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Friday, April 10, 2009 ( 4/10/2009 07:16:00 AM ) Bill S. "OPEN THE DOOR, RICHARD." Here's a cropped shot of Ziggy Stardust and Xander Cat at the back door. The latter doubtless wants to dash out so he can catch and feast on lizards in the backyard.  THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark." # | ( 4/10/2009 06:51:00 AM ) Bill S. "ONE BY ONE" After weeks of its creepy promos, we caught the premiere of the 13-ep Harper's Island last night. Despite some flat and overly expository dialog, we've gotten hooked by its Ten Little Indians premise. (For me, that tree of hanging bodies was the series' grabber image, though I also liked the guy tied under the boat.) Pulling a Janet Leigh on Harry Hamlin was a particularly neat touch, since for many of us viewers the last time we saw him was as the killer on Veronica Mars. Christopher Gorham's playing another "Henry"? Too bad his character's last name (Dunn) isn't as amusingly evocative as the one he carried on Ugly Betty (Grubstick). Are clearly time-limited series the future of serialized teevee dramas, then? I wouldn't mind if it was. Perhaps, if they'd been given a clear closing date from the very beginning, the writers of the Americanized Life on Mars wouldn’t have cobbled together such a crappy finale. # | Wednesday, April 08, 2009 ( 4/08/2009 01:39:00 PM ) Bill S.  "I THOUGHT YOU HATED THAT GUY." A quirky and provocative look at teen life in a company housing project, Miki Aihara's Hot Gimmick is the latest manga series to receive the VizBig treatment (among the other big-selling series to have gotten reprinted in this larger format: Dragon Ball, Fushigi Yûgi, and Rurouni Kenshin). Collecting three books of the original twelve-volume series into one fat 5-½"-x-8-1/2" trade paperback, VizBig's collection contains enough juicy plot twists, personal betrayals and romantic complications to get you hooked on the series' seriously screwed-up lives. Though marketed as one of Viz's Shojo Beat titles, this "older teen" rated series is by no means a flowery young girl's romance -- not unless your idea of innocent romantic comedy revolves around domestic violence, date rape drugs and possible teenaged pregnancy.The central heroine of Gimmick is a slender sixteen-year-old named Hatsumi Narita, who lives with her family in the Tobishi Trading Company housing complex in Tokyo. Because all of the building's families are tied into the company, there's a rigid social hierarchy established, with the wife of company vice-president Tachibana lording it over the families on the floors below them. The book's opening establishes this quite neatly in a scene where a friend of Hatsumi's named Subaru is seen rummaging through the garbage for a thrown-away Gundam model. When the building's queen bee observes this, she takes it as an opportunity to put down Hatsumi, who she thinks was also going through the trash. "I must insist that you refrain from doing anything that compromises the dignity of this complex," Miz T. states, establishing the rigidly judgmental milieu that spurs what's to come. Things grow complicated for Hatsumi after her younger sister Akane asks her to pick up a pregnancy test. The buxom fourteen-year-old has missed her period and doesn't know who the possible father might be; Hatsumi, who hasn't even had her first kiss yet, is appalled by her sibling Lolita's behavior but goes out to buy the "Yes or No" test, anyway. Unfortunately, she's seen with it by Ryoki Tachibana, the bookish son of the building's matriarch and Hatsumi's onetime childhood tormentor. In exchange for his keeping quiet, Ryoki blackmails our heroine into becoming his "slave." "There's something about her that makes me want to pick on her," Ryoki later explains to Subaru. Ryoki's new attempt at dominating our heroine is initially thwarted by another childhood acquaintance: Azusa Odagiri, a young teen model who is returning to the building complex with his widowed father. Tall and shojo handsome, Azusa at first appears to be the series' Prince Charming, but it soon turns out that he has his own sinister agenda. Blaming Hatsumi's father for the death of his mother, he wants vengeance on the Narita family and sees his former childhood friend as the ideal vehicle for his dastardly plans. Poor hapless Hatsumi pinballs between both of these manipulative bastards, between the verbally abusive "poindexter geek" Ryoki and the obsessively vengeful Azusa. She's both attracted and repelled by these two high-rise Heathcliffs, and we readers know