A Music Review by Andrew Norman
Table of Contents SHORT STORIES: Christlike in the Dive Joe Trinkle 4
REVIEWS: Hot Bodies In Motion Andrew Norman Staff Writer
HUMOR: Ready to be a Star? Jeff Shaffer 13 REGULARS: Pearls for Swine: thoughts from a mad hermit Fuck Palahniuk” Kirby Light Staff Writer 16
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The Critic’s Critic Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, 2009 Trevor Richardson 33 ESSAYS: Thank You for Sharing This With
CREATIVE NONFICTION: Maximental Rob Lee 20
the World
REGULARS: Stuck on Repeat Mass Hysteria” Rachael Johnson Staff Writer
INTERVIEWS
Mayen 35
An Interview with Kody Ford from 29
Road Notes Highway 101 North for the Winter” Jeff Costello Staff Writer 30
“Directing Democracy” Serials Dystopia Boy Trevor Richardson
Contents of Table
Laptop
Pen
Beer
pencil
Half burrito
doodles
some kind of crumbs
beer
napkin
dirty fork
notebook
beer
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5
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7
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Ready To Be A Star (reply via email only--NO PHONE CALLS, please!) Date: 02-10-12 Reply To: Author, Jeff Shaffer A NEW NATIONAL TV TALK SHOW IS CASTING REAL PEOPLE WITH REAL STORIES AND YOU CAN BE A GUEST! WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!! Do you have a strange addiction that is tearing your family apart? Are you lying about your addiction? Are you addicted to lying? Is your family addicted to hearing you lie? Have you been pretending to be mythical creature? Does the mythical creature need to take a lie detector test? WE HAVE A TRAINED STAFF WHO WILL HELP YOU! PLUS YOU GET A FUN PLANE RIDE, A NICE HOTEL ROOM AND FREE FOOD IN A BIG CITY! Are you afraid your daughter is living double life, or even a triple or quadruple life, and lying to you about it? Is it possible your daughter is actually someone else’s child, or a man in disguise? Are your children adopted and you lied to them about it? Do you wish that you and your daughter could take a lie detector test and a DNA test simultaneously? YOU CAN TELL US EVERYTHING AND GET TREATMENT ON THE AIR! DON’T WAIT, DON’T EVEN HESITATE! CALL 855-HELP4ME TO SCHEDULE YOUR APPEARANCE! Do you have problems with anger? Are you addicted to being angry? Are you constantly angry with your spouse, neighbor, best friend, or mythical friend? Is it possible you just think you’re angry but, in fact, you are lying to yourself and are really happy? Have you ever lied to yourself so much that your pants caught on fire? Have you ever set other people’s garments on fire and then lied about it? ALL GUESTS WILL HAVE ACCESS TO OUR GUEST SUPPORT TEAM HEADED BY A FAMOUS THERAPIST! WE PAY ALL EXPENSES--COMPLIMENTARY ICE INCLUDED!!! Do you like to bully co-workers and then call them liars when the boss wants to know why everyone is so upset? Is your constant bullying and addiction to lying interfering with every aspect of your real life and your mythical life? Are you worried that you may burn for eternity in the afterlife because of 13
your addictions? Do you blame everybody else around you for the fact that you’re a God damned liar? If you had unlimited power, would you force God to take a lie detector test? OPERATORS ARE READY TO TAKE YOUR CALL! THIS IS A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY FOR PERSONAL RESOLUTION AND CLOSURE! DIAL THE NUMBER NOW!! Do you enjoy flaunting your addictions? Do you enjoy being an object of scorn and ridicule? Can you recall the last time you told the truth about any subject that didn’t involve science or math? Are you ready to make a change and stop your addictions to lying, angry bullying, and living as a mythical creature? If you answered ‘yes’ to the previous question, were you telling the truth or lying? (Hint: there is no ‘right’ answer.) IT’S TIME FOR YOU TO GET NATIONWIDE ATTENTION! LET’S MAKE GREAT TV TOGETHER! BUT KNOW THIS: IF YOU SCREW WITH US DURING THE BROADCAST AND RUIN THE SEGMENT, WE WILL MAKE CERTAIN THE REST OF YOUR SORRY EXCUSE FOR A DAILY EXISTENCE IS WORSE THAN ANY LEVEL OF HELL YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE. AND THAT’S NO LIE. -------------
Jeffrey Shaffer has been authoring essays and fiction for more than 25 years. His work has appeared in a wide range of publications including T h e C h r i s t i a n S c i e n c e M o n i t o r , T h e N e w Yo r k e r , B a r k , T h e Wa l l S t r e e t J o u r n a l , a n d Ye a r ’ s B e s t F a n t a s y a n d H o r r o r . A n e w c o l l e c t i o n o f h i s writing entitled ‘Humor Without Borders’ in now available on Kindle. .
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Pearls for Swine: thoughts from a mad hermit Fuck Palahniuk
Kirby Light
After I say this you may get the sudden urge to kill me. You may want to rip out my eyes and stuff them in my butt so I can see you kick my ass. You may pull out my intestines and hang me with them or stuff me in a big plastic back and beat me with a club of some sort. But I think this needs to be said. So, I’ll step forward and say it. Fuck Chuck Palahniuk. “Fuck Chuck Palahniuk? But Kirby, whatever do you mean?” Well, you see living in the Portland Metropolitan area I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. Every cute female glasses wearing uptown book worn I meet seems to overly love the works of chuck Palahniuk. His books are all over the best seller list when they come out. He even has his own cult for crap sakes. (Wasn’t the last writer to have his own cult L. Ron Hubbard?) You’d think we’d be smarter by now. And my Microsoft Word spell checker has his name in its catalogue of words (go ahead, bust out word, mistype his last name and then right click it. It’s there man, I swear). Anyway, let me start over. I feel as though I’ve over played my hand a bit. So, I used to attend Clark College out here in Vancouver Washington. This was back when I still held dreams of a life as a doctor, working in the health care field. When I finished there I had spent five years at a two year school. It took me half a decade to realize that pursuing medical accolades and prestige of career status in such a field was just an act of Vanity. I more or less struggled
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Staff Writer
through any class that wasn’t an English class (math class). I took several fiction and creative writing classes simply to satisfy degree requirements. Along the way I had gotten some stories published in the campus magazine and worked as the business manager on the publication. During this time I read, read a lot. Living in the Portland Metropolitan area the only writer you really hear about is Chuck Palahniuk. I’d walk around campus and I’d occasionally see someone reading one of his novels. I’d get into discussions about books and someone would bring him up. Out of the natural cycle of my reading appetite I picked up a copy of the book Choke. I actually borrowed a copy from my sister. She’s a big fan of Chuck. (By the way, if a book begins by recommending that you don’t read it, trust the book. Put it down. Walk away). This was also around the time that the movie Choke came out in theaters. In addition to a love of books, I also have a love of movies. I like to watch movies based on books and then read the books, to see how faithful to the source material the movies are. Anyhow, I borrowed the book Choke from my sister. Up to this point I had only read Fight Club, which I enjoyed (this goes back to movies based on books). During this time I was also taking a creative writing class at Clark. Usually I would get to the class a few minutes early and wait outside for the proceeding class to finish. I’d read or work on homework. One day I stood outside the class room reading 16
Choke. The teacher of the class showed up early and waited also. Now, I have a strong opinion of English teachers, which I’ll keep to myself for now. But this particular teacher I know tried to be a writer. He had a literary agent once who shopped around a novel he had written, but unfortunately no one bit. This teacher gave biting literary criticism to his students about their writing, something I found refreshing because there’s nothing worse than someone who reads what you write and then says things like “Oh, it was good I liked it” or blathers about the good parts. I need someone who says, “Hey, this really doesn’t work and here’s why.” Out of all the English teachers I’ve had this guy was the one who probably could have made it as a writer more than anyone else. “What are you reading?” He asked me as we stood outside waiting for the last class to finish. “Choke,” I said. “Oh, that guy,” the teacher said and sort of rolled his eyes. “You don’t like him?” I asked. “Well, people consider him Portland’s greatest writer and I don’t see why.” At the time I didn’t honestly know that much about Chuck Palahniuk. Like I said, I only read Fight Club up to that point. But since that little exchange at my humble college I have read five Palahniuk books. Fight Club, Choke, Lullaby, Survivor, and Invisible Monsters. How does this lead to “Fuck Chuck Palahniuk?” Well, his writing is sub par and I can’t believe so many people buy this man’s books. There’s so much wrong with his writing. “But Kirby, how can you make such a judgment about a man’s life’s work just based on five books?” Oh, my wonderful avid reader, I do love and adore you. I do not need to drink a whole glass of milk to know that the milk has gone sour.
Before I really get into it, I would like to say that I enjoyed Fight Club. It will go down in history as an American Classic as it exposes American consumerism/marketing and a world that has a growing population of displaced men, written in a satirical fashion and blah blah blah. Fight Club will one day be sold in hard back at Barnes and Noble, with gold lined pages, stuck on the shelf between Great Expectations and Aesop’s Fables and all that other jazz (that was sarcasm if you didn’t catch it). But the sad truth is that the movie Fight Club was better than the book. And that’s a little truth that many Palahniuk cultists and fans many need to come to terms with. The only reason anyone knows or cares about who Chuck Palahniuk is, is because David Fincher and Jim Uhls made an awesome movie based upon Fight Club. Now to Palahniuk’s credit he does have something interesting to say here and there. Other than Lullaby, I always find some quotable line somewhere. But Most of what he writes leaves, me at least (and I’m sure others), with something to be desired. There are lots of reasons why each book isn’t so great (I could nit pick, but I won’t). The major problem with each book is that they all sound the same. Each one has the same narrative voice, the same characters over and over again saying the same woe is me song. They all have the same underdeveloped characters. They’re way too repetitive in their style of writing. And much of what is said is just useless facts and filler material, where instead there could really have been more character development or story or action. I really don’t need to know what someone uses to clean out grout from a bathroom or what a character should be doing when they are doing something else in the book. In addition, three out of the five books I’ve read, present sort of the same idea: I have to do the opposite of what I want because what I want isn’t really what I want it’s what society has pro17
grammed me to want. And if you don’t believe that just read Survivor, Lullaby, or Invisible Monsters. Brandy Alexander must get a sex change because s/he has to fuck up bad, s/he must do the one thing s/he wants the least. Tender Branson must have sex to save himself because the cult programmed him not to want sex. In Lullaby, Carl Streeter simply states it out of the blue. Out of the five books I’ve read, I was most looking forward to Invisible Monsters. It was the fourth book I read. I got excited about it when I had heard it was written before Fight Club but only published later. I thought maybe it would be different, having been written before fame, but it wasn’t. It was more of the same. So, in summation, the primary complaint and argument is that they are all the same. If I do read another Palahniuk book it will likely be a more recent one. I guess I still hold out hope. Either that or I’m a masochist. My money would be bet on the latter. However before I continue with this article, I feel that as a good rhetorician I need to express an opposing argument. Well, the only argument I’ve ever heard that seems to be a good one came from a friend of mine. We got into a discussion about Chuck and his books one night and I rambled off to her everything you just read above and then some. And she, in her subtle way, shrugged her shoulders and said, “I just like his stories.” To this I can only say that there are better stories out there, but that’s subjective. Subjectivity always defeats my articulate arguments. So, who am I to judge? If you like ‘ol Chuck, that’s fine. I still love you my avid reader. Maybe that makes me sound like a paper tiger, but whatever. “Damn it Kirby! What the hell was the point of this whole article?” you may be saying to yourself at this point. “Did you write this just to vent your own frustrations about your failings in the literary arts!?!” Well, no. I do that every day I live and 18
breathe. The point of this article is to make you more self conscious about how you spend your dollar. If you want to buy Chuck, then more power to you. But why are you buying and reading books that all sound the same and just restate the same ideas again and again? There are many other places and voices with more interesting and diverse ideas, which are more deserving of your money, time, and your intellectual and emotional attention. Places both big and small. Off the top of my head I can think of the book The Beach by Alex Garland, which is far better than anything that Palahniuk can produce. Or House of Leaves, which is an ungodly good read that presents a pleasant and warm idea in stark contrast to its disturbing story. And those are just the big books. There are also many small press publications, worlds of small press publications, which publish the works of unknown writers who do it simply for the love of the craft. Many people who publish these small publications don’t ever make any profit. Here in Portland there are the magazines Hubbub and Fault Lines and the small press house Future Tense Press (among others) who support writers who don’t have mainstream appeal like Palahniuk. Hell, there’s a whole section at Powell’s bookstore here in Portland dedicated to independent and small press books. These people have a wide range of ideas, stories, and voices that deserve to be heard and could use more support from you, my avid reader. Many small literary magazines around the country sell year long subscriptions for less than ten dollars. Fuck Chuck Palahniuk. So next time you’re out at your local bookstore and you go to buy that new twenty five dollar hard back or fifteen dollar paper back by Chuck Palahniuk, or James Patterson, or JA Janice, or Dean Koontz or whoever. Maybe just take a few more minutes to go exploring. You may find some hot springs among the shallow streams.
