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THE MIND WHICH CREATES THE MAN WHO SUFFERS
This title now seems very unwieldy and obscure. But, at the time I thought it was a terribly clever reworking of some of the key phrases from Tradition and the Individual Talent by T. S. Eliot, an essay that had very much impressed me on first reading. This was a moment when I was very much enmeshed in studying certain theories of literary influence: Ezra Pound’s concept of “Make it New” and Harold Bloom’s “Clinamen or Poetic Misprison,” from The Anxiety of Influence, to name just a few. This was all very pretentious; but it was the scholastic wallpaper that would be the backdrop for my little project.
I was not so much impressed by Eliot’s theories of influence as I was by his descriptions of how the personal needed to be separated from the aesthetic in the lives of successful artists. One can read the entire essay by clicking on the link below; But the key part I was deliberately referencing is in the passage quoted on the right.
The main idea I was trying to put forth was that there was a side of myself that was unable to reach this separation. I was trying to ferret out the sources of this “personal” interference and static. I eventually gave this well spring of unsuccessful artistry its own persona. I even gave it (him) a name: Adrian Sidney The subtitle I briefly appended to the drawing sequence was The Life and Death of Adrian Sidney.
That is, after all what this meant to me. It was my attempt to be exorcised of him, my attempt to “kill” him off.I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It’s easy. Just click “Edit Text” or double click me and you can start adding your own content and make changes to the font. Feel free to drag and drop me anywhere you like on your page. I’m a great place for you to write more. Tell a story and let your users get to know you.
“In the last article I tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of “personality,” not being necessarily more interesting, or having “more to say,” but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.
The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.”
T. S. Eliot, from "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
c
PAGE 1
page one, completed June 27, 1982
I played around with page and panel format constantly. I thought the project could stand alone both as a book, i.e., arranged in page format, as well as a sequence of “panels” of original artwork, i. e., pieces of paper with multiple frames on them. The dimensions of this first page would later come to set what I thought of as the “page” format.
The symbolism here is not subtle. The camera comes up again and again as a symbol for a range of obvious referents: perception (as in the totality of sensory and intellectual “input”), the visual sense, the impulse to frame, i. e., to choose to perceive some things and not others, in another words to edit. It is a device that also transforms experience. It records it. It “captures” it. It stops it. It is almost as though the camera has the ability to make time stand still. The camera is also continually presented as the symbol of an impulse with a dangerous side. If one has the power to “capture” experience, one also has the power to change it. Perception and the recording of experience can even be unreliable. What gets on the proverbial film may be not quite be the ultimate reality.
My first camera was a Praktina, a manual that required a separate light meter. However, the camera depicted here is more or less my father’s 1970's era Pentax - at least as it appeared in the pages of the owner’s manual. But, I really liked how the name Praktina sounded. Practical, in practice, praxis - these were descriptors of situations where IDEAS weren't sufficient, situations in which the "real" world needed to be engaged. Plus, I also liked that Praktina sounded like a diminutive. This is fairly typical of the symbolism that I kept trying to include. The symbols have referents, yes. But they are almost always referents to highly abstract concepts. Here, we are looking down the barrel of the camera. The full abstract symbol is that we are looking at someone else’s looking. We are looking at the visual trappings of that person’s “looking.”
This is not the drawing I had such trouble with in March, 1982. (That is on pages 5-6) Instead, it is one of two ways that I chose to introduce that drawing. I thought of this as being the most simple of constructs - the issue in a nutshell - so I started the sequence here.
It was simple conceptually; but I had some real problems creating it on paper. I came to realize what a drawing slob I had been up until this point. My straight edges were way too wobbly. My shading, whether cross hatching or stipling, was way too erratic. I actually completed the page and became disgusted with the results. This is my second attempt. It may not look like much; but the top frame alone took me 13 hours to finish. Even so, one can see the abnormal, out of perspective shapes of the camera in its corners. One vestige of my previous style can be seen in the base of the shutter button. There is a kind of stylized line that indicates the curvature of the button housing. It is a gimmick, like using a curved 4 latticed window frame reflection to indicate a soap bubble. Such things turn up a few more times; but this is a kind of last gasp for this cheap technique.
