Crank Prophet Bestride America, Grinning (Part Two)
from The Shape of Things to Come, 2006
With David Thomas’s death on April 24, I want to do what can to keep the work of someone I was lucky to know alive in the little corner of the public mind this newsletter might reach. I’ve written a lot about David’s work over the years; my piece from Artforum in December 1997, and this chapter from my 2006 book The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, is some of it. (Part One of this chapter is available here.)
The Ubu March
At the Knitting Factory twenty-four years later, in 2000, Thomas did not writhe on the floor. There was no room; the small space was packed. The end of the world was still present in the music, but no one even tried to mime the long-gone bohemian secret society. Across the last quarter of the century, enough who had heard the music had, year by year, stepped out of the larger crowd to give Pere Ubu at least pieces of an audience. There were calls for favorite songs.
Even in 1975, David Thomas took up enough space to make the notion of a hat the size of Oklahoma, shoes the size of Florida, and a coat the size of California credible. He called himself Crocus Behemoth in those days; on Pere Ubu’s first singles he hid behind the name, or inside of it. The name of the band, as personified by its singer, was itself a clue. It was the century in a single body, and in Thomas’s body it was the first New Wave. It was a legend: the protean saint and unkillable demon of the avant-garde, arriving in Paris in 1896 by means of Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi, his paean to a hated teacher, Pere Ubu himself: fat, stupid, ugly, fascist, gross above all, the huge, clumsy monster embodying authority without intelligence, power without reason, respectability without honor. He was the King of Poland, the King of Nowhere, King of Everywhere, King of Europe first of all, lumbering like a two-legged maggot into the First World War, and then dragging millions of innocent American boys, the grandfathers of the young men now taking the name, along with him.
