Episode 6: Black Panther, Really Old Wine and Nimbus

Salutations everyone! Today we’re going to talk about Black Panther in multiple media, really old wines and Nimbus.

So, grab your heart-shaped herb and your favorite cyber-enhancement, it’s time for Geekery and Wine…

The Geek Side

I have always loved Black Panther.

I know, I know. A dude of German-Russian heritage (and several others) from Nebraska…really?

Really.

It wasn’t every day that Mom went down to Gibson’s our local department store and I was able to check out the new comic book releases on the spinner. When I was growing up in my small western Nebraska hometown every comic character was precious. But none more so than Black Panther.

On its most basic level, a panther is cool.

The color black is cool.

And Black Panther was a king!

And he was black. Just like Tony Dorsett on the Dallas Cowboys or The Falcon in Marvel Comics or some of the stand-up comedians whom I loved listening to their albums on the record player at my friend Jeff’s house. But it wasn’t something I thought of as remarkable, these were just the guys I thought were awesome.

When the Marvel Super Heroes role-playing game came out in 1984, I desperately wanted to play Black Panther. My friends didn’t get it, why I loved the comic and the character so much. They thought he was basically Daredevil.

Now, at our high school in grades 10 through 12 there were only 3 African American students in the entire school and, well, none were comic book fans or nerds and I’m pretty sure they had enough on their plates just being part of a small group with almost no one else who looked like them.

So, I had this comic and this character that I loved and no one to talk about it with.

I think as I got older I started to see “the Meta” in the cross-over from comic book characters and mythological heroes (Hey….these seem to be the same thing!). And I was still enchanted with the continent of Africa. The mythology was incredibly different from the Greek and Roman myths that I learned about in Edith Hamilton’s Mythology and these beautiful watercolor illustrated books my parents got me from the elementary school book fair. I loved hearing those stories. 

I wanted the adventure that was promised, like Indiana Jones in the Jamaa El Fna. 

In my 20’s, I tried Ethiopian food for the first time and was hooked. It was amazing!

These were all revelations to me. I hesitate to call them “discoveries” because they were always there, I just didn’t know about them. But they were moments when my world became larger. Moments where I felt that there was so much more to experience and know.

So Black Panther was the surrogate, my tour guide for all those times when I saw something that inspired me and the world graciously magnified it and sent it back to subtly blow my mind.

And then a while back, after many years of waiting, there would be a film!

I saw the Ryan Coogler film and it was magic. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. First I had to have a brush with the divine word-spinner, the uber-scribe of Black Panther. Dare I say, Black Panther’s High Priest?  I would say forgive the pun, but I’m a Dad and was an English major…so…

I’ve mentioned a few times that I have a loving relationship with San Diego Comic-Con. It’s been a fantastic pilgrimage for me and my son and a wellspring of information. I even wrote about and narrated it in Journey to Nerdopolis (available on Audible). It was on my most recent trip to SDCC and I was traveling from panel-to-panel on Saturday afternoon. Doing my thing. When I had a collision with greatness.

First off…it was Saturday afternoon at Comic-Con and I had been going non-stop since Wednesday afternoon. As I’m walking down what seems to be the longest hallway ever, I glance to my left and see the sign that says “Professional’s Lounge.”

Hold the phone. I am a professional!

I have been coming to Comic-Con International on a professional badge for quite some time now. Why have I never seen this before?

What’s more, my feet were KILLING ME.

I poke my head inside and see that this a common thought amongst con-goers.

There is a collection of round tables, each seating 8 people, occupying most of the room and there is a 6-foot table next to the wall that has coffee, hot water and bottled water. It’s an oasis.

But there is nowhere to sit. I scan the room, starting to get that inkling of a feeling from high school in the lunch room when I make eye contact with an African American gentleman who has the kind of exhaustion in his eyes that I have in my legs. 

He nods at me slightly and motions me over and I see that his laptop case, sling bag, etc. is occupying one seat that he is now vacating for ME!

Thank goodness.

I relay my gratitude and we exchange names.

“Colby,” I say.

“Priest,” he says.

“What do you do? Seen any good panels?” I ask.

He has quickly to hand a couple of small paper items, a bookmark, a postcard. He tells me he writes comics and has not only seen some cool panels he’s been on them!

Awesome I say, anything I might have read?

“Oh, Deathstroke right now…and Black Panther, Green Lantern, Spider-man.”

“Dude, that’s amazing.”

So, my hardcore Black Panther fans are listening right now and thinking, “Dude, you are an idiot! You claim to be a Black Panther fan and didn’t know you were sitting with the man who pretty much redefined the character in the 90’s? The man who is probably the biggest reason why the movie came into being!”

Yes. That is what I am saying.

Fandom functions on two things. Actually, most things function on these. Time and Money.

When I was reading Black Panther in my childhood, I had a lot of time. And in the late 90’s, when I got my first teaching job I had neither time nor money…so, it fell away.

Once I had time again, Priest had disappeared from the comics’ scene. There is an amazing article on the Vulture site entitled “The Man Who Made Black Panther Cool Then Disappeared,” I’ll leave the web address on the written blog over at Geekery and wine dot blogspot.com. http://www.vulture.com/2018/01/christopher-priest-made-black-panther-cool-then-disappeared.html

Back to the table, we were having a great conversation about living in Colorado where I lived for 22 years when a couple more chairs opened up.

Two younger gentlemen sat down and since they were close to us I introduced myself and Priest did, too.

The reaction on these guys’ faces told the tale. They looked as though they were talking to God himself.

And I was having a gradual dawning of just how completely awesome this guy is.

But this is Professionals Lounge. So, I nodded my head at them knowingly (when I actually knew nothing) and made a small hand gesture like, “Be Cool.”

They tried…but, it’s hard to meet your heroes and maintain one’s chill.

With it having been multiple decades since I’d read much in the way of Black Panther, I was seeing the film and saying, wait…I don’t remember him. Hold on, wasn’t he…I dunno…Man-Apey-er? Well, fine maybe not THAT Man-Apey. I mean Eric Killmonger in the comics is physically impossible to duplicate in real life. I get that.

Hunh. Super-tech, cool heroes, fantastic combinations of cultures reflecting the immense diversity of the African continent. Check, check, double-check.

Somethings different…

Time to go back and buy the whole Priest run on Comixology.

Oh my goodness this was amazing! This was pulp adventure reinvented as political satire. I loved it! And I totally get why Priest is the iconic super shaman of sequential art.

This was tough though because I am ingesting the Black Panther series at a rate of about one issue every 20 minutes on my tablet and it took Christopher Priest a month to do each one of these comics. I feel like some uncultured clod who wolfs down a five-course meal in 10 minutes. But it’s so compelling, I can’t help it.

One aspect I adore in comics is when authors on an iconic title take the time to tip the hat to those that came before. You know, the ones that help make the title iconic. The differences between the Panther of the late 90’s and the Panther of the early 70’s is stark, but Priest takes the time to fold it in and make it understandable and cool.

And Sal Velouto’s Artwork was just wonderful. It lets the classic Black Panther be front and center in the most perfect way, and it even drew upon classic plot devices that were wonderfully wacky as well as friends and foes that lets them feel current.

Priest, you’re a master of your art form.

