#brushfires 2004

[celluloidrainbow]

BRUSHFIRES (2004) dir. Wendy Jo Carlton, Aprill Winney, Ai Lene Chor, Maria Gigante, Laura Lonigro, Amber Mohammad, & Etta Worthington When a shy girl, secretly in love with her rocker-grrl housemate, meets an unbalanced heiress on the run, anything could (and does) happen. (link in title)

[truecrimecrystals]

Silene Eaddy was only 15 years-old when she was brutally murdered during the early morning hours of April 17th, 2004. It was around 5:00 AM when authorities in Richland County, South Carolina were notified about a small brush fire. Columbia fire personnel were sent to the area off Highway 378 near Montgomery Lane and Pincushion Road, where they spotted the fire in a wooded area.

As first responders worked to put out the flames, they noticed the body of a teenage girl was lying facedown in the brush. She had suffered severe trauma to her body. Two days later, it was confirmed that the young victim was Silene. Dental records and a necklace she was wearing helped confirm her identity.

Silene, referred to by friends and family as Erica, had been the victim of a horrific murder. She had been savagely beaten and then set on fire. Medical examiners noted that Silene actually had soot in her lungs at the time of her death, indicating that she was still alive when the fire was lit. It is believed that the fire was set with the purpose of destroying evidence.

Silene was last seen alive by her family members between 7:00 and 7:30 PM on April 15th, 2004. She left her family's home on foot to walk to a neighbor's house around the corner. Silene was known to walk around the area and chat with neighbors, so this did not seem unusual. Silene's family members grew concerned when she did not return, but they initially waited to contact authorities. The teen reportedly had a habit of running away, but she usually returned within a few days.

By the time Silene's mother finally did report file a missing persons' report, her body had already been found. At that point, authorities were still working to identify the girl they had found in the brushfire. When detectives were notified about Silene's disappearance, they immediately suspected that she was the unidentified girl. These suspicions were confirmed shortly thereafter. Silene's case was then shifted into a murder investigation.

[read more]

[rustbeltjessie]

What are your top five memories?

I have been thinking about how to answer this for days. It's a rough question for someone like me who remembers everything. Also, what do you mean by 'top' memories? Happiest memories? Most exciting memories? Memories that have had the most impact on me/that I think about the most?

In any case, I've decided to answer with five memories which I think of quite frequently, with the caveat that if I were to respond on a different day, I might respond differently.

1. December 2002, Philadelphia. A. and I had already checked out of the hotel we’d been staying at for a couple nights, and decided to drive to South Street and get coffees and wander a bit before heading back to Maryland. Only, when we got to her car, she couldn’t find her keys. First we went back to every store and cafe we’d stopped in to see if anyone had found her keys, and no one had, and then she realized...oh shit. She’d accidentally thrown them into a public trash can when throwing out her coffee cup. We searched through some trash cans we thought they might be in, but at that point it had been hours so really we had no idea where they were. We called her mom, cuz her mom had a spare key to her car, but her mom was three hours away and had to work. So we got more coffees, wandered South Street some more, trying to figure out what the fuck we were gonna do; we didn’t have enough money for any hotels that were in walking distance and obviously we couldn’t get into the car to drive elsewhere. And it was cold, windy, slushy streets, December in Philly. Eventually, like, way later, almost night, we ran into a couple of the dudes from Violent Society. They knew A. because she was dating a member of a band they frequently shared a bill with, they bought us coffee and hung with us for a bit and managed to track down an acquaintance who gave us a place to crash for the night, and A.’s mom came to rescue us the next morning.

2. November 2004, Chicago. At the after-party for the premiere of Brushfires, a film inspired by a poem I wrote. Drinking a martini and someone walking up and saying: “Oh. So you’re the poet.”

