Dry Ice Factory

Work has continued to be ... oh, I dunno, challenging? Heavy? Hard? No, not really hard (other than the stuff I wrote about last time). Just heavy, I guess. I'm looking forward to taking a week and a half off in November.

Other than that, this and that. We're working on the next issue of Chunga. Mostly waiting for solicited artwork at this point, although I'm also finally editing the lettercol.

Last Thursday I saw the Seattle Opera's new production of Donizetti's The Daughter of the Regiment. Once again this was thanks to my neighbor's boss, who gets passes to the dress rehearsals but was unable to make it to this one. This time my neighbor joined me. The opera was a delightful truffle -- sort of a variation on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs about a young woman who was orphaned and raised by a regiment of French soldiers. I don't know much about Donizetti, but apparently he was massively popular in his day. This one was first produced in 1840, so it says something that people still want to see it nearly two hundred years later. The setting for this production was updated from the Napoleonic wars to World War II, and I believe the nationality of the romantic tenor was changed from Tyrolean to American.

Last night I watched the DVD of James Levine and the Metropolitan Opera's 1990 production of Wagner's Das Rheingold -- the first opera in the Ring Cycle. My article for this issue of Chunga is about seeing the Ring Cycle last summer. As I wrote here at the time, 15 hours of music is a lot to absorb, and I borrowed this DVD set from ron_drummond to try to get a better handle on it. I listened to the DVDs (with an occasional peak at the video) while I was writing my article; now I want to watch them. As before, I found a lot of music to like in Das Rheingold, and I'm fascinated by the fantastical, high fantasy nature of the thing. Just a tad different from the frothy romantic comedy of The Daughter of the Regiment!

I don't know what else. My raspberries have been incredibly productive this month. I picked a collander full on Saturday, and I can't remember ever picking them this late in the year before. Then again, I'm terrible about keeping a gardening journal, so I don't really know. I don't even know whether this has been an unusually warm October.

Oh, and I was also completely fascinated by an article in the Grauniad, "Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex?", particularly the concept of soshoku danshi ("grass-eating men"), which is a term of disparagement that some men have embraced. One of them defines it as "a heterosexual man for whom relationships and sex are unimportant." I wouldn't agree with the "unimportant" (quite the opposite, really), but I do identify with the mindset that makes do without and that finds process of establishing and maintaining a romantic relationship incredibly complicated and fraught. For me this has nothing to do with the kinds of socioeconomic conflicts this article is about, but I still recognize the psychosexual terrain being discussed. "Gradually but relentlessly, Japan is evolving into a type of society whose contours and workings have only been contemplated in science fiction," says one demographer. Life on the cutting edge, eh?

The PDF of Chunga 20 is now available on efanzines.com.



Featuring:

Write Rite by Earl Kemp

Sheffield Wasn’t Built in a Day by Jacq Monahan

Why We Need Hokum by Michael Dobson

The Journal of Federation and Monster Culture Studies by Andy Hooper

Space Age Bachelor Pad Music by Doug Bell

To a More Platonic Orb reviews by Randy Byers

The Iron Pig (lettercol)

Artwork by Jay Kinney (cover), Alexis Gilliland, Dan Steffan, William Rotsler, Potshot, D. West, Steve Jeffery, Steve Stiles, Brad Foster, and a back cover by Marc Schirmeister

We're planning to publish the next issue of Chunga for Corflu in April, so if you've been composing a LOC in your head for the past couple of months, it's now time to write it down and send it in.

The year has gotten off to a good start with the University of Oregon's first Rose Bowl victory since 1917. Take that, Cubs fans! I watched the game with Andy and Carrie, who were rooting for Wisconsin, but I think Chunga has survived the conflict.

Oh yeah, and I'm really happy with the new issue of Chunga too. It is dispersing into the world even now. We're going to try to publish the next issue for Corflu in April. Loccers take note!

Yesterday was largely spent working on Chunga. We're getting very close to going to press. The three of us met yesterday to wrangle out the last decisions. Now it's just a matter of attending to details (proofreading, wee bits of text, scanning book covers, etc) and finalizing the design.

After the meeting we hied to Andy's house to watch the Oregon-USC game, drink beer, and eat pizza. USC blew up Oregon's dream of returning to the national championship game, but it was an exciting game that came down to the final play. I'll be happy enough if the Ducks make it to the Rose Bowl, especially if they can finally win the damn thing.

Today is more work on Chunga and then raking leaves and checking to see if the gutters need to be cleared. There will probably be more football and hopefully a movie too. I have Alan Rudolph's Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle in the queue.

Specifically, issue 17 is back from the printers and thus is real at last. In a bit I'll be heading to the house of the Wicked Cool Co-Editor of the North, where a mailing party will ensue. A PDF will go up on efanzines in a month or so.

BTW, I met with my co-editors on Sunday, and we seem to be heaving laboriously back into motion on the next issue of Chunga. We think we finally have all text in hand, and now we need to scare up some artwork. It doesn't smell like victory yet, but it does smell faintly of progress. Abstruse apologies for our lethargy.

Well, the completion of my article has opened the floodgates, and suddenly it feels as though we have a live fanzine on our hands. Ha! Typical self-centered narrative. It was actually the arrival of the covers that conjured the contents. I love the way that the identity of a fanzine takes shape as the material trickles in, like the assembly of separate body parts gradually producing the sensitive soul of Frankenstein's monster.

Also, every time I type the tag "chunga" here, auto-complete offers "chuang tzu" as a possibility along the way, and I am reminded of that obscure Taoist master of fandom, Chunga Zut, whom I must write about at some point. I've got a false start somewhere called "Egobooboo". Possibly it's one of those things that's best left as a title and byline referred to in passing in an article about something else entirely.

A PDF of the latest issue of Chunga is now available for downloading at our page at efanzines.com. You know what that means. We have received our first LOC on this issue from Britain. Why haven't you written one yet?

Edited by Andy Hooper, Randy Byers, and carl juarez, this issue features:

The TAFFish Inquisition by Steve Green

The Mystery of the Chalupacabra by Marc Laidlaw

Some Things about Donald Westlake by Ted White

Two Ceremonies, One Red and One Blue by Lisa Freitag

Ben Turpin by Stephen H Silver

One Small Steppe by Andy Hooper

Let Us Review by Randy Byers

The Iron Pig (lettercolumn)

Artwork by Steve Stiles, Sue Mason, Steve Green, D West, Marc
Schirmeister, Dan Steffan, Bill Kunkel (Potshot), William Rotsler, Brad
Foster, Norman Finkelshteyn, Paul Hannah, Ian Gunn, Alexis Gilliland,
and Grant Canfield

The PDF of Chunga 14 is now up at efanzines.com. Aside from the fact that all the typos in the paper version have been corrected (ahem), one of the other main attractions of the PDF is that the photographs are in color. That makes quite a difference with the photos in Lisa Freitag's piece about Japan and the extraordinary Cthulhu car accompanying kip_w's LOC.