Weekend/ Monday and Tuesday Report

[moon_custafer]

1. Beatrice let me scratch her ears on the weekend; she still only lets me pet her if Nana’s nearby as a reassuring presence, but given that two-and-a-half months ago she was hissing and running away if any humans approached, this is pretty good news.

2. Today’s puzzle on the jigsaw-puzzle app was of the painting Watson and the Shark – not sure which of the extant versions, but I googled it after I got to work and read Elizabeth McCracken’s account of her feelings for the version in the Boston MFA.

3. The wasps are back; the really tall Orkin Man came and sprayed for them again.

4. I looked up some of the cast of HBO’s The Outsider, and now I’ve watched Derek Cecil in the first episode of the short-lived Push, Nevada (2002) which is… certainly something.

It’s not even so much a knock-off as a parody of Twin Peaks, everyone delivering neo-noir dialogue with a weird lack of affect. It’s like one of the Kids In the Halls bits that blurs the line between comedy sketch and impenetrable art film (Cecil’s character would have been played by Mark McKinney). I can’t even tell if I loved or hated it. I kept having to stop every couple of scenes to just process how weird it felt, and I thought I was pretty used to weirdness. That the copy up on YouTube is a flickery, low-quality transfer just adds to the vibe.

Also, I need to know who recorded that rock cover of ‘Ring of Fire’ that plays at the end of the episode.

Comments

[sovay]

Also, I need to know who recorded that rock cover of ‘Ring of Fire’ that plays at the end of the episode.

Social Distortion.

(That is indeed an incredibly strange piece of pop culture it's embedded in. Frankly it looks like the TV equivalent of a film maudit in a piece of weird fiction, like the sort of thing the protagonist saw once late at night on a local channel, looking half backlot and half found footage and all outsider art, and has never been able to trace again, until the rest of the story starts happening. Nice face on Derek Cecil, although that doesn't actually help anything.)

I am glad Beatrice permits the ear-scratching.

[moon_custafer]

Thank you for finding it!

I have an unfinished story kicking around somewhere in which the main character stumbles across a talk-show in which an old actor (I envisioned someone like Peter O’Toole) is telling a surreal, rambling anecdote that keeps setting off odd echoes of the situation the character is in.

Never finished it because I was having trouble trying to convey what I wanted to convey, i.e. a ghost story in which the protagonist’s problem is that his friends listen sympathetically, but keep treating the haunting as some kind of metaphor, without it being a simple case of disbelieving him or saying that it’s all in his head—i.e. they can accept supernatural events, but they still try to interpret them as having some symbolic meaning rather than just being what they are.

[sovay]

Thank you for finding it!

You're welcome! I thought I actually owned a copy of that cover, but I only seem to have Universal Hall Pass.

Never finished it because I was having trouble trying to convey what I wanted to convey, i.e. a ghost story in which the protagonist’s problem is that his friends listen sympathetically, but keep treating the haunting as some kind of metaphor, without it being a simple case of disbelieving him or saying that it’s all in his head—i.e. they can accept supernatural events, but they still try to interpret them as having some symbolic meaning rather than just being what they are.

Let me know if you ever do finish it, because it sounds great.

[moon_custafer]

Nice face on Derek Cecil, although that doesn't actually help anything.)

Having only watched him in one other thing, abruptly seeing his age rolled back by eighteen years just adds to the feeling of instability.