Whoa.
Hang on, folks—me an’ her’s been married six years today.
Yoiks.
Delightful things.
I’ve been a crab lately. I have, it’s true. Admit it. You didn’t want to say anything, but when I was out of sight you’d roll your eyes (lovingly, perhaps, but they would roll); out of earshot, and you’d sigh concernedly. (How expressive it can be: the sigh.)
But enough of all that! Enough of Ann Coulter and WorldCom and the appalling stupidity of Bush and co. Enough of disingenuous attempts to distract us by carping shrilly against judgments we all know are right (if rather touchingly petty in the bigger picture). Enough of worrying about the Mouse, for once. Or its cohorts and fellow-travelers. —Begone, the lot of you! Piss off! I want to be delighted.
And so: Dean Allen. For this, yes; a self-indulgent comic gem. But also because he pointed me to this.
Utah Phillips. Because even though my dad says Dick Cheney’s the right man for the job, I know Utah would still hit him right where it counts.
Stupid CSS tricks. —Also, stupidly glorious mathematical stunts I haven’t a hope in hell of ever understanding, but can just about manage to stand in stunned awe of.
Angela Carter. (How the hell did I manage to get this far without reading her?)
The Museum of Jurassic Technology, which is worth braving LA traffic for. Seriously. It is. You won’t believe me, you’ll be sitting there, stop-and-go, bullets of sunlight ricocheting off the chrome and glass all around you, cursing my name, you’ll pull off the highway and find the street corner and maybe five minutes later after parking and walking back you’ll stand in front of that unassuming little storefront and you’ll scoff, yeah, right, no fuckin’ way, Kip, you’re off your knob, but you’re there, you might as well go in, you’ve come all this way, so you punch the buzzer with an annoyed finger and then the door opens and in you step to the coolth of it and the darkness and—oh, oh my God—
The look on Jenn’s face, yesterday, when she showed me her first fan mail for title= Dicebox ::”>Dicebox, which is having some nice things said about it, here, and here, and over here. She’d told Chris it was okay to link to her, because he had before, and then there was this whole domain name fuckup (that, astonishingly enough, did not involve Verisign), and so to make sure people could find her again, she told him he could link again. (She’s been quite chary with the whole linking and promoting thing so far. “I want to have a full chapter done,” she says. “It can wait.” Maddening, perhaps, to impatient husbands like me, but it’s her call.) —Thing is, Scott McCloud saw Chris had linked to it, and so he assumed it was okay to let loose the hounds of hype. And even though Jenn says “He shouldn’t have done it! He was supposed to wait till I was ready!” she’s grinning like mad and she’s—I swear on anything you hold holy, a Bible, a Crowley biography, the Ifa oracle, whatever—she’s glowing. Little sparkles of light crackling off her. She got her first piece of unsolicited fanmail, you see…
—And while we’re on the subject of Scott McCloud, I’m also finding it inordinately amusing to say: “A search engine stole my eyeball!”
If you’re visiting from Bruno—
Hey. Welcome. Thanks for stopping by. Place is still a mess, yeah, I know, I was just trying to clean up, and I probably don’t have enough ice. There’s snacks hereabouts, and mostly just a bunch of random stuff—you might enjoy the essay on Buffy, or you might not, and you might enjoy the serial, though it’s far from complete and really strange and there’s maybe ten people on the planet who get a lion’s share of the jokes (I’ve forgotten most of them, myself), and there’s some links you might enjoy visiting, and hey, that Bruno’s pretty fuckin’ cool. Chris is a great guy, he’s up to book seven, can you fuckin’ believe it, and I must say it was a real honor having him ask me to write the foreword, and—
What? What did you say? Did I know I misspelled Delany’s name as “Delaney” in the Bruno foreword? Is that what you’re asking? Jesus, what do you take me for, an idiot? You think, what, I have all these books by Delany on my shelves, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and all the Nevèryon books and even (shh) Hogg and of course Jewel-Hinged Jaw and both Shorter and Longer Views, I mean, the man’s a fuckin’ hero to me, a literary god, and you think I couldn’t be bothered just once to look up and check the spelling of the name, I’m so arrogant I don’t think I could possibly be misremembering it? Is that what you’re saying? —Well, yes, goddammit. I was. Arrogant idiot, that’s me. Dipshit and dumbass. There. You happy? You satisfied? Is that what you came here for? Huh? Huh?
—Um. Aheh. Um. Sorry. I was just—uh. You know. Nerves. I just—sit down, sit down, I didn’t mean to blow up like that, no, no, please. I insist. Let me pour you a drink. Mint julep? Gin and tonic? I, uh—aw, shit! I’m out of fuckin’ ice!
Scholar; gentleman; scoundrel; cad.
So there’s this thing my grandfather used to say. My mother’s father, who ran away to Canada when war first broke out in Europe (for the second time, last century, but who’s counting?) and lied about his age, because the States weren’t in the thick of it yet, and he wanted more than anything else in the world to fly airplanes. Which he did: Spitfires, among others. Then he did a lot of editing and writing. For a while, he managed a department store: Gaylord’s, it was called. He was active for a good long time in one of those men’s clubs that make public service fun by layering it with secret handshakes and weekend barbecues, and he was a fanatic about playing golf at the local VFW, and he was a diabetic. Smoked like a chimney, too.
But that’s neither here nor there: this is about what he used to say, or rather, I was going to use what he used to say as a starting point. I’d do something he’d asked me to do—brought him the remote, say, or a glass of water, and he’d beam. “You, sir, are a scholar and a gentleman.”
