Pan Kleks Illustrations, ranked worst to best

As generations of Polish children know, Pan Kleks runs a magical academy for boys whose names begin with the letter A. His school is on the edge of Storybook Land, and his pupils regularly cavort with talking dogs and robot boys. Created by Jan Brzechwa in a series of books over 50 years ago, Pan Kleks has been on movies and the stage, and his image has been brought to life by dozens of illustrators over the years. 

But who has best captured the essence of this mischievous scholar?

Let’s take a look.

The Anonymous

Uninspired knockoffs are a hazard of the publishing industry, and Pan Kleks is no exception. Poland is awash with various editions bearing uncredited, often amateurish artwork, most of which would drive any reasonable child to put the book quickly back on the shelf. Here are a few of the notable failures.

Anonymous One: Homeless Bird Afficionado

Sorry to make you look at this. 

Widely known as a light-hearted academic and scholar of great renown, Pan Kleks exists today as if Brzechwa had been channeling both Willy Wonka and Albus Dumbledore twenty years before either had been conceived. Unfortunately this edition features a lackluster effort that seems to be channeling the Johnny Depp’s ill-fated Wonka more than Brzechwa’s hero. Here, Kleks is a leering, world-weary pedant with a Dorothy Hamill helmet cut and a cut-rate parrot. No no no.

Anonymous Two: Rainbow-headed hippie.

Perhaps no illustration better emphasizes the danger of setting a story in an all-boy boarding school better than this one. As a parent, nothing would red-flag this school like a headmaster who is wearing an obviously fake beard. Why is Kleks’s mustache made of copper wire? Why does he look like a fifteen-year old? Yikes. The boy here is actually turning to flee, which is the proper decision.

Anonymous Three: Inappropriate Ingenue

I don’t know what this is, actually. It may in fact be the cover for a soundtrack to the one of the movie versions. Whatever the case, it seems strangely adult-oriented. Sultry Kleks in a tartan wrap, his head at an unnatural angle, perhaps inviting you in to hear the secrets of the cosmos in his one-man show?

No?

Anonymous Four: The Meth Lab Genius and his Young Apprentice

I don't really dislike this cover, but it's a solid meh here. Could be any mad scientist and his boy, really.

Anonymous Five: Tolkienesque Ennui

Whew! Now, I don’t like to take away points for creativity, but there is creativity, and then there is misguided innovation. This feels like a mid-seventies homage to Lord of the Rings, with Kleks as Gandalf to that redhead boy’s I’d-rather-be-having-second-breakfast Bilbo. But the worst sin is to have replaced joy and wonder with world-weary drudgery. Kleks looks disinterested, as if he’s about to wander off, and the boy is little more than a head on a bow-tie tether. I’ll give it credit for whimsy, though. Those expressions! (*me, whispering* Actually, to be honest, the more I look at this the more I like it.)

(*clearing throat*) Let’s move on to illustrators whose names I could find.

Jakob Kuzma

Finally someone knows Kleks should be fun! There is definitely a playful air to Kuzma’s take — the multicolored hair, the jaunty joker collar on the starling Matthew. The other-worldy cosmic vibe is strong, yet Kuzma stays true to Kleks’s iconic elements — the yellow waistcoat, rainbow hair, and strange mustache.

Agata Łukasza

Lukasza posits a strange theory of Kleks: that he is most intriguing in the abstract. Other than this one amazing hero-pose, most of her illustrations show Kleks as a shadowy grey outline, a curious choice given the colorful character she could have put on display.

The shadowy master in his cluttered secret room.

Marianna Sztyma

Kleks applying his trademark colored freckles.

Talented and clever, Sztyma takes an arthouse approach to Kleks. She allows her characters a rubbery anatomy, instilling her figures a loose-limbed joi d’vive. Her inclusion of random detritus in the margins is a direct callout to Szancer (see below). But Kleks again seems a bit young to be the holder of ancient mysteries; he feels a bit like that resident assistant who wants to be your best friend, not headmaster of his own academy.

The master receiving a fresh box of holes.

Mikolai Kamler

The classic ‘Kleks pouring rainbows for dinner while floating’ scene.

