Too busy writing to post

But here are a few links:

In place of my regular gaming post, check out Cool Mini Or Not, which is, well, exactly as advertised.

If you want to brave the elements for a show, here are some new reviews:

Talkinbroadway: Well and and Peer Gynt and the Poetry of Pizza (mmm, pizza...)

And don't forget Lost is back tomorrow. No clever links for this, but I'll buzz in with opinions after the broadcast.

Right, this public television magazine isn't going to edit itself -- as much as I would like it to.

Buffy the Torchwood Slayer?

Torchwood Series 1

(BBC Video)

Torchwood Series 2

(BBC America)

Spun off from the revitalized Doctor Who franchise, Torchwood is an X-Files type show,  though this time its set in Wales and has five smoldering characters to craft sexual tension. The first series got good numbers on cable BBC3, so the second has moved a station up to BBC2. The reaction from critics and fans was a bit more mixed.

Put me in that camp as well. There's plenty to love on Torchwood (I'll get to that in a moment), but the show has a tendency to be loud brash and "modern" at the expense of clearly told stories and well-defined characters.

However, when it clicks, Torchwood can be amazing. The show's bleak look at life on earth is one of the darkest on television. It's a world where no good deed goes unpunished.

The concept of Torchwood comes from Doctor Who. It's a secret branch of the British government that researches and protects the country from alien threats. They also scavenge what they can from what they find, often using devices that they do not fully understand. At the end of the second season of the new Doctor Who, Torchwood in London is destroyed. There are, however, other Torchwoods, including one in Cardiff. There's a "rift" in space and time there, which allows all sorts of weirdness to fall through. Captain Jack Harkness -- last seen being brought back to life in the far future at the end of the first new Doctor Who season -- is in charge. And his resurrection has gone further than that -- the Captain can't die.

He's joined by a quarter of young and hot investigators who work in semi-secret (their existence is known -- it's hard to be subtle when you have a massive SUV with "Torchwood" written on the side -- but somehow kept quiet from the general public) on cases that are both science-fictiony and fantastic. 

As I noted before, sometimes the flash gets in the way of storytelling. The "cannibals in Wales" story really doesn't make any sense, while the "alien fight club" one is so derivative and silly that it undermines the very real confusion the main characters are feeling at that point.

Yet Torchwood can also hit on all cylinders. Sapphire and Steel creator Peter Hammond works his signature, creepy magic in "Small Worlds," where Jack and the team meet up with the forces of fairie and come across a situation that they cannot "win." "Out of Time" brings three ordinary people from the 1950s forward to the 21st century and explores their culture shock and efforts to cope in a sort of reverse Life on Mars scenario. Finally, we learn some truths about the immortal and multi-sexual captain in "Capt. Jack Harkness," when he travels back in time to the 1940s and meets his namesake. The episode also features some of John Barrowman's best acting in the series -- and one of the finest and most honest gay kisses I've ever seen on television.

Season two (running Saturday nights on BBC America in the states; on BBC2 in Britain) kicks off with "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang," which features the good and bad of the first series. There are lots of flash cuts and intrusive incidental music, and the plot -- well, it holds together a bit better than "Countrycide." To kick things off, James Marsters was brought in to play one of Jack's old flames. Marsters is basically playing Spike from his Buffy days, just without the vampire bit (though we never see him in daylight...) He brings a nice energy to the proceedings and it's fun to see the character again, no matter the name, but it does distract from the new chemistry of the team, which has grown since the season one finale. The creators have noticed the issues of the first series and are promising some adjustments. We'll see how that plays out over the next few months.

Riding with the truckers

There was something else this blog was supposed to cover... Oh, that's right: Music!

Drive-By Truckers Brighter Than Creation’s Dark

I’ve never hidden my love of this Alabama-based collective. Their mix of traditional southern music styles – from raging rock to blues to country to soul – with the fury and honesty of punk drew me in from the first time I heard their opus Southern Rock Opera.

Over the years, the band has gone through a number of lineup changes and stylistic shifts, but the underlying brilliance has not faded. Coming off their stellar support performance on Bettye Lavette’s The Scene of the Crime, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark finds the Truckers in another epic mood, crafting a long, complex and more-often-than-not, thrilling musical ride.

With three songwriters and vocalists, the band’s eclecticism is its calling card. What binds it all together is the excellent playing throughout, including contributions by legendary keyboardist Spooner Oldham, who helps to anchor the diffuse music into a cohesive whole.

