Score.

Used library copy of John Shirley's Eclipse Prenumbra.



Autographed. Wasn't listed as such.

-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.


image:the other Martin Taylor


Cobra pose.


image:the other Martin Taylor

My favorite - the Scorpion pose.


image:the other Martin Taylor

-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.

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.

that which is good in life

English muffin cheese toasties, w/ a dash of Tapatio hot sauce.

-d.d.

Science Can Cure You.

I love this sign.



I love this sign on this building.

I love this sign on this building, made of cinderblocks with little windows.

-d.d.

Graffiti Row

I'm not a particular fan of graffiti. But I concede that sometimes its really colorful and even a little awe-inspiring.



This photo doesn't really do this 2-block stretch of graff justice. This is looking SE from 14th ave toward the the Brooklyn-Gideon Pedestrian Bridge at SE 16th.

Since that teenager got killed by a train by the Lafayette bridge this summer, UP stepped up the "No Trespassing" emphasis on the train tracks. There's a well-trodden path beside the tracks between the NW Natural plant and the old Ford Motor factory that peds and bicyclists use to get from 11th to the 9th (where you can then access the Springwater corridor and the Eastbank Esplanade) that's now got a ton of no trespassing signs and even concrete barricades.

All by way of saying I began to feel nervous taking pictures of graffiiti on UP property w/ the train sitting right there - even clearly picturing the officer asking me questions ("why you taking pictures of graffiti? Recording yr work?").

-d.d.

Under a Stippled Sky

My scanner went out of whack again, and trust me, this is not remotely what the original photo looks like.



I would not want to be stuck on this road if this is what it looked like.

"Yeah, the Richards' farm is down the blood-red road, lined by pitch black fields under a stippled sky. You can't miss it!"

-d.d.

The Shady Gap Electric Railway

I acquired photographs of someone's 1975 vacation trip to Orbosonia, Pennsylvania, + the Rockhill Trolley Museum located there. The photographer would seem to have been more interested in the steam locomotives & passenger cars kept there¹, as those are the abundance of the photos, but they did take these of an open-air car, numbered 1875.

This one's a little blurry but I like the sentiment.


I really like this one. The car's colors look good + I like the "car stop" sign at the upper left corner is a nice touch.


Like lightbulbs? The back of this one reads "Carson filament bulbs - trolley car, Orbisonia, PA Sept '75."


The car was acquired from Rio De Janeiro by the museum in 1965, & has had extensive work (including a new paint job) done on it since.²

-d.d.


¹ The steam locomotives, actually, are part of the nearby East Broad Top RR.
² The Rockhill Museum's website's really nice. A particularly nice touch is the mini-essays regarding each of the trolleys in their collection. Take, for example, this bit about open cars such as No. 1875:

Open cars were very expensive for the transit companies to operate. Unless the climate was always warm, the transit company needed to have a second set of cars for the passengers to ride during the winter weather. Rainstorms were also a problem, although curtains that could be drawn provided some relief. The public still loved the open cars in the hot summer months. It was necessary to have a crew of two people to operate an open car, a motorman to run the car and a conductor to collect the fares. This was a dangerous job for the conductor as he walked along the side running boards to collect the fares as traffic in the busy streets flew by him. For these reasons the open cars were replaced by closed cars or semi-convertible cars.

Negative Zone

I was scanning old photos & my scanner went all Norman Bates for a bit. I didn't notice at 1st + had to scan about 30 pics TWICE to get them right.

These 2, however, look kinda cool.





Cool, in a "oh-here-come's-the-forces-beyond-humanity's-comprehension" kind of way.

-d.d.

Fallout Protection What to Know & Do About Nuclear Attack.

These are all from a 1961 Dept. of Def. publication.¹ That orangey color is really... eye-catching. My favorite's that last one: Mom & dad & child in thier little fallout shelter, dad cranking the hand-driven ventilator, mom reading the ONE BOOK in the shelter. What's 2 weeks when you have family?

-d.d.

¹ W/ an intro by Robert McNamara!!

Peace Special.

My maternal grand-aunt was a Red Cross nurse stationed in Portsmouth, England, during the first world war. This newspaper, not surprisingly, was in the back of her scrapbook. Sorry the paper won't fit on a modernday scanner. I like how the paper is formatted to be folded in half vertically, with a solid 2 inches of blank paper in the middle.

-d.d.

Color - Color Blazing, and Color Murky.

It turns out my mother's aunt, who went to college¹ in, like, 1907 or something, when that was kinda not the thing ladies did, AND THEN never married, was a bit of the homebrew historian.² Her typewriter-keyed manuscript weighs in at a hefty 250+ pages, including some loose newspaper & magazine clippings from the early-to-mid '60s.

On the back of a magazine article is this gem...


Click to enlarge
The "currently fashionable two-piece swimsuit?" Apparently this mag was too frou-frou to just call it a bikini.

Still, love that swank '60s ad art.

-d.d.

¹ Psychology.
² And, evidently, a bit of the fanciful illustrator.

