I'm currently involved with a project called HOLLOWPOINT, with John Kewley, my co-writer on @JOYMOTEL. Set in 1965 LA and Chicago, I have to dredge up some period photos for reference. We used to have this massive amusement park called Riverview right in the middle of the north side. I have memories of the joint, thought it was demolished when I was eight. We never had a lot of dough, but it was a cheap day just to walk around. The highlight for almost everyone was Aladdin's Castle, with a maze of oddities, a rolling floor, a hall of mirrors, and such. But I came across the damnedest photo of the ruins. Aladdin himself was dismantled just about last, the front of it was simply wood, maybe acting as a sound baffler for the people who lived in the two flats across the street. The last ride I was aware of that was dismantled was the parachute ride, because in the early 70s you could still see the black monolith from the Tri-State Tollway. Didn't expect to be writing about Riverview tonight, but that one photo really did it for me...
OK, so I'm working on this story HOLLOWPOINT with Horatio Salt, the guy who hooked me in on @joymotel. I tell him this story, back in 1978 I'm washing dishes at Sam A****ino's Sandwich Shop. Well, it was really called Pa's, but no one called it that. Same had a wife who looked like Carly Simon and they had just bought a new apartment in this huge building that is actually still behind the Red Lobster at 95th and Southwest Highway. One Monday near the end of July, he heads out to Mirabelli's Furniture on 103rd and Cicero to look at couches. Rush hour on a Monday. Three guys get out of a van and shotgun him away. No witnesses. Sam had the place as a front for a chop shop. After about a month of closing the place by myself and riding my bike home at midnight down SW Highway, which just about led to my backyard, I quit, because there were always (or so it seemed) suspicious looking cars parked across the way, when there was no reason for there to be any vehicle parked. In front of a bridal shop? a martial arts studio? I quit in August and before the end of the month, the place was torched. I want to say it was a month to the day of the killing, but I honestly can't recall. The photos above show what is now taking up the place the furniture place once stood, so yeah, no witnesses. I don't blame anybody, though. The third photo is simply there because I like old buildings that actually have a name. But that strip mall between Rosie's and Pluto's is where Sammy got his. It wasn't too long after the place was torched that I started working with the Elvis band.
Here is my June post over on STORYTELLERS UNPLUGGED. I posted a different photo, also taken on a bus, though at 87th and Central Park in the city. The one on SU is of the mannequin in that art shop.
Yearn For A Dream
Wayne Allen Sallee
June 28th 2009
We finally got our mid-90s here, so I’m listening to Cannonball Adderley and Charlie Parker. In the stinking summer subways of Chicago, the best thing you can hear is someone playing a saxophone with a pile of coins inside the case on the floor. One summer I heard a guy playing “I Can See Clearly Now,” and I can still see the moment, maybe fifteen years later, stopped in time. This temperature is great for me, health-wise, though I’m still one fingered, I can type for longer stretches, and this late at night I feel less tormented, as I sweat on the keyboard. Never at peace, just less tormented. Maybe that’s why men play the sax in the bowels of the city.
I am almost finished with a novel I’ve been ghostwriting, 91K out of 94K. I am actually excited, the original manuscript was turned on its head, but the author and I have worked closely so that the book is still his own. I’m sure with all of you novelists on board here, you know that feeling, being able to sit down and immediately be in the moment, know who does what next as the last five or ten minutes of the book’s life ticks down. I could say that I know that feeling from my short fiction, but not in the same way, as I always have the last line and title written before I start something.
