Episode 230 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
This week is a live show: Horror Movie Poetry Night III. We enter the dark rubicons of The Exorcist, Halloween, The Island of Dr. Moreau, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Darling, The Shining, Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Friday the 13th Part I/III, The Silence of the Lambs, and King Kong, and came out with poetry, essays, and literary mayhem. Good times.
The Drunken Odyssey All Stars were Glendaliz Camacho, Curtis X. Meyer, Stacy Barton, Jim Driggers, Shawn McKee, Jared Silvia, Whitney Hamrick, Teege Braune, & your host, John King.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
Episode 230 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
Episode 229 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 return to Jesse Bradley’s Halloween installment of his prose reading series, There Will Be Words.
Jesse Bradley, Karen Best, Shawn McKee, Teege Braune, John King, & Jared Silvia.
Erik Deckers
Plus a final performance from The Terrible Mr. Sundrop.
Episode 229 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
Episode 152 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, we have a roundtable discussion of Kattenstoet, the Belgian cat holiday that may or may not be a retroactive apology for medieval atrocities against felines.
Present for this discussion were Jared Silvia, Lisa Roney, and Teege Braune.
Episode 152 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
Episode 139 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
This week features our third annual Erotic Poetry Night,
with moi and The Drunken Odyssey All-Stars:
Danielle Kessinger
Teege Braune
Genevieve Anna Tyrrell
Anna King
Erica Dawson.
Many thanks to our most excellent venue,
& special thanks to our friends at…
NOTES
Check out Wilson Santos’ Dominican Republic project, including how to donate, here.
Check out Orlando Shakes’ wonderfully colorful production of Merry Wives, which runs from February 4 to March 7, 2015.
Photo by Tony Firriolo.
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Episode 139 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
Subject: The Greatest Film Every Made or An Average Tuesday for John King?
Date:December 22, 2014
You’ve called me out! It’s true that I have been hallucinating more and more regularly. Why, early this very week I had the strangest dream that you and I were being serenaded by an adorably sad, seven foot tall clown with a golden voice. What a strange but delightful vision. My pharmacologist warned me not to eat those mushrooms growing around the back of my house, but damn it, they just taste so good on pizza.
That being said, I feel certain that at least some of the details of my last letter took place in reality. For example: your neighbor Mrs. Thorndike had asked me not to use her real name so that the world would not be privy to her libertine activities, and while it’s true that her parties are not exactly orgies, but more akin to friendly afternoon games of bridge, most of us in attendance wear masks and a few of us (no names) do get naked. I used Nuala Windsor as a convenient alias, but alas, I chose too obvious a ruse. Nevertheless, it is you who has exposed a kind, if eccentric, elderly woman. Let that be on your own conscience.
The fact is, that as I read the details of your attack on Eyes Wide Shut, I kept thinking, John’s right! But where you groan and shake your head in agonized disbelief, I find myself filled with delight. Rainbow motif symbolizing adultery and sexual excess? Yes, I’ll take it! Proliferation of characters passing through thresholds and dreamy, drawn-out dialogue? Please, give me more! A highly stylized and antiseptic orgy that, despite the outrageous amount of nudity, is completely lacking in anything that could be considered erotic? I can’t get enough of the stuff!
It isn’t necessarily easy for me to say exactly what I love about EWS, but no matter how many times I watch it, whenever I hear Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite, Waltz No. 2, my analytic and aesthetic mind begins whirring with the possibility of making new connections, of reentering this strange universe that is both exotic and present. I never ever grow tired of viewing this bizarre and mysterious cinematic objet d’art. Watching the film after reading your critique, I’ve come to the conclusion that trying to convince another person that this film is a masterpiece, especially someone as intellectually gifted and adept at analysis as yourself, is simply a foolish endeavor. Which is not say EWS is a guilty pleasure. Far from it. You simply appreciate the oddball genius of Stanley Kubrick or you do not.
