Nanowrimo Day 18: in Which the Author Creates a Character for the Sake of a Moderately Priced Pun

I continued to follow the jawless ventriloquist dummy where he led me, but the river was  treacherous and in parts uncrossable. To fill in the plot gaps: Tunbridge, last seen on the bus talking to Mmrma/Mortimer about the fate of his beloved Crackers, had disappeared at an I-95 rest stop. His return had something to do with Woody Harrelson but I'll leave that for another day or the chopping block. This was the entire day's output of November 18th, selectively edited for spelling.

"You were looking for me, perhaps?" Tunbridge spryly climbed down from the luggage compartment, where he had been listning this entire time ... and scheming!

"TUNBRIDGE!" All in attendance cried out with a gasp.

"That's ME!" Tunbridge pointed a thick thumb at his barrel chest. "Or is it?" He removed his tweed jacket and unbuckled his khakis to reveal that which nobody in attendance could have ever imagined in their wildest dreams. [Note: at this point the subsequent character steps out of the aforementioned character's skin. This a crucial plot development.]

"Great Senator Kennedy!" Tex exclaimed, to the general confusion of his fellow man, for, the more apropriate ejaculation would have been,

"CRACKERS?" Morty looked from one Crackers to another Crackers, and then back again. He examined each Cracker's wrist for watchband straps, and then remember his crackers had been keeping time with a pocket watch. He did a double-take unencumbered by spring action. His head-bone stretched out several inches from his neck-bone in exasperation. "Why, I , err ... who ... what ..." Morty fell as if to faint, but quickly righted himself with a nudge from his Crackers.

"Sweet pea, yesterday, I knew that someday this day would come, but today, I didn't know it wouldn't be tomorrow. I thought it would be next week or maybe right after the high holy days, or maybe on the third thursday of May in an odd-numbered year divisible by three."

Crickets chirped.

"Morty, this is my twin sistuh, Cheese."

"CHEESE?!" The townsfolk shouted.

"Let me take a pictcha!" Ernesto, presently catching Damon Runyon fever along with da rest of dese mugs, took a look through da lens and made a pickchah of everybuddy all smiles.

"--that's Siamese twin sistuh, sistuh!" declared Cheese.

"Make that Evil Siamese Twin sistuth, sistuh!" clarified Crackers.

"Specifically, Evil Separated Siamese Twin sistuh, sistuh!" clarified Cheese, who at this moment it is too bad is not named Butter.


Is there such think as Siamese triplets? Have Research and Development on that, please?


R&D: Author, you can write whatever you like. If you wish there to be Siamese triplets for the sake of a cheap pun, then there are Siamese triplets.


Author: Thank you, R&D.

Suddenly, another figure descended from the luggage compartment, mysterious, unkown, barefoot and pregnant with more questions than answers.

"-- Make that Siamese triplet, sistuh!" clarified Butter.

"Crackers! Cheese! Butter!" The assembled masses cried out all at once and at different times, and in varying states of hunger for snack food and spiritual healing and physical comfort and potatoes and gravy and pajamas and cranberry sauce. It was, after all,  nearly Thanksgiving.

"That's right, aseembled masses," chortled Butter.

"I was born a freak!" cried Crackers.

"An evil freak!" pointed out Cheese.

"Whu? My sweet pea who is the dearest light oh my light and soul of my soul, aka Crackers - she was born evil?!"

Crackers hung her head sadly." It's true, Morty. The three of us, me, Crackers, Cheese, and Butter, were boin attached at the brains. Our dear muddah didn't know what was comin or how many! Labor was intensive and inefficient. The division of labor belonged to the people. Boy it was ruff gettin' around! We did cartwheels that would never end!

"I was the evil triplet always tryin' to drag my sistuhs into the paths of rabid wolves when I was safely ensconced in a cave. They were toin apart limb from limb all regulah like on a consistent and occasional basis of time and space. Why, their dresses were regularly in tatters like rags and such while I was in the finest of evening gowns even in broad daylight. Vera Wang designed my onesies! When Doctah K --"

"DOCTOR K! YOu mean Billy the K was a doctuh?! Well I'll be a separated Siamese triplet's sweetheart forevuh!"

"MORTY!" Crackers moved as to hug her sweetheart forever but first she had a story to tell - a tale of woe! "Well foist I gotta tale uv woe to tells ya." She chewed gum and talked at the same time. She was that evil. "It was Doctor Billy the Kay, moustachioed pimp bastard and world-class Siamese-triplet separating surgeon who took the awl to our triumvirate of vaudevillian devilry."

'I can't believe there are three of you!' Doctor Billy the K shivered in his flashbacking timbers of hirsute horror. 'Man, this will be a difficult operation.'

"So you can imagine from that flashback there that our confidence was not high in this sausage-fingered moustachioed man of medicine. Would yours have been? How about YOU?"

"Who are ya talki'n to Crackers, you'r talkin' to the back of the bus and tehre's ain't nobody there!" Morty fied.

"Oh yea! Well It was a marathon surgery, and ma and paw paced back and forth in the waiting room while Uncle Pat was praying that the devil had not visited upon our family this unholy trinity of us."

"And the ting is," interrupted Cheese, because she was evil not only in the ways of the Good Book but in the ways of the okay book, Emily Post's Ettiquette, which specifically addressed interruption of your separated Siamese triplet as a faux paw. "The ting is, as we were attached at the brain and such, the tissue we shared was continually comminicatin' all our thoughts and poisonalities amognst each other. I was born the goody two-shoes, ya know! I said my prayers every night and looked both ways before crossin' the street and said please and thank you. What a sucker I was!"

"And so was I!" Butter pleaded her case. "I was so pure and smooth like an Easter lamb. Crackers was so named because she crackered her way outta the womb!! So after the operation, imagine our collective surprise when me and Cheese - innocents both! - toined out the evil ones and Crackers got to be the goody two-shoes."

"Well I was a hookah and every ting," noted Crackers.

"Hay you're right - you were a vent of da night as dey say! Say Buttah, whadda ya think of that?"

"Gee I dunno about that Cheese."

"Well it was kind of indentured servitude and all, it's not like it was in my nachah - or was it?"

"Anyways," continued Crackers, who although she was now good and all, did not like to be interrupted, and grew redder and redder with each sister's interruption, shouted," HEY LEMME FINISH MY STORY PLEASE IF THAT'S OKAY WID YOUSE!"

Relative silence ensued, accompanied by occasional slack-jawed incomprehension, straight-mouthed indifference, eyebrow-raising malfeasance, winking impishness, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.

"Tank you!" added Crackers, proving indeed her goodness as a good triplet. "As I wuz sayin', umm, what was I sayin'? Well Doctor Billy the K having puhfoimed surgery on us, having all manner of lovers for hire mopping his brown at regular intervals and passing the scalpel when he asked for it, if ya know what I mean."

"What do you mean by that?" Said Tex, from whom we haven't heard a lot lately."I come from Texas, and they don't say that where I come from! In Texas!"

"Well cowboy," Crackers addressed Tex, who was not an actual cowboy but a shipping magnate who wore a cowboy hat and a string tie and knew where to get the best barbecue in Texas,"Do ya want me to drawr you a pictcha?"

"I sure love me some pictures. Why, back home in Texas, I got a lotta pichtchas on my wall. YEEEE HAWWWW!!!"

"Hey hey hey down cowboy, settle down will ya? I'll drawr you a pictcha later. After Doctor Billy the K was done with us and the last beads of sweat were wrung from his drenched moustache and eyebrows, we were kind of a little beholden to him."

"Is that why Billy the K stole you aweay from me at the movie show?"

"Movie show? What kinda talk is that? Movie show? What year do ya think this is, it's 1987 and yer talkin' like an old timer. Movie show. Sheesh." This was the evil Butter. She was mean and rancid, and was not available in your dairy section. She was ill-churned was this butter, milked from sour Bessie, the sourest farm cow on any farm there ever was!

"Ahem, If ye'll let me continue! Ahem. Billy the K changed our lives - but it weren't necessarily for the better!"

I wonder why - he's the greatest dancer ...

"Hey wait a minute, we already saw that flashback!" Morty pointed out this word padding device.

