A footstone.
Maybe 10 minutes ago I got hit by my ten-thousandth unique visit since I began counting back in December. (It was yet another search for Eisenhower’s rice.)
Jackdowry.
Dwight Meredith on real class war:
“We are finally in a position we’ve fought more than a decade to reach—a position where we can deal a death blow to the single most important source of income for radical legal groups all across the country,” wrote WLF Chairman Daniel Popeo. Among the foundation’s adversaries in the litigation, Popeo continues, are “groups dedicated to the homeless, to minorities, to gay and lesbian causes, and any other group that has drawn money from hard-working Americans like you and me to support its radical cause!”
—Also, Ignatz.
Barry on the Absent Fatso:
The Absent Fatso reflects a desire to avoid cruelty—the fat character who is there without really being there exists because mocking real people would seem too mean. But in fact, the cruelty is still there, and so are the real-life fat people; they’re just in the audience, rather than on screen. The Absent Fatso strategy doesn’t avoid cruelty so much as it makes it palatable.
—Also, on origami.
Trish Wilson on how, exactly, our family courts are stacked in favor of mothers over fathers:
Debra Schmidt is one such mother. Since Christmas time, 2001, Schmidt has been sitting in a California jail because she refuses to disclose the location of her two daughters, aged 7 and 9 at the time. She is protecting them from their father, Manuel Saavedra, who is a registered sex offender, an illegal alien who has been ordered deported, and an alcoholic. According to a press-release by Stephanie Dallam, research associate for The Leadership Council, the conviction came in the seven-year custody battle “after the judge refused to allow the jury to hear about Saavedra’s sex offense, his status as a registered sex offender, allegations of domestic abuse, or testimony by another ex-wife.”
George Washington on the Bush administration:
All obstructions to the execution of the Laws, all combinations and Associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, controul counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the Constituted authorities are distructive of this fundamental principle and of fatal tendency. They serve to Organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force—to put in the place of the delegated will of the Nation, the will of a party; often a small but artful and enterprizing minority of the Community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public Administration the Mirror of the ill concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the Organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common councils and modefied by mutual interests. However combinations or Associations of the above description may now & then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the Power of the People, & to usurp for themselves the reins of Government; destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
Boing Boing points us to this Business 2.0 article on our free market at work, yup:
Borders Group used to pride itself on stocking its bookstores with the widest selection possible in a brick-and-mortar establishment. In its cooking section, for instance, there were always more than 10 titles about sushi, including Sushi for Parties, the more supportive Squeamish About Sushi, and The Encyclopedia of Sushi Rolls, a definitive tome that explains, among other things, how to spell your name in makimono.
Now, Borders is planning to yank half of those sushi how-tos from its shelves. Why? In part because HarperCollins, the nation’s third-largest publishing house, told it to.
Welcome to the world of “category management,” a bizarre and controversial place in which the nation’s biggest retailers ask one supplier in a category to figure out how best to stock their shelves. You’d expect HarperCollins to tell Borders which of its own books are hot, of course. But that’s not what’s going on here. Borders has essentially tapped Harper to advise it on what cookbooks to carry from all other publishers as well.
John held up this study for some richly deserved ridicule:
She says the toys preferred by boys—the ball and the car—are described as objects with the ability to be used actively and be propelled through space. Though the specific reasons behind the monkeys’ preferences have yet to be determined, she says, the preferences for these objects might exist because they afford greater opportunities for rough and active play—something characteristic of male play. Also, the motion capabilities of the object could be related to the navigating abilities that are useful for hunting, locating food or finding a mate.
Males, she says, may therefore have evolved preferences for objects that invite movement.
On the other hand, females may have evolved preferences for object color, relating to their roles as nurturers, Alexander notes. A preference for red or pink—the color of the doll and pot—has been proposed to elicit female behaviors toward infants that enhance infant survival, such as contact.
And then there’s Gail Armstrong’s take on the color pink:
I’m sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use English.
Twenty-first century schizoid man.
Blogging is a fragmentary, contradictory enterprise. (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.) Even the most laser-like focus can’t help but skip trippingly from this to that to yonder, over there—hold tight, the world spins on a dime and everything’s different tomorrow. (I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.) A blog that’s little more than spontaneous eruptions of verbiage, linchinography on the fly, seems even more addlepated. (Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?) Morsels of meaning, concatenations of confidences strung like chronological pearls—before swine? Perhaps, but think of Hen Wen—there’s a pretense to or at least an expectation of coherence, of a logical, integral flow, neatly parceled stone to stone from here to there. We may not step in the same river twice, but we at least expect the temperature to be consistent, the bottom to feel much the same, the current just about as strong as it was when last we wet our toes. (Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?)
