Button Tapper

I’m currently in the process of retooling Black Heart Magazine, so that I can publish a wider variety of genres and not feel like I’m being disloyal to erotica.

Isn’t it stupid, how you start to have these ideas about Who You Are that don’t really match with What You Actually Are? Sometimes it’s because of how others perceive you, true, but sometimes it’s entirely your own fault. Perhaps spurred on by the things others believe, but ultimately up to you to correct.

It can be very hard to let go of a certain persona, particularly if it worked or was popular in the past. But I am definitely not the sex-hungry minx of Black Heart’s past anymore, if indeed I ever was.

(Was she or wasn’t she? I can see the gossip rags now. If anyone thought I was famous enough to celeb-profile, which I’m not.)

In any event, I’ve been madly storming the halls of my mind (some call this “brainstorming”), ransacking it for ideas, thoughts, conclusions on what to do next, and how to do it. So far I’ve decided this: Black Heart is now about fiction that breaks the rules.

What does it mean to break the rules? How does that translate to a mission statement? I say mission statements be damned; all you need is a nice soundbyte or elevator pitch. The fiction I publish breaks the rules, and that’s really all you need to know.

You can find our submission guidelines online. Supposing, of course, you’re rule-abiding enough to read ‘em. If not, you can send your submissions to me via the Black Heart contact form.

In other news, I’ve been madly reading up on all the other lit mags I can find online, and I think one of my new favorites is the Summerset Review. I was tracking down stalking an author whose work I enjoyed on another site, and discovered she’d published a piece at the Summerset Review. It turned out to be an essay, which was kind of interesting, since it seemed very much like her peculiar brand of fiction at first. In any event, I found it very strange and disarming and sad and funny by turns, and even wrote a letter to the editor about it, in a woefully misguided attempt to participate in their “Fifty-for-Fifty” contest (which encourages letters to the editor), only to receive a nice letter back from the editor explaining that this wasn’t the most recent issue, and there was a timeline involved, which I’d missed.

Whoops. I am an idiot. Or I was just so excited to read this piece that I totally didn’t realize it was from Summer 2009 and not Winter 2010. In either case, editor Joseph Levens kindly told me he could offer me a free copy of the actual current issue, so that I could potentially comment on that instead. So all’s well that ends well: free issue, nice editor, and some very well-written stuff at this journal, which I highly recommend (and not just because they’re sending me a free issue, although that certainly helps).

Therefore, you must now go read Aubrey Hirsch’s “Speaking from the Throat” at the Summerset Review, and while you’re at it, enjoy some of her fiction over at Litsnack, too.

Here’s my contribution to Dan O’Shea’s flash fiction throwdown, on the subject of churchly violence. His piece, Let Us Prey, can be found here, and the originally challenge is stated on his website, Going Ballistic, over here.

For the record, the following piece is a work of fiction, though it is based on certain real-life events that Montrealers may be familiar with. My own Dad doesn’t, so far as I know, actually believe that Jesus is magic, so let’s all stop conflating the author’s life with her work right now. Okay?

Okay, let’s do this thing! I call mine:

Biblical Proportions
by Laura Roberts

My Dad believes that Jesus is magic. And not in the Sarah Silverman way, either; he really and truly thinks the dude performed miracles, even from beyond the grave. Which is a shame, because if he really were magic, then maybe this whole thing would never have happened, and all those people wouldn’t have had to die.

I mean, it’s not like it’s Jesus’ fault, exactly. He did, supposedly, do a lot of great shit for a lot of people. It’s just that my dad wasn’t one of ‘em, and I guess he took that personally.

Wouldn’t you?

I’ll be the first to admit, I found the whole thing bizarre. Even—dare I say it?—crazy. It just doesn’t make any logical sense, and I’d always figured my father for the logical type, down to his pressed khaki pants and 9 to 5 as an accountant. Sure, he played the organ at church every Sunday and believed in a dude who allegedly walked on water, but so do millions of otherwise sane people, right? It’s the opiate of the masses, after all, and lots of people swallow that pill every weekend. But most of the others aren’t going to burn their churches down in a fit of righteous rage when things don’t go their way.

Presumably, anyway.

