Nothing like camping at the beach. I'm sunburned, and I drove the car a whole bunch.
I guess Mr. Outdoors likes it in the winter. In a tent, which is over on the far side of macho for my tastes, but, like, whatever floats your boat, eh? Er, I mean, rips your tent to shreds, sorry!
See you soon! As I recently signed an email at work:
Kissy-kissy to each and every one of you beautiful people!
It's, I have to say, a complete shame not to be on the Hill this weekend: I think, in some ways, this year's pride parade will partake of the nature of a victory celebration, even if the victory is not precisely what Lenin would embrace as politically meaningful.
Gay marriage in Canada, virtually guaranteeing legal recognition for gay domestic partnerships everywhere but the enlightened (not) precincts of my birthplace, Arizona. Yhe profoundly amazing Supreme Court decision of this week, essentially capitulating to the central demand of gay rights campaigners since the Stonewall riots that Pride Day commemorates.
I looked through the pictures of my visit to Ken in NYC in February, 2001, hoping I would find a pair f images that, apparently I did not take. Ken will confirm this, however.
We were walking around in the Village and passed by a low-slung dive featuring a fifties-style rusticated limestone front. As we walked by, I glanced at the bar's facade, thinking of Indiana limestone, and realized that the stone front, the locale, and the pride-rainbow neon and pink triangle in the window - plus the sign saying "Stonewall" - pretty persuasively argued that we were standing in front of the gay community's ground zero in the quest for political recognition.
I stopped and ranted for a moment to Ken about how important this place we'd just walked by was, how it represented a landmark of human struggle and in a way a new approach to thinking about political constituencies, and so on. I don't recall that Ken had heard about the role of Stonewall in the history of the gay rights movement and I flatter myself that he was interested in my fractured and ignorant recounting.
We resumed our peregrinations, through the cold, snow dusted streets. I was really liking the Village, with the tiny streets and below-sidewalk entrances to ancient buildings still in use. Without having walked over a block, we came upon a particularly charming section of row houses, all apparently converted to serve the various needs of an entertainingly imperialist institution known as Marie's Crisis.
As we walked by one of the sub-bars of the establishment (the Marie's Crisis Piano Bar) a plaque on the wall caught my eye as the snow swirled down from the night above me.
born 1737
died 1809
on this site
The world is my country
All mankind are my brethren
To do good is my religion
I believe in one God and no more"
it said.
I more-or-less freaked out on the spot. The red-headed prophet of American liberty, of the way that you and I, fellow Americans, conceptualize the boundaries and responsibilities of liberty in the person and in the state, had died about across the street (as I recall it - YMMV) from the site that would become Stonewall.
Although I can't recall if you could turn around ad see the bar, I certainly see his spirit in the events of that night in 1969. Today, I choose to imagine him in pride parades across the nation, although personally I do not visualize him in buttcut leather chaps.
The Donk breaks new ground in blogworld personality journalism, bringing us an exclusive interview with Anthony 'The Moo' Moussa, the genius behind the web-side reality show that is NJGUIDO.COM.
The Moo goes into some depth, bringing us a detailed look at the philosopy behind the lifestyle.
Guido to us is living the good life and completely enjoying our youth, it is prolonging our youth and being free of all the things that make uptight people soo damn uptight.
So, don't forget, party like a rockstar, and I understood The Moo to be inviting us all to his pad later.
How can I put this? I don't mean a word of this ironically - I think the interview is wonderfully interesting and funny. The Moo is bringing us a slice of his life - or, more accurately, bringing his peers a slice of their lives. It's like the old black and white club photos we've all found in our elder's shoeboxes.
Well, these things come in threes, right?
A few days ago I responded to a musicians wanted ad.
Accordion, Banjo, Mandolin, fiddle for punk rock sea shanties & Appalachian death polka. Pogues, Tom Waits, Hank Sr., Bad Livers, Clash, (123) 555-1212 or thewages@placeholder.com
Well, that more or less describes my musical amibtions and tastes, so, I kinda had to. That Bad Livers is key, too, and anyone who understands why the Clash and Hank Sr. need to be mentioned in the same paragraph has my vote.
As it happens, Jesse and Austin and I have plenty of shared acquaintances, and I think, closer musical tastes than we can really finger in detail yet. They have played the punk circuit for years, most recently as Thee Spectres.
Anyway, it went promisingly Friday night. They were sweethearts, Austin is into oddball instruments, there was no smoking in sight (!) and they have pro gear and tons of experience. So we'll see where we go with it.
The material they were bringing was very rocky, and my mando lead style is pretty well suited to rock structure songs. But I'm painfully undedeveloed as a lead player still. Additionally, there's a strong use of cartoon, high-color imagery - genre tropes, if you will - in the material that seems odd to me after years of straight trad material.
It's funny, innit? I want to write about genre stuff - SF, comics, noir, what-all - but I've grown stick-in-the mud folkie boundaries. Gotta think a bit about this. Some of the stuff was pretty promising, though.
At any rate it was great fun, they have another mando guy on the line, which I encouraged them to check out, and I feel like I at the least have the chance to make new friends.
One of the interesting things about our apartment is that the building was landscaped when it was constructed with fruit trees. We have blueberries, strawberries, golden plums and Rainier cherries.
I've been watching the cherries ripen on the tree for the past few weeks, and today as the temperature neared 80, I decided it was time to harvest a few. I was concerned that the birds had beat me to all the good ones, but I need not have worried. The tree's branches were weighed down with fruit.
At first I was pulling them off of their stems but quickly figured out that it was better to grasp them by the stem and twist away from the tree. As I did this, muscle memory took over. I'd completely forgotten, as I am wont to do, that as a child my grandfather had showed me how to harvest cherries. He had been, among other things, a fruit farmer in the Yakima Valley.
It was an unsettling experience, and also a moving one. I could feel his hand guiding mine.
Ran Prieur runs material on pitas.com reglar like, and it's a mix of funny, scathing, and maybe a bit over in the too-smart category. Me, I likey the too-smart. THis week, he interviews: [reverb=10 reference=butthole surfers]SATAN satan satan.
Among other things, forget about that Osama guy, never mind looking for the Bush connections: the Prince of Darkness has been pulling the strings all along, just like the fundies always suspected...
RP: And what are you trying to get done? What's your goal?S: What do you think? The total extermination of all life. Hate it!
RP: Life.
S: Stinking, breeding, blubbering, wallowing blob of wormy pus, squirming around, making noise, spreading everywhere. You can't control it. You never know what it's going to do. Life! I hate it! The only thing to do is wipe it out, everywhere, forever.
RP: So nothing left but rocks and sand--
S: No! Are you deaf? Even rocks are screaming with life. Messy edges, atoms bouncing around singing. What I want is absolute perfect eternal nothing.
RP: Suppose you get it. Then what?
S: (long pause) OK, you're right. It's not the having -- it's the getting. What I enjoy is the act of hating and destroying. Or no, what I enjoy is the feeling of it, that cold fiery tightness, your heart shrinking in on itself like a black sun of raging indifference. Ah, yes. Every time someone feels like that I'm there too, like a giant invisible mosquito perched on their shoulder sucking their blood. If you look close you can see me.
So, I'm getting a little bit of traction at work. I am working a mildly ill-defined gig at a former employer, a DVD and CD-ROM company that I worked for a few years ago.
I was going to write about how much fun it is to write marketing copy. It's like poetry, but without depth or feeling! I have been finding myself laughing out loud as I write it.
Oh, but the website they have sucks. I did a great deal of the original work on it, and it's not been overhauled since, just, kind of... picked to death.
But that job is so far from what I'm doing now that I'd be a fool to raise the issue. I think that probably a website is the last thing they need - and if I raise the issue, it would be in that direction.
Fifteen Minutes and Counting Down: The New York Daily News body-slams the Post off Frankenstein's assist off the ropes over his noting that something was awry with a story on Ang Lee's new Hulk flick.
Sadly, an incoming phone call here disrupted my AIM chat with Frankenstein on the subject. He was there one moment, and then the chat window went dead.
