Category Archives: Cool Things

Cool enough to be a category and a tag.

Cool Things: Casablanca

Posted by natechen on

It’s time for another classic film. I first saw Casablanca some time when I was in middle school, perhaps even earlier. I knew it was a cultural landmark, considered by some critics the greatest movie ever made, period. I know that I watched it and, even at a young age, enjoyed it a lot. Later, when I was in college taking my Introduction to Literature course it would be used as an example of film as literature. I had watched Casablanca many times in the years between my first viewing and college, but I still found the film to be enjoyable. But I was surprised, when the film reached it’s climax and the twists were coming fast and furious, almost the entire class gasped when the plot took a particularly dramatic turn. I thought everyone should have seen this film already. I mean, it’s a classic, right?

Well, just like plenty of people have never listened to classical music it seems plenty of people don’t watch classic movies either. But even if you never watch any other black and white film let me encourage you to watch Casablanca.

Plot summary time – Casablanca is a film set in World War II. It begins with the murder of two German curriers carrying important documents, which will help a famous member of the anti-Nazi underground, Victor Lazlo (Paul Henried), escape to the United States. The Nazis, working together with Unoccupied France, are aiming to keep him from “spreading lies” outside of Europe.

Events come to a head at Rick’s, owned by Richard Blaine (Humphrey Bogart). As a U.S. ex-pat, Rick feels he has no stake in the political conflict playing out at the tables of his cafe. But it turns out he has a personal one when Lazlo is accompanied by Rick’s old flame Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman). He’ll have to sort out his loyalties and feelings before all is said and done.

On the face of it, Casablanca could turn out to be a horrible movie. It’s got a lot of trite plot elements – love triangle, club owner, Nazis. But the writing is brilliant and develops the main story, and a wealth of side stories, in a staggeringly short period of time, maintaining dramatic tension with aplomb. Of course, the tension may hang together simply because the writers didn’t have an ending until right before it was filmed.

Casablanca is a classic in the way it shows the conflict in its characters. Rick’s not the only one who doesn’t know how to deal with the situation. Practically everyone but the hardline resistance members and Nazis seem to be of two minds about what they want – respect or profit, romance or cause, a dozen or more conflicts plague the characters and they never come out with pat answers. We see them struggle and bobble them right up until the end.

More than that, Casablanca entertains. Where so many movies could wander into melodrama or preachiness, Casablanca concentrates on making sure we enjoy every step from beginning to end. From Claude Rains’ fantastic performance as Louie, the Prefect of Police, to the musical battle between Lazlo and the Nazi Major, we smile, we laugh, we are engaged.

Casablanca is a great movie for the writer, as well. The characters are well built, introduced and developed. The dialog is good and the dramatic tension is great, deliberate or not. The next time you need a film for the weekend you could do much worse than this classic.

Jared Black Returns!

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Have you read the Kingdom of Jackels novels? If so, rejoice! (Hey, you! Rejoice!)

Jack Cloudie, the fifth novel in the series, has finally come across the pond to our benighted shores. While residents of the great old United Kingdom can read all six books in the series already, we must be content with what we have. And let me tell you, what we have is pretty good.

In Jack Cloudie the Kingdom will go to war, not that that’s anything new, but this time they face the people of Cassarabia and their womb mage creations. This time, the Royal Aerostatical Navy will have to face airships like their own. This time, Jared Black won’t be in his native element, the water. Can they win? More importantly, will we enjoy the ride?

The answer to the second question is an unqualified yes. If you love high adventure, satire or Jared Black, this is a book for you. The cranky old Commodore is back, once again plying his wits, vast experience and exhaustive knowledge of just about everything against the world and the contrary members of his own nation. This time he’s been called in to ride herd over an experimental armored airship, built by the now-defunct House of Quest, that has been sent out to figure out how the Cassarabians are getting the nonflammable gas they’re using in their airships. And he’ll have to do it without one mortal consideration for his aging bones or life of difficulty, so there’s nothing left to do but rail at the world and grumble his way through.

