JD'A – 2: KROME — 1971

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Krome, a further experience

6-1/4 x 7-1/8 inches:[1–2]: blank, [3]: title page, [4]: copyright, [5]: colophon, [6–8]: blank, [9]: text, [10–17]: images, [18–21]: text,[22–24]: images, [25–26]: red felt paper, [27]: image, [28–30]: text, [31]: text and image, [32]: blank, [33]: text and image, [34–35]: text, [36]: silver paper, [37]: text, [38]: [red] text, [39–40]: red paper with silver spots, [41–43]: [black] text, [44–54]: [back paper] images,[55]: text and images, [56]: text and image, [57–58]: text, [59]: [black and red] text, [60–63]: black] text, [64–68]: images, [69–70]: blank, [71]: [black and green] text, [72]: [green] text, [73-74]: [translucent paper, [75]: text, [76]: [black] text, [77]:[black paper] image, [79–84]: text, [85–88]: [black paper] fading image with white circle, [89-90]: blank, [91]: text, [92]: blank, [93]: text, [94–96]: blank.

Binding: Silver cloth over boards

Colophon:

This volume of story-graphics was produced completely by hand, using a flat bed printing press and sundry silk screen techniques.

This is copy number

[3 numbers each spelled in black ink]

[line]

of one hundred copies, so numbered as to designate the degree attained on the included graphic prints.of quality

[signature of Joseph J. D’Ambrosio]

[line]

Joseph J. D'Ambrosio

KROME

Note: None of the images are signed

From 19 Years and Counting:

Krome is a sequel to You Dress "Funny." In writing Krome, I wanted to refine the three-point exposition, and, also, since the reader turns each page, to experiment with graphics in series. Krome begins with a party, the ambience of which is conveyed through form and color, so the reader is in a specific state when the text begins.

A few copies are bound in white paper over boards to accompany those copies of You Dress "Funny" which are so bound.

Krome begins with an invitation to a party, and, as many parties,

[image] (1) it starts quietly,

[image] (2) and slowly increases in intensity...

[image] (3)...until everyone...

[image] (4) ...is having a very good time.

From A Memoir of Book Design:

Krome is a sequel to You Dress "Funny. " It continues with the illumination of hypocrisy while adding the human sense of suppressed emotions. In Krome I wanted to refine the three-point exposition that I used in the first book, and to experiment with graphics in series. What better place to use this idea than in a book where the viewer turns the pages and is unaware of what will be seen when the next page is turned.

Imagine the wonderful visual surprises that could be included in a story line because the series is slowly revealed to the viewer image by image. The book opens with an invitation to a party where the characters from You Dress "Funny" are reintroduced to the reader. What follows is a series of visual shapes and colors that start out as bland color with basic angular shapes and grow, as the pages are turned, into brilliant color and vibrating shapes. This is meant to entice the reader into a party that has a very slow beginning but grows in intensity until everyone is having a good time (including the reader).

Following the graphics, an expository preamble explores the nature of a social situation (the party) where public displays of emotion are pushed to their limits because of raucous commingling. This is followed by a poem which, on alternating lines, explores the contradictory and stressful nature of the situation. The message of the poem has a sexual connotation when related to the story and is highlighted by an ensuing sexually blatant series of graphics. The shapes are easily recognized as clitoris and vulva, but the male member more resembles a hybrid clitoris than a penis. The series has inserted within it a page of orange felt just before the coitus finale. The reader must touch the felt page in order to turn it and reach the end of the series. The sense of touch is not terribly sexually stimulative but the felt page feels remarkably similar to the human skin and adds to the experience.

From Krome, a series of eight graphics communicating emotionally a social gathering from its slow beginning when everyone first arrives… [images] ...to its conclusion when everyone is having a very good time.

The story is presented in a very simplistic manner, as in You Dress "Funny," with sober poetry realistically commenting on each section in such a way as to make foolish the characters and the writer himself. Isn't the writer of the story the same as the writer of the poetry? Thus, not only the tale, but the telling of the tale, represents conflict, which in turn creates drama, without which no story can entertain. And yet again let me say that unless the reader is entertained, he or she will not succumb to being led through the plot maze. Without a bit of obfuscation to tantalize, the reader will not be motivated.

Another poem stressing the futility of asking questions that have dubious answers because they are based on human emotions follows. The graphic next to the poem features a many-lipped red mouth with gigantic clenched teeth. This is meant to accentuate the last few lines of the poem that is reproduced at the right.

At one point in the story a central character is shown a scene: "...a bleak desert bathed in a ghoulish red light with low lavender mountains in the distance; spattered clumps of reddish green vegetation and a sheer mist suspended immobile inches from the ground." This page is printed in red ink with a facing page of red translucent tissue spotted with lavender mountains. Only the highlights of the mountains are colored. The shaded areas are left colorless to blend in with the red background. The ensuing text can be seen through the red tissue. It is printed in black ink. The entire array is meant to be simple and provocative and less than clear, because it is new and unknown terrain for both the reader and for the character in the story. 

