Sniping Snippets and Such

Eldon and the Bully

2010-10-05T19:22:00.000-07:00

by Cole Hornaday

In Kerala, a statue of the goddess Durga sheds droplets of honey.

In Portland, Oregon, a plaster statue of the Blessed Virgin weeps tears of blood.

Outside the Sit-n-Spin Laundromat just off Main Street of the little gray town, the Laundry Pervert dials up the focus on his field glasses as two women stuff their damp underthings into a front loader. He slumps behind the steering wheel of his brown Cadillac El Dorado and loosens the drawstring of his sweatpants.

Hurtling himself through the waitress’ pick-up window and onto the bar and grill’s kitchen countertop called for greater momentum than he had anticipated. “I’m getting old,” Agent E told himself seconds before he started his dead run for the window. He felt his calf muscle pull as he leapt, planted his dry palms against the dull metal surface and hoisted his bulk over the breach. Sweeping his leg over the dull metal frame, Agent E returned the gift of flight to three fried chicken baskets and sent four pairs of salt and pepper shakers into the molten depths of the deep fat fryer.

Landing in a crouch on the countertop, he heard his knees pop like snap peas.

The bully turned slowly, the yellow hue of his eyes matching the grease stains spattered over his apron. Cracked lips parted over teeth etched with the scrimshaw of forty-five years of black coffee and chewing tobacco. The ten-inch butcher knife held in his fist was fang-sharp but gave off no gleam.

In a mental flickering, Agent E ticked through options; leaping from this crouched position guaranteed a high probability of his being instantly impaled, and dropping to one hand to kick the blade out of the other’s was risky at this distance. He could launch himself into the rectangular rack of overhead fluorescents and then swing up and over his target, but there was that hot and smoking grill on the other side…

Not one of these moves would find its mark, because this high-concept fight scene in the kitchen of the Kickin’ It Sports Bar and Grill would never take place. No, this was reality -- dull, colorless, dry-mouthed and itchy-eyed reality.

Eldon took the off-ramp from Highway 22 onto the old 99 Interstate. The cloverleaf brought his little two-door Mazda down and around in a short loop, placing him on a beeline for the little gray town. Times were a-changing here-a-bouts and his former hometown was fast becoming a "commuter city." Locals now happily drove forty or fifty minutes to their workplaces in the Portland suburbs. This new cloverleaf was proof of a world of progress in store for the little gray town.

Lipstick on a pig, he thought.

When he enrolled in college nearly thirty years ago, Eldon planned to leave the little gray town and never look back. History is full of those foolish enough to look back; they turn to salt or their lovers vanish into echoes. Eldon simply wanted to avoid taking stock of the knives in his back.

But return he did; to work in the summer, live rent-free with his parents and be with his friends, until time moved everyone away.

And it was good.

Chapter closed.

Until his peers, cohorts and friends decided moving back to the little gray town was a pretty good idea. They had all been to college, lived the wild life, done beer bongs and backpacked through Europe. Now was the time to return to their roots…

…To be near family…

…To get real jobs…

…To live where things were predictable and safe…

…To grow their kids up…

…To live without fear…

…but especially to grow their kids up.

Heading south on the single-lane highway, Eldon saw little change save the older barns kneeled closer to the earth and the waving acres of hay had been replaced by scads of hybrid tree farms -- identical cottonwoods planted in dense, geometric rows, destined for pulp mills and future textbook leaves or tabloids or porno.

Eldon swore he’d never return to the little gray town were it not for Christmas. All the cows come home at Christmas, and for the past sixteen years the lot had met up on the day set aside by Brits and Canadians as Boxing Day. For the cohorts, it was just a day to say “hello” and do a little catching-up, a little bragging, maybe compare a few notes on what it meant to be the country’s dominant generation. Beer was drunk, cigarettes smoked, cheeseburgers consumed -- then. Now, not so much beer, and the nicotine monkey was unilaterally kicked… but fatty foods were always on the menu.

Then came the addition of babies. Lots of babies. Everyone save Eldon and Daniel (Eldon’s only gay cohort, and a respectfully mum proponent for Zero Population Growth, thank you very much) were entrenched in the laborious process of procreating.

It didn’t bother Eldon initially. In fact, it was amusing for a while, watching them all set aside their passions and juggle their principles for mortgages, carports, riding lawnmowers and satellite TV. Eventually Eldon’s bemusement turned to dismay as his cohorts, with very matter-of-fact nonchalance, willingly plugged in that formula of perpetuation written into their genetic code.

A strand of proteins Eldon was clearly born without.

For a long time the holiday meet-ups were held at a pub in the nearby city -- the state capitol to be precise, where one could purchase liquor. The little gray town had been a dry one for nearly a century, but all that had changed of late.

In the township’s early days, an ultra-fundamental church first staked their claim upon the land with the intent of building a community and a Christian college. When the school fell on hard times, the church allocated several hundred acres for the institution under the stipulation no alcohol would be sold within the city limits. The town agreed and stayed dry as a bone (alcoholically speaking) for almost a hundred years. The little gray town became a mini-Mecca for the righteous and the abstinent. A large Mormon community bloomed, and what was once a Christian college became a college of education complete with working police academy.

On any given evening you could find more tyro police officers prowling the little gray town’s night streets than stray cats, and woe-betide a teen caught out after the 11:00pm curfew or an out-of-towner inching the gas pedal a mile over the posted speed limit.

Ultimately economics called for a change in city policy. The little gray town needed more cash, and vice sells. “So let them drink booze,” the city council said, and the measure passed 53% to 47%.

Let there be booze -- and there was! His cohorts were ecstatic as this shift in little gray town policy made the holiday gathering venue so much more convenient. No more driving those fifteen miles from home. Now we can get that all done right here.

For a decade or more Eldon had kept the little gray town in the deep background. But now he was back, as was the taste of stale copper in his mouth and the sensation of butterflies dying in his guts.

And as fate would have it, the first person to open a bar on the little gray town’s Main Street was the bully.

In this life the bullied have three options: Fight, flight or succumb.

As a teen, Eldon quietly steered away from the works of John Hughes and similar filmmakers, those who believed that in this essentially gentle veil the noble voice of the downtrodden would be heard, and that the righteous would triumph not through fists but by wit. Eldon knew from experience in the dull light of reality the geeks, nerds, chubbies and freaks never have the last say. There is no rising up with fist raised high, blocking out the sun to fall like God’s Own Hammer upon the head of the tormentor. Best to endure the Full Nelson hold and grit your teeth under repeated impact of forehead on tarmac and wait for it all to be over.

He didn’t fight back, ever.

But there were times when karma did a payback.

Walking home from school, casually pedaling his bike in order to keep pace with a handful of schoolmates walking on the footpath beside him, he heard a familiar cry from behind, “Hey, faggot!”

Eldon had a choice: He could pedal away as fast as he could and avoid the bully, or he could stay and attempt to ignore him, save what little face he had. He opted for the latter and the bully commenced kicking the knobby back tire of his Huffy motocross bike. With each impact of the bully’s toe upon his back tire, his bicycle did a little hop forward.

“C’mon, knock it off,” Eldon murmured.

“Get off the bike and make me, faggot,” crowed the bully.

His friends looked away and hustled off down the path as Eldon tried to hold onto a pinch of dignity and remain upright.

Suddenly Eldon felt the entire bicycle jerk from beneath him, his pubic bone slamming into the head tube just below the handlebars.

“Goddammit!” Eldon screamed.

“Goddammit!” echoed the bully. But the bully’s tone was not mocking and his inflection resonated genuine irritation.

Looking back Eldon half expected to see the bully gripping the bike’s rear crossbeam. Instead, his eyes dropped to the toe of the bully’s shoe hooked into the spokes of the bike’s rear wheel. Half a laugh hit the back of his teeth before he could subdue it. The bully swore again and twisted his foot back and forth until it came free.

The bully looked up with hooded eyes and his face froze for a second. He stepped up onto the walking path and quickly trotted away. Facing front once more Eldon heard the pop of gravel under Firestone radials as the police cruiser pulled across the fog-line and blocked his path. The hatchet-faced Chief of Police rolled down his window and barked, “Mister, if I see you playing in traffic again it’ll be a call to your parents and one spendy citation.” Before Eldon could speak in his defense, the headman of the little gray town’s finest rolled up his window and pulled away.

The bully, now yards away, never looked back. Eldon's classmates were long gone. His face was hot and his eyes were a scorching red.

Eldon pulled around the corner from the Kickin’ It Sports Bar and Grill and parked his car along the weed-encrusted curb. The winter sky was the color of slate and for the thousandth time he noted not a single building along the little gray town’s main street stood taller than two stories. Eldon took a hitched breath and pushed into the bar. The charmless interior was warm; muted TV sets tuned to ESPN hung from metal pipes mounted to the ceiling, and slick posters of famous athletes crowded the cedar-paneled walls. His eyes took a moment to adjust as he scanned the room. His friends crouched on barstools around an elevated table at the room’s center. It was the day after Christmas and the place was almost empty. One arm shot up to greet him with a finger-twinkle wave. It was Daniel.

Eldon pulled up a stool, sat down and with typical reptile-brain impulse blurted out: “Guys, did we really have to meet here?”

At the other end of the table, Glen -- the cohorts' team leader and self-appointed wrangler -- rolled his eyes.

In Kerala, crowds numbering in the thousands gather about the honey-oozing statue of Durga. A woman squeezes her way through the icon’s adjunct guardians and wriggles close enough to swipe her hand along the statue’s base. With half a droplet of honey collected on the pad of her index finger, she is hurled back by the agitated crowd. Curling her finger into a loose fist, she drapes her hand with her headscarf and runs for home.

The bridge of the Opus Dei prelate’s nose is slick with sweat and his glasses refuse to stay in place. The night before, an overzealous attendant cranked the thermostat to “high” in anticipation of the official’s arrival, and now the side room off the little Portland, Oregon chapel is sweltering. Pushing his glasses back into place, the prelate notes how the viscous red liquid collecting in the plaster folds of the Blessed Virgin Mary has refused to evaporate. He touches a single droplet with a sterile cotton swab and slides it into the glass vial.

Inside the Sit-n-Spin Laundromat, the women’s underthings, warm and well-fluffed, tumble from the dryer into the empty basket. Near the front window, one woman clears a space on the blue Formica counter while the other lifts the basket and gives it a good shake in an effort to cool down the delicates. Parked just off Main Street of the little gray town, the Laundry Pervert, now on the cusp of ecstasy, drops his field glasses onto the brown Cadillac El Dorado’s passenger seat with a bounce. Pursing his lips and eyelids in tandem, he holds tight to the final image of the woman dumping her fresh, hot clothing onto the flat, cold countertop.

Under the hard fluorescent lights, the bully’s eyes were polished points of black obsidian. Slashing out with the butcher knife, his blade bit a shallow graze across Agent E’s bicep. The pain was instantaneous but when E’s foot connected to the bully’s ragged teeth, the relief was better than morphine. The bully wheeled backwards, the knife spinning from his grip. The bully quickly righted himself and spat out a plume of blood and broken teeth.

“You should have listened when they told you to drink your milk,” said Agent E, landing on the tile floor.

Eldon couldn’t tell you when the bullying began, maybe sometime in the summer of ’78. He seemed to recall it had something to do with the bully’s younger sister. He and the sister were sixth-grade classmates, the bully two years ahead. The little sister was tall and bulky but aggressive in her pursuit of Eldon’s affections. She’d show up at the door in a flower-print dress, tugging the hem down lengthening knees or call at dinnertime just to say “hi.”

What little interest Eldon may have had in the sister trickled away thanks to her socially awkward nature, and when her growth spurt increased near the autumn months, putting her a full two heads above Eldon, it evaporated altogether.

But the bully persisted. Eldon’s summer vacations, spent bent over in the heat and filth, plucking through row after row of strawberries to earn money for school clothes, were made all the more miserable when he heard the thunder of heavy footfalls on the copper-colored earth. Then the womp! sound as a handful of strawberries furry with rot was first slapped against his crown and then ground into his scalp.

Looking away from his friend’s eye-rolling dismissal, Eldon glanced at the laminated bar menu. Perhaps that was the tragic irony of all those years of torment -- the bully thought to defend his sister's honor, and Eldon had never wished to test it.

Daniel leaned over the table and they grasped hands, exchanged a pleasantry or two. “You don’t like this place?” he asked.

“I’d rather not patronize it if I can help it. The owner used to kick my ass on a regular basis when I was a kid.”

Eldon glanced up and, to his surprise, saw the bully through the server pick-up window. It was the first time he had seen this man for nearly thirty years and he looked so… normal. Though there was a shallow hunch to the man’s shoulders and his hair was nearly gone, it was still most definitely he.

Daniel turned and gave the bully a half-glance over his shoulder and turned back. “Yeah. I had my share of assholes, too.”

“Kind of hard to believe after all this time I still empower the guy by dwelling on it,” Eldon mumbled into his empty glass.

“Yeah, but the most infuriating thing is that he probably has no recollection of who you were and what he did to you,” said Daniel. “He could pass you on the street without a clue. Trust me, I recall a few assholes I’d love to invite to share quality time with me, a length of metal pipe and a very dark alley.”

Daniel lived with his boyfriend in Canada. He and Eldon corresponded over the Internet from time to time. He missed Daniel. At that moment he was reminded just how much.

“How long did he terrorize you?” asked Daniel.

“Nearly all the way through junior high,” said Eldon.

“You ever find out why he chose you?”

Eldon’s response came from somewhere dark and shielded with lead. “Does a bully ever really need an excuse?”

“True. Funny how we try to apply logic to stuff like that, and car crashes, and cancer,” Daniel smirked.

“I think it may have started with his sister. She had a crush on me. I avoided her like the plague before he even started in on me.”

“Maybe she told him a different story,” said Daniel.

“Possibly.” Eldon said, though he didn’t think so.

The waitress came around and Eldon ordered two pitchers of beer for the cohorts. He half expected to look up and see the little sister taking his order, scribbling away at her pad, not recognizing him at all.

In Kerala the desperate mother slams the door of her ramshackle home shut behind her. Approaching her son as he sits at the table, eyes unfocused and distant, she delicately unwraps her hand and touches the smudge of translucent amber to the space between his vacant, milk-colored eyes.

In Portland, Oregon, the church’s chief of forensics withdraws his face from the microscope eyepiece. His lips are pursed, his expression a bewildered cloud. He looks back at the Opus Dei prelate at his elbow and pauses. The two have worked together for decades, sharing nonverbal shorthand more commonly known to married couples. The scientist gives a single steady nod to the other and the message is clear: “This may be it.”

The Laundry Pervert returns his $300 pair of Sharper Image field glasses to their patent leather case. Pulling his sweatpants back over his hips, he reties the drawstring about his rounded middle. Popping open the El Dorado’s glove box, he removes a worn container of handy wipes. Reaching under his seat, he twists the release knob and rolls the seat back, giving himself room to swab down the recently anointed steering wheel and dashboard.

Once the bully was off balance, kicking him to the floor was an afterthought. Applying the ball of his right foot to the bully’s throat, Agent E paused before applying the fullness of his weight to the other’s trachea.

The bully’s face split into a bloody, jagged grin. “Happy now?” he said, his voice like a hasp on raw bone. Before E could respond, the bully began to shudder and choke…

Eldon downed his second pint and watched the top of the bully’s head as he worked over the hot grill, his head bobbing in and out of the pickup window frame.

Eldon and his father didn’t really talk, not like adults, until after Eldon had left home. As an administrator of the little gray town’s only junior high school, his father kept more than attendance records; he kept his share of secrets. In his capacity, he was often privy to the darkest things people will do. In the shallow Petrie dish of a rural community, germs of rumor can become a pandemic in hours. Eldon's father, well-educated and worldly, buried them all -- ensuring careers, saving reputations and shoring the ramparts of more than a few families.

Now retired and having moved far, far away from the little gray town, Eldon’s father spent his days organizing charity golf tournaments, musing over a life spent in the service of others and spilling the occasional bean.

“Their family used to foster a lot of kids. Because they were doing it under the umbrella of the Mormon Church, getting the kids into the system wasn’t too much of a pain. It was just coping with them once they got there,” his father had once said over his second glass of Riesling.

It was a chilly November afternoon when Eldon and his dad decided to look into pricing new radials for Eldon’s ramshackle Mazda. How he and his father had gotten onto the subject of the bully’s family life, Eldon didn’t recall. “I don’t know how long the mother had been abusing this one kid,” his father said. “He was about fifteen. I don’t know how many other foster boys she’d gone after. It scares the crap out of me to think about it. But the vice principal and I thought it best to get on the horn to the church bishop, see if we couldn’t get the elders to intervene. We figured if we could keep it within the church it would keep all hell from breaking loose.”

“What kind of abuse are we talking about?” Eldon asked. He saw the bully, his bully, all of twelve years old, looking up from within the shadow of a stout, red-haired woman with eyes like polished points of black obsidian and a face of granite.

“Sexual,” said his father.

Eldon swallowed and the world went from a black-and-white frieze to a watercolor wash of grays.

“Did she abuse her own kids?” Eldon said.

“Yeah, I don’t know. It was sexual in nature. The church dealt with it. I had to admire them for that,” said his father.

Eldon downed his third pint and got up from his seat. He fixed his eyes on the server window and the bobbing, balding head beyond.

Daniel’s eyes did a little bulge. “Where you going?”

“To pee,” said Eldon.

There was a little edge to Daniel’s voice: “You’re not going to get in his face, are you?”

“No,” said Eldon. “I’d have to take him by surprise, and that would mean hoisting my fat ass through that server window…”

Daniel looked back at the bully. “You’d need a running start for sure.”

“I’d be winded before I hit my mark.”

“Go pee,” said Daniel.

Agent E felt the delicate bones in the bully’s neck snap and watched as the other man’s eyes rolled back in his head. Cocking his head to the side, he looked down into the bloody mess of the bully’s face. “Shouldn’t you disappear in a flash of ash and flame?” he asked the corpse.

In Kerala, the milky haze that has clouded the little boy’s brown eyes since birth instantly clears. He stands and walks directly to the glassless window of the one-room hovel. A breeze picks up on the humid wind and he blinks. A black sparrow arcs overhead, and he tracks it until it flies over the next hill of the shantytown. At his back, his mother bites into her headscarf, and tears soak the vibrant red cloth. “Are those clouds?” the little boy asks.

In Portland, Oregon, a host of black sedans pull up before the little Catholic church and a squad of men in dark suits and glasses take up a formation along the sidewalk. Dressed in starched white robes, a church officiate exits the center-most sedan. Surrounded by the pack of darks suits, he is hustled into the muggy room behind the sanctuary.

Off to the side sits an empty wheelchair. A woman kneels, her arms outstretched, tears sliding down her face as her eight-year-old daughter takes the first steps of her life. The Opus Dei prelate looks to the officiate and nods, his lips parting into his first genuine smile in decades.

In the little gray town, the Laundry Pervert secures his seatbelt, puts his car in gear and drives the three blocks north to the town hall. Parking in his reserved spot, he isn’t surprised to see the lot is all but empty. It is Sunday, after all. He has a handful of land use proposals to review by Monday, and he did promise the town's constituents that, if elected mayor, he would work tirelessly in their best interests, Sundays included if need be.

On his way back from the men’s room, Eldon paused after rounding the corner past the kitchen. He could hear the sound of a metal spatula scraping charbroiled crud from the grill. Eldon watched the bully’s back as he worked. The bully turned. Their eyes met. The bully paused.

“Hey…”

“Hey,” Eldon said.

“You can place your order at the bar,” said the bully.

“Yeah, I know. It’s just…” his words dried up and blew away. “It’s just kind of weird, standing here, you know. This used to the old Black’s Department Store. In fact, I think right here was where they hung all the men’s Levis.”

“You’ve got a pretty good memory,” the bully said without humor and returned to his grill.

“Yeah, better than most. I think it gets in my way sometimes.” Eldon walked back to the table and his cohorts, pausing long enough to give Daniel’s right shoulder a firm squeeze.

Love and thanks to Kendra, HB, K., and R'Chaard

Somebody Open a Window, It's Getting a Bit Squamous Up In Here...

2010-04-14T14:42:00.000-07:00

Drosophila Melanogaster: Those pesky, annoying little fruit flies that replicate faster than bacteria, turning the whole atmosphere of your abode into that of a garbage dump. I take out the garbage. They come back. I spray the bucket. They come back. I walk around with a towel swatting them and they come back.

What recourse do I have other than burning this place to the ground?

Help.

Correspondence initiated September 30, 2009

Transcription as Follows:

Laurel Pederson Once I tried vacuuming them right out of the air...Didn’t work. I've heard cedar drives them away. Like shavings or some such. September 30, 2009 at 10:30pm

Cole Hornaday Hmm. I like the idea of vacuuming them right out of the air--that sounds like it could be a good bit of aerobic exercise. September 30, 2009 at 10:40pm

Laurel Pederson I’m not going to say it won't be fun. But they may fly right out after you turn it off. September 30, 2009 at 10:42pm

Sharon Kingsford We bought this cool little thing we hang over our compostables that does away with the pesky things. The brand name is Hot Shot. It contains dichlorvos. We'll probable find out it causes cancer or something, but at least we got rid of the fruit flies. September 30, 2009 at 10:52pm

Cole Hornaday Sharon: Is it like a fly strip? September 30, 2009 at 11:24pm

Elizabeth Ann Cable They hang out in your sink drain waiting...October 1, 2009 at 6:18am

Heidi Bertman The single fruit fly hanging out in our bathroom finally perished. I have had luck by washing down all the surfaces with a baking soda and water solution. And by keeping literally everything in the fridge. They don't survive the fridge. October 1, 2009 at 6:45am

Rachel Nathanson If you put a saucer of apple cider vinegar out they will land in it and drown. It is a good way to get rid of them. October 1, 2009 at 7:10am

Dawn Wildfang They are moist damp breeders, pour bleach in your drains and cover them. They hang out around warm moist fresh water spots to lay eggs that look like specks of fine ground sawdust and usually attach up under the sink, counter. Also put away any food source, fruit.

Too many years of bartending knowledge. October 1, 2009 at 7:46am

Sharon Kingsford It looks more like a long rectangular air freshener. It's a yellow strip of something encased in plastic with a hanger at the top. They call it a pest strip. You can see a picture here http://www.drugstore.com_xp88409_333181_sespider/hot_shot/no_pest_strip.htm October 1, 2009 at 1:00pm

Rachel Nathanson Um, did you read the caution on that thing? I might opt for apple cider vinegar. ;-\ October 1, 2009 at 3:58pm

Cole Hornaday Oookaay. I picked up some cider vinegar, will try that when I got home tonight. Dawn, if that fails, you'll find me dumping bleach down the drains as well--I just hate that stuff so much. October 1, 2009 at 4:03pm

Laurel Pederson CEDAR! Dude. It drives them away. Shavings or something. Or cedar mothballs. And it smells better than vinegar. October 1, 2009 at 4:10pm

Transcription Ends.

File Corruption Resolution Initiated. Remnant as Follows:

Cole Hornaday DROS-War Zone Journal

Entry Date 09.10.03

Final Entry.

The night was endless. Shortly after dusk, enemy sorties broke the air space over the counters and sink into strategic grids, whirling and diving in an ecstatic dance of death and destruction. Shiva smiled.

Chemical assaults on the Formica no-man’s land yielded little ground. When the aerosol option was exhausted, we met the enemy hand-to-hand with standard issue terry-cloth towels and rolled newspaper. Casualties were meager on either side.

Enemy troops continued to rally, emerging from shower and garbage disposal drains, waste buckets and cupboard crannies. It was clear enemy proliferation was imminent without an immediate and all-encompassing deterrent: the nuclear card was dealt.

Filling a saucer with apple vinegar and placing upon the glass carousel, we drew back and waited in the gloom for the enemy to take the bait.

A buzzing filled my ears, and not the persistent tinnitus earned that summer spent blasting Metallica dialed up to eleven. The enemy had arrived and they were everywhere. They gathered about the saucer’s rim. The waiting was agony. But not a single one fell in. Perhaps the Intel was wrong? Minutes turned to more minutes and more minutes turned into about and hour, but nary a fumble was made by the adversaries.

Time was up. Dozens of enemy troops were now gathered at ground zero. It was now or never. I slammed shut the microwave door and set the keypads for HIGH and 2:00 MINUTES.

No satisfying sparks, pops, or orchestral wails, just the droning sound of the exhaust fan and the trundle of the carousel.

When I opened the shielded door, all was silent. Suddenly a red speck of movement and one—NO, TWO of the enemy emerged from cover, taking flight they instantly disappeared.

How?

For generations man has used the drosophila fruit fly as the subject for numberless genetic experiments. Thanks to their speedy period of reproduction and brief lifespan, geneticists can tease and mutate, write and re-write, map and remap changes wrought upon the fly’s mitochondrial code—filling volumes with data, enough to rival the stacks of Alexandria.

They can survive just about anything, even having their very insides irradiated into a super-heated microwave scrambled.

Since dawn all has been quiet and strangely so.

I smell burning cedar for some reason…

And I keep hearing something eldritch, bloated and squamous moving within the walls.

October 2, 2009 at 7:13pm

Transcription Ends.

Sharon Kingsford Thanks Cole! You just helped two more fruit flies mutate yet again. When you wake up some night and those fruit flies are sucking out all your fruity goodness you'll wish you'd risked cancer and just bought the Hot Shots. October 3, 2009 at 12:47am

“Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species -- if separate species we be -- for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world."

H.P. Lovecraft "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family"

I, American Kabuki

2010-03-04T17:59:00.000-08:00

Life As a Costumed Mascot

About a year ago I came across a little-known independent film, written, directed, and starring Scott Prendergast called KABLUEY. The film is brilliant for no other reason than it drags the viewer into the hot, smelly, humiliating and frequently surreal world of professional mascotting.
Prendergast plays Salman, a loner, loser, sad-sack of a cipher arriving on the doorstep of his sister-in-law to help care for her two unruly boys while his older brother serves in the Middle East. Salman has been misled; room and board are not part of the deal. To earn his keep he dons the oblong-headed mascot costume of a recently collapsed dotcom and stands for hour after hour along a vacant rural Texas roadway distributing flyers for rental space in the company’s (now equally vacant) corporate headquarters.

No one knows Salman in this stark little town, no one recognizes him in or out of the big blue head. If he wasn’t before, Salman is a complete non-entity.

Salman also becomes an impromptu voyeur, privy to parts of people’s lives he wouldn’t be without the suit, and as this silent, featureless, creature of blue felt he makes friends and connections he’d be incapable otherwise. Salman’s affection-starved nephews so quick to abuse him before, now race to embrace him.

If Prendergast did not have a history as a costumed critter, color me shocked because he captured that whole reality so incredibly well it inspired me to take a look back on my life in a fuzzy suit.

An actor will take on any number of humiliations in pursuit of their art or, at least, in pursuit of their rent masquerading as pursuit of their art.

Opportunities for an actor’s self-inflicted debasement abound and for every other star that reaches a zenith, there’s a file of smutty photos or tasteless promotional efforts ready to be unearthed. In that light, the notion of dressing up in a big head and four-fingered gloves isn’t so bad.

There’s really very little written on the subject of professional mascoting or mascotry, but years ago a friend mentioned an article by Ned Zeman, printed in the December 1990 issue of Spy Magazine entitled, ‘American Kabuki.’ Between viewing KABLUEY and Zeman’s examination of the moist and reeking underbelly of costumed critter work, many things began to finally gel for me.

Mind you, much of Zeman’s discussion keeps tongue laid gently up against cheek. This was Spy Magazine, after all.

“Throughout history,” says Zeman, “every great culture has made its own singular, profound contribution to the performing arts. What is the singularly American art form, the ingenious method of expression that says to the world, and to history, Experience this art form, and you will have experienced America? It is, of course, American Kabuki—the art of performing in big, furry costumes.”

During my tenure as an American Kabuki, I donned oversized, fuzzy heads on two occasions. Strangely enough, in the broad pantheon of American Kabuki, a spectrum that ranges from dogs and wolves to ethnic caricatures and waterfowl, fate twice gave me the likeness of a big cat; a black panther in high school, and bobcat post-college.

According to Zeman there is only one reason a relatively sane human being would be compelled to wake up each day and ceremoniously put on 40 pounds of synthetic animal fur…the theatre.

Perhaps, but I’d argue there was far more to the lifestyle than just theatre.

And before we go any further, I’d like to stop and point out that my experience, and the insights found in Zeman’s article, derive from those dim days before the full onslaught of the Internet, before the all too diverse cornucopia of fetishes and aberrant sexual practices of everybody and his dog (and everybody with his dog, for that matter) became public forum. It was before Furries.

Never heard of Furries? Do a quick Google search, and come back.

***

Yeah, I fluttered my hands about my face trying to fling off that icky sensation as well.

Moving on…

When I wrapped up my first Bachelor’s degree in 1989 there wasn’t much for me in the way of career tracks. Jobs were everywhere, but not a one that fed my interest. My acting skills allowed me to interview well, but once hired each subsequent employer seemed to really enjoy firing me.

“You’re just not learning fast enough.”
“You don’t seem engaged in what you’re doing—you look like you’re bored”
“You’re just making too many mistakes.”
“You’ve been on the job three weeks, you shouldn’t still be asking me these questions.”

Two things sustained me during this period of perpetual McJob flux; community theatre and my regular gig as Captain Bobcat.

Bob’s Burger Express no longer exists. It was a modest local hamburger chain started by Bob Corey back in the 1960s. The restaurants ranged up and down the I-5 corridor between Salem and Eugene, OR. They weren’t big or flashy. They weren’t fast food juggernauts like McDonalds or Burger King, but they had a solid and supportive local following and they had a fairly astute marketing department. And they had a mascot.

Captain Bobcat’s costume wouldn’t win any Tonys. His huge head was made of fake fur and cotton batting stretched over a wire frame, and the head was so big I carried it around in one of those medium-sized drum cases. His face was broad and flat, more Persian than feral, to be sure, with simple facial details, plastic see-through mesh for eyes, and a broad, flat vinyl nose. His garb wanted desperately to be a mash-up of 1970s disco god and an extra from Sid and Marty Krofft; white gloves, glittery silver cuffs and spats, red satin party pants and (in my case) a knee-length cape, finished off with a garish, sparkly pull-over top emblazed with a bulls-eye pattern at the center of which hung the Captain’s emblem.

Captain Bobcat (CB) did public appearances at malls and county fairs, drove his tiny go-cart in holiday parades, appeared in local TV ads and radio spots but, most significantly, gave safety presentations to kids.

Being Captain Bobcat required some real performance skills beyond the average costume mascot’s job description because, unlike his fuzzy-headed brethren, CB broke a cardinal rule of the American Kabuki; he spoke.

According to Zeman, there are certain rules one must follow in order to lead a righteous and fruitful lifestyle of an American Kabuki. After inscribing the rules in his article Zeman leans upon them as Asimov did his Laws of Robotics…

1. Never Speak.

2. Never Remove Your Head in Public

3. Never Reveal Your Identity, Particularly When in Costume.

4. Be an Optimist.

5. Don’t Just Play the Character, Be the Character (This is Key).

Shameful it is to admit; during my years as CB I broke each and every tenant of the American Kabuki rulebook at least once.

Not only did I speak but also my head was removed in public --though done so with the assistance of a handful of over-bred, semi-rural twits at a local county fair.

It was just another hot summer day at the Marion County Fair, circa 1987. Cue the canned calliope and the aroma of cotton candy and deep-fried elephant ears. The crowds were dense and there was that pleasant general burble of crowd noise upon the air, but it didn’t prevent me from hearing the trio of pimple-faced dinks plotting at my back.

It was a not unfamiliar scenario at this point of my mascot career, so as casually as possible I continued handing out balloons and coupons for free fries while I gradually inching myself away from the gibbering pack, hoping to relocate myself among the throng of passersby and remove the culprits clear run at their target.

It was a fruitless effort. I was the lame gnu about to be picked off from the herd by a team of giggling hyenas. No one noticed my peril. Why should they? In my huge fuzzy head and red satin cape I wasn’t a person, I was a cartoon character.

If anything, they probably thought it funny.

Upon donning the trappings of an American Kabuki you learn instantly your identity is no longer your own—it has been dissolved, and even the most innocent of privileged, adolescent semi-rural shit-heads who say their prayers by night and never play hooky will foist all manner of abuse upon you because when you’re in that costume you cease to be a human being.

The three punks encircled me. When the tallest of the trio grabbed my elbows, locking my hands at my back, the shorter kid grabbed CB’s head. When the head came free I felt a gust of fresh, clean air hit my face. I recall my matted hair falling over my forehead and through the sweaty strands I fixed that rude little bastard with the darkest stare I could muster. When our eyes met he visibly blanched and his jaw dropped.

I’d been at this gig long enough to know he and his pals hadn’t the wherewithal to contemplate a world beyond yanking off that head. They probably thought they’d have a laugh, run off with the big fuzzy thing tucked under one of their arms and perhaps even goad me into a playground-style game of Keep Away.

They didn’t reckon on how that person under the fuzzy head would feel, or that he might just be psychotically pissed off.

Were I a teller of taller tales I would now describe in detail how the little wretch soaked and soiled himself through and through. But I’m not and he didn’t …but it would have been wonderful had he done so.

From over my shoulder, the kid holding my arms saw his little buddy’s slack-jawed gape and released me. The middle kid, the most clueless of the lot, began calling to the smaller to toss him the head. The smaller just stood there, shriveling under my glare. He mumbled something apologetic and tossed the head back into my arms.