On the other side of the battle lines, Omar ibn Barir, former slave, is working his way through the ranks of the Cassarabian army towards a revelation that will shake his country to the core. Not that Omar ever sets out to do these things. Mostly, he just wants to save the girl and do his duty. But the simplest goals often have the most complex implications.

Like all the Jackelian novels, Jack Cloudie is a rousing tale of adventure. While it does feature the Commodore, he once again sits comfortably in the secondary character line-up, so don’t go in thinking these are the trials of a slightly overweight old submarine captain. Airships, genetic engineering and many other factors come into play. Like all Jackelian novels, Jack Cloudie contains elements of satire, particularly strong in this tale, but as saying more than that definitely qualifies as a spoiler I’ll just say they’re there. Note that, while Cassarabia is a theocracy with weird practices, it is not, in and of itself, the primary focus of Hunt’s satirical guns. So if that kind of thing bothers you or entices you, be aware that it’s, at most, a minor subtheme.

All in all, if you like steampunk, satire, high adventure, airships or Jared Black, this is a novel for you.

One Year!

Posted by natechen on

What do you know! I’ve officially been on the interwebs and making regular posts for one year. That’s quite an achievement if I do say so myself (and I do 🙂 ).

It’s been a rough ride, what with me slowly figuring out how all the buttons and knobs on WordPress work and publishing an entire novel online. I’ve slowly put together a routine and marshaled a decent following. In fact, just last weekend I hit 50 people who follow via WordPress – here’s a shout out to Nhan Pham of Nhan-Fiction, customer number 50! Thanks for following.

The two most active followers would probably be renxkyoko, who appears to share my love of the manga Skip Beat, and L. Palmer, who looks at the world in a wonderfully quirky way. Thanks to them, and all the other people who have signed up for e-mail following or just stalk me via WordPress. I hope to be able to continue writing for many years to come.

P.S. After the initial writing of this on Friday the 29th of August, the fast-changing nature of the Internet came into play – by which I mean that I picked up a new follower. Welcome Marcela Cava Balsa! Hope you enjoy the show.

Cool Things: A Mighty Fortress

Posted by natechen on

It feels like there’s something  I haven’t done in a while. Oh yes, it’s time once again to plug the local theater community.

If you don’t live in Fort Wayne, or just have no interest in theater, this may not be the post for you. Sorry! But please come back on Friday for yet another rambling post on the art of writing. Of course, you’re welcome to stick around if you wish.

This year’s all for One season starts with a play on the life of Martin Luther, called A Mighty Fortress. Now that may not seem very interesting to you, as his primary claim to fame was as a religious leader who caused great disruption in the Roman Catholic Church by publishing a tirade skeptical of many church practices of the time. Many people feel  that religious conflict is just bickering about whether you use candles or electric lights, or how much money you should give or to who. And in Luther’s case, they’re partly right.

But the ideas we espouse influences how we act and the culture we live in. Luther came at a time when the idea of unquestionable authority was in. The divine right of kings and the unfailing nature of the pope were ideas that everyone accepted, but few people bothered to ask if they were consistent with the other ideas that defined their culture.

Luther stood up and challenged the idea that there was any infallible man on Earth. Not only was this not a popular idea at the time, it technically meant directly challenging his boss, as Luther was a monk and monks worked for the church, and thus the pope.

However, Luther felt that the ideas that undergirded his faith didn’t allow for one man to dictate to others to the point where men could set right and wrong. His belief in even the most powerful men being subject to higher laws was, in many ways, the intellectual foundation of the Western republics and paved the way for the American government of checks and balances.

A Mighty Fortress is a look at Luther in one of his darker moments, when he was jailed for his ideas and before he had any idea how meaningful they would become. (Arguably, he never would as he died before they could fully play out.) afO veteran Jeff Salisbury takes the role of Luther in what’s looking to be a great show.

The play will run through the weekend of September 6th, 7th and 8th. Ticket information and show times can be found here.

