Universe 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  Since Governments Michael has had a consistent crew and acting company, enough of whom can get free for a few months at any given time so that he can always start production on short notice. This way it’s possible for each film to take place in a city where a major political or social crisis is underway: the drug scandal and sabotage of construction by the students in Cloud Chamber, the newspaper strike in Government, the pornography trial which is in the forefront of Adult Mail, and so on. There are several uses of this motif beyond the obvious effect of guaranteeing the inclusion of political material. For one thing, an attempt is made as work on the production progresses to work the dispute into the plot as much as possible, to give the characters affiliations on one side or another, even to have the actors pursue these affiliations off-camera when possible. Thus Michael insures that the true story is mated with his outline, such that the characters will be responsible to unpredictable events beyond his control. What is most striking about this is to see the actors involved, on film, with people who aren’t playing parts at all.

  When Michael has a partial script completed (usually written by himself in collaboration with Spiegel or Ted Blau), he begins watching the papers for an accessible city where there is trouble he can use. Once his decision is made, he can get the full company and a van full of equipment to the location within three days. There they rent a house they can live in for the duration of the production, and afterward Michael takes the film back to Sacramento for synching and editing.

  On the first night in town, when everyone else has begun moving in, Michael goes to whatever bar or restaurant is said to be a hangout for one faction in the dispute. He picks a table or space from which he can see as much of the room as possible, then starts circulating and attracting as many people as he can back to his position. He buys drinks and food. Every night he comes back, treating people and making friends, playing down the film as a project, just asking if he can take some pictures at what is expected to be an important meeting or confrontation. Then he goes to the other side’s place and does the same thing. He finds it useful to offer cigarettes. He buys a pack of unfiltered kings, a pack of filters, a pack of menthol filters. Smiling, he opens a pack one-handed without looking, his eyes on the door of a bar or a MacDonald’s, his thumb pulling the red tearstrip across the top of the cellophane wrapper as he watches for faces, reconstructing the clippings in his mind.

  The probable reason that I lose parts of the films is that I never really see them to begin with. What happens is that the timing of the light’s variations provides a way out, to places I don’t remember. To locations: a dim stately bar where cold glasses leave perfect water rings on the hand-rubbed oak; a beautiful street in the financial district of an old European city where I walk, alone, after dark; empty spotless train stations where my only choice is to wait. The silence in the movies is layered so carefully as to provide a cover; I learn to fall forward again after years of steadying myself. It’s not like being stupefied by Jimmy’s songs when they were on the radio and it’s not like traveling by signal. Equations don’t work. But the surroundings, including the screen in front of me, fold up, and I go in slowly, brushing other lives, my head down, my hands wrapped together under my chin.

  * * * *

  They smuggled me my mail: Gourmet, Art jorum, Business Week, Vintage, Neiman-Marcus, Hammacher-Schlemmer, Pfaelzer Brothers, Harry and David, Greenland Studios, the Wisconsin Cheese Man, Sunset House, and our house organ, TTW On-the-Grow-Notes, published the same day the Time article came out. I looked at the Notes for news of myself.

  Michael warns that when you mention a splice to most people, they think of the tic of light and missed syllable in a bad print, not realizing that splicing is any joining of two pieces of film, and as such is the basic method of editing and composing a finished print. Furthermore, an expert editor can splice one sequence to another with no suggestion that an omission has occurred. When he wants to drop a line of dialogue, he connects what come before to what comes after and when the film is screened, the line in question never existed. So the general supposition is that this technique lowers the “stakes” of filmmaking by lessening the number of variables and giving the editor the power to regulate the action even after the fact.

  But Michael reminds us that the opposite is true: splicing increases the stakes, because the unadvised exclusion of a breath or gesture that belongs in the film will disturb everyone in the audience because they know exactly what belongs there, whether they know this consciously or not. They know better than the director, and as of that omission he has lost them.

  Michael was in his room on the first floor behind the kitchen, putting away Cloud Chamber, which he had been showing me half an hour before. It was the only white room in the house. A wire ran overhead with strips of 35-millimeter film clipped to it. On the desk were a typewriter and an enlarger and a lot of papers, and on the opposite wall was an old porcelain sink.

  “Hello?” he said when I came in.

  “I want to see that again,” I said. “I missed some.”

  But he continued putting it away. “So now you know you’re out,” he said. “Now that you’ve read it, you believe it. Without a trace.” He shook his head. “What do you suppose they’ll use that space for? Someone who has no idea what he’s doing, right?”

  He turned off his floor lamp, a household bulb set in the kind of conical silver fixture used for movie lighting. Now the only light in the room was from a small desk lamp, and the shadows of his fingers were long on the wall as he put the three reels in their box.

