his uncle, a homicide detective seen in the first issue investigating a series of murders, its own contained bit of intricacy – headless victims, a baroque pattern of abstruse clues, a set of linked strange objects found at each scene of the crime (the aforementioned lighter among them), a trap, a betrayal – which reaches its denouement thanks to the discovery of another headless body, a corpse which may be that of Steve Newman (or Neuman or Norman or Nayman or Noman), the protagonist of the first Bulletproof Coffin series, or the boy himself, now a grown-up survivor of an apocalypse he, via playing too rough with his toys, may have brought about. His death has no part in the machinations of the invisible architect of crime bedeviling the detective but is rather a direct effect of that first scene – you probably shouldn’t spook a newly reborn superhero unless you want a laser in the face.

Which is to say that his fate was overseen by another set of architects, out of view but obvious – Kane and Hine – a death which forms another pattern, one seen only in part and ready to reveal by series end – depending on its identity – either a kiss-off to that first series or our first glimpse of the vast loop which frames this one. Or maybe we can lay the blame back where we began this essay – with the boy, his hand guiding the aim of his Coffin Fly action figure and promptly burning the head off a nearby Ken doll with his awesome new lighter, a child’s tossed off bit of destruction which creates itself in the long chain of consequences and gives the series its own McGuffin, the corpse of the unknown man at the center of every narrative web.

Despite all the dots connected, the disparity between the two images remains – you can make the cognitive leap between the candy-colored collateral damage and the boy making the best of bland suburbia or you can just survey to your content, pondering the distance between the two, or, changing the metaphor, groove to their dissonance. As well you may, because this is the dominant tone of these stories, eagerly running roughshod over psychological realism and logic, too quick to take notice of its casual disjunctions of time and tone (“How, in issues two and three, is the lighter at two different sightings of the same lunar flare?” and various et ceteras in this mold), fueled by a potent mish-mash of comics and culture past; nostalgia with little use for preciousness, keyed not toward fidelity but fixation.

On its surface level, the latest iteration of The Bulletproof Coffin is a sectioning off of a nice chunk of the popular public past – the late fifties/early sixties – into a private playground upon which all the icons of the age – those damn inescapable superheroes, the beatnik, the commie, the astronaut, the detective – are let loose; within that continuum, the first sequence gains even more resonance, as a casual intermingling of its two probable extremes: suburbia and the superhero. This approach isn’t too unusual in comics (Mike Allred, anything entitled The New Frontier) but the airtight insularity, the private logic which gives the series the sense of a distant transmission from space, an alien’s fond pastiche of our Earth genres, suggests Guy Maddin as a more proper point of comparison.

There’s a distance to the proceedings, the content flattened out but not too weighed down by an implicit iconography, as you’d expect from Kane, his style honed on quotation marks and direct statements, fully at home with single self-sufficient images, with no use for spontatneity and naturalism – you’d be hardpressed to label any moment or item incidental, leaving you a lot like that detective, seeing every detail as a bit of overt or buried significance. As Jog points out, that boy makes a good surrogate for Kane’s sense of composition, all stiff figures bearing the stamp of Lord Kirby, so bright and blocky that all shadow should slide off (unless there to provide an outsized melodramatic silhouette against their backdrop) – the only moments which feel like deliberate fakery in this very artificial narrative are when they’re tinted so. Only rarely do the images come with a unified sense of space, typically when the doings veer into full-on superhero THRILLPOWER (ala our masked men beating the traffic), the character and their surroundings locked in the same grid; more often, there’s a disconnect, with the figures popping way out against an innocuous/indistinct plane or just plain cut/pasted onto a different texture. The coziness of the atmosphere, Kane’s assured sense of every panel as a limited set of well-defined variable elements, gives the sense that to wander into the environment just beyond any panel border is to risk encountering the void.

It adds up to a fever dream of Pop; underground connections and echoes, rumors, an unstable time line broken and reattached, bifurcating – continuity with less of an emphasis on cause and effect and more intent upon weaving a web of interconnections between images, moments. You don’t need to get mired in the exposition, the de facto gamesmanship and recontextualization – you can read the overly elaborate scenarios as simple extrapolations of a basic recurring image: a figure surrounded by his precious relics, in communion with them.

