Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker was a conniseuse of irony. She firmly believed that Fate kept a close eye on opportunities to flip one off with some little ironic twist, and took advantage of as many as possible.

She knew, in her hearts of hearts, that there were secret sensors in our machines. As soon as one gets a tax refund check, or wins a few bucks at the lottery, or finds a 20 in those jeans you haven’t worn for a year because they inexplicably shrank – why, something breaks in your car! Tax refund checks, royalty checks, advance checks – they, in particular, are magnets for major appliance death.

Our iron machines fail at the prospect of money. That’s irony for you.

Writers (and their families) don’t get paid on a regular basis. But when the money comes in, it tends to do so in nice chunks. I recently received a pleasant sum in advances, royalties, reprint fees, etc. This happens a couple of times a year, when everybody clears their books at the beginnings of the calendar and fiscal years. Kage used to wander around glaring at all our appliances during the run-up to these twice-annual paydays, warning each humming, blinking machine that this was not a signal to fail, and they were not to do so. They would purr and usually cooperate.

They must have been more afraid of Kage than they are of me. They are clearly working up to mass ironic money expenditures; there may even be a master plan, probably organized by the cheeky red cell phone. My printer has developed Frequent Paper Jam Syndrome. I am currently having to negotiate with the monitor port on my CPU to get any visuals when I start up each morning. The garbage disposal has just croaked it, and blocked up its side of the kitchen sink. Even my electric toothbrush is making a funny noise …

(BREAKING NEWS: the toothbrush is fine. I put the new head on at the wrong angle, and after it spun off and flew across the bathroom, all was well.)

The most conspicuous irony, however, is my new Kindle. Not that there is anything wrong with it! No, it’s delightful, and I have no buyer’s remorse at all. It’s light, quick, easy to use and comfortable to read – exactly what I wanted. However, no sooner had I settled in to enjoy it, than suddenly books began arriving in the post.

See, I don’t always know what’s in the incoming pipe, bookwise. I try not to buy books on impulse, because the amount of room in the house is, alas, finite … and I’ve never had the sense to live with other people who do not also read; so not only is space limited, it’s coveted by others. So I only buy books I know will want, books I’m waiting for, books in series or on subjects I know I love. I pre-order them, and then I can relax, and resist those moments when I just have to go buy something. Other women buy shoes or purses for mercantile therapy: I purchase books.

Three books have arrived in the 4 days since I got the Kindle, and more are coming. The one that arrived yestreday is worth 10 of the ordinary kind: it’s George R. R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons, Volume 5 in the enormous, glacially complex saga of The Game of Thrones. I think I pre-ordered it 2 years ago … entire new species have arisen while we have all waited for Mr. Martin to produce the various installments of this epic.

But I’m not complaining about that! The author doesn’t operate on the readers’ time schedules, and we have no right to bitch about how long it takes. Mr. Martin always comes through, and each books has been better than the last – I was happily sucked into this from Page 1, and am loving it.

The problem is: it’s huge. It’s Oxford Dictionary-huge. It’s planetary, nebular, galactic;  tall and wide, and freaking heavy. I am an old lady with cocked-up joints, and I was really delighted with the non-weight of the Kindle – I think it uses anti-gravity. And then suddenly, this irresistible behemoth arrives and wants to perch on my arthritic wrists and sit in my diminishing lap … man, that’s irony for you.

On the other hand, it beats the car breaking down. And I know I can un-jam the printer, and rig up something to keep the little black cat out it: her search for a nest being the main cause of its irregularities. And my toothbrush solved itself.

Though we will have to do something about the sink … but while I am waiting for the plumber, I can curl up on the couch and read A Dance With Dragons!

Post Script: the last two days, I was unable to convince WordPress to let me in. More of the local irony-storm, I am sure. Things seem to have returned to normal. Thank you for your patience.

Kage Baker loved the Coloured Fairy Tale books.

