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The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Monthly Archives: June 2015

The Global Barfly’s Companion #14: Independent Bar

29 Monday Jun 2015

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IBar, Independent Bar, Orlando

The Global Barfly’s Companion #14 by Brett Pribble

Bar: Independent Bar

Location:  70 N Orange Ave, Orlando, FL 32801

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The Independent Bar, more commonly know as I-Bar, is one of the few remaining old school watering holes of downtown culture. Most venues that the less-mainstream-minded locals frequented closed over a decade ago: Kit Kat Club, The Go Lounge, Knock Knock Bar, Harold and Maude’s. The once popular Matador has now reopened in the Mills 50 area, a part of Orlando many longtime bar hoppers have since jilted DT for. When BBQ bar closed last year (rumored to be reopening on Mills as well), some natives saw it as the last straw; nevertheless, The Independent Bar is still running strong after opening in the epicenter of downtown over thirty years ago.

The first time I visited Ibar it was called Barbarella (The owner recently opened a second club in Austin with the same moniker). While the club has undergone several name and design changes over the years, the spirit remains the same. Unlike most bars, there isn’t a “type” of person you can expect to meet there. Dudes dressed as pirates dance right next to frat boys. Ladies in tiaras celebrate their birthdays across from goth girls covered in tattoos. There is no proper dress code. Want to wear a three-piece suit? Have at it. Feel like just tossing on jean shorts and a tank top? Go right ahead.

Front Bar.

Front Bar.

In the front bar, modern chandeliers hang overhead and copper shoes decorate the back walls. Last Friday, a very amicable bartender named Tia made me a mixed drink, which is pretty cheap if you don’t mind well liquor ($4.50 on most nights).

Tia Serving Up Some Vodka.

Tia Serving Up Some Vodka.

From there I entered a long hallway with couches to my right and a dance floor to my left. This is the main room and one of the only places you can dance downtown without having to worry about someone rubbing their crotch on you.

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The dance floor is lit up by rotating laser lights and giant flat screen TVs that play the music videos of the songs you’re dancing to (Usually. Sometimes it might be just some random ‘80s science fiction flick or a bunch of spinning rectangles).

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Preston was holding down the bar in the dance room. He’s been working at bars downtown for a long time, and he swapped employers and came here after a once novel establishment was bought and turned into commercial garbage. Being served by Preston (and other the congenial staff) is part of what makes Ibar feel genuine. This is where people who actually live in Orlando have gone to party for decades. It’s not some shitty tourist trap in Downtown Disney or Universal CityWalk.

Preston behind the dance floor bar.

Preston behind the dance floor bar.

Upstairs you’ll find more couches and another bar. Lauren was holding it down on this particular evening, and she entitled her bar Lauren’s Lounge on a marker board next to the drink specials.

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Upstairs is a good place to people watch because you can see the entire dance room from there. It’s relaxing to observe patrons swaying to the beat the best they know how. That’s another perk: you don’t need to be a good dancer to feel comfortable dancing in Ibar. The variety of music they play (it’s all over the map) lends itself to just letting loose and not worrying about what you look like.

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If you are hyperactive like me, you’ll appreciate that you can travel through the club in a complete circle and never have to retrace your steps. So, if you’re feeling antsy in one room, you can just stagger over to others until you’ve reached your starting point. The downstairs bar provides a nice place to get away from the noise if you want to have a more intimate conversation with someone. It’s also a good place to go if you’re not in the mood to dance with your friends and just want to chill and drink. It’s like a tiny pub inside a club.

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Many longtime bar hoppers will tell you that they are too burned out for Ibar, but if it ever closed their mourning of its passing would be monumental. Ibar is an Orlando staple. For this reason, I think everyone should visit it at least once. Downtown Orlando on Friday and Saturday nights can be a real shit show with drunks everywhere and throngs of honking cars, but you’ll eventually make it to the safe haven of the club. During the week it’s much slower, so you can avoid the masses. The upstairs and downstairs rooms are usually closed during the week, but the smaller crowds free up more than enough space for you to get your drink on.

_______

Brett Pribble

Brett Pribble teaches writing courses in Orlando, Florida. He’s afraid of sharks and often isn’t sure whether or not he’s dreaming. He was previously published in Saw Palm, The Molotov Cocktail, and 10,000 Tons of Black Ink.

Shakespearing #37.1: More on The Tempest

28 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing

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The Tempest

 Shakespearing #37.1 by John King

 The Tempest

Miranda_-_The_Tempest WaterHouse

I adore The Tempest.

David Foley was entirely right last week: the drama of this play is peculiarly light and strangely weighted.

The wizard Prospero’s grievances seem unfathomable, and his sense of family, of relationships, is both intense, yet distant, pushed through his mind like a vicious abstraction trying to form itself into something like love.

Nicholas Rowe Tempest 1709

The trap that Prospero sets for the brother and king and the other conspirators who betrayed him feels like a pageant of robots who know their crimes, but are incapable of feeling anything about them, not even a stoic callousness that denies morality or loyalty.