Some might ask, wither Ta-Nehisi Coates? I did read A Nation Under Our Feet, the graphic novel of his first story arc on the title. It’s good. I enjoyed it. Priest to me felt, more personal somehow. And his sense of humor gave me these wonderful breaks in dramatic tension I just didn’t get from Ta-Nehisi Coates. To be fair, though, I should probably read it again.

The film actually seems to have more to do with Priest than Coates simply by having Agent Ross in the mix, which gave the movie a Priest stamp.

The Wine Side – Really Old Wines

It’s a fact of life…many wines don’t age well. I was talking with my good friend Steven and he said, “I’d really like you to explore further into your video game past. Are you not going to do it because the wines would cost too much?”

“What a cool, question!” I thought. And I looked in the basement and found that the oldest bottle of wine I have is about 10 years old.

But the answer to the question is, of course, more complicated than that.

I start with the Wisdom of George. I went to my boss’s house for dinner when I was in my mid-twenties. She was an amazing dynamic editor who always had a cool suggestion for what to read next and possessed an editor’s red pen so sublime you almost couldn’t wait to do the next revision. Her husband, George, was retired, and in his spare time was driving and reviewing cars for an auto magazine. And George had this to say:

            “I will never pay more than $10 for a bottle of wine. “

An interesting challenge.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think it’s fine to pay as much as you feel comfortable paying for a bottle of wine. I just had a lovely evening where a friend said, “I don’t drink wine very often, so when I do I don’t mind spending $25 a bottle on it.”

A great philosophy for the casual oenophile.

Buuuut, if, while drinking a wine, you can’t stop thinking about all the other things you could have bought with the money you spent on that bottle…it was too expensive.

For example, if while drinking a wine, I keep thinking, “I could have taken my wife and daughters to an evening showing of a new movie (aka 60-ish dollars)” then really I have no reason to purchase a finely aged Barolo at that price point. Especially when, in my humble, I could just as easily love a Montepulciano d’abruzo for 1/6^th of that price.

It is fascinating to see wines transfer out of the $10 club over time. There was an Italian wine that I loved called Monte Antico and when I was in my 20’s this was my go-to wine, because it was about 8 bucks and tasted great with everything. And then a couple of years later it was 9 bucks and finally, now I can find it on sale for about $11.

“But isn’t that just inflation?” you ask.  

Maybe. But I’ve seen other wines maintain their low price point over time and not just Yellow Tail either. I think wines “get discovered,” get popular, and then their prices go up.

The other factor that comes into play here is the “Special occasion wine.” If a person plunks down what’s for them a sizable sum, they may view it as a special occasion wine. And then it just sits there, waiting to be tasted and no occasion ever seems special enough.

If you never drink the special occasion wine in many ways you’re saying that nothing is special about your life. And wine isn’t supposed to make you feel sad.

It is an agricultural product, too. And if it’s grown and made, someday it will spoil. 

You know when a good time is? Now. Now’s pretty darned good.

Audio Goodness – Nimbus

Ah, Nimbus!!! This was another one of the books like Masters of Deception: The Gang that Ruled Cyberspace I had found and set on the shelf for later.

I had originally discovered Nimbus on the shelf of a B. Dalton Booksellers I’d worked at in Westminster, Colorado. The cover itself featured a warped head and face that somehow vaguely suggested Phil Collins…that one picture from the No Jacket Required album cover.

What drew me to the story was that it seemed to be a continuation of the dead Cyberpunk genre. And I wasn’t quite ready to let Cyberpunk go.

For those who don’t know, Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction that had its heyday during the mid to late 80’s and it’s most celebrated author was William Gibson. And his most celebrated work was Neuromancer. It brought the idea of “jacking in” to the Net into the mainstream and I loved it.

I read cyberpunk novels and short story anthologies and even game-mastered the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop roleplaying game written by Mike Pondsmith. Man fuses with Machine. Mind fuses with information. And everything is very dark and gritty because…you know…the 80’s.

The idea of effortlessly upgrading oneself to perfection was, of course, enticing…in the abstract. Practically speaking, it was a huge deal for me to get my ear pierced at 19 and that was but a single hole in one…earlobe. And decades later I still haven’t pulled the trigger on that tattoo that I’ve been talking about getting.

Also, this is perhaps the most interesting element. Nimbus was the first time I ever narrated a sex scene. I don’t consider myself to be a prude. I mean, yeah, I was raised in a small Nebraska town so not exactly the most daring of gentlemen…

Anyway…

I was narrating the book and knew a couple of days ahead of time IT was happening soon. I kinda psyched myself out at first and then I psyched myself up for it.

If I could fully commit to the moment the whole scene would be portrayed as a lovely moment of intimacy between the characters, instead of me feeling awkward about a part of the book I found steamy.

And ya know…then we could get back to the cybernetics...I narrated the scene in two takes.

What made me so keen on this book by Alexander Jablokov? I felt that Nimbus could have been the next Neuromancer. The story itself is a combination of cybernetics, jazz, and psychological tampering! Oh my god, what could be more cool?

I wanted to know more about Alex so I looked up the Odyssey Podcast: For a quick link to that podcast go to http://www.odysseyworkshop.org/podcasts2.html or wherever you get your podcasts. And got to hear him talk about plotting, characterization, and motivation. And I wholeheartedly recommend this series to anyone who is interested in the vocation of writing. Especially Science fiction and Fantasy!

In a great story, there must be trials for the main character to go through.

Some listeners may be saying, “Ugh! It seems like everyone you asked to do an audiobook has said yes. Wasn’t any part of it difficult?”

Enter a new person into the conversation. The author’s literary agent. This person has but one task. Ensure that the interests of her client are held first and foremost and that any deal entered into is fair to favorable toward her client.

Alex’s agent was frankly terrifying. She, at the time, rep-ed William Gibson of Neuromancer fame. And it seemed that every step I was taking to make our audiobook project happen was amateurish and not up to snuff in her eyes. Ultimately, I learned quite a bit from the experience…and we got the audiobook made. And it showed me the value of having a true seasoned professional in one’s corner.

Ordinarily, I would end the story there. But more recently I was at the Aritsia literary convention in Boston and I saw Alex’s name on a panel as a featured speaker. I said, “Hi” to him beforehand and he said, “We should grab a drink afterward.”

That drink turned into a 2-hour conversation about plot, characterization, the craft of writing and the direction of literature in general…it was fantastic.

And it would be a great story, even if it simply ended there. But in this case, we emailed a few times and he invited my wife and me to have dinner with him in Boston. Joining us was newly-minted science fiction novelist and his significant other, a biological sciences post-grad.

In my mind, at this point in the evening, I am seeing the clock spinning out of control. The time simply flew by. The newly-minted novelist spoke about his work debuting in the first quarter of 2019. His significant other talked about returning from her research trip to Chile and Alex and I both talked about our currently happening projects.

There was an amazing discussion about when the voice of the genre is passed on to the next generation. Its signifiers, when certain authors have said everything they are going to say and why other authors will only stop writing when they are lowered into their graves.

And where did this whole journey start? When I had reached out and said, “I really love your book, Alex, we should work together.”

It floors me.

Next time on Geekery and Wine: The Wil Wheaton conundrum, Mar de Frades Albariño and Sandstone.