We all did. Those venerable collections by Andrew Lang were one of the great delights of childhood; we all went through all of them with great absorption and pleasure. They remained favourites, even as we all found our ways to tales for older kids … but, you know, Sue Barton and Nancy Drew and all those other modern misses recommended as our role models couldn’t hold a candle to the adventure, magic, romance and sheer unexpurgated gore of the classic fairy stories.

Kage took very early to pirate stories, of course, and then The Odyssey, The Iliad and various histories; I somehow found my way via Freddy the Pig and science fiction into anatomy and the biological sciences. Anne and Kimberly just kind of dug their heels in and went on stubbornly reading the Andrew Lang volumes – it was easy for them to duck back into the stacks, as it were, and read what they wanted while Kage and I were alarming the librarians by being caught with The Decameron and The Golden Bough.

Somewhere along the way, though that palette of fantasy just vanished from the shelves. I remember looking for them when Kage and I, in our 20’s, had stopped in at the Ivar Branch to avail ourselves of their water fountains and bathrooms on a hot July day. Couldn’t find a one. We mourned them.

But! Technology is indeed the friend of the antiquarian, at least the kind that wants to preserve things. Today, I bought a Kindle – and in perusing the enormous, fascinating miscellany of e-books on Amazon, I found them. The Coloured Fairy Tale Books. All twelve of them. Uncondensed, un-Bowdlerized. In one volume.

For $1.99.

The cosmic injustice of this insanely low price is balanced out for me by the intensely personal joy that they’re cheap and I can get them all: Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, Pink, Grey, Violet, Crimson, Brown, Orange, Olive, and Lilac. They were the first thing I downloaded. Mine! Mine at last! Well, and Kimberly, with whom I will still have to compete for the goodies – but she, like Kage, is utterly diurnal and will go to bed hours before I do!

Thank you to all of you who sent me advice on which device to buy. All the information was useful, especially the part about going out and actually handling the machines before I made up my mind. That was what decided me on the nunlike little Kindle: demure, Quakerish, nothing much to distract from the written word. I like it a lot.

And now, Dear Readers, I am retiring with my new toy and my old books to enjoy myself. The Hill of Glass is in there somewhere …

Kage Baker wanted a Kindle during her last year. But she hated being an unpaid beta tester, so she watched and queried our several friends who essayed the leap in to ebooks. collecting data and making up her mind. That last months, she preferred to be read to – nobody had an audio playback yet on an ereader, so we went for the old-fashioned approach: I read to her.

Besides, she was really into Jeeves and Wooster around then, and she liked the way I did the accents. A soprano can be very expressive of upper-class British idiocy.

However, in the last few days, as we were finally beginning to sensibly discuss some long-range plans – ie, I was in denial and Kage was making plans for me – one of the things she told me was: “Get a Kindle or you’re going to drown in books. I know you, kiddo.”

And she was correct. One of my only physical indulgences this last year and a half has been books. And they are, yes, taking over; and while Kimberly is very patient with me, well – she has her own books stacked on tables and chairs and counter-tops and slow-moving cats … book hoarding only works well when only one person in the house does it. And I moved from a house where two people indulged, to this one where now four of us are guilty … the tide is rising remorseless and we be caught on a lee shore …

So today I have been spending a good deal of time researching available ereaders. I am almost sure it’s gonna be a Kindle, now; I’ve downloaded both Kindle and Nook apps to my desktop, for some hands-on experimentation, and have been trying out all sorts of the free books to see how it all works. It’s cool, so cool! I am hooked; I just have to decide which brightly coloured plastic insect appeals to my fishy hunger most.

Then tomorrow I will go forth an acquire it, and spend a happy Saturday buying books that don’t take up any space. He he he … what a futuristic delight! And Kage, who dearly loved techno toys, would be terribly pleased.

So I am off to more roaming through the evolving garden of print options, Dear Readers. This modern stuff is really pretty nifty. I can already see more of my desk!

Kage Baker was a naturally abstemious person. She rarely over-indulged, at least in physical pleasures; she had a disciplined and measured approach to most appetites, deliberately setting aside treats to be enjoyed later at a carefully pre-calculated pace.

