HOW I COMPARE TO EVERY OTHER STEPHEN JOHNSON ON THE WEB.
(part 2 of 42,900)

This Stephen Johnson is a computer-guy and suspense novelist. His debut novel, assassin's Game, is published through vanity press Xlibris, and is, according to his website, "a fast-paced thriller that I'm sure you're going to enjoy."

Suspense novels aren't my thing, so I'm pretty sure I wouldn't enjoy it. But the sample chapter I read is well-written in a breezy, suspense-novel sort of way.

Here how this Stephen Johnson describes his life:
I travel quite extensively throughout the United States, and as such, I spend a lot of time in airports, on airplanes, and in other cities. To help pass the time while on the road and during my off weeks between trips, I decided to write a book. For the past several years I had many different ideas floating around in my head for a novel.

Something about this description makes me sad. I picture a lonely life, always arriving in someone else's hometown, serving the needs of someone else's corporation. I'll bet this other Stephen Johnson knows the meaning of business jargon that he wishes he didn't. He has to wear a tie and has to be very nice to a lot of people he thinks are assholes. It's probably a more interesting life than most people, sure, but he'd really rather be writing books.

OVERALL COMPARISON: It's a push. Me and this Stephen Johnson are just about even.

ALSO: I've added a comment feature to my page. Feel free to use it.

   [ POSTED BY Steve Johnson @ 10:44 AM ] |

Monuments to Reprehensible Men

This Sunday was Robyn's birthday, so I took her to The Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Birthplace. I'm a romantic guy.

The library/museum/grounds holds a mess of important Nixon memorabilia (including high school yearbook photos, macrame gifts sent to Pat during the White House years and the cover of a Jimi Hendrix album), a reflecting pool, the house in which Nixon was born and an exact replica of the East Room of the White House.

As expected, the place is staffed by finks—the whitest of white people—and the editorial slant of the museum is: "Nixon sure was a great guy! A lot of bad things happened to him, but he was courageous to the end!" Nixon's political failures and embarrassments are largely glossed over, and when mention is made of his many cynical betrayals of the people, it's used to illustrate his phoenix-like ascents from the ashes of personal and professional disgrace.

In spite of the historical whitewash, I was heartened by the Nixon Foundation's nods to irony/surrealism. They seem at least haltingly able to recognize the humor inherent in a multi-million dollar edifice built to honor one of the most reprehensible figures in American History. There is a display commemorating the time that a tore-up Elvis Presley stumbled into White House carrying a gun because he wanted to "discuss drug policy with the president." Presley gave the .45 to Nixon, Nixon made Elvis an honorary DEA agent, and 30 years later you can have buy a picture of it on a T-shirt. That what I call history!

The gift shop definitely catered to that certain "Ha ha! Lookit me! I'm visiting the Nixon Museum!" sensibility. Available for purchase are the aforementioned T-shirts of Nixon and Elvis, a bunch of merchandise featuring photos of Nixon bowling, a Nixon family Paper Doll Book, and, coolest of all, stickers, t-shirts and a cappuccino mug featuring this logo:

As if "Nixon" is the name of a band the kids all listen to, or a brand of skateboarding equipment, and I should enjoy some Nixon with my new-fangeled, hipster coffee drink. I bought one of the shirts, naturally, and will wear it with pride to demonstrate my immense respect for our 37th president as well as my fashion forward attention to detail.

The humor's not just in the design; the accompanying nixon-crap catalog was surely written by someone with dry, transgressive wit. Examples: The text accompanying an American Flag tie-clip reads, "Nixon wore this American flag clip when he went to Vietnam, and Now Bush wears one in Iraq." Or, enticing us to buy a collection of John Phillip Sousa Marches, the catalog proclaims: "Four CDs overflowing with Sousa spirit!" My favorite--accompanying a baseball hat with the logo 'Commander in Chief:'--"Your friends will say, where did you get that?" No doubt they would.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The other museum I visited this weekend, the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibit, was utterly without humor or self-awareness. He may have created a worldwide, billion-dollar, notoriously litigious freak-cult (er… I meant to type "worthwhile, valid church that helps humanity." Sorry for the typo.), but L. Ron just wasn't a very funny guy.

