Along the Lines of Moon Pitchers

For the first time in the five years since I moved into in the All-New Duckhaus, I can say that I am Fully Unpacked… at least, as unpacked as I am ever going to be.

This startling development came about because I am expecting a visit soon from my father and his wife. They will be staying nine days (which ought to be a real challenge for all concerned)… this meant that I had to get the guest room ready to receive customers. Before I could even think about vacuuming, I needed to get the boxes up off the floor. And as that’s the room where I keep the lion’s share of DVDs, I needed to get the closet space organized, too.

It took me probably three, three and a half hours spread out across two days to re-organize the whole lot and shelve five years’ worth of accumulated DVDs. During this time I was reminded of something that I knew, but don’t often think about: When you sort movies by the year of their issue, you create a timeline of your own life.

It’s not so noticeable when you’re working with movies that were made well before you were born. Unless you were passing through some significant event the first time you saw, say, Casablanca, or unless there’s some special memory attached, like seeing The Wizard of Oz in a movie theater on a big screen after a lifetime of watching it on television, the pictures made before you were walking on the planet constitute history, and are largely safe from associations.

But now that I am well into my middle years the films that were made in the last three decades of the twentieth century and beyond all carry memory with them. Yesterday, as I was sorting material that was made in the last fifteen years, I was able to look at the shelf and say, this is where Mom’s leg was amputated — this is where she died. Everything beyond that point represents a new life. The hard last years of her life occupy maybe a foot and a half along the shelf, along a timeline that extends back and back and is filled with other connections: this is where I started working at the newspaper, this is where I was dating such-and-such a woman, this is the last movie that all my friends and I went to and watched together. 

We’re the sum of our experiences after all; and a life spent in the cinema is a life that can easily be retraced along a row of dusty old DVDs. I suppose the same thing is true with comics, which also tend to be sorted by their issue date rather than by such things as title or author or LOC. But I more or less stopped reading comics in the mid-eighties, by which time Marvel had been thoroughly ruined by a succession of moronic editors-in-chief… movies are the consistent path leading me straight through and beyond my comic-book-reading years, in both directions: here’s where I started drinking (the Gerry Anderson TV series UFO is, I found out, so much more entertaining when you are slightly soused). Here’s where Mom and Dad broke up. Here’s where I met my best, longest-lasting friends, one of whom left us here; here’s where I graduated from High School, and visited my cousins and grandparents in Minnesota for the last time. 

The shelves are fraught with beginnings and endings. The movies don’t just belong to the people who created them: they are woven into our lives.

— Frede.
www.ducksoup.me

www.tarotbyducksoup.com

The Tarot of Mister Punch

Click to enlarge.

My next Tarot project, The Tragically Comic or Comically Tragic Tarot of Mister Punch, is really very nearly completed. In fact I'm just waiting for the printed proof to arrive. My target on-sale date for this May 2nd. It's been a lot of great fun to make, and I hope it will be fun and informative to use. You can see this and all my tarot projects, including lots of boring written bits on how the decks came to be, at my tarot website, www.tarotbyducksoup.com. And this isn't the end, by any means! Stay tuned, Mystic Ones!

-- Frede.

www.ducksoup.me

www.tarotbyducksoup.com

The First Ten Minutes

I’ve now seen, at long last, the first ten minutes of Peter Jackson’s first movie culled from Tolkien’s The Hobbit and some of his surrounding writings; especially the Appendices attached to The Lord of The Rings.

Why only ten minutes of the first film? Because I’m saving the rest of the movie trilogy for the first week of May, when my Dad and his wife come to visit from Out West. It’s one of the few movie-type-thangs that the three of us share an interest in, and it was the chance for us all to watch it for the first time, together, that justified in my mind the expense of getting in the digital HD versions of all three movies.

Having gotten the damn things in, I just couldn’t resist peeking. It’s only human — and Hobbit — nature. 

My first impressions are as complicated as you might expect, if you know me. The movie has the feel of a terrific theme-park ride, and is a rich and vivid imagining of Tolkien’s universe as a whole; but as an adaptation of Tolkien’s little novel, his children’s tale about an awakening, Jackson’s Hobbit does real violence to the source material.

Tolkien’s novel starts out in a hole in the ground, and that’s a big part of the whole point. Mr. Bilbo Baggins is a provincial type, living with blinders on. All he knows of the world is what is in front of him: his village and his hole in the ground. Then, one fateful day, Something Happens. Something happens that makes Mr. Baggins suddenly realize that… there may be more to the world than he previously imagined. 

