Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker admired and valued The Weird. It was just like having unusually good hearing, and being able to catch hints of ultrasonic sound. Or seeing into the fluorescent or ultraviolet ranges: which all parrots can do, making us wonder constantly what Harry the Parrot saw when he stared rapturously at Kage’s red hair. Not the bronze/copper/amber the rest of us saw, that’s for sure – but what was it? He adored people with red hair …

Anyway, an awareness of The Weird was an extra sense for Kage. It gave her insights and ideas. And while most of what people notice is the horripilation effect (see yestreday’s Comments for an outpost of The Weird that troubles one of our Dear Readers), it’s not all scary. There are just as many lovely and beautiful things to be detected through the lens of The Weird, as well. And some of those days where people look odd are endlessly amusing. Have you ever noticed what very strange people wander the streets near Halloween? The Weird goes out without its masks, then.

Since everything is grist for the writer’s mill, every  bit of sensory input was  used by Kage as part of a story. She may not have described the sources completely for the readers, but there were underlying vistas and  lights and music enhancing every scene in her mind. All writers do that, I think; what they have to know in order to write a scene is much larger than the scene itself. Not all Kage’s sources were atlases and encyclopedias. To say The Weird was the source of her creativity is wrong, and too narrow – but if she hadn’t been aware of it, she probably would have been writing travel guides and gardening advice.

Thus, her fascination with the phenomenon of the Green Flash; Kage knew it for a doorway of The Weird long before Pirates of the Caribbean identified it. She watched for it avidly on I-5, but it doesn’t come there – the air is not clear enough, nor the horizon sufficiently flat. But there is a rose and purple glow that seeps out of the ground out there on hot evenings, and pools like dye in the orchards and hollows. It’s not l’heure bleu of the French: there is a red component to it. And it’s not the twilight absence of light, either; it’s an illumination all its own, and how it arises from the earth, from blue shadows and yellow sunset, is a mystery. It’s shining through The Weird.

Ever been in one of those inexplicable traffic jams? Those of you Dear Readers who dwell in California are all too familiar with them: suddenly the traffic slows, slows, halts. You search the radio and your IPhone for a traffic report, but while every other road in the vicinity may be blocked, yours is reported to be clear. You proceed at a heart-pounding 15 miles an hour for a while and then – with no accident in view, no flashing lights, no addition or subtraction of lanes – the traffic clears and you zoom on. Half the cars on the road are gone, and there’s nowhere they could have gotten off.

Oh, sometimes you pass a suspicious debris field – glass, plastic, lettuce, thousands of coffee filters, shattered crates marked Chicken … I’ve seen all these and more (and so have you, I bet) but they are not sufficient explanation. I mean, they are still there, and now the traffic is moving fine. But – does the air glitter a little? Is there a solitary fog bank or dust cloud hanging there beside the road? Kage said that was the friction left behind from the passage of The Weird. Kage said half the cars really had disappeared. Kage said we were damned lucky we hadn’t been one of them … yet.

(“Oh, screw you!” I would cry predictably, and drive like hell.)

It can go the other way, of course. Have you ever found a familiar place – your laundry room, your desk at work, that little walkway down to the mail box – a source of sudden fear? Sometimes you creep through a day in a state of terrified funk, then suddenly feel a burst of joy and relief come over you. It’s not depression; you’ve been afraid and now you’re not. It’s like emerging from under a menacing cloud. But there isn’t one.

Maybe your blood sugar peaked, or the hormonal tide turned. And maybe you just passed out of – or into – a patch of The Weird.

Kage Baker was a connoisseuse of The Weird. That’s with capital letters, maybe in a coloured font; definitely to be heard in italics. It’s a distinct condition of being or maybe a phase state of energy: like The Beat. Soul. Gestalt.  The Mandate of Heaven, the Will of the People, Public Opinion; only, not imaginary.

The Weird is not stories about people who give pedicures to possums, or very stupid criminals getting stuck in laundry chutes. It’s not about nutty laws like the one that prohibits shooting all game (except whales) from the California highways. It’s not lists of the 15 most amazing ways to die while riding a train. All those, amusing though they may be, are just examples of the sheer idiocy of human nature. They’re normal.

