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meyerlemon (![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} meyerlemon) wrote in ![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/community.gif){kind=small} fandom_wank,@ 2007-10-13 20:43:00 |
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Via an anonymous individual at wank_report. And Boing_Boing. And a quarter of my flist. And my obsessive Googling. Thanks, guys.
I think this belongs on f_w because the situation originated in fandom, but if not I can delete or move.
This is, in a nutshell, about screenwriter Josh Olson, his met-on-the-net pal, "Audrey", the woman she met on Deadwood boards who created a hot poet/firefighter out of thin air for "Audrey" to fall in love with, Harlan Ellison hosting an intervention, and singer/songwriter Dan Fogelberg, whose middleaged lady fans apparently also had an imposter in their ranks. Also: llamas.
Josh Olson is a screenwriter. He wrote A History of Violence. He's often to be found arguing in the comments of screenwriting blog The Artful Writer.
Bonus wank to help you understand the glory of Josh Olson's personality:
Professional writers fapping away about a messageboard for working screenwriters and how it was moderated. For almost 600 comments.
Josh Olson feels oppressed that he wasn't allowed to argue about politics:
You think political discussions are stupid, laughable even. Good for you. I, personally, think that a forum dedicated to whatever faceless, interchangable team of hacks wrote the sequel to the remake of the adaptation of the Porky’s videogame is idiotic.
(He was nominated for an Oscar for A History of Violence so he's much cooler than those dudes. Apparently. Also he went on to write the videogame BATMAN ANIME. Which I guess is okay. Because it's anime.)
Josh Olson is a better artist than someone who wrote blockbusters:
“One movie doesn’t make you king of the world. While I have never claimed to have a particulary good grasp of writing, I’ll happily match resumes or earning histories with you any day of the week.”
Five movies don’t make you king of the world. Neither do ten. I didn’t make this about resumes, nor will I. That you distill it down to earning power makes it all pretty clear, though. If I didn’t know we live in completely different tribes before that, I do now.
There isn’t a writer on this forum who’s made less money than I have in the last six months. I guarantee that. You made nothing? I got that beat. And guess what? I’m still one hell of a writer. No connection.
Josh Olson, after about twenty comments about why he needs to discuss his hatred of Republicans to be able to write:
Seriously - I’m not the one who keeps bringing this up. A few of you folks here are obsessed with the subject. You are disastrously, heinously, criminally wrong. Drop it. Move the fuck on. This is beyond insane.
(He's the one who keeps bringing it up.)
Etc.
Besides penning screenplays for Viggo Mortensen movies, Josh Olson apparently also hangs out on the internet and makes pals. One of his pals is "Audrey" (not her real name):
I met Audrey back in the nascent days of the Internet, when we were both on AOL, regular contributors to a message board devoted to screenwriting. I was just starting out as a writer, and might have optioned one or two things for a few hundred bucks (if that), and Audrey was someone who enjoyed the witty banter of writers. Her posts were funny, acerbic, unsentimental and smart, and one of the many things we bonded over was our enormous admiration for author Harlan Ellison.
Those immortal lines are the beginning of his article The Life And Death of Jesse James (not that one. or that other one.) A quick recap in case you don't want to read the whole thing:
Audrey gets married to this British guy she's not in love with. Olson is cool with that. Because he's about to become BFF with Harlan Ellison and has no time to worry about his friends' marriages:
Years go by, and my career takes off. Harlan Ellison becomes a fan of a film I wrote, A History of Violence, and invites me to write with him, adapting his short story “The Discarded” for the ABC series Masters of Science Fiction. In the process, we become spectacular friends.
(This will be important later.)
So now it's about 2005. Audrey is hanging out on Deadwood messageboards.(I was unfortunately unable to find out which board.)
***ETA: it was the HBO boards, and Janna's username was MissMagnolia, and her signature read:
--
Miss Magnolia
Read my friend auBoy:
www.thebloodofeden.blogspot.com
("auBoy" being "Jesse"'s handle, and "The Blood of Eden" being his since-deleted blog.)
Please seetrixalicious' comment below for fun original research on an alternate Janna personality on the HBO boards.
***END ETA
Audrey meets this woman, Janna St. James. Janna says "Hey, I should introduce you to my friend, Jesse Jubilee James! He's a tortured poet and a firefighter." Internet introductions are performed. Audrey falls in love with Jesse Jubilee James. He's eloquent! Tortured! Had I mentioned that he's a firefighter? Also he lives someplace romantic, like Montana. PANTYDROP.
Audrey leaves her husband. Makes plans to move to Montana to be with Jesse, a man she has still never met. They may or may not have swapped underpants to sniff for that all-important pheromonal attraction. The plans are canceled at the last moment, because Jesse shoots himself in the stomach.
