Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

Two great hostile camps,
or, The increasing us and the decreasing them.

“The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx,” says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.” Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the “sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism.”

The British Ministry of Defense is prognosticating, trying to part the mists of time for a glimpse of the year 2035: criminal flashmobs, city-killing EMPs, ethnic cleansing with neutron bombs, and still that dam’ specter haunts Europe. —Momus has a good question:

Isn’t “the world’s middle classes uniting, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest” pretty much a definition of the normal workings of any republic?

—Filed 6728 days ago to Squawkbox; Comment [1].

Three foggy mornings and one rainy day.

It was a while ago that Chris Bertram announced he’d finally pulled down Junius, his old Bloggered blog. So it was a while ago I sighed and went and searched the pier for whatever links I’d made to Junius, way back when. —Turned out there was only the one, to a write-up on three-sided football, but a rotten link is a rotten link. I copied the old href, brought up the Wayback Machine, and thumbed through the archives for an appropriate copy of Chris’ old page, then copied that href and replaced the rotten link in my entry with the internet archived deal.

Then I checked the other links in that entry, just in case, and found that Tales of the Legion: the Origin of the Legion had also rotted away. Ditto and so forth.

It’s becoming more and more of a chore, this scraping the hull for linkrot. And though the pier’s been a mostly going concern for five years now, it’s only got (checks) about a thousand entries with, I dunno, three or four outbound links per, on average? There’s no way an actual jumping joint like Eschaton or Crooked Timber could even begin to think of keeping up. (Not that I’m keeping up myself. I just check when I’m specifically reminded of something. Like the tickle in the back of the brain that says hey, I think maybe once you linked to Junius, back in the day. Depsite the constant bloggering it suffered.)

—About the same time as Chris was pulling Junius down, John Holbo was trying to figure out how to avoid linkrot upfront, maybe by using WebCite® right off the bat? But that links to WebCite®’s archived copy from the get-go and not the cited site itself, mucking with traffic and googlejuice and whatnot, and anyway WebCite® only wants scholarly papers to use their service, and even if it’s free I hitch at people so profligate in their use of marcæ registradæ®.

(Also of idle note: the various Bad Actors, over the ages. It’ll be a cold day indeed before I ever again link to a Yahoo news article, or anyone’s AP piece, or the Washington goddamn Post, let me tell you. —Plus, yes, there’s the linkrot I’m responsible for, Bad Actor myself, having once used an old Movable Type link-numbering scheme that I can’t easily mask to the new, sane, easily replicable link-naming scheme. I still get hits on those old pages, from time to time. No clue what they pointed to, without Waybacking myself. I wince a little every time I see one in the logs.)

Anyway, here’s what I want, oh plugin developers, oh API jockeys, oh Web 3.0 entrepreneurs agleam in someone’s eye: I want something that will spider through my site on a regular basis, testing outgoing links in all my various entries. Anything that returns a 404 gets automagically plugged into the Wayback Machine, and the href of the archived version closest in time to the date of the entry in question is returned and replaced in the rotten link. Once a week a report is generated: here’s what was found and fixed, so I can go through myself and re-correct any overly zealous corrections. If needed.

Lazyweb powers activate! Thunderbleg explodes into action NOW!

—Filed 6728 days ago to Indulgences; Comment [2].

That’s not what they mean by the Green Lantern Theory.

The latest from two of the Three Little Princes:

Crane asked if Romney believed the president should have the authority to arrest US citizens with no review. Romney said he would want to hear the pros and cons from smart lawyers before he made up his mind.

[...]

Crane said that he had asked Giuliani the same question a few weeks ago. The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently.

Superheroes react:

—art via Living Between Wednesdays

—Filed 6738 days ago to Squawkbox; Comment.

This is Sparta.

I’ve only got the one recording of the Mountain Goats’ “Black Molly.” It’s from Bitter Melon Farm. He’s singing in some dive bar somewhere, you realize, hearing crowd noise bubbling under the tape hiss. The sound of the guitar chords is degraded enough that they slash and ring like bells, and he’s belting out the lyrics in that adenoidal whine he saves for the angry songs, the one that’s either powerful, or the reason you don’t listen much to the Mountain Goats—

black mollies in the aquarium,
darting back and forth as though an earthquake were certain
and I turned up the heater
and I ripped off my shirt
and I grabbed hold of my stereo
and I threw it out the window
you were in town
again

—and this is the chorus; he’s stretching that word “town” out past any normal limit—

you’d come around
again

—and again, with “around,” and you can hear what he’s doing to his voice, punishing it with this song, and I know why half the time when I’ve seen him live, and why on most of the bootlegs I’ve got lying around on my harddrive he usually stops somewhere in the set and says if he goes on, if he sings “Going to Georgia” or “No Children” the way the crowd wants, he’s not going to have any voice left for tomorrow, in Eugene or Olympia or San Francisco.

