Pole Position

I've never been a big fan of cellphone cameras--but I think I have found the killer app for them:
And, thanks to it, I can now find my car at Albany Airport.

It's a Bird, It's a Plane...

Scientific American:

Marine biologist Silvia Maciá was boating on the north coast of Jamaica in the summer of 2001 when she noticed something soar out of the sea. At first she thought it was a member of the flying fish family—a group of marine fish that escape predators by breaking the water's surface at great speed and gliding through the air on unusually large pectoral fins. But after tracing the creature's graceful arc for a few seconds, Maciá realized this was no fish. It was a squid—and it was flying.

Cool.

And, words one rarely comes across: "On a LISTSERV dedicated to mollusks..."

I'd Call it "Ail"

The world's strongest ale, it would seem, requires the world's strongest stomach. Not only is The End of History stronger than whiskey or vodka at 55 percent volume, and not only does it fetch £500 a glass, but it is also sold inside the bodies of dead stuffed animals (how I wish I were making that up). I ask, what could possibly be more appetizing than pouring a hearty libation from the mouth of a dead squirrel?
This sounds like a horrifying preview of what a Ted Nugent Pale Ale would be like.

Time Doesn't Stand Still

Rush came to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC)--a scant mile from my house--Friday night; fortunately, the monsoon-like rains stopped about an hour prior to show time. They are doing construction on the Geyser Road bridge so I was unable to walk to SPAC and was stuck driving. Grr.

Anyway, the tour is dubbed the "Time Machine" tour, and is designed to be a stroll through the Rush ages (kind of like any Rush concert, really), with particular emphasis on the 1980s.

The stage set was designed with a "steampunk" theme. Steampunk, if you are not a regular visitor of Boing Boing, is a sub-genre of science-fiction that imagines the future as it was envisioned in the past, typically in the Victorian era (i.e., when steam power was prevalent); think of H.G. Wells, or the 1960 movie version of The Time Machine (but not the wretched 2002 remake which, coincidentally, was partially filmed in the Saratoga Spa State Park), Jules Verne, or even the great 1960s TV series The Wild Wild West. Basically, this meant lots of large vats, tubes and pipes, and occasional billows of steam. Neil Peart's drum kit, built especially for this tour, was absolutely beautiful, even if it wasn't as sprawling as it usually is. (His epic drum solo also had a kind of brooding sci-fi feel to it.) Occasionally, a stage hand would push a grocery cart on stage and toss a bunch of rubber chickens into a large cistern to the Geddy side of the drum riser. Okay. (It bears mentioning that amongst the Rush faithful, when describing where seats are, they are not stage left or stage right, but rather on the "Alex side [left] or Geddy side [right].)

As for the performance, it was the usual tour de force. They resurrected a few obscure tracks from the 80s that work better live than on record (I'm thinking anything from Power Windows or Hold Your Fire, which are my least favorite of their 18 studio albums. Oh, and after the intermission, they performed Moving Pictures, one of the greatest albums ever recorded, in its entirety. Paradise, really.

They also previewed two new tracks from their forthcoming Clockwork Angels album, "BU2B" (aka "Brought Up to Believe") and "Caravan." The record is apparently a science-fiction concept album; as Neil Peart wrote in the tour program, "these days an 'album' is an abstraction dearer to artists than audiences," which is why they are breaking with the timeworn pattern of recording an album and then touring behind it. I liked the new songs (they are available on iTunes), even if they still seem a little embryonic; they got mixed reviews from the folks I was hanging out with before the show (a friend of a friend is a moderator on www.therushforum.com and had organized a meet-up of regulars from the forum who, it bears mentioning, had not even been born when I went to my first Rush concert!*)

The band changed the arrangements of a few songs; "Closer to the Heart," tends to be the more protean of their songs, and "Working Man," dating from the pre-Neil Peart era, opened with a kind of reggae arrangement; it was more like "Working Mon." The opening bit of "La Villa Strangiato" sounded almost polka-like!

