Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 7/25/07

Artist's Statement

Finally it comes to this. I make excuses with readers with whom to expect a drawing of Mr. Kreider and can only offer much humility and fear the impatient refusal my own effort. I know it is a product of unsatisfactory replacement for the drawing of Mr. Kreider, but I hope that it will be found an amusing diversion by the readers.

It is a strange time in this place formerly known under the name of "the ground of the pleasant life." Once in the apogee of its golden age of it was a place of legend, swarming with the friends, the groupies, and the inevitable clingers-on. The infamous League of Immodesty met here for dinner of the oysters and the soft crab made fry in bacon and the ragout of terrapin and the centre of duck desiccated in Madeira, and to smoke of the cigars on the porch. The friends drank disgusting martinis in the chairs of the Adirondacks. Cartoonists canoed to the sand bank to stand in the water drinking beer and having friendly relationships with the bags of scum in their outboard motor boats. Crowds dined on the dreadful crabs cooked with the vapor out of spice, leaving heaps of entrails and carapaces to be cleaned by raccoons. Mr. Kreider fermented his own wine of the dandelions, and served his "breakfast à la rock and roll" to the overhung guests. A game called The Pants of Mystery was once played in the lawn. Mr. Kreider broke his clavicle in a battle of the toy sabres of light. People drank the wormwood and launched detonators of fireworks from their lips. Nudes swam in the neighbors' pool to jointly spend the late night. All played the guitars and sang songs and baked the miniature pies and nakedly danced singing the words "Hey, hey, what make you say to chicken and biscuits every day" around the well of the flames on the beach. There was the underhand sex on the neighbors’ landing, on the lawn, in the plantation of bamboo. Boules were played at dawn. Some of these things I witnessed, others are only stories I am told. Other indescribable things I may not speak.

But at the end it became a place only of loneliness and torment for Mr. Kreider while sorrow stretched with the pitiful sobs. Now he has flown from the area of despair and I only remain for the summer, given the responsibility to maintain the Web site and property and with the care for the loved cat of Mr. Kreider's, which tries my tolerance with its mercurial temper and stink of shit. The water is rusted, and the house full of unhealthy odors of the titmouse and of the mildew. The lawn is turned back over to savagery but it is not my work to mow it. For a time the geese of Canada raised their gooslings in the lawn. With twilight there are the fireflies. In the night an owl makes its hooting, and raccoons come to try to gain entry of the door of fitted latticework with their skilled paws. I estimate that my tenure here is almost with an end. It was an honor and, from time to time, a pleasure, to be useful and to promote the work of a man who I consider to be one of larger not recognized geniuses of the comic strip form in America, though his art and his policies are sadly "out of mode" in this country. I learned much from him, and his influence perhaps it is too obvious in my own mode of drawing. But time comes so that I go back to Paris, the place in the world where I am at ease, and concentrate all my effort on my own work. I myself having almost finished with my graphic novel, The Cat of the Man who Loved Nothing. " It will be dedicated to Mr. Kreider.

Readers, I will say to you: it is not true that Mr. Kreider does not love anything. You, the readers who know only his work, must to imagine that he is made bitter and a misanthropist. It is a true image, but not the whole. For what are the cynical ones but the disillusioned idealist, yes? And Mr. Kreider is deeply hidden in the middle a sentimentalist and a romantic man. He loves with terrible secrecy and passion, and his disappointments crush. He loves his friends as a family, violently he loves the women who are in his heart. He adores his unpleasant cat stupidly like it is a child or a woman. He loves the films of Stanley Kubrick and the books of Nietzsche and the clichéd music of the movies. He loves brackish oysters and the Scottish malt whiskey. He loves the old dishonoured President Nixon, and the old dishonoured planet Pluto. He loves the stars, and knows their names. He likes to speak with the friends more than anything, almost, except kisses. He even loves America, although it is the America which is always only in the future of the heart. He would not like that I say this, but because he is the missing and I am with the responsibility, I assumed my decision that it is a service to him to say it.

The readers will be relieved to know that I received the word of Mr. Kreider. He resides temporarily in the metropolis of New York, a place of which the ambition and attraction depress him invariably. He wishes me to send thanks to Webmaster Dave, his colleague Megan, and his friends Jennifer, Ellen, and Boyd. I do not know anything of his circumstances more.

-C.H.

23 July 20007


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