“The Frequency”
CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather was infamously accosted on the street by some apparently deranged—though oddly well-dressed—men one day in 1986. Their greeting to Mr. Rather was later adopted as the title of a hit song by alternative band REM, “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth.” In a tongue-in-cheek essay published in Harper’s magazine in 2001, Limbert disregards the official story and instead concocts a fabulist—not to be confused with fabulous—tale which lays out his theory that the men were actually acolytes of postmodernist author Donald Barthleme. The evidence he lays out is authentic, however: Barthelme’s fiction includes the phrase “what’s the frequency,” a character named Kenneth and the useful coincidence that Rather and Barthelme were born in the same year and both called Houston home at the same time.
The Knot
The Knot is a YA novel published by Limbert in 1988. The story is rather simple: Clay and Demi are two high school students who fall in love and whose whirlwind trek toward marriage puts a scare in the parents of both. What makes the story stand out—apart from being distinctly different from “The Frequency” is the structure. Both Clay and Demi get to tell their versions of the events in what amounts to two different books colliding together as one.
“The Frozen Archive”
Allman gets back to blurring the real and the fictional with this story published in Film Comment which purports to tell the tale of a literal archive of lost films frozen beneath a pool converted into a skating rink following the collapse of the Yukon Gold Rush in the former boomtown of Dawson City. One of the film recovered is a Lon Chaney flick thought to be lost forever, but the golden nugget of the find is a silent travelogue called “The Lost City of New York.”
Careers in Video and Digital Video
The diverse nature of Allman’s writings is put on full display here. Neither fiction nor semi-fiction, this is an actual textbook filled with advice (circa 2001) for carving out a career in the digital video revolution. Although certainly much of the content is outdated by now, it does feature a still-useful history of the events leading to the digital video revolution. The chapter titled “Jobs: Where and Why” is one of the shortest and does not feature what would be expected, but is rather a tale of a college friend of the author and an unknown director he met in Hollywood who would go on to make Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. Although much of the book is dated in the sense of the daily activities have changed a lot, even more of the book follows this chapter in providing sound advice from a broader perspective still capable of hitting home and helping a career.
Otis: On the Occasion of His Foray into the Wilderness of Civilization
Published in 1994, this book is often referred to as Allman’s debut novel, but the publication date of The Knot belies that. In reality, this is the author’s first non-YA novel and is intended for all audiences. Inspired by folk tales of figures like Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan, it is a the story of a naif named Otis who sets his mind to work on what seems to be a rather impossible task: damming the Mississippi River at the source as a means of protecting the lucrative business of making rain barrels operated by his father. It only gains steam from that original impetus and sends Otis on a wild journey involving a religious cult and the rescue of a goddess. Then there’s that matter of the other Otis. The dead thief also named Otis.
Bomber’s Row
Allman continues to stretch his limits and showcase his interest in the meandering road of the real and the not-so-real in this work which is neither short story nor textbook nor novel, but a play. The bombers of this row of infamy are three of the most notorious criminals of 1990s: Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber and the mastermind behind the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. All three men are (were) imprisoned at the SuperMax prison in Colorado and the play imagines a conversation between the three during the one hour out of the day each was freed from their solitary confinement. The joker in this deck of whiny kingpins each taking potshots at the failures which the others to prison (ironic, yes) is a ganglord named Luis Felipe who is insistent that these three more famous murderers are unworthy of being kept in the same prison as he since none had the guts to actually stare into the eyes of the people they killed like he has done.
Kenneth, What is the Frequency?
In 2004, the two-minute ordeal of Dan Rather was extended yet again with the premiere of Allman’s play based on the magazine essay based on the actual event. Both Rather and the writer at the center of Allman’s playful conspiracy theory—Donald Barthleme—are represented on stage. A siren named Carla is the linking device which brings it all together in the end. The plot is less important than the Barthelmesque postmodern fascination with how the story is told more so—at least to a point—than the story it is telling. As for character, Don comes off as much more intriguing than Dan, almost to the point of creating a kind of a miracle: making this whole thing become more about Barthelme than Rather and leaving Kennth merely a lost frequency in the sphere.