that whichever boy she ultimately chooses, he won't be the best choice. Still, we can't stop reading as our girl continues to careen through this harsh teen soap realm. Like I say, Hot Gimmick is not a sweet and sugary series: in the second volume, there's a real "what-the-hell" moment where Ryoki attempts to cop a feel on the doped and dreaming Hatsumi, only to have her wake up just as he's got both hands on her "small boobs." The third book features an extended sequence wherein our heroine's threatened by a crew of lascivious teens after Azusa has led the unwitting girl into their clutches. When Ryoki shows on the scene, neither she nor the reader can be sure at first whether he's there to save her ass or take it for himself. Nice girl, bad boys; not-so-smart women, foolish choices. It's a familiar enough romantic formula made more interesting by the unfamiliar setting, minutely delineated characterization and brightly clean artwork. VizBig's larger page size showcases Aihara's expressive line work to good advantage: she's particularly adept at inserting silent panels between major moments where you can see the characters processing what's just happened. Considering all the twists that occur in this addictive shojo series, you can't blame a girl like Hatsumi for needing an occasional moment's respite just to catch up. Labels: sixty-minute manga # |( 4/08/2009 06:47:00 AM ) Bill S. "SOME HOPE AND SOME DESPAIR" For today's mid-week music vid, let's go to one of Morrissey's best solo numbers. Someday we must have a debate on whether the song is positive or negative -- for now, I'll just note that I find the plus-sized actress in the video pretty darn cute. # | Tuesday, April 07, 2009 ( 4/07/2009 04:10:00 PM ) Bill S. A SIGN OF THE TIMES: Went to a luncheon for the area's coalition to prevent child abuse this afternoon. The typically well-attended (free lunch, after all) affair was down in attendance by about fifty bodies, a third of its usual attendance. A reflection of the way that child welfare agencies and staff levels have shrunk in Arizona over the past three months -- looked kinda sad. # | Monday, April 06, 2009 ( 4/06/2009 09:53:00 AM ) Bill S.  "I'M EVOLVED . . . BUT SENTIMENTAL" From its full title, you readily get the impression that Philip K. Dick's Dr. Bloodmoney Or How We Got Along After the Bomb is a rollicking dark comedy in the manner of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. The book was written in 1963, a year before that classic Cold War satire was released, but its title wasn't affixed to the book until after the movie was a hit -- at the advice of Ace Paperbacks editor Donald A. Wolheim. It's doubtful that this ploy did much for the Bloodmoney's sales, as Ace's cheap paperbacks weren't much known beyond its core readership of hard-wired sci-fi geeks back in 1965. Too, Dick was too honest a writer to indulge in the kind of crowd-pleasing broadswipe caricaturing that characterized Strangelove.Bloodmoney was reissued last year as part of the Library of America's hardbound collection of five Dick novels of the 1960s and '70s (the other four titles: Martian Time-Slip; Now Wait for Last Year; Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said and A Scanner Darkly). The book provides a solid reflection of the writer's focus and voice during the sixties; as with Time-Slip, it centers on a community of people struggling to survive in a harsh world where even their most hard-held beliefs are up for grabs. In this case, as the title indicates, it's the post-nuclear apocalypse. Set in Berkeley and Marin County during the eighties, after a nuclear accident in 1972 resulted in an outbreak of human and mutations, the book opens prior to the even more devastating holocaust that will change everything. We meet many of the book's main characters prior to the change. Among these are black television salesman Stuart McConchie, psychiatrist Dr. Stockwell, unhappy housewife Bonny Keller (one of Dick's chronically unsatisfied women), astronaut Walt Dangerfield, mentally ill former physicist Bruno Bluthgeld and thalidomide victim Hoppy Harrington. Bluthgeld is the Dr. Bloodmoney of the title. It's his supervision of high altitude bomb testing that led to the Catastrophe of 1972, and guilt for this has driven him mad. When full-blown nuclear war breaks out in the eighties, Bluthgeld holds himself responsible for that, too. Whether he's delusional and engaging in magical thinking -- or indeed truly has the ability to create an actual devastating nuclear event -- is never clearly resolved in the