Until then…

My Geeks

My Nerds

My dear, dear friends…

Adieu

In this episode, we talk about Plants vs Zombies, Seven Terraces Pinot Noir and Werewolves of War.

Time to grab your last-line-of-defense lawnmower and your sword cane, it’s time for Geekery and Wine…

To hear this blog narrated go to:

https://soundcloud.com/colbyelliott/geekery-wine-audioblog-5-plants-vs-zombies-pinot-noir-and-werewolves-of-war

The Geek side

I am someone who loves the special buy websites. (I’m lookin’ at you Groupon and Living Social Deals). My wife and I had virtually stopped going out to eat and going downtown once we had kids and the introduction of Groupon deals was enough of a carrot to finally get us to go out and enjoy a fancy dinner or wine tasting or chocolate tour in downtown Denver now and again. But by nature I am an explorer, so soon I was not only getting us 50% off at our favorite Peruvian restaurant I was also booking introductions to snow-shoeing classes and bargain condo times during ski season.

Two things led to yet one more and I was enticed into Groupon Goods. Whereupon I found really, really inexpensive tablet computers for my kids. And yes, originally it was just for my kids…but I digress.

My daughters are total troopers on long car trips. My oldest can go through her comics collection and my youngest can draw pictures for hours. But I also thought it would be nice for them to be able to play games and make use of the digital books I have in my Amazon Kindle Library. So after getting the tablets, I downloaded a few games and books for each of them.  And one of them was Plants vs Zombies.

Dun, dun Duuuun!!!

And this was a huge mistake…I realize that now, at least as far as my leisure time was concerned.

You see I didn’t just buy tablets for my two daughters, I got one for me too. It was the price of a good pair of sneakers and I had recently been envying my dear friend’s new tablet upon which he kept his digital comics collection. (The one I talked about on our trip to San Diego Comic-Con, A Journey to Nerdopolis)

It only made sense to get one…right? No more filling-up long, white slide-boxes in the basement AND my daughters and I could play games against each other, too. (Insert, wife’s disapproving dead-pan stare here).

Sigh…

So, PopCap Games’ Plants vs Zombies was originally released in 2009…yeah.  Although it was not released for Android until 2011. I realize that for some folks this game is so long in the tooth I might as well be talking about Space Invaders but, hey, again, a new device gave me the opportunity to enjoy a whole slew of games I’d never tried before. Imagine someone finally getting a Wii. They have to try Wii Sports Resort, right? Well, this tablet was my own personal games…if not Dance, Dance…revolution.

For those who don’t know, Plants vs Zombies is a tower-defense game. You are tasked with defending your home (specifically your backyard, but later your roof, as well) from hordes of cartoonish zombies (some with traffic cones or buckets on their heads, others on pogo sticks and on Zambonis…like I said cartoonish). To beat the horde you plant an assortment of equally cartoonish botanicals which have nonsensical yet ultimately logical defensive capabilities. For example, pea plants shoot peas at the zombies, and corn launches gobs of butter, immobilizing their target.

In Adventure Mode, things progress quickly adding new wrinkles at each level. A plain backyard gives way to an added swimming pool (meaning swimming zombies….just go with it), followed quickly by fog and/or darkness and lightning.

What amazed me was how quickly the strategy of the game consumed me. I would think about the game while driving or making dinner, “Ah, but if I move my sunflowers forward and move my cabbage launchers back, then…”

And on and on.

My daughters ultimately downloaded the game, too, and much to the chagrin of my wife, we talked battle strategy at the dining room table. It was amazing!!!

Little did I realize how differently my eldest daughter and I consume games. I am a hit-the-ground-running-finish-this-sucker kind of gamer. My daughter would read the descriptions and point out the wonderful bits of humor in the writing of the Zombie Guide that I otherwise would have missed. 

All of us ultimately got in on the chase for gold. Throughout the game, the player collects coins which can then be redeemed for additional levels and mini-games. It was this second mini-game within a game to see which one of us could unlock the whole thing first.

It was me. Which then became, “Dad, can we borrow your tablet to play the Whack-a-Zombie mini-game?”

Ah, the things we do for…braaaaaains…

AUTHORS NOTE: An update finally came down the pike and I was able to get Plants vs. Zombies 2. The new game adds a further dimension to the original. It isn't merely more of the same like so many other sequels. Is it good? Yes. But it is so good that it deserves its own blog entry so, for now, I will conclude to...

The Wine side

…eventually the wine side…there is a bit of a story here first.

The wine that I have for this month is a beauty, at least the 2007 and 2008 vintages were. I was introduced to this wine through an experience that terrified me and pushed me to be a better person.

When my friend Zack told me he was getting married I wasn’t exactly sure what would happen next.

Oh, I knew there would be a ceremony and all the lovely things that go along with it, but I didn’t know what my part in it would be. I know, it’s a very self-centered thing, but since I have been in junior high school, weddings have always meant, “Hey bud, I’ve got a job for ya.”

I’ve sung at weddings for over 30 years. That is a lot of sappy love songs. But Zack had a friend who currently played professionally in a local blues band, so…off the hook there.

Zack and I had met in our 30’s, so probably not going to be asked to be the best man or even a groomsman; normally position is instantly locked-up if the groom has a brother, but Zack had only sisters. Plus, usually high school or college friends get tapped for that.

Ugh…not usher…please, not usher.

“I want you to be the minister,” said Zack.

Say what, now?

Being that I had been a school teacher for 11 years and an actor and singer longer than that, my great friend wanted me to lead the ceremony.

I was humbled. I was honored.

I was scared…out…of…my…mind.

This was a memory people carry forever. What if I froze or messed up in some way. There was precedent there. I had on one occasion completely forgot whole lines of:

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds 

Admit impediments.”

Plus, how was I even remotely qualified for this? Weren’t their laws?

Zack told me about the Universal Life Church and how I could get ordained online. https://www.themonastery.org/ He had done it himself. Piece of cake.

It was. And I did.

I constructed a ceremony based on literature I knew Zack and Honey, his wife-to-be, loved as well as the most traditional of vows. I included some of the passages that meant a lot to me when I got married more than a decade before (including the aforementioned Shakespeare Sonnet 116). The couple and I talked it over and they liked what I came up with.

Then came the bachelor party.

I mean, really, how often does the minister get invited to the bachelor party?

We started in the lounge and cigar room of Del Friscos, an old-fashioned steakhouse in the Denver Tech center and here is where the wine came in.

Seven Terraces Pinot Noir from Marlborough, New Zealand was what I finally settled on while sitting in a worn, overstuffed leather chair next to a crackling fireplace. I felt as though Dr. Watson could stumble in at any moment, breathless, with “a delicate matter of some urgency that needed attending to.”   

I’d chosen Pinot Noir because I’d always thought it was the most flexible wine and I really didn't know what we were going to be eating that night. One could drink a pinot noir either with food or not. Additionally, it stood up well next to meats but didn’t overwhelm the flavors of chicken and fish dishes, especially when the dish was well-spiced.

In the glass, it had a rust color and tasted a little bit of ripe plums. This can be taken with a grain of salt, though. It seems to me that I become very suggestable when people start talking about the small flavors or "notes" of wine. If I can taste it for myself and not be influenced by another’s opinion, I can come up with what something tastes like on my own. But, if someone springs in with "Don't you taste a note of dark cherries?" I swear my taste buds SEARCH for that flavor and my brain won't stop until I think I can taste cherries or the other person is confirmed to be clinically insane.