Kirby Light is the fictional creation and pen name of Anthropologist, Entrepreneur, and prolific writer Artimus B. Gon. Kirby Light is both the hero and villian of his own story and many others. He’s been telling stories all his life but has been writing for only ten years. Only recently has he started seeing success, mainly with poetry, and you can find his writing in the most obscure of places. His hobbies include learning about auto mechanics, fighting Goliath, and Euthenasia.
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creative nonfiction
Maximental by Rob Lee
edited by Trevor Richardson
Walking behind the two blue vans I nearly smacked into him, head to head, as he came around the corner. “Sorry,” he said, sheepishly. He irritated me immediately, but I’d no good reason and knew it, which was also annoying. Everybody ought to get a couple hours a month to be a jerk, no questions asked, and on this morning I was pretty sure I had license. “This is Mick,” Winston said, standing above us in the open bay of the dingy warehouse wall. He smiled beatifically and waved a nonchalant hand at his friend. artwork by Erin Deale
“Hi,” was all I could manage, shaking Mick’s limp mitt. I’d wondered what the new guy was going to look like and had no expectations, but was surprised anyway. So very young -- lanky, loose limbed and taller than me although he didn’t seem it.
(names have been changed to preserve privacy) was also new to the company, and had gotten Mick the job, making condescending remarks the week before about how Mick needed help. He was unsure of himself, a little awkward, but Winston’s remarks were an odd way, I thought, to support a friend in a new situation.
Light brown hair, his nose smallish and slightly arched, reminding me of a little raptor, maybe a kestrel, peering down from his wire, pretty sure he couldn’t catch anything. Mick was a pleasant looking, with bright green eyes, although I didn’t notice this for months. He’d mug in front of every goddamned mirror we encountered -- and there are lots of mirrors in the elevators of high-rise condos -- singing “Oh, you’re so good lookin’,” pouring his heart out. It was funny and a little strange and, after a while, I decided the exuberance was a good thing. Winston
Winston was 6’4”, with a jaw square as a washing machine, a mop of dark brown hair, broad shoulders -- his back like a V, for victory -- and completely sure of himself. He and Mick had gone to high school together, and went to the same evangelical church. Winston’s parents were the church’s ministerial tag team. Winston shared with the owner of our window shade company a supremely self-assured manner, and so was to be our salesman. He was working with us to learn the basics of installing the prod20
ucts he’d be selling. Young and great, Winston knew everything he did would be superlative, so he was quick and offhand with the work, wouldn’t listen when I tried to instruct him, and did a consistently poor job. Once we had to stay late to hang large aluminum boxes in an office. Wanting to be done and go home, Winston pushed a twelve foot wide box into place before I knew what was happening. He crushed the sheetrock, and ruined the paint job on two walls, thinking nothing of it. He went on to sales, totally dropped the ball on a hundred details with a big client and was fired shortly thereafter.
the shade and then installing it as if brand new. I admired his rather headlong impulse to virtue, and was curious as to its source. There was also his flamboyance, introduced to me by the mugging in the mirror, with song and dance -- the hoofing Jesus -- which I thought funny too. It wasn’t long before I decided he wasn’t gay, although he was a twenty-six year old virgin, with an odd ambivalence toward women. We spent a good amount of time waiting for elevators, our cart brimming with long, white boxes, ladders and canvas tool bags. Mick might lovingly serenade a wall at any second, throwing his arms wide, which could be pretty embarrassing if we happened to be standing there with a bunch of construction workers. He would finally stop and cackle like a crazy person to show the performance was a big joke. I’d try to act like I didn’t know him, even as we both wore white shirts embroidered with the company logo. Once he announced his virginity in front of an elevator full of particularly hard-bitten steel workers. His good cheer nearly prevailed against the line of impassive faces. It was uncomfortable as hell and I admired his guts.
Mick and I got started on the work of his first day, loading the long, white shade boxes from the warehouse into the van. I was surprised at Mick’s passivity; he seemed to think half helping was his share of the work. I had to practically hit him in the chest with the end of a box before he’d grasp it. He contemplated the bound white cardboard like it was alien and potentially dangerous. He wasn’t lazy, but there was a passivity in his interaction with the physical I found interesting and worrisome, a sort of perplexed ambivalence. Over the next year and a half I usually worked with Mick and came to like him very much, but there were things I had to get used to. At first I thought he was gay, he was so meek. Christ-like, I thought, enjoying the joke, the outraged Christians. Mick aspired to be “good,” which meant saintly, although I don’t think he realized he was aiming that high. He rushed to open doors for strangers, loved to cheerfully introduce himself to the homeowners where we installed, trying to brighten their day, and was deeply concerned about the fate of the world, thinking his faith would make a difference. His sense of ethics was offended by the dishonesty of our company, particularly our habit of modifying toowide shades to make them fit; damaging
My first several months working with Mick he draped “joy” over himself like a cloak of Christmas carols. It could be a little hard to take, especially on those mornings when my annoyance had its monthly sanction. As near as I could tell it was an evangelical thing, Jesus riding in the van with us, or sharing a cloud, or sliding a red-hot poker in (you don’t want to piss off Christians). Mick would be in the driver’s seat, the sonorous tones of carefully scripted joy rising, with me looking for opportunities – a near collision, our cart falling out the left-open slider, spilled water – to exclaim “JesusFuckingChrist!” -- eliciting a gasp from Mick, and then several panicked moments while he tried to figure out how to address my crime. 21
Mick worked hard at that joy for months; to not be joyful was apparently a failure, while I waited for cracks to appear in the armor. A lapsed Catholic who ended up in a Buddhist monastery, I’d no use for evangelical Christianity – Christ’s message tortured into intolerance -- but if it helped Mick, fine, although I was surprised how little he seemed to know about something he put so much faith in. It occurred to me he’d do well to trust himself more, so I tried to show him the difference between what arose through him and what was laid on him, knowing full well what a can of worms that would be.
sion. When I learned of this, I thought of the emotional distance he must feel from his mother, the unimaginable bafflement, guilt and pain of a young boy in this situation. I tried to help Mick feel less afraid, pointing out young women watching him, encouraging him to make casual friends, to have fun and enjoy feminine company. On occasion there were little breakthroughs; he’d tell me about a conversation in a bar, a meeting for the second time. Then, in the third year of our friendship (the Recession; he’d been laid off, then me), we met for a beer. He’d been seeing someone regularly for a couple weeks and they were getting close. Mick was nervous about it and she was holding his hand and they were “sort of kissing.” He was so bewildered and intrigued by it all I found myself explaining how to make love. To say this is an awkward conversation to have with a grown man is putting it mildly, especially as, with Mick it was like explaining sex to Jesus.
The minstrel ridiculousness was actual joyfulness, not the cloak. At once fun to see -- a romp in childhood and silliness – and a prank Mick liked to tease me with. A frustrated entertainer – he regaled me with the latest from American Idol each week -- his only outlet was singing in the church’s pickup band with Winston. I was trying to get him to join a chorus, or take acting classes, where he could get instruction and develop craft, but all his spare time revolved around the church. But fissures were appearing, Mick pushed back against Winston’s domination, a brave thing for a mild guy like Mick. I encouraged him. He was coming into his own more and more, asserting himself, showing confidence. I loved it when he told me I was wrong.
So the emphasis was on skin and a light touch, and certainly didn’t mention nipples, or, god forbid, genitalia, which was sure to start a wave of fainting all over the pub (it being the sort of embarrassingly intimate moment that feels both widely broadcast and, once you step away, hilarious). Regardless my own disbelief at what I was saying, Mick was all ears, and it was actually creative and sweet – he’s such an earnest, well-meaning fellow. After a while I was thinking, “Gee this sounds pretty good, maybe I should try it.” Which occasioned my remembering how I’d begun my own education; rooting through sock drawers for copies of Fanny Hill or other Victorian classics full of retarded donkey-men and Jezebels beckoning from barns. But these books could be a little cryptic, so our reference was a Playboy moldering under a log in the woods. Unfortunately Mick didn’t mention till later his new friend was a devout Christian from Georgia,
At first I had left Mick alone, just showing him how to do the work, ignoring the little stuff. After all, I was thirty years older than he, so I tried to be patient. But his hostility toward women bugged me. He always spoke of “girls,” regardless their age, or if young and attractive, “Jezebels.” I explained that “girls” was disrespectful and “Jezebel” worse. But I didn’t yet know about Mick’s family, that he was afraid that all women were like his mother, who suffered paralyzing depres22
so the whole instructional was moot, my best flight in ages crashing without a trace.
came into focus. As the harrowing visits home continued I watched the self‐ confidence that had grown on the job drain away. Mick’s social network was within the church. He naturally thought he’d find support there, but this large circle of young friends found his problems awkward, their Jesus apparently not into downers. They lambasted Mick for his drinking and outbursts of anger. With the contours of his life rasping against its mold, he drifted away from the church.
