A Republic Behind the Wallpaper
A Primer on Outer Order Media, and All Who Sail Within Her
by Ralph Von Francis
There are easier ways to make art.
You could make a record.
You could publish a novel.
You could shoot a film, start a magazine, invent a critic, open an imaginary college, establish a repertory cinema, create a publishing concern, maintain several decades of cultural memory, produce competing schools of criticism and then allow all of these things to begin referring to one another until the distinction between archive and invention becomes sufficiently porous that an innocent visitor can no longer remember which door he entered through.
Or you could do what most people do and get a hobby.
Outer Order Media has chosen the first option.
I should establish immediately that I am not part of Outer Order. This appears increasingly important, because once one has spent several hours inside the thing, one's independence becomes difficult to prove.
Outer Order Media is the sprawling creative apparatus of Boston writer, musician, filmmaker and inveterate constructor Laurence Todisco, who performs and publishes much of his work under the name Lou Toad.
Calling Outer Order a "multimedia project" is technically correct in approximately the same way that calling New York a collection of buildings is technically correct.
It conveys almost nothing.
Outer Order is better understood as a private culture that has somehow achieved public infrastructure.
There are books.
There are records.
There are films.
There are essays and criticism.
There are fictitious magazines containing fictitious critics who possess sufficiently developed tastes that they occasionally seem capable of disagreeing with their creator.
There are imaginary academic institutions.
There are repertory film programs.
There are abandoned projects, recovered projects, revised projects, pseudonymous projects, projects commenting upon older projects and projects that appear to exist principally because some other project required evidence that they once existed.
It is simultaneously deeply silly and completely serious.
This turns out to be the essential Outer Order combination.
I. ENTER THROUGH ANY DOOR
The peculiar pleasure of Outer Order is that there appears to be no designated entrance.
I entered through the criticism.
Someone else might discover one of the books.
Another person could encounter Lou Toad's music.
Someone could find the 2018 short film Head Heavy without knowing there was anything behind it whatsoever.
A person might stumble upon a Maverick City Cinema program devoted to some neglected television movie and assume they had simply found an unusually obsessive film blog.
That person is in danger.
Because the next reasonable question is:
Who wrote this?
And that question leads to Buzz Drainpipe.
Buzz leads to Crease.
Crease leads elsewhere.
Elsewhere leads to Outer Order Press.
Outer Order Press leads to a novel.
The novel leads to another name.
The other name leads to an imaginary institution that seems to have a faculty.
Three hours later you are reading the aesthetic principles of a critic who does not exist regarding a film program held at a cinema that does not exist, programmed by a cultural organization which exists both fictionally and actually.
You begin checking the locks.
This is not because Outer Order is attempting some grand Borges-like deception.
Quite the opposite.
Its inventions are generally presented with a wink broad enough to admit a delivery truck.
The strange effect comes from accumulation.
Every little thing remembers several other little things.
After sufficient accumulation, the joke develops municipal services.
II. LOU TOAD: THE MAN AT THE SWITCHBOARD
At the center is Lou Toad, although "center" may be misleading.
Todisco's primary artistic talent may be less creation than connection.
He writes, records music, constructs cultural criticism, makes films, designs conceptual institutions and constantly feeds older work into newer work. An idea rarely remains merely an idea. It becomes an artifact, then a reference point, then part of the local history.
Lou Toad consequently operates less like the auteur presiding over a unified oeuvre and more like the proprietor of a particularly eccentric neighborhood.
He built the buildings.
He does not insist everyone inside them speak alike.
That distinction matters.
Outer Order's various voices are not simple pseudonyms pasted onto identical prose. Their differences constitute much of the project's architecture.
Which brings us to the crew.
III. BUZZ DRAINPIPE: CRITIC WITH A BROKEN SPEEDOMETER
Buzz Drainpipe is perhaps the easiest inhabitant to recognize.
Originally emerging from a Lester Bangs-like rock-critic impulse, Buzz became something more useful than imitation: a critic for whom enthusiasm and hostility have both been fitted with oversized engines.
Drainpipe reviews records as though they have personally arrived at his apartment demanding judgment.
His criticism proceeds through riffs, explosions, historical connections, affronted taste and sudden moments of unexpected sincerity.
A Buzz Drainpipe piece rarely asks merely whether a record is good.
It asks what sort of dangerous organism the record might be, who left it unattended, whether civilization deserves it and what would happen if one played it loudly enough to remove several layers of paint.
Underneath the comic violence lies genuine criticism.
Buzz listens historically.
He hears records beside other records, scenes beside other scenes, personas beside earlier personas.
If Outer Order requires someone to kick open the archive door, Drainpipe generally has the appropriate footwear.
