#I would make Alan Moore look nice | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

howdy-cowpoke · 1 year

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TIMING: Some time shortly after Monty rescued Manzanita. LOCATION: Alan’s boat / The Cave of Voices PARTIES: Alan (@alan-duarte) & Monty (@howdy-cowpoke) SUMMARY: Monty and Alan go on a boating trip which leads them to the Cave of Voices and down in an unexpected place. They meet a friend and a foe. CONTENT WARNINGS: None.

—

Alan was checking the equipment when Monty arrived. It had been a while since he last went to sea. Escaping from the stench of that black sludge could only be a relief. His shop being in oldtown, he didn’t have to suffer from it at all times, but most of the properties he sold were downtown. Alan’s employees seemed to have been just as disturbed with the smell which was the only comfort he found about the situation. It was easier to go through hardship with people willing to rant over the same things. It was easier even to leave the town for an afternoon with a friend. He liked hanging out with his employees, but there was always a certain distance there. He was their boss, and he couldn’t really talk about everything with them. Monty was someone he could trust with anything, down to his own life.

“We’ve been blessed with nice weather,” he exclaimed, walking down the deck to give him a proper greeting. “How have you been doing?” He hadn’t really conversed with Monty since they had dinner at his house. Dropping off a severed head for him to eat was not precisely what he would qualify as hanging out. He wasn’t too worried about it, per say, but it meant a lot to him, knowing that his friend was doing okay. One of the good things about Monty was that he always knew when he was lying. Alan sometimes let him get away with it. “I’m gonna get my shoes back on. You can undo the moorings if you want.”

—

Monty had a slight preference for the cold since dying, but his conflicting love of spring meant that on days like today, he wasn’t going to complain about the sudden heat wave. Anyway, it wasn’t hot—a place like this rarely got hot. Not like in México. It was warm in the sun, warm enough that he could barely feel it, which was nice.

Alan’s request to go boating hadn’t exactly come as a surprise—the man was often itching to get out on the water the moment the weather improved after the long winter. Monty had hesitated, however, worrying more than usual about leaving the farm hands on their own, in case that nasty slayer decided to return for round two. He knew Monty was undead at the very least, and it wouldn’t take much more snooping for him to realize that everyone working on that farm was.

Trying to push the fears from his mind, the zombie reluctantly agreed to join his friend. Recalling the gentle admonishment he’d gotten for his attire the first time they’d done this, he made sure to pull out the only clothes he owned that weren’t also work clothes, helpfully provided by the very same werewolf that wanted to see him make an attempt at not looking grungy once in a while. He even showered before leaving! Alan would be pleased.

Arriving at the docks a few minutes late, the zombie broke into a soft grin as he spotted Alan coming his way to greet him, barefoot as the day he was born. “Oh, you know… surviving,” he answered, letting his gaze fall to his friend’s bare feet. “You’ll get splinters doing that,” Monty commented casually, clapping a hand against Alan’s shoulder. “Sure, amigo. I got it.” Following him a short distance back to the boat, Monty threw his jacket on board and proceeded to detach the boat from the deck, tossing the lines back and hopping over the small gap onto the boat when he was done. The smell of the ocean was strong enough to cut through his deadened senses and he turned his face to the wind, closing his eyes for a brief moment to enjoy it before finding Alan again. “Please tell me we’re heading into Storm’s Eye Trench, to both our deaths,” he joked with a cheeky grin.

—

“I’m not going to get splinters,” well, probably not on his feet at least. Running around the woods had made his feet feel more calloused over time. Though he generally brought a change of shoes, Alan wondered if running around on paws didn’t have a slow effect on the state of his feet and hands. “I like the shirt, and the rest. Nice outfit,” if the other had lost his usual scent of hay, farm life and horses, Alan didn’t comment on that. Sitting at the front of the ship, against the railing, the werewolf was putting on a pair of boat shoes, if only not to slip and fall on such a quiet sea.

“Storm’s Eye Trench?” Alan glanced up at Monty with his eyebrows furrowed. It wasn’t unlike him to make jokes, but they didn’t usually have such a dark undertone. “If you want to die by my side, just say it,” with a saccharine grin, the realtor got up to his feet and headed toward the other end of the boat.

Its sails swelled by the wind, the sailboat slowly moved away from the shore. The sound of the wavelets crashing on the pier quieted down the more they sailed. Above their heads, gulls and kingfishers continued their ballet, controlled by the breeze which carried the two friends far from their town.

Alan, if he was more comfortable at the controls of his plane, had acquired a taste for the sea in the last few years. It was a much quieter activity, and he enjoyed being alone in the middle of nowhere almost as much as he enjoyed spending the afternoon with him. His eyes fell on his friend. He worried about what was going on in his head. He had experienced a painful event not long ago, and it seemed obvious that it would stick in his throat.

—

“You say that like you didn’t pick all of these for me,” Monty chuckled. Still, it was something.

Offering a shrug, Monty realized with a bit of regret that it had been an usually dark joke for him to make—surely that wasn’t the result of… everything that had been going on lately. Surely not. Biting the inside of his cheek to quell the embarrassment that threatened to rise, he did his best to look cavalier about the whole thing as he added, “Oh, sure, I’d love that. Someone could write one heck of a novel about it someday.”

Distracted by the birds, Monty failed to notice his friend looking at him. A soft smile had settled on his face, and for what was far from the first time in his unlife, he was thankful that the sun didn’t have such a negative impact on him as it did vampires. He might have given in to the call of the void a long time ago if he was never permitted to sit in the sun again, wind whipping his messy hair around as he watched a kingfisher dive and burst from the surface with a fish in its beak.

Turning to ask Alan if he’d seen it, Monty’s voice caught in his throat when he realized he was already being watched. It was a momentary stutter, fixed with a grin, though what he’d been about to say had entirely left his head. “What?” he laughed, hugging his arms a little tighter around his knees.

—

“Nothing,” it was tricky to tell Monty he’d been worried about him when he looked radiant. “You looked like you’d been sucked in by the ocean,” that might have not been his first thought, it was true. “I’m glad you agreed to leave the farm for a bit,” Alan might have done his best trying to reassure Monty, he knew that it would be a while before he felt safe in his home again.

Hand on the tiller, he returned his gaze toward the horizon, his eye darting toward the sails for a second. “I understand if you would rather speak of anything but that,” wasn’t that the point of all this? They left their problems behind here. There was nothing to worry about here : no hunters, no angry homeowners, no problems. He wanted to keep it that way. Otherwise, what was the point in running away? What was the fucking point?

He had to change the subject. “I had a meeting with the city council the other day,” he began. He wanted to build somewhere, and of course some ecologists wanted to save the frogs. “Anyway, I guess it went well,” he had to figure how he’d get the frogs to fuck off some place else, which meant he’d need to collaborate with the leaf fuckers. “You know, it’s the thing with the toads, the frogs, the… bog creatures,” he wrinkled his nose. “I don’t know what to do man,” it was easier when he was fucking with people. Even he didn’t like to disturb the peace of animals.

—

Not only was Monty bad at lying, but he was equally terrible at being able to tell when he was being lied to. So he took Alan’s answer at face value, grinning widely for a moment before that little twinge of fear, of regret crept back in, and made the smile grow smaller. “Ah… yeah. Yeah.” He didn’t know what to say so he just left it at that, only nodding his head as he looked out at the ocean as Alan offered an out.

Thankful when the werewolf turned the conversation elsewhere, Monty finally dragged his gaze back to his friend, stretching his legs out in front of him. “Well, you could always build somewhere that isn’t a stinky bog,” Monty laughed with a shrug. “Or… I don’t know. Get yourself a pied piper, but for frogs instead of rats.” It was an utterly unhelpful suggestion, which Monty knew, based on the humorous glint in his dark eyes.

“Ah, really though… maybe make them a really enticing habitat nearby, so they’ll want to move. Then everyone wins. Frog rights, and so on.”

—

Why did Alan have to mention the farm. Now Monty was probably picturing Emilio waltzing, or rather cha-cha-ing his way around the place with a stake in one hand and a knife in the other, stabbing away his grudge and sorrow.

Alan couldn’t help but laugh at the other’s offer. Yeah. Alan didn’t purposefully pick plots because they’d bring controversy. Most of the time, he didn’t get into any trouble buying land, homes… But there was always, every once in a while, a Tobias Greene (usually sans mafiosi), or a bog of frogs. “A pied piper?” That’s when he chortled. If the other had been closer, he’d have shoved him away. “You prick. That’s…” He sighed, his shoulders still shaking with amusement.

“I know. I will work with the associations. Council likes me, I’m probably going to get the okay,” he blew a raspberry and reached down to tie the tiller still. “How’s the sludge situation on the farm?” Giving it a go to make sure it was secure, he let go of some of the wind in the sails and went to sit at the front. “It’s hasn’t reached the office yet, but going downtown is torture.”

—

“Hope you do,” Monty answered honestly, marrying it with a soft smile. As the boat slowed and Alan came to join him at the front,the zombie made a face at the next question. “It could be worse, for sure… just some out on the eastern fringes, nearest the Flat.” He shook his head, wondering what on earth that crap was. “My catoblepones seem curious about it, but I don’t think I want them eating it.” Sure, they were designed to eat poisonous flora, but this sludge was… well, it was something else.

“At the very least, it doesn’t seem to affect the stink levels much,” Monty added with a breathy chuckle. Farms always had a particular smell to them, and Prickly Pear Acres’ proximity to the death pit certainly didn’t make matters any better. It really wasn’t a surprise that whenever their weekly visit came around, Monty was the one going to Alan’s. The poor wolf’s nose just couldn’t take it.

“What do you think, wey? Will it overrun the whole place?”

—

“If I had known… I’d have found you a plot north of the town,” what was it with that fucking abnormality. How bad would it get? He heard the noises in the past weeks, whenever he drove in the area, worked around Serpent’s Flat. “Mmmh, I spoke to a geologist who works at the university. They didn’t want him to investigate. That’s fucking weird, don’t you think?” Running a hand over his face, he let go of the railing to let himself slip to the wooden deck, crossing his ankles as he looked up at him. “I wouldn’t let them eat that. Poor things might get sick.” And finding a veterinarian who could care for them mustn’t have been easy.

Not that Alan would know.

“Huh uh,” surely, someone who lived there all the time would forget about the smell, but Alan had a feeling his nose wouldn’t. He didn’t seem too keen to laugh about it. This was worrying. People wouldn’t want to invest in a town who was covered in goo and stenched of that god awful smell. “I don’t know. I don’t fucking know,” rubbing at his face, he pulled his knee up against his chest and sighed. “This town man…” He sighed and turned his gaze toward the horizon. You could see the town from here. It looked normal, peaceful even, in a word : deceptive.

“Anyhow, surely there are nicer subjects to discuss.” Nothing quite like death and doom to spend a great afternoon with a friend.

—

“A nice sentiment, but you and I both know I was only able to afford the land you got me because it’s by that pit of dead people.” Monty threw Alan a knowing glance, and then a smile. He was sweet. Brows rose at the mentioned of the geologist—that was weird. “The… whoever runs this place, yeah, they sure are being… what’s the word… ah, cagey about it all. Like they know things we don’t. Or they don’t know anything, and that’s even scarier to them.” He shrugged. “Guess we’ll find out.”

Of course Alan had a larger stake in whether or not this town went belly-up, and Monty suddenly felt bad for laughing about it. “Ah, I’m sure it will all work out, my friend,” he tried to reassure the other, though his comforting skills left something to be desired. It always did in this place, didn’t it?

“Right. Well. Umm—oh! Oh, I didn’t get a chance to tell you yet, but a very nice man that works for the town’s animal control contacted me the other day!” About… “He—someone surrendered a horse at their shelter, and they didn’t have the facilities to take care of it, so he asked if I’d come get her.” Monty smiled, remembering seeing her for the first time. Definitely… just her. “She’s beautiful, Alan. Champagne coat and a bright red mane and tail, like fire. I’m still trying to decide what to name her.”

—

“I know, I know,” and the price per square meter had gone up ever since. Alan figured that with the state of the town now, it could substantially drop. If people started to leave the town en masse, it certainly would. Yet, it would be a while before that happened. People didn’t like to leave their home behind. Alan knew he would never be able to leave. His whole life was here, and he was too old now to restart over somewhere else. His shoulders relaxed, they often would in the face of the inevitable. He never was one to fight the current. Instead, he preferred to learn how to sail on bad waters.

“Animal control huh?” Although Alan was still listening to the other, his cheeks turned pink as he remembered his embarrassing encounter with that guy. That was a moment he would have happily forgotten about. “Champagne coat?” He reached at his collar for his sunglasses, pushing them up his nose. “You could call her Cliquot or Ruinart,” it was perhaps a bit of a cliché but champagne perhaps ought to be called like champagne. Leaning back, he looked at his friend, wrinkling his nose a little. “You took pictures, right? Of your new girl?”

—

Monty rolled his eyes at the suggestions, letting out a laugh. “How very Alan of you,” he teased, lifting his butt off the boat to fetch the phone in his back pocket. “But yes, I did.” Pulling up the photo album before passing the phone to Alan, the zombie leaned back on his hands. “Kaden—the man that helped me get her settled—seemed to like Manzanita, so I might stick with that. It was the first thing that came to mind, but I wasn’t positive about it.” He smiled, running a hand through his hair to get it out of his face. There was a beat of comfortable silence before Monty decided to elaborate a bit, hoping that Alan would be pleased with the news.

“I asked him if he’d—well,” he struggled for a moment, clearing his throat. “He seemed fond of her in the short time we had together, so I said he could come visit anytime. The horse, or… me.” An exasperated laugh made an appearance then, and Monty gestured at his friend with brows raised. “I’m trying to make friends, like you keep saying I should. So there’s one. Maybe. We’ll see.”

—

“What is that supposed to mean? It’s on theme,” he furrowed his eyebrows in apparent shock. Anyone who dared question his taste clearly had none, after all. Reaching out to take the phone from him, Alan pinched at the screen to zoom in. “Manzanita?” He would have guessed a French name would be the man’s pick but it seemed he was wrong to assume that. Handing back the phone, the realtor offered his friend a fond smile. “She’s a beauty. Makes you wonder why people can ever give up on their animals,” Alan knew he couldn’t commit to a pet. He was too busy, of course, but he also wondered what would happen to the poor thing if something happened to him. He might have a tendency to boast, but the werewolf was all too aware that tomorrow might be his last day on Earth.

His brows furrowed some more, but this time, there was a hint of amusement and a wrinkle of his nose added to the shock. “Would you look at that, making friends with the not so local locals, heh?” This was new. Crossing his arms over his chest, Alan’s fondness grew and reached his eyes. “I’m glad you’re trying. That’s what counts,” reaching over to pat his shoulder, the wolf turned to gaze at the sea. “This being said, if he’s the guy I think he is… I didn’t tell you about something that happened to me, the other day.”

—

“You know I can’t pronounce French words for crap,” Monty laughed, just… assuming that both those champagne names were French. Or maybe Italian, which was a little easier for him, but still bad all the same. Taking back the phone, he smiled at the photo for a few seconds longer before storing it away again, drawing his knees to his chest and wrapping his arms around them. “Beats me, hermano. But I’m happy to help them as much as I can.”

Alan’s praise really and truly meant the world to him, and Monty smiled widely. “Thanks,” he answered in a hushed tone, perhaps too quiet for the werewolf to even hear over the slap of the waves against the side of the sailboat. At the next statement, though, his head cocked to the side curiously. “Well, how many animal control officers named Kaden can there be in a town this size?” He paused, brow furrowing. “What… happened?” He hoped to God it wasn’t bad, something that would have put the pair at odds.

—

“And I can?” Well, yes. Alan knew French just enough to know how wines were pronounced. Since he wasn’t trying to be elected douchebag has-been of the decade, he refrained from pronouncing it the French way however. It didn’t help that he didn’t speak a word of French aside from Pinot Gris or Sauvignon. “I don’t think I should ever go anywhere near a shelter,” he’d end up bringing home more than he could care for.

Returning that bright smile right back, he didn’t quite catch what the other said. Alan wondered how the other would react to his story. It was quite ridiculous, and one he wasn’t really proud to tell. “I told you about the kid who stole my sandwich one noon and didn’t even say thanks?” Who cared if she never said thanks, honestly? Alan didn’t even care, but he was proud and he wanted her to apologize, at the very least. “Well, I found her, and well, I had to … well…shift. It was an emergency.” The wolf hadn’t even gotten to the part he was mortified about yet his cheeks were tinted pink again. Maybe it was that he always sought to impress his friend, but showing vulnerability never failed to make him feel naked. Not to say that he would have rather ran into someone with only a duvet to save his dignity, but his cheeks sure were burning now. “I didn’t have my backpack with me this time and I walked back to my car near-naked. I say near because I had a duvet,” he was aware that this really wasn’t a good look for him. If he had seen himself that day, Alan would have cringed so much he’d have turned into diamonds. “Anyhow…” He pressed his lips together. Did he really need to add more to this?

—

Nodding slowly and wondering where on earth this could possibly be going, Monty listened with an attentive ear and a curious mind. He let the other seemingly finish before speaking, though there was still a lot left unsaid.

“Wait, hang on. Okay. First of all, why did you have to shift when you found her? Who—what was she? It was an emergency?” His brow furrowed in confusion and he shook his head, continuing, “And what does this have to do with Kaden?”

—

It took a moment, but before Alan could muster the strength to respond, the pieces sort of clicked into place. Monty’s eyes widened and he let out an explosive laugh, slapping his hands against his legs. “Alan! No! You ran into him while you were post-shift naked?!” The zombie howled with laughter, squinting his eyes shut and flopping back onto the cushion, hands splayed over his stomach. “¡Ay, Dios mío! It’s the freaking oral exam all over again!” he cackled, not feeling the slightest bit bad for getting a kick out of his best friend’s embarrassment.

“I don’t fucking know, she turned into a damn bear. I don’t know if it was the surprise or something else, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in a long time,” part of his explanation was a call for empathy in those trying times, the rest was the actual truth. He was more concerned about his life around her than he had been with these damn mafia guys.

But it seemed he’d have to explain everything, didn’t it? Why did his friend have to be so cruel ?

Truth is, Alan couldn’t say whether having to explain or seeing Monty burst in tear-inducing laughter was the most painful to his self-esteem. The wolf kept his gaze fixated on the horizon, his lips pressed into a thin line that could have spelled out pain and a desire to disappear right on the spot. His cheeks were burning red, he knew that. Fucksake. “I sure did. He had a lot of questions about it, let me tell you.” With a sound of anguish, Alan let his back fall onto the deck and sighed. “I mean you’ve seen the guy. He looks like a Ken doll or something,” not that it should have mattered, but pretty people’s opinions somehow had more importance to him. It was incredibly shallow, he was not proud of it, but this was how things worked for him. “I told him I’d give him a discount if he didn’t mention this to anyone. D’you think he’ll call me back?” It was Alan’s turn to snort and chortle. “Oh man, I … Hey ! Fuck you with the oral exams,” he reached over with his hand to clumsily slap him quiet. “Fuck off, you…” At loss of words, the werewolf covered his face with both hands, falling again into a fit of laughter. “Let’s just say, don’t invite him when I’m around. I might make it very awkward.”

—

A werebear? That was new. Sounded like it was new to Alan, too, or at least alarming enough to make him shift unexpectedly. He didn’t have time to feel bad about that now, though, because everything was falling into place in the most hilarious way.

“I bet!” Trying to rein in his giggling, Monty pressed a hand to his own chest and muttered a string of Spanish kid-friendly expletives, but it wouldn’t do him any good, because Alan was doing nothing to help make this less funny. “A Ken doll! Ahh, I—” he had to stop again, snickering too hard to continue. “Mi hermano… te amo, pero no estás bien,” he wheezed, waving a hand in Alan’s general direction.

Feeling the smack only exacerbated the humor of the situation, but finally, Monty was able to calm himself down and quit cracking up at his best friend’s expense. Wiping the tears from his eyes, the zombie reached blindly for Alan and gave whatever part of him his hand found first a soft pat. “I tell you what, I tell you what,” he chuckled, grinning up at the sky, “I’ll make sure he sees me naked at least once, eh? Then we’re even.” He was joking, of course, pressing his free hand over his eyes and fighting the urge to start laughing again.

—

“What? You’ve seen his hair. It’s ridiculously shiny,” Alan said matter-of-factly. Sure, he managed to tame his own mane after all this time, but it was graying already, which was something that made him feel self conscious. The other kept on laughing in the meantime. The wolf looked down at the zombie, his jaded expression ruined by hints of amusement, a twinkle in his eye, sketches of a smile. Fucking hell. “No? ¿No estoy bien, en serio?” He gave him another smack for that. “No estoy bien. Vete a la…” Biting on the inside of his cheek, he found himself once again fighting back a smile, then laughter. “Oh fuck off,” he scoffed.

One knee folded up to support his arm and chin, the other leg folded to rest under his ass, Alan watched his friend search for his leg before settling his hand on his knee. Though it didn’t match Monty’s words, he found comfort in that touch. He knew there was more truth there than in those words, and it managed to make him feel better just as much as the thought of poor Kaden being introduced to the local nudist club. “And then you dare say you’re not an asshole,” he gave Monty’s ankle a pat. “D’you wanna go somewhere specific or do you wanna stick around here for a while?” The wolf usually had trouble staying grounded, and more often than not, the other managed to help with that. He could thank his childhood, and being the first of his siblings for that. No time to rest when you were the house’ cook, cleaner, courrier and example.

—

All he could was shake his head, still grinning as Alan tried to tell him off. “I’m not a—I’m so nice,” the zombie argued with one final chuckle, sitting up again and scrubbing his hands over his face. At the question of where to go, Monty glanced around them, trying to get a sense of their position. “We could go check out that weird sea cave at Harborside’s south point,” he suggested with a cheeky grin, knowing that disembarking anywhere but at the docks would mean getting wet. “Or, you know. Float here. Here’s nice, too.” He glanced at all the birds flying overhead, squinting against the sun. “Could get pooped on, though.”

And then, as an afterthought, Monty leaned forward until his hands met the deck, scooting closer to his friend until he was well within reach. “Also, I like your hair. I think it looks nice.” Even windswept as it was, what with their being on the open ocean, and all. He was sure he didn’t look any more kempt, himself. He smirked for a moment, then pushed himself up onto his feet to go retrieve his jacket and pull the sunglasses out of its pocket, holding onto the rope railing for support. “Up to you, though!”

—

“So nice,” Alan repeated with a roll of his eyes and a fed up smile. Turning his head the other way, in the direction of the Cave of Voices. Weird certainly covered the stories they had both heard about that place. You heard the same stories about the woods, the sea, the mountains, and even some of the streets of Wicked’s Rest. Alan knew some were true, and some were fabricated. The trick was to know which were which. “Could get pooped on,” he agreed, turning to find the other scooting closer.

His expression softened, and his eyebrows furrowed slightly. Switching his posture to hide the pink hue of his cheeks against his palm, Alan then stood up and attempted to fix his hair, which had been ruffled by the wind. Heh, Monty must have been teasing him about a cow lick spike in his hair. He looked over his shoulder while the other scouted away, though he didn’t have the heart to ask him what he meant by that. With a scrunched up nose, the disgruntled wolf headed toward the stern. “Let’s head to the cave. Maybe there will be a bit less wind over there,” he agreed. Pulling on the rope attached to the sails, he tied a knot once he had enough winds caught in here. “If you want something to drink, help yourself,” he motioned toward the cooler, while he checked on his phone for tides.

—

The boat tilted as the sails caught the wind and started to move again, and Monty was glad he’d had a firm grip on the rope. Stepping carefully, he moved back toward the stern and plopped down nearish the tiller, beside Alan, then reached for the cooler to pull it closer and fetch a couple drinks for them.

It was a bit of sail over to and then around the rocky outcrop that hid the cave in question, but the journey was far from a bad one. The pair had fallen into comfortable chitchat, which somehow felt even easier now that he didn’t have that rain cloud hanging over his head. He had no more secrets from his best friend, and that was honestly an incredible relief. Alan knew him like no one else did, and it was freeing.

Hopping up to his feet when he saw the dark, gaping maw of the Cave of Voices come into view, Monty looked back excitedly at Alan. “There it is!” He pointed with his free hand, the other still clutching his drink to his chest. He knew the story behind the name, and was painfully curious about hearing it first-hand. He couldn’t help but wonder what he would hear.

—

“There it is,” he confirmed, though his voice wasn’t as vibrant as his friend’s. Those stories were always a source of worry. If there was something to hear in here, he’d be the first to know. Though Alan tried not to show it, that thought frightened him. He always tried to keep his chin up. Call it being the big brother to 3 younger siblings, it just wouldn’t have done him any good to show frailty.

He took a sip from his bottle, before reaching over to release the wind. If they were to approach that place, they’d do it slowly. “That’s a fucking big cave,” the realtor commented. It resembled what the maw of the void must have looked like, uninviting, cold, empty and stunningly dark and quiet.

There wasn’t one bit of wind now, and yet, as they stilled, Alan could have sworn he heard a whisper. He glanced over at Monty, half expecting him to look back at him with a cocky grin on his face, muffling back his laughter as best as he could. “You didn’t hear that, I presume?” Nope, he didn’t like this at all.

—

Oh, Alan was already getting a taste, and they weren’t even in the cave yet! It made sense, what with his keen senses and all, and the zombie was eager to get in there himself. “No—come on!” His deeply buried sense of adventure was clawing its way out now, making him more closely resemble the young man he’d been that first year after meeting Hector, and the near twenty that had followed. Taking a long swig of his drink before setting it aside, Monty went to the bow of the sailboat and laid flat on his stomach, reaching for the nearest rock. His fingers gripped it and tugged, pulling them closer. “Anchor her!”

He didn’t exactly wait for his friend to join him, scrambling to his feet and tethering the rope between the rock and the boat, which left him standing alone on its slippery surface. Something deep in the cave made a sound—it was a little bit ethereal, like a voice calling to him, and his grin cracked wide. “I hear it,” he breathed, motioning for Alan to follow as he scampered over the rocks to head into the darkness.

What he found, though, was not an empty cave as expected. Instead, a black stallion stood in the spot where the ground evened out, its coat wet from the ocean mist, seaweed dangling from its mane like it’d gotten caught there after a swim. Monty slowed to a stop, mouth agape. “... what.” It wasn’t an intelligent reaction, but the farmer had never claimed to be that. “Alan…!” His voice was uncertain as he called for his friend, gaze never leaving the horse. It lifted its head and stared at him, big eyes blinking as it craned its head forward curiously. What the heck? What the heck?

—

He had seen Monty before in a similar state, close to euphoria. Alan never got tired of it and it was difficult for him to hide his smile. Seeing them both, it was hard to tell ourselves that it was the zombie who had the taste for adventure and not the werewolf, but Alan had had his dose of adrenaline when he was in the army, when he was attacked by this beast. To be honest, he got his adrenaline fix every month, every full moon. He knew full well that every full moon could be the last. That sort of realization certainly didn’t make you crave any other sort of danger.

“He hears it,” Alan repeated, though he lacked the unchained enthusiasm the other displayed. “Alright, wait for me,” he called out, and checking the ties on his shoe laces, jumped off the boat to follow him inside that damn cave. His eyes adjusted to the darkness with ease and he kept them fixated on Monty’s back, worried as he was to see him slip or disappear, somehow. In the past five years, that man had been one of three fixed points in the werewolf’s life, the other two being the course of the moon and his business. It was nice to have something that wasn’t either a burden or a responsibility. Something easy, at last, that made him unconditionally happy. To risk losing that, it wasn’t a good thought, it would be a terrible truth. And so he stared, even as a second silhouette showed itself.

Approaching his side, he finally looked at that animal in wonder. It wasn’t a ghost. It seemed real, although it didn’t precisely look like that champagne horse or Habanero. It was beautiful, for certain, but you had to wonder what it was doing here, and how it got here. Could horses swim at all? “How did it get in here?” He asked, eyes darting toward his friend. He knew the other was passionate about those animals and probably would want to get closer.

—

There shouldn’t have been a horse in here. But there was. I mean, sure, they could swim, but this wasn’t exactly an easy spot to get to. It was a miracle the creature wasn’t hurt. Unless it was, and he just couldn’t see it yet.

“I… it must have… swam. But I don’t know why it would have? There’s nothing in here for it, except shelter…” Maybe something had chased it in here. Given it no choice but to flee to a damp, dark, treacherous cave. “I need to make sure he isn’t hurt, hermano,” the zombie breathed, looking at Alan with concern etched into his features. He gave the werewolf a pat on his arm and then moved closer to the horse, hand outstretched for him to sniff. Soft Spanish words of assurance spilled from him as he stepped forward, allowing the animal to lean his nose closer to Monty’s hand. His ears flicked forward, intrigued rather than afraid, and Monty smiled. “Buen niño…” he hummed, running his palm up the animal’s muzzle.