Schooner on the Willamette.

Just north of the Marquam. This schooner was in port for the Piratefest up at Cathedral Park in St. John's, and appeared to be earning some extra $$ by taking some peds on a pleasure cruise (she came about and headed back down the river sortly after passing under the Marquam).

I'm sure the shades of Larry Sullivan, Jim Turk and Bunco Kelly¹ will gaze upon it forelornly when it passes Ankeny street...


¹ Infamous crimpers and shanghaiers. Turk is said to have shanghaied his own son.

Lafayette & Brooklyn-Gideon Footbridges.

The Lafayette footbridge was built, I think, by Union Pacific or Southern Pacific Railroad (depending on how old it is), since there is a lack of records or clues, at least on the infobahn, to provide a date of construction. Admittedly, given its apparent vintage, I would like to believe that simply no one thought it worthwhile to note the construction, seeing as, after all, its only a footbridge over some train tracks.

My guess would be post-WWII. An old zine I have confirms its presence in the early 1990s. So that "pinpoints" construction from the 1940s to the 1980s. Regardless, its old, and the wooden planks that make up its floorboards squeak and shake and flex a bit.


Lafayette bridge - looking west.


Lafayette footbridge viewed from the south.


Lafayette pedestrian bridge - looking east.

I feel it worth mentioning that this bridge doesn't actually have a name. "Lafayette footbridge" or "Lafayette ped[estrian] bridge" refer only to the fact that it abuts S.E. Lafayette street. I don't think the Marquis de Lafayette ever set foot in Portland, Oregon, much less the Brooklyn train yards.

The Brooklyn-Gideon Footbridge, by contrast, is clearly a more recent effort (although also officially unnamed). In fact, I swear some online maps still show an actual street RR crossing here, a supposition supported by the dead-ending and concrete blocking-off of Brooklyn Street.


Brooklyn-Gideon footbridge, viewed from the east.

Since the Brooklyn-Gideon Bridge doesn't span the Brooklyn Yards proper the way the Lafayette bridge does, hanging out at Brokklyn-Gideon will bear witness to many more people using the tracks as a shortcut through or around the mess that is the confluence of Powell, the train tracks, 99E, Milwaukie, Division, and SE 11th & 12th Avenues. Train-hopping can also be observed from here.

d.d. tinzeroes vs. the Transformers

I spill a lot of ink discussing 1986's Transformers: The Movie, in my first piece over at Reviewiera.


I always found the above image inexplicably disturbing. Actaully, "disturbing" is too strong a feeling. Just a sorta weird, "soemthing's off here," "whut da?" feeling.

Like, here's this gigantic, multiple-ton alien artificial life creation from an artificial metal planet¹, dangling a Terran biological life form (a salmon? a trout? it’s a sizable fish by human standards, I think, if scale is ever consistent in Transformers) like a fly on a string. What's a human in his eyes? An intelligent guinea pig? Even giving the Autobots the benefit of being, at least, are benevolent, this still has a strange, sinister, overlordy tinge to it.

-d.d.

¹ Cybertron: Presumably a "real" planet once, transformed by the Quintessons into a factory planet millions of years ago. They built a race called "Trans-organics", part-animal, part-machine, to serve them. Eventually the Trans-organics came to be beyond Quintesson control, and were placed in suspended animation in Cybertron's core (ladies and gentlemen, welcome to: "things I learned from the third season of Transformers!). The creation of the first versions of the Transformers soon followed, although they could not transform yet. Soon they were programmed to have intelligence, and perhaps unintentionally, feelings. Autobots and Decepticons are descended from the two basic classes of robot the Quintessons' built: industrial/commercial (Autobot) and military (Decepticon). Guardian robots, a third class, were produced to protect the Quintessons from their other creations. Eventually, a proto-Autobot known as A-3 built a device (the Matrix?), hidden inside his slave brand (the proto-Autobot insignia), that disabled the Guardians, and at last the Transformers (Autobot & Decepticon) rose up. The Quintessons fled into space to construct a new home world, Quintessa, and another slave-race of transforming robots, the Sharkticons, to serve them. They would remain uninvolved in Cybertronian affairs until Hot Rod & co. crash landed on Quintessa at the time of Transformers: The Movie.

Venture Brothers

The first episode of the Venture Brothers I ever lay witness to was one Sunday night at the Jolly Inn, back when Jeff Bastard used to wage-slave there and when C. Collision still used to get intoxicated. Being a public house of the lower order, the television was always on. Invariably, the channel was frozen on Adult Swim, w/ closed captions. This was the medium of my first Venture Bros. exposure. Despite closed captioning, my usual distrust of all things Adult Swim was tempered by visual images so bizarre my interested was thoroughly piqued.


I experienced a second episode when aforementioned Collision and I grabbed a 6er on the way home from the more upstanding Basement Pub after it closed (it closes at 1:30, giving the intelligent inebriate one full hour before beer-thirty to procure after-hours entertainments). Upon viewing the opening credits with sound, it only took few stanzas into the theme for me to declare, "this is J. G. Thirlwell!"


