Chico’s Newest Alternative Publication

Issue 0 - Spring/Summer 2011

ChiCo’s Cold War

TiTans p. 16

NoNo Parent Left Behind p. 10

Inside the LocalMusic Scene p.4Inside the LocaInside the Local Music Scene p.4

first copy is Free

TTaabblle ooff CCoontteenttsTable of Contents44

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In wine-making, there is a special kind of alchemy held in the cork. Until the cork is placed, the bottle will only hold grape

juice. The cork allows for the right conversation to be initiated between the stored liquid and the oxygen outside, making the spirits that so many love and enjoy. Without the cork that al-chemy is lost. The spirits are distasteful and odorous, the con-versation between elements is boring.

It would appear that our society has lost its cork, or at the very least is suffering from a horrendous case of cork taint, a culture of boxed wine, if you will. Entertainment, politics and indeed life as we know it have become boring, routine and repetitive.

Nothing is completely and truly original anymore, but simply inspired, influenced or in imitation of a predecessor. Sentient Magazine is no exception. We don’t claim to be any-thing wholly original, simply something new. Besides, in the rare occasion that something original is presented, more often than not it is seized and dismembered into a mass-produced and politically-correct shadow of itself.

Sentient Magazine will not succumb to such atrocities that compromise integrity. We are not driven by greed, political agendas or social stigmas. We aim to open the floodgates of conversation within the community. To reinstate the cork and reinvigorate the spirit.

We are a venue, a bullhorn, a forum in which the artists, writers, photographers and freethinkers of our community can move forward and evolve, with hopes to bring forth a more ho-listic understanding of the world around us and in turn a fuller appreciation and understanding of the human condition by pre-senting a hybrid of long-form literary journalism and editorial narrative combining freak philosophy with investigative report-ing.

By doing so a rare temperament can be submitted to the con-versation that may challenge common thought patterns.

We have no loyalties or bias to any political disposition, any specific lifestyles or philosophies. Each of us are of our own temperaments, some of which are in line with each other, oth-ers which are greatly quarreled upon. But one thing is certain, and that is that we are not held in line by “the prevailing super-stitions and taboos” of our culture.

Finally, this magazine would have never seen the light of day had it not been for the passion, dedication and support of countless individuals, all of us working pro bono and some of us going as far as to pay out of our own pocket for various necessities.

We are driven, we are relentless, we are Sentient. - J. W. Burch, IV

Editor-Publisher

Editor’s Note“The most dangerous man...is the man who is able to think things out...without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.” – H. L. Mencken, Smart Set Magazine, 1919

Logo and flag designed by David Karnowski

Editor-PublisherJ. W. Burch, IV

Chief Content EditorEarl Parsons

Photo EditorJeb Draper

Copy EditorAndrew Ansolabehere

ScribesTyler Ash

Michaela BogganNathan CollinsBlake Mehigan

Juan MejiaGina Pence

LensmanAllen Broome

Don’t Sue UsAny opinion stated is that of the author and does not reflect the opinions or views of Sentient Magazine. Authors, photographers and illustrators maintain copyright of their

work that appears in this publication.

Contact UsPhone: (530) 413-9161Address: P.O. Box 3838, Chico, CA 95927E-mail: sentient.magazine@gmail.comWeb: http://www.sentientmagazine.com

Stalk Us

CohortsMatthew BlakeAaron Quinn

Cover design by Jeb Draper

Funded in part by the Society of Professional Journalists

With the crimson stage lights of Cafe Coda laying a look of red war-paint on his pained expression, Jimmy

Galloway, front-man for Chico’s “homeschool rock” band-of-brothers The Shimmies, despondently wailed.

“I LOVE YOU!” he said, over-and-over like a ghostly vi-sion of Kurt Cobain as they closed out their set with a distor-tion heavy, balls-out version of their grunge-infused track, “July 4th.”

Bassist Stephen Galloway was busy splintering the head of his Fender as he smashed it into one of drummer Jack Gingerich’s spare crash cymbals while keeping on chug-

ging out bass lines like a diesel engine. Guitarist Sean Gal-loway had his eyes shut in a riff-ripping trance.

Then a guy charged past me out of the audience of less-than-25 like he was possessed by Jimmy Galloway’s scream-ing. He took up Gingerich’s spare set of sticks and started violently beating the other cymbals that the drummer didn’t have enough arms to use.

I stood in awe of the savagery. It was animal, primal, vis-ceral—a pagan musical ritual. Everyone went home that night having sacrificed the ability to hear, but they went home smiling.

Photo by Allen Broome

Music

Breaking the Sound Barrier

Words by Nathan Collins

“Joe-Blow-Bro would... just hear noise... Where we hear art or music - organized sound or whatever - they would not.”- Sesar Sanchez, guitarist

Every few nights a scene like this is playing out in some little venue in town. Chico music is a fertile landscape of ear-gasmic bands of every genre and style who play their guts out to small audiences in intimate club settings. Chico has several professional-level recording studios, The Origami Lounge and Heirloom Studios among them, that are pump-ing out limited pressings of full albums from these artists—not just little 3-track demos.

“There’s definitely a Northern California sound,” said Ses-ar Sanchez, the shred-head behind the diabolically heavy Teeph, post-rock astronauts Red Giant and contributor to Cold Blue Mountain’s wall-o-sound. “The Northern Califor-nia sound, to me is something that’s more—I don’t want to say experimental—but it’s a little bit more engulfing. It’s a little bit more thoughtful.”

So why isn’t Chico up there with the giants of West Coast music? What holds Chico back from being a household name in underground indie music?

“The Brick Works could still be open—if that was open it would be unbelievable,” said Dan Elsen, booking agent for Cafe Coda and drummer for prominent Chico post-rock ex-perimentalists La Fin du Monde.

As we chatted in front of the Naked Lounge cafe, the ghost-ly shell of the Brick Works cast its haunting spell from Sec-ond and Wall streets.

The building still looks like it did when big Chico bands like Number One Gun, Brain in a Cage and Oddman played there in the early 2000s—the big bang that molded Chico into a solid music town. And the reverberations are still be-ing felt. Those bands disintegrated but their members co-alesced into Chico sensations Surrogate and Armed for Apocalypse.

Since the Brick Works was shut down by the Alcohol Bev-erage Control because of “a string of alcohol-related inci-dents” resulting in multiple arrests, according to the Chico News & Review in a 2003 article, the spectral building has weighed heavy on musicians’ minds. There hasn’t been a mid-level, mid-size, all-ages venue that could sell alcohol in

town since. Even the Chico Area Pyrate Punx—the local chapter of a

highly organized, worldwide touring network for punk and metalcore bands—haven’t been able to firmly establish a punk rock cave in the last 10 years.

They’ve been getting by booking shows at Monstros Pizza for the last five years, the longest they’ve ever had a single go-to place.

“We can’t afford our own venue—we are working with this guy who owns this pizza place,” spouted Pyrate Punx repre-sentative Jimmy-lo from his perch on a barstool in their down-town Pyrate headquarters. “We can’t get our own place. We couldn’t do it. It’s impossible to pay for it.”

Before the Pirate Punx were organized in Chico, the local punk scene had the Do-It-Yourself-Rock-Garage, a warehouse where bands could turn up to 11, scream ‘til their vocal chords bled as the crowd moshed in steel-toed boots.

But like a mosh pit, that ended hard. There was alcohol. There was a fight. Somebody got hurt. The cops came.

The end.“It just takes one or two assholes to start a fight, give some

booze to some kid, whatever—then it’s shut down,” said Shier, a representative from the Bay Area Pyrate Punx. “It doesn’t take much anymore—this isn’t 1970.”

The Senator and El Rey theaters—large venues run by Justin Maximov and his compay JMAX Productions—don’t cater to local bands due to the high overhead costs that Local bands just don’t generate enough ticket sales to cover, said Brendan McDonough, a sound engineer who’s worked for JMAX for about seven years. The doors to those places only open for GWAR, Rob Zombie and Snoop Dogg.

“If you had somebody that cared—I hate to say it, man—but you’ve got to find somebody that’s got the money, the skills and the dedication like Justin from JMAX, but that likes not-mainstream music,” Elsen added back at the Naked Lounge. “The El Rey and The Senator can do those bigger name acts—and I don’t know how many people go to all those shows—but I don’t ever go to them.”

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every show.“I think the elephant in the room is the college, you know,” Stephen

Galloway said sitting next to the jukebox. “There’s obviously tons of young people that come there, and that’s the main demographic that’s missing at these shows.”

Former CN&R entertainment editor Mark Lore, who took his wares northward to the music hub of Portland and started TheDaysofLore.com, mused in an email from his new home base that the scene there does draw more student show-goers than in Chico.

“I do think it’s because students here are more inclined to seek out bands and shows than say a Chico State student,” Lore said. “It probably comes down to why someone chooses to attend PSU over Chico State, or vice versa. Portland is known for music, Chico is known more for its social skills.”

Other bookers in town like Zeke “The Bonecrusher” Rogers—a member of the Pyrate Punx, drummer for the doom-sludge monolith Amarok and guitarist of on-hiatus sludge-thrashers The Makai—has put years into developing Chicolist.com, providing a solid online listing of local-and-nearby shows for damn near the entire underground scene. But in a sad twist of fate, Rogers is moving to Portland.

“There will always be a music community in Chico,” Lore added. “People come and go, but there always seems to be a solid core of musicians who make things happen. There are lulls. In the 15 years I lived in Chico, I saw its ups and downs.”

The Pyrate Punx and Elsen are excited about the fact that the scene does seem to be on the upswing and sucking in more listeners. There’s been more turn-out for shows at Monstros Pizza and Cafe Coda in the past year than ever, both said respectively.

While standing on the edge of the utter chaos of the mosh pit in 1078 Gallery during Armed For Apocalypse’s skull-crushing set, it occurred to me that the place was too damn small for the ruckus. It was Sludge As Fest, so called for the common term of nauseatingly heavy music being “sludge-as-fuck.” It gathered all the most explosive local acts into the small gallery space—a kind of heavy metal IED organized and unleashed by Sanchez onto an unsuspecting public.

It was a hypnotizing experience being trapped in the dark mass grave of 1078 Gallery that night. Sweaty people smashed into each other, driven to mad ecstasy by the unapologetic power of the ribcage crushing riffs and oddly harmonic, guttural vocal-chord destruction. But I didn’t see many college kids there.

A week after the metalocalypse I conducted an informal survey of 163 students enrolled in required English courses at Chico State.

Not one had heard of Sludge As Fest.“Joe-Blow-Bro would probably see La Fin du Monde music, or

Birds of Fire music, or Armed for Apocalypse music, or Surrogate music and just hear noise,” Sanchez spouted from a barstool in the back of Duffy’s. “Where we hear art or music—organized sound or whatever—they would not.”

And it’s not for lack of effort to snag the dorm-room/frat-party recluses. Elsen pins up fliers all over the Chico State campus and tries to get coverage in The Orion, The Synthesis and the CN&R for

“It’s all about...moments in life that are worth living,” -Sesar Sanchez, guitarist

Photo by Jeb D

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But there are still performances with great bands and a $5 cover, but nobody shows, Galloway added. He considered the turnout at his last show to be “pretty mediocre,” even though it was hosted at the venerable Cafe Coda.

The truth is that the people who consistently come out for shows in Chico are the same local musicians that go to every show. Friends come out to see friends.

“It’s a musician’s scene,” Sanchez said. “Personally, I couldn’t give a shit, like, if we get new people to come and watch any of our people play—because that doesn’t ever happen. Very rarely you get new people. Maybe 5 to 10 percent are new people coming in to watch your shows and usually they don’t care or get it anyway.”

What Chico needs to break that listener-barrier is a venue that’s bigger than Coda and smaller than The Senator with a better sound system, Sanchez said, adding that a stable record label could help bring in the production, touring costs and promotion to push bands into the sights of bigger labels.

“Who’s gonna be the person that’s gonna do that?” Sanchez interrupted. “It ain’t gonna be me!”

As it is, the only way to not dead end and get a job with a 401k is to move to one of “these meccas of musical entertainment that aren’t that far away,” Galloway suggested. “It’s not like Rick Rubin is gonna stop by at Cafe Coda and be like, ‘Let’s make a record.’”

But few musicians in the scene have wet dreams of rock superstardom. They love the Chico scene as it is and they love what they have collectively made it.

“It’s all about your moments in life that are worth living,” Sanchez

Photo by Nathan Collins

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said about the coming-to-an-end of his first serious music project, Red Giant. “The music gave me those moments. We willed the music to give us the moments that we wanted. It was a means to an ends though—we made the music, and we wanted to rock and have a good time.”