Olson:
Jesse has a history of mental imbalance, and that he’s spent time in rooms made of rubber. Hey, he’s had a tough life. In September of 2005, for instance, he was in New Orleans helping Katrina victims, when he had a flashback to the horror he had experienced on 9/11. Apparently, he had gone semicatatonic. Bush’s America will do that to you.
Audrey is given pause. But when Jesse recovers, they get back together. She buys him an iPod and $100 worth of organic asparagus. Love has triumphed!
But then Jesse dies of liver cancer. Audrey mourns. Olson introduces her to Harlan Ellison to help her feel better. Audrey starts to get over Jesse. Olson then discovers something troubling:
Janna St. James, the woman who introduced Audrey to Jesse Jubilee James, is staying at Audrey's house in LA. Friends of Audrey and Olson, by this point kind of suspicious about the whole cowboy-poet-liver-cancer thing, have spent several days googling the shit out of Jesse James. Surprise! The dude doesn't exist!
Olson:
Which means that Janna, the woman who was Jesse’s friend, who met him years ago when she hired him to do some work for her, who visited him in the mental home, who filled Audrey in on the details of his funeral, who’s staying in the house with Audrey as we speak . . . It means that Janna is completely absolutely one hundred percent out of her goddamn mind.
And more:
Janna has done it before. [...] she used to haunt another message board, this one dedicated to singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg. There’s an entire history there, and it’s complicated as hell, but a woman named Janna St. James was discovered to have been posing either as Dan Fogelberg himself or as someone named Daniel who claimed to know Fogelberg. The back-and-forth with all the participants on the board gets intensely complicated in the way that only Internet controversies can. The important thing is that there’s an entire online community that was victimized by an impostor who turned out to be a woman named Janna St. James.
Also, the Janna St. James on the Fogelberg boards made reference to having once been gang-raped and abandoned in a field. Audrey’s Janna had told her the same story.
So then Olson calls his BFF Harlan Ellison for advice, and Harlan Ellison essentially stages an intervention with Audrey while Olson and his friends go over to Audrey's house and confront Janna St. James:
And there’s this woman, this Janna, this thing: a morbidly obese woman in her mid-50s, dull-eyed and empty-faced, sitting in our friend’s front yard. We walk in, Audrey’s friend Ianthe videotaping the whole thing in case Janna wants to claim we assaulted her, or something.
(Or in case, you know, Olson wants to post the clip on YouTube. )
They kick her out of the house. Audrey comes home and thanks Olson for saving her. Olson relies on karma to take care of Janna St. James:
[...] someday, Janna will prey on someone who is not capable, and strong, and possessed of smart, strong friends who care about her. And that person will snap, and Janna will end up in a ditch somewhere. Call it karma, or call it the natural progression of things, but Janna will end up her own victim. It would be immensely satisfying to witness it, or at least read about it in the paper, but we never will. You just have to learn to accept that these things happen, and that you rarely get to be there for the big payback. Just trust that it’s coming, and take what solace you can from that.
A ditch! Nice.
Feel free to read the article for some more of his bombastic prose. Per "Audrey", it may be turned into a movie. Exciting!
So... about Audrey! You're probably wondering how she's doing with this. Luckily, she keeps a blog. It's basically a document devoted to talking about how Janna St. James fucked her over. She's been maintaining it for nine months: A Piece of Fakey. Audrey says genius things like:
Yeah, he sounded too good to believe, except for the crazy part, and the PTSD that he got from being traded as a sex toy for four years to pedophile drug dealers by his molesting hippie junkie dad behind his chilly feminist lecturer mother's back. Too good to believe except for the older brother who shot himself the first night Jesse was raped by the dealers, the night his father hooked him on heroin to help him deal with the pain. Big brother couldn't deal with not being able to protect his younger sibling, and so offed hisownself. "Jesse" may have been a journalist/fireman who loved yoga, but he was damaged.
A journalist/fireman who loved yoga! But he was damaged due to being traded for drugs! You'd think that she's kidding, but she's not:
I'd been having email conversations with other friends of his, his ex-wife and other friends of his had posted on his blog, I'd seen pictures of his friends and ex-wife and son, his sister's house and his llamas. Which, of course, turned out to be Dan Fogelberg's house and llamas.
Remember Dan Fogelberg? He's the guy whose messageboard Janna used to haunt, and in whose fandom she was involved in some kind of sockpuppetry. Here is his website. You should visit and have your speakers turned on, because the idea that ladies who are fans of this guy were getting all hot and bothered about fake internet romances and fanwankery is delightful.
Speaking of Dan Fogelberg, in an earlier post, Audrey invites us to tell Janna St. James how much we dislike her. (Blogger profile redacted since I started typing, but it was this.) In the comments to this post, we discover this interesting tidbit:
I believe there could be several more chapters added from the Fogelberg fan group. People were hurt there, decieved badly, but most won't say a word, too ashamed I believe. I think there were several lustful encounters there with the imposter, many gifts sent to the imposter.
