Now available: Joey & Bowie: A Dead Rock Hair Coloring Book. A 12-page Zine featuring drawings by Andrew Fearnside. $10. Email atfearnside@gmail.com for your copy today!

Et In Arcadia Ego: in Latin, “Also in Arcadia.” But also, “And in Arcadia, I was.”

Arcadia: a mythical period of whose residents were in tune with themselves, their verdant world, their desires and their gods. For the Greeks of 200AD, Arcadia was a both a place and a time in the past where shepherds strolled green vales under a warm sun, untroubled by politics or wars or psychopathy.

Joey and Bowie are dead now. When they proclaim to us “Et In Arcadia, Ego,” we should hear something like Death’s moral warning to us in Poussin’s first Et In Arcadia painting: even in Arcadia, I, Death, am present… and so, remember the spiritual context of life! But we might also hear them proclaiming their success–in life they spent time in the Arcadia of Real Live Rock and Roll. They were the real deal! They created the Arcadias so many of us longed to inhabit.

As I made the many drawings that led to this zine, I listened to the Ramones, the Fall, the Buzzcocks, early Ultravox, synthwave superstars Gary Numan and St. Etienne. And of course a bit of Bowie. I immersed myself in the music of 1977-1981 in a way I never could as a 7-11 year old of that era, because in that pre-Internet period, access to new music defined social scenes. This music, and these musicians… these were the cultural heroes of my adolescence. These were the explorers who defined the character of my rebellion at the time. I played in bands in high school; thanks to my childhood friend Russell Davies, we played Numan’s “Cars” in front of people. Even as a youth this music was an Arcadia–a time that had passed that provoked both warmth and grief. And it is another Arcadia now. 

This little zine features drawings of Joey and Bowie’s hair. Some of their hairstyles remain iconic; some of them are baffling. Seeing a hairstyle without the head, like a wig without a stand, one has to chuckle, as we might at a stuffed squirrel. Seeing these hairstyles that had so much meaning to me as a kid stripped of their context I get something of the sense of loss that I need. It’s not just the loss of these two musicians who were like elder brothers to millions of us; it’s the loss of the context of my youth, and thus of my youth itself.

The zine also features drawings of what I found poignant about Joey Ramone. He was just a kid from Queens, rocking out with his friends. He was goofy and tenderAlways and forever, despite immense fame, he stuck with who he believed he was. What was it like for him at 45, looking back on a career as a legend? His music was seminal, and while the importance of that can’t be overstated, we have to acknowledge that his oeuvre is incredibly limited in scope when compared to Bowie’s. That’s not a bad thing; but it is touching. 

Goodbye, 1981… We will never see your like again. For now your watch is over.

Acknowledgments:

Written in 1936, Irwin Panofsky’s analysis of Et in Arcadia ego (also in Arcadia) by Nicholas Poussin (1638 - 1639) was provocative and enlightening in the development of this wee book. 

Thank you to https://lauradufresne.files.wordpress.com/ for hosting the PDF for all of us.

Thank you to Albuquerque’s Graft Gallery, for suggesting that I make a zine, and for the chance to be a part of a wild and wide-ranging show in their space: Follicle. Join Graft for the show’s closing reception on June 24. Thank you to Jessica Chao for alerting me to the show’s Call for Entry.