This Week in Geek (8-14/08/11)

Buys

This week, I got a few new "geekery"-related t-shirts (coming soon to a workplace near me!), Julian Barnes' latest novel, The Sense of an Ending, and a few DVDs - Duncan Jones' Moon (because I liked his Source Code), Mad Monkey Kung Fu, Five Shaolin Masters, Executioners of Shaolin, Martial Arts of Shaolin, and The Incredibles (can you believe I've not yet seen it?).

"Accomplishments"

I was visiting family most of the week, so not a lot of geekery...

DVDs: Traders was a mid-90s Canadian series about high finance on Bay Street (Toronto's Wall Street) and a particular favorite of mine. I tend to like workplace dramas that immerse you in a world you don't quite understand, nor need to, but seem completely authentic (like The West Wing or The Unit's first two seasons). Traders, despite the cheap, awful credits sequence is slick, edgy and modern to this day, but of course, I like it for the characters. I forgot how much I loved to hate Adam Cunningham (Bruce Gray), the duplicitous head of the brokerage firm, but also how sorry I felt for him getting outmaneuvered by the young mavericks of the show (the always classy Sonja Smits and Medium's David Cubitt). Certainly, it's the best work Patrick McKenna's ever done (from the Redgreen Show to this, no contest). The first season is strong, fun and dramatic, and it's my hope that if I spread the word, enough units will be sold to warrant the release of its four other seasons. After all, the first ends in a cliffhanger!

Books: Haven't read fantasy in a long, long while. When I was a teenager, my diet put the genre on par with science fiction, i.e. I read a lot of it. But by the time my role-playing ways turned away from Dungeons & Dragons in university, I also turned my back on sword&sorcery. This week, airport terminals and plane rides in my immediate future, I was looking for something short and compact in my pile of unread second hand books when I found the first three Elric books. On the heels of reading and enjoying Chris Roberson's Elric comic, I thought, why not start my Moorcockian education in earnest? The first book, Elric of Melniboné, introduces the main characters efficiently and manages to tell a complete adventure despite being part of something larger. The Shakespearean rythms of Moorcock's dialog and prose spoke to me almost immediately and it I like how it was basically an anti-Lord of the Rings (I absolutely cannot get into Tolkien's style). Elric is a man whose greatest weakness is his morality, which replaces the classical hero's hubris while still leading him down to the same doomed path. A vivid beginning.

Hyperion to a Satyr posts this week:
III.i. Briefings - Zeffirelli '90
III.i. Briefings - Kline '90

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