3. It was October 2007, a couple nights before Hallowmas. I was in NYC staying with my ladyfriend. We had been stumbling drunkenly across the Lower East Side, stopping into bar after bar, searching for a bar we had been to back in February and vowed we’d find again. We didn’t find that bar, but we did come across one that was pretty alright, not too crowded, good deals on drinks, a photobooth in the back & a good jukebox. As we were waiting for our whiskies up at the bar, a fella started talking to me. It was quite obvious from the get-go that he was hitting on me, and I wasn’t interested, but he seemed harmless enough, so I didn’t outright tell him to fuck off. He was skinny, wearing a black leather jacket & black jeans; I guessed he was probably in his mid-40s to early-50s, but his face was worn from years of hard living so it was difficult to tell for sure. He was also very very drunk, drunker than me n’ my girl were, even. He was swaying, slurring his words, drinking his beer straight from the pitcher. And I noticed his boots - they were these fuckin’ fabulous pointed-toe black-leather motorcycle/cowboy boot hybrid things, with chains wrapped around ‘em. My first mistake was saying: Hey man, cool boots. The way he acted when I told him I dug his boots, you’d think I professed undying love or something. We finally managed to shake him for a bit, and I headed over to the juke. I put a couple bucks in, enough for five songs. My second mistake was that one of the songs I played was by The Gun Club. “Sex Beat.” But there’s no way I could have known. When the song came on, and the drunken fella noticed me singing along and realized I played it, he rushed over to our table and started chattering wildly: I can’t believe you played The Gun Club! I’m from L.A., I was part of the punk scene there back then, I knew Jeffrey Lee Pierce and all those guys! (At least that was the gist of it, what I could gather from his slurred, staccato speech.) I mean, I did think it was pretty neat he knew poor old Jeffrey Lee, but I still was not interested in him, and at that point he was getting kind of annoying. So I just sorta nodded and didn’t really engage with him. My girl and I went back to our own conversation, and he just kept standing there. He asked if he could sit down with us, we didn’t answer. He stood there, swaying awkwardly for a few more minutes, then, with no warning, leapt over our table and landed quite gracefully on the bench on the other side. We stared at him, mouths open, too surprised to be pissed off. He leaned back, half-sprawled across the bench, sipped his beer. I do this, he slurred, because I am like a cat.

4. New Orleans. September 2008. I was paying for my purchases at Esoterica Occult Goods, and the phone rang. The witch behind the counter picked it up, said Hello?, then slammed it down. -Three months of hangin’ up on that motherfucker, you think he’d get a clue. How come no one ever believes me when I say I don’t want a boyfriend? -No one ever believes me, either. Or they say they’re okay with it, then… -They’re not.

5. Oakland, early 2011. I was hanging out with R., whom I’d only just met, but already had a crush on and was imagining kissing her, but she interrupted my reverie when we reached the empty house with the orange tree in the front yard. –Oooh, oranges, she said, then, looking down at her feet, I’m too short to reach them. So I, suddenly very glad to be a tall girl, swiped a few oranges off the lowest-hanging branch. –Thanks, she said, smiling again.We were only a few blocks away from my apartment, at that point. We exchanged phone numbers, started discussing tentative future hangouts to make a zine together, to see a show at Gilman. We passed the street next to the one I lived on – Oh my god, Frisbie Street, she said. Before I could say anything, she grabbed my hand and started to sing: We were a mess, bloody and half undressed in the shelter of the shadows of the Frisbie Street creek. A canopy of trees and leaves, with us hidden underneath. I joined in: Time rolls over me. Time rushes over me. Why try to run so fast? It still passes you by.

