Published January 5 2024
(The title here refers to the delightful Russell Crowe vehicle.)
[The Ohio Connecting Railroad Bridge brings double-stacked container trains from the Mon Line from the Ohio River’s southern shore across to the Norfolk Southern Main Line on the northern shore, where it exits the city towards Ohio and points West.]
Happy New Year! 2024! Two dozens past Millennium, and we are still out here, surviving towards the future world. Lady Chatterly’s Lover is in the public domain, among thousands of other 1928 works.
The back half of 2023 was a full & steady season in my life. Here’s a summary.
First Draft Complete!
[Megadimetrodons out on courtship display in B24 The Groundswell Flood Forest.]
I took a hiatus from the Dispatches to focus on writing A Field Guide to Newtopia, the book project I’ve been working on since 2019. The scope of work has expanded since then too, to nearly 1400 milestones (64 with a few variations). I’m over the hump - the project is more finished than unfinished. The writing should be complete by the end of this month. My goal for 2024 is to see the book into print production. The task will require an enormous amount of help - a good role playing game book is the product of many eyes and many editors.
It was a long year of writing, drawing, brainstorming, and puzzling out the dynamics of the book's simulation-like method of revealing overland travel situations. Here at the end of the year, each of the 36 hexes is distinct, well-described, and evokes feelings of dynamic, living landscapes, on Earth or well beyond it. A quote from Robert Macfarlane : “Landscapes that are generically apprehended and generically described are at risk of abuse.” My goal for each one of Newtopia's 36 chapters has always been to overcome the hard truth of that advice.
I seek through text and imagery a world which must be saved, because, in truth, our own world needs to be regarded with as much interest if we are to survive in it.
[Early brainstorming notes from the social history of 4-5 The Parklands, a white-walled cloister of skeleton-tended garden cities.]
I've done a lot of brainstorming-about-world-histories in the last year. A tool which helped in the recent months is the community-story RPG called Grasping Nettles, written by Adam Bell and illustrated by Sashah Li, both here in Pittsburgh, PA. Grasping Nettles provides a neat move-around-a-wheel system to bring the different factions of a society through cycles of action, reaction, change and change again. It is designed to be played as a group activity, but I found it greatly useful as a one-person brainstorming tool.
If you need a primer on role playing games as a hobby and a publishing industry, your best bet is the exhaustive, illuminative, and humorously insightful Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, by writer Stu Horvath. This archive and coffee table tome provides rare photographs and insightful paragraphs about role playing games published from their inception in the 1970s through to the 2020s (today). Mr. Horvath runs a podcast and instagram called Vintage RPG, and has gained an audience with cleareyed writing about the very odd things that grab the childhood imagination. The book is autobiographical without being cloying. It has opinions, but it doesn’t dwell on negative ones. For the uninitiated, it may provide insight into these nerds with these dice and these little guys on battle grid bases.
A Visit to A City
The Field Guide describes 36 ecological zones in a fantastic landscape long after our own civilization has passed by. I had the opportunity this last year to see a piece of art intended to be seen by such future civilizations - the famous and infamous piece of land art outside Las Vegas, Nevada called City.
Briefly, the work is an enormous multi-square-mile plaza of suburban curbs, gravel pitches, real and artificial rockfalls, gentle rises too perfect to be natural, and anti-rill gravel maintenance after every rainfall event. It is monumental in scale and execution.
Only six people are allowed on site at a time, and given three hours alone to walk the vast space. Heat and altitude limit visits to just one pre-dawn group per business day - around 1200 visitors per year. The benefactor-millionaire who lives next door to the artwork typically flies in, using the extra-wide driveway as a landing strip for his private plane.
City is in the middle of nowhere - an hour and a half of driving beyond Alamo, NV, itself two hours outside of Las Vegas. Alamo is not more than a few signed intersections wide. At 5am, it is eerie - the only lit area in a vast ocean of empty, shadowy air. At 11am, when one returns from City, it does possess a great bastion of civilization called Sinclair Oil, a gas station of modern delights, guarded by a giant plastic sauropod.
In addition to its other qualities, City is supposed to be kept analog only: no photos could capture it, so they ask for no photos ever. To whit:
The sculpture City is a registered work, protected by federal copyright law. Triple Aught Foundation has a strict copyright enforcement policy regarding unauthorized photographing or filming of the work. No unauthorized reproductions, public display or distribution of copies of the work, in whole or in part are permitted.
I’d appreciate this argument for the authentic experience and the authentic experience only, if the space or others like it were available to a lot more people than 1200 people per year. But like other sites designed to be sacred, and ancient, and contemplative, and remote, it will not be available to almost all of humanity. There’s no ‘authentic experience’ to miss out on for anyone beyond the 1200. We’re not at a societal place where we’d pay $40 million each in tax dollars for 100 more Cities, installed in every state and territory (a mere two days of this year’s Department of Defence budget). We won’t replicate this experience for others, not as a group.
