The Grosser

The last review of Motor Clásico I did was all about elegance. It’s fitting (possibly karmic, considering that I was a teeny bit judgmental?) that the very next issue I picked up featured a large photo on the cover of the Mercedes 600.

Now you might not immediately consider one of these classics as an exercise in bad taste similar to what a modern football player might drive… but in its time, it was considered the vehicle of choice for tinpot Third-World dictators. If the guy was embezzling, employing most of his family in well-paid government sinecures, and murdering large batches of his countrymen, he would invariably be driven around in one of these tanks.

That’s not to say it wasn’t a wonderful car. It was. Fast, powerful, and comfortable, it was a good place to be. But if you found yourself on the wrong side of that bulletproof glass, your life probably wasn’t going that well.

Stylistically, even now, I feel that good taste was sacrificed in the name of projecting power. The strong jaw, the vaultlike construction… all of it said: this car is a mobile palace. I’m certain any of our modern paragons of bad taste would approve.

The only other classic car I can think of that would compete with this one in the “bad associations” category are German official cars from the late 1930s and early 1940s…

The rest of the mag was the usual eclectic mix of old cars and bikes with a nice Hispano article and a history of Deusenberg, which I found fun. Not a notable issue except to remind me to keep my opinions to myself (the world has a habit of doing that. I have a habit f not listening).

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.

Sleepless on a Boat

All right. I know. It’s unfair to talk about a classic film from the 1950s in terms of a lesser (albeit still classic) flick from the 90s, but the way most modern audience members will engage with the second (and lesser) part of An Affair to Remember (1957) is through the lens of Sleepless in Seattle (1993).

They will be even more unfair that I am, as both movies hinge on a meeting at the Empire Stae building… and modern viewers will say, like I did while watching the older movie: “Hey, that’s like Sleepless in Seattle.” The opposite is true, of course, and the newer film openly admits the homage… but most people won’t remember that.

The main reason it’s unfair to link the two is that An Affair to Remember is, for most of its running time, a wonderful light-hearted comedy reminiscent of the screwball era (and of Roman Holiday) which only turns melodramatic at the end, which is the part in which we get the famous Empire State Building scene.

It’s the beginning that makes this movie. Though Grant is aging and Kerr is never the kind of actress you fall head-over-heels in love with, the chemistry between their characters works, aided by the airy humor. It’s a film you don’t want to end, a fantasy dreamworld disconnected from the troubles of the real world.

The second part of the film is the lesser part, and I consider it just the coda to give them some obstacles to overcome in order to achieve the promised happy ending. That bit got panned by critics in its day, but it’s fine… very few movies are perfect.

Anyhow, one of the better American films from the fifties, and one that still holds up well today.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.

More Galaxy’s Edge

While at WorldCon a couple of years ago, I bought not one but two issues of Galaxy’s Edge. I already did my review of the first of these, so now it’s the turn of issue 50.

First off, this was a fun one to read. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been reading way too much automotive content or whether it was actually better, I found this one to be a quicker, more engaging read than the previous issue I’d seen (which I’d also liked – but this one was better).

Like the previous one, this issue is filled with solid stories, a mix of new and reprinted fiction. The reprints are from superstars in the field, such as the late Mike Resnick and David Farland, so it’s not just some warmed-over obscurity.

The best of the stories was a hard SF tale by C. Stuart Hardwick entitled “The Snows of Maxwell Montes”, which is a fascinating look at mining on Venus. Of the serialized works, I found the piece of “Incarnation Day” by Walter Jon Williams to be quite intriguing, although I would probably need to read the whole thing to give a more complete verdict.

This issue also held another installment of Harry Turtledove’s “Over the Wine-Dark Sea”. And it was also good… but didn’t fascinate me quite as much as the initial one in issue 48 did. Of course, that was my introduction to Turtledove’s style and to the well-researched world of ancient Greece, so I was probably more engaged by the novelty.

These are good magazines, and I suggest looking out for them. Future issues will be in anthology form, which probably means more content in each individual delivery, but less-frequent installments. I’ll see if I can snag one and let people know what I thought.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.

Death Playing Chess – Watching The Seventh Seal

Most people–even those who have never seen Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal from 1957–are aware of that image in which death plays chess.

Here it is for those who’ve been living under a rock:

I count myself among those who’d never watched the film.

I’ve corrected that now, and can say that A) I liked it well enough, though I wasn’t blown away by it and B) it is quite an interesting mixture of themes and situations.

Essentially, it tells the story of a knight o his way home from the Crusades, who is attempting to keep death away by playing a game of chess with him. The reason is that he wants to understand more about the meaning of life before it ends. In parallel, it tells the story of a young family–husband, wife and baby–who are making their way as comic actors in a plague-ravaged land. The characters, along with a number of others, come together to give the knight meaning.