Last night I howled in outrage; today, I’m looking forward to APE.
If you’re going to be in San Francisco this weekend and you’re at all curious about the current state of comics-as-art (and how comics-as-industry is slowly coming to realize its potential even as it shoots itself in the foot with mad abandon), I humbly suggest you take some time Saturday or Sunday for a trip down to the Concourse Exhibition Center at Showplace Square, 620 7th Street. (I’d be a bit more effusive, but it’s going to be my first trip. But Howard Cruse will be there. How can you pass up the opportunity to meet Howard Cruse? And buy his books?) —Jenn is there to promote Dicebox, and is sharing a table with Bruno’s own Chris Baldwin: Table No. 297, or so I’m told. Back near the restrooms. Look for “Baldwin and Lee” on the exhibitor-list-booklet-map thingie. If she’s busy sketching for fans and he’s busy schlepping his books, I’ll be the guy with the Vandyke and the closely cropped hair telling you in no uncertain terms why reading Dicebox (and Bruno) whenever possible will clear up your complexion, increase the size of your secondary sexual characteristics, and guarantee a crushing defeat for the Bush/Cheney junta in 2004.
—Also: a double handful of Mostly Acquisitions available for sale and, if you’re lucky, personal appearances at the table by Erika Moen and Jen Wang, two of the six of Pants Press.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
David Chess gave me a word.
Actually, he gave me a bit more than that.
Two and one quarter years ago or so (roughly), something I’d put up whose traffic I was checking desultorily logged a couple of hits from davidchess.com. As you do when you’re checking traffic, I followed the link back and found this engagingly eccentric dailyish journal thing sprinkled with links to whatever had happened to strike his quotidian fancy.
I’d met my first blog-thing.
So I started checking in from time to time and through him met others (Medley, say, or the divine Textism) and through having become familiar with the general concept went on to find yet more without his direct help. And then back on 17 January 2002, I went ahead and started posting hereabouts. (Actually, it was over here, and I really need to clean that up, don’t I?) It’s been a year, I guess, though maybe what with the hiatus from August through November last year and the irregular posting before that, we don’t want to get too rambunctious with the anniversary talk. —Also, considering that I didn’t get around to writing this until the 20th.
I was suitably impressed, then, when he referred to linking to the Kip/Barry/Jenn ontogroup. —An ontogroup being a group or community that agrees on a similar ontology, or so it’s defined by Alamut, a member of Chess’s ontogroup. It’s a neat word, and I like it a lot, and I’m glad it’s in my vocabulary; it’s an interesting way of thinking about how you track thinking about the various groups you run into online and the ways they hang out and interact with each other. Barry and Jenn and I are linked, for instance, because we keep writing about how we’ve known each other for (yikes) a decade and a half, but that isn’t enough, I don’t think, for ontogroup status; that alone isn’t a shared ontology. It’s more the fact that we each take comics seriously (them as practitioners, me as a critic—and I hope by now you’re well enough acquainted with me to realize that’s as questionable as any other genre distinction), and even moreso that we were each molded to one degree or another by Scott McCloud at impressionable stages in our respective developments (for all that we’ve each reacted in different ways and done different things with that molding); that’s the ontology we hold in common—lightly, but. (On the obverse: I would not, say, lump Bruce and John and Ginger and Vince in the same ontogroup, for all that each can wax eloquent on the four stances.)
But ontogroups aside, for the moment: do me a favor and raise your glasses in the general direction of David Chess. To the extent that it’s anybody’s fault, he bears his share of the blame. —Also, be sure to read his post today: it’s an excellent example of his ability to take seriously something that seems whimsical and harmless enough—a sort of cultural reverse engineering that’s at once funny and thought-provoking.
So: thanks. —Onward and upward!
Kittenhawking.
I suppose it’s a better practice than Stephenhawking.
The handle, and flying off thereof:
Post in haste, repent in leisure; an unexamined screed is not worth uploading; never shoot back when you’re all het up. I’m looking over the past few long stories tossed off the short pier and wincing; watching myself dance out onto any number of limbs past the point where I know a damn thing about what I’m saying simply because I was set off and wanted to do something, anything—and speaking up is all too often confused with doing something. —It is; it frequently is. When you’re saying something substantive; when you’re bringing something to the table; when you’re telling a story you know yourself.
