An Experiment in Expression

Contributing my bit of Veterans' Day

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:46:06 GMT

Well, how do you do, Private William McBride?
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
I'll rest here awhile in the warm autumn sun;
I've been walking all day and I'm nearly done.

I can see by your gravestone that you were only nineteen
When you joined the glorious fallen in 1916.
Well, I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean--
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind?
In some faithful heart, is your memory enshrined?
And although you died back in 1916,
To that loyal heart, are you forever nineteen?

Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Forever enshrined behind some glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained
And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame?

Well, the sun's shining now on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire--no guns fire now.

But here in this graveyard, it's still no man's land,
And the countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

And I can't help but wonder, young Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you the cause?
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?

The suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For, Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again and again and again and again.

--The Green Fields of France, Eric Bogle, 1975

Oh, the places I've... called

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:29:03 GMT

Lawyer 1: "Well, that sounds like it'll be an awesome case... oh, wait, you're okay. Well, in that case, there's nothing you can do about it. Well, I mean, you could sue for the time at work you lost, but the settlement would be so small that it's not worth our time so we wouldn't go for it. But definitely give us a call if you start bleeding from your intestines, because that'll be an awesome case. Toodles."

Hospital 1: "Oh, no, that sounds awful! You should come right in for an x-ray, that could be very severe! Who's your primary care prov... you what? You don't have insurance? Oh. Well, in that case, fuck off. Hit the emergency room if you start dying, and be aware that we will totally catch you if you are faking."

Lawyer 2: See Lawyer 1.

Hospital 2: See Hospital 1.

Anne: Well, fuck, guess I better get ready to go back to work tomorrow.

The Good Ship Dental Drama

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:19:12 GMT

So: on Friday, I went to the dentist. Specifically, I went to Missions of Mercy, North Carolina's roving free dental clinic, because I have no insurance and no money and a very damn broken tooth. I planned it well in advance. I'd been wearing a temporary over-the-counter tooth plug since October, and I'd worked late every night that week so I could be off work to go do this. Yes, we all hate the dentist, but sometimes you have to accept that if you don't go you're going to be down some teeth, which is not an exciting prospect.

John did not want to go to the dentist, but he went anyway because he's a trooper like that.

So we were out of bed bright and early at four-thirty a.m., because the free clinic operates on a first-come, first-serve basis, and the doors were opening at six. We'd been advised to get in line as early as possible. No problem. We drove out to downtown Greensboro in the dark deadness of pre-dawn morning, found parking, and shuffled around the outside of the church looking for the clinic entrance.

There was already a two-hour line. Oh, joy. But, goddammit, free dental care is free, so into line we went. It was 34 degrees outside (1.1 degrees C, for you Canucks on my list) and we were freezing our butts off, but we were pretty far up in the line (John and I were numbers 134 and 135, respectively), so we figured the wait couldn't be that long.

Then two hours went by. Our feet went painful, then completely numb. Our breath crystallized on everything. We huddled in our coats and jumped up and down, achieving a spectacular amount of nothing. The gentlemen in front of us in line were from the Sudan, hunched over in their gigantic scarves, saying what I believe was the equivalent of, "Fuck, this country is cold," in Nubian. The ones behind us were from the Elm Street projects and kept spitting a lot (personally, I preferred keeping my spit in my mouth since it was, at least, at body temperature).

The line finally started moving with agonizing slowness while we watched a very uninspiring sunrise leak over the roofs around us. Another forty-five minutes or so went by as we stalled a paltry twenty-five people from the door, because a perky blonde woman with perfectly capped teeth had begun to run up and down the line asking people if they were here for fillings or for extractions. I wanted to keep my tooth if it could be kept, so I told her filling, which turned out to be the wrong answer because everyone who chose extraction was pulled out of the line and hustled past us into the building first. I was seriously concerned that John might erupt into violence after the third pack of people who had arrived an hour and a half after us trundled on by into the heated interior.

But, finally, we made it inside. Huzzah! The dental staff were resigned and didn't object to the fact that it took us almost ten minutes to fill out some very haphazard-looking forms, because we were not the first people to come in whose fingers were not working from the prolonged cold. We went through triage to make sure we didn't have the plague before we were let into the clinic (John has high blood pressure. Surprise), and then had our teeth checked for issues. John was pronounced sound, which we pretty much already knew since he was just there to keep me from being kidnapped while I stood in the line of endless suffering, so he was packed off to get a free cleaning. I obviously had a broken tooth, but there was good news: not only did the examiner believe it could be filled without too much issue (take that, people telling me it would have to come out!), but he also noted that my wisdom teeth had come in without me even noticing, and that as long as I kept taking care of them they shouldn't have any problems at all. Sweet.

And then off--to wait in line some more! Awesome. Again, not complaining too much. After all, I wasn't paying for this. John and I were now in separate lines, but we waved at each other and sent text messages relaying our progress toward the front. Because it was a smaller line with a faster procedure, John not only got to the front first but was actually finished with his cleaning before I even got out of line. He wandered disconsolately around the parking lot waiting for me--for another three hours, much to our unforecasted dismay. As I said, he is a trooper.

The actual procedures, by the way, were done cattle-call-style in a massive gymnasium, in which forty dentists and their assistants had set up large tables with equipment and forty portable dental chairs. It looked like an uncomfortable cross between a morgue and a horror-movie torture chamber (John took a very small picture, here), but, again. Free.

When I finally made it to an actual dentist, a bony little late-forties woman with dark, frizzy hair and a lot of mascara, I was more than ready to get this the hell over with. Sadly, I had to take off John's oversized coat to lie down on the table, which meant that I spent most of the operation trying foggily to keep from shivering and making my head move, because despite the large number of people in the room it was still goddamn cold. There were the usual needles and swabs and more needles and drilling while I tried to think of England, and then I was sent off for x-rays because maybe the tooth couldn't be saved (and let me tell you, being jumped to the front of the x-ray line made a lot of people very displeased with me), and then I was brought back because it turned out it probably could but it was a very near thing and very close to the nerve, blah blah blah, more drilling. There were a lot of drugs in my system by this point, so I wasn't particularly clear, which was probably pretty good since the dentist had inserted some kind of massive clamp in my mouth that left a gigantic metal handle sticking out so that I couldn't have closed it if I'd tried. Fun times indeed.

Then, after putting in a temporary filling (god, please let me have insurance in the next few months before it's shot, love, Anne), the dentist and her assistant were puttering around, trimming its edges off and filing down what was left of the original tooth, when two things happened simultaneously: both of them suddenly went white and wide-eyed, and I started choking as something completely closed off my airway. They both immediately dived for my throat with both hands, getting in each others' way so that I doubt they even got close, and, still choking, I started bucking around until (much to my short-lived relief) my throat suddenly cleared and I could breathe again and set about the business of panicking after the fact.

"What," was all I managed to really say, because I had to stop and say, "Ow. OW," instead and put my hands around my own throat, because something was slicing a painful trail down it from the inside.

There followed this example of D.D.S. franticness:

"Did she swallow it?"
"Oh, my god."
"Did you swallow it? I think she swallowed it."
"It's not anywhere else, she must have swallowed it."
"Shit. It wasn't a flame-shaped, was it?"
"Yeah, it was."
"Shit."

And then all the hardware was out of my mouth with blinding speed, the napkin had been ripped off my neck, and my dentist was propelling me across the building with the kind of nervous energy that only people who are pretty sure they're in deep shit generally have. With dizzying speed and determination, she dragged me around to at least four different people, each time telling them tersely that, "She swallowed a bur," like I had snatched it off her instrument tray and triumphantly ingested it like a naughty toddler. All of the people she told this looked shocked and shifty, and then immediately told her everything would be fine.

I wanted to know what a bur was, especially if one had just gone down my throat, because it kind of hurt and I was getting the impression despite my anaesthetized haze that something kind of bad had just happened. Nobody was interested in talking to me, however. In fact, I didn't find out what a bur was until I got home and cleared my brain enough to look it up, when it turned out that it was a drill bit shaped like an inch-long spear (I'm pretty sure the flame-shaped one is the one on the far right in that picture, with the pointy and the little teeth).

Unfortunately, since there were no x-ray machines on site that could be adapted to use on my torso--they were all for facial x-rays, for obvious reasons--there was a minimum amount of investigation conducted, at the end of which it was declared that it obviously wasn't in my lungs because I wasn't asphyxiating or coughing blood, so it had probably gone down my esophagus and into my digestive tract. My dentist, visions of malpractice insurance premiums dancing in her head, dragged me around to a few more people, all of whom said very carefully that it was entirely possible that it would just work its way out naturally and there was nothing to worry about. And then, looking extremely nervous, she re-drugged me, finished cleaning up my filling, and hustled me out of the clinic. I was advised that I should go get an x-ray at the hospital (again: no insurance, dudes), but that everything was probably fine. Oh, and also, if I started experiencing tearing or stabbing pain anywhere in my guts or started vomiting blood, I should probably also head to the hospital in that case. The assurances that everything was fine were not really backed up by all the continuing dentist panic and the number of people trying to simultaneously tell me that I was fine and that I should probably seek help if I suddenly started dying.

John was not amused, which I'm sure surprises no one. Hazy, confused, and still kind of woozy, we went home and I promptly passed out for fourteen hours after he stuffed some food into me in the hopes of coating the nasty little thing so it would be less pointy. He's been stomping around the room ever since, ranting about lawsuits and emergency rooms, waking me up every hour that I'm asleep to make sure I'm not bleeding out.

Now, forty-eight hours later, it's still in my system somewhere. I have no idea where. There's been mild nausea and discomfort, but nothing I could definitively point to as being caused by a foreign object. John's starting to get seriously worried that it hasn't emerged. I'm not exactly sanguine about it myself. Actually, having a miniature spear somewhere in my body is not conducive to calm at all.

Aaaaand, yeah. That was my weekend.

This is why it took three hours for me to re-emerge from what should have been a fairly normal procedure.

Scion Writeup #4: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 04:57:02 GMT

At the request of my story-lovin' ST (that would be John, as usual), here's the divine intervention and denouement that follow the last write-up's events. You know this scene was epic because not only did it happen a good two to three hours after the game was supposed to end, but Geoff's player, who had to leave shortly after his big speech to go to a family birthday party, actually drove a half hour back to our place afterward in order to be in it. (This is the kind of insane participant loyalty John's games inspire.)

The desert was preternaturally still around them, no air moving to disturb the sand in which they stood, no animal life daring to make a sound. Blood was crusting over the wounds on their hands, making them itch, and Sangria was watching Geoff, waiting.

"So," said Geoff after a short nerving-himself-up pause, looking very blond and out-of-place in the red desert, "how do I... ask him? I mean. He's not really around." He'd seen her father once, but the memory was somewhat fuzzy and unpleasant, as though his mind had rejected it despite the fact that the man hadn't paid him the slightest amount of attention.

In answer, Sangria only tilted her head slightly at his ignorance and raised her black-bone hand to the sun, burning fiercely overhead.

"Right." Feeling slightly foolish but aware that he was being observed expectantly, Geoff turned his head up to the midday sun. Sangria watched his smaller, paler corona reach up to its parent's. "Huitzilopochtli, great god and warrior of the Aztec people whose enemies are always defeated," he began with great formality, adopting the same heroic tone he had used when asking Sangria's own consent earlier, "I ask you for your daughter's hand in marriage. We have been shield... companions for some time, and I will defend her and our family with my life." The sun beat hotly on his pale face, and he concluded, "I request your blessing."

Nothing happened for a few seconds, during which Geoff wondered, among other things, if he had pronounced the god's name incorrectly, whether or not Sangria's divine parent already knew she'd been knocked up, what exactly protocol was if the war-god said no, and whether he was just talking to himself in the middle of nowhere. Then the sky split and the white-hot sun burst through it, blinding them both. He heard the thump beside him and realized that Sangria had dropped to her knees, and had the presence of mind to do the same as the sound of wings filled and overwhelmed his senses, sounding like a thousand birds in frenzied flight inside his skull.

Sangria was stoically silent, head raised, and tears from her blind eyes rolled down her cheeks to splash on the child's forehead. She did not avert her gaze from the solar onslaught, though she felt the thickness of her corneas burning away, the scars forming around their orbits. The baby, sensing something completely outside its scope, froze completely in its sling.

The only impression that could be made out for a while was color: a riot of blues and reds, greens and yellows in a moving, shimmering blur that was all damaged eyes could bear. When their vision cleared, it was no better; looking at him was painful, as if the colors themselves were so vibrant that they could sear.

"Son," said the god to Geoff, who was looking more than slightly dazed. The Norseman lifted his head to gape at the stern face, the explosion of color and feathers surrounding it. Sangria said nothing and simply drank in the sight; she had never seen her father in his true glory before. "Are you aware of the sacrifice you offer?" asked the god, his voice like the shout of a thousand men. Geoff nodded, firming his lower lip despite the somewhat stunned expression on his face, and when the god offered his hand him, he reached out for it automatically.

He made a smothered cry as great eagle-sharp talons tore his hand apart, rendering it a grisly, useless rag of flesh hanging from nearly-severed bones. The god's face remained impassive as blood stained his claws and pooled heavily on the ground beside them, and he said, "Then you are welcome among our people. I accept your sacrifice. You will defend our people and their responsibilities will be yours, and you will be one of ours." He reached out for Geoff's other hand, and despite his staunch belief that he was about to lose it, his new son offered it anyway. The clasp of a very human-shaped hand was warm and firm, burning beneath its skin before it released his intact.

The sudden slash of the god's talon made Geoff flinch after the fact, too slow to keep up with its speed and savagery, and then he stared as the clawed hand offered him its own severed twin, bleeding copiously in the harsh, unforgiving sunlight. "Here is my token. Be accepted among my people." The severed talon pulsed in Geoff's hand with its own strong heartbeat as he accepted it.

A second shape, significantly less colorful than the war-god, became visible once the onslaught of color moved away from him, and resolved itself into a very tall man with flowing, fair hair and the chiseled physique of an Adonis. He and Geoff blinked at one another for a second, like twins, and then Geoff said, "Dad?" and he said, "Son! My good friend brought me by--getting hitched!" and then they were hugging and stomping and beating on one anothers' backs in loud, noisy Norse celebration.

The god's shadow didn't fall over Sangria; it was the opposite of a shadow, bands of hot, living light that pierced to her bones. He touched her eyes and she was no longer blind, and his face, the color of the azure skies over the Tenochtitlan shantytown, was no longer mestizo but still the same, and she knew him. He reached out a hand for her and she took it without hesitation, feeling the piercing of her palm and the required blood weeping renewed from the half-healed wound as he lifted her to her feet.

"He is strong," was all he said to her. "You have chosen well, daughter. You will bear many strong warriors." He did not embrace her physically, as the two men to the side were still doing; they merely looked at one another, black eyes to brilliant sunlit ones, and understood one another, and the unbearable heat of his gaze was a kind of embrace.

It was still midday in the endless desert when both gods had gone, but it seemed dark and shadowed by comparison. The hems of Sangria's and Geoff's shirts were knotted together, and because of it they walked very closely together toward the distant city. Geoff hung the talon around his neck, where it rested, beating slowly and quietly, its claws against his skin.

*************

"What is that thing?" Goze asked, attention riveted to the still-bloody talon, revealed when Geoff yanked off his shirt and tried unsuccessfully to wring the sweat out of it. The avaricious interest in his tone was unmistakable.

"Uh," said Geoff, who looked in Sangria's general direction for help. She was breast-feeding the baby and didn't so much as look at him. "It's... uh, you know. I found it," he said somewhat lamely. "In the desert."

"You found it?" Goze's tone was patently incredulous.

"Yes," Geoff said, but it sounded more like a question, especially since the rest of the group--a group he liked to think he was the leader of, most of the time--and he amended, "Sort of. Well, it was... given to me."

"By what? Who's giving out severed animal parts?" Sophia leaned over from her seat, pulling her hair back from her face. "Did you kill something?"

"Well... no. No," Geoff said, again darting his eyes over to Sangria, who was watching the situation with thoroughly impersonal and unhelpful neutrality. "Not exactly. Uh." He had never been in the habit of lying to people he considered comrades in arms, and Goze's narrow-eyed, suspicious glare wasn't helping very much. Coming clean was usually his best option. With a huffing sigh that shook his large shoulders, he looked to Sangria and asked, "Should we tell them?"

Her gaze had suddenly fastened on him again; it wasn't because of his question, but because he had asked it in a series of chirps and sweet, short shrieks, the nest-sounds of an eagle. Her eye fell to the talon, resting against his chest; her father's gift to him. It raised back to his face, waiting earnestly for her answer, and she raised a shoulder in a short, sharp shrug. Everyone else stared at the man who had just begun speaking bird.

With another, more resigned sigh, he got up and marched resolutely over behind Sangria. He rested a large hand on her shoulder and, voice normal again, said clearly, "Sangria and I... are... we were married. This afternoon." Remembering the question that had started the conversation, he touched the talon and said, "It's... sort of a wedding gift. From her father." Sangria watched them placidly, and didn't bother to move or blink.

Silence reigned for five full seconds.

"Uh... congratulations, then. Mazel tov?" said Marcus, looking bewildered.

"What--I mean--" Sophia said, staring at them.

"It was the right thing to do," Geoff said firmly.

"What the fuck is going on?" said Goze.

*************

(For reference: Geoff, Sangria, Huitzilopochtli, and Baldur.)

Poor John. He had no idea that Geoff was going to do something so drastic, and had to completely invent the reactions of the gods on the spot.

Scion Writeup #3: Blood is Thicker

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:46:28 GMT

Oh, the twists and turns on the road to paradise, or something something to that effect something.

