Monthly Archive: December 2012

See the haunted opera “Lilith: Mother of Dreams” tonight!

  • News
  • December 20, 2012

There was a once-in-a-century storm that delayed the original premiere date. But Lilith will not be denied.

Join poet-violist (and ComicMix contributor) Alexandra Honigsberg, international artist composer-clarinetist Demetrius Spaneas, soprano Christina Rohm, and pianist-conductor James Siranovich at the premiere of Lilith: Mother of Dreams, a chamber opera of the iconic demon goddess. It’s debuting tonight at a historic haunted opera house, Flushing Town Hall.

The Lilith Project is conceived as a modern American suitcase opera, a chamber monodrama: intense, human, universal, compact in form and forces, accessible.

Before there was Eve, there was Lilith: Adam’s first lover, once human, made from the same dust, sensuality’s queen, bride of the Angel of Death, mother of opposing cosmic forces – strong, willful, unstoppable. She rules the storms of the skies and the heart – night owl, holy woman of power. From ancient tales of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, to Greece’s Lamiae and Daughters of Hecate, to Native American lore and Victorian Gothic Horror, Lilith looms large in the minds of men and women when the lights go out and they enter dream time. Some call her demon, vampire, child killer – others mother, lover, elder, friend. But whatever the appellations, she persists in the realms of our imaginations, from holy books and high literature to popular feminist concert series, TV shows, and Japanese anime. Child of Light? Daughter of Darkness? Both? Neither? You decide.

Composer Spaneas is a long-time professional, curator of Cornelia St. Café’s Serial Underground award-winning new music series’ 25th year, and Fullbright Specialist of the State Department’s musical diplomats. Librettist Honigsberg is a veteran violist, award-winning songwriter, long-time published poet, and this year’s winner of the Mayor’s Poetry Prize. Both Rohm and Siranovich have established opera careers all over the US and cities abroad.  Long-time colleagues in many configurations over the years, Lilith marks this creative team’s debut.

There will be a talk by the artists before the performance and then time for questions and answers, afterwards, and a reception to which all are invited. Come as you are, but gala premiere attire, period dress, and other unique finery is encouraged!

The production is fiscally sponsored by Composers Collaborative, Inc. $10 suggested donation/FTH members free, all welcome.

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Dennis O’Neil: The Elephant in the Punch Bowl

Dear Uncle Huff ,

Look, I know that your guns are important to you: more important than Emmy’s knitting is to her, more important than the twins’ comic book collection is to them, maybe more important than Gran’s daily mass and communion is to her.

For openers, there’s your collection, the best in town. From the nifty little .22 derringer to the awesome AK47, it’s a display of firearms you’re justly proud of. And yes, I remember sitting in your living room, cocking and dry-firing your Colt Peacemaker. Sure, guns fascinate me. I’m an American male.

But the collection is only the beginning. Guns provide a focus for your energy and enthusiasm. They give you a social life, too. I’ve seen you at the gun shows, kidding around with your pals, sharing information and opinions with them. They’re your tribe and you’re happy to have a tribe and to be part of this one. And guns give you an area of expertise – something most of us want. You stand holding the Glock in both hands and empty it downrange and the target you’re shooting at is shredded. You smile. You’re a damn good shot and you know it.

I wonder if fear isn’t part of your devotion to weapons. Some where along the line, you realized that the world is dangerous and unpredictable and having the capability to end an enemy’s life with a half-pound of pressure on a trigger give you a feeling of security.

Let us not forget your patriotism. When the “liberals” – a word you expel from your mouth like it has a bad taste – criticize guns and gun owners, you cite the Second Amendment and when the liberals suggest that our founding fathers meant for state militias to be armed and said nothing about ordinary Joes, you shrug.

Even if the founding fathers hadn’t limited their recommendation to military organizations, they lived and wrote about 236 years ago. Do you still ride to work on a horse?

I’ll ask one more question – a snide question, I admit: if you’re so star-spangled patriotic, why have you never worn a uniform? You’re strong and healthy and intelligent and, let us remember, a fine marksman; the Army would have welcomed you. Okay, like I said: snide. I have no right to judge you, or anyone else.

So instead of judging you, let me plead with you to be enormously brave. Admit that you’ve been ignoring the elephant in the punch bowl, that guns may bear some responsibility for the barbaric slaughter of innocents we are continuously witnessing. Heed facts and ignore slogans. Find the courage to abandon important elements of your life so a greater good can exist. Admit that you might be wrong.

