He dreamed of a summer’s day, in Spain, near a tumultuous sea, over which the sun fought and won a battle to color the spirits below. There was a party that travelled on and off the cobbled streets to beach and glen and back again, colored banners marking the route of revelry.

They were already beautiful, but they were rendered more so, luminous even, by the sun, and as they twisted their bodies around they glistened, golden and brown, bronze statues blessed with the breath of life.

There was music playing, a combo, several songs at once somehow rising in harmony to meet a crescendo near the blazing disc in the sky. They would twirl with their hands in the air, and tilting their heads back, steal a second’s glimpse at the brightest star.

It all seemed to fill them with euphoric energy, and that party lasted into the next day and night, and as he’d joined in somewhere along the way, he wondered if the dream would ever end, or it it was even a dream at all.

-Danny Grosso

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Continuing the expeditions of Jeff MacNelly, James Kilpatrick, and Eugene McCarthy, with apologies.

The Chickenhawk

This pitiful, featherless bird disguises its timid nature in seasons of conflict, when it emerges from its coop and dons false plumage with martial aplomb. Wrapping itself in armor, or flag pins, or a flag, the Chickenhawk belies its lack of courage with thespian craft, acting out scenes of bravado to audiences hungry for that sort of overacting. Most often, the runs of this farce are short, and the creature must recede to its dwelling and await another casting. However, in the unfortunate (for audiences) present era of endless war, the Chickenhawk seems to be permanently plying its unpalatable craft on multiple media platforms, there, by itself, lessening the intelligence of entertainment consumers who might hold their noses long enough to survive a soliloquy.

–Danny Grosso

It’s so American, really, to be built up on hype, to impossible heights, just to make the fall so much more devastating. He engineered and fed the world with his prodigious activism, before he was co-opted into laissez faire governments so they could share his shiny veneer – before completely undermining his approach. The smartest, brightest boy, who went west, like the country, from Iowa to Oregon and California, a sunny optimist about to run into the darkest depression in American history. Perhaps he became too much like those around him, after he was surrounded by power, in marble halls far from the prairie of his birth. Perhaps, this is all of our destiny, to become what others’ success demands, if we are all really powerless against the drumbeat of progress, or, alternatively, for those with plenty in hand, the status quo. 

It is hard to see photos of him as an elderly, diminished man, with the ghosts of Hoovervilles surrounding him like a grimy aura. Later presidents tried to humanize him, inviting him to public events, even soliciting his counsel. They, like those before him, were still taken by the sheer talent of that once golden boy. He acquiesced as they beckoned, for he knew what great things he knew, but he had already soured past potability. In ‘32 they practically ran him out on a rail, and 25 years later they wanted him to join up again. He must have still felt the sting of one of history’s great rebukes.

He may have managed the immense task, for him, in that late era, of smiling, of forcing his face to forget what was lost in that great fall from grace, but those pictures, just like his kind, are rarities. 

–Danny Grosso

Johnson’s mother left behind a sewing machine when they took her away shrieking. Grown mad over the loss of a young daughter to an outbreak of influenza, the woman spent the remainder of her short life in the company of the kind but helpless doctors at the State Hospital. They were unable to ease her rattled mind.

The machine was the only useful item, to Johnson’s mind, that the woman owned. Gifted to her by an old dying rich matron, for whom Johnson’s mother had provided maid service and sometime companionship, the item had become a source of entertainment for the boy, his mother, and his itinerant father, Josiah. When it became obvious that the baby girl was coming, Johnson’s mother began to make clothes with the machine while the boy sat beside her. It was how he learned to sew, and what he knew of his mother, and of himself, he learned while seated beside the machine. Still, it was a short period of learning, one followed by longer periods of solitude. It was a pattern struck and repeated, like a sewing exercise, whereby Johnson would stitch together the rest of his life. A brief epiphany, maybe begetting a short respite of commonweal, followed by isolation’s return. After his mother’s illness took her away, his father left on horseback, and to Johnson’s knowledge, never returned to the small farm on which they had lived.

-Danny Grosso

Excerpt from the short story. 

All of these people have been changed. All of the places remain until we change them.

