Month: September 2019

So, 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.

I 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.

Well, 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.

As 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.

This 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.

This 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.

Well, 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.