Americans search for fool's gold in Masquerade on January 13, 1987


One must pause, occasionally, in the relentless, illogical march of human history, to appreciate moments of truly splendid absurdity. And few moments in the mid-1980s achieved such a perfectly poised balance of brilliance, frustration, and sheer, delightful pointlessness as the saga of Kit Williams' Masquerade. And so, on January 13, 1987, the peculiar, tantalizing aroma of a mystery—already famously solved, mind you, but more on that later—wafted across the Atlantic to the unsuspecting shores of America.

This was the day Schocken Books released the American special edition of Masquerade. Now, Masquerade was not a normal book. Most books are content to sit on a shelf and be read, occasionally serving as a coaster or a way to level a wobbly table. Masquerade was different. It was a book that actively encouraged you to leave your house, buy a shovel, and dig up large portions of the English countryside in search of an 18-carat golden hare.

The American edition, published years after the original British frenzy, was a special sort of cruelty. It arrived after the treasure had already been found...five years earlier (!!).

The hare was gone. The game was, for all intents and purposes, over. But the book? The glorious, infuriating, beautiful book remained. It was a testament, perhaps, to the enduring human capacity for enjoying a good puzzle, even when the prize has already been claimed by a slightly questionable victor.

You see, the finding of the hare in the actual contest turned out to be even more scandalous than the release of the American edition after it had been found. Starting in 1979, grown adults, armed with magnifying glasses and an almost religious fervor, scoured the British countryside, muttering to themselves about moonbeams and shadow-plays, convinced that enlightenment (and a shiny hare) was just around the next hedgerow. The "finding" of the coveted hare was a rather convoluted affair involving a man with a letter, a subsequent confession of cheating, and a final, rather anticlimactic retrieval of the hare by Kit Williams himself, who then promptly re-buried it.

Schocken Books, perhaps sensing an opportunity to sell a dream, however tarnished, or perhaps just possessed by an entirely inexplicable impulse, decided to unleash a special American hardcover edition of Masquerade. A golden hare, buried across an ocean, solved by slightly dodgy means, now being re-presented to a new audience as if the chase were still on. It truly was, in its own peculiar way, a perfectly-1980s  moment: a profound, yet utterly pointless, exercise in the glorious, illogical pursuit of…well, of something shiny buried in the ground.

Americans, being a nation constitutionally inclined toward optimism, enterprise, and the belief that anything can be solved if you apply sufficient coffee and graph paper, greeted this belated arrival with the enthusiasm normally reserved for discovering that the British had invented tea several centuries ago and were only now telling everyone else how to drink it properly. Bookstores reported sightings of grown adults poring over the illustrations with magnifying glasses, muttering about atomic weights, equinoctial shadows, and the precise marital history of Henry VIII's wives (the first one being particularly relevant, apparently, though no one quite knew why until they did). Treasure maps were sketched on napkins in diners from coast to coast. Metal detectors were dusted off and pointed hopefully at suburban lawns, just in case the hare had somehow been reburied in Ohio during shipment.

It was beautiful in its way, this collective American derangement—a pure, uncut hit of hope and delusion served straight, no chaser. We’d missed the first wave, the real madness in Britain, but by God we were going to make up for lost time. We turned the whole thing into a national therapy session: if we could just crack this one last code, maybe the universe would cough up something real, something solid, something that wasn’t another mortgage payment or another divorce decree. The hare became our personal grail, our last best shot at transcendence before the stock market crashed again and the cable bill came due.

Of course it was all smoke. The treasure was never here. It had never been here. The book was a magnificent practical joke, repackaged and resold to a fresh batch of suckers who thought they were buying a map to El Dorado when what they really got was a mirror held up to their own fevered faces. Kit Williams, wherever he was hiding by then—probably in some Cotswold cottage sipping tea and chuckling—must have watched the transatlantic rerun with the detached amusement of a man who’d already burned the theater down once and was now selling tickets to the ashes.

In America, in 1987, we dug. We dug like bastards. And when the dirt settled, all we had left was a book full of pretty pictures and the certain knowledge that the game had been rigged from the start. It doesn't get any more Eighties than that.

Popular posts from this blog

Apple Hypercard links to the future on August 11, 1987

Image
Boston, Massachusetts - August 11, 1987   ZAP! POW! WHAMMO! On a muggy August day in 1987, in the heart of Boston’s MacWorld Expo, Apple Computer, those slick Silicon Valley shamans, unleashed a digital thunderbolt that’d make even the most jaded tech heads twitch like a hopped-up Kerouac on a Benzedrine bender. HyperCard ! The name alone was a neon sign flashing in the binary night, a promise of something wild, something free, something so gloriously unhinged it could turn every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a Macintosh into a programmer, a poet, a digital Prospero conjuring worlds from a 9-inch monochrome screen. Picture it: the convention floor, a buzzing bazaar of beige boxes and bespectacled geeks, the air thick with the hum of cooling fans and the fevered dreams of a thousand would-be Zuckerbergs. Apple’s booth is a temple, a shrine to the bitten fruit, and there, amid the faithful, Bill Atkinson—wild-haired, wild-eyed, the high priest of pixel and code—steps up to the altar. Thi...
Read more

Members Only jackets give entrée to the 80s' most-exclusive club

Image
ZOW! POW! WHAMMO! Here comes the 1980s, that electric decade, that glitter-burst epoch, strutting down the boulevard of history with a boombox on its shoulder, blasting synth-pop anthems into the ozone, the air thick with Aqua Net and ambition. And what’s that glinting in the strobe-lit haze? What’s that sleek silhouette slicing through the crowd like a shark fin through the waters of Port Harbor? It’s the Members Only jacket . Ah, the Members Only. A name that crackles with a delicious, almost illicit, exclusivity. Members of what , exactly? That remained wonderfully vague, a shimmering ambiguity that only enhanced its allure. Perhaps it was a club of the effortlessly cool, the possessors of some ineffable sprezzatura that allowed them to navigate the treacherous terrain of high school hallways and mall food courts with an air of insouciant command.  Perhaps it was a more metaphorical membership, a silent pact among those who understood the unspoken language of status, a visual ha...
Read more

Street Fighter establishes a new pugilistic order on August 30, 1987

Image
It was an unassuming Sunday in August. Yes, August 30, 1987. A date that, to the uninitiated, might seem as bland as white bread, but for those with their fingers on the pulsing joystick of popular culture, it marked the dawn of a new pugilistic order! Before this day, the arcade scene, a kaleidoscope of flashing lights and cacophonous bleeps, was already a vibrant, electric beast. You had your Pac-Man gobbling pellets, your Donkey Kong hurling barrels, your Gyruss spinning through the cosmos like a drunken astronaut. But these were games of reflexes, of pattern recognition, of the lone wolf versus the digital horde. Then came Street Fighter . Ka-POW! Wham! Thwack! Street Fighter came out of the shadows like a stranger stepping off a midnight bus, carrying a promise of violence and something deeper—something that hummed in the blood. Capcom, those game design wizards from Osaka, Japan, birthed it. A coin-op machine with a cabinet painted in bold reds and blues, it stood there in the ar...
Read more