Dad had made it very clear that something was wrong with him that Sunday, but I hadn’t been following the details. He said something about a score to settle, and in my bleary, pre-coffee haze I’d thought he was talking about the previous night’s hockey game with “Les Boys.” (The “boys” were all middle-aged men with children, so I dunno why they still insisted on the moniker, but I digress.) There was always some rivalry on the ice between him and Kevin O’Malley; they were old pals who took the sport way too seriously, for a couple of has-been wannabes.

St. George church fire, Cincinnati, Ohio (photo via eBaum's World)

Anyway, it didn’t really cross my transom that it could possibly have anything to do with THE LORD GOD ALMIGHTY until I heard the sirens and ran to the window to see smoke billowing out of the church just up the street. My Dad’s early-morning handiwork had set the thing ablaze.

It was a total mess. The place was like a tinderbox from Heaven, all original wood this and hardwood that. Went up like a book burning in Nazi Germany. The congregation narrowly escaped, by virtue of the fact that nobody in town ever made it to the service before 9:15, thanks to some quirk of timing at a particularly narrow covered bridge. Dad had started his spree at precisely 9:01, and even Father MacDougall hadn’t yet made his way from his breakfast at the rectory over the 15 feet to the sacristy by the time his loyal organist had doused the place in diesel (scrounged from his tractor) and struck that fateful match.

So why the hell did he do it? Well, it’s been all over the papers, so you’ve no doubt heard all the rumors already. But just in case you haven’t, here’s the straight dope: the dope wasn’t straight at all, and had recently been the victim of a botched operation that was meant to deliver Mr. Stephen Harris fresh from the ER as Mrs. Stephanie Harris.

I never suspected a thing. He’d told me he was going in for a routine procedure, something to do with a bum ticker, and then this.

As you can probably imagine, I’m mortified. Not only is my Dad a failed trannysaurus, but a murderer and arsonist to boot. (Wouldn’t have been so bad, except that a couple of the attending firefighters got trapped under a burning knave as they swept the building in search of church-goers. Tragic loss.) The whole town’s been talking about me, like maybe I’m next, and with that kind of pressure who knows? Still, I’ve been turning up weekly at the local synagogue, which is where the church’s weekly services have been transferred while the rubble is sorted (how’s that for irony?) and the congregation tries to raise money for a new church. I try not to make eye contact, but I can feel them staring at me, judging me. I try to take solace in the book of Job, but I really wish I’d just get swallowed up by some whale like Jonah instead. Seems like the stinking belly of the world’s largest aquatic mammal would at the very least offer a little peace and quiet.

Jesus ain’t magic, I can tell you that much. My dad found that out the hard way, and I guess I just wish someone had told the old boy a little sooner that the Good Book isn’t meant to be taken quite so literally.

Like Harriet the Spy, I will hunt down your secrets and reveal excellent truths about you. Unlike Harriet, I'll write a kick-ass bio for you afterwards, instead of humiliating you in my journal.

Since I’m feeling wild, crazy and generous today, I’ve got a special deal for anybody who’s been thinking about having their band, company, or even personal bio/”about me” page written up by a professional. While these types of pieces normally go for hundreds of dollars, today only through March 1, 2010 I’m offering this service for ONLY $25 A POP!

You heard me.

So if you’ve got a band that’s going to be playing at SXSW and you want to really get noticed, now’s your chance to hire a whiz-bang copywriter to kick that thing into overdrive.

If you’ve got a company in need of a more fun (or corporate) explanation of who you are and what you do, I’m down.

Even if you’re just thinking, “Hmm. This ol’ Twitter page could use a refresh,” or “Man, my personal website could use a little TLC!” I’m your gal.

I love writing bios. They’re easily one of the most fun and exciting pieces of information you can write in the field of copywriting, especially if they’re for awesome and exciting people—like you! Plus, I totally understand that most of my friends and clients are broke-ass students, starving artists, or other creative types who can’t afford huge fees just to make their sparkling personalities really shine.

So here’s your chance! Hit me up with a little bit of info about who you are, what you do, where you’re going (or want to go), and what you want to use this biography for (personal use? websites? PR material? marketing campaigns? that kinda thing). You can contact me directly using my contact form, or simply by emailing me at laura [at] buttontapper [dot] com, and we’ll go from there.

Looking forward to working with y’all!

Living in Austin, one of the perks (or downsides, depending on how you view traffic jams and industry insiders taking over your town) is being around for the annual SXSW festival. Having never been to this mega-fest in years past, and always looking on rather enviously, I’m now actually living at Ground Zero for some of the year’s big reveals in the music, film and tech industries.

In the words of Keanu Reeves: WHOA. (And also: DUDE!)

My husband is getting really excited about the music stuff, and has even started a website to profile some of the seemingly millions of kick-ass bands that will be here. We are both miffed by the amount of Canadian has-been bands on the roster (uh… Sum41, anyone?), but aside from that, it’s pretty exciting to know that lesser-known (yet TOTALLY AWESOME) experimental and avant-garde musicians like Zoë Keating are going to be here alongside heavyweights like Broken Social Scene and hometown heroes Spoon to play for an audience of appreciative geeks, nerds and industry insiders.

THE GOOD

I’m also pretty pumped for the film festival side of things, although the amount of “badge required” parties is annoying me at the moment. Obviously, I’m drawn to the “Midnighters” category, described on the official site as “Scary, funny, sexy, controversial – provocative after-dark features for night owls and the terminally curious.” (I mean, hello? Cannibal Girls?!) The Headliners Get Low (starring Bill Murray and Robert Duvall), Mr. Nice (starring my favorite wacky Welshman, Rhys Ifans), and The Runaways (Dakota Fanning in a Joan Jett biopic?! and directed by Floria Sigismondi??!??) are all on my Must-See list as well. And even though I really have no idea what connects barbershop quartets to punk rock, I am totally down with seeing interviews with my idols Henry Rollins and Janeane Garofalo in Barbershop Punk.

THE BAD

I am already convinced that Leaves of Grass (starring Edward Norton x2 as identical twin brothers and Richard Dreyfuss [?!] as a drug dealer [?!?] in Oklahoma [!!?!!]) is going to be a pretentious pile of wank. Prove me wrong, but you heard it here first: naming your film after an interminable Walt Whitman transcendental poem is really just too much.

THE FUGLY

Oh, and as for the fugly? I’ve never been able to make it through an entire Harmony Korine film, so Trash Humpers is on my list here. It’s not that I don’t think it’ll be entertaining or worth seeing, exactly. It’s just that Korine is one of those filmmakers that tends to rub me the wrong way. I guess that’s the point of everything he does, but his shock tactics doesn’t really rate with me. I don’t think art necessarily has to be beautiful to be worthwhile, but all doom and gloom all the time isn’t exactly honest, either, is it?

So yeah, SXSW is in the air, and I’m really hoping that the weather here in Austin clears the hell up before the fest gets started, because honestly? Snow in February is a big ol’ mood-killer for this gal, and you better believe no visitors to our fair city will stand for that white crap!

MORE HELPFUL HINTS

Still need a place to stay? I know a joint or two. Let me hook you up with $20 off a 6-day stay at the Extended Stay Hotels in the area. Hey, what’re friends for, yo? Besides, they’ve been spamming the hell outta me since I stayed two weeks with them, so I might as well return the favor…

SXSW runs from March 12-21, 2010. For more info on how to organize your personal SXSW to-do list, read Laura’s Gifted Travel piece here. Be sure to follow Laura on Twitter @originaloflaura to get up-to-the-minute info on all the latest parties, buzz and events!

Y’know, I hate to give any credence to the work of an obvious terrorist and possibly delusional psychopath, but I just read through Joe Stack’s “manifesto” (posted in full by The Huffington Post, despite its being removed from his website by government officials), and I really have to wonder what was going through this guy’s head when he decided to crash his plane into an IRS building in north Austin. Call it professional curiosity, as I’m a writer who’s always in search of a good seed for a story.

First of all, I live fairly close to the IRS building he targeted. I drove past it all the time, never knowing it was an IRS satellite office; it was a nondescript place, much like any other office building in the area. So when the plane first plowed into that building and everyone was freaking out about possible ties to Al Qaeda, I just chalked it up as some poor fool, perhaps someone who hadn’t had enough training as a pilot, making a terrible mistake in trying to land a wounded vessel. It certainly didn’t strike me as the work of a terrorist cell, and having lived in NYC when the 9/11 attacks took place, I didn’t have the same feeling of “Holy shit!” that I did on September 11. I even remarked to the bank teller who called my attention to the TV that if the building was only a few stories high, it wouldn’t be that difficult for escaping employees to jump to safety, unlike those who perished in the World Trade Center attacks. (I didn’t mean for that to sound callous, but to point out the obvious difference between the two attacks and the level of threat involved. The Austin IRS building hit this week was only six stories high.)