"So yer right!"


"So I visited the Indian years later, and when I told him 'How,' he said 'Fried," like he remembered me and everything!"

"Knock knock!"

It was a scene of chaos and mild confrontation erupting into occasional fisticuffs which escalated into World War. Famine and locuts plagues the world and her people, and the good and the bad alike, the separated Siamese triplets and Jo-jo the Dog-faced boy alike because enemies, brother attacked brother attacked the mailman. The nation would little remember what they said on the bus, but little will they forget what they did on the bus.

"Hey, wait a minute," asked Morty, pleading with the newly assembled guests to give him sixty seconds of their time for him to mentally digest their recent verbiage." "What have Cheese and Butter been up to all this time - besides pretending to be Tunbridge and whoever Butter was pretending to be."

"Carrot Top," clarified Butter.

"You mean you are the greatest prop comic in the woild next to Gallagher?"

"That was none other than  me! Statue of Liberty!" Butter waved her finger as if she was holding a foam number one hand.

"You are Carrot top!"

"I toured with the greatest performers in entertainment history and had audience with world leaders and Barbara Streisand. Boy I was king of the Vegetable tops! I Lorded over Broccoli top and Kohlrabi Top and Cabbage Head. Lettuce head was my slave. Tomato head my window washer. Bok Choy top my chef.”

The Five Stages of Post-NaNoWriMo: Denial (PG-13)

First stage: Not bad - it started to work here!
Second stage: I guess it's okay
Third stage: Hiding under the covers until spring

An excerpt from Day 15, slightly edited.

Mmrma climbed onto the empty seat behind Hannah. He gave her a thumbs up with his good hand. “Mmy mmhr, mmtah! Mmt mh nmnms meenn mm mn-my mwless mmntrlst mmy mmre!”” (1)

Mmrma’s seat-mate, a balding New York haberdasher and antiques dealer named Archibald Tunbridge, was understandably surprised to be addressed in such a manner by a one-eyed jawless ventriloquist dummy; but not because it was the first time he had ever been addressed in such a manner. “As a matter of fact I have.”

“Mmm mmk my mmx mfm!” (2)

“Perhaps some other time. But as a matter of fact I saw a vent not unlike yourself just recently in my shop. I was sorting a collection of photographs of Eleanor Roosevelt when a burly moustachioed man demanded I buy something from him. He strolled in with his raccoon coat and pointed a chorizo-sized finger at me accusingly. “Hey Mistuh, whadd’ll you give me for this here item I got?” he threw a stained shoebox on my meticulously organized mahogany counter, a cloud of dust rising from the sudden onslaught of boxy gravitas he visited upon it. The dust, mind you, not coming from my well-kept premises, but from the aforementioned gentleman - if I may use the term in the broadest sense - and his unsolicited delivery.”

“Mmmh, mmh, mg mh mm mnt mmmdy,” (3) an impatient Mmrma pleaded.

Archibald Tunbridge paused to examine his ragged cuticle and polish it with an ermine-collared 24 carat emery board. “Well if you’re going to be rude I suppose I can not tell it to you at all.”

“Mmmght, mmght, Mm mmrry mmldy. Mw mt mht mhe mmssve mmmsgggrmh mm mo mn! Mmmease? (4)“

“Very well,”Tunbridge continued.”I put on my archival gloves and waited for the cloud of dust to settle. I brushed dust off the top of the shoebox with a fine-fibred whisk broom I keep on hand for such occasions. And I opened the box. When I opened the box, I was startled - what I saw was a rare 1927 Ginger Jane ventriloquist dummy with the articulating elbows and the five-key eyebrow control, with hand-tooled ginger strands, and the spring-loaded double-take.”

Mmrma raised his eyebrow excitedly.

“In exquisite condition such a specimen would fetch a high four figures at Sotheby’s. But this poor creature - she looked like she had been tortured at the hands of some crazed, vengeful madman! Her once flowing ginger locks were singed a Thanksgiving turkey brown, one luminous green eye had been ripped out of its socket and her finely sculpted jaw was completely gone. I looked imploringly at the handlebarred demon who presented this ghastly wooden sacrifice before me.”

At this Mmrma shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and began to shudder imperceptibly.

“Eh, you know, I gave it to my kids to play with - I can’t believe they never learned to take care of their tings!”

“Sir, I’m sure you know this is a very special doll, but you’ve done terrible things to it. No doll should be treated like this, especially not a Ginger Jane!”

“Yeah, if I wanted ta be lectchered at I’da gone ta Town Hall. Tell ya what, Professah, I’ll leave this doll in yer capable white-gloved hands and whatever you do with it is fine wid me!” Billy the K waved his own massive paws in front of his face. “And do somethin’ about the dust in dis joint - no wonduh business is sowuh! Haw haw haw!”

Mmmra was now in tears of rage. “Mmmsth! Mmmsth! Mmse mp! Mh mnt mke mn mmr! Mt ms mh mho mhnk mh ms, Mh Mnt mnd mn mmr!” (5)

“I do apologize if my tale is rather graphic, sir, “ Tunbridge paused, wiping his bald pate for dramatic effect; if this had been for comedic effect, he would have contined the wipe down his face, brushing past his nose and turning his smile into a frown.”And I may have embellished somewhat as is my wont. But I assure you, good man, this tale has a happy ending. “

“Mmth! Mm mstle mt mh mmnmashm mf mr mst mmark!” (6)

“Sir, if you are who I think you are - and your behavior certainly indicates to me that you are - I can’t say I understand what you’ve been through, but please be assured that my intentions were noble and restorative. In fact, perhaps I can do for you what I did for the one you know as ‘Crackers.’”

“MMHSES MHLIVE?! MMAKRS MS MMLVE?!” (7)

“Yes, your Crackers is alive, Mortimer.”

“Mw mee, Mh mh mmst mmws mh moid mn mh mng mme - mh mmst mmws mh muh moid mvuh! May, mhw mmhm mu mn mnnsnd mh Mm myin moo mrs”? (8)

“Well, in addition to my expertise in the fields sartorial and antiquital,” - Mmmrma rolls his eye a hair at this, - “I am an expert in the field of sub-esophagal and reconstructive ventrilinguistics, and I determined what she was saying by examining the ligature of Ginger Jane’s - your Crackers’ - machinery as she struggled to explain to me her predickamentation. Err, predicament. And, although yours is a more common, dime-store ligature, I could extrapolate your meaning from the painful lessons of your Crackers.”

The guitar riff from Sister Sledge’s “He’s the greatest dancer,” - who can blame Will Smith for sampling it - plays.

“A strobe-light seems to flickr in the eyes of Archibald Tunbridge’s photographic memory. “Many splinters and liters of wood glue later, Crackers was able to tell me her story unencumbered by pain. She was a marvelous specimen, as I’m sure you knew - as she told me you knew,” Tunbridge raised an eyebrow. “She told me after Billy the K wrested her away from your Lawrence of Arabia-loving arms, he kept her hooked by means of the very substance that gave her the monniker you and all the other 42nd street swells knew her by. Billy the K had a cadre of females known for their great expertise in the art of seduction-for-hire in his collection of lost souls, but this Ginger Jane had a special spot in the devilish place where one presumes he kept his hear imprisoned, like another one of his indentured charges.

Here’s what we call our golden rule
have faith in you and the things you do ...

“Billy the K took Crackers and her sisters to the disco every night - cruising for Johns of course, but also because they loved to dance - especially Crackers and Billy the K. Despite their discrepancy in size - so she told me - the rhythm and the drugs flowed through their lithe bodies - or, rather, her lithe body and his malevolent animal hide; and although I am personally more interested in the pleasures and creations of the intellect, I can envy the figurative creative flow of the dance, however primitive and epinephrine-fueled was their hedonistic ritual.”

Mmrma nodded, catching the Professah’s drift. He already knew Crackers could shake her moneymaker, but he hated knowing that Billy the K was a dancing fool himself. Mmrma despised and at the same time envied what sounded like an undeniable terpsichorean talent.

