Here’s the pleasant, verging on ambient “Winter Breath” by Italian band Murnau.
I’m guessing they’re named after the German film director.
Shoegazer Sunday: Murnau’s “Winter Breath”
February 10th, 2013The Case of the Crappy Comic Book Caper
February 10th, 2013I’m surprised that neither Dwight nor Murray Newman picked up on this one. Lonnie Blevins, a former investigator at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, has been charged with stealing over $140,000 worth of vintage comic books. The comic books were purportedly taken from evidence seized from Anthony Chiofalo, a lawyer accused of embezzling more than $9 million from a client. Chiofalo’s own lawyer says it’s possible more than $1 million worth of collectables was taken from his client.
When Blevins (allegedly) tried to sell them for about half their value at a Chicago comics convention the dealer became suspicious. To allay their suspicions, Blevins “let them photograph his Texas driver’s license and showed his badge proving he was an investigator with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.”
It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to crack this case. I could actually see this working if he was very careful and only sold one or two titles at various shows or shops, maybe mixed in with a few lesser titles he purchased. (I’d be interested in hearing some of the titles he allegedly tried to fence.) But trying to sell a whole bunch of valuable comics all at once? Yeah, that’s going to raise some flags.
More on Chiofalo’s collection, which included “a baseball signed by Babe Ruth, a first edition Playboy and the first ever Batman comic book, worth about $900,000…a boxing robe worn by Muhammad Ali, a signed first edition of Mario Puzo’s novel, The Godfather, and a baseball helmet signed by Pete Rose.”
(Hat tip: Doug Potter’s Facebook page.)
It’s Raining Gene Wolfe Review Copies!
February 7th, 2013Any year is a good year to read Gene Wolfe, but it seems that right now we’re in a Gene Wolfe Year, or even a Gene Wolfe Sesquiennial, which started with his induction into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame and continued with him being named Nebula Grandmaster.
Then Michael Andre-Driussi (the author of Lexicon Urthus and other useful Wolfe critical works) published this:
And sent me a review copy, which I hope to get to shortly. I also have copies of Gate of Horn, Book of Silk for sale through Lame Excuse Books; just drop me a line if you want one.
And this just arrived in the mail:
That’s Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe, edited by Bill Fawcett and J.E. Mooney, which is due out in August. Complete contents here.
We’ll see if I can’t review both of those here in the coming months.
Ironically, I’m actually reading another Wolfe-related book with the same title right now: Peter Wright’s Shadows of the New Sun: Wolfe on Writing/Writers on Wolfe, which includes the interview I did with him for Nova Express. When I had lunch with him at the Chicago Worldcon, Gene said even he didn’t have a copy of the Wright book.
Hopefully Gene will be able to come to the San Antonio Worldcon. He said he was going to try to make it.
Shoegazer Sunday: Skywave’s “Nothing Left to Say”
February 3rd, 2013I don’t know much about Skywave beyond what’s on their MySpace page, which mentioned they’re from Fredericksburg, Virginia. With that deeply uninformative introduction out of the way, here’s the deeply reverb-drenched “Nothing Left to Say” off their album Synthstatic.
The Science Fictional Ruin of the Bulgarian Communist Party Headquarters
February 2nd, 2013Missed this when it came out last year, but this Daily Mail piece on the ruin of the Bulgarian Communist Party headquarters has some awesome pictures of very science fictional ruins.
Reminds me of those equally science fictional Yugoslavian Communist monuments. Monuments to an illusionary future by regimes that ignored their overwhelming, oppressive failure in the present.
For the Lovecraft Collector Who Has Everything
January 31st, 2013For a mere $3,000, the passport of H.P. Lovecraft’s ex-wife Sonia Haft Greene Lovecraft can be yours!
As a one-of-a-kind item, that’s actually cheaper than many of Lovecraft’s rarer books…
Library Additions: Three Clark Ashton Smith Items
January 29th, 2013I managed to pick up three relatively uncommon Clark Ashton Smith items from Heritage Auction’s weekly book auction:
I’d long heard that Roy A. Squires’ small press chapbooks were very well made, and I finally was able to snag a couple of them at a reasonable price.
I bought the Cockcroft because, well, I’m slightly fanatical about collecting bibliographic material, but also because I was hoping it might have some things not in Emperor of Dreams, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. I really would like a better Smith bibliography, as Emperor of Dreams is perhaps the most confusingly organized bibliography I’ve ever seen.
Unlike a complete H. P. Lovecraft collection, a complete Clark Ashton Smith collection is probably within my means, but it’s a pretty long-term goal…
“Movie 43 is the Citizen Kane of awful.”
January 28th, 2013So sayeth Roger Ebert about the latest movie from Peter Farrelly. When Ebert says a movie is worse than Freddy Got Fingered, you know that all lower bounds of the barrel have been breached.
