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October 4, 2012

From “The Prosperity Spoonerism” by C. Alton Parker

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Adam handed Virginia her gunbelt with two Remington Model 1875 revolvers, freshly cleaned and oiled, nestled in its holsters. “The Rangers know their shooting irons. If you’re asked why you use a Remington 1875 instead of a Colt 1873, tell them ‘Mr. Colt can go to hell: my parents used a Remington as Prosperity Rangers and that’s what I’ll use now.'”

Virginia accepted the belt and buckled it on. “Why do I need to say that?” she said with wrinkled nose.

“Because that’s what I’d say if it were me.” Adam shook his lame leg. “I may have lost my shot but I can still have my say.”

“But I only use the Remingtons because you bought them for me.”

“Out, out! You’re already late,” Adam cried. “And remember what I told you to say.”

*

Cunningham looked at the revolvers laid out as part of Virginia’s kit. “Most of our candidates are using Peacemakers,” he said with a note of surprise in his voice, “but I see you favor the Model 1875.”

Virginia nodded eagerly, trying to remember the lines Adam had told her to recite at just such a statement. “Yeah. Mr. Remington can go to hell. My parents used a Colt as Prosperity Rangers and that’s what I’ll use now.”

Cunningham and Hopkins looked at one another with meaningful, skeptical glances. “I…see,” Cunningham said.

 

October 3, 2012

From “The Lost and Found Parlor” by Carla Minch Betts

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Officer John Daniels, Deerton PD retiree, walked briskly toward the door of 1057 South County Way just off US 313. The umbrella that had popped up in the Deerton Public Library’s lost and found bin had the place listed on an “if found return to” tag sewn into it, which was just fine with John. Reuniting people with thelir lost stuff was his detective hobby, and even when it wasn’t much of a detective job it was still out and about and away from daytime TV gnawing away at his brain cells.

When he reached the front steps of the old farmhouse, Officer John was greeted at the door before he could even knock. He thought that a little odd, since scuttlebutt had it that the ornate old farmhouse, once owned and improved by a lumber baron, had been caught up in legal squabbles and abandoned. The person at the door was a woman of indeterminate age dressed in her Sunday finest (or perhaps, Officer John thought, what would pass as the Sunday finest for someone who only left the house on Sundays).

“I’m quite quite thankful you’ve finally arrived,” the woman–a shut-in? An ex-farmer? The cleaning lady?–said.

“Really?” Officer John said, clutching the umbrella a bit tighter. “Why’s that?”

“We have been expecting you.”

Before he could ask any other questions, Officer John was ushered into a home that looked nothing like the dilapidated state of the exterior. The interior furnishings were grand and well-kept, and only a few modern conveniences were older than the gilded age furnishing old Mr. Dounton himself would’ve preferred. With the mystery lady alternately shoving and grunting him along, Officer John emerged into the dining room, which was full of people peering at him from under the glow of smoky and dim incandescents. There was a single seat open; the lady (perhaps she was an Amway representative gone to seed?) guided the officer toward it.

When he sat down at the beautifully ornate Second Empire table, Officer John was able to get a good look at the others. There was Mamie Saunders, last scion of the old Saunders family in town and perennial instigator of book-banning drives at the public library. She was carrying and nervously shifting a brown paper bag in her hands, and a slip allowed a quick peek of the volume within: The Joy of Sex. Next to her was Harry Watkins, owner of the sleazy Gun Rack Bar and Grill on Dounton St., who gave Officer John an oily smile even as he nervously twirled a bottle of fine aged wine with a 1927 date.

As much of a surprise as it was to see people he hadn’t particularly liked as a police officer, the other two were even greater shocks. Retired Judge Cynthia Crewe was at the head of the table with a pair of ornate ladies’ gloves still fastened to each other by an anti-theft ink tag before her. And next to Officer John? None other than Popcan Pete, Deerton’s resident (and perhaps only) bum. He was idly flicking around a membership car for the Tecumseh County country club while talking to himself about CIA transmitters concealed in the table.