book. One character who clearly does possess hyper-normal powers is the phocomelus Harrington. Born without the use of his hands or feet, Hoppy has developed telekinetic abilities to compensate for his thalidomide created body malformations. When we meet him, he's working as a repairman for Modern TV, but after the nuclear devastation, his powers push him to the front of the small Marin County farm community that he makes his home. Trapped in a basement in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear strike, he immediately plans to take over his own small patch of California: "It would all be small towns and individuals," he thinks, "like Ayn Rand talked about in her books." If Bloodmoney has any clear villain, it's the sociopathic Harrington, who presides over his isolated community like little Anthony in Jerome Bixby's classic s-f horror story, "It's A Good Life." The preponderance of human and animal mutations in the post-Bomb world suits him. "In a way, there are no freaks, no abnormalities," he notes, though he still holds onto memories of the days when he was subjected to stares and mistreatment by "normal" folk. One of the book's other mutants, the unborn twin son of Bonny Keller, takes advantage of Hoppy's traumatic recollections in the book's genuinely creepy showdown. Among the average folk, the most central to the worldwide community proves to be astronaut Dangerfield, who went into space with his wife and is stranded in satellite orbit around the Earth after the war. Broadcasting music and readings of Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage to folks back on Earth after his wife's suicide, Dangerfield is the survivors' primary connection to a world they once knew. When the astronaut/deejay begins experiencing heart palpitations that may or may not be psychosomatic, psychiatrist Stockwell attempts to treat him via radio contact. Much of Dick's novel concerns itself with the very human need to reassert normalcy in the face of overwhelming catastrophe and the attempts of people to either build upon or deny the very changes that have gone on around 'em. A merciless, yet sympathetic observer of human flaws and occasional sparks of heroism, Dick shows both the positive and negative aspects of this drive. Stuart McConchie proves a good vehicle for this: even after the holocaust, he continues to tirelessly work as a salesman, shifting from now useless televisions to Hardy Homeostatic rat traps. His indomitable huckerism is appreciated by more one potential customer. "He is still planning, cogitating, bullshitting," one notes admiringly. At the same time, as a black male, Stuart remains subject to the racist suppositions of his white neighbors. The war, we learn, has even added an additional nasty fillip to this brand of bigotry as radiation burn victims are called "war darkies." The more things change, etc. As with other Dick s-f novels from the sixties, there's always a moment that evokes the period in which it was written and cements the no-longer-prophetic story as an alternate take on a future that we thankfully missed. In Bloodmoney, it's a scene early in the book where a small crowd collects in front of Modern TV to watch a "large stereo color TV set" to watch the space launch of Walt Dangerfield and his wife. Reading that scene, you can visualize the loitering extras in their suits and fedoras, their dresses and heels. It's the kind of well-picked mundane detail that helps to ground Dick even through his most freewheeling paranoid science fantasies -- and also adds to this disturbing and surprising evocation of Cold War nuclear anxiety. Labels: classic sci-fi # |Sunday, April 05, 2009 ( 4/05/2009 10:53:00 PM ) Bill S. "THE LINE FORMS ON THE RIGHT, BABE!" Spent the evening watching Kevin Spacey's Bobby Darin bioflick, Beyond the Sea: an odd, not wholly satisfying exercise that couldn't quite decide if it wanted to be Yankee Doodle Dandy or All That Jazz -- or perhaps Anthony Newley's sixties era ego trip Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? Spacey's flick had some fun musical dance numbers, but how come we never got to see his Darin doing the Top Ten folk hit, "If I Were A Carpenter"? # | ( 4/05/2009 07:41:00 AM ) Bill S. WEEKEND PET PIC: It's a Kyan Pup head shot, an apt image for a lazy Sunday a.m.  THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark." # | ( 4/05/2009 07:24:00 AM ) Bill S. TWEETY: Signed up for the Twitter thing this weekend. So now I can be more easily misquoted in the press. # | |
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