Crumbly Donut immediately recognized the writing in the journal as originating in the Codex Seraphinianus, since he owned a copy.
“Some people with whom I have shared this book find it frightening or disturbing in some way. It seems to them to glorify entropy, chaos, and incomprehensibility. There is very little to fasten onto; everything shifts, shimmers, slips. Yet the book has a kind of unearthly beauty and logic to it, qualities pleasing to a different class of people: people who are more at ease with free-wheeling fantasy and, in some sense, craziness. I see some parallels between musical composition and this kind of invention. Both are abstract, both create a mood, both rely largely on style to convey content.” – Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
Back in August while I was out of state, excerpts of the journal were “leaked” by Kelvin on his weblog. Crumbly Donut pointed to one particular passage prefaced by drawings of two multi-national sub-dismal beverage/food providers:
“Is this all you have to communicate to one another as a species? Rules & sales pitches? Where is the culture in your city streets? Where is the content? What is your history? [...] Somebody infuse some spontaneity and play into this work-a-day world before I just....vanish altogether”
This sounded like a clarion call to the Donut. “we NEED to start tagging, or more likely, postering.” Well, you don’t have to tell me twice. I talked to Crumbly and he had an idea to do a “SF Personalities” series. We whittled down a large list to five people; some were eliminated because there weren’t good photos/images available. Crumbly wrote descriptions for each of them. I fiddled with the images and fed them into a strange raster/vector program I had lying around. By the time I got back from the right side of America, I had all five images ready. A friend offered to print them insanely-large sized for maximum POW! Also ZAM!
His posterization offer included a sixth somewhat-unrelated image that was going to require some assembling. Meanwhile, I downloaded the two-page map that was co-created by Kelvin and Beth. Kelvin’s page coordinated with audio tracks extracted from a police interview of people close to Eva, conducted after she went missing. Beth’s page was filled with visual aids to help find the names of one-page domains that each featured a video segment related to that area. Everything was presented in chronological order; we were approximately ghosting Eva’s known whereabouts on the day she disappeared.
This time on our walkabout the roles were reversed: I didn’t know what was going on, and Crumbly Donut had been through the whole thing already. He fed me a few sugar cubes and we were off.
1. THE GARDEN.
The stairs up to Coit Tower were well-maintained and cut through some swanky bits of nature with trees and such. There was a cute little turn-off that features a small bench and ... a parking meter. The garden’s associated audio track was a police interview with Blair Lucien.
Detective: Mr. Lucien? We really do appreciate your patience ... let’s go over this one more time.
Blair: You can’t be serious.
Detective: Sir ... I know this is exhaustive ... and that’s the point ... we need to get every single detail. Now, can you tell me again, how you came to realize Eva was missing.
Blair: We’re going to go over this again? Haven’t we done this? I mean, shouldn’t you be out conducting some type of actual search?
Later, Beth is interviewed and indicated her parents wouldn’t let Eva in the house, which is why they would meet at the garden. She mentioned that Neil was the one responsible for the tile mosaics all around the area.
These interviews were agony to listen to because you don’t talk to the police. But I set aside my gritted teeth (in a small, tasteful, and moderately ornate wooden box) and pretended I was in a trapped in a fictional world where the police actually helped you! And candy was free, even high-quality licorice from Australia! Weeeeeeeeee!
The associated video for “URBANCRITTERS” showed Eva & Beth on the very same bench with an opossum, having a conversation. The opossum didn’t really contribute that much to the discourse. Beth was worried about rabies, Nature’s Hidden Treasure.
Just before we were about to leave the bench of tranquility, I spotted a Neil mosaic set below the deck. Oh! It was referenced on Beth’s page ... “To get beneath the surface, you must look over the edge ...” Almost missed it. This was a new revelation for Crumbly Donut, he hadn’t seen it the first time around.
2. THE NEIL ESTATE.
The Neil Estate audio track continues Beth’s police interview ... she gives explicit directions to his hovel, a flat bit of ground sort of on a little rise, obscured by foliage. The sign demarcating the area and leading us to the video is patterned on the numbered plaques you see on telephone poles that public officials use for their daily lottery picks. Nice place, needs a roof though ... I’m spoiled. The associated video gives us quick glimpses of Neil in his Estate suddenly flipping out about some sort of hair malfunction, apparently. We all have them.
[...]
Detective: Did you see Neil there, the night that Eva disappeared?
Beth: No, I didn’t ...
Detective: Did anyone else?
Beth: Well, I know that the others might have seen him that night. Play2 did I think.
Detective: Are you sure?
Beth: Uhh, yeah, Play2 mentioned something about seeing him.
Play2 is the second interview on the track. The detective pronounced his name in such a disapproving way that it made me want to tack a number to the end of my own name.
[...]
Detective: So I seem to have heard that you had some interaction with him on that night yourself. Am I right about that?
Play2: Nah. I never talk to him. We just talk about him ... crack jokes on him and whatnot.
