IZENZON VON ERTEGUN
He looked at himself in the mirror for a long time. His arms were hanging and his unshaved face showed a softness that until that very night he had not noticed. That was all? Life began to slow her course behind him and sharpened furiously every second to sink him there. His wife died when he was sixty and since that morning, he became a loner. Nobody visited him and he did not understand the epoch. Isolated on that deserted coast, from deep cliffs he felt raised by the hand of God and thrown to the rocky bottom. Already dead a million times. It's terrible, he told himself, to dramatize things so much. Then he took the razor and without soaping, passed the blade through his jaw to the height of the ear. Without realizing it, in the best Metropolis style, he began to shave while the tram and the cars and the noises of the Windgate Studios were diluted and cut as his incipient beard fell into the sink.
In all of America there was never a composer like him. Throughout the Americas, people used to go extinct overnight, and in his particular case the process lasted for twenty years, and the last nine years he lived in this Heddigan´s apartment, avoiding tomb robbers. When a man goes to the extreme of seclusion, he does so for two things: either to get in touch with Nyarlathotep or to forget something too deep to be forgotten.
Izenzon von Ertegun was totally incapable of understanding the present: his abilities were limited to observing the past as one analyzes spy photographs. He could edit the unpleasantness to his liking, make fade-out over women who said NO and slow dissolves among those who said YES; this filled him with satisfaction. Then he listened to Charles Klame for three hours straight and sat in front of a typewriter to shape his memories. Izenzon was sensitive to the question of form and thanks to this his only book had not been completed for ten years.
When he wrote, in addition to the form, he was interested in the destruction of the raccord. Since he began composing at thirteen, he had never cared to respect the logical continuity of his subjects and the result was that in trying to organize his work he jumped all those scarce-revealing fragments and chose only moments of climax, that were shown submerged in a halo of Immortality. There was the real von Ertegun: free of contingencies, photographed on the bright side. Of course, Charles Klame (a forgotten composer who for several years he had tried to rescue) had vilely taken charge of entangling his life until it became unrecognizable. So: Where did everything start? Or better, how to interpret all that nebulous business of Charles Klame? First, the first inevitable step -perhaps fatal- for Izenzon von Ertegun, was discovering that he needed other musicians. Even today he can not remember how the band’s name was invented and prefers to imagine that he saw it projected in the clouds, as Emperor Constantinus saw the Sacred Cross. That afternoon in 2008, between cirrus and nimbus and strata, you could clearly read in the Westburg sky:
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