“What best provides evidence of our mettle, do you suppose?” said the spider to the fly struggling in its sticky web.
“Is it the way we react to a crisis?” said the spider, readying its fangs for a bite. “Is it our relative composure in a time of violent uncertainty or, conversely, in a time of extremely certain doom? Oh, pray tell, little fly, do you have any thoughts at all on this important matter?”
“Fuck you,” said the fly.
I don’t know, maybe that’s a parable.
This is the cover of a chapbook I recently designed & published for Minerva’s Wreck.
It’s a collection of Robin Chotzinoff’s textual responses to Valerie Fowler’s exhibition
“The Story of the Deer In the Road” at Austin’s CAMIBAart Gallery this past September.
”Deer among broken gravestones, walking on earth once soaked in blood.
Buried wristbones still tied with rotten string.
The smell of pine and birch and smoke.
Deer who snaps a twig but otherwise the sound of nothing living.“
Note: 20 DEER 20 was published in an edition of 125,
of which the author & the artist received 100.
1. The day job that we do for the money we need.
2. Our true work, which may or may not bring in any of that money.
3. Just kind of aimlessly fucking around.
BLESSED ARE THOSE WHO OVERLAP
… is that the most accurate notion of what it means to humans was perfectly summed in the title of Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody.
Never mind what the book’s content so impressively relates. And discard, for simplicity’s sake, any titular allusion to James Joyce, because that’s an enhancement along the lines of how the steel guitar in that one Kitty Wells song sounds briefly like an attacking ship from the video game Galaxian.
But: Recall the convenience store, slightly off your beaten path, in which you discovered a lone Galaxian machine sitting in a dusty corner & you spent the next half hour or so feeding quarters into the machine’s chromed slot, slowly increasing your score as you lost money and gained knowledge and skills – relevant only in that context – with each new game.
Now imagine all the people in the world crowding into that store’s corner, surrounding you & the machine, relentlessly kibitzing on what you’re attempting to accomplish in the game, getting themselves all up in your face, meanwhile continuing to conduct their own diverse business in the aisles, entire cultures colliding between the shelves of sundries, a multitude of personal lives playing out among the candy bars and cigarettes, the tampons and bottles of motor oil … and only an infinitesimal percentage of those people realizing that the Galaxian ship, diving toward your own ship in attack, sounds so much like the steel guitar in that one Kitty Wells song.
But even that infinitesimal percentage will be, like, a hundred thousand people.
That’s the thing about the internet.
“There are things you’re supposed to know,” she tells me. “Like look both ways before crossing the street, and righty-tighty lefty-loosey, and always wipe front to back, and so on.”
“And maybe there are things that you’re not supposed to know,” she says, “but you wind up with the memories of them anyway. Like how it tastes to have a mouthful of blood after your father’s slammed you into a wall, and the way a Rexall’s window shatters when struck by a towel-wrapped fist at three in the morning, and what it’s like to accompany your dead brother’s girlfriend to the abortion clinic so she doesn’t have to deal with the lines of protesters or the fluorescent-bulb waiting room by herself.”
“There are things you’re supposed to know,” she says, “and there are things you’re not supposed to know. But you reach a certain point and you just know all these things anyway. And no matter what you do, they stain the inside of you. But maybe what some of them do is more like bleach the inside of you – every day removing a little more color from where there should be nothing but rainbows, every day just ghosting you a little closer to the grave.”
“So, yes,” she says, staring at the photo of her parents. “I do regret killing them. But it’s a pale fucking regret.”
“The guy who played bass on The Knack’s 1979 hit song ‘My Sharona’ was also the first lawyer to represent Dr. Jack Kevorkian.”
I don’t know where I picked up that bit of information, but it was something I’d tell people at parties or in bars or coffee shops or wherever, just dropping it randomly into a conversational lull – or even using it as an exit line, like, “Hey, lemme leave you with a piece of trivia before I hit the road.”
For years, I’d tell people this thing. I was like Scott Pilgrim always telling people about the origin of the name Pac-Man in Bryan Lee O'Malley’s comic-book masterpiece Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World (a series that was later made into a movie – a vastly underrated movie, please note – by Edgar Wright).
And why not tell people such a thing? The factoid was nigh on irresistible, triviawise: The sudden combination of “My Sharona,” the debut single from The Knack, a song with a killer guitar riff, a catchy little pop number about lusty young love, a perennial banger that’s enjoyed even by those who weren’t alive or old enough to be young & lusting when it hit the airwaves and instantly shot up the Billboard charts to Number One …
… and good ol’ Jack “Dr. Death” Kevorkian, the macabre celebrity pathologist who assisted so many desperate people (130, he once claimed) in killing themselves, until he was convicted of second-degree murder for it and spent eight years in prison.
That's a combination made to incite attention and stick deep in a person’s memory.
Unfortunately, my own memory was being a mite, ah, recalcitrant.
The last time I told someone that bit of trivia, I thought to fact-check myself via Wikipedia immediately afterward, maybe even glean a little extra quotable information, especially since doing that would help me procrastinate on whatever five most imminent Austin Chronicle deadlines were looming like angry shoggoths in the day-job background.
“Fuck you, angry shoggoths,” I may have muttered over my shoulder as I clicked the link to Jimmy Wales’s text-heavy online wunderkammer. And promptly discovered how wrong I’d been.
Oh jeez.
Listen: The guy who played bass on The Knack’s 1979 hit song “My Sharona” was not also the first lawyer to represent Dr. Jack Kevorkian. The guy who played bass is named Prescott Niles – and he had nothing to do with Kevorkian. It was Doug Fieger, the guy who played rhythm guitar for The Knack, who was …
… the brother of the Kevorkian-repping attorney Geoffrey Fieger. And it’s not mentioned exactly where that legal-eagle Geoffrey fits into the chronological line-up of Kevorkian lawyers over the years.
Got all that?
And it’s a bit less compelling of a trivia item now, too, isn’t it?
Ah, the shoggoths are coming, fuck my life.