I’m not sure why, unless it was a way to make goodies last longer. She could (and sometimes did) apply herself happily to excess, when it seemed appropriate. It just didn’t, most of the time. Thus a birthday pound of See’s chocolate would last through the summer, being enjoyed one piece at a time. A longed-for book might be read over two leisurely weeks – I, meanwhile, would have blazed through it in one or two unsleeping nights, greedy as a 4-year old.

Mind you, when Kage did overdo it, she overdid it amazingly. “All things in measure” was one of her mottos, but so was “Anything worth doing, is worth overdoing.”

Her usual alcoholic drink rule, in public, was 2 drinks. However, the size was not a consideration: which occasionally led to, say, the astonishing consumption of two half-yards of ale in the course of a meal. (A half-yard is 18 inches tall. It hold 32 ounces of fluid. Two of them is a half-gallon* …) She had a heroic capacity.

The only times this led to problems was when she got blind-sided by unfamiliar cocktails. The most memorable was two zombies at the old Trader Vic’s in Hollywood. Zombies are lovely amber concoctions of rums and fruit juices, customarily garnished with Carmen Miranda’s hat – perfect for Kage. At Trader Vic’s, they came in giant clam shells. By the time Kage got through 2 of them, various of her senses were switching on and off at random – she could speak, but not hear; walk but not control direction. That sort of thing. The evening culminated in the only sleep-walking episode of her life, which was thwarted by the fact that she forgot about the two downward steps at the front door – a lucky thing, as she’d also forgotten her clothes …

But Kage was always a pleasant and amiable person, relaxed and conversational and a marvelous raconteuse. She told wonderful stories when her inhibitions were gently dissolved, even wilder than usual, and many of the crazier scenes in her stories were initially conceived as she swayed gently under the influence of rum and orchids and fruit onna stick.

The binge scene in Ghiardelli Square, from Graveyard Game, was written from life … you should have been there …

I lack such control as Kage had. I usually simply refrain, content to warm my hands at the gentle flames of memory. Or, as it happens, the roaring out-of-control bonfire of memory. I’m not as good as Kage was, for instance, at stopping at two. I’ll forego sleep to read a new Pratchett or King or Baker all in a night; if I get a birthday box of See’s choccies, it’s gone within the week.

Today, the problem was licorice. It turns out that See’s also makes exemplary black licorise, with real anise oil and not cunning faux decoctions of wintergreen flavouring. It’s soft and fragrent and black as the Earl of Hell’s weskit, and it comes in elegant black and silver striped 12-ounce bags. One of which I have eaten, in its entirety, as I wrote this reflection on excess.

Man, Kage would be laughing at me. Time to go lie down, I think, and sleep off the licorice.

Oof.

* Thanks to Laura – she pointed out that I had originally calculated 2 half-yards to be a full gallon, which of course, they are not. Thus the correction. I blame the liquorice.

Kage Baker loved tropical weather. She loved it especially when it began to threaten storms – heat, and a touch of humidity; thunderheads evolving above the mountains like djinni just released from their bottles. A hint of weird green glass in the light, and a suggestion of orchids perfuming the wind.

These days happened from time to time in Pismo, when the breath of the Pacific blowing in our faces would suddenly come straight from Tahiti. Kage would dance in delight as the warm wind gusted through the windows, and the living room filled with the scent of roses from our garden. She’d put El Amor Brujo on the CD player, turn it up loud, and sing along  in idiomatic Spanish.

We’d usually end up down at Fin’s, which stood right on the literal edge of the sand where Grand Avenue ran into the sea. Ghost winds of sand rush across the parking lot there, writing myths on the old concrete in white glyphs. There are life-sized pirate statues in the entrance-way, and they serve enormous turquoise cocktails in giant martini glasses. I don’t know quite what they were – they were made with Blue Curacao and were deadly sweet – but after two of them, Kage’s eyes would light up like tiki torches and she’d start spinning tales about pirates, or the sorcerer Gard. Gard was born in thunder-weather like that.

