Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Louche Lad's LiveJournal:

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Monday, September 28th, 2009
6:01 pm	the living & the dead I heckled one of these trailers when it played theatrically. The other holds up OK. Despite disclaimers to the contrary, the differences between them -- their intended audiences, ideological situation, intrinsic interest -- are instructive. Current Music: Chantal Goya (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
12:06 pm	olivia escape Yma Sumac or Amy Camus, another flaming creature has left the planet. Imagine the golden door swinging open, a feather the color of sunlight wafts to the yellow newsprint at the bottom of her cage but the bird herself is gone. Xtabay. That voice is free to go back where it came from, up and up the heart of the Andes. A good omen. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 31st, 2007
11:01 am	not dead; dreaming A festive turn from Ann-Margret for all the beautiful and ugly, old and new people of livejournal and beyond. BOMBASTICUS WILL RETURN in: The Voluptuous Horror of H.P.L. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 15th, 2005
3:58 pm	Squid Versus Whale "You were much more emotional when you were younger." People talk a lot about monsters from the retro deep, but sometimes they still come to the surface. Squid versus whale. It keeps going on. Current Music: "Courting Blues," Bert Jansch (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 27th, 2005
8:59 pm	The CHANGE! One of the funniest things I have ever seen was an unsigned sheet of doodling we found back in the files of an art house in Salt Lake City, clearly the workings of an unhinged projectionist. It was a series of little portraits neatly labeled by age – Age 1, staring baby, Age 3, cute tot and so on. The gag was that at intervals the row of heads was interrupted by a caption “THE CHANGE!” and then when the dating resumed the person would have gone through puberty, changed sex, became maniacal, grown an extra eye, mutated into a hippo or whatever. Between CHANGEs, the aging process went on as normal but the heads got smaller as they got closer to the bottom of the page. I seem to remember it ending with panel after panel of tiny hippo skulls (Age 245 … Age 257 … Age 269). My God, that was the best cartooning I’ve ever seen. This was especially amusing for me because we had THE CHANGE in my high school too, only we called it the science of climacterics. This has since been turned into genre fiction by John Crowley but the basic idea was that the typical person goes through long-wave cycles that take you from crisis to peak every 14 years. I am not a big fan of this theory but people around me find it funny so I laugh along. Actually this is all preliminary for a POLL! ( Read more... ) (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 26th, 2005
12:06 pm	The Importance of Being Yma I first heard the Voice of the Xtabay about 20 years ago when, primed by a throwaway reference in an H.P. Lovecraft tribute anthology (at one point alien prog rock is compared to "Yma Sumac...that freak South American singer a few years ago"), I had the frankly bizarre good luck to find the original EP in the local flea market, a place where you could get Navaho food, hand-carved chess tables and other fern-bar gothic furniture trucked up from Mexico, and piles of Ballantine adult fantasy paperbacks priced at fifty cents. They undoubtedly had a lot of other stuff there as well but I was still young and relatively stupid. Anyway, if her voice was anywhere near Lovecraftian, I had to hear it for myself. Besides, the album was already 35 years old! A collector's item! So I threw it on there with a lot of the weirdly bloodless crap I thought I should like at the time (Chad & Jeremy, June Tabor and even, dear reader, a Sinatra record) and took a listen. It was satisfyingly exotic, conjuring a landscape of Inca rituals, mythology, lost Peruvian princesses and all that Nicky Roerich stuff . . . often in Spanish so I wasn't terribly interested. That stuff, I could get down the block, but the antediluvian culture behind the Spanish, the lost civilization where the girls could sing like birds, pictures were painted in the color of sunlight and anima menaces were calling like sirens from every mountain peak, that was exciting: The Xtabay is the most elusive of all women. You seek her in your flight of desire and think of her as beautiful as the morning sun touching the highest mountain peak. Her voice calls to you in every whisper of the wind. The lure of her unknown love becomes ever stronger, and a virgin who might have consumed your nights with tender caresses now seems less than the dry leaves of winter. For you follow the call