Whenever there’s an Aurora or Virginia Tech or Gabby Gifford, the pro-gun pundits say that now is not the time to discuss gun control, let’s wait until emotions cool. Then time passes and other matters claim the national attention, and eventually, there is more cause for mourning.

At least start asking the questions. Last week, 20 school children were shot to death.

Your nephew,

Jimmy

THURSDAY: Martha Thomases

 

NEW PULP AUTHORS VISIT EARTH STATION ONE

Some familiar names popped up on the Earth Station One Podcast this week.

The ESO crew goes on a journey we’ve been expecting for nine long years! Mike Faber and Michael Gordon, along with fellow ESO podcasters JD (The Delta Quadrant – A Star Trek Voyager Podcast) and Van Allen Plexico (The White Rocket Podcast) review the first chapter of The Hobbit trilogy. Plus, Bobby Nash is on hand to help author Jana Oliver face The Geek Seat. All this and the usual Rants, Raves, Khan Report, and Shout Outs!

You can listen to Earth Station One Episode 142 now at www.esopodcast.com.
Direct link: http://erthstationone.wordpress.com/2012/12/19/earth-station-one-episode-142-playing-riddles-in-the-dark-we-review-the-first-hobbit-film/

Follow ESO on Facebook and Twitter.
Check out ESO’s new Amazon estore here.

THE ADVENTURES OF NICHOLAS SAINT-DAY 2-FOR FREE FROM PRO SE!

  • News
  • December 19, 2012

THE ADVENTURES OF NICHOLAS SAINT, Tommy Hancock’s Pulp interpretation of Santa Claus and much to do with him, continue at http://pulpmachine.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-adventures-of-nicholas-saint-day-2.html for you to read for free!

Discover hidden wonders at the top of the world in Part 2 of the Adventures of Nicholas Saint and get the first peek at the man we all think we know as Santa!

And remember, click http://www.pulpmachine.blogspot.com/p/the-adventures-of-nicholas-saint-free.html to keep up with previous chapters!

Designed by Perry Constantine

AIRSHIP 27 UNVEILS NEW ON-LINE HANGAR STORE

  • News
  • December 19, 2012

New Pulp Publisher, Airship 27 Productions has unveiled their new website, the Airship 27 Hangar.

PRESS RELEASE:

NEW AIRSHIP 27 HANGAR

After months of hard work, Rob Davis, the Art Director has finished work on the new official Airship 27 Productions website. Titled the Airship 27 Hangar, the site features two all important links.

The first brings visitors to the PDF store where all Airship 27 pulp titles are available for $3 dollars as PDF downloads for their PCs or various e-readers.

The second brings readers to the Airship 27 Print-On-Demand shop at Indy Planet. Indy Planet is a division of Ka-Blam, one of the leading print-on-demand operations in the publishing world today.

“Now our fans can find all books with one click of their mouse button,” Airship 27 Managing Editor-in-Chief Ron Fortier announced. “These new internet shops have allowed us to drop the prices of our product while maintaining the high standard of quality our readers have come to expect from Airship 27 Productions. These steps insure our continued growth with dozens of great new titles now in the planning stages.”

“Expect our first title of 2012 to be released within the next week,” Fortier continued. “Both Rob and me are very, very excited about the future of Airship 27 Productions.”

http://robmdavis.com/Airship27Hangar/airship27hangar.html

A SNEAK PEEK AT DYNAMITE’S SHADOW SPECIAL #1

  • Uncategorized
  • December 19, 2012
Cover Art: Alex Ross

Dynamite Entertainment has shared a preview of the new ‘The Shadow Special’ #1, which is available in comic shops next week.

About The Shadow Special #1:
The Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.  But when Lamont Cranston crosses paths with an old friend–a fellow veteran of “the war to end all wars”–Cranston’s justice serving alter ego must judge a man whose path to villainy began with their friendship!  At the risk of his own secrets being laid bare, Cranston accepts an invitation to join a very exclusive club of adventurers whose dark hearts might be the worst The Shadow has ever encountered!

Writer: Scott Beatty
Artist: Ronan Cliquet
Cover: Alex Ross
Format: 40 pgs., Full-Color
Cover Price: $4.99
Rating: Teen+

Click on images for a larger view.

