The Slow Poisoners: Poison pen

Slow Poisoner Andrew Goldfarb plans to draw himself to death

By Newt Briggs

To a person of lesser conviction, Andrew Goldfarb might seem like a shameless roustabout. Imagine: a 36-year-old man with a college degree whiling away his days sharpening pencils for elementary schoolchildren and selling Halloween masks to businessmen in San Francisco's financial district! And playing in a go-nowhere rock 'n' roll band to boot! Why couldn't he have turned out more like his brother, Ed, who not only produced a Boyz 2 Men single but composed the score for the extended footage included on Apocalypse Now Redux?

Yet Goldfarb, despite his obvious shortcomings as a capitalist, is a man on a mission. Over the next 65 years, he plans to chronicle the 1,000 sorrows of the so-called "Everyman," Ogner Stump--a project that he expects will eventually claim his life.

"I'm up to number 54 or something," Goldfarb says. "If I keep doing about 15 a year, I will finish the last sorrow when I'm 100. I can only assume that sorrow will be death." The problem is that his family has not been historically long-lived. They "go early and often," and as the creator and illustrator of Stump, Goldfarb feels a certain responsibility to complete the task. "I'm counting on this to keep me alive," he admits.

The project began as a direct result of the San Francisco public transit system. Goldfarb initially fancied himself a painter but decided to switch to comics after he realized the difficulty of transporting large canvases via the bus. Stump represents Goldfarb's effort to visually document every ill of the modern age. To date, he has detailed Stump's aversion to triangles, Switzerland, knee injuries, ennui, shipwrecks, plumbing and coconuts.

"I do think coconuts are a sorrowful fruit--if they are indeed a fruit," Goldfarb says. "We're used to having coconut-flavored things, like coconut-flavored rum or whatever. But an actual coconut is difficult to deal with. I recall one morning in my bathrobe at Safeway trying to get a coconut open with a wrench, and it was a mess. The milk just kind of sploshes out all of a sudden. Then you try to eat the actual inside, and it's sort of got the texture of concrete."

Stump's first 25 sorrows have been compiled into Ogner Stump's One Thousand Sorrows, published by Berkeley, Calif.'s Wonderella Press. Although careful readers have observed the similarities between author and subject, Goldfarb says he is different than Stump because his imagined protagonist "parts his hair in the middle." But the similarities between the two, including the fact that Stump plays in his own two-man band, far outweigh the differences. Goldfarb's band, the Slow Poisoners, didn't start out as a duo, but in a clear instance of life imitating art, has since been whittled down to one.

"In the comic, I show Ogner Stump performing in front of an audience of three people, one of which is asleep, and this is often the case with a rock 'n' roll band when you're not signed to a big label and you're not cranking out the current hits," Goldfarb says. "We tried to get sponsorships from various corporate entities, all of which turned us down. I should note, however, that Snapple did provide us with a banner, but most beverage companies had a problem with the name the Slow Poisoners."

The name was taken from a chapter in Dr. Charles MacKay's 1841 treatise Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds--a book that described instances of mass hysteria, including a rash of slow (or gradual) poisonings in France in the early 19th century. It is just one manifestation of Goldfarb and Slow Poisoners drummer Foxx Trott's shared fascination with history.

"The past is weird," Goldfarb says. "There's no getting around it. And it becomes weirder the further away we get away from it. That whole prospect of tying damsels in distress to the railroad tracks is just bizarre. It's exactly the kind of thing that rock 'n' roll music should be made of."

This goal is at least partially realized on the Slow Poisoners' new album Melodrama, which Goldfarb describes as a "half-concept album in the spirit of The Who's Who's Next, Radiohead's OK Computer and the Jam's Setting Sons." Although it has no official structure, Melodrama is given a feeling of cohesion by a series of silent movie-inspired skits. The album also revives the "Carbarlick Acid Rag," which Goldfarb discovered on a piece of paper at a garage sale in his neighborhood. He was initially attracted to an illustration on the sheet music that depicted a group of devils dancing around a big poison bottle, but the band took its interest a step further and actually learned the song.

"I'm sure that if Clarence C. Wiley, who authored it at the turn of the century, was aware that there'd be degenerates listening to it 100 years later, he would be surprised," says Goldfarb. "Or maybe he'd be pleased. It's hard to know what a dead man would be thinking were he not, in fact, dead."