Therein lies the whole point, the entire purpose of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. He is telling you, the reader, to take off your blinders and climb out of your hole and look, just look at all the wonders out there that exist in the world. 

The rest of the story is just that: a little story that opens up nicely to reveal the only other part of Tolkien’s overall intent, which is to make the point that actions have consequences, and consequences reverberate outward.

We start in a hole in the ground, we open up as people and we see that if we are not careful, even in our isolation, our actions can have unintended consequences — consequences that future generations will have to bear. This is almost the opposite of what every insipid modern Tolkien-inspired fantasy tries to tell us, and something that bears more consideration.

Well, Peter Jackson chucks all that right out the window. He opens his telling of the story in the outer world, and spends the first ten minutes or so revealing the entire recent history of the dwarven race, providing us with backstory details that we are not supposed to have until, if you are following Tolkien, much later on in the narrative. 

And it is gorgeous. Jaw-dropping. This is what Peter Jackson does better than anyone and if you don’t think to yourself “WOW — WOW-ee-WOWW” in the first ten minutes of the picture than something must be wrong with your sense of wonder. It is, it must be admitted, a glorious visualization of Middle-Earth history, and a smashingly dramatic opening to a movie trilogy. Really, it is. I mean — you have to give Jackson that. Entertaining? Absolutely, one hundred percent.

Is it Tolkien’s The Hobbit? Ehm, no… and not even close. There is a huge philosophical divide between this movie Hobbit and the book, and one doubts that Tolkien would be happy with it. My tattered old paperback copy of The Hobbit bears the tagline “A Prelude to The Lord of The Rings” — even though it wasn’t written as such, but as a stand-alone story. Jackson’s movie is clearly designed not to be a prelude to anything. Instead, it is a follow-up, and an expansion upon, the movie trilogy.

I suppose that there is nothing inherently wrong with that. But those of us who just wanted a clean adaptation of Tolkien’s novel that we could watch before a screening of the movie trilogy are still going to have to settle on the animated Rankin-Bass version. 

— Frede.
www.ducksoup.me

www.tarotbyducksoup.com

Post Haste

My first email campaign is flying out even as I type this. Those of you not on my mailing list can ogle the thing here:

http://eepurl.com/biZuNX

Goodnight, Miss Farnaby

I'm very sad to learn, two months after the fact, of the Geraldine McEwan's death. I adored this woman. She was Miss Farnaby in Mulberry (a lovely short dramady series co-starring Karl Howman as the mysterious title character); she was deeply disturbing as Sister Bridget in The Magdeline Sisters, she was the captivating Lucia in two series of Mapp & Lucia, she was definitive Jean Brodie, she had a theatrical career spanning more than 40 years. She even voiced a character in Wallace & Gromit. It was the twinkle in her eyes and the suggestion of hidden depths that made her, by far, the most interesting Miss Marple. And so another great tree has fallen: and the world is diminished once again. Goodnight, Miss McEwan. 

--Frede.

www.ducksoup.me

www.tarotbyducksoup.com

The Neglectful Post

I’ve been neglecting the blog for a while now, but don’t think I haven’t been busy, although in different areas. Writing has taken a back seat to design, with the results to be seen at my brand-new dot com address, www.tarotbyducksoup.com . There’s a lot to see there right now, and more coming soon as Spring unfolds. If you like that sort of thing (and it seems that lots of people do, although some are reluctant to admit it), why not hop over there right now and take a gander — or even a duck.

Some might say I’ve been neglectful (or at least slow as molasses) on the pop-cultural front as well — I’ve only just finished, as of last night, watching Series 8 of the the revived Doctor Who.

It was a problematic season for me, and in a way I’m glad that I split it into two halves, although I did it out of spite. Six episodes into the fall run I was feeling terribly fed-up and frustrated by the thing, and could no longer justify paying DirecTV $68 a month just for Doctor Who, especially when I knew very damn well that I would be buying the whole series on DVD for less than one month’s satellite cost. The problem, as I saw it then, was that head writer Stephen Moffatt had shifted the emphasis of the show too much onto the companion, making incoming Doctor Peter Capaldi a supporting player on his own show and turning Doctor Who into The Jenna Coleman Show. Even now, I don’t think I was wrong; but Moffat’s ambitious plan for the season culminated in a deep and emotional two-part series finale that at least justifies what came before, while beginning to shift the emphasis back where it belongs.