When you don’t know anything about Charles Pickering, Sr., beyond other people’s stories found with a couple of quick Google searches, you should maybe not rush to the Movable Type; when you can only link up to what other people are saying about the Bush stimulus package, you should maybe not bother bringing that to the table (especially if you miss one of the more in-depth kickings around it’s gotten); when all you say on the subject of the coming Iraqi war is “Here, look at these pictures of folks there on the ground,” you should maybe cast about for a little more substance before yelling something inconsidered. (For “you,” of course, read me.)
Sigh.
Everyone’s got to find their niche; everyone’s got to find the thing they give a damn about. I’ve whinged about blogging and tipping points and echo chambers, and this is, indeed, a thing blogs can do, and some of them do it very, very well. Their success is inspiring and even intoxicating. Which does not mean this is all blogs can do, or should do. No.
You’ve got to find something you give a damn about, or you won’t do good work. I give a damn about judicial reactivism, fiscal insanity, and grotesquely stupid wars; what I haven’t given a damn about is stopping to think for a moment, marshalling my arguments, finding something of substance and bringing it carefully, deliberately, and as irrevocably as possible to the table. —That’s how I am, sometimes, with politics, with the state of the world as it is; I want to leap up on something and point and shout at the top of my lungs, “Jesus Christ, can you believe this shit?” Or words to that effect. To do something. You know? And when done well, it’s preaching to the choir, and that’s a fine thing to do from time to time; it’s just that preaching to the choir is, in the end, about as effective as pissing in a pool. You get that nice, warm feeling—and then what?
The thing is that the thing I give a damn about is rooting around in pop culture. Digging through the so-called dross for the joy of finding unexpected gems. Watching how people use the stuff and re-use it, poach from it and recombine it; lining up the pieces of it in pretty, signifying patterns; kicking it apart to see what makes it tick. Criticism, I suppose. (A lengthy and whimsical for instance.) —This is what I give a damn about; this is where (I’d like to think, anyway) I can bring something to the table. A table, anyway.
It’s just that it’s so damn frivolous. Isn’t it?
This narrowing of the American mind is exacerbated by the withdrawal of the left from active politics. Virtually ignored by the media, the left has further marginalized itself by a retreat into introspective cultural criticism. It seems content to do yoga and gender studies, leaving the fundamentalist Christian right and the multinationals to do the politics.
That’s Brian Eno, being a wee bit uncharitable and even unfair in Counterpunch. Still. Stings a little. (A lot, actually.)
But what he’s glossing over and I’m being disingenuous about is that the best criticism is at once deeply and transcendantly political (especially gender studies; yoga, too, has that potential), and that in even the most irrelevant of out-of-touch ivory towers, clear, vital, engaged criticism can end up changing the stories we all tell each other and the ways in which we tell them. Which is cool and even in its own (modest-seeming) way, earth-shaking. The potential, at least, is there; the possibility. Sometimes. Now and again. But it takes so goddamned long. It’s almost utterly and frustratingly dependent on contingency and the laws of unintended consequences. And there’s so many pressing needs right here right now and I want to do something—
Eh. Maybe I should go volunteer somewhere already. —Next month. After the taxes are done and the downstairs is ready to rent out again.
Yeah. That’s the ticket.
Behind the scenes.
So blogrolling.com is fine (and dandy), I got the blog roll up and running with a minimum of fuss, tested the handy (also dandy) one-click bookmarklet, and the flow of whuffie continues unabated. That’s it. Carry on. Me, I’m heading back to work.
Denying whuffie.
So I haven’t read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom yet but I have read this squib on Boing Boing about how the Guardian dubbed whuffie as one of the 25 technologies and notions that hold the most promise over the coming year:
It’s the great conundrum of the web. Why do so many people do so much for free? What do people get out of it? Whuffie—that’s what. Coined by writer Cory Doctorow for his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Whuffie embodies respect, karma, mad-props; call it what you will, the web runs on it.
See, I use Sitemeter to check the stats on this blog-thing. (Arguably too much.) It’s down this morning; I can’t see how many people have visited, or where they’re coming from.
I’m also using blogrolling.com to build a blogroll. I went to do some work on it this morning, and it’s gone from the internet; there’s something up (at least temporarily) with the URL. Since the rolls are hosted at blogrolling.com, blogrolls all over the net (like the one at Rittenhouse Review) are gone, kaput, nada. —So people who might otherwise have browsed through to new sites can’t. At least, temporarily.