And where else could the sensibilities of Shaky Kane and David Hine converge –  Kane’s Monster Truck and its eternal return to an arid internal landscape colonized, invaded by pop culture, the harsh wind of obsession kicking up a storm, and Hine’s Strange Embrace, with its lone fetishist in thrall to his exotic artifacts, a scene with a crime at its center sadder, more basic, and more brutal than any ornate private perversion – but in the notion of a trap built into all the bits of ephemera ubiquitous throughout the series: toys, memorabilia, every commonplace of the collector? And so the action figures, AA-battery powered ray guns, everything you wander through at your local retailer when you pick up the latest Daredevil, and, most of all, those strange fucked-up comics, assume the status of totems, fetishes, nexuses of obsession. These items aren’t simply food for nostalgia’s bottomless appetite (placing the series’ time frame into one receding into myth may be a way of forestalling nostalgia, acknowledging it but not allowing it to override the narrative), but potent in of themselves, talismans, catalysts for something like a rite of transformation, never underlined but nonetheless present. Running further with these implications, we might interpret the loops and whorls which make up the bulk of of the story, all its mysteries, as aspects of the mystery, the revelation which is experienced rather than spoken.

It’s an idea at the edges of the first Bulletproof Coffin – subsumed into that series’ preoccupations with plot and commentary, but fully present on the covers, the front cover inviting you in with an image of a character or characters (typically carrying a gun) amidst a mess of this potent detritus and the back a faux advertisement for such (the cover for issue five is close to a direct statement for those with eyes to see) – and in full bloom in Disinterred. It’s seen in first image of the series: the Unknown Fan guided by an Unforgiving Eye flashlight, an authentic replica British Army compass and a Swiss Army Knife toward “a land fit for heroes” and his doom, and continuing on, to that detective entranced by his collection of crime scene talismans, the final stepping stones to making his superhero fantasies hard truth, and, of course, that boy, wide-eyed and triumphant before his toys, and many another instance… these scenes are The Bulletproof Coffin’s home and everything which unfurls from them commentary, footnotes.

So far, Disinterred is a superior sequel, a plunge straight into the dream where the first series was compelled to kowtow to something like a reality principle, all its strange doings mediated by everyman Steve Noman. It’s fundamental flaw is that of many fair-to-decent superhero comics: subjugating its ideas to a plot which proves too neat, too pat, so the experience becomes something like a plain day at the zoo, the lions, tigers, and bears too easily cowed by their cages. Nothing quite matches the immersion into another world found in its first issue, Steve Norman breathing in a comic which shouldn’t exist like a former user returned to his drug of choice. The rest is fine, each issue following a similar formula, Steve Neuman parsing these samizdat texts from the Golden Nugget comics line for clues to find their fabled creators “David Hine” and “Shaky Kane”, a story which comes a few more times within sight of its first issue summit before resolving itself into an industry satire punchline. It seems facile to say that Disinterred enters the apocryhpal comics at the center of that series and never leaves, but, dammit, it’s true; beyond all the clever curlicues, its fundamental joy is that of a frenzy of images run amok, just like you like it.

There’s no telling whether an apocalyptic fade to white awaits us at the end of this story, as it did in the earlier tale. But the apocalypse isn’t forever, at least not in superhero comics, which tend to take their cue from their progenitor, Superman, the proof that one planet’s destruction can bear the strangest fruit of all. There’s always another one around the corner, as we saw in Disinterred’s third issue, which left us with only a single question mark to save us as one boy’s high spirits seemed ready to plunge the world once more into the fires of armageddon.

That question mark does its job well, resounding in all its forms – Who? What? Where? How? Why? – into the fourth issue. It is, undeniably (and nothing more than, if you so desire), an explosion of images, 84 in total and title, (along with a graceful four page coda, a concession to its serialized nature: four of those images tied in a neat bow by a bit of moody and wistful narration). Its creation goes as so: Kane drew, according to his id and/or gut, eighty-four single images (about twenty more than you’ll find in Monster Truck, making this a nice bang-for-your-buck affair), some discrete and random and others very much connected, which Hine then wrote captions and dialogue for, reframing images, elaborating on motifs, and inventing/augmenting narratives at his whim. The images were than handed over to a select group of cohorts, who each reshuffled the images at random, this being the final sequential order (four to a page) sent to Image for publication purposes.

