Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker was a big fan of conspiracy theories. She thought they were hilarious, just as a general class of data, and as insight into the way people’s mind connect random dots and create patterns out of junk.

However, she thought most of them showed a certain naivete and lack of true creativity. It’s so easy to blame the Vatican or the Freemasons or the Nobel Prize Committee or the French for scary crap; groups like that just carry psychic “Kick Me” signs taped to their backs. I mean, who has not wondered if the black light ink they stamp on you at Disneyland is not re-arranging your precious chromosomes in some way?

To amuse herself, and to explain certain anomalies in the world to her own satisfaction, and to make a little money: Kage invented The Company. Dr. Zeus, Inc. – as wide as the world; as long as the ages; as deep and layered as the mantle of the Earth, and just as prone to spew hot shit at irregular intervals. She gave them, if not superhuman powers, at least access to the classic preternatural ones – immortality, wisdom, strength – and then she gave control of their administration over to morons. She thought it would be interesting to see what happened …

Kage could be kind of a one-woman conspiracy all on her own.

She also based The Company in Britain. Why? “Why not?” she always answered. Some British fans have asked anxiously if she had a mad on at Brits or something, but she actually did it for quite the opposite reason. She loved Britain. She was an Anglophile. And she already knew the language and the geography and the history, so that was a free throw …

Over the years since Kage invented Dr. Zeus to account for apports, ooparts, UFO’s and re-discovered plants, animals and art, a lot of peculiar things have happened. Lots more things have been found or come strolling out of the woods. Neanderthals have been admitted to the Homo sapiens family reunion. Britain has lost its collective governmental mind and installed CCTV everywhere. Mars has water. Chocolate really is a drug. Dogs and cats are living together and mass hysteria has become a registered political party.

And now, a life-member of the House of Lords – one Lord James of Blackheath – has risen to convey to Her Majesty’s Government an offer from an anonymous corporation to more or less purchase England. For 17 billion pounds. In gold. To be used for all manner of splendid social improvements, out of the sheer anonymous goodness of their unknown hearts.

Read this:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/11/conspiracy-theories.html

Maybe Lord James of Blackheath is totally nuts; it would be in the very highest traditions of the English aristocracy. Perhaps it is an elaborate joke: ditto. Or maybe Dr. Zeus has just arrived, doffed his hat and made a particular suggestion to the Queen.

Maybe Kage was right.

Tomorrow: the birds, I promise

Kage Baker was a very polite lady. She always said thank you. We were taught very old-fashioned manners when we were small, and among them was that a thank you was always called for.

One of the rules of Southern Womanhood (which took a lot more on Kage, as the eldest) was that a true lady could make “Thank you so much!” rhyme spiritually with “%*&$^! you, dear” – or something  like that. But what a lady said out loud was “Thank you.” And she smiled. If she  really meant the thank you, the smile was designed to dazzle.

Please, Dear Readers, imagine yourselves now bathed in a dazzling smile from Kage, and most sincerely thanked by me. If you never saw Kage smile (a distinct possibility) you should imagine that her normally black eyes have brightened to a dark hazel green, her freckles are all squinched up on her cheekbones, and that she has dimples.  Or you can look at this:

The comments on yestreday’s post made me cry and think deeply. The nifty little gadgets on the business side of this site show that yestreday’s post got the most hits ever. This  effort of mine doesn’t get a lot of traffic, but the flow yesterday was bigger than usual.

So: thank you for listening. Thank you for understanding what I said. Thank you for caring that I said it at all. Thank you for telling other people about it – because you must have. And thank you for being the sort of people who vote, too. While the elections were a pretty mixed bag, California is a more fortunate place today than many in the country – and only people who get out and vote can accomplish that.

I am proud to know you all.

And now I’m gonna go do laundry. Because I am not a real lady, so I can say stuff like that to my friends.

Tomorrow: the meaning of birds

Kage Baker was an avid voter. She (and I) were in the first crop of 18+ people to get the vote, and she never missed an election after that. Her armoir had I Voted stickers all over it. A few fell off over the years; they got replaced at the next election. She was damned proud of voting.