The improvised solution to my newly noted sloppiness would later come to be the cornerstone for the technique I would use for the rest of the sequence. Commercial artists would often use products like Zip-a-tone to quickly “screentone” huge areas of a drawing. I had no idea that such products existed. But I did see the finished products, so I decided to approximate this in the only way I could think of. I would stick carefully positioned graph paper under the thick 140 lb. drawing paper. Then I would shine a very bright light up through the sheet of glass that the drawing was affixed to. And finally I would then apply a dot with my technical pen on top of every intersection of the graph paper. This was truly laborious, but, frankly, I was too inexperienced to think of an alternative. Thus graph paper, as the way to keep all things justified and parallel, became my #1 tool going forward. The SW to NE direction of the shading inside the lens makes it very visible.
The lower frame is the first of many examples of my self consciously aping Victor Moscoso and Luis Garcia. What appears to be “the actual” in one frame is transformed into “the depicted” in the next: the picture within the picture. And, hence, it becomes different. The camera above is “KX” (actual Pentax model). The camera below is “KSX” (The “S” is for “Sidney’s”). “Better Now,” as a laundry detergent advertising slogan for a camera is absurd. But in the context of - “Now that you see the camera is an image on a poster” - maybe it really is “Better Now,” as in more clear or more accurate. Maybe it is even enjoyable. “ENJOY?” A very curious phrase again. This is, perhaps, better suited for the restaurant business or used as a term to sell one on the BMW driving experience. Enjoy the camera? Enjoy photography? Or Enjoy the whole range of things that the camera can symbolize? Yes, the latter. It is meant as a totem of a kind of self-indulgence.
And then there appears to be stuff behind the poster too. Here it seems to be almost a pure design element, some sort of stylized fleur de lis or flag like symbol.
PAGE 2
The pull back which started on page 1 continues here. This remains a “go-to” plot device through out. Here we are introduced to “the room.” To anyone who knew me as I was growing up in the suburbs of Albany, New York, “the room” will be vaguely reminiscent of my childhood bedroom. It is similar - but not quite. Throughout much of these drawings there is a kind of dream logic. Familiar places and objects appear; but they are not always in the proper configuration. The familiar things which appear here are kind of like a deck of “symbol” cards, a deck that gets shuffled and dealt again and again.
The prominence of the bed right here at the beginning was an attempt to introduce this idea of the dream. The bed’s headboard is basically that of the bed I slept in as a child; however, I added the “Chippendale” notch. By 1982 the architectural outrage over Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building’s pediment had even made its way to my attention via magazines like “Art in America.” Including the notch here was kind of a cheap private joke: “The guy who sleeps here must be BAD. Look at the devil horns on his bed.” The foot board’s verticals are meant to look like bars. The mattress is bare. What sleep goes on here is apparently restless and not luxurious.
The clip on lamp is precisely the one I used for drawing. The dresser has no precise referent; but it is fairly typical of my (then) crude attempts to trumpet an object’s visual complexity. It is all black. “Helpful,” almost coloring book-like lines help delineate it. Think of a child’s “helpfully” indicating the eyes on a person’s face with complete circles. The style of delineating the bed frame is similarly crude. It’s all about line, line that shows the object’s silhouette. Shading, to the extent that it is in evidence, is secondary. The stippling on the right looks like a swarm of insects over the top of the drawing. This was the best I could do at the time - or, rather, the best I could think to try to do. Only the slightly better executed (though not quite properly situated) directional shading to the right of the dresser indicates that the artist might eventually start to “get it.”
