Books: Seattle Time Capsules

 Seattleness: A Cultural Atlas, by Terra Hatfield, Jenny Kempson, and Natalie Ross, Sasquatch Press (at that time part of Penguin Random House), 2018

Filmlandia! by David Schmader, Sasquatch Books (at the time part of Penguin Random House, but soon to be sold toe Blue Star Press and given its freedom), 2023 

Art In Seattle's Public Spaces by James Rupp and Miguel Edwards, University of Washington Press, 2018

Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle's Topography by David B Williams, University of Washington Press 2015

The Mushroom Hunters by Langdon Cook, Ballantine Books, 2013 (paperback 2023)

Seattle Noir edited by Curt Colbert, Akashic Books, 2009

Provenance: Various. I believe Seattleness and Art in Seattle's Public Spaces were gifts from the Lovely Bride (Seattleness has a Half-Price Books sticker on it). I found Too High and Too Steep at the Elliot Bay Bookstore when it was in Pioneer Square, The Mushroom Hunters was recommended by colleague Wolfgang Baur, and when I couldn't find it locally, ordered it from Amazon. Seattle Noir was a whim purchase at Barnes & Nobles when I was looking for something else, but it was shelved face-outward and caught my eye. I have no memory of where I found Filmlandia! - it just showed up one day and refused to leave until I read it. 

The Reviews: Books are times capsules. They can't help it. As soon as the last word is written, the final change is made, and the switch thrown and the electricity pumped into the presses, they are frozen in amber. They can be revised, they can be rewritten, but the sheer physicality of the book gives it permanence that no computer file can match. Historical books are trapped not only by their subject matter, but also that they represent the thinking of their times. Even those that want to be current (in PARTICULAR those that want to be current) are stopped at the point when they are finished. 

Anyway,

I've lived in Seattle (OK, a suburb of Seattle) for longer than I've lived anywhere else. I've got my 25-year chip, which allows me to complain about new people moving into the state. But I still have that newcomer's vibe of interest in the area, and picking up what I may have missed before I got here. So I've been accumulating books about Seattle, not out of a passion, but just finding them along the way.

So here are some books about my current home town:

Seattleness: A Cultural Atlas is an infographic book, in that it takes stuff about Seattle and its history and presents it in a variety of graphics - charts, maps, and tables. Some of them are cool. Some of them are obscure, some of them are historical, some of them are time capsules in that they are no longer applicable (listing of pinball parlors in Seattle, most of which are gone).

The infographics are good-looking, but are often more graphic than informative, and you have to do a little digging to understand what they are saying. But, it is immensely browsable, and worth keeping around, even as it slowly moves into the past. 

(They do hit on one subject that always irritated me - they talk for several pages about Shadowrun's Seattle. In the Shadowrun future, a virus transformed a large part of the population into orcs, elves, and dwarves. The orcs took over the Underground. The problem is, the REAL Underground (and Seattle has one), is located beneath Pioneer Square (created when they raised the streets), and FASA put a corporate pyramid on top of it. That's a nit, but in its defense I will point out that FASA, Shadowrun's publisher, was based in Chicago at the time.)

Filmlandia! A Movie Lover's Guide to the Films and Television of Seattle, Portland, and the Great Northwest. has a subtitle that pretty much describes it in full. It is a collection of short bits about productions filmed and/or set in Seattle area and the greater PNW.  Twin Peaks. Northern Exposure. Frasier (though only for one episode), Grey's Anatomy, An Officer and a Gentleman, 10 Things I Hate About You. Even the risible McQ in which John Wayne gets in a car chase up I-5 to South Lake Union, and there's no traffic. David Schmader was a columnist for The Stranger back in the day and does a good job. Yep, with all that old movie lore, it's a time capsule.

Art In Seattle's Public Spaces. Seattle is a land of public art. You're walking along, minding your own business, turn a corner, and BOOM! there's a mural or a statue or an installation right in your line of sight. In part that's because Seattle and King County have a 1 Percent for the Arts ordinance, where 1% of the budget for capital project improvement funds go to art. Nice plan, and it often means you get some monumental artwork (one my favorites is parked outside of Safeco Field, a Tsutakawa piece of a baseball glove with a hole in it. For many years, this was appropriate for the Mariners outfield). 

The book deals with public art in Seattle from SoDo (SOuth of DOwntown) to South Lake Union (now called Amazonia). Lots of pictures, ranging from the big orange Calder stabile in the Olympic Sculpture Garden to the Hammering Man outside the SAM to the Ken Griffey Jr statue outside Safeco. It includes plaques, large installations, and internal pieces within the city's buildings. The presentation is broken up by zones, south to north, and while massive, leaves out a lot of public works not in the city center - like Totten's Changing Form on Queen Anne Hill, Noguchi's Black Sun in Volunteer Park, or Beyer's Waiting for the Interurban in Fremont. 

