-¦ March 2020 ¦-

WHAT HE SAID

California Vietnam Veterans Memorial

▶ Calif. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Sacramento

“Take what they have left and what they have taught you with their dying and keep it your own. And in that time when men decide and feel safe to call war insane, take one moment to embrace those gentle heroes you left behind.” — U.S. Army Major Michael O’Donnell. | ¶ | Memorial Facebook page.

BLACK COUNTRY ROCK

“As revealed in the song Ziggy Stardust,
Ziggy was not a spider - he was the fly.”
-- Steele Savage

David Bowie Outside 1995 — The Bewlay Brothers Bowie and **Brian Eno** in a publicity still for their fourth collaboration.

Outside the musical world he inhabits, David Bowie can usually be found in the company of artists. These adventures through the art world found an expression in the early 1990s while playing around on his computer; he came up w/ the tale of a diary concerning blood and art. This having only recently chatted w/ Brian Eno on the possibility of launching several investigations into the malaise that is fin-de-siecle culture - the last five years of the 20th century - and what that might be like. In 1995, Bowie took this short story into the studio and, w/ Eno's involvement, produced a concept album concerning "this rather dark, satirical idea of where art could go." While Eno fiddles w/ the elusives and imbues the proceedings w/ propositions and strategies, Bowie massages words into music, seeking for fits or juxtaposition til a composition can cohere. At the same time, musicians are taking cues from Eno into which meadow the sound ought to and can roam.

Lyrics eventually separate and become voices, and the voices beaome, among others, particular characters: a detective following a lead, a victim who is murdered and turned into art, an assortment of suspects, and a minotaur. Having ironed out the inequities as well as iniquities, what emerges is the album 1.Outside, a disjointed and disjunctive dystopia involving violence and death, sex and rock 'n roll.

-|- FIVE YEARS

The cosmic Chameleon and the chance Corinthian lash themselves together, in the lab - on the slab - and bring forth “… a gothic drama hyper-cycle”.

Outside

Changes Prototypes of several characters found in a diary kept by Detective Nathan Adler.

❝ [Brian and I] had already started a whole set of improvisations in the studio around March, 1994. Out of that came dialogue and landscape that was tied together, not even tenuously. All the elements were fairly disparate. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance, by a narrative device, to chronicle the final five years of the millennium. The over-ambitious intention is to carry this through to the year 2000.

❝ What Brian and I are trying to do is develop a series of albums. [Outside] is the first in this cycle of albums. [The diary is] only the subject matter, it’s not the content of the album. The content is very much the atmosphere and texture of the music, that strange place that music indeed puts you which cannot be articulated. The story itself is semi-linear, so if you want to, follow it in a linear fashion, but it's not absolutely necessary.

The pieces themselves can be autonomous, they are pieces of music on their own.

❝ Well, Brian, very cleverly, because of being what he is, which is basically a conceptualist, turned everything into a series of games once we got into the studio: To allow the musicians to not be who they are for short periods of time. He would create little flash cards for them in the mornings. He would create situations they would have to put themselves in mentally, intellectually, and then start playing from that point of view. On each one, a character was written, like (You are the disgruntled member of a South African rock band. Play the notes that were suppressed). ... Because that set the tone for the day, the music would take on all those obscure areas. And it would very rarely lapse into the cliché. So we changed the status of the beginning of these pieces and they came into them like aliens from another place. It opened up a whole area of improvisation. ... It’s very hard to explain [laughs], you should have been there.

A piece that shows the extreme it could get to is A Small Plot of Land. That piece in particular was a first class indication of what happens when you put people in a strange place like that.

❝ As for musicians, it was important to choose those who were not weighed down with musical cliché, who had terrific control over their abilities. Yet were a bit loony.

❝ The lyric writing itself was fairly hazardous. What I did, I took a lot of areas of subject matter I’m interested in and wrote short paragraphs or pieces of poetry around those subjects and fed them into this Macintosh computer I have. I have a random key on it and it will randomize what I have written. So it was basically the Macintosh’s choice that it was New Jersey. But it was also a bit of England, too, with New Oxford Town. [Then decide] whether I was going to sing, do a dialogue, or become a character. I would improvise with the band, really fast on my feet, getting from one line to another and seeing what worked.

❝ There’s no intent in it, there’s no meaning. I’m not a meaner. I don’t have this great thing that I have to say. It’s a collection of fragments of information, of ideas, that are assembled and produce a certain atmosphere.

❝ Next year, we’ll develop a whole new slew of other characters or maybe re-introduce some of these or even negate some of them. Maybe we’ll never find Baby Grace. Maybe [Detective Nathan] Adler will become the next victim. I don't know. And that’s what’s kind of interesting. Maybe we’ll just get bored with murder as art and move into another area of our society. It’s all up for grabs. So I‘m quite interested in the future of this thing.

❝ I think [the album is] a confluence of events. First, we definitely perceive murder now as entertainment. It’s used to a massive extent in cinema. And pretty much it’s a space filler in TV. There’s the whole gladiatorial arena spectacle of somehow appeasing gods or looking at the fears and anxieties of the public.

❝ The momentum gathers as we approach the end of this cycle of 100 years, a huge anguish that everything will change. I wanted to make a record that reflected those anxieties, a state of moral, spiritual and emotional panic. With people breaking off into small groups to feel some sense of community.

❝ I think the idea of becoming comfortable with the idea of chaos is how we are progressing – that life and the universe are extremely untidy. Anything that pulls back the veil on that chaos is a step nearer a more realistic understanding of what our state is – so I embrace chaos. I’m a child of the ’70s, remember. I’m pluralistic by nature. I always had the unfortunate facility of being able to see both sides of every picture. It wasn’t a question of not being able to determine which side I was on, but seeing that things didn’t have sides. It wasn’t as simple as that.

❝ Oh, I’ve got the fondest hopes for the fin de siecle. I see it as a symbolic sacrificial rite. I see it as a deviance, a pagan wish to appease gods, so we can move on. There’s a real spiritual starvation out there being filled by these mutations of what are barely remembered rites and rituals. To take the place of the void left by a non-authoritative church. We have this panic button telling us it’s gonna be a colossal madness at the end of this century.

❝ Plus this growing momentum in body art, which has been precipitated over the last 15 years or so with people like Kiki Smith and Damian Hirst and Ron Athey and Chris Burden. The idea of using the body as yet another medium, like wood or metal or glass or stone -- almost the politicizing of the body itself.

Almost extrapolating on that in an allegorical fashion to have this rather dark, satirical idea of where art could go.

❝ About 20 percent of what I put in [the album] are fictional and the rest are real, but it’s very hard to tell the difference. But the most surprising one, like the Korean cutting off pieces of himself in the late ’70s in New York, was not apocryphal. I checked back with Art Forum.

❝ The morality of any society is quite strange. In the finality, it’s decided by law what happens. People change their network of comfort by changing laws to make things acceptable or unacceptable.

| OUTSIDE RESOURCES

[1] THE ART-RITUAL MURDER OF BABY GRACE BLUE

aka THE DIARY OF NATHAN ADLER ¶ It was at precisely 5:47am on the morning of Friday 31 of December 1999 that a dark spirited pluralist began the dissection of 14-year-old "Baby Grace."

The arms of the victim were pin-cushioned w/ 16 hypodermic needles, pumping in four major preservatives, colouring agents, memory information transport fluids and some kind of green stuff. From the last and 17th, all blood and liquid was extracted. The stomach area was carefully flapped open and the intestines removed, disentangled and re-knitted as it were, into a small net or web and hung btw. the pillars of the murder-location, the grand damp doorway of Oxford Town Museum of Modern Parts, New Jersey. ¶ The limbs of Baby were then severed from the torso. Each limb was implanted w/ a small, highly sophisticated, binary-code translator which in turn was connected to small speakers attached to far ends of each limb. The self-contained mini amplifiers were then activated, amplifying the decoded memory info-transport substances, revealing themselves as little clue haikus, small verses detailing memories of other brutal acts, well documented by the ROMbloids. ¶ The limbs and their components were then hung upon the splayed web, slug-like prey of some unimaginable creature. The torso, by means of its bottom-most orifice, had been placed on a small support fastened to a marble base. It was shown to varying degrees of success depending upon where one stood from behind the web but in front of the museum door itself, acting as both signifier and guardian to the act. It was definitely murder - but was it art?

¶ All this was to be the lead-up to the most provocative event in the whole sequence of serial-events that had started around November of tha same year, plunging me into the most portentous chaos-abyss that a quiet lone-hacker like myself could comprehend. ¶ My name is Nathan Adler, or Detective Professor Adler in my circuit. I'm attached to the division of Art-Crime Inc., the recently instigated corporation funded by an endowment from the Arts Protectorate of London, it being felt that the investigation of art-crimes was in itself inseparable from other forms of expression and therefore worthy of support from this significant body. ¶ Nicolas Serota himself had deemed us, the small-fry of the division, worthy of an exhibit at last year's Biennale in Vencie, three rooms of evidence and comparative study work which conclusively proved that the cow in Mark Tansey's "The Innocent Eye Test" could not differentiate btw. Paulus Potter's "The Young Bull" of 1647 (exactly 300 years before I was born, incidentally) and one of Monet's grain stack paintings of the 1890s. The traditional art press deemed this extrapolation "bullshit" and removed itself to study the more formal ideas contained in Damien Hirst's "Sheep In a Box."

Art's a farmyard. It's my job to pick thru the manure heap looking for peppercorns. Friday - 12.31.99 - 10:15a ¶ As in any crime, my first position is to peruse the motive-gag. The recent spate, thru '98-'99, of concept-muggings pretty much had me pulling breath for an art-murder. It was a crime whose time was now. The precedents were all there. It had probably its beginnings in the '70s w/ the Viennese castrationists and the blood-rituals of Nitsch. Public revultion put the lid on that episode, but you can't keep a good ghoul down. ¶ Spurred on by Chris Burden's having himself shot by his collaborator in a gallery, tied up in a bag, thrown on a highway and then crucified upon the top of a Volkswage, stories circulated thru the nasty-neon of NY night that a young Korean artist was the self-declared patient of wee-hours surgery in cut and run operations at not-so-secret locations in the city. If you found out about it, you could go and watch this guy having bits and pieces removed under anaesthetic. ¶ A finger-joint one night, a limb another.

By the dawning of the '80s, rumour had it that he was down to a torso and one arm. He'd asked to be left in a cave in the Catskills, fed every so often by his acolytes. He didn't do much after that, I guess he read a lot. Maybe wrote a whole bunch. I suppose you can never tell what an artist will do once he's peaked. ¶ Round this same time, Bowie the singer remarked on a coupla goons who frequented the Berlin bars wearing full surgery regalia: caps, aprons, rubber gloves and masks. The cutting edge. ¶ Then came Damien Hirst w/ the Shark-Cow-Sheep thing. No humans, palatable ritual for the worldwide public. The acceptable face of gore. Meanwhile in the US, 1994, I was in town on the night of the Athey scarifications. Thursday - 10.27.94 - 122 E. Village, Manhattan ¶ Ron Athey, performance artist not for the squeamish - former heroin addict-HIV positibve, pushes what looks like a knitting needle repeatedly into his forehead, a crown of blood, must hurt like hell. Stream red dribble-dribble. No screams. Face moves in pain. Carried upstage and scrubbed down in his own blood. Then water. Now dresses in nice suit and tie. Now in the black T-shirt and jeans, carving, w/ a disposable salpel, patterns, into the back of Daryl Carlton, a black man. Bloody blotted paper towels then hung on a washing line suspended over the heads of the audience. Blood-prints from life. An extremely limited edition. When it was first performed back in March, "Four Scenes in a Harsh Life" exploded controversy shrapnel through-out the National Endowment for the Arts. "We have taken every precaution w/ our disposal systems,"

An Athey spokes-person said. "The towels containing the blood are immediately deposited in hazardous-waste bags. Each evening, the material will be driven to a hospital for final disposal." Athey says he is dealing w/ issues of self-loathing, suffering, healing and redemption. Friday - 12.31.99 - 10:30a - Museum of Modern Parts ¶ I'm drinking up the Oxford Town. New Jersey fume. Salty and acid. Maybe I can get a handle on this thing back in Soho at the bureau. It used to be Rothko's studio, now the playground for all us Art-Crime folk, AC's or "the daubers" as we're dubbed. Rothko himself, in a deep-dark-drunk one night, carefully removed his clothes, folded them up neatly, placing them upon a chair, lay upon the floor in a crucified position and after several attempts, found the soft blue pump of his wrists and checked out He'd held the razor blades btw. wads of tissue paper so that he wouldn't cut his fingers. Deep thinker. Always was. 11:00am - "Dauber' HQ, Soho ¶ The only names the Data bank can associate w/ Baby Grace are Leon Blank, Ramona A. Stone and Algeria Touchshriek. The rundowns are brief but not to the point: ¶ [- RAMONA A. STONE: Female. Caucasian. Mid-40s. Assertive maintenance interest-drug dealer and Tyrannical Futurist. No convictions. Contacts: Leon Blank, Baby Grace Blue, Algeria Touchshriek. -] ¶ [- LEON BLANK: Male. Mixed race. 22 years. Outsider. Three convictions for petty theft, appropriation w/ plagiarism w/out license. Contacts: Baby Grace Blue, Algeria Touchshriek. -] ¶ [- ALGERIA TOUCHSHRIEK : Male. Caucasian. 78 years. Owner of small establishment on Rail Yard. Oxford Town, NJ. Deals in art-drugs and DNA prints. Fence for all apparitions of any medium. Harmless, lonely. -] ¶ Small cog, no wheels. Not much to go on but R.A. Stone weighs heavy on my memory. No problem, it'll come back. Best thing to do now is feed all relevant pieces into the Mack-Verbasiser, the Metarandom programme that re-strings real life facts as im-probable virtual-fact. I may get a lead or two from that. ... 11:15a ¶ Jesus Who. I hate typing. Anyhow, we've got some real interesting solvents from Mack-random. How about this! Verbasiser down-load, first block: No convictions of assertive saints believed Caucasian way-out tyrannical evoked no images described - Christian saints questions no female cristian machine believed no work is caucasian assertive saints believed female described christian tyrannical questions - R.A.Stone convictions martyrs and tyrannicals are evoked Female described sado-masochist questions - I am suicide described the fabric machine - Slashing way out saints and martyrs and thrown downstairs. ¶ Now the swirl begins. Now the image stack backs up and takes center stage. Ramona A. Stone, I remember this thickness, this treacly liquid thought. But wait, I'm ahead of myself. 6.15.77 - Kreutzburg, Berlin ¶ It's two in the morning. I can't sleep for the screaming of some poor ostracised Turkish immigrant screaming his guts out from over the street. His hawking shriek sounds semi-stifled like he's got a pillow over his mouth. But the desperation comes through the spongy rubber like a knife. It cuts the breeze and bangs my eardrums. I take a walk past the fabric machine, turn left onto a street w/ no name. The caucasian suicide center, naked and grimy, silhouetted by fungus yellow street lamps female slashing way-out saints for a dollar a time thrown downstairs if you can't take any more. Pure joy of retreat into death, led by the shepherdess. Anti mixed-race posters pasted upon their altar of pop-death icons party people.

