Recent news comes from Bangladesh: our dearest and best of friends Arafat Kazi, one time internet celebrity, is taking the jetliner from Dacca, BD to Boston, MA. He arrives mid-July. Plans are in the works for some form of reunion. Much happiness.

This reminds me: last year I was working with a non-profit during a tumultuous period of board transition. One of the board members did a little Internet Sleuthing on yours truly in the hopes of digging up mondo dirt with which to discredit not only me, but the board member with whom I was allied. A last ditch effort of the desperate. For an individual with a history of Telecommunication use predating the world wide web, there’s surprisingly little dirt to be had. Some curious entries from the days as a text file writer (mea culpa) & some truly unfortunate logs of me being a jerk on messages boards (mea culpa, ages 13 to 19). But otherwise there’s no evidence of illegalities, perversions, drug use, or any other thing that one could use to discredit a lad, unless one was a staunch opponent of the First Amendment.

In truth, there’s more good than bad– the major results are academic work, film work, and historical preservation. But this didn’t stop our anonymous board member. Not only were the aforementioned text files & message board logs turned over in a giant email dossier, but also uncovered was the bestfriendship with the aforementioned Arafat Kazi, a man with an astonishingly checkered Internet past. As our board member was both wild & desperate, and there’d never been a face-to-face, in their exultant frenzy, they made the incredibly odd mistake of thinking that me and Arafat are, in fact, one in the same. I’ll repeat that: this person mistook me for a 300lb+ five-foot-three Bangladeshi man. This board member believed that we were one entity working under two strange names.

This malicious slander was of course laughed at but did present me with the experience of having to explain the existence of Arafat to disinterested third parties. While at work. You try telling your boss how a creature that weird can really exist.

The highlight of this whole affair was the following picture, taken from Arafat’s livejournal, which was included as an attachment to the email expose. Arafat had captioned the photo something like “Here I am with my two wives!” This was sent in, I kid you not, as evidence of my craven use of the internet to further a gay agenda. Yes, I must have forgotten to mention: at least 30% of the expose was about me being a faggot, and said faggotry was framed as evidence of my unsuitability for the task at hand. Meanwhile, this was happening in New York City and New York State, with a New York State incorporated entity, and the anonymous board member in question was a lawyer. New York State, you know, being a place where such an email and a subsequent dismissal for presumed faggotry is illegal to an astonishing degree.

A lawyer.

Anyway, here’s the great brown beast and his two wives:

Speaking of Arafat Kazi, former internet celebrity, I’ve just received email from him, containing only this attachment:

Yesterday’s post, with its incidental mention of Dave Asselin, the world’s foremost Smashing Pumpkins bootlegger, got me nostalgic. I decided to try and find Dave. Not too long ago, he changed his email address and I’ve since lost the new one. My googling didn’t turn up his contact info, but it did uncover a lot of amusing links for other Dave Asselins. But nothing so funny as this.

I’ve no idea what I had been thinking, or why Dave consented, but for some reason we decided to internet hoax his death. This was nine years ago. Almost literally– 7/7/98. Someone still has the thing up. Does nothing digital die?

And to make sure it never does, here’s my own copy:

Did anyone actually believe this? The paragraph indents and the courier typeface, clearly identifying this as something done in Microsoft Word, makes me think no. But someone saved it. I do like the color of the faux-paper and for the record, that’s not a picture of Dave– it’s science fiction author Robert Jordan, who had talked down to me at a SCI-FI CON a few months before.

Two weekends only. Fritz Donnelly, genuine Germanic Irishman, Google Analytics pioneer, Deep Springs alum, wild dreamer and film maker:

Special bonus material. Ants swarming a cricket carcass, 2:30am:

As my blog is now getting several hits a day regarding former internet celebrity Arafat Kazi, and I presume this is related to his health, I’m going to post a little update as to what I presently know.

I just got off the phone with Arafat. He is currently in the ICU of a Boston area hospital, where he has been for at least a night, and I guess will remain. He’s been running a kind of malaria fever on-and-off for over a year and seems to have been particularly plagued over the weekend, leading to an E.R. walk-in with a 104 degree fever, a return visit, having shot to 105, and, finally, hospital admittance.

Actually getting an overnight admittance to a hospital under the current American health care system is one of the twelve modern tasks of Heracles, so it’s safe to assume that Arafat’s present condition is exceedingly serious. Frankly, he sounded awful. He was too weak to talk longer than a few minutes.

From what I gather, and I do remind people that this is filtered through Arafat’s understanding of science, which is somewhere between piss-poor and shit-awful, our man seems to have a malaria-like infection that is residing outside of his liver. The doctors have told him that it’s treatable but that they’ve never seen anything like it and can’t figure it out.

That’s what I know.

Arafat Kazi, former internet celebrity & my Bangla-buddy, came to America for a visit and nearly died of the Typhoid that he had contracted back in his homeland. Thank the Sweet Lord, for I am able to report that the manifold marvels of Western medical science have saved our modern day Mary Mallon. The man is cured!

Arafat, meanwhile, has seen fit to share images of his hospital stay, which I now pass on as a warning. Enjoy!

Live & oh so direct from Boston and Cambridge, our man in red, typhoid free & my Best Friend, who believes that the speed limit on Mass Ave is “I dunno, 100.” Even if life is a hideous game 80 years short and you can’t count on nothing or nobody, at least Arafat Kazi will dance for you once every summer.

IZOD:

The footprint of Howard Phillips Lovecraft in Rhode Island is surprisingly shallow: a plaque on the campus of Brown, a headstone & not much else.

But the discerning eye will find many traces of the gent from Angell Street. Often it happens with your knowledge– like returning home as a new Ulysses and being offered Lovecraft’s apartment at 10 Barnes Street and instead taking the one where Donald Wandrei wrote part of The Web of Easter Island. Other times, you find out years later– like discovering that your high school was on the same grounds as Lovecraft’s grammar school.

It accumulates over the years and then there’s nary a thing Lovecraftian you haven’t seen or done.

But there’s always more. We had, in particular, focused on the Dark Swamp of Chepachet, RI, the hardest to find of all Lovecraftian locations. In the summer of 1923, Lovecraft and the Eddys hunted for the swamp and could not find it– this mystery resonates through the letters and the first wave of remembrances & grows into a thing discussed in whispers and scholarly articles. For years I tried to uncover its location– but it wasn’t until USGS Topographical maps became easily searchable that I was able to find and pinpoint its very location.

USGS maps only tell one thing: where a place is, not how to get there. I had given my erstwhile chum, Andrew Harrison, a Google Maps location of the swamp’s GPS coordinates– he’d printed out some half-assed directions, but these were useless. So we drove around Glocester, RI desperately trying to get there from here. We trespassed private property. We mistook White’s Pond for the swamp. At last, we found a Department of Fish & Wildlife topographical map posted to a board and realized exactly what we, as men, had to do: drive the car down a dirt path, find a place to park, and then walk a mile in the woods.

And then, finally, we were there: the dark swamp. Dark because it’s wooded. Light hardly penetrates the dense canopy. A swamp because it’s disgustingly wet and covered in a large moss bed that attacks every living thing around it. It kills trees. It grows mushrooms. We saw no monster. But we had done it; we had gone to the most randomly inaccessible Lovecraftian location that we could– and only one jackass had fallen in the muck.

Me.

Update: Go here for directions to the swamp.

I didn’t even know these pictures existed– I found them accidentally while digging through the external hard drive, hunting down weird crap from ages gone by. I’m not sure why their quality is so atrocious.

They are from a performance of a canto in Dante’s Paradiso. It was for a class at NYU. I had talked Sam Tregar, author of the rivetingly titled Writing Perl Modules for CPAN, into helping. Sam was supposed to wear a goofy white mask and scream through a megaphone, but earlier in the day, we were walking around Gramercy Park and there in the trash was a homemade hat. Attached to its top was a placard reading KOSHER 4 EASTER. Sam, a Reform Jew with nothing but hatred towards the Jews For Jesus contingent, fell in love. I think we took it to my apartment and disinfected it with Lysol.

I’m in the second picture wearing an ape mask and playing the banjo. I had bought the banjo a year before on eBay for about $99. What kind of banjo do you get for $99? One that will never, ever, ever stay in tune. So I stuck a pickup inside and ran it through a fuzzbox pedal and then through a deathmetal pedal. This was all connected to a big amp. The only sour aspect of this whole performance was that the amp never got turned up loud enough.

The next year, I took another class with the same professor and we read The Decameron. Again a performance was a required assignment. Sam helped out with that one, too– he wore his wife’s viking halloween costume and played bass through a broken effects board. This time we made sure the amp was deafening. Sam let me borrow a big lobster pot which I wore on my head. I bought an aluminum garbage can and made a breast plate of its lid and spent the whole performance alternately bashing my chest or the can with a hammer while screaming about The Sea. Through a distortion pedal. By the end, the can was about half its original size, and I believe that I had bruised my chest somewhat seriously. A big highlight of this particular nightmare was the special guest appearance of Kaia Wong of the awesome band Mixel Pixel, who had a boss electric violin that looked like a Romulan warship. She was also wearing many, many mirrors tied to her body. She played the fiddle part to that terrible song “Cotton-Eyed Joe” and I think had a death metal pedal.

Sadly, no pictures of this exist, but I swear it happened.

Johnny Khalud Steps Into the Vortex.

The Way Johnny Khalud Back It Up Make Me Wanna Smack It Up

Johnny Khalud is METAL GURU!

special shout out to “unicorn marc.”

Johnny Khalud -in- The Occult Roots of Mormonism

WINTER TOUR ‘08 BEGINS HERE, PRELUDE:

Harvey Etter, Special Correspondent, Jersey Prophet & old textfiles guy. Formerly “The Master.” On the razor’s edge of 30.

Corner of Hollywood Boulevard & Gower, having just tread upon many a Celluloid Hero.

4:15pm, Saturday, December 1st, 2007.

UPDATE: I got an angry text message from Etter’s wonderful wife, Lauren, wondering why I had failed to give her creds for the photo. There was a paragraph I wrote about her, but I guess that didn’t make it. So. Behind the camera: Mrs. Lauren Etter, one of my favorite people in the world.

Go tell that to your friend in the cowboy hat.

elly jonez, old pal and romantic interest.

Astrologer, relentless self-chronicler and general paranoiac. Owns an amazing oversized copy of Manly P. Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages. Rooster-God with Snake legs. Original Camwhore & one of the first SuicideGirls.

My camera went missing, so this is stolen from her flickr account. At an ultra-Yuppie conference in the Getty Center. That dinosaur costs $300 and hugs.

Just turned 30.

Four days, three nights on Kenmore Ave.

2 Live N Die in LA.

December 5th, 2007 thru December 8th, 2007.

The Mysterious Dr. Tallon. Boy poet, filmmaker & apparent dweller in the opium parlors of 19th Century Limehouse.

Child of the same backwoods that inspired H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in The Darkness” & now transplanted to New York City. Bonafide hustler, making his name. Straight up 11211, the hippest palindromic zipcode of these United States.

Having found his mad Rimbaud book on the consignment rack of the St. Mark’s Bookshop– first, second & third impressions: “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”– I deciphered the various clues and codes and maps included therein and hunted down our man. We’ve been pals of the bossom ever since. Let me sleep in his bed. Was very concerned about the number of pillows.

Had borrowed a magick lantern & through it projected his magnum opus. A film that he’s been laboring on either 6 or 2 years, or his whole life, depending on your system of mathematics. As the lights went dark, I had a pang of worry– like, what if it sucked?– but that was only The Adversary giving ugly thoughts. I need not have worried. It’s a massive achievement.

Does a mean impersonation of Jim Carroll & demanded a rewrite on 2/3rds of this content.

At the ripest age of them all: 28.

December 18-19th, 2007.

Fritz Donnelly (on the right.) Filmmaker, writer & apparent Gollum impersonator.

Williamsburg bridge rising up behind. Mix-n-match mojo master. Man, that dude’s a mystery. Just go here.

Age: somewhere between 25 and ?

December something, 2007.

–

Previous Donnelly Action.

Following is an open letter of complaint from Arafat Kazi to Dhaka Stage, a theatre troupe in Dhaka, Bangladesh:

–

Dear Dhaka Stage:

Over the years, I’ve attended several of your plays. Off the top of my head, I can remember watching A Midsummer Night’s Dream and All in the Timing in the 90s, as well as one of Wilde’s plays. A few weeks ago, I saw a poster for today’s and tomorrow’s staging of your adaptation of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Being a fan of Douglas Adams, the theater, entertainment in general, and with pleasant memories of Dhaka Stage in my mind, I went to buy tickets at the Nordic Club for my friends today. I was refused on the grounds of, specifically, not being “foreign”.

I don’t want to go into the etymology of “foreign” and argue that, as your average rich Bangladeshi I was, in fact, an Other figure. I didn’t want to go back home to get my Green Card (Bangladeshi foreignness apotheosized). Curiously, my biggest reason for wanting tickets was to show my girlfriend a good time. We had met while I was living in Boston and she in New York, and both Boylston Street and Times Square featured prominently in our courtship. Interestingly enough, this wonderful girl who loves me enough to travel to Bangladesh, is herself foreign. Not ABCD foreign, not European-posted-in-third-world foreign, but a white girl from Galloway, Ohio; American as apple pie until I curried her favor and carried her away.

I’ve studied at one of the greatest universities in the world, and loving Bangladesh enough to return home in spite of a Foreign Degree and Green Card, I can say that I understand the importance of preserving one’s cultural trappings in the face of strangeness. Since we’re all homogenized these days, the only great differences that exist anymore are between rich countries and poor countries, between the occident and the orient. Beyond understanding, I can even say that I empathize with this need to make sure that expatriates in Bangladesh don’t forget Western culture and like Kurtz go native.