What makes it a time capsule is that, despite the size of some of these art pieces, they do tend to move around. Pieces are sold, moved, reinstalled. The cover displays Typewriter Eraser, Scale X, which is, well, a gigantic typewriter eraser. Owned by the Paul Allen family, the sculpture was at one time near the Sculpture Park, but moved to Seattle Center, outside the MoPop (Museum of Popular Culture), and was then sold at auction after Allen's death. I cannot find out who bought it or where it went from there. There are similar/duplicate pieces in Washington DC and Las Vegas, but that one was Seattle's.

(Should I ever win the lottery (fat chance), I'd like to create a web site listing all of the publicly-viewable art in Greater Seattle, because I think it deserves it).

Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle's Topography. Denizens of the Pacific Northwest have a reputation for being love-the-land tree-hugging environmentalists. But we've engaged in a lot of terraforming over the years, making low places higher and high places lower. This books hits the major ones - filling in the tidal flats south of the city, the Montlake Cut which dropped the level of Lake Washington 8 feet, and in particular the Denny Hill Regrade. 

Back at the turn of the previous century, the area north of Seattle's downtown was a large hill, which blocked future expansion and required too many horses to pull wagons up it. The answer from the city fathers was to use sluicing equipment from the gold rush to wash away the hill, load the dirt into barges, and take it out into the sound to dump it. By the time they finished, trucks had replaced horses as transport, and the area became a site of warehouses and used car lots for many decades until Amazon moved into the neighborhood (my first office at Amazon was on the 5th floor of a building on 6th Avenue, and I figure I was still under the original ground level). Williams, who writes a lot about nature in the Northwest, covers a lot of ground (heh) in describing the monumental early efforts that made Seattle what it is today. 

Seattle Noir is one of a series of local mystery novels offered by Akashic set in various cities, ranging from Baghdad to Baltimore and from Lagos to Las Vegas. It is collection of shorts set in the Seattle area, and it cool from the local angle - you've been in that neighborhood, you know what they're talking about, yeah, that feels like Seattle. And Seattle gives itself over to a lot of noir tropes - its power centers moving behind the scenes, its rain-spattered streets and continual gloom (mostly in October and November) creating a continual twilight broken by the neon of business and late-night lights of office workers. It sometimes feels like a city filmed in black and white. Noir town.

For me, though, noir is defined by people making ethical choices and being punished for it. Bogart loses the girl. MacMurray takes the rap. Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown. What is the morally right choice often goes up against the societal rules. And some of the stories fit that mode. Others, not so much.

Similarly, a lot of good stories are here that are "pure Seattle" - Duwamish tribal rites and Chinatown in the1900s and roadhouses at the city limits. Stories that embrace both our history and our outlook. But there are a few that, while good, you have to to fill in the locational blanks without losing too much of the tale. They're still worth reading, but don't hit the mark as Seattle tales. 

There are a lot of good stories here "The Wrong End of the Gun", "The Taskmasters" and "Blue Sunday" all have that hard-boiled edge. The protagonists are strugglers, the challenges down to earth. Some of the stories could slot in anywhere with a change of street names, but a lot of them feel very Seattlish. Best of that group was "Blood Tide" and "Center of the Universe".

So this is a time capsule in that a lot of the stories take place in that mythical ancient Seattle, But also the way the city has changed from the more recent dotcom boom and conflict between New Seattle and Old, in the evolving conflict since the book was published. It's worth looking at, but not too deeply.

The Mushroom Hunters: A Hidden World of Food, Money and (Mostly Legal) Adventures was written about ten years back, and reflects a Seattle of that age, with a rising food culture situated at the borders of a wilderness. Ten years later, the food culture is more established, and the wilderness pushed back a few more miles. 

The book is about the people in the wild mushroom business - those who go out and harvest them and those who sell them to the restaurants that feature them. These are no white buttons grown in a controlled atmosphere of a former coal mine. These are wilderness mushrooms - morrels and lobsters and chanterelles and white truffles, found in the more undisturbed parts of the PNW, sprouting up at rare times and only under certain conditions. It requires a lot of hiking, watching, getting up at ungodly hours and driving deep into the hinters. It also requires a flexible regard to local laws and trespassing signs. Langdon Cook weaves a tales of the mushrooms and the various people who hunt them out, from bus-loaded tourists on a spree to Vietnamese expats setting up their own claims.

Its only ten years ago, and I can feel the ground has changed. A lot of the restaurants mentioned on the receiving end of the mushroom train are no more, while others remain but have changed ownership. And likely the basics of the mushroom trade have remained, but are buried by more exurban and suburban sprawl. Its a good snapshot of an age and a business out here in Seattle.

And that's it - a whole collection of Seattle books that have popped up. More may show up over time, whether they are our history or are trapped in the amber of the moment that fingers strike the keys and the files are sent to the publishers. All in all, a good collection.