Chico is the little music town that could. It may never blow up, but the fuse will always be lit. Go out and rock your face off and support local music before it all moves away to one of those bigger nearby musicvilles. If you give a little, it will give back with a spine-tingling soundtrack.

“To keep it fresh and exciting I think you need people with vision and who have that otherworldly ability to see things in the long-term,” Lore suggested. “Bring exciting and different bands from out of town. Start a new venue. Start that band that is going to melt faces. Look at what Chico is missing. Of course, vision is one thing; having the energy and devotion to see ideas through is the real challenge.”

Cafe Coda, www.cafecoda.com(530) 566-9476, 265 Humboldt Ave.

Monstros Pizza, www.monstrospizza.com(530) 342-1111, 628 W. Sacramento Ave.

1078 Gallery, www.1078gallery.org(530) 343-1973, 820 Broadway

Check out local bands at these venues

Photo by Jeb Draper

Opinion

It takes a strong conviction to steal. To cheat someone out of their property requires a lack of humanity and a bar-

barous greed that outweighs every sense of ethic.Society is facing cunning villains disguised as CEOs.

Greed is running business into the ground and it all began with one of America’s triumphs.

The Greatest Generation survived the Great Depression, fought in World War II and revolutionized the way industry is done. They were American icons. They were military honorees, three presidents, several beloved authors and athletes who survived one of the most arduous times in American history. But perhaps their most significant legacy is the generation they spawned—baby boomers, the generation in power. The Greatest Generation worked to ensure that their children never suffered for lack of luxury.

Boston Globe columnist Myril Axelrod describes this upbringing as indulgent.

“The boomer generation had the good fortune to grow up in a post-war period seen as a ‘high’ time economically for the country,” she wrote in a February 2011 article. “Fur-thermore, their parents, having struggled and sacrificed in their own lives through both the war and the Great Depres-sion, were insistent that their children would not have to sacrifice. Rather, they lavished so much financial freedom on them that they became what has come to be thought of as the ‘Immediate Gratification Generation.’”

Political analyst Paul Begala criticizes them as “The Worst Generation,” characterizing them as “the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation in American history,” according to an April 2000 article of Esquire.

Just over a year after Begala’s article was printed, a company founded by some of the most respected boom-ers filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection following a scandalous misappropriation of funds, as well as invest-ment and accounting fraud.

Enron’s bankruptcy left thousands of employees out of a job and thousands more out of a retirement. At the end of a trail of blame were three boomers - Kenneth Lay, Jef-frey Skilling and Andrew Fastow, the CEO, COO and CFO, respectively.

The three made billions of dollars off investors by us-ing insider information to sell stock while hiding billions of dollars in debt under separate accounts. To keep the money flowing, executives encouraged employees and investors to maintain faith in the company throughout its downfall. Stockholders were left with worthless invest-ments when the dust settled while executives were guaran-teed billions of dollars in revenue.

“People perceive it as a story that’s about numbers, that it’s somehow about all these complicated transactions,” said Bethany McLean in the 2005 documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. “In reality, it’s a story about people, and it’s really a human tragedy.”

One of the benefactors of the Enron scandal was Jeffrey Skilling, who masterminded the dealings behind the Cali-fornia energy crisis in early 2001.

“Jeff had a very Darwinian view of how the world worked,” McLean said. “He was famous for saying once in Enron’s early years that money was the only thing that motivated people.”

By taking advantage of the deregulated system, Skilling and his employees used any tactic they could to keep ener-gy prices high on the West Coast, going so far as to incite blackouts to raise the price of electricity. Stage 3 rolling blackouts ravaged the state of California as the executives raked in the money from the rising price of energy.

This was a special category of evil and all for the love of money. Enron’s executives gambled away money on ficti-tious investments and made debt disappear while taking pay raises and bonuses.

There’s a certain lack of shame associated with being able to exploit thousands of people whose only crime was trusting you.

That was 10 years ago. The crime hasn’t changed but the victims have. The new demographic is younger and shares the same belief in a broken system.

High school students are told that a requirement for happiness in life is to have a successful job and make a lot of money, and the only path to that bright future is through higher education. In Fall 2010, 68,329 freshmen were offered

American Greed and

admission into the University of California system. Last fall, 412,148 enrolled in the California State University system. These young adults are told that if they don’t subscribe to higher education, they’ll spend the rest of their lives in desti-tution, working for fast-food joints because they don’t have a college degree.

Undergraduate tuition in the UC system is now around $30,000, a cost that financial aid can only put a dent in. In-state admissions were decreased while more profitable out-of-state admissions were increased.

Much to the chagrin of the students, the UC’s Board of Regents enacted a 32 percent tuition increase last fall. The students bear this burden willingly because they believe it is necessary, the price that’s paid for a happier life.

Behind that fallacy lies a deceit that echoes the crimes committed 10 years ago.

Recently, regent executives awarded $3 million in bonuses to themselves while the janitorial staff that maintains the building where the executives work had to take pay cuts. They later proposed the construction of a new sports stadium, assuring underwriting investors that tuition hikes would pay off the construction loans.

The overt lack of regard for the students is startling, but perhaps more shocking is the investment practices that the regents are using to line their own pockets.

The regents changed their investing practices in 2003, turn-ing away from blue chip stocks that reliably produce revenue toward private equity and real estate deals.

Predictably and conveniently, these investments have sig-nificant ties to some of the regent’s personal interests.

Because the regents have hired private investors, these new investments are exempt from the same public disclosure laws as those not managed by the private companies.

This lack of transparency has earned some of the regents millions of dollars from these clandestine transactions.

In an eight-part article chronicling eight months of inves-tigation, journalist Peter Byrne discovered the unsettling truth. The regents were investing in their own businesses and hemorrhaging money.

“After [Richard Blum] was appointed to the Board of UC Regents in 2002, UC invested $748 million in seven private

equity deals in which his firm, Blum Capital Partners, was a major investor,” he said in an article published by the com-munity-funded investigative reporting website www.Spot.us.

“A UC investment of $42 million, beginning in 2006, en-abled the buyout of a real estate company, Glenborough Realty Trust, in which Mr. Blum was a member of the board of directors and a stockholder.”

Since investing in fund that purchased Glenborough, the value of its stock has declined by $38.5 million.

The evidence of greed gets worse:“Starting in 2004, Blum Capital Partners bought substantial

ownership stakes in two for-profit vocational schools in which UC concurrently invested $53 million,” said Byrne. “These same educational corporations are seeing increases to their enrollment and profit due to class cut-backs at state-funded universities and colleges such as UC.”

By the end of 2009, $304 million in investments were placed in all 18 of the public companies in which Blum Capital Part-ners has a considerable stake.

There is no shame in these dealings, and there should be. While the students and faculty bear the financial burden of the dwindling budget, the regents are busy cutting clandes-tine deals to line their own pockets.

The regents come from the same stock as the Enron ex-ecutives, and the con hasn’t changed much either. The baby boomers have struck again, this time on a younger and more naïve victim.

Students will be drowning in financial aid debt for years after graduation while the regents will continue to gamble away the money earned through student tuitions and line their pockets with their personal investments.

Enron’s scandal culminated in a trial that included 16 plea-bargains and five guilty verdicts. But no justice was truly found for those who had lost everything through their invest-ments and pension plans. Students are walking through uni-versity doors, believing that they are investing in their own future while the money is really being diverted into executive pockets.

If something doesn’t change soon, they too will be remem-bered as yet another victim of the baby boomer generation.

Words by Gina PenceWords by Gina Pence

the Worst Generation

No ParentLeft BehindWords by J. W. Burch, IV

News

Photos by Jeb Draper

The room is packed. Every seat is occupied and many are forced to find a spot against the wall.

Some stand and others kneeling. There are some who find their spot on the floor. It is 6:30 p.m on Wednesday, Feb. 9. It is a school night.

The student-parents, interns and staff of Chico State’s Associated Students Child Development Lab, or ASCDL, have come for a single, unpleasant purpose. They had been warned that this meeting was to deal with serious matters.

Money is the problem, as is so often the case. Simply put, there’s just not enough of it to go around--both from the school and from the state-and less of it expected to come in. Adjustments are unavoidable and in progress.

Less enrollment, less jobs, less time. It’s the trickle down effect, the domino affect. Sometimes you flush and sometimes you bust. This time we bust.

The air is thick. Distraught looks of concern can be read across the room. No good can come of this.

AS Programs and Government Affairs director Jon Slaughter stands before the crowd.

“Bad news, bad news, bad news,” he says.Dark times are on the horizon, he says. He shakes

his head solemnly. The room is quiet. A look of unease and gloom can

be seen on each face. Exasperated sighs, moans, groans and sniffles are frequently heard throughout the meeting. A mother attempts to stifle her infant’s gibberish. Someone clears their throat.

A vague joke is made and the crowd seizes the opportunity to explode into nervous, almost obligatory bouts of laughter. Whatever may lighten the shadow of the storm cloud looming overhead, even if only for a moment. There are those who remain straight-faced and serious.

No time for jokes. It’s time to get down to business.“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Susan Toussaint,

Director of the ASCDL, said to the audience.

“We’re trying to get people back to work.”- Susan Toussaint, Director, ASCDL

The FactsThe economy is suffering and fewer people are able to af-

ford higher education. This results in fewer students, which results in less revenue through semesterly student fees. Fewer fees mean less money for the programs that operate with as-sistance from those fees.

One such fee is the Student Activity Fee, and the highest funded program under the Activity Fee is the ASCDL

The childcare center receives funding from many sources outside of the school. However, 39 percent of the ASCDL’s funding is generated through the Activity Fee.

“We are driven by enrollment,” Slaughter said. “And there is a direct hit to these fee-funded areas by not having as much income.”

Slaughter said that this year’s annualized enrollment figure is 15,500, and the university is budgeting for 400 less students next year.

“The worst case scenario would be seeing a $50k reduction. That’s large, that’s substantial,” Slaughter said. “We are cur-rently using some $150,000 from our reserve to balance oper-ating costs.”

As of March 28, the ASCDLs allocated funds for the 2011-12 academic year is expected to be 14% less, totaling in a loss of $23,357.

“All Activity Fee areas are getting hit with a similar, propor-tionate budget cut,” said Vice President Aaron Allnut. “We’re not just cutting out the legs from underneath programs.”

Since the childcare center receives the largest funding from the Activity Fee, the percentage reductions will be greater than other AS programs such as the Women’s Center or the campus radio station KCSC.

Roughly $1.8 million is allocated from the Activity Fee, and 35 percent goes to the childcare center and university com-munity service organization CAVE.

“As of right now everything is speculative and based on the information that is out there,” Slaughter said. “The challenge is not knowing where to go.”

But there are other woes to be concerned with. The state budget proposal brought forth by California Governor Jerry Brown aims to cut up to $12.5 billion in state spending, $750 million of which will come from cuts to child care funding. If passed, child care pro-grams such as ASCDL will see a 34.6 percent subsidy reduction, meaning more out-of-pocket cost for families that pay a fee as well as those receiving partially- or completely-subsidized childcare service.

“The state certainly is in a situation where we just can’t blindly trust that all or any of that money will be there.” Slaughter said.

If Governor Brown’s proposal is accepted, only 10 of the approx-imate 80 families enrolled in ASCDL will be able to afford enroll-ing, Toussaint said.

“For many,” Toussaint said, “it may mean the difference between going to school or not. It’s a very Draconian proposal.”

But the exact state of affairs is yet to be determined, and the full extent of the damage may not be realized for some time.

“There will be cuts,” Toussaint said. “It’s only a matter of where and how.”

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The ConsequencesCurrently, the eligibility requirement for

subsidized care is 75 percent of the state me-dian income. Brown’s proposal reduces that eligibility by 15 percent, meaning that those rendered ineligible for care will be forced to pay for childcare out-of-pocket.

The Governor’s proposal also plans to backfill the lost revenue by increasing fees paid by parents, which accounts for only 4 percent of ASCDL’s income.

This puts the fate of the ASCDL in the air, dependent on the outcome of a potential special election at the behest of Governor Brown.

Brown had tried to make the deadline to include the budget proposal in June but was unable to get the support needed to make the deadline. As of this printing, Brown has reached agreements with two of four Repub-licans needed to have a public vote on the re-formed budget. If at that time voters decide against extending taxes, the cuts will only go deeper.

“Sometimes it can feel like…there is no emotional attachment to the decisions that are being made,” Allnut said. “But there are a lot of people who recognize and care about the CDL.”

If the childcare program is compromised, the ripple effect will extend beyond the staff and student-parents of the ASCDL. Many peo-ple’s lives will be influenced, some drastical-ly, such as the parents and employees. Others will be impacted to a lesser degree, such as students getting graduation requirements.

