James Kelly - Rewired - The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

Well, I’m sorry, but that’s how it looks to me. It’s another quality present in every single remake, the sense that Little Latin Larry is supervising a bunch of kids at play and sneaking in some teaching at the same time. Don’t ask me what he’s teaching them. How to play, maybe. And don’t think that some people don’t need to learn how to do that.

In the third remake, the film crew appears explicitly for the first time, and we get the interviews interspersed with the sequences, and even with the musical numbers onstage, which I personally feel is a significant mistake on the sequence editor’s part. Obviously the sequence editor on that remake thought the in-between-numbers parts of the performance were dull, which is too bad, as you lose a lot of the bar atmosphere and you’re reminded constantly that this is a feature and you’re not actually there. This is fine with some things but it’s all wrong for Little Latin Larry. And I’ll go so far as to say this is more than an aesthetic choice, it’s true.

I knew there was something new and different coming up when Ola and her sidekick apologized for the amount of material they were passing on to me. Most of the time, they apologized for a lack of material, at least in one area or another. I couldn’t imagine having too much material to go through. Then she had the cases delivered to my editing room.

I mean, cases. I mean, crates. Yes, there were literally crates of recovered material — not reconstructed, but raw material recovered. An out-of-work dance team brought them in. I had to cut more cable and put together a board with a dozen more outlets before I could even get started sorting things according to chronological order.

Now it’s true that I have a preprogrammed sorter to handle the first layers of sorting, but I don’t depend solely on that, and I always supervise at least part of the process if not the whole thing. But this time, I had to have three sorting programs running simultaneously while doing a fourth myself, just for the sheer volume of information. I had thought that a lot of it would turn out to be overlap if not outright redundancy but I was wrong about that, too. While there was a certain amount of duplication, none of it fell into the category of back-up.

Every single memory bit fit into its own place where no other would go.

I edited for days. I slept in the editing studio. At one point, I fell asleep and woke up in the bar during “Twist and Shout” — I actually registered as having passed out on the floor under one of the tables on the side. A great big biker chick with curly black hair and Cleopatra eyes kept bending over me and saying, “Hey, honey, are you sure you’re all right?” in between twisting and shouting. For a while, I considered the Little Latin Larry Motel — instead of beds and rooms, you’d just pass out in the bar and whatever time you chose for a wake-up call would be a different number in the set, like “Twist and Shout,” or “Long Tall Sally,” or “Runaway.” That idea passed; but it’s not the stupidest thing anyone’s thought of, not by a long shot.

I was so many days putting a rough cut together that I kept insisting to myself that I couldn’t be sure about what I thought I had, that nobody could remember so much with any degree of accuracy, especially if you work out of sequence, the way I do. But deep in my heart, I did know. I think I knew before I even started editing the raw material, when I saw how much raw material there was to work with, and I just didn’t want to admit it. Because that was supposed to be impossible, you know. No one — and that is no exclamation point one double exclamation point — had ever found a combination of memory bits that, when assembled, would yield a complete, finished feature without interpolation or reconstruction. It just didn’t happen because it just wasn’t possible.

But there it was. The Return of Little Latin Larry and His Loopy Louies, His Luscious Latinaires, and His Lascivious Latinettes; music not only intact but in quadronic poly-sound, and every single member of the audience present and accounted for at all times. My editing program said there were no greyed-out areas whatsoever anywhere, and while you might be able to fool a person for awhile, you can’t hypnotize an editing program. But even then, I still didn’t want to believe that I had a complete feature with no reconstruction or interpolation necessary, so naturally, I took it for a spin.

I set the pod on Outcome: Surprise Me and zipped myself into it. I know my blood was completely clean, because I cleaned it out myself. Not doping; the blood never actually left my body to be recirculated. I used the in-body nano-machine method, even if it does give me a psychosomatic itch. It didn’t take long, though, because I stay pretty clean between features; it was really just to make sure there wasn’t anything lingering from the last one I’d done, a weird short subject called “But What About Moose and Squirrel?” which I cannot even begin to explain to anyone outside this particular clan who all claim ancestors from a particular area in Philadelphia. I just didn’t want to see anything out-of-context showing up and interfering with my concentration in any way. Then I set the IV drip for full feature, no intermission, closed my eyes, and went to see the triumphant return of Little Latin Larry.

It opened with split-screen — very tricky to do behind the eyelids, I wouldn’t have thought it possible on the first edit, so right away, I knew I had a double relative in there somewhere. Which is to say, either my audience member was also related to the band, or one of the band was related to the audience member. Or — astounding to think of, but stranger things have happened — both. And with both sets of memory bits present in each one. You don’t usually find that sort of thing can remain coherent, let alone linear in any way but, as I said, stranger things have happened.

Anyway, on the left hand side of the screen, you were going in the back door with the band, to the dressing room, while on the right, you were going in the front entrance of the bar. The perspectives on both were so well-realized, I began to think that maybe I’d been duped somehow and I had someone else’s finished product sizzling around in my brain chemistry, even though I knew that couldn’t possibly be — I had edited every moment out of pure raw material, and if there had been any finished product in there, it would have showed itself immediately as already refined. You can distract a person, but you can’t bribe a solution into disguising its molecular structure.

I have to say that as soon as I got used to the split-screen, I loved it. On one side, you could see the band getting ready, all the members psyching themselves up and getting into character. The Loopy Louies were like bikers, guys in denim and old sweatshirts who whaled the hell out of their instruments. Three guitarists, one drummer, and they were all in a little world of their own, of course. Bass guitarist is a husky guy with a lot of thick black hair, a day’s growth of beard and carrying around a bottle of something amber-colored with a label that says “Jim Beam” on it. He offers everybody a swig, including the Latinettes, who are teasing each other’s hair and putting on make-up on top of make-up on top of make-up. And then up in the top left corner of the screen, you get his bio: Lionel LeBlanc, graduate student in English, writing a thesis on Milton. Yes, Uncle Miltie! The guy is a scholar of Berle’s Divine Comedy and he’s wandering around with a bottle of Jim Beam and burping. You’ve got to love it.

The Latinaires are such a precision dance team that they can take the bottle from the Uncle Miltie scholar, swig, and pass it on to the next one without missing a beat or a hand gesture. They’re all mouthing something about a great pretender, the purple satin shirts look like liquid metal, the tight pants and the pointy shoes are positively low-rider classic.