More later, 

The Political Desk: Results

 I often use the term "hanging fire" in reporting these results. The term means a delay between an action and the results of that action. It comes from firearms, in that there is sometimes a delay between pulling the trigger and fully igniting the combustible gunpowder in the bullet itself. The delay in modern firearms may be a second or two, which is enough to cause the barrel to move off target and the shot to miss. In earlier muzzle-loading firearms, the gunpowder behind the cotton wad and solid bullet may not ignite immediately, with the same effect. In even earlier firearms like flintlocks, the gunpowder is on a pan external to the gun, and the powder may ignite with a bright flash but do nothing to fire the weapon. That's where we get the term "flash in a pan". 

And this is how the term applies to voting in Washington State. Ballots here need to be turned in at ballot boxes by 8 PM, or postmarked by midnight of election day in order to be counted. Older and more conservative voters tend to vote early in the process, while younger and more liberal voters tend to vote later. So if the race is close, it may be several days before the smoke clears (hey, another firearms allusion) and we get to see what happened. 

Case in point - Seattle Mayor. Progressive candidate Katie Wilson versus more centrist Bruce Harrell. On election night and the first drop of ballots, Harrell is up 54-46 percent, which in most terms would mean victory. But, late voters tend to skew further to the left. BUT this is an off-year election, and participation is often less than the big-ticket elections. AND there is a greater chance that last-minute mail-ins will not be postmarked in time because they've been gutting the post office (and announced laying off another 30k staffers because, you know, Christmas is such a slow season for the post office). In any event, I think that it will tighten up, and may even be a squeaker, but incumbent Harrell will stay mayor. [Edit - I wrote that paragraph on Wednesday after the election. A week later Katie Wilson not only caught up but passed Bruce Harrell (50-49.5). It may STILL require a machine recount (within 0.5% of total vote) and ultimately depend on verifying challenged ballots and counting late overseas-but-still-postmarked ballots, but it looks like Wilson made up an 8-point early debit to win.]

(And lest we think it that such a comeback was the result of mail-in voting, when I lived in Kenosha County, the initial election results (from Kenosha and Racine) showed huge margins for the Democratic candidates, from the urban vote, and the networks would declare it a win for the more conservative Republicans accounting for when the expected larger rural vote that would show up later. And they would be right.)

But let's look at the ballot at Grubb Street. This is as of Tuesday night, a week after the election.

Proposed Constitutional Amendment: Senate Joint Resolution No. 8201 (Amend the state constitution to let elderly care funding play the stock market as opposed to just investing in bonds): Approved 56-42 statewide. In King County the margin was 71-29.

King County Proposition No. 1 Medic One - Emergency Medical Services Replacement of Existing Levy: Yes 81-19

King County Public Hospital District No. 1 Proposition No. 1 Levy Lid Lift for Health Care Services: Approved 58-42

King County Executive: Girmay Zahilay 54-45.  The first night's count had it closer (50-48), but this was a choice between two good, similar candidates. 

Metropolitan King County Council District No. 5: Stephanie Fain 55-44 (This blog gave Fain the most tepid of recommendations, then her opponent pretty much flamed out with misleading claims and conservative backing.)

City of Kent Council Position No. 2: Satwinder Kaur  62-37.

City of Kent Council Position No. 6: Sharn Shoker 50-49 This blog endorsed her opponent in the primary but switched to Shoker in the general election, Then didn't mention it in the final summary. The management regrets the error. This is another close one, where Andy Song led the first night, then Shoker caught up and passed. So this one was Hanging Fire (see above). Unlikely that this content will come down to a recount, but this was another case of two good candidates.

Kent School District No. 415 Director District No. 4: Teresa Gregory 58-40

Kent School District No. 415 Director District No. 5: Laura Williams 65-34

Total voting in King County ran about 45% of registered voters, with a large percentage being turned in at ballot drops. 

OK, that's it. I'm going back to theatre reviews and talking about games, but I will pop back should anything change.

More later,

Game: All's Well

 The Well by Peter Schaefer, Shoeless Pete Games, 122-page softbound, 2021, Kickstarter

So folks by now know that I regularly post recent game arrivals here at Grubb Street. I buy most of them, either in Brick-and-Mortars or Kickstarter. I read most of them, though some more diligently than others. But I don't consider those mentions as real reviews because I haven't played them, and to give a game a review you really need to see or experience them in play. 

In any event, The Well. I kickstarted this way back, as well as a number of my colleagues on the Saturday Night group. One of my colleagues has done so to the tune that they rated a in-person gaming session with the designer, Peter Schaefer, who is local. So Peter came down from Mercer Island and ran us in a few sessions. And it was really good, and I actually had a personal epiphany involving it.

