Big Foot and Me

I'm back, sooner even than I expected to be, with another post at Tor.com.

This one is about my friend Eric Spitznagel, his Vanity Fair piece on Bigfoot, and the reaction it caused among cryptozoology enthusiasts.

I'm a Believer: Eric Spitznagel and the Mountain Goats

I love the Internet. Here's why today.

I spent 1991-1994 living in first England and then Chicago studying and performing theater, with a guy named Eric Spitznagel. Then in '94, I left Chicago for Bama and then California, and, back in the Stone Age, that would have been the end of it. Intermittent letters and phone calls maybe, long years of silence. Timothy Leary defined life and death as a continuum state, not an either/or, pointing out that you were already "dead" in parts of the world where you had no influence or contact, whether you were still alive in another locale or not, and you were still "alive" even after your physical death in areas where your ideas and concerns still had active impact. So, for all intents and purposes, in the pre-Internet age, Eric and I would be effectively dead to each other (with the occasional séance).

Instead, the following:

A few weeks ago, I realize that one single on a compilation CD that came with the Believer magazine keeps sticking in my head. It's "Palmcorder Yanja" by the Mountain Goats, and since Eric, in addition to being an author,is an editor at the Believer I shoot him an offhand email asking if he's familiar with them. He doesn't respond. I forget about it. Weeks go by. Then he pops up in my inbox explaining that not only is he obsessed with the Mountain Goats, but rather than respond to my email, he's blogged about his love of John Darnielle (the man behind the band) at great length. Here's a sample of what he wrote:

I love that the band's name is plural, even though it's just one guy playing an acoustic guitar. I love that John Darnielle, the lead singer (okay, the only singer), has a piercing nasal tenor that makes most people scrunch up their face and say, "What the hell is that?" I love that he's written hundreds of beautiful and sometimes hilarious songs about gardening, talking animals, abusive relationships in Florida, Aztec mythology and ancient Danish burial traditions - sometimes all at the same time. I love that most of his songs were recorded on a Panasonic RX-FT500 boombox, giving them the same crisp sound quality of an answering machine circa 1988.

So I read his blog, which so expressively communicates his passion that it inspires me to go to the Mountain Goats website, where I discover a horde of mp3s for free download. (There's also an equal amount of material available to stream, but I'm still hooked on ownership, so I only sample the music I can download into my iPod.) Well, I'm enough of a musical obsessive myself that I go hunting the net for photos of live performances I can use as faux CD-covers and to make sure I get the year of recording correct. I convey this to Eric while I'm still in the process, who happens to be online at the time I write him, and he response with a flurry of additional mp3s in my inbox - all bootlegs, live gigs, and rarities - not commercially available stuff I could buy - as neither he nor I want to take food away from an artist, particularly not one working on this scale. And besides, I know that having amassed around 30 or so songs for free, I'm not going to make it out of the day without going to iTunes and picking up something by the Goats as a dual act of thanks and clean karma. (I got "New Asian Cinema" - you should too). So now I'm a die-hard Mountain Goats fan. I've taken my iPod off "Shuffle Songs" for the first time since I got it, am playing Darnielle constantly, memorizing lyrics so I can sing them out of tune in the shower, and am working on converting my wife and child.

Which is why I love the Internet. Because, apart from being a case-in-point that Cory Doctorow is totally right when he argues that giving it away free generates sales, someone on the other side of the country who would have remained an increasingly-distant memory receding into my past has an active, vital, ongoing influence in my life in real time. All hail techology and old friends and the way the one brings us together with the latter.

Authors and Their Assholes

Eric Spitznagel is an old friend of mine I've written about on here before. He's a contributing editor for The Believer magazine and the Website editor for Monkeybicycle, and his journalism has appeared in Playboy, McSweeney's, Salon.com, Harper's, and numerous other places of note. We go way back to a time when we studied together under amazing Royal Shakespear Company actors in Oxford, England, and then spent a few years driving each other crazy writing and directing really horrendously bad black box theatre in crack neighborhoods in Chicago, IL. Our careers have run in odd parallel, with both of us moving into journalism and then books (he's the author of six). In fact, he has a recent book called Fast Forward that came out around the same time as mine. It's a bit different in subject matter, of course.

Anyway, Eric maintains a blog called Vonnegut's Asshole, the name referring to the famous asterisk that Kurt used to represent his anus in Breakfast of Champions. As Eric writes:

"Vonnegut's asshole had a profound effect on me as a kid. (There's really no way of writing that sentence without it sounding a little odd.) I was 10 or 11 when I first read Breakfast of Champions, and it was the first book that I picked out on my own. I can still vividly recall the day when I got to the page with Vonnegut's asshole drawing. I was in school, reading the book over a plate of cold tater tots during lunch, and I guess I laughed a little too loud. My teacher at the time - a humorless old bastard named Mr. Spearing - walked over and glanced at my book. When he saw the asshole drawing, he was livid. 'That is not funny at all,' he screamed at me. 'It's just childish and immature! It's absolutely disgusting!' He ripped the book out of my hands and refused to let me read it in school again. He spoke with my parents about it later and called the book "dangerous." I couldn't wrap my head around that. Really? A book could be dangerous just because one of the pages had an asterisk that kinda resembled an asshole? That was all it took? It was a life-changing moment for me. That's when I realized just how powerful humor - even childish, immature humor - could really be. If an asshole illustration is enough to make you howl in protest, it speaks volumes about your own insecurities. If you don't like something, just don't look at it. Don't read it. But if an idea makes you want to burn a book or snatch it out of a child's hands and hide it where nobody (least of all you) can ever see it again, it obviously touched a nerve."

So, in memory of the great man's life and in honor of his passing, Eric is hosting a series called "Authors and their Assholes," in which he invites notable writers to contribute their own artfully rendered anuses. So far, he's had such prestigious personages as This America Life commentator Sandra Tsing Loh, Other magazine publisher Charlie Anders, best selling author Brad Listi, and actress and author Kimberlee Auerbach.Today, day eight, Sean Williams ably represents the science fiction field with a diagram of his posterior parts. Trust me when I say you've got to see this to believe it. I think Vonnegut would be proud.