He'd signed off as spoke with a local acquaintance via the telephone... I'm sorry Paul! I wasn't ignoring you.
I AM ignoring my howling cat, who feels it simply unforgivable that he's confined within the apartment since developing intense flea allergies.
Viv and I spent most of Saturday night celebrating the solstice at Gravelvoice audio wizard Scott Colburn and his lovely wife Jaye Barr's new church home, on the deep fringe of Ballard.
I've known Scott since we were juvenile delinquent punk rockers back in the southern wilds of Indiana, and had the pleasure of working with Scott for several years at the Frank Doolittle Company, about ten years ago now.
I had a great time, caught up with the doins of all manner of folk, including the man that welded the Broadway's Jimi Hendrix statue together, Jeff and Brad from Wall of Sound and Confounded Books (who was unaware that his website was down... ), and the always amusing and positively puzzlin' likes of Rick and Alan of the Sun City Girls.
Their latest hijinks involve the potential tenancy of a former theater near Ballard formerly occupied by a local wildman who once tended bar at the Blue Moon, ran for Mayor, and generally was involved in all manner of crazy public surrealism.
It is good to know that SCG will be picking up that particular mystical torch. I've known the ladies since they arrived here in Wetsville and it's always a pleasure to catch up with them. One fine day, about ten years ago, I journeyed to darkest Tacoma with Alan, Charlie, and my pal Chuck on an expedition which included a pit stop at the pride of Tacoma, Bob's "World Famous" Java Jive.
The visit culminated in an escape by a monkey from a back room, whereupon the aged proprietress chased him about the appropriately named Jungle Room, wielding a furious broom while scolding him by name to "Get back in there!"
It was without a doubt the finest Pabst Blue Ribbon I have ever tasted.
This afternoon, I amused myself by paying a call on the Asian Art Museum, near my home, and taking in the sights and sounds of the new music quartet Sorelle. They played a piece that included flute transcriptions of whalesong, and damn if it didn't work.
Later, there was glass-breakage, mirror busting, and violin smashing. Who says long-skirted classical players don't know how to tear it up?
As I left, I saw the pleasantly ironic sight of a restored B-17 buzzing the Space Needle over the front-and-center view of Noguchi's Black Hole Sun sculpture, which sits in front of the museum.
All that and a 12,000-word transcription of the Lasky-Stump interview. It's been a round, firm, fully packed weekend.
Huh, willya looka that.
Gettin' bigger, y-to-the-izzle-all.
8 bit joystick calls the roll. Mr. Sooros brings the photons.
A good time, it seems, is had by all.
But where are the jello shots? Can it be true that there's no bar in Seattle that sports free wireless? Heavens to murgatroid!
in Izzle Pfaff's Overview of My Amazon Gold Box, skot muses,
"Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer - [Electronics]An almost narcoleptically boring proposition. Plus, an "intellimouse" sounds like something Alan Moore might craft a graphic novel around. Which, perversely, I would conceivably buy."
Regarding which, well, I knew something that he did not.
[Night.We open on a black frame, subsequent panels enlarging a tiny red dot appearing in the lower left of the initial frame. In voice-over, we read the following.]
Crap.
I thought I'd finally escaped.
Left it all behind, and run off to a life on the streets. But no.
Here, today, as I doze fitfully, dreaming of aged camembert spotted with pools of liquefaction and fungus, I twitch, restless, knowing I'll never clean the runny cheese from my whiskers again.
I've traded a warm, well-lit maze for a cold, wet, dark, smelly one.
At least it's dark. I like the dark.
[the final frame on the page reveals clearly that the red dot is a shiny red animal eye, although we cannot clearly see the animal's form.]
CUT TO
[Microsoft campus, executive suite: Steve Ballmer's office.
A very large, bullet-headed man is standing on a desk in a simian crouch. A ring of cringing lackeys squirms beneath him in chairs facing the desk. The bullet-headed man s arms are raised above his head; he is clearly the alpha monkey, the silver-back gorilla, and the black bar of the hefty holepunch he carries in one long arm is a deliberate echo of the tapir's jaw in the Kubrick film 2001.
He has enormous, dark pit stains deepening the blue of his shirt to a dense royal blue, the blue of a sapphire's infinite depths.]
[Ballmer:] OOOOOROOOOROOOOOOOO!
OOOOOAAAAHHH!
DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!
OOOOOOOAH!
WHERE IS THE INTELLIMOUSE! THE DEVELOPERS DEMAND HIM!
ORRROAHOOOOOOAAAR!
---
- an excerpt from a never published script, "Tell a Mouse," by Alan Moore intended for publication in Slate, summer, 2001. The project was cancelled over concerns that Moore's penultimate scenes might be percieved as insensitive in the post 9/11 climate. In the scene, Ballmer and the Intellimouse conduct a battle royale throughout the neighborhood at the foot of Seattle's Capitol Hill, stemming from a chance meeting near the dumpsters of Market House Meats and concluding with the collapse of the Met Park office towers across the street.
Moore responded by spending all of 2002 footnoting every line of dialogue in the script. A copy of the 2500-page Word document was leaked onto the net via Kazaa in spring of 2003. Microsoft responded by implementing a new search engine inteneded to delist any references to the script from MSN-based queries.
I also received official notification from Smilin' Eric Reynolds, Director of Schmoozing for Fantagraphics, that there's a warehouse sale in the offing.
It's Saturday, June 28, noon to five.
Chez Fantagraphics Warehouse
3667 1st Ave So. (100 yards south of S. Spokane Street)
Seattle, WA 98134
(206) 467 4940
Discounts range up to 30% for big orders and damaged books are on the block at half-off, so pray that the forklift guys are drunk.
Scheduled guests include Hate's Peter Bagge (2-4p), Scary's Ted Jouflas (1-3p) and Rebel Visions' Patrick Rosenkranz.
Reports of dancing girls and male strippers could not be independently confirmed. I belive this depends, again, on the level of intoxication among the forklift crew.
Tablet number 70's Wiretappingleads with my 500-word piece on Fantagraphics' successful plea for support that hit the web - and email inboxes throughout the comics world - at the end of May.
The news is good, as I'm sure you'll be happy to hear.
In editing notes, I noted no changes from the story I filed, although I've not made a detailed comparison. The title changed from my totally workaday "Fantagraphics Beats Crisis," or some such, to "Comic Relief."
In other news, it's very weird to be working in the same company - even the same location - that I was five years ago. Uncanny, even. I am striving to not bust out the grizzled vet routine, as only three people who work there now worked there when I did, so as far as they are concerned, I'm the new guy.
Thus, it's weird.
So Buck Woolley, a well-known figure to skee-ball buffs, wanted to know: "What's up with the, you know, Seattle blogger community?"
The query meant "Who should I start reading and why?" as well as "So are Seattle blog parties as big the bomp-bommity as the fabzizzah BABBzilla of NYC fame?"
Being either a housebound misanthrope or to busy to hit the swingin' Meetup parties (there's a gathering tomorrow night at Bauhaus in my freakin' neighborhood, fer the luvva pete) has meant I can't truly grant a verdict on implied question number 2.
But question number one, well, I referred to Jimfl, Danelope, Dan S, and Eric Sooros as well as Zannah, Jerry Kindall and MeFi. It seems to me through a good years informal observation that these people are among the longest running of the locals - and that there is some powerful, but mysterious to me, connecting thread running through them to MeFi.
It's never too early to write History, friends. Get cracking! Why, pray tell, does MeFi feature such a strong rainy city presence? Is it just that it was launched when there were many underemployed web-geeks surfin' on unemployment? Or is there some further thread?
I of course mentioned other sites as well... but alas, I am on a machine that does not contain the email and laziness is preventing me from even linking in a "link" category post, crazy as it seems (it's some kind of pomo dealie). I believe I mentioned the yeti, Daymented, Anita Rowland and le petit chou; I'm sure there were others as well.
(UPDATE: I added the links, under Frankenstein's incessant, pounding critique.)
