Off!

Off to Boca Raton. See you in 2003. Have a terrific time.

!

The first week of break has been fantastic, and not at all hectic. UCF has been justifiably abuzz about getting its first Rhodes Scholar. He seems vaguely familiar but I can't quite recall why. I don't think I had a class with him. But I was on my way somewhere today and ran across the vaguely familiar R.S. -- he waved and said Hi and I waved and smiled, thinking, This person, he looks vaguely familiar, and then realizing, Ah, R.S.!, and turning and saying "Congratulations!" To which he very graciously said Thank you.

Here's the thing: he looked vaguely familiar but not because of the R.S. thing. And now I'm not sure if we are somehow acquainted from before, hence his waving at me, or maybe he's been getting a lot of people looking at him, thinking, That person looks familiar, hence the preemptive smile-and-wave. I don't know. Anyway, he seems like someone who totally deserves this and will go very far. And he's an English major! And he speaks Spanish!

In other news, I received an e-mail from someone who was convinced that I was a hoax -- some fictive Colombian fellow concocted by someone else. Not so. I'm here, and I am who I am, and while I have no conclusive evidence I can offer this documentary proof from the new job at the writing center. I'm the blurry person in white on the bottom left hand corner of the group photo. You'll also find me under "The Consultants" -- Juan Martinez.

Oh, also: Updates to the Nabokov page!.

And: my friend Keith's life has been very interesting. I was given a heads up on the big news a few months ago, but you should visit and say hi and be nice.

Overwhelmed by indifference and the promise of an early bed

Via RobotWisdom, a link on gauging how much radio sucks. Very mathematical. Very true. And I was looking and laughing and thinking, Yes, but there's always New Jersey's WFMU, and then I look at the URL of the link.

So yes. Of course. Today's shaping up to be a glorious Sunday.

Also: I have not shaved in like three days. The break doesn't really start until Tuesday, but I'm getting my break beard in early. I have no clue why. All I know is it's time for reading and drinking way more coffee than is good for me and for wandering around the arboretum for lunch, trying to figure out if there really are different kinds of cypresses or if the person who wrote the little labels with the descriptions is pulling my chain, because I can't tell them apart, though I'm doing better with the ferns, and of course it's been a great couple of days for running on the treadmill and for lifting weights and for doing some writing. But every day is a great day for that. But now it's being done while temporarily furry.

Anyway. More coffee.

This Must Be the Place

So for a while I had been in a funk, and the most surprising thing about it is how everything pretty much proceeded as normal -- continued to get up early in the morning to work out, continued to do well in school and at work. What's also surprising is that there was no real gradual funk-tapering. I went to bed one night whilst still sad and woke up not. Another surprising thing: I had not felt this low in ages, and for the weeks that it lasted it seemed almost welcome, this shift, this change from muffled tranquility to raw heart-on-one's-sleeve condition. And then back to tranquility, with newfound awareness and appreciation of the unscripted nature of living. So the temporary shift was welcome, and yet all the same there was a certain envy for other creatures that don't seem to have this kind of problem. Like stoats. Stoats don't shuffle around all angsty.

But a stoat could not read up on the Ministry of Defense of his mother-country: "It associates the act of desertion with something completely not real." Nor could a stoat have watched the remarkable remake of Solaris, and think that Soderbergh improved on Tarkovsky.

I Know Perfectly Well I'm Not Where I Should Be

Admit failure. Accept defeat. Embrace loss. Be sweet. Be brave. Be yourself. Be someone else. Be elsewhere. Be right here. Be aware. Be oblivious. Understand every chamber of your heart. Understand that you are, in fact, holding said organ in your hands. Understand that it's okay to drop it or to misplace it once in a while. Be attuned. Listen. Don't. Talk. Don't talk. Be very very small. Read. Smile. Give in. Surrender. Be obvious. Be inscrutable. Write. Write about all the obvious things. Expect. Don't expect. Be fit. Be faint of heart. Be temperate. Believe in the randomness of the universe. Be open to every small good thing that comes your way. Understand that everything passes. Be very old. Be very young. Trust everyone. Throw your hands in the air. Say nothing. Need nothing. Ask for nothing. Keep nothing from anyone. Give everything away. Keep every bridge burning at the same steady rate.

Lines (Cut, Paste, Sink, Swim)

The perspective is like a shadow moving across a lawn.

My brain is the cliff and my heart is the bitter buffalo.

