The Carnival of Illusion.

"Which way's the magic show?"

"We don't have a magic show," insisted the concierge. "We have a 'Carnival of Illusion'!"

Leading the way to a nice doorgirl/promoter who pointed out my name on the reservations list ... without any hint of who I was ... even before the show began. (Just psychic? Or secret Italian gypsy strega princess? Hmmmm.)

Once through the curtains, low slung tables and pedestals show off trappings of historical magicians, sepia-toned daguerreotypes of serious people, peacock feathers in brass spittoons, and bejeweled boxes with unknown contents from dark corners of Asia. Implications of travel, a thick black and gold ticket, velvet pile and damask hangings all have a terrific RomantiGoth setpiece feel to them.

Yet for all its Victorian window-dressings, there's something almost postmodern going on under the ruffled hemlines at Sarlot & Eyed's "Carnival of Illusion". You know it's a magic show, they know it's a magic show, and because of this there's a mental combination of shrug and wink which occurs at that cognitive crossroads that are completely acknowledged during the first few conjurings. But in a very quick reversal this matching pair makes you feel like you've taken a mysteriously exciting wrong train a couple stations ago, the compartment door's locked, and it's too late to get off now.

The whole hour-long affair mostly doesn't stray too far from the conventions of clever math, decks of cards, linking rings, folding of money, slights of hand, and bladed objects, but it's not the tricks that are exceptional -- it's Susan & Roland's unique delivery of their material that will charm the socks and garters off anyone who meets them. Using stylized movements, sophisticated and warm patter, sketch character acting, leading questions, and a proper alchemy of grace and humanity, they renew and give personal context to tricks of the trade and illusions you may have seen before, but never with this palpable sense of affection for the art of illusion and matchless savoir faire.

And above this, Roland conjures a couple David Blaine moments, when your suspension of disbelief actually no longer needs suspenders and you slackjawedly wonder how he just managed to pull off that bit of miraculous weirdness. He's arch and has this knowing look about him, but not in a condescending way like some illusionists, more in an intimate here-let-me-share-this-with-you fashion.

Case in point, my personal brush with Roland's phenomena: Being selected from the audience is never something I shoot for, but if you're the Gothic with a top hat in a small parlour audience limited to 35 people, you're unavoidably going to get picked to go up front. During an illusion called "Postcards Around the World" somehow three cards from a stack of 10 were dematerialized out from under my very-secured-to-its-chair behind, and just as mysteriously rematerialized under a lady's derriere across the room. For my bafflement and cooperation Roland awarded me with a large box of M&Ms.

And as for the very winning Miss Eyed, there's an Uno Attack-like moment as cards aggressively launch themselves from a brazier and she even more aggressively skewers a five of hearts in midair on the tip of her sword -- a card drawn by an audience member only minutes before, and completely uneyed by Miss Eyed. She's lovely, energetic, quite the dancer, and possesses expressive orbs that more than merit her surname. All that, an aisle of chips, and she gives great email.

True magic has been resurrected in the parlour at the DoubleTree in Tucson, and if you want a taste of what might possibly be on the real supernatural wonder, you'll go place yourselves in the deft hands of Sarlot & Eyed's "Carnival of Illusion".

[Miss Eyed & Sir Sarlot. Go get a fancy ticket to see them at www.carnivalofillusion.com or book them for your next fête.] 

P.S. No, I'm not being paid to write ad copy, or comped in any way to endorse said performers whom I had never met until tonight. I'm up at 5 am, a whole nine hours later, writing this and still thinking about how brilliant it was, okay? Okay.

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Addenda/Updated Disclosure (4.21.14): So since posting this show review back in 2010, I've hung out socially with these local living performance treasures, played much Jenga, smoked hookah, and then had the honour of being hired to successfully draft the text of the new version of their current souvenir program! Recently watched their performance again with some great changes (mentalism, op-art costumes, & knife-throwing!) and building upon all the same strengths they already have in their show, plus the now much more poetic program. They rock magic socks!

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

the Legacy of Tron.

The success of 1982's "Tron" was because it rode the crest of arcade culture. If you were a kid pumping quarters into those arcade machines back in the day, you ate, drank, and sweated pixels because underneath it all you felt as though something more important was being accomplished on the other side of the screen. It was split-second life-or-death reaction times, and the payoff was when Flynn ends up on the other side of the cathode glass, and you find out it's all horrifically true: That we as users are electronic caesars committing our progamme gladiators to fight it out and kill for us, again and again and again.

