do you know what it means to miss the Kingdom of New Orleans?

Dreamt I visited the Kingdom of New Orleans. A cloaked Mardi Gras cult kidnapped my girlfriend, ceremonially sacrificed her, then shot & left me for dead.

A princess in disguise as an urban "prince" found me, tending my wound. Waiting to regain her throne from the interim republic, she DJed dirty beats, living in a rundown five-story house where she threw underground parties & exotic illegal fundraising dinners in. The city was walled like Carcassonne with additional giant saurian sculptures, a much larger Vieux Carré inside accented by medieval stonework & gargoyles, neon & glass, the sprawl extending all the way down to the Gulf Coast. The suburbs were composed of both brownstone and the raised gabled roofed houses, with bright but peeling shutters the Big Easy's known for.

The city was attacked by a sorcerer who came from the West with thousands of troops and gargantuan automatons, and I thought the city was done for.

[Carcassonne lit up. The city walls were like this but with neon accents.]

Then the outer wall's saurian sculptures animated, slashing with claws and breathing fire in their city's defense. The troops got in via many of the entrances, but the citizens of N.O. were no slouches, all taking up arms to defend their kingdom. The princess discarded her disguise, donned ballistic armor, and organized the people more effectively under her royalist banner. We fought the troops, but the invaders were overwhelming. She used magick to phase us into the depths of the city, but somewhere along the way I found myself displaced back in our world.

Weeks passed, and the phone rang. "It's the princess on the line," my Dad said, pausing, then, "At least that what she says she is." She told me that the city had been kept safe and she'd regained the throne, and was wondering when I'd be back for cake, champagne, and her latest setlist. But I knew that I couldn't get back there, that however I got there in the first place wouldn't be available again for a long time, and I was left saddened by the lack of means to return ...

... or couldn't I?

This dream of the Kingdom of New Orleans was amazing and all-too vivid. It felt more real than imagined. Sure, I could craft a short story or novella from this New Orleans that never Louisiana Purchase-d, that was discovered by France pre-Columbus and broke away from European colonial rule early. Instead I'm inquiring about the realness of the city, the feeling of its being out there somewhere, a solid in the chaos of dream, a true place.

[Crescent City Bridge. photo by Fred Gramoso.]

We can entertain the possibility of another thread on the Web of Wyrd, a variant design woven by The Norns to awe & explore, a quantum tapestry warp & wefted of a differing time & place, a shadow of choices not made here but elsewhere, where another version of ourselves louches purple absinthe at Duke Lafitte's Parlour House and eats ghost pepper & blue okra gumbo on cobblestoned Saint Peter Street.

This seems akin to a geographic slippage from the Berenstein to Berenstain universe, the rustling of cousinly leaves together from near branches of Yggdrasil, touching and aware of each other for a long, strange, wondrous moment.

In its Calvino-esque way, this Invisible City of New Orleans overlays, nests within, or is hidden upon the one we already know. Could the Texan Wizard's attack & invasion be the destructive Katrina of that world? Could the defensive saurians be our Louisiana swamps' aggressive alligators, memories of ancient colossi, or perhaps fossils & petrifactions given life in our foreshadowed future?

[Pink Alligator sculpture by the Cracking Art Group.]

Maybe the calls that say nothing from unknown numbers on your cellphone are coming from there, the princess dialing, looking for sleeping tourists who were once heroes of her kingdom's greatest battle. The city & her androgynous princess will haunt me, and I will miss them. So we ask: Have you been to the Kingdom of New Orleans? And if so, how did you get there?

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By day, Guillermo Maytorena IV is a happy bookstore fixture, but at night he's an Investigative Norse Mythologist! He's also willing to entertain the idea of being an adult film star, gynobot tester, or a tour guide in Scandinavia. Should you have any interest in his expertise or opportunities in those arenas, do contact him.

the steamgirl on a train.

The
more often I see models posed on top of the highly dangerous coupling
rods & wheels of steam engines, the more I realize how no steampunk in their right mind would ever risk actually sitting on them.

The above's a well-known & over-posted particular example of an accident just waiting to happen.



It would be the technological parallel to someone posing on the rods of a nuclear reactor core. Maybe daring steampunks could write it off as the alt-hist version of planking, but no. As steampunk photography's meant to show a believable alternate history, then standing on a moving train part you wouldn't ever stand on breaks the premise we strive for.



In establishing an alt-historical world, we require a level of verisimilitude. It's the history we know, but with a major point of deviation, usually technological, but sometimes political or social. To suspend disbelief and entertain the idea that history turned down a different track requires world-building that respects logical action.


I also suffered a defense of the above photo because some undersexed geek superimposed his idea of chivalry on it, as though I didn't appreciate the beauty of the model, which isn't at issue -- the would-be steampunk's lack of thought for personal safety is.


So why does this photo's idiotic motif of the steamgirl on a train persist?

[Pregnant
aspiring model Fredzania Thompson, 19, was killed by a freight train
after she became stuck between two railroad tracks while posing for this
photo shoot.]

In most photography, we are used to a fashion or artistic context.



For fashion, which far outweighs the circulation of art nowadays and so it's the device people are most familiar with, models are asked to pose in outré fashions, against nonsensical & outlandish things, all to get the attention of someone flipping at rapid pace through a magazine, or scrolling down a page so as to get the viewer to pause and buy a line of handbags or designer frocks. For example, the early 1980s Swatch ads had a girl looking through a telescope backwards, posed on one leg, the other leg up behind her, while was wearing sunglasses, and the telescope was pointed down at the ground. Like the steamgirl on a train, none of that makes any real sense, but the cognitive dissonance of the cited ad makes a viewer stop in question and look long enough at what's being worn to segue into desiring the product.


For the artistic, it's emotional aesthetics. A work is presented with a captured tableau that if successful evokes a reaction from the viewer. It could be one of repulsion, joy, agreement, moral uncertainty, social consciousness, fear, anguish, sorrow, et cetera, all depending on a combination of the photographer's intention and the individual internal reflection the viewer brings to the work. With a fair amount of photo manipulation today, we have many examples of cut & paste in order to construct worlds that never were to evoke wonders of another place & time we might desire to see or be in.



The steamgirl on a train fails because it's using the tropes of fashion photography while attempting to show a character from a greater world implied outside the frame. Still people can't see past the sex appeal of the cheesecaking model to the danger of the train, hit the plus button, and don't have discernment to realize the serious incongruence it does to establishing the world it's trying to imply. This hormonal override is why the steamgirl on a train persists.



And outside of these two mores, we have photojournalism like the following:

The photo above's a grisly and all-too-real example of what being too near a train at the wrong time does to a person. Newspapers tend to refuse to run photos like these because, as one professor I had in my journalism degree program said, "People don't want blood served with their eggs and bacon in their morning paper." Which also goes to say that it's not commercially viable content. Yet if papers had run more of the last photo in the past as a cautionary example, perhaps there'd be no foolhardy steamgirls set atop body chewing coupling rods and meat grinding train wheels, much less drivers trying to beat trains at crossings, or kids playing on tracks, with consistently fatal results.

And perhaps having to write this essay addresses a larger and more disconcerting problem in steampunk culture: That most have come to value an aesthetic shellac of thin brass paint and cogslappery over an actual participatory maker ethos. That we've perhaps forgotten the original manifestos of imagination made real, the desire to transform the world into one of our own choosing, and maybe this is also an unfortunate creative gap that requires minding lest the engine of the superculture we're commenting on runs over us in the end.



Steampunks & everyone else:

Don't muck about on trains.

Make what you want in the world to change it.

Mind the fucking gap.

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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+.

NBC's Dracula: Episode 8, Come to Die.

Whenever there’s a gun introduced into a vampire story, it’s a groaner since the audience knows a gun's an ineffectual weapon against a vampire*, so when it happens this episode it doesn’t hold any dramatic water ... unless the writers totally surprise you by getting their most gutless character to shoot someone for the vampire!

Finally the all fallout we've been waiting for as the season comes closer to its finale: Harker shoots Davenport! Lady Jayne breaks it off with Alexander (again)! Renfield throws down with Dracula! Jonathan casts Mina off in a final fit of distrust! Lucy’s faux seduction works too well as Harker gives her a go! Van Helsing krampuses Browning’s children!

Out of the above, seeing Renfield dish out tough love to Dracula reverses their usual cinematic relationship again. Renfield actually tells Dracula what not to do, restrains him physically, then stops him by strength of reason.

All this passionate interplay aside, the most clever contribution to the vampire lore was huntress Lady Jayne pouring a flask of holy water down her captives’ throats, and having their mouths erupt in black blood baking soda deathcanoes!

Setwise, while I’d first join many of the Pall Mall clubs to enjoy their furniture instead, one must say the Order Of the Dragon's got beautiful chesterfields in their hideout. Also we spot some really fetching gold rimmed tri-foot teacups!

Visually there’s really not too much experimental or cinematic loanage going on, which is a shame (with the exception of Dracula tossing Renfield into stairs, sort of like Renfield’s death in the 1931 version). Certainly this was a high drama character blowout, but maybe some practical vertigo effects for Harker’s post-murder nausea, or canted whip pans as he runs away from the scene, but instead we only get the usual costume piece camerawork.

It’s all up in the air, and it’ll be thrilling to see where it lands in the next two shows! Anyone care to make some guesses? Odds are Harker redeems himself by pushing Dracula into his power transmitter, which explodes into irreproducible fragments, revealing the still living Browning brats in a sub-basement, giving Harker enough press to permanently blow the lid off the Order in the first viral infowave, gets pardoned, and wins Lucy’s hand back for being the big hero he really isn’t. Yet I really still want to see it go like in my last paragraph of the episode 2 commentary, but I’m thinking the writers can’t see it that world changing “Fight Club” (film, not differing book) alternate history ending, which would more surely secure them a second season. We’ll see what the coffin of television holds in store next week.
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* Yes, there are good exceptions, like Underworld.

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+.