The next series of graphics indicating that an apple is regenerated from the atoms and molecules of the human body that originally ate it, is cryptic. But what better way than by using a visual medium can one explain such an event without resorting to pages upon pages of quantum theory? Some of the serigraphic methods use hand-cut film, grease pencil, and glue resist. The shiny varnish areas worked out well except for bleed through on the reverse side. I think this would have been alleviated by a substantial base before the varnish was applied. The series starts and ends with the same circular red image within a shiny penumbra to show the complete cycle from apple to energy form and back to apple again. This is very important to the story because the main character, David, will mentally break himself down into an energy form at the end of the book-the seed has been planted for the eventual conclusion.

If l am fond of any of my shapes, the strawberry in this book is one of my favorites. It is the most maniacal strawberry I have ever seen. And its purpose? The strawberry is one of the few plants with seeds on the outside as opposed to the inside of its fruit. This seed device is also very important to the essence of the story.

So why make it maniacal? To highlight the nastiness of banter that ensues.

After more text, there follows a poem with the first stanza printed in black and the second in red. The third combines the two, keeping the same color values, into a duet. The preceding text is a lovers' confrontation over the ill timing of separate sexual desires. The poem begins by stating that time heals all wounds and paradoxically ends, when the two stanzas are combined, as an omen of ill to come. And it does. The female is eradicated. But, she returns at the end. She is reconstituted-and that is the importance of the apple graphics.

No truth

I'm going to scream,

Can abide

I want to scream,

In the justification

But I shouldn't scream, 

Of suppressed emotions,

I'll die if I don't scream, 

For suppressed emotions 

I'm going to die,

Also suppresses

No, I'm going to scream

Truth.

Questions:

Why does one pacify

The lover,

And make demands 

From the friend?

Undoubtedly,

The short moment 

Of sexual gratification, 

Subservient or otherwise, 

Is vastly more guarded 

Than

The many cordial hours 

Of social relationship.

Or, 

Is it?

Is intimate relation,

As David and Naomi know it, 

So precious

That it must be guarded?

Copulation in Krome 

Need not be guarded

Because

It is not intimate.

But, is sex of that kind 

Worthy?

Perhaps

Copulation and friendship

(A marriage of maturity)

Should be combined.

But,

Is sexual relationship 

With a friend

Worthy?

What is "worthy?"

Babble, babble, 

Chatter, chatter,

Ug, bug, 

Tish, tush.

As the hysterical leaf

Clinging frantically to its branch in a windstorm,

So too,

That same branch

Holds fast to the trunk for stability;

And the trunk to the roots

And the roots to the earth 

And the earth to…

THE CENTER OF A SEQUENCE IN A SPHEROID

…to the roots,

And the roots to the trunk, 

And the trunk to the branch,

And the branch to the

Screaming

Frantic

Mad

Hysterical leaf

The next series of graphics deals with the emotional tension of a human under stress. It is preceded by a poem that conveys stress by using an hysterical leaf struggling to remain on its branch in a gale as a metaphor. It begins and ends in hysteria. Once again a circle of no beginning and no end is tacitly referred to. Only this time the hysterical leaf is the beginning and end of the chain, implying that the object expressing stress is the very thing which has to control it—no outside help is available. In the series of graphics, two light-colored images are squeezed off the paper by a domineering dark-colored shape. This is directly reflected in the text where tension drives the character, David, to extreme behavior, and he, too, becomes the manager of his fate. 

He is forced into a dialogue and an intimacy with a plant. The text at this point is printed in green ink and includes a page of green florist's waxy tissue for the reader to fondle. This is where the seed device from earlier in the story comes into use. Where naturally a seed would produce a plant, this plant deposits its seed (or germ of an idea) into David by engulfing him in a sexually stimulating leafy embrace.

A poem follows trying to justify the bizarre events that have just taken place with those events that make leaders out of ordinary individuals. This is followed by a verso page facing a recto page of pure black with only a circle of white on it. The story continues only to have the black page with the circle of white reappear, and then in ensuing graphic pages, slowly disappear as a gateway for the end of the story. The first appearance of the circle of white is a signal and a guide post to the reader that the story is nearing its end.

What is this story about? It is a theme I repeat in much of my early work: humankind is capable of far more than he or she contemplates, and will, given extreme predicaments, rise above them. Self-sacrifice is conditional to finding paths of new human experiences. In this case the central character, David, sacrifices himself. By doing so, his dearest friends, Naomi and Absalom, are regenerated from his molecular structure and returned from the dead. But David's energy does not die His reincarnated form goes on. This sounds like a religious theme. It is We are ever seeking our origins and our future. A spiritual path allows us to ponder the possibilities. If we can think them, they may someday exist, but evolutionary changes take place so slowly that we won't live long enough to see them. I am told, we, you and I, once had a tail. a This book, like You Dress "Funny," was bound in silver cloth. Its margins suffered also. Both editions were bound at the same time if you were wondering why I didn't learn my lesson the first time.

Who would believe
That a seed could grow
With a little sunshine and shower?
You could,
Upon seeing the shoot in its flat.

And who can conceive

That a man would know
The height of aspiring power?
You could,
Once he reached where he was at.

©The Book Club of California