You could've been a genius if you had an axe to grind.

Instead we're on earth unrolling bolts of cloth made from time, using trust for thread -- trust slowly coming off the spindle...

These things happen to other people. They don't happen at all, in fact.

Such observations, however, as I have been enabled to make in this matter have led me to believe that the hobbledehoy is by no means the least valuable species of the human race.

For the Birds

The third print issue of Pindeldyboz is out. You should get it because

• It features a lovely introduction by New Yorker Shouts & Murmurs editor Ben Greenman, said introduction having a glorious, poignant bit involving women and the novelist Thomas Hardy.
• It has a lovely cover involving a dart injuring, drawn by Ledbetter, plus there is a strong chance you will also get a poster of birds on a branch, drawn by the same artist.
• It has wonderful stories written by talented people, including
  • A broken-hearts travelogue by Jason Wilson, the series editor for The Best American Travel Writing (yes, the same people responsible for Best American Short Stories.)
  • A great rumbler of a tale by Mike Magnuson, author of the wonderful sort-of-novel Lummox.
  • The rest of the stories, including the last one. Read on for more on the last one.
• It has a story by yours truly that is better than average (for yours truly: this is an actual tale, a kind of fairy tale, with things happening in it), about a little girl in love with her two neighbors. Her two neighbors are women. The little girl is very sweet, but a little strange. You can say the same thing about the story. It is called "Errands."

Get it! Get it now!

The Sweaty Bits! The Wilderness of Monkeying-Around!

"Quiet," to quote the front cover of the book I'm currently re-reading for class, "has its own set of problems."

There was this girl I was monkeying around with for a little bit, this after not monkeying around for a long, long time, partly because I am pretty quiet, don't drive, and am not, no matter how hard you squint, Antonio Banderas. Also, I was kind of a heavy drinker for a long time -- a heavy drinker and a bit of a sloth, which resulted in getting really fat and the almost total cessation of monkeying around in parties (and when there was monkeying around it was the really drunken type, where the girl or I or both would walk away sour and hungover and full of horrible thoughts about how low, how incredibly low we must have sunk). So after I stopped drinking and started working out the thought of hooking up did not enter my mind. I was mostly just working out, reading, writing, watching knotty foreign movies (more Goddard than you can shake a stick at), and getting my act together. Which it pretty much is all together, the act.

But it was a pretty quiet act. And an act that, in all honesty, didn't really even conceive of the remote possibility of monkey-business, let alone monkey-business with a cutie. Or, if we are to be accurate and boastful about this, (and we should be): a hottie.

Anyway, it pretty much faded off after two weeks, but they were pretty damn wonderful, these two weeks, and evidence that the universe is skewed enough to dispense rewards where none are deserved, not really. The other thing about the monkey-business is that it reminded me of how everything else we do is really just a stand-in for monkeying around, for connecting with people (which yes, I know, is more than just surface, skin-deep, whatever: there's a lot to be said for plain objective beauty), and that most of what we do or write o read or paint or whatever works as stand-ins for this very simple thing, this very basic thing. That these stand-ins are wonderful. That they can move us. But that in the end they're just stand-ins. Literature is a great way to relate to the world -- the experiencing of experience, as Barth puts it. But the experiencing of experience in print is a poor substitute for actual experience.

There were of course a few flaky moments. Moments of total flipping out. Moments where certain CDs were put in the boombox and played -- CDs containing songs of total dejection and melancholy, which are actually fun unless you're actually a little dejected and melancholy, in which, for God's sake, man, play some Monkees or something. Jesus. But flaky moments nonwithstanding, this whole monkeying-around after not monkeying-around for so long was pretty damn wonderful. And the aftereffects, whether it's because I no longer drink (hence maybe less histrionics?) or have grown a bit or whatever, are not as bad as remembered: there's no bitterness, no anger, no regret. There might have been a day or two where I might have felt like a safe fell on me. But it was a cartoon safe -- you shuffled out from underneath, accordioned out ala Wile E. Coyote. At worst there's a bit of fatigue, and not much of that.

Mostly it's just this deep afterglow of contentment, this little warm core of gratitude.

If you're kind of skimming this and have gotten to the end and missed out on the point, here it is: Monkey around! It's good for you! (As to how to achieve monkeying-around, I am pretty much in the dark. There's the Vonnegut advice, which I have followed, and which may be actually helpful: Smile a lot and wear nice clothes. Also, work out. Also, don't try too hard (don't try to impress, don't try to be someone you're not, don't be all smarmy and sleazy about it). Also, don't worry too much about monkeying-around or not monkeying-around. Just enjoy it when it happens.)