The Companion can be a tough balancing act. You don’t want them to be a cypher, a plot tool — just someone to get into trouble or to ask The Doctor Pointed Questions so that he can explain the plot. You want them to have a personality and a story of their own. But you don’t want to go too far in that direction, to the point where the Companion takes over the show; and you especially don’t want to do that in a season where you’ve got a new Doctor just coming in to establish himself.

So, I still think that large swaths of this season were ill-advised, and a lot of my earlier criticisms (that Danny Pink was a 100 percent contrived character, created strictly to be killed off, and that Clara’s professed “love” for this character was artificial and unconvincing at best) are legitimate. But with the season now completed and Moffat’s “Master” Plan played out, one begins to understand his reasoning and forgive a little. His gambit for series eight would have been better off saved for next season, with Capaldi established, but we can’t change it now. All we can do is enjoy the season’s highlights, especially including the finale, and try not to think about its worst moments, especially including the lamentable “Caretaker” episode, which all by itself caused me to pull the plug on my TV provider!

Peter Capaldi was born to play The Doctor. He brings authority and love to the part; and if Matt Smith’s youthful exuberance is gone, that’s as it should be and part of the great contrast. Capaldi’s Doctor has taken more emotional hits, and feels the weight of them; still his delight in discovery and his rebellious nature comes shining through in radiant doses. One senses that his is the definitive Doctor for the revived series, even if we don’t (and we shouldn’t) lose our affection for his predecessors. It’s my great hope that Capaldi will stick with the character for some time to come, and my great fear that he won’t.

Meanwhile — regenerating The Master into a female form was a ballsy move, one that adds a little discomfort to the part; and yet I can imagine no one playing the character to greater perfection than Michelle Gomez. Certainly she has got the spirit of the part nailed down much more accurately than the really exceedingly annoying John Simm ever did: and dressing her up as an Evil Mary Poppins is a sly stroke of genius. I’m very, very glad to learn that she will be back in series nine.

So, in summing up: a problematic but ultimately enjoyable first season for Capaldi, with all the problems centered around Jenna Coleman’s character. Throwing Clara into the Doctor’s time stream was one of Moffat’s more brilliant ideas in series seven, although one that came with issues that were obvious even at the time. Those issues played out all through series eight, to its detriment. The series finale and then the excellent Christmas special came along and mended up some of those issues; let’s hope that trend continues in series 9. Let’s hope especially that Moffatt finally settles Clara Oswald back into the supporting role, where she belongs, and allows Capaldi to shine in all his mastery and finesse.

— Frede.
www.tarotbyducksoup.com

www.ducksoup.me

Tarot of the Zirkus Arrives!

Back in the glory days of Marvel Comics, it was not uncommon for Stan Lee to add an item to the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins page whenever Marvel or one of its characters made a splash in the Mainstream Media. My, how things have changed: Marvel is now owned by Disney and *IS* the Mainstream Media! 

But the '60s were a different planet, and Stan was justifiably proud whenever Marvel was, say, referenced in a movie in some way, or featured in mainstream mags like Time, Life, or The New Yorker.

So it pleases me now to be able to do the same thing, and mention that My TAROT OF THE ZIRKUS MÄGI received front cover mention and an eight-page spread inside the latest issue of SOMERSET DIGITAL STUDIO magazine! Good Things have a habit of wearing off fast, so I'm crowing about it while I can. 

Here are some snaps from the interior of the magazine. Click on them to enlarge.

 

I wasn't just whistling Dixie when I made this deck. I wanted it to be THE deck: a great-looking, working deck that would attract reader and novice alike. You can find it right here: http://circustarot.blogspot.com

Meanwhile, links to all all of my oracle deck projects are gathered in one convenient place: http://tarot-dsp.blogspot.com

Thanks to the editors at Somerset, and thanks to you all for helping to make this the happiest creative work of my career -- so far!

-- Frede.
www.ducksoup.me

An Independent View of The Zirkus

Rach Jardine, the UK's very own Tarot Ninja, just posted this review of my TAROT OF THE ZIRKUS MÄGI! Thank you very much, Missus! She has some nice things to say, and Anglophile that I am I could personally listen to her say them all day long!

In addition to her work as a tarot professional, Rach does the most amazing face painting... and she made the bag that you'll see in the video above. Visit her at her own site, right here: http://tarotninja.co.uk

-- Frede
www.ducksoup.me