May. The beginning of summer, the portal onto the new horizon of excessive temperatures, indeed the retreat into the bowels of windowless, brazenly air-conditioned rooms. A time for immediate reflection, but for people still lucky (unlucky?) enough to be on a university schedule, also a time for the stoking of new projects.

My spring was busy. But first, I’m happy to report that my book (Ken Russell: Re-Viewing England’s Last Mannerist) has received some attention. There is a short “Recommended” review in May 2010 issue of the American Library Association’s publication Choice. You can view it via their free trial, or through a library’s databasing service. There is a thorough review in the April 2010 issue of the Journal of British Cinema and Television. A preview can be viewed here.

The conspicuous lack of material on VF can at least be partially attributed to the other little bits of writing I’ve done for diverse venues. A few are fully and freely accessible online. I reviewed the recent anthology A History of Visual Culture: Western Civilization from the 18th to the 21st Century, edited by Jane Kromm and Susan Benforado-Bakewell (Berg, 2010) for the Southwest Journal of Cultures. I wrote a lengthy, comparative review of James Chapman’s War on Film (Reaktion, 2008) and Tony Shaw’s Hollywood’s Cold War (Edinburgh UP, 2007) for Scope. Though written two years ago, it emerged in issue 16, and can be viewed here.

I reviewed John C. Tibbetts’s highly commendable book All My Loving?: The Films of Tony Palmer (2009) for the above-mentioned April 2010 Journal of British Cinema and Television. I have two short pieces in the May 2010 issue of Film & History, one about the film The London Nobody Knows (1967), the other a review of Robert Shail’s Seventies British Cinema (2008).

The Last Word: Live!

One of my big projects for this summer is a live, improvised/sketch show based on the Va Gazette (Williamsburg, VA-area newspaper) column “The Last Word.” This column, now in its 25th year, is a forum which prints anonymous comments from the local community. By turns earnestly personal and maddeningly vitriolic, these statements provide easily adaptable material for what promises to be a gut-wrenchingly amusing performance. The show is June 18th and 19th (a Fri. and a Sat.) at the Kimball Theater in Williamsburg, VA. Ticket information, including preorder, is on their calender. The whole shebang is brought to you by 1693 Productions.

Plenty more to come. Many projects, original VF shorts, and reviews of diverse items of diverse media in the pipeline.

Bobby and J are joined by Kevin and Jimmy for a big Year in Review podcast that you do not want to miss. It also features part two of our dramatic reading of the Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest Worlds of Power novelization and sample some Japanese candy sent to us by GFOTS Erik.

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Music by virt

I played a whole mess of games including Far Cry 2, Beatles Rock Band, and Wii Sports Resort. J, on the other hand has basically only played Mass Effect and Beatles Rock Band. Big surprise, right?

Following this, we address a handful of news stories, providing our oh-so-valuable opinions.

We’re proud to introduce a new regular feature this week entitled “The List.” Each week we’ll pick a topic and a set number of games, by which we each come up with our own list. “Top 5 Most Evil Villains,” per se. What’s the actual topic of this weeks list? You’ll have to tune in to find out!

So what exactly makes this week special? Well, Bobby and J have each played a variety of games including Prince of Persia, Red Faction: Guerilla, My World My Way, and Shadow Complex (to name a few).

Oh! And of course the big news of the week is The Beatles Rock Band, which J has played through three times already and has some definite opinions on. And speaking of opinions, J decided he’d like to respond to videogame academic and critic Ian Bogost’s criticisms of the game. It’s a good discussion, if we do say so ourselves.

We kept it short and sweet at an hour twenty minutes, and yet managed to pack in another good discussion about morality motivations in games like KOTOR and Mass Effect, which Bobby and J (respectively) were each playing this past week.

It’s short, it’s sweet, and despite being a Low Score, it can’t be beat.

Only moments after we finished recording Big Episode 23 of the Low Score Podcast, we recorded what we’ve termed “After Hours,” a podcast by the Low Score hosts that is about anything but videogames. Last time we did something like this we got some useful feedback that helped us decide to split out evening recording session into two episodes.

Bobby, J, Jimmy, Kevin, Carrie, and Allison all took up spots in front of the microphones to talk beer, snacks, and music. And to argue a bunch. And to talk off microphone. And to throw zingers around and do schtick for you, our awesome listening audience. And, perhaps most imporantly, put dogs in our shirts.

We apologize that the audio quality isn’t that great, but it was a lot of fun to record and we hope you find humor in our drunken shenanigans!

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Things have really started to heat up over at Adam Miller’s site Camp Academy!  He’s been posting some great pieces on bad films as diverse as Witchboard (1986…starring Tawny Kitaen!) and National Lampoon’s Lost Reality (2004).  I’ve been lucky enough to recently contribute pieces on Won Ton Ton, The Dog Who Saved Hollywood (1976) and The Happy Hooker (1975).  Plenty more on the way, including a double-header on Robert Altman’s Popeye (1980), and a review I did of the British sci-fi-softcore film Zeta One (1969).

Today marks the debut of the Summer 2009 issue of The Modest Proposal, your low-key literary/review journal of choice.  The two main highlights are a long interview with Sam and Rebecca Umland about their book Donald Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side (2006, FAB Press) and a photo-essay on elephants by Roshan Patel.  On top of that, we’ve got four lengthy book reviews.  Stay tuned for another issue of The Modest Proposal in the Fall!

On the video game side of things, the extended VF crew recently got together in Richmond, VA and recorded a star-studed, all-in-the-same-room edition of the Low Score Podcast.  Discussion runs the gamut, from Fallout 3 to IP saturation.  Check it out.

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I wanted to quickly point out some recent wisdom on gaming bargains.  Sure, I occasionally get lucky with game purchases–in fact, just yesterday and I snagged a copy of Jade Empire for about $2.  According to our buddies at X-Strike Studios, there is a pretty massive, YMMV (your mileage may vary, i.e. apparently different from store-to-store) sale on right now at FYE (not, as far as I know, online, though).  On this forum thread, Mr. Tim Ekkebus outlines some of the great $1 and $2 games he was able to get thanks to FYE silently lowering their prices, to absurdly low levels, on last gen Xbox, PS2 and DS games.  If you are gaming on a budget this summer, and you probably are, be sure to check it out.

So, by way of Summer discussion, have you gotten any ridiculously good deals on games lately?  Secret sales?  Flea markets?

Episode 06 “Make it Work”

Episode 07 “Charming”

Episode 08 “Is it Meaty?”

Episode 09 “Questionable Content”