Dirty Words: “Let Go and Go On and On (Curbside Splendor) by Tim Kinsella

For me it’s Marlène Jobert, specifically in “Riders on the Rain,” a Charles Bronson French crime drama from 1970. Jobert made more movies than Laurie Bird, the subject of Tim Kinsella’s new novel, “Let Go and Go On and On” (Curbside Splendor), but I fell in love with her in this mod existential thriller just as Kinsella falls novel-deep for Bird. Of course I was very young and, likely, very stoned when I first came across the film on a late-night TV. That’s the thing about movies, they cast a spell. Film conjures an intimacy easier than in real life. 

Tim Kinsella probably had a similar moment of attraction, whether it was seeing Bird in “Two-Lane Blacktop” (1971) or “Cockfighter” (1974) or “Annie Hall” (1977), in which she had a bit part as Paul Simon’s girlfriend, when he became obsessed. Laurie Bird is a type that will do that. Unlike the European cool of Jobert, she is American and retains the residue of dirty hippie freedom to her lank form. In her few films that post-Woodstock glow is faded but remains alluring. There is something else about her. It’s inarticulate, but, of course this is a novel of words trying to capture that elusive element. 

“Let Go and Go On and On” by Chicago-based musician and writer Kinsella is evocative not only of a time and place, but of a feeling, a desire to connect with something that is no longer there, something that may never have been there. A shadow. Light exposed chemically on celluloid, flattened and preserved, more a tease than an actual taste. That’s a hard order to fill over 250 pages, but Kinsella manages to maintain an aura of longing, a delicate balance of fact and fiction, which mirrors the collective dream of the cinema at its best. 

Kinsella breaks his book into sections titled after Bird’s three movies, with a prologue featuring Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blowup” (1966), and concluding with “Bad Timing” (1980), the Nicholas Roeg film starring Art Garfunkel, about the investigation of a woman’s suicide. At the time, Bird was Garfunkel’s fiancé. She committed suicide, overdosing on valium, in his New York City apartment while he was on set in Vienna. 

That’s just one dovetail of fact into fiction. The book starts off almost as the novelization of the movies its sections are named after. It’s like we’re watching the movies with the narrator, who may be Art Garfunkel or Tim Kinsella or any other number of men similarly haunted by Bird. The characters in the films are referred to by the actor’s names, as if the movies were recording the real lives of these people, and in a sense the films are doing that. There is very little biographical information available on Bird and the three movies she appears in make up the majority of evidence available to investigate. 

As the story processes, though, the narrative strays from the screenplays and ventures into Birds early years as a model in New York City. Love affairs hinted or explicit on film are deeply explored. Famous people enter and leave, but we’re always there with Bird. She is constant, yet absent, referred to solely in the second person. 

Whether you’re a fan of director Monte Hellman’s cult classic “Two-Lane Blacktop” or his exploitation adaptation of Charles Willeford’s novel, “Cockfighter,” isn’t important to your appreciation of Kinsella’s novel. Hellman, another of Bird’s lovers, figures in the story, too, hiring her also as a still photographer for the latter film. When Bird quit acting she worked professionally as a photographer, taking the cover shot of Art Garfunkel’s 1978 album “Watermark.” Garfunkel also wrote about Bird, processing her death in a collection of prose poems called “Still Water.” Bird had that affect on men, and she continues to in the pages of Kinsella’s book.

There’s something about sitting in the dark of a theater or your room, heated by the cool glow of the screen on which fantasy is projected, drawing you in, giving you a sense of connection. It can set you off on a chase in which you never leave your seat. Did you lose it at the movies? That’s because the brain is the sexiest organ. 

Buy "Let Go and Go On and On" by Tim Kinsella here