Ah, yes. Lustful encounters. Everyone's politely silent on the issue that Audrey must have had, um, internet make-out sessions with the imaginary poet/cowboy, and therefore, one can only assume, with Janna St. James. But I digress! Naturally this made me google madly for what kind of mysteriously terrible things Janna might have done to the Fogelberg fans. Alas, I have not been super-successful at finding Fogelberg wank, only the detritus: Here, for instance, is a number of saved posts from alt.music.dan-fogelberg.
Someone claiming to be "Janna" engages in what looks a lot like a post-sockpuppet-wank "IT WASN'T ME"
attempt to clear her name:
"Years ago people insinuated themselves into my life on varying levels
trying to get next to Dan Fogelberg [...]
None of it matters, and hasn't mattered and will not matter. Nothing
it concocts. No angle it takes. No plot it thickens. No kettle it
blackens with its own soot. No fake people it posts as. No real names
it steals to make posts appear genuine. No fake men it becomes to woo
information (but can't take a meeting because he doesn't exist).
Nothing it says or does is ever going to make its opinion more than
just that. It's opinion. An opinion that not only bears no fact, but
bears no identity."
I did find a tiny bit more tantalizing Fogelbergery:
In this comment on Audrey's blog a person claiming to be a Fogelberg fan who was duped by Janna says:
I am someone from the Fogelberg fan group. I was one of those tricked
fans, not romantically tricked like a few others were, but tricked
never the less to think I was talking directly to Dan Fogelberg. I was
always leary, but so many others kept insisting it was the real person.
I was amazed that the person I was speaking with was a totally
different personality that the man who wrote such endearing music. Each
time I expressed my wonder at this, i was told by others, people have
different sides, this is him.
This deception went on for years on
and off. I was treated casually as a friend...but I knew of others just
waiting for him to be theirs. So I doubt too many of the believers want
to talk about it. There were other lovers thrown into the mix in order
to trick more lonely women into the lair of the imposter. All the time
these women were being charmed, some may have given gifts, I was never
asked for anything.
This woman, apparently together with other Fogelberg fans, also has a disappointingly tiny blog (two posts, not updated since), she says:
(First post):
Welcome.
This is the first post from Us, the Lady's of the Islands.We all have
known each other for quite a few years now. We have all been through
each other's ups and downs. We were led into a scam that left us
wounded, but not alone and not afraid to question the questionable. We
enjoy an abundance of Music, in fact that is how we met. We all share
the same interests and would like to see what we can find out there in
the world of Blogging. If all goes well, we'd like to eventually post
pictures and maybe even fill you in on some of our goings-on.
(Second post):
The Ladies and I
have been reading some interesting things lately. One I feel the need
to mention is about a woman who has been mislead, not only by someone
she met online, but by a person that she befriended. The reading has us
very interested as well as seeing the hurt and destruction that she has
gone through. We chatted and wondered if the person who hurt her is
still out there doing the same thing over again, just with new people.
What makes someone go to the extreme of making friends and then hurting
them? It totally sickens us. There is a video that was posted. A
pathetic video at that. Something needs to be done, but what? We hope
this woman who was hurt finds some sort of peace among all of this. We
wish her Luck in her fight. Lady Two
The Fogelberg thread, I'm afraid, dried up there. I keep hoping to find more: what with the middle-aged soft-rock fans having internet romances with another middle-aged soft-rock fan masquerading as a soft-rocker, it looks glorious.
But back to Janna. In what "Audrey" claims is Janna St. James' Blogger profile she says:
Some who have never had any direct contact with me whatsover and some who have and think they know me at all like to say I'm the world's best online scammer EVER. Every decade or so I get a taste to pose as a man (and up to 20 other people simultaneously) and reel me in some juicy middle-aged woman flesh for purposes they never quite explain. It sure ain't money or sex. This is because I'm a an expendable being who happens to be a conduit to much more interesting people they seek for the pursuit of their own issues and cons. My repeated flaw is devotion to people I actually know rather than a need to be safe and/or popular with strangers. So proceed to read me with caution. I can bend the minds of the uberintelligent and the agendized, and that's sayin' something.
In what is allegedly her blog (only two posts, not updated since April), Janna tells the extremely convoluted story of how a woman from the Internet moved into her home because she was interested in the husband of a friend of Janna's. But the wife was having none of it:
A pair of the man-in-question's boots had been left in my car. They sat at my front door so the wife wouldn't forget them when leaving. The wife suddenly grabbed one and approached the fact-finder with one of the boots and started yelling "Smell it! Go ahead smell it! This is what you want isn't it? Huh? Huh?"
... I don't know, either.
Janna is also an artist. She sells her jewelry under the name Arts Vandalay. But there, alas, the Janna trail seems to peter out.
Back to Jesse, poet/firefighter. He also kept a blog, which has since been deleted, but Audrey has a list of the posts she saved here.
