Rudimentary Papercraft with the kids

Yep.

Dingus and Dofus, there. Hopefully they'll be more enthuastic about the coloring part the second time around.

-D.d...

Pyramids of Mars

"Use the ring, Sarah!"

A pretty kick-ass installment of Dr. Who, of which I've been watching a lot lately, courtesy my public library. Turns out they have pretty much the entire Tom Baker run (that's been re-released on DVD, and sadly, 'Underworld,' the very first Dr. Who I saw, EVER, is not on that list), as well as a smattering of other Doctors and also the new series. So my viewing needs when the missus is away at work and the brood are asleep are taken care of.

-D.d.

Syllabus Getting a Bit Robust

Latest shipment in. Is it MY FAULT if I keep finding deals on rather hard to find books? Is it?

Looking forward to finishing AKIRA, and have been meaning to read more Blaylock.

With other recent purchases these should keep me occupied for a bit.

Black Bean Burgers

1 Can Black beans
half onion sauted
Half cup flour
2 slices bread, crumbled
tapatio, salt, pepper to taste

saute onions, mix into mashed beans and other ingredients. Form into patties and fry til brownish on both sides.

Metrophage

I've had some luck w/ book shopping online of late. Metrophage and aforepictured Morlock Night for under $7 each. On the last 90 pages of Mother London then totally expecting to enjoy tearing through a paperback every 3 days or so for awhile.

on deck.

on deck.

Question Box

In the 7th grade there were these 2 kids: Josh and Marshall. The jr. high in question was a bit odd, seeing as it was an even mix of North Dakotan kids and kids from the nearby air force base. Both Marshall and Josh were base kids, well, Marshall was, for sure. I think Josh was. At a time I was playing AD&D games that comprised of making characters and then having my friend Dan use the random encounter tables to give us something to fight, or just playing Talisman (both the set of AD&D books and Talisman were actually just hand me downs from Dan's older brother).

Marshall, meanwhile, was sitting down at the cafeteria table and flipping through the first edition of the cyberpunk RPG. Being 1988-89 and me being just 13 and pretty new to the whole sci-fi and fantasy thing, I can definitely say that was my first exposure to the term 'cyberpunk.'

Josh and Marshall would relate tales of their hijinx or try to generally crack each other up pretty continuously, so we got to hear in great detail how Josh had subscribed to Playboy and would have to race his mom everyday to make sure he got to the mailbox first, so he could remove any incriminating evidence before she saw it.

Unlike just about the rest of us 13-year-olds, he not only had a girlfriend, but was actually getting to feel her tits, and playing jokes like "tune-in-tokyo" on her.

My absolute favorite Josh & Marshall moment was during the sex ed unit of our health class.

The teacher, a nice enough, well-meaning guy, had set out a question box that students could use to ask questions secretly, which he would then answer out loud in front of the whole class. This makes a great deal of sense since few 13 year olds would even dare ask questions in front of the whole class about sex.

One day, he announces that there was a question in the box, and reads the note aloud:

"Can you get pregnant from swallowing sperm?"¹

Dutiful to the end, he answered the question. Josh and Marshal were beet red and snickering. I swear I though they would pee their pants.

We moved away to Portland at the end of that school year.

-d.d.

¹ Hilariously, the teacher gave the sentence this unnecessary extra beat: Can you get pregnant --- from swallowing sperm?"

Score.

Used library copy of John Shirley's Eclipse Prenumbra.



Autographed. Wasn't listed as such.

-d.d.

PWEI Detritus

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Love that little guy throwing facism in the garbage.

Wizards

Ralph Bakshi's on Flickr!


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Original production poster.


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My mom rented this movie for me (I can't remember if it was by my request or not, though) when I pretty young, like, 9 or 10, and it pretty much blew my easily-influenced young mind. I know the roto-scoped stuff gets singled out a lot for criticism but I found it pretty amazing at the time and I still kind of like it to this day, although I admit you can tell it gets leaned on at the end there when the budget had run out. More than anything, that opening 3 to 5 minute narration ("the earth exploded in a thousand atomic fireballs") and the blood-frenzy Blackwolf's army whips itself into when it sees the archival footage for the first time are some of my personal favorites in cinema.

