In the spirit of Halloween, I thought I'd share one of my favorite (non-) scary movies: Plan Nine from Outer Space. It's a delight, and an absolute disaster.
The film is remarkable for several reasons. Aside from being known as one of the "worst" movies ever made, it's the last film to feature actor Bela Lugosi (the guy who played the O.G. Dracula in 1931). Lugosi died before production really took off, so director Ed Wood hired a random actor to replace him. Wood still had footage of Lugosi, however, and he opted to simply splice the two actors' performances together.
Most audiences were unimpressed.
Now the movie has a quasi-legendary status. Almost everything about it is, by conventional standards, terrible. The acting, the writing; the production. Even when I first watched this as a naïve and impressionable six-year-old, I knew it was not a well-made movie. But that's its whole charm: as ridiculous a film this might be, it never takes itself too seriously.
For your enjoyment and chagrin, here's the whole thing.
- Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), directed by Ed Wood
The below poem, "Bright Blue Self-Portrait," is by the American writer Frank Lima. Born in Spanish Harlem in 1939, Lima's youth was marked by drug addiction, recovery from which led him to realize his love of poetry. After earning an MFA from Columbia University, Lima decided to pursue a career as a chef, though he continued to write until his death in 2013.
Lima was also featured in this painting by Wynn Chamberlain, which features Lima standing behind fellow New York poet Frank O'Hara:
Wynn Chamberlain, Poets Dressed and Undressed (1964)
If you enjoy this poem, you can read more of Lima's work here.
"Bright Blue Self-Portrait"
I thank the spiders’ webs and the circus dancers who stain our eyes with
Rapid movements and authorize our handcuffs to make no distinction
Between night and day or love and hate.
No one will know the sum of our arduous daily separations from bed to
Work. These pillars actually belong to you since I have not counted them
Or know any more than you do where they are or in what country they
Still exist. We can put all our concerns into a loaf of bread and French
Kisses, go to movies and watch the splashing milk on the screen imitate
the forest in the moonlight. Why all the fuss about the patrons becoming
Feathers, discharging their ideas of nobility on the evening news? There
Are no lights in the theater just soft snow from the balcony that is the
Little red schoolhouse where all this began.
Actually it was because of you I did not attend as often as I should have.
I was too embarrassed to face you across the clay modeling tables since I
Always felt like the clay in your hands was a cartoon version of my teen
Years, dear slippery-fish ladies of the sleepy west.
Don’t forget, my early life will be yours, too,
With its self-descriptions of poetic justice,
The tiny creatures we write about can describe themselves in the moss
We leave behind.
- by Frank Lima, from Incidents of Travel in Poetry (2016)
Julia Child and Jacques Pépin tear it up and make some sammies on Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home. This whole video is a gem, but the true highlight comes near the end, at 3:36.
When I was in middle school, my family got satellite Internet. It was a big deal: we lived on unincorporated land without access to public water or sewage. Having dial-up was exciting enough, but I was ready to explore the Internet within our new 200-megabyte-per-24-hours threshold.
Typing that now, I want to laugh.
By far, the most exciting prospect of having "high-speed" Internet was the ability to find new music. LimeWire was finally within my reach! There were about a hundred different bands I wanted to listen to, so I got to downloading. I could queue up two, maybe even three songs for download, and they'd be on my computer in an evening.
I felt like royalty.
Because these early (and admittedly, illegal and ethically-questionable) downloads were so scarce, I listened to those few songs constantly. I can still remember most of them: "Messes of Men" by mewithoutYou, "Saltwater" by Beach House, and lots of other indie pop that I was so proud of.
I still love those songs. To be honest, I'm probably more "hip" and self-righteous today than I was as a thirteen-year-old, but more on this later.
One of the most memorable songs I found was called "Only Success Can Fail Me Now," by Quasi. (Interestingly, the band was formed by ex-husband and -wife Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss, later of Sleater-Kinney fame, who had decided they were better off as musical partners.) This song was one of their few I could find on LimeWire, and I snatched it up before listening obsessively. For months, I burned that song onto many mix CDs, because it was "cool" to listen to obscure bands from the Pacific Northwest.
At the same time, it was—and still is—a genuinely good song. Not the best song ever written, and maybe not even the best song on its album, but one that has stayed with me. Even now, a decade later, I find small surprises in the melody; the instrumentation. Who knows whether I'd feel the same appreciation if I listened to this song for the first time today? That's part of the beauty of truly loving a piece of music: it grows with you, through time and circumstance.
