Book Report: Scooby Apocalypse Volume 1 (2017)

Book coverSo, Brian J., you’re saying. It’s not enough that you count looking at artist monographs as reading a book for your annual total, but now you’re counting comic books? Well, in my defense, gentle reader, this is a collection of the first six comics in a re-imagining of the Scooby Doo universe published by DC comics from 2016-2019 (or so I learned on the Scoobypedia). So it’s not too far off from, say, Potbelly Mammoth or a graphic novel. He said in his defense.

One of my boys borrowed this from the library, and one of my boys (perhaps the same one that checked it out) this weekend said it creeped him out. So I picked it up.

The book reboots the story as post-apocalyptic fiction. Velma works for a secret corporate lab that has a plan to release nanobots that will reprogram humans to be nicer to each other. When she discovers that her superiors also will make humanity docile, she invites an obscure journalist (Daphne) and her cameraman (Fred) to the complex. They and a dog trainer (Shaggy) and an artificially augmented dog (Scooby) are the only ones who are unaffected when the triggered nanobots instead turn people into monsters. They grab a prototype armored vehicle and head out into the wastes in search of… Well, other survivors or other of the complexes.

Not much happens in the first six issues, really. We get some flashbacks about Shaggy and Scooby and Velma, but too many of the pages deal with the bickering between Daphne, who blames Velma for the apocalypse, and Velma, who really did. The actual action of the issues are kinda nil. Reading the above post about the cancellation of the series after 36 issues, I saw the same complaints with the whole run.

Oh, and spoiler alert: Taking a page from the movie, Scrappy Doo is a bad guy–but is arc is just beginning at the end of this volume.

Eh. I didn’t care for the reboot/reimagining. It didn’t creep me out, though.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Book Report: The Art of Carl William Peters (1994)

Book coverI liked this collection better than Jon Corbino: An Heroic Vision. They both come from the early part of the 20th century, where painting has been freed from the line, but Peters’ subject matter is more appealing. It depicts landscapes, generally creeks/rivers or docks, but with human figures in those landscapes.

Well, “figures” might be a little giving. Basically, they’re a couple of brush strokes. But the effect is more akin to the original Impressionist influence. Well, maybe it’s more akin to what I take away from my favorite Impressionism–a sense of a remembered scene or setting.

Unfortunately, as the introductory text indicates, Peters liked to do the same scenes over and over again at different times and in different seasons. So although most of the work is pleasing to look at, if you run through a catalog for an extensive show like this one, it’s repetitive.

But, like I said, pleasing to look at. The human figures make them more pleasing than Monet’s sterile, flora-only landscapes anyway.

I wonder if I will remember Peters or Corbino in a year month or two. Unless I see some of their things at the Springfield Art Museum sometime soon, and I can say, “A-ha! I saw a monograph in that artist,” probably not.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Book Report: Jon Corbino: An Heroic Vision (1987)

Book coverWell, this is the first artist’s monograph that I’ve browsed during the 2019-2020 Packers season.

The book is a couple of full-color plates and a lot of black and white images. The art itself is unclean lines with Degas-like Impressionist touches. The subjects tend to be human figures, but the unclean lines combine with the phrasing, so to speak, make it look a little like Soviet peasant art. I didn’t like it much.

As you know, gentle reader, aside from Impressionism, I prefer cleaner lines, and most of the stuff produced after 1870 will not please me. But your mileage may vary.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Death All Around Us

For some time, Facebook has shown me phantom notifications on my login screen.

When I log in, they’re gone:

So last week, I thought perhaps these notifications from people on my friends list that I have unfollowed, generally because their posts are unrelentingly anti-Republican and anti-Trump, and I’d prefer not to think about how many people I’ve known on a friendly basis who wouldn’t mind if I was put up against a wall and executed for wrongthink.

So I unhid a couple, and one of them, a former co-worker of and bridesmaid for my beautiful wife, had a couple of posts about organ donors who benefited from her son. So I clicked a couple of times, and I learned that she had taken her son to college last year, and a couple of days later, he died.

This effected me in a couple of ways: I felt awful that I didn’t know this before now–nor did my wife, who might have also hidden her on Facebook. I mean, they still get together when my wife goes to St. Louis, but the last time had been before he died, so we just didn’t know. I felt bad for not knowing, and reeled a bit from his death so young–the bridesmaid had been early in her pregnancy at our wedding, and I don’t think I ever met the lad.

