Radiance (12 page)

One must praise the independents, who simply ignored Edison and continued to make beautiful silent movies, more advanced and complex and heartbreaking than any throwaway studio talkie stinking up the summertime. I remember it: how slowly, then less slowly, sound ebbed away. Sooner rather than later, for an actor to talk on-screen became the mark of the Sellout—someone with deep enough pockets to pay Edison's blood price. No True Artist, no Work of Quality, no Real Film would be caught dead making that kind of obnoxious noise. And bit by bit, the Big Boys on the Moon copied the starving artists so that they could convince the public of their Authenticity, their Great Aesthetic Merit, so that they could butter their bread on both sides. We are the People's Entertainment! Bang, Smash, Yell, Crescendo! No, wait! We are Radical, Envelope-Pushing Artists! Hush, Hush, Soft Now. Win awards, stuff cannons with cash, bask in acclaim—and, hell, it saves money not having to deal with the devil in a back room, dithering over the price of a microphone.

And thus we find ourselves in an upside-down land where the technology exists, works beautifully, has even advanced—for no Edison can keep his hands to himself for long—but no fashionable soul would be caught dead using it. Men stand astride our world and call out: STOP. The System Works. They ask that everything stay the same forever, for Sameness is Profitable. Our Man Freddy E still bleeds filmmakers for exhibition rights, and we may all look the other way while he rolls piggily in his piles of lucre. Time passes, and we become accustomed to the status quo. Theatre Speaks, Vaudeville Sings, Radio Yammers Away Nonstop, but the movie hall is quiet as a church. Time passes, and audiences drink in this Truth with their mother's milk. I have seen with my own eyes the recoil of audiences when faced with some flickie that sliced up its producers' hearts at Edison's golden table for the right to let poor Hamlet ask his famous question instead of staring dumbly at a plaster skull and waiting for the title card to do his job for him. Today's moviegoer will get up and leave, convinced he has been swindled, rather than listen to a human voice.

     What could it cost Friend Freddy to, quite simply, let us speak?

     And yet, and yet. There is beauty in silence. I do not believe a film like Saul Amsel's
Bring Me the Heart of Titan
would have been made in a world where every film chattered on to its contentment. What of
The Moon of Arden
?
The Last Cannoneer
? If I were to turn back the clock and pluck Fred Edison from his ill-gotten celluloid throne, I should lose these reels which wrapped my heart three times round. He has bound us to Prometheus's rock—but have we not made friends with the eagle? Have we not learned to love life without our livers?

     The Worlds' Fair is a time of brotherhood and goodwill. It is an expression of Progress and Marvels of Modernity.

     Let me put it baldly: Mr Edison, get out of the way.

     
Halfrid H

     
Editor-in-Chief

I am not willing to relinquish the rare and rough magic of our silent movie halls. They are silent as a church, yes. Because they
are
churches. Yet I am no less willing to never hear the dreary Dane fail to decide his own fate. For him, the question will ever remain: To be or not to be? For us, it is: To speak or not to speak?

I myself can put nothing baldly, for I feel quite hirsute on the matter, tangled, knotted. But I will say: Mr Edison, you have exiled us to an uncanny country of the mind. We cannot love you for it.

Algernon B

Editor-in-Chief

 

Look Down

Look down.

Across the stage of your skin. The graceful proscenium of your clavicle, your shoulder, the long bones of your arms. The apron of your gentle belly. The skene of your skull, where all the gods and machines hide away, awaiting their cues, clanking away in their cases, puffing smoke and longing. Look down; something is happening on your navel, your omphalos, your knotted core of the world. You cannot feel the light playing over your skin, but you prickle with gooseflesh anyway. Light has no personal temperature. But your body knows instinctively that light is cold. The
idea
of light, the narrative of light. Light will chill you blue. The trickster hemispheres of your brain insist that the flickering images
do
have weight; they press on you like greyscale fingers, corpse fingers, angelic fingers, unworlded hands. The touch of images alters you—it must, it cannot help but. And more than touch you, these pictures, these maps of illumination enter you. Photons collide with flesh; most reflect, some penetrate. You carry them inside you. You carry them away and far.

You feel them, though they cannot be felt. You shiver, though there is no cold. You take them inside you, though they asked no permission.

It feels like breath. A breath spent long ago, arriving only now.

Severin's face dissolves into another. This one is more beautiful. Anyone would admit that. It possesses the pressed-moth-like quality of a person born, through sheer chance, with precisely the face that her era prized. It's too delicate and arch for our modern tastes. Too crafted, too distinctly feminine to suit our current rage for the androgyne. The small, sullen, Christmas-bow mouth. The immense, slightly wounded eyes. The pale hair curled like a statue of Apollo, crowded close in to her heart-shaped head. The perfect and somehow vaguely perverse jut of jaw. Her eyebrows spring high, high, high, like parentheses over the sentence of her face—a sentence that goes, “Love me, and I will laugh for you, and if you can make me laugh, my laughter will, quite simply, ransom the whole of the world from death.”

This is Mary Pellam. The Moon's Sweetheart. Ingénue for Hire. Seventeen years of age, in her first significant role: Clementine Salt, heiress with a pistol in her petticoat.
Meet Me On Ganymede
(dir. Hester Jimenez-Stern, Capricorn Studios, 1908), in which Miss Pellam appears on-screen for a scant four minutes, one and one half of which she spends shut into a stasis cask, banging on the glass with her fists like a Snow White who hasn't read the script. But she quite makes off with the picture. She will work steadily but not spectacularly in the maiden mill after
Ganymede
, her look too innocent for villainess roles, too cherubic for the fallen woman. In distress and out, she remains an upstaged damsel until wrinkles sign her resignation letter. Only then does her career really crack off. With a Hamburg hat and an eye patch she will become Madame Mortimer, greatest detective on nine worlds. With a shot through the eye of a villain she enters our concerns.

Mary's smile is a spotlight—whomever it lands upon becomes brighter, becomes more real.

It lands upon us.

 

The Ingénue's Handbook

Begun 20 August, 1908, Quarter to Three in the Afternoon

By Mary Alexandra Pellam (Age 17)

Grasshopper City, Luna

I have come to the Moon to make my fortune!

Good Lord, isn't that what all the girls say? And the boys and the richies and the paupers and the grifters and the
real damn artistes
and the homesteaders and the silver panners and the writers and the vaudeville has-beens and the bank men and the gangsters and the patrons—oh the patrons! You be sure to call them
patrons
, missy, while they're patting your knee and sweating through your skirt—the old perverts and the young ones, too. A chickie hates to be cliché, but the minute you set foot up here, on this rock that's nothing but one big studio set, you figure out right quick that clichés sign your checks and tuck you in at night. Come on up to wardrobe, honey, we've got a belt-sander to take care of any originality you might not have checked at customs. No problem.

I didn't need much work, truth be told. I could've come off a showroom floor. The Latest and Greatest Model, Shined and Sheared and Shipped First Class, Perfectly Engineered and Industrially Lathed to Factory Specs! Get One Now, Before the 1909s Come In!

That's me. I'm not ashamed of it. It gives me a good giggle. I am the Girl. I barely need a name. Every audition is a room full of rose-faced cupid fodder, and they all look just like me, talk just like me. They've suffered just the way I have: enough to give the eyes a knowing slant, but not enough to ruin the complexion. And they all came to the Moon as freight, just like me.

Check my credentials if you have a care: Born Oxford, England, Earth, eighteen and ninety-one. Mama was a mama but she did something artistic-like so you can be sure I come by my ambitions honestly. Mine painted. She covered canvases with portraits of the prize roses in her garden, large and small, red and pink and coral and puce like shades of lipstick. Wild and tea and heirloom. Desperate, weeping things, they were. I'll tell you something: when you see a Pellam rose blossom in close-up, three metres by three metres, it looks like a mauve monster. It looks like a mouth set to gulp you whole. Papa was a professor of linguistics. Helped to write the dictionary, did Pellam Senior. Gaze upon my childhood, O ye curious: I was built out of roses and etymologies.

Obviously I ran away to Camden Town just as soon as my nicely turned calves could carry me. No more dinners with those lurid leviathan gullets staring at my peas and potatoes with pointedly erect stamens. No more Greek origins of simple household words and
I say, we've started in on the J's this year and you know what that means: Jackals and Juggernauts and Jungles! Deriving respectively, of course, from the Sanskrit roots
srgalah
, “the howler,”
jagat-natha
, “the lord of the world,” and
jangala
, which, oddly enough, signifies “aridity.”
Couldn't you just scream?

I
could. Because when you draw a
really
rotten lot in life, you stick it out, make your best, tighten your belt. But when your draw is just a
touch
irritating, just a
squidge
confining, well, you hightail it and right quick. I'd have been good and goddamned if I was going to end up painting roses like my life depended on it in some snivelling doctoral candidate's hut. Oh, but you didn't
stay
in Camden! Not if you could help it. Not if you were a Girl Like Me.

No, in those days—and by those days I mean these days, and by these days I mean all the days to come—it was the heavens or nothing at all. If you had a brain to rub against a lust for something better than shabby old Earth and her crabby old empires, you were saving up for a rocket or already long gone. It was fifty years on from the great train robbery perpetrated by Master Conrad Xavier Wernyhora and his big sister Miss Carlotta Xanthea, a couple of Australian-born Polish kittens run off from the Hobsons Bay rail yards with spare parts, lunch, and a working knowledge of engineering to set off their little cherry bomb in Hawaii, where the equator loves us and wants us to be happy. I used to draw pictures of that first fabulous ship in my schoolbooks. The
Tree of Knowledge
, shot out of a bloody circus cannon, a snug capsule with their handprints on it in gold paint. It carried Conrad and Carlotta all the way up here to the Moon, crash-landing through a genteel sort of gravity into … well, just about where I sit, where the Savoy in Tithonus now stands, with the silver-choked shores of Mare Nubium in sight.

It's a fair bit nicer now, with pistachio meringues, a nice pot of white-tips, and a waiter with a rear that I daresay won't quit. Although I've not developed a taste for creaming my tea with callowmilk yet, I'm sad to report. It's just not
right
. Milk shouldn't taste like much of anything but vague thickness and sweetness. Callowmilk has a spice to it. A
tang
. I expect I shall learn to savour it soon enough. I need it, after all. We all do. Slaves of Venus where the callowhales lie silent offshore and ooze. Without callowmilk we couldn't stay. It's a matter of density, see. Skip the cream in our tea and our bones would go as light as hat-straw within a year or two and we'd keel over with a sad Irish slide whistle. So I stir and stir and stir and it still tastes positively beastly.