Unfortunately, I had waited too long to buy tickets, so I had really crappy seats and could not see any of the rear-screen projections, which were apparently very funny. I guess I'll have to wait for the DVD. I did manage to catch the one thart ended the show which went on wa-a-a-a-y too long.

All I can say is that I am glad these guys are still around. The Saratogian review is here. I also heartily recommend the recent Rush documentary Beyond the Lighted Stage.

The complete set list was:

Spirit of Radio (Permanent Waves, 1980)
Time Stand Still (Hold Your Fire, 1987)
Presto (Presto, 1989)
Stick It Out (Counterparts, 1993)
Working Them Angels (Snakes and Arrows, 2007)
Leave That Thing Alone (Counterparts, 1993)
Faithless (Snakes and Arrows, 2007)
BU2B (new--Clockwork Angels, 2011[?])
Free Will (Permanent Waves, 1980)
Marathon (Power Windows, 1985)
Subdivisions (Signals, 1982)

Intermission

Moving Pictures (1981)
Tom Sawyer
Red Barchetta
YYZ
Limelight
The Camera Eye
Witch Hunt
Vital Signs
Caravan (new--Clockwork Angels, 2011[?])
Drum solo
Hope (Alex Lifeson acoustic guitar solo; Snakes and Arrows, 2007)
Closer to the Heart (A Farewell to Kings, 1977)
Overture/Temples of Syrinx (2112, 1976)
Far Cry (Snakes and Arrows, 2007)

Encore:

La Villa Strangiato (Hemispheres, 1978)
Working Man (Rush, 1974)

I wonder if they'll tour in 2012 for the "100-year preanniversary" and play 2112 in its entirety...


*1982, for those playing along at home

Tidal Pools

Looks like another maritime evening; I have tickets to see Rush at SPAC tonight, as a monsoon has swept in from the west (the same one I took off from in Grand Rapids yesterday). Fortunately, I have indoor seats.



The 1980s! "The suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth..." or anyone with a pulse, really.

I Write Like

I just read about a Web site called I Write Like that claims it can analyze your prose and tell you what famous author you...well, write like. I suppose I'll be skeptical about it if it likens me to authors I don't like, but claim it's eerily accurate if it likens me to authors I do like. As I write this post, I have not tried it yet.

So let's go live to I Write Like.

First, a little mantra: Not Dan Brown, not Dan Brown, not Dan Brown...

I'll start with some text from Disrupting the Future, the book about revitalizing the printing industry that I co-wrote with Dr. Joe Webb. Who do we, in combination, write like?

I write like
Isaac Asimov

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Okay, that's acceptable. I guess I'll have to grow mutton chops. Idea for a mystery novel: Murder at GraphExpo...

So, next I'll paste some random paragraphs from Virus!, a silly science-fiction comedy novel I self-published a few years ago. Who do I write like? (I shudder to think...)

I write like
Douglas Adams

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

ZOMG!!!! That site is utterly brilliant!! The people who developed I Write Like are geniuses!!!

Okay, how about a random passage from It Might Have Been, an unpublished "serious" novel?

I write like
Charles Dickens

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Wow! I love you, Dr. Johnson, and I want to have your babies. (I am not fudging any of this, by the way.)

Okay, how about a boring old printing industry business conditions report I wrote for WhatTheyThink?

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Hmm...I think he might take umbrage at that. If he were still alive he'd roll over in his grave...

Okay, one last one. How about one of my silly movie recaps:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Interesting. I've never read David Foster Wallace--maybe I'll pick up Infinite Jest and see if it's a combination of comic recaps of bad science-fiction movies and a printing industry business conditions report. Maybe I've got an idea for my next WhatTheyThink report...

So, basically, I think I Write Like is spot on, and the people who created it are complete and utter geniuses.

Comments?

I rarely look at the comments on this blog, because I never get any, but it seems I'm world-famous (or something) in Asia. I hope no one is saying anything obscene...