“But Crackers longed for you, Mortimer. Through the disco haze and the pills and the glitter and lights, the free-floating feeling of indestructability that her namesake poison gave to her, even after seventy-two sleepless hours at a time of non-stop dancing and hooking - something tugged at her, fingered her keys if you will, and in the middle of the dancefloor at Studio 54, one night she said to Billy the K, ‘Oh Mortimer, turn me around again!’

"Billy the K stopped and looked at her, the rainbow lights darting around her face, the structure that had captured the imagination and hearts of so many ventriloquist audiences spanning five decades - but never like this gem of the ocean ... and Billy the K slapped her. Hard. He was a big man, as I’m sure you remember, and his soft voice made his penchant for horrible violence all the more shocking. Her jaw came off with that one swipe. Splinters flew over the lighted dance floor ..."

Good Times
These are the good times
leave your care behind
These are the good times

"Crackers stared at Billy the K in disbelief, too stunned to feel the excruciating pain."

But Mortimer could feel it - it was the pain he lived with every day, all the more acute knowing that his beloved met the same fate. His one eye stared into space. He was thankful that she was better, if the Professah was not steering him sideways. And he wanted to know what happened. But it was the worst story he’d ever heard.

(1) “Hey there, mistah! Bet you nevuh seen a one-eyed jawless ventriloquist dummy before!”

(2)”Well knock my socks off!”

(3)”Yeah, yeah, get to the point already!”

(4) “Alright, alright, I’m sorry already. Now quit with the passive aggression and go on already. Please?”

(5) “Mistuh! Mistuh! Please stop! If it’s who I think it is, I can’t stand no more!”

(6)”Mistuh! I bristle at the connotations of your last remark!”

(7) “SHE’S ALIVE?! CRACKERS IS ALIVE?!”

(8)” Aw gee, that’s the best news I hoid in a long time - the best new I eveuh hoid evuh! Say, home come you can udnerstand what I’m sayin’ to yers?”

In Which the Author Allows Himself to Write Without Producing A Masterpiece Every Time Out then Doesn't Allow Himself to Write Without a Living Ventriloquist Dummy Every Time Out

One of the many ways I procrastinated during NaNoWriMo was the time I spent finding good coffee (thank you Baked and Wired in DC, and Stumptown and Joe the Art of Coffee in New York) and a nice quiet cafe where I could sit down and write. (Note: do not try this in Georgetown on a Sunday.)  It used  to be when I walked into a cafe and saw people writing - and I mean, using pen or pencil and paper and writing - I'd think, "poh-ser!" Now here I was sitting in cafes pawing at my laptop for a couple of hours a day Writing A Novel. Because it's cute when I do it.

I had given up caffeine sometime during the second or third Snowmageddon. Maybe cabin fever ramped up my baseline anxiety, but I had become more aware of what caffeine did to me since I'd started meditating. I'd started mindfulness meditation practice to learn to relax, of course. But through the books of Pema Chodron as well as the evening meditation group I was attending once a week, I slowly learned that the key word might not be RELAX so much as gentle. I knew there was always a lot bouncing around in my brain, circuits firing and re-firing until they shorted out and sometimes started to emit sparks and smoke.  But we all do that, and when you learn that, and when you learn not to judge yourself and that imperfection is the rule ... well it's a goal that's ever truly reached but it's  a process
that you keep processing, like a regular kitten on a branch.


So I signed up for NaNoWriMo for reasons similar to why I took up meditation -  to get over that self-judgement, to allow myself to write something that wasn't a masterpiece (cf. title). Okay, NaNoWriMo *was* a Journey, sans amazing animals, except for the very end, where I was inspired by mountain lions in the news on November 30th to devise a surprise attack that ended up with Kitty the mountain lion accepting the Oscar for Outstanding Actress in a Supporting Role for her portrayal of Annie Sullivan in an all-feline version of The Miracle Worker; and which brought me to my 50,006th word.

But I digress - isn't that what NaNoWriMo is all about? Letting the mind go and following it. (Um, caffeine agitated me, blah blah, back up to three cups a day and that's alright too.)

The other major form of procrastination was finding what music to listen to while I was writing. Selected inspirations:

1. Seeburg 16 rpm department store music (youtube)
2. Aphex Twin, "Cliffs" (youtube)
3. Weschel Garland, "Hi (Friends)" (itunes)
4. Glen Cambpell, "Witchita Lineman" (youtube)
5. Brian Eno, "1/1" (youtube)
6. Penguin Cafe Orchestra, "Penguin cafe single" (youtube)

Electronica seemed to help the most, and pushed me through the early stages of the Mmrma story, but it got an even bigger push when I put on the Chic box set.


Disco, particularly the variety produced by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers, was perfect for writing. In terms of meditation, it wasn't so much concentration practice as openness practice, and what you opened to was rhythm: the beat gave my fingers, with their limited typing skills something to propel them as if the keyboard was a dance floor and my fingers wore bell-bottoms. And the story went with it. I'd never much cared for Sister Sledge's "He's the greatest dancer" when I heard it on the radio as a kid (I vaguely remember having the 45 and burning the edge of it on a dare); but hearing it on the Chic box set was a revelation. The stuttering guitar line sounded like The Meters' Leo Nocentelli on coke. The repetition was hypnotic, the strings sliced at the tension, and that sick keyboard fill slices finally lets it out like an alien baby out of William Hurt. I became obsessed with the song, and it even inspired a plot line - with Crackers, the second living ventriloquist dummy in my tale.

I didn't realize Crackers was a character at first, but as soon as I named her she was there.  In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I didn't go back to edit the previous day's work, but I'd often go back to what I'd written earlier that day to expand upon it.

November 13. Morty talking here - I added paragraph breaks but this is otherwise unedited:

"Bill was laid up for months after that - with his bum leg and my bum jaw, we couldn’t get work! Before that, the two of us - who wouldn’t hire us? Nobody wouldn’t hire us, that’s who! We were living like the Kings of Kentucky! Champagne baths for Bill, warm sponges for me.  And the dames! Somethin’ about a man drinkin’ a big glass a water and whispering sweet nothings  through a wooden dummy - and I liked to roll my eyes a lot while I told them stuff, it knocked ‘em out!  

"And you know, Bill likes to think he calls all the shots, but if you want me to let ya in on a little secret ... he doesn’t!  Sometimes Bill can be passed out drunk on rye whiskey - and beleive you me, if it happened once or twice it happened a few dozen tiems and then some. But while he’s lying on the parquet in complete oblivion - that’s when I take over! That’s right, me, Mortimer! I call the shots, I make the moves, I turn my head this way, I turn it that, I flap my jaw like this, see, like I’m doin’ now? ‘Cause I’M CALLIN’ THE SHOTS, SEE? 

"And if you think the dames come running when Bill is runnin’ the show,  you ain’t seen nothin’ like when I’m runnin’ the show! I can do things Bill can never dream of - that most dames had never experienced before - and never will again!  None a them goils ever sawr a fella turn his head around 360 degrees. You shoulda seen the look in their eyes! You could almost say I ruined them for men of flesh and blood. Once they get a taste of Mortimer! I tell ya. That kinda precision, it really does somethin’ to a lady. Really turns the faucets on, if you know what I mean. I mean - you oughtta know what I mean, ‘cuz YOU’RE a dame! Man I had to lock the doors at night it got so rough. The little dames, the big dames, the blonde dames, the brunettte dames - it was like we were the Beatles! Not a lotta redheads, though,  because Bill is funny about them, he got hurt once, ya know how it is. Well maybe you don’t!  

"But,  man it was really living! And then, after the accident - we were doin’ so bad, we were trying to beg for money, for work, but  - I was gettin’ to be too much of a burden to him,  so I run off in the middle of the night. I was down on my luck, I wouldn’t sleep - I wouldn’t eat! I rode the rails lookin’ for work, running away from it all. And Bill came running lookin’ for me too, he musta looked in every freight car between here and Tijuana! He finally found me right before I was gonan end it all - I had a rock tied around my waist and I was just gonna go down into the rivuh. I’d just let the rock go when Bill saw me and jumped in after me. Without a jaw I woulda been gone that much quicker, you know? And you know what I hated most Betts? You know what was the woist? I couldn’t even tell him thank you proper like. He knew, but I wanted to say it, I wanted him to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, ‘Thanks fer savin’ my life, Bill!’

