The Diamond Island

I just got myself a copy of a graphic novel called Fall of Cthulhu: The Fugue. If you are unfamiliar with the HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu myhtology, here’s a synopsis, free of charge.

The universe is populated by monstrous, unstoppable alien god-beings that drive anyone who has dealings with them into madness or death. In the past, these beings ruled the universe and people were just apes in a petri dish for their amusement, when they thought about us at all. For some reason, the god-beings were all imprisoned and/or put to sleep in forgotten nightmare worlds and locations on earth. Their cultists and minor demon servants live in secret among us, and wait for the day when the beings rise again to show us the true meaning of long lines at the fast checkout lane.

Chtulhu is only one of the “beings” in the mythology, but for convenience’s sake many geeks use the name to describe the general mythology. As in “the world of Cthulhu”.

The story in The Fugue is your typical Cthulhu story:

1. Person encounters mysterious plot.
2. Person investigates mysterious plot.
3. Person tries to stop mysterious plot.
4. Person goes insane or dies hideously.

Sometimes the person in the story escapes to tell the tale, or even manages to foil the plot. But the ending nearly always makes it clear that the unimaginable horrors of the universe are not defeated, only delayed from their eventual awakening to cause havoc and higher electricity bills.

I found the mystery in The Fugue too rushed, and therefore hard to follow. The protagonist plods through the mystery and finds out things by accident. That’s always been the problem, I think, with Cthulhu stories set in the modern age. Writers today don’t have enough faith in the material. They feel the mystery has to be complicated, and the protagonist has to be dragged along because otherwise they’d turn the thing over to the cops or just get killed.

I enjoyed one of the characters known as The Harlot, a ghoulish demigoddess who captures men and puts them into boxes of madness for all eternity (guess how the protagonist ends up…oops, I made boo boo). The interaction between her and the protagonist, even if it was one sided, was the best part.

I find the idea of Cthulhu worth pondering. Unimaginable alien horrors lurking in states of mind now only accessible by means of forgotten rituals and encounters with minor monsters makes great material for stories. The Fugue disappointed me because I expected better.

I started thinking about a scene in The Sandman graphic novels, where Dream (a divine being) tells his sibling Desire in so many words that humans are not playthings to be toyed with. It is the other way around, that they play out their divine roles in the manner of dolls in a dollhouse for humanity’s purposes.

It’s a point of view that can lead rapidly to hubris and self-inflation, which I want to avoid. But I think something that is perhaps missing from the Cthulhu mythology is the most alien and horrific “being” of all – human beings. That the collective will and growing consciousness of humanity is what really pushed the monsters back into their prisons, and all the talk of a “rise of Cthulhu to roam free again” is just wishful thinking on these beings’ parts.

The apocalypse of terror might already have happened – when humanity rose from the depths of it’s own unconscious sunken city and beings like Cthulhu were forced to cage themselves for the amusement of people lest they be snuffed out like the dinosaurs. A few cultists play at being followers of these mad monsters of unimaginable power for the sake of their own unreflected projections, while the rest of us pretend they don’t exist because we like it that way?

Not that the preceding premise of “the elder gods are out there waiting to rise again and get you” is invalidated. But what kind of terrifying secret would it be to find out “Cthulhu is humanity’s favorite action figure in the game of life where everything hurts for real”? What if it’s both?

The Fugue falls far short of evoking anything beyond “some people get jacked at random”. I read this graphic novel and chuckled at the machinations of the Cthulhu monsters to further their plans. I’d like to see the Crawling Chaos’s (human) face when he gets his monthly gasoline card statement. You want horror? Try shopping at Wegman’s without losing your mind.

In garden news, the potatoes are coming up nicely. The tomatoes need a lot of care, so it’s touch and go with them. Onions and chives are on target. The lettuce, contrary to last year, is being really difficult. It looks like it might surge forward soon. I hope so, it’s been a long spring.

The basil croaked, which really surprised me. The other herbs are doing well and spreading rapidly. I’m psyched because our cooking gets so much mileage now out of them, and we now know the power of saving herbs for later in the winter. The garden is teeming with earthworms, which it wasn’t last year. I guess word has gotten around that this plot is active.

K and I have a huge amount of plants in moss packets ready to plant, hopefully this will start the serious attack of garden goodness. Oh yes, and we have a new blue hose with a purple multi spray attachment that rocks the mike. Our major challenge this year is keeping the weeds, which have mounted a massive attack on all fronts. My back is killing me, and the thistles ruined my gloves, requiring me to get a fresh pair. Sheesh!