Now that some trust had been established, Monty made a slow circle around the animal to check him for wounds, but didn’t find anything. His hands glided across the horse’s damp flanks, his eyes bright with wonder. “Why are you here, niño? A cave is no place for a caballo.” He turned, looking back at Alan. “... I don’t feel right leaving him here.”

—

"Swam?" Alan looked over his shoulder. It was a dangerous walk for someone who came from the nearest beach, with a chance to twist your ankle or slip and injure yourself. The horse would have swam for a bit. "That's a long way," he commented, rubbing at the back of his neck in apparent confusion. He doubted that to be likely, but he supposed it was plausible.

Dropping his hands to his hips, the werewolf stayed one step behind. He didn't know a damn thing about horses or tending to animals. If there was something unexpected to come, he supposed Monty would know best.

"No te preocupes, I don't see anything," as far as he was aware he was the only one out of them who could see as clearly as if it were broad daylight, and the animal seemed unharmed.

“Monty, we’re not gonna manage to make him climb into the boat,” he began. He was pretty damn sure the poor animal would freak out and try to escape anyway. “We could try animal control but I’m not sure they’re equipped for that,” Alan commented. Squatting down, he took a look up at the horse, his eyes narrowing as he wondered how the fuck he got in here. Swimming, right. But from where?

—

“No, no, I know…” Getting the animal on the boat had been the furthest thing from his mind. But as he stood in front of the stallion, stroking his nose, he didn’t know what to do.

Then a voice came like a whisper in his ear, and he knew. “He swam here. It’s the only thing that makes sense. But he has to swim back out.” Monty glanced back at Alan, shooting him a soft, lopsided smile. “I’ll ride him out.” It was by no means safe, but it was the only idea he had. He absolutely could not leave this cave without helping the animal, and as he already knew… animal control was not equipped to deal with this. “It’s the easiest way. Getting other people involved will only make it more challenging.” The horse tossed his head almost like he understood, pushing his forehead against Monty’s chest and angling his body toward the cowboy. Like he wanted to be ridden.

A peculiar feeling settled in Monty’s head and chest, and he decided he wasn’t going to question this, even if Alan did protest.

—

“Well he’ll swim ba-” ck out by himself, was what the werewolf meant to retort. Cut off by the other’s counter offer, he fell silent. That wasn’t a good idea. Wouldn’t that make it harder for the horse to swim? And what if the animal started drowning? What then? Monty wouldn’t allow it to happen, and while there was a chance he didn’t need to breathe underwater, Alan’s chest felt tighter at the idea of watching him sink below sea level for a time that was just too long for anyone who resembled a human being. “You’re not serious,” he finally retorted, his voice echoing against the walls of the cave. Quieter this once, he glanced at the horse, who seemed to agree with Monty. Well that was a ridiculous thought. Horses couldn’t possibly be so clever. Ignoring that thought, Alan looked back at his friend and shook his head.

“That’s fucking stupid, Monty. I’m calling animal control,” he warned, stepping a couple feet away to get reception on his phone. “Just stay there, alright, I’ll call the damn…” He fell quiet while he searched online for their phone number, oblivious to what happened beyond that small screen.

—

“I am serious!” His hands came up to the animal’s neck almost protectively as he pouted at his friend. “I have ridden horses through deep water before. It’s fine.” Rivers, sure. The occasional lake. But not a sea cave with jagged rocks and swelling tides. But if this stallion had made it all the way in here on his own, then he had to be a strong swimmer.

“It’s not stupid,” Monty grumbled, looking away from Alan. “I already know they can’t handle horses. That’s why Kaden called me.” There was a chance he wasn’t even speaking loud enough for his friend to hear, his words more directed at the horse in question. His resolve was solidified, and he nodded. “Right. C’mon, niño. I’ll guide you back out.”

Shrugging off his jacket and dumping it on the rocks, it was quickly joined by his shoes and his phone. Alan could get those, if he saw fit. And with that, the cowboy gripped a handful of the stallion’s mane and jumped, heaving himself up and over the animal’s back.

There! That wasn’t so bad!

“Alan,” Monty called to get his attention, wearing a grin, “we’ll be heading due… west.” He pointed to the left. “See you there!” The horse was already making his way into the water, somewhat to Monty’s surprise, who had thought it was going to take a bit of coaxing. But everything seemed fine, and for a moment, they bobbed in waves as the horse kicked off the land and began to swim. Perfect. No problems.

Until of course, there was. With a startled gasp, Monty watched the stallion drive his head down into the water, with the rest of him quickly following. Which included Monty, who was now… somehow stuck to the animal’s back. He didn’t even have time to look Alan’s way before he disappeared beneath the surface, a stream of bubbles in their wake as he yelled and attempted to pull himself free.

It was no use. He was trapped.

—

He didn’t try to further argue any of it. It was absolute nonsense and Alan knew better than to throw himself into a conversation that would only turn sour. The tide would move into the cave before they agreed to anything. Hearing that Kaden, the animal control guy, was no good with horses didn’t manage to make him put away his phone. “There’s no fucking reception,” he mumbled, climbing up on a rock to get closer to the cave’s opening.

He just had to befriend the most fucking stubborn guy in town, huh?

Truth was, he fully expected every single attempt to get the horse to move out of here to fail, and he wasn’t really worried about the noises he heard in his back. What worried him, however, was what would happen if Monty had to accept that they couldn’t save that poor animal.

And still no reception. The forty-something moved further away, his eyes riveted on the small bars at the top of his screen. Of course, he would never pick up any signal while they were inside that fucking damp cave. He put the phone back in his pocket, glanced briefly at Monty who was happily perched on the horse’s back. “You’re a moron, you know that, right?” With a smile, and a scoff, he turned his back on him again, hands on his hips and tried to think of a solution, one more time, even if there was most likely no way to make it work.

It was expected : he blanked, and his mind only offered him thoughts regarding what he should say to convince him that there was nothing they could do. But while he mentally peregrinated, Alan was no longer focusing on what was happening behind him. If he figured the horse would back out of the water, neigh in fear, rear up and cause ruckus, it took a few seconds too much before he realized the cave was a bit too silent. They couldn’t have swam so far already. He would have seen them pass him by. He would have spotted Monty’s gloating expression. Fuck.

“Monty?” He called out. “Monty ?!” The werewolf roared this once, his eyes searching frantically around until they finally spotted them, underneath the surface. The zombie’s name was uttered once more, hurriedly, while Alan rid himself of his jacket, kicked off his shoes and entered the water without hesitation. It was nowhere near as warm as he would have liked it to be, but a force commanded that he ignore that and instead dove head first after the drowning pair, noticing only then that Monty was not trying to bring the horse back up, but rather fighting to get off of it. What the fuck.

It was one of those situations where being a monster wouldn’t have helped him. He could only rely on himself. What a terrifying thought that was.

Catching up on the pair, he wrapped his fingers around Monty’s wrist first, to let him know he was here, and with the hopes that he could just pull him out of here.

—

Feeling something grab onto his wrist, the zombie’s frightened gaze flicked to Alan as he tilted his head back. He wanted to say no, to tell the other to get back to the surface, but he couldn’t. Any sound he attempted to make was lost in the water that filled the space between them, and the horse… thing was just dragging him deeper. It craned its neck and bared its teeth, which were now much sharper than they ought to have been.

Monty shook his head, trying to pull Alan’s hand free from his wrist. He’d drown down here, and Monty, well… he didn’t need to breathe. He still often did, but the seawater that filled his throat now was pretty good at preventing that. Still, the force his friend was managing to exert in the opposite direction seemed to have slowed the creature enough to agitate it, and it turned its gaze on Alan. The equine body twisted sharply, unnaturally, and those teeth snapped at the werewolf, missing only by centimeters. Monty let loose another muffled cry, reaching forward to wrap his free arm around the monster’s neck and heave it back toward his chest. He’d… have to kill it, wouldn’t he? Or they’d both die down here. And his bite was much stronger than Alan’s, at least when he wasn’t shifted.

As his gaze focused on the animal’s throat—no, not animal. It wasn’t real. Whatever it was, it was a trick. He still felt sick. The horse-thing fought against him, kicking with its powerful legs in an attempt to separate the two men. Monty felt the clock ticking and again urged Alan to return to the surface as best he could, but… well, his friend knew he was not a strong swimmer. He would likely be loath to leave Monty behind, even if he wouldn’t drown, knowing he would simply sink to the bottom.

As the beast struggled, the zombie bit down on its neck. Which was a big neck, but he had the benefit of being very familiar with horse anatomy… assuming this thing wasn’t different on the inside. One bite wouldn’t do it, though. No, he had to rip and tear and dig, employing his hand when he could. The water filled with blood and the creature began to panic. As it panicked, something else started happening. Its horse-like features were slowly melting away, giving way to a much more human appearance that had hands that could fight back. They scrambled to gain purchase on Monty’s lithe form, but the human neck that was now his target was much, much easier to destroy. He couldn’t think about how horrifying this was, first having to maul his favorite animal (or what had appeared to be his favorite), and now having to do the same to… a man. Just a fucking man.

—

Kicking away from that monstrous jaw, Alan didn’t try to make sense of anything that happened. They were both in peril, down here, fighting this beast in an element that was playing against them. This was all Alan could focus on, the fright, the urgency of it all. Even if Monty couldn’t drown, he couldn’t possibly survive being devoured by that monster.

He’d have to act quickly for his own sake too : the more time the wolf spent down here, the more he exposed himself to the chance of never coming back to the surface. Nowadays, he wasn’t much of an athlete. His days as a footballer were far behind him, as were his days in the army. Yet, running through the woods still counted as exercise, right? Perhaps it would have been wise to think about all this before he dove in, but he hadn’t thought about that at all. All that mattered was saving him.

Shaking his head if only to voice his refusal the only way he could and denying his friend the right to end up all by himself in this hostile environment, Alan swam back to his side, careful not to get too close to the death trap that constituted the horse’s jaw.

The water turned red, and Alan felt his heart drop in his chest, while he stared with wide eyes through the sea water. He didn’t expect to see Monty digging his teeth into the beast’s neck. He’d never have expected violence from him, even more so when facing something that looked like that animal he cherished. Many times, he had listened to the zombie as he told him about Habanero. Alan couldn’t really understand that connection the other had with his horse, but it didn’t take understanding it to realize how heart wrenching this must have all been. Perhaps it was a relief to see the monster switch into something else, into a human. Hands wouldn’t do much to Monty, and they wouldn’t do much to Alan either.

Approaching the wrestling pair, Alan wrapped an arm around the shapeshifter’s neck. Strangling him would be a waste of time : Alan would suffocate long before the other met its end. Bringing his other hand up to cradle that thing’s cheek, the wolf counted on Monty to hold away their arms and help him get over with it.

—

As Alan’s arm came to wrap around the creature’s neck, Monty pulled his head back, eyes fixed on the open wound before refocusing on his friend’s face. Taking his cue, the zombie held on tightly to the fighting assailant, holding it still so Alan could snap its neck. The moment it went still, Monty was pushing on Alan, pushing on him to get back up to the surface. He was a much slower swimmer, though, and couldn’t help his friend get any higher any faster. He just hoped the idiot wouldn’t waste time trying to help him.

Slow progress became no progress, and Monty growled in frustration as he sank all the way down to the bottom, his bare feet meeting rock and sand as he looked up at the far off, glimmering waves above. There was a dark, vaguely-human shaped spot, which he hoped was Alan, breaking through them and lingering for a few moments.

Well, at least he hadn’t drowned.

So began the long trek back toward the cave, and the cliff that rose up to form its bottom where Monty had found the horse—the thing—in the first place. At least climbing would be easier underwater.

—

The cave’s ceiling reflected onto the water above Alan’s head, dark and menacing, and as he swam up, his lungs burning, begging for fresh air, the werewolf told himself that perhaps he wouldn’t manage to make it. Maybe he dove too deep, maybe it was too far above him. Maybe.

And yet, after a while, he could tell the surface was right there, just an arm’s length away, right there. Just right there. His hands pierced through the veil first, followed soon by his head. The sound of the waves crashing gently against the shore, that gentle melody was broken by Alan’s gasping and coughing as he filled once again his lungs with oxygen, and tasted the salt on his tongue.

Well aware that the other wouldn’t miss the fresh air as much as he had, he took a few more moments before he dipped his face in the water again, if only to get an idea of where he was. One day, he’d need to teach him how to swim, he told himself. Defending himself seemed to be far from an issue. It was a relief, the sort that brought a light to his face. At last, he swam back toward the shore, and took a seat on the rocks, pinching at the top of his nose and running his hand through his hair. He could hear the voices again, coming from the cave, though he was too busy with his thoughts to care at all this time. What would have happened if he hadn’t jumped into the water? What could have happened in the water. They were both safe now, but if he had just listened. What fucking madness had this all been. Alan wiped at the corners of his mouth, trying to get that bitter taste out of his mouth. Maybe he had no right being furious. It all had gone well, in the end. Maybe so, but maybe he was terrified of what could have been. His mouth trembled briefly before he decided to pull his shit together and stand back up.

—

It took a few minutes, but finally Monty was heaving himself up from the edge of the pool of ocean water that lapped at the rocks of the cave, retching as he did so, his body expelling all the water he’d… inhaled? Swallowed? Whatever the case, it felt terrible. But as soon as he could lift his head again, his gaze darted around the darkness of the cavern until it fell on Alan, and he could breathe a sigh of relief. He spoke in frantic Spanish as he struggled to his feet, wading through the shallow water over to where Alan was standing. “Alan, I’m sorry, I-I didn’t think—I didn’t realize—!” He couldn’t quite form his thoughts into words, feeling them catch in his throat as his emotions got the better of him.

You should have just left me was what he was thinking, of course, but he dared not say it aloud. Because he knew, really, that he shouldn’t have put Alan in the position of needing to rescue him in the first place. Hadn’t he done that enough for one lifetime? “I’m so sorry, my brother. I—” He wanted to reach for him but couldn’t and so he remained awkwardly standing in the water up to his knees, looking just as wet and bedraggled as his companion. Also, there was horse hair stuck in the back of his throat.

—

“You think I don’t already know that?” Alan gave him a glance. His lips quivered. Fuck. He shook his head and wiped his fingers beneath his nose. What was even the fucking point. They were fine, weren’t they?

But what if they hadn’t been fine. Alan shook his head, chasing those thoughts away, trying to pry that possibility away. “You could have fucking…” He stopped himself mid sentence. He couldn’t say that word. The word felt like needles in his throat, and Alan who always longed to have someone who could understand him, and who had found just that in Monty was beginning to realize that perhaps the zombie didn’t understand how necessary it was that he just lived. Or perhaps Alan hadn’t realized before that he wasn’t really immortal. Perhaps he should have told him to stay away from that damn fucking horse with more conviction or even said no to going anywhere near that damn cave.

Closing his eyes, he brought his hand up to his lids. They trembled beneath his finger tips. “I don’t…” He took a breath, and another, collecting himself with every single sip of air that he took. “We should head back to port,” if his voice sounded too even for the occasion, the look in his eye betrayed all of his efforts, and it was swiftly that he turned on his heels to pick up his shoes and his jacket.

—

As the events of the day settled over him, sinking in deep just how foolish he’d been and how badly that could have gone, Monty lapsed into silence. He could only nod when Alan spoke, announcing that it was time for their departure.

He still didn’t know what they’d killed down there, and a part of him never wanted to know. But the warmth of its blood was not a memory quickly pushed away and it lingered like a bad taste on his tongue, reminding him of the one of two types of brutality he was capable of. But worse than that was what he’d done to Alan. Put him through. Just another mistake in a long line of mistakes, ones that Alan always had to bail him out of.

He deserved better than that. Monty knew this, but the truth of the matter was that he was selfish when it came to Alan, and he couldn’t make himself walk away. Besides, Alan wouldn’t let him. Just like he wouldn’t leave him to sort out his own problems when he got dragged underwater by some bloodthirsty beast because of his own idiocy, and just like he had covered up the other’s fuckup in the woods all those years ago to help him stay… It was a useless thought.

What he could do, though, was be better. So he quietly gathered his things and rejoined his friend on the boat, helping as was needed to get them out of there, but otherwise keeping to himself with his head down and knees pulled to his chest. He hated that the expression his friend had worn was his fault. But he could apologize until he was metaphorically blue in the face, and that wouldn’t change a damn thing.

So, he thought, he just had to be better.

#. thread ;#. with ; alan duarte #. come sail away ;

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caltropspress · 2 years

Text

A Catechism for billy woods’ Church

Everyone here takes a great interest in church matters.

—Donald Barthelme, “A City of Churches” (1973)

The poison is bad for ya, stupid. You're equal measure to dirt, dust, grime, and puss, you're just a rapping infection... You're pure roach.

—Kool Keith, freestyle, In Control with Marley Marl on WBLS, 107.5 (1989)

[S]he went out to look at the sky. There were no clouds at all. It was a low dome of sonorous blue, with an undertone of sultry sulphur color, because of the smoke that dimmed the air…. She looked away over the trees, which were dingy and brownish, over the acres of shining wavy grass to the hills. They were hazy and indistinct…. Sometimes a tiny fragment of charred grass fell on her skin, and left a greasy black smudge.

—Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing (1950)

Along its eastern edge the sky’s aflame. He skulks back to his mud, his ferns and stones…is it unease he feels, without a name, or merely autumn gnawing at his bones?

—Alan Moore, Issue 27 of The Saga of the Swamp Thing, “By Demons Driven!” (1984)

1. SYMPTOMS ARE PROLONGED AND PAINFUL

Something malodorous emitting from the Oval Office: Nixon and Reagan jacked up on the thought of paraquat. Whitey hit Mexican marijuana fields and then doubled back, raining herbicidal death on the crops that would be harvested and shipped north in the ’70s and ’80s. Stoners who thought they were stone free were instead coughing up a lung and asking where it’s from (the DEA, son—ain’t nothing nice). “Are you experienced?” became Are you experiencing side effects? “Paraquat” is about knowns and unknowns, about the acquisition of knowledge. woods deduces that the “spot on 116 must’ve had the cops in they pocket” when he peeps them selling “hydro jars [for] fifteen a pop” with a “line out the door.”[1] Not to knock that, but he’s got his own hustle thanks to a relationship hookup: “Stacy said her sister’s boyfriend had the new hot shit, / Gave me the plug like a stock tip.” He acquires the inside scoop, the insider trade, at the risk of the SEC on his back. The windfall made him a believer, he “found religion.” I’m a prophet, he declares (and its homophonics predict a propitious future: I’mma profit). Business is booming—blowing up like the World Trade. woods is feeling haughty now [from haut, “high”], “looking at the city like jihadis in the cockpit.” The knowledge got him knowsdiving. We all love to see the white man shook, so he Mohamed Atta mean-mugs with the force of T La Rock, Nas, and the Wu at his back. It’s yours, the gods seem to tell him. “It’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine,” woods mos definitely repeats as mantra. Stares down that skyline like a metal-faced terrorist eager to claim responsibility. His impact will blow trees back and crack statues.

As woods is T.O.N.Y., it only makes sense “in D.C. they called [him] New York.” Trafficking across the Verrazano so frequently that the metonym stuck despite his place of origin. Start in on that Malachi Z, though, and woods won’t suffer it; he “can’t respect it.” He’s dismissive of false idols and can’t commit to blind faith. Even if Zev Love X abides, woods echoes Brian Ennals on “Death of a Constable” who proudly affirms “and I do eat swine.” woods protests with a plate of chicharrones for breakfast while these Nuwaubians puff on Newports. Dr. York recites the Hypocritic Oath in a supermax cell. The cult leader’s not “deep in the Tombs on a humble.” No Papillon exit-plan for him. No squinting at the sun like woods says on “Headband.” On “Cellz” off BORN LIKE THIS, we learned “DOOM [was] from the realm of El Kuluwm, smelly gel fume.” Emphasis on that emanating smell—a brutal stench. woods gives it the Gas Face and the stink eye all at once—travels N.Y. to D.C. but gives a wide berth to G.A. (maybe a detour through Stankonia, though). billy woods don’t rock the white robes or take the road to Tama-Re. Oh, that shit, Dambudzo Marchera writes in The House of Hunger. There’s a lunatic fringe to every way of life.

3. THE ROACH IS NEVER DEAD

We was raised on it, right? Might should’ve said we were razed on it, by it—that’s an actual fact. Demoed the bodily temples. The Pentecostal church crumble. Oh, oh, the leaf and the damage done. Amerikkka the hell razah. What other choice did they have? They “scraped and fought,” and sometimes the “quick lick turn to a kidnap”; sometimes they wait until you’re in the car to tell you that it’s stolen. There but for the grace of God, it seemed “everybody else got caught.” Keep poison control on speed-dial for when the War on Drugs goes nuclear, for when “whitey hit Hiroshima.” Acid rain is a “light drizzle on the tarmac.” Everything soot-covered as the “black rain baptize[s].” Beaked plague doctors roam the village. The cannabis plants become bubonic chronic. On “All Jokes Aside,” woods raps that “the place smelled like Raid,” like you’re huffing the can until convulsions. What aren’t we inhaling? What are these in[hell]ants? I CAN’T BREATHE chants on carbon-coated streets beneath smoggy skies. For another bad touch example, take El-P, who warned of “sucking on lead paint popsicles.” Or Phan Thi Kim Phuc running scared, naked with napalm burns in Vietnam. Or the 55-gallon drums of chemical waste floating down the Love Canal. Fucks with your head. “The acids of gut-rot had eaten into the base metal of my brains,” Marechera writes. That’s the psychological pollution Cage spoke of on “Agent Orange,” so you better get stuck with a Thorazine solution. Rifle through the drawer for the roach clip because the roach is never dead. Raid can be damned. We’ve heard the expression before—on “Manteca,” on “ECOMOG.” A post-apocalypse eclogue: the roaches still scurrying after the fallout. Viktor Vaughn’s “Never Dead” left spinning on the turntable. The subject keeps smoking; the landscape still smoking. Apropos that it was Subroc’s sobriquet. The roach, you see, is reincarnation.

Always in anticipation of the worst, staring to the “black skies […] waiting on the thunderclap.” In the tenement, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Guess how much black mold your tenement hold. The inevitability of it all. Hard to turn the page; harder still to start the “second chapter.” Waiting on that sky-suck: “it’s the Rapture, / Anno Domini—it’s no before, only after.” After death, though—a second life. Establish a year zero. In The Progress of This Storm, Andreas Malm sees it differently: “[T]here is nothing but the present. Past and future alike have dissolved into a perpetual now, leaving us imprisoned in a moment without links backwards or forwards.”

woods chronicled the losses on Terror Management. “dead birds” consolidated the ecological L’s into a verse:

Bread cast on water come back poisoned. Film line the pot you boil water in. Spoiled meat dipped in bleach. Old oil drums the snake coiled in. Once the goyim go in—it's microwave with the foil in. Particulate matter stain the skin right where it meet the respirator mask rim. The original sin. Nowadays he start every book at the end.

Time is running out, and it’s been in effect. Go get a late pass. We’ve been living the Anthropocene obscene, and it’s only worsening.

In Fresh Kill, Shu Lea Cheang’s ecosatire film from 1994, obnoxious bons vivants dine on lipsticked fish with glowing fluorescent green pollutants contained within at a restaurant called Naga Saki. Whitey hit Hiroshima and doubled back for this queasy spoon.[2] What was fresh for ’88 wasn’t necessarily fresh at all. Certainly not fresh for ’98, or 2008, you scum-suckers. Naga Saki was serving a crudité of fresh fruit for rotting vegetables. “Isn’t that something? Seventeen thousand tons a day,” Mimi Mayakovsky says from the deck of the Staten Island Ferry as she watches a garbage barge crawl along the Hudson, headed for the Fresh Kill landfill. She doesn’t know the half. Later, a newscaster reports from a tilted TV screen sitting atop an old stove: “...investigated the possible radioactive leak of an American hydrogen bomb that disappeared off the coast of Okinawa 24 years ago…” Cut to footage of the blossoming mushroom cloud over the sea. “The Pentagon confirms that the bomb has dissolved harmlessly on the ocean floor…”

The radioactive waste insidiously infects the supply chain—it starts showing up everywhere. Shareen and Claire’s daughter plays with her toys, and a green fluorescent orb suddenly glows in her palm. They bring her to the doctor—he’s incredulous: Green hands? Green head? Turning green? Give her plenty of liquids. “‘Kill’ is Dutch for stream,” Mimi says on her public access program as the steady stream of waste becomes more apparent. The fish glow; the cats glow. Comparably, the same green as the TV screen on Redman’s Muddy Waters album cover. Jiannbin, a hacktivist when he’s not slicing sushi at Naga Saki, sits with a seemingly endless perforated ream of dot matrix copy paper. He reads from a “Globex” corporate report he’s gained access to through his late-night hacking efforts: “High levels of Technetium-99 and Iodine-129 found in fish: extremely radioactive materials.”

On the Church album cover, a brick structure towers over us courtesy of Alexander Richter’s low-angle photograph. Oxidized truss structures criss-cross at its foundation. Fire escapes are distant, rising to a vanishing point. The balcony seats are empty—nobody’s out. They shelter in place while barely visible skinny limbs of winter trees strain up from the foreground, aching for attention. These are buildings in Washington Heights, “the home of church,” Richter tells me. This massive geometric construction blots out the sun. And if you look carefully, you’ll see several fluorescent green lens flares within the intersections of the trusses—indicating that even in this brick-and-steel church, orbs of the sickness are beginning to appear.

Sure, cataclysmic acts of gods and men for days. But those macro fractures don’t nag like the micro ones. You’ve got to control what you can—maintaining the mint condition of your sneakers, for instance. That’s where “Artichoke” starts: “I used to use a toothbrush to keep my kicks white—it mattered that much.” Buggin’ Out knows the struggle. You might’ve paid a hundred bucks (American dollars!), so you’re not just gonna let some sweaty white man in a Celtics shirt bump you off the block. Larry Bird befouling the pristine whiteness of your sneakers?[3] Man, you might as well throw them shits out. Them shits is broke. The situation might even turn violent. You might give that man a hundred headaches. Phife Dawg sure as hell would. “I sport New Balance sneakers to avoid a narrow path,” he raps on “Buggin’ Out.” “Mess around with this, you catch a size eight up your ass.” On “Whayback,” Tame One spoke similar of a bellicose past: “Back when steppin’ on kicks in ’86 got your ass kicked.” woods acknowledges there’s “certain things you can only learn from a fistfight.” Marechera recalls a knuckledusted fist hurtling itself at [his] teeth. Any spat could turn torrential. Marechera knows “you raise your fist at somebody and at once you are a potential killer—there is nothing manly in that. This business about ‘being a real man’ is what is driving all of us crazy.” Brothers on some ill shit, kill shit, Brewin says. Is Buggin’ Out that man? Nah, he’s just the struggling Black man trying to keep his dick hard in a cruel and harsh world.

Not a melee does every petty argument make. Just because Mookie and Vito argue over who the best pitcher in the game is (Dwight Gooden or Roger Clemens?), doesn’t mean you’ll be run out of town in a pair of Jordans. Or, worse, strangled to death for them as Michael Eugene Thomas was in 1989 (just three months before Do the Right Thing premiered in theaters). Not every quarrel over stats and standings is as heavy as Rodman sitting with the gun in his lap in the Palace parking lot. Or Spencer Haywood ordering the hit on Paul Westhead. Though sometimes relationship woes do justify the sportaphors (I mean, the blunts was like Shaq’s fingers!). Even if you loved that girl, you knew it “wouldn’t work like Harden on the Rockets.” Other times, you might be “feeling like Harden on the Thunder”—unappreciated, unloved, destined to go out like Iverson, “chucking brick after brick.” Harden ended up in Philly; “she loves me not is where [woods] landed.” (He might want to make like ELUCID on Valley of Grace and take his talents to South Africa.)

Step into a world that is bigger than you. Instead of a War on Poverty, they got a War on Drugs—and a War on Terror—so the police can bother you. You’ve gotta “move like the Black codes,” like the meadow is patterned and plotted with landmines and bear traps. “Every move [is] measured.” Avoid getting jumped by Jim Crow. Keep a “folded paper in [your] coat”—paper proving you’re gainfully employed, not some corner boy. Evade those vagrancy laws. Don’t you know bad boys move in silence and violence? “Keep [your] own counsel,” but the only Green Book you know is High Times, so you hug those papers tight to the chest; better yet—sew them into your Army jacket lining.