The Weird is the antithesis of normal. Kage felt that The Weird moved through the world like a fog bank, manifesting here and there, in season, when certain conditions were met. It could develop nearly everywhere, but some places were more prone to it – like Lookout Mountain Drive, off Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills. It wasn’t necessarily alarming or uncanny. It wasn’t always frightening. One could go hunting for it (Lookout Mountain Drive is pretty reliable …) but normally you just suddenly find yourself enveloped in it.

One of its more common manifestations – at least for us – was that some days people looked funny. Have you ever noticed a day like that? No matter how regular their features, everyone looks – odd. Their eyes are too far apart or their shoulders are jointed strangely; their facial bones suggest peculiar geometries beneath the skin. Obviously one meets unusual-looking people all the time; it’s only a sign of The Weird if everyone you see is like that. And sometimes, that happens. It’s interesting.

Kage watched for it, and the reports of its passing, all the time. It was the weather of the fantastic, she said. Writers have radar for things like that. No matter what they write – they may compose the sunniest children’s stories in the world, they still have their antennae on for places where the world is thin. It’s their natural resource, the raw material to be shaped however their particular pen demands.

Kage said UFO flaps could be signs of it, though in this age of Photoshop and RC hummingbirds that is getting rarer. Bigfoot sightings were more likely to be true signs of The Weird – not necessarily signs of Bigfoot, you understand, but of some electromagnetic, neurotropic static that produced strange sensoria in people. Haunted houses, she felt, were rarely actual instances of The Weird: more often haunting phenomena are caused by bad electrical insulation, faulty plumbing, really old wood settling. Maybe even by dead people, but they don’t count as The Weird – Kage felt that dead people, especially if they were lively enough to be haunting somewhere, were a perfectly normal part of life.

Sometimes, it’s true, The Weird is a warning: a sudden chill on a back road, a flicker in the corner of your eye that sets your heart pounding. Have you never passed a section of road you were unwilling to traverse? And wondered, as you sped past and were vaguely grateful your tires were sound, if something were watching you from the verge? That’s a sign, Dear Readers. It may be a sign you need coffee and a Snickers Bar – and in fact, it probably is – but then again, it may be something else.

Kage always opted for the something else. When we passed someplace on the road where The Weird hung in the air like a fragrance, she would be moved to tell stories. Sometimes they were scary ones, as those could be guaranteed to keep me awake – at least until I began gibbering, yelled “Oh, screw you!” and drove off to find the shelter of an open McDonald’s. If whatever we sensed had scared Kage, though – which was surprisingly hard to do – she would tell happy stories to fight it all off. Love tales, adventures, the triumph of heroes and honest men. Laughter. Lots and lots of laughter.

Lord Ermenwyr was born in part of panic on a dark road …

Stories in the news, things glimpsed on the road, extraordinary statements overheard in a crowd. They were a hobby for Kage, like birdwatching. She kept Life Lists for both. Today, a hooded merganser. Last week, sun dogs stacked above the Tehachapis. And from the  WTF file at CNN, reports of lilies blooming in the Sargasso Sea.

Tomorow: maybe some snapshots of The Weird

Kage Baker believed in seasonal moods; that they were natural, unavoidable, and ought to be indulged. Not the moods of Nature, necessarily: those were beyond mortal ken or alteration. But the moods of the people living in Nature, those were adjustable. She felt they ought to follow natural inclinations. Especially hers.

Spring fever, summer doldrums, a restlessness in fall. The urge to hoard and hibernate during winter. I don’t think it was an innate sensitivity to the rhythms of her body – Kage had an antagonistic relationship with her body, and tended to ignore it as much as possible.  She just had a set idea about how the various portions of the year should be experienced: and no one had ideas as set as Kage Baker.

It was part and parcel of the blood thinning/thickening thing. I think. The workings of her mind were not always clear, though the results of that working were. However, Kage had preferred habits and patterns that she couldn’t or wouldn’t explain, but clung to stubbornly. I spent most of my life figuring out what she needed to live in peace and creativity, and then explaining it to her and everyone else. There were just ways she liked to be, and she would go to enormous lengths to facilitate those moods.

Every season had its own candle colours and incenses and table linens and decorations and cocktails and festive foods; it changed a bit as the years went on but the basic cycle was well in place by the time she was in high school. And it never changed completely, nor ever stopped. The year rolled along in a constantly renewing pattern of accessories, all designed to promote the specific mood of the house and the season.