“When you met us, Bett, we were trying to make it in the Big City ... we were ... I’m ashamed to say it, Betts - we were hustlers! We walked up and down 42nd street, all rags and ass - we’d do it for a fin, we’d do it for a buck, we’d do it for smack ..."

At some point that evening I told V. that Morty had become a Times Square hustler and would do anything for smack. "Anything for a snack?" she asked me. (She also had a great line that I'll have to steal later: "These holes in my arms ain't from termites, sister!")

I went back to add:

"... we’d do it for snacks! Please mistuh, I bet you’re so big, I’ll work for peanuts, and I mean peanuts!  Boiled peanuts, honey-rasted cashews,  Jordan almonds, Brazil nuts,  chocolate-covered spanish peanuts, beer nuts, you name it, if it was a nut, I did bad things for a can of them. And I had a baaaad habit, it goes with the trade - tracks marks all over the woodgrain. And I don’t have to tell you somebody like me, without a jaw - well, I was popular in my way, a lotta the showbiz types - I’m not the kind to name names but if I were, a lotta Emmy-winning actors, with beautiful actresses and beautiful children at home - why, they’d be ruined! But I don’t like thinking about those days Betts. Nobody should have to go through what I been through Betts. If I never see another boner again it’ll be too many! Sometimes I wonder how the both of us didn’t end up in the East River tied around a jukebox.

“That’s why Bill couldn’t talk when you met us, Betts. He’d fallen a long way, a lot further than twenty feet to the ground, a lot further than twenty feet underground if you get my picture. Yours was the first kind face either of us had seen in a long long time. The big city eats you alive Betts! It eats you alive ... eats you alive ... eats you alive..”

Crackers was on the way.

50,006

That's how many words I wrote during November for National Novel Writing Month (affectionately known as NaNoWriMo.). The organizers of NaNoWriMo encourage those who take up this challenge, which entails writing an average of 1667 words a day for 30 days, to develop outlines and characters and notes - anything but actually writing the book. But that felt like cheating to me (outlines and notes are part of writing, are they not?), so I wrote without a net, as it were, though I did come up with a concept on October 31st:


I thought my working title, Fifty Easy Pieces, gave me a framework that would give me some direction, but also left it wide open for whatever performance art piece my gallery-crawling hide could come up with. My artist was loosely based on Marina Abramovic, who I wrote about here, and some of the pieces I wrote were not so thinly disguised variations of her work. I also wanted to use the exercise to work out ideas I had for my own art, like for an abandoned department store that played old muzak tapes, or a piece that would take place on a bus.

But it was a lot harder than I thought, and I found myself committing that most base of artistic sins, one that plagues the work of  talented but precious artists from Tom Robbins to Tim Burton: I was trying too hard. I kept up the pace for the first week, but much of what I wrote, which I plan to throw out, came off labored and forced. Hannah wouldn't take me through the month. The second week began badly, as my word count went down to 800 on the 8th and 117 on the 10th, the lowest word count I posted all month.

So what did I do on the 11th? I went to New York, where I thought I'd get some writing done (and see the opening night of The Pee Wee Herman Show on Broadway, but that's another story).

And it worked -- before I even got to the Lincoln Tunnel. I was on a packed Boltbus with minimal elbow room when I began to write my performance art piece to be performed on a moving passenger bus. Hannah would maker her way around the bus chatting up passengers and using a different persona for each passenger (psst - trying too hard) and one of the first passengers she chatted with was a ventriloquist named Bill.

My interest in ventriloquist dummies grew out of a fantastic gift from my homie, a Carol Channing dummy that became a recurring inspiration for photo shoots. But when it came time for my fictional dummy I wanted to find a model, a name, and somewhere on I-95 I Googled "ventriloquist dummy," and the resulting images which led me to eBay and what would turn out to be my muse for the rest of the novel.

I didn't start writing about him till the next day, but when I did, for the the first time since I started NaNoWriMo - maybe the first time ever for me - instead of me writing dialogue for a charcter, the character spoke for himself. The trouble was that spoke the way you’d expect a jawless ventriloquist dummy to speak:

”Mma dmmt seah!” exclaimed Mmrma, struggling with his deformity. “Mha, Mma nemmh mmep mha mmrst mmdy mmre!”

I was touched by his inability to communicate, and identified with the inarticulate longing to communicate. The dollar bill, used for scale in the eBay listing, also hinted at a Skid Row past. But I couldn't sustain the jawless patois, which is harder to write than you'd think, so I devised a way for him to get his voice back and let him sing. An unedited excerpt:

While Mmrma was sleeping, his legs started to twitch. He was dreaming - he dreamed that he was running in a field holding hands with Hannah and he had his jaw back and two eyes to see her with. He looked at her and she at him, and he dreamed within the dream, of a grueling twenty-four hour surgery that restored his voice and his vision. He dreamed within the dream within the dream of the time he told Hannah all about how he lost his jaw and an eye.

A bassline begins and Glen Campbell sings, “I am a lineman for the county ...”

“Bill was a telephone man in Louisville and he took me along on jobs. We’d roll along the country roads in his Chevy pick-up truck and he’d strap me along his leg while he straddled up the utility poles. We climbed as high as the birds, Betty [the name of Hannah's persona at this point] , we could see for miles - it was the most beautiful countryside you ever saw Betty! It was a hard living but man I woulda paid for that view - I’d pay to see that again and I’d take you and we’d count the pigeons - we’d count the pigeons Betty!”

And I want you for all ti -i -ime

“Then one time a storm was coming, but we were young and cocky and we thought we were invincible.

‘Are ya sure you should go up so high there, Bill, I mean, doncha see the storm clouds comin’ - can’t ya see them Bill? Bill!’ 

‘Aw c’mon Mortimer, we’re almost up to the top and after I check out the cables we’ll head right back down.’ 

‘I got a baaad feelin’ about this Bill. A baaaaad feelin’.’

And wouldn’t ya know I was right! The storm moved in quicker than he thought and a cloud pased on right over us and it got almost pitch black. ‘Ah, let’s get back down Bill, this makes me noivous!’

‘Oh alright, if you say so Mort--’

And then - I didn’t know what hit me Betty. It was like the sky opened up and went right through this bag o’ bones!” Mmrma knocked his head, whole now. “The bolt struck the pole and Bill came tumbling down twenty feet and as he slipped off my face caught one of the climbing pegs on the utility pole - BOOP right through the peeper! Tore my eye out and ripped my jaw clean off! I still get nightmare about it Betty! I wake up screaming, except I can’t scream. Get it, Bett? I CAN’T EVEN SCREAM! All I wanna do is let out a big holler, let out the pain, but I can’t Bett, I can’t! I CAN’T SCREAM!”

It was November 12. I was in New York, and I wrote 3064 words that day, and also found time to eat at my favorite ramen joint, do a gallery crawl in Chelsea (I quite liked the paintings of Tony Scherman at Winston Wachter and Paulina Olowska at Metro Pictures, and the sculpture of Kristen Morgin at Zach Feuer), and see a documentary on the influence of Finnish television broadcasts in Soviet Estonia.

Patricio has been busy, Part 2: The Wonderful World of Kittens

The "Homewreckers." Courtesy Bright Red Rocket.

Article first published as DVD Review: The Wonderful World of Kittens on Blogcritics.

Microcinema International is best known for distributing video titles from outside the studio machine, and featuring, at minimum, upper-middlebrow aesthetics. Among their recent releases are Seven Easy Pieces, a survey of performance artist Marina Abramovic’s 2005 Guggenheim residence; Tatsumi Hijikata: Summer Storm, a document of Japanese Butoh dancers; and the 2002 science fiction feature Teknolust, which stars art-house darling Tilda Swinton in a quadruple role as Rosetta Stone and three Self-Replicating Automatons cloned from her own DNA. (I didn’t believe it either. ) So it was with surprise and delight that I spied on Microcinema's docket of upcoming releases the title I present to you today: The Wonderful World of Kittens. Is this a lowbrow, if adorable and fuzzy, anomaly in their catalog? Is this kitten-porn elevated to the level of performance art? Perhaps the answer is a little of both.

