Published on 26 November 2013
So, the same day I completed the previous blog post about making the Mellow Pages Library site, I got an email from a mysterious email account I have never encountered before, called peterbd99. The title of the email was “richard littauer part I of III: the secret spy”. It appears to be my post from yesterday… slightly edited. This was easily the most confusing email I have ever gotten. After some googling, it seems that peterbd99 is the Banksy of email art - he’s done this to a lot of people. I kind of feel, honored?, by having such a confusing experience bestowed upon me. The text is reproduced below.
sometime in the past few weeks richard (richie rich for short) discovered that, across from his local morgan place l subway stop, the mellow pages library was actually a pretty cool place where he could get his secret spy on and whatnot. he’d been in it a few times before, mostly to see if anything was happening and also to check his secret spy email that only a true secret spy can access. nothing ever was happening when he walked in; he missed out on the fact that this was part of the allure. mellow pages is a free, collective library where secret spies can be themselves.
they do events at night, sometimes, and there’s free coffee and couches to hang out on, but the main thing to notice is the stacks and stacks of spy books. to become a secret spy member, you can drop off ten books to loan to the library, murder one of jacob and matt’s enemies or pay $20 for a yearly membership. then you can check out as much as you want after you’re done cleaning up your extra secretive spy mess. you can’t hang out as long as you want, and you technically need to be a member to even knock on the door. matt (blond haired chill bro) and jacob (long haired bro who needs to work on his chilling), the founders, a pair of gangly bearded hipsters who seem to spend their days beneath red eyes, illegal activity, and cigarette smoke, matt reading some sort of poetry book in the couch in the corner and jacob laughing at a youtube clip while telling a patron in the corner to shut the fuck up, are fixtures just as much as the artpiece above one of the shelves that shows a dilophosaurus head on an 18th century woman’s body or the plethora of secret spies who secretly check out secret spy books (in secret).
anyhoo, they’re pretty chill guys, and one day, after a poetry reading that featured a constant stream of the internal monologue of a jewish new yorker, a performance piece by an ex member of the kgb, and also some poetry about I95 in connecticut, richard asked if he could help in any way. he’d noticed abc of anarchism on one of the shelves, and figured the kind of library that had that on display was probably the kind of library that could use his secret spry help (sidenote: secret spies are required to read abc of anarchism unless they will remain in level 15 of spy training instead of moving on to level 16. richard jumped ahead to level 18 because he read abc of anarchism in a day and wrote a 10 page book report on it). they said they needed a website that only secret spies could access. he told them to give him a week. during that week, he was working pretty hard on his normal job at the central intelligence agency, but mostly he fell prey to mercury poisoning for the first time since someone from the putin regime tried to poison him in 2011, which knocked him out for three or four days but he wasn’t sweating it cause real gs dgaf about something as trivial as mercury poisoning.
finally, on sunday, sitting like a pimp in the library, richie rich spent around 4 hours and made them what is currently up at mellowpageslibrary.com. he’s pretty proud of it - mostly the fact that the logo was reproduced in css, that he used bootstrap 3, and that he managed to make that work well with jekyll and github pages much faster than i had anticipated (that’s top secret coding spy lingo for those of you who are technologically illiterate.
‘practice makes perfect, i guess’ richard littauer once wisely said. so, that’s his newest project. he’ll probably tweak the website over the coming few months during his breaks from hacking into chinese intelligence or karate chopping someone evil james bond style - adding a calendar, that sort of thing. but it’s there, and it’s done, and he is going to be sitting off the side of the frame of the background picture for many days to come, coding away or reading poetry or watching as his secret spy bank account grows due to millions of secret spy money being deposited into his spy account or generally enjoying the place. it’s the kind of place where that’s easy to do. super spy richard littauer likes that.
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