Frankie has taken to bullying Blink, the older and weaker female cat. It’s gotten to the point where Blink is always hiding and skulking about, and it’s driving K and myself up the wall. In all other ways Frankie is a honeybear, but when she doesn’t get her way (such as wanting to get a walkies outside and we say no because the landscapers sprayed the grass with pesticide today), she acts out on Blink.

We’re really not happy with our vets. We took Frankie in for a respiratory infection, and they decided to give her the latest round of shots because we hadn’t been in to update them. This was in addition to the antibiotics they prescribed. Now, we hate giving Frankie her shots because she becomes weak and sad for three days, and it’s heartbreaking to watch. So for them to give her the shots before we could protest, when she was already feeling crummy because of an infection. Well, the vets are on my poop list. I’m going to go empty my wallet somewhere else. Frankie hid under the bed and sulked for days, and it made me mad.

On the bath front, my aunt gave me an awesome array of bath salts from Pretty Baby, and some cool dude bath bombs from Lush. Alas, I’ve used up the gift boxes and I emptied out my main store of goods the other day. Not having the requisite ability to meditate my cares into valuable cash and prizes at a certain level is of course, intolerable. But understandable, since my stress levels have been off the wall the last month and a half.

Actually, I have a whole stash of bath bombs I’ve been holding onto for karmic reasons, which I’ve been unable to touch. The victims I’ve planned these for will no doubt benefit, but for me it means lean times. So K and I made a brief run and I picked up some more of my faves. There’s this pine-volcanic gravel bomb that does the trick nicely, and I’ve been jonesin’ to make use of that kind again. Stimulates my brainstem nicely, and I’m glad to have it back.

Picked up the third Age of Bronze, titled “Betrayal Part One”. It’s as good as always, and I read through it so quickly it’s sad. The Trojan War is finally starting to heat up, as both sides start to maneuver their pieces into position, while the personal stories of the characters continue to develop in interesting ways.

Of particular interest to me is the diplomatic mission to Troy to regain Helen and avert the war, where several people reveal their character in really cool ways. I never get tired of Odysseus’s trickery, and I have to say Palamede’s honesty is starting to win me over. Paris’s cowardice, arrogance and treachery are really going too far. Troy is doomed.

K has been getting the hiking bug, and after a long search she finally found a pair of boots she could deal with. REI had nothing but high priced, weird and poorly manufactured junk. That surprised me. LL Bean just didn’t pass the muster. So we hit the local Ranger Surplus, because I needed a new pair of jungle boots and a new pair of fatigues. K was skeptical, but she found exactly what she was looking for there. Durable, support, reasonably priced, and not made cheaply.

I swear by my army boots and fatigues. My old desert storm boots and fatigues have been slowly falling apart this last year, despite my best efforts to milk them further. I’ve worn the fatigues for twenty-one years, and the boots for eleven. The service, when it comes to the basics, knows how to make long-lasting, hardy equipment and that’s no joke.

The boots breathe and stand up to anything while giving you support and protection. The fatigues cover your legs with cool/warm air as necessary, and they protect you from terrain, foliage and insects like nobody’s business. Plus the pockets are awesome. I’ve carried empty beer bottles in all four at the 9:30 Club, saving my friends and me the hassle of throwing them out while the music is raging. It’s good to have a new set. I feel it’s appropriate, in a way, with the way my life is going.

Yup, it’s time for another dissatisfaction post. I got loads of issues with popular culture, and here comes the latest diatribe of destructoid doom! I’ve been out of the comics field for a while, when I gave up my comic box a ways back and decided I’d run out of patience with the endless storylines that never resolved, or the stupid inconsistencies that never made sense. The hero business gets mighty boring after a couple of years of waiting for things to happen that matter.

Graphic novels have allowed me to explore new avenues of coolness, and the independent comics out there, both in print and on the web, have kept the faith. There’s things out there that feed me. I should be happy. I’ll probably never buy DC or Marvel again though, and I look back at the old days of The Uncanny X-men, Alpha Flight, and Teen Titans with a fondness I know in my bones I’ll never know again. It’s like a right of passage for adolescents. One day, the power fantasies stop being fun, and the lack of fun overrides your faith in what the heroes mean to you.