Some of them dated back to childhood. Some of them dated back to what she wanted in childhood but didn’t manage to acquire. Kage spent a lot of her adulthood finding and recreating things she had loved as a kid. Old-fashioned Christmas bubble lights, which vanished for years but then seem to have come back into fashion for her. Beistl paper cutout decorations, which had never stopped being made but suddenly became findable again with the rise of the Internet – Kage had best adored the Halloween ones, but before she was done with her ecstatic collecting, we had them for Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and St. Patrick’s Day as well. I made her hang the especially villainous leprechaun in the hallway where I didn’t have to meet his leer.

Glasswax holiday designs on the windows: those were one of her biggest successes, because they had gone extinct somewhere in the last 40 years. Momma had always declined to purchase something that had to be washed off the windows eventually; but Kage burned for them for decades. She found the stencils on EBay, amazing amounts of them. She found a Glasswax clone at the Vermont Country Store site. And for the last 5 years of her life, Kage painted Glasswax on the front room windows at Christmas.

Do not think, Dear Readers, that she was alone in these obsessions either. Maybe her degree of mania was a bit higher than mine – it was higher in most things, and higher than most people’s … But I was a willing participant. I’m the reason we had coloured lights up year round, carefully changed out for the various seasons. I rigged my bathroom with faerie lights in place of the overhead, and set up a zombie pirate ship as a night light in Kage’s room – one of those Lemax holiday models, called (I kid you not) The Pillager. Most people think Lemax only makes Christmas villages, but believe me – they do other astonishing things. And Kage loved them.

So do I.  So does Anne, who let Kage paint her windows with Glasswax too. And luckily, so does Kimberly, who was already showcasing coloured lights on her front porch. Oh, maybe I am doing it a bit more now, for sweet remembrance’s sake, but I really like putting up the lights and deco. I just found hot pink LED lights to string on Kimberly’s front porch for Valentine’s Day – and believe, me, pink strings of lights are not easy to locate. Next month I’ll change ’em out for green ones, for St. Patrick’s.  (My brother- in-law, a very patient man,  just accepts this all as an outre form of porch light …)

And if took me longer than usual today today to locate my scattered neurons and get this blog entry up – and, oh, it did – just chalk it up to Spring fever.

Kage Baker said often that life was both more beautiful and more horrible than we are told as children. Also, more interesting, if you pay attention to its oddities. She usually told this to children who were going boneless with ennui, complaining loudly that they had nothing to do and were booooored …

“You can’t be bored! The world is full of fascinating things!” she would tell them sternly. “Look at me, I haven’t been bored in 40 years!”

“But that’s because you’re interesting,” our nieces and nephews would whine.

“Sit up and I’ll teach you to play gin,” Kage would say, and would proceed to do so while spinning tales of outrageous things we had done in our teens and twenties.

It was true, though: Kage was interesting in and of herself. She was so interesting, and her stories were so grand,  it usually took a dozen games of gin before the niece or nephew noticed that she never lost. Then they usually chalked it up to getting distracted by her tales (driving through the Hills on the wrong side of the street, pretending we were in England; the time Grandma saw a UFO; the time a UFO saw Kage): especially when they were little, and she would throw occasional games to prevent juvenile tears and despair.

But actually, Kage just never lost at gin. She rarely lost at poker, of any variety. Or whist, War or Fish. Or bridge, although she detested it; she couldn’t keep score and was a lousy dummy, but still she won. I myself gave up playing cards with her 20-odd years agone, when she started drawing pat hands of 11-card gin while I was the dealer. How can this be? you may well ask. I do not know, Dear Readers: I only know it happened.

But the kids loved playing cards with her, watching her long clever hands shuffle and deal. Kage was double-jointed in most her fingers, and shuffled like a pro. She always had a burning desire to be able to make a gambler’s rose, which is a way of fanning out a whole deck of  cards in your hands. She practiced and practiced as a kid, and sprayed a lot of cards around – but in her adulthood  she mastered it, to the delight of many small children.

She loved card tricks, magic tricks, sleight of hand. She never learned many, though, because of the vision problem that left her intermittently blind in one eye: a slightly botched surgery for strabismus when she was two left her with one eye permanently off-center. By adolescence, her brain had compensated for non-stereoscopic vision by blocking the input from her left eye most of the time. If she closed either eye, the other one worked well enough. But if she kept them both open, the vision on the left sort of – blinked in and out, was how she described it.