The love story between Miranda and Ferdinand seems passionlessly bland—the meeting of almost unbearable innocents–a retread of a fairy tale or Greek myth (Psyche and Eros) turned on its head.

Miranda and Ferdinands Log

The alcoholic antics of Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo have a difficult time seeming funny.

Stephano,_Trinculo_and_Caliban_dancing_from_The_Tempest_by_Johann_Heinrich_Ramberg

Few productions can live up to this illustration.

Only Prospero’s relationship to Ariel, the enslaved sprite, feels emotional throughout the play.

Prospero and Ariel

David said, “the island is a created world, and it’s created through language, and you need to pay attention to that.”

The words are the world of The Tempest.

And it is a world that will return the fantastic to the ordinary, through a deliberate leave-taking of magick and the transcendent. Propsero vows,

[T]his rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.

This is the last play Shakespeare wrote solo, and its farewells fill me with sadness, this sense of the ending that Shakespeare had before the ending. Four to five years before his death in 1616, Shakespeare said goodbye as a thaumaturge.

_______

1flip

John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.

Episode 159: Mixtape #4 (Lost in Sinatraland)

27 Saturday Jun 2015

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Frank Sinatra

Episode 159 of the world’s greatest writing podcast is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to myself and share some music. Musicality affects my writing a lot. Perhaps I cherish sound since I nearly went deaf as a child. It took awhile for Sinatra to enter my imagination, but since taking up residency there, Frank hasn’t left. So this mixtape is devoted to this man and his music, and a few other people along the way.

Lost in Sinatraland

TEXTS DISCUSSED

The Frank Sinatra ReaderGay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is also available online here.

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Episode 159 of the world’s greatest writing podcast is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

The Curator of Schlock #94: The Devil’s Rain

26 Friday Jun 2015

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Satanism, William Shatner

The Curator of Schlock #94 by Jeff Shuster

The Devil’s Rain

Shatner versus Satan? My money’s on Shatner!

DevilsRain1 

There are days I really don’t like my job as the Curator of Schlock, days where’s I’d rather just up and quit and raise ferrets for a living. That’s because every so often I run into a movie that’s so bad that I just want smash my DVD player and exsanguinate my plasma TV. You do not promise me a movie that features William Shatner versus an army of Satanists and the devil himself–Ernest Borgnine–and then switch out William Shatner for Tom Skerritt! I’m so angry that I want to type out this review IN ALL CAPS.

WHAT MOVIE AM I TALKING ABOUT?

It’s 1975’s The Devil’s Rain of course! What? You’ve never heard of it? Robert Fuest of Dr. Phibes fame directed this clunker. He also directed Revenge of the Stepford Wives which will make an appearance on this blog someday.

Anyway, I guess I need to discuss the plot. William Shatner plays this cowboy looking guy…well, it’s not in the old west, it’s in modern times. And the town he lives in was once inhabited by Pilgrims with the buckle hats and everything, which I guess means it really wasn’t out west. Shatner is wearing a cowboy hat at any rate.

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Anyway, he drives out to a ghost town to meet up with Ernest Borgnine who is also wearing a cowboy outfit. Borgnine wants some book that Shatner’s family has passed down from generation to generation, one of these forbidden tomes that people keep hanging on to just so some power hungry Satanists can swipe it from them. Shatner declares that his faith can beat Borgnine’s Satanism any day of the week.

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Shatner enters a church that’s filled with Satanists all chanting “Satan is good. Satan is my pal.” At least, that’s what I remember them chanting. Shatner starts reciting The Lord’s Prayer, but he falters, pulls out a gun, and shoots one of the Satanists who then oozes yellow slime.

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Did I forget to mention that these Satanists have no eyes? Ewwwwwwww! Borgnine is leading the ceremony all decked in a red robe and says Shatner failed or something and now his soul belongs to Satan. Shatner loses his eyes like the rest of them and Borgnine turns into Satan himself with the horns and everything.

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So who else is in this movie? Ida Lupino plays Shatner’s mother. I know I should know who she is. I’m sure she starred in something with Ray Milland. Anton LaVey is in this movie as himself, I assume. I guess he was brought on as a Satanic consultant.

I do give props to the way they portray the Satanists in this movie. They’ve got the black robes and the pentagrams and everything. Anyway, Shatner smashes some urn with a bunch of souls in it and the Satanists begin to melt. Yeah, every Satanist in the movie melts and it takes like fifteen minutes for them to completely deteriorate. I think the director thought all would be forgiven if the audience just got the chance to see some Satanists dissolve into slime.This movie doesn’t quite hold up the way The Wizard of Oz does.

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Oh, and Tom Skerritt escapes with his beautiful wife who is (obviously) Ernest Borgnine in disguise.

