Kenneth Hite's Journal

One Step Closer to the Pleroma
I've finally made it into the real section of Previews. Not the realest of the real sections, the DC section at the front, but at least up in the green-sidebar front pages, the pages heroically emblazoned "Comics and Graphic Novels." I've been name-checked in listings way back in the pink-sidebar "Games" ghetto loads of times, of course, but I've become jaded and callous about that.¹

What am I on about, you ask? In this modern era, many of those of us who buy comics do so using the Previews catalog, which we fill out for our Friendly Pusher about three months before delivery date. And for the first time, I have a book in the "Comics and Graphic Novels" section of Previews, namely The Complete Idiot's Guide to U.S. History, Graphic Illustrated, which is on page 206 of the May 2008 issue, under "Alpha Books," which is the imprint of Penguin that handles the Complete Idiot's Guide series. Irksomely, I'm listed as "Ken Hite" instead of "Kenneth Hite," but the artist (the exceptional Leah Hayes) got her name listed correctly, so I imagine that's a win for the book, and hence for me, nonetheless.

A listing in the May issue (usually) means a July release for the book, although the Internet in general claims an early August release, with the exception of the Amazon listing, which holds out (somewhat worryingly) for "December 31, 2025." So sometime between July and Blade Runner, then. Which is, in its own way, one possible arc of U.S. history, and of Previews, too, I suppose.

[1] Not really.

Beltane With Art Students
Big night ends with the sun coming up through my window; that's how they mostly end, to be sure, but tonight I was downtown until 3 a.m. for Looptopia, a Chicago version of the "Nuit Blanche" they do in Paris and other cities not (quite) as wonderful as Chicago. Last year we made it all the way until dawn, but the meager breakfast reward in Millennium Park was so disproportioned to the night that this year we ejected ante-anti-climax.

But before that, we saw a re-imagining of More Songs About Buildings And Food with a joyous crowd vibe (and a crowd that was, on average, considerably younger than the album, your humble narrator excepted), and Daniel Burnham cornices standing out against the reflective sky like a screen grab from God's Blu-Ray, and a rhythm-and-rec-room band playing behind acrobats and stilt-walkers in a Midnight (EDT) Circus in Daley Plaza, and all the art the Fine Arts Building would show us including a So-Creepy Little-Girl Sphinx by Richard Laurent that is the best Changeling cover never used (and sadly not on his website), and a giant glowing piece of hard candy, and a late-night book sale, and a kite parade, and "The Weird Sisters" (who billed themselves as "naughty vaudeville" but were more "normal music-hall") in Adler and Sullivan's sublime Auditorium Theatre, and an hour of an experimental film group only just a wee bit too much in love with itself but entrancingly earnest withal, and horrible Dunkin' Donuts mocha latte but every other coffee shop mysteriously decided to leave thousands of dollars just sitting in the street for others to pick up ...

... and some really awesome fire dancers. For that show, we started back behind the crowd, unable to see anything except on the tiny display screens of the digital cameras being held above us. "What's the opposite of Jumbotron?" I asked my companions. Responded wisely

bigstokes80: "Tron." And so it was, and upon tron upon tron we watched the dancers spin and twirl flaming hula hoops and batons and bolas and staves, fighting and mating and claiming and presenting, with their fires flapping desperate bids for liberty in the wind off the river, seeing them scattered on tiny screens in all sorts of light-setting and freeze-frame defaults, a fractal vision of postmodern paganism complete with communal soul-capture almost as entrancing in its way as the actual spectacle.

* * * *

Which I eventually did see, thanks to my osmotic eeling powers, as I shouldered toward the front row throughout, occupying niches emptied in the demos as sated spectators fell back or ran off to some other delight, until I had as good a view as anyone not pounding away at a bongo drum. I remember thinking, of the slim blonde fire-eater, that I was surprised that I was surprised that she had a pierced tongue. In retrospect, once you've gone in for fire-eating, a little tongue-piercing is like a walk on the beach, I imagine.

* * * *

All this plus Hot Doug's for lunch and another Nikkatsu Action New Wave film (Velvet Hustler) at the Siskel Center, serendipitously keeping us out of the rain, and Iron Man in digital projection tomorrow with Hop Haus burger to follow. My city is so very, very good to me.

Is It Safe? Cosmic Kittens and Atomic Dogs
So for those of you wondering where I've been all this time, and perhaps even where I am now, the answer is Las Vegas, where I attended the GAMA Trade Show and did some work for one of Christian Moore's many enterprises and am now taking a weekend to hang with Christian & c. before going back to Chicago to get my lower right wisdom tooth taken out. "In one city, release from pain. In the other, pain."

Highlights of the trip include Owen and Daniela's new kitten Cosimo, who struggled manfully, and even kittenfully, to keep me entertained all last Saturday night: staging two prizefights with my left foot, running up and down my recumbent form, falling asleep on my chest, doing the old "random pounce" on anything that struck his fancy, and engaging in a bravura performance of Help, I've Somehow Become Trapped In A Sheet, featuring the most dramatic escape attempts since Houdini's milk can. Truly inspiring.

James Ernest was kind enough to help me brainstorm the central dice mechanic for Casey Jones is Dead, which you will hear more of later, unless you are

kaynorr and

gnosticpi, in which case you may hear of it somewhat earlier, perhaps during a lengthy playtest session.