Back when I wrote my character studies for my three Scion ladies--Alison, Dierdre and Sangria--I was generally sure where they were going. They had their goals, they had their backgrounds, and they certainly had personalities.

So if you were going to guess which one of them completely jumped the tracks and escaped with the entire metaphorical train in tow, which would you think it would be?

I wouldn't have guessed Sangria, but there it is. Of all of them, she's the most likely to follow orders and stick to her guns, and she's by far the one with the least capacity for creativity (knowing twenty-five ways to kill a guy with a tent peg isn't really creativity). So the sudden sharp ninety-degree turn in her life threw me for a bit of a loop, but it's certainly been fun figuring it out.

But I know I'd rather read about what happened than listen to me tell it, so here goes nothing. New dramatis personae have been introduced, and are as follows:

Sophia Archimedes: A college sculpting student turned field medic and intellectual counsel for the current very badly-matched group of Scions who are trying to save the world from the depredations of the titans. She is a daughter of Athena and Sangria is vaguely aware of her existence most of the time.
Geoff Matheson: A former executive chef at a Las Vegas casino, now a massive, blond and beautiful Norseman who takes care of any social interaction through sheer force of personality (and it's a good thing, because the rest of these people are terrible at it). He is a son of Baldur; Sangria listens to him sometimes since he is clearly the leader.
Mitchell Gozer ("the Goze"): An Indiana Jones clone who lives to look for treasures and outwit opposition. He is a son of Hermes, and Sangria only notices him now and then because he deeply dislikes her and occasionally attempts to interfere with her actions or insult her.
Marcus James: An alcoholic ex-fisherman with a way with a blade, Marcus is very certain of wrong and right and generally makes his views on just treatment loudly known. He is a son of Shango, and Sangria barely even registers his presence.

Sangria, as we know, is a sociopath, so these are less "people she knows" and more "characters that sometimes interact with her, often to her brief puzzlement".

By this point in the story, Sangria has spent a few years running her father's errands ("missions", which he provides to her in manila folders, just as her generale did) on her own. She tops the Mexican Government's most-wanted list of criminals, having committed treason, and has since carried out enough high-level assassinations and destruction missions all over the continent to make the red list for the United States and FBI as well and is considered an international terrorist. The most confusing part of her life arrived nearly three years ago, when her father sent her out with strict orders to guard the safety and well-being of Mitchell Gozer, and, eventually, the rest of his companions as well. She has no real idea why, especially since Goze and his compatriots make little to no sense to her most of the time, but Sangria isn't in the habit of questioning her orders, especially when they're divine. It's in following them around that she has lost all the flesh of her right arm (now a permanently charred, visible-bone limb), spent a year in the jungle with Geoff attempting to find civilization when they were separated from the rest of their band, put down another god's uprising against her father, and eventually ended up in Australia, dealing with an infestation of recently-escaped titans.

*************

Mount Sonder towered across the landscape to the west, the bulges and folds of its stony surface painted red by the sun overhead. The dust of the desert beneath them was redder, coloring their sweat to blood as they marched.

Sangria's job was to watch them, so she did. Her silent shape behind them looked like a shadow, part of the landscape of heat and dust.

Panting, Sophia observed, "It really does look like a pregnant woman." Her fair skin was burning beneath the outback sun, making her look even redder.

"It looks like a rock to me," Goze said, and addressed Geoff for the tenth time in their trek. "Are you sure we've gotta be wandering around in the desert? I mean, it seems like there's gotta be a more efficient way to do this."

Geoff, by far the palest of all, shook blond hair out of his eyes and asked long-sufferingly, "You got a better idea? Because I would love--I mean love--to go somewhere with air conditioning, room service, maybe a bar, get a little lady action going on..." He was too tall to look at, but his chest heaved and said that he was tired. The silver around his wrists glittered and smoked in the sun.

"There's nothing closer than Alice Springs," Sophia said, scrubbing sweaty brown hair out of her eyes. "And Goze saw something out here. Let's just find it and deal with it and then we can rest for a few days and you can go to whatever bars you can find."

"When I said, 'Hey, something's over there,' I didn't mean right over there. It's not an exact science," Goze grumbled. Their footprints were vanishing behind them, wind smoothing them back into the sand.

"It never is," Geoff said philosophically. "Can you see anything now? Because I am seriously about to just lie down and have myself a snooze here in the middle of nowhere."

Goze frowned, sweeping the area with his gaze, but Sophia was already pointing when he opened his mouth. "Does that have anything to do with it, maybe?" she asked at the same moment that he said, "Oh, good, look. There you go. Magic rock."

The stone stood at least twenty-five feet high, brown sandstone and red sand burnished together by years of wind and hot, beating sun. Three slightly smaller stones, one round and full and the others balancing it in a seemingly precarious position between, turned it from a hulking edifice to a kneeling shape, a head bent forward over a swollen belly.

"No, that looks like a pregnant woman," Geoff said, amused in spite of himself, and no one could argue the point. The massive rock formation's skin was the weathered brown of the desert itself.

"It doesn't seem like it's doing much," said Sophia, and she stepped closer to examine it. They all four moved closer, and as they did so did Sangria, watching.

The sand beneath them shivered ever so slightly, and Sangria stopped. One hand raised slightly, hovered curiously as though unsure where to go.

"What the hell?" Sophia exploded, and her incredulous expression drew the mens' attention. "What just--what the fuck, I'm pregnant!" She said it as though she were announcing that she'd been shot, or that she had a sudden disease.

"What?" said Goze, blinking at his cousin.

"Uh... that seems like something kind of personal, Sophia," Geoff hedged, peering down at her. "Also, I don't know if I really want to ask how you suddenly realized--"

"No, I mean I just got pregnant. Just got pregnant. Like, ten seconds ago," Sophia insisted, nose wrinkled in furious thought. "I can feel it, you know, like... well, I guess you don't know," she said in exasperation, glaring at the two bewildered men, "but the point is that I am." She pointed up at the kneeling woman, still blank, unmoving stone. "Goze, your magic rock just got me pregnant."

"It's not mine," he pointed out, then looked past her. "Oh, my god."

Sangria, a small, black shape in the desert sand, put a hand on her abdomen, looking down at herself impersonally. The watching expression on her face never changed as she felt the sudden strange warmth in her belly, the tiny sun that pulsed like an echo of her heartbeat.

Geoff followed Goze's gaze, and gaped. "Wait, her, too?"

"Jesus." Goze rolled his eyes, but turned to Sophia for help. "Well, can you do anything about it? You know, that healing-infecting stuff you do? I mean, it's what, like a tadpole right now?"

"It doesn't work like that." Sophia shook her head, though she looked reflective. "I could probably make it sick, so maybe it'd die on its own, but I can't just get rid of it."

The sand muffled Sangria's steps so that they didn't realize she was there until she was moving between them, a silent shadow slipping across the sand. "Sangria, do you... oh, well, okay, then," Geoff tried to interject, and then moved back as she went right past him, a small, faint cloud of red dust following her.

She stopped in front of the rock, a small shape between its spread knees. The sun in her belly shifted and pressed against the walls.

She struck the formation in the center of its rotund stomach, and the rumble of the mountain was like a groaning voice as it crumbled and collapsed into debris. The sun inside her stretched.

*************

It was a week before they stopped for a full rest, the men sprawling in the dust as comfortably as possible while Sophia made a pillow out of her pack and curled up nearby. Sangria waited for them to sleep and stepped silently over their bodies, leaving a transient footprint behind by each before she turned and walked away into the desert darkness. An acacia bush loomed in the windy stillness and she sat carefully behind it, cross-legged, feeling its thorns scratch at her skin as she turned her back on the sleeping camp.

The skin of her stomach was smooth and tawny, free of most of the scarring and roughness that showed on her face and arms. It rose and fell gently, breath in, breath out, as she regarded it unblinkingly. The service knife glittered black underneath an equally black sky.

"I am my father's hands," she told it in a language that was not Spanish and never English, her voice another flat, sighing wind across the dunes. "There is no more room in me." The knife made its first cut, then its second, and its third. Sangria placed the leather of her belt in her mouth, and it finally plunged.

When it was done, she closed her eyes and went to sleep as well, the knife clutched in her right hand sleeping in the dust, the small, bloody shape on her left a forgotten bit of flesh in the dryness. She dreamed of tortoises with their shells cracked wide, their tender stomachs bare for hunters.

*************

"...the hell is wrong with you," Sophia was saying, and her fingers were closing the gaping wound before Sangria even opened her eyes, weaving the flesh back together like an old woman's loom. "Wake up, okay? This thing won't shut up and I'm not taking it." The hunting wail of an eaglet turned into something lower and angrier, and Sangria opened her eyes.

Sophia rocked back on her heels, her other hand awkwardly supporting a creature against her shoulder. It was human-shaped, though small, and red and brown from sticky, crusted dried blood. It was howling the howl of the eaglet. The other woman thrust it in Sangria's direction as soon as she began to sit up, looking concerned that it might be dangerous. "I heard it screaming when I woke up."

Sangria looked with flat eyes at the infant, and then at the ground where the amputated piece of her womb should have been dry and shriveled by the morning sun. The sand had drunk her blood greedily, but nothing solid remained. Even the earth could not swallow a fetus whole.

Much to Sophia's perturbation, Sangria stood and walked away without a word, back toward the camp. The other woman trailed after, protesting and refusing any responsibility for the wailing creature, until Sangria had sat down on the ground and begun tearing her shirt into strips, tying and twining them. Sophia rolled her eyes in equal parts relief and confusion as Sangria finally turned, the strange cloth contraption slung about her neck, and reached for the creature.

Sangria settled the baby into the makeshift sling, its weight holding the cloth fast against her breast, hanging where once the GAFE bat had hung. The child had stopped its screams and was staring solemnly back at her. Beneath the soft brown fuzz of its hair, pale like down, two tiny horns poked from its skull, rounded nubs like the lumps on a newborn goat-kid. They looked at one another for a moment, black eyes to black eyes, in silence. We all take care of one another, her grandmother told a black-eyed child.

Sangria pulled down the cup of her sportsbra and the child opened a mouth full of needle-sharp little teeth to sink them into her dusky nipple, and she knew that it was hers after all, and understood the importance of things. No amount of demanding or questioning from her charges had any effect on her; she merely trudged silently on with them, and the baby now joined her in silence.

"Wow. Demon-baby. That's... something," said Geoff, face somewhere between amused and horrified.

"I'm deforming mine so it dies," said Sophia definitively.

"What the fuck is going on?" said Goze.

*************

The city was not a large one, but it had people and a thriving business district, and that was all that the four of them needed to be excited. Sangria followed behind them, quiet as always, and shadowed their steps from hotel to bar to office and back again. If she thought it was strange that she was spending this afternoon on the rooftop of a skyscraper, half-riddled with bullet-holes, while Goze talked to a man with goat legs and horns, she didn't show it. She waited silently, and the baby watched the goat-god from beneath his own horns.

"Yeah, I can probably do that. I guess. Find me my mountain and I'll get your distraction," said Pan, nimble fingers scrubbing at his goatish beard. The lower half of the suit he wore flickered oddly, somehow fitting his body and yet looking like any other pair of dress pants.

"Thanks, man. I really appreciate it. We're not exactly equipped to take on an army at the moment, ya know," Goze replied, grinning.

Pan's grin was considerably more unsettling, his yellow goat-teeth bared in a smile that was both hideous and bizarrely compelling. "Don't thank me yet, brother. Remember, you called me in." The sudden olive-scented breeze as he vanished was out of place atop such a high building, and left them as quickly as the god himself.

Goze immediately sank happily into one of the shadows on the roof, no doubt to appear at street level somewhere. "We're still on the roof," Sophia pointed out to no one in particular, looking dubiously over the edge toward the ground, thirty-five stories below. "And the helicopter's gone."

"I'll fly you down, little lady," Marcus said genially, and let the air currents around him gather them both up and waft them over the edge. Sangria he ignored completely; the woman was a monster, and he would have no truck with her.

"We jump?" Sangria asked Geoff in her broken, accented English, breaking the customary silence. There was no particular inflection to her tone to say whether or not she thought this was a good idea.

"Yeah, I think I'd rather not. Hang on a second." Sangria waited, gaze patient and steady, as Geoff clenched his large hands, the Australian sun glinting from the silver of the bracelets on his forearms. Their surfaces clouded, then scummed over, and the frost giant blood that was his birthright froze over his hands and body. A moment later and a spider-thin bridge of ice snaked down from the building's top, spiraling down to the street far below.

"Going down," he said with a sigh and a grin, but she was already on his back, fingers locked on his shoulders, small weight balanced on two feet braced against his spine. As they skated down to the ground he laughed at their speed and his mastery over the elements, a full-throated, uninhibited sound, seemingly unaffected by the weight of the woman the priest called the Devil's daughter. Sangria said nothing, a carving of a woman with moving, living eyes.

At almost the same moment that Geoff's foot first touched the ground, the shockwave hit the city. Around them in the streets, men and women suddenly stopped, shivered, and turned to one another. Sangria was not really cognizant of the sudden appearance of massive quantities of alcohol, or of the clothes being left in the street around her; she was consumed suddenly by the scent of Geoff's neck, earth and sweat an inch from her face, and by an urgent, unknown command bursting in her core, spreading veins of heat through the rest of her. His head slewed around to face her, surprise and something more feral roiling through his eyes, blue as her grandmother's lapis earring.

Blood roared in her ears and lower as he reached an arm around to pull at her clothes, and burst eagle-winged against the back of her eyes. Sangria did not know what desire was, or how to respond to it, but she knew when something was required of her. The sun was at exactly midday overhead, watching her with its stern eye, and its burn felt right on the back of her neck. Geoff was larger than she was, one hand circling her entire arm even now, but she was by far stronger than he was. She rode him to the ground and did what was required of her.

There was pain and there was blood when he pierced her, spilling in an offering beside them, and so she knew that she had chosen as her father wished her to.

*************

Twelve hours later, the spell lifted as suddenly as it had descended. Frightened people dashed out of the streets, clutching piecemeal garments and coverings; shame and fear clouded their eyes, and here and there a secret bright-winged flash of exhilaration. Sangria seemed not to notice them at all, striding through the streets in her silent, sure way, an exhausted Geoff stumbling along in her wake. The blood had long dried down the inside of her thighs before she dressed, a warrior's badge of combat.

"Sangria... Sangria, wait," Geoff said, the bruised circles under his eyes evident in his voice. "Look... we can't tell anyone. About this. Okay?" When she failed to respond, he repeated, "Okay? Just don't."

Sangria merely looked at him and marched on, her spine as straight as if he had ceased to exist. Her lips were shut and silent once more. Once they found her missing charges, she was the only one.

"--a bacchanalia," Sophia said in an accusatory tone. Her hair was mussed and loose around her face, her face flushed and her clothes askew. "Did you tell him to do that?"

"Nice walk of shame there, cuz," said Goze, who looked sweaty but otherwise good-humored, completely ignoring her question. "What were you doing?"

"Drinking," Sophia declared. "At a bar." Her expression dared anyone to argue with her statement. "What were you doing?"

"Breakdancing!" Goze clapped Marcus, equally winded, on the shoulder. "Well, I won, of course, but Marcus here, he's got some talent. Think we could get a pretty respectable crew together, ya know?"

Sophia peered at Marcus. "Have you--are you drunk?"

"Blasted," Marcus agreed happily, and Goze clapped him on the back again before noticing Geoff, all but weaving on his feet from exhaustion.

"Let's not even go there," Geoff said before he could ask the question. "I'm not drunk, I haven't been carousing, I don't breakdance. I just need a shower and about ten days of sleep."

Sangria, as always, said nothing at all, and, used as they were to her presence by now, no one even noticed her.

*************

Somewhere on the way to their haven for the evening, a small, deserted farm on the outskirts of town, Goze's expression had gone from easy-going to shocked and then right on into smug, half-derisive smirking. He kept his peace on the subject for a period of almost two hours, during which they settled into the small cottage, Goze and Geoff marking a room for themselves and leaving the other for the two women to share. Sangria and the odd baby disappeared into it as unnoticed as snakes through tall grass, but before Geoff could do the same, Goze leaned against the other bedroom door, a nasty grin breaking over his face, and said, "So."

"So what?" Geoff shook his head, recognizing his companion's mood and in no shape to deal with it. "Look, it has been a ridiculously long day. We should all get some sleep before tomorrow."

Goze laughed, though the sound had a slight edge to it. "Oh, yeah, I bet you need some sleep. So. You and--" And he jerked his head toward the door of the other room, still open a sliver. Sophia and Marcus, hung over and tired themselves, nevertheless looked up curiously.

Geoff stilled for a second, then closed his eyes and re-opened them, rubbing a hand across his forehead. "What?" he hedged, his tone overly nonchalant. "I don't think you're really--"

"So you did have sex with--"

"All right, come here," Geoff growled, hoisted Goze unceremoniously by the collar, and hauled him outside. Dropping the smaller man on his feet, he asked pointedly, "What are you doing? I don't need--"

"What are you doing? Did you know you put a bun in the oven there, chief?" The indignity of being carried outside was somewhat soothed by the expression on Geoff's face, now slowly draining of blood.

"What?" He rubbed his temples, shaking his head. "Okay, yes, fine. We did. It was... whatever that was, and it's not... that's not possible," he finally finished, though the dismay in his tone said that he was fully aware that it was, indeed, possible.

"Congratulations, Geoff. You found the most fertile thing in the entire desert." Goze folded his arms, somewhat enjoying his sometime leader's distress. "I can see it, you know. Like a little golden thread, from you--" and he poked Geoff in the chest, "--straight into her stomach. Sorry, man. That's how I even knew about it to start with."

