Plenty of successful songwriters reach a point in their careers when mere songwriting just isn't enough to satisfy their undying creative urges. Some, like Joy Division's Ian Curtis, find their true passions in a shocking untimely death. Some, like John Doe and Ice T, feel the need to express themselves as thespians. Pete Townshend, Tom Waits and Lou Reed look to books and musical theater (i.e. "rock" opera) to expand their horizons. Still others, like John Lydon, choose the art of self-parody and punk Vaudeville as their outlets for creativity. And for Pere Ubu's absurdist/ surrealist extraordinaire David Thomas, I guess it was just a matter of time before he got involved with a weird, non-specific music-theater project like Mirror Man.

Unfortunately, Mirror Man sounds like a half-baked vanity project of sorts. Its main features are a rickety premise, cracked Dixieland blues, wank-jazz background music, and annoying Kerouacian spoken word. Obnoxious gonzo wordsmith Bob Holman, who recites one of his own compositions here, does what he's best at-- enunciating verse in such a way that, if only for a split second, you think he's actually conveying some sort of meaning. I hate to say it, but the general content of this prose-poetry play-cum-alt-rock opera smacks of bad poetry slams. It's the kind of incomprehensible Nuyorican poop that stoned 19-year-old Lit majors tend to gravitate toward in an act of rebellion against their oppressive institution's narrow curriculum.

Thomas begins the disjointed tale, "Mirror Man Sees:" "He's reelin'/ He's a ghost on the face of a neon land/ Mirror man..." And soon, Holman begins depositing some random word configurations on top of the background mood music: "What's the mirror see anyhow?/ The mirror is a sea, I'd say." Some of these pieces end up as half-realized songs, and some are just random rants and babble-fests over the Waits-ish carnival music churning lazily behind it all. Characters appear with no rhyme or reason, going off on rambling "testimonials," revealing nothing beyond a few wacky quirks. So it's not long before you realize that, as mind-blowingly original as Thomas' lyrics have proven to be in the past, his fragmented, ADD style doesn't really lend itself to an extended theatrical piece like this.

Mirror Man constructs oblique scenarios set against some sort of dystopian post-apocalyptic American wasteland-- a kind of Mad Max- meets- Paris, Texas prairie noir musical. Throw in the general influence of the Beatles' "Revolution 9," and there you have it. With a few exceptions, most of the goofball musical themes just scratch and scrape along, not ever really making for any sort of varied or challenging listening experience. You could, however, imagine scores of evil circus dwarves doing a square dance to it. And, for me, the pacing of this sluggish monster of a modernist "opera" is about as stimulating as watching your rusty-jointed grandpa finish a painfully slow round of miniature golf.

The album's closer, "Weird Cornfields," finds Holman in fine form: "Tonight the world will end.../ Cornfields into infinity, cornfields and I'm drowning." The horn section begins to get unruly and a crescendo builds, but this rare bit of musical drama dissolves too quickly. "You are the haunted house, and you are my coupe de ville," Holman insists. These are the words Mirror Man leaves us with. And do we know what's going on here yet? Are we supposed to? Of course not. From what I gathered, Mirror Man meets his end when he's smothered by many cornfields or something.

If you fancy yourself the local English department rebel-- maybe the angry, scrappy white dude with dreadlocks, carrying around your Ginsberg and Kerouac amongst a sea of tweedy T.S. Eliot-loving deadbeats-- you may want to acquire this chunk of multimedia experimental nonsense to impress your classmates. Otherwise, be happy you can get all Pere Ubu albums in CD format now. After enduring Mirror Man, you'll want those close by.

-Michael Sandlin