Most of the time, she also appeared slightly wall-eyed, which was why she rarely looked strangers in the face. She was tremendously sensitive about it; you knew she trusted you if she would look at you. If both her eyes were looking straight at you, though, it meant she had a migraine – and what she was seeing then was anyone’s guess anyway, as the sensory scrambling was intense for her.

But she adored sleight of hand, and liked to acquire small pre-packaged “tricks” – she was a devotee of the Hollywood Toy Store, and that magic shop on Main Street at Disneyland. She had to keep buying new ones all her life, since she lost them when she was a kid and then gave them away to other kids when she was an adult. So she kept an endless string of things like The Disappearing Coin and The Egg In The Cup tricks on her desk, and dazzled every little child she knew. I found the last Egg In The Cup when I cleaned out her desk …

Ah, that hurts to remember. But it’s good to recall that Kage had magic in her hands and eyes, and that she was absolutely right about the nature of the world. It’s more horrible, and yet so much more beautiful, than we suspect. We have to rely on people who know – people like Kage – to tell us.

Kage Baker would have said of today: Let’s go driving! The sky is the most exquisite enamel blue, the few clouds are every colour of a Persian cat and just as fluffy. It’s cold and clean and bright and gorgeous; and agonizingly temporary to boot. Which is half the charm, of course.

This is a between-day, an edge day, a driving day. If Kage were with me, Dear Readers, I would be headed up the Grapevine right now, just to see how far we could get before the Highway Patrol sent us back down for not having chains or any sense.

It’s the day between storms here in Los Angeles. It rained yestreday, and it will rain tomorrow; maybe as early as tonight. There’s another one behind it, too; the storm door (A phrase of violent romance that Kage adored) is open wide. They are good old Northern storms, coming down the coast from Washington and Oregon – swift winds, high seas, snow for our parched and parsimonious mountains and good heavy rain the city can’t handle …

Actually, the city of Los Angeles itself does pretty well. Every scrap of earth will hoard this rain and bloom into yet deeper green grass and oats, more wildflowers, taller volunteer trees and tomatoes. It’s the human inhabitants who freak out, especially the ones who were not born here; thousands of people evidently moved to L.A. under the curious impression we had no more weather than a vacuum bottle. The only maps they consulted before arriving were the ones to the Stars’ Homes, I think; they failed to notice that we here in the Los Angeles Basin are essentially a flood plain jammed in between the mountains and the sea.

And we’re at a sub-desert latitude. And we’ve covered far too much of the poor thirsty earth with concrete, and there are far too many people here anyway: and most essentially, we’re a Basin. A big shallow bowl. So when the rains come here, it all floods and washes away. The hills walk, the roads dissolve, the cliffs crumble, the rivers first come back to life and then go on zombie rampages … for the natives and the acclimatized, it’s all rather exciting and invigorating. But the emigres tend to panic.

Sure, it can be disturbing when the cemeteries in the San Fernando Valley wash out and corpses go floating through Northridge – but, hey, that hasn’t happened in over 20 years.

And sure, smooth green hills all over the city suddenly develop long bright slicks of bare earth and bury the streets below: but can that really be said to be a shocker anymore? Heck, in the 1830’s two or three entire towns vanished in the mudslides, and it’s kept it up faithfully ever since – the folks with the hillside houses can hardly claim they didn’t know they had built on a slope. The stilts under their living rooms are a dead giveaway.

And lest I be accused of being heartless – I plead the nonchalance of the native. I grew up here, Dear Readers, on the edge of the only part of the LA River that is a living river (complete with ducks and frogs and floods), under the dancing hillsides of Griffith Park, around local corners from not one but two peripatetic Forest Lawn boneyards … I know how to negotiate this McDonald-wrapper-studded flood basin like a New Yorker knows how to walk on dirty snow.

I shall be fine when the rains come. At least, I will be if some transplanted Midwesterner in an SUV doesn’t ram into me because the gleam of the wet street has spooked her. In the meantime,  I think I’ll take a drive.

The nephew won’t be out of class for hours yet,, and I have a full tank of gas. The wind is rising and the sky is shouting with light. And I bet the I-5 is still passable at least as far as Gorman …

Kage Baker did not care for audiobooks. She loved being read to – by a real, live, present right there to show her the pictures on demand, kind of person. But she didn’t like audiobooks. That was a real regret to her, because she thought she ought to like them; they seemed like a great idea, and she sincerely wished she could enjoy them. But she didn’t. And I just find them annoying.

