I came across the trade paperback of Silk: The Life and Times of Cindy Moon while on my lunch break. I was in a comic shop downtown. I liked the blurb on the back. So I bought it. Though I have not kept up with the whole Spider-Verse narrative -- in fact, I think I have only read a few Spider-Man comics since I was laid off the spring of 2011-- I must say Silk was thoroughly captivating.
And it dawned on me why last week. My coworker was describing to me her post-work routine: her husband is not allowed to interact with her until she has consumed a glass of wine and watched Judge Judy on television. She says that after watching Judge Judy tell people what morons they are, she feels better, the stress from the work day magically sloughed off like an old snake skin.
I told her that her ritual reminded me of Enoch Emery in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952) and how he would walk through the zoo after work and swear at all the animals in their cages -- "Oh, you ugly fucking monkey! Look at how stupid you are!" -- and how much better it made him feel.
My co-worker had never read Wise Blood. So I described it to her, how important it was to me as a young man leaving college because it is basically about a young guy going off to make it in a big industrial city in the South.
Silk #1 picks up where the trade paperback leaves off. One of the young men who works at the comic shop in my neighborhood said that it has everything a comic book should have. And what I found that to be is the Wise Blood formula: a young person finds himself/herself in a big city and must survive. Throw in some fighting in the air high atop skyscrapers, and you have a real page-turner.
Below are eight scans from Silk #1. Cindy Moon wakes up in her overpriced New York City studio apartment, visits her brother in rehab, battles soldiers from Goblin Nation and smashes Mockingbird on top of the skull with a brief case. The writing is by Robbie Thompson; the art, Stacey Lee.
When my wife and I arrived in New York City one blisteringly hot August we were able to register in time to vote in the general election. In the letter below to my wife's cousin, Sarah, a woman our age who lived and studied music in Boston, I mention that I plan on casting my vote for Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. But I don't think I did. I think I voted the Socialist Party ticket for president.
Dukakis ended up winning in New York but was trounced nationwide by George H.W. Bush. That election is mostly remembered for a series of sound bites from the debates (Lloyd Bentsen's "Senator, You're No Jack Kennedy" disintegration of a bumbling Dan Quayle and Dukakis' bloodless response to the hypothetical rape and murder of his wife, Kitty) as well as two devastatingly effective ads run by the Bush campaign: the tank ad, and the Willie Horton ad. But what is not generally remembered about this race is that Dukakis enjoyed an enormous lead in the polls after the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, something like 21 points, which he proceeded to squander thanks to a series of gaffes.
Lee Atwater directed a shrewd campaign for Bush I. Yes, the tank and Willie Horton ads were ruthlessly effective, but so too was an ad that featured black-and-white stills of gas lines and Hippies protesting and hostages in Tehran blindfolded. The message was "Do want to go back to the social chaos of the 1970s?" The answer from the masses in the fall of 1988 was overwhelming "No." Dukakis was the last Democrat to run for president as an unabashed liberal. Today the social chaos of the 1970s is looking pretty good.
The letter is mostly an analysis of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952), one of my favorite novels at the time, along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and Charles Bukowski's Ham on Rye(1982). Sarah loved Wise Blood too. The last paragraph reveals a flirtation that Sarah and I carried on. Though it was never consummated, today I find it regrettable; proof of a confused young man bound for decades of moil and suffering.
Autumn 1988
We didn't make it up, but almost. We got on 95 North and after about eight miles the front end starting shaking and sliding like Anchorage back in '64. So I balanced the scale and decided against a 40-mph voyage to Boston. Tomorrow I have the day off to cast a losing ballot for your political pater. I'll take the stallion in for a grease job and an evaluation. Hopefully the ball joints aren't totally shot; if they are, I'm looking at a pretty penny.
Right before we left for Boston to see you we were throwing a bunch of stuff in a duffel bag, and I remembered your copy of Flannery O'Connor. I tossed it in . . . but we never went. So here I was with Sarah's unearthed O'Connor. -- I decided to re-read WISE BLOOD. And I did, and I think I got a little closer to the bottom of that dark swamp deep space which is the twenty-four-old mind that built that story. I used to grind this ax, on my first reading, that Haze was the best man, the best man on earth; a man shrouded everything else in the story; a man who every woman wanted because he was, plain and simple, a man. And, if you notice, this is true: Every woman in the story does want Haze, every single one. Hazel Motes is just about as incredible as you can get. But this time around I didn't notice Haze that much. I saw him more as a worker, a part player, albeit a big part, but a worker nonetheless . Enoch Emery is the one who breathed in my ear. He's "wise blood" (the one who always mentions it); he's the one who guards Eden's gate (a guard at the zoo gate); he's the man who gives names to all the animals. He's the one who steals the new jesus. And he is the one who is taken up by God. But I don't know what the fuck Flannery is trying to say in all of this -- that the world is part Enoch? Part stinking intuitive child? A shit-assed brat that is always right, but always nasty and unacceptable?