Fight Music for High School Kids

Here's a nonstory by yours truly: Treatment.

Henry Darger is real, a great artist and also disturbing. Also real is Jandek, who is disturbing if nothing else.

In sort of related news, I found a copy of the Marshall Mathers LP on my way to work. It's scratched up but plays fine, and it's damn good.

Who knew?

OK. Everybody knew. I'm two years behind.

Also: Beck's Seachange is a bruiser of an album about the emotional after-effects of monkeying around. Anyone who has ever monkeyed around will dig it. I can imagine Boswell listening to it while recovering from the delights of London.

Time Out

I've spent the better part of today typing revisions to a short novel I wrote four months ago. I like it for not other reason than it is the first time I've consciously drawn on film. It's a really messed up take on Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, with the narrator in a kind of timeless limbo, as a kind of Beast shackled to computer from whence he recounts his experiences.

I had not realized while composing it how much of it hinged on solitude -- much of the narrator's complications stem from his conviction that everything he has will be taken away (it is, else where's the fun? he loses the girl and has to find her in a forest, and there is a rose involved, and ala Cocteau there are sentient limbs everywhere, but you also have mechanical birds, and a Hyundai Excel floating on a river, and a few scenes filched from Lynch), but also on how this fear both magnifies and dampens his enjoying the present or the past. The novel takes place in an eternal present. Time has stopped. No one goes anywhere. What the narrator recalls took place before the end of time, and much of the melancholy of the narrative comes from knowing that the mutable's no longer there. That there's no then anymore. So all I'm saying is I'm happy with this twisted little fable, and happier still that I avoided writing, "Once upon a time," which I don't see how I managed not to.

Here's one motto for the novel that was briefly considered when writing it, reconsidered when revising, and finally dismissed:

Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.

Not in the running but actually apropos would have been this snippet from a Nabokov-L discussion:

He was perpetually stricken by the ineluctable passage of time, the evanescence of which so often thwarted his enjoyment of any given moment.

In the end, I went with something that had nothing to do with time.

Sad Professor

Most of these narratives share several important features. The passionate intellectual is usually arrogant, for one thing, operating under the delusion that his mastery of the life of the mind encompasses mastery of the unrulier life of regions lower down. This fatal mistake is almost always the root of the intellectual's undoing. In the end, these stories are about hubris as much as they are about passion, and their chief purpose is to provide a series of entertainingly humiliating correctives to the professor's inflated sense of self.

All true, all true. What one could add -- regardless of whether one is under the thrall or not (one is, at the moment) -- is that it is far better to fall -- far better to accept this unruliness and to accept that one will most likely spaz out, and that one will be simultaneously be quite at home in one's skin one moment and quite willing to crawl out of it the next. That one can't go through with it without a good deal of slapstick, and tripping at every other step, and falling into trap doors set up by one's worse self.

Here's the thing: relax, let it all happen, see what happens, enjoy it while it lasts, and be very grateful for the kindness of women.

The Cult of the Cult

Is it very hard to tie together John Updike, Francine Pascal, the guy who wrote War of the Roses, and Jack Chick? And also Shannen Doherty? And The Simpsons? It is not, not if you have nothing to do and you're at work and stuck in front of a computer on a Sunday.

Also, you should know that even though Our Little Corner of the World has nothing to do with cults, it might be worth checking out anyhow. Even if Rhino mispells the last artist on the soundtrack. Also, there is this.

Royal Journal

I've mailed this this python ad, and this love note to Royal Journal. They do not top the Plaid Hippo. They do not even come close to The Thumbs Up Guy.

Hootchie-Kootchie

Sally Bucher's concept of the nonmusical never gained the respect it deserved. Sally, like most people bent on deconstruction, loved what she set out to tear apart. She thought up the nonmusical not because she felt that the American musical movie needed to be done away with, but because she felt that having a movie set up as a musical, but with no musical numbers, could work. That yearning for a song and a dance could produce an equivalent, if different elation from the one felt when presented with a song or a dance.

Sally's obsession took root after watching Meet Me in St. Louis for a whole night. She rewound the tape and played it the minute it ended. Vincent Minelli did many things right in the movie, but what did it for Sally were the moments were you'd hear a cue for a song, wait for the number to begin, and instead have the scene play out with the song bursting in later, unexpected.

