The Culinarium in Pioneer Square. 2015-2023.

Our adventures of 2023 began by shutting down our beloved Nordo location in Pioneer Square. We took it apart bit by bit, sold some of it off, gave some of it away, and put some of it in storage for a later day. That space had served us well for 8 years, and it was an honor to be a part of that community. And, with that, one door closed.

But another door appeared. Unsure where it would lead we opened it with some trepidation. It opened onto a room of bookshelves and desks and cabinets and multiple other doors of all types. It glowed in a pale moonlight passing through a skylight. A few yellowed desk lamps scattered about the room provided the only light.

The first building we fell in love with…

And the exploration of something new began.

Within the first cabinet were pictures of Seattle buildings taped to the inside of the doors. Some industrial shells in SODO, a brewery in Ballard, a church turned event space in West Seattle, a bank on 3rd Avenue. There were real estate contracts, investment papers, transcripts of long conversations with real estate lawyers, and “how to buy real estate” books in mostly organized piles.

Nordo’s Great Escape.

Through a steel door we found ourselves on the streets of Los Angeles where we infiltrated and reported on the NEXT Immersive Summit . We met individuals pushing the boundaries of storytelling and learned about this immersive wave of entertainment sweeping the country. And while there we jumped into Hatch Escapes to prove to rats that humans were intelligent too.

A wardrobe led to New York City, specifically to an asylum where we partnered with a demon to escape before patrolling the halls of the McKittrick Hotel in search of answers. Sadly, the doors to the hotel will be locked at the end of the year as “Sleep No More” finally closes after a 12-year run. This one production single handedly inspired a generation of artists to work in the immersive sphere. We were there in 2010 as well and carried away a bit of their magic then.

After exploring from coast to coast, we sat at a desk covered and stuffed with papers, photos, and folders. The desktop could not be found, and the drawers could not be closed.

Confessions of a World Building Junkie.

Scraps of paper contained snippets of dreams woven together into stories. A tome called the Book of Findings contained a table of contents and an appendix but nothing else. It was awaiting to be filled. Dossiers described ominous character descriptions and incriminating photos. It all appeared disparate on the surface, but it seemed to be from the same world. Was someone building something? A new world of stories?

Nordo’s Portal Polls.

In a cabinet over the desk was a projector and reels of silent film telling the tale of a Daydream Machine in 8mm. These we shared on Instagram.

We paused to take in everything we had discovered.

One last door caught our attention. Dark grey with embossed stars how could we have not noticed it before. A soft green glow emanated from beneath it. The door knob brass and heavy.

 The door clicked closed. Footsteps echoed. The ceiling hid in the shadows. There was a low, soft thumping sound. And there, in the center of the room on a round green table, illuminated by a single spot:

We had found the Laboratory of Stories. And in 2024 we will provide you a map so that you too can find the Laboratory of Stories. There will be events in which we explore the Laboratory together and discover a whole new world of dreams. And if we are lucky, we will find the portal to this world and open it.

Thank you for coming with us on our 2023 journey. Please join us in 2024. 

Drawn to the Void

Exploration is a primal drive. Scale the hillside and see what peak lies beyond. Drop into the darkness of a damp cave. Leave behind one shoreline in the hope that there will be another one. Eventually.

Despite the fear of the unknown, people have time and again stepped off the ledge and taken the plunge. Today, humans have walked nearly every square foot of the globe. Myths, folktales, and epic stories have been inspired by the need to discover and see something new, go somewhere new. It fills a void.

Did you ever follow the route of a river or highway in an atlas with your finger? Tracing each curve. Rising over the mountain ranges and dropping down into the valleys. Letting the town names slip by. Moving toward larger spaces with fewer words and fewer lines. Wondering what existed in those blank, nebulous areas on the map. Have you ever let your mind wander?

It’s still exploration. You ask the questions, “What if?” And that question sparks the itch to look deeper. More questions follow. “Who lives there?” or “What do they eat?’ or “Do they know where they are?” Those blank spaces ask to be filled.

The imagination takes over. New maps are drawn. This is where world building begins.

In the Nordosphere, exploration has begun. Ever so gradually a tapestry is being woven from a few distinct, colorful threads. The threads may be characters or objects, places or an exchange of words, and each one, on its own, may appear insignificant but as a collection they begin to form a picture. An illustrated map rolled up and tied with a crimson ribbon and found in the bottom of an attic trunk under a pile of neatly folded but well-worn dresses.

As an explorer of a new world you have to follow your nose, listen to your instincts, and chase what is bright and shiny. In a new, mysterious world you have to grope around in the dark and pick your steps carefully. Follow the lights in the distance. What are the threads begging to be followed?

So, presenting in no particular order the threads of a world weaving itself into being.