As I was saying, I thought I’d tasted ripe plums with just a hint of pennies, like when you were a little kid and put one under your tongue. That's the flavor and it wasn’t unpleasant.

Red Alert, BIAS warning!

I have really great associations with New Zealand wines. I was an exchange student there for a semester, specifically the semester when I was doing my student teaching. I had an elder statesman teacher who was going to show me how New Zealand wines were superior to Australian wines. Long story short...he did. Although his impromptu wine class specifically focused on Chardonnays and Sauvignon Blancs. A shout out to YOU, Mr. David Pavish wherever in the world you may reside! You helped a young budding ee-no-file begin to find his way.

So, to sum up: I have great associations for the country of New Zealand and their wines in particular. That was combined with the request of a friend to officiate his wedding ceremony, a task which delighted and challenged me. Those things fused with a fantastic bachelor party where I met the acquaintance of some great guys and got to raise a glass with a dear friend.

Neat trivia fact: That dear friend commemorated the occasion of his wedding by gifting me a sword-cane by way of saying thanks. I still own it and love it to this day!

Update: I recently sought out the current year of Seven Terraces and was able to find it at Drink Dispatch (drinkdispatch.com) I would love to say that I got the wine and we are both living happily together. But the course of true love never did run smooth. (Shakespeare, AGAIN?) The first shipment came up with an “interruption note.” The wine got as far as Illinois and was damaged. So, it took two tries to get the four bottles that I ordered.

Was it worth it? Did it still hold up?

Oh my, yes indeed! It is a great bottle of wine, running at about $17.

Audio Goodness -- Werewolves of War

What first drew me to this short story by D.W Hall wasn’t so much its content but its form. The books I’d done previously had all been full length, lasting upwards of 6 or 7 hours. At the time (sometime in 2011) when I was looking on the Audible site I didn’t see much that was simply short fiction. Many times when I was listening. I was in the car. I was going to the grocery store (20 minutes each way) or prepping and cooking a meal (25 to 40 minutes). Wasn’t there a need for short stories? When I was a teacher I remember Edgar Alan Poe’s definition of a short story was a work that could be read in a single sitting and as an author, it’s what I most liked to write. Maybe there would be joy in the narrating, too.

So I began to look around, thinking that perhaps a classic was in order. In college, I was a vocal performance major (hoping to become an opera singer) when I started and I knew that part of voice study was studying and performing classic Italian arias and art songs. Additionally, any classical actor wants to play Hamlet or Lady Macbeth. Wasn’t there an equivalent to be drawn here?

Therein lay the problem. If I had chosen, say, Dracula, there were well-over 30 different performances already on the Audible website. How in the name of all-that-is-clearly-pronounced would I get my story to stand out?

Within the “classic” notion there are many genres, obviously. What about classic science fiction? The stylized ideal with bubble helmets and flying saucers was really appealing. And there was a lot of literature out there that was originally published in now-defunct science fiction magazines that was in the Public Domain.

Public Domain basically means “belonging to the public,” and if I could find something that was unrecorded it would be like finding an old art song in a dusty garret, a lost reliquary inside a forgotten tomb.

Nebraska Elliott and the Lost Venusian Jungle Planet!

Yeah, well…moving on…

I found The Werewolves of War by D.W. Hall, originally published in Astounding Stories in a 1931 issue and taking place in 1938. It is a war tale. An alternate future wherein America must stand against the United Slav Army, the city of San Francisco has fallen to this terrible force and only a few brazen pilots can stem the tide of the enemy and beat them back.

I also looked at it like a proto-Steampunk long-before Steampunk was a thing. Comedian and uber-nerd, Chris Hardwick jokes that Steampunk is what happens “when Goths discover the color brown,” but this could also be seen as how Steampunk evolves into the 20^th century, which I found pretty fascinating.

And a tale of war. I never really pictured myself as a teller of war tales. As a kid, I was fascinated with my dad’s LP’s of Victory at Sea, ones that featured “the sounds of 16-inch guns! Naval Combat Planes and torpedoes being launched!” All set to a Richard Rogers classical score. Nevertheless, I’m not sure if anyone would have cast me based on my voice. I guess that’s the advantage to being the publisher and casting yourself.

On the minus side: This is a fairly long short story clocking in at a little over an hour and although there wasn’t very much short fiction when I looked for it in 2011, the short fiction I found was not terribly well reviewed. Perhaps deeper pools of narrative are more satisfying to the bulk of listeners.

And…sadly…there are no ACTUAL WEREWOLVES in this piece. It is the name of the pilots’ fighter wing. There are acid bullets but no silver ones. Some listeners may feel disappointed when they discover a sans lycanthropy story.

On the plus side: the recording itself was really fun! I wanted to capture that pulp feel, the steely-eyed men and their deeds of derring-do. When I found the right intro music I just felt like there was something missing. The intro bumper was a great piece of music but it didn’t put me in the story. So I went into my library of sound effects and found the sounds of anti-aircraft fire and fighter planes buzzing and mixed them into opening sequence – just like Victory at Sea! I have to say, it made me really happy and absolutely craving other works from DW Hall. Was he some kind of forgotten master? I would look into his work more for future pieces.

Find Werewolves of War on Audible at audible.com. And be sure to check out all current and future projects at last word audio.com.

And stay updated by signing up for Monkey Missives and following me on Twitter @colbyelliott

Next Time on Geekery and Wine: Black Panther, really old wine and Nimbus.

Until then…

My Geeks

My Nerds

My dear, dear friends…

Adieu

Destiny, Tremo, and The Supergirls

To hear this blog narrated go to:

https://soundcloud.com/colbyelliott/geekery-wine-audioblog-4-destiny-tremo-and-the-supergirls

Greetings everybody!

In this episode, we’ll be talking about a ton of stuff including Dungeons & Dragons and why HP Lovecraft may have been a crazy oenophile even though he was a teetotaler.

So, grab your Gjallahorn Rocket Launcher and that highlighted, dog-eared copy of the Necronomicon, it’s time for Geekery & Wine!

This week: Destiny, Tremo, and The Supergirls

The Geek Side

It all starts with a mysterious box in the mail.

My college roommate, dear friend and the best man in my wedding, a wedding that had fairly recently celebrated its 20^th anniversary said that he had “checked with my wife to see if it was okay” and now had sent me…something.

“What was that something?” I asked.

ANNOUNCER: “The answer may surprise you!

“An Xbox One.”

Whaaaaat?

Thousands of fur-clad barbarians on horseback charging across the snowy tundra fill my mindscape!

Battle, Conquest, victory…RAWR!!!

Well, that and feeling sweaty and awkward in a polyester tux in college choir singing Verdi’s Dies Irae.

“Dude, that is HUGE!” I said, “Wait, my wife really okayed this? Hang on…”

I walked upstairs and found out, yes, she was cool with this.

Well, huhn.

The game we would be playing on this XBOX One was Destiny and we would game together again. We would be able to talk on headsets while we went on quests. And there would be rocket launchers. 

Come to think of it…it seems that many aspects of our friendship were and are based on rocket launchers…more on that in a bit.