This kind of weather is even rarer in Los Angeles. It’s true we have an ocean on one edge, and the L.A. Basin fills with fog and marine phenomena easily: but thunderstorms threaten very seldom, and usually fail of their promise.  Thunderheads form over the eastern mountains and the desert breathes all heavy on us – but it usually all drifts away, leaving the city sprawled hot and unsatisfied.

Sometimes, though, summer storms follow through. It actually happened a lot when we were kids, and then the cycle changed – since then, Los Angeles has apparently forgotten what it’s like to have a hot storm bear down on us. The weather girls are bugling soprano alarms on the evening news, and predicting the End Times … but it’s happened before. Even though we are Los Angeles. It’s only a bit of rain.

We’ve had a small spate of them lately, though only the hills are getting any rain – but it’s been enough for flash flood warnings, which would have amused Kage no end. Flash flood warnings in July! She’d be watching the thunderheads rising up the arch of the sky right now, and praying for lightning. And, you know, the wind is rising quite a bit around here; the air is wet and sweet, the light is going verdigreen. The summer heat – it’s almost 90 degrees, even here in the lee of Griffith Park – presses on all your limbs like a sleeping lover, and the only way to survive is to get your hair off the back of your neck anyway you can: combs, knitting needles, persuading Harry to sit up top and hang on to it …

We may have weather yet.

Kage Baker regarded California as The Edge of the West. The reason is fairly obvious; head far enough west in California (at one point in our lives, maybe two blocks …) and you completely run out of continent. End of the line, end of the world, beyond which lies the Uttermost West and gods-only-know-what-for-sure.

The fact that the only town on Catalina Island (26 miles west of the continental edge) is named “Avalon”, Kage felt, only proved her point. Time seems to have stopped in that odd little town, at several points – the late 1800’s, the 1920’s, the 1960’s – and then been stirred with a big stick. The atmosphere of Avalon is a big swirled sundae of eras, fashions, technology, cars – you go there and the last 150 years come wandering down the street and pass you on the way to the candy store. Where, incidentally, during WWII when the Island was closed to tourism and the OSS was running a training camp there, the automated taffy pulling machine never stopped running …

I observed, in a conversation elsewhere this morning, that one of the things I love about Southern California is the pervasive atmosphere of alternate reality. One of my old friends (and Kage’s. Hi, Scott!) thought the statement was amusing enough to post on Facebook. That made me think, and smile a lot – because it’s a viewpoint I learned from Kage, an idea that has shaped my whole life, and a standard that California never fails to live up to.

Most everyone in the world thinks we’re odd, and they’re right, but they don’t really grasp the enormity of it. Costumed skaters at Venice Beach, the superheroes infesting Hollywood Boulevard, the walking neuroses that pass for entertainers around here, the entire atmosphere of the music and film industries – these are symptoms, not causes. Other cities have thriving music and movie companies, and they’re not like us. Reality is thin here, and I think the local gods double and triple it to cover the holes; then they gaffer tape it in place, shrug, and give it up as Good Enough.

Robert Anson Heinlein had a good description of it, which Kage cherished. You can see it here:  http://tinyurl.com/y9grzk7. But even that is too narrow a view. The weirdness is less localized than even Mr. Heinlein realized.

It’s why Kage postulated an enormous quartz crystal giving off High Weirdness vibes under the Hollywood Hills. There really are outcroppings of crystals all over the place up there; we found lots, and I still have them even now. Some of them we dug up searching for the Spiderpool, in fact, up above Woodrow Wilson Drive.

It’s why a nice little semi-tropical microclimate along modern Sunset Boulevard prompted an early developer to build:  not greenhouses, but a camel farm. It’s why various brain trusts decided mulberries, bananas, alligators and gojis were all destined to be the next big cash crop in L.A.; and all were assiduously, if temporarily, farmed. It’s why Hollywood was founded as a town based on total abstinence from alcohol (It was. Really.), in an area with no open water sources. People settle here and the weirdest things just seem to become logical and straightforward.