I write my best in the evenings, and so I’ve taken advantage of summer, not wanting it to slip away so fast. I hurt from typing, but not everything is fine motor motion. This past week, I went kayaking for eight miles on the Chicago River, with the rains causing the river to be three feet higher and loaded with dead rats. As a kid, I saw a syndicated b&w cliffhanger-type thing on Garfield Goose, “Journey To The Beginning of Time,” which ran about 60 chapters. These guys go canoeing in Lincoln Park after being at the Museum of Science and Industry here in Chicago, go under a bridge and end up in prehistoric time and there’s some really cool stop action filming. I can only remember two guys’ names, Tony and JoJo, and it was kind of a rip to find out at the end that all 60 chapters turned out to be a dream of JoJo’s after falling asleep on a bench by the T. Rex exhibit. Well, a gyp, as we said back in the day. Also went to Taste of Chicago and had lunch with a few people in the Loop, came up with street talk and story titles as I rode the el. This last mostly comes from people being on their cell phones. I always wonder why the hell people are on the phone all the time, what did they do before cell phones?
What is the deal with the current trends in publishing? Some dude got a five figure advance from HarperCollins for a book that consists of, well, funny “tweets” on Twitter. Thing is, he has an email set up for people to send him these examples, which then leads me to believe that people will just make up funny entries. Now, there are some odd things I come across, the few times I’m on Twitter nowadays, my favorite being my writer friend Maurice Broaddus writing “I can’t believe I’m up this late trying to buy a pool for my son’s frog.” Mind you, no one would get this unless they have nieces who have Webkins. But I contacted my agent about this Twitter event, and suggested he market @joymotel, the Twitter novel I wrote with John Kewley (our hook being the review in the Boston Phoenix and the fact that John and I have never met or spoken on the phone.) You look at, say, Project Gutenberg, and you have bookshelf to ubernet. The new trend seems to be the reverse. Its no longer “What happens on Twitter stays on Twitter.” Another example is HARRY POTTER SHOULD HAVE DIED, which is entirely filled with speculations that had been posted on message boards on said ubernet. So I again contacted my agent, and working with a fellow in Los Angeles, have started writing LOST’S LONG CON, which intersperses a blog about the television show LOST that has been five years running with new material consisting of the two of us doing a Siskel & Ebert routine. The pitches can’t hurt, and for once in my life I’m looking at what’s on the shelves and knowing I have the time to write something that might slip through the window before the next trend hits, presumably “anecdotes involving iPhones,” and yes, you heard it here first, folks.
I suppose that if there is a topic to be discussed here beyond my usual ramblings, it is the net-to-shelf thing going on. I suppose it is a good thing, encouraging people to go out and buy a damn book, yet there is something vaguely insidious about it. If PK Dick were alive today, he’d find a way to write a great novel about it, likely involving corporate mind-control. He would certainly have invented the word UbikNet.
I’ve been taking a mess of photos, I always used to as references, and I have a Flickr account. Always use a disposable camera. Sometimes a multiple shot, but usually I want it to be a karma-like thing. In the last issue of WIRED, Hideki Ohmori talks about disposable cameras. A lot of what he says is right on target with my general feelings towards social networking, and I do have my toes in the water, but don’t really plan on dog-paddling daily on Twitter and Typepad and LinkedIn and Plaxo. Also, though no one asked, Facebook might as well be the Chicago River, in my opinion. I get more emails from FB than I do regular mail, and when I politely reply on FB, I then find myself replying to five or six other friends who have replied to my original reply, even though no one asked. Do I sound like Andy Rooney now, or what? I’m glad I don’t have his eyebrows. Imagine Rooney’s eyebrows on Larry King’s face. Yeah, good luck getting that image out of your head now.
Anyhow, Ohmori closes his interview by saying this. “We do not always want a faithful representation of reality. Sometimes we yearn for a dream.” Hopefully my photo will post; I took the picture while the bus I was on passed 91st and Cicero.
Enjoy July, my unseen friends. Call or hug a veteran next weekend, after you watch YouTubes of what’s going on in the streets of Tehran.