The one difference I’ve seen elsewhere in the world, in this culture-preserving movement which is common to all immigrants, no matter where or how permanent, is that members of the host country are usually invited to participate or, at the very least, attend as guests. My friends used to drink beforehand so that they could survive the Bangla Society bore-a-thons hosted at MIT. I remember even trying to get them to listen to Bangla rock music, comparing James favorably to Iggy Pop and “Ekta Prem Dao” to “I Wanna Be Your Dog”.

Now Douglas Adams and Shakespeare will live on in greatness whether or not their works are performed by your piddling group. But hosting a play in Bangladesh, and then barring Bangladeshis from being able to watch it, smacks of arrogance, of self-importance and cultural egotism. I guess that, while I’m angry at not being able to watch the play, I could have justified my personal exclusion by writing it off as the exclusivist habits of a bunch of incompetents who’ve failed at both getting posted to nicer countries AND at befriending people from their host country, thereby essentially dooming themselves to the soiled pit of each others’ society. This would have been my personal reaction to being refused, as an individual member of society, from watching a live adaptation of one of my favorite novels ever. (I even have the original radio scripts.) But as an aesthete, as a patron of the higher arts, as a fan of Douglas Adams and other Greatest Hits of Literature Written In English (or translated to), this snootiness transmogrified itself, in my eyes, from petty racism and xenophobia to a complete refutation of all the qualities that have made literature great from the time of Wordsworth onwards. I can picture Byron raging at the injustice of it all, I can imagine DeQuincey writing to Keats, I can picture serious Arundhati Roy likening the incident to Gandhi on the train and unable to find her own family a seat when Dhaka Stage invites her to speak on tolerance and friendship. I thought of my own immigrant experience in America, and finally, I thought of the girl that I love, and her own situation as an expatriate living in Bangladesh. What if I had faced a similar situation when I walked into Boston University for the first time as the only brown student in my literature classes? Would I have spent Christmases in New Jersey with my best friend, and would he ever have been invited to my parents’ apartment for Eid? What about my girlfriend? What if my friends, instead of accepting her as a fellow human being, responded with the Dhaka Stage welcome and rejected her on the basis of her not being Bangladeshi?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, because thankfully, out of all the “foreigners” I know, both living in Bangladesh and all over the world, and all the Bangladeshis I know, similarly scattered across the globe, none of them are assholes. Pity you guys are.

Arafat Kazi

The last time that I last saw my old pal and BFF, Arafat Kazi , was way back September-way. That particular trip was total shite, but me and Kazi had us some good times– bumming around Harvard Square at midnight & road-runnering up from Boston on 1A and Route 128 to Salem and Gloucester. His countrywoman, the ever lovely Jisha, accompanied us as we toured a crummy Wax Museum. With the advent of night, a natural fear of vampires forced our return to the state capital, where Arafat’s mother offered me some of her famous tea and sympathy. It was enough to cause a massive emotional panic; it had become too much, too familiar. Too many choking old memories. I bid my Banglaboy goodbye and fled down Burbank-street. Desperate, totally desperate, to get out of Boston.

How reassuring that, apparently, some things never change.

Now Kazi’s back in Bangladesh and I’m here in Hollywood. There is a near-daily exchange of emails that pledge our undying fraternal love. He can come on heavy with his Muslim public/private opprobrium regarding my life choices, but still. I miss my monster.

This longing got me Googling-oogling, and I discovered remnants of the days of future past, when Arafat was an undergraduate at Boston University and a columnist for the student newspaper, The Daily Free Press. It’s hard to imagine what possessed the editorial body– boredom, probably– to print Kazi’s dirty filth on their clean pages, but for several months, the man wrote weekly under the heading of “300 Pounds and Rising.”

Amazingly, these articles remain available. To shame Arafat Kazi for a period of indefinite duration, I offer links to each and every one. Salaam, Arafat-bhai, and give my regards to Auntie:

September 8th, 2003 – The American Way and a third of the world

September 15th, 2003 – Downloading tips and tricks for the Pope

September 22nd, 2003 – Stars and stripes: an exposé

September 29th, 2003 – Don’t Be Hating the Fat Kids (*)

October 6th, 2003 – The Perfection Solution to the Crappy Day

October 20th, 2003 – Whetted by the American Dream

October 27th, 2003 – The lonely path of the frotteur

November 3rd, 2003 – All that glitters is not Goldin

November 10th, 2003 – Mindless drones: come to me

November 24th, 2003 – Don’t Welsh on me, homophobes

December 1st, 2003 – Hope for more than a Lindt truffle

December 8th, 2003 – A life in the life of a BU lifer

(*) To Arafat’s lasting horror, the 9/29/03 column, “Don’t Be Hating the Fat Kids,” which he considers best amongst the lot, was co-authored by yours truly. This was done to expedite matters– I needed Arafat out of my apartment, but the column was overdue. I pushed him away from my computer and did the second half in about five minutes. For the record, my opinion is in total opposition: I think it’s the worst.