L.A. Woman
Oddly Gone Comix: The Whole Sha-Bang - Now at:
http://oddlygonecomix.thecomicseries.com/comics/50/
wizard
enough
damaged/repair (“everything i ever gave up has claw marks all over it”)
Dissolve, peddle, foist, abnegate, diminish, oust, jettison, dismantle, obliterate, donate.
Polite and stifled, patchwork of private property from sea to shining sea. Deep woods of dogtown memories, rank with murder and soft, deciduous scents. Heartmind always jagged, as granite buildings and fire escapes erupt out of the stolen earth. Always resplendent and toxic, stoned on asphalt, felt up by the franchise.
Stomaching an old woman in her putrid home of rotting scraps, her front door open wide and blaring the sound of her favorite marimba music album, an invitation. The boy and his bike and his hoodie and howling after-school winds. The donut shop cleared out, other kids removed by parents and guardians. The streets lazy and loosening and unconcerned about the cold. Issues of pregnancy, memories, a new living situation away from the city. One of those houses with all the other houses in a place with a pool and building to do the laundry in.
A silvery photograph on fine, thick paper in the mind. The heartmind, the stomachmind, the timemind. The accumulated boredom of childhood. Waiting. Cigarettes. Terrible, small plots of grass behind a gas station or alongside an overpass. A constellation of various garbage spread out like trinkets on an Indian blanket at a roadstop in the 1950s for the tourists, queasy with fear and expectancy.
Meditations on survival and landscape. The enormous earthforms that mesmerized our ancestors, mysterious places for storytimemind and ritualistic starvation. Old hotels, famous roominghouses, buttes and burial mounds, theaters falling apart since their heyday, rivers trickling through dead sea beds and eating the earth, scarring her with exquisite bite marks, the sound patterns of mumbling addicts and hustlers quivering nauseously in the wind. Greasy money. A field of wildflowers. The earth belching with fear and shame. Hemorrhaging internal ruptures from every cigarette butt squashed under each leathery toe upon hardened slabs of machinery vomit.
The earth feels each stab like a withered reptilemind clad in a case of metal-shelled torture machine with gasketed apertures for suctioned needle insertion. The injections produce effects both horrific and majestic. A wealthy collector with tanned fingers places each image-on-silver-gelatin-print into metal flat files carefully. Each image is resting in coolness, under thin sheets of tissue, the images vile and beautiful and loved and cared for and nourished by the calm moderate air of clean interior behind a series of well-bolted doors.