Now we are getting somewhere! Kamler brings a lot to the table. This feels most dedicated to the source: a long orange mustache, rainbow Einstein hair, a yellow waistcoat. Kamler’s Kleks is both clever-looking and fun, a spritely half-elf who finds it amusing to hang with the humans and dispense whatever wisdom he sees fit. Kudos to you, Kamler.

Adventure is out there!

Suren Vardanian

Vardanian brings a lightness and color to Kleks while still keeping a splotchy, anarchic line. Kleks’s hair is a savage rainbow, and his overall appearance is early Grateful Dead by way of Sgt. Pepper. Vardanian’s Kleks has also eliminated the mustache, which means there’s more room for an infectious, constant smile. The wardrobe update is a curious touch - Kleks is less an eccentric academic here, and more of demented majorette. A true original in the canon, Vardanian’s edition is a worthy runner-up to the original and still champion Kleks illustrator.

Top hat and spectacles… a true gentleman of magic knows how to accessorize.

Jan Marcin Szancer

Considered the alpha male of 20th century Polish illustrators, Szancer was the first to draw the infamous ‘Mr. Inkblot’ in the book’s original publication. In a happy convergence of 1950’s loose pen-and-ink mayhem with Brzechwa’s trippy kid-friendly prose, Szancer’s illustrations, like Tenniel’s Alice in Wonderland, are the gold standard to which all Kleks-icographers must aspire.

The unforgettable Teapot Train incident.

Strangely, Szancer seems to have ignored most of what those who came after regard as essential. Kleks’s hair is black, his mustache normal. His wardrobe isn’t as egregiously eccentric as many illustrations; he could be any well-appointed man about town (of the late 19th century, perhaps). And yet Szancer fills Kleks with a sense of play and whimsy that matches the tone of the book and helps create the mood of the story.

Overall Szancer displays in Pan Kleks what made him the premier Polish illustrator of his, or perhaps any, era. A loose, confident line, a distinctive color scheme, a dedication to detail bordering on obsessive clutter. Szancer knew that what kids want from a picture is stuff to look at, a composed portrait that leads the eye from detail to detail, picking out elements of scene that make up story.

I don’t know what’s happening here but damn I want this on my wall.

Epilog

Now, a confession. As to the matter of what happens in Pan Kleks, I’m not sure at all. I’ve watched parts of the movies (in Polish), but don’t know how faithful they are to the books. And since my Polish remains at the level of an intelligent Golden Retriever, and I have yet to find an English translation, it may be a while before I actually know what’s happening in these illustrations.

Updates will be provided as warranted by consumer demand, my own motivation, and the progression of my Polish skills.

Memed, my Hawk by Yashar Kemal

Vintage Turkish Cover

Sixteen months after I moved to Ankara, one of the leading literary figures of Turkey, Yashar Kemal, died. Kemal was a polarizing force of Turkish literature: charismatic and beloved by generations who came up in his wake, he was also a radical firebrand, a constant thorn in the government’s side. For these reasons, I’d long had his seminal novel Memed, my Hawk, on my radar – what could inspire so many, I wondered, but scare those in power? I had a surprising amount of trouble finding it in English here in Turkey until a few months after his death, on a trip to Istanbul, where I found a copy in a bookstore that caters to foreigners. Nearby, a Turkish bookstore had Kemal’s image on a three-story banner clinging to its side, andit was inhis shadow I walked home.

As I cracked Memed, my Hawk open in my AirBnB flat I wasn’t sure I’d be able to relate to a sixty year old Turkish masterwork. There I was, a stolid American of some privilege, embedded in modern Turkey, hundreds of miles and decades removed from the peasants the book jacket described. What could it say to me? An early passage describing the thistle fields of the eastern Taurus mountains seemed an ambiguous portent: “Thistles,” Kemal tells us, “generally grow in soil which is neither good nor bad but has been neglected.” And “They sprout so thick, so close together, that a snake would not be able to slip through them.” A curious start, but no matter. I soldiered on.

