Here’s a Business Journal story on Castle Branch and its founder.

New reviews. Yeah.
Here’s Birds of Avalon. Here’s Citified.

Wonkavision is gearing up their web reviews, and I’m going to be a part. Just sent in some stuff on the new Birds of Avalon and Citified. Here’s one from earlier this year on Goodnight Loving.

Journal story about UNCW.

bonbon story for the business journal…from february 2008

Here’s my review of everything for the march 2008 issue of bootleg.

Review of Everything-March 2008
The Target Antiques
by Josh Spilker

There’s this old cabinet that sits inside my mother’s house. Rescued from her grandmother’s house, it’s a wide cabinet with a countertop that she affectionately refers to as a Hoosier Cabinet. Popular in the Indiana watermelon fields, it had sat in my great grandmother’s house since the 1910s, with many such peaches preserved and peanuts shelled on its white metal countertop. I went to my great grandparents’ house a few times before they both died. They lived on a farm, off of a dirt road. A sprawling farmhouse, its backyard was full of watermelons, cantaloupes, corn and the occasional peanut crop. The outlying barn housed a hundred cats in my estimation, amidst run down tractors and old glass Coke bottles.

The house contained much of its outdoor ambiance. With no air conditioning, screened doors held out the mosquitoes but not the smell of cats or ripe fruit. Afternoons spent on porch swings drinking tea ended in dinners of peas and cornbread.

I know my mom had many more memories of that house that I did, and she wanted a piece of it for our suburban Florida home. We lived in a new house, built towards the end of a cul-de-sac where all of the yards featured skinny pole trees held up straight by strings and wooden stakes.

If my mother had to rescue old furniture to be featured in her suburban home, what pieces will I save from my parents’ home, if any? Or what pieces of modernity will be passed on from my contemporary home to whatever ancestors I may have? How about this futon I’m sitting on as I write this. My first furniture purchase directly after college, I decided to swing for the fences and paid a full $400 to receive a top-notch frame along with thicker cushion than the normal futon from Big Lots.

Since that time, it has stuck with me through four cities in five years, alternately serving as my primary bed and primary living room centerpiece. Or perhaps the coffee-stained metal swivel rack I bought from Target will stand the test of time. It’s mass-manufactured frame came in a rectangular box that I assembled at home with a few shoves and grunts to make sure the pieces remained tight against the weight of my toaster oven and coffee machine. The wooden square that sits perched atop this four foot portable rack is stained by small amoeba puddles of coffee residue that line the top, showing off my many morning indiscretions of spilled coffee*. Perhaps this very rack will come to symbolize my existence to my grand-relatives, showing that life did transition from the 20th to the 21st century. To say that my morning coffee habit has any bearing on my legacy is perhaps like saying that a wadded up ball of aluminum foil showed a distinct pattern in our eating habits.

Or perhaps those two things will show a great deal. That the coffee craze of the late 90s and early 00s had an effect on people’s home making abilities. That our use of aluminum foil enabled us to preserve food for longer periods of time, along with the greatest access of food known to mankind. Perhaps my coffee routine will seem quaint in a number of years from now, when beverages have made a full transition to fruit juices, and caffeine is only consumed by energy drinks and pills. Or perhaps coffee reaches such a critical mass, that municipalities establish their own breweries and it is pumped in via old water pipes, and m coffee maker is seen as a simpler time, a less hurried season.

In reality, things hold importance just because they are still there. 102 year old people become national celebrities, just because they still exist–not because they’ve necessarily done anything that the media might consider spectacular, but just they have a found a way to navigate the trials of life without succumbing to them in one way or another. So we put potsherds and spoons in museums, not because they are great works of an age, but because they are the only works left from an age. The mouths they fed, the person that thought of them are all dismissed for the sheer survival skills of a spoon or fork.