Officer John had some choice words for some of the folks at the table, most of whom had made regular careers out of rubbing each other the wrong way. But before he could say a word the indeterminate lady parted a curtain and a tall, dignified figure entered the room.

“Luminaries and ex-luminaries of dear Deerton, I’m so glad that we were able to arrange invitations guaranteed to attract your interest,” he said. “My name is Ernest Dounton, and I’ve brought you here to discuss which of the five of you has murdered me.”

From an idea by breylee.

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October 2, 2012

From “Power Wars” by Melissa B. Blechdach

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The great irony of the mobile revolution is that as the devices become more common, their batteries are less and less removable, less and less replaceable. So even as we’re freed from cables to connect to the internet, we’re often reshackled just as quickly by power cords to recharge the first-party nonremovable rechargeable battery buried deep in our cell phone or computer. Newer places with high portable power needs, like airports, are often built with dozens more outlets than would have been de rigueur before the iPhone revolution.

And older places? Things can get ugly around the few places to plug in.

Take for example Terminal 1 at New York’s JFK airport (a misnamed aerodrome if ever there was one, as Kennedy’s famous nasal Massachusetts accent makes clear). It was built, and renovated, long before the advent of modern post-9/11 security, much less iPhones. That’s why the giant x-ray scanners are floating in the middle of the ticketing area instead of behind the scenes, and why the security checkpoint overflows into the presidium between Korean Air and Japan Airlines.

It’s also why duels over the 8 recharging stations in the food court overlooking said presidium are always so fierce.

First you’ve got your campers: people who move in on an off time and take all four outlets at one of the two “Recharge Here” stations for themselves. iPhone, iPad, iBook, the i’s have it and they all need juice like hyperactive toddlers. And using them for even an instant brings the level of that precious juice way down–the last thing you need before a 10-hour transatlantic flight. So why not stay plugged in, all four devices, your entire 11-hour layover? The JFK people try to discourage this camping with their Marquis de Sade brand chairs, whose backrest is only comfortable if you don’t have a spine, but if people can master the seats on a subway they can master anything.

Then you’ve got the abandoners. They slip in and plug in a single device–a phone, usually–and then vanish for hours, possibly days. Secure in the knowledge that the campers will call out anyone who tries to take their stuff, the abandoners feel free to wader the terminal, the city, and the state unfettered by the vulnerable electronics slowly charging in the food court. While others often hope that some purse-snatching lowlife will help themselves to an abandoner’s iPad, they never seem to.

The snipers are also prevalent. They’ll swoop in and unplug someone else’s gizmo when they’re not looking–an abandoner, usually, but sometimes a camper. They try to nip into an outlet quickly, grabbing only enough charge to make one phone call or play one game of Angry Birds, but usually won’t replace the plug they’ve co-opted. Only when the camper runs out of juice near the Azores or the abandoner returns from Mongolia do they learn of the unpluggery that went on behind their backs.

Finally, the beggars. They will approach the campers or snipers, looking forlorn, and choose whichever one looks the kindest, most gullible, or most awake. Then they’ll pour out their whole life story, weaving a tale of woe and despair to try and guilt their way into power. Even though the worst thing to happen to them in years may be a slightly burned order of McDonald’s fries, the beggars will nevertheless speak of their recent arrival from Auschwitz, their debilitation brain tumor, the callous way a Mercedes driver ran over their pet nutria. If their victim isn’t moved, additional woe is added until they give in.

Naturally, JFK being JFK, the aforementioned types will not speak the same language, use the same body language, or have the same conception of personal space. The occasional violence, such as the Great Plug Brawl of 2012, is due as much to this as the aforementioned subtypes.

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October 1, 2012

From “Across an Age” by Altos Wexan

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We forget, sometimes, the full width and breadth of what a life can encompass. Especially one that’s been long and fruitful.

The oldest people you’re likely to see today, in their late 80s and early 90s, would have been born during or just after the First World War. That’s a useful reference point if only to drive home the enormity of that span: 65 million people fought and 16 million died in that conflict, and there isn’t a single veteran alive today. The last official veteran died this year and the last combat veteran a year ago.

