This week we check in on a wizard and a warrior preparing for adventure.
The music in this week's episode is used under a creative commons share-and-share-alike agreement. Thus this story, in turn, can be used freely as the basis of other creative works. Bound for Adventure (Marcos H. Bolanos) / CC BY-SA 4.0 As a special bonus, please enjoy these circa-1984 drawings that may as well be of Quanz and The Magus:
This story, constructed as a series of tweets, explores the concept of limited information. Ha ha, so pretentious. Maybe that's the opener to write if this podcast were somehow on a museum wall. But yet, but yet.... Our narrator has been near an uncertain event (a terrorist bombing in San Francisco: but the location, nuclear contents, and casualties of the bomb are unknown). He hears only rumors - can communicate only by tweets - and sporadically at that, with a dying phone battery and failed telecommunications. At the same time, he hopes to put the brightest spin he can on a flight from town by foot. Every one of those factors, as you can see, involves some limitation or distortion of the information available to the listener. Anyway, I guess this particular story is not a comedy.
Last week, Michael and I had the wonderful opportunity to go down to Slab City. And so I wanted to write a story centered there.
Here are my NOTES: (1) I understandthat "hit the slab(s)" has a couple of slang meanings, but one is to get on the highway. (2) In this bit, I speak of Slab Cityindirectly, but - Air Force base, Salton Sea - it's sillyquibbling. I demur from calling out SC specifically, because I made up most of the particulars inside town. So we have a Slab City of the imagination, if that works.
There is a library in Slab City: an Anarchist Library run by a wonderful woman I've barelybriefly met named Cornelius Vango. Hers is not the library I describe here, but I was inspired by it. I was also inspired by Salvation Mountain, and the idea that Salvation Mountain was built by a lovable old crank who passed it on to younger apprentices when he died.
(3) Rancho Costa Nada is one of my favorite books. It is simultaneously a screed against civilization, and a manual for how to build a passable desert hermitage ("hogan") for under a thousand bucks. To me, Philip Garlington, author of RCN, is an unknown cultural hero.
(4) Kilgore Trout is one of the greatest things Kurt Vonnegut ever dreamed up. He is a disgruntled writer appearing in many of KV's novels - a crank whose strange, dreadful-seeming, or possibly-visionary science fiction broadsides are published in innumerable porn mags. Due to postal laws of the time, a certain amount of print matter was required in blue periodicals. Trout could not publish anywhere else, and poured supposed millions of words into these spaces. I love Vonnegut's strange idea of Kilgore Trout. Trout was a man who made his way as he could before the day of online 9-11 conspiracists.
(5) The Richard Brautigan quote is from his novel The Abortion. It meant a good deal to me to quote this specific book, because, title aside, it's about a man who runs a fancifully surrealist library in San Francisco in the years before the summer of love. It's an economically-impossible reverse library where people bring the librarian books that they've written, full of their hearts'ideas. They deposit these documents so that they will not be seen again. In the end, a woman entices Brautigan's protagonist to enter the real world and stop living in a repository. I felt I was almost thinking of a mirror-reflection of all of that. (5) If you didn't know, the quote from Col. Colby is from Apocalypse Now. (6) I would be remiss not to send people to the Slab City reality show of Jack, a raconteur with whom we were happy to spend a hunk of an afternoon on Sunday, May 15. Kirsten Dunst was right in the neighborhood filming an indie movie about aliens - Jack was participating. That's not a joke. We will all be eagerly looking out for this Kirsten Dunst movie.
I try to squeeze in a story about a gnome, but there are just so many sponsors to acknowledge...
NOTES
(1) Michael and I met some friends to camp near Joshua Tree for the four days preceding this post. We agreed during long car discussions that we'd like to put up a funny episode this week - not something black and dour like the bits we have in our pocket at the moment. So I came home from an arduous trip, got up at 6am the day after, wrote this thing, recorded the voice at 8, collected the music tracks, and finished editing in order to post it by the end of a late lunchtime (yeah, I was actually at work in between). And that is why even casual audiophiles will notice the sound isn't as good as it might be. Well. Consider the heroic duress under which it was whipped up from scratch. (2) The Gnome Story (or "Song") is a real, existent piece Mike and I recorded in the sessions for our album. We decided it was one of those times when things just didn't work out: The Gnome Song is a mess. So we buried it in the CD-ROM special features of the disc, where it was assured that no one could possibly find it. It's an inside joke for us that I am pretending to offer The Gnome Song as the content of one of these podcasts. Because it will never be in one of these podcasts. (3) All the non-gnome music in this piece was obtained by going to www.freestockmusic.com and entering the search term "corporate".
This week's bit is grand and rollicking and old. The recording's new, but the story is like, 1999 old. Mike and I used to perform it in the live shows we did in our salad days. Ten years after that, when we put together a CD, we left this out. I was an ambitious youth in 2011, harboring delusions that this story could form the core plot of a feature-length animated film. One or two animated shorts down the pike, I can certify today that that seems unlikely. So "Temporary Insanity" deserves (1) a goofy title like "Temporary Insanity" (we used just to call it "The Slide Song"), and (2) a recorded existence. But who knows. Maybe this story'll still someday form the "core plot" of a graphic novel.
P.S. I truly once temped at a firm that designs prison kitchens.
Happy Tuesday! We are beginning a podcast.Michael and I (Marc) have dreamed up this project as a season of 24 weekly episodes appearing on Tuesdays. Each one's going to be a short story or vignette [Marc] set to music [Mike]. What's short? Five minutes, or on an extraordinary week wemight stretch to ten. Our opening number on this grand May (not to be confused with grand mal) Tuesday is about a man living in solitary confinement. It's good to start off light! But the quiet and spareness of the piece- even the guitar-tuning notes that open it - these maybe-just-maybe evoke the idea of a story creating itself out of the void. So we pickedit as our starter. But sure, ok, it's dark, and there are even brief moments of cussing. Don't play it at top volume in your work cubicle, which seems unlikely anyway. The story is called "Playlist".
REFERENCES Yeah!, I actually have references, as I often might with these pieces. (1) Hell is a Very Small Place: Voices From Solitary Confinement, Jean Casella, ed. This anthology of writings by men and women who've lived through solitary confinement, or who are still incarcerated, appeared just earlier this year. It is terrifically powerful, and proceeds go to the nonprofit Solitary Watch. (2) Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There. Mark Baker, ed. I read this book in the late 80s, and the story never left me of Col. Thomas Moe, who was imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton and built houses in his imagination during solitary confinement. I distort his story somewhat here (Deer Hunter, in water up to the neck in a bamboo cage etc.) as the conflations of a semi-unreliable narrator. Sorry! The jist is the same. (3) Solitude, Ella Wheeler Wilcox. "Laugh, and the world laughs with you / Weep, and you weep alone". A self-conscious allusion.
