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@ 9:43:00 PM, ,

This Is Captain America Calling Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Another trip through the shortboxes last night. This time I dug out some old stuff from Pacific Comics: an indie outfit from the eighties that seemed pretty daring at the time. I usually confuse them with Eclipse, but a quick Wiki-check shows that many Pacific folks headed over there when PC went belly-up. At any rate, the books aren't terribly memorable, but they are sort of charming. There's lots of very conscious boundary-pushing, but but the boundaries were a long way from where they are now--so all of the edgy storylines and prominent nipplage come off as almost quaint and exotic. And, as with Camelot 3000, it's nice that people were still writing straightahead heroic adventure stories, even if they were muddying them up a little. (Like Mike Grell's Robert E. Howard riff in Starslayer.) Twenty-odd years after Dark Knight and Watchmen, can you still write stuff like that without irony or condescension?

@ 7:51:00 AM, ,

Cartoon Planet Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Not all rediscoveries are fun. On a high from the Star Trek movie, I was looking for some old-fashioned space opera and gave the Lensman books another whirl. Rather, the Lensman book: I got about three pages into part two before hollering basta. My tolerance for square-jawed heroes is pretty high, but "Doc" Smith really abuses the privilege. Chapter after chapter of sang froid and joshing in the face of death and roll-up-your-sleeves gumption make you remember just how radical Philip K. Dick's schlubs looked back in the sixties. Then there's the cosmic chess game and the hilariously weird science--all of which might be enjoyable on their own but taken together are just too alienating to make for a good read.

@ 6:57:00 AM, ,

Dancing With the Moonlit Knight

I've made a couple of rediscoveries lately. Portishead's third studio record, which I didn't even play all the way through when it came out, popped up on the shuffle and I was surprised at how strong it was. It's definitely not as fun as the earlier ones; it doesn't have that trashy-sexy vibe and there are very few hooks to grab onto. But it's an ingratiating headphone record: a moody, meditative record with some rough patches to keep you from zoning out entirely. I hope the next one is a little friendlier, but I won't be disappointed if they keep going down this path.

Meanwhile, sorting through my shortboxes to find stuff to dump, I came across Camelot 3000. I loved it as a teenager but some friends had been smack-talking it lately. On a re-read, I can definitely see why it comes off as unsophisticated. Everything in the book has very bright edges, from the terrific Brian Bolland art on down. Even with the usual Arthurian breast-beating, good is good, and bad is terrible. All in all, it feels very much like a traditional superhero series. If somebody put this out today, it would probably be jam-packed with Alan Moore-ish erudition (pagans, rape, Olde English) and populated with ambiguous characters.

Still, I dug it. The art is terrific and the writing is smart: Everybody's got an arc, and all of them pay off. Good stuff.

@ 6:27:00 AM, ,

Please Pardon Our Appearance

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that I haven't filled in links and other things, which means you're being denied vital stuff like my 1996 article about the peccadilloes of e-commerce. I'll get around to it when I can, I promise.

@ 6:25:00 AM, ,

Crawling From the Wreckage Monday, July 13, 2009

Firing things up again. The new look, hopefully, will shake me out of the rut a little bit. Keep an eye out.

@ 8:36:00 PM, ,

James and the Cold Gun Saturday, November 22, 2008

How about that, I'm back.

This blog took a field trip into the big city last night to catch up with an old friend. Two, actually: a long-suffering editor and James Bond. The editor has all the familiar gripes, and Bond is still burning about stuff that happened two years ago in the last movie. The new one isn't a tenth as good as that one. The editing is terrible--everything shot in choppy close-ups--and there isn't even a pretension toward story. For instance, we don't get a flashback to the last film, so Bond just comes roaring out of the gate, shooting people for reasons you sort of get (but it clearly doesn't matter if you do). Judi Dench, meanwhile, is swell as M, but also does inexplicable things: Why is she helping Bond now? And why isn't she anymore?

The transitions between scenes are largely hilarious. At one point, we get two minutes of CSI gibberish about how the money in some dead guy's wallet had microfibers from some other guy who just cleared customs etc. etc. For Chrissakes, just say: Bond, go to Haiti, and get it over with. Nobody in the studio or the audience seems to care if you come up with something plausible, so why bother?

Some small touches were nice. The song is pretty good; I'd even say it's got the most street cred of any since Live and Let Die. It would've gotten bonus points for actually using the title. Even Duran Duran pulled off that one. The title sequence was also pretty fun. But both of those positives get undercut by one mystifying negative: The classic theme doesn't show up until the closing credits. I just don't get it. That two minutes of music is worth at least a half hour of audience goodwill, and you bury it till the end? You really think David Arnold is doing something better with his anonymous score?

Even the trailers were embarrassing. John Cleese has signed on to embarrass his geriatric ass in the new Pink Panther movie. Even worse, my life model has a bit part; is this the best he can get these days? The Bond people couldn't throw him a bone?

And the Star Trek preview just made me miserable. Yes, I'll be there opening day; I'm not made of stone. But the whole thing looks like Clone Wars, from the what-just-happened graphics to the cluttered story to the blank-eyed youngsters. Free advice: Reboots only work when the original stunk.

@ 6:32:00 AM, ,

A Better Tomorrow Thursday, August 14, 2008

Speaking of first lines and Seventies sci-fi, I should also point to the copyright page of Isidore Haiblum's Interworld, which contains the following:

A portion of this work appeared in Swank magazine.

@ 9:28:00 AM, ,

My Spaceship Knows Which Way to Go Wednesday, August 13, 2008

This post is about one of the greatest first lines I've ever read. But first I'm going to bore you with some thoughts about Seventies sci-fi.

Our friends at Outside the Dome have an ongoing series about bargain-bin genre novels from the Me Decade. They've covered lots of the high points, but I want to suggest one stylistic tic that I think defines the genre: the hipster voice.

I haven't read enough of these novels to speak definitively, because frankly a lot of them really suck. But most of the ones I've picked up--both highly regarded ones and obscure trash--have a nasty, nihilistic tone that sounds something like Lenny Bruce doing a Mystery Science Theater act over an Asimov story. In other words, you've got many of the standard sci-fi tropes--Earth recovering from disaster; space crews exploring the unknown--except the narrator is sneering at them. The characters are inevitably nasty to each other, especially when it comes to race (every black guy is a Panther, every white is Archie Bunker). There are lots of offhand references to terrible things happening, with no weight given to them in the story or in the narrator's head. ("We lost Switzerland to the Garcia Plague last year.") Sex is pervasive and embarrassingly dated (TOPLESS STEWARDESSES!!!!!!). Even better is the language itself, full of radical slang that was out of fashion as soon as it hit the page.

At any rate, that's exactly what I got when I picked up a copy of Ron Goulart's A Talent for the Invisible at the book-exchange rack at my train station. Every single trope, down to the teleporter-hostess who asks our hero if he wants to have sex before he blips off to Portugal. So why am I determined to read this one to the end? Because of the very first line, one of the truly great specimens of the genre*:

Robots were chasing him.

For that, I'll put up with 144 pages of horseshit.

* The best ever, of course, leads off A Scanner Darkly. Look it up!

@ 11:26:00 AM, ,