One advantage of moving often - easily cataloged memories

 I have two memories from before or around the time of my first birthday.  My younger daughter, Sage, has no memories of Brazil, where we lived until she was more than three and half years old, and no memories of China, where we live until she was over a year old. 

Psychology Today, in an online article by PhD Vanessa LoBue, published April 11, 2022, states that it is impossible for me to have memories from my first year and a half of life; these memories are constructed from photos or stories of the older people around me. When I told me daughters that I thought it was odd that Sage had no memories from Brazil, my older daughter, Solveig, told me it is because babies' brains have not developed their hippocampus, the region of the brain that stores memories and creates a sense of time.  LoBue, our PhD psychologist from Rutgers University, explains in her article (which I looked up after Solveig told me about underdeveloped hippocampuses) that memories come in different types. Babies first develop recognition and procedural memory before they develop autobiographical memory. Autobiographical memory is generally tied to a sense of self and of time passing and comes around 18 months of age. In addition, LoBue explains that memory, especially autobiographical memory, is not fixed. These memories are malleable, can change with time and under new circumstances, have the ability to be manipulated by outside forces. This is more true in children than in adults, but happens across all age groups. Interesting. 

I do plan to return to LoBue's conclusions when I write about an American prisoner case I dealt with as a vice consul in my first tour as a foreign service officer in Shanghai, China. The American, a first grade teacher at Shanghai's French School, was arrested and convicted of sexually abusing several of his students. For now, I'll just focused on memories in my family. Happily, they do not include child sexual abuse. 

My first memory is of falling of the porch of our home in Homer, Alaska. There was snow on the ground, which broke my fall. I can begin to place the relative age and date of this memory based on two items: Alaska and snow. I was born in Alaska, lived there until I was approximately sixteen months old. My Dad then moved us to Casterton, Australia, for a one-year teaching exchange program. I know I was a toddler, and that my twin brother and I were held back from our Mom, who was leaving by car, by an accordion style child's gate on our home's second story porch. We were super connected to our Mom. I have vague memories of screaming at this particular separation, not being able to get past the child's gate, then the ground rushing up to meet me and being buried in the snow. My Mom talked about this event on occasion for the remainder of her life to illustrate how Leif and I were such mama's boys. Maybe I created the memory from her stories. I don't think so. The memory of the ground rushing up, the confusion of struggling in the snow, is my memory, not part of the story she tells.

Photo from the same winter as the fall from the porch. This was the winter of 1975/76.

My second memory is of hitting a tree. Again it is in Alaska, and there is snow. We were on a sled going down a hill. We were supposed to roll out of the sled before it went into the trees. I can see my older brother, Tor, doing just that, explaining to us that's how to do. The next thing I remember is my face smashing into a pine tree trunk, the bark scratching my face, blood. The first part of the memory perhaps comes from stories from my Mom and Tor. The second part, my face hitting the tree, is all mine. I thought it was a memory form age three, but as an adult my Mom told me no, Leif and I were one. It happened before we moved to Australia, not after. Damn, that memory is so typical of us three brothers. Tor the talented adventurer. Leif and I the blundering boobs. 

Solveig's first memories are from Malaysia, probably close to her second birthday. I passed a Chinese language test for the States Department and was invited to join the 164th foreign service officer generalist class when we still lived in Malaysia. We travelled to Idaho, then Colorado just after Solveig's second birthday. She remembers her grandfather, who she calls Gong-gong (this literally means paternal grandfather in Mandarin Chinese, which I encouraged because Gong-gong had no other grandchildren at the time, and Sage was his second and final grandchild) putting her in the the basket of his motorbike and giving her a ride around the neighborhood. This happened before Solveig's second birthday

Sage has a variety of fun memories from Virginia, where we moved after our tour in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She was over three and a half years old then and says she has no earlier memories. I feel like Sage had a super happy-go-lucky life in Rio. She had an oldish nanny (baba) named Raquel who was big, gregarious and loving and then moved on to a very loving, nurturing, and creative preschool up the hill from our apartment. It was all very Rio-style; lush (or big-bosomed and big-assed in the case of Raquel), artistic, musical, joyful. Sage doesn't remember any of it. 