That world had electricity, automobiles, and telephones but still how unspeakably alien it would have been to someone from today raised on wireless networks and instant global communications? And yet it all coexists with living links to the past, people whose earliest memories predate the Wall Street crash and the Roosevelt presidency.

And yet, almost more so than the great events and wars that serve as mileposts of our history, there was the day-to-day, the mundane business of existing. Too often, that’s forgotten. Anyone can talk about a war, but who can tell us what breakfast was like in 1925? History book remember the market crash, but who remembers what was being taught in school that day?

That’s the greatest gift and the greatest tragedy that a long full life brings. It’s a window to the past, but once it is closed there is so much that is lost forever.

When I think of my grandmother, who was born in June 1918 and died this morning 9 months short of 95 years later, I think of all those little moments of the past–the family past, the historic past, the mundane past–now lost forever.

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September 30, 2012

From “The Strange Life of the Unseen” by Simona Genesis

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“He was a scientist to the end. Even as a paranoid schizophrenic he tried to catalog every little pink elephant he saw and scientifically evaluate it.”

Angela ran her hands over the stack of field notebooks, many yellow with intense age and loving wear. “These?”

“Yeah. Not just his own hallucinations, either; he spent the last few years haunting every internet kookspace he could worm into, trying to get corroboration of what he was seeing and to record things that others had experienced but he hadn’t.” Jacobs tapped one of the books. “Field and collector notes, even a set of nomenclature…it would be a crowning work of scholarship if it weren’t completely insane.”

“Please don’t use that word. He was my grandfather even if he was just another kook to you.” Angela picked up one of the more recent books. “Can I read it?”

“I’m not sure if I would,” said Jacobs. “If you’re worried about preserving any sort of conception you have of him from the past.”

Angela brushed him off and opened to a random page. “Kellisande Lume. Appears as a worm building tunnels out of light in he sky above buildings that face to the southwest. Causes people to look at the pavement when they walk and gradually lose the ability to appreciate natural beauty. Driven away by strong odors of olives, clocks running backwards, and people with a vague sense of empowerment. Collects dried leaves and is 90% constructed therefrom aside from its skin. Only visible to .0001% of the population naturally as well as those who have been blind from birth and recently gained their sight.”

“It goes on like that for 127 volumes,” said Jacobs. “There’s one that lures people to their deaths by painting pictures that can’t be described out of dust motes, and one that lives in melancholy beams of sunlight grazing on the sighs of the brokenhearted.”

“Are…are you sure he was crazy?” Angela said. “Things like that really could exist, if no one could see them.”

“Listen to yourself,” Jacobs said. “Look, we brought you here for insight into your grandfather’s disappearance, not to talk metaphysics. There’s more in here, come on.

He led Angela into the adjacent library, passing through a beam of wintery midday light from an attic window above and shuddering with an involuntary sigh.

Inspired by this page.

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September 29, 2012

From “The WHPL Interview of November 23, 1975” by Andrea Brautkleider

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Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from a November 23, 1975 WHPL interview with French filmmaker Auguste Des Jardins prior to the American release of his final completed film. Des Jardins’ film, Le fantôme de la lande (released internationally as The Ghost of the Moors), was a major success in France and a minor success elsewhere. Critics usually regard it as a “lesser” work when compared to Des Jardins’ other films (most notably his masterpiece Les trois Juliets), but its immersiveness and potent psychological horror profoundly influenced later filmmakers’ own horror efforts. Notable proponents of the film who cited it as an influence include Kubrick, Carpenter, Craven, and King. Des Jardins died suddenly four months after the interview was recorded leaving a number of incomplete projects; it was his last public appearance and one of only a handful of times he was interviewed in English.

INTERVIEWER: You’ve constructed a–such a really effective, one might even say horrifying in the most flattering possible sense, ghost story. So the question, ah, suggests itself: do you, yourself, believe in ghosts?

