effigies

Chris Kammerud

Hello, readers

Last night, what involved the Southwark Fireworks Festival, proved the perfect distribution of eating, riding, walking, watching things blow up, walking some more, and riding home. Curry consumed at Shad, near London Bridge, which features beautiful glass plates, trimmed in red, that they promptly removed upon our ordering because, I guess, we did not order the special food that rewards the orderer with being able to keep the pretty, pretty plates. We rode the bus to the park, or close to the park, and then walked with a lot of people, passing down an alley, people hanging out the windows, watching the sky explode with light in configurations resembling spirals, willows, and hornets nests. I waved at some of the people. They did not wave at me. This makes sense because of the aforementioned sky exploding probably distracting them from the ten thousand people passing by and the one boy waving.

In the park, we stood under a tree, still holding onto a smattering of autumn leaves, and watched the pretty lights flashing in the sky, as well as those more earthbound shiny things a few hundred yards to our left what included a carousel and glittering, spinning, swing thing. They played Frozen during part of the fireworks. It reminded me of Vietnam and a boy who said he was so tired of that song and I asked him if he was tired of the song or people singing it and he said, people singing it. He said he actually liked the song. That’s the way of things. You like them, but say you don’t, because.

Someone asked about effigies. Someone in the comments yesterday, and also someone who was me, last night, before I even saw the comments, because effigies. Apparently, they don’t do them very much anymore, and not so much in giant public gatherings because fire bad, protest scary. Apparently, not too long ago, children pushed wheelbarrows around with unlit effigies in search of candy. Which helps explain why Hallowe’en was not that big in England considering they have children carrying around death figures every November 5th, so who needs pumpkins?

We went home by way of a long walk, three of us discussing school, Harry Potter, fandom, fairly rare and beautiful messes of hair and what’s to do be done with them, authors we love, authors we heard about once, authors that wrote whole books about a baseball.

It was a good night.

Happy effigies, readers.

Burn on1.

ttfn.

[1] Yes, that was horrible. Well spotted.

remember, remember

Chris Kammerud1 Comment

Hello, readers.

image
from Mirror (UK)

The Southwark Fireworks Display includes music, circuses of fire and light, food and drink stalls, and, so far as I can see, very little mention of what Bonfire Night in the UK (apparently it’s celebrated on different days for different reasons in different countries) actually refers to, which was remembering and remembering how on the fifth of November, erm, ing, during the gunpowder, treason, and plot, the King and Parliament survived being blown up and so celebrated by setting things on fire.

In the olden days, apparently, it was known as Gunpowder Treason Day and somehow or other attracted a very anti-Catholic sentiment during which, as Wikipedia puts it, Puritans gave sermons on the ‘dangers of popery’. Followed by children begging about town with effigies of Guy Fawkes (did they carry them like torches?) and so the day became known as Guy Fawkes day. Also, there were class riots.

Most of these things, readers, I’m not sure anyone remembers.

Now, it’s all about fireworks and things going boom.

The other night, at BFI Southbank, there was a showing of Brazil (introduced by Paul McAuley). In the film there was a scene in a restaurant in which a bomb goes off and there is much blood and horror, but everyone not directly affected goes on about their day doing their very best to ignore the bombs and the blood, the waiter even pulling a bamboo screen across the carnage so as to better allow his diners to ignore what was happening on the other side.

It felt very apropos to most of life, and I was scared that my life was mostly spent eating food at a table with a veil drawn across what I didn’t want to see. I would prefer to see, rather than not see, or so I tell myself, but I imagine this is what everyone tells themselves all the while some secret waiter, in some secret part of their mind, draws veils and curtains and shuts doors and whispers, “Oh, no, nothing to see, here, nothing worth remembering anyway.”

I will be at Southwark tonight, at the festival of fire and memory, and will report back on whether anything of note (anything worth remembering, that is) burns or explodes or otherwise adds a bit of dark magic to an evening.

Happy 5th of November, readers. Happy remembering.

ttfn.

star wars

Chris KammerudLeave a comment

Hello, readers.

