Weekend update
Dec. 11th, 2005 09:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Yesterday was sunny and warm, so I decided to get out into it.
First I walked up to Diva on Stone Way -- shedding scarf, coat, and, finally, even hat as I climbed the ridge in the glorious sunshine -- and bought a double short latte. (I'm done with tall lattes, I tell you.) Then I lazed along 45th, staying on the sunny side of the street, hiding behind my dusty sunglasses. I stopped at La Puerta near the Ave and had three delicious shredded beef and cilantro tacos with beans and rice. The TV was playing a soccer game between Leon and Oaxaca. I'm really starting to have a thing for La Puerta. They make a nice enchilada en mole, too, and I just like the atmosphere there.
Down the street to the Magus, where I bought three used paperbacks, all by Leigh Brackett. (Turned out I already had a copy of a different edition of The Coming of the Terrans. Duh!) Then onward to the Big Time, where I drank a pint of the Rainfest (an ESB, I believe) and a snifter of Old Woolly barleywine while I read the excerpts from Stapledon's Last and First Men and Burroughs' Pirates of Venus in the Aldiss anthology, Farewell Fantastic Venus!. The Stapledon, which I read back in high school, was bracingly weird and iconoclastic, with one of the most perverse takes on "ethnic cleansing" that I've ever seen. I also read "The Treasure of Ptakuth" -- a relatively insubstantial Martian story in the enormous Leigh Brackett collection from Haffner Press, Martian Quest - The Early Brackett.
As I finished the Brackett story, I spotted Wolfgang, whom I hadn't seen for months and months. Turns out he had spent some of that time stuck in Montevideo, Uruguay waiting for the fishing ship he was contracted to count krill for. (He counts krill on krill fishing ships as part of a UN monitering program.) He was stuck there for a couple of months and ended up teaching self-defense to prostitutes. (Wolfgang is something of a renaissance man. When he isn't counting krill, he's teaching martial arts in Europe. He also built an elaborate tree house for Sting at an estate in Italy.) He's thinking of moving to Montevideo since he spends so little time in Seattle anymore and the rent is cheaper down there.
I came home and watched Fritz Lang's obscure, poverty row crime thriller, The House by the River, with a break in the middle while I talked to Ron in New York for an hour and a half. Enjoyed the Lang movie quite a bit, with its gothic air of the return of the repressed and its self-aware examination of the ironic consequences of story-telling. It's also an interesting movie in that by 1949, when it was made, Lang had so alienated all the studios in Hollywood that he was stuck making a picture for the bottom-feeding Republic. Working on low budget films was one of the few ways he could maintain autonomy from the producer-driven system that he so despised -- and that was only too happy to return the favor. Unlike Hitchcock, he never figured out how to work the Hollywood system, but then, as far as I can tell, Hitchcock had never gotten the power and resources in Britain that Lang got in Germany in the old glory days.
Oh, and Ron is freezing his ass off in Albany. Harold Bloom Himself told Ron that while he was too old to relocate, he couldn't understand why anyone would leave Seattle to spend a winter in the northeast. Ha! Harold Bloom critiques the climate!
Today is an editorial meeting of the Chungavirate. We are slowly progressing toward completion of issue 11. Feels like we're crawling through molasses, stuck like flies in amber, but it always feels that way once we've got all the text in hand and are in the design and artist-harassment phase. So after crawling through molasses I'll need a beer, and thus I'll be at the pubmeet at the Blue Star. See a couple of you there, I hope!
First I walked up to Diva on Stone Way -- shedding scarf, coat, and, finally, even hat as I climbed the ridge in the glorious sunshine -- and bought a double short latte. (I'm done with tall lattes, I tell you.) Then I lazed along 45th, staying on the sunny side of the street, hiding behind my dusty sunglasses. I stopped at La Puerta near the Ave and had three delicious shredded beef and cilantro tacos with beans and rice. The TV was playing a soccer game between Leon and Oaxaca. I'm really starting to have a thing for La Puerta. They make a nice enchilada en mole, too, and I just like the atmosphere there.
Down the street to the Magus, where I bought three used paperbacks, all by Leigh Brackett. (Turned out I already had a copy of a different edition of The Coming of the Terrans. Duh!) Then onward to the Big Time, where I drank a pint of the Rainfest (an ESB, I believe) and a snifter of Old Woolly barleywine while I read the excerpts from Stapledon's Last and First Men and Burroughs' Pirates of Venus in the Aldiss anthology, Farewell Fantastic Venus!. The Stapledon, which I read back in high school, was bracingly weird and iconoclastic, with one of the most perverse takes on "ethnic cleansing" that I've ever seen. I also read "The Treasure of Ptakuth" -- a relatively insubstantial Martian story in the enormous Leigh Brackett collection from Haffner Press, Martian Quest - The Early Brackett.
As I finished the Brackett story, I spotted Wolfgang, whom I hadn't seen for months and months. Turns out he had spent some of that time stuck in Montevideo, Uruguay waiting for the fishing ship he was contracted to count krill for. (He counts krill on krill fishing ships as part of a UN monitering program.) He was stuck there for a couple of months and ended up teaching self-defense to prostitutes. (Wolfgang is something of a renaissance man. When he isn't counting krill, he's teaching martial arts in Europe. He also built an elaborate tree house for Sting at an estate in Italy.) He's thinking of moving to Montevideo since he spends so little time in Seattle anymore and the rent is cheaper down there.
I came home and watched Fritz Lang's obscure, poverty row crime thriller, The House by the River, with a break in the middle while I talked to Ron in New York for an hour and a half. Enjoyed the Lang movie quite a bit, with its gothic air of the return of the repressed and its self-aware examination of the ironic consequences of story-telling. It's also an interesting movie in that by 1949, when it was made, Lang had so alienated all the studios in Hollywood that he was stuck making a picture for the bottom-feeding Republic. Working on low budget films was one of the few ways he could maintain autonomy from the producer-driven system that he so despised -- and that was only too happy to return the favor. Unlike Hitchcock, he never figured out how to work the Hollywood system, but then, as far as I can tell, Hitchcock had never gotten the power and resources in Britain that Lang got in Germany in the old glory days.
Oh, and Ron is freezing his ass off in Albany. Harold Bloom Himself told Ron that while he was too old to relocate, he couldn't understand why anyone would leave Seattle to spend a winter in the northeast. Ha! Harold Bloom critiques the climate!
Today is an editorial meeting of the Chungavirate. We are slowly progressing toward completion of issue 11. Feels like we're crawling through molasses, stuck like flies in amber, but it always feels that way once we've got all the text in hand and are in the design and artist-harassment phase. So after crawling through molasses I'll need a beer, and thus I'll be at the pubmeet at the Blue Star. See a couple of you there, I hope!