Yes, it is all pretty crude; but these scenes weren’t really about depicting objects. They are about depicting the IDEA of objects. One of the most important objects is the rug. I grew up with numerous oriental throw rugs; and the border of the one here is a version of the design on one I still own today. At the time I was a bit taken with the idea that intricate patterns could symbolize the hidden, inscrutable significances of the visual world. This is a bit evocative of the thinking that underlies classic OCD. One of the early chapters of Moby Dick, titled The Counterpane would definitely have been on my mind. The counterpane on Ishmael’s bed (remember THE BED) is intricately decorated. Queequeg’s tattooed arm, similarly patterned, rests on top of the quilt. Melville himself does a great job evoking the kind of phantasmagoric effect of pattern. Click on the link to the right to read the chapter. The rug is a collection of symbols which are unreadable, yes; but it is also a kind of chess board. I chose this idiosyncratic grid pattern for this emphasis.
Finally, the pattern of the wallpaper was something I remember devoting endless attention to. I went to wallpaper supply outlets and brought home huge books of samples. “I need to wallpaper a room,” I told them. The pattern I chose was actually only about 3 inches in the sample; but I chose to blow it up all out of proportion to indicate the artificiality and stylized rendering of what is presumably meant to be some kind of flowering plant. The occupant of this room has chosen to paper over the edges of his personal space with these kinds of stylized facsimiles of actual/real visual objects. Also, it was yet another pattern that I liked throwing in. Plus, the wallpaper lines helped break up the space.
And that poster! Who would have a poster like that?! No one. Such a poster would never exist. It is functioning here almost like an in-frame caption. Or, maybe the guy who “lives” here needs posters like this to remind him of something about his self concept... Maybe that’s what those books by the bed are for too. But we just don’t know yet.
Lying on the rug in the top frame is an envelope. Looking closer, we can even see a return address: “Kid Sid’s Context.” This was to have been the title for the drawing I never finished in March (and would later become the drawing on pages 5-6). The phrase came out of a poem - the actual content of which is not so terribly important - that was at one time meant to have accompanied the drawing. Basically, it is the shorthand that I mentally used for this room. It is a letter from this room to someone or something. We find out more about this letter later on.
The page’s lower frame includes the window frame, storm windows and all. I had been a phone solicitor for a thermal window company the previous summer. Note the fake brand: All Season’s Thermo King. The room is “sealed off.” It is a very unsubtle way to introduce the idea of an inside/outside dichotomy. It would be a repeated framing device in the pages to come. There is a shutter visible (could it swing closed?) Even the screws are visible - typical of the unnecessarily excessive detail that continually appears. One last not so subtle point: the letter is visible only when viewed from the inside - not from the outside.
page 2, completed July 1, 1982
Philip Johnson and John Burgee's AT&T Tower (now SONY Tower) completed in 1984
My feet on the rug that was the template for the drawing. The rug is showing the signs of decades of wear in 2010.
return address: "Kid Sid's Context"
Pattern I found in a wall paper outlet in Wickford, Rhode Island in June, 1982
PAGES 3-4
This is probably the most unusual page layout of the sequence. Perhaps the unorthodox page layouts of Miller’s “Green Dog Trumpet” made me feel I had license. In book layout the crease would fall in a very awkward place; but I remember thinking that clustering the drawings this closely together would produce an unusual and somewhat confusing effect. For me, this would be a “good thing.” I made the spaces between the frames so small that, at a glance, one might mistake the vertical and horizontal white space as part of the actual scene being depicted. I thought of this like an additional visual “speed bump.”