It’s foolish on my part, and due largely to my bad habit of using books as opiates. I like to get lost in a book,  be overwhelmed and transported; I go deaf when I read. If you’re listening to an audiobook while you sew or drive, literature-inspired catatonia is not an optimum reaction. Even on airplanes it disturbs the attendants.

Many of our friends – all veterans of long-distance drives, who know the value of staying awake – recommended them to Kage and me over the years. And we tried several times to get into them. No luck, unless you count howls of outrage and laughter when a chosen reader was clearly unsuited to their task. For example, Tim Curry, who can ordinarily do anything impeccably, was totally inappropriate for the numerous Southern accents he used in reading Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour. Maybe if he hadn’t used such a honeysuckle-soprano-Vivien Leigh-Kyra Sedgewick drawl for the heroine … I almost drove into the California Aqueduct listening to that one, I was laughing so hard.

However, lots of very nice and intelligent people do like audiobooks. And there are undoubtedly lots of them that will not send an unsuspecting listener into catalepsy or hysteria – my good friend Neassa, who is an ardent devotee, has never once driven into the Aqueduct, to my certain knowledge.

Kage got queries constantly about when her books would come out on audio; I have continued to get those queries, usually about once a month, since she died.  It just never came about. But at the Nebula Awards last year, I met a pleasant young man who seemed quite serious about it – and now, after all his good work, In The Garden of Iden is finally available as an audio book.

It’s out from Blackstone Audio, unabridged, as an MP3-CD. The reader is one Janan Raouf, about whom I know nothing except that she is an actress. She has done movies, TV and stage productions, though, including some costume drama – which might bode well. I know Blackstone Audio thinks well of her and did not choose her casually.

You can get the audio Iden directly from Blackstone Audio, at:  http://www.blackstoneaudio.com/search.cfm?search=IN+THE+GARDEN+

Or you can also find it on Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/Garden-Iden-Novel-Company-Novels/dp/1441774343/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1297892953&sr=1-1

I find I cannot bring myself to listen to someone else read this or any other of Kage’s work: not yet. Someday, I am sure, but not yet. I would only hear another voice reading it, and that would be a phantom – not even a respectable ghost, either, but a bad recording in the the out-0f-date sound studio of my mind. And then it would occur to me that I can’t remember how her voice sounded and I would get all soggy and hard to light … Aqueduct time, then.

However, Dear Readers, the first person to listen to this and tell me about it will receive a prize. Some of it will be edible. Some will be collectible. Depending on your proclivities, it may be both. I don’t judge.

But in the meantime, the first Kage Baker audio book is out there now.  I hope you enjoy it.

Kage Baker postulated, loudly and frequently, that Mars would never be colonized until someone figured out a way to make money off of it. This wasn’t just her innate pessimism, but rather a judgment based on her studies of history: especially of the British East India and Hudson Bay Companies. Also the history of Mussel Shoals (now La Conchita, what portion of it is not under various mudslides) and other railroad towns.

This was one of the basic premises in her novel The Empress of Mars. In fact, it is essential to her entire history of the colonization of Mars, being first mentioned in the Company series in connection with the disaster that eventually overtakes Mars Two. The primary – and official -Martian colony is founded by a for-profit company, the British Arean  Corporation. Mars Two is founded independently by literal outcasts of the agrarian corporate system.

As a matter of fact, in the course of the novel, both colonies end up pretty much ignoring the mandates of the BAC and both eventually prosper in their divergent ways. True, Mars Two suffers a serious setback when someone plants a bomb in the magma chamber of Olympic Mons that Mars Two is using as a source of arethermal energy; the resulting pyroclastic explosion is a pivotal disaster in the alternate history of the Company novels.

Mars Two survives, though. (It’s in Kage’s notes. I’ll get it written someday …)  And Mars One does succeed as an agricultural society, eluding the efforts of the BAC to turn it into a monoculture slave-labour tree farm. Mars becomes a free society rather than a company town. But still – no one gets up there to even try to colonize until the BAC foots the bill in its hunt for obscene profits.