It’s helpful to state this in full because it isn’t the probable end point, as you may have gathered from the creator’s allowing the winds of circumstance to shake up their process – they oblige (implore) you to read the issue in a random order, skipping from image to image “…until you achieve a state of enlightenment”. Should you find your way to nirvana hindered, it helps to know that, as advised by series editor Destroyovski**, you can take the process further, cut the comic up into its individual components, shift the pictures at your will, toss them onto the floor and read them like entrails.

While we can latch onto the obvious points of reference for this narrative approach – Burroughs and Brion Gysin (openly acknowledged all throughout), Adrian Veidt (Before Watchmen: Ozymandias will surely bear this same gimmick at some point), etc. – what’s most appealing to me is how inevitable it seems when looking at The Bulletproof Coffin project as a whole: the neat, and perhaps unintended, progression from a first reasonably coherent and self-contained series, to the series following – each issue separate but reflecting off each other in a blur – and culminating here, as The Bulletproof Coffin becomes what it seemingly always wished to be: a system of scenes and images, breeding uncontrollably, repeating, mutating.

It’s an end point which seems apt given how the issue extends the narrative I’ve concerned myself with mainly in this piece. Specifally, we’re afforded another glimpse of that boy, this time clinging to his toys as he stand in the rubble of catastrophe, and from there its scope expands: into prehistory, with a possible long game played across millenia by aliens, involving glowing yellow monolithic meteors crashing into Earth in a 2001 homage, its substance compelling primitive men to worship, sacrifice, and murder for it, and later, presumably, to haunt that detective, provide that boy with his lighter, and lend its name to the Golden Nugget comic company, home of Coffin Fly, The Unforgiving Eye, The Red Wraith, and all the rest of your favorite heroes. And so the series reframes its dream history as a history of dreams corrupted from the onset, an infection coloring reality, with much of what we’ve seen as symptoms – note the series’ patron saint, Burroughs, and, hell, all the cut-up jollies of this issue – of a virus of images.

Beyond that clear trail of narrative breadcrumbs, this tidy little interpretation – the rough equivalent of Burrough’s explanation of Naked Lunch as “…a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork” – is a fertile associative pathway through these pictures, should you choose to follow it. That quote may serve as actual inspiration  for one specific image here (look for the lollipop), but you’re more likely to find “seeing” as a literal act a more common theme, always accompanied by revelation in the abstract (note the Psycho – or Psycho by way of Blue Velvet – nod on the first page). And, appropriate to the issue’s interactive spirit, you get to play that part, channel your inner Rowdy Roddy Piper and directly uncover what is hidden, the falsehood leading to the truth, or vice-versa.

But we needn’t limit ourselves – everything’s equal when you find yourself in a labyrinth without a center. There’s more here, other stories, Tales From The Bulletproof Coffin which will never be fully told (given that the series is two issues and a standalone special before its race is run), footnotes, side moves, and gleeful contradictions of what we’ve seen already, more human remains in a graveyard, an alternate history of Russian space travel, “Shaky Kane” in formaldehyde and the sad fate of poor old compromised “David Hine”.

And, as you’d expect, it slips beyond these borders and quotation marks, pointing outward to something like the real, whatever that is. Kane’s pastiche of Lichtenstein’s “The Exhausted Soldiers” is worth a pause: Kane acknowledging his earlier work, strips which partook of a Pop Art instinct thankfully divorced from any surrounding frame of hierarchy or condescension, with a deftness of commentary and a playful sense of quotation which effectively made them detournaments of themselves? Or a presentation of the cultural moment when simple pulp pleasure became divorced from itself? Likewise, “Shaky’s Dilemma”, another free floater, this one depicting Kane as he appears when he displaces air, nifty Warhol do and all, adrift amidst the infinite Krackling Kirby Kosmos on a stray bit of room, armed only with a pencil, a longbox of comics, and a portrait of Frankenstein as he ponders whether to relinquish his lonely island for the vast expanse before him; to leave his treasure behind and find either an endless realm of possibility or the inky depths of the void?

