The winter storm that rolled over much of the East Coast this
week merely glanced my inland NJ location on its way from battering the South to
pummeling New England. Nonetheless, the few inches of snow in combination with
temperatures of 7 degrees (-14 C) were enough to make me question once again why
I live in a Northern state. They also make me wonder once again why our early
modern human ancestors moved north at all.
Migrating into the cold was not the first instinct of our
ancestors. Those that left Africa some 65,000 years ago (after not having bothered
for 100,000 years) hugged the southern coastline of Eurasia in their initial trek
outward. They reached Australia before they reached Europe. This seems
eminently sensible to me. We are, after all, tropical creatures. Unclothed
humans feel chilly at 77 degrees (25 C), so even a sunny Mediterranean climate
requires some protection most of the time. Besides, Europe and much of Central
Asia already were inhabited by cold-adapted Neanderthals and Denisovans; the
small but notable percentage of DNA from both archaic species currently found
in non-African modern humans dates from this early phase of the out-of-Africa
migration as they brushed against the southern flank of their ancient cousins’
range. It was only after the southerly regions were in their hands that modern
humans turned north and took those lands for themselves. Why did they? There
were abundant resources up there. Colder climes were rich in fish and game –
particularly large game such as ibex, aurochs, red deer, and horse, which
provided a feast with a single kill – as well as edible nuts and plants. These
attracted bands northward while the annoyance of fellow humans to the south
repelled.
Still, I imagine they had second thoughts when the
winter winds whipped up and their bearskin clothes failed to stave off shivers.
More than a few must have succumbed to hypothermia. In subfreezing temperatures
without proper protection this can happen in minutes. Even in fairly recent
times cold proved to be a deal killer for would-be settlers. The Little Ice Age
lasted roughly from 1300 to 1850, reaching the most bone-chillingly low
temperatures around 1600. It put an end to Norse settlements in Greenland and
North America. It scuppered several European attempts to secure a foothold in
North America north of Spain’s tenuously held St. Augustine settlement in
Florida. Jamestown was a very near thing – and that was Virginia.
My quasi-niece & friends enjoying
the cold
There are still attractive riches in northern regions, of
course, which explains in large part why 21st century humans choose
to live there. It is possible to adapt to extreme cold even without modern
conveniences. The Inuit, unlike the Norse, thrived in Little Ice Age Greenland.
My own perseverance owes more to inertia than ambition, however. I grew up
here, friends and family are here, and my home is here. Picking up stakes and
moving would be both expensive and troublesome. Nonetheless, in a straight-up
choice I’d pick a tropical grass hut over an arctic igloo any day. The day yet
may come when I pick it over my current house, too.
We are told that the
onset of the new year is the time for fresh starts and looking forward. Given
the nature of time (or at least the human experience of it), looking forward is
not really an option. We are driving in reverse gear in a car with a stuck accelerator,
no shift, and no brakes; further, all the glass is painted black except the
windshield in front of our eyes, so we can see only where we’ve been. We do
have some steering control, but we merely try to surmise what’s ahead based on
what’s behind. Most of the road hazards we encounter are complete surprises. We
often miss the ones about which we’re most worried only to slam into something
we never seriously considered.
We all know this, which
is why nostalgia outweighs expectations on New Year’s Eve. The song, after all,
is Auld Lang Syne, not New Times A-Comin’. True, there are some
years that we are happy to see come to an end – more than a few people felt
that way about 2016 – but that, too, is a retrospective way of evaluating
things. At this stage in my life, I’ve had far too many retrospective New Year’s
Eves to recall each of them individually; even if I could, I’m far too lazy to
write about them all – and am kind enough not to try to inflict such a tome on
a reader. I’ll be unkind enough to recall ones at decade intervals, however.