-d.d.

"Roman candles are bombastically pretty and make a great noise"

May '98 Interview with John Shirley from OMNI.¹ I love Shirley's interviews. This is a favorite of mine. I ape the flow of this interview a lot (like, a lot) when I write dialog.

DE: [...] in the early 70s, you joined the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard?

JS: I was in the Coast Guard in Portland. I joined it like joining the Foreign Legion because my girlfriend left me for a certain corrupt, sex-addicted guru. I never did quite get over her. I found the Coast Guard to be totally unsuitable for me and me for it, BUT it was a very good, seasoning thing for me [...].

DE: And in Portland you got into punk rock?

JS: I was in the punk band SadoNation in Portland, as lead singer, and then went to New York City and started Obsession. Basically punk saved my ass, it gave me an alternative identity to the tortured and unacceptable one I'd sewn raggedly together; it gave me a forum for reacting to things like the My Lai massacre and the industrialization of America, the "mini-malling" of America, the tract-housing of America.

New York was both glorious and depressing. I'd have done much better there if I hadn't got side tracked into drugs. The needle, later the glass pipe. Drugs leach away the energy of life-direction. But the East village was a place of inspiring ferment. People like Basquiat and the early Beastie Boys and Karen Finlay and Nick Cave were around. [...]

DE: All this time you were writing. Getting published in magazines like Amazing and Fantastic and anthologies edited by people like Terry Carr and Robert Silverberg?

JS: They tried to give me direction, give me outlets. They bought stories, tried to hammer my spiky manner and undisciplined style into something more artful and crafted, God bless them for trying. Ted White and Silverberg and Carr and Jim Frenkel and Ellen Datlow especially helped.

Other writers would throw a really good, cunningly aimed fastball at the editorial catchers; I'd fire a roman candle at the editors and usually they'd duck and swear at me. Roman candles are bombastically pretty and make a great noise, but they fly crookedly, after a moment, and they burn out quickly.

Still, since I was prolific, some of it came out, more or less satisfactorily. [...] But I had no understanding of professionalism. I had no social graces, was a compulsive womanizer -- which didn't help me make friends; but then my wife at the time liked women, too. We were strange people. I was childishly manipulative -- and, worse, clumsy at trying to manipulate people -- people winced at my swaggering; but I wasn't a cowardly, colorless nerd either.

The thing is I really did come from the streets, so where I came from it was right and natural to say anything to try to hustle something up. Truth or lies, it was all the same because you were trying to hustle the squareheads. I had punk damage, too, and thought that doing things professionally was selling out or something.

DE: [...] in the early 80s you met up with these SF writers: William Gibson, who you met at a convention in Vancouver and recommended to Terry Carr and Robert Sheckley; Rudy Rucker, Lew Shiner, Richard Kadrey, Bruce Sterling. Sterling edited a samizdat -- a one page newsletter -- called Cheap Truth, in which you guys (self-named "the Movement") attacked mainstream science fiction and pushed your own version of SF. This "movement" was later dubbed "cyberpunk," of course. What was your role in this?

JS: I only contributed a little to Bruce's brilliant broadsheet, but in public, at conventions, on panels, I was, quite often, the point man; or flailing away at Bruce's side. I'd say ANYFUCKINGTHING. We wanted a science fiction that was open to other cultural influences, like, yes, punk, like modern art, like surrealism, like the more artful noir films and fiction, and people like William Burroughs; and we wanted to dilate the iris of SF so that it took in more sheer FUTURE. I think Bruce felt that most SF was cowardly in its vision of the future. It was coy, winsome, mild mannered, or when it had energy it was oriented toward the kind of guys who took fencing lessons (I love you, Tim Powers, I don't mean you) and dressed up like the characters in the original book Starship Troopers and what have you. Pathetic beer hoisting pot-bellied fannish "macho."

DE: Part of being the "real punk" in cyberpunk was being obnoxious. There are all these stories about you from SF cons: tossing over panel tables, assaulting editors verbally and sometimes physically, Harlan Ellison challenging you to a duel...

