an inverted monolith

 It's always postgame here at the Echolocution desk.

 

So I'm re-viewing Backrooms, back to front, for no reason other than boredom, really.

 

This was worth watching in the theatre, mainly for the sense of scale.  Without the Big Screen, this could easily be a webisode.  What I failed to pick up on, when we watched it, was the truly subtle shit.  Like the Kubrick.  Not the Shining references-- that's as on the surface as the overlay of the Red Room onto the Backrooms.  No, it's the Monolith:

The monolith is all over this thing.  And not just the implied dimensions of the hole in things that the Monolith represents--  the monolith, inverted.  Look at that top shot, of the abyss the door is perched over, and the stairs leading up.  That's this 2001 shot, turned inside out:

 

No naked vacuum of space above, no structurally sound archaeological dig & secure ground below, and a sadistically ordinary household door with a petflap, lording over it all.  That's a really, really wildly interesting inversion, to me.  Because it says something and it's mute, all in one.  Like the monolith.  Like the phenomena of the backrooms, its actual pop culture ubiquity.

 

We choose art because it reflects something in us.  Art, like our friend the monolith, is the o.g. black mirror.  And there's no small amount of art that goes into figuring out why an image Speaks, and what it's saying.  In this instance, for me, it's all about capital, baby.  The backrooms is about what america is, and has been since before my grandparents were inclined to have kids.  It's a machine for living in, and getting lost in, which only knows how to propogate the images it steals, and it's increasingly shoddy, slapdash, and surreal.  And the way you get there is by stumbling through a door you either didn't realize was there, or, by falling through an opening that wasn't all that hidden or structurally sound to begin with.

Capitalism, and its discontents...

 

I've heard a lot of chatter about the Still Lifes in the backrooms being a metaphor for the AI bullshit that's drawn all the flies, and yeah, sure.  But AI is just capitalism, too.  The material reality of AI is that it's just a tool, and the tool's utility is down to our ability to imagine uses for it beyond, y'know, cannibalizing everyone & everything it has ever brushed against.  It's an outgrowth of capitalism, that's all.  It's not the Dominant Metaphor for how much America sucks, even if it is in the running for top five examples.

 

No, at the end of things, the backrooms are the monolith:  a dark slab of potential, containing anything we care to envision.  We like to pretend we can envision Infinity, Eternity, and the Silence of God in all their terrible, meaningful aspects, but the fact is that Void of Potential & its Projected Contents will stun and belittle us and leave us feeling very old and alone with unkind, inevitable death.

Because...  That is the end of 2001.  Starchild notwithstanding.

 

Because there's nothing for that weird, isolated foundling to stand on.

Lest I sound like there's no Happy Ending, well--  there was.  In the original book version of 2001.  (Has that been revised by Clarke & his estate?  I've only read the original novelization.)  The starchild returns to earth and takes out our nuclear missile defense network and all the satellites attached to it.

Kubrick cut that shit.  And Kane Parsons doesn't leave us in any less enigmatic of a place.  Those final images, my friends.  Instead of a sinless, reborn infant wombed by naked space, we're left with a fragmented (therapist's!) self-image, adrift in a non-place.  Tell me that isn't saying something very specific & true about the involuted maze america is beginning to recognize itself as.

Yeah, yeah, spoilers:  NOBODY GETS OUT.

Is The Backrooms a great movie?  No.  But my god, it's full of sta

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - June 2o26

June?  We've survived into June...?  How about that.

The New Statesmen (1988/1989/199o) - written by John Smith & illustrated by Jim Baikie, Duncan Fegrado, and Sean Phillips, + Brendan McCarthy & David Hine

How many times have I read this, at this point?  Six times?  More?  Sad fact is, I don't know enough about the history of orchids to say whether their symbolic use in this comic works.  But most everything else does.  Future histories are tricky business.  This one holds up, even if its fashions don't.