More nuggets:
Farrelly was going for a 21st century version of “The Groove Tube” and “Kentucky Fried Movie,” two very funny, very raunchy and very influential sketch-comedy flicks of the mid-1970s.
The only thing “Movie 43” has in common with those movies is it’s in color.
Also:
Academy Award winner Halle Berry no longer can cite “Catwoman” as the low point of her career.
Ebert gave it Zero Stars. Yet, for some reason, his readers have given it four. Go figure.
Shoegazer Sunday: Echodrone’s “Time”
January 27th, 2013Here’s Echodrone’s cover of The Alan Parsons’ Project’s “Time” from their Mixtape for Duckie covers album. The video has less than a hundred views as I type this, so I’m happy to showcase something that actually qualifies as new! Most cover albums do nothing for me, even by artists I really like (see also: Scratch My Back and Strange Little Girls), but everything I’ve heard from this I liked so much, I just went ahead and bought it
See how long it takes you to figure out what the video is about, something I twigged to very early, and which ties into themes explored in their previous videos.
Movie Review: Django Unchained
January 21st, 2013Django Unchained
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Written by Quentin Tarantino
Starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins, Dennis Christopher, James Remar, David Steen, Laura Cayouette, Don Johnson, Ato Essandoh
Django Unchained may not be Quentin Tarantino’s best film, but does seem to be the film that comes closest to fulfilling his vision for what he wanted it to be. He wanted to make a big-budget, hyper-violent, A-list, American spaghetti western antebellum slave revenge thriller. Django Unchained is such a perfect realization of that goal that I doubt anyone will ever attempt to do the exact same thing ever again.
Also, it’s a film that admirably self-selects its audience. If you think you’ll like it, you’ll probably really, really like it. If you think you’ll hate it, you’ll probably really, really hate it. It’s not a film for the faint of heart, or those with a low threshold for movie brutality.
If you’ve seen the trailer, then you know the basic setup: German bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) frees slave Django (Jamie Foxx) to help him track down three brothers he can identify, then makes him his partner in the bounty hunting business. A bit later, they go to rescue Django’s wife (Kerry Washington) from the clutches of Mississippi plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DeCaprio). Stylish gunplay and general brutality ensues.
Like all Tarantino’s movies, there are postmodern nods and namechecks to previous films, including recycling the theme music from 1966’s Django for the opening titles. Unlike his previous films, Tarantino has done a better job sanding off the rough edges and toning down his showier stylistic flourishes. They’re still here, but seem like a more natural fit for the material, be it a slow motion montage as a procession rides past, or solarized flashbacks to Django’s slave past. Likewise, the digressions seem more organic to the film (a scene of proto-Klansmen bitching about the poor quality of eyeholes in their hoods is funny enough that you’re willing to overlook its shaggy nature).
The script is clever and fairly taut for its 165 minute running time, and it doesn’t have the dead spots of (for example) Inglorious Basterds. There are two or three plot twists, some more improbable than others. Django’s wife is named Broomhilda and speaks German (because her original owner was German), which not only makes Waltz perfect for the role Tarantino obviously wrote for him, but actually provides three or four handy plot points in a nice, tidy package. They have a clever plan to rescue Broomhilda. It comes really, really close to succeeding.
Acting ranges from the solid, to really good, to downright excellent. Bruce Dern and Don Johnson are just fine in supporting roles. Jammie Foxx is fine in what amounts to a Shaft Kicks Dixie’s Ass role, though suffers in comparison to Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name. Waltz is very effective in his hand-crafted role of a learned, articulate man who hates slavery and kills people for money, though it’s less of a revelation than his Oscar-winning turn as Hans Landa. Samuel L. Jackson finally gets to play a villain worthy of his simmering rage.
But for me the best performance is the movie is DiCaprio’s Candie, a plantation owner whose southern hospitality doesn’t prevent him letting a runaway slave get ripped apart by dogs, and his fury at finding himself being played is something to behold. The trailer suggested he might be playing it to broad and jokey, but his actual performance is very nuanced. DiCaprio has steadily improved as an actor, and of what I’ve seen him in, this is easily his best work.
Of course, some of the usual suspects have gotten their knickers in a twist over an American spaghetti western depicting the evils of slavery. What do they want, to soft peddle the crimes of slavery instead? And those criticizing the film for being brutal and violent: Have you not seen a Tarantino film before? It’s like someone complaining that the Seventh Season of South Park is full of potentially offensive humor. Really? You don’t say?
As previously noted, those with a low threshold for bloodshed and brutality should stay far, far away. As Dwight noted after we left the theater, “I hope they gave the squib guy a bonus.” But if you like Tarantino, here he’s pretty much at the top of his game.
And if I had known that the action figures would be discontinued, I would have picked some up.