Kage was an historian at heart, and she knew how seldom people actually get to have a hand in their own governance. Our system of representative democracy – while admittedly often a cluster-f**k of unimaginable proportions – is nonetheless the best system currently going. Winston Churchill told us so.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth … Every little girl should know their names, and all the other ladies who were reviled, jailed and tortured for the right to vote. Kage said there ought to be a jump-rope rhyme for it. Everybody remembers jump-rope rhymes.

Two years ago, I had a heart attack the day before the 2008 Presidential elections. Once I got to the ER, it became obvious they weren’t going to let me go -I was distraught. I had to vote! It was the most important election of my life, and I was not going to miss it. However, I was unable to talk the doctors into a day pass from the ICU, for some reason. (Maybe because they were still hysterical over my driving myself into the ER in the first place.) But they were most unreasonable.

Kage was my saviour. She got hold of the hospital ombudsman, she got hold of an absentee ballot, she got the appropriate waiver to allow her to hand-deliver my ballot to our polling place. She came to my bedside, I voted and signed and sealed, and off she went. By foot and bus – Kage could not drive – in a rain storm, in our tiny Pacific Coast town where the buses run only once a hour and stopped nowhere near the polling place …

But she did it. She marched through the storm and the growing darkness, chanting “Liz – Cady – Stan-ton, So-jour-ner-Truth!” to keep the cadence. (I know she did because she was chanting it when she left my room in triumph that afternoon.) She didn’t get home until long after dark, and went upstairs to our dark apartment all alone, to a dinner of rum and toast with a parrot for her sole companion.

She called me on the phone to announce her victory, and cried on the phone over my being so sick and far away. I cried too. We swore we would always take care of one another, as we had for years, until we were two madly eccentric old ladies racing one another to the polling booth in our wheelchairs …

Kage Baker died because she was poor and uninsured and self-employed, and no one would hurry on her care. Her cancer was diagnosed in March of 2009 – therapy did not begin for another 6 months, and surgery was stalled for 8 months. So when it finally came, the cancer had metastasized to her brain, her lungs, her gut … they cured the endometrial cancer, it was the stuff that grew while state and federal aid wasted time that killed her.

I have a very personal stake in health care reform. But we all have a very personal stake in reining in corrupt bureaucracies, rapacious banks, elected officials who sit on their asses and delay, delay, delay. Kage Baker is not the only person whose death can be laid directly at the door of the greedy, dishonest and powerful.

Go vote. Whatever your principles are, make sure your voice is heard. It really is a matter of life and death.

Really.

Kage Baker always felt that you could not have too many fresh beginnings. If there was a chance to mark a new line in the earth, turn a corner, flip to a clean page – she took it. She never really abandoned the old – she never abandoned anything – but she made new starts matters of frequency and ritual.

Her most frequent ritual act was the purchase of a new sketchpad or notebook. Clean white paper, she said, was the ultimate goad. Opening a new electronic “page” on the computer was just not the same – nearly everything she wrote began its life on paper first.

One of the results of this habit was that I packed a couple dozen boxes with sketchpads and notebooks when I closed up our house. Some of them dated back to grammar school. The hoard from high school is enormous, and holds the genesis of most of her published novels. As the strata of her adulthood approach, more and more of the notes are stacks of blank typing paper, stuffed into artists’ portfolios. They aren’t typed on, you understand – they are all hand written, Kage’s pen having been irresistibly drawn to mate with the white, white paper …

Today is November the 1st. It’s also All Saints Day, and lots of good Christian people pray for the souls of their dead; especially the ones whom they feel have made it to heaven, and may be in a good position to lobby. It is also, anciently,  the Celtic New Year; lots of good Neopagan people are wishing one another “Happy New Year!” and strewing fresh herbs for the winter. Kage favoured lavender and southernwood.

Kage always celebrated this, of course. We’d pack a basket and a bag, and take a frugal autumnal picnic out somewhere – then we’d bury the remains of the Feast from the night before, and have a quiet meal. Kage would draw or scribble something new in a new notepad; I’d usually start a knitting project or a new book. The ritual acknowledgement of the Borders, you see, where all power and life begins.

Today, I’ll mostly write. (Surprise! It’s what I do these days.) I’ll send these wild musings off into the aether for the kind folks who check them – my way of waving over the back fence, letting the friends and family know I am still here and working. I’ll work on Nell Gwynne, which has lately been a pain and a torment but now seems likely to yield to the final push (Linn -the-agent will be so pleased).

