PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

The Garth Danielson Christmas Booke 1976

 

Back in 1976 I created a booklet to give out as a Christmas card. It was a little commentary on the commercialization of Christmas by me and some really nice drawings by Stephen T Riley and Stuart Gilson. I made a bunch of copies to mail out to people I knew. James Hall took 3 or 4 of them and bound them in hardback form. I kept one, one went to each artist, a possible 4th one James kept for himself. I'm not in contact with James anymore so I can't ask him. I lost track of Stu but had heard from him in the early part of the century when the Decadent Winnipeg Fandom guys were talking about getting together. It didn't work our and we all drifted apart again. Stu is a professor in one of those big fancy colleges you might of heard about. .
I had lost track of Steve in the 80's and hadn't even known he had died until I found a mention of it on a web page. The other day I had Goggled Steve's name and found a listing on Ken Lopez Bookseller's site for the copy that had been sent to Steve. I emailed Ken and found that he had become the recipient of books and fanzines from Steve's collection. I asked Ken if he can put me in contact with the man who had gotten Steve's collection and passed along some of it to Ken. Perhaps I can fill in more of Steve's story.
I thought that the book had come out pretty good when it was new but today I see a lot of the type is awfully crooked. It was typed on a Selectric typewriter and pasted out by hand. I sure seem to have invented some odd hyphenations. The title page is rub on lettering and it too is a bit crooked.
There's nothing wrong with the art, I think it's still great. I have all the pieces and the cover mounted and framed. That was done by Steve in 1977. He mailed the huge frame, with unbroken glass, to me. It occasionally gets hung up on my wall. To see the whole booklet find the link in the post and click it.

 

Prints 1974

I published 2 sets of Underground Comic art prints in 1974. One set was by Larry Todd and the other was by Tim Boxell. The sets were signed and numbered and limited to 300 copies. When I got back the signed copies from Larry I found that he had hand colored #61.  Wow, was I ever pleased. I certainly kept that one. 

Tim Marion was asking about the Larry Todd prints the other day and he wondered if there were anymore. Sadly Larry and Tim were it. The prints didn't sell well enough to continue with the series. In the 1980's I used the left over prints as covers on my fanzines. I had another Larry Todd illustration that I included as a bonus print when someone bought both sets. The sets had a certificate with a nice logo by fantasy fan artist Stephen T Riley. You can see the whole set over on Flickr.

Sansho The Bailiff 1954

I got the Criterion edition of Sansho The Bailiff from NetFlix and watched it over the weekend. It's a 1954 Japanese film written by Fuji Yahiro and Yoshikata Yoda from a story by Mori Ōgai. It was directed by Kenji Mizoguchi who had directed Ugetsu and the 1941 version of The 47 Ronin. He directed a lot of other films in his career. It started in 1923 and ended in 1956 with a total of 98 credits as listed on the IMDb. Sansho The Bailiff is set in the Heian period of feudal Japan. It's a crappy time, there's plenty of war and the poor are pretty much stuck in poverty while the handful of rich guys screw everyone they can. The Governor of a province has overstepped his boundries. He's sent into banishment and his wife and children are sent to her brothers. 

Later the wife, kids and a nanny travel to see the father. On the way they're kidnapped, the kids are sold to Sansho the Bailiff, the mother into prostitution on the island of Sado. The nanny is falls out of the boat and no one bothers with her, she's not even worth getting wet for. Sansho is a real terror, he keeps his slaves in line with torture and murder. Trying to escape will get you branded, getting too old, weak or sick gets you left in the woods to die. They won't even bury you; the birds will take care of your corpse. The kids grow up in Sansho's compound and the boy Zushiô becomes hardened to the life. The girl Anju retains her heart. Their father was a just man who believed that without mercy, man is not a human being. Not many in the land felt that way, especially those that were at the top of the pile.

The kids plan their escape but another slave puts a kink in it. She's sick, medicine costs money, so she's to be left in the woods to die. Zushiô is assigned to carry her there and the sister is sent along to help. Anju decides to stay behind and distract the guard watching them so her brother can escape with the other slave. He takes her to a Buddhist temple where she gets some medicine. Back at the compound Anju drowns herself so she won't have to tell where her brother went. Zushiô makes his way to Kyoto to see the Chief Advisor. He proves who he is and the CA makes him Governor of Tango which is where Sansho lives. He also tells him that his father had died the year before. Zushiô frees the slaves of Tango and exiles Sansho. He finds out his sister is dead. The slaves party so hard they burn Sansho's house down. Zushiô resigns his post, knowing that he's overstepped his bounds, and travels to find his mother. He finds her and they have a sad reunion.