DES JARDINS: I don’t believe in ghosts. I believe in humans, fantastic creatures who tirelessly search for the answers to impossible questions, who cannot resist a good story, and who are so adept at seeing things that aren’t there they’ve made it a billion-dollar industry.

INTERVIEWER: And yet you’ve created a–well, directed a film which features them–ghosts, that is–in a starring, ah, role. Would you care to speak to the, ah, apparent contradiction of a man who does not believe in ghosts directing a ghost story?

DES JARDINS: You believe the film is about ghosts? Perhaps you should watch it again.

[gentle laughter from DES JARDINS, INTERVIEWER, and AUDIENCE]

DES JARDINS: That knock on the door late at night, that spectral form prowling the ancient halls? They are as much in our minds as one’s imagination, one’s soul, one’s neuroses. Oh, there may well be some slight external reinforcement–a gust of wind here, a reflected shaft of moonlight there–but it’s the human mind that provides the essential pieces.

INTERVIEWER: So the film is, well, about as much about what’s in the character’s heads a-as what they experience supernaturally?

DES JARDINS: It is entirely about what is in their heads, my friend. Think about it: our minds are the lens through which we must experience all the world has to offer. Yet we know from dreaming that the mind has no inherent rules, and that it is certainly not bound to any of the petty laws of the outside world. The central assertion my film makes–that all of my films make–is that we exist in a strata of rules and laws imposed from without. The film, the book, the painting, even the brightly painted schoolbus–all represent chinks through which we can glimpse a purer world from which all constraints have been removed.

INTERVIEWER: So you, ah, see your work as having a somewhat…a somewhat wider context than a single story, is that it?

DES JARDINS: If I can take viewers to a place where, for whatever reason and by whatever mechanism, they are able to make their own laws of nature, motion, and time, then I will be happy.

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September 28, 2012

From “Into the Stream” by Wen Baguio

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I am among the travelers who have crossed over. I listen to their discussions on how to use their ability to alter the natural laws of this world to create beauty, peace, and harmony. But something is wrong.

I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be watching this as a film, seated comfortably in the world’s most avant-garde digital theater.

One of the travelers quietly slips away from the discussion. I catch a fleeting glimpse of their face and it reminds me of someone I once knew. I have forgotten their name, and everything else about them but I still remember those eyes. I follow, drawn to that stranger who is not a stranger in my confusion.

I find them standing where the water meets the land in a broad expanse of white sand. They turn to me, smile, and suddenly the surroundings are different. We are in a garden of topiary and elaborate sliding metal walls that stretches as far as I can see. It was created by them, that very moment, by bending the laws of the world.

Welcome. The words are not spoken, nor do they need to be.

I don’t understand. I reply. I’m just watching you in the film; I can’t be among you.

A curious thing, isn’t it, plunging into the sacred cenote? There are many chinks between the worlds, after all. Whether you choose to see this as anything other than a trick of dream logic…you are here.

The strange but not strange traveler holds out their hands; what should have been empty air is instead a chess set of frosted crystal with strange and elaborate pieces haphazardly set upon it. Their first move is to bring two pieces, impossibly, into the same spot at the same time.

The rules have been altered by the power of this place: the object is not to kill or capture but to embrace and love.

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September 27, 2012

From “In the Marguiles Theater” by Ernest Dellapenta

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“I’m here to see The Sacred Cenote,” but I seem to have misplaced my date.”

“Misplaced?” Marcus laughed. “is that a recurring problem with you?” He meant it as a good-natured jab but it keened a bit.

“Yeah, I think this is the third time I’ve been ditched at the movies,” I said. “I’ll learn my lesson one of these days.”

Marcus shifted his weight uncomfortably, feeling he’d touched a nerve. “So, The Sacred Cenote, huh? I heard the movie took five years to make and that you can only see it as the original dead director intended in New York, LA, and here at the Mackinac. NY, LA, Hopewell…one of those things is not like the other, eh?”

“I think it’s because the new director graduated from the SMU film school,” I said. “I’m certainly not complaining; I’ve never seen the Mackinac this full and I had to buy the tickets online through a lottery. Of course the whole date situation and missing the first quarter of the film already isn’t helping.”

