Journal of No. 118

All the photos (and a couple videos)

I flew up Thursday to Portland for the 20th anniversary fest. Got set up in my hotel, and then ventured out for food and haircare products. I was happily surprised to find that you can still buy brilliantine. The Thursday night VIP party was held at a speakeasy, Circa 33, and we were encouraged to dress Thirties' style. I didn't really go for period authentic, but tuxedos are pretty timeless, and the brilliantined hair added some vintage flair. Great venue & good drinks. I spent some effort flipping the dipswitch from introvert to extrovert, and managed fairly well at mingling with people I knew and people I didn't. A sazerac and some ciders also helps to lower the shields, so that pretty soon, I'm embracing Charlie Stross and Jeff Combs.



Met lots of other good people there. Dick Lupoff and his wife -- discovered we were both Raiders fans. Leeman Kessler, princeofcairo, a gaggle of other attendees. And plenty of friends that I generally only get to see at the fest: Glancy, Gwen, Andrew, Andrew & Linda, Gwen & Brian (who had some particularly kind things to say), and ...

The party was really a high point. It was a great venue, and everyone was relaxed -- just a bunch of fascinating people with a common interest being people together.

( ... )

In the HPLHS FB group, someone was reading HPL's work chronologically and wondered out loud, "Where are all the tentacles? I'm a decade into his writing career and nary a tentacle!"

Me: It might just be that gluing tentacles onto monsters is not actually Lovecraft's primary contribution to weird fiction.

---

And since it happened about the same time, I may as well record a bit of this IM with Prime:

Prime: Mrs. Prime is using feedly, too. I use Mrs. Prime (who emails me 10 articles/day from feedly)

Me: Using a non-Artifical Intelligence to prioritize things. That's clever.

Prime: well, there is a certain inherent bias
Prime: I read a lot about babies and nutrition

Me: They're pretty nutritious, I imagine

Prime: and tender

(awesome 3D photo by Mark Spieckerman)

Zipped down, parked, and then walked under the blazing sun to the brunch. Enjoyed the effort that went into the benediction. I shot some video of our High Priest doing his own riff on "Imagine", but it didn't turn out so hot, alas. Hello, the Future occurred. Next were the author readings. I drew the short straw and went first. I think it went reasonably well, but nerves are an issue. My idea of performance is to peck away at a keyboard in the safety of my own home, with no one around. But I got a couple nice comments about the reading, so I'll say it went well enough. Denise Dumars and Bryan Thao Worra are much better at working a crowd. I think my favorite reading was Denise's poem "EVP".

Then we had our panel, and the above were joined by Cody, Skipp and artist Mike Dubisch. We bandied 'cosmic horror' about, and I think it was really a high point of the brunch. At least for me. People who know their shit had some complementary and contradictory discourse about Lovecraft in the modern age. I said some things that charitable people would consider profound.

During the subsequent schmoozing, I got to make the acquaintance of about-to-be-honored Michael Reaves, who I have just now learned shares my birthday. I started off on the wrong foot, since I was unaware that he suffers from Parkinson's. Production of speech is difficult for him, but through the good graces of his daughter Mallory (whom I know tangentially via Wyrd Con, of all things) we had a good conversation. He was a bit miffed, I think, that we on the panel had not mentioned his script for The Real Ghostbusters. I fell back on the very true statement that it hadn't yet screened at the fest.
( Welcome to the beginning of the films )

I know all the Angelenos are posting about this, so I'll add one piece of trivia to make this worthwhile.

As you know, my office is reeealll close to LAX, so I had a great view of Endeavour. We emptied the office to go have a gawk at it. I knew that since they were setting up viewing on Imperial that they were going to land on the South runway. Which is bad, since the office is along the North runway route.

The first sight was pretty impressive. Even small and in the distance as it was, it was clearly not the same as the usual airplane. But fortunately, this was just a first pass, and they buzzed us along the North Runway!



After that, we saw it turn up north, and it went to visit my pals at JPL/Caltech.

Eventually, it came back for another flyby over the south runway, and then finally the landing run. We didn't have very good sights of that, but the flyover was more than enough! It was also neat to see people on all the roofs in the area.

My set of photos

Oh, I almost forgot the trivia. So Endeavour is named after James Cook's HMS Endeavour. We know that Endeavour will wind up at the California Science Center. But where is the original Endeavour?

HMS Endeavour was renamed the Lord Sandwich... MMmmmmm... sandwich... and in August 1778... in order to confound the French fleet... the erstwhile Endeavour... was scuttled... in Narragansett Bay. Not far from HPL's beloved Providence.

"The FBI has evidence that for the past 15 years someone in Syracuse [NY] has been panicking office workers with powder-filled letters threatening an anthrax attack.The FBI has evidence that for the past 15 years someone in Syracuse has been panicking office workers with powder-filled letters threatening an anthrax attack. ... One peculiarity stands out about the letters — many of them contain passages from the writings of H.P. Lovecraft".

I don't agree with the assessment that the eyeball "might be a reference to a specific Lovecraft character, Cthulhu ... [who has] tentacles coming out of his face and one all-seeing eye." I think that may be confusing the references to 'cyclopean' architecture and even a reference to Polyphemus: "... the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue..."

The FBI flyer offers a reward of up to $10,000 for info. Sadly, the images don't seem to show any of the Lovecraft-related material. Not that that would be likely to help much.