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<eyebeam><blast> The Fissiaultian Paradigm - Yves & Mia in Exile
The Fissiaultian Paradigm - Yves & Mia in Exile
There have been some inquiries regarding Mia L'amar, wife of
Yves Fissiault, born Myra Learner in Los Angeles in 1925. She was a
Hollywood starlet blacklisted during the McCarthy Era who had a habit of
rewriting her lines in screenplays for the "B" & "C" science fiction
films she starred in during the late 1950's and early 1960's, much to
the annoyance of her directors. She stragetically inserted factual
scientific information into her lines. She felt these interventions were
a creative act, and that industry was an interesting vehicle for
artistic practice. In retrospect, the factual accuracy of her
interventions prove to be uncanny if not oblique.
Thus, in a scene when a space alien, for example, would be shot by a
beam from a cosmic ray-gun, she would interject information on the
physics of cosmic rays as in the movie, "It Came from the Ring Nebula"
(1959)......
"No please, don't shoot that gentle creature from parallel
universe CL49. It's like any being on any
planet.....anywhere.....anywhen....that's trying to make whatever sense
it can out of all the complexities that keep sprouting up all over the
universe, including the fundamental abstract questions that obviously
lurk behind the surface like, "Who are you and why are we here?" Don't
you dare fire that concentrated ray of photons from your wretched
ray-gun with its monstrous force of the concentrated energy of the M87
galaxy whose central "blue jet" is 2,500 light years long, bursting with
the most powerful cosmic rays known whose light arrives 35% polarized in
a unique bluish continuum, something like that of the Crab Nebula
blasted forth by the supernova of AD 1054."
Her line was actually supposed to be, "No, please don't shoot."
This behavior led to skepticism on the part of the Hollywood
power-brokers, as well as on the part of the Hearst newspaper empire who
labeled her as a "subversive". Eventually she was called into court and
accused of being a spy and giving away top-secret classified information
(provided by Fissiault through his employment in the aerospace industry
at Rockedyne Corporation). She was charged with using popular culture as
a vehicle for disseminating classified information which was supposedly
directed toward a steel-toothed counter agent from Uljanovsk using the
name of "Bert Travis", who ran a strip-joint called, Transducers, on
Inglewood Boulevard near the Los Angeles airport.
After being found guilty during the trial, a $10,000 bail-bond was
posted by Theodor Adorno, a close personal friend of Yves Fissiault, who
was living in a small apartment in Pacific Palisades owned by the
University of California where he held a Visiting Scholar position at
the time (while working on "The Authoritarian Personality" and
collecting notes for "The Jargon of Authenticity"). In a clandestine
meeting at Junior's Deli at Pico and Westwood Boulevards, Adorno agreed
that Fissiault and L'amar should flee to Mexico until things cooled
down, sacrificing his entire savings for their safety.
Fissiault and L'amar's two-toned 1956 Thunderbird two-seat convertible
hard-top was jam-packed with Mia's stuff, including a set of five
matching horse-hide suitcases and they drove south on Highway 101 to
Tijuana. Crossing the border they continued on to Rosarito Beach, picked
up their friend Thomas Pynchon who was having a "peyote vacation" in an
aluminum trailer parked on a bluff above the beach with two coeds from
San Diego State College. Pynchon was hallucinating and sitting behind
the two front seats on the suitcases, moving forward, looking backwards,
legs dangling over the turquoise trunk of the car, singing some stupid
song he learned in the Navy during the war, playing a set of bongo drums
nestled between his legs while simultaneously shaking a pair of maracas
carved and hand painted with the image of a sombrero and the
words,"Tequila Sunrise":
"Oh, THE WORLD OVER THERE, it's
So hard to explain!
Just-like, a dream's-got, lost in yer brain!
Dancin' like a fool through that Forbid-den Wing,
Waitin, fer th' light to start shiver-ing--well,
Who ev-ver said you couldn't move that way,
Who ev-ver said you couldn't try?
If-ya find-there's-a-lit-tle-pain,
Ya can al-ways-go-back-a-gain, cause
Ya don't-ev-er-real-ly-say, good-by!" (TP.GR)
Fissiault's notebooks are water-damaged for several pages at this point,
but become legible again when they arrive in Puerto Escondido. After
several days of fishing, strategizing and hanging out they cross the
Sierra de la Giganta mountains in the Thunderbird on the only gravel
road that existed at that time. They lost a day when the radiator boiled
over and were assisted by a man transporting chickens from Ejido
Insurgentes to Puerto Escondido. The road between Villa Constitution and
La Paz, a stretch of 236 miles was in very bad condition, having been
washed out at numerous arroyo crossings every ten or so miles. Eight
days later they arrive in La Paz. This is problematic for Fissiault
because he had called in sick to his supervisor in the Electrical
Engineering Division of Rockedyne two weeks earlier and had not been
anywhere near a phone. On April 16,1963, they put the Thunderbird on a
ferry which takes them to Puerto Vallarta on the mainland.
From Puerto Vallarta they head for Guadalajara to meet with Dr.
Professor Octavio Ruiz de Leon, at the Museo de Anthropologia. Ruiz de
Leon was trained as a engineer/neurophysiologist (who later spent 15
years studying global intelligence based on beetles) and had been
recently installed as Interim Curator of Palaeontological Collections at
the museum. It there that Fissiault was finally able to get a telephone
call through to his employer only to discover his security clearance had
been revoked and his contract terminated.
So begins the year Yves Fissiault, Mia L'amar and Thomas Pynchon spend
living in San Miguel de Allende just off the Plaza de San Francisco on
Calle Solano. More on this later.
Just last week I received a letter from a Mr. William Wilhelm of Hermosa
Beach, California, who upon the occasion of cleaning out the garage of
his recently-deceased grandmother, Esther, uncovered a small footlocker
filled with what appear to be out-takes from the films of Mia L'amar.
Apparently, most of the films have been severely water damaged (most
recently by the El Nino storms and prior to that by the severe storms of
1991 and 1972) but some remain intact. Mr. Willhelm has kindly agreed to
donate the films to to the Yves Fissiault Archive (if they in fact do
turn out to be the lost films of Mia L'amar). The archive is housed in
Brooklyn, New York under my curatorship, and is accessible to the public
by appointment only.
Ever onward,
Eve Andree Laramee
----------------------------
at last, a signature.....
Sculpture Faculty
Sarah Lawrence College
Bronxville, New York
wander@earthlink.net
homepage, projects, etc:
http://www.artnetweb.com/laramee
http://www.artnetweb.com/laramee/exhibits.html
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~ruag/96F/Laramee/about.html
http://psfa.sdsu.edu/school_of_art/maingallery/laramee.html/laramee_title.html
http://www.plexus.org/laramee.html
http://orathost.cfa.ilstu.edu/cfa/galleries/lar.html
http://orathost.cfa.ilstu.edu/cfa/galleries/larst.html
http://www.zingmagazine.com/zing3/reviews/028_laramee.html
http://tns.sdsu.edu/~unicom/Spring97News/Design.html
Interview with Jordan Crandall
http://www.artnetweb.com/laramee/interview.html
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"And why shouldn't I invent some way, however fantastic and contrived,
of
talking about something, without someone having to ask whether I'm
qualified to talk like that?"
----Gilles Deleuze, "Negotiations"
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