St. Louis Week: "The Shaft Build"

This Kickstarter project promises to revise our understanding of our world, starting with our understanding of the Great Pyramid of Giza. It's not a monument to a dead pharaoh; it's "a stone steam engine built by the Atlanteans 12,000 years ago."

"Just talkin 'bout [Atlantean steam engines]!"

The author clearly understands the potential significance of such a finding, and therefore poses following a rhetorical question: "If you could completely rewrite 12,,000 years of world history, enlighten 7B people, and solve Man's oldest, and greatest enigma, would you do it?" [sic] Clearly the writer has contemplated re-writing world history. The pity is that he didn't bother re-writing the text of his Kickstarter page, the one where he asks us for $62,000 to support his outsider scholarship (and outsider punctuation).

The author is not shy about his qualifications to revise our understanding of human history. According to his autobiographical sketch, he is "A literal renaissance man," one having "vast exposure and experience in Engineering, Design, Sewing, Machining, Surveying, Writing, Acting, Philosophy, and Spirituality." Literally.

His video runs over nine minutes, but evinces high production values. In the interview that dominates that video, he explains his qualifications in another way, and explains his methodology:

I'm not a scientist. I can give you a laundry list of what I'm not. I'll tell you what I am, though. I specialize in one simple thing: free and independent thinking. Newton called it pure thought. I think unobstructed by opinions, unobstructed by schools of thought, even unobstructed by the evidence. The evidence of the other hundred-and-eighteen pyramids up and down the Nile will block the starting point. The evidence of written history will keep you from the starting point.

Let's hope the evidence doesn't keep the author from his $62,000 goal.

St. Louis Week: Life's Interesting Dramas

Here's a Kickstarter project that might interest afficionados of outsider art, or social workers apt to call the cops on parents who make their kids read Daddy's poetry on YouTube. It's a reversal of the usual, "Lemme read you this goofy thing my kid wrote."

Aww, Daaaad...

The author's poetry not only rhymes, but it resonates with contemporary debates about the growing inequality of wealth in the US:

Never forget who controls all wealth,
Your life breath, your possessions and your health.
For all the silver and gold passing through many hands,
Vast and innumerable as the oceans and sands,
Belong to The Maker who created this world,
When the ugliness of hunger and homelessness is unfurled.

Call me insensitive to poetic impulses, but I don't find the speaker's claims reassuring--but this Blog Post isn't about me or my Desire to expropriate the rich. This is about the Poet, and his random Capitalization, which I can only hope is as unpredictable in Life's Interesting Dramas as it is on the Kickstarter page that describes said anthology as "the Book of Poetry with 100 of my very best poems covering a variety of Topics."

The project goes beyond poetry. The book includes paintings by the author.

"I got the [painting], a ménage à trois/ Musta broke those Frenchies' laws..."

I must admit that while I don't know much about painting, I sure like this one. See, I like to imagine I'm the one in that room, and the painting is what I'm seeing, because that naked lady is giving me the "Paint me, Big Boy" eyes. Furthermore, the lady with the deltoids and the cleavage is giving me the "I can't believe you're going to paint her while I'm in the room... yet I find the prospect thrilling" eyes. (It must be the wine.) It seems we're in Paris, where people are classy and drink wine and put things on pedestals. My presence here suggests I'm on vacation, and able to afford to go to abroad on vacation. If I were really in that room, I'd turn the portrait of the epaulette-wearing guy to the wall and show Miss Nude France how we paint 'em in the U. S. A.

(Then again, the painting also makes me want to call the Missouri Department of Social Services' Child Abuse hotline.)

Yet the artist's ambition does not end here. Life's Interesting Dramas is to comprise not only the book, but an "animated movie." Is this the "Classical Movie" of the Kickstarter page's title? I am curious to see how the artist realizes his "classical" vision in animation.

St. Louis Week: Gimme Gimme Gimme

Kicking off St. Louis Week on Shitstarter, we have this project, in which Robin Tidwell aims to raise money for a "new novel." That's all we get to know--not the title, not Tidwell's reason for soliciting money, not her previous work or lack thereof. The "About the Project" text appears to consist solely of the first few pages of the book, her survival-horror narrative's in medias res beginning.

     She took the phone call out in the hallway.
     “No names. It’s time. Are you okay?”
     “Yes. I’ll be taking the side roads.”
     “Good. Someone needs to be picked up. See you soon. Good luck.”
     Abby tapped her Bluetooth and disconnected. She stepped back into the locker room and cautiously peered around the corner. The office at the far end of the room had the curtains pulled shut tightly; she knew what that meant. She closed her eyes for a moment, saying a prayer, but only for a moment. It didn’t pay at all to be unobservant.

Two lines into this novel and I'm already confused. Who is talking? Who is listening? Who is the antecedent of that first word, she? I suppose it's Abby, but I don't learn that until four lines later. What's an office doing in a locker room? Not only does Tidwell make St. Louis look bad by not saying so much as please when she asks total strangers for money to write her novel, she can't write her way out of a locker-room. (My confusion about speakers and spatial relationships is almost enough to make me ignore the gratuitously adverbs and the product-placement. How sad is it when a brand name is the most vivid detail in a novel's opening?)

Not pictured: anything related to this new novel.

Furthermore, Tidwell has not bothered to supply us with an image that tells us anything about this novel. The above photo shows some old books, but look at the spines. These are reference books, not novels. The image gave me an idea: maybe the author had Googled some lazy phrase like "old books" and used one of the first few hits as the image for her Kickstarter page. So I tried it. I did a Google image search for keywords old and books, and the above image was the fourth hit.