you were dragging me down again with you

“Fuck Eugene!” somebody usually says. And sometimes he sings what the crowd wants. Sometimes he doesn’t. The crowds have been getting pushier, lately. And larger. But this time nobody’s calling for anything, because he’s still singing “Black Molly”—

siamese fish flashing like sparklers
it started to rain
and the telephone rang a couple of times
I put a bullet through its cold dead brain
and I got out my photographs of you
and I put bullets though all of them too
you were

—and here, in this recording, the crowd noise boils over in cheers and whoops, applause even, as he lifts and pulls his voice to some triumphantly broken point—

            in town
again
you’d come around
again
you were dragging me down again with you
yeah

And maybe it’s the release in his voice they’re cheering? That sudden savage joy that fills you when you finally give up and stop worrying and fall into the fact that you’re going down? That you know, you finally know there’s nothing you can do?

I’d like to think so. But somebody starts the cheer with the bullets, the ones that go through every photograph of her he’s got.

Heidi posted a mashup poster for The 40-Year-Old Spartan, and I chuckled and followed the link and there were enough other goofy mashups there that I emailed it on to a couple of friends who’re the sort to chuckle at that sort of thing. LOLSpartans. You know. And I didn’t think anything more of it until one of them emailed me back. “Those images are really great,” she said, “but those message board quotes, though probably hyperbolic, give me the serious wiggins.”

Message board quotes?

Sure, there was text, but I hadn’t read it. I’d assumed it was just there to frame the funny pictures. Who has time for that? —So I went back to the site. “To say that you’d have to be living under a rock to not know about all the hype surrounding 300 would be an enormous understatement,” it begins.

The movie’s hype has taken on absolutely absurd proportions, to the extent that it just had to be documented on WTFsrsly…

On forums you find posts about crazy 300-related stories such as this one by SmithX on the IGN boards:

And it ends like this—

The hype has turned into madness! (I’m refraining from making a “madness” joke here) The past month there have been many threads (some that had nothing to do with the movie) that randomly derailed into posts screaming “THIS IS SPAARTHAAA!”. Meanwhile, people are hard at work doing these hilarious 300 photo manips:

And then the mashups. But the message board quotes? The crazy 300-related stories posted to demonstrate that the hype’s absolutely absurd?

Here’s the first one:

Well i found out someone i know is in alot of trouble today, he was drunk in a club and there was a girl dancing by some stairs so he went up to her…..................... Kicked her down the stairs shouting this is SPARTA

Here’s the second:

We had all lined up in front of the theater for about 30 minutes, and then they brought us in. I had to stand right beside these two fat, horse-faced lesbians eating each other tongues like they were making a political statement or something. So, like 30 minutes later, we end up shuffling in the theater and these bitches start bitching about having to wait when the movie is about to start and it turns out they were going to see that Jim Carrey movie 23 and they were missing it. So, the ugliest of the two just exclaims like there’s nobody there “This is the wrong fucking movie!”. I just had to do what I did next. I shouted at the top of my lungs “This is SPARTA” and kicked her in the chest, causing her to fall down about 8 steps to the floor. Most were shocked but about 80% of the theater started to cheer as I was forcibly thrown out by 2 officers. Charges are going to be pressed against me apparently, but it was worth it.

And that’s it; those are your examples of crazy 300-related stories that demonstrate the hype has taken on absolutely absurd proportions. —Are they true?

Does it matter?

I don’t know if John Darnielle sings “Black Molly” live all that often. Is it an old favorite now mostly retired from the setlist? (He’s sick to death of “Going to Georgia,” and you can’t really blame him.) An old obscurity, dredged up now and again for the fans who’ve been with him since the cassette days? I don’t know. I’ve seen the Mountain Goats a number of times, and he only ever did “Black Molly” once. Was it the last time we saw him at the Doug Fir? Or the time before that? I’m not sure. Did somebody specifically ask for “Black Molly”? I don’t remember. But I do remember how he sang it. —The other thing I remember from that show, that sticks clearly in my head, is how he sang “Game Shows Touch Our Lives,” his voice lifting a little from the hushed falsetto he saves for the reflective songs, “People say friends don’t destroy one another,” and then Peter joined him and they punched the next line, “What do they know about friends?” the way he punches “Hand in unlovable hand” when he sings “No Children” or “Take your foot off of the brake, for Christ’s sake” when he sings “Dilaudid,” except really that’s more of a strangled yelp, isn’t it. —Damaged people damaging each other. The savage joy that fills you when you let go. Apocalyptic. “Black Molly” begins like that.

“Black Molly” began like that, yeah, there in the dark crammed basement of the Doug Fir, but it started at a yelp and climbed from there, and the crowd all around was starting to grin when he threw the stereo out the window, and there was a whoop when he stretched that first “town” out on a rack, but it was only one whoop. And then the phone rang a couple of times, and he shot it, and then he pulled out the photographs, and there were more whoops, and he put bullets through all of them too, and the crowd started cheering and applauding, just like it does on the Bitter Melon version I’ve got, well before the song is over, yeah!