Creative Writing Update

A hot-as-hell holiday weekend gave me the opportunity to stay inside the air-conditioned house and do another long-awaited (by me anyway) Movie Mis-Treatment--this time, the 1954 "eyesore" Killers from Space.

Also, I added the script for Take Offs and Landings to the Fiction page on my proper Web site. This is a stage play currently under consideration by the Theatre Workshop in Johnstown, NY (fingers crossed!), which did a staged reading of my Past and Present Tense last year. I hope I learned from my mistakes!

Heatwave

Ugh. Says weather.com:

I think they're understating it. Remember that Twilight Zone episode where it got so hot that paintings were melting off the wall? It's getting like that...

Fit to Be Dyed

On my trip to Philadelphia last week (or whenever it was), I read the Stieg Larsson "phenomenon" The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It's funny; I would say that literally two-thirds of the people on the train were reading either it or the sequel (The Girl Who Played With Fire). It really is one of those collective unconscious things; I found myself trying to hide the cover, as I felt embarrassingly conformist!

(By the way, the author is not to be confused with Gary Larson, who would probably write a book called The Dragon With the Girl Tattoo.)

Actually, I rather liked the book, although I'm not entirely certain why it's become the phenomenon it has. Possibly the real-life saga of the author has something to do with it (Larsson died abruptly at age 50 after delivering three completed manuscripts--the story goes that an elevator was out of order, he took the stairs and, being a heavy smoker, he had a massive heart attack as a result...make of that what you will). He's not a bad writer (although his books are translated from Swedish, which may explain some of the odd phrasing here and there), and spent most of his career writing for the financial press, so he has a very unadorned but functional style. His translator is British, so characters ride in lifts and hide things in the boot of their cars, etc., which I have no problem with.

I have to admit, compelling as it was (and, yes, it did keep me up late one or two nights), it's not a particularly complex story. I was expecting all sorts of twists and turns, and plots within plots, but it's all rather straightforward. (Actually, the things I was expecting may make for a more compelling thriller!) I was also expecting the two parallel plot threads--the corporate malfeasance and the family murder--to turn out to be linked in some way, and--spoiler alert-- they are not. And Mr. Evil--Wennerström--doesn't even make an actual appearance in the book. One would have liked some kind of confrontation between Mikael Blomkvist (the co-protagonist of the book) and his nemesis, but nothing doing, although Wennerström gets a great comeuppance; would that all the financial scumbags and Bernie Madoffs of the world got the same.

And the opening scene--elderly Henrik Vanger gets a mysterious flower on his birthday, as he has for 40-odd years--is a bit of a grabber, but at the end, I couldn't can't help but wonder, "He couldn't have figured that out ages ago?"

The other protagonist--she with the titular tattoo--Lisbeth Salander, is a well-drawn character, although the speed with which she bonds with Blomkvist seems a bit too facile, given her fundamental antisociability (I'm being vague to avoid spoilers). They don't meet until halfway through the book, so maybe a bit more set up would have made the relationship a little more realistic. Still, she's a great character, and you root for her even when she's doing something unspeakably horrible, because the people she's doing it to are the scum of the Earth. (The original Swedish title is Män som hatar kvinnor which means "Men Who Hate Women," which is apt, but probably a bit less commercial and cryptic.)

And with all the Swedish names and places, it's very easy to get umlaut fatigue. I am still seeing dots before my eyes. Or above them, actually.

I wonder, if the author had survived, and the book had been properly edited and perhaps bits of it rewritten, if it would have been a lot better. But even if it doesn't quite live up to its hype (but then what does?), it's at least a million times better than anything Dan Brown ever wrote, so it has that going for it.

So, it's ta ta to the tattoo; I just started the second book, so we shall see.

The Saratoga Film Forum showed the Swedish film adaptation last month, so maybe when it comes out on DVD I shall rent it. I can only imagine what Hollywood will do to it.

But then, maybe I like the Fountains of Wayne song better.