Idle Words: Macej looks at a suddenly popular blog in the Polish blogosphere, and muses about the popular response to blogs that chronicle the end of life.
As someone who is fascinated with the way that we greive in virtual space, I found his thoughts intriguing.
Wah! Well, I'm all scattered! I have TOO MUCH TO DO!
Suffice to note that I have some sort of new job, doing marketing copy and other things for once and future employer M-2K again - that starts Monday. Also, this past week, I did my first driving-in-traffic since I was 16 or so and it went well.
I also have to finish transcribing the Lasky-Stump interview, build screens for the house, do the dishes, laundry, and cooking, and frankly I forget what else.
The results are in from SIFF with the Golden Space Needle Awards, and guess what? Three of the films I caught were honored, and one I didn't see but wrote about was too!
Milwaukee, Minnesota, the film noir I enjoyed but with which I was puzzled due to the strange performance choies made by the director and lead actor was honored both for Mr. Troy Garrity's lead perfomance with a 2nd-place Best Actor award and also as the Winner of the New American Cinema Award.
Jamie Hook's The Naked Proof won an honorable mention in the latter award as well.
Molly Parker's performance in Marion Bridge won a 3rd-place runner-up for best actress, and Brock Morse won a 4th-place runner-up for Best Director for Westender, presumably an acknowledgement of the film's desert sequences.
The big winner, though, was the just-about-in-wide release New Zealand-set film, Whale Rider, carrying Best Director, Best Film, and first runner-up for Best Actress, validating the possibility glimpsed in the trailer.
I was disappointed and puzzed to see that American Splendor was not honored - perhaps the award from Sundance and reception at Cannes made it ineligible for consideration. In my opinion, of the films I saw, it deserved best screeplay, director, and actor for both originality of vsion and execution.
On Thursday, I met alternative comics artists David Lasky and Greg Stump at Caffé Vita, formerly Café Paradiso, near my home on Seattle's Capitol Hill for an interview which will form the basis of a story featuring them and their Seattle-set comic book, Urban Hipster. We talked about the book for a little over an hour and a half, and I will be transcribing the interview and probably post the transcript here when the feature sees print in tablet.
I also took a few pictures of them both at Vita and in the Comet.
I've known David's work for quite some time, as he sent me a copy of his often-cited mini-comic adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses some time ago, but we'd never met. I don't think I was highly familiar with Stump's work except in that he has had a long-running comic in both The Stranger and in the Portland Mercury, "Dwarf Attack."
Lasky is a classic comics introvert, very soft-spoken, and was wearing extremely long-and-thin rectangular-frame glasses with heavy black frames, a neat goatee, and shoulder-length brown hair pulled back into a pony-tail. Stump is more socially forward, and in his white teeshirt, well-muscled frame, and clean shaven head bore a resemblance to a well-known cleaning product's anthropomorphic spokesperson.
I explored many aspects of the comic book they work together on, highlighting the relationship of the book to Seattle as a specific locale, and in particular the neighborhoods of Ballard, Capitol Hill, and the University District.
In order not to go into detail about the content of the piece I'm developing, I'll just hold off on talking more about it today. However, I can note that I very much enjoyed the opportunity to speak with these guys, and think that I can really develop a good feature on the interview and their book.
Coloring Outside the Lines: a punk rock memoir
Aimee Cooper, 132pp, published by Rowdy's Press
Back in January or February, author Aimee Cooper sent me an email, asking if I'd like to review her self-published book, Coloring Outside the Lines, apparently in response to a dual review of Please Kill Me and American Hardcore I'd posted under the title "I'm so bored with punk history". I concluded that blog entry with the bon mot, "Next time you see me picking up a copy of 'Midwest Punk Rock Archaeology Review', please kill me." I was understandably reluctant, then, to take a look at Ms. Cooper's book.
I needn't have worried. Ms. Cooper's book is a non-fiction memoir of her days working as the first receptionist for Slash records and as the accidental house-holder for a tribe of punk kids circa 1979-1981 in Los Angeles. These kids were seen onscreen in a fairly fictionalized presentation, Penelope Spheeris' second film, Suburbia.
Despite the obvious romanticization of the people and lifestyle seen in the film, for many years, Suburbia was the best fictional American film about punks. It may still be, but the film's flaws grated on me even then, and I have long wondered about both the real kids in the film and the story of how it came to be.
Ms. Cooper's book provides part of the answer to these questions, as the kids in the film were both played by and based on her peers. The kids referred to themselves as The Connected, or TC, in an early echo of what would come to be the gang-like ethos of certain later LA punk bands and fans. Reflecting the differences in the development of punk in America during the 1980's, the majority of the kids in TC were teenagers with home and discipline problems.
They tended to be younger and less experienced and educated than the older LA punks, again, a pattern seen in New York and elsewhere. When I was a kid, it was a distinction drawn between the "artpunks" and the "fuzzies," so named after the first super-short haircut many younger punks would get as they sought entry into the scene.
As an adult, I think it's also somewhat reflective of class distinctions: the fuzzies, who later became the basis of the hardcore period in American punk, tended to be from both more working-class and more mainstream family backgrounds. Instead of artist or academic parents, their families worked blue-collar jobs, or if their parents were well off, the adults in the family were professionals, doctors and lawyers.
Ms. Cooper reflects the transitional period, in that she was older than her peers in TC, having graduated from UC Santa Cruz before moving to LA. This helped her to convince the Slash people to invent the job she took, but as she recounts, she was to remain an outsider at the record company.
Over time, she found herself becoming friends with a number of younger punk kids, who eventually moved in with her and her roommate, founding a communal living space that is clearly recognizable as the classic "punkhouse," where all is in common, even the giant resulting mess.
As the unstable living situation produces various escalating misadventures, Cooper's narrative is focused ever more closely on her relationship with a young woman named Maggie, who appeared in an illustration on the cover of LA Weekly in 1980. That source may have helped to inspire Jaime Hernandez and his character of the same name. I was not able to confirm this, however.
As the story moves along, Maggie and the young Cooper have a falling out that leads Cooper to withdraw, disillusioned, from the whole punk lifestyle and scene. According to her, she was unaware of the next few years' development of the national punk scene, as she was traveling in Europe, and really only learned about it on beginning the publishing process for the book itself.
I found this book to be very enjoyable and quite well written. A memoir, it's loosely structured, but the simple narrative thread that underlies it, the hoary device of a coming-of-age-tale, served it well. When the plot focused on the development and loss of the bond between Cooper and her friend, I literally thought to myself, "This would make a great movie."
Ms. Cooper confirmed to me in an email that the subject's come up. I had hoped to place this review in a publication more appropriate than the blog, but having heard nothing in response to some queries, I felt I should simply go with it. Ms. Cooper expressed interest in another interview, and I may do that here as well.
This book was the opposite of Blush's American Hardcore; it has only a minimal interest in scene politics and the name-dropping that unfortunately accompanies any creatively-based cultural endeavor. For me, that made the book intrinsically worthwhile. That's not to say that Ms. Cooper does not provide anecdotes of some luminaries of the LA punk scene. There are several stories set in the Slash offices featuring Slash honcho Bob Biggs, his wife Penelope Spheeris, X leaders Exene Cervenka and John Doe, and a dinner hosted for the band Black Flag by Ms. Cooper and her roommate.
Johnny Thunders brackets the book, as well. He inspires Cooper's interest in punk, and she meets him again as his junkie slip had gathered fatal momentum.
However, her attitude to these stories is detached and disillusioned: she kills her idols, indeed. The only thing more punk rock is self-publishing your own book about it, and I'm happy to recommend it to your attention. Any punk or person interested in the history of the subculture should find the book interesting; however, if your interest in punk is primarily and specifically musical, well, fuck off.
Coloring Outside the Lines website
Rowdy’s Press
P.O. Box 847
Elgin, Texas 78621
Here's a couple more links about it: an interview with the author by No Front Teeth, a UK zine; a review by loserjames.
I saw a couple copies on the shelf at the new Confounded Books location on Pike.