“We are a point of access,” Toussaint said. “There are large numbers of students who use the observation booths as part of their academic courses. We cross a lot of majors.”

Removal of the facilities, which include two observation booths, would impact numerous majors on campus, including child develop-ment, kinesiology, nutrition and psychology, some of which require set hours of observa-tion. Chico State students would have to ob-tain those hours away from campus.

“We’re trying to get people back to work, we’re trying to get people employed,” Tous-saint said. “What is the impact if you’re em-ployed and can’t afford child care? How can we get people back to work?”

Such a blow to funding as the Governor proposes will only complicate things for fam-ilies, according to Toussaint.

“I really wonder how some families are able to balance,” she continued. “They have rent, they have utilities, food, phone, travel, car insurance. To add child care into that is like ‘whoa.’”

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“The challenge is not knowing where to go...”- Jon Slaughter, AS Programs and Government Affairs

Opinion

The Coup de GraceWalking across the Chico State campus with my twin

boys holding each of my hands, I can’t help but notice the glares that are shot our way.

If the boys say something cute and some may smile in our direction, but most feel some sort of inconvenience at our presence because they’ll have to slow their pace or step lively to work their way around. Most choose the latter and grumble words of discontent as they scuttle by.

These are my classmates—young, inexperienced, often spoiled, with the notion of family life in the distant future. They are ignorant and judgmental.

The very idea that a man with children is foolishly at-tempting to get through college is unfathomable to them. All they know is we are standing between them and their next class or timely escape from campus, off to partake in the lifestyle so regularly associated with college, filled with promiscuity and excess. Incriminating Facebook pho-tos and general regret.

I, on the other hand, will be enjoying a quieter night in, with any such degeneracy done in private—after the chil-dren have been laid down for the night, of course, and still with work to do.

Most of my classmates cannot handle the routine that has become my norm—little to no sleep with few days of rest or relaxation, constant deadlines looming overhead, the utter caffeine dependency. God forbid anyone falls ill. Nothing throws a wrench in the works like a sick member of the family.

All work has to be done at night. That is when the house

is quiet and placid, unless someone is willing to watch and even teach your youngsters during the day.

This is where programs such as the ASCDL come in. Without such programs, people such as myself who are at-tempting to offer a better life for their offspring will be forced to either sacrifice more and work harder for their dreams or put them on an indefinite hiatus.

If those in my direct contact are this disgusted, disdain-ful, annoyed and uncaring toward my struggles as a stu-dent-parent, how can it legitimately be expected that the voters will act any differently when presented the propo-sition? Not out of any sort of malice, mind you, but rather pure ignorance.

Will voters who benefited from these programs continue to support them? Or will they simply remain quiet and let them fade into the ether? One can hope for the former, but the latter seems more likely, especially considering the state’s financial and budgetary woes.

Governor Brown’s proposal is blatant thievery in this regard. California’s deficit must be absolved, but no ben-efit will come from forcing those already unable to afford childcare, whether completely or in part, to foot the bill.

Inevitably, those who are forced to give up the college life will only contribute to the struggling unemployment rates, which stands at 12.3 percent in the state of California as of February 2011 and 9.2 percent nationally as of March 2011.

Whereas , given the opportunity and assistance need-ed to complete a degree, they could be playing a part in battling our troubled economy.

Issue 0 13

Piracy and the Emergence of VinylWords by Blake Mehigan

Piracy in the traditional sense has existed for centuries, but digital piracy is an issue that has taken siege of a domain vastly more

expansive than all the oceans—the Internet.Ever since the rise and fall of Napster, peer-to-peer file sharing

services have been operating in violation of copyright infringement and intellectual property law.

Napster, a peer-to-peer file sharing program whose demise was the result of a highly publicized trial, opened the floodgates to sev-eral more file sharing websites and programs in the coming years. In piracy of music alone, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) website reports that 30 billion songs were down-loaded illegally between 2004 and 2009.

In the decade following 1999, the year Napster was founded, re-cord sales have fallen 47 percent from to $7 billion, according to the RIAA website.

Piracy has grown over the past three decades with the rise of mix-tapes and CD burning, but it didn’t become an issue until people discovered the Internet.

Napster co-founder Sean Parker believes that the convenience of downloading music illegally is largely the problem associated with people not opting to purchase music.

“You have to accept that the war on piracy is a failure,” Parker said in CBS’s Tech Talk blog.

Online music stores began picking up steam as the piracy boom was starting. While Napster rebooted as a paysite in 2001, iTunes launched at the same time and rose to become the largest online music store in the world.

In Eric Pfranner’s article from the New York Times, he notes the biggest concern for record labels is that the digital market may have topped off now. For 2010, digital downloads had risen 6 per-cent while sales as a whole were down between 8 and 9 percent,

according to the website of the International Federa-tion of the Phonographic Industry.

In the wake of what has been a steady decline, record labels like XL Recordings and Domino have found a way to change the game and remain relevant in the music in-dustry. XL CEO and founder Richard Russell attributed the label’s success to quality over quantity and investing in the bands on its label.

“We get offered 200,000 unsolicited demos a year and yet only sign about one artist a year,” said Russell in an interview for The Guardian newspaper in England..

His label has several notable bands on it, including The Prodigy, Vampire Weekend, and Beck.

After leaving major label EMI, Radiohead released its first album with XL in a very different way. The band made their 2007 release In Rainbows available for download at whatever price the buyer saw fit, even for as little as a cent. The average paid price ended up being around $1, according to study done by The Times of London.

Their most recent album The King of Limbs was re-leased as a digital download a day earlier than the band originally announced. Listeners could purchase the digi-tal download for $9 in MP3 and $14 as a WAV file. For $48, avid fans could purchase the “newspaper album,” which comes with a CD, two 10-inch records and a book of art-work.

But while legal music downloads continue to rise, they are still not compensating for the difference of money lost in physical music sales. A study showed that for every legal download there are 20 illegal downloads, according to the website Crunchgear.com.

In the week of Aug. 8-14, 2010, Nielsen Soundscan re-corded the lowest weekly sales numbers since recording them in 1991 at 4.95 million albums, according to NPR’s Caitlin Kenney.

Record labels are in an uproar about lost business since the rise of illegal digital downloading, but bootleg record

labels are nearly a thing of the past, too.A man identifying himself as Scorpio, the label that he

once ran, said that the bootleg industry is all but wiped out, according to David Browne’s Vulture blog on nymag.com. Bootleg content is still available, but people are more likely to share it with each other over the Internet instead of sending it to a bootleg label, said Scorpio.

And while bootlegging is a sort of piracy in its own, it hadn’t affected the sales of records quite in the way that online piracy has. While bootleg albums as an industry are a thing of the past, something from the past is making its own resurgence.

Vinyl records have become more popular in recent years despite the availability of more current forms of music.

“It takes me back,” said Chico local Ted Gledhill after purchasing a record at Melody Records, a local music store that specializes in its large selection of vinyl records along with CD’s and memorabilia.

Despite concern over piracy as a potential business buster owner Ray Coppock said he hasn’t noticed much of a hit in sales but he’s not sure how much of it is a fad and how much people are genuinely gaining interest in vinyl again, adding that vinyl records appear to sell quicker than CDs.

“It hasn’t had such an affect that I couldn’t stay in busi-ness,” he said. “[CDs] sell pretty well. It’s not like nobody is buying them.”

Whether vinyl is a trend or not is uncertain, but piracy isn’t. It is something ingrained in our culture to some ex-tent and factors into the “now” mentality we have. Piracy certainly isn’t anything new, but it is something to con-sider keeping an eye on.

In the case of many in the record industry, it’s an issue they will continue to address and battle.

“It’s the reality,” Coppock said. “You have to deal with that.”

Photo Illustration by Jeb Draper

Beneath the soil lies a forgotten house of Titans, a subterra-nean facility known only to the locals. The remnants of the

Cold War are still buried in the countryside outside our collegetown, overshadowed by student life and left to collect asbestos-ridden water, beer cans and graffiti.

Chico legend has it that during the heat of the Cold War, aninter-continental missile complex was built in the farmlands todefend our country from a possible attack by the Soviet Union.Another, even scarier legend is that one of the Titan I missilesit once held actually exploded underground, nearly wipingChico off the map in one of the worst nuclear mishaps in U.S.history.

It’s been rumored that occult worshippers have used the sitefor their strange rituals. Many of the older Chico natives couldtell you that the legends are true and some could say they’vewitnessed the buried behemoth firsthand, like Eric Norlie, 44,who’s been down in the bowels of the Cold War casualty closeto a hundred times now.

“The earliest memory I have was my dad taking me out thereand I was probably not even a teenager,” he said during a rainyinterview at Broadway Heights.“I can remember walking up tothe edge of one of the silos and looking down into it and seeingall the scaffolding that was built into the structure.”

His father would take him from their house in Durham on sal-

vage trips out to the site. Back then the owner of the silos al-lowed the public to buy leftover machinery and pieces of thecomplex for salvaging.He didn’t really think much of it until col-lege, when he and a group of seven friends set out to explorethe silos one night in 1985.

To enter the Titan complex they had to squeeze in through ahole in the ground that led to what was called the “propellantterminal,” which once held a liquid oxygen tank that extendedout above the ground.

“I can remember being the map-maker,”Norlie said,“just try-ing to jot down as much as I could in terms of where we went.”

Back then, there was a caretaker who lived in a mobile homeon the premises.

“We were near the entry portal and eventually someone start-ed hearing footsteps coming down the stairs,” he said.“So thatwas when we headed out as fast as we could.”

From then on Norlie ventured on little missions at night andfinally started parking out in front of the property in the day-time to sneak around. He noticed that no one was really watch-ing the place and decided to look for the owner to see if heneeded another caretaker.

He found Robert Lague’s name under the property listingsand looked him up in the phonebook.The now-deceased Laguewas happy to have some help with his property because

Se e a e6

Beneath the soil lies a forgotten house of Titans, a subterra-nean facility known only to the locals. The remnants of the

Cold War are still buried in the countryside outside our college town, overshadowed by student life and left to collect asbestos-ridden water, beer cans and graffiti.

Chico legend has it that during the heat of the Cold War, an inter-continental missile complex was built in the farmlands to defend our country from a possible attack by the Soviet Union. Another, even scarier legend is that one of the Titan I missiles it once held actually exploded underground, nearly wiping Chico off the map in one of the worst nuclear mishaps in U.S. history.

It’s been rumored that occult worshippers have used the site for their strange rituals. Many of the older Chico natives could tell you that the legends are true and some could say they’ve witnessed the buried behemoth firsthand, like Eric Norlie, 44, who’s been down in the bowels of the Cold War casualty close to a hundred times now.

“The earliest memory I have was my dad taking me out there and I was probably not even a teenager,” he said during a rainy interview at Broadway Heights. “I can remember walking up to the edge of one of the silos and looking down into it and seeing all the scaffolding that was built into the structure.”

His father would take him from their house in Durham on sal-

vage trips out to the site. Back then the owner of the silos al-lowed the public to buy leftover machinery and pieces of the complex for salvaging. He didn’t really think much of it until col-lege, when he and a group of seven friends set out to explore the silos one night in 1985.

To enter the Titan complex they had to squeeze in through a hole in the ground that led to what was called the “propellant terminal,” which once held a liquid oxygen tank that extended out above the ground.

“I can remember being the map-maker,” Norlie said, “just try-ing to jot down as much as I could in terms of where we went.”

Back then, there was a caretaker who lived in a mobile home on the premises.

“We were near the entry portal and eventually someone start-ed hearing footsteps coming down the stairs,” he said. “So that was when we headed out as fast as we could.”

From then on Norlie ventured on little missions at night and finally started parking out in front of the property in the day-time to sneak around. He noticed that no one was really watch-ing the place and decided to look for the owner to see if he needed another caretaker.

He found Robert Lague’s name under the property listings and looked him up in the phonebook. The now-deceased Lague was happy to have some help with his property because

The Lost TiTans

ust ation by J aWords by Tyler Ash

Illustration by Jeb Draper

Sentient Magazine16

m s e commaps.google.com

ss e 0

there was a constant amount of work needed to mend the fence aftereach adventurous night of teenage mischief.

With the OK from the owner,Norlie was free to explore the manmadecaverns at his leisure between 1990 and ’92.He researched the facilityand found a cache of abandoned documents and operation manualsunderneath the crawlspace of one of the control rooms. Figuring thathe could do a service to the community by writing a history of the cov-ered colossus,listing all of the technicalities and contributors that wentinto to the construction of the site.It was one of the first books ever writ-ten on Chico’s Titan I Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Launching Base.

In 1959, the U.S. government seized 275 acres of land from NathanH. and Harold V. Thomason under eminent domain, a legal action thatallows the state to purchase land at its current market value without theowner’s consent and sell it to a third party for public or civic use.