Now I see the city’s sameness, its connection to the past, and the hush that you’ve provided has stayed with me, so that I can conjure it up when I wish…

From Chicago Gothic (2007), Available at Amazon Books. Artwork and text copyright Danny Grosso.

The Traveler first appeared in The Loyola Phoenix in 1982 under the title D.C.. Many of the original strips were damaged in the layout and printing process, so the author reworked them in 1990-91.

 

–Danny Grosso

It never ended. It will never end. He will keep agitating. They will keep repressing. 1977, in England, meant something, even in the new world, and means something still, to him, and the other few that kept the aesthetic. The scowling presence, the jackboot jaunt, but the stuff wears thin on a second decade. Most left for sell-out status, few stayed. At the brokerage houses the powder was free, but that proposition  was unattractive to the real partisans if they had to become yuppies in the bargain. No, he won’t do it. No condos and babysitter budgets, no working wives and money markets. He knows Joe Strummer would never cave. Even the pressure of stardom and the cascade of money couldn’t make Joe a Tory. Here, on the other side of the pond, he himself could think of nothing to make him a Republican. Even music of the 50’s was too progressive for those people; Christ, they were still listening to Benny Goodman. Meanwhile, the modern soundtrack slashes through his mind and he navigates the street scene back then; of homeless wanderers and sick refugees, turned-out factory workers and people cut off the dole. It’s morning in America but the sun don’t come up here. The passing of years erased the obvious evidence but left the collateral damage. It was a trick they pulled, letting it get so bad that people would become grateful for the slightest improvement, then watching the grateful spend the rest of their lives toiling just to keep the status quo, while access to real capital swirled invisibly, unknowingly just out of their reach, to the powerful few. It never ended. It will never end. He will put on his leather and yell at the world.

-Danny Grosso 

Memory can latch onto odd things. Sometimes the endeavor of a moment’s glance can burn a lasting impression.

He remembered her face for awhile, but that image faded over time, overpowered by the starkness of her get-up, all that boxy contrast, a somehow delicate squareness. Against the hazy sky, she looked like she was placed in a light box for viewing. Her clothes moved herky jerky smooth, like a long-form modern dance, alone on stage, out there on the street. The world was changing; cold war to glasnost, malaise to ambition, downers to amphetamines.  It was beginning to look different as well.

Walls come down, trends evolve from muddled to clean, people open their eyes anew.  Freedom can mean everything, and sometimes, it can be just the littlest thing. The loose proportions of a new design that is worn on the body, an intimate artistic display, can mean freedom in a small but not unimportant way. The breeze between the garment and the body, the freedom of movement at the joints, the respectful limitation of palette, all of this can elevate the feeling, embody a new era, and by hyperbolic extrapolation, generate hopefulness.

He had no idea if she knew anything about the heaving sociopolitical changes that gave him vertigo, or if she cared that there was still apartheid in South Africa, troubles in Ireland, and a plague of homelessness, disease, and unemployment here at home. What he saw in her was the seed of hope. She looked different, so times may be different, and things might somehow be getting better.

-Danny Grosso

Continuing the expeditions of Jeff MacNelly, James Kilpatrick, and Eugene McCarthy, with apologies.

The Oppo

The shaded Oppo is, or may be, for as much as we know we know, which is not nearly enough, the essential creature of the new political age. Stealth in its movements but bombastic in its pronouncements, the Oppo is a master of the dark arts of political intrigue. Its senses are naturally drawn to controversy, a reverse of the common ‘flight from danger’ instinct. Its skills are highly evolved and continually evolving,  to match the digital, instant gratification ecosystem of an incessant news cycle. Shamelessly results-oriented, the Oppo produces its legacy of scandal without any second thoughts, and continuously moves on in search of more progeny. In this way it operates as a dangerous predator, striking indiscriminately alike on the deserving and undeserving. The vanquishing of consensus, its only real threat in the bestiary, has left the Oppo with unlimited vistas through which to pursue its charge. Also, the modern entrenchments of political factions mean that there is always a market for the Oppo’s work. Look for this creature to continue to rise in prominence, or rather, look for its work. Its secret agent skills make this creature hard to hold.

-Danny Grosso

From Chicago Gothic (2007), available at Amazon Books. Artwork and text copyright Danny Grosso.