“Thank you, sir,” I’d say.
“No, no,” he’d say, “what you should say back is, ‘And there are damn few of us left in this world.’” And he’d bust out in this hoarsely infectious laugh, hack hack.
—Of course, he’d also set up his accoutrements for his morning insulin shot, syringe and vial on the table, sleeve rolled up, and he’d load up the syringe and peer at it in the morning light and then beckon me over. “Time for your morning shot, young man!”
“No, sir,” I’d say, shaking my big solemn head, as he busted out laughing again, hack hack.
It seems there’s a subset of our friends hereabouts who, upon discovering Jenn and I had not yet seen All About Eve (an oversight, we readily admit it, but we have seen The Lady Eve, so there, neener), were downright eager to see my reaction to it. Or not to it, per se; wondrous movie that it is, it has been sufficiently steeped into the public pop-consciousness that it’s impossible not to thrum with deja vu when the battle of wills begins between Margo Channing and Eve Harrington. —No, it was specifically the character of Addison DeWitt that they wanted to see me see: coldly scheming theatre critic and manipulative sonuvabitch par excellence, that coolly silky voice edged with menace like a velvet nap, wrapped in fine black suits like he just stepped out of those Arrow shirt ads from the ’20s and ’30s. A fop with an iron will; a fop with power, with a taste for power like a good brandy or a fine single-malt. I’d take to him instantly, they swore. A new Excelsior, a non pareil; a new paragon. I had to see him.
One is not entirely sure how to take that.
(Oh, I loved him. Indeed. Want his wardrobe and his cigarette filter. Still: one doesn’t like to be quite so—obvious?)
Having read a bit now about the actor who played him, I’m eager to rev up a George Sanders film festival. Rather like the Barbara Stanwyck bender we went on a while back—though Sanders doesn’t seem to have had quite Stanwyck’s luck in landing the classics. Still: it’ll be nice to get a shot of him in the system, to be able to have and to hold a clear picture of him: in evening dress, in an archetypal Stork Club, say, a quivering ingenue or slighted husband standing affronted before him, voice in high dudgeon: “You, sir, are a scoundrel and a cad!”
And he’d smile, just so, his eyes—sad? You wouldn’t call them that, but that’s the impression they’d leave, when you went over it after the fact—and this is what he’d say right back in that voice, that voice: “And there are damned few left of us in this world.”
Parades and cigarettes.
So I wake up just the other side of sober, and my best green suit’s a wrinkled puddle at the foot of the bed. It reeks of cigarette smoke, and I’m remembering enough to be obscurely glad that gin doesn’t stain wool. When I stumble into the bathroom for some clumsy ablutions, I see in the mirror I’ve still got an earring in one ear. Leaning forward does alarming things to various internal systems keeping track of such stuff as balance and pulse rate, so I swallow three prophylactic Advils and blink until everything settles.
It was one of those nights.
“Jemiah’s having a party to celebrate her second book coming out,” said the email invitation. “It’s ‘dress code fabulous.’” So Kevin dyed his hair red and Jenn (“his” Jenn, and not “my” Jenn, and let’s not get into all that right now) had red streaks and rhinestone piping, and I had the aforementioned green suit and the walking stick from Guatemala, and Sara bleached her hair bone white and then washed some nameless sunset color into it, and my God, you should have seen Steve’s underwear. Fabulous? Oh, yes, my friends. Fabulous. —So: off we set for the Mallory Hotel, a ten-minute drive from the Lloyd Center, tops; maybe another ten minutes to find parking if we weren’t lucky. Or twenty minutes by MAX. If that. But—
See, we’re all plugged-in people. We smirk (or groan) at how W’s written up in the Guardian and we listen to NPR through our computers (though we’d really prefer it if they used Quicktime) and we’re flinging links back and forth to the decision on CIPA hours after it’s made and a whole day before those lumbering newsprint dinosaurs can get their summaries on the streets. (And let’s take a moment to note that that’s my local library on the front lines of this good fight. Yay!) —Television? That’s for watching DVDs on, right? Radio? What?
Problem being that us international elite knowledge-workin’ webheads somehow missed—the lot of us—the fact that Saturday, 1 June, was opening night for Portland’s annual Rose Festival.
“There’s an awful lot of traffic,” said someone.
“Oh, yeah,” said someone else. “It’s the Rose Festival, isn’t it?”
We tried to cross at the Morrison Bridge, but it was going up. Kevin (who was driving) pulled a deftly illegal U-turn, and we cut north to the Broadway Bridge. Much clearer. No one was on it. Other side of the river, we found out why: Broadway was blocked off and all traffic being routed up Hoyt.
“Is that a parade they’re setting up?” said someone.
“I thought the Southwest Airlines Grand Floral Parade—the signature event of the Rose Festival, or so I’m told—wasn’t till next week,” said someone else.
And they were right. This was the Portland General Electric/SOLV Starlight Parade, presented by Southwest Airlines.
So we routed ourselves up Hoyt. All we had to do was cross 405 and double back to the Mallory. And we’d be fine.
“You know,” said someone, brightly, “we could just duck back to the Lloyd Center, park there, and take the MAX in. It does run right past the Mallory, you know.”
“Nah,” said someone else, pragmatically. “We’ve already come this far, let’s stick it out. It can’t be that bad.”
Roughly 45 minutes later, we were parking Kevin’s car by the Lloyd Center and climbing out with much groaning and stretching. (This is how the suit came to be wrinkled. “If you wanted,” offered Steve, mischievously, “you could nip into our place and borrow an iron…”) —“You know,” said someone, pointing to the Lloyd 10, “we could just be evil and bag the whole thing as a lost cause and go see Star Wars.”