One place in which I must disagree with you, however, is your assertion that EWS is a projection of a “repressive Puritanical libido.” Tom Cruise’s Dr. Bill Hartford’s never-realized sexual misadventure is more complicated than an attempted escape from inhibition. After all, he and his wife Alice seem to share an active sex life.
What sends Dr. Hartford down the rabbit hole is not Alice’s confession about the naval officer, but rather the realization that his wife is a sexually autonomous person and not merely an ornament reflective of his social status and object of male sexual desire. His emasculation is not so much a result of learning that his wife once wanted another man, but that women are tempted by sex at all.
Instead of handling this emotional trauma the way one might in the real world, either by seeking marital counseling or engaging in some kind of midlife crisis, Bill enters a psychological labyrinth inside a dreamscape version of New York City that begins with an oddly inverted version of his own situation. A deceased patient’s daughter, who looks remarkably like his own wife Alice, spontaneously and without warning professes her love to Bill despite her engagement to a man who looks remarkably like Bill himself, the bright opulent rooms juxtaposed with the same dull blue light seeping in from the windows.
Bill attempts to redeem his masculinity throughout a series of increasingly odder scenarios that culminate in a masked orgy, a place where women are reduced to literally faceless objects of pleasure, but just as his near temptation by the models at Ziegler’s party was interrupted before he was able to go where the rainbow ends, every encounter fails to culminate in sexual union or restore the shattered order to his world. He returns from this journey to discover another man’s face beside his wife in his bed. Of course, it is own face, his mask from the orgy, his own illusion occupying the place of his real self.
All boundaries have been subverted, the lines between dream and wakefulness, fantasy and reality, and representation and that which is being represented.
But it’s like I said: you either dig that sort of thing or you don’t. I doubt I’ve convinced you that you enjoy a movie you’ve previously called “a pretentious waste of time.” I can offer one last detail, however, that I think you might appreciate. This theme of representation even seeped into the actual production of EWS. You mentioned you recognized the location of Rainbow Rentals as a cross street between Sixth Avenue and Washington Square Park when, in fact, Kubrick’s phobia of flying meant that none of the movie is filmed on location.
Instead a reconstruction of New York City was built in a sound studio in London. Kubrick’s eye for detail was as unquestionably sharp late in life as it had ever been before.
While my defense may have fallen on deaf ears, I will say, if nothing else, I take pride in the fact that I was able to force you to endure a second viewing of EWS and that the wonderful music of Jocelyn Pook was redeemed in your eyes.
Only now as I reach my conclusion does it occur to me that maybe I have missed your point altogether, and perhaps your frustrations with EWS are much more basic: simply put that a film climaxing in a bizarre orgy will never impress you, a man for whom masked orgies have simply become a routine detail of any humdrum Tuesday evening. Enjoy your orgies, my friend. I hope to see you soon.
Episode 131 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
This week’s episode got a bit out of hand. Jared Silvia tells me that, for legal reasons, this needs to be called a radio play.
Anyway, I talk to Santa, have an interview you have to hear to believe–maybe you still won’t believe it–plus
I replay Melissa Crandall’s personal essay about A Christmas Carol.
NOTES
Pre-order Nathan Holic’s new novel, The Things I Don’t See, here for only $6.
Episode 131 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
Subject: The Unspeakable Awfulness of Eyes Wide Shut (Redux)
Date: December 15, 2014
Teege, I am more worried about you than ever.
First, my villa complex uses garbage cans. There is no dumpster. This leads me to believe that you are either hallucinating again or else you are bothering even more strangers with your relentless obsession.
Of course, one might reasonably conclude that the reality of one night, or a handful of nights, let alone a whole lifetime, is not the truth, just as no dream is ever only a dream. Still, I am worried about your fantasmagorias about attending orgies with elderly women, especially if they (the orgies) are as boring as the one depicted in Eyes Wide Shut.
Second, you know as well as I, alas, do, that the preposterously-named Nuala Windsor is a character in that cinematic abomination. Either your movie-watching companion was having you on, or maybe you knew but played along, eager to blur the lines of reality and boredom the ways EWS does.