In honour of the New Year, though, I will also work on notes I have compiled over the last 8 months of nights unsleeping . Some are drawn from the stacks and stacks Kage left me, wherein I found – mirablile dictu! – notes for a story older than any of our nieces and nephews, one we wrote together so long ago we still had waists. It may not be as ultimately useful as a sweater or a pair of socks, but then again – it may.

It’s my New Year pledge. It’ll keep me working on eveything else, and remind me that life goes on.

Tomorrow: fantasy and reality in an epic battle! It’s election day! Get out there and vote, kids!

Kage Baker always cooked a feast on Halloween.

Pork roast, corn, stuffing – grain, bread, autumn vegetables, and the sacred meat of that fairie-bred creature, the pig. It’s a Welsh thing, the pork. You gotta read the Mabinogion to understand it. Stuffing is just force-meat, one of the oldest meals on the British Isles; the onions and turnips and apples and nuts went into the stuffing. And grain is  … grain, the quintessential Fall food. Kage served creamed corn because, well, she liked it.

It was all carefully prepared, served on our best dishes from serving bowls and platters – not from the stove (we were working ladies; there were a lot of skillet meals in our house.) Candles and linen graced the table. We used the good glasses. And, though there were only the two of us, Kage set out three plates.

Kage would fill the first plate and set in the place of honour. I would pour a mug of good ale and a glass of old whiskey and set them out as well. Then we’d fill our own plates, toast the beloved dead, and share our feast with our loved ones who were gone.

The strange and isolated places Kage and I lived, we seldom had more than two or three trick or treaters. We had a quiet, sedate dinner with our dead. But where I am now – we get hundreds of kids! Come dark the front steps will be swarming with happy children and we’ll take it in turns here to restrain the Corgi, soothe the guard parrot, and answer the door. With all this furor to cover – we’re having pizza.

A plate and a glass will nonetheless be set aside. There will be pork sausage. There will be a glass of Coca Cola added to the beer and whiskey.

Soul cakes. The Day of the Dead. The funeral meats. The plenty of the traditional wake, the covered dishes and green bean casseroles. Halloween, All Soul’s Day, La Dia del Muerte, Samhain – they aren’t about blood and demons and death, not at heart. All that other is just spooky fun and nonsense, an excuse for the young and thoughtless to run around in the dark and eat sweets.

This night the door between the worlds is unlocked, and may in fact swing free. The honoured and beloved dead may walk out a little ways and ease the hearts of the living. Good reason for a party, eh? And nothing to fear. If any shadows coalesce on my doorstep, I will welcome them in.

Especially the tall, distracted-looking redhead at the back …

Kage Baker never felt a single day was enough in which to do justice to a good holiday. Especially one with a lot of buildup – you can’t anticipate for weeks and weeks, and then discharge all that celebratory energy in a mere 24 hours.

Hence the 12 days of Christmas (which we celebrated). Hence our tradition of Birthday Weeks, wherein all manner of small gifties and treats were revealed each day. Hence adopting  an old Celtic habit – count the holidays by nights; start the part the night before, celebrate all day, and into the next night. You can turn a mild little dinner party with, you know, spinach dip and maybe some cheese crackers, into a full-on Festival!

So today I start the serious last-minute deco of the house: add more lights, so the porch can be lit entirely by strings of orange and purple and no nasty mundane light bulbs are needed for the kiddies to find their way to the front door. (There are also the surprisingly bright crystal skulls, after all.)

Gotta drape the windows with black cloth, so the Jacob’s Ladder lightning generator shows up well – it gives the front that de rigeur mad scientist’s lab look. And, Jacob’s Ladders being electrostatically active, if kids point their fingers at the window glass, it appears to strike at them – screams and fun galore!

Gotta set up the Amazing and Perfect Fog Bubble Machine: it produces ghostly translucent grey bubbles that float around like apparitions and then POP! in a burst of fog. It is so unbelievably cool that kids have been known to run around in the bubbles in the driveway rather than come up to the door for candy. Now, that is effective!