Sometimes, when it gets to be too much, I just spasm out, becoming, well, the real me. It was by far our warmest day this year, it might've hit 90. I had lunch with Greg Loudon, then went to Reckless Records and bought CDs on the cheap of Cannonball Adderly, Roxy Music, and Dizzy Gillespie, bought some great stuff at the Unique Thrift Shop at 35th and Archer (having noticed their 50% off sign on the way downtown), rode my bike to Walgreen's and back, sat with Buddy the Mitch and read a bit of DREAM BABY by Bruce MacAllister. Never once feeling tired, so I kind of expected my brain would pop a rod at some point. It just happens. There's no trigger point. Not in this weather. In winter, a stiff wind will jolt my neck and make me clock out. Not in this weather, though, it can happen any time. I ate Pepe's tacos and watched the Cubs. Nothing. I talked with my agent about a pitch regarding @joymotel. Emailed Horatio Salt, my partner in crime who started it all, just fine. Nothing. Bip bop Bip. Emailed Salem Press about some articles I'd write for their Masterwork Plots books. By now I was quite sweaty, so I thought a shower was in order before I continued with this lengthy writing project I'm involved with.
And THAT is when it happened. Best I recall, I smashed my skull against the side of the soap dish, chest-high, because it was dangling from one end. There's some swelling around the soft tissue area, gee, good thing I bought a Bricklayers Union cap at the thrift store, hey? (For those keeping track, I currently have 39 visible scars). And it hurts like a bitch. But I used that pain to put in the very scene in this writing project that needed it. I think I pulled off a much better Chapter 68 than if it was just another night. Maybe Karma is like Rain Man. Hurt Wayne. Uh oh, Wopner. More of Indianapolis tomorrow. If I wake up. K-Mart, Cincinnati. Three o'clock, Wopner's on.
I've been playing the minimalist on my blog of late out of general malaise. I suppose I could argue that I use the last hour or so before I go to bed to write a new chapter for @joymotel, but this is not always the case. Horatio & I attempt to put up 20-40 posts a day (a post amounts to about three sentences, but its all in the brevity, we are up to 1275 posts). I'm just tired of being stuck inside all day and, at least for a few days (again!), we are to have below zero temps. The snow is gone, we had 40s over the weekend, and today was the last decent day. I had hoped to go downtown, but one of my nieces was sick, so I watched her after my sister went to work. No big deal there, I wish my nieces were more accommodating, but that's cool. The days are getting noticeably longer, even with overcast skies, so once it gets to where its in the 30s with no wind chill, I'll head downtown. I just realized that I never did post about last Monday, when I went to the Mystic Celt for the annual red light night. I had wanted to wait on my film getting developed, but none of my full moon photos came out, and then I ended up losing my impetus for describing the night. I'm finishing up the photos from the Bughouse Square set, the first is from when I connected trains in the Loop, crossing over at Washington Street so it was free, and there is this cool building that I used to have the ghost sign for. All that is left is AND TALLOW, the full sign read FUR, PELTS, AND TALLOW. I thought it best to take the photo before the rest of the wording was gone. Out of sequence is an odd photo of my block as I rounded the corner from the church parking lot I always cut through. I honestly have no idea when I took this photo, I don't know why I'd be walking in the sleet. Ah, well. Mysteries. The last is from a block or so from Washington Square Park. I just saw how the tree branches framed the building, and it even makes the one window look as if there is some huge shadow in it. I'm not one for arty photos, but I do like my tree branches.
Well, I have come to the realization that I evidently cannot die. Earlier tonight I had another encounter with the dreaded Closet Light Bulb. You might recall my post from back in August, whereas I shattered the bulb with my superhuman polak/hillbilly strength and blew the electricity through half the house. A few hours ago I pushed the Mortality Envelope a bit higher (lower?)and, really, its not like I set out to do these things. The cord fell off the ceiling fixture last night, so I unscrewed the bulb and went to bed. Bought a new ceiling fixture, one of those circular things, from the Ace hardware, which constituted a half-mile walk when the mid-afternoon temps were at their highest, about ten below. So later, I'm listening to one of the CD mixes GW Ferguson sent me, and I'm on my little stool, ready to combat modern technology. I take the old fixture off, thinking, hey I'm fine, the last time I touched the filament in the bulb, and said bulb was gone. You can see where I'm going with this. I put my hand up with the new fixture and OF COURSE I touched the green wire and the red wire together. Last time, I kicked the stool over and dropped to the floor. This time, I just found myself on the floor, I had been listening to a song about Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower sniper, but then I was hearing "Do You Think I'm Psycho, Mama?" The song in between that I (kinda sorta thankfully) missed was "The Homecoming Queen's Got A Gun". So there I was, maybe 6-7 minutes later and about five feet across the room. So, my theory is this: either I can't die, or every time I do, one of my alternate Earth selves is shunted over here. Wouldn't be surprised if that is what happened to PK Dick every time he OD'd on the 200 amphetamines he downed each day. I'm thinking of a story I might write and send to F&SF, where Earth-20 me, who is a very successful writer and still has all his hair to give him a David McCallum kind of look, ends up here and finds he has to suddenly be balding plus lead a pathetic and wretched life.