Humorous or not, the founder of Scientology's pimp hand is strong...still. He had minions of bitches out early this Saturday morning, up on ladders, soapy buckets in hand, cleaning up his building on Hollywood boulevard. It was gleaming too. When you got girls polishing your shit and you've been dead for 20 years, that's a strong pimp hand. You don't get that by making fun of yourself.


Lookit 'em work for L. Ron!


My tourguide was a case-in-point: a lithe, beautiful blonde about 25, she was L. Ron's ho to the core. She probably gives this tour 20 times a day, but each word was infused with the single minded-devotion of a whore for her pimp. "L. Ron Hubbard became an Eagle Scout at 13," she said lovingly. "He was the youngest Eagle Scout ever."

The highlight of the museum, to me, is the display dedicated to his Sci-Fi book series Mission Earth. Regarded by everyone who is not a Scientologist as one of the worst novels ever written, Mission Earth's display features two badly made wax figures arranged within a replica of a space ship. A serious tape recorded voice intones: "In order to describe Mission Earth's 10 volume length, a new word had to be coined: 'Dekalogy.'" Mission Earth is over 1.2 million words long!" Wow, That's a lot of words!

The New York Times wasn't impressed, though. It described Mission Earth as "a paralyzingly slow-moving adventure enlivened by interludes of kinky sex, sendups of effeminate homosexuals and a disregard of conventional grammar so global as to suggest a satire on the possibility of communication through language."

But 1.2 million words, New York Times.

Anyway, the diorama features villains Soltan Griss and Lombar Hisst from the planet Voltar. (I didn't make those names up, either. Those are really what L. Ron called his characters.). The creaky animatronic space villains jerk around a bit, laugh manically, and recite the most stilted dialogue ever created about "conquering the Earth" and then the song "Cry Out," begins wailing from the speakers.

"Cry Out" is an L. Ron rock composition played by Edgar Winters. Sample Lyrics: "Once it was a very nice planet/
A home for those of us who care/But there are fools in high places/Who foul the sea and air" Sings Winters. Groovy. The omnipotent narrator gravely informs us that "'Cry Out' has been adopted as a rallying cry for many environmental groups."

Keep in mind, this is all offered in a cancer-serious manner, like an exhibit about Ghandi or Winston Churchhill might be presented. We are expected to be in awe. There is no acknowledgement of the ridiculousness of Mission Earth. No mention of the circumstances under which it was written—a paranoid, drug-fueled L. Ron keeping order among his inner circle with a gun, sailing his yacht around the ocean, unable to land anywhere because the IRS would arrest him immediately, typing complete claptrap into a typewriter day and night (err…that's all a typo I meant to say, "brilliant L. Ron, researching the human mind on the world's oceans"). The Scientologist tour guide looked me in the face the entire time, as if daring me to smile.

I only joked about one thing, though: The tour ends with (and I'm not making this up either), a gilded curtain, about 20 feet high by 40 feet wide. A triumphant fanfare begins playing, spotlights swirl around, and the curtain swings open majestically to reveal rows and rows of awards that Ron has won. The walls part, revealing another row of commendations and plagues. They part again. Etc. Until finally, the horns and strings reach a triumphant finale, the walls part one final time and a hugungous photo of L. Ron is revealed, lovingly smiling down on us from on high.

"L. Ron seemed like such a modest guy," I said thoughtfully. "I wonder how he would have felt about this display."

The tour guide shook her head slowly. "I wonder about that too."


Here is a picture of L. Ron Hubbard trying to communicate with a tomato.

   [ POSTED BY Steve Johnson @ 6:47 AM ] |

The Car Smash-Up

So some fucking bastard-ass bastard ran into my car with his truck in the parking lot of a Starbucks this morning. No injuries. No police, Etc. But now my ride is even more ghetto than it was before.

After the collision, The guy who hit me kept wanting to talk about the accident, beyond just: "Gimme your insurance information, please." Mr. I-Drive-A-Big-Pickup-Truck-And-Don't-Watch-Where-I'm-Going was keen on discussing who was at fault. I'm all for people expressing their feelings, and he seemed to be very strongly owning his lack of culpability, but there is a time and a place for everything, and it soon became clear that he was casting me into a blame spiral. Doctor Nussbaum told me to avoid toxic personalities and head towards the heart-light, so I was all "this is a matter for our Insurance companies to discuss, sir." I'm sure our insurance companies will sit down together and discuss the matter in a mutually supportive, blame-free-zone and not a patriarchal, combatative milieu.