Star Wars. Two words, inside of which a great deal of my imagination unfolded, through various super, old-bit adventures, space-based dogfights, card games, movie poop shoots*, and fan-fiction**. It also led me to this interview, The Power of Myth, between Bill Moyer and Joseph Campbell, which led me to deeper love and appreciation for the enduring power of stories (especially involving snakes and pretty ladies and not dying), and played a large part in me deciding to travel around India for 6 weeks after teaching in Korea.

Once, in 9th grade, in shop class, someone interrupted a game of Magic: The Gathering, to express their wonder as to whether or not I masturbated to one particular image of a buxom female (possibly a faerie with sharp, blue hair) and they were sure I did, that I probably could only get a cartoon girl to pay attention to me, and I remember the smell of sawdust and being so angry I could cry. I remember later Yoda saying that fear leads to anger, and anger to hate, and hate leads to suffering. I wonder if being so angry you could cry is the suffering he meant.

I don’t remember, as many do, a great deal of bullying or taunting because of Star Wars. I imagine it’s much different now. I wonder what people are taunted for playing at in shop class. I wonder if any of them have a story they will love and hold onto and remember later when life makes them so angry they could cry.

The stories you love become a part of your story.

For the entirety of my life, when I looked up at the stars, some part of me saw a fairy tale of heroes and princesses and the possibility of redemption.

On December 13th, the British Film Insititute, as part of their Science Fiction season, Days of Fear and Wonder, will be holding a STAR WARS day, in which–along with special guests, special cocktails, and special DJs–they will screen all three films of the original trilogy. And I will be there, along with a new friend and my fellow geeks, old and new, collecting a few more stories to squeeze in between the words star and wars.

*

As Jay and Silent Bob so lovingly referenced as a sort of almagamation of movie news websites that sprung up with the web and, perhaps not coincidentally, the pre-production days of The Phantom Menace, the most famous/notorious being Ain’t it Cool News–a site I spent a great deal of time on during my late teens and early twenties, witnessing the evolution of ‘first’ and the supposed power of the internet to crush opening box office results.

**

At one point in my life, I wrote a great deal of Star Wars fan-fiction (not slash) at a site called wattos junkard, which much to my sadness and the inevitability of time, no longer exists. Though, I believe, if one were to search for the words Domus Prime, one might find where Sailor Coruscant transported our imagination, somewhere safe and sound and lit with dark sparkles, I’m sure.

rain and wardrobes

Chris KammerudLeave a comment

Hello, readers.

In the bedroom, a man is taking apart and putting together our wardrobe. The bottom bit, once slanted and running away towards the floor, will now be put straight and brought back in line. Perhaps, fixed, the wardrobe will open onto a new world in which I can go and become a wizard and live a very long happy life where I can fix my own wardrobe.

It’s finally gotten cold in London. Scarves and overcoats abound. I’ve decided I need an overcoat. It would be good not to be cold. And also to look good. When I was younger, I knew that it was better not to be cold, but I didn’t understand how to look good–or rather, how to feel good enough to want, or believe, that I could look good. It seemed impossible. I was chubby and not cool and everything was expensive. It was much better to buy 4mb of RAM so that I could play Space Quest 6, than it was to think about having a really great pair of pants, or coat.

Now, I don’t think about RAM so much. Computers take care of themselves. We’re post spec.

When I was younger, the most I thought about clothes was that they could be big and baggy and hide who I was, and that if I didn’t put too much thought into them, then they wouldn’t say anything about me or my thoughts. Now, I think that saying your clothes say nothing about you is very much like saying stories aren’t political, which is to say that everything is political and, of course, how you present youreslf says something about you, however much you do or don’t think about it.

I do think about having a nice coat, now, and clothes that fit. My shoes come in a variety of colors. My scarves are bright. I’m happier with myself and happier to be seen.

Sometimes, being seen is a political statement.There’s something to be said here for wardrobes and closets and singing in the rain. I will leave it unsaid, though, as one must leave room for the reader to see for themselves.

Happy Monday, readers. You know who you are. If you don’t, find out. And then show someone else.

ttfn.

Halloween

Chris Kammerud1 Comment

Hello, readers.

Here is a picture of me dressed up as Doctor Who.

Doctor Me

Can’t seem to find a picture of me dressed as Captain Jack. If you would like, though, readers, do feel free to imagine me in a kitchen dressed as Captain Jack, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what you’re missing.