I’m an apostate, then, in the comic sense of the word. I can still be marketed to. It’s called “the maturation of the industry”. Titles are darker and edgier now, to compete with the rich competition of Manga, and independent trade paperbacks. But last year, with the advent of the television show Heroes, something came to the surface that started to bother me. Good show, but I think there’s a fundamental flaw in hero comic books that has never been addressed, or if it has I’ve never run into it. I’m not sure exactly, that it can be addressed.

What I see a dearth of in comic books, particularly the mainstream ones, is the now familiar self-defeating cycle of, origin of hero, establishment of hero as righter of wrongs (or “doer of what they are supposed to do”), appearance of villain(s) to challenge hero, big dude fight to see who the big dog is, generic victory, return to “establishment” or “appearance” phase, repeat as long as sales are good. If sales are poor, instead of “victory”, hero gets rousing defeat and indefinite retirement until they can be retconned back into action to see if they are saleable again.

Funk dat! Get a new cycle, fool!

See, today’s mainstream heroes are commercial property. They can never resolve a story; they can only embody qualities dependent upon who is telling the most current version of their tale. The hero reaches a certain point, at which they never go anywhere but around the same carousel.

Look at Spider Man. K bought the complete spider man comic series (something like 400+ issues) on CD-ROM a few years back, and I managed to wander through it a little. This was during the time of the surge in popularity with Ultimate Spider Man and the Spider Man movies. What struck me was how the long-term spider-man saga in the comics was a never-ending cycle marked by certain points where an “idea”, like the black suit or the marriage of Mary Jane and Peter Parker, took hold as official changes. Meanwhile, the Ultimate Spider Man comics (a “re-invention” of the series for a modern day), and to a certain degree, the movies embodied a shocking revelation to me: You could tell the entire story of spider man (as it has been developed) very quickly because of this cycle.

In other words, the “story” of Spider Man has been in reality just one long narrative without end, in a way not dissimilar to many Dungeons and Dragons games where your Level 36 Fighter keeps going from one fight fest to the next because there’s nothing to do but fight more monsters and level up. In order for it to be a story, there has to be a resolution, an endgame. But that’s not possible because it’s an “intellectual property” that must provide “increasing profitability”.

Well, Spider Man has been around long enough now where the gig is up. The story has been told in all ways that count. You can try and “reboot” or “scorched earth” the character, but the problem is, you still tell the entire story in 11 volumes or less. You can tell the entire story in three movies and you are done, finished. That’s all there is. Talk about depressing! We’ve finally come to a point where the comic book characters have been with us long enough to cross three generations, long enough for a major paradigm shift.

If that leads to a gradual telling and retelling of the major heroes, so that Spider Man becomes a version of a modern day story akin to Gilgamesh, I’m cool with that. These stories are done, so it’s time to see what’s cooking on the pot now, in terms of what is fresh. Because that’s what I’m most interested in. I see it as a sign that something else is coming to the boil. This preoccupation with “realism” in what is really a psychic, non-real fact of inner existence means there is a need to move the hero into a different realm of development. I’m not sure fandom wants or can handle it, but I think it is happening already in the dark corners of the internets. At least I see the signs that perhaps we are ready to take another look at the hero, and our need for the still vulgar and underestimated comic book

See, the hero always appears in response to a need in society. Something is wrong, someone who can make the wrong right appears. The wrong is righted. That’s the hero’s journey in a nutshell. Departure, Initiation, Return. So if “realism” is the goal, then isn’t the next step to take the villain out of the picture by identifying what he/she/it signifies? Or to put it another way, if comics are an escapist power fantasy, why not depict the hero resolving the problem and kicking rear end?

Or to make it more clear, you will never see Superman putting a stop to the war crimes in Guantanamo, Batman defending lawfully protesting activists in New York City from police brutality, or Reed Richards of The Fantastic Four making testimony before congress on global warming. They can never be shown fighting even aliases of those kinds of problems, because it’s too controversial. They only ever fight, in dramatic fashion, some goofball named Galactus or Lex Luthor who represents a “generic threat” in terms of “every hero has their opposite”, thus Heroes are neutralized. It’s a means of neutering the heroic impulse and keeping the art form from reaching its creative, natural expression.

There’s a problem in that these kinds of heroes stand for a process in the psyche, and so how much you can take them out of their natural element and place them into more concrete realizations is problematic. The means of expression, even in a “democratic” society as ours are limited to narrow bands of discussion. But I think if comic book heroes are to mean something now, they have to start exploring the next step of creative evolution and start fighting the REAL “super” villains. An ordinary person by themselves can only do so much against centers of concentrated power, such as a sociopathic corporation. It requires a “super” human to appear and with the mask of unconscious identity fight crime where it really exists.

