The unaksed question

It’s been a stack of years since I last saw my friend Dave, not since before he relocated to California. We shared an independent streak, coupled with moderately obsessive work habits. It’s not unusual for me to go years without seeing people I care about very much, and I think it was the same for Dave.

Sometimes people die in the interregnum.

Dave died yesterday, in Oakland, California, at age 40, in a tragic accident. I’ll address that later. First, I want to tell you about my friend Dave.

I first heard about him from Brian Geltner, who I met while he was playing drums in Nervous Cabaret, and who’d recently scored a movie I’d made. Brian is both an immensely talented multi-instrumentalist and a singularly great guy. Somehow, everyone I’ve met through him is similarly stand-up and also, improbably, immensely talented.

“You gotta hear this guy Dave Deporis,” Brian said, “He’s pretty special.”

So Edna and I went with him to see Dave play at 169 Bar on East Broadway. Maybe it was ’04? I’m bad with years. And yeah, holy shit. The guy was special. His voice was spectacular: resonant, soaring, ghostly and full, an elemental human voice through which you could also hear that other thing, that coherent trans-dimensional energy which animates a human. Call it a soul.

I liked the songs, too. “Swan King” and “Catholic Smoke Ring” are still favorites. I’ve seen a bit of live music, and not all of it sticks with me like those songs that night. “The Adult Song” maybe toed right up to the twee line for my tastes, but it was a Millennial anthem a decade before anyone cared what a  Millennial was.

The title of this post comes from a song of his I heard later, at Nervous Cab’s first record release in the basement of 68 Jay, and only heard him sing that once. It encapsulated what those performances felt like: a singular moment in this world, imagined or seen only by one human’s eyes, encoded into words and sound and brought to life in the mind of the listener, becoming a shared emotional experience.

For Dave, the practice of music was fundamentally and profoundly spiritual. He taught himself to sing and to play guitar in service to the embodiment and expression of that spirit. And he was good at it.

But he rarely admitted to being satisfied with a performance, and he was never satisfied with a recording.

It was enough to drive you crazy. Peter Himmelman touches on the phenomenon in the excellent tribute to Dave he posted at Forbes.

It wasn’t that Dave never finished things, it was that he would never declare anything finished. Nothing, no matter how good, ever got his stamp of approval. Everything came with a caveat: it was a demo, it was a scratch mix, it was okay for now but don’t play it for anyone. Great recordings went unheard because there was no correct order in which to present them.

His talent wasn’t unrecognized. People wanted to work with him, to record him. But jeezis the guy was uncompromising. That’s not to say he was a diva: he wasn’t. Nor was he exactly a perfectionist: he appreciated a beautiful aberration. Nor, for all of his eccentricities, was he some precious naïf (I never quite got his David Who Loves the Sky persona, but whatever it was it definitely wasn’t a shtick).

He understood the realities of the music industry and he understood the economic necessities of life, and life as an artist. The guy worked his ass off. He could be pushy, sometimes to a fault. And he was tough enough to withstand the brutal shitkicking that Bloomberg era New York delivered to artists.

Money for survival was always a problem. He was expert at acquiring recording equipment on Ebay, getting a couple demos out of it and flipping it at enough of a profit to keep him going.

But Dave was not, and was never going to be, a “professional” musician in the industrial sense. He put in the work, alright. But for Dave it was impossible for the practice of music to be anything other than a spiritual act, and certainly not an obligatory, commercial one. His resourcefulness, resilience, and commitment to making music were astounding.

The danger with that approach, of course, is that in New York City, where the stress level and the demands of the dollar are relentless, the psychic conduits of spiritual energy can quickly fray and short-circuit spectacularly.

Which is to say that not every performance was transcendent. Even with a decent sound system and a friendly audience, things could go haywire. I remember one night in particular. Fred Wright and Matt Morandi put together a show at Charlotte Glynn’s loft. I think Fred and Matt played as Pntgrl, Andrea Hansen did a great solo Painting Soldiers set, and Dave played.

