Did you get a chance to experience the cognitive dissonance that comes from VanderMeerian words read in a high-toned children’s literature type voice? Speaking of VanderMeerian weirdness, there was a nice little slice of it over at Tor.com. Sometime soon (yes, Real Soon Now) I will write another golden book post, and this one will focus on a Pat Cadigan… Read more →
Tag: things to listen to
Happy Accidents
That’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” by Édouard Manet. I spent a bit of time thinking about it recently because of a cut-and-paste error. It started when the guys over at SFFAudio pointed out that the podcasts of UCSD lectures are available for a limited time. Their intention was to direct us to quickly grab the MP3s (before the were… Read more →
How Did I Miss This?
Well, apparently I missed this year’s Massey Lectures. Quite a change from last year, when I was even part of the broadcast, eh? This may be in part because this year’s lecturer was Margaret Atwood, and I have a deep-seated and utterly irrational dislike of the woman. (I’m not saying that it’s irrational to dislike her, just that my particular… Read more →
Because it’s still on my mind
’nuff said. Read more →
Artist & Savvy Businessman
As I write this I’m downloading five new tracks by my oft-mentioned-here pal Danny Michel. It appears that just before Christmas Danny made a deal to get digital rights to his back catalogue back from the label in exchange for giving them the rights to retail physical copies of his new indie CD. At least that’s what I get out… Read more →
Aside
I’m normally not much for ordered lists, and especially not ordered lists of “favourites”. I tend to break things down into relatively low resolution buckets and am happy with that. For instance, with music I tend to assign a song to one of {Awesome, Good, OK, Tolerable, Terrible, OH MY GOD MAKE IT STOP} and stop there. There’s not a lot of reason to try to assign comparative rankings among Awesome songs–they’re all worth listening to, pretty much at any time, and the ranking would be a function of my mood, what I’ve listened to lately, etc, and thus would be so constantly changing as to be useless.
That being said, it occurred to me earlier this week, that I have a ready answer to “What’s your all-time favourite song?”, and that answer hasn’t changed at all in over half a decade now. And second place has been locked for just as long. After that there’s just a bunch of Awesome songs, though.
Sunday Night Gallimaufry
You know the drill, this is the miscellaneous tab closing ceremony. Since I’m tired of politics today, there will be none in this list. I have had several discussions about this recent article on a particular form of elective surgery. All that I can conclude from these discussions is that I have different aesthetic than many of the people I’ve… Read more →
Diverse practyk in many sundry werkes
My goal is to redefine the whole history of rhyme ‘Cause the only way to free the soul is to free the mind And no wisdom as old as this should be confined To total mystery, so we’ll just read the signs And DaVinci codes, and try to see the science In this linguistically-composed pristine design –extracted from Rhyme Renaissance… Read more →
Some Lovely Canadian Music
While I was driving today, I took the opportunity to listen to Tom Barlow’s eponymous album. I’ve mentioned the album here a couple of time before, embedding the song Billion Dollar Rockets in a previous post, and also discussing How Low Can You Get and Married By Elvis in some other posts. So I did a little YouTube digging when… Read more →
Let’s Do The Time Warp Again
This post has nothing to do with the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Do you know the BBC Radio show Twenty Minutes? Do you know the British author Justina Robson, much-mentioned on this blog, and much admired by me? (That’s her picture up there.) Do you know Doctor Who? Did you know I’m a big old Doctor Who geekI’m a Baker… Read more →
Cursing Music
On my recent drive back to Canada, among the many other good things that happened, I had a chance to be reminded why I love Etta James singing Damn Your Eyes so much. Here, you have a listen, and it should be obvious why that is: As I was listening to it, I got to thinking that I don’t have… Read more →
Wednesday Bookish Links
I was delighted to find out this week that Emma Bull is writing a sequel to Territory (you might recall I was pretty excited about that one), tentatively titled Claim. Of course, in the interim, I can always get a hit of Shadow Unit. (I think I might have mentioned that once or twice, possibly.) I have made no secret… Read more →
Robyn Tuesday
This post is in honour of my old pal Roach, a real fegManiac, and my pal EBOC“of the Shire” who is about to have his first Robyn Hitchcock experience. I’ve got about a half-dozen Hitchcock albums, mostly from the 80s and 90s. I think I might have had one or two before Roach started campaigning heavily in favour of Hitchcock,… Read more →
Grateful Thursday
I am totally having a Grateful Dead day today, and I feel motivated to share with you all. Annotated Lyrics: Scarlet Begonias, Ripple, Uncle John’s Band, and Tennessee Jed. The other track, Me & My Uncle, is a cover. Read more →
Ions played instead of notes
This is how things happen: First, author Sarah Monette mentions a LiveJournal that posts a poem every Monday. I follow this link and make a note to come back later and look for poets I am not familiar with. And as I start looking over the list the first thing that grabs me is a post of Thylias Moss’s poem… Read more →