I never did quite manage to dress up as Rose. Perhaps, another day.

Once upon a time, my father told me that only people with no imagination possess no fear of the dark. This seemed wise to me at the time, especially as it was said by him as he rolled back into bed after having been sick as a result of chemo treatments and also cancer.

A lot of people describe horrible events as unimaginable, which is silly. What they mean, I think, is that very often the terrors we imagine have more to do with who we are and where we come from than the world we live in. By which I mean, my terrors tend to involve the dark and faces, which is a perfectly reasonable terror for a lonely boy who overheard his parents arguments and whose ancestors sat around a fire, afraid of loud noises and what might wait on the other side of the darkness, but in so many ways, the dark is a far less terrifying place than rolling back into your bed, sick from chemo, and pretty sure that soon you will be dead. But not a lot of people imagine the mundane moments of horror that intrude on our lives. It’s not that they’re unimaginable. It’s just that they don’t live as brightly in our imaginations as the devils and ghouls that more often haunt the darkness that haunts us, inside and out.

Sometimes, when I wake in the middle of the night, for just a moment, a shape, or a face, will peer in from the dark doorway, and a terror will grip my heart that I’m not alone. I know it isn’t real, but it feels real enough. In those moments, I think of what my dad said and the terror loosens and my heart beats a little easier. Something about how he shared his terror helps in those situations, as I hope, very much, that it helped him. Remembering his words means that he’s there in the dark with me, and I’m not alone. Some ghosts are worth not giving up.

Happy Hallowe’en, readers.

ttfn.

Chris KammerudLeave a comment

what.

Hello, internet.

Last week, the name Bo Burnham graced these pages(1) because of what. and how it’s the future of comedy, what with its singing, dancing, miming, and deliciously meta and sometimes surprisingly heartfelt riffs on reality, consciousness, comedy, and, um, riffs.

One of the things I loved about his performance, though, is something very old fashioned. Story and theme.

Bo’s up there at the beginning, and he’s stalking about, roaring like Godzilla, and then he’s reading from a notebook that he shows you is blank and wonders, ‘Why am I lying to you?’, and then he’s playing a song and wondering how to make sense of the sadness and why is everyone laughing? Very soon, it’s very apparent, that this routine is less stand-up and more avant-garde one man show in which, for better or worse, you’re watching a comic and performer struggle through a David Foster Wallace level of noise-drunk, self-involement, searching for some sense of meaning in the cliche’s, in the weary punch lines, in the routines of comedy past. Bo Burnham loves burying jokes and casting aside one-liners in a style deliberately out of sync with expectation.

Every generation grows up believing they know everything. It’s never been true, but lately, it’s been closer to the truth. We are so far post-modern that I think most of us can agree we’re post-reality and looking back and in and out trying to find out when we passed reality by and how we can find it again. Something real. Something genuine. I watch Bo Burnham in what., and I see a comedian five-steps ahead, assuming his audience is at least three-steps ahead, and so left wondering, how the fuck do I tell a joke when I, and everyone, already knows how all of this works? And what’s the point anyway? We’ve had comics before. I’m just another guy on a stage doing the same thing everyone else has ever done and how can I be new and me and real when whatever I do feels like a copy of someone else?(2)

And Bo, like DFW, does the only thing you can, really, which is to dig in and reach out and try to create something, anything, out of the noise. There’s such joy in watching Bo mix live and pre-taped bits. For some, perhaps, watching a man mime playing keyboard, after, you know, already actually playing the keyboard earlier might seem silly. But, I think, while it is silly, it’s also brilliant, because all the mixing of live and pre-taped stuff begins to feel like a comment on the noise, tangible and intangible, real and unreal, that all mixes together until we get to that place post-reality where so many people don’t care when they go to see 2NE1, or Girl’s Generation, or watch reality TV, or a YouTube video, whether it’s really real, or kind of real, or so fake it’s hyper real.

