Sailbourne

Continuing the craziness that was 2008 …

May — The Thing

One of the true highlights of the year came on a warm Saturday afternoon in May.  It was the ninth annual UFO Festival at the McMenamins Hotel Oregon in McMinnville.  It was our third trip there to help the folks at Willamette Radio Workshop put on a live performance.  This year was extra special, as the main feature was an adaptation of John W. Campbell’s short story “Who Goes There?” titled (as several of the film adaptations of the same story were called) The Thing, written by Joe!

Mattie’s Room on the second floor of the Hotel Oregon was packed!  All the seats were taken, and several groups of people sat on the floor behind the seats, while more stood and listened.  For some forty-five minutes, the WRW cast, speaking Joe’s words, held all those people absolutely spellbound.  In between The Thing and a performance of “Flash Gordon,” Joe and I talked to people about WRW, and sold discs of WRW shows, Dry Smoke and Whispers, and of course, “Afterhell.”

Q3 — Medical Leave and Heavy Downtime

On the first of July, right about noon, I was struck with a pain in the lower abdomen.  It put me in the emergency room, and before the end of the month, into surgery for a full hysterectomy.  Joe has written a well-detailed and heartfelt account of this over in his blog, so I will keep the note here to a few bits and pieces that still stick out in my mind about the whole experience:

• I took a cab to the emergency room that first day.  Turns out the driver was an audiodrama enthusiast who gave me a copy of a disc he’d helped create, called “Yes, Virginia, There Is an Anti-Claus.”  Absolutely hilarious.  I’m still trying to locate him again.
• At the end of the visit to the emergency room, the doctor was preparing to write me a prescription for painkillers.  I distinctly remember telling him, “Let’s start small and go with the Vicodin.”
• In the near-frantic rush to get ready to go into the hospital, one of the most important things to me was going to buy a bathrobe.  I did manage to find a rather nice one.

After the surgery I spent the next seven weeks at home, healing and trying not to do too much too fast.  (Always a challenge for me, that last.)  I got to watch a bumper crop of 1980s TV on DVD — the entire first season of The Equalizer and most of the short-lived Stingray series.  It was a treat, really, since I missed both the first time around.  Also got to take in a lot more of the Democratic National Convention than I would have otherwise, and completely ignored the Olympics.  (Heck, I had to think for a minute as I was writing this where they were even held.)

By mid-September I was back at work, and things were looking a bit more normal, but the year wasn’t done with us yet.  I’ll finish it off in a few days.

It seems like 2008 was a really wild and crazy year for just about everyone we know — no less for Joe and I.  Before the memories fade too far into the distance, I thought I’d do a brief summary.  Then I can stash all the grief where it belongs — the past.

Q1 (Jan-March) — Black Cat, Giallo Hotel

It all started looking like Lilith had a cold — her nose was runny.  We gave it a week — the normal time for a virus to run its course — and took her to the vet.  It wasn’t a cold.  After some tests, it seemed likely that she had nasal lymphoma.  There was only one way to be certain it was cancer — take her to a specialist for a rhinoscopy.  We had the money for that.  We paid it, Lilith had the surgery, and we got good news and bad news.  Bad news: it was definitely lymphoma, it wasn’t really curable, and we didn’t have the money for things like chemotherapy.  Good news:  the rhinoscopy left Lilith feeling much better, almost as if she wasn’t sick at all.  We had some more time with her.  No telling how much.

At the same time, Joe was working like crazy on the last episodes of the latest, biggest, meanest Afterhell story:  “Bloodbath at the Giallo Hotel.”  The final installments went out over the podcast feed, and Joe compiled the story in time to send it off for the Mark Time/Ogle Awards.

Q2 (April – June) — Farewell, and a Mention

After six weeks of good health, Lilith took a bad turn for the worse in early April.  We and the vets did what we could, but there wasn’t much left.  At the end of April, we had her euthanized.  It broke our hearts.  After almost exactly ten years with us, she was gone.  Lilith had adopted Joe back in 1998, and he was always her person.  He has begun to tell her story in his own blog.