I got to see the proofs for Where the Deep Ones Are, now coming in August, and for Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales, coming rather sooner than that both to PDF and print. And I got the green light for a very fun project along those lines that had stalled out after last GenCon, but is now under the control of myself,

righteousfist, and

philreed. Other GTS leads on other work will, as is traditional, appear in this space when they have ripened, or will never be mentioned again, by me or anyone else.

In gustatory developments, Owen and Daniela and I hit the Golden Steer, Las Vegas' finest steakhouse; a whole gang of us went to Pearl, where the scallops in XO sauce redeemed the chef's tasting menu; a different whole gang of us went to Lotus of Siam (as discussed previously in this space); a gang overlapping with the first two gangs went to Sushi Roku where Christian cavalierly sprang Kobe beef ishiyaki (cooked on a hot rock) on us; and then it was Thursday.

Upon which day the keen and incisive

dwatts inveigled me into going out to scenic Cashman Field to watch the Triple A Las Vegas 51s (complete with alien head and Star Trek font on the jerseys) beat the living tar out of the Portland Beavers, 8-1, in a stunning defeat of walkable New Urbanism. It was, as minor-league games tend to be, a great day at the ballpark, if not much of an exhibition of quality pitching. (At one point the batter was hit by a ball hurled by the contemptible Portlanders, giving rise to crowd dissent, but we observed that if the pitcher couldn't hit a strike zone intentionally, he probably couldn't hit a batter intentionally either.)

dwatts and I agreed that Cosmo, the 51s' mascot, while definitely gray and an alien, was more like a Nommo than he was a Gray. At the game, I had an Atomic Dog, which is a big fat Hebrew National frank stuffed with cheese, covered with chili and melted nacho-style cheese, upon which my encased-meat instincts drove me to splosh raw onions and yellow mustard. As always, my instincts proved sound.

Not so my instinct, upon polishing off three foaming beakers of Lucid absinthe (generously offered up to a select clientele by Jason W.), to go drink another couple of vodka tonics. But Lucid tastes far less foul than either the crazy Czech stuff or the bathtub stuff, and results in much the same fun sensation (if less overtly), so there is that.

Soon back to Chicago, and from thence to LA in a bare month for BookExpo. In between: dental surgery, much writing, and whining about both of the above. Oh, and Iron Man.

The Battle of Algol
Recently I accidentally discovered what I believe to be the first work of the "military SF" subgenre, H. Beam Piper's Uller Uprising, which among other things takes a remarkably blase view of atomic warfare for a book written in 1952. It's essentially a redress of the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, only on the planet Uller, and it's satisfactory, though not Piper's best work.

But I stumbled across it while charting the edges of an interesting (well, interesting to me) lacuna in military SF, the "heroic counterinsurgency" story. There are plenty of stories of military SF commando operations, from the opening chapter of Starship Troopers on down, and Elizabeth Moon and David Weber are only the two latest examples of "naval SF" which by its nature can't really get into counterinsurgency. Most of the rest of the military SF field are "heroic insurgency" tales of one sort or another, or conventional war stories. It's understandable, both from a structural point of view -- an insurgency has a natural narrative thread to it -- and from a historical one, given that America was itself the result of a heroic insurgency, and American SF is in large part "America one world over."

But it's interesting nonetheless that on a somewhat less-than-cursory survey the only other "counterinsurgency SF" (American or not) that I was able to find was Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling's collaborative duology Tell the Spartans and Prince of Mercenaries (and, depending on one's definitions, a few of the earlier Falkenberg stories). Am I just missing a few books somewhere (maybe in French?), or is there really a big old gap there? And if the latter, is it waiting to be filled, or is there some further structural reason I'm not getting why it doesn't exist?

Thrilling True Tales of Earthquake Terror!
So last night at 4:37 a.m. there was an earthquake centered in far-downstate Illinois. (Richter 5.2, baby!) At the time, I was writing (a chapter of Greg Stolze's new game Grim War, should you be interested) and felt no tremor, as I was also listening to the Pixies, who will Make An Earthquake In Your Very Mind.

But even above Black Francis' yowls, I did hear some sort of crash from the second bedroom. "Oh, what has Nancy gotten herself into now?" I asked, but upon investigation discovered that my carefully-preserved copy of the Chicago Tribune from November 10, 1989 had fallen down and knocked my Blair Witch Project action figures off the top of the bookshelf. I picked everything back up and put it back, and returned to the Pixies.

Please don't consider me a hero -- any man would have done the same.

Are You Sure You Want To Use Your One?
Last night,

gnosticpi and I hit the last night of the premiere run of Jim Sikora's film The Earl, at the Siskel Center. Think Intacto crossed with The Hitcher, restricted entirely to one scene -- total unity of theme, place, action, and character. It's Aristotle with crowbar-fights.

It's based on Brett Neveu's late-night play of a couple years ago, and it retains the staginess of its ancestry, not least since Neveu adapted the script. This is not a down-check; it's like watching a Mamet film.

And not just in the staginess -- the focus on arbitrary gamesmanship, the physical and emotional cruelty, and the hyper-masculine atmosphere are all Mametesque. (Mametian? Mametish?) The story is about three brothers who meet in an abandoned warehouse to play a ritualized game of physical violence -- the repeated jargon ("Ten acknowledged!" spoken in a triumphant, sneering tone) and rules-lawyering ("You can't call a hold unless a person or animal is actually approaching!" "There's no way you're at H now. I think that was a short count.") was especially true to life, and darkly comical, to us gamers.