I slung the head back upon my shoulders, went to my pick-up, and took an extended cigarette break.

The Disney Corporations contract American Kabuki work around their parks in pairs, one in costume, the other hovering about as bodyguard. The pair trades-off wearing the suit, one in, one out, in half-hour intervals.

I would spend two or three hours at a stint in that smelly old suit and no one to shadow me. I was mobbed, tackled, shoved, punched, kicked, and decapitated. But for all the abuse I received, I got numerous hugs, pats, ear scratches and Thank You’s, both verbal and written--the best of which I received in crayon pictogram.

AND I erred volumes against Zeman’s dictums. I’ll spare you the tedium and instead share one other anecdote, a moment of personal revelation I would not have experienced were it not for Captain Bobcat.

Please step back in time with me. It’s about six years before I donned to big, fuzzy head. It’s the early 1980s. It’s high school in a rural Oregon town, a place yet to discover the notion of cultural diversity.

In 1984 my graduating high school class numbered around three-dozen people, only a tiny handful of them people of color. Perhaps their number was merely a matter of ratio to that of any student body in the region at that time. I couldn’t tell you. Rural is as rural does.

Regardless, there was the inevitable tension between the pinks and the tans and the tiny handful of browns and beiges.

There was a young woman—we’ll just call her “N”, short for Nefertiti, because my crush-bound heart saw her sharp, angular features reminiscent of that ancient stone bust depicting Egypt’s lost queen; the swan-like neck, the almost almond-shaped eyes and light coffee and cream toned skin. I thought her stunning above all others. She had poise and she had grace, and a class that transcended any other young woman in those lonely halls. The quality of her character had nothing to do with the color of her skin.

I remember once confiding to a female classmate of the touch of a crush I had on N. She flinched saying, “But she’s black. Don’t you have a problem with that?”

Of that, little more need be said.

I always treated N with the utmost respect, if not deference. But one day the classroom windows all but blew out and I was the unwitting cause. I recall sitting at my desk, a row behind N, recounting some story to someone beside me. Who knows what I was talking about, all I recall was describing a scene that included uttering the words “ghetto blaster,” a term once coined in reference to portable stereos or boom boxes. N whirled on me and in so many words called me a bigot—“ghetto” was a racist term, she snapped, the implication made all too clear I was a racist for using it.

I choked, stuttered and blanched as only a naïve-but-well-meaning-pink person and would-be liberal in the heart of rural Oregon can. I struggled to form some kind of apology, but N shut me out and turned around. Nefertiti had spoken and the little pink burbling guilt-creature never mustered the strength to speak to her again.

N didn’t graduate from Central High. Within a year I noticed her absence in the halls and classrooms. I heard she’d enrolled at a high school in Portland--more metropolitan, to be sure, and hopefully more tolerant.

I never got a chance to apologize or explain myself. I wanted so badly to prove to her I had never intended to make a racial slur, but the opportunity was past. In the years to come the universal dilemma of this incident became the fodder for many a debate in my college Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, Asian Studies and African American studies classes; where do you draw the line between racist condemnation and simple naiveté?

If you get blasted for a boo-boo, what do you do-do?

It’s a much more loaded issue than one would anticipate. All I know was that once I had a big-time crush on N, and in one waggle of my tongue the hope of love fulfilled was decimated. But I also think I got a crucial peek into how isolated she felt and how pent up those feelings had become.

I secretly wondered that my culturally adverse peers and me had created in N distrust, if not hate, for pink people.

Now we take a big bobcat leap about six years from then into the future. I’m back in the fuzzy head, passing out balloons at the local mall. The Captain is in ‘silent running’ mode. Though doing the safety presentations for classrooms packed with kids was fun, especially when it came to seeing their eyes bug when the costumed being before them actually spoke, sometimes it was less draining being dumb, especially for longer gigs like mall appearances.

But for all the jerk-wads there were kids and adults who knew the Captain on sight and greeted him with great appreciation. Kids would dart out of the crowd and hug me or stand at my elbow and tell me all kinds of wonderful things. Sure, there are the requisite screamers and runners—big fuzzy heads are scary to little people, but there were others simply bursting with unbridled, unconditional affection and the urge to express it.

It was one such moment while handing a string of a helium balloons to a nearby parent (no mean feat in white cotton gloves, let me tell you) that a small, two-legged missile rushed at me from beyond my limited peripheral vision. He was a little guy, reaching to just above my knee--creamy brown skin, a curly thatch of jet-black hair and a pair of stunning golden eyes. He glommed onto my leg and gave it a mighty hug. I looked down and silently stroked his head.

These are peak moments for the American Kabuki. Crossing paths with people, most often those very small children fortunate enough to see the world as a place of wonder and warmth and kindness.

I heard someone call to the little boy and he twisted his face from where he’d buried it in the Captain’s pantaloon.

His mother’s long legs entered my crosshatched line-of-sight and I was given a gut-kick hard enough to hurtled me back in time. There was N. She didn’t look all that different. Perhaps she stood taller, perhaps there was more confidence in her stance, but it was undoubtedly she and I was looking right at her and she had no clue.

Her little boy disengaged himself and reached for a balloon. “Come on, honey, daddy’s ready to go.” I methodically tied the string to the little boy’s wrist and looked up to see Dad’s approach. He was as pink as pink could be. Pink like me.

She took the guy’s arm with one hand and Daddy lifted the little missile into his arms. Nice. Nice picture.

So, what’s my point?

Had I not been in the Captain Bobcat regalia, it is entirely likely a moment this significant would have been missed. N hurt me when she accused me of being something I was not—or did not mean to be, but it was a safe bet her outburst came from a place of isolation and disenfranchisement. What I learned from the seclusion and anonymity of that big, ugly mask, was whatever she felt about the world in high school was now settled and gone.

I’d held onto that ugly little moment for years and it was time for me to let it go.

She looked happy and as she walked away I could only hope that happiness would last and last.

I held onto the CB gig for another year, but eventually I went back to school to pursue my Masters Degree in, yes, Acting. It was a rough road, and there were moments when I got so weary of the constant ‘constructive’ criticism and 15-hour days spent on campus there were times I actually missed that hot, smelly costume and its power to wipe me (albeit, temporarily) from the face of the earth.

Oregon UFO Festival reaches 10-Year Mark

2010-01-24T00:49:00.000-08:00

**Below is one of my first forays into freelance writing.

In July of 2009 I persuaded my best pal, Dennie Chong, to take a road-trip with me to McMinnville, OR to cover the 10nth annual UFO Festival sponsored by McMenamins brew pubs. It was a blast. Dennie took some awesome pictures. I talked with some amazing people. But when it came to finding a home for this piece, takers were non-existent. After nearly six months of pitching, I grew despondent. Early on, my dream was for this article to find a home with THE FORTEAN TIMES or, perhaps, FATE MAGAZINE.

This hope never materialized.

As a last ditch, I submitted the piece to TAPS PARAMAGZINE (a publication loosely affiliated with SYFY CHANNELS's GHOST HUNTERS reality-TV program). I sent an email with my article text, a sampling of Dennie's pictures, and a request for the publication's submission guidelines.

This publication, not unlike all the others, did not respond to my inquiries.

In October of 2009 I went to the coffee shop located above the University Village Barnes and Noble here in Seattle to meet someone.

It was a first date.

Arriving early, I decided to browse the magazine racks and spied the latest edition of TAPS PARAMAGAZINE. Upon taking the copy from the rack, I spied a cover article blurb noting the OREGON UFO FESTIVAL. I thought, "Shit, no wonder publishers have been so reticent, someone else beat me to it..."

Imagine my shock and dismay when I peeled back the cover and discovered it was my own article with my own byline. Dennie's pictures were not present, just some lousy stock photo images.

That day I called the offices of the publication. Upon reaching a live person, I advised them they had no right to publish my article without notifying me. The woman I spoke to said that because mine was an unsolicited article, TAPS PARAGAMAGZINE was in no way responsible for compensating me--not even with a complimentary copy of the magazine.

I checked with the by- laws of the Freelancer's Writer's Union and found that, yes, they were obliged to pay me because, technically, my work IS copyright under my name once I put word to paper. I sent a threatening letter, certified, to TAPS PARAMAGAZINE advising them of this and quoted to them, line and verse, the union by-laws but it to no avail.

I never heard back.

My heart broke a little.

...I had the best time with Dennie on this road trip. I spoke with some amazing people. Dennie took some equally amazing pictures--but, then, he does that quite often.

I mourn that we didn't make any money off from our efforts.

...bastards.

Boycott SyFy's GHOST HUNTERS. Read my article.

And a VERY special thanks to Richard Schulte and Julie Hoverson for their invaluable help as proof readers and editors.

Oregon UFO Festival reaches 10-Year Mark

UFOs: Still a resilient cultural phenomena once you can get past the doggy costumes and deely boppers.

McMinnville, Oregon, nestled in the heart of Oregon Wine Country, home of the UFO Festival (May 15^th and 16), is a tiny town of roughly 30,000 souls. Having been raised in this region, it shocks me the provincial rural Willamette Valley culture would tolerate an event like this, let alone sustain it for ten years.

Upon our arrival my photographer Dennie Chong and I gravitate to the nexus of UFO Festivities, the McMenamins Hotel Oregon pub. Our waitress greets us sporting springy antenna capped with little gray alien heads. “Nice deely boppers,” I say. She looks at me askance, she’s never heard the term, and she thinks I’m flirting. “Are you here for the UFO Festival?” the plucky young thing asks. We nod. “Oh, good—you guys are my favorite!”

A couple enters and slides into a booth ahead of us. Tall and lean, they are dressed identically, sharing an affect for spade shaped bangs teased over exceptionally high foreheads. They move in sympathy, almost rehearsed. I wonder, are they genuine “visitors”, or simply devoted to the belief they are.

For the first day, festivities are light and décor is sparse; a few colored Mylar balloons shaped like gray aliens drift about and one spies the occasional spacecraft painted across shop-front windows, but little more. We’re feeling a little let down.

I ask our antennaed waitress about the lack of decoration, this is a festival, after all. She assures me things become more colorful come tomorrow with the parade, costume ball, and the alien pet costume contest wherein participants tempt fate by dressing their animal companions as otherworldly creatures.

Tim Hills is staff historian for McMenamins Hotels, Pubs and Breweries. He conceived of the festival 10 years ago while pursuing a promotional angle for the opening of the newly renovated McMenamins Hotel Oregon. Deep in the stacks of the Yamhill County Historical Society, Hills came across a story from 1950 about Paul and Evelyn Trent’s UFO encounter and its series of famous photographs, images still considered to be some of the most significant evidence of flying saucers.

Kicking things off in 1999, Hills invited noted ufologist, and authority on the Trent photos, Bruce Maccabee as guest speaker. “We had no expectations, as it was supposed to be a one-off thing to mark the 50^th anniversary of the Trent sighting.” Hills did not anticipate Maccabee’s draw within the UFO community, and McMenamins was overwhelmed by the turnout. “We held it in what’s now our dining overflow room … and people just packed out into the lobby and into the restaurant.”

So a one-off event became an annual one, with a parade following two years later. “We realized very early on that we had to maintain the integrity of the serious speaking part of the festival or else the whole thing would just fall apart into something really silly and that’s not what we wanted to do,” says Hills. “We’ve been very fortunate that some of the bigger name speakers [have drawn] people to the serious side of the festival.” Since its modest inception, the festival has grown exponentially, drawing such notable names as Budd Hopkins, Richard Dolan, Dr. David Jacobs and Jesse Marcel Jr.

This year the UFO Festival welcomed Kathleen Marden, niece of Betty and Barney Hill, and former MUFON director of field investigator training, speaking with physicist and researcher, Stanton Friedman. The two brought to light heretofore-unknown facets of the Hill abduction case found in their new book, Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience.

Also present were UFO witnesses Kris and Marc Bales sharing their 2000 encounter in the wilds of Northern Idaho. Peter Davenport of the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle discussed a roundup of 2008 UFO cases.

But it was keynote speaker Linda Moulton Howe’s presentation of one family's 1974 eyewitness encounter between military and UFO in Albuquerque, New Mexico that brought in an unprecedented number of listeners, filling each and every one of the McMinnville Community Center stadium seats and spilling the audience onto the center floor.

Come Saturday afternoon and the quiet streets of McMinnville are alive. It seems the town’s entire town population, and large percentage of those neighboring, crowd the sidewalks. I lose my photographer in a squad of clone troopers and klingons. The parade rolls by in fits and starts; cub-scouts dressed in surgeons garb fling candy plucked from the body cavity of a prone eight-foot alien made of green cellophane and aluminum wrap, a performer in a grotesque paper mache head, barefoot and clad in coveralls, runs in terror from silver suited aliens, and zombies wielding light sabers tumble and pirouette to Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

The day becomes more dynamic, with live musicians, crafts people, and a brilliant live recreation of Orson Welles 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds performed by the Willamette Radio Workshop. The Alien Pet costume contest features a box tortoise with a felt flying saucer strapped to its back. Looking about, one wonders what UFO contactees and hardcore researchers of old must think. Is this festival the future of ufology? Has it been reduced to parades and Pug puppies in silver lame? Is ufology dying a slow death?

“Some of us are getting old, there’s no denying that,” says veteran researcher, Stanton Friedman, “I cannot say that I’m getting any younger. I wish I could, I wouldn’t be talking about flying saucers if I could say that.” Friedman says UFOlogy is far from tumbling into a death throe and the proof is in the numbers. “I think [critics] are short-sighed…I’ve been out there. I’ve given over 700 lectures in all 50 states, nine provinces and 16 other countries. I do loads of radio and television programs. I come to a place like this and everybody is swarming all over me because they’ve seen me in all of these television shows and they’re exited.”

Freidman looks past the Mylar balloons and cardboard saucers to the core benefit of an event like UFO Fest – it inspires the need to wonder and the need to question. “I’ve been here before and was very impressed with the attitude of the sponsors and the people who came to the event.” One must concur. The enthusiasm at UFO Fest is buoyant, and in Friedman’s eyes, this breeds a degree of hope for the future of ufology and its potential for growth and expansion, “I talk to lots of people and I find that I provide inspiration for other people to spend perspiration.”

A Pirate’s Life For Me: The Bounty of 'Pirate Radio USA'

2009-06-05T16:41:00.000-07:00

**Below is an article written back in 2004 for previous version of the Boxoffice.com website. A very, very truncated version of this article appeared there, this is the original version.

Dwelling on the fringes of the entertainment media is not a prerequisite for the independent filmmaker, but it surely leads one in pursuit of some of the most innovative subject matter. For a greater part of their adult lives, independent documentary filmmakers Mary Jones and Jeff Pearson (AKA “DJ Her” and “DJ Him” respectively), found an outlet for their creative voices through underground venues such as public access television and, the subject of their recent documentary, pirate radio.

Pirate Radio USA is an odyssey that begins in the corner of a dilapidated garage in Seattle, Washington, and expands in scope to cover our basic human rights as American citizens. Says Pearson, “I originally thought this would be a film about radio, but it turned into a discussion of our basic freedoms.”

The concept of Pirate Radio production (as we learn in the documentary) is really nothing new, and until government regulation of the airwaves in the early days of radio’s emerging commercial validity, homemade radio broadcasters were as plentiful then as neon lights in Las Vegas. What few people realize is that small, low frequency broadcast devices are relatively simple to construct (if one has a handle on some basic electrical engineering skills), and cost nothing to covertly transmit. Granted, the broadcast radiuses of such transmitions are counted in city blocks, nonetheless, it is now very, very illegal.

As a filmmakers still developing their narrative style, Jones and Pearson put a great deal of emphasis on the hard-rock mining experienced in their early days in community television, “Had we not already gotten our feet wet in the trenches of public access television, there was no way I could have had to confidence to take the risks I did in making this film.” That being said, Pearson credits a great deal of the film’s narrative style and quirky visual elements to years and years of trial and error, “Without it, some things would have been done too tepidly versus how succinctly and aggressively they are dealt with in the film.”

Shooting for Pirate Radio USA began in 1998 and gradually evolved into a puzzle whose pieces didn’t all turn up until, late 2005. Initially, Pearson wanted to make a film solely about his perceptions of those dangerous and sexy alternative voices he heard resonating within pirate radio’s pocket universe. Before long, the film’s vision began to expand as they found themselves caught within the thick of the WTO riots and what Pearson ultimately saw as the rise of the current American Police State and its hand in the centralization of the media. “What is never really stated in the film is that our message is not about Left Versus Right, its not about Right Versus Wrong, its really about Big Versus Small…and just how expansive is our human experience.”

Pearson admits that it is almost impossible to construct a documentary film narrative without some kind of agenda. In the Big Versus Small subtext of Pirate Radio USA the filmmakers admit it was impossible to remove themselves entirely from the action. But if an agenda exists within the through-line of Pirate Radio USA, it is to draw small circles within bigger circles, and observe while the content expands beyond its meager boundaries.

According to our current political climate, to run, organize, and broadcast a radio station without permission (and subsequent licensing fees) is a felony, and a venue for potential anarchy, and yet, its is also an unrestricted medium for the execution of one’s First Amendment Rights. So which is it, anarchy or democracy? Frankly, it’s a dilemma those who dwell in the first class section of the popular entertainment media don’t hear a great deal about. Says Pearson, “If the film has a particular agenda, it is Post Objective. In our mainstream media we are creating a condition in which we avoid the obvious for fear of not being objective. Its impossible to document things with any real objectivity—I mean, can you really excuse yourself from being a human being? What we tried to do was document our experiences as we had them—that was our goal…And only by placing ourselves within a situation as people who have been affected by those experiences was the truth most likely to be revealed.”

Thus far, Pirate Radio USA has been awarded an Official Selection at the Austin Film Festival, given the Best Features Judges Award at the Zion Independent Film Festival, and a Winner in the Best Documentary Film category at the Wine Country Film Festival. But, true to form, ultimately Jones and Pearson found distribution for Pirate Radio USA (as unique as their body of work) with B-Side Entertainment (www.bside.com). Located in Austin, TX and specializing in “Film Festival Technology,” B-Side Entertainment has established a unique relationship with nearly 100 different independent film festivals nationwide--a veritable pirate’s booty for the low-budget/no-budget indie filmmaker. B-Side promises an elaborate process of film promotion by handling such chores as festival-wide and personal screening scheduling, festival audience rating and reviews data collation, and audience-to-filmmaker web interaction all done in conjunction with IFC.

As Pearson says, it’s really about Big Versus Small.

Resonating within each frame of Pirate Radio USA is a discovery Pearson holds very close to heart. “Through the making this film, we learned that our freedom of speech is a tool by which we keep ourselves free. It’s not an end in and of itself. Pirate radio, in a sense, is one small, self-organizing effort to create a better world.” Clearly, in seeking to capture something small, Jones and Pearson have set sail into the straits of something much, much bigger.

For more information, please check out the following sites...

www.pirateradiousa.com

www.bside.com

http://www.myspace.com/piratedj

Stewart Stern Talks About Paul Newman

2009-05-29T16:54:00.000-07:00

As is true of many writing efforts, there is a story behind the story. This one is no different. Though in this case I am reluctant to go in to great detail for fear of risking threat of slander. I’ll simply give you what I can…

When Paul Newman died in September of 2008, I received an email from a co-worker whose direction I take as seriously as that of any publisher. The email title line simply said, “DO THIS.” I was advised I should contact Newman’s close friend, Stewart Stern, for comment on the actor’s life. Get 50 words, and get it yesterday.

I’ve had a tentative correspondence with Mr. Stern for some time, but was uncomfortable approaching him during what was obviously a time of grief. I did, but with some reluctance. Mr. Stern was gracious enough to respond, stating he’d love to talk with me but would have to get back to me in several weeks, as he was preoccupied with issues pertaining to Newman’s family and estate.

I heard from Mr. Stern about two weeks later. We talked for over two hours about his relationship with Paul Newman. I was left with over 15, single-spaced pages of interview transcript. Knowing that I was only asked for 50 words, I wrote up as brief a story about Newman’s life and accomplishments as I could. Needless to say, it more than exceeded 50 words.

Since the source material for an article I was scheduled to write for a certain publisher was having trouble coming together. I suggested my Paul Newman article as a replacement.

I learned the 50-word piece had been scrapped.

I was then vilified for even making such a suggestion, let alone writing such a lengthy and unsolicited piece. What was said to me sent me back to a counseling, when all that need be said was, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

I tried several other publishing sources, all of which turned me down. By then Newman had been dead nearly a month, and talking about his greatness, talking of the void left by his absence was simply no longer of any value in the public consciousness.

The Sexiness of Death has a very limited shelf life.

Mr. Stern contacted me stating he wished to review my piece as he was concerned over revealing something not fit for public consumption. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the piece had been shot down.

He read it. He loved it. He made minor additions.

About a week later I was walking through the grocery store. I glanced over at a row of Newman’s Own bottled salad dressing. I saw that image of Newman on the labels, row after row of broad smiles and glittering eyes codified into a brand that will live on alongside his films for as long as this culture can remain upright. But it’s just an image of the man.

I thought, “Don’t worry…I know you some. I know you enough—I know you now more than anyone in a hundred mile radius, maybe even a thousand.” Save one. One man, who loved Paul Newman will all of his heart and a greater part of his soul and was so very kind to share those thoughts and feelings with me.

Stewart Stern Talks About Paul Newman
Cole Hornaday
12.2008

In September of 2008, the entertainment industry, and the world as a whole, lost one of its great shining lights when Paul Newman lost his battle with lung cancer.

What do we hope to leave behind? Is it our hard work, our deeds, our stories? Shakespeare said, “ The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.” Is our bid for a positive, lasting permanence a totem left to the physical world, or is it something far less tangible?

The long-time friendship between Paul Newman and Hollywood screenwriter, Stewart Stern (REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, SYBIL) spans over fifty years. Fifty years of life, love, art and adventure lived both within and without the beauty and chaos of the entertainment industry. It was a bond that began in the early days of live television, while Stern was writing for NBC’s Philco Television Playhouse on a production called THUNDER OF SILENCE, “In my story there was a farm couple down in Middle Atlantic States and they had two sons who had gone off to war and one of them had been killed…I was about to bring on the hero [and]…I suddenly had no vision of him and just didn’t know what I was going to do—except maybe quit. I went home and happened to turn on the television and caught one of the other live-dramas. I saw this boy on his knees trying to explain something to [his mother] about the war…and he let out a moan, this, ‘aaahhh’—I’d never heard the like of and it came from so deep inside him, and just had me in tears and I thought, ‘That—that’s the quality-- that’s the boy who has to play this…’ And it was Paul Newman.” 

Through that initial production, Stern’s relationship with Newman began to expand, “And right after the show went on the air, Paul walked me cross-town to meet the love of his life, Joanne, with whom a new friendship developed that is a ruling one in my life, giving me not only family membership in her heart, but most of the talent that lit up my work.”

Through his entire life, Newman was fascinated by the divergent notions of nature and nurture, chaos and luck; trying to determine whether there truly was any sense to the senseless, or whether the good or ill that befalls us simply happens at random. The common observer may have noted this view of the world in the roles he played, the sporting activities he pursued, and the charities he helped to establish and maintain. Yet one area of his life seldom left to chance was his investment in his friends and loved ones. Regarding their friendship, Stern said, “I was never able to figure it out…There was a part of him that was so vulnerable, and that was the part of him that I was attracted by because I understood and it was a part that really only we could share. I never was able to be the part of his life that I envied other people—you know, to go fishing off the Florida Keys or to be athletic or to be a racecar driver. [We were] this very unlikely combination that nobody could quite figure out."

Since his death, people have spoken volumes of Paul Newman’s legacy, the charities funded by his Newman’s Own products, the Hole in the Wall Gang camps for seriously ill children, and more. But for Stewart Stern, Newman’s legacy is something far simpler, and far more personal, “I think, for me, it’s his example as a man--as a human. He had an appetite to just keep going and to keep growing and to never quit and to face the things he feared being. He had acrophobia and so he would get onto a higher wall each day until he didn’t have it anymore. He just would hang in there like a terrier. He said, ‘Its the one thing I have that a lot of people I know don’t, and that’s tenacity; I will hold on until the end and I may come in after Brando and I may come in after Dean, but, by God, I’m going to get there.’ He admired people who had that kind of grit and he wanted everybody to have the chance to feel it.” It was precisely this willingness to allow one to explore their own potential, to forge their own grit; that has left the most indelible impression upon those who knew him. “That’s what he admired so much in other people and wanted to support people who proved it, and so many of his friends felt the benefit.”   

Immortality, true immortality is that part of yourself you transfer to others through your lifetime; it is a commodity that passes on and on.

In May of 2009 it was announced writer Shawn Levy, film critic for The Oregonian, would be publishing a bit of a biographical tell-all on Paul Newman; “Paul Newman: A Life.” From the promotional material it sounded as though very little of the book’s source material was original, but cobbled together from non-family reminiscences and previously published material.

I have yet to peruse the book. I’ll bet you the $29.99 cover price Levy has not half the riches as I when it comes to stories about Paul Newman. Stories shared as only a Best Friend can.

An Interview with Stanton Friedman

2009-05-28T12:11:00.000-07:00

Below is a transcript of my recent interview with physicist and noted UFO researcher, Stanton Friedman conducted during the 2009 UFO Festival in McMinnville, Oregon. This interview is part-and-parcel to a freelance article of which I am writing.

Regardless of one's belief's on the subject, you cannot ignore Friedman's skill for debate nor the passion of his beliefs. He's also simply a highly entertaining speaker.

UFO Festival 2009
McMinnville, Oregon
May 16, 2009

Interview: Stanton Friedman

Q: Was there an inciting incident that drew you into the field?

A: Yeah. I read Edward J. Ruppelt's The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects and I thought it was intriguing. Then I read about 15 more books, some of which were crap, and then at the University of California-Berkley Library I found a privately published version of the Blue Book Special Report #14 and it was a shocker to me because a) it had not been mentioned to me in any other books and I don’t know why—well, I guess I do know why, and b) there was a guy who put it together (this was before the Freedom of Information Act and somehow we got a copy) you know, government documents are not copyrightable so they could get away with it… It included the press release that went out with it on October 23^rd, 1955. And here is the Secretary of the Air Force talking about this huge study—he didn’t give the title— he didn’t say who did the work, nobody asked him, he got all kinds of publicity around the country and he flat-out lied. He said in the press release—and this is Donald Quarles [the fourth secretary of the Air Force] “On the basis of this report we believe that no object, such as those properly described as flying saucers, has over-flown the United States. Even the unknown 3 percent could have been identified as conventional phenomena or delusions if more complete observational data had been made available.” Well, that sounds like it takes care of the problem. The only trouble is that I have the report in front of me, and there are 240 tables, charts, graphs and maps—I’m in data heaven—the unknowns were 21.5 percent, what’s he talking about? They were completely separate from the 9.3 percent of the 3201 sightings—not a small group. 9.3 percent were listed as insufficient information, so by definition he was lying.

That shook me up. I mean, I was working under security and I knew that sometimes you had to sort of tiptoe around the truth—you can’t give it up but you don’t want to lie either… He didn’t seem to mind lying at all.

Q: And none of that information you came across in that document was redacted or…

A: No! It was an unclassified report. I’ve distributed many copies of it since, again, because you can’t copyright it so anybody can reprint it. But it’s not fair to talk to people—well, there’s no way you can get the documents to check and I tried to show the tables compiled from the data in the report. There were rather careful not to show it as explicitly as I did.

So that was an important moment for me. And the second one… Frank Edwards was a newsman in Indianapolis radio and stuff. He wrote a book Flying Saucers: Serious Business which was a best-seller, and I had been living in Indianapolis for three years working for General Motors and I had moved to Pennsylvania and gotten to know Frank because he was active in NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Arial Phenomenon) and he sent me a copy of the book. I called Frank and said, “Frank, I want to go public. You know everybody here in Pittsburgh,” because he did know everybody. So he gave me several names and one of them was the producer of a talk show called Contact on KDKA Pittsburgh—the first major radio station. And I called the producer and it was, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you…” Even in though in Pittsburgh being a nuclear physicist for Westinghouse is a gold-plated credential. I mean, you want a loan, how much do you want?

It was less than a month later they called me at 6:30 a.m.—Could I please be on their show at 7, they had someone cancel. And I lived near the station so I said, “Yeah, well, I guess that I could do that…” I did the show. I didn’t know then quite how to handle a guy who didn’t know what he was talking about—the host…how do you be polite and still say, “Hey that’s an idiotic thing to say…”

Somebody at work—a technician at work—at Westinghouse had heard the show. Her book review club was reading Frank’s book and would I give a talk to their club in her living room. That was my first lecture—my first taste.

Q: How old were you when you first became interested?

A: When I first read Rumsfeld’s book I was 22, so it was it was three and half to four years later…

Q: And were you still working on your undergraduate degree at that time?

A: No, I got out of school early. When I first read Rumsfeld’s book I was a young nuclear physicist working for General Electric aircraft nuclear propulsion department—big program spending 100 million a year, which was a lot of money in 1958 as you can imagine. We had 3,500 people working fulltime, 1,100 of them engineers and scientists.

Q: A Nuclear Airplane?

A: Yeah. It would have a rather major advantage: it could fly for thousands of hours without refueling. That means it has an awful lot of range.

Q: What happened with that project?

A: It got cancelled like everything else I had ever worked on.

Q: What is your take on those members of the UFO Community who say the study is in its death throes?

A: I think they’re full of crap. Some of us are getting old, there’s no denying that—I cannot say that I’m getting any younger. I wish I could, I wouldn’t be talking about flying saucers if I could say that.

I think they’re short-sighed and I say that because I’ve been out there. I’ve given over 700 lectures in all 50 states, nine provinces and 16 other countries. I do loads of radio and television programs. I come to a place like this and everybody is swarming all over me because they’ve seen me in all of these television shows and they’re exited and they’re so glad that I do it. I, once, a few years back offered on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast (when he was doing the show) to send people free information if listeners would send in a self-addressed stamped envelope to my post office box in Maine. I got over 1,000 requests, all but five with the SASE. Over 200 post-it notes saying, “ Thanks for doing what you are doing…” “I’ve been following your career for 20 years—Keep it up!” These are people I don’t know and they don’t know me, but there’s a constituency. So I know that the public is interested. Both of my most recent books, Captured: The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience and Flying Saucers and Science, are doing well. Flying Saucers and Science is in its fourth printing already and it just came out last year. And I’ve just signed a contract for another book.

Q: What is your response to critics who say you’re simply backing over old ground?

A: I don’t know what that means. Look, when I check my audiences, I find that fewer than 2 percent have read any of the five large-scale scientific studies I talk about. So, yeah, to the guys who have read those it’s old ground, but how about the rest of the people—the other 98 percent. So what’s the point of worrying about it if people are ignorant? One of the most common reactions I get is, “Gee, I didn’t know that…” “I hadn’t heard about that…” “I’m so glad you brought that up…” And it’s just like the Betty and Barney Hill case; most people have heard about the case, but judging from the response we received from the lecture yesterday, there were an awful lot of people who said, “I’ve never heard that…” —this, that, and the other piece of data.

They’ve heard of Roswell, they’ve heard of the Barney and Betty Hill case, but they don’t know the details, so I don’t know why people make silly statements like that.

The trouble is, when you listen to these statements, what’s the basis for it? In other words, I get people that say, “Everybody knows that MJ-12 is phony.” Well, how is it that everybody knows that? I’ve written a book about it and everybody who reads it doesn’t say, “Oh, that’s a bunch of crap,” they say, “I didn’t know all of that stuff.” So why should I be put off by the prophets of doom and gloom who are too lazy to get off their butts. I get so sick of Armchair Theorists. I’ve been to 20 archives—but I hear, “Oh, that document’s phony because the dates are wrong.” Well, go to the damn archives and you’ll find ten different date formats.

Or, “You called him an Admiral when he was only a Rear Admiral.” Talk to military people for God’s sake. I’ve got mem-cons [memoranda of conversations] with a whole bunch of military guys all using admiral or general and none of them were Four Stars. So I don’t have much time for the prophets of doom and gloom.

Maybe what they are saying is that they are too lazy, they can’t see a way to get out there and they’re mad at Friedman—too damn bad.

Q: What is your take on this kind of event?

A: I’ve been here before and was very impressed with their attitude and the attitude of the people who came to the event. I talk to lots of people when I’m sitting and signing books—though I’m not doing that here—but it’s where you get a chance to talk one-on-one with them…and I find that I provide inspiration for other people to spend perspiration. That is, they don’t want to stand up and be public, but they are very grateful that I am. I’m not a masochist—I mean I’ve had nine hecklers in over 700 lectures… Eleven hecklers—two of them were drunks so I don’t really count them. But you get that many with sports, religion, and politics I’m told.

People say, “They must give you a really hard time…” I don’t get a hard time. I once sat down and figured that I had answered over 50,000 questions. I’m not a masochist. I don’t do this for people who give me a hard time. Sure, I’ve had those nine drunk hecklers—one of them, it turns out, was a professor of physics. He starts off during one of my question and answer periods, “I’d never heard so much nonsense in my life.” Fortunately my response was, “Can you be a little more specific than that please?” He went through about eight “You said that...”s. One was, “You said that Betty and Barney Hill went to Zeta Reticuli and back in two hours...” I say, “Sorry, no, what I said was they were on board the saucer for two hours, they didn’t go anywhere.” The next one was, again, totally wrong. I didn’t know who the guy was and then somebody from the other side of the room said, “Hey, how about taking some sensible questions.” So the guy gets up and leaves and I said, “I’ll take a question—who was that?” It was doctor so-and-so a professor of physics—he hadn’t heard what I said, he was in Never-Never Land about what he thought I must have said because he knew there couldn’t be anything to this… I’m going on because people respond so well and because I feel those of us who can make a difference should. You can’t sit back and say, “Let somebody else do it…” If I can take advantage of my professional background, my speaking skills, my research efforts, to intrigue, excite, stimulate, and educate people, then I have a responsibility to do that. And sure, I’m not saying that everybody should do what I do. I’m very fortunate, I found out early on that I could keep my wits about me and that my memory was totally trustworthy. So I go on the stage—It isn’t enough to say, “Well that’s a good question, I’ll give you an answer tomorrow,” you have to have an answer now. I found out that I was good at that. I’m good at the stage. I play to my strengths. Not everybody can, and I’m not saying that everybody should. There are some very smart people who cannot do that particular thing. I can’t play a violin, but I’ll listen to the guys that do.