The makers of the Titan I Missile,the Martin Marieta Company,head-ed the construction of the Titan (I-C) Missile Facility to be operated bythe 851st Strategic Missile Squadron at Beale Air Force Base in Marys-ville.

Four years earlier, President Eisenhower made production of the In-tercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) the highest national priority inresponse to the Soviet Union’s frightening progress in rocket technol-ogy.Northern California had been suggested for the location of Titan Imissile facilities because its geographic area allowed access to areascrucial for keeping large missiles in low profile.

Chico’s I-C missile base was the third in a“triad”of facilities in north-ern California, including one in Lincoln (I-A) and one near Marysvillein the Sutter Buttes (I-B).

Before the I-C facility was built, Norlie says that Chico was consid-ered the alternate capital of the state.

“If Sacramento was ever attacked and there was a need to move thecapital, it was Chico,” he said.“But that changed after the missile basewas built.”

There were always extra security precautions on everything thatwent on during the construction.

“If you were working on the place, you never worked by yourself,”Norlie said. “You always had your work double checked so therewouldn’t be any sabotage.”

The facility is 1,600 feet long and 900 feet wide. It reaches 165 feetdeep underground and was built to withstand a blast 50 times theforce of gravity, which is more than the blast of a nuclear attack. It hasa volume of 2.5 million cubic feet and a floor space of 100,000 squarefeet, including six floors per silo. There are approximately 2,000 feetof cement tunnels,9.5 feet in diameter,which connect each area of thebase.

When the base was completed in 1962, controls were turned overto the military staff. It was this same year that one of the worst nuclearaccidents in our country’s history took place.

The civilian workers and engineers of the Martin Marieta Companyneeded to show the military how to operate the facility before it couldtake full control. During the early morning of May 24, safety engineerJoe Herrington was performing atmospheric tests in the missile silosduring a fuel and un-fuel procedure. In Silo No. 1, the tests showed ab-normally high liquid oxygen levels,which he reported to his superiorsover several days.

When they finally went down to the bottom of the silo,officials discov-ered that ice had begun to form all around the base of the Titan I mis-sile from a valve not properly closing. Herrington’s supervisor kickedthe ice at the base of the missile and watched it shatter on the floor.

Issue 0Issue 0 1717

there was a constant amount of work needed to mend the fence after each adventurous night of teenage mischief.

With the OK from the owner, Norlie was free to explore the manmade caverns at his leisure between 1990 and ’92. He researched the facility and found a cache of abandoned documents and operation manuals underneath the crawlspace of one of the control rooms. Figuring that he could do a service to the community by writing a history of the cov-ered colossus, listing all of the technicalities and contributors that went into to the construction of the site. It was one of the first books ever writ-ten on Chico’s Titan I Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Launching Base.

In 1959, the U.S. government seized 275 acres of land from Nathan H. and Harold V. Thomason under eminent domain, a legal action that allows the state to purchase land at its current market value without the owner’s consent and sell it to a third party for public or civic use.

The makers of the Titan I Missile, the Martin Marieta Company, head-ed the construction of the Titan (I-C) Missile Facility to be operated by the 851st Strategic Missile Squadron at Beale Air Force Base in Marys-ville.

Four years earlier, President Eisenhower made production of the In-tercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) the highest national priority in response to the Soviet Union’s frightening progress in rocket technol-ogy. Northern California had been suggested for the location of Titan I missile facilities because its geographic area allowed access to areas crucial for keeping large missiles in low profile.

Chico’s I-C missile base was the third in a “triad” of facilities in north-ern California, including one in Lincoln (I-A) and one near Marysville in the Sutter Buttes (I-B).

Before the I-C facility was built, Norlie says that Chico was consid-ered the alternate capital of the state.

“If Sacramento was ever attacked and there was a need to move the capital, it was Chico,” he said. “But that changed after the missile base was built.”

There were always extra security precautions on everything that went on during the construction.

“If you were working on the place, you never worked by yourself,” Norlie said. “You always had your work double checked so there wouldn’t be any sabotage.”

The facility is 1,600 feet long and 900 feet wide. It reaches 165 feet deep underground and was built to withstand a blast 50 times the force of gravity, which is more than the blast of a nuclear attack. It has a volume of 2.5 million cubic feet and a floor space of 100,000 square feet, including six floors per silo. There are approximately 2,000 feet of cement tunnels, 9.5 feet in diameter, which connect each area of the base.

When the base was completed in 1962, controls were turned over to the military staff. It was this same year that one of the worst nuclear accidents in our country’s history took place.

The civilian workers and engineers of the Martin Marieta Company needed to show the military how to operate the facility before it could take full control. During the early morning of May 24, safety engineer Joe Herrington was performing atmospheric tests in the missile silos during a fuel and un-fuel procedure. In Silo No. 1, the tests showed ab-normally high liquid oxygen levels, which he reported to his superiors over several days.

When they finally went down to the bottom of the silo, officials discov-ered that ice had begun to form all around the base of the Titan I mis-sile from a valve not properly closing. Herrington’s supervisor kicked the ice at the base of the missile and watched it shatter on the floor. Ph u tesy of Eric NorliePhoto Courtesy of Eric NorliePhoto Courtesy of Eric Norlie

Sentient Magazine18

They began ascending the long stairs to the top of the silo whenthey came across a white,misty cloud seeping from one of the liq-uid oxygen lines connected to the missile.The two rushed up theremaining flights of stairs to warn the rest of the facility.Dark,thicksmoke began pluming out of Silo No.1.

Herrington hastened his attempts at evacuating the missile basepersonnel into a single, large elevator that led to the surface. Hesqueezed everyone into the elevator, but there wasn’t any roomleft for him.He ran up the remainder of the auxiliary stairwell witha failing breathing mask, inhaling the black smoke the rest of theway to safety.

At 7:08 a.m., right after everyone got up to the surface, the mis-sile exploded, destroying the silo and sending large metal androck fragments skyward with chunks of debris raining on thecountryside as far as a quarter-mile away.

The two silo doors, each weighing 116 tons, were flung open

like a drunken gunslinger bursting through swinging bar roomdoors.The silo itself channeled the explosive force straight into theair like an underground cannon.

At that time,a 21-year-old laborer at the base named Ralph Con-treras saw the damage the explosion caused to the complex.

“When that silo blew up,it blew those doors right open and scat-tered cement all over the north of Chico,”said the now 72-year-oldman.“It was a mess. There were over a hundred men working onthat shift but nobody was hurt.”

No one died from the explosion but nearly 60 men were treat-ed and released by Enloe Medical Center for minor injuries andsmoke inhalation later that day.

In a 1992 Chico Enterprise-Record article recalling the explo-sion 30 years earlier, journalist Ed Farrell noted that “the only mis-sile ever fired from the Chico base was done accidentally, and theonly persons ever injured, were the crews trying to complete thejob.”

“It was quite a shock for Chico,” Contreras said.“It scared a lot ofpeople.”

He said that at the time, the No. 1 Silo was actually the best of thethree. It was already going to pass inspection whereas the No. 3 Si-lo’s doors wouldn’t even open all the way.

“It would open halfway and stop,” he said.“So they were still try-ing to work on that one and then the Number One silo went out.”

The Chico missile explosion would have made national headlinesthat day,causing panic in an already anxious America.But the nationwas more focused on watching Scott Carpenter become the firstAmerican to orbit the Earth in the Mercury spacecraft,eclipsing thesilo explosion entirely.

Reconstruction of the silo began immediately. It cost $20 millionto repair, most of the money focused on replacing the incineratedTitan I missile. On Jan. 22, 1963 a new Titan I missile was placed inSilo No.1.

During the operational years of the base,it housed most of the AirForce personnel year-round.They had their own sleeping quarters,kitchens and even TV rooms.

“There was quite a city underneath there,” Contreras said. “Itcould have been a real nice club after they closed it down.”

The complex’s energy came from four large generators produc-ing enough electricity to power a community of about 6,000 people.“Big ol’diesels,”Contreras called them.

When all four generators were operating at maximum capacity,they used about 400,000 gallons of diesel fuel per month.The basehad two 67,000 gallon and one 5,000 gallon diesel fuel tanks.

“You’d go down in there and you couldn’t hear anything,”he said.

Contreras recalled working at the facility when one of the roomsexploded,blowing one of the facility’s employees to bits.

A foam material that was supposed to be fireproof had beensprayed onto the walls of a room in the base.Later on they found outthat it wasn’t fireproof so they had to go back in to take it off. Con-treras and the other laborers used sandblasters to get the hardenedfoam off of the ceiling and the walls,but for some reason the base’spainters wanted their job sandblasting instead of painting. So thelaborers gave it to them so they wouldn’t have to stay overnight.

“The sparks coming off the sand hit one of the gas pipes and it justblew him up,” Contreras said. “After that, the painters didn’t wantthat job anymore so they gave back to the laborers.”

The laborers then chiseled off the material, which worked muchbetter than the sandblasters.

The missile base was operational for only three years, between’62 and ’65,due mainly to the new developments in ballistic missiletechnology.Titan I missiles were hard to take care of and extremelydangerous to handle because of the explosive nature of their liquidrocket fuels,not to mention the many risks of explosions during thefueling process,which the Titan I-C Missile Facility learned the hardway.

When the Department of Defense came out with the Titan II mis-sile,which were much easier to handle and maintain due to the ad-vancements in solid rocket fuels, the Titan I missiles were phasedout of the military’s operational inventory.

“When we were working there they were already obsolete,”Con-treras said.“They knew they weren’t going to last but we kept work-ing there.”

With all the danger and doom lurking from the missile silos,they were a huge employer for local Chicoans looking for work.

Sentient Magazine18

They began ascending the long stairs to the top of the silo when they came across a white, misty cloud seeping from one of the liq-uid oxygen lines connected to the missile. The two rushed up the remaining flights of stairs to warn the rest of the facility. Dark, thick smoke began pluming out of Silo No. 1.

Herrington hastened his attempts at evacuating the missile base personnel into a single, large elevator that led to the surface. He squeezed everyone into the elevator, but there wasn’t any room left for him. He ran up the remainder of the auxiliary stairwell with a failing breathing mask, inhaling the black smoke the rest of the way to safety.

At 7:08 a.m., right after everyone got up to the surface, the mis-sile exploded, destroying the silo and sending large metal and rock fragments skyward with chunks of debris raining on the countryside as far as a quarter-mile away.

The two silo doors, each weighing 116 tons, were flung open

like a drunken gunslinger bursting through swinging bar room doors. The silo itself channeled the explosive force straight into the air like an underground cannon.

At that time, a 21-year-old laborer at the base named Ralph Con-treras saw the damage the explosion caused to the complex.

“When that silo blew up, it blew those doors right open and scat-tered cement all over the north of Chico,” said the now 72-year-old man. “It was a mess. There were over a hundred men working on that shift but nobody was hurt.”

No one died from the explosion but nearly 60 men were treat-ed and released by Enloe Medical Center for minor injuries and smoke inhalation later that day.

In a 1992 Chico Enterprise-Record article recalling the explo-sion 30 years earlier, journalist Ed Farrell noted that “the only mis-sile ever fired from the Chico base was done accidentally, and the only persons ever injured, were the crews trying to complete the job.”

“It was quite a shock for Chico,” Contreras said. “It scared a lot of people.”

He said that at the time, the No. 1 Silo was actually the best of the three. It was already going to pass inspection whereas the No. 3 Si-lo’s doors wouldn’t even open all the way.

“It would open halfway and stop,” he said. “So they were still try-ing to work on that one and then the Number One silo went out.”

The Chico missile explosion would have made national headlines that day, causing panic in an already anxious America. But the nation was more focused on watching Scott Carpenter become the first American to orbit the Earth in the Mercury spacecraft, eclipsing the silo explosion entirely.

Reconstruction of the silo began immediately. It cost $20 million to repair, most of the money focused on replacing the incinerated Titan I missile. On Jan. 22, 1963 a new Titan I missile was placed in Silo No.1.

During the operational years of the base, it housed most of the Air Force personnel year-round. They had their own sleeping quarters, kitchens and even TV rooms.

“There was quite a city underneath there,” Contreras said. “It could have been a real nice club after they closed it down.”

The complex’s energy came from four large generators produc-ing enough electricity to power a community of about 6,000 people. “Big ol’ diesels,” Contreras called them.

When all four generators were operating at maximum capacity, they used about 400,000 gallons of diesel fuel per month. The base had two 67,000 gallon and one 5,000 gallon diesel fuel tanks.

“You’d go down in there and you couldn’t hear anything,” he said.

Contreras recalled working at the facility when one of the rooms exploded, blowing one of the facility’s employees to bits.