The blogs are mostly boring emo writing about his feelings and about how the way he says "That" makes Audrey's toes curl, but if you scroll down, you can read a bad short story about a guy who refinishes a bathtub for his lady love, and then they Do It in his truck:
She put her hands against the roof of the truck to brace herself as she raised herself up empty and came down full of him. Hours of practice made her know she dare not move too much right now or lose him early. So she knelt there, giving him time to get used to their union and distracting him with the unbuttoning of her blouse.
After they finish, he takes her to his open-air bathtub:
He washed her body and her hair with orange blossom honey pure vegetable soap from the south of France. And rinsed her hair with waterfall of rainwater reserve he'd put in a pitcher he pulled from somewhere Out of Africa. Warm and clean, she luxuriated once again while he fed her red grapes and ripe cherries.
Yeah, I don't know why anyone would expect "Audrey" to realize that Jesse Jubilee James is not actually a dude, or anything.
Finally, just in case you still think Audrey is a sucker for falling for this routine, Audrey has pictures.
Jesse's father, "Davian Blaine" (hee hee hee) in the middle, "In Colorado back in the hippie days". Or, you know, "Three college dudes with rockin' sideburns about a year ago."
Jesse's Argentinian friend, Pavlo.
Jesse feeding a prairie dog, because he's sensitive.
"Jesse". (I understand. He has a nice beard.)
"A photo of "Jesse" the day he left the NY psychiatric facility (2004 I think) - he said he wanted to remember what his stay there was like." (The. Best.)
That's it. There is No More. Except for the hundreds of pages of "Jesse"'s blogs that I don't know if I'll be able to wade through.
Bonus:
*legionseagle posts a dissection of the Olson article, criss99 shows up to say that: "The only thing that really comes through in your “essay” is the fact that you seethe with loathing and jealousy for anyone who achieves anything in this life.", mini-wank ensues.
* Others share their imposter stories in these comments to Audrey's blog. Bonus-bonus Victoria Bitter reference.
* Someone suspects that this is all an elaborate hoax by Olson. (I had more links in this vein, with people theorizing that Olson was Harlan Ellison writing a hoax to entertain himself, but I lost them. Sorry.)
* A commenter on Audrey's blog can relate, because she was once taken in by someone with a dying baby.
* I believe that these may be "Dan Fogelberg's llamas". You're welcome.
ETA: "Audrey" has updated her blog with two excellent things:
1) Posts by "Jesse"'s "idiot savant friend", "Cakey", who seems to manage a ranch:
my pretty little wife arrived middle of the day. i took her over to the home site and had her pound in the first nail of her dream house. she squealed like a cowboy ho at a rodeo. it was real cute. she read all the stuff me and auboy wrote in the cement and she cried. that dont mean nothing though because she cries when the biggest box of cheerios is on sale two for one.
2) A helpful "Jesse timeline":
January 2006 - [...] "Jesse" is being pursued by his friend "Pavlo," who believes "Jesse" is really gay deep down. His friend "Bean" comes to stay with him after his wife finds out he had sex with a prostie in Vegas. [...]
February 2006 - "Jesse's" mother wants to tell him something important, through his therapist, Annie Martel (an old friend of Janna's from the John Denver days), but then he has a seizure, and it turns out his brain is bleeding. [...] After the operation, he recovers, and plans to go to Ireland with his grandfather, sister and son to settle his other grandfather's estate there [...]
March 2006 - The day before he's scheduled to go to Ireland, "Jesse" is bullied into drinking tequila with his wayward homophobe temporary housemate "Bean," and "Bean" rapes him. "Jesse" relapses and can't go to Ireland, and "Bean" is sent off to rehab. "Jesse" instead tracks down his dad through AP contacts and finds out he's in Pakistan. He plans to go there in April, returning days before our scheduled Easter meeting. His sister comes back from Ireland, finds out what he's planning, and forbids him to go.
April 2006 - "Jesse" defies his sister, and with help from "Pavlo," gets out of town and goes to Pakistan.
More ETA: the comments on the article are good times. This person really disliked A History of Violence:
2 (seemingly) unrelated things happened to me recently: 1) Last week, my girlfriend and I watched "A History of Violence" for the first time. I hated it. The dialogue seemed sooo contrived and the story seemed soo predictable that I really couldn't believe how well received it was critically. It's confusing. Maybe I'm missing it. 2) Today, I started reading this article, and from the beginning all I could think was, 'This writing is terrible! There's no rhythm to it and it seems totally inauthentic.' And then, Boom! It's you again! I can't believe you're the same guy! An Academy Award nomination? I really must be missing something. Is writing poorly a stylistic choice you've made that people are embracing? Are you a magician? What the fuck is going on?