I bring to bear single-mindedness, a dedication, a very low tolerance for idiocy, and the recognition that I can hold my own with anybody. Because I’ve always found that the Noisy Negativists almost invariably do not know what they’re talking about.

Q: Is there a difference between a skeptic and a debunker?

A: Yes. I’m a skeptic. I say, “I don’t know, let’s hear the rest of the story of the story and then I’ll decide.” Is this document genuine? Well, I may visit a couple of archives and check on a lot of things—I’m a skeptic. I don’t assume it’s legitimate because it says what I want to have it say. And I’ve done more to show, for example, that MJ-12 documents are phony more than anybody else. I found the originals that were emulated. I don’t sit in my armchair and say, “Well, those don’t look genuine to me…” I say, “Here’s the document that this one is based on if you’ll notice that the wording is essentially all the same—a few little changes…” Basically, when you get a signature: “I approve, HS Truman, July 9^th, 1947,” and they fit right on top of each other, three separate hand-written things on a page—yeah—one’s a phony, when you know where the other one came from and you know that it isn’t a phony. So I go at it, but I start off with the premise that “I don’t know.” That’s being a skeptic, “Let’s see what kind of information we can get out it.”

Now, the debunker says, “I do know, I know that this is all crap and there’s nothing to this.” As a matter of fact, my latest paper will be given in Denver in August for MUFON, the 40^th annual international symposium, is “The Pseudoscience of Anti-UFOlogy” …and I beat the hell out of the Nasty, Noisy Negativists and the stupid things they say, like some of the stupid things they said about the Hill case last night. How can anyone in his right mind say Barney only saw a light in the sky, when you have all of that stuff without the hypnosis? Two rows of windows, etcetera, etcetera—that’s not a light in the sky. So, I don’t have tolerance for these guys. When the head of what used to be the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) now it’s the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, Dr. Joseph Nickell is their chief investigator. He’s got three degrees in English and he’s worked as a magician—intentional deception is the world of the magician, you understand. He said with Roswell, and inexperienced PR person sent out a totally unauthorized press release. I’ve been to the guy’s house, he didn’t even know the guy’s name, Walter Haut the press guy. Unauthorized? Colonel Blanchard told him to put it out. Inexperienced? He’d flown more than 20 combat missions over Japan as a navigator and bombardier. He was such a good one that he was chosen to drop the instrument package over one of the two nuclear weapons tests conducted in 1946, Operation Crossroads in the Pacific. You picked your best people because without the instrument panel in the right place you’ve wasted your explosion. And very well thought of in the community, I checked. I don’t accept people at face value. But that’s typical of the attacks. It’s pseudo-science, you make it sound legitimate but it isn’t.

Q: You made a comment last night, when the inevitable question comes up as to why flying saucers haven’t landed on the White House lawn, and you made a comment human beings being too mean.

A: Look, we are a primitive society whose major activity is tribal warfare. Look at our history: fifty million people killed in one lousy war tells you something, and seventeen hundred cities destroyed and this year we will spend, collectively, approximately a trillion dollars on things military where more than 30,000 kids die every single day of preventable disease and starvation—it tells you where our priorities are…

But the White House lawn? First of all, since when does the President of the United States speak for 6 billion earthlings? He has trouble speaking for 300 million Americans. Secondly, what would be the point, it’s a no-fly zone. They tried in 1952, we set up all kinds of jets, they splashed around for awhile, they went down and came back—that’s what that book Shoot Them Down was all about. Do you realize that orders were given to military pilots, “Shoot them down if they don’t land when instructed to do so?” How do you tell an alien space craft, “Down, down!” They’d just go “Screw you, buddy!”

But those orders were given. We have newspaper articles to prove it.

Q: One of the entr'acte musical themes being played before you took the stage was the original score to The Day the Earth Stood Still. There was this sort of Ventures-esque surfer music and then I heard the Theremin. To me, that film is sort of synonymous with the cold war anxiety toward xenophobia but also this relatively progressive notion of, “We’re just not ready.” That was the impression I’d gotten from the subtext of one of your last comments.

A: Certainly on our planet, people in power don’t want to give up power. No government wants its people to owe their primary allegiance to the planet instead of individual government—nationalism is the only game in town. I mean, just look around—look at the world. I see it in Canada where I live. It’s a constant battle. No, we’re not ready. The key thing for man is power, to preserve power. If you’ve got it, keep it. We saw that every day, from the smallest dictatorship to the biggest country. So, that’s why I say we’re not ready. If we’re going to send a spacecraft to another planet, it had better be an earthling spacecraft. United Nations don’t let cities join—you’ve got to be a country. Why would a local galactic federation membership committee consider the membership of only one country? It’s got to be a planet—so who speaks for planet Earth, guys? Nobody. I mean, you can say the United Nations but how much power do they have? How much impact?

I mentioned in a previous interview that America has tested 331 nuclear weapons. Think about that. And the first H-Bomb—I mean, I worked on fusion propulsion systems back in the 1960s—the first H-Bomb was exploded—it was a bulky old thing—in 1952 in the end of October, early November. Ten million tons of TNT was the equivalent energy release. The fireball was three miles wide. And that wasn’t the biggest one: a few years later the Russians tested 57 millions tons of TNT and look at the progress we’ve made, during World War II the big weapons were ten-ton blockbusters, and now we’re talking ten million tons. Now what would the aliens think when they see that? Hundreds of ships that steam in there for the test because it’s a complicated business. These guys are idiots, what else can they say? And it’s a beautiful planet, but you’d never know the way they act toward each other.

Q: What do you think now informs the study for the future?

A: Well, there is a chance that the money Bob Bigelow is planning on spending via MUFON to actually fund serious investigations—pay the people, may set off a major effort by other people wanting to get involved, makes it legitimate instead of amateurs. You can’t keep out the kooks and quacks they’re always there it doesn’t matter what field you’re talking about. But if you could fund some good work and publish that…if you get some journalists that behave like journalists instead of like Noisy Negativists, because some of them are. What’s important here is—I call it the David Suskind Syndrome. I got a call in the early 70s. I was living in the L.A. area and came to New York because they wanted to do a show about flying saucers. And they wanted all kinds of stuff from me and they wanted a good skeptic, and I said there aren’t any. But here’s how to reach Phil Klass and they wanted an abductee and I got them Betty Hill, and so forth. We’re there taping and between segments he says, “I read the New York Times and there’s nothing in there that says these things are real.” So, the Suskind Syndrome is first the strong belief that “I keep track of what’s important in the world. It’s [“If it’s...”?] important then I know about it, that I read the New York Times and the Post” or whatever. And secondly, “if this were important, we’d be there and I would know about it and the fact that I don’t means there is no data there,” so it’s a vicious circle. I’m not going to waste my time looking for something for which there is not evidence at all. I mean, how do you fight that? I see it with the SETI cultists and I’ve tried to assess (Seth) Shawstack for this I talked about five large-scale scientific studies in a lecture he heard me give on QE2 (the Queen Elizabeth II) and we were each giving three lectures, got a free trip. After each one I asked, “How many people have read this?” These were well-attended lectures on the Queen as there wasn’t much to do on the North Atlantic after you see all the pretty sights. He didn’t raise his hand to any of them. We did a debate on Coast to Coast Radio. I won. He still hadn’t read it. I got 57 percent and he got 33 percent and 10 percent said, “I don’t know.”

Now, he wasn’t as bad as Michael Schermer, Head of the Skeptics Society. You know, I couldn’t have written a better script for him… He started off by saying, “Look, there’s nothing to this, like with all other paranormal phenomena there’s a ‘residue effect.’ 5 percent cannot be explained—you just don’t have enough data and that’s the way it is. If anybody expects to explain them all is mistaken.” Boy did I jump on that one with both feet. “As what you just said is totally untrue and Project: Bluebook Special Report 14, the largest study ever done, 21½ percent of the cases could not be identified—completely separate,” and I rattled off the statistics just to impress the audience. Of course he wasn’t paying any attention…The UFO evidence: 18.6 percent of 4,500 cases couldn’t be explained. In a University of Colorado study, according to a special UFO subcommittee of the world’s largest group of space scientists, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) 30 percent of 117 cases cited in detail could not be identified. I got 80 percent of the vote after that one.

But I read two of his books for God’s sake, and quoted back stupid things that he said! So I’m a skeptic about everything. I give a harder time to some of the pro-UFO people than a lot of other people do.

Q: I really appreciated a comment you made in response to a woman’s question last night. She was asking about some reality-television program (which I do not follow) about UFO Hunters (on the History Channel). You gave her a cautionary comment about media perception. To this day it shocks me that so many television viewers take what they see as “gospel” and lose touch with the fact that they are dealing with an entertainment medium. But when shows like The X-Files were at their peak--that informed a lot of public interest. What is your response to that sort of thing?

A: Well, that was labeled fiction. It wasn’t “This is a documentary and everything you’re about to see here is true.” I don’t object to programs that stimulate the public to think about anything strange. Why not? I do object to people who try to pass off half-assed fiction as reality. I know that the UFO Hunters did a show about the Maury Island case, not far from Seattle, and left out and important amount of information which would have informed the viewer that most of that story was nonsense. And so that I object to—when you play fast and loose with the truth, that’s not good as far as I’m concerned. Stimulating people—people ask me about Star Trek—I think anything that gets people to take a larger look at our place in the universe… Gene Roddenberry was a very sharp guy. Part of my concern, one reason for sticking with it for so long, is that we need to learn that we are not the big shots in the neighborhood. We cannot justify what we do on the basis of “We’re the smart guys around here so what we’re doing must be the most important investment and most accurate—whatever.” Part of my role or goal (maybe both) is to get people to see themselves as others see us. How do we look to aliens? It’s not a pretty picture. I mean I can find plenty of things I like about this planet. I’ve traveled a lot, I’ve seen a lot of places, but from a society-viewpoint, I think a professor in another solar system had plenty of thesis material for his grad students and most of them are not very pretty. Why don’t they speak the same language, all of them? Why is there so much prejudice? Why do so few people have a lot and so many people have only a little? I’m not a communist, but I’m saying that if you live in a society, can’t you be concerned about all of these starving kids? I mean the Bernie Madoffs in this world make me sick. It seems to me the Bush people stood for greed. I mean, like it or not. I’m not for these aerospace contractors who charge $600 for a toilet seat or whatever…I’m also very much opposed to putting everything out in public view. There’s a need for security, “Don’t you think the president should tell us everything?” No, I don’t. You can’t tell your friends without telling your enemies. They listen to the radio and read the newspapers too. And there is a need for legitimate security. I mean, suppose we figure out a better way of monitoring the flight of something in the atmosphere than just radar. If there’s another signal we can get. Should we put that out in the open where Osama can get it? That makes no sense. And there are times when...well, the United States and Russia. The Russians knew we were flying U2s over the Soviet Union during the Eisenhower era. Why didn’t they say anything? They quietly protested to the United States, but not publicly. They didn’t want the Russian people to know that they couldn’t do anything. Once they could, when they shot down Gary Powers’ plane, they went public in a very big way and I give Ike credit (after the first few lies) for saying, “No, it was ours and we need to know what they’re doing because they are a closed society. We’ve had Pearl Harbor, etcetera, etcetera.” But there is a need for security and I’m surprised by most of the people who say, “You should release everything,” are people who have never had clearances. We live in a dangerous world and handing your enemies—I mean, its like atomic bombs…If you have a new slave labor you can get the uranium out of the ground a lot faster than [unintelligible] so finding out about it gives you a leg up. We should not give our enemies a leg up. I’m not paranoid, everybody’s got an “other:” India and Pakistan, China and Russia aren’t always friendly about things—the Middle East…it’s a mess out there, so I am not for putting everything out in the open. I think there’s a very big difference between saying, “Look we know that the planet is being visited, we know that they haven’t destroyed us yet, we are convening international conferences that will simply deal with the political, the scientific, the religious aspects of this phenomena. It’s a planetary phenomenon and we need to treat it as …planetarians. I just made up a new word. But you see my point. I do not think—and people get mad at me, the Steve Greers of the world who say, “We’ve figured out free energy and they’re keeping it from us.” Give me some evidence, Steve, you’ve been talking about this for years and you’re still trying to raise $1,000,000 for a company that’s going to develop all of this stuff and please send money. Would you believe he offered to give all of his secrets to people who’d pay $600 bucks to spend a weekend with him on his farm? But, you’d have to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Think about that.

Holiday Travel Travails '08

2009-01-16T15:33:00.000-08:00

I've been procrastinating about posting this missive. I kept thinking I'd come up with some further insight or witty take on the whole process of simply trying to get to my folks for Christmas, but it has yet to come. January is here, so I'd best get this posted.

For those of you unaware, the pacific northwest was hit with what can only be described as a blizzard. It was an eastern seaboard-style winter blow-out with snow drifts almost five feet deep, streets of frozen washboard ruts, inclined streets turned into unscalable slopes.

Fortunately, all of my month's assignments were done when the storm came down. I was anticipating catching Amtrak to Portland from Seattle on the 23rd. But as my departure date neared, train and plane schedules were halting all across the region. I was panicked this would be my first real Christmas alone. I didn't care much for that idea, nope, not at all.

Below is the travail, in its original email form, sent to a pal who I knew damn-well would be reading it from from his safe and warmth perch behind the counter of his record store in Kailua, HI

DC,
Well...I made it.

How do I describe this trip without having a nervous breakdown?

Amy and I were checking the Amtrak status all day Monday, and were relieved to find Amtrak running when they updated their website at 9:00pm.

I didn't sleep all night, I was getting so anxious, even WITH my new medication...

Amy had a friend with 4-Wheel drive who was happy come and shuttle us over the ice and snow to the Amtrak station. When we got to the station we found everything heading south was running on time. Dad had suggested I extend my ride on to Salem, or reserve a seat on a Greyhound, as he didn't think it wise to risk driving up from Salem to get me. Unfortunately, all train routes were stopping in PDX, and they couldn't book me a bus seat at the time. I'd have to book a seat from the Portland Greyhound station.

We got to PDX AHEAD of schedule (like, 11:15am) and Amy walked me over to the Greyhound station which was less than a quarter block away.

Entering the depot was like being dropped into a war-zone. Travelers hunkered around the Greyhound bus depot was like refugees. The place was like all the airports from here to BC, only on a much smaller scale; people camped out on blankets, provisions provided by the bus depot littered folding tables; stale bags of Wonderbread, cold cuts, and bottles of mustard and mayo. These were those people trying to get to Denver, CO, or California, and had been stranded for days.

I bought a $15.00 one-way ticket on the 3:40pm bus to Salem. Amy waited until her Dad came to get her in the Red Cross Truck (he was a volunteer). I wasn't worried, I had plenty to read, and such a little distance to go. Less than forty miles. I really felt pretty blessed.

I got bumped from the 3:40PM bus because of the mass of displaced people. Those of us bumped were ensured a seat on the next bus to arrived...whenever that might be.

So there I was with the great-unwashed and toothless, for several hours at the PDX Greyhound depot.

Then it started to get weird. I drug my bags into the Men's room and entered a stall. Suddenly I heard a pounding of something on a metal door several stalls down, "Whatchoo doing bringing that beer in here, that's against the law--come on out of there!" It was a Depot Security Guard.

"Just a minute man, I'm taking a shit!" came the reply.

"Can't you read the signs all over the place? You can't come in here to drink your beer!"

"Fuck you, man, I just got out of jail, give me a break!"

"Come on out of there right now!"

"At least let me finish taking a dump!"

"Come out or I'll be callin' the police!"

"AW, GIVE ME A BREAK MAN, I JUST GOT OUT A JAIL, I GOT NO WHERE TO GO AND NOTHING BUT A T-SHIRT ON!"

It disintegrated from there. Eventually the coatless jailbird was escorted from the terminal and I finished my business.

I found a place to sit near the depot "deli." I had plenty to read, and sat as patiently as possible but being as much a sheep as any other, whenever there was an announcement of an incoming bus, I'd grab my bags and queue up like the rest of the woolies. I didn't want to get bumped again.

It went from weird to surreal at that point; a one-legged man, about six foot five, hobbled into line with us. Mike was very, very chatty, and I had to crane my neck to look him in the face and keep from eyeing the phantom space between his empty, foreshortened pant-leg and the floor.

Mike liked the girls, and started making time with some little gal reading MARLY AND ME. The book inspired him and he commenced to tell a story, "This buddy of mine had this dog, and one day I was visiting and the dog came back from running around the neighborhood with a size-twelve, left-foot hiking boot in his mouth. He must have stolen it from a neighbor. He brought it right up to me and dropped it on the ground. That was amazing! I thought, 'Now I can go hiking!'"

I had to walk away.

I couldn't board until around 5pm. And then I experienced the most harrowing bus ride of my life. It took almost 5 hours to drive forty miles to Salem. The bus had chains, but it bumped and slid over the frozen ruts the whole 40 miles to Salem. I don't think I have ever experienced something so frightful as riding in a several hundred ton hunk of metal as it fishtailed at 50 miles an hour. I could not see to either side of the road as long-delayed semi-rigs crawled, bumper to bumper alongside us. Our bus, in the center lane, was hemmed in by wall after wall of frozen metal.

I was never so happy to see my parents as I was when I got to Salem. They'd been waiting in the depot for hours. I was worried they'd been there even longer since I'd not been able to update them via cell. As it turned out, someone else in the depot had a relative on my bus, and called with regular status reports, sharing them with the other concerned family members who sat waiting.

But I made it. Christmas was spent with my sister and her family, just south of Salem, in Lebanon, OR. Lebanon had no snow. It had all melted. They didn't have the foggiest as to what all the fuss was about.

Merry Christmas.

...don't even get me started on my New Years.

Sliding Down the Learning Curve

2008-09-30T14:12:00.000-07:00

As conscious beings, we’re all on a Learning Curve. Always.

A Learning Curve, according to an amalgam of sources, is defined as, “The amount of learning and the time it takes to learn it.”

Some people arrange their lives in such a way as to avoid having to learn new processes; new job skills, to start over—and do so from scratch. In a society where a Liberal Arts degree is the default for all those incapable of adding Column A to Column B and or retaining three characters in an HTML code, we were taught said degree would make us more marketable, demonstrate our malleability, making us more enticing as a potential employee. We were not forewarned our “versatility” would also render us terribly, terribly expendable in the job force, nor prepare us for a state of perpetual adaptation-tumble.

I know a handful of people who’ve gone back to school (not unlike myself) on the State’s dime each and every time they were laid off or downsized out of a job and have done so MULTIPLE TIMES. It’s a veritable revolving door of New Worker Training.

But that is their experience, and this is about mine…and, anyway, I digress.

In 2005 I quit my job at Northwest Education Loan Association. I went back to school to study Graphic Design, and, in doing so; I started up the new slope of a Learning Curve. And, like little Sisyphus, I now find myself tumbling from its steepest incline, into the gully, where I right myself, listen to my knees pop, my back creak, and start back up the slope.

Graphic Designers in Seattle are not quite a dime a dozen, but they’re damn close. Granted, their job opportunities are not as slim as for, say, an actor or would-be acting teacher, but it is a career found within that same realm of the Liberal Arts, and tailored to be just as flimsy as far as any kind of corporate viability is concerned.

Upon completing the graphic design program I was hungry and eager for work, and nervous as hell I was simply re-inventing the wheel I’d forged with my MFA in Theatre. Where does a graphic designer look for work? Do you seek out corporate or design firms? Well…not if you’re fresh from a community college you don’t—but the school and your advisors are not going to tell you that. So, you sign up with every design placement agency in town. You build a physical and an on-line portfolio, and you network like a Black Gnat in estrus.

You also do potentially risky, if not stupid, things like applying for jobs on sites like Craigslist.

Craigslist; that domain of “self-policing” classified ads that’s nothing short of the lost island of THE LORD OF THE FLIES. The only way to police that site is to avoid it all together.

Case in point: Financial anxiety and desperation upon leaving school inspired me to respond to a Craigslist posting; CARTOONIST WANTED FOR NEW BUSINESS. Or something…the entrepreneur had a chain of businesses and was in the process of developing a web site and newsletter and he wanted someone to design a series of single or triple-panel cartoons to be featured therein. He liked my designs and suggested we meet.

The business was a massage parlor just off I-405 in Renton. Not massage therapist’s, but a massage parlor complete with bubbling hot tubs and steam rooms and dainty women of various Asian persuasion running about in short robes and doing a great deal of giggling.

Maybe I am naïve or maybe I prefer to give some folks the benefit of the doubt…or maybe it was pretty clear this chain of establishments were dyed-in-the-wool rub-and-tuggers and I simply didn’t care because I needed cash—and let’s face it, where there is vice, there is cash.

I met with the owner (who’s name escapes me at present) and we—no—I--tossed some ideas around. I came up with the notion of patterning the strip after Max Cannon’s RED MEAT. I always loved the stock-image, static, ink-stamp look of the RED MEAT strip and thought the minimalist approach was quite brilliant because of the time one obviously saves on new illustrations.

The owner gave me less-than-very-little with which to work as far as content was concerned. All he would suggest would be punch lines pertaining to, “Ahhhh- MY happy place…”

w.t.f??

I did up a series of characters based on his suggestions: “Cute Asian Girls.”

I drew up at least one strip, did a cost breakdown and invoiced him and was promptly blown off for the next month and the month after and the month after that. No money paid, no phone calls returned. I gave up.

That was back in October of 2007. This August I decided to do a little research into the doings of Red Dragon Spa—see if they had a website, see if they had an online newsletter and comic strips—I mean, maybe the owner simply didn’t like my designs and was uncomfortable telling me as much.

Instead, I found this…

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/371436_massage19.html?source=mypi

I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised.
But am I really so dim?
Maybe. But I have to admit this bit of information; “…a registered sex offender is believed to have helped get a business license for the Renton parlor. In a license application, the sex offender, who was convicted of child rape in King County and now living in Kirkland, is listed as one of three contacts for the business, police and court documents say,” REALLY unnerved me, and moved me from feeling as though I’d been played the fool to downright angry.

Yes, maybe I am naive, but the giggling Asian girls and steamy atmosphere of the place were not lost on me--you can be a bit of a perv and still be a good person, right? Just because you’re a perv, doesn’t mean you’re bound to skip on your bills, does it?

Am I rationalizing, or am I feeling the long-term after effects of the bald-faced acceptance of people—the Benefit of the Doubt-- bestowed on me through years of internalizing the teachings of Sesame Street, Sid And Marty Krofft, and the ABC After-School Special?

I do know for certain I’m out about $300.

I’ve had other gigs for which I’ve applied to through Craigslist (not to mention the pursuit of available single women…god…don’t get me started down that path…or up that curve as the case may be) that have not been so spectacularly abysmal, but disappointing nonetheless. There was the potential gig with Pacific Coast Monuments in Everett, WA. They were looking for illustrators to design and typeset custom cemetery memorials and headstones. And as a friend pointed out I may want to think twice about the job as, “You’ll be dealing with so many sad and angry people…”

Geez, it like a wasn’t a mortician’s gig…besides, the job would pay almost $30.00 an hour, a wage I’ve never had in my life. I did a sample design to the Creative Director’s specs, landed an interview, and afterwards was asked to design a second, more detailed, memorial stone. This took about 5-6 hours, as the illustrations were more complex than the first. I never heard back—no, “Thanks but ‘No Thanks.’” Nothing.

That’s very typical of job-hunting in the metro-Seattle area, mind. No common courtesy just institutionalized apathy that borders on the passive-aggressive. All part of a cultural perspective, here, I have yet to understand.

Then someone advised me that I really shouldn’t be doing such extensive work as part of an interview…after all, what’s to keep the other party from using your work as their own..?

Crap.

I supposed I could do some kind of obit search for the stone(s) I designed, but I fear it would be more trouble than it was worth.

I no longer trust anything or anyone found on Craigslist.

So this was one of my first forays into the land of freelance design…this was one of my first efforts to climb a new Learning Curve. And if a Learning Curve is defined by the AMOUNT you learn and the TIME IT TAKES to learn it, I live in fear of not living long enough, as I need plenty of time to process.

Simplicity Is...

2008-08-18T16:43:00.000-07:00

In the winter of 2001 I was flung into a new life. The attack on the World Trade Center was yet months away. I was a newly-made single man, living alone on the outskirts of a very big city with few to connect to and little to connect with. I worked a swing shift and commuted an hour by bus into downtown Seattle. The route home each evening was dreary and lonely, made all the more dreadful by the anticipation of even more dreary loneliness awaiting me at home. I didn’t care much for my life but I did struggle to improve it, and my perspective, as best I could, from scratch.

The one light during this time was the Internet, access to which, for the first time in my life, was all-my-own-alone.

Part of my efforts involved a great deal of thinking, thinking about the notion of Simplicity. Like Pirsig’s pursuit of Quality in ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE, I was seeking Simplicity. I imagine there wasn’t a great deal of difference in that which I was seeking to subsume and Pirsig, it was really just semantics. I thought a lot about how I could shape this new life of mine into something better, something stronger, but I had no one in my immediate airspace with whom to connect, to resonate.

Always seeking some level of connection, I polled all the folks on my email list, asking them to define for me, in their own terms, the notion of Simplicity.

Responses to my inquiry were fair to middling. After reading them over, I dropped them into a file in my yahoo mail account, and there they sat for over eight years. But they were never entirely forgotten. Some are so frighteningly profound they still evoke an intense emotional response in me even now. I believe the response so deep because I have the honor of knowing the person from whom it was formed.

In this age, information is the greatest of commodities, it is the stuff of our lives…but unlike material stuff we can accumulate and horde and squirrel away out of sight, digital information does not gather dust. Had it that capacity, I may just have taken the time to lug these responses into the light and “dust” them off sooner.

Such is life, when it is not as simple as one would wish.

I’m finally sharing these responses, and I’ll leave names in place until I am requested to do otherwise. It was sad to realize just how many of these folks have dropped from my radar, or vice versa. In retrospect, there is a dearth of responses here, something which surprised me in re-reading them after all of these years. Perhaps I don’t think and ask the same questions as my peers, perhaps I ask them too soon, or too late.

But it all, ultimately, begs the question; is my life any simpler now than it was then? I if say ‘yes,’ I fear I will be lying, and if I say, ‘no,’ I fear the response more negative than is factual. Not a particularly simple answer, now was it? But I will say that I am closer than I have ever been before because, frankly, I quit making it a conscious concern to pursue that which is Simple several years back. I believe now, instead of thinking, I began to work on doing…

…or I could just be blowing a lot of smoke.

It did occur to me that another such poll is in the offing; times have changed, the original respondents have changed…and now I keep this blog, and this is such and ideal filler.

Oh, and any insights you may wish to share are always welcome.

Please read on.

Simplicity is…

"Complexity that no longer worries. Peace of mind is simple, but it's reached through many worries first. Decide what you will do, don't rush the decision, and do it. If the course is wrong, lather, rinse, and repeat.

Consider that the elegance of Shaker furniture took a lot of consideration."
-Gene Ha

"Simplicity is the art of making the least possible more than enough."
-Professor Jack Watson

"Simplicity is.... an answer "yes" or "no".
Simplicity is...a lie of the "white" variety
Simplicity is...pantheism
Simplicity is...doing what feels right
Simplicity is...a shirt devoid of marketing
Simplicity is...a cirrus cloud at dusk"
-Douglas Hayko

"Simplicity:
Not letting what you THINK you want
Get in the way of what you really need."
-Rocco Lieuallen

"Simplicity: Trusting that God will guide me to glorify Him in all things I do. Anything else doesn't matter, really."
-Joseph Butler

"Simplicity…A lack of chaos and confusion (and my personal goal)."
-Susan Paige-Giberson

"Simplicity...
--Balance, as in the Tao
--Efficiency and elegance
--Occam's Razor"
-Kevin Smith

"Simplicity is
A striving for contentment, if you will, for what I have. Not a longing for things I don't have and don't need. Breaking down into something’s basic parts - what is needed?"
-Traci Smith

"The first thing that comes to my mind is the road that I live on. There are no lines on the road. There are only 3 farms on the road...2 dairy farms and my horse "ranch." It is the kind of road that if someone drives by, you stop what you are doing to wave. The majority of the traffic is from tractors. (Although if one vehicle goes by an hour it must be rush hour!) I don't lock my door, EVER! I leave my keys in my vehicles-and don't lock the doors-all the time, my vehicles are parked outside. It is a simple road; it makes part of my life simple, calm, serene and happy."
-Marsha Vine

"Uncomplicated, requiring few steps and not
difficult to follow. This word in particular brings to mind the Simplicity patterns for sewing, which are designed for anyone to use. You don't have to be a professional for it to come out correct."
-Laura Poor

"Explaining something so that a child could understand."
-Melissa McKee

"Simplicity is the opposite pole of complexity - it forms a dynamic balance and whole with complexity, the relaxation phase as counterpoise to the action phase. It is the inward breath - taking in preparation for the out-going breath - putting out."
-Thea Rowe

"Simplicity is the most basic and organic way in which to react to or create an idea or circumstance.

I will leave you with this on line answer, thus keeping it simple."
-Cynthia Bestemen

"Unadorned perfection."
-Sarah Engler-Young

"When I do not have to analyze something to find the meaning behind it."
-Courtney DiMartino

"Simplicity is bare-bones living. Easier and less fraught with worry than Complexity."
-Heather Ronai

"Freedom."
-Kelly Warren

"The absence of clutter. Literal and figurative."
-Rob Harriman

"Simplicity is sister to science, brother to function."
-Prof. John Schmor

The Shittiest Day in I Cannot Remember When...

2008-06-10T02:35:00.000-07:00

In 1987 I came across this beautifully illustrated children's book written by Judith Viorst and illustrated by Ray Cruz called, "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day." (ISBN-13: 978-068971173) I was 22 when I discovered the book. I do not recall how I came across it, but over the past 20 years, whenever a Cascade of Crumminess tumbles over my day, I see the cover of the book in my mind, and hear echoes of the first few lines of text, "I went to sleep with gum in my mouth and now there's gum in my hair and when I got out of bed this morning I tripped on the skateboard and by mistake I dropped my sweater in the sink while the water was running and I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.."

This day was one of those Terrible, Horribles...

Imprimis:

I started out today researching an article on "green concessions" packaging for Boxoffice...then covered a shift at the computer lab for Denny (I dropped him at the airport Thursday for his return to Hawaii...poor bastard will be there until August).

A student asked for my feedback on his packing graphics for Design 6, I offered to show him my own from my on line portfolio. He looked at it and said, "Oh my God, when you're rich and famous can I PLEASE REDESIGN your website for you?" I didn't appreciate his tone. He later says to me, "You always seems so irritable." I mumble a mock compliment regarding his admirable lack of inhibition.

...he thinks I said, "ignition."

After my shift at the lab, I rush from Shoreline to First Hill for an American Radio Theater recording session. I remember to bring disc recordings of my audio play, WHEN THE WORLD SCREAMED, for any actors in the company who've not received their complimentary copies. One actor reads over the CD insert I've designed, looks over my graphics and adapter's notes, and immediately points out a type-o that no one over the last five months has caught, including me. The Artistic Director points out the inherent inconvenience of my design being that it's fourteen inches long. Evidently purchasing 11x17 size sheets of paper is a hardship for her. I feel she is insinuating I redesign the insert.

We rush through recording 80+ pages of transcript from the Artistic Director's latest project, NAMING NAMES which deals with the McCarthy Era Hollywood Blacklist. As per usual, we have no rehearsal, no read through, not even a discussion of the subject matter. As is often of late, I feel a creeping agitation over this lack of preparedness and how it just seems to compound the inconsistency of acting and directing experience in the group.

Near the second to the last page of the piece, a newer male member reads from a scene between an FBI agent and a blacklisted actor. The question pertains to the relationship the actor shares with his girlfriend. The FBI agent asks, "Did you perform 'coon-uh-ling-Goos' on your girlfriend?" I just about rip open a bowel trying to contain myself. I do my best to keep quiet. The digital disc is still recording.

This performer's wife is in the room. They're over 50.

Cunnilingus. Say it out loud--it sounds just like it looks, for god's sake. Sad. I guess he doesn't know what it looks like.

Earlier in the recording session, the Artistic Director attempted to deliver a line in Spanish and mangles it badly. I ask if I can give it a shot. I've barely mouthed two words, when another member of the group with not a fraction of my action experience (but prides himself on being a top-notch mimic) hovers over my shoulder, feeling obliged to coach me on my efforts at pronunciation. I've had two years of Spanish in high school, another two in college. I feel the heat rising, so I cup my hand over the mic and firmly say to the Mimic, "Thank you." He doesn't get my tone, and proceeds with his efforts to coach me. I ask him if he'd rather do it and I sit down. It takes him about 9 takes for a line of dialog made up of 6 words. He doesn't understand why I'm irritated.