Milwaukee, Minnesota
US, 2002. Dir. Allan Mindel
6/14 9:30p Pacific Place
6/15 1:45p Egyptian
Winter's white blankets Wisconsin. A twenty-something idiot-savant (Troy Garrity) lives at home with his brow-beating mother, earning large sums as an ice-fishing champion. A grifter thinks she has him on the line, but first one, then another man claims to be the boy's father in the wake of his mother's death. Twists drift like snowbanks in this taut film noir.
I giggled with delight and tension throughout the film. It delivered everything I want from a film noir, despite its' happy ending. The film's knowledgeable play with the rules of the genre extends even to the final fade – to white, not black.
While Garrity's Adam Sandler impression mystifies, I readily adapted to it. The film's well-cast and acted, and the hypersaturated, slightly blown-out look of the film both uses apparent natural light in homage to 1970's thrillers and presents an artificial, pulpy green and yellow palette, implying age.
---
Garrity, the lead actor, is the son of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. The best known actors in the film are Randy Quaid, portraying a wonderfully reptilian "traveling salesman" (sporting a rust turtleneck, a splotchy bottle tan, and a wide-lapeled reddish-tan belted car-coat) and Bruce Dern, as an unkempt older copy shop owner.
I loved the production design of the film.
I make reference to Garrity's Adam Sandler impersonation. He plays the ice-angler, literally, as if Adam Sandler were doing an impression of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (Jim Flanagan take note). It's weird, and what mystifies about it is why the actor would chose to adopt such a derivative seeming mode for the performance. I can't imagine that it wasn't considered and then accepted as an aspect of the film that would be discussed upon release. Perhaps the filmmakers simply decided it wouldn't detract from the rest of the film.
If that's the case, it was a good call from my perspective. While the film doesn't top Red Rock West for contemporary noir, it's close, and this is something of an accomplishment when one considers the extent to which Red Rock relied on action sequences to get the adrenaline pumping - Milwaukee, Minnesota eschews action nearly entirely, relying on plot and dialog to work one up into that pleasurable tizzy.
(I find it interesting to note that both this film and - just maybe - Gordon's King of the Ants employ brain dysfunction as a character element. Memento sure had an impact in funding choices, looks like.)
King Of The Ants
US, 2003. Dir. Stuart Gordon (WORLD PREMIERE)
6/13 9:30p Egyptian
6/15 11:30a Cinerama
Sean Crawley (Chris McKenna) is a likeable, callow fool drawn into a murder-for-hire scheme. When he attempts to collect his blood money, he's held captive and tortured in a graphic second act, into which hallucinations and fantasies are intercut. Escaping, he seeks out his murder victim's wife as his lover, fulfilling one of his fantasies. When she discovers who Crawley is, he accidentally kills her. He then seeks out the thugs he originally killed for and systematically kills them in a climactic confrontation.
This film is better than my summary implies. Unfortunately, I found it less intelligent than it wanted to be. You're supposed to like Crawley; I thought he was an idiot. The closing scene's reliance on the vengeance-bound heroism of the self-made man was not appealing to me, not a big Charles Bronson fan. Despite this, there's serious filmmaking here, delineating an amoral, misanthropic existentialism with an unflinching eye.
--
(originally posted June 10 on the Tablet SIFF Board)
I felt obligated to see and review this film after having seen Gordon's fascinating, entertaining interview on the Onion A.V. Club web site. Gordon is the director of Re-Animator and other cult fare, as well as Honey, I Shrunk The Kids.
I went with a bit of trepidation, as I am not at all a gorehound or generically interested in horror or slasher flicks.
King of the Ants was adapted from the novel of the same name by Charlie Higson, a British TV comedy writer. Originally published in 1992, the few online encomiums for it I saw were uniformly celebratory; one suspects it belongs to the New British Novelists grouping around Trainspotting, but I found no direct link between them.
At any rate, the thrust of the narrative is similar: what happens if you take a poorly educated, callow young man and instead of thrusting him into the military, a job or family life, hook him up with thugs and torture him for several days? Higson's answer: he grows an antisocial philosophical system. Fair enough. That's the serious material the film grows from as well.
My disinterest in and discomfort with screen violence meant that I was was not entertained by the film. Again, that would appear to be a part of the film's intent. So does the film succeed?
I don't think it does. It's brutal and in the end celebrates Crawley as a kind of Randian architect of house demolition. I personally have a bone to pick with Randian existentialism - it's philosophy for adolescent idiots that seek isolation to confirm their egocentric fantasies of revenge and power - and this certainly colors my view of the film. What I'm uncertain of is whether the film intends to celebrate this worldview. The closing shot - Crawley strides purposefully toward the camera as the house explodes behind him - is such a cliche of the action film that it reads as both celebration and - just maybe - ironic commentary. If it's supposed to be ironic, however, it's overly dry and will not be noted as such by the great majority of viewers.
Westender
US, 2003, Dir. Brock Morse
6/13 - 9:30p Broadway
6/15 - 6:30p Broadway
Asbrey of Westender (Blake Stadel) is a medieval swordsman, trailing a crew of brigands in an attempt to reclaim his dead wife's ring. Shot in verdant Oregon forests, the film's first half is fairly pedestrian fantasy fare, dimwitted sidekick, flashing swords, rope-bound slave girls, and all. Stadel has an action-hero's presence; however, a more judicious use of raging tantrums by the script might have been advisable.
The film veers off unexpectedly in the final 45 minutes to depict an arduous desert crossing by the troubled, angry warrior. The last section of the film is nearly wordless. The light and beauty of the landscape against which the character sheds his armor – literally and emotionally – were remarkable.
When at journey's end, a climactic battle resolves the hero's quests, the return to genre conventions is a letdown, reading as an appeal for consideration as a back-door pilot.
--
(posted to the Tablet SIFF Board on June 10)
In writing for Cinescape, I became aware of the large numbers of downright kooky independent genre films being produced. I don't mean so much films that are created with even the least possibility of being distributed in the conventional manner - I mean works whoch are created by obsessed individuals and their extended social networks.
For whatever reason, many of these films are genre works, probably because genre works thrive in the context of marginalized subcultures. People that don't believe they have access to the center of the culture seek smaller-scale arenas in which to define themselves and their work. From these isolated environments, great works can emerge, and any lover of punk rock or the science-fiction short story will immediately understand my interest in zero-budget indie genre filmmaking.
In the case of Westender, I was disappointed in my hopes for an avatar of this concept of film. It's relentlessly commercial in production values and displays the common accidental misogyny of a certain style of pulp fantasy writing. This misogyny is most notable in the "mercy killing" of a dying woman, apparently a rape victim - probably intended to convey the idea that the warrior's code includes mercy, it effectively reiterates the rape, which otherwise would have remained offscreen. Rather than feeling I'd learned something about the character, I felt I'd learned a bit about the age and judgement of the filmmakers.
Despite these flaws, the desert segment of the film was successful on its' own terms. Inevitable comparisons to Lawrence of Arabia and Star Wars aside, the film's most direct debt in this segment is to A Man Called Horse.
Fort Ebey State Park and Whidbey Island
Viv and I took advantage of the unseasonably warm weather over last weekend, the first full weekend in June, to camp out at Fort Ebey State park. It's south by about one-third of Whidbey Island from the bridge at spectacular Deception Pass. You can reach Whidbey from Seattle either by road or by ferry. If you choose to stay off the big boats, the route takes you north to Mount Vernon. There, turn west and drive through the Skagit Valley before heading south again through Oak Harbor.
Mount Vernon happened to be holding a farmers' market by the banks of the river that flows through town. Viv needed a latte, so we took a pit stop. We'd planned to buy bread on the road, and bought an overpriced loaf at the market. It was good bread, mind you, but we paid too much for it.
While I was there I enjoyed some of the signage typography on the town's buildings.