“There’s no booze in Star Wars,” said someone else. Grimly.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ll be booing up a storm, myself…”
There was more like that. —The MAX, of course, was terribly crowded, since we weren’t the only ones to note the difficulty of maneuvering an automobile through downtown. It pulled away from the Lloyd Center stop and everyone already crammed onboard glowered at the people waiting at the 7th Avenue stop who shrugged and squeezed on anyway. At the Convention Center stop, the conductor got on the loudspeaker and said something no one could entirely make out about how the MAX wouldn’t be going all the way and anyone who wanted to cross downtown could mumble garble squawk.
“You have got to be kidding me,” said someone we didn’t know.
But he wasn’t. The MAX trundled across the river and shuddered to a stop outside Pioneer Place, end of the line, everybody off—almost as close as we’d gotten yet, but still with many blocks to go. Though not so many we couldn’t walk it. (Despite the fabulousness of some of the shoes being worn.) So we surged ahead and—
Oh. Right. The Portland General Electric/SOLV Starlight Parade, presented by Southwest Airlines.
You ever try to cross a parade with that many corporate sponsors?
“Well, shit,” said someone.
“The Skybridge!” cried someone else, brightly.
The Portland General Electric/SOLV Starlight Parade, presented by Southwest Airlines, was trundling its way down 4th, between the two big blocks of Pioneer Place. Which are connected by a third-floor Skybridge. Saved! We dashed into Pioneer Place and clattered up two flights of escalators (okay, we stood impatiently still in a horde of people who’d had much the same idea as the escalators jerked us up too slowly) to find the doors to the Skybridge shut and locked.
“You know,” said someone, as we were jerked back down two floors, “there were people on the Skybridge. I wonder if they got locked in there somehow, or…”
“Not really caring,” said someone else.
None of us at this point were too terribly into the whole people thing. But: we were fabulous, dammit. We had our goal; it was a simple one, easily accomplished. We were bright. Resourceful. Thirsty. And it was only a few thousand people between us and our Excelsior. We’d tried ignoring it, going through it, going over and across it…
We ended up walking around it, and got to the Mallory in time to hear Jemiah finish her first reading. And put in a drinks order, but really, the important thing was to be there to support the book and the reading and what the hell was taking those drinks so long?
This, then, all of it, perhaps goes some way towards explaining why I threw down martinis at a steady clip, and perhaps also why I’m glad gin doesn’t stain wool. And why I am stingy with details as to the witty and amusing things Johnzo said and Victoria said and Kirsten said and Jemiah her own dam’ self and I’m sorry, I can’t find a link for Ralph the Chiropractor (it was Ralph, wasn’t it?) and if I did realize suddenly (or was told) that the reason Brandon had been naggingly familiar was that she’d taken some photos for Anodyne (yes, I’d been the managing editor, but it was only for a few months and I was always misplacing memos), or that vampires are (yet) big in the Zeitgeist not so much because of the linkage of blood and sex and disease and death (though yes, of course, that’s there) but because they are all of them so very tired and jaded and numb and laden with ennui (not such a bad thing to pretend to be when everything’s moving so far so very quickly), or that Portland doesn’t have a Cleveland (but it does have a Clyde), or that the rhetoric of cane gestures bears some intriguing similarities to the rhetoric of cigarette gestures which it might well be worth exploring when less impaired, and there was something in all that about tall redheads, wasn’t there? —Well. None of that is important enough to go into any of the details that are anyway thin on the ground, today. But that is, perhaps, enough to give you a taste. Oh! And Steve was able to inform us all that eating a torched M&M was rather like nibbling a chocolate chip cookie that had been in the oven a wee bit too long. There.
The cigarettes, though—
See, none of us smokes. But quite a few of us smoke, from time to time. Socially, you know. At parties. If someone else is. That sort of thing. I’d brought along the packet of cloves I’m working on this month; I’d had maybe two or three of the 20. There’s now just the four left, and that doesn’t count the pack of regular smokes someone nipped out and bought when I wasn’t looking.
So that, see, explains the whole reeking of smoke thing. —And I didn’t even tell you about the bar full of bitchy Rosarians. Or the Commodore. (Which wasn’t the bar that was full of bitchy Rosarians.) And did anyone ever figure out what the hell those big guys on the TV set were doing, with those giant rocks, and that wall? I wasn’t imagining that, was I?
(Jenn? “My” Jenn? Though she regretted missing an opportunity to wear her ball gown, it wouldn’t have had much fun on our trek, and anyway, there was the whole ankle thing from last week, and besides all that, she’s getting close to getting the first chapter done, so she stayed home and drew and made merciless fun of me when I staggered in at what, 2:30 in the morning? —Thanks to a bucket brigade of rides organized on the fly by people who’d had less to drink than I. Anyway, go, look, see!)
Paging Laura Miller.
Someone want (kindly but firmly) to explain to Ms. Miller and Salon’s crack team of copyeditors that Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore are not one and the same? —Though props nonetheless for attempting to recognize Dave Gibbons’ and David Lloyd’s respective work on Watchmen and V for Vendetta by crediting the (incorrect, but) scripter as a “co-author.” (Of course, I’m just assuming that’s what she meant by “co-author.” It could be that somehow the idea’d been gotten that Moore and Gaiman worked together on those books… “Stephen Sondheim, co-author of Jesus Christ Superstar—”
(Anyway.)