Tyranny Rex (1998) - written by John Smith & illustrated by (deep breath) Steve Dillon, Will Simpson, Mark Buckingham, Paul Marshall, and whatever other flying monkeys were indentured at 2000ad on a given week

Tyranny Rex starts funny and ends by never fucking ending.  The first arc, with Steve Dillon, is full-on comedy.  It's got some great sight gags.  Then it's au revoir Steve, and hello muddy inks from everybody's least fave, grottiest Hellblazer artist, Will Simpson.  Whom I frequently confuse with Mike McKone, of 'Sex Warrior' infamy.  But yeah.  From Will Simpson onward, I have no clear idea what Smith intended to accomplish with these comix.  Comedy?  I guess Tyranny was meant to be a female counterweight to Devlin Waugh, but wotta bellyflop.  Like the kind that causes a body to lose consciousness.

Fires & Murmur (1988 & 1991) - written & illustrated by Lorenzo Mattotti

These are Vibe Comix.  Like, on an intellectual level, the plot of Fires is easy enough to piece out.  But it's never quite about the business it declares-- there's a shiftiness to these books, both on the artistic & narrative levels, such that you're never quite certain what you're reading.  The easiest dismissal would be to call them dream comix, or art comix, but even if they are those things, they're not.  Because the pages, the pages always tell you something different.  Panel to panel, chapter to chapter, they're not interested in lining up so much as communicating the vibe.  These books vibrate with captured energy.  Murmur is the slipperier of the two books.  One is a horror comic, the other is a metaphysical wrangle with self.  But which is which, and why does it matter?  Just lay back with 'em and let the vibes wash your kinks out.

Exquisite Corpse (199o) - written by Jerry Prosser & illustrated by The Pander Bros.

Speaking of kinks.  This was a weird one.  Have I talked about this before?

So I was seventeen, and a virgin, and didn't know a single thing about sex, really, despite being raised by degenerate hippy scum, when this comic showed up in a quarter bin.  I was always convincing my aunt to take me to the one comic shop Dogwater had to offer, and she was always reluctant.  Like, waits in the car reluctant.  She wouldn't go into a record shop, even.  That could be because the one CD store we had in town hoisted a flag-sized poster for Ritual de lo Habitual over the register...  It could also be because my aunt Edwina was a classic repressed churchgoing lesbian.  Anyhow.  She thought filth was everywhere--  and was she wrong?  Because in that dingy quarter bin I found one issue of Exquisite Corpse.  A book that seemed quite unhappy about sex, gray and antagonistic and menacing.

What I could not know, then, is that I'd found the least explicit & disquieting of the three (unnumbered) issues.  I'd seen a couple house ads in issues of Dark Horse, promoting it, and I knew the Pander Brothers from reading Grendal, but as to what the comic -was-, its narrative intent, I couldn't decipher.  It seemed like a dying dream, or fantasy.  I knew it was one of those books it would be a bad idea to get caught with.  By that point I'd already been suspended for "trafficking pornography" at school--  i.e. bringing an issue of Heavy Metal to use for reference for a painting.  So I knew what smut was, even as I didn't have the slightest idea what sex was for, or about.

Because let's be up front here:  my school did not have a sex ed course.  It disguised its sex ed course as Home Economics, and squirreled away the realities of sexuality in an elective.  So I got what passed for sex ed, because I wanted to take a course on sewing and balancing a chequebook.  What I knew about sex, you could've inscribed on an oyster cracker.  I was a hick.  But I knew enough to realize that Home Ec was not actually teaching us anything other than some murky biological realities; Home Ec was on the curriculum so the school could argue that it was not teaching anything godless.

Point being, even dumb as I was, Exquisite Corpse felt dangerous.  It wasn't trying to sell a hollywood notion of fucking, and it wasn't pushing a heteronormative, judeo-xtian agenda.  It also wasn't interested in talking down to the reader.  If I'd been able to get the other two issues, when I was seventeen, and if I'd been caught with them...?  Those books would have been burned.  By my parents.  Who grew up rebelling against book burnings, public pyres of Beatles records and being told that masturbation would result in disease & insanity.  They grew up knowing what repression really was, and they tried to avoid me experiencing it, but by god they would have disapproved of these comix.

Because they're grimy, and unpleasant, and grim.  But they're also really well built, artsy little things.  Three issues, which may be read in any order.  And you should.  Do what I did, find 'em on the 'bays.  They're cheap.  They're beautifully packaged, with photo covers, and fun design elements--  each issue, in lieu of a # number, is represented by a type of knot.  And they're quite elegant little knots, dedicated to a knotted subject: abuse.