"Oh, god." Geoff rubbed his hands slowly over his horrified face, then said firmly, "Seriously. Do not tell anyone else. I am very serious right now." Goze, who was perfectly well aware that both Sophia and Marcus had been plastered to the window since they'd gotten outside and had probably heard every word, just raised his hands in surrender.

Geoff went back inside, marching past Sophia and Marcus without comment, and pushed open the door to Sangria's dark room. She was curled in the far corner of the bed, back to the wall and away from the window, black hair free for once and spread out around her, looking like dried blood in the half-light. Her left arm was hooked around the horned infant, holding it securely against her breast, and her right arm, charred and blackened, gripped a long, wicked knife. Her breathing was even and slow. The baby opened its black eyes and regarded Geoff for a moment, and then yawned and went back to sleep.

He sat for the remainder of the night, staring at her, his face a bleak mask of indecision and mortification.

*************

In the tinted dark just before dawn, Sangria laid the baby flat on the dirt ground outside the farmhouse, pale-horned head pointed to the east. Around its prone body she scattered .387 Magnum hollow-tips in a precise spiral pattern, leading to the child in the center.

"For strength," said her grandmother, laying her three precious, prized arrowheads on the ground, pointing toward Jaquinta's new son, lying fitful and fussy on a woven blanket. Their surfaces were old and pitted, worn from shining black to a dull, deep grey by the passing centuries. "And for masculinity. They will guide the child toward his true nature."

Sangria, a grotesque little parody of a child, crouched nearby and watched, black eyes flickering in the dawn light.

Her motions were swift and precise as she bathed the child in a bucket, her voice rising and falling in that macehuallahtolli rhythm, turning him over and over to show his body to the sun from every angle. He stretched tiny arms and gurgled with infantile joy as she sliced her palm and squeezed the drops of blood from it into his waiting mouth, and then grew solemn again as she raised him above her head, the knife still gripped in her bone-black hand.

"What's she doing?" Marcus asked in a whisper from the door where the four of them were watching, confused and concerned by her bizarre activity at this early morning hour.

Sophia was frowning in concentration, trying to follow the words without much success. "It's some kind of ceremony. Something she thinks is important."

Goze looked vaguely interested. "Is she going to kill it? Because that would be unbelievably excellent. It's a huge liability. Not to mention creepy."

"I don't think so." Sophia's expression hovered around annoyed, disapproving of things going on that she couldn't automatically decipher. "I think she's naming it."

Her grandmother's old-woman voice rose and fell in that macehuallahtolli rhythm, turning the infant over and over to show his body to Jaquinta's household, an empty tin hurt across the dusty alleyway. "His family and people will know him, so that he will be accepted." She lifted the small fidgeting body over her head briefly, turning it in the air, and then placed him back on the blanket. "The ones who matter most, in Tlalocan, will know him, so that he will be protected." Her weathered old face was serene.

Sangria's black eyes did not blink as she looked over the baby, a hawk looking at an insect. "Why are you doing this?" she asked, raising her flat gaze to her grandmother. "Where is Jaquinta when you show his family?"

Her grandmother looked again at the empty shack, expression grave and unreadable. On the wall beside the door had been nailed a brightly-painted crucifix.

"She will not know his name," Sangria said reflectively, the rising sun in her eyes.

"He will know it," said her grandmother.

Sangria told the baby his name, and the sun on the horizon pulsed once, brightly, blinding her for a brief moment. He was already clamoring to nurse, chubby fingers reaching for her breast, as she replaced him in his sling and gathered up the bullets. She went back into the farmhouse without a sound, and the baby with needle-sharp teeth drank while she replaced the bullets, with a one-by-one click, into their clips.

Most of her charges wandered off to ransack the farm for resources, bored now that the show was over, but Geoff hovered in the doorway. After a few minutes of hemming and hawing and tentative overtures that received no response from Sangria, he turned to go, defeated by her immunity to his social charms. As a last-ditch effort, he finally asked directly, "What did you name it?"

"Chicahua," Sangria said with finality.

He looked surprised that she had answered, and tried to repeat the name back a few times, seemingly unable to wrap his tongue around it. Cautiously, he pushed a little further and asked, "What does it mean?"

"Strong," said Sangria, and loaded the last handgun.

Geoff scratched self-consciously at the underside of his chin. "Can I just call him Chico?"

Sangria raised her eyes to look at him.

"Huh, okay. No, then," Geoff said, and retreated back out to direct things around the farm.

*************

No one much wanted to spend another day hiking through the outback, but with only one car between them, there was no avoiding some walking. Geoff was simply too large to fit comfortably in the car without taking up the entire back seat, and eventually he sent Goze, Sophia and Marcus ahead toward the next city. The rumble of their protesting car engine faded into distance and red dust, leaving Sangria and Geoff trudging through the desert on their own. Shadows stretched, shrank, and grew again around them as they walked.

In a tone of massive reluctance and discomfort, Geoff finally broke the silence to ask, "So, your son... how is he?" Sangria's flat gaze was unnerving, but he had had plenty of recent practice in staring down military leaders and found that there were many useful parallels. "Did you father accept the... uh, naming ceremony?"

Sangria's black eyes blinked once, but she responded, "Well. He is ours now." She said it as though it made all the sense in the world, and did not lessen her stride.

"That's good," Geoff said, wind somewhat taken out of his sails by her terse answer but nevertheless still determined. "How do you like being a mother?" The awkwardness of the question was somewhat painful for him, but she seemed not to register it.

Her eyes closed again in that slow, reptilian blink, and her shoulders moved slightly as she turned her head to look at him while they walked, something sharper in her attention that might have been curiosity. "It is my job."

Geoff frowned slightly, confused. "Your job is to be a mother?"

Sangria indicated the napping baby at her chest as though this were self-evident, and trekked onward. There was silence for a few more moments as Geoff collected his thoughts, but he was a seasoned leader of men and an experienced charmer of women, and his indomitable personality couldn't be kept down by confusion and embarrassment for long. "Sangria," he said, looking every inch the Viking warrior despite his mild sunburn and sweaty neck, "you're already a great warrior, but I know how important motherhood is. How would you feel about having more children?"

The same flicker of interest shuttered behind her eyes for a moment as she looked at him sidelong. "Also my job." Her heavily accented English was never quite right, as though the language fought her. "Both are my job," she said with a rock-solid certainty.

Not about to back away now that he was getting a response, Geoff rumbled, "Well, I don't know about your job, but I do know something about duty. And honor. Sangria." His very large hand closed on her arm to bring her to a stop, and he looked down at her, no trace of awkwardness or confusion remaining now. "We need to talk about what happened in the city."

Sangria stopped marching and looked at him. The desert rocks around her echoed her patience and stillness, waiting noncommittally.

There was nothing to find in her empty black eyes, but his blue ones tried anyway, fastened to hers. "Sangria, I seek your father's blessing. I intend to ask him for your hand in marriage." The pronouncement was certain, his speech now confident. "We have fought alongside one another for a long time now, and we have had our differences; but we have always come through, and we have always looked out for one another." He stepped closer now that she had stopped moving, and his nearness woke the baby, which squinted up at him as uninterestedly as its mother. A lesser mortal might have given up in the face of their combined indifference, but it was in Geoff's blood to hold forth in heroic speech, and there was no stopping him now. "I know that your... duty lies in the missions of your father, and I respect that, even if I can’t understand it some of the time. I was raised in a city without many morals, a place where the concept of duty meant nothing, but my mother..." The expression on his face was something stranger and more final now, a decision-face. "My mother taught me differently."

Blue eyes settled on the baby bound to Sangria's breast, then shifted to her flat abdomen and up to her face, as determined as he'd ever been to lead his men into battle. "If your father approves, I will be your husband. I will defend your family as my own. I will protect this child as my own... as well as the one that you now carry." He placed one great hand on the baby's head, covering its tiny horns, and pressed the other against Sangria's belly, both heavy with possessive pressure.

They stood there for almost a full minute, a bizarre negative-copy tableau in the middle of the outback desert--he enormous, pale, blond and unearthly in his beauty, and she small, dark, as unsettling as bone. There was triumph in Geoff's ice-blue eyes now, because he could see that he had accomplished something that neither he nor anyone else he knew had ever managed before: Sangria was showing an emotion on her disused face. She was surprised.

It was not the words that she was looking at, but the sun that had risen around their speaker. Geoff was outlined to her eye in a corona of midday light, her father's gift paradoxically granted to this alien creature. She felt the answering warmth in her womb, felt it turn in response, and knew that it recognized its family and its people. The sun-god's gift rolled over her skin like honey, momentarily lightening the black eyes that looked steadily forward. We all take care of one another, someone said. I am my father's hands, said someone else, but the voice was the same.

The silence had brought back some of Geoff's uncertainty, and, left standing there in dead quiet for too long, he laughed nervously. "Will you marry me?" he asked, as though unsure the intent of his original speech had penetrated, and smiled the lopsided grin that had so often endeared him to any woman he chose.

The sudden slash in her palm bled freely, dripping red into the thirsty dust, and though it took Geoff a second or two to understand why she was offering him both her hand and her knife, he was solemn and stalwart as he sliced his own heartline as well. The blood mingled and made itself one thing as she briefly pressed her palm to his, and then she sheathed the knife and turned without a word.

When the car finally returned for them, sans a passenger so that there would be adequate room, Sophia and Marcus could not for the life of them find a non-invasive way of asking why on earth Geoff's and Sangria's shirts had been knotted together at the hem.

*************

But wait! There's more? Well, yes, in ensuing scenes Huitzilopochtli actually makes a personal appearance to bless the union, Sangria spends her wedding night getting eaten by a massive bunyip, and Goze finds the entire situation so bizarre that he almost takes a swing at someone, but I'm pretty much tired, you know? My stab-at-the-keyboard writing-without-editing-blitz take on those scenes will have to wait for some time I haven't spent my entire day involved in various kinds of hospital drama.

(Also, I did not make Geoff's massive speech there up. It, and most of the rest of the dialogue, is copied as close to verbatim as I can remember from what the players actually said. This is what we're doing when the rest of you are going to bed on Sunday nights so you can go to work in the morning.)

Because of all my ladies to suddenly take on a strongly romantimaternal role, she makes the most sense, right?

Buh.

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:34:26 GMT

Upset is only a beginning word to describe my feelings most of this week.

But everything will, eventually, be all right.

(Assuming work, family, sickness, bills, and a falling-apart house don't cause me to have a stroke and die.)

Serendipity

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:44:17 GMT

The world is a funny place. For example, John and I were just fighting today over whether or not I could afford to go get lunch. I pointed out that we had about $75 in our account that was not spoken for; he countered by asserting that I was going to get scurvy if I didn't eat a sandwich and some fruit or something.

So then, later that afternoon, who should call me but my undergraduate alma mater? I had recently requested transcripts in order to apply for a graduate program, and my stomach did a few backflips when the woman identified herself as a worker in the business office calling about my account. Goddammit! It would be just like them to find some ancient library fine or parking ticket I didn't pay while I was a student that would cause this transcript business to be slowed down!

Instead, she said, "So, my records show that you were due a refund check in the amount of [redacted] dollars in fall of 2004, and we never issued one to you. Would you like your [redacted] dollars?"

Hell, yeah, I would like my [redacted] dollars! Woohoo!

It's moments like these that make me feel like the universe isn't out to squash me after all.

Chickenhawk attack!

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:55:23 GMT

After a long and exhausting (but fruitful!) LARP night, John and I stayed in bed until noon. Then we got up, ate some french toast, and watched Highlander. And while we were immersed in the adventures of Duncan McLeod of the Clan McLeod, there was a very loud, very solid thump on our roof. We both ignored it for two whole seconds, accustomed as we are to apartment living, until we looked at one another and suddenly had the same epiphany: oh, yeah. We live in a house now. Nobody lives above us.

So John, in nothing but a pair of sweatpants, ran outside to see if a branch had fallen or something, while I jogged to a window. And both of us saw a great big red-tailed hawk flop down to the yard, still clutching a bit of whatever unfortunate critter it had nailed on our roof. It stared at John menacingly for a moment, and then took off and disappeared into the trees (which we have noticed have very large nests at their tops, but we'd never seen any of their owners before).

Guess whose kitties aren't allowed to play outside anymore?

Sweet boys

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:49:33 GMT

Aww, I got a present! The fine gentlemen of Mon Frere--John, AJ, Mat, Bob, Al-don, and Abe--gave me a very pretty book last night (Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon), as a thank you for my assistance in running lights and sound for their show. It's especially sweet because I'm sure they know I would have done that for free anyway.

I'm excited about this book. I love retellings of myths and classics from the points of view of different genders or social classes; in fact, one of my favorite versions of the Robin Hood myth to date is Jennifer Roberson's Lady of the Forest.

And I dearly love the Arthurian legends. I've often considered doing something similar to the Phantom Project with them. ♥

The Phantom Project: The Phantom of the Muppet Theater by Ellen Weiss

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:02:00 GMT

Muppets!

The Phantom of the Muppet Theater by Ellen Weiss, 1991
Grade: C

Muppets!

Man, I love the Muppets. I can't help myself. It's some wacky combination of childhood security (puppets! Happy puppets! They sing and dance!) and adult hilarity (oh, the tongue-in-cheek jokes I did not get as a kid) that I find completely irresistible. Someday I'm going to own the entire run of The Muppet Show and spend a whole week in my PJs watching it. But I digress.

Anyway, this is a wee little picture-book, obviously child-oriented, detailing a story involving a Phantom haunting the Muppet Theater, site of most of the Muppets' shenanigans. Interestingly enough, the story's gone through a few further transformations by the time it gets to this book; from the original Gothic novel, it arrived on The Muppet Show in a 1977 episode, in which various characters from the theater begin sighting a Phantom of the Muppet Theater, who is eventually revealed to be an ex-actor whose theater career was ruined by the panning of the critics, prompting him to haunt the theater in a funk. From there, it goes to this book, which follows most of the same beginning format but actually takes a completely different direction when it comes to the actual denouement of the story. The timing makes me wonder if the 1977 episode might have been an affectionate parody of the contemporary de Palma/Finley film, which also featured a flesh-and-blood Phantom haunting a variety-style theatre; this picture-book, however, was written a few decades later and doesn't show any signs of being related.

Pictures are important in a picture-book, and these don't disappoint; the Muppets ar rendered faithfully and engagingly, and the painted art is a treat, not only because of its familiarity but also because it keeps a very energetic and whimsical style throughout, adding busy touches and humorous side happenings that are totally appropriate to the characters and setting.

The Phantom of the Muppet Theater appears to be one of the more useful sort; he never does anything negative or frightening, aside from existing, and generally provides beneficial aid to the bewildered performers--rescuing Miss Piggy's dog, discovering maintenance issues before they can cause a problem for the audience, and providing general help around the place (all without being seen, of course). It's in his secretive style of helping that most of the remaining vestiges of the original Erik can be found; he uses notes to communicate with people he won't speak to face-to-face, and is very proprietary about the theatre in general (though he is more paternal than commanding).

The suspicions of the cast and crew are in opposition to those of the superstitious original characters; it is only when almost everyone in the house has been touched in some way by the Phantom that they begin to suspect a presence, and even then they shrug it off in favor of performing their show with clear heads. A far cry from the panicked ballet rats, but, then again, I doubt anyone really expects the Muppets to be crying in corners instead of exuberantly shooting themselves out of cannons.

Eventually, when Gonzo's finale goes awry (as it always does) and he needs to be rescued from the flies, the Phantom is revealed to be John Stone, the actor who opened the Muppet Theater way back in 1802 (entertainingly, this has him predating the gentleman upon whom he is based by almost 80 years). He is actually and undoubtedly a ghost, a fully supernatural Phantom, which is something we've seen less and less frequently in later versions of the story. This is not only a change from the original story's ambiguous but at least definitely solid Erik, but also from the original version of the Phantom of the Muppet Theater, who was also a solid, living... creature? (I'm not sure; he looks a bit like a tiny, peeved dragon.)

Naturally, Stone is a benevolent Phantom who only wants to keep maintaining his beloved theatre and making sure everything runs smoothly, so after some momentary discombobulation, the Muppets happily agree and everyone goes their merry way. There are no further traces of the original plot left intact, except that Weiss makes a point of letting us know that Stone has something of a soft spot for Miss Piggy (though, of course, he would never extend it further than rescuing her dog and keeping her costumes in order).

There's nothing spine-chilling going on here, but, eh. Who cares? Muppets! It's light, fluffy, child-friendly entertainment, and that's okay with me. The adult themes and Gothic trappings of the original would have detracted from the aim of the picture-book, and it doesn't suffer for their absence; besides, it is, unsurprisingly, very cute.

Also, god damn do I love me some Muppets.

(Cross-posted from The Phantom Project.)

The Phantom Project: Erik: the Phantom of the Opera from Crysys Games

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:44:42 GMT

Erik: The Phantom of the Opera from Crysys Games, 1987
Grade: C

Anne: Oh, man, baby. Look at the cover of this eighties game. Look at it. It is spell-binding.

John: What the hell is going on on that cover?

Anne: He looks like a bad-tempered Chinese man with gorilla hands and a serious need of hair gel. And is that a lamppost growing out of the Garnier?

John: Why does he have an axe?

Anne: I have no idea, but I think I'm delighted. It could be a holla to the 1983 movie.

John: But that makes no sense. He won't use an axe in the game!

Anne: OR WILL HE?

John: I'm not playing this.