We got on the road again, following a familiar route that takes us by a fast-food shack that I constantly forget to take a picture of: "The Net, since 1956." Apparently the Skagit has a good lead on the rest of us in high-speed networking and so forth. I'm always puzzled, though, by the relatively small size of the building and the refreshing lack of Californiesque bragmobiles parked about the facility. Oh well, it's probably some sort of distributed-office, miniaturization deal.
Once out of the Skagit, you're in Military Land. Several active military bases are nearby. While rainbow stickers may be seen with frequency, yellow ribbons, American flags, and hand-painted signs in support of the military were everywhere, some a bit the worse for wear after months of hard service.
The drive into Whidbey passes over the twin spans of the Deception Pass bridge. The parkland abutting the bridge is generally reckoned the most beautiful in the Washington State Parks system. The better known parks, like Rainier and Olympic, are National Parks – the state sorta got the leavings, but geez, what leavings!
We were headed to yet another of the land scraps that are ever-more-shakily administered by a perennially underfunded state parks department. Fort Ebey was used as a coastal defense gun battery emplacement during the end of World War II and opened to the public as a state park in 1967. The gun-emplacement mounts and accompanying bunker system is still in place, overlooking Admiralty Inlet and the waters directly north of Port Townsend. Just a few miles down the island is another state park, also a former military post, Fort Casey State Park. It also offers a campground, but it's not reservable in advance.
I'd picked out our campsite online, believing, based on a map, that it would be just steps from the water's edge. Neglecting to consider the strategic elements involved in locating an artillery battery, I hadn't considered that we might be atop a 300-foot cliff, as indeed we were.
Despite this, the views – and weather, topping 90 degrees – were stunning. We strolled along the flat trail at the bluff's edge, still hoping to find a route to the beach in our flip-flops. Gnarled, ancient pines, obviously Ents deep in woody slumber, provided shady respite as we followed the cliff, helplessly stopping to ooh and aaah at the view.
Finally, consulting the map with growing consternation, we grew puzzled. "Beach," it said, an arrow pointing off the map. We kept on, finally finding the trail indicated but noting that is was not a well-maintained trail. In flip-flops and shorts, we were not really prepared for a woodsy lumberjack hike.
At last we reached a point where the trail looped by a breach in a sandwall. A family group mugged for their camera, and we asked if they knew of a beach trail. They were quite puzzled, and began to describe local landmarks and things that had washed away years ago, and finally decided that the cut in the cliff they were occupying was the supposed trail.
I went to the notch and looked at a steep series of eroded sand gullies, a slippery decsent of "only" about 200 feet. A subset of the locals encouraged us to go down. "Oh, it's easy," they urged. A voice of reason among them also noted the easy-speakers had just returned from the Andes, and thus nearly any trail might appear easy to them. Viv and I turned back, disappointed.
We had passed a closed trail; the main path we were on showed signs of neglect; and throughout the park were signs of other budgetary limitations. The check-in booth was only manned a total of three hours that day, forcing us to take a special trip to get a park map. Information posted along trails appeared to be outdated or inaccurate from time to time. There were limited numbers of trash receptacles and restrooms.
When we got back to the trail to our campsite, we decided to continue down the bluff trail in the opposite direction we'd taken earlier, toward the gun emplacement site. We walked a few yards down the path and saw a magnificent plateau covered with long, waving grasses. On the plateau was a concrete bunker, and above was the gun emplacement. We went into the cool, pitch-black interior of the man-made cave, and exited the other side.
Back at camp, we made dinner and then returned to the plateau's long grasses to investigate a trench and to watch the sun set into the water. That night I read Vivian book six of the Illiad by the fire.
The next day, we finally found the beach access, to the north of the gun battery, and walked along the beach, noting the myriad dead crabs, presumably cooked in the heat of the day before when their kelp strands had grounded on the beach. On a snag above us, a bald eagle sat a while before taking wing.
The weather was absolutely perfect again, and it was pleasant to be in the cool ocean air as the sun beat down.
We decided to poke around the nearby small town of Coupeville before leaving, which sits on the shore of Penn Cove, home of Washington's most-eaten mussels, and the shoreside districts of which are a national historical reserve. Founded in the 1850's, the small, old-fashioned downtown includes an 1853 blockhouse – one of four nearby, all dating to the 1800's - and a commercial wharf which was in use in the 1880's.
The tidal flats under the wharf are covered – absolutely covered – with mussels. The gulls walk along the banks of shellfish, pecking and gulping with less than the usual squawking and squalling. In the wharf-building itself there's a mounted skeleton of a juvenile grey whale, found dead on Whidbey in 1998, and a tourist gewgaw shoppe.
The shops in the historic area near the wharf tend to the antiquey and baubley, as ever in America's tiny tourist hamlets. We even poked into a store that featured everything for the dog owner that's got everything, including hats for your dog and tiny dog-angel ornaments to comfort those seeking the solace of knowledge that the afterlife includes beloved pets.
After learning that the plastic bags of water stapled above the open shop door "keep flies out," I chuckled, noting the buzzing winged creatures just inside the door. Perhaps they were the beloved pet-sprits; plainly they couldn’t be flies. We moved on.
Toby's was the only beer-serving establishment open that Sunday afternoon, and so we stopped in for a plate of their repeatedly prize-winning fish and chips, which I must endorse as among the best fish and chips I've ever eaten. The front window of the place featured unit stickers of countless military outfits, and there were a couple of well-shorn young men impressing some ladies with tales of derring-do in booths nearby as we ate. In fact, as we ate, the place filled up, and competition for booth space became as cutthroat as in your favorite hipster cafe.
One of the truly striking things about Coupeville, in fact, was the relative lack of crowds. To an extent, this was true at Fort Ebey as well, although the campground was full to capacity. Whidbey is just remote enough, and just working-stiff enough, thanks to the military bases, that it's in the third rank of attractions among driving distance to Seattle, after the big mountain parks and the San Juans themselves.
Third place in Puget Sound, especially in the summer, is still pretty damn good. The thinner crowds on Whidbey are without a doubt a perfectly good reason to return; anyone who's ever been stuck in the perpetual, summer-long traffic jam high atop Mount Rainier at the unhappily named Paradise parking lot will have good reason to appreciate an unhurried, crowd-free weekend on Whidbey Island.
(Here are all the photos from the weekend. Anita Rowland has also written about a visit to Coupeville.)
For years now, I've collected a peculiarly American subspecies of handbill, one which seems to bring out the obsessive best in the designers of the material. It's been a popular subgenre for years, probably longer than I have been alive, and sits right on the border of illegality.
Friends, I am discussing the fake-bill advertising handbill, in which the size, shape, and markings of genuine American currency are imitated, with varying degrees of acuity and detail. The reason for the popularity of the device is not hard to fathom. First, as a handbill, if the fake money is casually discarded in the street, it's very difficult for a passerby to ignore as it reposes on the sidewalk.
Second, one's impulse is to immediately pull a bill from your wallet to compare the two works. This impulse toward comparison means that the handbill designers have the liberty of going to town on each discrete element of the design, re-imagining each part of the currency's iconography in support of their own goals.
Here are some. Click the images to see the bill at 640 pixels wide; from there, click again to see it at 1000 pixels wide.
Additionally, refashioning currency is a recurrent meme in art as well, irresitably merging art and commerce into a reflective unity. I'll begin with the front and back of such a bill I've have for about 15 years, probably the work of a zine artist who now lives in San Francisco. I also have a bill that is unquestionably by this person, but not reproducible here, as rather than employing degenerated xerox imagery on green cardstock, the bill was photocopied on to black cardstock. It's eerie.
Occupying a middle ground is this $100 playing card:
This bill combines an unusual bluntness with the peculiar typographical choice of a kind of Olde Germanic font, probably intended to convey a message of impending fascist danger. The artist's urgency of comittment here apparently led them to eschew both the use of color reproduction and the more customary obsessive detailing. Curiously, particularly on the back of the piece, these two tendencies come together to create a note whch bears a distinct resemblance to a Weimar Republic inflation-era mark. Personally, I suspect this to be an accident rather than an intentional reference.