Speaking of PK Dick, I've also mentioned here about my joint venture with "Horatio Salt" @joymotel over on Twitter, the link to the blog (for those who'd rather read it chapter by chapter) is on the left. Well, it was mentioned today in the Boston Phoenix, by Mark Miliard, and in a second article, names @joymotel as one of the top ten Twitter novels-in-progress, with ours being the only one shared between two writers, and who have never met nor talked, no less. Here's the excerpt.
Novel idea: Twitter fiction
Post-modernism, post by 140-character post
By MIKE MILIARD | January 14, 2009 | Recommended By 2 People
Toronto ad man John Kewley — he writes concisely for a living — likens Twitter, teeming with constant updates, to a global "brainstream" where users can submerge themselves in others' thoughts, feelings, and existential particulars. So he's co-writing a language-dense, James Joyce– and Philip K. Dick–inspired Twitter sci-fi narrative, Joy Motel, the plot of which plugs the reader into the protagonist's stream of consciousness.
Kewley's writing partner, Wayne Allen Sallee, is someone he's never met. ("We've never even spoken on the telephone.") Nonetheless, they correspond online, and "share a wavelength," and one day, when Sallee tweeted Kewley with "a snippet of a film noir–sounding sentence," Kewley replied in kind. "I sent him one back, to sort of build on his, and we did about 20 of those."
The pair banged on back and forth, braced by the brevity and immediacy mandated by the medium. "You can just jump on there because you have half a thought, and then an hour later, Wayne will respond," says Kewley. "We don't know where this is going. It's real-time writing on Twitter."
I signed up with Twitter back in August, figuring it would be a good discipline to write coherently in only 140 characters, and if someone were to check my list of followers & those I follow, they'd see wayyy more people in advertising than writers. This is thanks to Paul Isakson and, to a lesser extent, Sid Williams. Here's the deal. There's a show on AMC called MAD MEN, centered around the Madison Avenue advertising agency of Sterling-Cooper, circa 1962. Don Draper is the creative director on said show, and Paul decided to take on the role of Don Draper on Twitter. It was an experiment of his, he's in advertising up in Minneapolis, not with AMC. I saw Sid make a funny remark and I jumped in, apologizing, saying that Sid thought it was 2008 because he had been hit on the head. From that point on, I was in 1962, whenever I talked to "Don," always keeping it in the past. We never did send messages much, but it was neat trying to squish 1962 brand names out of my brain, like Oasis cigarettes. Paul eventually stopped the charade, wrote about it on his blog, but it was fun while it lasted, as I now have a lot of 1962 references for when my stories are set in the past of my Humboldt Park childhood.
I call what Paul tried a "thought experiment," a phrase used by physicists and mathematicians. I figure, why can't a writer of fiction have a thought experiment of his own? As I mentioned above, its all about discipline. I was talking to Capcom about LOST, and how I long ago thought the Numbers represented people (and this was before viewers learned of the Oceanic 6; there are six "cursed" numbers in a doomsday equation, for those who do not watch the show). People would ask me to explain why I thought a number could be a person, and I couldn't explain, its not like I was thinking outside the box, it was like thinking out loud. Brainstorming an idea for a story. A thought experiment. Sid has started up a series of podcasts and I had another idea I visualized in my head, to make YouTubes of someone reacting as a short story is heard. Think about it, a podcast is basically someone reading to no one. So why not do a short story that has a person reacting (albeit staged) to the bulemic zombie or the obsessive-compulsive ghosts? It may not even work well, but I can see it in my mind, and, as with everything these days, the Net is all about self-promotion. So at some point in the future you might be seeing a few WillySid/SillyWayne videos when you hit search on YouTube.
