TRUE JESUS OF COOL
by Jim Trombetta
CHILLIN' WITH QUINN THE ESKIMO,
TRUE JESUS OF COOL
by Jim Trombetta
The end of the world ain't
what it used to be. Back in the boom
times of the cold war, one push of the well-known button would
send everything up like your father spraying too much
charcoal-lite on the grill some Sunday -- now that was an
apocalypse. That 30-mile H-bomb blast radius makes the words
nowhere to run really mean something. Oh, the end is still
stalking us now, it just seems less dramatic, a slow and
lingering thing like a real bad sunburn or a nasty bug...
crueller maybe in that it gives us all the more time to worry...
Which is why it still seems timely to listen to the crazed
carol
printed above, a gone gospel beamed direct from the Bermuda
Triangle, a prophecy of the advent of ...what, an eschatological
Eskimo? Well, every apocalypse deserves its own messiah, and its
own prophet too, in this case a kind of John Q. Public who "likes
to do just like the rest." Speaking through this regular
Joe,
Biblical Bob presents the tale of people obsessed not just with
creating memorials but with "build-ing boats"... like
old man Noah.
Because the end is nigh...right?
Except pretty soon we're slipping and sliding on the black
ice of
these words. Like "come all without." Without what?
Well,
without whatever, I guess. Or just, outside. Then, "you'll
not
see nothing like the mighty Quinn." A heavy pronouncement,
but... Hold on a minute, Bob, let me get this straight: we'll
never see anything like him? Which is to say, we'll never see
anything as...impressive? Or, is this an assurance that we'll
at
least see something (that is, not nothing)... Or, simply, we'll
never actually see the big guy at all?
Or what?
Well, it's an absolute statement that pulls the rug out from
under itself... executing a pratfall in the midst of a
never-ending cosmological ping-pong of all and nothing (with
major supporting players some and one) that bounces through the
whole song... suggesting that no one thing is ever absolutely
all
or nothing.
As for Quinn, what is known about him? Not much. But as an
Eskimo he does have a certain claim to coolness.. even to a state
of being Coolest... to find a being cooler than Quinn would be
like going north of the North Pole. You can't get there from
here. And you don't need to, because he's coming this way... in
his own good time. Bringing...
Yawn. A predisposition to "doze." Hard to get excited
about
that...seems a little anticlimactic. But when the climax in
question is the Absolute End -- or absolute Zero -- a little
anticlimax might hit the spot. In a world where the sirens never
quit, so jammed up that you not only have to be on your toes,
but
those of everybody else in the vicinity, it might be nice to...
chill out.
Or as Mr. Zimmerman sings elsewhere, "Genghis Khan could
not
keep/ All his kings supplied with sleep."
Such is the Cool of which the mighty Quinn is the avatar: a
balm
against the fire-breathing, the righteous and the trigger-happy;
a polar opposite to the merely hip, to the Mohawked doorman
checking out the fit of your bicycle shorts before he lets you
into the new hot place; a victory over anxiety by plain old daily
life.
"Quinn the Eskimo, I don't know. I don't know what that
was
about. I guess it was some kind of nursery rhyme."
- Bob Dylan, notes to Biograph
(Chill with Dyl: "Quinn the Eskimo" is featured on the CBS/ Sony
CD's Biograph and Self Portrait.)
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