Wednesday, December 25, 2019

Two little words

Taking a break from Godzillarama - well, actually, G v. Mechagodzilla is on in the other room, so the rama is still ramin' - to post what might be my favoritest Xmas story of all, courtesy of Leonard Pierce, who I used to read at his LiveJournal, and who is now on Instagram and GoodReads and probably some other places as well. Anyway, here's his story:

***

The big man didn’t belong in this bar. Not like Widner did – you could take one look at Widner and tell that he’d spent most of his adult life on a fake leather stool throwing back vodka tonics. The big man was different.

When he’d walked in, the jingling bell on the door (old Fluke, the bartender, made this one concession to the holiday spirit and no other, which is why Widner drank here) was nearly drowned out by the howling winds outside; the big man brushed snow off of his shoulders, thus removing the only thing that marred his five hundred dollar suit. He had perfectly styled hair, blue like gun steel and with a precious little spit-curl that he absently smoothed back into the coif that had probably cost more than the suit. He sat at the stool next to Widner and ordered a Soder.

Well, at least it wasn’t milk, thought Widner, wincing his way through another vodka. The big man peered at him through his big, round glasses as if he was a jeweler looking for flaws; he’d find plenty. Only two types of people looked at you that way: cops and queers. 

“Take a picture, pal,” Widner hissed. “It’ll last longer.”

The big man chuckled. “Actually,” he replied, “it wouldn’t. I have a photographic memory.” He sipped at his cola and gave a bit of a pull to his blandly handsome face, as if it was stronger than what he was used to.

“You a cop?” Widner asked. He wasn’t particularly worried; there was no paper on him that he could remember – nothing fresh, anyway – but he still didn’t relish the prospect of dealing with the law, not with the problems he was having.

“No, I’m no policeman,” the big man said, chuckling in a rehearsed-sounding way. “Actually, I’m a reporter.”

Widner squinted through the vodka mist. “Hey, yeah, you look familiar, actually. You from TV? I seen you before, I’m sure of it.”

The big man shook his head with finality. “Absolutely not,” he said. “I’m strictly print. I work for the Planet, up in Metropolis. I’m down here researching a story, as it happens – I sort of got lost along the way and stopped in here to get my bearings.”

He kept peering at Widner through those hokey coke-bottle lenses. It was starting to make the half-drunk barfly extremely nervous. “Look,” he said, in a lush’s voice that tries to hide itself but comes out as suspiciously quiet, “what, why do you keep staring at me like that? What’s this story you’re doing in a dumpy little burg like this, anyway?”

“Oh, it’s a real pip,” said the big man. “I’ve been following the story of this SKULL experiment that went awry. Apparently they’d hired a lot of fellows, ex-cons mostly, and subjected them to a radiation treatment that changed them somehow.” 

Widner’s face went as pure white as the snow stacked around the corners of Fluke’s windows. He flashed back to the ad he’d answered six miserable years ago in the Underworld Star, the horrible sterile chamber they’d stuck him in, the sickly pink glow that washed over his body and turned him into a monster for a penny-ante paycheck. He remembered how all his troubles began.

“It so happens,” the big man continued with a gregarious smile on his wide, honest face but a steely glare behind his round frames, “that what this treatment did was to unleash the id of these men. It somehow actually gave a sort of parapsychic life to their innermost desires, to their basest instincts. The men couldn’t control this id-creature. Different things would trigger its release – particular sights or smells, emotional reactions, even combinations of words.”

On his creaky barstool, with subzero temperatures outside, Widner began to sweat. He couldn’t pull himself away from the big man’s piercing gaze. And as he spoke, as he described the exact circumstances that had turned Widner’s life into an unending nightmare, Widner flashed on the last six years – how, once a year, whenever anyone would say two little words, two words people only said during the last few weeks of December, he’d black out. When he’d awaken, he’d have money in his pockets, blood on his hands, and the knowledge that he’d soon see a newspaper article about a hideous pink demon made of glowing light that had wreaked havoc in a bank, a bordello, a police station.

“At any rate,” the big man continued, “it turns out that there’s a very simple cure. But there’s one man left, who didn’t get the word, and I’m trying to track him down.”

Widner panicked. Simple cure, my ass: this guy was probably some sort of snitch. If he fessed up, the big man would turn him over to the cops in a heartbeat and he’d spend the rest of his days in a cage – or strapped to a table in some lab. No, sir. Not for Sal Widner. The big man stared at him more steadily than ever, but somewhere, somehow, Widner found the strength to tear himself away. He leapt up from the barstool, nearly pitching over forward into the big man’s arms.

“Listen, pal,” he sputtered in panic and false bravado, “I ain’t never heard of this crazy crap, and I don’t like the way you’re lookin’ at me. Now, why don’t you clear your big-city ass up on out of here, before I clean your clock?”