Not long after we said goodbye to Lilith, we got surprising news from the folks at the Mark Time/Ogle Awards.  Afterhell Volume 3: Bloodbath at the Giallo Hotel had earned an Honorable Mention Ogle award.

And at about the same time we realized that Kyouju wasn’t well.  More vet visits, more bad news and good news.  Bad news:  he had a hyperactive thyroid, not uncommon in older cats but relatively rare in a nine-year-old.  The treatment: radioactive iodine, involving a four-day vet hospital stay and four weeks of isolation and minimal contact with us.  The good news:  He was completely cured.  Even before we could let him out of his cage, he was putting the pounds he had lost back on.  Joe’s written about this in detail, too.

I’ll cover the second half of the year soon.

Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, one of the last of the Von Braun team of rocket scientists who came to America from Germany at the end of World War II, has died at the age of 94. He left this world even as the latest NASA space probe successfully landed on Mars; and yet, Dr. Stuhlinger’s legacy includes the invention of ion propulsion engines, a means of transport which made it technically feasible for humans to travel to Mars themselves — an invention made nearly 40 years ago.

So much of what is still science fiction should, by all rights, be science fact by now. Especially when it comes to space exploration. There are plenty of reasons why the space program stalled in low Earth orbit in the early 1970s, reasons which are explained and debated by people far better informed and experienced in the subject than I am, and I would encourage you to seek these out. One of the most enduring arguments on the subject follows the theme “Why should we spend money on space when there are so many problems here on Earth?”

It’s a valid question, one which has been posed for a long time. In a posting at the excellent NASA Watch blog, Keith Cowing reproduces a letter written by Dr. Stuhlinger sometime in 1970 or 1971, answering the question in great, careful, thoughtful and thought provoking detail.

Dr. Stuhlinger enclosed a copy of the famous picture shown above with his letter. He said of it:

The photograph which I enclose with this letter shows a view of our earth as seen from Apollo 8 when it orbited the moon at Christmas, 1968. Of all the many wonderful results of the space program so far, this picture may be the most important one. It opened our eyes to the fact that our earth is a beautiful and most precious island in an unlimited void, and that there is no other place for us to live but the thin surface layer of our planet, bordered by the bleak nothingness of space. Never before did so many people recognize how limited our earth really is, and how perilous it would be to tamper with its ecological balance. Ever since this picture was first published, voices have become louder and louder warning of the grave problems that confront man in our times: pollution, hunger, poverty, urban living, food production, water control, overpopulation. It is certainly not by accident that we begin to see the tremendous tasks waiting for us at a time when the young space age has provided us the first good look at our own planet.

We didn’t send humans to Mars in Dr. Stuhlinger’s lifetime. If more people heed his words, we might just get lucky … and send them in mine.

You will no doubt have read the sad news in many other places by the time you read it here, but if you haven’t seen it yet, go take a look at Sydney Pollack’s obituary. 

I’m hardly qualified to comment much on Pollack’s career, having seen few of the movies he directed, and even fewer of those which he acted in, but I can comment on one of them.  Since it’s one of the movies which ends up in the “other stuff” list in his obituary, maybe the contribution is worth making — lots of people will talk about Out of Africa or Tootsie or Michael Clayton, but not so many, I guess, will talk about The Yakuza.

Sydney Pollack directed The Yakuza in 1974.  Like Shogun five years later, it was an American/Japanese co-production, and most of it was actually shot in Japan.  I first saw it on video in 1985 or early 1986.  On the shelf, it looked like just another action movie, but I was particularly curious about the Japanese element (having just recently become fascinated with Japanese history and culture). 

I wasn’t expecting all that I found — the carefully layered plot full of double-crosses and genuinely unexpected twists, the depth of the characters, the explanations of and real respect paid to the Japanese culture and traditions which underlie the story.   One of its themes — a fall from grace and the effort to achieve redemption — is one of my favorite kinds of story.

And so many of the elements of the film just plain work, even if on the surface you might not expect them to:  casting Robert Mitchum in the lead, Brian Keith as a bad guy, a triple clash of culture (American vs. old Japan vs. new Japan), a score by Dave Grusin.  Under Pollack’s guiding hand, it all works.  The Yakuza became one of my favorite movies, though I rarely had a chance to see it again, until last year when it (finally!) came out on DVD.