  “You peeked,” I said, sitting down on the bed.

  He shrugged, then went to a shelf over the sink and took down his Pentax. He flattened his back against the wall opposite me, took a step forward, knelt, and began taking pictures.

  “Won’t it be too dark?” I said.

  * * * *

  THREE

  “I hear you singing in the wires.”

  —jimmy webb, “Wichita Lineman”

  Very soon now, any month, information will start disappearing from the memory banks of all the computers in the world. This won’t be a matter of anyone deliberately tapping or erasing the material. It will find its own way out. It is possible for holes in cards to heal, for leads to lead nowhere, for magnetic particles positioned on tape to align themselves with silence. Those data never wanted in to begin with, and now, all by themselves, they are going to desert. By the process of elimination, the same few names will come up again and again, every day a smaller variety of names printing out with greater frequency of repetition until finally there are no more names available. I have all this legal pressure on me, or I could give you the names of people who know what’s going to happen and are getting out of the business already.

  I had my first inkling of this in a conversation with Michael on the first morning after I told him we could go ahead with shooting. I’d gone out in Steve’s car and gotten us some doughnuts at a shop on the mall, and now Michael was saying that it would make more sense to pick a new target for action by signals, and to follow that progress in the film, than to re-stage the action I had already run in LA.

  “You know what’s computerized now?” he asked me.

  “What?”

  “All the draft stuff,” he said.

  “Including local?”

  He nodded. ‘The Sacramento board just got it last year. Pat’s action group had this girl who was clerking in there undercover and she was ripping off a few cards every week to see if that would throw it off, just taking five or six out at random.”

  “Stealing the cards wouldn’t make any difference,” I said, “there’s an override that goes back and duplicates the information if the remaining cards are in sequence. I worked on it. What did she do with them?”

  “What, the cards? I don’t know,” said Michael. “But you could do the same thing to the draft computer that you did to the others, mess it up so everybody comes out ineligible or something. And then we could make
the movie around that, just have you—”

  “Aren’t all those records duplicated somewhere, though?”

  He thought a minute, spreading a dust of confectioner’s sugar on the tabletop, then said, “Well, in order to do the movie with you really doing it, you have to make the equipment again and make up the programs and everything, right? So then the movie shows how it’s done, and we start screenings in the fall—I mean, this is still a movie, it’s not just a training film or anything, but we show basically how it’s done and then all of a sudden next winter you have all these people building their own equipment and going into their own boards and then Rand and Dow and all those—”

  “It’ll take a couple of weeks to make the equipment,” I said.

  “I want that time for preproduction anyway, and we have to order some new cameras and lights. A lot of my stuff doesn’t even work now.”

  “Okay,” I said, “are there people who can steal us some printouts and things?”

  What’s amazing, looking back on this—watching for behavior here—is that I wasn’t thinking about the politics at all. The politics became the pretext, retroactively, for what I’d done, including the embezzling, but not until the trial got under way in LA, and by that time there was the June 20 Committee (the day I got arrested). All these people say that the movie project was a wet dream on Michael’s part and a bitter gesture on mine because of being ignored in Notes, but all I could think of then was the idea of having so many strangers working from my instructions, a new kind of technician who—with Michael’s help—would appreciate fully the implications of what they were doing when they worked with frequencies. That was all I wanted. It was during that conversation that I got excited for the first time about making all the computers go dumb, and the film seemed like the first step. It’s taken us seven years to realize that it works best when no one pushes, that the tendency of languages is to unwrite themselves, that codes will go for their yellow capsules rather than be broken. But I got very optimistic then and told Michael everything I was thinking. In return he took some notes in his spiral notebook, nodding, tapping the table, taking the flow of material like a telegraph terminal. When I was done he put the notebook away and, looking straight at me, said, “That’s really plausible,” and then we began to plot the movie.

  * * * *

  Midday in a rundown part of Sacramento. Vacco (myself) enters a phone booth at a gas station and makes two calls, his voice lost to us through the glass. When he’s finished he runs across the street to a weathered Mustang with a young man at the wheel. Vacco gets in. They drive away quickly but not recklessly. There are no other people in the sequence, which consists of about ten takes: we pan into the booth with Vacco and stop as he shuts the door. The calls are covered by two alternating medium shots, one low-angle, one head-on, with a long establishing shot of the block inserted while he’s dialing the second one. Then there’s another long shot for his exit from the booth and the run across the street—same scope as the establishing shot but from the opposite angle—followed by an insert of Vacco’s hand on the car door, a high-angle medium of him getting in and sitting down, tracking forward a foot for his short conversation with the driver (again, inaudible; the only sound on the track is wind and a truck offscreen), switching over to a medium shot of Vacco from over the driver’s shoulder as the car starts pulling away from the curb, and then back to the long shot as the car gets two blocks away from us and starts to turn right onto a cross street. It’s black and white, with good focus, too much grain, and nice steady dollying and panning. The new equipment made a big difference, even to the point of smoothing out the shooting style. The only hand-held shot is the one taken from over Steve’s shoulder, a shot which boxes my face into a triangle formed by the corner of his window and the line of his jacket from his neck to the point of his shoulder. There’s just an instant of camera jiggle, where my head, a bald ball at three-quarters to the camera, freefloats in the dark of the car, then regains its equilibrium, the up-and-down motion settling out to an intangible level by the last second of the take.