 

Five Things I Learned from The Devil’s Rain

  1. Death Wish 5 should have featured Satanists as the main bad guys. It could have ended with Paul Kersey falling into hell and shooting The Giggler again.
  2. Tom Skerritt and his mustache are not welcome at The Museum of Schlock.
  3. William Shatner does not make a convincing Pilgrim.
  4. Satanists need to come up with less complicated plans for world domination.
  5. William Shatner is still a hero even when he’s a hollowed-eyed Satanist.

_______

Photo by Leslie Salas

Photo by Leslie Salas

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.

Heroes Never Rust #99: 1985

24 Wednesday Jun 2015

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Mark Millar, Marvel 1985, Tommy Lee Edwards

Heroes Never Rust #99 by Sean Ironman

1985

I grew up reading comics, specifically X-Men comics. At first, my father would come home with a bag full of random comics for me, my brother, and my sister. My siblings lost interest over the years, but my interest grew. As a teenager, I would go weekly to the comic book shop. My mom never really understood my interest in comic books, but in her defense, reading comics in a time before superhero movies took over Hollywood and made hundreds of millions of dollars was very different. She would look at the covers of my weekly purchases and point at a muscular male character and joke that I was reading comics because I could imagine myself as that character. If a female character, drawn voluptuously as many female comic book characters are, my mom would joke that the reason I didn’t have a girlfriend was because I was looking for a woman who looked like that. I never understood why she thought I read comics because I wanted to be one of the superheroes. I’ve never understood that argument for any story in any medium. I have never wanted to be Superman, Spider-man, Cyclops, Wolverine, Batman, or any other superhero you can name. I have never imagined myself in their costumes or living out their adventures. But, on trips to visit family in New York during the summer, I would imagine Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters (later renamed Xavier’s Institute for Higher Learning). I didn’t want to be a specific character, I only wanted to be me, but I wanted to live in a world where the X-Men existed. Being a superhero, with all the powers that would come with it, wasn’t nearly as interesting as living in a world of superheroes. The world of Marvel Comics with all those locales and interconnected stories and continuity sparked my imagination (the importance of world building may also be why Marvel films are reliable hits these days). I must not have been the only one to want to live in the world of Marvel Comics.

Marvel 1985A few years ago, Marvel 1985 was released. Written by Mark Millar and with art by Tommy Lee Edwards, the six-issue miniseries sees the villains and heroes of the Marvel Universe enter our world. Toby Goodman, a Marvel Comics fan, sees the Red Skull one day in his neighborhood while walking with father. Toby lives in our world, in 1985. From May 1984 to April 1985, Marvel Comics released Secret Wars, a crossover between Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four in which a cosmic entity known as the Beyonder creates a planet for the villains and heroes to do battle. In Marvel 1985, the villains have snuck into our world. There are no big entrances in the middle of New York City with portals opening in the sky and villains pouring out. The Red Skull, Dr. Doom, the Vulture, and the Mole Man live in an old house in the woods., the kind of house kids probably thought was haunted. I grew up in a South Florida suburb, and we had no house that was haunted, but we still had the houses we treaded carefully by as we passed by on our bikes. We still wondered what happened on the inside of those houses, mostly owned by childless couples or single men, who were rarely seen in their yards. The cars were parked in the garage, and we would only see the garage door open, a car pull away, and then the door close. After someone moved out of a house, we could sneak in, but without furniture and personal belongings, the houses were no longer interesting.

marvel-1985-1-3Most of my youth was spent reading and watching popular fiction: comic books, sword and sorcery fantasy, science fiction. Even in comic books, I wanted the fantasy. Characters without superpowers were not interesting to me. Real life to me was going to school a few blocks away. It was watching my parents work jobs they hated and living paycheck to paycheck. I wanted those houses on our block to contain something new and exciting. I liked the X-Men most of all because a mutant could be anyone. They didn’t need to be super smart, or super athletic, or super rich. They didn’t need to be in the right place at the right time and just happen to get struck by cosmic rays or radiation. The X-Men were just people, kids who reached puberty and gained mutant powers. In some ways, the X-Men were the most believable out of all the comic book characters. How many of us feel like we have more to offer, that there’s something inside that people haven’t seen? Comic book universes allowed us to imagine. Not imagine us with superpowers, or at least not just superpowers, but us coming across some bizarre and otherworldly creature walking through those strange houses.

Marvel 1985My mom wouldn’t allowed me to play Dungeons & Dragons because she thought people who played were much too into it and weren’t able to separate fantasy from reality. But, we knew going through those houses that there weren’t really strange creatures, horrific monsters, or alien technology. But, that’s not the point to imagination. How many things do we have today that were once a part of a person’s imagination? Imagination lets us see a different world, and we might come back from our imaginations with something we could use in the real world. I’ll admit, though, we don’t need imagination. Many people live their lives without exercising their imaginations. But, those lives seem so empty to me. Imagination lets us be kids again, riding through our neighborhood staring at houses and creating stories.

_______

Photo by John King

Photo by John King

Sean Ironman (Episode 102) earned his MFA at the University of Central Florida. Currently, he teaches creative nonfiction and digital media at the University of Central Arkansas as a visiting professor. His work can be read in The Writer’s Chronicle, Redivider, and Breakers: A Comics Anthology, among others.