A little thing, really—
Does it ever bother anyone else that, in television commercials, when they go to swipe a credit card through a reader, which is something all of us have done (or so I am presuming; presuming, that is, an audience comprised almost wholly of those with little pieces of plastic in their pockets with magnetic strips on them that can be swiped through devices connected to modems that will transfer bits of information across phone lines and thus signify to a merchant whether you can pay for whatever it is you’re paying for)—you ever notice how they always run the cards through right-side up, so you can see the logo? Which, since the stripe is near the top of the card, is actually upside down, from a utilitarian point of view?
Does this bother anyone else out there? —It’s just me, isn’t it.
That quality of being cheesy,
or, Suspicions confirmed.
Before I get into this, I feel the need to affirm that yes, what follows is, indeed, true—in every important particular.
We—me, and Jenn, and Chris Baldwin—were cruising the Gorge, looking at waterfalls. Our second stop of the day was the impossibly picturesque Vista House, perched rather cheekily at the very lip of Crown Point’s precipitous plunge into the Columbia River. (A small plane flew by; we looked down on it.) Now, I feel the need to point out that, while I was nattily dressed, we were doing an old-fashioned outing in the country—and really, a straw porkpie such as the one I was wearing is, perhaps, not quite the thing to wear with tweed. So it wasn’t like I was being a stickler or anything. (I want to make sure you grasp this: we were all wearing tweed.) —Still, I was the only one with a tie, and a vest; perhaps it was this that singled me out for their attention.
“Excuse me,” said one of four (or perhaps five?) scruffily clean-cut young men. “Could you—?” He was holding out a small digital camera.
“Of course,” I said. Instructions were given—peer here, yes, hold this until it clicks, simplicity itself. The four (I believe it was four, and not five) of them arranged themselves, arms about shoulders, jockeying a bit to sort themselves out. I didn’t have to suggest that the tallest of them ought to stand in back. They knew the drill. “Horizontal or vertical?” I asked, as a formality; we’re in the Gorge, for fuck’s sake. “Horizontal,” said the one who’d handed me the camera. —Landscape it was. I framed them nicely (if I do say so myself), lower rightish quadrant, with the arc of the river and the deep, deep ditch of the Gorge, thirty miles or more of it, over and out behind them.
I should perhaps relay at this point my uncertainty regarding their clothing. I seem to recall that one of them wore a sweatshirt with the logo of some gym or perhaps a sports team emblazoned on the front; I recall some stylish corduroys. A half-zip polarfleece pullover, perhaps, on one of them (though that might be the sweatshirt, reduplicating oddly in my memory). —But surely the hearty salmon chamois shirt I insist on draping around the shoulders of one of them is some odd cross-referencing error from my days writing copy for Norm Thompson. (It couldn’t have been that obvious.)
Poses struck, smiles plastered, camera set, I poised my finger over the shutter release. “Say something cheese-like,” I said. Ever the droll one.
“Something cheese-like,” cried three (or perhaps four), all of them quick and game.
“Smegma,” said the fourth, quickest by far and droller than I.
(I’m pretty sure there were just four, come to think of it.)
Seeing doppel.
He smokes, of course, because I let him. Doesn’t mean I’ll let him have the good stuff. Silk Cut, or Gauloises, maybe. Harsh and bitter and nasty. I glare at him through the haze.
“Yeah?” he says.
“I’m getting tired of it.”
“What?” he says. “The lies? The deception?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Christ, I don’t think I’d ever realized how acerbic he comes off, sometimes. How sarcastic. Cocksure and arrogant. —Is his voice sliding ever eastward, over the Atlantic? Is mine getting more Southern? “You know I’m probably not going to do anything about it.”
“Except bitch at me.”
“Why not? What else have I got to do around here?”
“Nobody’s stopping you from getting anything done.”
“You are!”
“And whose fault is that?” He smiles. We both have beards, naturally enough, but they do different things to our smiles. His is unpleasant. (I am told by those in a position to know that mine is more, shall we say, goofy.)
“Elias,” though, is what I say next. Struck by a sudden—insight?
“Elias,” he says. Skeptical. “Your last and least pathetic attempt at creating a truly evil person.”
“That’s who you’re starting to remind me of in these little chats.”
“Please,” he says. “Elias was adolescent transference at best; irresponsibly inept psycho-social lashing out. —Or did you miss the significance of how the other character you played then was such a monstrous suck-up?”
“Don’t try to psychoanalyze me,” I snap. (I honestly had missed it. Till now.)
“You and I,” he says, grinding out his cigarette, “are playing for altogether different—and higher—stakes. On a considerably more public stage.”
I have to laugh at that.
“It’s getting more public all the time,” he says, coolly, shaking out a fresh cigarette.
“For you, maybe. A little.”
“What’s good for me,” he says, sighing, “is good for you.”
“And what’s good for General Motors is good for America.”
And that’s when he laughs. “Pretty much. But it was me that got you into Dante’s for free that night.”
“Which was such an effort for you, I’m sure.”
“Did I get what I wanted in return? I don’t remember ever seeing that write-up…”
“You know that wasn’t my fault.”
“Whichever. But it is both of us being spoken about. Elsewhere. Sometimes in the same breath.” That grin again. “You nearly had a heart attack when you stumbled over that one.”
“You exaggerate.”
“Perhaps. Nonetheless: you are, I think, afraid. Of what? Paraliterature is paraliterature.”
“It’s not that simple,” I say. “It’s hardly that simple.”
“It sounds to me like someone needs to remember the lesson of the Mark of Cain.”
“And emet, yes, yes. Thank you for showing me of the error of my ways.”