And then there are people, at the end of the second page of the comments bickering about, er, "Audrey is a reliable witness!" vs. "Bitch crazy!" but these comments mention what might be Audrey's real name, so I'm not sure if I should paste them here. They're mildly entertaining, though, and worth a browse around. Definite sockpuppetry of some kind.
I think this belongs on f_w because the situation originated in fandom, but if not I can delete or move.
This is, in a nutshell, about screenwriter Josh Olson, his met-on-the-net pal, "Audrey", the woman she met on Deadwood boards who created a hot poet/firefighter out of thin air for "Audrey" to fall in love with, Harlan Ellison hosting an intervention, and singer/songwriter Dan Fogelberg, whose middleaged lady fans apparently also had an imposter in their ranks. Also: llamas.
Josh Olson is a screenwriter. He wrote A History of Violence. He's often to be found arguing in the comments of screenwriting blog The Artful Writer.
Bonus wank to help you understand the glory of Josh Olson's personality:
Professional writers fapping away about a messageboard for working screenwriters and how it was moderated. For almost 600 comments.
Josh Olson feels oppressed that he wasn't allowed to argue about politics:
You think political discussions are stupid, laughable even. Good for you. I, personally, think that a forum dedicated to whatever faceless, interchangable team of hacks wrote the sequel to the remake of the adaptation of the Porky’s videogame is idiotic.
(He was nominated for an Oscar for A History of Violence so he's much cooler than those dudes. Apparently. Also he went on to write the videogame BATMAN ANIME. Which I guess is okay. Because it's anime.)
Josh Olson is a better artist than someone who wrote blockbusters:
“One movie doesn’t make you king of the world. While I have never claimed to have a particulary good grasp of writing, I’ll happily match resumes or earning histories with you any day of the week.”
Five movies don’t make you king of the world. Neither do ten. I didn’t make this about resumes, nor will I. That you distill it down to earning power makes it all pretty clear, though. If I didn’t know we live in completely different tribes before that, I do now.
There isn’t a writer on this forum who’s made less money than I have in the last six months. I guarantee that. You made nothing? I got that beat. And guess what? I’m still one hell of a writer. No connection.
Josh Olson, after about twenty comments about why he needs to discuss his hatred of Republicans to be able to write:
Seriously - I’m not the one who keeps bringing this up. A few of you folks here are obsessed with the subject. You are disastrously, heinously, criminally wrong. Drop it. Move the fuck on. This is beyond insane.
(He's the one who keeps bringing it up.)
Etc.
Besides penning screenplays for Viggo Mortensen movies, Josh Olson apparently also hangs out on the internet and makes pals. One of his pals is "Audrey" (not her real name):
I met Audrey back in the nascent days of the Internet, when we were both on AOL, regular contributors to a message board devoted to screenwriting. I was just starting out as a writer, and might have optioned one or two things for a few hundred bucks (if that), and Audrey was someone who enjoyed the witty banter of writers. Her posts were funny, acerbic, unsentimental and smart, and one of the many things we bonded over was our enormous admiration for author Harlan Ellison.
Those immortal lines are the beginning of his article The Life And Death of Jesse James (not that one. or that other one.) A quick recap in case you don't want to read the whole thing:
Audrey gets married to this British guy she's not in love with. Olson is cool with that. Because he's about to become BFF with Harlan Ellison and has no time to worry about his friends' marriages:
Years go by, and my career takes off. Harlan Ellison becomes a fan of a film I wrote, A History of Violence, and invites me to write with him, adapting his short story “The Discarded” for the ABC series Masters of Science Fiction. In the process, we become spectacular friends.
(This will be important later.)
So now it's about 2005. Audrey is hanging out on Deadwood messageboards.
***ETA: it was the HBO boards, and Janna's username was MissMagnolia, and her signature read:
--
Miss Magnolia
Read my friend auBoy:
www.thebloodofeden.blogspot.com
("auBoy" being "Jesse"'s handle, and "The Blood of Eden" being his since-deleted blog.)
Please see
trixalicious' comment below for fun original research on an alternate Janna personality on the HBO boards. ***END ETA
Audrey meets this woman, Janna St. James. Janna says "Hey, I should introduce you to my friend, Jesse Jubilee James! He's a tortured poet and a firefighter." Internet introductions are performed. Audrey falls in love with Jesse Jubilee James. He's eloquent! Tortured! Had I mentioned that he's a firefighter? Also he lives someplace romantic, like Montana. PANTYDROP.
Audrey leaves her husband. Makes plans to move to Montana to be with Jesse, a man she has still never met. They may or may not have swapped underpants to sniff for that all-important pheromonal attraction. The plans are canceled at the last moment, because Jesse shoots himself in the stomach.
Olson:
Jesse has a history of mental imbalance, and that he’s spent time in rooms made of rubber. Hey, he’s had a tough life. In September of 2005, for instance, he was in New Orleans helping Katrina victims, when he had a flashback to the horror he had experienced on 9/11. Apparently, he had gone semicatatonic. Bush’s America will do that to you.