Songwriter/vocalist Patterson Hood calls this album a “grower.” Which is more than encouraging. I already love Brighter Than Creation’s Dark. How will I feel after it “grows” on me?

Disfear Live the Storm

I could really do some shorthand with this review and just say: "Excellent Scandi-crust D-beat hardcore fronted by former At the Gates frontman Tomas Lindberg." Now, for those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, I'll take this one step at a time.

"Scandi-crust." Scandinavian-based "crust" is a particular style of punk rock that is based on heavy, metal-style riffs. The guitars are usually downtuned, which makes the music more menacing. Crust was an offshoot of the anarchist hardcore of the 1980s, with England's Amebix usually cited as the style's ground zero. Scandinavia (in this case, Sweden) has spawned tons of extreme punk and metal bands over the years, from the church-burning black metal acts to a legion of pissed-off punk rockers.

To jump ahead a bit, Tomas Lindberg seems to have been a member of all of the Swedish bands in the last decade, though it really is "only" half a dozen. At the Gates took death metal (the intense and technical style that emerged out of the 1980s thrash scene) and added enough melodies and harmonies to give the style a fresh kick. Since then, millions of bands have copied the style, but few have managed it as well as At the Gates. After the band imploded, Lindberg went off into punk rock (with occasional forays into metal, such as The Crown) while the bulk of the band became the Haunted. At the Gates will reunite for the first time since the middle 1990s this summer for a string of concerts.

To move back, "D-beat" is another sub-strain of hardcore punk rock. In this case, the name is drawn from the signature drum beat, which is powerful and quite easy to hang a couple of chords and riffs on and make memorable hardcore. It started mainly with angry  Brits Discharge, though there is also a Scandinavian school that started around the same time, followed by others around the world (Japan has a particularly good dis-scene). Like At the Gates, millions of bands have followed in Discharge's footsteps, utilizing the beat, a riff or two and a few lines of lyrics to spread their message of, er, war is bad and we're all going to die horribly in a nuclear war and, oh, the cops aren't really cool either (OK, it does beyond this, but sometimes it's hard to tell).

So what makes Disfear (note the "dis" prefix) such a great purveyor of the style? Well, Lindberg sings for all those bands for a reason -- his vocals are distinct and powerful, even when he's just yelling his head off. The band is made up of seasoned pros who have plied this kind of music for years and no how to take the seemingly limited tools and make it fresh. The 10 songs here are loaded with raw, raw power, but power that is molded into something focused. The band hits a number of highs here, including longtime live favorite "The Furnace" and the punishing album closer "Phantom." So, yeah, excellent Scandi-dis-crust. And in the middle of winter, what else does a hard rock fan want except something so intense it melts away the snow and ice?

And for a bit more: this month's column from Lavender, my long-awaited Best of 2007 list.

How I fell into the rabbit hole

(Ed's life of gaming, part two)

So how did this all begin? What brought me to the point where my home is decorated with garishly painted miniatures in a variety of violent poses -- and drawn from numerous fantasy and science fiction settings -- and spend most of my time "watching" TV actually hunched over my painting station (one corner of my coffee table, covered in newsprint) with a seemingly endless supply of pewter and plastic figures?

It started in Green Bay. Well, actually, no that's not quite true. I was actually living in Sturgeon Bay (up in Door County, about 45 minutes from Green Bay) when I took the miniature plunge. Now I'd long had a vague interest in "that" side of the gaming and comic book stores, even while I spent most of my time turning colorful pieces of cardboard 90 degrees (er, playing Magic: The Gathering). The figures intrigued me -- I mean, they looked cool and the guys (and the occasional gal) playing them looked like they were having a lot of fun. But I looked at the prices on them and saw how many it took to play, and figured it was out of my price range, especially if I wanted to feed my Magic habit at the same time.

Moving to Door County both 1) took me out of the Magic gaming circles, which took some of the interest away in collecting the cards and 2) meant I was actually making a living wage that left me with a bit of discretionary income. 

And there was a new gateway drug in 1999. While most Games Workshop (the English-based market leader in fantasy/science fiction tabletop gaming) systems required quite an investment, they had come out with a skirmish-based fantasy game called Mordheim that you could play with the contents of a starter box (which cost $60). I watched a few games, got a feel for what it was about and decided to take the plunge. With a bit of help from the more experienced gamers I was ready to start.

