Archive: 2014

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Ka-chow! sneezes the roscoe.

The opening of Jack Womack’s _Going Going Gone_, injects us into an unpredictable world that wobbles between an alternate hipster-scene of New York City in the 1960s and the seemingly hallucinatory ramblings of a drug-addled protagonist, Walter Bullitt. The story begins in a Washington, D.C. hotel room, where the first person jive talk kicks in: “Soon as I spiked I turned my eyes inside. Setting old snakehead on cruise control always pleases, no matter how quick the trip.” Sprinkled through almost every sentence are hokey metaphors. The phone doesn’t ring, “those jingle bells“ do. And on the other end of the line is a Federal agent of some kind, who is so square that he can’t understand a word of the hipster-narrator. But the narrator is more like one of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers than a secret agent, and he himself was so startled by the phone that he almost made for the john to “drown his bagged cat.” To flush his pot down the toilet, get it?

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Finding your way around Mars...

Pretty soon we will be able to know the solar system like the back of our hand. Then what? Stars in our pockets like grains of sand? watch on Youtube

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Steele Savage - Adventures with the Heroes

A nice surprise at the Davis Square Goodwill!   An ex-library copy of Adventures With the Heroes (1954), illustrated by Steele Savage.   This is the companion volume to Adventures With the Giants (1950) that you can find nicely scanned over at Ragged Claws Network. In both volumes, you will find Steele Savage’s crisp rendering in pen and ink, with a beautiful depth and texture provided by two-color separations.    For example, the illustration for the chapter, Sigurd’s Horse (p45), shows a wonderful use of a single color — darkened with black hachure lines for the foreground figures, loosely rendered for the curving river, and lightly washed across the background for mountains. The painted cover (presumably done in watercolor) is a lovely composite of the major scenes found in the book, with a mild looking dragon lying slain at the feet of a diminutive hero, and with its tail wrapped across the pale green landscape.  This altogether dreamlike image reveals the mastery of an artist who deserves our attention all the more. The complete set is posted at yunchtime.tumblr.com