Happy Thursday, everyone! Winter is ramping up here in Chicago, the Bulls are playing well, the Bears are a disaster and the less said about our NHL team the better. Plus, the MLB owners have decided the best way to deal with a minor labor dispute is to lockout the people who make the product that people pay money for. So, while we all sing labor standards and flip off the 32 ownership groups, let's see what I've found at the thrift stores.
Again, a programming note. We're moving down south sometime in the Spring, so I'll be shopping less. So maybe some more highlights of what I'm weeding and depositing in Little Free Libraries.
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A few years ago, a company called Biblioasis decided to try and resurrect an old Christmas tradition, that of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. (Hence the line in the old Edward Pola and George Wyle standard, "The Most Wonderful Time Of The World" about telling scary ghost stories.) This is the only one I have of theirs (there's apparently about 12 of them) and it's a handsome little paperback.
Walter De La Mare was a British novelist and poet active through the '50s who was a favorite of many 20th Century authors, apparently people like H. P. Lovecraft, for his children's stories and especially for his run of supernatural works. I'll admit a complete ignorance of his work but this is one I'm going to read this Christmas season along with my annual reread of A Christmas Carol.
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On October 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater players broadcast a performance of the H. G. Wells novel The War Of The Worlds, which panicked people across the USA and caused minor riots and people heading for the hills as they panicked over supposed alien landings in Grover's Mill, New Jersey. People went nuts hearing the radio broadcast, thinking it was a news story and that we were being invaded! What a great example of how people used to be stupid about media!
Of course, this story is pretty much bullshit. Historical research and contemporary surveys found very little actual panic that wasn't someone trying to drum up a good story (there's a decent amount of speculation that Monday Morning Quarterbacking by newspapers was them pushing back at how radio was supplanting them in the popular media).
So this book, written by the radio play's author Howard Koch, needs to be taken with a dump truck of salt. That said, it contains his extremely entertaining radio script, some damn good photos of the people involved (hey, did you know H G Wells and Orson Welles met in 1940?) and even a section at the end talking about the current state of research about Mars as of 1970.
And besides, I found this book had as a bookmark a cardboard ticket for a Phillies game from June 15, 1973 against the San Francisco Giants. (A game the Phillies lost at home at the old Veterans' Stadium.) U was just over a month old when that game happened and I assume an owner of this book put this ticket in this book and you can't not love that kind of a history in a book.
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So one of the pleasant surprises as a filmgoer this year was that Cruella was not only good even very good a movie that knew what it was about and acted as a very interesting prequel to a minor Disney animated work but it had things to say about parenting and self-identity and the class between bespoke fashion and the oncoming wave of punk and ready-to-wear in London in the '60s or '70s. (The movie plays very fast and loose with the time in the fashion choices and the music, but it works quite well so I'm not complaining.)
But! That is not what I'm here to talk about
Dodie Smith these days is almost certainly best remembered for her novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians, but for my money this is her best book. A tale of an eccentric British family living in a ruined tower of an old estate, who encounter two Americans who've inherited the estate down the road, this is a sumptuous novel of maybe love and two sisters who aren't sure if they want to get out or not (it reminds me very much of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived In The Castle that way), and trying to figure out if their family structure will even let them keep living there. It's far less tragic than Jackson's novel, but it shares with hers a feeling of sharp little tragedies that you feel all the more as a teen. And hey, there's a quite good movie version with Romola Garai, Bill Nighy, Rose Byrne and Tara Fitzgerald! (And for Buffy fans with taste, Marc Blucas shows up as one of the Americans.)
Cruella is streaming in the USA on Disney+.
I Capture The Castle is streaming free on Prime, Hoopla, Kanopy and with ads on Vudu, Pluto TV, Tunbi and Roku TV.
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Armin Shimmerman is one of those actors who everyone knows from something. Maybe you know him from Star Trek, or from Buffy, or the '80s Beauty and the Beast, or his Shakespearean work (I saw him do a monologue once from Richard III that was one of the most chilling things). But I like that he for a bit was doing a sideline where he was co-writing with a guy named Michael Scott, novels about John Dee after he was kidnapped by an alien and transported to a dystopian late 21st Century. Now this is not the DC character John Dee, ocassionally know as Doctor Destiny. This is a historical figure, the alchemist and supposedly spy for Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth back in the 16th and 17th Centuries. By all accounts highly intelligent and canny, it's fun to see him try on the 21st Century for size and see what he can do with it. (There's a whole weird plot about hostile aliens trying to force an Elon Musk type to develop bad tech to so they can take Earth for their own under galactic law, but that's the least interesting part of the novel.) There's apparently a few more in this series and I should get to them.
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My recommendation for this week is new to Shudder, Le Pactes de Loups (The Brotherhood Of the Wolf) the decidedly weird kung-fu drama set just before the French Revolution as a French nobleman is sent to discover the mysteries of a series of monster attacks. Based on the historical accounts of the supposed beast of Gévaudan, this is such a weird, lovely movie where at any moment Monica Belluci shows up as a brother owner with an agenda of her own, or Mark Dacascos is a Mohawk who kicks ass or there's a giant monster who may be controlled by a band of hill people. It's lovely and fun weirdly stylish and has probably the best use of the slow-mo craze of martial arts movies of that time.
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