The Global Barfly’s Companion #13: Eden Bar

22 Monday Jun 2015

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Susan Lilley

The Global Barfly’s Companion #13 by Susan Lilley (Photos by Phil Deaver)

Bar: Eden Bar

Location: 1300 S Orlando Avenue, Maitland, FL  32751

IMG_3411(1)It’s five o’clock somewhere, but it seems to be forever five-ish at the lush and lovely Eden Bar, where the magical glow of twilight is filtered for hours through the moss-draped oaks that shelter this inviting outdoor hangout. I am waiting for a friend at the polished curved bar and gazing the vision of Eden portrayed in the trippy Bill Plympton mural on the back wall—think Alice in Wonderland meets Henri Rousseau.

IMG_4174A woman a few stools down is sipping a gin and tonic and reading a book of short stories by home-girl author Vanessa Blakeslee. What better omen than seeing a person you don’t even know reading your friend’s book?

The Eden Bar is attached to central Florida’s premier art cinema, Enzian Theatre, located happily on Orlando Avenue in Maitland within screaming distance of Winter Park and close enough to home for us to walk there. Bliss.

My friend Paula arrives, and we mull over some snacks on the menu—shall it be virtuous edamame? Mediterranean dips and pita? Or the full indulgence: fries laced with truffle oil? I order a French 75, rumored to be a favorite cocktail of The Lost Generation, and wonder if Zelda Fitzgerald ever had too many of these. Tending the bar today is Danielle—a writer and editor who also happens to be a whirlwind mixologist.

IMG_4173(1)She makes drink-making into a power sport. With a dazzling smile. Pulling beer on tap is dashing Andrew, surely the youngest skilled barman in these parts.

On another day you might see Peter behind the bar, a spectacular painter whose work I cannot afford. The music is always just what I want to hear when Peter is in charge. His cocktails are works of art and he treats his regulars like welcome pals. He’s also an affable host to first-timers. But don’t even think about being a drunken, loutish jerk at this bar; Peter ain’t having it, thank God. Having said that, you can be weird, quiet, chatty, tipsy, heartbroken, celebratory, or just in a hurry to grab a snazzy cocktail and get inside Enzian Theatre before the lights go down for tonight’s movie.

FullSizeRender-2Yes, writers love this bar, but so do artists of all kinds and interesting folk of every stripe. During the annual Florida Film Festival in the spring, the place is crawling with filmmakers and film people and film lovers, which makes for superb people watching. But I love ordinary weeknights here, where a writer can bend over a moleskin notebook alone or talk ideas with a friend or colleague. Where someone very nice will bring you a beverage and some food to keep you going. Where you can make new friends and catch up with the old.

_______

Susan LilleySusan Lilley (Episode 82, Episode 85) is a Florida native. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Poet Lore, The Southern Review, Drunken Boat, Slipstream, Sweet, The Apalachee Review, and The Florida Review, among other journals. She is a previous winner of the Rita Dove Poetry Award and her chapbook, Night Windows, won the Yellow Jacket Press contest for Florida poets. Her chapbook, Satellite Beach, is out from Finishing Line Press. She was stunned to be voted top choice for Best of There Will Be Words prose reading series in Orlando for 2013, which resulted in a chapbook of memoir essays called When We Were Stardust.

Shakespearing #37: The Tempest

21 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing

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David Foley, Shakespeare, The Tempest

Shakespearing #37 by David Foley

The Tempest

The Drink: Dark and Stormy. Photo by Amy Watkins.

The Drink: Dark and Stormy. Photo by Amy Watkins.

Sometimes it takes a production that doesn’t work to make you understand how a play does. As I re-read The Tempest, I wondered guiltily if I’d ever much liked it. Coming after Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, it felt tepid. Where was the drama, the deep emotion? The next night I went to see the new Shakespeare in the Park production, directed by Michael Greif, and irritably doubted if the play works at all.

Part of the problem was language. Nobody in the production—including, weirdly, New York Shakespeare Festival stalwart Sam Waterston—has been encouraged to think about it, and a good deal of Prospero’s magic is a magic of words. If anything makes him seem like a self-portrait of the playwright, it’s the way he builds a world of words and makes everyone play a part in it.

So the island is a created world, and it’s created through language, and you need to pay attention to that. On the other hand, with a lot of Shakespeare you can get away with short-shrifting the language. Even if you mess it up, Shakespeare the dramatist will pull you through.

But, as I say, there isn’t much drama here. Greif tries to deal with that by pumping up what he can find. Pitched intensities of speech keep burying the language, and the dialogue is underscored with kettle drums and flashes of light in an understandable but misguided hope that drama will happen if he just keeps hitting it hard enough.

