Matthew Stadler's Personal Weblog

Thursday night, May 10, Mississippi Ballroom, Portland, Oregon. Mark that date on your calendars because you’ll want to see this. I’ll be giving a lecture on the lost notebooks of Dr. Frieda Lionswater, which detail her design for a device that produces a clean form of energy. She disappeared in 1986, and all her notes and research with her. Before her untimely disappearance, Doctor Lionswater kept a laboratory out in Wonder Valley, a remote part of the Mojave Desert in California. I drove out to her former laboratory, the last place anyone had seen her. It was hot and dusty, and the air had an odd odor of chemical smoke when I drove up to the converted ranch where she had done her research. A very sinister man came out and I think he may have had a gun in his pocket. “Who the hell are you?” he said. I mumbled something about the wrong address and wasted no time getting out of there. Back in town I went to the library and to use the computer and mentioned the research I was doing to the librarian. Luck was with me as it turned out she had known Dr. Lionswater. She advised me not to go out to where the lab had been; it had been taken over by squatters who were making meth. She had heard that Dr. Lionswater had a son, John, who had moved to Malaysia. So I looked him up and caught a plane to Kuala Lumpur. Sadly, he had a mental illness that caused him to think he was Somerset Maugham. I had to play along with him. He had used his mother’s money to buy a rubber plantation and a white suit, and he didn’t have much of anything else, except a really good-looking boyfriend. The boyfriend, Musa, told me that John had been fine until he was attacked with a mysterious chemical, causing him to become mentally unstable. He had taken what was left of his mother’s money and moved to Malaysia. But he did have some moments of lucidity, and would talk about how his mother used to collect scorpion venom, which he thought was perhaps used for the mysterious device. “Be careful” he said to me as I got into a taxi bound for the airport. My next stop was to talk to Dr. Lionswater’s laboratory assistant. He was currently assisting another scientist doing research on Belgian chocolate, so I flew to Brussels and arranged a meeting. “So if you’re all concerned with the environment and stuff,” he said, “why are you flying all over the place?” He confronted me. However, I felt that he was hiding something by trying to be antagonistic. After talking to him for a long time and using my calming hypnosis techniques on him, he told me that Dr. Lionswater had an abandoned gold mine on her property, where she may have had another, secret lab. But he got very frightened when we talked about what may have happened to her, and started talking about conspiracies by oil company executives and the royal family of Brunei, and then all of the sudden refused to say another word. I flew to Lima, Peru next. What a city! I was lucky I got there when the Molusk Festival was going on. After some sightseeing, I went to interview Dr. Lionswater’s former husband Ben. He told me that Dr. Lionswater had buried a drum containing some papers in a remote cave on the coast of Maui. I chartered a plane, then chartered a fishing boat and went to the map coordinates he gave me. But in the cave was a man waiting for me with a big bag and a gun. I had been set up! He had been waiting in the damp cave for so long that it aggravated his arthritis and he couldn’t pull the trigger. I ran out of the cave, but more people were waiting for me, and they put me in a big burlap sack and dropped me from a helicopter into a shark-filled lagoon. But the burlap was fragile from being stored in that damp cave too long, so I was able to get out and escaped except I wasn’t fast enough and one of the sharks managed to bite me on the pinky finger. In fact I’m typing this with one hand! I stealthily made my way back to the cave, and the people were gone. I dug on a spot where the earth seemed to have been disturbed many years ago. I found a steel lunch box containing many papers with scientific notations on them. But if you want to know exactly what they said, and hear more about my research, you’ll have to come to my upcoming lecture in Portland. I have recently given this lecture in Melbourne, Australia, Caracas, Venezuela, Agana, Guam, Nairobi, Kenya, and of course, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I’ve been continually pleased and surprised that people seem genuinely interested and I’ve continued to draw large crowds in each place I visit. In fact in Caracas all the people could not fit into the auditorium, and had to watch it on closed-circuit television out in the street. The one in Melbourne was a bit sparse though. I think there was a big cricket match on that day. But the people who showed up showed great enthusiasm. The day after my lecture in Portland, I leave to give the lecture in Paris, Aachen, Germany, and Berlin. Make sure to attend my lecture in Portland, Oregon, on Thursday May 10, at the Mississippi Ballroom.

As you all know I love teaching. Another thing I love is traveling. Over the past couple of weeks I've had the opportunity to do both. First, on May the Tenth I traveled to Portland, to give a lecture on travel photography. Giving a lecture to Americans on art before going to France, was good practice. It was more than travel photography, it was about black and white travel photography. I talked to them about black and white film development, and creating a portable studio. The audience found it interesting you didn't have to worry about film damage at the Airport X-Ray machines, if you developed your own prints while on the road. Many folks came up to me afterwards and, asked about the details of how to construct one of these portable labs. The lecture itself ended at 3 in the afternoon, and my flight for Europe was at 6, so I didn't have long to answer questions. It had been thirteen years since I'd been out the country, and now I was spending about two weeks abroad. Of course the security procedures where defiantly bewildering, and I was thankful, that I had recently discovered the miracle of portable film development. In Paris I knew I'd be speaking in broken French (gasp), giving the "Inventors of art," advice. Actually I had thought of the French as more into beauty and the arts then they where. The audience I had was generally easy going, sans a couple of folks. When I lecture to them about film processing on the road, and stated "It would lead to better photos," a mumble spread through the room. I learned to talk less about art, and the times I did cover it, the audience appeared skeptical, which lead to me delivering an even less sound lecture. So I talked more about the technical side of film development. Apparently a lot of French artists have converted to digital photography, and so they where generally interested in the techniques used in mobile film processing and printing. But the next morning when I was to meet Herve Caumont. The lecture hall was the first real piece of France I observed, as my flight came in at night. It was a gigantic room, it probably seated in excess of one thousand people. As I walked through the halls, the sound was perfectly rendered. A foot step even sounded beautiful. I thought this was because of my sleep deprivednes. But when I met Mr. Caumont, the hall still had the same beautiful acoustics. Caumont was an amazing man to talk to. I always loved his travel books, and the life with which he described his travels, but to talk to him in real life was a mind blowing experience. Even with my broken French, and his broken, and British flavored, English the images he "painted" with words, as I said before, where amazing. He was preparing for a lecture but he did manage to tell me some interesting stories that hadn't made it to the final edit of his book. He says he'll add some of his stories to a future book, so I think I'll just leave you readers with some suspense. I then spent my remaining days in Germany. I visited the Alps, and it was sad to see how once covered snowy mountains, now resembled the Appalachians of my hometown. After two days in Germany, I gave a similar lecture in Berlin. Many Germans are proficient in English, I guess because of our occupation of them, so this lecture was relatively easy, and the crowd reaction resembled that of Portland, that is the many questions and surprises of this portable film lab.