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  1. MikeKardec

    Why Irish soldiers who fought Hitler hide their medals

    It is worth mentioning that until just after WWII the British Empire held a great deal of the world under it's ignorant yet well meaning thumb. We in the US, being the first of the anti-colonial revolutionaries, often forget that others may have said, "Give me liberty or give me death!" Now...
  2. MikeKardec

    'Angry Days' Shows An America Torn Over Entering World War II

    "Just a tangential thought - as much as Tolkien denied it, the run-up to WWII must have heavily influenced his Lord Of The Rings trilogy." I agree! It's also amusing to see how he co-opted the quintessentially German "Ring Cycle" and converted it to an English vision of the story. You...
  3. MikeKardec

    Tramp Steamers

    I can't draw worth a lick but a junior high class in drafting inspired me to have some fun modifying a Bethlehem Steel plan for a ship my dad sailed on. Altering it to match the fictional vessel from some of his stories was a lot of fun. You can click on the pics for a close up --...
  4. MikeKardec

    Definition or Description of Noir

    To step away from "film" but sticking with Noir ... I'd say that The Shield occupies the sunny but deadly LA of Raymond Candler and Ross MacDonald. And story-wise The Shield could have been written by James Ellroy. My project, now near completion, is a Western but there were some westerns...
  5. MikeKardec

    Definition or Description of Noir

    Those are good examples! And it IS sort of like the difference between art and pornography ... you know it when you see it. I wonder if people would consider The Shield or Breaking Bad to be Noir. They don't have some of the visual qualities but the stories might be right out of the...
  7. MikeKardec

    On The Road (2011)

    There was another film, Heart Beat, with Nick Nolte, John Heard and Sissy Spacek that covered a lot of the On the Road territory. If I remember correctly it drew some of it's production design from Edward Hopper paintings. I believe it also focused a bit on the Hudson back seat but it's been a...
  8. MikeKardec

    'Angry Days' Shows An America Torn Over Entering World War II

    Like a lot of Journalistic endeavors the front office often tends to insist on the political slant of their class or tribe but, luckily, individual reporters still occasionally try to do good reporting no matter what 'headline' the editor puts on it. Back in the '80s I was at a conference where...
  9. MikeKardec

    Adventures on your vintage motorcycle!

    That's not abuse, that's homage! Well polished atrophy in a garage is abuse.
  10. MikeKardec

    The Orient Express

    I think they have expanded the service to include other locations but I believe you can still get from London to Istanbul, though I'm not sure you do it all in one train car. A tip from some friends who have taken it ... beware the summer heat, like many things European there is no Air...
  11. MikeKardec

    Sunset Strip 1964

    Wow! I can't remember that far back but that was my old neighborhood. By '68 or '70 the street was wall to wall flower children sleeping on the sidewalks and camped in the brush on the hill sides just above and below Sunset. I can remember stepping over their legs as I walked home from...
  13. MikeKardec

    Noir Novels/Hard Boiled Fiction

    Ross MacDonald was great, sort of a grown up version of Chandler's writing, ie. not so much cute wordplay and stuff that doesn't move the narrative forward. I love Chandler but he's sort of a hyper noir writer. Jim Thompson was the noir-est of noir writers. Boiled so Hard he was...
  14. MikeKardec

    BBC's Ripper street

    Matthew Macfadyen was also on the excellent MI-5 (or Spooks depending on where you are) in the early days. It is a series that is sort of Britian's answer to 24. Unlike 24, they make a point of killing, maiming or turning their lead characters rogue ... which causes a LOT of suspense. You...
  15. MikeKardec

    BBC's Ripper street

    Great show. Vastly superior to the BBCs other 19th century police drama "Copper." In fact it's sort of like Copper done right ... odd they'd be producing the two at nearly the same time. The shotgun issue is interesting, most firearms of the period had their patent date stamped on the...
  16. MikeKardec

    Digital shooting and projection

    I love the smell of film, real film. Hell, I love the smell and the sound and the feel of working on mechanical equipment. I love the look of film and, though you can approach that look on digital, the hoops you have to jump through and the finicky aspects of making it look that way require a...
  17. MikeKardec

    Definition or Description of Noir

    I was discussing an upcoming comic book project on another website and, though the project is a western I described it as Noir. Someone wrote in and asked what Noir really was, feeling that it somehow equated with gangsters, so I wrote the following reply -- "It's sort of a general idea...
  19. MikeKardec

    The thirties in the seventies

    Farewell My Lovely, Chinatown, a bad remake of The Big Sleep, Dillinger, Bound for Glory, Paper Moon, Emperor of the North, Lucky Lady, etc, etc, were some other films that came out in the 1970s. I'm not all that certain that this trend in Hollywood was reflected in the rest of '70s culture but...
  20. MikeKardec

    Tramp Steamers

    Any one aware of the work of Howard Pease? He wrote a great many stories about the merchant marine in the 1930s. Quite a few of his books were a bit like a slightly more sophisticated "Hardy Boys at Sea" though he did get into some heavier themes in the early days of WWII. Regardless of some...
  21. MikeKardec

    New Zealand Art Deco

    Lived in various "down under" locations for more than a year. Napier is charming, very deco ... but it is a small town. I'm not sure it's worth going solely for the festival. HOWEVER, New Zealand is really worth visiting for all it's many attributes and that might be a great time to plan a...
  22. MikeKardec

    Russia posts Katyn Forest documents

    It can be easy to forget that Stalin was the original, the first, longest lasting and most effective 20th century tyrant. I suspect that he set the model that other pretenders attempted to emulate. He inspired paranoid bad asses right up to Saddam Hussein.
  23. MikeKardec

    Books on Radio Drama

    John Dunning wrote a couple of non fiction books and the great, Two O'Clock Eastern Wartime. A novel that goes deeper into Radio Drama than any other I have read.

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