That brings me back to the kitchen rack I got from Target. I went there to find something to put my coffeemaker on. I wanted a rack with shelves, so I could stick my toaster oven underneath it. On the bottom shelf sits our crockpot. All of these things I think more consciously about than the rack that those items sit on. I put coffee in the coffeemaker, bagels in the toaster oven, a roast in the crockpot. I understand what those things do–the rack just organizes. It sorts my already existing things into a tidy vertical column.

Perhaps that is the enduring legacy of the age. Not what we organize, but that we organize at all. That Excel and Access are classes all their own. That my email is sorted, that my computer screen is clouded with little “folders” telling me where to put things. But office organization has always existed, and perhaps so have cabinets. But at least my great-grandparents Hoosier Cabinet had a countertop to it, a platform to make and create. But as I drive around our fair town, I see whole stores devoted to cabinets and organization. Stuff to organize more stuff. We’re not making anything, we’re storing and organizing everything. The symbol of our lifetime in the early 21st century that will outlast us all is not the things that we organized, but the things that we organized with. Here’s to the Target antiques.

*copyedit after publication

Here’s something I submitted to Hobart for their baseball issue, a lit zine I respect. They didn’t accept it. And I don’t feel like sending it somewhere else. And baseball season is fast approaching.

Tampa Bay Devil Rays: No moat, no hope
By Josh Spilker

It’s ten years since the Tampa Bay Devil Rays have come into existence, and they’ve never constructed a moat around their stadium. The moat could hold devil rays, and really give the fans a cuddly mascot that they scoop out of the water and be shocked by. Not that the devil ray has any lifelike features that humans can relate to—no eyes, no soft fur, no predator instinct. It is just a sleek fish always on the defensive against little Timmy stepping on him and then Timmy’s mom causing a big scene and trying to hit the devil ray with a plastic bucket or the convenient Croc. Poor Timmy may just become a Yankees fan after an experience like that.

Why a team would name themselves after such a creature has never made any sense to us that have followed the Devil Rays faithfully over the past ten years. In fact, when wearing my Tampa Bay Devil Rays shirt around my North Carolina town, most of the time I get derision and shock. “I didn’t know the Devil Rays had any fans,” they will say. I can understand their incredulity, because how many people name the Devil Ray as their favorite animal? Almost none, except for the Devil Rays’ moat keeper if there was one. Which there is not as previously mentioned.

The Devil Rays had a team in 2000 made up of beefed-up stars that was supposed to push us into the playoffs. That year was billed “The Hit Show.” Yes, Jose Canseco was on it, and he sure didn’t provide the hits that make a winning team in the conventional sense. We also had Fred McGriff, Greg Vaughn, and Vinny Castilla, all who had better careers elsewhere before they came to the Devil Rays. At some point we also had Wade Boggs. Tampa Bay is not only where your grandparents come to retire, it’s also where baseball players come to retire as well. Lou Piniella, now the manager of the Chicago Cubs came to Tampa Bay for—well, no one knows why. It was much bally-hooed that Old Lou had never had a losing team for long where ever he coached, that is until his time with the Devil Rays ended. We made Lou a loser, Wade Boggs a loser, and Jose a drug addict. Scratch that last part.

The team has a few good players on its current roster. Carlos Pena did win the American League Most Improved Player award last season. It’s probably only downhill from here. Scott Kazmir and James Shields lead the rotation, and should be the only members of the rotation. There is Carl Crawford, who is the Fastest Man You Have Never Heard Of. Even if you have heard of him, I will declare authority over you right now by saying that you have not. He is also the Fastest Man That Deserves a Moat.

But the moat has become a moot point. The Devil Rays changed their name to the Rays as of this season. The team decided to change its mascot from the “tangible marine life that we could at least see” to the “abstract concept that no one knows quite how to define.” Is the team a light beam that you can stick your hand through? Or is it perpetually “a ray of hope”—a team that constantly reinvents itself to become younger and always full of potential. No one says “ray of doom” but I just did, and for a team that has never had a winning record that might be the appropriate descriptor.

Because there is no moat there is no drawbridge to the future.