But first, I researched and developed on my own, because I'm a busy little bee like that. This game was originally released for the ZX Spectrum, one of the first popular personal computers in Britain. It looks a lot like a gigantic, possibly not-too-bright calculator. Of course, in this age of supercomputers that can calculate sine, like, way faster than that, the Spectrum and other machines of its ilk are completely obsolete, but it had a very large following back in the day. One reason for this was because it was very easily programmable, meaning that people could write their own simple programs, and the other was that it had a huge number of games generated for it over the course of its short lifespan. Yay! Games! About masked men in opera houses! Sure, why not?

So my first problem here is apparent: I don't exactly have an 8-bit computer from 1982 lying around amongst my newfangled space-age gadgets. But another great thing about time and technology constantly fornicating is that they produce babies like the internet, which is the world's largest repository of geeks telling other geeks about stuff they like. It turns out that there is a very large community of faithful old fans of the ZX Spectrum, and that they have ported many of its games and programs over for PC use, provided you have the tech savvy to operate one of the kajillions of Spectrum emulators they have also written. Oh, you wacky geeks, what would I have done without you? So I sneaked on over to the nest of Spectrum geekery, snagged a copy of the game (long ago fallen into the public domain, much like Leroux's novel), and started trying to convince my computer that despite the fact that it has more RAM than it knows what to do with and a proven history of being able to take whatever massive abuse I subject it to, it really wants to pretend it has less capacity than a graphing calculator.

That took about an hour, mostly because I was trying different emulators and hoping one would operate close to the way I wanted it to. But then, huzzah! With a discordant buzz of low, ominous, almost cacophanous chords, the game ran! DANGER!

Then I spent another hour trying to figure out how to configure the damn thing so that I could use keyboard controls to do things. Even after I (vaguely) succeeded, it was still very touch-and-go. Sometimes, when you say right, my computer decides you go left. It's bad, baby, and it does what it wants.

So, anyway, in the game, you play Raoul, intrepidly racing through the opera house in the hopes of rescuing Christine, who has been kidnapped by the madman Erik. So far, so good! Raoul is adorable in his evening wear, with a wee little top hat that he grabs whenever you force him to jump over something. He also has a tiny pistol, which may hearken back to Leroux's novel and its scene in his bedroom, or to a more recent version, such as the 1943 Lubin/Rains film, which featured people shooting at the Phantom in his very lair. The pistol is for shooting the many things that Erik begins throwing at poor Raoul the moment he starts moving away from his starting position, while you try to run around and find the six pieces of the key that you need to get into Erik's lair and free the distressed singer. It's one of the more basic run/jump/duck/climb ladders kinds of games; Super Mario in nineteenth-century evening dress.

The things Erik throws at Raoul, by the way, are hilarious. First it's just rocks. Sheesh, Erik, way to be uninventive. Then it's skulls and large, grinning theatre masks. Ooh! Symbolic! Then it's suddenly bombs--shit, bombs! And then pyrotechnic flares! Ack! Then books, and ghosts, and holy Mary mother of god he's chucking chandeliers at you, and it only gets wackier from there. All the items, with the exception of the rocks, seem to have been selected by the game makers to have something at least peripherally to do with the Phantom's character; the skulls and masks are self-evident, while the bombs and flares could be related to various stagecraft skills or Leroux's love for pseudo-supernatural abilities in his character, the books are appropriate for a learned man (albeit one who does not care about his books very much), and the chandeliers have plenty of precedent (though where do they keep coming from? Aren't we out of chandeliers in this damn place yet?). And ghosts, well--looks like this version of the Phantom has a bit of a supernatural element to him, doesn't he?

Unfortunately, while I'm not what I would call bad at games, I'm also probably not spectacular at them. Which means that, about five minutes into my first attempt at this game, a flying skull clocked my tiny Raoul over the head and I received the following message in gigantic capital letters:

ERIK HAS DEFEATED YOU. CHRISTINE IS DEAD.

Dead? Fuck!

What are you doing, Erik? She can't go walking with you on Sundays if you kill her, you nutjob. It seems clear that this Erik is more in the vein of the horror versions of the character than the more nuanced or romantic ones. So I resurrected Raoul with the reset button and soldiered forth again, and immediately got creamed by a funeral mask.

ERIK HAS DEFEATED YOU. CHRISTINE IS DEAD.

Goddammit. Raoul and I got back up again, made it up the stairs, and were chased to our dooms by a battalion of ghosts.

ERIK HAS DEFEATED YOU. CHRISTINE IS DEAD.

Okay, fine. No problem. I'll just get back up and--

ERIK HAS DEFEATED YOU. CHRISTINE IS DEAD.

What the fuck, I barely--

ERIK HAS DEFEATED YOU. CHRISTINE IS DEAD.

Look here, you stupid game, I totally jumped at the right--

ERIK HAS DEFEATED YOU. CHRISTINE IS--

And it was at this point that I called John for a consult, so I could go get some soothing cocoa and not break anything. He swaggered into town, full of smug machismo, a video game master prepared to sit down and defend the little woman against all the pixellated violence she just couldn't handle on her own. After a few minutes of complaining about the counter-intuitive controls (it wasn't designed for a modern keyboard! That's not my fault!), he settled in to investigate.

ERIK HAS DEFEATED YOU. CHRISTINE IS DEAD.

"What the hell? Are you serious? I can't jump and shoot at the same time?

"Sorry, babe. It's an old game. You know how the old-school ones go. It's like Frogger but with fewer safe places to stand."

"How do I reset this thing?"

ERIK HAS DEFEATED YOU. CHRISTINE IS DEAD.

"Where the hell are all these things coming from?"

"Presumably Erik is throwing them at you. From... I dunno, one of his secret trapdoors or passages. Seems like something he'd do."

ERIK HAS DEFEATED YOU. CHRISTINE IS DEAD.

"This is asinine. Did you see that bullshit? NO ONE ON EARTH COULD HAVE AVOIDED THAT."

"Well, clearly someone could, because the game makers didn't create it to fail. Are you saying the game has beaten you, darling?"

"No game beats John! What the fuck, was that a butterfly?"

"Uh... I have no frame of reference for butterflies being related to the Phantom of the Opera, so I'm not sure. Could have been. Maybe he ran out of chandeliers."

ERIK HAS DEFEATED YOU. CHRISTINE IS DEAD.

"My brain is going to fucking explode, honey. This is a terrible game."

"Or is it just TOO HARD, eh?"

"NO. It is a BAD GAME. It is the WORST GAME EVER. Absolutely, positively THE WORST GAME. I want you to write that in your review. In fact, it could be the whole review."

ERIK HAS DEFEATED YOU. CHRISTINE IS DEAD.

"You're such a grump, honey."

"I have to leave now, or you're going to need a new keyboard. WORST GAME EVER."

And that was pretty much the extent of our foray into this game. I tried my hand at it a few more times, but it was so ridiculously difficult that I was absolutely unable to get more than a third of the way through it before keeling over each time. John refused to enter the room again until I turned it off, and explained to me in very annoyed tones that he NO ONE ON EARTH could possibly have beaten that game except on its native platform, and since we don't own a ZX Spectrum, it is TOTALLY UNREASONABLE for anyone to expect him to win and therefore does not reflect on his manhood AT ALL. I consoled him that he was, indeed, very manly, and that his attempt to aid me, abortive though it might have been, was very valorous.

My grade is based on what little I could see of the game; while nothing mind-blowing, it's got averagely enjoyable gameplay once you get the hang of it, and the little story touches added to an otherwise formulaic game are fun, especially for a fan of the story. The sound is awful and the graphics, in all their spell-binding four-color glory, are extremely primitive, but those things are constraints of the time period, so it's hard to really knock the game over them. My greatest sadness is that, since apparently John's and my powers combined are still not enough to get us through the opera house to actually confront Erik himself, I will never know what his representation in the game itself looks like, or whether there is anything interesting going on in the inevitable lair scene at the end of the game.

So here is my challenge to you, internet children: if anyone else out there has played this game to completion or is so excited by this review that they go out and do so, tell me about it! Is the C grade still applicable? Is there anything interesting going on in later stages of the game? Are we complete video game failures because we can't beat a game written on an 8-bit computer?

We probably are. I would not be surprised.

(Cross-posted from The Phantom Project.)

And Crystal Caves, too

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 02:42:12 GMT

Question of the night: Why do I no longer have the option of joystick-driven computer games? When did those become so passe? I miss my joystick. It gave me many happy hours.

Shut up, you prurient wankers, I mean joy in Commander Keen and Duke Nukem.

And maybe I WANTED to be unproductive!

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:09:14 GMT

Few days are quite as nice as the ones wherein you wake up at 12:30 p.m. in a warm bed, try on awesome new clothes, have a nice lunch, play a long, emotionally-frought role-playing game, and then spend a few hours cuddling under a blanket on the couch watching House.

My weekend was pretty rad. Unproductive, but rad.

Bam!

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 02:31:11 GMT

Opening night show a success! Naked men, shouting, flawless sound and light cues (okay, not really. But they worked okay!).

Now to do it again next week!

(I am so tired!)

Edit: Post-party even more of a success. Man, I love you guys. Bob, AJ, Tom, Mat, Al, Jennie, Thomas, Amy, you are my heroes.

Grown-Ass Men

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 19:33:26 GMT

Stupid game emulators not wanting to run on XP. Why is my life so hard? Whine. Whine.

But in more important news, all the North Carolina peeps should come to John's sketch troupe's comedy show, Grown-Ass Men, which will take place on Friday, October 2nd at 8:00 p.m. at the Idiot Box. As the pseudo-stage-manager, I have read and seen all the sketches rehearsed. They are wildly, horribly, gut-wrenchingly inappropriate, and also very funny. There will be a second performance on Thursday, October 8th.

Do not miss out on this chance to see grown men running around on stage with sex aids and bottles of alcohol. You'll hate yourself if you do.

The Phantom Project: Phantom of the Opera by Walter Murphy

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:45:32 GMT

You know what's great for taking your mind off your dental woes? Disco.

Phantom of the Opera by Walter Murphy, 1978
Grade: C

Walter Murphy is a dude who, back in the seventies, made something of a name for himself by re-arranging classical music in disco form, thus fusing sparkly electronic music with classical tone patterns. These days, some may be entertained to learn, he is composing (and winning Emmys for!) music for the Seth MacFarlane animated TV series Family Guy and American Dad.

This particular piece is a bit odd to categorize, because it's not technically a musical--it was never intended for staged dramatic performance as far as I know, and has no script attached--but also not really just a concept album, since it directly follows the Phantom story from beginning to end. In the end, I just ended up referring to it as "the album" all the time, because damn if I know what to do with it. Damn thing is very hard to find on cassette tape and has never been released on CD; it's much more common on second-hand LP and 8-track, though, so if you've still got a player for either of those around, the wonders in store may still be available to you.

Introduction:

The introduction is simply a thirty-second clip of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, one of the most recognizable organ pieces in existence. I love that toccata, so I made a little squeal, and it's also very appropriate for a Phantom story, both because of the original Erik's organ-playing and because it's a very beautiful and complicated but also very menacing-sounding piece of music.

The Phantom of Your Dreams:

And then, pow! The funk begins. This is a much more modern, disco-rock style song, full of electric guitars and powered by a slightly nasal-sounding male voice, which I believe is Murphy himself (sadly, the singers aren't credited, so I don't know for sure, but I think that Murphy plays the Phantom while the singers for Christine and Raoul are lost to the mists of time). He sounds a bit like Kermit the Frog to me in this song, though, of course, your mileage may vary. The song switches back to the toccata in the middle, with the organ juxtaposed over other parts of the fugue being echoed in drum and piano, creating an interesting aural effect before returning to the regular, un-classically-embellished chorus.

The lyrics are very appropriate and set the character up as a semi-supernatural, mysterious figure, making references to invading the "catacombs of your mind" and asserting that "I'm the music you think you hear", suggesting that this is addressed at least in part to Christine. In fact, the lyrics occasionally seem a bit out of place in contrast to the very quick-tempo, major-key popular music framing them, but the overall effect is a good one, of something dangerous presenting itself as something enjoyable.

Dance Your Face Off:

The title has obvious significance when we're dealing with a character that has an extremely hideous face that isolates him from the world--i.e., a faceless character. The suggestion is present that other people may in fact be in danger of losing their faces, or, alternatively, that some activity in which they are participating (presumably opera performance, based on the story's setting and the presence of the performance word "dance" in the title) may have caused the character himself to lose his face.

This is an instrumental disco-funk piece, which nicely sets the stage by representing the bustle of life at the opera house (or, possibly, even an actual performance going on at said auditorium). It's nothing particularly dazzling, but enjoyable enough if you like the style.

I'm Your Man:

The same disco-funk trend continues here, but now with heavy use of horns and saxophones, staple instruments that will continue through most of the rest of the album. The song is, like the first one, sung by Murphy as the Phantom, and, also like the first one, the melodic line seems almost too upbeat for the lyrics. Ostensibly a sort of cheerful love song to the object of the Phantom's affections, the song contains lines such as "if you want to get them to listen/Just stand next to me/You'll be given undivided attention" or "believe me, girl, if I'm around/Whatever's in your way is gonna tumble down", which seem like innocuous enough protestations of affection and the song could easily be interpreted as a very generic one without prior knowledge of the plot. In context, of course, those lines become more than a little bit sinister, and the effect is a cute one that invites those "in the know" to be in on the riddle while others might have no inkling until the end. The barely-there suggestion of things to come gives the listener a good background for why Christine might have viewed this person as a safe, helpful individual, and, interestingly enough, the frequent use of the word "man" and the general appealing aspect of the song makes the Phantom seem like a much more human figure than he otherwise might.

And there are Bee Gees-style falsetto whoops here and there, so what more do you want?

A Night at the Opera:

Another instrumental; in fact, it looks like the entire album is pretty much laid out that way, with the pieces in instrumental-vocal-instrumental-vocal order.

This is a much more tempo-driven piece, with a more recognizable rock beat beneath the same use of horns and what sounds like an electric organ. Again, because of the title, one assumes that this is a performance taking place at the opera house, possibly even Christine's debut performance, considering its chronological placement in events. A highly pop-isized (so not a word) version of Beethoven's Ode to Joy is the centerpiece, with extra syncopation and constant electronic instruments beneath a string section and choir in order to keep the piece moving quickly and emphasize its modernization. The idea of a performance is ably communicated, despite the somewhat weird synergy between the two styles.

The Music Will Not End:

After another very recognizable classical piano introduction, this is the Phantom's love ballad for Christine, sung in a slow, pop-music style. The lyrics are nothing particularly special--they could belong to any love song--but the idea that Christine is personified as music (touched on in the Yeston/Kopit musical's "You Are Music") is an appropriate one for a character who idolizes music as his only escape from an otherwise bleak existence. Various lyrics suggest that she makes him feel "reborn", which refers to his eventual redemption through her, and his descriptions of her as "profound" and "serene" are much more positive and calming than any language used so far on the album.

Reverie for Christine:

Back to instrumental music. This is the gentlest piece on the album, by far, and is composed mainly of piano and string music over what sounds like cannibalized bits of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. The electric organ heard on other parts of the album sneaks in at about three-quarters of the way through, suggesting that the piece is either being physically composed or played by the Phantom, or that it is a mental journey of his.

It's worth noting that this is the only place any of the characters are named, aside from the title of the album itself. Raoul and Erik, while certainly and obviously present, are not mentioned by name.

Toccata and Funk in D Minor:

Bach is back! And much badder than ever, as one would expect from a classical/pop fusion. I love the way that Murphy plays with contrasts here, juxtaposing the fugue itself, played on classical organ with meticulous, fantastic precision, with a drum and electric guitar counterpoint that adds urgency to the sound and roughens things up somewhat. The toccata continues to play mostly uninterrupted for the first half of the piece, after which point straight disco-funk of Murphy's composition takes over for a while, but it's enjoyable popular music, so I have no real complaints (especially since the toccata comes back--with moaning minor-key choirs!--shortly thereafter to finish things off with a bang).

Keep Dancin' (Then It's Back to the Dungeon Again):

This piece fairly obviously represents the masquerade ball from Leroux's novel (as an aside, I'm fairly certain that this album is almost entirely based either on that novel or on the 1925 Julian/Chaney film; I can find no real influence from other versions anywhere). The lyrics (sung by the Phantom again) reference both Mardi Gras and Carnivale, probably two of the most well-known masked events still celebrated today, and play heavily on the idea of the Phantom being able to enjoy himself in the safety of anonymity as everyone else masks up, too. This, along with the preceding toccata, is the high point of the album, the popular music composed mostly of syncopated piano, counterpoint percussion, and horns and guitars moving the action forward, not to mention a pretty bitchin' guitar solo about halfway through.

This is one of the most interesting songs for lyrics, as the Phantom really lets loose and gives us some insight into his inner workings. The idea of a certain amount of sensual physicality is explored when he asserts that he "taught Valentino to tango", and other lines add to the sense of a sexual force. Probably the most intriguing, however, is the little backstory he gives us for himself, in which he says that he was "Singing songs the devil won't sing/In a fit I danced my whole face off/And that's when they elected me king." The infernal symbolism (which, by the way, explains the cover, which is very Faustian and which excited my curiosity from the outset), fanciful though it may be, suggests itself as a metaphor for the original Erik's belief that he was cursed with ugliness because of his foreordained evil nature, and the second half of the line reminds us that, despite his hatred of his condition, it is the very hideousness of his face that gives him so much of his power (obtained, naturally, through the fear of others and the ability to terrorize them).

Also, I giggled when he said, "I look so good in red, it's a sin," referring to the Red Death costume. Hee.