That's me putting a trigger guard in there.  It's just not a nice book.

I don't know how successful this little project was.  Honestly I'm amazed Dark Horse was able to publish it at all.  In most places, as I understand, these books were relegated to the Adults Only bin.  With reason.  But yeah.  Solid book.  And the least sexy thing you're guaranteed to read this year.

Dick Tracy:  the Ballad of Crewy Lou (1951) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould & Dick Locher

You've never heard of Crewy Lou!?!?  Well, it's not like she didn't try.

The bodycount on this one is something.  Crewy's no The Brow, but she herself straight up threw a bedridden mobster over her shoulder and stuffed him into a medical sterilizer like he was a load of wash.  She was primed to crank the steam when she was stopped.  Nothing is beyond.  Look at that hair!!!  Ruthless.  Beat Tess Trueheart in the head with a rock and kidnapped Bonny Braids!  Villainous as they come.  Doesn't even hesitate when it comes to offing Brainard, her big brother, neither.  Hell, the number of cars she goes thru...  Crewy Lou's harder on wheels than Furiosa!!

Yessir, mmm-mm!!  Good comix.

office day two

Sat on beach and wrote four pages.  Firming up Hero of the Fever.  I usually take two passes at dialogue / narrative and then splice it until I have the pacing right.  Read / re-read 'The Screwball Asses' for its queertopian p.o.v. circa Paris1973.  Did some sketching.  Came home.  Dyed hair.  Finished OCD painting the wooden art project thing I've taken to calling "Level Map" or "Stage Map".  Did some more inking on the Kammerer portrait.  Have most basic linework done.  Shaved & cut hair.  Next up, dinner!

(over)packing the office

Backpack contents:  Three notebooks (pocketsize sketchbooks).  My 2nd laptop, Battles.  Scripts for Denizen & illustrations in progress for Burroughs Folio.  One large sketchbook, new.  My newest mp3 player, Bangs.  Portable bluetooth speaker.  Large bottle water.  Umbrella.  Binoculars.  Leatherman multi-tool.

That's probably too much weight, combined: paper, electronic, & equipment.  Right knee seems to be improving, gradually, but it's sly & tricky on a whim.  I should leave the binoculars.  But you never know who you'll see on the channel trail:  deer, coyotes, rabbits, heron.  Had great luck with deer lately.

Been noticing strange aches in scar tissue w/ this storm system.  Last three-four days it's been mild pressure in/around the skull fracture, which makes sense, because the injury was adjacent to sinuses.  Brief moments of increased sensitivity, some throbbing, nothing sustained.  Went in minutes.  This morning is curious because the scar tissue that's reacting is my right ear.  Which doesn't act up, generally.

Could be weather-predictive.  Four years in, I'm still learning what anything means, if it does.

Off I go.  Let's see if I can get Hero of the Fever underway.  I'd like to start serializing it here next month.  At the very least will use this outing to finish reading 'The Screwball Asses'.  Useful in re: queertopian concerns.  Studied some patented breakwater designs last night, so those are going in the sketchbook.  Feel like I have a handle on where to take this thing.

Who'd'a thunk reading all of Theodore Sturgeon in my mid-twenties would pay off at fifty?

whilestones o1

As in, whiling away the time.  Portmanteau, with "milestone".  As in, implied marker.

Yesterday's Whilestones were:

(i)  Inking a portrait of David Kammerer, which I penciled months ago.  This is the second rendition of Kammerer, and the correct one.  Began inking approximately ten minutes before--

(ii)  Doing a radio interview with Eamonn Clarke in Wales(?) about John Smith & Jim Baikie's 'The New Statesmen'.  Had kicked around the idea of doing a podcast about it a year ago, and then last month Eamonn hit me up and said let's do it.  So I finished my re-read of TNS at 6am, then wrote up my notes, had an orange & some tea, inked for a minute, and did the thing.  It was enjoyable & embarrassing, all at once, because I've no right to talk shit about Alan Moore, but then, perhaps I do have right inasmuch as I'm queer and Moore isn't.  So I slagged 'Watchmen' some, and I praised 'The New Statesmen' some, and I generally hemmed & hawed & eventually figured out to take a cue & record an outro.  Eamonn was most kind & generous.  It was one hell of a way to start celebrating...