I felt very empowered by my assertion of positive selfhood and I'm going to turn the whole incident into a watercolor painting and a very important and moving screenplay to star Jessica Tandy as the unsuspecting barrista.

   [ POSTED BY Steve Johnson @ 11:36 AM ] |

   [ POSTED BY Steve Johnson @ 9:19 AM ] |

The Salton Sea is a fucking disaster--a 360 square mile inland lake that sprang into being 99 years ago when a dike broke and the Colorado River flowed into the lowest depth available, the Salton Sink, an ancient, dead land 228 feet below sea level in South Eastern California. A disaster and a low point, all in one.



It’s too windy and too dry and too hot and it stinks. The brackish water positively reeks of dead fish. Sport fishing enthusiasts keep stocking it with different breeds and they keep dying because the lake is too salty. So many dead fish have washed up on shore; the “sand” of the beaches is composed of their sun-crispy bones. If the Salton Sea was a person, he’d hock up phlegm all the time and not shower.

But the irrepressible Marty Barrett and I drove 200 miles to take in the desolation of the Sea then seek salvation from desert folk art visionary Leonard Knight.

The first stop on our daytrip was the Salton Sea Recreation Area, and, in spite of all the aforementioned checks on the “shitty” side of the ledger, the place has advantages over more “traditional” vacation locations in nearby Palm Springs/Joshua Tree—for one, there’s the space. More space than you can imagine…just empty desert on one side and a soupy, brown frothing sea on the other. A landscape from Mad-Max, but with extra smell. No need for a camp reservation near the Salton Sea, either. There are plenty available, year-round.

We stood around for awhile, smelling the fish and wondering whether swimming was a good idea. I thought not: After all, the lake was fed by irrigation and storm run-off, and would you swim in that? Some brave souls nearby were fishing from their campsites, though, so we assumed people ate whatever hearty life they pulled from the stew.

We saw several Eared Grebes, which are dumb-looking, awful birds that everyone hates. “Eared Grebe” is fun to say, though. Try it.

Then we took a brief pitstop at nearby Bombay Beach. It should have been briefer. The small town/RV park is filled with busted-up trailers, burned-out buildings, grime and poverty. Totally hopeless. The best possible outcome of a sightseeing trip to Bombay Beach is the guilty feeling of taking a cheap holiday in other people’s misery (as Johnny Rotten put it). The worst result almost certainly involves a run-in with local tweaked out meth farmers who perform meth experiments in their meth laboratories.

Also pathetic, a 200-room motel built on the shores of the Salton that looked like it once offered fairly upscale accomadations. At some point, someone believed that people would flock to the stinky, windy, sunblasted hellscape of the Salton Sea if only there was a hotel there. Of course it's boarded up and long out of business now. But unlike many abandoned buildings, there seems little sign of graffitti or squatters. I guess even hobos have enough sense to avoid such an inhospitable locale.

(A brief aside to mock Marty’s misfortunes is called for here. While we were walking around Bombay Beach, he thought he was about to step in some dry cracked sand…But it turned out to be mud! And he sank in up to his damn shins! HA HA HA!!..HIS PANTS GOT DIRTY AND HE RUINED HIS SHOES!!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAA!!! MY SIDES HURT!!!)



But the real point of the trip was Salvation Mountain. I’d been talking to my cousins Jim and Pat over Easter, and we were each commiserating about our tendencies towards not doing things we wanted to do, preferring instead to play videogames (in my case) or save people’s lives (in theirs). I brought up wanting to visit Salvation Mountain for the last 4 years, and never having gotten around to it. So this was me getting around to it. Dig it:



Awesome, right? Here’s the story of the place: Leonard Knight, formerly a snow shoveler in Vermont, crash-landed his hot air balloon here and regarded it as a sign from God. He spent the next 20 years (and around 60,000 gallons of paint) transforming a blasted-out ridge in an abandoned missile range into this explosively vibrant testament to his faith.