1957: I still sometimes wear suspenders
but I've given up on bowties
1957: I truthfully can’t
say I recall this New Year’s Eve, and I would have been in bed as 1958 arrived
at midnight anyway. However, I do recall specific events (and presents) from
that holiday season which includes the Eve. I can’t say I yet had acquired a
reflective nature either. At age 5, upon how much is there on which to reflect?
If I had thought about it, I probably would have recalled my first day of
school, which was a major life event of 1957. In those benighted days (though
somehow we still tested better 12 years later on SATs than today’s students)
they didn’t really teach us anything academic in Kindergarten. It was just
about getting socialized to the school experience and to other kids. At the end
of the first day I got on the wrong bus. I’ve been searching for the right one
ever since.
1967: I was a sophomore
and suitably sophomoric. To the extent I had a Holden Caufield year, this was
it. There was much teen angst and awkwardness on which to reflect. I did win my
one and only blue ribbon earlier that year in a horse show event. Mostly,
though, it was a year of re-evaluation – which is to say one of finally accepting
that I wasn’t as exceptional as I would have liked. I actually remember
watching on TV at home the ball drop at midnight in Times Square as 1968 arrived.
I don’t know why: I remember few of the others specifically, but that one
sticks.
Eyes across the table
1977: This was the high
point of my youth. At 25 I was as fit as I’ve ever been and my adult life was
coming together in a hedonistic decade that only those who experienced it would
believe. Moreover, there was that one. You know the one. We all have the one,
even if we didn’t end up with her or him and are glad we didn’t… yet still the
one. I don’t remember New Year’s Eve specifically, but a few days earlier I was
at PJ Clarke’s with those eyes across the table. 1977 was a good year.
F150 parked by my cabin in the
woods
1987: For me, 1987 was a mixed bag, congruent with broader
events that included a booming economy terminated by an epic stock market crash
that was worse than 1929 or 2008, albeit with far milder aftereffects than
either. I didn’t own stocks then, so the market movements didn’t affect me
directly, but they did indirectly. I had a pleasant but fragile relationship
(not live-in) that already had lasted more than a year and wouldn’t end until ’89.
I owed a substantial (for me) mortgage sum, but I owned my home and it was a
good investment. I still had my favorite vehicle to date: a simple 1979 Ford
F150. The truck did have a quirk though. The shift on automatic transmissions
in that model year sometimes would hang up between P and R so that you could
think you were in Park when you weren’t. One time I slid the shift into
what felt like P and left the truck to open a garage door. Suddenly the F150
was off backwards. I ran after it yelling, “Stop!” For some reason the truck
didn’t listen. It arced off the driveway, slipped between two big black
birches, and smacked into a flexible young cedar. The cedar bent enough to stop
the Ford without significant damage. I scolded the truck for running away but
praised it for its choice of trees. I don’t remember what I did for New Years
Eve that year so it must not have been very memorable. 1987 was OK.
1997: Storm clouds brewed in 1997.
I really can’t explain that further without being more boorish than I want to
be even 20 years later. The year wasn’t without excitement, true enough: stormy
weather rarely is. But 1997 is a New Year’s Eve I remember, and the year closed
with a deep sense of foreboding that proved well-founded.
2007: The almost decade-long rough
weather (including deaths of friends and family) subsided in 2007. The year
ended with a sense of calm I hadn’t felt in years. I looked forward to more of
the same as the clock ticked toward 2008. I don’t remember exactly what I actually
was doing that particular Eve, but I’m sure of the feeling because it had
lasted a month. Favorite memory: just sitting in a chair doing nothing but
enjoying not being swamped by immediate worries. In the event, 2008 proved to
be tumultuous financially, as it was for so many other people, but not in other
ways, so my prognostication was mostly right.
