To the barricades, lucky duckies!
To a person earning $12,000, the Journal argues, paying 4 percent in federal income tax is notenough to get his or her blood boiling with tax rage. … [A]s fewer and fewer people are responsible for paying more and more of all taxes, the constituency for tax cutting, much less for tax reform, is eroding. Workers who pay little or no taxes can hardly be expected to care about tax relief for everybody else. They are also that much more detached from recognizing the costs of government.
—via Slate. Also, the Washington Post. (Seeing as how I don’t subscribe to the Journal and all, I can’t link to it directly.) You just can’t make this stuff up, folks.
Now that’s Homeland Security.
Via MetaFilter, the stirring tale of the Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency (1868-1975). (Includes an all-too-brief overview of long-forgotten Agency-inspired television programs.)
Fret not at the irresponsibility of the current administration in neglecting so grave a threat to our homeland: this agency emeritus is recruting. Find out how you might fit in.
Hypocrisy.
I’m starting to think that when it comes to such programs as Total Information Awareness, supporters must be able to pass the following litmus test:
Would you support the same power in the hands of a Democratic administration?
I imagine very few would. Certainly, as then-Senator Ashcroft makes very, very clear in this article written back in October 1997, our current Attorney General would fail miserably.
But while it’s well and good (and funny, in a black, auto-Schadenfreudeian sense) to scoff at the hypocrisy of the hands-off, smaller-government, conservative right wing currently in power, there’s a deeper and more troubling lesson to be drawn: attacks of this nature on the Bill of Rights and our civil liberties aren’t so much a problem of right (or left); they’re a problem of people in power. “The Democrats have not been strong on civil and constitutional rights,” says Jeralyn Merritt. “The Clinton administration, which we admire for other accomplishments, was terrible in these areas.” (She expands on it hereabouts, but be sure to click through to her 1996 article.) —After all, Bush initially opposed the draconian barrel of pork he just signed into being; it was Congressional Democrats who pressured him into (so enthusiastically) picking it up and running with it.
That said, it’s worth noting the nine nays on Homeland Security:
Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts; Paul Sarbanes, D-Maryland; Jim Jeffords, I-Vermont; Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii; Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii; Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia; Carl Levin, D-Michigan; Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, D-South Carolina; and Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin.
Are your Senators on the list? You might want to let ’em know how you feel about that…
The fruits of Serendip.
In the course of looking for a snarky quote on Lessing’s Canopus in Argos: Archives for an earlier squib (not that I’ve read it myself, mind; though I enjoyed The Good Terrorist lo these many years ago, I’ve yet to go through a serious Lessing phase, much as I haven’t gone through the Russians, or Dick; anyway, Canopus is famously held to be monumentally turgid in some circles, and I’m getting rather off-topic here) I stumbled over an interview with Thomas Disch, in which I learned the following (we join a conversation on his kids’ books already in progress):
TD: Yes, and others. And others still in the works. I’ll tell you one of my favorite ideas that I haven’t found a taker for yet—maybe there’s a publisher out there who wants me to write it for them—a book specifically for young girls titled So You Want To Be The Pope. It would resemble a career guide, explaining that, well, yes, nowadays girls aren’t yet allowed to be the Pope, but so many other barriers have fallen: so here is your plan for how to set about becoming the first female Pope. A perfectly serious book on the subject, that would talk about the history of the papacy. . . [laughs]
DH: I can see why some publishers might be a little wary.
TD: . . .and talk to a sensible, ambitious, idealistic young girl who would want to be the Pope. I think it would be a wonderful book.
Well, hell. I’d buy it in a heartbeat. —Until then, we should maybe add it to the Invisible Library..?
There are two kinds of books in this world.
So I find this book on the science fiction shelves of a middlin’ bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina, and my interest is immediately piqued. (Look at the cover. Does that look like science fiction to you?) (And yes: that sort of snap judgment does indeed kick over a can of worms. Nasty, divisive business, those genres. But: think of “science fiction” less as a much-maligned, ghettoized idiom whose ability to address the human condition with a much wider than usual array of metaphor and imagery has been grotesquely overlooked by narrow-minded Philistines, and more as a commercial classification which overworked booksellers use to quickly categorize product for easy sales—think of it like that, and you’ll see what I mean when I say a book like this on those shelves in a store like that is going to catch your eye.) (I mean, geeze, next thing you know you’ll be putting Canopus in Argos in between Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and Harpy’s Flight.) (Actually, Powell’s shelves half of Canopus in Literature and half in Science Fiction/Fantasy. Which doubles your chances of stumbling across it, I guess, but makes it a bit difficult to pick up the whole set at one go.)
