Month: August 2009

Mark Mallman is a musician of great endurance (he’s performed 52-hour marathon shows consisting of a single song) and great eccentricity (he sometimes appears as his lupine alter ego, Mallwolf). Now, as a companion piece to his most recent album Invincible Criminal (out on Badman and featuring guest vocals from the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn), Mallman has emerged as a great storyteller with a graphic novel due early next year. Featuring Marvel comics-style artwork by Stephen Somers, The Incredible Urban Myth Of The Invincible Criminal is being presented on magnetmagazine.com as an audio book with daily installments throughout the week. Read parts one, two, three and four.

“The Incredible Urban Myth Of The Invincible Criminal Part 5” (download):
https://magnetmagazine.com/audio/TheIncredibleUrbanMythOfTheInvincibleCriminalPart5.mp3

What is it like, you ask, to drink yourself into the CRT tubes of a late-’60s Zenith color television set with a killer robot in the basement storage facility of your apartment building? Let me attempt to illustrate my position in greater detail. Picture this: You’re not a human being anymore. Your being has simplified. Your essence has digitized. You can finally abandon your one-time quest for simple human decency. You’re just an everyday guy who works in a grocery store that gets robbed over and over and over and over again on a security camera. The yin and the yang of being on the digital is the zero and one of it. Visually, everything is in color, but spiritually, it’s black and white. It’s purely a manic state. In my previous state, I’d reverted to some wicked memory of a stench. I was like a half-dead fish floating underneath a pier. I couldn’t commit to actually living a life. The Killer Robot, on the other hand, was too friggin’ stupid to remember anything other than this state being half-dead. It was stupid; therefore it was free.