A foam material that was supposed to be fireproof had been sprayed onto the walls of a room in the base. Later on they found out that it wasn’t fireproof so they had to go back in to take it off. Con-treras and the other laborers used sandblasters to get the hardened foam off of the ceiling and the walls, but for some reason the base’s painters wanted their job sandblasting instead of painting. So the laborers gave it to them so they wouldn’t have to stay overnight.

“The sparks coming off the sand hit one of the gas pipes and it just blew him up,” Contreras said. “After that, the painters didn’t want that job anymore so they gave back to the laborers.”

The laborers then chiseled off the material, which worked much better than the sandblasters.

The missile base was operational for only three years, between ’62 and ’65, due mainly to the new developments in ballistic missile technology. Titan I missiles were hard to take care of and extremely dangerous to handle because of the explosive nature of their liquid rocket fuels, not to mention the many risks of explosions during the fueling process, which the Titan I-C Missile Facility learned the hard way.

When the Department of Defense came out with the Titan II mis-sile, which were much easier to handle and maintain due to the ad-vancements in solid rocket fuels, the Titan I missiles were phased out of the military’s operational inventory.

“When we were working there they were already obsolete,” Con-treras said. “They knew they weren’t going to last but we kept work-ing there.”

With all the danger and doom lurking from the missile silos, they were a huge employer for local Chicoans looking for work.

Photo Courtesy of Eric Norlie

Issue 0 19

“When that silo blew up, itblew those doors right openand scattered cement allover the north of Chico...Itscared a lot of people”- Ralph Contreras, Laborer

In fact, Chico Electric was the electrical contractor of allthree Northern California missile bases.

The owner of the then-new company was Cecil Nielson, whosaid that Chico Electric had only been in operation for a yearsince 1960.

“We operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week because ofthe urgency of it,” he said.“It was a busy time.We didn’t havemuch sleep.”

While it was beneficial to some Chico locals, many othersresponded very negatively to the nuclear missile base. Infact, the Chico Peace and Justice Center might not have beenestablished if it weren’t for the base’s existence.

During the construction of the missile silos between 1959and 1962, as well as during its operational years, WilhelminaTaggart started leading peace vigils with Florence McLaneand Helen Kinnee to raise awareness about the horrific out-comes the missiles could bring.

“Wilhelmina was worried that this would target Chico andmake us a spot for the Russians to send their own missiles,”said Steve Tchudi, media adviser of the Peace and Justice Cen-ter. “She was concerned about the escalations of the nuclearnightmare and the whole direction in which the world was go-ing.”

They decided to continue their peace vigils after the Titan Imissiles had been removed. In 1982, the three women foundedthe center and became a non-profit organization a year later.

“We can trace our lineage right back there,” Tchudi said.

In 1964 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara instructedthe end of the Titan I Missile series. By March of 1965, the mis-siles in Beale Air Force Base’s jurisdiction were removed fromits three bases: I-A, I-B and I-C.

The 851st Squadron deactivated and disassembled them,shipping the fallen giants to the San Bernardino Air MaterialArea at Norton Air Force Base.

In a 2005 issue of Chico Beat, a now discontinued weeklypublication, journalist Tom Gascoyne wrote about the currentwhereabouts of one of Chico’s Titan I missiles, which made itall the way out to Nebraska in 1968.

“Today the 95-foot tall missile stands on display in Gotte

Park in the tiny town of Kimball, which proudly bills itself asMissile Center, USA,” he wrote.

The park boasts that it is world’s largest complex of ICBMsin the world.

After the base was clear of missiles and personnel, the De-partment of Defense hired Robert Lague to dismantle and sal-vage the valuable materials still housed within the Cold Warcrypt.

One of the provisions in the Strategic Arms Limitation Trea-ty states that the reactivation of the dismantled missile basesmust take considerably longer than the construction of a newone. So the Lagues purchased the salvaging rights to the mis-sile base from a government surplus land sale in 1971 and re-moved many of the large fuel tanks, equipment, piping, wiringand operation controls to sell at their salvage yard in Lathrop.

“For ten years we took out everything we could possiblytake out of that missile base and sold it,” said Robert’s widowMargaret Lague in a phone interview,adding that the base wasa “precious possession” of hers. She still reminisces about thegoats, the sheep, the five dogs and the lake filled with big cat-fish.

But what appears to be a peaceful field above ground givesway to dark tunnels and a large,hazardous cavern below, filledwith asbestos, contaminated water and sharp metal—not tomention whatever creatures have tried to eke out an existencedown there.

According to a 1992 Chico Enterprise-Record article by DirkDusharmen, an 18-year-old Chico State student named CarrieGoff and a large group of trespassing teens were exploringthe missile base. The teens hadn’t walked more than 500 feetof tunnel when Goff slipped through a hole on the second leveland fell 20 feet down.

She hit a cement slab partially covering another hole andlanded in stagnant water at the bottom of a large cavity, nextto a missile silo. If she hadn’t landed on the cement, she couldhave been impaled by several metal poles protruding fromthe water.

Goff actually drowned before her friends climbed down andresuscitated her. The teens called the fire department, who

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“When that silo blew up, it blew those doors right open and scattered cement all over the north of Chico...It scared a lot of people” - Ralph Contreras, Laborer

In fact, Chico Electric was the electrical contractor of all three Northern California missile bases.

The owner of the then-new company was Cecil Nielson, who said that Chico Electric had only been in operation for a year since 1960.

“We operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week because of the urgency of it,” he said. “It was a busy time. We didn’t have much sleep.”

While it was beneficial to some Chico locals, many others responded very negatively to the nuclear missile base. In fact, the Chico Peace and Justice Center might not have been established if it weren’t for the base’s existence.

During the construction of the missile silos between 1959 and 1962, as well as during its operational years, Wilhelmina Taggart started leading peace vigils with Florence McLane and Helen Kinnee to raise awareness about the horrific out-comes the missiles could bring.

“Wilhelmina was worried that this would target Chico and make us a spot for the Russians to send their own missiles,” said Steve Tchudi, media adviser of the Peace and Justice Cen-ter. “She was concerned about the escalations of the nuclear nightmare and the whole direction in which the world was go-ing.”

They decided to continue their peace vigils after the Titan I missiles had been removed. In 1982, the three women founded the center and became a non-profit organization a year later.

“We can trace our lineage right back there,” Tchudi said.

In 1964 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara instructed the end of the Titan I Missile series. By March of 1965, the mis-siles in Beale Air Force Base’s jurisdiction were removed from its three bases: I-A, I-B and I-C.

The 851st Squadron deactivated and disassembled them, shipping the fallen giants to the San Bernardino Air Material Area at Norton Air Force Base.

In a 2005 issue of Chico Beat, a now discontinued weekly publication, journalist Tom Gascoyne wrote about the current whereabouts of one of Chico’s Titan I missiles, which made it all the way out to Nebraska in 1968.

“Today the 95-foot tall missile stands on display in Gotte

Park in the tiny town of Kimball, which proudly bills itself as Missile Center, USA,” he wrote.

The park boasts that it is world’s largest complex of ICBMs in the world.

After the base was clear of missiles and personnel, the De-partment of Defense hired Robert Lague to dismantle and sal-vage the valuable materials still housed within the Cold War crypt.

One of the provisions in the Strategic Arms Limitation Trea-ty states that the reactivation of the dismantled missile bases must take considerably longer than the construction of a new one. So the Lagues purchased the salvaging rights to the mis-sile base from a government surplus land sale in 1971 and re-moved many of the large fuel tanks, equipment, piping, wiring and operation controls to sell at their salvage yard in Lathrop.

“For ten years we took out everything we could possibly take out of that missile base and sold it,” said Robert’s widow Margaret Lague in a phone interview, adding that the base was a “precious possession” of hers. She still reminisces about the goats, the sheep, the five dogs and the lake filled with big cat-fish.

But what appears to be a peaceful field above ground gives way to dark tunnels and a large, hazardous cavern below, filled with asbestos, contaminated water and sharp metal—not to mention whatever creatures have tried to eke out an existence down there.

According to a 1992 Chico Enterprise-Record article by Dirk Dusharmen, an 18-year-old Chico State student named Carrie Goff and a large group of trespassing teens were exploring the missile base. The teens hadn’t walked more than 500 feet of tunnel when Goff slipped through a hole on the second level and fell 20 feet down.

She hit a cement slab partially covering another hole and landed in stagnant water at the bottom of a large cavity, next to a missile silo. If she hadn’t landed on the cement, she could have been impaled by several metal poles protruding from the water.

Goff actually drowned before her friends climbed down and resuscitated her. The teens called the fire department, who

Archive Photo

Sentient Magazine20

torched a hole through the top of the shaft to hoist her out from100 feet underground. She later recovered and was fined fortrespassing along with rest of her group of friends.

A year later, in 1993, legislation from Congressman WallyHerger ordered a clean-up of the site, so that accidents likeGoff’s wouldn’t happen again.The silo doors remained open tothe public until this time.The standing water, lack of protectiverailings and sharp metal scraps aren’t the only dangers that gohand in hand with exploring the tunnels.

“The place is contaminated with asbestos and they know it,”Mrs. Lague said.“I know it and everybody else knows it.”

Herger’s 1995 clean-up program organized by the U.S. ArmyCorps of Engineers found that fuels, oils, solvents, asbestos,volatile organic compounds and possible radiation resultingfrom the 1962 explosion are all potentially lurking in the soiland groundwater surrounding the facility.

Although the contamination report noted that “no radioac-tive material discharges were reported or known” after theexplosion, the City of Chico still exists today. Odds are thatthere wasn’t a nuclear warhead on the missile at the time ofthe accident.

“I didn’t realize what asbestos was until after someone de-scribed it to me,” Norlie said. “I realized ‘Oh yeah, I can re-

member seeing plenty of that.’”Asbestos is a combination of six naturally occurring silicate

minerals that was once used in products like tiles, insulationand shingles. The inhalation of asbestos fibers can cause lungcancer, mesothelioma and other serious illnesses.

Chris and Robert Ricken own the land today and say that thebase has been sealed off from public access. The site is pa-trolled on a regular basis and the one of the two current prop-erty owners still lives on the property.

“It’s really just a piece of land now, everything’s closed up,”Chris Ricken said in a phone interview.“I don’t even go downin there.”

The silo doors have been sealed for public safety concernsand most of the equipment has been salvaged, so actually see-ing the facility isn’t even an option anymore.

To even get onto the sealed-off property, one would have towalk through the neighbors’ grazing land.

“To get to my place you have to trespass through their landas well,” Ricken said about his home.“I just don’t want peoplecoming out there and expecting one thing and then getting introuble.”

Ricken won’t think twice about seeking prosecution for tres

Sentient Magazine20

torched a hole through the top of the shaft to hoist her out from 100 feet underground. She later recovered and was fined for trespassing along with rest of her group of friends.

A year later, in 1993, legislation from Congressman Wally Herger ordered a clean-up of the site, so that accidents like Goff’s wouldn’t happen again. The silo doors remained open to the public until this time.The standing water, lack of protective railings and sharp metal scraps aren’t the only dangers that go hand in hand with exploring the tunnels.

“The place is contaminated with asbestos and they know it,” Mrs. Lague said. “I know it and everybody else knows it.”

Herger’s 1995 clean-up program organized by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers found that fuels, oils, solvents, asbestos, volatile organic compounds and possible radiation resulting from the 1962 explosion are all potentially lurking in the soil and groundwater surrounding the facility.

Although the contamination report noted that “no radioac-tive material discharges were reported or known” after the explosion, the City of Chico still exists today. Odds are that there wasn’t a nuclear warhead on the missile at the time of the accident.

“I didn’t realize what asbestos was until after someone de-scribed it to me,” Norlie said. “I realized ‘Oh yeah, I can re-

member seeing plenty of that.’”Asbestos is a combination of six naturally occurring silicate

minerals that was once used in products like tiles, insulation and shingles. The inhalation of asbestos fibers can cause lung cancer, mesothelioma and other serious illnesses.

Chris and Robert Ricken own the land today and say that the base has been sealed off from public access. The site is pa-trolled on a regular basis and the one of the two current prop-erty owners still lives on the property.

“It’s really just a piece of land now, everything’s closed up,” Chris Ricken said in a phone interview. “I don’t even go down in there.”

The silo doors have been sealed for public safety concerns and most of the equipment has been salvaged, so actually see-ing the facility isn’t even an option anymore.

To even get onto the sealed-off property, one would have to walk through the neighbors’ grazing land.

“To get to my place you have to trespass through their land as well,” Ricken said about his home. “I just don’t want people coming out there and expecting one thing and then getting in trouble.”