(iii)  My fourth birthday.  I keep thinking it's been five years since I cracked my skull, and it hasn't been.  It's only been four.  Four very busy years.  Siegfried wanted to take me out to get my nails done, but there weren't any slots open, so it's scheduled for later in the week.  In the meantime, we--

(iv)  Planted two native pollinators in the community garden and did some upkeep on our plot, before...

(v)  Going to Kathy Osterman beach and picking trash.  It's a habit, cleaning up the minute shards of plastic & half-eaten straws & desiccated cigarette butts, bottlecaps & sandy napkins & deflated mylar balloons.  The buried children's toys, sandbox molds & hearty injection-molded trowels, those we put aside for some seekers of joy to find.  And then we--

(vi)  Retired home for a bit of art.  Got surprisingly far with that portrait, yesterday.  Didn't intend to.  But basic linework's half-done now!  I tried to record the process but that only resulted in some choice footage of the back of my ear.  So...

(vii)  There was another whilestone, but the veil of discretion must be drawn over its celebratory nature & causal placement in the chain of accomplishment & pleasure that resulted in my turning 4, or 50.  Because technically, it's fifty.  But technically, my legal birthday isn't for another six months, either.  At any rate, a good day overall, because--

(viii)  I wasn't this guy four years ago, and this wasn't my life.  It's wonderful to grow into being myself, at long last, and shake off the South.  In the south I couldn't have told my husband how much he's changed & revitalized me.  In the south I couldn't recognize myself or my aspirations.  More than anywhere else in america, the south conditions the human animal to repress & censor & deform itself.  It teaches us to betray our own best interests in favour of What The Community Thinks.  It teaches us the belt, the paddle, and the freshly-cut privet switch.  It teaches us to hate ourselves, just enough, to deserve saltine cracker Christ.  Man, leaving Atlanta was retiring from a gig hoisting a pitchfork in hell.

(ix)  Also to be filed somewhere in all that were some re-reads.  I reread the 11th chapter of Watchmen, to confirm a thesis spouted aloud during the pod, because from the moment Eamonn stopped recording I started asking "Did I free-associate that shit?"  Re-read confirmed what I knew:  Joey & Aline are collapsed atop one another against the spraypainted Hiroshima Lovers, the sacrifice New York's publishers demanded of Watchmen's author.  As a corrolary, also re-read 'The Screwball Asses', an auto-critique of queer revolutionary tendencies in France in 1973.  Because these are the things I think about as I build a queertopian webcomic, which...

(x)  I totally failed to promote, coherently, on the Mega-City One podcast.  Self-promotion does not come natural, even to the sort of self-absorbed dinosaur who still believes in The Power of Blogging.  Hey, it's a beginning.

broadcasting resumes

 Over tea and a slightly savaged orange.

the lit bit - june 2o26

After Kathy Acker (2o17) - by Chris Krause

I don't do bios very often.  Maybe one to two a year, on average.  No real reason other than mental hygiene.  Fiction's my thing.  I try not to learn too much about my fave creators.  Because scuttlebutt may be part of art but it shouldn't be a primary point of access.

This was finished two days ago.  Normally I wouldn't carry over, and leave this last month, but...  Hell, it's the scuttlebutt aspect.  Kathy Acker knew Neil Gaiman.  Or was it Neil who knew Kathy?  There's an ambivalence in the text to this, in a book replete with tales of Who Fucked Whom.  In the light of Neil's troubles, and the fact that he could afford to throw lawyers at Todd McFarlane (with help from Marvel), it's near impossible not to speculate.

See, Kathy was in the London S&M scene, and she bought & sold 3-4 different flats around London & Brighton.  As Neil puts it, it's the resale of one of these flats that caused their friendship's elision.  He thinks.  Kathy was notoriously flighty with her friendships, and her passions, if they weren't one and the same.  And they rarely stayed stably in any of the three categories:  friendly, fucking, and friends who fuck.  It was pretty well known how she handled her intellectual & amorous affairs, which is why the reluctance around Gaiman's appearances stands out...