She wrote letters to Sally Benson's estate, thinking that the original New Yorker articles would make the perfect nonmusical. It was already one of the finest musicals around. It would be the first nonmusical. You'd have all the cues, even some from the original. But you'd have no songs. You'd have people about to break into dance. They'd lean into a step that would turn, with balletic precision, into an ordinary, earthbound motion.

Bucher's letters received an unexpected warm response. Bucher, alas, had been deep into the film, had in fact gone so deep that she convinced herself that the response to her letter was written by Sally Benson herself, and she also believed that she (Sally Bucher, Sally B.) was Sally Benson reincarnated. Benson wrote a flurry of letters back -- some dealt with the nonmusical in question, and some with the basic filmic groundings for the nonmusical, but most spilled out Sally B.'s life in tragic and effluent detail. Her handwriting betrayed her desperation, her anger, and her delusion. Sally B. killed her creation with her derangement. The nonmusical was not to be.

What happened to Sally? I don't know. I don't know anyone who knows. The letters remain in the archives. The person who wrote them has vanished.

Daisy

I have turned into someone overly concerned with lists. Here are some:

1. The Rolling Stone 200: A list of 200 essential rock and roll records. I've discovered a few amazing albums via this list, and I've picked up some very mediocre CDs as well, but for the most part (specially the 50s part) the list has been a revelation. CD burners rock.
2. Anthony Burgess' 99 Novels of the 20^th Century: A terrific list with some great and sometimes forgotten books. Surely Burgess included more than a few in there simply because they'd be overlooked otherwise (Nabokov is in there twice, but not for the obvious)
3. El Diablo Songs: Songs whose name is "El Diablo." Must find them all.
4. Ebert's Great Movies: Yes, Ebert. Matt Groening said that the nicest thing about movie critics on TV is that they wear nice sweaters. The other nice thing is that they seem to have a good grounding in film history. I'm about halfway through the films, thanks to the university's terrific library.
5. Movies mentioned in A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American MoviesI'm also halfway through these. I've been looking for one that features an army of women running into a mirrored hall in slow-motion while an unbelievably melancholy voice runs through a voice-over. I forget which movie Scorsese pulled the scene from. But the other movies he's picked (and that I've seen) are pretty damn cool.
6. Compact Deuce: I've discovered some terrific bits here, many available for next to nothing on Half.com. And some I knew already and was pleased to see that they were well liked elsewhere.
7. William Shakespeare, in Chronological Order: I'm up to Richard II.

Lists offer the illusion of completion. These items are all you need. These books are all the books you need to read. These movies are all the movies you need to see. This is all you need to know. It isn't. There's far more out there than one can absorb. But I think that as long as the illusion is acknowledged as such, it's fine, and other than betraying an obssessive-compulsive streak, it's mostly harmless, or about as harmless as setting up an elaborate train-set in your garage, or building a replica of monuments with toothpicks in your living room, or writing and illustrating beautiful, bloody epic stories about little girls in danger while working as a janitor, or preparing for the inevitable coming of the lord with tinfoil and a high degree of intuitive art.

I also love lists posing as anti-lists. They too have a point.

Work

Emeril Naranjo died of cirrhosis on the eve of his forty-fifth birthday. He weighed three hundred pounds, was five foot flat, and owed enough rent to include this datum into his checklist of writerly dolors. He died broke. He died drunk. He died owing money. He did not die in obscurity: his stories had been much admired by fans of genre fiction, specially by fans of evil ventriloquist dummy stories.

Genre efforts suffer from doggedness -- the worst of it, no matter if it's crime fiction, horror, fantasy,or science fiction, reads like a checklist of expectations. The best plays with those conventions. Naranjo wrote 103 short stories about animated dummies. The best of these subtly played with the expectations of the reader. Several raised the possibility that the dummy might not be alive and demonic at all, and some deconstructed the story even as it unfolded. (The least succesful of these featured titles for individual bits of the story. (Ie, "4. IN WHICH THE CHARACTERS BEGIN TO SUSPECT THAT THE DUMMY MIGHT BE COMMITTING THE KILLINGS," "7. IN WHICH THE DUMMY HIDES IN A WOODEN ORANGE CRATE AND WAITS FOR HIS NEXT VICTIM," "8. HIS NEXT VICTIM.") Given his massive output, some repetition was to be expected. He wrote quick, and he hardly revised, and his kind of writing could only find a home in magazines that accomodated quick, patchy prose.