JS: Whoa, wait -- he didn't challenge me to that kind of duel. He thought I'd dissed his writing and he challenged me to a writing duel! [...]

DE: But the other hijinx you were up to didn't do a lot to endear you to people who could help your career.

JS: [...] I only wish those stories were exaggerated rather than under-reported. I don't know, I have regrets about some of it, but on the other hand the whole SF and publishing scene was so DEADLY BORING then and mostly still is now. Hey, just trying to be helpful, ease the boredom! But it was not strategically wise, no. I think to this day I don't get certain writing jobs because of fall-out from that sort of horseplay. And sometimes people take shit too seriously.

-d.d.

¹ Kindly archived in its totality at Dark Echo.

stikfas doing yoga

image:the other Martin Taylor

There's plenty of stikfas pics on Flickr, but I found these one's particularly charming.

Handstand pose.


image:the other Martin Taylor

Headstand pose.


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Cobra pose.


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My favorite - the Scorpion pose.


image:the other Martin Taylor

-d.d.

Fucking Hell

Am I the only one who interprets this as the special Hell reserved for Nazis? I mean, I guys in Wehrmacht uniforms being herded off trains into camps by grim reapers. I tried reading up on this piece by the Chapman brothers but couldn't find anything...

-d.d.

Meet You in Poland, Baby

And then there's this song.



The opening violin part always kicks me into a sort of floating in halycon memory state, and then the air raid sirens kick in.

Everybody's Ass is Up for Grabs

As I recall, the first 3 Foetus albums I owned were, I think, the Butterfly Potion EP (the only Foetus at all available at the Beaverton Tower Records), the Sink collection (b/c it was such a deal - a ton of songs on that album), and, for budget reasons, the Male double-live pack (which I didn't really realize was a live album when I got it).

I pretty much sold all my CDs in the fall of '96 when I was hard up for cash, including most of my Foetus stuff (couldn't stop listening to Gash, however), so I kinda forgot about this album. I reacquired it recently and the minute I hit play it was like I was in my room in the dark wearing headphones in high school again. This is an amazing live album - great sound quality and the live band is basically the Swans(!).

Track 1 is 'Free James Brown,' and I think this is footage of the same CGBG's performance Male is recorded from.

Cops are Out

So, back in like '89 I'm staying up late to watch Monty Python at 11:30 on MTV (!) and also late at night MTV would run this program called "Post-Modern MTV" or something like that which as basically them mining the available library of British music. Britian being Britain, 99% of thier stuff was basicaly alien to American tastes, so, yeah, it sounded pretty avante-guard to me.

In these same days PBS was running five or whatever episodes of Dr.Who back-to-back-to-back as giant 2.5 hour "movies" (I still remember my massive disappointment in the fact this was not the intended broadcast format when Sci-Fi started rerunning them in the mid 90s in thier original form).

SO.

I was pretty much shitting bricks when the following video emanated from the tee-vee in my parents' basement...



More recently, I've been on this glam rock kick, and lo and behold I stumble across Sweet's 'Blockbuster.' Hey, I know that beat!



It all comes together.

-d.d.

Mobile Army Wheurhouse

On the live albums Rife and Male, J.G. Thirlwell as Foetus plays a song called "Faith Healer" (on Rife its titled 'Hate Feeler'). In the midst of my recent Foetus-completionist kick, I became momentarily swooned by the first 2 minutes or so of the Rife version, enough that I actually asked, for the first time ever, where this song came from (it only appears on the mentioned live albums).

Now, Thirlwell does have songs that do not appear on studio albums ('Puppet Dude' comes to mind, which is only played live, and I think there's another), so I had to follow the trail when 'Faith Healer' is credited to one Alex Harvey.

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band hails from Scotland, as does Thirlwell, is of the vintage to probably be the sort of vinyl spinning on a young Thirlwell's record player, if my math's right.

And, in my opinion, I hear a lot of Alex (who died suddenly in like '83 of a heart attack) in Thirlwell, both vocally and compositionally.

This performance really jumps out at me at exceptional.

Studio Guild Admiral

Studio Building/Guild Theater (actually the same building), built 1927.



Admiral Apartments, built 1909.


-d.d.