This scenario has worked many, many times. It’s one of the driving forces of imperialism and colonization, and appears as a prime mover throughout human history. (References and citation available upon request …). And now, it seems that it has finally dawned on the embattled folks at NASA:

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/111476/20110211/nasa-mars-colonization-red-planet-mission-space-one-way-corporate-sponsorship.htm

NASA has long prided itself on being a purely intellectual agency, driven by the most incorrupt versions of the hunt for expansion of human knowledge: not run by the military, not corporate shills. Overlooking the fact that the majority of the astronauts have been required to be military personnel – and some aberrations like lowest-bidder contracts on O-rings – they have clung to this ideal with admirable tenacity. But they are not just ivory tower intellectuals; a lot of the founding generation had roots in WWII, and the current generation has grown up in literal combat with the US Congress for the right to stay alive.

They are tough and realistic at NASA. They are used to inventing new systems to accomplish their aims. They would have found a way to power rockets on the human spirit by now, if they hadn’t had to sell their souls to Congress just to stay in business … and the model of the mercantile-exploration company has finally come round again to their attention.

Want to buy a piece of Mars? Instead of the individual con men who have been “selling” square feet of the Moon for the last 40 years, you may soon be able to invest in a real, honest-to-Mammon corporation and acquire a stake in Mars! And eventually you’ll be able to homestead; as long as you promise not to come back.

It does work. It has its drawbacks and problems, of course, and can blow up in your face – but no more frequently than solid-fuel rockets, and our record with those is pretty good. It’s sure as hell worth a try. Kage would be cheering madly for the attempt, and laughing madly, too, to see it happening.

But it will. There is money to be made Up There on Mars, and someone will try. Kage postulated that a colony would have to be underwritten by the appetite for profit – and now this is being considered. She pointed out that a Martian colony must be one-way, or the colonists would scamper home at the first chance – and now the one-way trip is all the rage. She observed that it would have to be funded on speculation and hope and greed, because humans work well for those goals: in this desperate world, the perfect balance of those forces is coming ever closer to completion.

Let us pray, also, that whatever corporations pony up the brass for this marvelous opportunity do not read Kage Baker’s books. In fact, keep ’em away from any science fiction! Because the other thing that always happens is that the colony founded by the company – whichever company it is – eventually breaks free. It becomes Ontario, Boston, Macao, Honolulu … Mars Two.

I’d invest in that.

Kage Baker, being both a history buff and (at one point) a Catholic schoolgirl, did a lot of research into saints. I am uncertain that it was actual piety that inspired the research; there wasn’t a lot to read on the classroom shelves except the The Lives of the Saints, which in the 1960’s was sort of the National Inquirer of Catholic literature. It was full of weirdness and violence.

I recall that when Kage did a background check on St. Valentine, she discovered that there are 12 or 14 of them on the liturgical calendar. It was during that period late in the 20th century when many of the less-easily verified saints (or those too easily identified as pagan gods with the serial numbers filed off) were disenfranchised. However, apparently since there is such a crowd of Valentines – all of them martyrs – their names were left on the list of those whom Catholics were advised to consider venerating. It was sort of an individual serving, free will, personal-choice decision.

When you consider that February 14th was noted by Shakespeare to be the day the birds begin to nest, you can see there must have been an older, non-Christian tradition associated with the day. All the Valentines are male, and the names means simply “worthy, strong”. He is usually martyred with a blade, usually decapitated. He might be one of those vegetable fertility gods so popular in pre-Christian Europe; Geoffrey Chaucer’s crowd associated February 14th and Valentine with romantic love. (Even the traditional cards date back to the 14th century and earlier; Hallmark is blameless on this one.) Or it might be a holdover from the Roman Lupercalia, when young men energetically ran around Rome dressed in goatskins, lightly assaulting young women with faux whips: the entire thing being intended to assure fertility.

Fertility is in most of it, which maybe accounts for the over-heated young men and birds’ nests. The romantic love can be identified as being added during the Age of Chivalry; one assumes the devotees of Eleanor of Aquitaine preferred flowers and sweeties to lashes of bloody goat-skin. But no one is quite sure how that crowd of Christian saints got involved … it is, appropriately enough for both religion and the way of a man and a maid, a mystery.

