Aaron Vanek
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[edit] Aaron Vanek - Intro
Aaron started attending Enigma meetings in 1988-89 (his freshman year at UCLA), but thought it was too geeky for his tastes. However, as if this nerd-clave was rotten flesh, he brought his maggoty carcass back to the fold, and has, over the years, slowly burrowed his way into Enigma's group-brain, where he exerts his influence to get the club to climb tall buildings. Once they're at the top, he'll sprout out of Enigma's head, killing the host and spraying his spores over a wide area, seeding other geek clubs with his viral way of thinking.
[edit] Roles in Enigma
Over the years, Aaron has:
- Served as club president (1990) and vice-president (1991), both with Amy Creamer (in the corresponding officer position)
- Worked as guest relations director for Enigmacon V and Enigmacon 6, and assistant chair (second in command) for Enigmacon 2005 (also helped run a live game at Enigmacon IV)
- Coordinated/ran Enigma's Writers' Workshop
- Edited/published Enigmata (volumes 10 and 11): While in this position, Aaron launched a complete redesign of the quarterly periodical to zine size. He also added: four-color covers, local advertisements, distribution in local specialty stores, and in addition to the usual fan fiction and fan art content, articles/reviews of current videos/books/games/people in the genre field
- Setup, polled, and tallied Enigmans to get the results for Enigma Top 20 for 2006
- Organized and headed up the Friday night event of Enigmaversary II, held at Nova Express and featured a long slide show of photos from the club's storied history
- Archived all of Enigma's videos (up to 2006), as well as cut (edited) both video reels for Enigmaversary and Enigmaversary II. The videos can be viewed on DVD at the Enigma Library
- With the help of Pat Mannion, started/ran the first three or four Maxicons/Minicons: got the venue, set up the sign up website page, organized the games, etc.. Pat had the idea about the same time, Aaron posted to the list first.
- Started/ran all Dilithium Chef contests at Maxicon/Minicon, where members make dishes that include a secret ingredient and has a sci-fi, fantasy, or horror theme, and the attendees vote on the best (and get to eat!)
- Brought in special guests to speak at various Monday meetings, including director Nicholas Meyer (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan), screenwriter Terry Rossio (Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean), legendary comic artist Bernie Wrightson (Swamp Thing, Frankenstein) & writer/editor Len Wein (creator of the New X-men, Wolverine, and editor of Watchmen), director and UCLA alumnus Fred Dekker (Monster Squad, Robocop 3, Enterprise (TV)), special visual effects artist/supervisor Al Magliochetti (The Addams Family, Dune (TV), The X-files), director of the movie Alien Raiders and production designer on The Blair Witch Project, Ben Rock, and anime and video game voiceover actress Stephanie Sheh.
- Organized a club donation of games to US troops stationed in Iraq as part of their Ziggurat Con.
[edit] Live Games
Aaron has also run a few live games for Enigma, including:
First Call of Cthulhu live game -co-GM w/Matt Steele
Spy Game (first campus-wide live game) – co-GM w/ Kirsten & Harry Teplitz
First Sandman game, Season of Mists (which spawned four sequels) - co-GM with Robert Hurt
Silver and Sage - co-GM w/ Kirsten
Hogwarts - co-GM with many others
Spirited Away - co-GM with Kirsten
ChronoAgents road rally
Limbo Lounge - co-GM with Kirsten
Space Cadets: Guardians of the High Frontier - head GM of large team running the game for WorldCon 2006 (LA Con IV)
Class of '83 - co-GM with Chris Vrem, scenario written by Nick Huggins (for a weekly Enigma meeting)
Gatsby & the Great Race, head GM - with Kirsten, Mike Tice, Christian Brown, and Richard Becker.
- Submitted/handled the entry forms, videos, photos, and organization/attendance for four of five Enigma nominations for the First Annual LARPY Awards. Mike Tice also submitted an entry, which won (Best Monster Costume for Miskatonic University), along with three of the four entries Aaron submitted, including: Best Comedy LARP: Scooby-Doo Cthulhu; Best Solo Action Sequence: Kevin Moran as St. Peter singing "Hell" at Limbo Lounge Limbo Lounge; Best Makeup: Hee-soo and Colleen Kennedy as Widow Merriwether for the Silver & Sage game. Aaron didn't get any of the trophies, but he did hold the one that was ripped out of his hands and broken by a Wet Maynard as Aaron was posing for a photo after accepting the trophy for Karen Bowman (Scooby-Doo Cthulhu GM).
- Written a comprehensive essay about the art of Live Action Role Playing, what it is, where it came from, where it's going, available as a free PDF download here.
- Helped start, with a number of other veteran larp hosts/GMs, the Enigma Live Game Lab at the end of 2009.
- His Call of Cthulhu role-playing campaign won "Best Gaming Group" (all players were from Enigma) from BIg Iron Vault for breaking out of the house and gaming at the Old Zoo in Griffith Park. Info in issue #4.
[edit] Other Contributions
Some of the other more minor things Aaron has done for Enigma: handed out the first club survey to see what Enigma liked/disliked about the club (everything); started the first boffer massacre meetings; started the post-winter holiday re-gifting tradition; started/ran Game-a-Lympics; ran a few Massive Nuclear War meetings; provided materials for a few screenings; organized the Nightmare Before Christmas holiday party; took/uploaded about 50% of the photos in the Enigma gallery; and bitched and whined to occasionally get the moniker "and horror" added to the description of Enigma (UCLA's Science fiction, fantasy, gaming and horror club).
[edit] Publications
When he wasn't involved in some kind of Enigma project or other, Aaron has been published in the magazines Film Threat (back when it was printed), Comics Scene (a cover interview with author Neil Gaiman as Sandman ended), Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer (once edited by Pat Mannion and featured many Enigmans in between its pages), Wild Cartoon Kingdom (co-wrote, with Greg Van Eekhout one of the first articles on the Schoolhouse Rock series of educational cartoons, which included transcribing the lyrics to half of all the damn songs), was a regular columnist for Third Word magazine (pieces were about things like hackers, for which his AOL account was hacked, and comic book artists like Jill Thompson and Alex Ross, both of whom Aaron has interviewed), and was a regular contributor/Bureau Chief for Sci-fi Universe magazine (many articles, mostly anime reviews). He was a staff writer for Chicago's Screen magazine for a year.
Aaron's fiction stories have appeared in the Twilight Tales chapbook When the Bough Breaks and the Bram Stoker-award winning anthology, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories (Enigman Greg Van Eekhout has two stories in there as well). Also, an essay Aaron wrote on the cinema of horror author HP Lovecraft was translated into Italian for the book Sculptus in Tenebris and an updated version was reprinted for the Spanish webzine La Estela deLuvehkrapt (scroll down for English PDF version).
Aaron's game-related publications include the Call of Cthulhu RPG scenario They Sleep by Twilight printed in Worlds of Cthulhu magazine issue #5, plus two CoC adventures in the monograph book entitled Farewell, My Sanity, published and distributed exclusively through Chaosium, Inc. This monograph also features artwork by Enigman David Milano and layout/design by Kirsten. These two noir adventures featuring the Guzman-Willent detective agency were originally written for and ran at Enigma's Maxicon.
Aaron is the cocktail reviewer for the Los Angeles Examiner. It means his drinks are tax write offs.
[edit] Video games
Aaron has also worked in the video game industry, first as employee #3 for Learn Television, an educational company that quickly became Jellyvision, makers of the You Don't Know Jack! series of trivia games, then later as a game designer for the now-defunct Terraglyph Interactive Studios. He's credited as a playtester for Activision's Interstate '76 and Dark Reign: The Future of War, but he never really tested either.
[edit] Movies
Aaron considers himself a filmmaker. Two of his short movies, The Outsider and My Necronomicon can be viewed as part of the HP Lovecraft Collection, Volume 3, featuring the wonderful movie Out of Mind, a biography of Lovecraft. Another of Aaron's movies, Return to Innsmouth (based on the story by Lovecraft), is currently only available on PAL VHS (but it may be released on DVD someday). His fourth Lovecraft film, The Yellow Sign, is distributed through Lurker Films. A trailer of the The Yellow Sign can be seen here.
A music video he made with a few Enigmans, on a western set and featuring whiskey shots, poker, guns, a fist fight, and a pole-dancing girl, can be seen here.
Aaron's latest short movie, Call of Tutu, can be viewed on YouTube.
Aaron's second Lovecraft short film (made in 1997), My Necronomicon, is also on YouTube.
He has also worked on many, many other movies, commercials, and industrials (like the bonus material for the Robocop BluRay DVD, and the almost all-Enigman superhero feature, Surge of Power, directed by Mike Donahue.
[edit] Everything Else
Aaron graduated from UCLA in 1993 with a degree in English Literature, emphasis in Creative Writing (short story).
He attended, but has yet to gain an MFA from Columbia College Chicago's graduate film school.
He has interned for the magazines Midnight Graffiti, Film Threat, and Roger Corman's film company Concorde/New Horizons.
He was a disc jockey (DJ) at UCLA's radio station KLA, where he had his own weekly heavy metal show. He was allowed to swear on the air only if there was a swear word in the title of the song. There are many metal songs with swear words in their titles.
He worked for four years at UCLA's Cooperage restaurant, and now mourns the fact that the pizza part is now a Taco Bell.
He has also worked as personal assistant to novelist Jay Bonansinga, writer/director Charlie Carner, office manager for Next Wave Films (part of the Independent Film Channel, NWF is now defunct), and kick-started Columbia College Chicago's west coast alumni organization, transforming it from a volunteer group to a paid full time staff position with an office and a big budget.
Aaron Vanek appears as a villain in issue #1 of the comic book Tales of the Green Hornet (vol. 3). That issue was written by James Van Hise, who edited Midnight Graffiti magazine, and whom Aaron invited to Enigmacon V, later interning for the magazine. Van Hise subsequently immortalized Vanek as a wealthy fat maniac who tries to kill everyone who crossed him with his house of traps. That's how all this started, thanks to Enigma!
Aaron lives with his wife Kirsten (whom he befriended at Enigma) and a bitey cat named Spike.
His favorite beer is Boddington's and his favorite spirit is Catdaddy moonshine.