I though one of the advantages of moving so often was to help with memory. I can categorize memories based on distinctive places I have lived, then place the memory in time. It works for me. It doesn't work for Sage. From birth to the age of thirteen I moved nine times to seven different small towns: Homer, Casterton, Spearfish, Virginia City, Sandal, Alpine, and Valdosta. I generally feel this is a curse, but I'm trying to find some advantages in it. The most stability I had in my life was six-year in Valdosta, Georgia. That is odd, because Leif and I were like ducks out of water there, never felt at home. Home is where the heart is. 

Dungeons and Dragons Art Review - Gerald Brom the Dark Master

My disturbed  sleep brings me to this place in the history of TSR's Dungeons and Dragons game - Dark Sun and the art of Gerald Brom. Brom is without a doubt the dark master of D&D art. No other painters for the genre draw near his hard edge and ugly beauty. Indeed, he was such an outlier he is the only one among TSR's painters to move on to a far more prominent solo career. I think I can write that his artistry is renowned even outside the genres of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. He's such an artist that he dropped his first name. He is BROM. Here I will focus on his pre-BROM days as a TRS Pit artist, with a special emphasis on the Dark Sun campaign setting. 

Brom began working for TSR in 1989 and was an inhouse artist in the Pit through 1993. I believe one of his first D&D paintings was of a wild elf for the Dragonlance setting. It may have first appeared in the 1989 Dragonlance calendar, but I first saw Wild Elf as a full color interior in The Complete Book of Elves, an AD&D 2nd edition source book published in 1993. Wild Elf foretells the coming of the grunge era. Looking at the work below, I try to place what sets it apart fromTSR's Four Greats of Elmore, Easley, Caldwell, and Parkinson. The stone background with skulls could easily feature in the work of Caldwell or Parkinson. The tree roots, Parkinson. The figure's pose and general composition, Elmore. From there we have a divergence. The blade of the spear has a naked quality to it, the true appearance of hard edged metal. The skin and musculature of the figure also have a quality that speaks truth. Then there is the face. It has detail not seen in the other painters. The quality is so different it had me wondering if Brom works in acrylics rather than oils. Brom states that he combines both, starting with acrylic washes and moving to oils for depth and detail.  The hair, war paint, spiked vambrace all point to the grunge era to come. That face almost looks to be inspired by Eddie Vedder. 

                 Brom's Wild Elf

From here we make a true departure from the Four Greats and all Dungeons & Dragons art up to 1991. Here we arrive at Dark Sun. Brom's themes are grim and apocalyptic. The style of art is harsh. Lumps and pounds of flesh come to mind. Colors go from clashing to subdued. In many cases I say the colors are ugly. It reminds me of grunge, which I hated at the time. All my friends were deep into grunge music and esthetic. I recall too many high school nights spent in dark, dank rooms that smelled of shrooms and snakes with the aggressive thumping of grunge bass guitar and the wailing complaints of grunge singers. As much as the Dark Sun esthetic speaks to grunge, I have a fascination and attraction to Brom's vison of the setting. My twin brother and I bought the massive D&D Dark Sun boxed set. However, we had never before even brushed the surface of the dark apocalyptic. We remained dyed in Arthurian legend, landscapes of the British Isles, and pre-Black Death medieval history. I think we played one or two sessions of Dark Sun and gave up, not knowing how to approach the subject matter.  

Brom's The Darkest Shadows

The image above is the cover to Dragon Magazine Issue #173, published in September of 1991. It was TSR's entre to the Dark Sun setting, with that massive boxed set for the game setting coming out later in the year. There's just nothing pretty about this Brom's painting, but it's well composed and executed, hard to look away.

Brom's Burnt World of Athas 

The painting above was a full poster included in the original boxed set. The two interior books of the boxed set (were there two?) featured covers with the left and right half of the painting. Below are two pieces of concept art Brom did for the game, probably earlier in 1991. 

