Milkfed Criminal Masterminds Newsletter
HO HO HO
- matt fraction -
it’s march 1997 and i’m about to come to portland for the first time. the night before i leave, david foster wallace is on charlie rose. michael ondjaate comes up; THE ENGLISH PATIENT had just won an academy award or was just about to anyway. He’s a writer and a poet, not a screenwriter, so it’s a thing they talk about.
It’s march 1997 and i’ve just stopped reading INFINITE JEST; at this point I was struggling, however subconsciously, with my drug use and found Wallace's evocation of a bad stone too much to bear. A few months prior I’d dabbled with angel dust and ever since getting high had been kind of nightmarish. And yet I still would get high as often as I could. This is because I am a drug addict.
I still like Wallace's shorts and his nonfiction so I watch him with Charlie Rose. Go read A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN. Wallace brings up an Ondaatje book of poetry he prefers: THERE’S A TRICK WITH A KNIFE I’M LEARNING TO DO. Great title. I misremember it as “There’s a Trick That I’m Learning to do with a Knife” because there’s a meter my tongue finds more easy but then, hey, I'm no poet. Wallace calls it "A Few Tricks WIth A Knife I'm Learning to Do." I guarantee you, I promise you, I would bet everything I own he realized his error the second he left that studio and regretted it with a burning, stomach-tightening, anxious flood of shame and embarrassment.
In Portland, then; at Powell’s for the first time. An anthology of Ondjaate’s works is on sale cheap, collecting, among other things, THE CINNAMON PEELER (subsequently a personal favorite) which contains THERE’S A TRICK WITH A KNIFE I’M LEARNING TO DO. It’s a book I’ve had ever since, one I refused to get rid of, to jettison or resell, no matter how broke I got, no matter how shaky my hands and how much I wanted to drink or get high. Seventeen years I’ve been lugging this black brick around, because of, among other things, THERE’S A TRICK WITH A KNIFE I’M LEARNING TO DO.
I also buy BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy.
The next year GOOD WILL HUNTING will be nominated for several Academy Awards. Elliot Smith plays a song called “Miss Misery” on the soundtrack. He’s from Portland. I found him on that trip too. Elliot Smith was in a band called HEATMISER. That his solo work is delicate and soft always kind of surprises me; if you knew what Heatmiser sounded like at first, but then Heatmiser started to sound like Elliot Smith and then Elliot Smith left Heatmiser, left Portland. He’ll receive a nomination for “Miss Misery” but it loses to the TITANIC song but I still remember getting chills watching him play, hearing him haunt hollywood in his white tuxedo and thrift shop guitar.
Two years later he records a cover of “Figure 8” from SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK. It’s music for spiders to slow-dance at prom, as haunting and melancholy as the original. Smith would call his next album FIGURE EIGHT but the song was only on the Japanese version of the LP. The original was sung by an amazing jazz vocalist called "Blossom Dearie." I am not making that up. If I made that up you would say that I am a bad writer.
A year after that in the girl’s apartment who first brought me to Portland I read Wallace’s “Tense Present” in HARPER’S. It, like “The Cinnamon Peeler,” has stayed with me ever since. What a mind, that guy. What a writer. His intelligence is so massive light bends around its edges. Here’s a thing that was hard for me when I was trying to be a writer: other writers are so fucking good and I literally did not crack 1000 on my SATs. I do not want to be a bad writer.
Nine months after that I’m on my first double-date with the woman I will marry. We go to see THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS. In it a character named Peter Bradley, making fun of Charlie Rose, talks to Owen Wilson, whose character makes fun of Cormac McCarthy and David Foster Wallace.
Two years after that Elliot Smith kills himself. He drives a knife into his chest twice — twice. Posthumous records are released but I have trouble listening to them.
David Foster Wallace kills himself five years after that. A lifelong struggle with depression and medication broke bad and the world of words suffered a catastrophic loss. One can only imagine the hole it blasted through his family.
Ten years before that he crafted “The Depressed Person” in HARPER’S. It was, and is, brutal; since his death I find it nearly unreadable, as I find Elliot Smith now unlistenable, a kind of act of telegraphed self-immolation, the yawlp of an animal crazed with pain howled perhaps in a pitch only others like him may recognize.
