Pop Culture Gadabout
Friday, March 06, 2009
      ( 3/06/2009 09:38:00 AM ) Bill S.  

"WE WILL SEE TO IT THAT THE KINGDOM OF KOD WILL THRIVE!" The second entry in No Starch Press's series of shoujo "EduManga" devoted to math and science, Mana Takahashi and Shoko Azuma's Manga Guide to Databases takes a mildly more fanciful approach to its story framework. Where the first book, Statistics, presented its daunting concepts through dialogs between a middle-class teenaged schoolgirl and her grown-up tutor, Databases makes its student vessel the princess of a fairytale kingdom and her teacher a perky fairy named Tico.

Our heroine, Princess Ruruna, has been left in charge of the Kingdom of Kod (a.k.a. "The Country of Fruit") when her parents leave the country for a world tour. ("It is one of my important official duties to travel abroad," the bearded king vaguely explains.) With the unprepared princess in charge of managing the country's fruit production and distribution, the poor girl struggles to get a handle on things. It isn't until she receives a package from her parents containing a locked book, though, that she's provided the tools to manage things more effectively.

As Tico instructs Ruruna and her loyal aide Cain in the terminology and basics of databases, the uses of relational databases and possible applications of the tool, our heroine has to fend off the advances of a egotistical pretty boy prince from a neighboring kingdom and, of course, come to realize that her childhood friend and aide is really the one for her. This sketchy bit of romantic subplot is rather perfunctorily handled, but at least it's not as potentially squirm-inducing as the schoolgirl crush Statistics' heroine had on her adult tutor.

More amusing are the off-handed side comments made by Ruruna and Cain about Tico's teaching style and periodic wardrobe additions -- as well as the occasional bits of Topper-esque comedy revolving around our two students' conversations with a creature no one else can see. Artist Shoko Azuma isn't as far-flown with the visual flights as Iroha Inoue was in Statistics; perhaps the more fanciful story setting is meant to compensate for this, but the fact remains that when you've got panel after panel of charts and teaching heads, you still need to razzle-dazzle 'em.

Too, the presentation of databasics doesn't strike me as smoothly managed as it was in the stats volume. There's an over reliance on panels of floating tables and charts hanging in the space between our characters, and at times the effect is more crowded than it is visually welcoming. Still, I suspect that shoujo readers coming to this book for an introduction to the subject will leave with a decent grounding in it.

As with the first Manga Guide, the book interweaves comics with text and study questions designed to further explicate the material. I skimmed this material because, frankly, I was more interested in seeing how Tico's teachings would make our harried princess' life easier. "By using databases," Ruruna tells us at the end of the book, "I will build a wonderful country where everyone can enjoy a convenient way of life." Go to it, Ruruna!

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      ( 3/06/2009 06:55:00 AM ) Bill S.  


BEANS AND RAT FACES: Artist and Third Banana aficionado Aaron Neathery debuted a new daily webcomic series this week on the Modern Tales website, a post-Apocalypse comic serial entitled "Endtown". I've had a sneak peak at the first fifty episodes, which combine sci-fi, slapstick and mutant manimal laffs with a lotta expressive cartoonery. Definitely worth a click . . .
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Thursday, March 05, 2009
      ( 3/05/2009 07:34:00 AM ) Bill S.  


"WE'RE JUST NOT ON THE SONG WE WANT TO BE ON."* Watching last night's Lost, I couldn't help chuckling near the end of the episode when ABC ran a promo for the show that was following. "Return to the seventies with Life on Mars," the announcer told us. Hey, we've been in the seventies for the last hour!

*Tony Orlando & Dawn's "Candida"?
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Wednesday, March 04, 2009
      ( 3/04/2009 04:56:00 PM ) Bill S.  


"I SIT BESIDE A YOUNG MAN, HEADPHONES ON HIS EARS" A long-standing folk-rocker with a knack for alluring melodies and straight-faced romantic lyricism, Irish singer/songwriter Luka Bloom has had a long career as a musician -- both under his current stage name and his birth name Barry Moore -- that goes all the way back to the late seventies. Despite this durable career, the man isn't much known in the U.S., which isn't surprising considering how much scant regard basic songwriting receives these days. But those lovers of hard-strummed "electro-acoustic" music and honest singing, who perhaps came to Bloom with his early nineties releases and lost track of him after he began following more ambient turns, the new Eleven Songs will be viewed as a happy return to folk-rock form.

Shifting from infectious country-folk shakers like "I'm on Your Side" and "Eastbound Train" through Latin-tinged celebrations of the beauty of the world ("I Love the World I'm In") and gospel admonitions to free your mind, the soothing voiced Bloom deftly conveys a mood of warmth tinged with melancholy without readily succumbing to the boy/man posturing of so many male singers. This is experienced music sung by a guy who isn't here to impress you with all the roads he's traveled, but mainly wants to tell you about the things he's seen. "There is a time we must sit with ourselves," he explains over a deftly played Spanish guitar in the album's opener. "Let the breeze in, let the winds blow."

The album has only one serious misstep: the hectoring "Fire," which uses an admittedly addictive chorus to rant against 21st century techno alienation. Sorry, Luka, but I'm writing this review for the Internet. Besides, Billy Joel ruined the use of fire imagery in the service of protest songs twenty years ago.

The rest of Eleven Songs is hooky and welcoming: great music for those times you wake up in the middle of the night feeling that unexplained sense of dread -- and want to listen to something that won't wake your significant other back in the bedroom. Listening to "I Hear Her, Like Lorelei," I couldn't help thinking of John Cale in one of his more subdued moments. But disc finale "Don't Be Afraid of the Light that Shines Within You" is the one you'll keep running through your head after you crawl back into bed. An achingly beautiful inspirational track, it implores its listeners to "warm our hearts and faces in the heat of the burning flame" (okay, I'll accept that fire image) over backup by Dublin's Gardiner Street Gospel Choir. In these grim times, we need all the buck-up music we can get . . .

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      ( 3/04/2009 01:04:00 PM ) Bill S.  


PORK: So I read that John McCain, singling out the most risible earmarks from the latest Obama stimulus package, chose to make $1.7 million for "pig odor research in Iowa" the first scornworthy item. Gotta tell ya, John, if you'd ever lived in Central Illinois downwind from the local hog farms, you wouldn't think this was such a trivial deal. Them porkers can be pretty damn pungent. Once, when I was working as a foster family supervisor, I had to step into a foster parent's hog shed in the middle of winter to access the damage that their foster son'd wreaked on some pipes in the building. I never got the stench out of my blazer . . .
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      ( 3/04/2009 09:55:00 AM ) Bill S.  


KEEPING THINGS ON AN UP NOTE: It hasn't all been grimness and post-employment gloom at the OakHaus: we (frugally) celebrated wife Becky's 55th birthday yesterday and are continuing to move forward with the book publication of our big-assed romantic serial, Measure By Measure. Publisher Pearlsong Press is looking toward a mid-June release of this rascal, so we recently had some photos taken for the back cover. Here’s the one the publisher chose; I don't think I look too goofy in it . . .


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      ( 3/04/2009 06:53:00 AM ) Bill S.  


MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: I see that XTC's psychedelic homage band Dukes of Stratosfear are getting their album and EP re-released. I love those discs, but, if forced to choose, I'd favor the less cartoonishly druggy Skylarking, which was released under the band's own name. Here's one of the great tracks from that disc, "Grass."


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Monday, March 02, 2009
      ( 3/02/2009 12:40:00 PM ) Bill S.  


"SOMEONE SINGING A CATCHY SONG." All us part-time smart guys who congratulated ourselves on catching the Brecht allusion in Watchmen's proto-EC pirate horror comic, "The Black Freighter," can pat ourselves on the back even more fervently now. With the latest installment of Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Top Shelf Comix), ultra-dense scripter Moore slathers on the Threepenny Opera refs with the same allusive brazenness he brought to Bram Stoker or Jules Verne. In the first volume of the new three-book mini-series, Century: 1910 (set for April release), Moore and his artist collaborator O'Neill cut between the League's investigation into an impending menace and sequences where Brecht characters Jenny Diver (a dying Captain Nemo's daughter, we learn), Jack MacHeath a.k.a. Mack the Knife and Sukie Tawdry sing and dance to classic Brecht/Weill compositions.