Why?

I’d like to say it’s the savage joy. It’s the release. You’re coming around again, to drag me down again, and there’s a certain exhilaration in giving up to that, the top of the emotional rollercoaster thrill. —But I could just make out their faces in the dark and even if I couldn’t I could hear it in their voices. The crowd was cheering the rage, however impotently expressed. The crowd wanted the bullets, and the bullet holes in the photographs, and. The crowd smelled blood. —And I know why he’s angry, but it’s not why they’re cheering, and I was left standing there, outside the concert, outside the song, my stomach cold, thinking of screwflies.

—Filed 6739 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment [3].

Hole of darkness.

(Back to the Anodyne well. —Almost ten years ago I was holed up in a sleeping bag on the floor of an elementary school gymnasium somewhere outside Edmonton, speed-reading my way through a copy of—well, you’ll see in a minute. I hadn’t read it in years (had I read it, really, at all?), but I’d decided it was the perfect thing to pastiche for a piece on the Woodstock Mystery Hole. I ended up liking it well enough—this piece, I mean; I liked it even better when I heard it had been read aloud, in most of its entirety, at a poetry night at that breakfast joint on Hawthorne, but it has a new name now. —The breakfast joint, I mean. Has a new name now. I don’t think they do any more poetry nights.

(Barron doesn’t so much do in-person tours of the Hole these days, so I’ve cut the bit with the phone number, and cleaned up some old typos and undoubtedly inserted some new ones. Photo’s by Juliana Tobón. All due apologies to Konrad Korzeniowski, without whom, etc.)

The Henry, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of sails, and was at rest. The Slough stretched before us like, well, like the end of a terminable waterway. Sky and sea would never weld together without a joint here; too many trees, and used car lots and office parks, and besides, the Pacific was a hundred and twenty miles away. The air was dark over Swan Island, and further back seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest and the greatest town hereabouts.

Val, the Editor of the magazine and our host, stood in the bow, looking off toward the interstate. Still, nothing else on the Slough looked half so nautical, and we looked upon her with great affection. Anne had, because her her many years and many virtues, the only cushion on deck, and was lying on the only rug. Carter sat squarely in the aft, round sunglasses perched on his nose despite the gathering gloom. He had sunken cheeks, a stylishly pale complexion, stylishly black clothing, and, with his legs crossed, his hands resting on his knees, palms up, he resembled not so much an idol as someone who wished to be mistaken for one. Val, satisfied the anchor had good hold, or at least that we were not going anywhere for the immediate moment, made her way aft. The day was ending beatifically. The slick oily sheen of the water shone brilliantly, struck by the declining rays of the sun. The pacific stillness of it all was broken only by three young men thirty yards or so off, taking great pains to catch a fish they would not be able to eat. Only the gloom to the south, downtown, brooding (as I said), became more somber, more slatey, every minute. It was difficult to countenance that our normal work was not out here in the bright Slough, but behind us, within, yes, that brooding gloom.

At last the sun set, dusk began to fall about us, and the three young men left, without a fish. Lights began to appear in the used car lots. The US Bancorp Tower, an incongruously pink thing erect in the midst of downtown, shone strongly in the last rays of the sun. Lights of cars and trucks roared past on the interstate, a great stir as ever going north and south.

“And this also,” said Carter suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

His remark did not seem all that surprising. It was just like Carter. Still, Anne and I exchanged glances, wondering perhaps if one of us ought to say something, before—

“I suppose you folks remember I did agree to write a story on the Woodstock Mystery Hole once,” said Carter, and then it was too late. We were fated to hear about one of his interminable experiences.

“I don’t want to bother you too much with what happened to me personally,” he began, betraying with this remark that was what he would best like his audience to hear. “But to understand what happened to me you ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I came to travel down the long dark thoroughfare of Woodstock Street where I first met the poor chap.

“I got the assignment from Tiffany, your Cyberculture Editor. I don’t know how she first got involved. Murky connections there, I don’t doubt. I met her one hot afternoon in the Brasserie Montmartre, which was gratifyingly cool and deep in shadow. She appeared suddenly, the back of her head freshly shaved, dressed in a pink thrift-store Chanel knock-off. She stayed long enough to eat two of my fried artichoke hearts and hand me a most singular envelope.

“It had been white once, turned grubby now and worn to a state of extremely dirty softness, as if it had passed through many hands before travelling from hers to mine. Inside was an extraordinary assortment of papers, articles culled from a variety of periodicals, from the Oregonian, a state-wide newspaper run by a reclusive family back East, to the Grantonian, an exercise in high school journalism. Also newsletters, a pitch-black postcard, obscure flyers, a singularly odd liability waiver…

“The gist of it all was a story about a man named Barron, of indeterminate age and height, who grew up in Madras, discovered the joys of substitute teaching, lived in New Mexico and California for a brief time, then came to Portland, where he bought a house in Southeast, and dug a deep hole in his backyard.

