Yesterday, sometime around 9a.m. a power outage hit the house in Michigan that houses the Mill Avenue Vexations web server. As a result, it remained offline for most of the day (we're all hard working folk who spend a great deal of our lives away from home.)
Suffice it to say, once people trickled back again we were able to get her back online again. The sound of hard drives spinning up cheerfully serenading my friends as they reset their clocks from the flashing 12:00.
It seems that the street preachers have suffered a winnowing in my absence. Their numbers have reduced, a bleakness waxes their expressions and tints their voices as they shout to passersby. I am told, though, that some have broken away to spend time at the Arizona State Fair – a place that I no longer patron insomuch as visit in my childhood memories.
I'd like to bring up this moment that I'm extremely amusing bringing Kazz with me on my Mill rounds, since – unlike me – he is a recalcitrant atheist. And by this I mean, he coughs into his hand and shrugs and the next thing you know he's into it with one of the preacher's about some point of deception. I like to examine the preachers as an interesting examination of predatory memes clawing and scratching and fighting for headspace. While I cannot dismiss the fears of people, like Kazz, who see these people as the scout-drones of dangerous memes corrupting otherwise free-willed individuals, I do somewhat dismiss the memes themselves on the grounds that they don’t have much to do with me as a person (nor the people who spread them.) Also unlike me, these people’s memes are Kazz’s enemy because of the nature of their ideas; whereas with me it is a cultural vendetta that causes me to ignore their advances and avoid discussion.
The great eyeless masses don’t need this messiah to rescue them from these particular saviors – but it doesn’t mean they’re not entertaining to listen to.
It’s just a virus, after all. Particularly insidious, yes, but years of evolution and psychic development have allowed the wet wiring of both individuals and their social synergies to develop extremely effective immune systems.
One particularly welcome element to the Ave was in the form of George, a light-on-his-feet young man who I would suspect is going to ASU. According to him, he came to town stranded and went off in every direction but Mill initially. Kazz and I found him arguing with one of the preachers about some point of fact that I didn't quite catch. The way that his face lit up when I mentioned Erisianism simply made my day. I hope to see him again. I gave him a copy of Vexations Volume 5.
The nights are getting colder! So, whatever that long, dark road brings us beneath the taciturn glow of Mill Ave’s lamps, and the blinking of those cranes building the Centerpointe Condominiums above…
"...your eyes are telling stories that I can't neglect."
In what I think is a rather excellent trend, Gothic Angst web zine has been reviewing their way through Mill Avenue Vexations -- the latest news on this subject, the review of Vol 3, is now available to peruse on the Vexations blog.
This volume things start getting rolling with deaths happening in the original crew, Vex starting to home in on the problems at hand, and the world essentially doing its darned best to go to hell in a handbasket...
The literary reviewer, H. M. Garber of goth e-zine Gothic Angst, has published a review of Volume Three from Mill Avenue Vexations. People should dash on over there and check it out.
It was my first night on Mill since I came back to Arizona and things went pretty well. Vexations Volume 5: Drum Circle is now in print (but not on the web yet) so I hit the Ave to get some of the physical booklets passed out to people who might want them.
Kazz and I first crashed the party that is Mill about 8p.m. and discovered a wispy dearth of everything Mill related: the preachers hadn’t appeared, the street rats were sparse, and pretty much even the crowds were wan and insubstantial. So, instead of waiting around like a pair of loons honking on a street corner, we ambled about looking for some dinner.
Up and down the drag we took ourselves. There are a number of different eating establishments on the Ave, and so we headed for Quiznos; however, we quickly discovered that they’d closed up for the night (at 8p.m. – our arrival time.) So we veered away from that edge of Mill (that’s a little ways from Monti’s, by the by) and winged our way back towards Centerpointe and ended up in UNO’s Pizzeria. Where I offered a book to our waitress, it’s Volume Five, which puts her ahead of everyone else, but if she likes it, hopefully she’ll come back.
After dinner things picked up a little.
Some street preachers appeared, at least one whom I recall from last year, and friendly rats started to gather about the drum circle area.
