This year had exceptionally fine Halloween decorations. In my part of town I was particularly taken by a black bat with a six-foot wingspan and glowing red eyes; several yards transformed into nicely creepy graveyards - one of which was crowned by a glittery banner hung from the second floor of the house that announced FANGTASIA! - and a new house by Braes Bayou that had two big furry spiders stalking up the front steps. As to the last, the spiders, plus some skeletons and cobwebs, amounted to a nice scare, but the really scary thing is the adjacent bayou. The house has such a high and handsome set of front steps because it was built to stay dry the next time the bayou floods.
To me, this year's Halloween seemed cleaner than Halloweens over the last six or seven years. As well it might be. The United States, in the form of its government, was visiting death and hell on the Middle East and actively promoting the destabilization of climate and the extinction of species, not to mention Wall Street having its unchecked, obscene orgy of greed. In 2009, there's at least as much scary stuff in the world as there was in, say, 2005, but we're not the most scary, out-of-control, hell-bent monster in the world. That's a good change - and worth a Peace prize. It makes our Halloween decor relatively innocent fun again. (Somewhere in some yard I'm sure somebody put up a dollar sign and a stock market ticker... scares that keep on scaring.)
Better our Halloween should be clean and fun. Halloween is the day before the Day of the Dead, or All Saints in the traditional Christian calendar. In Mexico and Mexican-American parts of the US, it's an important holiday with the sense that dead family and friends return to visit. People who celebrate the Day of the Dead by putting up ofrendas, the altars, clean the house beforehand in honor of the occasion. This time around, the United States managed to clean its house somewhat before the Day of the Dead. And how appropriate that earlier this week President Obama took a midnight helicopter trip to Dover Air Force Base to meet the returning bodies of 18 service members killed in Afghanistan. Today, November 1, we put away the plastic skeletons and pack up the yard spooks and the dead come to help us understand life.
Well, another Turkey City writers workshop has come and gone, and near as I can figure it, there were no fatalities this time around. Indeed, it was one of the lowest-key Turkey Cities in recent memory (although by my reckoning, I've missed the last two held). In addition to myself, the other writers involved in this unique form of self-immolation included Bruce Sterling, Meghan McCarron, Elze Hamilton, Caroline Joachim, Paul O. Miles, Chris Nakashima-Brown, Lawrence Person, Jessica Reisman, Fred Stanton and Jen Waverly. Don Webb was originally supposed to attend, but injured his back and wasn't feeling up to it. All of this went down in Chris Nakashima-Brown's ultra-hip urban hi-rise apartment which more than one person had difficulty reaching because of the twin forces of a farmer's market and a cyclists against cancer rally blocking off some or all of Austin's main downtown streets.
There were more sample chapters from in-progress novels this time than any Turkey City I can recall. Interestingly, there were also no submissions that came off as ready for publication, either, which kind of bucks recent trends. Below, the Turkey Citizens hunker down for a frazzled reading session before the bloodletting starts:
Below left, Jessica Reisman, brought a rewritten opening sequence to an in-progress novel. It reminded me of Martha Wells' City of Bones in tone if not content. Below right, Elze Hamilton, a newcomer, brought perhaps the coolest SFnal concept to the party. Her story also provoked the most passionate responses from the group, so that's a score for the rookie.
Below left, Bruce Sterling applies is distinctive brand of literary criticism to a hapless story. Below right, Fred Stanton brought the opening chapter of a mythic, supernatural space opera hybrid. I got a kick out of it, but threw Nakashima-Brown for a loop when I described it as a "Post-colonial pseudo-Pakistani anal-retentive society," which was apparently too close to a Bruce-ism for him to parse coming from my mouth.
Yes, Jen Waverly and Meghan McCarron were up to no good. You can tell by the fact Waverly started hitting the sauce early. McCarron seemed taken aback by the Laissez-faire structure of the workshop, in particular the lack of a timekeeper. Everyone was pretty bleary-eyed by the time things wrapped up, so perhaps a timekeeper would be a good idea.
Traffic stops and pedestrians flee when Turkey Citizens are on the move for lunch. We ended up eating in a nifty Thai place right next to the former location of the late, lamented Adventures in Crime & Space bookstore, which is now a boutique owned by Sandra Bullock. And I also spilled a glass of water on Nakashima-Brown's iPhone, but he'd wisely installed a waterproof ap, so all was well.
Left to right, Caroline Joachim, Lawrence Person and Paul O. Miles. Joachim brought a time-travel romance, Person a R.A. Lafferty pastiche and Miles a story best described as period Texas Weird.
Chris Nakashima-Brown demonstrates exactly what he'll do to me the next time I bring a 9,000-word story to a workshop with a 5,000-word limit.
The critique session gets under way, in which egos are crushed and dreams ground underfoot. Ah, good times...