The addition of chocolate to the regalia is probably the most logical part. Chocolate has been regaled as an aphrodisiac by everyone who used it, since whenever they started to use it: Aztec emperors drank it it for stamina with the many royal wives. It was Spanish nuns who figured out how to improve the stuff with cream and sugar; it was promptly forbidden to young girls in most of Europe. What else to give, on a spring-time festival connected to fertility and romantic love? And, speaking as an older lady retired from the lists of love, I can assure you all, Dear Readers, that the charms of chocolate do not wither or fade with time …

Kage was especially fond of the small, solid-chocolate hearts that come in fancy bags from See’s Chocolates this time of year. They are covered in scarlet foil, which delighted her eyes, and are simply superb. She’d share them with the parrot, rolling the foil into glittering balls for him to chase between tasty theobromos bites. Valentine’s Day may or may not be the day the birds begin to nest, but given the opportunity, they sure like a bit of chocolate to commemorate it. So I must go share with Harry now. He is meowing most fetchingly for my attention, and some festive chocolate. That red foil tips him off every time.

So Happy Valentine’s Day, Dear Readers.

Kage Baker loved movies. Visual input was her preferred sensory channel, and so gazing into the electronic eyes of a screen was a perpetually satisfying experience for her. She would go on fondly sometimes about her childhood nights in the soft blue lunar glow of the cathode ray tube.

It’s why her books are full of cinematic references, and why the private slang of the Company Operatives is called Cinema Standard. Kage didn’t think the movies themselves were romantic – no one who grows up in The Industry (as we did) really believes that. But the romance of the process – the hands-on magic and kitchen-sink alchemy of making moves entranced her: all those essentially blue-collar sorcerers writing stories in light. The end product, the finished dream, the artifact was what Kage loved.

Watching film was a panacea for migraines. It energized the ennui and flat effect of colds. A video game was always a perfect treat, the best reward and/or bribe for meeting a deadline. She loved to read, but the mental result of reading was a panopticon in her brain: constantly revised and renewed, repainted, edited and then shot again as the story rolled on. Me, I hear the words in my mind first as I read, and then gradually a picture builds up like scenery back-projected on a scrim: for Kage, it was instantaneous conversion into vision.

As she grew up and learned more, an urge to edit and direct was revealed. Yep, what she really wanted to do was direct – and she did. Her favourite roles at Renaissance Faires were backstage, behind scenes. and downright covert – she stage managed, she directed troupes, she filled out skeletal improvisations with dialogue and action. Then she usually watched anonymously from the sidelines to see how it all turned out. Kage lurked.

Though sometimes she took the stage … we did a couple of little plays where we traded rhymed lines of narration, she and I. And Kage would balance a broom on her fingertips while she walked in processions, sometimes; a half mile route up a rocky dirt avenue, the ribboned broom blowing like a dozen tiny banners over her head, arm out and head back as she walked it unerringly along the road and never bobbled once. Sometimes she would toss it from hand to hand – never grasping it, you understand, just twirling it on her fingertips.

I think that’s how she plotted out her stories, too. It’s the best representation I can offer, after decades of watching the dance of her brain scatter sequins around. She whirled like a magneto and threw off sparks, ribbons, ideas in all directions.

One of the side effects was that she gradually started re-editing movies out loud while she watched them. Not in theatres – she abhored noise in theatres, was one of those fierce old ladies who Shush! talkers, texters and cell-phone users. Or she’d elbow me into kidney damage and make me turn around to threaten someone …  but in a movie house, Kage was a perfect lady. It was at home in her own living room that she got carried away and started re-cutting movies as we watched them.

Talking during movies (again, at home only) is a long tradition in our family. We all do it, in styles ranging from arguments with the characters on screen to scholarly lectures on costumes and history. And there’s always at least one person who wants everyone else to please SHUT UP. But we don’t. Any of us. Ever. Kage was just like all her siblings in this – objecting vociferously if someone wanted to loudly discuss Roman burlap-hanging techniques, and then turning right around to explain how she would have re-cut that last scene in Jurassic Park III.

Although the most common response with the lot of us is a MST3K-style cineme dementia stream of wisecracks, so Kage may have been justified in yelling at the hooting and hollering to quiet down … you know that scene in Mendoza In Hollywood, Dear Readers, where the First Ever Cahuenga Pass Film Festival takes place? The room full of Operatives laughing and talking and yelling things at the screen? Where Imarte flips out at the end and goes looking for Babylon down on Vine Street?

Drawn from life, Dear Readers. Drawn from life. You can trust me on this one.

I was there.