¶ A zero w/ no name looks dull-eyed to Ms. Stone, the drone that says "in the future, everything was up to itself." Yea. ¶ I remember Ramona. She set herself up as the no-future priestess of the Caucasian Suicide Temple, vomiting out her doctrine of death-as-eternal-party into the empty vessels of Berlin youth. The top floor rooms were the gateways to giving up to the holy ghost. She must have overseen more than 30 or 40 check-outs before the local squad twigged what was going down. 10.28.1994 ¶ New Yorker magazine, advance copy celebrating fashion. It's a first of its kind since Tina Brown took over as editor. One look is all it took. It took the look and wrote a new book on what sophi-staplites would take and bake. Guy Bourdin featured heavily in this new eDISHion. Since the advent of AIDS and the new morality, and, of course his death, his dark sexy fatal style had fallen out of Vogue. ¶ An uncompromising photographer, he had found a twisty avenue through desire and death. A white female leg sticking gloomily out of a bath of black liquid enamel. Two glued up babes covered in tiny pearls. The glue prevented their skins from breathing and they pass out. "Oh it would be beautiful," he is to have said, "to photograph them dead in bed."

¶ He was a French Guy. He had known Man Ray. Loved Lewis Carroll. His first gig was doing hats for Vogue. He'd place dead flies or bees on the faces of the models, or, female head wears hat crushed btw. three skinned calves heads, tongues lolling. What was this? Fine Arts? The surrealists might even think his work passé. Well, it was the '50s, that's what it was. The tight-collar '50s seen through unspeakable hostility. He wanted but he couldn't paint. So he threw globs of revengeful hatred at his nubile subjects. He would systematically pull the phone cord out of the wall. He was never to be distrubed. Distrubed. Never. Everything and everyone died round him. ¶ One shoot focusing upon a woman lying in bed was said to be a reconstruction of his estranged wife's death. Another picture has woman in a phone booth making some frantic call. Her hand is pressed whitely against the glass. Behind her and outside are two female bodies partially covered by the autumn leaves. His dream, so he told friends, was to do shoots in the morgue, w/ the stiffs as mannequins. I don't know. I just read this stuff. Now his spirit was being resurrected. We're mystified by blood. It's our enemy now. We don't understand it. Can't live w/ it. Can't, well ... y'know? Friday - 12.31.99 - 11:30a ¶ After surgery and investment in a bullet-proof mask, Ramona turned up in London, Canada as owner of a string of body-parts jewellery stores. Lamb penis necklaces, goat-scrotum purses, nipple earrings, that sort of thing. The word on the street, however, suggested that it was not in the best of interests to become one of her clients as occassionally, a customer would step into her shop and not come out again. ¶ The whistle blew after a much-loved and highly respected celebrity, known for being known, failed to show for a gallery-hanging of her mirrors. Other celebrities, equally known for being known, some only to each other, thought it the most profound exhibit in years and couldn't take their eyes off the works. All the pieces sold within an hour, many for record prices. ¶ When the critic for Tate magazine asked for an interview / the celebrity-artist, the gallery owner recalled that he hadn't seen her since earlier that day. She'd mentioned that she would be going shopping for a diamond-encrusted unbilical cord as a celebratory thing to announce her pregnancy. She would be back in an hour. Just a quick stop at the "Gallstone." ¶ 1986. That pregnancy would have been produced a being that would be around 14 years of age. If it was still alive. ¶ To be continued... -|- Read The Annotated Diary of Nathan Adler

[2] GENESIS

The concept album 1.Outside aka Outside is based, in part, on a diary that Bowie kept over the course of a 2-week spell and, found wanting for publication, instead turned it into a short story about taboo. Revisiting the cut-up method, pioneered by the Dadaists of the 1920s and later deployed by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs to disrupt a linear progression, Bowie stitched together another kind of diary: kept during the course of a murder investigation. Bowie claimed that it took about three and a half hours of using the cut-up method to create "virtually the entire genesis" of the album. He had just stepped away from finishing the soundtrack to 1993's Buddha of Suburbia mini-series for BBC Televsion. -|- Bowie on death, violence and chaos in his 1995 concept album Outside [-12:50-]

[3] CONTAMINATION

Outside was just one of several albums, a set, that Bowie started to work on w/ Brian Eno. The next one was to be Contamination, peopled w/ "17th century" characters. The day after Bowie's death, Eno recalled: "About a year ago [David and I] started talking about Outside – the last album we worked on together. We both liked that album a lot and felt that it had fallen through the cracks. We talked about revisiting it, taking it somewhere new. I was looking forward to that." -|- More

[4] OUTSIDE ALBUM

-|- Producers - David Bowie, Brian Eno -|- David Richards (co-producer) -|- Mixing and additional treatments - David Richards, David Bowie -|- Mastering - David Richards, Kevin Metcalfe -|- Assistant Engineers: Ben Fenner, Andy Grassi, Jon Goldberger, Domonik Tarqua -|- Album Design & Image Manipulation - Denovo -|- Photography - John Scarisbrick -|- Stylist - Jennifer Elster -|- Recorded at Mountain Studios, Switzerland. -|- Mixed and Additional Treatments by David Ricahrds, Assisted by David Bowie. -|- Mastered by David Ricahrds and Kevin Metcalfe at The TownHouse Digital Mastering Studios, London. -|- The Leon Suites Complete 1994 [-1:11:14-]

[5] MUSICIANS

class="red">-|- Carlos Alomar - rhythm guitar -|- Joey Baron - drums -|- Yossi Fine - bass -|- Tom Frish - additional guitar on "Strangers When We Meet" -|- Kevin Armstrong - additional guitar on "Thru' These Architects Eyes" -|- Bryony, Lola, Josey and Ruby Edwards - background vocals on "The Hearts Filthy Lesson" and "I Am With Name" -|- Listen to full album online [-6:22:01-]

[6] OUTTAKES

Includes, among others, Enemy is Fragile - I'd Rather Be Chrome - Dead Men Don't Talk - Inside the Motel - Baby Fingers - I Am W/ Name Hide Me We Creep Together Part 1 - Hide Me We Creep Together Part 2 - The First Time - Hello Leon - OK Riot. -|- Leon - The Outside Outtakes - 2016 edit [-1:09:45-]

[7] TOUR

On the Outside tour, Bowie and his band would come onstage while opening act Nine Inch Nails was finishing, and both bands performed "Subterraneans", "Hallo Spaceboy" and Scary Monsters",

followed by 2 NIN songs ("Reptile" and "Hurt"), after which NIN decamped and Bowie's set proceeded. -|- David Bowie + Nine Inch Nails - Dissonance Live 1995 (HD) [-45:16-]

[Lyrics] LEON TAKES US OUTSIDE : Leon Blank

Valentines Day - 25 - June - 16th - Wednesday - July 6th - 20 - 0 - 20 - 15 - Martin Luther King Day - June 18th - June 6th - Wednesday - August 18th - 9th - 1999 - 12 - Nicholas - August - Wednesday - 13th - Sunday - 5th - March - October - January - October 13th - Wednesday - Martin Luther King Day - Afternoon - In view of nothing - 20 - 0 - 1 - Late winter - Martin Luther King Day - 12 - 16 - August - Wednesday - 13th - Friday - 7 - June.

-|- Leon Takes Us Outside / Micah P. Hinson - The Dreams You Left Behind [-4:51-]

[Lyrics] OUTSIDE : Prologue

Now. Not tomorrow. Yesterday, not tomorrow. It happens today, the damage today. They fall on today - they beat on the outside, and I'll stand by you. - Now. Not tomorrow. It's happening now, not tomorrow. It's happening now. The crazed in the hot-zone. The mental and diva's hands. The fisting of life to the music outside, to the music outside. It happens outside, the music is outside.

It's happening outside, the music is outside. It's happening now, not tomorrow. Yesterday. Not tomorrow. The music is outside. It's happening outside. The music is outside. Outside. -|- Reddit - Official Album Discussion #25 - 1.Outside 1995

[Lyrics] THE HEART'S FILTHY LESSON : Detective Nathan Adler

(Heart's filthy lesson) There's always the Diamond friendly, sitting in the Laugh Motel. The Heart's filthy lesson, with her hundred miles to hell. Oh, Ramona, if there was only something btw. us, other than our clothes. Something in our skies. Something in our blood. Paddy, Paddy, who's been wearing Miranda's clothes? It's the Heart's filthy lesson - falls upon deaf ears. (Heart's filthy lesson) Falls upon deaf ears. (Heart's filthy lesson) Oh Ramona, if there was only some kind of future. And these cerulean skies: Something in our skies - Something in our blood. Paddy, Paddy? Paddy, oh Paddy, I think I've lost my way. (Heart's filthy lesson) I'm already five years older I'm already in my grave. (Heart's filthy lesson) Will you carry me? Oh Paddy, I think I've lost my way. Paddy, what a fantastic death abyss. (Heart's filthy lesson) It's the Heart's filthy lesson. Tell the others. -|- The Heart's Filthy Lesson - David Letterman Show 1995 [-5:03-]

[Lyrics] A SMALL PLOT OF LAND : Citizens of Oxford Town

Poor soul. Spit upon that. Poor soul, he never knew what hit him - and it hit him so. Poor dunce. He pushed back the pigmen. The Barbs laughed - the fool is dead. Poor dunce. - He's less than within us. The brains talk but the will to live is dead. And prayer can't travel so far these days. The talk of your life , standing so near - to innocent eyes. Poor dunce. Swings thru the tunnels and claws his way. Is small life so manic? Are these really the days. Poor dunce, poor soul. -|- A Small Plot of Land - Live Wembley 11-15-1995 [-6:55-]

[Lyrics] (SEGUE) BABY GRACE (A HORRID CASSETTE) : Baby Grace Blue

Test, testing, testing - This, hmmm, Grace is my name - And and I was...um... - It was that photo... a fading photograph of a patch..., a patchwork quilt. - And they've put me on these ... - Ramona put me on these interest drugs - So I'm thinking very too bit too fast like a brain hatch - And ah they won't let me see anybody - If I want to sometimes ... and I ask - I can still hear some pop...popular musics and aftershocks. (Ahhh-choo) See I've been watching a television of um... in the homelands - That's the new homelands and um that's all I can remember - And now they just want me to be quiet - And I think something is going to be horrid. -|- (Segue) Baby Grace (A Horrid Cassette) - By bowiechick [-1:30-]

[Lyrics] HALLO SPACEBOY : Paddy

(Hallo) Spaceboy - you're sleepy now - Your silhouette is so stationary - You're released but your custody calls - And I want to be free - Don't you want to be free - Do you like girls or boys - It's confusing these days - But Moondust will cover you - Cover you - This chaos is killing me - So bye bye love - Yeah bye bye love - Bye bye love - Yeah bye bye love - This chaos is killing me - And the chaos is calling me - Yeah bye bye love - Yeah bye bye love - Bye bye love - Good time love - Be sweet sweet dove - Bye bye spaceboy - Bye bye love. -|- Hallo Spaceboy - Brit Awards '96 w/ Pet Shop Boys [-2:47-]

[Lyrics] THE MOTEL : Leon Blank

For we're living in a safety zone don't be holding back from me. We're living from hour to hour down here and we'll take it when we can. It's a kind of living which recognises the death of the odourless man. When nothing is vanity nothing's too slow. It's not Eden but it's no sham. There is no hell there is no shame. There is no hell like an old hell. There is no hell and it's lights up, boys. Lights up boys. Explosion falls upon deaf ears while we're swimming in a sea of sham. Living in the shadow of vanity - a complex fashion for a simple man. And there is no hell and there is no shame and there is no hell like an old hell. There is no hell and the silence flies on its brief flight. A razor sharp crap shoot affair and we light up our lives. And there's no more of me exploding you. Re-exposing you. Like everybody do. Re-exploding you. I don't know what to use. Make somebody move. Me exploding. Me exploding you. -|-The Motel - Live Rotterdam 2003 - A Reality Tour [-6:07-]

[Lyrics] I HAVE NOT BEEN TO OXFORD TOWN : Leon Blank Blue

Baby Grace is the victim, she was 14 years of age. And the wheels are turning, turning, for the finger points at me. All's well but I have not been to Oxford Town - all's well no I have not been to Oxford Town. Toll the bell pay the private eye. All's well - 20th century dies. And the prison priests are decent, my attorney seems sincere. I fear my days are numbered - Lord get me out of here. All's well but I have not been to Oxford Town - all's well but I have not been to Oxford Town. This is your shadow on my wall. This is my flesh and blood. This is what I could've been. And the wheels are turning and turning, as the 20th century dies. If I had not ripped the fabric, if time had not stood still, if I had not met Ramona, if I'd only paid my bill. All's well but I have not been to Oxford Town - all's well but I have not been to Oxford Town. This is my bunk with two sheets, this is my food though foul, this is what I could have been. -|- I Have Not Been To Oxford Town - Audience-recording - NEC Birmingham 12-13-1995 [-4:23-]