Obviously, there’s plenty of ways to host this stuff yourself and not be dependent on other people’s bandwidth or server issues. But for those of us without the requisite skillset, well, they’re darned useful.
But they’re also a glaring weak spot in any economy of whuffie.
—Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just cranky. More coffee, then off to work. Whee.
My God, the hair.
Barry, of course, weighed in with his two cents about the Haberdashery, and the evanescent, delicately necessary threadworks of artistic communities; now Jenn’s written up her own account of what it was like and how it all came together, Back in the Day.
With pictures.
What’s frightening is most of that hair is still around today. Be warned.
Bonus: Amy’s put in an appearance, in the comments to my original post; get thee a blog too, woman. And: if you lean on Sara, she might just post those Clarion ’91 photos. —This nostalgia kick could get to be a trend.
Roots.
I need to talk to my folks more at some point or another about this stuff; I trust vaguely that notes have been gathered and compiled in loose files somewhere, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that most of the family lore is in the memories stored in one head or another and yet to be written down in any but the most cursory form. (My father’s been on a geneological kick off and on—he tracked down a church in the Czech republic in a village where one branch or another of the ur-Manleys springs from—but my father’s office is, to put it charitably, a godawful mess.)
—And it’s families lore, isn’t it. Not “family lore.” Looking back into one’s ancestry is like looking upriver at all the many and various tributaries—rivers, riverlets, streams, creeks, cricks, branches, springs, trickles, washes and wets—that all could have been the proximate source of this or that molecule of water floating past you. You can pretend to follow one main track back in time, say this is the river, and the rest feed into it, but that’s a construct. It privileges one set at the expense of others. It’s families, not family. Bloodlines a-plenty, not a single, magisterial bloodline stretching back in time like the Mississippi.
But I digress.
Roots on my father’s side: mostly on the western and more hardscrabble edge of the Appalachians: Alabama, western Georgia. I know we had some folks in Winston County, who voted to secede from the Confederacy when the Confederacy seceded from the Union; Dad likes to say that folks in Winston County were too poor to own slaves and didn’t give a good God damn about states’ rights and just wanted to be left alone with their moonshine, so. —Of course, there’s also a Cherokee (or half-Cherokee) who served in the Confederate Army as a scout.
Which, apparently, qualifies me for this.
Though—aside from my own personal misgivings (which are legion), there’s the small matter of the Wiggin on my mother’s side who served with Sherman on his famous March. We have his cavalry saber somewhere in one of the closets of my parents’ house. That Wiggin unpacked his carpet bags and married into a family (families) come down in time and station from the mighty Middletons—genuine Southern plantation aristocracy of the rice variety, there on the South Carolina coast, where Gullah is still spoken by basket-weaving women on the street corners of Charleston, where society matrons still archly refer to “The Late, Great Unpleasantness.” (“War Between the States” being a vulgar term, you see.) We’ve visited the plantation, which is now a carefully maintained park; we had a feast of steamed oysters and pork in the old kitchen and heard ghost stories about the family crypt. —One of the Middletons, as is often pointed out, signed the Declaration of Independence. His grandson signed the Ordinance of Secession.
I was born in Sheffield, Alabama, and after about six months was moved to Richmond, Virginia, where I laid down my first memories. (The first one I can date with any assurance: in the car, pulling up the driveway of the smaller house, as someone on the radio noted it was the one-year anniversary of the Watergate break-ins. I have earlier memories, but none I can place with such precision.) When I was—five? six?—we moved to Arak, Iran, where I spent a year and a half in the small American school for the families of engineers working on a couple of projects for the Shah, reading Tintin comics and Boys’ Own Adventure stories from Britain. By 1976 we were back in the States, in North Carolina; in 1978, I saw Las Guerras de las Galaxias in Caracas, long, agonizing months after all my friends back in the States had seen it. When I went to the Breckenridge County Spelling Bee in Kentucky (sixth grade), I lost on the first round because I spelled parlor p-a-r-l-o-u-r.
All those British adventure stories, you see. (My brother-in-law, who’s from somewhere south of London and who gets asked from time to time—no lie—if he was in that band, is a professor of history who specializes with a kind of grim glee in the antebellum South. Go figure.)
I was born in the South, and did a lot of growing up there, but if you tried to cram my roots into a box conveniently labelled Southerner, it would be a hard fit. I’d be a hard fit. I don’t talk Southern. (Though I’m noticing more and more of my father’s turns of phrase popping up in my conversation. Shorn of the accent, but.) I don’t write Southern. (Though it’s a fine enough business for them that do.) I didn’t grow up thinking Southern. (Then, who does?) —Yet I am a Southerner.