Stepping officially outside any context of narrative or process, we might consider this wondrous little object a requiem for the classical floppy comic, at least in light of the Big Two letting all and sundry know they’ve got their eject buttons firmly in sight before the weight of so much paper sinks the regular ship of commerce. What finer way to commemorate these engines of four-color fury, among the simplest pleasures imaginable and soon to be reliant on actual engines, than to premise your work on its tactility, to lay the comic’s own destruction down as a necessity, the better for we readers to place ourselves in the gutters, now as wide as you care to make them – to navigate them at your will before the path laid down becomes a strict imperative?

So what is The Bulletproof Coffin, Disinterred or otherwise? I clearly have no idea. An inoculation treatment for we remaining consumers helpless before the Wednesday week? A cheerful bit of fucking-around, more ambitious than most? A dance before the slow motion self-immolation of the genre? All or none of the above? You decide – whatever point I had, I’m certain it’s been made. This maze has worn me out, making me good and tender for whatever minotaur lurks in these endless hallways.

The only comfort I have is that, right now, suspended as we are between this issue – this blatant flurry of images which ends where we began, with that boy having made a mess with his toys – and the next, we can make these judgments, proclaim these connections. Until he picks them up and decides to play again.

*This essay, posted the day after Disinterred #5 is released: D.O.A.!

Possible reasons this piece is the newest enlistee in The Hateful Dead:

1. A computer gone wonky, currently being repaired.
2. The 1500 or so words I wrote on Flex Mentallo relative to the first Coffin series (featuring a nifty Greil Marcus quote and pointed commentary on the Gary Friedrich affair – look out pundits!) that I continually reworked and redrafted until I simply realized they were unnecessary.
3. General lassitude.
4. Et cetera.

For the sake of balance and not completely copping out, there’ll be a review of issue 5 soon, probably next week but definitely after tomorrow (when I’ll have picked up and read the damn thing), replete with a list of the numerous errors of presumption I’ve made with this now-official 3800 (and nearly 5300) words of dead weight, along with the names of which saints’ statues whose feet I’ve kissed in atonement for whatever sin I’ve committed by posting this essay in something like bad faith (I think).

** Destroyovski is a good example of the distinctions between the two iterations of the Coffin: an unseen figure at the margins of the first series, a Russian oligarch, a possible pseudonym for Kane, a supplier of epigrams, someone or no one. He emerges in the second as the editor listed in the inside front cover, below Kane and Hine, contributing terrifically melodramatic editorials in the backmatter, his portrait a close-up of a white man with a black fedora and coat, his face obscured by a green apple in homage to Magritte. You can read his essay on the sexxxy debut of Catwoman in DC’s nu52 here.

Slumberland

The Man Who Grew His Beard (Fantagraphics) by Olivier Schrauwen

(Spoilers ahoy, though there may be little need for this disclaimer, so reliant is the book on the reader’s first-hand experience of form clashing against form; nonetheless: “…warned…” etc.)

I’d consigned Olivier Schrauwen to a hazy and pleasant memory from a volume or two of MOME, so many thanks go out to Chris Mautner for pointing out this book’s existence, Schrauwen’s first actual stateside release (any stray copies of My Boy you wanna send my way are welcome, comickers), which escaped my notice when it was published a few months back.

It’s a big batch of critic-friendly comic strips, comics which resemble curios excavated from some none-too-defined European past and more often than not have all the daring shallow-space visual syntax of a Garfield strip. They’re less stories than contraptions that wear their artifice and structure on their sleeve, like those medieval homunculi which transparently show their cogs and mechanisms while making their programmed movements. You can get a decent grasp of the fundamentals of The Man Who Grew His Beard– its blunt force of two levels of reality interacting – from the panels below.

The man is what registers first – beyond the obvious trait of viewer identification, the man’s physical form closer to our own than anything else on display, we can see that he’s constrained to the literal edges of the frame, a far sturdier base for reality than the rickety (presumable) spatial dimension before him. You can see the shift in the blissfully shoddy environment to accommodate him from panel-to-panel, the ceiling of the crawlspace raised, which should give the nature of the sequence away, assuming it wasn’t already clear – the man interacting with his own imagination, at the losing end of a conversation with himself. It works as shorthand for his character that he’s at first obliged to obey its rules, fitting himself into the low crawlspace to speak to the mouse, with the ceiling shifting itself upward according to his instincts as he raises himself to react in the second panel.