It occurs to me that pretty much the opposite tack is needed for The Tempest. You should take your cue from its most famous line: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” This is not Midsummer, though; it’s a daylight dream. Prospero is insistent that everything needs to be concluded by “the sixt hour.” The play makes a dream of the drama of our waking life. Even the drama of grief is transformed in Ariel’s lovely song: “Those are pearls that were his eyes.”

The play is built on such dream-like images. Greif leaves out an important one. In the final scene, Miranda and Ferdinand are revealed playing chess. Chess is a game of rank and stratagems. It’s the world in small, if you understand the world and all our experiences of it (even love) as inextricably bound to skirmishes for power and advantage. The island, too, writes that world small. Far from civilization, it helplessly recreates structures of obeisance and aggression. Caliban, the least civilized character in the play, only needs to see a pair of drunks on the beach to create a little principality of them.

And yet The Tempest longs for a world innocent of all that. Gonzalo conjures this world in his vision of a “golden age” without “treason, felony,/Sword, pike, knife, gun” where “nature should bring forth” in “all abundance,/To feed my innocent people.” And Miranda and Ferdinand’s wedding pageant is an idyll of peace and plenty, of “turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep,/And flat meads thatched with stover.” Miranda is radically innocent, always encountering the world as if for the first time. What loss of innocence does that chess game represent?

Caliban represents another kind of innocence. From a position beyond the reach of civilization, he calls into question its most cherished structures. As does the play. Perhaps The Tempest is less a drama than a diorama, framing all our structures and stratagems as a dream and hinting at the dream’s dark irrationality. As Prospero says of Caliban at the end of the play, “This thing of darkness/I acknowledge mine.”

_______

David Foley

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

Episode 158: Julian Chambliss

20 Saturday Jun 2015

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Episode 158 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to the historian Julian Chambliss,

Julian Chamblissplus Dmetri Kakmi writes about how reading Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky taught him how to write about psycho-geographic dis-associations.

Dmetri Kakmi

TEXTS DISCUSSED

Ages Of HeroesSheltering SkyNOTES

Check out Julian Chambliss’s site here.

Check out John Sims’ site devoted to the Confederate flag project.

Check out the news coverage of the Flag Funerals Project by (in order of decreasing journalistic competence) WESH, WKMG Local 6, and WFTV.

Read The Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s statement about the Massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church here.

Check out the pro-slavery comment made at a diversity panel at CPAC in 2013 here.

To read about the Stop Owlcatraz movement, go here. Read about the car incident here.

Carlton Melton‘s song “Sequoia,” which accompanied Dmetri Kakmi’s essay, appears on their album Pass It On.

Carlton Melton Pass It On

_______

Episode 158 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

The Curator of Schlock #93: Race with the Devil

19 Friday Jun 2015

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Peter Fonda, Race with the Devil, Warren Oates

The Curator of Schlock #93 by Jeff Shuster

Race with the Devil

Fonda and Oates. Need I say more?

DevilC1

I guess I do need to say more, otherwise I’ll have a seven-word review.  1975’s Race with the Devil from director Jack Skarrett was a nice surprise. The Internet dubs this movie as an “occult thriller” which is what people call horror movies when they don’t want to call them horror movies. Whatever. The movie starts out with Peter Fonda in a motorcycle race, and that’s enough to sell me. I guess I imagine every character Peter Fonda plays as a kind of reincarnated Wyatt. 

This movie also stars Warrenn Oates (of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia fame). I’ve gathered that Fonda and Oates were kind of the “Two Coreys” of their day. Lara Parker (Dark Shadows) and Loretta Swit (M*A*S*H) play their wives. The four of them decide to take a vacation in the middle of winter, hoping to drive an RV all the way to Colorado for some skiing.

DevilC3

All goes well until Oates decides to have them make camp off the beaten trail rather than spend the night at some fancy RV campsite. Fonda and Oates get their drink and look ready to hit the sack when they see a tree across the river catch fire. A glance through some binoculars reveals a whole bunch of Satanists chanting and dancing around. 

Now, this is more like it! No dwarfs named Hercules doling out stupid curses or Christopher Lee performing ultra complicated reverse-baptisms. We just get some old-fashioned Satanists complete with hooded robes, naked women frolicking, and virgin sacrifices. It’s that last part that freaks out Fonda and Oates.

Oates’ wife helpfully yells at him from the RV to get to bed, and the Satanists realize they’re being watched. Fonda and Oates break for the RV, kicking off a race with the devil (worshipers).

I have to say these are some bush league Satanists. Upon closer inspection we see that they’re all not wearing the black robes. Some of them look like they just took an old blanket and wrapped it around their head. Some are wearing them like capes. Maybe proper vestments don’t matter to them, but it’s pretty ridiculous when the Satanist chasing you is dressed like Captain Underpants! And you’d think one of them would have canvased the area before going through with whole human sacrifice ceremony. Just torch the RV or postpone your human sacrifice until the following week. 