Kazz got himself an argument with one of the more vocal preachers—whose name escapes me to this day—and I let them have at it. I’ve long ago given up really discussing Christianity with this person in particular because his discussions have no substance. He’s worthwhile as a person to spend time with, but we have cross-purposes on the Ave, I suppose, so we only speak in passing.
Also among the group was Emanuel, a tall black man with a deep voice which I recall being one of the more fervent and powerful debaters. I rather liked listening to him discussing things with passersby. He appears to have had a crisis of faith and given up the Born Again attitude for a book on Atheism. I even gave him a Vexations volume—I am a little timid about offering them to the street preachers because I am not kind to them in the novels, primarily because they’re a nuisance on the Ave and I have some opinions about their presence. I’m not going to pretend that I’m not too happy about how abrasive they are, but I figure that there’s no need to strain our relationship by biting off their nose to spite their face.
As for other important people, at drum circle proper I ran across Amish—with his guitar and calm demeanor—and even Osiris! He’s outdone himself and bought a cane exactly like mine (the City Stick crafted by Cold Steel.)
Finally, Kazz and I dropped by the Graffiti Shop and chatted a little with Lawrence—the most awesome man in the entire Universe—I signed a book for him and passed it over. He even mentioned that he knew some amateur filmmakers from a nearby university who are thinking of making a film about a blind girl who has a psychometric ability: when she goes about her day and touches objects sometimes they
stay with her, and when she sleeps she sees/experiences the lifeline of that object in her dreams. I think that I would be extremely happy to help script a story involving that. (Vex herself can use psychometry and did so in The Legend of Sleepy Phoenix.)
That’s all that I can report for today, it’s been a good weekend, Mill looks good.
For future reference, I think I've found a pretty solid place to do Knight Investigator badges if I ever want them: http://www.shieldspride.com/
It would end up costing around $500 for a couple of them, but it might be worth it just for the total amusement. I would end up having to ask them if they can turn the 7-point stars so that they are point-up when they do the stamp and imprinting, but the silver ones are close enough to pass cursory muster.
So... who wants to be a detective?
So, I haven't actually written up my review of Jade Empire yet. It's been an oddly busy summer. However, I have gotten four other video games that I'm preparing reviews for, and they would be: XIII: Thirteen, Pariah, Bad Mojo, and Darkfall.
XIII: Thirteen
Thirteen by Ubisoft is an interesting little escape from the usual photorealistic first-person shooter types out there by presenting everything in a much more comic book cell-shaded style. The opening sequence to each of the chapters looks exactly like panels being produced out of a comic book, and internal events snap into view with a similar effect.
With voice acting by everyone’s beloved David Duchovny (who played Fox Mulder on the X-Files) we picked up this title less because I know the comic it is set from and more because I don’t mind his voice...
Read the rest of this review at Vox ex Machia »
Pariah
Pariah is an all around mediocre first person shooter that just cannot stand up under the weight of its own ego. The graphical complexity of many of the environments was certainly beautifully painted, the puzzles seemed interesting enough, and the foes—while not that bright—did perish with satisfying cries of pain; but it seemed to lack that spark that makes a video game worth playing. It is a straightforward nothing-special-here first person shooter and nothing more.
Read the rest of this review at Vox ex Machina »
Hopefully I can muster the time to hit those others that I wanted, but this is what I have at the moment. My next set of news will probably encompass my work on Vexations more than it does Vox Ex Machina but I figured that it was a good time to introduce that to this slice-of-life blog as well...
Living out in Michigan makes for some very slow days. I don't quite get out as much as I do in the mean, sun-baked streets of Phoenix. Also, I might mention, I really don't get near Detroit much more than once a month.
So, what I've gotten myself up to has mostly been video games. Lots of video games. Recently I bought myself Prey and F.E.A.R.
Prey, an uncanny, scary, atmospheric FPS involving a juxtaposition of aliens and Native Americans. The game starts out presenting our hero, Tommy, a jaded and disillusioned Cherokee boy (young man really) trying to break free of the Reservation. It's steeped in every pop culture Native American cliché that I could think of, and then some. Suddenly, aliens attack. They start sucking up cars, people, the bar he works in, into this weirdly convoluted ship that is traversed via a bizarre network of space-warping portals.