Imposing on poor Samantha Fish after
a 2017 NYC concert
2017: Well, (as anyone who has
done the math so far knows – though I can’t imagine who would have troubled to
do the math), there is Social Security, isn’t there? There are also senior
discounts at movie theaters, but, since the ticket sellers sometimes give me
the discount without my asking for it, the discount comes with a bit of a
sting. That happened to me for the first time last spring and a couple times
since then. 2017 was a good year for me: not as good as ’77, but nonetheless a
good year. I’m very aware that my life clock is no longer in the wee numbers,
of course, but that’s OK, too.
What of 2018? Well, as mentioned
up top, all we sense of that is guesswork based on the road behind. With any
luck, next New Year’s Eve 2018 will have counted as another good year. I hope it is
for you, too. Happy New Year.
I am not a clothes horse and never have been. This is unlike
my dad who enjoyed being a natty dresser. As a builder he wore plaid flannel
and work jeans on most days, but he enjoyed the opportunity to spiff up in tie
and jacket at Rotary meetings and Builders Association meetings and other
occasions when more casual attire would have been perfectly acceptable. He left
behind a walk-in closetful of jackets and dress shirts – even a tuxedo. Even in my trim days they didn’t fit me, so I
don’t still have them. Nor did I inherit the natty gene. Once out of prep
school (where tie and jacket were required by the dress code) I tied a half-Windsor
so seldom that whenever my mom spotted me with one she took my picture.
Autumn 1970. If the items
still fit I'd probably still wear
them, bell bottoms and all.
I was not (and am not) actually averse to the notion of donning semi-formal or formal attire. I just don’t bother much. Moreover, like many
long-single men, I keep and wear clothes not just for years but for decades,
and so look typically a bit rumpled. When the garments eventually are tossed
out or donated, it is not because they are out of fashion. It is because they truly
have frayed away or no longer fit. Save for one overcoat, I don’t believe I
have anything in my closet remaining from the 1960s but there is more than one
item from the 1970s. These items remain because they still fit, meaning they
were considerably too big at the time they were bought.
The reader might remember being disappointed as a small
child when a gift under the tree turned out to be clothes instead of toys.
Those days are long gone, for in 2017 I’m gifting myself with more clothes than in any year in the past decade – maybe more all other nine years of the decade
combined. I’m happy to get them, even if I begrudge the cost. Not that the
budget for them was high: just high for me. This splurge was because I’ve
finally accepted that I will not fit into 1997 clothes ever again. 1997 was the
last year I could wear something from 1972 without straining buttons or fabric
(though perhaps straining taste). I think 20 years is long enough to sustain
the fantasy that my corporeal dimensions of 1997 are recoverable. So, I emptied
out much of the closet and acquired apparel that fits. I still won’t look
natty, but at least the buttons will button.
People have been donning fashions for a very long time.
Prehistoric and ancient clothes don’t survive well in the archeological record,
so we don’t know what the earliest ones were like. Though ancient garb is
depicted in early historical art, we don’t have many samples of the actual
articles; those few come only from sites extraordinarily well suited to
conservation such as Egyptian tombs. We can’t know for sure why people started
wearing clothes in the first place, but we can make a pretty fair estimate of
when thanks to lice. Lice are persnickety creatures. Each species of louse
prefers a specific species of host. Though uncommon, it is possible for a louse
to jump host species, but when this happens it quickly adapts over surprisingly
few generations to become a new species itself. Nearly every mammal species has
only one cohabiting louse species. Humans are rare in having three species of
louse that are ours alone: head lice, body lice, and pubic lice. DNA studies
can show how long ago species diverge, and body lice diverged from head lice
some 107,000 years ago. (DNA shows pubic lice diverged from gorilla lice; the
less said about that the better.) “Body lice” is a misnomer, for they do not
cling to the body. They instead have claws specially adapted to cling to the
interior of clothing, which means clothes have been around for at least 107,000
years. That is some 40,000 years before modern humans spread beyond Africa, so
warmth probably wasn’t the prime motivation for dressing up.