Leonard was grateful for the paint we brought him and only too happy to show us around the place. He was really excited about his newest project: Knight is recreating his hot-air balloon. He’s finished half of an igloo-style enclosure built of adobe and bales of hay, held up with load-bearing, painted “tire trees.” Dozens of donated windows are inset in the painted adobe, letting in pale shafts of sunlight…It was more beautiful than any stained glass I’ve ever seen.



“It’s made of a thousand bales of hay, more or less,” Leonard told us. “It started to crack and fall in on me four years ago, so I built this.” Knight said, gesturing to the painted “tree” in the middle of the half-finished room. “It’s made of 6 truck tires and adobe, so I started pushing sticks into it and that held it up.”

“How did you learn to build all this?” I asked.

“By making mistakes,” he said.

We climbed all over the mountain taking in the views from the summit. Then Knight showed us the recommendation letter entered before congress by Senator Barbara Boxer a few years ago, and handed us a stack of Salvation Mountain postcards.

He didn’t mention religion until we brought it up, and his message was that the “six denominations” shouldn’t argue with one another; that God loves each of us equally.

“I’m trying to get ‘God is Love’ to everyone in the whole world,” Knight said.

I hope this page helps a little.

   [ POSTED BY Steve Johnson @ 8:26 PM ] |

It has been a long, aimless, depressing week in the middle of the cruelest month, with gusts of contempt punctuated by simmering hatred and highs in the mid 80s. I blame T.S. Eliot, that bitch.

I don't like leg warmers coming back, and I don't like The Apprentice, and I don't like the inevitable physical and mental detrioration that I will suffer, from now until I die.

Within one generation everyone you have ever known will be gone and there will be no trace left of anyone who even remembers anything about you. Totally erased, and you're wearing leg warmers?

But I like House of Leaves. That's a good book!

Also: HEY YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN

   [ POSTED BY Steve Johnson @ 1:38 PM ] |

I'm going to challenge the Webmaster of suspensionofdisbelief.org to a knife-fight. Dot-org and dot-net are the Internet's Crips and Bloods, so we have beef.

I can take him. He's younger than me, sure, but I'm pretty resourceful, and I learned all about stabbing a guy when I was in stir. Besides, I heard that most of MIT's meager knife-fighting courses are taught by adjunct professors anyway. (Yeah, that's a diss.)

This SOD.org guy focuses on politics--surprise! he hates Bush--postmodern critical theory and has a problem with Harold Bloom. So he'd have me beat in a forensics competition, but he's not going to be able to talk his way out of this one.

He'll be all: "Moretti's is an interesting new approach, another tool to add to the kit for the study of literature, and a welcome attempt to shake up an entrenched system, but why all the zero-sum rhetoric?"

Then I'll be like: STAB!!!

I was going to write him an email to say: "Hey, we have the same web address with a different TLD! hyuck hyuck!" but then I read his "Expectations About Correspondence" and wasn't sure if I could measure up:

Expectations About Correspondence: It's become necessary to make this more clear, because mine seemingly differ from those of at least a sizable minority of people. Bottom line; if I fail to reply to something, it doesn't mean I hate you or I'm rejecting you. Due to lack of time/will and my own idiosyncrasies, I usually only reply to messages which demand some sort of reply. If you post a comment that asks a question, or tells me something I didn't know, or in some other way fosters conversation, then I'll reply; otherwise, I might not. Some comments just stand alone and leave little need or room for followup. Ditto for emails... if you send me a short email praising my site, or detailing how you think the same way about something, I may or may not reply."

That's what I call intimidating. It's why I'm not underestimating him when it comes to knife-fighting. I lost my left eye when I underestimated a Spanish statistician, and I won't make that mistake again.

Unlike my .Org doppelganger, I have no expectations about my correspondence or much of anything else in my life for that matter. I'm laid-back and into the Tao and shit. But rest assured, should I fail to respond to anything you send me, it is because I hate you.

   [ POSTED BY Steve Johnson @ 11:15 PM ] |

I think this is going to be a big job...

...from the always amusing writer's section of Craigslist, Los Angeles.


HAVE A MOVIE SCRIPT 115 PAGES THAT NEEDS TO BE PROOFED FOR MISTAKES. I WILL NEED TO SEE PROOF OF PREVIOUS WORK OR A RESUME. OR IF YOU ARE STILL IN SCHOOL AS A ENGLISH MAJOR I WILL JUST NEED TO SEE SOMETHING STATING THIS. PLEASE EMAIL IF YOU ARE INTERESTED.