Pay mind to the Armageddon rap. Extinction Level Events unfolding. In about four seconds the teacher will begin to speak, but KRS is absent and woods is getting paid per diem to sub. “Open your book to Revelations,” he instructs. Learn about the “white phosphorus burning through the night”—a lesson learned before, on “Snake Oil,” which was meant to help you “see the light, white phosphorus bright.” But such incendiary enlightenment has the whiff of toxicity. The bad news pollutes your mind and you wake up to “a world made of plastic,” BPAs present in every household item (fake plastic trees, even—laced with roach repellent). Flipping pages fanatically, learning of a second death, a bubbling lake of fire, and how Death giddies up on his pale horse. “Hell followed with him” (Revelations 6:8, KJV), of course. woods watches from the fire escape: “Hellfire out the sky.” Trade out your reading material for some lighter fare, but motherfuck Billboard and the editor—’cause here comes the Predator drone. Don’t fear the MQ-9 Reaper. That “drone fly like metal kite,” which is appropriate if we check in with Clint Smith, who writes that the drone “looks as if it might be a toy.”

6. THE LOUD GROWS LOUDER

woods feels like ELUCID’s apprentice. ELUCID—the sorcerer, the spelller wordsmith and dispelller of myth, wearer of fuchsia and green, seer who unilaterally decided Shit Don’t Rhyme No More—passes an amulet of van van oil to woods so he, too, can practice many practices, get flexi with the Old Magic. Follow that Bessie Hall protocol. woods’ is familiar. Self-confessed: his great-grandmother “was a witch”—neighbors “came for poultice when they was sick. / They came when the baby was late or too early to save, but the mother lived.” Like Lauryn, she’ll hex you with some witch’s brew if you’re doo-doo. woods is no witch doctor—just a Funk Doctor. On “Haarlem,” he dressed in sauvage drag and bragged of being the “King of all Blacks” who “eat[s] human hearts.” On “Fever Grass,” he’s taking a headcount of those that are left: survivors who “ain’t got no heart.” Some mark-ass bitches.

No talisman is trick-proof, though. Cold creeps through the cracks—drafty windows and the door doesn’t seal. We’re in the “house of hunger” again—trapped, but this isn’t a trap house. Someplace wearisome and precarious, crowded and genealogical. A family affair—what’s fair? Auntie’s “bent back from the juggling” of two jobs; your mom “mumbling about [her] deadbeat husband”; your cuz trying to “get that baker’s dozen.”

In an episode of Steel Tipped Dove’s occasional podcast A Palace from Ruin[4], woods ponders what life was like for his ancestors in colonial Jamaica. [Press play on Muddy Waters and let the intro’s nature sounds design the vision.] They lived remotely on a “mountaintop in the middle of nowhere.” woods emphasizes just how secluded they were (“deep in the bush”; “not even a town”). He describes it as a “place that sometimes feels like it stands outside of time,” which makes it even more inaccessible to him. The second verse of “Fever Grass” evokes a fever dream of what that world would look like if woods could travel back. A hale grandfather builds “God a house in the jungle”—a church!—a humble but heroic one as every brick is stacked purposefully after he “mixed cement out of pain and sweat.” Once construction was complete, “fear of the pit” had the preacher in the pulpit “hurl[ing] threats,” much like Reverend Branham’s fire and brimstone sermons sampled throughout the album. Women have it the worst, simmering in heat and sin with “bowed heads,” showing deference, sweating through “Sunday [from] sunup till sunset,” envying the “hummingbirds [that] sip from long-neck flowers” outside the church window. Their “sway” is sexy, but the churchwomen are restive, hiding the supple movement of their “hips under thin shift under church dress.”

If not from the sanctimonious, then the church seems at least a shelter from the encroaching wild—despite woods noting on “Pollo Rico” that there’s “no church in the wild.” He flows the Holy Ghost and implores the congregation to get the hell up out their seats. Preach! But the preachers in the church and the inhabitants of the house can’t withstand the insistent wilderness. Nature finds a way.

woods paints an agrarian scene, one in which villagers tirelessly try to manage the wild that surrounds them. “Sugarcane [is] stripped with machete” as men navigate the “tangled fever grass.” “Green mangoes [are] peeled with teeth,” the fruit subjugated to the famished humans. Animals are hunted, skinned, and pelts are stretched to satisfy Man’s desires—“tambourine[s] jangle” and “goatskin drums” beat a triumphant rhythm. They repose beneath the “breadfruit heavy in the trees” and admire the “stands of bamboo where roots men crop they weed.” The picture is one of Man’s victories over Nature, a modest mirrored reflection of the gardens of Versailles.

In Doris Lessing’s debut novel The Grass is Singing, Mary married Dick Turner out of desperation. They take up residence in a dilapidated house surrounded by the “miles of dull tawny veld” of Southern Rhodesia. As farmers, they perpetually fail to cultivate the land. Instead of dominating Nature, the uncooperative crops sink them deeper into debt. If only their mealie patches were as yielding as their oft-abused native laborers. Dick and Mary’s relationship strains, and Mary’s depression eventually leads to a psychotic break. As reality slips, Nature seizes upon the Turner home: “[T]he trees were pressing in round the house, watching, waiting for the night.” Mary’s paranoia and persistent fears of failure and unfulfillment lead her to personify Nature’s threat. She comes to understand “this house would be destroyed. It would be killed by the bush, which had always hated it, had always stood around it silently, waiting for the moment when it could advance and cover it, for ever, so that nothing remained.” Her mind is “filled with green, wet branches, thick wet grass, and thrusting bushes,” as she herself is invaded in the same manner as the house—they’ll be overwhelmed as one. Mary can see her own demise, though she’s apparently incapable of seeing her antagonized servants are the wilderness that surrounds her. It’s easier to imagine the end of her dwelling-place by unremitting vegetation:

...creepers would trail over the veranda and pull down the tins of plants, so that they crashed into pullulating masses of wet growth…. A branch would nudge through the broken windowpanes and, slowly, slowly, the shoulders of trees would press against the brick, until at last it leaned and crumbled and fell, a hopeless ruin.

Likewise, disaster has struck on “Fever Grass”: someone or something “cut the power,” so you’ve got to learn to “thrive in the dark”—make do, [terror] manage. Time crawls and “every day is a tally mark,” but on the plus that affords you the opportunity to decide whether you’re a killer or a coward. Gotta find a way to stay “lit like wet blunts” when the blood rain starts to fall. Even as the droplets “tattoo” the “tin roof,”[5] you gotta ignite the pilot light on that “cold stove.” Play your position or get the fuck out the kitchen. For woods, the gastronome, the cold stove is a devastating setback. Havoc and Prodigy felt the temperature rising, but Marechera felt it plummet: “And I was cold; I have never been so cold in my life. The ice of it singed my very thoughts.”

Find warmth where you can. Keep lines of communication open. Those hummingbirds in the second verse network with the hum of the microwave in the first.[6] Vibrations of tail feathers communicate with the machine code in the control panel. A frequency all its own—call it Hummingbird style: 70 times in one second.

The “house of hunger” that opens its rickety, rust-hinged doors on “Fever Grass”—with its “cold stove” and “madness in the cupboards” (Old Mom Dukes Hubbard knows too well that they’re bare)—clearly invokes Dambudzo Marechera. On Armand Hammer’s “Dettol,” woods hears the “rattling chains [of] Marley’s ghost” (notably, he ascribes the disturbance to “something [he] smoked”). Dickens himself calls the hullabaloo a “clanking noise.” While Scrooge recoils at the racket of Marley’s ghost, woods leans in close to listen to Marechera’s. “The chain [Marley] drew was clasped about his middle,” Dickens writes (and we figure he must “dance like [he’s] in leg-and-waist chains,” as woods says on “No Days Off”). Marley’s chain was “long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made…of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.” Marechera’s ghost, meanwhile, drags around rich resources and raw materials for woods to seize on: Armand Hammer’s “Black Sunlight” refracts Marechera’s Black Sunlight; the gatefold of History Will Absolve Me bears an eerily relatable quote from Marechera’s Mindblast as epigraph (“My father’s mysterious death when I was eleven taught me—like nothing would ever have done—that everything, including people, is unreal”); “Cuito Cuanavale” features woods getting all autobiographical and axiomatic: “I rep my era: bridge the gap between Marechera and Sweatshirt. woods turns Slick Rick the way he wears Marechera’s chains. As Marley’s ghost haunts Ebenezer’s lumber-room, we find Marechera’s spirit haunting the margins of woods’ rhyme-pad pages. Marley and Marechera: these mar- prefixed ectoplasmic visitors don’t disfigure or despoil their hosts; they awaken them—marshaling their [literary] worlds together.[7]

9. IT’S THE MONSTERS THAT I CONJURE, IT’S THE MARIJUANA

In his songs, woods incessantly answers the questions posed by a nameless, faceless interlocutor. The question, more often than not, is: What is it? As in, “Grand Wizard, God, what is it?” (if we walk down Memory Lane). Or spasmodically like Nore on “Superthug”: What, what, what, what, what? woods answers that aphasia with anaphora—the contraction it’s predominates. On “Fever Grass,” the effect sets a scene:

It's madness in the cupboards, It's no table manners at your cousin's, It's humming microwave ovens, It's auntie bent back from the juggling.

The tekneek is also suitable for meditating on problematic world affairs and your own, as he does on “red dust”:

It's not the heat, it's the dust, It's not the money, it's the rush, It's not the weed, that's a crutch. It's not greed, that's not enough.

And on “Remorseless,” the effect is tonal, conveying tension and release:

It's now or never. It's a freedom in admitting it's not gonna get better... It's fucking over. It's all payment pending.

It’s a mode of expression Marechera practiced as well (though he axed the contraction): “It was a prison. It was the womb. It was blood clinging closely like a swamp in the grass-matted lowlands of my life. It was a Whites Only sign on a lavatory. It was my teeth on edge—the bitter acid of it! It was the effigy swinging gently to and fro in the night of my mind.”

If it’s not this, it’s that. Black Sheep knew the score (Engine, engine, number 9…). “Inexorable—you can’t stop what’s coming.” Survivor’s remorseful Puff all up in the ad-libs with the won’t stop. A slow train coming, and you’re Perils of Pauline track-shackled. You better be coming in from the cold like Bob and the Wailers, or else Everything Remains Raw like Busta’s ill-omened The Coming. Raw lips; raw hands; raw sewage; raw meat. R-A-W: Big Daddy Kane spelled it out. “The meaning of raw is ‘Ready And Willing’ to do whatever is clever, / Take a loss—never.” No, you can’t stop what’s coming, but woods appears to say we’ve got to at least be prepared for what’s coming, which means knowing what it is.

10.

As a rapper and as a man, woods must settle with—in Marechera’s words—“this cruel externality.” The world’s harshness is ardent—burning through ozone, exposing us. Counter this overexposure with the interior world of writing. Marechera scavenged rubbish dumps for reading material. Eco-racism, check it, quite literally enabled his writing—each notebook a sacrifice zone; hypothesize this: pollution h[e]aven.

“I came up in the cesspool,” woods raps on “Fuchsia & Green.” He came UP in the cesspool; he was RAISED on paraquat—the trajectory is ascension. But he dwells in the rotten core firstly. Rite of passage with the plague rats. Marechera did it: “I was writing an article about shantytown and while inspecting the pit-latrines there I fell into the filthy hole…. It was in a way a necessary baptism.” Stagnant water special. James Joyce was christened just the same. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus is bullied by a schoolmate, Wells, who “had shouldered him into the square ditch…. It was a mean thing to do…. And how cold and slimy the water had been! And a fellow had once seen a big rat jump plop into the scum.” He falls ill as a result and spends days bedridden watching the firelight on the wall of the infirmary. These cesspools, pit-latrines, and square-ditches are transformative. Got to cope by getting positively septic. On “Artichoke,” woods “flush[es] his system with sativas.” Later, on “Classical Music,” he tells us he “flushed everything” (but the haze). Plumb crazy maneuvers to discard the waste. These sludgy skinny dips—these fully and foully freak versions of Thomas Eakins’ Swimming Hole—are swampwater sessions.

11. A TALE OF THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP

The swamp is a gothic territory, haunted by the past. Catch a whiff of what Marechera calls the “foul breath of our history.” Stale, moldering. In “No Haid Pawn,” a piece of postbellum fiction penned by Thomas Nelson Page in 1887, the author affects a Black dialect to tell us just what the woods are: “hit’s de evil-speritest place in dis wull.” Well then. Page’s story is of a white man daring to explore the putrid pathways others have only gossiped about. He ventures into the swamp, coming upon a ramshackle haunted house once inhabited by a slavemaster who cut off the head of one of his slaves and hung it in a window. To set an example, naturally. The swamp-dwelling carries what Lessing might call an “air of bleak poverty.” Mary Turner would strive to clean it up, polishing every surface “as if she were scrubbing skin off a black face.”

Messiah Musik’s beat for “Swampwater” is disorienting. He, too, braves the overgrowth. We can hear the same ringing harmonics as RZA’s “Ice Cream” production—a residue of Earl Klugh, only warped and morphed by humic and fulvic acids. But Messiah doesn’t help us get “all up in [the] guts” of women with these swamp blues rhythms, not unless we’re talking about intestinal parasites. French vanilla, butter pecan, chocolate deluxe? Negative on that. But Messiah makes your nodding neck stiffen from the listeria outbreak on your waffle cone. Watch for the sudden spillage to the sidewalk and all the kids cry.

12.

In the swamp neck-deep…

—“The Foreigner,” from History Will Absolve Me

In 1992, Showbiz & A.G. released Runaway Slave. “I’m aware of all evil and devilishment,” A.G. raps on the title track, “because I’m living in a rat-like wilderness.” Often, the swamp is an escape route. In keeping with their ongoing argument that most slaves were content on the plantation, proslavery novelists portrayed swamp runaways as aberrations. This was a gross miscalculation. Some are still running. Your ass was running too, fast as you could, punching yourself in the chest. On “Schism,” woods finds himself “waist deep in the swamp when [he] heard the hounds.” He felt the pressure, the pangs of fear, he “felt it in [his] bowels.” It’s the feeling itself, not the hounds, that’s so much trouble to escape.

In an 1856 issue of Harper’s, David Hunter Strother published a purported travelogue of the Dismal Swamp. He’s drawn there by a novel desire:

I had long nurtured a wish to see one of those sable outlaws who dwell in the fastnesses of the Swamp; who, from impatience of servitude, or to escape the consequences of crime, have fled from society, and taken up their abode among the wild beasts of the wilderness.

Strother happens upon the cautious and watchful “Osman,” one such “sable outlaw” with a weapon in hand, fringed with reeds and willows. Strother’s account is bullshit, a fiction, but remains full of possibility. When Moses the houseboy is discovered after exacting revenge on Mary Turner in The Grass is Singing, he’s described as “a great powerful man, black as polished linoleum, and dressed in a singlet and shorts, which were damp and muddy.”

In the 1880 novel The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable seized on that same prospect. Cable broached the topic of racial injustice in his work, magnifying that which proslavery authors worked so hard to diminish: “But he was assured that to live in those swamps was not entirely impossible to man—‘if one may call a negro a man.’ Runaway slaves were not so rare in them as one [...] might wish.”

On “Swampwater,” woods fears the “penitentiary blues” he’d have to wear after one quick lick gone grievous, but he sings a penitentiary blues, too. John and Alan Lomax both recorded work-songs at prisons, including Parchman Farm, the infamous plantation-cum-prison of the Mississippi Delta. In 1940, Bukka White recorded “Parchman Farm Blues,” articulating the dream he had while inside: “I sure wanna go home, / I hope someday I will overcome.”

13.

It was blood clinging closely like a swamp in the grass-matted lowlands of my life.

—Marechera (1978)

The swamp provides invisibility. Easier for Maroons to plan insurrection when caked in mud from green beanie to Timbs like Redman on the Muddy Waters cover. woods reaches for the ghillie suit, not the shiny suit. Needs something covered in sage-colored twigs and twine. He rather lurk than floss. Camouflage comes from the French camouflet (“to puff smoke in someone’s face”).[8] Smoke and mirrors stunts. On “Fever Grass,” woods speaks of the “bamboo where roots men crop they weed.” woods himself disappears in a thicket of bamboo in upstate New York on the cover of 2015’s Today, I Wrote Nothing. A. Richter brings to vision the “grass high as bamboo” that woods mentions on “Dark Woods.”[9] In the “Pollo Rico” music video, Joseph Mault places woods in lush green bamboo, too. No better cover than the backwoods. Blow that smoke in the opp’s face. A blunt brand becomes a record label’s namesake but also speaks to the shadowy wilds in which woods and his cadre navigate. Dre recreated the Zig-Zag rolling papers label for The Chronic album cover—like Backwoodz, another détournement that obscures the original context.

14. THE NUKEFACE PAPERS

Adapt and empower: that’s the necessary potion. In Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, Harriet Beecher Stowe palms the vial of acacia powder: “the near proximity of the swamp has always been a considerable check on the otherwise absolute power of the overseer.” The swamps are “regions of hopeless disorder,” Stowe writes. The description fits much of Messiah Musik’s work on the album: the impulse is to withdraw from the frenzy, but the reward is to embrace the chaos. Emerge stronger like ELUCID on “Ghoulie,” with “mud under the nails [and] smell of swamp moss and dead things.”

Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing resembles Strother’s Osman. From his run between 1983 and 1987, Moore’s The Saga of the Swamp Thing tells the origin story of how Alec Holland, a doctor, developed a “bio-restorative formula, which was intended to promote crop growth.” Holland’s experiment is sabotaged, and an explosion sends him and “his chemical soup” into the surrounding swamp—“teeming with microorganisms.” Holland is reborn as Swamp Thing. Moore asks us to “imagine that cloudy, confused intelligence, possibly with only the vaguest notion of self, trying to make sense of its new environment.”[10]

The transformation is consummated through self-acceptance. Swamp Thing’s understanding of his own existence comes together rhizomatically. Somewhere quiet…somewhere green and timeless…I drift…the cellular landscape stretching beneath me…am I at peace?...Am I…happy? Even if woods was systematically polluted and poisoned by paraquat,[11] he still “scraped and fought” and won out in the end—he enters Another Green World (Issue 23’s title). Brian Eno’s “In Dark Trees” plays on a ghettoblaster—a Promax Super Jumbo boombox, serial number: 2014.270.2.1a, to be precise—the crusty and corrosive terminals of the D, motherfucker, D! batteries still functional. You don’t want Nunn of that. Not everyone was so lucky; so many others got caught.

Nukeface—a laid-off mineworker, a deranged drifter—became a nuclear waste addict. Perfect storms are rarely predicted, and so no one would’ve guessed the Lombard Mine explosion of ’68 would lead to a lease of land, to overflow pits being used for radioactive dumping. The man who would be christened “Nukeface” by the local street kids guzzled that waste out of beer cans with an insatiable thirst, stooping pit-side to fill a sixpack. He slurped the slag. Nukeface was the whitey who doubled back. He didn’t die—he mutated into a brain-damaged and demented tramp—and grew frustrated and embittered when the coal company sealed the mine. His supply dwindling, he fled into the damp green cosmos, crossing paths with Swamp Thing. Nukeface’s poison touch irradiated, and he seared toxic handprints into Swamp Thing’s acrid chest—a stop-and-frisk like when Giuliani was mayor, like when Bloomberg was mayor. Swamp Thing bowed his head and prayed, Let there be grass.

“How sickly seem all growing things,” Georg Trakl writes in his poem “Heiterer Frühling,” but seems is not absolute. On “Artichoke,” woods (whose name itself is so few pencil markings short of weeds) ambiguously repeats, The weeds overgrown, the weeds overgrown. Weeds are an invasive species to some, medicine to others. Weed is the town where Lennie nearly got himself lynched—the best laid plans of mice and men end up in an irrigation ditch, caught in a ravel of morning glory, waiting out the mob.

But Swamp Thing is a “moss-encrusted echo of a man,” and this is meant by Moore in a good way. He’s adorned with fibers and filaments. He settles for nothing less than the piffy with the red hairs—those cornus alba sibirica stems shooting every which way. Alec Holland has become a “ghost dressed in weeds.” Marechera might describe himself less favorably (“I was, I knew, a dead tree, dry of branch and decayed in the roots”), but he shouldn’t be so deprecating. Turn up the volume on your Artifacts tape; listen to Tame One talk of “smok[ing] the blunt that’s like a tree trunk.” Say to yourself, Just like a tree planted by the water, I shall not be moved. To survive, it’s imperative to become one with the weeds—to become weed-wedded.

15. MEDITATION IVXX

What’s that shit that they be smoking? Pass it over here. Inquiring minds want to know. The weed helps you release yo delf. Even if you don’t have that mythical Methtical strain, you’ve got options. Tical was originally called The Burning Book, and the smoke Method Man exhales from his hellified flow on the album cover doesn’t cloud our judgment, but sharpens it. Somewhere woods was in a hall plush with piff, studying the image—that scroll caught in the wind with blackletter Gothic script (like a gutted and unspooling blunt leaf), trying to decode its esoteric message. On “Biscuits,” Meth was “smokin’ on a Spike Lee joint,” while woods knew a plug with the “bomb like the Spike Lee joint.”[12] Life in marvelous times, woods adlibs at the beginning of “Schism,” and a hearty laugh to follow. On the Mos Def song of that name from 2009’s The Ecstatic, we learn “their green grass is green; our green grass is brown.” woods’ grass is singing. When the words hit us, it’s like Fat Ray says, like the first time catching a contact. You streak through the dry grass of your fears, Marechera writes—in full sovereignty of your soul. Stoned is the way of the walk, but woods pursues something loftier for the blunted. In the past, he has “scoured the Heights,” but found “no piff.”[13] He’s been fickle: “That’s okay, but that’s not the haze.”[14] This ain’t something you can just Whatever, man. This is looking for the perfect leaf. Looking for weed so strong “your limbic system not a friend.”[15] Unclasp the jewel case of Super Chron Flight Brothers’ Emergency Powers CD: unfold the liner notes to view the two-page spread of bud—a verdure set to murder the “Dirtweed” of the album’s DOOM-produced single. The expectation is super chron[ic]. You want a room “thick with smoke,”[16] a chamber. You fiend to “get stupid high.”[17] Trying to chill out, like, Everything’s okay—Quinton’s on the way.

“Check the motion while I be puffin’ the potent,” Redman raps on “Case Closed.” The motion is meditative: empty the lungs, cycle the air. Enter another green world, and another one—an anodyne and analeptic. Add kef to the tip of your spliff, feel like you can relax, “like you could disappear, like [you] wasn’t surrounded by the past.”[18] Weed as an escape from the past, but woods simultaneously dredges up his past—in that way, it’s a manual of exorcism. Questions come up, but woods “ain’t even answer—[he] just let the weed burn.”[19] He’s Frederick Douglass with the dutch, finding freedom and peace.

16. TOOK THE HAZE TO CHURCH

The immortal question: If you find a bag of weed on the floor, motherfucker, what the fuck you gon’ do? Miracles happen, and that bag of weed is a miraculum—an object of wonder. Pick it up, pick it up. Hold the church to the sky (HIGHER UP, cries ELUCID, HIGHER). Elevate the practice to the sublime. woods goes full anti-Iverson: You don’t smoke how I do—I be practicing.[20] For woods, he embraces the religious ritual—as you know, he wakes up and smokes weed. This rendition of his Fajr prayer brings him closer to illumination. Marechera concurs: “He took dagga; he believed that there is a part of man which is permanently stoned and that this was beautiful.”

billy woods steals the title of “Christ of Marijuana” from John Sinclair. For him, weed is faith. Qui fume prie: smoking is praying. He paces the nave of the Gothic church of his own making; walks the aisles to the transept; peers through stained glass to make the flying buttresses through the heavenly light. Still, in his treatise On Architecture, Leon Battista Alberti writes of a church so plain that it induces contemplation. Alberti wants the windows high, so high that one could only see the sky and not be distracted by the external world. On “Falling Out the Sky,” woods buys in and “genuflected when [he] heard the weed price.”

In John Carpenter’s 1987 film Prince of Darkness, a green substance swirls within a glass tabernacle in the cellar of St. Godard’s Church (maybe this is the “ceremony in the church basement” woods mentions on “Artichoke”). The sticky icky green spills over and into the mouths of skeptical physics researchers—a Satanic slime eager to spew its evil essence. You will not be saved by your god Plutonium, the spirit behind the computer screen types. Again, the green is the same green as Richter’s lens flare.

In Cigarettes Are Sublime, Richard Klein writes: “Smoking grass is usually a communal [act]; it draws the initiates into a circle of preference, including them and excluding others.” The weed draws a crowd; woods tracks the gatherings. Standing room only, he sits “slumped in the last pew” on “Scaffolds” and notes “the pulpit [is] packed.” On “Dettol”: “Packed house, pew to vestibule.” The homily is action-packed. People get ready—ready to die.

Usually everyone in the village—from the lords and ladies down to the peasants—joined the professional stonemasons [everyone must get stoned, if you will] in doing their part to construct an edifice to the glory of God and to the representation of the Church on earth. Churches were not merely places to go on Sunday or decorations for a town; they represented a bridge between the physical and spiritual realms—from heavy stone to heaven. The monk Suger, abbot of Saint Denis, in 1144 wrote:

I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world.

Suger knew of the swamps, the Planet of Slums [rest easy, Mike Davis]. So do we. We’ve normalized our sorry plots to the point we greet each other with “my slime.” Suger had ambitions to fill his church with light. He wanted for it to be one thing: s[ub]lime.

17. IT’S SIMPLE MATHEMATICS

Bucka, bucka, bucka, bucka, bucka, bucka! The artist formerly known as the Mighty Mos: “This is business—no faces, just lines and statistics.” “Swampwater” delineates the murky business of the drug deal like a part-part-whole word problem (“copped the whole package”). woods republishes an unexpurgated edition of The Art of the Deal, proving just how artless it is. The math is weird; “Mayans never counted to here.” On “Rehearse with Ornette,” woods played Itzamna and counted bars on fingers like he was doing sums. “Vindaloo” taught us if someone fuck up the count, you pocket the difference and bounce. Take that Diddy Dirty Money where it’ll take you: fecal matter and pathogens dispersing in the air when you make it rain. “Immediately switched my math,” woods raps, staying flexible on “Alternate Side Parking.” He does not need the 99 problems. Doesn’t need the 88 keys on the piano. He keeps things pragmatic as the metric system. How he put it on “Stranger in the Village”: “Everything for sale except the scale.” woods as Anubis, weighing your heart against Truth. Meanwhile, petty pushers nickel-and-dime you—bunch of luniz with five on it but treating it like a mil. The church architects know beauty has to come correct—correct application of Pythagoras’ rules of proportion, which is a system of musical harmony. Import those arcades of Corinthian columns with semicircular arches into your DAW. The stonemason used numbers to reflect the divine order. “Think I’ll roll another number for the road,” Neil Young sings hoarsely, a throat ravaged by time and the drags of doobies. On “All Jokes Aside,” woods listens to math rock and is no doubt harangued by angular melodies and time signatures that slice ligatures. King Crimson out the guillotine type tortures. To decompress, he’ll roll a fat number.

18.

Dead church.

—ELUCID, “Smile Lines”

When the math’s right, you end up with something magnificent, like Chartres. In 1973’s F for Fake, Orson Welles delivers a passional monologue on the church. He celebrates its anonymity, seeing as how it’s “without a signature.” Many hands make light work, though, and Chartres was the effort of all for one and One for All—or maybe one for none. Welles is correct: no single name is attributed to its creation. Zero: a cypher. A circle of MCs; a circle of passers and puffers. Welles rebuffs scientists who tell us our universe is one “which is disposable” by pointing to the “one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest” which is Chartres.

But Orson Welles was fakin’ jax, too. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, he blasphemed weed. “All it does is give you extremely bad breath,” he said, adding, “it’s a terribly overrated drug.” And he only told half the story of Chartres.

“Nice church you got here,” woods says on “VX,” “be a shame if something were to happen.” In June 1194, a fire devastated Chartres. The basilica was sparking like the wiring in a Black church. Burn, Chartres, Burn—I smell a riot goin’ on. An anonymous account of the event (everything associated with Chartres is nameless, faceless) describes how “certain persons” rescued Mary’s tunic (the Virgin, not Magdalene) by moving it into the lower crypt. They stayed “shut up there, not daring to go back out because of the fire now raging.” They were protected from “the rain of burning timbers falling from above.”

Out of despair, the people, clerics, and nobility of Chartres built a new church. How high? [the exalted Red and Meth sing with the angels]. Well, high enough for the planets and the stars and the moons to collapse. Inhale deeply—until those lungs collapse. The church strain places the apse in your unfortunate collapse, lifts you back up, and constructs the Most Beautifullest Thing in this World, beautiful as a rock in a cop’s face.

19. UP IN SMOKE

Smoke clouds vision and disappears memories, but woods uses smoke to reclaim them, to shape them. Watch the chimney for the signal, for that Pope smoke from the Vatican conclave—that fumata nera. Can you smell it? It’s got that pungent skunk stink of a blunt. Joyce knew the smell.