Brom's Blood Weaver

This cover painting for the 1993 Dark Sun adventure module Dragon's Crown by Richard Baker is, for me, the epitome of the setting. Unforgiving, ugly, otherworldly. It's no wonder Brom went onto painting the cover for the horrific hellscape of a computer game Doom II. It's worth noting the composition is 100% inspired by Frank Frazetta's Conan painting, The Destroyer. 

Brom's Seductress

This Dark Sun painting has always intrigued me. It's an interesting depiction of the sorcerer-ruled cities of Athas, Dark Sun's world setting. But mainly I think it's the colors. They have a very desert Southwest feel, which is close to me. The female figure again goes to Brom's ugly beauty, and to grunge. There's no seduction there for me. The painting was split in half to feature on two Dark Sun novels by Troy Denning, The Amber Enchantress and Arcane Shadows. Denning's novels were also a departure from previous TSR fare. Main characters routinely died. 

Brom's Freedom

Freedom is a classic that becomes representative of Brom's post TSR style. It was the cover to the 1991 adventure module of the same name, Freedom, by David "Zeb" Cook. The pale flesh and black spiked features of the figure's rig again speak to the grunge esthetic. I would not call her pretty, but a grim beauty, yes. 

I don't expect to ever return to Brom's work in this blog, so I'll add a few more of Brom's Dark Sun paintings below for additional flavor:

 

Brom's The Reconeers

Brom's Dune Trader

Brom's Slave Tribes

A good sample of Brom's more recent works can be on his website:https://www.bromart.com/

I'll add two final Brom D&D paintings that were not of the Dark Sun setting, and then two classics from his early solo career. Plus my final thoughts. Brom's not to my style. I have a gentle soul. Brom's is dark. He is an excellent artist. His paintings demand "look at this."

Brom's cover painting to the AD&D 2nd edition adventure module FR11 Dwarves Deep by Ed Greenwood, published in 1990. Lumps of flesh. Pounds of meat. 

Brom's cover painting to Legacy of the Drow, the collectors edition of the trilogy of the same name by R. A. Salvatore, published in 2001.  

Brom's The Gunslinger from the Deadlands RPG Player's Handbook published in 1996. An earlier Brom painting of an undead confederate soldier is said to have inspired Shane Lacey Henley's Deadlands "weird West RPG, and he did his level best to commission Brom to do the first work of art for the game. 

Brom's iconic painting for the computer game Doom II, released in 1994 by id Software.

Peering Beyond the Veil

I have not slept well for months due to varying pressures and pains in my ears and nose, probably the result of a damaged audial nerve. As I lie semi-conscious in the dark of night I feel the memories coming. Between the memories, which make me feel brittle and old, I have night terrors. I feel (believe) I am seeing past the veil at the end of life. What do I see? The chaos of atoms being ripped apart, the void of space filled with horrible rending. I have no other words for it except that it is terrifying. I am not ready to go there. I have to assume through all that chaos something crystalizes again into consciousness or life. 

I am not a scholar or a philosopher, nor an avid reader of books, journals, blogs, websites, social media posts...What do I know of the veil? I've heard of it. It makes sense. As I think back, the first time I heard of the veil in a concrete sense was in a Mormon Church in Alpine, Texas. My twin brother and I would go there about once a month with our best friend, Casey Dickman, and his family. We'd spend the night at Casey's on Saturdays, occupy ourselves with books or the piano while he read passages in his Book of Mormon, chat and listen to his music before going to sleep at a decent hour and go to his church the next morning. I recall there being preaching or discussion of crossing the veil at birth, or lifting the veil. It makes sense. Before we have consciousness, before we develop into a human being, there is something that precedes, something before. Between then and this life there is a veil which we do not see past, but sometimes we feel or sense past. 

Now I feel that I have peered beyond the veil at the other end, death. Am I cracked? I feel like my head cracks open at night in the dark. I'm better in the day.  In the daylight I cannot recall the memories that visited me in the night. 

