TRI-STAN: I SOLD SISSEE NAR TO ECKO
The fuzzy Hensonian epiclete Ovid the Obtuse, syndicated chronicler of trans-human entertainment exchange in low-cost organs across the land, mythologizes the origins of the ghostly double that always shadows human figures on UHF broadcast bands thus:
There moved & shook, Before Cable, a wise & clever programming executive named Agon M. Nar. This Agon M. Nar was revered throughout medieval California’s fluorescent basin for the clever wisdom & cojones with which he presided over Recombinant Programming for the Telephemus Studios division of Tri-Stan Entertainment Unltd. Agon M. Nar’s programming archē was the metastasis of originality. He could shuffle & recombine proven entertainment formulae that allowed the muse of Familiarity to appear cross-dressed as Innovation. Agon M. Nar was also a devoted family man. & so it came to pass that, as his Brady Bunch & All in the Family flourished & begat Family Ties & Diff’rent Strokes & Gimme a Break & Who’s the Boss?, from whose brows, hydra-like, sprang Webster & Mr. Belvedere & Growing Pains & Married…With Children & Life Goes On & the mythic Cosby, all with ads infinitum, Agon M. Nar in private family life did beget three semi-independent vehicles, daughters, maidens, Leigh & Coleptic & Sissee, who did then grow & thrive like kudzu among the fluorescent basin’s palms & malls & beaches & temples.
So favored was Agon M. Nar, industry legend had it, by company CEOs Stanley, Stanley & Stanley, as well as by Stasis, God of Passive Reception himself, & too so blest with savvy, that by the time his three lovely maidens—whom he now saw & adored every third weekend—had undergone their first Surgical Enhancements, Agon M. Nar had actually vanquished the esurient, heavy-hitting & high-profile Reggie Ecko of Venice as Recombinant Head of all Tri-Stan, R. Ecko of V. falling then gently back to the basin’s pastel earth, deposed & just royally pissed, under a parachute’s aegis of golden silk.
& Agon M. Nar administered Tri-Stan Entertainment’s affairs wisely & cleverly indeed; &, as is recorded, recombinations of derivations of ripoffs of spin-offs of pale imitations came to dominate & soothe the formerly chaotic MHz, Before Cable.
& while recombination as ēthos metastasized, soothed, & remunerated across the pink-orange landscape of medieval CA, Agon M. Nar’s unattested daughters blossomed into nymphetitude. Ever farsighted, Agon M. Nar wisely provided for monthly tribute to the fluorescent basin’s God of Surgical Enhancement, the spherically crispate & sartorially retrograde but plasticly facile Herm (‘Afro’) Deight MD, he of the plaid bellbottoms & lavender smock; & H.(‘A.’)D.MD, G. of S.E., well pleased at such tribute, fashioned Agon M. Nar’s daughters into nymphets far, far lovelier than the stony vicissitudes of Nature would have provided solo. Nature was a bit honked off over this, but she had more than enough on her plate in medieval CA already. Anyway, Leigh & Coleptic Nar eventually blossomed into USC cheerleaders, post-vestal attendants at the Saturday temple of the padded gods Ra & Sisboomba; on their subsequent careers Ovid the Obtuse is mute.
But it was Agon M. Nar’s youngest daughter, his Baby, his Love-Dumpling, his Little Princess—viz. Sissee, the Nar family’s lone aspiring thespian, haunter of casting calls for commercials & daytime serials—who did become Herm (‘Afro’) Deight the Enhancement technēcian’s favorite & Personal Project; & after much non-HMO tribute, plus rituals & procedures so grisly as to compel lyric restraint, the eventually nearly 100%-Enhanced Sissee Nar so like totally surpassed her acrobatic sisters & all the fluorescent basin’s other maidens that she seemed, according to Varietae, ‘…a very goddess consorting with mortals.’
& she consorted a lot. For as word of her trans-human charms spread throughout the basins & ranges & interior wastes of medieval CA, bronzed men with cleft chins & rigid hair from as far away as the Land of Huge Red Pines journeyed in loud & extraordinarily phallic chariots to gaze upon Sissee Nar’s spandextral form with wonder & glandular excitement, & to consort. The tragic historian Dirk of Fresno records that so vertiginously protrusive was Sissee Nar’s bust that she needed aid to recline, so juttingly sepulchral her cheekbones that she cast predatory shadows & had to do doorways in profile, & so perfectly otherworldly her teeth & tan that the BC demiurges Carie & Erythema, mortally affronted & blasphemed, entered an appeal for aesthetic justice (specific appeal: for a nasty attack of comedones & gingivitic recession) to Stasis—i.e. yes the Stasis, Overlord of San Fernandus, Board-Chair ex off of Tri-Stan’s parent, the Sturm & Drang Family of Exceptionally Fine Companies; Stasis as in summum solo, Olympic Overseer, God of Passive Reception & all-around Big Mythopoeic Cheese. Carie & Erythema’s case never even made it onto the Olympian docket, though; for Stasis, G. of P.R., had himself personally gazed down upon & admired Ms. Sissee Nar, & from his home-entertainment module kept distant video tabs on the riveting maiden at all times via the state-of-the-art hand-held technai of his foam-winged factota, Nike & Fila (who split shifts).
It’s right around here that Ovid the O. tone-shifts to Lament. For alas, the God Stasis’s immortal S.O., the basin’s Queen Goddess, Codependae, was seriously ill pleased that Stasis spent more quality time admiring Sissee Nar’s camcorded image from the vantage of his module’s exercycle than he spent even bothering to deny his infatuation with the much-Enhanced maiden to Codep. over the Olympian couple’s oat-intensive breakfast. Stasis’s denial was Codependae’s ambrosia, & she found its absence inappropriate & irksome in the extremus. & plus then when she came out of the sauna & found the Reception-God on his cellular pricing swan-costume rentals—well, this was understandably impossible to detach from; & Codependae vowed retaliation against this mortal & undulant strumpet before her entire Support Group. The horn-mad Queen began teleconferencing with the affronted demiurges Carie & Erythema, plus had her administrative assistant contact Nature’s administrative assistant & set up a brunch meeting; & Codep. basically got all these transmortals, their self-esteem compromised by Sissee Nar’s Enhanced & Passively Received charms, to declare a covert action against Sissee & her much-favored father, Agon M. Nar of Tri-Stan Unltd. Having three divinities plus Nature all honked off at you at once is just not good karma at all, but mortally naive Sissee & workaholic Agon M. ignored sudden sharp increases in their insurance premia & went about their business of moving & shaking & recombining & undergoing Enhancement & auditioning & consorting & avoiding anything in the way of autoreflection more or less as usual. I.e. they were blithe.
It soon came to pass that Codependae & Co., after much interface, settled on a vengeance vehicle. This was the Telephemically dethroned, parachuted, & highly vengeance-oriented Reggie Ecko of Venice, who’d suffered a massive self-esteem-displacement & had sold his house & tank of pedigreed carp & moved into a freebase fleabag in an infamous Venetian residency hotel known along the boardwalk as The Temple of Very Short Prayers, & was now spending all his time & contract settlement hitting the alkaloid pipe & drinking Crown Royal right out of the velvet bag & throwing darts at 8 × 10s of Agon M. Nar & watching incredibly massive amounts of late-night syndicated television, gnashing his increasingly discolored teeth &, like, totally embittered. A covertly active strategy went into effect. While the demiurge Erythema began to appear to Reggie Ecko in the mortal guise of Robert Vaughan hosting Hair Loss Update every night from 4 to 5 A.M. on Channel 13, & to work on him, Codependae herself began work on the heart, mind, & cojones of Agon M. Nar, insinuating herself into his 4–5 A.M. REM-stage as the Cerberian image of Tri-Stan’s three CEO Stanleys, ancient entertainment-kabalists who never left their video center & shared but a single large-screen CCTV monitor & remote between them. Under Codependae’s direction their images began to kibbitz at Nar’s psyche, & to Foretell. There are at this point long, long Ovidian lyrics about the vengeful Goddess’s CEO-mediated siren-songs to the oneirically impressionable A.M.N….so long in fact that Ovid’s copyed at a certain glossy organ ended up deleting major portions of the epiclete’s SIREN.SNG file. The thrust of what’s stetted, however, is that Cod.’s covert plan begins, alas, to unfold with all the dark logic of a genuine entertainment-market inspiration.
This inspiration—the thesis Nar thought was his own, mortally, on awakening—appeared as inevitable as his Enhanced Love-Dumpling daughter’s own part in it. Now, Telephemus Studios & Tri-Stan Entertainment, consulting the cassocked vestals at the Oracle of Nielsen, God of Life Itself, were much vexed by the nascent spread of Cable Television & the geometric expansion of grainy syndication’s eternal return. Turner & ESP’s Network & Chicago’s Super 9 were then in utero. The industry was abuzz. It was said that Stasis Himself had personally placed shiny TelSat appliances in the star-chocked sky, with a per-use fee structure. It’s now 4–5 A.M. O verily must Tri-Stan get its foot in the door of Cable’s ground floor while there is still time, sings the three-headed siren; & Agon M. Nar, asleep & nystagmic, can feel the epiphanicity of what the three S.’s Foretell, the best of both possible worlds: no Sermonette, no Indian crying at litter, no anthem or flags or sign-off at the Close of the Broadcast Day, no Close of the Broadcast Day at all: instead, a 24-hr low-overhead loop of something so very archaic as to appear forward-looking, & not on any ‘cable’ but on & in the very air. The siren sings to Nar of oracular foresight, making the pitch with charts & pointer: Cable offers nothing new or improved & dies on the vine as hyperborean MHz TV expands to even the weeest of wee hours via black-and-white recycling. & not just recycled Hazel or I Married Joan, no, the callid & thrice-disguised C. did sing of the Ultimate Rerun, 100% echo: myth, classic & Classical myth: rich, ambiguous, archetypal, cosmological, polyvalent, susceptible of neverending renewal, ever fresh. The high-alto dreamsong was complex & mostly C#. Covert seeds were thus sowed by A.M.N.’s nightshade: a moebioid ticker-like loop that became its own REM mantra: ENDYMION PYRAMUS PHAETON MARPESSA EURYDICE LINUS THOR ESHU POLLUX THISBE BAAL EUROPA NIEBELUNGEN PSYCHE DEMETER ASMODEUS ENDYMION WALKüRE PYRAMUS ETCETERA.
Awakening thus in fugues & paroxysms, Agon M. Nar did thereupon consult mediated Oracles, offer leveraged tribute to images of Nielsen & Stasis, & sacrifice two whole humidors of Davidoff 9'' Deluxes upon the offering-pyre of Emmē, Winged Goddess of Victory. There was much market research. Finally, journeying personally to the uniscreened video center of Stan 1–3 & (aided by charts & pointer) pitching his epiphany to the big boys, Agon M. Nar found Tri-Stan & S.&D.’s Executive ICOP well pleased. Codependae kept intercepting emergency calls to Stasis’s pager.
& so it came to pass that, on the same week Sissee Nar’s nose was Enhanced into eternal aquilinity, Nar & Tri-Stan’s much-ballyhooed Satyr-Nymph Network was born & licensed for analog broadcast. In brief, S-NN comprised an ingeniously simple 24-hr low-overhead loop of mythopoeia mined at 10￠/$1 from the loded stockrooms of the BBC’s toga’d & grape-leafy mythophilic period 1961–7. Here the prefeminist epiclete Ovid the O. usurps & dithyrambicizes—without credit or tribute—the historian Dirk of Fresno’s account of S-NN’s philosophy, Codependae’s invidious dreamsong, Agon M. Nar’s oneirically inspired bid to launch the greatest kabal network of all BC time—the Satyr-Nymph Network: ‘… basically an ingeniously simple 24-hr interspliced loop of mythopoeia harvested from the gravid stockrooms of the BBC’s antically antique ’60s & targeted at that uneasily neoclassical demographic class that already consumed reruns without even chewing. This lonely & insomniac audience found the invariant sameness of S-NN’s circuit of British b/w mythic skits—serial legends of e.g. Endymion & Pyramus & Phaeton & Baal & Marpessa & surreally cockney Niebelungs—good: reliable, familiar, hypnotic, & delicious as the taste of their own mouths. For Agon M. Nar, this appetite for repetitive echo spelled divine inspiration—in the words of statistical microecon, autogenerative Demand. For not only did S-NN feed at the syndicated trough of viewers’ hunger for familiarity, but the familiarity fed the mythopoeia that fed the market: double-blind polls revealed that in a nation whose great informing myth is that it has no great informing myth, familiarity equaled timelessness, omniscience, immortality, a spark of the vicarious Divine.
‘… that A.M.N., when deep asleep, heeding the song of a jaundiced Goddess with three gray heads & one Curtis Mathes remote, began actually to believe he could explain the very nation on whose left shoulder he moved & shook. There existed today, the three sham-Stans sang, an untapped national market for myth. History was dead. Linearity was a cul de sac. Novelty was old news. The national I was now about flux & eternal return. Difference in sameness. “Creativity”—see for instance Nar’s recombinant own—now lay in the manipulation of received themes. & soon, the C# siren Foretold, this would itself be acknowledged, this apotheosis of static flux, & be itself put to the cynical use of just what it acknowledged, like a funnel that falls through itself. “Soon, myths about myths” was the sirens’ prophecy & long-range proposal. TV shows about TV shows. Polls about the reliability of surveys. Soon, perhaps, respected & glossy high-art organs might even start inviting smartass little ironists to contemporize & miscegenate BC mythos; & all this pop irony would put a happy-face mask on a nation’s terrible shamefaced hunger & need: translation, genuine information, would be allowed to lie, hidden & nourishing, inside the wooden belly of parodic camp.
‘I.e., the Medium would handle the Message’s P.R.
‘& for the wise & clever Agon M. Nar, it had already begun. This process. For of course Codependae was doing to Agon M. Nar what Agon M. Nar’s S-NN would do to the fluorescent BC market, viz. convincing him that those most bivalent of pharmaka, double-edged gifts so terribly precious & so heavy on the heart that a thousand sleepless weeping years couldn’t even start to make good their price… persuading A.M.N. & USA that the unearnable gifts of inspiration were naught but the products of his own mortal genius, through recombination. Agon M. Nar was invited, in unseen short, to imitate a God. To re-present history. To let’s say for instance combine the fall of Lucifer & the ascension of Aepytus into a Dynasty-type parable about the patricide of Cronos. Oprah as Isis, Sigurd as JFK. & all in fun, is the thing. Keep it light, self-mocking, Codependae sings in Nar’s tri-Stanley’d dreamvoice. Let the heroes tell their “own story,” & their confabulation of myth with fact & Classical with post-Enlightened will reveal meaning & compel market-share. & there can be young upscale ads infinitum, hip paeans to Bacchus & Helen & ultrabuff Thor. & the revenues from the campy old BBC loops can then be plowed back into deliberately cheap & stagy S-NN/Telephemic myth-reproductions, which “original” remakes can then themselves be run over & over, really late at night, say from 4 to 5 A.M., laser-aimed at those sleepless pre-Cable repetiphiles who can’t but get stoned just watching.
“That is to say,” the covert Codependae spells it out behind A.M. Nar’s multichart pitch to the three ancient Stanleys whose guise she’d used to dybbuk Nar in the first place, composing thus her own insidious loop, unseen, “that S-NN will purvey myth & compel -share by purveying myth about the transmogrification of ‘timeless’ myth into contemporary campimage. A whole new kind of ritual narrative, neither Old Comic nor New Tragic—the sit-trag. Pure Legend: about itself, legend, theft, repetition, eternal return, self-regeneration as loss as self-regeneration. A kind of cosmic outtake, Gods flubbing lines, cracking up, mugging at cameras.” Etcetera.’
All this according to Dirk of Fresno.
& the Satyr-Nymph Network came to be, is the rub. Three palsied liver-spotted thumbs were raised before resuming the eternal struggle for the Stans’ one remote. S-NN was run up the E-M flagpole. & lo. Sine production costs or satellitic overhead but very much cum an Olympian advertising budget, S-NN kicked much 24-hr ass. The BBC’s resuscitated situation-tragedies were instant syndication classics on the order of Rascals & Caesar/Coca. Obscure BBC contract players from the R.S.C.’s minor leagues, now well into their thespian senescence, enjoyed cult followings & sudden endorsement cachet. A muffler company put a toothless cockney Midas under lifetime contract & so did prosper; a bald & trifocal’d Samson did health-club spots; etc. Everyone was winning. TriStan became an even more proud member of the Sturm & Drang Family of E.F.C.’s; Agon M. Nar received an honorary Emmē & was wisely & cleverly humble about it; Sissee Nar continued to Enhance, tan, aerobicize, flourish, & consort; Reggie Ecko of Venice bounced in & out of detox facilities, returning ever to his high-N pipe & velvet Crown & Temple of Very Short Prayers & Trinitron to await, via the hirsutely groomed Robert Vaughan, the transformation of his benthic ire into narrative meaning.
At about this point Codependae & Carie & Erythema sat back to watch Nature, incited further by the brunch-rhetoric of Codep., take her place at the retributive helm.
Alas, we no longer get to say ‘alas’ with a straight face, but ‘alas’ used, according to legend, to be what you said in great stoic sorrow over tragedies ineluctable, over the blackly implacable telos of Nature’s flawed unfolding. So alas: for given Sissee Nar’s Deighted pulchritude & her modest, mirror-denying grace under technical beauty’s great pressure, & given her own prescient father’s position & prestige & marketing vision, plus his devotion to his Little Princess (not to mention his twin investments in both the Satyr-Nymph Network & the aesthetic technē of Herm (‘A.’) D. MD), it was both naturally & tragically ineluctable that one Sissee Nar, aspiring thespian, would, before two Nielsenial Sweeps had marked the seasons’ circuit, audition & screen-test & survive two callbacks for & yes finally land a starring role in the very first ever original S-NN/Tri-Stan mythic reproduction. This was a recombinant update of Endymion, one of the most popular of the stagy old BBC sandal-fests. The reproduction, Beach Blanket Endymion, not only came in under its shoe-string budget, but its prime-time debut nearly threatened the slot-supremacy of NBC’s roughly eighty, a thirtysomething knockoff about flappers & hepcats struggling to find both themselves & sustained continence in a modern nursing-care context.
& both Focus Groups & mail confirmed it: Ms. Sissee Nar, in the SNN original repro, was a phenom. It was, yes, nonpositive that she could not act, & that her unEnhanceable voice was like nails on a slate. But these flaws were not fatal. For Sissee Nar’s title role, opposite the contemporary logos-legend Vanna of the White Hands as the lunar Selene in this somewhat Sapphic redux of a well-known minimyth, called only for catatonia. Sissee turned out to be a natural. Forever asleep on Mt. Latmus’s rather incongruous beach, she had only to lie there, cross-dressed, Enhanced, & immortally desirable; her antinatural beauty was enough. She was poetry in stasis. Despite a slight tendency toward palpebral twitching, her closed eyes had a magic. Long-jaded viewers were rapt, Vanna’s show stolen, critics indulgent, & sponsors all but manic. Stasis even taped the thing, up at home. Sissee Nar got a Guide cover & a Varietae profile. She became, as B.B.E. ran like clockwork every 23 hrs, a high-RF light in the small-screen firmament, albeit somewhat typecast: for Tri-Stan’s F.G.-respondents did attest with one voice that they loved Sissee for, not despite, her eerie enactment of the vegetative state. Her morphean passivity touched a chivalric nerve, apparently. A market for large-r Romance. Classic-minded viewers yearned for a maiden comatose, gloriously unconscious—for who is yet more remote & unattainable & thus desirable than the oblivious? Dirk of Fresno’s own editorial here is that there seems to be something death-tending at the very heart of all Romance (‘… that every love story is also [a] ghost story…’) & that Sissee Nar’s voluptuous recumbency spoke to this black thanaticism in the contemporary erotic Geist. Whatever the source of Sissee’s unconscious allure, the industry found it good, & thus recombinable. An ‘original’ S-NN reshuffling of the Norse myth of Siegfried, with Sissee as a narcoleptic Brynhild, was rushed into reproduction. Dyspeptic men in worsted blends journeyed far by air to feel both Nars out re merchandising tie-ins, for the Official Sissee Nar Doll—gloriously devoid of all function—seemed a Natural.
Safe to say that even the wise, clever, worldly & level-headed Agon M. Nar was extremely well pleased.
Alas, too well pleased. For prominent among the rapt red-eyed faithful who tuned in to watch Sissee as Endymion lie there desirably couchant as Selene ministered Sapphically to h/her over & over & over in the weeest of broadcast hours was the vexed & malevolent Reggie Ecko of Venice, late of Tri-Stan & Recombinant eparchy, more recently of obscurity & the B. Ford Clinic, & even more recently of the Erythemic Robert Vaughan’s sibylant & Iagian late-night campaign. Erythema’s visitations had gotten progressively more effective: after many liters & quarterounces & very short prayers over glass pipe & flame, diplomatic relations between R. Ecko & reality had pretty much broken down. & it so happened to be on the early morning of his pharmacological sanity’s tether’s frayed & final end, alas, that Ecko first laid eyes on Sissee Nar’s androsupine performance in S-NN’s Beach Blanket Endymion, the self-same hour of which saw also Nature & Codependae, cross-dressed & adhesively whiskered, now insinuate themselves into his cloacal room as respectively a Domino’s deliveryman & an assertive associate of a certain chemical creditor known only as ‘Javier J.’…& as the littoral Endymion so gloriously failed to unfold they began to work on his psyche in earnest—as too, oblivious, did Sissee Nar, there on the Trinitron’s screen.
Both Ovid the Obtuse & his usually reliable Hollinshed D. of F. leave obscure the dramatic question whether Ecko of Venice fell addled head over snakeskin heels in Romantic love with the comatose 2-D image of Sissee Nar because of the parthenopic blandishments of N. & C., or because of the Dionysian febrility associated with chronic ingestion of C17H21NO4, or because he was just plain addled & at tether’s end, or whether it was because the formerly high-profile Reggie Ecko had fallen into corporate invisibility & saw in Sissee Nar the apotheosis of commercial image; or whether on the other hand it was just one of those large-r Romantic love-at-initial-reception things, the stuff of chivalric myth, the Tristian/Lancelotian f*ck-it-all plunge, the Sicilian thunderbolt, the Wagnerian Liebestod. It does not much matter. What matters, alas, is what this eros wrought.
Malignly serenaded by Vaughan, Domino’s, & Latin creditor, plus of course no stranger to obsession since his corporate displacement & Lucifer-like fall into what had started as mere recreation, R. Ecko of Venice was ripe for metamorphosis into that most dread of the fluorescent basin’s BC monsters: the lunatic stalker-type fan. What little psyche did remain to him was in a twinkling consumed & possessed by the image of what he saw lying there passive on Latmus before him. He began to live all & only for the reappearance of Beach Blanket Endymion every morning at 4–5 PT, at the same time that he began to see the cathode screen itself as the dimensional barrier that prevented his 3-D union with Sissee Nar’s much-Enhanced 2-D image. He kept breaking his Sony in rages & then running out to buy another. Your standard lunatic love-hate thing. He wrote creepy unpunctuated letters to S-NN & Tri-Stan (red crayon), made supplicating/belligerent calls. The creepy letters he even more creepily signed ‘Your Act?on The Huntsman.’ He used his alkaloid plenty to lure & debrief those young Adoni with whom S. Nar’d consorted on her path to recombinant stardom. Plus he began keeping the rambling clinical diary expected of your classic stalker-type fan. In it he represents himself as an Errant Knight displaced from his proper place & time & embarked on your basic daemonic love-quest of chivalric Yore, yet also tormented by his post-Romantic awareness of the quest’s chimeracity: he knew full well his trans-dimensional love to be daemonic, unreal, puerile, compensatory, Wertherian—i.e. ‘about FICTION not FRICTION’ in his vulgate phrase—but he was helpless, driven, possessed, as if impotioned, & for this bewitchment he did blame both Nars, pater et filia duae: they had created, for him, in the Sissee of B.B.E., the Ultimate Erotic Object of the contemporary industry: ideally proportioned, aesthetically flawless, sartorially hermaphroditic, rapturously passive, &, most bewitching yet, in every way 2-D, dimensionally unattainable, ergo a blank screen for the agelessly projected fantasies of every man with a red car & shades & a ’tude behind which bulged a heart just starving to be allowed to buy w/o reservation into what it was far too late anymore to truly believe in. Reggie wrote that he’d hear, watching, Sissee sing, hear a waxproof C# threnody as her buxom shepherd lay moon-caressed in the fulgence of a cathode pulse. More bedazzlement—he knew her part to be silent but felt her unmoving ventriloquent lips to be moving in song, for R.E. of the Temple of V.S.P. alone; & only because he wanted it so. (Ovid takes a rhetorical moment to ponder: was this musical interface Erythemically inspired? Codependaent? Unreal? No matter?) Reggie Ecko records singing phogistic duets with the comatose TV image, &, with that flaccid figure, reaching the sorts of unimaginable passion-heights one reaches only with dolls & dreams—dreams of the unattainably-dead-in-life. Malignant divinities or no, Ecko’s was a flameout of the most classically Romantic sort: the agony of Sissee Nar’s unattainability was in him a fisher that netted all other pains & frustrations & vexations & terrors in his wine-dark psyche & presented the haul in one unendurable anamnetic load, capsizing him. & so Ecko freebased heart-bursting amounts of product & composed creepy Crayola poems & communed with C. & Co. & through their assuasions bought wholly into this whole trite & trendy medieval CA codependent-inner-child-dysfunctionality deal, this men-who-love-too-much-not-wisely-type thanaphiliacal thing where he believed not only that the passive 2-D Sissee Nar was the timeless & ideal object of his deepest longings but that this love was by nature unconsummatable in the merciless daylight of 3-D reality. (LA-area Alanon, by the by, would diagnose this a lethal combination of Grandiosity & the Pity Pot.)
… Ovid’s point finally being that Ecko of Venice & the T.V.S.P. decides that he can ‘attain’ Sissee Nar only in the unionized melt that is death’s good night. Both Robert Vaughan & the high-alto sirens affirm this decision as meet & good (Codependae calling him ‘esse’).
Codependae then elects to afflict Agon M. Nar with the following dream. A.M.N.’s Pac 10 daughters Leigh & Coleptic are being held hostage by some extremely serious militant CA Hispanics who threaten to hang them by their own lustrous locks if Nar doesn’t complete the single telemarketing labor they demand: he is to find a hypnotic avatar of the ancient-Greek Narcissus & air him, i.e. broadcast his irresistible image over & over, in order to entrance the Anglos of medieval CA into the glazed narcosis that will make them easy pickings for lean hungry barbarians from the Latin south. Their voices on Nar’s cellular are highalto. Agon M. goes as usual to seek counsel at Tri-Stan’s videonic HQ, but the three antique Stans can’t concentrate on his trouble: they have only one of everything among them, & when two or more of them have to visit the exec washroom at the same time there’s always a hell of a row about time & trade, & A. Nar, in that aphasiac frustration so common to nightmares, can’t make himself heard through the Empedoclean squabble over porcelain & part. Finally a mysterious pockmarked Hispanic custodian does that psst thing from the doorway—without context or explanation, he informs Nar that he has consulted the Oracle of Stasis & that the ortolan-entrails have Foretold that Agon M. Nar will never be able in time to find a qualified male Narcissus II (no modern man, even in the much-Enhanced fluorescent basin, being divine-looking enough to hold the rapt gaze of demographic millions), but that a bona fide female Narcissus-grade object will, ironically, be found by Nar no farther away than his own neocolonial home’s bassinet or the cover of last week’s Guide: yes his Love-Dumpling, esse, his Leettle Preenciss, who will, however, the custodian says the $88.95 entrails Foretell in no uncertain terms, herself prove to be the cause of Nar’s own personal doom—vanishing then with an eerie & not all that Hispanic or even masculine laugh. Nevertheless, properly freaked by the prophecy, the still-dreaming Nar (yes this is all still in the dream, on which Codependae has spared no effort or expense) the still-dreaming A.M.N. remands Sissee’s new Norse reproduction to the purgatory of a permanent 4–5 A.M. slot, when even 24-hr-loop demographics are grim. Yet fatalistically alas, for this weeest-hour slot is also the slot when all the really seriously insomniac drug freaks & neurasthenics & flameouts & lunatic stalker-type S-NN fans tune faithfully in; & no fewer than about 400 different lunatic stalkertype fans start stalking his narcoBrynhildic baby, sometimes actually bumping into one another in mid-stalk outside Sissee’s S-NN dressing room; & but eventually in the dream one of the stalkers finally accomplishes his mission, & she dies in a hail of laser-scoped semiautomatic gas-tipped bullets; & even though in the dream’s remainder Agon M. Nar himself doesn’t get killed off (so the carbuncular custodian’s prophecy isn’t fulfilled within the dream itself) A.M.N. feels so horrible & benighted by REM-cycle’s end that he’s pretty sure when he wakes up at 5 A.M. that if the dream’s epilogue hadn’t been preempted by his Hispanic houseboy’s gentle prod Nar would also have bought it just from sheer Laiusian grief & guilt.
The point being that Agon M. Nar is colossally frightened & upset by the dream (BC programming executives tending to place great importance on oneiromancy), & he immediately suspends prereproduction on the Siegfried thing & pages Sissee Nar & beseeches her to return to & secret herself in her Venice beach house & keep a very low & window-avoiding profile for a while… which Sissee immediately does, because she’s pretty much passivity in motion & does whatever A.M.N. tells her, & also because she has an extremely small ego from never once having seen herself in a mirror. Except alas, it’s child’s play for the natively Venetian Reggie Ecko—who’s now pawned his Trinitron & bought an AK-47 from an auto-weapon stand right on Dockweiler Beach in Playa del Rey—to find out exactly where the unlisted Sissee lives: her sleeping face is burned into CA’s consciousness, & he has only to flash a glossy 4 × 5 around Venice’s various health clubs & silicon wholesalers to have babes & dudes alike immediately recognize the image as of the unlisted S-NN girl who’s living low-profile just over a certain set of dunes.
& so Reggie Ecko, adorned in finest Alfani & light-denying glasses, & suffering mightily from coke-bugs & general desiderative frenzy, journeys forthwith to Sissee’s off-violet beach house &, after checking all the windows’ drawn shades & repeatedly shaking the sand out of his loafers & ringing the Cyndi Lauper doorchime, booms the door & bursts the pathetically naive safety-chain, & Sissee’s in there innocently passing the time with Walkman & a Buns of Steel aerobics tape; &, as best forensic authorities could later determine, Ecko—crashing in & seeing Sissee Nar not only upright & awake but in what looked for all the world like vigorous purposive motion—for a brief too-human moment hesitated to open up & actually fire, & Sissee had a moment’s chance to run for her life & escape the fatal stalker-type tribute, except apparently she’d happened to catch a doubled glimpse of herself in the mirrored sunglasses Ecko wore to protect his rheumy Romantic retinae from the horrific light of the 3-D day, & Sissee was apparently just, like, totally transfixed by her own human image, literally frozen by what’s got to have been the revelation of her Enhanced & trans-human charms in the first mirror of any sort she had ever gazed into, & apparently she was standing there so utterly static & passive & affectless w/ shock that Ecko’s heart retumesced with doomed unendurable ur-Romantic C#-aria-type love once more, flooding his ravaged CNS so utterly that he suddenly came to/departed from himself again & ventilated Sissee Nar, liberally, then somehow shot himself not once but three times in the head.
… w/ the tragicomic irony here being that Ecko’s wacko & retrograde Romantic dream of union with Sissee in death turned out to come true. For S. Nar & Ecko were recombinantly joined in just precisely the 2-D world he’d Foreseen as their only possible union. For the syndicated vehicles Donahue! & Entertainment Tonight & its many avatars like Oprah & Geraldo! & A Current Affair & Inside Edition & Unsolved Mysteries & Sally Jessy! & Solved But Still Really Interesting Mysteries paid lavish & repetitive tribute to the now-tragic epic of Sissee Nar’s cometic rise & Reggie Ecko’s fall at the hands of Sissee’s father & the father’s epiphanic & Laiusian dreams & Sissee’s paralysis in the mirror of Ecko’s lenses & high-caliber ventilation & gruesome death with her Walkman still on & urging the first police on the scene to Flex That Fundament & Ecko’s mysterious triballistic suicide & subsequently discovered Crayola diary. & the very most famous Varietae photo of an unconscious Endymionic Sissee & a photo of Reggie Ecko jet-skiing with Ricardo Montalban back when he’d moved & shaken at Tri-Stan’s apex—these two images kept getting juxtaposed on-screen & placed side by side behind the commentators’ variform heads; & the Enquirer even did the job right & spliced the negatives together & claimed they’d been lovers all along, Ecko & Sissee, with a fetish for cross-dressing & watersports…& so fan/lover & star/object really were, in a sort of cynically campy but still contemporarily deep & mythic way, united, melded in death, in 2-D, in tales & on screens.
& then when Ovid the Obtuse’s gregarious Rolfer happened to be discussing his own obsession with the celebrated case one day during a spinogravitational alignment, & saying (the Rolfer was) how it seemed a terribly insensitive & grisly thing to say but that Ecko & Sissee Nar looked, in 2-D juxtaposition, like just the sort of perfectly doomed couple that all good BC Americans of whatever erotic persuasion hear & read & fantasize Romantically about from the age of say Grimms’ Tales on… at this point Ovid the O. got the idea to turn the entire affair into this sort of ironically contemporary & self-conscious but still mythically resonant & highly lyrical entertainment-property. The fact that Agon M. Nar—now so peripetially devastated that he has in public cursed the Gods via Prepared Statement & has ceased all moving/shaking/recombining & has allowed S-NN to be surpassed in the Sweeps by a rank cable imitator, Ted of Atlanta’s Hit or Myth Network—that Nar had had his attorneys tell Ovid the Obtuse that any unauthorized Sissee-lyric would constitute grounds for legal action deterred O. the O. not one iota. Seeking, as his lapidary soliciting abstract put it, to ‘… renew our abiding puzzlement at such suffering,’ Ovid proposed to reconstitute & present the story as a ‘… high-concept miscegenation-of-Romantic-archetypestype metamyth,’ a kind of hottub-swingers’ incest among Tristan & Narcissus & Echo & Isolde; & in the abstract he not only confirmed but did in fact plagiarize Dirk of Fresno’s theory that such were Stasis the P. Reception God’s grief at the demise of his mortal Flavor-of-the-Month & wrath at the lovesick ex-exec who’d 86’d her that he denied Reggie Ecko’s thrice-shot soul the peace of any sort of Underworld visa, that instead Stasis condemned Ecko’s ghost to haunt forever those most ultra of broadcast television’s UHF bandwidths, to abide there annoyingly & imperfectly juxtaposed with all figures & imbricately to overlap & mimic their on-screen movements as an irksome visual echo to help remind impressionable mortals that what we’re transfixed by is artificial & mediated by imperfect technē. (Like we didn’t already know. (Plus reception was nearly perfect on Cable by this time anyway.))
& but one final & epexegetic ‘alas.’ For such proved to be the descantant Ovid’s love for reflecting on his own periphrastic theories about what made Agon M. Nar & Stasis & Codependae & the Satyr-Nymph Network & the popularization of timeless lies resonate aesthetically that he neglected to make any substantive mention of the fact that Sissee Nar had in fact been Skinnerianly raised to fear & avoid & religiously eschew all mirrors, any surface with reflective burnish, her wise & clever but somewhat Behaviorist father fearing that her image’s ever-Enhancing beauty would, seen, render her unattractively narcissistic, stoned on self-love; & Ovid neglected to reveal how the whole reason A.M.N. had chosen a comatose role for Sissee’s debut was so that her eyes could remain demurely shut during shooting & she could be spared any involutant glimpses of herself on monitors or tape, etc.; that if A.M.N.’d maybe let his Enhanced Love-Dumpling have one or two quick mithridatitic glimpses of herself in mirrors—thus letting her glean even some slim bit of an idea what Herm Deight MD’s aesthetic Enhancements had wrought—before at last Ecko of Venice’s reflective shades hove into her unprepared view, she’d not have been so transfixed & shocked by an image which actually she alone in all the fluorescent basin saw in truth as imperfect nay flawed & inadequately Enhanced & like totally gnarlyly mortal, & she might have been able to keep it psychically together enough to run like hell & escape the semiautomatic Wagnerian intentions of the lunatic UHF-ghost-to-be. So Ovid ended up having to stick all this narratively important background in right at the end, pretentiously referring to it as an ‘epexegesis,’ & the Acquiring Editor of the respected glossy organ he’d solicited was ill pleased, & the organ didn’t buy the thing after all, although Ted of Atlanta’s cable H.O.M.N. bought the rights to Ovid’s overall concept for one of those ‘Remembering Sissee’–type tribute-specials that lets you use a whole lot of public-domain footage over & over again under the rubric of Encomium; & even though ‘Remembering Sissee’ didn’t actually ever make it onto the wire (Hit or Myth was by then processing 660 myth-recombination concepts per diem), its Option Payment to Ovid was far from dishonoring, & between that & the respected glossy organ’s Kill Fee Ovid the Obtuse ended up making out okay on the whole thing; don’t you worry about Ovid.