Okay, Okay…this may require some backstory…

Although Bran and I met at the softball diamonds when in junior high school, he worked at the concession stand and I was at the park to watch my father play slow-pitch softball, our friendship really began in earnest with Dungeons & Dragons in high school.

Bran and I were fortunate enough to be core members of perhaps the best homebrew D&D/RoleMaster groups ever assembled. What made it so epic? We had popular guys, nerdy guys, jocks, party hounds, and anarchists in the same group. And because the social cliques were all over the place the player characters (or PC’s) came at problems (and each other) in funny, twisted and bizarre ways.

Any role-playing group generates fantastic tales of adventure. But this group sometimes took the adventure back into the real world.

Roman-candle fights, “the fake purse tied with fishing line” gag and a homemade shoulder-fired rocket launcher were only some of the shenanigans we engaged in in high school.

Some of my readers/listeners may be saying right now, “Hey, hey hey…those were all guys…no girls?”

We tried. We honestly did. But it was the clichéd situation where girls would come in and watch the game to see what we were doing, get bored and leave. That’s not to say that I didn’t have D&D campaigns with female group members in high school, I did. But this…was not that group.

Among this group was Bran. His cousin Travis, Dungeon Mastered (or DM-ed) our games. Other members included Travis’s brother Trent, as well as Tim, Cory, and Pat.

There was something about those amazing weekend nights, sitting around a dining room table fighting evil (and sometimes plotting evil) that was etched into the stone of our youth. Those listeners who were awakened to the awesomeness of D&D through Stranger Things on Netflix realize its pull is no joke. The intensity of those old campaigns was just like what you saw in that series, except we were in high school.

And while I love all those guys and the memories we made together, it’s my friendship with Bran that’s deep in my bones.

Now, in short, one of my dearest friends, missed those old campaigns and wanted to hang out with me 1,700 miles away.

I know, some may be saying, Previously, on Geekery and Wine “You said you never considered yourself a console-guy. Computer games were meant to be played with a keyboard and mouse …all hail the ASWD! This is a second time you are giving in to the dark side of consoles!”

And you would be right.

Yet, Bran was also my college roommate that forcibly (well, gently-forcibly) made me change my “tech religion.” I was an education major so it was all-Apple-all-the-time, until he stopped me, taught me some keyboard shortcuts and walked me through building my first PC.  If anyone was going to change my mind about tech it was Bran.

Bran was the friend who, as teenagers, was my sounding board while trying to figure out Life. We discussed everything together and our favorite format was the ultra-long walk around our hometown. We would start talking about this sci-fi book or that role-playing game and more than an hour later be we’d be saying, “Wait. Where the heck are we?” Not an easy feat in a hometown of 23,000 people.

You see, Bran is my Spock.

Back to the modern day…and Destiny.

The way I first heard of this game was truly magical. I was still teaching high school theatre when Destiny came out in 2014 and I had to hear my theatre technicians talking about going on missions and their plans of how they were going to go on missions after rehearsal when they were backstage. It didn’t apply to me at the time, so I just thought, “Meh, another Massive Multiplayer online world.”

So it kept building in my consciousness…

By the time I got the game and the XBOX One, Brandon had purchased Destiny on sale with all the expansion packs. It was awesome. And it seemed like every free moment I had I was texting him, “Got time for a mission?”

As a strange aside, texting one of your best friends about gaming late at night or early in the morning is odd to say the least. You find yourself getting ready to send a text like “You awake?” and wondering, “Wait a minute, is this the video game equivalent of a booty-call?”

About Destiny (first released Sept 9^th, 2014)

In Destiny, you become an alien with the ability to infinitely reincarnate thanks to your “ghost” a small AI that hovers around your character and fills the role of info-dumper and story catalyst. “Explainer-in-chief” might be another nice way of putting it.

Originally, Game of Thrones actor Peter Dinklage was the voice-actor for Ghost, but I guess many found him to be a bit dry and uninspiring. And between the Alpha and Beta release of Destiny, he was gone. They did try to keep him on by adding a vocal synth and it helped somewhat but, it wasn’t as spritely as current Ghost, Nolan North (who incidentally voiced Nathan Drake in the Drake series on PlayStation).

If you want to check out the side-by-side comparisons of the voice actors check out “Destiny Ghost Voice Comparison - Dinklebot vs. Northbot” on YouTube, if you read Geekery and Wine in print form at geekeryandwine.blogspot.com I’ll have the hotlink there, too.  

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeyeQnKTFUU).

Your character is one of three classes, Titan, Hunter, and Warlock. And one of three races: Human, Awoken (a blueish race) and Exo (having a robotic exoskeleton). And it is a 1^st person shooter. There are different kinds of guns, swords, grenades and, of course, rocket launchers. The overall power level of your character is expressed in number-form as your Light. The higher your Light, the tougher the opponents, the better your loot and the more game worlds open up to explore.

When Bran and I first started playing I was always worried that I would be the weak member of our duo so I would go down to the basement and practice. Practice then that became “How can I gain an edge that will help us do better in battle?” and finally…my impishness got the better of me and I just wanted to make sure that when we first logged on, my Light was a liiiiiitttle bit higher than Bran’s.

I know, I know. I’m horrible. But I have only a younger sister and he is an only child so, yes, of course, there is always going to be a healthy sibling rivalry between us. And we laugh about it often.

A next fascinating aspect of Destiny is how its creators curated actors from so many sci-fi shows that I love. Nathan Fillion as Cade-6, of course, is the one that everyone comments on, but there is also Gina Torres completing a mini Firefly reunion. Lance Reddick from Fringe as well as Bill Nighy from Hot Fuzz are also fantastic additions. 

Side Note: Since Destiny 2 has come out, I thought, at first, creators had tried to extend the Firefly “collect-em-all” philosophy by adding Jewel Staite as the split personality-ed Failsafe but found out later it was, in fact, multifaceted actor Joy Osmanski. But then after doing a bit of research for this audioblog, I found out that they had indeed added another ex-Firefly-er—Morena Bacarin as Sagira the Ghost of Osiris. There are so many amazing voice actors in the Destiny series, like Lenny James from The Walking Dead, and Oded Fehr and Erick Avari from the 1999 film The Mummy.

Destiny (and Destiny 2) are great games whether you are trying to figure out, “Where do I know that voice from or just using it as an excuse to stand on an alien planet with your best friend and shoot rocket launchers.

The Wine side

So, Tremo was a fun online find for me. I’d originally ordered it through Barclay’s Wine (barclayswine.com), at a stage when I was ordering mixed packs and mystery packs (more on that in a future episode).

The label, which features a red fish on a stark black background evoked something out of Lovecraft and, when I found it, I thought it could be my secret weapon of entertaining.

Anytime we had friends over we would all bring a bottle of wine and I would break out the Tremo and everyone loved it. It seemed to me that Spanish wines particularly Tempranillos of the Rioja region are very drinkable. They go with everything and don’t have the harshness of a big, bold Cabernet Sauvignon.

And then, a few years ago I put together a role-playing group, to play at my house and I thought, since I was hosting, and this was a roleplaying group for adults, that it was time to move beyond the “orange-tinted Cheeto fingers and copious amounts of Mountain Dew” games of our youth.

“Dammit, there should be wine.” I said to myself, “And dammit, it should be Tremo!”