Divided into chapter titles such as “Molly Kitten Plays with a Thing” and "Kittenball Championship," The Wonderful World of Kittens offers surface cuddliness as advertised. At the same time, it is not lacking in the depth one is accustomed to from purveyors of independent cinema.

The chapters are divided between interior and exterior set pieces. In the former, the kittens are frequently let loose on studio backdrop muslin, but there is no reining in the exuberance and messiness of reality, as the kittens wreak havoc on the varieties of man-made ball. The tour de force “Play Ball!” offers a rhythmic electronic score punctuated with electronic pan-flute sounds, signifying the kittens’ abandonment of high society for primeval nature a la The Blue Lagoon. As the program is rated C for Cute, these young explorers will not discover their sexuality. At nearly ten minutes, “Play Ball!” is a long chapter of this wonderful world, but will human civilization degenerate even more quickly? It ends with a kitten batting at the camera, which goes chillingly dead — just like The China Syndrome.

The music for The Wonderful World of Kittens was composed by artist Brian Dewan, whose original music and drawings have also appeared in a series of filmstrip programs. (In 2000 I saw the artist present these charming filmstrips at Brooklyn's Pierogi Gallery.) His score for Kittens is more interesting than you'd expect from your standard baby animals video, though not so interesting that the music overwhelms the kitten play. Still, Dewan pushes the envelope of pet sounds in such chapters as “Kittenball Rematch,” which introduces free jazz violin tones as a musical counterpoint to the feline chaos.

As the chapters unfold, Molly Kitten becomes a clear stand-in for the artist. Molly "Plays with a Thing," is "On the Prowl," "Is Curious." Are these not the concerns of the creative class? Is the reference to Ulyssees more than coincidence? Yes yes yes she said yes.

Kittens reaches its dramatic peak with the startling “Homewreckers.” It begins with the tranquil repose of a sleeping black kitten, but soon breaks down into a scenario of home invasion not unlike Michael Haneke’s brutal film Funny Games. Finally, the program ends with “Naptime.” One can only guess what adorable horrors will ensue upon awakening. The Wonderful World of Kittens was originally released by Bright Red Rocket in 2008. It will be available from Microcinema on October 26 — just in time for Halloween.

Patricio has been busy

I was a writer before I was a photographer. This year I've neglected my photography but have been writing more than ever before. If neglected this blog last month, it is in part due to the fact that I have been busy writing for three other venues:

The one I get paid for, as part of other duties which I've always had a hard time explaining to people.  Trust me, I work hard for your tax dollars, and last month wrote about various composers' birthdays and seeing Sir Paul McCartney on tv.

Blogcritics.org, where I have recently published reviews of documentaries about ventriloquism and controversial artist Brock Enright.

And DCist.com, where my arts reviews began appearing last week. Yesterday my review of the Poussette-Dart and Robert Ryman shows at The Phillips Collection was published.

With this flurry of activity, I wish I could work on my own stuff. It's not a matter of time, really - a friend once told me that if you wanted something to get done, ask a busy person. It didn't make sense to me until I became a busy person myself. But I'm struggling with my own projects, and the struggle begins with what my own project would be.  How will I marry writing with photography? As I work on, or avoid working on, applications for photography competitions, I face a blank page.
The answer must be right in front of me. I'll let you know when I find it.

As an aside - or is the answer somewhere within? - last month I had the opportunity through to meet a number of musical heroes: Elvis Costello, Jack White, Herbie Hancock, the Jonas Brothers (well, somebody's heroes). I even got a glimpse of Paul McCartney being whisked away to an official dinner. I took photos of my friends with some of these luminaries, but absent Taylor Swift there was nobody I was excited enough about to want to have my picture taken with them.

But the week after the all-star soiree, I met somebody I did want my picture taken with:



Tommy Wiseau is the auteur behind the cult phenomenon The Room, and I don't use the word auteur ironically. For all the press calling this "The worst movie ever made," for the awkward dialogue and acting, the writer/director/star has some kind of amazing vision. Not everybody hears that whistle - unlike many bad movies, what makes this enjoyable has nothing to do with camp or a wink-wink knowingness. The charm of Tommy is that he doesn't know. As much as the audiences that pack houses to see him at midnight screenings aroudn the country show up to laugh at him, he stands by his vision. It may not be a coherent, comprehendable vision, but it's clearly a vision - Citizen Kane homage aside, what other movie is like this?

I, Hoarder: 180 gram vinyl edition

I have three different vinyl pressings of Love's desert-island-disc Forever Changes. I have two Dexy's Midnight Runner's lps - most don't realize there was more than one, but it predated "Come on Eileen" and is more informed by Northern Soul than the Celtic whatever of their second album. I have no fewer than four Sheena Easton albums (at least three of which were purchased in the last twelve months, none for more than a dollar), and this afternoon discovered I still had the promotional album card - a thin slab of cardboard with the cover art on one side and promotional text on the other - for her Strut album. Does anybody out there like jazz tumpeter Woody Shaw? I have several of his 1970's lps for Columbia, the entire run of which was collected on a box set by Mosaic Records, but I've never listened to them and can't remember where I bought them - maybe one or two came from a trip to Amoeba Records in Berkeley in the '90s. Man I bought a lotta records there.

In short, I hoard vinyl - I have hoarded it since the 80's, and have memories of the dollar used bins at Kemp Mill Records in Georgetown where you could have picked up a mono pressing of St. Pepper for less than $10 (sadly, I didn't). I remember when Zodiac records, a Latin music specialist on Columbia Road, mysteriously acquired an incredible record collection full of punk/new wave lps that they were selling for $1.50 a pop. I picked up early Roxy Music, Todd Rundgren, John Cale solo records; I passed up a first pressing of  X-Ray Spex' Germfree Adolescents because I already had a copy. Too bad, because a few years later I saw them selling for three figures.

In the early oughts I lost a few boxes of records to mold damage owing to a flooded furnace room, but besides that I've never made a concerted effort to shave off the collection's unruly beard which is now several ear-splitting decibels beyond ZZ Top.  In the ensuing years, there has been a resurgence of record stores (and I mean record stores) in this town, with three excellent sources of used vinyl within walking distance; the dollar-bins at one of those shops is the bane and boon of my existence, full of strange records of all lands with jaw-dropping covers that - well, like this:



Or this:



There are thousands of lps in my basement, and I weeded a boxful this week. Some were easy decisions: did I ever need the Blow Monkeys lp? I'd always thought their hit, "Diggin' your scene," had an unresolved chorus that should have gone on for another bar. I don't think I ever listened to Difford and Tilbrook's post-Squeeze album more than once - for that matter, I can say the same of Squeeze's last album, and do I really need any besides Argybargy? If that? They were a band I used to eat up like corn flakes but they no longer stay crispy in my milk. I never listened to my Guided by Voices double-lp bootlegs, but I'll probably give those to my brother if he wants them. And I always thought Pussy Galore was trying too hard.

Of course, I went for a walk this evening and bought a new lp, Excavated Shellac, a collection of old string-centric 78s from foreign lands compiled by the curator of the blog of the same name, and issued by Dust-to-Digital, producers of the fantastic Goodbye Babylon set of old gospel. I bought it at Melody Records, the best new record/CD  store left in Washington, DC. I remember buying a picture-sleeve 45 of "(Just like) Starting Over" at Melody Records, when they were still at the corner of Connecticut and Q, the week before John Lennon was killed. Over the years their stock shifted from vinyl to CDs and now they again have a healthy selection of new vinyl. When I bought a Big Star 45 at Melody several months ago, it was the first time I'd bought a 7" single from Melody in more than a decade.

The thing is - I could have bought a whole stack of records from the dollar bins I could have bought twenty one-dollar records for what I paid for Excavated Shellac.

My apologies to those not infected by vinyl geekery. I feel I've gone on ad nauseum like a friend goes on about where he's seen what movies and how he saw  that movie at the Jerry Lewis Cinema in 1971 and how an appallingly expurgated version of it ran on the CBS Late Movie in 1975. I have waxed more than was my intention, and could wax some more. I have a problem. I am a recordaholic.