I tell you, it's one sad thing after another. It's a really well made film and people who see it rave over it big time. It's just not something I might want to watch that often. It's a great looking film and worth seeing for that. You can see it on YouTube and I've stuck a link in the title above. I'd recommend it, especially for those that like a bleak drama.

Misfit Lit Art Show 1991

  

Back in 1991 I was more interested in the underground comix scene than I am today. In 1991 there was an art show called Misfit Lit Art Show and it opened December 7 1991. i went and these pictures above are from the show. I wish I had more but I was mostly there to see S Clay Wilson. On the 6th S Clay was at Dreamhaven signing. I got to hang out and, lucky me, it turned out that he was pals with Roldo who was an old pal of mine from Winnipeg. That lead to S Clay drinking all the beer at Sperhauk's house and me letting S Clay buy me a middle of the night breakfast at Perkins. I still remember the evening fondly even if I can't remember all the details. There was a fair bit of beer involved and who knows what else.

On the 8th there was a panel discussion with S. Clay Wilson, Gilbert Hernandez, Reed Waller, Kate Worley, Jackie Urbanovich and Pete Wagner. Pete was the only local and while he did publish some of my stuff in his book, he never returned the artwork. Now you can see the panel on YouTube above. There's a bit of an interview with some guy before hand.

Tim's Vermeer

I watched Tim's Vermeer today. I had read about it on Boing Boing 2-3 weeks ago. A few days later Joe had mentioned he'd watched it from NetFlix and enjoyed it. I put it on my queue, bumped it up to the top, then pushed it down a couple of discs. It's a film about Tim Jenison and his theory on how Johannes Vermeer painted the pictures he painted. There isn't much known about the life and painting techniques of Vermeer who is now known as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age. He died young and didn't make that many paintings. If he used the method Tim comes up with in the movie I can sure see why. The movie was produced by Penn Jillette and directed by Teller. It took a long time for the film to get made because it took a long time for Tim to recreate the setting of the painting and all the props in it. I enjoy watching people making stuff. It's just one of those things I like. Hell, I even like machines making stuff. To make the movie they used various video cameras and wound up with 2400 hours of video. Don't worry, the movie only shows you 80 minutes of that material. What is there is entertaining and educational. It's well worth a look. And if you tell people about it, they'll think you're all scholarly and shit.

What I Read In December 2013

I really racked up some numbers on my booklist and I ended the year with a total of 97 books. Like the sales during the Christmas holiday period I added almost a quarter of the total in that last month. Twenty four different books, some graphic novels, were wolfed down in December of last year.

   

Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix by JK Rowling still continues to entertain me. What more could you want?

Lassie - The Wild Mountain Trail by IG Edmonds has Paul return home from school. He finds out his old friend Hank has suffered a head injury. Hank's gone home from the hospital but he's still a bit loopy. When he runs off into the mountains Paul and Lassie have to save him from himself and anyone else he might hurt. There's some crooks and a firebug on the mountain to complicate things. This is another Whitman book rom the fairly large series of Lassie books. You can read more about the series here. I only have two of them but I didn't look that hard for them. It was ok and while I'll keep it I don't know that I might want to read it again.

Kidnapped by Cole Fanning is a Walt Disney book from Whitman. Disney adapted the Robert Louis Stevenson novel into a movie and then wrote the book based on the movie's script. David Balfour comes to visit his uncle Ebenezer. The old man is a creep and a criminal. He gets a ship's captain to shanghai David and sell him into indentured servitude. The ship hits a large boat and Alan Breck Stewart is the only survivor. Once aboard it becomes clear the Captain will kill Alan for his money belt. Before that happens Alan escapes and takes David with him. David eventually gets back to his uncle for a spot of vengence. Not a bad story but not that well written. I might have read the Stevenson novel when I was a kid, it would have appealed more, but I'm not that interested in it today. I see those Whitman's and any with Disney, or 60's TV, connection seem to come home with me. They're nice quick reads and they do add a bit of variety to the fictional diet. It's another I'll keep but not re-read.

   

Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince by JK Rowling is the 6th book but you should know that. Harry gets a potions book that used to belong to the Half Blood Prince and finally gets good grades in potions. Of course Snape isn't his teacher, Horace Slughorn is. Too bad all that great knowledge was destroyed in the fire that comes later. Way of the world, huh.

Mr Stink by David Walliams is about a girl who befriends a stinky man who sits on the bench near a store. It's set in the same world as his previous novel but only a couple of characters make the cross over. I found it charming, funny and at the library. The girl's mom is a go-getter who is running for local office and the dad has sadly been forced to give up his youthful pleasures for a family and such. Things work out nicely in the end. A delightful book that once again reminds us not to judge people by what you see. Valuable knowledge often comes from the oddest places. It's been adapted to BBC TV. I'm interested in seeing it.

