Rytius Records (Substack Edition), Ch. 17

Chapter 17. Tent Raiders

17. Tent Raiders

That evening there was no game, but a presentation. It wasn’t historical but contemporary. It wasn’t high art or really even pop. It was something like samizdat, readymades, or early hip-hop. Fila had all the gear: the playback machines, the recorders, the cables, racks, and devices, all the screens for all the formats for all the sizes. Particularly late-twentieth-century mini-dv tape common in handheld videocameras from that era, of which there are many brands that are easy to maintain and that remain suitable for use.

The tapes are more expensive because the playing is the thing. Nobody is rushing out to buy a camera to record, because they don’t have a clue what to do. But to watch something worthwhile? To see something everybody is talking about? You need to be part of a community something like that of the recordkeepers or you need your own copy. And that means you’re at the mercy of the movie man.

Fila didn’t like how it was one of the few occasions on which all the recordkeepers could get together anymore, even the Speculative Historians. There was nothing in the event itself to push them apart. Showtime at Fila’s Finds was a tradition, and he promoted it with a poem, as a place where you might

discover a discovery!
no game but a frame to fall in
to have a ball in
to escape and go all in

Sometimes, understand, recordkeepers find things that are way out, unrelatable, perplexing and vexing, and they can’t work it into a game because their referents are lame. Or, just the same, they don’t know what to say about it. That’s one way things can get into the show. There’s a whole other way things can go.

◆ ◆ ◆

Dancy and Rob brought kettle corn. Voom made a sour-cream dip and a tomatillo salsa for his fried tortilla chips. GJ and Sugarpie had made one sweet-potato pie each, and they wanted everyone to judge which was better, because it was cinnamon versus cardamom. Floweria brought some yellow cake with real chocolate icing, made from real dark chocolate chips. D-Man said they were from Trinidad, because that’s what the merchant told him. No, he didn’t really have a reason to believe the man, but his great-great grandparents had been from Trinidad and he enjoyed imagining that tropical isle, a faraway place he would most likely never visit, and to which he would most likely never discover the substance of his connection.

“There’s never not enough dessert,” Fila noted. D-Man agreed, the reason being that he was working up an appetite moving folding chairs from the basement to the annex. He would have looked forward to rice and peas or red beans and rice or black eyed peas or fried chicken or a plate of crispy crawlers with shredded hash browns and ketchup or Sosoface was supposed to be helping, but he was flirting with Bonbon instead. Ice cream for dessert. D-Man wasn’t mad at Sosoface. Not all the way. Fila wasn’t as fast, but he couldn’t be mad at that, either. D-Man had volunteered to help Fila, and that was that.

Fila had to get up and squeeze between the chairs that were set a little too close, even for this annex, which, while able to accommodate a hundred guests milling about on foot, what with all the distance and space in and among the shelves and racks of books and artifacts, could hold maybe only about 2 or 3 dozen chairs lined up in such a way that they all faced the same way, with a line of sight to the projector screen. All this in order to start the film. Consider the hieroglyphic language of twentieth-century electronics, high technology mass-manufactured consumer goods made in Asia, where the human languages are non-alphabetical, ideographic, tonal, and altogether inaccessible to the other major marketplaces. An international system of symbols, a pictorial pidgin, arose after the Second World War, and all pidgins are commercial trading languages. Like any language, it takes time to learn. The olden ones may have learnt it easier, given that they swam in such rich streams of commodities produced by a world working class across a global network of production and exchange. Language learning is always a matter of exposure. But that’s why Fila had to be the one to press ▶️ on the mini-dv camera.

◆ ◆ ◆

The picture was fuzzy like they usually were; folks don’t clean the lenses of their cameras, dust gets into the sensor, pixels die. Handheld anti-jitter technology was in its infancy in the late twentieth century, as the contemporary trend of found-footage horror films conveys. It could not possibly have served as a source of horror unless it were real and unavoidable in recordings. Imagine The Blair Witch Project in a world with anti-jitter software. It’s impossible. Now imagine the late 1980s television show Cops with smooth tracking shots, on a Steadicam. Similarly outrageous, a formal incongruity, a paradox. That’s why Tent Raiders, a crowd-sourced community project “broadcast” by a network of smugglers, pirates, and Illadelphians remained vérité, no matter how big it got, no matter how many tapes got sold. Think of something like America’s Funniest Home Videos produced by a team of psychopathic war boys from Mad Max: Fury Road, and then consider the universe of scandals possible in the production and distribution of such an underground video series, filmed by perpetrators of piracy, rape and pillage in the very act of piracy, rape and pillage. And then consider the sort of scandal impossible in the production and distribution of the same, only via intimate personal transaction and word of mouth across the entire North American continent. The distributors always cut the rape scenes, and there were never any corpses onscreen. With that you may begin to understand the fascination the series held across all strata of twenty-second century North America, let alone among such sensitive cultural types as recordkeepers.