[Lyrics] NO CONTROL : Detective Nathan Adler

Stay away from the future, back away from the light, it's all deranged - no control. Sit tight in your corner, don't tell God your plans, it's all deranged - no control. If I could control tomorrow's haze, the darkened shore wouldn't bother me. If I can't control the web we weave, my life will be lost in the fallen leaves. Every single move's uncertain, don't tell God your plans, it's all deranged - no control. I should live my life on bended knee if I can't control my destiny. You've gotta have a scheme, you've gotta have a plan, in the world of today, for tomorrow's man. No control. Stay away from the future, don't tell God your plans, it's all deranged - no control. Forbidden words, deafen me in memory - no control. See how far a sinful man burns his tracks, his bloody robes. -|- No Control 1995 [-4:12-]

[Lyrics] (SEGUE) ALGERIA TOUCHSHRIEK : Algeria Touchshriek

My name is Mr. Touchshriek, of Touchshriek, with mail over and fantasy. My shop sells egg shells off the shesores and empty females. I'm thinking of leasing the room above my shop to a Mr. Walloff Domburg - a reject from the world wide Internet. He's a broken man; I'm also a broken man. It would be nice to have company. We could have great conversations. Looking through windows for demons, and watching the young advance in - all electric. Some of the houses around here still have inhabitants in them. I'm not sure if they're from this country or not. I don't get to speak much to anyone or that sort of thing. If I had another broken name - oh, I dream of something like that. -|- (Segue) Algeria Touchshriek - Matt Chamberlain as Algeria Touchshriek 1-18-2016 [-3:56-]

[Lyrics] THE VOYEUR OF UTTER DESTRUCTION (AS BEAUTY) : Artist / Minotaur

I shake - at the mother's brutal vermin. I shake - and stare at the watery moon. With the same desire, as the sober Philistine. And I shake (turn and turn again) worm, the pain and blade - turn and turn again. The screw is a tightening atrocity - I shake. For the reeking flesh os as romantic as hell. The need to have seen it all: the voyeur of utter destruction - as beauty. I shake - turn and turn again - I shake - turn and turn again - I shake. Research has pierced all extremes of my sex. Call it a day - call it a day. Needle point life blinds the will to be next - call it a day. Today. -|-The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (as Beauty) - Live Loreley 1996 HQ [-50:40-]

[Lyrics] (SEGUE) RAMONA A. STONE / I AM WITH NAME : Ramona A. Stone + her Acolytes

I was Ramona A. Stone. I started with no enemies of my own. I was an artiste in a tunnel. But I've been having a mid-life crisis, and I've been dreaming in a sleep. And ape men with metal parts, I've spat upon deeply felt age. I've hid my hearts in, and I hate the funny colored english. We'll creep together you and I, for I know who the small friends are. I am with name, I am with name, I am Ramona A Stone. A night fear female. Good timing drone. I am with name, I am with name, I am Ramona A Stone. (She should say: twitch & stream - it'll end in chrome - night of the female - good time drone.) A person who loses a name, feels anxiety descending. Left at the crossroads, btw. the centuries - a millenium fetish. (Give it to me one more time!) Anxiety descending. -|- Ramona A. Stone - Fluxus open [-4:07-]

[Lyrics] WISHFUL BEGINNINGS : Artist / Minotaur

Cruising around me - the flames burn my body. Wishful beginnings - does this remind them again and again? You're a sorry little girl. You're a sorry little girl. Please hide - for the pain must feel like snow. You're a sorry little girl. Sorry, little girl. Please hide from the kiss and the bite - shame burns. Breathing in, breathing out. Breathing in only doubt - the pain must feel like snow. I'm no longer your golden boy. Sorry little girl, I'm sorry little girl. The pain must feel like snow, there you go. Cover me, cover me. We flew on the wings. We were deep in the dead air, and this one will never go down. We had such wishful beginnings, but we lived unbearable lives. I'm sorry little girl. Sorry, little girl. So so sorry little girl. The pain must feel like snow. There you go, there you go. -|- Wishful Beginnings (a Bowie a day) 2016 [-6:33-]

[Lyrics] WE PRICK YOU : Members of the Court of Justice

White boys falling on the fires of night (I wish you'd tell). Flesh punks burning in their glue. Revolution comes in the strangest way (I wish you'd tell). I'd rather be inside you. Tell the truth - we prick you. (You show respect even if you disagree - you show respect.) Mama can I kiss you daddy can I ***you (We wish you well). Innocence passed me by. Wanna be screwing when the nightmare comes (I wish you well). Wanna come quick and die. All the little rose-kissed foxy girls - shoes, shoes, little white shoes; where have all the flowers gone? All the little fragile champion boys - toys, toys, little black toys; dripping on the end of a gun (Even if you disagree). -|- We Prick You - Unreleased version 1995 [-4:14-]

[Lyrics] (SEGUE) NATHAN ADLER : Detective Nathan Adler

Old Touchschriek was the main nameserver. Suspected of being a shoulder surfer, but he didn't know from shit about challenge response systems. Now Ramona A Stone we know was selling interest drugs. She got males all hung up on her mind filters. She was if you don't mind me saying so an update demon. Now Leon, he couldn't wait for 12 o'clock midnight. He jumps up on the stage with a criss criss machete and slashes around cutting a zero on everything. I mean a zero - in the fabric of time itself. Was this a suspect? I says to myself - Woa! "Quelle courage!" - Oh wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back to when it all began– -|- David Bowie as Nathan Adler [-1:13-]

[Lyrics] I'M DERANGED : Artist / Minotaur

Funny how secrets travel, I'd start to believe - if I were to bleed. Thin skies, the man chains his hands held high. Cruise me blond cruise me babe. A blond belief beyond beyond beyond. No return no return. I'm deranged. Deranged, my love. I'm deranged down down down. So cruise me babe cruise me baby. And the rain sets in, it's the angel-man - I'm deranged. Cruise me cruise me cruise me babe. The clutch of life and the fist of love - oer your head - big deal Salaam. Be real deranged Salaam, before we reel. I'm deranged. -|- I'm Deranged - Outside mix version [-5:18-]

[Lyrics] THRU THESE ARTHITECTS EYES : Leon Blank

Stomping along on this big Phillip Johnson, is delay just wasting my time? Looking across at Richard Rogers, scheming dreams to blow both their minds. It's difficult you see, to give up baby, to leave a job, when you know you know the money's from day to day. All the majesty of a city landscape. All the soaring days in our lives. All the concrete dreams in my mind's eye. All the joy I see thru these architects eyes. Cold winter bleeds on the girders of Babel. This stone boy watching the crawling land. Rings of flesh and the towers of iron. The steaming caves and the rocks and the sand. Stomping along on this big Phillip Johnson, is delay just wasting my time? It's difficult you see to give up baby, these summer scumholes, this goddamned starving life. -|- Thru These Architects Eyes - By Anna Dennis [-4:11-]

[Lyrics] (SEGUE) NATHAN ADLER : Detective Nathan Adler

[Lyrics] STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET : Leon Blank

All our friends now seem so thin and frail. Slinky secrets - hotter than the sun. No peachy prayers, no trendy rechauffé. I'm with you, so I can't go on. All my violence raining tears upon the sheet. I'm bewildered for we're strangers when we meet. Blank screen TV, preening ourselves in the snow. Forget my name, but I'm over you. Blended sunrise, and it's a dying world. Humming Rheingold, we scavenge up our clothes. All my violence raining tears upon the sheet. I'm resentful ror we're strangers when we meet. Cold tired fingers, tapping out your memories. Halfway sadness, dazzled by the new. Your embrace was all that I feared. That whirling room, we trade by vendu. Steely resolve is falling from me. My poor soul, all bruised passivity. All your regrets ride rough-shod over me. I'm so glad that we're strangers when we meet. I'm so thankful that we're strangers when we meet. I'm in clover for we're strangers when we meet. Heel head over, but we're strangers when we meet. -|- Strangers When We Meet - Top of the Pops 1995 [-4:03-]

[27] CREDITS

Based on reports from, among others, Nick DeRiso, David Fricke, Kev Geoghegan, Paul Gorman, Edna Gundersen, Larry Katz, Peter–R. Koenig, George A. Paul, Chris Roberts, Emma Saunders, Steele Savage, and Internet searches. Thank you bowiesongs, The National, Jason Lundberg, One Half of the Bowlettes, lo-fi noise makers, wn, john b, Mauro B. C., sonyakossta, Timetakesafag, SenseOfDoubt1, bowiechick, Beco2103, theMusicofmyLife1, BOWIElover,

Jorge Gago Lopez, Matt Chamberlain, joymarr, KyOdar, BlueM2012, Halloweenjack84, Anna Dennis, david bowie tin machine.

[28]
POSTSCRIPT
David Robert Jones aka David Bowie died from liver cancer two days after his 69th birthday, on January 9 2016. His ashes were scattered on the island of Bali, in a Buddhist ceremony. He left behind his wife Iman Muhammid Abdulmadjid, teenage daughter Alexandria, adult son Duncan Jones, Duncan's ex-nanny Marion Skene, and long-time personal assistant, Corinne Coco Schwab.

| Back |

ARGONAUTS OF THE AIR

Sailors in the Sky

Heaven is fairly crowded these days, and space agencies on Earth race each other to get to choice spots first. From mapping the dark side of the moon to landing on an asteroid in the Kuiper Belt, space exploration proceeds tangentially. |…| Spaceflight is space science concerned w/ ballistic flight into outer space, then through it. Early space agencies tackled this fundamental step, and today's spacecrafts are capable of space voyages and orbits of other space objects, and have hoisted 536 humans into space, twelve of whom walked on the Moon. |…| Other spacecrafts, satellites that orbit worlds including ours, have reached critical mass and the smallsats get prefixes like mini-, micro-, nano-, and pico-. |…| Joint plants to hoist a heavy telescope into orbit around the Earth which, in tandem w/ mobile systems roaming the star systems, promises insights to invent the future of space.

• • ° • • ⊙ • • ✦ ☀ ☆

Established in 1902, wholly owned by the government, the Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities develops and operates spaceflights, space science and a cosmonatuics program for the Russian Federation. It also arranges space tourism for fare-paying passengers to the International Space Station and, as of 2009, six have done so. A mission to Mars in 2012 failed, yet a robotic mission to visit a Martian moon is still in the works. In the future will be a spacecraft landing on Venus, and a Moon orbiter equipped w/ “penetrators.”

Headquartered in and around Moscow, the agency is successor to a space program that spanned 1931 to 1991, responsible for the first satellite, the first spacesuit, the first human spaceflight module, the first space rover, the first space station. In 1961, cosmonaut and pilot Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. Two years later, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space.

★ • • • · • ⊗ ✶ • °

Sustaining its fleet of aircraft at the end of World War II, in 1962 Canada became the third country to launch a satellite into space. In 1990, the government formed the Canadian Space Agency , reporting to the minister of innovation, science, and economic development, headquartered in Quebec, w/ a mission to apply space knowledge for the benefit of Canadians and humanity.	When three separate space companies merged in 2003 to form the Japan Aerospace Exploratory Agency , it brought under one roof expertise in x-ray astronomy, radio-astronomy, and the magnetosphere. In 2012 it became a part of government oversight and a program to militarize space. Famous for landing a probe in 2018 on an asteroid in the Kuiper Belt.

• • ☀ • • . • ° • ✪ •

“… operational space application systems …”

Eastablished in 1975 and headquartered in Paris, the European Space Agency has 22 member states collaborating on space exploration projects, convened as a consequence of European scientist leaving after World War II, w/ a mission “to provide for, and to promote, for exclusively peaceful purposes, cooperation among the European States in space research and technology and their space applications, with a view to their being used for scientific purposes and for operational space applications systems.” The agency's major spaceport is in French Guiana, where it conducts human spaceflight, launches Earth observation satellites, and flies spacecraft to the beyond.

⊙ • ◆ ★ ☁ ✦ · ☼ ✪ • ·

In 1971, the United Kingdom became the sixth nation to launch a satellite, and by 1985, the British National Space Center. Replaced in 2010 by the UK Space Agency , and made an executive agency of the government, responsible for its civil space program, and its representative in all space negotiations. The agency is based in Wiltshire, in the former home of its predecessor. It is currently making plans for its first spaceport, and studying ways to clean-up space debris, an emerging field.

Formed in 2010 to be a government agency, the South African National Space Agency 's satellites monitor Africa for flooding, fires, and the environment, and hosts the only space weather regional warning center for the continent. It's mission is to nurture partnerships and promote industrial development of space, to stimulate interest in space science, to deliver space-related services and products to South Africa and the region.

• ✦ ★ • • ☆ • ★ ⊙ ✶

In 1969, the Indian Space Research Organization was created by the government, and headquartered in Bangalore. It is now the sixth largest space agency, developing and delivering satellite tools for home consumption, such as dedicated distance education, telemedicine, cartography, disaster management, weather forecasting, broadcasting.	Begun by the military in 1961, the space program in Brazil passed in civilian control in 1994, and became the Brazilian Space Agency , based in two locations: a spaceport and a rocket launch, which happens to be the closest to the equator of all launch bases, and the most ideal for a launch of a geosynchronous satellite.

✪ • • • ⚫ ☆ · • ✦ • •

China adminsters four departments handling all-things space: systems engineering, general planning, space science, and foreign affairs. Together they oversee space and lunar exploration programs. They do so at the behest of the eighth national people’s congress, which established a commission of science, technology and industry for national defense, and formed the China National Space Administration in 1993, headquartered in Beijing, to develop a national space program.