Afterwards, Margery, in whose house we meet, insists I take home a Tupperware of some fresh fruit she has been storing. She's fearful it will spoil and (besides) the raspberberries will be coming in before summer's end, and she needs to make room. I accept, and stick the container in my bag. I forget about it. I have to drive the Mimic home. At some point in the evening, he hurt his voice while attempting to create as much vocal variety for each of his characters. He coughs dramatically, and speaks in a choked voice as though he's trying to hold a wad of mashed potatoes in the cleft below his uvula. It is the most quiet ride home I have ever shared with him. For a moment, I feel blessed.

I drop off the Mimic, and a few minutes later I pull into my apartment parking lot and see the OIL light on the dash has become a steady red glow. That's a bad sign, it means the well has hit bottom. I'm frustrated, I'm well aware this rattle-trap burns oil like no tomorrow, but I just added two quarts on Saturday afternoon. I get out and walk around the front of the car. Black runnels of oil drip over the grill and there is a fine patina of black ooze on the hood. For the second time since buying this car, I have neglected to properly seal the oil cap. I lift the hood and see the cap is long gone and everything underneath has been spattered in black ooze. I drop the hood and decide to deal with it first thing in the morning.

"oh, yes, there will be blood..."

I get into my apartment and set my shoulder bag on the kitchen counter. It leaves a wet smear when I shift it the right. I've forgotten about the Tupperware container of fruit. Liquid has poured all over the inside of the bag. My date Planner, Phone Book, Note pad, sketch book, small-scale portfolio, an issue of The Fortean Times, and two comic books are soaked and now ruined.

Its late but I disregard the neighbors and yell, "What else you got for me, huh? Come on, I KNOW you're just getting warmed up!" I yell to no one in particular, not even the cat.

I open up my email and see a message from the Golden Eyed Woman I took to see a play on Saturday night. We're very different, but think she's incredibly striking and more than just a wee bit intriguing. She writes, "My dad was a logger as well as an engineer. I have a predisposition for smart rough mechanic-types. These days I seem to specialize in male friends. Really sweet, good, dear ones, who I want to hug, and dance with, or do Tai Chi and Chi Gong with and joke a lot and am among the persons wondering why it isn't a romance. But it isn't. None of them really are. So I feel like saying, be my friend, but please, don't go getting romantical on me, okay?"

I hesitate in emailing her back with a link to the Wikipedia definition for "Fag Hag." However, I do spend a few vain moments trying to locate online resources for women of that particular inclination.

...and thank god I've finally met a woman with the good sense to admit outright that, YES, she's actually looking for nothing more than a replacement for her father. Because, Jesus-shit, I really wish the last five or six women I've dated had been capable of extending me that courtesy.

It's 2:30am on June 10th and my shittiest day in I cannot remember when is now two and a half hours over.
I hope.

Timeslip: Mary Ann Got Busted

2008-04-22T14:49:00.001-07:00

Have you ever noticed that little button on your DVD remote that seems gadgetry’s equivalent to the appendix, that thing called Timeslip button? I have no freaking clue how to work it, but it has a use…I looked it up; Timeslip: The ability to playback and record at the same time.

That’s just great. But I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to apply said definition. I thumbed through the manual, I looked on the internet, but each and every bulleted list of instructions was just about as counter-intuitive as…well, a VCR instruction manual.

But, god, the term is so very cool, and when you say the phrase, Timeslip, all kinds of cool science-fictional and fantastically speculative images tumble about in your mind…well, my mind, anyway.

Let’s play with the idea—Are we, as human beings, not subject to Timeslip? Sure. Think about the flesh-and-blood counterparts to the characters that populate our popular culture and personal myth. We all know beings that play back and forth in time through our consciousness…

If the above was just a bit too obtuse, please forgive me; I’m referring to actors. Specifically, those who devoted a greater part of their careers (if not their lives) to playing characters that, intentionally or not, became part of our interior audience, our personal chorus, our popular (if not personal myth).

Take, for example, Mary Ann Summers. As a pre-adolescent young male, I don’t think I even knew if she had a last name until I did a Google search this afternoon. As a matter of fact, I don’t think a great many of us knew she, nor any of the seven fellow-castaways of Gilligan’s Island had last names (or first names in some cases) because those details didn’t matter to us. She was just Mary Ann, when her name was uttered among my chums on the playground, they all knew to whom you referred. She was an icon, a crucial element, and a fixture in the pantheon. What really mattered, initially, was how Mary Ann and her compatriots made us feel—and they usually made us feel pretty good; they tickled our insides, they made us grin, but when the credits rolled at the episode’s close, we didn’t think much more on them until the next day the show aired; Timeslip. That is, until we (well, those like myself in the heterosexually inclined strata of the viewing audience) began to suffer the slow-creeping of hormonal change of preadolescence and Mary Ann’s presence became more persistent. She didn’t go away at the flip of the dial. Desire does not fade like the ancient glow from the cathode ray generator.

We had three potential objects of desire women in the Gilligan’s Island pantheon—well, two, really, as Mrs. Howell couldn’t possibly fit into the equation. Mrs. Howell was about as sexually appealing as Grandma, and sadly, for many of us, she was the equivalent surrogate.

Ginger was just too dangerous. Ginger was best defined by a term I learned a lifetime later, in college; Ginger was Sex on a Stick. Ginger was a train-wreck of glamour and neon-lit eroticism; she was glitter, she was tinsel and gold, and to a small-town boy like me, she was the absolute pinnacle of that which was unattainable. Ginger came with a hefty price tag. Not a price tag in a pejorative sense; I’m not talking hustler-ship or harlotry—I’m simply saying to woo her, wed her, and possibly bed her, you had to have a healthy pocket book to keep in Ginger Grant’s good graces.

Mary Ann’s character was brilliant in design; she was simple and just a little bit insidious. Obviously Mary Ann was constructed to be the Girl Next Door. She’s the gal you’re supposed want. She’s the gal you could bring home to Mom, because if you were to bring home Ginger, you may never be allowed through that door again. No, with Mary Ann you were given a rare combination of sincerity, simplicity, a touch of serenity and maybe, just maybe, a pinch of something spicy—something sexy, though you’d never actually call it that. And that was okay—for some reason it was okay to harbor these feelings for Mary Ann. Maybe it was the ponytails, maybe it was the plaid, the calico, the bobby socks, the maryjanes…because Mary Ann was an erotic safe-zone. You didn’t have to feel guilty for feeling something naughty about Mary Ann, and for that reason your gradual march into sexual awareness was softer, gentler, and when you thrummed with that first vibration of soft erotic tickle for Mary Ann it was something you were supposed to do. You wanted her, yet you felt a certain chaste protectiveness of her. In your mind’s eye, you never saw her in lascivious poses and you’d probably whither up and die to see her in a two-piece. No, Mary Ann, as a presence, was something to be protected, protected in the same safe place you kept those very early feelings, when the rough mechanics of sex began to take over and propel you toward adulthood.

And on October 18th, 2007, Dawn Wells was busted out in the toolies of Idaho for reckless driving and possession of drug paraphernalia.

“Mary Ann: Busted!” the headlines ran.

That really rattled me.

But the image attached to the police blotter brought home to us by CNN, MSN, and E! was not the winsome object of novice-love, but someone bearing closer resemblance to a certain melon-mugged and wizened Jedi master. And this, this moment, this is where we must step back from the flow of the Timeslip and shake ourselves a bit. Dawn Wells, actor, aged 69, founder of the Idaho Film and Television Institute and organizer of the region's annual family movie festival (known to all as the Spud Fest) was sentenced to five days in jail, fined $410.50 and placed on probation after pleading guilty to one count of reckless driving, was the one got busted—not Mary Ann Summers.

Mary Ann lives on a perfectly pleasant desert island, somewhere in the Pacific, with all those loveable characters. And she’ll exist, in the Timeslip, where we view, playback, and record her over and over again.

Dawn Wells will go on with her life, and hopefully not get busted for reckless driving, or drug paraphernalia because, you know, that’s not the best example to be setting for the youth of America.

Regarding (a Certain) Sunday...

2008-04-19T12:29:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time I worked at this godawful customer service job at an equally godawful student loan guarantor. I worked nights, the only benefit being I usually had no sociopath supervisor staring over my shoulder. In between calls I had too much time to think, but just enough time to write. I wrote a whole series of biographical snippets...this was in the days before blogging was in vogue (at least, I think it was). Many of those witty little missives are long gone, held in the silicon grip of one or more of my former, virally corrupt, PCs.

This story has been in my yahoo email draft file for years. I passed it around to friends via email. Many of them laughed. It became a key element of a novel I have been working on (on and off, now mostly off) for the last 6 years. Funny, I have yet to reach this story's point in my novel.

Mary was a woman I met when I was a freshman in college at the Univeristy of Oregon. I was smitten beyond words. That was in 1985. In 2001, through the magic of the internet, I tracked Mary down. At the time she was living in Portland, but eventually moved to Seattle. We had coffee, we had a great talk, and she invited me to dinner.

I'll post the piece below

***************************************************************************

THIS IS A TRUE STORY.

So. I left my apartment at about 5:15pm to beat the traffic and the rain and make it to Mary's house by 6:00pm. I had downloaded the street directions from the internet and called to verify I had accurate directions. Needed finer details; her apartment was around the backside of a two-story house, brick with blue trim. Brick, with Blue Trim. Did I need to dodge dog poop? No, theres a path.

I made it to 83rd Ave North with time to spare. Raining VERY hard. I pulled up to house number 543 at 5:30pm. Way early. Best to sit tight. Breath deep. Have a smoke and listen to the rain. Did that, for 15 minutes. At 5:55pm I put my club on the Duck Truck steering wheel, slung my satchel bearing two bottles of whine over my shoulder, and hefted a cardboard box holding three freshly painted figurines (one for Mary, the other two to simply show-off) and marched up to the house. 543. It was white and the lights were out. I wandered up the driveway. Yeah. There's an apartment back there. But it is dark as well. Brick house, blue trim. I wondered if I had not had a moment of dislexia, inverted the house numbers. I pulled my phone book from my bag, water dripping off my baseball hat...No...It says 543...I wander down the street, looking for, perhaps 543...533...I see a medium sized dog standing in a driveway...533...Mary has a dog...Could THAT be it? I wander up the driveway, the dog barking at my heels.

I have a bag with two bottles of whine slug over my shoulder and a cardboard box with three sculpted and painted figurines in my arms. The next thing I know, the dog has leapt up and bitten into my right arm. Had I not been wearing my leather motorcycle jacket, the bite would have gone clean through and broken the skin. I keep moving and suddely realize I cannot move my leg...I am dragging a dog that has now locked it's jaws around my right calf. I look to my left, and mounted to a mail box post reads a sign...BEWARE OF DOG. Shit. Shit. Shit. I get back in the Duck Truck and start giggling like a madman. What the hell is this? Who is responsible? Is it HORNADAY LUCK? Is it ANDERSON LUCK? TURNER? CHENOWITH? Who is accountable for this freaking Sorry Pass?

Don't panic, Ace, shit happens.

It dawns on me I must call Mary. I do not even LOOK at my watch. I didn't bring any cash, not even a spare quarter. But I remember that my Mother, several months ago, in her infinite kindness and charitability and foresight gave me a calling card from Verizon with 30 free minutes. Please God, let it still be in my wallet. My leg is starting to throb. Do I feel blood dripping into my boot? Or is it just rainwater?

I pull out onto the main drag of Fremont Ave and find a payphone. I dig through old business cards and outdated coupons. There it IS. I dial her number,

"Uh. Hi. Mary. It's Me, um, I think I wrote your address down wrong...543?"
"Yes..."
"Um. North 83rd Avenue?"
"Oh. No, Cole, 84th..."
"urrrr. Okay. I'm Okay now. I'll be right there..."

Brick House, Blue Trim.
Brick House, Blue Trim.
Am I bleeding?

Brick House, Blue Trim and a little black dog-face peeking at me through the doggy-door. CHRIST ON A FUCKING CRUUUUUTTTTCCCCHHHH!!!

The dog barks, sniffs. I reach up and ring the bell, my arm still throbbing.

...and a pause in which all the Great Blue Whales of the Oceans give birth...And Mary opens the door into the dark and Claire, her Lab-And-Something mix rubs up against my leg and wags her tail and says, "Hello."

And I cannot TELL you how badly I had to pee.

I told Mary what happened. I re-introduced myself to her not as Cole Hornaday, but as the Crown Prince of Goobs. Nice to meet you.

We talked lots. I played "kick-the-ball" with Claire while Mary cooked and we finally got down to the nitty-gritty of swapping some stories. She made Salmon and rice with ochra and dessert was some sort of shortcake with peaches, flambe. And Mary was grateful because I got Claire tuckered out enough that she fell asleep at our feet while we ate..And we put away both the bottles of Reisling AND the Chardonnay and I got her to tell me more of her story and I freaked her out (again) with my stainless-steel memory because I recognized an antique globe in an alcove as being the same her Mother had had in the window of her living-room in Salem, circa 1987. And at about 10:30pm I said, "You look really beat, I'm gonna get out of your way."

And I said, "I have really enjoyed spending time with you and I hope you feel the same..." I made some suggestions.

"I will give you a call week after next."

And I got two hugs and I walked back into the night feeling just fine. Feeling like, "Yeah, I AM okay." And today I am really proud of who I am and who I represent and how I was raised and what I believe in and even if she doesn't feel the same way about me, which she most likely does not, that's okay too, Because I got more than I had ever hoped. I got to finally hear her story. I want to hear more chapters...But I also am wise enough to not be greedy. I made her laugh and I made her nodd her head at my insights and I did a good job. I gave her the deer sculpture I had made and I think she liked it. I did a good job of just being me.

This morning I found I was sporting a bruise the size of my nephew's fist on my left calf. No blood.

Brick House, Blue Trim.

THIS IS A TRUE STORY.
By cole hornaday, age 36.
the end.
***************************************************************************

Epiloque. 2006

Nothing really happened with Mary and I. We went out to dinner a few weeks later. She was distant and distracted. Clearly uncomfortable with what I was willing to pay for our meal. Several days later, she sent me a terse email saying, basically, "Thanks, but no thanks." That was okay. It wasn't entirely unexpected.

Making contact with her, again, was the equivalent of fantasy come to life, but the reality was, we really had very little in common. I don't know how I thought we ever did. I was young. Really young.

But one thing that has always kind of bothered me, and maybe this is all simply my ego at work; Mary had no recollection of me. She didn't remember the time we spent together in school, she didn't remember our talks over coffee, nothing. Even with my efforts to reach back in time, to find this woman again, she is now, as she was to me over 20 years ago, a mystery.

Sometimes mystery's never get solved. And that's okay.

I keep a picture of her framed on my bathroom wall. I look at it every day. It is there to remind me of some things, and to keep other things in perspective. And, sometimes, to simply remember to let go.

Addendum. May, 15, 2009

It was a hurried afternoon. I'd been out of town all weekend covering the McMinnville UFO Festival for a potential freelance project. My cat was sick and not eating. I was rushing around trying to catch up on all the things I didn't get done over the weekend, like buying canned cat food instead of dry in a desperate attempt to get her to eat. I stopped in at the QFC on Holman Drive on the way to several other errands. While pushing my cart past the check-out stands I saw a familiar flash of gold and blue.

"Naw. That couldn't be...she's long-gone from here. Grad school or some such."

I half-heartedly piloted the cart down the spice aisle, all the while taking delicate glances over my shoulder.

"Geez, girl, lift up your head from your pocket book so I can be sure..."

I decided not to bother. This was old ground that I'd passed from long ago. I finished my shopping and trundled into the checkout line. Good God if she wasn't still there. I looked her up and down. It was Mary. How old was she now? She looked amazing. And her frame was as lithe and compact as I remember. I tried not to stare. I was close enough to smell her. She didn't look up or see me.

Usually a steady stare laid on a person unbeknownst will kick in at least some kind of sixth sense and they will look up at you...not this time.

She rebuffed the bagboy's offer to help her out with her groceries and pushed her cart away. I heard her voice. I check the music against those engrams, deeply buried. It was the same. I numbly paid for groceries and let my eyes follow her out of the store.

While stuffing the sales receipt into my wallet I looked up to see her returning her cart.
What the hell. I'll head out that way and see if I don't intercept her. I did.

"Hi. Mary. Do you remember me this time?" There came that inevitable bland look someone gives you while there brain flips through file cabinets and dusty rollodex.

Pause. "Oh-YES! How are you..."
"Cole."
"Yes--Cole, I knew that..."

And we talked a little. She'd gone to graduate school in Switzerland. Switzerland--wow. And was now back at Harborview Medical working on AIDS research.

"Wasn't that what you were doing before? Or something like it?" No. It wasn't.

For some reason I felt I SHOULD have felt as though I'd put my foot in my mouth, but this time I did not.

She had problems fitting into the culture of Switzerland, felt out of place. I commented on how I discovered fitting in somewhere is not about the established culture's resistance to you, but your need to simply build yourself an island of like-minded people. When you're young, that takes little time at all because we are all so many blank slates and so very malleable. As adults it is a struggle and something I live with daily. But once you've built that island, you have to work very hard to keep it 'shored up.' Pun failed. Moving on.

She asked what I'd been up to and there I was unwashed, graying and portly--never expecting to ever see her again--I took a deep breath, found my light, my pitch of voice...and stopped myself. There never was nor ever would be a need to put on a show for this woman. There was no point.

The needles came down, the dials twisted counter clockwise.

I told her about quitting my job, going back to school, lucking in to becoming a professional writer, radio theatre, and my efforts to get involved with Seattle fringe theatre. I gave her my card saying, "You can visit my website to get an idea of what all I've been working on." And then I broke it off and said I needed to get moving.

But I did say that to her that I was probably happier now than I have been in a long time. I had to throw in the obligatory, "Granted, I live alone with my cat..." comment. I couldn't help it. I've got to create those Checkovian 'Laughter Through the Tears,' moments or I simply don't feel fulfilled.

She said, "It's good to see you, Cole. I'm so glad to hear you are doing well." Pleasant, clinical. She owes me nothing.

But her eyes are still that very spring-glacial blue and her hair is still of molten honey, and though I saw a little more age peering back from the wells of her eyes, I still cannot help but feel there is a pantheon out there missing a goddess.

But that's just me.

Interview: Marjane Satrapi

2008-04-18T17:14:00.001-07:00

Hey All,
The work I did for the Boxoffice.com website has been archived within the site, but each time I brag about having interviewed So-And-So and I attempt to forward the link to the victim of said bragging, the link never works. I am dubious that my contributions will be preserved for posterity, so, at the risk of breaching some contract and facing legal repercussions, I'm going to cut and paste at least one of those previously published pieces here; my interview with Marjane Satrapi. I conducted this interview about a month prior to the release of Satrapi's film, PERSEPOLIS, in the states. A much, much longer version version exists on my hard drive, but I think this (heavily edited) version a much more enjoyable read...

So, enjoy already...

Marjane Satrapi

December 18, 2007

Illustrator and storyteller Marjane Satrapi has found an audience with young and old all over the world. She is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times, and has produced such graphic works as Chicken with Plums and Embroideries; but it is Persepolis, her four-part series of illustrated biographical novels recounting her childhood in Iran during the rise of fundamentalist Islam, that has earned her international attention. Now an animated feature directed by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, Persepolis has garnered accolades from Toronto International, Telluride, and New York film festivals. Released through Sony Pictures, Persepolis arrives in New York and Los Angeles on Christmas Day.

Q: Where does the title “Persepolis,” come from?

MJ: Persepolis is the ancient capital of Persia. It is the name the Greeks gave to it. “Persepolis” in Greek means the city of the Iranian….It…helps people to not forget that this is a country with 4,000 years of history. Plus, its one word, its easy to remember—a beautiful word. When titles are too long, you never remember them. Once you hear the name “Persepolis,” you remember it.

Q: In reading Persepolis, one is struck by your parents very liberal intellectual depiction, especially against the dominant fundamentalist culture of the time…

MJ: You have liberal parents and crazy fanatic parents—you have them everywhere. I have a friend who lives in Salt Lake City. All of her neighbors are Mormon. Jesus Christ, thank God I was born in Iran and not in Salt Lake City with those kinds of parents, that would be just Hell.

I am much happier to have been born in Iran—a challenge though it was. But having the parents surrounding me that I had, unlike being born into these Born Again Christian families—I’m ten times happier. I am very happy to have not been born into a fanatical family. It doesn’t matter if you are born into the freest country in the world; if you are born into a fanatical family…if you are stuck with them in your childhood, you are stuck with them….

Q: Were people of your parent’s mindset very commonplace in Iran, or do you feel your parents were the exception to the rule?

MJ: I don’t know if I can say “common.” If I say that about the whole if Iran, it’s definitely not true, but I come from Tehran, and I came from a middle-class family and we had enough money to travel to Europe, to go to movies, etc—and not to have major problems….All of my friends had similar situations as my parents did; very educated, very open-minded,

Q: In your preface to Persepolis you characterize Iran as being a strong nation, a nation whose language and culture stood up to repeated invasions for centuries. And yet, the most detrimental alteration of that culture ultimately came not from without, but from within. Why was this?

MJ: Let’s remember there is 5,000 years of history here. The Persian Empire was the biggest in the world—ever—until that point in time. The first words of the world were written in this country, the first Federal System was established in this country. It is a strong identity that is there. But this condescension with which the western world looks upon this region of the world can be unbearable. Changes in a country, of course, have to come from within the country. From the second you say, “I will go and bring peace to this country,” from the second you invade this country you are an enemy of this country, whether you wanted to be or not. If you love your own country and you think it belongs to you, you need to remember other people share exactly the same feelings. So how is it that we can determine that pride for here is good, but the pride there is not? How can we determine if people in another place have great pride for their own country and that other people don’t have any pride?

In making Persepolis--if there was a goal to it as an artistic project—it was to show that a human being is a human being no matter where in the world they come from. I wanted to show what it was like to grow up in a place where the individual is repressed and what you do to grow up in that and what you do when it comes time to leave. For the living, it is not just enough to be alive, as individuals we need more. This is a story about things that have happened and are still happening and will continue to happen in many countries of the world. Once in a while those changes come from your government, once in a while it comes from your family, from your school friends, but that’s why some many people can identify with the story.

Q: In the latter half of Persepolis, your boyfriend, Markus’ character says, “ Culture and education are the lethal weapons against all kinds of fundamentalism,” and yet it was a group of Iranian student revolutionaries who seized the American Embassy in 1979, holding them captives for nearly three years…

MJ: You need to understand something--the Shah originally took power in Iran by a coup d’etat supported by the American government in 1953. Memories carry from one generation to another. Imagine that in 1951 we nationalize our oil, Egypt nationalizes the Suez Canal, and whole wave of democracy comes into this region. Suddenly this coup d’etat happened. President Truman didn’t want the coup, but it happened and after we didn’t have any trust for the American government. You have to understand that the secret service of the Shah was very much helped by the CIA—they kidnapped people and tortured them. So, the people are not very friendly toward the US government. When the hostage situation happened, it was a big deal for you, but for us not so much because these were not nice people to us. Also, let’s face it, nobody was killed and nobody was tortured. They spent 444 days there and then they came back to their country and that was it.

I grew up with the idea that Americans were the worst people in the world… because of what I was taught in school. But I come to America for the first time, looking for other reasons to hate them, and I got this slap in my face because they were all so fucking nice. During the last election—me, the Axis of Evil— here I am defending Americans in France, declaiming what was being said about Americans—Why? Because I know who Americans are, they are not pro war either, they are nice people and they want peace in the world. Why did I feel this way? Because I had been instructed to do so? No, it was because I went and I saw and I tried to understand who the American Person is…Being very much constricted by your ignorance is where the problem lies…I make an effort and make discoveries and suddenly things are not the way I thought.

If we understand that we have different points of view, how can we hate each other?

Q: In the publishing realm there does exist an effort to maintain a distinction between the graphic novel and the comic book, at least in the West. Case in point, Alan Moore (creator of V, For Vendetta, The Watchmen, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) has referred to comics as being predominantly superhero stories, or more precisely, “thirteen-year-old power fantasies.”

MJ: All of that is Comics. It’s just the medium of Comics and I like Comics. I always say that I am a cartoonist and I make comics. I have never said that I was a “Graphic Novelist.” What is a Graphic Novel…? “Graphic Novel,” is really a term that the publishers created to save the bourgeois from being scared or ashamed to read comics in front of their friends. I’m a cartoonist and I make comics and I don’t care for this “Graphic Novel” stuff.

Making comics is just a medium--it’s just an arrangement…It’s like animation, people ask, “Why did you make your movie an animated movie instead of using real people?” It was the choice that seemed the most logical. Animation, really, is not a style of storytelling, its not a genre, it’s a storytelling technique.

Q: Were there any particular challenges in seeking support for adapting Persepolis to film?

MJ: The biggest challenge for people…was getting them to understand that a comic book is not a storyboard for a movie. There was this initial feeling that if you are adapting Comics, all you have to do is take the book and film the frame one after the other and you have your movie, which is not true. A movie is a completely different narration and you don’t have the same relationship to it. They’re two different media and two different kinds of narration. We kept many of the main elements from the comics, like the characters, but a whole new framework around it had to be created. The two works, the book and the film, are very similar, but at the same time they are very, very different and that is the whole paradox of the project.

Q: In adapting Persepolis into an animated film, were there moments that stood out as being particularly challenging?

MJ: No, we really tried to proceed with the story and forget about the book. We just pulled the comics apart and started to develop the narration. If there was dialogue that would be good for the movie, we kept it—but just some of it—for the most part we had to recreate the whole thing.

Q: While watching Persepolis evolve into a feature-length film, did you make any new discoveries about your story?

MJ: Absolutely. In a book, for example, it’s very easy to cover sixteen years of someone’s life, but it’s not so easy in a movie because then you would have five movies in one. You have to choose an axis; you have to choose a turning point. When we began making the movie, I was in a very nostalgic time of my life, so we decided to structure the whole film a flashback. Setting it up this way is all part of the decisions you have to make for film but not for a book. In a book your audience can take their time, in a film, your time is limited.

Q: You made the conscious decision in 1994 to leave Iran indefinitely, and yet you still refer to it as “my country.”

MJ: Of course I do. It was not an actual decision. I can go back, the problem is, if I may leave once I go back—that is the question! Of course I see Iran as my country, but France is also my country. The situation is not exactly the way I want it to be, but it will never stop being my country.

Q: What is the one thing you hope your audience retains from viewing Persepolis?

MJ: That they find themselves saying, “These people are just like us.”

Wheeled Wonder Women: Producing and distributing Blood on the Flat Track: The Rise of the Rat City Rollergirls

2008-03-14T13:40:00.000-07:00

**Below is the unpublished article written for boxoffice.com**

If you’ve been raised in this country with even a smidge of liberal education you’ve undoubtedly been subject to the ongoing struggle for women’s equality. Those with an even more extensive liberal background have even Majored in Women’s Studies, where one is frequently immersed in intensive essay, lecture, and testimonial inscribing the suffering brought on by the weight of a very male dominant culture bearing down upon the Feminine identity.

But attend one women’s Roller Derby bout, and all those essays, all those testimonials, and all that worrisome oppression becomes a distant memory, if not a questionable and foggy fantasy. Attend one Roller Derby bout and you may very well wind up fearing for the sanctity of your fragile, liberal-educated soul. And like most, you’ll ultimately find yourself reveling in the audacity of spirit, the ferocity of competition, and the raw, uninhibited theatricality of a spectator sport that, for nearly a generation, went into a strange dormancy and was all but forgotten by American Popular culture until a handful of outrageous women, some promoters, some punks, and some savvy business people came up with the notion of revitalizing the sport, hence the inspiration for the Leaky-Sleazewell Production’s recent documentary, Blood on the Flat Track: The Rise of the Rat City Rollergirls.

The rebirth of Women’s Roller Derby and, in particular, the emergence of the Pacific Northwest’s eminent league, The Rat City Rollergirls, has been as fast and as furious as the very nature of the game. So let us thank the gods of modern technology that as this new subculture bloomed, sprawled, and entrenched itself in popular consciousness, that several young documentary film makers had the means, the time, and the inspiration to detail the event from the inception.

“If you’ve ever seen Roller Derby and, especially, if you are someone interested in the spectacle of cinema—how would you not want to film this?” Lacy Leavitt, one half of the Leaky-Sleazewell Production’s duo, who with her co-director Lainy Bagwell, state they saw the potential of a powerful documentary subject within moments of viewing their first Rat City Rollergirl bout, “it’s so big and beautiful an sexy and funny. It was just obvious immediately to both of us that we had to make a film about this.”

But for all the above noted flamboyance of this fresh, new subculture, it is Leavitt and Bagwells’ delicate documentation of the leaguers’ individual stories that enhances the vitality of this community for the viewer, an aspect of Blood on the Flat Track of which many league fans were critical, but as Bagwell says, “You see these women and you figure they must all drink beer and kick ass and take heroin…but this film takes away all that because you get to know them and see what they do for a living and what their families think and the things they go through.”

With the same grit and vigor that so inspired their filmmaking, Leavitt and Bagwell set out two years ago to capture the evolution of this roller derby league with more than one facet to their agenda. Intent on keeping costs and crew to a three-person minimum, they shot, with the assistance of editor and videographer Wes Johnson, over 250 hours of footage with a production budget subsidized by two temp jobs resulting in a very tight, very dynamic 95 minute film. The filmmakers admit their funding was sporadic, “It came from our bank accounts. We worked temp jobs…the nice thing about doing a documentary about roller derby is that roller derby is not the girls’ full-time job; they’re playing and practicing on nights and weekends so we were there nights and weekends.”

Blood on the Flat Track premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival on June 15th, 2007. It was a gala event for the Seattle roller derby community; red carpets, chandelier earrings, shimmering, open-backed dresses revealing a whole tapestry of tattoos, flashbulbs and video cameras galore but sadly, no war paint. Granted, the premiere evening audience was ramped to unconditionally support the film, but even those not deeply indoctrinated into the roller girl community could not deny the documentary was an impressive piece of independent film. Since then, the film has made the rounds to at least eight film festivals nationwide and garnered positive reviews, and even though an independent film producer could not ask for a more eager viewing audience, firm distribution the film is still forthcoming.

“Through working with at IFP (Independent Feature Project) and Film Market,” Bagwell points out; “I’ve contacted several people…there are a couple (distributors) who’ve seen screeners who are interested. We’ve sent it out to some of the larger film industry festivals and are waiting to hear back. Of course, we’d love to have a small theatrical release or DVD release, but if not, we’ll do it ourselves…”

Indeed, not all independent filmmakers would have the luxury of tapping into such and eager and enthusiastic audience, the benefit of choosing such a dynamic community as the subject or your film. Says Leavitt, “Obviously any filmmaker would love to be in the position where they have several people banging on their door wanting to distribute their movie. The only real major concern is having to go with a distributor that’s going to try and sell as some schlocky sex-piece.”

Yet, unlike many other films, Blood On the Flat Track has a very unique fall-back position for distributing their film, “We have potential to tap over 200 leagues worldwide…,” says Bagwell, “You average over 70-80 girls to a league, 200 leagues—somebody in there knows somebody that runs a theater or who works in distribution…We get so many emails from derby leaguers wanting to know he the DVD will be done so they can sell it at their merch (merchandise) tables, but we wanted to wait and make sure we had exhausted all our options before we look into self release.” One wonders why these filmmakers would even hesitate to go directly for the roller derby attendee market, and bypass the whole gauntlet of conventional film distribution.

“The biggest challenge,” Bagwell confides, “is that we are up here in the Northwest without a lot of resources to be traveling down to LA or New York. I think if we were in LA right now, it would be a lot easier to get this done. Right now everything is over email and the phone, but I don’t think is anything that’s insurmountable.”

For updates on film festival screenings of Blood on the Flat Track: The Rise of the Rat City Roller Girls, please visit their website www.ratcitymovie.com.

-Cole Hornaday, January, 2008

Dangerous Women: The Kind to Bring Home to Mom

2008-03-13T20:41:00.000-07:00

Hey All,

I don't know if I've blathered on quite enough about the high level of DIY documentary film being made in the Pacific Northwest of late. Its a dangerous breed of filmmaking, as all it takes is modicum of patience, an ounce of discipline, at least one video camera, a love of puzzles, and a sterling sense of vision.

As of last night I've seen three documentary films within the last year, produced in the Pacific Northwest that moved and rattled me beyond measure; PIRATE RADIO, USA, BLOOD ON THE FLAT TRACK, and GIRLS ROCK!

While writing for boxoffice.com I had the opportunity to pitch my own articles and not simply wait around for the editors to call me with an assignment. Being the champion of the undergod I feel obliged to to be, I sought every opportunity to promote two of the films listed above.

One article that was entirely aborted thanks to the editorial collapse of boxoffice.com was my coverage of the Leakey-Sleazewell production, BLOOD ON THE FLAT TRACK: The Rise of the Rat City Roller Girls. You can find out more about the film itself at the site below.

http://www.ratcitymovie.com/betasite/

I had the good fortune to have friends in common with the filmmakers, Lainy Bagwell and Lacey Leavitt, so convincing them to meet me for an interview was rather uncomplicated. My interview session with these two women was a peak moment for me, a peak moment of Seattle living; sitting in a faux-punk/cabaret club, drinking beers, talking with two brilliant, creative women about making their movie about Roller Derby chicks and their culture.

Man, it don't get much more "Seattle," than THAT.

I'll post the interview transcription below, with the intent of posting the actual article drawn from it at a later day.