After hearing about two boys stealing altar wine from the sacristy, young Stephen Dedalus’ thoughts wander to that “strange and holy place” and the activities he’d seen carried out there. Of particular note is a “boy that held the censer [and] had swung it gently to and fro near the door with the silvery cap lifted by the middle chain to keep the coals lighting. That was called charcoal: and it had burned quietly as the fellow had swung it gently and had given off a weak sour smell.”

Stephen often imagined himself as a “silentmannered priest,” and he would mimic his priest’s movements: “he had shaken the thurible only slightly.” Nimble movements like sealing the blunt leaves with saliva. Ultimately, Stephen knows the vocation isn’t for him: “He would never swing the thurible before the tabernacle as priest. His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders….He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world.” Sounds familiar.

20.

On “Magdalene,” woods “wish[es] [he] still smoked cigarettes.” Deeper into his journey, his descent, he “[buys] a pack, [and] grimace[s] at the taste.” He needed a break to keep from breaking. Richard Klein explains that the cigarette break

allows one to open a parenthesis in the time of ordinary existence, a space and a time of heightened attention that gives rise to a feeling of transcendence, evoked through the ritual of fire, smoke, cinder connecting hand, lungs, breath, and mouth. It procures a little rush of infinity that alters perspectives, however slightly, and permits, albeit briefly, an ecstatic standing outside of oneself.

[NB: Klein’s get lifted diction: heightened, rise]

“For Kant,” Klein continues, “the sublime, as distinct from the merely beautiful, affords a negative pleasure because it is accompanied, as its defining condition, by a moment of pain.” The yellowed teeth; the morning cough; the barcode lines around the mouth. Cigarettes, like pot-leaves coated in paraquat, “are poison…they are not exactly beautiful, they are exactly sublime.” They are a way to cope, if only for the duration of the act. And so woods will “get up and roll a ’wood [and] feed the cancer in [his] chest” like he describes on “Dirge,” and he’ll feel damn good about it, too.

21.

The fire long dead—this just smoke and ashes.

—“Artichoke”

What burns never returns, Don Caballero’s Damon Che might philosophize, but I’m funkdoobious. Wouldn’t U B? Okonkwo’s rap name was Roaring Flame—he was a “flaming fire,” Achebe writes. ’Kwo sounds like he’s strutting and sashaying at the ball like Venus Xtravaganza. (Lot of rappers worry about gender-bending…) And, yeah, Paris is burning. Looking into the log fire, he’s got the nerve to call his son Nwoye “degenerate and effeminate.” How could he have begotten a woman for a son? The smoldering log sighs in concert with him. “Living fire,” Okonkwo concludes, “begets cold, impotent ash.” Better up the dosage of the blue pill or get hyper off the ginseng root. But sometimes you’ve got to johnny blaze the village to pacify the spirit of the clan. The egwugwu burn Mr. Smith’s church to the dirt. Feel its warmth, something Nwoye doesn’t get from his father’s embrace.

Is that the fire in which you burn? “Forever smokin’ the mic,” J-Treds raps, and the “lyric contact got [him] open. / Naturally higher—no need to pass the Dutchie.” Ashtrays overflow on “Schism,” indicating woods has been burning the midnight oil. Burns through pages like Royal Dutch Shell does the fields of Ogoniland. Writing in his book of rhymes until the words pass the margins. Ken Saro-Wiwa—he sacrifices himself for this shit. Ashtrays overflowing and evahflowing with church embers. The ash of Chartres. The scorch stains on your saucepan. The stinking stains of history. Trotsky and Reagan battle it out in the cypher, each flipping each other’s script, damning each other to the ash heap of history while woods writes songs about Pompeii. The volcanic ash of Vesuvius reaches from Petrograd to Port Royal. woods raps with a pyroclastic flow.

Living off borrowed time, watching the doomsday clock tick faster. Midnight in a grossly imperfect world. Waiting on the end of history, leafing through Fukuyama’s miscalculations while a thousand Fukushimas penetrate thyroid glands. “That’s what it is about swamps…too damp,” Nukeface remarks. “Nothin’ burns for long.”

22.

On “Nigerian Email,” woods promised to “break up trees on your fourth-generation imitation Premier beats.” Ya playin’ yaself if you emulate. Messiah Musik isn’t dwycking around—his beats are mellifluous dissonance. “A splinter of melody piercing the ear with brittle notes,” if Marechera had a listen. The swampwater soaks in and turns the music skronk. His loud grows louder, like the jittery strings on the first half of “Schism.” Abrasive and raucous, as loud as Loud Records, as loud as Steve Rifkind riffling record contracts in triplicate, as loud as a Mystic Stylez-era Three 6 Mafia collabo with Megadeth. All of Church’s tracks sing with a crossed signal. Doris Lessing might say it’s “that insistent screaming” you here and believe to be “the noise of the sun, whirling on its hot core, the sound of the harsh brazen light, the sound of gathering heat.” Beats that make woods want to fling inkwells and lumps of sadza. Messianic as his namesake on tracks like “Frankie,” where he composes a delicate mess to clear the moneylenders from the temple. We bask in the after-clarity and quietude. He’ll take a dime-a-dozen Goodwill copy of The Messiah and suck it through the sewer grates. What he creates is what Marechera mentions: “A cloud of flies from the nearby public toilet…humming Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus.’” Messiah Musik uses oblique strategies, I imagine, to achieve sounds unthought. He shows up where King Tubby met the Upsetter and nods to the noises made by the people from the grass roots. He communicates to woods through aether talk—not stems. No stress, no seeds, no sticks, for that matter either. Songs of antimatter. Guitars channeling a Wimshurst high-voltage generator.

23.

On the legs of the piano, carved in the manner of African sculpture, are mask-like figures resembling totems. The carvings are rendered with a grace and power of invention that lifts them out of the realm of craftsmanship and into the realm of art.

—August Wilson, The Piano Lesson, “The Setting” (1987)

On Terror Management’s “Dog Days,” woods teased he might “play you some Neil Young on the piano.” Messiah Musik was his companion there, too, and it wasn’t a piano but the wheezing keys of a Hammond B2 organ we heard. On “Classical Music,” the piano does play, gently, but the drums turn the beat into a nerve-shredder—the rhythm got us sweating like the Nervous Records logo. The juxtaposition evokes something Evil [Dee], something like the “crone play[ing] keys of elephant bone” on “The Big Nothing” (an even earlier Messiah Musik collaboration). The simple fact is this: woods can’t play classical—his voice is too hardcore, “like Kool G Rap music made for concert piano,” as Bigg Jus once said. woods would maybe be more comfortable doing a boogie-woogie. Music made to get bills paid. Boogie, before it got reduplicated, referred to a rent party, and you know, you know, you know, you know the rent is too damn high. (That that Bill Withers!)

woods was a poor piano student, frustrating his tutor with the “wiry gray[s]”—she’s stressed. “Always late for lessons,” he confesses without citing CPT as an excuse. He lacked passion; he failed to put in the work: “She could tell I was guessing.” [We talkin’ about practice?] These old habits die hard, become “lifelong trait[s].” He’s “still guessing today”—still. Unfamiliar with the ebonies and ivories, “could never really find [his] place.” It’s not that he didn’t feel bad about it—how couldn’t he? She laid the guilt trip on him. “Disappointment etched every line in her face” as she listened to him fumble through the score; and, when he did fuck up, she cut to the quick. “Piano hands, she used to say, What a waste.” The criticism keeps stinging; he stays laid up in the cut (like Havoc living his hell on earth: Watch these rap niggas fuck you up). Tough to tell if it’s her or woods that’s “still disappointed today.”

She tried to school him: Amadeus’s 28th instead of church. She got dramatic (“drew the heavy shades”) and demonstrated God’s grandeur (of which the world is charged, writes Gerard Manley Hopkins) through the instrument. No cathedral necessary. He was attentive, “watched her play” as “light poured the Lord’s grace” and “rich chords” filled the place. Her performance rings of religious epiphany even if he doesn’t “quite [find] his way,” or find his faith, or find Jesus. Game recognizes game. woods has certainly kept searching (three “always” and three “find/found’s” form the trinity for our proof-texts in this exegesis).

If there was spirit to be found, it was the spirit of the hustle. Boy Willie, the watermelon-selling brother in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, wants to pawn the family piano against his sister’s wishes. Berniece argues, “Money can’t buy what that piano cost. You can’t sell your soul for money.” But Boy Willie doesn’t fetishize the hulking heirloom: “I’m talking about trading that piece of wood for some land.” He pays no mind to the supposed magick of the piano. billy woods plays Boy Willie, you see—disillusioned, hell-bent on any inheritance he can hardscrabble together.

Doaker, the siblings’ uncle, explains that Berniece believes the piano “got blood on it”—and it does. “I don’t play that piano cause I don’t want to wake them spirits,” Berniece explains. Doaker eventually elaborates on the history of the piano, how Sutter the slaver traded a mother and child for it, severing the family over an object. The slavemaster’s wife was given the piano as an anniversary gift but missed her prized domestic slaves. Sutter forced the patriarch of that splintered family to flex his carpentry skills (“a worker of wood”) and carve their faces onto the piano. Years later, while Sutter was celebrating at a Fourth of July picnic, Boy Charles (Berneice and Boy Willie’s father) liberated that piano. Consequently, he was hunted down and burnt up in a boxcar.

At the end of the second act, Sutter’s ghost rears its honky head in an attempt of reclamation, but Boy Willie fends it off in “a life-and-death struggle fraught with perils and faultless terror.” Her brother needs help, so Berniece finally plays the piano, and what she plays is “both a commandment and a plea. With each repetition it gains in strength. It is intended as an exorcism.” The song she plays is “a rustle of wind blowing across two continents,” and it keeps Sutter’s ghost at bay. Boy Willie realizes generational wealth is its own curse. What we already know: Anything you want on this cursed earth probably better off getting it yourself.

Berniece plays the “old urge to song” and the song is “found piece by piece,” meanwhile woods “played the piece till it fell to pieces”—into micro-fragments, Saafir would say. Chasing ghosts, chasing ghosts, woods chants. (What ghosts? Sutter’s ghost? The ghost of the Yellow Dog?) woods’ “arpeggios break,” doin’ damage with the fracturing [JVC] Force of a Black Flag nervous breakdown or the “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” of Robert Johnson. The verse itself breaks down into a mosaic of memories (from piano lessons, to religion, to culinary, to drugs). Broken down completely, woods needs to build up. He “sifted seeds”; he “made niggas believe when [he] grated cheese”; he was “proud to be accepted.” In the end, “the police rush the gates,” and the splendor of the ocean floor becomes an unseemly flushed toilet (though he “couldn’t bring [himself] to flush the haze”). The simultaneous storylines of his life follow this indirect pattern. Lessing writes: “He arrived at the truth circuitously: circuitously it would have to be explained.”

24.

On “Frankie,” the titular character is as her name implies: direct. Despite her bohemian trappings, she doesn’t tantalize woods—she vibes with him. She gives it to him straight, no chaser. We’re blessed, too—a rare linear and localized narrative. The setting is Morningside Heights, “back when the building was nice”—in other words, “Frankie” is an idyll. The halcyon days. The song isn’t on the mourning-side; rather, it helps us reach the heights of a vaulted church ceiling. The elevator may “grind and hiccup,” but, nonetheless, it allows us to get lifted. Keith Murray is our elevator operator, and we’re moving on up in the world. Me and you, your mama, and your cousin, too—woods brings us all along.

What appears platonic at the initial pass might be more amorous than anticipated. “Frankie” is a spiritual ascent. The “old biddies out front with The Watchtower ask if [woods] know[s] Christ,” but he walks with purpose past the extended arms with the JW rag. He walks determinedly, faithfully, not ashamed to bow his head and “pray [the elevator] don’t get stuck.” He moves in spirit, inspired—it’s not the breath of God which gives him life, but the expectation of a climax. “Black pussy is the world’s first religion,” ELUCID says, so when Frankie “buzzed” woods up, it was unquestionably a love buzz, a tingling sensation.

Frankie’s “whole floor smell[s] like nag champa”—a fragrance that rescues him from the rank city streets. A frankincense aroma to the strain. Frankie is neither hag nor nag. She comes correct with mysticism—eastern medicines to cure his western illnesses. A sacred space: leave the “shoes at the door.” Her “roommate was Shanta” (Shanta? Shanta from the Rāmāyana?). They’ve got “rugs like 1970’s Cairo,” but the furnishings are less emblems of Edward Said’s “exotic sensuousness” and more an exposition of exxxotica. The filth of second-hand finds. “Half the stuff in here they found on the street,” woods says. “I helped carry that TV—stupid big.” At the beginning of Fresh Kill, Shareen Lightfoot carries a TV through a homeless encampment—all tarp shelters and crap-filled shopping carts—and loads the set onto a wall of other binned boob tubes. Near the end of the film, Shareen admonishes her partner Claire as they carry a pink piece of furniture down the block: “Claire, be careful. This is a Joséphine Empress chaise lounge, okay?”

Every spot in the apartment his eyes settle on is an aphrodisiac—dope and dopamine. For weed, woods “had to burn it raw” (a prelude to the fires still to come), and the cannabis got his receptors hot and bothered. His relationship with Frankie is, without question, an intoxicating one.

She spins “Dick Gregory on vinyl”; my money’s on the 1970 Frankenstein album, pun intended. “They say more bad things about the drug users than they do about the pushers,” Gregory remarks. “They don’t say nothing about the cat in the silk suit and the alligator shoes that’s pushing that stuff.” Shanta’s role is selector. An hour later, sounds from Jamaica, or Nigeria (can I recommend Side A of Fela’s 1973 Afrodisiac?). Frankie moves to the music, skanking, before Shanta settles on Sade’s “The Sweetest Taboo.” Now woods is burning candles—and sage—and all his other plans got canceled.

They “roll Js on [an] Amharic Bible that [Frankie] found on 113th.” woods can’t let this opportunity pass him by. Why? Because Frankie is the dopest Ethiopian. Redman’s somewhere out in Jerz nodding approvingly as the couple Smoke Buddah. (Shanta has dipped by this point.) woods inhales deeply and slumps against the trunk of the Bodhi Tree. I got a slight problem: I smoke weed too much. But there’s no problem here.

Frankie gives new meaning to old flame. Her corner apartment is infused with light: “the sun run riot.” Rays of light beam through the “French doors”—you can get lost in the floating motes. The “hardwood [is] shining,” and Frankie herself is illuminated, “looking like she might just burst into fire.” Maybe woods’ love sickness is lethal and he’s dead already, and Frankie’s a ryde-or-die bitch practicing suttee. Maybe this is her spontaneous human combustion, sunstruck. No stench of accelerant, and her demise has a Calvinist bent. Perhaps punishment for her untold sins, the corruption of her spirit. Doctors once theorized an individual too intoxicated was liable to become flammable. Frankie was too lit. Shit, it happened to drunken sailor Miguel Saveda in Melville’s 1849 novel Redburn. He was relegated to a bunk in the forecastle, and when they checked on him later, he had “two threads of greenish fire, like a forked tongue, [that] darted out between the lips; and in a moment, [his] cadaverous face was crawled over by a swarm of worm-like flames…while covered all over with spires and sparkles of flame, that faintly crackled in the silence, the uncovered parts of the body burned before [the crew].”

Or maybe they burnt all those herbs and their persons to purify. The summer months burn by. woods and Frankie sit at the open windows and listen to the “broken jazz float in.” Messiah Musik liberates the plinks of piano, and his horn sample blares funereally. He’s Henry Caul in the final scene of Coppola’s The Conversation, blowing his sax in his tore-up from the floor-up apartment, exasperated, having not found the bug. For woods, Frankie’s big windows have gotten tinier—what do you expect? He followed the White Rabbit and drank from the “drink me” bottle, did he not? Frankie with the Cheshire cat grin. Her fire melts the Italian ices, those “Marinos left out till slightly unfrozen.” That’s how he wanted them anyway. Patient, just “waiting for that moment.”

25.

Nirvana turns to drama on “Cossack Wedding.” woods is a “disaster tourist wandering” Chernobyl.[21] He’s touring the ravages of a calamitous relationship, one which has left an “alienation zone…30 kilometers wide.” He wends through scabrous wildlife, and we follow his extended metaphor wherever the umbrella leads, even if we’re guided to the ruins of a reactor explosion.

woods is not a disaster tourist so much a disaster capitalist, of sorts—I mean in the way he mines the past for the profit of his spirit (and ours when we hear it expressed in song form). But dude is radioactive ill—bilious woods with the broken heart. His core melts. “Never again would I suffer wholeheartedly for any woman,” Marechera writes. How could he if his heart is dissected, atriums to the right and left? woods looks like he’s seen a ghost and is turning over Ghostface lines in his head. His heart is cold like Russia after the breakup, breakdown. “For those cold wars you need endurance,” but woods just don’t have it in him. A partnership that once warmed the cockles of his heart now cancers the conjugal visit. Contaminants stain the sheets of the connubial bed. Throw the Magnum to his head and squeeze until the bed’s completely red. He feels isotopically iced out. Feast on mercury fish (unavoidable). Hot wire his heart. Put an end to all this cold chillin’.

She dresses down to a demure “black bra strap,” but the sex is a mess. “Never nothing lurid” save for the “dead fish [and] wild boars swollen with tumors.” “Radiation flow out [his] phone jack like a Keurig,” because the best part of waking up is caesium in your cup. The love doesn’t last; the communication breaks down. Only “snippets of dialogue” detected. He might crack a smile but ain’t a damn thing funny. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder—to hold her, to swim in her “aqueous humor,” growing more splenetic by the second.

The chorus offers clarity: “I’m a sucker; I fall for it every time.” Every time—so this is a pattern of behavior. The past is not without incident. Chernobyl had partial meltdowns in ’82 and ’84 prior to the big blowup of ’86. woods is sympathetic when he self-deprecates: I’m a sucker. Sucker M.C.’s: move back, catch a heart attack.

The bubbler pools boil over, ooze corium: woods and the missus consider whether to give it another go. He reminisces on what was—the books he’d loaned her. DFW’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again was a miss (the title itself befitting of his synopsis on what they had between them).[22] As for the Solzhenitsyn? “She skipped to the end.” The novel in question is the 500-page Cancer Ward, no doubt. In it, Kostoglotov scans a health department certificate—“On it was written: ‘Tumor cordis; casus inoperabilis’ [cancer of the heart].” The whole library love affair sums up to say less. Yet Lessing says more of Mary Turner:

It had been a drug, a soporific, in the past, reading them; now, as she turned them over listlessly, she wondered why they had lost their flavor. Her mind wandered as she determinedly turned the pages; and she realized, after she had been reading for perhaps an hour, that she had not taken in a word…. For a few days the house was littered with books in faded dust covers.[23]

That isotope chill prevails. woods feels “the cold creeping in [his] bones.” Creeping, because he’s creeped-out. Gone from creeper to crept-upon. Feels it “in [his] bones” like a neoplasm—deep in the marrow. Bones thugged in disharmony. She’s Creepin on ah Come Up. Like a force of nature, her “wind whip around [his] home,” spookily. “She came when I’m sleeping,” he says, vulnerable as can be. A succubus looking for a sucker. Postpartum possibly, what with her “breasts leaking [and] pussy unkempt.” The description is adjectivally nauseating, in Marechera’s words.

Wasn’t only her uglies going bump in the night. Ethereal beauty emerged: “Around her the light bent.” She was aureoled—something saintly and subtle; not like the raging immolation of Frankie. Not the excessive sunlight of Frankie’s loft either—this light is ambient, “like an opium den,” with the requisite narcotic effect. An air of mystery: “[He] couldn’t quite see her face.” She was dressed in all black like The Omen [can’t spell women without it—am I right, fellas?]. Her fashion sense is dour like the weed she got “from her friend.” She moves with the night, wears its cloak. He pulls on the “piff with a fragile stem,” and we consider the fragility of his mindstate. You gots to chill, he tells himself. “I mind my business,” he raps. Strictly business. It’s a lesson hard-learned. Stay the fuck up out my biznass. “A very bad business,” the people say of Mary Turner’s death at the hands of her houseboy. “Nobody beats the Biz,” woods sings. The M-A-R-K-I-E might make the ladies scream and shout and be bound to wreck her body, but this ain’t no party, woods ain’t no king of discoing. “Real mens mind their own business,” Daniel Dumile definitively said. woods always with that palm-to-the-camera pose—behind that, he’s still Mugabe in a DOOM mask.

He needs a double portion of protection—some [will-]power beyond prophylaxis. Strives to keep the “wolves behind the fences.” This means setting “snares in the snow.” This means he’s “dug trenches,” “mined roads,” and “interrogated peasants,” but his precautions are futile: the “wolves [are] at home in bed.” We’re reminded of reliable hiding places. You’ve got to peel back the glossed lips and “peep the teeth like a dentist.” You guessed it: toothy: long and glistening. I think it’d be in your best interest to dead the Little Red Riding Hood worries and, instead, polish your Red Army Faction tactics. Might need a Heckler & Koch MP5, because her passions and ploys make her Meinhof more formidable than your Baader. There’s no keeping her down or out: “In the morning [his] pillow smell[s] of pine cones.”

26. SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN-EYED BANDIT

My betrothed fled to the forest, hid in the pines Still set a place for her, unlatched the door so she could come inside.

The encounter in the forest carries a chivalric quality, though chivalry is dead of a malignancy. We had the lady by the throat—carcinoma hugging her thyroid—yet still she pursues her lover. woods’ “Cossack Wedding” runs parallel to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. While sheltered in a lord’s castle, the lord’s lady seeks to seduce the young knight. With the lord busy leading a hunt “through a lime-leaf border” [cue Nate Dogg: smoke weed everyday], the lady sneaks into Gawain’s room. She finds him “slumbering in his sheets, / dozing as the daylight dapple[s] the walls.” Gawain, woozy, hears “the sigh of a door swinging slowly aside.” He lapsed by not locking the door (much like woods who “unlatched” it). He lifts his head and discovers the lady “looking her loveliest…craftily closing the door.” He feigns sleep, but the lady “cast[s] up the curtain” of his bed “and crept inside” [...yeah, just keep it on the down-low]. He fake-awakes, and she tells him, You’re tricked and trapped! She proposes a truce, threatening to “bind [him] in [his] bed” if he doesn’t agree to it. Gawain, recognizing the situation, refers to himself as a “prisoner” and asks her permission to dress, stalling. She denies the request and says she’ll “tuck in [his] covers corner to corner, / then playfully parlay with the man [she] [has] pinned.” The lady isn’t “hid in the pines” like woods’ stalker; she’s got him pinned. The lady tells Gawain, “do with me what you will. / I’ll come just as you call.” woods’ refrain of “...so she could come inside” hits different in those castle walls and bloody chambers. Ahooga!

27. SHE’S DRIVING ME OUT OF MY MIND: THAT GIRL IS POISON

Angels in white ask why she’s weeping: And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.

—John 20:13, KJV

“She said, Come get me and I’m yours,” woods testifies on “Magdalene,” but the communication has gotten so poor that the line actually “went dead.” Unlike Mary Magdalene, woods’ Magdalene won’t even approach the sepulcher. She wasn’t present for his crucifixion. She rather play the coy mistress. Come get me…. She offers herself as a possession on some Craigslist killer shit: CURB ALERT. Casual encounters have been SESTA-ed out of existence. This ain’t the glory days of “Ca$h 4 Gold” when woods could ask, Do I know you from Craigslist? Those erotic services have been Ctrl+Alt+Deleted. Not a “spray tan and glitter” situation either. On “Schism,” woods stumbles into “a strip club everywhere [he’s] touring,” but Magdalene isn’t a dancer “bent at the waist, left cheek on the mirror.” What’s sacred, what’s suitable? ELUCID queries. What’s profane, Magdalene? The wayward woman. You could imagine a time when she twerked—put her thing down, flipped it, and reversed it—as orgasmic as Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, but now she’s in distress with seven devils swelling in her silicone chest.

woods wants to keep her talking—he puts “bread on her phone” like some Eucharistic handout—but a bad penny finds its own way to hell, and Magdalene shuffles about as da baddest bitch since Trina. Brother on the phone tells woods, “She don’t wanna be saved—get it through your fucking head.” He can’t, though—he’s thick. Can’t accept he’s a savior denied, his overtures met with threats—he’s stubborner than that. woods is in hot pursuit, and his verse on “Magdalene” is a road novel.

This isn’t woods’ first foray into the genre. “Magdalene” calls back to “Sleep” from Today, I Wrote Nothing, but his latest car journey is far lonelier and grim—more big sleep than sleep. He’s driving unaccompanied, approaching the interchange of the road to Parnassus and the road to perdition. McCarthy’s “cities of the plain hum in the distance,” brimstone and fire falling fast as the AM radio static of a Reverend Branham sermon intensifies. At turns, as disquieting as a joyride in Christine from Mandeville to Sligoville. On “Swampwater,” the car ride was a commute with “really no time for fear.” Only had to compete with the “dying sun glare through thin atmosphere, [the] windshield smeared, [and] AC blasting old air.” Progress was on pause: “standstill traffic.” On “Pollo Rico,” woods recollects how his “heart used to sing crossing the old Goethals.” And on “All Jokes Aside,” he’s counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike like Paul Simon, gone looking for Amerika.

With “Magdalene,” woods’ actions are deliberate, not whimsical. He “slept all day so [he] could drive the next.” Early to rise, it was “still dark when [he] left.” The drive is immediately desolate—not gridlock’d, but “streets empty.” He hankers not for nicotine, but for the ritual that comes with smoking a pack. He tries not to fixate on the “check engine light lit.” The day ends as quickly as it begins. woods clicks on the high-beams, and those “brights plowed the night.” He’s alone in his eternity at the wheel, as Kerouac says. Like in Lynch’s Lost Highway, the dashed yellow lines of the asphalt-black road are swallowed up by speed.

There’s nothing too sexual about woods’ check engine light—nothing on par with ELUCID’s pleading Suck my dick and tell me I’m beautiful, anyway. woods is a forsaken man, and only so much lust can be summoned from his vehicle—the good vibrations of the rumble strips along the shoulder, okay, the quivering chassis—but his whip isn’t anywhere near as erotic as Robert Johnson’s ride on “Terraplane Blues.” Like woods, Johnson “feel[s] so lonesome” on the 1936 recording, but his “moan” is libidinous. He longs for his lady, eager to “hoist [her] hood” and “check [her] oil.” Where woods ignores the check engine light, Johnson pulls out his dipstick with the quickness. He wants to charge his lover’s batteries, give her generator a spark, and tangle with her wires. He holds out hope that her “spark plug will give [him] fire.”

woods can spot the cell towers on the horizon—the signal reliable enough for a “split-lip selfie” to come through. Not the first time—and likely not the last time—Magdalene has been hit, vows of gentleness notwithstanding. The man Magdalene is shacked up with readies “his great hand swinging yet again to smash,” like Marechera writes—prepared to “beat her until she [is] just a red stain.” Words chosen more carefully when the threat of violence in the air.

The “broken white lines” on the highway double as the lines on mirrored glass—vices and indulgences in which woods and Magdalene once partook. Blowing through states? More like, “Blowing through my mind,” if you were to ask Melle Mel. woods has got vision dreams of passion—a feeling of euphoria tempered by his previous Cocaine Blues. I took a shot of cocaine, and I shot my woman down: it might be worth the bid in Folsom. Less problems. No matter, woods is “riding clean”; no “trees mash[ing] in the grinder” like on “Sleep.” He’s been “eighteen months clean” of the stuff, but that doesn’t stop the dreams that form as his eyes grow heavy, hypnotized by the lines. He can “taste the acetate” in the dream—something visceral. Similarly piercing when he can’t “get hard,” but at least he gets to “[watch] her masturbate” like some woman with tattooed hands. Magdalene doesn’t bite her bottom lip, but “blood trickle[s] out one nostril.” Jerked awake.

Forty winks at a “rest area in [the] Carolinas” to regroup. He eats some Chick-fil-A, “washed [his] face” in the “gas station sink”—those baptismal waters. Probably no soap in the dispenser. A “funny feeling” creeps in when another text goes unanswered. He feels a “familiar weight,” and succumbs to the temptation of a pack of cigarettes. Count ’em: familiar three over [“weight”; “rage”; “place”]. You can call them Graymalkin, Paddock, and Harpier. That’s right—he’s driving a “car full of ghosts” in the “HOV lane.” Not only Magdalene’s ghost, but Stacy’s, Frankie’s, and who knows who else’s. His car holds four in the back; two if they’re fat. This savior business is nasty, no question. Pac was doing 85, trying to outrun his enemies, but to paraphrase woods on “Fuchsia & Green,” he and his phantom girlfriends ride to the bloody end like the Ceauşescus.

woods “coast[s] right off the interstate.” His final call goes “straight to voicemail.” No music; no Capone-N-Noreaga’s “Driver’s Seat”; just his own voice to serenade him. The “road narrows” as his options do. State troopers will ping his phone, “GPS [his] fate,”—they’ll discover his putrid “human remains when [they] dredge those lakes.” The same as how he dredged up those past relationships—interest piqued at the autopsy table. “Doubt and questions” remain, “rattl[ing] like wedding cans on the getaway car.” Some real Bonnie and Self Jupiter mythos. The holy matrimony, the monogamous union, the vindication: he gets none of it.