The agency runs this program as a national industry having its own policy and enforcement rules, and has sent eleven of its citizens, taikonauts, into space. Its logo depicts a human surrounded by escape velocity thresholds yet standing above these rings, to emphasize humanity's capability to explore.

• • • ✶ ✶ ⊙ • · • • • ✦

In 1907, Germany was interested enough in space to set up an aerodynamic experimental station. It soon had company, among them a society, an association, an institution, and a consortium. Their effort coalesced in 1997 to become a government entity responsible for matters pertaining to energies, transportation, as well as their roles in aerospace, the German Aerospace Center , headquartered in Cologne, w/ fourteen satellite facilities working on the use of hydrogen as an energy carrier, building a suborbital spaceplane, and doing research into traffic congestion as well as research on emissions, among other projects.

France's space agency, founded in 1961 as "a public administration w/ industrial and commerical purpose," the National Centre for Space Studies is headquarterd in Paris, and reports to the ministries of defence and research. A participant in search-&-rescue missions, it is currently planning a trip to Venus, and is a pioneer in space medicine when the first French astronaut, Jean-Loup Chrétien, came home in 1982. It is the third space agency to go into space, w/ a mission to secure and defend, and to transpose civilization to space. The go-to space agency for all things UFO, w/ a collection going back to 1954.

• · ★ • • ☆ . · • • ☼ •

The Italian Space Agency, founded in 1988 and headquartered in Rome, was one of the earliest countries to do research on rocketry and space propulsion. In 1914, a paper to achieve this was published by Giulio Costanzi, and the race to space was on. If you want to know about gamma rays, go to Italy, a founder of the precursor to the European Space Agency, w/ plans for a future spaceport.

Established in 1991 to report to the minstry of education, the Romanian Space Agency coordinates the natinonal space technology research program and related activities, incl. the promotion of space science in schools. There is a heritage in Romania of firms specializing in flight and its pedigree is impressive. Hermann Oberth is one of the founding fathers of rocketry, and the pioneer of rocket propulsion, Conrad Haas, who wrote: “But my advice is for more peace and no war, leaving the rifles calmly in storage, so the bullet is not fired, the gunpowder is not burned or wet, so the prince keeps his money, the arsenal master his life; that is the advice Conrad Haas gives.” Conrad Haas was born in 1509.

· • • ✶ • • ⊗ • • • • ☀ ·

Established in 2002 as a national space program, the Algerian Space Agency oversees four operations: techniques, applications, satellites, telecommunications, and brings space technologies to any discussions on sustainable development in Africa, which it monitors for natural disasters.	Having interest in space since the 1960s, legislation to create a Philippine Space Agency has support w/ the government, already partnering w/ other Asian countries to launch a 50-microsatellite network, and space science promoted in classrooms.

☆ • • • ✦ ☀ ‥ • ☆ • .

In 1946, the government set up a national advisory committee for aeronautics to observe rocket experiments, which eventually became rocket-powered aircraft programs, then manned spacecraft programs. Formed in 1958 by the US federal government, NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an independent entity responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. This was followed by a two-man spacecraft module program, which led NASA to become the first space agency to land a man, Neil Armstrong, on the Moon, in 1969. To prepare Armstrong and the other eleven who landed on the Moon, a ten-mission pre-event, beginning in 1962, had two-man spacecrafts orbiting the Earth and engaging in extravehicular activities such as space docking and space rendezvous. Just as important, it conducted observations to gather medical data on the prolonged effects of weightless on humans (fourteen days).

Data from its triumphal Moon mission took on the need for a laboratory in space, and by 1965 Skylab was in orbit. The heavy milestone was acheiving low Earth orbit, one that occurs every 90 hours, through the lives of fourteen astronauts. NASA has 166 manned space missions under its belt, and in 2018 it launched a survey satellite to transit exoplanets, worlds circling other stars, and will send a robotic spacecraft to probe the outer corona of the Sun. Missions are planned to Mars and Europa, a flyby of a Kuiper Belt object, samplings from a future asteroid landing, even one or two space telescopes. A directive back in 2017 tasked NASA w/ taking humans near to or else onto the surface of mars by 2033.

In 1998, five agencies from Canada, Europe, Japan, Russia, and the United States, came together to launch the International Space Station, w/ an agreement to maintain long-term international co-operation, “on the basis of genuine partnership,” and to build a manned station in outer space capable of personnel housing “for peacful purposes.” Scheduled rendezvous are performed for crew rotation and to replenish supplies. 2018 marks 20 years since the Zarya module lifted off from Kazakhstan, inaugurating a milestone of cooperation in space.

There are 58 space agencies, three on the equator. Expect three more from Australia, Sri Lanka, and Philippines. They send up satellites, conduct human spaceflight, and launch extraterrestrial spacecrafts. Since 1958, the United Nations has maintained an office of outer space affairs in Vienna, tasked w/ a mandate to promote peaceful uses of outer space.

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WHAT SHE SAID

Elise Cowen

METAL MEN

Illustrated w/ collages, drawings, maps, paintings, photographs, prints and quotes

| ⁋ | Out west, when 1848 was only twenty-four days old, New Jersey mechanic James Marshall was making a routine inspection of a water channel underneath the sawmill he ran for his employer, he noticed some odd-looking ore in the waters of the South Fork of the American River, it was “... gold, bright, yet malleable.

“ I then tried it between two rocks, and found that it could be beaten into a different shape, but not broken.” | ⁋ | Nine days after Marshall emerged from the waters w/ his find, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, transferring a large tract of Mexico to the United States. | ⁋ | These concurrent events then precipitated the California Gold Rush of 1849, when people came from all over the world, carrying their tools and dreams and praying to the god and goddess of wealth for a show of “colour” | ⁋ | First they came from Monterey, San Francisco, San Jose and Sonoma: clerks, doctors, laborers, lawyers, mechanics, rancheros. Also, sailors who had deserted their ships, and soldiers who had deserted the Mexican War. As word spread they came from Hawaii, Mexico and Oregon. | ⁋ | Gold seekers showing up at John August Sutter’s sawmill, where gold was first discovered, had no need for milled lumber, and his business went into decline. All the while, a new settlement grew across the Ameircan River and became Coloma, the first gold rush town in California. Next to Sutter’s Mill stands a monument, the first in the west and built by the Native Sons of the Golden West, to mark the grave of James Wilson Marshall, the “discoverer of gold.”

	Easier to cross the isthmus of Panama to get to California than to go around Cape Horn. Canoe up Chagres River to the jungle town of Culebra, where donkeys await for the trip to the Gulf of Panama, eleven miles away.

Fort Laramie

| ⁋ | Maps were consulted and what would become the California Trial began w/ established routes there. Emigrants showed up either in towns along the Missouri River, or those in Illinois or Iowa. There they formed wagon trains and headed west across a landscape of grasslands, prairies, rivers, steppes and valleys to reach of Fort Laramie in Wyoming. In the first six months of 1850 over 39,000 people were recorded as having passed through this fur-trading post.

Fort Bridger | ⁋ | Beyond Fort Laramie is the Rocky Mountains where its best gateway spot to cross awaited: South Pass, a broad and level corridor. Eighteen miles is a fork in the road: Oregon-bound folk turn right and those on the Mormon Trail and ones afflicted w/ gold fever turn left, toward Fort Bridger, Salt Lake City, and California.

California Trail | ⁋ | One can also get to Oregon from California, by taking the Applegate Trail (1846), a route used by emigrants as a less hazardous alternative to the last leg of the Oregon Trail. | ⁋ | Overland travelers used specific routes depending on their starting point and final destination. The condition of their wagons and livestock, the availability of water, were deciding factors.

| ⁋ | The Oregon Trail begins in Missouri and leaves from Fort Leavenworth, Independence and Saint Joseph for a two-thousand mile journey to the Oregon Territory. After crossing the Great Plains and getting to the other side of the Rocky Mountains, this journey starts to head west northwest to Fort Hall on the Snake River, then Fort Boise, Whitman Mission, The Dales, Fort Vancouver, Fort Astoria on the Columbia River, and journey’s end in Oregon City, founded in 1929.

| ⁋ | The Santa Fe Trail goes from Independence, Missouri, through Kansas and a corner of Colorado, crossing the Arkansas River, passing Bent’s Fort, to reach Santa Fe in New Mexico. There it loses its identity somewhat as it connects w/ the Southern Emigrant Trail (a commerce and travel route also known as the Gila Trail). From Santa Fe, one is to follow the Gila River west to Fort Yuma. This part of the journey is known as the Old Spanish Trail (1829), an trade route btw. Santa Fe and the Pacific Ocean.

| ⁋ | In the 16th Century the Spaniards were devising a way to bring trade from the inland to the coast.

Southern Emigrant Trail

| ⁋ | The Mormon Trail begins in Nauvoo, Illinois, passing Council Bluffs, Iowa, Scottsbluff, Nebraska, before joining up w/ the Oregon and California Trails in Wyoming. After crossing the Rockies, the Mormon Trail continues south southwest to Salt Lake City, crossing Utah Territory and ending in Los Angeles. (Travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco on the El Camino Real, a 600-mile “royal road” connecting 21 missions and built by the Spaniards, from San Diego to Sonoma.

| ⁋ | An eight-month sea route from New York to San Francisco involving a harzardous rounding of Cape Horn.

| ⁋ | Clipper ship leaving New York on a maiden voyage to San Francisco.

| ⁋ | Clipper ship Comet, making the fastest run on record btw New York and San Francisco, battered by a hurricane off Bermuda.

A gold miner carries a pickaxe, shovel and pan. Adds a rocker, hopper, conducts hydraulic experiments. A water wheel would be nice, picking up individual quantities of gold-bearing gravel and sand.

gold mining tools

| ⁋ | Each gold miner totes his personal gear: a pair of blankets, frying-pan, some flour, salt pork, brandy (or some other sanctifying spirit); some procure a mule. Field gear must-haves are a pickaxe, shovel and pan.

forty-niner | ⁋ | Ruddy ones w/ no financial backing whatsover learn to congregate along mountain trails and wait for supply wagons passing through, to bring food and tools and to carry out gold dust. Saturday nights were for salooning and carousing, and Sunday is a holiday: writing letters, laundry, tool repair, swapping stories, napping.

gold mining tools | ⁋ | A twelve inch shallow sheet-iron pan to rinse soil w/ water and locate the gold.

gold mining tools | ⁋ | A ROCKER is a rectangular wooden box mounted on two rockers and set at a downward angle.
| ⁋ | The HOPPER is a box, sitting on top of the rocker, and lined w/ a sheet of perforated iron sheet. Beneath that is an area known as the “riddle-box.”
| ⁋ | The LONG TOM is an improved rocker and hopper, reaching up to twenty feet in length. A long sheet of perforated iron lines the bottom and beneath that is the riddle-box.

forty-niners | ⁋ | Women too had gold fever. From Mexico, Chile, Peru, England, France, New York and New Orleans they came, and their presence brought semblances of calm to hot-headed men.

| ⁋ | Depicted in history as adventuresses, courtesans, harlots, pickpockets, prostitutes and the demimonde, these women were also bookkeepers, cooks, laundresses, shop-keepers, maids, and wives. When mountain roads improved sufficiently to make travel btw. towns feasible, they set forth as performers, donning bright costumes while singing and dancing.

| ⁋ | In 1851, one Mrs Clappe arrived in San Francisco w/ her husband, and soon they left for the gold fields. In her letters home she depicts life in that era. Known to history as Dame Shirley, she learns about geology among other insights, and pays a visit to a rural doctor’s rude office of pine shingles and cotton cloth.

On July 11, 1851, “English Jim” Stuart, a member of the Sydney Ducks, was hanged for robbery and murder.

| ⁋ | Yerba Buena was originally a hamlet w/ an excellent harbor, found on the tip of the San Francisco peninsula. Meant to be a maritime trading post, the Spaniards first built structures profane and sacred, the Presidio and the Mission of San Francisco de Asis. Ships docking in its cove discharged sailors who were greeted by a Spanish-style plaza (now Portsmouth Square).

| ⁋ | On arrival gold miners sought lodgings in shanties and tent towns on Telegraph Hill, and stayed long enough to buy supplies and provisions and head for the gold regions. | ⁋ | Before there was a Barbary Coast there was Sydney Town, situated around the base of Telegraph Hill. It was a frontier patch of lawless land ruled by English convicts by way of Australian penal colonies. Brought over in convict ships to work in gold mining, they deserted en masse, returned to San Francisco, and regrouped as a gang, the Sydney Ducks, preying on people and property and willing to commit murder to survive. Soon they were joined by a gang of lady pickpockets.

| ⁋ | Sydney Town was replaced by a red-light district knownworldwide as the Barbary Coast, chock-a-block w/ bars, saloons, brothels, concert halls and dance halls, where “getting shanghaied” was first tried out. It suvived the 1906 Earthquake but by 1917 was no more.

	Sutter’s Mill by the American River. Gold was also found along the tributaries of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers: at Auburn, Diamond Springs, Grizzly Flats, Missouri Flat and Placerville.

| ⁋ | Coloma was the first gold mining town, next to Sutter’s Mill. By 1852, it had a post office and a jail – both popular destinations.

| ⁋ | Gold mining also took place at Bidwell’s Bar, Cut Eye Foster’s Bar, Downieville, Dutch Flat, Goodyear’s Bar, Grass Valley, Helltown, Illinoistown, Iowa Hill, Kanaka Flat, Lousy Level, Marysville, Murderers Bar, Nevada City, Plumas City, Poker Flat, Rough and Ready, Washington, Whiskey Flat, Wisconsin Hill, and You Bet. | ⁋ | Gold miners also headed south: Angels Camp, Chinese Camp, Dogtown, Fair Play, Hornitos, Jackson, Mokelumme Hill, Mormon Bar, Rawhide, Rich Gulch, Shaw’s Flat, Sonora, Volcano.

| ⁋ | Now a ghost town inside Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park.

| ⁋ | Home to Native American tribes incl. the Miwok, the Sierra Nevada was rudely affected by the Gold Rush. In 1849 an incident occurred along the Middle Fork of the American River when some forty-niners died and then some Native Americans were killed. An uneasy truce obtained when Native Americans were hired on as laborers and paid in tin, but by 1900 their numbers had declined to ±16,000.

| ⁋ | Before James Cagney as the Frisco Kid and Edward G. Robinson in Barbary Coast> dramatized life during the era, there was a lost 1913 feature, The Last Night of the Barbary Coast.