And after all this thistle business, I was somewhat surprised to discover that Memed, my Hawk is a swashbuckling, page-turning, adventure story chock-full of noble peasants and evil villains. It’s the story of a young boy named Memed who grows up oppressed and abused by the landlord of his village, Abdi Agha. Memed runs away (through the thistle fields, naturally), only to be recaptured and abused further. Eventually he falls in love with the Agha’s niece, which leads to further tragedy, and he must run to the hills to join a band of brigands, one of whom, Mad Durdu, steals “even the underpants” of his victims. Much of the rest of the book is Memed’s long quest to avenge himself against the evil, exploitive landlord, be reunited with his love interest, and (almost coincidentally), free the peasants from their oppressive yoke. There are gunfights, noble sacrifices, and tragic minor characters like Memed’s loyal right-hand man Jabbar, and the conflicted but good-hearted tracker, Lame Ali.

I was pleasantly surprised, then engrossed. I consider myself a fairly literary reader, but a great chunk of my soul is dedicated to cheap thrills from old school pulp: John D. MacDonald, Dashiell Hammet, Patricia Highsmith. The idea that Turkey of the mid-twentieth century had tastes similar to the USA, with clear distinctions of good and evil, and was prone to idealize a troubled past, made me feel connected to my adopted country in a new, comforting way. Could it be I’d found a spiritual cousin to the dozens of noble outlaw myths from Zorro and Robin Hood to Australia’s Kelley Gang and ballads of American gunfighters? Sure I had.

The early chapters of Memed, my Hawk adhere closely to a timeless mythology where technology is limited to guns and plows pulled by oxen. Memed’s first visit to a city is related in fairy-tale language to describe glittering windows of glass and the magic of paved roads:

“Near these was a big tiled building and beyond it lay the whole town, like a toy city, with its roofs of shiny corrugated iron, its whitewashed roofed terraces, and its red tiles. Memed and Mustafa stared at this site, their eyes wide with astonishment. How white it all was! How many houses there were! They couldn’t take their eyes off it.

“Crossing the Boklu stream, they entered the town. The windows shone in the sunlight. Thousands of shiny panes, like crystal palaces, just as Dursun had said. A town for fairy kings, with palaces.” (p. 60)

But then complications set in. By the book’s third act, the evil Agha has sought the help of an equally corrupt government stooge, and we learn about the fledgling government in Ankara, that the brigands crowding the hills are the remainders of the troops that rallied to fight the French and English eager to divide the remains of the Ottoman Empire amongst themselves, only to be foiled by the great Ataturk. Suddenly we’re in a real time and place. And it is a political world after all, even if Memed himself doesn’t care much about the national government.

Kemal would claim his whole life that he was simply a bard, a tale-teller, a link in a chain of storytellers running from the dim past to the sketchy future. But his claims of being apolitical seem at best disingenuous, however, since by 1952, when he wrote Memed, my Hawk, Kemal had been steeped in political intrigue for years. His father was, apparently, a feudal landlord, and was murdered in a mosque while five-year old Kemal watched; Kemal himself lost an eye in the incident. And as a teenager, Kemal would be arrested for trying to unionize tractor drivers in southern Anatolia.

How could such an attitude not be reflected in his writing? The thistles in the field were not merely for local flavor; peasants everywhere face thistles of all kinds, from harsh overlords to military dictatorships to corrupt oligarchs. Life is a hardship to be endured until finally Memed tells the peasants: burn down the thistles, then sow your field. Veiled in metaphor or not, this wasn’t a message a government could tolerate without reprisal, even from a beloved author and perennial Nobel prize short-lister. His outspoken nature, socialist leanings and minority status - he was a Kurd in a land ruled by Turks - would ultimately, in 1995, earn him a 20-month suspended jail sentence for speaking out on Turkey’s continued harsh treatment of its minorities.

A few months after reading Memed, my Hawk, I had the chance to visit the Eastern Taurus mountains, not far from Kemal’s birthplace and the fictional Taurus mountains of Memed’s world. As we left the airport and the driver steered our car up into the rugged foothills, I had an eerie feeling of deja vu: It was all as Yashar Kemal had described. The stony fields covered in thistle patches, the high canted stratas of crumbling dusty stone, and there, along the cliffs above the treacherous scree and shrubs: caves, dark holes where a brigand could hide out while gendarmes camped on the valley floor.