- "Only Success Can Fail Me Now" by Quasi, from Featuring "Birds" (1998)
This short story, "The School," was written by Donald Barthelme and published in The New Yorker in 1974. When I read it, I feel occasionally unsettled, but consistently triumphant and amused.
Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that ... that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems ... and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.
It wouldn’t have been so bad except that just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes all died. But I think that the snakes – well, the reason that the snakes kicked off was that ... you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of the strike, and that was explicable. It was something you could explain to the kids because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant. So when things got started up again and we found the snakes they weren’t too disturbed.
With the herb gardens it was probably a case of overwatering, and at least now they know not to overwater. The children were very conscientious with the herb gardens and some of them probably ... you know, slipped them a little extra water when we weren’t looking. Or maybe ... well, I don’t like to think about sabotage, although it did occur to us. I mean, it was something that crossed our minds. We were thinking that way probably because before that the gerbils had died, and the white mice had died, and the salamander ... well, now they know not to carry them around in plastic bags.
Of course we expected the tropical fish to die, that was no surprise. Those numbers, you look at them crooked and they’re belly-up on the surface. But the lesson plan called for a tropical fish input at that point, there was nothing we could do, it happens every year, you just have to hurry past it.
We weren’t even supposed to have a puppy.
We weren’t even supposed to have one, it was just a puppy the Murdoch girl found under a Gristede’s truck one day and she was afraid the truck would run over it when the driver had finished making his delivery, so she stuck it in her knapsack and brought it to the school with her. So we had this puppy. As soon as I saw the puppy I thought, Oh Christ, I bet it will live for about two weeks and then... And that’s what it did. It wasn’t supposed to be in the classroom at all, there’s some kind of regulation about it, but you can’t tell them they can’t have a puppy when the puppy is already there, right in front of them, running around on the floor and yap yap yapping. They named it Edgar – that is, they named it after me. They had a lot of fun running after it and yelling, “Here, Edgar! Nice Edgar!” Then they’d laugh like hell. They enjoyed the ambiguity. I enjoyed it myself. I don’t mind being kidded. They made a little house for it in the supply closet and all that. I don’t know what it died of. Distemper, I guess. It probably hadn’t had any shots. I got it out of there before the kids got to school. I checked the supply closet each morning, routinely, because I knew what was going to happen. I gave it to the custodian.
And then there was this Korean orphan that the class adopted through the Help the Children program, all the kids brought in a quarter a month, that was the idea. It was an unfortunate thing, the kid’s name was Kim and maybe we adopted him too late or something. The cause of death was not stated in the letter we got, they suggested we adopt another child instead and sent us some interesting case histories, but we didn’t have the heart. The class took it pretty hard, they began (I think, nobody ever said anything to me directly) to feel that maybe there was something wrong with the school. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the school, particularly, I’ve seen better and I’ve seen worse. It was just a run of bad luck. We had an extraordinary number of parents passing away, for instance. There were I think two heart attacks and two suicides, one drowning, and four killed together in a car accident. One stroke. And we had the usual heavy mortality rate among the grandparents, or maybe it was heavier this year, it seemed so. And finally the tragedy.
The tragedy occurred when Matthew Wein and Tony Mavrogordo were playing over where they’re excavating for the new federal office building. There were all these big wooden beams stacked, you know, at the edge of the excavation. There’s a court case coming out of that, the parents are claiming that the beams were poorly stacked. I don’t know what’s true and what’s not. It’s been a strange year.
I forgot to mention Billy Brandt’s father who was knifed fatally when he grappled with a masked intruder in his home.
One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of –
I said, yes, maybe.
They said, we don’t like it.
I said, that’s sound.
They said, it’s a bloody shame!
I said, it is.
They said, will you make love now with Helen (our teaching assistant) so that we can see how it is done?
We know you like Helen.
I do like Helen but I said that I would not.
We’ve heard so much about it, they said, but we’ve never seen it.
I said I would be fired and that it was never, or almost never, done as a demonstration. Helen looked out the window.
They said, please, please make love with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened.
I said that they shouldn’t be frightened (although I am often frightened) and that there was value everywhere. Helen came and embraced me. I kissed her a few times on the brow. We held each other. The children were excited. Then there was a knock on the door, I opened the door, and the new gerbil walked in. The children cheered wildly.
