Last night we watched the 1932 Boris Karloff film classic from Universal Pictures, The Mummy, I borrowed it from the library. Great, great film. And great research material for me, given my interest in spicing up the plot of Jim and the Flims with some Egyptian spells and a mummy.

In the first scene, it’s 1922 (echoing Carter’s opening of King Tut’s tomb in 1922), and two archaeologists are in their field quarters, studying their haul. In the corner leans an open sarcophagus with Karloff mostly wrapped in mummy-bandages, and with a wonderfully wrinkled face. He’s the mummy of Imhotep, a priest from 3,700 years ago. A handsome young Oxford-educated archaeologist is studying a little box with an inscription of the lid along the lines of, “Whoever opens this box will die from the mummy’s curse.”

So naturally he opens the box, and within is The Scroll of Thoth. Thoth is that Egyptian god who has a skinny bird’s head, an ibis head. The hieroglyphs are so old that they’re pre-Dynastic. But our dreamy archaeologist copies some of them out, and begins trying to read them, reciting the text in a low murmur.

In his casket, Karloff/Imhotep, twitches an eyelid, opens his eyes, moves his hand. Cut to blond archaeologist youth still studying the Scroll of Imhotep a few feet away. A crufty hand comes into the frame and rests upon the scroll. On one finger, the mummy’s hand bears a ring with a scarab in it. The mummy leaves carrying the Scroll of Thoth. The Oxford boy backs off to the side of the little room and—begins hysterically laughing.

“He laughed until he died in a strait-jacket the next year,” we learn from the romantic-lead-type archaeologist in the next scene, which is set ten years later.

Karloff reappears, he’s still the walking-mummy Imhotep, but he looks fairly cleaned-up, thanks to magic. He’s wearing a fez and presents himself as a local named Ardeth Bey. He guides the romantic-lead archaeologist to the untouched tomb of Princess Ankh-es-en-amon, a so-called “Vestal Virgin,” from the good old days.

A quick jump forward and now Ankh’s mummy and all of the statues and ornaments from her tomb are in Cairo museum, Karloff/Imhotep/Bey goes there, lights a lamp, kneels, and recites a spell from the Scroll of Thoth, which he still has.

“Ankh Salaam. Ankh Salaam. Ankh Salaam,” chants Karloff, which is kind of great, as he’s using, like, the only two vaguely Egyptian words that anyone in the U.S. audience knows.

Not far away, in downtown Cairo, a flapperesque half-Egyptian girl at a nightclub hears the psychic call. She (played by the dishy Zita Johann) is the reincarnation of the Princess, she carries the ancient ba and ka. She’s peppy and languid by turns, depending on whether she’s under the Mummy’s spell.

And now there’s some back and forth. The romantic-lead archaeologist wears an Amulet of Isis to protect himself from the Mummy. Close-ups of Karloff’s wrinkled, triangular face, eyes huge, glaring hyptnotically. To cast a spell he holds out his hand with the scarab ring. To kill an distant enemy, he clenches his hand, and sends an old duffer to the carpet with a heart attack.

The Mummy wants to kill the flapper and then to use the Scroll of Thoth to revive her to be his wife. They’ll hang out with the sun god, Amon Ra. Karloff calls this transformation The Great Change. But a statue of the goddess Isis saves the flapper.

And in the last scene Karloff does the classic Mummy-movie thing of turning back into a skull. And now the lovers can get it on. Yeah, baby!

I’m thinking about Ancient Egypt for two reasons. For one thing, having seen the King Tut show , I’m thinking of bringing the mummy of Amenhotep into my novel, Jim and the Flims.

And for another, I enjoyed my daughter Isabel’s re-invention of hieroglyphics in some of the panels of her graphic novel Unfurling . I’ll reproduce a couple more images from Isabel’s graphic novel today—if you’re in the San Francisco area, you can still go see the show this month—see Isabel’s Unfurling page for more info.

Several years ago, I gave Isabel a book on hieroglyphics, and she eventually came up with the brilliant notion of using a form of heiroglphyics as the native tongue of the restless street-people known as tweakers. (One of her friends suggested the language might be called Tweakenese.)

I love that there are glyphs for cigarettes and for shopping carts. And only a few different glyphs, really. When you look at ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, it’s like they’re always talking about the same dozen or so things.

I’ve been gleaning more info about Egyptian notions of the afterlife—which I’d calling Flimsy in my novel—and I’ll reproduce some of it here, mostly edited from the Afterlife section of the Wikipedia article on Ancient Egyptian religion.

The ancient Egyptians believed that humans possessed a ka, or life-force, which left the body at the point of death. Even after death, the ka needed offerings of food, whose spiritual essence it could still consume. The ka might be thought of as simple existence or the bare notion of “I am.”

Each person also had a ba, the individual personality—what we might call software. Unlike the ka, the ba by default remained attached to the body after death. Egyptian funeral rituals were intended to release the ba from the body so that it could move freely. After being freed, the ba was believed to return to its mummified body each night to receive new life. Thus the state of the tomb and the mummy were important for the survival of both ka and ba.