This is not just in memory of Kage, although it is that as well. None of this delicious Samhain excess is new to Kimberly, my sister with whom I now live. She does this too. Over in Burbank, sister Anne has also decked her house with lights, skulls, bats and a perfect snow storm of orange and black garlands, and I believe my niece Katie has transformed into her annual Stlylish Ghoul morph. We all do this.

Halloween being on a weekend this year facilitates the elongation of the holiday, too. The neighborhood kids have been insane little bunnies since yestreday – the grammar school down the street loosed an avalanche of anticipatory trick or treaters at 3 PM, and the streets have been full of fairies, pirates and really little Iron Men ever since. They shriek and race and dance through the scarlet camphor leaves like maddened butterflies; no candy until tomorrow, but they are rehearsing for all they are worth.

This is, after all, a celebration of the honored and beloved dead – not just the scary ones. It’s not just ghoulies and gheasties. People we love are out there in the dark, come to see the party and the lights and hear the laughter. We’ll hand sweets to a few hundred strangers’ children in memory and celebration of the hands we miss, the dear hands we wish we would still fill with the good things of the earth.

That’s the point, I think. It sure is for me.

Tomorrow: Samhain, Halloween, Dia de Muerte and other solemn reasons to have a huge party

Kage Baker much admired sleight of hand. She knew well that people see what they expect to see. The human mind fills in the gaps in what the eye actually reports, and it fills those gaps with what is most familiar – what it has seen before. Almost as often, people see only what they want to see, and all they need is encouragement to choose that favoured outcome.

Working in reverse, this is notoriously why people  watching a (carefully doctored) film of an exciting football game or a “crime” in progress completely miss the gorilla strolling through the background. The gorilla was chosen as the most  obvious anomaly the researchers could come up with – but their subjects have been asked to pay attention to the game or the crime or at least the foreground, and the unexpected and absurd addition of a gorilla gets routinely edited out by the common-sense brain.

Kage said you could use this technique to hide anything, and the Company would and did.

Right now, the internet is in love with a bit of 1928 footage from the premier of Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus. It appears to show a lady talking on a cell phone. Kage would have adored this footage, and the attendant flap – it’s gorgeous, if inadvertent,sleight of hand, and it perfectly illustrates the phenomena discussed above.

Why did no one ever notice this before, asks the Irish gentleman who found it. Well, until very recently, audiences had no reference for the lady’s actions: it is only now that we automatically interpret her hand-to-ear actions as cell phone use, because only now do we see it everyday. Voila, it’s a cell phone. People saw what they expected to see.

What else could it possibly be, asks everyone who sees it. Well, without some basic research, the answer has been: a time traveling cell phone user! Wow! Partly this has been happening because it’s entertaining; partly because research takes time and is not so amusing; and partly because it’s a lot more interesting to assume the lady is, indeed, a time traveler. People saw what they wanted to see.

I, however, like research, and have a personal interest in proving/disproving time travelers. So my first reaction was to investigate what it could have been, other than a cell phone. It took me about 10 minutes to find an alternative answer – apparently, it took other enterprising research sluts even less time to find the same answer. For several days, the wonks have been posting this information hither and yon on the Net – only today is it being widely heeded.

I guess it wasn’t as entertaining to most people.

I thought it was fascinating, though. What I found (in a very modest Google search) was a retrospective history of hearing aids on the Siemens site, a normal corporate self-aggrandisment,  that showed a 1924 hand-held amplifier for a portable hearing aid machine. The promotional photos show the now-familiar hand-to-ear posture we associate with cell phones. The amplifier seems to have work on bone conduction, and to have been attached to a larger unit that could be carried in a purse. It is almost – almost – certainly what the lady in the Chaplin footage is using.

Too bad, so sad, the lady at the preview of Charlie Chaplin’s movie is not a time traveler from the future. No, not from the future … though she is on her way there, to be sure.

She is an operative of Dr. Zeus, of course. And she is indeed being careless with a Section Seventeen violation (thank you for that observation, Kara!), although a case can also be made for her just putting up her hand to shield her eyes or adjust her hat. I’m sure that’s how she explained it to her facilitator. No, that’s all quite ordinary. Most  viewers have missed what is really fascinating about this.

She’s a Neanderthal.