There are scenes in comic books where this threatens to make an appearance. I’m thinking of a scene from a particular story in The Defenders, where they are fighting a group of anti-African American extremists called The Sons of the Serpent. The SotS are ordinary humans with a funny common costume and some high tech weapons like ray guns. They are able to get the drop on The Defenders because of this high-tech advantage, and numbers. The ordinary boyfriend of Valkyrie springs forward as they are making a street demonstration and about to burn Valkyrie on an upside down cross.

The man’s heroism inspires the ordinary people on the street who are watching this show of violence. One guy says he’s got no love for black people, but you don’t burn them because you don’t like them. If that ordinary guy can do it, so can they. Time to take back the city for regular people! A riot ensues, and the onlookers overwhelm the SotS members, forcing them to flee.

During the melee, The Defenders regain the upper hand and regroup. One of the leaders of The Defenders, Nighthawk, discovers that the source of his vast wealth has been funding the SotS without his knowledge, and he freaks. It’s a rather poignant scene, complicated by a later scene that I’m not sure is a cop-out or a real statement on hate across all lines of people. But the point I take from this storyline is that heroes are supposed to inspire regular people to make changes. The hero is worthless if they do all the work all the time. They bring back that gold which is necessary for regular people to make a change in their own lives. Because it’s the public that matters, not the privileged world of heroes and villains fighting on their turf for supremacy. That smacks of aristocracy and elitism, not the power within every person to contribute to the group’s real benefit.

I’m not sure if the time has come, but the current iteration of comic book heroes has run its course. It is way past time to spawn or die, and I don’t think DC or Marvel can pull it off. If it happens, it will happen in the independent fields out there, in the wilderness of the Internets. Do it. The public needs to be inspired, because they have lost their way, and they shiver in fear because they don’t know what can be done now, in this darkest moment of greatest danger and greatest potential.

03/31/2012 Edit: Oops, the Defender’s name was Nighthawk, not Yellowjacket!

I think the “cold” war has been won. The germs are giving up the ghost to the combined pesto-pasta and tomato slice beatdown with a dram of fresh squeezed orange juice. Both K and I appear to be improving rapidly, and are getting main power back. We spent the weekend catching up on life patrol and the maintenance of our Slack pool.

She bought herself some new jeans, as her current selection was getting beyond threadbare and the ability for the astronautics fields via sewing to repair. I spotted for some Halloween goodies, as I think this will be a Celtic New Year where I have the motivation to actually dress up. I’m going to be Bloody Gore Face! Aieee! We also got ourselves a new futon, as the previous one had decided it just didn’t have the will to go on anymore. To recap, clothes, decorations and a good night’s sleep vitaly important to well-being. I see my Sims bars going up now. All about the tyranny of objects drill sergeant!

Long range patrol even brought back some fascinating tidbits from the internets for me to mull over. The uncommonly cool Designated Sidekick is doing a survey on what people want from their comics. I took the survey (it’s a long one), and have to say it was informative just considering the questions. I want sex and violence in my comics, and the mask is a must-have, but I’m more interested in believability and consistency than what superheroes are wearing or that the leaders of a team always have a certain quality. I think it’s ultimately neat that such questions are even being examined now, by someone, rather than relying on the good old staples. The bronze, silver and gold ages of comics are over. Now it’s time to get busy!

Some aliens on other planets are just plain disturbing to my sensibilities, but good grief, bless them for keeping the universe alive! I’d just gotten done talking about Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man, and that movie’s musical oddness. Well my science officer told me over in the Occasional Superheroine galaxy, there was a sensor reading of Christopher Lee sings. From an 80’s movie called The Return of Captain Invincible. Dear, sweet baby yeh-seus, I gained some Insanity points. Oh, can’t wait to see this one in its entirety. Christopher Lee certainly has lived a fascinating life!

Meanwhile, back at the bat-garden, the tomatoes continue to go down. The marinara sauce is on back order now, so it’s smooth sailing. But I don’t think we’ll be getting too many more tomatoes out of the deal. Maybe the last wave in the next two weeks, but then that’s it. The herbs are all going to flower, and it’s gotten harder to harvest them regularly. farming isn’t just growing and harvesting, it’s also preserving and storing them properly. The Jalapeno plant refuses to give up, however, and this brave little plant is putting forth a nice juicy array of peppers that are all turning red now. Wow, love to ya, little plant. You go!