The Well is a nice, tight little RPG. Its world and purpose are extremely focused. Its mechanics are relatively simple and adaptable. The mechanics exist primarily to serve the world, and the world is an expression of those mechanics. Yeah, that sound pretentious, but that's the best way to explain it.

The world consists of Bastion, a single city, moving eternally down a bottomless shaft. What else is there? Doesn't matter. The city moves ever-downward, digging out new rooms and storehouses on the sides of the shaft, eventually exhausting their resources, and continuing downward into new territory, abandoning the older city behind it/above it. Think of a slug leaving a slime trail, where that trail is the earlier civilizations. They use the previous cityscapes as dumping grounds for trash and burial places for the dead.

OK, but the dead don't stay quiet, as the dead tend to not do. There are humanoid skeletons and zombies roaming the upper reaches, but also spiders which are constructed of boney bits, skull-shaped bats with wings of rotted meat, and piles of ropey, semi-liquified flesh prowling the halls. So adventurers known are gravediggers (that's you guys) pass up through the locked doors to find lost stuff. It's an inversion of the traditional going down into the dungeon to loot ancient civilizations - instead you're going up to loot your own recent past.

Completing a task is simple - roll a d6 against a target number set by the moderator (GM). If you roll a "6", roll again and add that number as well. There are no character stats in the traditional sense, but you can get additional dice to roll for proper tools (Axes, for example, add a +1 die when the action is murder) or specific skills (Mechanics, First Aid, and magic (involving painting runes)). In addition, you can propose a gambit, which is an potential situational penalty you come up with it (I get an extra die to hit my target with an arrow, but I risk running out of arrows would get you an additional dice). Depending the severity of what you offer, you can gain up to three dice. The downside is that if any of the dice you roll show a "1", the bad thing you propose happens. 

Your history and contacts provide springboards for the adventures themselves. There are a lot of factions in Bastion, and at start you have good relations with one of them and less-than-good relations with another. The ones that don't like you can give you grief, but the ones that DO like you can lean on you for jobs, which carry their own perils. 

Peter Schaefer, the designer, led our little group of gravediggers through two adventures over several Saturday nights. The first was to take a group of tourists (well, sensible upper-class citizens) above the city to find an old fountain from a previous age. The fountain had a particularly nasty mass of animated dead tissue called a tangle, and we beat a hasty retreat (I don't think we lost anyone, which was to our credit). The next time we heading up, it was to track down an escaped criminal. Everyone else had contacts to bring her back alive for trial. My group of criminals wanted her dead, and my orders were to bump her off. And I made a hash of it - blowing a couple straightforward opportunities and not taking any gambits in order to improve my odds. In the end she escaped and I was treated as an incompetent by my criminal gang. 

Did I say it had cool art? It has cool
art, by Kurt Komoda

  And my personal epiphany? I don't like playing a bad guy. As a GM, I have little trouble tormenting the players and having NPCs lie or betray them. But as a character, I tend towards the good, and will self-sabotage to get a more accommodating solution. I've done the bad guy thing before in betraying other players, but never really liked it.

 Anyway, the play of the game fits well within short timeframes, like convention games or an evening session or two, but has the potential to spread out into larger campaigns and issues. You can guide your character through the pitfalls of life as a gravedigger and retire, or end up source material for the undeadlies prowling the upper galleries. It is an excellent melding of traditional dungeoning and gritty urban roleplaying. Wilderness need not apply. Good times.

The book itself is very stylish, showing you can do stuff in black and white and still have it come off neat and professional. The interior art is evocative, in particular the monster illustrations.  The cover gets a nod for not being the traditional three people looking heroic on the cover. All-in-all, its an excellent presentation of an excellent game. 

You can get the pdf of the game at Peter's Itchio site, and get a gander at some of the cool art. Worth checking out.

More later, 

Book and No Movie: On the Rocks

 The Hot Rock by Donald E. Westlake, Grand Central Publishing, previously known as Warner Books, a Division of Hachette Book Group, 1970.

Provenance: Apparition Books, Renton, which has an excellent collection of esoterica, plus solid SF and mystery sections. After discussion of caper films among my Saturday night group which mentioned the movie version, I found this copy, its spine uncracked, on its shelves. 

Review: I've talked about Donald Westlake before in these pages, and how he balances both hard-bitten, hard-boiled protagonists with lighter, more human-sized, comical characters. The Hot Rock is an example of the latter. I was attracted to it because, many years ago, I saw the movie version with Robert Redford and George Segal, and when the subject came up in our group, I kept my eyes out for a copy.

This is the first of the novels featuring John Dortmunder, a very good thief with very poor luck. He goes free from prison and an old buddy picks him up in a stolen car with MD plates. The old buddy, Kelp, has a job for him - stealing a large emerald belonging to an African nation on the behalf of a rival African nation. Dortmunder is uncomfortable with the idea, but lacking a lot of options, throws in with Kelp. 