Wrote this essay awhile back, and Brian at Bootleg printed it last February I think. I wrote it while I was in Atlanta right before I came over to Wilmington. I still think it was a pretty good piece, though I don’t think too many people liked it.
Here’s the link, or it’s after the jump.

On the Trail of a Sadistic Bunny
By Josh Spilker

The following occurred in Atlanta, Georgia. All of the events that follow are true and happened in the order mentioned, as to the best that I can remember. I think. This intro has made the story seem a lot more dramatic than it actually is.

Two piles of books. Keep and giveaway - the age old system of determination. Keep: anything I mostly enjoyed (Walker Percy), should’ve enjoyed (Willa Cather) or should’ve read (James Joyce). Giveaway: anything meant for a season (money troubles: Suze Orman), anything meant for frivolity (Anne Maxted: frivolity is easily replaced), or anything too frivolously laborious (The Mensa Book of Genius Questions: won’t even attempt).

A problem. The Celery Stalks at Midnight, by James Howe. On the cover: a dog and a cat staring at a glowing green celery stalk. It’s thin, it’s a little worn. It’s YA. It’s a story about pets, vegetables, and pets that suck the juice out of vegetables.

“Why did you put this in the giveaway stack?” My wife had found my dilemma and disrupted the balance of the age-old system of determination. “I love this book,” she continued. “What’s it about? A vampire rabbit or something?” I asked. I had yet to open it up to find out. “Yes,” she said, “You know, Bunnicula.”

Bunnicula. A vampire rabbit that sucks the juice out of vegetables. And this book was the sequel. Stories from the 80’s. Stories from our youth. “Oh yeah,” I conclude, “I liked that story.”

Next night. A night for going out. Or at least out of the house. We choose ice cream. A store named after two pet dogs of the owner. A shaggy-haired boy is working behind the counter, while his girlfriend is waiting on the couch clutching a cell phone.

I choose blueberry cheesecake mixed with cotton candy. My wife samples Guinness, and it tastes like an off-color vanilla. The alcohol doesn’t freeze, says the shaggy haired boy, excited by the possibility of being so close to an adult beverage. He is still YA. My wife nixes that one, however. She goes for “Live by Chocolate.”

We talk. We chat. We sit on a rustic-looking bench that moms in their mid-30s deem as cute. We look up and around. A chalkboard behind the counter advertises a sandwich made with apples and brie. “It’s like a gourmet grilled cheese,” says my wife - my translator for all things fine or refined. I had never heard of it before. It sounds like something moms in their mid-30s might enjoy. We look up and around again. Bunnicula. We see it and pause. It’s a sign. It’s a sign advertising a play going on all month, based on the book. It’s a play for moms in their mid-30s who might also have YA children. This upcoming weekend is the last weekend. My wife can’t go; she has to work on Saturday. I decide to go. I have to follow this bunny trail wherever it leads.

Bonty agrees to go. I saw him a few days later at a church community group and he says he can go. Bonty enjoys the performing arts. He was in an a cappella group in college, and once managed the finances for a fledgling theater troupe. Bonty doesn’t even chafe at the $12 price. “Oh, that’s not expensive,” he said when I told him it was expensive.

I try to figure out culture’s fascination with deranged and sadistic rabbits. Why does rabbit irony have such a large progeny? There’s Frank the prophetic rabbit in Donnie Darko, the children’s book series about dumb bunnies called Dumb Bunnies, and Matt Groening’s Life is Hell, which serves as an inside joke to The Simpsons faithful.

I ask my wife about the deranged bunnies in popular culture. “Why do they put little girls in horror films?” explains my wife - my translator for all things symbolic and puzzling. “It’s the same thing,” she says. I get it. No one expects rabbits or children to do the things our culture makes them do.

Saturday. Play day. It’s an early show, 11:30 am, to take advantage of the theater company’s “Family Series.” Bonty and I arrive at the playhouse at 11 am, only to get our tickets and encounter a man still folding programs. The door won’t open for another 10 minutes or so, they tell us. “What do you think they think about two guys in their twenties going to see Bunnicula?” asks Bonty as we see parents in their mid-30s file past with their kids that are mostly under the age of twelve. “I don’t know,” I say.

