Ray From a Poison Sun
Lethem, Clowes, Empty Country, Meat Puppets, Life's Great Disappointments.
I lived right on Atlantic Avenue above an empty bar, across from the hospital that maybe had a Taco Bell—one of the only ones around—but maybe didn’t. A rumor I could easily verify but never bothered with. On my corner was a funeral home and a furniture store. A hunchbacked man swept the sidewalk in front of both—another unconfirmed rumor: he slept in the back of the funeral home. Better not to think too hard about it, better to not reduce the man with a hunchback to a caricature of a human. But how did that rumor start? Where did I get it from? I wasn’t one of those neighborhood guys who absorbed rumors from barstools and spit them back to whoever listened. I shopped at the Trader Joe’s in the majestic old bank building, lurked the bookstores—there was more than one!—on snowy days, drank coffee and smoked weed and wrote zonked out paeans to Young Jeezy mixtapes on my hot blacktop roof in the summer, an interloper in a neighborhood I couldn’t afford, part of a patchwork of gentrification I pushed forward by virtue of my very existence. I lived in that apartment for only two or three years, but I was part of the neighborhood even when I tried not to be. I came home to the comfort of kids playing, dropping their bikes on stoops of single family brownstones. I lived a life that didn’t make sense because I was young and dumb and when presented with comfort I didn’t know what to do except feel uncomfortable with the comfort.
Jonathan Lethem’s new book, Brooklyn Crime Novel, is his return to his artistically fertile stomping grounds: Brooklyn, from, roughly, the late ’60s until right now. Somewhere in that period—earlier than right now, but way, way after the ’60s, I lived near to where he grew up. It doesn’t really matter that I did—the neighborhood was already a place where you could catch them filming Gossip Girl, where you’d see celebrities at the British chip shop that would deep fry anything you brought in without hesitation, where you could jog the neighborhood at any hour without worry. In other words, the uneasiness he documents was largely eradicated, or at least hidden from view by the time I got there. But anyway: consider this book part of his Big Ideas New York Novel series, joining the ranks of Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, and Dissident Gardens (I didn’t include Motherless Brooklyn here because it falls more in line with the genre exploration work Lethem does when he’s not writing a Big New York Novel), as a patchwork exploration of the American experience, shot through with a healthy helping of weeded mysticism, gentrification, youthful magic, teenage sexual exploration, dusty pocket sci-fi books, an obsession with the accidental psychedelia of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and the gateways of music and comics and art.
Brooklyn Crime Novel is probably the most difficult of Lethem’s Brooklyn Novels because it never quite allows us to inhabit the characters—we never learn a single character’s name, for instance. This is a stylistic choice: Lethem’s book spans families, decades, social circles, socioeconomic trends, muggings, etc—it’s a “big” book, if not in length then in scope, like Lethem is trying to write definitively about a small portion of a city that can never be pinned down, that elides concrete definition in favor of a constant, but often subtle mutation. In this way, it’s a systems novel in miniature—a bird’s eye view of a neighborhood and its denizens, fucking up, fucking, fighting, lying, escaping—twin worlds, the parents and the kids, and the rules that bind and break them, telling us something about ourselves and our humanity. It’s a frustrating and sad read—the tragedy of youth we do glimpse feels voyeuristic, just intimate and personal enough, even though we are not there. Not really. But we are complicit nonetheless.
Dan Clowes’ phenomenal new book Monica follows, roughly, the life and extended world of a woman named Monica. At one point in the latter half, in search of answers about her family history, she joins a cult. The cult is plainly pretty loony, and they all do a lot of pretty typical cult things: they exist in a constant state of paranoia, live austere lifestyles in squat drab buildings, wearing squat drab clothes. Their grasp of reality is tenuous at best. Still, Monica falls in with them. Reading this section of the book for the first time, I experienced a strong sense of deja vu—I had read this part of this book before. I was sure of it. Deja vu in itself is not so remarkable, but this was persistent. As I write this, in fact, it’s still there. A cursory internet search tells me that there was no actual way I could have come across this section of the book before the moment I read it, yet the images, the plot, the resolution (rather the approximation of a resolution), felt like they’d all been with me forever. What was this weird magic? Why does it still persist?
In the absence of any concrete answers, I’ll instead chalk it up to the layered storytelling of the book itself—a life refracted and fragmented, stretched across decades, with time being denoted by artistic shifts in the comics medium—war comics, outsider horror comics, etc—it’s all bolstered by Clowes’ distinctly Clowesian style (I’m allowed to write something like that because Clowes has been around long enough and accomplished enough to describe his style as in the style of himself). There’s already been a lot of great writing about Monica, with a couple common through lines: read it more than once, read it carefully, re-evaluate. Alternately, you could do none of these things—read it once and you’re watching the rise and fall of the American experiment, shot through a prism of sadness and false nostalgia for the kind of life we think we wish we could lead, before finding out that even that life is not the one we are looking for.
Empty Country, “Syd”
This song reminds me of the Meat Puppets—it’s not as fried, not indebted to, like, acid trips, the Dead, and specific strain of bummer outlaw country as that band is—but it’s like Meat Puppets in the way it barely holds itself together. It’s no quite fully lo-fi, but it sounds murky and messy and when the emotional register gets dialed up toward the end, it hits that much harder. Clarity of emotion sent against the backdrop of fucked guitars and the sound of a band “accidentally” cohering into something great will never not be a winning formula.
As a bonus beat, here’s “New Gods” from the Meat Puppets classic II. Much like Wu-Tang Clan, merely talking about them or thinking about them makes me want to binge-listen to the entire catalogue. There should be a name for music that is so great, that contains so many worlds and tunnels to follow that merely having a passive thought about it prompts the deepest of deep dives, even if you’ve done it before. Anyway, I can remember hearing this song for the first time, way after it came out, in 2006. I was helping edit the FADER’s extremely prescient Jerry Garcia issue, and when I was suddenly able to connect the dots from Garcia and the Dead to Meat Puppets to, say, Blues Control and Animal Collective and the axis of New York experimentalists that I was obsessed with at the time. It was a revelatory moment.