of the Xtabay...though you walk alone through all your days. That's from the record jacket but was quoted in FATE magazine, which only demonstrates that Yma's fan base and the Lovecraft people were often found drinking in the same bars. A few years later, at school, we would blast this album and the Singing Nun as a kind of sonic warfare (this would later become much more sophisticated), but then again we did a lot of dumb things like get really drunk and dance to the national anthem of Finland or whatever, all this weird junior united nations gone bad type stuff. And that's when I heard that Yma Sumac didn't really exist, she was just a Jewish girl from Brooklyn (the details always vary slightly) named Amy Camus, a failed opera singer who reversed her name for publicity. Since the "xtabay" is actually a Mayan legend (a long walk from Peru) and a cunning pig-latin anagram for Les "Baxter," god of exotica, there's some circumstantial evidence for this. But then, dear reader, who was "Moises Vivanco," the debonair Indiana Jones of bandleaders who (legend has it) called the princess down from the mountain and eventually married her (twice)? Was he from Brooklyn too? Another of the masks of Baxter? To be honest, it doesn't interest me so much which side of the mirror Yma/amY came from as what's been on her mind since then. Why did she drop out of sight in America after making only a handful of records and a few movies? Did her "unusually constructed" mutant throat finally give out? Why did she do most of her work in the '60s behind the Iron Curtain? What were they aiming at, the impersonation of the gods or just a quick marketing hook? At what point did the act become real, if it wasn't always thus? At this point, the people who knew the secrets are dead or in relative seclusion -- the truth is slipping away and matters less and less to the world it leaves behind. At the end, all that will be left is those four- or five-octave recordings in some language that claims to be court Quechua. That amazing throat was real. So much has been said about the girls over the years, but we have never found an answer. It didn't matter in the end how old they were, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling: still do not hear us calling them from out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together. Current Music: "Xtabay," Yma Sumac (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, September 24th, 2005
9:07 pm	Little Gidding I had the funniest dream that I’d gotten really old. I moved slow and with deliberate ennui. My brain was clogged with all the details about synthetic derivatives and politics and God knows what pointless minutia. Oh yeah, the difficulty of wringing returns out of a flattening yield curve. And I spent all day staring at a monitor when I wasn't doing meetings and when I wasn’t doing that, I only fell for incredibly strict and career-oriented girls! Scary! On the other hand, in the dream they’d brought the wheezing under control, maybe because old people don’t, you know, actually suffer from juvenile complaints. By the itching of my chin, keep the outside from the in. It’s lucky the back-to-school weather snapped me out of it so I can get on with the awfully big adventure, Tink. The fire and the rose and the convertible paper are one. Which is to say the enemy Hook is your father the banker in drag, and that's the secret. This uncommon solvent enables the natural gold to be reincruded, softened and restored to its original state in a saline, friable and very fusible form. This is the rejuvenation of the king, described by all the authors: the beginning of a new evolutionary phase, personified in the motif we are considering by Tristan, nephew of King Mark. In fact the uncle and the nephew are, chemically speaking, one and the same thing; of the same kind and similar in origin. . . . Truly it is a strange place, this forest of Mort-Roi, and how like it is to the fabulous and wonderful Garden of the Hesperides! – Mystery of the Cathedrals Stay awake! Current Music: "Jaded," Aerosmith (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 16th, 2005