DevilC4

I don’t think my family ever owned an RV. We had what was called a “camper van”. It had a bunk bed and a refrigerator that came with a little lock to fasten it closed. My mom packed stew for a camping trip one time and my dad forgot to fasten that lock. Stew was flying all over the place as soon as he made a left turn. Dad was not a happy camper that day.

DevilC2

Still, one thing we never had to worry about was Satanists attacking our vehicle. RVs are kind of like fortresses on wheels. And if a Satanists tries pouring gasoline through your skylight while you’re doing 85 on the Interstate, just climb up top and shoot him with your shotgun…and try not to fall off a vehicle going 85 miles per hour because you’re racing with the devil.

_______

Photo by Leslie Salas.

Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.

Aesthetic Drift #4: On the Road, After Living in Jack Kerouac’s House, Part 2

18 Thursday Jun 2015

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Ciara Shuttleworth, Jack Kerouac

Aesthetic Drift #4 by Ciara Shuttleworth

On the Road, After Living in Jack Kerouac’s House, Part 2

When I left off with Part 1 of this blog, I was in Winside, Nebraska, where I lived for a large chunk of my childhood.

After sending Part 1 off to John King, I spent one more day in Winside before getting back on the road, and made a large garden-heavy dinner with Lin Brummels, her son Zeke and his wife Mollie, and her daughter Liz.

LinLizZeke

Lin’s cilantro and spinach were taking over her garden, so I made cilantro hummus and we steamed spinach, grilled huge chicken breasts, and sautéed mushrooms and Brussels sprouts in salt and pepper. I hadn’t seen Zeke since 1998 and Liz in even longer, but I wasn’t surprised that they have turned into exceptionally kind, articulate, funny adults. It also came out that the next people to occupy the old farm house my family had lived in were two women who used it as a brothel, departing quickly once winter hit. The Brummels got a dog out of the deal, named John Dog after the john who’d abandoned it near starvation.

The next morning, I left with a heavy heart, hoping to find myself back in Winside soon. I was stopped by road construction outside Pierce, Nebraska, and photographed Flat Jack with a local girl, holding the “Slow/Stop” sign, who had taken Flat Stanley on her family’s vacation last summer.

OutsidePierceNE

Flat Jack and I drove through O’Neill, “Nebraska’s Irish Capital,” past an abandoned school house at the edge of Bassett, over Bone Creek outside Ainsworth—which is roughly where we hit the 2,000-mile mark of the road trip. Johnstown is a middle-of-nowhere town with a few old pioneer wagons by the exit, a bank and a dry goods store, both of which look long-closed, and an open and active saloon, even though it was before noon. The landscape was changing…more firs, more pines, but fewer trees in general, and not nearly as green. Entering Cherry County, a sign that proclaims, “God’s Own Cow Country.”

I stayed on Nebraska highways as long as possible before cutting through the impoverished Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Groups of men walked down the highway, heads tucked to chests, and a drunk man attempted to kiss a woman on the sidewalk and was pushed aside and lectured as he laughed.

I spent two nights in Spearfish with a friend from the University of Idaho MFA program, Matt Bauman. He teaches five classes of comp a semester and, while still kind, there is now a pervasive sadness about him. He isn’t writing much and isn’t submitting his work for publication. We Googled colleagues from the program, and I was shocked to find that most of our talented group are, like Matt, not publishing. We did a short hike to Roughlock Falls in Black Hill National Forest, went to the lookout tower on Terry’s Peak, and explored Deadwood.

Deadwood

I left hoping that Matt would launch himself back into his writing.

LittleSalmonRiver

My initial plan was to visit a number of friends in Montana, but when Arian Katsimbras, a young poet recently graduated from the Virginia Tech MFA program, suggested I visit him and my fellow University of Idaho alum, Lindsay Wilson, in Reno, I thought, “Why not?”

I put in a 626-mile hard-haul through Wyoming to Salt Lake City where I stayed a night with David and Carol Kranes. On the way, I crossed the North Platte River, which was placid, but a couple dozen miles later, it was narrower and rushing. As I cut through Rawlins, Wyoming, to get on I-80, a deer stood so still in a cemetery, I thought it was a statue. As I was about to look away, the deer bolted across the cemetery and was gone.

I hit Salt Lake in late-afternoon. I am a fan of David Kranes’ work, especially a 1989 novel, Keno Runner.

DavidKranes

He was the artistic director at Sundance Playwrights Lab for fourteen years, which is where he and my father met in 1990. David and Carol immediately poured wine and set out a spring guacamole with chunks of cucumber that I need to request the recipe for.

CarolKranes

We told stories about family friends from the Sundance era, and talked books and travels. There is the bedraggled body of a deer behind a shed in their backyard, headless after guys working on their house must have cut off the head for the antlers! They are still obviously in love and have recently become grandparents. Although this was my first time meeting them, their hospitality made me feel at home and I hope to visit them again soon. I dawdled over breakfast and insisted on taking photos, but then hit the road again, for the 500+ miles to Reno.