Sumerian catwalk
What fashions looked like for the first 100,000 years or so
is anyone’s guess. We have 5300-year-old remains of cold weather attire from Ötzi,
a middle-aged fellow whose body was found in the Alps where it had been frozen
in ice for all those millennia. He had a sheep hide coat, goatskin leggings, bear
fur hat, intricately made deerskin and string shoes stuffed with hay, and a
woven grass cape. A man after my own heart, he repeatedly had repaired his
well-worn coat. He’d probably owned it for decades. Had Ötzi not died a violent
death in his mid-40s – a flint arrowhead is lodged in the body – he might have
kept it for a decade or two more. Middle-age spread was less of an issue with
residents of Europe’s cool climes back then, so he wouldn’t have needed
tailoring or a replacement.
Not being Ötzi – and on the whole I’m pleased with that – I
do need replacements, but now I should be good for another 20 years.
It is not yet officially winter but winter weather has
arrived as it usually does by the onset of December in these parts. Due to the
vagaries of scheduling, it seems that musicians and shows I want to see live
are at nearby venues during December, January, and February more often than the
25% of the time one expects by chance. Last night I was in NYC to catch Samantha
Fish at The Cutting Room.
(She was there last July, too, so winter has no monopoly on my preferred performances:
just an outsized share.) The show was good, of course, yet, strangely enough,
standing in line in the cold for doors to open (late) is not as much fun as it
was when I was 18.
Frankie waited in line too long
Fortunately, the temperature last night was just borderline
freezing, which is positively balmy compared to those of some of my line waits
in the past. Two stand out in particular. One was in 2004 outside The Bottom Line in the Village where
Richie Havens and Janis Ian were on a double bill. It was a windy January night
with temperatures in the negative single digits (Fahrenheit). By the time the
door opened I had ceased to feel my feet; my fingers – despite being deep
inside pockets of a fleece-lined coat – felt as though they were pierced by
needles. The true winner, though, has to be the night of a Motörhead concert some
30 years ago at Roseland – a venue,
incidentally, where my parents once jitterbugged to Benny Goodman. The penetrating
wind on that subfreezing eve maintained a high-pitched whistle. Again my feet
went numb and this time so did my fingers, which no longer functioned as
fingers. I couldn’t complain, though, for I had lost my power of speech. The
combination of a numb face and chattering teeth meant I literally (not
figuratively but literally) could not articulate words.
Only one person of my own acquaintance ever died of
hypothermia (though one is enough) and it was not in line for a rock concert. I
was a few steps along the path however. Whenever someone insists on standing
out in the freezing cold, the body’s first response is to protect core
temperature by constricting capillaries and blood flow to extremities: hence
the numbness. As your body continues to shed heat you reach the boundary of
hypothermia at a core temperature of 95 (35 C). As core temperature continues
to drop, mental functions become unreliable: assume any decisions you make at
this point will be bad ones. At least you probably won’t be scared: at a core
temperature of 91 you won’t give a damn about much of anything. At 90 you might
not be unconscious technically, but you might as well be. At this point, if you
don’t get someplace warm you are on your way to joining Ötzi the Iceman.
The good news is that all this generally takes longer than
the wait in line to a concert. Even if hypothermia does overtake you, if help
comes along there’s a chance of being revived even from a core temperature in
the 60s. All the same, I wouldn’t recommend the experience. I’m glad I caught Motörhead
in its heyday. (Founding member Lemmy Kilmister died in 2015.) Nonetheless,
faced with a similar wait today, regardless of the artist I’d abandon that line
and find the nearest coffee shop.
You never know in NJ what winter will bring. Sometimes (though
not often) the snowfalls start in October and keep piling on top of us for the
next five months. Other years we get a dusting or two in February, and that’s
the end of it. This year, the first snow since last March fell yesterday. It
wasn’t much – just enough to stick – but it counted. It provided a bare excuse to
spend the weekend at my home in the woods with a book and DVD. Both are worth a
look.
