Sometimes I think I should staple my ears closed when I go out in public lest I be fatally infected with The Ridiculous and The stupid.

Tonight at a diner while getting a quick dinner after attending a rehearsal for a play I'm writing about, I'm sitting across the aisle from a party o' four, of whom the one doing most of the talking seemed straight out of Goomba Central Casting, with a voice that carried, yielding such as:

"No, I didn't sleep with your aunt!" Followed a few minutes later by, "No, I didn't sleep with your mom!"

And this exchange:

"Yeah, she came out of gay-ism."
"Gay-ism?"
"Yeah, I converted her. Two months with me and she lost the butch."
"Okay, but that doesn't necessarily mean she's not anymore attracted to wo ..."
"Now you're confusin' me."


Then there's the exchange between cashiers at the local grocery whilst I waited in line. (Facebook friends will have seen this one.)

"She said I was incompetent!"
"She did."
"I can't be incompetent -- I don't even know what 'incompetent' means."
(The last sentence stated with an air of triumphalism. You won, I guess.


I live in a sitcom, I does. Whether it's long jumped the shark isn't for me to judge.

In the interests of moving this conrep along before the events slide further into the realm of Memory and Dream ...

So I'd made it through Friday evening and my one-shot debut (which I'd love to hear sometime if hms42 can unearth it among his reams of recordings; hint but no big rush) and up to the Pegasus nominees concert.


( Too ... many ... words ... )

OK -- so this week's Deadlinestuff and Automotivestuff is behind me, and I can finally sit down and start the frst of a series of OVFF conreps, the standard practice of attendees at SF or filk conventions to let those who didn't go know what they missed and to let those who did know what was hap'nin' around the corner.

To begin: Absolutely lovely con, best of the four OVFFs I've been to since 2005. An inspired and diverse lineup of guests -- GOHs I'd never heard live (nor had a lot of relative newbies, I'd expect) like Duane Elms and Larry Warner; an hour set aside for a FUMP showcase; various favorites like Toyboat or Heather Dale & Ben Deschamps. And the expanded weekend made things not seem rushed. (It also meant I got to hear the entirety of the Pegasus concert -- I'm usually always running late on Friday, and it's a toss-up if I'll make it in time for the whole thing. This year ... I was running late on Thursday.) And there were a couple filk-circles this weekend that easily rank in My Top Ten Circles, were I to list such a thing. Many congratulations, accolades, bouquets and yays to braider and the concom for an Even Finer Than Usual Job.



( Much wordiness ensues. )

I was just updating the events calendar for the A&E section I edit at The Company when I noticed that the George Eastman House's Dryden Theatre is screening the 1922 Dracula film, Nosferatu ...

... and, as a sure sign that I just spent a weekend at a filk convention, I immediately noticed that "Nosferatu" scans to "Desperado."

I have no intention of doing anything with this knowledge, for which we can all be grateful. Though this is the kind of post I regret making in a few days after mrgoodwraith or phillip2637 pick it up and do something evil to it.

Home safely from OVFF. Posts and photos and such like shall ensue at Some Point Real Soon Now. Tight deadline for The Company, but I got a fair amount done in advance before leaving for Ohio, so I'm not stressin'. Yet.

Sounds & Images: Red Roses and Dead Things - Seanan McGuire
State O'Mind: Content

I have arrived safely at OVFF.

Filk shall now commence.

Second load of laundry is in the dryer, last load of dishes are half-done, bags are mostly packed -- which means I only have about two more hours of errands ahead of me before I can get on the road to OVFF. Sigh. I expect I'll arrive sometime in the 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. corridor, which is still fairly early for filkers. Anyway, enough time whilst the laundry bounces around to finally update this thing.

My posts here have been fairly (to put it mildly) sporadic over the past couple weeks. Some stepped-up duties at The Company -- various new features in my A&E section, an expanded online presence, etc. -- plus my usual tendencies to overcommit myself work-wise, have kept me busy. (And when I haven't been busy, I've usually been doing Funstuff and Lifestuff.) For short, pithy, sarcastic non-sequitir stuff, I've been using Facebook, because it's more geared for that sort of thing than the verbose, meatier fare I post on LJ. Not that this post will be all that meaty -- it's a shakedown of the past few weeks -- but it's certainly verbose.