Mick’s story slowly unwound as we installed innumerable window shades; a stoner in high school, he was popular, but alienated from his suburban surroundings. He felt a vacuity all around him, which included most of his friends. But he didn’t know how to express his discontent, and hadn’t unearthed the inner resources to be a rebel, to find his own way. He was isolated (the watchword of modernity?). His family did great till he was twelve, when his father, a developer working for his own very successful father, ran into serious problems with the collapse of a project, and their affluent lifestyle disappeared overnight. Mick’s father stopped working after that. His mother’s depression was incapacitating, leaving her medicated and bed-ridden for years. By the time I knew Mick, she was well enough to work at a day-care center. Mick was the oldest. The elder sister, 19, was into meth, selling and using, and was in and out of jail. Sullen and hostile, she’d recently had a child. Mick’s younger sister had gotten into heroin in her junior year in high school. I suppose it was naive of me to be surprised; apparently suburbia has progressed from eating disorders. His brother, two years younger than Mick, was doing well, teaching in a ghetto school in Baltimore. By the time all this came out, Mick was attempting to befriend and help his two sisters. He didn’t really know them, as they were eight to ten years younger and he‘d left home when they were still kids. Mick found the visits confounding, alternating between junky nod and hyper‐hostile, but he persevered, a civil interaction a breakthrough. As the scope of the family problems slowly came out – the jail visits, a shot of heroin before homeroom – the incredible weight of Mick’s life
After Mick was laid off we would get together from time to time in the evening, for a few beers. He looked up to me, the transition from teaching a job to mentoring smooth. The better I knew him and how lost he was, the more I tried to help. I encouraged him to read; to express how he really felt, rather than the happy talk; tried to show him he was already a “good” person, that he had that covered. He’d tell me about his visits with his sisters, how hard it was to reach them, but not much about his parents, who seemed a strange vacuum. I began to see where the impulse toward the saintly came from; both self-denial and a way forward. But if the child feels he’s the cause of his parent’s pain? Mick needed so much to be kind to himself, and I’d explain over and over how even saints are flawed and that this was a good thing; the root of compassion. But this was too much of a leap; his guilt too deep. And I understood, guilt instilled in me as a child by the Church, its sick need to corrupt and to control children with “Original” sin, and worse. Different sources of guilt perhaps, but still, so hard to get over. Mick and I would sit on opposite sides of long tables in the cavernous wooden pub, big glasses of beer in front of us, and have long conversations, mostly about spirituality and religion, feelings of inadequacy and the existential angst that fed on them. I’d wanted to 23
go to a place called the Enchanted Valley in Olympic National Park for some time. It occurred to me a wonderful natural setting might help him get out of himself a little; would he like to go? Mick was enthused at the prospect. Maybe in July, after the snow, I said. I was surprised how much sense I made during these talks, that there was perhaps some merit in the life I had chosen after all, that I could say wise things to Mick and he’d agree and seem bolstered, tears brimming in our eyes at the closeness we felt, everything shining with the warm glaze of alcohol, but always that barrier we never managed to get over, the kindness Mick gave everyone but himself.
The place was full of bears so we had to hang our food. Mick threw the ropetied stick thirty feet up over a branch. It got stuck and we pulled like crazy, but we couldn’t get it to come loose. So we pulled really hard, the branch bending like a bow, and let go, thinking the stick would shoot free. It didn’t rocket, catapult or launch; it just disappeared, gone so fast it was like it never existed. We looked everywhere to see where it had gone while we laughed, but there was no trace. Now we didn’t have rope and bears are actually serious about food. I’d been around them in Yosemite and they didn’t scare me at all a hundred feet away. But those bears were pros, opening cars like old tin cans, people forbidden fruit in their little blue tents. I was afraid these new bears were amateurs. It was getting darker and more nervous. Then I thought to hang the food under the bridge and we were saved.
We rented a car and made the four hour drive from Portland to the trailhead near Lake Quinault, at the southern edge of Olympic National Park. We got sidetracked going back and forth on dirt roads between the ranger station and the trailhead, paying fees and filling out the right backpacking permits, sitting in the sun on a lawn overlooking the lake. By the time we finally had our packs on, walking the forest, it was late afternoon. Enchanted Valley was thirteen miles, so the idea was to make camp as far in as possible, then dayhike to the valley. Because of the late start we couldn’t set up camp as far in as we’d planned. But no mind; the forest was varied and beautiful, giant trees among the merely towering. Every so often we’d stop and I pointed out identifying features, as I was trying to teach Mick the common trees. The old logging road became a narrow trail, the ground an endless array of exquisite moss and leaf/twig designs, four‐petaled white bunch-berry, dewy yellow violets. In the deep woods light fails early, so we made camp over a bridge crossing the Quinault River, hurtling white through the stone gorge, ferns waving on the walls.
Mick kept late hours and sat up well after I had gone to sleep. I was up as light was just beginning to filter down into the trees. Mick was crammed against the side of the tent as if he were trying to burrow through in his sleep. I made coffee with water from a spring back up the trail, and explored the gorge, sinking six inches into moss with every step. Everything was shaggy with lichen, licorice fern, emerald club mosses, liverworts, an astonishing variety of green texture. Mick finally got up and, it being a sort of vacation, I didn’t hurry him; but we had a long walk in front of us. It was almost mid-morning by the time we got going, the landscape a big surprise to me; instead of conifers shoulder to shoulder as I’d expected, we followed the river through one flower strewn meadow after another, groves of huge trees between. I had wondered what made the valley “enchanted,” figuring 24
it was a dark, moss-draped forest with elves peeking out, and fairies on the wind. Instead, when we got there in the afternoon, we were confronted by a narrow, flat valley, its sides almost vertical. The north side was a miles long wall, topped with a series of saw tooth 5,000 foot peaks. Below each was a glacier scooped into the rock, from which a cascade fell; an escarpment with a dozen falls, each different, and each well over a thousand feet high. At the end of the valley was a 7,000 foot peak with a large glacier; the headwater of the river. We lounged in the warm sun against logs along the river, snarls of alder, ripped out by winter high water, lining the banks. But the afternoon grew late and it was more than ten miles back to camp, so we set out, the pace stiff, as we needed to be back by dark. Mick didn’t want to lead, so I strode along, occasionally pointing out things I noticed. I’d look back to encourage Mick – twenty-one miles in a day is a lot, and Mick had never done anything like it – and he’d look up to acknowledge my attention, but his expression was always inward, like he couldn’t actually see past his internal dialog to what was around us. I was disappointed I couldn’t open his eyes, couldn’t show him what I so love.
Our pub sessions continued, but sporadically, sometimes months apart. I offered my own experience as a spiritual seeker; what had helped me, that I felt I was finally settling into my skin after so many years, often laughed at myself and felt a wonderful and intangible connection to things; he needed to give himself a chance, to be patient. Mick was living with a high school friend in the suburbs and regularly getting blotto drunk. Up to that point I’d always felt our conversations/pep talks were making progress, that Mick really got what I was saying, but things didn’t get better for him -- quite the opposite. The last talk we had he’d stopped drinking, which was good, but there was a hollowness in his eyes, a dead, empty look that scared me. I wondered if he was medicated. Or does depression look that way? This time when we parted I felt no elation in having helped. I didn’t know that I’d ever done Mick any good. He was always hopeful, enthused at the end of our conversations, but once he was out of my sight I didn’t know if the optimism evaporated in a minute or day. I worried my attempts at helping might hold too much of my own rebelliousness, making things harder for him. I encouraged him to seek professional help, but that seemed unlikely – it’s so expensive. I asked him what he remembered about our trip to the Enchanted Valley. He said he was happy with himself to have made it through the twenty-one mile day, but the place didn’t seem to have made much of an impression. When he’d told me on the phone that, “Life is hard,” I thought he was facing the truth of things, that he would buckle down as he had done at work when I’d been really tough on him. I may have failed to help, but what was imposing itself now was the Recession and a country suddenly and permanently retreating from Empire
After being unemployed for nearly two years Mick got a job installing TV cables for a large corporation – work he’d done before – and managed to lose it with that strange combination of entitlement and cluelessness. He went to work on four hours sleep; missed a day in his first week; insisted that the problem was poor communication when he lagged behind in the training; but was crushed when they let him go anyway. He spent most of his time anxious and depressed, working occasionally in Winston’s latest venture, a moving company. He told me I was the only truly sane person he knew, but he never called. 25
to something else, with young people steeped in how perfect they are discovering frailty. Occupy Wall Street a realization of incipient peril.
had been developed to treat infections were found to change brain chemistry and jumps of logic went off like a room full of rat traps; change the brain chemistry and the cure will come. In 1987 Prozac was introduced, promoted as a corrective to serotonin deficiencies in the brain, and therefore a treatment for depression, except that serotonin deficiencies have never been proven to cause depression. Prozac had the big advantage of not having the many side effects of earlier drugs. Parallel with this revolution in psychiatric drug use were skyrocketing rates of depression and mental illness. A large study done between 2001 and 2003 found that 46% of those studied had at least one mental illness at some time in their lives, and many experienced more than one. 10% of Americans over the age of 6 take antidepressants. Anti-psychotic drugs are the most proscribed group of drugs in America. Mick had sought help and rather than feel comforted, my reaction was alarm, and not without good reason.
Then Mick’s four grandparents died in rapid succession. All in their 80’s, they had simply worn out. I talked with Mick on the phone after the second grandmother died. He had no idea how to grieve, or even if it was okay. He was trapped in a sanitized white room with enormous emotion, like purple and blue clouds swirling around him, worried there shouldn’t be any clouds at all. I told him it was important to cry, to let it out and to feel whatever he felt and it was all okay. He was relieved to hear that grief was acceptable. He’d been in that room for weeks, while aunts were at each other’s throats, looking to pick the estate’s bones. That “life is hard” was now swamping Mick’s boat, that blank look in his eye perhaps the end of his will, his ability to bail, water at the gunwales and rising. What happened to him if he sank, to sit on the bottom, staring up at the surface like his mother and father?
Two weeks after our phone conversation we finally got together. Mick’s eyes didn’t have the vacantness that had alarmed me at our last meeting. After talking for an hour he told me something he’d “never told anyone.” He’d had a breakdown, it had been “terrible” and he’d had himself admitted to a hospital. He was ashamed. I told him everything was fine; he’d had a problem, sought help and there was nothing wrong with that. I think he was surprised I didn’t blame or think badly of him. It had happened two and a half months after he lost the cable job. Nothing had meaning for him, everything seemed pointless, he didn’t understand why he was alive, but was terrified of dying. He was in the hospital for three days, mentioning that an attendant there had been nice to him, had told Mick he was “smart and would get over this.” Mick saw the psychiatrist once a week. They discuss the
Mick told me he’d been to a shrink. It sort of slipped out during a phone conversation. He’d been diagnosed as bipolar and put on powerful drugs, Risperdal and lithium. I told Mick I wanted to see him as soon as possible. In the meantime I happened onto an article by Marcia Angell, in the New York Review of Books, on three texts critical of the current state of psychiatry, it’s connections to Big Pharma, and antidepressant/anti-psychotic drugs. For almost forty years the received wisdom has been that chemical imbalances in the brain are the cause of both depression and mental illness, but the connection has never actually been proven. As Angell puts it “instead of developing a drug to treat an abnormality, an abnormality was postulated to fit a drug,” which is to say drugs that 26
drugs Mick’s taking and if they’re helping with the anxiety and depression. The doctor has never expressed any interest in Mick or his family or why he feels the way he does. The Risperdal didn’t help so now Mick takes Geodon one night and Seroquel the next, to see what might work. Apparently they take time to become effective. Throw them against the wall, see what sticks. (Mick’s breakdown had happened before our pub meeting when I noticed his strange eyes; perhaps caused by the Risperdal.)
taker, a prize winning journalist at the Boston Globe, presents evidence that the drugs themselves may be exacerbating psychological and emotional difficulties by their disruption of brain chemistry; for instance a person taking something for depression may degenerate into a more serious problem through the chemical monkeying, the unproven assumption that the “drugs work” still unchallenged, so “treatment” continues on to larger dosages, or more powerful drugs, and so more brain abnormality, in a downward spiral. Another possible reason mental illness is now so wide‐ spread is the way it’s defined. When I looked at symptoms for bipolar disorder the list is so long and vague they could be applied to anyone having a bad day. This is not an accident: Big Pharma now has control of the definitions of mental illness. Pfizer released Seroquel in 2008. So far it’s grossed $5.9 billion.