He was frazzled when he showed up, visibly agitated, and the performance kinda went sideways. Dave never phoned it in in those situations. Rather, he’d just open all the valves and let loose, which could have the effect of exacerbating the short.

Anyway, after he played, some angry dude showed up demanding to know where Dave was. Dave managed to dodge the guy for a minute, but it wasn’t a huge loft and the dude confronted him. Apparently this asshole had been harassing Dave on the phone all day, claiming that he was owed money because he’d voluntarily sent out an email blast about one of Dave’s previous shows, and felt like that entitled him to a cut of the door as a promoter. He was clearly desperate and nuts, and threatening. I remember Freddy expertly defusing the situation and sending the guy packing.

And I know Dave got frustrated seeing people who weren’t any more talented than him get a lot of attention and press and notoriety and shit. It’s the kind of scene bullshit that you can’t let mess with you, but it can be overwhelming in this city, and I remember it feeling particularly noxious in those days.

The thing is, there’s no one scene in New York City, whether you’re a painter or a writer or a musician or an artisanal cheesemaker. It’s a city of 9 million badasses. There are hundreds of scenes. And all of them think they’re the scene. But the one with the most money around it tends to crow about itself the loudest and, certainly back then, usually draws all the press. There was a sense that going to shows was more of a fashion statement for most people than it was a musical experience. It turned me off from a lot of stuff, for sure.

And I think it got to Dave. He told me once he was more comfortable walking into a roofers’ bar in rural Florida where he didn’t know anybody and playing a set than he was a Brooklyn hipster spot.

The analogy I make about living in New York is that it’s like the relationship between the alternator and the battery in a car. When the relationship is healthy, it draws from you and charges you in equal measure. When it’s not, it can fry you.

And all the crappy stuff about New York just kept getting crappier, and pretty soon the only “creatives” anybody seemed to give a shit about were the cheesemakers.

I found out Dave had split town on social media. He was in Northern California. It looked like he was happy making music there, and that he’d found a community that gave a shit about it, and him.

Brian told me he hung out with him the last time he was in town. Dave had played a bunch of his new stuff for him, and was actually excited about the recordings he’d been working on.

Then, sitting at an outdoor café in Oakland, somebody snatched Dave’s laptop. According to reports, Dave chased after them to get it back. They got into a car. Dave grabbed them and wouldn’t let go. They peeled out. He died of his injuries.

I don’t think for a minute that Dave cared about the machine, costly as it may have been.

But his music was in it.

It is one of the ultimate evil banalities of American life that no matter how hard you work for what little you have, there is always someone ready to steal it from you.

I’m sure that banal human didn’t intend to end my friend’s life when they yanked his laptop.

I’m also sure that Dave didn’t deliberately risk his life to get it back. He put his whole life into his music every moment he breathed. I doubt it was other than instinct.

It was a horrible accident, a wrenching tragedy, the loss of a special human, and a real friend. My heart breaks for his family, for the life-long friends of his I got to know, Daniel Greenspan and Jared Whitham, and for the many other friends like me Dave collected over his many travels and his too few years, whose love and support I know he felt, appreciated, and returned.

So, Dave. 

Thanks for that Radiohead ticket at the Tower. It was a great show, but the fonder memory is wandering around rainy Upper Darby with you beforehand, swapping stories, talking music and hearing song snippets.

Thanks for helping me move my mom from Pennsylvania to Virginia. It was a brutal job, and you held your own against my grandmother with grace and wit.

Thanks for the friendship.

I cannot imagine you coming to rest in whatever quantum state exists beyond this one.

I can only imagine you soaring.

So it’s pushing 11 years since I made a movie called EVERY DOG’S DAY.  Thanks to indiepixfilms.com, it’s still available.  People still ask me about it, so what the hell, it’ll be this month’s post.

