The first stages of a new St. Remedius art project/promotion platform, and a special birthday event announcement

(Remember how, in the days of standard episodic television before streaming and binging, many dramas and some comedies would give a thumbnail update starting with “Previously on…”, flashing scenes so fast that people starting midway through a season or story were more confused than before? Well, that’s what this newsletter is like. Look at these as regular updates of how the sausage is made, with what, and whether or not the staff washed their hands after they used the toilet. Or, worse, if they only washed their hands before using the toilet.)

SIGNAL BEGINS

Welcome to the 135th installment of the Annals of St. Remedius newsletter, bringing you snide commentary, fascinating events, and options for making life ever so slightly more entertaining. I’m Paul Riddell, your chronicler, captain, administrator, and navigator, and we return to previously uncharted waters momentarily. In the meantime, the news, including announcements of upcoming events that aren’t necessarily St. Remedius events but should be of interest to readers.

Since my first summer in the Dallas area in 1980, summer has always been a little aggravating. 2025 is no different. My girlfriend Sarah, Camina Drummer to my Alex Kumal, has been an absolute hero over essential repairs on her house, where everything keeps escalating. A soft spot in the middle of the living room floor? Time for a crew to climb down, only to discover a potential family of opossums and one definitely dead possum, all of which had to be excluded and removed before any further work could start. More foundation repairs to keep a garage wall from collapsing. The foundation crew cut the cable running to our wifi router, which required a crew to install a new router (the tech said “I need to take this one…to a museum”) and dig a whole new cable channel across the front yard. A monster elderly hackberry tree was one good windstorm away from demolishing the garage, which required a top team to take it down without destroying everything under it, and then toppling a set of younger hackberries that settled in the chainlink fence surrounding the back yard. (As most North Texans discover rapidly, hackberry seedlings love growing in the spaces in chain link fences, and the stump of the big elder still had chunks of the long-gone 1970s-era fence it overgrew decades ago.) And the leak from the kitchen sink pipe that was completely invisible until the crew went under the house to fix the soft spot? We’re still waiting on a report, especially since the house is old enough to have had asbestos installed behind the drywall, back when it was still legal in the US.

We’ve been persevering through all this joy. Parker the Lint-Covered Breast Implant takes less after his namesake and more after his namesake’s nemesis, when he isn’t shedding twice his body weight in cat fur. Sarah spends her evenings working on a new project, of which details will only come out when she’s good and ready. And me? I’m making St. Remedius flyers.

For those coming in late, I’ve been returning to my zine roots in efforts to get further word out about the St. Remedius newsletter. These efforts start with, but definitely won’t end with, a regular series of flyers incorporating St. Remedius characters and situations, as well as hyping upcoming “Mandatory Parker” concerts in such bustling cultural centers as Menasha, Wisconsin and Krum, Texas. The idea isn’t just to catch the vibes of the weird-ass flyers one used to find all over Dallas, particularly at Cafe Brazil locales and the much-missed Tower Records store on Lemmon Avenue, but to give tastes of the upcoming St. Remedius zine. Well, it’s been a great opportunity to get up to speed on Affinity Publisher as well, so there’s no complaints.

The problem with flyers, as well as any other print promotional material, is making sure that they are accessible. The idea is to move flyer bins to various events in Dallas, such as next year’s Texas Frightmare Weekend and Oddities & Curiosities Expo, as well as set up more permanent bins in amenable locations. The big issue is to make sure they’re unique but still recognizable as St. Remedius locations, make sure that they don’t lead to a mess, and make an impression. What to do?

Well, to start, it’s time for some creative garbology. Back in the 1990 and 2000s, the greater Dallas area was just covered in bins and dispensers for a wide range of promotional guides, weekly newspapers, monthly freebie magazines, and lots and lots of sales guides. Many didn’t survive the first decade of the 21st Century: if the bins were metal, they were either collected by the owners of the intellectual property in the hope that the scrap value could cover some of the costs of bankruptcy or quietly grabbed by industrious scrap collectors and taken in themselves. Plastic ones generally sat in the locale, literally collecting dust, until the property owner told someone “Toss that crap in the compactor” or some wiseacre grabbed one for gun or bow practice. A few still stand, collecting nothing but dust and occasional dead insects, in places where the attitude was “It’s not MY problem,” offering opportunities to wannabe artists with enough room in the backs of their cars and absolutely no shame in being watched as they haul the bins to their destinies.