Back to Don Draper. I made a few friends in advertising on Twitter, from Gulnar Ozturk in Turkey to Horatio Salt in Toronto. Horatio and I started a riff where Salt & Sal would have 140 character vignettes whenever the mood struck us. Last month we combined our individual thought experiments and started Joy Motel. Its a stream of information (replacing consciousness) novel, with its own blog for people to follow, though it intrigues people to see a new entry pop up out of nowhere. Like overhearing three sentences of a conversation on the street. Joy Motel might be the novel a man was writing when he died, we don't know yet. Horatio and I are still processing the information. We seem to be having success, whereas I failed miserably when I tried to send a message to Gulnar in Turkish, as it made little sense to her.
Anyways, this is part Happy 2009 promotion for @JoyMotel, the link at the left, along with Horatio's and Paul's sites, and my general discussion of thought experiments. I'm curious if Bob or Charles have had similar brain flashes, where something bounces around your head like Harlan Ellison in a Philip K. Dick novel, yet you can't explain it until all of a sudden it makes perfect sense. I'm sure it works for all of us when concocting our stories, but I'm thinking the comparison is more along the likes of deja vu from what Charles calls 'iceberg memories.' Or is it just me who is crazy?
A friend of mine out east had posted the Sonseed YouTube on her blog awhile back, and I swiped that. I guess it was all real, the band played in East Brooklyn in the late 70s, stranger still one of the male singers eventually headed a school district and died choking on a sandwich. So, yeah, I guess every little thing is on YouTube now. So if any of you choose to look up Wayne's Veins and see me do my vein-popping
trick, well, that's my sole contribution to the YouTube library. For those of you who have already seen my parlor trick, skip ahead to read my December entry for Storytellers Unplugged, as follows.
TO SEE IF I STILL FEEL
by Wayne Allen Sallee
28 December 2008
Years ago, I starved myself one day just so I could write about it in my commonplace book, this was when I thought it important to experience something instead of guessing or taking someone else’s word for it. I’d make notes of whatever random words or metaphors came to mind as I hungered. Mind you, I share my father’s metabolism; we both bleed long and fast, and we burn through calories like nobody’s business. I’ll eat three to five times a day and I’ve never stayed above 155 lbs. for long, and I do feel (my own patented) physical pain faster if I do not eat. I’d often have a milk shake to ease the spasms in my back, maybe the same way people grab a smoke, so on that long ago late Saturday afternoon, I made my notes, I took some photos of my immediate surroundings for story referencing, then spent fifteen dollars at Gold Coast Dogs under the Wabash el tracks. My metabolism pretty much plays a big part in how fucked up I am when it comes to the spasms I get this time of year, my body eating up calories in double time when Chicago spends three days without topping the zero mark in temperature.
Present day now, and, yea, I’m listening to Johnny Cash, and, yea, his cover of Trent Reznor’s “Hurt.” In the last eight days we have gone from sub-zero temps to thunderstorms and the expected flooding as a foot of frozen snow sank into the erff and into my crawlspace, still there because its still raining as I type this, still nearly 60 degrees. Yesterday morning on Twitter, I was kidding the local gang that the only thing we are missing this week is a volcano erupting on the Tri-State Tollway.