8:53 am	Bright Stars and ... Guitars and ... (Things We Love) Shout-out to the MURMAIDS for providing the subject line to this post. By now the girls are in their late 50s. What do they look like now? Maybe you pass one every day. Maybe they died young. The lovely and talented shideem put me on her list to say ten things that bring me a moment of joy. At first I wanted to just copy down the lyrics from this guy's hilariously spaced-out cover [click on "listen to MP3s" -- it works okay even on dial-up] of Tom T. Hall's equally goofy (but apparently sincere) song "I Love" but while it does sum up my philosophy pretty well, it would probably alienate people. You be the judge! 1. Being of use. Sue me. 2. Tabbouli. Eat it in bulk. Eat it together. Eat it for peace. 3. Hypnotizing moppets with common household crap (aka "the spatula game"). 4. Walking long distances. I still want to do Albany. 5. Colors mostly found in tweed. Just for a change, give me oxblood, midnight, moss, charcoal. 6. Zooey Deschanel! She plays ukelele! 7. The last eight minutes of the movie Orlando. But only those minutes. 8. Eating museum food with the old ladies. They know my scam, they just don't care. 9. Opening the windows in spring. Ah, the week of perfume and skirts. 10. Leaving the windows open in fall. The air turned to smoke and tannin. I think 7654321b, eestiplika, flamewalker, jearl, myblueheron, sagasdraumr, tigbitties and tommygirlk (among others) would produce interesting answers but anyone can play. Current Music: "I Love," Tom Heinl (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 13th, 2005
8:50 am	Greetings to the New Brunette Once again it's the kind of September when you were a young and callow fellow the grass is green and grain is yellow and school is back in session. The kids are back at NYU in their hordes, leading clumps of dizzy parents down the sidwalks like goldfish gasping on a leash, making me feel fleetingly but still absurdly like Pnin without the bowl. And the lingering morning and the quickening evening are the day. This is one of my favorite times of the year. Whenever I get together with the new music crowd, you can bet the conversation will end up revolving around three main poles: pedagogy, a compositional technique called "Robot Shakespeare" and my own climacterics. (The movie Conan: The Barbarian gets honorary mention depending on how drunk people get.) This weekend was a perfect example. Consensus is that the lack of accountability around NOLA is rooted in a failure of ethical education -- and that necessarily includes training to recognize the limits of the ego, that is, training in critical thinking. Instead, the public system provides no real ethical training (church and state, after all) and the home-school platforms make things worse by pretending to offer ethics but only pouring morality instead like lard down their little throats in the form of beginner books for the soul. Fat pigeons. Then on the way to the museum there was a belated labor day parade up Fifth Avenue and I wondered what happened to the American flags and the bikers with their eagle jackets. The answer is that the failure of universal education robbed the cadres of their natural leadership. In the museum proper I saw the Millets and thought about the correlation between the narcotic sentimentality of the 1840s and the economic collapse underneath it. And I finally scored the first hunk of Tony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time [see also], repeating my ancient pattern of connecting with something crucial in the world of literature at exactly the moment where it will wreak maximum havoc with my work habits. It is currently in the stack mocking me, waiting for its moment to unhinge. And as last week's simultaneous scalp and heel wounds (!) heal, I've stabilized somewhere around 1986, staying up far too late on a school night to watch 120 Minutes so I could learn what the kids in Europe were up to three, four, five years previous. Which makes me wonder why nobody ever plays Billy Bragg any more, Here we are in our summer years Living on ice cream and chocolate kisses Would the leaves fall from the trees If I was your old man and you were my missus Shirley, Give my greetings to the new brunette Current Music: "Greetings to the New Brunette," Billy Bragg (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 1st, 2005
1:11 pm	Last Days of Disco Man, did McClellan just lose it on the live feed or what? This is above, if not his pay grade, his expertise. UPDATES: Feed did in fact just cut out suddenly "as though someone kicked out a power cord." Greenspan Lunch is being spun in weird and bizarre ways, much more cheerful than earlier indicated (although we're going to be buying European gas grades wholesale?! is that how desperate they are?). DHS Czar "Ask the White House" PR event turned out to be expected soft fluff but unexpectedly terse, again understandable -- given the amount of work his office should be doing this week, why even have it? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, August 29th, 2005
