Turpentine Mouthwash

This is the story of how a postage stamp, a rocket scientist, and a blind bluesman brought an obscure musical tradition of outer Mongolia to the world. I'm sitting in a Portland, Oregon rock club. It's situated right smack in the middle of the downtown meat market. To the right of me is Voodoo Donuts. Gutter punks spange outside, grabbing a few bucks from the drunks attracted to the scent of bacon and glazing. To the left of me is a flophouse, the human overflow sleeping in the streets outside it. On a normal night, the club caters to bored frat boys and enterprising bank tellers, everyone dressed in their cleanest polo shirts, Axe so thick it smells like a Thai ladyboy exploded. Tonight it's different. The club is filled with drifting incense. People crowd the stage, sitting on the floor indian style, necks aching to see the white robed performers. Passers by wander in, hoping for the usual drunken party, and stand struck dumb. The sta...

Photo by Mandy McGee

After hunting around the internet for a few minutes, I found a few pictures from my time performing for the Portland performing arts troupe Societas Insomnia. It was a deeply disorganized group, with dozens of performers dropping out and being replaced, sound and lighting issues, and big egos getting stepped on constantly. But man oh man, do I enjoy performing.

Five years ago I was prolific. In the multiple moves I've done since then, amidst the stress and chaos of life for the past few years, my output and vociferousness has fallen somewhat. My attention span isn't what it used to be, my hands hurt after a few hours of typing (thanks to all the fractures), and while I'm loathe to admit it, the mental alacrity of youth has abandoned me somewhat. I've exchanged it with greater depth of thought, a more pragmatic approach to problems, but I miss the mad lurchings of my youthful ideas. So I'm doing what anyone in my situation would do. Republishing my old work, sprucing it up, and letting it reinvigorate me. Its not nostalgia, my least favorite emotion, but a kind of vampiric time travel. I'm stealing my own ideas. March 17, 2005 "So what do you believe? I mean, do you believe in God?" He scratched the stubble on his chin. After a moment, he kneeled into the sand and drew two circles above an arc. ...

1. Getting out of her way wasn't hard, but it was difficult. What I mean is that she lived like a hurricane, big eyes and big hair, ready to smile that witch smile or cut you down. What I mean is that you saw her coming a mile away, a thousand miles away, you heard her name whispered in warning, carved in the fucking stones saying 'do not go there.' But all those warnings did little to convince me. When she came skipping down the street she looked like a girl, and nothing more. 2. So I got sucked in. It happens to the best of us, and the best of us prostrate ourselves to whatever she needed. The midnight screaming fights, those were for the best. The first knife she pulled, the one she swore up and down killed her mother and father and then pointed at my heart, that was a catharsis long needed. I lied to myself with born-again ferocity, ignored the strange brown stains under her fingernails and the watery glimmer in her eyes. Then she showed me the tattoos. 3. The ...

Story happens. The human animal is a storytelling machine. We never need to be taught the basics of narrative, because the basis for all story is simple causality. Events that follow one another are likely linked, our brains dictate, and we scour the environment for clues to the nature of that link. If nature does not provide an obvious answer, we confabulate and confuse, projecting our intuitive understanding of human motivations upon the world. It is this inborn need that is the core of narrative. We understand stories on a primal level; they trick our limbic system and beguile our amygdala. True, on the higher levels of thought we understand this is an illusion, but one we are willing to indulge in for the sake of a thrill; we aren't such slaves to our passions as to allow them unchecked reign. The methods of this manipulation have been codified, expanded upon, and undercut since the Classical period, but the core of story -- causality with meaning-- is maintained. A gre...

The core of the tragic character is, despite their hubris, rational. In fact, it is this rationality that allows the audience to empathize with their plight. If hardships befall a fool, or if the protagonist willingly walks into their own doom without forethought, the audience may cheer their dissolution, and will very likely be bored. The character's actions and motivations are understandable, and therein lies the pathos. If a character finds themselves in a horrible situation, even by their own hand, the audience must feel that they'd be in the same situation given the same circumstances. The horror protagonist must be self-propelled towards their doom, and those choices must ring true. This is almost self-evident, but think to all of the cheap and lazy horror stories that depend on the main character's intense stupidity and stubborn refusal to acknowledge anything like danger. Without the protagonist's rationality (and note that I do not mean that each choic...