Just finished reading Luc Sante’s Low Life: Life and Snares of Old New York and was amused by the volume of material devoted to my ancestor John McGurk’s notorious Bowery bar – McGurk’s. He served whiskey shots needled with benzene, turpentine and cocaine sweepings, in an environment bad enough to drive his ‘girls’ to suicide. Six succeeded in 1899 alone, succumbing to quickly quaffed drams of carboxylic acid. McGurk was run out of town soon after, relocating to California, where his reputation apparently prevented his daughter from enrolling in convent school. He died in 1913. McGurk’s was demolished in 2005 and 295 Bowery has been rebuilt as part of glass complex, and looks the better for it, I do declare:
“James McGirk, a ‘Hibernian fugutive,’ is being held – possibly in Washington D.C. – for killing his wife; his execution has been stayed by President Jefferson, leading his perennial critic, editor Thomson, to wonder in print what public office McGirk is to be awarded. September 11, 1802.”
NB: This is a work in progress, Parametric Press has commissioned this game and I’m in the process of working with them and their team. (Link to working outline)
The story I want to write is very location- and decision-based which is why I think it needs an interactive interface – plus I like the idea of the decisions being made having consequences for the reader/player. There was a Native American college in Oklahoma (Bacone College) that used to be one of the best in the country, particularly for a kind of peculiar style of art called Flat Style painting — a kind of sleek modern 50s interpretation of Native American visual culture — they used to let artists live on the campus in exchange for letting them teach a few classes and that they left some of their work. Fifty years later and the campus is destitute, they can’t pay professors, yet it’s filled with dusty, decaying art.
You play an adjunct art professor. I’d like to write what seems like crime drama taking place in the college (in that the inciting incident would be deciding to make off with some art work) but gradually would explore some of the complex racial and financial dynamics at play in a ruined Southern Baptist tribal university. South Eastern Indian culture was so thoroughly eradicated that what remains is largely a construct; there’s also the ethics of stealing, and then the escape itself.
My technical skills aren’t too bad. Besides a somewhat experimental body of work (my most recent creative essay was for a cryptocurrency magazine and was a ‘decentralized history of Bitcoin’) I have experience writing copy for games (I used to be the editorial lead for a serious game called PlaytheNewsGame). And I would imagine keeping this to about four potential endings (meaning lots of overlapping forks). My programming skills are limited to basic HTML for now but am willing and eager to learn.
There’s a lot of it. You’re welcome to dive into the pile. But the damn thing is riddled with bit-rot and paywalls. So let me offer suggestions and an occasional link to a Google doc or Web Archive.
Before I forget: here’s a combination of personal memoir with archival images I found from grandfather’s exploration of the Amazon: My Grandfather’s Imposter.
If you read my personal statement you’ve already read the first place winner of the 2016 Oklahoma Society for Professional Journalists Best Writing Award. This one, published in the much-missed THIS LAND PRESS, is typical of what I enjoy writing the most: (The Horror of the Ouachita Mountains). Here’s one about Vaporwave: (The New Flesh PDF, page 95). I gave a condensed version of it as a speech at the Oklahoma Innovation Institute’s annual conference — which was a massive thing sponsored by Texas Instruments and I was sandwiched between three pipeline corrosion experts and my slide show of “sexual golf” was deemed quite peculiar.
Let me close with a link to my last Bitcoin story, it’s interactive, I wrote a deconstructed history of Bitcoin for 21Cryptos Magazine (A Deconstructed History of Bitcoin’s Last Decade). 1F24KqhGNCnEVvAPcq2Z41BkrAb8PRq91h
Check out my latest cover story in 21cryptos magazine. I spoke with a couple of experts who were approaching crypto from different philosophies and found they both came to a remarkably similar conclusion. Plus analysis with behavior economics, 4chan/biz mythology and tiny bubble lore.
Latest article for 21Cryptos magazine. Saving the world’s worst economic crisis with Cryptocurrency – discusses a few recent attempts by crypto-currency companies and foundations to stabilize Venezuelan hyper-inflation by increasing the adoption of crypto-currencies.
“James McGirk, a ‘Hibernian fugutive,’ is being held – possibly in Washington D.C. – for killing his wife; his execution has been stayed by President Jefferson, leading his perennial critic, editor Thomson, to wonder in print what public office McGirk is to be awarded. September 11, 1802.”
EDIT PLEASE! AAAAAARGH
RSS feed for comments on this post. / TrackBack URI