Books Without Conversations

I am deeply deeply ashamed that, when co-authoring Disrupting the Future or doing the various debates and presentations on the subject of print vs. new media...I am ashamed that I had completely forgotten about the opening paragraph of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?'

A fine English major I was! I hang my head in shame...

Unfriendly's Restaurant

Good grief. From the "that which doesn't kill you just makes you huge" file, via Ken A., the "successor" to the appalling KFC Double Down is the Friendly's (and one uses that brand name advisedly) Grilled Cheese BurgerMelt. What is it? Well, gird your ventricles:

First, there's a Friendly's Big Beef burger, but instead of a bun, there are two (count 'em, two!) grilled cheese sandwiches.

Ill yet? You will be:

1500 calories (870 of those from fat); 79g of saturated fat; and a whopping 2090mg of sodium (trouncing the Double Down, which weighs in at a paltry 1380mg of salt)

Here's my question: does it come with a defibrillator?

I'm beginning to get the feeling that Dagwood Bumstead was the paragon of healthy eating.

Censory Overload

Channeling both George Orwell and James Joyce...

Remember back in 1984, when Apple's famous Superbowl commercial introducing the Macintosh played on how Apple was going to destroy Big Brother (which was supposed to be IBM)? Well, to coin a phrase, "meet the new Big Brother, same as the old Big Brother." But, then again, at least they reversed their tyrannical decisions:

Once again, following bad publicity, Apple has reversed a decision involving content for the iPad. Just in time for Bloomsday--today!--the annual celebration of James Joyce and his modernist masterpiece "Ulysses," Apple announced that it was a mistake to demand changes in "Ulysses 'Seen,'" an adaptation of the book for the iPad that began life as a web comic. To win approval from Apple, the creators had altered several panels that included nudity.

And:

Apple this week also overturned a decision involving a graphic-novel adaptation of Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest that introduced gay themes (or extrapolated from gay subtexts). To get the okay from Cupertino, the creators of that app placed opaque black boxes over images of two partly disrobed male characters kissing and fondling. After bloggers complained, Apple called that move, too, a mistake.

Speaking of Ulysses, last night, during my annual re-reading of it, the "Cyclops" episode kind of reminded me of the Teabaggers.

Tales of Brave Ulysses

It's June 16--a happy Bloomsday to everyone!

Among the Madding Crowds

New Pornographers Friday night at the House of Blues in Boston!

Spanning the Globe

Once again, The Onion tells it like it is.


Boston Globe Tailors Print Edition For Three Remaining Subscribers

Flower Power

While in London a couple of weeks ago, Amy M. and I went to the Chelsea Flower Show, which was a lot more fun that I was expecting it to be. It really is quite the event; the BBC devoted an hour of prime time coverage to it each night all week.

It was also quite mobbed:
I was promised giant mutant vegetables, and I was not disappointed:
Some of the display gardens were quite elaborate:
I like the idea of this; would that all roads could be devoid of cars and covered with flowers:

And, of course, carnivorous plants are not without their appeal:
And here's a motto I think we could all live by:
After downing rather voluminous Pimms and lemonades, we went in search of food, and followed the signs that read "Seafood and Champagne." We were not disappointed.

I got bit by (among other things) the gardening bug, and picked up a bunch of seeds (mostly herbs) which, after only less than two weeks, are growing insanely.

It Was 30 Years Ago Today...

Well, last Sunday, actually. On May 30, 1980, Peter Gabriel’s third album was released, the one widely believed to be his masterpiece, if not in terms of sales, than certainly of artistic vision.