So here's Stuff Dave's Been Up To Lately:

* Made by way to the Casa De erinwrites and Rand a few weeks back for a house concert featuring Greg Klyma, a singer-songwriter those of you unfamiliar with him may want to check out. Turns out I didn't know anyone at the concert other than the hosts and Greg -- I'd interviewed him a few months back for The Company when he played locally -- though at least two separate people thought Rand and I were brothers. Which was odd, as I don't think we really look the slightest bit alike: The only physical commonality is that at times we each tend to have more than our share of hair.

* Interviewed Peter Noone from Herman's Hermits -- he told me how when he was growing up, his grandfather would get on the piano during family gatherings and sing the old English musichall song "I'm Henry VIII I Am." By "get on the piano," he meant just that -- get on top of the piano. Years later, in the studio, grandpa wasn't around and Noone didn't know anything but the first verse -- hence, "second verse, same as the first!" Neat story, whether or not it's true. (I sometimes have my doubts about Celebrities' Pithy Anecdotes.) Other recent interviews: Peggy Seeger (who was audibly relieved when my first questions were not about Pete or Ewan McColl), Jonathan Edwards ("Sunshine"), Cheryl Wheeler.

* Thanks to Le Facebook and some gatherings we've made happen through such, I've been able to reconnect with a number of people from my high-school years -- people I really hadn't expected to see again -- and it's been much fun. Reconnecting with people after 20 years is interesting, if a bit surreal if your last mental image of them was age 18 or 19 or so. In most cases, it's still the same person at core, though altered by significant life experiences as well as the passage of years. I'm probably the most changed of the batch -- back in the mid-80s, I was a very straight-laced, clean-cut, conservative-evangelical, withdrawn type who really didn't do a lot of associating with people. These days I'm the one arranging the pub gatherings. *smiles* I like to think that I've retained what is worthy, honorable and good from my previous self while discrading what is unworthy, dishonorable and bad -- and that this is a process I repeat regularly. Then again, that's hardly unique; I think we all like to think that.

Ehhh, there's a lot more I could and should post, but I think the laundry is near-done and the Road beckons soon. For those of you going to OVFF, see you tonight, maybe.

A rare full post about this and that will ensue shortly -- just wondering who among all y'all are going to OVFF. I'll be there, albeit no doubt arriving very late on Thursday. But it's filk, so we do "very late" with aplomb.

About 85 hours of Stuff To Do in the next 43 or so, of course.

Words: Desire of the Everlasting Hills by Thomas Cahill
Sounds & Images: 9 Great Rock'n'Roll Dance Hits by The Infra-Red Radiation Orchestra
State O'Mind: A tetch harried, but generally content

I tend to be capable of separating the art from the artist. That is to say, I may really like and appreciate a work of art (painting, book, play, musical piece, film, etc.) ... and be familiar with attitudes and/or actions on a creator's part with which I seriously disagree -- in extreme cases, which I find reprehensible or evil. The two don't necessarily affect each other: I can still appreciate the work while condemning the actions/attitudes of its creator.

Examples: I like some early Orson Scott Card (Wyrms, Treason, the Alvin Maker books before they started to seem like the same book over and over) and say so unapolegitcally, without endorsing Card's more recent politcal screeds. My many issues with Objectivism don't stop me from loving Steve Ditko's art on the original Spider-Man comics. I still like some of Tom Cruise's better work, though Cruise the person strikes me as increasingly distasteful and wacky. I love Bob Dylan's work, but it doesn't stop me from watching the Don't Look Back documentary and thinking he was needlessly a colossal jerk a good deal of the time back in the day. And there's plenty of cultural, casual anti-Semitism in many of the 19th-century (even early 20th) authors I read and enjoy, such as Dickens. There's the work, and there's the creator -- a creator's excellent work doesn not justify or negate unworthy or evil actions or attitudes on his/her part; nor do the evil actions/attitudes of the creator negate what's good about the creation.

You can probably guess where I'm going with this.