For anyone who's interest, I consider the critique my own story received during Turkey City over at my Gibberish blog.
You’ve seen it. Everybody in the urban United States has, and I have no doubt it’s scattered across the world. It’s the blue COEXIST bumper sticker where the white letters are, respectively: the crescent and star of Islam; the Peace symbol for “o”; a male-female-equality “e”; a Star of David for the “x”; an “i” topped with a Pagan Pentacle; an “s” adapted from the Taoist Yin-Yang symbol; and a “t” that’s a Christian Cross. Though there are many variants, this is the classic. There seems to be some controversy over the copyright of the classic design. Interestingly, the artist is not the party trying to control the copyright, according to a Web site called carryabigsticker.com.
Recently I saw the bumper sticker on a late-model car in the parking lot of a Roman Catholic retreat center. Someone there was evidently on the Coexist wavelength.
Then when exploring my new neighborhood (Old Braeswood in Houston) I found a pleasant little park with a bench surfaced in hand-made tiles. One of the tiles is a bright yellow take on COEXIST. Very sweet.
There's a venerable writers' workshop of ill-repute, semi-permanently situated in Austin, known as Turkey City (for the sticklers to tradition, the full and formal name is the Turkey City Writers' Workshop and Neo-Pro Rodeo). Writers of note who've braved this august meat grinder on occasion include Howard Waldrop, Steven Gould, Lisa Tuttle, George Alec Effinger, George R.R. Martin, Connie Willis, Jeff VanderMeer... well, the list is long and impressive. It's held irregularly these days, often coinciding with Bruce Sterling's whirlwind trips through town, and this coming weekend just happens to be one of those irregular days.
Historically (which is to say, by unofficial yet no less sacred tradition) Turkey City participants put off writing their sacrificial piece of fiction until the last possible moment, in some cases scribbling feverishly until the wee hours of Turkey City eve before staggering in the morning of with a crumpled sheaf of still-wet mimeographed copies, smelling strongly of carcinogenic chemicals with enough purple ink to stain your fingers for a week.
Some participants in this weekend's shindig apparently have no respect for tradition, and have used email (aka Tool of the Devil) to distribute their story early. For shame. I, for one, will and am continuing to follow precedent slavishly. In fact, with the deadline staring me down at the end of the week, I broke down Sunday and began to write. Not too terribly much, mind you, but it was fiction, and it was short (or shortish. By my standards). I even have a title: "Where the Rubber Meets the Road." This is, by my reckoning, the first writing that I've done this year that wasn't A) an interview, B) a book review, C) an installment of Memory or D) related to my Chicken Ranch non-fiction book project in some way. It's somewhat startling to realized that here it is, October, and I haven't written a single piece of short fiction for the entire year. Not that I've ever been a prolific writer by anyone's definition, but still.
Last night things started clicking a little bit, story-wise. Word production topped 1,500, which is a good number for me. Some character details surfaced that give the tale much-needed subtext. The ending, which had persisted as an undefined "something poignant happens" vagueness, has begun to coalesce into something verging on tangible. And I've even twigged on the general mood the piece needs, as opposed to the mood I thought it should have. There's still a long haul between now and Saturday, but I'm slightly more optimistic today than I was yesterday that I'll have at least a coherent first draft ready by then.
And if not? Well, I'll have to burn that bridge when I come to it.
I've always thought libraries in general and the one in which I work in particular have so much interesting stuff - starting with but by no means limited to the books. Here is a case in point. Last Saturday, Rice University received a Moon rock in honor of John F. Kennedy. It was in the Rice University football stadium that JFK committed the USA to the Moon race in 1962. The Kennedy family received the rock from NASA in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo lunar landing. The Kennedys now have donated it to Rice. Through March 2010, the rock is on exhibit in Rice University's Fondren Library.
Photo courtesy David Engle. Check out David's images of Rice and Houston on Gigapan: it's a fantastic photographic technology.
"The chair...is against the wall. John has a long mustache."
This cryptic message to Americans in occupied territory crackles over the radio in the mountain camp led by Patrick Swayze in John Milius' Red Dawn (1984). An incitement to revolt, one that mirrors the banner seen across the music store-turned Soviet-American Friendship Center just before it blows up: "People of America, Rise and Join the Revolution!"
I recently had the fortune to see a special Swayze memorial screening of Red Dawn at Austin's Alamo Ritz. I don't think I had seen the film since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And once you stop laughing at the Brat Pack interpretations of Milius' napalm-perfumed Nietzschian dialogue, it's interesting to experience the movie at a long distance from its Cold War context. And realize that the movie is an alt-history fantasy of twentieth century American revolutionaries.
