of course, it’s a bowdlerized 9th that defeats the ironic distancing

Geez, listening to these wrecked classical LPs, with something like 60% of the sonic data just cut out and gone, is GREAT.

Pretty much as long as I have been aware of my taste, I have always preferred stuff that was imperfectly reproduced and the immediate downstream material created by people excited by their own misunderstandings.

These old, scratchy, lo-fi records can only reproduce a fraction of the performance they purport to bring to the listener. The balance is in the listener’s head. And there’s no music in the universe that can trump that.

Viv’s in California for two weeks, so I am rocking the bachelor life. Tonight! Three hours of uninterrupted Great War flight simulation followed by two hours of reading fantasy novels in front of a fire while listening to thrift shop Beethoven vinyl, super scratchy. Good lord, am I a reactionary? No, no, I’m totally not!

As a consequence of reading The Merchant Princes, I have picked up my old friend and lost habit of Amber, the Zelazny multiverse books he began cranking out in the sixties after Lord of Light. I read and reread these books as a kid, along with the seventies DeCamp/Howard Conan books, whatever Moorcock I could find, and Lieber’s elegant Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser material.

I’ve had the luxury of long, contemplative rereads of everything Moorcock and Lieber ever wrote, and Lieber’s fantasy pair take the cake for elegant, self-aware literary work. That said, I adore Moorcock deeply and when he puts his mind to it he writes a deeper book than Fritz ever chose to.

The last time I took a run at Zelazny’s Amber books, I was put off by what tonight seems to be the witty conceit at the heart of the work: he writes in the authentic American pulp crime voice (a genre he had pursued) while applying it directly to both then-fresh Campbellian narrative and still-fresh multiversal theses. It’s a lead pipe cinch.

Except somehow last time the inherent dames-and-devils tropes of the prose and posture just put me off, the casual American sexism and so forth. I couldn’t plow through.

This week, however, I’m more amused by the intentional collision of cod-medieval speech address and hard-bitten tough guys treating amnesia with fisticuffs. When I first read it, I would not even have been aware that the material was an engineered genre crossbreed.

Anyway, wish me luck. I aim to stick with it through the classic half and bail later.

My hosting company blocked a post here due to an overeager SQL injection filter and the subsequent daylong wait for them to sort it out seemed to derail me.

In the interim, we traveled to the Oregon coast of a weekend as we do in Spring and enjoyed the preseason beaches. While there, we had dinner with Tim Hommey and a crew of his pals. Tim was my drummer in Vortex ages ago and was a crucial drummer in the very-late 80s Bton post-punk scene. It was delightful to see him after so long.

My birthday made me cranky as usual which seemed to be exacerbated by the return home – all day Monday I felt deeply grouchy and unsettled, yelling at springtime birdcalls out the window. It was so obstreperous and irrational that I was at least able to joke about it with Viv.

Then we had two days of evening thunderstorms, a rare occurrence that Logan has a profound aversion to. He whimpers and shakes and must maintain direct physical contact with one of us while traumatized. We adopted him in July, and he was said to have been feral in Snohomish prior to being sheltered, although he was chipped. The shelter reported to us that calls to his prior family went unanswered.

This has raised a suspicion in my mind that possibly he was unhomed by the landslide in Oso in March of last year. If he was at the shelter for a month when he came with us, he would have been on his own for about seventy days, which seems longer than what they told us but which would account for his extreme reaction.

This week I am at twelve and a half miles, with my longest single-day run at four and a half. The ten percent rule puts me at twenty five miles by May, which I can live with.

My weight and blood pressure have been stubbornly resistant to change – I’m down about five pounds from my February start and my BP has only dropped by about four points. My pulse has dropped considerably, which is good. Oddly, at the doctor’s office on Wednesday my BP measured at 117/74 and then 128/80, which is thirty to twenty points lower than my home readings and in line with what I would have expected in response to sustained excercise. It points to equipment failure or inapt procedure.

As it happens I found a monitor at Value Village today for $4, so I grabbed it figuring if it was broken or wrong it would at least be a different wrong than the one I have been using. Sadly, it gave the same readings as the one I have been employing, so I will have to calibrate against a known good machine. However, given two machines providing similar readings, the likely outlier here is the reading taken at the doctor’s office, which is troubling.

Viv is off to California for a couple of weeks in the morning, during which time, among other things, I will file our income taxes and my monthly business taxes, probably attend my first baseball game of the year, welcome a visitor in turn from California, and hopefully develop and stick to a syllabus-planned training program within Rise of Flight to address some specific deficiencies in my technical abilities within the sim. It’s kind of silly to exert such discipline on behalf of a game, but in effect I have done so with respect to baseball, simply as an observer, over the past four years. This time investment came at the direct expense of time spent in Rise of Flight, which just turned five.

I’m well past Twitter now, which is interesting. I liked it much more than I ever have or am likely to enjoy Facebook. I have reactivated a small subset of RSS feeds in The Old Reader now, and find I consequently spend much less time refreshing this or that digital appliance in search of new content, exactly as desired.

I completed a steam through the early Stross series called “The Merchant Princes” to mixed effect. Apparently the publication history of the books was checkered and as a result some of the material I read appeared to lack a final editorial polish, which is a shame. Even so, it was clearly the work of an author-in-progress and not as pleasing and well-realized as Stross’ current works.