**** ****
One Touch of Venus (1948)
The 1980s romantic comedy Mannequin frequently appears on “Guilty Pleasures” lists, but the
1948 inspiration for that movie is largely forgotten. One Touch of Venus turned up frequently on late night TV when I was
a child. It was a favorite of my sister and I enjoyed watching it with her.
Since then it all but has vanished from the airwaves. Not even TCM has it on
regular rotation. Prior to this past weekend I hadn’t seen it in more than 50
years. I had forgotten completely that it was a musical. So how does it hold up
decades later?
One Touch of Venus
was a successful Broadway musical starring Mary Martin in the early 1940s. The
music was changed and curtailed significantly for the ’48 screen adaptation but
the script was scarcely altered. Stage and screen are two very different media
and scripts are rarely interchangeable. That is the biggest weakness of the
movie production, particularly with regard to the overly-broad-for-screen
character Eddie Hatch. Nonetheless, the overall result is still modestly pleasant
fare.
Plot: Department store magnate Whitfield Savory (Tom Conway)
buys the relic statue Anatolian Venus as an attraction for his store. In an
inebriated moment, window dresser Eddie Hatch kisses the statue. Venus (a
stunning Ava Gardner) comes to life and causes any number of comic
complications before being recalled to Olympus by Jupiter. In the meantime she
also resolves a number of romantic issues for the people in the store. Much of
the comedy is provided by the unrequited affections of the female characters,
which is a reversal of the usual state of affairs then as now (as current news
all too relentlessly demonstrates). Eve Arden as Whitfield’s competent right
hand operative is especially splendid.
This movie is no classic in any sense other than age.
However, if you are looking for light mindless entertainment and are thinking
“maybe Mannequin,” try One Touch of Venus instead. It is better,
which isn’t saying much but is saying something.
Thumbs ever so mildly Up.
**** ****
Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 by Laura
Engelstein
The global history of the 20th century is very
much a history of the varying fortunes of Russia. In world wars, proxy wars,
cold wars, ideological contests, and the post-Soviet restructuring, when Russia
wasn’t the central player it still was a weight that tipped balance scales. The
key moment that defined Russia’s 20th century was the 1917 October
Revolution. Yale historian Laura Engelstein released her book on its 100th
anniversary.
The events covered by Engelstein are covered by many other
books on my shelves. (My degree is in history, which isn’t one that’s likely to
fill a graduate’s pockets but is one likely to fill his or her bookcases.)
However, they tend to suffer from being either too general (e.g. histories of
WW1) or too specific (e.g. individual biographies or particular accounts of the
February and October Revolutions). By covering the whole period of World War,
Revolution, foreign intervention, Civil War, and consolidation with the New
Economic Policy in a single volume, Engelstein is able to put events in proper
context with sufficient detail but without overwhelming the reader.
The astonishing evaporation of imperial authority in early 1917
by no means ensured that the Bolsheviks would prevail in the end even with
Lenin’s single-minded dedication to that outcome. Engelstein details how it happened that they
did, through a mix of random events, politics of division, and calculated
violence.
When I wrote the blog Cat
Wars last month I would have given odds that my 19-y.o. cat Maxi would snap
back from his injuries and ailments one more time. He didn’t. Today he went to
Cat-halla.
Maxi 2016
I’ve had seven cats in the past 32 years: generally two at a
time, for several years three, and continuously since 1985 at least one.
Whenever one has died I’ve been immediately importuned to adopt another in its
place. The pleaders come in three varieties and the first two mean well: 1)
there are those who actually seem to think I want a replacement, and who thereby
think that they are being kind; 2) there are those who mean well at least for
the cats by trying to place them in my home whether I want them or not; and 3)
there are scheming guys who hope to win the favor of some habitually cat-rescuing
woman by placing a cat for her at someone else’s (my) expense rather than their
own. If only the last type restricted their schemes to cats… I never want a
replacement. Don’t get me wrong. I am fond of my pets when I have them. I just
don’t seek to adopt any in the first place; they are a responsibility that,
given a prior choice, I opt to do without. Except for the first two kittens (adopted
to help out my sister) in 1985, they’ve come into my possession only by the
accidents of life – in a sense, so even did those first two. Maxi and Mini (d.