There is no doubt that Mick’s breakdown was serious and that he needed help. It’s also true he’s intelligent and lucid, and referred to this episode as an existential crisis; he’d lost touch with the moorings of his life because they’d been whittled away and he’d lost the self-confidence to maintain a hold. There was nothing irrational about his reaction, quite the opposite. In a state of mind this fragile he’d have done anything the psychiatrist told him to do. He told me he feels “kind of oppressed” when he meets with him. Mick also sees a psychologist. She gives him handouts to read about how to manage anxiety, but he doesn’t seem to know why he’s seeing her. He said, “There isn’t help to be connected,” by which he meant to talk with anyone about his situation, his thoughts, no community to be a part of. I thought it interesting the only person he met during his hospitalization who showed interest in him was an orderly. When people get lost doesn’t it seem obvious they need to be found, which must involve other people?
Our faith that mental illness is biological (and what else can we call it but faith, without proof), releases us from responsibility for our illness; it’s a chemical imbalance as say, a thyroid problem is. Well, maybe not entirely released from responsibility; witness Mick’s shame in telling me about his breakdown. But freed enough to feel comfortable taking pills, which seems to be the point for drug companies and psychiatrists; ever increasing proportions of the population on psychotropic drugs, the new normal. Nothing new here; powerful interests molding a problem to their advantage. But what scares me is the underlying assumption that what it means to be human, and nature itself, are simple -- because simplicity suits industry -- is our handy recipe for the accelerating disaster of unintended consequences. Man as Technological God is still the clown behind the curtain, but the curtain remains drawn and the clown is a megalomaniac.
If these drugs work so well – and their advocates insist they do -- why is the incidence of mental illness accelerating? One of the books reviewed in Angell’s article is Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. Whi27
The Great Recession has conveniently been portrayed as a typical downturn, with recovery around the corner. But given the concerted effort by the business/political establishment to shift wealth upward, and how successful this effort has been – the top 1% holding more wealth than the bottom 90%, with the attendant gutting of unions, the stagnation of wages, and the evershrinking middle-class -- this downturn may well be permanent for the vast majority of Americans. What are the mental health ramifications for those in free fall? Keeping a lid on this pot could prove challenging; how forcefully will “mental health” be imposed if things continue to deteriorate? (It’s remarkably easy to put people in a locked mental ward against their will.) This may seem alarmist and depressing, but not to worry, here’s a pill. Rome had its lead pipes, we have pills that change people’s brain chemistry in ways we don’t understand. What could go wrong?
tion and – Jesus as Inquisitor -- vulgar piety, and the monumental size of Occupy Wall Street’s task comes into focus, mental health an increasingly vague edifice, along with facts and meaning. In the year and a half I worked with Mick, usually eight hours a day, five days a week, never once did I witness a noticeable mood swing, the central symptom of a bipolar condition. There was, for a time, his Christian effort to be “joyful,” and some days he was less happy than others, but his disposition was consistent and he was almost always pleasant company, his singing and dancing both light‐hearted fun, and his desire for celebrity; the place where angst dissolves. He was never manic. The depression that overtook him? Avoiding depression in Mick’s situation would be challenging for anyone. He had virtually zero resources available to help him through an emotional minefield. What he needs is counseling, and a job, and guidance toward getting his confidence back. I talk with him on the phone every couple days now. He tells me he’s trying to summon the courage to assert himself with his psychiatrist.
It’s assumed that going forward China will become more like the West – with democracy and an egalitarian society – but is the West becoming more like China? Corporate hegemony is ascendant. “Do no evil.” Technological marvels, and the usually trivial conveniences they offer, have become synonymous in the public mind with freedom. I’ve job hunted over a period of forty years and this is the first time my search has been through the internet and social media. The pressures to categorize oneself, to compete, to conform, are far beyond anything I’ve experienced before. (It’s true this is also the worst job market I’ve seen, but the impersonality of doing things this way, the isolation, the downward pressure on wages, are striking.) Are we creating an electronic system of compliance, where the serfs will police themselves? Add a large student loan and a political system that’s become a carnival of corruption, corporate domina-
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Rob Lee is a writer and photographer living in Portland, Oregon.
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Stuck on Repeat
Mass Hysteria by Rachael Johnson Staff Writer NBC’s Today Show recently shared the story of twelve high-school girls in New York mysteriously developing stutters and tics. The purported diagnosis? Mass hysteria. It’s also known as “conversion disorder,” and symptoms may include neurological problems and difficulties in speaking. (Stump, 2012) It has been determined that the cause of the disorder was not carbon-monoxide, drug abuse, or communicable disease. Yet, it is important to note that this is not the first time that young girls on the east coast started acting strangely. This might lead those who know their history to suggest witchcraft as a possible cause. The most well-known case of witchcraft induced mass hysteria occurred in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts. It started when the minister’s daughter Elizabeth Parris and his niece Abigail Williams began spouting incoherently and falling into contortions. The number of afflicted girls grew to seven, all ranging from nine years old to the later teens. (Linder, 2009) The mass hysteria finally ended when the residents of Salem realized that the witch hunt wasn’t improving their property values, and that killing an old man with heavy stones wasn’t something to be proud of. Dr. Laszlo Mechter, the neurologist who had made the mass hysteria diagnosis, had this to say on the NY teens’ outlook: “It’s happened before, all around the world, in different parts of the world. It’s a rare phenomena. Physicians are intrigued by it. The bottom line is these teenagers will get better.” (Stump, 2012) With any luck, they’ll get better without the involvement of a mob brandishing pitchforks. Sources: Linder, D. (2009, September). Famous american trials. Retrieved from http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ ftrials/salem/SAL_ACCT.HTM Stump, S. (2012, January 18). Health today. Retrieved from http://todayhealth.today.msnbc.msn.com/_ news/2012/01/18/10181277-teen-girls-mystery-illness-now-has-a-diagnosis-mass-hysteria ---------Rachael Johnson, a fresh voice in the Seattle writing scene, offers her regular column,“Stuck On Repeat,” which puts a unique spin on current news stories by taking a look back at other moments in history where the same thing went down. It’s true what they say, history repeats itself.
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In a sense it has always seemed to me, since coming to California in 1969, that north and east are the “wrong” ways to go. To the east lies my past, growing up in a small, constipated, puritanical New England town where my youthful curiosity and skeptical attitude towards authority were regarded as nothing less than criminal. Not to mention the long winters, with snowfalls of several feet. As skid row-loving Bukowski said, when faced with a rural Oregon college campus among trees and mountains, “…in the world as God meant it to be, I felt like I was in jail.” But I can safely say Unionville, Connecticut, was not what God meant anything to be. In California, I understood what all the fuss was about. San Francisco was where all the oddballs and characters went, people guilty of having a personality, everyone who had felt as if they were in jail “back there.” Between the west coast and “back there” was the Middle, bland and safe, another kind of jail where, it seemed to me on
two visits to the upper Midwest, people had a great deal of tolerance for nothing much at all. So I have stayed as close to the Pacific Ocean as possible for the past 40 years. And, with an invitation to hunker down for the winter in Portland and work on a long-neglected writing project, and possibility of snow in the Siskiyou pass, the decision to go the extra miles and take 101 was easy. First stop was Willits, where restaurant food is still mostly mediocre at best, the girls at the ironically named Paradise coffee shop are no longer friendly, and the wi-fi password they gave me didn’t work. Onward, into Humboldt which I haven’t seen in winter for a long time, past the empty Bigfoot and tree house tourist traps, through the foggy hills
and valleys, all very dark and gloomy in a grand sort of way. The real beauty of this is often being the only car on the road, well worth all the extra miles. Eureka, like Willits, has not improved. A dour place with an underlying current of hostility or at least testiness. I stop at Motel 6 and due to bad weather and fatigue brave the restaurant next door. Unfortunately, my intuitive assessment of the food was correct, but I choked down their packaged turkey slices with insta-flake potatoes and canned gravy, a common American dish which, I discovered in places like Illinois and Wyoming, was generally less potentially nauseating than the rest of the menu. Here I have a minor revelation: whenever possible, avoid eating at places that have the word “restaurant” on the sign. I mean, if they need to say so… In the morning I push on without breakfast, and get an avocado and banana at the health food market in
clean dried insect goop off the glass. Another reason to take the coast route. I make it to Langlois and the Greasy Spoon Cafe, a place that serves real food. But it’s mid-afternoon and they’re just closing up. So on to Coos Bay, for a too-sweet noodle dinner in a not-really-Thai place. As a connoisseur of fleabag motels, I can testify that for forty bucks you can get a decent room on 101 in Oregon, that is far better than the cheapest dump in Marin County (Budget Inn, Corte Madera) for $68.00. A night at the Silver Sands in Florence and off, up 126 to Eugene, where I stay with a friend and sleep off the thousand-plus miles from Southern Calif. Only a hundred miles to Portland. ______________
Arcata, hoping to find a decent breakfast farther on. In Crescent City I fill up with gas, and am regarded with some degree of suspicion because I’m not wearing the requisite proletarian baseball-type hat. Across the border in Brookings gasoline is thirty cents a gallon cheaper. Oh, well. Highway 101 offers up spectacular scenery, even for the visually blasé, and the tedium of distance driving is broken by the constantly changing nature of the road itself. Aside – travel advisory for I-5 north, in spring or summer: Dunsmuir and surrounding area near Mt. Shasta is an epicenter of windshield bug-splatter. Your windshield wiper/washer only makes it worse. My solution is to carry single-edge razor blades, and last time through there I was stopping every five miles or so to
Jeff Costello has been writing for forty years in and around the west coast and has signed on to share his unique observations about American life, the absurdities of traffic, what he’s seen on the road, life as a musician, and pretty much whatever else he deems worth sharing. A talented musician, cultural critic, and man of many parts, Jeff offers expertise, experience, and wit via “Road Notes” each month.