28. THE BLUES REMEMBERS EVERYTHING

…looking for a body…

—ELUCID, “God’s Feet” (2021)

The blues remembers how the pillow smells of pine cones. The blues remembers the accidents and where the bodies are buried beneath silt and hydrilla, slicked with algae. The blues insists on its ever-presence—an evergreen tradition. This is how Kurt Cobain, an anguished and bedraggled white man, can channel Lead Belly in 1993 from a 1944 recording. The tormented speaker of “In the Pines” (or “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” as it appears on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York, sans question mark—’cause you already know the answer) begs his girl (my girl, my girl…) not to lie to him. His suspicion (in the pines, in the pines) is somewhere “the sun don’t ever shine.” [The doubled-phrasing is in keeping with the theme of duplicity.] The dark woods are Jacob-and-Wilhelm level Grimm, but the forlorn lover follows anyway. He’s “going where the cold wind blows,” blows so hard that he’ll “shiver the whole night through.” Or, as Cobain sings it—thrrrrrroooooughhhaghhh—as if retched from the depths of his Flagyl-filled acid-scathed gut. On “Long Gone Lonesome Blues,” Hank Williams’ woman was “long gone,” leaving him “lonesome blue,” and his only solution was to “find [himself] a river, one that’s cold as ice.” Cobain’s pilled and drab olive-green cardigan can’t even begin to keep him warm.

Everything is so unformed, so wild, and so lonely! I never saw anything so lonesome as these woods are. Here you can ride miles and miles, hours and hours, and hear nothing but the swaying of the pine-trees, just as you hear it now.

—Nina Gordon in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred (1856)

The sun don’t ever shine in the pines; this ain’t Frankie’s corner apartment. Come night, the pines are dingy and frigid. There’s Soviet partisans in the pines, and woods’ betrothed from “Cossack Wedding,” too. Doris Lessing describes Mary Turner as “a woman whose life had been so unhappy because of economic pressure that she had literally pined to death.” To pine is to be in the pines.

Nirvana as descendent or derivative of the blues (a Situationist dérive more truly, maybe)? Well, reader, don’t you know that things go in cycles? Excursions are more easily achieved in motor vehicles—cover more ground that way. Don’t simply defer to Inspectah Deck and his evocations; Cobain, at times, was a wild rockstar who smashed guitars, but for most of his life he was a mordant personality inhabiting a Pacific Northwest region as putrefactive as a bacteria-packed Petri dish. Junk-sick, love-sick, and living homeless under bridges, he too remembers and represents what the country forgot. The drop-D riff on “Heart-Shaped Box” forms the basis of 3 Melancholy Gypsies’ “Sunsprayed” (oh, so Frankie wasn’t sunstruck—she was sunsprayed!), and woods interpolated “Come As You Are” on “Robespierre.” Memoria, Barrie McLain sings.

29.

The old man died beneath the wheels of the twentieth century.

—Marechera (1978)

The muck and mire of memory is heavy—we’re swimming in murky waters with naive hopes of recovering bodies. Bodies pulled from the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah. Bodies pulled from the greenhouse above the garage. Which way is up? The point-of-view switches from first- to third-person in the closing stanza of “In the Pines”; the brokenhearted man tells the conclusion of his story from the hereafter—of how he was “her husband,” and a “hard-working man,” and how “his head was found in a driving wheel, but his body never was found.” No human remains when you canvass the area. The driving wheel puts the scene of the accident at a train crossing, but it corresponds to the steering wheel just as well. If your mem’ry serves you well, as Dylan and the Band sang in a gin-soaked chorus, this wheel’s on fire: “...rolling down the road, / Best notify my next-of-kin, / This wheel shall explode!”

In The Grass is Singing, Lessing describes how Mary Turner notices her husband Dick in a way she never had before on the drive home from the market:

As he gripped the steering wheel, his lean hands, burned coffee-color by the sun, shook perpetually, although almost imperceptibly. It seemed to her a sign of weakness, that trembling; the mouth was too tight-set. He was leaning forward, gripping the wheel, gazing down the narrow winding bush track as if trying to foresee his own future.

Childless Dick Turner appears poised for an accident, an accident that keeps repeating through time. In James Agee’s A Death in the Family, posthumously published in 1957, a father dies on the road returning from visiting his own ailing father. A cotter pin that holds the steering mechanism together works itself loose. The grisly details of his demise are described to his wife while her children sleep upstairs:

[H]e must have hit a loose rock with one of the front wheels…. They think it must have wrenched the wheel right out of his hands and thrown him forward very hard so that he struck his chin, just one sharp blow against the steering wheel. And that must have killed him on the spot…. That auto threw him out on the ground as it careened down into that sort of flat, wide ditch.

On “bigfakelaugh,” woods waits interminably for his father to come home as the day turned to evening: “Tree limbs skim the water, the dark deepen, / The car swerve, rainy season.” woods relates his father’s final words on Camouflage’s “Dirge”: “There’s a noise in my head, / Last thing my father said, / On the side of the road, then he was dead.” Was the noise that of a fly buzzing, startled out of the swampwater?

In The House of Hunger, the protagonist watches a film: “Of the pictures shown there were many traffic snarl-ups and ghastly road accidents.” One of the accidents was of an “old black man, rags tucked in, cycling into town.” On “Dirge,” woods sees the same man, but younger: “I remember his bike twisted, / Wheels still stuck in that truck hood, / So, yeah, I don’t sleep that good.”

Much in the manner that the son in the Agee novel is told of his father’s death, Marechera writes: “Mother woke me up to tell me that father had been struck down by a speeding car at the roundabout; I went to the mortuary to see him, and they had sewn back his head to the trunk and his eyes were open. I tried to close them but they would not shut, and later we buried him with his eyes still staring upward.” Lead Belly said the man’s head was “found in a driving wheel,” and these decapitations are not so different.

These father-bodies stack up. (You can’t bury that many bodies; they burned ’em in piles.) The emotional weight: immense. We’re the children carrying the concept-heavy Dead Father with cables in Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father (1975)—it bears repeating: The Dead Father’s head. The main thing is, his eyes are open…. Dead, but still with us. Still with us, but dead. Child is father to the man, hopelessly dragging the corpse farther than it seems willing go.

30. IT WAS WRITTEN

...hundreds of thousands of people devote their entire lives…to acquiring skill in twisting every phrase in all possible ways and finding a rhyme for every word. And these people, often very kind, intelligent, capable of every sort of useful labour, grow wild in these exceptional, stupefying occupations and become dull to all serious phenomena of life, one-sided and self-complacent specialists…

—Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? (1897)

Many of Tolstoy’s adherents—of which there were many—had never seen his face. They depended on the realistic rendering completed by Nikolai Ge in 1884. In Ge’s painting, the writer is black-bloused and hunched over his desk. He sits with furrowed brow in deep thought, the straggles of his hoary fern-moss beard hanging low. Pen in hand, his papers are piled and strewn before him. He’s searching for words, like, “How can I put this when this itself is amorphous?”

In the self-portrait woods paints on “Schism,” the “ashtrays overflow.” He’s got the whole world in his hands, and the whole of human history is in his ashtray (there’s that ash heap again). But “the shit [woods] wrote,” it speaks to the tangible action of writing. Not saying he’s going to drag a stylus across a cuneiform tablet, but what he writes, you “can’t do it on a phone”—to do so would minimize the practice and the work itself. In The Grass is Singing, Mary Turner receives a note from a messenger—a request from her husband. She has to “stifle a scream” when she sees the native holding it: “He held it as illiterate natives always handle printed paper: as if it is something that might explode in their faces.” woods subverts this image of the subaltern. The paper won’t “explode” in his face; rather, what he writes on the paper—those incendiary lyrics—will blow up in the pallid faces of his oppressors. Zulu Tolstoy toying with the colonizers. No surprise here: we always assumed he was in the booth at Steel Tipped Dove’s reading off parchments.

There were days, woods admits, where he wrote nothing. On “Lost Blocks,” he tossed “rhyme books in a rubbish tin,” but now “they gon’ live on.” How could he dare be so arrogant? Like Paris, the devil made him do it. He tells us so on “Fuchsia & Green”: “The devil move my pencil.” Faustian bargain: Robert Johnson negotiating the cotton fields of Dockery Plantation to arrive at the crossroads; woods navigating the necropolitan streets of rubble to arrive at the Cross-Bronx Expressway. But you can’t blame the devil like ELUCID said on Save Yourself; you’ve got to save yourself. woods is mostly on the humble, but, as he said on “FNU LNU,” he lets “the pen gloat.”[24]

31.

My thoughts chalked themselves on the black page of a dreamless sleep.

— Marechera (1978)

Rappers are a logocentric lot—viewing what they do on the mic (speak, spit, et al.) as closer to the truth. Each is a god of the spoken word (In the beginning was the Word…), world-builders, speaking everything-is-everything into summary 16s—each an O.C.: Word…Life. Freestyling, especially, appears to reinforce this idea, as improvised thoughts manifest as speech. Writing, historically, is seen as subordinate to speech—secondary, a hype-man at most, a freestyle transcription. That’s why Socrates didn’t write shit down. Neither did Stringer Bell (Nigga, is you takin’ notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?) or Paulie Walnuts (I don’t write nothin’ down). Writing solicits danger—the risk of being too removed from the original thought (and that thought is the truth, Ruth). In Of Grammatology, Derrida undoes this notion of speech as king, as prime mover [of crowds]. He instead argues that language results from the interplay between speech and writing. Writing composes A Book of Human Language (as Aceyalone made known, establishing the guidelines in ’98).

billy woods reminds us, frequently, that what he delivers to us through his voice [presence] comes off the page [absence]. We know he stares at the page, blunted. We never see the well-worn and thumbed-through rhyme book, but he draws our attention to it: The shit I wrote…. Others aren’t so quick to; they uphold the primacy of speech (“I think about what I’m gonna say, but it’s never pen to paper,” Jay-Z has repeatedly claimed). To write, for many, is to endanger or deaden. woods, meanwhile, welcomes the risk (...’cause I’m HAZARDOUS, Godfather Don declares). If the words die on the page, woods simply resurrects them on the mic, on the stage—the resuscitation as heavy and as heaving as a Biz Markie beatbox. Still, nothing is ever simple. We could argue woods never writes either—after all, “they said the greats ain’t write shit, they just poured out they anguish.”

32. They gon’ be here when all y’all are gone.

woods no longer has fears that he may cease to be. Unlike John Keats who expired at 25 (like Tupac, like Scott La Rock), tuberculo-sick, a hacking cough into a blood-spattered cloth, woods takes stock of his life and rap career. Keats wrote “When I Have Fears” in 1818, but the sonnet wasn’t published until 30 years after the poet was placed in cemetery clay. He knew it was coming—some Don Killuminati-type premonitions. Even left instructions for his epitaph: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. The Young English Poet clearly had a “tombstone head and a graveyard mind,” to quote Bo Diddley on “Who Do You Love?” (For who do? read “hoodoo”—and so well, it’s a spell, hell…) “Just 22,” Diddley sang, “and I don’t mind dyin’.” Keats knew his life and lyrics were fleeting—that’s why his name was “writ in Water.” Another sonneteer washed. Another man done gone. Keats stands “on the shore / Of the wide world” alone, and he “think[s] / Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.” Like woods smoking and thinking until those “ashtrays overflow.” Catch wreck and then shipwreck. “[L]ove and fame” dissolve into “nothingness” and “sink.” “Spanish galleon—I was sunken in place,” woods raps on “Classical Music.” But he gains a Mariel boatlift on “Fuchsia & Green”: “I’m a vessel.” AKAI SOLO previously spoke to the fact: “Even though the vessels differ, we’re all still sailing.” woods’ flow is blood-flow—arterial spray. Suffer and survive the aqua seafoam shame.

Keats and woods, stubbornly, make the decision to write—acts of preservation: etched in stone or grooved into vinyl. For all the afters possible: posterity, posthumous, post no bills over these epitaphs. On “Robespierre,” woods promised: “You niggas gonna remember me even if it’s burning in effigy.” But on “Schism,” the picture is rosier. “My poems need a home,” woods raps—taking up residence in our consciousness, likely—and it’s there that they’ll “live on.” In fact, “they gon’ be here when all y’all is gone.” They’ll exist beyond us—we’re transitory; his poems are not. His lyrics won’t deign to settle for a file “on a phone.” “Maybe a little limerick,” he concedes, but even five Edward Lear-like nonsense lines harness substantial power. On Armand Hammer’s “War Stories,” a Messiah Musik-produced track from Shrines with Tom Waitsesque conundrum percussion, we learn a limerick is all it takes to “get the plantation lit.” woods is focused on the Payback. Time is Running Out Fast, and payback is a thing you gotta see (all hail James Brown). “It wasn’t all at once,” woods admits, “but trust me: everyone paid.” We knew his agenda coming in; knew he was close to completion. On “Indian Summer”: “I swore vengeance in the seventh grade— / Not on one man, the whole human race. / …I’m almost done—every debt gets paid.” God be praised. God bless the dead, but we not talking about John Keats. We’re talking about william woods.

In the moment, it might feel like “ya mans was doing too much,” but he MUST NOT SLEEP; MUST KEEP SCRIBBLING. Can’t stop before his “pen has gleaned [his] teeming brain.” Killah Keats can’t be laid to rest “before high-pilèd books” are written. Like Keats, woods wants to behold “Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance” on the “night’s starred face.” He wants to “trace / Their shadows” into your record collection, if not the Heinemann African Writers Series. He wants us all to be able to say, Ya mans did every damn thing.

33. EXEUNT

Soft you. A word or two before you go.

—Othello (5.2.397)

I’ve said too much—that’s my bad, but “Pollo Rico” and “All Jokes Aside” are a dyad of resignation, a surrendering. A removal of the signum. Scratch the name from the account book (“bad memories, sad endings”). Don’t leave one damn identifying mark. I think of Chartres again—without a signature, Welles said. “Everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash,” yet, the church remains. As “Pollo Rico” begins, we know we’ve arrived at our destination—a point of no return as pointless as each before it, so clearly there’s “no point going back and forth over who did what.” For his part, woods steps back and widens his view: “My character arc: Rolling Loud to Shakespeare in the Park.” Lord Scotch to Lord Chamberlain’s Men. woods stands tall, at the edge, like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea and Fog—above the crowds, above the clouds where the sounds are original, like Guru, like a guru. He looks, listens, and observes as a “man apart, drink[ing] alone [in a] packed bar.”

What are you waiting for? A dream deferred, a future unfixed, or maybe just awaiting the end. You can’t stop what’s coming (as woods said on “Fever Grass,” but also Uncle Ellis in No Country for Old Men). It ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity. You’ve got to be ready, like Marechera: “I was at that moment prepared for the knife-thrust.” woods is primed to “get stabbed [and] stagger off in the dark.” Is this a dagger which I see before me? Lance Un Rivera shanked in the club by Jigga Man; Hamlet having the potent poison [of paraquat] quite o’er-crow his spirit. Or maybe he stabs himself like Othello. Whatever the case, he’s the star of the show, and then instantly he’s someone else, an “understudy” just “waiting in the wings.”

I’m always waiting on the thunderclap, woods raps on “Paraquat.” In T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the thunder speaks (section V. of the poem is titled “What the Thunder Said”), and the message is bleak: “He who was living is now dead, / We who were living are now dying.” In The Grass is Singing (its title culled from The Waste Land), Mary Turner is menaced by thunder as Moses, the houseboy, braces to cut her down with his weapon—likely a scythe, what with its “long curving shape.” She screams, but the cry is “stopped by a black wedge of hand inserted between her jaws.” Mary describes Moses as one with Nature (“the bush avenged itself”). Moses is only the medium, not a vengeful victim who had suffered her whip across his face and wore its scar. She sees him as inseparable from the trees, which “advanced in a rush, like beasts, [and] the thunder was the noise of their coming.” After the murder, Moses “look[s] down at the piece of metal he held, which he had picked up in the bush, and had spent the day polishing and sharpening. The blood trickled off it…” Some real stab your brain with your nose bone revenge.

34.

She saw on his face that queer grin of his, that was more a baring of the teeth than a smile: self-critical, assessing, defeated. She hated to see it.

—Lessing

As embittered as you might be, you’ve got to adjust your expectations. woods’ uncle teaches the truth to the youth. He says, Hey, youth—here’s the truth: “When the revolution was over, they gave ’em half what they promised, / Let’s be honest, / And the ones who bust they guns went home to tin cups of tea, that same plate of porridge.” Even revolutionaries—those guerillas in the mist—resort to Oliver Twist begging: Please, sir, I want some more. But the diminishing returns mean gruel’s all you get in the end. The uncle tells him, “They can’t bury that many bodies, [so] they burned ’em in piles.” No other choice—it’s a public health issue. Can’t leave bodies exposed to be picked apart by scavenging dogs like Polyneices. It won’t be cinematic, his uncle essentially says. woods can barely see his face through the dark: “I could see his teeth—it wasn’t a smile.”

35.

The chorus of “Pollo Rico” reveals woods is keeping vigil. We who were living are now dying. He slips another dollar into the “hospital vending machine” with the despondency of a man who just signed the DNR. It’s New Year’s Eve, which is just another way of saying it’s the end of something. Even if he sneaks in the Clicquot, it’s still all suffering. A last meal of pollo rico and yuca fries. A tray table on castors becomes a table of plenty.

Here comes the sun-king: “Louis XIV in a vape”—something regal, exalted; something Reggie noble. That’s the sufferer’s divine right. “You hit it twice,” and the two hits speak to the two levels of familiarity operating here: woods’ familiarity with the D2 button on the vending machine grid, and our familiarity with the experience in general. We’ve all been in that same waiting room, flattening crinkled dollar bills against our thighs, making meals of those same salty and sugary snacks—a danse macabre we all do. The images of the vending machine and the Cheetos is something so banal compared to what woods hopes for: “Nothing but love in paradise.” Of course, that love doesn’t arrive until the very end, once reality sets in. Prior to that, it’s only offhand hoes (bringing to mind those jihadis in the cockpit, aiming for 72 virgins).

In Richard Klein’s words, the Louis XIV vape “is itself a volume, a book or scroll that unfolds…”—[the unfolding blunt scroll of Tical’s cover again, still whipping in the wind]—“...its multiple, heterogenous, disparate associations around the central, governing line of a generally murderous intrigue.” The vape, then, is both the breath of life (first hit) and the last breath of death (second hit).

In woods’ hands, the Louis XIV vape is a thyrsus, the wand of Dionysus, which Baudelaire took to be the symbol of all poetic language. In 1869’s Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire calls it “a sacerdotal emblem” in the hands of killah priests, “celebrating the divinity of whom they are the interpreters.” The thyrsus, physically, is “a baton, a purp staff, a hop-pole, a vine-prop; dry, straight, and hard.” The thyrsus is twined with “stems and flowers” in “capricious meanderings.” The vape—like the blunt or the joint—is woods summoning us to church through his words.

36.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

—James Joyce, “The Dead” (1914)

On “All Jokes Aside,” woods is the sick one now, “surprised” and indignant about the co-pay for his meds. “No cocaine” to numb the pain (though it is a “snow day”). Sips of soda for his upset stomach—which is Lee Perry-level upset—and plays math rock and Roc Marciano softly on the stereo—you know the selections. Don Caballero’s sophomore album from ’95, my guess, what with its twelve-framed smoke-stack emission cover art and flare-stack back cover. The only acceptable Roc Marci on a snow day is “Snow,” so let’s go and finesse the flow. Brick as heck out there, in here, as “the cold wind writhes about purposelessly as if there was nothing but air in the gleaming casket of creation,” Marechera says. So feel blessed for the creature comforts and let yourself get weepy and introspective.

“Once they broke open the safe,” woods raps, but we know they is just as well him. “The eyes take a moment to adjust so you can see what’s inside,” and woods takes an inventory: a meaningful “newspaper dated March 15, 88’; a “few CD-Rs” (early demos); “Megagraphitti on VHS” (Vordul always haunting his headspace); “a guap of haze, just in case.” The Mr. Serv-On CD reminds woods, and us, that lives are long. Picture billy woods riding a gold-plated No Limit tank, not a T-55. Like a rush of blood to the head, woods assesses the damage of his personal history. “The sarcophagus crack the purest,” he said on “Cossack Wedding,” but the pharaoh’s corpse is at the whim of so many changing hands, all its component parts purloined, perused, and exploited.

Really, though, “All Jokes Aside is another love[-sick] song, like so many on Church—chronicles of a cleft communion. We hear the moans of Desdemona. And woods finds himself on the road again—Magdalene still back at the half-empty apartment, checking that tomb. This car episode is an exodus, or an escape. Like on “speak gently,” woods chooses to “E-ZPass past the cowards.” But once the traffic clears, woods takes his “sweet time, the scenic route,” as he did on “Western Education is Forbidden.” He misses and longs for that “burnt sugar sweet between those thighs,” but he has to settle for schlocky and saccharine love songs. Speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike singing “Sweet Caroline.” Emotions overflowing, tears in his eyes, he wails, Good times never seem so till it’s goodbye. woods is “sorry for the hurt [he’s] caused,” and his guilty pleasure road mix soundtracks his own guilt.

All told, woods “enjoyed the ride” of the relationship, but “she’s gone”—and he repeats it so many times that we know she ain’t coming back. Pac poured out a little liquor, and woods put the church in the sky. His new life will be lived “after the locust storm.”

37.

We finna smoke like it ain’t no tomorrow.

—Scarface, on Devin the Dude’s “Sticky Green” (1998)

...if there was a swarm of locusts, then he took it for granted, with a kind of angry but determined fatalism, that they would make straight for his most promising patch of mealies.

—Lessing

woods asks for the angels to blow the horns fast—he’s been read’ to go. Those horn blasts mean the dead is coming home. This is the day of the locusts. This is post-fallout, so rise up out of your shelters. woods joins Marechera in accepting that “there was almost nothing left but locust-like raspings of wings in his mind.” In Things Fall Apart, the inevitable was irrefutable: “...at last the locusts did descend. They settled on every tree and on every blade of grass.” Achebe’s locusts manifest a colonial settlement; for woods’, the locusts are more like a divorce settlement. The locusts, which appear from “the smoke of a great furnace,” fall “upon the earth: and unto them was given power” (Revelations 9:2-3, KJV). The blighting insects are like the boll weevils Lead Belly sang of—they’re “lookin’ for a home,” just as we all are.

38.

When the face gets revealed, game gets real. On “Pollo Rico,” woods “showed [his] face.” On “All Jokes Aside,” he flips through a “couple of pictures where [he] didn’t cover [his] face.” These are details paid to a face that has systematically been effaced. Catch a body, head for Houston. Shave the beard. Four names; two aliases. And all of ’em is mud. “I been around since long,” woods says, “I got a couple names.” He’s had to be both mask and man. In his Marechera-mode, he must create for himself “a labyrinthine personal world which would merely enmesh [him] within its crude mythology.” He’s had to “plot the coup, while [he] cop[s] the plea,” and the assonantal connection of those dactyls [plot the coup | cop the plea] in reverse order goes to show how fast he can flip it: mask on, mask off. He’s looking to the next move while settling another. And we’re carried along, swiftly and smoothly, on the short-o of plot and cop.

A fact of life…we’re going to die. ‘Be of good heart,’ cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced—but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.

—Orson Welles, F for Fake (1973)

woods is the opposite of Lessing’s Dick Turner, a man who “did not put these feelings into words; he had lost the habit of word-spinning, living the life he did.” woods is the word-spinner, tireless. And when he feels, fair creature of an hour, that he shall never look upon thee more (the crowd, not Keats’ object of affection), he puts pen to pad again. The debt he feels toward the audience is the same debt he feels toward himself. “I was contrite until I had the crown,” he discloses. Those hard-c’s, r’s, and n’s, after all, sound as serious as contrition—give me that old time missionary Christianity ’cause it’s good enough for me? woods, we know, is remorseless. He’s done all he can. “I was right all along!” is what he tells the crowd. He’s “waving on the runway walking backwards,” blowing kisses at his opps. Or, more likely, he’s “squatting on stage” as Mo Niklz lowers the channel fader on the mixer. On “Paraquat,” woods said it’s “easy to take, hard to give back,” and that sentiment circles around again on “All Jokes Aside” when he’s “hoping [he] never took more than [he] gave.” He hasn’t.

Footnotes:

[1] According to Reggie Noble, there’s a Million and 1 Buddah Spots, but in an interview titled “The Redman Boom Buying Guide” with On the Go magazine in 1995, he confirms “116 is the Spizot.”

[2] Whitey always doubles back. On “Myth” from Terror Management, woods noted the eternal recurrence: “Whitey stole the soul—came back ’round like we old friends.”

[3] Larry Bird’s Celtic teammate Robert Parish was busted for 5 ounces of weed and got six months probation. As per Ricky Powell’s burned-out reporting for Grand Royal: “I just do it for relaxation,” the Chief said.

[4] A Palace from Ruins, August 17, 2020 episode with Armand Hammer.

[5] Lessing’s Mary Turner heard the percussive sound, too: “...at night the rain would drum down on the roof, on and on, endlessly…”

[6] Just as his auntie’s “bent back” is inverted by his cousin who sits in the “back bent”—woods’ words and imagery are in constant communication.

[7] “Marley’s ghost” may as well reference Bob Marley, too. Reggae’s opaque presence is less fog and more smoke: that sacramental ganja encircling the visitor. “The world will confuse ya and you’re worried and don’t have no time to think, and herb is that thing that’ll give you a little time for yourself so you can live,” Marley says.

[8] The cassette shell case for Church is tinted radioactive green—that same Fresh Kill fluorescence to it. The interior of the J-card is military camo—not the pixelated version of the Iraq War, but the Vietnam-era green and black blotches. The kind you’d see in Platoon, Dafoe shotgunning Sheen through his Remington.

[9] Marechera writes: “Richter would not be Richter without the staining of those baptismal scars.” Late in Fresh Kill, after their sushi is outed as toxic, Naga Saki rebrands as Mumbo Gumbo. The waitress serves up “Swamp Potion” drinks and the owner sings “Kingston Town”: Sad to say, I’m on my way…

[10] In Southern Change, Issue 41 of Moore’s Swamp Thing saga, is an issue about a soap opera being filmed on a Louisiana plantation. Swamp Thing comes upon a cemetery site and asks, What is it…that attracts them…to this dismal place? Louisiana locals are hired to play slaves, and method-acting soon becomes possession-acting.

[11] Toxins run through woods’ discography. Armand Hammer’s “Dettol” is an antiseptic and “VX” is a nerve agent. Our whole world’s like Mr. Gower’s apothecary, delivering poison to the masses. woods and ELUCID slap us upside the head and make our ears bleed.

[12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20] “ECOMOG”; “checkpoints”; “Houthi”; “toothy”; “Western Education is Forbidden”; “That Was Then”; “Falling Out the Sky”; “Black Sunlight”; “The Fuhrman Tapes”]

[21] “Cossack Wedding” is a disaster tour, whereas Aethiopes took us along on a cannibal tour. Scared to death and scared to look, we’re shook—but woods will have it no other way. He forces us to stare, and we can’t help ourselves. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes how “fear of the present leads to mystification of the past.”

[22] How interesting that a David Foster Wallace book is offered up—the pale king of dick-lit. Perhaps Wallace’s stalking and walloping of Mary Karr should give woods’ partner pause.

[23] Later in the novel, Mary returns to reading, but on her own terms: “Her wonder deepened. She had not seen books for so long she would find it difficult to read. She looked at the titles: Rhodes and His Influence: Rhodes and the Spirit of Africa: Rhodes and His Mission. ‘Rhodes,’ she said vaguely, aloud. She knew nothing about him, except what she had been taught at school, which wasn’t much. She knew he had conquered a continent. ‘Conquered a continent,’ she said aloud, proud that she had remembered the phrase after so long. ‘Rhodes sat on an inverted bucket by a hole in the ground, dreaming of his home in England, and of the unconquered hinterland.’ She began to laugh; it seemed to her extraordinarily funny.”

[24] woods’ doesn’t feel the need to brag; he allows his personified pen to engage in the gloating. He doesn’t punch—his lines do. Derrida explains that “one must think of writing as a game within language.” Today’s claims that an MC’s “pen game” is strong makes an apt metaphor. Socrates, in The Phaedrus, says “the play is played out; and the rhetoric enough.”