These three frames are, more or less, my cartoon depiction of what is often called in physics “The Observer Effect” (often confused by lay people with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. See link for details). In physics this term refers to changes that the act of observation will make on the phenomenon being observed. Here, as the quality or, rather, the precision and accuracy of observation increases, the scene being observed seems to change. In frame one there is a car. In frame two we realize that we are separated from that car by a window. (a selective framing device) But by the time we realize this, the car (and its apparent ability to illuminate with its headlights) has moved. Now it has become “different.” By the time we reach frame three and we realize that we have been looking at a reflection in a mirror all along, the car has moved on... or, as I was trying to insinuate, we realize that it was in fact never there. Or was it? This recurring car - apparent drive by visitor is introduced here with what I hoped would be a high degree of uncertainty. Yes, the mirror "reveal" is a kind of cheap, visual trick that gets our attention - but what in fact is happening? I wanted to leave it unclear.
The car itself is a 1973 Ford Pinto Wagon - with faux wood side paneling, exactly the car I most often drove for the preceding several years. Cars like this are slippery objects to fit precisely into a perspective grid system; and one can certainly see that I struggled to get the image down on paper. Of note is the fact that there appears to be no driver; but I have helpfully revealed the license plate KS CTX (again Kid Sid’s Context).
The obsessive attention to the little bits of hardware seem quite unusual to me now - the hinges, the mirror clips and screws, the door knob and locks, the window latches, the witchy specificity of the lamp in the yard (modeled on one I had seen down the street in Wickford, RI - behind a neighbor’s actual picket fence). Again, it was not so much about how things were supposed to look as about successfully signaling that all the required objects were present and accounted for. Another significant technical detail for me is the line that marks the corner in the largest frame. It starts out as black; but as it runs across objects drawn solidly black, it changes to white. Again, my extraordinary commitment to the idea of line seems ferocious.
Another technical problem I confronted was how to depict the bushes in the yard. Rather than coming up with a convincing way of showing leafiness, I chose instead to go with a very stylized overgrown briar patch looking thing. Just what is that? Is this winter and the leaves are gone? No (we are given the idea of a date in later pages; but there is no real indication that what is being represented has any actual temporal specificity) This is just a big, black, malignant looking, wickedly twisting thing. Yikes! I did, however, want there to be a contrast between this stylized image of “actual” vegetation (not successfully rendered by the artist, i.e., “me”) and the intentionally stylized wall paper rendering of vegetation - another inside/outside contrast.
The interplay of the multiple light sources was another element that I remember trying to concentrate on. The car’s headlights cast shadows in toward us at the beginning and then later, once the car has passed or is absent, the yard light casts the shadows away from us. This is just basic shadow direction drawing; but I was laying the ground work for what would become a later theme: looking/perceiving being its own kind of "light" (complete with “looking” photons and their attendant energy quanta) A bit trippy and abstract, perhaps; but this is typical of the way my mind chose to cross pollinate concepts at the time. Finally, the interplay of the 2 headlights going through the picket fence is a kind of childish homage to Young’s classic two slit interference experiment. Is light (perception) a wave or a particle? Apparently both, according to Young. (see link for details)
Another significant technical detail is my decision to abandon the heavily structured forms of shading of the last two pages and simply “go to town” on the street with free form directional slashes. I remember that this had been the only way I could think of at the time to make the light feel palpable. Last, that area behind the door is simply black. Is it a void? Or is it something the artist has just chosen not to include? It is just a vertical black slit, much like the frame breaks are similarly sized white slits.
pages 3-4, completed July 6, 1982
An asymmetrical two page layout from Ian Miller's "Green Dog Trumpet"
Illustration of Young's Interference Experiment
Big fat white line just magically appears to signify, "look, I'm a corner!"
Is that vegetation? Or a symbol for malignancy?
New York, where I used to drive a Ford Pinto Wagon had front license plates. KS CTX for Kid Sid's Context.
PAGES 5-6
pages 5-6, completed July 22, 1982
This is, perhaps, not the kind of dramatic scene that one might have expected when I described my difficulties in starting this drawing sequence. Yes, THIS is the scene I had been working on (so unsuccessfully) back in March of 1982. This is actually the third version that I finished in July of that year. I had produced a second version in May, one that I ultimately rejected for sloppy workmanship and insufficiently imagined shading techniques. The two scenes from the previous 4 pages are unified here, shown to be “in” the same room.