Jeezis, what do I say about EDD?  It’s a story I somehow talked a bunch of my friends into helping me tell with a camera.  I honestly thought I could make a digital movie for thirty grand and turn it around for sixty.  I could only get my paws on ten, but I still thought maybe an idiosyncratic movie with a unique look, voice, and talented if unfamiliar cast might be marketable.  What can I say?  I was young.

It’s an exercise in pragmatic imperfection.  Somehow, it exists.

 I wrote the script in maybe 1998, based on the pre-9/11 hustle by which people would marry aspiring immigrants for cash.  I’d heard about people who’d been divorced three and four times before they turned 28.  The story was smack in the gray area between love, loyalty and finance that marriage often exists in.  That was the Rubin era on Wall Street and the Deitch era in SoHo, and American culture was well on the path to corporate quantification.  The idea that humans should mate based on FICA scores was just beginning to become dominant (it wasn’t always like that, kids), so I figured those themes might be relevant for a while.

I tried to write it as a mainstream romantic comedy.  (Those who know me know that’s not a comfortable fit.)  I developed it under the tutelage of Hal Hartley, who I’d met while doing art department work on his movie HENRY FOOL.  He was interested in executive producing it, packaged with a couple other projects.

 That didn’t come together, so I took a stab at shopping it around on my own.  The response was positive but the most common line I got was, “You won’t have a problem selling this, but it’s not for us.”  Riddle me that, Batman.

So I shelved it and continued to scrape by on prop gigs and hack carpentry.  Next thing you know a bunch of stuff happens and it’s 2003. 

I’m working and hanging around a scenery shop in DUMBO (VHS4EVR!) and am surrounded by an unfair number of astoundingly talented, funny and active artists and performers.  I was itchy to make something and I had this story sitting on a shelf.  The Panasonic AGDVX-100 had recently hit the market and would fit on a credit card.  Attainable computers could run editing software.  All the makings of a movie were right there, except, y’know, a budget.

I tried to raise sixty, then fifty, then thirty grand, but only came up with ten.

The only person who got paid beyond meals and transportation was Dan Johnson, the sound mixer.  I shot it myself and drove the van.  Susan Leber and Jeff Caldwell kept the paperwork in order and wrangled a sprawling cast of 26.  The rest of the production staff consisted of Edna Leshowitz (then girlfriend, now wife).

 People ask why I didn’t just make a good-looking short, or a more realistic portrait of fewer characters.  I dunno.  If that’s what you want, watch THE VISITOR.  It’s a really good movie.  But it baffles me how people can look at a thing and critique it based on the fact that it’s not another thing. 

 People also tell me I shouldn’t have shot it myself.  Maybe.  But I respect the trades and don’t want anyone working on my shit for free.  Jeff and Susan own a piece of it for their help and I insisted on giving the cast SAG-sanctioned deferments even if they didn’t care. 

 I threw the script over my shoulder once production started.  Steve Cuiffo and the girl who played Stella knew all their lines, but everybody else winged it.  I taped up pages off-screen for Peter Lorenzo sometimes.  Since most of my favorite lines came from the cast I didn’t take credit for the script.

 The result is pretty much the cinematic equivalent of a Xeroxed comic book drawn by someone who really can't draw but tries really hard.

 Some people don’t like it, others love it.  The people I know who love it tend to be awesome, and the people who don’t like it (often also awesome) still seem to find things about it they enjoy watching. 

 I’m not one for nostalgia, but I really enjoyed the ten days we shot it over and I think the movie retains a sense of shared fun.

 Yeah, I tweaked the story after 9/11.  I watched the towers fall from the waterfront in DUMBO.  I understand why seeing that could make someone want to join the army.  But for me, it had the opposite effect.  The way I see it, the only real way to stop a game of whack-a-mole is to unplug the machine.  A strong military matters, but only a strong society can do that.

 For the record, the best movie about post-9/11 NY is Ilya Chaiken’s LIBERTY KID.