The film further fueled my interest in Japanese culture and was a direct influence in quite a bit of my writing, particularly my work in the Chamber of Mystery game and my original and principal character in the ISA Phoenix game, Yoshino Marina.  It led me to Zatoichi, Lone Wolf & Cub (the movies and the manga), and Musashi.  A novel still only in my head, about a cursed katana, probably owes its conception to The Yakuza.  And there will no doubt be more, as the years go by.

Many of the people involved with the movie are gone now, sadly — Pollack, writer Leonard Schrader, Mitchum, Keith, Richard Jordan — but some are still around, including the Japanese leads Takakura Ken and Kishi Keiko, writers Paul Schrader and Robert Towne, and composer Grusin.

When looking up The Yakuza on the Internet Movie Database, I learned that there is a remake in the works; with all respect to those working on that movie, I hope it’s never finished.  Sydney Pollack’s The Yakuzais an oft-overlooked masterpiece — better that it stay such, and be left to stand on its own.  If you haven’t seen it, at least go rent The Yakuza — even if you aren’t normally one for action movies, this one will be more than worth your time.

A revisit, for this Veterans/Armistice/Remembrance Day:
(yes, I know it was actually yesterday, but there are still plenty of observances going on today, so …)

“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives. You are now living in the soil of a friendly country therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”
– Mustafa Kemal, written on a war memorial on the battlefield of Gallipoli

And this is well worth checking out too:
For Better or For Worse comic for November 11, 2007

Joe and I set out on what was to be the longest trip of my sabbatical — ten days — on Monday, June 25. We had decided to make the trip to the Bay Area in two hops each way. You can, and we have, driven from Portland to the Bay Area in one day, but it can end up being anywhere from ten to twelve hours behind the wheel, and that just gets tiresome.

We stopped for the day in Gasquet, California (just a few miles over the state line) at the Patrick Creek Lodge. The main lodge building was constructed in 1926, when Highway 199 was still a gravel road. Around 1980, my dad had a second job tending bar at the lodge, and I had always wanted to stay overnight there. Our room was small (but hardly the smallest hotel room I’ve ever been in), but clean, comfortable, and quiet. As it would have been back in the 20s, there was no television. No cellphone reception, no Internet. Joe and I agreed that all it would need was a desk and it would have been the perfect writing retreat.

After a little while in our room to rest and relax, we ventured outside to have a look around. The lodge sits where Patrick Creek runs into the Middle Fork of the Smith River, and there is a National Forest campground just across the highway. We followed a path along the creek, underneath the highway, to the river. We found a spot where one branch of the path ended where we could sit and take some pictures. I perched on a rock for a little while and put my feet into the water, letting the sensation take me back to my childhood, where I spent many summer days swimming in this very river — albeit never at this particular spot.

We wandered along a series of paths built of river stone. In some places the trail had washed away, and in others, the walls were covered in thick moss. It felt a little like stepping back into Middle Earth. We found some signs later that explained that the old campground had been built in the 1920s as well, and in those days there was a footbridge across the river and even a diving board at one of the best swimming spots. Major floods in 1955 and 1964 had washed away a lot of what had been built back then. (There are a few more pictures of the old campground and the lodge in the gallery; click on either of the pictures above and you can navigate to them.)

We walked back to the lodge, enjoyed a very nice dinner, and retired to our room, where we ended up playing a session of Call of Cthulhu — my first effort at being a Keeper of Arcane Lore, and one in which I thought I did rather well, at the risk of being immodest. It was warm, and the room didn’t have air conditioning — but we slept with the window open, hearing the rushing water of the creek and the wind in the trees. We both want to go back, and stay longer next time — we’ll just have to make sure we get a room with a desk.

Y’know, I don’t think I ever actually did have to write one of those essays when I was in school. Sometimes I wonder if anyone ever did, or if it was something that just got made up for sitcoms and cartoon strips.

In any case, I thought it might be fun to recount some of what happened to me over the ten week extended vacation I had this summer. I had wanted to blog about it as it happened, but it never quite seemed to work out. Ah well!