The soundtrack was pretty great, too, and for an immensely low-budget film (shot on VHS of all things) the rest of the technical stuff was more than adequate.

The only flaw, such as it was, was that the structure of the film was as brutally simple as the dialogue was oblique. The brothers play their game, the Earl shows up and reverses the dynamic, the end. The film would have benefited from at least one, or ideally two, twists, to play up the gamesmanship of the story, rather than merely the gamesmanship of the setting. Now, this may have been Neveu's point -- that all games end when the powerful refuse to play -- but I think he could have kept (or even reinforced) that theme while still feeding us a little narrative twisty-juice.

All of which said, well worth seeing if it comes to a festival near you. I'd call it a B+ movie with little hesitation, and if you grade on the curve for the budget and such, well, then the movie has definitely taken its ten.

The Good, the Bad, and the Guy With Puffy Cheeks
Lord, Lord, Lord was it gorgeous outside in Chicago today.

gnosticpi,

kaynorr and I celebrated the glorious spring afternoon by sitting in a dark room for two hours, watching A Colt Is My Passport at the Siskel Center.

The film, which I hadn't heard of either until last night, is a kind of pseudo-New Wave gangster flick, directed in 1967 by Takashi Nomura for the Nikkatsu studio, starring Jo Shishido as the puffy-cheeked hitman with a code of honor. (It's not really New Wave, because it doesn't deconstruct its plot or genre, nor do its characters violate their norms in order to validate themselves. Plus it was ignored by critics.) It's the kind of straightforward "Killer B" genre film that in its own way is as predictable and as surprising as Greek tragedy. In addition to its own not-inconsiderable virtues as a movie, it's also a neat grayscale window onto 1960s Tokyo-Yokohama -- Nomura clearly and evocatively limns the docks, the rich gangsters' villas, the offices, and the roads.

It's also fascinating to decode all the films that go into it, many of which are themselves explicitly recursive exercises in Japanoiserie, from Le Samourai to A Fistful of Dollars. (Nomura's film even has a whistling spaghetti-western theme song!) And of course, the films that come out of it, such as (possibly) Don Siegel's equally interesting 1973 crime thriller Charley Varrick (another great movie with an antihero who's just plain smarter than everyone else) and (almost certainly) Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog, which (in addition to being yet another case of Japanoiserie) borrows great chunks of the plot and some of the specific bits.

All especially intriguing, given that this movie was considered a cheap throwaway from a second-rate studio. We apparently got to see the only existing 35mm print of the film, and no subtitled version exists. (We got supertitles projected onto the screen, translated by the Japan-American Society of Chicago or some such.) Apparently there's some sort of traveling series of these "Nikkatsu Akushon" films going around the country, and it's the Siskel Center's turn; if they come to your neck of the woods, it's well worth your two hours and your nine bucks, no matter how nice it is outside.

Crushed Under the Weight of Metaphor
This is just too freaking cool to sit on until I can work it into a column in four months to a year.

But first, some prefatory ramble. We're on the penultimate adventure of the current game¹ and I'm beginning to think about what we might run next. One contender² (bred of seeing There Will Be Blood and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) is Unknown Armies, set some time in the latter half of the 19th century. Just when -- 1870s? 1890s? -- is currently up in the air. But the following has made the 1890s a stronger contender.

The wise and devious

robotnik gave me a pointer to this entry in Paul Collins'³ blog, which contained the following snippet of almost unimaginably pregnant occult metaphor:

In the US, for instance, the War Department struggled with mountains of haphazard medical files until the newly touted method of card filing was adopted in 1887. Hundreds of clerk transcribed personnel records dating back to the Revolutionary War. Housed in Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC -- the scene of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination a generation earlier -- the initiative succeeded a little too well. Six years into the project, the combined weight of 30 million index cards led to information overload: three floors of the theatre collapsed, crushing 22 clerks to death.

Can anyone say Ascension of the Bureaucrat in 1894? [EDIT: Per Wikipedia, on June 9, 1893.] Blood sacrifice to begin the Information Age? Creation of the "mass man" from data (which is to say, DNA) and crumpled flesh (of 22 people -- where was the 23rd, necessary to complete the full chromosomal pairing?), intermingled on the blasphemous regicidal altar of America? The possibilities are limitless.

And I haven't even mentioned the ostensible purpose of Collins' entry, the Belgian Index-Card Wikipedia, the Mundaneum, which is so obviously an Informationale⁴ op, and which caused a rift in the highly occult (in my games, anyhow) field of architecture when Le Corbusier was hired to design a (never built -- or, never officially built) new Mundaneum Building in Geneva in 1929.

Yeah, I think there's some juice there, too.

[1] Immortal PCs, each adventure takes place a decade later, in the fictional idiom of that decade -- Western in 1870s, melodrama in 1880s, South Seas Adventure in 1890s, Edisonades in 1900s, etc. Truth & Justice, which is working about as well as any system-light system can be expected to under that kind of strain.