They put together a team: Dortmunder is the planner. Kelp is the contact. Murch is the driver (who obsesses about driving), Chefwick is the locksmith (who is model train fan), Greenwood is the all-around, the utility outfielder of the group, a hapless romantic. They're all mugs who have had their run of hits and misses, but never a big score. They meet in the back of a bar and plan out the heist from the New York Coliseum. No small thing. The heist works, until it doesn't. Greenwood gets caught with the emerald. 

So now the plan becomes how to get Greenwood out of jail with the emerald. And they do, but they don't. Author and screen critic Robert McKee refers to this as "the gap" which drives character development - the space between character expectations (Greenwood gets the gem) and reality (The cops catch Greenwood). That sets up the next part of the heist (getting Greenwood back) and ratchets up the tension as a result. This happens a number of times - where they succeed until they fail. And as Gilda Radner's character, Rosanne Rosannadanna says, "It's always something."

And so it is. Dortmunder is the pessimist and ready to walk away several times. Kelp is the optimist, and keeps bringing him back into the fold. The risks get bigger with every iteration, as do the resources. The plot bounces along nicely, the characterization is good, and Westlake has an economy of style that plays out incredibly well here.

Anyway, after talking about it in our Saturday night group, we went hunting for the film version from 1972, with Redford, Segal, Paul Sands, and Zero Mostel. And we couldn't find it. Anywhere. Not streaming. Not on Amazon. Not even at the venerable and incredible Scarecrow Video. which is the last local outpost of rentals. In our overheated, overproduced, content-heavy modern times, it is not to be found. I found a Spanish-language version, but that's not the same thing at all. I remember seeing it in the theaters fifty years ago, and seeing it on TV once or twice, but the ground has opened up and swallowed it whole. Would love to know the story of why.

Maybe we have to plan a heist.

More later, 

 

Book and a Movie: Canary In a Coal Mine

 The "Canary" Murder Case by S.S.Van Dine, Fawcett Publications, 1927

The Canary Murder Murder Case, written by S.S. Van Dine, Albert Shelby Lovino, Florence Ryerson, Herman Mankiewicz, directed by Malcom St. Clair, Paramount Pictures, 1929.

Provenance: The novel is from the collection of Sacnoth, who provided a large number of mysteries for my late mother-in-law when she lived with us, and which I have been slowly burrowing through over the years. The book itself became a shop-worn volume tucked in my jacket pocket, to be read at the moments when I was waiting for someone or something else (the rest of you use phones these days, so you understand the principle). Nearing completion of this particular mystery, I inveighed upon my Saturday-Night crew to watch the film version (we had previously watched The Kennel Murder Case, another Philo Vance mystery. 

The Reviews: The "Canary" Murder Case (the original put the name in parenthesis, and I'll use it here to separate it from the film) lived for several months on the best-sellers lists, and was regarded as being a definitive advancement of the genre. Its detective, Philo Vance, was a erudite intellectual dilletante who is good friends with the New York City DA, Markham, and is allowed to tag along on investigations. A Broadway actress is slain in her locked apartment, and all clues point to an interrupted burglary. Vance, who is more concerned with the psychology of the criminals than mere apparent evidence, disagrees with the prima facie appearances. And the fact that all the initial evidence points to a burglar only strengthens his opinion. The crime scene is, in his opinion, "too perfect". 

It turns out that the Canary had numerous suitors and former suitors and a taste for blackmail, and that her apartment building had more visitors that evening than the news stand at Penns Station. Suspects are gathered, solid alibis are established, then shattered, and it all leads up to an unreasonable poker game with Vance, Markham, and the suspects. Vance knows who the killer is after that game, but the evidences shows it impossible. Until in the final pages, Vance discover "how he did it", with a bit of high tech wizardry (for the time) which left me shaking my head. 

The writing is engaging, though I had a hard time putting William Powell (who is Vance in the movie - more about that later) into the mold of Vance of the book. Instead I kept getting Frasier Crane as Vance - he would quote Latin, refer to obscure artists, and noted that he had to dash out to the opera or a Monet showing. Vance of the books is extremely elite and dilettantish. As a result, he also codes gay - his encyclopedic knowledge of art and disdain for the commonplace, his elaborate mode of speaking, his fondness for NYC Clubs, plus his relationships with the other male members of group (Markham, the rougher, doubting Chief Detective Heath, and the narrator) gives off strong gay vibes in the modern age. (Of course, Van Dine himself believed that romance had no place in mysteries, so this may account for some of that attitude).