What else could I be?
For all that I haven’t spent more than two weeks at a time south of the Mason-Dixon since 1985.
Getting on the bus last night, there was, at the back, a tall man in a long black trenchcoat and a black leather cowboy hat. On the hat in the middle was a buckle: the Confederate battle flag in all its starry, barry glory.
You see them, from time to time, here in Portland (one of the whitest major cities in America). Mostly in the windows of pickup trucks, or muddied SUVs. (Do they think like pickup truck people? Like people who go off-roading?) For all that this is the furthest north I’ve ever lived.
Seeing that flag makes me think of a lot of things: alternate histories (those damn cigars!) and the romance of vanishing chivalry and brutal, dehumanizing hatred and appalling, sugar-coated ignorance and The Dukes of Hazard and a satisfyingly juvenile fuck you! to the powers that be and gun racks and cowboy hats and For Us By Us and redneck frat boys and my brother driving carriages in the background of the upcoming Cold Mountain movie and red dirt and pine needles and the Smokey Mountains at dawn (Bat Cave, North Carolina and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee) and hey, remember that guy who clocked me outside of the pool where I worked as a lifeguard? I’d kicked him out for roughhousing, six foot mumble, two hundred some odd pounds, me a skinny white sophomore in high school, and when I was climbing into the car of the friend who was driving me home this guy comes out of nowhere and grabs me and yells and punches me, and Shark, my boss (a hair under six feet but more of it muscle), pulls him off, and we went to the police, and it turned out he had a number of previous convictions for assault (also battery), enough so that when I stood in front of a judge and swore that yes, this man attacked me, and he stood up and said he had, and he was sorry, when they led him away, a black man two or three years older than me with a kid (possibly two, the cops were unsure) out of wedlock (as they say), it was to a jail outside of Columbia for a six-month sentence; I think of that, too, and I also think of the basket women in Charleston pretending to hide from tourists’ cameras as if their souls would be stolen (until you offer them five bucks, or ten) and I think of what Gullah sounds like and how much I enjoyed those steamed oysters. And maybe in one way or another that flag “stands for” all of these things, for me if not for every Southerner; this is, after all, my heritage. Or some small part of it.
But the flag also stands for this. It always has.
And whether the guy in the back of the bus wants it to or not, it always will.
Boxing Day.
There’s this guy in Canada who insists that the perfect gift for Jenn would be for me to announce that I am giving up pornography. Instead, I think I’ll share some of my meager traffic with her, by pointing out that now that she’s got Movable Type up and running, I can link to her wonderful post about the last time she went to a strip club. (It was coincidentally enough my first. I got to find out what’s the cruellest song for anyone—male or female—to strip to: “Eleanor Rigby.” Ouch.)
In other Boxing Day news—but I should maybe first tell you about an email my mother sent me, several years ago. Back about ’95 or ’96, I think, when we had one email account for an entire household of college drop-outs (and a couple of graduates, yes yes) and I still remembered how to use Tin and Pine and whatnot. It was a simple email message: a hyperlink, and the words, “Oh really?” or something to that effect. The link was to an entry in the archive Oberlin had maintained of posts made to its intramural bulletin board, a limited Usenet-like forum called Infosys. Some bright young thing had put the archive on the web in those heady, early days, so that by clicking on this simple hyperlink, one was taken almost instantaneously to a post I’d made in—what, 1988? Thereabouts, anyway—about the best places on campus to have sex.
My mother, ladies and gentlemen. —The archive has since (thank God) vanished, a victim of limited bandwidth, perhaps, but the peculiar mixture of embarrassment (aw, geeze, Mom, close the door!) and sudden joy (she read something! That I wrote!) has stayed with me. (By the way: mostly braggadoccio and hearsay. In case you were wondering. Honest! It was!)
Now, we have our differences politically and otherwise that probably are not as great as we imagine (and our similarities, ditto) and we maybe don’t talk about them as much as we ought. Family. You know. So while I knew she knew about this blogthing (the link’s in my email sig, after all, shameless self-promoter that I am), I didn’t really know what she thought of it. Or even if she read it. Until I opened one of my packages from The Folks: The Tipping Point. And said to myself, “Aw, geeze, Mom, you read that mawkish thing?” and “She reads it! Wow!” all at once.
My father—you know, I think I will have some Utah Phillips waiting for him when he gets back from Spain. (See above re: differences, as well as similarities.)