The Spiderpool itself, which we have been discussing here (and will again) is but one example of how inspiration takes a 90-degree turn from away from everywhere else here.

Los Angeles is so peculiar, on such a daily basis that hardly anyone even notices anymore. It’s all part of ordinary days in L.A. Yestreday we had thunderstorms sweep through the Basin, dropping rain – positively alien weather, for here, despite which we also managed to have a few brushfires in the same areas. At the moment, it’s nearly 90 AND we have a flash flood warning in effect: due to sudden downpours in the hills, and the fact that the last snow from the winter is only now melting … though until it does, there are people up there skiing naked. Ah, Los Angeles!

It was the perfect place for Kage Baker to have been born and to grow up. She absorbed all the peculiar vibrations and grew attuned to them. She may even have grown to need them, like electromagnetic fields. The other places we’ve lived were all certainly weird … and if they weren’t when we arrived, they got strange while we were there. Kage wrote what she knew, as she always solemnly assured questioners.

There will a full moon next Friday. It’ll be time for the big blue and green hairy guys to come loping down out of Griffith Park again. Maybe they can go for a beer at the Big Foot Lodge on Los Feliz  …

Kage Baker loved the fourth of July. She was fiercely patriotic. She was the daughter, niece, cousin and aunt of soldiers. She never missed an election, determinedly exercising her franchise no matter what weather, car problems or grief the world threw at her. She payed her taxes. She wore poppies on Veteran’s Day. She was American, and proud of it, and believe me – she was an historian, she knew all the nasty little secrets our country has accumulated over its brief life. She still thought the United States was the best bet presently available on the planet. (So do I.)

And she loved, loved, LOVED  the 4th of July, especially during our years in Pismo Beach – they have a wonderful show there, fireworks shot off the Municipal Pier. We, living in walking distance of the beach, strolled down every year with our sand chairs and gloried in the 4th of July with several thousand of our neighbors. And as many of our friends and family as could make it to our house – we set up tent cities in the backyard, had kids sleeping on the kitchen floor.

It’s illegal to sell, buy or set off fireworks in Pismo Beach. That stopped absolutely no one: they just bopped over to the next nearest towns (the lovely Grover Beach and Arroyo Grande) and bought them there.  All the towns surrounding Pismo boasted Fireworks Stands on every corner – Pismo had no stands, but it did have miles and miles of beach. On the 4th, everyone did their best to encourage intermural economy. Then they brought their fireworks  to the Pismo … the official Fireworks Show was usually scheduled for 9 PM. Thanks to determined amateurs, by the time the show began, the beach had looked and sounded like D-day for a couple of hours.

The accepted practice is to dig a pit in the sand. You arrange the family chairs around it, and the younger and nimbler members jump in and out of the pit, setting off fireworks. Everyone has a small family show before the big one begins. By dark, the smoke is a waist-high drift along the whole 7 miles of the beach and the air smells of gunpowder. Kage would be in ecstasy.

Classically, only sparklers and snakes should be allowed out of the pit. However, though most of the black powder fans are well behaved, there are always a few idiots who run around with Roman Candles stuffed in their swimming trucks, or throw firecrackers and Ground Bloom Flowers, or launch sky rockets too low over the crowd. Those folks are promptly nabbed by the Pismo Beach Police Department – which numbers about 8, with 30 volunteers. Nonetheless, they do a grand job, mostly by focusing their efforts on actually dangerous stunts – unless you are actively on fire or lighting up someone else, they simply stroll along smiling and turn a blind eye to the Normandy Beach re-enactment on every side.

They never bother the inevitable ship’s signalling cannons that sound from the posher houses on the hills. Nor the mortar crew that sends up in the cypress woods by Pismo Creek ever year and launches stars and rockets out over the ocean. Those folks know what they’re doing.