I'm concluding this little show-and-tell with my two favorites in the collection. For balance, I'll interject this remarkable born-again Christian bill between the 9-11/anti-Bush pieces. This bill is one of my older pieces, and is marked "copyright 1980(?) by Robert H. Hill." I can't tell if the date is 1990 or 1980. It's entirely hand drawn, and really rewards careful scrutiny. Olive branches become loaves and fishes, "One Dollar" becomes "One Savior" and "One Way", and so on. The hand-drawn nature of the rendering accentuates the act of creation itself as an act of faith and devotion.
The artist has also simplified the design of the bill itself, eliminating the anti-countefeiting measures such as intricate engraving and so forth. Again, this has the effect of increasing the effectiveness of the piece: there's no way to misunderstand the simple message the artist is interested in communicating.
Finally, we come to what must be regarded as the undisputed masterwork among the collection. It's so incredibly detailed, so carefully printed, that a doubletake is almost always required to really grasp what it is you're looking at. The publishers of the work undoubtedly realized this, and upsized the bill from a standard U. S. currency size by about 20%. This is not reflected in these thumbnails, but if you check out the large images, you can see the sizing difference there.
The bill itself is festooned with URLs, none of which I've checked out, and it picks up the thread of the N30 bill and runs with it. In fact, it runs to the ends of the earth, to the moon, and back. It's by far the most obsessively detailed phony bill I've ever seen.
Where Robert H. Hill's simple message was enhanced by a stripped-down presentation, the 9-11 artist's work is interested in conveying the idea of a sinister, complex world of interlocking interests, cynically exploiting the events of that terrible day to move their international corporate agenda forward. The design of the bill reflects this in every detail, from the spiderwebs in the corners of the front of the bill to the hidden corporate logos that appear throughout the surface of the detailed engraving.
Having a hard time spotting them? Here's a couple. On the back of the bill, to the left and the right of the circular seals, a leafy decorative element curls up and over the thin white rule separating the central cartouche of the design from the border. Click into the very largest view of the bill, which will be 1250 pixels wide. Look in the center of that curling foliage. It's the Gulf Oil logo!
Now look in the lower border band, still on the back. Look directly to the left and also above the large word "ONE". In order, from left to above the white band, moving clockwse, we see: "HALLIBURTON", the masonic order symbol, the Lockheed-Martin logo, and neslting under foliage again and in the shade of an oil derrick, the ARCO logo.
On the front of the bill, the internal decorative fringe atop the central cartouche border at the bottom of the space is a repeated motif of oil derrick and oilfield pump. In the numerals "9-11" on the back of the bill, the letters "C I A" are faintly visible. This is only a sampling of the incredble amount of semi-hidden material visible on the bill.
Clearly, the objective is to provide a kind of miniature training ground for the sort of perceptual experience the designers and publishers of the bill hope that people will have upon encountering it, the experience of looking around at the world and forever seeing new and sinister patterns. Whatever your opinion of the world-view expressed in the bill, it's a tour-de-force of this particular school of design.
An argument for increased sensitivity in the proofing and decision-making process among dental advertisers in The Seattle Weekly. From mid-May, this was going to run here when my disk crash went down.
Argall
William T. Vollmann
746 pp. Viking, 2001.
ISBN.nu listing
I already ran a quick piece on Vollmann's Argall, and noted, foolishly, that I hoped to complete a formal book review of the work before going on about the book for another five hundred words, which permitted me to start to say what I wanted to without expending any particular intellectual energy. Absurdly, yet obviously, my need to review the piece became much less urgent as a result.
Nonetheless, it's past time, so here we go.
Argall is volume three of Vollmann's seven-volume "imaginary history" of the mythic points of contact between the native peoples of North America and the inbound Europeans, Seven Dreams. In my earlier gesture toward a review of Argall I outlined the plan and scope of the series, which is not necessarily published in the chronological order of its' subjects. Thus, volume six, The Rifles, preceded Argall to the bookseller's stall. To date, including these two books, four of the seven volumes have seen print.
Argall tackles what is likely to be the best-known of the historical-cum-mythic events that Vollmann will tackle in the series, the fateful encounter of one Pocahontas and one Captain Smith of the Jamestowne colony in the reign of King James, father of Elizabeth. Previously he's tackled the Viking colony at l'Anse-aux-Meadows, Newfoundland; Franklin's ill-fated polar expedition in the mid-19th century, and the arrival of French missionaries among the Huron in the 1500's. While I have never seen subjects listed for future volumes, it would be reasonable to expect a work that covers the encounter on the plains at Little Big Horn, possibly with reference to the later one at Wounded Knee; perhaps one covering the meeting of the Aztec and Spaniard, and so forth.
My interest in Vollmann's work is multifold. I was introduced to his writing not as a reflection of his status as one of the most interesting, ambitious, and challenging writers of his generation, but because he is the son of one of my father's long-time colleagues and close friends. I first met him when we were both teenagers, but I can hardly say we know one another.
When he was in Seattle for the release of his fugue-like, carefully developed collection of short stories, The Atlas, I introduced myself and expressed hope that we might correspond or have a beer together sometime. This was reciprocated, but due to laziness and ill-fortune that's not yet happened. He did not have a recollection of our childhood encounters, I think.
At any rate, what a pleasure it's been to come across his work. It's very nearly perfectly to my tastes, although his fascination with squalor and extremes surpasses mine. His playful intensity in the use of language and his commitment to a kind of transparent authorial subjectivity and honesty are both unique, in my experience, and of a depth that invests them with the resonance of poetry. They are not merely the work of a clever wordsmith, but also express perceptions and emotions that can be hard to convey.
For example, the works of Tom Stoppard are often knocked for a kind of surface gleam that is said to prevent deeper emotional resonance. I believe this criticism is misguided, but it's founded on the density of Stoppard's wordplay: it's not uncommon for viewers or readers to have to work so hard to keep up with the language that the material is drained of emotive intensity.
In Vollmann's work, this is not the case. He certainly engages in pyrotechnic displays of both structural and linguistic virtuosity, but the material he covers is generally so compelling – or so distasteful – that it never flags into coolness.
Argall features Vollmann's most mannered linguistic game to date. The entire book (save the eighty or so pages devoted to glossaries, personal and place names, chronology, and exhaustive sourcing notes) is written in a kind of neo-Elizabethan English, complete with shifting spellings of common words, names, and places. The frontispiece of the book announces the game. It emulates, with a modicum of winking, the frontispieces of any number of pre-modern publications, with their exhaustively florid typography presenting a long-winded précis featuring the citation of a higher being. The higher being is Okeus, the name that Powhatan and his people gave to their god or patron demon. Reader, mark it well.
A passage, selected at random:
While his Soldiers doff'd their armor at last, then cleansed it by rolling it in a barrel of sand & vinegar until it glistered again like unto new, Sweet John (fearing to un-brigandine himself, on account of President Radclyffe's malice) strolled about the Fort, discovering that most were sick or idle, as ever, and the rest dissatisfied.--page 286, Argall
It might seem that the lingo, daunting as it is, would prove wearing. Vollmann has such control over the language that one readily adapts to it. This is partly due to a sort of stagecraft. The language he employs is a gesture to genuinely antique language, but once one adjusts to the unexpected frills of "doff'd" and "glistered" and "un-brigandine," the architecture of his stage-flat stands revealed as contemporary spoken English.
Under the surface of the ornamented, metric prose, Vollmann's up to still more trickery. He writes of social activity between the people from whom Pocahontas comes in plain language, if there's no European on stage. While retaining the rhythms of the rest of the prose, he employs shorter sentences and has "doff'd" the flowery ornament-words. When the narrative centers on this or that individual in the company of the English colonists, a similar shift in voice occurs. Vollmann notes in the end matter that he has sought to employ not only temporally appropriate phrasing and floridity in the prose and speech but also to use vocabulary elements that are regionally specific to the region of England that the individual character in question came from.
The sum effect of this meticulous craftsmanship is to cast the characters in the book into remarkable relief and definition. It's truly striking, as one swiftly gains a sense of the persons he's writing about without fully apprehending how it's done. He allows the character's voice to overflow the directly attributable quotes and thoughts and to momentarily appear to inhabit the authorial space.
