the website of author and local favorite blake michael nelson | about | contact: theblakeshow@gmail.com
|
NEWS AND VIEWS - MARCH 2023
WRITING NEWS Playground Noir is finally out! You can buy it here. 
The book is a collection of six hard-boiled detective stories, but starring elementary school kids, and taking place in the late 1980's. It's kind of parody and kind of not. Here's the back cover copy: Philip "Pip" Fencer is a hard-bitten, hard-boiled detective, addicted to candy cigarettes and with a knack for getting into trouble. His beat? The rough-and-tumble hallways of C.J. Daly Elementary School, circa 1987. For three bucks a day, plus expenses, nine-year-old Pip will take on any case, from petty theft (stolen water pistols) to extortion (bullies demanding lunch money), and he'll do it all in his own inimitable style. I probably had more fun writing this book than any other book I've written. Check it out! I also started writing the ninth Signalverse novel this month -- Galatea and the Dupe, it's called. I'm not expecting it to run very long; in fact even calling it a "novel" is probably a stretch. It's sitting at about 20,000 words now, and I think it'll hit at least 35,000, but 40,000 is probably wishful thinking. We'll see. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M READING This month I finished reading Arne K. Lang's Clash of the Little Giants: George Dixon, Terry McGovern, and the Culture of Boxing in America, 1890-1910, which is basically a dual-biography of Dixon and McGovern, two of the best featherweights/bantamweights in history. I was especially amused by some of the nicknames I came across in this book -- some, like Mysterious Billy Smith and Joe Walcott, the Barbados Demon, were familiar to me, but there were several others I'd never heard of before: Ike Weir, the Belfast Spider Fred Fulton, the Minnesota Plasterer McHenry Johnson, the Black Star Ed Binney, the Boston Black Professor Andy Watson Walter Edgerton, the Kentucky Rosebud James "Jumper" Howe Pedlar Palmer, Box o' Tricks Torpedo Billy Murphy Johnny Griffin, the Braintree Lad Oscar Gardner, the Omaha Kid William Dudley Brown, Young Pluto Turkey Point Billy Smith Frank Craig, the Harlem Coffee Cooler And so on. Anyway, it's a good book, with a lot of good information. I also started reading Buddy Levy's River of Darkness and got about a hundred pages into the first Berserk omnibus, which was recommended to me by a friend. It's okay so far, but there's not really a whole lot to read here; it's mostly artwork, and I've never been one to linger on the artwork in a comic or manga, no matter how great it is -- I usually just kind of scan it and move on. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M PLAYING Still working my way through Trails of Cold Steel IV, which I started around Christmas. This game is huge. But I also completed Yumimi Mix Remix this month -- a Saturn game published by Game Arts back in 1995 (it's an upgraded version of the Sega CD original). I'm actually a little reluctant to even call it a "game", though, because it's not very interactive at all -- every once in a while you're presented with a choice, but none of these choices change the overall story and there's no bad endings. But it's a very charming little adventure, with appealing characters, an interesting aesthetic (the whole game looks like Lunar cutscenes), and a lot of genuinely funny scenes and situations. The fan translation is also top-notch. 
I wonder what I would have thought of this game if it had received a North American release back in 1995. I probably would've been annoyed by the subtitles (I preferred dubs to subs until the early 2000's), but I think I would've appreciated the novelty of it. * * * * * * * * YOUNG INDY When I first got the news, back in the day, that there was going to be a TV series chronicling the adventures of a young Indiana Jones (called, appropriately enough, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles), I was beyond excited. I had loved the Indiana Jones movies, and especially Last Crusade, which had come out just a few years earlier and which was one of those movies I had watched about a million times. A show about a young Indy, produced by Lucasfilm, and airing on one of the three broadcast networks (ABC) I could actually pick up on my little nineteen-inch TV? I couldn't wait. 
I remember liking, but not really loving, the first episode. What I wanted from an Indiana Jones TV series was rip-roaring adventure, narrow escapes, swordfights, fisticuffs, booby-trapped temples, and sweeping quests for lost cities and hidden treasures, with maybe some supernatural stuff thrown in for good measure. What I got -- what the world got -- was a talky period drama, with the Corey Carrier Indy getting into adolescent hijinx in Africa and India and so forth, and with the older Sean Patrick Flanery Indy fighting and spying for the Allies during World War I (and romancing a different woman every week). It wasn't really what I was expecting. I didn't like seeing an elderly Indy puttering around in the modern world, annoying people with his stories. I didn't like that there were no lost cities or big adventures, or that there wasn't any supernatural stuff at all (except maybe that one episode where Indy met a guy who may or may not have been Dracula). His sidekick, Remy, was a nearsighted, overweight Belgian -- nowhere near as fun or funny a character as Short Round, Sallah, or Henry Jones, Sr. It just felt too ordinary, too down-to-earth. And even as a kid, I found it ludicrous that young Indy kept running into all these historical figures -- everyone from Sigmund Freud to Charles de Gaulle to Mata Hari and Theodore Roosevelt. I watched the first few episodes, and caught a few more later on if there wasn't anything else on TV, but by the time the show went off the air in 1993 I had pretty much lost all interest in it. Years later, the series was reworked as The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones -- the framing scenes with old Indy were removed and the episodes were assembled chronologically (when it first aired, these various adventures were shown out of order, which made it hard to follow at times, especially for an eleven-year-old kid like me who didn't really know anything about history). These repackaged episodes were then shown on some cable TV channel in the early 2000's -- I forget which one. It came on Saturday mornings, anyway, and for some reason I started watching it. By now I was in my twenties and much more interested in history, especially World War I, and this new, reworked version of the show hooked me. I still wasn't very interested in the earlier Corey Carrier episodes, but the Sean Patrick Flanery episodes, which followed Indy across Europe, I now found fascinating. I also found the secret to really enjoying the show, which is to pretend that the young Indy character is not really Indiana Jones. If you just imagine you're watching a period drama about a polyglot kid with an interesting background who somehow gets himself involved in all these historical events, and not about the tough, wisecracking archaeologist from the films -- because these two characters have virtually nothing in common -- the series becomes much more enjoyable. Anyway, it's a very underrated show and if you've never seen it, I highly recommend checking it out. |