He smiles, a little—pleasantly—and nods appreciatively. “Emeth. But that was a good idea of yours.”
I frown. “I’d thought you were the one who came up with it.”
He looks away, down at his keyboard. Sucks in some smoke and blows it out. “You had a point in coming here? Aside from pestering me?”
“Ada,” I say.
“Or Ardor,” he says. “What about it?”
“Who gets it?”
“You? Or me?”
“Precisely.”
He waves a hand dismissively. “Go ahead and take it. My plate is pretty full at the moment.”
“Gee,” I say. “Thanks.” It isn’t as withering as I’d hoped.
“Just maybe don’t write anything about it until you’re sure you’ll finish it. This time.”
“You haven’t finished it yet, either.”
“Of course not,” he says. “And yet,” musingly, “we will think different things about it…”
“Will we?”
“If people remembered the same,” he says, “they would not be different people.”
“Think and dream are the same in French,” is what I say—I think—but I’m not sure, because one of us says, “Douceur,” and for a moment it’s almost like I’m the one sitting there, tie loose, almost but not coughing on a lungful of bitter nastiness that suffuses effortlessly into my thirsty blood, and I’m peering up at him, ratty sweater puckered by an old blob of translucent caulk, in dire need of a haircut. “Douceur,” I say, again, or not, and he shakes his head—“Silk Cut,” he says—and coughs once, wetly, into a curled-up fist, and the moment passes.
“Do you?” he says, suddenly serious. “Want me to stop?”
Well, no, I don’t say. That’s not what this is about, I don’t say. I just—I just— I just can’t find the words. (Which is the crux of the matter. Isn’t it?)
“That isn’t really feasible,” is what I end up saying, and I wince (inwardly) at my glaring lack of charity.
“All right, then,” he says. Stiffly.
So I turn to go. And that sonofabitch just goes right back to typing.
An attempt at sketching in prose what goes through my mind when Robyn Hitchcock begins to ramble in that engagingly undrunken monotone about the Isle of Wight before starting to contort a guitar in his own unmistakable, beautifully ugly idiom.
I don’t like to point at someone and say, hey, that person right there, that’s my best friend, but looking back, I’m starting to think maybe Kim was my best friend in college, for most of it. Easily as tall as me and big, a black belt in aikido—the first time I ever met her sister was when I agreed to take Kim to a Moody Blues show in Cleveland, because Zak was out of town and Kim’s mother really thought it best that a man should accompany Kim to the concert, you know, for safety, and geeze, I felt safer with her around, and that was what was so funny, see? (I met her sister then because, you see, Annemarie was going to the concert too, with her boyfriend at the time, but let’s not get sidetracked. This isn’t about Annemarie.)
There was the night we were hanging out on the Memorial Bandstand thingie, the atrocious affront to undergraduate sensibilities put up my freshman year that Rob had the brilliant idea to hang a Fotomat sign off of in a prank that misfired at the last minute. (Would I have been caught by Security, had I gone that night, like that guy who was too stupid to do anything but run when it went down bad? —Who cares?) Me and Zak and Kim, and Zak had a theatrical rapier, light and flimsy, just the thing for wearing under your cloak on a cool autumn night when you’re a romantic college student (strike that; let’s go with Romantic, instead); I had the cane that had been an integral part of the costume (there is no other word for it: tails, top hat, white gloves, cane) that I’d worn to my senior prom and still carried from time to time as an affectation (I’d also worn zero-prescription stage glasses the first couple of weeks at college, because I don’t need glasses, but they’re cool to play with—until a friend who did need glasses gently pointed out it was kind of, you know, dorky) and Kim had nothing at all but her bare hands and, well, her aikido; anyway. We staged this mock running sparring Erroll Flynn donnybrook up and down that stupid pomo gazebo, all for none and your ass is mine: rapier on staff, click clack, and Kim reaching in every now and then to grab a hand or an arm or something and twist and send one or the other of us scuttle-rolling across the floor. Enormous fun.
There was the night, and this one I’m having trouble placing, because it took place in one of those gorgeous upstairs lounges in Asia House, and I didn’t live in Asia House until my disastrous third year (second-and-a-half, really), and by that point Zak and Kim were married and living in Kent, or maybe it was one of the towns near the place where Kent State is, I dunno. —Annemarie and I saw The Mountains of the Moon in a theater there—or was it Kim and I? And Zak? (All I really remember about the damn thing is when Speke kissed Burton.) So I’m thinking this pretty much couldn’t have happened that year, the year—semester, really—I was living in Asia House. But I’m hard-pressed to explain exactly how we came to be there otherwise, or why. But there we were, me and Kim and a boom box and a tape of the soundtrack to The Mission, and for whatever reason—whenever it was, my second year, or my second-and-a-half, there was stress and to spare—we were, well, dancing. Not together; not even to the music, per se. The music was a catalyst—that oboe, the chanting, those drums; the movement was, well, something else. But we did it. And never really spoke of it. (Did it have to do with Zak? Liz? Not Annemarie, no, not then, which would place it in my second year, and it doesn’t really matter why, really, not so long after the fact; whatever it was we were upset over or worried about is long gone, and all that’s left is the memory of what we did about it, which was striking and inexplicable and oddly haunting. And I still have no idea why we were in Asia House that night.)