Like all those seeking a better tomorrow, the Chinese too came to the California Gold Rush, and soon formed a fraternity in Coloma, squatting spent claims and working as a team over the “tailings” left behind. In 1880 this gold-mining Chinatown was destroyed by fire.

Events from February 4, 1846, when the ship Brooklyn left New York for San Francisco w/ members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints aboard, to the last day of 1849, when a state census listed some 42,000 overlanders, another 35,000 who came by sea, plus 3,000 sailors who deserted their ships.

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WHAT HE SAID

Nicolas Roeg

ROMANCE COMICS

I Love Lois

Lois Lane

Working nine to five as a reporter for a city daily must not leave time to do much else. As a single female working and living alone in Metropolis, how do you find balance in your life?

Lois Lane, Clark Kent and Superman are the creations of writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, two Cleveland teenagers nurturing keen tastes and quick psyches, who combined complementary skills to make manifest their dream of another world. They invented a city of skyscrapers where an otherworldly creature lives and makes its living as a newspaperman, while wooing a wonderful woman, and using as his secret identity a coward’s persona. Overnight their comics become a bestseller, starring the Man of Tomorrow opposite Lois Lane.

**FUNNIES FAN**

Clark perusing the funny pages when Lois gets inquisitive.

THE GOLDEN AGE Lois Lane is already there when Clark Kent arrives on his first day at the Daily Planet, she’s working on a lonely hearts advice column. Clark, a seasoned reporter, gets called in to the editor‘s office and is assigned a new beat. In a supreme act of irony, he’s to cover someone who has been seen in Metropolis, looking to be a champion of the oppressed. Proximity to the vibrations of an unknown being notwithstanding, Lois soon slips into a vaudevillian vortex. Somehow a dastard is sure to create mayhem, usually a damsel-in-distress episode plays out, maybe an acrobatic act follows displays of unnatural skills, w/ a secret identity plot tying things up into a bow.

Page after page, the reader gets to know more about a super-being living in Metropolis, while he himself is getting to know more about Lois, pulling her into the maw of mayhem by his dada duels w/ super foes. Lois can’t see Clark for the super-simulacrum that he’s hiding behind, is drawn to Superman instead. Clark smiles and winks often at the reader, seemingly at ease w/ the imponderability of it all.

Lois and Clark start dating right away, in the first comic book they go out on the town in evening dress. The next week she flies off on assignment to a foreign land and, due to misadventure, ends up blindfolded and standing in front of a firing squad. Back home again, Lois resorts to dropping a sleeping pill into Clark’s cocktail so as to chase a lead and beat him to a scoop. This brazen stunt backfires when she lands in trouble and, for the first time, falls out of a window.

But first, she hones in on Clark’s beat by looking up the Man of Mystery herself, trying to score an exclusive. Going to a traveling circus where he was performing for charity, an unexpected twist ensures she will not get her scoop. Their editor, Perry White, will sometimes send them out together, especially when murder has occurred. They’ve covered politics too, and, for the sake of filing a report, once took a cruise together. On these occasions, Lois often ends up solo because Clark can and will disappear at the first sign of trouble. One time this happened, she was tied down next to a table saw w/ the on switch deployed, too annoyed though not surprised w/ Clark to bother about her predicament.

Chastened to live another day, Lois expands her comfort zone, finding it in herself to bring comfort to a thawed caveman, out of time and gravely disoriented. She was one w/ her natural self another time when she ran around w/ a great ape. Through all this, Lois kept up her advice column, where once a grateful writer bequeathed a gold mine to here and which, sadly, she lost. She then plunged herself into a murky tale about a fifth columnist movement in Metropolis, wading into espionage, disinformation, and sabotage. Staff photographer Jimmy Olsen could, if prodded, fill in more details: Resorting to disguise in order to bring down a den of thieves, or committing crimes while hypnotized, or getting involved w/ murder when her fingerprints were found on the revolver, or being tied up w/ a bomb nearby (several times).

Around this time she meets Lex Luthor. Picking through the day’s press releases, Lois sees a tony and toothy one: Someone has called a gathering of the millionaires of Metropolis. Intrigued, Lois finds a way into the mansion and hides behind draperies. Eight men enter, followed by their host; Lois pulls out her notepad. Altogether, these men control railroads and airlines, real estate and financial firms. They’re involved in prohibition-era rackets, one has a publishing firm hawking inspirational books. Another runs a secret fascist cell, while the last to speak turns out to be a common man who had impersonated in order to give a rant on the wickedness of wealth; what happens to him is not shown on the next panel. All this Lois takes down, filling one comic page w/ nine speech balloons each of considerable length. Suddenly, Luthor appears w/ a weapon and knocks everyone, including Lois, out.

By 1943, budding popularity for her character propels Lois onto the cover w/ Superman, gasping as he goes head-to-head with crime’s comedy king, the Prankster. Lois is on the splash page too, because she has inadvertently stepped too close to a giant jack-in-the-box … a year later she lands her first series, LOIS LANE GIRL REPORTER, focusing on her exploits w/out Superman or Clark; it ran for thirteen issues.

♛ EPILOGUE Looking back at the Golden Age (which took place on Earth-Two), it has come to light that the biography of Lois Lane, beginning from about 1948 on, has properly belonged to the Silver Age, and its revamped version of Lois.

All along, readers had grown up w/ a Golden Age Lois, there was a Golden Age Clark; and Superman, too. It turns out there has been – and always has been – some other Lois, who lived on Earth-One, w/ another Clark and a different Superman.

In 1956, fan loyalty was rewarded when DC Comics put out the first issue of SUPERMAN’S GIRLFRIEND LOIS LANE. Once again, a new Lois Lane sprang forth, helping to usher in the Silver Age. She again came fully formed – and having a lived-in backstory. The first two tales, about a witch and a wig, look forward towards the experimental 1960s, when beauty was redefined, and backwards, w/ a ginned-up glance at the battle of the sexes, when it was still in black-&-white.

What is left of the original Lois are some stories about the Man of Steel in which she features prominently, where she proves herself an intellectual equal of a super-man. These historic events embark embryonically from the heartland of America during the onset of World War II. They then roam globally, and extra-globally, disembarking at an untested outpost – the Cold War.

Lois of Earth-Two became marooned until the DC universe took on a reimagination. By 1978, her story was once again rethreaded into the continuity. She had married Clark in the late 1950s, discovered he was Superman, went on to new adventures, even after their son was born, passing the mortal coil in 2005, in events occurring during the Infinite Crisis.

THE SILVER AGE The winds of change began blowing in the mid-1950s, when DC Comics rehabilitated a dormant character from the past and introduced a new Flash, having a new backstory and wearing a different costume. Gradually, this new DC Universe folded outwards and divided into two.

In 1956, a seminal tale had taken place on Earth-One. While Barry Allen was working late one stormy night, an accident sends a bolt of lightning crashing into the room, striking chemical vials filled w/ various liquids. Barry is knocked unconscious and falls to the floor. Lying in a suspicious-looking soup of laboratory liquids overnight, he undergoes a sea change. What had lain on the lab floor that October night was a police-lab scientist, what arose and got on its feet the next morning turned out to be an agile Adam – and harbinger of a new era. This refashioned Flash draws a chalk line at the starting point, resets the timer to zero, jumps into his costume and takes off. Soon enough he learns of the existence of Earth-Two, and visits w/ the original Flash, semi-retired but still contending w/ super-villains. Overnight, the aggregate number of super-beings doubled, then grew, as readers couldn‘t get enough.

The Lois of Earth-One lived a complicated existence, being routinely subjected to Imginary Tales of what-ifs that bedevil readers w/ known facts from familiar fantasy. This Lois had her own title, which ran for 137 issues, ending just in time to usher in the Bronze Age, and are known chiefly as having imparted a level of light-heartedness to her life.

In btw., Lois left her classic looks behind and is shown on a 1968 cover tearing down part of her own masthead containing the words "GIRL FRIEND", and throwing it to the ground. This was just one step less shocking than her get-up: knee-high go-go boots and a rocking Aquanet hairdo, declaring that she was through w/ the Man of Might. This fit of feminist zeal subsided, though, and the designation reappeared on the next cover. Lois Lane, born on Earth, had up until then led an unearthly existence, all because she chose to be near the one she loves, and do battle w/ battalions of babes intent on becoming the one to make children w/ the alien Adonis.

As our story begins, Lois is about thirty years old, and Clark is two years older than that.

▶ Action Comics №1

Champion of the Oppressed
[-1938-] Lois Lane sprang into life fully formed, alongside the genesis story of Superman. On his first day at the Daily Planet, Clark Kent knows he is smitten w/ her, and actively pursues Lois.

When Clark is assigned to cover a mystery man showing remarkable potential, Lois is intrigued and goes on a first date to find out more. Twirling about the dance floor, he asks pointedly, “Why is it you always avoid me at the office?” “Please Clark! I’ve been scribbling sob stories all day long. Don’t ask me to dish out another.” All the while she’s acting bored and staring off into space, when her eyes happen to lock onto Butch, who’s been staring at her for quite some time.

Seeing his move Butch cuts in, then things turn ugly, and Lois gets an inkling that Clark may not be a man’s man. When Butch facepalms her date she storms out and calls Clark, for the very first time, “… a spineless, unbearable coward!”, and is later rescued by you-know-who. Catching up w/ the car that has just abducted her, Superman upturns the vehicle and catches Lois, for the very first time, as she spills out of the backseat window. What he does next w/ the car is famously depicted on the iconic first front cover. Turning his attention back to Lois, she backs away in mild terror until he says, “You needn’t be afraid of me. I won’t harm you.”

Transfixed, she lets the strapping stranger scoop her up into his arms and, leaping high, carries her away. This winning formula provided years of creative chaos as the three characters circled each other round and round.

Thus ends the first tale of Lois Lane’s life, and the beginning of her startling adventures to document the existence of this mental marvel and physical wonder, devoted to daring deeds that will reshape the destiny of a world.

▶ Lois Lane №17

The Daily Planet
[-1960 - An Untold Story + Demand Classic-] Every year on the anniversary of her first day, Perry White has thrown an office party to celebrate. Then one time he became sentimental, and opened up. “... When Lois first asked me for a job, I told her I would hire her if she brought me three scoops in three days! She did it ... w/out Superman’s help!”

When Clark is assigned to cover a mystery man showing remarkable potential, Lois is intrigued and goes on a first date to find out more. Picking up the cue, Lois blows out the candles, gives the first slice to Perry, and takes over. On the first day Perry handed her a couple of leads, and she chose the easiest one: securing evidence on a team of safe-crackers. She went dressed as a cleaning lady and boldly entered their lair. She then kicked over the waste paper basket, plugged in her vacuum cleaner, and turned it on. This brazen act turned up pure gold when a torn-up note was recovered and when taped back together, implications were deduced, and arrest warrants then issued. Los had her first scoop. By now slices had been made, and plates started to go around.

Her next assignment was to secure the first-ever photograph of a reclusive royal, prone to strongarm tactics in order to secure his privacy. And she comes back w/ the photo. Then Clark and Jimmy Olsen ask for another slice, both at the same time. Lois takes this opportunity to sit down, staring into the cavern created in the cake. Her car had unexpectedly broken down on the third day, and she ended up walking miles out to nowhere in order to interview an archaeologist, claiming a new discovery. She gets her story, and it’s a doozy but, w/ no easy access back, Lois devises the most ingenious methods yet known to newswriters worldwide, enabling her post to reach Perry. It is front page news, and Lois lands her dream job.

▶ Superman №17

Man or Superman?
[1942] One time Lois and Clark teamed up to track down the Talon, titular head to a gang of thieves. She later returned to her desk, thinking she was going to write up a scoop, only to learn that Clark got there first.

Exasperated, she then asked and he then gave a reason so lame that it was enough to make her wonder if Clark might be Superman. There have been many versions of this story.

In one telling, they were working at their desks when a commotion on the street below draws their attention: a necklace robbery was in progress. She suddenly got a feeling she knew what Clark would do next, which was to give a flimsy excuse and disappear, then a minute will pass and Superman should (and will) come flying past the window. This quizzical look does not go unnoticed w/ eagle-eyed Clark as he stages a retreat. Changing into his costume he thinks back to the very first time Lois ever did all of her wondering.

It happened one morning when he had flown over to the office, and she had caught a quick glimpse. Lois was rounding a corner and became aware of his landing on the roof of her building. “… and now he’s dropped out of sight! Good gracious! Maybe he works on the Planet staff, under a secret identity!”

▶ Lois Lane №3

Miss Lonelyhearts

[-1958-] Lois once went above and beyond her duties as the advice columnist. She had shown up at the eighth floor landing window of the Belvue Apartments, where a despondent man was threatening to jump. Lois climbs out, telling him she too wants to jump, “Er-(gulp!) Do you think you’re the only person in the world w/ a broken heart?” Promptly looses her footing, goes over the edge. She manages to catch the corner of a election banner hanging below and before it tears off she has swung into position to plummet through a number of window awnings which cushion her fall until a fireman’s net catches her.

This vivid demonstration of falling in love cures the man’s sick heart, so he climbs back in and goes to where Lois is being treated. “You’re wonderful, Miss Lane! The next time I commit suicide, it’s going to be over you!”

▶ Lois Lane №29

School for Scoops
[-1961-] Through pluck and perserverance Lois becomes the number one female reporter in the United States! The University of Metropolis then asks her to give a lecture course. Hearing this news, racketeer Nick Roker sends two gunmen to the campus. Because. Lois proves a precocious professor, and w/ the help of Jimmy Olsen stages reanactments of actual cases.