Well, not to start gaming. First, I needed to learn the arcane art of model assembly. Inside the Mordheim box was a rule book, a small bag of dice, short, red plastic rulers called "whup ass" sticks by the gang and several hunks of molded plastic. These were "sprues." Each one contained a variety of heads, torsos limbs, weapons and other equipment. With the help of a handy X-acto Knife, I began to extract the pieces and then use a pot of superglue to bond them together. Truthfully, I spent more time slicing into my fingertips and gluing my fingertips together than actually getting the models assembled (nowadays, I use hand snips on the plastic sprues; I still glue my fingertips together). I worked on the minis for a bit that evening at Rogue Traders in Green Bay, and then headed home to complete the job. It took some time but I got it done.

I hadn't bought any paint or brushes, so I couldn't start that side of the work. Impatiently, I went out to Wal Mart and picked up some spray paint to prime the models. That would have been OK, except I bought a glossy instead of a matte, giving the models a rather bright shine -- one that eventually made it rather tough to paint. The box provided two "sides," either a group of human mercenaries or sentient giant rat-men called Skaven. Since I'd used the glossy on the Skaven, I worked on the human side instead. Understand, I hadn't held a paint brush since high school, but here I was  trying to pick out tiny tiny details on miniatures that were about an inch tall. Needless to say, those early experiences didn't turn out the best, but I found that the work satisfied a need deep inside. The mixture of collecting, gaming and creating was nearly perfect for me.

It didn't take long for me to go from that gateway into the hard stuff. A month or so later, I picked up a copy of Games Workshop's science-fiction game, Warhammer 40,000 (typically called 40k). There, I was introduced to a dark far future where my only hope sat with my sloppily painted forces. Again, the background sucked me in, but it was the gameplay -- with a mixture of strategy, brute force (from the minis, not the players) and furious dice rolling -- that kept me going. 

In the last eight years, I've been through tons of game systems and a dizzying amount of models. Often, I get rid of rule books as I drift away from a particular game, but the Mordheim rulebook still sits in a place of pride on my bookshelf. (The glossy Skaven, however, were long ago sacrificed to one crazy conversion project or another.)

A little bit of this, a little bit of that.

I alluded to this book yesterday, but lovers of Victorian crime fiction, steampunk, the X-Files, super heroes, Lovecraftian horrors and other oddities will get a thrill out of The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club (Monkeybrain Books), a new collection of short stories by Kim Newman.

Sherlock Holmes fans will recognize the name of the Diogenes Club, the elite, nearly silent establishment favored by Mycroft Holmes, which we got a couple of glimpses of in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. Kim Newman draws in characters from history, fiction and his own creations from other books in this jolly collection of short stories, where the members of the club serve as a type of super-secret service, fighting against dangers from beyond the earth. The stories stretch from the end of the 19th century up until the late 1970s and the storytelling style changes with the times, such as a hardboiled tale of the Elder Gods set in the 1940s. 

I've been a fan of Newman's for quite a few years, especially his similar Anno Dracula novels (fictional and real characters interact in a world where Dracula was not defeated and has gone one to take over the British Empire). Even if the characters caught in the cross-currents (a couple even show up from novels Newman wrote in the Warhammer fantasy gaming world) fit in well with the others. Newman draws the characters extremely well (Conan Doyle makes for a great supporting player in one tale) and the tales themselves are constructed quite well. Once you get past the cultural clutter (one of the later stories, for example, includes the Manson Family and Lon Chaney Jr.), Newman's story are rock solid, full of interesting twists and turns and an energy that never flags.

New Link (a talkinbroadway one should be coming along soon as well):

SpotLight Awards

And, oh dear, Heath Ledger is dead. 

At last, a new year's resolution

Hey, it's something I like to take my time on, especially since many of the worthy items (being more organized in my business, writing more, eating better) are things I should do without any influence from a "resolution."