It was indeed a harsh landscape; in olden times you would need harsh sensibilities to survive it. I was used to the sprawling malls and sterile towers of Ankara, and was energized in this world of Yashar Kemal that still somehow existed. The geography he had embodied still teemed with goatherds, cows, and peasants resolved to the hardness of life but still with open hearts (and guesthouses) for outsiders. And it was there, where literature meets landscape, that I felt most connected to Memed, and to an Anatolian heartland most would assume has vanished.

You’re not the only movie exec who can greenlight his 5th grader’s movie script, Washburn.

Well, well, Washburn, my old friend, times must be hard at that sad little warehouse you call a motion picture studio. What's with this wild rumor I hear? This crazy announcment in Variety that you’ve signed your kid’s 5th grade English assignment to 'write a science fiction movie script' into production? “The Goo Aliens fight Space Pirates,” is it? Sony Pictures, with a budget of 80 million? With Singer to direct? I see, I see.

If this is some kind of scheme, it will never work. If you think you’ve got some kind of advantage over me, that’s where you’re wrong. Because you’re not the only movie exec who can greenlight his 5th grader’s movie script, Washburn.

My kid’s in the same school. Of course, you’d know that, since you put your little boy Braydon in Hodgington Academy not three months after my Sophia was enrolled. Bush league move, that, Washburn. Did you not consider my Sophia has the same English teacher, and had the same assignment?

“Rainbow Princess Cop” goes into principal photography in six weeks. Oh, and while I have your attention, three more words: Jolie. Gosling. Dench. That’s right: Dench. I sense you’re wincing a bit at that, aren’t you? I am forced to chuckle like a cheap melodrama villain. Mwa-ha-ha, Washburn.

It didn’t have to be like this. Remember the old days, when we were in film school in that wave following Spielberg and Scorsese? We were going to set the world on fire. We could have been partners. But here we are, forty years and countless trophy wives later, these children of our late middle age pitched in heated proxy wars for box office totals that mean nothing, nothing!

Actually, what was I thinking? They mean everything.

Nevertheless, this is the life we’ve chosen. Ever since Goldman made a fortune off of his grand-daughter's Time-Travel Unicorn Bounty-Hunter concept, this is the path the American public has chosen for Hollywood. We merely provide, Washburn, we do not dictate the tastes of a nation. But I digress…

I hear you have no third act, Washburn. I hear the Space Pirates have no motivation. Well, all the fire-breathing black-hole Godzilla clones Weta can render won’t get Blockso the One-eyed Pirate Prince through his dark night of the soul!

Yes, it’s true: Sophia made a copy of Braydon’s script. We know everything.

You thought you could keep this from me? Well, I thought we were friends! But co-chairing the PTA subcommittee on uniforms and field trips means nothing to you. I had to learn it from the front page of Variety like every other schmuck in this town.

I have Michael Bay on hold right now. This is what we call the endgame, my friend.

To conclude, I wish you the best, Washburn, I really do. I consider you my closest rival. Sophia (she really has her father’s instincts for this sort of thing) tells me Pennington’s boy wrote “Pizza Disaster!” (it's lazy and uninspired, the boy simply won't apply himself, even with Adam Sandler on board). And Weinberg’s kids, well, “Nemo Unchained” would be caught in legal limbo for decades. No, it is you and I, my old friend, who will see this battle through to the bitter end.

See you at the Oscars, Washburn. May the best parent win.

Mistletoe Drone.. of DEATH!!!!!: (a one-act Christmas melodrama)

They ordered Love...
....they got MURDER!!!!!

Here is my 2014 Christmas gift to you all:

Mistletoe Drone ... of DEATH!!!
Inspired by a true story

*** Mistletoe Drone Operator at TGI Friday’s was the best job this "kind-of-a-loner, kept to himself" could get.***

SCENE: TGI Fridays, interior. BARRY, pimpled and bitter, is dressed in TGI Friday's shirt and suspenders with lots of flair. His hair is lank and greasy, a sneer on his face. He holds the MISTLETOE DRONE controller and scans the restaurant. It’s filled with young couples in love, feeding each other french fries and sesame jack™ chicken strips.

BARRY (Voice-over): (Bitterly) Look at all you happy couples. Sitting there with your thai pork tacos, staring into each other’s eyes, longing to kiss. Here, I'll make you kiss!