Venture a bit further into the image and Here There Be Dragons. Seemingly, the mouse would appear to occupy the background, the average reader intuiting a man against the crudest of stage backdrops, with the mouse merely the liveliest element of that backdrop. And, were we compelled to squint more, we could place the mouse well in depth along the left-hand pathway, the key visual cue being the walls which recede away from us, the man’s posterior at their meeting point, with him awkwardly chilling (as all talking mice do) flat against the corner where the floor meets the wall, his artist unable to give him a spot in the ample spatial dimensions provided. Of course, there’s no guarantee that the spot below the mouse is space. It could be merely an inclined bit of floor, a ramp or ramp-like, which would place that damn mouse in the same foreground as our man – note how its textures match that of the ceiling, a ceiling which, no matter that it refuses to stand still, laughs at your attempts to gauge its dimensions. Maybe it’s both, the man’s imagination unable to settle – who knows? Everything is contrasting cues, dots that seem to connect but never quite.

It’s a toughie!

Which is the point. What’s presented here isn’t the ugly-for-ugliness sake that comics often traffic in – the Panter/Brinkman/Chippendale/Nemoto/Rory Hayes/Everyone/Ever mold – placing the image in its sequential context foremost over any prefab notion of beauty, allowing moments of grace to arise as we perceive the relationship between one image and the next, creating its own makeshift vocabulary. Nope. It’s just plain ineptitude, a deliberately charted system of not-living-up, ugliness which sticks its tongue out at both the man with the bad haircut and you, dear reader. It’s not a representative sample but the idea of “worlds colliding” is plain to see, the fuel for every story – hell, every page – in the book.

This sequence is from “The Assignment” (click to experience it in full force), which may be the funniest strip in the book thanks, I suspect, to the contrast between the man’s impotent and bewildered Little-Nemo-like panic and the all-declarative-statement insolence of his imagination. The man asking for the cheese is emblematic of the central character of most of the stories here, his physical features those of maturity but his mindset and social standing that of a twelve year-old, a succinct metaphor for arrested development who all throughout will maneuver his way through an environment which resists his control, albeit an environment that doesn’t always wear its contrast as eagerly as the one above. 

So yes – worlds colliding. Built around that basic structure at every story’s center – the man, his will to control – is a binary opposition of perception, one representing reality and the other unreality: the terrifyingly mundane vs. fantastical exaggeration, a controlled rationality vs. a short-circuited imagination, reality vs. art, etc, with both sides of the marquee frequently defined in stylistic terms: one of them recognizable, easily equivalent to the world we know, its laws of logic, and the other dimension none-too-steady, impressionistic or grandiose or just continually shifting, ready to become something new in the next panel; Little Nemo’s dilemma played out in seven variations. Surrealism is probably a faulty description – there’s a ruthless logic underlying every detail, a sense of gamesmanship which ensures we always know where each element stands in relationship to its counterpart.  

That system-frenzy might suggest a built-in sense of distance in the work, surface pleasure as something either glossed over for the sake of appreciation or ready to reveal itself under the amorphous term of “beauty”, which is pretty far from one’s actual first-hand experience; I may be speaking as someone who’s clocked in a few thousand hours staring at art comics, but these are some mighty user-friendly strips – you might make your way through the hundred or so pages here in twenty minutes, the book humming along like clockwork, seemingly reading itself. The narratives tend to snap shut from the first panel on, the reader guided along helplessly through the story like Charlie Chaplin flowing through the gears, with one concept/style and another concept/style working in tandem, formal fireworks all ablazin’.

Most of the strips end as only such stories can – with Schrauwen undermining the system he’s set up. Sometimes it’s a bold rupture between boundaries, a sly authorial wink, or merely a concluding ellipsis, letting the matter at hand stand unresolved; extratextual gestures which allow both sides of the dualism at play an equal footing, if only to underline what we’ve been doing all along: watching drawings comment on other drawings. Little Nemo rarely wakes up here – he wasn’t really sleeping. With the playing field leveled, the parity of style and content thoroughly established, you might be obliged to stare and stare again at these strips, parsing the overall patterns from the smallest details, discounting nothing: background pattern abstractions; the seemingly throwaway panels, very much akin to the apropos-of-nothing center panels you’d find in Krazy Kat, that begin and/or end various stories as punctuation; the specific symbolism behind page border design, etc. Is the final panel of “The Imaginist” – a series of yellow, blue, red, and brown watercolor smudges – abstract or literal? Either way, it may be the most moving moment in the book. Go too far into this mindset and you’ll find yourself wondering whether you can extrapolate the conceptual thrust of a strip from the spatial relationship of an obnoxious mouse in a single image. Stay wary, readers!