But it bothered me more acutely because the boys at Nogglestead are entering those rebellious teen-aged years and are becoming difficult in a sophisticated manner. Sometimes, we have to become strident in rule enforcement, which includes discipline, raised voices, and a lot of time spent angry and frustrated at our boys. Knowing that this young man died at 18, a couple of years older than my own children, made me viscerally aware that my family is spending some of our very limited time together with this nonsense. But it’s within the realm of normal child behavior, and parenting it takes some effort. It is harder, though, when viewed through the lens of mortality.

Last week, I also came across a trackback from Dustbury.com on a post I put up in 2010, right after I switched from blogspot/Blogger to my own domain and WordPress. I sent him a little note telling him that I appreciated his blog for a long time, but he never got it because he passed away this weekend. Charles was probably the longest-time reader of this blog excluding me, and I read his blog several times a day. Even now, when I have a spare moment, I find myself typing his URL in the address bar. I’m going to miss him, and I only knew the online version of him.

I don’t have a pat conclusion for this post. What, hug your family while you can? If you’re like me, that will probably diminish the further I travel from this moment–although my much-mentioned double-effect narrator always keeps me mindful of the passage of time and the loss of this moment at pretty much every moment.

Here, have some David Gilmour.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Unprecedented, Except For All The Others Who Set The Precedent

In his review of Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, Christian Toto lauds Ronstadt for doing an album of Spanish songs.

We also see (among the many highlights) Ronstadt’s rise to a stadium-filling superstar, her surprise stint performing “The Pirates of Penzance,” the creation of the “Trio” album (alongside always-engaging interview subjects Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris) and, perhaps her most surprising career turn, the creation of the Spanish-language “Canciones de mi Padre” album.

A recurring theme appears – whenever someone tells Ronstadt she can’t do something, she does it anyway and finds success. Projects like a solo career, opera and an unprecedented album of traditional Spanish music by an English speaking pop rock star proved to be the opposite of career killers.

Unprecedented!

Except for:

  • Eydie Gorme with Trio Los Panchos, Amor (1964)
  • Eydie Gorme with Trio Los Panchos, More Amor (1965)
  • Eydie Gorme with Trio Los Panchos, Navidad Means Christmas (1966)
  • Eydie Gorme with Trio Los Panchos, Canta en Español (1970)
  • Eydie Gorme with Trio Los Panchos, Cuatro Vidas (1970)
  • Vikki Carr, Que Sea El (1971)
  • Vikki Carr, En Español (1972)
  • Vikki Carr, Hoy (1975)
  • Vikki Carr, Y El Amor (1980)
  • Vikki Carr, El Retrato Del Amor (1981)
  • Vikki Carr, A Todos (1984)
  • Lani Hall, Lani (1982)
  • Lani Hall, Lani Hall (1984)
  • Lani Hall, Es Fácil Amar (1985)
  • Doris Day, Latin for Lovers (1965)

That’s almost off the top of my head.

Although perhaps Vikki Carr, born Florencia Bisenta de Casillas-Martinez Cardona but who came to musical prominence with an Anglicized name, might be a stretch as she ended up being more of a Latin singer than an English one–her albums after 1980 are mostly in Spanish.

But, still, by the time Linda Ronstadt got around to it, English-speaking pop stars singing in Spanish (or Portaguese) was almost its own genre.

Although I cannot fault him for not being as knowledgeable about mid-century American songstresses as I am, I can fault him for the modern writing where everything is the best or the first and every play in every game breaks some sort of record.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Five Things On My Desk (VII)

Apparently, I haven’t done one of these posts in three years. I’d like you to believe, gentle reader, that my desk has been impeccably clutter-free in that interim, so I will not dispel your notion should you have it. Although, I am pleased to say, none of these items has been on the desk for three years, some have certainly been on my desk for too long.

The Thank You Card

My oldest son had his birthday at the beginning of the summer, and my beloved aunt sends him a gift card every year. Every year (well, and at Christmas, too, so it’s more than once a year, but only once for the birthday) I have him write a thank you card to her. Sometimes it’s delayed a little while so he can say what he spent the money on, but this year, he spent it quickly on a Nerf gun. But it took a couple weeks (a month’s worth) to get him to write the card. And then he gave it to me to mail, and I generally include a little card of my own with it. But as I have not yet written that note, the thank you card languishes.

The Christmas Ornament

Gentle reader, this is not a true Christmas straggler (that is, a Christmas decoration in some nook or cranny that is not boxed when the Christmas decorations come down). The school my children attend has an annual fundraiser with ornaments depicting the theme of the school year, and I buy extras to give as Christmas gifts. This one was an extra.