MUSIC REVIEWS
Hot Bodies In Motion by Andrew Norman Staff Writer Band: Hot Bodies in Motion Album: Old Habits (EP) Members: Ben Carson, Zach Fluery, Scott Paul Johnson, Tim Lopresto For Fans Of: The Black Keys, Stevie Ray Vaughn The Seattle-based blues/rock combo describes their sound as “Baby-makin’ mammal funk, laced with old-school blues roots -- Hot Bodies acknowledges the dangers in putting this much sexy into one sound.” There isn’t a better way to phrase it, as proved by their “Old Habits” EP, released January 8th of last year. The dynamic motion of the album pick up from here, closing with “Wanchu”, an from cover-to-cover accomplises what many up-tempo, danceable number with a decidgroups can’t do with a full-length recording, edly Latin flare driven by organ and guitar. moving the listener through a journey that occurs on both a musical and emotional level. As a whole, “Old Habits” tastes like a well-crafted cigar, hitting the musical The album opens with a mournful gang- palette with a variety of flavors from the fiery vocal line that gives way to the hot ‘n’ spice of the first track, through the complex heavy, riff-driven “Old Habits”. Carson’s layers of the middle and drawing to a satisfypowerfully raw and honest vocals wrestle ing finish. Whether enjoyed track by track or with his inability to maintain control of him- as a whole, know one thing: you just found self around an ex. (This idea is reinforced by the latest addition to your “hot jams” playlist. the album art: a woman’s slender hands, fingernails painted black, are seen pulling on ---------marionette strings.) Regardless of the lyrical content, this track should be playing the next time you’re making a move. The rest of the EP gives an intimate view of Carson’s strug- Norman Andrew is a 3rd year Creative gle layered over backbreaking, punishingly Writing Major at Corban University out of wicked riffs, until “Whiskey Drive”. Despite Salem, Oregon. A poet and avid musician, the tempo, this slow-jam still brings subdued Norman is involved in several groups both energy to the table, loaded with a sexual un- on and off campus and has begun as a voldercurrent that feels just barely restrained. unteer writer here at The Subtopian as our Following on its heels is the tender “15-8”, a on staff music critic. pillow-talk-whisper of a tune. The album does 32
The Critic’s Critic
Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, 2009 A Review by Trevor Richardson of the New York Times review: “The Brawling Supersleuth of 221B Baker Street Socks It to ‘Em” by A.O. Scott Maybe it would have made more sense to do a critique on the more recent sequel to the new Holmes franchise, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, but something about the treatment of this first installment has been getting my gourd ever since it came out. I will start by saying that I have been, since time out of mind, a rabid Sherlock Holmes fan. Now, someone can say whatever they like about the quality of this movie as a movie, but I am sick of hearing ignorant critiques of the characterization of Holmes as portrayed by Robert Downey, Jr. I will present here a few excerpts from a review taken out of the New York Times.
age created solely for early film adaptations. There is an occasional mentioning of that classic deerhunter hat we’ve grown to expect, but it is not his uniform, and certainly not required by the original author. As for the aforementioned fist fight, the whole world seemed to be up in arms at the thought of an action-capable Holmes. But let’s go to the books, shall we? In the literature, Holmes and Watson regularly carry pistols and Watson, being a former soldier, often refers back to his “old service revolver.” Being an English gentlemen, such as it is, Holmes often went out with some kind of stick or cane, particularly on adventures that took him into the muddy terrain of soggy old England. Doyle, via the narration of Dr. Watson, describes Sherlock Holmes as an expert at “singlestick” and on two separate occasions the cane is used as a weapon. Furthermore, in “A Study in Scarlet” the original Holmes novel, Watson takes a lot of time to describe his new acquaintance, Mr. Holmes. I would like to add that in this point in time, Sherlock has not even become a full on inspector and has instead taken to only occasionally consult with Scotland Yard affording him a lot of time at home to work, think, and practice his broad range of elaborate skills. Anyhoo, among the skills described is swordplay in which Holmes is described as an expert with the sword and he is shown in “Gloria Scott” practicing fencing.
“Early in “Sherlock Holmes” — and also again, later on — the famous sleuth demonstrates his ratiocinative powers in a way undreamed of by his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle. Observing a thug standing guard over a horrible crime in a dimly lighted church, Holmes calculates just how to surprise the man, disarm him and beat him senseless. The audience follows his thought process through slow-motion pre-enactment, observing how the laws of anatomy and physics will be used to snap bones, gouge organs and turn flesh into pulp. Then, having seen it diagramed once on screen, we see it all again, with more noise, in real time. Elementary!” First off, “elementary” as in “elementary, my dear Watson,” was never written by Doyle nor uttered by the literary figure. That was something created for the early adaptations of Sherlock on BBC television and early film. Second, the vision of Sherlock as a stuffy, pale, frail, crisply-dressed Englishman was also an im 33
Again, from the New York Times review, “But Holmes has never been much for physical violence, and the chief innovation of this new, franchise-ready incarnation, directed by Guy Ritchie and played by Robert Downey Jr., is that he is, in addition to everything else, a brawling, head-butting, fist-in-the-gut, knee-in-thegroin action hero.”
The point, ladies and gentlemen, is our assumptions about Holmes are not based on the books, they’re based on bad movies and bad TV. People that write stuff like this have likely never even read a Holmes book. Just as “Elementary, my dear Watson” is a part of popular canon that was never attributed to Conan Doyle, the idea of Holmes as a weakling with nothing to offer but a brain is a vision that should not be attributed to the original work. Holmes was a bad ass, a tough guy, a wild thing, and a lout. He was dangerous, laconic, ill-tempered, sleepless, witty, and dirty. Doyle, the inventor of the character wrote him that way. Ritchie did not make a Sherlock Holmes movie that was untrue to the original literary figure, he made the first adaptation of the work that even attempted to get it right. And just for the record, the vision of Watson as a tubby little moustacheoed Brit who huffs at Holmes’ wit is also wrong. Watson meets Holmes through a friend named Stanford after he arrives in London from Afghanistan. He was a medic in the war, also in top physical condition until his leg was wounded. Watch the movie again, Watson limps regularly and is even referred to as a soldier. Could it be that the reason Guy Ritchie’s film gets beat on so hard is because he’s the only guy that really read the books while everyone else is judging him based on BBC Television? I think so.
Lets cut to the chase, lots of Englishmen carry canes or know how to fence, right? It doesn’t warrant Guy Ritchie’s insane portrayal of Sherlock Holmes as Bruce Lee, does it? Is Mr. Scott right? Was Holmes never much for physical violence? There’s something you have to understand about the literary character, despite being over 100 years old he is still, even by today’s standards, a pretty edgy character. He has a drug problem that crops up nearly any time he gets bored without a case. He is given to manic fits of strenuous activity when his mind is not being occupied and this urge leads him to pick up a ton of insane abilities. One of them is fist fighting. He is described as a bare knuckle fighter, a boxer, and even describes himself to a prize fighter as “the amateur who fought three rounds with you at Alison’s rooms on the night of your benefit four years back,” in The Sign of the Four. In other words, he went toe to toe with a professional boxer and the boxer says he wasted his talents, he could have been a great fighter if he hadn’t gone into detectiving.
In fact, I’d say it’s elementary, my dear Reader.
Holmes gets into physical altercations frequently in the literature, moreover, in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Sherlock tells Watson that he bested Professor Moriarty through his knowledge of “baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me.” For those that don’t know, baritsu is a reference to Bartitsu, a form of jujitsu which relies heavily on up close encounters, brawling techniques, and using the weight of opponents against themselves. All of these are portrayed in the analytical tactics used in the Holmes movie by Guy Ritchie which our esteemed critic from the New York Times seems to be opposing. Martial arts, fist fighting, cane fighting, sword play, boxing, and much more are only part of Holmes’ smorgasbord of skills and for those that find it ridiculous to see Holmes shirtless in a fighter’s ring like some kind of Tarzan or superhero, keep in mind that Watson often references Holmes’ peak physical condition.
Read the full review taken from the New York Times at http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/12/25/ movies/25sherlock.html
--------This article by The Subtopian Magazine’s founder, Trevor Richardson, is an invitation to everyone to review the big movie critic’s that you disagreed with somewhere along the way.
Visit www.subtopian.com/the-critics-critic for more information.
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THANK YOU FOR SHARING THIS WITH THE WORLD
them write “I need this. I need to write out my anger and frustration”. Being an author myself, I completely understand that to write about your feelings can be just as good therapy as speaking about it. I can just imagine that not being able to share your thoughts about something so life changing would make you go crazy.
by Mayen No. Don`t even think about it. Shut down YouTube and I will be so mad. We all like to look up music and other random videos. For me, it`s also a way to communicate with my friends and family back home. My father and I send each other links to musicvideos on youtube, our different songs of the day. My friends and I send each other trailers for movies we like and funny scenes from TV shows. I can also look up videos from Norway and show them to my American friends and the other way around. The internet is such an amazing way to share and explore culture so the thought of all that changing with this censorship bill didn’t have me scared, it had me mad.
I have read through many of these blogs, and one thing that repeats in all of them are the words “thank you.” Thank you for your supporting comments and words. These bloggers apparently find much trust and support in having a blog. I`ve never written a blog, but I can understand that having over a thousand people write to you that “you`re not forgotten, thank you for sharing this with the world” must have a huge impact on your self-esteem and mental health after nearly being shot while trapped on an island. The day of this horrible event is a strange memory to me. I was in America, the big USA, so far from home. Suddenly I read online about the bomb and the shooting. I never thought I would read the words “terrorist attack” and “Norway” in the same sentence. I was reading about what had happened, checking my mail and my facebook repeatedly, crossing my fingers that nobody I knew had been hurt, or killed.
Norway was hit by a catastrophe on July 22nd last year. A car bomb went off in Oslo, killing 8 people. A couple of hours later 69 more died in the summer camp shooting. Many more were hurt. Then, now and probably in the future, the internet was used to show support to the ones who lost a child, the ones who got hurt and the ones who escaped with “just” invisible wounds. The internet was used to share thoughts about what happened that day. People found support in videos and blogs. Somehow the internet makes the world a bit smaller, and makes you feel less alone.
Little Norway. Safe, little, beautiful Norway. Up to that day people thought that things like that couldn`t happen there. I felt so powerless, so confused. My dear, dear Norway, I want to do something for you, I want to help you. Of course, I couldn’t. Not physically. All I could do was write to my friends and family, show my support through the internet.
There is nothing like this bill going on in Norway. No censoring the internet. And what do people do? Whatever they want. Who does it hurt? Nobody. You might think the internet was censored or limited after July 22nd, but it has stayed the same. Enough was changed that day. And what would happen if these blogs and pages were shut down because someone said the wrong thing or shared the wrong link?
Sometimes, when I read about war and people being killed, I think to myself, “Why is it necessary to write about this?” There`s nothing I can do to stop people getting shot on the other side of the world. But then again, we need to know. We need to not forget that people suffer. It`s when I read about war that I think about the importance of peace. I am glad that the rest of the world knows about what happened in Oslo that day. It
A quick google search gave me a number of blogs about Utøya, survivors writing about what happened and how it has affected their lives. A lot of 35
would be wrong if people didn’t. Some things are just too big not to be shared. In some ways, I feel Norwegians have more contact with their government than Americans have. Of course, Norway is way smaller, which I`m sure has an impact. We also have a lot of local politiancs and local parties we can contact if we have questions and opinions. If we feel we are being treated unfairly or have something important to say we contact the local newspaper and sometimes get an interview. We are very eager to let the rest of the country know when something is not right or fair. While Americans choose to “occupy”, Norwegians are big on torchlight procession. I’ve never participated in one, but I`ve seen many. I’m not saying Americans should find their torches whenever something happens, but maybe it’s this peaceful way of doing things that makes the government trust us, and the other way around. The irony is that Americans are a much warmer people than Norwegians. You’re more polite, welcoming and observant to people around you. So dear government, before you go shutting down anything show a little trust in your people. There are so many kind souls out there. Maybe Norwegians are less careful and trust people more blindly, but again Norway is more peaceful than America. Until July people didn`t think things like that shooting could happen in Norway. Recently a Norwegian politican said that the shooting at Utøya, where the summer camp was held, could be a punishment from God, a punishment for the growing conflict between Norway and Israel. As you can understand, this has led to a huge debate.
party, the kids’ party of one of Norway’s biggest political parties, AP. A few months after the tragedy it was election time in Norway. Some people said that AP used July 22nd to get sympathy and votes. Personally, I think that is a terrible thing to say, but again why shouldn`t those people be allowed to share their opinion like I share mine? I would say the biggest media in Norway is the newspaper. Both the paper version and online. Most online newspapers have a “say what you mean” column under the biggest news and you can write whatever you want. No censoring. And that is a good thing. I think that a little bit of discussion is healthy. If someone were to censor my words, my opinions, I would be upset. Of course I would. I am entitled to have an opinion. Maybe it`s because of our freedom that we’re also so calm. People rely on being able to share their opinions online and feel no threat of being controlled by the government. Why would the government want to control us? We are doing fine just as things are, don’t take away a freedom we just use to express ourselves and decorate our lives. Norwegians often think “What`s the worst that can happen?” Some may call us naïve. I choose to call us trusting. We ask strangers to watch our bags at the bus station while we run into the store to buy something. People tell me to remember that things are different in America and I do remember. I also feel safe here. So again, dear government, take some of that genuine kindness I find in Americans and let the people make their own decisions.