We did the fertilizer thing, did some weeding, though the pesky weeds have free run of the place. Too many orcs for this tag team to take on. We’re going to have to call in the garden weasel or something. A huge wolf spider jumped out of its burrow, deciding that the watering was not to its liking and ran for the storm shelter. Sheesh, talk about what big fangs you have! Which brought me to thinking about how K and I have been battling a lot of spiders lately.

A host of them have been running loose in large numbers on the bottom floor. Even the cats, who do cave cricket patrol, leave them alone. I’ve had to squash these intruders, because I resent having my body turned into an emergency liquid nutrient supply when the lesser insects get overwhelmed. And man, reddish translucent scary spiders (Gnaphosids?), brown nasty hairy biters (Sac Spiders?), and even a few large rapid-moving wolf-like spiders (Wandering Spiders?). What, did I just enter a sequel to The Giant Spider Invasion?

Love that movie. Great late night show for a kid to watch and get scared out of his wits! Special guest stars are Alan Hale Jr., also known as “The Skipper” from Gilligan’s Island, and Leslie Parrish, also known as the inspiration for Richard Bach’s soulmate novel The Bridge Across Forever and the crewmember who decides to go with Khan in the Star Trek episode where Ricardo Monteban tries to kill Kirk with his “genetic super-soldier” army. Both Alan and Leslie are outstanding avatars of cultural development in The Giant Spider Invasion.

I will note that the main female character, a scientist played by Barbara Hale, survives in the movie. I attribute this to her having a pair of pants on at all times. The women who run around without any pants on do not fare so well, as you can see in the trailer. Remember, being a sexy woman in a movie nearly always equals death, injury or unconsciousness! Well, at least there’s a cheesy giant spider wrecking havoc in downtown that looks suspiciously like a modified VW bug. You get your culture points where you can get ’em!

I’ve been revisiting some of my favorite goodies in the Slack menagerie, and I figured I might pass them along to some of you looking for Scooby clues to your own personal mystery. I’m something of an explorer junkie, and I get a thrill out of finding new and exciting things that delight me. I have a certain rarefied taste for the weird, the exotic, the forgotten, and the “snake fingers”. Or at least I tell myself I do!

There’s an artist named Eric Shanower, who is doing a comic book adaptation of the Trojan War, called Age of Bronze. When he completes a story arc, it gets published in a graphic novel (I’m sorry, “trade paperback”) form by Image Comics. Two of the seven volumes, A Thousand Ships and Sacrifice are out now, and the third volume is coming out by the end of this year. I’m getting the shakes just thinking about it.

The writing and the artwork are nothing short of stunning. Eric has studied his subject well, and he manages to make the culture and the historical events come alive in a way I’ve never quite seen before. Every character comes across so you know who they are, and what part they are playing. The clothes, the weapons, the intrigues and customs are so fascinating, I can’t pull away. I highly recommend anyone who loves ancient cultures, epic stories, or human drama pick this up. The realism and the believability are very high. The sex and violence are handled very well, played out as matter-of-fact experiences suitable to the era. There are no cheap thrills here.

Two things really move me about the series. One is the way in which the “gods” are handled. When it comes to the supernatural, dreams become messages from the Gods, centaurs and nymphs are a particular type of people studying a certain kind of craft, and storms become visible manifestations of a deity’s divine disfavor. It’s all in their heads, but the psychic influence is very real. The characters in the story come in all shapes and sizes of “belief”, but they all accept the supernatural as a given explanation for anything beyond their immediate psychological experience. It reminds me of the closeness of aboriginal peoples to the unconscious, and yet these are all characters who are setting down one of the foundations of western culture. It’s fascinating.

The other thing that moves me is the way in which the story makes the Trojan War accessible and interesting. I just haven’t had an interest in reading about the Trojan War, even though it’s something that is set down as a classic of “literature”, simply because nothing hooked me about it. But this stuff is awesome. Eric’s writing manages to juggle dozens of names, kingdoms, and events and keep them down-to-earth and understandable. You want to know about these people, because you become invested in their stories, from the problems of King Agamemnon, to the destiny of Achilles and the hubris of Paris, it’s captivating in a way that makes history (such as we know of it) fun and exciting.