1980’s Peter Gabriel was third album to be titled Peter Gabriel, even using the same typeface, his idea at the time being to have each album seem like subsequent issues of a magazine. As a result, the third album is unofficially called “Melt,” as the cover features what appears to be Gabriel’s face melting (courtesy of Hipgnosis). (He would have kept this going but his record company decided, with album four, that he should start naming them properly; so 1982’s Peter Gabriel ended up with the more or less official title of Security, likely because the cover picture appears to be a still from a bank security camera. Minimalist titles like So, Us, and Up followed. In fact, those are the only proper studio albums he has released since 1982; not the most prolific of artists, is he?) Five years into his solo career (Gabriel left Genesis in 1975, following The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway tour), his first two albums, Peter Gabriel (aka “Car”) and Peter Gabriel (aka “Scratch”) careened from style to style, sometimes successfully (“Solsbury Hill,” “Here Comes the Flood,” “D.I.Y.”), sometimes less so (most of “Scratch”). However, by album three, he had found a sound, a vision, and the songs that made them work. It could be called “world music,” although at this stage I’m not sure what world it would be; certainly not Earth. I first heard “Games Without Frontiers” on the radio circa 1980 or 1981 or so and thought it was one of the strangest—and coolest—songs I had ever heard. The rest of the album is only modestly less strange, but still very cool, and more than a little haunting.

“Melt” was produced by Steve Lillywhite, early in his production career, and the record boasts the sound—of which Lillywhite was a chief architect—of the “gated” drum sound; that is, a noise gate is applied to a conventional drum to change—or eliminate—the decay of the impact. Coupled with a lack of cymbals, it tended to add a unique, punchy, and at times almost electronic sound to acoustic drums. This became a popular sound in the early 1980s, and it is argued that this was the first album to use this effect. It is highlighted on the opening song “Intruder” (drums played by Genesis mate Phil Collins—the effect is also featured on Collins’ “In the Air Tonight”), a creepy creepy song about, well, an intruder. “I know something about opening windows and doors/I know how to move quietly—to creep across creaky wooden floors.” The obsession with obsessive personalities continues on “No Self Control” (“I don’t know how to stop!”). “Start” is a brief sax/synth instrumental that leads into the radio favorite (well, played on the radio once or twice) “I Don’t Remember,” featuring Tony Levin’s “Stick” (a type of mutant bass).

More deranged characters appear in “Family Snapshot,” an attempt to get into the mind of a Lee Harvey Oswald-like political assassin (“‘I don’t really hate you/I don’t care what you do/We were made for each other—me and you/I want to be somebody/You were like that, too’” After the heavy drama of “Family Snapshot,” side one (in the old vinyl days) ends with the light-ish “And Through the Wire” featuring guitarists Paul Weller (The Jam, whose classic Sound Affects came out in 1980) and Dave Gregory (XTC, whose extremely classic Black Sea also came out in 1980). Side two opens with the big hit (well, it occasionally got played—it rose to #48 in the U.S.) “Games Without Frontiers”—and, yes, that’s Kate Bush chanting “Jeux sans frontières” in the background), leading into “Not One of Us” (“You may look like we do/Talk like we do—But you know how it is...”). “Lead a Normal Life” is set in a mental institution. The album ends on a political note; “Biko,” about South African anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko, who was killed in police custody in 1977. The song begins and ends with a chant of the South African song “Senzeni Na?” (“What have we done?”) which was sung at Biko’s funeral. “Biko” was often played at the end of Gabriel concerts, and the audience were encouraged to chant along.

Speaking of which, several SU-ians and I journeyed to Rochester in 1986 to see Gabriel live on the So tour. Although he didn’t play “Solsbury Hill” (my favorite Peter Gabriel track), and I was not a big fan of So (it was his big mega-platinum albums with “Sledgehammer,” “In Your Eyes,” and “Big Time”), it was still a phenomenal show.

So, let’s put on the great Peter Gabriel, melt a bit, and get so strange across the border...

The official pre-MTV video for “Games Without Frontiers”—ah, the state of video technology in 1980!

It Was 25 Years Ago...

25 years ago yesterday, on May 13, 1985, Dire Straits’ fifth studio album Brothers in Arms was released. It has the distinction of being the first compact disc I ever bought; I had got my first CD player as a high school graduation present (which I suppose suggests that that was 25 years ago, as well...oh, joy) and Brothers in Arms had just come out, so...