◆ ◆ ◆

Darkness and suddenly a green spotlight, but it wasn’t a green spotlight but a night vision scope clicking on to reveal a literal tent—but a large one, like those housing small carnival attractions or Bedouin families—being surrounded by raiders, like a squad of paramilitaries on reconnaissance. They used hand signals to keep mostly quiet, and the more one watched Tent Raiders the more one got to know and understand who the perpetrators were. Hand signals are like gang signs, and most of the perpetrators used some flavor of Illadelphian signal. Even here, in South Dakota, where the tent being raided was a slow-moving section of a semi-nomadic colony on the move. Probably for food reasons, as one can imagine would be a problem out on the Great Plains during winter.

“The chatter over the radio makes it feel so real,” Dancy said. The quiet the perps kept was mostly for dramatic effect.

“It is real,” Liz said.

“You know what I mean,” Dancy said.

The perps were as a matter of course quite heavily armed, and there was almost no chance that any normal civilian grouping would be able to match them in firepower. They never seemed to come across other gangs, perps, or mercenaries.

Slacker perps were visibly unprepared on screen, goggles off, headsets around their necks, standing lazily at ease around the tent; the cam perp filming in night vision crackled threats to shape up and they did. There was some grumbling over the air, and a long beep of censorship.

“What was that about already,” Fila said.

“Yeah, nobody even did nothing yet,” Liz said.

“It’s probably you know what it is. They don’t even let them say it,” Voom noted.

“They’re calling dibs on the women,” Hunnybunny agreed.

The cam perp swirled his index finger around to rally the other perps. Half surrounded the tent and half invaded, weapons drawn. The cam perp led the breach, and, once inside, he gave a slow look around, so as to film everything and everyone before waking the victims. They were sleeping soundly. Then he told the men outside to let off some shots. Pandemonium broke out inside among what appeared to be two families, with two sets of parents and two sets of children. Screams of surprise and a man jumped up alarmed to trip over his pallet and land on his wife, who had been trying to run from out of a crawl. It was almost funny, and then the camera cut to a new scene.

“And on the girls,” Vinilla said. Her daughter was asleep at home with her sister as sitter.

There was neither muss nor fuss in the next scene, which was entirely silent. The two bound and gagged men and a teenage boy were led out of the tent and sat down.

“Why do they cut the sound?” Fila asked. “They’re selling horror, right? Why not give us what we paid for, so to speak."

Men outside the tent had already removed the property from inside the tent, and were already going through it, splitting it into two piles.

“I think it’s against the law,” D-Man said.

The males had not been sitting for a minute before the two adult women and three tweenage girls were led out of the tent, also bound and gagged, and placed forcefully on the ground near the males.

“What law?” Sugarpie asked.

“Yeah, there’s no distribution company to charge with anything,” said GJ.

One perp set the tent on fire, and cam perp examined the pile of belongings precious to the two families. “What law?” Fila repeated.

“I’m saying, though,” Rob said. “There’s nobody to charge."

“So why censor then?” Fila asked.

Cam perp wasn’t very interested in the families’ pile of belongings. He walked back over to the victims. He spoke something to them, causing one of the men to fall over, and the other jumped to his feet, whereupon another perp slammed a rifle butt into his solar plexus. He crumbled to the ground as well.

“We agree the Illadelphians organize all this, right? They do the perpetrating and the recording and the first distribution, right?"

Nobody had any doubt about that.

“It’s organized crime showing the world that they rule the world with vicious, inhuman brutality. And yet they are careful not to offend our sensibilities,” Fila said.

“Like we can trust them, even though they are raping and killing and destroying. Like we can trust them not to...offend us, or something,” Dancy agreed.

“It’s propaganda,” said Sosoface.

“Yeah, but how and what kind?” asked Rob.

Cam perp went back to the piles of precious belongings, those things these families troubled themselves to carry through the blizzards of their travels, and set fire to the larger, presumably the discard pile. He appeared to laugh with the perp who had been doing the sorting. Then he lit the other pile on fire as well.

“You can watch it with your whole family,” Floweria said.

“Yeah. Only grown-ups get the whole show. But the essential part, that they rule the world with brutality and impunity, is a lesson for the whole family,” Fila agreed.

Cam perp got close in on the victims while another perp forced them to watch their belongings burn. After all that, they weren’t even victims of robbery, the raison d’être of the show.

“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it,” Fila concluded the presentation, and hit ⏹️.