- "The School" by Donald Barthelme, from Sixty Stories (1981) and sourced from The End of Life website
Monday:
Chicken-crisps (hamburger may be substituted), peas, milk. Dessert: apple or chocolate cookie. I can’t sleep unless I check all the switches.
Tuesday:
Choice of French-bread pizza or turkey ham sandwich, steamed vegetable mix, chilled peaches, milk. If I bang my head I count 1 plus 1 is 2, 2 plus 2 is 4, 4 plus 4 is 8, 8 plus 8 is 16, and I keep going until I ‘m sure I don’t have brain damage.
Wednesday:
If everyone had seven fingers it wouldn’t even be weird because everyone would have seven fingers. We would all go around and say, wouldn’t it be weird if we had five fingers. I can see into the future. Choice of steak-um sandwich or Italian-style cold-cut sub with lettuce and tomato, quick-baked potato, fruit shortcake, milk.
Thursday:
Sometimes when I have to pee I drop a tissue square in the toilet first and then pee on it so no one will hear me, peeing. It really helps to quiet the sound, of the pee, when it goes in the toilet. Steak and cheese sub, carrots, applesauce, milk. Secondary schools add green beans.
Friday:
When I am older I will carry things around in buckets. All kinds of things. I will have secret areas that I will put them in, and then each day the things in the buckets will be different. I don’t know why I like buckets, but I saw a picture of a lady with wooden shoes on and she was carrying around things in buckets attached to a pole. I asked my dad why, and he said it’s her job. I could do that, easy. Alternate for the week: Chef’s choice.
In belated honor of St. Valentine's Day, I present the satisfyingly awful "Laid," produced by Brian Eno.
When I was younger, I had but a vague idea of what this song was about. Today, I'm amazed that these lyrics were broadcast on mid-nineties American radio.
Other exciting tidbits:
I did standup for the first time on Friday night at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The audience was receptive and attentive, especially the generous friends who trekked out to cheer me on. Already I'm itching to perform again.
Over the course of the weekend, I've spent a solid four hours in front of a piano (two hours of which were under the tutelage of my dear pal Deeks, who patiently taught me all sorts of songs).
Today I impulsively hopped on the bus and wandered around Cambridge and Boston like a dense little tourist. I got back to Wellesley an hour ago, and I'm still defrosting.
In 2014, Elia was nearly sued by the Penguin Group for her book We Go To The Gallery, a satire of the popular Peter and Jane series. (The book is dark, weird, and painfully funny; you can read tidbits here.) Penguin claimed that Elia's work, independently made and published in an initial pressing of 1,000 copies, infringed on their copyright of the original series. They ordered her to stop selling the book and to destroy any remaining copies she owned.
As you might have guessed, a lot of artists, writers, and human beings thought that was a little far-reaching. But Penguin's voice (and wallet) was bigger, and Elia was—as far as I can tell—elbowed out of the mild and non-threatening success her work had earned her. If that weren't bad enough, a year after issuing their cease-and-desist to Elia, Penguin began a new series of Ladybird books for adults on topics like "dating," "the hangover," and "the mid-life crisis." I haven't read any of these books, but I have a more than slight suspicion that the ideas were copped from Elia.
Today I nailed down another final exam. I'm done with John Milton, now and forever. Did you know that he forced his daughter Deborah to learn to read ancient Greek, just so she could read aloud to him once he went blind? The worst part is that he taught her how to read it, but he failed to teach her how to interpret it, so she just had to read him long epics in a foreign language she couldn't understand.
And though academia is currently the sun in the solar system of my life, I'm truly and absolutely excited about my work.
It's also worth noting that I've had way too much coffee today, but that after I finished my final I went and ran hill repeats because I was so jazzed about being done and caffeinated. While I was running those hills, "Billie Jean" unexpectedly began playing, which made this video feel even more appropriate. Can you imagine someone making a commercial like this today?
One day, I'll be so funny that someone will film me cooking dinner for one.
In this low-resolution video, several of my favorite things collide: David Lynch; low, ambient lighting; sitting outside telling stories; and quinoa. It's twenty minutes, ergo I don't encourage you to watch the whole thing. Unless you too love the above-listed things, which perhaps you do. I don't know your life.
I could write a book about this song, at the very least. But I'll leave it at this: "Angel," Shaggy's subsequent single, was undoubtedly about "the girl next door."