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m a “gamer”. I have a lot of hours of the roleplaying game culture under my belt, some of it productive, some of it not so much. Right now, there’s an independent movement in the roleplaying game community, and it’s producing some of the best gameplay and theory I’ve ever seen. While the big models lose money and produce increasingly meaningless drivel, creator-owned and developed games are hitting the market from left field in a way that is exciting and amazing.

One of the games from this fertile field is Lumpley’s Dogs In The Vineyard. You play the watchdogs of God in a wild west that never was. Essentially, you are traveling witch hunters who deliver the mail, lend a hand in the community, and purge the faithful of their demons and sin. The background is some of the most awesome stuff I’ve ever read in a roleplaying game. The rules are pretty simple; you have a character sheet of “traits” that measure how much narrative control you have over conflicts. When there’s a conflict, everyone rolls dice and describes how they bring their traits into the fray. The dice are used like cards in a series of “raises” and “sees”, until somebody runs out of luck and has to give. The game can be played in four hours and tossed aside, or played for long-term character development.

The gamemaster is a just another “player”, and the group has to collaboratively create the game’s story as it moves along. There’s no “prep”, really. You make up characters, the gamemaster makes up a few proto-NPCs and a basic town structure, and everything gets created as the play moves along. Players are expected to be effective and win, and the gamemaster is not allowed to have an outcome in mind. The challenge is in coming up with conflicts that escalate out of control so that when the players get to decide the outcome, they have to decide if it’s worth the cost.

What I like about this game is how the focus is all about the moral decisions of the players. People do the unexpected, and the story can change at a moment’s notice. At the end of it I’m exhausted and exhilarated. You can play with timing and effects so that the conflicts work out in amazing ways, giving the group a lot of freedom to decide on outcomes that make sense and are cool. You don’t sit there and expect the gamemaster to entertain you, or lead you along a story they’ve already written with a few “yes” and “no” answers along the way. I haven’t felt this hopeful and delighted about gaming since 1987. It’s an explosion of creative energy.

There was a remake of The Wicker Man, starring Nicholas Cage, which probably has to be one of the funniest crummy movies I’ve seen in a while. It made me go back and watch the original starring Christopher Lee (You know, the dude that played Saruman in that horrible Two Towers gorefest) and Britt Ekland (Who played the “Bond girl” Mary Goodnight from The Man With The Golden Gun, which also, maybe not-so-coincidentally starred Christopher Lee). I also cracked out the CD and listened to the music from the film. Crumbs, its all evidence supporting Gore Vidal’s contention that good movies only get made by accident in the “entertainment industry”. Or maybe it was an accident that this movie slipped through the cracks in the mid-seventies and was made at all. The story of how the movie survived is worth reading about.

If you haven’t seen it, an English policeman comes to an isolated island off the coast to investigate the disappearance of a young girl named Rowan Morrison. Lord Summerisle (played by Christopher Lee), the local aristocrat, runs the island. The town’s source of wealth is a yearly harvest of apples. The policeman finds that nobody knows who the girl is, and that everyone practices a form of paganism based on the old traditions of their ancestors. The policeman is a deeply devout Christian, so he soon comes into conflict with the island inhabitants. Despite the uncooperative nature of the townsfolk and Lord Summerisle, the policeman learns that last year’s harvest failed and in a few days the missing girl will be sacrificed to restore the fertility of the apple orchards!

There’s a sinister aspect to the townsfolk, and yet they are all very musically inclined. Many people who watch this horror classic are stunned to encounter the musical numbers of this film, and the context in which they are presented. The musicians who worked on the soundtrack were pure talent, and have crafted some memorable numbers. From “The Landlord’s Daughter” sung by the men in the pub to honor the gifts of Venus, to the tense fear of “Chop Chop” as the townsfolk place their heads one by one in a circle of intertwined swords, hoping the Hobby Horse doesn’t choose their head. You will certainly laugh at the fiddle work of the “Maypole”. The pagan version of sex-education is, well, original I suppose.

The reason to check it out is because there’s nothing else like it. The movie stands on it’s own as a unique work of art never to be repeated. It really is one of the best horror movies ever made, with the theme of personal and group ignorance at the end haunting you in a way that won’t let you sleep at night. The town and it’s inhabitants have to be seen to be believed, and Christopher Lee gives what is probably, and rightly so if it is, the best performance of his entire career as Lord Summerisle. Brrr.