My neighbor is Mrs. Thorndike, and she’ll be crushed to know that you’ve been watching VHS movies with another elderly woman down the street or wherever. She asked me to tell you to call her. You’ve made things awkward between me and my neighbors, Thomas.
Third, I checked the DVD out of the library and watched it for the first time in fourteen years, and, ouch, EWS seemed even more unbearable this time.
Eyes Wide Shut should have been called Tom Cruise Walks In and Out of (Mostly Opulent) Rooms.
This two-and-a-half hour movie would have had a running time of about seventeen minutes if Kubrick had used jump-cuts instead of lavishing steady cam footage onto every entrance and exit. I wonder if Kubrick saw Scorcese’s two major steady cam shots of entrances in Goodfellas and thought, “I will use that in every scene, despite there being no coherent story-enhancing purpose of such cinematography.”
And here is where you might pull the thesaurus down and tell me that such footage represents the liminal, and that such representation is essential to the themes of EWS, in particular the in-between state between reality and dream, and the in-between state between reality and perception.
But there is no liminal state between boredom and boredom, Teege. The liminal is a lazy metaphor, the expression of a lack of anything real to communicate.
The aging and ailing Kubrick must also have been reading too much Harold Pinter and decided to out-Pinter Pinter, because the amount of pauses is excruciating. If he used jump cuts and lost the pauses, the running time of EWS comes down to about seven minutes.
And when the dialogue finally comes, often it is delivered with Quaalude-grade stupefaction.
When the plot drudges towards Tom Cruise finally about to crash the black mass orgy, we ooze into the totally-essential tuxedo and costume rental scene, where we get to meet Mr. Milich of Rainbow Tuxedo Rentals, and learn about his tragic bald spot.
The name of the rental place–considering the barely cryptic innuendo of Nuala Windsor earlier in the film, whose sexual predilection almost makes her either a succubus or a reality television star–is so symbolic as to be nauseating, especially since I used to walk by this actual location on my way to classes at NYU. This is on one of the cross streets between Sixth Avenue and Washington Square Park in the West Village.
When Milich enters his office rather late at night, he catches two men with an underaged girl, all of them in states of undress. He attacks the men and screams at the girl, who’s either his daughter or ward, who runs to Tom Cruise for protection. She then immediately casts lusting looks at her new protector like some Lolita, without the nuance or ambiguity Nabokov gave his nymphette.
The point seems to be to call into question what one sees, and to wonder if the world is so ubiquitously corrupt, or if one’s imagination–if one’s own repressive Puritanical libido–is being projected dangerously out onto the world.
In the fucking West Village in the latter half of the twentieth century, one of the least sexually inhibited locales in America. What next, a closeted gay man living in San Francisco who wants to come out, but is afraid the people in his city won’t accept his sexual orientation?
If the movie’s setting was Indianapolis or Chicago, the profoundly nuerotic sexual anxiety might make more sense.
Probably Arthur Schnitlzer’s Dream Story (Traumnovelle), the source material for EWS, makes more sense: Vienna in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
Milich, as a proud business owner, should have been the main character, as I liked him, his daughter, and the two Asian men with her were more interesting than everyone else in the movie.
It turns out, Jocelyn Pook’s music is wonderful; it reminds me of her music for the film of The Merchant of Venice. The annoying music from EWS (sampled and repeated for maximum annoyance as a tone poem of boredom) is György Ligeti’s “Musica Ricercata II: Mesto, Rigido e Cerimonale,” which I think translates to “Can some shadow demon please help me tune this piano?”
This movie has scarred me with its awfulness, dear friend. Please explain how you see it as anything other than a pretentious waste of time, the silly effort of a former cinema master pretending that he still has something to say.
_______
John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.
Subject: The Unspeakable Awfulness of Eyes Wide Shut
Date: December 1, 2014
Teege, this obsession is unworthy of you, dear friend.