How can you try to find a meaning behind what happened that day?
-------Mayen is a Norway-born authoress recently relocated to the fair US of A. At 22 years old, she’s been reading and writing since childhood and got her first job in a library. Her first novel was published in 2010 in Norway and the second came out last year. In addition to writing, Mayen is educated as a Health and Social Worker and aspires to work in the medical field. She has also worked in theater as an actress, producer and director, has worked as a makeup artist, and gives confirmation classes through the Human Ethical Society.
Even though most people disagree with the whole punishment from God, that politician still has a right to speak his mind. Freedom of speech is big in Norway. You can pretty much say whatever you want. The only thing you have to do is deal with the consequences, if there are any. The summer camp was a camp for the AUF political 36
INTERVIEWS
An Interview with Kody Ford from “Directing Democracy” by Trevor Richardson Last summer I did a little book tour around the country for American Bastards. I put on these multimedia gigs with bands, artists and other writers. It went pretty well and I met a lot of cool people. One of those people was this guy named Kody Ford who operates his own magazine out of Little Rock, The Idle Class Magazine. Anyway, old Kody and I didn’t get to talk for too long, but we’ve stayed in touch and I could tell right away that he was the sort that is possessed with that certain kind of fire that leads people to great things. Here we are, a hair over six months later, and Kody is wrapped up in this new project, “Directing Democracy.” As soon as I heard about this idea I knew it was just the kind of from the hip shooting Subtopian is all about. This is how we take control and get ourselves out of this dystopian spiral we seem to have given into. I interviewed him to get the lowdown on Directing Democracy and the concept of DIY government. Here’s what Kody had to say: TR: So give us a little background on this idea. Where did it come from? How long have you been working on it? KF: A few years ago, Gabe Gentry and I developed a show called “Agents of Change” for PBS. Basically, it was like “Road Rules” meets civics class. We’d have college students of different political beliefs traveling the US and writing legislation. PBS was interested, but couldn’t fund it. We had some Congressmen on board as advisors, but then Thehill.com ran a smear job story on us and it all fell apart. Jump ahead almost 3 years: things are worse than before. People fed up with Congressional gridlock. You’ve got political movements like Occupy and the Tea Party popping up. People want change, but they’re going about it the old fashioned way: trying to elect politicians who claim to be like-minded. (More so in the Tea Party’s case. OWS hasn’t been around long enough for us to see its effect on an election cycle.) We decided to revamp “Agents” into “Directing Democracy,” an Internet/film initiative that will get people to write their own legislation (to help the middle-class) and take it Washington D.C. We’re going to film the whole thing. Nobody has done something quite like this. We’re very excited about getting it off the ground. TR: Do you or any of the other founders have any kind of background in politics or are you just passionate civilians? KF: Gabe is a very civic-minded gent. He’s worked on a lot of campaigns as a volunteer and a paid staffer ever since he was in high school. This whole idea came out of his experience as a counselor at Boys State. Back in late 2007, he pitched the idea for a student legislature that would write bills to be given to politicians. I can’t remember if it was a state or national thing. Regardless, it evolved as we developed “Agents.” As for me, I’m just a passionate civilian. I follow politics and current events. Over the last few years, I’ve had my faith in our elected leaders of both parties wane. The system has become so corrupt that people are going to have to step up to the plate and not just demand change, but do it ourselves. 37
TR: Should we expect an admirable cause with little focus, like the Occupy Movement has been described by some sources, or is there a plan about what changes you hope to go after? KF: We want to go beyond a cause. Regardless of how you feel about Occupy or the Tea Party, they’ve done a great job of changing the media narrative. But like all things in the media, there’s an inevitable backlash. We’re not interested in a lot of bombast. We want to go directly to the people and get them to write this wiki-style bill. Then they can elect their citizen representatives to travel the country, meet with relevant parties (i.e.--academics, business leaders, local and state politicians), and revise the legislation. Once they arrive in D.C., they’ll deliver a copy of the final bill to every member of the House of Representatives. We’ve kept things a little open-ended. The only stipulation we’ve created so far is that the bill helps the middle-class. I’ve had friends say that it’s way too broad, but that’s how bills are anyway. A Defense Spending Bill is gonna cover all aspects of the military. That’s just part of the legislative process. But I do feel that our citizen representatives will narrow it down. Maybe this bill will deal with the tax code, maybe it will be about incentives to bring jobs back from overseas. Who knows? Only time will tell. TR: Would this project be possible without the technology? What long term effects might technology have over the future of American Democracy? KF: This project would still be possible without the Internet, but having social media and all of these online tools makes it significantly easier. That said, it’s still tough. Trying to contact all of our Facebook friends about something is difficult and time consuming, particularly considering Facebook’s SPAM guards. I get why that exists, but it sucks when you’ve sent the link to 60 people and Facebook threatens to shut down your profile if you keep contacting people that day. Regardless, we’ve been really excited about the support from our friends and their friends. Regarding the long-term effects, we don’t have delusions of grandeur. We know this bill that gets written won’t save our economy or anything. We just want to make a film about the process that serves as a catalyst for long-term engagement from the American public. People need to realize that they can write a bill and take it to their Congressman/woman. Will it get introduced into committee? Maybe not, but if people organize and do this, they can put the pressure on our elected officials to change things. Take the State of the Union speech. Last year Obama was harping on deficits; this year, he’s positioning himself as the champion of the middle-class. Election aside, you can’t help but feel that all of those people in Zuccotti Park had something to do with the narrative change. TR: So you mentioned a documentary film will be produced during this process. What are your plans for the movie and where can we watch it when it is done? KF: The documentary will be filmed while the citizen reps are on the road. We’re gonna shoot 100s of hours of footage. You’ll see firsthand how our reps write the legislation. I personally wish we could release this as a mini-series. Instead we’re gonna edit it down to a feature length documentary. Gabe is a great filmmaker and I have faith that he will knock this one out of the park. Once the film is in the can, we’re going to try the film fest circuit and then we’ll have some premieres. Definitely one in Arkansas. Possibly a few in towns we visited along the way. After that, we’ll have a DVD/digital download available. TR: Is there anything people can do to help raise awareness or ensure the success of Directing Democracy? KF: Check us out on Facebook: www.facebook.com/directingdemocracy. That’s pretty much our HQ. We’re on Twitter (@DDemocracy) and Tumblr (http://directingdemocracy.tumblr.com). We haven’t launched the Wikipage yet. I’ll keep you posted. A website will be up sometime in the coming months. 38
Please tell your friends about us. Our fundraising ends on Feb. 13. You can donate at www.indiegogo.com/ Directing-Democracy. We’re trying to raise $12,600 to make the film. We’re getting there, but still have a few grand left. If you’ve got enough cash for a six-pack, you can help us fund this. TR: American’s today, especially those from the current generation, often have either an apathetic or even negative opinion about voting? What do you say to that? KF: People have been burnt many times. It’s just natural that cynicism develops. When it comes to running a democracy, there’s not much difference between apathy and negativity in my opinion. People need to be aware of how things work and become engaged. As a US citizen, your job doesn’t end when you walk out of the voting booth. A lot of people say, “Let’s just vote ‘em all out.” And then what? Elect newer, slicker versions of the last batch. Basically, if you turn away after you elect a politician, there’s somebody else waiting to steer their opinion. That’s why we want to start the DIYgov movement. Hopefully, after this project is over and the film is released, people will release that being a true citizen of democracy requires more work than voting on election day. TR: If Directing Democracy is a success will there be other events in the future or is this a one-time thing? KF: I can’t really say. We’re just focused on getting this bill written and making this film. As I mentioned, we do home it inspires people to take things into their own hands. After that, who can say? Time will tell. TR: In life it is said that you should not have expectations or you’ll just be disappointed. But forget all that. How do you see this experience going for you personally? What are you hoping for? KF: Gabe and I just want to make it work. We want to get people engaged, elect these citizen reps, and get them on the road. Then make the best film we possibly can. TR: Is there anything else you’d like to add? Be sure to follow us on our social media channels. Help spread the word. If you have questions, email directingdemocracy@gmail.com. Thanks. TR: Thanks, Kody, best of luck in the whole endeavor and just know that for my money you’ve already succeeded just by trying to go farther than most ever will. --------
For anyone interested, Directing Democracy is still taking donations for this project, find out more at the Directing Democracy Facebook page. Keep an eye out for more updates in the future as this project takes off on the road and may be visiting a town near you. As Kody says here, America only works if people get involved with it and the same goes for the Directing Democracy experiment.
39
serials
MEMORANDUM Date: 09/12/30 Re: Special Surveillance Agent Emmett Anders To: Director Price From: Section Supervisor Wilkes Director Price:
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Do you remember that one? We’re from a different time, you and me, a time when American universities still taught Latin studies, but now I almost wish they hadn’t. In ancient Rome it translated as “who will guard the guards themselves?” or “who will watch the watch-guards?” We know it as “Who watches the watchmen?” I’ve had this old chestnut rattling around in my head ever since you assigned me to this project, but in our case it’s more like, “Who watches the Watchers?” The irony seems almost unfair. It should be noted that the requested materials attached to this document have been transcribed according to Protocol Number C122004. Rather than telling you what you so apparently already know, I will only touch on some of the anomalies that arose in the process of transcribing this record. Due to the recent upheaval, the record for Agent Anders became corrupted and required some reorganization and, I dare say, creative editing. At times the file was borderline unintelligible, as if the file were recording the thoughts of more than one individual, at other times the lucidity of the Thought Chip record seemed to border on mechanical. I hope this transcript will suit your needs and whatever failings in my work might be explained away by the strange events of the past few days at headquarters. As per your instructions, certain names, locations and details have been changed in the event of media leaks or hacks into our system. I understand the necessity of preventing outlaw celebrity or martyrdom should this reach the public. In light of the current situation, one cannot be too careful, even us Watchers can be watched now.
41
Thought Chip Record: Agent Emmett Anders 09/06/30 :: 8:47 AM “I know you’re out there.
I know you’re listening.”
