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I'm writing this, sick at home and coughing directly onto a shitty 100 dollar laptop i got for work. i'm still using my macbook for work. i don't even remember what prompted me to dredge up my old blog; i think it had something to do with mark fisher. but either way, i've been meaning to return to the intellectual swamps i was wading in during my days at university. so it's fitting that i have, on a whim and at the mention of a cabin, started anpther rerun of TANIS.
TANIS is a fictional podcast docuseries about a man trying to uncover a strange, mysterious myth. it weaves cults, conspiracies, corporate intrigue, classified ads, cabins, crimes and confusion together through the narration of a weedy sounding guy named nick silver. it also includes the dark net but i couldnt think of a c word for that. it happens to hit all of my favourite interests and topics of research. in fact, the podcast might have contributed to my delving into these topics at uni. i started listening to it in my first year, 2016, when i was in the dorms and went nocturnal. it was TANIS and true crime. i still remember how afraid i would get, anxiety ramped up to 100, after listening to this mildly spooky podcast alone in the dark. since then, i've relistened to the podcast at least ten times over the years. i love it dearly.
it's not a great podcast.
TANIS has an incredible atmosphere. set in the pacific northwest, it captures a rainy darkness, a kind of obscuring, dim fog that sinks and seeps into everything. and as i said, it hits on topics that i adore. there's a weird ceo of a corporation that wants him to perform scientific field research. documents from that corporation lead one to believe that the corporation is actually performing tests on the host himself. there's a cult that keeps trying to dseduce and drug him with dandelion tea. there's a hacker girl who's written to be a joss whedon character. there's a cabin in the woods, for fuck's sake. there's a weird deer-headed cloaked figure! there\s a wet, mossy, bloody smell that stings the eyes! there are nightmares, backroom,s, military-grade materials, government spooks. all the ingredients are there, but the writer, terry miles, just cannot for the life of him stick the landing.
the dialogue is somewhat stilted and awkward, the conversations simultaneously dropping exposition clumsily and beating around the bush in excrutiating drawn-out back and forths. each season leaves you with more questions, more unfinished threads, than the last. nothing is ever outright solved. TANIS does not have a conclusion. the most recent season, S5, is half a worse version of the first few seasons and half a dryly recited novel that I absolutely hated. i seriously despised the novel. some guy having a shit time that slowly got worse for 6 hours. but aside fro the shitty novel i love TANIS, warts and all.
the name CABIN FEVER came from a book i purchased at the melbourne book fair. a few classmates and our lecturer went on a trip there in february of 2020. we happened to have booked the very late plane home to new zealand before its borders were shut for months. while we were there, i got to see an exhibition and listen to a talk by METAHAVEN, my favourite designers at the time. i don't remember much about them anymore, but i remember a film they had in the exhibiton. i think the show was called field study. the film had clips of people standing on these mounds and hills of black sand. why do i think it was filmed in hungaria?
CABIN FEVER is split into three sections: shelter, utopia, porn. there's also a final chapter called art. it follows the history of cabins as the shelter of colonial pioneers and bushmen staking a claim into the wildlie and enacting their manifest destiny, working their way west. it then captures the utopian dreams of hippies taking to the deserts and hinterlands in settlements like drop city and the geodesic domes of buckminster fuller. afterwards, it talks about cabin porn, the obsessive glazing of cabins by the rich software class of silicon valley and their desires to leave the city and escape to nature, to a more authentic or dreamy lifestyle in the woods. a simpler existence. screen free. CABIN FEVER ends up, again and again, in that whirring heart of darkness they call san francisco.
i'm currently listening to episode three of tanis -- the girl in the high tower. nick silver, in his gentle, warbling voice, is describing the elevator game. it's an old urban legend wherein you have to go up and down to a specific series of floors in the elevator in a specific order. if you do it right, you'll end up... somewhere else. but there are all sorts of opportunities to being 'stuck' or 'lost' in some indeterminate non-here. the elevator game is never mentioned in TANIS again. it still scares me enough that i turned on my lamp to banish the darkness of my room, lol. it only occured to me now that the elevator game seems to be a parallel to the central game or challenge within TANIS, that the 'runner' must overcome. they must follow a series of paths and routes, looking for signs, refraining from interacting with anyone who dwells within TANIS. episode three goes on to discuss some suicide victims, a bulletin board frequented by hackers, serial killers in seattle -- "the pacific northwest is the end of the frontier, and you can feel it in the air. something about this reguoion is magnetic, pulling the most dangerous and evil among us beneath it's dark canopy."
friday, 13th of june 2025