Radiance

Araceli Garrastazu came after that. The femme fatale, Mary Pellam’s opposite—the perfect witch-seductress for my father’s every overwrought phantasmagoria. I barely knew her. I was running with whatever wolves would have me by then. The colours of Tithonus beat grey Virago every time. I didn’t want to act, but I slept with producers anyway; Gloucester and I danced on the carousel boats every weekend with my father’s rivals and I took girls and boys to my cabin on endless ugly promises of introducing them to Percy: Yes, of course, darling, he’s just dying to find the next big thing and you’re so lovely. You’re devastatingly talented. You’re perfect. You’re perfect. Until that horror show with Thaddeus Irigaray. That turned off my faucet, I can tell you. And by then Araceli was off to reinvent herself on the radio. [SEVERIN strokes her throat with her hand, a throttling, effacing gesture.] We’re almost done, aren’t we? Lumen’s left. Lumen’s my mother now, lucky number seven. She’s the reason I’ve got a boatload of circus with me. I love her. I love Lumen Molnar for everything she is not. I love her because she is nothing like me. I love her because she has never been to Venus. I love her because she has only one face. I love her because she is at this moment having supper in the cantina with Maximo and Mariana and Augustine and Gloucester. Because she came with me. Come with me, and I’ll love you until Jupiter burns out and the callowhales speak.

[SEVERIN clutches ERASMO’S arm. Her nails dig in. But she speaks to the camera.]

Do you want to know the truth about my mother? She was wonderful. She was kind. She never left me. She tucked me in at night and woke me in the morning. She played with me every day and she never missed a recital or a bedtime story.

Her name was Clara.

She could hold just under 150 metres of film at a time.

Oh, Those Scandalous Stars!

Limelight, 20th February 1933

Editor’s Note: The Iron Hand of Edison

A simple rule, enforced simply:

Movies don’t talk.

But whose rule is this? What Moses came down from the mount with such a thing engraved upon his personal stone?

Surely, our current state could not have been the shining future meant by those early masters of light and sound. It is Edison’s rule, enforced not by the Burning Bush but by Lawyers Burning for Their Fees. The name of Edison has become synonymous with the dastardliest of business practices, the most crushing arrogance. It stains the whole family, from Thomas Alva, who collected patents like baseball cards, to Our Present Edison, who continues such draconian strategies that he has, single-handedly, retarded the progress of motion picture technology by fifty years.

Your humble host has taken out editorials of this sort before. My readers must forbear. Given the upcoming Worlds’ Fair in the glorious metropolis of Guan Yu, overlooking the glittering shores of Yellowknife Bay on our dear sister planet of Mars, the very first to be hosted offworld, what better time can there be for Mr Franklin R. Edison (Freddy to his friends) to release his patents’ vice grip on reel, recording, and exhibition equipment and allow talking pictures to run wild and free? That is, after all, the natural state of technology. And so it was, once upon a time. Before the right to speak, the privilege of the voice, became the property of one man, to give and take away as he pleases.

Places, Everyone!, 14^th April, 1933

Editor’s Note

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. That’s how the song goes. It does not go, In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with the Patent Office and the Word could only be afforded by God. In the early days, for a brief moment, the wealthiest of studios and directors—and of course, governments—could afford the exorbitant fees demanded by Edison and his descendants for the use and exhibition of films. For a dim, glimmering moment, the great epics of Worley and Dufresne crackled with orchestras and soliloquies. But it did not last.