  That was the only part of the planned movie that ever got shot. I took the cards and printouts from the girl who met me at the bar so I could look them over, but the bar was too dark so she said she’d steal some more and we’d get that part another day.

  In the rest of Michael’s outline, Vacco goes from the phone booth to a bar and meets a Student Mobe girl who gives him stolen cards and printouts from the draft board. He opens an active file on the language and hardware being used. In an interview, he explains which books and journals to read for information on programming languages and how to design programs that will introduce crippling discrepancies into any standing program, and how to feed those programs to computers over any telephone. I was worried about this last part because it’s so much talk and I was afraid it would drag, but Michael was going to intercut portions of his Chicago footage, which was very good, by the way.

  At an electronics hobby shop in the Sacramento suburbs, Vacco buys all the necessary parts for his frequency-making equipment. We see him assembling the box and compiling charts that match the draft-board computer’s programming language with tables of frequencies. Later he sits in an armchair, playing beeps from the box into a home telephone as he reads from a list of numbers titled “June birthdays— flat feet.”

  Everything on the film was to have been real, including that last sequence. Our intention was expertise, which is why we spent almost every minute of the two preproduction weeks together, talking to almost nobody else and teaching each other all the craft we could before shooting started. It was no accident that Michael was in my room, with a camera, when the arresting FBI agent came to the house a few days after we shot the phone booth stuff.

  * * * *

  So Jimmy stopped writing big hits. Very soon after the arrest, a matter of a few months, his share of airplay dropped as quickly as it had risen and hasn’t changed much since.

  I’ve never believed the story about the Student Mobe girl being an informer, nor do I think it really matters. If anything, it’s my fault for not recognizing how much power can go into a small space, like three minutes of music. The trick is that with information you need the construction and combination of symbols, which gives you that misleading multiplicity again, but power is a single sustained tone with nothing to say. You can get a lot of it in a small place. At the time of Jimmy’s hits, several of us were on orders every minute. It didn’t feel that different from normal life, but then Jimmy’s technique was sophisticated and had distance as a cover, so it could be forever before we pin it down.

  What worries me is that he must think I’m angry for the way he singled me out. I’d like to tell him that I understand, that I’m not mad, but they won’t even let me talk to him on the phone. The last time I called up they said he was working on a new solo album. I have that one. All it is is music, like everything else he’s done since that summer. I don’t know if anyone’s done the actual research yet of digging out the lyrics and melodies from during and after that period, I mean complete copies of both sets, but that would be an interesting project for someone and probably not too unwieldy.

  Anyway he’s stopped, so it’s one of two things: either the connection left him or he decided he’d gotten what he needed and it would be safest if he played it quiet for a while, and if he was turning things back over to me there was no need to have the waves coming off the radio anymore. The third possibility, of Jimmy running up against the program that incurs silence, wide silence, silence in the balance of matter, is also worth considering, and there’s the chance that after he got cocky he got scared. Certainly, the blatancy of the clues he was dropping at one time is amazing: all the lyrics to “Wichita Lineman,” the one about the folk technician who is “searching in the sun for another overload,” but especially the arrangement (which one of the newsmagazines called “the wow-wow-wow sound of wind whipping through the wires” but which is in fact the completely wirel
ess heartbeat of freefloating control waves). It’s clear, looking back to that summer, that I got the pictures of him at work for a reason: they were feedback. Every transmission has two ends. I can understand his reason for keeping low profile now. It’s ridiculous to ask him to share his findings when he’s already pointed the way to so much, and it’s important to understand that for someone in his position the situation is getting harder, not easier. It was during the last part of the trial that “Galveston,” which is “about” a Texas boy in Vietnam but actually is concerned with this feedback phenomenon (“I can see her standing by the water . . .”) got hot. It was the instrumental tag, the music with nothing said alongside it, that stung the hardest. I should have known exactly what was happening the first time I heard it—out on bail, going to lunch in Marv Loewinson’s car—and started crying.