http://voar.io/ is back, it seems.
Ken and Mary attended tonight’s Mariners game but left before Felix closed out his 101 pitch complete game victory. We had dinner and drinks with Dan, but changed venues before the game started from Bill’s to Gainsbourg, where instead of the Mariners, the media fare was the last ten minutes of “Les Soeurs de Bellville” and Tarkovsky’s immortal “Solaris,” so even though I only caught the bottom of the ninth once we got home I feel bathed in masterworks.
I wish I knew why I added a PHP date-based function to my monthly archives here. It’s been tossing strtotime errors for years and I basically didn’t care enough to fix it, for now, it’s closed. Comments up next. Then reformatting all the Twitter dumps? Dunno. I liked how the Twitter dumps chased off everyone. That’s a feature, not a bug.
Yeesh, my hosting provider nuked permissions on short-form php tags a while back and I just took note of it. A bit of search and replace and things are all better but still, argh.
A series of scheduling needs led to the rare opportunity to drag Viv out to a weeknight baseball game, Iwakuma starting against the improved over 2014 Houston Astros. It didn’t start well, the second Astro knocking a 381 foot home run into the right field stands, and he struggled with control until getting yanked in the sixth at a mere 71 pitches. This is his third weak start, and I am thinking he (along with pretty much every M’s pitcher nit named Felix) is in for a spell in Tacoma or even Everett. Eventually the M’s lost after tying it at 5-5 during Kuma’s tenure on the mound. We left after Kuma was pulled (something I had promised Viv in order to meet her bedtime needs), and I watched the end of game at home.
Two Astros fielders slipped and fell while attempting foul catches, there was a crazy Astros wild pitch, and several times when fielding coverage sagged on the Houston side, the Astros players visibly drooped and slowed down in effort. I don’t know how many of them are new to the team, but even though they won they did not look like a team that thought they could or would.
Finally, just before Kuma was pulled, I noticed a sliver of a moon with a hugely bright planet crowning it some distance directly above – a conjunction, I believe it’s called. After looking it up on my phone I knew the planet was Venus. The day was unseasonably warm and gloriously clear and so the dusk emergence of the pair was striking, the occluded side of the moon warm and dim with Earthlight.
In high school, a kid I knew who had an international upbringing and I became friends. I don’t recall his actual name, but let’s call him Andreas and hope we’re wrong.
Anyway, Andreas was really into post-Police mod style, which included the provocation-intended appropriation of skinhead style as gay style. When I knew this kid, we were to young to really talk about it it in those terms, but oh man, that was his bag.
Anyway, we were pals, picked-on punk-rock buds. At the end of the school year when it had become apparent that I was the school’s punk-rock lightning rod, on the last day of school he gave me his 1980s green-exterior emergency-orange interior polyfill NATO flight jacket.
I wore it as an alternative or complement to my daily leather motorcycle jacket throughout high school and college. While a sophomore, I sewed a round “STIFF records” logo to one shoulder, taken from a tee shirt celebrating the US release of Ian Dury’s immortal “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll.”
With the help of a high school friend, I silkscreened the logo-of-the-moment for D.O.A. on the back (D.O.A. is a Vancouver BC punk band I still feel unabashed love for). A year or two later, and I had test-stenciled a line of similarly sized round insignia down the other arm. A year or two more, and I sewed the slightly oversized Lousma-Fullerton inaugural STS mission emblem on the opposite shoulder from the Stiff.
More patches and buttons came and went or stayed (such as the 1981 Black Flag patch). After moving to Seattle, The harsh midwestern winter’s need for a winter overcoat was gone, and eventually I stopped wearing it.
I could never easily dispose of it, of course. It is an element of my colors.
Recently, as I have noted here, I began flying a WWI combat sim game called Rise of Flight. I have lots to say about it, but elsewhere.
My rig is in the basement and is often somewhat chilly compared to the warm first floor spaces, and so I have taken to wearing a sweater when I fly the game. Mostly of late it has been an oshkosh zip-front turtleneck cardigan with twill shoulder panels in faded olive intended to refer to the design of UK paratrooper uniforms immediately after WW2.