A Doctor A Day – “The Girl In The Fireplace”

Using the new Doctor Who Limited Edition Gift Set, your noble author will make his way through as much of the modern series as he can before the Christmas episode,The Snowmen.

For a person as long-lived as The Doctor, all his relationships seem to go by quickly.  This one goes by REALLY quickly…for him, that is.  But quite a long time for…

THE GIRL IN THE FIREPLACE
by Steven Moffat
Directed by Euros Lyn

“What do monsters have nightmares about?”  “Me.”

A young  woman in 18th-Century France is calling into her fireplace for The Doctor.  And after the opening credits, the narrative shoots 3000 years later, where the TARDIS lands on a spaceship light years from Earth.  Mickey is fascinated at the view, Rose is enjoying showing him the ropes, and The Doctor is wondering why there’s an antique fireplace in a derelict spaceship.  Looking into the hearth, he is rather surprised to see a young girl named Reinette looking through the other side.  She is even more surprised, because her side of the fireplace in in 18th century Versailles. After a brief talk, he examines the fireplace, and finds a latch, causing the whole thing to rotate around to the other side, into the 18th century.  The young girl is there, but she explains confusedly that their chat was months ago.  The Doctor examines the room briefly, noticing the clock on mantle is broken…but he still hears ticking.  He finds the sound under Reinette’s bed, and discovers a mysterious figure, clearly from the ship, but clad in period dress.  The creature has been scanning Reinette’s brain, and The Doctor can’t imagine why they’d expend the energy to cross time and space to scan a seemingly normal young girl.  Rather than spend time placing her in danger, The Doctor lures the thing back over the fireplace portal and onto the ship, quickly incapacitating it.  It’s an intricate clockwork android whose design The Doctor can’t help but admire, but it teleports away before he can inspect it.

Telling Rose and Mickey to stay put (because that ALWAYS works), he spins the fireplace back around, only to discover that Reinette has grown in QUITE the attractive young lady…specifically, the one we saw calling for hope in the pre-credit sequence.  She chats with him, catching up with her childhood friend, and plants a quite passionate kiss on him.  It’s only after she leaves, and he’s confronted by a guard that she realizes that young Reinette is the Madam du Pompadour, possibly one of the most famous (certainly the most successful) courtesans in human history.

Back on the spaceship, Mickey and Rose are off exploring, and The Doctor finds a horse, clearly having wandered onto the ship through another transfer point between the ship and Versailles. Walking through that one, The Doctor sees his now slightly older and even MORE hot friend in the garden of the palace. Meanwhile, Mickey and Rose have discovered that human body parts have been used to repair and maintain the ship – a human eye in a camera and a heart running as a pump.  The part they need the most is Reinette’s brain, which they will take on her thirty-seventh birthday.

Why does a spaceship from 3,000 years later think the brain of a French courtesan will be compatible with its computer system?  Well, that is a rather good bit of the story.

This is one of Moffat’s best episodes, mixing the complex time-travel plot that he will soon become (in)famous for, and a simple love story. Others clearly thought so as well, it’s the first of his Hugo wins for the show as well. What’s interesting is that he really only spends a couple hours with Reinette, but it’s across most of her life.  We’ll see this theme pop up a couple times – it’s basically the same way the Eleventh Doctor met Amy Pond.  And the idea of the out of sync timelines will re-appear with Amy again, in The Girl Who Waited.

The sets were built in a very unique way for this episode.  The spaceship and bedroom sets were actually next to each other, so the fireplace could actually rotate between them.  The rest of the rooms of the palace connected as well, for the various moments of moving between rooms.  One of the most complicated effects shots in the episode was The Doctor crashing through the mirror.  A number of elements, including CGI glass, the jump being done at a different location, and all the people in the room.  Sometimes the stuff that looks the best and takes the longest doesn’t look like an SFX shot at all.

Mike Gold: Violence and Comic Books

Are comic books too violent?

Sure, this is a question some will ask in the wake of a tragedy like last Friday’s massacre in Newtown Connecticut – and a question soon-to-be-ex Senator Joe Lieberman asks every day. But let me put aside my deep-seated prejudice against book-burners for the moment and tell you who else is asking this question right now.