Cool Things: The Thieftaker

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Thieftaker, a novel by D.B. Jackson, focuses on one of the less glamorous aspects of the history of law enforcement. A thieftaker was a kind of bounty hunter, hired to find and retrieve or negotiate for stolen property. They didn’t exist for very long, as it seems to have been a rather corrupt line of work, and they were eventually replaced by something much closer to modern policing with the appearance of the Bow Street Runners.

However, like most other kinds of bounty hunters there’s something that perks human interest in the idea of seeing wrongs set right, and the idea of someone who will step in and help do that is doubly appealing. Throw in the many reasons a bounty hunter might have to be jaded and searching for his humanity and you have a great recipe for conflict, internal and external.

Of course, we’ve seen all that before. So Jackson goes for broke by adding not one but two twists. The first is fairly unsurprising. Thieftaker is a historical fantasy, meaning that protagonist Ethan Kaille is not only a bounty hunter, he’s a speller, using a dash of magic to augment his street smarts and help him catch his man. Ethan keeps his secret using the usual blend of caution and intimidation that readers of most urban fantasy will be familiar with –

Wait, scratch that, no he doesn’t. While Ethan is cautious with his magic, he has to contend with the novel’s other major conceit: It’s set in Boston, Massachusetts, in the year A.D. 1765. People still heartily believe in magic, and, while conjurors like Ethan are still talked about in hushed tones, that doesn’t mean a good lynching is outside the realm of possibility. Fortunately, there’s new taxes from Britain and riots in the streets to keep people from paying too much attention to one little ol’ theiftaker.

That is, until a young woman is murdered by magic, and her jewelery is stolen. Her father hires Ethan to find the stolen jewelery and the murderer in the process. Unfortunately, Ethan is hired in part because of his magical savvy, proving his secret is not quite as secret as he might like.  Before the day is done, he’ll cross paths with another theiftaker who isn’t glad for his competition, a number of conjurors much more powerful than he is, and luminaries no less bright than Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty.

Not that Ethan has much use for people who incite riot and ruin…

Thieftaker is an interesting book that gives a rather revealing look at what getting a crime solved might have been like before police forces came into being. It was a much more personal kind of a thing, but also much more difficult to see done, for reasons of expense if nothing else. Ethan Kaille is an interesting character who stands out from the crowd in some noticeable ways, not the least being nearly forty as opposed to his mid twenties like most other characters at the beginning of an detective/adventure series. But probably the best part about the book is it’s sense of place and time.

The many details of Eighteenth century Boston have been lovingly recorded, and Sam Adams is by no means the only historical figure to get screen time. The details of the people and places have been recreated with a historian’s love for detail and a fantasy author’s love for the fantastic.

If you love historical fiction of just about any type, I recommend Thieftaker to you wholeheartedly.

Cool Things: Twelve Angry Men

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One of the benchmarks for art is it’s ability to remain relevant to changing times. Twelve Angry Men is one such film (at least, the 1957 version, I haven’t seen the remake.)

The premise: A murder has been committed. The victim: A man from the wrong side of the tracks. The accused: The victim’s 18 year old son, who was heard shouting at his father only hours before the murder. This… is not their story. Rather, this is the story of the twelve men who must convict or acquit the accused. Is there enough evidence to say with certainty that the man killed his father? If so, he will go to the chair. Is there doubt in their minds? They must let him free. Do they even feel the need to take the time to debate what seems to be an airtight case? After all, this is one of those people from that neighborhood.

As it turns out, only one juror, Number 8 (Henry Fonda), feels the need to say anything at all. But sometimes, that’s all it takes.

Twelve Angry Men is not a film about justice in the way we usually understand them. It doesn’t focus on the person who was wronged or the person who did the wronging. Rather, it sits down and takes a hard look at how we deal with both groups of people. It’s a film about truth and shades of gray, but at the same time it doesn’t say there is no truth but rather that we have to acknowledge both the truth and our difficulties in finding it by doing something we don’t like to talk about today – judging. Through out the film, the jurors carefully judge evidence, witnesses, the accused, the victim and even each other in order to arrive at their final verdict.