It may be foolhardy to view them as anything other than top-down idea-first affairs, but it is fun – a sideways glance at them, with “equations” taken out of the equation, and it’s easy to see each strip as a single-minded exploration of a different kind of space: “Outside/Inside”, with its two halves at cross-purposes, is two iterations of the same idea – the borders of its panels as claustrophobic and imprisoning barriers; the final untitled strip shows space at its most inconsequential; “Congo Chromo”: the traditional comic strip space, with the image lugged around by the characters at all times; etc.

Mautner mentions Yuichi Yokoyama as a point of comparison and you can see where he’s coming from. Schrauwen’s works aren’t precise studies of hypothetical physical structures and forces in time, of course (though who knows? I’ve only read the one book), but you can tag them both as experimental, and that term here isn’t a critical byword, ready for a blurb, but an exact description, each strip air-tight and controlled, everything you see wrung dry of any interfering association, all for the sake of effect. But if Yokoyama’s consistency and uniformity (any glance at a Yokoyama image and you may not know what you’re looking at but you know you’re looking at Yokoyama) suggest the obsessive-compulsive m. o. of your average cartoonist, the stories in TMWGHB are as different as they are alike, enough to suggest seven twists of a kaleidoscope, a new and distinct pattern produced from the same specific set of elements each time around.

In this respect, Schrauwen seems closer in approach to Mark Newgarden (discussed aplenty here) – beyond their commitment to bringing the laffs, each are top-down technicians inclined to approaching their strips in a made-to-order manner, a specific style for a specific concept. Newgarden (The Man Who Grew His Nose?), though, is a postmodern man of tomorrow who works in an inveterate mode of pastiche, his bag of tricks diverse but (the key difference) limited, while Schrauwen footprints in TMWGHB are rarely in the same place twice – once a problem has been worked through, it’s tossed and the roundelay begins anew. This may be a slight exaggeration – no aesthetic ground is ever completely salted, but, cursorily scanning the book, the variety and the widely dispersed skill set on display may suggest the work of three or four different cartoonists rather than a single antsy one.

It’s not all novelty obviously – even beyond Schrauwen’s reliable “x + y = z” structure, he’ll gleefully repeat the same story, as evidenced by “Hair Styles” and “The Assignment”, each a conflict between a good/rational student (apparently the same student in each, his beard and hair of considerable length and his eyes set at an unwavering intense gaze redolent of an emotional disorder) and a bad/irrational student, with their setting a school for artists/cartoonists (all meek men in suits, no ties) – both clear iterations of one basic scenario, but with different variables inserted, enough to  imply a hypothetical Schrauwen-verse (where a Crisis of dimensions collapsing into each other is a regular event). “Hair Styles” is a sly and enigmatic point/counterpoint piece, bare bones and diagrammatic, and not only because about half of it is composed of illustrative diagrams – easy to digest but difficult to describe. In it a phrenological-type treatise on hair set forth by the good student bedevils the bad student, his own unruly hair placing him at a problematic place on the hair scale, the eventual punchline being how this sublimely ridiculous bit of categorizing devours both the bad student’s form of rebellion against it, revealing it as entirely in key with his crazy hair nature, and, possibly, the narrative itself. “The Assignment”, already discussed above, takes a less subterranean and more process-minded approach, hewing closer to the narrative rule of “show, don’t tell”: an assignment is proposed and the students navigate a psychological space dictated by their one-dimensional nature toward its completion.