[2] The way we do things in my game group is that I solicit suggestions from the players and work them into about four or five proposed campaign ideas; then the players vote and I go with the winner. Other current contenders are a vampire-hunting game, a more traditional fantasy sort of thing that I'm likely going to set on the Island of Calyferne, and an occult-conspiracy game revolving around the secret history of the U.S. Presidency.

[3] Yep, that Paul Collins, the author of the immensely wonderful Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World, which covers in fine and sprightly style such folk as the Shakespearean forger William Henry Ireland, physicist-hoaxer Rene Blondlot, hollow-earth enthusiast John Cleves Symmes, and Baconian delusionist Delia Bacon.

[4] The Informationale being my term for the radical 19th-century group from which descended Steve Jackson's conspiratorial Network of computer-hackers; see GURPS Y2K for further details.

Petit Guignol
Tonight,

his_regard and I went to the Bailiwick Theater on Belmont to see the Tantalus Theatre Group perform Dreadful Penny's Exquisite Horrors,¹ which for a play involving severed fingers, suicidal puppets, and a murderous rape (among other things), was oddly restrained. The sense of play-acting, of theatricality, was always there, but only intermittently productive of heightened sensibilities. Since it simply could not be naturalistic (although the first shock of naturalistic fear in the play worked surprisingly well), it needed more blood, more threats to the audience, more use of the sheer presence that only live theater can convey.

Part of it was no doubt down to the mechanical constraints -- lighting, makeup, and such could have worked better, but the budget and facility might not have supported them.

Part of it is that the role of the Grand Guignol in society has been taken over by the visual media -- currently the Saw and Hostel school of "torture horror" -- and so the theatrical community writ large has let those muscles atrophy.

Part of it is that this is not something that theater likes to say about itself. An awful lot of authorities claim that no play of Seneca's was ever performed, or that Titus Andronicus is a bad play (rather than what it is, a brutal play), or otherwise talk as if theater didn't begin as Dionysian orgy complete with omophagia. From there it's just a hop and a skip to versions of Hamlet that leave out the ghost. With nothing pushing theater into that niche, and no social vacuum waiting to be filled and pulling theater into it, this kind of intellectual softness can perpetuate itself.

Part of it is that the moral raison d'etre of the Grand Guignol and Dreadful Penny's -- to implicate the audience in the performance and indict us as batteners upon bloody violence -- is so often, and so easily, used as a transparent excuse to present naked carnography. Theatrical critics of the type adduced above are sensible of the risk of pandering, in this realm at least, and often the decision is taken to simply avoid the question, or to treat the entire topic as distasteful. This is evasion. The line between Peeping Tom and Saw IV may be murky, but it's there.

And all of it is kind of a shame, because if the cast and the playwright hadn't had to fight both the audience and themselves, they might really have gotten something going on.

[1] It's based on a play by Matthew Rossi called Dreadful Penny's Midnight Cavalcade of Ghoulish Delights. I think this Matthew Rossi is not our own

ezrael, the gifted eliptonist and author of Things That Never Were, but a different Matthew Rossi.

The Shambler Arrives
Went by the mailbox today and It was here! Two copies of It, specifically, my author's copies of Trail of Cthulhu! Although the book (or Ye Booke) has been out since earlier this month, my first box was apparently routed via the Invisible City at the Magnetic Pole, so only Now Can It Be Revealed, to me at any rate.

I'm still quite, quite fond of it, and now that I've seen Jerome's art and layout, I'm even fonder. I'm not sure a book of mine has had such a good solid graphic design template since the original-series LUG Star Trek RPG. And unlike that time, I had nothing to do with this design at all. If you don't believe me, or suspect my proud parenthood of contributing to contributors' bias, I urge you to download the PDF of the eight sample pages from Pelgrane and see for yourself.

Of the parts I actually had something to do with, I'm especially proud of my multiple-versions Gods and Titans section (my treatment(s) of Hastur is/are revealed in that sample PDF), the central nugget of which -- the intentionally contradictory conspiratorial Truths -- I ripped off of JD Wiker's wonderful Dark*Matter book. [EDIT: In comments, I am reminded, by JD himself, that the core Dark*Matter book was by Wolfgang Baur and Monte Cook, so they deserve the credit. Frankly, I'm not sure I would have the strength to give someone else credit for that wonderful book if it were mistakenly ascribed to me, so all credit to JD for that.]

Should that have convinced you, Magna Innomiando gratia, you can get your own copy at your Friendly Local Game Store, from Pelgrane, from IPR, from our kindly licensors at Chaosium, and no doubt Many Many More.

If you've bought it, or heck, even if you've just read it, let me know what you think!

What It's Like In My Head, Part LXXVIII
So I've just gotten out of bed and I'm walking along the hallway when I feel something under my bare feet and look down. There's a little pile of dust and crud on the carpet, with two pennies in it.

My first reaction: "Hmmm. I wonder what sort of undead my cat killed up here this morning."

I wish I drank coffee in the morning so I could blame not having had my coffee yet, but no, this is just my brain set on "normal."

Working Out With The Heavy Bag
Tonight,

mollpeartree and I went to see the Chicago Chorale's performance of Bach's "Passion of St. Matthew." This is, as all will recognize, one of the absolute Musts of the Western cultural canon -- and I got through all three hours of it. I was even whistling a little of it while making grilled cheese, so it must have sunk home somewhere.

