Contents
  1. Form
  2. The Baggot continuation
  3. Stars' carving
  4. Lower Lair / Essential Tremor
  5. Jerry and the obsolete job
  6. The gimmick
  7. Los Angeles underneath Los Angeles
  8. Connections
  9. Publication
  10. Structure and contents

Form

The work refuses to choose a container. It introduces itself as a play, co-operative side-scrolling video game, mixed-media art installation or criminal confession for A and B, then tells the reader: β€œYou are both of them.” Its preface simultaneously complains that contemporary distribution is broken and asks the reader to pass the work around.

The Baggot continuation

The opening repeats a sentence from Jumbo Dumbsludge / NEVER FORGET exactly: β€œAll of this has happened many times before.” More importantly, it takes that work's central historical irritantβ€”King Baggotβ€”and moves him from screen research into physical Los Angeles.

A and B walk Hollywood Boulevard. One prides himself on remembering everything he sees, hears and reads, yet cannot remember Baggot. When the pair reach Baggot's star, both insist that it looks too new and was not there before.

Stars' carving

Instead of researching harder, they decide to attack the evidence. They return around 3 A.M. with tools and cut the Walk of Fame star out of the pavement. The act literalizes a recurring JQD move: when the representation and lived reality disagree, test the representation materially.

The star is hollow. A ladder descends from beneath it.

Lower Lair / Essential Tremor

Below Hollywood Boulevard, A and B meet a theatrical β€œKing Baggot” who behaves like silent-film prestige, Satan, a lounge act and a disaster-movie villain forced into the same body. He claims dominion over earthquakes and uses a trident to produce seismic events, announcing cities and magnitudes with vaudevillian flourish.

The first story's impossible publicity language returns as occult stage branding. β€œMost Photographed Man” has become a supervillain credential.

Jerry and the obsolete job

Then the costume opens. The supposed Baggot is Pseudobaggot: Gerald / Jerry, formerly a music-video editor living in a rent-controlled Las Palmas apartment. When paid music-television editing work dried up, he β€œgot this bright idea to just Make Up a Guy.”

This is one of the corpus's cleaner jokes about defunction and refunction. A disappearing media economy produces not retraining but mythology. Obsolete labor becomes a demon. An old celebrity name becomes intellectual property acquired by squatting.

The gimmick

Jerry has spent years under Hollywood Boulevard and maintains another fake-grave setup around Whittier Boulevard, where a different prop produces floods. Tired of the work, he asks A and B to take over. They refuse to inherit the deaths required by the role.

B breaks the earthquake trident. It snaps β€œlike any other gimmick.” That one phrase locks the story back to professional wrestling: the occult instrument, criminal apparatus, stage prop and performed identity are all the same thing until someone tests them.

Los Angeles underneath Los Angeles

The geography is not incidental. Hollywood Boulevard, Las Palmas, Whittier Boulevard, Northridge, Simi Valley and β€œEast LA” all become parts of the apparatus. The story turns Los Angeles's actual surfacesβ€”stars, streets, rent control, media employment and earthquake consciousnessβ€”into trapdoors for a second civic reality.

See Hollywood, Los Angeles, Los Angeles & Civic Life and Parallel Toponymy for neighboring geographic mechanisms.

Connections

King Baggot Β· Baggot Brain Β· Wrestling / Kayfabe Β· Reality / Deception Β· Work / Value Β· Productive Refusal Β· Forms & Disguises Β· Instruction as Form.

Structure and contents

Publication footprint: approximately 1,924 words Β· 5 image elements Β· 2 embedded-media elements Β· 14 distinct heading markers.

Visible structural markers

  • Satellite data reveal anomalies up to 19 days before 2023 Turkey earthquake
  • A mysterious YouTube video ( I have no involvement with this and it appears that David Lynch may be playing an elaborate prank on me ) uploaded by user β€˜ Horacio the Handsnake ’ that currently has five views:
  • β–ˆβ€Alternate realities are the future if not the present.”
  • [title card drop]
  • NEW WESTERN π”Έβ„π•‹π•Š & 𝔸𝕋 H𝕃𝔼𝕋𝕀Cπ•Š
  • SAURIAN SKIES KINO (sα΄€/α΄›α΄ )
  • ego def/ILLUSION
  • aka
  • β€œ The Most Photographed Man in the World . . .
  • The Face You See in the Moon. ”
  • (did you feel it?)
  • (you know her)
  • β€œWhittier Boulevard baby.”
  • CMD XI.

Named material with encyclopedia nodes

James Quentin Devine Β· ego def/ILLUSION Β· Pseudobaggot Β· King Baggot Β· Hollywood

References linked directly from the publication

Archetype lens

The continuation literalizes substitution through Pseudobaggot and also assigns the reader both roles in its two-character apparatus. See Double / Mask / Avatar and Reader / Player.

Disturbance profile

sacred / profane

This profile marks formal pressure points rather than moral positions. Context matters: hits may come from narration, dialogue, quotation, parody, self-description or fictional documents. See Transgression & Disturbance.

Publication

Published 2024-06-17. Read the original publication β†—