4:01 pm	Age of Aquarius "We had a much better time in those days than the movie reflects," says Guthrie. "They made the movie to show how valiant our attempt was to create a . . . new world." But because the filmmakers didn't believe the movement would have any long-term effect, they depicted it as a failure. Alas poor Arlo, what impresses me about Alice's Restaurant is the sensitivity with which Penn captured the transience of the hippies and their essentially children's crusade. This movie came out in 1969, three days after Woodstock let out, and the Stones were already slouching toward Altamont. The characters know that they've already run out of time: if only they'd bought the church sooner, Alice says early on, maybe Arlo wouldn't have wandered off for so long, they would have kept their happy little clan together. But they buy the church, Arlo comes back and everything seems to go fine -- for a little while, until Shelly comes (back) with heroin on his mind and busts the scene up. Okay, Diane Linkletter melodrama, everybody mourns. But then Ray, aging beat turned paterfamilias, has two startling visions, drunk off his ass at his own wedding. First, he dreams of his hippie clan filling the church with helium and evacuating the dying earth like a rubber balloon into the sky, wherefrom they will rain flowers on the squares below "to remind them that happiness is possible" or something like that. Okay, everybody can dig that; that sounds fun. Impractical, allegorical maybe, but fun. And then he decides to sell the church and "buy a couple hundred acres up in Vermont, sweet land." Alice, his new bride and co-owner of the church, immediately stops having fun, but Ray continues: if only they'd bought land in the first place, maybe Shelly wouldn't have had such trouble. If only ... then maybe. And Pat Quinn as Alice puts in a wordless performance so worthy of Katherine Ross that I am ashamed for the Internet that there are no pictures available for me to show you. Know a good thing when you got it, Ray, you dumbass. You have plenty of room in that church to shelter plenty hippies. Don't go wandering off again, but they always do. Meanwhile, of course, Arlo's real father Woody has died. Separately I am aggravated to see that the Mothman movie jacked up the price of John Keel's books, especially the epochal Eighth Tower, which I find myself wanting a new working copy of but $100 for a yellowing Signet paperback is really outrageous. Did anyone actually see that movie? Current Music: "Don't Fear the Reaper," Caesars Palace (awful!!) (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 28th, 2005
10:38 am	Songs to Aging Children Come GIRL: I dig Bach. ARLO: I happen to dig music, but I don't know too much about him. GIRL: You should have gone to a better school. Today I have to ponder the emerging nanotech tools space (it's important to sell shovels and blue jeans to those North Sea scientists panning matter for flecks of valuable stuff), talk about exciting developments in the world of exchange-traded mutual fund products and also train for a double-plus-insanity thing I might be doing. The local sushi cartel is also having a matsuri at noon and then old man Mekas is having a Harry Smith double feature. So naturally the Sundance Channel in one of its few fits of competence throws on Alice's Restaurant and I am momentarily distracted by the complex portrait of the rise and fall of hippie civilization, with all its exposed brick folkie coffeehouses, big kitchens, 13-year-old diseased groupies, deconsecrated churches, brocade funerals. Naturally I have got to get out of the house and am heading to the southern fried lesbian brunch dive I love so much because it always smells like a week at my aunt's. I'll update this later, y'all, with some pondering about hippies. (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 25th, 2005
1:23 pm	These Our "Current" Middle Ages "In the 1960s and early 1970s, the era of the last great hiring frenzy, departments of English, French, foreign languages, art history, and history in even medium-sized universities had at least one medievalist -- English departments often two or three -- and even small colleges had a sprinkling of medievalists. Most institutions took on board scholars working in the Middle Ages, and it is exactly those people who are now approaching retirement." -- Richard W. Unger, "Medievalists, Demography, and the Next Decade," Medieval Academy News (July 2003) I enjoy the quasi-holy sense in which primarily New York-based writers in the 1960s and early 1970s held the Cloisters and by extension the world of chivalry and quests. How and why did they form such an opinion of that era? What power over their hearts did it hold? When and why did its attraction wax and wane? While the evolution of academic visions of the Middle Ages is fascinating and everyone loves the Kelmscott scene that gave us everything from the Rossettis to Peter Warlock, today I'm more interested in the immediate origins of the "medieval" as a middlebrow American genre. Our knights and damsels are very different from the ones Howard Pyle or even Hal Foster illustrated back before the war, and then during the 1950s we were too busy watching the skies or playing Cowboys & Indians. This post deliberately ignores Umberto Eco, fine though his work may otherwise be. Instead it wallows in American bestsellers and global cinema of the 1960s and 70s, the era of that last great hiring frenzy. At the moment I am also not particularly interested in the "fantasy" or "hippie" genres separate from the "medieval" per se. ( Notes toward a timeline ) Current Music: "Medieval," James (Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 24th, 2005
