I’m in an elevator, I’m in Los Angeles, and I’m listening to a copy of TV On The Radio’s new record DEAR SCIENCE… about a month before it comes out. It’s enthralling– chilling– Los Angeles smells like magnolias and water but it still FEELS like Los Angeles and I’ve got this amazing electric throb shooting through my ears and down my spine. Ever time I get nervous I turn it up louder and tamp down the fear. Headphone reverie. Rock apotheosis. The record helps me keep my shit together. And I’m on an elevator KEEPING my shit together

And then TV On The Radio got on the elevator with me.

“Well this is some real PHONOGRAM shit right here,” I thought to myself, covering up the iPod screen in my hand to make sure the band didn’t see.

Now PHONOGRAM 2.7 is out in the world and there’s no more of it, no more PHONOGRAM to look forward to, and christ that breaks my heart.

With “Wolf Like Me,” my arch-rival, my nemesis, my Other, Gillen McKelvie, has put the guitar down, kicked the mic stand over like a dick, twisted up the knobs for good measure and laid the resonating thing belly-up on-stage to howl like it’s dying. PHONOGRAM 2.7 has left the building and now all that’s left is the jaw-aching atonal sound it left in its wake. It lives now in the negative space of show and at the middle of a pile of black shirts that commemorate things like it. Like any great show its not the songs you remember or the antics but the whole mise en scene of the thing, and like any great show, passing through it leaves you with a head soaked in cough syrup and cold with sweat.

I could write on and on about the joys of each and every issue but that’d be… well, creepy, really; my pathology really should remain out of direct sunlight. But I’ll say this much about it by way of raising a glass to its good name and better memory:

I knew I loved PHONOGRAM– love-loved– when in the first issue of its first arc RUE BRITANNIA, a young man stopped making out with a young woman he’d waited quite a long time to make out with so he could replay the same song over the course of two hours. I’ve done that. I knew that. That’s me. For my sins and in horror that was me.

And for all the… art… of PHONOGRAM (which shall remain un-ruminated upon, so as to spare both myself and GILLENMCKELVIE from the embarrassment, which, believe me, would be profound), the second arc, THE SINGLES CLUB, ends with Kid With Knife– who apparently is a real dude!– sort of both making mock and celebrating the entire premise of the series. He runs around like a lunatic with a song in his head and a song in his heart and he almost gets in a fight and he dances his ass off and goes home with the girl. It’s perfect. It’s absolutely perfect. As a single, as a part of a whole, as an ending, as a summation. It’s the best thing either Gillen or McKelvie have ever done, and tops their combined accomplishments as well. For now, anyway, but that’s another show, Oprah.

I love this book, with every fiber of my being; PHONOGRAM is my favorite comic. Without it I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself.

I’m glad it was Kieron who named This Thing Of Ours out loud, this rivalry– that’s right, I said it– in which we’ve both very clearly chosen to frame our relationship. The Richards/Doom-ness of it. Through that lens, PHONOGRAM 2.7 exists only for me and its message to me is up your game. Gillen as Mind Gangster. Time to fill the office with sand and break out the fireman hats.

But for now:

Encore, motherfuckers. Encore, encore. Stomp the floor with me until the rafters shake. Stomp so loud they have to come back.

And keep doing it until they’re gone so they know what they did here and so they know what they’re leaving behind.