As I run I have been slogging through DS9, which is frankly somewhat of a chore. I gave up on the series in initial broadcast specifically because of the religious themes of the show – I simply have no interest in spirituality, mine, yours, or those of some fictional characters in a future that will never exist. It’s frustrating because the show at least respects its’ internal logic and the scripts are generally well-crafted (when it’s not a comedic-relief episode), and some of the performers – especially Avery Brooks – are magnetically intense. But literally every time they get to the heart of the show, Sisko’s role as the Emissary, I start sighing loudly and rolling my eyes. This kind of stuff is hard enough for me to treat as I am obligated to when it’s people’s actual belief systems. I choose to be obliged to respect them and I take that duty seriously, respectfully, and with a sense of good will.

But when it’s a made-up religion created specifically to carve out a space to permit fiction writers to talk about religious experience without giving offense? What can I say? It’s dumb. It’s straw men in dialog with other straw men, and I do not mean the wicker man kind.

Anyway. I extend my duty of good will toward the show and will experience it respectfully in its entirety. And then I will express a more qualified opinion.

I have been wearing bandannas as sweatbands while I run and while doing laundry was surprised to realize that a couple of the ones I have been using were ones I have had since I was a teenager. That jolted over into a memory of my maternal grandfather buying me a red bandanna sometime in the 1970s at a rural grain elevator, the co-op store, presumably in northwest Missouri near his childhood home, although I have no memories of visiting my mother’s family in that area with her parents. I guess that means that he may have bought that bandanna with me elsewhere or that it was a different relative.

The elderly bandannas I do have are two-color dye, on white cotton, giving a three-color pattern, and are marked “made in USA” with a pattern number, I guess what we’d call a SKU. There’s no real possibility, I guess, that the factories that made these remain in operation. I wonder how old the patterns are?

I guess they could have been about a century old when they were new, although I doubt that a factory would have kept such a design in production for that long. They surely refer to a design tradition that was about that old. Of course, that tradition drew its design vocabulary from older European and Asian handwork and the collision of that tradition with the industrial age in England and elsewhere between 1790 and 1900.
I suppose there must be a thriving collector’s market for vintage bandannas. Maybe someday I’ll look for it on ebay.

Finally watching Gyllenhall in Nightcrawler. I could tell at release it was an uncredited remake of Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman, and as coverage and reviews pioed up I became actively irritated that the remake was not being noted.

Jake’s gauntness and off-kilter affect are enough, as far as I am concerned, to definitively establish his character as Buster’s descendant.

The film’s described as a disturbing LA noir. As I watch it tonight, clear in my own mind that it’s a remake, I see it as a comedy.

Listening to a regional Sunday evening jazz show spin a series of versions of a specific tune from circa 1920 to circa 1940 and the host keeps emphasizing the movement from pre-Louis to post-Louis, you know, the Jazz Narrative. But I like the oldest stuff best! The arrangements that sound the most modern to me are the most boring. The ones that sound weird and stilted and have bad notes sound THE BEST.

This is clearly a side effect of the Rise of Flight YT playlist I have been growing for the past couple weeks. Certain songs just get stuck in my head, like “Auntie Skinner’s Chicken Dinner,” and no amount of rock and roll can dislodge them.

Listening for the simulated sound of engine trouble always reminds me of far future interstellar ship sensor output directed to audio or scent or touch rather than dials and readouts.

(Posted on Facebook initially, this post is basically my initial post there plus comments I made in the resulting thread.)

We’ve been watching Space: 1999. It’s WAY weirder than I remember. I pretty much dig it, despite the great scoops of plot nonsense often found in any given episode, and just ignoring the whole set of issues with the premise.

For example, I give you this extended electric sitar recital slash film noir tracking shot wordless intro. I mean come on, this beats Data’s string quartet with a two-by-four.

The episode in particular centers on a ghost from the future that the leader of the PLANT SEANCE seen at the end of the intro has summoned. Not once do they engage in technobabble regarding FTL time distortion, time travel, or slingshot orbits: the ghost is immediately recognized as some sort of psychic projection from the actual future that they try to trap in the medical isolation ward with tiny radar dishes! Beige flares and suede ankleboots, maaaan!

The instrument is a Coral electric sitar, which was made by Danelectro. I have an electric mandolin made with parts from one of these, originally including the ‘buzz bridge’, which I swapped out for a conventional bridge because an electric mandositar is something that we all have reason to regret.

One of the fun, strange aspects of the show is the way it blends Hammer horror tropes with sketched elements drawn from the British SF New Wave. It’s not quite as clearly from Another Culture as Eastern Bloc SF, but it is beautifully of its time.

it’s very definitely as silly as Voyager, but unlike Voyager, where the show repeatedly shot itself in the foot by refusing to allow silly premises the dignity of internal coherence over the arc of an episode, this show seems to be very extremely serious about any given silly premise, which is basically how to do great horror camp. And my god! The sets! They spent a BUNDLE on this show, apparently on spec. You can kind of tell when they have budget issues on a show because the “alien ship” interior or whatever will sometimes be a featureless black room with double-exposures of glowy lights. It’s on Hulu, so if you can live with jarring modern commercial intrusion, no expense beyond time is needed.

I guess they extensively retooled for season two, which I have more memories of from childhood – that’s the season which introduces new jackets as a uniform element and the weird-eyebrow shapeshifter alien lady.

Oh, and the sitar guy is UK sixties and seventies session player Big Jim Sullivan.