Iron Patriot #5

Iron Patriot #5 was the the end of line for the series. It is too bad. Because though the story by Ales Kot never in the main rose above the level of filler, the art by Garry Brown and the colors by Jim Charalampidis jumped out at you. Brown's work on Iron Patriot was truly alive, a combination of Primitivism and classic Kirby from his Silver Age heyday. When in the future I look back on 2014 Garry Brown's five-issue run on Iron Patriot will sparkle like a Zeitgeist diamond.

Kot acknowledged in a Tweet that Iron Patriot was not his best work: "I believe Iron Patriot is my weakest work, but I managed to find a way to make it personally relevant through what I feel amounts to sheer will and a firm refusal to give up on anything I ever put out into the world." 

Bravo! Very Nietzschean. And Kot strikes a Nietzschean chord that ends the series with strength and depth when a comatose Rhodey dreams of seeing his father, who just sacrificed his life to save him, as a boy. Make sure to see the last scan at the bottom of the page. The text reads:

I don't remember much of the next few days.

Just fragments of dreams. 

People stopping by. 

Being immersed in Tony's meditank.

I had a dream about you. 

You were fishing, alone. 

You were a boy. 

You smiled at me. 

I realized that I was myself, as I am now, and you were that boy again. 

You said something but I couldn't remember what it was.

Previously I have opined that nihilism is the province of fathers and sons. The father leads the way into the abyss and the son dutifully follows along behind. In the process, a reversal takes place. The father becomes the idealized son, "the youth of eternal summers" that Van Morrison sings about in No Guru, No Method, No Teacher (1986), and which Kot and Brown capture so well. And we are back in the garden.

This is "the tain of the mirror" to the ceaseless striving and constant suffering of the eternal recurrence: We are always already -- here, now -- back in the garden.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #30

Drinking and fighting (with friends), the cruel story of youth. But this is after all the "Colt 45 Chronicle." Not a lot of pyrotechnics in this letter though, which is to my college buddy Shale. A lot about fellow Berkeley man Matt Biondi who had just won a number of gold medals at the Seoul Olympics that summer and who I gush about drunkenly (and laughably) based on a momentary glance he cast in my direction one sunny Sunday afternoon. But I catch myself mid-epistle, leaning heavily on Nietzsche in the process. Shale was a Nietzsche man all the way.

The fantasy, the palm at the end of my drunken young-man mind, that closes the communication is a recurring one -- the full house, the children asleep, etc. Now it's obvious to me that, like a lot of people from broken homes, I was trying to restore some sort of idealized lost unity; that, and, living in a high rise and working in the megalopolis, I was feeling isolated.

Autumn 1988 

Oh, my God, you wrote! With tapes no less. The clouds part and a single dove descends, lighting on my brow and filling me with the Spirit -------------- Diogenes marches into Athens; the Pig spits banquet brew in a whore's face; we all dance on D. Boon's grave.

A lot of water under the bridge since we last talked, too much to recapitulate here. Suffice it to say that we rambled out of Berkeley on a Saturday afternoon and were married in Reno on a Saturday night; drove across USA and then into NY; Ashley is going to school, and I have a boring/shitty job. Terri was here when we arrived but soon went to Guatemala to see Colum. Now she's back. Colum was here for a brief time doing a story on crack with a friend of his from Columbia. The last night he was here I drank too much. Terri and I, Johnny Walker Red label and a case of ol' Adolph. We got into a fight, Colum and I that is. I don't remember what I said. I feel pretty crummy about the whole thing. I puked later on that evening. One thing's for sure, this place is plenty overrated. I'm ready to climb back into the driver's seat and rediscover the West. Biondi and all those gold medals started me thinking about Berkeley again. I used to walk by that gym every day. You had to look up. The pool was on my route to campus. Once, when I was on my way down from the fire trail during one of my seasonal displays of physical assiduity -- I had run the fire trail three days in a row, or something like that -- I had an encounter with Biondi. Harmon pool was straight ahead and I was feeling good, turning on the speed and shining that shine you can only beam after five-plus miles. Biondi shot me a look, which was simply the look of humble and beneficent respect from a colossal and world-historic athlete. I had forgotten all about this until I was watching TV. So I started rooting for him. He became Berkeley and Berkeley became him. -- Oh, man, I know, beer-tear waxing over now-jaundiced adolescence. I'm not pumping atavism, no "Use and Abuse" herds-feeding-yonder(ism) here; it's just that it beats anything else, truth-value wise, at this juncture. Anyway, I came home Friday evening after performing the 9-to-5 eternal return, and I see your package on the table. I rip it open and read the letter, and bam! I do the reverse hermeneutic and shoot into the future. You said something about a commune. So I immediately started thinking about the time when Ashley and I have the full-blown manor house, behind which is an austere chalet, the one with your name plate always polished. Ashley is at the hospital, the kids are in bed, and, tossing my head up to a big fat clock on the wall, seeing that it's a quarter 'til, I dart out the door and down the path -- to Uncle Shale's. I hit the door, but before even touching wood, the fridge case-full and the stereo speaker-loud, are calling me in. I stride in and your just slurping down your last drop of java, text still in hand. Alright! Where's the beer?

Who the fuck fights the good fight anymore? Thank God for you, man. Toadies, featherweights, that's the shit filling the box seats, let alone general admission.

"Down In the Valley"

Today was one one of those days readymade for oblivion. Nothing remarkable. A workday. Mild weather. Chores performed. I've been transporting boxes of documents to the new building in Seatac; loading up the local's minivan and heading south on I-5. Tenant improvement construction is still underway. I have to don a hardhat and safety goggles when I enter. The ambiance of a construction site remains unchanged from when I toiled as a laborer in my twenties. Grumpy, sadistic men trapped in an eternal recurrence of junior high physical education class. As I shelve the old documents in the new file room I get to listen to my iPod. I am out of sight. This afternoon, really the best thing that happened all day, I heard "Down In The Valley" by The Head and the Heart: