#110: The Criminality Clinic

The van raced down empty Second Avenue under a succession of street lamps illuminating nothing at this hour. We came to Cass Park at the foot of the avenue and made a sharp left in front of Masonic Temple. Turning right down Cass, we crossed the Fisher Freeway toward Downtown.
        “You’re actually going to try to take extralegally procured prisoners across the border to Canada?” I asked. “I’d like to see how you’ll manage that.”

#107: Ms. Megatronica and Ponty Polverizzo

Of all the Hypothetic jargon and fantastic visionary concepts swirling around in my head, not to mention the actually disorienting experiences I’d experienced over the preceding several months, something about the comic book story Chase Bradford had created stuck in my head. It was his name for the villains in the title of his story: “Ms. Megatronica vs. the Garnookian Butt Worms of Rott.” It reminded me of something I had read somewhere, but I couldn’t exactly place it at first.

#70: The Once and Future Crime Busters

After our mysterious encounter with our art history professor, we broke off and scattered about the museum to select a painting or statue to write about. I chose a large canvas by Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) entitled Cotopaxi (1862), a large tableaux that filled up an entire gallery wall, or so it seemed to me, featuring a volcano erupting. Smoke billowed up into the stratosphere, creating a blood red sky around a setting sun, with lush, colorful jungles stretching toward you in the foreground. There was even a little South American man and burro on a path watching the whole thing. Ever since school trips in childhood, it had been my favorite painting in the whole museum; I could stand in front of it and have it fill my whole field of vision for hours at a time. I remembered a teacher in grade school telling us it was an allegory for the Civil War that was waging in the American South when it was painted, so I threw that in my paper, although my guess was Professor Joshua bar-Joseph, whom his teaching fellow Michele Selket referred to by the mystical nickname Doctor Messiah, would consider such pedestrian interpretation overly-determined and literal-minded.

#53: I Got the Senior Thesis Blues

I clacked away at my typewriter into the wee hours of the morning. In the background was the Warren Woodward University public radio station, WWWU, humming at a low volume on my cheap clock radio. It was so late, the programming had gone from news to jazz to classical; they were now broadcasting some free-form art rock courtesy of a deejay who was also an editorial contributor to Detroit’s anarcho-primitivist underground newspaper, The Fifth Wheel. The sounds were hypnotically weird, and I was getting bleary-eyed.