Unfortunately, as we now know, this wasn’t a mistake at all; it was an aggravated assault by a disgruntled person in trouble with a government agency.

Now, nobody in their right minds is a big fan of the IRS as an institution, as I’m sure we’ll all agree. They take your hard-earned money out of your pocket at least once every year, and then they hand it over to other government agencies, who spend it on god-knows-what half-baked ideas, wars and whatnot. The IRS is an obvious target for people who are pissed off, though most have the good sense to limit their attacks to angry emails and stand-up comedy types of jabs. Still, I can’t say it’s surprising that someone would make an attack on such a building, since it’s a potent symbol, although I’m not sure why the main branch in Washington, D.C. wouldn’t have made a better target for someone so unhinged as Joe Stack.

But even if you were unhinged and pissed off about how the government was perpetually stealing your money, and even if you owed tens of thousands of dollars to said agency, I don’t see the logic here. Crashing a plane into the side of a building doesn’t solve your debt. (Furthermore, what kind of rich bastard still owns both a plane and a sweet house when he owes several thousands of dollars to the IRS?! Something don’t add up.) Suicide is certainly a response to overwhelming money woes that many people take, but suicide bombing? That’s what we’ve got here, people. His plane itself was the bomb, and flying it into the side of a government building is both a terrorist attack and an act of treason, by most common definitions.

To me, Joe Stack is no hero. He’s no patriot, no “true American,” and he’s certainly no one to emulate. He’s a sad example of someone who thought he was above the law, who thought he could play the system for his own ends and lost big-time. And by flying his plane into the side of that building, he lost any sympathy he could’ve had from any people who might have looked kindly upon his plight. He’s gone, but his debt is not. And now his wife and kid are stuck with it, not to mention knowing that their dear old Dad was a nutbar who totally screwed them over as his last earthly deed. They don’t even have a home to go back to, since ol’ Joe Stack burned it to the ground so that the IRS couldn’t claim it in exchange for all the thousands of dollars he owed them.

What prompts such acts of selfishness and greed? And what prompts others to look upon these selfish acts as “heroic”? I honestly don’t know. And maybe I don’t want to know.

I guess my point is that I can see shades of Fight Club in this story. Fight Club is a story I enjoy as a piece of fiction, precisely because of its anti-authoritarian tones and sense of rebellion against a world gone mad. But Fight Club has one hugely glaring flaw in its storyline that is always overlooked, and that is: blowing up buildings does not erase the debt record. Everything is stored on computers, and even if you were to destroy many computers and their hard drives, that information is undoubtedly stored on many other computers, many other hard drives and systems. Information is replicated all the time, and there will always be copies and copies and copies to fall back on. You cannot erase your debt by destroying physical items, then. You can only erase your debt by committing another illegal act, by hacking into the system and changing 1s to 0s. Period.

For a software engineer, Joe Stack wasn’t very bright. You’d think he would have known this, or figured it out while he was wallowing in self-pity. Violence isn’t the answer, you twit. But maybe computers are.

To be clear: I’m not advocating hacking into anyone’s computers, governmental or otherwise. I may be fascinated by hackers, but I’m not one of them, nor do I have any desire to be. Still, if you really wanted to set everyone on a level playing field, or become a true American hero by liberating the people from their chains the way Joe Stack’s supporters claim he wanted to, you’d need to be a bit more crafty about it. You’d have to be a helluva lot more selfless, and a lot more intelligent. You’d have to have heart, and you’d have to have skills. And you’d have to be a ninja who left no trace, rather than a simian who left a giant suicide note right on his website’s homepage.

There’s undoubtedly a thriller type of novel in the bones of Joe Stack’s story, but not as reality has written it. I still think Stack’s a selfish idiot, a traitor and a terrorist, and if he’d survived his attack on that building, I would’ve advocated harsh punishment, but there’s something to this story that I think people (unfortunate as that may seem) relate to. It’s why people are calling him a hero, even though he isn’t, and the use of the word in this situation is insulting to anyone who is or has been truly heroic (like, say, Robin De Haven, an Iraq war veteran who helped get many of the people working in the building to safety). There’s something more to the story than the simple summary of “disgruntled tax dodger commits suicide,” and I’ve been thinking about this from the perspective of someone writing a short story or novel about it. I’ll let you know if I come up with anything else.

In the meantime, what do you think about Joe Stack? Hero or terrorist—or something else entirely?