The big man simply smiled, a jovial, reassuring smile, and rose from his own barstool. “Sure thing, friend,” he said. “Didn’t mean to ruffle your feathers. I’ll be on my way, to see if anyone knows the fellow I’m looking for.”

As the big man walked with a confident, easy gait towards the jangling door, Widner couldn’t help but call out to him. “Hey!” he shouted. “What’s the so-called cure, anyway?”

The reporter turned and smiled that calming smile again. “A concentrated, fast dose of x-rays,” he answered. “You have a merry Christmas.”

 And, for the first time in six years, nothing – glorious, holy nothing – happened to Sal Widner.

***

Like I said, a great story.

Season's Greetings!




Saturday, November 2, 2019

Minifig!

So, this came in the mail today:


Courtesy of my brah Phil, it's a Heroforge miniature of yours truly. The three B's are there: bald head, bushy eyebrows, and beard. The book and the big d20 are suitable talismans for this part-time DM. And the kilt with Chuck Taylors was my teaching uniform for years.

All in all, not a bad job!

Thanks, man! now I just need to roll up a character to match...


Monday, August 19, 2019

Radical

So, Wonder Wife is off to Hawai'i and I have plenty of time on my hands, and over this weekend I read Cory Doctorow's Radicalized.

The book is collection of four long short stories/short novellas/whatever-they-ares. Because some of the motifs and conceits are sort of science-fiction-y and because there are (thinly disguised) superheroes in one story, I am talking about it here on Thark, but the subtitle of the work is Four Tales of our Present Moment and I could easily place this on Epicurus (where I get as political as I ever do).

From the internet of things shit to institutionalized racism, from the inhumanity of healthcare-for-profit to the inevitable failure of libertarian me-firstism, Doctorow throws all that is wrong with our culture into stark relief through compelling narrative: political analysis delivered through ripping yarns.

I'm not sure what impressed me more: Doctorow's grasp of the ethical aspects of technological, economic, and political structures and his lucid unpacking of them, or his ability to tell an engaging story through spare, direct prose that still sings with a distinctive voice. I don't have to choose; it's a win-win.

I was familiar with Doctorow from Boing-Boing and Twitter - along with Sarah Kenzidor, he is one of my go-to sources in these troubled times -  but I hadn't actually read any of his fiction until now. I am remedying that immediately: Walkaway is open on the table now.

Read Doctorow.

Saturday, May 18, 2019

Small wonder

So, yesterday Wonder Wife said she might want to bounce up to Vancouver , BC today to get some vegetarian wonton soup (Vancouver is awesome for finding vegetarian restaurants). When I awoke this morning, my phone reminded me that today was the first day of VANCAF - the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival. So after a breakfast of some fluffy, fluffy eggs*, we nexus-passed through the border and headed to the Roundhouse Mews.


The Roundhouse is a residential/commercial complex in the Yaletown neighborhood near downtown, with a nice interior courtyard and a community center/event space/gymnasium as part of the deal. It was there that this free event was taking place - and yes, it was indeed no charge to get in. Now admittedly, there were no Big Names to be found - and certainly no movie or TV people - but there were a zillion indy comic artists, graphic novelists, illustrators, and cartoonists filling the gym and program spaces.


Besides the absence of Hollywood types, the other difference was the lack of a significant superhero presence. Most of these artists were small press or self-published, and most of the genres represented were historical fiction, horror, fantasy, autobiography - well, I guess just about everything besides superheroes.  The place was abuzz with activity, just like a comic con, only a little bit mellower.


Two things stood out immediately as we cruised the festival. The first was that we could tell how much more multicultural a community Vancouver is, certainly when compared to Bellingham and even when compared to Seattle. It was great to see so many different folk at the event - both as creators and as part of the crowd. The other observation was how LGBT-friendly the event was, in a very intentional and visible way. Not only were there gender-neutral bathrooms and pronoun stickers, but my rainbow tie got me a lot of love.


I managed to keep my spending down to one deluxe GN and this lapel pin, which I will probably wear every day from here on out:

(attributed variously to Jack Kirby and Charles Schulz)

Wonder Wife initially thought she was just going along for the ride, but it turned out to be just her kind of scene. She soaked up the ambiance, chatted with a number of creators, and bought several works, including a comic, some frameable strips, and some illustrations. If she hadn't gotten so hungry for wontons, we might have stayed longer.

All in all, a great visit to swell little con. It's going back on the calendar for next year.

*You should Google that phrase - there's an extraordinary number of responses

Saturday, April 13, 2019

In the green (streaming serendipity part two)

So, as I mentioned last time, Wonder Wife and I had a short run of streaming some good movies lately. As I was napping watching The Monster That Challenged the World ( a quintessential 1950s monster movie, about which perhaps more later) I recalled that I needed to post about the second great find.