For all his flaws his stuff bristled with life. He could be very funny and very creepy. He had Sam Fuller's taste for lowlifes, and his same distaste for hipocrisy. Fuller admired Naranjo, and before he teamed up with Hanson for the fantastic but ill-fated White Dog had considered an evil dummy story about white supremacy in Peoria. Naranjo jotted down a couple of scenes but the project never materialized.

He wrote a few screenplays and teleplays. Not one was filmed -- odd given how his influence can be felt in movies like Devil Doll, Attenborough's Magic, The Unholy Three, and can be seen (albeit diluted) in the Chucky and Puppet Master movies. In television, Naranjo partly inspired "The Glass Eye" in Hitchcock's TV series, episode 6X20 of Hooperman, the Bobcat Goldwaith episode from Tales from the Crypt, several episodes of Hammer House of Horror, and Joss Whedon's Talent Show from Buffy, which includes a very clever nod to Naranjo, as well as the kind of twist that the master of the evil dummy story excelled at.

The dummy, blank and sinister, lends itself to many interpretations. It's an uncontrolled ID, a savage Other, an Inner Child gone wrong. The dummy's everywhere, and has been associated with hack television and low-budget movies for so long, and so effectively parodied, that it's easy to forget that when the concept works, it really packs a punch.

Naranjo devoted his life to it. He never owned a dummy. Like Spielberg, who distrusted the ocean and its great predators after completing Jaws, Naranjo believed that he would incur some kind of karmic, all-too fitting retribution if he were to ever bring a dummy into his shabby apartment. He did learn to throw his voice around, but his friends said that you could see his lips move.

You Won't Let Those Robots Defeat Me

Nothing right now but half-thought thoughts on the infinite variations of stories about evil ventriloquist's dummies in television and movies. One particular writer crafted a hundred-odd stories, teleplays, and film-scripts -- all centered on dummies. More on him Wednesday.

But why not listen to the new Flaming Lips album right now instead? Online? Yes!

What are you looking at?

Pornography may be joyless, humorless, dull, depressing, damaging to its participants, drab, and badly lit. It is also a legitimate consumer product. Some of it is not, obviously. Some of it is plain evil. But most of it is harmless.

Pedophilia is not. Obviously. Pedophilia is evil and unambiguously wrong. No circumstances excuse it.

Of course, great art has always been made of great evils, and even funny art has been made at the expense of grim and humorless idiots. Great art can deal with with the sordid, but many confuse the latter with the former. Nabokov has been particularly unlucky in this regard. (Even Hunter S. Thompson has muddled the author with his subject matter, but in the good doctor's case alcohol plus a general and pure desire to mess with the world is excuse and justification enough. He is exempt.) And when you set up a half-assed site devoted to a great artist, it's almost inevitable that those looking for the sordid subject matter end up at your front door. They're grubby folks. Here's some of what they have been after for the past five days:

Day of 6/21/2002:

Top 10 Search Keywords by Server Used

[ Result keywords removed because they were attracting a great deal of pervies looking for precisely those keywords. Me dumb. ]

Removed from this list are the many legitimate searches -- all the people looking for everyone from Amis to Zadie. This is all to say that Dear Abby did the right thing. And to say that for all the good the internet has done, it has also exposed (partly because it's mediated, and partly because everyone remains more or less anonymous) more of of this unpleasant, damp underside of one's fellow that one would wish, and that every once in a while it's probably healthy to expose that damp underside to the world, so that we can all say, collectively, "Yuck," except for the person who was looking for "feet newsgroups," who is probably OK if only a little strange, and for the person who searched for the hippo cartoon, whom Dr. Millmoss bless.

From Tinfoil Trapeze (Trapecio de Papel Aluminio) By Buendía Shane, Bogota, Picatori Press, 1986¹

"Is Otis Redding the better singer, for even when he sings the sad songs he sounds happy."

"No. Is Sam Cooke, for when he sings the happy songs he sounds sad." ²

We overheard and did not join in. I wanted to join in. I wanted to let them know that I knew the people they discussed. I realized that my knowing the two soul singers formed my only real interest in the discussion, and that I had no opinion one way or the other. Sam Cooke. Otis Redding. In this stained-glassed dive in the centro. To hear the Americans talk of them in the brief silence between a Cuban son and a Colombianized rocksteady made sense. Otis and Sam had found a temporary home.