This group would change game systems and genres depending on who was Game Master (the general term for the person in charge of the table that week). There wouldn’t ever be one person who was the DM and we wouldn’t solely be playing D&D.

We started playing Call of Cthulhu, an RPG created by Chaosium in 1981. The characters are investigators in an H.P. Lovecraftian world trying to stop the Giant Unknowable Evil (with capital letters on all of those words.) while not losing their lives and sanity in the process. But just to let you know: the player characters in this game always ultimately succumb to the Great Unknowable Evil because they are mere mortals. The conflict and tension of the game are created by how long they can hold out before ultimately being defeated.

Oh yeah, the wine…

It is from Valencia in the Rioja region of Spain and can be either a straight Tempranillo varietal or Tempranillo with “Maceration Carbonica.” (also known as CARBONIC MASCERATION!)

Carbonic maceration is simply a winemaking technique, in which whole grapes are fermented in a carbon dioxide-rich environment before being crushed. Rather than just fermenting the juice which is what generally happens. The result is a smooth wine that is fruity – sometimes like strawberries and plums and sometimes like raspberries depending on the vintage. What does it run? I think with the Groupon discount I was able to get the cost down to about $11 a bottle.

Our Call of Cthulhu game was the story of a group of filmmakers in the 1930’s trying to create a horror film on an isolated island off the northern coast of England. I wanted the group to have a wine that was thematic. And the Tremo fish reminded me vaguely of the Erol Otus illustration of The Deep Ones that’s in the 1980 AD&D reference book Deities and Demigods in the Cthulhu Mythos chapter.

My character, the leading man of the film, died spectacularly at the end when some tentacled monstrosity picked up the building I was in, crushed it and then returned to the briny deep. And our film crew captured the whole thing and kept it in the final cut of the film. The studio dedicated the picture to my memory and the scene faded to black. You can’t ask for much better.

And now I can’t think about Tremo without associating it with HP Lovecraft.

And then recently something nightmarish happened. I thought, “It would be nice to see if this wine is still everything I thought it was. And wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a taste of history.

Alas, much like the Lovecraftian imagery that I associated with this wine, it now appears to be gone!

Was it the faintest figment of my heated imagination?

Groupons were purchased and unable to be redeemed. The site said that this newly purchased voucher was expired! Going to the Bodegas Alegre website, Tremo is not listed as a wine they produce.

It’s as though it doesn’t exist! It never had existed! The Mad Sommelier Abdul Alhazred put his tasting notes upon it and now it is utterly gone. Only trace images of bottles past are on the web. Hastur the Unspeakable has bought the last case for his ski vacation with Nyarlathotep at the Mountains of Madness!!!

…okay, let’s tap the brakes here.

How did it all end up? The Groupon I found from Wine Insiders on Tremo just needed a moment with their customer service department. There was even a section in the FAQ for a specific email to send messages to if one got an expired message on a recently purchased Groupon.

They were delightful to deal with. Check them out at wineinsiders.com.

Audio Goodness: The Supergirls

I had found a beautiful review in Entertainment Weekly of a book called The Supergirls, Fashion Feminism, Fantasy and the History of Comic Book Heroines. It got an “A-“and said:

“Sharp and lively—and just obsessive enough about women who wear capes and boots to be cool but not creepy. [Madrid] clearly loves this stuff. And he's enough of a(n) historian to be able to trace the ways in which the portrayal of sirens and supergirls has echoed society's ever-changing feelings about women and sex.”

Comic books? Super-powered heroines? Neat!

I grabbed it, read it, and loved it. So I then tracked down the author Mike Madrid and emailed him. I sent him a sample of what the book could sound like and asked what he thought.

But this wasn’t a title that was a decade in the back lists, this was published about a year before and his response to my query was unclear. He loved the sample, but told me that his publisher “didn’t have any plans to do an audiobook at this time.”

Ah, nuts. I’d struck out. “So it goes, Billy Pilgrim.”

And so I’d consigned the clip to the trash bin as maybe something I could send out as a sample to show the quality of my work.

About a month later I get an email saying, “Thanks for your emails to Mike, why don’t you send me a copy?” Cheers, Tod. T-O-D.

Wow.

This would be my first experience dealing directly with the publisher. It was kind of weird at first. I thought that since there were authors who spoke directly to creators like me that that would be the way it was always done.

Not so. Hence the, “My publisher has no plans to produce an audiobook at this time” part of the conversation.

After a couple of days, Tod liked the recording and said, “Let’s chat.” And we set up a phone call.

Meeting Tod was exhilarating from the first three words. I heard the words, “This is Tod,” and they sounded…well, not how I thought they would sound…not “un-Tod-like” per se…just…umm…

“You weren’t expecting Tod to be female, were you?” she said.

Whenever we spoke on the phone I was keen to have Tod take me seriously and so I amped up everything I said. Not only was the book going to be “good” it was going to be “amazing!” We would not just be “successful,” we would “achieve world domination.”

And there she stopped me.

“No World Domination,” she said.

And she explained to me the company philosophy on her website exterminatingangel.com:

 “Making a living, not a killing. Reorganizing our lives on a human scale. Dreaming how we want our lives and our world to be.” 

So…no World Domination. Got it.

And as a grace note, Tod also communicates in email with no capitalization. It was a bit like having a correspondence with the poet e. e. cummings.

Over the years I even got to meet her and her husband, film-director Alex Cox, in person, when I drove to and watched WONDER WOMEN! THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICAN SUPERHEROINES at the University of Colorado campus in Boulder where Alex was teaching at the time.

With the audiobook itself, what I tried to do was to make the characters feel as though they were in their appropriate eras. Wonder Woman from the 40’s sounds different from the Wonder Woman of the 70’s. That “Linda Carter” lady had quite an influence!

But I asked myself when recording it. “How close should I sound? Should I try to almost impersonate Linda Carter for 70’s Wonder Woman or other film actors for their modern-day counterparts?

No.

What I wanted to do was to capture the essence of the character without feeling like I was doing an impersonation. Which unless it’s pitch-perfect will be something that is ultimately nit-picked about the book.

Another worry and perhaps the only real criticism I heard about the book in print form was the fact that there were no illustrations. This would be a book about female superheroes in a medium that is dependent upon a visual component and that wasn’t in the text.

But what was in the text was the pure joy that Mike Madrid had for the subject. He’s a lifelong fan of comics and has since published two other volumes on women in comics and written pieces for Fashion Canada in addition to being interviewed for the documentary I mentioned earlier.

From a meta standpoint, my daughters were getting older and I wanted them to have a window into geek and nerd culture. I thought The Supergirls might be that window.

I was a little concerned that a book on comic book heroines might be better voiced by a female narrator. But my thoughts on how to deflect those critical bullets were two-fold. One, the author was male and as a narrator, it was his voice that I most needed to capture, his passion for the subject and why it was culturally important. And two, this book had been out for more than a year. If someone was going to step up and create it they’d had the opportunity and passed.

If I stepped in and made this book, it would be, for me, the perfect combination of subject and medium. The important thing was to convey the passion surrounded by a Lasso of Truth.

Oh, sweet line! What am I going to say when I finish the audio blog about Wonder Woman Unbound…ugh!