The Spyglass:

A Spyglass allows you to see into this new world. There are many versions of it made by scientists and artists over the years. It is said they all are based on Edmund Halley’s spyglass experience. On May 3rd, 1715, Halley observed a total solar eclipse in England and recorded seeing 6 different objects that he later called Nebula, that being a relatively new term in astronomy. It is believed that what he actually glimpsed using the Spyglass was a portal into the dream world.  A Bubble.

The Blue Typewriter:

The Blue Typewriter allows for the transference of words and therefore thoughts and emotions from one world to the next using typewritten letters. It has often been used to allow the deceased to reach out to love ones, but it is never for free. It has been in the possession of the Letter Writer for some time and perhaps always, but that is not clear. For more on the Letter Writer see the Book of Findings.

Fetishes:

Dreams are Temporary Bubbles in time and space, and strong Dreams will create Fetishes. They are objects that embody the essence of the dream.

The Dream Collector:

A strong present that gathers Dream Fetishes and will trade them or gift them when it suits her. She cherishes the Fetishes and is sometimes unwilling to pass with one she particularly enjoys. She can be found on the edge of red plain working in her windowless laboratory melting down Fetishes and storing them in crystal boxes for some later use.

Dream Pajamas:

Made of dark bronze silk with the silver pattern of a snake, the pajamas allow the wearer to seamlessly pass between dreams. They are currently in the possession of the Laundromat and recorded as Artifact #181. The number 8 designates a portal.

Join us and be the first to peak into “The Laboratory of Stories”. With a series of daydreams the construction of the next world has begun. Log onto Instagram on Tuesdays, answer a series of polls, and help fill in the voids on the map. Come exploring with us.

An example of the results of a Portal Poll - where participants are invited to help create Nordo’s upcoming “Laboratory of Stories” on Instagram Stories @CafeNordo

Confessions of a World Building Junkie, Part 1.

I have been playing role-playing games since the age of 9 when my father, who co-authored a gaming system with his friend Derek called Infinity, ran a scenario in which my two older cousins, Shawn and Dawn, and myself played a squad of commandos directed to save a group of scientists held captive in a three-story home by a group of enemy combatants. We gathered in the early morning to surveil our guards and devise a plan. Then, under over of night, we began the assault. We scaled the stone wall that surrounded the property, but before we could manage to enter the house phosphorus grenades exploded all around. We perished on the lawn. At least I did. One of my cousins may have made it inside. I can’t quite recall. It was over 40 years ago. I was hooked.

I grew up in a home with framed illustrations of iconic moments from the Lord of the Rings series. My favorite: I gazed at a scene from the perspective of down the well in Moria as Peregrin Took leans over the edge with a pebble pinched between his fingers poised to drop it just to see how deep the well is. Remember this moment? In Peter Jackson’s movie rendition Peregrin knocks over a whole bucket and chain for more comic effect. Either way, the sounds bring disaster upon the Fellowship.

I grew up playing board games, mostly of the war variety.  I began with basic ones like Stratego, eventually learning more complicated systems like Wooden Ships and Iron Men, and finally graduating to the master class of Squad Leader, in which we replayed WWII battles that took hours upon hours to complete. Rooting out Bugs in Starship Troopers was always a good evening. Dungeon, the gateway board game of Dungeons and Dragons, became very popular. As was Survive!, in which you started at the top of a volcano on a jungle island and raced to find a boat and escape before being obliterated by the inevitable eruption. The list goes on and on.

You get the point. I was raised in an atmosphere that primed me to become a role-playing addict. I probably had no choice. That was me in Stranger Things, 11 years old in 1983, riding my bike with a gaggle of friends in a small town, mine was Holland, Michigan not Hawkins, Indiana,  playing Dungeons and Dragons and wishing to God that we could find a demagorgon or mad scientist.

I drew maps of fantasy worlds regularly, complete with misty mountain ranges and lost islands at sea. I created NPCs (non-player characters) to populate these worlds such as Gustav, the gruff and condescending gnome detective decked out with useful and at times faulty contraptions who always had a nefarious job for the characters to complete. I built theological empires that crushed the will of its citizens (this one is not so fantastical). I spent as much time as I could imagining these other worlds.

 Anyone remember Mazes and Monsters the made for TV movie starring Tom Hanks in which he plays a young man who loses his grasp on reality and eventually stabs someone thinking that person was a monster? My mother was concerned I might do that.

(If you’re lost at all by the titles or jargon, don’t worry, you certainly know someone who plays role-playing games either openly or secretly. Ask around, they can walk you through this blog post.)