I meant that as a hint that I’d like to slink into the specially modified Marguiles Theatre at the Mackinac and finally take my seat, but Marcus was clearly in the conversation for the long haul, oblivious: “Yeah, I thought about seeing it, but there aren’t any reviews online and I’m more in a mood to laugh today. So I’m going to see Two Brides and a Groom with some friends.”

Enough was enough: I liked Marcus but I was intent on escaping he afternoon with a shred of my dignity intact. “Well, I’m going to the theater to see if my date abandoned me or just went into the movie without me.” My tone (and my past experiences with girls, if Marcus had any inkling of that) made it clear that I strongly predicted the former.

I bid him a curt goodbye and entered the theater, my armful of popcorn and soft drinks (meant for two) shifting and leaking uncomfortably along the way. The theater was very avant-garde, with leather benches almost like pews instead of seats; to my surprise it was lit up and the screen was dark, despite the fact that the movie must have started ages ago. People were milling about, most of them dressed for the occasion like a night at the opera, making me feel very conspicuous in my business casual slacks and polo.

I went to the front of the theater to try and see if my date was in any of the seats, but I couldn’t get a very good look at half of the seats due to a bizarre divider that (I thought) ought to be in the way of the mover projector and cast a giant shadow on the screen (then again, perhaps it was the projector). Disappointed if not surprised that I couldn’t see Aimee, I made my way back into the middle of the theater…only to hear Aimee’s distinctive liting voice call for me from above.

To my shock and extremely pleasant surprise, she had been saving me a spot on one of the upper benches by laying bodily across it, something made possible only by the pew-like layout (I saw a lot of sorority girls in other nearby “pews” doing the same once I knew to look for it). Aimee sat up as I approached; I took in that pretty red dress, the same dress she was wearing when we reconnected. I feel awful for assuming the worst about her.

Turns out that I came in during an intermission. I put the soda and popcorn where Aimee can reach them just as the lights dim. The “pews” all move forward on silent hydraulics as they do so; I realize that everything is designed to move about as the movie plays.

The posters promised a revolutionary degree of immersion at the Marguiles, and they certainly weren’t wrong.

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September 26, 2012

From “The Sacred Cenote” by Ava Guilbeault

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French avant-garde filmmaker Auguste Des Jardins had committed a script and production plans for his masterwork to paper and blueprint before his untimely death in 1976, but he freely admitted that the technology to bring his rough vision into reality did not exist. Rumors persisted for years that he had actually finished the film but it had been suppressed by jealous peers of censors, mostly begat by a few staged and altered “production stills” Des Jardins had set up as visual aids in searching for investors willing to back a project that, by his own estimate, was “20-30 years from fruition.”

When the American director Anthony Marguiles was poring through Des Jardins’ personal archives in Lyon, looking for notes on his remake of Les trois Juliets, he stumbled across the plans for the untitled project. After Three Juliets swept the Academy Awards and won the Big Five statuettes, Marguiles had the clout to pitch the project. He presented a complete script and production designs in Des Jardins’ hand, written in English, to the bigwigs at RKO Republic, the third largest studio in 2000s Hollywood. The late director had written in English, according to his surviving notes, to achieve the same effect that Beckett had writing in French: an economy of word and style that stripped away all artifice.

The script was simple: a disparate group of people (teachers, students, professionals) found their way to a realm where the ordinary rules of existence no longer applied. The means for doing so varied, from the first journey in a dilapidated old bus to later ones hidden in a grove of orange trees; the script hinted that the world was full of such chinks to a more fluid reality, and that each one had some deep and hidden meaning for viewers to decipher. Once there, danger and freedom seemed to mix exhilaratingly in the script: the characters altered the rules of reality simply by invoking new ones, usually by association with a familiar concept. For example, being underwater and invoking the “power of Poseidon” would allow one of the travelers to breathe there; the production notes contained details of a long, loving tracking shot which started at sea level in a cenote and went straight down hundreds or thousands of feet to where an actress lounged with a mermaid tail, breathing underwater, having invoked the “power of Poseidon.” The shot continued with her awaking and swimming upward as the camera followed, breaking the surface in a flying leap that also dispelled her altered form.