And then there is the matter of the book's narrator - supposedly Van Dine himself, who is presented as Vance's lawyer and constant companion, but who vanishes as a character whenever Vance has someone else to chat with. Indeed, all of "Van Dine's" conversations with Vance are along the lines of "I tried to convince Philo to tell me what was going on, but he remained tight-lipped".  Narrator "Van Dine" is effusive in his praise of this great detective. And the "Van Dine" of this volume was living with Vance in Manhattan, since his own apartment was being renovated. So yeah, the aura of "more than just friends" hangs heavy over their relationship in a way that those of Holmes/Watson, Wolfe/Goodwin, or Poirot/Hastings does not. 

So, with twenty-some pages to go in the book, and with me confident of whodoneit and having an idea of howhedidit, I sat down with my Saturday night group to watch the movie based on it. And it is pretty bad in movie form. We get that The Canary (The OG Flapper Louise Brooks) is a nasty blackmailer right off the bat, and she vanishes from the film upon her demise. Vance (William Powell) is already on the case, investigating her on the behalf of a local banker, as she was blackmailing his son. The son was innocent and one of the young ingenues with Mary Astor, herself in an early role (and therefore innocent as well). Most of the bits of gathering the suspects were shortened, but it concluded in the same unreasonable poker game where Vance tests the mettle of the suspects. He realizes who the murderer is, but that murderer perishes before they can confess, and Vance must find out the howhedidit on his own (though better than the way he did in the book).

I say it was pretty bad - it was slow, pokey, and there were odd shifts in the filming. The reason for it was that it was originally filmed as a silent movie, and then retrofitted with dialogue and additional scenes afterwards. This was Powell's first appearance as the lead, and his theater training gave him a natural diction and movement that was missing from the silent-scenes filmed earlier (There was a lot of held shots of people looking grim). And Louise Brooks herself refused to participate in the reshoot, so a lot of her lines were dubbed and in many cases her face obscured. 

This is Powell's first gig as a leading actor in the movies, his first talkie, and and an early establishment of his film character as a hero as opposed to a villain. His calmness and comfort really stands out here, and while he does not have the wit and savoir faire of the Thin Man and other roles yet, neither does he come off with Van Dine's eliteness and esoteric nature. He is dapper, mannered, and restrained.

So, the end result - both movie and book are verging on their centennial. They're of their era (The movie in particular has a couple black actors in supportive, comical roles  - yeah, cringeworthy). They are both worth revisiting, though know that you may face disappointments in their resolutions.

More later, 

Recent Arrivals: The Odd Lot

 So it has been a while, but new games continue to accumulate here at Grubb Street. Some are Kickstarters, but others are from various stores in the area. And I have to say, it's a good thing. There are more game stores operating in the Puget Sound region now than there were 10 years ago, and I am pleased to see brick-and-mortars even as I take advantage of funding new products in advance. 

Some of these new projects that have shown up push back the standard limits of what is a role-playing game, and reflect the wide diversity found in the hobby. Some cleave closely to one version of D&D or the other, or have that heady whiff of nostalgia to them, while others challenge a lot of basic assumptions and tropes in the play-style. So this is a mix of old and new 

Let' see what's here: 

Elder Mythos Deluxe Edition by Michele Paroli and Marta Palvarini, Mana Project Studios, Boxed RPG containing a 240-page digest-sized hardbound, 2 Card Decks, 9 dice, GM Screen, and 10 scenario maps, 2025, Kickstarter. This is a Lovecraftian game where you play. not a cultist or an investigator, but a Mythos Entity itself, both competing with and collaborating with other (player) Mythos entities. It is listed as using the Year Zero engine, but that is pretty much just using that system's dice pools and a card-based initiative session. As an Elder God, you use your turn to manipulate lesser entities (including mere mortals) in the play field, and to mess up the manipulations of the other players, then describing those manipulations in detail. There is a GM/Eldritch Master who is supposed to corral the whole thing. The game play feels like a brain-storming session where there are no bad ideas, but there are bad ideas. The entities you represent stand outside of time, space, and traditional role-playing tropes. The book itself has variable fonts, white on black printing, and a lack of index to help you navigate. So this one would be a learning experience.  

Pendragon Gamemaster's Handbook by Greg Stafford et. al, Chaosium, 238-page hardbound, 2024, Wizard's Keep Games. I mentioned there's been a rising tide of game stores in the area, and I was happy to see one of the locals, Wizard's Keep Games, carrying a deeper level of Chaosium products. This Gamemaster's book is a toolkit-style of book on diverse subjects, supporting the core book -- court life, religions, and the supernatural, as well as new rules for running large battles, plus a goodly collection of NPCs and creatures. The presentation on parchment-ish paper is as solid and the art styles are appropriate for the period, and should become a browsable book in my collection.. 