The film is at once a dark comedy–easily visible–and also a philosophical rumination on the meaning of life and religious thinking. At its core, it’s another extremely weird Scandinavian look at religion.

Even though (in common with Terry Pratchett) the best bits are the ones that include the character of Death, there is no point during which the film drags. It moves from the dramatic, to the tender, to the disturbing, to the picaresque without stopping to pause for breath.

Best of all, it is a rare film in which almost everyone dies and it’s still a happy ending.

Good stuff, and one you absolutely must see, no excuses. It’s on Youtube with English subtitles.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.

More Elegant Times

One of the things that I accept unconsciously is that old cars were built to a more elegant standard than today’s. That doesn’t mean they were necessarily better. Often they were utter crap, and today’s cars are more comfortable, faster and more reliable. It’s one thing to enjoy old cars and another to believe in the rose-tinted world.

But one thing that was certain is that the cars of yesteryear were built more elegantly. By this, I’m not just talking about design, but about materials. I think chrome (used in moderation), metal, brass and leather are more satisfying, respectively, than plastic, plastic, plastic and plastic.

The same happens with society. Elegance used to be an important concept among humans as well as cars. Up until the late 20th century, there was still a class of automobile that was reserved for a certain class of person. Well-bred, well-educated and well-dressed. Nouveau riche need not apply.

Today, however, with mass-production of the high-end cars, any footballer or rapper can buy a Bentley without even getting a supercilious sniffle from the bouncer at the door. Luxury has become ostentation reserved for people who, through no fault of their own, don’t know any better.

Of course, the English still do social strata quite well. But Bentley is owned by VW, who will sell them to just anyone.

Why did I suddenly go off on a tangent about social strata disappearing in many countries to be replaced by the quite different concept of economic strata? It was all caused by the Maserati on the cover of Motor Clásico 29 (above). That achingly beautiful and understated coupe could only be driven by people of a certain class. They needed a certain amount of wealth, as well, of course, but that was secondary.

Now? Almost every prestige car brand aims for the “upjumped pimp” market, and they’re quite painful to look at.

Is it a bad thing that undereducated and uncultured people from lower strata have gained access to luxury goods in unprecedented numbers? Perhaps, from the standpoint of pure democracy, it isn’t. But if you enjoy elegance in your automobiles… you’ll end up like me: reading classic car magazines.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.

The End of the World in Full Fantasy Color

The first I heard of Jack Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth was about fifteen years ago when I read a antho logy entitled My Favorite Fantasy Story, in which important writers of the 1990s each chose one tale that managed to move, influence or impress them. To my surprise, two of them were by Jack Vance, a writer I was aware of as someone active in the fifties, but who I’d never placed among the genre greats.

The stories were “Mazirian the Magician”, which I found okay, but not particularly great, and Lianne the Wayfarer, which I found unforgettable.

More importantly, the introductions stated that the stories were part of a larger cycle of Dying Earth stories, and I thought it would be cool to buy the rest.

Eventually, I bought the volume that includes the short stories from the original cycle (and holds the two I’d read) as well as three standalone novels: The Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel’s Saga and Rhialto the Marvelous.

The first thing that comes to mind is that Vance’s imagination is quite fertile, but more than that, his grasp of human nature is masterful. What kind of people will inhabit a world they know is doomed, you ask? A race of people who will take what they can, take it now, and not worry overmuch about the niceties of civilized interaction. When you toss magic into the mix, you have basically two categories: victims and victimizers.

This is true on the macro level–murderers and their murderees–as well as on a micro level–swindlers and the swindled. Every interaction between two individuals is a game of who can take what the other has that he wants.

Which means that the best of the books are the two that star Cugel the Clever who is a cunning little bastard who slots in the middle. He’s not powerful enough to be one of the feared and respected masters, but he refuses to be anyone’s victim for very long. Which means that he spends the entire book being on one side or the other of the little power games, whether that be in search of wealth, revenge, sex or anything else.

As to the sex, there isn’t all that much of it, but what there is is consistent with the rules of the world and with the personalities of the people within, which would be a brave choice today, but was more natural in the 1950s and 60s when these books were written: people back then were realists who didn’t try to conform to a uniform morality or even care about outraged special-interest groups who can’t accept the world as it is. I’ve seen any number of reviews and posts saying that the Cugel books are awful because of some of the things Cugel gets away with, but they’re actually internally consistent and that is more important than being “nice”.

Of course, two novels worth of Cugel swindling and being swindled would test the patience of even the greatest of saints, even though each episode is interesting in itsef, so I was delighted to switch gears to Rhialto, who is one of the powerful mages of his age, and who is involved in struggles at a slightly higher level–if philosophically similar in vein.

This was a fun book, and it is also one of those that everyone seems to have read, an important book in the genre. So I’d recommend giving it a go.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.

A Surprise Because of How it was Structured

I don’t recall when I first heard of 12 Angry Men. I’m reasonably sure a teacher mentioned it to a group of us either in Middle School or in Junior High, and harbored a desire to avoid. the thing at all costs ever since.