IV. DAX SILVER: ENTHUSIASM WITH AN EDITOR'S PENCIL
Where Buzz detonates, Dax Silver organizes.
Dax is the critic who appears to believe that culture is best served by somebody remaining delighted but refusing to become sloppy about it.
He possesses a peculiar editorial optimism.
Bad enthusiasm is insufficient.
Good enthusiasm requires discrimination.
Dax therefore occupies an important role in the Outer Order ecosystem: he allows pleasure itself to become critical method.
The difference between Dax and Buzz can be summarized roughly as follows:
Buzz discovers an obscure record and kicks your apartment door down.
Dax discovers the same record, brings a clean copy, explains precisely why Side Two matters and gently questions why you have allowed your turntable stylus to reach this condition.
Both are useful men.
V. DON OVERCAST: CULTURE AFTER THE RAIN
Then there is Don Overcast, arguably the most quietly dangerous of the critics.
Overcast writes from the point at which popular culture has stopped being merely entertainment and begun becoming memory.
Television, old films, libraries, records, routines and ordinary objects acquire emotional weather.
His criticism tends toward reflection rather than verdict.
A Don Overcast essay can begin with a television comedy and somehow end up discussing time, class, aging, cities, loss, ritual or the metaphysical importance of keeping a shelf slightly untidy.
He is perhaps Outer Order's best evidence that the project's humor should not be mistaken for emotional evasiveness.
There is tenderness here.
It is simply kept away from violins.
VI. HOLLIS VANE: FILE CLERK OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
Hollis Vane occupies a different department.
Vane approaches culture through the bureaucratic sublime.
UFOs, municipal infrastructure, obscure histories, forgotten technologies and strange systems are treated with an almost administrative seriousness.
A Hollis Vane piece frequently feels as though some forgotten government office has accidentally hired a poet.
This creates one of Outer Order's most characteristic tonal combinations:
the fantastic explained as procedure.
A sewer system can become liturgy.
An alien visitation can acquire paperwork.
The impossible becomes funny because it is handled according to policy.
The ordinary becomes beautiful because somebody finally bothered to document it.
VII. LESTER SAGE, A. DUVANT, GIDEON VOID AND THE OTHER ROOMS
Beyond the more visible critics are figures whose functions occasionally resemble departments in a very small and badly funded university.
Lester Sage serves the archival impulse: history, recovery, classification, the sense that every cultural object has spent the last forty years waiting patiently in a box.
A. Duvant tends toward essayistic reflection, the intellectual wing of the operation where ideas can stretch their legs without entirely losing contact with popular culture.
Gideon Void moves toward fiction and literary territory, where Outer Order's appetite for private mythology becomes narrative rather than criticism.
The important thing is not memorizing the personnel.
This is not Marvel.
There will be no examination.
The names work because they create distance within a single imagination.
Todisco can approach an object from several angles without insisting those angles resolve into one authoritative position.
That is considerably more interesting than merely having pseudonyms.
They behave like internal editorial disagreement made visible.
VIII. THE INSTITUTIONS
This is where Outer Order begins getting alarming.
Most artists invent characters.
Todisco invents organizations capable of employing the characters.
There is Crease Magazine, home to criticism and cultural archaeology.
There is Outer Order Press, through which the literary branch gains physical form.
There is Maverick City Cinema, an imaginary repertory house capable of programming double features, retrospectives and impossible seasons with considerably more personality than most actual streaming interfaces.
There is Maverick City College.
There is Ethertown Polytechnic.
There are labels, columns, video concerns and other pieces of cultural scaffolding.
None individually would be unprecedented.
Together they create something much stranger:
institutional worldbuilding.
Outer Order rarely says, "Here is my opinion about this movie."
It says:
"Here is tonight's program at the cinema."
It does not merely say, "I wrote an essay."
It asks which publication ran it and which critic wrote it.
It does not merely produce an object.
It produces the cultural circumstances surrounding the object.
That is the fundamental trick.
IX. THE REAL OBJECT IS THE ECOSYSTEM
It would therefore be a mistake to judge Outer Order principally by determining which individual artifact is "best."
There are stronger and weaker pieces, certainly.
There are projects that feel complete and others that feel like fragments recovered from a workshop floor.
But Outer Order's actual masterpiece may be the relationships between the pieces.
An old film becomes part of the history.
A record becomes evidence of a period.
A critic reviews something produced elsewhere in the ecosystem.
An invented publication establishes continuity.
A new project retroactively alters the meaning of an older one.
The archive develops sediment.
Eventually Outer Order begins generating the sensation associated with real cultural history:
nothing seems to have begun exactly where you started looking.