2015) were inherited from my parents in 2001.
There always were dogs and cats and other sundry animals
around the house when I was growing up. Pets are commonly regarded as good for
kids, and so they are. One of their benefits seems anything but a benefit at
the time. They frequently are a child’s first real encounter with death. About
a decade ago Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) commented that the biggest social change
since he was a child is the insulation of modern life from death. He said there
was much more consciousness of mortality in daily life, and that, when his
family went to visit relatives on the weekend, they went to the graveyard; in
those pre-antibiotic days young people were as likely to be in there as old
folks. Nowadays we tend to banish Thanatos from our environment to the extent
possible. Of course we are aware of it intellectually, but we keep the
awareness as superficial as possible. Losing a pet is likely to be the first real
mortal loss with strong emotional content that a child experiences. Nothing
truly prepares a person for the far bigger losses that inevitably are to come,
but even that bit of training helps a little.
Maxi had a long and good life by the standards of felines. That’s
all one really can ask. He is my final pet, and in many ways he was the best. Anyway,
so long Maxi, and thanks for all the mice, birds, rabbits, moles, and snakes.
We all know some of those conspiracy-minded folks who carry
on about how the government or corporations are suppressing knowledge of cancer
cures or free energy or what-have-you in order to protect profits on
pharmaceuticals and petroleum or whatever. The hole in those arguments always
has been that the U.S. and the West in general are not the world. All this
marvelous tech should be in use wherever their dominance doesn’t extend.
In his science fiction novel Influx, Daniel Suarez asks, “What if they’re right anyway?” Might
that explain why, nearly half a century after the Moon landings, instead of
Martian colonies we just have better phones? The Bureau of Technology Control
(BTC) in his novel is a secret government organization that identifies emerging
disruptive technologies and prevents their general introduction, though the BTC
members make full use of the tech themselves. The inventions include anti-aging
drugs, cold fusion, cancer cures, genetic engineering, hypersonic transport,
true artificial intelligence, and much more. Supposedly the tech is being held
back while "assessing their social, political, environmental, and economic
impacts with the goal of preserving social order," but, predictably, the
social order the gatekeepers are most interested in preserving is their own
primacy and power. What about the “U.S. and the West in general are not the
world” thing? There are other BTCs.
Jon Grady is an eccentric researcher who invents a
gravity-mirror with profound implications for industry, defense, and space
travel. He is abducted by BTC agents who try to recruit him with specious
arguments about the greater good. Authoritarians are always adept at justifying
their authority. He doesn’t buy it and consequently finds himself in a prison
with other scientists and inventors. With help from fellow prisoners and
disaffected BTC members including the genetically enhanced Alexa, can he
escape, help expose and bring down the BTC, and let the long-delayed future
finally arrive?
In many ways this is an old-fashioned scifi novel with the
protagonist battling the odds against an arch-nemesis. But that’s OK. This is
recreational reading material and succeeds as being good… well… recreation.
Thumbs Up for what it is: Not high-lit – not even
high-scifi-lit – but entertaining.
**** ****
Ghost in the Shell (2017)
Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost
in the Shell was an inventive instant-classic cyber-punk anime in 1995 that
inspired numerous animated and live-action films to follow, notably The Matrix. Surprisingly, it took more
than 20 years to be adapted directly to the live-action screen. This heavily
Americanized (though still set in Japan) version, now out on DVD, starring
Scarlett Johansson has suffered from the time lapse. What may have been
innovative in 1995 looks derivative today even though ultimately it derives
from the ’95 original.