Call of Cthulhu The Sutra of Pale Leaves: Twin Suns Rising, by Damon Lang, Andrew Logan Montgomery, Jason Sheets, Yukihiro Trada, et al, Chaosium, 192-page hardbound, 2025, Wizard's Keep Games. The past is another country. Japan is another country. An adventure set in Japan in the go-go eighties (40 years ago) is several countries removed. This particular adventure establishes a new manifestation of the King In Yellow and its infiltration into Japanese society. The book deals with Japanese mythology, manga, and the Yakuza, and sets up for a SECOND volume of adventures, Carcosa Manifest. The primary designers come out of the Sons of Singularity, who did The Sassoon Files, and The Blessed and the Blasphemous, and the design here shows a lot of their approach in the form of flowcharts to guide the adventure and confidants to use as plot hooks to bring the players in. 

Orbital Blues by Sam Sleney (writing) Josh Clark (art) and Zachary Cox (more writing), Soul Muppet Publishing, 206-page digest-sized hardbound, 2021, Mox Boarding House. An impulse buy, as I note that Mox has slowly be growing its RPG selection over the years, and bringing in some more esoteric titles. Orbital Blues has been out a few years. It is a pretty straightforward game system - a character has three stats (Muscle, Grit, and Savvy) and uses d6s to resolve tasks and combat. Its genre is "Space Western", which includes Firefly, Mos Eisley, and in particular Cowboy Bebop. It's a dystopian setting, where the future has passed through the planets and satellite settlements and then moved on, leaving poverty and oppression in its wake. You're outlaws on the fringe of society, trying to make a dishonest credit by smuggling, bounty hunting, and heists. Also picked up a copy of A Starborne Resistance,  a slender 48-page squarebound, which provides a planetary setting of a dying colony ignored and oppressed by a once-mighty Confederacy. The books have that art-book look, in that no two-page spread looks like any others. Lack of an index means you're going to have to remember where you read that particular useful rule. Looks interesting. 

Orders of Inquisition by the RPG Professor, Self-published,  120-page softbound, 2025, Kickstarter. This is the sort of product I enjoy, and one that kickstarter excels at bringing to a wider audience. It takes the traditional tropes of gaming fantasy and turns them on their heads. As opposed to the gods (of all alignments) being player-supporting forces, the gods are distant and cruel, and their agents in the world fanatics. The book rolls through the alignment godheads presenting the negative side of faith, followed by specific orders, new classes, spells, and relics. In general, its crammed with some really nice, non-standard ideas. It would be an excellent addition to the more grimdarkish campaigns.

(And as an aside, I always wanted to develop a Good-aligned cult that believes fanatically that the dead should stay dead. Which is a really good thing when talking about vampires, and a really bad thing when you're talking about your fighter who has just been resurrected.)

Mythic Bastionland by  Christ McDowall, Bastionland Press, 208-page hardbound, 2025, purchase at PAX. This is the weirdest book of a weird lot. It looks great, but you really need to bore into it to understand what is going on. It's a fantasy Pendragonish setting, where you are a knight with powers and a mentor. You travel the land (hex-crawling to create the Realm) and encounter stuff, until you are powerful enough to go to the City and join the Round Table. I think. The presentation is the challenge - a collection of  one-page summarized followed by detailed descriptions of the various knights you can be. It wraps up with a series of dialogues between DM and players which to make some sense of it all.. The is beautiful, the presentation is compact, but it requires a lot of engagement just to wrap your head around. 

Random Jottings 22 Omnibus by Michael Dobson, Canal Press, 202-page softbound, 2025, gift of the author. Mike Dobson was my boss for several years at TSR, and following his tenure there he continued to write histories, books, articles, and commentary. A lot of that can be found here. This is a personal fanzine in which he talks about his travels, Wikipedia, and most relevant to this audience, his time at TSR and other gaming companies, and includes an article in the Comics Journal. Good bits of history. 

The Planar Codex by Cody Faulk et al, Daggerwood Games, 200-page hardbound, 2025, Kickstarter. Coming from my Manual of the Planes background, I always find planar books interesting. And this is a 5E (2014) product and is Great Wheel adjacent, and you'll recognize versions of the Feywild the Nine Hells, the Seven Heavens, and Mechanus (formerly Limbo). That means that they can be supplement old-school and Planescape-style settings, or be used to create a new planar arrangement. The approach is nice and very player-centered - new subclasses for all the original classes, new spells, and new races. My only gripe is that the fiction that headers each section is printed in an italic script font, which makes it slow going for these old eyes. 

The Medieval Fortress by J.E.Kaufman, H.W.Kaufman, Illustrated by Robert M. Jurga, Da Capo Press (Perseus Books Group), 320-page softbound, 2001, from the collection of Sacnoth, but actually purchased from Barnes & Noble in Tukwilla in 2005 (The receipt was being used as a bookmark). OK, NOT a gaming book per se, but the type of book I really like - a comprehensive reference work on medieval fortresses and walled cities. So this is browser's book for me, to be picked up and leafed through, and a reference if I'm doing any serious historical castle design. Good illustrations, though the photos are a bit muddy in black and white.