Compensation: $100


What is it about the movie business that causes people who can't construct simple sentences to choose writing as a career?

Is it possible to understand the human heart enough to write a coherent film and yet be unable to understand the function of the "caps lock" key?

   [ POSTED BY Steve Johnson @ 10:23 AM ] |

We just got back from the third annual Johnson/Byrne Easter Holiday-a-thon and Sewing Circle in Alameda. It's been growing every year, and has become a family reunion of sorts, with many aunts, uncles, cousins, grandmas, granpas, hangers-on, babies and nere'do'wells running around.

I know everyone thinks his or her respective family is the best of all the families... but in my case, it's really true. It's been proven by science.

Because I have trouble writing about things that mean something to me, I won't get into the whole weekend. Instead, I'll post an interesting fact I learned from my cousin Pat: Sometimes when doctors remove a tumor, it has hair, teeth and even an eyeball in it! That's what I call rad. It really sums up the Easter Spirit. I can feel the Easter Spirit all the way down to my crotch.

See? Dumb jokes are where it's at.

Here is a movie of small wooden sushi boats floating around a San Francisco sushi bar.

   [ POSTED BY Steve Johnson @ 8:51 PM ] |

This is Mimi:


Mimi is staying at Joshua Tree for the next few weeks. She lives in a Winnebago and spends her days whizzing around the national park on her Honda. She must have buzzed our site 5 times a day, on little mini-bike errands and joy rides.

I asked about her worst accident, and she told me about a terrible, Superman-flying-through-the-air wipeout she took after stopping hard with only the front brake. No injuries though. "Just my pride. And a few bruises," she said.

She'd just come from Slab City in California--a makeshift community alternatively described as either a cesspit of derelicts, vice and horror or the last bastion of off-the-grid community left in America. It depends on who you ask.

Built at an abandoned Navy Base, Slab City is not far from the eastern shore of The Salton Sea. It offers visitors and residents totally free camping in a relentlessly hostile desert environment. Dizzying sun, endless wind, etc.

Mimi left because Summer is coming, and you'd have to be insane to spend Summer in Slab City. The temperature soars well into the 100s and the only people who stick around are without other options--the truly down and out. Mimi has enough resources to tool around on a mini-bike and decorate her Winnie with lounging wooden animal sculptures, so she's not staying in Slab City for the Summer.

I wanted to ask if I could take her bike for a spin, but I wasn't sure about the etiquette of that sort of thing, so I left it alone.

   [ POSTED BY Steve Johnson @ 8:11 PM ] |

A man who has blown all his options can't afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can't afford to admit -no matter how often he's reminded of it -that every day of his life takes him farther and farther down a blind alley.

--Hunter Thompson

Also: Bob Dylan in a Victoria Secret commerial. Last night I was watching a perfectly enjoyable program on MTV about this beautiful 21-year-old woman getting breast implants to look more like Britney Spears. I like programs where people have plastic surgery and come out of it fulfilled and happy. I like the big reveal at the end, where the patient's family and friends gather to ooh and ahh over how the person they've loved their whole life now looks like a weird semi-human with an unnatually straight nose and blinding white teeth. Our culture is certainly worthwhile. Soon into the show, I caught the corporate-moody Victoria Secret ad featuring Dylan's "Love Sick" and an appearance by the man himself, looking very solemn and Vincent-Price-like, leaning against a brick wall while whisps of dry-ice smoke rise around him. "I'm walking through streets that are dead...My feet are so tired...The clouds are weeping...I'm sick of love, I wish I'd never met you. I'm sick of love, I'm trying to forget you." That makes me want to buy some sexy lingerie.

Obviously, I'm apalled. Not Bob, right? Pitching cheaply made underwear for some corporation? I was still having teen angst over the business decisions of someone I'll never meet even this morning, until my coworker, the great Acme Andersson, reminded me that I need to trust Bob. "Who are you to question his judgement?" Acme says. And he's right. There's a reason for it, even if I can't understand it. It may become clear to me at some later date, or I may never understand it, but I have faith. That's the important part.

Turn on your funk motor. I know it's tough.
--James Brown

   [ POSTED BY Steve Johnson @ 6:13 AM ] |