He controls the MISTLETOE DRONE toward a SEXY COUPLE. It stops, its mistletoe payload directly over the WOMAN's head. The SEXY COUPLE looks up. WOMAN laughs, and MAN kisses her.

MISTLETOE DRONE dips closer, closer, while the SEXY COUPLE’s kiss becomes more passionate.

Ominous music swells.

Enter MANAGER

MANAGER: Hey, Barry, that drone’s a little close, don’t you think?

BARRY (falsely cheerful): Hey, yeah, oops! Guess they looked a little too happy!

The MISTLETOE DRONE rises, ominous music fades. The SEXY COUPLE's kissing becomes more passionate.

MANAGER: Want me to take over for a while?

BARRY: Nah, I’m good.

MANAGER (Looking at SEXY COUPLE, who knock dishes off the table and climb on to continue making out and groping each other): Well, you’re doing a great job.

BARRY: Thanks, boss!

Exit MANAGER

BARRY scans the room again. His eyes squint.

BARRY (Voice-over): Oh, you blissfully ignorant fools. All of you, believing love is anything but a bittersweet prelude to a lifetime of solitary misery.

His attention becomes focused on a YOUNG INNOCENT COUPLE making lovey-eyes at each other; it’s apparent they are on an early date, infatuated but shy.

BOY: Hey, they have that mistletoe drone thing. (exaggeratedly casual) That's cool, I guess.

GIRL: Oh, I hope it doesn't come here. It would be a *shame* if I had to kiss you. (She smiles and blushes.)

BARRY (Voice-over): Is that... Tiffany? Tiffany who once spurned my advances? I spent the night of Spring Fling alone because of you, Tiffany! Oh, and now, you flounce and rut with this unworthy cur?

BOY stabs a shrimp, puts it on GIRL'S plate

BARRY: (voice-over) Ah! You split with him a Jack Daniel's Shrimp and Ribs that should by rights be mine? Oh, yes, kiss him, by all means ... I’ll make you kiss. I’ll make you kiss... in hell!

BOY: Hey, that operator is looking at you funny. Do you know him, Kelly?

GIRL: Never seen him before.

MISTLETOE DRONE-view camera, closing in on the YOUNG INNOCENT COUPLE who smile and set down their cutlery as it approaches, and give each other a bashful glance.

BARRY (voice-over): Oh, sweet revenge best served cold, with Tennessee Whisky Cake for desert, on special this week!

The BOY moves close to the GIRL, puts an arm around her shoulder. She touches his hand as they wait for the MISTLETOE DRONE...

MISTLETOE DRONE-view camera as their smiles turn to confusion, then fear as the MISTLETOE DRONE buzzes ominously closer, closer.

BOY: It's coming in kind of... fast...

GIRL: Hold me!

BARRY begins to chuckle, rising to laughter, rising to maniacal laughter.

Cut to SEXY COUPLE, now half-naked, making out on their table. BLOOD SPATTER hits them. They look up. WOMAN screams.

MANAGER: Oh, for Pete's sake, Barry.

Fade to credits as BARRY’s laughter grows ever louder and the screams of patrons drown him out.

-- END --

Colchis is famous for the Golden Fleece

Jason and Medea

Excerpts from a new international version


Cast
Chorus: various fifth and sixth grade Korean public school students whose vocab consists mostly of phrases from their textbooks.

Jason: A greek warrior, prince of Iolcus
Medea: Sorceress and princess of Colchis
Creon: King of Corinth


Part 1, Colchis:

Chorus:
Hello, how are you? I’m from Colchis.
Colchis is beautiful and special.
Colchis is famous for the Golden Fleece.

[Enter Medea]
This is Medea. She is very pretty.
She can do magic too.
But, she is very sad. Let’s listen!

Medea:
Oh, but that the world could know of my laments,
of the darkness in my soul. For it has
been said that tragedy should bite my heels
until time’s bitter end, that I should be
the ruin of great men through magicks and treason
most foul. But in truth I know not whether
my mind’s contents are fair or foul, for a life
of shelter tells me that should the test come,
I may not know it. Hark? What silver flash
upon the sea’s wine-stained horizon do I spy?