I don’t remember exactly to whom I gave them last year, so I’m not sure what to do with this one. Perhaps, as we’re now a two tree family, we can put one from 2018 on each.

My Great Grandmother’s Paintings

My great-grandmother executed these paintings maybe, what, fifty years ago? They were on the wall of our house in the projects–so after the divorce, apparently my sainted mother got custody of them as well.

Here at Nogglestead, we had them on the wall in the dining room until a woodburned chicken keyhanger replaced them because suddenly my beautiful wife likes chicken decorations in the kitchen and dining room. They went unboxed into the garage, on my workbenches (which have more than five things on them, I kid you not). When cleaning the garage, I brought them into the office here until I can determine a good place to hang them. They’re not big pictures, but the walls here are very full already and getting fullerer.

The Light Bars

I bought these LED light bars out of a catalog over 10 years ago before they became common enough to find in department stores. I wanted them for indirect light atop bookshelves, and they did that at our house in Old Trees and here at Nogglestead for a while. Well, they sort of did. I set them atop the bookshelves but never actually turned them on.

So a year or so back, I had to clear some space atop the main den’s bookshelves for audio courses. I brought these into my office, and they’ve sat on the far edge of my desk where I put things that I should put away somewhere other than my desk. They’ve been there except for the times when I have moved things I should pick up and put elsewhere to the floor. This last strategy does not work, as I then might put some of the things away but generally pick up the floor by putting them on my desk.

I’m not entirely sure where I would put them, which probably means I should just put them into the donation box in the garage.

The Pen I Thought Was Cool When I Was Ten

Man, when I was in elementary school, the four-color ballpoint pen was the greatest thing. You could write in one of four different colors. All the cool kids had them.

So, of course, I did not. I got my first Trapper Keeper from a trash can in the projects (and my first bike came from a dumpster), so technology this advanced was way out of my experience.

Now, some forty years later, The Heritage Foundation has sent me one along with a fundraising pitch, and I cannot think of a single thing I want to write in green.

This shall probably be the first thing to leave my desk as I give it to one of my boys who will likely find it as cool as I would have.

Now that I have mentioned these things, perhaps I will be inspired enough to remove them from my desk.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Book Report: The Chemistry of Love by Billy Pearson (2018)

Book coverAs you might recall, gentle reader, I bought this book on my last excursion to ABC Books, where the author was signing books.

To recap a bit of it: He started writing books when he was 80, and he’s got nine books out and a couple more coming out. If you’re wondering how he can do it, I’m guessing he does it by dictating using a speech-to-text program and then does not edit the work very carefully. I mean, you have missing quotation marks, some wrong words which sound like other words that fit, and that sort of thing. It’s not as bad as Dark Star, but you do have to pay attention when you read.

The story revolves around a couple of high school students who become good friends in college and get an incredible opportunity to run a pharmaceutical? Bio-chemical? plant while at the university. The main character gets free rein and builds a multi-million dollar subsidiary of the small company that gave her a shot. Along the way, the young ladies learn about sex, start families, and whatnot. Then the book ends with them in middle age when one of the women’s husband is discovered to have been unfaithful and has a gambling problem. This ending doesn’t really add much.

At any rate, it’s best to think of your grandfather telling you a bedtime story when reading the book. It’s pretty simply done, with years passing between paragraphs and some passages where it’s not especially clear which character is doing what. But, still, not Dark Star.

I suspect the style will work better in his other books. Which I’ll get to by and by.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Songs of Fatherhood

As you might have noticed, gentle reader, if you’ve been around a while, I don’t often speak of my father on this blog other than to mention that I remember the exact television movie in 1981 that I was watching (Twirl) when he told me my parents were separating. My parents did indeed divorce, and my custodial parent and we boys moved shortly thereafter to Missouri from Wisconsin. So my contact with my father during my teen years was intermittent phone calls and a couple weeks in the summer. I did get to live with him while I was going to college, but I disappointed him in many of his measures, including moving back to Missouri after college. He didn’t come to my college graduation which was in Milwaukee, which hurt. Later that summer, they discovered he had lung cancer, and he passed away in 1995 when he was 47, and I was 23. To make a short story long.

I associate two songs from the period with my father although they weren’t necessarily among our shared musical interests (we both liked Billy Joel and the Eagles).

The first is Rod Stewart’s “Forever Young”. Back in those days, children, MTV and VH1 played music videos, and young people watched them.