The camera on the poster now helpfully reads KS CTX, just like the license plate. There are a few new items visible as well. There is the dresser, uncompromising in its massive blackness. Again, line is extensively indicated by black on white. The dresser, like the headboard, also has the Chippendale notch. There is another black piece of furniture which appears to be a desk with a blotter below the window. There are two collections of books visible. The only visible title is on the big book in the pile by the bed: “Random House Dictionary.” I was playing with the idea that this was in a random, or non-specific house. Finally, there is the tape deck - more on that later.
And what exactly is this room? It was my intention to create a kind of staged arena in which various symbols would emerge in successive scenes. I had chosen wallpaper initially as simply a way of alluding to scenes in Victor Moscoso’s “Cosmic Comics.” But, later, I became attracted to the notion this wallpaper was a kind of temporary covering of a certain kind of blankness, a kind of paper “tent.” The “void” like black that is slightly visible behind the door is more directly signaling this as well. All that is visible (in a kind of “Tron”-like spareness; yes, it was 1982 and that film had just been released) is the underlying grid of the artificially compressed perspective system. The mattress has a hole; the poster is ripped and repaired with tape; even more - it is peeling off the wall. On the next page we even see that some of the wall paper is peeling. We are looking in through not just one window - but two, a not so subtle way of referencing eyes and vision. The stuff in this room is almost a scene for an odd kind of panopticon that we look at through the windows. And the “cracks” in the facade are showing.
Yeah, right. It’s all that. WTF? Well, at the very least we know it is a room in which someone is using a tape deck at night. The whole “Kid Sid’s Context” thing came out of the whimsical poem that was (once upon a time) to have accompanied this drawing. It describes a youngish male’s splicing bits of different pieces of music together on a single cassette. This is something I and my long time friend Jim Forni used to do with some degree of regularity. We called the results of this process “Interruptions tapes.” One of the novelties of doing this was hearing how the juxtaposition of certain songs seem to slightly change them, or at least change one’s impression of them (Is that the same thing?). I would often spring these tapes on unsuspecting listeners, and it was very interesting to see how they had difficulty recognizing very well known pop songs. The original (and now discarded) poem had taken a kind of Eleanor Rigby tone of alienation and loneliness (“Darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there” - something I found myself quite literally doing on a few occasions). Collecting bits and pieces of experience so as to “splice” them together like so much wall paper to make an artificial but, perhaps, more intellectually satisfying environment was something the poem emphasized was inherently alienating and probably ontologically corrupt.
Can one get any of this from looking at this drawing? No, not at all; but I want to emphasize that this is a drawing of the work space (mental or otherwise) of someone alienated and removed in just this specific way. What starts immediately after these 2 pages is an (attempted) extended display of just this attitude, put forth in the very visual terms of this very person’s own choosing. All that said - this will remain the visual space or visual game board in which this display will take place. We will cycle back here again and again.
Detail of page 30 of Victor Moscoso's 1971 "Cosmic Comics." Note the wallpaper.
from "Yellow Submarine"
from "Yellow Submarine"
from "Yellow Submarine"
from "Yellow Submarine"
PAGE 7
page 7, completed August 2, 1982
As I write this in the digital world of 2012, the idea that cassette audio tape could have at one time been considered the height of high fidelity seems positively ancient and quaint; but in 1982 it still was. Maxell and its contemporary advertising campaigns made it an obvious choice here. (plus all my own audio cassettes were that brand) The cassette and the tape deck are signifiers of “things audio,” yes; but they are more centrally used throughout the sequence to denote the sequential recording AND STORING of information. I will get right to it and say flatly that the cassette tape is used as a symbol of accumulated experience, i.e., memory - and by extension, identity.