Book Review - Lapvona (nihilism defined)

 It has been a very long time since I read a book that left me feeling vile for having read it. Lapvona is one of those. It feels like the definition of nihilism, gross for the sake of "look what I can write and make you read." 

I can't recall the title of the book prior to Lapvona that left me ill for reading, but it would have been in 1997 while living in Egypt, a book my friend, Betsey Arrigoni, passed to me. It featured long scene with a severed head.  I just completed Lapvona in 2026, so almost 30 years have passed since words on a page left me feeling so violated. It was actually my 12-year-old daughter, Sage, who picked up Lapvona at a school book swap. The cover and summary caught her attention. At the same time, the cover was eery enough that she wasn't ready to crack open the book yet. That's how it came to me, and I'm very happy I read it before she got to it. 

Lapvona, a novel by Ottessa Moshvegh, takes place in a an undefined medieval territory of fertile land not far from the sea governed by a feudal lord in his castle and a Christian priest moving between the church below and the castle above. As the book opens the priest is manipulating the blind faith of the common folk while on the margins of society a lonely shepherd and his afflicted boy make their own connection to God. There is also an old blind woman who is Lapvona's herbal healer and former wet nurse, also living on the margins, and who may or may not be a witch. The Church could easily claim that she consorts with the Devil, but from her own perspective she simply has a pragmatic drive to live.  She is the story's original nihilist. The story slowly reveals connections between a large cast of characters, slowys lets us in on how base and selfish they are, how greatly removed they are even from basic ties that should bind a community together.  They are all nihilists by the end. 

What left me so hollow by the end was that Moshvegh hints at redemption as she drags her cast ever deeper into moral depravity and strips away their beliefs. I wanted to believe her goal was to arrive at a larger discourse of faith, or even just politics or community. But she never gets there. The book becomes an orgy of foul acts - murder, torture, rape, incest, cannibalism, desecration. I feel the arthur mocking me: "There you fool, look at the excrement I dragged you through. Welcome to the real world." 

This is not the world I am looking for. It is not the world I want for my children. 

Dungeons & Dragons Art Review - Fifth Wheel Jim Holloway!!!

 I'm returning to D&D art, returning to TSR's Pit. The Pit had the Four Greats of fantasy genre oil painting - Elmore, Easley, Parkinson, and Caldwell. Then there was Jim Holloway (passed away June 28, 2020). He worked at TSR's pit from 1981 to 1983, had a freelance career before and after. For the after, Holloway continued to do commissions for TSR, including Dungeons and Dragons. Somewhere I read Jim Holloway was self trained, self taught. Somewhere I read he was the workhorse of the Pit. He did produce a very large catalog of black and white inks that filled the interiors of many D&D books. That has to be my focus, because that is where I mostly encountered his work. But let it be know that he did interiors and covers for many RPG games, most notable; Battletech, Paranoia, and Tales from the Floating Vagabond, plus covers for Dragon Magazine and Dungeon.  The guy was prolific and adapted to genres ranging from comedy to horror, fantasy to sci-fi, ninjas to westerns with spies and gangsters in between. 

Holloway tends to be forgotten or dismissed in the shadows of the Four Greats. Maybe because he did a lot of humor. Maybe because he started with interiors, just black and white, and then moved to painting primarily after leaving the Pit. It took me a little longer to appreciate him as much as Elmore and Parkinson, but he should be appreciated.

What do I love about Holloway's D&D art? His work is often kinetic. More importantly to me, his work connects to the real world, and to history. As an old member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, I have a great appreciation for Holloway's weapons, armor, and garb connecting to real world history and settings. It also connects to older D&D with David Sutherland's use of historical armor and weapons rooting old school RPGs to history, and thus real, gritty. It makes for good fantasy RPGs in my opinion. 

You get an excellent sense referencing historical armor and weaponry in the two black and white interiors below. I'm not sure where Holloway's piece comes from, but Sutherlands is from the original D&D Holmes Basic boxed set, happily stamped onto  into brain from age 5 or 6. I have to wonder if Sutherland was an early influence on Holloway's TSR artwork. 