“Apparently, as more than one of the journalists reported with a straight face, the hole had always been there. Or so Barron said—all he’d had to do was take a shovel and remove the dirt, and lo and behold, there it was.

“It presented an extravagant mystery. I looked up from the papers, dazed, and seemd then to catch sight of this Barron, in my mind’s eye. It was a distinct glimpse, of a lone man, pale against the ever-present overcast, standing above a great dark gaping hole in the earth, his hand moving a bit, gesturing, beckoning me down.” And here Carter moved for the first time, startling us all, his form silhouetted against the sickly salmon glow of the sodium-vapor lights, his hand gesturing in conscious mimicry of his vision of this Barron. “I shuddered,” he said, and he did. “Every account of the man commented on his air of inscrutability, that he is ‘shrouded in dark mystery’, ‘too fast to be caught off-guard’, ‘prone to wearing grey suits and thin ties’. That sort of thing. Not one of them came close to answering the great question now looming before me: Why.”

Here Carter drew a deep breath, and ran a hand through his lank black hair. “Of course, that question begged another. How. The only directions I could find turned out to be the (of course) mysterious phrase, ‘Just two miles west of I-205’. Not terribly helpful in getting me to the man.

“I was still pondering this problem when the answer dropped almost literally into my lap. A bit of email, from Barron himself, allowing as how he’d ‘heard’ of me, and wanted to invite me to a ‘Meteor Shower’. Just a brief, cryptic note appended at the top of a standard form letter, giving date and time and details about the potluck and, most importantly, driving directions. I was set.

“His house turned out to be a small grey affair, set close on a dusty cul-de-sac. The front of it is screened by shrubbery and a grey wall, and just off to one side of the front patio has been set up a Gift Shoppe, where I could buy more of the pitch-black post cards (close-ups of the Hole, it seemed), flasks of genuine ‘Vapors’ exhaled by the Hole, various tracts dealing with the Hole, and with an organization known as the Universal Church of Fun, ‘magick’ mojo crystals.

“Next to the Gift Shoppe was a pipe which rose out of the ground and terminated at about chest height, with a sign on it, inviting me to toss in a coin and make a wish. ‘All wishes 100% guaranteed.’ I shook my head at the impossibility of this claim and walked through the open doors of the house and out, into the backyard.

“‘There is pot-luck beer,’ turned out to be the first words I heard Barron speak. ‘But it’s so bad it’s been here year after year… feel free…’ He was taller than I expected, though not so tall as you might think. Still, I had almost no inclination to take him in at the moment, his thin, wiry frame, his unruly mop of grey hair. I was too busy staring at the yard.

“Along the back of it, utterly incongruous in this Southeast neighborhood, was a twenty-foot tall laurel hedge, a perfectly straight, tailored wall of greenery. Below that, spread in a smooth oval, was a lovely, close-cropped green lawn that stretched from the hedge to the back porch. Scattered about its rim were clusters of lawn chairs; already a number of people had arrived, and were disporting themselves genteelly.

“Barron noticed how the hedge drew my attention. ‘Nice, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘I wanted a tree house, but I didn’t have a tree. So I grew a hedge.’ He took me across the lawn and showed me the inside, which was hollowed out; built within was a platform which ran the length of the hedge. ‘People like to climb up here and peer out at the party.’

“I took the opportunity to ask the first question which came to mind: how on earth could he guarantee those wishes? ‘Ah,’ he said, sagely. ‘They are 100% guaranteed to be wishes. What happens after that—well.’ And then he was off, greeting a new group of partygoers.

“I followed slowly, stepping out from behind the hedge, looking back towards the house. And stopped dead in my tracks, feeling for a moment the ineffable mystery I had come here to answer tickling tremulously at the edges of my perception.

“I saw, for the first time, the complex of the Mystery Hole.

“It was a simple affair, but bizarre. A kiosk stood over the Hole, with a sign on it, announcing that this was the ‘Deluxe Mystery Hole.’ Behind that stood a blue fiberglass tower, atop which, incongruously enough, was a rowboat. And rising from the very lip of the Hole was what appeared to be a flight of stairs, climbing dizzily up to meet the roof of the house; as I approached, it resolved itself into a clever trompe l’œil—incredibly narrow, it proved nothing more than a plank of wood, cut cunningly to seem a full staircase.

“I went closer. A concrete apron surrounds the hole, shoring up its edges; an orange safety strap guards one side of the kiosk, and, on the other, a simple wooden ladder rises provocatively out of the depths.

“How long I stood there, on that apron, I could not say.