The odd games she ran, the uncategorizable intersections of role playing, improvisational theatre, performance art and encounter group—geeze, that makes them sound terrible, which they weren’t. Chas, Zak, Liz, me, her: I’m thinking, say, of her vision of Eden: the room was dark, and Bach was playing, terribly loudly (organ fugues, but it could have been a Goldberg; my memory is lousy, ask anyone), and she as God was pelting us all with stuffed animals and fig newtons. Zak (Leviathan) sat in a closet and said things I couldn’t hear, and Chas (the Serpent) kept tempting Liz (Eve), but I (Adam) wasn’t following any of that; I was taking up the stuffed animals and naming them, pretty much. Just focussing on my job, what I’d been told to do, and when the whole thing went down bad it took me desperately by surprise. The music, the darkness, the animals, the food—all gone, and why? Why? —An image of Adam (it’s far from the only one, of course) I’d never have found myself, and always liked. (What of Eve? The Serpent? Leviathan? God? I don’t really know. Thus, the inherent limitations of the medium.) (In Boston, there was a Greek myth, with [sort of] masks; but that’s more complicated, much, and I don’t want to get sidetracked.)
I can still see her, in my mind’s eye, for all that it’s been years since: almost a parody of the Teutonic milkmaid, a Valkyrie in muddy boots, big blue eyes and ruddy cheeks (yes: ruddy) and a disarming handful of childlike expressions—fierce determination, glum disappointment, gleeful wonder—that could cross her face in alarmingly sophisticated ways, and all I have to do to smile is think of her tossing back her head and belting out “Ja, ja, ja, ja!” like Madeline Kahn. I can hear her still, too—not so much her voice exactly as the music of it: the pitch, the timbre. The rhythm. (Zak is harder to hear. Chas is here in town, so. Liz? Almost gone—a faint hint, the flavor of it, yes, but I told you: my memory is lousy. Annemarie—but no.) —We only ever slept together the one time, but it wasn’t like that, not at all: we were both trying to be fair to other people. Thinking back I can’t say for sure that this was the first time she’d ever slept with someone she didn’t love, didn’t long for, yearn for, need, but it was the first time I ever had, and it was—fun. Relaxed. We laughed a lot.
But it was Eva, not Kim, who gave me Hitchcock. “You’ve got to listen to this,” she said, and played me “Heaven,” and then the whole of fegMANIA!, start to finish. Eva, whom I took to my senior prom: me in that get-up, tails and top hat, white gloves and cane, and her in a white creation of lace and satin and silk, and white fishnets underneath. (I can see her easily enough, and hear her, too: she had an adorably goofy laugh, like Jenn does. Kim, too. Which is not to say Liz didn’t, per se.) Eva’s LPs I taped: fegMANIA! and Black Snake Dîamond Röle and Element of Light and I Often Dream of Trains and Invisible Hitchcock and Groovy Decoy or Decay or whatever it was called and yes, I found my own copies later and bought them all, and more besides, which is something the record companies claim they just don’t understand. Eva who was hunting for a copy of “Bones in the Ground” off the impossible-to-find Bells of Rhymney EP. (It was later included in a reissue of I Often Dream of Trains that I have on the shelf, over there.) And it was Eva I was trying to conjure up that achingly lonely night in my dorm room freshman year, the corner room I shared with Kevin in the cornerstone dorm of the main campus, and the windows were open and I had Element of Light in the tape deck cranked up high (Kevin was out) and when “Bass” stumbles to a halt, it’s then that the backwards guitar starts crawling out of the speakers and lofting up suddenly swooping into the sky with the drums and bass clattering after it, oh—
—and when it’s over, I look over at the door and there’s Kim, whom I’ve met maybe once before (Zak introduced us; there’s a whole story about how they got together, but I’d get it wrong, and anyway, I don’t want to go into it). It’s Kim leaning there on the jamb and that gleeful grin is lighting up her face, and I’m standing there blinking, slow on the uptake me.
“I heard the music,” she said, “and I thought it might be you. And then I looked up and saw the top hat bobbing around in the window and knew it.”
—Liz never liked Robyn. Jenn doesn’t much, either, but it’s more like she’s never really acquired the taste; Liz actively disliked him. (Still: the one time I saw him in concert—with Kim, and Zak, and Chas, and Annemarie and her boyfriend at the time were there, too, weren’t they—I bought a T-shirt [“One Long Pair of Eyes”] and when later that summer I bussed out to see Liz [Cleveland to Philadelphia over the Pine Barrens to Atlantic City and down the coast to Toms River] I gave it to her, which says a lot about how little I knew of what I was doing, then.) But that isn’t really why last week when I stuck my head into Movie Madness and poked around until I found Storefront Hitchcock I waited until a day when Jenn was at work and I wasn’t to pop the tape into the VCR and sit down and watch it.
But that is why—all of it, mind, every bit, and the stuff I’ve left out, too—that’s why when he started to talk about the Isle of Wight, I felt the floor drop out from under my feet, and I hung there, shivering, waiting—
“Every year I can walk along that beach,” he said, or something like it, “a little bit grayer, a little bit fatter, just walking through the same pools. And the thing is, the sand erodes, the soil is very soft there, it crumbles away; every year a few meters of that beach is just lost into the sea. So you can imagine that where people walked three centuries ago is now far out to sea, and their ghosts are literally walking over the sand dunes.”
And then, oh God, that guitar—
A thought.
Perhaps studying the manner in which sites like this one utterly fail to be convincing will help us to develop a better Turing test.
(Go. Look. See if you see what I mean. Then read this, and see if we’re right.)
PS: Don’t give her your email, whatever you do.
The power of the internet.