Whether they saw the anime or not, viewers will see little
new here. Cityscapes are swappable with those in Blade Runner 2049 right down to the giant hologram advertisements. That
said, the movie still looks good. Director Rupert Sanders has handled the
material well with the dialogue and action scenes covering all the ground they
need to cover coherently and competently. The movie flows well and there are no
glaring holes in the final product.
Premise: In the future, humans enhance themselves with
cybernetic add-ons. This is taken to the extreme when a young woman’s
disembodied brain is implanted in an otherwise fully robotic body. Except for
flashes, her memories are missing of her time as a normal human but she is told
she is a survivor of a cyberterrorist attack that killed her parents, and that,
as a brain in a full cyber body, she is something new. She joins an
antiterrorist organization called Section 9 and attains the rank of Major.
However, events cause her to question her actual identity, her human status,
her real history, and the motives and morals of the defense contractor
responsible for her existence.
In 1999, the year that The
Matrix was released, this movie would have made more of a splash. In 2017
it is an also-ran, and no amount of Scarlett in skintight attire can change
that. If you have a couple free hours some evening, this is entertaining
enough, but not much more. Thumbs ever so slightly Up.
**** ****
Black Widow:Deadly Origin
by writer Paul Cornell and artists Tom Raney and John Paul Leon
The Black Widow (Natalia Romanova) has been a part of the
Marvel Comics universe since 1964, sometimes as villain and sometimes as hero. The
appearance of the character played by Scarlett Johansson in recent Marvel
movies along with plans for future movies prompted Marvel to reboot the
character in its comic books. Black
Widow:Deadly Origin successfully
does this with a coherent updated origin story that doesn’t totally lose sight
of her earlier Marvel history. The story is told in flashbacks grafted onto a
contemporary tale.
Born in 1928, Natalia was subject to a Soviet super-soldier
program similar (though not identical) to the one in the US that produced
Captain America: hence her lack of physical aging. Her loyalties flipped a few
times over the years, and still aren’t to be taken for granted as was shown in Captain America: Civil War when she
opposed the Cap despite their personal relationship. The comic reveals that much
of her evolution as a person has to do with the father figure Ivan who is not
what he seems to be.
Marvel has produced many fine comics and graphic novels.
This isn’t one of them. It doesn’t have an engrossing standalone story-arc and
so it fails as a graphic novel. However, it succeeds at doing what it was
intended to do, which is to flesh out the history and character profile of one
of the more interesting Marvel universe characters. This is the publication for
you if you watched the The Avengers
movie and asked yourself, “Who is this woman anyway?” Black Widow:Deadly Origin
tells you what you need to know and more. The comic is well-drawn and is aimed
at an adult (or at least young adult) readership, not kids.
Dual Score: Thumbs Down as a standalone comic. Thumbs Up as
a movie character bio.
**** ****
Samantha Fish – Belle of the West (2017)
Regular readers (there are a few out there) may recall that
Samantha Fish is one of the current crop of musicians whose gigs I try to catch
when she is in the area. She is an exceptional blues guitarist with an
appealing voice and a good stage presence. In March of this year she released Chills
and Fever in which she enriched her earlier basic three-piece sound
with horns, keyboard, and a wider range of song styles. This is still the album
I’d recommend for anyone unfamiliar with her work.
Belle of the West,
her second album of 2017, is a worthwhile addition for those who already are
fans even though (or because) it is not more of the same. “You should always
get outside of the box,” she said, and in this album she did. The tracks,
including originals and covers, with a few exceptions are much more country
than blues. That’s not normally my first (or second or third) choice of genres,
but this album works, and it’s hard not to give credit for trying something
different. Once again, if you’re new to Samantha, this atypical (and possibly
one-off) album might not be the place to start; pick up Chills and Fever or, better yet, see her live (http://www.samanthafish.com/tour/).
But if you already have other tunes of hers on your cd shelf or in whatever
digital format you prefer, Belle of the
West should join them.