There’s this bit, by the end of the show, when voices off-stage begin taunting Bo (calling him a fag, offering to make him rich if he’ll just focus more on his brand, wondering why he acts so arrogant on stage and then so shy off). It’s brutal, honest, and a little scary, watching him cower in the dark, all light dimmed to a spotlight on his body, and the voices calling from the darkness, name-calling, name-dropping, naming him whatever they see fit. Earlier, Bo does something similar in a routine of Gollum-like split between his left and right brains. Then, he figured how to unite his logic and emotion into comedy. Here, he does something different in that he’s not explicit in what he’s doing. He doesn’t explain or analyze or undercut the punchline of this joke because there’s no joke, there’s just this, Bo raising a hand, cutting the voices into a refrain, ‘We think we know you. We think we know you.’(3). It’s so eery and awesome and then, he turns, he moves his hands a different way, and he begins remixing the voices that taunt him into something like a dance-pop-revolution, into something beautiful and alive and not burdened by fear or shame or logic or anything of what he’s been talking about all night.

It’s brilliant.

That is not all that’s on my mind, readers, but it’s enough, and all that I’m writing about today.

Happy post-reality.

ttfn.

(1)Webpage. Witness the linguistic skeumorphism! At some point, far off in the future–when apes or aliens or robots or [insert surprising but inevitable overlords of humanity] rule the earth–someone will ask someone else where the term webpage came from and that someone (probably a magical analog cyborg) will say, ‘Well, my little Farfanoog, a long time ago people used to worship trees, and the spiders that lived and wove webs between the leaves, and they used to strip the wood from the tree to make their own webs in which to write words and one day they learned how to weave their dream weavings into the clouds and they called these floating images that graced their glass, webpages.’

(2)Before the internet, before we had everything, it must have been easier to feel unique, mustn’t it? Or is that just generational exceptionalism?

(3)It’s a phrase that seems as much about how people think they know Bo, as it is a phrase of how, in the YouTube generation, perhaps more than any other celebritied generation, so much of the fame is based on the idea (real, unreal, magic) that fans and artists know each other, that there’s this intimate connection wherein your videos are you, and you are your videos.

The Great Perhaps

Chris KammerudLeave a comment

Hello, readers.

Recently, I began reading Looking for Alaska, John Green’s first book. More recently, I finished it.

Here are some thoughts about my thoughts.

Thought #1: That’s a lot of cigarettes.

Thoughts about thought #1: The characters in Looking for Alaska burn through more words and ideas and cigarettes in one scene than a great many characters sniff at for an entire novel. They smoke in the shower. On the soccer field. Under a bridge, by a lake, in a spot they call the “The Smoking Hole.” And while they smoke, they talk about writers, labyrinths, the last words of the famous dead, and, on occasion, a little bit about themselves and the mysteries of being themselves and wanting to be closer to the selves of others. They talk about themselves, and their ideas, the way they burn through cigarettes, as though their lives depended on burning through the very things (cigarettes, themselves, each other, their ideas) that might one day kill them.

The story of Looking for Alaska is, in so many ways, so terrifically small in scope–there’s a handful of teenagers attending boarding school. But, it’s so much bigger on the inside, so full of what Miles, the main character, calls, ‘The Great Perhaps.’

Thought #2: There was this girl.

Thoughts on thought #2: A very great many stories could begin with the words, “There was this girl…” And it’s a problem on the whole, because, on the whole, it tends to reinforce the idea, so very often idea-ed in stories, that women exist as something for people to stare and wonder at, and be transformed by rather than, you know, for them to exist as and for themselves. Stories of, “There was this girl…” include: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Leon, Scott Pilgrim vs. All the Things and Stuff , and Anna Karenina. And, of course, in some of these, the girl in question is absolutely a character unto herself rather than existing solely as a symbol for whatever thing about life the writer wants to write about, or a fulcrum around which another character’s life pivots. In the case of Anna Karenina, for example, we get it all, because Anna has her own story, her own arc, as well as, more or less, functioning as a symbol for, um, I don’t know, the existential horroradventure of being a woman in late 19th century Russia, both bursting with and being swallowed by love and convention. In the case of Looking for Alaska, Alaska is also, like Anna Karenina, both herself and a symbol, if in very many fewer pages, and with far more smoking and drinking of Strawberry Hill than probably Anna Karenina or Tolstoy would go in for. Alaska is a character unto herself, with a past, and concerns, and sorrows. But she’s also a symbol for the Great Perhaps, for those mysteries and sorrows of the larger world for which Miles, the ‘main’ character, has set out in search. Also, possibly, she doesn’t have terribly much of an arc. But, in this book, in this story, there’s something to that, because unlike Anna Karenina, our narrator here is not Leo Tolstoy, a.k.a. possibly god, but a sixteen-year-old boy, Miles Halter, who may not understand the arc of Alaska until later, until, looking back, he understands his story through the stories of others.

