Happy Bastille Day!!

I intend to celebrate with a baguette and some imported raspberry jam. Vive la France.

Shakespeare, the brand

As I've been wandering about the web in search of interesting Shakespeare stuff, I've noticed that there are more than a few items with "Shakespeare" as a brand name. I started Googling a bit for more information and ran into some interesting articles on just that subject.  This article on Shakespeare in Advertising appeared on Transmedia Shakespeare (studying Shakespeare beyond the text).  It begins:  Shakespeare. One word, a name, that represents so much more than a man. Shakespeare is an industry, a language, a symbol of literature and art, and an era in time. The advertising world has used this to their advantage, and Shakespeare’s influence can be recognized in almost every branch of pop culture.
The No-Sweat Shakespeare blog has an intriguing article called "The Shakespeare Brand in the World of Commerce." Starting with the example of the Learjet, the article discusses what the writer calles "Shakesploitation."
Shakespeare author Ben Alexander has some interesting figures here, showing where the search term "Shakespeare" rates in the Google-verse.

The Feminist Fiction Give-Away

There comes a time in every reader's life when she looks at the sagging weight of the six bookcases in her six-room apartment and says--time to clean house.
For me, that time is this weekend.
In the spirit of Feminist Fiction Friday, I am going to start with the ladies.
I'm divvying up the books into various packages.
And all you have to do is let me know you want one of the packages.
That's it.
Yes, it would be nice if you decided to follow the blog.
I'd love it if you followed the NoHo Noir twitter account (@nohonoir) or my own (@storyauthority) but seriously, All you have to do is leave a comment on this post calling dibs and I'll get in touch with you and arrange to ship you the books.
Please just claim the books if you're in the US--I'm also footing the media mail postage.
So check out the books:

Package #1--Carol O'Connell's Kathleen Mallory books. If you don't know the books, here's the Wikipedia article.

If you liked Steig Larssen's Millennium trilogy, you will love these books. I have nine of the paperbacks and possibly one hardback (not shelved with the others.) The titles include:  Winter House, Find Me, Mallory's Oracle, the Man Who Cast Two Shadows, Crime School, Stone angel, Shell Game, Killing Critics, and Dead Famous.

Feminist Fiction Friday: Liza Cody

I am going to Bouchercon 2012 this year and am very excited. But I wish I'd been there last year when Liza Cody was there and taking part in panels like "Telling Women's Stories." (She refers to it as "the inevitable feminist panel.")
I love Liza Cody's series protagonist Anna Lee and her novel Dupe (which, according to Wikipedia introduced the professional female private detective to British Mystery fiction) was the first I ever read. Cody also has a series about professional female wrestler, Eva Wylie. I've not read any of those books because the backdrop doesn't interest me, but I'll get around to them at some  point.
I love that Anna Lee is smart and savvy and totally real. It's an ongoing complaint that there aren't enough female protagonists in crime fiction, and I always point people toward Liza Cody in response.

Smell Like Shakespeare--Black Phoenix Alchemy scents

I have loved perfume ever since I was a little girl playing with my grandmother's perfume bottles. (She had all those old lady scents of gardenia and musk rose and cut-glass atomizers for spritzing them on.)
I used to wear perfume to work every day, light citrusy scents like Chanel's Cristalle and Hermes Green Oranges. At night I favored darker, more Oriental scents like Halston's Night (now discontinued). Sadly, I now live with someone who is allergic to perfume, so I mostly smell like Dr. Bronner's Peppermint soap these days.
But I still like reading about perfume, and a few months ago I stumbled across the Black Phoenix Alchemical Lab's scents.''The company specalzes in formulating body and household blends with a dark, romantic tone.
Turns out their Illyria collection was inspired by Shakespeare's characters. Reading the descriptions of the various scents is in itself a sensual experience.The one that sounds most appealing o me is "Katharina," a blend of white musk, orange blossom and peach. Like the other scents in the collection--the masculine Iago and Antony, the severe Lady Macbeth (sweet Bordeaux wine, currants and wild berries), the perfume comes in an amber vial priced at $17.50 per 5 mil bottle.
If you want to indulge your senses, spend a few minutes on their site. And remember, "that which we call a rose would smell as sweet" if we called it something else...
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Review of Romeo & Juliet Sealed With a Kiss

I grew up on classic, Disney-style animation but I'm not really a fan of the genre, despite really loving Monsters, Inc. and the Toy Story series from Pixar. (I was put off by the character design in Brave, for instance, because I thought the princess looked like a red-headed troll doll.)
I'm not someone who ever sat around in my jammies on Saturday, eating cold cereal and watching cartoons. And so I find it hard to get past ugly animation and enjoy the story. (An exception was for the first season of the Ghostbusters animated series, which I found myself addicted to.)
My expectations for Romeo & Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss (2006) were pretty low.
the movie was clearly a labor of love and done on a budget. Phil Nibbelink was director, writer, animator and voice talent and a comic relief character called Kissing Fish was voiced by Chanelle Nibbelink (wife, daughter, sister?). The actors voicing Romeo and Juliet (who are, in this family-friendly re-imagining, seals) have the same surname, but whether they're related by affinity or consanguinity, I don't know.
Nibbelink has a lot of good ideas here--and his instincts for what will make good musical interludes are sharp--but the constraints of his budget are everywhere. The quality of the animation is so poor that at times, in the long shots, the seals look like cavorting brown and white sperm.

Romeo and Juliet are as big-eyed as Keane portraits, and drawn very small in relationship to the other seals (except for fat Benvolio, a sweet comic relief character who is genuinely amusing at times). The problem is that there's a kind of disconnect between the way the young seals look and the intensity of their love. That's of course the point of the story--the passion of the young lovers--but transposed to animation and it feels a little off-kilter.
Mercutio, Romeo's best friend, is a here a fun-loving seal with musical talent and a lot of chutzpah. Nibbelink salts his dialogue with tons of Shakespeare quotes, repurposed to fit his story. "All the world's a stage," he muses as Benvolio enthusiastically adds, "Let's act!" (Mercutio looks distractingly like Scooby Doo at times.)
I'm all for introducing kids to Shakespeare but am not sure that Romeo & Juliet is the play to start with.  This one has some scary stuff--when Friar Lawrence shows up with Juliet's body, she looks dead--but all it takes is the touch of a golden/rosy dawn and everything is all right.
When the movie came out, 54 percent of critics liked it but it made less than $500 thousand domestically.  (According to IMDB, the budget was around $2 million.)
You can get a pretty good idea of the movie from the trailer, which is here.
The movie didn't do much for me, but then, I'm not the target audience.

Kill Shakespeare

Kill Shakespeare is a 12-issue comic book that's a mash up of ideas and characters from the canon. for more info, check out the Wiki listing.