DC Comics is asking this question. Actually, it’s asking the question “Are DC Comics too violent?” And that’s a valid question, as long as those asking it are aware that they’ve been continuing a trend of some decades and that there is no real evidence that there’s a causal link. But that DC name, now synonymous with Warner Bros, is right there on the cover… as well as on all those movies, profitable and otherwise. But movies are a horse of another color: for one thing, children actually go to movies.

Way back in the fall of 1976, DC Comics published Action Comics #466, pictured above. I ran it slightly larger than our usual graphics so you can see what I’m talking about. This was a somewhat controversial cover: several big-name creators found it abhorrent. They felt we shouldn’t beat up babies on the covers of DC Comics. (No, causing harm was what those old Johnson-Smith ads inside were for.) The story was reprinted in a trade paperback back in 2000.

But at that time I was DC’s entire marketing and publicity department, so publisher Jenette Kahn brought me in, showed me the cover, and asked what I thought. “Well, to be honest,” I said paraphrasing like hell, “I hadn’t noticed it as untoward when I first saw the cover several months prior to publishing. Now that you mention it, I see the point. It doesn’t offend me, but little does. Professionally, unless one of the nut-groups is having a slow day I doubt it’ll be a problem.” It wasn’t.

Jenette said it didn’t bother her either, but we had a nice conversation about limits. That’s a good thing to do from time to time, particularly if you’re in the media racket and you are dependent upon the pleasure of mom’n’pop store-owners.

But you can’t please everybody.

Given some of DC’s recent comics – and by “recent” I mean “at least since the time they broke Batman’s back” – one wonders how they will evaluate the standards. Note that the Comics Code Authority, the guardian of comic book morality and the exorciser of four-color excess, approved the above cover. Today such decisions are made where they should be, in-house.

If, by way of example, it is deemed the current Batman mega-arc “Death Of The Family” crosses that revalued line, would DC alter it for the trade paperbacks and omnibus editions? Or forgo these editions entirely? If not, well, so much for the new standards.

Which is OK by me, but it’s not my call. It’s been a while since I’ve been on their payroll and, knowing me as well as I do, were I still in editorial I’d be pushing those new limits right up to that “you’re meeting with Human Resources tomorrow morning” point. Hey, I’m a brat.

I’m not expressing concern or outrage, nor am I screaming censorship. It’s good for such concerns to evaluate and reevaluate their standards from time to time and, besides, as the great A. J. Liebling said, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil

 

Doctor Who’s new TARDIS revealed!

tardis-550x366-5242320

After a couple of teaser photos, the BBC has released a shot of the new TARDIS interior, to premiere in the upcoming Christmas episode, The Snowmen.  Featuring a much more sleek design, it’s much  more like the old school sets, that, to quote Arthur Dent, “really looks like a spaceship”.  The TARDIS from the TV movie on has looked more like a bachelor’s apartment, with everything thrown in, and patched up with random bits of junk.  However, in a cut scene from The Doctor’s Wife, It’s explained that the TARDIS console is itself under the aegis of the chameleon circuit.  It’s not made of junk, it’s made out of very high-tech components that look like junk.

The basic design of the control has not changed much.  There’s still a railing around the perimeter, and what looks like a multi-level setup again.  The additional console to the rear is new, but not entirely so.  The Hartnell and Troughton control rooms had panels and console along the back and side walls, which eventually vanished as the control room grew more simple, and action was centered around the main console.

So why does it look all high-tech again?  I have what might be considered a Clever Theory.

If I may take a comment from Time Crash literally, this may be the TARDIS’ “default” desktop setting.  This is what an off-the-rack TARDIS looks like inside.

This is the TARDIS of a guy who doesn’t care anymore.

There’s the remotest of possibilities this may not be “the new set”, but just a temporary one, until The Doctor becomes more his old self again.  It looks a bit…simpler, certainly more sparse that the current one.  It may not be intended to be kept long-term.

New companion Jenna-Louise Coleman mentioned liking the new console in an interview with CNN, discussing “these new kind-of rolly balls” which is an out of context statement if you ever heard one, and even lets slip that she gets to fly the TARDIS at one point, tho it’s not made clear if this takes place in the Christmas episode, or further down the line.

Other surprises for the Christmas episode includes news that Ian McKellen will be voicing the titular baddie, although rumors and whispered spoilers suggest he may be voicing another character, one who may carry through as an antagonist through the second half of the season.  The…force behind the snowmen, if you will.

 

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