So. Early Wednesday morning I get this email Chris Staros, Brett Warnock’s better half over at Top Shelf Comics, had sent to various and sundry fans and industry types. Top Shelf’s book trade distributor had just announced they were filing for Chapter 11, which meant (even though they were good guys, and downright necessary in an industry pretty much controlled by one distributor) that the $80,000 Top Shelf had been hoping to see, they probably wouldn’t, which (in turn) meant that Top Shelf was in serious trouble. Staros was basically asking that everyone who could buy a Top Shelf book or three directly from them, to provide what they call an infusion of cash and keep the wheels turning and the fires lit and all that. And believe me, there are books on the Top Shelf list I want to order. So Jenn and I sit down and tick off a couple of things (mostly, we need to get the Strangehaven collections, but I wouldn’t mind a couple of the Hey, Mister books we don’t have yet), and I thought maybe I’d mention something here and maybe try to write up a squib for Plastic.com—you know, get the word out to the 20-some-odd people I can reach.
Well.
Thursday night, I get this email from Chris Staros (whose better half, you know, is Brett Warnock). Seems—thanks to mentions in such places as Neil Gaiman’s journal, and Warren Ellis’s world-shaking forum—Top Shelf comics had gone from out of business to more business they could handle in, like, 12 hours.
Twelve. Not even a single goddamn day.
Staros counsels patience, as they work diligently to fill the sudden flood of orders; but if you haven’t, go anyway and pitch in. Us, we’ll be ordering stuff probably this weekend, so Chris, Brett: be patient yourselves. And congratufuckinlations. Couldn’t happen to a nicer couple of comics publishers.
Just once.
I don’t know, maybe I’m behind the times, and you know, I don’t wanna hear about your “I don’t wanna think about it, it’s all too much, I’m overloaded” crap, just sit there and read this, for God’s sake, and then when you’re done go pick up your socks and put them back on.
Just once, just once I want to hear this done live. Where’s that schedule—
The Mouse Police must never sleep.
Hey! Let’s dabble in something that may well be illegal, soon. Ready? Type this into your handy text editor:
10 INPUT A$
20 PRINT A$
That, my friends, is a piece of software capable of reproducing copyrighted works in digital form. When I upload this page to the web, I’ll be distributing it for free—a civil offense under the Hollings-Disney act, and quite possibly a criminal offense as well. Wasn’t that fun?
This, perhaps, is the most compelling (and most easily sound-bitten) reason to stop the Hollings-Disney act (call a spade a spade, by God: it’s not Hollings-Feinstein; it’s not the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, an Orwellian doublespeak phrase if I ever heard one; it’s Hollings-Disney—the damn thing practically has mouse ears stamped all over it), but it’s far from the only reason. And the CBDTPA (and the DMCA—remember that one?) is far from the only thing to get in an uproar about. The world of “intellectual property”—which, mind you, is nothing less than speech and thought—is about to get very, very ugly, and these laws and proposed laws are, I’m afraid, little more than the tip of the iceberg.
(Of course, I “stole” the BASIC example from this handy little rant by Declan McCullagh, thereby compounding my crime. See how easy it is to become a thief?)
There is an uproar, at least. It’s nearly impossible to surf the web these days without running into wry, disgusted, alarmed, horrified or just plain furious commentary on the unbelievable scope of the Hollings-Disney Act, and the unmitigated gall of the Disney Five who’ve signed on to sponsor it. The best of these is doubtless Dan Gillmor’s fiery op-ed on our “Bleak Future,” but there’s also the Guardian reminding us of how maybe it’s a sign the Communists won the Cold War after all (one might also point out that the steps Cuba has taken are if more draconian than Hollings-Disney also more likely to be successful); Kevin Kelly’s excellent piece in the New York Times magazine reminding us that what Hollings-Disney is trying to protect isn’t creativity or art but a goddamn business model; Declan McCullagh (again) in Wired, pointing out the unthinkable threat to art, creativity and code at greater length; a Salon piece by Damien Cave, pondering the practicality of the whole idea of unbreakable copy protection in an age of information (back when Hollings-Disney was known as the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act, before it got its creepy Orwellian make-over)—heck. The only piece in favor of this insanity is one in which Michael Eisner, Disney’s CEO, summons forth the ghost of “internet pioneer” Abraham Lincoln. Eisner was drawn to Lincoln, no doubt, because the Great Emancipator also had a habit of smashing reporters who said things he didn’t agree with and trampling on the First Amendment rights of inconvenient presses. —Of course, Lincoln was fighting a war; then, I suppose Eisner thinks he is, too. (The reporter in question is still getting her licks in, thankfully enough.)
So speak out! Do it now! Don’t trust in the statistics that point out that the tech industry brings in 600 billion bucks, while Hollywood accounts for a measly 35 billion; keep in mind that it’s Hollywood, and the music industry, and potentially publishers, media conglomerates, game companies—anyone, that is, who makes a buck off buying or selling art, entertainment and information. (Except, oddly enough, the writers and artists and musicians themselves. The ones who actually do the creative work. —Funny, that.) Also: remember that the tech industry is slow to avail themselves of Congress and politicians, for a variety of reasons—whether it’s that the computer sector has been a frontier for so long, or that it’s dominated by libertarians whose political naïveté sometimes makes pie-in-the-sky progressives look Machiavellian by comparison, it’s true: geeks are out of their league when it comes to world-class schmoozing.
So: write letters. Fax blast. Kick up a ruckus. Here’s a letter I cribbed from shamelessly in composing my own (more theft!), and here’s the handy dandy list of senators, and how to contact them. Let the EFF help you comment to the Senate on the future of digital media distribution, and while you’re there, give them some money.