I think of northern Nevada as my father’s. Nebraska belongs to the family, but northern Nevada belongs to him. I was ages ten to twelve when we lived in Las Vegas, but Elko and Fallon and the great stretches of desert and scrub will always be in my father’s heart the way the Pacific Ocean is in mine. I stopped at Elko’s Folk Life Center and was given a tour by Artistic Director Meg Glaser.

MegGlaserElko

The gift shop has my father’s chapbooks and a Paul Zarzyski CD for sale, and I saw the stage where both have read their poems. Meg told the story of my father talking their way into Mona’s Ranch, a brothel, to buy t-shirts, and getting out just before they brought the girls down to try and sell an hour or two of old-fashioned Nevada party-love.

In Reno, I checked into the El Dorado for $37 a night.

ArianBookstore

Arian swung by to pick me up and we stopped by the local bookstore before hitting the bars to drink too much whiskey, as poets often do when meeting for the first time.

ArianCiaraBarPic

We talked writing and books, and he told me how gentrified Reno has become since he left, but the bar we ended up at is still authentic, still a place where fights break out on the weekends. He’d bartended for years prior to grad school and it is a life he has no interest in diving back into. At a booth near us, a kid fell asleep, and although the kid’s friends were ignoring him, dancing and drinking, Arian said they would get him home safely, even if they had to carry him to his apartment; that is how Reno is.

JackEnjoysReno

The next morning, I slept in and then wandered with Flat Jack, taking pics.

InReno

That evening I met up at the Depot, a local brewery, with Arian and his girlfriend, Jessica, a law student in Seattle, as well as Lindsay Wilson and the fiction editor for The Meadow.

JessicaArianCiaraLindsay

We called it an early night, at around 9 P.M., as I had another 600+ miles to drive the next day to Grangeville, Idaho.

I left Reno in a torrential downpour, with heavy traffic that pulled off a little ways outside Reno on USA Parkway—there must have been a shift-change at a factory. I hydroplaned three feet into the next lane at one point, even though I was going below the speed limit. Luckily no one was in the lane! By Winnemucca, the rain had all but cleared off. As I crossed over into Oregon, I went through a small town, McDermitt. Feral cats crossed the highway at a leisurely pace and, a few miles further north, two bobcats dashed across the road and into the brush before I had time to stop for a photo.

Although it was a nearly 600 mile drive to Grangeville, and despite the 55mph speed limits through Oregon, the day flew by as I went back and forth between Mountain and Pacific time zones. I’d been on the road for nearly 4,000 miles. Although road-tired, I was still curious about ever-changing landscapes, the people’s faces in towns I coasted through. I was fully enjoying my temporary gypsy existence. The American landscape is diverse, beautiful, and I’d been through lush southern forests, across the rich clay hills of agrarian northern Nebraska, the South Dakota badlands, Utah salt flats, flat stretches of Nevada desert….

On the road, everyone cuts forward, although yesterday is no more gone than where you nighted last. Because I stopped often to take pictures, I’d pass the same semis three times in one day. As a woman traveling alone, there are road-rules: don’t stop at rest stops or gas stations with no other women around, don’t linger anywhere too long or too far from your car, get in your car and drive on if strange men try to talk to you, don’t get pissed when a semi cuts you off to pass a slow RV, because it takes much more to downshift than it does for you to slow in a car, and say yes to the miles and how your mind drifts.

Cocoa, Ciara, Jessi, Luke, Mo, Lone Tree, Nebraska, July 28, 1988

Cocoa, Ciara, Jessi, Luke, Mo, Lone Tree, Nebraska, July 28, 1988.

I thought about how my family packed up an AMC Eagle station wagon in 1988, Cocoa the Irish Wolfhound in the very back, my mother, younger sister and brother in the back seat, and my older sister, Mo, and I sharing the shotgun seat—in charge of music and maps as my father drove—for the trek from Winside, Nebraska, to Las Vegas, Nevada. We did it again when we moved from Nevada to eastern Washington. Even before those epic road trips, my parents piled my older sister and I into a Pinto wagon to move just after Christmas of 1979 from the Bay Area to Fairbury, Nebraska.

I find joy on the road. As I neared Grangeville, with only three nights left of my fifteen-day road trip, I realized my love for the road is the result of family moves that included many photo-stops, bologna and mustard sandwiches, truck stops where our Wolfhound would growl at anyone who came too close. It is the excitement of going somewhere new, and the desire for “what’s next?” once landed.

On the move to Las Vegas, Mo and I Xeroxed copies of a Dwight Yoakam photo and wrote notes on them for hotel housekeeping or to leave on the back of toilets at gas stations. We had practiced his signature, so would sign each as if it were a personal note from Dwight. Having Flat Jack along on my post-Kerouac House road trip gave me a similar giddiness. It was Jack who insisted I find someplace to turn around on many two-lane highways to retrace our steps back to a creek or abandoned house or pretty horizon. Often I’d say something about traveling alone and be corrected: “And Flat Jack.” Flat Jack became a major part of the trip, a curiosity for friends to follow on Instagram and Facebook.

