And just like that, the summer's over.
Two days ago, another monsoon blew through central Maine; in its wake the temperatures dropped by about ten degrees, and the humidity dropped by an astonishing 40 percent.
That part of it is a joy: for the better part of three months, the humidity has been hanging in the upper 80 percent, low 90 percent range, essentially turning Maine into a bayou for the whole summer. I've lived in the state for about 50 years now, and never experienced a summer like this, where the house had to be kept shuttered even at night and the dehumidifier became the most important appliance in the place.
It was the kind of summer to make one feel almost glad that the summers are getting shorter, as they seem to be. (Why is that? As you get older, 'tis true that the years fly by faster and faster, bur why is it that winter never seems to get any shorter?)
The monsoon was just one of about four that swept through here this year. That's different, too. We used to get rain. It could last a day and drizzle steadily but not violently. Now we get nothing but thunderstorms and downpours of the most intense kind, with the rain gushing down and creating a river, a waterfall off of my roof. It's fun to watch, and here in town the power almost never goes out, so I don't have that worry anymore; but it's different, very different, from the summers I remember growing up at the old house
This last Big Storm didn't just take the humidity: it took the summer. Suddenly it is cool and dry; just as suddenly, the whole character of the light has changed. At nine AM it arcs through my bedroom window at almost the same angle as at late afternoon. The day is notably shorter. I see leaves on my crazy-branch backyard tree already turning yellow. Here in the middle part of the afternoon the shadows are already long and the crickets already chirping.
The growth has stopped. The atmosphere is that of Quiet Waiting.
This is perhaps my favorite time of year. It came overnight. I suppose it will pass just as quickly.
-- Frede.
www.ducksoup.me
www.tarotbyducksoup.com
Friday, August 28, 2015
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Punch Gets A Book
The companion volume to Mr. Punch's Tarot is here!
and soon at Amazon, B&N, and wherever fine books are sold.
Mister Punch and the Tarot go back a long way together. Both originated in Italy, and both explore life's Great Mysteries. Indeed, Mister Punch is perfectly suited to the Tarot! Now the creator of the celebrated Tarot of the Zirkus Mägi has produced a Tarot that feels as if it should have existed over a hundred years ago, featuring Mister Punch and his full cast of adversaries.
Along with card meanings for the Major and Minor Arcana and unique spreads designed just for the deck, this companion volume also features a fully illustrated treasure-trove of Punch & Judy history (including a version of the original play), plus insightful connections between the worlds of Punch and the Tarot and even a short story by the deck's designer..
Also available as a PDF eBook!
This PDF format edition has all the content of the paperback -- every picture, every Punch, every Dumb Assertion. In fact it was made from the same InDesign files as the paperback -- only the front and back covers have been downsized. The PDF file can be read on your computer or mobile device. Works great in iBooks.
Monday, August 24, 2015
Sunday, August 23, 2015
New from Duck Soup Productions: The BROWNIES: THEIR ORACLE
Now Available!
(You can click all the images to enlarge) |
Hear Ye, Hear Ye!
THE BROWNIES HAVE YOUR FUTURE WELL IN HAND.
Palmer Cox's famous Brownies have been charming and delighting readers for 150 years. Now Cox's detail-packed drawings of The Brownies have been newly colored and incorporated into a unique new divination tool, the latest entry in THE PLAYROOM ORACLES. See them all at
www.tarotbyducksoup.com
Palmer Cox's famous Brownies have been charming and delighting readers for 150 years. Now Cox's detail-packed drawings of The Brownies have been newly colored and incorporated into a unique new divination tool, the latest entry in THE PLAYROOM ORACLES. See them all at
www.tarotbyducksoup.com
85 Total Cards in Two Decks
(60 JUMBO 3.5 x 5.5 cards, 25 Poker-Size cards)
plus 4 page booklet, in a Jumbo Tuck Box
$59.99
Saturday, August 22, 2015
Rotgut for Elephants
www.ducksoup.me
Friday, August 21, 2015
Projected on Smoke
More or less Random Ramblings down the aisle of my Home Cinema theater…
Oh, how I scoffed at Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy the first time I saw them in Rose Marie. Oh, how I mocked the signature song of that movie: “When I’m Calling Yooooooooo-woo-woo-woo, woo-woo-wooooooo!” But my mother would have them in the house… she had grown up watching them on the Big Screen, and was enamored with their movies. I don’t know when it happened, but after a few years of poking fun at them, god help me, I started to like them. Now their best movies are among my favorites — I know! I know! But I can’t resist their strange power from the past. Maytime is indeed one of their best, but also the only one that I know of which is an out-and-out tearjerker. MacDonald and Eddy were on-again, off-again offscreen lovers, and it shows: their duets are hauntingly erotic. Maytime has all the elements: it is lovely to look at, delightful to listen to, and features a strong supporting cast in John Barrymore and Herman Bing. Barrymore character is so bitter that he’s brittle; and when he cracks you know it isn’t going to end happily. At last, at last, nearly all the MacDonald/Eddy musicals are available on DVD: and you can’t go wrong — if you approach it with an open spirit — with Maytime or Rose Marie.