Everything has antecedents.
That is extraordinarily difficult to fake deliberately.
Outer Order achieves it largely because the antecedents frequently really do exist.
X. THE AI QUESTION
Any contemporary discussion of Outer Order must eventually address artificial intelligence, because AI has become part of its current production method.
The lazy interpretation would be that Outer Order is an "AI art project."
That description strikes me as historically backward.
Outer Order predates the present generative boom in crucial respects. Todisco already had music, writing, films, personae, publishing concepts, private mythologies and an appetite for worldmaking.
AI did not supply the world.
It supplied infrastructure.
This distinction may eventually prove culturally significant.
For certain artists, generative systems function primarily as vending machines: request object, receive object.
Within Outer Order they function more like a municipal works department.
They help connect roads that already existed.
A character can suddenly produce ten pieces without requiring ten months.
An old concept can acquire visual form.
A fictional institution can generate documentation.
A musical idea can be mocked up.
An essay can provoke an image, which provokes a program, which becomes part of the archive.
The speed increases enormously.
But the governing peculiarities remain stubbornly human.
Outer Order would not become Outer Order simply by giving another person the same software.
One would merely obtain another person with software.
The essential ingredient is the preexisting interior geography.
XI. IS ANY OF THIS SERIOUS?
Unfortunately, yes.
That may be Outer Order's funniest joke.
It is playful enough to produce imaginary colleges and invented critics with drainage-related surnames.
Yet beneath all this apparatus are recurring concerns pursued with considerable consistency:
work.
class.
memory.
cities.
obsolescence.
popular culture.
technology.
spiritual life without organized doctrine.
the dignity of maintenance.
what survives.
how ordinary people construct meaning from whatever happens to be lying around.
This is why the elaborate mythology does not collapse into trivia.
The machinery points somewhere.
Outer Order is fascinated by neglected objects because it is fascinated by neglected people.
It repeatedly returns to things the official culture has filed incorrectly, dismissed too easily or forgotten before their usefulness was exhausted.
A mediocre television program can contain one astonishing idea.
A forgotten record can illuminate an era.
A municipal routine can become ritual.
An old technology can reveal an entire philosophy of labor.
Outer Order's governing proposition might be:
Look again.
XII. THE EXPERIENCE OF DISCOVERING IT LATE
There is another reason I suspect Outer Order may become more interesting over time.
It is built for accidental archaeology.
Imagine encountering the whole thing twenty years from now with no explanatory apparatus.
You find a record.
Then a review.
Then a book.
Then another critic.
Then a film.
Then something called Maverick City Cinema.
Then you realize the cinema has programming history.
Then somebody mentions Crease.
Then you discover Crease has writers.
Then the writers appear elsewhere.
Then something from 2026 refers to something from 2018.
Then something from 2018 turns out to have roots considerably earlier.
At some point you stop asking:
"What is this?"
and begin asking:
"How large is this?"
That is the correct question.
The answer appears currently to be:
larger than any reasonable person would have made it.
Excellent.
XIII. SO WHAT IS OUTER ORDER MEDIA?
Here is my attempt at the short version.
Outer Order Media is a long-running independent creative world centered on the work of Laurence Todisco/Lou Toad, encompassing music, fiction, film, criticism, publishing, invented personae and fictional cultural institutions.
But that still sounds horribly respectable.
Try again.
Outer Order is what happens when one person's accumulated cultural life develops its own civic government.
It is record collection, neighborhood memory, basement rehearsal, public library, late-night television station, small press, repertory cinema, imaginary faculty lounge and half-remembered pirate broadcast.
It has influences without behaving much like its influences.
It has canon without demanding obedience to canon.
It has continuity without requiring plot.
It is sometimes ridiculous because actual culture is ridiculous.
It is sometimes moving because actual culture accidentally becomes moving while nobody is looking.
Most importantly, it possesses that rare property among invented worlds:
it seems capable of continuing when its creator leaves the room.
One can imagine Buzz Drainpipe arguing somewhere with Dax Silver over a record Lou Toad hasn't made yet.
One can imagine Don Overcast quietly filing an essay about the disagreement.
One can imagine Lester Sage discovering the correspondence thirty years afterward.
One can imagine Maverick City Cinema holding the retrospective.
And somewhere in the administrative basement, Hollis Vane is undoubtedly completing the necessary forms.
That is Outer Order.
Do not worry about understanding all of it.
Nobody understands a city before visiting.
Pick a door.
Go inside.
Just remember where you parked.
RALPH VON FRANCIS
Independent critic, unaffiliated observer, and presently uncertain whether Ethertown Polytechnic has tenure.
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