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This won’t do you any good as a review, as I maintain my practice of withholding pertinent details in order to maintain my anonymity.
My wife and I went to a play Friday, a musical about two hobos in a graveyard, told with people and puppets and projections of woodcuts and things. Parts were very good, the puppets were effective (the dead baby puppet was effectively creepy), the sound-collage incidental music worked very well, some of the singing was impressive, the premise itself had a great deal of promise, potential for explorations of the psyche using deep metaphor.
But. The way they wrote the narrative leaned toward maudlin, the male lead’s over-enunciation screamed “I’m not really a bum,” and the lyricist seemed to care more about nailing a perfect rhyme than conveying some real meaning.
The space itself was worth the price of admission, with weird art, bicycle-car frames with forks, a puppet theater on wheels with at least a dozen backdrops of street scenes, etc., ready to roll in on tracks when the crank is turned, chandeliers remade with shells and beads. Everything huge. Sort of like a hallucinatory vision of 70 years ago in America.
Even without the space, though, they’d have had me at creepy dead baby puppet.
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personally, i think this is a wonderful idea. i’d be the first to volunteer, even with the casket closed and some dirt tossed on top.
Vicar upset that grave therapy didn’t work out. “Weird News,” Metro.co.uk. 3/28/08
… innovative plan to help parishioners escape the stresses of daily life by letting them lie in an open grave …
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‘I wanted people to think about what weighs on them down in the darkness and gather the energy to resist it.’
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… one man was still shaking, 20 minutes after his seven-minute spell in the dank grave ended.
R1n65 & Pl13r5
Woman ‘made to remove nipple ring with pliers’. “Weird News,” Metro.co.uk. 3/28/08
This brings back memories. Once upon a time, very near the end of my first marriage, I had a nose ring. I had installed it myself with the help of a friend, a few beers, some ice, and a carrot, about 5 months after my wife had taken our toddling daughter to a hippy community in some southeastern mountains with a vague intuition that the world was going to end. Also, she wanted to go far away from me, as my drinking, depression, inability to forgive her infidelity with another woman, refusal to buckle under the hysterical sweeping generalizations of her burgeoning angry, male-bashing young feminism, and hesitance to share a faith in some harmonic convergence or another made her somewhat unhappy.
In the time of the nose ring, I lived in an apartment with a musician friend. A young woman, a freshman at the college I also attended, lived down the hall. She was a clown, professionally, or on her way to being so. A little granola, too. I guess I liked them that way back then. Hippy chicks like to get fucked up and are easy. Anyway, I pursued her and we hooked up. Being the honest, indiscrete fucker I was, I told my wife about it when we next talked on the phone, somewhere between nonchalant and celebratory, like “Look at me, I’m happy! Aren’t you happy for me?”
My wife came back then. I picked her and the kid up from the mountains, as a matter of fact, after staying up all night attempting, unsuccessfully, to screw my little hippy clown girlfriend. We three ended up moving into my parents’ basement, but I could not find a taker for my half of the rent in the old apartment, and I retained a key.
One day, on the anniversary of my friend & roommate’s birth, there was to be a party at the old apartment. My wife told me I could not go, and I resented that, and told her so. So, I bought one or two bottles of red wine and a fifth of scotch and went to the party early, before my friend & roommate even returned home. I was pleasantly drunk by the time he came back, planning on getting absolutely fucking smashed.
Before I could do so, my friend spies my angry wife climbing up on the porch from the parking lot, screaming the way she still does. She entered through the sliding glass door (was it unlocked? did my friend open it to avoid unnecessary noise? i was drunk, and a poor witness) and screamed more, pushing me, threatening to go down the hall and physically harm my little hippy clown. I pushed back hard enough to slow her down, but not enough to give credibility to any claim I was “fighting” her.
Then, the cops came, separating us to get our stories but already under the assumption that them man assaulted the woman. We both attested, however, that we pushed each other, and we were thus both arrested for spousal assault, me drunk, her having left the baby in the car. They asked us the usual questions. I cracked cop jokes (wish I could remember the jokes, but it’s all a little hazy). My wife chuckled nervously. The cops grew more and more agitated.