Plus a bonus number six, because I was just thinking of this recently:

6. Autumn 1998. I was in Vancouver with my parents (after just having had a truly life-defining experience in Seattle, but that’s another story for another time). There was this big meal for lawyers that my dad worked with, and I was there, bored out of my skull, until this very drunk Scottish lawyer pegged me as a ‘hip young person’ and we got to talking about music, and he just went on and on about how much he loved Dire Straits. His poor wife was mortified, and kept saying, dear, please leave her alone. And I want to make it clear here that he was in no way hitting on me, he was just a very drunk Scottish man trying to talk about rocknroll, so his wife’s mortification wasn’t like “stop hitting on the jailbait,” it was purely “please stop being a drunk nerd and bothering this poor teenager.” (For the record, I found him hilarious and charming; though I did not share his extreme love for Dire Straits he was the most fun person at that dinner.)

[bobmccullochny]

February History

February 16   1852 - Studebaker Brothers wagon company was established.

1894 - Gunslinger John Wesley Hardin is pardoned after spending 15 years in a Texas prison for murder. Hardin shot and killed a man just for snoring, by firing through the wall at the sleeping snorer.

1923 - In Thebes, Egypt, English archaeologist Howard Carter entered the sealed burial chamber of the ancient Egyptian ruler King Tutankhamen. He had been looking for King Tut's tomb since his first trip the Egypt in 1891. The outer chambers were discovered in November, 1922.

1959 - Fidel Castro was sworn in as prime minister of Cuba after leading a Communist guerrilla campaign that forced dictator Fulgencio Batista into exile.

1964 - The Beatles appeared in the Ed Sullivan Show for the second time.

1968 - Haleyville, Alabama was the first town to use the 911 emergency number.

1983 - The Ash Wednesday brushfires in Southern Austalia took the lives of 71 people, becoming Australia's worst fire ever.

2005 - The National Hockey League canceled the entire 2004-2005 regular season and playoffs.

[mourningsickness]

Hyde Park's Pet Cemetery

On a gloomy Saturday morning, I braved the spittle of rain and my mounting sleep debt to attend a tour of Hyde Park’s Pet Cemetery. I was late arriving, as usual, and had to run from the station to catch the group, which meets every few months outside the refreshment stand near to Speakers’ Corner. Closed to the public except on these occasions, the cemetery is located in the north-east corner of Hyde Park, backing onto the Bayswater Road. It is secreted behind liquorice-black railings, concealed from full-view of the traffic by the foliage that forms a mesh over its metal bars.

The cemetery itself was the result of a kind of accident. Its inaugural burial took place in 1881, at the request of Mr. and Mrs. J Lewis Barned, two frequent visitors to the park. The gatekeeper, Mr. Winbridge – whose cottage was then attached to the small patch of turf that now forms the burial ground – used to sell them lollypops and ginger beer (Soteriou, 2015). The first plot went to Cherry, their children’s Maltese terrier. The garden at Victoria Lodge was one of the dog’s favourite walking spots and, as a favour to his friends, Winbridge allowed for him to be buried inside. His moss-speckled tombstone, which stands there still, reads: ‘Poor Cherry. Died April 28. 1881’.

Rumour spread like brushfire. Winbridge’s second internment was the Duke of Cambridge’s beloved Yorkshire terrier ‘Prince’, who was (sadly) mangled under the wheels of a moving carriage. The cemetery is full of such tender inscriptions: “To our gentle lovely little Blenheim, Jane – she brought the sunshine into our lives, but she took it away with her”, “My Ba-ba – never forgotten, never replaced”. Winbridge himself was responsible for most of the burials, sewing the bodies of the animals (predominantly dogs, some cats) into calico bags before laying them to rest with his own hands (Soteriou, 2015). Few of the animals’ owners actually attended these internments, for fear of worsening their own distress. Indeed, the cemetery held particular sway with London’s wealthier classes; many of the animals buried there hailed from regal, or military stock. Though its gates closed officially in 1903, the last burial – which took place in 1967 – was that of an ex-regimental mascot.