                 Holloway (generic goblinoids, but always more interesting than those of the 4 Gs)

             Sutherland (pig faced orcs!, from Holmes' Basic Dungeons and Dragons, 1977)

The first thing stands out in Holloway's style, sets him apart from the Four Greats, is his use of hard, black shadow in his black and whites, sometimes blocking out most of a figure as nothing but black silhouette. It may have been his secret to quickly turning out interior pieces for the Pit. True or not, it is very distinctive and often times very effective. It's also present in Sutherand's art. I've mentioned Holloway's kinetic energy already in figures and scenes, and his use of true historical references. There's something else that sets obviously him apart from the Four Greats - his women look real. They are not models or bombshells. That must be another reason he gets shoved to the back. His women have a certain look. Nerds. The girl at the game table. The goofy classmate. It's refreshing, but not exactly what draws in pre-teen and teenage boys. Finally, Holloway at least has the feel of someone who played RPGs. Many of his scenes show a playfulness that reflects the interactions of the players running the characters in the games. 

(Interior from Kim Mohan's 1986 Wilderness Survival Guide; all of Holloway's style elements in one.)

Below is one of Holloway's earlier Dragon Magazine cover paintings with a typical female figure. Again you get an immediate feel for grounded realism despite the goblinoid s below the tree. On a side note, it is very difficult to find online libraries of Holloway's paintings. There are almost always seen as cover art. He didn't have his own website or online store. This again sets him apart from the Four Greats.  

                    (Holloway girl, Dragon Magazine #88 published Aug 1984)

I first encountered Jim Holloway's work at age six, when my cousin Eric passed us the over-used copy of his Holmes Basic D&D set missing many pages, along with a battered but still complete D&D adventure, Tom Moldvay's The Lost City, a true classic of RPG writing. The Lost City may have been Holloway's first color painting cover for TSR. We tried running the adventure several times but never got very far as youngsters. I'd like to give it another go as an adult. The art work, however, was completely adsorbing for me. Again, Holloway seems to have studied his subject, maybe from several Osprey military books illustrating period uniforms and equipment. Everything fits. You can almost place it as 11th to 12th century Mediterranean with a bedouin Arab mixed into the group. Holloway takes that historical approach and turns it on its head, shocks, with the addition of the fantastical. It's also a joy to see the same character's used throughout. I love, love, love it! Here are some highlights:

                (Holloway's cover for Tom Moldvay's The Lost City, published in 1982)

(Principle interior art piece laying out the the opening of the adventure. Brilliant!)

(There's the fantastic intruding on realism)

(Who knows why, but this one gave me nightmares at age five or six and I stopped playing D&D for several years)

(Holloway's humor on display.)

(Perhaps Holloway's most famous creation, Zargon, at the bottom of the Lost City.)

A few more items of note on Holloway's composition to which I will attach some of his art: his ability to do battle scenes, and his connection to Japan and the orient. I'll tackle battle scenes first. He did a cover for an RPGA adventure while at the Pit which hinted at his ability to tackle complex scenes packed with characters and action. He followed that up as a freelance artist some mouth watering illustrations plus one evocative cover for Dragon Magazine. 

(Cover illustration to Frank Metzer's To the Aid of Falx, published for the RGPA in 1982.)

 

(Unknown source and title. Holloway did a series of dwarven battle scenes like this one.)

(Unknown source and title. There is a lot of action and tension packed in here.)

(Unknown title, but this cover to Nov 1987 Dragon Magazine #127 deserves to be seen in its own right.)

Moving to to Japanese samurai and ninja themes, I've read that Holloway was part Japanese. One half, one quarter, I do not know. Regardless Holloway did a series of cover paintings for AD&D's Oriental Adventures and Eastern Realms source books and adventures. He was TSR's go to artist for these settings. He also di several Dragon magazine covers with Japanese themes. Here are two of my favorites from the genre. 

(David "Zeb" Cook's 1987 Blood of the Yakuza. Ninjas and such were huge in 1980s America)

(Jeff Grub's 1988 MM vs. the DC. This one-on-one duel was perhaps unique in TSR cover art.)

