Ah… memories of some truly dire films (so many of them near shot-for-shot remakes of other horror films) made with my parents’ camcorder just so I wouldn’t start asking my male friends if they perhaps wanted to suck my dick…

Shadows in the Sky
Wednesday Night Live
Deadly Spells**
Cole’s Puppet Show
House**
Ouija**
Our Faces of Death
Rock ‘n’ Roll with Cole
When a Stranger Calls Back… Again
House: The Theatrical Release
Suspense
The Burn
Quake
Sasquatch
King Kong
The Cards of Misfortune
Buried Alive
Schindler’s Shortlist
Shipwreck
Windstorm
Skate-O-Rama
Rock ‘n’ Roll with Cole 2
Untitled Funny Movie
Fat Workout
Vietnam Charlie’s Apartments and Cutlery

** = episodes of our own “Tales from the Crypt”-style horror anthology series called “Midnight Hour” or “Nightmare Tales” (I can’t really remember and it always changed anyway)

The bold titles were honored with Best Picture nominations from the prestigious E-cademy Awards, along with a never-finished-but-at-the-time-in-preproduction film called Delusions that snagged the fifth spot on wishful thinking alone. (I think I’d ended up settling on it being the sort of pre-sexual platonic love story between an outcast boy and his deaf best friend who tries, unsuccessfully, to teach him sign language.) Unquestionably, if I were to reassign the nominations today, Delusions would make room for Skate-O-Rama and When a Stranger Calls Back… Again would probably get booted as well, though for what I don’t know. I might have to dip into the decidedly not film-like Fat Workout.

Lists, Lists, Lists | 1 Comment »

I went back to the same box that I was digging around in last night and started reading my senior thesis (written as a junior, since I wanted to wrap my English major up first and concentrate on the Mass Media one the next year) non-fiction essay (12,000 words, a couple thousand not that bad) which had initially been a journey through the career of Stevie Wonder. Perhaps a journey as viewed by a not black, not blind little boy in suburban Minnesota who really didn’t take all that strongly to other Motown artists until much later but who listened to Hotter Than July nearly every day for years… whose other favorite record at six and seven was the Sesame Street LP with a sticker on the upper right corner that read “To: ________, have a happy birthday. Love, the gang on Sesame Street.” (I never figured out whether it was my mother or father who altered their penmanship to make it look like Maria or Bob or Mr. Hooper was the actual author of the salutation.) Still, the emphasis had been shaping up to be extraordinarily objective, omniscient, clinical and dull.

I hadn’t realized that what my professor Paul Gruchow and the entire English department at Concordia meant by the term “non-fiction seminar” wasn’t necessarily synonymous with “non-subjective non-fiction seminar,” and came to the gradual understanding when all my peers turned in their week’s quota of ten pages of draft material all drenched in first-person narrative. Two weeks from the end of the semester, and limping in at just over 25 of the required 60 pages of rough draft (to later be whittled down to a tight 40), I tossed in an episode in which I frantically listened to “Do Like You” at the same moment that I had inadvertently admitted my homosexuality to a friend over the phone on my last night of summer at home before Sophomore year. Gruchow and my classmates, who had for two months feigned interest in the subject that I was ludicrously still struggling to enliven on the page without explicitly referencing my own personality, went nuts. “This should’ve been your essay all along!! This can still be your essay now!!” I wasn’t impressed with their enthusiasm, not only because it would mean throwing almost half the required page tally in the dustbin but also because it felt like a goddamned trump card. Their reaction only stressed to me how cheap and easy it would be for me to simply describe my coming out process and have them genuflect… Christian private school kids all (some more liberal and urban than others, but still willing, as I was, to tuck themselves into the enclave of lip-service to the controversies and cognitive crises of higher education by attending a school that had an intervisitation policy that kept men out of the women’s dorms, and vice versa, for all but some 24 hours each week).