I consider myself extremely fortunate to be counted among the extraordinary writers associated with New Texture, publisher of my novel nu luna.  I also consider myself extremely fortunate to know Wyatt Doyle, founder thereof, as is everyone who knows him. 

In the interest of full disclosure, I knew Wyatt long before New Texture took shape.  We both grew up in Lansdowne, PA and our paths had crossed as kids in the 80’s:  I was in the audience at the Halloween screening of “The Wolfman” he MC’d at the Lansdowne Theater, and I had likely competed against him or one of his brothers in a pine-car derby (my own association with scouting was short-lived; my Cub Scout pack was the Dirty Dozen of the den and I never made it through Webelo.  I believe Wyatt made Eagle.  I did win a derby once, though).  

The first time I remember hanging out we were 15 or 16 on the set of Operation: Blue Moon, which I recall as being a strange amalgamation of young-adult murder fantasy and war movie, directed by Philadelphia underground legend Norman Macera and shot by my neighbor Bob “Bobby October” Joyce on equipment borrowed from the local public-access channel.   I don’t remember if Wyatt was there for the stunt involving live explosives and a trampoline that resulted in the fracture of Tim McCloskey’s collarbone.  I do remember going with Wyatt and his dad to see Ken Kesey read (not long after my own dad had put Sometimes a Great Notion in front of me.)

Later, Wyatt and I worked together at the great Movies Unlimited’s former outpost at Lawrence Park.    We kept in touch into the mid-1990s when I was living in Koeln and he was at Bennington.  I keep a bound manuscript of the collected “Speedlace Letters” he wrote at the time on my shelf. 

I’ve always respected his writing and his omnivorous taste in media.  He’s also always been a fair, honest and brilliant dude who surrounded himself with good people.  Since I’ve known him he’s put some terrific books, movies, performers, music and people in front of me, many of which and whom have proven significant, and I was bummed that we lost track of one another in the respective life-vortices that took him to L.A. and dropped me in NY. 

So I was psyched in 05-06 to come across New Texture, the writers’ collective he’d established.  Unsurprisingly, he’d assembled a badass cadre of contributors.  The posts from Wyatt, Plato Jesus, Stanley Jason Zappa, Moby Pomerance et al are a big part of what convinced me that the Internet didn’t have to be all garbage.   I was likewise psyched when he invited me to contribute, because aside from an unsuccessful stab at screenwriting my writing had been more or less buried for nearly a decade.

It’s been great to participate as New Texture has evolved into independent publishing, partly because I enjoy working with Wyatt and like what he puts out (like me, he loves genre and non-genre in equal measure), but also because I think the model he’s building for writing and publishing is valid and important, especially now that the publishing industry apparently no longer has the resources to find and cultivate new writers, nor the flexibility to identify and adapt to rapidly changing trends in reading and book buying.  There are no advances, there is no marketing budget.  Just writers trying to make great books for, and sell great books to, readers and appreciators of great books.

l-r Larry Niven, Andrew Biscontini

In October of 2013 I had the good fortune to be a panelist at the second annual San Diego Comic Fest, thanks to the efforts of my friend and publisher Wyatt Doyle of New Texture.  Major thanks also to Mike Towry, Clayton Moore and everyone else involved with the fest for hosting such a fun event and giving a first-time SF novelist both a chance to interact with a lot of great people and a seat on the dais with some of the most brilliant and talented professionals in the field of comics and science fiction.

For a small con, I found myself torn between concurrent awesome stuff I wanted to see and hear surprisingly often.  But missing out on great shit because of other great shit is what they call one of them happy problems, and every panel I checked out was engaged, engaging, informative and relevant to the state of the arts and the business they exist in, and I was proud to be part of an indie delegation that included Wyatt, Sandee Curry, the great Kate Danley and Henry Baum. 