3. THE GROTTO.
This is a small frequently-used cushy area hanging on a fenceline just below Coit Tower’s parking lot. It had a couch-type area ... and someone sleeping there.
We were very quiet. I went to open the box with the mosaic number, but then something occured to me.
“Wait ... if you didn’t have the code, how did you open this?”
“It was already open.”
CRUMBLY DONUT. After getting the video location (“Delta particles”) and another code phrase (“Soon obsolete”) I carefully re-locked the box back up and we quietly snuck past the sleeping woman. The video itself had Eva, Tawny and Chloe discussing the obvious merits of Delta Particles, showing same to Beth who was operating the camera. Play2 & Delsqui turned up and they razzed the women about taking the Delts. At the end of the video, we saw Eva place what is apparently the Golden Mix Tape into the box and walk away.
On the audio track, Play2 described where the Grotto is, and the detective tried to nail him as a supplier of Delta Particles. “Delsqui and I, like I said before, are clean. If anyone around us was experimenting with Delta, they sure in hell didn’t get it from us. We don’t need drugs to get on, and you can quote me on that. Same thing with Delsqui.” Delsqui’s interview was next, and the detective played a friendly game of “lying.”
Detective: He said there were some Delta Particles going around at the grotto on the night in question ... and that you guys were [sing-song] pretty high ...
Delsqui: Hahaha ... nah nah man ... first of all, I know my boy didn’t say that. Secondly, do you think you’re going to give me the talk ... by telling me this bullshit? Nah, Play2 and I, we don’t get high there. Nor will we say anything to cop each other out. So you can take that talk somewhere else, homey.
4. THE STONE WALL.
While talking with the detective, Play2 described seeing Neil interacting with the stone wall that leads up to Coit Tower.
Play2: We’d seen the dude dippin’ around that wall all the time.
Detective: Dipping around?
Play2: Yeah, you know ... looking down, poking around the crevices between the rocks, looking back up again ...
Detective: Doing what?
Delsqui: Doing what he does! Being a weirdo! Why don’t you go ask the guy!
Beth’s sheet had a drawing of the stone wall with specific hollows demarcated by track times; the hollows contained mini-dioramas of key events in Nonchalance history, and the track times corresponded to Neil’s explanation of these same events. We started “dippin’ around” the stone wall.
Detective: [...] You were interacting with a missing person ...
Neil: MESSENGER PIGEON!
Detective: You’ve been spotted lurking around the rock wall ...
Neil: I was leaving breadcrumbs to the past ... for people in the future ... Some people will never be ready ... but ... the queen ... the queen she was born with wings! What’s your explanation for that?
Detective: Who’s the queen?
Neil: No ... you wouldn’t recognize her highness the divine queen of Nonchalance ... Eva Lucien [...]
Neil: YES! YES! THE DIFATER! They arrived in the new world in the late 17th century ... we heard the land song, and learned to harmonize with the inhabitants ... the Nashua ... a native tribe of the Northeast, they took us in ... we were made like their own, with mutual admiration ... a cultural fusion that upon unification formed a higher state of consciousness ... [...]
We were persecuted by the English settlers, they ... chased us down ... burned our villages to the ground ... and ever since – history has been re-written ... our existence simply erased from the books ... Nonchalance became ... the lost tribe. [...]
Detective: What does this have to do with Miss –
Neil: It has to do with the railways! Those steam engines and freight cars, along the tracks ... gathered around garbage fires, American hoboes ... descendants of Nonchalance passing along the tradition ... they would share and spread a folk tale ... the Confabulation ...
EPWA Special Agent Little Donut explorinates the hidden alcoves of THE STONE WALL.
... a story that foretold a queen who would someday emerge and shine brightly like a beacon for the strays, she’d have the special ability to navigate our world and theirs, uniting the lost tribe ... and leading these pilgrims ... all the descendants of Nonchalance home ... to Elsewhere.
5. COIT TOWER.
Coit Tower, as we learned via Dr. Hewitt’s “Hidden San Francisco Series,” was built “by the eccentric heiress Lillie Hitchcock Coit.” I’ve never been up in the tower, seemed like too much to pay to get just a little bit higher.
The police interview with Tawny has the detective telling porkies again.
Detective: So what about Neil? I seem to have heard from your friends that he may have been trouble for you guys.
Tawny: No you didn’t.
Detective: Really?
Tawny: Yeah, really. You’re lying. Neil may have been strange, but he was never a problem for anyone [...]
The Coit Tower gift shoppe was swollen with a large dumpster’s worth of SF-specific trinkets, so it took awhile to find the golden mix tape envelope as alluded to on Beth’s page. The die-cut card featured a photo of the SF Savants backed by a missing Humphrey the whale. The envelope itself featured ads for Hip Hop Shoe Repair, Radio Nonchalance, and Film Yard Video which was in the area. At the bottom of the envelope, the video link “SAVANTSRGO” appeared.
The video featured Delsqui, Play2, and Cornelius pulling synchronized and individual breakdancing moves to Freestyle’s “Don’t Stop The Rock.” At the end, Beth’s camera focused in on some discarded bird feathers.