Gentle Explosion:

This piece is obviously softer and more romantic, but it's straight pop-disco, none of that pesky classical nonsense getting in the way of the electronic beat and synthesized instruments. This is Raoul's only song, and the voice is noticeably different from the Phantom's, but damn if I know if it's Murphy again or a completely different singer--I'd bet money on the latter, but unfortunately there is no credit for the singers anywhere on the album, which makes me a sad panda. Despite the uninspired instrumentation and melodic line, the use of a small choir whispering "J'taime" in the background is a nice touch that keeps things tied to the original French drama, and the lyrics rely heavily on warm, sunny imagery, very unlike the Phantom's many songs, in their expression of devotion.

You Can't Do That To Me:

The Phantom's response song, a disco version of a jealous rage, is surprisingly laid-back in its melody line, major-key and not overly hurried while still managing to sound somewhat menacing. The lyrics help, most of them having to do with his anger over having been "two-timed"--he mentions her "spitting in his face" at one point, but it is impossible to take things seriously after, near the end of the song, he informs Christine that if she messes with him, "Girl, you'll be chicken fricassee". Snort-laugh. A lot of Murphy's lyrics have walked the line between acceptable interpretation and silliness, but there's no saving that one.

Rescue Me:

And we've come to Christine's only song, sung, again, by a woman whose name I don't know because she isn't credited and the internets have failed me in my quest to suss her out. Unsurprisingly, it's a very soft-pop, melodic love song style, as Christine implores Raoul to rescue her from her predicament (one assumes this is post-kidnapping). Interestingly, she waffles between begging for rescue and trying to deter him, using lyrics such as "I'm in a place I hope you'll never be", which nicely captures the original Christine's desire to go to Raoul for comfort but also her fear that he would become too involved and be murdered by a jealous Erik.

The Chase, et fin:

This part is the biggest clue that the album is probably inspired at least in part by the Julian/Chaney film and its crazy carriage-chase ending, as the title suggests a similar scene being played out. The instrumentation and tempo become frenetic; strings sawing away, percussion and pizzicato thumping along at odds with one another, and heavy bass instruments underscoring the possible menace all add to the atmosphere of danger. The music comes to an obvious climax about halfway through, when the music cuts and only near-inaudible bass instruments and a few distant churchbells break the silent tension; I'd hazard a guess that this is the moment in the 1925 film in which the Phantom faces down the mob on the bridge, momentarily seizing control over the situation again. This seems borne out when, a moment later, the piece ends with distinctly funereal organ music.

It's certainly a very different take on the story, and interesting because I haven't seen anything quite like it before; however, the music, even allowing for the change in cultural tastes since the disco period, is less than impressive, and the format doesn't allow for a lot of really in-depth examination of the material. But it really is interesting, and a good effort at translating a subject into a difficult medium, so if that sounds intriguing to you (or if you just love you some disco and love you some Phantom and see a bright, beautiful possibility on the horizon) it would definitely be worth a look.

(Cross-posted from The Phantom Project.)

Help.

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:51:36 GMT

One of my right-side molars just broke. Straight up broke, and I accidentally swallowed the piece that came off.

I have no money, no regular dentist, no credit, and, as discussed a mere few days ago, no insurance.

There's a gigantic hole in my mouth and it's really freaking me out, even though it doesn't hurt (yet).

Help.

More vitamin E, please

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:37:13 GMT

Oh, Friday.

The smell of my cubemate eating scrambled eggs with ketchup at 12:30 p.m. The neverending thuds as the office above us apparently has a cagematch on company time. The dulcet tones of Lady Gaga singing "Poker Face" for the twenty-third time in my cubemate's headphones, thoughtfully turned up so I can share her music from afar.

Yes, my cube is a happening place to be... unless, of course, you want to have health insurance, in which case my cube is the Calcutta to your Paradise Island, Florida. Supposedly, I should have health insurance through my temp agency, which they initially told me would kick in after I had worked for them for six months. Since that mark passed a little while ago and I hadn't heard anything, and since I would like to someday see a doctor and discuss little things like whether or not John is going to keel over dead when he turns thirty, I called them up to ask about it. Turns out that not only was the health insurance supposed to kick in six weeks after I started working, not six months, but that I... don't have any. Why? They did not know.

So off I went to pose my question to the insurance company (name withheld to protect the incompetent), whose personnel also found it to be a real head-scratcher. I had turned in forms; I had applied; they had a working relationship with my employer. So why is there no insurance? Aha, the cause came to light: it appears that the box that says "do you want health insurance" at the top of the five-page form was not checked, so they couldn't process it. God forbid they accidentally give me insurance if I turned in paperwork but secretly didn't want any and thus failed to check a box, hoping against hope that they would understand my plight. I don't recall making this mistake, but sure, okay. Everybody does. However, I would kind of like to know why the insurance company failed to ever contact and ask anyone--me, or my agency--if I might like to correct the mistake. Wouldn't you think they would want to do that? I mean... they don't get paid anything if I don't have a policy. I thought they liked getting paid.

But apparently they don't like getting paid, because let me tell you, my attempts to give them money were met with stringent, offended rebuffs all morning. Everyone was very upset with me for not checking the little box (how could you, Anne?) and making their day that much harder, and they were mortally offended by the my suggestion that perhaps I could correct the mistake and thus reinstate my aborted policy. Don't I understand the difficulty involved in doing their jobs? It turns out that not only will they not allow me to fix this and restart the policy--hilariously, the policy is officially declared dead at, you guessed it, six months, so it can no longer be resurrected howsoever hard they might chant and wave their insurance wands--but that they will also not let me apply for a new policy through my company.

But I want to give you money. I'm standing here, holding money. Don't you want the nice money? No. I guess you don't. I'm informed that I can't reapply until April, because of something having to do with them only taking applications for insurance from my company in April each year (what do the people who get hired at times other than March and April do?), though I strongly suspect that they simply want to give me time to reflect on my sins and meditate on the importance of the little box, which, if checked, could have admitted me to a wonderland of co-pays and free clinic examinations.

So here I am, enjoying some fresh egg-and-ketchup odor and some melodious techno-pop concerning the joys of bluffing with one's muffin, and should I fall over from some kind of horrifying disease in the next six months, I want everyone to know that I love them.

The Phantom Project: The Climax, directed by George Waggner

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:14:24 GMT

Oh, old movies. The longer I work on this project, the more I find that I'm coming to adore you.

This is not, despite appearances, a movie about orgasms.

The Climax, directed by George Waggner, 1944
Starring Boris Karloff, Susanna Foster, and Turhan Bey
Grade: B

When I started this project, I dismissed this film... in fact, I dismissed it multiple times. It kept coming up, since it was filmed as a sequel to the 1943 Lubin/Rains Phantom of the Opera, but because the script had been substantially changed and Rains himself, the very recognizable Phantom that carried the first film, had pulled out of the project, I kept ignoring it anyway. It wasn't until fairly recently that finally, after revisiting some summaries and convincing myself that maybe this wasn't going to be as unrelated as I thought it was, I decided it deserved to be included. Geez, Anne... bitter over the occasional unrelated piece of material you spent money on, or what?

Then, of course, it was only available in rare out-of-print VHS format, or as part of a large DVD collection of Boris Karloff's films. Such is my life.

My first note of the film was that the classical score, which is very typical of its time period and uses lushly instrumental orchestras in sweeping phrases, was extremely similar to Edward Ward's score from the Lubin/Rains film. About ten seconds later, the credits informed me that Ward also composed the music for this film, so I got to feel smug for a few seconds. It's not the most inspired score I've ever head, but it fits its film and the fashions of the time perfectly, and the incorporation of snippets of other classical scores here and there doesn't hurt at all.

The action is once again set in an opera house--in this case, the Royal Theatre, possibly a reference to the Palais-Royale theatre in France--and revolves around Dr. Frederick Hohner, the theatre physician, and his thwarted love for the soprano Marcellina. The film begins with a short introduction in the present day, showing us Hohner (played by the inimitable Boris Karloff) arriving at the darkened theatre in the middle of the night, and letting us overhear a pair of stagehands discussing how he comes every night to sit in the abandoned dressing rooms and dream of his lost love, Marcellina, who disappeared a decade ago. The pan-around shots of the abandoned dressing room, covered in dust and drop-cloths, is suitably creepy, and Karloff's dynamic presence somehow manages to make a scene in which a man walks into a room, looks around, and then sits down and ruminates both gripping and anticipatory.

We plunge into flashback, as Hohner recalls the tragic events of yesteryear. How do we know it's a flashback? Well, because someone's put a sparkly red gel around the edges of the shot, ringing the screen in glimmering see-through crimson. It frankly looks pretty laughable by today's standards; low-budget, to be sure, and very unsubtle, but it's all part of watching films from before the magical days of computer editing and color specialists. It's hard to knock a film for the constraints of its time period; in any case, while the color kind of beats you over the head, it does let the audience know that a flashback is in progress and further adds a spot of lurid color that clues us in that Bad Things may be on their way.

Marcellina, played by the lovely June Vincent (who, by the way, bears just enough resemblance to Susanna Foster to be both evocative of her and still very distinct), is an operatic diva at the peak of her career, bringing the house down every night and even receiving a royal invitation to perform for the king (which king? Who knows? Apparently not important, since I'm not even sure which country we're in). The establishing opera performance--dubbed, I assume, by Foster, since she'll be playing a character with an identical voice--is vocally lovely; in fact, I think that Foster is sounding better in this film than she did in the Lubin/Rains production, though both are high quality.

The conflict comes from the fact that Hohner is a jealous man, and doesn't want to share Marcellina with her adoring public any longer. The relationship between the two of them is somewhat nebulous; the cover copy on several editions of the film refers to her as his wife, but while he is obviously an old flame or a lover of some kind, the nature of their connection is never explicitly stated. Since this is a sequel of sorts, I'm reminded of the early passages in Leroux's novel dealing with ladies' fans and footstools in the Phantom's box, implying that he may have had lady friends or mistresses prior to his obsession with Christine; Marcellina could certainly be said to fill such a role, since the actual Christine character is yet to come, and a tragically-ended previous love affair provides interesting avenues of cause and effect when it comes to the Phantom's manic pursuit of Christine.

The psychology of Hohner--obviously our Phantom figure, though it will get a lot more obvious in a minute or two--is by far the most intriguing aspect of the film. Marcellina's accurate accusation that he wants to "lock her up" in his "private, selfish little world" rather than letting her choose her own destiny is dead-on accurate for the Phantom, and while his adamant opposition to her performance--he states that he can't bear any man off the street being able to share in her beauty "just for the price of a ticket"--is initially confusing for a viewer used to the traditional Phantom's crusade to make Christine the talk of the town, it's not too far-fetched a leap. The lines in Leroux's novel concerning Christine's promise to sing only for Erik, in particular, stand out as being very similar in intent, if not in execution. The comment implied by Hohner's hatred of her performance is also interesting, with its suggestion that performance is equivalent to prostitution (this idea will be explored thoroughly in about thirty years in the 1974 de Palma/Finley film); the idea is certainly not a new one, having been visited in Leroux's work as well as many others, but its power is undeniable. Even an audience aware of the unreasonableness of Hohner's stance can sympathize with his feelings of jealousy.

All of this is somewhat secondary to the largest mental defect assigned to Hohner; namely, his personification (and vilification) of Marcellina's voice. He snaps in this scene, believing her voice to be an actual separate entity, one which is intentionally and maliciously attempting to separate him from his love. The idea is evocative of Christine's own fear in Leroux's novel when she felt that her voice, under the Phantom's tutelage, was no longer her own, though the presentation is much more violent and unbalanced. In an attempt to destroy the voice that is keeping Marcellina away from him, he strangles her to death (much too quickly to be realistic, I might add, but this is the forties and no one wants to see eyeballs and tongues bugging out), and his murmurs that now they can be together forever are both frightening in their madness and curiously sympathetic, a perfect mix for a Phantom character.

We already know from the present-day discussion between the stagehands that Marcellina's mysterious disappearance was never solved, and the mystery is kept intact when we come back out of the flashback before Hohner gives any clue as to what he plans to do next. In contrast with the colorful dressing room in the flashback, the same room looks even more funereal in the present with its columns, stone statues, and pervasive grayness. The contrast is so marked that I found myself wondering if the extremely similar color conceit from the 1990 Yu/Cheung film might have been inspired by Waggner's choice here.

The bustle of the daytime theatre is splendidly rendered, impressive mostly because of the gorgeous sets (which, of course, are largely reused from the Lubin/Rains film--they were very expensive sets for the time, and Universal was not above pinching a penny here and there if they could get away with it). There is only one manager of the opera house, condensed down from the original two, and he is referred to as "Count" Seebruck, a title which made me wonder if he is the first iteration of the later trend of slimy noblemen in positions of power over the opera house in later films (D'Arcy in the 1962 film, Baron Hunyadi in the 1983 film, etc.), despite his lack of personal dastardliness. The extremely identifiable (and disagreeable) Carlotta character is introduced here, the diva Jarmilla, who is a textbook perfect image of the bitchy soprano stereotype that will become the norm for the character in future retellings; also presented is the baritone Roselli, who seems to be filling the role vacated by Anatole, the second Raoul-figure from the 1943 film, though his romantic interest in Angela (our Christine) is somewhat peripheral in this version. The need for an understudy comes from Jarmilla's divariffic tantrum, in which she refuses to sing this evening, another interpretation of events that will become very popular in later versions of the story.

A very cute little side scene occurs in which a panicked maid runs to the stars and manager, screaming that she's found a corpse in the dressing room; in a flip from Leroux's story, however, it is not the dead Buquet but rather Hohner himself, having just fallen asleep in the abandoned dressing room. Granted, Karloff looks quite sallow in this film (though not to the extent of Leroux's Erik, obviously), so her fright is somewhat understandable.

Christine finally enters, and she is a young girl named Angela (a very obviously positively and divinely-connotated name) Klatt, a prodigious singing talent coming to the opera house in the hopes of making her career. Her fiance, young Franz Metzger, is in tow; as in the Lubin/Rains film, he has been given a musical career of his own (as a composer this time), in order to make his character more compatible with Angela's world than the original Raoul, a soldier and nobleman, would have been. As is usual when the Raoul character's role is changed, the social questions of love across class lines and the consequences thereof are abandoned, though their relationship is warm and believable.

As should surprise no one familiar with the story, Angela's lovely voice gets her a major role in the upcoming performance. It also gets her Hohner's distressingly intense attention, because her voice is, of course, a dead ringer for Marcellina's. His hissy fit is short in duration because other members of the staff, also recognizing the uncanny similarity to the vanished soprano's voice, haul him off before he can freak out too thoroughly. The musical performance itself is much more modern than anything presented in the 1943 film, more resembling the sort of show that was in vogue at the time rather than what would have been popular in a turn of the century story; since no time period is ever given for this film, one assumes it's probably set in the forties as well, which costuming and character behaviors bear out. In fact, now that I think about it, I may like Foster's vocal performance in this film better partially because the music is much more the style that she was known for, and she sounds lovely. Jarmila, too, sounds gorgeous, though I can't find a record of who the singer might be and don't know if Vincent herself was doing the recording.

Unfortunately, there is quite a bit of unnecessary comedy going on in the audience as Franz, bursting with pride at his fiancee's debut, annoys his seatmates continually with talking and invasions of their space. The inclusion of comedy that detracts from the story was the largest issue with the 1943 film, so it's not surprising (not exciting, but not surprising) that its carried over in here; however, this is one of few instances that feature it, and the film as a whole is stronger because more attention is paid to the suspense and plot than to Bey's antics. I will note, however, that his constant gnawing on his program as he watches every move Angela makes is adorable, and that he plays it well; had the comedy been confined to that, I would have been a happy girl.

Based on the strength of Angela's performance, Seebruck decides to revive the made-up opera The Magic Voice for her; this is, of course, the same opera that Marcellina was performing when she disappeared, and it has not been put on since because no leading lady with a suitable range could be found. The name of the opera is of course quite significant in light of Hohner's obsession, and his angry insistence that it should never be performed again underscores this (we'll see this echoed way down the line in the 1987Argento/Barberini film and the 1997 Spencer musical, which both use similar ideas of a cursed opera).

Hohner's formidable anger is completely gone by the time he catches Angela leaving the theatre, however, and he's nothing but gentlemanly and comforting as he convinces her that theatre protocol says he must subject her to a throat examination after every performance. In fact, he's so effectively gentlemanly that it ratchets the creepiness up a few levels, since we know exactly what he's capable of, and the "throat examination" made me squirm in my seat, reviewing all the horrible possibilities. The tension does nothing but ramp up to an almost suffocating level as he shows her around his office and home, that same unsettling intensity riveted on her face as he watches her every move. By the time he's offering her a strand of pearls that belonged to Marcellina, wrapping it around her throat with an exquisite combination of sensuality and danger, the audience is ready to scream, and poor Angela is just beginning to get an inkling that something is wrong.

A very nice small touch comes when he mentions that his home is specifically vented so as to allow him to hear all the performances from the adjacent opera house; it recalls the Phantom's ability to hear performances from his underground home in the 1943 film, and Angela's delighted exclamation that it's just like a private box brings to mind Leroux's Box 5, guarded by Madame Giry, where the Phantom traditionally views the operas in solitude.