“Though I could see the bottom—Barron has installed small lights in the Hole—I could not tell how deep it was. Some of the news accounts I had read offered figured which ranged from 15 to 16 feet deep, but standing there, breathing in the cool air wafting from the depths, I was struck by uncertainty. The ladder seemed to descend much further than that, dwindling off to some strange horizon far below my feet, while the cobbled floor of the Hole, gleaming in the dim lights, seemed close enough to touch.

“‘How deep it it?’ asked a serendipitious voice behind me. ‘Well,’ answered Barron’s mellifluous tones, ‘it goes all the way to the bottom.’ I looked up. He was showing a couple of young men to the Hole, and smiled at me, pointing to an enormous sheet of black glass attached to the side of his house, like a sheet of darkness from the Hole lifted up and hung, frozen, in the air. ‘The Black Obsidian Mirror of Higher Truth,’ he said to me. ‘In which we can all see our dark sides.’ One of the young men asked, ‘Should we wear a hard hat?’ Barron pointed to a rack of them, beside the Hole. ‘If you like,’ he said. ‘Hmm,’ said the young man, selecting one, which had the name ‘Larry’ printed on it. ‘What happened to Larry?’ ‘Well,’ said Barron, ‘we have his hat…’

“And as I stood there, unmoving, the men climbed down the ladder, quick as you please, and Barron greeted an older man with a long and tangled white beard, who had driven up from San Francisco for the Meteor Shower, and his companions, two women who had been college roommates many years before, and now were sisters.

“Larry, and his hat. A boat sitting high on a blue tower. Our dark sides revealed. A hedge-house. A Hole. For a moment I was seduced; it all seemed so simple. Of course. The Hole went all the way to the bottom; what other answer was there?

“No. I shook my head. That way was too easy. I would get to the bottom of it; climb down the ladder and see for myself. Only not yet, not yet.”

Anne grunted again at that, a sharp, sardonic sound of amusement. “What?” said Carter. “You laugh? Give me a cigarette.” She did so, wordlessly, and held out her lighter for him. In the sudden light of its flame the hard planes of his face leapt out in sharp contrast to the gloom. “I don’t have a head for heights, as you well know. Nor for depths, as it turns out. People came and went as I steeled my resolve, many of them signing one of the liability waivers attached to the kiosk, planting a hard hat on their heads, and climbing down. A couple got up into the boat high above our heads, settled the oars into the oarlocks, and insisted to any who asked they were headed for Zanzibar. Voices cried out suddenly, peals of laughter rang out, coming from nowhere I could see—until I remembered what Barron said about the hedge, and saw the eyes peering out from the laurel leaves, high above the gathering throng, which in turn jeered the unseen lurkers.

“For some reason, that I couldn’t say, those voices clinched it. I made my choice. Before I could think about it, I signed the waiver, clapped a hard hat on my head, and climbed down, into the Hole.

“It was cool, and dark, though the lights helped. It was not a very long descent. At the bottom, the Hole stretched out into a short tunnel, turned a corner, and ended at a dead end. It seemed unremarkable enough, but that only deepened the mystery. Why? Why were all these people here? What drew them? What about this assemblage of strange, cast-off objects held such a deep fascination? This is only a hole in the ground, after all!

“It was when I turned to leave that I saw the first sign. On a small sheld on the wall stood three tiny figurines: Fred Flintstone, Mister Spock, and Harry S Truman. Left by pilgrims to the Hole? Or Barron himself? I couldn’t say, but something obscure, almost sinister in their juxtaposition urged me to hurry out of the Hole and back into the light. But before I set foot on the ladder, I saw one last thing, that gave me pause.

“How I wish I had not stopped.

“Light spilled out from something low, close to the ground by my feet. I knelt, and saw there a tiny door, a hand’s span in height, with a light shining through, from somewhere behind.

“Where had it come from? How had it gotten there? What lay on the other side? I reached out to touch it, try its handle—it would not turn. The door would not open. Was it a genuine mystery? Or another clever fake? The question maddened me, as I knelt there, an indeterminate distance beneath the surface. Until, with thundering suddenness, the answer came upon me.”

And here Carter stubbed out the cigarette Anne had given him, and something about that last little spark of light going out caused all of us to shiver, I think. “I could not learn what was on the other side,” said Carter, “because there is nothing there. I could never learn the reason why because there is no reason. All these people, the Hole itself, its accoutrements, Barron and his enigmatic sayings, all were here for one thing and one thing only:

“Fun.”

We were all silent for a moment, a long moment, that seemed to stretch almost to a breaking point. Val finally was the first to speak. “What about the meteors?”

“Meteors?” hissed Carter with startling vehemence. “After that, you want to know about meteors? That’s the only question you have?”