Jimmy walks the class through the first scenario: Drugged by a gang she’s been after, Lois gains consciousness to find that she is bound, gagged, inside a tiny basement. Someone behind is about to put a blindfold on her. At this critical moment, Lois locates the basement’s electric meter and memorizes its serial number.

This bit of information helps break the case and gets her a scoop. Before dismissing the class, she hands out writing assignments.

The students return the next day and are greeted by a gruesome set piece: Having crossed the line w/ racketeer “Duke” Benson, he entices her over to his office and there ties her up in a chair, placing a bomb under the chair before his exit. Ignoring the lit fuse, she leans forward and nudges the phone off its cradle, picks up a pencil w/ her mouth, and dials 9-1-1. By the time she grades this second assignment Lois has deduced that two are not written by journalism students.

Thinking to instruct her class by treating this as a case study, she outs them only to realize too late they were sent by Roker. Lois’s quick thinking disarms them long enough for Jimmy, using his signal-watch, to summon Superman, who makes a brief cameo at the very end.

▶ Lois Lane №55

Raleigh Review
[-1965 - An Untold Tale ] One time, Lois took Jimmy Olsen and Superman to her college reunion. There she grew nostalgic and, picking up a school scrapbook, leafed through and found a clipping of her first scoop for the Raleigh Review.

It was an impossible first assignment: to join an all-male only fencing team and write about the experience. The fencing captain, who was a good sport and willing to go along, gives Lois a week to practise before they were to meet in a bout. Through diligence and sheer love-of-writing, she outfences the captain, landing Lois her very first scoop. Then she puts down her punch and begins leafing through a second scrapbook, locating a clipping of her first-hand account of discovering a new comet – by fluke,

during a night at the Smallville Observatory, where she was using the telescope to write a paper for astronomy class. The last page of the scrapebook held a tattered clipping of her strangest scoop. Taking a solo field trip for biology class, Lois had stumbled across – and captured on film – a live pterandon and a living sabre-tooth. Her biology teacher is wowed. “Those prehistoric creatures vanished without a trace, Lois! But thanks to the movies you took, we know exactly how they looked and acted!”

▶ Adventure Comics №128

First Date
[-1948 - Bonus Tale - An Exclusive Adventure of Superboy ] While attending high school, Clark was once sent a letter from the Daily Planet:

Clark Kent, 713 Main Street. congratulations! You are one of the two winners of our annual contest to honor the best school newspaper reporters. Your prize is a free-trip to Metropolis, where you will be allowed to work as cub reporter for one week.

Overjoyed and full of bonhomie, Clark shows up and is introduced to Lois Lane, the other winner; he takes an instant shine to her. The editor tries to break his spell by assigning a competition to see who can bring in the best story of the day, whereby the winner will get a front page byline! Lois suggests a side bet to Clark, “The loser treats the winner to an ice cream sundae?” “I never bet … but I’ll make an exception in your case!” After handshakes all around, Lois ventures out and, based on a hunch, stumbles into criminal activity, resulting in being tied up and about to meet her end – Superboy arrives and saves the day. After he has dispatched her attackers, he glides over and unties Lois. On an impulse she jumps into his arms and asks to be carried away from the scene, a request the Boy of Tomorrow was fated to grant. She wins the competition (Clark has been too busy) and, after work, he takes her to a soda fountain and pays his bet. They spend the week chasing stories, then it’s time to wave goodbye to Lois from a train platform, wondering if he’ll ever cross paths w/ her again.

| LOIS LANE NOTES

[1]
LANA LANG – In 1950, the first LL to enter Clark's life happened when Prof. Lewis Lang, his wife and daughter Lana first became neighbors w/ the Kents. Lana promptly becomes prey to an ex-convict, and her life in Smallville then becomes threaded into Superboy's. It was while staying w/ the Kents when her parents go on a business trip that she began to suspect that the two boys are one and the same. This causes Superboy to fly over to Africa, helping the Langs round up animals they were contracted to procure and destined for zoos, so they could come home early.
[2]
COMIC BOOK ERAS: Golden Age [-1938-to-1955-] – Silver Age [-1956-to-1972-] – Bronze Age [-1973-to-1985-] – Steel Age [-1986-to-2015-] – Diamond Age [-2016-to-2040-]
[3]
BACK COVER AD – In the very first appearance of Lois, Clark and Superman, the back cover was bought by the Johnson Smith & Company in Detroit, Michigan. They were purveyors of, among other things: - pocket radios - midget radios - midget pocket radios - magic radios - crystal radios - radio & television books - experiment sets - wireless transmittals - telegraph sets - electric phones - electric baseballs - world mikes (a microphone) - deluxe microphones - big entertainers (an air mattress) - Stinson Reliant giant flying planes - all-metal model airplanes - wigs (blond only) - yacht caps - live chameleons - x-ray glasses - booklets on hypnotism, learning to dance, learning to tap dance, ventriloquism, and ju-jitsu - whoopee cushions - joy bussers - rings - luminous photos - luminous paints - movie projectors - telescopes - field glasses - world's smallest candid cameras - bull dog fish hooks - and Japanese rose bushes.
[4]
BASED ON reports from, among others, Tricia Annis, Tim Hanley, Steven Thompson, and the internet.

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PIXELS

RETROGRADE 2020

Planets orbit, generally, west to east, in prograde motion. Off and on though, one or another turns idle, and is seen to move east to west: a retrograde transit.

Over the course of 2020, several celestials will turn retrograde; Hermes does so thrice. | ⁕ | In the scheme of things, across the Sky, it has come to pass that these retreats now incl. primordial-god Uranus, who begat the titan Cronus, who begat olympian bros Hades, Poseidon and Zeus. Zeus in turn sired more olympians: Aphrodite, Ares and Hermes. | ⁕ | Hestia, wounded, is marooned in the Main belt. The goddess of the hearth carries still an eternal flame, but in her present mood not willing to stay this year longer than is warranted, when light dims and a chasm opens to view – around July 11. Then is when fire signs should stay away from matches. | ⁕ |

| retro-Sky

Having taken four steps into 2020, dispirited URANUS already finds business so unsettling that the progenitor of goddesses and gods retreats. This primordial-god knows full well that his eminence is not well suited for this coming storm.

▶ Diamond Dusted

Expect the expected. Expect an eyewash. Time enough to adapt and embrace awe. Time to sit down w/ one’s thunder for a tête-à-tête. Father Sky’s parting gift can be a realization that less is really more. In a natal chart it denotes eccentric behavior privately practised, and endless shunning of new methods in favor of the tried and true.

| retro-Time

Entering 2020 w/ a gleam in his eye, by the time CRONUS pays attention to where he’s stepping he has already tripped into the Underworld. Worse yet, the god of duty has taken ill, and will take til mid-autumn to recover.

▶ Sadness Swapped

Playing mind games now isn’t a useful pursuit because the sad too go on dates. Time enough to declutter closets and sort negativity from positivity. Father Time’s parting gift can be a tidier habitat. In a natal chart it denotes a natural depressive having no father figure. No discipline. No self-esteem. No lightheartedness. No respect for the elderly. A moody self-nag.

| retro-Hell

Pinned under Gaea, marinating in generosity and greed in equal measure, lies HADES. The god of the dead has been in and out of this jam going on twelve years now, and it empties out the last pebbles of his innocence.

▶ Death Denied

Prepare to let go. Prepare to be picked on. Be prepared to pay IOUs. Time is granted to soak in a bath of one’s subconscious. Time enough to prune the past, face the future. The god of rebirth’s parting gift should restore situations to the way they were. In a natal chart it can cause constant application of the brakes: Inability to change and unable to express intensity. Inability to go w/ the flow and unable to recognize what just played out. Inability to trust and unable to guard from predation. Inability to lead while reluctant to forgive betrayal.

| retro-Rain

Visiting minor divines during the summer trigger ripples enough to unhinge placid POSEIDON. The sea-god turns, and at zenith becomes porous and releases light enough a glimpse of the chasm will occur.

▶ Saliva Suspended

Self delusional no more; the god of earthquakes is still, crystal clear. Time enough to slowly wake up from dream. Poseidon’s parting gift is to return the veil he borrowed and redrape it over your head. In a natal chart, there will be a diffuse unawareness of beginnings and ends, as well as a diffuse awareness of the ego and its boundary.

| retro-Cloud

Having to spend early summer til harvest moon upside down, ZEUS is mighty discomfited. The king of heaven is undergoing a rite to counter moral degradation, imbuing light into the chasm by sticking his head in there.

▶ Heaven Heaved

Time enough to detach from jollity. A disbelief in the future sets in, overlaid w/ a general lassitude for warning signs of optimism. Time is granted to set up, and run, endeavors both personal and collective. The thunder god’s parting gift can be a gain, made through pain. In a natal chart it can denote stunted growth, and a practitioner of the seven vices. A show-off; broke to boot.

| retro-Pain

Taking a two-week break before autumn ends, ARES seeks help from his two sons. While Deimos holds a lit torch, Phobos takes out 13 stitches on arm of the god of war’. What should be guileless morphs instead into a delicate operation filled w/ iffiness.

▶ Libido Locked

Trivial and transient frustrations make for an accident-prone period. When the guardian of agriculture departs, he leaves a scar that needs to heal. In a natal chart, frustrations will multiply: Unresponsive father. Undefined features. Unfulfilled focus. Unsettled fights. Unassured fucks.

| retro-Foam

Throwing on a summer dress does not become APHRODITE, as she falls prey to a virus of coarseness and she knows it. Two weeks on, the goddess of sex will either have been innoculated or has resorted to hitting reset. She expects relapses lingering into autumn.

▶ Royalty Ruined

Ruminate for all it’s worth, then try to renovate. Aphrodite’s parting gift can be a hindsight which is helpful and unhelpful. In a natal chart it can manifest in strained affections. Desires lurk when they shouldn’t. Self-defeating. Attracted to the unattractive.

| retro-Guide

By mid-spring the god of communication is already spent, and falls into the sea of unreason. For two weeks, HERMES is an empty vessel swimming w/ a complex school, shoring up so as to deliver many messages in one staggering trip. | ⁕ | By summer solstice the god of commerce’s winged feet give out again. The delay will cost the god of divination to lose three weeks in hyper-objective contemplation amidst messy domesticity. | ⁕ | During autmn equinox the god of travelers gets to show off his good manners, yet manages instead to incur unhappiness. The shepherd of souls to the Underworld will then have to unclog his cluttered brain and reset his god-given intuition.

▶ Augury Ambushed

The most frequent, therefore the most worrisome of visitations, is a retrograde by Hermes. It all happens inside one’s brain. Mistakes now can cost. Re-dos do recur. Breakups then breakdowns. Logic takes a break. Time is granted to adopt thought-out words in order to inhibit miscommunication, misdirection and mistakes. Time enough to listen. Even time to work out private connundrums. As a parting gift, Hermes restores garden-variety sanity. In a natal chart it can signify one born w/ a spoon in its mouth, hence inarticulate talk, leading to untidy thoughts. Someone who exhibits good rapport w/ No.

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GONE

♟| 2018
Camp Fire

The first smoke from the deadliest kind of wildfires descends on the Northern California town of Chico and blots out the sun. Caused by an electrical failure, the inferno took seventeen days to quell, and its epicenter was Paradise.

Mikal Shively lives in Chico

| ¶ | “Last night we packed and staged our get-a-way on our dining room table ready should the evacuation order come ...
| ¶ |
This Morning (11/09/2019) – When it finally became “light,” there was / is no sun. The sky is a dull grey and it is VERY still and cold compared with earlier in the week. All Butte County schools are closed so the Junior High across the street is dark as is the High School down the block – The College is also closed today. It is VERY still / quiet, and darkish outside – The air is terrible ...
| ¶ |
Last night friends from south-east Chico, were evacuated north and west into the core of town. We were all on pins-and-needles as to whether or not all of Chico would be evacuated – As of this morning the evacuation order for the core of town HAS NOT COME. There are reports on Google that houses along the Skyway (VERY BIG HOUSES) on the outskirts of Chico and possibly houses on Stilson Canyon Road have burned? ...
| ¶ |
As of this writing, we are hunkered down, with little real news as to how Chico is faring with regard to the fire. The electricity is on as is the heat (as I said above, it has turned cold). Not much else to report ...”

♚| 2018
National Museum of Brazil

On September 2, fire gutted the museum and turned millions of pieces of artefacts into ash and smoke.

Aftermath

Gone are collections on paleontology, anthropology, archaeology, and indigenous Brazilian ethnology. A wing devoted to Ancient Egypt, incl. a throne room, has vanished. | ¶ | Partially lost is the 12,000 year-old skull of Luzia, oldest of Americans (80% has been recovered). | ¶ | National Museum of Brazil

The Bendego meteorite (above), biggest found on Brazilian soil, has survived its terrestrial trial in okay shape. The second largest space rock ever found in the world, when a boy in Monte Santo, Bahia came across it in 1784. | ¶ | The museum’s website keeps track of its retrieval program and has produced a video (37:59).

♜|2014
Wilbur Hot Springs

Established in 1865 for rejuvenation’s sake, this Northern California hideaway continued into the 21st Century w/ no electricity. It burned down in 2014.

Long, long ago

The resort compound is in Colusa County in Northern Calofrnia, where an unpaved road leads past a gate to arrive at the site. | ¶ | On the left three large concrete baths sit side by side: hottest, hotter, then hot. The latter drained into a swimming pool, where the water turns cold. | ¶ | On the right a large building housed the reception office, guest rooms, communal bunkbed room upstairs, and a reception desk in the foyer next to a formal library room. The kitchen was powered by propane which meant several refrigerators and a bank of cooking ranges ran silent. | ¶ | Next to this a smaller building housed staff. And here an artist-in-residence program enshrined a cultural presence mystical in its dabblings. | ¶ | Not a surprise, but the resort has now been rebuilt.