“Outside/Inside” (a name which could apply to every story here), with its point of departure a school of man-boys, may form a triptych with those two, story wise, if not in point-by-point structure; it certainly is the most rigorously defined piece, with both sides, banality and delirium, given a thorough working over. It may be the best piece in the book or, more strictly, it has the best sequence – nothing can quite touch the strip’s first half, a misbegotten journey from a school to a train station by one of Schrauwen’s bearded man-children, a wordless set piece, all momentum, that can be boiled down to a camera eye glued to a character who only knows two actions – standing still and moving – with every page another chunk of spatial continuity livened up by a new angle. It’s a combination that yields a fluid series of effects, at first registering as a nice and precise portrayal of the humdrum, our protagonist’s steady movement across a continuous environment rendered moot from our perspective by the way he’s glued to the same spot in each panel, and then shifting into something close to the climax of a Buster Keaton movie later in the sequence as he races to reach his train, now well in transit, running his legs to their limit across town, all the while seen in long shot against scenery that, no matter how much it changes, will always see him pinned roughly to the same damn location.

The second half (“Inside”) is the expected inversion, a replay of the scenario from the boy’s POV. If space overwhelmed our lad earlier, proving, in the end, victorious, here the boy conquers space, unreliable narrator-style, retaking those all-too earthbound events and enfolding them into a fantastical and outlandish self-serving story, expanding and eliding all the earlier po-faced ineptitude into a saga of triumph, replete with a faithful horse and an orgy scene. The earlier black-and-white naturalism and rhythmic beats follow suit, replaced by a thudding storybook style of stained glass pomposity, the ornate symmetrical page designs refitting all happenstance into moments of distinct dramatic purpose. The sum of it can’t live up to the first part, but as a potent game of dueling authors – Schrauwen vs. our little man – it stands on its own, a mighty bit of conceptual stunt work in the Raymond Queneau mode.  

Of all the stories in this book, “The Imaginist” comes closest to resembling a more typical Ware-inflected entry in the afore-mentioned MOME, the original stateside port of call for much of the book’s contents, with its sympathetic positioning of a lone soul against the world in hand with a sense of the mundane close to the desultory static happening outside the window nearest to you right now, coming as it does with a familiar 21^st-century setting (the only given status quo here which resembles our status quo) and stray bits of pop culture (dude, Extreme). It’s a more conventional take on “Outside/Inside”, or just more organic – another case of a coherent external environment juxtaposed with a frenzied subjective reality but with its emphasis on sensory immediacy over overt formalism, the two states at play not discrete but intertwined, intersecting. Squint a bit and you can see other traits transposed here and made literal, most plainly the earlier metaphorical stasis of our little man unable to escape the frame, a state which here becomes genuine physical stasis, our protagonist (the titular “Imaginist”) a wheelchair-bound catatonic, his interior world another realm of glory, an oddly twee and mutable dreamscape both informed by the outside world and complete detached from it, a place of bright bright bright colors, endless airy movement, and rendezvous with pretty ladies, all prone to being continually affected/disrupted by the drab shit-colored actuality of his situation. As with everything else here, those interactions come with their own logic, with our hero reframing and readjusting any outside stimuli set to a steady lull into a dependable bit of joy and, whenever overstimulated, helpless before the turmoil of his perceptions, with a trip into the less familiar domain outside his apartment leaving him adrift in an ocean of synaesthetic chaos with only stray bits of coherence floating in and out of his frequency. The final frames are another reiteration of “Outside/Inside”, the boy’s imagined denouement here played absolutely straight in a key bit of uplift; too good to spoil in either case.

Loosen the tether of the reality principle and you’d get something like the untitled story at the end of the book, the closest anything here comes to empty calories, all exhilarating effect. Elements from earlier pieces – the teacher/student relationship, a male id running Duck Amuck – appear here, inserted into a sci-fi premise (the use of an old virtual reality machine which looks a lot like a beach ball drawn by C. F.), with everything attenuated into a quick thin-as-can-be pretext for the sake of the main event: Schrauwen’s manipulation of a glowing garish beach scene, an image with the generic beauty of a postcard and the pictorialism of a diorama, two wide panels to a page, with every form therein in constant flux, subject to subtle or extreme shifts from panel to panel – a hermit crab becomes a crab and then a cartoon crab which is then slain with a trident by a sea god-type who emerges from the waves riding a giant sea horse; a monkey  enters, changes into a Neanderthal and then into a mulleted party dude who  proceeds to frolic with and fuck a bikini babe, along with five or six other variables, all against a mutable backdrop set to a prime directive of “beach scene. It’s an overcaffeinated idyll which culminates as you’d expect – into chaos, our machine malfunctioning and the two-panel structure breaking down, the images stuttering into chaos in the familiar digital age error pattern and climaxing on what one imagines is an actual climax, a vision of our lovers embracing in endless repetition looping into the yellow static infinite. And then the teacher says stop and then it stops. End!