By the time they got to “Have you ever thought about suicide?” they were just itching for an excuse to do me so harm. Of course, the nose ring had to go, as hundreds of suicides are carried out yearly using quarter-inch needles made of cheap, flimsy metal. Not so flimsy, though, as I was unable to remove the nose ring quickly, and they had to step in with their special tool.
Unfortunately, the pliers didn’t work either. They only twisted the nose ring, widened the hole, traumatized the tissue. (On the other hand, maybe they did work–maybe that’s just what the cops had in mind.) Good thing I was anesthetized.
The nose ring stayed in for several days, until I was no longer able to fight off infection without breaking and removing it. I have a tiny little scar, and a reinforced dislike of authority figures, and a train wreck of an ex-marriage to remember it all by.
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When I very young, there was a play put on for us young kids in school, in which a big wooden puppet of a soldier changed from good to evil by swiveling his head around to reveal a different, ugly face. To be honest, so much in that statement could be dead wrong factually, but that’s how I remember it. Almost immediately, that vile, corrupt, rotten, two-faced maggot-eaten wooden puppet began to live in my closet, threatening me with its morally ambivalent presence.
There were other monsters in the house, but always a nearby friendly monster to balance the threat. The evil vampire in the downstairs hallway was matched by the friendly Frankenstein’s monster under the stairs; the robber in the hallway between the upstairs bathroom and my parents’ room by my friend the Invisible Ape (who I could see only at certain angles, from the corner of my eye). There was no balance for the two-faced wooden puppet, so I gathered my stuffed animals around me at night, and gave them all super powers and costumed alter-egos.
There has always been a beast inside the closet door for me, though. Something of which I’m most afraid, that never shows its whole face to me at one time, the identity of which seems to shift if only because the rigidity with which we define our (psychic and geographic) environment does not reflect reality.
To bring the story into the present, I had a dream last night. Apparently, my high school class had a reunion party of some sort in my parents’ basement.
Before that, or concurrently with it, my old debauched friend KF had a party at his house with lots of booze and drugs and several females from my high school experience who served themselves completely naked to each of the (fully clothed) male guests, formerly of the black t-shirt tribe, stoned and outfitted in the leather, flannel, and hooded sweatshirts of the 1980s metal heads. I twittered on the edge of sobriety and fidelity, too excited to leave, too frightened to indulge. (Were there nobler causes for my hesitation? I don’t remember feeling them.)
Back at the reunion, the crux of my dilemma, everyone seemed to pass by staring intently but uncertain, and pass on without a word. In the recesses of their minds, they had a hazy recollection of me, but none was sparked to recognition.
This is my current beast inside the closet door, that which peers over my shoulder in the neverending darkness: my own two-sided, amorphous nature, being neither one thing nor another, lech nor virgin, holy nor depraved, drunk nor sober, child nor grownup, consigns me to be forgettable, to be nothing.
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‘Magnetic Boy’ keeps crashing computers
Experts are baffled as to why the youngster has the bizarre power but believe it is down to the unique amount of static electricity he produces.
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“I think there’s something in his body chemistry, something in his makeup that causes the computers to go haywire.”
***
Static experts have been called in to monitor the youngster but have been so far unable to pinpoint the cause, admitting that his super-static ability remains a “mystery”.
Secret Identity: Joseph Falciatano, a 12-year-old student from Lura Sharp Elementary School in Pulaski, New York
Powers: Can stop computers and electronic devices by causing them to “crash”
Weaknesses: grounding pads, anti-static wrist-straps, etc., poor conductors
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I used to write about little people sightings, and other strange creatures in the modern world. Don’t know if I can find those old posts and stories. Don’t know if it matters much. But here is the latest. It’s pretty much proven a hoax, but I always like to think “What if this were true?”
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You know, I really don’t belong here. These people are way too smart for me. I can just imagine, had I gone to lab after that dismal failure-making exam, that TA and Other TA would point at me and whisper in another language, “What he doing here? He no belong here!” Other TA would gibber at me in Chinee, something like
and TA would say, “He say you no belong here, stupid. Go back to city college. That where you belong.”
And I would say something like
and I would leave.