But something else sunk home, too -- I am very seriously out of shape when it comes to listening to grownup music with grownup ears. I listened pretty much exclusively to classical until I was 16 or so, and it was still a big piece of my leisure-time listening until age 23 -- my annum transiens to a) grad school, b) Chicago (meaning excellent rock radio, WXRT-that-was), and c) CDs (making my classical tape collection moot). Since then, the occasional symphony, or the opera when

muckefuck has a spare ticket, is pretty much my ambit. Result: my concentration, my ear, and my sense of proportion are all terribly rusty.

The spiritual component tonight was a real wringer, too, but at least I expected that.

Back to the bunny slopes for a while -- that Arcade Fire is pretty good.

Seven Wonderings
I see by the April issue of Fortean Times that the Charles Fort Institute has completed its vote on the Seven Fortean Wonders of the World, to wit:

Bigfoot/Yeti
Crop Circles
Nazca
Oak Island
Piri Reis Map
Shroud of Turin
UFOs

Unlike conventional wonders, Fortean Wonders don't have to be mega-structures of a physical kind; anything that compels "wonder" is fine by C.F. Thus this list is high on things that produce (or more aptly, destabilize, or both) intellectual mega-structures.

The general public was invited to submit nominees -- none of this "panel of experts" business -- and the result was this decent list of 79 wonder-wannabes. Some may note that my carping well after the balloting was closed is singularly unproductive sour grapes; I would respond, in Fortean style, by denouncing the concept of "after" as mere mass delusion foisted upon us by the Establishment.

With such questions out of the way, we are left with a much more interesting question, again to wit: What would be a better list of the Seven Fortean Wonders, then?

The CFI list does have the virtue of containing a spread of category-representative items -- Bigfoot stands in for all cryptozoology, the Piri Reis Map for all "alternative chronology" and "earth changes" stuff, the Shroud for the Dan Brown megillah of Secret Christ Malarkey. The Shroud is actually a pretty good one, as it includes the key (and under-loved) element of po-faced Real Science(tm) needed for a proper Fortean stew, but I'd pick the Sea Serpent as a better (and more evocative) cryptid, and Thera over the Piri Reis Map as it's bigger and more attractive and not obvious nonsense on stilts. Plus, the archaeologists and the geologists are, last I heard, pouting and not talking to each other about the wide variants in dating the eruption. Fort would have been delighted.

I also like the UFOs being on the list, as Fort wondered about strange things seen in the skies probably more than anything except strange things seen falling out of them. The ongoing subversion of the "rivets and Martians" extra-terrestrial hypothesis by the truly Fortean "phantoms and folly" psycho-social hypothesis just adds another wonderful layer of damnation to the facts on the ground. Er, in the sky.

The Face on Mars should replace crop circles in the "hoax spawned by pareidolia" category. What better Fortean Wonder than one we can't get to? Plus, Mars!

I'd also put the Giza complex (Pyramids and Sphinx) on the list. I enjoy the notion that the Fortean and the Classical still overlap -- that 2,200 years after Hellenistic travel writers drafted that first list of Wonders, we moderns still react with the same combination of pseudoscience and slackjawed yokelry that they did, and with more condescension and less justification. This would be my nomination to replace Nazca on the "weird ancient things that brown people can't possibly have built" category.

So we've got:

Face on Mars
Giza Complex
Sea Serpents/Lake Monsters
Shroud of Turin
Thera
UFOs

I'll throw the question of the Seventh Wonder open -- you don't have to replace Oak Island in the "Masonic Foolishness" category. And frankly, maybe we can come up with something better than the Shroud, which looks kind of picayune in its new company. So what say you all?

And Now, An Illustrative War Story, Also For Gary
I don't normally tell war stories in this LJ for whatever reason, but if the combination of Gary's final levelling-up and GM's Day isn't enough justification for me to tell one this time, nothing is.

So we're at my game tonight (we've moved from Mondays for a bit) and here's the situation.

It's the 1960s (the Mod ones, not the Trippy ones), and the game is ultra-level Truth & Justice.

The PCs are on their Jack Kirby spaceship with Sir John ("call me Jack") Vandeleur, to steal the diamond at the center of the Sun for reasons that needn't concern us now, or we'll be here all day with the setup.

The players (and the PCs) don't trust Vandeleur, who hasn't told them how he plans to actually, you know, take the diamond ("the size of the Isle of Skye") out of the Sun. They further assume that since Vandeleur has a diamond skull full of Evil Martian Quantum Programming, he's going to somehow taint the Sun's diamond and make everything worse.

So they get

gnosticpi (the cold-projecting samurai who Vandeleur had thought was immobilized keeping the ship from, you know, dissolving) to knock Vandeleur out, and they pop a helmet on his head. Said helmet was used by the Russian super-security guards to download their super-routines to their brains, before the PCs trashed the Russian lab in order to get the power amplifier that the samurai was now using to cool the ship. So

gracefuleigh (the mesmerist-songstress-mage) figured it would be a great way to deliver her mojo to Vandeleur and purge the Martian programming out of his skull. Indeed it is, she rolls boxcars, and pow, Martian programming exorcised.

So we're talking about it, and one of the players (was it

luckymarty?) says "So in essence, what we just did is pop a Helm of Opposite Alignment on the guy."

Indeed we did, seekers. Indeed we did.