Of course, for all this mummery, it's Bill, Bill, Bill behind the stage, and as is customary, he interweaves direct personal narrative – of his visits to England, his visits to the strangely barren site of the original colony in Virginia. He looks at the graves and rusted buckles of the multitude who perished of starvation and disease. They lie next to a river so full of fish that it was a constant source of comment by the starving, poxed aristocrats of the little fort by the River James.
Adding to my enjoyment of the book was my family's Christmas Eve, 2000 visit to the colony site itself. The visit enabled me to more clearly visualize certain aspects of the locale. Additionally, while I was reading the book, National Geographic's earlier article about recent archaeology at the site was consulted. They published a reconstructed view of the stockade and information about the Starving Time, when so many of the colonists died.
Vollmann closely focuses the book on the historical relationship of Pocahontas and John Smith, concluding that there was no lovers bond between them, but as he imagines it, a loving relationship as between an uncle and niece or even siblings, of a sort. The Native girl was truly a child when they first met and eventually married another man in the colony before traveling to England with her husband, were she died still quite young.
He pulls no punches, evenhandedly recounting the ways of low-intensity conflict on all sides. He renders the intricate political and social relationships between the Native Americans in their villages and the complex weave of familial relationships and personalities that constitute their society. He carefully delineates the dangerous ground of class and privilege that both fires the ambitions of and regularly kills off the Englishmen in their rusting helmets and listing stockade.
In fact, he's obscurely chosen to name the book after one Captain Argall, in mocking contrast to the failed ambitions of Smith. Argall was a sea captain who was intimately bound up with the colony from its' inception, and whose journeys of resupply gave him much the advantage of constant exposure to the swirl of London court and royal politics. The lesson of the book, based on Smith's unfortunate trajectory, appears to be: do not serve your masters with the sweat of your brow, but with the bended knee, the embroidered lace cuff, and with large quantities of gold and treasure obtained in any way whatsoever.
As noted previously, of the published books, Fathers and Crows is surely the most accessible of the published works in the Seven Dreams to date. However there's simply no question that Argall, with its' intricate construction and obsessive craftsmanship, is the highest literary accomplishment in the series thus far. By now, I suppose it's possible that the next Dream may be deep in final editing: from a purely selfish perspective, I surely hope so. If Vollmann continues to leap forward from book to book in this manner, there's simply no way to know what to expect.
Edited by Michael Chabon
ISBN.nu
I picked this up at the same time as I did McSweeney's 9, thinking it was a McSweeney's spinoff or one-shot like the Hornby music thingy. It's a stunt book, guest edited by the reigning high priest of high-and-low-brow, the Pulitzer-prize-winning Spider-man scribe (HA! that was fun to write) Michael Chabon, and it delivers exactly what it promises: McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. Out in March (published, apparently as a gift to me, on my birthday), I just now completed the book. I read it as I once did Analog and Fantasy and Science Fiction - over many short sittings, generally a story at a time, and had a great time. The book collects a genuinely impressive array of literary stars and up-and-comers with grizzled vets of genre writing.
Chabon welcomes readers in an agreeably reactionary introduction in which he effectively points out that the fashionably reflective, quiet, "moment of truth" short story has driven "plot" out of respectable literary journeyman's bag of tricks. While the veracity of this claim is disputable, the essay is also a recognizable permutation of the genre writer's defensive frustration with the ghettoization of American letters. Chabon proposes to rectify the matter by guest-editing an issue of McSweeney's in which Each! Story! Will! Thrill! And! Amaze! As you might have guessed, this is that book.
One odd feature of the publication is the large number of mountain-climbing stories – apparently, if contributors couldn't bring themselves write a real genre piece, a mountain-climbing story would do. I felt, in general, that these attempts at Outside-style adventure travel writing fell flat. This is possibly because I have a prejudice against adventure travel writing in general, a distaste which goes back to my dislike for Hemingway, so I shall refrain from reviewing or citing any of the mountaineering pieces.
(UPDATE: Upon reflection, it may be that I'm mischaracterizing these pieces - at least two of them concern the neocolonial power relations inherent in guided adventure-travel getaways, rather than the testosterone-and-landscape material I associate with the likes of Jon Krakauer.)
The balance of the stories (in my mind, about two-thirds of the book) are a mix of genre writing, from straight-ahead science fiction to a delightful cops-and-robbers piece set in 1930's Oklahoma from the well-tempered pen of Ellmore Leonard. Neil Gaiman contributes a Gaimanesque memoir –cum-ghost story, Michael Moorcock weighs in with one of his yummy pastiches on prewar juvenilia, and Stephen King bangs out a deft post-apocalyptic tale which forcefully reminds one what a subtle writer he can be.
Moorcock's piece offers the tale of the metatemporal detective Sir Seaton Begg's well-known intervention in the Nazi Party's Night of the Long Knives. It should be noted that Moorcock is far too crafty to even hint that he's writing about actual historical events, or that in his version, Himmler dies rather than the bumbling brownshirts.
I have always loved King's short stories much more than his unutterably cruel and sadistic novels - I am always amazed that my fellow Americans take pleasure in these extended meditations on the nature and practice of cruelty and torture. You are all bad people, and should be ashamed of yourselves. Does your mother know you read that stuff? King's a saint, though, and writes like an angel when he's keeping to word-count.
So far so good, eh? It's sweet pleasure itself to read these people's work in conjunction with other, more literarily conventional writers' works, and in certain cases, where the non-genre folks put aside the fear or distaste or disinterest that has kept them out of the pool previously, they rise to giddy heights on the shock of the fireworks.
Predominant among these stories is Chuck's Bucket, a hilarious, beautifully pomo sf story by Chris Offutt, son of Andrew Offutt, a prolific fantasy and sf author. In the tale, a blocked writer named, unaccountably, Chris Offutt, meets an academic who's perfecting a time machine, and uses the time machine to get sufficiently unblocked that he can turn in his assignment for a magazine, McSweeney's, assigned by the scalawag and generally more-successful author Michael Chabon to the somewhat sad-sack Offutt. The story struck me as so funny, and is so knowingly attuned to the conventions of the hack stories that certainly do populate the pages of many's the pulp magazine, that it sort of took flight, managing to speak emotional truths at the same time as it took a burlesque turn on the stage of my mind.
Chabon himself contributes a pastiche, The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance. It's an alternate-history sf tale set in Victorian Colonial Louisiana in the aftermath of the failed Ohio Rebellion of 1896. Interestingly, the story is a straight homage to none other than Michael Moorcock's wonderful alternate-history Warlord of the Air series. Chabon does a great job on the too-short tale, which is effectively an origin story, setting the stage for full-blown serials should Chabon find himself suddenly out of work and in need of penny-a-word pickup gigs. It's of particular literary interest to read Chabon's work after the Moorcock piece. I came away from Chabon's story confirmed in my appreciation for his work, and hope he takes the time to proceed directly into straight-up sf for a time. I could tell he read the right stuff when he was kid the first time I laid eyes on Kavalier and Klay.
However, and in some ways this is not surprising, the most original of the stories is by hometown hero Sherman Alexie. He turns in a brief zombie story called Ghost Dance. In it he imagines the shambling bodies of Custer's long-dead Seventh Calvary rising from the graves at Little Big Horn. Alexie's unique voice delivers the story with both greater brutality than is usual either in his writing or in horror generally, and manages to both respect and expand the boundaries of the genre he's working in. At the same time the story packs an unmistakable rhetorical punch, which derives directly from the specific genre elements he employs. It's quite a piece.
A brief aside about Alexie's work – his stuff seems to me to be growing stronger with each story I read, and his stuff was pretty good to begin with. It's getting to the point that I'll be scouring for everything he's ever written quite soon, I suspect.