Chorus:
Look! It’s a boat! Such a big boat!
Who is it? Who is in the boat?
Medea does not know.
But, he is handsome.

ENTER Jason

Chorus:
That is Jason. He’s from Greece.
He’s very strong and kind. He wants to be King.
Let’s listen again!

Jason:
Long I have journeyed and hard, to this land
to seek and claim the fleece of gold foretold
as birthright destiny. But unseeming
of kindness is this land, and people here
shall surely prove awesome strange indeed.
But lo, what shape is that of woman shone
on distant parapet? Let us move close,
that providence may to me her hand reveal.

Chorus:
Medea likes Jason. She will help him.
She gives him many things.
She helps him get the golden fleece.

----

Let me know in the comments if you want the rest.

Writer's Corner: a close look at The Deep-Blue Goodbye, by John D. MacDonald

An inexcusably pulpy cover

John D. MacDonald was a very successful crime writer from the 1950's through the 1980's. He's best known now for the Travis McGee series, which starred an observant, cynical houseboat beach-bum in Lauderdale, Florida. MacDonald also wrote more hard-boiled fiction such as the novel The Executioners, which was twice filmed under the title Cape Fear. But Travis McGee, the blue-collar James Bond who took on cases where he can recover money and take half as the fee, was his most enduring creation.

His first McGee novel, The Deep Blue Goodbye, appeared in 1964, and while it seemed to ride on the coattails of James Bond's runaway success, there's a lot more to it than that. Strange as it seems, the McGee books were part of a thriving culture known as 'books for men,' in an age when men - mainstream, actual men - read books. Books on war, books about cowboys, books about private detectives. Pulp writers like Zane Grey pumped out western after western, and war titles were also numerous. Somewhere along the line, (I'd say about 1980) men stopped reading, and mysteries almost died out with them, until Sue Grafton and Sara Paretzky came along with female leads to save the genre. But that's another post.

Approaching the McGee novel's from a writer's perspective, there's an awful lot to learn from the success of one of America's great mid-list genre authors. So let's tear into one specific passage, looking at its key strengths and weaknesses, to answer the one question every author needs to ask: Why should my reader keep turning the page?

This passage occurs on the second page, after McGee introduces that he's on his boat, The Busted Flush, and the location is Lauderdale, Florida.

Chookie McCall was choreographing some fool thing. She had come over because I had the privacy and enough room. She had shoved the furniture out of the way, set up a couple of mirrors from the master stateroom, and set up her rackety little metronome. She wore a faded old rust-red leotard, mended with black thread in a couple of places. She had her black hair tied into a scarf.  

She was working hard. She would go over a sequence time and time again, changing it a little each time, and when she was satisfied, she would hurry over to the table and make the proper notations on her clip board. 

Dancers work as hard as coal miners used to work. She stomped and huffed and contorted her splendid and perfectly proportioned body. In spite of the air conditioning, she had filled the lounge with a faint sharp-sweet odor of large overheated girl. She was a pleasant distraction. In the lounge lights there was a highlighted gleam of perspiration on the long round legs and arms.

There's nothing fancy here, it's just clean simple prose, a bunch of facts with only a few moments of inspired writing. But for a moment, let's just soak in that first sentence: Chookie McCall was choreographing some fool thing. Here are my reactions to that sentence:

1. What kind of name is that? It's great, a mix of hard consonants ending with a soft l; it speaks of a mind tuned to whimsy and seriousness in equal measure.

2. We know Chookie's a dancer, but not just any dancer, she's one who does choreography. In 1964, most men would be happy to date a dancer, but Trav has met a woman who goes one better - she 'writes' dance.

3. From 'some fool thing' we know all sorts of things. First, we know Trav doesn't know or appreciate much about dance. Second, we know that even if he doesn't care about dance, he cares enough about Chookie to let her do her job on his houseboat.

That's pretty cool, that he can pack all that information into one short sentence.

Overall this scene is a great indication of the compassion Trav feels for women. As it turns out, Trav and Chookie aren't sleeping together. As the book develops, Trav's feelings for women separate into a strange mishmash of 60's paternal chauvinist condescension with a fig leaf of equality-of-sexes neo-enlightenment. This little bit here on the boat, where Trav is both patron and companion is a great bit of foreshadowing.