But: note how the EFF Action Alert points out the possible incremental implementation of Hollings-Disney, even if the act never passes the Senate. (Scroll down to the “Incremental CBDTPA” header.) It’s not enough to stop this act and then go back to sleep. We’ve got to stop it, and the next one, and the next one, and the next… (I’m not so sure I want to go so far as to call for the elimination of the idea of intellectual “property,” but given the abuse copyright is taking in the name of the bottom line, it’s a tempting thought. —Warning: though that particular page is perfectly safe for work, the rest of the site isn’t, really.)
But closer to home, and far more likely: we must insist upon a recognition of the Fair Use rights we all have, and we must insist on their protection. The Consumer Technology Bill of Rights proposed by DigitalConsumer.org is a good start—no matter that I’d rather be called a “citizen” than a “consumer.” Still. Send their fax and make your wishes known. Now. And don’t stop. Boycott Disney, yes, and let them know you’re doing it, and why. Stop buying major label albums. Vote with your dollars, yes—but it’s far more important to speak up, loudly, defiantly, and often.
Whether we like it or not, we’ve all—all of us who write, who read, who make art and take it in, all of us who don’t have a corporation and an assault team of lawyers at our beck and call—we’ve all been drafted into the Mouse Police.
And the Mouse Police never sleeps.
(Or did I “steal” that from Jethro Tull? Oy.)
This time, it’s personal.
Yeah, I know. Two entires in a row with Salon links. It’s so 1999. But trust me. What this guy is saying is absolutely vital.
Just ask my mom.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer Painter of Light.™
Run, don’t walk! It’s “Kick Thomas Kinkade Day” at Salon! Not just one, but two hatchet jobs!
Hey—it’s a dirty job...
Slaysome.
I am an avid viewer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as you might have guessed). Sue me: I like a show that’s taut, well-written, funny, scary, emotionally true (even if a tad melodramatic at times), confident enough in its skewed storytelling to kick it around and have fun.
This may explain why the current season has been something of a disappointment.
Oh, it started strong. Started with a bang. Bobbled a little, but then there was the musical, which was the astonishing miracle of a elephant waddling up to the edge of a plank near the tippy-tippy-top of the Big Top itself, a black feather clutched in its trunk, and you know the thing’s all gonna be done with wires, they’re not gonna let an elephant plummet to its death or anything, but, I mean, come on. Fly? In forty-eight minutes plus an overture? Singing and dancing? Original songs? On a TV show? My God, doesn’t anyone remember Cop Rock? (Why, yes. Fondly, in fact. But that’s a kettle of fish of another color.) —Anyway, the elephant fuckin’ rocked.
And then the writing headed south (hear that giant sucking sound?), and Willow got “addicted” to magic, and we won’t even talk about the Doublemeat Palace fiasco.
There’s been glimmers to keep the true fan going, though even I have been tempted to just go shut it off, already. But the past few episodes—I mean, like, Xander and Anya’s wedding, which was a low farce that couldn’t pull itself off, you know? And the guy they got to play Uncle Rory: nice enough, but too familiar, and he was no Bruce Campbell. It all felt wrong (even if the whole bit with future Xander coming back to warn himself not to marry Anya was a nice touch)—until we got to the end, when it suddenly became clear that this episode had been written by someone who was sick unto death (much like myself) of the TV wedding convention, the iron-bound law which states that one party or another will, must, has to have “cold feet” and consider tossing the whole shooting match into the garbage (usually on the flimsiest of pretexts) only to have his or her love reaffirmed by some pious TV bullshit, much laughter, the best man forgot the ring, the bridesmaid’s snogging the brother-in-law, ha ha, I do. Gag. —So to see the farce on Buffy turn suddenly, sharply into ordinary yellow-bellied craw-sticking chickenshit everyday tragedy, as Xander walked, was—well, it was refreshing. Didn’t redeem the episode, but did manage to salvage it, give it that kick of something umf.
But last night’s—
Last night’s—
God damn. Last night’s was creepy nasty good in all the right ways. A beautiful job of deconstructing the show itself, stripping it down to bare essential parts and kicking them around and laughing even while you wince at some of the rough bits, and then put it back together again with a triumphant roar and a last lingering shiver—
Jesus.
(I’m being incoherent. I do apologize. Some of this is [one hopes] mitigated by the fact I just got done watching it; I was at the laundromat last night. We taped it. Watched it tonight, just now, over dinner [torta de papas, olive bread, a nice enough Primitivo] and sat there, grinning at each other, hey, this one isn’t gonna drop the ball. So this is fresh and hot off the press and raw and all of that.)
Remember DS9? (Hell. Remember when Trek didn’t actively suck rocks?) Anyway. There was that episode where the Orb or whatever was fucking with Sisko’s head and he was suddenly somehow back in the ’50s writing science fiction stories for a low-rent Golden Age two-bit Campbell knock-off ’zine. A nice enough episode actually dealing with race in a meaningful way (let’s not talk about the show’s uneasy relationship with race) and even if it had a Twilight Zone naïveté it was still something nice to say about the power of dreams (or, let’s be realistic, the power of two-bit Campbellesque pulpy genre fiction). —It was a graceful reminder of why exactly DS9 was doing what it was doing in the way it was doing it, and even if they cheesed it out a little over the next season or so with Sisko’s ’50s alter-ego occasionally popping up in a mental institution, scribbling scripts on the walls, it still helped galvanize the show. Plus, it was neat seeing all the various alien actors without their prostheses.
Anyway, point being: I’m sure that casting a bald black man with a neat little beard as the mental ward doctor in last night’s Buffy was a conscious nod; a tip of the proverbial hat.