Given how well that ethos of translation played out, you'd expect this 3.0 (because 2.0 already happened in a PC & console release awhile ago), that the game grid and digital environs would now reflect the ideas of time-consuming MMORPGs, first-person shooters, real-time strategy sims, higher-speed internet communications, terragig storage, smartphone applications, sexting, and all the other bells and whistles such technology has gifted us with in the last 28 years since the original "Tron". Instead what we have are updated designs on much of the things in the first film, plus a few new vehicles that should fly off toy shelves in time for the holidays. (Yes, I bought a die-cast Light Runner.)

Perhaps the true Legacy here is this: The investment of $200 million into this sequel only supports the fact that the 1980s still and will always rule the cultural school.

[Excellent double feature art poster credit to Eric Tan.]

Best bit? The Score. Pounding threat, electronics laced with a nearly human jarvik heartbeat so you know something's at risk. While Daft Punk's never been past a fun and rarified novelty, if they don't win an Oscar for this soundtrack, there's no justice on the aural grid.

The strength of Tron is its setting with all that it implies. The moment of emotional reaction of user being trapped in a computer world, that emotionally neutral wonderland of cold blues and angry reds being the dominant factor. Contrast with the compounding of Sam Flynn's reactions, and pushed over the edge by Michael Sheen's over the top performance as Castor, and what was once the placid cyberworld is now upstaged and imbalanced. The only apologetic I can fathom would be that since programs are now more sophisticated their behavior would be more emotional to reflect that, but the film doesn't imply this, and I had to come up with it.

Olivia Wilde is the digital hotness, and on top of that every lady in tightly glowing striped pajamas in this film is. Notably, icy blonde Beau Garrett's the digital coolness as Gem.

Nit picks: Jeff Bridges young computer generated face looked like digital botox -- it just never looked organically believeable. The light cycle sequence didn't have the uncontrollably insane velocity that was so felt in the first movie. Yes, it had alot of clever dynamic changes, but if it'd been rendered differently it might have possessed the hammering-heart-pushed-up-into-your-now-choking-neck thrill it should have.

And for a movie encapsulating the currents of lightspeed electrons, pacing flagged in a few spots. In the first even when there were moments you were learning something about the digital frontier, and it was more the still hum of a machine that you knew could wake up at any second. Here in parts where the chase isn't on, it's more like the machine's i7 got swapped for a P1 and you're waiting for the flippy hourglass to turn back into a cursor so you can get on with it.
Visually everything's very, very pretty. Spatially well defined, imparting a sense of place one'd love to visit and is left wanting more of at the end of two hours.

As a sequel "Tron Legacy" doesn't stand alone, but it makes a worthy successor to one of Disney's most ambitious modern classics. Helmets off to the house of mouse. Now let's go play some deadly frisbee on the Wii!

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Post-Review Film-Influenced Addenda:

from 12.3.14:

Exciting Tron-esque teaser panel from "Batman Incorporated" issue #7 (July 2011).

Followed by Batgirl on lightcycle in issue #8 (August 2011).

Morrison & Clark may have partially wanted to homage 1990's "Batman: Digital Justice" (and "Dick Tracy" from the dialogue and catchphrase in that first panel [clever!]), the first completely computer illustrated graphic novel, but the lines of light, neon primaries, and the lightcycle are pure "Tron Legacy", and speaks alot for Tron programming our expectations of what a virtual reality version of the internet might look like as Bruce Wayne upsells it to potential investors.

A month before the film, Marvel did a few "Tron Legacy" style variant covers as promotion for Disney, its parent company:

[Thor.]

[Spider-Man. Note Tron City-scape.]

From 9.12.13:

And then they got in ... to the real world:

[Happy accident lightcycle race in foreground. Photo credit goes to yours truly.]

It seems "Tron Legacy" director & professor of architecture Joseph Kosinski's design sensibilities & lightline styling accents have influenced someone else, and actually crossed through an I/O tower to rez up as Tucson's aLoft Hotel at Speedway & Campbell. At night it really does look like a data construct from The Grid.

from 8.3.13 at 4:07am:

Then there's nights when one re-screens with your peeps:Yes, Stacia & I derezz programs for the MCP!

[February 2011.]