Tonight, however, I realized that was upstairs and started looking through basement closets for an appropriate sweater.
I came across my NATO polyfill bomber jacket.
After flying it for a couple of hours, I will note that the jacket has the olfactory equivalent of a patina. As well as a kind of patina.
a message from the future, found in an elevator in 1969.
Moorcock’s Miscellany fan dialog with Mike about his interest in, appreciation of, and personal dealings with Zelazny. My acquaintance R. Wang drops by. MM is too savvy to talk in depth about Z, but makes nice and points out that he was Zelazny’s publishing editor back in the day. Oh, I want to read a less-guarded take. Corwin is either Elric as an aspect of the Eternal Champion or something closer – there can be no accident regarding the characters’ colors.
A poster in the thread notes that Hawkwind cut two songs nearly certainly based on Zelazny stories.
A moment’s reflection on MM’s avowed openness to shared characters, in particular and specific the character of Jerry Cornelius, tells me all I really need to know. Whether or not Zelazny consciously borrowed the “Cor” phoneme for Corwin is fundamentally not germane. Corwin and company clearly are an aspect of MM’s groundwork, and when I think I see a glint of his stuff shining through, given Zelazny’s amply documented love of allusion, I. can think of no reason to to accept the insight.
A long critical analysis of Zelazny’s Amber.
I think the last time I read these books, which I love and have reread on many occasions, was in the 1990s. I recall taking a crack at them sometime more recently but not making headway, back when I was experiencing internet-inflected difficulty with extended readerly concentration, maybe a decade ago.
I’m a more critically-engaged reader now than I was certainly when I first read the books, and I think probably than I was when I last read them – I’ve certainly read more widely and also worked professionally as a writer. So I’m more sensitive to technical aspects of material I read, and likely also to allusive content.
I’m more aware of how Zelazny is using and creatively reshaping the raw material he’s playing with in the books. He’s juxtaposing different genre traditions and then incorporating amusing grace notes such as characters meeting a “cadaverously thin” writer named Roger or experiencing a shift in perception explicitly described and named as cubist. Again and again a minor set piece is presented as a tableau in a scene where one of the the Rider-Waite tarot cards is unquestionably described (The Hermit, as Dworkin leads Corwin up the tunnel from his cell; The Hanged Man, as Corwin and Ganelon interrogate a young deserter in Benedict’s Avalon).
Anyway, the texts are far richer than I understood initally, consuming them simply as fast-paced and accessible adventure fantasy, in ignorance of both many of Zelazny’s witty allusions and the ways in which reading deepens when one questions the work and treats the author and his characters as untrustworthy. In short, it’s better than I knew and I am finding the reread deeply satisfying. It’s also delightful to recognize how clearly the series influenced Zelazny’s friend George R. R. Martin’s own epic series of internecine aristocratic struggle.
Chip Delany reviews Star Wars, 1977. Page scans.
“The main good guy is the dissatisfied young farmer, Luke Skywalker, played by an engagingly naive Mark Hamill. Etymologists take note: the relation between Lucas and Luke is obvious. But more too that the name George comes from the greek word georgos: farmer,i.e., “earth man” or “earth walker.” George Lucas/Luke Skywalker, dig? The film is a blatant and self-conscious autobiographic wish fulfilment on the part of its ingenious director.”
1985 Zelazny-authorized interactive fiction game Nine Princes in Amber.
Moved a bunch of banker’s boxes of old files, like, college notes and junk, but found these in the process.
They were given to me either just before or just after I moved to Seattle by Bloomington, Indiana artist (and the sculptor of these pieces) David Ebbinghouse. David proposed an exchange whereby I would bend my then-considerable powers of art writing upon his career, and he would give me these.
Alas, life in the west eroded the bonds of former lives and the essay was never writ. I certainly still feel I should write it, but there’s a lifetime more art made by David today than what he’d made by 1990.