[Image taken from a blog post by a programmer named Xaprb.]

Once the ka was free to roam, its goal was to unite with the ba to form a complete soul, called an akh. In order to achieve this, the ba had to pass a judgment known as the Weighing of the Heart, where the jackal-headed god Anubis weighed the heart of the deceased against a feather (which symbolized Maat, the divine principle of fairness and order). The ibis-headed Thoth took notes.

If the heart was heavy, the ba was destroyed by the crocodile-headed demon Ammut, also known as the gobbler. Otherwise the ba united with the ka to form an akh. And then, by the way, you’d want to make sure that the gods gave you back your heart.

Specific beliefs about the activities of the akh varied. The vindicated dead were said to dwell in Osiris’ kingdom, a lush and pleasant land believed to exist somewhere beyond the western horizon, and kings were said to travel with Ra the sun-god in his boat that glides across the sky every day.

[This image is another detail from Unfurling again…I like the SF feel of it. The gnarled fingers tinkering with the broken hi-tech artifact.]

There was also a notion that an akh could also travel in the world of the living and magically affect events.

On a completely different topic, I saw Devo play their whole first album live at the Regency ballroom (about the size of the Fillmore) in San Francisco last week. Here’s a YouTube video that a guy standing in front of me made with his cell phone, it’s of their superficially non-PC (but, at a deeper level, rather empathetic) song “Mongoloid”.

It was great to see Devo come out and kick butt with their music. They’re old, but they’ve gotten very tight and extreme. We had a great cheer session. “Are we not men???” the bass player would bellow, and we’d roar back, “We are Devo!!!” My favorite moment was when they took an instrumental break during this strong, and were just shredding the music.

I still recall how liberating I found that first Devo album. Like the Ramones, Devo made me want to write science-fiction in a certain kind of way. Extreme, rocking, in your face, dadaistic, and easy to absorb.

[“Cave of the Lost Secrets” image by Daniel White.]

Yet another topic: the Mandelbulb, that is the long-sought three-dimensional versions of the Mandelbrot fractal, which I blogged about before in my post, “In Search of the Mandelbulb.” Daniel White has just posted a very nice summary of his work on the Mandelbulb.

“Unfurling” is a graphic novel drawn on a scroll of paper by my daughter, Isabel Rucker, going on display from November 5-27, at the SOMArts gallery in San Francisco.

[Tuesday night: A weary Isabel finishes mounting the show. The scroll is in three 150 foot rolls, mounted one above the other, held in place by wood stripping and protected by Mylar plastic.]

“Unfurling” stretches over 400 feet long, is a foot high, and is drawn in black ink pen with watery washes. The comic panels vary in length (up to ten feet long) to mirror pauses, vast scenery, or thought patterns.

Most of the panels are too long to fit into the narrow column of this blog, so I’ll just post a few details clipped from the panels so you can at least have an idea of the art.

The seven-year project began in 2002, when Isabel decided to free herself from the size of regular pieces of paper, canvas or sketchpad. She was living in a warehouse full of artists near the intersection of Cesar Chavez Street and Third Street in San Francisco at the time.

She fell in love with a young man in Pinedale, Wyoming, and moved out there to live on a ranch with him—and a few years later they married. Pinedale is definitely off the grid, but filled with natural beauty.

“Every day there was something new to see,” as it says on the full-length version of the panel above. Briefly put, “Unfurling” describes Isabel’s journey from San Francisco to Wyoming.

Living in Wyoming seems to have brought her to a level of visionary peace.

The opening party for the Unfurling : This Land show is Thursday, November 5, 2009, 6 p.m.-11 p.m. at SOMArts, 934 Brannan Street, in San Francisco, CA 94103.

The show also includes new pencil drawings by cartoonist Mark Bode for the graphic novel Cobalt 60, and Mike Dingle’s I See the Future, a massive collage work consisting of found objects combined into the general shape of the United States. This opening should draw an interesting crowd.

Directions: SOMArts is near Eighth Street and Brannan, near Trader Joe’s, not far from the the Sixth Street exit from Route 80. Here’s a link to a map.

I hope to see some of you there!

Added November 8…

Here’s a pasted-together and way-too-small photo of the left end of Unfurling as it’s hung. You read the whole top row, then the next row, and then the third row. Awesome. Mabye later we’ll post a big image of the whole thing. Or make it into a book…

This is Isabel at the opening, in the center, with some friends and viewers, standing in front of some of Marc Bode’s comic art.

I’m celebrating Halloween at the World Fantasy Con in San Jose. It’s nice to see so many writer friends and to discuss our craft and biz. I talked about my paintings on a panel yesterday with some other writer-artists.

[See my previous post for info about the Japanese paintings.]

If you have too much fun, Emilio sent in a link to a “lifelogging” article about 22 “lifebox” tools, starting with the SenseCam, which takes a picture of just about every damned thing you see—it’s said to be “aimed at helping Alzheimer’s and dementia patients recall the events of their day.” Where did I put my glasses? Did a ghost take them?

Woooo!