A week ago today was the memorial service for Harry Fassl, though we did not go to Lake Michigan because of the ice and cold. Everyone gathered in Oak Park, his 80 year old dad amazed at just how many people were webbed together because of Harry, who signed his work HEF, and his ashes will instead be tossed along Pratt Beach on the vernal equinox. I no longer have to make notes about things like hunger pains and the effects of the weather, but I was thoroughly amazed that when I had left my home in Burbank it was -15 and two trains and two hours later, it had dropped to -35. (The gathering had been planned for the solstice sunset.) I had to cross a park to get to Harry and Diana’s place, when I rounded the conservatory building I entered a white out. I felt as if I had been punched in the bridge of my nose while simultaneously being force fed ammonia. I actually dropped to my knees and bounced back up like a marionette. Harry passed away in October; Jeff Osier put it best, saying it was as if he had left at the end of a paragraph. After my co-conspirator in Texas, Sid Williams, I emailed Harry most often, the crazy stream-of-consciousness stuff you’d expect from two guys who shared a love Green Lantern, H. P. Lovecraft, and sumo wrestling. Two months later, I still feel as if I lost a roommate I knew over fifteen years. I went in the basement and took photos of his lab equipment, various sculptures and pinboards. I found a rubber banded stack of postcards I had sent him going back to 1993, many more in recent years as I did not get a chance to visit once I fled Chicago to this relatively boring street just a mile from my old house, because bus schedules changed and a mile west translates to another hour travel time. He sent postcards, as well, I think we both just liked mystifying our respective postal employees, and his last one was signed Your reporter on the fringe…
By Tuesday the weather hit the thirties and it was snowing amidst thunderstorms. Thunder snow is what they call it. I had stopped taking my pain medication–those goofy things that jiggle the receptors in my brain–for close to a week, because what is the point if you are constantly in pain regardless. Part of it is getting no respite from typing my one-fingered tap dance, but I suppose I could throw being lonely and insane into the mix. So Tuesday afternoon when I started up the snow blower, I closed the garage door and stared and the blades, determined to know what it felt like to want with every synapse in my brain to shove my good arm into the blower, just like I wanted to know what it was like to be starving that time years past. I stopped thinking about it once I realized I was rationalizing about it. On Christmas Eve, I spasmed while checking the amount of water I poured into the coffee pot for the next morning, and I smashed my head into the bottom of a cabinet, waking up on the floor a few minutes later. Sometimes my body will subconsciously screw with me so I don’t have time to rationalize; Wednesday I waited for the bleeding to stop and then I applied Super-Glue, which works almost every time. Doubtful this one will scar, so I still look like Frankenstein in spirit only.
One writing venture I took up this month was starting a novel on Twitter along with Horatio Salt, its called Joy Motel. Even when I’m at my worst, typing then stopping and rubbing different muscles while I chew a toothpick, making so many gestures I could be mistaken for a third base coach in an asylum, I can still dole out 140 characters, the limit of a Twitter entry. Over the last few months, Horatio and I–complete strangers–had started writing about Salt & Sal in odd crime noir sentences that we batted back and forth like a ping pong ball. We thought it was time to write something more modern to reflect Twitter, yet we ended up with a still-ongoing tale that reads like a mix of PK Dick and James Ellroy. Horatio, much more versed in technology than I, has started a blog, http://www.joymotel.blogspot.com that reflects the novel from the beginning, each few days beginning a new chapter. It’s the kind of mental displacement like Bruce Willis had in 12 MONKEYS, so I’m certain my portion of the novel has my brain on spin dry at false dawn each morning. I’d suggest checking it out, if only because part of me sees this as one of my last big writing ventures. It has taken me two hours to type this, yes, a lot of thought going between each brick of a sentence, but still. Without spell-check, I’d be lost. I’ve learned from the ghostwriting gigs that it does me no good to meet a deadline by typing for ten hours a day and not doing much of anything else. Yet still not being able to write in a timely manner. I think my biggest disappointment was not being able to get the voice activation software to work properly, I had set my hopes too high. I really do want see if I still feel, and those snowy blades looked damn inviting, so that means I’m still making mental notes for some reason. Things getting clearer as I head west into the black. Your chattel, Wayne
This entry was posted on Sunday, December 28th, 2008 at 12:21 am.
Categories: advice, forensics, inspiration.