It’s a voice in a dimly lit room. Wool blankets and aluminum foil cover the windows. The single spoke light of a candle paints the room a brown out kind of orange. Nothing is visible beyond the candle and the dull rectangles of light at the edge of one poorly wrapped window. There’s just the voice. Disembodied at first and preceded only briefly by the sound of a striking match. The voice says, “Maybe I really am crazy. Maybe they’re right and you really ain’t there at all. But I know you’re out there. I know you’re listening to this. And I know what you’re doing to us.” The orange spark of a cigarette ember drags a silhouette into the camera frame as if on a leash. The dusk hues of low burning fire, smoke and tobacco cast a weak light on a haggard face that could be twenty years of age or forty. Difficult to say. The cigarette leads the man to the camera and he sits down on a coffee table covered in beer cans, cigarette butts, pizza boxes, old magazines, broken glass and unlit candles dripping like crystalline spikes in a damp cave. His whole apartment looks like a damp cave, come to think of it. The light of the television washes out the orange and paints him a weird, desolate blue. Thoughts of the light at the end of the tunnel, angelic voices and Saint Peter come to mind. He stares right into the screen, right into my camera, and says, “I just want you to know I can see you too. I know what you’re doing and I ain’t planning on taking it lying down.” The haggard face is young, but made to look older by a veil of long, greasy dark hair, the early warning signs of stubble crossing over the threshold into a full on beard, poor hygiene, and too much emotion. He drags his cigarette and says, “That is all for now. There’s an old saying, ‘Who watches the Watchers.’ I just thought I’d take the time, have a little sit down, a little pow-wow,” he chuckles at this last bit for some reason, “And let you know it’s me. You watch us, but I’m watching you right back.” The kid blinks. My screen flickers. Weird. White lines of static cross the monitor horizontally. Lights in the compound blink on and off. Something strange is going on here. As if by reflex I pound a key and the image freezes. I stand up so abruptly I topple my chair. I can see other tech stations, screens going haywire, long rows of lights across the warehouse compound blink as if speaking Morse Code gibberish. Gotta hurry. I make a file for the live feed I’ve just 42
recorded, drag the file onto a portable drive, pull the stick out of the computer and right then, the whole system crashes. Black out. Standing in darkness now. the hell?” talk.
There’s a lot of “What
I make a bee line right for the Boss Man. this.
He’ll want to see
Thought Chip Record: Agent Emmett Anders 09/06/30 :: 8:53 AM This place is a factory of surveillance, suspicion and eyes on everything. We’re the elite. Supposed to be the best of the best. And right now everything is mass panic, chaos, people tripping in the dark and dead phone lines. Emergency power kicks in and I sigh relief when the AC gets blowing again. When you’re this far underground, air conditioning means breathing, not just comfortable temperatures. The lights are a dull green. I can remember a time, twenty years ago or so, when the E-lights were red. Like the damaged bridge of the starship Enterprise. Ridiculous. Now I’m thinking of this guy, Chambers, Mick, he was going through a tough divorce and hadn’t had a good turn with a lady in well over a year. Hard luck case all around. Started drinking. Got thrown out of strip clubs for getting too physical with the girls. Physical meaning molesty, not beating on them or anything. Anyway, he got heavy into pornography, weirder and weirder stuff as he got desensitized, and started watching it and jerking it at work instead of running the tech for surveillance like he should have been. Not as good of internal security back then to keep that kind of crap out, plus, we all know our way around a computer, of course we’re gonna figure out how to get video of a guy masturbating off of a fourth story hotel room balcony onto some girls sunbathing down below, or girls doing stuff to barnyard animals, or shit with amputees just sitting there with no limbs, just a lump of sex organs and an open mouth. Yeah, weird stuff, the guy was desperate, hungry. Anyway, he crashed the entire network one day, caught us a bad virus that meant red lights, reserve power only. The feeling of a Klingon battle cruiser coming back around to finish you off. The lights made everyone panic more than anything. That’s when we switched to green backup lights. They line the perimeter of the ceiling so you have a dim sense of the dimensions of the room. I put my sights on one bulb like the Eastern star in that Jesus story and start walking. 43
Somebody shouts, “Who was it this time? If your porn is going to bring down the system at least get enough for the whole class to share.” There’s a few laughs.
Nobody knows what just went down.
A few blocks down and I hear a guy saying, “Is it White? back! Oh my God, it’s White, isn’t it?”
He’s
Superstitious bull shit peddler. There was a time, when I was a much younger man, when working in a cubicle was a symbol of frustration, utilitarianism, or disgrace. Sometimes it still burns true, but then, they didn’t have my cubicle. There aren’t any acoustic blocking walls with that weird fuzzy cloth or the cheap desk. No annoying receptionist down the way or phones ringing off the hook from Des Moines with some loser looking for someone to complain at. It’s wall to wall tech. On the right it’s nothing but a stack of thirteen inch television screens, six high and eight wide, for monitoring different footage simultaneously. On the left, all sorts of lights and dials, buttons, equalizers, and plug-in jacks for all sorts of devices meant for designing, combining or editing sound and video. And at the back wall there’s the terminal, my main desk, and the biggest, most advanced computer yet devised by man. A fifty-two inch flat screen monitor, multiple keyboards, multiple hard drives, and enough memory to run the whole country in the event of system-wide failure. I could create, edit, and distribute an entire feature film from scratch without ever picking my ass up from my leather chair. And we all have one of these rigs. Every watcher, an entire compound of us, there’s gotta be more digital memory and computing speed in this bunker than there’s ever been in the whole history of America combined. I mean, there’s more tech in a cellular phone than there was in the whole Houston command center in ‘69, and they put a man on the moon. Allegedly, anyway. Now look at us, enough processing capacity to build a moon if we wanted to. I pass row after row of cubicle, each identical to the one before it, the one after it. Same rig. Same chair. Same man running the equipment, a thousand Wizards of Oz, pulling levers behind their curtains. The Great and Powerful. Wizards in gray jumpsuits, the standard uniform. It’s a warehouse full of G.I. Joe lookalikes. Crew-cuts. Square jaws. We’re All-American ball players turned Captain America parachuting over Saigon or fighting Ruskies or Japs or Hajis. Whatever foreign foot soldier was in vogue dur44
ing our individual forays into combat, espionage and surveillance. We’re all the same man. Different backgrounds, maybe, different names, even generations, but we’re the same. Patriotic Americans. Boots clicking. Yes sir. No sir. Charlie. Echo. Roger. And now we’re here. It’s a warehouse full of G.I. Joe lookalikes, if G.I. Joe came in different models like a Barbie doll. Barbie. Skipper. Waitress. Flight attendant. Old Joe. Young Joe. Black Joe. White Joe. Army. Navy. Air Force. Marines. One fish.
Two fish.
Red fish.
Jew fish.
It’s all the same. Maybe they select us for our athletic builds or our Marlboro Man features. There’s an illusion of equality in sameness. I can recall reading how Martin Luther King, Jr. told his constituents to be less black. To blend in, to get accepted, to work more, church more, drink less, smoke less, and dull down the screwing. Be white if you want to succeed. Make ‘em forget you’re black. It’s like all the serialized black sitcoms to ever curry any favor. They all portray some kind of a Suburban family with so-called white family values. Mr. Huxtable. Uncle Phil. Carl Winslow. There’s a comfort in sameness. Makes us look equal and somehow that makes us more American. Gotta wonder if Jefferson imagined “all men created equal” to mean standardized living. And here I am, at work with a room full of G.I. Joe dolls. And I’m one of ‘em. I reach the elevator and hit the down arrow. Another example of how the old cubicle days have changed, I’d wager. In the old days, your boss would be on the top floor, as high as possible, to assert his dominance. But when you work underground up means down and down means up, so I hit the down button and wait for the bell. Doors slide open and I step in, pressing the button for 28, the bottom floor. Rubbing elbows with hell, if you ask me. Still, it’s not like Boss Man is much different from the rest of us. I reckon we’re all toiling in the Underworld. To an older, more primitive culture, this is all it took to be demons, imps or Hades. There’s that feeling of the bottom dropping out from under you when an elevator stops. Like not all of your parts stop moving down at the same time. It’s probably the most vivid reminder that the human body is just a sack of liquid. The elevator stops and your innards blob like a water balloon dropped 45
prematurely without enough force to burst. The elevator doors slide open and I encounter Boss Man’s secretary. I tell her I need to see him, it’s something urgent. She lets me in and he gets to fussing around with his laptop like he’s hiding something. I don’t know, wanting to look busy, or maybe he was jerking it at the computer. No way to be sure. Boss Man looks like the rest of the G.I. Joes but he’s younger than me, which gives the sensation that he’s kissed ass or paid up to the right people. You don’t become master of this kind of operation at thirty years old without blowing somebody. Figurative, literal, or otherwise. “Jesus Christ, Anders, what the hell is it? I thought I had you on that protest march in Omaha. Don’t tell me you got something already? Can’t you see we’re in a crisis here?” “No, sir, well, yes, sir. Not exactly,” I reply dumbly. “But I followed some leads and found something. You’ll want to see this. I suspect it is related to the system failure.” “Why come all the way down here to Level 28 in the middle of a crash? We’ve only just gotten basic power back up, computers are still rebooting, but they won’t have eyes outside for several more hours. We’re locked in, literally and technologically, what could possibly be so important you had to show it to me right this minute?” “Trust me, sir, just watch the feed.” I hand him the portable drive and he jacks it into his laptop and waits. The video plays. The scraggily little bastard saying, “I know you’re out there.” The whole bit plays and Boss Man patiently closes the video, places the drive back on the desk, folds his hands and says calmly, “You were right in bringing this to me. Something new is going on here. RITA will be coming back on line momentarily, but she won’t have internet access, and none of our people will be able to get any live feed on a mouse fart for the rest of the day. Still, for your uses, you should be able to get right to work. Databases, video files, statistics, and records should be available in the next twenty. I want you to hang up your other projects. This is your priority now. I want you to find everything you can on this character. I mean everything, go back to the beginning. Do what you do best, right? I mean, they don’t call you The Shrink for nothing. You’re the best I got at character assassination. I mean, whoops, analysis. I want names, associations, addresses, drugs he’s taken, schools 46
he’s attended, girls he’s humped, the works. man?”
Got me, work-
“Yes, sir, I’ll go straightaway,” I reply, turning to leave. “Anders,” Boss Man says, “Forgetting something? I don’t want you thinking you can clutter up my office any time you find something with a little intrigue.”
Prick. He holds up the drive like he just found a used condom in my desk or a porn rag or some goddamn thing. The smarmy little shit. I take it sheepishly and hop back on the elevator. I sigh, muttering under my breath, “Don’t think you can clutter up my office. Anders. Anders. Anders. This is your priority.” Looking down at the palm of my left hand, there’s the portable drive, sitting there ominous and lightweight all at once. Contradicting itself without doing anything at all. Funny the way we add meaning to things and then get mad at them when we don’t like what they have to say. I almost throw it against the heavy metal elevator doors. Instead, I just let out a long funnel of air and say, “This is my priority. Joe Vagrant. Who are you, Joe?” The doors open and I walk on heavy feet back to my cubicle.
47
Thought Chip Record: Agent Emmett Anders 09/06/30 :: 9:13 AM
I step off the elevator and there’s a couple of guys that look familiar, as if everybody in this place didn’t look alike already, but I can’t place their names. Really gotta work on my social skills. One of them says, “We heard you were talking to the boss, Anders. Is it true what they’re saying? Is White back?” “This is his revenge, isn’t it?” asks the other one. One of them, not sure which with my back turned, calls after me, “Silence isn’t a denial, Anders! You can’t hide the truth, not here.” I ignore them and walk down the cubicle gridiron back to my console. For a brief second I could have sworn I heard the first few notes from The Legend of Zelda theme, the old one on Nintendo from when I was a kid. Gone just as fast as it appeared. Whatever.
Sigh. Back at my desk now of these lights and tically rearranging of the fans kicking is my territory, my
and feeling comforted by the familiarity monitors, the relaxing hum of static franitself on the glowing screens and the buzz in at intervals to cool the system. This space, and it is time to get back to work.