A year ago, on the platform of the Grand Floridian monorail station, with Christmas tunes oozing from the eaves, and huge wreathes prematurely dangling, you extolled Stanley Kubrick’s final cinematic hurrah, that turgid psychosexual melodrama that is part architecture porn, part Noh play (maybe it’s just the acting), and part predictable postmodern conspiracy narrative.
Tom Cruise’s tortured innocence as the private physician of the one percent was unbearable.
The notion that there is a privileged subculture in modern New York City so sexually repressed that only a black mass-style orgy (or is it an orgy-style black mass?) could liberate their Puritanical souls is ludicrous. Like the show Friends, Eyes Wide Shut imagines a New York City unpopulated by those actual New Yorkers who live there.
Nicole Kidman was even more unbearable than Tom Cruise.
Am I supposed to be enjoying it on a merely impressionistic level, as a sort of affectless tone poem that isn’t really about the human experience, but something sublimely inhuman, like the last sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey? Are hallucinogens necessary for appreciating Eyes Wide Shut?
Is the movie just something for the eyes to focus on while listening to Jocelyn Pook’s maddening music?
As a friend, I ask you these things, because your harassment on this issue has gotten out of control. The way you boom your mitts on my door after midnight, with that ratty VHS copy clutched in your hand is startling my poor neighbors. You’re like the Ancient Mariner with this wretched tape as your albatross that you are somehow proud of.
Apparently, the old woman two doors down from me invited you in, and you showed the movie to her and offered your own expert commentary on the film while she watched it. At least you found someone who had a VHS machine. You drank all her lemonade after you finished the Guinness you had brought. She thought you were very nice. Does Jenn know you are doing this?
Really, buddy. I’m getting worried.
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John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.
Adventures in Halloweening: An Afterword in the Style of Bierce
To the loyal and dedicated readers of In Boozo Veritas, I have co-opted Teege’s blog this week in order to plead for your assistance. No one has seen or heard from Teege since Halloween, and I am asking you to please come forward with any information about his whereabouts to which you may be privy. I’m not sure if he ran away and is in hiding, was kidnapped, or has simply vanished into thin air. I believe that he is alive because he has posted on social media, albeit only sparingly and without giving any clues to his location. The idea that he was tortured into giving up his Facebook and Instagram passwords before being brutally murdered has, of course, crossed my mind, but is simply to grizzly a notion for me to entertain.
When I describe our evening, I think you will understand just how bizarre the situation truly is. Halloween began normally enough. We were both excited as it is our favorite holiday. While I was teaching, Teege had planned on doing last minute costume shopping. He arrived at my school mid-afternoon to eat lunch and made a strange comment.
“That zombie Nat seems to be lurking around every Halloween store I go in,” he told me. I was confused because his best friend from college is named Nat, but lives in Seattle.
“Nat is in Orlando?” I asked.
“Apparently so,” he answered.
“Did you know he was coming? Did he fly all way from Seattle this morning? Why was he dressed like a zombie? Is he going to hang out with us tonight?” I found it surprising that this would be the first time Teege would mention Nat’s visit.
“What are you talking about? Not Nat Evans. Nat Orel,” came the cryptic answer.
Before I could ask who Nat Orel is, some children noticed the giant plastic meat cleaver Teege was holding and the necklace of human ears he was wearing, and the attention was redirected.
After school we came home to put on our costumes and get ready to go out for the night.
Teege dressed up like an evil Leprechaun and I went as Leprechaun meat, my guts spilling out of my shirt. Around 9:30 we met friends at Redlight Redlight and ordered pizza from O’Stromboli. Drinking a glass of stout in order to stay in character, Teege was laughing and happy, in his element, but he was also a little distracted and kept looking around as if searching for someone. After a couple of hours we left Redlight Redlight to see the midnight showing of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at the Enzian.
We pulled into the already packed parking lot, and as we slowly drove by the costumed revelers overflowing out of Eden Bar, Teege shouted, “He’s here! The bastard found me!”