Many films (both today and even in the era of black and white) act as if there are only two groups of people in the world: People who see the world in black and white and look for right and wrong everywhere, and people who see the world as shades of gray with no right or wrong anywhere. Twelve Angry Men is a film about people who think there’s probably something like right and wrong, but have to deal with sifting through all the gray to get there. And the gray is more than just rather tenuous, morally questionable situations. This is real stuff.

What obscures justice isn’t contrived situations of philosophical arguments. It’s punishing heat. It’s grating people in the seat next to you. It’s a pair of tickets to the next big ballgame, which you’d rather be watching then being here (or really, most other places.) It’s personal prejudices, grudges or just a desire to see the immediate surroundings in harmony. It’s not like the jurors don’t think there’s a right or wrong, they just don’t see what it has to do with this situation here.

But in the end, a young man’s life hangs in the balance.

In the end, the integrity of twelve men rests on judging the case rightly. And, in turn, they will determine whether their society will do justice by that young man and his father, who is now dead and buried. When they leave that courthouse, there will be no cheering crowds, no newspaper headlines and, from the looks of things, no unshakable, life long friendships.

What there will be is a sense that justice might not be so far away after all.

Cool Things: Doomed by Cartoon

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In many ways it seemed like William Tweed had it made. He was the boss of one of the most powerful political machines in the history of New York, and possibly the United States. He and his political underlings had arranged to keep large swaths of the public coffers at their personal disposal through graft and patronage. Their takings are estimated at a minimum of $1 billion in today’s money. Some estimates go as high as $8 billion.

Although Tweed would hold only a handful of high profile offices in his life, as an alderman and later as a commissioner he would engineer massive overpayments to contractors and companies that he owned or were owned by his friends and allies. Tammany Hall seemed to be in an unassailable position astride the New York City economy, gorging itself on public money and keeping many dependent on the money they doled out. But in the space of just a year or two a coalition of city fathers, turncoats and one unlikely character artist would break Tammany Hall’s power and leave it flailing for relevance in the new political landscape.

Doomed by Cartoon, by John Adler, tells the tale of Harper’s Weekly and Thomas Nast as they set out to call out and bring down Tweed and his ring.

Thomas Nast is not a well known name today, but many aspects of his work are now irrevocable parts of the American consciousness. Among other things, he created the modern image of Santa Clause and the association of the Republican Party with the elephant. He also helped to popularize the images of Columbia (America personified as statuesque Greco-Roman woman bearing sword and shield), Uncle Sam (Nast is credited with adding the goatee) and the Democratic donkey.

But few of his accomplishments equal the significance of his stand against Tammany Hall (although he is credited with being a deciding factor in the election of Grover Cleveland as well). The contrast between Tweed and Nast is stark. One was a big man, the other small. One was a wealthy man of far reaching influence in business, the other was a very poor business man and had little influence beyond beyond being a goad in public policy. In many ways, it was a bit of an American David and Goliath battle.

But Nast did far surpass Tweed in one respect, and that was his ability to influence people. While Tweed’s methods were usually straight forward bribes and blatant corruption that couldn’t be proved only because he was holding all the cards, Nast leveraged humor, cultural touchstones and memorable images into a platform that goaded his opponents to distraction.

While it’s fair to say that there were far more factors at work in Tweed’s downfall than Nast – inside information, a timely riot, news exposes in other papers – it was Nast’s constant attacks in Harper’s Weekly that kept the issue before the people. Tweed himself acknowledged Nast’s influence when he said, “I don’t give a straw for your newspaper articles; my constituents don’t know how to read, but they can’t help seeing them damned pictures.”

In fact, attempts would be made to bribe Nast into leaving the country for a while, with offers of half a million dollars (worth considerably more then than now) being made. But in the end Nast stayed in New York Tweed went to jail. In an ironic coda, when Tweed escaped a few years later and made his way to Spain by boat, the Spanish police would identify and arrest him using a Nast cartoon as a reference.