“Well,” she said, with more patience than I could have mustered, “it was a Meteor Shower you went to, and—”

“A joke! A simple joke, like everything else there! The Hole, that tower, all that effort expended over a dozen years, his entire substitute teaching career for all I know, all of it for nothing more than silliness, whimsy, fun!” He seemed overwhelmed, and took a number of deep, panting breaths to calm down. “I fled. Climbed out of the Hole, dropped the hard hat, and fled out of the gate. I didn’t care to stay and find out what silly joke would lurk at the bottom of the meteors.

“Needless to say, the story will never be written.”

Silence reigned again. Anne seemed about to say something, then thought better of it, and busied herself with lighting a fresh cigarette. Carter lurched to his feet and moved forward, heading belowdecks at a slow, shambling pace. “The fun! The fun!” I heard him mutter as he passed.

We three waited until he was out of earshot.

“You know,” said Anne, “I asked Barron about his Hole once.” It did not surprise me to learn that she knew him; Anne knows everyone. “It seemed dangerous to me, having folks crawl in and out of a hole in your backyard, and I called him on it. ‘You’re always in danger underground,’ he said. ‘Some folks drive for hours to experience that sort of danger, spelunking in caves and such. I just wanted to be able to do so in my own backyard. So I wouldn’t have to risk my life out on the highways.’”

“Eminently sensible,” I said.

“You want to visit sometime? We just have to give him a quick phone call. He’s in the white pages, under ‘Barron’. He likes to have a couple hours’ notice, before you drop in.”

“Sounds like fun,” I said. “Val? You interested?”

But she was staring amidships, at the hatch which led below, through which Carter had lately passed.

“What an utter drip,” she said.

“Yeah,” I sighed.

—Filed 6743 days ago to Indulgences; Comment.

Dirty fucking motorcycle cops.

Fellow Obie Michelle Malkin wants you to know the crimes of the few outweigh the needs of the many, or some such crap:

It wasn’t enough that Portland anti-war thugs burned a US soldier in effigy, and tore and burned the American flag. According to the Portland Tribune, they also knocked a Portland police officer off his bicycle and committed yet another disgusting act:

This splinter group of protesters showed its support for “peace” by burning a U.S. soldier in effigy. It exhibited its supposedly pacifist nature by knocking a police officer off his bike—an action that brought out the police riot squad.

Perhaps the most disturbing scene of the afternoon, however, involved the man who pulled down his pants in front of women and children and defecated on a burning U.S. flag. This disgusting act actually elicited cheers from some members of the crowd, but we hope that the emotion it produces in the community is one of revulsion…

...The anti-war demonstrators who behaved responsibly this past weekend have an obligation to denounce—and distance themselves from—those protesters who purposefully offend others and consequently destroy the intended message of peace.

Still waiting.

A few fringe actors? Not.

—Meanwhile, out in the real world, here’s what a few “fringe actors” think of the last throes of the whole goddamn dead-ender cause:

Larry says all the cops on motorbikes gave the peace sign to the marchers, but he was only able to capture the image of this one. It stands to reason the hearts of many Portland Police officers must have supported the rally for peace on Sunday. Their counterparts in Iraq are frequent targets of insurgent attacks. Their brothers and sisters, sons and daughters in the military are dying alongside the loved ones of peace activists. Keeping the peace is hard. Our police officers know better than many, that creating peace out of chaos often takes small gestures of friendship as a first step.

Small gestures of friendship. —Greg Sargent quite correctly highlights the small gesture of friendship in the Tribune’s editorial, the one so conveniently left on the cutting-room floor by Malkin’s callous elipses:

The vast majority of the estimated 15,000 protesters who took part in a peace march Sunday in downtown Portland did just that. They were well-behaved, well-intentioned and serious about their cause.

[...]

Most of the people who marched on Sunday fully understand [that violence harms their cause]. And by singling out the few who didn’t, we don’t intend to place thousands of demonstrators under one label.

But it’s too small a gesture. The Tribune went on, like Malkin, like Hannity, to demand that someone—anti-war demonstrators, peace protestors, the Left, Fox Democrats, motorcycle cops, the growing majority of all of us Americans—make a show of denouncing the actions of less than a tenth of one per cent of their number. Fuck that. Wake me when someone—Wolf Blitzer, my senators, the last principled conservative, the Washington Post, the Tribune its own goddamn self—denounces the moral monsters who dragged us into this mess in the first place. Between Dick Cheney and some overly enthusiastic trustafarian shit-head who’s drawn all the wrong lessons from direct action, I know which has done more damage to our flag, and our country, and us. —I know who I’d rather have on my side.

—Filed 6746 days ago to Squawkbox; Comment.

Unzeitgemässe betrachtungen.

I don’t at this point remember what the flyer looked like. It would have mentioned Buffy if Buffy had existed at that point, but it was 1992, and Buffy (as we know it now) was five years away. Did it say something about the X-Files? It would have, if the X-Files hadn’t been a year away itself. I’ll say this for them, if nothing else (though I’ve said more, and will again): they were surfing what ended up becoming one hell of a big, big wave.