Corollary Thought to Thought #2: Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) gets thrown around a lot of late, possibly beginning with Eternal Sunshine, and continuing on into this day. It refers to a girl in a story who exists as a mess of wonder and terror (very often sexy, very often with a slight bent towards death and destruction, or endless joy, which is a kind of death, all situations of stasis–whether of joy or terror or anything in between–being a kind of death) that awakens the hero (generally a boy) to the mess of wonder and terror that is life. It’s very much a part of the larger canon of stories referred to in Thought #2 as “There was this girl…” I happen to have loved a great many stories of said type, and several MPDGs (Clementine/Eternal Sunshine, Ramona/Scott Pilgrim, Summer/500 Days Of, Anna Karenina/Anna Karenina, Penny Lane/Almost Famous), but I’m aware that the best stories, the best tropes, transcend themselves, and that the MPDG trope is part of a larger and always necessary trope of how sometimes, in your life, someone appears at just the right time and changes everything, of which movies like Almost Famous and Once are perfect examples in which there are so many manic pixie dream guitarists and girls and vaccuum repairmen that enter into each other’s lives and all of them are changed by it.

The characters exist to transform each other and themselves.

So, if at the end of your story in which “There was this [insert appropriate pronoun here],” the person referred to by the appropriate pronoun has not undergone any change, has not experienced a story of their own, you might want to look at that again and wonder over whether your story might not be bigger and better for having a MPDLGTBQETC. that is not simply magical and mysterious, but also mundane and unambiguously a person capable of growth in their own right.

Thought #3: Someone once said that every story is about sex and death.

Thoughts on thought #3: Yes. Sometimes there are lasers, too.

Thought #4: That’s probably enough thoughts, for now.

Thoughts on thought #4: But about the fox hat? Or the labyrinth? Or last words? Or all of those discussion questions John Green helpfully answered and posed at the end of the book?

Thoughts on thoughts on thought #4: I’m hungry and want to eat lunch now.

Happy Wednesday, readers.

Go seek your Great Perhaps, wherever and with whomever it might wait.

ttfn.

Things

Chris Kammerud1 Comment

Hello, readers.

Here are things making me happy this week in no particular order except the one I wrote them in.

1) Bo Burnham. what. The stand-up of the YouTube-I don’t have time to finish this sentence because there’s a picture of a cat I need to write a poem about in which god doesn’t care about me or you and my emotions always get the better of me but I’m still gonna try because-generation. It’s fantabulism and surrealism and pop songs done with all the heart one could ask for in a performance that includes air guitar, air harpsichord, air cymbals, dis-embodied voices, masturbatory, orchestral, masturbations, and at least one murdered pentacorns (a unicorn with 5 horns). At some point, in some distant past, from somewhere, I saw the end of this performance on YouTube. And now, having seen the full show, I’m so excited it exists. Go watch it.

2) John Green. I know, I know, I’ve been talking about this all week, but Looking for Alaska is so damn committed to its characters and its emotions that it’s no wonder it spawned what has become the entity known as JOHN GREEN which now controls one-third of the interwebs. I do this thing sometimes when I read where I imagine criticisms of the thing I’m reading and then think of answers to those criticisms. Because I like arguing with myself, I guess, or maybe getting the jump on anyone who wants to argue with me. It leads to me sometimes talking in a way where people wonder if there presence is entirely necessary. The criticism I imagined people leveling at a book like Looking for Alaska is that it’s white kids at a boarding school and there’s a mysterious, crazy, magical girl and it reminds me of the stuff people said about Michael Chabon’s, A Model World and Mysteries of Pittsburgh. That the scope was too small, or the imagination not deep enough, or it was too romantic, too young, too naive. Well. I answered my inner critic by pointing out that all the best art comes from focusing on something, however big or small, until you can see the entire universe in it. Or. Well. The opposite. Douglas Adams focuses on the universe until you see yourself eating a sandwich. And, also, cricket. Also. Yeah. I like romance and death and finding the world inside curves of skin and falling leaves and it’s nice to pay attention to everything in all the things. Something like that. I like this book and the world is more awesome for it.