I'll post updates on this continuing crisis, as developments occur.

twelve thirteen things I ate two weeks ago: part 3: Flushing

I go to New York regularly but I seldom venture out of Manhattan and even more seldom into Queens. I may complain about increasing gentrification of  the Lower East Side or the Sexandthecitification of The Bowery but I never run out of things to do there. Well for once I was at a loss for things to do, and maybe the few hours I spent in South Philly gave me a taste and yearning for a big city that was not losing its regional character. Forty-five minutes on the subway, to the eastern terminus of the 7 train, I found that character in Flushing, where the advetrtising was predominantly in Chinese even before I got out of the station.

Whenever I watch Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations,  I always salivate over at least some of the regional dishes he tries, and no less so than when he devoted a program to New York. Still, as I tend to do with things I see on tv, I forgot about it. But my friend G., whom I've run into in several different neighborhoods in New York over the years, strongly recommended The Golden Mall in Flushing, not just for the food but for the sensory overload. Thanks, G.

Xi'an Famous Foods, was easy to get to but not that easy to find - I saw at least four different entrances to Golden Mall, and couldn't reproduce how I got there. There is basement entrance to 41-28 Main Street on the corner, and if you can find that, you'll find the liang pi (cold noodles, $5, pictured) and the lamb burger ($2.50, not pictured - it looks like a sloppy joe, but, laced with green chilies and cumin,  it tastes much more fantastic), and have an outrageously good and spicy meal with change from a sawbuck.

About a block down and across the street from Golden Mall is the Tai Pan Bakery. Wouldn't animal cupcakes be an intriguing variation on the cupcake craze? The mobile cupcake van could tweet that they're running out of goat. This ram was made of two layers of tiny sponge cake with a creme filling. Not as sastifying to eat as it was to photograph.

See the sidebar on seltzer in part 2. This can of agua con gas is courtesy of the cafe at PS1, the Long Island City affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art, which are both currently exhibiting surveys of performance art - in general at PS1, and, specifically, Marina Abramovic's at Moma. Also recommended at Moma: the work of found poem/collagist/ Manhatan Project scientist Bern Porter, which I found more inspiring and much less crowded  (I was the only one  there) than the Cartier-Bresson show upstairs. Peppy, a performance artist in his own right who travels with me frequently, is courtesy of my homes. The patriotism is from one of the dollar stores (real cost $2.99) in one of the sensory-overloaded malls along Main Street in Flushing.

Finally, it took me years of visiting New York before I found a chocolate chip cookie to go back for.  Within stumbling distance of  Eisenberg's is this chewy, vanilla-soaked answer to your cookie questions, from The City Bakery, which is home to an annual hot chocolate festival and the sippable cuppa cocoa you see here.

Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog of Tokyo

Article as  first published on Blogcritics.org.

Daido Moriyama, along with Nobuyoshi Araki, was part of a new wave of Japanese artists to break out of photographic traditions in the late '60s. For Moriyama, these traditions included things like focus and a level camera; his high-contrast, grainy black and white images are pure street photography, but he's just as likely to print images that are all blur and texture as he is to point his lens on disaffected youth and the banalities of everyday life. Whatever the subject, or lack thereof, his best work is full of energy, and pushes the limits of the form and what constitutes photography.

Moriyama has largely avoided the media, but that changes with the feature-length documentary Stray Dog of Tokyo (a reference to the title of one of his books), which includes extensive interviews with Moriyama as well as with the often hilarious Araki, and Japanese magazine editor and photography critic Kazuo Nishii. More intriguing for photographers, like myself, a single camcorder follows Moriyama on a photo shoot wandering around the Shinjuku ward of Tokyo, not unlike the titular stray. The camera also follows Moriyama to the darkroom, though he shares none of his developing formulas, perhaps not even to himself. Nishii recalls an exhibit which required an enlargement of one of Moriyama's prints, but after a photo lab was unable to replicate Moriyama's print, a consultation with the artist revealed that he himself couldn't remember how he printed that one.

Photographers like me will also be curious to know what equipment he uses. Araki explains that his friend almost always ends up borrowing a camera, which then becomes his. Moriyama's first was a toy camera made of Bakelite (the rugged substance that makes up any number of Brownies and other plastic cameras), and has always felt that you can make a good picture with anything. Then again, the 35mm point-and-shoot he uses on screen appears to be a Ricoh GR1s — no Leica, but not exactly a cheap camera either. But the small, wide-angle compact is perfect for his "no-finder" aesthetic; instead of looking through the viewfinder, he looks in one direction while pointing his camera in the other - from his chest, from his side, even from below his waist. In this manner, the wide-angle lens is likely to pick up whatever it was in that direction caught his eye, be it a businessman out on the town or a group of schoolgirls.

Stray Dog of Toyko also shows Moriyama shooting his very first digital still and video footage - the documentary was shot around 2000-2001, when digital was not nearly as ubiquitous as it is today. The results are funny, and, despite high-resolution color, recognizably Moriyama. But don't think that he's abandoned the analog. In addition to a steady stream of monographs, Moriyama has lent his brand name to a pocket-sized toy camera that uses 110mm film and is packaged with a small print of his signature stray dog.

In a perfect world, a documentary about Moriyama would be shot in grainy, hi-con 35mm film - something along the lines of Let's Get Lost, Bruce Weber's now classic documentary of the defeated and soon to be dead Chet Baker. Stray Dog was shot on video, but is edited well enough to rise well above the usual level of documentary as DVD extra. Students of photography and observers of modern Japan alike will learn a lot from 84 minutes with Daido Moriyama.

twelve thirteen things I ate two weeks ago: part 2: Manhattan

My next stop was New York, where my usual first stop after getting off the bus or train is for the double katsu at Go-go curry, the sole American outlet of a Japanese chain that honors New York Yankees star Hideki Matsui with a gorilla mascot and an excellent roux-based curry. But I was heavy laden and saved my Japanese jones for the Tan Tan Men @ Menkui Tei in the East Village. I don't know how many times I'd walked by this place before finally venturing in last year, but  since I've discovered it, I haven't been to New York without stopping by. The ramen noodles and spicy ground pork are perfect for a cold winter night. The $4 Sapporo draft makes it fine for all seasons.

Depending on the browser you're using to read this, about here you'll see what layout designers call trapped white space. I learned about trapped white space, and that it was something to avoid, from, if memory serves,  Mr. John Bailey, the contracted liaison between the high school yearbook staff I worked with and whoever our publisher was. I never forgot the lesson, and in fact much of what I learned about photographic composition comes from cropping photos for the yearbook, even though I wouldn't pick up a camera for some years after that. So if you happen upon a 1983 or 1984 Aetonian, and find a photo of my friend Jim waving from across the school library, his hands strategically, and unintentionally,  spread from a vortex formed at the base of a crucifix (thank you, Society of Jesus, for the strong education); well I didn't mean to crop out the top part of the crucifix - it was an editorial decision made above us.

As this digression may have entirely negated the trapped white space I was  afeared of, let us continue apace.

New York hotels don't often have the "continental breakfast" that many chain hotels offer guests, but The Mave (on Madison Ave) had good coffee and okay pastries available from 7-9 every morning. But getting up before 9 in the morning in New York isn't something I normally do. So to fuel up for a morning of browsing in the Antiques Garage, I wracked my brain and then Google to find the name of the sandwich shop I'd seen written up in the blog Jeremiah's Vanishing New York for their exemplary formulation of the iconic New York drink, the egg cream.

Eisenberg's is the name, and at 22nd and 5th just south of the Flatiron Building it's another of those places I've probably walked right by a few dozen times, blissfully unaware of the deliciousness within. When I found the place, I couldn't even remember resting my eyes upon it for even a glance before. I had the pastrami and eggs: juicy, spicy, tender pastrami, the best I've ever had (and that include's Katz's Deli).

That's the egg cream. I haven't had enough egg creams to maneuver the nuances of seltzer-to-syrup proportions, but I can vouch for its tastiness.

Not pictured: the cortado from Joe's the Art of Coffee on 23rd St. near 9th Ave; the best cuppa joe I've had since returning from a trip to South America last year. Which reminds me. Among the culinary discoveries I made in South America, besides the fantastic $9 steaks to be had in Buenos Aires and the revelatory bacon cheeseburger I had in, of all places, a Ruby Tuesday's at the Santiago airport, was agua con gas. In restaurants, diners are offered the choice between agua con gas or sin gas, the latter being regular tap water and the former being the carbonated water known here by the brands Perrier or San Pellegrino, and the generic seltzer.

Me gusta!

In DC it's easy to get Perrier or San Pellgrino or club soda in single-serving bottles. But seltzer is a rarer bubbly animal.  Merriam-Webster defines it, with endearing circularity, as water from the German town of Selters (what genius added the "z"?!), and if I am reading the wikipedia article correctly, there appears to be no real difference between seltzer and other carbonated water. But seltzer is a lot more fun to say and write, and hear, which you can do right now from the disembodied neutral voice of Merriam-Webster online. And it is part of the regional lore of New York, so much so that the city was abuzz when the last remaining seltzer-delivery man had to take time off to recover from an injury in 2009.

Which is a long way of saying I get seltzer, be it in egg cream or in its raw form, whenever I'm in New York. Your corner bodega chooses Canada Dry, but the seltzer syndicate is in completely different territory in Penn Station, where Hudson News proudly stocks only Seagram's seltzer.

The foodstuffs pictured above and adjacent to these spring-watery passages are, first, what remained of the fish special at Cucina di Pesce. I never got what the name of the fish was, despite hearing it at least three times from my friendly waiter Sal; and the beginnings of a heavy night's sleep brought on by the same restaurant's tiramisu. I wish there were an Italian restaurant this good in DC, but I know that if there were, it would cost twice as much.


Apologies for the trapped white space.

Part three: Flushing and back again.

twelve thirteen things I ate two weeks ago. part 1: Philadelphia

For my 1400th post on The Bloggy, Bloggy Dew, and by popular demand (two people asked!) I'll tell you about a weekend that started out as a Timothy Carey tour and ended up a foodie tour of two cities - three if you count the concubine's beef I had for lunch at Pete's Diner back home the day before I left.

I was in Philadelphia for a limited amount of time and wanted to make sure I had one known quantity of cheesesteak before heading north. I'd been to Cosmi's Deli in South Philly once before with my homes. Theirs was the highest rated sandwich in the "Ultimate Cheesesteak Taste Test," conducted by Richard Rys of Philadelphia magazine for Frommer's Philadelphia & The Amish Country, 2007 ed. To give you an idea of the reviewer's local cred, he rated the most famous cheesteak stands, tourist-magnets Pat's and Geno's, at the very bottom of his list. I walked two miles to get there, from 14th and South Street, past a Little Vietnam in South Philly (I saw a couple of bahn mi joints) to get a cheesesteak with whiz, and it was worth the walk.

[Not pictured: a crappy late-night carry-out cheeseteak with scrambled eggs. It wasn't even as good as the cheesteaks I can get at the corner Chinese carry-out back home.]

My hotel was close to the Reading Terminal Market. A sidebar in Frommer's suggested DiNic's as a decent purveyor of the Other Philly Sandwich, the roast pork (John's Roast Pork, rated high in the Frommer's cheesteak list, is reportedly The place to go) . I got one (right) with sharp provolone. It tasted healthier than a cheesesteak, but wasn't *that* much less greasy. I'll have to get broccoli rabe next time. Nice touch: The Thank You for Shopping Here bag.

I don't remember the name of the place whose siren song called me with this display of the Drunken Orange, a rich nutella/whiskey/truffle topping - which made its home on what was, alas, a medicocre shortbread base. Proper shortbread would have made it worth the heavy feeling in my tum tum.

Next stop: New York.

Timothy Carey's 57 Varieties

I went up to Philly last weekend for a four-hour program of films featuring Timothy Carey, the late great character actor who hammed his way through dozens of bit-roles. I've written about him previously. Some of his movies you've seen and love - notably his significant supporting roles for Stanley Kubrick in The Killing and Paths of Glory (his famous scene in the latter involces a cockroach); some you haven't seen and wouldn't love if you had (Chesty Morgan, anyone?) A contrary fellow if there ever was one, he turned down roles in all three Godfather pictures, because, he claimed, he didn't want to be one of those actors who was in it for the money. Chesty Morgan, anyone? I tease, but in my search for the Timothy Carey mysqtique I've watched a lot of bad movies, and the only one I couldn't get through was the so-called sex comedy Chesty Morgan. Which is too bad, because the director let Carey go on at length during a dinner scene where you can clearly see his fellow actors becoming uncomfortable with Carey's riffing.

Carey was also a director, most famously of The World's Greatest Sinner, a film whose reputation was such that Elvis Presley asked to see it (Carey has an uncredited role in the Presley/Mary Tyler Moore vehicle Change of Habit, as a hulking, massive grocery store clerk.) Carey's son Romeo presented a documentary about the making of TWGS (Mike White, who administers the Timothy Carey page on Facebook, writes about the documentary, and the other films shown that evening, here.) and answered questions at the screening. One of his remarks hit on why I'm so drawn to Carey - the guy simply didn't care what people thought of him. If this can be seen in his supporting roles in other people's movies, it goes in spades for his work as a director.

TWGS was rarely seen until it ran on TCM Underground last year. Carey plays Clarence Hilliard, an insurance salesman who up and quits his job to follow his own strange path - as a God. He enters politics as God Hilliard, and also tries his hand out as a rock star. One of the talking heads in the making of documentary notes that Carey has no proficiency on the guitar before making the movie, but claims that he got by on charisma alone, and could have opened for Elvis. That may be overstating things:



The film is a mess, but has a few remarkable scenes. As hard as Carey is for other directors to rein in, he's even less inhibited here, which isn't always a good thing. His performance relies too often on shouting - from streetcorners, from stage. The most memorable scenes are softer, or at least, not as loud: a seduction scene with an elderly former insurance client; and the final revelation.

TWGS has been difficult, but not impossible to see, until recently. Much rarer is Tweet's Ladies of Pasadena, a collection of footage, shot between 1969 and 1974, that was slated for a tv pilot in the 70s. This train wreck makes TWGS look like Citizen Kane; my first reaction was that it was unwatchable, but as it went on and I laughed hard at one and then another ridiculous scene, I couldn't look away, always wondering what the hell he might do next. Carey stars as the roller-skating, bib-overall wearing Tweet Twig, caretaker of a menagerie of animals including goats, chickens, ducks, dogs and kittens (all of which belonged to the Carey family). Who talk. Yes, Timothy Carey made a talking animal picture, and naturally, the German Shepherd has a German accent.



After the four hours of films were over, Romeo Carey, who expressed surprised that more people didn't walk out on Tweet's (several in the audience did) took questions from the audience. I asked if he knew about this newspaper item:

New York Times, May 8, 1957
Missing US Actor is Found

MUNICH, Germany, May 7 (Reuters)--Timothy Carey, 31-year old Hollywood actor who disappeared from his hotel here sunday night, was found gagged and handcuffed on a lonely road outside Munich this morning, the police said here today. They said the actor had hitched a ride in a car driven by two English-speaking men, who held him at gunpoin, robbed him of $40 and finally dumped him by the roadside.

Romeo Carey did know about it. After shooting for Paths of Glory had wrapped, Timothy Carey had been frustrated with the publicity around Kirk Douglas and his other co-stars. So he faked his own kidnapping. In another incident around that time, the crew had gone to a burlesque show one evening in which one performer ended her act in a buble bath on stage. Timothy Carey walked right up to the stage and got into the bubble bath with her.

Carey's son painted a picture of life with father that was funny and uncomfortable. Romeo admitted that he used to be tremendously embarassed by the Tweet's footage. Toward the end of his life Carey became obsessed with the artistic possibilities of the fart. His last, unfinished project was a play called The Insect Trainer, about a man convicted of murder by farting. Carey liked to fart in church, just before reaching out to greet his neighbor in a sign of peace.