It was early high school when I found myself going to the mall and visiting the bookstore beside the video arcade to obsess over the different gaming systems. If I couldn’t afford them I simply opened them and read the rule books of different gaming systems in the bookstore, and yes, store managers do not like you cutting the plastic, opening the boxes and sitting on the aisle floor for an afternoon read. I got busted for that. But, I digested so many systems: GURPs, Bushido, Vampire: The Masquerade, Pirates and Plunder, Rune Quest, Paranoia, Call of Cthulhu. Some my friends and I played regularly, like Chill, Shadowrun, and Warhammer, but most I just read by myself. I loved the rules of combat, the method in which characters were created, but most importantly, I loved devouring the descriptions of the different worlds that these games lived in. You see, I was addicted to World Building.

Yes, I love role-playing games, but in my 20’s, I stopped playing them so much. Not sure why. Maybe because it was tougher then to find a group of like-minded nerds. It’s not like today when they’re everywhere. Also, drinking and role-playing games tend to collide in a mess of futility, and drinking had become quite popular. And I had discovered writing, and the art world.

So, the games slipped away, but what I never lost a passion for is the world building. Creating political systems, economic systems, river docks, bar names, poisonous mushrooms, disgusting regional recipes. The task of creating a fully realized fictional world is just simply a never-ending joy.

Terry’s set for Onērus at Nordo in 2017

I could go on and on about world building. I could talk about how writing and truly any art springs from a fictional world that bubbles in the mind. I could, and probably did in this blog already, talk about how the magic of world building for fantasy and science fiction novels gave birth to role-playing games, and how those games in turn have laid the foundation for the immersive arts that are exploding today!

Read more of Terry’s reviews on immersive games here, and here.

At Nordo, we are not only writing business plans and looking for buildings to house the next iteration. We are also constructing the infrastructure for the next world of stories. It’s already begun in daydreams using flights of fancy. Beakers bubble. Characters talk. Tales weave. And in fact, in case you missed it, you can help guide the story through our Portal Polls.

This concludes Confessions of.a World Building Junkie Part 1. Keep following for Part 2, in which I delve into my current obsession, The Laboratory of Stories.

Join in and become the first to peak into our latest world: The  Laboratory of Stories. More prizes await for those who play. You can do this by logging on to Instagram and finding @CafeNordo on Tuesday, October 24th . You’ll play a series of polls and your answers will help us visit the next star in our creative universe.

While exploring the Library stumbled upon a string of discoveries. First, we found the Book of Findings. Questions had been written in the margins, and as we answered them aloud “blue vials, crystal bottles, hollow trees” stories scrolled out on the page. Second, we found a Spyglass made of brass and walnut hidden behind a collection of dusty maps. It doesn’t magnify the world like an ordinary telescope, but instead jumbles the world like an erratic kaleidoscope. But today, under a soft full moon, we looked at the night sky and saw threads like fissures. We focused on one of them.

The Spyglass

 A young woman with an unusual grasp of composition and color began sketching a pattern in her notebook that she could not see in her head, but could feel in her hand, and if she had been asked to describe it she would have been unable to find the words.

The colors of the sketch bled seamlessly between one another and subtle vibrations of sensation could be recognized in the weight of the lines.  Anyone who saw the page in her notebook could never recall it well enough to describe it much less copy it.

In time, after many twists and configurations in the story, it would become known as the first diagram for measuring imagination. 

Photo Credit: Terry Podgorski

It is bright here in LA. And the streets and sidewalks are harsh. I am standing on a corner, at a bus stop, steps from yet another fantastic taco truck. It’s a perfect place for a spell of vertigo.

 The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Culver City, Los Angeles.

Reality and dreams dance in a mesmerizing exhibition. Photo taken illicitly by Terry Podgorski.

 The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, Los Angeles is subtle. One might say shy or well disguised, able to stand on the street corner and pass as “normal” in the light of day, at least in comparison to its Chelsea cousin, Sleep No More (read my review here). The Museum is another type of dream in which you are not quite sure if you are dreaming but you’re pretty damn sure you are dreaming because it all feels just a bit off but yet it’s just as normal as standing in your kitchen with a cup of coffee in hand except, now that you think of it, it’s not your kitchen but your grandmother’s kitchen, and she’s been gone for some time, and it’s all in a green palette that she would have never used and she’s talking to you and telling you it’s time to get to school. It’s definitely a dream.

But you’re struck by the cup. It’s such a normal cup. White. Heavy. With a graceful loop for your finger. It fits in the palm assuredly. Maybe it is real after all.

There is no kitchen in the Museum or white archetype of a coffee cup, but there is a bona fide fissure in understanding. And you are asked to stare at it.

