Amazing Grace and the Technicolor Poolicorn

Plucking Around for the Week of September 12

The best thing I read this week was about goddess Grace Jones. I have a new appreciation of her life and music after watching the documentary Bloodlight and Bami at the Montclair Film Festival. She’s an awesome performer and cultural icon, an original who cannot be denied. And this profile, “on Hippie Acid Love and the Rain-Soaked Scents of Jamaica,” on the event of her working with Beyoncé, is well worth a read. She continues to be amazing. I’m not much into candles, but if I were, I’d be buying the one she designed with Boy Smells. The doc is on Netflix. And she’s been killing it for decades. Just watch her video for “Love is the Drug”:

Here’s a feel-bad feel-good story from the Boston Globe. A creepy middle school teacher was mean to the boys and creepy to the girls, making them dance, take off their shoes, and other stuff that should have had him fired, given enforced counseling, and precluded from working with children ever again. The boys began recording his actions and passed them down to new students, because the girls complained and nothing was done. The teacher even bragged that he’d never be fired. Now the “pedo journal” is being used as evidence against him. The kids speak out about what it’s like to go to adults for help and get nothing. They’ve completely lost trust, and they are right. The adults who were told should be ashamed and also corrected, as there are mandatory reporter laws. The kids did their job. The adults, as we too often do, failed them.

I went on a caravan through some legal backroads in the Pines with some Subaru owners and a Jeep, and we had a good time. It doesn’t deserve its own post, but here’s a video of me driving back after we found the end of a feeder strip road on the map. We also drove down Goodwater, through some burn areas.

I started reading The Talisman by Peter Straub and Stephen King, and it’s a slog. I forgot how… loquacious King can be. It’s been a hundred pages, and Jack finally made it all-too-briefly to the Territories, the fantasy mirror-world inspired by the final lines of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I like the world of the book, set a resort town closed for the season, where young Jack has escaped with his has-been B-movie star mom, fleeing his rapacious uncle Morgan Sloat. It’s not too fantastical yet, and has Speedy Parker—a rather cardboard, walking “magical negro” trope, the janitor with a mystical bottle of hooch that transports you to the Other Side—so it’s feeling very dated, and I’m having trouble pretending I am reading this in 1982.

Yavash Yavash is cool art project by Shahin Tivay Sadatolhosseini, meant to help heal the divide between the United States and his home country of Iran. He walked a gym wheel from Aachen, Germany to Washington, D.C. with a ship in between. He met a lot of people on the way, and stayed with people he met. An ambitious project of friendship. You can read more at his website, or in this brief profile.

I really enjoyed “Evolution” by X in last week’s issue of The New Yorker, but the two best pieces of writing that I’ve read in recent memory are winners of the Insider Prize, by incarcerated writers, and chosen by writer Lauren Hough. If you’ve read her excellent book of essays, Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, you know that she spent time in the D.C. jail, so she’s one of the more informed judges you could have for such a prize. But these two pieces, one fiction and one non, should not be patronized as “prisoner writing.” They are incredible pieces of writing by writers who happen to be incarcerated, and you can read them at LitHub, or through Lauren’s substack:

Insider Prize

Both of those pieces are haunting me, even the flippant end-of-the-galaxy story. It’s so much better than a lot of short SF stories I’ve been reading lately. I helped fund the SolarPunk zine, which was supposed to showcase positive futures, and the first issue fell really flat to me. The stories were just boring. And I’ve read good stories about hopeful futures before! The Hieroglyph anthology was somewhat better, but it’s like we can’t make a compelling story set in that kind of future, because we don’t believe in it. Do you know of any recent ones? Or is it just easier to walk away from Omelas?

I’m working on a piece about my obsessions, and another just came to mind, thanks to Kim Parkhurst, about German dueling, rural eye-gouging duels, and American football, which are all related. So that’s what’s coming up next. Good news for you is that we’re closing up Playa del Pluck for the season, so I will be exploring the ruins, history, and woods of South Jersey more, and cavorting with my Technicolor Poolicorn™ less. And perhaps this year I’ll kick off that series of podcasts/vlogs/whatevers from The Lounge Pit…