Gary Gygax, RIP
Gary Gygax, the Troll Lord Games forum tells us, has died at age 69.

To my knowledge, I only met him twice; once, when we were both guests at a game store grand opening, and once at GenCon 2007. History should record that he didn't seem particularly interested in me either time, and history will also record that there's no reason he should have been.

After all, everything I have accomplished professionally has come about, directly or indirectly, as a result of his efforts.

But aside from the immense, irreducible professional debt I owe him, I also (and perhaps more importantly) owe him a huge amount of great, good fun. Not just in his co-invention of a game form and a hobby that has consumed thousands of delighted hours of my time, but in the exuberance of his ideas, expressed through his own inimitable vocatory blend of pastiche, pedantry, and pomp. For all that I point to Avram Davidson as my cynosure, it was Gary Gygax (along with his cousin of the soul, Robert E. Howard) who first showed me what you could do by putting history in a Really Big Waring Blender -- or perhaps a Waring-Waring-Cuisinart-Guisarme -- and setting it to "color."

And it was Gary Gygax' work that first pointed me at the works of Jack Vance, for which, again, no words -- not even Gary's words, redolent with pulpy fronds and antiqued thesaurus-hide -- can properly express my debt.

Gary, like all of us in the creative business, rolled his share of fumbles, but his hits were all natural 20s. Somewhere around Elysium's gaming tables, he and Fletcher Pratt are already arguing about flanking bonuses.

Dee Is For Deelightful
Many thanks to

jnutley, who from the infinite goodness of his heart sent me a copy of A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits, compiled by Meric Casaubon in 1659 from Dee's manuscript diaries, and as (slightly more recently) displayed on my Amazon wish list, from whence

jnutley plucked it to wend its way to me. (For those interested in such things, it is also available online here, nestled within what seems like a very nice interface. Searchable, too. (EDIT: Or, rather, it is if your Internet access, like mine, is via a University that provides access to the EEBO site. Failing that, there's a (non-searchable) PDF version of the book downloadable here.)

Just reading along in it is so much more informative and evocative of the process of skrying angels than mere description; Edward Kelly must have been a master actor to keep all the various voices and speech patterns in his head. I think my personal favorite angel-aethyr-whatever is "Il," who shows up on page 41 in front of a curtain, in ragged apparel but wearing a "white satten" jerkin, and says: "Room for a player. Jesus, who would have thought I should have met you here?" In an earlier seance, Il was even described as looking like "a Vice in a play"; and sure enough on page 42, Il claims "I have business in Denmark." I could troll through the rest of Il's appearances and pull out plenty more like that -- in short, I think I've found the smoking goetic gun for Dee's dramaturgies.

There's also a lot of untapped prophecies in the various angelic and aethyric utterances; the notion of Dee and Kelly as Nostradamian figures has a lot of pernicious potential.

But my favorite bit so far is one that Phil Masters and I stumbled over in Cambridge when we were looking at the microfilm collection there; it's from a seance on May 23, 1584, and from page 156 of Casaubon's edition:

Now appear many Crocodiles, long necked, scaled on the body, with long tales. A great place appeareth, covered about with fire. Many great Serpents appear here of 200 foot. It appeareth very Eastward. No people appear here."

The narrating angel (Nalvage) calls the place Coxlant, and in the tour of the world Nalvage is conducting, it immediately precedes the Garden of Eden. Did Kelly skry up dinosaurs? After all, if he were making things up, wouldn't dragons have made more sense to him?

Fun on every page. Untranslated Latin on many pages, but such is the price one pays for being a dabbler instead of a real scholar.

That said, my Dee dabbling is now well and truly enabled. I've already got the nice Peterson edition of the Mysteriorum, published by Weiser as John Dee's Five Books of Mystery: Original Sourcebook of Enochian Magic, and a copy of The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee and the Catalogue of His Library of Alchemical Manuscripts, so I'm pretty well fixed for primary Dee activities, and I've already discovered that I can't make heads or tails out of his formal magical-Hermetic texts, so I'm just as happy to depend on Robert Turner's Elizabethan Magic: The Art and the Magus where need be. (That book, by the way, is just impossible to find; I stumbled over a copy for thirty bucks at Fields in San Francisco a few years back and counted myself lucky. I'm not sure what I'd recommend that's actually available. There's probably something out there, though.)

So big thanks again to

jnutley for helping a brother out. Over the years, every so often someone has (to my dumfounded amazement) been so nice as to out of the blue send me books they suspect (or know) I want; I've embarrassingly less often been so nice as to thank them publicly. Well, my Leap Weekend Resolution is to thank such people going forward, in a format very like this one.

Scraping the Sky With serpentstar
So the way I remember it starting is like this: sitting in the booth in Clarke's on Belmont with

gnosticpi and

serpentstar, eating a "hobo omelet" (though it seemed awful picky for a real hobo -- portobello mushrooms, red onions, and mozzarella) and thinking "it doesn't get any better than this."

It was about to get better.

But why I thought that: I was in my city, on my way to a party, in a place I'd never been and drinking the second mango-tini of the night, with good friends, one of whom had come all the way from North Wales to see me. I had fed him not just well so far, but superbly, to wit:

* Thursday, we ate Giordano's stuffed pizza, shipped piping hot from the outside of Plato's cave to Earth. (We also drank a great deal of homemade damson vodka, a lovely hostess gift from

serpentstar.)