In any musical genre there’s the dross mixed in with the gold. I have a hard time finding a dark ambient artist that tops the spectral atmospheres and cavernous sensations of Lustmord. The entire catalog of this artist is showing up on Soleilmoon, and I’ve been snapping them up as I get the bonus warp power from my engineer.

I came across some scattered MP3s that friends had on their memory sticks and I was like, “whoa”. My tastes are really weird and unpredictable, and part of that combination involves music that I can space out to, relax with, and go into deep imaginations with. So when I heard the landscapes of a couple of tracks off of Stalker and Where the Black Stars Hang, I had to see for myself if the rest was any good.

Well, save for Metavoid, I have yet to be disappointed. The aural landscapes Lustmord paints are dark, threatening, and deep. It’s like going into the depths of Loch Ness and touching the slimy back of something alive, encountering the monolith of 2001: A Space Odessey, or traveling through the secret tunnels of the Great Pyramid and witnessing a rite never seen by outsiders. You can’t help but walk away from these soundscapes and feel stunned. Gotta love it! I’ve still got a few left to snatch up, and am looking forward to further journeys into the unknowable that Lustmord makes possible.

But don’t take my word for it, scare these goodies up in your online search and see what other people have to say. It’s all about the lucky coincidence. These veins of mithril found me, maybe they’ll find you!

I’m in my go-cart of a car, by name of Micro-Blue, coming back from the comic book store. I stop at a red light and wait, my mind in the automatic pilot of the daily grind. I happen to look in my rear view mirror at just the right dramatically appropriate moment, and I watch the Batmobile draw up behind me. Not the Batmobile of the recent movies that started with Michael Keaton as Batman. No, I’m talking the Batmobile from the BAM-POW days with Adam West as Batman.

For a split second, it’s one of those surreal moments where you feel like you’ve just switched universes, and I’m actually in an episode of Batman. I’m one of those ordinary people the Dynamic Duo always passes by on the way up a building or through some everyday street. The goofy person who waves or says a few corny lines to them before they carry on. You know, a filler character. They shake their heads. You know how it is being a superhero; everybody wants to stop you for a moment to chat when you’re hot on the trail of the Riddler or the Penguin.

So I turn around, fully expecting to see Batman and Robin and to have my ten seconds of corny dialogue in the alternate universe. Only, the guy behind the wheel of the Batmobile looks like Chuck Norris during the moustache years with mirror shades. I smile and give him the “thumbs up” sign and he waves at me like the peasant I am. I’m disappointed to be back in Droid Land, to be sure, but it’s still the mutha-scratchin’ Batmobile, for goodness sake! The guy turns off at an intersection and I continue on, totally pumped that I got to see live and in person the actual Batmobile that I used to own as a kid, only in smaller size.

Corgi toys made a die cast metal Batmobile back in the seventies (or it was Dinky, but I’m fairly sure it was Corgi), and I had one as a kid. It was pretty cool, with a tiny plastic replica of the batphone in between the two seats, a plastic replica of flames shooting out the back tailpipe, the triple exhaust in the back shot missiles out the back, and you could press a button and a huge buzzsaw would pop out the front. Totally keen! Of course, it never survived the rough years of my wild childhood, and is lost to the ages, except perhaps on the internets as jpegs.

I get home and tell K, and she doesn’t believe me. So we hop in the car to go looking for the Batmobile! We don’t find it, which of course puts me in the position of having seen Batman and Robin, but no one will believe me. No really, I did see the Dynamic Duo! K gives me the eye. She believes me, but its fun mocking me for seeing things. Later on we discover that a diner near where we live holds “classic” car shows. So we’re guessing that was where the Batmobile was headed, and that it may still reside somewhere in the area!

But that’s how close a Carlos Castaneda moment can be. At any time, something can drive up behind you and send you into an alternate universe, or connect you with another reality. It may be that in another parallel dimension, I turn around and it is Batman and Robin behind me. What would I have said? Which episode would it be? Crumbs, it’s weird thinking how close I came to being a cornball one-shot character in the Batman real world show.

Two and a half years ago, after going to my first sheep and wool festival, I decided to have K tutor me in the art of knitting. I had a few extra experience points, and you never know where a Level 1 skill will take you over time. I like to have a broad base of skills on my character sheet. I just wish I had more time to train those experience points up!

I started work on a scarf, doing a very basic knit stitch, and managed to get about eight inches worth before I petered out. Since then, I’ve been working on it on and off for small periods of time. K mocks my snail’s pace. She manufactures things in spurts, but she manages to do a lot of work rapidly while I putt-putt along.