Until it cycled through and became the next of the 1001 movies I was scheduled to watch. So I bit the bullet (the only one I absolutely refuse to view is La Historia Oficial – no political movie about the Argentine dictatorship can be anything but a least-common-denominator piece of utter crap). So I watched it.

Now, to explain why I liked it, I first need to tell you what I expected. I expected an overly-dramatic, weepingly emotional bit of feeling sorry for the poor, misunderstood victim of prejudice (the criminal is a young Puerto Rican immigrant in the 50s).

If it had been like that, I would have voted to send the defendant to the chair on general principles. Anyone who needs to use pity and circumstances as a defense probably did it.

But that’s not what happened. Somewhere between the typical Hollywood pity-fest and the silver screen, intelligence intervened, and instead of showing that society was to blame, the structure became that of a Poirot mystery.

Brilliantly, each point of witness testimony was presented, analyzed and, eventually, debunked. Just the way a good detective would have done, except that none of the men in the room were the accused, so their resistance was on emotional grounds as opposed to grounds of guilt. Finally, everyone understands–as does the viewer–that the boy isn’t guilty on the evidence presented, and has to concede.

The description of the kid makes it clear that he’s a menace, and that he’ll just end up hurting someone else in due course… but with the evidence as presented, there’s no possible verdict other than not guilty. It’s not an uplifting ending… but then again, most murder mysteries aren’t uplifting; the enjoyment lies in watching the detective reach his conclusion.

So I liked this one probably for reasons very different from those who establish it as a masterpiece of cinema. I enjoyed it as a murder mystery, in the knowledge that, though justice was done, you can’t fix the fact that it can never end well.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.

More Spanish Delight

I have a huge pile of Motor Clásico Magazines that I got from an old book dealer a year or so ago. They’re sitting behind a couch and I’ve just now gotten around to reading them, because I managed to kill off the big pile of Road & Tracks!

So we’ll be discussing these…

Number 26, from March 1990 leads off, interestingly, with the Lotus Europa, a car most people barely have on their radar (for several good reasons as well as the usual bad ones). It’s a bit of a niche car, and as such makes for delightful reading (often, cover vehicles are ones we already know about in detail).

Which is probably why I enjoy the fact that this mag mixes car and motorcycle articles. As a car guy, I don’t know all that much about bikes, so those always pique my interest… and the history of electric cars in Spain is also a wonderfully obscure subject that fascinates.

But best of all was watching the Spaniards shake their heads at the Mexicans running the modern iteration of the Panamerican Road Race, which, despite modern sensibilities, is still wild and woolly. Then, they also ran a piece about the original one, in this case the 1953 version. That was cool.

If you read Spanish and like old cars, I heartily recommend you pick up an issue of this mag. Back issues are quite cheap and plentiful, and you’ll get to see the classic car scene from a different angle.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.

Massive, Sprawling Biblical Melodrama

Cecil B. De Mille is a man I always linked with the earliest days of Hollywood, and was actually surprised to see he was still active, and enormously well-funded into the technicolor 1950s. And he was also still relevant, as is shown by the fact that The Ten Commandments was the second-highest grossing film of the 1950s, behind only Ben-Hur, which came later and I would assume was somewhat influenced by the success of the earlier epic.

Charlton Heston, of course, was iconic and perfect for the role of Moses. He was a hero in the traditional idiom, chiseled of jaw and stoic of temperament (which is actually kind of refreshing to see considering today’s obsession with showing that kind of character as the villains) and Nefertiri was all slinky and sensuous (which is also cool in its own right, considering the 1950s, for the most part were not a slinky and sensuous decade).

But the best performance has to be that of Yul Brynner. The dude could just plain act, and looked like no one else before or since. When you combine that with the role itself (imperious Pharaoh Ramses), you have a mesmerizing character that viewers will remember for a long time.

It’s a bit long, and has a few soap opera moments, especially in the first half, but it’s a fun watch. And the link with early over-dramatized silent films (which had to be that way because of the lack of sound) is very evident. I think De Mille never lost his habits from the era, despite showing a penchant for excellent sound work, too.

Anyhow, this one was fun, and if you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a watch.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.

And Something Different: A Motorcycle!

So, you all know by now that I draw cars occasionally to unwind. So far, so good. But, inspired by a visit to the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham, UK (I was there for an SF convention, but I wasn’t going to miss that museum!), I did something different this time. Have a look:

The Brough Superior is considered one of England’s great bikes, and this is the beginning of the famous line. A wonderful piece of purposeful machinery, and an all-time classic.

Drawing this one was… interesting. That engine detail was a bear to get right, and every little cable had its own areas of shadow and light. I don’t know how artists who do this for a living–and spend a lot more time in front of their drawing boards than I do–don’t all go blind!

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.