The both laughed. “She says you are like her son.”
“Your son just graduated?” gingerly again.
“No,” she said between chuckles. “He's on Rikers.”
The majority of the patrons of Smith Street were familiar with Coprolalia, though no one could impart much of use on the matter. Most of the bartenders wanted to know where I was conducting my graduate work. I would reply that I had just finished my undergraduate studies. Interest then faded. A couple at one of the bars on that strip was less dismissive. We talked over the course of two or three drinks. I don't remember the girl's name — it was mildly ethnic, perhaps an Eastern European version of a common American name. She was career-oriented and had these perfect eyebrows that I couldn't help but admire, even if I had never really considered a woman's eyebrows to be a point of interest. The guy's name was Rob. He worked as a paralegal and didn't really think of it as anything more than a temporary gig, as he played in an “alt-country” band that was beginning to gain a significant following. I was hesitant to believe him at first, but his collection of guitars backed up the claim. This collection included, but was not limited to, a '68 New Yorker, a '66 Tele, and a newer Ibanez that he swore by. He was trying to find a Casino (“the guitar Lennon played in the 'Revolution' video”), but the search was proving to be far more difficult than he assumed it would be (“A decent one is like two grand, man”). The jukebox featured a Woody Guthrie song that had been reworked by Wilco and Billy Bragg, something that evoked an elated smile from Rob each of the four times it came on. The song brought back rather painful memories for me, but that's a story in and of itself. Most of our conversation revolved around music and his band, the Ribs. He confessed that they were struggling to find a sound, but this did nothing to stifle his confidence in their abilities. Their style was defined as “Pixies meets Ryan Adams, though recently we've been doing a lot of almost Zappa-esque stuff because our new lead guitarist is fucking nasty. He's our Nels Cline.” According to Rob, their fans appreciated the more technical aspects of the newer songs, and they had been gradually getting more and more people to come and see their shows. They were better off financially than they had been the previous year, as a good deal of money had been coming in through iTunes. By means of a somewhat flawed inductive conclusion, he figured he would be able to quit his day job in two years. They just needed to keep reaching new people. Myspace, he said, was a great way to do so. He reminded me of this at least seven times before I left.
I realized fairly on that a lot of the bars on Sean's list no longer feature the work of Coprolalia. Some no longer exist (the bars, that is). Of those that do, it is common for them to have recently renovated or simply painted their facilities. I initially believed this only applied to Manhattan, but, as the week wore on, I found that this statement did not need geographical qualification. Suffice to say, many hours were spent examining canvases home to nothing more than the typical banalities one runs into when scanning over a lavatory wall.
Sometimes these banalities encroached upon Coprolalia's work, which was yet another difficulty. Such is the case when you abandon the process of painting. One bar in particular, some painfully trendy place on Ludlow, was coated in graffiti so thick that I couldn't discern where one thing ended and another began. Everything lost its original meaning, its original purpose, its individuality. This was something of a paradox, perhaps a critique of the information age. Maybe it was even a deliberate effort on the part of Coprolalia, but I doubt even he could dedicate enough time to create something so baroque. After all, he is far more of a laconic artist than most like to admit.
Still, there were some basic themes that I begin to discern as the number of pieces I saw grew. Some of his work is almost maudlin in its cynicism. While it certainly is the case that any wit runs the risk of appearing bitter or fatalistic, Coprolalia does not seem all that concerned about being labeled a misanthrope. Sometimes his work makes him seem conceited or impudent; other times it reveals a man who is modest, perhaps even unsure of himself. His references also run a gamut, though, in this case, it ranges from the weird to the arcane. The less obscures stuff incorporates figures from pagan mythology: Prometheus, Pandora, Orpheus, Icarus, and Phaeton all appearing regularly. He is also a fan of using passages from Shakespeare and the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, which, according to St. Jerome, is where the real wisdom is to be found. In his more esoteric pieces I have caught everything from Chaucer to Ferlinghetti, Milton to Baraka; all of the Karamazovs have popped up, as have most of the Impressionists. And then there are the philosophers, not only the ones with whom nearly every American college student has some affinity (Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, etc.), but the more (post)modern ones that seem fixated on the distinction between inference and reference, identity and difference. It is sometimes frustrating to find one of his pieces only to not understand what the hell he is talking about, though not as frustrating as being told the piece's obvious and superficial meaning by someone at the bar who doesn't understand that my confusion is far deeper than they assume. A lot of times I feel as though I should take a month off to study up so I can be a few planes closer to the one he is on, but I have neither the funds nor the time.
But I have come to understand his work better with each passing day (the city, too, has become more realistic; it's existence is no longer a pastiche of film and song and prose, but a breathing, living thing). I even believe that I'm beginning to understand him as a person. I may not be an expert in character sketching, but I do believe I can say this of the artist: he is terrified of commitment (romantic or otherwise), he mourns for the future, and he is not French, as the only misspelled words I have found are either derived from or of that language. He is probably of average height because most of his work is at my eye-level or below (and I am just above the average height). I don't think he works in a gallery or anything like that. I would place him in a far more pedestrian occupation, one that denies him the ability to use his talents. This conclusion comes from noting the environments he favors. These bars are not particularly receptive to the artistic types or the hip college students who spent their high school years in solitude listening to the Swans and cutting themselves; the bars are blue-collar dives, places where the foul stench of an inflated ego would inevitably lead to confrontation — and, consequently, recognition.
I have not been targeted, even if it is very clear that I am a recent college graduate. Well…with one exception: I was accosted by a Birchist lawyer who enjoyed using inflated language and Latin terms that didn’t quite sound right. It was at a place nearby the criminal and civil courts of New York County. Though the bar did not look like the type of place visited by a man in three-piece suit, who just happened to think himself to be kindred spirits with John Galt, the bartender knew him by both name and drink. (Proximity to the courts must have been the primary appeal. True, there may be other bars if one goes east, past Columbus Park and into that little region of Chinatown where the sidewalks are painted with grease and animal blood, where the mephitic stench of shit and sun-soaked gore and decay and hoisen sauce and some pungent herb that's probably high in thiamine creates an imperious cloud that not only irritates, but may actually destroy, the olfactory system. Presumably, this is what keeps rent in the area so low, but, then again, it may be the profusion of vermin known to take to the streets under the cloak of Erebus like those retinues of thugs that terrorize the citizenry of Gotham and Metropolis. It's a sight that would haunt even the Orkin Man. Then again, one could go west, toward TriBeCa. Due north leads you into the less soiled regions of Chinatown; northwest places you in SoHo; northeast takes you into a bizarre little region that some people are now calling LoHo as opposed to the Lower East Side, probably because someone felt that every neighborhood south of Houston Street needs to be abbreviated by employing only its northern latitudinal boundary.) The lawyer was not especially combative; he was just of that genre of conservative who finds nothing more aggravating than a college-educated person with a penchant for sympathizing with the victims — both foreign and domestic — of colonialism, imperialism, and the industrial arm of the corporate oligarchy, which provides low-paying, menial, and incredibly hazardous jobs to people who have been displaced by either the political arm (the IMF and U.S. Treasury) or the agricultural arm of said oligarchy. He went further, claiming every leftist to be an elitist and a Stalinist, a person who a) has no real ties to the working class and, consequently, does not understand them, and b) wishes to exploit this same class to promote an agenda that is nefarious, detrimental “to those who actually work,” and rarely, if ever, defined.