The desk lamp shines down on the tape deck. The light directed on an audio component is “shedding some light on memory/identity?” This scenario draws attention to a certain kind of incompatibility: light (visual) vs. tape deck (auditory). There must be interesting stuff on the tape; but one can never “see” it.
The audio component is also by itself. It is not attached to an amplifier or loudspeakers. The input seems to be a microphone, presumably carrying the voice of the person who lives/uses this room. The cassette door is open; yet, the VU meters show sound. The “tape counter” reads 002 in the lower frame. I meant this to indicate that this was TAPE PLAYER: take 2. Also, it isn’t a tape player or recorder. It is a “TAPE VIEWER.” The pages that follow are meant to be “that which is viewed,” a kind pictorial representation of thought or of one’s interior mental world.
Realistic was the in-house Radio Shack brand of the era (usually denoting poorly made merchandise); and this product is precisely the one I owned. Nevertheless, “Realistic” seems a made-to-order brand for my purposes. If one is to be shown the interior world of thought, the visuals used to illustrate it should be “Realistic.” Notice how that word has a slightly different connotation from those three words that one most often hears in connection with semiotics: The Imaginary, The Symbolic, and The Real.
I loved being able to include words like “Power” “noise reduction” “Bias” and “EQ” on the machine face because of the connotations that they might add: varying ways of internally adjusting memory, memories of perceptions, and ideological conclusions. The play button is depressed in both frames. Some audio tape is spilling out of the cassette carriage in the top frame, and even more is spilling out in the lower frame. The tape has a kind of sinister, liquid quality that I like even now. The sense of frustration that one felt during this era when one’s tape “got eaten” (i.e., yanked out of the plastic spool and crumpled up beyond playback) is something I am sure my contemporaries will remember. Here the audio tape seems to be gradually released in a more controlled and gently flowing way. The audio tape will remain a consistently present element from this page through page 16. I meant for the scenes that follow to be read as “on the tape,” and by extension (if the tape symbolizes memory and identity) as interior thought.
Some brief technical notes. The revealing of the wood grain in the desk lamp’s intense glare seems notable. The lower frame is probably the first instance of my deciding to render an object “nearly” black rather than flat black. There seems to be some tentative notions of directional cross hatching in the top frame’s spot light on the dresser. I remember feeling somewhat liberated that I could allow a rather chaotic scribble texture to function as the matte metallic top of the audio component - almost a symbol for the idea of the “chaos within.” The floral wallpaper pattern, however, seems to almost float in its solid blackness amidst a sea of dots - a mole/”beauty mark” on the ‘face” of the picture.
The iconic Maxell ad.
TDK still going strong in "Blade Runner's" 2019. A cassette mass marketer's logo as a backdrop for Roy's often quoted description of his impending death, "All these memories will be lost in time like tears in the rain." Is the droopy tape loop in the drawing a "tear?"
PAGE 8
page 8, completed August 4, 1982
I can not for the life of me remember exactly why I felt I needed to make this set of frames more narrow. I wanted to emphasize verticality in the “fall” of the tape loop? I didn’t want to devote too much horizontal space to the lower frame? Whatever the reason, the sizing is unique. This turns out to be a somewhat important image, something we discover again on pages 26-28. This view of the dresser and tape player is almost in profile. When one takes a moment to figure out where exactly this is viewed from, one realizes that it is from the bed. The unrolling (unfolding) of the “story” I was describing in the previous page is, perhaps, more properly a “dream.” Maybe this is not exactly a true “I am sound asleep and in REM phase” dreaming as much as it is a “daydreaming” or imagining; but we should definitely understand that this is meant to be from the perspective of the occupant of the room.