I don’t remember what the flyer looked like, but it worked on me at least: I auditioned. On a whim, but. I rode a bus out to Hampshire College, memorizing my lines on the way, and stood in the middle of an empty classroom and read them back: the opening lines of the epilogue to The Secret History. (Have I mentioned that Gonzo is my favorite Muppet? He’s my favorite Muppet because he says in the first movie that he wants to go to Bombay, India to become a movie star.) —Anyway, it worked on them: I got the role: I was going to play Harlan, the one who read from the Necronomicon and went mad but nonetheless lived to tell the tale.

“I managed to get out of taking my French exams the next week, due to the very excellent excuse of having a gunshot wound to the stomach.”

I knew who Lovecraft was at the time, even if I hadn’t read much Lovecraft at all. Maybe “The Call of Cthulhu.” (I’d played the game.) But of course I’d heard of the book. Who hasn’t? —I’ve read a lot since then. Even the Houellebecq. He was very, very good at what he did, Lovecraft, but what it was he was doing wasn’t writing, per se. Took me a while to figure that out.

I’d almost forgotten this part, so I might as well write it down now. They were still looking for someone to play—was it Harlan’s girlfriend, whose name I can’t remember? Or Liz West? Who later became Harlan’s girlfriend, when I simplified things. Whichever; anyway. I actually asked the girl who was working in the software store in the live mall if she was interested in auditioning. (It was called the live mall because it had actual stores in it, and was across the frontage road from the dead mall, which is where I was working, in the market research phone bank.) She was blond and sharp and dressed in the sort of suits you wore to sell software in retail shops in those days, and I rode the bus with her down to Hampshire for her audition in the TV studio we’d later use for the bluescreen work, and I couldn’t tell you who was more nervous, me or her: her because she’d never really acted before; me because I’d been crushing on her for months. (I’d asked her out once before, right after I’d seen Husbands and Wives in the live mall movie theater, but she hadn’t noticed, and anyway she had a boyfriend.) Whichever it was, it didn’t work out. —She got a ride home from her boyfriend. I rode the bus back to Sunderland.

This wasn’t the film student, mind. Nor was she the other girl at the live mall I’d occasionally hangdog around, who worked in the Sam Goody or whatever it was called, and who’d been mishearing the lyrics to “Fuck and Run” until I pointed out it was “fetters and sodas.”

Yeah, I know. I still like it better.

Filming—taping?—filming started in November or so of 1992 and ran through the spring of 1993, on just about every campus in the five-college area: the Hampshire library, the UMass physical plant, exteriors at Amherst, me dancing shirtless in a Mount Holyoke dorm room. (I don’t think we shot anything at Smith, come to think of it. Did we even shoot anything in Noho? I don’t think so.) There was a camera guy and a sound and lighting guy and the writer and the director and the guy who would have been the producer if there’d been more money involved. (Glenn was there, too. Glenn could tell you a lot more than I can. I’m terrible at this sort of thing.) The writer faded away after a bit, though I don’t want to speak ill of him, and the director and the producer guy, especially the producer guy, ended up writing a lot more as scenes had to change given the locations and the actors that were available. —I ended up writing some, too, ad libbing in the scenes in Harlan’s room, where he reads from the Necronomicon and goes mad; I’m afraid I was reading The White Goddess at the time, and so there’s a lot of “I am the shield for every head; I am the tomb of every hope” in that stuff. I wrote a scene between Harlan and his girlfriend that I was really happy with, when we got the physical plant for a couple of days to shoot in, until somebody pointed out I was riffing on what Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher had done to rewrite their scene in Empire Strikes Back. —Have you ever done a play or a student film or anything like that? Then you know what I mean. (Do you? I haven’t made any actual gestures in that rhetorical direction. Ah, fuck it: I just need the transition. —And anyway if you haven’t, let’s face it: this digressive blog post isn’t going to get you any closer.)

I’ve mentioned in the past the last time I took anything hallucinogenic? When I ate mushrooms with the crazy Greek up in Butterfield? And I spent most of the trip grabbing people by the lapels and demanding they show me, right then, something magic, and laughing maniacally when, of course, they just stared at me blankly. Magic? In this day and age? Please. —Pretending to be someone who’d read from the Necronomicon and gone mad for months on end had taken its toll, you see. It’s my only excuse. The crazy Greek finally got tired of my whingeing and dragged me outside, up to the top of the hill above Butterfield, where some crazy artist at some point had built Butterhenge. —There, he said.

Wow, I said.

And I’ll always love him for that, and forgive him anything, even though he used to bellow Ladies! Kiss me! It’s okay, I’m a Lesbian! (He was from Lesbos, you see.)