It’s actually a rather straightforward political story, in as much as political stories can be straightforward, but what makes Doomed by Cartoon unique is that it includes over 160 Nast illustrations, giving them context and pointing out the ways many of them tie into the events of the Tweed era. As an amateur artist and a student of politics I found it very interesting. Maybe you will too.

Cool Things: Quintessence

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Some books try to create a cleverly envisioned world that replaces the world we know with a something that is different from everything we know. History, geography and sometimes even physics are totally alien things. Some books replace only the tiniest possible things and painstakingly work to make everything else the same, so that we are struck by the ways the story is like coming home – except not. It’s the rare book that shoots for something in the middle. Quintessence is one of those books.

David Walton gives us the Europe that we know and love, with a history that is mostly the same, with one major caveat: The Earth is flat.

It’s been scientifically proven and everything.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Age of Exploration is playing out a little differently there  than it did here. But it is playing out, regardless. Explorers have discovered a land literally on the edge of the earth full of gold, gems, new plants and animals and a host of other wonders. The problem is, all the explorers who came back slowly sickened and died, most before they could even make it back to England.

Meanwhile, Europe is embroiled in the usual political, social and religious controversies that have defined that continent pretty much ever since the Romans decided it might be fun to conquer it (and perhaps even before.) Before our story is over, mad alchemists, royal surgeons, gentlemen scholars and Protestant leaders will all be involved in exploring the new land and the strange nature of quintessence, the alchemical substance that suffuses it. Also, the Spanish Inquisition makes an appearance (bet you weren’t expecting that.)

Quintessence has a strange charm to it. Most of the characters are ideologues, but perhaps that’s not surprising given the time they come from. A person had to be highly motivated in order to undertake the kind of exploratory journey that is at the heart of the tale, and even today it’s usually idealism that motivates that kind of behavior. And, of course, I have no problem with fiction that’s suffused with ideas.

What’s better is, most of the ideas are given fair hearing. Even Catholicism, which is something of the villain of the book, has sympathetic voices as well. On top of that, the characters are believable in their pursuit of their ideals, not simply cardboard cutouts that spew speeches. They struggle with their motives and make surprising choices from time to time.

At it’s core, Quintessence is a fun adventure story that delivers exactly what you want, strange sights and exciting times, but leaves you with a little extra to chew on and the promise of second helpings to come.

Cool Things: His Girl Friday

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Okay, time for another black and white movie spotlight! This week’s selection is His Girl Friday, another film staring the impeccable Cary Grant as the leading man. This time out, Rosalind Russell takes the leading lady’s role. If you’ve never seen this film, there will be a brief summary in the next paragraph. If you have, feel free to skip it.

Walter Burns (Grant) is the editor of The Morning Post, in an age when newspapers were Serious Business and getting that story justified anything and everything in the eyes of the newspaper man. In fact, Burns has managed to alienate his wife and star reporter, Hildegard Johnson (Russell) with his demanding nature and total devotion to the job. Now they’re divorced and Hildy is looking to settle down with a nice quiet man instead of coming back and remarrying Walter like he wants her too. Worse, the accused murderer that the Post has been defending from it’s editorial page is about to be executed. Sure, he might have shot someone but the only reason to hang him for it is to score the corrupt sheriff and mayor a few political points. Clearly this is a grievous insult to truth, justice and the integrity of the Post’s editorial page! Walter Burns will have to stop the hanging, scare off Hildy’s new suitor and win her heart back – and do it all in one night!

His Girl Friday is a delightful romp. For the most part it enjoys poking fun at people in authority, be they the police, politicians or psychologists, they’re all up for some good natured ribbing. But no one gets it more than the newspaper reporters that form most of the cast. While journalists today seem to view themselves as a very dignified, important profession, the newspapermen in His Girl Friday are just a step above cutthroats, and they know it. I suspect that their two-fisted, winner takes all attitude might still be around in many newsrooms today, just with less of a manic glee for the hunt to go along with it.