Images:

The Teacher's Guide to the Nuwuabian's Language frontispiece (detail) | “Zev Love X and Subroc at the compound.” Image appeared on the back of Operation Doomsday album cover (1999) | Fresh Kill, dir. Shu Lea Cheang, 1994 (screenshot) | Redman, Muddy Waters album cover (1996) | Do the Right Thing, dir. Spike Lee, 1989 (screenshot) | Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing, First UK edition, 1950 (detail) | “Marley's Ghost,” Charles Dickens, illustration by John Leech, 1843 edition (detail) | Wood engraving published Harper's New Monthly Magazine (September 1856) | billy woods, “Pollo Rico” music video, dir. Joseph Mault, 2022 (screenshot) | billy woods, Today, I Wrote Nothing CD cover, photography by Alexander Richter (2015) | The Saga of Swamp Thing, “Another Green World,” Alan Moore, Issue 23 (April 1984) | Brian Eno, Another Green World, 1975, back cover (detail) | Berkeley Barb, 1968 (detail) | Cannabis sativa, From Franz Eugen Köhler's Medizinal-Pflantzen (1887) | “Hangin’ Wit’ Da Clan,” High Times (1996) | Prince of Darkness, dir. John Carpenter, 1987 (screenshot) | Berkeley Barb, Issue 508, May 1975 (detail) | Romare Bearden, The Piano Lesson (Homage to Mary Lou) (1983) | Suttee. Gouache painting by an unknown Indian artist (ca. 1880) | The Chernobyl nuclear power plant sits crippled two to three days after the explosion in Chernobyl, Ukraine in April, 1986. In front of the chimney is the destroyed 4th reactor. (AP) | Black Market Research, East Village Other (1968) | Lost Highway, dir. David Lynch, 1997 (screenshot) | Picture of Kurt Cobain’s home taken April 8, 1994, the day he was found dead there. Mike Urban. Copyright MOHAI, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection | Nikolai Ge, Portrait of Leo Tolstoy (1884) | Pope Sylvester II and the Devil in an illustration (c. 1460) | Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich (1818) | Black Market Research, East Village Other, 1968 (detail)| The Teacher's Guide to the Nuwuabian's Language frontispiece (detail)

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violetsystems · 1 year

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#personal

I think there's been enough space between real life and my emotions to talk about it. I don't see the failure as any other way when it comes. And it has been a lesson in constants. That's the trick of isolation unfortunately without much validation. You try to convince yourself that your situation is different. And people are wall to wall around you trying to manipulate you into thinking worse. There's a point when you call bullshit. And for me and the rest of American society it just doesn't happen once. You have to be constantly vigilant of the world around you. When I sat in training for a shitty job at a culturally appropriated sushi shop I was told the reason sexual harassment laws exist is because of "snowflakes." I've heard that term more than I have wanted to since I've set back into mainstream society. It always comes from people who sound like they do too much cocaine. Which is a lot of people out here. I wish it weren't the easiest way to describe the "wall" but it is. I've never done the shit. I drink a lot of coffee black. But even that is limited to three cups a day. I set a lot of rules and routines for myself that I try to follow. When I walk into an environment that just lets caution and shit hit the fan, it is jarring. Have I been exactly cradled by society from a social justice perspective? No. I unfortunately know the true depth of the Alan Moore paradigm. You can try to reach out for help but nobody is in control. There's enough people to sound nice and make you feel wanted for a second. But ultimately they don't want to face or confront the root of these problems. Which is seriously not helping by not confronting or calling people out on their bullshit. I know how it is. You can and will be blacklisted. You'll be on Tumblr for years writing about it even through the writer's strike. You see I literally took a nine dollar and hour job with tips not for the YouTubes but because that was all that would pay attention to me for the last two and a half years. I've had resumes at major fashion houses, the ACLU, even the office of police accountability. And I'm just some invisible schmuck who should have learned my place in society and not invested in a rival EV company as to not piss off the mob or billionaires with my forcible retirement and pension. How do you even explain shit anymore without it sounding like a treatment for a shitty Tarantino movie. Which is why I probably took a few weeks off to digest it all.

I got punked at the sushi place like I get punked in the neigborhood. People want to excuse it away as my own fault and not listed up in a gang database. They want to use me as a soapbox to show everything that is wrong with a subgroup of people I don't actually belong to. They try with group interventions that skirt the boundary of legality because they know no one like me can afford 20k for a lawyer to retaliate. But there's some meat to it that drips off the bone like a real car wreck when it is allowed to acquiesce. It follows me around like a sick dog and I get it to do tricks. The performative cyclone that is just waiting for my big moment to break it up and cuck me back into my apartment thinks it gets away with murder. These shit heads are in broad daylight with the intimidation and retaliation. And I watch people helplessly wondering if I'll reach out and explain it to them so they can open their big fat mouth and make it worse. I've done that enough for years. The truth is I should have known how fucked up things were and I do. I spent most of my time saving money and looking for ways to pare down my own expenses. But never did I think I'd be sitting here making excuses for it for other people at this level. I honestly should be the one to break it to people that America is more than fucked right now. You have a Supreme Court that just casually rules against fair use and women's bodies. You have a performative layer of news that is just for profit propaganda. You have no way to be or feel represented other than writing on a dead social media platform to friends around the world. And you have every cokehead in this city riled up and soaking up the attention because they're desperate for annihilation. And I see no way for these people to be able to pay the bills at this rate. And this worries me in a lot of ways. I'm not just looking for a job for my future. I'm an only child with divorced parents. My mom could lose her house. My dad won't help her. People around this fucking neighborhood project their sitcom lifestyle of socially oppressed millienial and I'm living a fucking horror show. My life out here is nothing different from Cuba outside of the thin layer of constitutional rights and fuck you attitude that keeps people from getting in my face.

I don't see a future for me here. I don't see anything. I wake up. I go to sleep. I had my identity, my dreams, my friends and my narrative robbed and toyed with around the world by vile, petulant mother fuckers who deserve to eat curb repeatedly. And they will metaphorically speaking. I'm the one who has to clean it all up. Trash dripping from someone's balcony onto mine. Rabid animals roaming my garden. People looking the other way or making fun of my physical appearance or political beliefs with litter and trash. Alleys full of fentanyl and heroin needles. You people love that cheap low rent lifestyle that steals people's life savings and gives it back to the bank. The same bank running PPP loan scams so brazen you could leave it all in a James Joyce book out near the dumpster like the rockford files for a tenet style dead drop and nobody... I mean nobody will touch that shit with a ten foot pole. They'll never go on record. They'll make memes about you on their fake social media when you ask for help. These people are more than petty. These people are consistently vile. And people make excuses for what they did to me. Buried my narrative. Called me crazy. Turned me into the legend of curly's gold on the Internet. A living, breathing world heritage post locked behind a paywall that doesn't pay me at all. What part of my rights evaporated and shit the bed in the Stardew Valley sense. I don't even really believe I communicate to the outside world anymore. My mental health is of no concern to the people who actively as a group on this block with the help of nbc universal partake in Ed Burke style bullying on a daily basis. And the feds just watch. You might think they set this shit up. America is one step ahead of you. My country is nothing but an insurance company with an army. And I'm sure they'll write you a check if you survive. Most of us weren't meant to past forty. And that's why I'm already dead to people in a sense. My emotions towards apologies from people died a long time ago. I was always trying to move on. And in some ways, the writing is still on the wall that I don't belong here as a victim for a bunch of closet terrorists. But if the shoe were on the other foot. I'd rather terrorize you with my success. So I'm passing you the fail ball slugger. Make it count. <3 Tim

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tailsrevane · 2 years

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[comic review] batman: the killing joke (1988)

“hello. i came to talk. i’ve been thinking lately. about you and me. about what’s going to happen to us, in the end. we’re going to kill each other, aren’t we? perhaps you’ll kill me. perhaps i’ll kill you. perhaps sooner. perhaps later. i just wanted to know that i’d made a genuine attempt to talk things over and avert that outcome. just once.”

i mean, there's not much i can really say about this one at this point that's going to be remotely surprising, right? it’s well-written enough for what it is i guess. i’m glad joker’s “one bad day” theory is resoundingly defeated, though there are times when lesser writers seem to buy into it wholeheartedly. the actual confrontations between batman and joker are pretty good.

but, y’know. there’s the treatment of barbara gordon. the way she’s literally objectified by the story. i think a lot of people associate this story with her, but the story treats her as nothing more than the knife to be twisted in her father as part of the joker’s plan.

i also think a lot of people who haven’t read this are under the impression that this story is oracle’s origin story, but again nope. alan moore was under the impression that he was writing a non-canon side story, and had no plans for what would happen with barbara after the story. he has publicly stated that he thought canonizing the story was an absolutely awful choice. which is nice, but it doesn’t actually make the way he treated her in this not horrible? so, you know.

again this isn’t the worst batman/joker story if you look at their actual interactions in it, but on balance there is just pretty clearly more bad than good here. c-rank

#batman #batman: the killing joke #the joker #batman comics #dc comics #comic review #reviews #comics

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laceyeb · 3 years

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Because I’m determined to be excited about this season of DWTS (and I genuinely am!), I’m going to try to post much more about this season than I did last season and start sharing my opinions now! Starting with the cast thus far of course, with my excitement ranking out of 10 because I do what I want.

Jojo Siwa and Jenna - 1000/10

As soon as I heard about Jojo being with a female pro, I started manifesting Jenna with all my heart and I am sooooo excited!!!! I’m not saying that ANY female pro on this show is even remotely homophobic in any way shape or form because I do NOT believe any of them are. HOWEVER... If I had to pick one female pro who I feel like would be most “onboard,” it would be Jenna. (Or Sharna, but I’d prefer Jojo with Jenna just because Jenna is younger.) If this sentiment/how I expressed it comes off problematic, please let me know because that is absolutely not what I intended and I hope you understand what I’m trying to say. Anyways... I don’t know if I’m anxious, excited, terrified, curious, overjoyed, etc. etc. etc. Perhaps all at once. I can’t wait to see how this goes and how it is received. I’ve already had a small rant about the target demographic of this show, but I’m choosing to be optimistic. I would definitely prefer that they don’t spend the ENTIRE season talking about the ground-breakingness. First episode, yes. Very important, very groundbreaking, etc. Then I’d like this to just be normalized. I don’t want them to be treated any different than any other couple. I just want them to be like everyone else. I don’t expect them to change the entire world, but this is still very very important and I am very very excited. And anxious. (Also not my anxiety acting up when I sent my mom the rumored list so far and her response was “I’m disgusted.” She’s apparently “disgusted” by the fact that there are people on the cast she’s never heard of. As if we haven’t been doing this for 30 seasons now.)

Sunisa Lee and Sasha - 8/10

I did not pay any attention to gymnastics during the Olympics (aside from the general news I stumbled upon on the internets) because all my waking hours were focused on soccer, but she’ll obviously be great. I would not say that Sasha is my favorite pro, but they’ll likely be a great match. I need to find some interviews of her or something to get a sense of her personality. I’m excited though because I’m sure they’ll be fun to watch.

Kenya Moore and Brandon - 2.5/10

I’ve never heard of her, so I have no opinion. I do have a soft spot for Brandon though. Is she like well known? Popular? Likable? Dancingly inclined?

Amanda Kloots and Alan - 6.5/10

You know I love Alan with my whole heart, so that automatically gives them some points. I recognize her name and that’s about all I’ve got for her. In the little bit I see (I’m just using the Kristyn Burtt article for this), she seems very excited to be there. Dream come true and all that. I will always give anyone a chance if they come in with such a good attitude.

Olivia Jade and Val - 5/10

Right in the middle 5/10 for this because I just don’t know what to expect. Like are they going to edit her packages sympathetically or actually sympathetic AND convincing? Do I feel any excitement for her to be in the spotlight like this? Not really. But she might surprise me. Val can really do no wrong, though, at the risk of starting an uprising, I’ve kinda lost interest in him as a pro as of late. No real reason. Just feel like there’s other pros I care more about/am more invested in.

Matt James and Lindsay - 5.5/10

I’m very excited to have Lindsay back, so let’s start there! It feels like it’s been about 27 years since we’ve seen her, despite the fact that she posts about 4 hours of IG stories a day and I happily watch every second. I don’t know a whole lot about Matt aside from the fact that he’s a Bachelor guy. I don’t think I’m exactly thrilled about what little I’ve seen and I don’t know what he’s like personality-wise. But at least Lindsay is back and seems happy so far.

Iman Shumpert and Daniella - 2/10

I’ve never heard of this guy and could not care less about basketball, so I don’t even have a reason to get excited. I’ve got nothing against Daniella at all, we just don’t know her that well yet. Is he well-known/likable/have a likelihood of dancing skills?

Jimmie Allen and Emma - 9/10

I don’t know a great deal about him personality-wise either, but I’m already excited! I love Emma, I love a country singer on DWTS, I love getting to see someone on the show who I already know. Very excited all around! Can he dance? Who knows! But I look forward to finding out! He’s got a few great songs that I absolutely adore and I need to make a playlist! I think they are going to make a good pair and I’m glad he’s with a pro I really like (aka not Cheryl I guess 🤷🏻‍♀️).

Brian and Sharna - 11/10

Sharna. Sharna’s man. Sharna in love. Sharna happy. What else could I possibly ask for?! I wondered if they would partner them together or not. In a non-pandemic world, maybe not. What with married pros living apart from each other for the season, they would have to too if they weren’t partnered together. Not that they deserve any special treatment. But if they don’t HAVE to be apart, why have them be apart you know? It’s going to be really entertaining to watch Sharna post about her “partner” for the next two weeks when we all know it’s him. Believe it or not, I have not followed their relationship really super close and they also don’t post an excessive amount together (which I have no problem with because people are entitled to their privacy and what not), so I’m excited to get to see so much more of them together! If Sharna’s happy, I’m happy. Can he dance do we think?!

Christine Chiu and Pasha - 1/10

Uninterested. No idea who she is and like with Daniella, I just don’t know Pasha enough to get that excited. Again: Is she likable/popular/dance-inclined? Beats me. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Mel C. And Gleb - 4/10

I like Gleb more than most do, but I’m not obsessed by any means. (I mean, he’s not Sharna.) Nothing against any Spice Girls, but I’m fairly neutral on the whole. She will likely be pretty good and probably fairly popular. I look forward to seeing how she does, but I’m pretty much take it or leave it with them. It’s entirely possible she could be the dark horse I fall in love with by like week 3 and then decide she’s my favorite of the season.

Melora Hardin and Artem - 10/10

I’m VERY excited. I’ve already posted about her a bit, but oh boy I’m excited! I’ve seen exactly ZERO episodes of The Office, but I know her and LOVE her from The Bold Type aka one of my most important Gay Awakenings™️. (There were several...) I love me some Artem and he will be a great match with her as well. She’s definitely going to be one of the older pros this season (though I think she’s in her 50s which is decidedly not OLD old), but I know she has Broadway experience. I would love a week 1 foxtrot to put her solidly in a 3 way tie for third place with 4 7s and then coming in week 2 with like a samba that she absolutely nails (8,7,7,8) to prove she really can do it all. (It’s possible I’ve been watching this show for too damn long.)

Mike Mizanin - 1.5/10

I will not call him “The Miz.” I do not know this man and I do not care. Put him with Cheryl and send them home week 1. Ok wait. I’ll be nice. I definitely know NOTHING about him, but maybe he’s a fun and pleasant person. We’ll see. And if he is, I might entertain the possibility of calling him “The Miz.” (Whenever they have anyone from like WWE, UFC, boxing, or anything like that, I just do not care because I don’t know anything about them. But Paige VanZant was my actual Gay Awakening™️, so I try to keep an open mind.)

#dwts30 #will update when the last ones are announced!

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nomanwalksalone · 4 years

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BOOK REVIEW: SIMON CROMPTON’S BESPOKE STYLE

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans

Simon Crompton’s Bespoke Style is a shout from another period into the void that has been this past year. For the past decade, Crompton has been an infuriatingly disarming voice of intelligence and reason describing his various orders and experiences with makers of custom (and otherwise spousally unpardonably expensive) clothing and accessories. His latest book hit my quarantine bookshelf like a temporally retconned souvenir of Crisis on Infinite Earths, a link to a time that seems from a remote and recalibrated universe.

In that universe, Bespoke Style offered readers the chance to see Crompton make himself the pleasant, bearded and tattooed guinea pig for 25 of the best. Sadistic boarding school masters would be disappointed to learn that said best were not birch switches but some of the most prominent tailors in the world, whose styles, cuts, finishing, prices and proportions Crompton compares as closely as possible in the pages of Bespoke Style. And that’s it.

It’s a concept so simple it’s rather genius, as well as seemingly pointless: in each chapter the author poses in similar garments (generally a single-breasted two-piece suit or jacket and trousers) from each of the 25 houses, describes their styles and cuts and contrasts those with their neighbors’ or competitors’, and provides the same set of measurements for each tailor’s work so that the reader can get a sense of how each house differs from the others and what makes them stand out.

As the book was sponsored by cloth house Vitale Barberis Canonico, the Anderson & Sheppard haberdashery and shoemaker Edward Green, Crompton accessorizes each pose with A&S accessories and nice Green shoes. A particular splayed-leg shot modeling his Anderson & Sheppard clothes through a turned-around open-back chair is perhaps the book’s raciest. Cromton notes that almost all of the garments he wears were ordered in the house style, something clearly on display in his Huntsman jacket, a tweed whose huge check could even have deafened the jacket Roger Moore wears in The Man With The Golden Gun.

Simplicity presumes various absolute. :Here, such presumptions include that the tailors profiled are indeed the best, most prominent or most likely to be of interest to Crompton’s readers; that each house has a consistent style; and that each house will maintain its level of quality. The nature of a book like this, all about comparing details, invites quibbles attacking such presumptions. Out of the 25 tailors profiled, only two (Camps de Luca and Cifonelli) are French, while the book has two separate sections for Italian tailors. No Smalto or Florian Sirven at Berluti, for example. Some of the cutters (scrupulously listed in each chapter) who made the garments Crompton models have retired or move on, causing real changes to house styles or quality at certain prominent tailors who would prefer we continue presuming their perennity.

But this is a book that is the mirror image of quibbles: exhaustive details for the pulling apart, snapshots already fading of past moments. For this simple book captures a tension: it profiles famous tailors at a particular moment in order to memorialize their details and differences, even as many of those houses, and the custom tailoring tradition itself, are being undermined by skyrocketing rents and retail prices (prices are easily double, or more, the full prices I was paying at some of the same houses a decade or so ago), by the retirement or departure of knowledgeable and experienced staff, and all the pressures that mean that a skill that required years of patient, difficult practice and training is now exercised competently by, as well as only available to, a dwindling few who must still believe that what they are making or getting is more than just the Emperor’s New Clothes… even if more and more companies, even some of the most famous, sometimes try to get clients to accept less than what they ordered…

So whether or not the houses that Bespoke Style compares will remain, in some pocket universe, so even if it outlives its practical goal of providing aspirational punters a way of comparing and deciding on what tailors they would use… in their castles in the sky.. it is and will ever more become an interesting artifact, a time capsule like the books Alan Flusser used to write that told men where to find custom tailors (and British clothes) in cities all over the world. Our time-warped, isolated universe, each of us encased in our own Phantom Zone, can already find this book an interesting curiosity. Should time ever move linearly again, whether or not some Monitor realigns the various incarnations of the multiverse so that we actually travel and wear suits, this book will become a reference for sartorial archaeologists the way that old issues of Apparel Arts did, the closest thing to some sort of record of how names that were once meaningful supposedly looked, draped, fit… once upon another time.

#rjman #reginaldjeromedemans #features

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davidmann95 · 4 years

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So... Morrison’s 10 part interview on All-Star Superman, along with all other older Newsarama articles, just seem to have ceased to exist. One does not simply live without having those interviews available to reread... Can I find them anywhere else?

Rejoice! I finally borrowed a computer I could put my flash drive into, and emailed myself my copy of the Morrison interview. Here it is below the cut, copied and pasted direct from the source way back when, available again at last:

Three years, 12 issues, Eisners and countless accolades later, All Star Superman is finally finished. The out-of-continuity look at Superman’s struggle with his inevitable death was widely embraced by fans and pros as one of the best stories to feature the Man of Steel, and was a showcase for the talents of the creative team of Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant.

Now, Newsarama is proud to present an exclusive look back with Morrison at the series that took Superman to, pun intended, new heights. We had a lot of questions about the series...and Morrison delivered with an in-depth look into the themes, characters and ideas throughout the 12 issues. In fact, there was so much that we’re running this as an unprecedented 10-part series over the next two weeks – sort of an unofficial All Star Superman companion. It’s everything about All Star Superman you ever wanted to know, but were afraid to ask.

And of course there’s plenty of SPOILERS, so back away if you haven’t read the entire series.

Newsarama: Grant, tell us a little about the origin of the project.

Grant Morrison: Some of it has its roots in the DC One Million project from 1999. So much so, that some readers have come to consider this a prequel to DC One Million, which is fine if it shifts a few more copies! I’ve tried to give my own DC books an overarching continuity intended to make them all read as a more coherent body of work when I’m done.

Luthor’s “enlightenment” – when he peaks on super–senses and sees the world as it appears through Superman’s eyes – was an element I’d included in the Superman Now pitch I prepared along with Mark Millar, Tom Peyer and Mark Waid back in 1999. There were one or two of ideas of mine that I wanted to preserve from Superman Now and Luthor’s heart–stopping moment of understanding was a favorite part of the original ending for that story, so I decided to use it again here.

My specific take on Superman’s physicality was inspired by the “shamanic” meeting my JLA editor Dan Raspler and I had in the wee hours of the morning outside the San Diego comic book convention in whenever it was, ‘98 or ‘99.

I’ve told this story in more detail elsewhere but basically, we were trying to figure out how to “reboot” Superman without splitting up his marriage to Lois, which seemed like a cop–out. It was the beginning of the conversations which ultimately led to Superman Now, with Dan and I restlessly pacing around trying to figure out a new way into the character of Superman and coming up short...

Until we looked up to see a guy dressed as Superman crossing the train tracks. Not just any skinny convention guy in an ill–fitting suit, this guy actually looked like Superman. It was too good a moment to let pass, so I ran over to him, told him what we’d been trying to do and asked if he wouldn’t mind indulging us by answering some questions about Superman, which he did...in the persona and voice of Superman!

We talked for an hour and a half and he walked off into the night with his friend (no, it wasn’t Jimmy Olsen, sadly). I sat up the rest of the night, scribbling page after page of Superman notes as the sun came up over the naval yards.

My entire approach to Superman had come from the way that guy had been sitting; so easy, so confident, as if, invulnerable to all physical harm, he could relax completely and be spontaneous and warm. That pose, sitting hunched on the bollard, with one knee up, the cape just hanging there, talking to us seemed to me to be the opposite of the clenched, muscle-bound look the character sometimes sports and that was the key to Superman for me.

I met the same Superman a couple of times afterwards but he wasn’t Superman, just a nice guy dressed as Superman, whose name I didn’t save but who has entered into my own personal mythology (a picture has from that time has survived showing me and Mark Waid posing alongside this guy and a couple of young readers dressed as Superboy and Supergirl – it’s in the “Gallery” section at my website for anybody who can be bothered looking. This is the guy who lit the fuse that led to All Star Superman).

After the 1999 pitch was rejected, I didn’t expect to be doing any further work on Superman but sometime in 2002, while I was going into my last year on New X–Men, Dan DiDio called and asked if I wanted to come back to DC to work on a Superman book with Jim Lee.

Jim was flexing his artistic muscles again to great effect, and he wanted to do 12 issues on Superman to complement the work he was doing with Jeph Loeb on “Batman: Hush.” At the time, I wasn’t able to make my own commitments dovetail with Jim’s availability, but by then I’d become obsessed with the idea of doing a big Superman story and I’d already started working out the details.

Jim, of course, went on to do his 12 Superman issues as “For Tomorrow” with Brian Azzarello, so I found myself looking for an artist for what was rapidly turning into my own Man of Steel magnum opus, and I already knew the book had to be drawn by my friend and collaborator, Frank Quitely.

We were already talking about We3 and Superman seemed like a good meaty project to get our teeth into when that was done. I completely scaled up my expectations of what might be possible once Frank was on board and decided to make this thing as ambitious as possible.

Usually, I prefer to write poppy, throwaway “live performance” type superhero books, but this time, I felt compelled to make something for the ages – a big definitive statement about superheroes and life and all that, not only drawn by my favorite artist but starring the first and greatest superhero of them all.

The fact that it could be a non–continuity recreation made the idea even more attractive and more achievable. I also felt ready for it, in a way I don’t think I would have been in 1999; I finally felt “grown–up” enough to do Superman justice.

I plotted the whole story in 2002 and drew tiny colored sketches for all 12 covers. The entire book was very tightly constructed before we started – except that I’d left the ending open for the inevitable better and more focused ideas I knew would arise as the project grew into its own shape...and I left an empty space for issue 10. That one was intended from the start to be the single issue of the 12–issue run that would condense and amplify the themes of all the others. #10 was set aside to be the one–off story that would sum up anything anyone needed to know about Superman in 22 pages.

Not quite as concise an origin as Superman’s, but that’s how we got started.

NRAMA: When you were devising the series, what challenges did you have in building up this version of the Superman universe?

GM: I couldn’t say there were any particular challenges. It was fun. Nobody was telling me what I could or couldn’t do with the characters. I didn’t have to worry about upsetting continuity or annoying people who care about stuff like that.

I don’t have a lot of old comics, so my knowledge of Superman was based on memory, some tattered “70s books from the remains of my teenage collection, a bunch of DC “Best Of...” reprint editions and two brilliant little handbooks – “Superman in Action Comics” Volumes 1 and 2 – which reprint every single Action Comics cover from 1938 to 1988.

I read various accounts of Superman’s creation and development as a brand. I read every Superman story and watched every Superman movie I could lay my hands on, from the Golden Age to the present day. From the Socialist scrapper Superman of the Depression years, through the Super–Cop of the 40s, the mythic Hyper–Dad of the 50s and 60s, the questioning, liberal Superman of the early 70s, the bland “superhero” of the late 70s, the confident yuppie of the 80s, the over–compensating Chippendale Superman of the 90s etc. I read takes on Superman by Mark Waid, Mark Millar, Geoff Johns, Denny O’Neil, Jeph Loeb, Alan Moore, Paul Dini and Alex Ross, Joe Casey, Steve Seagle, Garth Ennis, Jim Steranko and many others.

I looked at the Fleischer cartoons, the Chris Reeve movies and the animated series, and read Alvin Schwartz’s (he wrote the first ever Bizarro story among many others) fascinating book – “An Unlikely Prophet” – where he talks about his notion of Superman as a tulpa, (a Tibetan word for a living thought form which has an independent existence beyond its creator) and claims he actually met the Man of Steel in the back of a taxi.

I immersed myself in Superman and I tried to find in all of these very diverse approaches the essential “Superman–ness” that powered the engine. I then extracted, purified and refined that essence and drained it into All Star’s tank, recreating characters as my own dream versions, without the baggage of strict continuity.

In the end, I saw Superman not as a superhero or even a science fiction character, but as a story of Everyman. We’re all Superman in our own adventures. We have our own Fortresses of Solitude we retreat to, with our own special collections of valued stuff, our own super–pets, our own “Bottle Cities” that we feel guilty for neglecting. We have our own peers and rivals and bizarre emotional or moral tangles to deal with.

I felt I’d really grasped the concept when I saw him as Everyman, or rather as the dreamself of Everyman. That “S” is the radiant emblem of divinity we reveal when we rip off our stuffy shirts, our social masks, our neuroses, our constructed selves, and become who we truly are.

Batman is obviously much cooler, but that’s because he’s a very energetic and adolescent fantasy character: a handsome billionaire playboy in black leather with a butler at this beck and call, better cars and gadgetry than James Bond, a horde of fetish femme fatales baying around his heels and no boss. That guy’s Superman day and night.

Superman grew up baling hay on a farm. He goes to work, for a boss, in an office. He pines after a hard–working gal. Only when he tears off his shirt does that heroic, ideal inner self come to life. That’s actually a much more adult fantasy than the one Batman’s peddling but it also makes Superman a little harder to sell. He’s much more of a working class superhero, which is why we ended the whole book with the image of a laboring Superman.

He’s Everyman operating on a sci–fi Paul Bunyan scale. His worries and emotional problems are the same as ours... except that when he falls out with his girlfriend, the world trembles.

Newsarama: Grant, what are some of your favorite moments from the 12 issues?

Grant Morrison: The first shot of Superman flying over the sun. The Cosmic Anvil. Samson and Atlas. The kiss on the moon. The first three pages of the Olsen story which, I think, add up to the best character intro I’ve ever written.

Everything Lex Luthor says in issue #5. Everything Clark does. The whole says/does Luthor/Superman dynamic as played out through Frank Quitely’s absolute mastery and understanding of how space, movement and expression combine to tell a story.