Draw Steel Heroes Book One: Heroes by Matthew Colville, James Introcaso, Willy Abeel, and Robert Djordjevich,  MCDM Productions, 402-page hardbound, 2025, Kickstarter; Book Two: Monsters, 378-page hardbound. This one demands a LOT more attention that this brief write-up can provide. This is a deeply impressive re-imagining of the D&D-style of game, reconfigured from the ground up, showing origins in 4E in its crunchiness. It is quite specific in its goal - it is about combat encounters, and the rules reflect that at every turn. No base assumption of D&D is left unchallenged - use of 2d10s instead of a d20, you always do SOME damage in combat (the only question is how much), Characteristics are refashioned with a small spread of scores. The archetypical classes are rethought, as well and while recognizable, function in different fashions. Spell are are rethought as abilities. Everything has shorthand box. 

The game is more than combat, but will function best at a table with a battlemap or online, as opposed to everyone in comfortable chairs scattered across the living room. The monster book contains new versions the reliable and recognizable foes, along with high level baddies that do some world-building for us, and rethought alternates for the TMed creatures like the Mind Flayer and the Beholder. There is a lot of lore in the game, but most of it is parked in descriptive text of the character classes and creatures, so it bears a complete reading. My one nit in presentation is that the excellent art for the monsters needs to be labeled, so I know which of four stat blocks on the page is applicable.

In short, Draw Steel is an adventurous reincarnation of the traditional TTRPG, and if you bemoan the lack of crunch in a lot of modern incarnations, this is one to check out. Its the one I'm going to be moving through in the next few weeks. 

And that's it for this bag of stuff, mixed though it be. I really like the spectrum of projects that come out of roleplaying, and while not all of them are my particular pipe of tea, I am glad they're available, and if they strike your fancy, you should hunt them down.

More later,  

Theatre: Creature of the NIght

 Dracula Adapted from Bram Stoker's novel by Nathan Kessler-Jeffrey, directed by Brad Lo Walker, Renton Civic Theatre, through November 2nd.

Many, many years ago I wrote a short play and staged a reading at the Burien Actors Theatre with five readers. Two of them were friends, but three were recruits that I had never met before. All did a wonderful job at the time, but I noticed that one of my then-readers was in a play down at the Renton Civic Theatre, which is just down the hill from Grubb Street. So I made a rare evening excursion into Renton to a theater I had never attended before.

And a word about the Renton Civic Theatre, which is community theater at its best. From the street it is an unassuming theatre marquee sandwiched between a realty company storefront and a Japanese restaurant. The venue inside is excellent, the house and stage both larger and more comfortable than the Taproot's. The lobby is small, and has handbills from the 40s when this was a motion picture house. There is a bar this particular evening there was no alcohol, because the only volunteer at the counter was underage and could not serve. It's really a nice place. On this Friday night the house was mostly full, and there were more than a few attendees who ignored the whole "turn off your phone" warnings. Ah, well. 

The play itself is an excellent adaption of the original novel. The novel is epistemological in nature, which is to say that it is presented as letters, diary entries, and other first person accounts. Moving it to the stage results in a series of vignettes where the characters recite the letters, then move seamlessly into scenes with the other characters. As a result they're doing a lot of their own stage management as they haul chairs, tables, and coffins on and off the stage. 

Adapting to the stage also involved other changes. Quinton Morris, the cowboy in the book (and you did read the book as a kid, right?), gets a slight mention but never appears on stage. Neither do the brides. The finale remains in London as opposed to fleeing back to Transylvania. Yet that doesn't change the story itself, and helps retain the sense of the characters being overmatched by the Count. The production also gender changes Renfield, which actually works better.

The actors are all excellent. My reader, Michael Yichao, is the hapless Jonathan Harker, the lawyer dispatched to Castle Dracula to help Dracula move to London. The heart of the play belongs to Mina (Dani Davis) who hits everything precisely and sharply.  Angela Martin does double duty as the manic Renfield and the supportive Sister Agatha. Lucy Westenra captures the coquettish nature of Lucy. David Breyman posts an almost-comic Dr. Seward, Cameron Widmark is very British nobility and honor as Arthur Holwood, Lucy's fiancé, and Phillip Keiman is an endearing Abraham Van Helsing. And Tadd Morgan is our Count, shedding the Hungarian accent early as he modernizes for London and makes himself a holy terror. 

There is humor in the horror, and most of it comes from the characters themselves - Harker's naivety, Lucy's shallowness, Seward's moroseness. It is subtle and effective. And that's a challenge given that Drac himself has been parodied to death over the decades. There's one sequence that created inadvertent giggles among the audience, contrasting Jonathan and Mina's wedding with the death of Lucy, but in general the actors kept the audience in check and enthralled with a story that many of them knew since childhood. 

You want a Halloween play? Here's your Halloween play. Go enjoy,

More later.