Below, note the bottles of blue & green energy for thirsty video warriors, bowls of red vs blue computer chips, and, um, data-salsa. Yeah, hot mexi-data-salsa.

[Melisszler Vs Gwyeniflynn. July 2013.
Due to Grid wavelengths being outside of the visual 3700-7000 angstrom range, this photo's blurry. Also, Sark Lives! {somewhere in this shot}]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

all too NinPotent.

Eric's being a geeky sassypants, telling me he just bought that chic pinstripe sterling silver card case ... for cards he hasn't even made yet. "But they're going to say 'Eric Issac-Basset, Stupidity Prevention Consultant."

Jim Wise walks in, red in the face from too much driving in the 100+ degrees to and from Mount Graham Observatory to work on telescopic mirrors as an optical engineer. Always gives me grief for wearing the black low-top split-toe tabi shoes. ("I need them to climb castle walls 'cause I'm shinobi like that.") A few months ago, Jim almost got into a fight with two skate punks in the parking lot, one of whom slapped his car with his deck while he was stopped at an intersection. Those pimply faced punks were lucky Jim decided otherwise. 

Why? Jim's a freaking ninja.

Back in 1990 he was cast as a Foot Clan soldier in the first live-action TMNT. But it's not Hollywood that gave him his Ninja status -- it's the decade and a half of training before that in the arduous and deadly art of Ninjitsu that qualified him to be an adversary to guys in green foam rubber turtle costumes. And to give me grief over shoes I've got no business wearing.

Yet I've unwisely decided to get his attention by saying, "Eric, Jim there needs you as a consultant."

But red-faced Jim's actually in no mood to trifle. Stepping towards me behind the front desk, he replies, "Here, I brought you something."

His arm flicks down, and *click*, the blade flips out of the quicksnap folding knife he's got cradled in his hand. All the action's happening just below the counter so if the blade comes up under my ribcage he'd probably have enough time to nonchalantly walk away before I collapsed in a pool of my own organs.

Unthinking in no-thought, I sweep my left hand down to block his rising wrist, while my right thrusts palm out to connect with his chest. Well almost, as he steps back, half surprised. But not as surprised as I was, because I've no idea where those moves came from.

"Hey! That's really good. You've earned your ninja badge."

Today, I am Ninja!

[And this is the secret badge I'm waiting for, all the way from Koga, exclusively handwoven and delivered by a fivesome of hot Kunoichi. Well, not really. But Jim is bringing me something like this.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

no longer missing.

My worthless elementary art teacher comes into the store. Miss Abrams. Young angry hippie woman flailing about irrelevantly at my inner city school to make a difference, now a week away from retirement. Bitter, judgmental, dressed like all the rest of the 1960s burnouts. We exchange neutral and practiced empty pleasantries. I ask the important question: "Whatever became of Mr. Martinez?"

"He died of AIDS."

I reel inside. My favourite teacher is dead.

Unexpectedly, she follows up, "He was such false man."
As though her surviving by pure chance into retirement somehow made her superior.

"I loved him dearly," I replied flatly. "He did have a roommate Chris that he used to speak of quite a bit." He spoke of the death of Chris' mom to teach us in a heart-rendingly personal confession about loss. This conversation didn't seem like it was going to match that. "Maybe they were more than friends."

"All that time with Lily, the third grade teacher. It was a scandal. And what with all the machismo back then, the men on staff got all the love from Conrado, the principal, and it was such a boys' club. You know, a few years later, Ramon didn't even take his class into art anymore. He said it wasn't important, they didn't need it, and Conrado said that was just fine."

Ah, so that's what it was about. Of course this was the "art teacher" who declared "There's no wrong way to do art" and proceeds to unnecessarily modify the aesthetics of what you're trying to create. Fucking hypocrite. Maybe Ramon figured that out, too.

"To the contrary, I remember he actually touted art. He even won an award in college for a little sculpture called 'Medulla'."
Judy Abrams seemed to think for a second before partially backpedalling, "Well, I didn't know him that well. He was good in the beginning, before all the politics."

The justice here is that even if Ramon was fabulous enough to be incidentally gay, at least he will never be eulogized for having a paintbrush stuck up her useless ass.