And: I now have a lovely example of Arabic calligraphy (the alphabet, cunningly matted and framed) to add to my astrolabe, thanks to the Spouse; also, my mother-in-law (the lovely and talented Kathy Lee—take a bow) got me a cashmere sweater. “It’s the in thing, apparently,” she said. “Snuggly and comforting, since it was such a hard year for everyone.” She got Jenn one, too. —It’s the first cashmere sweater I’ve ever worn: it’s at once the lightest and the warmest sweater I have, and from now on I insist that all my winter garments be woven of the stuff.
Assuming, of course, that 2003 turns out somewhat less hard than 2002.
Now none of youse has any excuse.
For a good long time now, those of us who are blessed with God’s own computer and are in “the know” have blithely typed our simple text into the marvelous Tex Edit and then scrubbed it briskly with Dean Allen’s invaluable AppleScripts for web writing. It’s how you get decent punctuation and alternate characters and some small modicum of typographic competence on the web (plus easy linkin’) without having to remember the dam’ Unicode for an em-dash (——in case you were wondering) or whether you closed that strong tag three words back (oops).
But the unwashed heathens—or those of us who have to close our sleek little iBooks and trudge our way to day jobs in a stodgy, Gated world—were left bereft, forced to rely on our own meager (meagre?) devices.
Until now. —Mr. Allen has concocted a simple web-based Perl thingie that takes text you drop in and Unicodes it and wraps it with a decent assortment of happy tags. Post sparkling text with proper punctuation (and diacriticals!) to the web from anywhere at all.
So if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to get up, put on some pants, go to work, and pretend to do this-that-or-the-other while tinkering with this happy little toy on an infernal, fenestral device.
Cold hands, and a winterscape.
So I was up late last night what with one thing and another and I finally crawled into bed at half past one the next morning. The cat was grumpy but he should understand when I come to bed at that time of night I’m going to shake the blankets out and he’s just going to have to deal.
Jenn was still drawing. (Actually, speaking technically, I think she was applying a texture from a Yoshitoshi woodblock print, but technically it was drawing.) Garbage was on the stereo.
Sometime later I halfway wake up. She’s crawling into bed. Her feet are cold and she shoves them up against mine to warm them which is maybe why I halfway wake up. Her fingers are cold, too. (She’ll tell you it’s because there’s a hole in the wall of her studio where the electric space heater used to be and so she gets this fearsome draft, but really, the woman has poor circulation. Ask anyone who’s shaken her hand.) I manage to find the clock and hit the glowbar: it’s 3:37 in the morning. The cat is on the pillow by my head, so this wakes him up. He lets me know he’s grumpy. Dammit.
This is what she goes through to put up new panels of Dicebox.
In addition to which, she’s also got a piece in a First Thursday group show. That’d be tonight, it being First Thursday and all. (Which I realize is short notice and I’d have maybe said something sooner but I just found out it was tonight and not a month from now or so this morning as I was putting on my jacket.) So if you live in Portland and you’re at all curious then I recommend you make your way down to PushDot, at 833 Northwest 14th Avenue, there in the Pearl; we’ll be there ourselves at some point or another from time to time.
But if you can’t make it; if you’re in another state or unforgivably busy or some such excuse, well, I’m telling you, it’s more impressive in person, but if you just can’t make it, we’ll understand; we’ll try to understand. Here, then, is a taste of Hecate.
Pardon my dust.
Also my tardinesses, as I pardon the tardinesses of others (ha). I’m walking around my brand new copy of Movable Type, kicking the tires and sniffing the new-blog smell; it’s a little naked right now, and off-the-rack, and my spanking new domain name (www.longstoryshortpier.com; do keep it in mind) still hasn’t propagated, so I’m forced to explicitly use the directory I’m piggybacking off the Spouse’s site, and I haven’t even put any links in over there yet, and the funny thing is that by the time most of you out there read this one or more of those things just won’t be true (knock wood). —Ah, ephemera.
Anyway. The content from my old hand-built journal has been re-entered herein, and flagged with categories I haven’t gotten around to organizing, so you can wander through the archives in a somewhat more orderly fashion and leave a comment if you like and even permalink, if you are so inclined. Otherwise, go read Dicebox, and remember that Barry’s a better man than I, and oh, I dunno. Leave a comment if you have an idea or a suggestion or a brickbat or something.
Whoa.
Hang on, folks—me an’ her’s been married six years today.
Yoiks.
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.”