The end results of the latter can be fun for those who know and recall the Opera -- who perhaps have Lotte Lenya's or even Judy Collins' rendition of "Pirate Jenny" lodged in their sense memory -- though I suspect it can be rather distancing to readers less familiar with the work. Seeing unfamiliar tunes on a comic book page is more than a little distancing, but, then, a certain amount of audience alienation is essential to Brechtian aesthetic theory, no? Part of the joy of this series has been picking through its crowd of allusions to Victorian and Edwardian entertainments, but whether the regular readership'll be as well-versed in Marxist theater from the 1920's as they are Sax Rohmer is something else again.

That noted, the singin'-&-dancin' portions provide a great outlet for artist O'Neill's caricaturist bent. Set on the docks, they revel in Edwardian squalor with a glee that's close to underground in its intensity. In one sequence, for instance, we're shown a gang-raped Jenny Diver as Sukie both tends to the battered woman and sings a stanza from "Pirate Jenny," with its threatening refrain announcing the imminent arrival of the Black Raider. Visually strong stuff that's wholly dependent on the artist's considerable storytelling skills since the Moore the scriptwriter doesn't provide much in the way of expository text beyond tweaking some of Brecht's lyrics.

The part of the book that'll bring regular readers back to the League is more conventionally handled: our crew attempting to track down a group of diabolical occultists led by "diabolist" Oliver Haddo (the title figure of Somerset Maugham's early The Magician). At this point in the series line, the League is primarily comprised of vampiress vampire-touched Nina Murray, a rejuvenated Allan Quatermain, ghost-hunter Carnacki (lead of an obscure fantasy series by William Hope Hodgson), former thief A.J. Raffles and the ambiguously sexed immortal Orlando (perhaps best known in this identity as Virginia Woolf imagined him/her). It's the presence of that last who provides much of the quarrelsome comedy in the first book -- the ambi-sexed immortal tweaking the sensitivities of his more straight-laced colleagues -- though a little of this goes a long way.

Our bickering League, prompted by a prophetic apocalyptic dream that Carnacki has experienced at the book's opening, delve into the activities of the Haddo Cult, inadvertently providing the cult's leader with a clue as to the best route for plunging the world "into a strange and terrible new aeon." That this plan is somehow connected to the coronation of King George hints that one of the primary subtexts of Century: 1910 is the birth of the Modern Age. "It seems that in our new century, fortune is set to favour Mr. MacHeath and his kind," Mycroft Holmes notes after Mackie's been reprieved from a much-due appointment with the hangman's rope, "and may heaven help us all." You can't help wondering whether Mycroft isn't also speaking for the notoriously cranky Moore when it comes to the present century.

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Sunday, March 01, 2009
      ( 3/01/2009 11:22:00 AM ) Bill S.  


THE HARVEY GUY: Couldn't let the weekend go by without acknowledging the death of Chicago radio legend Paul Harvey. The man was a staccato conservative voice for decades, with a style that hearkened back to earlier days of commercial radio. I used to hear him at a teen in Arlington Heights, IL., on the weekends -- and, if I didn't agree with his politics, he still had a kind of honesty in his presentation that his followers can't come close to mustering. Ain't a lotta right-wing radio voices these days who would even dream of changing their mind on a major conservative touch point, but Harvey famously did so on the Vietnam War. R.I.P. Paul.

For this lover of underground comix, Harvey holds another significant place: he reportedly served as the inspiration for Skip Williamson's cranky conservative caricature Rag-Time Billy.


(Image taken from Williamson's Lambiek entry.)
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      ( 3/01/2009 07:09:00 AM ) Bill S.  


IN MY OWN SPECIAL WAY: Today's the Gadabout's anniversary: seven years ago, back in Illinois, this blogger was posting his Responsibility Ducking Intro. Looking back at this blog's first posts, I see a short appreciative piece on Joey Ramone's solo swan song, a consideration of controversial former Marvel editor Jim Shooter, an opening look at the final episodes of The X-Files, followed by some words about the second season opener of Six Feet Under, and the dissection of a pop culture ref from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Not much different from what I've been writing today, though life's demands have kept me from being as fecund as I once was. (Don't see that situation changing any time soon.) I'm still playing that Joey R. disc in regular rotation, incidentally: when I'm particularly feeling life's brickbats, I've found it's one of the few pieces of music that'll keep me going.

So here's to another year of bloggin' . . .

(Oh, and a happy belated ninth blogiversary to the redoubtable neilalien!)
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Pop cultural criticism - plus the occasional egocentric socio/political commentary by Bill Sherman (popculturegadabout AT yahoo.com).



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