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling rounds out the series and I poured through it mighty fast. I think that was the 8th read through so I'll be taking a break for a couple of years. The page count is high enough in the series I could probably read twice that number of smaller books. I like books that are 150-250 pages, especially if I have to hold it for long. I'm reading an omnibus of Oz stories that has 1400 pages and I have to lay it on my desk at work to read it.

 

The Art Of Ray Harryhausen by Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton is Ray talking about his movies and the work that went into them. It's heavily illustrated with his art and there are plenty of interesting stories about his experiences making the stop motion animation for the films he worked on. I have a fondness for those films and have seen some of them several times. I fear the book would appeal more to the movie fan, but you never know, often getting into the mind of a highly creative person is well worth the visit.

Walt Disneys Uncle Remis Stories as retold by Marion Palmer takes the Joel Chandler Harris stories and sanitises them a bit for the Disney audience of hte 1950's and '60's. It's a large hardcover that's got a good number of illustrations. I wasn't that fond of them as I am of the Carl Buettner, or Paul Murray, illustrated stories that appeared in the Disney comic books. The stories are ok but it would be more interesting to read the originals.

   

Sword Woman And Other Historical Adventures by Robert E Howard was so dull and boring that I could hardly finish it. You would have thought I was water skiing across those pages.

Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets by Herge is the first of the Tintin stories. I read a modern English language reprint of the original 1930 black and white version of the story. It's the only Tintin story that was never redrawn for color publication. The story ran in installments in Le Petit Vingtième and then was packaged in book format. The art is much simpler and the story is twice as long as the more familiar color editions which run a uniform 62 pages. The story telling techniques aren't as refined as they would become. The humor in the story is cruder. I had bought an imported French language edition of the first three Tintin stories in the early 1970's but did not read French. I even tried translating the story with a French to English dictionary but it was difficult and I got bored with it soon enough. Due to my circumstances I was one of those Canadian kids that didn't take French in school. I learned German instead. In the story Tintin takes a trip to the Soviet Union. Tintin discovers what a shitty place Russia is and nearly gets shot by a firing squad.

A Tale Of Two Castles by Gail Carson Levine has a young woman from a tiny village travel to the big city. She wants to apprentice as an actor but instead winds up apprenticing to a dragon. I really like Levine's books, she has a good style, interesting goings on and plenty of good plot stuff. There's a bit of mystery, some danger and a good bunch of characters. I'd recommend this to anyone who likes a bit of adventure and fantasy.

   

The Battle Of The Red Hot Pepper Weenies And Other Warped And Creepy Tales by David Lubar is another collection of his short, 2-4 page, stories that have weird things going on. Some are funny, some are dumb, some are entertaining and some are not. It's another thing I got on clearance at the Half Price Books. They must get too many Lubar books in so I find the occasional one in the clearance section. You can pop through them in a couple of hours and then forget about them.

Tintin In The Congo by Herge is the second story and I read the English language replica edition. The original story was packaged as a book in 1931 and the color edition was redrawn in 1946. There were more changes made to the story in 1975. It was the last of the Tintin color editions to get an English translation. For some reason I don't have a copy of the color edition. The story puts our boy reporter in the Belgian Congo where he blows up a Rhino. As I said the jokes were cruder. It's one of the many things that got changed when the story was redrawn. Tintin goes up against gangster Al Capone who has his fingers in a diamond smuggling operation.

Tintin In America by Herge is the third in the series of TinTin stories. The black and white edition came out in 1932 and the color in 1945. I read the latter though I have a copy of the former. Tintin makes a trip to Chicago and gets mixed up with gangsters. Al Capone makes an appearance. The gangsters try to kill Tintin and eventually they chase him into the west where he meets some Native Americans. It's all pretty silly for the most part but I enjoyed it.

   

Star Trek - The Prometheus Design by Sondra Marshak and Myana Culbreath was one of several Star trek paperbacks for half a buck each a while back and every now and again I read one. While investigating the violence on Helvan the crew get infected. It's not a very good story and dull on top of that. Best I toss this one out. 

The Case Of The Shapely Shadow by Earl Stanley Gardner has Perry Mason help the secretary of a real estate broker figure out a blackmail lot. About average for the series. I still don't find them as interesting as some of the other series that ESG wrote.

Hellboy 11 - The Bride Of Hell And Others by Mike Mignola collects more stories written by Mignola and drawn by other artists. I wish he would illustrate his own stories but there you go.