A couple of days later, I literally bumped into Austin-based conspiracy theorist Alex "Infowars" Jones coming out of an elevator in an underground parking garage (very Deep Throat). I had heard about the latest story Alex was following, regarding the apparent takeover of the town of Hardin, Montana (including the town's abandoned prison) by a private military contractor operating under the name American Police Force.
The story, initially picked up in regional media, was perfect material for Alex's master narrative of the imminent imposition of martial law by the incipient world government, complete with FEMA-style permanent "emergencies" and prison camps for those with the will to resist: - In a remote part of the country, a previously-unheard of private company called "American Police Force" arrives to take over the local prison, which has been abandoned for two years. News searches reveal a CNN report from April that Hardin and the local "Two Rivers Authority" is proposing to establish a Gitmo-style detention camp for enemy combatants: "Guantanamo Bay West."
- In the town, black Mercedes SUVs appear with "City of Hardin Police Department" logos.
- The logos feature a coat of arms of a very Old Europe-looking double eagle. Upon investigation, it turns out the logo is an exact copy of the Serbian coat of arms!
- A similar logo is found on the website of American Police Force, which reads like material created as backstory for the new season of 24 (except for the very odd touch of a continuous loop of Ravel's Bolero on the home page), full of pictures of European-looking soldiers in action poses and lots of riot control gear.
- Reports indicate APF is somehow affiliated with Blackwater/Xe.
- The chief executive of American Police Force turns out to be a mysterious Montenegran, Michael Hilton, also known as Miodrag Mic Djokic.
- A sign posted on the inside of the detention center reads "NO HOSTAGES WILL BE ALLOWED THROUGH THESE DOORS."
As the story develops, it becomes apparent that "Michael Hilton" has an extensive criminal history as a fraudster, suggesting that the conspiracy is an elaborate con of a a bunch of rube local pols. Hardin as Poisonville?
Which makes me imagine what should have been the last Patrick Swayze movie, one that would have married his talents for action and song and dance: a 21st century post 9/11 remix of The Music Man. Harold Hill=Michael Hilton, selling the folks of Two Rivers City on the idea of paying his imaginary Blackwater affiliate to turn the town jail into a lucrative government detention camp for terrorists and traitors. Envision a massive Bollywood techno mix of "Seventy-Six Trombones," with the marching band replaced by mercenary riot police, a whirling dervish mob of Central Asian terrorists, and chorus of fat and happy Montanan townspeople.
And then I read that somebody is already filming a remake of Red Dawn. Currently in production in Michigan, Red Dawn 2010 involves a Chinese invasion of suburbia, with Chris Hemsworth (Capt. Kirk in the Star Trek reboot, and the upcoming live action Thor) in the Swayze role and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Comedian) in the Powers Boothe jet pilot role. Suburban 21st century analogs to drinking the blood of a fresh-killed deer TBD.
Red Chinese invasion? I suppose 20th century thinking is to be expected from a remake of a movie whose plotline was rendered obsolete in 1989, but this is even worse, Yellow Peril stuff worthy of some vintage pulp like The Spider.
A more attuned remake for the post-9/11 world would retain Alex Jones as a consultant, and feature an occupation of America by our own government in league with multinational forces and the gnomic cabal of the Bilderberg Group — perhaps tapping that scary thread of The Turner Diaries running through a lot of the Tea Party rhetoric. Imagine our high school jocks going underground in the abandoned Circuit City, becoming guerillas fighting the invasion of their town by FEMA, the National Guard, and Belgian Blue Helmets. Imagine a Hollywood movie that takes on as its plot an actual near-future American revolution.
To the astonishment of many, the American Planning Association's 2009 list of Great Neighborhoods in America includes Montrose in Houston. The surprise comes when "Houston" and "planning" occur in the same sentence. Houston is a sprawling unzoned bricolage of people, places, industry, commerce, arts, and academia. Planned it is not. It may not even be a city, if you define city as an urban entity where there is sensible zoning and mass transit such that you don't absolutely have to own a car.
The APA designating Montrose a great neighborhood was reported in the Houston Chronicle this week. "One of Houston's original streetcar suburbs..." says the APA. "Eclectic and urbane, the neighborhood is a fusion of architectural styles, land uses, and people."
Enormous credit goes to the gay community, which has made Montrose its Houston heartland since the 1970's. Countless gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people and groups poured their creativity, labor and money into these city blocks over the years, because they felt they had a right to live in a classy and congenial area. Along the way, a number of remarkable institutions decided they could coexist with the GLBT community and practiced vital commitment to the neighborhood too. These were museums, schools, businesses, and churches (one of which I belong to - St. Stephen's Episcopal Church.) All of these stakeholders together proved capable of planful urban vision in the absence of same at the city level. The APA designation bestowed on Montrose should not be seen as sanction for Houston's general planlessness, which much of the time has dreadful results. No, it's a salute to Montrose!
For more details on the 2009 Great Neighborhoods visit the APA Website.