Obviously the introduction of digital technology would greatly facilitate the making of Des Jardins’ film, but there were other considerations that made it astonishingly difficult to realize. There were, for instance, the dark and unpredictable entities with the same power over natural law that emerged later in the narrative, which the script hinted might be anything from natives of the strange land to projections of the sojourners’ hidden fears a la Forbidden Planet. As the tone shifted from liting and verdant to dark and urgent, the darkness was scripted to “be on the verge of escaping into our ordered world.” There were scenes which called for *the environment of the theater itself* to be altered as this came to pass, everything from dimming or undimming the lights to changing the physical arrangement of seats and walls (something which could only be achieved with a Disney-esque level of animatronic sophistication).

Marguilles struggled mightily with the technical challenges, insisting that he stick as closely as possible the Des Jardins’ original designs despite howls of protest from the distributor and theater chains. Eventually they reached a compromise: three theaters would be modified to show the film as intended, with Marguilles’ personally covering half the expense and agreeing to produce documentary films through his company to help the space turn a profit in the long run. The theaters were the IndieTastic Beverly Hills, the Avant-Garden Brooklyn, and the Mackinac Theater in Hopewell, Michigan.

The film, officially the Untitled Auguste Des Jardins Project but referred to in marketing and promotional materials as The Sacred Cenote, opened in those three theaters five years after production began and expanded to 3000 theaters worldwide one week later.

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September 25, 2012

From “To the Depths of a Dark Love” by Kira Palka

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The human being is a complex machine, the human mind even more so. It’s no wonder that, with all that complexity, thing sometimes don’t line up quite right. And with love as the most complex emotion, it’s no surprise to find that as the very thing that becomes stunted or twisted in a person, leaving them incapable of loving or of being loved in return.

I’m not sure whether to loathe these wretches, or to pity them. Perhaps a measure of both is called for.

Recall, for instance, Alberto Luis Exposito, president and dictator of the República de San Martín from 1960 to 1989. The only son of a cold military man and the formerly vivacious daughter of a major politician, Exposito lived in a household where love was a weapon. His parents, unable to divorce, engaged in and flaunted numerous affairs simply out of spite. At the military academy, his classmates taunted him for his shyness and lack of experience with women, but his superiors respected his drive and lack of distraction.

By the time of the Sanmartíno Coup of 1955, he was a colonel and a member of the junta that seized power from the democratically elected government. By methodically playing his adversaries against one another he became president at the astonishingly young age of 35; Exposito became known as “El Caudillo” after his idol, Spanish strongman Francisco Franco. The República de San Martín ran like a Swiss watch under his regime, with torture and imprisonment alongside urban and rural development (much of it implemented by forced labor).

The inhabitants of Pueblo Navarro, a small city outside the capital, felt Exposito’s wrath more than most. Seemingly at will, he rearranged the city and its people: approving new construction one day and demolishing those same buildings the next, sacking or reinstating or handpicking everyone from the mayor to street vendors. Those who lived along the Plaza de la Revolucíon in particular felt the sting of El Caudillo’s micromanagement, and wondered how a man with 15 million people under his thumb had time to review candidates for milkman.

After Exposito was overthrown in 1989, the American ambassador to the República de San Martín from 1977-1981 confided to reporters what he had been forbidden to discuss: President Exposito, El Caudillo of the República de San Martín, had been madly in love with Maria Ramirez, a stenographer he had met during an official tour of Pueblo Navarro in 1966. Unable to bring himself to approach her, and unwilling to apply the full force of his dictatorial power to force her to his side, Exposito had instead made informants of Maria’s friends and coworkers and used his titanic influences to remove what he saw as annoyances and distractions. It was his vain and twisted hope that Maria would notice the great hand of state at work in her life and reward the president with her love.

There is no reason to suspect that Maria even noticed Exposito’s interest before her 1988 death in an automobile accident.

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