The fellow who found the film most unkindly suggested she is a man in drag, but that is just rude. However, observe her short legs and long torso; she is quite robust and even stocky, but does not move like an obese person: no, she walks at a brisk, well-muscled gait. Judging her against the zebra statue and the signs, she is short, although that hilarious hat adds height. Her feet, and even more so her hands, are squared and broad but display an agile grip: Neanderthals had  fine hand coordination.

And her face … note the large protuberant nose and the broad cheekbones. The upper orbits of the eyes cannot be seen under the brim of the hat, but they appear quite deeply set above that wide zygomatic arch. The mouth is broad, and the chin – while not actively receding – is slight, appearing to descend at a straight flat angle from the jaw rather than the outward-jutting chin of Homo sapiens sapiens.

No, there is just no doubt about it. This lady is an Operative of Dr. Zeus Inc., of Homo sapiens neanderthalensis stock, and she is strolling the streets of Kage’s home town 36 years before Kage was even born! That’s just incredibly good stuff, Dear Readers. That’s better than an ordinary time traveler with a mere cell phone.

It’s just a matter of knowing what you’re looking at.

Tomorrow: almost Halloween!

Kage Baker, as is well known, loved chocolate. She liked a lot of candy but nothing as much as theobromos. Her fondness was so well known that she got chocolate from strangers in the mail; people came up to her at Conventions and offered her exotic varieties; there were always bars of the local favourites left as gifts in her hotel rooms.

It was because she made theobromos THE intoxicant for her immortal cyborgs, of course. Kage used to say sometimes that she wished she had imbued the Operatives with a mad craving for rubies or Apple stock certificates, but she was an honest artist. She wrote from the heart. Also the limbic system, where pleasure circuits and addictive behaviour conspire to give us our more eccentric habits. And Kage’s limbic system liked chocolate.

But there was also an immortal truth in that plot point: because chocolate is an intoxicant for everyone. Even a man who is pure of heart and says his prayers at night will someday find that chili-infused, Breton-sea-salt semi-milk bar with cocoa nibs waiting for him in an alley: and when she’s done with him, he will wake up in a mall in the Valley, licking crumbs out of a cheap See’s wrapper …

It’s fitting, I guess, that in this season of monsters and scariness, there should arise news of  threats to the world cacao supply. Crinipellis perniciosa and Moniliophthora roreri are fungi which cause, respectively, witches’ broom disease and frosty pod rot. The disease course differs in them, but the end result is the same: no cacao pods. There are no known preventative or curative agents for either of these evil mushroom relatives, and so far only two real strategies seem to work.

The first is to destroy infected cacao trees – the old hoof and mouth remedy. Isolation is a part of this strategy as well, preventing the fruit of affected trees (mostly in their native South America) from infecting healthy crops in Africa where most cacao is now grown.

The second, still in its beginning stages, is to breed fungus-resistant trees. Some trees are always immune or at least harder to infect, and work is now underway locating these hardier specimens and breeding naturally resistant strains from them. (This has been tried before, notably in  Cambria CA with pitch-pine disease, and has shown good progress.) Scientists have  also been busy mapping the genome of the cacao plant. A first draft should be released by the end of this year, which will make identifying the resistant strains and then breeding them much easier and faster.

There was also an interesting little transaction over this summer that seemed to evade most people’s notice. In July of 2010, someone bought 241,000 tons of cocoa beans: the entire European supply for the year, and then some. It’s said to be worth over $650 million dollars. No one knows who did it. But someone, someone with a major sweet tooth, now owns most of the cocoa beans in the world.

So, what do we have here? Evil fungi attacking cacao pods – straight out of H.P. Lovecraft, that, sporulating minions of the cthonic depths contaminating our theobromos supply! If you eat the stuff, do you gradually turn in a grey, powdery, misshapen thing, mewling in a dark corner? Lots of things like that mewl around in dark corners in Lovecraft’s universe …

Opposing that is a valiant group of geneticists frantically mapping the helpless cacao trees’ genome, determined to awaken their latent superpowers. And if you don’t think that’s Kage’s Company in action, I – I just don’t know what to say, that’s all. It’s Dr. Zeus, I tell you!