The answer came last week, as I scanned the two shelves full of books that I have bought -- many of them brand new -- over the last years that I haven't read. A quick count came up with more than 50 unread titles. Quite a few of which I really want to read. So, my resolution is to clean off those shelves over the coming months. Thankfully (well, sort of thankfully I guess) I don't have much in the way of money for fun stuff right now anyway, so it's not too hard to just plow my way through these books. I've already made a tiny dent, finishing up a couple of books I picked up recently (including Kim Newman's terrific oddball collection the Secret Files of the Diogenes Club; a couple of misc. Brian Lumley anthologies; and J.R.R. Tolkein's The Children of Hurin, not to be a crowd-pleasing epic anytime soon, but does include the Professor getting all Greek on us with an incest subplot). Books on the horizon include Neal Stephenson's recent trilogy, a China Meiville book for young audiences and George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire (though I may wait for book five -- George promises it will be out by this fall).

The resolution has cascaded to my other interests, so I'm staying away from new video games until I finish some of those I've bought (and since the last one was the Half-Life 2 "five games in one" Orange Box, that may take a while), while I've cut off most of the new miniatures until I finish some unfinished projects (there are five, plus some misc. ones that I finally put some paint on) that are hiding under the couch. We'll see how it goes.

Will you come down the rabbit hole with me?

As I've slowly expanded the scope of this blog, It has become more and more a "State of Ed" report. As that is the case, I've decided to expand the scope into some more far-flung areas. No, I'm not talking politics (other, more astute writers, can explain this much better than I can -- I'm an arts writer at heart) or even sports (though that may creep in from time to time). No, I'm talking gaming. Not video gaming (that's already a part of that) or gambling (no interest at all), but pure, geeky fantasy gaming.

Let me move back a step first. Over the years, I've put a lot of thought into my hobbies. This perhaps is a sign that I overanalyze my life. Still, it is something that I've mused about, no matter what the hobby is at the time. This thinking has led me to a few conclusions:

1) A hobby should be fun. That should be self-evident, but who hasn't found themselves gritting their teeth over an activity that Seemed Like a Good Idea At The Time?

2) A hobby should be a way to connect with other people. Whether or not you like these people can often dictate if it is worth doing or not.

3) A hobby should be, at a certain level, a worthless activity. Not that it can't make you happy, but I'm suspicious of activities with some kind of financial goal at the end. Playing poker with friends with small change? Fun. Playing poker (or Magic: The Gathering for that matter) for high stakes? Er, not really for me. Our society is really geared toward achievable goals, especially ones that may help us financially. At a certain point, people really need to re-embrace the kid inside and do things just for the sake of doing them. 

Over the years, my career has been based on taking the things that I love -- music, theater, writing, photography and the like -- and making them a part of my job. I don't regret this at all, but it does often leave me short on the point number 3. Over the years a number of activities have filled that last bit, from collecting comics to playing Magic: The Gathering (my biggest ever success was a second-place tournament finish that netted me about $30 in store credit; these days, my only play time with the game is the occasional prerelease tournament). In recent years, this part of me has turned, nearly exclusively, to tabletop miniature games.

In a nutshell, these are like the army games plenty of youngsters played as youth. You get your troops of green army men, set them up and let them fight imaginary battles. These more organized games that I play now have rules, statistics for each miniature and require lots and lots and lots of dice rolling. My own interests being what they are, they also focus on fantasy and science fiction settings, so you may command futuristic elves against a horde of Alien-like invaders; or have giant mythical beasts battle it out over a piece of territory. 

Silly? Of course. Fun? Oh heavens yes. It's like playing chess with a rainbow-colored assortment of pieces, all of which can be set up in a myriad of different ways each game.

The games can also be divided into two other primary types -- ones that use prepainted miniatures (Hero Clix, for example, allows you to fight gangs of Marvel, DC or independent superheroes against each other in a spandex-clad orgy of violence) and ones that require the owner to assemble and paint the miniatures themselves. While I have a smattering of the former (including a sweet giant AT-AT from a Star Wars game) my real love is in the later. My apartment is packed with these, from forces that have been completed to boxes of ones waiting for me to get the painting process.

It's a sometimes tedious but also engaging and therapeutic process. And when it works well, the results can be so satisfying. (Hmm, that's all kind of like writing, isn't it?) I'm going to take a look at this over the coming weeks, from army selection to painting to actually playing. I'm not so much interested in offering advice -- there are others far more skilled in all of this than myself -- but in exploring the hobby itself and what it means for me. Though I have been actively painting for years, the gaming side has fallen by the wayside. Now that I'm not working three or four jobs, I will try to get out more and more to actually play.

So do you want to come down the rabbit hole with me? If you do, be warned, you may find yourself with a box of space marines, a tub of glue and a smattering of paints before you know it.