Ricken won’t think twice about seeking prosecution for tres

Issue 0 21

passing, a misdemeanor punishable by six months in thecounty jail or a maximum $1000 fine.

“It would be just like me trying to walk in your back yard,”he said.“You’d want to know what I’m doing there, right?”

He stressed that it’s simply just a residence now.“It’s private property, it’s not a museum,” he said. “If they

want to go see one there’s one in Tucson, Arizona.”Tucson’s Titan Missile Museum, or Air Force Facility Missile

Site 8, was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1994 andhas regular tours that go all throughout the base.

In Norlie’s book about the Titan I facility, he created a planto construct a subterranean entertainment complex, using thePower Dome for musical concerts and theater productions. Hehas a music degree from Chico State and would play his guitarin the Power Dome when he was the caretaker of the property,making use of the dome’s ample reverberation time of abouttwo to three seconds.

“I appreciated the acoustics,” he said, adding that he was inthe process of fixing the facility’s electrical grid when some-one stole the tools he’d left out the day before.

“I was so upset,” he said.“I just decided ‘you know, why am Iworking this hard to be alone out here?’”

This was all during the first Persian Gulf Crisis and Norlie

wanted to get the facility up and running so Chico could po-tentially have a bomb shelter. Other ideas for utilizing the pre-existing structure have been mushroom farms and data vaults.Once a compost company even wanted to fill the hole withcompost to generate methane in the silo tubes.

Norlie said it has the potential to be an offsite campus of ei-ther Chico State or Butte College, who could design it as “anew facility that was for the community, not as a war machine.”

He said that the only way to reoccupy a facility of that sortwould be to take advantage of the expanding airport area, al-ready nearby; that way, there would be a much smaller road toget to the facility without destroying any residential areas in itspath.

For now, the old I-C missile base is still buried, deterioratingmore and more as the water table slowly trickles in each year.Its doors are sealed but its story lives on in a dark, abysmalgloom.

Not a single Titan ever shot out of its silos save for the flamesof the accidental missile explosion in 1962, proving that thesweat, lives and chemicals sacrificed during the existence ofthe base were of no ultimate use.

But when all’s said and done, Chico’s Cold War missile basehas had quite an impact on our region’s history - and its soil.

Issue 0 21

passing, a misdemeanor punishable by six months in the county jail or a maximum $1000 fine.

“It would be just like me trying to walk in your back yard,” he said. “You’d want to know what I’m doing there, right?”

He stressed that it’s simply just a residence now.“It’s private property, it’s not a museum,” he said. “If they

want to go see one there’s one in Tucson, Arizona.” Tucson’s Titan Missile Museum, or Air Force Facility Missile

Site 8, was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1994 and has regular tours that go all throughout the base.

In Norlie’s book about the Titan I facility, he created a plan to construct a subterranean entertainment complex, using the Power Dome for musical concerts and theater productions. He has a music degree from Chico State and would play his guitar in the Power Dome when he was the caretaker of the property, making use of the dome’s ample reverberation time of about two to three seconds.

“I appreciated the acoustics,” he said, adding that he was in the process of fixing the facility’s electrical grid when some-one stole the tools he’d left out the day before.

“I was so upset,” he said. “I just decided ‘you know, why am I working this hard to be alone out here?’”

This was all during the first Persian Gulf Crisis and Norlie

wanted to get the facility up and running so Chico could po-tentially have a bomb shelter. Other ideas for utilizing the pre-existing structure have been mushroom farms and data vaults. Once a compost company even wanted to fill the hole with compost to generate methane in the silo tubes.

Norlie said it has the potential to be an offsite campus of ei-ther Chico State or Butte College, who could design it as “a new facility that was for the community, not as a war machine.”

He said that the only way to reoccupy a facility of that sort would be to take advantage of the expanding airport area, al-ready nearby; that way, there would be a much smaller road to get to the facility without destroying any residential areas in its path.

For now, the old I-C missile base is still buried, deteriorating more and more as the water table slowly trickles in each year. Its doors are sealed but its story lives on in a dark, abysmal gloom.

Not a single Titan ever shot out of its silos save for the flames of the accidental missile explosion in 1962, proving that the sweat, lives and chemicals sacrificed during the existence of the base were of no ultimate use.

But when all’s said and done, Chico’s Cold War missile base has had quite an impact on our region’s history - and its soil.

Photo Courtesy of Eric Norlie

Words by Michaela Boggan

Photo by Jeb Draper

Dealers on Dealing

At the age of 15, “Addie” was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 15 and was introduced to the world of drug dealing.

“Addie,” a 21-year-old Chico State junior, was hyper, outgoing and overly enthusiastic in high school. Doctors diagnosed her with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and prescribed her the psychostimulant Adderall, which made it easier for her to concentrate in school but made her feel unsocial and disconnected from her peers.

She started taking less Adderall at 17-years-old, only using it when the pressure of homework came into play. She was prescribed 90 Adderall pills per month and usually had 70 pills left by the end of it. It only took word of mouth for the clients to come.

Adderall, composed of amphetamine and dextroamphetamine and used to treat narcolepsy and ADHD, among other conditions, has become the stimulant of choice on college campuses across the country. Students have adopted it as a “cognitive enhancer,” a study aide during stressful times in the semester. But according to the National Center for Biotechnology Infor-mation, overuse of Adderall can cause rashes, difficulty sleeping and irrita-bility, as well as heart attacks, strokes or in some cases sudden death.

Prescription drug use overall has been growing on college campuses. A 2010 survey by the National Collegiate Health Assessment reported that approximately 20 percent of American college students have used pre-scription drugs.

When “Addie” began college, her clients doubled, she said, introducing her to a world of friendship, money and drugs. She started taking morphine at age 20 after being introduced by a friend.

“There are two times where I felt like I was addicted to morphine,” she said. “And that was when I was depressed about something.”

Morphine is an opioid used to treat moderate to severe pain, dampening the perception and emotional response to pain in the central nervous sys-tem, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

“Addie” realized morphine was a never-ending circle of crashing and abuse. She would take a pill to relieve her withdrawal, but the pains would come back when the morphine wore out. She always needed to reach that numb feeling.

Eventually she started selling morphine, not to make money, but because she found it comforting that others were taking it, too. She would buy 20 pills for $80 and sell them for $5 a piece for a $20 profit, she said.

“Addie” didn’t like the direction her life was going, especially with her schoolwork, and she decided that morphine had to get out of her life. Since she was still selling morphine, quitting was hard. After a few relapses, she realized the money wasn’t worth it and stopped selling morphine and Ad-derall all together.

“I was at a point where I could see it was going to ruin my life if I let it,” she said. She continues to remind herself about her college goals.

“Bud,” a Butte College student, began selling marijuana to his close friends when he was 21. Eventually, he decided to become an entrepreneur in the pot-friendly community and began selling weed to Chico State and Butte College students.

“Bud” currently sells to five regular customers and about 10 to 15 oc-casional customers, he said. He obtains his supply from a local grower and prices by the gram depending on the quality, quantity and season.

“Bud” believes marijuana should be legal.“You can go to jail for having an ounce of weed on you,” he said. “When

others with a higher crime like pedophiles are getting away.”Going to jail is a big concern in his daily life. It affects the way he lives. But

he tries to be smart about his work and only surround himself with people he can trust.

“It’s very easy to start dealing and it’s not the best idea,” he said. “But it’s an idea.”

A Dollmaker’s TaleFiction by Stephanie MaynardFiction by Stephanie Maynard

Every third Saturday of the month at the market square, with all the other farmers and crafters, the Dollmaker

would peddle his wares.Month after month, year after year, it was always the

same. The Dollmaker would enter the square with pale hands balancing two wine crates that nearly hid his wiry frame from view and gave the Dollmaker an almost comi-cal appearance. Spindly legs and arms protrude from his box body with wisps of white hair peeking out the top. His face remained hidden even after the boxes were removed and his eyes were always veiled by a hood, dark glasses or a mask.

No one in the town would see him at any other time ex-cept those Saturday mornings. He was a quiet man, by all accounts. Some called him aloof or standoffish but they had not spoken to him, so their words count for very little. Any-one that had approached the Dollmaker would report that he was, despite all expectations, a charming man—easy to talk to, quick to smile, and the very best at his craft.

Little girls and boys would stop at his table without fail.

Some would sit patiently and watch his work in silence un-matched except during dreams.

One little girl named Emily watched him for four hours every market day, saying nothing, drawing pictures of the dolls and handing them to the Dollmaker. Her parents were too poor to afford one of his creations and Emily nev-er asked for one. She just liked to watch and draw.

They never spoke to each other, little Emily and the Doll-maker, but would smile kindly at one another from their seats and admire each other’s finished works.

On an unremarkable Saturday morning the Dollmaker gave her a doll of her own and refused payment from Em-ily’s mother. Emily smiled and thanked the Dollmaker and continued her market-day ritual until she was grown up with a daughter of her own.

The townsfolk talked among themselves and declared the gesture sweet, but it didn’t stop them from finding the Dollmaker an altogether eccentric sort. If it bothered him, the Dollmaker never said anything about it. His routine stayed the same, whatever names given behind his back

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or to his hidden face.The Dollmaker would set the boxes on the ground as careful

as if the contained sleeping infants. From the first box he pulled out a bit of shade, a faded quilt made by a loving grandmother and small hand carved boxes of tools and paint. The small boxes went on the larger crate, the blanket on the ground behind it and the shade just above and slightly to the side. From the second box came the dolls. First arms and eyes then half finished naked bodies, then half finished dresses, and then from the very bot-tom, from satin-lined boxes came three dolls.

He would never sell his masterpieces. He never even gave them names.

From the red-lined box came a doll of palest porcelain. Her lips and hair were the color of rubies by candlelight. The paint used on her eyes was made with real gold. Tiny veins of gold and red jewels were sewn into her velvet dress and tightly curled tresses and her body was the standard childlike form, but her face was shapely and belonged to a woman. She smelled like newly open roses in the afternoon. She was a queen.

From the pink-lined box came a doll who was in form the twin to the first. Her curls were wild and unadorned gold and her eyes were wider than her twin’s and looked constantly excited. Her slippers were dark blue set with a single diamond on the toe. One color could not be used to describe her eyes—they began as midnight along the edges then lightened and changed to pinks, purples, reds and golds until it reached the tiny black pupil. Her dress matched her eyes and her wild curls. She smelled of strawber-ries and deflowered rosebuds.

The last was the smallest of the dolls, half the size of her four sisters and twice as delicate. She had come from a blue-lined box. She was paler than the ruby doll, her tilted blue eyes wider than the pink’s. Her clothing alone was embroidered silk. Her hair was strange for it too was a blue that would be natural on anything other than hair. She had no smell, not even of the paints used in her making. Her eyes were too shiny, as if about to cry.

So well crafted were they that they seemed like breathing tiny children on the cusp of speaking. Their painted glass eyes seemed to follow browsers around the market and more than one person had sworn they’d seen the dolls blink or tilt their heads. But the Dollmaker would never back these stories up. He never even spoke of the dolls except to declare he would never sell them. He never even gave them names.

Little girls would stop and watch the Dollmaker at work in qui-et wonder and want nothing else but one of the sisters.

“These dolls are not for children or collectors or nurseries,” he would say. “I made them wrong. I forgot to give them a heart. They are not for the likes of you and you should be grateful for that. Have another doll. See here? I just finished this one. A heart nestles in her chest and she wants only for a friend like you.”

And the Dollmaker would hold up a doll from where he had been working and it would be a beautiful doll by all accounts, but not perfect. There was always a blemish. A spot, a line, a slight imperfection that made the dolls look more alive. They were flawed but beautiful. And if the children or their parents hesitated the Dollmaker would make a little necklace for the doll

and the child at no additional charge, just for the two of them. Years later, the plastic dolls would be forgotten in a landfill or

cardboard box but the Dollmaker’s dolls would still be sitting polished and dusted on the shelf, taken down once a week to brush the curls and straighten out the dress.

The Dollmaker should have never let the dolls out of their boxes but the sisters attracted many customers. The Dollmaker had the brains but not the heart to lock them away, a fact he often lamented.

It started with the doll in the pink-lined box. It was fitting things started with her. She did after all, the Dollmaker would later muse, have the look of an instigator about her.

A little girl with blonde curls in a pink ribbon and dress de-manded her mother buy the doll from the pink-lined box. She couldn’t live without it. The Dollmaker said no. The mother pulled out her check-book.The Dollmaker said no and pulled out a different doll. She would have none of it and ended up storming away in tears.

“Shame on you,” said the mother. “Yes,” said the Dollmaker, eying the pink doll warily. “Shame

on me.”If the dolls never came

out again, that would have been the end of it, but the little girl snuck back to the booth and waited until the Dollmaker’s back was turned and she snatched the doll off the table and ran off.