The cemetery was, it is fair to say, in a state of some disrepair. The headstones were mossy with age, and many of them knocked together, like bad teeth. Some had sunk so far into the hard ground that they appeared almost to be growing from it, like stocky roots. This is, perhaps, to be expected. Given its removal from the public sphere, the need for maintenance is less pressing than in the case of other urban ‘heritage’ sites – such as London's ‘Magnificent Seven’, which counts Nunhead and Old Brompton cemeteries among its number. Though grimy, many of the headstones at Hyde Park were visibly marble, a subtle hint at the graveyard’s former glory. As our guide was quick to point out, this affective custom of the bourgeoisie concealed the more sinister scourge of poverty and destitution that characterised much of Victorian life in London. Opposite the park, in Bayswater, were slums – many of whose (human) inhabitants would have been buried without such niceties, in unmarked paupers’ graves. The cemetery speaks then not only to the weight of affective, and sentimental value invested in pets, but also to a time when pet-keeping was a signifier of intense privilege. For those outside the safe confines of the Victorian leisure classes, they would have been simply an unaffordable luxury.

In her book Precarious Life, Judith Butler offers us the concept of the obituary as the vehicle par excellence for public memorialisation, and the ‘legitimation’ of deaths (Butler, 2004). Paradoxically, she suggests, the obituary functions as a determinant in what kind of lives are valuable. Whether or not a life is grieveable also dictates whether or not it is valuable. Certain forms of life, it turns out, are more grieveable than others. Butler utilises the fraught example of the lives lost (and much “obituarised” on the front page of the New York Times) in 9/11, versus the anonymous, civilian casualties who lost their lives in the Iraq war. Though distant, the cemetery at Hyde Park also brought this notion to mind. What about these delicate companions made them more worthy of commemoration than the vast numbers of poor who lost their lives during that time? Why is it that a visit to a pet cemetery constitutes a ‘quaint’ outing, where a visit to an abattoir would not? Why does there exist no such visual catalogue for the thousands of less-readily individuated species that were lost during the long twentieth century?

The Times, that bastion of media centrism, recently began publishing pet obituaries, sometime in 2016, suggesting that contemporary media enacts a similar function now. Although the Victorian cemetery fell into disrepair through disuse, across the country there now exist dedicated Pet Funeral services, as well as successful working pet cemeteries (among these are facilities in Surrey and East Grinstead, Sussex). Indeed, a 2015 study found that a quarter of British pet owners had ‘either organised funerals for their animals, or would consider doing so’ (Schopen, 2015). Cremation and burial services are already offered by roughly 50 funeral parlours; in excess of 10,000 pet services are conducted each year, including cremations for goldfish, budgies, and mice. We might well ask whether such affairs could be classed as forms of ‘griefsploitation’ – a fresh market for the necro-industrial complex to mine. Though these ceremonies reify and celebrate our love for our pets, this renewed professionalisation also seems at odds with the privatisation of mourning that has taken place across the span of the last century. Recalling the rituals surrounding the death of the small animals of my childhood, I am drawn to stories of ashes scattered in plant-pots and ancient hamsters lovingly buried in shoeboxes in back-gardens, or (for those without the luxury of such spaces) surreptitious areas of public parks.

One aspect of the visit I found particularly bizarre was the discordance between the gesture of affection embodied in each tombstone, and the names of the pets themselves, many of which verged on aggressive, or derogatory to the modern viewer. There were inscriptions bearing terms of endearment – ‘patient and loving to the end’, ‘dearly loved and faithful friend’, ‘a most gentle, a most loving Persian cat’ – nested underneath jagged, monosyllabic names like ‘Scum’, or ‘Smut’. Such ‘punk’ naming felt out of kilter with the wider sentimentalism at work. I was particularly appalled that one gravestone – partially concealed by the scraggly branch of an overhanging tree – appeared to have the N-word etched into it, followed by the birth and death dates of the dog interred within the grave. The sight felt like a violent reminder of the sprawling, and ductile networks of oppression in which Victorian mourners would have been embedded.

