Play: En Garde!

 Athena by Gracie Gardner, Directed by Kathryn Van Meter, presented in collaboration with Salle Auriol Fencing Club, Arts West, Through May 4. 

Back to the Junction in West Seattle. Dinner at our favorite sushi place, a desert donut at the nearby Top Pot (which was also hosting a local distillery for a tasting for rye whiskeys and berry liqueurs), and the Athena at the Arts West on its opening Friday. A play about two young women. And swordplay. A lot of swordplay.

Mary Ellen (Anteia Delaney) and the aforementioned Athena (Allison Renee) are 17-year old fencers training for nationals. Mary Ellen is dexterous, gangly and introverted, fencing to make herself look better for college. Solo-named Athena is strong, loud, and pushy, fencing to prove herself the best. Mary Ellen is from the burbs and wants to impress her parents. Athena is from the city and has a rocky relationship with her father. Both are socially maladroit. They start practicing together. And the play is about their relationship as they cross swords and words and emotions.

They're seventeen, and all the emotions are on the surface. The conversations just tumble out nonlinearly, with whipsaw changes in direction and hummingbird levels of attention. And through it all you see the bonds growing between them, as they both want the same thing, and very different things as well. You're supporting Mary Ellen at the beginning (she's the underdog of the pair), but come to appreciate Athena as well.

The play is presented in collaboration with the Salle Auriol Fencing Club. There have been a lot of such team-ups in West Seattle's productions, usually other entertainment groups but this is the first one for a fencing club. The single setting is the piste - the long strip that combat takes place on. The action orbits around the field of combat, but centralizes there. And the fencing is ... real good, and carries the plot forward as both young women change each other. 

And the Athena is ... good. I liked it but did not love it, but then, I have never fenced nor been a 17-year-old girl. The Lovely Bride DID love it, because in her storied history she was both. I found it well-written, well-acted, and well-presented. Arts West has produced another excellent evening of entertainment. 

 More later,

The Political Desk Pops Off

OK, I'm going to be 'that guy'. The grumpy old man complaining about the responsibilities of the modern world. Blame the killer head cold that has been kicking me around since Gary Con, but I'm going to vent a little.

This past week a packet arrived from the King County Department of Elections with a ballot. And the ballot had one measure on it. One. The official title is Proposition No. 1 Regional Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) Levy. Its to fund the King County Fingerprinting unit. Yep. Fingerprinting.

It's a replacement levy for the elapsing levy. It is a property tax increase, but at a lesser percentage than the previous one. Of course, your house is worth more at this point as well. but doing the numbers, it is an extra 20 bucks on top of everything else. And AFIS has done a pretty good job for the past few decades, has been really transparent about their work, and touts their successes on their site. And checking on the web, there is not even a statement AGAINST this measure.

But,

But,

But why are you asking US at this point? Shouldn't this be part of the rest of the budget? Is this worth sending out ballots for something like this?

Well, they're asking us because thems the rules. You want the county government to boost your property taxes (even by about a Jackson) without your OK? You want a chance to be a part of the decision -making process? Well, here it is. Being a separate item also protects it from being put on the chopping block for some closed-door budget cutting (like, say, the mounted police unit for Seattle itself, which met its end last year due to budgetary constraints). 

And the ballots have a lot more on them, just not stuff where I'm living. School levies on Mercer Island and in Enumclaw. Fire Protection issues in Renton, Duvall, and Woodinville. And some of this stuff can't really wait around for a November election. 

I'm actually an opponent of the proposals to bunch everything together in one mammoth ballot, and as a result am willing to put up with this "pecked by baby ducks" approach to government. And if it is a irritant, its the same sort of irritant as getting your oil changed at regular intervals, or separating your trash and recycling, or taking those two separate bins to the curb, even when it's been raining for hours and you're really rather be inside because you already have a nasty cold. AND hauling them back up the driveway. In the RAIN.

But I digress.

Anyway, go vote when you get your ballots. Its practically frictionless at the moment, and requires only a little effort on your part. It shows you're paying attention. Despite all my whining about the process, I'd say let's keep the AFIS, and vote Approved on this. 

S'allright? S'allright.

More later,

[UPDATE:] Proposition one passed, 58 to 42%. However, only 25% of the registered voters weighed in on the matter, which as always, a little sad. By the same token, a hotly-contested school bond issue on Mercer Island also passed, with 50% of the citizens weighing in. So, good going, Mercer!

Book: An Elegy for Ellison

  The Last Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison (with J. Michael Stracynski), Blackstone Publishing, 2024

Provenance: Christmas present from the Lovely Bride, purchased off Amazon.

Review: I talked about Harlan Ellison the man back here. Let's talk about his "last work" - The long-promised collection of bleeding edge stories called The Last Dangerous Visions. 

I read the initial Dangerous Visions (published 1967) in hardback in our high school library, and purchased paperback editions of it and its two-volume sequel, Again Dangerous Visions (1972), in college. For a young person who had drifted into SF through the ABC axis (Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke), the subject matter and writing was a bit mind-blowing. It helped codify the American New Wave of Science Fiction, went after a variety of societal taboos, and kicked down the doors of tradition bolts-and-rivets SF.

Then there was a bit of a lapse of about 50 years, and only after Ellison's passing did his executor, J. Michael Stracynski (the Babylon 5 guy), organize the remaining material Ellison had, added a few stories, and finally finished the volume. 

The result is a mixed bag. Some pieces have that urgent, nostalgic, whiff of the originals ("Assignment No. 1" by Stephen Robinett and "A Night at the Opera" by Robert Wissner). Some feel like political tracks that could appear in the Economist ("Hunger" by Max Brooks). Some were utterly frightening ("The Final Pogrom" by Dan Simmons, which combines the holocaust with American Ingenuity, made more poignant by recent events in this country). Some of the best feel like recent, post-Harlan additions. "War Stories" by Edward Bryant, dealing with weaponized sharks, was brilliant in both presentation and subject. "First Sight" by Adrian Tchaikovski mixes the tropes of first contact, alien cultures, and the limits of the senses in a nice little package. But more than a few were "meh" - OK, but not shaking the earth great. And there were short "Intermezzos" by D.M.Rowles that just completely missed the mark. The art (by Tim Kirk) is a wondrous call-back to the earlier volumes, but the Ellisonesque intros (telling you WHY this story and this author are worth your time) are mostly missing. Yes, and there some typos in the text, including the punchline of Ward Moore "Falling from Grace", which needed a bit more typographic love to make the story land.

The longest entry in the book is Stracynski's own introduction/eulogy of Ellison, two parts remembrance of a friend, and two parts why-this-project-is-late. He hits the good parts and bad parts of Ellison in his travel from Terrible Infant to Grey Eminence, and offers some reasons behind his personal actions over the years. But reasons are not a denial of responsibility, and Ellison the man, the writer, and the editor, has to accept responsibility. An afterword talks about earlier incarnations of the book, and seems like an interesting collection of stories in their own right.

And the end result is ... OK. This final volume would neither kick down the doors of traditional SF (which now continues, but no longer dominates, the marketplace), nor wade onto the shores like a Leviathan, sweeping all in its path. My mind is not blown, but then, I'm no longer a teenager, my high school has been completely renovated, and the world turns and moves on. Some of the dystopian futures are all-too-real. Others feel right around the corner.

But it's a suitable memorial to a mercurial talent. Thank you J. Michael. Rest easy, Harlan.

More later,