The best parts about this game happen to be some of the humor. Once and a while, wandering about, you come across a panel on the wall that is currently receiving radio from Earth—and it happens to be Art Bell. Callers continually call in about various strange happenings, lights, and other events involved with the alien attack and he does his best not to believe them.
The biggest problem I had with Prey is that it was amazingly short. The death mechanic is interesting—when you die you are thrust into the alternate world of your ancestors where you fight the dishonored dead—of course, this makes short work of dying over and over because you come back, whilst your foes do not. It doesn't have enough replay value to go back in with a more difficult setting.
The best things about this are the weird varieties of puzzles that present themselves from the space-warping qualities of the ship. Sadly, the game just does not go far enough with those puzzles. The most intriguing part was a labyrinth of wall-walking-gravity-conveyors, but it didn't end up lasting that long.
High point? Discovering that the aliens were apparently the doom of the Anasazi causing them to totally vanish so long ago (not that we haven't seen me using this sort of a plot in Vexations or anything.) I laughed, I cried, I kicked alien butt in the name of my ancestors.
F.E.A.R. This game fell down mostly on story. While the creepy little girl effect really got me, and I loved having bullet-time to take out my enemies in this FPS shooter it really wasn't doing such a good job of keeping my attention. What drove me forward wasn’t the interesting new foes, but the next time I met Mr. I-Eat-Dead-Bodies or the scary little girl who light fires and threw stuff at me.
Otherwise it was a generic FPS with horror elements. Things that I did like involved how the bad guys would jump for cover, or leap over objects to get at me. They'd throw grenades when I was hiding and scream in horror when I appeared. I'm told by everyone that they're telepathically controlled clones, but they seemed pretty well socialized for clones.
There isn't much in the way of tactics, or problem solving that I had to do. The enemies are loud—well, most of them are—talking to each other in their outside voices on the radio whenever I'm getting near. I don't need to walk like a cat, these guys were made to be snuck up on.
I think that they could have done a lot more work with the NPCs (or at least more NPCs in general who weren't specters walking in my vision) and had them be more interactive. Maybe some escort or protection scenarios. As a horror it did a pretty good job with the ethereal ghosts that fell into dirty ashes every time I got a good look at them, and the dead bodies falling out of ceiling tiles, but sadly eventually it just got tired. I stopped jumping at noises about half-way-through. I think it was because I realized nothing was coming to get me anymore, at least nothing that wasn't going to bark, “AREA SEEMS CLEAR!” on its radio before it came up on me.
Today, I got Jade Empire.
Let's see how this goes.
The wonderful rE/dOx and LadyDev have showcased Mill Avenue Vexations, our lovely detective/cabdriver Vex Harrow, and awesome author Kyt Dotson on The Ungodly Hour once again! You can get the mp3 audio here. Listen up everybody, and after you’re done: go visit The Ungodly Hour. You can find the showcase and their music by finding the March 30th, 2007 show.
Read more about it on Vex's news blog.
Well, Vex over at the Mill Avenue Vexations blog beat me to this one, but apparently there is a superhero who sometimes patrols the Ave. His name is Citizen Prime and when he hits the mean streets in his beautiful costume (costing him almost $4k) with his cell phone and a hearty dose of extroversion.
I discovered him because I found an article at AzCentral.
On a Tuesday night in April, I followed Prime on a shift. As part of a recent effort to interact with the community more often, he spent a couple hours in the late evening strolling Mill Avenue in Tempe, mingling with the crowds.
He has a Myspace page and even a full blown webpage—still under construction, but I’m sure it’ll be awesome.
I for one, find it heartening that he treads softly places where I so solidly place my own soul.
The Ave.
Via Boing Boing, I discovered this neat service, outside.in.
The project manager, Stephen Berlin Johnson had this to say about the research from the goings on:
Since we've been tracking local blog posts by neighborhood for six months now, we figured it was about time we figured out exactly what the US's bloggiest neighborhoods were, given that this is the question every sensible person has been trying to find an answer to for years now.
What's interesting about the list we compiled is that it turns out placebloggers tend to thrive in gentrifying communities -- half of our nabes in the top ten were in the middle of some form of gentrification. makes sense, but it wasn't something we went into the project expecting to find.
I suppose that as myself, I am not surprised. My neighborhood of choice is Mill Avenue, and Mill is suffering from a very powerful case of gentrification. It's like a disease that wracks a body—the immune system rushes to the aid, but discovers no enemies to fight, just strange, new growth. A cancer. And so some of the elements, in this case the citizenry, fall to squinting into the sun and going through the motions.
With things that are familiar vanishing under the treads of bulldozers people begin with the light touches: they start talking about what it used to be like—how they wish it still was.
Today Vex on Mill Avenue Vexations brought up a lot of this stuff, observations of the old, the execrations into the new.
It's like Walt Richardson said, "There's a lot of changes, down on Mill Avenue." Oh, but those times are done changing.
For good or bad.
Once again, I have returned to Michigan and, although on my arrival the weather notwithstanding, it is actually extremely green here and not white. The beginning of April seemed to haven’t quite released itself form the clutches of the Snow Queen and I have some interesting photographs of flurries and a very light wannabe blizzard caught in an MPEG. Unfortunately, these things will be remaining on my hard drive for the time being.
The not-so-humble of Ann Arbor is brimming with activity these days, enough that it was next to impossible to find a parking space this last Sunday to go to Borders and buy a bunch of books to read. In doing so I picked up a series of totally random titles from the shelves along with a few that I actually want to read—such as titles by William Gibson that I haven’t gotten into yet and sadly the next in The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind (yes, it’s crack.)
It’s taken me almost two weeks now to totally settle in and recover from the airplane trip and the dramatic change in climate. My fingers are eternally cold now; a distinct and strange change from living in Arizona. Although, truth be told, since it was winter in Phoenix the temperature has changed little between there and here at the moment.
I look forward to this summer because it means I’ll have a lot more time to spend working on Vexations. Expect at least six new novelettes coming out. Covers are already in commission and things are looking up.
More news later.
It's not every day that I get to report something so interesting, but recently my writing netted me something wonderful. One of the shopkeeps on Mill Avenue, Lawrence Owenby, gave me a necklace for writing Vexations.
He is the proprietor of The Graffiti Shop, does glass-blowing, and is a general all around scoundrel and awesome person. If there is anything about the Ave that I love the most, it's him.
This necklace nicely exemplifies the simplicity of his presence and additions to the Ave. Being a glass blower he creates lots of different items from large (smoking bowls) to the small (much like the above necklace.) I bought my first pentacle from him a long time ago, about the time I lived on the Ave as a MIll rat.
I gave it to Ms. Vex Harrow, of course, since she suggested that she could make a rather powerful talisman out of it. I figure that she'll probably have something to say about this gift herself.
I don't receive gifts for my work in the community very often, and I didn't quite expect one from Lawrence's quarter--I give him the books because I think of him as one of the important fixtures that makes the place what it is. He's a welcome part of my life and experience down there. The Graffiti Shop is an element that I would like to see prosper and continue to bring good things.
Go. Hunt. Visit the Graffiti Shop. Visit Mill.
Since I am currently waiting to get my camera back from where I accidentally let it lie (my friend's house.) I thought that I'd share this interesting little link with everyone that reads this blog.
It's a Wiki Map of the Mill Avenue District.
I even added the Mill Avenue drum circle to it.
Mill Avenue Vexations Home Sweet Home has been released to print!
This one is a tribute to artists, particularly those who have done work for me in the past. It is a story that will probably someday become one of the comic book versions of Vexations.
It will be available over the next few Saturdays at drum circle and the Graffiti Shop on Mill Avenue. Possibly at other locations as more places take the booklets in small numbers.
Remember, supplies of these are limited and it is not available on in the web store yet, so get out and get one soon.
One could easily liken a city to a person, with a childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Phoenix and her metro cities have always fascinated me for this reason. This city—as I have previously posted—is constantly attempting to re-invent itself. Tearing down the old, building up the new, and sometimes even demolishing the new to bring up the newer and newest-fangled bleeding edge of urban domination.
Mill Avenue is no exception to this. It is a center of community, commerce, and conversation that suckles most directly off of the youth and the college, which is why an article posted over at Exurban League caught my attention.
If you want 6th Street, you've got to get rid of the bland corporate storefronts and blander post-retro buildings and get back to Tempe's roots. Bring back the fun of starting an evening out by filling up at Restaurant Mexico then going over to Wong's to listen to Dead Hot and then up to Edcel's for Walt Richardson & The Morning Star Band and capping it off by a 2am breakfast at Stan's Metro Deli and all the other things that brought Mill Avenue back from the brink of irrelevance. People used to line up out the door at The Coffee Plantation on a Friday or Saturday night: When's the last time anything was that popular on Mill?
The Ave has always kept my interest because there were things to do and places to be. The Graffiti Shop, Coffee Plantation, the deep thud of a band playing at Long Wongs—while these places are older than they are new, they were not Abercrombie & Fitch, or the newest reincarnation of some stupid sunglasses store limed with faux stone and too-bright windows in the dimness of the twilight. I know that I am one who advocates the drum circle before all else, but Mill is also the buildings and the stores that have been proudly lifting their chins and smiling at the passersby.
Now, condominiums are going up around Mill, they’re building them at the waterfront of the fake lake, they’re lurking just beyond the grand glow of the Ave, and looming with dire intent. These people who haven’t even visited Mill except for through the tempered glass of their limousines, and through the slats of office windows, are making decisions about changing Mill into a tourist paradise. Their concept of cool is imported from Scottsdale, trying to attract teenyboppers with money. To leech gross out of high-rent storefronts that are all glitz and glam that have no staying power and no substance. No soul.
That's it for now. News from the street level. It’s Saturday, and soon another Mill Avenue Night.
According to an article that I just found laying around on AZCentral.com the police are hitting the bricks again along my favorite haunt, Mill Avenue. The article starts out extremely well, in my vision, issuing notes about extremely useful things that having officers on foot patrol does for the population. Anyone who has watched police officers ride past on their bicycles, noses in the air.
This is not a bad thing.
The police are our civilian warders, although many place themselves and act like a sort of paramilitary and literally look down on the civilians whom they are dutybound to protect this is a sociological problem that is created by the cliques of the profession and I might mention is felt rather palpably by a great deal of people who live on the Ave. The more people lend to disconnect them from the goings-on of the street the worse this behavior can only become. Bringing them back into the fold should help build a bit more tolerance on both sides.
For the most part police officers on patrol and denizens of the street don't scrape against one another--transients, Mill rats, tourists, college students, none of these groups have any reason to tangle with the police. But, when people come together there are always those times when friction becomes fire. These times are when it is best that our warders are aware of and sensitive to all the cultural innuendo that drenches the Ave and don't end up inflicting more injury when they attempt to help out.
So, I say to people. See a police officer walking the beat on our red bricks and say, "Hello." Make sure that they know they're welcome. Get to know them. They may be in uniforms, they may have guns, but they're people just like we are.
If the Ave is going to be a worthwhile place for all of us we must embrace all comers -- especially our civil protectors.
Mill Avenue Vexations Volume 4: Portents by Kyt Dotson has officially been released to print, e-book, and HTML! It is right now available for pre-order in our online store (copies will become available very soon as they are being printed right now.)
As per usual, a run of one-hundred is on the presses right now that will be released for free on Mill Avenue and the surroundings, while a small set will be held aside for people who are out of state who would like to support this project. Don’t miss out on owning one of our collectible booklets, Vexations is a piece of Tempe history and is slowly becoming a mantelpiece of readers on the Ave.
Also, if you happen to like the cover art go to the artist’s thread in our forums and give her some props! Her name is Marlon Teunissen and she did a stunningly good job.
Burning rubber where angels fear to tread.
