September 2009 Archives

1. Glow-in-the-dark stuff. Specifically, the semi-articulated glow-in-the-dark skeletal pirate that I got from a box of Cap'n Crunch in 1978, but I like all glow-in-the-dark things. Luminous green plastic reminds me of being a child, pulling the bedsheets over my head at night to surround myself with as much cavelikle darkness as possible, using my invisible hand to make whatever glowing thing I happened to have hover before me in the black. The best kind of glow-in-the-dark things were things that I didn't know glowed in the dark until I happened to catch sight of them at night. I had a Micronaut Pharoid which, I discovered, had a glow-in-the-dark chest plate. Occasionally I would be disappointed by something made of a plastic which had the tell-tale tint of glowing plastic when the lights were on, but did not actually glow when they were off.
   
   
2. Pancake mix. This isn't a childhood memory: I bought a box of the stuff during my cycling tour across the U.S. in 2006. It seemed a great luxury to mix simple powder with water at my campsite and cook up a batch to fuel my morning's ride. They weren't fantastic pancakes. But when I cooked them over my little white gas Dragonfly stove, slathered them with cheap maple-like syrup, and ate them in front of my tent with a plastic fork, they became a small portion of stable home during my four months of nomadic and often lonely travel.
   
   
3. The Fujifilm Go. It's a portable X-ray machine with a big, friendly logo on its side. It runs on Windows XP, has a touchscreen, and can transmit images over WiFi. I saw one in the corridor outside of X-ray #2 at the hospital last week while waiting for my mother to get X-rays of her hip, which it turned out she had dislocated by trying to pick up the cat. The Go seemed like a cool piece of high technology on wheels with a smiley face on it. Later, I read the brochure and found that it was, in fact, just that. It's got silent dual motor drive and bops around with its 15-kilowatt telescopic X-ray tube, ready to irradiate you and show you your insides. If I had one, I'd roll it everywhere and X-ray all sorts of people and objects and would most likely do very naughty things with it.

Sir Francis Hinsley's momentary animation subsided. He let fall his copy of Horizon and gazed towards the patch of deepening shadow which had once been a pool. His was a weak, sensitive, intelligent face, blurred somewhat by soft living and long boredom. "It was Hopkins once," he said; "Joyce and Freud and Gertrude Stein. I couldn't make any sense of them either. I never was much good at anything new. 'Arnold Bennett's debt to Zola'; 'Flecker's debt to Henley.' That was the nearest I went to the moderns. My best subjects were 'The English Parson in English Prose' or 'Cavalry Actions with the Poets'--that kind of thing. People seemed to like them once. Then they lost interest. I did too. I was always the most defatigable of hacks. I needed a change. I've never regretted coming away. The climate suits me. They are a very decent, generous lot of people out here and they don't expect you to listen. Always remember that, dear boy. It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard."

Evelyn Waugh
The Loved One

What it comes down to is that the belief that selling work really comes down to who you know is magical thinking, or at the very least it's wildly overrated in terms of what actually sells work. Yes, there are authors for whom their assurance of a blurb on your cover might convince a publisher to buy your novel, sight (and quality) unseen. Currently, they are called "Stephenie Meyer" and "Dan Brown."

A note found on one of those little homework pads you cop for ten cents at Gussie's...I wrote on an experience with L.S.D. a while ago:

"Little kids shoot marbles
where branches break the sun

into graceful shafts of light...
I just want to be pure."

I found it all crumpled up in these old pants in history class this morning.

Ames, ever the showman, calls the crowd to attention. Then he apologizes. The knife-thrower is running late.

"I wanted Miss Saturn, she's this hula-hoop person. But she wasn't available," he tells me later. "So then I wanted Ula the Pain-Proof Rubber Girl--I once broke a cinderblock on her belly while she lay on a bed of nails. But she wasn't available either. So she suggested Throwdini." More than anything, he loves to put on a show. Despite the harrying demands of a TV series, he describes the process as fun, like "putting on a big wedding." On set, he looked around and said, "All these people! All these trucks! There's a truck with a spigot on the side where coffee comes out! All because I wrote something. This is beautiful."

"How are you baby? How do you feel? I bring you this--" It was a bottle of cognac. The orderly brought a chair and he sat down, "and good news. You will be decorated. They want to get you the medaglia d'argento but perhaps they can only get the bronze."

"What for?"

"Because you are gravely wounded. They say if you can prove you did any heroic acts you can get the silver. Otherwise it will be the bronze. Tell me exactly what happened. Did you do any heroic act?"

"No," I said. "I was blown up while we were eating cheese."

Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell To Arms

But the fact is that Rocky Horror Picture Show doesn't need to be remade -- it's already its own remake.

The movie remakes and respawns itself week after week as new generations of teenagers discover it at local rep houses and learn that freaks are everywhere (and they can be freaks too). How can you remake something that has already been remade thousands of times over by its audiences? And by theater troupes who reenact it? Plus, there's simply no way that the 1970s sexytime tale of a "sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania" could ever be told or retold in an era of safe sex and gay marriage. These days, Frank N Furter would just get married to Rocky, settle down, and move to the suburbs. The characters we love in Rocky Horror, and that audiences talk back to in cities across the world, cannot be "updated." And they cannot ever be remade in a way more pleasing than we can remake them ourselves, in our local theaters, wearing silly makeup and carrying umbrellas.