And who was Ramon Martinez? The man I knew was a young firebrand who was a Chicano in the best sense of the word. A responsible, divorced single-father who drove a white convertible MG. He took care of himself, ate a tablespoonful of honey every morning for health. Honest enough to fail the student teacher Benny who didn't know fractions any better than we did. Ramon would speak first with joy about his mother, then with frankness about her loss which happened that very same year, having to be strong to come back to the chalkboard. So audacious as to teach us about Juan Diego & the Virgen de Guadalupe in a public school, the Mexicano hero-martyr Jesus Garcia who saved Nacozari from a burning trainload of dynamite, required a verbatim recitation MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech and the hope that it encapsulated. With science, it was astronomy's Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, nuclear power generators and bombs, brought a practicing neurologist in with an actual human brain on a tray and gave us gloves so we could touch the curves and crannies in the gray matter, even the mind-bending ideas of the big bang and oscillating cosmologies. The curriculum pulled no punches, raised questions, made us not only learn but want to think. So ambitious his classroom made front page above the fold of the metro section with its presentations on race and classroom philosophies. The passion and conviction in his teaching was palpable, and equally effective.

I last ran into Ramon around 1991 and we talked for about 45 minutes straight. He'd changed his name after some ancestral research and said he was working on drafting educational software to teach children about Mesoamerica. I'd always meant to follow up with him after that chance meeting, but getting my double degree and other personal involvements took the intention off my radar, regrettably. It seems the only thing I can do now is ask people who knew him to fill in the blanks for me. But what I learned from him and remember of Ramon Martinez, an enlightened man and teacher, I will never forget. Thanks for everything, Mr Martinez.

[Sartorially suited Ramon Martinez in the left foreground. Third from the right, lil' young me sporting the "Pak Rat" shirt at the height of videogame arcade culture.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

the undead subtract the subjectivity of math.

"Vampires a mathematical impossibility"?!?

If physics professor Costas Efthimiou thinks he's so damned clever, why isn't he working on applied fusion, as opposed to pulling this cynical nonsense to get his name in some third-rate science website's well-buried Halloween feature article? Publish or perish, indeed. (What's also odd is a dead link from his homepage to Transylvania University, and vacation pictures of the Greek islands -- an alleged hotbed of vrykolakas activity! Is he really a disinformant?)

Math relies on unproved postulates to complete its geometries, and resorts to imaginary numbers to solve its problems, while even Euclid's unreal linear thinking unravels and frays when distances inevitably curve. If some number zealot needs to go comfort himself under spreadsheets of theory so he can feel safer at night, then let him fool himself. Anyway, Efthimiou's based his formula on a zombie mechanism, not a vampiric one. Single vampire bites do not necessarily spread the blessing.

Stoker's Van Helsing, yet another self-proclaimed "Mr Know-It-All", was partly deceived the by this same misconception: "... they cannot die, but must go on multiplying the evils of the world; for all that die from the preying of the Un-Dead becomes themselves Un-Dead, and prey on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever widening, like as the ripples from a stone thrown in the water." (pp. 263-264, McNally & Florescu, eds.), which is likely where the mathmonkey drew his flawed timestables from. Plus, the idea of vampirism's been around for far more than 400 years, as paintings on ancient Assyrian pottery suggest. And by the time numerous official military and medical accounts of vampirism crashed upon the intellectual shores of the Ages of Reason & Enlightenment, it was none other than philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1788) who had the illumination to conclude: "If ever there was in the world a warranted and proven history it is that of vampires."

Maybe Count Vladislaus Dracula in 2004's "Van Helsing" encapsulates it best: "Why can't they just leave us alone? We never kill more than our fill. And less than our share. Can they say the same?" Only stupid hunters shoot all the game, while the smart ones care to leave enough for next season, and vampires aren't required to kill their prey like humans, monthly or otherwise.

Leave the vampires to the vampirologists, and go say your faithless rosaries on the abacus you litanical mathematicians, because undeath defies not only math, but the limitations of life itself.

[From a long-ago blog, re-posted/re-contexted here in honour of the recently deceased Jerry Nelson, the voice of Sesame Street's Count Von Count. His character lived the folklore that vampires are possessed by a compulsion to count grains or thistles, a facet that could be used to stymie pursuing undead or delay their entry into homes. But for The Count it was not only a teaching technique but a joy that seemed to celebrate his infinite nighttime existence, a creature beyond the rational using the rational to sum up the world around him, and arguably the happiest of characters on the Street. Thanks for all the love of countless things in life & unlife, Mr Nelson.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

Tucson, obviously.