Where was I?
Ah, yes. Saw this book a year ago, finally just got around to picking it up, have now begun reading it, pure curiosity and no real expectations (though Anthony Burgess does go on about how it’s Scotland’s shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom), so it wasn’t until I got to this passage—
Lanark did not wish to be an artist but he felt increasingly the need to do some kind of work, and a writer needed only pen and paper to begin. Also he knew something about writing, for when wandering the city he had visited public libraries and read enough stories to know there were two kinds. One kind was a sort of written cinema, with plenty of action and hardly any thought. The other kind was about clever unhappy people, often authors themselves, who thought a lot but didn’t do very much. Lanark supposed a good author was more likely to write the second kind of book.
—that I smiled to myself and settled in; I’m in good hands with this one. (It gets rather rapidly weird and strange. Science fiction? No. But a dark fantasy, thus far. In the modern idiom, of course.)
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.
24 hours and 11 years.
In 12 hours we’ll probably be on final approach to San Diego.
In 24 hours, asleep on the floor of someone I haven’t met yet.
For about four or five hours in there, at least, I imagine we’ll be wandering around a very large room filled with 50,000 fans of various and sundry genre entertainment products, some of which can be called comics. That’ll begin in about 14 hours or so, I think. Give or take. We’ll do it again in about 36 hours. And again in about 60. And one more time—
Just over 11 years ago, I did two 24-hour comics. Not in a row. Between the first 24-hour comic and the second 24-hour comic, we sat huddled in a room around a black-and-white TV for hours and hours and watched news reporters duck and wince at loud noises against a fiery Middle Eastern night and talk about Scuds and American air strikes. We scribbled things on a couple of pages of a sketchbook, interlocking and interacting comics that were making black jokes about what was going on in front of us because what else could you do?
Scott McCloud invented 24-hour comics about 12 years ago. In about 14 or maybe 15 hours, Winter McCloud is going to kick my ass in Pokémon.
Barry is the only person who actually “owns” a piece of Kip Manley original art. It was a page from my first 24-hour comic. It hung on the wall of the room we shared in the apartment we were living in 11 years ago or so. It was an odd metafictional piece starring the first cartoon character I ever created. (The next time you’re around when Amy’s around, she’ll ask me to draw him for you. I guarantee that.) And I kind of liked it, even if I stole the whole “Bigby” thing shamelessly from Sarah, who has no home on the internet just yet. (Go read some of her chapters in Herschberg. They don’t suck.) And I did do a third 24-hour comic. It was my first attempt to come to grips with autobiography and love and sex and magic and not and pretty much the whole big snarling mass of What Happened at Oberlin. But since I didn’t finish the 24 pages in 24 hours, it doesn’t really count. (Barry and Paul and Jenn and I all did 24-hour comics at the same time in pretty much the same room, that time. And we were all on our third 24-hour comic. But Paul didn’t finish his in 24 hours, either. Barry and Jenn, who’d never finished within the time limit before, did.) This third round was maybe eight years ago? Nine? Whatever. Not too many people have done three 24-hour comics. There’s reasons.
But it’s the second one I did that I like the best. Barry kept telling me I should put it up on the web, why not. And Jenn, too. So thank them if you like, but blame me if you don’t. You will probably like it a little better if your monitor is set to 1025 × 760 or bigger. Mine’s set to 800 × 600, and I have to scroll up and down, and I didn’t mind so much myself, but it’s my comic. You might not be so patient.
I should have been asleep two hours ago. I probably won’t be asleep for another two hours, at least. We’re both waking up in about five and a half hours, give or take.
But here and now, ladies and gentlemen, what the hell: 24 pages drawn in 24 hours straight; my second ever 24-hour comic; an 11-year-old story that remains near and dear to my heart—
When you least expect it.
“You think so?” said Jenn.
“Eighty-five per cent,” I said, after a moment, and then the guy on stage we were talking about did this thing with his eyes and I knew. “Ninety-five,” I said, since it’s always a good thing to leave some room for error, even if (especially if) you’re known for this sort of thing.
See, when my birthday rolled around last year Jenn got me Mink Car and the McSweeney’s with They Might Be Giants doing the soundtrack and tickets to the show which would be at the Crystal Ballroom the very night I would turn 33. (Actually, I turned 33 at 11:11 AM EDT, but that’s neither here nor there.) —Unfortunately, due to some understandable delays in air travel, they didn’t make the show, and so the show was postponed until this past Friday. (And if it weren’t too late to urge you to go see They Might Be Giants in a ballroom where you can dance on air I’d do it—when they do “Clap Your Hands” off the new album and everybody starts pogoing in synch you get some amazing height, like off a trampoline or something, wow.)
But we weren’t talking about They Might Be Giants; we were talking about the opening act. Who were this guy with a guitar and this other guy, and they could sing and did some killer Everly-esque harmonizing and some physical comedy and if reviewers tend to say they do a Barenaked Ladies–Phish kind of thing, I’m afraid I’ll have to bow to their judgment; I don’t know from either referenced band. But I can tell you about snarky comedy that veers close to wet sentiment but skates the thin edge and comes back, and how if you’ve got the stones to do a rearrangement of “Don’t Let’s Start” when you’re opening for Johns Linnell and Flansburgh, you’d damn well better be able to pull it off like these guys did.
But it wasn’t even that we were talking about. “You think he’s the guy from Buffy,” said Jenn.
“Yeah,” I said. “The one without the guitar, I mean.”
And you know what?
It’s true. He do read wierd stuff (sic).
Steve Lieber cuts a magisterial figure in a silk dressing gown and a pair of pinstriped trousers from a bespoke morning suit. He’s bracketed top to bottom by flawless white spats and a leopard-skin fez, that indispensible Excelsior! of sartorial whimsy. “Come in, come in!” he booms, stirring a cup of coffee. “May I offer you anything? Coffee? Port? A cigar?”
“Oh, no,” I demur, stepping into the airy chambers of Mercury Studios as one of the black-clad assistants takes my jacket. (Yes, it’s a hot summer here in Portland. But one doesn’t make points with Mr. Steve Lieber by dressing down.) “I’m fine.”
“Are you certain? They’re Cuban…”
“Couldn’t possibly.”
“Well then. What can I do for you, Mister, ah—I’m dreadfully sorry—”
Oh, how charming! As if it’s his fault he doesn’t remember nobodies like me. “Kip Manley, sir. Freelance critic of the paraliterary. I wanted to speak to you about your upcoming column, for, ah—” And here was a dicey dilemma. How to refer to the (rather rudely named) site without risking a disruption of our delicate decorum? Luckily, discretion was close to hand with a deft dodge: “Kevin Smith’s movie and pop-culture periodical?”
“Ah, that rascally World Wide Web site, Movie Poop Shoot dot com,” said Lieber, his voice and genial smile suggesting that, while its declassé taste was not an habitual one on his tongue, he nonetheless revelled genteely in the Rabelaisian wit of this misbegotten moniker. He continued to stir his coffee. “An argosy of acerbic articulations on (and analyses of) the arcana of that glorious business we call genre entertainment. How wonderful that a movie’s nebulous marketing scheme could, like Pygmalion’s statue or Frankenstein’s monster, take on a life of its own and go forth, into the world, to do what good it can. And how pleased I am to be able to steer its course with my few humble suggestions.” His spoon clinks against the cup, a merry sound against the industrious hullaballoo of the studio all about us: I can just make out shy, retiring Paul Guinan before he ducks back into the echoing gut of a hollowed-out 1887 knock-off of a vintage Reade Electric Man, brought it at no little expense for vital artistic reference; that bearded man taking tea beneath the windows with Ron Randall is, yes, George Lucas, here I believe to confer on the finer points of Imperial starship chandlery for the forthcoming third and final film (I try not to gawk); and in yonder corner—but no: I was sworn to secrecy as to the nature of the project being got up to there, and its participants, else I’d drop such hints as would make the whole comics industry sit up and slaver. —And this is a quiet day at Mercury.
“At any rate,” says Lieber, “if you’d care to step over to my workspace…” Stirring his coffee, he leads me to a sunlit corner laid with a hand-knotted Persian rug, defined by a pigeon-holed secretary desk to one side (quaintly archaic, its miniature writing-surface burdened with several precariously balanced stacks of leather bound books and brightly colored comics periodicals) and a sleekly modern, skeletal drawing table to the other (an ebony-and-teak tabouret, its dozens of drawers neatly shut, stands half under it like a faithful hound). A work table defines the third side, and it is here that Lieber pauses, looking a moment at the work of two black-clad assistants upon a sheet of bristol board, painted with black ink and strapped to a restraining frame. One of the assistants holds a bedraggled toothbrush, stiff with white paint, and shakes it at the board as if to admonish it for some imagined slight. “If you would,” says Lieber, holding out one hand and shaking back his rakishly unfastened French cuff. The assistant gladly surrenders the brush. “I think you’ll find,” says Lieber, holding the brush bristle-up and then whipping it with a subtle twist of his wrist, “that with white on black, a modified Wronski flip results in a more pleasingly scattered splatter. It’s just the thing for starfields—if a bit tiring for explosions. Here. Try it yourself.” The assistant takes up the brush again, and performs quite adequately. Lieber beams. “Now then,” he says, stirring his coffee. “Where were we?”
I should, perhaps, take this opportunity to steer the conversation back to our ostensible topic, but I’m distracted by the tantalizing mound of books. “Are these for upcoming projects?” I ask, picking up a much-loved copy of Eco’s Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language.
“Ah. I’ll be reading the chapter on symbol closely as part of my terminally in-progress response to McCloud’s Understanding Comics. While the semiotic dialect between signifier and signed is not the same thing as the closure of which McCloud speaks, there’s nonetheless a mischievous transference at play into which I wish to delve more fully. Plus,” he purses his lips, stirring his coffee, “there’s Dylan Horrocks’s piercingly trenchant Journal essay to take into consideration.” He sighs, stirring his coffee. “I’m afraid at this rate it shall be posthumously published, if ever.”
“And this?” I say, of a trade paperback edition of Anne Hollander’s Sex and Suits.
“Ah,” he sighs. “Don’t get me wrong. Wonderful book. But she has little to say on the subject of rep ties, about which I shall be doodling a little piece for Gentlemen’s Quarterly. I’m afraid the definitive history has yet to be written… Oh, and the Carter there—have you read Carter?”
“No,” I allow, momentarily spell-bound by the bizarre image on the cover, as provocative as the title: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman.
“You must read Angela Carter. At any rate—and though it’s not officially hush-hush, I nonetheless really shouldn’t tell you—”
I perk up. He stirs his coffee a moment, drawing it out. Smiling.
“I’ve tentatively agreed to adapt that book for a publisher who as yet must remain nameless.”
“Excellent!” I cry, and then the next book in the stack catches my attention. “But Sex and Rockets?” I say, holding up the luridly jacketed hardcover. “Surely this is a bit lowbrow?”
“Not at all,” he says. “Work-product. It is the definitive biography of John Parsons, who made a brief appearance in the most recent issue of Alan Moore’s Promethea. I’m curious as to Parsons’ continued cachet as a black magician of some note when it’s quite clear from his own writings he wasn’t a terribly good one. A point I intend to make in my mostly favorable survey of the occultic history underlying that marvelous comic book—in an upcoming edition of my column, which is, I think, why you came to see me today?”
Indeed. Playtime is over. I pull out my notebook to begin the formal interview as he lifts his spoon from the coffee cup—it’s a delicate green cup, fragmented with delicate black lines, as if sketching an incipient fracture; Lieber will, in a moment, explain that it is a priceless example of the Japanese soma-yaki style. But at this moment he lifts the cup to his lips and sips. “Ah,” he says, smiling. “Just right.”
—But! Honesty compells me to admit that I have taken some few liberties with the truth. The “Wronski,” after all, is a quidditch maneuver, and those who know me will recognize that I loaned Mr. Lieber my own prized leopard-skin fez. As for the rest of it: oh, heck. Go read his damn column yourself and find out. It’s a hoot and a half, and if he isn’t really tackling obscure rocket-scientist magicians and surrealist erotomanic picaresques, well, he is writing about comics about bees and about non-linear road trip poetry and about skin-mites that live on Charles Darwin’s head, so I wasn’t too far off. Was I?
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.)