I like my first reading better because it made sense. I don't know what the second one means, something dark and deep like Satan and the ocean between the continents and smoking crack. In the end, the story ends with Haze and his pure selfless vision. Flannery wants the man, the hero -- Hazel, who wished his heart was the world and dies like Christ. Enoch is too far out in left field, the black dog panting silently in the bleachers. And I remember that your favorite memory was the image of Enoch in the putty rain brushing up against store fronts, his umbrella inside out, the new jesus crumpled in a brown paper bag on his arm.
I had a dream of the two of us, you and me, in a room, under a microscope; it was wild and okay; it reminded me of Haze.
Tonight caps a work week where I was put fully in mind of the Hobbes quote "that Man to Man is an errant wolf." In my case, a wolf, perched atop an ergonomically correct chair, trapped in a carpeted, air-conditioned pen, transfixed by a flat screen. Granted, no one is lighting me up with mortar fire -- it's not truly a "war of all against all" -- but it is, after a fashion, a hell realm.
Fortunately I can still sprint. I sped across six busy of lanes of International Boulevard traffic to catch the bus to the train station, and then I sprang up four flights of stairs and jogged over a skybridge and up an escalator to enter the train car just as it was about to depart. A miserable work week gives way as a promising weekend begins.
Last weekend I kept thinking that it was June. But it's not. It's already August. The light here is already starting to recede ever so slightly. What a joy it was on Saturday night to be alone -- a bachelor at home -- cooking a sirloin and listening to Music From Big Pink (1968):
It was as if after nearly 50 years of existence I have arrived at some sort of dialectical synthesis. The past sublated into a healthy, relaxed, unitary present free of man-woman conflict. For a musical accompaniment I could ask for nothing more than "Tears of Rage," the first track Richard Manuel/Bob Dylan masterpiece:
And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse
When Levon Helm died last year I received a request from my mother, who is a resident in an assisted-living facility, for a copy of Music From Big Pink. Under the impression that I had a copy in my iTunes, I assured her that I'd have it in the mail right away. To my surprise it turned out that I was mistaken. All I had on my computer was The Band (1969) and The Best of the Band (1976). I promptly went online and downloaded the 2000 digital remaster and burned the old gal a copy.
All my other recordings of The Band were on magnetic tape. The copy of Music From Big Pink that I thought I had was actually a used cassette that I purchased the first summer I lived in the Emerald City 23 years ago. If you don't count Planet Waves (1974) and The Basement Tapes (1975), which are Dylan and Band collaborations that were staples of my university days, it was the first album of The Band's that I owned. For me it will always be the best. It is linked in my mind with my first run at being a bachelor.
In 1990 I left my wife in New York City and flew to San Francisco. From there I took a Greyhound to Southern Oregon where I purchased a used Jeep Gladiator pick-up manufactured in the late 1960s. It was a "high, rat-colored car" (which is Flannery O'Connor's description of Hazel Motes' automobile in Wise Blood), and I drove it north up I-5 to Seattle, entering the city the morning after Randy Johnson threw a no-hitter against Detroit.
I worked construction that summer and jogged the ribbon of greenery that I run to this day and listened to Music From Big Pink,Sonic Youth's Goo (1990), The Lemonhead's Lovey (1990), Nick Cave & the Bad Seed's The Good Son (1990) and plenty of Neil Young's Tonight's the Night (1975). I drank Midnight Dragon malt liquor and slept on the floor and read about Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in the national edition of the New York Times. I was a young man alone, estranged from his wife, but okay with it. Rick Danko's cover of "Long Black Veil" spoke to me.
At the beginning of fall that year I traveled back to New York City in an unsuccessful attempt to patch things up with the wife. It was then that The Last Waltz (1978) -- that end-of-the-line love song to arena rockers -- became my manifesto, my lifeline. But my first love is Music From Big Pink. It's my bachelor's anthem, a perfect organic whole of funky, folksy, iridescent, soulful, regenerative music that occupies a timeless space -- a triumphant tribute to the Hippie wisdom contained in Timothy Leary's "turn on, tune in, drop out." -- It can done! The Band proved it at Big Pink.
