A day (or two) at the book sale

/ Alex Good / Leave a comment

How many books? To find out, keep reading to the end of this post!

This past weekend I spent at the annual Friends of the Guelph Public Library Book Sale. I may have been going to this event every year since it got started. At least I have a bookmark from the first one and talked about last year’s visit here. You can also check out previous visits by following some of these links. This post is part of a series then. Or you could see it as a follow-up to my big Walking Guelph post, since I’ll include some more pics of my hometown here.

The sale actually runs for four days, from Thursday through Sunday. I attended opening day (when there’s a $10 entrance fee) and again on Saturday (no charge). Thursday was a bright sunny day, without a cloud in the sky, at least in the early going. I don’t think it’s ever rained on a book sale! So I walked downtown to the bus station. Along the way I walked by the new police station. It’s not all new, but what they basically did was add a huge new addition onto the existing building. I think they just completed it a year or so ago. Colour me unimpressed. Looks ugly without being threatening. But look at that blue sky.

Behind the police station is the Guelph Armoury, home to the 11th Field Artillery Regiment. Built in 1906-1907 in the Gothic Revival Style, and opened in 1911. Just in time to start training young fellows for the big dance that was about to start across the pond. I was in the mess once for some kind of a party. I was in the reserves when I was in school, but it was a Toronto regiment.

Behind the Armoury is the train station. Cute little building. Nobody’s ever in it. You buy your tickets online. But at least during business hours the building is open so you can step in to get out of the rain.

Across from the train station is the bus station.

That’s a train in the background.

Next stop was the book sale, which was again held out in the Northwest Industrial Park. Also known as the back of beyond. I miss the days when they had a location for it downtown. But I think it’s hard to find a place with enough space.

I’ve mentioned before about the lack of facilities. This year they must have been listening to some feedback because they had one (1) portable toilet across from where everyone lined up to get in. That thundershack was getting a lot of use.

Not much to report about the actual sale. It was quite well attended on Thursday. This is the parking situation on the road across from the site. If you drove (and most people do) then you were going to have a long walk to the sale. I don’t know where this row of cars ended. Somewhere over the horizon.

I think I bought about 30 books over the two days. A lot more than last year. A few titles I even had stored in my shopping cart at an online bookseller, so they were real wins. And some more obscure titles that I don’t know if I’ll ever get to. I’ve been just thinking recently about how I probably have more books now than I’ll every be able to read. Intimations of mortality.

On Saturday, when I got back, the bus let me off at the University Centre, where an old friend of mine was running a board- and role-playing game convention. He was playing a game called Zombiecide. This is what it looks like.

It sounded like fun. I was invited to play but I figured it would take me too long to get up to speed. Some of the other tables had role-playing games set up on them. On one the dungeonmaster running things had his laptop hooked up to a flat-screen TV lying face-up on the table, with the players moving their figures around on top of it, where the map was displayed. I was quite impressed by that.

Anyway, those were the highlights for the weekend. Maybe I’ll do it again next year. Much as I enjoy it, (a) I don’t need any more books and (b) it really is out of the way. But as long as my back holds out I’ll probably keep saddling up and make the trek. Thanks for reading!

OK, so they didn’t proof read this one.

Movie Mags: Marquee Volume 9 Number 4, May 1984

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

Marquee Volume 9 Number 4, May 1984

Only my third Marquee post and the second Harrison Ford cover. That guy was box office in the 1980s. I don’t think this magazine would fetch as much as a collectible though as there’s a small hole in the back cover and some fading.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock was coming soon so it got a write-up here. And yes, Spock was alive.

I don’t think I saw any John Hughes movies when I was of the age to be watching John Hughes movies, and there sure were a lot of them around. I did see Once Upon a Time in America though, and hated it.

“On Location” was a new feature. At least it didn’t appear in either of the issues I showcased previously. Of the films mentioned here, I did not see Country, Beat Street, The Muppets Take Manhattan, Stick, The Flamingo Kid, Oxford Blues, or The Razor’s Edge. And I can still say I’ve never seen any of those movies. I did see Conan the Destroyer and A Soldier’s Story though.

Movie Mag index

Druuna: Mandragore

/ Alex Good / 58 Comments

Druuna: Mandragore

Mandragore is the fifth volume in the erotic adventures of Druuna, though I have a hard time following much of a sequence through them. As I said in my review of the previous book, Carnivora, this is “a story cycle that runs in place, never really going anywhere because time and place have no meaning in the Druunaverse.”

If you’ve managed to follow the plot thus far you know that Druuna, in various states of undress, is trying to find a cure for a techno-biological plague known as the Evil. She travels a futuristic wasteland full of mutants and robots that may be all in her head, or in somebody else’s head. The somebody else primarily being a computer AI that has merged with a spaceship captain named Lewis. This human-AI hybrid has also absorbed the consciousness of Druuna’s former lover, Shastar. Meanwhile, a different ship’s captain, Will, and his medical officer Doc, are trying to find a cure for the Evil. In Mandragore they do this by sending Druuna into the computer’s mind. So she thinks she’s dreaming, and what happens all seems like a dream, but it’s not her dream but Lewis’s. As Shastar, who retains some independence, gamefully tries to explain:

After all these centuries his mind is exhausted and has fallen into a state of inertia . . . into a kind of lethargy wherein his unconscious impulses amplify reality, creating his own autonomous universe! Yes, Druuna, we are products of that universe, of his dream . . . a complex unconscious psychic elaboration!