Realistically rendering the cassette tape was an insurmountable problem for me. It is too small to adequately detail; plus it would get lost in the thicket of hard outlines of objects. What happens instead is that the audio tape becomes instead just a running collection of four lines. It runs through the subsequent frames, almost like some kind of “follow the bouncing ball” sing along caption in a film. One note about the tape: the unspooling means that not one, but two strands are rolled out. It is a loop. Think of the plug that goes into your wall socket. (like the one seen in the top left of the upper frame) There are two wires, not one. The loop needs to complete a circuit in order for the current to work properly. It is the same here: out and then back again. There are even two electrical cords in the frame for comparison (tape deck and lamp).
The lower frame was one I remember being unexpectedly pleased by. The almost purely abstract patterns of the rug, the tape, and the floor made what I thought was a nice trio: unreadable pattern (the tape), natural pattern (wood grain; revisited with increasing detail throughout), and man made coded pattern (rug). I think there is even a glimmer of technical improvement.
PAGES 9-10
pages 9-10, page 9 (two left frames and lower center frame) completed August 18, 1982; page 10 (upper center frame and two right frames) completed September 15, 1982
A page from Berni Wrightson's "The Muck Monster"
from Berni Wrightson's "The Muck Monster"
This two page sequence now reminds me of the childhood parody song “On Top of Spaghetti.” It rolled off the dresser and onto the floor; and then “my poor” cassette tape (like “my poor meatball”), it rolled out the door... On one level this is a cinema style montage meant to indicate motion, travel, and distance. We (or at least the consciousness of the individual I am symbolizing with the unspooling cassette tape) are venturing out into the wider world here. I do not remember having any kind of template in mind as I was producing this; but when I look at one of the pages of Berni Wrightson’s “The Muck Monster” now, I see some very obvious parallels. The narrator of that story, having been reduced to a gooey stream of dissolved organic stew flowing down a hillside, has his consciousness mingled with the wider world. Our “narrator” here (I use the term loosely) has his consciousness flowing out to mingle with the wider world as well. Even the grated storm drain image seems evocative of Wrightson’s drain. I didn’t know I was ripping it off at the time; but it seems clear now that I was.
The elements in the frames are important as well. The phone system is very much in evidence. Yes, there is the sloppily executed “Ma Bell” man hole cover; but there are also telephone poles (and, one assumes, the connecting wires). There is the US Mail. The house has its own mail box (seen to be open and empty); and then there is the larger, more communitarian mailbox on the street. (remember the letter on the rug on page 2) These are systems of connectivity. One does not see connectivity happening so much as one is shown the symbols of that which can connect individuals to the greater society, the part to the whole. And our “narrator” (I’ll run with this terminology a bit farther) seems to be offering himself and his consciousness (the now tortured cassette tape comparison) as yet another form of connectivity. We will find out in more detail what this entails later on: a kind of imagined Walt Whitmanesque aesthetic sensibility.
The other system of “connectivity” shown here is plumbing, specifically a drain. Unlike the other “systems,” this one disposes of unwanted or unnecessary items. “Entry” into this system takes things away rather than connects things together. Plumbing, as an atmospheric backdrop emerges rather prominently later on in the sequence. The threatening looping of the tape over the grating here is a way of foreshadowing the rather dramatic “flushing” away of consciousness that will be shown on page 36.
The border between the bedroom floor and (what we presume) is a hall is significant as well. It looks like the hall is covered with a kind of octagonal black tile. No, I had never seen any tile that looked like this; but I liked the fact that it made the hall floor kind of look like a grate - the grout being the metal and the black being the subterranean space beneath. There is an undercurrent of subterranean space running throughout this 6 frame sequence as well. There is the darkened basement window, there is the ACTUAL drain (as well as the “trompe l'oeil” drain of the hall floor), and the space covered by the man hole. Yes, I did want “underworld" connotations to be there.
Finally, the concrete is dramatically overcracked in almost every frame. This is partly due to my overworking it; but it is also a way to continue the whole ripped mattress, torn poster, peeling wall paper motif.
The tile like pattern of this style of manhole appealed to me precisely because it looked like a kind of tiling.