Audrey is given pause. But when Jesse recovers, they get back together. She buys him an iPod and $100 worth of organic asparagus. Love has triumphed!
But then Jesse dies of liver cancer. Audrey mourns. Olson introduces her to Harlan Ellison to help her feel better. Audrey starts to get over Jesse. Olson then discovers something troubling:
Janna St. James, the woman who introduced Audrey to Jesse Jubilee James, is staying at Audrey's house in LA. Friends of Audrey and Olson, by this point kind of suspicious about the whole cowboy-poet-liver-cancer thing, have spent several days googling the shit out of Jesse James. Surprise! The dude doesn't exist!
Olson:
Which means that Janna, the woman who was Jesse’s friend, who met him years ago when she hired him to do some work for her, who visited him in the mental home, who filled Audrey in on the details of his funeral, who’s staying in the house with Audrey as we speak . . . It means that Janna is completely absolutely one hundred percent out of her goddamn mind.
And more:
Janna has done it before. [...] she used to haunt another message board, this one dedicated to singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg. There’s an entire history there, and it’s complicated as hell, but a woman named Janna St. James was discovered to have been posing either as Dan Fogelberg himself or as someone named Daniel who claimed to know Fogelberg. The back-and-forth with all the participants on the board gets intensely complicated in the way that only Internet controversies can. The important thing is that there’s an entire online community that was victimized by an impostor who turned out to be a woman named Janna St. James.
Also, the Janna St. James on the Fogelberg boards made reference to having once been gang-raped and abandoned in a field. Audrey’s Janna had told her the same story.
So then Olson calls his BFF Harlan Ellison for advice, and Harlan Ellison essentially stages an intervention with Audrey while Olson and his friends go over to Audrey's house and confront Janna St. James:
And there’s this woman, this Janna, this thing: a morbidly obese woman in her mid-50s, dull-eyed and empty-faced, sitting in our friend’s front yard. We walk in, Audrey’s friend Ianthe videotaping the whole thing in case Janna wants to claim we assaulted her, or something.
(Or in case, you know, Olson wants to post the clip on YouTube. )
They kick her out of the house. Audrey comes home and thanks Olson for saving her. Olson relies on karma to take care of Janna St. James:
[...] someday, Janna will prey on someone who is not capable, and strong, and possessed of smart, strong friends who care about her. And that person will snap, and Janna will end up in a ditch somewhere. Call it karma, or call it the natural progression of things, but Janna will end up her own victim. It would be immensely satisfying to witness it, or at least read about it in the paper, but we never will. You just have to learn to accept that these things happen, and that you rarely get to be there for the big payback. Just trust that it’s coming, and take what solace you can from that.
A ditch! Nice.
Feel free to read the article for some more of his bombastic prose. Per "Audrey", it may be turned into a movie. Exciting!
So... about Audrey! You're probably wondering how she's doing with this. Luckily, she keeps a blog. It's basically a document devoted to talking about how Janna St. James fucked her over. She's been maintaining it for nine months: A Piece of Fakey. Audrey says genius things like:
Yeah, he sounded too good to believe, except for the crazy part, and the PTSD that he got from being traded as a sex toy for four years to pedophile drug dealers by his molesting hippie junkie dad behind his chilly feminist lecturer mother's back. Too good to believe except for the older brother who shot himself the first night Jesse was raped by the dealers, the night his father hooked him on heroin to help him deal with the pain. Big brother couldn't deal with not being able to protect his younger sibling, and so offed hisownself. "Jesse" may have been a journalist/fireman who loved yoga, but he was damaged.
A journalist/fireman who loved yoga! But he was damaged due to being traded for drugs! You'd think that she's kidding, but she's not:
I'd been having email conversations with other friends of his, his ex-wife and other friends of his had posted on his blog, I'd seen pictures of his friends and ex-wife and son, his sister's house and his llamas. Which, of course, turned out to be Dan Fogelberg's house and llamas.
Remember Dan Fogelberg? He's the guy whose messageboard Janna used to haunt, and in whose fandom she was involved in some kind of sockpuppetry. Here is his website. You should visit and have your speakers turned on, because the idea that ladies who are fans of this guy were getting all hot and bothered about fake internet romances and fanwankery is delightful.
Speaking of Dan Fogelberg, in an earlier post, Audrey invites us to tell Janna St. James how much we dislike her. (Blogger profile redacted since I started typing, but it was this.) In the comments to this post, we discover this interesting tidbit:
I believe there could be several more chapters added from the Fogelberg fan group. People were hurt there, decieved badly, but most won't say a word, too ashamed I believe. I think there were several lustful encounters there with the imposter, many gifts sent to the imposter.