Did you follow that? Anyway, this conversation takes place within the dream so technically it checks out, even though outside the dream, on Will’s ship, Druuna has a separate existence.

Now since this is a Druuna comic the “serum” or antidote to the Evil takes the form of . . . male ejaculate. That would be the mandragore. Which is something Druuna has no difficulty coaxing forth. Unfortunately for the otherwise more-than-willing donors, the only time that such seed can be harvested is when a guy is strangled, so Druuna finds herself being the fluffer in a series of snuff films within the Lewis mind. Though I wasn’t sure why Lewis (or the AI) was so keen on getting a supply of mandragore. But then if you learn one thing from reading these books it’s that you can’t ask too many questions.

So there’s a lot of sex, and of course a lot of Druuna running around in a thong and tight t-shirt. Plus for some reason in this book she’s wearing stockings as well. That really made no sense, but I guess Serpieri had a thing for girls in stockings. In any event, this is the end of the series for me. The series did go on for another four volumes but I haven’t read any of them and I doubt I will now. They’re actually collector’s items and hard to track down. This one cost me $15 or so back in 1992. Today it’s only available from resellers, with the best price I found being $560 on Amazon. Obviously it’s not for everyone, as it pushes a lot of boundaries relating to sex and violence and consent, but in its own sub-sub-genre of philosophical SF erotica I think it’s something special.

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Holmes: The Adventure of Black Peter

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

For some reason I thought that Black Peter was another name for the devil, but I might have been thinking of the goat at the end of the movie The Witch called Black Phillip. Or maybe I was confused with Zwarte Piet, even though he is one of Santa’s helpers and supposed to be a good guy.

In any event, this Black Peter is a bit of a devil, being the brutish former master of a whale ship who is found stuck by a harpoon to the wall of his little hut. That’s a big clue right there, as Holmes begins the story at a butcher shop, trying to transfix a dead pig with a spear and learning that this is not an easy thing to do. Whoever killed Black Peter had some muscle. Black Pete’s real name, by the way, is Peter Carey, which put me off balance since that’s also the name of a celebrated Australian writer. I see the name “Peter Carey” and I think of the author. Can’t be helped.

The story here follows the usual series of steps, including the apprehension of an innocent man who Holmes has to clear. The killer is caught at the end using the same handcuff trick as is used on Jefferson Hope in A Study in Scarlet, and he’s a similarly sympathetic figure though I don’t know how far his plea of self-defence will take him in court.

The back story is too involved to be able to follow, and from what I’ve been able to gather it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in terms of the treatment of financial securities, but overall this is a lively adventure that fans probably appreciated. My favourite part is the lead-in, where Watson talks about the “memorable year ‘95” and its “curious and incongruous succession of cases.” These introductory passages get picked apart by Holmes aficionados because sometimes they include references to previous cases and sometimes they just remain teasing little clues to stories that Watson never wrote up. In the latter category we have to put the case of “Wilson, the notorious canary-trainer.” I wonder what that was all about. Apparently his arrest “removed a plague-spot from the East End of London.” Experts still debate over what Wilson was up to, and whether “canary” even refers to the bird of that name or instead has the slang meaning of a stool-pigeon or refers to something else entirely.

Holmes index

Movie Mags: Tribute Volume IV Issue 3, Winter 1983

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

Tribute Volume IV Issue 3, Winter 1983

Unlike Marquee, Tribute is a Canadian movie magazine that is still being published and widely circulated, distributed in Canadian theaters six times a year. Its first issue came out in 1981 with a cover featuring the movie Reds and I still have a bunch of them from the 1990s. On their webpage their magazine archive only goes back to 1999 so I’ll be sharing some stuff you won’t see anywhere else!

This particular issue is a rarity as it was early days and the format was a bit different than other similar magazines at the time. There’s 20 pages of coverage of Gandhi, with profiles of the cast and crew as well as historical background. And part of the (contemporary) historical background can be seen in the ads. Like this one for Medallion Ultra Milds. I don’t know how popular these were. From the Cigarettespedia web page: “The big problem with the first generation of light cigarettes was that smokers noticed that they couldn’t get enough nicotine from them to satisfy their craving, unless they changed the way they smoked. ‘Sucking air’ was how many described the experience of smoking Imperial’s Medallion brand.”

And who can forget the Mark VI Lincoln Continental Town Car? With a hood like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier I’m pretty sure you could drive these straight into a brick wall at 80 mph and have time to eat a sandwich before the shock wave from the impact reached you. Who needs airbags with that kind of protection up front?

