Girl In Soup

I have a story about a homemade chicken costume in issue 29 of Hunger Mountain Review. You should check it out if you’re a real weirdo.

This old ball-bearing factory is probably haunted. The pipes cough up black sludge every few weeks. The books archived here haven’t been opened since the Reagan administration. The old bank vault in the basement seems like a horror movie waiting to happen. Reels of film are locked in a cage: Fantasia, Citizen Kane, something called Girl In Soup. There’s a locked door with a sticker of a bull on it, and beneath that a phone number to call in case “alarm sounds inside”. No one can tell me what’s behind it, though I’ve been tempted to call.

They’re tearing it all down soon.

I don’t blame them.

The breakroom is now a dumping ground. There are old wired phones and keyboards, file organizers that look like they’re out of an Aunty Donna skit, unwanted volumes of handsome university press coffee table books. A toad statue, whom I spirit home to decorate our porch.

For the past five years I’ve lived a couple lives in this building. Most importantly, it is the home of Wolverine Press, a letterpress printing studio where I had essentially free-range to print whatever my heart desired. In a few months, we will rehome all the cabinets of lead type, the paper, and ink, and the half-functioning printing presses to greener pastures. It is the end of an era for a very small group of people.

Until then I’m printing as many posters as I can.

Doing letterpress means being confined to the physical limitations of type. The shop has several hundred image blocks, ranging from religious iconography to newspaper ads, paperback art and holiday ornaments. They’re often inexplicable, enigmatic and contextless. Artifacts that have survived almost entirely by chance, and not because they are even close to representative of merit. When news of the inevitable end came down, I made an informal resolution to print something with every single one.

I’ve come to love collaging these little freaks into organized chaos. Letterpress now, to me, is primarily a practice of collage. I don’t add anything particularly new, but try and put these old things into a novel context that remixes and reinterprets their meaning.

Thanks to the shop’s wizard, Fritz, we also have thousands of image plates saved from being scrapped, which aren’t quite print-ready. Many are oxidized or bent, and none of them are affixed to the wooden furniture that raises them to equal height of the accompanying lead type. For years we’ve tried to organize them. We have schematics for various bomber planes, line drawings of 49 sex positions, hokey illustrations from a circa 60s Big Book of Jokes. Recently I’ve been refurbishing some. I asked my dad to saw some wooden blocks, which I layer with double-sided carpet tape and then clamp the image plate onto. It works sometimes, but many are so warped there’s no hope.

My Uncle Dana is a musician. He sings, plays guitar and frottoir (a metal washboard he rakes with metal bottle openers), and grumbles about the decline of Music. As long as I can remember, he and my dad have bellyached that everything in art, music, and life is now derivative. They’re certainly not alone in this sentiment. To them, this is derogatory, and I can understand their feeling even if I disagree. Originality, even as they might define it, is almost always a reaction to established norms. You don’t get the driving distorted guitars of punk music without the preceding easy-listening pop. And sure, popular music moves in cycles, influenced as much if not more by market forces than artistic vanguard. Dissonance defying clarity and then losing favor is a war so oft waged it might as well be a community theater production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream. R&B to rap, grunge to post-grunge, electronica to industrial, pop to trap and back all over again. Our hunger for new music never seems quite quenched.

When Butch Vig started the band Garbage, he was sick of being The Guy Who Produced Nevermind. He was fascinated by hip-hop and club music and how they harnessed the genre of the remix as their own. Black culture once again pointed the way forward in music, and digital sampling began to permeate the popular landscape. According to guitarist, Steve Marker, Garbage wanted to "take pop music and make it as horrible sounding as we can." Two critically-acclaimed and commercially successful Grammy-winning albums later, it was clearly a winning strategy.

Garbage aren’t complete collagists in the way that say The Books are, with their library of found-sound poetry. However, Garbage makes liberal use of sampling and looping and bastardizing various genre influences to brew an intoxicating sonic mélange. Take for example the live staple, but popularly underrated track “Hammering In My Head”.

The song begins with a bouncy bass and drum groove that would sound at home in a cyberpunk car chase. The main guitar refrain has more in common with a submarine’s claxon than traditional rock riffage. Shirley Manson, the not-so-secret ingredient to the band’s entire sound, speak-sings with a sultry snakebite snark. She lands sublimely somewhere between the BE NOT AFRAID of the Biblically-accurate Bilinda Butcher and Gwen Stefani’s wrinkle-nose pout. Even as she twirls falsetto to the cathedral’s painted ceiling at the song’s center point, Manson remains alluringly aloof. You can’t sing along because she’s frozen you like a sleep paralysis demon.

Listen to that bridge,

Pillow talk as invitation and threat. If you’re dreaming, it had better be of me. And why would you sleep when I’m right here?

It’s Manson’s elastic delivery that set her apart from other popular alt-singers of the time. She absolutely could hit Debbie Harry heights, but so often would withhold vocal fireworks to create a mood that defied the caterwauling celebration 90s rock so often aspired to. Her catharsis is quiet, calculated, and laser-guided.

Before joining the Americans, Manson had never penned lyrics before. Not that you can tell, when her soliloquies build such substantial tension in their layering of image over image into a crossbreed of confessional palimpsest. In many ways Manson parodies pop tropes so thoroughly that instead of eliciting humor she artifices horror. She was named for Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, but her artistic MO suggests a lineage owing more to sister Emily and Wuthering Heights. Desire is a scary thing.

Everything Garbage does has a precedent, but the recontextualization of all these familiar sounds and scenarios feel deeply haunted. Garbage is music to be played in a graveyard, just to see if the dead will dare rise.

Music in many ways owes its form to collage. The layering of tracks and instruments and voices over one another to build something greater than the sum of its parts? Well, that’s as true of DIY bedroom acts with Garageband as it is of the Sydney Philharmonic.

My friend Anna (pictured above) asks me if letterpress has influenced my approach to writing. I would like to be smart enough to say it has, but I just don’t know. Maybe writing has always been like collage. Picking out the odd memories and ephemera of living and pasting them into scenes of semi-sense.

My dad suggests an alternative avenue to restore those warped printing plates. He has a jar of tiny nails that once belonged to his grandfather. It has sat in his own workshop for decades, after another unused lifetime above that forefather’s workbench. My dad mails me the nails and a hammer.

“They’re pretty small; driving them in shouldn’t bother anyone,” he tells me after I suggest my partner, cat, and neighbors might not appreciate the emotional fulfilment of this intergenerational moment as loudly proclaimed by steel on steel.

When I take the tools to the warehouse not long for this world, the hammer rings like a broken church bell. Someone passing by asks if I’m ok in there. I bend two of the nails before they work perfectly, pinning the zinc image plate older than me to a block of wood. It prints like a dream. Ready to make something new.

In addition to calling for a Ceasefire in Palestine this week, please consider asking your reps to vote NO on the KOSA bill, which is more trans panic trash nominally touted to “protect the children”. It’s own sponsors have admitted it’s explicit goal is removing “transgenderism” from our world.