Neo-Tokyo

The recent big reading spree got me to thinking about and identifying my major influences. For example, AKIRA's a bigger visual cue for me than Blade Runner is, at least in terms of what future metropoli are supposed to look like.


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The major point on which the Blade Runner city is better than Neo-Tokyo is the ethnic/cultural melting pot imagery of the Blade Runner city. Neo-Tokyo's pretty much all ethnic Japanese.


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Recently I've been purchasing piecemeal and reading the original manga. Its unbelieveably good, and its funny how the movie, which is no slouch, is, at best, some crib notes for the books.

But dang, I've got 1-3, but these things are expensive!


-d.d.

Selk'nam

Oddly, I came across these postcards whilst in the midst of an image search for "The Land Leviathan," as in the book by Michael Moorcock.¹



There are a few more here.

They are of the Selk'nam, also, Ona, an indigenous people who dwelt on the Tierra del Fuego until the beginning of the 20th century, when western culture quietly disposed of them.

I don't have a whole lot to say about them, other than that they are quite striking visually, and that I think you should look at them. And that it never ceases to amaze how something so authentically otherworldly to our modernish eyes can exist, or existed, right under our noses.

-d.d.

¹ Fat was reading this very book. He had dared me, in a way, to guess which edition, according to cover art, he had purchased. Aware only of the DAW edition's art, I was forced to seek what other options were available.

Brooklyn's Kiser Studios.

The Sellwood Beefeatured a short piece on the Kiser Studios, formerly located at 3833 SE Milwaukie (at Bush St.) a while back.¹

The Kiser Bros. (Oscar and Fred) started out as photo printers.² Oscar drowned in 1905, but Fred carried on the business under the name Kiser Photo Company.

Kiser sold the company to Clarence Winter in 1915.

In 1922 the studio dabbled in silent film production, including a Western bank heist flick titled “Flames” (1926) featuring a very young Boris Karloff in the role of Blackie the Bandit. Some scenes where shot in Sullivan's Gulch. Others at a sandlot by Gregory Hall at Sacred Heart.

-d.d.

¹ You can read the full article over at the Bee, tho' I'm not sure how long it will be posted there...
² Print runs included the Columbia Gorge, Crater Lake, the 1904 St. Louis Expo, and the 1905 Portland Expo, which, it turns out, easily turned a greater profit than the its predesessor in 1904 .

Jack Gaughan Sci-fi Paperbacks

image : levar

I've been exploring Flickr with an eye towards stuff marked with Creative Commons Licenses rather than copyrights. These are the best from a search for sci-fi cover artist Jack Guaghan.


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I'm attributing source with the "image:____" beneath each image. If you click on each photo it follows through to Flickr. Both contributors have more paperbacks scanned.


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Pretty disappointing results, really. Compare the search for Creative Commons pics with one including "copyrighted" photos. Sure, there's a bunch of NASCAR related crap in there, too, but the search easily triples the results of the Creative Commons search.


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I really wanted to do a gallery of Moorcock novel covers but the CC results are pretty skimpy. Lame.

-d.d.

Songs about Dirigibles

Early Aviator doesn't just have archival photos of airships and biplanes, it also has oddities like cover art to sheet music about airships and biplanes!

Also, this curious "incident report" about "Rodney Gerrard Voß F1.103/17."

-d.d.

Incomplete Essays About Street Railways

Hey! Remember way back when I was churning out info on Portland's old monopolistic streetcar network? Well, turns out I have maps I made and articles I started that I never finished. Here they are!

Woodstock Line



In 1889, w/ electric streetcar lines under development in Portland and Albina, residents to the south & east of East Portland began to gather subscriptions to fund an electric transportation system of thier own. By May they had gathered $45,000 towards this purpose, & began negotiations w/ Sprague Electric to build the line. Sprague, however, wanted the subsidy up front to cover costs, while the investors wanted to pay on completion of the trolley route. The deal fell through, & in July new negotiations opened w/ Thompson-Houston Electric, while the total subscriptions for the line rose to $55,000 (the equilivent of about $1.2 million today). A deal was struck August 4th for 6 & a half miles of track & electrified wire. The City of East Portland granted a franchise Nov. 9th & construction began in December. (all preceding from Labbe 69)