Superboy and his dog on the moon – that perfect teenage moment of infinite possibility, introspection and hope for the future. He’s every young man on the verge of adulthood, Krypto is every dog with his boy (it seemed a shame to us that Krypto’s most memorable moment prior to this was his death scene in “Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow.” Quitely’s scampering, leaping, eager and alive little creature is how I’d prefer to imagine Krypto the Superdog and conjures finer and more subtle emotions).

Bizarro–Home, with all of Earth’s continental and ocean shapes but reversed. The page with the first appearance of Zibarro that Frank has designed so the eye is pulled down in a swirling motion into the drain at the heart of the image, to make us feel that we’re being flushed in a cloacal spiral down into a nihilistic, existential sink. Frank gave me that page as a gift, and it became weirdly emblematic of a strange, dark time in both our lives.

The story with Bar–El and Lilo has a genuine chill off ammonia and antiseptic off it, which makes it my least favorite issue of the series, although I know a lot of people who love it. It’s about dying relatives, obligations, the overlit overheated corridors between terminal wards, the thin metallic odors of chemicals, bad food and fear. Preparation for the Phantom Zone.

Superman hugging the poor, hopeless girl on the roof and telling us all we’re stronger than we think we are.

Joe Shuster drawing us all into the story forever and never–ending.

Nasthalthia Luthor. Frank and Jamie’s final tour of the Fortress, referencing every previous issue on the way, in two pages.

All of issue #10 (there’s a single typo in there where the time on the last page was screwed up – but when we fix that detail for the trade I’ll be able to regard this as the most perfectly composed superhero story I’ve ever written).

I don’t think I’ve ever had a smoother, more seamless collaborative process.

NRAMA: The story is very complete unto itself, but are there any new or classic characters you’d like to explore further? If so, which ones and why?

GM: I’d happily write more Atlas and Samson. I really like Krull, the Dino–Czar’s wayward son, and his Stalinist underground empire of “Subterranosauri.” I could write a Superman Squad comic forever. I’d love to write the “Son of Superman” sequel about Lois and Clark’s super test tube baby.

But...I think All Star is already complete, without sequels. You read that last issue and it works because you know you’re never going to see All Star Superman again. You’ll be able to pick up Superman books, but they won’t be about this guy and they won’t feel the same. He really is going away. Our Superman is actually “dying” in that sense, and that adds the whole series a deeper poignancy.

NRAMA: Aside from the Bizarro League, you never really introduce other DC superheroes into the story. Why did you make this choice?

GM: I wanted the story to be about the mythic Superman at the end of his time. It’s clear from the references that he has or more likely has had a few super–powered allies, but that they’re no longer around or relevant any more.

For the context of this story I wanted the super–friends to be peripheral, like they were in the old comics. The Flash? Green Lantern? They represent Superman’s “old army buddies,” or your dad’s school friends. Guys you’ve sort of heard of, who used to be more important in the old man’s life than they are now.

NRAMA: Some readers were confused as to how the “Twelve Labors” broke down, though others have pointed out that Superman’s actions are more reflective of the Stations of the Cross (I note there’s a “Station Café” in the background of issue #12). Could you break down the Twelve Labors, or, if the cross theory is true, how the storyline reflects the Stations?

GM: The 12 Labors of Superman were never intended as an isomorphic mapping onto the 12 Labors of Hercules, or for that matter, the specific Stations of the Cross, of which there are 14, I believe. I didn’t even want to do one Labor per issue, so it deliberately breaks down quite erratically through the series for reasons I’ll go into (later).

Yes, there are correspondences, but that’s mostly because we tried to create for our Superman the contemporary “superhero” version of an archetypal solar hero journey, which naturally echoes numerous myths, legends and religious parables.

At the same time, we didn’t want to do an update or a direct copy of any myth you’d seen before, so it won’t work if you try to find one specific mythological or religious “plan” to hang the series on; James Joyce’s honorable and heroic refutation of the rule aside, there’s nothing more dead and dull than an attempt to retell the Odyssey or the Norse sagas scene by scene, but in a modern and/or superhero setting.

For future historians and mythologizers, however, the 12 Labors of Superman may be enumerated as follows:

1. Superman saves the first manned mission to the sun. 2. Superman brews the Super–Elixir. 3. Superman answers the Unanswerable Question. 4. Superman chains the Chronovore.  5. Superman saves Earth from Bizarro–Home. 6. Superman returns from the Underverse. 7. Superman creates Life. 8. Superman liberates Kandor/cures cancer. 9. Superman defeats Solaris. 10. Superman conquers Death. 11. Superman builds an artificial Heart for the Sun. 12.Superman leaves the recipe/formula to make Superman 2.

And one final feat, which typically no–one really notices, is that Lex Luthor delivers his own version of the unified field haiku – explaining the underlying principles of the universe in fourteen syllables – which the P.R.O.J.E.C.T. G–Type philosopher from issue 4 had dedicated his entire life to composing!

You may notice also that the Labors take place over a year – with the solar hero’s descent into the darkness and cold of the Underverse occurring at midwinter/Christmas time (that’s also the only point in the story where we ever see Metropolis at night).

It can also be seen as the sun’s journey over the course of a day – we open in blazing sunshine but halfway through the book, at the end of issue #5, in fact, the solar hero dips below the horizon and begins the night–journey through the hours of darkness and death, before his triumphant resurrection at dawn. That’s why issue 5 ends with the boat to the Underworld and 6 begins with the moon. Clark Kent is crossing the threshold into the subconscious world of memory, shadows, death and deep emotions.

Although they can often have bizarre resonances, specific elements, like the Station Café, are usually put there by Frank Quitely, and are not necessarily secret Dan Brown–style keys to unlocking the mysteries. I think there might be a Station Café opposite the studio where Frank Quitely works and the “SAPIEN” sign on another storefront is a reference to Frank’s studio mate, Dave Sapien. At least he’s not filling the background with dirty words like he used to, given any opportunity

NRAMA: For that matter, do the Twelve Labors matter at all? They seem so purposely ill–defined. They seem more like misdirection or a MacGuffin than anything that needs to be clearly delineated.

GM: They matter, of course, but the 12 Labors idea is there to show that, as with all myth, the systematic ordering of current events into stories, tales, or legends occurs after the fact.

I’m trying to suggest that only in the future will these particular 12 feats, out of all the others ever, be mythologized as 12 Labors. I suppose I was trying to say something about how people impose meaning upon events in retrospect, and that’s how myth is born. It’s hindsight that provides narrative, structure, meaning and significance to the simple unfolding of events. It’s the backward glance that adds all the capital letters to the list above.

Even Superman isn”t sure how many Labors he’s performed when we see him mulling it over in issue 10.  When you watched it happening, it seemed to be Superman just doing his thing. In the future it’s become THE 12 LABORS OF SUPERMAN!

NRAMA: And on a completely ridiculous note: All–Star Superman is perhaps the most difficult–to–abbreviate comic title since Preacher: Tall in the Saddle. Did you realize this going in?

GM: Going into what? Going into ASS itself? In the sense of how did I feel as I slowly entered ASS for the first time?

It never crossed my mind...

Newsarama: I’d like to know a little more about Leo Quintum and his role in the story. He seems like a bit of an outgrowth of the likes of Project Cadmus and Emil Hamilton, but in a more fantastical, Willy Wonka sense.

Grant Morrison: Yeah, he was exactly as you say, my attempt to create an updated take on the character of “Superman’s scientist friend” – in the vein of Emil Hamilton from the animated show and the ‘90s stories. Science so often goes wrong in Superman stories, and I thought it was important to show the potential for science to go right or to be elevated by contact with Superman’s shining positive spirit.

I was thinking of Quintum as a kind of “Man Who Fell To Earth” character with a mysterious unearthly background. For a while I toyed with the notion that he was some kind of avatar of Lightray of the New Gods, but as All Star developed, that didn’t fit the tone, and he was allowed to simply be himself.

Eventually it just came down to simplicity. Leo Quintum represents the “good” scientific spirit – the rational, enlightened, progressive, utopian kind of scientist I figured Superman might inspire to greatness. It was interesting to me how so many people expected Quintum to turn out bad at the end. It shows how conditioned we are in our miserable, self–loathing, suspicious society to expect the worst of everyone, rather than hope for the best. Or maybe it’s just what we expect from stories.

Having said that, there is indeed a necessary whiff of Lucifer about Quintum. His name, Leo Quintum, conjures images of solar force, lions and lightbringers and he has elements of the classic Trickster figure about him. He even refers to himself as “The Devil Himself” in issue #10.

What he’s doing at the end of the story should, for all its gee–whiz futurity, feel slightly ambiguous, slightly fake, slightly “Hollywood.” Yes, he’s fulfilling Superman’s wishes by cloning an heir to Superman and Lois and inaugurating a Superman dynasty that will last until the end of time – but he’s also commodifying Superman, figuring out how it’s done, turning him into a brand, a franchise, a bigger–and–better “revamp,” the ultimate coming attraction, fresher than fresh, newer than new but familiar too. Quintum has figured out the “formula” for Superman and improved upon it.

And then you can go back to the start of All Star Superman issue #1 and read the “formula” for yourself, condensed into eight words on the first page and then expanded upon throughout the story! The solar journey is an endless circle naturally. A perfect puzzle that is its own solution.

In one way, Quintum could be seen to represent the creative team, simultaneously re–empowering a pure myth with the honest fire of Art...while at the same time shooting a jolt of juice through a concept that sells more “S” logo underpants and towels than it does comic books. All tastes catered!

I have to say that the Willy Wonka thing never crossed my mind until I saw people online make the comparison, which seems quite obvious now. Quintum dresses how I would dress if I was the world’s coolest super–scientist. What’s up with that?

NRAMA: Was Zibarro inspired by the Bizarro World story where the Bizarro–Neanderthal becomes this unappreciated Casanova–type?

GM: Don’t know that one, but it sounds like a scenario I could definitely endorse!

Zibarro started out as a daft name sicked–up by my subconscious mind, which flowered within moments into the must–write idea of an Imperfect Bizarro. What would an imperfect version of an already imperfect being be like?

Zibarro.

NRAMA: I’d like to know more about Zibarro – what’s the significance of his chronicling Bizarro World through poetry?

GM: It’s up to you. I see Zibarro partly as the sensitive teenager inside us all. He’s moody, horribly self–aware and uncomfortable, yet filled with thoughts of omnipotence and agency. He’s the absolute center of his tiny, disorganized universe. He’s playing the role of sensitive, empathic poet but at the same time, he’s completely self–absorbed.

When he says to Superman “Can you even imagine what it’s like to be so different. So unique. So unlike everyone else?” he doesn’t even wait for Superman’s reply. He doesn’t care about anyone’s feelings but his own, ultimately.

NRAMA: The character is very close to Superman, so what does it say that a nonpowered version on a savage world would focus his energy through that medium? Also, does Zibarro’s existence show how Superman is able to elevate even the backwards Bizarros through his very nature?

GM: All of the above. And maybe he writes his totally subjective poetry as a reflection of Clark Kent’s objective reporter role. The suppressed, lyrical, wounded side of Superman perhaps? The Super–Morrissey? Bizarro With The Thorn In His Side?

But he’s also Bizarro–Home’s “mistake” (or so it seems to him, even though he’s as natural an expression of the place as any of the other Bizarro creatures who grow like mold across the surface of their living planet). He feels excluded, a despised outsider, and yet that position is what defines his cherished self–image. He expresses himself through poetry because to him the regular Bizarro language is barbaric, barely articulate and guttural. And they all think he’s talking crap anyway.

It seemed to make sense that an interesting opposite of Bizarro speech might be flowery “woe is me” school Poetry Society odes to the sunset in a misunderstood heart. He’s still a Bizarro though, which makes him ineffectual. His tragedy is that he knows he’s fated to be useless and pointless but craves so much more.

NRAMA: Zibarro also represents a recurrent theme in the story, of Superman constantly facing alternate versions of himself – Bar–El, Samson and Atlas, the Superman Squad, even Luthor by the end. Notably, Hercules is absent, though Superman’s doing his Twelve Labors. With the mythological adventurers in particular, was this designed to equate Superman with their legend, to show how his character is greater than theirs, or both?

GM: In a way, I suppose. He did arm–wrestle them both, proving once and for all Superman’s stronger than anybody! And remember, these characters, along with Hercules, used to appear regularly in Superman books as his rivals. I thought they made better rivals than, say, Majestic or Ultraman because people who don’t read comics have heard of Hercules, Samson and Atlas and understand what they represent.

For that particular story, I wanted to see Superman doing tough guy shit again, like he did in the early days and then again in the 70s, when he was written as a supremely cocky macho bastard for a while. I thought a little bit of that would be an antidote to the slightly soppy, Super–Christ portrayal that was starting to gain ground.

Hence Samson’s broken arm, twisted in two directions beyond all repair. And Atlas in the hospital. And then Superman’s got his hot girlfriend dressed like a girl from Krypton and they’re making out on the moon (the original panel description was of something more like the famous shot of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kissing in the surf from “From Here To Eternity.” Frank’s final choice of composition is much more classically pulp–romantic and iconic than my down and dirty rumble in the moondirt would have been, I’m glad to say).

Newsarama: Tell us about some of the thinking behind the new antagonists you created for this series (at least the ones you want to talk about...): First up: Krull and the Subterranosaurs...

Grant Morrison: We wanted to create some throwaway new characters which would be designed to look as if they were convincing long–term elements of the Superman legend.

We were trying to create a few foes who had a classic feel and a solid backstory that could be explored again or in depth. Even if we never went back to these characters, we wanted them to seem rich enough to carry their own stories.

With Krull, we figured a superhuman character like Superman can always use a powerful “sub–human” opponent: a beast, a monster, a savage with the power to destroy civilization. For years I’ve had the idea that the familiar “gray aliens” might “actually” be evolved biped dinosaur descendants, the offspring of smart–thinking lizards which made their way to the warm regions at the Earth’s core.

I imagined these brutes developing their own technology, their own civilization, and then finally coming to the surface to declare bloody war on the mammalian usurpers! It seemed like we could develop this idea into the Krull backstory and suggest a whole epic conflict in a few panels.

Dom Regan, the Glasgow artist and DC colorist, saw the original green skin Jamie Grant had done for Krull, and suggested we make him red instead. Jamie reset his color filters and that was the moment Krull suddenly looked like a real Superman foe.

The red skin marked him out as unique, different and dangerous, even among his own species. It had echoes of Jack Kirby’s Devil Dinosaur that played right into the heart of the concept. A good design became a great design and the whole story of who Krull was – his twisted relationship with his father the Dino–Czar, his monstrous ambitions – came together in that first picture.

The society was fleshed out in the script even though we see only one panel of it – a gloomy, heavy, “Soviet” underworld of walled iron cities, cold blood and deadly intrigue. War–Barges that could sail on the oceans of heated steam at the center of the Earth. A Stalinist authoritarian lizard world where missing person cases were being taken to work and die as slaves in hellish underworld conditions.

NRAMA: Mechano–Man?

GM: An attempt to pre–imagine a classic, archetypal Superman foe, which started with another simple premise – how about a giant robot villain? But not just any giant robot – this is a rampaging machine with a raging little man inside.

Giving him a bitter, angry, scrawny loser as a pilot turned Mechano–Man into a much more extreme and pathological expression of the Man of Steel/Mild–Mannered Reporter dynamic, and added a few interesting layers onto an 8–panel appearance.

NRAMA: The Chronovore – a very disturbing creation, that one.

GM: The Chronovore was mentioned in passing in DC 1,000,000 and would have been the monster in my aborted Hypercrisis series idea. It took a long time to get the right design for the beast because it’s meant to be a 5–D being that we only ever see in 4–D sections. It had to work as a convincing representation of something much bigger that we’re seeing only where it interpenetrates our 4–D space-time continuum.

Imagine you’re walking along with a song in your teenage heart, then suddenly the Chronovore appears, takes bite out of your life, and you arrive at your girlfriend’s house aged 76, clutching a cell phone and a wilted bouquet.

NRAMA: One more obscure run that I was happy to see referenced in this was the use of Nasty from the old Mike Sekowsky Supergirl stories. What made you want to use this character?

GM: I remembered her from the old comics, and felt her fashion–y look could be updated very easily into the kind of fetish club thing I’ve always been partial to.

She seemed a cool and sexy addition to the Luthor plot. The set–up, where Lex has a fairly normal sister who hates how her wayward brother is such a bad influence on her brilliant daughter, is explosive with character potential.

They need to bring Nasty back to mainstream continuity. Geoff! They all want it and you know you never let them down!

NRAMA: Speaking of Mike Sekowsky, I’m curious about his influence on your work. I have an odd fascination with all the ideas and stories he was tossing around in the late 1960s and early 1970s – Jason’s Quest, Manhunter 2070, the I–Ching tales – and many of the characters he worked on, from the B”Wana Beast to the Inferior Five to Yankee Doodle (in Doom Patrol), have shown up in your work. The Bizarro Zoo in issue #10 is even slightly reminiscent of the Beast’s merged animals.

GM: Those were all comics that were around when I was a normal kid, prior to the obsessive collecting fan phase of my isolated teenage years. They clearly inspired me in some way, as you say, but certainly not consciously. I’d never have considered myself a particular fan of Mike Sekowsky’s work, but as you say, I’ve incorporated a lot of his ideas into the DC Universe work I’ve done. Hmm. Interesting.

While I’m at it, I should also say something about Samson and Atlas, halfway between old characters and new.

Samson, Atlas and Hercules were classical mainstays of old Superman covers, tangling with Superman in all those Silver Age stories that happened before he learned from his friends at Marvel that it was possible to fight other superheroes for fun and profit, so I decided to completely “re–vamp” the characters in the manner of superhero franchises. Marvel has the definitive Hercules for me, so I left him out of the mix and concentrated on Atlas and Samson.

Atlas was re–imagined as a mighty but restless and reckless young prince of the New Mythos – a society of mega–beings playing out their archetypal dramas between New Elysium and Hadia, with ordinary people caught in the middle – and Superman.

Essentially good–hearted, Atlas would have been the newbie in a “team” with Skyfather Xaoz!, Heroina, Marzak and the others. He has a bullish, adolescent approach to life. He drinks and plunges himself into ill–advised adventures to ease his naturally gloomy “weighed down by the world” temperament.

You can see it all now. The backstory suggested an unseen, Empyrean New Gods–type series from a parallel universe. What if, when Jack Kirby came to DC from Marvel in 1971, he’d followed up his sci–fi Viking Gods saga at Marvel, with a dimension–spanning epic rooted in Greek mythology? New Gods meets Eternals drawn by Curt Swan/Murphy Anderson? That was Atlas.

Samson, I decided would be a callback to the British newspaper strip “Garth.” Although you may already be imagining a daily strip about the exploits of time–tossed The Boys writer, Garth Ennis, it was actually about a blonde Adonis type who bounced around the ages having mildly horny, racy adventures.

(Go look him up then return the wiser before reading on, so I don’t have to explain anymore about this bastard – he’s often described as “the British Superman,” but oh...my arse! I hated meathead, personality–singularity Garth...but we all grew up with his meandering, inexplicable yet incredibly–drawn adventures and some of it was quite good when you were a little lad because he was always shagging ON PANEL with the likes of a bare–breasted cave girl or gauze–draped Helen of Troy.

(Unlike Superman, you see, the top British strongman liked to get naked. Lots naked. Naked in every time period he could get naked in, which was all of them thanks to the miracle of his bullshit powers.

(Imagine Doctor Who buff, dumb and naked all the time – Russell, I’ve had an idea!!!! – and that’s Garth in a nutshell.

(Sorry, I know I’m going on and the average attention span of anyone reading stuff on the Internet amounts to no more than a few paragraphs, but basically, Garth was always getting naked. In public, in family newspapers. Bollock naked. Let’s face it, patriotic Americans, have you ever seen Superman’s arse?

Newsarama Note: Well, there was Baby Kal-El in the 1978 film...

(Brits, hands up who still remember the man, and have you ever not seen Garth’s arse? Do you not, in fact, have a very clear image of it in your head, as drawn by Martin Asbury perhaps? In mine, Garth’s pulling aside a flimsy curtain to gaze at the pyramids with Cleopatra buck naked in foreground ogling his rock hard glutes...).

Anyway, Samson, I decided, was the Hebrew version of Garth and he would have his own mad comic that was like an American version of Garth. I saw the Bible hero plucked from the desert sands by time–travelling buffoons in search of a savior. Introduced to all the worst aspects of future culture and, using his stolen, erratic Chrono–Mobile, Samson became a time–(and space) traveling Soldier of Fortune, writing wrongs, humping princesses, accumulating and losing treasure etc. Like a science fiction Conan. Meets Garth.

Fortunately, you’ll never see any of these men ever again.

Newsarama: How have your perceptions of Superman and his supporting characters evolved since the Superman 2000 pitch you did with Mark Waid, Mark Millar and Tom Peyer? The Superman notions seem almost identical, but Luthor is very different here than in that pitch, and so is Clark Kent. Did you use some aspects of your original pitch, or have you just changed his mind on how to portray these characters since?

Grant Morrison: A little of both. I wanted to approach All Star Superman as something new, but there were a couple of specific aspects from the Superman 2000 pitch (as I mentioned earlier, it was actually called Superman Now, at least in my notebooks, which is where the bulk of the material came from) that I felt were definitely worth keeping and exploring.

I can’t remember much about Luthor from Superman Now, except for the ending. By the time I got to All Star Superman, I’d developed a few new insights into Luthor’s character that seemed to flesh him out more. Luthor’s really human and charismatic and hateful all the same time. He’s the brilliant, deluded egotist in all of us. The key for me was the idea that he draws his eyebrows on. The weird vanity of that told me everything I needed to know about Luthor.

I thought the real key to him was the fact that, brilliant as he is, Luthor is nowhere near as brilliant as he wants to be or thinks he is. For Luthor, no praise, no success, no achievement is ever enough, because there’s a big hungry hole in his soul. His need for acknowledgement and validation is superhuman in scale. Superman needs no thanks; he does what he does because he’s made that way. Luthor constantly rails against his own sense of failure and inadequacy...and Superman’s to blame, of course.

I’ve recently been re–thinking Luthor again for a different project, and there’s always a new aspect of the character to unearth and develop.

NRAMA: This story makes Superman and Lois’ relationship seem much more romantic and epic than usual, but this one also makes Superman more of the pursuer. Lois seems like more of an equal, but also more wary of his affections, particularly in the black–and–white sequence in issue #2.

She becomes this great beacon of support for him over the course of the series, but there is a sense that she’s a bit jaded from years of trickery and uncomfortable with letting him in now that he’s being honest. How, overall, do you see the relationship between Superman and Lois?

GM: The black-and-white panels shows Lois paranoid and under the influence of an alien chemical, but yes, she’s articulating many of her very real concerns in that scene.

I wanted her to finally respond to all those years of being tricked and duped and led to believe Superman and Clark Kent were two different people. I wanted her to get her revenge by finally refusing to accept the truth.

It also exposed that brilliant central paradox in the Superman/Lois relationship. The perfect man who never tells a lie has to lie to the woman he loves to keep her safe. And he lives with that every day. It’s that little human kink that really drives their relationship.

NRAMA: Jimmy Olsen is extremely cool in this series – it’s the old “Mr. Action” idea taken to a new level. It’s often easy to write Jimmy as a victim or sycophant, but in this series, he comes off as someone worthy of being “Superman’s Pal” – he implicitly trusts Superman, and will take any risk to get his story. Do you see this version of Jimmy as sort of a natural evolution of the version often seen in the comics?

GM: It was a total rethink based on the aspects of Olsen I liked, and playing down the whole wet–behind–the–ears “cub reporter” thing. I borrowed a little from the “Mr. Action” idea of a more daredevil, pro–active Jimmy, added a little bit of Nathan Barley, some Abercrombie & Fitch style, a bit of Tintin, and a cool Quitely haircut.

Jimmy was renowned for his “disguises” and bizarre transformations (my favorite is the transvestite Olsen epic “Miss Jimmy Olsen” from Jimmy Olsen #95, which gets a nod on the first page of our Jimmy story we did), so I wanted to take that aspect of his appeal and make it part of his job.

I don’t like victim Jimmy or dumb Jimmy, because those takes on the character don’t make any sense in their context. It seemed more interesting see what a young man would be like who could convincingly be Superman’s “pal.” Someone whose company a Superman might actually enjoy. That meant making Jimmy a much bigger character: swaggering but ingenuous. Innocent yet worldly. Enthusiastic but not stupid.

My favorite Jimmy moment is in issue #7 when he comes up with the way to defeat the Bizarro invasion by using the seas of the Bizarro planet itself as giant mirrors to reflect toxic – to Bizarros – sunlight onto the night side of the Earth. He knows Superman can actually take crazy lateral thinking like this and put it into practice.

NRAMA: Perry White has a few small–but–key scenes, particularly his address to his staff in issue #1 and standing up to Luthor in issue #12. I’d like to hear more about your thoughts on this character.

GM: As with the others, my feelings are there on the page. Perry is Clark’s boss and need only be that and not much more to play his role perfectly well within the stories. He’s a good reminder that Superman has a job and a boss, unlike that good–for–nothing work-shy bastard Batman. Perry’s another of the series’ older male role models of integrity and steadfastness, like Pa Kent.

NRAMA: There’s a sense in the Daily Planet scenes and with Lois’s spotlight issues that everyone knows Clark is Superman, but they play along to humor him. The Clark disguise comes off as very obvious in this story. Do you feel that the Planet staff knows the truth, or are just in a very deep case of denial, like Lex?

GM: If I had to say for sure, I think Jimmy Olsen worked it out a long time ago, and simply presumes that if Superman has a good reason for what he’s doing, that’s good enough for Jimmy.

Lois has guessed, but refuses to acknowledge it because it exposes her darkest flaw – she could never love Clark Kent the way she loves Superman.

NRAMA: Also, the Planet staff seems awfully nonchalant at Luthor’s threats. Are they simply used to being attacked by now?

GM: Yes. They’re a tough group. They also know that Superman makes a point of looking out for them, so they naturally try to keep Luthor talking. They know he loves to talk about himself and about Superman. In that scene, he’s almost forgotten he even has powers, he’s so busy arguing and making points. He keeps doing ordinary things instead of extraordinary things.

NRAMA: The running gag of Clark subtly using his powers to protect unknowing people is well done, but I have to admit I was confused by the sequence near the end of issue #1. Was that an el–train, and if so, why was it so close to the ground?

GM: It’s a MagLev hover–train. Look again, and you’ll see it’s not supported by anything. Hover–trains help ease congestion in busy city streets! Metropolis is the City of Tomorrow, after all.

NRAMA: And there’s the death of Pa Kent. Why do you feel it’s particularly important to have Pa and not both of the Kents pass away?

GM: I imagined they had both passed away fairly early in Superman’s career, but Ma went a few years after Pa. Also, because the book was about men or man, it seemed important to stress the father/son relationships. That circle of life, the king is dead, long live the king thing that Superman is ultimately too big and too timeless to succumb to.

NRAMA: There is a real touch of Elliott S! Maggin’s novels in your depiction of Luthor – someone who is just so obsessive–compulsive about showing up Superman that he accomplishes nothing in his own life. He comes across as a showman, from his rehearsed speech in issue #1 to his garish costume in the last two issues, and it becomes painfully apparent that he wants to usurp Superman because he just can’t be happy with himself. What defeats him is actually a beautiful gift, getting to see the world as Superman does, and finally understanding his enemy.

That’s all a lead–in to: What previous stories that defined Luthor for you, and how did you define his character? What appeals to you about writing him?

GM: The Marks Waid and Millar were big fans of the Maggin books, and may have persuaded me to read at least the first one but I’m ashamed to say can’t remember anything about it, other than the vague recollection of a very humane, humanist take on Superman that seemed in general accord with the pacifist, hedonistic, between–the–wars spirit of the ‘90s when I read it. It was the ‘90s; I had other things on my mind and in my mind.

I like Maggin’s “Must There Be A Superman?” from Superman #247, which ultimately poses questions traditional superhero comic books are not equipped to answer and is one of the first paving stones in the Yellow Brick Road that leads to Watchmen and beyond, to The Authority, The Ultimates etc. Everyone still awake, still reading this, should make themselves familiar with “Must There Be A Superman?” – it’s a milestone in the development of the superhero concept.

However, the story that most defines Luthor for me turns out to be, as usual, a Len Wein piece with Curt Swan/Murphy Anderson– Superman #248. This blew me away when I was a kid. Lex Luthor cares about humanity? He’s sorry we all got blown up? The villain loves us too? It’s only Superman he really hates? Genius. Big, cool adult stuff.

The divine Len makes Lex almost too human, but it was amazing to see this kind of depth in a character I’d taken for granted as a music hall villain.

I also love the brutish Satanic, Crowley–esque, Golden Age Luthor in the brilliant “Powerstone” Action Comics #47 (the opening of All Star #11 is a shameless lift from “Powerstone”, as I soon realised when I went back to look. Blame my...er...photographic memory...cough).