“Who’s here?” I asked thinking he was pulling some prank or playing a silly game.
“When we walk through Eden Bar look for a guy wearing a black trench coat and a big, droopy hat.”
He took my hand as we made our way through the dense crowd, but I didn’t see the man Teege had described. We found our friends Jared and Lesley, joined them at a table, and the conversation turned to other topics: Halloweens past, the Lady of the Lakes Renaissance Fair next weekend, and my upcoming interview of Jeff VanderMeer, the author of the best-selling Southern Reach Trilogy who will be reading at Functionally Literate on the fifteenth of this month. It wasn’t until after our beers and popcorn had arrived that Teege mentioned the strange man one last time.
“Have you seen a guy with a black trench coat and a big hat in zombie makeup in here?” he asked Jared and Lesley as if making casual conversation. We all glanced around the theater, but no one in the audience was wearing that specific costume or resembled the person Teege had been seeking.
By that time Leather Face had begun to chase a member of the Enzian’s staff around the auditorium with a chainsaw. They disappeared through a side door, the lights dimmed, and the movie began. All the spectacular, grainy horror of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was even more disturbing and wonderful on the big screen.
As a couple, it has long been a favorite of ours, and early in our relationship we bonded over a mutual love of the film. Plus, it was the first time either of us had watched it since Marilyn Burns’s passing a few months ago, which brought an extra emotional layer to the final image of Sally drenched in blood, riding off into the sunrise.
The audience gave the movie a standing ovation and was bursting with enthusiasm despite the late hour after it ended. While exiting the theater and chatting about our favorite moments, Teege slipped off to use the restroom. Jared, Lesley, and I stood around in the lobby talking when I began to realize just how long Teege had been gone. Reluctantly, Jared agreed to check on him. He returned moments later shaking his head.
“He’s not in there” he said simply.
As there is no exit from the Enzian’s men’s room to the outside except through the lobby, this was a remarkably unsettling situation. We had all seen him go in the restroom, but no had seen him come out. Others came and went, but not Teege. There was nowhere else he could be, and yet he was not there.
A thorough search of the In Boozo Veritas offices revealed heaps of empty liquor bottles and an unfinished manuscript that read, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” written over and over again, but nothing unusual. I asked John King if he’s knows anything, and he said that Teege has not written or reached out to him in any way, but added that if Teege fails to meet his contractual obligation and submit an In Boozo Veritas entry this week, he has to give back the $50,000 advance John pays him on a quarterly basis, so I have used this cry for help by way of taking on the burden in Teege’s absence.
It is possible that he will show up on our doorstep this very night, drunken and incoherent as usual. On the other hand, I may receive a ransom letter from any of the nefarious characters with whom Teege is involved. Perhaps his skeletal remains will be uncovered six months from now under the tiles of the Enzian’s men’s room when plumbing issues require that the floor be replaced. Disturbing as this proposition is, considering the inexplicable nature of his disappearance, it is not my worst fear. I worry that the truth may be even darker, that Teege has somehow entered our very atmosphere, slipped into a fourth dimensional plain of existence, riding the tremor of terror, the ghost of our favorite holiday that lurks between the bumps in the night, he’ll reemerge hungry and vengeful in October of next year, eager to loose the spirit of Samhain on us all, whether we will it or no, a night of inexpressible horror to last throughout the eons, a Halloween without end.
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Jenn Benner knows well that narrow path of existence between ecstasy and terror. She is a horror aficionado, which may explain why she chooses to spend her time with Teege Braune.
Episode 122 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 share a recording of a Halloween show in Jesse Bradley’s prose reading series, There Will Be Words, in which I was a reader.
The There Will Be Words Fourth Annual
Flash Fiction Spooktacular featured
KAREN BEST KEITH GOUVEIA MATT PETERS REBECCA SWAIN VADNIE JOHN KING WHITNEY HAMRICK BRETT PRIBBLE TEEGE BRAUNE JARED SILVIA
Karen Best (Photo by Leslie Silvia).
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Episode 122 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