The subscribers were also tract holders along the route. (Thompson, 20)

By April 1890 four Pullman cars were on the way & Thompson-Houston had completed negotiations for the use of the Willamette Bridge Railway Co.'s tracks on East 5th (now SE Grand) & across the Morrison Bridge. Included in the deal was the contruction of a powerhouse & trolley barn at SE 26th & Powell, including an implicit agreement that Willamette Bridge would takeover full operation of the line when it was finally completed (which it did, on July 1st 1890). [Labbe, I think]

Problems w/ the electrical system & use of old horsecar rails delayed operation, delaying full functionality up into March of 1891. [Labbe, again, I think]

Montavilla Line

Didn't even begin accumulating data for this article, though, for reasons unknown to me, I like to call Montavilla "Montanaville" sometimes...



The Astoria Street Railway (1888-1924)

This aborted article is sad because the subject matter was quaint and interesting, and I would have liked to have finished it.

The fourth act in the play of The Astoria Street Railway or, The Connecting Link, a Tale of Scow Bay is now on the stage. The curtain rose on the present comedy last summer when the Astoria Street Railway was organized, and after a brief existence sold the franchise (or rights, whatever they are) to F. P. Hennessy, a pleasant spoken gentleman from across the sea, who with his associates constituted the company that, purely as a matter of benevolence, was going to build a street railway from Uppertown down the roadyway to Squemoqua Street¹, and from there the Lord knows where. The evident inability on Mr. Hennessy's part caused the scheme to collapse. All that remains is an uptorn roadway, and unpaid creditors. Among others who took hold in good faith was Pierre Bronsdon, builder of the Portland street railway. He worked one month for free and paid his own board, whereupon he secured the franchise from Hennessy on February 7, 1885.²

Astoria's trolleys thus got off to a shaky start.

[great old Astoria pics, following]







[Astoria used to have this massive waterfront built entirely on piers, so you could cut a hole in the floor of a business and fish, if you were so inclined. 'Course, the side-effect was that it made downtown into a giant tinderbox, and in 1924 almost the whole place went up in smoke. A lot of the trolley track was out over the same such piers, and was never replaced.]



-d.d.

¹ Squemoqua being presentday Commercial Street.
² Dennon, Jim. "Astoria's Streetcars" in Clatsop County Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2 - Spring, 1989. p. 16. Dennnon adds, "the city didn't recognize this transfer [from Hennessy to Bronsdon], so for all intents and purposes the franchise was void."

the spice of life

Sweet jesus fry cook.

I am a Welshman, I do love cause boby, good roasted cheese.

Quite by mistake, while looking for something else, I came across a recipe in my cookbook for Welsh Rabbit. Scanning it briefly (asking myself, "WTF is Welsh Rabbit?"), I quickly noticed that it involved the same small saucepan and the same base and procedure of butter, flour, milk, and cheese as the baked mac and cheese I make perhaps too often. Except you (my eyebrow arched a bit at this) add a lot of pepper and pinch of cayenne/half a teaspoon mustard (i.e. make it spicy) and (my jaw dropped at this part) then just spoon the whole sauce over buttered toast (I love toast!)!

For all of 2 seconds I decided to make this for myself for breakfast the next day. Then I decided to just have it for dinner.

start toasting two three pieces of bread

melt 1 tablespoon (eighth of a stick) butter in a small saucepan on medium low heat til it starts to froth a bit. Turn the heat down to real low

add 1 tablespoon of flour. Mix til the flour and butter have combined in the manner of a sauce.

add 1/4th cup of milk, stir til you have a consistent sauce again. Add another 1/4 cup milk and repeat.

Add a cup of shredded or finely chopped cheddar cheese. stir til the cheese has melted into the sauce. Add pepper to taste. Add a pinch of cayenne if you want. I put a bunch of Tapatio hot sauce in mine - just make sure its not Tabasco or some shit like that where its just vinegar.

take your toast, butter it, put on a big plate. Pour the sauce all over it. I eat mine with a fork (this is what I call a meal) but I guess you could eat it with you hands too

Prob a killer post-drinking meal.