It also gave me the opportunity to sit on a panel discussing the current state of the private development of the moon with writer and aerospace engineer Blaine C. Readler, John Trimble (who along with his wife Bjo is credited with getting Star Trek on the air in 1966 and naming the first space shuttle the Enterprise), and legendary SF writers Larry Niven (whose Ringworld books and Integral Trees I consider essential to the genre) and Jerry Pournelle, who, in addition to collaborating on numerous seminal hard SF works with a roster of some of the best heads in the game, is generally regarded, by me at least, as the visionary thinker behind the idea that brought about a peaceful end to the Cold War.

Absent any false humility, I have to say that, intellectually, sitting me next to Jerry Pournelle strikes me as a little bit like sitting Bugs Bunny, fresh out of a hole in the ground and noshing on a carrot, next to an F-16: each highly effective but in very different ways and contexts. 

Anyway, Niven showed up and was seated between us just as Pournelle was about to shred a couple of my book's (acknowledgedly theoretical) precepts, and I think the resultant exchange of perspectives and ideas was worthwhile, if disappointing to anyone looking for news of an imminent permanent habitat: the takeaway I got was that space elevators are probably the way to go for regular access to low-Earth orbit, robots are great in vacuum but have cost limitations, there’s no American political will to set up shop first, and the investment is still so enormous that there’s no return on it in sight. 

Niven and Pournelle both seemed to feel that a sufficiently wealthy and unrestrained individual is the missing essential element to spearhead the necessary technological progress, and while I don’t think they’re necessarily wrong, the notion struck me as being somehow very 20th Century.  But I can’t think of any other notion having supplanted it, unless it's the subjugation of human culture to profit algorithms, which would suck.  I recommend Walter Tevis’s The Steps of the Sun on the subject, which Wyatt tossed me a copy of outside the excellent 5Ave books in San Diego.

Anyhow, the whole reason I wound up there in the first place is that I wrote a science fiction novel called nu luna (I’d put it toward the middle of the the SF Moh’s scale) which is set on the moon 400 years after colonization and concerns the problem of the unquantifiable in a highly quantified society.  nu luna is now available as both a trade paperback and an ebook.

I didn't snap enough pics while I was there, but here's a red carpet roll that Wyatt grabbed:

This is a thing that happened and this is how I remember it.

It’s maybe 1989 and Norm calls saying that his buddy Scotty and his wife have this new business doing costumed cartoon characters for kids’ birthday parties. 

They need four guys to dress up as knockoff Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and they’re paying $20/hour cash.  Which still doesn’t suck, and this was the late 80s and I was like 16.  Three hours would give me a matinee, a stack of comics and a nice trip through 3rd St. Jazz & Rock and the Record Exchange.  Fuck yeah.

Norm tells me that he, Clayton and Tim are onboard so I say ok, later suspecting Tim and Clayton had probably just heard that I was already in as well.  The costumes, he assures me, are awesome. 

So on the appointed Saturday morning we gather at Norm’s and head over to Scotty’s, somewhere deep in Southwest Philadelphia.  At the breakfast table, his wife gives us the outfits pictured above: pretty much green pajamas, a pillowcase painted like a turtle shell, green pantyhose to cover our hair, the color-coded TMNT bandana mask, and green face paint. 

I’m not picking on Scotty and his wife.  A lot of endeavor, resourcefulness and skill went into the making of them.  But I think we’d all imagined some sort of foam padding, maybe some sort of enclosed plastic helmet with eyeholes or something, so it’s not just you, right out there, in tights with a stocking on your head, in green face paint and a thin bandana mask. 

But there we were.   Parked back at Norm’s.  So we suit up and pile into Scotty’s 70’s VW Rabbit.  I was Donatello.  Purple bandana and bo staff. 

The first party of the day was kind of awesome.