I don’t think the essay (which I will undoubtedly post here piecemeal, like a serial, in the future… with the comments function disabled) ever came together the way I’d have liked, aside from what I considered to be an extremely poignant ending by my own standards. How could it have? I literally wrote it back in Burnsville on a long weekend field trip away from distractions (and immersed in its setting to jog my memory). If I recall correctly, it was something like a 72 hour marathon that left me quivering and overwhelmed with nostalgia by the time I was finished. It was the opposite of catharsis. I wanted to literally fuck my own past and impregnate the memory with the chance to live it over again. Nonetheless, Prof. Gruchow cornered me on the penultimate session of our class, once he’d had the chance to read my new rough draft, and asked me how I’d ever summoned up the “bravery” to present my deeply personal experience coming out to my best friends for the first time. Bravery, I thought at the time, would be to tell the entire class to fuck themselves for not being as impressed with the life of Stevie Wonder as I am. But I just nodded and admitted that the experience was there for me, as a writer, to exploit. And who was I to argue against the class’s enthusiam? I received a big pat on the back in the form of an “A-” that I never felt was truly in praise of the form and style of my writing, but in spite of it and preoccupied with the candor. I would remember this moment years later when I read in the Star Tribune that the man, who used to so generously and trustingly regale his classes with stories of his struggles with clinical depression and suicide attempts and stays in asylums, had finally lost the battle. I still cannot accept that a man who not only seemed to be admitting that his own worst enemy was himself, but even went so far as to swallow his pride and surrender to that enemy, thought that I was brave. It probably says a lot more about the socio-sexual environment of my alma mater. Someone once told me that the administration of Concordia used to claim “officially” (whatever that means) that the population of their campus was plum fresh out of gayfolk.

I associate Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity” with the Freshman-First-Semester® moment when I bought the album from the Fargo Walmart (impressed by the listening kiosks which were relatively new at the time and were enough, in my state, to have me reasoning that Fargo couldn’t be all that bad, coo’) and brought it to the basement kitchenette of the girls’ dorm next door to mine (i.e. Faggle Rock) to play it for Frog (alias of Kari Wangen), the sweet Garth Brooks-listening girl who was nursing a crush on me crippling enough to allow me to introduce her to Talking Book. She also was rumored to have borrowed my brand-new sweater (which represented my very first piece of clothing I’d ever bought with the specific hope of more closely adhering to Conformia’s clothes-horse code — preppy because, in the kingdom in which even lady shoulder pads could still be spotted on Sundays, even prep chic was punk), and, upon slipping it over her torso, clutched the valence green acrylic of the sleeves in her fists between her breasts and gushed that she was wearing a piece of my clothing. At any rate, while Jay Kay velvetted all over the bridge, she looked at me and said “He’s no Stevie.” A couple years later, I would be offering rides back up to Concordia to my sister’s high school Danceline friend who insisted that I play the song over and over again because it the pretty boys of The Wiggum Project covered it at Cornstock that year. I thought one, a soccer stud who used to bring up Karl Marx in my social problems class (a room whose chief demographic was undoubtedly one and the same with those who, a year later, were deeply disturbed by the school’s invitation extended to a group of Buddhist monks who, horror of horrors, dissolved “profane sands” in our campus pond), was worth the raves. The song still sounds pretty good to my ears (it’s certainly held up better than a lot of the other stuff I was listening to in the fall of ‘97, mostly because I wasn’t listening to much else in the fall of ‘97 aside from my roommate’s Prodigy album)… not great, but my neck turns into a rod of pulsating steely tension from the nostalgia overload it triggers… or maybe it’s stiffening in nostalgia for the time in my life when it didn’t used to hurt all the time.

Freeze Frame | No Comments »

I just found this in a folder, tucked behind some random monologues I wrote and a few piano jury grade sheets. My senior fiction writing class portfolio required a rough draft for a microfiction, ostensibly as a cherry on top. Here’s what more or less became the last thing I wrote for my B.A. in English Writing that wasn’t related to journalism. Really nothing more than a tossed-off tangent based off a minor detail in one of my other stories (the first line was taken directly from the story), and literally written in the fifteen minutes I had before my portfolio was due, hence a number of flubbed punchlines. (”Clown stock”?) Sadly, looking at it now… it might be the only piece of writing from my college experience explicitly written for a class that I think has any potential. And there’s this Valentine’s Day thing.

“NOTHING TO SNIFF AT” — a microfiction.