The paragraph continues with a bunch of things they tell you not to do in writing school, namely start four consecutive sentences with the pronoun She. There's a lot of descriptive tour-guiding with one stellar phrase (rackety little metronome), and I'm willing to let MacDonald break a workshop 101 rule because he's given me enough confidence from the opening of the book and his 'some fool thing' line that I move along the bridge of description till we get to the payoff: 'Dancers work as hard as coal miners used to work.' Here we get a sense of Trav's appreciation for Chookie and her career even if he knows nothing about it. He's a guy with some insights. In other words, he's a voice worth listening to.

Then he spends a few sentences of pure 'male gaze,' reducing Chookie to her body and its smells and the pleasure he gets from them. It's really kind of piggy, and justified only because she's a dancer, and dancers are a reduction of body to art, but it's still a male privilege thing, which, while offensive, plays to MacDonald's audience. Which is another measure of MacDonald's talent. You can reduce McGee to sexist pig, or you can try to rationalize it by saying MacDonald created actual empowered women - and he does have a lot of strong female characters - but - and this is not a small point - you still trust McGee as a narrator. McGee is self-aware, confident, and reliable. This goes a long way in securing the trust of a reader.

You may think MacDonald wasn't smart enough to think through all these issues of gender and patrician attitudes, but later passages, where McGee thinks of himself as a modern knight errant, saving damsels and feeling guilty for bedding the women he saves, would prove you wrong. These are exactly the kinds of things writers think about, and when he was on, MacDonald was in tune with everything he was doing, and with his core audience.

And so, let's reduce everything to one rule: Find your audience, and give them a reason to keep turning the pages. Everything after that is gravy.

Star Wars De-specialized

Headline:

This is the Jabba you should never have seen.

A "despecialized edition" of the original Star Wars is now available for (quasi-legal) download.

Backstory:
I've been longing to see the original 1977 theatrical release ever since George Lucas slapped Part IV: A New Hope before the crawl for the 1981re-release. Part IV, what was that, we wondered around the junior high school lunch table. We felt a little cheated that four years earlier, we'd walked in on the middle of the story. We didn't know this was just the first of George Lucas's tinkerings. By the mid 2000's, he'd made edits so that Han doesn't shoot first, thrown in a bunch of new aliens, added digital Jabbas to unused footage, and re-shot battle sequences.

Countless touch-ups later, the movie is now more the lynchpin of Lucasfilm mind games and pawn of Lucas's megalomania than it is a piece of filmed entertainment. Consider that Lucas refuses to let the original releases of the trilogy be viewed or released. He recalls 35mm prints of the original whenever they come up, and says the originals are but 'drafts' of the movies now available and 'enhanced' through his digital re-editing. All well and good, except...

The original Star Wars is a monumental achievement. It's probably the most sophisticated piece of pre-digital special effects work ever put to film. With 1970's technology - basically plastic and rubber - Lucas created an entire world of spaceships and aliens, and with each sequel he upped the bar. I have no idea why Lucas is ashamed of these movies. You, sir, kicked ass. These are seminal works of American history.

But he refuses to let anyone see these movies - his best work - in their original, un-tampered versions. It's baffling. Lucas should be proud of these masterpieces. He should be hosting retrospectives and receiving awards, not hiding them away from some churlish sense of shame.

Enter the 'De-specialized' version, created by a team of dedicated graphic wizards around the world. These are some serious restorationists and digital ninjas themselves, cobbling together a 1977 'original' from what Disney/Lucasfilm has dumped on the world - a travesty of poor color correction and technical flaws - and those few original prints not yet under his control.

Here: this video gives a great sense of the amount of work involved, and the variety of source materials used:



Pretty cool? Pretty cool.

Okay, yeah, I know. The past is gone. The Har Mar Cinema, where I watched the original, was gutted in a renovation in the 90's, then turned into a Cub Foods fifteen years later. I no longer fit into my Superman underoos. You can't go back to Tatooine. The restoration will never be the original.

But I could indulge my inner ten-year old and watch a grey-market release of Lucas's masterpiece. If only it were legal, I'd do it... right... now...

For more information on the legacy of Lucas's tinkerings, visit SaveStarWars.com