So beyond sick of hearing complaints about the heat, the "scene", that it's not a "real city", the "boredom", the "lack of culture", and most ridiculous, that "there's no trees".

I also hear I-10 is still open. You may leave now, if that is really your wish. Believe me, we won't object.

Aside from being a third-generation Tucsonense, there actually are alot of reasons Tucson is the superior home. Cairo, Amsterdam, Olympia, Seattle, DC, Chi-town, Vancouver, Toronto, Detroit, Manhattan, New Orleans and more. I've been to all of them, but at the end of the night I still come home to Tucson. As a collective we lay claim to:

• Saguaros. Anyone can have and plant trees, but Saguaros are available nowhere else.

• Big city amenities without metropolitan ills. The crawling traffic, overtly violent crime, and indifference of the population haven't come here to detract from our fine dining, clubs, and culture.

• Astronomy. City codes prevent civic lighting to be over a certain amount of lumena, so the night skies remain relatively visible for professional and amateur stargazers who are lucky enough to be in the astronomy capital of the world. Yes, the world.

• Residents are nice, smarter than the average bear, and relaxed, which translates to all of those good qualities rubbing off on you. Sure they can't all be winners, but on the curve we're a brain trust.

• Most tectonically stable place in the world. NYC sinks by 2020. San Andreas will one day turn LA & SF & SD into New Atlantises. Meanwhile, we'll have a beach in Yuma so sit tight and wait for the new coastline.

• 300 days a year of good weather. No ice scrapers, snow shovels, or salted roads eating your car's undercarriage. July & August swelter, but it's a small trade, and nothing swamp or A/C can't remedy.

• More galleries per capita. While I'm not sure where I heard this, I'll buy it with all the artspaces downtown, the Historical Society, UA museums, and, of course, the TMA.

• Coyotes! Hear their mournful howls at night. Watch them cross breed with lonely dogs. They go through your garbage but you'll feel so sorry for them you won't care.

• A club scene more than proportional to our size. Also, unlike most cities, even major metropolises, we have a Gothic weekly happening at three different venues, on three nights a week. Other cities usually only host a monthly, if that.

• The Wishing Shrine. El Tiradito is the only wish fulfilling shrine dedicated to a sinner who got shot for loving a married woman. Amen.

• San Xavier. Rising from a dusty plain, a white stucco brilliance that is called "The Dove of the Desert" is an intact structure of Spanish colonialism. The indians of the surrounding reservation have made their peace with it and every weekend booths outside sell the best frybread you'll ever eat.

• The re-opened Fox Theatre. The 1930s art deco cinema reflects Tucson's civic sense of historical preservation over progress. Rio Nuevo will feature a mission-like structure at its heart as well, which will retrofit these same sensibilities.

• Bats! Droves of them. I hear them many nights, twittering about lampposts for flying insects. Seasonally camped out in underpasses at River Road and East 22nd, they emerge in big living whirlwinds at sundown.

• Our weirdest secret is The Door to Pandaemonium. In the heart of the city at Speedway Blvd and First Ave there's a bit of prime real estate that should've been developed ages ago, but never has been. This cactus and scrub lot just feels ... wrong. Don't believe me? Go visit in the dead of night for yourself, and we'll compare notes.

• Sunset. Reds like you can't buy in a jar.

• The largest All Souls' Procession in the world! You'd think Mexico City being the most populous, but no -- it's us with our 10,000+ mourners and celebrants who photograph each other and dress with an inventiveness rarely seen elsewhere.

• The ladies. That 'Zonie accent, the Latina calenturas, and given the enclaves of Greeks, Russians, Indians (feather & dot), as well as the flood of university and corporate transfers we get like a respiration of new beauty every season, every flavour you can savour is here for the seducing. Come get some.

Still dissatisfied? Then it's you, not the city. Only boring people get bored, so go be boring elsewhere. I hear Portland's the new spot for this year's grass is greener crowd. Get in your fucking Volvo and go be too hipsterist for Portland instead. We'll probably see you in two years when you realized how good you had it and what a fool you truly are. By then however we'll have rented your cool Barrio Viejo apartment to someone far less whiny than you.

[This long arm of Tucson belongs to Clay.]

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

the Secret of the Golden Bowl.

The singing bowl haunts me, its note following me hundreds of miles away from that back alley music shoppe hidden within the depths of San Francisco's Chinatown.