I was pretty much a Dire Straits fan from day one—I had their debut 45 “Sultans of Swing” back in 1978, and I pretty much kept up with them throughout much of the early 1980s. Mark Knopfler is a guitar god.

Having formed in Britain as part of the pub rock movement in the mid-1970s that preceded punk, Dire Straits were certainly out of step in their homeland, although they were a hit in the States (“Sultans of Swing” was a top 40 single). They began as a four-piece—Mark Knopfler on lead guitar and vocals, brother David on rhythm guitar, John Illsley on bass, and Pick Withers on drums. Only Illsley would still be in the band by Brothers in Arms.

Their first, eponymously titled record (1978) remains one of the great debuts, with scarcely a bad song on it (“Sultans of Swing” was in it), although their quickly recorded follow-up Communique (1979) had that “difficult second album” feel to it, and the scrabbling guitar solo in “Lady Writer’ was obviously supposed to be the next “Sultans of Swing.” It wasn’t.

David Knopfler had left by the third album Making Movies (1980), which was a great leap forward in style and complexity, and 1982’s Love Over Gold—boasting the compelling 14:25 “Telegraph Road” and one of the greatest, most intense guitar solos ever—went even further. (It remains my favorite of their six studio albums.) A retreat to simpler material resulted in the 1983 EP Twisting by the Pool, by which time Pick Withers had been replaced by ex-Rockpile drummer Terry Williams, albeit temporarily. (It was also in 1983 that Mark Knopfler recorded his first movie soundtrack, to the great Bill Forsyth film Local Hero, and started his career as a producer, producing Bob Dylan’s comeback Infidels.)

By 1985, Dire Straits was little more than Knopfler, Illsley, and a collection of other musicians and less of a proper band. (Session man and ex-King Crimsonsite Tony Levin plays his “stick”—a weird sort of bass—on “One World,” actually my favorite track on the record.) Odd, then, that Brothers in Arms became such a mammoth hit record. The first three tracks are still mainstays of FM radio—“So Far Away,” “Walk of Life,” and of course “Money for Nothing,” the anti-MTV song that ironically became an MTV hit (the computer animation—a novelty in 1985—helped). Actually, it wasn’t really an anti-MTV song; Knopfler often wrote from the perspective of characters, and in this case it’s blue-collar appliance schleppers who think that there’s nothing to being a musician.

I confess to not having been all that impressed with Brothers in Arms at the time; sure I liked it, but it was actually my least favorite of their records at the time. It’s hard to explain why; listening again to it 25 years later, it’s not especially dated like a lot of albums from the 1980s—perhaps the atmospheric pop jazziness of many of the tracks didn’t suit me at the time, but I appreciate it a lot more now. I remember using the new features of my first CD player to skip slower tracks like “Your Latest Trick” and “Why Worry” but with hindsight they’re actually quite nice. Perhaps I’ve mellowed in my old age. “Ride Across the River” always seemed a tad Peter Gabriel-esque, and the title track remains a haunting, beautiful classic.

I think part of the difficulty was that it was the first record I remember hearing that was released at CD length (actually, it’s only 54 minutes and change, although I remember it being longer, for some reason); as someone brought up in the vinyl era, you get used to the rhythm of two ~21:30 sides; song sequencing used to be a bit of an art, and even today albums that go on much longer than 45 minutes can’t always keep my attention. It’s hard to explain.

Following the tremendous success of Brothers in Arms, Knopfler was never particularly comfortable as the rock star, so he retreated into soundtracks and production and didn’t reconvene Dire Straits until 1991 and the so-so On Every Street. And then he called it a day and began a solo career. He remains a guitar god.

So let’s put on Brothers in Arms, celebrate the leaving forever of high school, and recall a time when this kind of computer animation was impressive.


Then we can check out the Weird Al version.

Talk Talk

Via The Onion, of course:

I confess I don't have cable, and avoid cable news channels at all costs, so I don't really know, but from what I've read...you mean, this isn't Glenn Beck?