Enjoy.

Interview, Lainy Bagwell, Lacey Leavitt
Writer/Director Team of BLOOD ON THE FLATTRACK: The Rise of the Rat City Roller Girls

Q: Tell us a little about your background(s) in documentary filmmaking. So, were you two AV Club Geeks high school?

Lainy Leavitt: I totally wasn’t (an AV Geek) I was a journalism student. I edited my school paper at Lake Stevens High School (just north of here). I’ve always been into writing. I wrote for the Everett Herald when I got out of high school. I always thought that I would go into journalism, but at a certain point in high school I realized films were more something that you could do—you could actually make films. I was like, “Why wouldn’t I want to do that, that’s a lot more fun and creative,” so I immediately set my sites on screen writing. I went to UW and did the cinema studies program but determine that I am just too bossy to let someone else take my script and do what they want to do with it. But I also wanted to direct. My mom had daycare kids in our basement and I got them together with a video camera and got them to do a re-enactment of A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN which we still cannot find the VHS tape for…. it’s going to be an Easter Egg on one of my DVDs someday.

Oh—sort of a side note-- But while I was home for the holiday, my mother found these old Barbersol commercials I’d mocked up with Barbies when I was nine—remember those awful Barbersol commercials? Barbersol mated with Barbies, it was awful with my home phone number as the phone number to call.

After graduating I went to New York and worked on The Squid and the Whale. Seattle didn’t have a lot of film stuff going on so I decided I would just move to New York! I became assistant producer on The Squid and the Whale, I started working film festivals and I worked for the IFP New York, I’m on the board here in Seattle now, but I’d been working and then I went to Slamdance because I knew someone out in LA which where I met Lainy who was also from Seattle. I was living in LA by that point, but she was in Seattle. I had a couple of screenplays, but we kept in touch and I went back to New York and was working a documentary production company that was a really terrible experience because the guy was crazy and I hated it. So, I decided I would come back to Seattle for the summer and work on a documentary project. We decided to go check out the Rat City Roller girls and that’s kind of everything up until this point and how that all worked out.

Lacy Bagwell: I’d been a film fan since I was about 10 or 11 years old. Didn’t do anything in high school other than smoke a lot of pot and drink a lot of beer.

I was not in the AV Club; I was kind of a bad kid. My parents didn’t really know I was a bad kid because I hid it well.

After high school I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. All I knew is that I really like film, so I went to the video production program at Seattle Central Community College for two years and after that there just wasn’t a whole lot of work in Seattle so I went out and did a variety of other jobs, still thinking, in the back of my mind that this (film) is what I want to be doing at some point. I started working for film festivals; volunteer for SIFF for six or seven years and then got a job with them. I’ve worked for them, now, for five years and I knew the woman who was the director of the film festival at Slamdance because I had worked with her in Seattle. I went out to work with her in Park City and that’s how I met Lacy.

I didn’t work on any productions up to that time at all. I think I had this fear for a while that since I didn’t have a resume, who was going to take me? I don’t have any experience; really, all of my experience is old. I figured I might as well start from scratch, and start on my own, and come up with an idea and work with someone who has experience and knowledge and go from there…I just thought it would be easier to do something with someone else start from there and gain experience that way.

That’s really it. I PA’s on a film in the middle of working the Roller Girl film to get some knowledge on how film sets work. I didn’t get paid for it or anything…

Q: In reading your biographies, you mention you had begun work on a documentary on Meth addiction. That sounds like a very ambitious project for two new filmmakers.

LL: It would be a big thing. I still want to do it some day. I’m from Snohomish County and my dad used to work for the Granite Falls school district and I think at one time they were the number one Meth capitol of the whole of the United States. My aunt actually runs the anti-Meth coalition in the Ellensburg area so I had been talking with her. But I actually know someone from my hometown, my next-door neighbor’s son-in-law. I once had the biggest crush on him; totally attractive, totally good looking, had a wife and two beautiful kids, they were adorable, just like the perfect family, and he ended up getting a Meth addiction. It started out and he was doing cocaine and went to meth while he was doing construction jobs to stay awake. He wound up just completely throwing everything down the tubes and ended up in jail for armed robbery after he held someone up at knifepoint—a whole family up at knife point, actually, after he broke into their house.

I’d been talking to my neighbor and thought I would do this documentary over the summer. That turned out to be a much more ambitious project. We actually did one interview with the police chief at Lake Stevens and with the wife. That was intense. Of course they are friends of the family so that was very intense—I also have some cousins who are meth-addicted-- I want to do it at some point but it’s pretty big.

So, then I figured I was just there for the summer we’ll just shoot the Roller Girls and we’ll be done in three months. I figured I’d just stay until the end of the season, and by that time we’d just begun to learn about what was going on so then we decided to wait until the end of next season and so on and here we are two years later. I’m still here.

Q: What drew you to this particular project?

LL: We brought Lainy’s camera to the first bought we ever went to—I’d been back in Seattle for a week and I heard about the Rat City Roller girls least three times within the week I was back. We were turned on to the idea of doing a film about them so we decided to bring a camera to our first bought and see what happens. If you’ve seen Roller Derby and, especially if you are someone interested in the spectacle of the cinema—how would you not want to film this, its so big and beautiful and sexy and funny—it was just obvious, immediately, to both of us, that we had to make a film about this.

Q: As a duo, how did you negotiate a single vision that was going to go into the film?

LL: Man, if we’d only done Deal Memos back in the day.

LB: Loaded Question.

LL: Being a writer I loved documentary filmmaking, but never had any idea I would go into documentary filmmaking. Going into the second season we talked a lot and we had a pretty clear idea of what we thought the story should, what we wanted to show people about the league. We used some footage from that first year, but it was only after being around the girls for so long that we could put together the parts that we wanted to show. There are so many girls that we wanted to show that aren’t in the movie because there were just too many amazing personalities. Going through and strategically looking at each of the teams, looking at the relationships this makes the most sense to show this part of the league and that relationship makes the most sense to show that part of the league. Eventually it ended up that we were in the culture for a long time and we came to a decision on what we wanted to do.

LB: I think even more of it came out toward the end after we’d shot everything. After looking at all of the interview footage we got a better idea of where we could go with this—its almost like the story kind of writes itself with the girls from what we got out of the interviews and the things that they do. A story can take a 180 degree turn depending on the situation.

LL: And along those lines, sometimes of the footage would inform the interviews. We’d seen something and asked them to talk about it or in an interview they’d sometimes they’d point out things that we never even noticed about the league or about a game. That turned out to be interesting too. We had a clear, but fairly nebulous idea but of course in documentary you’re kind of at the mercy of your subjects

Q: A great deal of time in this film is devoted to the players’ personal stories, in particular, their relationships to their partners in and outside the league, rather than the actual blood and guts aspects of the sport. What type of feedback did you get after the fact with regards to these choices?

LL: The majority of the feedback I’ve received has been that people really liked the amount of time we spent on the players. I’ve only heard two nay-sayers talk about how much time we didn’t devote to actual bouts and plan strategy—but they were the most hard-core derby fans they know a lot l about roller derby already and really get in to the strategy. You may not get it from our film and I don’t think you get it from watching just watching two bouts, but once you start to really pay attention to roller derby, the strategy is so amazing and actually very subtle. It’s a very subtle sport that is actually really funny when you are watching all that is going on, but there are actually some very subtle strategies going on. But the vast majority of people we talked to really like the amount of time we spent with the girls.

One of the reasons I wanted to spend so much time with these girls was when you think of roller derby, you automatically think they must all be crazy, they must be drunk, bartenders, barflies and aren’t doing anything else with their lives—just crazies—of course, there are some of those of those—but they’re lovely, too, it doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. But there is just such a wide spectrum of women who are in roller derby and for us to have been involved in the league for so long we really wanted to capture that. We were as interested in the girls personally as we were in the stuff going and hoped that would translate to the audience.

LB: I think what we did was do away with a lot of the stereotypes. You see these women and you figure they must all drink beer and kick ass and take heroin or whatever. But this film takes away all that because you get to know them and see what they do for a living and what their families think and the things that they go through. I only heard one or two people complain about the bout stuff, and it was the same thing, it was people who were already derby fans. But we weren’t making a movie for derby fans we were making a movie for people who don’t know what its like to play derby and don’t know what these girls are going through. A lot of people had never even heard of roller derby who came to see the film, so they got an education at the same time. And it’s across the country, its everywhere, that’s the nice thing about it, you can go see it anywhere even outside of the country.

Q: Roller Derby went into a lull for several decades as a popular spectator sport. What’s your take on the process of reviving roller derby as a part of a subculture?

LB: I do know that what culture in which it has never lost its popularity is Japan. In Japan its men and women combined. They’ve been around constantly there’s never been a break for them. That’s the only place that I know of and I’ve done a little bit of digging. They started, again, in Texas in 2002.

Q: How long did principal photography take?

LB: We shot for two years and we shot a little over 250 hours of footage. We shot everything that the girls did—followed them around; we went to practices, we went to meetings, we went to the bouts, we went to the bar nights that they had—karaoke, everything that they did, that we could possibly go to, we went. We went out of town with them a couple different times. We shot every single thing that they did.

Q: Tell us about some of the unforeseen challenges in making this film?

LB: That we shot way more footage than we could ever use. There was a point where I’d tell Lacy, “We’ve got to go shoot this, and she’d be like, ‘Why?’” And there were time’s she’d say “We’ve got to go shoot this, and I would ask, ‘Why?” It was because we had enough footage and we needed to stop at some point. Finally we did, but there were so many things out of 250 hours and film was 95 minutes. Do you know how much crap I have at home and she has at home? We have a ton left over, and a lot we’ll use for the DVD. That was it for me—we shot a lot of really, really good stuff, but a lot of it we’ll never use. I guess the only other challenge would be that we really should have looked into raising some sort of funds before we got started.

LL: Just to ad to what Lainy said, I wanted to say that, toward the end, I was more about what I didn’t want to be shooting because I had an idea of what we were using and what we’re not going to be using and we’re not going to use that. So I had to ask, “Do we really want to be spending another $20 on tapes because I know we’re not going to use it.

One of the challenges for sure, when we first started out, we brought our cameras to our first bout-- we’d called ahead to make sure it was okay. We just show up saying, “Hey we’re two people who want to make a movie about you guys so you’re going to let us film everything you do, right?” And they were like, “No.”

In the beginning, especially, Darth Skater who was the head of media at the time, was very much, like, “Wait minute, who the heck are you people, what the heck is going on…” and was very concerned about what we were doing and what we were all about. The Roller Girl reality show has just come out and there was a lot of concern about just letting strangers film them all the time—“Look what they make those girls look like all of the time—we don’t want to look like that kind of thing.” But finally, by the end of the first season, we finally had won over enough trust, they knew who we were, they knew what we were about, they knew we totally respected their community, and the fact that we were women also really helped, by that time we had finally established enough of a trust that they invited us to a lot of the stuff too, certain teams more than others. We would get calls, “Hey, we’re doing this, do you want to come out?” “Yeah, thank God, we didn’t know about that,’ when in the beginning we would have been dying to know about those things.

Q: And how long do you think that took to get incorporated into their family?

LL: We started shooting in June of their very first season, so basically, half way through the first season. Four to five months? We were totally in by the second season.

LB: By the time we stared the second season, we were gold. And Darth Skater now is like our greatest advocate. She was the one person in the beginning who was most leery of us.

LL: She was just doing her job. We kind of got on just before the big media wave hit-- right when we came they started getting bombarded with media requests and photography requests, it was way too much and nobody could really discern what was going on. At the premiere we did a private screening for the girls before we showed it. It was in our contract with them. It went really well. Darth Skater came up on the stage and said, “I’ve just got to say that I gave these girls so much shit in the beginning and look what they’ve done –they’ve done such a great job!” It was sort of the perfect little bow to tie up the package at the end of the story.

Q: Where did you get your financing?

LL: It came from out bank accounts. We worked temp jobs. The nice thing about doing a documentary about roller derby is that roller derby is not the girls’ full-time job. The girls are playing and practicing on nights and weekends so we were there nights and weekends. I worked on two films during the production as location manager here in town. But at a certain point I decided I couldn’t be spending 10-12 hours a day on someone else’s film because we needed to devote time to our own film. So, financing came from other crappy jobs.

My parents gave me a couple of bucks.

The nice thing was that Lainy owned a camera and our second cameraman, Wes, owned his camera. We had to rent green screens a couple of times for the credits, which was, like, $20 from a camera store. We have gurus, like my friend Joe who helped us out on all the post-production stuff. Otherwise we did everything else on Lainy’s computer or my computer.

LB: That’s the beauty of modern technology. DV Tapes are cheap.

LL: We’ve had three fundraisers so far where we had a bar night; we had two at the Funhouse, one at the Highway 99 Blues Club, the Socket Wenches Bar—one prior to completion and two after the fact. Really, the biggest cost for us has been in transferring it on to screeners, besides road-tripping down to Vegas or flying to Tuscon for the tournament.

Q: Did you consider the cut screened at SIFF to be the final version, or have their been cuts since that point in time?

LB: We’ve edited since then, but it was minor, very minor. We just fixed a couple of things. We had the sound redone, and maybe two or three little edits.

LL: When we did the last edit, or eyes were pretty blurry—we couldn’t see straight. We only finished editing it four days before we showed it and SIFF was like, “Alright, give us your tape NOW or we’re not showing your movie.” There was like one pause we thought was a little too long and two others that we shortened. Other than that it’s the same movie.

Q: How many festivals has the film traveled two thus far.

Both: Eight, so far.

Q: This film continues to make the rounds to film festivals, but how are you planning to distribute to the general public?

LB: Through working at the IFP and Film Market I’ve contacted several people through those organizations. There are a couple people who have seen the screeners who are interested. We’re obviously not too coy about handing out screeners because obviously we’ve had our premiere. Of course we would love to have a small theatrical release or DVD release, but if not, we’ll do it ourselves. We get so many emails from the derby leaguers wanting to know when the DVD will be done so they can sell it at their merch (merchandise) tables, but we wanted to wait and make sure we had exhausted all of our other options before we look into self release.

Q: That being said, is there a criteria you are following when it comes to shopping the film around to distributors?

LB: We’re just sending it out to film festivals right now. We sent it out to some of the larger film industry film festivals and waiting to hear back from them right now. The other scenario is that we have potential to tap is that there are over 200 leagues worldwide. You average 70-80 girls to a league—somebody in there knows somebody that runs a theater who works in distribution. I think we can get some kind of, at least, minor theatrical run.

LL: I’d say in terms of criteria, obviously any filmmaker would love to be in the position they have several people banging on their door wanting to distribute your movie and you can pick who wants to spend the most on P&A. But the only really major concern is that we wouldn’t go with a distributor that’s going to try and sell it as some schlocky sex-piece or something like that. Just as long as it’s not someone who would try to treat it like a B-Movie, and was someone who was willing to treat it well.

Q: What have been some of the biggest stumbling blocks in getting this film distributed and how did you overcome them?

LB: The biggest challenge is that we are up here in the Northwest without a lot of resources to be down in LA or to be in New York a lot. I think if we were in LA right now it would be a lot easier to get this done. Right now everything is over email and phone, but I don’t think its anything that’s insurmountable. There are so many documentaries about roller derby popping up.

LL: At this point we need to beat everyone to the punch.

LB: I don’t want this to be pegged as a regional film, that it’s just a Seattle film. I don’t think many realize that there is this awesome subculture of derby going around. I guess it’s about making sure people realize what big potential there is here. I think this film is very accessible to all sorts of people, just as roller derby is more accessible now to more fans than you think. The fans are pretty diverse, just look at how diverse are the fans in the movie.

Q: Where do you go from here?

LB: I’m producing a feature film featuring Aiden Quinn and Alicia Silverstone. I’m also writing a fictional script about roller derby and another comedy script as well. I think documentaries are great fun, but not really part of my skill set. I do want to got back to the Meth project some day.

LL: I have ideas on my brain and on paper, but nothing solid. I want to do a horror film. Totally 180 degrees.

An Interview with Margaret Avery

2008-03-13T18:30:00.000-07:00

When I was but a lean and wan little punk, dreaming of being a professional actor, I knew from the get-go I didn't want to be a star. I wanted to be known, sure. I wanted to be respected and appreciated, sure. But I knew from observing at a cool distance that to be a celebrity was to submit to some form of self-imposed madness, if not torture.

No. I wanted to act, but preferred to conjure romantic fantasies of Shakespearian ensembles performing out of doors, to appreciative audiences in semi-rural Pacific Northwest, low-budget, Independent films that scored accolades at little film festivals at area wineries...

Honestly, I preferred the notion of the Working Actor, the Actor's Actor, that guy that never wanted for regular work, but who's presence fell just outside the scope of popular attention-- A good actor, a competant actor, an actor who was crucial to fleshing out the healthy body of an ensemble, but a guy who's role was no big deal and could wander in and out of the 7-11 after a case of Guinness without getting mobbed. I thought that sounded just about right, and I kept my eye out for actors I whose careers I thought rested upon a similar plane of professional success; Keith David, Brad Dourif, Clancy Brown. You may know their faces, or even their voices, but not their names--that is, unless you make it a conscious efforts, because the talk shows and tabloids are not and will not be burning their likeness into your brain.

Such an actor is Ms. Margaret Avery. Granted, her balloon went up above the herd in 1985 when she was nominated for an Academy Award Nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Shug in THE COLOR PURPLE, but not long after said balloon dropped below the eye-line once more. Ms. Avery never stopped working, and her contributions have been steady and strong. Ms. Avery has participated in a veritable spectrum film genres, and she has had the career I would have liked, had I grown up to be a real-live actor.

Below is an interview I conducted with Ms. Avery for the boxoffice website in January, 2008. Her most recent film, WELCOME HOME ROSCOE JENKINS, a comedy featuring Martin Lawrence, was set to release in February. Initially I was very frustrated in my efforts to successfully research Ms. Avery's career. I found lists, blurbs, and bullet points acknowledging her accomplishments, but no interviews with her on the internet. I was very excited, as this meant I may be the first to have the opportunity share her thoughts, insights, stories, and glories with the world wide web. Sadly, the editorial control of boxoffice.com went down the crapper shortly after I transcribed my interview with Ms. Avery.

I am posting the interview below, in the hopes that others will enjoy the incredible scope of experience in Ms. Avery's career as much as I.

On a more personal note, it wasn't until mere moments before I spoke with Ms. Avery on the phone that I discovered she'd been in one of my ALL TIME FAVORITE SF films, the public television adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin's THE LATHE OF HEAVEN. I watched the film multiple times in high school, but was surprised to realize that I had not seen a re-broadcast for, well, decades.

POST INTERVIEW I discovered that THE LATHE OF HEAVEN was not only public television's most frequently requested film for re-broadcast, but the original prints had all been destroyed when PBS found they could not afford to renew copyright on the film. Why not? Because a key moment in Le Guin's story, and subsequently the film, featured a tune by THE BEATLES and we know how simply priceless a BEATLES tune has become in the marketplace of popular entertainment...

Yes, you can now find copies of THE LATHE OF HEAVEN on DVD (released in 2002) but, believe it or not, they are remastered the feature from the murky, tinny home video of a very devoted fan. A hallow, muzak-quality version of the original BEATLES tune now stand in place of the original tune.

In retrospect, I wish I'd spoken at greater length with her about THE LATHE OF HEAVEN past her passing comments...but such is life.

Anyway--enjoy.

Interview: Margaret Avery
Interview, 1.10.2008
Cole Hornaday

Q: You have an amazing resume that covers a breadth of experience that expands not only several different eras of filmmaking but eras of cultural transition as well…

A: The work I’ve done goes back quite some time, because when I look back I realize there are many people that are no longer with us. I think, “Oh my god, I’ve been at this a long time…”

Q: It is often heard that actors consider themselves a “success” as long as they’re working. Do you share this sentiment?

A: Its interesting you as that because when people say, “Oh, you’re an actor,” I say, “Yeah, when I’m working…” But, in another sense, Acting is something you’re doing all the time—You’re always observing people—as the actor. Sometimes you’ll meet interesting people and you’ll think, “I’ve got to use that in a role.” We sometimes—particularly as we get older, we’re doing more character work…somebody’s laugh or the way they look at you when they’re in doubt—its good stuff and its real stuff and if you can incorporate that into an interesting character its very enriching.

Q: Anymore, in this country, a highly successful actor has become the equivalent of royalty and the barometer to that level of success seems to be the level of harassment they receive from the paparazzi. That being said, what denotes a successful acting career in your eyes?

A: I think of the paparazzi as a nuisance myself. You think of people like Michael Jackson—some of the real icons—they cannot go anywhere without being bombarded by people. There is absolutely no privacy. I can see how they would wish to live in isolation. And money-wise, if you use that as an indication of success obviously they’ve got it, but who would want to live they way that they live. I like being around people, but I know that when we were shooting The Color Purple, if Michael (Jackson) was to visit the set we were all excited to meet him because he was very much involved with Quincy Jones at that time on several projects together. Before long word got around that he could not come because it would be too much of a disruption to the set, people are going to be following him and we thought, “That’s too bad.” Also, Whoopi Goldburg had just done her one-woman show for HBO, and I didn’t realize she had become so popular. We went to a concert for Patti LaBelle and Steven (Spielburg) insisted that she take his bodyguards because he wasn’t going to be in town for that weekend. Whoopi insisted; “Oh no I’m not going to need any body guards!” Well, we’re settling in for the concert, waiting for it to begin, and somebody discovered that she was in the audience, and this was before she had the notoriety that she has now—Oh my God—its seemed like the whole arena just came down on us—this mob that was just frightening to see come. Those experienced bodyguards just whisked her out of that area.

I’ve also had the experience when we went to screen The Color Purple in Alice Walker’s hometown, we were walking into the theater and there were all these people behind the ropes. I was walking a little too close to the ropes and some woman just grabbed my clothing, trying to rip it off me. I’m sure she was doing it to get a souvenir, but when you have this whole crowd of screaming people it can easily get out of hand because it can start feeding into the excitement of, maybe, somebody who wasn’t excited in the beginning but is now following along with the crowd—its like a riot. That’s very scary. So, would I like to have that happening to me all the time? No.

Q: There is a transition for some actors where acting goes from being your job to a livelihood to a Way of Life…

A: I would imagine that’s part of the upside or downside of you career choices. Everything has its upside and downside. People ask, “Don’t you get tired of people always referring to you as Shug?” The Color Purple was twenty-one years ago, and that’s a compliment. In one sense you ask, is that the only thing I’ve ever done? Well, no I was films and television for twenty years before The Color Purple and now its twenty years later, and I’ve still been working, but people remember me as Shug and I’ve come to accept that if that’s what they love about me then that’s okay, that’s a blessing. There are some many, many fine actors and people never remember them. I still get work because of being Shug (laughs). You accept what is, and just not let it get out of hand as far as letting it interfere with your personal life and know who you really are.

Q: You worked steadily during that period of cinema history we now call Blacksploitaion filmmaking…

A: Absolutely, I started out in that ear and was happy to get those films. It was like the beginning for black actors to work on film.

Q: We know that titles, or labels, for an era or time-period is a retroactive process, did you or your peer attribute a title to the type of films your were making at the time?

A: No, we were all glad for the opportunity to work. We were mostly experienced actors from theater. A lot of the actors were trained in New York. Myself, I’m a West Coast person and my training came from San Francisco and a lot of Free Theater in Los Angeles, though I did have a little training in New York. So, by the time we had the opportunity to do these films, we were trained actors first.

Q: Therefore, when you were working in this area of film, did you ever have a moment when you felt what the films called for was beneath you?

A: I think nudity was something I didn’t care to do. And at that time there wasn’t a lot of vulgarity as far as language—I think that just started within the last fifteen years. There was one incident where they were using a bible in the scene and I didn’t appreciate that and I did make a comment to the director and he said something like, “Oh, don’t be so prudish…” But I take religion seriously and I don’t think it should be integrated with entertainment all of the time.

Q: Tell us a little bit your acting background?

A: My mother, who was a hard-working, yet uneducated woman--she, when I was a child instilled in me that education was the most important thing. As a child I wanted to learn to dance and to sing and that to her was not acceptable, she felt; “Okay, we have enough black people dancing and singing and grinning—you need to be educated. It was always a priority that I go to college. In the 1960s women of color weren’t thinking about getting into corporate businesses or anything like that—black women—or all women, really, were looking at careers in teaching or nursing or social work. Those were basically the choices. So I chose Education.

My mom always told me, “Get your education first. No one can take that away from you...” So, I used that—I eventually did decide to go into acting, but I was substitute teaching during the day. I had four years of teaching experience before I decided to move to Los Angeles for film. I had taught first and second grade. That was one of the best things for me because it allowed me to work during he day as a substitute and then I did all these things at night in preparation for acting career—there was a lot of free theater, but you need money for your pictures and the acting classes, dance classes, voice training—its all very expensive. What else could I have done? I could have worked as a waitress, but that’s not always steady work either, and you’re depending on tips. At that time in the 60s and early 70s women of color didn’t have the same opportunities to work in the better restaurants and hotels as a waitress where you’re going to get more tips.

A lot of things have changed. I started out working about the time when credit cards were becoming common. At that time women couldn’t even get credit without a husband.

Once the Blacksploitation films started up, I was really ready. I had an agent at that time, they took me on, when they did sign me up, as a favor to a friend but they really didn’t think they would ever be able to cast me because Blacks weren’t on television, they weren’t in the movies other than Sydney Poitier and Cicely Tyson. Diane Carroll had a series but that was very rare. So when Black Exploitation films started up and it became Black Exploitation because we were exploited in the sense that it was the white producers, writers and directors getting the money and we were so anxious to work we didn’t quibble over not getting much money. Then they took the films and showed them in the black neighborhoods. So who was benefiting from the films? Yes, we were getting the experience, but you want to work for money too. That’s how exploitation started. As far as the films made today goes as long as people are being paid sufficiently then its not exploitation. If they’re not paying the actors or putting all the money in their pockets from the box office receipts or the video sales, then that’s exploitation—regardless of color—it’s the same thing.

Q: Coming up to the present, you appear in a new film, Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins?

A: Yes, and its definitely not an exploitation film. I think everyone got decent money on this one—I know I did.

Q: Tell us a little about your experience in this film…

A: It was awesome. I think the director sets the tone for the set and my hat’s off to Malcom Lee or director/writer/producer. He came around each morning and personally said, “Hello,” and asked how you were and it was genuine. If you had any anxiousness sitting in that make-up chair before going out in front of the camera, it was kind of a soothing thing that occurred. And it was not only with the actors, it was a genuine feeling on that set with the crew all the way down from lighting to the people who handled the catering. With the actors, I never felt there as any competition among us, it was a true, wonderful, ensemble group. We genuinely liked each other and were happy for someone to come into a scene and give it that cap line that it needed. And Malcom welcomed that in anyone’s ability. You know, looking at that cast, you have quite a few comedians; Mike Epps or Monique—we just rolled with them. The problem was that Malcom couldn’t get some of them to pick up a line at the same place—they were all so spontaneous—so at the end of the scene we’re all laughing and they all wondering, “What did I do?” Which is a little different from actors—James Earl Jones and I would just look at each other in awe and thing, “Is this not incredible what these young people can do?” Sure, we brought to it a little more stability of the “old school” acting, but I was very excited and impressed to hear people say that they had learned from me, to hear Martin Lawrence say, “Gee, I’ve learned so much from you Ms. Avery.” That made me feel really good.

Q: A film you did several years, that received quite a bit of critical response, but appears to have not been re-issued on DVD was the PBS adaptation of Ursula Le Guins’ The Lathe of Heaven…

A: Oh, yes—Well, I actually got a notice from the public television broadcasters seeking permission to broadcast it again. It was one of the first films I ever did as a leading lady, acting across from Bruce Davidson. I saw it late one night on television. I’d fallen asleep and woke up to the sound of my own voice coming from the television. I looked up and all I could think was, “My God, look how little my waist was!”

Q: The film has since been remade and broadcast on the Sci Fi Channel, but its unfortunate that the earlier version has not found a more permanent audience, as your work in it was quite significant and effective.

A: That’s the thing about film acting. When we’re acting on stage, we get immediate response from the audience. But on film you just never know what the response was because we don’t have the contact with the audience in the same way.

Q: You recently visited Ghanna and that brought up some valuable revelations and insights for you.

A: This was more of my own adventure. I initially thought I’d try to visit Acusla Busla who played Nettie in The Color Purple. I remembered her, a couple of years before, saying I should come and visit. Eventually I did get to hook up with her, but only by happenstance—communication didn’t work out, giving her prior notice—she didn’t know I would be arriving until I was actually there. But as far as my experience there was concerned, going to Ghanna, I just can’t explain it. To see where my ancestors were in the slave caves and those dungeons, to look out on the ocean where slave ships came in to get them was indescribable.

Q: Is this an experience you are planning to utilize in some way in performance or writing?

A: I don’t know-- that remains to be seen. But I certainly understand now, if inner strength or a sense of faith or hope—if its passed from generation to generation, I can understand how I’ve gotten my strength to survive the many obstacles in life that I have. Can you imagine trying to survive such a traumatic event in you life? Fifty percent or more of those people taken in to slavery died of disease or whatever.

You sometimes must look at your past, to see where you’ve come from in order to see where you’re going to go. And I understand that so much better now. The whole experience has made me a much better person. And if you yourself can become a better person and share that part of yourself with someone else and help them—that’s the other part of me, being a psychotherapist. You kind of begin to understand who you are and why you are the way you are by the path that you’ve traveled. As a counselor and psychotherapist I think that you have to try to get into another person and understand their struggle. To have a little bit of empathy and not push them faster than they can go.

End.

Awesome Lady.

Post Holiday Offal-ness

2008-01-09T13:13:00.000-08:00

I turned 42 on December 27, 2007.

If upon turning 33, you have your "Jesus Birthday," (so named because of Christ's age at the time of The Crucifiction) when turning 42 do you celebrate your "Meaning of Life, The Universe, and Everything," birthday?

Yeah, okay--so it's a stretch.

These last two holidays I've had a riding companion to down as far as
Portland. Amy had to be back for a doctor's appointment today, so we wound up driving back on my birthday. I would have liked to stay in Oregon longer, but as I've been renting a car to travel on holidays, it was wiser, all told, to come back when we did.

But while nearing the north end of Tacoma we had a moment I found to be most poetic. The ticker board above the Interstate began flashing warnings about lane closures ahead due to road debris. Mind you, they never tell you precisely WHAT is blocking the roadway. Amy flicked on the radio out of curiosity. We turned in just in time to hear the announcer say, "In my twenty years of radio broadcasting, I have never encountered anything like this prior to this year, and this is the second incident in as many months..." What she was referring to was the detritus spilled from an overfilled truck in route to an animal rendering plant.

...and when we reached the heaping helpings of offal awfulness, the helpful civil servants working for the WSDOT Hazardous Materials crew were NOT routing drivers around the piles of inerds, brains, and marrow, but directly THROUGH IT!! I started laughing hysterically, but poor Amy, being a vegetarian of typically fragile disposition, began to wretch.

I hesitate to say "Only in Washington," because that shit is just as likely to happen in Wisconsin...

Wisconsin. Home of Killer Lard Balls. No shit. Pools of rancid lard were found seeping up from the soil for months following a fire which burned a Madison cheese factory to the ground. Neighborhood dogs were discovered dead from asphyxiation, the turgid lard balls lodged in their throats.

Sure and we BELONG at the top of the food chain.

So. My birthday? It wasn't so offal

The Firing Pin (Guns and Madmen Parts I and II)

2007-11-16T23:10:00.000-08:00

***The below ramble was originally written back in April, 2007, upon the heels of the Virginia Tech massacre. It has two parts, because I don't seem to know how to put things simply, or with any kind of brevity.***

The Firing Pin (Guns and Madmen Part I)

The Virginia Tech shooting this week simply reinforces some of my beliefs about the arrogant ignorance rampant in this country. The first is regarding gun control, and the other is the stigma regarding mental illness.
Our very worldview in this country supports these continued outbreaks of violence. The new people want to equate this sort of incident as equivalent to terrorism. How many people who climb to the top of towers, hide in the trunks of their cars, break in to classrooms, schoolyards, places of businesses, and begin killing people at random are mentally stable people with a socio-political agenda? None. And a great deal of the time, they are people in agony who have been either overlooked or squeezed out of the system.

Last July we had a shooting at the Jewish Federation in downtown Seattle in which one woman was killed and six others severely wounded (one of whom is a member of the UUC). The shooter stated he hated Jews, and blamed them for all his ills. He'd been mentally ill for years, but authorities had always looked the other way. His mother had gone to the public heath services and requested help for years, but her requests had fallen on deaf ears. And he had access to guns.
There was a great deal to the solutions Michael Moore proposed in Bowling for Columbine. Sadly, his voice is one in which I can no longer place a great deal of trust. Moore has gotten to the point in his politics that I actually no longer trust his "liberal" moralizing. I don't think he is the progressive he believes himself to be...because he is not above using cheap tactics that I find to be beneath him. And I still have to admire someone who is so terribly successful at getting in people's faces.
I don't think enough has ever been done about gun control in this country, and the combination of blind persistence in upholding archaic ideals and the total lack of compassion and progressive care of the mentally ill will only continue to result in the continuation of these bloodbaths. They'll just keep happening and people will continue to be shocked and amazed and bewildered each time. And when the media storm passes, they go back to lowering their heads and muttering, "that'll never happen here."