I ran the striker hard around the bowl's lip and suddenly the space just filled with ringing as if out of nowhere. Or maybe an unheard sonaressence pulled from the corners of the room into the bowl and poured out again, an invisible but tangible aural reflection.

It made me wonder if there were bowls that sang, like celestial choirs, or others, a dark portal of lowest basso pouring up from an Abyss. Genesis stories state that matter gets created from sound, God conjuring the world from The Word, and the Aum, same as song evoking an emotion from nothing.

I asked an esotericist I know about the bowls and he mentions the blocks of the pyramids, after somehow getting treated, being lifted with a tap from a resonant staff or tuning fork (perhaps our ankh ...). I think of lamas & saffron robed priests levitating in their Himalayan temples, attuning themselves, perhaps with the bowls as a focusing tool. I'm sure my odd source also thinks of rounded saucers with their otherworldly humming being a slight friction against the atmosphere as they spin & turn at high velocity -- ships also rumoured to land or originate from within the Earth's highest mountain ranges.

Apparently around since 11th century BCE, the bowls were made with a now lost technology that used 5 to 12 metals, including amounts of silver and gold, all of which seems alot of trouble for a simple bell or container for offerings, so there's more here than meets the ear. On a molecular level everything vibrates. If you place one singing bowl near a silent one including some of the same metals, it will begin to sing.

Silver's negative charge attracts particles, and gold's noble and electrically conductive qualities may have factored in the forger's choice of materials for the bowls. The older the bowl, the darker a tarnish it has, affecting the tone.

Listen to the still, to the silence where there's supposedly absence. Instead you'll hear presence, the hum of yourself & your echo reflected back, a low roar awash with subtlety, as blood passing through artery and vein. Call this frequency or soul or anima or chi, the bowls reveal the ringing that is everywhere to begin with.

Last week, dozens of dealers in imported wares brought bowls into Tucson to sell at our international gem show. After playing hundreds of bowls, many centuries old if not unknowingly older, I found the bowl that hummed my song, a deeply shadowed opera conducted in infinite wavicles that push and flow through the invisible so hard you can feel it through your very skin.

With the right bowl one could summon the prima materia sound, to fill the bowl with intent, as a magician does a cauldron, and then send it out with the sound's return to whence it emanated to act on that will & wish from within, to affect the timbre & fibre of existence, to destroy, to refine, to reform, to remake the World. That is the secret of the Golden Bowl.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

it breaks my heart.

I would send that photo of you on a clear blue day in SF, holding the flask. It's that bright and shining moment of perfection where everything you feel is unquestionable and more than real and so solid it flays you free of the unimportant past and cracks opens the future like a pomegranate, each bead a sweet red bit of life to come, and you know in your soul it'll all taste good from here on out.

You're holding the flask in your hands, the one thing you wanted more than anything for your 30th birthday, and it reads "fire in a bottle", and it doesn't matter that nobody else knew what it meant, only us, only us, only us, only we knew.

Later, there were moments and pauses where our love flagged. The difference was that I had to try and pay attention to the ones where it didn't: the nights of sweat, breakfasts of unneeded donuts and fritters, you in marabou slippers, us driving out to see that total tourist trap in Dragoon that was so stupid it didn't matter because we were there together snickering among the scorpions frozen in paperweights; leaving the apartment like a dream in the stewardess outfit at 4 in the mornings, sleeplessly sexy, touching down like the setting sun when you got back in the evening, rising, falling, rising again, out into the world and ovaling back to me where I waited with presents washed up on the shore of my nights at the store. In them, I saw you, and the desire I had for you.

It was you who doubted, who saw those same moments not as answers but as questions to be raised but for your own reasons, because in the end security was more important than love for you. Is it? Have you now found it a few just too convenient doors down? I can't say. I've always been secure with myself, safe in my own arms, self-contained. I still am, but you've cracked that container, and while it's all still together in my boundless soul, there's a space where you're missing, where the cold enters, depressurizing my insides when I don't expect it, and I see you through the hairline gap, and I miss you: the bangs, the full smile, eyes of dusk, charms you never even saw, but that never failed to surprise, seen as though it were always the first time. Through the heartfissure I accidently watch re-runs of the Christina channel, and what was once my favourite show now breaks my heart, and the fucked up thing of it is you don't even have to be there to do it again.

Yet I can't tell you, or send you the photo. Pride forbids it, my righteous anger tells me such offerings are undeserved, that they weren't adequate to save us in the first place, that maybe, after it all, they'll signify only to me, and are ultimately unasked for.