The screenings were held at the International House of Philadelphia (amiably known as IHOP) in conjunction with the show "Dead Flowers" at Vox Populi (link NSFW), where it will run through the end of the month before moving to New York's Participant Inc. Gallery in May. The curator was inspired by the work of Timothy Carey and his refusal to compromise his artistic vision. The show assembles a group of transgressive artists who work with the body: Genesis P-Orridge, Kembra Phfaler, Cynthia Plaster Caster, among others, and a selection of ephemera from Carey's career - film stills and other promotional materials, and, pictured above, a fart chastity belt. The other artists' connections with Carey seemed tenuous to me, other than their shared fixation with their own bodies, but it was a treat to see the Carey ephemera at hand.

The Waffle Iron Stripped Bare

Welcome Prince of Petworth readers. Apart from occasional blogcritics reviews, I've been neglecting this blog in favor of my tumblr, but it behooves me to produce content of a more personal nature here, being that my work blog has lately been more fun than my so-called personal blog. But before I tell you about how I was born, and what makes me cry, and how my experiments with butterscotch pie turned out, I'd like to wish everyone in the Greater Washington Area and all across this great solar system of ours ... a Happy International Waffle Day! The picture at left is from the web presentation Washington As It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959, where you can also find a series of views of the old Waffle House on 10th Street, across from Ford's Theatre. You missed a spot!

Seven Uneasy Pieces

Marina Abramovic, "Entering the other side." Courtesty of Microcinema.

This post first appeared in a slightly different form on Blogcritics.org.

Belgrade-born Marina Abramovic, the subject of a recent New Yorker profile, is the first performance artist to be honored with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. To coincide with "The Artist is Present," Microcinema has released Seven Easy Pieces, a document of Abramovic's week-long residence at the Guggenheim in 2005, in which the artist spent seven hours a day performing one of five landmark performance art pieces by other artists and two of her own.

Performance art is by nature ephemeral - documentation may exist only in photographs or perhaps no more than the memory of an audience. Abramovic seeks to remedy this institutional loss - but is anything lost in translation? Seven Easy Pieces, directed by Babette Mangolte, condenses forty-nine hours of performance into a ninety minute video. Abbreviated as it is, the time given to each work conveys a sense of the passage of time: a summary of gestures is introduced and cycled through and repeated, and the gestures are cumulative. So for Bruce Nauman's "Body pressure," as the artist presses herself repeatedly against a Plexiglas divider, you see the traces of skin grease accrue over time, obscuring the view of the artist as she steps back from the wall.

The pieces run from the sublime to the ridiculous, the funny to the self-indulgent, the simply uncomfortable to the frankly disturbing. A re-interpretation of Vito Acconci's infamous "Seedboard" is a case in point for any number of these. In 1972, Acconci spent nine days masturbating for eight hours in the crawlspace under a ramp in Sonnabend Gallery in New York, fantasizing about those walking over him and murmuring explicit thoughts through an amplifier. Ambramovic, despite a repertoire that includes generous amounts of self-flagellation and other varieties of pain, seems in this piece less self-contemptuous than Acconci. She invites her audience, sitting in an intimate circle above her, to interact and tell her their fantasies; in one shot an excited male spectator is seen lying face down, caressing the plywood and gently humping it.

In 1969, a black-leather jacketed Valie Export cut the crotch out of her trousers and trained a machine gun on a movie theater audience. [Ed. - it was a pron theater, and she addressed the men in the audience to "deal with a real woman."] "Action Pants, Genital Panic" dripped Punk Rock at the time, but lost some balls, as it were, in the institutional confines of the Guggenheim. A heckler can he heard telling Abramovic, "Put down that gun or use it!" This may be fodder for those who believe that a work of performance art belongs to its own time: an event that once subverted expectations of passivity has become, if not passive, inert.

Gina Pane's "The Conditioning" is tailor-made for the ascetic element in Ambramovic's work (for her current show, she asked the young performers participating with her to adhere to a strict program of fasting). A jump-suited Abramovic lays on a steel bed atop an array of lit candles, which she switches out as they melt down.

Joseph Beuys, "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare" may be the strangest of the pieces, and this is coming from someone with a very high bar for the strange indeed. The artist's face is sloppily plastered with gold leaf, fragments of which dangle from her face and fall to the stage (she sweeps up the detritus during the piece). She's accompanied by a taxidermied hare, which she alternately cradles in her arms, walks along the stage with and holds with its floppy ears dangling from her mouth.

"Lips of Thomas" is one of Ambramovic's own pieces, from 1975. Originally performed over the course of two hours, this piece was expanded for the Guggenheim. It is uncomfortable watching at any length. The artist sits naked at a tale, eating honey from a jar and drinking wine as a metronome slowly keeps time. She gets up from the table to stand fully naked before the audience, revealing a five-pointed star drawn on her stomach. She takes a razor blade and cuts along one line of the star, then proceeds to lie on a cross made of ice (underneath a space heater aimed at her stomach), and then sits up to flagellate herself. She puts on boots and a military cap, and waves a flag, lined with the blotted stains from her razored belly, while a Russian folk song plays. Repeat, for an excruciating seven hours.

The seventh day must have come as a relief to both audience and artist. In "Entering the Other Side," Abramovic simply stands in a giant blue dress in the center of the Guggenheim rotunda.

Abramovic said, "I do not want the public to feel that they are spending time with the performances, I simply want them to forget about time." For ninety minutes of at times taxing performance - albeit not nearly as taxing as the seven-hour iterations - I was largely compelled, if not entirely convinced. Seven Easy Pieces is a frequently uneasy time, and may not win the artist any converts. Nor will it answer the questions of purists who may argue whether performance art should be recreated at all. But as a well-produced document, fans of the artist will find it essential viewing.

No thumbs for A Behanding

This post first appeared, in a slightly different form, on Blogcritics.org.

What do you get when you blend violence-as-humor, ironic use of racial and other epithets, casual misogyny, and the kind of relentless profanity that's the sure sign of a lazy writer who can't be bothered to come up with original verbal shock tactics? A Behanding in Spokane is what you get, and, in the case of this critic, eyes rolled all the way into the back of my fucking head.

Irish playwright Martin McDonagh followed his acclaimed Aran Islands Trilogy with a foray into Hollywood. He wrote the the screenplay for In Bruges, one of my favorite films of 2008. But, back on Broadway for the first time in four years, he has taken a major misstep with A Behanding in Spokane, his first work set in America. And what did the celebrated playwright pick up in the New World? A bad case of the affliction that saddles too many writers these days: actue Tarantino-itis.

Don't get me wrong - I enjoy Tarantino's writing and directing, but his example has begat so many wannabees who believe that Attitude is all you need for success.

Christopher Walken stars as the behanded Carmichael (affected much?), a man who lost his left hand forty-seven years ago to a gang of cruel hillbillies in a railroad yard. He has been seeking his missing digits ever since, and meets with a pair who claim to have in their possession that long lost hand. If you're eyes aren't rolling already I can't help you. In Bruges worked so well because despite the seeming leading with what appear to be the standard-issue assassins-on-the-run type, there's a lot of heart and emotion behind the characters' motives. It was more than just a po-mo gangster black comedy: it was a moving character study. But Walken plays Christopher Walken, and the self-consciousness of the writing is met by Walken's own self-consciousness - his delivery is forced, his timing mannered, as if instead of putting his signature voice and timing into a well-drawn character, he's competing with the writer's own notion of what a Christopher Walken character ought to be like. Sam Rockwell does somewhat better as the hotel clerk/receptionist; he seems to have walked off the set of a particularly violent episode of the Andy Griffith Show, and that's as good as angle as any to take with this material, but the material really favors for no one - least of all the would-be hand dealing couple, an African American (Toby, played by Anthony Mackie, who gets some laughs mostly at his expense) and a blonde (Marilyn, natch, played by Zoe Kazan) who are subject to nearly all of the aforementioned ironic epithets.

Admittedly I saw the play in previews, but barely a week before it opens in earnest, I can't see the producers coming in to make any major changes. And why should they - the audience I saw it with, despite skewing heavily to the Golden Girl set, laughed at all the right places. There's no accounting for taste, but if you do like A Behanding in Spokane, maybe we shouldn't get the early-bird special together.