Their Spanish improved with beer. Their dancing did not.

I drank a shot of aguardiente chased by orange soda³, then danced with Marcela. When we got home I played a tape of Redding singing Cooke's Chain Gang. I don't know why I thought I'd see the Americans again.

---

¹ Mr. Shane, like many Colombians of his generation, was heavily inspired by Andres Caicedo's Que Viva La Música. While Tinfoil is not on the whole succesful, I can't for the life of me figure out why Música remains untranslated. It's a kickass novel.

However, since Caicedo's novel will no doubt eventually be Englished and Shane's will most likely not, I thought I'd give you a taste of it. Like Caicedo's, it's about drinking, dancing, screwing, and obsessing over music.

² In the original, the broken phrases are meant to suggest gringo-ized Spanish. They are about successful there as they are in here, meaning not at all. Why people think accents are funny is beyond me.

³ Naranja Postobón in the original: the Colombian orange soda of choice to chase aguardiente.

Excerpt

Yesterday, the neighbors painted the walls red. Today they painted the kitchen tile red, the living room rug, the appliances -- fridge, microwave, stove, stove-top, all red -- the ceiling, and the knickknacks: Hummel figurines, Star Trek collectible plates, posters of Anna Nicole Smith, Britney Spears, and James Dean at the Hopper diner. All red. They opened their windows to aerate.

Justiniano walked from school to his apartment to find the open window, the red room, and the two men in their black red-speckled suits standing with their brushes looking in his direction. They had lived opposite him forever. They never said anything.

They had never done anything odd until now. And Justiniano could see, arrested in his passage from the covered patio with its defeated plantain tree to his small apartment with Digimon already on, that there was nothing particularly odd about the act itself -- his parents had painted his room a cheery, muted yellow last year. And if they said nothing to him, he had not made any great efforts to say anything to them as well. He said little. He probably talked less than the men with the dark suits and red-tipped brushes.

Itemized and Annotated

1. Jerky¹
   
2. Carrabba's Chicken Bryan²
   
3. General Tso's Chicken³
   
4. Pepperidge Farms Bread⁴
   
5. Campbell's Ready-to-Consume Plastic Jar of Tomato Soup.
   
6. Folger's Whole Bean Coffee⁵
   
7. Stir-Fry Chicken and Beef
   
8. Olive oil & Carlic⁶
   
9. Publix-brand Lite Yogurt
   
10. Publix-brand caffeine-free diet soda. ⁷
    
11. Imitation Crab Meat
    
12. Chocolatinas Jet
    
13. Green mangos with salt.
    
14. Boars Head hams and cheeses
    
15. Ark Clams
    
16. Bananas
    
17. Nutella⁸

¹ This is the best jerky in the world.
² Recipe here.
³ Eaten very sparely these days as it is a caloric bomb.
⁴ See Joel Achenbach's essay on Pepperidge Farms in Why Things Are, on why consuming PF products can be made into a disquieting funhouse experience.
⁵ 100% Colombian. Of course.
⁶ For item above
⁷ But no, not a Mormon.
⁸ See Kafka.
⁺ And all this as a way to remark on how delightful routine can be -- on how eating the same thing every week (excepting 2, 3, 12, and 15, which are only consumed on special ocassions, and salad-cut hearts of palm, consumed when the mood strikes), and how one can truly revel in quality products manufactured in countless numbers by massive corporations. (Or conglomerates? Note that the bread and the soup come from the same source, as probably do a few other products.) Note, too, that every page of my memo pad holds a permutation of this list: need more of this, ran out of that. And we can't say goodbye w/o remarking that this, right here, is what we all dreaded -- minutae compiled from the sidelines of everyone's routine. Sorry! And yes, there are far less trivial sidelines, not to mention far more entertaining food-related material.

Love for Sale Unlinked

Once my cousin started we could not get him to stop. We asked him, but he would only say, "I'm just a poor boy. Yeah, baby. You think I'm dead, but I sail away. The train keeps on movin'. The king of Marigold was in the kitchen. Johnny's in the basement. I'm all shook up. Blame it on Cain. Who do you trust, the little spider or me? Thank you for the days. How very."

And so on.