I wonder if one night you'll realize that more than that immediate family you love, the shoe leather father of impossibly high regard, self-declared asshole brother, sweater-vested aloofly uncaring younger brother, and especially your unwinnable mommy dearest, that for that time, I cared for you more than all of their small mouths could ever hold, and cared most of all.

And in the end, now a year later, in the wake of your unsober tear eyed unannounced visit to my parents, I'm right: love isn't enough. In the end I was the one left holding the bag, the bag filled with gifts left ungiven, gifts poured back into the oceans of unwanted things, these artfully wrapped presents that weren't just gifts -- they were years of I love yous to come, the red seeds of pomegranate that once shined and burned inside that bottle like a fire, impossible but true, if only for a moment of our lives, flowing away from you,
almost,
but not,
tasted,
given up ...
gone.

#    #    # 

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

reveal your alignment.

When I was 7, my buckos & I would play Dungeons & Dragons during lunch, seated on the cold concrete of the schoolyard, wearing out erasers on queer looking forms and tossing the funny polyhedral dice as fast as our imaginations could swing cruelly spiked morning stars into the heads of pretty elves.

For those of you who aren't familiar with role-playing games, one assumes the identity of a character which you verbally play, while another narrates the setting in which the characters move about & directs the results. Most RPGs are traditionally based in some Tolkienesque fantasy world. Mechanics of chance & combat are determined by attributes held by the characters represented by numerical values which are then brought to bear against the values of your adversaries & the dice sort out who is left standing, but strategy & creativity also play a large part.

In these mansions of imagination, a man named Gary Gygax created the construct known as Alignment to describe a character's moral & ethical compass, which determines how the character should behave and act so the narrator can then duly reward the player for being true to form in the gaming world. Usually most characters are good or neutral with chaotic & lawful striations, but you sometimes find players select evil. These selections are just you filling in a box on a character sheet for an alter ego.

But what if this box was really about you?

A few months ago I found an official online quiz that reverse engineers your Alignment selection:

D&D Official Online Alignment Test.

It's a multiple choice 36-question test. Maybe that's a simplistic system, filing all of human decisionmaking into 9 categories, but I found it interesting & thought provoking to actually answer these queries as best applied to myself. After all, for centuries we've been taking game-like devices & applying them as divinatory tools to real life, like the I Ching or Tarot or Runes or Ouija or Magic 8-Ball or Tasseography or the Enneagram or The Cube or the DSM-IV, and using them to relay personal insights from within & without ourselves.

Some of the questions will twist your noodle & hurt your brain, others will seem not to apply, but if you substitute say the word "king" for "president" or "governor" on the assassination question then they can easily relate. The "magic spell that makes copper coins look like gold" can be translated as "retail accepted fake credit card", and so on and so forth.

My results? To confess, my "character"'s alignment is Neutral Evil. This is the closest to "True Evil", where both law & ethics are non-factors, tools to be used indiscriminately for personal ends, and what matters most is one's own gain & self-preservation. At first I was a bit disturbed by that result (who honestly views themselves as evil?), so I've gotten many of my co-workers to take the test for perspective, and a few have cashed out as Chaotic Evil, where schadenfreude & harmful mischief for evil's sake hold the reigns of persona, which one might consider worse, given the purposelessness of such actions. Most seem to be Neutral. This Alignment can either be viewed as striking a balance or a lack of convictions, depending. But even some of the Neutral Good, the "True Good", folks answered many questions in a not-so-courageous way.

So maybe I'm the baddest of the bad, but bear in mind that I will testify on your behalf despite death threats from the powerful & corrupt judge, and if the orcs come to Arizona, you bet your hit points I'll go to Gate's Pass & defend Tucson against the orcish hordes, unlike all of those spineless Neutral/Lawful/Chaotic do-Gooders. (My derringer & 500 hollow-points are ready, you pigfaced baconheads! Bring it, I'll crush it!) This difference implies that perhaps it takes the latitudes evil allows to accomplish things for the greater good. Besides, Alignment's really like the car -- it may pull a certain direction, but you're still at the wheel and can compensate for that tendency (i.e. you don't have to gleefully run over the rabbit, unless your party likes eating freshly treadmarked coney). Take it, see what it reveals about yourself, and let us know where you land on the Alignment field. You may be surprised.

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.