Dave Maass

So, I’m finally getting around to filling out the rest of this new site. I’ve just posted the two documentaries I directed for the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology in 2004 and 2005, which you can watch here or download for your own leisurely viewing.

Bitter: Chronicle of the Final Boddingtons Strike: a 17-minute observational documentary about a five-day strike by workers desperate to save the historic Strangeways brewery in Manchester.

Residual Doubt: Portrait of a Capital Case Investigator: a 25-minute profile of Mary Durand, a “mitigation investigator” working on death row cases in Arizona.

I’m in the process of uploading more. You should see my 2008 DNC video blog online soon.

Great news: Semantics King Jr has filed the paperwork, payed the fees (thanks to y’all generosity) and received non-profit incorporation for NewLiberian.com in the state of Minnesota. We haven’t achieved tax-exempt status–that will take years–but through a partnership with the Niapele Project, we’re now able to accept tax-deductible contributions.

Now that we’ve reached this landmark, we’re hashing out where to take the site next. We’re long overdue for a design overhaul, we’re discussing a journalists’ book drive and we would love to raise some funds to compensate and recruit more local writers in Liberia, Ghana and Accra.

Hit us with your ideas.

Back in another life, I was living in the UK, where I was up to my upper lip in spoken word. Mostly I was involved in organizing “Live Lit” nights, though I did regularly read some original prose writing. At one point, I was invited to fill in for performance art legend Ed Barton on an Arts Council-funded tour to Gateshead, Cardiff and London with a bunch of wack-ed out musicians. One singer-songwriter performed clothed only hand-carved wooden underpants; another performed in droog-like white suits and masks, and the singer for headline act, Lord Mongo, wore a four-foot fake horse cock that would spray drinkable yogurt during the set’s, errr, climax.

Then there was me, hamming up the whole “American Dave” shtick.

Meow Wolf has offered me the opportunity to read some of my old stuff this Sunday. I’ll be warming up the crowd before the Berkeley-based poetics troupe We are the Unreal (pictured). I can’t promise I’ll impress you. The Brits seemed to like it, but then again, a little contrived American charm goes along way across the pond.

The show starts at 7pm, ends at 10pm and there should be two other local acts. Meow Wolf’s asking for a $5 donation at the door, but no one will be turned away for being broke.

P.S. The Meow Wolf site describes the night as slam–I have been assured it is not, thank god.

I just finished listening to a nearly three-hour radio dramatization of the 1951 novel “The Day of the Triffids” by John Wyndham. No, I hadn’t heard of it either, but it seems to have been quite popular among people who read science fiction novels in 1951.

Let me tell you: It is the best non-zombie zombie story ever written. In place of the undead, Wyndham’s got triffids, these tall genetically engineered plants that look like headless, topiary giraffes. They have the ability to pull up their roots and walk on them, which makes this  unmistakable  clickety-click, nails-on-table top, sound…which is probably how the sound engineers made it, I know, but still. I get those classic shivers down my back just thinking about it. Triffids also have poisoned whip stingers than can kill you instantly. Why would they want to do that? So they can root next to you and start sucking up the nutrients once you begin to decompose.

Triffids wait for you outside your front door, or pile up in groups against fences until the pressure knocks the barrier down…and you’re never quite sure if it’s all just instinct or if on some level they are strategizing how to get inside. So, yeah, functionally, they’re pretty much just zombies in killer plants’ clothing.

That’s what I thought at first, too, but what makes triffids more frightening than zombies is that Wyndham went one step further. The crazy brit introduced a global catastrophe: massive, instant blindness in 90% of the population of the planet. So, in Day of the Triffids, you’re not just following a band of survivors through post-apocalyptic England, you’re following a band of mostly blind survivors getting picked off by creepy-ass walking plant monsters.

Yeah, I know. Awesome. And guess what. BBC is adapting it to a television miniseries and has scheduled it for broadcast in November.

Personally, I can’t imagine CGI triffids being a 10th as scary as the ones already in my head.