And so I think it’s the moral duty of each visitor to City to go ahead and sneak some documentation out, as an individual action of experience-sharing, regardless of the wishes of the artist or the foundation elected to manage the place. If the place truly has ineffable, unphotographable qualities, what harm does photography do to it? If the feelings it elicits are not feelings one could prepare for, what documentation is going to spoil their elicitation on-site? To keep this hard-to-access piece from seeing reproduction is the worst kind of elitism.
Praxis: Miniature Titans and Newtopia Residents
[Dianisia, Artillery Sovereign, Spotted Snakefolk Ranger, patrolling the few free-flowing highlands of Newtopia region 15 Northwest Glacier.]
Artmaking is not linear. In negative cases, this manifests as messy, obscure efforts across many mediums. When multidisciplinary practice fires on all cylinders, work in one medium provides clarity to work in other media. Painting small miniatures helps me solve problems of physical description. Finding and composing little landscapes of plastic lets me work through ideas of fantastic ecology and deep fictive history. From the writing and the miniatures, drawings for the book emerge naturally and swiftly. These things flow into each other, accelerating the work towards completion.
[Polaris, one of the Great Ghost Bears of 41 The Nail. Their civilization of enormous philosophical sorcerers was forcefully ended by a powerful magical event - their hexagonal temple-city was isolated from the surrounding geology and lifted violently into the sky, crushing the bearmonks against the Ceiling of the World. Their shades still appear on starlit nights, and their calming mantras blink from distant suns.]
I’ve put together about a hundred miniatures related to Newtopia, covering all thirty six hexes. I will continue to create them, filling in the details of the world as well as pursuing my own fancy. As the book moves towards print, these physical prototypes will see even more use, as staging and blocking for the line art inside the book. I’ve used them in playtesting, as combatants on a square battle grid. Eventually, I will have them available for sale at local art markets and on my website.
2024 is a golden age for the hobby of making small crafts. Innovative acrylic paints are coming out all the time. There are many styles of high quality 3D printer available to the consumer, and more .stl files online every hour. We swim in a sea of little plastic guys. And we live an an age that revels in spectacle - clear photographs and engaging video of brightly colored, sparkly friends. Newtopia seeks to provide. You can follow my crafting more closely on instagram, where I am at pittsburghpapercraft.
[A goddess of embodiment and reality, weighed down by the chains of material being.]
Ezell
[Musicians Rachel Meirs and Cory Shenk provide back porch tunes to an outdoor community meal after the performance.]
The play I exhorted you to in my last missive, Ezell, Ballad of a Land Man, was a hit - a series of excellent community-raising nights (and one Sunday matinee) in late September & early October. A cast from across Appalachia convened to tell stories of land and water right at the edge of our own Allegheny River.
I assisted as front-of-house person and general photographer, welcoming neighbors to the space, dispensing beverages, and helping prepare the communal dinner space for after the play.
[Bob Martin as Ezell Parsons, expressing generations of community in this one-man show.]
The sound of Appalachia is a post-industrial sound. The land is a land with strewn metal junk turned up from the earth and then thrown away by prior generations or present litterbugs. Old cans, strange hardware, chain and rebar and angle irons, these things are some of the physical ‘rust’ of the Rust Belt. Ezell made brilliant use of these found and re-found objects, creating droning noises from washers, meditative snare-sounds from strings of cans and chains. The performance was pierced by the occasional Allegheny Valley noise: the Norfolk Southern main line runs just across the river; the venue shares an access road with a metal recycling facility, whose crushing machines produce characteristic intonations.
[Carrie Brunk as Eliza, daughter of Ezell, with Cory Shenk hipdeep in the river, behind.]
And in quiet moments, the play fell into harmony with the river and its sounds. The wind, the birds, the gentle lapping of passing wakes against the meager shore. And that’s Appalachia, too: a temperate rainforest yearning towards abundance and diversity. An archipelago of mountain environments, each host to strange and special plants and salamanders. The bones of our continent’s greatest mountains, rivals to the Himalayas and source of the nutrient-laden soils of the continent’s agricultural heartland, are just a few dozen miles away.
The play’s music makes this link direct: Cory calls out some of the haunting lyrics of ‘Black Water’ by Jean Ritchie:
Then they tore down my mountain and covered my corn
Now the grave on the hillside's a mile deeper down
And the man stands a talking with his hat in his hand
While the poison black waters rise over my land
Sad scenes of destruction on every hand
Black waters, black waters, run down through my land
The Allegheny and the Monongahela drain the Allegheny Front in Pennsylvania and the West Virgininian ranges as far south as Cheat Mountain. These rivers still transmit vital resources downstream and up, connecting remote townships to global markets, with dredging provided as a federal service. The endless bounty of running water coming down from these hills, that is the sound that will carry us through most any calamity, and something we must safeguard for the future.
The work continues. Carrie and Bob, who are, together, Clear Creek Creative, can be found at clearcreekcreative.net.
Best Winter Wishes
[Tuesday Cat in her winter scarf. What an excellent muse, what a trusty Studio Cat!]
From this studio and house up on Observatory Hill, I wish you all warmth and wellness in these colder, darker months. I hope to write to you again soon.
I’d love to hear from you all! Comment below and let me know how your life is going!
Warm regards from Pittsburgh,
Connor