Because we are unable to look at this problem as society, as a culture, it's always easiest to blame the shooter, call him an isolated freak incident and move on...until it happens again.
I believe that perhaps 90% of people in this country, who own guns, don't need them.
I believe that perhaps 90% of people in this country who are mentally ill receive no form of support, medication, therapy, or compassion.

Case in point. My downstairs neighbor, Dave, is a Vet from the First Gulf War. Five years ago he was working as a mailman, when he came across an apartment where the resident had committed suicide. He reported it to the authorities and they left the body to decompose for several days. He had to pass by the apartment every day. The decomp apparently triggered PTSD from his time in combat, and he started having anxiety attacks which resulted in a nervous breakdown. He's been unable to work since. He collects disability. But now the Veterans' Affairs administration has Outsourced out their Mental Health Evaluators and begun a process of cutting funding. The inference here has been that the Bush administration seeks to cut VA funding so cash can be funneled into his tidy little war in the Middle East…so he can make more Vets.

Dave tried to go back to school, but the state says they will not fund him because they cannot determine if he is mentally healthy enough to warrant investing in his education. ACT the organization that re-evaluates VA funding has just cut his benefits in half, because he has missed his mental health evaluations, because of depression. Now Dave is trying to subsist on half a disability income.

Catch-22?

I care about Dave, and I am not afraid of him or his angry rants. And trust me, he has plenty. But would I be surprised if he pulled a Columbine or a Virginia Tech? No. And though it may sound cold and harsh, and inhumane, I wouldn't blame him. Because he has asked for help time and time and time again, and been turned away. And when he does make an appointment, when he does get someone's attention, they give him the bum's rush and push him through the system.

I also wish to state that I am not against people bearing arms. I am not against hunting. After living in Wisconsin for 7 years, and working in theater companies in rural areas, I saw so many people destroy their vehicles, and nearly lose their lives, to accidents involving deer. There are too fucking many of them. Man has killed off all of their natural predators, and plowed further into their living spaces. Frankly, the hunter's in WI couldn't deplete the population sufficiently, so there was always a large percentage of deer dying in agony on the roads, dying of disease, and starving in the winter. Shoot 'em up. We've got plenty. Have a ball.

But who in hell NEEDS automatic rifles and armor piercing bullets to bring down a three-point?

I tried to make these points to a co-worker; I stated that this kid at VA Tech was mentally ill, and shouldn't have access to guns, as should few other people, her argument is "Well, there are plenty of people who drive cars, and they kill all the time--there are plenty of incidents where people drive through crowds and kill people." I couldn't even begin to discuss an issue with someone who totes the Republican sloganeering of the Fox "News" Network. I let another coworker deal with her. He knows how to "Banter Safe." I am too passionate; I was going to blow my top from the second she opened her mouth regarding the tired and clichéd gun-control counter arguments.

I also refuse to enter into combat with an unarmed person.

A person who's essential perspective in the majority; Guns don't kill people…and the mentally ill are evil and should be put down.

And they don't seem to understand why this keeps happening. Why the bodies continue to pile up.

What is wrong with saying, "This society is sick, and we need to work on a cure?"

Why is that so terrible, why is that so much like admitting to some kind of wrongdoing? Because before you seek a cure, you have to admit there is an illness.

Somebody tell me I am not alone.

I will follow up this blog with a LENGHTY piece I have written for my Coletrane entries at Steam.FM. I have yet to determine if posting the other piece in that venue is a wise plan or not.

-C

Firing Pin (Guns and Madmen, Part II)
Current mood: angry

Hey All,

With the events on Virginia Tech campus this week, many recollections have come up for me. Recollections and sensations I have not felt for a very long time. Why now? We've had school shooters crop up on a regular basis for the last twenty years or more. Perhaps it is because this most recent took place on a college campus, and because life on a college campus was such a vital and influential time in my life that this event seems almost blasphemous. Or maybe it is because these events are just so damn similar.

In the fall of 1984 I was staring my freshman year at the University of Oregon. My father was UO alum from the generation before. He went to school on the GI Bill after his stint with The Marines, and pledged Sigma Alpha Epsilon, I have the impression he had a terrific time.

If you know me well, you will be equally puzzled as to why I followed my father's advice and registered for Fraternity Rush. I am and was too, but I was entering a new world, with no real friends or support group to speak of, and Dad was just so damn convincing.

It was an uncomfortable time. Not simply because it became readily apparent that I was correct in my assumptions that the other males with whom I would be interacting in the process of "selling myself," to some elite and archaic order of masculinity shared little kinship with me, but because I'd had all four wisdom teeth pulled the week before. The hinges of my jaws felt stripped raw, a socket that had not been properly sutured was being slow to heal, and I was sporting a prominent black eye.

It was a long week. I slept on the sleeping porch of my old Fraternity house. Drank milkshakes, hung around campus, and visited bookstores during the day, and marched from Frat house to Frat house in the evenings. And I sat in the SAE house lounge and watched a lot of MTV.

Near the end of the week, and despondent over my housing prospects, I entered a house that seemed to stand out from the rest. For one thing, it was positioned just south of MacArthur Court, and not part of the dense cluster of houses that made up Frat Villa, to the west of the library. It was kind of isolated. The young men inside came across as genuine, warm and sincere. I discovered the house president had done theater in high school, and another young man, sporting the frosted swoop of many a new-wave band, pegged jeans, and ankle-high Beatle boots seemed to share my interest in music, movies and (maybe even) comics. His name was Michael Feher. I liked him, and I thought he was kind of cool.

When it came time to fill out the "bid cards," for the houses I wished to pledge. Delta Tau Delta was my A-Number-One.
In response to my bid, I received an obligatory offer from Sigma Alpha Epsilon, as I was what you call a "legacy," thanks to my father prior membership. I also received an offer from a house I do not even recall visiting, and a puzzling note from Delta Tau Delta; they couldn't take me in, but wanted me to sit tight, as they wanted to put my request to a second vote when the remaining balance of their members had returned from summer break. Puzzling.

The house president (we'll call him Bryan) suggested I take up residence in their sleeping porch, and hang out until another vote could be cast.

And my first day of college classes was coming up in a few days.

So, I hung out and partied with the fellows from DTD. They seemed a cool lot. And out of all the Fraternity boys I met over the last week, I seemed to share the most with them.

The weekend before classes were to start, they voted on me again, and the vote was against. I really didn't understand. It made no sense. I got along with all the fellows I met; I had things in common with the guys, what was the big deal? Was I not wealthy enough? Too short? Pursuing the wrong degree? I was fairly upset, and I was up against the wall. I'd put in a reservation for a room at the dorms simultaneous to putting my name on the docket for Fraternity Rush. To my knowledge, the window had closed for me to get my dorm-room deposit back. I assumed that to mean that there would no longer be a room available for me as well.

I picked up my belongings and went to the only other place I could think of…the Theta Chi house, the house of which I had no recollection of visiting that had offered me a membership. It was readily apparent that the Theta Chi's campaign to attract pledges had been fairly unsuccessful. Many rooms stood empty.

The house president put me in a rather large room, full of packing cartons and broken furniture. The door was twisted on its frame and wouldn't close. I put my suitcase against it in an effort to hold the door closed. That evening two fellows were wrestling in the hallway, and threw open the door. I asked them, politely, to take their homosexual courtship down the hall. One spied my earring and said, "Homo? Who's the fag with the earring?"

Yeah, I know. But it was 1984.

This was starting to reek of high school, and that smell was twisting my tummy.

The next morning, after a rather intimidating first day of class in a lecture hall full of over 200 students, I made my way to the UO Housing Department offices. Some small, and overlooked god-ling was smiling upon me. According to the leather-faced lady behind the counter, my deposit on a room was still good and, yes, there was a room available.

I moved my suitcase and books into the tiny room in Bean Complex. My new roommate was nowhere to be seen. I went to the cafeteria and ate lunch. I later met a girl who lived the floor above me, Christine. She had her sister in tow. I already knew her sister, I'd met her at one the DTD parties, and she was Mike Feher's girlfriend. We chatted a little about how my life had been in flux, and how I was sad and disappointed that I didn't get accepted into the fraternity. The sister didn't really say much, just looked into the distance, or found the brick wall behind me far more interesting than my disappointment.
I met my roommate, a husky African American man from LA named Warner. Warner was a philosophy and economics major. But he liked SF and comic books or, at least, tolerated them. He claimed that he had received so many head injuries while playing football in high school that his heart beat was slower than that of a normal person. He also claimed that he had had several operations on his knees and ankles from torn ligaments and shattered bones that left him listing to the left as he walked. I liked him a great deal.

And my father had to admit he was in error, for the first time in my recollection. He said, "I'm really sorry son, but the Fraternity System has really changed since my day."

Not really, Dad. They're still a fraternal order, based on elitism and secrecy.

I started to do something I never imagined I would accomplish at college; I began to fall into a routine.

Early in the morning, a week and a half later, the Resident Assistant stopped several of us in the hall, she said their was a sniper at Autzen Stadium, and we were to steer clear. I doubt even a stray bullet could reach us from Autzen Stadium, it was over a mile away, on the other side of the McKenzie River.

By noon we'd learned from the local news that the sniper was dead, as was one other man, an exchange student from Africa attending UO on a track scholarship, in training for the Olympic track team. He was a married father of one. Wounded was a member of the UO Wrestling team, a young man named Rick O'Shea. Yes, that was his name. Don't ask me how I remembered it.

Dead by his own hand was Mike Faire. The young man, from Delta Tau Delta, I'd met during Rush Week, the young man sporting the frosted swoop of many a new-wave band, pegged jeans, and ankle-high Beatle boots, who seemed to share my interest in music, movies and (maybe even) comics.

According to the local news, Mike owned an AK-47 semi automatic rifle. He kept the weapon at the fraternity house. But the house president (Bryan) demanded he keep the weapon's firing pin in the house safe. On Friday, the day before the shooting began, Mike said he was going hunting, and requested the return of the firing pin. Mike didn't go hunting, not for Deer, at least. He stole a car, drove to a local sporting goods store, broke in through a back window and stole another automatic rifle, several rounds of ammunition, and a SWAT officer's midnight blue nylon jumpsuit. Michael then swathed his face in camouflage paint.

He then drove to Autzen Stadium, hurdled the fence, and waited for dawn.

At dawn he killed Chris Braithwaite with a single shot through the heart as he ran the jogging trail that lead to the stadium.
Mike then fired several rounds at the arriving wrestling team, and kept them at bay in the weight room through the entire siege. When he got bored, Mike shot out the scoreboards and the windows in the stadium.

As we watched the information unfold on the television set of a hall-mate, Christine arrived. I asked her if she knew the name of the shooter. Sure, she said, "Mike Feher…"

"Yes, but isn't he your sister's boyfriend?"

She paled and ran for the pay phone.

I was correct. Though the realization made me feel dizzy and my vision stuttered. Christine hung up the hall phone and ran out the door for her sister's sorority house.

Campus shut down for several days. The local authorities attempted to hold the Delta Tau Delta Fraternity accountable for Feher's actions and voiced their disdain and indignation over allowing the young man to keep a lethal weapon in the house.

I recall viewing a television a press conference where I watched my erstwhile Fraternity Brothers parade past the cameras. It was the first time in my life I actually moaned in disdain. One of the women in the room put her arms around me. I couldn't help it; the tears began to run. I can only draw up an overall sentiment of those moments; that none of those young men felt any accountability for Feher's actions or their ill attention to his problems. Ah, Brotherhood.

Several weeks later, a personal ad appeared in the campus newspaper, The Emerald. I never saw it, I only heard. It went something like,
"To Our Brother, Michael. We miss you. May you be at peace."
And so it goes…

Please Fast Forward The Tape.

It is 1990. I am working on a second BA at the UO. That degree in Film and Television just doesn't seem to be opening the career doors my father thought it would when he suggested it at my Major field of study six years before. I've come back to complete a theater degree. Yes, laugh, please. It's really all I can do as well at this point.

What I was doing at "Rod's," one of the only Gay Bars Eugene, really isn't important. I was there with a friend, and what kind of relationship he and I had really isn't important either. Suffice it to say that I liked the music they played, I liked the atmosphere, the drinks were strong, but I seldom encountered someone of my particular preference. Its not that girls were scarce at Rods, its simply that the female clientele were far from my type. Perhaps it had something do do with the corse facial hair and cork books, I dunno...But the person I did encounter that evening drew up some old and contorted feelings. As I bellied up to the bar, a young Asian man immediately recognized me. Tu had rushed the Delta Tau Delta house the same week as I. I'd lost touch with him long ago. I did know he had been accepted to the house. I wondered if their was some racial quota they were expected to make. I'm pretty damn Arian, after all.

Tu was Vietnamese, and had come to this country as a teenager. He was a pleasant guy, but spoke in a rocky and sometimes broken dialect…and his speech was terribly sibilant.

After a brief hug he said, "Do you remember Mike Feher?"
"Sure."
"That guy was really messed up."
"Well, obviously."
"No. Not only did they let him keep his guns in the house, after he did all those things, they found all kinds of child pornography in his room. And lots of cocaine…They said he was snorting cocaine that whole time he was shooting up the stadium."
"That must have been terrible for you guys—that whole experience."
"Not too bad for me, I didn't really know those people that well yet. I mean, I could tell you who was gay and who wasn't…"
"Really?"
"Yeah, you know the house president at the time? He was the only one really in the closet."
"He told me he had a girlfriend. He showed me pictures of her."
"Oh, sweetheart, like that ever matters…"
"It really upset me that they wouldn't let me join the house."
"Why? You're straight, aren't you?"
"Yeah."
"Most of the guys on the board knew that—they were trying to keep you away from Bryan. He was a very manipulative person. He was also into younger guys. They wanted to spare you."
And a canvas that had been blank for several years began to fill in with detail. But my next question was, did the conflicts of social mores, sexual politics, and subterfuge contribute to Mike Feher's outbreak of violence and madness? As I mulled this, Tu was bustled away by some colorful compatriots. I never saw him again.
Strange to learn you were oblivious to total strangers acting in your interest, stranger still to wonder why, they were so concerned about me becoming a Cabin Boy for the DTD house president, how they could possibly overlook their own compatriot, who was so lost, so angry, so troubled as to shoot up Autzen Stadium, and then chew on their own bullets.
Sometimes I wonder if anyone even remembers the incident. Early on, I kept expecting someone to dramatize the events as a made-for-television movie. Now, comparatively speaking, Mike Feher's story hardly warrants a short film for You Tube. I mean, look at it--the body count was SO LOW by today's comparison.

We all want to say we were present at some relevant turning point in history,
"I saw Buddy Holly play the night before his plane crashed…"
"I marched with Dr. King…"
"I fought for my country in Vietnam…"
"I saw the first tower fall…"
But who wants to say they were present for the inception of a dark and violent societal trend?

What is that trend, you ask? Campus Mass Murder/Suicide? School Bloodbaths?
These things don't just happen spontaneously. People don't act on their mental fears and anxieties solely because they are "sick in the head." And if I were to admit I believe in genuine evil, this would not be it.
These massacres have become commonplace, and I am amazed at the state of denial in which our culture persists in existing. These events are happening for a reason, people. The shooters cannot be written off as simply mad, bad, and unloved. They are sick. Why? And why now with such regularity? We need to start asking these questions, and asking them out loud. And when we get the answers, we cannot turn from them. There is a sickness in our society, and it must be cured or the bodies will continue to pile up.

Think about it.
More later,
C

When Dulls the Edge

2007-09-29T14:44:00.001-07:00

Hey All,
Something intrinsic to the nature of creativity is its limitation as a marketable resource. I don't know how some artists do it, how you avoid burnout. I love it when an actor piques in the media's eyes and is dubbed, "The hardest working actor in show business!" The clowns are on top with two, three hit films running simultaneous in the multiplex and they are fireballs. And then the inevitable crash, the fall from grace, rehab...that climb to the top and slow fade to black. Mostly, they survive.

You see it in every episode plot of E!, True Hollywood Story. And if that poor soul doesn't fit the traditional arc of rags-to-riches-to-crash-to-redemption-and-renewal, their story is seldom told due to risk of falling ratings. I loved the actor, Roddy McDowell. I grew up with him playing apes in movies and television, Flicka movies, Fright Night. But I once watched his bio through tears of boredom. There were no scandals, no disasters, and no epic tragedies. He was a brilliant child actor, who grew into a brilliant mature actor. He was constant, steadfast and true. He was a good person and a good actor, and when the producers of E! tried to plug some scandal into his story, it was forced and lame. He didn't burn out. He was no king; I loved Roddy, but he was no Rock King.

But musicians? Musicians are worse than actors, it seems. Because it is the nature of rock culture to "Burn out," rather than "Fade away," (As Mr. Young once put it so well). Axel Rose sits in his mansion on the hill as we await his solo album promised years and years ago. Is he struggling with drugs, self-destruction, or is he gearing up to reign fire upon the heavens like we hate to admit we expect?

I have often equated (and I am far from alone in this) the fiery apogee of rock stars to the equivalent of ancient King Sacrifice. What's that, you ask? Believe it or not, many an ancient culture, prior to our current rise to a state of "civilization," appointed a king for a duration of time (usually a diurnal year) through a lottery or divination, and at the end of his appointed rule, he got the axe, or the spikes, or the flame pit, or what have you, to ensure prosperity for the community in the coming year. God. Can you imagine THAT LEVEL OF COMMITMENT in leadership?

I mean dalliances with the interns would be a little more tolerable when your term is terminal.

But if rock music is ultimately a theatrical ritual, a celebration of life, then what is the rock artist's ultimate goal? Why to make lots of money, because money and fame? That is what all human beings crave. Really? Then why are so many of these people so freaking miserable, why is their fiery rise so often fueled by their own very personal agony? Is it because they fulfill a vital role in the persistent rejuvenation of our culture? Hmm. That was the whole point of King Sacrifice, to be sure.

But here is a question: do Rock Kings make the choice to survive, or drive themselves fiery acts of self destruction.

Granted, I doubt it's a conscious thing.

It's something kind of hard to peg down. Clearly not all musical artists die the sacrificial death. Some, just as I said, sort of fade away, or fade into the background. Others waste away, while we hope they'll just get it over with (Can you say Courtney Love?) so we can all move on.

I bring this notion to you after an email exchange with Friend R'Chaard. We were talking about how we lost our forward momentum and passion for certain artists after a certain point in their careers (and our lives). R'Chaard bemoans the fact that he didn't even know one of his favorite bands broke up years ago, (had a "Farewell Concert," and everything) or that another favorite band leader had committed suicide in 2001 until very recently.

And I thought about how I have watched one of my favorite bands, REM, fade, fade, fade, fade into (what I consider) a pale version of themselves. I've seen them in concert twice--a big deal for me--following a band with such devotion especially when they ascended to a pricier ticket range (and weren't of the "promising local" variety). But through the years I've purchased their records solely out of inertia, through some sense of forward momentum because from 1983 to 1987, Murmur to Document, this band spoke to me on a level unlike any other. So, like clockwork, each time they released a subsequent album I made my way to the record store and bought it. I didn't read reviews, I didn't wait for interviews or videos, I was a record producer's favorite dog--one of the Pavlovian Breed.

It wasn't until REM's 2004 release, Around the Sun, that I realized I couldn't distinguish one song from the other-on their last three albums! I guess it begs the question, who was really burnt out, them or me? Perhaps that is beside the point when you are talking about Rock Kings. I like the guys from REM, they're good people, they put their money into good causes, they ask their listeners to be proactive in politics, world economy, and the environment. Michael Stype is a really non-threatening and pleasant gay man. Your Grandma would really like him. But did they choose to be beings that abstain from a sacrificial domination of the airwaves, or did they lack a certain cosmic quality vital to being a Rock King? Is there a death wish that somehow propels one's creative passions? And if you, as an artist, burn out, does the death wish?

I'm not sure. But I listen to Document and hear stuff that makes my brain vibrate and my heart thrum, and I hear stuff from Reveal, UP, and Around the Sun and the resonance doesn't even begin to rise above a mumble. It makes me sad, and it makes me feel old, some days it makes me feel burnt out.

More later,
Coletrane

Timecapsule

2007-09-29T14:43:00.001-07:00

Timecapsule

Physicists recently went public with the statement that time travel, the literal transportation of a physical body, in this four-dimensional space-time, is impossible. As corporeal beings we will only be able to move forward in time.

Check it out here, and then come back for coffee and grumbles.

What do I say to that? Bastards-sure, go ahead and poop on the parade, we don't mind. Obtained any more grant money to kill any more dreams and imaginations of low-brow public? How about space travel? Uh-huh...Lightsabers? Great. Well, keep it up, before long you'll have destroyed each and every hope of the Basement Dwelling Nerdoid Masses out there.

Yeah, have fun with that.

But, the above discussion doesn't seem to rule out some sort of ephemeral, psychic, or disembodied time-traveling, now does it? Hey, that may be safer anyway. If a time traveler is not made up of solid, crude matter while he/she is on Chronal Walkabout, the less likelihood of somebody stepping on a butterfly and irreversibly altering the future, yeah?

See, I time travel all the time. I seem to do much more of it as I now that I ever have before. Alas, I usually only do my time traveling from a seated position and seldom do I see the sun make a million passes in the blink of an eye, nor do I witness oceans rise and fall as I pass through each subsequent corridor. I travel back as an ephemeral creature, of thought and emotional, and more than just a smidgeon of gas.

At this point I fear I must also amend some statements I made regarding The Road Tape. I was pretty bald-faced in my determination that there were only two reasons for the genesis of the Road Tape-to either snare or share the affection of another. I must recant and amend. The Road Tape is also a time capsule. A time capsule of this nature can be given to you by anyone, anywhere, but preferably from a friend, and a dear one at that.

I was reminded of this shortly after I completed the previously mentioned blog.

I used to drive a well-maintained, 1985, Chevrolet Luv Pick Up Truck. The radio was shot, but the tape deck worked. I dreamed of installing a CD Player...but I dream on many things...

I seldom throw things away, especially compilation tapes of The Road and Mixed variety. I would actually look forward long drives in my Luv because it meant I could do a little time-traveling with my little shoebox of old cassette tapes. Tragedy struck when, while working the night shift at a certain hellish not-for-profit student loan guarantor some crack-baby-son-of-a-whore broke into my beloved toy truck and went for a joy ride, the police eventually recovered my ride my precious shoebox of ancient cassettes was missing, replaced by packet after packet of ephedrine-related cold remedies. I imagine that each of those precious cassettes had been chucked out the driver's window in a meth-addled frenzy, spreading them up and down the interstate.

Fortunately, I didn't leave a handful of my faves in the Luv at the time of the left. So, my time traveling became limited, but not put to an end.

Sorry, back to my point...

I have a Mixed Tape in my possession, entitled Moments of Male Bonding. Trust me, the title was nothing short of tongue-firmly-implanted-in-cheek. My dear friend, R'Chaard, compiled the tape. We'll call him thus due to his unending love of all things Trek or Trek-Related. R'Chaard--it sounds Trek-like, don't you think? I mean, it could be a Vulcan name or Romulan, yeah?

Bite me, who's telling the story, anyway?

I first met R'Chaard somewhere around 1985 (if memory serves). He is one of those most intuitive and intelligent people in my close circle. Yes, we bonded, and no, there was no drumming, chanting, or blooding. R'Chaard and I are still in touch; he's now a proud ex-pat, living with his male-companion-for-life-or-longer in the frozen wilds of Canada. I see him at holidays...the ones we celebrate in the states, at least.

The tracks found on Moments of Male Bonding are significant more due to their re-inscription of personal myth than anything else. The tracks are as follows...

Side A
-Language Is a Virus - Laurie Anderson
-Wildlife - The Talking Heads
-Don't Stand So Close To Me (1986 ReMix)
-Big Sky - Kate Bush
-The Boy In The Bubble - Paul Simon
-Don't Pay the Ferryman-Chris de Burgh
-Sledgehammer-Peter Gabriel
-Red, Red Wine-
-Tinseltown In the Rain - The Blue Nile
-The Flat Earth - Thomas Dolby

Side B
-Independence Day - CS Angels (AKA Comsat Angels)
-Tonight - David Bowie
-The Ghost In You - Psychedelic Furs
-Lovers In A Dangerous Time - Bruce Cockburn
-Burning Airlines Give You So Much More - Brian Eno
-Begin the Begin --REM
-Don't Fall On Me - REM
-In God's Country - U2
-We'll Be Together - Sting

The word eclectic does not describe...
Or, maybe it does.
To go into grand detail as to the personal significance of each song, and the spark of joy and recognition felt upon hearing each selection for the first time and why such feelings surfaced would take pages and pages and probably foil your patience with me for all time. Suffice it to say there are some definite favorites here, but that is not why this compilation is so precious.

R'Chaard, his room mate (a close friend of mine, going back to Junior High), myself and another mutual friend would spend many a night drinking beer, chain smoking, and yabbering on about everything and nothing. R'Chaard sat in lotus-position upon the floor, bulbous headphones clapped to his ears, a sward of vinyl spread about him in a wreath. He played DJ, and when R'Chaard played DJ, there were few beings in the universe more content. The rest of us would play board games like Trivial Pursuit, or haul out a massive collection of Lego bricks to see if we could construct some monument that included each and every piece found in that tattered box. Those were good times. The subject of the conversations are lost on the ether, but I can still go back to those moments and hear

"Que Es Mas Macho...Banana or Knife?" And chuckle.

Moments Of Male Bonding is comprised of tunes I would request during those long, smoky nights. Only a small portion of these tracks are of the tunes I consider as part of the aforementioned personal theme song canon. No, this collection is more of a time travel platform in and of itself. I listen to them as a whole, and I am spirited back to that claustrophobic apartment, the posters of Bogie and Bacall on the walls, the grotesque copper-burnished ceramic lamps, the clink of beer bottles, the haze of smoke, the sound of laughter that was high and long and so very free.

No, you can never go home again. But there moments, brief they may be, when you can at least stand on the threshold and call into the foyer. And, sometimes, if you are very, very, and you've booked your passage back through the right channels, someone will answer...

More Later,
Coletrane

Themes And Memes...

2007-09-29T14:41:00.000-07:00

Hey All,
Have you ever heard a song of such passion and complexity, verve and poetry that it just fit every aspect of your being? To me, that is a song of Great Brilliance--when the writer of said song so utterly taps the univerisality of an experience that you feel as though that piece was written about you, to you and only for you. That is a great song. But not necessarily a great song to everybody.

What we're talking about here is a theme song. Perhaps we need to contrive a more appropriate descriptive term, as Theme Song has some cultural baggage that may very well foil your efforts to express your personal experience through the music of others...
...Lets face it, when you hear the phrase Theme Song you inevitably hear audio snatches like

"Where everybody knows you na-a-a-ame..."
or
" I'll be there for yo-o-o-u..."
or
"People let me tell you 'bout my best friend..."

(You earned yourself a sweet little a cyber-cookie if you are of an age to identify that last one.)

The above are theme songs. They're written and marketed to identify a particular program. The tune helps the audience identify the characters, plot, and themes of the program.

What I'm talking about is a song that (in the serialization of your own life) would befit your very own personal experience.
...and a song of which you cannot get enough.

I've had more than a few Theme Songs throughout my life. At times I've heavily identified with a particular song because of its overall context, at others I was drawn to it because of one. single. phrase...

"...the bitch took all my money and went to Chicago..."

"She closed the blinds and drew the curtains, with knots I have yet to untie..."

see what i mean?

I once thought that it would be a rare treat for myself (and another of great patience of heart and soul to be sure) to compile a passal of these covetted theme tunes into a string, almost a biographical narrative; a musical mosaic of my life story.

I'd really like to believe we slough off conceit with age as we do skin cells, but I fear this may not be the case...

I actually did this on occassion, when I felt the audience receptive to it, but I seldom pointed out to the victim of my efforts just what kind of compilation they held in their hands. I think I wanted them to guess. **chuh** I doubt they ever did.

A prime of example of this sort of practice is found in Nick Hornby's novel, HIGH FIDELITY. The film starring John Cusack and Jack Black deviates little from the film, save moving the setting from London to Chicago. The characters in both narratives find great joy in combing through their exhaustive record collections to formulate such thematic compilations. I could relate to those moments in either version of the story, only too well.

Personal Theme Music, like so many silly things we human beings practice, is an excercise in which we homo sapiens, in an effort to apply order to our reality, package, compartmentalize, and parcel out a given experience-get a firm grip on it in order to hold it up, turn it over, and better understand it. If we are not gifted enough as poets, ourselves, we look to the works of others. We take a theme and call it a meme; "any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another." (see Wiktionary entry.)

Think about this next time you're making a road tape for that certain sweetie. As you cue up one track after another--think about it--you're taking the artistic expression of another and organizing it to fit your own. Nothing wrong with that, as a matter of fact, I would argue that's what it's there for.

I often wonder if the genuine poet is driven to create his/or work when the work of others just. doesn't. quite. cut. it. That is to say, the poet relishes the works of others, but when he/she encounters a vacuum, just on an apportunity to fill it?

**meh** I think I just opened up a whole big can of stinky worms there...best leave that topic for another day...

And what tunes would go on my list?
What songs twist the key to the dark reaches of my soul?
um...You may have to look up about a half dozen you women for whom pined during those romanitic and desperately horny years of my youth...as that was my most fertile period of theme-"ing." But we both know that time moves on, and boyish crushes are moist and flimsy things, apt to dry, flake, and drift off on the cool breeze.

Let's do this, tit for tat, Quid Pro Quo. You make up a ten-song list, with footnotes if you wish, briefly discussing the significance of the tune, and I will do the same.

Ready.
Go!

More Later

Coletrane

Them Kids And Their Rock and Roll...

2007-09-29T14:40:00.002-07:00

Hey All,

If I had kids, I'd want to protect them. The bizarre thing is, I'd want to protect them from the things I like; ultra violent zombie flicks, those filthy late-night cartoons on Adult Swim, and that devil music-Rock And Roll...well, most of it.

I like reading articles on those rock musicians who bridge the gap from angst-ridden-youthful-artist to angst-ridden-stay-at-home-dad with a modicum of success. But few artists seem able to reconcile their art with child rearing. I cannot imagine. Think about its, its struggle enough to be a cultural rebel, but can you imagine trying to be a cultural rebel while your child sits, enrapt, singing along with a big simpering purple dinosaur?

Somewhere in our cultural development, someone established that children's entertainment had to be childish. Not childlike, not innocent fun, but childish...that is to say, insulting on any level of intelligence.

Yet every once in a while mainstream pop, indie, and alternate pop artists team up to produce albums of children's works that roll out to a remarkable degree of success, appealing to the child in both kids and adults alike. Let me say up front that I in no way wish to appear to snub those artists who've made their career at being dedicated, sincere, and remarkably creative children's songwriters. I'm talking about those folks who (as rule) cater to big people.

Play, a new anthology featuring the work of such artists as Channels, The Supersuckers, and Mudhoney follows an all too brief line of contemporary alternate and indie artists who have contributed to children's albums with works of sincere fun and innocent frivolity.

Play is the sort of album that will drop under the radar of my adult indie listeners unless fate has dictated they initiate procreation a bit earlier than their peers....

But play is not the first of its kind by any means. When you have a moment, I urge you to check out the tracks on For The Kids (2002) and For The Kids Too (2004) released on Nettwerk Records. Each anthology features works by known artists from Tom Waits and Barenaked Ladies to Ivy and Matthew Sweet. Frankly, I was disappointed to find several artists covered older standards, than writing new songs, but in many cases (Ivy's version of Sing, for example) the artist has treated the standard to such an original arrangement, I cannot complain.

And then there are those bands that have capitalized are their capacity for childlike wonder all along, but weren't inspired to cater to a much, much, much younger audience until they began stocking their own, like, The Might Be Giants and their albums No! and Spine, but frankly? I've been buying TMBG's albums for my niece and nephew (not to mention myself) for years. They are fun, they are quirky, their words and rhythms spark a young person's imagination, and do it all with a G-Rating.

Genuine creativity requires the artist to draw their creativity from a very child-like place of innocence and vulnerability. Yet, to me, it has always been a little surprising that so few adults can successfully create for children themselves?

I'm not afraid to admit I own a majority of the albums listed above, and will recommend them to those who have children or not. Please bare in mind, if my recommendations are rejected, jeered upon, or giggled and pointed at I'll most likely sit in the corner and cry.

More later,
Coletrane

The Road Tape Mystique

2007-09-29T14:40:00.001-07:00

The Road Tape.

There was once a time if I were to hear the phrase, "Hey, I made a road tape for you..." I would feel either extreme excitement or extreme trepidation. See, back in the day, you either hoped for or feared The Road Tape.

The Road Tape was a token of affection, and frequently a very loaded token. Yet, The Road Tape frequently came from two sources, those for whom you felt reciprocal affection and those for whom you did not.

The Road Tape was a risky token. As I've previously mentioned, song choices in a particular context become highly personal things-snippets of the music collector's soul made manifest in a theme, ballad, or anthem. When someone compiles a collection for a fresh object of affection, they are giving over a gift of their heart, both red and raw.

You say you cannot appreciate the significance of which I speak? What fresh faced little kittens and pups you are...Clearly you have not lived, you have not loved, and you have never had to truly disappoint. That being said, I strongly suggest you locate a copy of Nick Hornby's HIGH FIDELITY: A NOVEL. Find a coffee shop or park bench, bus depot or mossy hillock and give yourself over to it. It's a quick read. If reading isn't your thing, I pity you-but at least do yourself the courtesy of sitting down to watch the film starring John Cusack. It's a more than adequate adaptation. But do it on your own time, I need to keep moving here...