2:43 pm	At the Movies ( Pick ten movies, find pictures, pass it on! ) (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005
11:17 am	Sky Blue Bells Ringing Click to enlarge! A decade and more later, I still love the Doom Patrol comic book. That first issue I found in a Hastings Media in Wyoming, disembodied brain versus brain while a lovesick gorilla and a gay robot body look on and I laughed out loud. Back issues emerged across the country -- a particularly rich stash in Des Moines. New issues every month, always strange and often intimate stories of cosmic dysfunction and personal resilience. The unworldly summer smell of the world with the windows open, late nights driving along the vine-choked train tracks for doughnuts and always more coffee. Acting out the dialogue but our voices could never quite get "funny" enough to evoke the crazed art-house villains, surly monkey girls, well-meaning bodybuilders, hermaphrodites from space and everyone was in love with Jane, brain of Truddi Chase in the body of Maya Deren. Everyone in that comic was horrifically mangled but still functional. So were many of the fans. We wanted to adapt it for late-night AM radio because that way, people would never be sure if the static was in their set or an integral part of the production. A lot of people were using noise as a production technique back then: Derrida was king, the Sonic Youth were huge, Joel-Peter Witkin was muy célébrée and Gibson's Agrippa was on the horizon. This particular panel is one of my favorites of all time and was the frontispiece of the last academic paper I ever wrote, an amazing REM-fueled grunge-era meltdown. She is talking to an armchair about the end of the world. There was so much time in those days to think deeply about obscure and useless things like literary style or the short story form or dead languages. There needs to be something like this for today's kids, training wheels into the absolute elsewhere. Maybe there already is. "Look out the window. Doesn't this remind you of when you're in the boat and then later that night you're lying, looking up at the ceiling, and the water in your head was not dissimilar from the landscape, and you think to yourself, Why is it that the landscape is moving, but the boat is still? Look! They're shooting buffalo!" Current Music: "Driver 8," REM (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 17th, 2005
12:01 pm	LWMT It's only the fact that I'm no longer following flamenco even remotely seriously that keeps this little detour through the 1970s from turning my life into a TV remake of Strictly Ballroom. Otherwise, God knows Tina Sparkle is looking for a partner and it is theoretically "my year," whatever that means. Zero for Conduct: The current round of fun began on Monday, when I finally tracked down a copy of the rare moppet revolt movie Melody a/k/a SWALK (much, much more detail here). Sadly the obsolescence of postal mail has turned the alternative title's acrostic meaning into a bit of trivia for the playground folklorists, but my older readers will remember. When we got L.A. television back in the high desert days (beamed across via repeating stations), Tom Hatten would play this movie about once a year on KTLA's "Family Film Festival" and I became a huge fan on those occasional Saturdays and Sundays at 4:00. It's an extremely subversive and cute movie (thanks as always, Alan Parker!) in its depiction of the anarchic, polymorphous urges of actual children, those savage little heathens. I eat granola and tabouleh and dream of carob candy; I read midlist trash by Michael Moorcock; I watch this movie for the first time in a quarter century. The world is unspeakably humid like a book-buying tour of Ann Arbor, where I heard a Sandy Denny record for the first time. Yesterday's Hero: And then I find out that my father, the capricious choirboy womanizer slash survivalist square, is getting another divorce! This is a really shocking thing because everyone figured he was relatively happy being a soccer dad type, abandoning his wild experimental dance techniques for a life of sleep research and those damn horses, which I always hated and personally hope they go with her. Love is in the Air: But can dogs and cats feel love in the air like an impending earthquake, and if so, can they tell the difference between it and some other natural disaster? A lot of shoes have been dropping lately. How many feet does God have? Is a life lived in fear a life half lived? Have I collected enough playground folklore yet? PS I saw Broken Flowers with Sharon Stone and Tilda Swinton and Jessica Lange and the mother from Six Feet Under. And they all looked great! Current Music: "Stargazer," Shelagh McDonald (Comment on this)