   

Hellboy - The Storm And The Fury by Mike Mignola is the 12th of hte Hellboy collections. It collects the two stories that Mignola wrote. Mostly I enjoy the character and his troubles.

Abe Sapien - The Devil Does Not Jest And Other Stories by Mike Mignola collects a bunch of Abe Sapien stories. I liked most of these too.

Aliens Ate My Homework by Bruce Coville is a silly short novel about a kid and some tiny aliens. He takes them to school where they have a fun time. There are plenty of gags and silly situations. Coville writes well enough and the story moves along quickly. It's not a keeper and I'll pass it along to the bookstore for some credit.

 

Tintin - The Cigars Of The Pharoah by Herge is the 4th of the series. The original black and white story was serialized in 1934 and the color edition was done in 1955. Tintin is on a cruise in the Mediterranean when Interpol detectives Thompson and Thomson accuse him of smuggling. That leads to a chase to Arabia and eventually India. There's a pretty good mystery and we meet some of the longer running characters like the stupid Interpol detectives and master villain Rastapopoulos.

 

Tintin - The Blue Lotus by Herge continues the previous story with Tintin in China during the Japanese invasion. The black and white art was collected and published as  book in 1936. The color edition came out ten years later. It's one of my favorite covers.

 

Tintin - The Broken Ear by Herge has Tintin in south America chasing after the mystery of the stolen fetish. The 6th story first was collected in 1937. The color edition came out in 1943. We meet General Alcazar for the first time.

Tintin - The Black Island by Herge has another of my favorite covers. It's got a good story and Tintin rockin' a kilt. The 7th story came out originally in 1938, it was redawn in 1943 for color publication and again in 1966. Once again Thompson and Thomson think Tintin is involved with a crime but of course they are wrong. Tintin is investigating some counterfeiters and the story leads them to England and eventually the black island off the coast of Scotland.

All in all a nice bunch of stories to read. Most of the books are keepers.

Okinawa Soba

There's a guy, Okinawa Soba, on Flicker that I have in my Contacts. He posts a lot of his own pictures, taken around Okinawa, and those are quite interesting. I'm probably never going to go there and this is a great way to see something interesting from a guy who lives there. He's got plenty of variety in his pictures and I always find something of interest. I wish my picture taking was as interesting.

He posts a good number of these hand colored pictures taken by photographers a century ago. He has a good bit of info about the people taking pictures and selling them. This one was published somewhere between 1913 and 1924. I thought it was very lovely. I don't have anything against hand coloring. I think color can make a good black and white picture more interesting. I think this is much better colored than most of the hand colored pictures you see. There's a lot of good things about the picture. You can catch more of these delightful ancient relics at his Flickr Photostream in the link above. Worth a look.

Angkor Wat Street View

Google has added Angkor Wat to it's places you can wonder through with Street View. It's very cool. You can follow the footpaths and even go into some buildings.

Harry Potter Travel Posters

I really liked these Harry Potter Travel Posters by Caroline Hadilaksono.

Japanese Travel Posters

I feel I should post more posts that just aren't about tv and movies but I'm lazy. Occasionally one or another of the few Blogs I still look at has something that might lead to me to look for more examples. On one of those Blogs I noticed a link to an auction house with some Japanese Travel Posters. They were rather pretty. So I Googled and harvested some of more of them. I thought I would post some of the nicer ones.

The above image reminds me of some of the Japanese postage stamps in my collection. They did a lot of their stamps in that shade of green or the brown below. I stopped collecting the newer Japanese stamps 6-7 years ago. I prefer the old ones.

 

I like those Air France posters quite a bit. I've always been a fan of commercial art.

Japan is certainly photogenic. I would bet Japanese picture post cards would be a nice source of interesting images too.

Nice, huh. If you guessed it would be old, you'd be right. If you guessed Japanese, you'd be wrong. Here's the description of the card from the stock photography site it came from:

While this looks like a scene straight from Japan, this photo was actually taken here in Belgium. This is the view of the Japanese Tower from the gardens of the Royal Palace in Laeken, Belgium. Léopold II had the tower constructed along with a Chinese pavillion which were inaugurated in 1905.

Here's a 1936 card from the RCA Japanese Garden in Rockerfeller center New York City.

I really enjoy the old linen back, hand colored cards from the first part of the 20th century. It's another thing you can Google and see plenty of nice images. There are some blogs and sites that feature old post cards. Moore's Postcard Museum is a nice one.

Here's a favorite from their recent posts. Gets off the topic of Japan travel posters but that's the way things go, you know.