Luckily (for me), Hohner did not employ any of my awful imaginings, instead choosing a method I wouldn't have come up with: hypnosis. Through a combination of flashing lights, a large, spinning patterned wheel, and his own hypnotically monotone voice, Hohner puts the unsuspecting Angela into a trance and suppresses her voice, making her unable to sing. It is obvious that he still believes the voice to be a separate entity, one now inhabiting Angela; his murmurs during the hypnosis that the voice must be sent back to the dead Marcellina in order to silence it forever are thoroughly creepy, all the more so because Karloff's delivery is dead-on balanced between reasonable and completely whackjob crazy. He adds a physical reminder to the mental block, giving her an atomizer (which we will see in several later versions, including the 1983 Markowitz/Schell film and the 2004 Schumacher/Butler film), the sight of which reinforces his commands. The fine line that Leroux walked, balancing the question of the Phantom's supernatural powers versus his human nature, is surprisingly well preserved, the hypnosis existing in a grey area of pseudo-science that could be taken either way depending on the viewer's tendencies. A confused and sleepy Angela is packed off home, and we are treated to a suitably disturbing moment when Hohner begins hearing the disembodied voice singing throughout his office; turning off a gas light silences it, but only for a second, until he is tearing through his office putting out every light he can find, panic on his face, and the audience realizes that the sound we have been hearing is only in his head. The voice panics him so badly that he begins shouting that it is coming for his beloved Marcellina, and, after shutting down all the lights, he hurries through his office and through a series of locked doors that have been conspicuously closed in every shot, finally emerging into a tomb-like room covered with memorabilia from Marcellina's performances. The centerpiece, of course, is Marcellina herself, preserved perfectly (and somewhat unbelievably, but then again, he is a doctor; maybe he has embalming skills) in a glass coffin. His desire to protect her, even now, shows the depth of his insanity; only dead and silent is she truly "safe", able to be owned and protected by him.

We also meet Luise on the way through the doctor's living quarters to his office; a very severe older woman in unremitting black, her presentation and connection to the Phantom figure (she's his maid and lives in his house, the only living person with whom he has regular contact outside the theatre) suggest that she may be a version of Madame Giry. While she has no daughter to take on the Meg role, she was, as we saw in the flashback, a close pal of Marcellina's, and the way that she shadows Hohner around his house suggests that she has her suspicions about her girlfriend's fate.

The next day, it almost seems that the hypnosis was a failure; Angela is singing once more in rehearsal, but she seems obviously troubled and confused by something. When Hohner himself arrives on the scene, glaring at her with an understated fury that we know is directed purely toward her voice, she instantly freezes up and is unable to sing another note, finally fleeing to her dressing room in tears and confusion. I would also stop singing if Karloff were glaring at me like that from the doorway, most likely because my heart would immediately stop. Her tearful inability to explain the problem to a bewildered Franz is very reminiscent of Christine's inability in Leroux's novel to explain the Phantom's strange hold over her to Raoul, and a subsequent confrontational scene, in which Franz clutches Angela and Hohner extends a hand to her, leaving her clearly torn between the two of them and frightened by the control he is exhibiting, also strongly reminds a viewer of the dynamics between the original three characters. The Phantom wins, as he tends to do in these situations, and Hohner spirits Angela off to keep her locked up in his house for the next few weeks, ostensibly because she requires "rest and healing" before she can sing again.

Surprisingly, because she's been something of a dour and possibly antagonistic figure, it's Luise that smuggles a deeply concerned Franz into Hohner's house while the doctor is out, and who helps him half-kidnap a drugged, hypnotically spellbound Angela and hustle her out the back door. The maid also lies to Hohner on his return, claiming that the girl has simply vanished; the revelation that she is not on his side begs the question of what exactly she's doing living with and working for him, and her surreptitious attempts to get into the firmly locked secret room give us most of our answer; she's On The Trail. Hohner, still frighteningly calm about things, seems almost not to care about Angela's departure; when Luise asks tremblingly what he's going to do, he informs her, "Nothing. That girl will obey me no matter where she is," a powerful statement that both reinforces our belief in his hold over her and again recalls the influence Erik had over Christine in Leroux's book.

Angela refuses to sing despite being rescued from Hohner's clutches, having completely lost confidence in her ability on top of being unable to circumvent the hypnotic blocks. Franz, afraid that she's going to let her career simply die out of fear, decides to force her into performing by going over her head and writing a letter to the king, extolling the virtues of her voice. As we expect because we recall it from the beginning of the film when it happened to Marcellina, the king is impressed and issues a royal order for a command performance, and Angela, protesting all the way, is hustled off into costume and makeup before she quite knows what's happening. Angela's friends and family--Franz, unyieldingly supportive, and Mama Hinzl, a bustling old woman who recalls a combination of Leroux's Mama Valerius and Madame Giry in her kindly yet overbearing manner--conspire to make sure she has no time to back out of it, and Franz remains with her every moment in case Hohner, whose hold he still doesn't understand but whom he has now recognized as a threat, should try to interfere. Franz demonstrates a little more brainpower than most Raouls when he recognizes Angela's strange attachment to the atomizer and not only has the liquid inside tested (plain, colored water, much to his confusion) but also makes sure she doesn't bring it to the theatre, and "accidentally" breaks the replacement one that Hohner has left in her dressing room. It's so nice to see leading men with a few brain cells to rub together, or at least some ability to think on their feet.

Unfortunately for everyone, Hohner has a secret passage into Angela's dressing room (which, naturally, was Marcellina's back in the day); it's not behind the mirror but behind the wall panel, opposite it, allowing him to appear seemingly from nowhere and scare the wits out of the poor girl gazing into the mirror. Upon hearing that she will be performing, he decides to write off the hypnosis as a bust and abduct her to take care of the problem in a more permanent manner, unrolling an extremely squirm-inducing roll of nasty, sharp implements and medical instruments, but is thwarted by a timely rescue by Franz and Luise, who confronts the doctor with the knowledge that she finally has proof of his murder of Marcellina (the pearls that he gave to Angela, which Marcellina had been wearing when she disappeared). They leave him with the prompter holding a gun on him while they head for the performance and police, respectively, and it's Karloff's time to shine as he beings to rant feverishly, claiming that he will not be responsible for the consequences if Angela sings (again, a complete 180 from the Phantom in Leroux's work, but one that works very well for the story presented in the film). Karloff's facial control is astounding as Angela's voice begins to pour in through the vents--a constantly increasing cascade of tics and twitches, all over that unyieldingly intense expression, communicate that he is about to detonate, and seriously contribute to the suspense since we know he's not about to be contained by an old man with a gun for long.

And he isn't. He manages to clock the prompter (who survives--whew!) over the head with a statue and make his escape as he hears the police sirens coming, and dives into Marcellina's room, locking the series of doors behind him, shouting both frighteningly and piteously that they'll never take her away from him. Waggner's direction here is powerful, as Angela's performance continues and the voice is everywhere in Hohner's house, pursuing him into the locked rooms much more surely than the police do; it's not the police Hohner is primarily worried about but the malignant voice, which he believes will once again try to come between him and his love. As happens in many versions (the 1983 Markowitz/Schell one comes to mind), he accidentally knocks over a gas lamp and ignites a fire, but, in the most telling decision of the whole film, he runs to the door--the police are already cutting through the first few in the succession--and throws the deadbolt, locking himself inside with the flames... and, more importantly, with Marcellina, whose coffin he attempts to shield with his own body until his presumable death in the conflagration. This unselfish act, misguided by insanity though it might be, doesn't quite achieve the redemption of Leroux's novel, but it does make Hohner a much more sympathetic villain as the audience realizes that, despite his mad, awful actions, his first love and priority has always been Marcellina.

Upstairs, Angela, finally free of Hohner's influence, sings her heart out, and Foster sounds absolutely stunning. The high note of the finale is piercingly perfect, and made John pull off his headphones and inform me that it was not a humanly possible noise. The juxtaposition of the miserable, fiery end of Hohner with the glittering royal performance is intentional, letting the audience know that the danger has passed and that everyone will be getting their happy ending (well, except the villain). As in the 1962 Fisher/Lom film to come a couple of decades later, there is almost no falling action, and the film ends abruptly, but it's not so unresolved-feeling as to ruin the rest of the movie.

One of the most obvious questions here is that of which of the two major female characters--Marcellina and Angela--is actually the Christine analogue. While it's Angela that is being menaced in the opera house and who is kidnapped and ultimately rescued, it's Marcellina that is the real focus of Hohner's obsession and whose voice and love motivate him to commit his dastardly deeds. Personally, I find the idea that Marcellina represents Christine more resonant and interesting in context of the story; in this version, Christine did not escape the Phantom and did not have the opportunity to redeem him, and was instead murdered by the strength of his violent obsession, a very possible outcome to the original story had events not unfolded precisely as they did. This suggests that the Phantom's obsession (possibly motivated in part by deeply-buried guilt, but more likely by anger at being thwarted and the desperate desire to make reality conform to his mental vision) is not ended or even tempered by the death of its focus, but rather intensified, and makes the film more of a true sequel if we consider it to be events that occurred after the original story (or one very like it). It's more accurate to say that Christine has been split into two characters here; Angela is the one who undergoes the physical trials and who provides the dramatic focus that moves the story along, but it's Marcellina who has the symbolic and psychological significance. I strongly suspect that this film's handling of this intriguing idea may be directly related to the very similar beginning to the 1983 Markowitz/Schell film, which featured a Phantom whose wife had died and whose obsession with his Christine figure was due largely to the fact that they sounded identical; another film that may have drawn from the idea is the 1987 Argento/Barberini film, whose Phantom figure was drawn to the Christine figure not because of her personally but because of a prior relationship with her mother, whom she was physically similar to.

Several other ideas are present that won't appear in the more mainstream body of Phantom literature until much later in the timeline; most notably, the lack of a deformity for the Phantom (which we won't see until until the 1989 Thomas/Gillis movie and the 1998 Argento/Sands film) and the Phantom doing or attempting actual physical harm to Christine (not truly present until the 2001 Bernadette novel and the 2002 Pettengill book) are serious deviations from the story. However, they remain within the realm of creative interpretation, and the fact that they recur in later versions suggests that they are not just flukes brought on by poor writing, but rather phenomena that share a common source in the collective modern interpretation of the story. Also represented here for the first time is the idea of a Phantom hiding in plain sight (revisited in the 1987 Argento/Barberini film, the 1989 Little/Englund film, and the 1997 Pratchett novel, to name a few), and the concept of a Phantom who has no romantic interest in the Christine character (present in the 1974 Levitt/Cassidy film, the 1988 Plone/Sussman film, and the 1997 Spencer musical, again, only a few).

I found it interesting that almost all of the names in the film are Germanic. Hohner, Klatt, Seebruck, Munzer, Metzger, Baumann, Hinzl, and Brunn are all extremely Germanic surnames, while even the characters' first names--Friedrich, Angela, Karl, Franz--would be perfectly at home in a Bavarian schnitzelhaus. The only exceptions to the rule are the opera singers and the maid. Marcellina and Roselli, both of whom sport obviously Italian surnames, may be named because of the prevalence of Italians in both the repertoire and performance of opera; Jarmila Vadek, on the other hand, has a highly Slavic name that is completely unique in this cast. The maid, Luise, is the only person to have a name of French extraction. Considering the time period in which the film was made, it's interesting to theorize as to whether the number of German names has anything to do with the political and wartime tensions afoot in the United States; a heavily German-sounding name (or several of them!) could quite possibly add to the aura of fear for a horror film when its audience was still in the throes of World War II.

Surprisingly, because it's somewhat forgotten in the annals of Universal horror, I thought this was in fact a better film than the one that preceded it (not by a lot, but nevertheless); the time spent on the suspense rather than on gratuitous humor made things much more cohesive and immersive, and Karloff's performance is so strong that I could probably watch him skulk about for days, even if nothing happened. Not the most fantastic of films, but definitely one to enjoy again, and a really interesting look at source material for a lot of later versions,

This was, incidentally, nominally based on several preceding films and a play by Edward Locke, also titled The Climax and also dealing with an opera singer. However, the actual plots of the play and this film bear one another very little resemblance; it's more likely that a few elements were borrowed from Locke's play, but that the majority still comes from the original plan to create a sequel to the Phantom story (and this is, in fact, the very first Western sequel to the story, being predated only by the 1941 Chinese sequel to Ye bang ge sheng).

(Cross-posted from The Phantom Project.)

Why doesn't this movie want to make me happy?

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:43:18 GMT

U.S. release date now, plz.

The Phantom Project: Angel of Music by D. M. Bernadette

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:16:38 GMT

Sigh. This book... I don't even know.

Angel of Music by D. M. Bernadette, 2002
Grade: F

This book is sort of a tragedy. Here we have an author whose grasp of some of the story's themes is actually not that bad; yeah, some of them are swings and misses, and some of them are downright stupid, but she gets it right here and there. However, even when her plot is coherent, the book is so severely retarded by what can only be described as a supreme lack of writing ability that it becomes actually difficult to read. This book is so poorly written that it is literally almost unreadable.

In fact, I'll lead off with its technical issues, because they really are a dominating feature of the book. I wasn't encouraged, starting out, by a subject-verb agreement issue in the back cover copy, but I still came into it with an open mind. Books, covers, not judging, all that stuff. But when the first few paragraphs featured double exclamation points, missing commas, unnecessary commas, and massive caps-lock key abuse, I knew my gut instinct had been correct.

It's hard to find one writing flaw to focus on at a time. A huge, constant, painful issue is the misplacement of commas, which do not appear in sentences that they should and then leap into others with totally random placement. Run-ons and fragments are everywhere because of this, and, worse, the incorrect usage isn't even consistent; sometimes Bernadette will put a comma somewhere it ought to be (i.e., "Oh, Raoul, I didn't hear you! Come in!") only to somehow forget how by the next time the situation comes up (i.e., "Oh Raoul I didn't hear you, come in!") The examples here are small, but try, if you will, to imagine something approaching six hundred pages written that way. It was actually impossible for me to try to keep track of all the comma disasters past the first chapter. I would cry were I an editor assigned to this mess.

Another issue, almost comical, is the fact that all shouting is accomplished via CAPITAL LETTERS. I am not kidding when I say that characters in the throes of drama are absolutely prone to lashing the caps-lock key down and bellowing until our eyes beg for mercy. Hand in hand with this unfortunate tendency is Bernadette's love for exclamation points, which seldom appear alone, preferring to travel in packs of three or even four for solidarity. When Christine makes a naughty joke and Erik cries, "CHRISTINE!!!!" in response, it's like slapping the reader in the face with a dead fish: abrupt, painful, confusing, and it stinks. Occasionally, capital letters also serve to inform the reader that the character Means Business, such as when Christine is told, "You are much too naive Christine, Wake Up!" We totally Get It. Christine is So Chastened.

And homophones, oh, god, homophones. People must "make due" with less. They also "poll" the boat around on the lake, "message" one anothers' sore throats, perform their morning "toilet", find their curiosity "peeked", take steps to "insure" their future, "gage" their emotions, avoid "undo" haste, "pour" over the words of letters, watch the "lightening" in a thunderstorm, experience "shear" exhilaration, "secret" themselves in hiding places, take care to comport themselves "discretely", "loose" their way in the dark, "access" their situation, make sure to sing in the most emotional "manor" possible, perform feats using "slight" of hand, laugh "hardily" at each others' jokes, are "lead" down paths, keep their ears "pealed" for intruders, and "wonder" through corridors. Those are the ones I wrote down, before it became too depressing to continue. The characters also, over the course of the book, constantly "preform" arias and operas. I seriously thought it was just an accidental typo until, with sinking heart, Bernadette repeated it... eleven more times. I counted. She... she doesn't know. Oh, god.

And that's not even mentioning that compound words apparently frighten Bernadette into running off into the woods, because she does not allow them in her book, preferring to bewilder readers with phrases like "what so ever", "blue prints", or "something is a foot" (you don't say!). It's jarring where it's minor, and in the worst cases, like our foot issue, actually obfuscates the meaning of the sentence. Sometimes she even dices up unsuspecting noncompound words, such as when Christine comes through an ordeal "in tact". There are also cases in which Bernadette uses the wrong word entirely, such as on page 49, when Raoul's "comment was likened to a slap across the face and she shrank from him", though, of course, no one is actually likening it to anything since it's just in the narration and no one is discussing it or thinking about it. This word... it do not think it means what you think it means. It is far from the only one.

And if all of this wasn't harrowing enough for you yet, the actual writing format is even more difficult to plow through. Paragraphs are gargantuan, sometimes spanning multiple points of view, tenses, and speaking characters, and may run up to a page and a half in length. It's worse than reading Faulkner. Bernadette also has major issues with managing dialogue; half the time there's none at all for pages, while we're informed that characters "discussed" this or "assured" one another of that or "had long conversations" in which they become bosom friends, but we are never shown any of this presumable dialogue, instead having to just take the narration's assertions at face value, which makes for very boring reading. The other half of the time there is nothing but dialogue, also for pages, in which characters give massive monologues for pages at a time, making the reader's understanding of what is going on even more likely to give up, go out back, and commit hara-kiri.

This, by the way, is the reason it took three weeks for me to finish this book and come write about it. Y'all should consider yourselves lucky that it didn't take longer; my work ethic and sense of determination are huge and beastly, but they are not actually divine.

But the plot! you say. What's happening in the plot? Well... a huge amount of stuff is happening in the plot, but very little of it is actually plot, if you follow me. We should possibly be grateful for Bernadette's habit of simply telling us that things happen without actually explaining them, because if she had explained everything in this book it would have topped a thousand pages in length. Bernadette has basically written a series, spanning from the end of Webber's musical (she has, indeed, a passing acquaintance with Leroux's novel, judging from some references and the occasional use of the Phantom's name, but most of the book is extremely obviously based on the 1986 stage musical; there are also occasional glimmers of what might be influence from Kay's 1990 book) to the end of all of the protagonists' lives, and then decided to make that series only occupy the physical space of one book, resulting in a book that goes on forever but that is saying very little most of the time. The general gist of it is that, after the events of the Webber musical, Christine and Raoul discover in short order that they don't actually want to get married, she returns to the Phantom's lair and nurses him back to health, and then they fall in love, get married, have a kid, and die. It takes five hundred sixty-three pages for them to do this, because time jumps are employed only where they would not make things easier for the reader, and incidental scenes that add nothing to the narrative, such as a bazillion evenings in which the Phantom and Christine have a dance/dinner party and then hump, are described in loving, only-slightly-varied detail every time. It seems that Bernadette herself did not know where she was going for a majority of the book, since there's no real sustained buildup to speak of and the action crests and ebbs about fifty thousand times over small happenings, right up until the very end, when it just sort of peters out.