Ah, yes. Lustful encounters. Everyone's politely silent on the issue that Audrey must have had, um, internet make-out sessions with the imaginary poet/cowboy, and therefore, one can only assume, with Janna St. James. But I digress! Naturally this made me google madly for what kind of mysteriously terrible things Janna might have done to the Fogelberg fans. Alas, I have not been super-successful at finding Fogelberg wank, only the detritus: Here, for instance, is a number of saved posts from alt.music.dan-fogelberg.
Someone claiming to be "Janna" engages in what looks a lot like a post-sockpuppet-wank "IT WASN'T ME"
attempt to clear her name:
"Years ago people insinuated themselves into my life on varying levels
trying to get next to Dan Fogelberg [...]
None of it matters, and hasn't mattered and will not matter. Nothing
it concocts. No angle it takes. No plot it thickens. No kettle it
blackens with its own soot. No fake people it posts as. No real names
it steals to make posts appear genuine. No fake men it becomes to woo
information (but can't take a meeting because he doesn't exist).
Nothing it says or does is ever going to make its opinion more than
just that. It's opinion. An opinion that not only bears no fact, but
bears no identity."
I did find a tiny bit more tantalizing Fogelbergery:
In this comment on Audrey's blog a person claiming to be a Fogelberg fan who was duped by Janna says:
I am someone from the Fogelberg fan group. I was one of those tricked
fans, not romantically tricked like a few others were, but tricked
never the less to think I was talking directly to Dan Fogelberg. I was
always leary, but so many others kept insisting it was the real person.
I was amazed that the person I was speaking with was a totally
different personality that the man who wrote such endearing music. Each
time I expressed my wonder at this, i was told by others, people have
different sides, this is him.
This deception went on for years on
and off. I was treated casually as a friend...but I knew of others just
waiting for him to be theirs. So I doubt too many of the believers want
to talk about it. There were other lovers thrown into the mix in order
to trick more lonely women into the lair of the imposter. All the time
these women were being charmed, some may have given gifts, I was never
asked for anything.
This woman, apparently together with other Fogelberg fans, also has a disappointingly tiny blog (two posts, not updated since), she says:
(First post):
Welcome.
This is the first post from Us, the Lady's of the Islands.We all have
known each other for quite a few years now. We have all been through
each other's ups and downs. We were led into a scam that left us
wounded, but not alone and not afraid to question the questionable. We
enjoy an abundance of Music, in fact that is how we met. We all share
the same interests and would like to see what we can find out there in
the world of Blogging. If all goes well, we'd like to eventually post
pictures and maybe even fill you in on some of our goings-on.
(Second post):
The Ladies and I
have been reading some interesting things lately. One I feel the need
to mention is about a woman who has been mislead, not only by someone
she met online, but by a person that she befriended. The reading has us
very interested as well as seeing the hurt and destruction that she has
gone through. We chatted and wondered if the person who hurt her is
still out there doing the same thing over again, just with new people.
What makes someone go to the extreme of making friends and then hurting
them? It totally sickens us. There is a video that was posted. A
pathetic video at that. Something needs to be done, but what? We hope
this woman who was hurt finds some sort of peace among all of this. We
wish her Luck in her fight. Lady Two
The Fogelberg thread, I'm afraid, dried up there. I keep hoping to find more: what with the middle-aged soft-rock fans having internet romances with another middle-aged soft-rock fan masquerading as a soft-rocker, it looks glorious.
But back to Janna. In what "Audrey" claims is Janna St. James' Blogger profile she says:
Some who have never had any direct contact with me whatsover and some who have and think they know me at all like to say I'm the world's best online scammer EVER. Every decade or so I get a taste to pose as a man (and up to 20 other people simultaneously) and reel me in some juicy middle-aged woman flesh for purposes they never quite explain. It sure ain't money or sex. This is because I'm a an expendable being who happens to be a conduit to much more interesting people they seek for the pursuit of their own issues and cons. My repeated flaw is devotion to people I actually know rather than a need to be safe and/or popular with strangers. So proceed to read me with caution. I can bend the minds of the uberintelligent and the agendized, and that's sayin' something.
In what is allegedly her blog (only two posts, not updated since April), Janna tells the extremely convoluted story of how a woman from the Internet moved into her home because she was interested in the husband of a friend of Janna's. But the wife was having none of it:
A pair of the man-in-question's boots had been left in my car. They sat at my front door so the wife wouldn't forget them when leaving. The wife suddenly grabbed one and approached the fact-finder with one of the boots and started yelling "Smell it! Go ahead smell it! This is what you want isn't it? Huh? Huh?"
... I don't know, either.
Janna is also an artist. She sells her jewelry under the name Arts Vandalay. But there, alas, the Janna trail seems to peter out.
Back to Jesse, poet/firefighter. He also kept a blog, which has since been deleted, but Audrey has a list of the posts she saved here.