It’s a weird system, but it works. There are usually no injuries, no fires, no disasters. The few malefactors are handcuffed to the cops’ bikes (crowd’s too thick for cars) and taken at a dog-trot to the downtown station. The most dangerous thing about it is the chance of a fist-fight between two territorial artillery captains. Or forgetting the lighter. We always brought down at least two, as our fireworks crew got pretty pre-emptory down in the pit …

By the time the official show began, Kage would be in a glittering-eyed frenzy. By the time it ended, she was limp, hoarse with cheering, and exhausted. We’d police the sand for bits and bobs, fill in the pit (aside from the illegal fireworks, we were a very law-abiding bunch) and walk slowly home with our lawn chairs.

This was the other dangerous part of the 4th at Pismo – getting out after the show. The town is only about a mile wide, all of which is squeezed between the sea and the hills. The population is 8,000 people. Highway 101 runs along the landward, but there are only 4 on-ramps. The streets are tiny and narrow. And by 10 PM on the 4th of July, an average of 75,000 sunburned, over-stimulated, drunk, exhausted people are all trying to leave at once.

We never lived more than 2 blocks from the beach – we snaked our way home through the crowds, and then sat about watching the exodus for another hour. Amazing scenes of desperation, courage, automotive disaster, Good Samaritanism and civil disobedience would take place. There was rather too much puking in the gutter, and we had to chase public urinators out of the yard on occasion (I remember Kimberly turning a flashlight beam on some poor sod pissing against my garage and demanding, like Justice Herself, “What do you think you’re doing?” I think the guy almost ruptured himself. He certainly peed on his feet and ran off trying not to get anything caught in his zipper …), but mostly it was just another kind of light show: red tail-lights filling the streets like rats’ eyes, the improbable volume of the crowd pouring out of the tiny town.

Kage’s last 4th of July, no one could get away to join us. And Kage did not have the strength to walk to and from the beach. Which was no problem – with no guests, we just moved our lawn chairs out on the balcony and watched from there. Not as noisy or smokey or crazy, but still a wonderful show. We had a great time.

Last year, I just listened to the booms and bangs and whistles, and tried to comfort the family zoo. It was fun, though. I’ll do the same thing tonight, watching carefully to make sure that the neighbors – who do have fireworks and are setting them off and don’t have the sense to do it in a non-flammable place – don’t set their house or ours on fire … Southern California is not such a great place for feral fireworks.

But Kage would have loved it. The banshee scream of a Piccolo Pete, the hiss of a fountain, the disturbingly soft organic boom of a cherry-bomb: ah, how her eyes would light up!

I’ll check Pismo Beach ‘s webcam around 9 o’clock tonight. See how it looks … in Kage’s memory.

Kage Baker was a queen of searches. She was patient, implacable and ingenious – when something caught her attention, she would track it down to the uttermost limits of the Internet. However, she was also incredibly busy and slightly distractable. That combination served her very well as a writer – she wrote a lot (like, all the time); she was always willing to track down an obscure reference and thus locate a new story idea. But it meant that some of her obsessions waited years before she began to hunt them in earnest.

The Spiderpool was like that. She began a methodical search for it only a few years ago, between novels. The project was initially hindered by a couple of intractable physical facts: she didn’t know it had an official name, The Spiderpool – she had called it the Sentinel, but was pretty sure it wouldn’t be on the Net that way. She had no street address for it. We’d never even found the street it was on. We’d only ever gotten there by crawling up a hillside and under someone’s chicken wire fence.

Google Earth was one of Kage’s personal favourites for finding things, but it was of limited use in this search. The biggest problem was that there is essentially no flat ground up in the Hollywood Hills – a lawn, a porch or a house foundation might be rendered flat for purposes of building, but the land itself – and the streets – are nothing like level. Bringing the viewpoint on Google Earth down to street level yielded distorted psychedelic   landscapes but no easy recognition; Google Street View was in its infancy when Kage started searching. And the Spiderpool wasn’t on a street to begin with.

However: most amazingly, Kage found immediately that she was not the only one fascinated with – and hunting for – the Spider. There was a whole community online just as obsessed as she was, whose interest in the thing had begun with, of all things, cheesecake photos … it turned out that there were a lot of old photos and movies out there, and some of them had a very, very weird background. The Poolies, as they call themselves, had initially been collecting antique girlie pics when they started getting obsessed with the drug dream backgrounds.