The “Thousand Clowns” masquerade ball was going along well enough. Underneath the disco ball, and to the pulse of countless forgotten disco chestnuts — Carrie Lucas’s “Dance with You,” Stevie Wonder’s “All I Do,” Ashford & Simpson’s “Bourgie Bourgie” — the almost thousand clowns danced, glitter in their eyes. There were actually only about 630 clowns, but the promoters were happy to have any. Clown stock had fallen sharply in the last two quarters, and this turnout was encouraging, to say the least.

Flopsy was a clown from the Shrine Circus family. Her nose was still developing, but already it had a more radiant red tint than had been seen in many years. She had an austere wardrobe, which came with the lineage. Tonight, she had a stunning ensemble matching a singular four-foot necktie with a fetching yellow umbrella as an accessory.

“Flopsy,” her brother Dizzy chided her, “I hope you’re not planning on opening that umbrella indoors. You know it’s bad luck.”

“Oh, Dizzy,” she pacified him, while dispassionately squirting her lapel flower to see if the stream was clear. “You’re always looking out for me. How long before you realize that I am a grown clown now. Do I have to get my graduate degree in cream pies for you to know it? I do have my tiny-car-with-twenty-clowns-in-it license.”

“My sister,” he condescended, “has the gumption of a Bozo, but the maturity and wisdom of a mere Cookie.”

“And my brother is nothing but a second-rate Ronald McDonald.”

“At your service and respecting food, folks and fun.”

“Dizzy,” she switched gears. “Who is that clown over there?”

Dizzy followed her gaze. She was eyeing a strapping, handome flesh-pancake wearer who wore a straw hat over his fire-engine afro pouf and matched it with a garden hose from which he was spraying tinsel over beach balls.

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “Why don’t you go over there and ask him, if you’re so mature and wise?”

Just then Dizzy looked up. Four bloodshot eyes locked. The mysterious boy-clown had turned around and flopped his size 43 shoes in her direction. She flitted over to meet him halfway as the lights dimmed, “Endless Love” poured from the speakers and time stretched out like a renegade strand of cotton candy spooled by a hung-over Carnie. They hesitated a moment.

“Have we met before?” asked Flopsy.

“I feel as though we have,” was his dreamy response.

“My hands are cold,” Flopsy exclaimed.

“Let me warm them,” said the boy as he sparked a blowtorch. Flopsy giggled.

“You have an innate knack for comedy,” she cooed.

“And you… you have an eye for it.”

She turned from him and turned her gaze ceilingward (ignoring Stilty Uncky Sam’s highwater crotch).

“I’ve been watching from the sidelines for so long… so long,” she said between hitched breaths. “But now I feel as though I should be a part of it,” regret and hope entering her voice.

“I’ve been hoping that the shift from rural to urban America wouldn’t leave my kind irrelevant before my time,” he said, trying to follow her gaze, “but now I’m just a third-stringer, stationed outside the stadium bathrooms with balloons and a change purse.”

“You’re amazing and beautiful,” she said turning back around, finally daring to put one white-gloved hand to his face. “What kind of circus would deny you your rightful place in the limelight?”

“I will never speak ill of my circus,” he said, stoically but minding Flopsy’s lusty outrage. “My circus is my lifeblood. Circuses keep our kind alive. What is your name?”

“Flopsy.”

“Flopsy.” He let the word marinate at the end of his blue tongue. “My name is Mr. Hoe. As I was saying, it is with great pride that I submit to the will of my family name and say, with even more pride, that I am a Barnum & Bailey clown.”

Flopsy could hardly believe her ears. How could this beautiful and intelligent clown belong to the circus family that had long been a blight on her family’s existence and well-being? The family with whom they had been locked in a decades-long death struggle?

“Deny thy ringmaster, and refuse thy tent,” she exclaimed petulantly, “or I shall no longer know thee.”

“… Suit yourself,” he said and opened up his garden hose, unleashing a gale of wind that blew Flopsy across the ballroom and careening into a table loaded with cream pies.

Dizzy rushed to her rescue.

“I think he likes you,” he said. Flopsy liked a gob of custard from her wrist.

“I do too,” she answered.

Clowns | No Comments »