Flat Jack is also the catalyst for a book. Kris Wetherholt of Humanitas Media Publishing saw the #flatjackontheroad images early in my road trip and contacted me through my father. Would I be interested in doing a book of Flat Jack photos and stories from the road? I became even more diligent about snapping pics with Flat Jack!

I hit Grangeville in late-afternoon and Gary Gildner met me at the city park to lead me up the mountain to the home he shares with his wife, Michele. My father and Gary have been friends since before I was born, but I had not seen him in over a decade, and had not met Michele. This visit, like the Winside visit, was important, because I was reconnecting with someone, as an adult, who had known me since I was a child. Gary and I had spoken over the phone and corresponded via email when we published in the same issue of The Southern Review, but to share meals and wine and stories tied it all together.

GaryMicheleGildner

The Gildners set me up in the guesthouse they built above a two-car garage. The wood from the barn they’d torn down to build it lined the walls and framed the windows and bathroom mirror. It was like staying in a country resort. Michele left a TV tray on the bed with nuts and chocolate, a book, lotion (she knew I’d be dried out from the West’s arid heat after months in Florida!), and the wifi password. A true hostess and great cook, Michele made me feel at home… as if I’d known her for years. She is a graceful and lovely former ballerina. I spent as much time, if not more, with Michele as with Gary. The memories that came up when trading stories were inspiring, and I plan on writing an essay about the six months my family lived in Gary’s Des Moines home while he was a writer-in-residence at Michigan State University and my father was visiting writer at Drake University.

DeerAtGildeners

After two glorious nights with the Gildners—hiking, writing from place to place on their property, and spending afternoons and evenings with them, I hit the road again for a day in Moscow, Idaho, where I went to grad school.

My first stop was Mary Blew’s house. I correspond with Mary regularly, so there wasn’t much catch-up to do, but she is someone I will never get enough of. Mary and I sat on her porch with whiskey, talked for hours before I headed up to the university campus to say hello to Yvonne Sertich, who had been my boss when I was Programs Manager for Executive Education, and then to Terri and Mike Gaffney’s home, where I would spend the night. After a glass of wine, we headed for Moscow’s Art Walk.

Annie, Mike, and Terri.

Annie, Mike, and Terri.

I met friend and fictioneer, Annie Lampman, at the Prichard Art Gallery, and we swung by photographer Nick Beymer’s exhibition briefly before meeting Buddy and Camie Levy for drinks at the Garden, and meeting back up with the Gaffneys for dinner at Maialina.

BuddyLevy

Jack (left) and Buddy Levy.

I ran into countless friends and acquaintances along the way and was reminded how warm and welcoming Moscow is. Why did I think one night would be enough? It was a terrific way to end the road trip, a mini-reunion/mini-homecoming before driving the final miles to eastern Washington.

BackInEasternWA

Now that I have landed in the scabland of eastern Washington north of Moses Lake, I am beginning to write toward the Humanitas Media Publishing book, and will need to go through the 1,000+ photos I took on the road. I am also hunting down the original copyrights for the two Flat Jack images I used…to gain permission for use in the book. Humanitas Media plans on donating a portion of the proceeds to the Kerouac Project of Orlando.

I am also pulling together a chapbook anthology, through my father’s Bunchgrass Press, of poems from a group of writers that significantly influenced my work and life while I lived at the Kerouac House. The chapbook anthology will be printed in an edition of about 100 on 100% cotton paper and will not be for sale, will only be available from the writers involved. This treasure will forever bind together, through poetry, some of my favorite people.

The road trip was the perfect way to extend the Kerouac House residency. I am grateful to Dona Black, Bret and Susan and Donovan Gottschall, Lin Brummels, Zeke and Mollie Brummels, Liz Daehnke, Carolyn Rabe, Bill Burris, Jim Hansen, Matt Bauman, David and Carol Kranes, Arian Katsimbras, Lindsay Wilson, Jessica Berry, Gary and Michele Gildner, Terri and Mike Gaffney, Annie Lampman, Buddy and Camie Levy, and so many others for the beds, meals, drinks, stories, and joy. I am also grateful to my folks, Red and Kate, who are my biggest fans and supporters, who are part of everything I do, and who will sleep soundly again now that I am off the road. Roughly 4,500 miles over fifteen days are behind me, but the projects will keep the residency and road trip—and Flat Jack—alive for some time.

_______

Photo by Drew Perlmutter.

Photo by Drew Perlmutter.

Ciara Shuttleworth was born in San Francisco and grew up in Nebraska, Nevada, and Washington state. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Confrontation, The New Yorker, The Norton Introduction to Literature 11e, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. Shuttleworth received an MFA in poetry from University of Idaho, a BFA in painting/drawing from San Francisco Art Insitute, and a BA in studio art from Gustavus Adolphus College. She was a 2014 Jerome Foundation Fellow at the Anderson Center at Tower View, and The Jack Kerouac Project of Orlando’s 51st resident at Jack Kerouac House.

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