Each and every time I plunged head-first into the swirling pools of romance, a new Road Tape for the party in question was seldom far from inception. I spend hours making up The Playlist; which songs best act as an Entre Act, Act One, Act Two...and so forth. And, yes, I did try to design the content like a theatrical production (by this time I WAS a student of the theatre, after all). Oh, I could write my own poems for that other party, draw them a picture, sing them a song (and in many cases I would do it in all eventuality) but The Road Tape was Def-Con One, it was the First Deployment, it was the beach head-With your Road Tape you dipped your toes in the water to test the temp and current, before leaping in.

Which made it all the more painful if you had one ounce of empathy and were in receipt of The Road Tape from a party for whose affection you did NOT share.

...because you couldn't simply GIVE IT BACK. You had to take it home, you had to listen to it, and you had to do your ever best to stuff the sensations of guilt you experienced as you heard those tunes (so lovingly assembled) that gave you a peek into that other person's very tender, very vulnerable soul.

I need not remind you it is 2007, and recordings made on magnetic tape are becoming as common as snail darters. They are becoming artifacts of courtships past like ornamental fans, root beer lip-gloss, and bundling boards. But I have a few still in my possession. I have a few that represent both sides of the relationship equation. I cannot tell you how many I made for other people, but I have no doubt they are legion.

Why I haven't thrown many of these out years ago I not know. But like I said, they are artifacts of times past and I have a love of history, the more personal the better. I have one sitting on the desk next to me. I am fairly certain it was the last such tape made for me by another person, compiled by a woman in 1989 or 1990, somewhere in there-on the cusp of an era's end in more ways than one.

I am not going to name any names, but I will say that it was indeed one of those tapes. When she gave it to me, I felt a twinge of guilt, because I knew exactly what it meant. And it meant something I knew I would ultimately be unable to reciprocate. Maybe that is WHY I have held on to it for so long. I felt obliged to treat it with a certain amount of respect. It is an artifact, after all.

Oh, I suppose you want to know what is on the tape don't you--you inquisitive little imps? Since it has been a dog's life since I spoke with this woman at any length, and she didn't feel too keen on playing Catherine-Zeta Jones to my John Cusack when last I emailed her-perhaps I'll spill...

TITLE: I HOPE YOU GOT...FAT
Side A
˙ David Bowie-Changes
˙ Jevette Steele-Calling You (Theme from Bagdad CafÇ)
˙ Sting-Message In A Bottle (Live-Accoustic) The Secret Policeman's Other Ball
˙ Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton-- Cause We've Ended As Lovers (Instrumental) The Secret Policemen's Other Ball
˙ Van Morrison-Moondance
˙ Ivan Neville-Why Can't I Fall In Love?
˙ The SugarCubes-Birthday
˙ The Pixies-Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf)
˙ Tears For Fears-Everybody Wants To Rule The World
˙ Pink Floyd-Comfortably Numb
Side B
˙ David Bowie-Fame
˙ The Violent Femmes-Fat
˙ Sinead O'Connor-I Want Your Hands On Me
˙ The The-Armageddon Days (Are Here Again)
˙ The Sugarcubes-Deus
˙ The Violent Femmes-Mother Of A Girl
˙ Concrete Blonde-Everybody Knows
˙ The The-Kingdom of Rain
˙ Brian Ferry-Same Old Scene
˙ Loggins and Messina-House on Pooh Corner
˙ David Bowie-Changes (Live)

Without delving too deeply below the surface of this collection, its safe to say this is a really interesting mix. And, I wonder, if I had not prefaced this list by telling you the nature of my relationship with the maker, would you have been able to make a healthy inference as to ours?

I think it advisable to simply overlook the Loggins and Messina track--Fuck me, I have NO IDEA what that tune is saying-maybe I don't want to.

Clearly the maker of this tape was a seasoned Maker Of Road Tapes. There is a theme here, and herein we find tunes that represent acts and even scene changes. My analytical skills also have told me (over the years) that there was a very strong subtext dealing with this person's frustration in establishing long-term relationships (I could be wrong-God knows I would be the last person to even attempt some kind of objectivity here). Most of all, this tape has a Prologue and an Epilog in the Bowie song, "Changes," a song very dear to many people and a tune deeply rooted in our cultural core. I think the use of the Bowie tracks says something very positive and insightful about this person in that she opened and closed her tape with two different versions of the song. Sometimes I felt that with this tape she was telling me about her losses, struggles, frustrations, but also held onto a certain sense of optimism and openness to change.

I'll leave the rest of the analysis up to you.

I'm feeling unquestionably full of crap right now.

More Later,
Coletrane.

Scrobbling Along...

2007-09-29T14:39:00.001-07:00

Hey All,

Recently while combing through several blogs on the state of music, entertainment, and giant squids, I found myself visiting a "competitor's" webcast site (BTW, this activity, I recently learned through the tutaledge of the Base Cyber Vulgar, is called "Slogging"). I figured the site was developed and managed by Brits as there were a great many odd spellings of things like "grey," "colour," "valour," and such. There were also a great deal terminology with which I was unfamiliar.

Right up front, I encountered a term with which I was unfamiliar: "Scrobbling." I assumed the term foreign to my eyes due to my yankee upbringing. I mean, it sounded so much like a quaint British Schoolboy euphemism for tongue-kissing (personally, I am uncertain if the Brits acutally use their tongues when kissing--they are British after all.)

No. Not really. A quick Wiki search later...

"Last.fm is an Internet radio station and music recommendation system that merged with sister site Audioscrobbler in August 2005. The system builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste, also recommending artists similar to their favorites, showing their favorite artists and songs on a customizable profile webpage, comprising the songs played on its stations selected via a collaborative filter, or optionally, recorded by a Last.fm plugin installed into its users' music playing application."

So, essentially, when you scrobble or, play the role of scrobbler, you can only do so on Last.fm. Perhaps that has changed since the above posting. Please feel free to enlighten me--Just, PLEASE--Do Not try to sell me a carnation while you're at it.

It appears as though life as a scrobbler has its benefits. As a scrobbler you have your very own private stash (or cache as the case may be) of your own mp3 collection. No more digging through cracked stacks of jewel cases, or those mylar sheaf binders made grimy by Mocha Latte Spillage, no more sifting through the passanger side footwell of your car while hitting the interstate onramp at 75 Plus. Nope, its all right there, in tidy, compressed files that will never see the slightest wink of a drifting dust mote.

...there was a time when my three heaviest possesions were my futon, my set of dresser drawers, and a 1'x4' orange crate made of cedar slats. That crate was packed tight with LPs. It weighed about fifty pounds. I carried it with me, back and forth from college, from this apartment to that. I carried that heap of pressed vinyl balast deep into the fastnesses of the 1990s. When I moved across the country, I opted to leave it with a pal who shared a great many of my tastes in music. I also hoped that when the time came for a much-needed fix by a certain band or artist, I could call upon him to make a tape for me (he was ALSO of the the few caucasions I knew at the time still in possession of a turntable and working needle). Within a year he claimed the crate had been lost.

That would never happen if you were a scrobbler.

Yet, there was something to be said for building that collection of crated vinyl. I spent many a long hour flipping through bins at rare and used record stores. I talked with a lot of dealers about bands and sounds and influences. I met some cool people. It was fun. When that orange crate was lost, I didn't mourn the vinyl so much as the passing of a passtime.

Ultimately I did my ever best to replace my beloved oddball and outre recordings on CD. It wasn't easy, and I'll wager there are still a few very, very, very limited press run vinyl EPs from Promissing Local Bands from up and down the west coast that I will never be able to replace. I wondered for a moment if those LPs could be worth anything. Probably not.

But, gee, that would never have happened if I was a scrobbler.

A few blogs ago I brought up the subject the recording industry's copyright infringement blitzkrieg regarding webasting. A concern that has yet to be dealt with is just how the industry is supposed to deal with those legions of scrobblers out there. They have a private stash of copyright music records of which they have never paid a dime. Will that litte stash soon be considered a single channel and fall under those edicts, or will it be considered a private stream, subject to another set of rules? Will all of those downloaded music files be returned to the buzzing ether, or will Billy and Bobby Sue Scrobbler have to pay a ransom to the recording publishers?

I really wonder if any of this is much of a threat to your average scrobbler. You can return your favorite tune to the buzzing ether with as much ease as you retrieved it in the first place. No skin lost.

In 2001 I got a call from my old pal. He said his older brother had found an old orange crate full of vinyle in the attic of his parents' garage. Did I still want it? All I could think was how heavy it was going to be to lug that down from the rafters, how hot and sweaty a job side-stepping down a rickety ladder to lug the crate to my car. And THEN, where the hell was I going to put that freaking crate?

That wouldn't happen if I was a scrobbler.

...maybe I should do something about that.

More Later,

Coletrane

Pigs and Pearls

2007-09-29T14:34:00.002-07:00

Hey All,

My friend Kt recently sent me an article published last week in The Washington Post, entitled "Pearls Before Breakfast", written by Staff Reporter, Gene Weingarten.

In the article, Weingarten asks virtuoso Violinist, Joshua Bell to participate in a social experiment. Bell is asked to take up the role of busking street musician in a busy DC Metro station during rush hour. He'd play a classical concerto upon his Stradivari violin, handcrafted in 1713, with a value estimated in the millions. He would give an incognito public performance, a performance for which mere days before seats sold for $100 each.

If you have a moment, please read the article, its quite amazing and sparked ideas in me for several blog discussions.

The upshot was this, "How would busy pedestrians react to a virtuoso musician in their midst, playing some of the most beautiful music in the world?"

The results are really amazing, and a far cry from the speculations of several critics and analysts. Bell played for about 45 minutes, and earned roughly $43.00 (though earning pocket cash was not the overall intent). But, frankly, half of that was a contribution by a woman who actually recognized him. One person. And that was because she had seen Bell in concert very recently. Few people actually took the time to even linger over the beautiful sounds emanating from the plaza. Those few that did linger, had had some modicum of experience in actually playing the violin, so though they didn't recognize Bell, and his obvious genius, they knew his skill was worthy of recognition.

So, what did the article teach us? There is an immediate assumption that because Bell played before the random working class factions passing back and forth, that they did not have the intellectual capacity to appreciate what stood before them; Pearls Before Swine. I must admit this was my initial reaction as well. All of those flesh-wrapped-robots are too preoccupied with their schedules, buying lottery tickets, their bottom line, their perspective so narrow that they are incapable of appreciating the beauty in their midst.

It seems the only kind of person sincerely and unanimously drawn to Bell's performance were children, very young children, who were quickly tugged away by their parent.

Me? I told myself, Why, I know damn well I'd be stalled out right there on the tiles, I'd pause in mid-stride by the sound, I just know I would.

Or would I?

What Weingarten and his associates discovered was that the pedestrian's oblivion of Bell's performance was not a question of connoisseurship, but of context. The environment the researchers had chosen to conduct the experiment was the nexus of a bustling, lower to upper middle class people. It was determined that any one of the several hundred people who overlooked Bell could very well have appreciated the music he was making, but they simply didn't have the time, and neither was such beauty expected in such a place. And who could blame them, when you're in a hurry to make a n appointment, a meeting, a delivery, a deadline, your return from a break, when you are preoccupied with answering to someone of higher authority, you seldom have time to stop and appreciate a simple miracle before you.

But had Bell set up camp on the steps before the Kennedy Center, The Met, you know damn well a crowd would have gathered the same way they did when The Beatles began performing Let It Be on the roof top, and when U2 attempted to reprise the experiment twenty years later. Successful artistic efforts, it seems, rely a great deal on context and environment. And timing, let us not forget timing.

I'll continue this discussion in my next blog.
More later,
Please stand by.

Oh! You are SO Alternative

2007-09-29T14:34:00.001-07:00

Hey All,
You'd think a person so bent on defying labels would spend less time pondering them...

I was doing a little "slogging" last week, and came across an older discussion on a Live365 forum regarding the definition of Alternative music .

Some good points were made by several individuals, but I must give credit to one entity by the handle of Rhyslud, who said some inredibly poignent things. I am going to cut and paste this person's comment because it resonates so deeply for me..

"In the early 80s I spent most of my driving time with my left hand on the wheel and my right on the radio dial -- searching for something interesting to listen to. Despite the recommendations of a few friends, I had closed my mind to the punk movement (my loss).

I found myself more often than not on college radio stations. Artists like Elvis Costello, The Smiths and the Cure had been around for years and to my amazement were never played on mainstream radio.

Apparantly I was not the only one who could not stomach one more replaying of Bob Seager's Old Time Rock & Roll. Capitalizing on the college radio boom, commercial "Alternative" stations sprang up across the country offering an alternative to the closed-mindedness of standard commercial radio.

It seems though that the term "Alternative" has been co-opted to define a particular genre of music. And the so-called "Alternative" stations have become every bit as closed-minded to alternatives as their Fleetwood Mac-playing predecessors. From what I hear, in order for a song to be played on an "alternative" station it must either BE at least ten years old or SOUND at least ten years old."

No wonder this new stuff is making me feel pretty settled and comfy. And I thought I was adapting to that "shock of the new" so well...

This person is not alone in holding tightly to this loose fitting definition. Frankly, we are hitting a phase of Alternative and College music that I enjoy very, very much. I realized a few months ago that the reason I am enjoying it so much, is that in sentiment and harmony, orchestration and content, it reminds me of the music I dug so 20 years ago.

It is the nature of Popular Culture to recycle, reuse, and reflect. With Popular Cutlure, quite literally, what goes around, comes around--and that is not necessarily a bad thing. As I comb through the latest single tracks from bands like My Chemical Romance, Muse, and Cold War Kids, I hear traces of bands that I loved. This beat reminds me of The Cure, that lyric turn-phrase makes me thing of The Smiths...and so on.

I guess I was foolish to think that an iron curtain drops when popular musical trends shift gears and a style evolves out of something, and never looks back. That's really a wrong-headed attitude, but that's the notion of style and fashion and popular music--it all poaches from itself. I think that what I have found as significant in artist advancement is in the evolution of technology. One upon a time the David Bowie worked with a Moog Sythesizer and it was something ahead of its time, now its archaic, not to mention the electronica-centered Hair-Bands of 20 years ago...thank god that aspect of the era was left behind.

I may be a hard-core nostaligist...but not THAT nostalgic (or that hard-core).

Before it Smelled Like Teen Spirit, it smelled like Aqua Net and that, friends and neighbors, was the smell of future generations burning under an ozone free atmosphere...

...but I digress.

What was best about that era of music that I am so thrilled to find resonating over and over again? How about the highly personal metaphor, the subjective and unapologetic voices of rage, discontent, dissillusionment, awe, mystery, and...hope? Yeah, I hear a lot more hope than I did ten years ago.

Because once you work through the anger and the rage, you can look upon things with a clearer head. With a clearer head you are more apt to see an issue from more than one angle; you see options. With options comes a sense of hope. Hope is the best Alternative this life has ever given me.

How about you?

More later,
Coletrane

Minding the Generation Gap

2007-09-29T14:33:00.001-07:00

Hey All,

Once upon a time, the notion of a Generation Gap was cause for social and political concern by the dominant generation. The Baby Boomers must have seemed such a hedonistic, amoral horde to the Greatest Generation, the survivors of WWII, as their progeny rioted in the streets, imbibed in free-love and mind-altering substances to their hearts' content, and threatened political upheaval while turning culture inside out.

As we the turned the corner of the last century, the oncoming generation has become more of a target for demographic analysis and potential profit than a threat to the status quo. This is the nature of a Capitalist System, to be sure, but was it so obvious in the generations before or was the generation preceding the Baby Boomers too fearful their progeny would put a lasting end to all they cherished as a culture?

Since the arrival of the Baby Boomers, preceding generations seem not so fearful of their replacements, there seems to be proportionally much less drastic change, much less that challenges The Establishment of the predecessor. Granted, each generation sees it as their duty to rebel against the prior, but one wonders whether the envelope has been stretched to its limits long, long ago.

Toward the late 1980s and early 90s I grew very excited by the growing trend of what many call Modern Primitivism--the body piercing, the tattoos, and surgical implantation. The beauty found in the grotesque these younger people relished astounded me. But I was a bit deflated to see so little challenge or opposition put forth by the elder age group. Parents didn't care that their sons were getting lanced through the scrotum or pronghorns implanted in their foreheads.

"Its his means of expressing himself."
"But he looks like something from a Circus Sideshow!"
"Yeah, there's good money in that..."

When I was a senior in high school a single earring (in the left ear, mind) was the extreme in youthful rebellion. My father wouldn't have it, "Not while you live under my roof," he'd blare out. He saw an earring as an anti-establishment statement. I also pondered whether it would publicly bring into question the sexual preferences of his only son. Talk about threatening The Establishment. So, two weeks before I left home for college, I pierced my ear and walked around with a tiny band-aid on my ear hopping my Dad would not notice. I even tried to remove the stud before the allotted period needed for the piercing to heal for fear I would be found out. My sister eventually spilled the beans, and I was made to suffer terrific guilt for my actions.

While scouting his alma mater (and my future), we visited his original fraternity house. Imagine my joy when we discovered each and every member of the frat house had his ear pierced with at least one small (and comparatively conservative) silver plate or diamond stud.

I was both elated and disappointed. Elated because my act of rebellion had found validation in a tier of my father's culture, and simultaneously disappointed because my act of rebellion had found validation in a tier of my father's culture. Rebellion, counter-culture, I discovered, quickly became a commodity.

I think Dad was just concerned people on the street would see me as a fag. I'm sure that he was confindant not ALL the fellows in the SAE house were queer... Just trendy. And trends are commodities in the modern marketplace. Damn. I'd sold out before I'd even stepped up the auction block. How much did that suck?

Steven Heller, editor of the Village Voice states, "When I was a teenager the term Generation Gap made it to the cover of Life magazine, and there seemed to be a truly profound schism between what the pre-World War II adults believed and practiced and how we baby boomers acted. Our aesthetics, tastes and styles were totally different and so foreign to our parents-indeed, downright alien. Now the generations seem to blend together. Our music is similar to the next generation's music; our tastes in film, literature, art and design are almost indistinguishable, save for the personalities behind them. Sure, there are codes and languages that are unique to this or that age group, but for the longest time I have not heard the term Generation Gap."

It has been argued that now, with the advancements of personal interface technology like iPods, Cell phones, and cyber enviroments like myspace and YouTube, a gap has begun to yawn once more.

John Carlin, president of cutting edge advertising firm, Funny Garbage, states, "I think this is why it's important to bandy around terms like Generation Gap. Not as a marketing tool but as a demarcation of how things are changing in the lives around us. It is hard for us freaky geezers to feel healthy and adjusted in the imperfectly fabricated world we live in. It is hard to find equilibrium in a constantly changing, perpetually accelerating environment made up more of information than feelings. So, if the younger generation sees patterns rather than things, hopefully they will use this new sense of reality to fashion new and exciting forms of expression. I can't wait."

So, with the advancements of technology as comes the speed of assimiliation as distinquishing characteristics of, say, Gen X vs Gen Y. Well, that's okay, some things you need to take your time with...

But when did the evolution of a species from one generation to the next become about selling products? Where is the intent to rebell, the drive to distinquish one era's trends and methods from another. Maybe it always was about comodification and I just wasn't paying attention, I was too busy trying to figure out how the hide my earring, enough AAA batteries in my pocket for the Walkman, and dye my hair without staining the sink.

More Later,
Coletrane

Sources
The New Generation Gap: An Exploratory Conversation with John Carlin , Steven Heller, Village Voice, May 22, 2007

Metal Odyssey

2007-09-29T14:32:00.001-07:00

Hey All,

If you have not gathered so far, intellectual enthusiasts of popular culture always intrigue me, probably because I enjoy someone who can successfully articulate their perspective as an insider, but more than likely because I consider myself one of their ilk-and I exist if, for no other reason, to justify myself each and every day. Therefore it is a great pleasure to hear a well-articulated analysis of something even I have considered lowbrow at one point...Heavy Metal.

Granted, Sam Dunn and Scot McFayden the writer/director team of the 2005 documentary Metal: A Headbanger's Journey explore the cultural facets in close and academic manner, without losing touch with their subject matter. They cannot, Metal is in their blood. My personal change in viewpoint regarding the merits of Heavy Metal did not begin and end with the efforts of Messrs Dunn and McFayden, no, that began years ago in graduate school when I was stunned to find many an English Lit graduate student equally invested in Metal, but this documentary jelled many issues for me, and settled many more.

See, where I grew up, the handful of metalheads I encountered were more likely as not intoxicated thugs, more inclined to break windows at the high school, burn down playground equipment, and torture farm animals than grasp and wrestle their spiritual disillusionment through Metal. Perhaps I would have been better off growing up in Vancouver, BC with Dunn and McFayden.

Its sad, Metal: A Headbanger's Journey was released in 2005, and though I had several opportunities to view it on cable, I never got to see it from beginning to end. There was also the issue of prime-time cable censorship as well-too many distracting blips and beeps while artists and fans expressed themselves in their tradition vernacular-they cussed a lot, as many a metal head would be expected to do.

So praise for this film is a bit late in coming, to be sure.

Two things impressed me most about Metal; the filmmaker's efforts to create a Heavy Metal family tree, and the alacrity with which they consistently returned to this tree as they made progress through the roots and tenets of metal, the second impressive effort was the deeply articulate and insightful interviews with an array of metal artists. After listening to the likes of Bruce Dickinson (Iron Maiden), Ronnie James Dio (Dio, Black Sabbath), and Lemmy (Motorhead) (just to name a very small few) speak about their craft and careers I realized they are just as much artists as any other.

It's always frustrating to view a documentary on a subject with whom you are already familiar, you feel the film's efforts are redundant or simply preaching to the choir. A great deal of the time these failings are due to time and financial constraints placed up the filmmakers. Metal succeeds where so many other documentaries fail, because though its faced with the same constraints, it succeeds in enlightening its audience in unforeseen ways. Through some very direct interviews with both artists, media and cultural critics, I walked away no longer seeing metal heads as nothing but a bunch of screaming brutes, but a subculture in a sincere search for themselves and a community.

The only point of contention I had with the film was its persistent belief in the resilience of metal in a metalhead's life, not too unlike the all-purveying attitude of a Marine, "Once a Marine always a Marine." Similar statements are made about metal in the film, there appeared to be an all or nothing belief in commitment to the culture; you couldn't ride the fence regarding metal, it was all or nothing.

I listened to metal for a while in my youth, and much later as an adult during a really, really angry time. Since I was raised to vent verbally and not physically, I had no recourse but to drive straight for the record store, pick up copies of Metallica, Rob Zombie, and Iron Maiden and go for one long, long drive with the tape deck volume cranked to eleven.

It helped. It helped a lot. It was a method of therapy I have used on more than one occasion since. But, I'm sorry, I am no metalhead, nor will I ever be at this late date. You won't find me tossing in the pit and I cut my hair off ten years ago. I'm not going to be setting up my pup tent at OzFest and subsisting on beer and corndogs for a weekend. That won't be happening. But I wonder, had I made the metal commitment when younger, would I be a more grounded person now? Its a stretch, I know, but lets play with the notion for just a moment...
--Okay moment over!

Regardless, have no doubt, I'll support you when you scream and shout at the devil. No problem.

And I highly recommend Metal: A Headbanger's Journey to those highbrow, lowbrow, and the creatures in between.

More Later,
Coletrane

Just Because I Thought It Funny...

2007-09-29T14:31:00.000-07:00

I just don't get The Advertising Media sometimes. I mean, isn't there such a thing as glutting your Own Market? Over-saturation of you own product? I always thought so, but maybe I've missed something, somewhere in my ten-plus-odd years of higher freaking education pertaining to media and entertainment-I must have missed something pertaining to how they run the freaking machine!

Trust me, this won't be the first time I contemplate demanding a refund for said education.

But I digress...

If are anything like me (and I pity you to the bottom of my lonely heart if you are...) you actually sit and watch television commercials. You appreciate how they are produced, performed, directed and orchestrated. But, you are equally puzzled when you see a multi-million dollar corporation, already indelibly marked upon the frontal lobes of our popular conscious, like McDonalds, Sony, or Geico, seemingly overload the airwaves with several different ad campaigns for their same product.

Geico is the best example; we have our ever evolving "Geico Gecko" series, the "Joe Average Customer Testimonial/Celebrity Translator" series, and the omnipresent "So Easy A Caveman Can Do It" series. There may be even more threads to Geico's current ad campaign tapestry, but I think three is sufficient mention for the purposes of this blog.

I have little pride, I'll admit that I find myself laughing at these ads, they work on me, and-yes-I even recall the product names hours, maybe even days or weeks after viewing the commercial. (Something ad agencies don't always figure into their media-savvy alchemy when concocting an ad campaign-it has been found that people have a tendency to recall the clever elements of an individual advertisement, but will often forget the name of the actual product name.)

But Geico-Geico seems more than hell-bent to saturate the Car Insurance Market. Don't they know that you can over stimulate your audience and run the risk of driving them away? Apparently this is not an issue. Or, they are bugging to core over the old-school traditionalist who chose an insurance company based not on a current and clever ad campaign but more due to a family tradition. Gramps used it, Dad uses it, and so I might as well use it...

"Sir, do you and your wife have Mutual Climax?"
"No, I think its State Farm, isn't it, dear?"

Its just not something I care to think about or shift my hairy kiwis over, I just don't care that much, whether I live under the barrage of a half a dozen clever ad campaigns or not. But, mayhap, it matters to them...

Good God! It just dawned on me; this whole ad glut--maybe its all my fault. Geico keeps rallying against the great unwashed and uninsured because of complacent dinks like me...

**chuh** too freaking bad.

When our Creative Director, Prison Dwigt, told me of the Variety Article I thought he was joking, and an uncharacteristically lame joke at that. But, no, it is as much truth as can be uttered from beyond the barriers of the Hollywood Dream Machine. That's right, those fey, Young Upwardly-mobile, Urban Professional Neanderthal types are getting their own freaking sitcom called Cavemen.

Lame, does not describe.

Yes, this is the point where you may mutter, "There is no God." But I don't think it quite that extreme. Nor is such a thing unprecedented. Do you recall that obnoxious talking baby, with the harsh voice like Jimmy Kimmel, featured in Quiznos ads? He had his own short-lived TV series, following an earlier dint as an ad persona. So, no, it's an obnoxious way to churn cash, but its not unheard of, the question is, how long will our Cavemen be able to run over the hardpan of the entertainment marketplace before dying their more than timely deaths by advertisement attrition? I'm curious.

Which begs the question...will the narrative of this program deal at all with Geico car insurance or will these characters be their own, stand-alone entities? My goodness, I think I am actually building up a modicum of anticipation for this lame-ass show.

Honestly, I'm looking forward to Cavemen; I may even set my VCR in order to trap them on magnetic tape. Why? It's just my nature, I suppose. I never once taped an episode of Cop Rock and to this day I regret it...why? Because when I tell people about that damn show, no one will believe me.

But the bottom line, which I did actually learn during those ten-plus-odd years, is even bad press is good press. As long as the name is afloat, the product flies and money changes hands. Lame or no.

I hate that.

and don't blame me, I wasn't the only one who laughed...

More Later,
Coletrane

Jumping the Shark, or Humping the Guppy?

2007-09-29T14:30:00.000-07:00

Hey All,

Jumping the Shark- a term used to denote the point at which a popular television program has passed its prime. This point is usually evident when writers introduce absurd or extreme plot twists that are illogical in terms of the program's original context. These moments usually cue the program's death knell, inidicating a program is essentially killing time until its ratings drop and it reaches cancellation. The term directly refers to the episode of Happy Days in which Fonzie jumps over a shark on water skies. This is the point, according to its fans, in which the program reached an all time low. A Jumping the Shark moment can not only be an absurd storyline but the introduction of an extremely outrageous or incongruous character to replace an original cast member(think Scrappy Doo, Cousin Oliver, Agents Reyes and Doggett?).

Having consumed as much television in my life as oxygen and complex carbohydrates, I have seen sharks jumped time and again. As usage of the term pervaded popular consciousness, people attempted to apply it to other facets of the entertainment medium, but to limited to success in my mind.

"So, when did your favorite band Jump The Shark?"

I am reluctant to say the notion is equally applicable to popular music. I say this because music and television production are two very different art forms. For one, a television show dictates a particular vision of reality with setting, archetypes, and iconography. Music doesn't fall under the same precepts because you are dealing with more specific genres and styles, and the work of an artist and his or her collaborators. If an artist pulls a Neil Young, and does a total one-hundred-and-eighty degree turnaround with their style choices from album to album, that's more like jumping ship than jumping shark.

There are hordes of bands and artists out there who have made drastic moves to either reach a larger audience (and bring in more cash) or stretch and refresh themselves artistically. Some artists make a career of constantly re-evaluating his or her stage personas, which, in turn, becomes a trademark...can anyone say David Bowie?

One of the more common transitions seen in pop music is the evolution of teen pop star to rock and roll slut. We see it most recently with Joss Stone. When she arrived on the scene as a sixteen-year-old moppet with her straight blonde hair and fleshy apple cheeks, signing her autographs with smiley-faces, dressed in thrift store skirts and baggy peasant blouses, she was sweet, innocent, and cute as a little bug's butt. Now she's a grown-up 20-year old with her deep crimson tresses, frosted eye shadow and skin-tight mini skirts paired with spike heel boots, she scares grandmothers into aneurisms and makes grown men cry.

Has Joss Jumped the Shark, or has she simply grown up?
...Or is she Humping the Guppy? We've seen it happen before, the cute, early-adolescent songstress turned super-slutty rock star and candidate for rehab. Are these performers encouraged to mutate so by their agents and publicists? Or is it because there is a darker, more daring being struggling to escape into the world? Or is it simply that sex sells?

I wouldn't know without biting, go ask Mr. Owl...

More Later,
Coletrane

Guilt By Association

2007-09-29T14:29:00.000-07:00

Hey All,

Music is a powerful recall device. Statistically it is supposedly not as intense as your sense of smell, but it must run a close second, no? Music can have the power to draw up strong positive or negative associations for all of us. The music may very well have been something you once adored, but thanks to a lengthy courtship between yourself and a bottle of mescal, you can no longer stomach Synchronicity, or thanks to that little girl who crushed your heart into pÉtÇ, you cannot bear to hear, say; I'll Stop The World And Melt With You, Roxanne, The Ghost In You, Hello, Broken Arrow, Tunnel of Love, Jeepster, Once in a Lifetime, Norwegian Wood, Hey Jude, Stormy Weather, Pennies from Heaven, Barracuda, Suffragette City, She Blinded Me With Science, Georgia On My Mind, Rhapsody In Blue, Drive, or Penny Lane...

Perhaps I am too free in revealing my interior life.

Those who know me and my musical tastes, know full well why I despise certain bands and artists, its seldom due to lack of talent or the hallow catchiness of a song. It is usually because I have a deeply negative association with said artist or performer.

For example...I hate Tori Amos.

Granted, many a male of fragile ego and deeply steeped machismo finds something threatening about Tori Amos. Perhaps it is the casual freedom with which she writes about her history of sexual abuse, perhaps it is the wave of female spiritual empowerment that crested with her popularity, or how she became popular music's spokesperson for the female disenfranchised, or perhaps it was that image in the liner notes of Boys For Pele in which she suckles that cute little piglet with such puckish glee. Perhaps. But, none are solid reasons for my hating the music of Tori Amos. In fact, I will honestly say that I really don't dislike her work due to anything she has done, personally.

We're talking association here.

In the spring of 1990 I moved to the bustling "liberal academic" environment of Madison, Wisconsin to attend graduate school. Before leaving the Pacific Northwest, I stocked up on some new music. One album I picked up with a certain degree of anticipation was Amos' Little Earthquakes. I liked her sound. Her lyrics had a particular bite. I loved her voice, she reminded me of Kate Bush, and I'd been pining for new work from Kate Bush something awful. When I arrived in the muggy climes of Madison, I heard Little Earthquakes everywhere-in bars, restaurants and markets. I felt that twinge I usually feel when I have unknowingly bought into a fad, but didn't let it bother me.

I didn't let it bother me that my two new housemates would play the album simultaneously from their respective bedrooms, frequently oblivious to their waves of dueling female angst that seemed to form a cataract around me. Yes, I said angst.

No, I didn't let any those assaults of the spring of 1990 perturb me. But the negative association did begin with that particular housing situation. Not only did I share a house with these people, but all of my graduate classes as well. I could never escape them (nor they me for that matter). The worse of the pair was a troll-like little man from Boston who suffered from an advanced case of Adult Onset ADD and progressive acne. He prided himself on being an open minded and progressive liberal, carried on and on about the rights of women and the marginalized, but when he saw the mini skirt our housemate chose to wear for that evening's party, advised her to go and change out of it is as it was so revealing she would simply be "asking" for trouble.

He also muttered to me in confidence how relieved he was to discover I was heterosexual, as I had given him the opposite impression during our first telephone conversation. This didn't surprise me much at all, as I well recalled the tone of our first conversation. He said to me, "I think we're going to have a good time in Madison, I hear there are a lot of cute chicks there..."

"Uh. Yeah."

He couldn't have been more obvious in his homophobia if he'd spritzed himself from an atomizer of testosterone.

Within several weeks, he advised us all with great pride he had joined a campus interest group called MSR: Men Stopping Rape.

God, that name still makes me flinch.

MSR's mission statement reads thus: "Men join MSR for a variety of reasons: many of us have known someone in our lives who has been assaulted; some of us have come to question our own behavior and the role violence has played in our 'initiation' into modern masculine culture, and we desire to learn how to avoid perpetrating assault; all of us benefit from an atmosphere of support and understanding."