It’s been very much an animated summer, in a way that has restored my faith in animation as an art form despite the numerous nauseating attempts of Dreamworks and Disney/Pixar to foist upon the public the flattest, dumbest, most bone-headed and trivial movies that they possibly can. Of course theirs are the movies that win the Academy Awards, because between the two of them they practically own Hollywood. This doesn’t make their movies any less lousy, any less strictly paint-by-numbers. Walt Disney himself would be disgusted with the product that today goes out under his name. For real animated features, ones that stir the senses and the spirit and bathe us in marvels as the medium has always been capable of, one must look abroad.
Of course it's not the first time I've seen A Hard Day’s Night. But it is the first time I've seen it in the original widescreen, in HD and full stereo, on a modern big screen telly. So it feels like the first time.
Wow. This is not just the best Beatles movie, but (as everyone already knows) a real cinematic game-changer. Somewhere in the top all-time 100? I think so.
When, early in the film, the boys all play and sing "I Should've Known Better" in the freight car, I get all choked up every time. It's just a perfect little thing, you wouldn't change any part of it if you could... and it was all so long ago, now. A whole other world. I feel lucky to have lived in simpler times than this, and lucky that I can still, to some failing degree, travel back to those times through the magic of film.
— Frede.
www.ducksoup.me
www.tarotbyducksoup.com
*
*
Among my favorite animated outings this summer (which has included a boatload of product from the great, defunct Studio Ghibli as well as from Britain’s Aardman studio — more on them in another post) is 2010’s Chico and Rita. The picture opens in Castro’s Cuba, which it conjures in mesmerizing detail, but it wastes no time in whisking us back into the heady post WWII years when Havana was hot and the jazz was hotter. The story is one of those Romances in which the lovers are apart more often than together, but in is evocation of Cuba and America in the heyday of Jazz it is jaw-dropping, flawless, beautiful. When was the last time you saw a grown-up story animated this powerfully? It’s a Romance that lies not in the smooching or rolling around in bed (although there is a fair amount of that), but in its elegant worldview, in the colors, sights and sounds. For anyone sated on the Dreary Disney product, this is a real shot in the arm.
*
www.ducksoup.me
www.tarotbyducksoup.com
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Mr. PUNCH's Tarot Book: Coming Soon in Paperback, OUT NOW as a PDF e-Book!
click to enlarge |
OK -- I am trying an EXPERIMENT.
In advance of the paperback edition (which will retail at $15.95), I'm making a PDF eBook version of MISTER PUNCH'S TRAGICALLY COMIC OR COMICALLY TRAGIC TAROT BOOK available right now for $5.95.
This has all the content of the paperback -- every picture, every Punch, every Dumb Assertion. In fact it was made from the same InDesign files as the paperback -- only the front and back covers have been downsized.
It can be ordered from ANY of the ordering pages at my website, www.tarotbyducksoup.com . Orders are being handled by Ecwid, my shopping cart system. When your order is marked PAID you should get an email with the download link. (And if you don't you should let me know, and I'll get it to you. This is an EXPERIMENT, remember!)
The PDF file can be read on your computer or mobile device. Works great in iBooks.
If this EXPERIMENT is a success, you can bet I'll add my other Tarot Books to the PDF line -- and maybe my fiction and comics, too.
That address again: www.tarotbyducksoup.com . Click anywhere you see "ORDER THE DECKS."
The PDF file can be read on your computer or mobile device. Works great in iBooks.
If this EXPERIMENT is a success, you can bet I'll add my other Tarot Books to the PDF line -- and maybe my fiction and comics, too.
That address again: www.tarotbyducksoup.com . Click anywhere you see "ORDER THE DECKS."
The gates are open!
-- Frede
www.ducksoup.me
www.tarotbyducksoup.com
Saturday, August 15, 2015
More Bricks in "The Wall"
www.ducksoup.me
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)