Check out The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy and the History of Comic book Heroines by Mike Madrid, narrated by me, Colby Elliott at Audible.com. And check out all of the cool new upcoming projects at lastwordaudio.com. If you’d like to stay updated sign up for Monkey Missives.

Next Time on Geekery and Wine: Plants vs. Zombies, a great Pinot Noir and Werewolves of War.

Until next time…

My Geeks

My Nerds

My dear, dear friends…

Adieu

Death Note, Barolo and Pest Control

So, trigger warning!

We’ll be talking a bit about whitewashing and cultural appropriation!

So, grab your favorite manga and that vintage VHS copy of Akira, it’s time for Geekery and Wine.

This is the second in this particular flight of four.

THE GEEK SIDE

So, I wanted to watch an anime with my eldest daughter who is 16. Anything our family watches on TV can usually be described as a “so-and-so show.” This means if I watch it with my wife, it is a “Mommy and Daddy Show.” Game of Thrones would be one such example. Then there are “Daddy/Daughter Shows” wherein both my high school junior and her 6^th grade sister watch with me. But I also feel that each of them should have individual shows that we experience one-on-one and can have as a shared vocabulary.

But the question was, where to go next with anime?

Ouran Host Club was a huge favorite of my eldest daughter, she was introduced to it by her then best friend and Fairy Tail had already been one that she’d enjoyed, too. Her adult older brother had shared Fullmetal Alchemist, InuYasha, and Black Butler.

I love when anime has a science fiction or fantasy element but there are so many directions to go. And I wanted to be sure that it was sophisticated enough for the two of us to merit real, in-depth discussion.

Like many Gen X-ers, I came to anime through the classic Speed Racer re-runs of the 1970’s, I then re-discovered anime when I was in my early 20’s with movies like Akira, Fist of the North Star and Ninja Scroll, but I didn’t think that starting a daddy-daughter anime with people’s heads exploding in plumes of blood was the way to go. And to be honest I felt a little out of touch. So I checked on the Nerdist website and found Dan Casey’s The Dan Cave. And in a short film’s length of time (that short film incidentally called the “The Best Anime for Beginners to Watch) I had 10 series to ponder, some were classics that I knew, others would be discoveries for the both of us. And on that list was Death Note.

Now, everyone who has ever been an angsty teen has wished for the ability to command the power of life and death, right?

No…just…me?

Well, what if you found a mystical book where you could write a person’s name and method of their demise and it would come true? This is what happens to our protagonist Light Yagami. And that’s the premise of Death Note.

What follows is an amazing animated series about how power corrupts, with a cat-and-mouse game where our anti-hero is desperately trying to continue his crusade against evil while subtly being corrupted by it and not be caught by the authorities, thrown in for good measure.

It has monsters, both human and otherworldly. Shinigami, supernatural ministers of Death, ultimately control most of the Death Notes (each has their own copy) and these demonic creatures are only visible to those humans who are holding one of the stray Death Notes.

What made this extra compelling to start was the added bonus, a live-action version of Death Note that came out last summer. So, after finishing the series we could cap it off with the live-action film!

We watched the entire series together followed by the Netflix film and I’m not sure how I feel about it. At least insofar as the live-action goes. The anime was excellent.

Generally speaking, anime is always much more dramatic: the villains are more arch, the victims more innocent, simply from the way they are drawn. Lines extending away from a sprinting character to imply super-fast running is not something commonly seen in live-action (unless it’s the 2010 release of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World which was wonderful, btw).

What could a live-action film bring to the table that the anime could not? And why create something in another art form that was already amazing in its current incarnation?

Well, for one thing, a Netflix audience will have a wider reach than a manga or anime…at least in the US and add fans to the ranks of Death Note who don’t read Japanese comics or watch anime. It could even bring them back to the original manga.

I was so excited I couldn’t wait until we finished the series. I watched the trailer for the live-action film.

Two things struck me. One, westernized again and two, Asian bleaching.

The original series takes place in Japan. This was in Seattle.

Which is fine, there is a very large Asian population in Seattle.

But that large Asian population was ignored and the main characters were mostly Caucasian.

Fast Forward one Month 

Now that I’ve seen this movie on Netflix I can say it is…an interesting interpretation. The relationship between Light and his love interest Misa-Misa in the anime has been replaced by a more earnest relationship between Light Turner and Mia. While in the anime the romantic relationship is hopelessly unbalanced, Misa-Misa seems at times an absolute fool for Light and has no internal goals except winning his affection, in the film, they are equal partners and the scriptwriter takes that equality as a means to have their relationship be very conflict-ridden and angsty.

I know that we are taking 37, half-hour episodes and condensing it into a 2-hour film. And I can appreciate that that means streamlining aspects of the overall story arc. But, it seems to me that there was more to be gleaned from the anime than just the names of the main characters and the concept.

Part of the reason I loved the anime Death Note was BECAUSE it was Japanese! Taking the Japanese culture out of it would have made it somehow less special, less transformative. Why would someone simply want the human story without the spices that made it distinctive?

Think about it in terms of food. You can have a bowl of spaghetti or you can have a bowl of Pho. Both are ostensibly a bowl of noodles, but the flavors, the nuances, and personal connotations are widely disparate.  

And yet…and yet…

Looking closely, the art style of the Death Note anime anglicizes some of the main characters. The character of Misa-Misa has a distinctly paler skin tone than that of the other characters. And the antagonist L’s eyes are rounded and wider than any of the other characters. Perhaps this is to imply that he is naïve in the ways of the world (a wide-eyed innocent) or that he keeps his eyes wide open while investigating the Kira murders. Probably the latter…but it could be something else…

I went online and read an article in The Hollywood Reporter from April 4th, 2017 entitled 'Ghost in the Shell': 4 Japanese Actresses Dissect the Movie and Its Whitewashing Twist.  The issue of whitewashing discussed in the article was prompted by the live-action film version of Ghost in the Shell wherein the character of Major was played by Scarlett Johansson, a white actor.

What struck me was this quote:

When THR interviewed Japanese fans about the whitewashing claims, they weren't bothered by it, and neither was Mamoru Oshii, who directed the 1995 anime version. How do you feel about their response?

[Actor Ai]Yoshihara: People in Japan worship white people.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/ghost-shell-4-japanese-actresses-dissect-movie-whitewashing-twist-990956

This leaves me feeling really conflicted. I understand that having an international star like Johansson can bring extra box office punch to a film. But at the same time seeing characters that are so distinctly Asian in origin played by someone outside that culture seems just wrong. Especially considering that there aren’t that many mainstream Hollywood films that feature an Asian lead to begin with.

This also led me to do a bit more research on cultural appropriation and I found a really great article from mic .com

The article’s title?

Why do white people still not get that cultural appropriation isn’t ever cultural appreciation?

https://mic.com/articles/184170/why-do-white-people-still-not-get-that-cultural-appropriation-isnt-ever-cultural-appreciation#.a05s7F942

The gist was this: a white artist wears an item that is sacred to a culture or religion but wears it simply as ornamentation, without any of the cultural weight it also carries, thereby lessening it. And that white artist is free to simply discard the item when it is no longer cool. Whereas a person from that culture doesn’t have that luxury.