* Friday, we ate lunch at Hot Doug's: Bacon-Jalapeño Duck Sausage with Blood Orange Mustard, Pâté Bigarade and Mandarin Oranges; a Smoked Crayfish and Pork Sausage with Cajun Tartar Sauce, St. Pete's Blue Cheese and Diced Sweet Peppers; and a Bacon and Cheddar Elk Sausage with Guinness Mustard and Hickory-Smoked Rambol Cheese. The duck was so good it made the elk taste expected.

* Then dessert (black cherry and vanilla cone) at Oberweis Ice Cream, which puts the real into nonpareil.

* Then dinner (Seven Seas Soup at a Mexican seafood place in Pilsen where we went because I couldn't remember Cocina Mundial in time -- still pretty great, as were the salmon ceviche tostadas. The oysters were mediocre, but one can't have everything -- OR SO I STILL THOUGHT AT THE TIME, he foreshadowed.)

* Saturday noon I grilled up three New York Strip Steaks from Paulina Meat Market, where we had gone on Friday. The plan was to feed

serpentstar on good Chicago steak so that, upon encountering actual good steak for the first time in his life, his fabled British reserve would crumble and he would roll around meeping in sheer delight while we sat and mocked him from the perspective of people who can eat steak like this any time we feel like it. Well, the enginer was truly hoist by his own petard -- even given the kack-handed way I wound up grilling it (on a freezing cold grill in 30-degree weather, so it never actually, you know, seared) it was perhaps the fifth-best steak I've ever eaten. So we all drowned out

serpentstar's complete emotional collapse ("This is really quite good.") with our own ecstatic Maenad cries.

* Although they went with that meal, the martinis I shook up in my new Zeppelin-shaped cocktail shaker deserve their own bullet point. North Shore Gin, Vya Vermouth, blue cheese stuffed olives.

So I wanted to feed

serpentstar Ethiopian food, but he threw a British tantrum ("Er, could we possibly have a salad?") so we went to Clarke's. Where, as I intimated previously, things were as good as they could get.

Until the waitress showed up with a hot-chocolate brownie, topped with whipped cream, and three spoons. "These," she said, "are from the young ladies in the corner booth." Yes, three cute girls had bought us dessert!¹ And sent us a mash note! With runes in it!

What could we do but introduce ourselves and invite them along to the party (a Flash Gordon screening at

d_swindler's place, where rumor had it there would be Really Good Bourbon)? And who could then be surprised to find them au fait with RPG jokes and Sealab 2021? They turned out to be

zombienedwin, Chesney, and Kris10, and were very funny and charming in addition to being remarkably trusting of strange men in diners.

So the moral of the story is: in Chicago, there's no top floor on that elevator. And the other moral is: eat plenty of salad.

[1] Technically, they no doubt had bought

serpentstar -- who was his usual resplendent self in purple mohawk-dreads, leather, and ophidian skull tattoo -- dessert, but being courteous types, they included myself and

gnosticpi in their gesture.

Portrait of the Artist as a Teleporting Douchebag
The twenty or so minutes of Jumper that were under the mostly sole control of Doug Liman -- the fight scenes and chase scenes -- are pretty darn good. The rest, not so much; it would be indefensible charity to give the movie anything better than a D+.

A detailed breakdown should be unnecessary, but: Rachel Bilson is certainly easy on the eyes, but like her namesake Rachel (Weisz), she apparently doesn't bother to, you know, act if there's no script. Samuel L. Jackson and Jamie Bell aren't even given parts, so much as portraying bumpers off of which the impenetrable steel pinball that is Hayden Christensen (as terrible as ever!) thuddingly rebounds with only a very occasional "ka-pwing." Diane Lane is wasted with an almost breathtaking profligacy.

Unlike some reviewers, I actually approved of the movie's general churlish refusal to explain anything -- the film is built around disorienting, breakneck experience, after all -- especially since when Tobor the Script-writing Robot did occasionally attempt exposition, he made things worse and dumber. Far better to just see the weird machines and strange extensible Taser-nets and random knifings in the jungle and anonymous mook assassins. Most important, though, the morality of the film is repugnant where it is not merely despicable, and its stupid, brutish protagonist is concomitantly unleavened with any sort of human decency, fellow-feeling, or even charm.¹ Which is certainly a realistic outcome for an adolescent who discovers a superpower that lets him escape the consequences of his actions, but I didn't go see Jumper for the psychological realism.

I went to see it because Doug Liman had, up to now, made only really, really good movies. Consider that string well and truly broken.

The chicken vindaloo at India House, however, was really, really good, balancing the vinegar and the spices on a knife's edge. So between that and those 20 minutes of fights and chases I mentioned above, the evening wasn't entirely wasted.

[1] In this sense, Hayden Christensen is a triumph of casting -- but you can see him play a smug, pouting twerp in Shattered Glass, a vastly superior film, if that's all you want.

2d6 Fish In A Random Writer
Monday after Dundracon was a lovely dalliance with

stjeromes and

themagdalen and El Bebe, punctuated by a BLT (technically, American bacon, spinach, and tomato) pizza from LaVal's and animated discussion of nothing much.