We see a sign. Drinks are allowed in the theater, so we step back outside. I go back to the car for the coffee I left. Bonty goes into a smoothie place. There’s a homeless man sitting on an embankment near my car cutting up aluminum soda cans. He has a painted sign that says “Homeless/Would like some food” or something like that. It’s nicely done, in the style of those “Home Sweet Home” signs seen at a great-grandmother’s house.

The program folder guy says we can go in now. The usher gives us two different options for seats, and we take a second row perch. The stage is a square, and the seats are arranged at a 90-degree angle on two sides of the square. Supposedly it’s a sell-out and the seating is tightly regulated. The kids and parents we saw earlier begin to pile in. Many kids are carrying copies of Bunnicula. One girl, about nine, with brown hair halfway down her back desperately saves a seat for “Ms. Handler.” Other conversation focuses on how the animals will be portrayed. We wonder the same. Maybe a ventriloquist. A boy with surfer-flowing hair in the same group as Ms. Handler’s seat-saver counts the number of audience members. “49 people,” says the surfer boy. We scrunch up so a baby boomer woman with a long skirt and a bag labeled “Zen Popcorn” can get by us.

The crowd is still arriving. One man with a thin blonde comb-over and large, early 90s glasses walks by, followed by a similar looking woman except with gray hair. “That guy who just walked by,” says Bonty. “I know him. That’s the guy I interviewed with. He’s the head honcho.” A few months back, Bonty interviewed with a local theater company to help manage their finances. Their operation was on a much larger scale than his previous experience, so he wasn’t offered the job. They took seats on the back row. The guy didn’t seem to recognize Bonty, and Bonty didn’t wish to reintroduce himself.

The lights dim. The usher comes back out near the stage, this time wearing a cargo-pocketed jacket. No one is sure why. The announcer makes some jokes involving death, but also demonstrates lightning, thunder, and darkness effects so all the kids can get used to it.

A family living room. Two humans come out. A guy in a spotted brown corduroy suit says his name is Harold. He is supposed to be a dog. A girl comes out in an orange tie-dyed pants suit with an orange headband and says her name is Chester. She is supposed to be a cat. No ventriloquists so far. They sing a song with the chorus, “You can’t trust a human without a pet.” Immediate conviction. I have no pets, nor do I really want any. I have withstood my wife’s insistence on a Labrador retriever. I usually counter with a hound dog. Those conversations don’t go well.

The family comes home. They bring with them a rabbit they found in the movie theater during a showing of Dracula. They argue about names for the rabbit. The mom decides on a combination of “Bunny” and Dracula. Bunnicula. This is a turn-on for the father for some reason, and he chases the wife off stage.

The rabbit is brown-headed with vacant pink eyes. No pupils, just pink coaster-sized eyes. His white body comes up to Harold’s knees. The rabbit has a puppeteer. The puppeteer is mummified in material that looks like gray panty-hose. Even his face is covered. His hand fits into Bunnicula’s neck. This puppet master apparently goes for the jugular. But the puppeteer is no ventriloquist. Bunnicula stays eerily silent. The play continues with a dancing segment that looks like the ‘Thriller’ video. The parents do Thriller, the kids do Thriller, the pets do Thriller. Bunnicula sleeps in his makeshift cage–a predictable mash up of chicken wire and plywood, but with a trapdoor for the masked man’s hand.

Finally, the real action. X-Files conspiracy music oozes out. Bunnicula’s eyes light up to infrared. He looks like ET’s parents coming out of a spaceship. The girl in the row in front of me grabs her dad. Bunnicula freaks her out. He sneaks out of the cage. To the refrigerator. He sucks a tomato dry. A juice-sucking rabbit.

Why doesn’t the rabbit just drink water out of his bowl? Why did the masked man let him out of the cage?