My first day away from work — Saturday, June 23, 2007 — I attended the Japanese Bobtail Breeders’ Society annual awards banquet. It is held in a different location each year, generally alternating between the East Coast, West Coast, and Midwest. This year’s meeting was held at the Multnomah Falls Lodge, about thirty miles west of Portland.

While Multnomah Falls can be seen from the highway (Interstate 84), I’d never had a chance to look at it for myself. This picture was taken from the parking lot, using the brand new digital camera I’d borrowed from Joe for the evening. (Clicking on it will take you to the LJ gallery, and from there you can navigate to a larger version of the same picture.)

The falls were the best part of the evening; the banquet itself started off a bit rough — I’d had to try and manage a setup which the lodge management had changed on us at the last minute, and I had no idea how to rejuggle table seating. Who could be seated with who, and who had better darn well not be seated anywhere near whoever else, all that sort of thing.

But it all worked out okay in the end, and I got to head out into the sunset of one of the longest days of the year. The real vacation beckoned.

What follows is one part review, one part appreciation, and one part musings on the threads of causality — at least when it comes to the stories I’ve been trying to tell for so many years.

Somewhere around the time 1979 became 1980, two guys in their early twenties, then living in Tampa, Florida, created a radio show. A radio drama, a species that was rare at best and regarded by most folks as having been extinct for 25 years or more. This one was called “Dry Smoke and Whispers,” and it was one part noir dectective story, one part science fiction, and all magic.

At the same time, in a very small town on the northwest coast of California, a girl of thirteen bought her first Dungeons and Dragons book — paid $20 for it, a fortune to her in those days, and hauled it everywhere with her, hoping to find someone to play the game with, to create a fantasy world they could share.

Skip forward to the present day. The guys who created “Dry Smoke and Whispers” are still at it. They had produced almost five dozen shows, then lost the majority of them to a hurricane in 1985. With the help of fans who had taped episodes off community radio stations, they recovered some stories, and ended up remaking a few into even more grand, gorgeous tales than they were before. Also in the meantime, they crossed the country and came to live in Portland, Oregon.

The girl — now a woman “closer to forty, though,” (quoting a line from one of her favorite movies) — also came to Portland. She and her husband still have that very same D&D book, along with dozens of other role-playing books for many different games and settings.

Of all of them, though, the one closest to her heart is called the Chamber of Mystery, set in a pulp-adventure version of our own Earth of the late 1930s. Over the years the world of the game grew into a deep and detailed place, and she tried to create stories to match.

She met the guys who make “Dry Smoke and Whispers,” and got her first chance to actually listen to the show, which she had only vaguely heard of before.

And it was, to put it very simply, mind-blowing.

Joe and I — yes, I’m the thirteen year old that was, who is way too close to forty now — started off by listening to the Season One set: five episodes from the earliest days of the series, enhanced with some interstitals and supplements produced in the last few years. We entered the world of Quaymet, the capital of a vast alien galaxy, “Art Deco catacombs of good times past.” This was the world of Emille Song, Special Detective; of his allies and enemies.

After we listened through the first five stories, while waiting for the opportunity to pick up the next set of three tales (“The ShadowMan Saga”), I listened through the set again. A few episodes once or twice more. One night, I even had a dream of being in Quaymet, overseeing the construction of an addition to its remarkable architecture. The image has faded, but I seem to recall it being some sort of flying, hanging garden …

Then, a few days later, I got to listen to the first story of the Saga, titled simply “The ShadowMan.” By the end of Part 2, I understood why I’d been dreaming about Quaymet, and why this series moved me so.

The creators of “Dry Smoke and Whispers” have done with their stories everything that I have been trying to do with the Chamber of Mystery game since I started it fifteen years ago. They have created stories which are epic in scale and yet deeply, intensely personal for the characters involved. A world where science and technology mix freely with psychic powers, mysticism and magic; where powers beyond the view of ordinary folk watch and try to shape the fate of the world (for good or ill); where both the heroes and villains are not all that they seem; where tales that are very much of their own time and place also speak very clearly to us in the here and now.