Lastly, some unknown person with lots of money and a fondness for chocolate has acquired the entire European supply of raw cacao beans. Who can it be? Not Dr. Zeus this time, I think; the Future Kids don’t approve of theobromos. No, I think it has to be rebel operatives – the cyborg revolution is upon us! Or at least, the electronically enhanced buggers are gonna take all the chocolate for themselves …

These are pretty damned scary monsters, kids. I think I need a Hershey’s Bar …

Tomorrow: getting close

Kage Baker never missed Halloween Night. Most of them, she was out running around with a head tucked underneath her arm, filching Hershey Bars from the small relatives we were body-guarding.

When the kids were back home and had retreated to crouched defensive positions over their candy haul, she and I would go driving to look at the neighborhood decorations. The orange and purple lights, the strobes and candles, the guttering jack o’lanterns leering from porches and walls – the last trick or treaters running, shrieking, down the streets, high on sugar and the delight of racing around in the dark. The odd grownups’ party debouching into the street, giggling and questionably dressed …

Usually, we’d pass at least one die-hard who was still roaming the streets in character, and would not come out of it. Highly unnerving to pass a vampire, a werewolf, a cloaked and skull-faced figure who turned empty eyes on us as we passed – but neither waved or shouted, just stared us out of sight … method actors? Really subtle trick or treaters? Or the actually eldritch, taking advantage of the holiday for a night’s unencumbered license?

“Did you see that?” Kage would exclaim in horror and delight. “Do you know what that really was?”

“No, and neither do you,” I would reply, speeding up.

“Oh, yes, I do. You know that house further up  La Presa? The one that always smells like frying pork? Well, it comes down from there …” she would begin thoughtfully.

“Shut up! Shut up!” And I’d cram a Nestles Crunch in my mouth and hit the gas.

Mind you, we were in our 30’s at this time.

Last year was Kage’s last Halloween. We didn’t know it, and I thank God for that – we actually had some fun. The reason we did not do something last year was that we were in a hotel in San Jose (World Fantasy Con – Kage got a nomination), we were squiring Kage’s agent around (and poor Linn has never forgotten when we dragged her off on an exhausting 7-hour Disneyland visit) and Kage was in a wheel chair.

On the way to San Jose, as we were roaring up Highway 101 outside exotic Prunedale, Kage suddenly remembered that she had packed no clothes. Two hoodies and a nightgown; her Buke, copies of  her nominated novel, a wind-up Godzilla that shot sparks; 5 pounds of candy and the soundtrack to Bride of Frankenstein and a papier mache skull: but no clothes except the ones she was wearing. Luckily, there is a mall in Gilroy (Garlic Capitol of the World!) that is so large it distorts the local gravitational field; we got out the wheelchair and had a whirlwind shopping trip.

Thus, Kage was accoutred in  new clothes for her last Convention, and quite enjoyed herself. I pushed her from place to place with the usual left/right confusions. We caromed off a few doorways. Our good and saintly friend Neassa carried luggage and ran errands; Sara Goodman (may her line increase!) found space for Kage’s panels when the schedule went wonky. Kage handed out candy from a bag in her lap, and entertained herself by scaring people with the truth.

“Now, what did you do to yourself?” various people would scold, hands on hips, surveying her shawled-and-wheelchaired self disapprovingly.

“I got cancer!” Kage would say promptly with a big grin, and hand them a Kit Kat Bar. It one of the things that amused her all that weekend.

“You’re scaring people,” I observed as another victim went off in social shock.

“Screw ’em if they can’t take a joke,” said Kage. “I’m still smiling. Now, back to the room, Igor – we’re almost out of chocolate!”

She didn’t win, but she appreciated the nomination. She didn’t eat – she played architectural games with her food at the banquet; I don’t think anyone noticed but me, but by that time I was calculating her caloric intake hourly in  my head. We discreetly repaired at the necessary times for her to lie down and get her scheduled chemo through the port in her arm – I was trained to do it, and our luggage included the ice chest that held her drugs … so every 6 hours, the monster tapped us on the shoulder to remind us.

We had fun anyway. It was a good Halloween. People ran up and down the hotel corridors all night, laughing and yelling. We ate chocolate and Kage kept Linn awake for hours with wild stories of her life.

She always knew there were real monsters out there.

Tomorrow: Halloween crafts!