When this one came on, my father said something to the effect of that’s how he felt about us. I couldn’t understand it then, but now I’ve got children entering the end of their childhoods, and they’ll suddenly be out on their own, and I have to wonder how I’ll have served them as a father. A mixed bag, I suppose. I mean, I’m here, I pay attention, and I go to their ball games and whatnot, but sometimes I get wrapped up in my own pursuits and don’t play with them like I used to. Well, I shoot hoops with them from time to time, and I’ve been known to teach them to split wood. But I cannot know now how successful my parenting will have been. And I probably never will, with certainty, know.

But to me, the boys and then men will always be continuous with the toddlers whose faces brightened palpably when they saw their daddy.

I expect my father had similar feelings with some additional complexity in his absence from my younger years. Or maybe not.

The second song is Mike + The Mechanics “In The Living Years” which came out a year after the Rod Stewart song, and it is from the perspective of the son.

Even at that young age, I knew that some day I would not have my father, so every time I heard the song, I made a point of telling my father that he was a good guy. Actually, I did this to the point that it bothered him, as though I was being arch, although I was sincere. And a couple years later, he was actually gone.

You know, I told him what I needed to tell him from my perspective then. However, it was the perspective of a late adolescent, a college student. I wish I’d been able to share things from an adult, a man’s perspective, with him. But, you know, the date of departure is out of our hands.

Now, of course, as a father, I wonder whether my children will have a better impression of me when they’re adults and perhaps fathers of their own. I only hope I’m here to see it. Unlike my own father.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

A First Pass Answer Is Never

When Will Men in Hats Come Back?:

Whatever happened to the hat? Whither the fedora? Where have they stashed the Stetsons? Who has banished the boater and trashed the tweed cap? Why is a “Deerstalker” considered a Vietnam movie and a “Panama” no more than a canal?

Who can resist the gritty allure of the gumshoe Bogart tugging at the brim of his hat, or John Wayne glowering from beneath a splendid Stetson? Sherlock Holmes’ brain cannot work without the protection of his deerstalker nor can Gandalf be a whizz without his wizard’s hat. Could there be a Davy Crockett without his coonskin, a Cyrano without his chapeau, a Don Quixote without his saucepan helmet or an Indiana Jones without his hat? Indeed, is a hero a hero at all without a hat?

I don’t wear a hat because it’s fashionable to do so. I wear a hat because I want to.

I’d like to think it tracks with the conclusion of the piece:

When will men in hats come back? When men come back. When we push back from our desks and laptops, turn off the television and go back outdoors where we belong we will start to need hats again. When I am heaving bricks in the heat of El Salvador on a mission trip I need a hat. When I am trekking with kids to the top of Mayan ruins I need my broad brimmed hat to shield me from the sun. When I am hunting and fishing and working on the farm I want my head protected. When I am out on the street meeting the people I am supposed to care for I will want a hat, and should I ever go into battle I will insist on a very large hat…

….so the enemy has something to aim for.

Although I’m sure any overlap between me and real men is merely a trick of the light.

(Link via Instapundit, not his more lidded co-blogger Ed Driscoll.)

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Book Report: Herschend Family Values As told by D.R. Jacobsen (2017)

Book coverThis book marks a momentous event: I have read all of the books that I bought at Calvin’s Books in May. I jokingly said I would probably not read those five books that day. And then I set as a personal goal to do just that. And now I have.

This book looks to be almost an employee or management handbook for Herschend Enterprises, which started with Silver Dollar City west of Branson and now includes a number of theme parks around the country (and the Harlem Globetrotters). The book talks about working and acting with a servant’s heart (although it does not use those terms). It has a couple of corporatey bits in the intro and the conclusion, but most of the book is short chapters of anecdotes where employees or co-workers at Herschend properties went the extra mile to help sick or down-on-their luck customers or co-workers.

I liked reading the book, and I’m thinking about recommending it to my beautiful wife. She likes reading good leadership books, but perhaps this one isn’t so much in that particular vein.

You know, one might be cynical and think this book is just lip service to an ideal and a way to get the company employees to behave this way for better customer service, but sometimes, I’m not cynical, and I think the book is sincere. Even if it’s not, at least the corporate masters recognize an ideal outside of the short-term materialism of the corporation. But I think it’s pretty sincere.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Short Memories

As you might expect, gentle reader, I review the Facebook Memories section every day to see what I was thinking or posting about in the past on this day. Kind of like when I mope through the archives here when following a link from the stat tracker to a page someone visited from 2004.

Yesterday, I got this one:

Of course, I had a game of Civ IV running in the background.