The Dollmaker watched her disappear into the crowd, sighed and went back to his work. He turned his mind to other places and times, like little Emily, now grown and a successful artist, who had sent him the most lovely portrait last week.

The child named her stolen doll Lucy and she was never aban-doned or replaced. It was all she wanted. They needed match-ing everything—matching dresses, matching earrings, match-ing pajamas for when they slept together in the girl’s bed.

Lucy had not been made with a heart but the cavity where it should have been was a fantastic place to hide pill bottles and little plastic bags of white powder that made all of the girl’s dreams come true. It never seemed to show up on a scanner or smelled by a dog. It was a perfect situation, the girl would say to herself.

But the girl could not stop time. Lucy’s body weakened, espe-cially around the chest area. Lucy broke and a piece of porce-lain pierced the girl’s heart when she rolled over in her sleep. A boy

But the girl although the little girl treasured Lucy above all oth-er things, she could not stop time. The body of Lucy weakened, especially around the chest area. One night while the girl slept dreams of white powder, Lucy nestled against her breast, Lucy broke. A boy found her two weeks later and did nothing except raid her money and the doll. The police found her a week after that.

Lucy ended up discarded in a dumpster by the boy after he had taken what he wanted from her chest. She was taken to a landfill where she was found by her creator, for sometimes the Dollmaker liked to come here and find old treasures. He

You must never make a perfect doll. There must be a tiny flaw somewhere that people will see.

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picked her up, took off her name and soiled clothing, fixed her empty chest and brushed her hair and put her back in her pink-lined box. She came home but her brief escape had planted ideas in unfriendly and foolish minds.

The doll in the red-lined box was stolen not long after her twin, stolen by a poor widower who gave it to his father. Neither of them could stand the idea of being bested by the other. The daughter named the red doll Elizabeth, a name from a book she had been reading. She and Elizabeth and her father would read often and the daughter would make Elizabeth act out all the hero parts and the daughter would go to sleep with dreams of doing great things worthy of bedtime stories.

The daughter started taking Elizabeth to school as a good luck charm. She excelled at every subject and graduated at the top of her class. Several notable universities offered the money her fa-ther could never have come up with to continue her education. She went to law school, became a lawyer, then a senator. Her support-ers and rivals all admitted she had great skill and even greater luck. Elizabeth stayed with her in a special compartment made into the senator’s briefcase.

Perhaps, historians would later muse, she would have become President but for an unfortunate incident. The senator had just fin-ished making a speech at the school she had attended as a child and one of the students tried to grab at Elizabeth while the doll was sitting atop the senator’s briefcase. The senator furiously grabbed the doll and smacked the child across the face, ending her politi-cal career. She faded into obscurity and hid in her own home, ven-turing out only to throw Elizabeth at her father’s head and blame him for her failures. The heartbroken father returned Elizabeth to the Dollmaker, who said no words of forgiveness or fury. He left her name with the father and put the doll back in her red-lined box.

No one stole the doll from the blue-lined box. No one snatched up the blue-haired doll with her too shiny eyes. She was given away.

It happened on a Saturday morning as the Dollmaker walked his boxes to his usual place. There, huddled on the sidewalk in filthy rags and matted dark hair was a shivering girl. She was uncon-scious. No one in the town paid her much mind. The Dollmaker paused and set down his boxes to examine the girl, careful not to show his eyes. He rolled her over and lifted her hand and moved

the hair from her face. Her eyes remained shut. If not for the shiver-ing, he might have thought she was dead or frozen. The Dollmaker took her to a doctor who declared there was nothing he could do. There was something wrong with her heart and she would not be able to get a transplant.

The Dollmaker did not set up his tent that day. He took the girl back to his home, washed her and dressed her and called her Faye. She did not respond to his touch or his words and lay asleep. The only indication she lived was a trembling heartbeat and un-sure breath.

Sadly, the Dollmaker accepted the truth of the words of the doctor. His brain told him to accept the death, but he had not the heart for such things. He took the doll from the blue-lined box and placed it in Faye’s bed.

The next morning Faye and the doll were sitting at his table, eat-ing breakfast and smiling when he entered the room.

Faye rarely moved further than bed to chair to coach in the fol-lowing days, moving with her tiny pale feet wavering in front of her with one hand on the blue-haired doll and the other on the Dollmaker’s hand.

The doctor, at the Dollmaker’s request, stopped by the house, observed Faye’s movements, her laughter and the color on her cheeks and pronounced it a Miracle.

“Perhaps,” the Dollmaker said. Had the doctor been paying more attention to him and less on the Miracle, he might have no-ticed regret in the Dollmaker’s voice. But the doctor only had eyes for a Miracle.

What a kind soul the Dollmaker had been to take in the girl, said the doctor to his friends and family. The town readily agreed that it had been a Miracle and the Dollmaker might be eccentric, but wasn’t he a good hearted person? And how kind of him to make a doll just like the girl for her to play with? For now that she was recovering, it seemed she and her doll were uncannily alike in appearance, except for the hair color. It was quickly forgotten the doll had been around some years before Faye had shown up. The two were firmly linked together from beginning to end in the mind of the town.

The only thing the town ever thought was the rumor that the Dollmaker refused to show Faye his full face. How very odd, the townsfolk said to themselves, feeling slighted for Faye’s sake. But Faye didn’t seem to mind and never asked.

Photo by Jeb Draper

Sentient Magazine26

Faye continued to live with the Dollmaker, coming to market ev-ery third Saturday. And the Dollmaker, for his part, began to teach her his craft. How to stitch dresses, how much blush should go on cheeks, how dark eyelashes should be, the best sort of hair to use for wigs and how to paint glass eyes blown by hand.

But above all else, the Dollmaker told Faye, you must never make a perfect doll. There must be a tiny flaw somewhere that people will see, even if they do not recognize it. There must be a flaw and there must be a heart, otherwise they will not be fit for others to own. For her part, Faye did just as she was told. But for her own doll, she largely discounted the Dollmaker’s advice and Faye spent hours examining first her doll and then herself for flaws to erase. She never found any on the doll. She made matching cloth-ing for them. She returned from a salon with blue hair the perfect match of her doll’s. She powered her face and watched her waist and pressed her clothing so the folds would be just right.

Faye tried to do the same for the Dollmaker as she had done for herself, but he refused her advances. If his trousers tore and his hair went out of place or he went to bed with paint beneath his nails, he paid it little mind.

Things continued much this way for many years, Faye and the Dollmaker living pleasantly together making dolls for the town and would have continued this way if Faye had not tried to see his face. Always he kept it hidden, through hood or mask or tinted glasses and Faye began to think this unfair. She began to suspect there was some deformity or blotch he was trying to cover up. So one night, while the Dollmaker slept, Faye went to his room and crawled into his bed. His sleeping breath blew lightly at the sheets. A black-eyed mask lay over his face with wispy hair over it. Careful not to make a sound, Faye gently lifted brushed away the mask from his face.

She was disappointed. There were no holes or skin blotches. No scars or blemishes.

It was the most perfect face Faye had ever seen outside of a doll. The skin was pale and smooth, no stray hairs or wrinkles, pores so small they were invisible. The face was perfect, flawless like polished porcelain.

The eyes that he never showed were equally perfect. Faye ex-cepted at least one to be missing or marked up in some fashion but there were just two closed eyelids framed by those very pretty natural lashes that only men and dolls ever seem to get.

Faye started to turn when the Dollmaker awoke. He sat straight up in bed and turned his full gaze onto his blue-haired charge. His irises were a grey so pale they nearly disappeared into the whites. The Dollmaker’s eyes were glassy and shiny as if about to cry.

“Get out,” he said, rising from his bed and grabbing the girl by her elbow, forcing her from his room down the hallway and out the front door, slamming and bolting it shut.

Faye’s doll was still inside the house. She screamed all night for him to let her back in and give her back her doll but the Doll-maker went back to his room, put his mask back over his eyes and went back to sleep.

By three in the morning, Faye had stopped screaming. She was out of breath and her chest felt tight. Her blue hair lay listless and damp on her head. Dirt clung to the bottom of her feet and her palms and sweat coated her skin. She walked to the back of the small house and grabbed a rock from the dirt that was as large as her fist and bashed in the bathroom window. It was a small area and a tight fit and the breaking was uneven. Shards of glass scraped and dug into Faye’s body as she entered the house.

She did not go the Dollmaker’s room— she wanted her doll, not him. Her doll was in his workshop where he kept all his dolls and the three sisters in their lined boxes. Faye grabbed box and after box, tearing off lids and emptying their contents. She overturned tables, threw pain bottles and brushes and smashed worthless doll parts to the floor. She couldn’t find her doll.

The Dollmaker, she decided, must be hiding it, keeping it in his room when it did not belong to him. It was her doll. He had stolen it. It was very hard to breathe. Her heart was fluttering erratically against her rib cage. Her head felt light and a trickle of red ran down her forehead like careless paint mixing with her blue hair.

Faye grabbed a doll’s arm that had broken off into jagged edg-es at the elbow and went to the Dollmaker’s room where he was sleeping soundly.

His perfect face was perfectly content to steal her doll and let Faye shiver alone out in the cold. He had made a mockery of her and her little attempts at beauty, all the while hiding his own face, more perfect than hers, more perfect than anyone’s, so he could laugh at her. All this went through Faye’s mind, intensifying her hatred.

It wasn’t fair, she thought. It wasn’t right. Faye stumbled closer and closer to the bed with cut feet and heavy breathing.

The Dollmaker did not stir. He did not feel the weight of Faye’s gaze or her bleeding form pressing down in his body. Faye clutched a broken doll arm so tightly in her hand that her knuck-les turned white and oozed out blood. She raised the arm and brought it down, slashing him across the throat and tearing off his mask so she could watch his too-shiny eyes be borne and die.

She held onto his form and placed a hand over his perfect mouth to stop any struggles and silence any cries. He did neither. His only reaction was a single tear rolling down his cheek. He lay still and silent until life left him. She took the body and put it outside in a garbage barrel where all the broken and discarded dolls went.

Then Faye went back into the house and fell asleep in the Doll-maker’s bed.

When she woke the next morning, the new Dollmaker cleaned the workroom and went to the market square with all the other farmers and crafters on the third Saturday and peddled her wares.

She would enter the square balancing a single wine crate with her tools and doll parts. She always smiled, but her eyes were too shiny as if about to cry. If one looked at her lawless skin closely, they would find scars running up her arms and legs and face, hid-ing under expensive makeup.

She worked on dolls during the market day, a doll that was her physical perfect likeness sitting always in her lap.

The Dollmaker set up her area to show off three dolls in glass cases she would never have the heart to sell. The first two were sisters and came from boxes lined in pink and the third was their brother and came from a box lined in white. He was tall and spin-dly, but not awkward. His clothing was pressed to make every fold perfect. His white wispy hair, so fine to put to shame even the most masterful of spiders, was neatly brushed. He smelled of dried paint but his nails were clean. His pale glass eyes were too shiny as if about to cry and a glass tear was frozen on his cheek.

The town marveled at the brother. “He’s so sad,” they said, “but so perfect.”

And the Dollmaker would just smile.“Yes,” he’d say. “He’s perfect. Would you like one of your own?”

Words by Earl Parsons

The Digital Comedian

Comedy has adjusted well to Society 2.0. While the mu-sic and publishing industries look at the Web as an

ever-vigilant threat, comedy veterans and rookies alike have taken advantage of its opportunities. Will Ferrell and Adam McKay debuted Funny or Die in 2007 with “The Landlord” and the site ushered in an era of commercial success that parlayed into increased recognition of come-dians on the Internet.

Funny or Die forced the comedy community to increase its presence on the Web, but performers have taken ad-vantage of social networking since the Myspace days, and microblogging services like Twitter were practically made for telling short jokes and advertising show dates. The strongest new media community to grow from this elec-tronic spring of success is the podcasting circuit, which has loosened the stranglehold that morning zoo programs like Mark and Brian had over radio humor, what with their decade-old Monica Lewinsky jokes and songs about fart-ing.

Shows range in content and quality, but professional podcasts usually employ a revolving cast of the best ac-tors and stand-ups working in comedy today, usually with a heavy emphasis on impressions and improvisation. Podcasts are a great place to hear your favorite comedi-ans in a natural environment or learn a different side of dramatic performers like Jon Hamm. There are a slough of other great comedic performers getting exposure who are rarely seen outside of their secondary roles on a few sitcom episodes, from Andy Daly of “Mad TV” and Paul F. Tompkins of “Mr. Show,” to Upright Citizens Brigade co-founder Matt Besser and the Sklar brothers from the ESPN Classic’s “Cheap Seats.”