I haven't tried it yet, but you can substitute beer for the milk

also, you can add, like, some beans or chopped tomato to the mix.

I will never make fun of the cuisine of the British Isles again.

Never.

-d.d.

Flying Gasbags

Portland was first introduced to airships at the 1905 Exposition at the shore's of Guild's Lake. There were supposed to be two, the "City of Portland" and the "Gelatine," but the "City of Portland" suffered damage and was parted out and combined into the "Gelatine." The "Gelatine" did stuff like fly around the fair grounds and deliver mail to St. Johns and Vancouver.



The above picture, with caption, can be seen here.

Other photos from the expo:

Baldwin-Tomlinson Airships City of Portland, Gelatine 1905
Tomlinson Airship Gelatine Portland 1905
Baldwin Airship Gelatine Portland 1905
Baldwin Airship Gelatine Portland 1905
Baldwin Airship Gelatine Portland 1905
Baldwin Airship Gelatine Portland 1905

-d.d.

J.G. Thirlwell in Popshifter

image:bre pettis

J.G. Thirlwell is the only musician who has completely kept my attention in the 15 years since I first encountered him.¹ There are others, to be sure, who have been around for awhile, but either I did not appreciate as much then as I do now², or were fond of, then forgot about, only to be pleasantly reminded of them later.³

Foetus alone has been the constant.⁴

There's a link at Foetus.org to an interview with Thirlwell at Popshifter, detailing the many projects Thirlwell keeps himself busy with.⁵ A new Foetus album in 2009! Highlights follow…

[note: I've truncated the questions⁶]

Popshifter: Is working on The Venture Bros. something you find difficult?

Thirlwell: It exercises different creative muscles, sometimes, those of “problem solving.” It’s made me better in some ways. As I said, I work way in advance so I’m never rushing at the eleventh hour. I don’t consider it a “day job.” It’s a different part of my career and legacy. I established a musical vocabulary and identity for the show.

As for the work process, first I get a copy of the animatic (which is the storyboard edited with camera moves and the dialog embedded in it). I watch it and block out musical ideas, sometimes re-editing cues I’ve already written, and make notes for new compositions. I sync them up then view it with the director Chris McCulloch. We talk about what works and what doesn’t. Since we are watching essentially an animated storyboard, sometimes its not always clear what’s going on in the action to me.

We also discuss the character’s motivation, back-story and exposition, and the subtle subtext of each individual joke. Then I get to work creating the score and afterwards we review it again and I tweak it.

Popshifter: How did you get involved writing for the Arcana book series?

Thirlwell: John Zorn edits and publishes the Arcana books, which consist of musicians writing about music. He invited me to write an essay. The essay I wrote is about tinnitus.⁷

Popshifter: […] you seem to have an obsession with afflictions or medical contexts. . . are you a total hypochondriac, or […] did you stumble upon a medical textbook you just can’t put down once you start reading it?

Thirlwell: Yes, names of afflictions are a thread in my work. I’m not sure why I’m drawn to them but part of it is the linguistics and the endings. I also like words with “X” in them. I have several threads in my work, including the color palettes that I choose and the monosyllabic four-letter title.

Popshifter: Are the pretty ones really always insane? If that’s the case, then why bother?

Thirlwell: Because they are the ones that hypnotize.

-d.d.

¹ Came across him (and his sizable discography) reading the Industrial Revolution book, then purchased Sink, I think, at 2nd Ave. Records, when said store was at its original location, in the shoebox space.
² Pop Will Eat Itself.
³ Chemlab.
⁴ Though, regrettably, I sold off most of my Foetus discography in during the lean years. I have since been reacquiring it, piece by piece, in the last year or two.
⁵ Robots. Opera. Sculpture.
⁶ Aside from being a nice way to highlight what I find interesting in an interview, truncating interviews is a good exercise for working on your editing abilities.
⁷ In Arcana II.

Scuba. It sounds funny. Scuba.

I've never pre-ordered anything before.

Until now.



In some sort of indicator of our age of New Media, I've probably only seen 3 or 4 episodes of Venture Bros. at their regularly-scheduled time. And I haven't even seen a single solitary episode of Season 3.

-d.d.