Thematically, it’s not a terribly deep movie. Walter suffers from a serious case of misplaced priorities. Yes, his newspaper is a great business and has a clear effect on the people it serves (whether that effect is good or bad is hard to tell). But he’s let his joy in his work override his responsibility to serve the needs of his wife. It shouldn’t take divorce proceedings and her nearly marrying herself to another man to realize her value, but this is Hollywood so that’s what happens.

For her part, Hildy is a bit of an escapist. She flees directly from Walter to a man who’s his total opposite – boring instead of charismatic, stolid instead of ambitious. But she also gives up on using her talents and passions, something that Walter always loved her for and encouraged her in.

By the end of the show, they’ll have learned to appreciate each other again. Even if they haven’t learned anything else.

From a writer’s perspective, His Girl Friday is a study in dialog. The movie is unique in the frantic pacing of the spoke word, with many of the characters simply talking on top of one another. It reflects the lightning pace of the news world that the characters live in, but could also become confusing very quickly. That it doesn’t is a testament to the skills of the writers and director who put the film together. An astute watcher can learn a lot about punchy dialog that informs the listener (or reader) while keeping things moving along.

If you love writing, humor or both, His Girl Friday is a movie for you.

Cool Things: Small World

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Have you ever felt cramped? Siblings leave you with no room to breath? Suffering from cubicle claustrophobia? Ready to break out a sledgehammer and do your best Tony Stark impression, whether you need to create a new element or not? Well hold onto your horses for just a moment! Before you go postal, pick up Small World.

Small World is a game of real estate (but honestly, what isn’t?) Like in many board games, in Small World players  take control of a faction and try to rack up as much territory as the can. There are several twists to Small World.

The first is implied by the name of the game: the map is really, really small. In fact, there are actually three or four different boards in the base game, smaller maps for fewer players and larger maps for more, but none of them so large that your factions won’t be stepping on each other’s toes within the first turn or two. Unlike Risk or other conquest board games that give you a few turns to get yourself established, Small World practically demands that the action start as soon as pieces hit the board so that there’s never a dull moment (set up goes pretty fast, too, so you can get to the action right away.)

Small World’s second quirk is the sheer number of factions. While the game itself is a fairly simple counting game that involves no dice, the catch to it is your faction runs out of resources to expand with very quickly and never gets more than it’s original allotment (with one or two exceptions). A key part of the game is knowing when it’s time for your current group to go into “decline”. When in decline, you still score points for that faction’s pieces but they can’t expand any longer and they don’t have the same resources to stand up against invaders as an active faction. On the bright side, you can pick a whole new faction to go wild with and get right back into the action! Thus, while Small World supports a maximum of five players it comes with fourteen different races which conform to typical fantasy archetypes. You’ll find Elves, Humans, Halflings, Dwarves, Orcs, Giants, Tritons and more to help you on the way to world domination, each with a special trait to help you in conquest or scoring points. This gives everyone enough to play through the game and also keeps things fresh for repeated playthroughs.

But wait! Even with fourteen different races the game could quickly become stale, since you’ll use two or three of them in the typical game. There’s only so much that can be done to make them different and interesting. So a race isn’t all that goes into defining your faction. There are also twenty special powers, and one is paired with a race at random. Thus in one game you could have dragon riding Trolls and sea faring Giants and in the next you’d have to tangle with flying Dwarves and underground Humans. Since there’s more powers than races, repeated combinations are extremely unlikely and you can’t base a strategy on finding and using a specific power, as there’s no guarantee that power will turn up over the course of the game!

In addition to the frantic play of the base game, Small World comes with several small expansions that add more races and powers to the mix for even stranger factions (what do you mean “stout Faeries”?) to keep everyone guessing. Small World is great for parties or just a gathering of friends for a night of board games. If you like either one of those things, it’s worth checking out.