Here I'll return to Holloway's kinetic dynamism, which sets him apart for the Four Greats. You see it above with Mad Monkey, and below with one of my favorite Dragon Magazine cover paintings.

(Holloway's cover to Sep 1990 Dragon Magazine #161)

There is much, much more to Holloway's artistic repertoire, but this post mostly represents his working under the the shadow of the Four Greats. I wonder if that was a motivator for him leaving the Pit? I'll add these three paintings to close. The bulk of Holloway's work post TSR material I will save for another time. 

(David James Ritchie's 1982 adventure Ballots and Bullets. I think Holloway depicted Pit artists in the faces. Easley is certainly present in the front right, Elmore likely on horse in rear left.)

(Holloway's cover painting to Feb 1992 Dragon magazine #178. Nobody at TSR could do dwarves as well as Holloway., which remain a staple of Tolkien inspired fantasy.)

(Holloway's cover for Jordan Wiseman's 1986 Tales of the Black Widow Company for FAFSA's Battletech RPG. It's pretty much a stand out classic in the genre and shows what Holloway was able to do when he got out of the Pit.)

 

The Tap is Open Again

 Two memories from long ago came back today.

Sage was watching a YouTube video of her friend's cousin in a bare fisted boxing match. It was a brutal contest as expected. Sage had never seen anything like it. It brought back a memory from ages 4, 5, or 6. I've only got the age range because it was Spearfish, South Dakota before the year in England. We were in the basement of another kid's house. He had boxing gloves. We put them on and boxed in that unfinished basement, then in the front yard. That's what kids do when they find boxing gloves. It was silly really. Nothing brutal. Somewhere in that evening (it was evening I remember) GI Joe fits in there, the Sunbow cartoon. Did we see it at a video store? I can't remember. That probably puts the year at 1982, or 81 at the earliest. 

The second memory I told the girls about this morning, and I already forgot what it was. 

We've Got Two Years

 This week I've felt it heavy on me, especially on the edge of sleep and waking. It does wake me. Solveig will finish high school in two years. If I get into the weeds it's more than two years. There is another month and change left in her 10th grade year, then we have two months of summer. That gives me a little more pause for calm. But two years is so close. 

Solveig does not seem so much like sixteen. She is. I'm in denial. The change started for me after we left Vietnam at the end of her 7th grade year, then summer in Vietnam, then back to Estes Park Colorado in August 2023, then home schooling Solveig and Sage there for two months, then the move to Falls Church, Virginia, where Solveig started 8th grade a day or two before Halloween. And that's when it hit. 

First, an old foreign service colleague who's daughter is the same age as Solveig invited her to a Halloween party. Half the girls there were decked out in makeup  trying out sexy little costumes for the first time. I hope for the first time. I don't think Solveig had a good time. I need to mention that Solveig went to Marry Ellen Henderson Middle School. Shin reached out to parents somehow before we arrived asking who would be willing to do some play dates with Solveig before she started school so she would feel more comfortable with the transition. I don't know if Shin used the word play date. Maybe. It felt like that. Even if she did not, the response was awkward, hesitant. Girls at that age are very discerning about who they choose to be seen with, hang out with, be friends with. Parents don't make arrangements. I think Solveig met one group of girls at a cafe, one or two of them were also at the Halloween party, and that was it. She didn't do anything with them after that. We also connected her to an old friend from before the three years in Vietnam. No spark. The connection fizzled. 

Solveig's first two months of 8th grade looked very lonely to me. She closed up. She came home directly from school, sketched, did homework, looked out the window. She developed acne and hid behind her hair. Most importantly, she started listening to music. She got ear pods, (Not my idea. I hate those things.) and plugged in and started becoming a discerning teenage girl building her identity around music and anime. American middle school identity building. 

Time marches on. It's hard to fathom that was almost three years ago now. She is not closed up anymore. She emerged from that shell she created, curled into, then emerged as a teenage girl. In two years she will be an adult. Legally. And I am crumbling out of middle age into my later years. Sometimes we wake up, and the world seems like it is turning to ashes.