It’s all there, painted with layers of sound the way Maxfield Parrish painted in layers of glazes and varnish, with the same rich, multi-dimensional results. If you enjoy audio theater, you will love “Dry Smoke and Whispers.” If you’ve never tried experiencing your tales of adventure in a purely sonic dimension, there’s no better place to begin.

In the words of Kyle Jason, “Do it to yourself because you owe it to yourself.” Go visit Quaymet.

And don’t be too surprised if you dream.

It’s hard to believe it’s been 16 years … so many images of that late afternoon are still so vivid.

Mid-October, and it was still bloody hot in San Jose. Doesn’t start really cooling down until November. Joe and I, engaged and living together (we were married a year and three days later) were working at a wholesaler of marble, granite and ceramic tile. It was time to go home, and we were both wrapping up the tail end of the work day when the shaking began.

I froze first, waiting for it to stop.

It didn’t. So I ran — with several of the others in the office part of the building, out the front; as Joe and the rest of the warehouse crew came out the back. The floor-to-ceiling windows at the entrance of the building were rippling like sheets being tossed over a bed.

We all met up outside the warehouse area, as the ground had finally stopped moving. Joe had a Walkman — one of the few things that helped him get through the grind in those days — and had already tuned in KGO, relaying the reports that had already started coming in from almost 100 miles away in all directions.

“The Cypress Structure has collapsed,” he said. I don’t think he believed it himself. It was hard for any of us to believe.

We made our way home, slowly, across surface streets with traffic lights out — even with the traffic jammed, things were eerily quiet. Our room in a second floor apartment hadn’t escaped unscathed; the top half of our board and brick bookshelves had collapsed, and the medicine cabinet had popped open, the bottles falling and smashing a crystal goblet I used to hang my earrings on. But we had power, so we turned on the television, and saw the pictures for the first time.

The San Francisco Marina District, buildings collapsed and burning. Cars running off the fallen section of the Bay Bridge.

And the Cypress Structure. What seemed like miles of double-deck elevated freeway, pancaked, slabs of concrete and steel lying atop and askew. It was still hard to believe. Even as I write this, with the freeway long since gone, it’s hard to believe.

A new park is being dedicated in Oakland today, where one of the Cypress off-ramps once ran. Story from the SFGate website

I had a rather unusual experience today. I was spreading out newspapers to carve our Halloween pumpkin and the spread was on the obituary page for about ten days ago. Along with the standard form listings, there were a number of display ads, placed as memorials to folks who have gone, sometimes a year or more ago. I was just struck by how much was really said, not only about the person who is gone, but those left behind who placed the ads.

Here was one:

In Memory of My Beloved Son
Jason Edward Alan Aldritt
Dec. 5, 1974-Oct. 19, 2003

Beloved son you were a kind, gentle, and generous young spirit, whose heart and soul had been shattered. Your world had become a place of torment and despair. Anger and fear had taken up residence in your mind and your heart was not strong enough to see the deception. You lost the battle against self-condemnation. You accepted everyone for who they were, even their darkside, but you couldn’t show or feel the same leniency towards your own shortcomings. You chose to live in silent desperation without anyone understanding the depth of your despair. Forgive us, and especially me, beloved son, for not giving you enough love and strength to overcome your demons. I continue to welcome our dream-time together and in quiet sorrow, impatiently wait for the time when my broken heart will be mended upon our meeting in Nirvana, when joy will once again reign.

With Much Love,
Mom

And then, telling a very different story:

RAYMOND A. TOWN, JR.
November 13, 1932 – October 19, 2001

SCENE: A stag party in 1955 at a Grange Hall, deep in remote Clackamas County. Someone at the poker table shouts, “RAID!”, and out the ladies restroom window we go. Whew, just made it!

NEXT DAY: Four inch headlines in Oregon Daily Journal Newspaper, “CLACKAMAS STAG PARTY RAIDED.” Drat, there we are on the front page … we forgot about the sign-in sheet at the door.

PENANCE: Twenty three years old and grounded by our parents.

Everlasting Memories, Bud.

I was just so struck … these are real people, with real stories. So much more real than what passes for “reality” programs on TV. I’m beginning to wonder if there isn’t a book in here, somewhere …