It's in a nice neighborhood out in Drexel Hill, all trees, lush lawns and faux Tudors.   The kids are between 2 and 5 so they don’t care that we’re a bunch of baffled dudes dressed like idiots, they're just psyched to have someone in a dumb outfit to play Turtles with.  Norm has a whole mini-dojo going over in one corner of the yard, teaching ninja air-kicks.  I knew enough of the lore from the Eastman & Laird comics (though I was more of a Flaming Carrot man – Fortune Favors the Bold, indeed) that I could lead an assault on the nefarious Hand’s stronghold on the other side of the garage.  Tim and Clayton manage to charm the suburban moms even through smears of green greasepaint. 

Then the hour’s up and we’re back in the Rabbit, crammed in and blasting along I-95.  The windows are open but the wind is hot and acrid and we’re beading sweat through the paint but fuck it, we’re in it at this point.  Probably either 93.3 WMMR or 94 WYSP. 

Scotty’s yelling over the radio that this next party is a really big deal.  Something about how the kid almost drowned once so every year the mother makes a huge deal out of her birthday and goes all out with pony rides and a swimming pool and the works.  I don’t know why you make a point of having a swimming pool at a party for a kid who almost drowned but look at me: fuck do I know? 

Soon we’re rolling over potholes through the refineries and sooty vinyl of Marcus Hook, and pull into a cracked concrete driveway with a stand of balloons tied to something, coming to a stop next to a jaundiced Shetland that gives me a look like it really doesn’t give a fuck that nobody wants to ride it.  None of us were the type to get spooked by a hard neighborhood, but there was a shared sense that this was perhaps not to be quite the Gatsby-esque celebration of childhood that Scotty described.

After Scotty has a quick pow-wow with the mom he leaves us there: he’s gotta go back home to get into his own costume, which was too big to fit into the Rabbit along with the four of us.   

The mom leads us up the driveway.  Very gracious and not making a big deal at all out of our get-ups or the fact that they weren’t holding up so well to travel and sweat.  We make small talk, “Oh, it’s so nice your kid didn’t die and you throw this nice party every year…” and such, and a bit of information comes up that Scotty neglected to pass along to us in the car: the kid is turning 13.

We round the corner into the backyard.  Aside from a couple of random toddlers, the youngest kid is like 9, and a hard 9.  A big dude with spiderweb-tattooed elbows is cooling his feet in the inflatable pool.  Only Norm makes an effort, as probably only Norm could've, but even that doesn't last long.

Some meanfaced kid snatches my broomstick bo staff and runs amok smacking people on the ass with it and then this black girl, probably like 12, really lays into me: she was not as forgiving toward the outfits as I had been and she's taking it way too personally.  “The fuck are YOU supposed to be!?”  A shove to the not-particularly muscular chest, “You supposed to be a TURTLE?! Pf.” A disparaging pinch of the pajama material around my not-particularly muscular arm, “We supposed to BELIEVE this shit?”  I think the dude with the tattoos might’ve gotten the exchange on his Hi-8.

I manage to snatch my bo staff back from the ass-smacking terror and join Tim, Clayton and Norm by the shed, where commemorative polaroids like the above are available for $2 apiece. 

The volley of ridicule doesn’t last long and we’re pretty well ignored, but definitely ready to go the fuck home by the time Scotty finally returns and extricates himself from the Rabbit dressed as Fitzy the Fitness bear, probably the only legitimate costume in the repertoire, purchased from some defunct local educational broadcast.  It had fuzzy ears and a big hoop belly and basketball shorts and a jersey that said “Fitzy.”  Whiskers and nose were drawn on. 

So hey hey, kids here comes Fitzy bounding up the driveway past the Shetland, who still doesn't care, and the four of us muscle him behind the shed and hassle him for his keys.  He tries to talk us out of it but he gives in and doesn’t try to be a dick by pro-rating the last hour or anything, and by then clearly nobody gives a shit if we were there or not.  What did they need us for when they had Fitzy to get them into shape? 

Back at Scotty’s his wife ordered us a pizza and paid us cash.  And after I’d washed off the greasepaint I went downtown and caught a movie and bought a bunch of records.