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Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District
Posted 29 Dec 2007
Writer: Ben Katchor
Artist: Ben Katchor
Publisher: Pantheon Books
5.00 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Adam McGovern
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An excavator of the metaphorical pocket change dropped down the
gratings of hurried lives, Ben Katchor believes in the wealth accrued
from what falls through the cracks of our consciousness. His ongoing
magnum opus, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, is a mumbled hymn
to the unnoticed mysticism in the mundane.
“Katchor has the creative outsider’s instinct for
scratching the surrealism beneath the surface of everyday modern
lives.”
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Knipl is a meandering everyman whose occupation, though often as
marginal to the narrative as that of any mysteriously-employed sitcom
dad of the 1950s, is central in its symbolism: as whole worlds,
represented by their architectural fashions, come and go in the
ferment of a major city, he’s there to witness the lapse-dissolves of
history. These passages, of course, are the strip’s real theme; though
nominally set in the present day, Knipl is about lifestyles and
personalities as anachronistic as old buildings but, for better and
worse, a lot less easily cleared away.
Katchor’s single-page adventures will focus on the one cafeteria in
the city where a certain favorite soft drink can be found, or the
solitary enthusiasts of the government’s least-visited memorials;
these are several-panel haikus on the arrangement of jello squares in
a diner dessert case, or the purposeless plastic shapes that flutter
out of poorly die-cut shopping-bag handles. The first Knipl collection
was titled Cheap Novelties, and presented each episode’s heading
inscribed on a different junk souvenir. Katchor and his characters are
connoisseurs of the ephemera that both brightens our lives and defines
their transience — a chronicle of implicitly celestial significance
maintained by ostensibly inconsequential figures, a kind of Scrapbook
of Judgment.
As befits this fleeting vigil, Katchor records his curious events
and eccentric personalities with a sketchpad black & white line
and ink-wash technique, which has the eloquence of Chinese brush
painting while mirroring the spontaneity of his slice-of-life subject
matter and the informality of its proudly rumpled players.
Which is not to say the commonplace doesn’t appear alien under his
microscopic scrutiny. Katchor has the creative outsider’s instinct for
scratching the surrealism beneath the surface of everyday modern
lives, and in The Beauty Supply District he goes further than
ever in what has been an increasingly dreamlike take on the American
dream. The title itself refers not to the kind of
industrial-accessories zone that past books would concern, but a
center of ready-made creativity for artists, now in decline as the
culture coarsens. Knipl wanders this area, visits a museum of lost
time housing a forgotten condiment magnate’s unread books, and ranges
a forest of free-associative signboards and street names that form a
subtextual laugh track, a corner-of-the-eye Greek chorus.
If for James Joyce history was a nightmare from which he kept
trying to awaken, for Knipl it’s a midnight-pastrami farce on which
someone keeps pushing the snooze button. Since no one leaves this
world alive, it’s only right that we should leave it laughing, and
down Katchor’s street of dreams the quiet desperations and simple
pleasures are never too far apart.
Adam McGovern began reading Moby-Dick in 1999. The other
night he woke up with a start, excitedly scribbled “water the
clock” in his bedside notepad, and fell back to sleep,
remembering nothing of the incident.
—CCdC—
Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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