He could quote at length and at random for hours. Like the poor fellow in that Undeclared episode or the people who use Monty Python chestnuts as a shield from normal interaction with human beings -- when the mood struck him he'd string these half-sensical monologues out of other people's work. (David Byrne attempted to write a full song out of advertising slogans, but failed. My cousin succeeded by not concerning himself overly with sense or sensibility. He would just string the words along.) But then he'd step outside and talk with people other than his cousins and be perfectly normal. I don't know. I suppose it was our thing, an family in-joke that most of the family was not in on.

Bombay Quiz

Flying across the desert in a TWA I saw a woman walk across the sand. She carried a navy backpack, bottled water strapped to the side on black mesh, a fat paperback in her hands: the orange spine suggested Penguin. I thought of Capote’s “Mojave.” I thought of desert dwellers and their perils.

It did not occur to me, until after landing, that we must have been flying far too low. Else how did I spot this apparition? Nor did I wonder why she was there. I suspected she was there for the simple animal joy of movement – we move: we exercise: we jog and lift weights and do push-ups and TaeBo and walk across abandoned territories because how can you not.

How can you not put your body to use?

I don’t drive. I walk. Listen: I’ve been walking up and down Orlando since 1996, and not once have I had a bird shit on me. What are the odds? And I have not had a fall or endured any real discomfort – no sprains or breakages – in forever, years and years and years. Yes, knock on wood.

And also there’s this: I’ll be fixing a roast beef sandwich when I get home and when I’ll bite into it I’ll feel like the panther at the end of “The Hunger Artist.” And this: why do we wake up with this ball of unalloyed joy bouncing close by? Why is it following us? And why do we know it's OK?

Radura

"Art requires the precision of science, science the enthusiasm of art."

So read the signature file of a stranger. It sounded familiar. I did not know why he had e-mailed me, or why he had chosen to talk to me about the lamentable lapses of the Internet Movie Database, which fails to note the remarkable contributions of Andrea Botkin (no relation to Christy) to independent cinema on both coasts.

She worked on the sidelines, mostly as a grip or as a catchall assistant, often for little or no money. But her enthusiasm proved invaluable in productions where money ran short, including the infamous La Bete.

The e-mail alleges that she worked with Mike Jittlov on his opus, Wizard of Speed and Time. Jittlov, like many mavericks, worked towards a singular vision, and the singularity of that vision outweighed all else. He has found fans in people whose visions have likewise gone against the grain.

MST3K, another unconventional success story, lasted longer than anyone could have anticipated. That they continue to work together in various projects is heartening.

Andrea Botkin worked with a lot of people, but never for very long. She wasn't very good with money. She never earned much. She worked as a substitute teacher, a job she liked because it afforded her time to help out with movies.

She knew the technical side of filmmaking inside and out. Without that knowledge there would have been no art.

The gap between dazzling competence and equally dazzling incompetence seems uncrossable. It parallels the uncrossable divide between true art and the banal, the crass derivative, the lumpen misfire.

Cha Cha Cha

Without the alterna-wave of the mid-nineties there would have been no Aterciopelados, and arguably no Shakira. Before 1994, Colombia's rock-en-español scene had been under the influence of Iron Maiden or The Cure. Death- and Thrash-metal or mope-synths. Nothing else. And the latter had been filtered through Argentina – via Soda Stereo.

Grunge changed everything in Bogotá. The first fuzzy indicator arrived in the form of the Argentineans, whose "De Musica Ligera" echoed chord for chord "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Soon Bogotá bands whose sets sounded vaguely Smiths-ish or unapologetically Slayer-ish now absorbed The Pixies by the pound, and Sonic Youth, and of course Nirvana.

For every band that made it – made it modestly (1280 Almas, La Derecha, Estados Alterados, and the kickass folks from Bloque) or big (Aterciopelados, Shakira, Ekhymosis and its lead singer's Grammy-winning solo venture: Juanes, and Carlos Vives) – there were a hundred that did not come close to making it. Petrarquía played five gigs in the Zona Rosa's Kalimán before vanishing altogether.

The name they had kept from when they played heavy metal, but by 1996 they had absorbed a lot of Ween and Talking Heads. What Petrarquía poured out owed much to the Heads, and to David Byrne's latin-influenced solo albums, specially Rei Momo.