Friday, August 12th, 2005
9:50 am	Stump the Apologist: Fizzy Lifting Drinks I have a question for the Apologist. As much as I enjoy Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, I have a problem with the Fizzy Lifting Drinks sequence (a scene missing from the original book). Basically, this scene boils down to Charlie doing what the other children do; the only difference is that unlike Augustus, Violet, Veruca and Mike, Charlie doesn't get caught. Doesn't this scene undermine the very nature of Charlie's character? Doesn't Charlie's behavior undermine Wonka's entire succession plan? Why is Charlie allowed to get away with the same action that visits ironic retribution on the others? - TMB, New England Hi TMB, thanks for reading. As you know this is one of the great doctrinal controversies within the Wonka community and I hope I can shed new light on the subject. The original movie adds Fizzy Lifting Drinks within the context of the larger "Slugworth the Tempter" plot, which you know is also an interpolation designed to (a) give the Charlie character some grist and (b) scrutify the otherwise inscrutable Wonka character by ascribing some level of machination to his activities. Wonka as the random and largely immoral potentate from the book was seen as too confusing for the mass audience, and the business of employing Slugworth/Wilkinson to test his potential heirs was added to fortify the product with moral or "family" value as well. ( Read more... ) Do YOU love something that everyone else hates? Tell the Apologist, and if he won't stick up for it, you get your money back! Not intended as aesthetic or investment advice. Current Music: "The Speaking Hands," Woven Hand (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 10th, 2005
11:37 am	A Martian Odyssey: Secret Language of Birdlike Aliens The earliest short story in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, that fat and day-glo set of three Avon paperbacks on my father's shelf, is "A Martian Odyssey." It was written in 1934 by Stanley Weinbaum, whose career flared for exactly a year and a half before he died of throat cancer, aged 35. I estimate that this story earned Stanley (or more likely his widow) about $25. It is the future. A guy crashes on Mars, meets a native and they have adventures. A bright child reading this story may be interested primarily by the Robinson Crusoe nature of the guy's relationship with the alien, a goofy ostrich guy who calls himself "Tweel." The earthman teaches the alien a little English, which is good because Martian is incomprehensible (as the guy says, "if that's a language, I'm an alchemist"). They meet a non-intelligent silicon monster that makes pyramids, a robot or immortal machine. They meet a gooey black monster that can read your mind and reflect your desires. Finally they meet a race of totalitarian workers that share basic logic with humans and ostrich guys but whose higher mentality took a right turn somewhere into completely alien territory -- "one one two," yes, but "two two four" isn't part of their universe. These possibilities for exotic ways of life are compelling to a child learning that the world outside the family unit is full of all kinds of people and things. Even today, we love our truly "alien" aliens, as long as some bumpy-headed humanoid or other lens exists to help us relate them back to the people we grew up with. An especially bright child may note that in 1934, radical totalitarian alternatives to life in these United States were on the rise as Europe in particular slid into the absolute elsewhere or "planet Mars." Unfortunately, such a child would overstate the case (the Saar, for example, wouldn't be annexed until 1935) and would miss the point of the telepathic horror at home. ( Read more... ) Current Music: "Humans from Earth," T Bone Burnett (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 4th, 2005