There was a specific lover who Kathy called "the German", and he's distinct from Gaiman in terms of having a proper name and different vocation, but there's some overlap in The German's m.o. in how he & Kathy conducted their affair.  The German, like Gaiman, was married.  Like Gaiman--  reputedly  --The German loved power games, headfucky semi-public scenarios, and thrilled to theatrical cruelty.  While it's possible they didn't ball, similarities between The German's amorous m.o. & testimony from Gaiman's accusers about the games he played are remarkable.  Maybe she told Neil about her adventures with The German, and he decided to re-enact those games with later partners.  Perhaps?

The ambivalence in Krause's narrative around the period these two are onstage with Acker is extremely curious; there is a sense of overlap between the characters for several pages, then the affair ends, quite abruptly, and Kathy sells her flat, fleeing London, optimistically, for a return to New York.

Gaiman doesn't show up again until the final two chapters, and that's when their friendship drifts out.  Over a real estate favour, where Gaiman was somehow responsible for selling her then-recently acquired but never-lived-in Brighton digs.  Gaiman himself sounds uncertain about what happened.  "I didn't sell it fast enough, I suppose," he mulls.  There is no further speculation.

And--  here's a thing  --there is not so much as a single mention of Delirium.  Or Kathy's reactions to being depicted in Sandman.  Which would have come up, as Delirium's development in the comic series occurred as she was living, and in those years Kathy was in her multimedia phase, moving from spoken word recordings to live shows with The Mekons and playing at scriptwriting...  Kathy being Kathy, all-about-Kathy, it's positively bizarre that there's no mention of her reacting to having a comix avatar over at DC.  She would have known.  She would have talked about it.  She had seven years to talk about it!!!

Sandman ended the year before she died.

I am not saying I smell lawyers circling the outer research waters of this book.  Because that would be actionable, and Neil has Miracleman on his side.  They were friends.  What more need be said.

See why I don't read biographies?

High Risk: An Anthology of Forbidden Writings (1991) - edited by Amy Scholder & Ira Silverberg

Bought this two years ago for an essay by William S. Burroughs.   Contains Kathy and Dennis Cooper and all the other belles of the big gay lit ball.  Since I needed a breather between, embarked on a short story by Gary Indiana, who I've never read before.  Gary was friends (frenemies?) with Kathy Acker & David Wojnarowicz.  Which has sweet fuck all to do with his cred as a writer.  This is strikingly well-written, clear-eyed work, with excellent atmosphere.

 

I'll pursue more Indiana soon.

Cruising (197o) - by Gerard Walker

Another carryover from last month.  Siegfried just finished reading it.  From everything he said about the plot, Friedkin worked to incorporate as much as possible into its film adaptation.  So I'm genuinely curious now.  Started first chapter last night.  Apparently the author was a fan of Samuel Fuller...?  Like, he namechecks Hitchcock, Kubrick, and "Sam what's-his-name, the B-movie guy whose mysteries are so big in France."

As I'm reading the sentence I finishing it aloud, and my husband's like "Knew you would fill in the blank.  Nerd."

The Screwball Asses (1973) - by Guy Hocquenghem

A wonderful little utopian essay about double-standards, doublethink, and dumbness in the sexual revolutionary.  If you want to understand what Queerness means, in relation to the world we all have to "earn a living", pay rent, and pay for our own funerals in, well:  read it.

I have a physical copy on my shelf.  Found in the same little free library in Atlanta where someone left a copy of 'My Loose Thread' by Dennis Cooper.  I've said some terrible things about Georgia, and have some downright hostile insights into Atlanta, but that li'l free library was a reminder-- not everyone In The Community is a class traitor or clone-ass scenester bitch.

Good to re-read.  The right words in my ear, at the perfect time, on exactly the correct project.

Kathy Acker: The Last Interview & Other Conversations (2o18) - edited by Amy Scholder & Douglas A. Martin

Re-reading Douglas Martin's letters from the intro.  Which directed me to an essay of Kathy's, 'Some American Cities', from Marxism Today...