The band played Colombianized songs tinged with the Latin flourishes of American rock acts. They added the metronomic congas and sterile trumpets that American musicians turned to when they wanted the "Latin sound." The band loved that sound. They loved it, though most every other Colombian rejected it – rejected it as one rejects the sound of one's own voice when played back on a tape recorder. That's not us. That's not Latin music.

It wasn't. And when Petrarquía played it back, it wasn't even Colombianized American Latin music. They sounded like a cabaret act from deep in Minnesota whose only exposure to Latin music had been the Chiquita Banana theme song. It was glorious.

They played for the last time late in 2001. I wasn't there. They played a small club – they didn't do a single one of their own songs. All covers. A friend e-mailed me the set list.

They played a couple of songs from Rei Momo, and Carole King's "Corazon," and five (!) from Kirsty MacColl's Tropical Brainstorm, Ann Magnuson's "Sex With the Devil," Nelson Riddle's Shelly Winters Cha Cha Cha, "Isla del Encanto" by the Pixies and "Isla Bonita" by Madonna, "Buenas Tardes Amigo" by Ween.

They said goodnight and don't plan on playing again. My friend said that the club wasn't full but that the people that were there were very enthusiastic, and that hardly anybody was drinking.

Roam Thither, Then.

Decline is inevitable. Emilio Fulano's three novels, when placed on an imaginary Cartesian graph where x marks Time and y marks Quality, depict a pathetically small triangular pattern:

		.



	.		.  

The first novel was a wild but hermetic fantasia based in part on a Kipling book from which others have also drawn inspiration. Emiliano built his amusements like others built parks -- and like all parks Emiliano's were cursed with misfortune and haunted by the strange and the unsavory. The second novel suceeded in its own small way. Reviewers compared it favorably to Avram Davison's best. It proved an unfortunately accurate comparison. Like with Davidson, Emilio's readers were enthusiastic but few. Emilio released his third novel when he was in his sixties. Poor, and in poor health, he died four days after the novel was released. All but a few copies remain. It is not an undiscovered classic: the novel reads much like everything Exley wrote after A Fan's Notes. Emilio chased after the ghost of his great achievement, knowing he could never equal it. He wrote the kind of knotty, unreadable postmodernist prose that Wolfe, among other people, have argued against.

A careless reader will connect the three dots with straight lines. The careful reader will trace a parabola through its directrix to its humble vertex and down again. Is it surprising that the first thing to come to mind is not a molehill but a frown?

Others fared much better. They hardly wrote a dud, and kept their love of puns alive from their earliest efforts all the way through. Emilio loved language games not wisely, but he loved them well.

Roduél: Gloriously Impure

The case against retired Chilean filmmaker Roduél never captured the attention of the American media, which had its own film-related business to chew over. Whether or not he was involved in the scandal -- he probably was, although his degree of guilt is unclear -- is of far less importance than his development of game-shows in his country and in Peru and Japan.

The Japanese-Peruvian connection, on the other hand, should strike anyone as yet one more example of the charming mestizaje that defines South America. Few other places are as willing to borrow so many bits from everywhere, everything, and everyone (as the girls from lpanema will attest). There are other places that manage this mingling just as well, of course.

If, as David Foster Wallace pointed out, television is insidious because anything you throw at it is co-opted by the medium, then South America's mestizaje is its less creepy real-life twin: a place where whatever is thrown at it is absorbed, reshaped, reimagined. Music and pop culture go through it, but so does life.

Roduél's work did not dig into the mesh of life – he was too superficial a craftsman. All his films coasted along the surface. But in his less guarded moments, a careful observer could detect a willingness to go deeper. He borrowed freely from Kurasawa's wide open shots. Several of his soap-opera projects for Chilean TV, which I had caught late at night on Colombian's (now defunct) Canal Dos, showed the distinct influence of David Lynch (low bass in otherwise casual settings, deliberately ungraceful movement, incongrous details added to the background of the set) and Cassavetes, of all people. Roduél was not the first to ask his soap-opera stars to improvise, but he was certainly one of the first to do it right, and to use the handheld camera effectively in the context of a South American soap-opera, though in a few episodes the tape marking where the actors should stand is clearly visible. As for Roduél's claims to have watched Polanski's The Tenant once a week for a whole year, I don't know what do with that, considering the sordid parallels one could draw from the latter's sordid infelicity.

He might have gotten his start because of his relationship with Leila Diniz, but the man had talent. He was not the first to be led astray by Hollywood. As for his name, he is not the first one to indulge in this affectation. He has quite a bit of company.