I open up RITA, the search engine for the entire surveillance system database. I suppose men have always attributed female names to whatever vessel or conveyance they found themselves toiling away on. It makes the work seem less heavy, I don’t know, maybe it even injects a level of sensuality that numbs the pain of working at sea or on a desert train or on horseback on the Mexican border. Only, in this day and age, my life is tech. It’s this computer, this program. My life is RITA. And she’s the only girl who ever understood my needs. I type his name. “Joe Vagrant” brings up references to some popular folk rock band, the Johnny High-Fives, a few known residences, a couple of associates, and a birth certificate cross-checked against a legal name change request from fourteen years ago. I red flag the names and the documents and make a mental note: Joe Vagrant was Joseph Blake until June, 2027. The birth certificate indicates a few cold facts. 48
Joseph
Blake. Born July 2011 in a hospital near the Blackfoot Reservation in Montana to a white mother, Vivian Blake, and a deceased Native American father, name redacted. Interesting. I do a search for Joseph Blake and find the address of his childhood home. This is tricky work, especially when going back so far, but if I can find a location I can find a camera. There weren’t as many to work with back then, but they were still around. Appliances mainly. Sometimes, if the location was primed for surveillance, they’d be in the street lamps or smoke alarms. The television is always a safe bet. TVs or cable boxes. Newer models after 2002 came standard with surveillance cameras. In the early 2000s people even started buying refrigerators with built in flat-screen television sets. Our eyes were everywhere. The best part was the advances in surveillance tech. TV and movies has the public thinking they know this stuff, they know exactly what to look for, but they don’t. Like so much in the media, it’s all misinformation. The truth is it’s built in, most of it smaller than a BB. Anyway, the job became a real cinch after the HD crossover. Analog to digital and all that. Suddenly people had to buy new televisions or, at the very least, adaptor boxes to make their old ones work with the new system. And there we were. Planted quietly in every new piece of hardware, in every home around America that wanted to watch the boob tube. Easy as pie. Easier even. I mean, pie means making crust and filling and baking it at the right temperature and not forgetting about it while Hawaii 5-0 reruns on cable and then it has to cool and – unless it’s store bought. That should be specified, easy as store-bought pie. Whatever. Focus, old boy. Your mind wanders. The address for Joseph Blake is a town right on the border of an Indian Reservation in northwestern Montana, the Niitsitaapi(redacted), one of the major holdings of the Blackfoot Nation. Whenever I start a new portfolio the first thing I like to do is get a sort of lay of the land. I want to find my eyes and ears on as many corners as possible to make it easy to track people’s movements. Without much effort I can already pipe into the video feed of a dozen overhead street lamp cameras, a security camera for a back road gas station, the police station feed, a truck stop, a factory and a church. I assign one of my many monitors to each camera and start the feed. The nearness of the reservation is going to be a tricky issue. 49
Since Article 6 of the Austerity Measure Act in 2026 we officially cut ties with certain Indian nations. Lack of funding finally gave the Blackfoot what they always wanted – sovereignty. The US government couldn’t afford to hold them up anymore, so we cut them loose. Now the borders are closed and looking in, even looking in on the past, gets into some unusual jurisdictional issues. But to be a Watcher you have to go around the law sometimes, so I pipe in and see what eyes I can find on the reservation. I’m always amazed when I look into these little worlds within a world. The long, strange history of who these people are and how they got here is as tragic as it is fascinating. I mean, we don’t really even know what to call them. To us they are a mystery only offering the appearance of a solution through our own judgment, apathy, rumors or forgetfulness. When I look at them, as a white man enjoying the fruits of their land, I first think – what do I call you? Native American never seemed right. We all know Indian is wrong too. Nobody wants to call them all by their individual tribal names, either because there are too many to track, or because they all seem to translate into the same thing, “The People.” Or maybe it’s just because white people love to put categorical stamps on things whether it’s a race, a genre of music, a type of book or a political party. But we just can’t put a white stamp on the first Americans. Their world isn’t like ours and requires a different vocabulary. These particular people, however, can simply be referred to as the Blackfeet. Or is it Blackfoot?
Jesus, this really isn’t simple at all.
The space they occupy is as mysterious as the people themselves. It calls to mind memories and images of sci-fi worlds where technology and ancient tradition live side by side, episodes of Star Trek where some alien species keeps to the old ways while selecting, through deliberation, which advances in modern science to let through. They might refuse a new weapon or the iconic transporter pad, but choose to let in new medicine or new understanding of the stars. It’s piecemeal, but with a purpose. The Blackfoot and their land look just like that. There’s the colorful robes for traditional ceremonies and the face they put on things for the tourists. Traditional, even sacred designs in the land, the wood, or the homes, sit like a veil over the surface of a world of poverty, hard times and life on the backburner of American society. Ancient trees, rolling green grasses, and livestock run right up to the muddy driveways of travel trailers and mobile homes, those giant, seemingly generic black mesh satellite dishes or old GM 50
trucks. It’s strange, it all looks like the past, but it’s not just one past. It’s a conglomeration, a salad bar of ancient histories ranging from the first story of the sovereign Blackfoot to the leather fringe tassels of the 19th Century wars between cowboys and Indians to the white trash denim jacket wild abandon of the 1980s. Nothing here is new. Nobody has a new truck here, not even the cops. No one has a shiny new Mustang, that one they came out with in 2005 that looked like a weird, art-noir bastardization of the old GT, for example. The trailer homes are twenty years old. The buildings are wet with black algae, rainwater, and time. Then the people, walking around in dime store denim and bolo ties. Everything looks so bizarre, so interesting, as if the people have made the conscious choice to stay behind the times, to hang back, to deny the metaphoric transporters or phasers, but allow in a select range of modern advances. They have roads, but they aren’t paved. They have trailer parks sitting beside traditional tribal meeting places and wooden canoes. It’s like the way early braves would steal muskets and firearms, but still ride horses in war paint into battle. In this place you can almost hear a tribal leader’s voice saying, “We will use automobiles, but no automobiles that require any computerized parts or microchips. It’s like they want television, but not HD. I know I’m all wrong, the truth is always simpler. In point of fact, they probably can only afford these things since most of America’s natives live well below the poverty line, making less than $14,000 per year. I’d keep fixing up the same old truck too. In reality, there is no single answer to how things got this way. It’s just a long history of forced concessions, compromises and adjustments. Tiny adaptations, that’s how evolution really works. And these true indigenous people, these first Americans, have evolved into something proud, but strange. Still, looking through the lens of the past, watching this reclaimed video feed, I can’t help getting these impressions. And I just can’t help wondering how the world got to the point where a people could wear such beautiful, ornate robes and jewelry and honor the gods and memory of their ancestors only to turn around at the end of a fire dance and get in their 1987 Bronco. It’s casinos and ghettos in one village and no one is to blame but us. A road leads out of the Blackfoot nation, down a steep hill and settles at the bottom on Notown(name redacted by tran51
scriber), Montana. There’s a trailer park that looks like a John Waters movie threw up all over the stuff I was just looking at on the reservation. This is the Blake family residence. (Note: For reasons of security, I would like to remind you that I have blacked out any references to all points of reference I can remove without losing the story. In the event of a leak you and I both know how devastating these facts could be in the hands of the wrong hacker.) When I bring up the video for Joe’s home I get a clear view of what looks like one of those old trailer jobs with the bad curtains and the fake wood paneling on the walls. There’s pictures like mad and a couple of tattered looking old recliners, a sofa with floral pattern and a coffee table with doily things and a lot of used coffee mugs with lipstick stains on the rim. Looks like an old lady should live here, not a young someday rock star. It’s white trash meets Antique Roadshow and an alcoholic kicker. There’s that feeling of voyeurism I always get when I take on a new case. Like I’m watching somebody screw and they don’t know it. But I shake it off and get to work. The time stamp on the video indicates that the year is 2012. Joseph is not quite one year old. A woman enters the room. Baby in her arms. Mother, possibly grandmother. Estimate fifty years of age. Hair in rollers. Pink wool bath robe sporting cigarette burns, coffee stains, and something resembling baby vomit or spilled milk. Her skin sags around her jowls, the result of a life of too much scowling. An unhappy woman at first glance. Part of the job – making quick observations and drawing conclusions. It’s the first thing they teach you when you get tapped for the position. I’ve always done it anyway, just the way my brain works, I guess. Suppose that made me an ideal candidate for the gig. The woman says, “Look, Joey, the president has just declared it an act of treason to hack any financial systems, banking, federal or whatever else there is – I don’t know, I guess it’s because the money is running out so anyone messing with it is messing with America. What’s a hacker, you say? It’s like those boys that broke into the Sony Network this year and messed up everybody’s games and whatnot. Or those other boys that stole all those financial records and security information and… sometimes I forget you’re just a baby. I worry about you, you know? Growing up in a world where buttons can do more damage than bullets.” 52
The baby starts crying and I cut the feed. I type a few keystrokes and the video jumps forward. The news reports on the strikes in Madison, Wisconsin, state legislation threatens the collective bargaining rights of teachers and other state employees. Now Joseph and his mother are watching The Twilight Zone. Here they are watching the news on the liberation movements in the Middle East, the uprisings of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and the subsequent wars that will follow. Vivian, Joseph’s mother, says, “They’ll never learn. The harder you fight the system the more you justify them tightening their grip. Look at this, Joey Baby, now the military is in complete control over Egypt and we’re going to war in Libya.” Jump forward. The timestamp on the video reads 08/23/13. Joseph is two now. On the television, images of mass demonstrations, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people marching or camping in city streets flash by like a slideshow from the worst vacation of all time. The mother says, “Joey, baby, what do you think, huh? First the hippies say ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and the whole nation jumps on the bandwagon. Now there’s so many people protesting the economy is starting to suffer. People just aren’t working, they’re just stopping everything. Remember what I told you about the Luddites? No, of course you don’t, you’re a baby. They were the ones with the wooden shoes.” Baby Joseph laughs and claps pudgy hands together at the sound of his mother’s smiling tone. She holds his hands and starts clapping them together, patty-caking a little song, “First the people stop working, then the country starts hurting, then the government starts its soldiers marching and we all fall down.” The baby laughs. On the television a riot has broken out in the streets of Washington DC. National Guard troops round up protesters, spraying tear gas, firing into the crowd, and rounding up as many as possible, arresting them and tossing them into large vans. The President makes an announcement. Following the advice of his Homeland Security director, a man named McKinley, the president declares, for reasons of National Security, it is now unlawful to participate in any action that can damage the American economy. The President uses the devastation and the fear caused by the protests and the failing economy as an opportunity to associate the protests with his new terrorist threat to America, the techno terrorist, working through computers to undermine the national integrity. The protests be53
gan on the internet, the hackers work on the internet, therefore, the protesters are working for the hackers. It seems simplistic now, looking back, but at the time America ate it up. People will believe anything when they’re afraid for their future. At a press conference in Pennsylvania, he says, “Anyone participating in events modeled after the Occupy Wall Street Movement or the uprisings in the Middle East of 2011, or the new weaponization of social media as a means of bringing dangerous people together to topple governments will be considered a terrorist threat and an enemy of the United States of America. Under the authority of the US Patriot Act the activity of such websites will be officially monitored for the safety of this great nation.” It seems like a thousand years ago. The day the Watcher Program officially began, when we all got pulled off our individual duties, driven out to an abandoned military compound in West Virginia and tasked with the Sisyphean duty of monitoring the internet for terrorist hacker chatter. It was the day America stopped looking one way and started looking another. I think I read a Ben Franklin quote about this once, but I don’t remember it. But I don’t have room for politics or judgment, a Watcher is objective, and right now, this moment, my job is profiling this kid.
To be continued in issue 2.
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serials.
dystopia boy 0.2...