As for movies, Tootsie was obviously a big deal. Other full-page ads in this issue were for Lovesick with Dudley Moore and Elizabeth McGovern (no recollection of that) and Without a Trace with Kate Nelligan and Judd Hirsch. I sort of remember hearing about that one but I don’t think I ever saw it. Something about a missing kid.

Movie Mag index

 

Absolute Martian Manhunter 2: The Agency

/ Alex Good / 13 Comments

Absolute Martian Manhunter 2: The Agency

They lost me with this one. More swirling clouds of psychedelic smoke. More inexplicable happenings in an alternate alien and/or psychological reality.

I couldn’t even tell you what the story is about. There’s some secret government agency that’s keeping tabs on the “Martians.” They capture MM, somehow, and spirit him away to some black hole called Nihilo Bay, which is literally a black hole, to perform an autopsy on him. Or vivisect him, since he’s still alive. In the meantime, John Jones’s marriage is breaking down and he’s been saddled with a blue Martian named Despair-the-Zero. Despair spends the rest of the comic whispering in John’s ear about how he should just kill himself but John digs deep and shrugs him off and manages to rescue MM. How does he break into Nihilo Bay? Where is Nihilo Bay? Does Nihilo Bay even exist? Don’t know. “We break the mind/body barrier and leave physical reality in our incomprehensible dust . . .” and Bam! there we are.

Is any of this real? Or is it all just a figment of John’s imagination as he’s having a breakdown over the death of his son? Or is his son really dead? We know the Martians can’t be killed because they “do not have death concept. Life death do not apply.” So the White Martian is still out there too, dancing in a conga line with the other Martians. Maybe. Or perhaps it’s all psychodrama-a-go-go. In any event, I’m out. It does look great but I can’t take it anymore.

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Movie Mags: Marquee Volume 7 Number 5, September/October 1982

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

Marquee Volume 7 Number 5, September/October 1982

Unlike the previous Marquee magazine I featured, this issue was filled with a bunch of movies I haven’t seen. Or that I can’t remember seeing. I know I never saw Yes, Giorgio, but that’s something a lot of people can say. I didn’t check, but I don’t think this issue is quite as sought after as the one with Harrison Ford on the cover.

I also missed Tex, Hammett, and Love Child. Do these movies even still exist? Somewhere? I think I did see My Favorite Year at some point.

I know I didn’t see The Dark Crystal. I’m pretty sure I saw Fast Times at Ridgemont High on TV, but I can’t be sure. Hey, this was over forty years ago!

Movie Mags index

Injection

/ Alex Good / 14 Comments

Injection

Some graphic novels you read for their story, others for the characters. Injection, at least for me, falls pretty squarely into the latter category.

There are five main characters, members of a team tasked with the mission of making the twenty-first century more interesting. Not kidding; that was the mission. They did so by creating something they call The Injection, then they went their separate ways. Sometime later, The Injection is back and the brainy avengers have to re-assemble.

Author Warren Ellis saw each of the team members as being an archetype. There’s team leader Maria Kilbride as the slightly mad scientist. There’s Brigid Roth as the hacker. There’s Vivek Headland as the detective (Sherlock Holmes as played by an Indian Benedict Cumberbatch). There’s Simeon Winters as the agent (“James Bond. Of course.”). And finally Robin Morel, the magician, or “cunning man.” He’s an expert on English mysticism and folklore, which is something that comes in handy.

It’s an interesting group and each character is given room to develop. So much so that none of them individually takes over the story. Where I thought the series broke down though is in the presentation of The Injection. This is described, I don’t know how accurately, as a “non-biological artificial consciousness emulator” (we’d just say AI) that was, as I mentioned above, designed by the team in order “to make the 21st century more interesting.” But this isn’t just any AI but a “haunted AI”: “a strongly tactical, problem-solving, inductive and object-oriented machine learning system” that came to be inhabited, somehow, by something one of the team members “can only describe as the Other.” Or maybe it always was the Other. I wasn’t sure. Anyway, it can open a gateway to the Other World, which leads to the release of supernatural forces from that world, based on myth and folklore, that proceed to rip people to shreds.

Why does it do this? It isn’t clear. As Brigid tries to explain “they hate us like we’re spiders. Because we’re alien. Or they’re just pricks.” She hasn’t decided yet. And I’m not sure if we can even speak of them in the plural. Are they perhaps all just facets of The Injection? Or are they an independent, third force that The Injection has released? I didn’t feel like Ellis had fully thought this out. Or maybe he had ideas for where it was all going but never got around to explaining them. It seems clear that he intended the series to go on, but this collected edition takes us through issues #1-15, ending in 2017, and I don’t think there have been any new developments since.

So the story is frankly mush. And it wraps up with a straight steal from the end of the 1967 film Quatermass and the Pit. I mean, I don’t mind a bit of borrowing or homage, but this is just cut and paste. However I did like following the different characters around as things got going and I actually would be interested in reading more if they ever continue the run.

Graphicalex