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.
An amusing factoid about yours truly.
Yes, it’s been a while. I could say the same about you, you know. Have you written? Have you called? No, you have not. It’s been hectic, you say. Yes, I’ve heard it before. And how, exactly, is that novel coming along? Or was it a screenplay? I forget.
I, at least, intend to make some sort of amends. I hereby offer up for your amusement, delectation and derision the following bit of autobiographical trivia: one of my all-time favorite movies is, yes, Joe Versus the Volcano. Go: find a copy (the video store will have it in stock, I guarantee), settle down, watch it. Better yet: pick up Rushmore and do a double feature; not that I’ve done it myself, but watching Joe again last night put me in mind of Wes Anderson and his loopily earnest mode of storytelling. Joe never quite manages Anderson’s lilting gravitas, but it’s still an interesting light by which to view the earlier flick, I think. That lack is probably what keeps Joe from being truly great.
—Hey. I said it was one of my favorites. I never said I thought it was one of the best.
The pause that—
“Hey, Kip,” said Kevin. “You want a Coke?”
“What?” I said.
You had to have been there to see what was mildly fucked about his question: he’s on the ground, scratching his dog’s head, and I’m some fifteen feet up in the air on a neighbor’s ladder, caulking the top of a window frame and an ineptly drilled hole where someone fed the television cable into an upstairs room. I’ve been meaning to fix it for a while now, but a) had no ladder and b) it’s been raining a lot, so. But here I am, wrestling with a caulking gun, a tube of caulk that’s recalcitrant at best, and rising gusts of wind, and Kevin’s asking me if I want a Coke. Sure. What the fuck.
So I get the caulking done, and he brings me a Coke, and I climb down off the ladder and carry it back around the house and set it down on its side and step back and take a deep breath. I don’t think I like heights much, or ladders. But really, it’s best to figure that out after you’ve gotten down, than otherwise.
Chore done, I take the Coke inside and sit down to take back up the task of writing that bloody introduction, and every now and then I sip some Coke. I don’t drink soda or cola (or, as we call it generically in the South, “Coke,” as in: “What kind of Coke you want with your burger?” “Root beer”) all that much anymore. I like beer and wine and seltzer water and a little sugar in my coffee which I drink by the pot, but me and pop parted ways some time ago. Still. Every now and then. You know?
But what I’m noticing is, it’s been an hour or so, and I’m halfway through the 20 oz. (250 mL, apparently), and I’ve still got this racing tension in my chest, you know? Little jitters running down my arms and into my fingers, like my nerves are nervous, firing at shadows. And I’m thinking it’s maybe an after-effect of the ladder and the height and the stupid bloody caulk, but no, it’s been too long for that.
No—I think it’s actually the Coke. Geeze.
Plus my teeth have that weird dry filmy feeling, now.
(What? I have to get back to writing the other thing? Aw, c’mon. I can stretch this out for another joke or three. Honest. I could. —Geeze. You never let me have any fun. Bastard.)
Currently.
reading:
a] Candas Jane Dorsey.
b] Samuel R. Delaney.
c] Umberto Eco.
d] Michael Moorcock.
listening:
a] The Royal Tenenbaums.
b] Tom Waits.
c] Jenny Toomey.
d] “Once More, With Feeling.”
wearing:
a] Sweater.
b] Blue jeans.
c] Slippers.
d] Boxer briefs.
eating:
a] Left-over sushi.
b] Torta pascualina.
c] Eggs one-eye.
d] Girl Scout cookies.
pondering:
a] Us.
b] Them.
c] Why.
d] Why not.
procrastinating:
a] This website.
b] Someone else’s website.
c] Two (no, three) stories. And one essay.
d] That bloody introduction.
Which side are you on?
Choose up. The margin in the middle is disappearing rapidly.
On the one side: [a] [b] [c] [d] [e]
On the other: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
Look to your neighbors, step carefully, and watch your freakin’ back.
Ghosts.
I keep my hair cut short, these days. It used to be quite long. But it’s too thin to look good like that, now, and it’s ebbed back from my face like a low spring tide. So I keep it short, quite short, buzzed short for long, hot days.
Of late, though, I’ve been at home, at work on the web and ’net; I talk on the phone to most of those I work with, and I have a dearth of cash. I’ve not gone to get my hair cut for some time. It’s now as long as it has been for months.
At the end of this past week, as I walked through Old Town, the wind blew up in strong gusts, and my hair was now so long that it tossed on top of my head, a brief wild dance held fast by the roots, and I felt the ends of my hair prick my ears, and the skin of the back of my neck. It was a thing I’d not felt—I don’t want to say “for years,” but it had been a long time, a long, long time. I stopped there on the curb and felt my skin crawl down my back, down where my ribs curl in to meet my spine, pricked by the ghosts of my hair, my long hair, tossed in a long-gone wind—
(And now I stop and fret: “ghosts.” Is that one sound, or two? At first blush, one would think one, but say the word out loud, and hear it, where the “t” breaks the flow of ess to ess, and turns the breath of the word from one gust to two, or one and a half, but more, I think, than just one. And what of words that have been joined by a dash? Does “long-gone” count as two words, two sounds, or is it one word, one thought, but two sounds, joined by that small line?
(This game is hard; more work than it might seem, at first. But fun.)
Choice demographic.
“So there’s this great article on Salon,” I’m saying.
“Yes..?” says Jenn. She’s tapping and clicking at the iMac, putting pictures of arcane technical gear into seemingly arbitrary places on a giant white field.
“You remember Stargate? You know how it became a TV show?”
“Vaguely.” We’ve got our Buffy, our Angel, our West Wing, and I guess we won’t be watching Futurama much anymore. —And Farscape, whenever it manages to be on. But I digress.
“Well, it used to be the number one syndicated action hour whatchamacallit on TV. Hot enough that they were actually talking about doing another movie, a whole series of movies. They were talking a new Trek.”
“And?” She’s peering intently at the computer screen. Tap. Click.
“Well, the producers decided being number one wasn’t good enough. See, the audience was tilted female—”
“Oh,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Space bimbo?”
“Yup. And killing the sensawunda exploration plotlines in favor of dark ’n’ moody conspiracy theories. So the fans’ favorite actor left in disgust, and they let him go, and now the fans are revolting, the ratings suck, and the plans for a movie are pretty much on hold.”
“Idiots. Why do they keep screwing things up like that?”
“I dunno. Hey. What’s that?”
She tears her eyes away from the screen for an instant. She’s using the stylus tonight, with the drawing tablet. She swears by it these days. Makes me feel old-fashioned. Give me a keyboard and a mouse any day, please. —Besides, it looks anachronistic, that plastic pen, the paperless tablet, and her Dickensian fingerless gloves. But I digress. “It’s an issue of Bitch.”
Which, of course, is rather obvious. What I’d meant by asking “What’s that?” wasn’t so much “What’s that?” as “I see you’ve recently acquired an issue of Bitch; might I inquire as to why—assuming, of course, there is a specific purpose?” It’s just that “What’s that?” seemed more efficient. More fool me.
Luckily, it hinges on Dicebox, so Jenn’s eager to talk about it. “It’s got an article on black women as characters in science fiction,” she says, “so I picked it up. I haven’t read it yet. I have all this work—”
“Mind if I?”
She sighs. “Just leave it where I can find it.” Moves a speaker—I think it’s a speaker, it’s round and wedge-shaped all at once, and on a weird wire cradle, but it looks like it has some speaker cones in there somewhere, and it’s the sort of matte black that’s really popular with serious hi-fi gearheads—anyway, she moves the speaker a smidgeon to the left; nudges it back. So I pick it up. Flounce on the bed. Flip open the magazine. Mermaids on Coney Island, fatsuits as the new blackface, a comparison of mary-kateandashley and My Evil Twin Sister, an intriguing interview with Allison Anders (I’d always thought Gas Food Lodging was overrated, but that’s neither here nor there)—and Harriet the Spy? From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler?
Hold the phone.
“I loved Harriet the Spy,” I say.
“What?”
“Harriet the Spy. I loved it. There’s an article in here about the gender gap in young adult fiction. Lamenting how we’ve fallen from the heyday of the ’60s and ’70s, when you had books like this with characters like Harriet or Claudia and writers like Louise Fitzhugh and M.E. Kerr. Christ, I’d completely forgotten her. She rocks. Is That You, Miss Blue? All those books.”
“I remember,” says Jenn. Apparently, I’d bored everyone to tears a few weeks ago by pointing out to all and sundry that The Royal Tenenbaums was Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The Westing Game, 20 years later.
“It seems I’m an anomaly.”
“Oh?”
“Boys aren’t supposed to like reading books about girls. I had no idea Harriet the Spy was a girls’ book.”
“It is.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be. It’s just a fucking awesome book about, about being a writer and too smart for your current circumstances and just starting to figure out how to manipulate the wider world around you and . . . ”
“But it is a girls’ book.”
“Yeah, well, fine, I understand that. But it shouldn’t have to be.”
Jenn yawns and stretches. “Boy, am I glad we dropped a half-gig of memory in this puppy. These files would be impossible to work with without it.”
“Of course,” flipping more pages, “the backlash is that everyone thinks boys don’t read enough, and so there need to be more books for boys, and so more books are written with boys as heroes or narrators.” There are exceptions; there are always exceptions. (And it’s an utter coincidence one of those was written by someone I know. So there.) “Even Kerr’s written mostly from the point of view of boys lately, and you remember Island of the Blue Dolphins?”
“Yes…”
“They wanted him to change the sex of the heroine. He had to convince them it was based on a true story.”
“Geeze.”
“‘Why have young males been left out in the cold when it comes to publicly funded libraries? I think it’s because most librarians are female—or gay…’”
“Who said that? The writer?”
“No, she’s quoting a Canadian educator. Ray Nicolle.”
“Jerk.”
“Yeah. And—”
“What? What’s so funny?”
I’m giggling because I’ve reached the point in Monica T. Nolan’s article (“Harriet and Claudia, Where Have You Gone?” and it’s not online yet, so go grab issue no. 15 of Bitch and read it your own dam’ self) where she ties it all together: “The publishers of YA books must woo male readers, and—like the quintessential heroine of the ’50s teen romance—have embarked upon a never-ending quest to win a boy’s approval and gain the status and sense of self-worth they crave.” I’m giggling because suddenly, it all makes a twisted sort of sense, the whole Stargate fiasco—of course being number one in the ratings isn’t cool, if your viewers are primarily girls. The icky, uncool, clingy side of fandom, the obsessively thumbnailed gallery side, the slash-fiction writing side, the side of fandom that insists on making comparisons to Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and David Copperfield, as the Salon article takes pains to point out: the girly side of fandom. Of course that’s uncool. You want to hang with the in-crowd, the geek-kings, the choice demographic as Ferris Beuller would put it: the fickle, disdainful 18-25 males who think Seven of Nine is hot and argue about conspiracy theories and don’t buy all that much, which is why advertisers are so keen on snaring them, which all makes sense if you stand on your head and think about it with high school logic. Junior high school logic. The Stargate producers just wanted to be cool, man.
Screw the chicks.
“Yeah,” says Jenn, as I’m trying to convey this epiphany to her. “That’s nice, but—”
“Fuck,” I say, waving my arms around. The cats are getting nervous. “It even explains that crap about NBC thinking they have to skew their comedies male next year. They’ve been making too many shows for women. Like Ed. Jesus!”
“Hon,” says Jenn, still peering at the screen, “you’re starting to rant.”
“But,” I sputter.
“Why don’t you go write all this down? And let me finish my work, okay?”
Well, it does all make sense. It does.
Some credibility issues.
How seriously can you take an FBI warning about possible terrorist attacks when the talking head on the “newsbreak” says, “Coming up at ten: could Yemeni terrorists be planning another strike? We’ll tell you where in America they may strike—tonight!” —And then, salting their own wounds, the talking head next to him says, “Plus: the Oscar nominations are announced!”
Boutique cynicism.
“There’s a saying that goes,” says the lawyer, “if you want a million-dollar verdict, start with a million-dollar client.”
The party of the first part is definitely a million-dollar client. Without giving away specifics that I can’t give away, let’s just say that through pretty much admitted negligence on the part of the party of the second part (do they really write like this, lawyers?), something horrible happened to the party of the first part, and I’m not on the jury that’s deciding how much the party of the first part will get, in economic and non-economic damages. (We are instructed not to consider punitive damages, though the party of the second part ought to have it coming.) Instead, I’ve been hired for the day to sit on a fake jury, so the lawyers for one part or another can figure out just how the case is likely to play out. And it’s a good temp job, as temp jobs go, and there’s something engaging about sitting in a room with five other people and laying out why you think thus-and-so, and listening to other people say why they think this-and-that, and figuring out where the boundaries are and the middle ground and the size of the ballpark, and then figuring out what game you’re playing in it, and everybody being more solicitous than usual in such circumstances, hearing each other out and paying attention, because even though this is fake, it’s still close enough to something we were all taught was holy, in a secular sort of way. (No one’s been sued, among the six of us, that I know of. I doubt anyone’s been arrested.)
But we are basically deciding what the party of the first part gets for the trauma; for having this event occur, and affect them. The economic damages—lost wages, medical expenses—are undisputed. It’s merely the bonus money, in a way. It’s not like something like this happens every day; there’s no going rate for this event. We have to pluck a number, pretty much out of thin air. (How much longer will the party of the first part live? How much does that break down to, per year? What’s a good, round number?) We get hung up, arguing over the final amount—we have our good round number, but some want the agreed-upon economic damages added to this number; others want the economic and non-economic to add up to the number, which the jurors of the first part claim is unfair, as, if the party of the first part had made more money, say, the economic damages would then have been higher (more wages to have been lost), and the non-economic damages thereby lower—in effect, punishing the party of the first part for being a more productive member of society. (And in fact, the lawyers for one part or another were curious as to the possible effect the relative affluence of the party of the first part might have on this aspect of the proceedings.)
—The book I’d brought with me was The Royal Family, which I’m re-reading for whatever reason, and I’d been in the middle of the “Essay on Bail” when the paralegal came down to let me into the building. So maybe I’m worrying overmuch about the price of everything and the value of nothing, but it seems to me we’re dealing with a singular event, here; I don’t want this to have a going rate. (I don’t want it ever to happen again.) It seems to me important, then, to signal this (somehow, but to whom?) by joining the jurors of the second part. Let it be a flat number, overall. What does it matter, at this level? I don’t think we ever settled it, but the basic questions had been answered, so we were free to go. Here’s your check.
It wasn’t until today, reading “The False Irene,” that I remembered the three guys in the toy store. Coming around the corner, looking for the Legos, and hitting the—smell, that was the first thing: sweet, but the sort of sweetness I used to smell when I had the problem with my ingrown toe and couldn’t afford to have it looked at. It’s a high, bad sweet smell, the sort of smell that reminds you sugar is a poison. There’s a sour roundness to it, a saltiness almost, approaching that corn-chip smell of old socks—a stale, burring undertone to the high strange keening of that sweetness. The smell coming off these three, or one of the three, I don’t know: a man with a mustache, black hair shining unwashed under the lights, a black jacket, smeared; he’s throwing boxes of Legos to the floor, laughing. Two—kids?—one was a middle schooler, I think; the other older. I do not have a clear picture of them. (He wasn’t throwing Legos to the floor. He knocked one box down—on purpose, I think—and picked it up, shaking it. Shaking it in the face of the older kid. “I broke it,” he said, rattling the Legos around inside the box. “I broke it.”) —But that smell; that smell. I’m wondering, now, later, how much he would have gotten. Had that event, you know, happened to him, instead.
(As a side note: Vollmann’s Amazon page currently notes that customers who bought titles by William T. Vollmann also bought titles by these authors:
- Marcy Sheiner
- Penthouse Magazine
- Caroline Lamarche
- Rick Moody
- Paula Fox
(I somehow think he’d be amused.)