One year later, or seventeen years later, depending on where you start counting, I live in Portland. I live near where my ex’s aunt lived, purely by coincidence. I have memories of this place from seventeen years ago: the gas station, the convenience store that used to be another kind of convenience store, the random street name, the dry cleaner that used to be a restaurant. Colson Whitehead says you belong to a place once you remember what that place used to be like. He was talking about New York but still. It’s a nice point. If you can remember what this place was, you can count yourself among the things here that have not changed, you can feel as though you belong here because you preserved while other shit did not.
I am driving around with my kids, playing the soundtrack to SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK. A personal favorite of mine is “Unpack Your Adjectives.” I find there something evocative and haunting in the woman’s voice, something at once both actorly and vast, high of octave and crisp of edge and deep in some kind of sense of soul, almost.
I look the song up. It’s sung by Blossom Dearie. Blossom Dearie also sang “Figure 8" originally. Again if I wrote this you'd find it sentimental and trying at best.
Blossom Dearie’s eponymous album (1959) contains the Rodgers and Hart standard “Ev’rything I’ve Got.” The lyrics, emphasis mine, go:
I have eyes for you to give you dirty looks
I have words that do not come from children’s books
There’s a trick with a knife I’m learning to do
And ev’rything I’ve got belongs to you
The Portland I met in 1997 isn’t around anymore. There’s no more Coffee People, the dead zone downtown from stark to burnside, from third down to the river sure as shit isn’t a dead zone anymore. There’s a “The Pearl District” now. People still pretend they were around when the X-Ray was around; the math doesn’t jibe but whatever. The Hentai theater remains, thank Christ. There’s still a Cafe Montage but I dunno if they still yell when people do oyster shooters. I don’t drink or get high anymore. Dearie is gone. Wallace is gone. Elliot Smith is gone. That Portland is gone, too; the world is darker for their absences.
I have kids and a van that plays DVDs and I drive it playing SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK. You could’ve told me in 1997 that I’d have four arms and be fifteen feet tall and it would have seemed about as likely. You could’ve told me in 1997 that Wallace and Smith would be dead by their own hands and I’d raise a glass to them and tell you you’re drinking with the third.
I keep trying to find a punchline here, and I suppose the punchline is this: I stuck around and more was revealed. Curious, trivial, meaningless, weird, coincidental, useless, banal, unimportant, funny ha-ha, funny strange — this strange little cul-de-sac of coincidence, this latticework of happenstance — maybe it doesn’t mean anything other than I am alive. And it is because I am alive that I see from time to time this beautiful pattern of lace that somehow, magically, seems to connect everything together, a figure ∞ engulfing us all. I guess the punchline is this: even now, at this time of year, when things can feel so dark and bleak, I am not alone. Even if I cannot see it there is an invisible system of links and connections to ghosts and to babies not yet born that run through me no matter how hard I try to cut them.
I listened to my daughter sing “Figure 8” in her soft, lilting voice, her natural vibrato and quiet tone providing spooky wee accompaniment. I listen to this child of mine, seventeen years ago inconceivable to all involved, I listen to her sing.
And I never want the song to end.
The darkest night of the year is coming soon. Don't stop singing.
#ICYMI
Uncaging Bitch Planet (Analysis) on Atoll Comics.
Bitch Planet #1 on AV Club, IGN, Wired, Comics Alliance, Newsarama and Bitch Magazine.
Bitch Planet & Ody-C on Junkee.
Matt Fraction Takes a Break from "Abusive" Twitter on Digital Spy.
Review: Captain Marvel #10, the Anniversary Issue on Comicosity.
DeConnick and DeLandro Dare Us To Be Non-Compliant on Multiversity.
Bitch Planet Breaks Barriers and Faces on CBR.
tl;dr
December 20 - KS & MF Signing at Cosmic Monkey, Portand, OR
January 7 - ODY-C #2 in stores
January 8 - Image Expo
January 28 - Bitch Planet #2 in stores
January 28 - Casanova: Acedia #1 in stores
January 28 - ODY-C #3 in stores
February 18 - Bitch Planet #3 in stores
February 19-22 - KS at Disney Princess Half Marathon Weekend
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