So, in short, dear hearts, if you cleave to your Cheever, you might feel free to take a pass on this. But if you share the fine, manly tastes of the brighter classes among us, and savor the ozone tang of a laser-scored orbital liner on the tarmac after the dawn run from Istanbul, you'll find McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales a suitably improving and civic-minded read.
From the reading deck, this is your Literary Commander, signing off.
Palm Announces Acquisition of Handspring (Palm press release, via Dvorak in his BoingBoing guestblog).
Huh. I'm thinking this is probably not such good news for Palm users, and of course it's bad news for Handspring peeps.
Ed Emmer's Wolfe essay from BOT is now available as scanned images hosted on my imageserver.
Ed, a fast talking brainslinger of no mean wit, wrote the nine-page stemwinder, a hilarious, withering dismissal of a specific essay that Mr. Tom Wolfe published in Harper's just as the hardback edition of "The Bonfire of the Vanities" hit shelves.
Here'e how Mr. Wolfe's website describes the essay:
In 1989 Wolfe outraged the literacy community with an essay in Harper's magazine called "Stalking the Billion-footed Beast." In it he argued that the only hope for the future of the American novel was a Zolaesque naturalism in which the novelist becomes the reporter -- as he had done in writing The Bonfire of the Vanities, which was recognized as the essential novel of America in the 1980s.
("literacy community"?)
As Ed warms to his topic, the dismissal becomes broader and ever-more peppered with funny invective. It's the literary equivalent of watching a friend grow frothy in rantful wroth over a couple glasses of beer.
Ed, as Anne has noted, also sweated his fevered brow in a heroic effort to precisely duplicate the layout of the original essay.
A tender tale involving Darth Vader, the mall, 1978, and a seven-year-old child.
Warning: a cynical sense of humor will GREATLY enhance your appreciation of this anecdote. While I was much too mature to have the same experience as the unfortunate Matthew in 1978, as a willfully childless 37-year old, this story reduced me to tears of helpless laughter.
Goliard Dream: The Mall Hungers for Fresh Meat.
In which Felicity stewards Brittany and Sarah to the mall. There, the girls find they can't find what they seek, for a time. How long a time? How long indeed, for the mall is large, and they are but Brittany and Sarah.
The Naked Proof: Seattle Filmmaker Does Good
Jamie Hook leans against the coffee shop window, talking a blue streak. He's been tweaking sound for The Naked Proof, his feature-film directorial debut, discussing the production process on the "romantic comedy." The film is a comic look at the unraveling - or rebirth - of philosophy grad student Henry Rawitscher, who begins having possible hallucinations of a "Very Pregnant Woman." A SIFF selection, The Naked Proof premieresat the Egyptianon June 13, at the Cinerama.
Editing notes:
The original title and cutline were "A Priori Knowledge: A brief dissertation on The Naked Proof."
A well-intentioned cut in the paragraph above left the theater from a showing of the film that preceded the pressdate of the paper, resulting in the confusing impression tha the film will be playing at both the Egyptian and the Cinerama on June 13. It won't; it'll only be at the Cinerama.
Here is a link to the other piece I have in that ish, a review of the Canadian film Marion Bridge. This is the review where I apparently did not follow herd practice in the use of a 10-point rating scale.
Sometime in 1980, I think, my dad spent a great deal of time determining that he wanted to follow his individualist streak and obtain a Kaypro II, a 64k dual-floppy machine that used the pre-DOS operating system CP/M and whose most important feature was the tank-like, large-suitcase-style construction. The keyboard was housed in the lid of the box, and the drives were stacked next to the 9-inch green phosphor screen.
(While I'm certain that the computer was in our house by 1980, documentation indicates that Kaypro IIs were released in 1982, so it's likely that the computer was something else – maybe a DEC-10 dumb terminal with the coupler described below. I supose this would mean my interest in online communities preceded my interest in some computer games, but others would have been avaliable, such as Adventure.)
I was disappointed that he'd not decided to pursue the Apple route at the time, as I'd seen my good friend Eric's father's lab computer, an Apple II, and hoped that Eric and I would be able to learn together, swap software, and so forth. Alas, it was not to be.
My father, an academic, had long used computers in his research for publication, but the machines available to him for these operations were punch-card-programmed and consequently quite limited in terms of access, active storage space, and convenience. I don't know what the final selling point for Dad was, but 1980 would have been about the time the first productivity applications came on the market - WordStar, VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, and so forth. I believe the hot home-office database program at the time was dBase II.
I was only mildly interested in that aspect of the machine. It was the games that I was interested in. Eric's apple had an amazing graphic game called "Choplifter" on it (seen here in a C64 color version which is actually less clean in appearance than I recall the vector-graphics based one on the Apple). I had seen other dazzlingly promising displays on an academic network called PLATO (check out that link! A historical marker!) that linked the Indiana University and University of Illinois main campuses. Imagine my disappointment when I learned that the Kaypro had no graphics capabilities whatsoever.
At best, programmers could animate ASCII characters to create games that were functional emulations of the video games of the day, at least some of them, such as Donkey Kong and Pac-Man. Despite the underwhelming graphics these games were playable.
However, clearly it was in the manipulation and presentation of text that the Kaypro would perform best. I still have saved games of ADVENT, the cp/m Adventure port, that are playable on my current Mac G4, courtesy a rock-solid cp/m emulator available freely at emulation.net. "You are in a twisty maze of passageways, all alike."
When the maze held no more mystery, I began to pester my father for a system user ID to the campus computing network, known at that time as Wrubel. That was short for the name of the central campus IT facility, Wrubel Computing Center, a dingy little set of rooms tucked around the back of the large physical education facility known as the HPER, or 'hyper'. Today, WCC occupies my old middle school. Jon Konrath has an online history of the growth and changes that occurred shortly circa 1990 which led to the center's relocation.
My dad was able to access Wrubel via an amazing device, apparently designed by Goths and sent backward in time to the seventies, called an acoustic coupler.
It's a modem, but rather than simply plugging the cord from the phone into a little jack, you have to take an old-fashioned, round-ended telephone handset and jam the ends into the heavy-duty round rubber cuffs that grip the speaker and mike with what can only be described as sexual intensity. Then you dial the connection number, wait for the familiar hiss and burble, and flip the switch on the coupler, telling it to translate the white noise into 1s and 0s. (Image courtesy of the University of Virginia online Computer Museum)
I believe the device may have reached the startling transfer speed of 300 baud. On a good day. I'm sure you can imagine the inherent inefficiencies. (The info page linked above describes the speed as 10 characters per second.)
At any rate, Dad never did spring for an ID, and I ended up "obtaining" an unused, forgotten account that I continued to employ until sometime around my graduation from high school in 1984. And what on Earth was I doing, poking around the guts of the WCC?
Why, participating in an early incarnation of a bulletin board, of course. It was called Note; it was completely unauthorized; and occasionally it would eat up enough system resources to attract the attention of a dutiful high priest (we called them 'truck drivers,' natch) and be deleted.
At any rate, my experience is similar to others' initial experiences of BBS-based communities. It was my first brush with written communication as a vehicle for self-expression and argument in a meaningful context. A great deal of eccentric amusement. Silly names. Fascinating, detailed arguments about the overarching issues of the day, the millenia, and Star Trek. It was the best, and it wholly validated parts of my personality that had never experienced positive feedback, largely by putting me into social contact with other linguistically-gifted persons.
Then in 1981, we moved away for a year; when I returned, girls, punk rock, and the assorted attractions of full-blossomed adolescence drew me away from the Note community, as it was called. Since it was a social network largely inhabited by current college students with an interest in computers and this was the very early 1980's, there was a great deal of admiration for the music of Rush, and very little for that of the Sex Pistols.
I continued to use the computer, until I graduated from college, in fact; all of my term papers were written on it. But I never forgot the online experience, and when in the early 1990's, the first tendrils of Internet culture began to tenderly caress my lobes (I believe I the form of the FutureCulture email list), I immediately began a crash course to obtain a more recent-vintage computer and modem. That was in 1992, I think.
(This was written as a contribution to Adam Kalsey's Newly Digital distributed memoir project.)