3) Tea. I received some gunpowder green tea from a lady and it is delicious.

That is all.

See you next week, readers.

ttfn.

Famous Last Words

Chris KammerudLeave a comment

Hello, readers.

In John Green’s Looking for Alaska, there’s a character obsessed with the last lines of famous people. This led me to thinking about the last lines of not famous people and about my mom and dad and how I have no idea what their last lines were. I remember things they said that would be good as last lines, such as, in no particular order.

1) It’s your turn for adventures.

2) Is this heaven?

3) I can’t think of a third thing.*

But, these weren’t their last lines. They said other things after these things. Very many of them not terribly cogent. Also, I wasn’t taking notes. Or recording them.** Presumably this is why there are so many last lines from famous people. Because someone was taking notes. Also, because they’re famous people write books about them, and I guess you need to have a last line or two in there. Also, also, people probably sometimes make last lines up, or collect the last, best, cogent thing the person said because having your last line be recorded as, “Aaaaaaaarrrrrgggggghhhhh” only really works if you’re a former member of Monty Python.

I presume that, in one manner or another, the whole remembering last lines thing will become a part of how Looking for Alaska wraps up. I don’t know how that will be, yet. I do know, though, that having a character obsessed with the literature of the very nearly dead is fun. It provides a context frame for scenes because, oh, yeah! Death! It’s always around us. John Green in video, and in words, presents such urgency. His stories have a will to bigness. They yearn.

Happy Wednesday, readers.

ttfn.***

*These might very possibly be my last words. Well, not the words I just wrote, but the asterisked ones, well, not those, because clearly many words followed them, but you get the idea. Whatever that means. How do people get ideas? Does our brain have an idea catching mechanism? Is it a mirror neurons thing?

**Well, except I did, after not recording conversations with Dad, ask Mom to let me record her as I asked her question about life, the universe, and everything, and that was a lovely thing to have done and to still have. If you’ve never interviewed your parents. Go for it. It’s fun. Maybe make some cookies, or cake, or tea, if that’s your thing, and sit down and share the eating and talking and make a record of who your parents are and were and who you were when you spoke to them.

***It’s unlikely my last words will be ttfn. I’ve told EG that what they should put on my tombstone is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut.

“If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Flash the Virgin

Chris KammerudLeave a comment

Hello, readers.

Two things.

1) Jane the Virgin reminds me of Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies and these are delightful things to be reminded of while watching television as very few moments while watching television do I think, oh, but THIS NARRATOR MAKES EVERYTHING SO MUCH BETTER. And so, when it happens, when I’m watching the travails of a curmudgeonly young woman surrounded by inanimate ephemera what give voice to her subconscious desires, or pie makers who kill and grant life with a touch, or, as with this new tv show, Jane the Virgin, I watch a young woman witness her life fall into a melodramatic orbit reminiscent of the telenovelas she loves, I take note, I smile, I think. Cool. I’ll give this a try.

2) After watching ten minutes of The Flash, the latest in the forever neverending run of our current superheroic culture, two things occurred to me.

a) Barry Allen’s father is the actor who played The Flash in that other TV adaptation of The Flash which feels like it was a dream I had once.

b) This, and Gotham, are both attempting to inject some silliness and fun and, while Gotham is hindered by the fact that ultimately it must, in order to succeed, be something of a tragedy such that Batman is required to exist, the Flash is not hindered by anything other than TV special effects. Point, Flash.

It’s blustery today. Blustery is an important word in Gary Shytengart’s Super Sad True Love Story. There’s apparently a hurricane landing in northwest England. In London, this has meant bursts of wind that bring to mind the fastest man in the world running past you and knocking you back with his wake.

Also, I have begun reading Looking for Alaska and am in love with the phrase, THE GREAT PERHAPS. It’s a good phrase.

Happy Tuesday, readers.

ttfn.