8:45 am	Stump the Apologist: Mr & Mrs Smith (2005) Hey, how's life in the 212? Get cavity searched lately? But seriously, put your impenetrable nerd dance on pause for a second and tell me whether I should go see Mr & Mrs Smith. I want to see it but since this is the movie that broke up Brad & Jennifer, would I feel like I'm emotionally cheating on Jennifer? Okay, got to run. HEATHER in the Seatac, 98 on your zip code dial Hi Heather, thanks for reading and for your concern. Weirdly enough, I got my bag searched the first day but haven't even seen an inspection crew since. I have my theories. The cool thing is that a city bus just passed the office with a big yellow WITNESS RELOCATION banner on it. Huh? As for your movie question, given your fascination with the "Kill Bill" story arc, I think you would find Mr & Mrs Smith pretty decent. And I wouldn't worry about feeling like you're betraying Jennifer Anniston. Didn't she look happy dating that guy from Swingers, whatever his name is, Glenn Gould, Lex Luthor, oh yeah Vince Vaughn? And now they say she's dating Owen Wilson. ( Middle-Class Agents! ) Do YOU love something everyone else says is stupid? Tell the Apologist, and if he won't stick up for it, you get your money back! Not intended as investment or aesthetic advice. Current Music: "McGoohan's Blues," Roy Harper (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2005
2:39 pm	The Devil Wore Polyester It's Halloween 1973 and E. Gary Gygax is putting the finishing touches on the original Dungeons & Dragons. The stock market is in the early stages of the worst crash since the Great Depression. If Gygax turns on the radio, he'd hear all the different flavors of the music of exhaustion, sentimental and soft. I mean, "Angie" was at the top of the charts -- the Stones at their least rocking, Altamont four years in the ground -- and the Top 20 was full of what we would today consider crap. Dylan was similarly enervated, literally knockin' on heaven's door. Cher getting in touch with her Indian side, the Carpenters and the Osmonds, solo efforts by Ringo and Art Garfunkel, Marie Osmond, Jim Croce. The bottom half of the Top 40 is even worse! Arguably one of the great brute demonologists of his era, Gygax probably doesn't turn on the radio. Despite the dice, those early books were more ROTC than yahtzee, almost completely divorced from civilian culture. In the strictest sense, they depict a survivalist fantasy, a barbaric environment where polite society has either atrophied to the point of irrelevance or simply never gotten started. An explicitly Howardian world where the only right is might, but perplexingly something called "law" exists as a metaphysical concept that is often almost interchangable with "goodness." "Law" is basically out of this world. Outside the firelit circle of the "law" cavort the forces of chaos, which are sketchily described in their legions. This is a planet squirming with pumpkin-headed bugbears, cringing ghouls, dragons in their colors, mutant animals and tribes of savage beast-men. Orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, trolls, ogres, kobolds, gnolls -- whatever those are. Even humans are encountered primarily as feral nations: bandits, nomads, brigands, pilgrims and the occasional band of hopped-up berserks like bikers trashing a small town. These were the rules for a fantastic "medieval" wargame campaign, playable with pencil and paper and miniature figures. The middle ages, as we all know, were a post-apocalyptic era, the dark and twisty passageway between civilization and today, lit by torches. Gygax's world (and to be fair, Arneson's -- and Arneson displays this tendency even more strongly, so much so that his own work is fragmented and obscured almost beyond the point of reconstruction) is undeniably post-apocalyptic in tone. Something big has broken down; something fell. This is a world pockmarked with ruins that contemporary characters crawl through like vermin, unable to comprehend the technologies that went into building the dungeons, much less duplicate the effort. "Dungeons beneath the 'huge ruined pile, a vast castle built by generations of mad wizards and insane geniuses,'" Gygax says. That's an odd and stunning phrase for the place where we have our adventures. The huge ruined pile is civilization, once vast but now in post-terminal decline, and the generations of mad wizards and insane geniuses are our forebears, the giants on whose shoulders we do not so much stand in Newtonian terms but in whose cyclopean skulls we scavenge for lost treasure and "magic" that obeys rules first described in a book called The Dying Earth. We have grown so small. At this stage in the game, there is almost nothing beyond the dungeons but the vast and terrible wilderness. The alternative is Art Garfunkel singles, Watergate, Vietnam, the oil crash. A little over a year later, the original D&D had become a monster hit and Gygax was hard at work on the follow-up, Greyhawk, and Neil Sedaka's ungodly "Laughter in the Rain" was at the top of the charts. Current Music: "Kashmir," Led Zep (11 Comments |Comment on this)