I've seen Kickstarter pages that stunned me with their egregious writing, or their Hindenburg-explosions of fonts, or nine-minute promotional videos shot in mop closets, but I have never seen one that took less work and care.

Echant with Christed Light

This Kickstarter project aims to launch a series of spiritually-instructive children's books featuring unicorns, talking birds, hay-varmints, and a barefoot white boy named Chadron. The first book, Rasazar an Enchanted Unicorn, "sets the stage for the next two books dealing with Christed Light, (Reiki), the calling of the Great Spirit and the dark side. In this book they will learn about such things as pink being the color of forgiveness and what unconditional love means and much more."

Chadron and Rasazar: BFFs.

"Christed Light" seems, on the basis of my cursory Internet research, to be a real thing--inasmuch as any New Age re-purposing of actual religious doctrines counts as a real thing. This video explains Christed light. I think.

Chadron gets lit.

But not all is Christed Light in our world, or the author's. She has faced major obstacles, including "the unforgiving illnesses of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder," which make me less inclined to dismiss this project as the ramblings of a kook, groping toward comforting, mystical solutions to the realities of mental illness and America's lack of a first-world-style government healthcare system. The project appears to be exactly that, which is why we should not dismiss it.

The author notes that "the reader will receive Chakra Color Therapy as they read and view the pages." This, too, appears to be a real thing. Something tells me that this book would make a great slideshow, especially if combined with psilocybin mushrooms and a beanbag chair, provided I could forget about the schizophrenia.

Epic Abuse: Short Films

From now on, anytime I hear anyone use the word epic to describe something that isn't (A) a narrative poem (B) hundreds of pages long and (C) written in a lofty style (D) about heroes in the historic past, I will cough the word bullshit. If the inspiration is upon me, I will cough something like I hate that people who don't understand the words coming out of their own mouths are the engine of linguistic change, turning useful, specific terms into vague buzzwords.

An epic pile of dishes.

Then Patroclus said, "Achilles, son of Peleus, 

who in future story will speak well of you, 
unless we put away these dishes, washed

by fallen Argives? Lend me your towel, 

and I who am fresh might drive these plates 

back into the cupboard."

Calling a big pile of dishes epic is silly, but it's excusable, because dishwashing doesn't presuppose any narrative or artistic ambition. Nobody begins soaking last night's meatloaf pan with an invocation to the muses.

"Of knives and the sponge I sing..."

However, the making of art, and the making of a Kickstarter page to ask strangers for money to finish or to promote that art, does presuppose narrative or artistic ambition. You might think that people with such ambitions might be careful not call their bro-comedy films epic, and that they wouldn't call their self-described "short" films epic, either.

You would be wrong.

The Vivian Girls: A Play with Music.

Admit it: you have been waiting for a musical about Henry Darger, too. If you donate to this Kickstarter project, you might just get to see and hear one.

Henry Darger was born in Illinois in 1892 and died in 1973. An orphan, he worked as a janitor and lived as a recluse during his long life, attending Catholic mass every day. After his death, his landlord discovered in Darger's apartment a cache of hundreds of paintings, journals, and manuscript narratives, including The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, an illustrated prose narrative that ran over 15,000 pages.

By Darger standards, this is not even close to weird.

The video for the musical play's Kickstarter page runs too long (seven minutes), and the song lyrics muddy the creators' interviews, but let's not quibble. Henry Darger would have made a seven-hour Kickstarter video, starring only his mumbling self, featuring paintings of nude intersex children riding to war on butterfly space-dragons, set to music that he played on instruments made of tin he scrounged from garbage dumps. Then he would not have even uploaded it to the Internet, but instead left it for his landlord to find.

These artists are insiders, but let's not hold that against them.

This musical commemorates the work and life of a man who lived in a major city, in the most technologically advanced country on Earth (for its time), and who belonged to its dominant ethnic group (white), yet who had the ill fortune to lack the economic and cultural resources to channel his talents into normative routes like professional illustration, commercial writing, or high art. Help playwright Stacy Sims celebrate the work of this outsider.

"Gods Word" or God sWord?

What is the evangelical Christian SCUBA enthusiast supposed to wear, secular SCUBA enthusiast t-shirts? Well, not anymore.

He hath loosed the fateful [bubbles] of His terrible swift [fonts]...

The examples of Breathe Life's designs that the video displays make me feel as if I ascended too rapidly and got the bends. According to the makers, "By wearing your Breathe Life Dive Wear shirt you will be fulfilling our mission by 'Spreading God’s Word, providing the Sword of the Spirit to carry out God’s plan.' We’re on a mission with a promise!" They don't tell us what the promise is, or what they plan to do with that sword.

I guess I'm not familiar with that translation.

In their video, they explain that they won't limit their designs to SCUBA diving, but will include "spear fishing, cave diving, snorkeling, and general water-related Scriptures for everyone." Jesus can be your spear-fishing buddy.

I will fear no eel-sharks.

Postscript: On second thought, I will fear eel-sharks. If there's one thing I learned from Leviathan (Cosmatos, 1989), it's that that eely thing is probably a Soviet "experiment that tampered with nature's most basic laws." (If there's two things I learned from Leviathan, the second is that a budget spent mostly on sets and lighting won't make your mash-up of Alien and John Carpenter's The Thing grow legs.)

And if there's one thing I learned from watching both Leviathan and Deepstar Six (Cunningham, also 1989), it's that each movie features one of the main actors from Robocop (Verhoven, 1987): in Leviathan, Peter Weller; in Deepstar Six, a scenery-chewing but still under-used Miguel Ferrer. Curiously, 1989's other deep-sea monster movie, The Abyss (Cameron), features no actors from Robocop. Where were you on that one, casting director Howard Feuer?