At the other end of the spectrum are “The Grotto” and “Congo Chromo”, each, all things being relative, a step or so back from the dominant mode of full-blast formalism, the expected themes displaced not onto any erupting formal mechanisms but directly onto the subject and action of the story, matters of Ye Olde Literary Substance.

Of the two, “Congo Chromo” is both less traditional and more straightforward, a blunt-as-can-be satire about a comedy duo of hapless self-satisfied Belgian colonialists who blunder through a cartoon Congo, going about blindly as masters of their foreign domain and all the while getting their asses handed to them two or three times a page. And that’s basically the whole of it, seemingly free from the prevailing conceptual schema – an odd characteristic for the first story in sequence, not where you’d expect to find an outlier. But a closer look and you can see the same preoccupations. The bulk of the story is long stretches of medium shot images of our pair gettin’ into hi-jinx, their very physical form unstable all throughout, slipping and sliding from a default human form to the bodily proportions of big-headed kids or bloating up to Humpty-Dumpty size, a switch-up depending sometimes on their situation and other times, you suspect, just because Schrauwen felt like drawing them that way. Interspersed are occasional long shots of the scenes we’ve been watching, with our viewpoint loftier and all characters devoid of most features beyond their race – the Europeans rendered mainly in white and the Africans (who, significantly, only appear in these instances) all in brown; it’s a sudden shift into understatement, past tense, with an absence of motion or caricature, a step back from the strip’s de facto immediacy which places a frame of realism around this Silly Symphony, letting us feel the weight of history. In the end, thoroughly trounced by the unfriendly jungle, our beleaguered pair o’ pals are only left with escape down the river, a voyage which leads not toward a confrontation with any Heart Of Darkness but, inexplicably, to a dreamlike European countryside, where we leave them – snug as a bug in the familiar complacencies of home. I think we can draw the necessary conclusions.

“The Grotto” isn’t a top tier strip, but it’s still pretty good, beginning with one of the odder things you’ll encounter in a Schrauwen strip – a prologue – which may be a tip off that what follows may prove atypical. It’s something like a fable – an alternate mythology of life on earth arising directly from ink on the wall of a grotto, humanity arising from that Platonic cradle, doing great deeds, and, in its twilight, receding back into it and then segueing into a performance by an artist who’s seized upon that Promethean force of creation to conjure up butterflies, alien-types, a Pegasus, and various other cutesy forms, all coming alive to delight his adoring audience, with a lot of mileage from his hammy flair on stage before his fellow cave dwellers, part magician and part arena rock, tight leather pants and all (Hey! Photoreference!). Soon enough, our artist grows weary, realizes his “art” amounts to glorified balloon animals, and opts, like a prima donna God, to rest. He immediately makes a James Brown I-can’t-go-on-I’ll-go-on about-face, casts his cape aside (sure!), douses himself with ink and dares to go even further, drawing a passageway into which he beckons his audience – to escape their comfortable self-imposed grotto prison and accompany him on a Journey Into Mystery into whatever lies beyond. As an aside to this concluding image of possibility, we see that the same inky medium which may carry us to transcendence can, perhaps, breed monsters as well, as seen with the spiders – formed from stray ink carelessly spilt – which crawl menacingly toward a lil’ tot in the audience. Ambivalence!

And so it’s the most ground-level strip, a shift in polarity from the pure play in the field of form we saw in the “day at the beach” story. The struggle for control which plays out everywhere else has here been won; rather than appearing as a language with its own grammar, the irrational is subjugated to the demands of the narrative, reduced to an adjunct of “the way things are”, a given, domesticated into an entertainment. It’s a “useful” story from which to learn, fraught with significance, lending itself to a one-to-one interpretation (slot “art” or “creativity” or whatever your preferred term is into the symbolism provided) rather than the book’s more common self-sufficient experiential metatext. Fittingly, it ends the moment before every other story begins – poised before the entryway into the land of wonderful, horrible dreams.