You’re always staring at something intently at the museum. Peering at diagrams and dioramas and dialectic arguments. Sometimes, it’s through a microscope at the carving of a golfer on a needle. Sometimes, a hazy piece of glass hiding the x-ray of a lily. Or a spyglass with an owl inside perched on a branch. The mission seems plain enough. You’re being asked to look at the world, and find the truth in it, but regardless how hard you try it is not there. Unless the truth is; there isn’t any.

You must understand that at this museum something else is on display besides history or fact. The inspiration for the exhibits comes from the wild possibilities of the world and humans. It’s that thing that artists through the centuries have tried to touch, describe, put on a pedestal and reveal.

Actually, imagination is on exhibit here. Or is that wonder? Perhaps it’s possibility we are looking at. Can we tell the difference?

What is real and what is on display? That’s the crack in the Museum of Jurassic Technology.  In Sleep No More the crack is a story broken into pieces and scattered across a hotel. In each, reality and expectations are broken, a portal opened, a world reveled, and a promise made.

Photo Credit Stephanie Diani for the New York Times. Pictures the “Wundertrailer” in the Garden of Eden exhibit.

Imagine a crack.

A carefully scratched jagged line in polished stone.

A peeled and stained curl in a formica desktop.

A crumbling split in dusty concrete at your feet.

It’s the promise of walking dreams while awake, of escape, of breaking the confines of what people tell you reality is.

Smash the mirror. Or step through it like Alice.

Portals and the Other Worlds in Between

Now, we’re going there. “There” being the “great beyond”. We’ve talked spaces. Real brick and mortar buildings in Seattle. (Read about our search here). We’ve talked places. Inspirational attractions from East Coast (here) to West (here). We’ve talked games. Cracking puzzles that change the narrative. Now, let’s talk alternate realities.

“Imagine a crack.

A carefully scratched jagged line in polished stone.

A peeled and stained curl in a formica desktop.

A crumbling split in dusty concrete at your feet.”

There are portals. They come in many forms. There are natural ones like harbors and caves and ones made by human hands like an arch or a tunnel. They can be unlocked and free to access or guarded and require a passport. Portals can charge a toll. That toll can be paid in money or in something more personal. They can be uplifting, transformational, and the means to a new beginning, but they can also be cloaked in shadows and marked with regret. These portals signify that something has gone forever.

 Artists have managed to open portals.  Once inside you become enveloped in another standard of rules and even though the outside world remains, just within the flip book of thoughts, “I need to call my mother”, “where did I leave that card”, “I need bananas for breakfast tomorrow”. The familiar fades and another sense of direction takes over. Then, we know we are somewhere else- an alternate reality.

Twice, lately, I’ve experienced this vertigo. The first...

Photo Credit: Yaniv Schulman

Sleep No More. Chelsea, NYC.

I’m wandering an abandoned asylum on the 4th floor of The McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea, New York. The floor is complete with a turn of the century operating room, a collection of bloody bathtubs, and a maze of birch trees. I am standing in a small office flipping through a log book of patients looking for a clue to what happened in this place. I decide it’s time to leave and descend the stairs. But my path is blocked. A nurse in her white uniform with red piping ascends the stairs with a small crowd of masked ghosts following behind her. I stop, stand aside to let the gang pass, and do a 180 to join at the back. We crowd into the receptionist’s office where a cloud of loose pages hugs the ceiling like a cloud trying to escape. The nurse takes a seat at the desk. She opens the log book I had been pawing only a minute before, pauses over a name, makes a notation or two, and looks up with a red-lipped grin acknowledging us for only an instant as if we are only notions before closing the book, returning it the desk drawer, and heading on from the office to eventually meet another nurse in the maze of trees. They begin a silent argument of indignations and petulant gestures that turn into a dance until the nurse I followed from the office pirouettes to leave only to collapse backwards into the arms of the others and drapes to the ground. All the while we, the audience, hover on the edges staring through the branches, silenced.

Photo Credit: Yaniv Schulman

We, the audience, wander The McKittrick Hotel, the site of Sleep No More, in our white masks that turn each of us into a voyeuristic ghost in search of a story. They tell us it’s “Macbeth through a Hitchcock lens” whatever that is, though I guess in some way we do know what it is and like it. We believe we know the story of betrayal and murder and ultimate hubris, and we know that “something wicked this way comes” as we wander the halls, but we do not know what portion of the story we will stumble upon at one moment or when we may be implicated. We pass from one diorama to another searching for meaning, a clue to which way to wander, a direction from a performer or a written note that clearly tells what is happening, but we look in vain. We stand amongst dried herbs and moldering taxidermy, read case files and stare at photos of murder scenes looking for the thread of a story, feeling it press down all around, whispering in our ear, “I promise you’ll get it next time.”

And this is one type of Alternate Reality. A Liminal Space. Bold and dark and dripping with passion.

The second spell of vertigo is yet to come. Stay tuned…