I never really got into Civ V; I think I rebelled at having to sign into Steam to play it. So I kept installing Civ IV on new PCs, up until my Windows 7 box where I had to do a special hack to turn off a graphics service to play it. Which lasted until the video card on the old PC began to choke out, probably under the weight of Civ IV running all the time.

Instead of trying to re-create the hack on a Windows 10 machine, I went ahead and installed Steam and bought Civ IV through Steam, and I still play it far too often today.

I know, I could have installed Civ V or even Civ VI since clearly I’ve gotten over having to connect to Steam each time I play Civ IV, but I tend to look at it as comfort food. Something I can play without much thought. I don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to learning new games these days, and I don’t even buy games with the thought that I would play them (which I did for much of my 30s and early 40s–buy a game, install it, watch the intro and maybe play the training level, and then I’d decide that I’d be better off reading a book or tending to my household during that time.

So fourteen years after its release, and nine years after I predicted I would move on from it, I’m still playing Civ IV.

I’m not sure if it counts as a thread weaving through my life connecting me to my pre-child past or a deep, deep rut I’m stuck in.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Book Report: Missouri: Images of Nature by Charles Gurche (1990)

Book coverThis is the second monograph or collection of photography I’ve reviewed this football season, and strangely enough, neither of them really during a football game. As it happens, one of our floor lamps died this year, and I moved the one I used when watching football to the more important location by the reading chairs. So I ended up with a couple monographs out on the sofa-side table, but not enough light to really look at them. So I reviewed this book whilst in my reading chair.

It’s a collection of photos of various places in Missouri taken over the course of a year or so by a professional landscape photographer from the west coast. He groups the photos in chapters based on a photography conceit such as Color, Form, Moment, Place, Microcosm, and Light.

The photos are landscapes, but some of them are very narrow in focus (with a whole chapter on Microcosm). I don’t like the photographs of a single leaf on a lichen-covered rock nor collections of lily pads on a pond as they’re just exercises of technique in service of showing us a technique or a texture, not in showing us a scene. Or maybe I’m just flogging my new dichotomy. Sometimes, though, the different textures work together in a single scene that is a scene, though, so the photographer has some definite talent.

Still, a pleasant enough browse. It contains images of Elephant Rocks and Johnson’s Shut Ins on the eastern side of the state. When I was growing up back there, I remember the other kids in school talking about going to those places on the weekend like it was nothing. Do you know where we went on the weekends when I was growing up? No where. Well, no where like that.

So I’ve gone through two of these books already, and I have yet to watch a complete football game. I shall have to visit the book sale on half price day to resupply my monographs and photography collections in early October for sure.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Book Report: Catherine Murphy: New Paintings and Drawings (1989)

Book coverWell, it’s football season again, so I will finally get a chance to review some of the artists’ monographs that I got last May (and I can go nuts since the next Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale comes in October).

This book is a collection of line drawings and paintings as the title says. The artist’s subject matter are still lifes of a sort–she has three self portraits and another painting with human figures in them, but there are also, what, landscapes that look like a picture taken out of a house window or images of rooms, wallpapers, and window interiors without anyone in them.

The technical skill is great–some of them are nearly photographic in quality. Definitely interesting things to look at and a great combination of textures and techniques.

The afternoon that I began to browse this book I went to an open house at a gallery here in town that featured an artist who practices a more modern approach to art. Some of it was figurative, but it was all pretty flat. Some of it was just textures and strokes on the canvas. But in any case, it was clear that you were looking ata painting. In this book’s images, you’re looking at something in a picture or a drawing. Have I made this dichotomy between modern and classical art before? It seems like you can apply it to literature, too.

At any rate, a pleasant way to spend an hour or two, and I wouldn’t mind going to see some of her work. According to Wikipedia, you can find it in many collections, although none in particularly close locations. Perhaps I’ll get lucky and the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art will pick something up before I make my way down there.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Well, Not Exactly

Pop culture theology is always suspect. I don’t go to heavy metal songs for a better understanding of the Bible; I don’t go to television series or movies; and I shouldn’t go to commentary on television series or movies.

Like this one: AMC’s ‘Preacher’ Shows Jesus Robbing a Bank, Working with Hitler.

My quibble:

According to the Bible, Jesus Christ is the Son of God.

That puts the truthiness of the statement on the veracity of the written work.

That’s like saying that the inalienable rights recognized from our founding documents come from our founding documents. And if they can be amended or proven untrue, the inalienable rights can be alienated.

Sloppy writing? Sloppy thinking? Or is the author only repeating the assertions he read in a book?

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories