Boomtown Gone Bust
Dawson City, Alaska is a real town and the story which is told in the author’s short story “The Frozen Archive” actually happened. But it is in the telling of the story that this amazing true story of the discovery of old silent films thought to be long gone comes to life. Very early on, imagery situates how the town that grew out of the Yukon Gold Rush collapsed into the town in which those film canisters would eventually be discovered. One can almost see the transformation taking place over time beneath a never-changing cosmic light show:
“The Gold Rush built this town, nestled on a bend in the Yukon River. It has too many saloons for its size, and the locals make good use of them. A casino. Wooden sidewalks. The smell of wood smoke everywhere. At night, the great mysterious blue mucus of the Northern Lights.”
The Dark Developments in Braggodocio, MO
Allman’s debut mainstream novel is titled Otis: On the Occasion of His Foray into the Wilderness of Civilization. What, you may ask, is the stimulus behind this fella Otis deciding to take that first foray beyond the safe and comfortable environs of his idiosyncratic hometown, Braggadocio, Missouri. Well, sir (or madam), it’s like this: one day the “dark developments” began and simply continued to grow unabated:
“Inevitably, the first well in Braggadocio appeared that year like the first bubble in a pot of water coming to a boil. Soon the sound of pipes linking together was everywhere. Outhouse door hinges turn to rust; flies went freely. Lawn care became a topic of conversation. Children discovered the sprinkler in the summer, their parents discovered warm showers, and winter cars in the driveway discovered their shine.”
“Nobody Knows Anything”
“Choose a song. Go out and shoot yourself crazy. Use every technique in the book. Rifle the drawers of cinematic in television history. You won't even have to think about making a soundtrack. Cut wildly. Break the rules. In six years, movies with songs as the soundtrack will be the hottest thing that hit television.”
This collection of sentence fragments and staccato rhythms qualifies as imagery to prove a point. It is what the author describes as something that his college film professor should have said when he sent Allman and his fellow students out into the world of digital filmmaking. Instead, the actual advice that this college professor steeped in the art of experiment cinema gave his students was short and to the point and doubtlessly brilliant at the time: “Whatever you do, don’t make a film of your favorite song.” In his textbook, Careers in Video and Digital Video, the versatile Mr. Allman offers his collision of what seems to be great advice at the time and what would eventually prove to have been better advice as a perfect embodiment of screenwriter William Goldman’s one unassailable dictum of Hollywood: “nobody knows anything.”
What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?
It’s a great song, but REM doesn’t really explain much in the way of what actually happened to Dan Rather on that fateful day in their song. The essay title simply “The Frequency” which Allman published in Harper’s opens with a quick delineation of the events of that incident which would taken on a life well beyond its proper scope. In remarkably efficient use of description imagery, Allman gives readers everything: all that is actually know about those few minutes that just really should not even still be famous all these years later, but still manage to be so:
A cool evening, upper Park Avenue, in the Eighties. Newsman and reservoir of trust, Dan Rather, dressed casually, walks home from dinner at a friend's house. Two well-dressed white men in their thirties—one six feet tall, with dark hair and a mustache—accost Rather, one of them demanding to know, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” "You have the wrong guy,” Rather replies. One of the men responds with a punch to the newsman's jaw, under his left ear. Rather flees into the lobby of a building on Park Avenue, and the thugs pursue him, punching, kicking, badgering Rather repeatedly with the strange query: “Kenneth, what is the frequency!”