Kage was elated, triumphant, and thrilled Then, terminally embarrassed – there were lots of photos, all right, but most of them had pertinent details of architecture blocked by scantily clad young women. Bear in mind, Dear Readers, that these photos are from the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s – they are so incredibly mild as to be practically fit for LIFE magazine. But Kage Baker was very likely the most modest woman in the United States, who was not in a religious order; she was too shy to go online and evince a desire to look at photos of semi-naked girls …

As we ultimately discovered, the Poolies themselves (though most are cheesecake fans) were not that interested in the girls in the Spiderpool pictures. They wanted to know about the setting. There are some hilarious conversations on the group site, that basically boil down to:  Q: “Does that look like a really cool castle-motif tile behind that girl’s leg?”  A: “I don’t know! I can’t see that really cool tile, there’s some tit in the way!”

Anyway: while she was paranoid about putting her name to anything, Kage could not pass up the chance to join the Poolies. Besides, we had information to share! We grew up there! We’d been up to the site! So, working on our perpetual theory that we were sharing a brain, I joined and we both talked.

It was another example of the Universe turning its eyes on whatever intrigued Kage. Almost as soon as we joined, discoveries began to pour in. A few people made it up there; old photos began to surface everywhere; the architect of the insane fantasy was unearthed. And the fantasy entire turned out to be much, much more than we had ever imagined …

The Spiderpool and its attached house, garden, mosque, assorted zenanas and cabanas and tool sheds were built by Jack McDermott, an early auteur in Hollywood. He made and decorated films in the tweens and ’20s; he built his house of the sets used in such classics as The Thief of Baghdad and The Phantom of the Opera. It was glorious madness:

He lived there until 1946, when he died. The house passed to an ex-wife and/or a son (Jack was the kind of guy whose past was a little unclear …) and for the next 20 years it was used for parties, photo shoots and general mayhem. It grew neglected. It burned at least once and was (sort of) revived. But in 1962, it was declared abandoned and the City of Los Angeles razed a lot of what was left – except for the wall of The Sentinel that caught Kage’s eye all during her childhood.

There are lots more details to share, and I’ll resume tomorrow. But I will leave today’s offering with a photo demonstrating the sort of torrid photos once shot there – and one shot by another eager Poolie only a few years ago, when she too crawled up the hillside hunting for the house that Jack built …

Kage Baker had a life-long obsession with an architectural oddity that she called The Sentinel. It was visible from the backyard, a bit of weirdness on a nearby hillside – the degree of visibility depended on how high the mustard and wild oats and fennel were growing that year, and whether or not a tree had recently fallen down or grown up.

When we were little, she would sometimes pause in the engrossing business of the backyard chaos to creep off to the edge. She’d stand there, her arm round a eucalyptus tree, and stare out over the canyons at what could be seen of the Sentinal – a fraction of white wall and a hint of coloured tile, and a shape that suggested a flat-topped pyramid.There was enough eccentric stonework in our own neighborhood – hell, in our own yard, thanks to Momma’s occasional sculpting fits – that the idea of a Mayan temple two hillridges away was not impossible. Kage burned to get over there and explore it.

We knew there were weird houses up there – the things we passed when Momma was simply driving to and from the store were rich with gargoyles, tiles, jury-rigged crenelations and other architectural follies. What was so fascinating about The Sentinel was that we never seemed to pass it on the streets. Kage could see how to get there overland (sort of; by following her habitual technique of straight-line trespassery) but she couldn’t figure out how to get there on the streets.

At that early age, we were not yet allowed to go romping around the hills. And Momma was not inclined to go driving around in search of Kage’s whims – as I would become when I learned to drive. So for literally years and years, all Kage knew about that distant thing was that it looked like one side of a pyramid; it was black and blue and white, like a magpie; it was covered in tiles. And, once she old enough to “borrow” Dad’s binoculars, that it was decorated with an enormous Spider in a web.