And that’s the current situation. Several of these wonderfully UV-inhibiting plastic beasts were still in a back access area behind a recently renovated strip plaza, just taking up space because the owner had neither reason, capability, or intention of retrieving them, and the property owner didn’t care what happened to them so long as they were GONE. A quick trip to the site, and I came back with two to start with. If they could be converted, great. If they couldn’t, then they’d become my problem. Thankfully, they’re going to work out just fine.

The starting problem is that most of these have been out in their locales since the early 2000s, and definitely looked it. Rains washed the dust off the tops, but it was thick inside, and years of ultraviolet abuse left the front sheet of Lucite brittle and almost opaque. The base and sides had labeling where the paint had cracked from years of thermal stresses, but the main structure was still sound and even flexible. This wasn’t going to break into pieces the moment it was moved.

The real determination that nobody was going to miss this: When the bins were stocked regularly, the crew handling the restocking also cleaned off stickers and graffiti every month, or replaced the whole bin if the graffiti couldn’t be removed. This one had been tagged long enough in the past that the Sharpie ink was starting to fade from sun exposure, but the real test was the interior.

Look at that. You could grow potatoes in that dirt. I could spend a day in my childhood rolling around in a sandbox and carrying half of it back with me, and still not have the mineral content of the interior of this bin. Yeah, nobody’s particularly worried about getting this back.

An unanticipated effect of moving this beast was the extensive pectoral and bicep workout getting this into the car. The base contained four holes for mounting bolts into concrete and asphalt and bolting the base to the living earth, but I expect a lot of recipients said “No way on Elvis’s green earth are you bolting these things down in front of MY shop.” This meant that the base had a plug through which a large pile of gravel and an equal amount of water went in to weigh the base down to keep it stable in heavy winds. As I discovered, this was about 30 kilos of gravel and water that went sloshing all through the interior as it was moved, with two holes in the back apparently designed to allow excess water to drain out. It wasn’t a problem to move them: they were just ungainly, and removing the gravel meant cutting a port in the base to dump it out.

In addition, see what looks like paper pulp in the photo below? At first, that’s exactly what it looked like, as if spare bits of paper from years of bin contents filtered down and slowly rotted in the water/gravel mix. As it turned out, this is a great example of what is generally referred to as a “biofilm”: bacteria in the water and gravel entered the previously pristine interior, received just enough sunlight through the plastic to add energy to the mix, and produced quite the bacterial slurry. At least it ended up on the ground and not all over the interior of my car.

Ah, but the acid test: would these be the correct size for a St. Remedius flyer? Well, after removing the badly weathered front door and the equally opaqued Plexiglas separator, it turns out that it’s just perfect. Well, with a lot of work, anyway.

Now, if I merely wanted a generic flyer bin, then it’s a matter of adding a few stickers to cover the original paint, and we’d be done. As mentioned before, though, the idea is to make something unique. After a thorough scrubbing and rinsing, it was ready for painting, and then Phase 2…

To be continued…

St. Remedius News

It’s been a long time in the making, but flyers and other ephemera aren’t the only things to expect in physical form from St. Remedius. This next week starts a push for a shop on RedBubble full of truly unique art for your fancy, and yes, it includes Mandatory Parker album cover art. (There’s really no point in doing this unless it comes with a whole set of Mandatory Parker concert tour T-shirts.) In the coming weeks, expect to see St. Remedius bumper stickers, Mendellosian Books notepads, Siouzi’s Coffee & Books coffee mugs, and Tim Waite For Texas Governor posters, as well as so much more. Look at it as a way to cover costs on the newsletter without locking out installments as “Subscriber-only”, and a great way to really mess with the heads of Significant Others, friends, cohorts, coworkers, and fellow denizens of that music fest in northern Michigan where you’re kept up all night with the nimtwits in the tents next door yelling “Can I get a group hoot? HOOOOOOOOT!” (Trust me: there’s a story in this one, and I’m not the person to tell it. However, when the time is right, I might tell the story of how I nearly accidentally killed the actor Butch Patrick, and that’s a group hoot in itself.)

In related news, the gifts for paid subscribers are getting together, including a lot of utter strangeness only available there. Maps of the St. Remedius campus, Mandatory Parker magnets, autopsy diagrams, confidential reports, and maybe even paper dolls. you’ll boogie ‘til you puke.

Cooking References

I have the same attitude about chocolate that I have for Scotch: I have no real interest in either, but friends and cohorts love both, and I’m fascinated by the process of producing both. For Scotch, I highly recommend the book Still Life With Bottle by Ralph Steadman; for chocolate, I very highly recommend The Chocolate Bible by Christian Teubner. Do you want the early history of xocolatl? Do you want the history and the recipes developed when the miracle beans hit Europe? Do you want more information on commerical production, or information on how to work with chocolate? All right here.