♚| 2018
Salvator Mundi

Detail of the painting “Savior of the World” showing evidence of Leonardo da Vinci’s authorship: the left hand is shown through the transparent orb.

Salvator Mundi

Painted circa 1500 and rehabilitated as an authentic Leonardo da Vinci, this painting was bought in 2018 and promptly disappeared.

♟| 1933
Thylacine

From the Greek denoting canine and pouch.

Tasmanian Tiger

Roaming over continental Australia, Tasmania, a quadrant of New Guinea for four million years, this carnivorous marsupial’s natural enemy was the dingo and now believed to be extinct – due mainly to humankind. | ¶ | Still, occasional sightings occur.

♜| 2011
Tunisia

A burning pool says goodbye to the Mediterranean Sea. | ¶ | Tunisia in freefall during the 28-day campaign of civil resistance popularly known as the Jasmine Revolution. | ¶ | More photos.

♜| 1989
Berlin Wall

Günter Schabowskiwas of the East German government gave a press conference on November 9 abolishing border checkpoints, and border guards were briefly flummoxed on how to obey their directive to shoot trespassers. | ¶ | The end of the Berlin Wall had begun.

♟|2011
Natori Tsunami

Following behind an earthquake in Miyago Prefecture, Japan, a tidal wave overwhelms the coastal town of Natori. | ¶ | There is a short video (2:38).

♝| 1968
St Boniface

St Boniface cathedral in Winnipeg burns on July 22 1968.

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MONSTER MASH

Seed|

▶ “… a few murders here and there.”

Seminal tale of a quest to reverse a curse: a scientist’s experiments into invisibility and his regret when success is achieved. Traveling incognito under piles of clothing, his head wrapped in bandages, wearing wide-brimmed hat and goggles, Claude Rains as Griffin, the Invisible Man, takes up room and board in the village of Iping, slowly turning homicidal due to the formula’s side effects as well as his desperation. Gloria Stuart as his fiancee, E.E. Clive the constable, and Una O'Connor the innkeeper. (1933) Watch full movie.

Sequel|

▶ “I can’t find peace in the underworld.”

The scientist-brother of the first Invisible Man, using the original notebooks, re-creates the formula and uses it to set a condemned man free in order that he may pursue the real killer. Vincent Price is the voice of the second Invisible Man, not visible until the final scene. With Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Alan Napier, Nan Grey. (1940) Watch full movie.

Screwball|

▶ “I’m nothin’ but a nothin’.”

This time around it’s a woman who gets the invisibility diet when she answers an ad and becomes a volunteer: Bombarbed by a light ray, she turns invisible. Word gets out and Blackie and his gang become interested and show up. Kitty Carroll is the Invisible Woman. With John Barrymore as the scientist who took out the ad, Oskar Homolka, Shemp Howard, Maria Montez, Anne Nagel. (1940) Watch full movie.

Spy|

▶ “I can’t tell you people apart.”

Trying to steal the invisibility formula are Axis agents under diplomatic cover in England. To thwart them, the grandson of the original Invisible Man absconds w/ the original notebooks and performs the experiment successfully on himself. He then parachutes into Berlin to bring the battle to their own doorstep. Jon Hall is the anti-axis agent who turns invisible. With Peter Lorre, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Albert Basserman, Ilona Massey, J. Edward Bromberg, Key Luke. Screenplay by Curt Siodmak. (1942) Watch full movie.

Scion|

▶ “Pioneers have always to contend w/ fools.”

High tale of ghoulish revenge meted out to another scientist who succeeded in stabilizing the formula. Starring John Carradine as Doctor Drury, Gale Sondergaard, Lester Mathews, and Halliwell Hobbes. Jon Hall returns again as the invisible one. (1944) Read more.

?|

▶ “A changed world w/ me as its guiding genius.”

Cameo by Vincent Price as the Invisible Man, in the last reel of Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and again in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1951) all but cements cinematic life for this famous character.

There is a 12-part serial detailing a rogue scientist's use of the formula to create an invisible army and become The Invisible Monster (1950), starring Lane Bradford, John Crawford, Richard Webb, Aline Towne, and George Meeker; Stanley Price is the Phantom Ruler.

Soon afterwards there was a landing onto the streets of Santa Monica by the Phantom from Space (1953), shedding his spacesuit and revealing a terrifying condition.

He wasn't the only one. Robby the Robot landed to save the Earth w/ help from The Invisible Boy (1957).

A murder in New Orleans uncorks the music and brings out the Invisible Avenger (1958), a b-&-w co-directed by James Wong Howe.

Over seas, the Japanese Invisible Man had adventures in Tomei ningen to hae otoko (1957) and Oh! Toumei ningen (2010).

Closer to home, wraithlike beings living on the Moon rain annihilation on their innocent host as the Invisible Invaders (1959).

Experimenting w/ the formula to create a zombie is The Amazing Transparent Man (1960), directed by Edgar G. Ulmer.

Wishing to steal it is the evil mastermind The Invisible Dr Mabuse (1962).

An imperceptible creature capable of following all his deadly demands is Dr Orloff's Invisible Monster (1970).

An Indian potion turns Dean Jones into a super hero known as Mr. Superinvisible (1970).

Now You See Him, Now You Don't (1972) stars Kurt Russell, Cesar Romero, Jim Backus.

A convicted strangler waiting his sentence in prison uses paranormal means to attain The Astral Factor (1978) wreaks vengence on those who convicted him, incl. Stefanie Powers and Sue Lyon.

An employee at the State Department, The Man Who Wasn't There (1983), is chased by foreign agents after ingesting the formula.

An episode from the compilation comedy Amazon Women on the Moon (1986) concerns the embarassing reveal of “Son of the Invisible Man.”

The son of a poor scientist discovers the formula and becomes Mr India (1987) to save his country from a self-serving pompous fool.

Abused teenage nerd discovers the formula and as The Invisible Kid (1988) embarks on payback.

Nerdy-therefore-abused teenager discovers the formula and as The Invisible Kid (1988) seeks revenge.

Lusty young scientist perfects the formula and becomes The Invisible Maniac (1990).

Yuppie adapts to a new life and chronicles his Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) a film directed by John Carpenter w/ Chevy Chase, Daryl Hannah, Sam Neill.

Lab experiment gone awry is related in Invisible: The Chronicles of Benjamin Knight (1993).

Invisible Mom (1996) and Invisible Mom II (1996) concern the delightful consequences of drinking any fandangled cocktail your spouse might care to be mixing at the moment, which turns a happy home topsy-turvy.

The formula poisons a volunteer scientist, and as the Hollow Man (2000) and Hollow Man II (2006) he becomes ethereal and an intangible menace.

The Erotic Misadventures of the Invisible Man (2003) contains a litany of his racy antics.

Donning a costume during Halloween turns a shy and unpopular thirteen-year-old into the unapparent and veiled Invisible Boy (2014).

Using the formula for erotic pursuits is the reason for the mistitled Invisible Centerfolds (2015).

| back |

| Top |

-| March 2020 |-

WHAT SHE SAID

Elise Cowen

METAL MEN

Illustrated w/ collages, drawings, maps, paintings, photographs, prints and quotes

	Easier to cross the isthmus of Panama to get to California than to go around Cape Horn. Canoe up Chagres River to the jungle town of Culebra, where donkeys await for the trip to the Gulf of Panama, eleven miles away.

\| ⁋ \| Maps were consulted and what would become the California Trial began w/ established routes there. Emigrants showed up either in towns along the Missouri River, or those in Illinois or Iowa. There they formed wagon trains and headed west across a landscape of grasslands, prairies, rivers, steppes and valleys to reach of Fort Laramie in Wyoming. In the first six months of 1850 over 39,000 people were recorded as having passed through this fur-trading post. \| ⁋ \| Beyond Fort Laramie is the Rocky Mountains where its best gateway spot to cross awaited: South Pass, a broad and level corridor. Eighteen miles is a fork in the road: Oregon-bound folk turn right and those on the Mormon Trail and ones afflicted w/ gold fever turn left, toward Fort Bridger, Salt Lake City, and California. \| ⁋ \| One can also get to Oregon from California, by taking the Applegate Trail (1846), a route used by emigrants as a less hazardous alternative to the last leg of the Oregon Trail. \| ⁋ \| Overland travelers used specific routes depending on their starting point and final destination. The condition of their wagons and livestock, the availability of water, were deciding factors.	\| ⁋ \| The Oregon Trail begins in Missouri and leaves from Fort Leavenworth, Independence and Saint Joseph for a two-thousand mile journey to the Oregon Territory. After crossing the Great Plains and getting to the other side of the Rocky Mountains, this journey starts to head west northwest to Fort Hall on the Snake River, then Fort Boise, Whitman Mission, The Dales, Fort Vancouver, Fort Astoria on the Columbia River, and journey’s end in Oregon City, founded in 1929. \| ⁋ \| The Santa Fe Trail goes from Independence, Missouri, through Kansas and a corner of Colorado, crossing the Arkansas River, passing Bent’s Fort, to reach Santa Fe in New Mexico. There it loses its identity somewhat as it connects w/ the Southern Emigrant Trail (a commerce and travel route also known as the Gila Trail). From Santa Fe, one is to follow the Gila River west to Fort Yuma. This part of the journey is known as the Old Spanish Trail (1829), an trade route btw. Santa Fe and the Pacific Ocean. \| ⁋ \| In the 16th Century the Spaniards were devising a way to bring trade from the inland to the coast.	\| ⁋ \| The Mormon Trail begins in Nauvoo, Illinois, passing Council Bluffs, Iowa, Scottsbluff, Nebraska, before joining up w/ the Oregon and California Trails in Wyoming. After crossing the Rockies, the Mormon Trail continues south southwest to Salt Lake City, crossing Utah Territory and ending in Los Angeles. (Travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco on the El Camino Real, a 600-mile “royal road” connecting 21 missions and built by the Spaniards, from San Diego to Sonoma. \| ⁋ \| An eight-month sea route from New York to San Francisco involving a harzardous rounding of Cape Horn. \| ⁋ \| Clipper ship leaving New York on a maiden voyage to San Francisco. \| ⁋ \| Clipper ship Comet, making the fastest run on record btw New York and San Francisco, battered by a hurricane off Bermuda.

Fort Laramie

| ⁋ | Maps were consulted and what would become the California Trial began w/ established routes there. Emigrants showed up either in towns along the Missouri River, or those in Illinois or Iowa. There they formed wagon trains and headed west across a landscape of grasslands, prairies, rivers, steppes and valleys to reach of Fort Laramie in Wyoming. In the first six months of 1850 over 39,000 people were recorded as having passed through this fur-trading post.

A gold miner carries a pickaxe, shovel and pan. Adds a rocker, hopper, conducts hydraulic experiments. A water wheel would be nice, picking up individual quantities of gold-bearing gravel and sand.

\| ⁋ \| Each gold miner totes his personal gear: a pair of blankets, frying-pan, some flour, salt pork, brandy (or some other sanctifying spirit); some procure a mule. Field gear must-haves are a pickaxe, shovel and pan. \| ⁋ \| Ruddy ones w/ no financial backing whatsover learn to congregate along mountain trails and wait for supply wagons passing through, to bring food and tools and to carry out gold dust. Saturday nights were for salooning and carousing, and Sunday is a holiday: writing letters, laundry, tool repair, swapping stories, napping. \| ⁋ \| A twelve inch shallow sheet-iron pan to rinse soil w/ water and locate the gold.	\| ⁋ \| A ROCKER is a rectangular wooden box mounted on two rockers and set at a downward angle. \| ⁋ \| The HOPPER is a box, sitting on top of the rocker, and lined w/ a sheet of perforated iron sheet. Beneath that is an area known as the “riddle-box.” \| ⁋ \| The LONG TOM is an improved rocker and hopper, reaching up to twenty feet in length. A long sheet of perforated iron lines the bottom and beneath that is the riddle-box. \| ⁋ \| Women too had gold fever. From Mexico, Chile, Peru, England, France, New York and New Orleans they came, and their presence brought semblances of calm to hot-headed men.	\| ⁋ \| Depicted in history as adventuresses, courtesans, harlots, pickpockets, prostitutes and the demimonde, these women were also bookkeepers, cooks, laundresses, shop-keepers, maids, and wives. When mountain roads improved sufficiently to make travel btw. towns feasible, they set forth as performers, donning bright costumes while singing and dancing. \| ⁋ \| In 1851, one Mrs Clappe arrived in San Francisco w/ her husband, and soon they left for the gold fields. In her letters home she depicts life in that era. Known to history as Dame Shirley, she learns about geology among other insights, and pays a visit to a rural doctor’s rude office of pine shingles and cotton cloth.

gold mining tools

| ⁋ | Each gold miner totes his personal gear: a pair of blankets, frying-pan, some flour, salt pork, brandy (or some other sanctifying spirit); some procure a mule. Field gear must-haves are a pickaxe, shovel and pan.

On July 11, 1851, “English Jim” Stuart, a member of the Sydney Ducks, was hanged for robbery and murder.

\| ⁋ \| Yerba Buena was originally a hamlet w/ an excellent harbor, found on the tip of the San Francisco peninsula. Meant to be a maritime trading post, the Spaniards first built structures profane and sacred, the Presidio and the Mission of San Francisco de Asis. Ships docking in its cove discharged sailors who were greeted by a Spanish-style plaza (now Portsmouth Square).	\| ⁋ \| On arrival gold miners sought lodgings in shanties and tent towns on Telegraph Hill, and stayed long enough to buy supplies and provisions and head for the gold regions. \| ⁋ \| Before there was a Barbary Coast there was Sydney Town, situated around the base of Telegraph Hill. It was a frontier patch of lawless land ruled by English convicts by way of Australian penal colonies. Brought over in convict ships to work in gold mining, they deserted en masse, returned to San Francisco, and regrouped as a gang, the Sydney Ducks, preying on people and property and willing to commit murder to survive. Soon they were joined by a gang of lady pickpockets.	\| ⁋ \| Sydney Town was replaced by a red-light district knownworldwide as the Barbary Coast, chock-a-block w/ bars, saloons, brothels, concert halls and dance halls, where “getting shanghaied” was first tried out. It suvived the 1906 Earthquake but by 1917 was no more.

| ⁋ | Yerba Buena was originally a hamlet w/ an excellent harbor, found on the tip of the San Francisco peninsula. Meant to be a maritime trading post, the Spaniards first built structures profane and sacred, the Presidio and the Mission of San Francisco de Asis. Ships docking in its cove discharged sailors who were greeted by a Spanish-style plaza (now Portsmouth Square).