And I absolutely see it. Here is where my question comes in. Every artist lives in the world is waiting or even actively-seeking for something to fire their imagination. Something. Anything that is not the same same-ness that he or she experiences every day. And artists have this innate desire to seek The Truth with capital T’s on both words. But I don’t think any of us is under the illusion that we will find The Truth sitting there in whole cloth form. We need to find pieces of it and somehow make a tapestry into a whole. For example, for a time I thought I could find peace and serenity in Yoga, I obsessed over it. I tried to practice every day. I subscribed to Yoga Digest, I learned what each of the asanas were, and I tried to tell others about why they were significant. And I sought it for its contrast.

I’m not sure that, as an artist, I could create from just the elements of my own experience. There must be something exceptional to add to the mix otherwise why leave the house?

THE WINE SIDE

Ahh, Barolo…when I start to talk about it I think about challenging wines. What makes a wine challenging?

Prestige? Awards from the major reviewers? Wine Spectator? Robert Parker? James Suckling?

A high price tag? Could be all of the above.

Barolo itself is made from the Nebiollo grape and is from the Northern Italian region of Piedmont. And it’s true that this wine is usually pretty pricey. What I try to do to lessen that price tag is buy this wine younger and then leave it in the basement and let it get expensive. There were some that might have balked at the 15 dollar-a-bottle price of Cercius from the last show, but a passing glance at wine.com finds that you can’t even find a Barolo for less than $32 a bottle. A little searching did find one for $25 on another site. But still, it’s not an everyday wine, at least not for me.

And maybe that is what makes me think of this as a more advanced wine. A special occasion wine. One of those wines that you uncork an hour or more before company comes to “let it breathe.”

Alright let’s stop right there. For some out there, this last line crosses that pretentiousness Rubicon.

Phrases like:

                “The wine has good legs”

                Or “this has notes of…”

                Or lastly, “An Oaky…usually Chardonnay”

But you get the idea.  And in a lot of those situations, I would be the first to agree with you. But when it comes to aeration…yeah, I think there’s some validity there.

Wine aerators are easy to find and not very expensive. Some of them are simple devices inserted into the top of the bottle that introduce oxygen into the wine as it is poured. I’ve tried the Rabbit and the Vinturi and friends ask me, “Does it even do anything?”

The short answer is, yes.

Another, more familiar, technique is decanting, wherein wine is poured into a vase shaped pitcher. The vase is usually somewhat squat in silhouette, with the bottle of wine pooling at the bottom and an air space above, all enclosed in glass. This presumably gives the wine more contact with oxygen than it might through the thin neck of the bottle.

And finally, most effectively, I’ve poured the whole bottle of wine through an aerator into a decanter and then…ya know, let it respirate.

The craziest thing I’ve ever heard of though is when, a few years back, I went on a wine and food tour in downtown Denver. The gentleman next to me owned a liquor store in the trendy LoDo part of the city and he mentioned that instead of using an aerator he simply used…an immersion blender.

Whoa. Violent!

It reminds me of the Orc Barbarian in a D&D party who decides to use his battle axe to deal with the annoying flies around him. But, at least according to the liquor store owner, it works like a champ.

So, what kind of wines need aeration?

“Tight wines.”

When my wife takes a sip of a wine that is overwhelming either in its dryness or some other flavor that is displeasing (high alcohol content, bitterness, etc.) she might tell me that a wine is “tight” and needs an aeration to loosen up. Putting a little oxygen in the mix gives the wine a chance to get a little further into the chemical process that occurs when the bottle is opened and sometimes even an increase of a couple of degrees in temperature can help.

What about the wine itself?

I was able to save a 2005 Barreri & Rovati Barolo Riserva and it was really special. The first thing I noticed was the color of this wine. Perhaps it was due to the varietal or it could be the age, but I noticed it’s almost rust-colored hue. When I began started drinking wine and experimenting with different regions and varietals I thought that a rust-colored wine meant it had gone bad. It hadn’t and doesn’t, of course. Even some Pinot Noir’s have that reddish-orange color.

So, how does it taste? Taking a sip, yes it needed some oxygen. But it was going to be a really strong Italian wine, so that meant an alcohol content of at least 14%. It tasted a bit like bing cherries, too, which I appreciate. It went really well with steak on the grill, but it would have been great with pasta in a red sauce, too. And as an added bonus, I’d gotten it at Trader Joe’s for around $20, so that was cool.

And our connection point between Death Note and Barolo?

Death Note was first serialized in Shueisha's manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Jump from December 2003 to May 2006. Putting our Barolo about dead center in its run.

Audio goodness – Pest Control Liner Notes

As much as I’d like to, I can’t take credit for discovering Pest Control by Bill Fitzhugh. That honor goes to my old friend Eric. Back in 1997 he called me and said, “This is your book! It’s full of references to music, has crazy characters and wonderful amounts of humor.”  Mind you, this was in the days before I was a narrator. This was just one friend recommending a book to another. And, a small piece of advice? If you have an “Eric” in your life, that friend who truly knows your taste and gives you amazing recommendations all the time, keep them on speed-dial…always.

Next time we got together he loaned me his copy…and he was sooo right. Pest Control is the story of Bob Dillon (D-i-l-l-o-n), a New Yorker, trying to start his own exterminating business. He puts out flyers to promote the new business endeavor and, due to a weak grasp of the English language of some foreign ne’er do wells, they mistake Bob for an international contract killer. Much hilarity ensues.

Now, those who have caught my live panels at comics’ conventions know I met Bill Fitzhugh because he was audacious enough to put his email on the back of his books.

I’ll show him, I thought. I WILL email him.

“Hi Bill, my name is Colby Elliott and I really love your work. Question, “Do you own the rights to produce audio for Pest Control?”

His response, “I own the rights for all my work.”

“Let me send you a sample of Pest Control, let me know what you think.”

His response was cautious, “I don’t open files from people I don’t know that I received on the internet.”

I get that. And luckily I had a giant spool of CD’s sitting next to my computer to burn off and send to him out in sunny California.

After a week or so we got back in touch, he’d liked it and I started recording Pest Control.

It was difficult. My previous book, Masters of Deception was non-fiction. This would be my first fiction book. There were characters with accents that spanned the globe: German, French, regional US and even some African countries thrown in for good measure. And some distinctive characters that came on scene briefly early in the book and then appeared tens of chapters later. I had to be very precise when writing my Character Bible, my handbook for keeping characters straight.

Additionality, I was, until then, still working from hard copy. But the sounds of page turns were a pain to edit out later so I decided it was time to go digital. I’d gotten a Kindle but I worried that the “click” of the page turn would be audible in the recordings. Something to keep an eye on.

I am very grateful to Bill for giving a new kid a chance. His faith in our collaborations has now yielded 3 audiobooks to date with another on tap for 2018 with one even winning an AudioFile Earphones award in 2017. But we did have our rough patches. You see, in addition to being a new audiobook producer I was also a new small business owner. And that, as anyone can tell you, has its own challenges. Once while trying to get our paperwork ducks in a row, I unknowingly sent him all of my personal information. He gave me a concerned phone call and let me know what had happened. But, Bill being Bill and truly unflappable said, “Oh, I was just headed out to go get a mortgage and open a few new credit cards.”

Thanks, Bill, for being patient with a newbie.

Next Time:

Destiny, Tremo and The Supergirls

So, until then…

My Geeks,

my nerds,

my dear, dear friends…adieu!