Robert Pollard
EAT II
2005, Rockathon Records
In 2023, anytime someone tells me that Artificial Intelligence will take over the arts and replace human creations with digital patchworks, I stop listening to that person.
There are a few drops of truth in it, probably. I’ll give them that.
A popular song birthed entirely from an algorithm isn’t far-fetched these days. The awkward clickbait articles that I get suckered into reading online never seem to come from human beings. Life is in a weird place now, for sure. This is not the same world that my Generation X ass grew up in.
But if someone sincerely believes that HAL 9000 will be the new Mozart, I think that they just hate people. That’s the only explanation I have for why it makes sense to anyone that human connections through music and writing will simply fade from fashion. We will no longer care about what others are feeling, thinking, and seeing. We won’t be hooked when someone who shares our experiences makes something great out of it.
Instead we’ll be satisfied with artistic blow-up dolls.
I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it at least for oddballs like you and me. Us deep-diggers. Us crazies who get into EAT.
That’s what I think about in 2023 as I go over this second issue of Robert Pollard’s long-running art magazine. Its X-Acto knife cuts and its occasional visible Scotch tape, and even its poems, have human fingerprints all over them. Today, it feels like a resistance outpost against the cyber-dystopia.
Under a front cover that, at a glance, suggests an old US government handbook, EAT II begins with fourteen pages of poems.
They’re all over the place. Some are abstract. Some are jokes (see “Tits Across America”, a satire of media hype). Some are blunt pieces of knowledge from a guy with a head of silver hair and decades of notebooks.
Pollard’s poems give you the same guy that you get in his songs. He’s so productive that I can’t imagine him being tortured by doubt or perfection. Once he starts writing, I don’t see him pacing the floor over his next line. I think he trusts wherever his right-brain goes. If it goes nowhere, he moves on and it’s painless. The fragments left over become raw material to be used elsewhere whenever it fits the rhyme and meter.
I enjoy Robert Pollard’s poetry. Like all good writers, he has an ear for concrete imagery. Each piece projects a movie in your head.
In “Have You Begun the Process of Excusing Me?”, he dishes out life advice (“Write four songs a day/ even if they suck/ and jerk off/ plan an evening with someone you love and/or are able to tolerate”, he writes in the opening lines).
“Wild Life Injury” is a heartbreaker about a dying animal hit by a car (“She will not recover/ from the cold highway/ next to an aircraft engine facility”).
“Public Domain” and “Song and Dance” are two poems that share the same page and feel like related commentaries on the artist who becomes a mere entertainer, covering old songs for an easily pleased crowd. I don’t think a Robert Pollard Sings the Great American Songbook album is likely to happen (in case you were wondering).
Sometimes a familiar line from a Pollard song will pop up, but in a whole other context and the only point to it is that he simply likes the line and it became a collage element, something to be cut out and reused.
It’s all collage art.
The visual collage art in EAT II, all twenty-four pages of it in the magazine’s center, flows exactly like the poetry. They’re all over the place. They range from crass jokes to flummoxing dreams. Decades-old images mix and converse. Each piece feels like an accident, which also happens to be how the best rock songs sound.
My favorite is “Stellar Seclusion”. It’s a mere three pieces fixed together here to make something haunting. I want to see this movie. I want to buy this album. I want to have dreams about this.
It also stands as an example of Pollard’s spartan sensibility. Of the thirty-three collages here (including the front and back covers), most are constructed from a mere three or four elements. Some are made with only two. There’s one composition here made from twelve pieces and Pollard acknowledges its messiness in the title, “Slop Art”.
Three works here are constructed from eight pieces and Pollard seems almost shy about that. He doesn’t like collages that are busy and frantic (“Far too many pieces make the puzzle absurd”, he writes in the song “US Mustard Company” on From a Compound Eye). When he uses eight pieces, it’s in the service of mystery and murkiness.
See the great “Bring Me Adam’s Shadow”, where eight pieces seem like so little in its multiple, moody frames that almost move like a lost silent movie as your eyes scan it. Or maybe it’s another world as seen through a door crack.
When the poetry returns for the last fourteen pages, I’ve read enough word-pictures and seen enough collage-art pictures that a bigger picture emerges.
That picture is of Robert Pollard, 47-year-old man, who not only wrestles with a changing world, as middle-aged men do, but he also ponders the deeply rooted flaws in the old, conventional ways.
“Distortions” is nine simple lines that conclude with the thought that we’ve perverted our concept of happiness because of human weakness (“We created distortions/ Through time, order and impatience”).
“Buy 1 House Get 1 Free” takes aim at competitive rat race thinking.
The oddest piece here, “Begin Your Life’s Work, Make It a Masterpiece”, is formatted as a letter addressed to “Dear Sirs (Good Ones)”, Our narrator is concerned with “spiritual poverty” and “‘Commerce – The Game of Gain'”. One of the questions that he or she asks of the “Good Ones” is “will you keep delivering the sky?” Also, “Per chance, over coffee and doughnuts have you devised a better plan for the question mark man?”
Does natural beauty have a place in the modern world? How about self-expression?
One thing that I love about Pollard is that he’s an optimist. He won’t let himself become the old asshole who tells the kids that they all suck because they didn’t see The Beatles on Ed Sullivan like he did.
When he takes shots at society, I think it’s because that’s how you help build a better world. You pick up a red pen and not only circle everything wrong with the present day, but you circle everything (as you see it) that’s wrong about what you grew up with. The younger generation can help you with that. Sometimes, at least. They’re flawed, too. We all are.
Maybe the most hard-hitting poem in this whole grab bag is called “Aim My Friend When You Puke, Into the Future”. I need to show you the whole thing.
You have to trust the kids. That’s all that you can do. It’s the only option. You can pass on knowledge, but you have to let the young be themselves in the end.
Will Artificial Intelligence take over the arts?
I think the kids will figure it out. Shut up and let them make their own sense of it all.
The older generations’ best argument is the vast decades of history of music, literature, and films and the human beings behind it. And it’s a good argument.
We loved all of that once upon a time.
Robert Pollard cuts it up here and makes new stuff from it.
We were hooked on it. We feasted on it.
Maybe the next generation will want to eat, too.
(The Constant Bleeder will always be free. If you want to show your appreciation, you can buy me a coffee. I could use one!)