	Sutter’s Mill by the American River. Gold was also found along the tributaries of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers: at Auburn, Diamond Springs, Grizzly Flats, Missouri Flat and Placerville.

\| ⁋ \| Coloma was the first gold mining town, next to Sutter’s Mill. By 1852, it had a post office and a jail – both popular destinations. \| ⁋ \| Gold mining also took place at Bidwell’s Bar, Cut Eye Foster’s Bar, Downieville, Dutch Flat, Goodyear’s Bar, Grass Valley, Helltown, Illinoistown, Iowa Hill, Kanaka Flat, Lousy Level, Marysville, Murderers Bar, Nevada City, Plumas City, Poker Flat, Rough and Ready, Washington, Whiskey Flat, Wisconsin Hill, and You Bet. \| ⁋ \| Gold miners also headed south: Angels Camp, Chinese Camp, Dogtown, Fair Play, Hornitos, Jackson, Mokelumme Hill, Mormon Bar, Rawhide, Rich Gulch, Shaw’s Flat, Sonora, Volcano. \| ⁋ \| Now a ghost town inside Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park.	\| ⁋ \| Home to Native American tribes incl. the Miwok, the Sierra Nevada was rudely affected by the Gold Rush. In 1849 an incident occurred along the Middle Fork of the American River when some forty-niners died and then some Native Americans were killed. An uneasy truce obtained when Native Americans were hired on as laborers and paid in tin, but by 1900 their numbers had declined to ±16,000. \| ⁋ \| Before James Cagney as the Frisco Kid and Edward G. Robinson in Barbary Coast> dramatized life during the era, there was a lost 1913 feature, The Last Night of the Barbary Coast.	Like all those seeking a better tomorrow, the Chinese too came to the California Gold Rush, and soon formed a fraternity in Coloma, squatting spent claims and working as a team over the “tailings” left behind. In 1880 this gold-mining Chinatown was destroyed by fire. Events from February 4, 1846, when the ship Brooklyn left New York for San Francisco w/ members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints aboard, to the last day of 1849, when a state census listed some 42,000 overlanders, another 35,000 who came by sea, plus 3,000 sailors who deserted their ships.

| ⁋ | Coloma was the first gold mining town, next to Sutter’s Mill. By 1852, it had a post office and a jail – both popular destinations.

| back |

WHAT HE SAID

Dr Mabuse

ROMANCE COMICS

I Love Lois

Lois Lane

Working nine to five as a reporter for a city daily must not leave time to do much else. As a single female working and living alone in Metropolis, how do you find balance in your life?

As our story begins, Lois is about thirty years old, and Clark is two years older than that.

Action Comics №1

Lois Lane №17

Superman №17

Lois Lane №3

Miss Lonelyhearts

Lois Lane №29

Lois Lane №55

Adventure Comics №128

First Date
[-1948 - Bonus Tale - An Exclusive Adventure of Superboy ] While attending high school, Clark was once sent a letter from the Daily Planet:

| back|

BLACK COUNTRY ROCK

“As revealed in the song Ziggy Stardust,
Ziggy was not a spider - he was the fly.”
-- Steele Savage

-|- FIVE YEARS

The cosmic Chameleon and the chance Corinthian lash themselves together, in the lab - on the slab - and bring forth “… a gothic drama hyper-cycle”.

Outside

Changes Prototypes of several characters found in a diary kept by Detective Nathan Adler.

| OUTSIDE RESOURCES

[1] THE ART-RITUAL MURDER OF BABY GRACE BLUE

aka THE DIARY OF NATHAN ADLER ¶ It was at precisely 5:47am on the morning of Friday 31 of December 1999 that a dark spirited pluralist began the dissection of 14-year-old "Baby Grace."

[2] GENESIS

[3] CONTAMINATION

[4] OUTSIDE ALBUM

[5] MUSICIANS

[6] OUTTAKES

[7] TOUR

On the Outside tour, Bowie and his band would come onstage while opening act Nine Inch Nails was finishing, and both bands performed "Subterraneans", "Hallo Spaceboy" and Scary Monsters",

followed by 2 NIN songs ("Reptile" and "Hurt"), after which NIN decamped and Bowie's set proceeded. -|- David Bowie + Nine Inch Nails - Dissonance Live 1995 (HD) [-45:16-]

[Lyrics] LEON TAKES US OUTSIDE : Leon Blank

-|- Leon Takes Us Outside / Micah P. Hinson - The Dreams You Left Behind [-4:51-]

[Lyrics] OUTSIDE : Prologue

[Lyrics] THE HEART'S FILTHY LESSON : Detective Nathan Adler

[Lyrics] A SMALL PLOT OF LAND : Citizens of Oxford Town

[Lyrics] (SEGUE) BABY GRACE (A HORRID CASSETTE) : Baby Grace Blue

[Lyrics] HALLO SPACEBOY : Paddy

[Lyrics] THE MOTEL : Leon Blank

[Lyrics] I HAVE NOT BEEN TO OXFORD TOWN : Leon Blank Blue

[Lyrics] NO CONTROL : Detective Nathan Adler

[Lyrics] (SEGUE) ALGERIA TOUCHSHRIEK : Algeria Touchshriek

[Lyrics] THE VOYEUR OF UTTER DESTRUCTION (AS BEAUTY) : Artist / Minotaur

[Lyrics] (SEGUE) RAMONA A. STONE / I AM WITH NAME : Ramona A. Stone + her Acolytes

[Lyrics] WISHFUL BEGINNINGS : Artist / Minotaur

[Lyrics] WE PRICK YOU : Members of the Court of Justice

[Lyrics] (SEGUE) NATHAN ADLER : Detective Nathan Adler

[Lyrics] I'M DERANGED : Artist / Minotaur

[Lyrics] THRU THESE ARTHITECTS EYES : Leon Blank

[Lyrics] (SEGUE) NATHAN ADLER : Detective Nathan Adler

[Lyrics] STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET : Leon Blank

[27] CREDITS

| Back |

Now I think the writer no longer needs to invent the fiction. The fiction is already there. His job is to put in the reality. The writer’s task now is to become much more analytic, especially the science fiction writer. He has to approach the subject matter of ordinary lives the way a scientist approaches nature, his subject matter. - JG Ballard 1974

-| March 2020 |-

⇴ ≹ ★

Round Hole Square Peg

Feb 8 – Mar 4 Long Hall GalleryPlummer ParkWest Hollywood LA

Hours + More Info

| retro-Sky

| retro-Time

| retro-Hell

| retro-Rain

| retro-Cloud

| retro-Pain

| retro-Foam

| retro-Guide

♠ | Typography

Johnny Strike Voices, guitars (words) Hank Rank Drums, percussion Roger Strobel Bass Michael Campbell Processed sounds, bowed strings, soundscapes Joey D'Kaye Guitar, synthesizers, theremin

♥ | Layout

Cover treatment for a proposed junior high school textbook.

♣ | Collage

Poster for a white elephant sale.

♣ | DVD cover

Sabrina Alonso’s feature documentary Grizzly Road: The Last Days of the California Grizzly. Cover features a b-&-w photo of a grizzly captured and held in captivity by William Randolph Hearst for 22 years: Monarch.

♥ | Business cards

For De Vera

Illustrated w/ collages, drawings, maps, paintings, photographs, prints and quotes

| ⁋ | Each gold miner totes his personal gear: a pair of blankets, frying-pan, some flour, salt pork, brandy (or some other sanctifying spirit); some procure a mule. Field gear must-haves are a pickaxe, shovel and pan.

| ⁋ | Coloma was the first gold mining town, begun as an encampment next to Sutter’s Mill. By 1852, it had a post office and a jail – both popular destinations.

A Haunted House

-by Virginia Woolf-

⇴ ≹ ★

Round Hole Square Peg

Feb 8 – Mar 4 Long Hall GalleryPlummer ParkWest Hollywood LA

Hours + More Info

♠ | Typography

Johnny Strike Voices, guitars (words) Hank Rank Drums, percussion Roger Strobel Bass Michael Campbell Processed sounds, bowed strings, soundscapes Joey D'Kaye Guitar, synthesizers, theremin

♥ | Layout

Cover treatment for a proposed junior high school textbook.

♣ | Collage

Poster for a white elephant sale.

♣ | DVD cover

Sabrina Alonso’s feature documentary Grizzly Road: The Last Days of the California Grizzly. Cover features a b-&-w photo of a grizzly captured and held in captivity by William Randolph Hearst for 22 years: Monarch.

♥ | Business cards

For De Vera

♠ | Pencil

A hand-drawn map of the staircases of Forest Hill. There are eleven: Alton, Alton Backstairs, Magellan, Merced, Montalvo, Oriole, San Carlos, Sola, and the Grand Staircase, which drops down to Dewey Avenue.

♦ | Prepress

CMYK quarter-page ad on newsprint.

✈¦ Nevada

RENO | ¶ | Hot rods still drive on N Virginia Street, where the original casinos roamed.

✈¦ Nevada

VALLEY OF FIRE | ¶ | Established in 1935, the Valley of Fire State Park is Nevada’s first state park and a favorite of Ansel Adams.

✈¦ Northern California

SEA RANCH | ¶ | Standing in front of Condominium One in 1991 is the team that made this habitat in Northern California overlooking the Pacific Ocean a reality: Richard Whitaker, Donlyn Lyndon, Charles Moore, William Turnbull.

✈¦ California

✈¦ San Francisco

OCEAN BEACH | ¶ | Treacherous due to strong and cold rip currents, lashed by waves coming from the Pacific Ocean, this parcel on the west coast of San Francisco forms part of the rugged ribbon the National Park Service has made of the California coastline.

✈¦ Monterey Bay

ASILOMAR | ¶ | Stone wall inside Merrill Hall. | ¶ | Painting of the Engineer’s Cottage, where architect Julia Morgan stayed while building Asilomar. | ¶ | Back door to the Engineer’s Cottage.

✈¦ California

✈¦ Four Corners

MONUMENT VALLEY | ¶ | Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park is in Monument Valley, near Four Corners and along the Arizona and Utah borders. | ¶ | It forms a quadrant of the Navajo Nation Reservation, whose name for this land is Tsé Bii’ Ndzisgaii, valley of the rocks.

✈¦ Los Angeles

-¦ March 2020 ¦-

-|- FIVE YEARS

The cosmic Chameleon and the chance Corinthian lash themselves together, in the lab - on the slab - and bring forth “… a gothic drama hyper-cycle”.

Sailors in the Sky

• • ° • • ⊙ • • ✦ ☀ ☆

★ • • • · • ⊗ ✶ • °

• • ☀ • • . • ° • ✪ •

“… operational space application systems …”

⊙ • ◆ ★ ☁ ✦ · ☼ ✪ • ·

• ✦ ★ • • ☆ • ★ ⊙ ✶

✪ • • • ⚫ ☆ · • ✦ • •

• • • ✶ ✶ ⊙ • · • • • ✦

• · ★ • • ☆ . · • • ☼ •

· • • ✶ • • ⊗ • • • • ☀ ·

☆ • • • ✦ ☀ ‥ • ☆ • .

Illustrated w/ collages, drawings, maps, paintings, photographs, prints and quotes

| ⁋ | Each gold miner totes his personal gear: a pair of blankets, frying-pan, some flour, salt pork, brandy (or some other sanctifying spirit); some procure a mule. Field gear must-haves are a pickaxe, shovel and pan.

| ⁋ | Coloma was the first gold mining town, next to Sutter’s Mill. By 1852, it had a post office and a jail – both popular destinations.

I Love Lois

Feb 8 – Mar 4
Long Hall Gallery
Plummer Park
West Hollywood LA

Feb 8 – Mar 4
Long Hall Gallery
Plummer Park
West Hollywood LA

RENO

| ¶ | Hot rods still drive on N Virginia Street, where the original casinos roamed.

VALLEY OF FIRE

| ¶ | Established in 1935, the Valley of Fire State Park is Nevada’s first state park and a favorite of Ansel Adams.

SEA RANCH

| ¶ | Standing in front of Condominium One in 1991 is the team that made this habitat in Northern California overlooking the Pacific Ocean a reality: Richard Whitaker, Donlyn Lyndon, Charles Moore, William Turnbull.

OCEAN BEACH

| ¶ | Treacherous due to strong and cold rip currents, lashed by waves coming from the Pacific Ocean, this parcel on the west coast of San Francisco forms part of the rugged ribbon the National Park Service has made of the California coastline.

ASILOMAR

| ¶ | Stone wall inside Merrill Hall. | ¶ | Painting of the Engineer’s Cottage, where architect Julia Morgan stayed while building Asilomar. | ¶ | Back door to the Engineer’s Cottage.

MONUMENT VALLEY

| ¶ | Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park is in Monument Valley, near Four Corners and along the Arizona and Utah borders. | ¶ | It forms a quadrant of the Navajo Nation Reservation, whose name for this land is Tsé Bii’ Ndzisgaii, valley of the rocks.

♟| 2018
Camp Fire

♚| 2018
National Museum of Brazil

♜|2014
Wilbur Hot Springs

♚| 2018
Salvator Mundi

♟| 1933
Thylacine

♜| 2011
Tunisia

♜| 1989
Berlin Wall

♟|2011
Natori Tsunami

♝| 1968
St Boniface