Other Reading

Current reading that may or may not be tied to previous and upcoming St. Remedius installments, but may be of interest anyway:

Nonfiction: Show Posters: The Art and Practice of Making Gig Posters by Pat Jones & Ben Nunery (Powerhouse Factories, 2016)

Fiction: Smoking Mirror Blues by Ernest Hogan (Create Space Publishing, 2018)

Art: Pacific Rim: Man, Machines, and Monsters by Davis S. Cohen (Insight Editions, 2013)

Music: Chinese Fire Horse by Garbage (were I three more hours premature, Shirley Manson and I would be the same exact age, so this song hits particularly strongly these days.)

Events

We’re definitely into summer in the Dallas area, and after 43 summers here (I missed two by being trapped in Portland, Oregon for the summers of 1996 and 1997), you learn a few tricks on getting through with safety and sanity relatively intact. In particular, this includes movies, especially with the old theaters with massively overpowered air conditioning that make you forget the heat and the glare for a few hours. For this little ginger duck, this means regular runs on the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff, which currently features looks at the big summer films of 1982 and the 40th anniversaries of the films of 1985. For various reasons with which I will not bore my ever-patient readership, I never got a chance to see the John Carpenter reboot of The Thing in theaters during its original release (I call it a reboot because while the Howard Hawks original sharing its title was a spectacular film, Carpenter’s was much closer to a thorough adaptation of the original John Campbell, Jr. novella “Who Goes There?” than Hawks would have been capable of doing at the time.) To those willing to come out to the July 9 screening at the Texas, I can attest that spending nearly two hours in a big theater like the Texas watching events in Antarctica will make you forget the heat outside, at least for a while.

The big one at the Texas Theatre, though, is intensely personal. 40 years ago this August, I celebrated my nineteenth birthday in the Viking Theater in downtown Appleton, Wisconsin, watching the premiere of a film I had been waiting years to see. In fact, I discovered the chance to be an extra in the film a whole day too late, so seeing it was especially important. This was a movie that changed the direction of my life in so many ways, including escaping Appleton and moving back to Dallas, studying everything I could find on practical makeup effects and film theory, and ultimately leading to my first publication with the science fiction magazine New Pathways in 1989. My search for a copy of the soundtrack taught me so much about the music industry and its distribution at the time, and I still refuse to believe any clerk at any store who swears something will be in “in two weeks” until I actually have it in my hands. I made a lot of friends over the years based on our mutual love for this film, and while other friends gave me grief, they at least appreciated that I could argue why this worked for me at the time it did. For the last 38 intervening birthdays, I made a point of celebrating birthdays by watching it on videotape, DVD, or streaming, and now for the first time since 2016, when the Alamo Drafthouse ran a screening with the director in attendance for a Q&A afterwards, it’s going to be on a Dallas screen for a crowd to see it in all its glory.

If you thought the movie was Lifeforce, interesting choice. (I still use the 1980s movies of Tobe Hooper to describe the period of Hollywood “where cocaine ran across the land in great rivers.”) If you chose The Goonies, please slap yourself over and over until some brains seep in. No, I’m talking about the long-awaited second sequel to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, one third of the reason why I get into so much trouble at job interviews when I’m asked “So who is the best Captain: Kirk or Picard?” and I answer “Lochley, Dallas, or Rhodes.”

The upshot: on Saturday, August 9 at 7:30, the Texas Theatre runs a special 40th anniversary showing of George Romero’s Day of the Dead, followed by a live music show featuring the bands Cheap Fix, The Eerie Family, and Oddfellows, with the option of attending just to see the film or to catch the whole show afterwards. I’m not in Appleton, the Viking Theater has been demolished for nearly a third of a century, all of the friends I made at that original screening are gone and some are dead, but the Texas is a very welcome substitute. If you can’t make it, there’s always next time. If you can, let’s turn this into a St. Remedius fan event for the ages.

In the interim, the various Silent Book Club events in the Dallas area are a very welcome social/not social event, especially during the summer. In particular, the Garland Silent Book Club meets August 2, and September 6 from 11 am to 1:00 pm, and the monthly Half Price Books Silent Read at the flagship store in Dallas runs on July 16 starting at 7:00. And yes, there will be flyers.

Final Words

135 installments and a little over a year of St. Remedius. What a long strange trip it’s been, huh? And as a reward for plowing all the way through this, the Comments section is live for everybody. Questions about St. Remedius and Parker may be answered in upcoming Personal Interludes. Just don’t make me regret it.

SIGNAL ENDS

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

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