Bodies of Work: Essays (1997) - by Kathy Acker

Which I have!!!  Back on that urbanism track.  Thanks, Kathy!

The House of Impossible Beauties  (2018) - by Joseph Cassara

Next up!  For real!!  Unless further distracted by research.

three glimpses thru a window

The pile on the noon lawn is protean breakup debris: dude's clothes and plastic junk the shapes of which elude the sidewalking casual eye and hangers and papers and wrappers and razors and usb chargers and I keep walking, and when I return by an hour later the only thing to disturb it is the wind and eventually it is gone, over the course of the day, scattered, dispersed, collected, gone except for bill statements wetted and hung over privet hedge to dry and flake in the sun and be carried away over two days.  The secondfloor window from whence it spilled open one hour and closed the next for rain.  Nothing much seems to happen.

Days later going back home to finish laundry passing the cops wondering where they parked and nothing much seems to be happening on noonstreet, our foot patrol thumbs in their vests doing the slow strut up the steps to the building where the pile was, eyes on the secondfloor, calling in wondering Where she is.  I don't see their car and they don't seem on alert.  Switch the laundry out and back outside back past and the twentysomething hair up in a dayathome bun in blackshirt blackpants is explaining He's gone I put everything out But he has a key If you'll stay here I'll go up He's unpredictable.  My last walk back on the last load her head out the window one patrolman's saying If he comes back.

Same afternoon same street altogether empty except for the smoker in cloudgray wrestling taped-up gym bag 'round a sixpack gut, a standout, unfamiliar face wreathed in white cirrus as he passes fresh cigarette bogeyed to lips he busts out BRENDA behind me and I chance a look back, up, and to the left at the closed busted-out bedroom window the hole in the glass a parallellogram drawn with french curves, pieces of the whole laid on the patchy grass where billpaper mache coats the brush and cloudgray stranger shouts BRENDA, BRENDA he bawls again cigarette between his fingers and pacing the fence up and down up and down howling BRENDAAAHHH, and I'm fingering my phone but five minutes later he's gone.

what's he building in there (not comix)

 

the drawback to this paint on these found materials

is it takes forever for the wood to drink the paint

and you watch the paint change colour & texture

as it dries, thins & solidifies, bonding to the old layer

how it looks when you painted is NEVER how it appears dry

Tracing Gould - o16

"What can we expect from the 'reformed' Frank White?"

Christopher Walken smiles that nervous little needle-toothed grin, an aw gosh spasm of mirth, and the lines around his eyes are swept away by the seriousness of inspiration.

"Do you, know what I want to do to you, counselor?"

The counselor laughs, feeling glamorous as Kim Basinger cast as Vicki Vale--  there's a wallpapered poster just off Times Square covered in the Tim Burton Batlogo and she's wondering how long 'til it peels and starts to tatter and pretty soon junk ad tickertape parade for the paving over of the porno theatres  --and she jousts with the freshly showered, freshly sprung mobster.

"What's that?"

"I...  want to take you...  on, the subway."

And he does.  Because, after five years being escorted cage to cage to cage, he can.  And when the hoods come they don't come in a dozen, they're kids prowling, not real criminals.  Three to one eraserheaded cracker with a piece.  The counselor covering her bare breast almost as an afterthought.

Her eyes on Frank.  Everyone's eyes on Frank.  The grip angled like a hardon.  The lady or the tiger.

Frank pulls his money clip with an underhand toss and the wad spins into the skinny kid's damp palm.

"Come down to the Plaza.  I got work, for you."

Frank smiles his preferred Trump hotel customer smile.  Winks.  The kids backing away, eyes big, feeling the luckiest they've ever been, to be able to retreat.  Rich, healthy, pants freshly pissed.  Feeling wild and a little outta breath, not high.  Weirded out.

Thinking 'That piece was real.  This money's real.  Wazzat motherfucker actually real?'

There's no evidence Abel Ferrara ever gave a fuck about Dick Tracy.  But his little electric blue and goldlit epic paen to Christopher Walken's face, it's a Dick Tracy kinda vibe.  So this one goes here.