Many of the tourists around me were taking photos on their devices, smiling and laughing at the headstones with a sense of childlike wonderment best-described as ‘cooing’. I, too, took photos on my iPhone. Images provide a useful visual jog to the memory; such tours are rare, and I likely won’t return again. As I did so however, I felt ill at ease. There was something vaguely unsettling about the collective glee the cemetery provoked. Its modern-day status as a ‘charming’ spectacle, worthy of capture, felt incompatible with the lived distress of people who buried their pets here, and were too distressed by their loss even to attend. The group (myself included) stood laughingly over the grave of Balu – a dog whose headstone informed us he had been spitefully poisoned ‘by a cruel Swiss’ in 1899. He was singled out by the guide as part of a lighthearted, ‘spot the murder victim’ game. Some tenderness seemed to have been lost in translation here. Was it historical distance that allowed this laughter to enter the frame? Or is there something inherently comical about the prospect of violence committed against the nonhuman by the human? Does a person’s lived experience of suffering expire, or collapse into the stuff of ridicule after a fixed point? If so, who gets to make these kinds of ethical calls? A group of tour-goers, on a bitter Saturday morning?

Increasingly, I felt reminded of the grotesque aspect of our modern relationship with our pets, who seem to be incrementally perceived as source-material for ‘viral’ internet content; whether the innocent videotapes of ‘Animals Do the Funniest Things’, Youtube videos, memes, or thirty-second looped Instagram clips. Despite our care – or perhaps as a facet of it? – we seem to trade in the ridicule of animals, like a gag-reel writ-large. Even in this space supposedly consecrated to their memory, animals retain some affiliation with this ridiculousness. Teasing can be an expression of love. But I wonder if teasing does convey affection in quite the same way, when its object does not have the faculty to tease back. I think of my cat, and his concrete, palpable sense of humiliation when he is laughed at.

Hyde Park’s Pet cemetery is a historically-specific cultural monument, a sign of its time as well as the Victorians’ putative sentimentality, and their pompous, performative affective customs. Showiness aside, it also speaks to a moment in which pets – and their deaths – first began to be taken seriously. The rise of domestic animals saw pets gain not only ‘pet’ names but, with them, a sense of individuality that made them worthy of such commemoration. Even if there remains something spectacular about this space, with its bourgeois intentions, it acts also as a permanent trace of remembrance, an expression of gratitude for the company of creatures whose memories have long-since expired.

Bibliography

Butler, Judith, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004).

Schopen, Fay, 'Lots of people are getting pet funerals. Don’t, it’s a rip-off', Guardian, 14 September 2015<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/14/pet-funerals-rip-off-money> [Accessed 14 February].

Soteriou, Helen, 'Inside Hyde Park's secret pet cemetery', Telegraph, 4 August 2015, <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/Inside-Hyde-Parks-secret-pet-cemetery/> [Accessed 22 February].

[bobmccullochny]

February  History

February 16   1852 - Studebaker Brothers wagon company was established.

1894 - Gunslinger John Wesley Hardin is pardoned after spending 15 years in a Texas prison for murder. Hardin shot and killed a man just for snoring, by firing through the wall at the sleeping snorer.

1923 - In Thebes, Egypt, English archaeologist Howard Carter entered the sealed burial chamber of the ancient Egyptian ruler King Tutankhamen. He had been looking for King Tut's tomb since his first trip the Egypt in 1891. The outer chambers were discovered in November, 1922.

1959 - Fidel Castro was sworn in as prime minister of Cuba after leading a Communist guerrilla campaign that forced dictator Fulgencio Batista into exile.

1964 - The Beatles appeared in the Ed Sullivan Show for the second time.

1968 - Haleyville, Alabama was the first town to use the 911 emergency number.

1983 - The Ash Wednesday brushfires in Southern Austalia took the lives of 71 people, becoming Australia's worst fire ever.

2005 - The National Hockey League canceled the entire 2004-2005 regular season and playoffs.