You can imagine how this fascinated Kage. It nearly drove her crazy.

By 7 or 8th grade, though, we were exploring the hills with no hindrence. The youngest, Genny, was born when Kage was 14 – Momma was very busily involved with either Genny or studio work (landscapes and Christmas cards, mostly) or both: any of us who could take care of ourselves for 8 hours at a time were encouraged to do so. Momma could work with the baby in her basket under an easel; the rest of us prowling around nagging for pocket money and rides places drove her mad. So, as long as we came home for dinner, we had no real hindrance to wandering through the Hollywood Hills.

It was during that early phase that Kage actually found her way to the site of The Sentinel. What she found was the high, weird wall itself – not one side of a pyramid at all, but a sloping front above the remains of a pool, built up against the hillside. The rolling ground all around it hinted at ruins and the remains of buildings, but The Sentinel itself stood almost alone by then in a green dell in the hills. There were modern houses all around, almost closing it off – Kage got there by clambering down the hillside from an unpaved road. She took a chunk of tile and concrete, fallen from the lower hem of the mosaic Spider – I still have it.

We tried to get back during high school, but she could never find the way again. The houses grew up tall and new all around it, and we could no longer locate a path. Even if we had simply climbed up through the wild oats and poison oak, we’d have found our passage blocked by inhabited buildings – the place had become a sequestered hollow, unused and hidden by the back walls of the houses around it.

But Kage never stopped being fascinated by it. That’s h0w I know that the all the paths disappeared, and that exploring only got you trapped under very suspicious people’s houses and back decks … we tried that, and that’s what we found.The Sentinel was hidden in a cup of hillsides and back walls, lost under the trees in a forgotten garden.

And then we left Los Angeles, and journeyed hither and yon over the landscapes of California. Kage explored the ruins of Sutro’s Pools and his statuary garden in San Francisco; she climbed the trails in Silverado to find the ruins where Robert Louis Stephenson spent his honeymoon; she found Drake’s Bay and got to handle the looted Chinese porcelain those Elizabethan pirates left behind.

But she never forgot The Sentinel, that strange place up the hill. When we finally settled in Pismo Beach, she began researching it through the all-seeing eye of the Internet. And a fe years before she died, she found it, and the people – just as intense as she was – who had also found it by accident and been exploring it. They had learned a lot, and they were willing to share.

So Kage found out it was called The Spiderpool. And that it had been built by one slightly crazy film maker, built into a faerieland garden attached to a Moorish hallucination of a house, and ultimately re-discovered by people collecting 1940’s girlie photographs …

Tomorrow – we’ll get into details. But this is what it more or less looks like now:

Kage Baker always made an enormous deal of birthdays – she stretched them out over several days, if she could manage it. Not just her own; other peoples’, too. Like mine. Which is today.

My younger sister Kimberly is of a like mind, and has been plying me with birthday goodies all day. The barbecue is heating for the steaks, there will be yummy mushrooms and corn and potatoes, and watermelon! There is a Red Velvet Ice Cream Cake for dessert! With fancy plates, even.

Also, she and my nephew Michael have worked all day to restore my computer to life. Kimberly drove, in  the awful heat, to the wonderful Burbank Frye’s that has a crashed flying saucer stuck in the wall over the doorway, so Mike could get the cables necessary to finagle a working connection between the CPU and the monitor. And he did it! My computer works! I got a wireless mouse as well, and am now as happy as a clam.

But other than these (admittedly satisfying) triumphs and delights, I’ve done nothing useful all day. Nor will I, I suspect. I’m kicking back now and relaxing. The evening is beautiful and clear and warm, and I am somehow 58 years old. I’m gonna go have A Refreshing Iced Coffee Drink and leer at the rib eye steaks.

Tomorrow, I swear, I will begin the long strange tale of Kage’s fascination with and pursuit of The Spiderpool. And to intrigue you all a little … enjoy this.

Spiderpool Wall