And I like the Silver Age Luthor who only hates Superman because he thinks it’s Superboy’s fault he went bald. That was the most genuinely human motivation for Luthor’s career of villainy of all; it was Superman’s fault he went bald! I can get behind that.

In the Silver Age, baldness, like obesity, old age and poverty, was seen quite rightly as a crippling disease and a challenge which Superman and his supporting cast would be compelled to overcome at every opportunity! Suburban “50s America versus Communist degeneracy? You tell me.

I like elements of the Marv Wolfman/John Byrne ultra–cruel and rapacious businessman, although he somewhat lacks the human dimension (ultimately there’s something brilliant about Luthor being a failed inventor, a product of Smallville/Dullsville – the genius who went unnoticed in his lifetime, and resorted to death robots in chilly basements and cellars. Luthor as geek versus world). I thought Alan Moore’s ruthlessly self–assured “consultant” Luthor in Swamp Thing was an inspired take on the character as was Mark Waid’s rage–driven prodigy from Birthright.

I tried to fold them all into one portrayal. I see him as a very human character – Superman is us at our best, Luthor is us when we’re being mean, vindictive, petty, deluded and angry. Among other things. It’s like a bipolar manic/depressive personality – with optimistic, loving Superman smiling at one end of the scale and paranoid, petty Luthor cringing on the other.

I think any writer of Superman has to love these two enemies equally. We have to recognize them both as potentials within ourselves. I think it’s important to find yourself agreeing with Luthor a bit about Superman’s “smug superiority” – we all of us, except for Superman, know what it’s like to have mean–spirited thoughts like that about someone else’s happiness. It’s essential to find yourself rooting for Lex, at least a little bit, when he goes up against a man–god armed only with his bloody–minded arrogance and cleverness.

Even if you just wish you could just give him a hug and help him channel his energies in the right direction, Luthor speaks for something in all of us, I like to think.

However he’s played, Luthor is the male power fantasy gone wrong and turned sour. You’ve got everything you want but it’s not enough because someone has more, someone is better, someone is cleverer or more handsome.

Newsarama: Grant, a recurring theme throughout the book is the effect of small kindness – how even the likes of Steve Lombard are capable of decency. And Superman gets the key to saving himself by doing something that any human being could do, offering sympathy to a person about to end it all.

Grant Morrison: Completely...the person you help today could be the person who saves your life tomorrow.

NRAMA: The character actions that make the biggest difference, from Zibarro’s sacrifice to Pa’s influence on Superman, are really things that any normal, non-powered person could do if they embrace the best part of their humanity. The last page of issue #12 teases the idea that Superman’s powers could be given to all mankind, but it seems as though the greatest gift he has given them is his humanity. How do you view Superman’s fate in the context of where humanity could go as a species?

GM: I see Superman in this series as an Enlightenment figure, a Renaissance idea of the ideal man, perfect in mind, body and intention.

A key text in all of this is Pico’s ‘Oration On The Dignity of Man’ (15c), generally regarded as the ‘manifesto’ of Renaissance thought, in which Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola laid out the fundamentals of what we tend to refer to as ’Humanist’ thinking.

(The ‘Oratorio’ also turns up in my British superhero series Zenith from 1987, which may indicate how long I’ve been working towards a Pico/Superman team-up!)

At its most basic, the ‘Oratorio’ is telling us that human beings have the unique ability, even the responsibility, to live up to their ‘ideals’. It would be unusual for a dog to aspire to be a horse, a bird to bark like a dog, or a horse to want to wear a diving suit and explore the Barrier Reef, but people have a particular gift for and inclination towards imitation, mimicry and self-transformation. We fly by watching birds and then making metal carriers that can outdo birds, we travel underwater by imitating fish, we constantly look to role models and behavioral templates for guidance, even when those role models are fictional TV or, comic, novel or movie heroes, just like the soft, quick, shapeshifty little things we are. We can alter the clothes we wear, the temperature around us, and change even our own bodies, in order to colonize or occupy previously hostile environments. We are, in short, a distinctively malleable and adaptable bunch.

So, Pico is saying, if we live by imitation, does it not make sense that we might choose to imitate the angels, the gods, the very highest form of being that we can imagine? Instead of indulging the most brutish, vicious, greedy and ignorant aspects of the human experience, we can, with a little applied effort, elevate the better part of our natures and work to express those elements through our behavior. To do so would probably make us all feel a whole lot better too. Doing good deeds and making other people happy makes you feel totally brilliant, let’s face it.

So we can choose to the astronaut or the gangster. The superhero or the super villain. The angel or the devil. It’s entirely up to us, particularly in the privileged West, how we choose to imagine ourselves and conduct our lives.

We live in the stories we tell ourselves. It’s really simple. We can continue to tell ourselves and our children that the species we belong to is a crawling, diseased, viral cancer smear, only fit for extinction, and let’s see where that leads us.

We can continue to project our self-loathing and narcissistic terror of personal mortality onto our culture, our civilization, our planet, until we wreck the promise of the world for future generations in a fit of sheer self-induced panic...

...or we can own up to the scientific fact that we are all physically connected as parts of a single giant organism, imagine better ways to live and grow...and then put them into practice. We can stop pissing about, start building starships, and get on with the business of being adults.

The ’Oratorio’ is nothing less than the Shazam!, the Kimota! for Western Culture and we would do well to remember it in our currently trying times.

The key theme of the ‘Dark Age’ of comics was loss and recovery of wonder - McGregor’s Killraven trawling through the apocalyptic wreckage of culture in his search for poetry, meaning and fellowship, Captain Mantra, amnesiac in Robert Mayer’s Superfolks, Alan Moore’s Mike Maxwell trudging through the black and white streets of Thatcher’s Britain, with the magic word of transformation burning on the tip of his tongue.

My own work has been an ongoing attempt to repeat the magic word over and over until we all become the kind of superheroes we’d all like to be. Ha hah ha.

Newsarama: The structure of the 12 issues involves both Superman’s 12 labors and his impending death. Do you feel the threat of his demise brings out the best in Superman’s already–high character, or did you intend it more as a window for the audience to understand how he sees the world?

Grant Morrison: In trying to do the “big,” ultimate Superman story, we wanted to hit on all the major beats that define the character – the “death of Superman” story has been told again and again and had to be incorporated into any definitive take. Superman’s death and rebirth fit the sun god myth we were establishing, and, as you say, it added a very terminal ticking clock to the story.

NRAMA: When we talked earlier this year, we discussed the neurotic quality of the Silver Age stories. Looking at the series as a whole, you consistently invert this formula. Superman is faced with all these crises that could be seen as personifying his neuroses, but for the most part he handles them with a level head and comes across as being very at peace with himself. You talked about your discussion with an in–character Superman fan at a convention years ago, but I am curious as to how you determined Superman’s mindset.

GM: I felt we had to live up to the big ideas behind Superman. I don’t take my daft job lightly. It’s all I’ve got.

As the project got going, I wasn’t thinking about Silver Ages or Dark Ages or anything about the comics I’d read, so much as the big shared idea of “Superman” and that “S” logo I see on T–shirts everywhere I go, on girls and boys. That communal Superman. I wanted us to get the precise energy of Platonic Superman down on the page.

The “S” hieroglyph, the super–sigil, stands for the very best kind of man we can imagine, so the subject dictated the methodical, perfectionist approach. As I’ve mentioned before, I keep this aspect of my job fresh for myself by changing my writing style to suit the project, the character or the artist.

With something like Batman R.I.P., I’m aiming for a frenzied Goth Pulp-Noir; punk-psych, expressionist shadows and jagged nightmare scene shifts, inspired by Batman’s roots and by the snapping, fluttering of his uncanny cape. Final Crisis was written, with the Norse Ragnarok and Biblical Revelations in mind, as a story about events more than characters. A doom-laden, Death Metal myth for the wonderful world of Fina(ncia)l Crisis/Eco-breakdown/Terror Trauma we all have to live in.

The subject matter drives the execution. And then, of course, the artists add their own vision and nuance. With All Star Superman, “Frank” and I were able to spend a lot of time together talking it through, and we agreed it had to be about grids, structure, storybook panel layouts, an elegance of form, a clarity of delivery. “Classical” in every sense of the word. The medium, the message, the story, the character, all working together as one simple equation.

Frank Quitely, a Glasgow Art School boy, completely understood without much explanation, the deep structural underpinnings of the series and how to embody them in his layouts. There’s a scene in issue # 8, set on the Bizarro world, where we see Le Roj handing Superman his rocket plans. Look at the arrangement of the figures of Zibarro, Le Roj, Superman and Bizaro–Superman and you’ll see one attempt to make us of Renaissance compositions.

The sense of sunlit Zen calm we tried to get into All Star is how I imagine it might feel to think the way Superman thinks all the time - a thought process that is direct, clean, precise, mathematical, ordered. A mind capable of fantastical imagination but grounded in the everyday of his farm upbringing with nice decent folks. Rich with humour and tears and deep human significance, yet tuned to a higher key. We tried to hum along for a little while, that’s all.

In honor of the character’s primal position in the development of the superhero narrative, I hoped we could create an “ultimate” hero story, starring the ultimate superhero.

Basically, I suppose I felt Superman deserved the utmost application of our craft and intelligence in order to truly do him justice.

Otherwise, I couldn’t have written this book if I hadn’t watched my big, brilliant dad decline into incoherence and death. I couldn’t have written it if I’d never had my heart broken, or mended. I couldn’t have written it if I hadn’t known what it felt like to be idolized, misunderstood, hated for no clear reason, loved for all my faults, forgotten, remembered...

Writing All Star Superman was, in retrospect, also a way of keeping my mind in the clean sunshine while plumbing the murkiest depths of the imagination with that old pair of c****s Darkseid and Doctor Hurt. Good riddance.

Newsarama: This is touched on in other questions, but how much of the Silver/Bronze Age backstory matters here? What do you see as Superman's life prior to All-Star Superman? (What was going on with this Superman while the Byrne revamp took hold?)

Grant Morrison: When I introduced the series in an interview online, I suggested that All Star Superman could be read as the adventures of the ‘original’ Pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths Superman, returning after 20 plus years of adventures we never got to see because we were watching John Byrne‘s New Superman on the other channel. If ‘Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow?’ and the Byrne reboot had never happened, where would that guy be now?

This was more to provide a sense, probably limited and ill-considered, of what the tone of the book might be like. I never intended All Star Superman as a direct continuation of the Weisinger or Julius Schwartz-era Superman stories. The idea was always to create another new version of Superman using all my favorite elements of past stories, not something ‘Age’ specific.

I didn’t collect Superman comics until the ‘70s and I’m not interested enough in pastiche or nostalgia to spend 6 years of my life playing post-modern games with Superman. All Star isn’t written, drawn or colored to look or read like a Silver Age comic book.

All Star Superman is not intended as arch commentary on continuity or how trends in storytelling have changed over the decades. It’s not retro or meta or anything other than its own simple self; a piece of drawing and writing that is intended by its makers to capture the spirit of its subject to the best of their capabilities, wisdom and talent.

Which is to say, we wanted our Superman story be about life, not about comics or superheroes, current events or politics. It’s about how it feels, specifically to be a man...in our dreams! Hopefully that means our 12 issues are also capable of wide interpretation.

So as much as we may have used a few recognizable Silver Age elements like Van-Zee and Sylv(i)a and the Bottle City of Kandor, the ensemble Daily Planet cast embodies all the generations of Superman. Perry White is from 1940, Steve Lombard is from the Schwartz-era ‘70s, Ron Troupe - the only black man in Metropolis - appeared in 1991. Cat Grant is from 1987 and so on.

P.R.O.J.E.C.T. refers back to Jack Kirby’s DNA Project from his ‘70s Jimmy Olsen stories, as well as to The Cadmus Project from ’90s Superboy and Superman stories. Doomsday is ‘90s. Kal Kent, Solaris and the Infant Universe of Qwewq all come from my own work on Superman in the same decade. Pa Kent’s heart attack is from ‘Superman the Movie‘. We didn’t use Brainiac because he’d been the big bad in Earth 2 but if we had, we’d have used Brainiac’s Kryptonian origin from the animated series and so on.

I also used quite a few elements of John Byrne’s approach. Byrne made a lot of good decisions when he rebooted the whole franchise in 1986 and I wanted to incorporate as much as I could of those too.

Our Superman in All Star was never Superboy, for instance. All Star Superman landed on Earth as a normal, if slightly stronger and fitter infant, and only began to manifest powers in adolescence when he’d finally soaked up enough yellow solar radiation to trigger his metamorphosis.

The Byrne logic seemed to me a better way to explain how his powers had developed across the decades, from the skyscraper leaps of the early days to the speed-of-light space flight of the high Silver Age. And more importantly, it made the Superman myth more poignant - the story of a farm boy who turned into an alien as he reached adolescence. I felt that was something that really enriched Superman. He grew away from his home, his family, his adopted species as he became Superman. His teenage years are a record of his transformation from normal boy to super-being.

As you say, there are more than just Silver Age influences in the book. Basically we tried to create a perfect synthesis of every Superman era. So much so, that it should just be taken as representative of an ‘age’ all its own.

In the end, however, I do think that the Silver Age type stories, with their focus on human problems and foibles, have a much wider appeal than a lot of the work which followed. They’re more like fables or folk tales than the later ‘comic book superhero’ stories of Superman when he became just another colorful costume in the crowd...and perhaps that’s why All Star seemed to resemble those books more than it does a typical modern Marvel or DC comic. It was our intention to present a more universal, mainstream Superman.

NRAMA: In your depiction of Krypton and the Kryptonians, you show the complexity of Superman’s relationship between humanity and Earth even further. Krypton has that scientific paradise quality to it, but the Kryptonians are also portrayed as slightly aloof and detached, even Jor-El. But from Bar-El to the people of Kandor, they’re touched by Superman’s goodness. What do you see as the fundamental difference between Kryptonians and Earthlings, and how has Superman’s character been shaped by each?

GM: My version of Krypton was, again, synthesized from a number of different approaches over the decades.  In mythic terms, if Superman is the story of a young king, found and raised by common people, then Krypton is the far distant kingdom he lost. It’s the secret bloodline, the aristocratic heritage that makes him special, and a hero. At the same time, Krypton is something that must be left behind for Superman to become who he is - i.e. one of us. Krypton gives him his scientific clarity of mind, Earth makes his heart blaze.

I liked the very early Jerry Siegel descriptions where Krypton is a planet of advanced supermen and women (I already played with that a little in Marvel Boy where Noh-Varr was written to be the Marvel Superboy basically). To that, I added the rich, science fiction detailing of the Silver Age Krypton stories and the slightly detached coolness that characterized John Byrne’s Krypton, which I re-interpreted through the lens of Dzogchen Buddhist thought, probably the most pragmatic, chilly and rational philosophic system on the planet and the closest, I felt, to how Kryptonians might see things.

We also took some time to redesign the crazy, multicolored Kryptonian flag (you can see our version in Kandor in issue #10). The flag, as originally imagined, seemed like the last thing Kryptonians would endorse, so we took the multicolored-rays-around-a-circle design and recreated it - the central circle is now red, representing Krypton’s star, Rao, while the rays, rather than arbitrary colors, become representations of the spectrum of visible light pouring from Rao into the inky black of space. In this way, the flag, that bizarre emblem of nationalism becomes a scientific hieroglyph.

Showing Krypton and Kryptonians was also important as a way of stressing why Superman wears that costume and why it makes absolute sense that he looks the way he does. I don’t see the red and blue suit as a flag or as rewoven baby blankets. There’s no need for Superman to dress the way he does but it made sense to think of his outfit as his ‘national costume‘.

The way I see it, the standard superhero outfit, the familiar Superman suit with the pants on the outside, is what everyone wore on Krypton, give or take a few fashion accessories like hoods and headbands, chest crests and variant colors. In fact, all other superheroes are just copying the fashions on Krypton, lost planet of the super-people.

Superman wears his ’action-suit’ the way a patriotic Scotsman would wear a kilt. It’s a sign of his pride in his alien heritage.

Newsarama: Although All–Star Superman ties in with DC One Million, you style of writing has changed dramatically since then. How do you feel about One Million now?

Grant Morrison: I just read it again and liked it a lot. Comics were definitely happier, breezier and more confident in their own strengths before Hollywood and the Internet turned the business of writing superhero stories into the production of low budget storyboards or, worse, into conformist, fruitless attempts to impress or entertain a small group of people who appear to hate comics and their creators.

NRAMA: Obviously, this book is the most explicit SF–Christ story since Behold the Man, only...happy. Superman/Christ parallels have existed for decades, but this story makes it absolutely explicit, from laying his hands on the sick and dying to...well, most of issue #12. You’ve dealt with Christ themes before, particularly in The Mystery Play, but outside of the comics, how do you see Superman as a Christ figure for the “real” world?

GM: The “Superman as Christ” thing is a little too reductive for me, and tends to overlook the fact that Superman is by no means a pacifist in the Christ sense. Superman would never turn the other cheek; Superman punches out the bully. Superman is a fighter.

When did Christ ever batter the Devil through a mountain?

The thing I disliked about the Superman Returns movie was the American Christ angle, which reduced Superman to a sniveling, masochistic wreck, crawling around on the floor, taking a kicking from everyone. This approach had an odd and slightly disturbing S&M flavor, which didn’t play well to the character’s strengths at all and seemed to derive entirely from a kind of Catholic vision of the suffering, martyred Jesus.

It’s not that he’s based on Jesus, but simply that a lot of the mythical sun god elements that have been layered onto the Christ story also appear in the story of Superman. I suppose I see Superman more as pagan sci–fi. He’s a secular messiah, a science redeemer with tough guy muscles and a very direct and clear morality.

NRAMA: Continuing the religious themes, in issue #10, you have Superman literally giving birth to himself, both philosophically and as a character – a nice little meta–moment showing how Superman inspires a world where he is only fiction. How did that idea come about?

GM: It came from the challenge we’d set ourselves: as I said, issue #10 had been left as a blank space into which the single most coherent condensation of all our ideas about Superman were destined to fit.

I wanted to do a “day in the life” story. So much of All Star had been about this threat to Superman himself, so we wanted to show him going about a typical day saving people and doing good.

Then came the title “Neverending,” which comes from the opening announcement – “Faster than a speeding bullet!...” of the Superman radio show from 1940, and seemed to me to be as good a title for a Superman story as any I could think of. It seemed to distil everything about Superman’s battle and his legend into a single word. And the story structure itself was designed to loop endlessly, so it went well with that.

On top of that went the idea of the Last Will and Testament of Superman. A dying god writing his will seemed like an interesting structure to use. Then came the idea to fit all of human history into that single 24 hours. And then to show the development of the Superman idea through human culture from the earliest Australian Aboriginal notions of super–beings ‘descended” from the sky, through the complex philosophical system of Hinduism, onto the Renaissance concept of the ideal man, via the refinements of Nietzche and finally, down to that smiling, hopeful Joe Shuster sketch; the final embodiment of humanity’s glorious, uplifting notion of the superman become reduced to a drawing, a story for kids, a worthless comic book.

And also what that could mean in a holographic fractal universe, where the smallest part contains and reflects the whole.

Of course the next panel in that sequence is happening in the real world and would show you, the reader, sitting with the latest Superman issue in your hands, deep within the Infant Universe of Qwewq in the Fortress of Solitude, today, wherever you are. In “Neverending,” the reader becomes wrapped in a self–referential loop of story and reality. If you actually, seriously think about what is happening at this point in the story, if you meditate upon the curious entanglement of the real and the fictional, you will become enlightened in this life apparently. According to some texts.

NRAMA: On a personal level, you’ve explored all types of religions and philosophies in your work. What is your take on religion and how it influences humanity, and the Christian take on Jesus Christ in particular?

GM: I think religion per se, is a ghastly blight on the progress of the human species towards the stars. At the same time, it, or something like it, has been an undeniable source of comfort, meaning and hope for the majority of poor bastards who have ever lived on Earth, so I’m not trying to write it off completely. I just wish that more people were educated to a standard where they could understand what religion is and how it works. Yes, it got us through the night for a while, but ultimately, it’s one of those ugly, stupid arse–over–backwards things we could probably do without now, here on the Planet of the Apes.

Religion is to spirituality what porn is to sex. It’s what the Hollywood 3–act story template is to real creative writing.

Religion creates a structure which places “special,” privileged people (priests) between ordinary people and the divine, as if there could even be any separation: as if every moment, every thought, every action was not already an expression of dynamic ‘divinity” at work.

As I’ve said before, the solid world is just the part of heaven we’re privileged to touch and play with. You don’t need a priest or a holy man to talk to “god” on your behalf: just close your eyes and say hello. “God” is no more, no less, than the sum total of all matter, all energy, all consciousness, as experienced or conceptualized from a timeless perspective where everything ever seems to present all at once. “God” is in everything, all the time and can be found there by looking carefully. The entire universe, including the scary, evil bits, is a thought “God” is thinking, right now.

As far as I can figure it out from my own reading and my own experience of how the spiritual world works, Jesus was, as they say, way cool: a man who achieved a state of consciousness, which nowadays would get him a diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy (in the days of the Emperor Tiberius, he was crucified for his ideas, today he’d be laughed at, mocked or medicated).

This “holistic” mode of consciousness (which Luthor experiences briefly at the end of All Star Superman) announces itself as a heartbreaking connection, a oneness, with everything that exists...but you don’t have to be Superman to know what that feeling is like. There are a ton of meditation techniques which can take you to this place. I don’t see it as anything supernatural or religious, in fact, I think it’s nothing more than a developmental level of human consciousness, like the ability to see perspective – which children of 4 cannot do but children of 6 can.

Everyone who’s familiar with this upgrade will tell you the same thing: it feels as if “alien” or “angelic” voices – far more intelligent, coherent and kindly than the voices you normally hear in your head – are explaining the structure of time and space and your place in it.  This identification with a timeless supermind containing and resolving within itself all possible thoughts and contradictions, is what many people, unsurprisingly, mistake for an encounter with “God.” However, given that this totality must logically include and resolve all possible thoughts and concepts, it can also be interpreted as an actual encounter with God, so I’m not here to give anyone a hard time over interpretation.

Some people have the experience and believe the God of their particular culture has chosen them personally to have a chat with. These people may become born–again Christians, fundamentalist Muslims, devotees of Shiva, or misunderstood lunatics. Some “contactees” interpret the voices they hear erroneously as communications from an otherworldly, alien intelligence, hence the proliferation of “abduction” accounts in recent decades, which share most of their basic details with similar accounts, from earlier centuries, of people being taken away by “fairies” or “little people”.

Some, who like to describe themselves as magicians, will recognize the “alien” voice as the “Holy Guardian Angel”.

In timeless, spaceless consciousness, the singular human mind blurs into a direct experience of the totality of all consciousness that has ever been or will ever be. It feels like talking with God but I see that as an aspect of science, not religion.

As Peter Barnes wrote in “The Ruling Class”, “I know I must be God because when I pray to Him, I find I’m talking to myself.”

Newsarama: When we spoke earlier this year, you talked about some of your ideas for future All Star stories. Are you moving forward on those, or have you started working on different ideas since then?

Grant Morrison: I haven’t had time to think about them for a while. I did have the stories worked out, and I’d like to do more, but right now it feels like Frank and Jamie and I have said all there is to be said. I don’t know if I’m ready to do All Star Superman with anyone else right now. I have other plans.

NRAMA: You end the book with Superman having uplifted humanity – having inspired them through his sacrifice and great deeds, and with the potential to pass his powers on to humanity still there. Do you plan to explore this concept further, or would you prefer to leave it open–ended?

GM: I may go back to the Son of Superman in some way. At the same time, it’s best left open–ended. I like the idea that Superman gets to have his cake and eat it; he becomes golden and mythical and lives forever as a dream. Yet, he also is able to sire a child who will carry his legacy into the future. He kicks ass in both the spiritual and the temporal spheres!

NRAMA: The notion of transcendence – always a big part of your work. But the debate about All Star Superman is whether or not it "transcends its genre." Superman becomes transcendent within the series itself, and inspires the beings on Qwewq, but does the work aspire to more than that? Is it simply the greatest version of a Superman story, and that’s enough?

GM: That would certainly be enough if it were true.

It’s a pretty high–level attempt by some smart people to do the Superman concept some justice, is all I can say. It’s intended to work as a set of sci–fi fables that can be read by children and adults alike. I’d like to think you can go to it if you’re feeling suicidal, if you miss your dad, if you’ve had to take care of a difficult, ailing relative, if you’ve ever lost control and needed a good friend to put you straight, if you love your pets, if you wish your partner could see the real you...All Star is about how Superman deals with all of that.

It’s a big old Paul Bunyan style mythologizing of human - and in particular male - experience. In that sense I’d like to think All Star Superman does transcend genre in that it’s intended to be read on its own terms and needs absolutely no understanding of genre conventions or history around it to grasp what’s going on.

In today’s world, in today’s media climate designed to foster the fear our leaders like us to feel because it makes us easier to push around. In a world where limp, wimpy men are forced to talk tough and act ‘badass’ even though we all know they’re shitting it inside. In a world where the measure of our moral strength has come to lie in the extremity of the images we’re able to look at and stomach. In a world, I’m reliably told, that’s going to the dogs, the real mischief, the real punk rock rebellion, is a snarling, ‘fuck you’ positivity and optimism. Violent optimism in the face of all evidence to the contrary is the Alpha form of outrage these days. It really freaks people out.

I have a desire not to see my culture and my fellow human beings fall helplessly into step with a middle class media narrative that promises only planetary catastrophe, as engineered by an intrinsically evil and corrupt species which, in fact, deserves everything it gets.

Is this relentless, downbeat insistence that the future has been cancelled really the best we can come up with? Are we so fucked up we get off on terrifying our children? It’s not funny or ironic anymore and that’s why we wrote All Star Superman the way we did. Everything has changed. ‘Dark’ entertainment now looks like hysterical, adolescent, ‘Zibarro’ crap. That’s what my Final Crisis series is about too.

NRAMA (aka Tim Callahan): Continuing with the theme of transcendence: The words "ineffectual" and "surrender" are repeated throughout the book. Discuss.

GM: Discuss yourself, Callahan! I know you have the facilities and I should think it’s all rather obvious.  

NRAMA: What was the inspiration for the image of Superman in the sun at the end? (I confess this question comes as the result of much unsuccessful Googling)

GM: I didn’t have any specific reference in mind - just that one we‘ve all sort of got in our heads. I drew the figure as a sketch, intended to be reminiscent of William Blake’s cosmic figures, Russian Constructivist Soviet Socialist Worker type posters, and Leonardo’s ‘Proportions of the Human Figure‘. The position of the legs hints at the Buddhist swastika, the clockwise sun symbol. It was to me, the essence of that working class superheroic ideal I mentioned, condensed into a final image of mythic Superman, - our eternal, internal, guiding, selfless, tireless, loving superstar. The daft All Star Superman title of the comic is literalized in this last picture. It’s the ‘fearful symmetry’ of the Enlightenment project - an image of genius, toil, and our need to make things, to fashion art and artifacts, as a form of superhuman, divine imitation.

It was Superman as this fusion of Renaissance/Enlightenment ideas about Man and Cosmos, an impossible union of Blake and Newton. A Pop Art ‘Vitruvian Man‘. The inspiration for the first letter of the new future alphabet!

As you can see, we spent a lot of time thinking about all this and purifying it down to our own version of the gold. I’m glad it’s over.

NRAMA: Finally: What, above all else, would you like people to take away from All Star Superman?

GM: That we spent a lot of time thinking about this!

No. What I hope is that people take from it the unlikelihood that a piece of paper, with little ink drawings of figures, with little written words, can make you cry, can make your heart soar, can make you scared, sad, or thrilled. How mental is that?

That piece of paper is inert material, the corpse of some tree, pulped and poured, then given new meaning and new life when the real hours and real emotions that the writer and the artist, the colorist, the letter the editor translated onto the physical page, meet with the real hours and emotions of a reader, of all readers at once, across time, generations and distance.

And think about how that experience, the simple experience of interacting with a paper comic book, along with hundreds of thousands of others across time and space, is an actual doorway onto the beating heart of the imminent, timeless world of “Myth” as defined above. Not just a drawing of it but an actual doorway into timelessness and the immortal world where we are all one together.

My grief over the loss of my dad can be Superman’s grief, can trigger your own grief, for your own dad, for all our dads. The timeless grief that’s felt by Muslims and Christians and Agnostics alike. My personal moments of great and romantic love, untainted by the everyday, can become Superman’s and may resonate with your own experience of these simple human feelings.

In the one Mythic moment we’re all united, kissing our Lover for the First time, the Last time, the Only time, honoring our dear Dad under a blood red sky, against a darkening backdrop, with Mum telling us it’ll all be okay in the end.

If we were able to capture even a hint of that place and share it with our readers, that would be good enough for me.

#All Star Superman #Grant Morrison #Superman

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