The blogs are mostly boring emo writing about his feelings and about how the way he says "That" makes Audrey's toes curl, but if you scroll down, you can read a bad short story about a guy who refinishes a bathtub for his lady love, and then they Do It in his truck:
She put her hands against the roof of the truck to brace herself as she raised herself up empty and came down full of him. Hours of practice made her know she dare not move too much right now or lose him early. So she knelt there, giving him time to get used to their union and distracting him with the unbuttoning of her blouse.
After they finish, he takes her to his open-air bathtub:
He washed her body and her hair with orange blossom honey pure vegetable soap from the south of France. And rinsed her hair with waterfall of rainwater reserve he'd put in a pitcher he pulled from somewhere Out of Africa. Warm and clean, she luxuriated once again while he fed her red grapes and ripe cherries.
Yeah, I don't know why anyone would expect "Audrey" to realize that Jesse Jubilee James is not actually a dude, or anything.
Finally, just in case you still think Audrey is a sucker for falling for this routine, Audrey has pictures.
Jesse's father, "Davian Blaine" (hee hee hee) in the middle, "In Colorado back in the hippie days". Or, you know, "Three college dudes with rockin' sideburns about a year ago."
Jesse's Argentinian friend, Pavlo.
Jesse feeding a prairie dog, because he's sensitive.
"Jesse". (I understand. He has a nice beard.)
"A photo of "Jesse" the day he left the NY psychiatric facility (2004 I think) - he said he wanted to remember what his stay there was like." (The. Best.)
That's it. There is No More. Except for the hundreds of pages of "Jesse"'s blogs that I don't know if I'll be able to wade through.
Bonus:
*
legionseagle posts a dissection of the Olson article, criss99 shows up to say that: "The only thing that really comes through in your “essay” is the fact that you seethe with loathing and jealousy for anyone who achieves anything in this life.", mini-wank ensues.* Others share their imposter stories in these comments to Audrey's blog. Bonus-bonus Victoria Bitter reference.
* Someone suspects that this is all an elaborate hoax by Olson. (I had more links in this vein, with people theorizing that Olson was Harlan Ellison writing a hoax to entertain himself, but I lost them. Sorry.)
* A commenter on Audrey's blog can relate, because she was once taken in by someone with a dying baby.
* I believe that these may be "Dan Fogelberg's llamas". You're welcome.
ETA: "Audrey" has updated her blog with two excellent things:
1) Posts by "Jesse"'s "idiot savant friend", "Cakey", who seems to manage a ranch:
my pretty little wife arrived middle of the day. i took her over to the home site and had her pound in the first nail of her dream house. she squealed like a cowboy ho at a rodeo. it was real cute. she read all the stuff me and auboy wrote in the cement and she cried. that dont mean nothing though because she cries when the biggest box of cheerios is on sale two for one.
2) A helpful "Jesse timeline":
January 2006 - [...] "Jesse" is being pursued by his friend "Pavlo," who believes "Jesse" is really gay deep down. His friend "Bean" comes to stay with him after his wife finds out he had sex with a prostie in Vegas. [...]
February 2006 - "Jesse's" mother wants to tell him something important, through his therapist, Annie Martel (an old friend of Janna's from the John Denver days), but then he has a seizure, and it turns out his brain is bleeding. [...] After the operation, he recovers, and plans to go to Ireland with his grandfather, sister and son to settle his other grandfather's estate there [...]
March 2006 - The day before he's scheduled to go to Ireland, "Jesse" is bullied into drinking tequila with his wayward homophobe temporary housemate "Bean," and "Bean" rapes him. "Jesse" relapses and can't go to Ireland, and "Bean" is sent off to rehab. "Jesse" instead tracks down his dad through AP contacts and finds out he's in Pakistan. He plans to go there in April, returning days before our scheduled Easter meeting. His sister comes back from Ireland, finds out what he's planning, and forbids him to go.
April 2006 - "Jesse" defies his sister, and with help from "Pavlo," gets out of town and goes to Pakistan.
More ETA: the comments on the article are good times. This person really disliked A History of Violence:
2 (seemingly) unrelated things happened to me recently: 1) Last week, my girlfriend and I watched "A History of Violence" for the first time. I hated it. The dialogue seemed sooo contrived and the story seemed soo predictable that I really couldn't believe how well received it was critically. It's confusing. Maybe I'm missing it. 2) Today, I started reading this article, and from the beginning all I could think was, 'This writing is terrible! There's no rhythm to it and it seems totally inauthentic.' And then, Boom! It's you again! I can't believe you're the same guy! An Academy Award nomination? I really must be missing something. Is writing poorly a stylistic choice you've made that people are embracing? Are you a magician? What the fuck is going on?
And then there are people, at the end of the second page of the comments bickering about, er, "Audrey is a reliable witness!" vs. "Bitch crazy!" but these comments mention what might be Audrey's real name, so I'm not sure if I should paste them here. They're mildly entertaining, though, and worth a browse around. Definite sockpuppetry of some kind.
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