J.G. Thirlwell, of course, is a musical fave of mine since shadowy past days of high school. At the time I was an insufferably devoted NIN/Minstry fanboy and was looking for more of the same ilk. Thirlwell's work, all under the various Foetus monikers, was not the same ilk (nor, as it turned out, was PWEI, which also remains my other musical fave). I dabbled in several Foetus albums, but I recall the Sink album, consisting of old singles and various instrumental pieces, being the first to really get under my skin.


Around my senior year of high school Thirlwell's first and only album for Sony came out: a Foetus disc entitled Gash. That album rocked. It rocked even more when I became a sexually frustrated college freshman, the de facto soundtrack to my year of dorm life. This fit all the better when Thirlwell interviewed and said Gash was about a breakup.

I believe I may have never seen another episode of the Venture Brothers on television, but Collision was way into the show, and would pass along tidbits when the fancy struck him. We both pined for the dvd release. Collision later related to me that investigations had revealed none other than Ben Endlund was also involved in the Venture Brothers as a writer as co-creator Jackson Publick's college roomate.


Ben Endlund is the artistic and writing genius behind the Tick comic book, which I had read in the even more mist-enshrouded and spooky days of middle school, and, of course, watched the still rather bizarre, surreal, what-the-hell-is-this-doing-on-TV-anyways Tick animated series on Fox when I was in high school.

When Venture Bros., Season One finally hit dvd last month, I didn't notice. I was busy setting myself up for heartbreak by falling for Dirk Nowitzski and Josh Howard. But when that was over, I was ecstatic to find out that a TV series I'd seen one actual episode of (the muted one doesn't count), scored by one youth hero, written by another, well then, dammit, I'm going to the viddy rental store!


13 episodes of bliss.

Willamette Shore Trolley.

A few colleagues and I sessioned upon the Willamette Shore Trolley a weekend past ago.

The 1932 J.G. Brill Co. "Broadway" Trolley Car (No. 813) is maintained and operated by the historical hobbyists over at the Oregon Electric Railway Historical Society, and the trolley fares (10bucks round trip, 6 one way) are a primary revenue stream for the Society.

The trolley has a schedule of sorts, although since this is most definitely a tourist and enthusasist's mode of transportation, the Conductors & Motormen are not adverse to running late. The trolley itself is comfy and airy, and rocks, sways, swings, creaks, squeaks, and rattles as it rolls down the old Red Electric tracks from SW Moody & Bancroft to downtown Lake Oswego. One fellow remarked the trolley was rocking him to sleep with its rhythmic swifting and swaying, which is notable if only because there are none of the bumps associated with riding a bus and a fraction of the noise.

The trolley itselfs sort of a queer-looking thing. My colleagues noted it was a blocky and ackward looking vehicle. I have to agree insofar as its definitely resembles little the what we think of as a "traditional" trolley, by which we're really thinking of just about anything built between, say, 1890 and about 1915 or so. It is these trolleys which grace the fronts of ready-made rice boxes and sit in family Italian restaurants.



This later-day Broadway car, however, resembles something I'd expect to see in a Miyazaki film. It’s a strange breed that mixes something distinctively old (a trolley) with a lot of features I'd frankly expect to find on a 1950s autobus. Bizarre!

My Name is Grahf... the Seeker of Power.

If I could pick a memory most fond out of the four years I went steady with my Sony Playstation, I would have to go with Square's 1998 sci-fi psycho giant robot RPG Xenogears. I played all 30 hours of this game twice: the first in 1999-2000, the second in 2002.

Xenogears is the only game that makes me consider the possibility firing up the ol' Playstation, complete with fire-engine red SD Ultraman stencil. Then I remember better things to do with my spare time. Still… the temptation.... lingers…

Regardless of whether I will ever fire it up again, I think Xenogears was and is (given what I gather to be a recent retro movement in the gaming world in regards to RPGs) a fantastic science fiction RPG.


Fei, Billy, & Bart take on two double-tailed blue coyotes.
The story of Xenogears and the world in which it takes place in ("Ignas") can be described as the unique flavor one might get when by taking substantial, Japanese-seasoned portions of wuxia tradition, Frank Herbert's Dune, television's groundbreaking Neon Genesis Evangelion, and a mishmash of other assorted skiffy tropes and devices, put them in a blender together, and hit frappe.

This all comes at your pretty fast and gets the first act off to an interesting start. Things don't get really interesting, for me, at least, until protagonist Fei is in the Aveh desert and a strange Gear (a giant robot) flys up and lands on top of a natural stone pillar.

The cloaked and masked pilot emerges and stands on the shoulder of the Gear and speaketh...



Okay. This is cool. Some nice operatic music goin' in the background. I'm diggin' it. Then he drops this gem:


Whoa! What does that mean? What's going on here? The very second Xenogears drops this "slayer of god" (a phrase actually used a little later on, if I recall) concept into the soup, it essentially drives the rest of the story to the very end.