Come the evening, I met up with Brian Isikoff and

giddoen at Endgame, the best-of-breed game store in Oakland, prefaratory to dinner at Le Cheval, a French-Vietnamese restaurant around the corner. I managed to bullyrag

giddoen into splitting the "Five Courses of Seafood," each of which takes over one of the five basic flavors (hot, bitter, salty, sweet, sour) for a harmonious and tasty balance of humours, or chi, or whatever version of malarkey they have in Vietnam.

Regardless of their malarkey, though, the food was outstanding. I quote from the menu (

muckefuck and other purists should insert diacriticals where needed):

GOI SUA SEN - SHRIMP SALAD W/ LOTUS ROOTS
Shredded cabbage, prawns, jelly fish, lotus roots, mint leaves, topped w/fried onions, peanuts, in our vinegar dressing.
CHEM CHEUP NUONG - BROILED GREEN MUSSELS
Broiled green mussels in half shell, topped w/fried onions and peanuts.
CANH CHUA CA - HOT AND SOUR SNAPPER SOUP
Snapper in Pineapple flavored broth w/celery, mushrooms, bamboo shoots and tomato.
TOM KHO TO - PRAWNS STEWED IN CLAYPOT
Stewed in our special sauce w/mushrooms.
FILET OF SNAPPER IN COCONUT MILK
Sauteed coconut milk and curry w/okra and eggplant over lightly breaded red snapper.

The mussels, the eggplant in the coconut milk, and the mushrooms from the tom kho to were the absolute standouts; I foolishly didn't start in on the shrimp salad until after eating enough of the other dishes that its delicate flavor stayed mostly hidden. That said, the snapper in coconut milk and the snapper soup were excellent; in both cases, the fish flavor came through, but it wore very different outfits.

And just because we could, everyone enjoyed a side of:

BO TAI CHANH - MARINATED RAW BEEF Served cold
Thin slices of raw beef, marinated in lemon juice, topped w/peanuts, sesame, ginger, fried and fresh onions.

The result was a kind of beef carpaccio ceviche; very tasty. The description above omits the cilantro and peppers, which were pretty key to the ingredient list.

From thence, then, to Isikoff Base Camp, where we recorded an installment of Brian's podcast, 2d6 Feet In A Random Direction, thence to Casa de

luagha, and off to the airport bright and early Tuesday morning.

Speaking of orthography, I just now decided that podcasts, like other journals, take the italic. So that's done, then.

Nothing left but to read up on the Ahnenerbe and wait for the imminent arrival of

serpentstar. Gosh, I hope he's hungry.

Beyond The Fields We Know
The doughty

luagha being otherwise engaged at an RPGA convention, I was forced to brave the daunting threshold of Fields Book Store on Polk Street in San Francisco, pound for pound the finest occult bookstore in the English-speaking world, all by my lonesome. I went early on Friday, before heading out to Dundracon, and once more I maintained my Princely incognito. But unbeknownst to me, Fields had spent the intervening year gathering its forces for an insidious Mantis Stance blow.

Sure, the Occult Nazi section once more came up empty of novelty. With an airy laugh I perused Fields' now-assimilated sections on Shakespeare and Blake. With the savage conquering hand of a Hannibal, I wrought my usual destruction through the used and remaindered sections, coming away with two serious historical works: The Great Famine (on the Famine of 1315-1322 that heralded the onset of the Little Ice Age) and the somewhat more lurid (but still respectable) Descartes' Secret Notebook: A True Tale of Mathematics, Mysticism, and the Quest to Understand the Universe, which may yet spawn a Suppressed Transmission in its own right, if I can understand enough of the math to riff on it convincingly. Also used, and still worthy of serious consideration: Joscelyn Godwin's early survey Robert Fludd: Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds and a Kessinger reprint (a steal at $12, I tells ye! I curse their grasping hides!) of Joseph Williams' 1932 study Voodoos and Obeahs: Phases of West India Witchcraft. And finally, used, and likely complete though entertaining balderdash: Jesus, King Arthur, and the Journey of the Grail: The Secrets of the Sun Kings (which posits that Arthur's Druids made the Ardagh Chalice to record the secrets of Viracocha, unless I nodded off while skimming it).

But that wasn't the last of it. Like the legendary slayer of the basilisk, though I had not turned to stone, the poison burned unnoticed along my spear-shaft. I bought three new books, although I think any fair-minded jury will allow they were all Vital Necessities: Ronald Hutton talking academic good sense about Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination; a tenderly-awaited (as the hart longs for the cooling stream) translation of Michel Lamy's Jules Verne: Initie et Initiateur, Englished as The Secret Message of Jules Verne: Decoding His Masonic, Rosicrucian, and Occult Writings; and Newman and Principe's Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry, dealing with an American alchemist contemporary of Benjamin Franklin from a faultless history of science perspective, and incidentally probably setting me up for yet more unkind things to say about Carl Jung.

But though weakened, I retained enough strength to leave behind Steven Sora's newest (The Triumph of the Sea Gods: The War against the Goddess Hidden in Homer's Tales), the incredibly interesting-looking Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp, and yet another excellent-looking book of sacred geometry, to wit: Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque.

Sure, I can put them all on my Amazon wish list, but even I know the essential futility and hollowness of that gesture. I flavored my lunch (Moroccan lamb sausage on a French roll) with tears that day, I can tell you what.

A Pyrrhic victory at best -- the saga continues.