Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 56

Randy Cassingham has been collecting and sharing strange news stories for almost 20 years now on his newsletter, This Is True. Often funny and always thought-provoking, this e-book collection features weird-but-true stories ranging from outrageously funny to just plain outrageous.

The format – all single-paragraph stories, each with a headline and tagline – makes this a good book to keep on your phone to pick up whenever you have a few minutes. Watch out, though: it’s way too easy to read “just one more story”…over and over and over!

Some stories feature follow-ups, such as a couple who marketed a bizarre invention who later brought it to “Shark Tank,” or how politicians’ careers fared after some embarrassing incident. Others feature links to expanded stories on the author’s blog, opening the story up to additional related thoughts or discussion.

One of the interesting things about this book is that it spans 2001-2002, so it offers a look back at the post-9/11 days, the paranoia of the anthrax scare, and the early spread of “zero tolerance” school policies. It’s an interesting view of some of the events that have shaped today’s political climate.

Available in paperback and multiple e-book formats at This is True Books.

Open and inviting, with friendly staff and a wide, well-organized selection. New and recent releases take up an entire wall, broken down into kid’s books, media adaptations (find your Dr. Who and Star Trek comics easily, no matter who’s publishing them this year), DC, Marvel, Vertigo/Max, and indies.

They also have a large selection of paperbacks and hardcovers, though that’s a little harder to look through since some are filed by author, some by character, some by title, some by publisher and some by topic. If you can’t find something, just ask. And if they don’t have it, they’re happy to special-order it for you.

They don’t have much in the way of manga that I’ve noticed.

It’s also kid-friendly: if you have a child who’s too young to read the kids’ books without destroying them, there’s a toddler-sized table with one of those bead-track toys, and the back area where they do signings and games has a TV where they often show superhero cartoons or movies.

Did I mention signings? They frequently get artists and writers from the LA area to do signings, and I mean big names. Mark Waid was in a few weeks ago, and the first time I walked in the store there was a flyer for a Mike Mignola appearance.

I’ve been going to this store weekly for about a year and a half. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to review it.

The Game Hub

Update: They’ve expanded into the next storefront over for gaming events and supplies. Mostly collectible card games (Pokémon, Magic: The Gathering, etc.), some tabletop.

Today we drove down into San Diego to see the new touring version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast stage musical. The simpler staging and costumes work (though the castle set from the 1995 Los Angeles production really added a lot to the mood), but the big numbers like “Be Our Guest” do suffer from the smaller cast. And while I don’t really miss the two songs they cut (“No Matter What” and “Maison Des Lunes” were the weakest of the score), I did miss the battle between the townspeople and the enchanted objects…and the new song (OK, not that new, but it wasn’t in the original production) they added, about how happy Belle is to have given up her dreams, is actually creepy. Seriously, did no one think that one through?

More specifically, good DC time-travel comics.

DC One Million is a Justice League story that spans 800,000 years. It was a big event, but there’s a collection that features the main story and the key tie-ins.

JLA: Rock of Ages is another Justice League time travel story. Grant Morrison revisited some of the same ground later on with Final Crisis (in this one, several members of the League jump forward in time a decade or so and find that Darkseid has conquered Earth), but IMO Rock of Ages hangs together better.

Time Masters from ~1990 is a good stand-alone story featuring Rip Hunter. (Not to be confused with Time Masters: Vanishing Point - I haven’t read that one, but as I understand it was built around Batman: Return of Bruce Wayne and Flashpoint.) It was reprinted a few years ago, so you should be able to find it. It’s a time travel conspiracy story with the modern team of time travelers trying to block Vandal Savage and the Illuminati in different periods of history.

I rather liked the short-lived series Chronos, about an industrial spy who stumbles into becoming a time traveler. It only lasted around 10 issues or so. Another short-lived series, Hourman, was about a time-traveling android and spun out of DC One Million.

We saw Cirque du Soleil’s resident Los Angeles show last weekend. Cirque is always impressive, and Iris has the usual collection of trapeze artists, contortionists, tumblers, ribbon flyers, and elaborate costumes you’d expect from one of their shows. This one stands out for several reasons:

• I like the history of movies, so all the thematic references to early cinema and classic movies were fun. The Dolby Theater is a great match for this look.
• They did a great job of mixing live performances with live and time-delayed video, giving it a very different look from most shows. (And as the program pointed out, the video effects react to the performers, not the other way around.)
• This is the first Cirque show I’ve seen in a long time where I enjoyed the clown performances as much as the acrobatics.

Some highlights:

• The filmstrip act, where the performers walk through a series of identical rooms, each performing an action for a camera that plays back on a short delay, and each interacting with the previous performer’s recorded action.
• The soundstage number at the opening of act two. I think the entire cast was onstage, all doing something different, all at the same time. An incredible illusion of chaos.
• A film noir-style fistfight turned into a tumbling trampoline act.

The only disappointment was that act two felt a bit short, probably because the individual numbers were so long.