Okay, you say. So the writing is god-awful and the plot is shitty. So what's good about this?

What's good is that Bernadette, despite not having the writing skill to communicate her ideas effectively, does have some interesting ideas, and does explore a few directions that are interesting in light of earlier versions. Despite a somewhat marked tendency to paint the French aristocracy as consciousless villains, she does not apply the same black-and-white view to Raoul, who, while certainly somewhat out of character for a while when he becomes a petulant, drunken society boy who dumps Christine because she doesn't like his friends, still retains a decent amount of sympathy and personal integrity over the course of the novel. Of course, this is helped by the fact that he disappears around chapter three and won't really return for any extended length of time until chapter twenty-two or so, but the point is that some real thought was put into his character, even though he's been removed from the role of hero in the story. The very end of the book, in particular, features an aged Raoul and Christine as bosom friends and confidantes after the Phantom's death, but never again as lovers, a bittersweet choice that really underlines the comment Bernadette is trying to make about their relationship.

Other choices are more ambiguous, but still interesting. The Phantom is referred to simply by his nom-de-plume for most of the beginning of the book, in response to the Webber musical version, I assume, which does not assign the character a proper name. However, this sobriquet will be abandoned once he comes out of his coma and starts romancing Christine, at which point she, and everyone else, will begin referring to him exclusively as "the Angel" (later, he changes his last name to "Angel" as well, making the married couple they inevitably become Mr. and Mrs. Angel, referred to preciously by the rest of the opera house as "the Angels"). Normally, as I'm sure you've noticed, I start frothing when authors begin calling the Phantom "angel" with no provocation, since it makes no sense for Christine to fall back into the fantasy already exposed as a devastating lie without some extenuating circumstances. However, Bernadette is actually making a psychological comment here, attempting to pull off a sort of dual personality thing; the Phantom's coma is a symbolic "death", from which he is resurrected by Christine (who, hey, gets to be a Christ figure in this novel--look at that!), and he declares upon waking that the Phantom has died and that he will henceforth be the Angel, an actually different person. That everyone seems to be fine with this after a few minutes and the world is full of butterflies and laughter stretches credulity more than a little bit, but the narrative makes it clear that Christine's use of the name stems from her belief that he now is the noble being she'd believed he could be, even if that being isn't actually divine, and his own sincere attempts at reinventing his personality make the idea of a new persona viable. Is any of it believable? No. It's written terribly and not planned very well, either. But it is a good idea, which I recognize. Incidentally, the name Erik is mentioned a few times (apparently the local friar christened him, which surprisingly locates his birthplace right in Paris), but he refuses to use it because of its connections to his past and to a family that didn't want him.

And speaking of family, that's another interesting theme that Bernadette uses several times over the course of the novel. As many authors do, she removes Christine from the mothering role assigned her in the original novel in regards to the Phantom (because the subconscious idea of incest is too freaky? Because they just don't recognize it? Who knows?), and instead substitutes Madame Giry. She doesn't quite go the whole hog a la the Spencer musical and make Giry the Angel's actual mother, but both he and Christine begin referring to the woman as "Mother Giry" within a few pages of her introduction, and her role from then on--often peripheral, but she is around--is strictly a maternal one for the happy couple. Note that Meg is not included; god knows why, but she got kicked out of the book after a brief, early appearance so that Madame Giry could focus exclusively on the lovebirds. In the same vein, Christine also has a father figure in the newly introduced Dr. Joseph; Dr. Joe was a close personal friend of her father's and has apparently been taking care of her ever since his death. Again, he's merely present to provide a support net for Christine (and, by extension, her husband) so that the characters aren't alone in the world; unfortunately, while many authors find the idea of their protagonists forsaking society for their love terribly romantic, they never actually write about it, since living with no friends or family or connections kind of sucks.

Another move, one that is brand-new in Phantom literature, is the creation of Henri, Christine's older brother. Christine is traditionally an only child, so giving her a living relation (albeit one who is exiled to Belgium for fear of getting murdered by vengeful noblemen--remember, aristocracy = evil) substantially detracts from her orphaned status. My theory is that this is done (again, possibly subconsciously) to give her a more stable footing and to allow the Angel to be the uncontested master of orphaned angst, which has more appeal from a certain dramatic standpoint than messy, complicated things like parallel characterization. Henri and his family also serve as a foil to constantly give the Angel an opportunity to mope about and soliloquize about how lovely families are and how lucky everyone but him is to have one.

And then, of course, there's the kid. Christine, as she is prone to doing in these versions where she bangs the Phantom, gets pregnant and has a son. It's interesting to note that that makes four out of five books that make the Phantom's offspring--and he always only has one--male, the only exception being Pettengill's novel with its stillborn girl. All the living children are sons, and they're all exactly like their father except without that inconvenient ugliness issue. I'd hazard a guess that some of this has to do with the potent virility (or at least, in modern interpretations, masculinity) symbolism surrounding the Phantom, and also with the idea that writers feel the need to give the Phantom what he wants--that is, they recreate him in miniature form, but without his flaws, so that he can vicariously have the life he wanted. It's not a great idea, story-wise; it's trite, and becoming a cliche within the body of Phantom literature itself at this point, but it is enlightening when it comes to analyzing trends. (As an aside, I'd also theorize that the Pettengill novel's female child is an exception because that author was not intending the child to live; the kid was a device through which to effect Erik's salvation, and as such was a miniature of her mother, the original instrument of redemption.)

The most interesting feature of this particular Phantom mini-me is that he actually dies within the story, at around the age of seventeen (I think... the narrative had totally given up on being coherent by the last eighth of the book or so). He falls out of the flies to his death on the stage, wailing and devastation, anger and grief, etc. It's something to note in case it recurs in previous versions, but I honestly can't figure out what the point of it was. Christine and the Angel go into a long round of recovery and wailing, of course, but there doesn't seem to be any purpose or statement behind the random tragedy, other than Bernadette feeling the need to inject yet more angst for her protagonists to overcome.

Another thing to note is that, in keeping with the trend of "sexifying" the Phantom, the Angel is mad hot. Not only does he lift "iron weights" to keep hs physique in shape (that's about the third Phantom since our beloved Eric from Phantom of the Mall started the trend... guess you can't be a sexy protagonist without a regular fitness routine), but his deformity is described as covering "at least a quarter" of his face; while I expect the half-face deformity in works derived from Webber's musical, this is the first version I've encountered to think that the half-face deformity was still too much and to tamp it down yet further. The actual deformity itself is not described, mostly, I assume, because it isn't attractive, though mention is made several times of his "grotesque" lips, another obvious nod to the makeup from the Webber musical. The Angel also has a "deep cleft in his chin" that Christine loves to stick her tongue in. Totally hot.

There are a lot of other things wrong with this book... a lot. There's veiled suggestion that domestic abuse is okay if he loves you (authors! stop doing that!); there are buckets and boatloads and veritable arks full of sex, none of which is described well or relevant to the plot but all of which is visited in loving detail, constantly, even when the Angel is almost 80 years old; there's insistence that the Angel's past misdeeds are okay because he's really sorry and also he never killed Buquet and Piangi's death was totally an accident; there's the blithe assertion that anyone who dislikes the Angel/Christine relationship as presented is just jealous that nobody loves them that much; there are so many instances of random muggers/rapists/footpads jumping the protagonists for no reason other than to provide momentary antagonism and lasting angst that I really can't even remember how many there were (it doesn't help that each encounter is suspiciously similar); there are random Threats to Christine's Virtue, for the same reasons. But it's all I can do at this point to point and click the mouse and try to remember what actual, correct punctuation use looks like. The best of the book, by far, is the last chapter, when the Angel's already dead and Christine and Raoul hang out together as though they were in The Notebook, until she also dies and the novel ends with him visiting her grave in his wheelchair. But even this chapter suffers from the same issues as the entire monolithic 560+ page rest of the book, so it really can't be called a success.

I didn't want to give the book a failing grade; it really did show glimmers of interesting ideas here and there. But I had to be honest, and honesty says that I would never, ever, ever recommend this book to anyone, no matter how interesting the idea buried on page 264 is, and I would never, ever, ever read it again, not even if I were sentenced to life in a blank white bubble with no other sources of stimuli. It tried, but it ultimately completely failed to tell its story; and, if I'm still being honest, said story wasn't much good, anyway.

Is it un-academic to put a sad face in my review? I feel like one is warranted.

(Cross-posted from The Phantom Project.)

Scion Background #3: Dierdre O'Riordan

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:39:08 GMT

Dierdre was my latest-created Scion character (for my third concurrently running game... yes, John and I probably are trying to kill ourselves). She is a blast; ineffective except at the most inconvenient times, uncomfortably insightful when not totally oblivious, and completely discombobulating to everyone else, but in a way that forces them to re-evaluate almost constantly. She's not yet quite as fleshed out for me as the other two, in terms of her future development, but she's getting there surprisingly rapidly (surprising because I really hadn't any idea where she was going when I started with her).

Dierdre is a strawberry farmer from Oregon. It is the sum total of her occupation and existence, unless you count "darling of Podunk, Nowhere" as a secondary profession. She is also the daughter of Danu, the mother-goddess who bore the Tuatha de Danann (in Scion, the Tuatha are considered the Celtic "pantheon" of gods; they're not actually gods in the mythology, not really, but I imagine pretending they were made life easier for the game developers. Danu herself actually is a goddess, however). Danu is the goddess of fertility, childbirth and water, and representative of the Celtic lands themselves, particularly Ireland and the British Isles.

Even many years later, the first thing Dierdre could remember was dancing with her Da.

She was two years old--almost thee, she insisted--and the inside of the little old farmhouse was her playground, where she could climb furniture, investigate objects, and trip over her own baby-chubby feet every third step. Her Da came home every few hours to check on her, burned red and dark by the sun, his hands always brown with dirt. Dierdre liked dirt, and contrived to get covered in it whenever possible.

"I don't have time for you to have a bath every few minutes, girl," he told her teasingly, sweeping her up into the air as she giggled, chestnut baby-curls bouncing around her face. "You'll just have to be dirty all day." Dierdre squealed with pleasure and he mock-sighed, swinging her around once, twice, before putting her back on the ground, where she wandered in a small, dizzy circle for a moment. "Won't know my own daughter when I come back. She'll be looking like a little brown changeling." Dierdre sat down on the floor with a thump and grinned happily up at him, one little thumb finding its way into her happy mouth.

After the sun went down, her Da was all hers again, coming home to make them simple food at his simple stove, his sun-browned hands making equally brown vegetable stew. Dierdre also liked vegetables, as she was prone to telling him. In fact, she was prone to telling him that she liked a great many things, at the slightest provocation.

"Da, let's dance!" She jumped up and down, almost losing her balance in her excitement. "Come oooon!" She was, indeed, the picture of a little brown fairy child, barefoot and smudged, with an angelic smile.

Her Da shook his head at her. "You're making enough noise for both of us," he teased her, but he went to the mantlepiece anyway, and took down his tinwhistle, causing his daughter to crow with delight and begin running circles around his knees until she keeled over, eyes crossed from the exertion. "A feadog's no match for the whistle you make when you're excited, my girl," he told her, but he played her a jig anyway, eyes flashing amusement beneath his craggy, graying brow.

"Gay Goose!" Dierdre declared, proud that she knew the name of the dance, and then she proceeded to stomp and spin all over the living room. She fell down several times and seemed to barely notice, though her Da stopped eventually to prevent her from tipping into the fireplace. She giggled up at his mock-reproving glare, and then waved her little arms at him. "Up!"

"Demanding little mushroom, aren't you?" He swung her up in her arms and carried her off toward her bed, ignoring her protestations that she wasn't tired and she wanted more. "Ah, Dierdre, what will I do with little you, hm?"

"Dance?" she suggested, making him laugh. Despite her attempts to get back up, the warm quilts he was tucking around her shoulders were making her drowsy, eyes already drifting closed as her thumb inched toward her mouth. Sleepy and yawning, she curled pudgy fingers around her father's much larger thumb and asked drowsily, "Is Ma home tomor? You could show her stawbries."

The smile on her Da's face was gentler and sadder, though Dierdre, who liked smiles, didn't really see much difference in it. "No, little darling, your ma isn't going to be home tomorrow, but some bright day she'll come to see what her little girl looks like. Don't you worry." He kissed her forehead, leaving a faint smudge in the dirt there. "You'll like her. There never was a more beautiful lady than your ma. Bath for you tomorrow, my girl."

"Kay," Dierdre agreed around her thumb, and was asleep before he could even get up.

*************

By the time she was six, Dierdre would no longer be confined to the house while her Da tended the fields all day, and insisted on going with him, trotting determinedly out in an enormous floppy hat. Da sent her back to the house for shoes every day, but even when she fetched them he'd find them under a plant somewhere only an hour later, while his daughter ran about with mud between her toes. Dierdre, she told him in tones of cheerful solemnity from beneath the brim of her ridiculous hat, liked mud. She freckled instantly in the sun, so that she looked like she'd been splattered with it even when she was clean.

Her favorite part was in the spring, when they planted new fruit. She trailed along behind her Da as he grunted and sweated, shoveling dirt carefully to just the right depth. Then she would dart out from behind his legs and pop the root cluster of a nascent strawberry plant into the hole, usually sideways or askew so that Da had to help right it, and then dance about in victory. "Now we'll have more strawberries!" she said every time, and every time her Da allowed that this was correct, and they would indeed have more strawberries. A few times he had to go back and find her, sitting in the mud in a row somewhere, staring with fascination at a plant they had only put into the ground an hour ago. She seemed incapable of understanding that it would take time and that it was not liable to start sprouting leaves and fruit before her very eyes. "But it wants to have strawberries," she told him, excited for the plant's ambitions.

"Just like a little girl," he told her with a pat of his calloused hand to her small head, "trying to grow up so fast! Don't worry, my little strawberry queen. It'll get there in time. Sometimes you have to wait for the things you want most."

"Like Ma?" she asked unexpectedly, clear green eyes blinking innocently up at him from the vicinity of his kneecap.

He blinked back, and said, "Like a puppy with a bone, aren't you?" He sank his spade into a nearby clod of dirt and lifted her up, groaning and pretending to stagger under her weight while she shrieked and giggled. "Yes, like your Ma."

Dierdre clambered up his arms and onto his shoulder, surveying the fields like a very dirty, diminutive foreman. "Ma's the strawberry queen, not me. The queen of all the strawberries!" She kissed his cheek absently, affectionately. "But I can be the princess, right?"

"Sure, and you can," he agreed, shifting his shoulder to make her more secure. "I think your Ma'd like that. She'd say you were the prettiest princess any strawberry field ever had."

"Because she loves me!" Dierdre crowed, waving her small arms jubilantly at the sky. Her Da laughed and put up a hand to steady her, lest her enthusiasm overbalance her.

"She does, no doubt about that. Now you and I have to plant the rest of this row before the sun goes down... you think you can stay out of mischief while I dig, or is it into the bath with you now?"

*************

The world changed when Dierdre was nine years old, and there was a terrible downpour over their house. She thought it was great fun, running from window to window, wide eyes looking out at the lightning and lashing rain with excitement. "The sky is having its own jig!" she informed her Da, but he didn't share her excitement.

"At this rate, the whole crop'll drown," he said, pulling on his work-stained boots.

"You'll get very wet if you go out there," Dierdre informed him. "I'll go, too!"

"If you go out there, you'll get so covered in mud I'd never be able to recognize you again, my girl," he said, shaking his head at her. "The tarps are too big for you to handle anyway, little princess. You'll have to watch the house while I'm gone."

"But I like water!" she insisted, and he tousled her hair, pausing in his frowns to give her a fond smile.

"Tomorrow we'll go out and you can squish as much mud as you can stomach, little strawberry princess. True on my word." He pulled the hood of his work coat over his head and headed for the door. "But stay here, for once, Dierdre!"

Dierdre compromised by spending most of the storm out on the porch of the farmhouse, barefoot on the rickety, half-painted boards while the driving wind lashed rainwater at her like a weapon. She didn't mind; after all, she did like water. It was more like a game that the storm and she were playing, really, and it was winning and splashing her all over! She could occasionally make out the large shape of her Da when lightning flashed, moving about far away in the fields with his tarps and his poles, but it was too dark and rainy to see him any other time. She cheered for him from the porch, anyway. "Save all the strawberries, Da!" she cried merrily, and sometimes clapped for his invisible but surely wonderful efforts.

Old Remus Jones, the sheriff of their little corner of farmland and dirt roads, was considerably surprised to find her there when he arrived with a few thoroughly waterlogged deputies in tow, all of them slickered up against the storm. The child looked like a small, bedraggled otter, smiling happily up at them while rain sluiced unendingly through her soaked clothes and hair. "We're evacuating on flash flood warning," he bellowed over the noise of the storm, rewarded only with a distinct lack of comprehension in the girl's eyes. "Where's your father?"

"Da's saving the strawberries!" she declared cheerfully, and pointed out into the heart of the strawberry fields.