All well and good, beautiful, in fact, I say.

Yet when asked about his reasoning for joining this particular organization he told us he did so in order to meet people, i.e., women. To my knowledge, and that of my colleagues, he did not join because of an association with a rape survivor or victim of violence.

From there on my desire to pith this smarmy, self-important twerp only grew as he made it more than clear on several occasions that he genuinely believed women were objects meant for pedestals, artifacts, pieces of property to be coveted and protected. And the only suitable protector for the modern woman was an enlightened man like himself.

But the deepest negative association came when Mr. MSR believed himself to hold the wherewithal to direct Timberlake Wertenbaker's play Love Of the Nightingale, a feminist deconstruction of the greek myth of the Rape of Philomela.

The set was minimalist and simple, a black box playing space with benches and black blocks. The actors dressed simply. But it was the walls and floors of the set that made me anxious; they were papered with enlarged newspaper headlines screaming about rape, rape statistics, and male violence against women. To say the set dressing was heavy-handed would be an understatement. And what should come jangling out of the air about the dimly lit space but Tori Amos' Little Earthquakes. My gorge rose. Something in my head snapped though I could not articulate it at the time, there was murder in my heart.

Graduate school taught me few things that I could use outside its ivory towers. But one valuable lesson learned was to never speak with any authority for the marginalized unless you are one. It's just going to get you kicked in the kiwis...or, it should, in this case.

In embellishing his production of Love of the Nightingale, with Amos' signature song, he simply demonstrated his own ignorance of what it means to be marginalized. He knew nothing of the issues presented within the play-- female empowerment, lesbianism, feminism, female spirituality, or bonding. Amos' song was a pop-totem signifying his own ignorance. But told himself he did and not only that, was an authority on the subject.

The Clue Phone was ringing off the hook, but Mr. MSR just refused to answer. You see, he understood women, he understood the marginalized, and he had the authority to speak on the subject through this play. The problem was, this play was not solely about rape. It was about a lot of things, but not just rape. Rape was a vital element of the story, but not the entirety of the story.

This poor clown couldn't grasp this, and further demonstrated his own ignorance by using that fucking Tori Amos song.

After three years of graduate school and a lengthy relationship with a feminist academic, I learned several key things about feminist culture.

A) They have no sense of humor.
Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: That's not funny.

B)If you have a penis, its best not to make yourself out to be an authority on things feminist, see, frequently a feminist will take this as being a tad oppressive.

C)When in doubt, refer to letter A.

Ignorant and self-important people are frequently well meaning, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions to be sure. But this clown had his cruise control set, and Tori Amos on the FM.

And that's why I hate Tori Amos. As I said, really isn't her fault, it's just a nasty association

Goodbye Blue Monday

2007-09-29T14:28:00.001-07:00

Hey All,

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died yesterday. He evidently bumped his head very badly, and died from subsequent complications. If you've read much of his work, or simply flipped through copy of Breakfast of Champions you'll get the above reference, why it is significant, and why I used to doodle the phrase on notebook covers, journal leaves, scrawl it in wet sand, and on the occasional men's room stall.

If you don't get it, I want you to go get a library card.

I think I have read every piece of Mr. Vonnegut's fiction, save his most famous, Slaughterhouse 5. Why? Because I saw the movie too damn many times, and wanted to wait until those images in the film--someone else's interpretation of Mr. Vonnegut's imagination--were plowed under by time. I wanted my reading of the book to be as fresh as possible.

I started reading Kurt Vonnegut at the behest of Rob Harriman when I was about 20 years old. I am now 41. I still have never read Slaughterhouse 5. But. I haven't seen the film version for almost 20 years as well, so, the imagery (the brief and teasing glances of Valerie Perrine's boobage) is finally beginning to fade. I'll try to get around to reading it before the curtain gets drawn.

I hope.

Many people banned Mr. Vonnegut's books. Sometimes they were banned because of the sex, but mostly because of the Humanist stuff; the skepticism. Mr. Vonnegut frequently questioned the purpose and/or existence of a supreme being. That propensity for such great questioning can happen to you when you are huddled with fellow prisoners of war in a makeshift prison called Slaughterhouse 5 as bombs fall overhead. Bombs dropped by your own countrymen. That sort of experience will fill you with a certain taste for cosmic irony, if you survive. It'll also get your books banned and burned.

But Mr. Vonnegut stated in one of his last biographical works, Fates Worse Than Death (1991), "The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am." Be that as it may, it clearly informed his worldview, his vision of reality. And, besides, now that he is dead, along with his literary, "Author's Voice," I can speculate as to the nature of his writing until all of them lonely monkeys in a room full of typewriters hack out the complete works of Stephen King.

I loved Kurt Vonnegut's books. I frequently gave them to people who were not "readers," because they were insidious and deceitful works. His were always rather short books and appeared to be an "easy read," and frequently less than 200 pages with larger size type. But if the recipient of my gift had one iota of intellect, they realized they had been asked to think about a great, great many challenging things before they were through.

heh.

Mr. Vonnegut also liked to doodle, and in one of his many doodles he advised his readers to learn to distinguish an asterisk (*) from a certain delicate bodily orifice of one's "lower 48."

Translation: Know the difference between an asterisk and your asshole.

In an interview this morning, Gore Vidal made comments as to how Mr. Vonnegut more times than not hid his social commentary behind the veil of Science Fiction. A tactic, he stated, found more frequently in writers from the Post WWII era as it made their satirical efforts more accessible or palatable to the general public, teaching through deception, which is always the benefit of a good satire, correct?

I don't think I've ever read anything by Vidal of any length, I don't think I share enough with him. He turned me off with his comment. He knew Mr. Vonngegut, and knew his work for a long time. Mr. Vonnegut never wrote a dram of SF, he wrote Speculative Fiction. Speculative Fiction (a term I am quite certain Harlan Ellison coined to describe his own work) is something far more dangerous, far more insidious, and far closer to the bone. Science Fiction can look at a great many things, but there are always rules to the stories woven, many of them technological. Speculative Fiction has fewer rules, and deals more with the knotty alchemy of human nature, the chemistry of the soul.

I was surprised to hear that Mr. Vonnegut attempted suicide at just the about the time I was introduced to his work. His attempt failed. He later stated, "My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children."

I'm glad he didn't succeed. His work brought me a great deal of insight and, frankly, joy, thereafter. As he and I both matured, his writing became...softer...not dull, per se, but definitely not so sharp. Sure, there was still a bitter taste to the steely jabs, but the bite was not so deep. I made this realization when I correctly guessed the identity of the narrator of one of his later novels, Galapagos. Perhaps it was easy to guess the narrator's identity because I had been so deeply mired in Mr. Vonnegut's work for so very long and was well entrenched in what passed for a "shared universe," within his works. Perhaps for that reason putting the pieces together wasn't so difficult. The narrator closes his story with a backhanded sense of optimism. The human race has finally destroyed itself, but they left behind the seeds of a simpler, gentler race of beings, and that was just fine with him. He felt he'd never done much with the life given him anyway, but now he could watch the progress of this new race of beings, better than Homo sapiens, he opined, and do something genuinely productive, for all eternity.

If you haven't read Galapagos, you should, it was one of Mr. Vonnegut's better final works. You should especially read it if you aren't a "reader," per se. It's a very short book; it won't take much of your time...

I'll talk about music next time.

God Bless You Mr. Rosewater.

And So It Goes,
Coletrane

Getting That Fix

2007-09-29T14:26:00.000-07:00

Hey All,

Running Steam.Fm has been more of a joy-ride than I ever couldn't anticipated. Why? Because I have been out of the loop of contemporary music for so very long that I thought myself too old and creaky to every be able to understand it again, that I'd be left in the dust like every other member of a past generation, burdoned with blinkers to anything new. And could you blame me? As I was drug, kicking and screaming, into adult hood where there is no more time to party til dawn, cruise clubs, or cough up that hard-earned cash for live shows, I saw popular music paddle up onto the shores and sprout new limbs all over again. But, seriously, can you really blame me for not being too taken in by the music that followed fast on the heels of my youth?

COME ON.

The Spice Girls?

The Boy Band Flavor of the Week?

Ace of Base?

...JESUS JONES???

No. No argument. Stop. Look back over your shoulder, and thank GOD ABOVE you don't turn to a pillar of salt!!

Now. Can you blame me for losing interest, distracted by the woes of adulthood or not?

**chuh** ...I digress.

As I was saying...I have been out of the loop of contemporary music for so long, I had all but forgotten what it is like to discover a new tune get that joyful little tickle out of playing it at least once, twice, three times a day---and really fucking loud, too!

...how old am I again?

I forgot what that was like. I forgot what it was like to find a song that speaks to those rare and delicate dark places within my core.

Granted, I no longer feel the urge to theatricality that once walked hand-in-hand with that song fix--you won't find me picking up a hair brush or black marker to use as an impromptu microphone, but the joy felt within that moment has found me again.

Life is good. Good music makes life good.

...to what songs am I referring you ask? OH, BITE ME. Why don't you just ask for me to print off a list of my greatest hopes and fears while your at it. Listen to my webcasts and guess.

Or find some of your own.

Be Good, Be Ready, Be On Time,

More later,

Coletrane

EduCore; It Rocks Your Socks

2007-09-29T14:16:00.001-07:00

Edu-Core: It Rocks Your Socks

Hey All,

This weekend was one of the best on record. It was the Fifth Annual Emerald City Comic Con, one of the few times I ride tandem with the hordes of other geeks out there in the Great Wide World. In attendance was an old friend, Gene Ha . Gene is a well-known illustrator, having received some of the most prestigious awards in the comic book industry. He's worked with people like Alan Moore and Harlan Ellison, and drawn such comics as TOP TEN, THE AUTHORITY, OKTANE, and THE JUSTICE LEAGUE.

To be frank, this show is one of the few periods, through the course of the year, where I let unfurl my regularly private freak flag. And even then, my public demonstration is pretty tame. I do little more than show up, spend money, chit- chat with the creators, and quietly covet their wives. Any woman who will love, honor, and obey a professional geek, let alone sit beside them while their fawning fans of frequently questionable hygiene hover over them and smile and nod and smile and nod is worth her weight in Red Kryptonite. And I miss the days when such a woman shared my space (no pun intended).

But I didn't want to gush on too much about the comic show. The Con itself doesn't have much to do with music, though in the eternal ebb and flow of popular culture, comics and alternate music most assuredly overlap in many peoples' interests.

When Gene arrived in Seattle, we lunched at one of my favorite little diners at the base of Queen Anne Hill, and I then took him to one of my favorite places in ALL Seattle-Archie McPhee's! Not only had Gene never heard of our great Purveyors of Fine Popular Culture, he had never been to their shop space. Suffice it to say that Brother Gene purchased more than he could safely schlep onto the plane home and store in his current apartment. In a few weeks time he and his wife will have moved to an actual house. He has enlisted my aid in shipping them out at that time, when his new toys and treats will be given suitable lodgings. For now they sit in my entryway closet.

Yes, you're right, Archie's has little to do with music either.

Therefore, the highlight of the evening was after we found our way to Seattle Center Northwest rooms for an all ages hardcore punk show. Gene had grown up in Indiana with the lead singer of the local hardcore band, Bloodhag . Out his typical devotion to his friend, and the kindness of his heart, Gene had done the cover art Bloodhag's first full-length album, Hell Bent For Letters.

Frankly, I wasn't expecting much, I mean, an All Ages Punk show, in the convention rooms of Seattle Center just past the quaint fountains and manicured shrubbery? Sounds dangerously homogenized and safe from all things anarchical if you ask me-distinctly A-Punk.

We entered through the very clean glass doors, past the entry desk and descended the stairs to the tidy lobby of the very small auditorium. Sure we saw the requisite Doc Martin boots with silver shin guards and speed laces. There were tattoos and piercings in the (now) traditional soft tissue areas, and we even saw a handful of Mohawks in Manic Panic Red and Blue. But Gene and I had to release a unanimous snort when we saw the sigh above the auditorium door that read, "Maximum Occupancy: 51" The place seemed designed to discourage anything remotely riotous or transgressive in any way. And My God, that place was clean. Unnaturally so-nary a beer can, bottle, cigarette butt, or congealed pool of vomit. I'd have felt like I was in the basement of a church were it not for all the pasty-faced Stepchildren of Satan skulking about.

We walked into the auditorium to catch the last few songs by the second-to-last-band, Ghengis Tron. I couldn't help but admire those guys for the witty name they contrived for the band.

BloodHag hit the stage minutes later, and they were nothing I would have expected. As they set up their instruments I saw that each member of the band sported a white dress shirts, horn rim glasses, and ties. Sure, most of the guys had tats, and many more the exposed soft parts of their bodies pierced, but there was something inherently staid, if not outright nerdy about them. I couldn't help but like them before even hearing their set.

Jake Stratton, (Prof. JB Stratton) Gene's pal from way back is lead vocalist. He looked to me like a stunted version of Dr. Jeckyl's Mr. Hyde with his shaggy mop of hair and dense mutton-chop sideburns. There was something cute, cuddly, and ostensibly carnivorous about him. I liked him right off.

Bloodhag's modus operandi was one unlike any other. If you visit their myspace page, you'll find their punk philosophy, "Our mission is to spread the gospel of Edu-Core. Bang The Head That Does Not Read. Everyone Smarter Than Everyone Else. Use Heavy Metal music to promote literacy and vice versa."

Edu-Core. Freaking brilliant.

The set cranked up, Jake reads from a sweaty piece of folded paper the name of a science fiction author, "This next song is a about James Blish. Not a great author, but not bad either," He drawls, "Unfortunately Blish sold out in the late 1960s and became best known for writing the Star Trek log books that adapted each episode of the original television series to print," and with a burst of frantic electronic fury, the familiar Cookie Monster squall of unintelligible hardcore lyrics pierce the eardrums of the crowd. The song is a short, sweet strafe of white hot sound. Somewhere in there are bits and bytes of information regarding said author's best works, his literary vision, and other cool stuff. I don't Grok. I don't speak angry, mutant muppet. My cerebellum is too old, the gray matter too gray to filter out the white hot sounds and translate the garbled language. But I get the subtext, and it is good.

And so it goes, Prof. Jake spewing more informational tidbits regarding SF, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction authors like Jack Womak, Douglas Adams, Anne McCaffery, HP Lovecraft, and Madeline L'Engle. Professor Jake smears icing on the cake when, between tunes, he hucks used SF paperbacks into the audience. Gene snags an obscure text by an equally obscure author. It smells sweetly of disintegrating paper pulp; the smell of comic shops and used bookstores, the only smell I'd ever wish in my nose when I leave this world. requisite twenty feet from the building's entrance to be sure...) its cherry conservatively pinched off.

The tunes are too short, as is the show. The Under-Agers quickly clear from the sterile performance space. I see one cigarette butt on the floor. My limited forensic eye tells me it was partially smoked outside (the butt placed in a breast pocket or half-full hard-pack. It was dropped on the gleaming floor of the tiny auditorium by accident, clearly, and looks as out of place here as canned krab on a Dairy Queen Sundae.

I must say that after Bloodhag, the remainder of the weekend was a bit of an anticlimax. I saw some of my favorite comic artists, met with some fellow geekoids, and had my token Con Dog and subsequent heartburn. But it was Bloodhag that left and indelible mark upon my frontal lobe. Angry Geeks spreading their gospel of literacy and rage. Verily, the are Fiends of the Library.

You can check out Bloodhag on myspace, or their website, www.bloodhag.com. Their latest album, Hellbent For Letters is available in (archaic) vinyl or contemporary CD from Alternate Tentacles Records (YES! That Alternative Tentacles!!) .

Long Live Edu-Core!

More Later,
Coletrane

Circus Contraption

2007-09-29T14:15:00.001-07:00

Circus Contraption: Mighty In Their Tights

Hey All,

From time to time, I have encountered the trappings of an odd sub (or perhaps even sub-sub) genre of music. It's a sound that distills brassy horns and accordions, saints bone flutes and Klezmer, calliopes and sousaphones. You've heard touches to that which I refer in music from Tom Waits and Oingo Boingo and very recently with The Dresden Dolls. There is something macabre and dirge-like, yet bombastic and celebratory.

Some would call these sounds "circus music" or "circus punk." You know the themes-those brassy, rough and tawdry sounds heard issuing from the Hoochie-Coochie shows, or accompanying acrobats, jugglers, snake charmers, and animal acts.

In the fall of 2004 I attended a very odd and surreal puppet show at the now deceased Empty Space Theater in Seattle, WA. The puppet-play, Frankenoccio, was innovative and took some interesting risks, but ultimately didn't do much for me. What did move me about the performance, however, was the accompanying ensemble; Circus Contraption. At the time, their ensemble was rather small; a stand up base, accordion, and several brass instruments. The musicians are dressed in tattered vintage clothing, smudged face paint, and the occasional faded wig. Throughout the performance of Frankenoccio I was continuously moved and intrigued by the music, how it seemed to capture something older and more mythic yet catered directly to the deep and darkening mood of modern goth and emo rock.

Needless to say, I was very exited to have the opportunity to see Circus Contraption (performing without the distraction of existentially tortured puppets) at the Showbox in Seattle last Friday night.

The crowd was quite large, seemingly peopled with extras from the sets of Cabaret and HBO's Carnivale. I leaned against a rail and watched the colorful creatures in the audience. For all the corsets, top hats, cans and cravats, I wondered how close the impromptu milieu resembled the performance spaces of the Weimar period with all its decadence.

Taking the stage, Circus Contraption, this time around, took on more a burlesque attitude that I had previously encountered. Behind the band hung banners featuring images of grind house girls and burlesque dancers. "Burlesque in Black and Blue," one banner cried.

Throughout the show, as the level of tawdriness increased, I felt this group was more about smut and the bawd, than circus. My viewpoint was heavily validated by Sally Pepper's solo in which she encouraged the audience to sing a long with, "I'm Gonna To Tie You Up, and Do Things To Your Weiner."

I think initially I was disappointed in the change of scope the group took on. As I said, I was very impressed by the eerie and intimate atmosphere Circus Contraption created in the performance of Frankenoccio, so I did not anticipate the expansion of their stage presence to fit the space in the Showbox. I think this simply demonstrates the versatility of this group, and their success in blending circus punk, grande guignol, and burlesque tease-all very transgressive forms of theatre, and not rock and roll, per se.

The set lasted about an hour and featured a barrage of jangling, tormented, and ecstatic musical imagery accompanied by jugglers, some audience participatory spanking, one incredibly talented pole-dancer, and girls in poodle costumes.

I had a blast, Circus Contraption is my kind of theatre and I cannot wait to see them trod the boards again.

According to their literature, Circus Contraption is a non-profit, one-ring traveling circus based in Seattle, WA. You may learn more about them by visiting them on myspace or their website.

Anthem-Ology, Part Deux

2007-09-29T14:13:00.000-07:00

Hey All,
Weeks back I broached the subject of the significance of the Rock Anthem. There have been a handful of pop songs I would consider to be the anthem of a generation or even anthem of an era. To my frustration, I discovered not only could I not get a consensus for the pertinence of a particular song as anthem, I couldn't get consensus on what defines an anthem in the first place. Therefore, I ambled through an analysis and discussion (with the help of my friend, R'Chaard, The Cosmic Castaway), bluffed my way in and out of a definition, and fiddled with a particular tune's potential as an anthem and slinked off under cover of darkness.

I assumed my subject was simply too esoteric or highbrow (or, perhaps, simply ahead of its time), hence the difficulty in finding resource and support material on the inter-web.

Lo, yesterday I came across this brief article in NME. Granted, the (unnamed author) poses listing a ranking the Top 50 Indie Anthems. But he/she gives a very helpful definition of the pop music definition of anthem; "It's the moment in the night when with a special tune behind you, for three and a half minutes it's like you can do anything at all. It's the songs that bring meaning to life and bring you and your friends close together. They're the songs that make a difference."
I really appreciate that last part, the songs that bring meaning to life and bring you and your friends close together. Essentially, the anthem is the musical theme you use to bind yourself to your and your community together.
Finally, validation for that which I've been prattling on about all along--how music aids in the re-inscription and reinforcement of values in a particular community.

Unfortunately, in the previous discussion I didn't stop to consider how genre fits into the equation, or repetition, for that matter. Perhaps this is where the consensus breaks down. I neglected to consider what an era's metal anthem may be, Hip Hop Anthem, Country, Pop, Punk...you see the challenge here...
That being said, I was initially disenchanted by the amount of repetition of artists in our Indie Anthem list. I see a great many songs by The Smiths, Joy Division, and The Stone Roses. It is interesting, however, to find a great many of the songs proposed are not recent, and voters are looking at songs from more than simply one era, not simply their own ear.
So, perhaps there needs to be a distinction between a Generational (or Era) Anthem and Genre Anthem. In the Genre Anthem, obviously, era is not a concern.

And look, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit tops our Indie list-a song whose significance I have mulled over for many years. Frankly, I see Spirit is the anthem of Gen X, just as I see Don McLean's American Pie as an anthem for the Baby Boomers...but this is just my perspective as a pop maven and pocket ethnographer. I am sure there are better thinkers out there with better documentation and stronger argumentative skills would successfully say otherwise and that is perfectly acceptable.
Time will make us all liars no matter what we do, so bicker away.

More later,
Coletrane

Anthem-Ology, Part I

2007-09-29T14:12:00.000-07:00

Hey All,

Present and of late, I have been polling those near and dear to me regarding some music-related terminology. The discussions have been fruitful and amusing but, frankly, resolved very little of my confusion and may very well have created even more.

What is an Anthem? The common understanding found in Webster's and elsewhere a) a hymn or praise of glory, b) a sacred composition (set to words from the Bible). We know the national anthem (or OF it, I imagine), and a hymn that habitually begins a religious service can be considered an anthem.

Clearly my understanding of the definition of Anthem has been in a severe state of torque from early on. You see, I have always thought of pop songs with narrative through line and wide dramatic scope as Anthem.

I always thought Don Mclean's American Pie was publicly considered one of the greatest rock anthems ever written. Now I learn that it isn't even an anthem and, according to close friends, there may be very little about the song worthy of being called great. Where did I get this "anthem" notion, I wonder? Was it some bald-faced comment made by a DJ on local AM Radio I listened to in my youth?

Or was it something more gross and insidious, like Alanis Morrisette erroneously defining the concept of irony, not once, but multiple times? Good God, I shudder to think of how a generation of music fans are now unable to distinguish the difference between bad luck, hypocrisy, and a freaking literary stylistic device!

Western civilization is falling.

I find few things more frustrating than the discovery your understanding of a thing has been in error for a dog's life. I know it's not that big a deal, but why the hell didn't anyone every correct me long ago?

It would have been so easy...

"No, dude, American Pie is not a Rock Anthem."

"No shit? Then, what kind of song is it?"

"Long, dude, long and tedious."

"I've always like the imagery in the lyrics, the story, and the chorus is catchy as hell..."

"Just too annoying, man."

The discussion frequently bogged because I'd encounter resistance to even my appreciation of the song. That was damn frustrating, even my dear friend, R'chaard was quick to supply, "Too bad it's such an insipid melody and boring narrative. (Sorry--perhaps I dislike the song because the Chronal Walkabout it triggers leads invariably to grade school: a period so bleak that the Bicentennial and "Space: 1999" are the undisputed highlights."

...he's snarkier than I, believe it if you can...

Go ahead and Google the phrase Rock Anthem, go ahead, I'll wait...

So you Google the phrase and what do you find? Songs that celebrate Rock and Roll in and of it self with lists of Rock Tunes devoted to Rock.

But, as per usual, I think R'Chaard was a step ahead of me...

"Now that I've given some thought to the idea of rock anthems, it
seems to me that an anthem is a piece that expresses and celebrates
a sentiment that all the listeners already have. It doesn't seek to
convince--or if it does, it does so only through strength of numbers
and peer pressure. Almost everyone feels patriotic during the
national anthem. Those who don't are at least aware that everyone
else thinks they SHOULD feel patriotic.

Maybe this explains why I think rock anthems are all rubbish. The
sentiments they express and celebrate are at best, self-evident; at
worst, stupid. 'It's fun to rock out.' Well obviously. If it wasn't,
you wouldn't be surrounded by 29,999 other people doing exactly the
same thing. 'It's good to thumb your nose at authority,' provided
it's not the band's authority to dictate the emotional state and
fashion sense of you and the other 29,999. 'It's good to be uniquely
yourself.' 29,999.

Odd then, that Born to Run strikes me as a good rock anthem to the "concept" of New Jersey. Sure, "this town rips the bones from your
back," but I find myself thinking "Yeah New Jersey's a dump, but
Springsteen is perceptive enough to see that and to write this song
and this song is fucking brilliant and Springsteen's from there so
if he's from there, NJ must be the BEST!" Maybe?"

I think there was a syllogism in there...

So, a genuine anthem is a tune that celebrates its own nature? A Rock Anthem is reinforces Rock. A Catholic Anthem reinforces Catholic Faith; a National Anthem reinforces a Nation. I know I made the syllogism unnecessarily complicated. I made this syllogism, and I made the syllogism unnecessarily complicated, therefore I am an unnecessarily complicated human being...or, something like that.

So Don Mclean's American Pie? What is it? We're told that Mclean was inspired by the death for rock and roll pioneer, Buddy Holly. The song tracks the course of the narrator's very personal experience of loss,

"When I read about his widowed bride,
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died"

To a broader loss of cultural identity,

"Now for ten years we've been on our own
And moss grows fat on a rollin' stone,
But that's not how it used to be.
When the jester sang for the king and queen,
In a coat he borrowed from James Dean
And a voice that came from you and me..."

One wonders if he's talking about Buddy Holly anymore...

"And in the streets: the children screamed,
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The church bells all were broken.
And the three men I admire most:
The father, son, and the holy ghost,
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died."

The song appears to expand in scope from the particular to the general, and become something that voices a resentful acknowledgement of our culture's turning of the corner into a new phase of existence. Don Mclean's American Pie is not a Rock Anthem, per se, its not a song built to celebrate the joy of rocking and rolling, it's an anthem about Rock's place in our culture. It's a song about how rock and roll is present in our transition out of an era of naivetÇ and innocence.

See, its true what Grandma used to say, "You kids and your rock and roll, it'll all end in tears..."

...sorry, that was more work than I anticipated. Hurt my frontal lobes, there...

Tune in next week when Coletrane opens his mouth and inserts his foot clean up to his pasty white thigh in an effort to define a ballad.

Can you believe they pay me for this?

More later,
Coletrane.

American Idle

2007-09-29T14:10:00.001-07:00

American Idle

Not long ago I was on a long road trip with an old friend. Elle and I have known each other since we were students in the Theater Department at the University of Oregon, (truth be told, we were on our way to a reunion for said department) back in the days before the College Radio was a musical genre. We don't see each other much, so we managed to fill all seven hours of the drive down with little effort. At one point Elle asked me, "So have you been watching American Idol?"

"No," I spat, "I cannot watch that show." Not, "I cannot stand that show," not, I "cannot get into that show," but "I cannot watch that show."

"Why not," Elle gasped, "I'd think you'd be all over it?"

"The same way I get into Blood Sports and Cockfighting?"

"No, I just figured you could appreciate the whole process, the whole theatrical aspect of the competition."

"No. I look at it like I do most Reality Television; its all Emotional Gladiatorial Sports, like Jerry Springer and Judge Judy. The American Public love to watch their fellow man gutted before their eyes..."

"But they're also rooting for the winner, you get to share in their victory like an athlete."

"I don't know about you," I said, "but I got into theater because I was always the last pick for prison ball..."

...remember that phrase, I've been planning on using it for the title of my autobiography (just as soon as I get all 100,000 pages of it off to Lulu.com).

"But the competition just makes it so exciting!"

"I can't handle it, I can't handle watching American Idol for the same reasons I cringe at talent shows and have sympathetic anxiety attacks while sitting in auditions."

"Why are you feeling sorry for them? They want the chance to perform, they want to be famous. Look at all the people who have no talent whatsoever, but show up the each nation-wide audition and humiliate themselves in the hopes they'll get on TV?"

"I feel sorry for those people too, I think. Those folks aren't burdened with any sense of self-awareness whatsoever."

"And I think you were born with too much!"

"I imagine you like watching car crashes, too."

Maybe Elle was right. Maybe I am too sympathetic. I cringe too easily. I'd be a terrible Stage-Daddy, I'd be the first one hooking my kid from the wings.

That being said, I was fascinated to hear that Jennifer Hudson, the American Idol 2004 season hopeful who was voted out while less talented and more media-pretty performers remained, had been cast as Ellie in the film adaptation of DREAMGIRLS.

Casting Hudson made wonderful and poetic sense to me--Cast an American Idol underdog AS an underdog and you've sold half your tickets. Smart marketing; I'll bet you a nickel over half the folks standing in line for DREAMGIRLS on its Opening Night were Idol fans.

I haven't seen DREAMGIRLS yet. I'll get around to. I saw it on stage in the 1980s. I got it then, I'll get it again.

And the film producers' gambit paid off further when Hudson was given an Oscar for best supporting actress. Nifty and clever marketing gimmick I say, but I'm still not going to watch that fucking show.

American Idol not only churns up my empathic response after years of performing myself, but it also homogenizes everything I despise about popular culture.

Hudson said herself stated on at recent Oxygen Network interview, that the last thing American Idol producers are concerned about is talent. The American TV audience has been trained to look for combinations-- a voice and a look, a voice and a story, a voice and a gimmick, a voice and charisma.

Not only can I NOT STAND watching people willingly put themselves through a meat-grinder for public validation, I cannot stomach Top 40 Music Standards. Because Top 40 Music Standards are about recycled ideas, fashion, stories, and gimmicks-homogeneous crap. And that's primarily what those folks choose to sing on that show. There's no time or space for something original.

So, there are at least three reasons off the top of my head why I cannot watch American Idol.

Idolatry and Idol Worship is a favored pastime of Mainstream culture and it is seldom about talent, craft, poetry, and independent thought. It's about pretty faces, bodies, pictures, and songs that seldom have any more substance than stale air from a bicycle pump.

To find the good stuff, the art that challenges, teaches, re-defines, you have to go hunting as it won't be delivered to you on a silver platter each week by Network Execs.

Ooch. Riding that Hobby Horse so hard has left me a little saddle sore.
More Later,
Coltrane

All You Need to be Famous is a Hairbrush

2007-09-29T14:08:00.001-07:00

All You Need To Be Famous Is A Hairbrush

Hey All,

I discovered recently that all you need to be famous is a hairbrush, a video camera, and a big bathroom mirror.

I never thought that the days of air-guitar bands holding equal footing with the cheerleading squad and the football team would come back around but in a sense, they have. I just spent the morning looking over fan-made videos to the latest Kelly Clarkson single "Never Again"over at Yahoo Music.

Sometimes hard research takes one to dark places...

For a generation raised on Jerry Springer, The Real World, and Survivor, who've probably never heard of Andy Warhol and his prediction of our unified future fame, where any press is good press, where any exposure is good exposure, its no big thing to fake up your own rock video with a music file and a web cam.

Lip synching before the bathroom mirror was once a secret pastime for at least three generations, but in the 1980s, the barriers between public and private exhibitionism began to dissolve. Now I wonder, do they exist at all?

One cannot argue with the subtle brilliance of the Fan Video campaign. In no uncertain terms, it builds a web community around an artist, and ensures fan solidarity. With the release of former American Idol finalist Kelly Clarkston's latest single, Yahoo invites dozens of fans to submit their homemade videos to the Yahoo Music site.

Things haven't changed much in the body language of Lip Synch performance, would-be rock stars still rely heavily on the flipping, tossing, and preening of one's hair as a key emotive device, any cylindrical device clutched in the hand seems to conduct sound, and subtly is equivalent to foreign currency-it has no value here...

But for all the online unification of Clarkston fans, there is one thing in common, their isolation in the global community. No, really. Look at the videos and you'll find a vast majority of them made by a single person (usually female, but there are a handful of males) working at it alone in their bedrooms. You can tell the setting quite clearly from all the background dÇcor; the stuffed animals, the lace curtains, floor length mirrors, and posters of Orlando Bloom.

Old School Air Band performers, on the other hand, have always been a pretty shameless group, they get up on stage with their tennis rackets and entrenching tools and sell their songs like life hinges on it. But these new web cam performers create their work in isolation, upload it, solicit critiques from their peers, and, if very lucky, see their efforts bashed (edited) into a complete video featuring a collage of fan-made contributions. But never do they (I imagine), nor will they, find themselves before a live audience. It's all-virtual, and it's all very safe-for all concerned, to be sure.

The Air Band performer, in most cases, has everything they need to perform...save talent. That is to say, they have a modicum of stage presence and focus, and (God help us all) perhaps even a smidgeon of charisma. This isn't so evident with web cam synching. It's a private act made public, made "pseudo-private" by the virtue of cyberspace. There is no theatricality to the performance as you would find in the soul of the Air Band.

My point is that the web cam performer can construct a virtual rock star fantasy, complete with rock video, without the muss and fuss of things like stage fright, hot lights, crowds, or flying objects, whereas the old-school Air Band performer of old has to get up stage, at the risk of being pelted with corn cobs and put their fantasy currency where there silently-flapping mouths are and really, really go for it.

Where's the art in emoting for your web cam I ask you?

In the bigger picture, I'm sure it really doesn't matter, because web cam performers participate in something I shall always applaud; a contribution to a community. And community, at one time in the dark reaches of our ancestory, was the goal of a theatrical performance--its purpose was to bind us together...

...It's just tough to peg a no talent twink with a gooey-gray orange on line.

More later,
Coletrane