6. TOP OF FILBERT.
The final stop on the walkabout was a small fenced-off area overlooking a school. The audio interview had Chloe and Beth describing leaving a party with Eva; they then noticed a squad car “jamming up the hill like they were looking for somebody.” Beth ran behind the gate and hid, Chloe ran, and that’s when Eva went missing. “She was just gone.” The accompanying video is pretty much the same thing, with Eva looking completely out of it ... the final shot was of Beth whispering: “Eva .... Eva ... Eva ...”
The track then switched to the last interview, with Neil, who was a little more out of it than usual.
There are bridges ... bridges that you can’t see ... but not because they’re small ... but ... some times they are small ...the visible is not always invisible just because you cannot see it ... faith is what is unseen ... what you do not see is wings ... grow wings for soaring high in the realms of divine nonchalance ...
And then he repeated himself like a lock groove at the end of a record. At this point a second detective walked in the room.
Detective2: Are you getting anything out of him?
Neil: Wings ...
Detective: No, this is completely useless.
Detective2: Not on abduction. But we can sure detain him on other charges.
Detective: All right let’s do it ... I’ll put a call into Sextonfield.
Something that another person pointed out what seemed like months later because it was: “O.C. Sextonfield” was one of Octavio Coleman’s aliases as indicated on the radio broadcast in Dolores Park. Completely misssed that.
WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK.
The last stop on Beth’s list has an image of a videotape with “FYV” on it – Film Yard Video. Somehow when I walked in I knew exactly where to go – the “Cults” section – and I immediately found the tape in question, “Soon Obsolete.”
The tape shows Eva being hooked up to the mind recorder from the Memory To Media Center. She’s interviewed (“I don’t have typical days”) and a live video of what the machine is pulling down is shown as an inset. She described checking out Baudrillard’s book The Consumer Society from the library, and as she describes going to Jane Hewitt’s office at 580 California, the machine locked on and switched to her memory video. She described being five and losing a tooth, and the tooth fairy (in her two-level-deep dream-within-a-memory) seemed to be a menacing figure in a familiar black zentai suit.
Then she described a meeting with Neil; we’re shown the actual meeting.
Neil: [...] I recognize you.
Eva: You do?
Neil: Miss Elevyn Katherine Lucien, daughter of Peggy. I know your mother.
Eva: What? My mother is dead.
Neil: You know that’s not true. And now, it is my extreme honor to stand before the queen of divine nonchalance.
Neil went on to explain that her “visions are real,” that’s she’s a descendant of the lost tribe of nonchalants, and can navigate “both worlds.”
[...] she would transmit the energy ... and like a beacon of light ... guide us all toward divine nonchalance ... and once again we would flourish in our kingdom ... the domain of Elsewhere. You are that queen Eva ... your mother sent me here to find you ... this place ... here ... it’s not ours ... we’re beyond this. You are meant to transcend this world, Eva. This is the prophecy and soon it will be fufilled. All obstacles are obsolete.
The video ended with a pointer to the url thelostmixtape.com. At the domain, there is a short video of someone scrambling for a golden tape cassette that is labelled with an email address:
I sent a hello-howdy-doo email to the address, but didn’t receive any immediate response.
A few days later, Crumbly Donut and I went to the Valencia wall with a poster of Emperor Norton.
I did a little bit of stenciling in college but never liked the results and working with spray paint seemed too messy. As if wheat paste isn’t, ha what a funny. Crumbly and I used spare pieces of cardboard to spread the goopy paste around on the back. We applied the Emperor to the wall in an enthusiastic and forceful manner.
We weren’t really sure how we were going to connect this to the larger construct, but then as [fake philosopher name] once said, part of the path is not on the path.
Emperor Norton (aka Joshua A. Norton) (c. 1819 – January 8th, 1880)
The celebrated “Emperor of the United States” passed through the streets of
downtown San Francisco in a uniform of his own making, printed his own money (accepted as legal tender in the city) and was revered by the citizens as a peacemaker and an ambassador to the world, despite his eccentricities. Norton I was forward thinking with his imperial decrees: insisting that a bridge build between San Francisco and Oakland and presaging the idea of the League of Nations by almost 50 years.
He was a living legend during his benign reign in the mid-nineteenth century, the embodiment of rugged, quirky individuality, universally recognised as an early jewel in this City by the Bay.
Some say his reign has yet to end.
The sixth SF personality was 580 California. Obvious. It was an exercise in jankiness; I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it but these things have a way of blowing up in your face. It was finally assembled out of a discarded flat-screen HD TV box and cow/spray glue. Everything came out roughly how I wanted except the columns which looked horrible. I intended to glue it somewhere in an alley. Perhaps there was a horizontal something sticking out of an alley wall somewhere I could use as a support beam so the model would be jutting from the wall sideways.
That’s an actual Microwave Harassment Jr. Jr. sticker there on the electrical cabinet.
Say, why not continue on to the next part: Tribute / Exhibit.