I rewrote his role as Jamshid. The Exco 347 scene is I think maybe the one most directly lifted from the original script.

“As bad as it looked, there in the Albemarle, I still think we could have patched it up somehow. It wasn’t from desperation that he did it. Nor, I think was it fear.”

Everything was filmed. Taped? Filmed. On little 8mm videotapes. I have no idea what became of the footage (I only ever saw the trailer, which premiered some months after the filming was finished; again, Glenn could probably tell you more). I know it was finished, because they told me, and I asked if they were sure, and they said yes, and I asked if they were damn near positive, and they said Kip, Jesus, we’re done already, it’s in the can, and I said okay, and I cut all my hair off and shaved off my beard. I looked so different they used me as a Miskatonic University administrator in one of the last pickup scenes it turned out they needed to film.

When filming began? Back in November? I would have told you love was a crock. It didn’t exist, and if it did, it was a mug’s game. Which was maybe why I’d been able to ask the girl who worked in the software store in the live mall if she wanted to try out for a movie, even though that sort of cold call is otherwise terribly out of character for me.

By the time it was done? I’d already kissed Jenn for the first time, in December, which I’d like to think surprised us both.

Wow, I said.

We moved to Portland in 1995, and by one of those quirks of fate that unites places like the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts and the People’s Republic of Multnomah County, the director and the producer guy and the guy who’d done either the camera or the lighting and the sound (I remember the guy, just not whichever thing it was he’d mostly been responsible for) had all moved to Portland, too. I actually worked in the same building they had offices in for a while, as Portland is when you get right down to it a terribly small town. —Anyway, for one reason or another they decided they wanted to redo the whole damn thing from scratch. The Necronomicon. You know, some college kids find a copy and read from it. Hijinks ensue. They wanted to know if I was interested in writing—rewriting?—the script. They’d use it to go chasing dot com money, which was thick on the ground in those days.

Turned out I was interested. Who knew? —What resulted isn’t technically speaking mine, though I did write most of it. I’ve long since lost the original original script, the one we actually filmed back in Massachusetts, so I can’t tell you for sure what little was lifted from there. Nor can I tell you which bits were written by Amy Glynn, or which bits were cut by her, either. I won’t play coy and tell you she did the funny bits. There’s some (very) weak stuff in here, yes (I will play coy a little), and only some of it was intentionally put in so the producer guys would have had something to cut if this version had ever actually found some dot com money to burn. There’s stuff I regret leaving out, yes, like the dialogue that would have rationalized the gun, and maybe I would have put it back in before the cameras had ever actually filmed that scene, if. If. —But I’m mostly happy with how it ended up, the script anyway, or I wouldn’t be sticking it in the commonplace book. Mostly, rereading it, I’m fascinated by how quickly it’s become so anachronistic, having characters who so flagrantly smoke. You know?

Amy, by the way, used to have the same voice teacher as Mark Eitzel, but that’s a story for another time. —As for the here and now, folks, I give you:

• Act I: “Some secrets of this world, that God has damned.”
• Act II: “You just want it to be true.”
• Act III: “Satisfaction brought it back.”

1. A young man cannot possibly know what Greeks and Romans are.
2. He does not know whether he is suited for finding out about them.

—Filed 6753 days ago to Indulgences; Comment [5].

Time to Frenzy.

Distressing news via BlogTown: Reading Frenzy, the amazing zine and comics and independent press emporium that’s been a Portland fixture for 13 years, needs our help. Here’s the message from Chloe Eudaly:

We’re rounding the corner on our 13th year, and while I’m not particularily superstitious, it does seem to be adding up to a rather unlucky phase in our long, illustrious history. A series of unfortunate events, both business and personal, have brought us to a critical juncture and we need your support to see us through.

As a faithful reader, I’m sure you appreciate Reading Frenzy and what we offer to our community of readers and publishers: a rare outlet for independent and alternative media, a hub of local literary activity, and a cozy space for art and literary events. Internationally recognized for our devotion to the small press and zines in particular, we’ve even inspired others to follow suit and open shops in their own towns.

Reading Frenzy is as much a community resource as it is a business, and as such has always depended on the generousity of volunteer staff, a team of supportive professionals who help us for free or cheap, and the occasional fundraiser. We have a couple bigger events in the works, but in the meantime here’s how you can help break the spell:

• Go on a Reading Frenzy shopping spree! Can’t find what you want now? Buy yourself (and a few of your friends) gift certificates!
• Buy a Co-Frenzy membership for $100—you receive a 10% discount for one year, plus a signed/numbered Reading Frenzy/Spiral Bound print by Aaron Renier!
• Have a bright idea for a fundraiser? Bring it on! We’re thinking rock show, spaghetti feed, and book sale—but not at the same time!

Thanks so much for your continued support!

Go. Continue your support. And spread the word!

—Filed 6753 days ago to Indulgences; Comment [2].

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