They were all four of them looking, Dierdre and the three men, when lightning split the sky as bright as noon for a second. Dierdre's Da was illuminated in that second, his hood having fallen back from his head, a very wet man battling the elements for his crops, one hand clutching the final corner of a heavy grey tarp while the other plunged its aluminum support pole into the earth. Like the heavens reaching down to play tag, the lightning tapped a blinding finger against the end of the pole.

The sheriff and his deputies immediately sprang into action and charged off into the fields toward where the farmer had just been seen, their progress hampered by mud and water. Dierdre remained on the porch, where her Da had told her to, and clapped her hands and cheered for the men who were obviously going to help her Da finish saving their crops.

When they came back later, all swearing and grim-faced, they were carrying her Da between them. He must have fallen down, she assumed--after all, Dierdre herself fell down all the time--but one of the deputies swept her gangling little body up into his arms and held her away despite her squirming. She peered over his arm, large green eyes questioning, but could not see anything of real interest in the dark, and all she could hear was Mr. Remus shouting something into his walky-talky. Craning her head up to see the deputy's face, she asked innocently, "Did you save all the strawberries?" His expression said he was at a loss for words, and she added, "Why is my Da sleeping in the middle of the porch?"

The deputy did not explain, and, much to her confusion, Dierdre was put into a musty-smelling car and sent through the rain to the community school on top of the hill. Da didn't come, but there were still strawberries to look after, so that was perfectly normal. She pointed out that he probably needed her help, but none of the men responded other than to look at one another over her head.

*************

Dierdre was at the school for two days. That was all right with her; she liked the school, despite its distinct lack of dirt, and the other children who were nice to play with. The fields would need to be taken care of, though, and who would help her Da? He couldn't dig holes and plant strawberries. That was ridiculous.

Her cheerful inquiries produced no results until she asked the nursery teacher, who looked shocked at the question and then muttered something uncomplimentary about men in general before whisking Dierdre off to the other room, sitting the skinny little thing down on a wooden bench to have a look at her. Carefree green eyes, overlarge in a freckle-spattered face, smiled expectantly at her, floating above a body that could easily have been a scarecrow's. The child needed to eat. The nursery teacher filed it for future reference, and then put her hands carefully around Dierdre's small arms.

"Dierdre, darling, your father is... he's not going to come back, I'm afraid." The obvious lack of comprehension in Dierdre's eyes made her pause, search for words.

"That's silly." More bewildered than anything else, Dierdre crinkled her little nose and smiled sweetly at the teacher. "Da always comes back. So we can have shepherd's pie and play. And then we plant the fields together."

"Not this time, sweetheart." The teacher winced, and thought a few more choice things about the deputies that had just dumped the girl off without explaining what was going on. The childish innocence in her face was a difficult thing to shatter, but she would have to face reality eventually. "He was electrocuted. He's... gone. I'm sorry, honey. We'll take care of you now."

Dierdre's head tipped to the side, obviously perplexed. She didn't know that long word, or understand the sad expression on the woman's face. She spent a moment trying to figure out where, exactly, her Da could have gone, and then looked up, eyes suddenly round and surprised. "Oh! He went to see my Ma, didn't he? That's where he is." She considered this for a second, and it made sense. "She's very pretty, you know. And he said he misses her."

Relieved that the child apparently understood now, the teacher gave her a warm hug, patting her back comfortingly. "Yes. He's with your mother now." The town had never seen Dierdre's mother, but O'Riordan had given every indication of being a widower. "He's going to stay with her."

"I want to meet her," Dierdre said wistfully against the teacher's chest. "She loves my Da and me very much." The teacher released her, disturbed by the lack of upset the child was displaying, and searched her face as Dierdre solemnly added, "It's okay. I'd want to stay with Ma, too. He'll be very happy there."

And it was okay, Dierdre knew. Da had always wanted Ma to come back, so today he'd gone to be with her instead. She wanted to go, too, but Da said you had to wait for the things you wanted most.

She cried a little bit that night, and wasn't really sure why. Nobody should cry when something good happened.

*************

The town raised Dierdre in a sort of communal round-robin fashion, because she seemed to wander around so much that it became impractical to do otherwise. She did very poorly in school; it wasn't that she wasn't biddable, or that she didn't do her best to please the teachers, but she simply seemed unable to grasp concepts that easily caught the attention of the other children her age. More often than not she gazed out the window, and the teacher found it enough of a trial simply to keep the girl inside at a table rather than somewhere outside, playing in the dirt, splashing in some water, making daisy chains or nettle crowns.

Brief attempts were made at teaching her needlework and cooking, both of which met with only middling success. Her needlework was passable, but she couldn't concentrate on it long enough to finish any project; likewise, she developed a natural affinity for baking and dessert-making, but seemed only indifferent to the heartier, more savory staples of life. Some discussion was had concerning sending her to Portland to learn to be a pastry chef, but it was abandoned soon enough. Her father hadn't left her any liquid assets, just the old house and a few acres surrounding it, currently half-wild with neglect. They could have tried to sell it to finance the idea, but everyone was aware that Dierdre herself would never allow that.

There was only one thing Dierdre wanted to do: grow strawberries. She told anyone and everyone, and in a town that made most of its livelihood from the crop, few argued with her.

By the time she was twelve, and still spoke and behaved like a child discovering the wonders of the world for the first time, the townsfolk knew that she was simple in the head. Most of them viewed this as good fortune for her, because she never realized that she should have been sad.

*************

Dierdre took charge of her father's farm when she was sixteen. The wild strawberry plants were pruned where they could be and removed and replanted where they could not, and the fields required many hours of back-breaking labor to whip back into shape. Dierdre did very little of it; even close to full-grown now, she was still a small slip of a thing, barely able to heft a spade much less spend hours plying one. It was the young men of the town that did it for her; she thought they were very nice indeed and told them all so, and made them pitcher after pitcher of lemonade, which she served on the rickety porch in a kerchief and apron in between shifts of cleaning the old house from top to bottom. The young men were grateful for the lemonade, both because it was delicious and because it gave them a reason to linger near Dierdre for a few more minutes of their day. She was totally unaware of their interest in the way her frizzy curls had turned into a chestnut cloud around her face, and the way that her hips and breasts had swollen and firmed into volutpuous womanhood. Many a mother in the town reprimanded her boy for his moral turpitude in lusting after a girl who was simple in the head, but they still refit the farm for her, all the same.

After the house was once again clean and ready for her to live in, Dierdre spent the rest of the week working alongside the boys; they dug and planted in the strawberry fields, while she carefully planted saplings in already-dug holes around the sides of the house. Her sunny smile and insistence that "Soon we will have apples and lemons and plums!" made no one begrudge her the orchard project, even though half the things she was planting probably wouldn't grow in the cool, damp Oregon climate, and the other half wouldn't bear fruit for years. When the farm was finally back in shape, Dierdre sent everyone home with cinnamon crumbles and settled down to sit on her porch.

"Now I'm back home," she told the fields, which stretched around her silently. "We'll all grow together!"

*************

Dierdre turned eighteen with little fanfare. She was a beautiful young woman now, so much so that the men of the town still looked sad when she came up in conversation, a lovely creature with a simpleton's mind. She wasn't the tireless farmer her father had been, but she did surprisingly well for working the farm on her own, bringing in a respectable crop of berries each year, and cheerfully baking pies from them for the entire town in her enthusiasm. She was still freckled and barefoot, but now those qualities made her look less like a muddy child and more like a spirit of the orchard herself.

She came home from town one night, a basket full of eggs over her shoulder, to find an old woman just straggling up the road toward her house. This did not concern Dierdre at all; the ladies of the town were always coming to her house to talk and have some pie, though they said they were "checking" on her. Dierdre was of the firm opinion that all neighbors liked one another and went to one anothers' houses regularly for no reason at all. This woman seemed too tall, though, and Dierdre realized as she got close that she didn't recognize her from the town.

"Hello!" she called, waving happily, basket clutched tight in one hand. The opportunity to meet a new friend was one of her favorites. "I'm Dierdre. Would you like to come in for tea and pie?" She came to a stop just in front of the woman, whose face was hidden by a silver-edged hood.

"I'd like that very much," said the woman, and Dierdre skipped up the steps and invited her inside.

As she puttered around the kitchen, finding ice cream and boiling the kettle with great care, Dierdre asked, "What's your name? You don't come from the town so you must be going somewhere."

"I am going here," said the woman, whose voice was low and musical and infinitely comforting. Dierdre liked it very much and made sure she gave her extra ice cream on her pie.

"Oh, it's nice here!" Dierdre agreed, on a topic that she understood perfectly. "We grow strawberries and eat them all year round, and anyone will play games with you if you ask them to." She gave herself a slice of pie, too, with a fat scoop of ice cream, before joining the woman at the table. "You'll like it. Everybody does."

"I should say so."

The voice was warm with amusement, and it made Dierdre drowsy. She yawned without being able to help herself, and then said, surprised, "I'm sleepy." She concentrated on finishing the pie before the ice cream melted everywhere, but felt even more sleepy with a full stomach.

"You can rest with me, if you like," said the woman, who pushed her chair out from the table and leaned to the side, offering her lap.

Dierdre rubbed her eyes, then slipped barefoot out of her chair and over to the woman, sinking down on the floor next to her and putting her head in her skirted lap for a rest. Dierdre never suspected ill of anyone, but even if she'd been inclined to do so, it would have been totally impossible to be afraid of the lady now stroking her hair gently, humming a soft tuneless sound that lulled her ever closer to sleep. "Little lamb, you must be lonely," said the lovely voice, wrapping Dierdre in a sheepswool blanket of sound.

"'M'not," she responded sleepily. Sleeping like this felt so good, better than the bed by far. "I have lots of friends. 'N strawberries."

"But no one to be with you always," said the woman's voice, sounding sad.

"Th'strawberries're there all the time. I like growing them," Dierdre responded, a sleepy smile on her face. How silly, the idea that she might be sad when she had all these things to do and people to talk to!

The woman bent down to lay a soft kiss on her forehead, leaving a cool, pleasant feeling where her lips had brushed. It spread over Dierdre's head and then her entire body, a feeling like falling into the pond on a hot day, but not as shocking. "Your mother loves you, little one. You've grown up into a fine young strawberry princess."

Dierdre squinted blearily up at her, all but unconscious but suddenly beaming with sweet joy. The hood could not completely cover the woman's face from this angle. "Da's right, you are the most beautiful woman there ever was!" she exclaimed, crawling instinctively further into the comforting arms and lap. "He went. To see you, 's'a long time 'go now." The happiness did not abate, but she couldn't keep her eyes open anymore.

"I know," said her mother, lips curving in a smile beneath the obscuring hood. "He's at home now. I'll tell him how beautiful his daughter is." She brushed Dierdre's hair again, lovingly, with a hand, but the child was fast asleep and did not move a muscle.

*************

Dierdre woke with her head pillowed on a kitchen chair, blinking at the sunlight streaming in through the windows above the sink. She thought at first that her mother was still in the room, because she could hear the humming from last night, but as she opened her eyes she found that one of the tiny hummingbirds that haunted the strawberry fields was hovering just in front of her freckled nose, darting back and forth as it tilted its tiny head curiously at her. She crossed her eyes attempting to look at it, then giggled at its antics and said, "Oh! Hello, there!"

The diminutive bird whizzed once around her head, and then alit on the table, where it promptly buried its slender little beak in the cold, gelled remains of last night's pie. Dierdre followed it, eyes rising above the edge of the table and crinkling in delight, but a determined buzzing turned her attention to the window, where eight or nine other shapes flitted nervously back and forth on the other side of the glass.

"You all want some pie!" she said, clapping her hands and momentarily startling the first hummingbird, and threw the windows open with glee. The birds fell back, agitated, and then zoomed into the room and started jockeying for position around the pie dish. Dierdre laughed with excitement, and then ran out on the porch to see if her mother was still at the house.

The woman was gone, Dierdre found after looking everywhere. She finally accepted this and sat down in the dirt between two strawberry plants, both of them just beginning to poke ripened red heads out at the sunshine. She huffed a sigh of exertion out and peered at the emerging fruits, pleased as always to see them. One of the plants was pushing a cluster of berries up to her, almost as if pleading for help, and she saw that they looked leathery and shrunken, brown instead of the cheerful red. "Aww," she said, patting the diseased fruits comfortingly. "Poor things. You want to grow up, just like me."

The berries warmed slightly under her fingers, and their color slowly brightened to red, peels like onion skins of brown husk falling from them. Dierdre clapped her hands over her mouth in delight. "You figured out how to grow!" she said, fascinated by the suddenly healthy color, and then turned to grin up at the sun. Her Ma had made her like her--she was really the strawberry princess now!

"Hey, everybody," she shouted jubilantly, jumping to her bare feet in the middle of her deserted fields, "it's time to grow! You can all grow up now!"

The rustling and creaking of the plants around her was like the conversation of her favorite friends as she darted through the fields, running toward her little house orchard. Leaves broadened and vines curled in and out of her path, while fruits swelled to the size of her head and beyond. Around her, the strawberries obeyed her joyous command and grew, and grew, and grew.

When she reached the orchard, she couldn't help but dance about under the trees, oranges in one hand, pears in another, apples falling around her like rain. The hummingbirds, berry-stained and frenetic, zoomed out of the house's windows and surrounded her in a whirring, trilling crowd. More fruit! they demanded, tiny tongues licking her skin through narrow beaks. More fruit and pie, Dierdre!

"I can make every kind of pie!" Dierdre declared, and raced off toward the house, bright-winged hummingbirds zooming along in her wake. The ivy was already climbing to cradle its walls.

*************

Dierdre was visiting all the strawberries the very next day, one fruit split open in her palm for the hummingbirds to siphon from, when she met the very large man. She had never seen a man who wore only pants before, no shirt, or a man with so much fur on his person, and definitely not a man whose head looked a bit like Jessie's cow Gertrude but with much bigger horns and a fiercer expression. He was walking down the dirt road, and his feet made loud clomping sounds until he stopped and snorted huge nostrils at her. The sound he made was like the bellow of a bull.

"Oh!" Dierdre was fascinated, hummingbirds forming an excitable cloud around her face as she stepped up to the man. Her face broke in its sunny smile. "I'm Dierdre!" She put a finger to her lips, surprised and curious, and then used it to gently bop the monster right on its damp, snorting nose. "You have a very big nose. You must smell everything!"

The man made an odd chuffing sound, shuffling his large, heavy feet and looking at her somewhat askance. She noticed the remains of a gargantuan strawberry's stem in his hand, stained with sticky juice, and said, "You like strawberries! What's your name?"

The man made a noise like the grumbling of rocks in a ravine.

"Marvin, that's a great name!" A hummingbird inspected the inside of a huge bovine ear, only to zip away and hide in Dierdre's brown curls when it flicked irritably. "Would you like to come to my house and have something to eat?" She smiled again, up all three feet to the creature's face. "I make really good pies."

The minotaur blinked at her, shuffling its large feet again, and then said in a bass voice like a mountain's, "Okay, Dierdre."

She chattered brightly all the way back to the house, the fingers of her tiny hand wrapped around a massive index finger as she tugged him along after her, and if she realized that she was bringing a fairy tale home for tea, she didn't show it in the slightest.

She waved vigorously at the fields, as they passed by. The plants swayed in the breeze, their unnaturally huge heads nodding gently, and she knew that her Ma was waving back.

I just realized that Dierdre is the only one of the three women to have a goddess as her divine parent, as opposed to a god. The other two are daughters of fathers, and that tends to shape them pretty significantly (Alison in her titanic daddy issues, and Sangria in her authority ones). I'm not really sure if she's more stable because of it or less so, and, furthermore, I'm not sure what it says about me either way.

Role-playing characters: where we discover too much about ourselves.

For those who wondered, they're Rufous hummingbirds. :)

Argh

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:38:17 GMT

Who wanted to start off Labor Day weekend with a throat infection?

Not me!

...too bad!

I also need a mint julep

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 01:07:14 GMT

There are so many things I should be doing.

But all I want to do is go to bed at 8:30 p.m.

I'm old.

Someone wheel me out on the veranda so I can grump at children.

E-X-H-A-U-S-T-E-D

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:33:42 GMT

I am so very, very, very tired.

LARP went really well! We all had a blast, and now we get to start the chronicle next month (oh my god, I'm going to collapse). So that's only about five million things to do, right?

Cameron was here all weekend (got in on Thursday morning, and just left last night). I hadn't actually seen him in person or had a real conversation with him in over two years, and yet it was like we had just stopped living together yesterday. We had a great time running around the city, both with and without John, and we were both really sorry to see him go. I didn't realize how much I missed him. Cameron is awesome (he also co-STed the LARP. It made life soooooo much easier).

Work is going to be insane for a few weeks, though, hampering my ability to do things like fix the LARP website and design flyers and sleep; one of my co-workers is departing on her honeymoon tomorrow, meaning that I'm going to be covering her job for at least two weeks. Joy in the morning. At least it's not a difficult job.

Yesterday, John and Cameron and I trekked out to the Winston-Salem Ed McKay's (the local NC used bookstore of awesome) just to see if it had some things we wanted that weren't at the Greensboro location. It did, of course; we got pretty, pretty World of Darkness books, and there was a shelf of free books (ones that were a little too beat up to sell), so I got to walk home with twelve free Stephen King and Lovecraft Mythos books. Glee! You see, I've always been meaning to read The Stand... Yes, I am aware that it's a bad idea.

And speaking of reading, I still have to finish my current Phantom book, which is only about 450 pages into the 650 pages of pain. It's like plodding through mud.

I seriously can't even sit upright to type this, I'm so tired. I blame John and his twelve-hour Scion game. No one can recover from that.