Prospect is a great hard science fiction story, one that could have come from Clarke or Asimov. It is both big and small in perfect proportion. It is big, because it gives us a constant and full sense of a much wider world than we seen in the film itself, without having to show us any of it. It is small because it is totally focused on the characters and their struggles, not special effects or spectacle. There is conflict and danger in abundance, because these particular people are in this particular place facing this particular problem. They are not trying to save the world, but rather just trying to survive.

They are Cee, a young girl stranded by circumstance on a hostile moon during a treasure-hunting expedition, and Ezra, a freebooter of dubious ethics, who is an enemy-turned-ally. Together, these two must face natural and human threats in order to secure passage back home - or at least off the planetoid full of threats.
 

The actors are wonderful. Young Sophie Thatcher gives a compelling, tightly-controlled performance as Cee - it's all in the eyes - while Pablo Pascal's turn as the expansive Ezra is captivating, seemingly an admixture of equal parts True Grit, Firefly, and Shakespeare.


As equally compelling as the leads is the art design. The vehicles and suits and equipment - excuse me, the sets and costumes and props - are all totally realistic and plausible in a retro-futuristic dieselpunk sort of way. Everything looks and feels utilitarian and grimy and used; I haven't had so strong a sense of realness to a science fiction setting since the first Alien.


If you want edge-of-your seat tension in a completely engaging sci-fi world,  Prospect will not let you down.

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

All shook up

So, Wonder Wife and I have been favored with some streaming serendipity lately in the form of two movies that we just happened to come across while browsing, each of which was a total blast. here's the first.


The Quake is the Norwegian disaster film that is the sequel to The Wave, which won all kinds of awards and broke all kinds of records in Norway and around the world. Like the original film, this follow-up features Hollywood-style special effects and spectacle while maintaining focus on the individual characters, who we can really care about. It helps that all of them, even (or especially) the main protagonist, Kristian, are cut from decidedly unheroic cloth, and the image of these everyday people coping with an unbelievable natural disaster has a lot more power than watching The Rock stunting his way through the same sort of scenes.

Kristian, the ever-suffering geologist, having played Cassandra once before when a tsunami wiped out his fjordside hometown, finds himself once again sounding the alarm before the earth moves in Oslo and once again being unheeded  by the official bureaucracy - all while contending with PTSD, depression, a failed marriage, and estrangement from his kids. He's a total Nordic Job, and we feel for him every step of the way.


And the action scenes are terrific: tense, suspenseful, edge of your seat stuff. This is no slow-moving character study; the producers have earned their action-film moves well, and once things start shaking, you're in for thrill ride.

Walaka's predication: there will be a third film in the franchise (there's a literal handoff to a new character that I expect to see more of) and it will be.... The Storm.

See this movie.

 

Wednesday, April 3, 2019

The sensibilities that time forgot


So, I made a shopping blitz through Henderson Books the other week and grabbed a whole slug of stuff, including a copy of The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The paperback I bought was not graced with the old style cover art picture above; it was released to coincide with the film version of the story ("A major new motion picture!") in 1974. I have always had a soft spot for that cheesy, breezy Doug McClure flick, and thought I would check out the original, as it was a Burroughs I had never read in my glory days of cutting a reading swath through all things pulpish.

A bit of a shock it was.

The novel was originally published in 1918 and man, does it show. The typical ERB-ian adventure is there, all right; lots of excitement and derring-do to go around from a stalwart protagonist. But the casual racism and sexism, the unapologetic imperialist and colonialist attitudes, and a surprisingly robust anti-socialist/communist stance were real stumbling blocks to my enjoyment. There's lots of discussion about not judging something out of its own context, and I get that, sort of. But as many people have noted about Golden Age comics, sometimes it is just hard to read them. In point of fact, I didn't finish the book.

This response I had made me wonder about all the other ERB I had read as young man - Tarzan, of course, and the Barsoom novels, Pellucidar, and Carson of Venus. Are they as dated and problematic as this is? It was 45 years ago or more that I was reading them. Were the times so different then - was I so different then - that they were, and I just didn't notice?

I'm not sure I really want to find out; perhaps imperfect memory is a gift in this case.

But I do wonder about the "product of its time" argument. I am currently reading some of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries (two books from the same Henderson haul - one upstairs in living room and one downstairs on my nightstand). These were written in the early 1920s, and while some of the language and terminology may be a bit awkward, to say the least, there's a lot less stereotyping and bit more humanism present. Maybe that can straightforwardly be chalked up to a difference between Burroughs and Chesterton, but it takes some of the responsibility for the, ah, challenging characteristics of art away from "its time" and lays it at the feet of its author.

In any case, I am a little trepidatious about dipping back into another fave from my youth, Ernest Gann, but I'll give it a go. Twilight for the Gods was written in '56, so how bad can it be?