We moved in April of this year, and my sad little knitting project has been sitting around in a box with no prospect of getting any energy put into it. It’s not as if I don’t have enough projects to do after all! What with daily life encounters, honeycomb hideout chores, and my book baking in the creative oven I doubt I can do much more than I’ve been doing.

But, I think I’m ready to put some more training time into it again, and generate the sweet-sweet experience points needed to pump up the jam. I think it’s useful to be able to make your own clothes, so look out robots and mutants of doom; I aim to make the secret weapon!

You see there’s this old World War 2 comic book I remember reading about back in the day. The plot is this soldier gets a big wool scarf from his mom, and all the other guys in the platoon make fun of him because they got chocolates and cigarettes while he got a big goofy scarf. The suggestion is that he’s a wimpy momma’s boy for getting something so crummy. But, as the story progresses, the scarf starts proving useful and pretty powerful.

It keeps him warm while his buddies freeze in their foxholes (the campaign is taking place in winter). It snags on a branch just as a sniper shoots at him, saving his life. When he gets disarmed in a fight, he uses the scarf as a hand-to-hand weapon to kill his opponent. The scarf stretches to make a small camouflage net allowing him to ambush the enemy with his submachine gun. And at the end, he burns the scarf so his buddies can use the smoke to signal the air assault where not to bomb.

What am I making again? That’s right, a scarf. Baby steps to world domination. Doctor Who knew the power of the scarf and so do I. My plans are proceeding along every avenue!

Ahhh. The smell of comic book newsprint in the morning. My earliest comic book memories are of Kamandi (The Last Boy On Earth), Defenders, The Witching Hour, The Haunted Tank and my all-time favorite, Richie Rich. There was a bus station in Athens, Ohio that had a comic book stand and there was a newsstand in Hanover, New Hampshire where I would get a hold of these titles. Those places of magic exist now only in my mental archives. They shall remain a lost wonder of the world to inspire my thoughts in this adult age of my existence.

Then came the Tintin books, starting with Red Rackham’s Treasure. That wrapped Christmas present started a revolution in my psyche that has remained with me to this day. The ripples are still being felt and absorbed by my brain. Back then, I started drawing them to learn how to make my own comics. That’s really where I found out what the power of comic books to tell a story could be. I wanted to be Tintin, and in my crude comic books I was, or he was my sidekick and his adventures were really my adventures.

It would be many years still before words like “trade paperback” and “sequential art” would enter my personal space. Even as I struggled to copy Tintin’s distinctive tuft of hair, amazing work was being done in the field that I wouldn’t find out about until much later on down the line. People like Crumb doing underground comics, people like Eisner doing mainstream comics. It boggles my mind to think of the titanic work on culture and civilization that was being done at the time.

My dedicated comic collection phase came after a trip to Austin, Texas. I picked up issue #182 of The Uncanny X-Men. The one where Rogue switches personalities to Carol Danvers and goes after S.H.I.E.L.D. to rescue an old lover of Carol’s. The art and the story were top-notch. My cousin had collected X-Men and I’d read a few, but this is where it connected and I was hooked. From then on, I’d begin my collection phase, which is a whole story in and of itself. The Uncanny X-Men lead the way, and it’s still a huge influence on me as to what superhero groups should be about.

I outgrew my comic book collection phase. Too expensive to maintain a subscription box. Too many titles to keep track of. A decline in quality by mainstream titles from Marvel and DC. I’ve entered a state of mind where I expect a certain level of maturity and deeply moving story that I just don’t get these days. I refuse to put up with never-ending storylines and lack of continuity any more. I’ve also grown tired of the mindless sexism and racism of mainstream comics. You could say I’ve entered the treasure hunt era for comics, with an emphasis on graphic novels, or “trade paperbacks” that resolve what they put forward.

K gave me the hook-up. The three Courtney Crumrin books by Ted Naifeh, published by Oni Press. The artwork turned me off at first. Just because I’m looking for new and different, doesn’t mean I can handle it off the bat! But it’s grown on me, and the story of young Courtney learning the ways of magic in her warlock uncle’s mansion, while dealing with everyday growing up issues, has moved me. I’m blown away, and never get tired of reading it. This is what gets me up in the morning, the Richie Rich at the dawn of time to the Courtney Crumrin of today. I’m looking at the monolith.