Mom hears noise. She comes in and grabs a knife Psycho-like. Only to cut into the white tomato. “A white toe-may-toe!” says Father who has now come in. “A white toe-MA-toe!” says one of the sons in the play. Father and Son have competing faux-British accents. Everybody back to bed.

Play time lapse. No one in the audience knows what day it is. Chester reads Edgar Allan Poe. Harold eats chocolate cupcakes. The pets conspire about how to prove Bunnicula is a vampire to the family. Can dogs eat chocolate? Can cats read? More dancing, more shadows.

Bunnicula lights up again. Hissing smoke. Girl grabs father, and accidentally hits my leg. This freaks me out more than the bunny. I look over to Ms. Handler’s handler. Surfer Boy took her place next to Ms. Handler. Ms. Handler’s handler sits next to a hip guy in a screen print T-shirt with curls out the back of a baseball hat. Probably her dad. They probably live in some sort of commune with Zen popcorn lady and Ms. Handler.

More white vegetables. They find a white zucchini, and furious violin music is played at the zucchini mention. “Do they make music?” Harold asks Chester, referring to the zucchini. “No, they make casseroles,” says Chester. No one knows why the zucchini gets music. A different son blames the white vegetables on them not being organic. He talks about pesticides. This goes over well in the art crowd. I think I hear Zen popcorn lady laugh.

More play time lapse. Chester confronts bunny with garlic. Then a steak through the heart. This funny food sight gag is not lost on the parents in the audience. The relationship between pets and their food is explored more through this play than any medium since the first Purina commercials.

The denouement. It all ends suddenly. The man behind the mask is revealed to be a veterinarian next door. We trusted their suspension of disbelief, just to have it backfire on us. Lights come up. They do Thriller off the stage. The faux-Brit accent Son comes back on stage too quick. He waves to his real mom. All suspension is gone. Oh well. We get over it quickly.

“I want to meet the cat,” I hear Ms. Handler’s handler say as I’m standing in the aisle. “But I’m scared,” she says. “Yeah, I’m scared too,” says another girl, apparently part of the commune as well. “You’re a scaredy cat! You’re a scaredy cat!” Surfer Boy quickly analyzes.

Bonty is waiting in the entryway of the theater. “I know Chester the cat,” he says. “Or I mean, I know her. Kathleen.” Kathleen plays the cat. Kat plays the cat? This is deeper than even Surfer Boy could put together. Bonty didn’t want to say hello. He worked with Kathleen’s husband at a coffee shop and once said something mildly embarrassing to her and her husband. He wasn’t a close enough friend to have seen her since, or for him to apologize. Bonty doesn’t want to meet the cat. It’s probably hard to apologize to someone while they are sporting fake whiskers. Apparently, the kids aren’t the only scaredy cats.

Actually read this last wk, but it was my first time. All of the repressed sexuality was a bit surprising–I don’t feel like I knew that about this book. But the things that people liked about Reilly, his funny office habits and his oft-putting way of speaking about everyday things was interesting. Traditional notions of work are really deplored in the book. The character of Jones reminded me a lot of a book I previously read–“Hip: The History” by John Leland, because it traces the African-American characters in popular culture as being “tricksters,” and Jones fits that mold. We discussed in class quite a bit why Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer, and I put forth because it revealed a subculture that everyone knew about, but that no one had written about–that being New Orleans.

Ran through this pretty quick this past wknd and into New Year’s. A pretty easy read, but gripping. The author admits she tried to write the memoir from the view of her seventeen year old self, so she is pretty harsh on her parents. But it comes down to this: they claim one thing, but act in a different way toward their children.

It’s a compelling read also because of the family dynamics…her parents adopted two black boys and brought them into a family of white girls. Unfortunately some of the race narratives that you can presuppose (read “Mind of the South”) do occur.

On top of that, there is the Christian boarding school that treats its students like animals, and the way they become “reformed” is through lying and cheating their way out. Hypocrisy from the staff once again taints Scheeres’ view of Christianity.

It’s not Christ that keeps people away from him, but Christians.