The podcasting medium promotes a more specialized type of humor, marking a sharp evolution from stand-up’s origins in vaudeville.

Stand-up wasn’t considered a culturally relevant art form until the ’70s brought the popularity of Richard Pryor and George Carlin. HBO premiered on satellite in 1975 and began carrying hour-long stand-up specials, cultivat-ing an interest in live comedy that lead to an explosion of venues across the country. Three-hundred clubs sprung up between 1978 and 1988, according to Patrick Bromley, comedians guide of www.About.com. Every bar and res-taurant suddenly wanted talented people to yell at their

customers through a microphone. By the end of the ’80s, Roseanne Barr and Bill Cosby had

their own shows and stand-up programming that sprouted up on different channels across cable television, from the A&E Network’s An Evening at the Improv to MTV’s Half-Hour Comedy Hour.

A flood of comics rose to prominence in this era, from Eddie Murphy to Steven Wright. But for every comic who found success, there were those like Bill Hicks who couldn’t find their audience. Comedy club attendees didn’t under-stand his abrasive, confrontational approach to the dis-gruntled everyman archetype that became a stand-up staple under Carlin and Lenny Bruce.

Comedy dwindled in demand during the early ’90s as established performers transitioned into acting and bars replaced stand-up with karaoke. Performers who cater to a club audience were able to tour the remaining clubs on the circuit. As casual fans were weeded out, new comedi-ans had to wait for the debut of Comedy Central and the Internet to gain a following.

Comedy Central filled the gap left when HBO remained a premium network, catering to the audience that stuck with stand-up after the crash.

Alternative comedy began to thrive as the Cable Age transitioned to the Internet Age, outgrowing the confin-ing training ground that comedy clubs had become in the brick-wall era of the late ’80s. Now comics can use podcasts and social networking to reach out to audiences most compatible with their style.

With the lowered demand for comedy club acts in the midst of the crash, stand-ups began performing at music venues, a strategy pioneered by anti-comic Neil Ham-burger in 2000. Comedians in this environment were able to cultivate an edgier style for a younger audience that could appreciate it. This movement culminated with the Comedians of Comedy tour in 2005, in which Patton Os-walt, Brian Posehn, Maria Bamford and a pre-“Hangover” Zach Galifianakis toured indie rock venues across the country and documented it for Comedy Central.

Stand-up comedy is now one of the few alternative me-diums that have taken advantage of new media and man-aged to climb to the top. Podcasting and YouTube has kept stand-up and sketch comedy relevant in the Infor-mation Age.

Photo by Jeb DraperP y p

Opinion

Photo by Jeb Draper

Issue 0 29

Fans of Capcom’s “Vs. series have awaited the return of the frantic, light-ning fast 3 on 3 battles that Marvel vs. Capcom 2 launched more then 10

years ago. After many years of speculation and rumors, Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds is a reality. The flashing lights and diverse roster span-ning the two universes return with a revamped look and new characters.

The game’s most distinctive features are the new 3-D character models and dark, comic book aesthetic. Marvel vs. Capcom 3 offers 36 unique char-acters, equally split between Marvel and Capcom, including some new additions to the franchise. Many characters from the previous installment, which boasted a whopping 50 characters, were cut or replaced. Popular characters such as Spider-Man and Ryu make a return, accompanied by newcomers Zero from Capcom and Phoenix from Marvel.

The Good:Balance. The previous installment, although fun, faced the difficulty of

balancing characters, many of which were slightly altered clones of oth-er characters or faced problems because of their size. Capcom has since minimized that issue by providing better-scaled and even characters that interact fluidly with one another. The controls have been revamped to light, medium, strong and special attacks that work well in chaining combos, making it easier for beginners to handle the complexity of executing the devastating over-the-top hyper-combos the franchise is known for.

Capcom has also added a new gameplay technique called the X-Factor, which makes characters glow red and increases their abilities for a short period of time, allowing disadvantaged players to quickly turn the tables on their opponents.

Finally, the title sequence is a beautiful display of full motion video that showcases the somewhat-limited story that these games tend to have.

The Bad:Difficulty. At first, beginners will spend more time seeing the Game Over

screen than actually playing the game, which has no tutorial feature except for a half hearted mission mode in which players are given tasks to achieve with each character.

While difficult at first, once you become familiar with the combo system, the game becomes so easy that it is difficult not to notice.

Dropping and swapping characters from previous installments is a dou-ble-edged sword. Neglecting to include fan favorites such as Megaman and Gambit makes the character select screen seem lacking, but Capcom has announced plans to include more characters as downloadable content. The character endings also leave something to be desired, as they are still pictures rather than full motion video.

The Verdict:Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds has small flaws that are negli-

gible to the overall experience. This game was made to be enjoyed by two human players willing to develop an impressive skill and uncanny desire to find the perfect team.

Capcom’s efforts to create a beautiful, challenging game show their ability to efficiently combine both universes. Promises of downloadable characters keep up the spirits of fans hoping to see an old favorite of theirs make the jump into fray. Online mode is quick and easy to find opponents of varying skill levels.

Words by Juan MejiaMarvel Vs. Capcom 3

Reviews

Yorke’s soulful sighs appear in the relaxing songs “Lotus Flow-er” and “Codex,” both of which contain the conventional Radio-head-esque, sorrowful sound.

The new album is still very listenable, just somewhat disap-pointing when compared to other enjoyable classics. People love Radiohead because they aren’t the average mainstream band, and even though it doesn’t show, they have much more poten-tial than what’s heard in The King of Limbs. Hopefully this album doesn’t set the tone for the rest of their career and is just a one-time occurrence, because if it isn’t, I’m afraid the Radiohead that won the hearts of millions of fans in the last two decades might become fiercely polarized.

Sentient Magazine30

Unlike their previous album Plastic Beach,Gorillaz’ new venture is a

much more calm endeavor, with each track being recorded in a different city while touring.

The album saw a physical release on April 16 in vinyl for Record Store Day and April 18 for CD, although it has been available online since Christmas, the newest Gorillaz release has gone by mostly unnoticed, especially con-sidering the praise that Plastic Beach had received.

“Phoner to Arizona,” the record’s first track and single, introduces the listen-er to the musical stylings and tone that dominates the length of the album. Running just under 45 minutes, The Fall is a sentimental, bipolar and often homesick record. There is a

The Fall, GorillazWords by J. W. Burch, IV

King of Limbs, RadioheadWords by Tyler Ash

In true unpredictable Radiohead form, their eighth album The King of Limbs was announced only five days before

its release date in February. It’s been four years since their last self-released album In Rainbows was released, so when I heard about it I was overwhelmed with excitement. The al-bum artwork looked awesome (as usual) and I knew it would probably be just as worthy of my ears’ attention as In Rain-bows before it.

Radiohead has been one of my favorite bands for awhile now, producing masterpieces like The Bends and OK Com-puter but I can honestly say that The King of Limbs falls far from my expectations.

Every Radiohead album has its own personality and the experimental band has become known for their unpredict-able and unorthodox creative output, but their latest album is sadly very predictable.

I’ve found that some Radiohead songs take a few listens to get used to, but almost every song in The King of Limbs took me at least two or three tries for my ears to get settled. Melancholic tones overlay crunching electronic beats with Thom Yorke’s haunting voice crooning in and out of the songs.

But the interesting variation found in their other albums just wasn’t there. Repeating drum loops in “Bloom,” “Feral,” “Separator” and every other song make the average Ra-diohead fan bored and disappointed, causing the album to seem as if the praiseworthy band was just going through the motions for the past four years since In Rainbows.

This is their shortest album to date, with only eight tracks and around 37 minutes of music. The two notable songs on the compilation appear toward the end of the album. Thom

melancholy air to each track, even when the music is somewhat upbeat.

One good example of this manic tone is the track “California & the Slipping of the Sun,” which begins with an announcement from an LA train station giving way to an acoustic guitar and slightly distorted vo-cals that progressively delve deeper into an electronic abyss.

The Fall is very disconnected from the band’s other albums. Lyrics and elec-tronic melodies are often distorted to the point of indistinguishability.

Overall, The Fall is a grand album and will definitely be enjoyed by longtime fans.

However, those new to the band would probably be better suited with their earlier releases like De-mon Days or Plastic Beach. After that, The Fall will be ready for a revisit.

Issue 0 31

Red Giant & Silian RailWords by Nathan Collins

Pride Prejudice & Zombies 3

shouted “WHOO!” bursts into a carefully-timed break in the feedback.

Then comes the polyrhythmic, math-inspired sonic beating—interspersed with Schmidt’s crisp, jazz-influenced drumming, Sanchez’s reverb-laden guitar expeditions into outer space, lead-guitarist Williams’ signa-ture fret-shredding and bassist Adrian Hammons’ thunderous rumblings. The track ends with a descent into absolute unbridled heaviness.

I remember the times I saw the Giant play this song live, and it was always fucking wild. Schmidt threw a stick into the mosh pit at Monstros—the same time that Hammons broke his strap and played his bass on the floor like an upright bass. Then the last performance at the Origami Lounge—Hammons handed his still fuzzing bass to the audience, and as it crowd-surfed, everyone chanted “YEAH!” in punch-drunk ecstasy. Though those times are gone, the track is here as a memento.

Visit Sidewithus.com and click on “listen” to hear the track I’m talk-ing about. Hit them up for a download of the track. If you want a physi-cal copy of this sublime limited-press split, see Sesar Sanchez at The Music Connection—the best place to find local records. And don’t think it’s all about the Giant—Silian Rail is out-of-this-world badass in their own right.

Few bands ever live up to their name—but Chico’s post-rock instrumentalists Red Giant mix bright,

sparkling melodic content with astronomical, engulfing heavy tones that can melt the surface of the earth.

This four-song split with Oakland’s math-heavy, shoe-gaze power-duo Silian Rail, released through Stand With Us Records, represents the bright burning-out of Red Giant’s four-year, local-only career.

It’s a sad, post-apocalyptic world with them gone. Mem-bers Sesar Sanchez, Kirk Williams, and Casey Schmidt all have other monolithic local projects—Teeph, Armed For Apocalypse and Birds of Fire, respectively. But these last two Red Giant songs, alongside the memories of their first album, You Sir, Have Falsified the Future, warm the cold dark insides of a musicophile’s chest cavity.

“Rife with the Itus”—once a live-only special, encap-sulates everything that was so groundbreaking about Red Giant. After short noise-guitar intro, a collectively

Words by Gina Pence

Elizabeth Bennett was enjoying her “ever after” with Fitzwilliam Darcy when a zombie outbreak rav-

aged England in the times of the Regency. Trained as war-riors to fight the “sorry stricken” zombies, Lizzie and her family vow to destroy every zombie they come across—until Darcy is bitten. Un-willing to part with her love, Lizzie must compromise everything she values to find a secret antidote to save him.

Steven Hockensmith’s Dreadfully Ever After is the third entry in the the original Pride and Prejudice and Zombies series, written originally by Seth Grahame-Smith. While the original Pride Prejudice and Zombies is a delightful reimagining of Austen’s masterpiece that seamlessly blends romance, zombies, intrigue and ninjas, this misses its original tongue-in-cheek tone. It’s a fun read but takes itself too seriously in the middle of the novel as the characters take off on their own respective journeys that seem to trav-el nowhere.

Jane Austen’s a tough act to follow, but Hockensmith does an admirable job of keeping the same themes while in-

cluding the playful additions of Grahame-Smith’s edited edition. Thank-fully, Hockensmith takes a liberty with the original characters to fit in his apocalyptic world. Supporting characters such as Kitty, Mary, Mr. Bennett and Anne de Bourgh are given back stories and character depth that was never investigated in the original or in the previous books of the series.

Unfortunately, two of the pivotal characters are neglected in this re-model and their original fiery personalities are rendered dulled and

dreary. Darcy spends much of the novel moping over his new condition as Lizzie repetitively bemoans her new status as a married lady. Hockensmith encourages the readers to become invested in the outcome of the novel, which will help through the muddled middle. Granted, readers will have to remember Austen’s ver-sion of Lizzie and Darcy to care much about them, but Hockensmith’s developed characters of Kitty, Mary and Catherine de Bourgh will keep readers intrigued.

For the third adaptation of a classic novel, Hocken-smith has an adequate grasp on what his task is—create new storylines, develop existing characters and intro-duce exciting new ones, and keep the stuff that worked so readers can reminisce. The regression of Darcy’s and Lizzie’s characters is lamentable, and lovers of the

classic may resent the departure from Austen’s masterpiece in much the same way Twilight is a departure from Dracula. But those willing to sus-pend their disbelief will enjoy an afternoon of zombie slayings in Lizzie’s England, as she slouches her way into becoming the spitfire heroine we all remember.

www.sentientmagazine.com