One of my eight or 10 favorite films is Chinatown, the noirish 1974 film starring Jack Nicholson in one of his signature roles, private detective Jake Gittes, whose investigation into a municipal official's apparent affair leads him into a major, vast and intricate web of municipal corruption involving murder, incest, and the water supply for the city of Los Angeles. Great performances by Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, Diane Ladd and even those in minor roles like Burt Young (the future Paulie in the Rocky movies). And one of the greatest, most evocative and world-wearily chilling lines in filmdom: "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown."

The film was adapted from a Robert Towne screenplay by ... director Roman Polanski. The same Roman Polanski who was recently arrested in Switzerland on a decades-old charge in connection with the rape of a 13-year-old girl in the U.S.. He had pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual encounter with a minor, but skipped the country before sentencing. Polanski's supporters and apologists claim that the now-deceased judge at the time wanted, for political and public-image reasons, to make an example of Polanski and ignore the stipulations of the plea-deal that had been reached.

That may be -- surely there are jurists overly concerned with politics and public image. But it doesn't change the fact that Polanski conceded he had sexual contact with a 13-year-old. He drugged and raped a child. And judicial-system wrinkles don't seem enough to account for the vehemence of the high-profile "Free-Polanski" apologists -- few of whom I think would be inclined to support an admitted rapist and fugitive if he had been someone who wasn't rich, famous and connected.

I tend not to attribute base motives to people's political actions, so I could possibly-conceivably-if-I-squinted have conceded that the Polanski-supporters were mainly concerned about Corruption in the Judicial System Circa 1970s. Doubtful, but I could accept the small possibility that that was the concern of people like Martin Scorsese, Ethan Coen or Natalie Portman. Until tonight when someone on Slacktivist linked to an LJ post containing the free-Polanski petition ... which minimizes the drugging and rape of a child as "a case of morals."

A case of MORALS? Rape?!? Yup, according to the petition signers, that's all it is ... not like rape is a crime or nothin', just some insignificant transgression of cultural mores or whatnot. Apparently it's just us puritanical Americans being all repressed and uptight and stuff. No big deal, right?

Unless it had been their daughter. Or sister, or niece, or friend. Or self.

(I get that the victim herself is on the free-Polanski side, but who cares? A victim or a victim's family might personally forgive a rapist, murderer, kidnapper, armed-robber, etc. ... but they don't get veto power over the criminal justice system's processing of a felony. Polanski's family was once in the victim's role themselves -- his wife Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family. But even if Roman Polanski were to personally forgive and mentally absolve Charles Manson, it would make no difference judicially: Chuck remains in prison where he belongs; and I think few would disagree. This has nothing to do with forgiveness; it has everything to do with crime and punishment -- with equality before the law. With -- as battered as the phrase got during the Clinton impeachment fiasco a decade ago -- the Rule of Law.)

I separate the creator from the creation, as I said. So I'll probably still enjoy and appreciate the work, past and present, of Martin Scorsese, Harrison Ford, Natalie Portman, the Coen Brothers (I don't think Joel's on the list), Jeremy Irons -- for that matter, Woody Allen.

But as people, as human beings ... I find myself questioning, at the very least, their judgment.

Sounds & Images: Tonight's Austin City Limits. Tonight it's Dave Matthews Band. I have a colleague who could be Dave Matthews' twin if he were about 12 years older.
State O'Mind: Puzzled

So I didn't actually have unknown wealth untold -- it just turned out that I began renting at my current apartment building more than nine years ago and paid a security deposit; when an account has been dormant for so long, the bank checks in to affirm that yup, I'm still living there and still know about the account. Ah, well. I had allowed myself to think that maybe I had overpaid on one of the several car loans I'd taken out through that bank and they had only discovered it years later ... uh, yeah.

So ... sorry to disappoint janeg, but no buying a manse and establishing Pondfilk East or anything like that.

So a colleague in our legal-advertising department at The Company popped into my office to tell me they got an ad from the Major Regional Bank listing around a hundred or so names and addresses of people who have unclaimed cash value exceeding $50 that needs to be claimed. And that my name and address is on the list.

I have absolutely no idea what this could possibly be about.

But I suppose I'll find out tomorrow. The worst-case scenario would be some glitch and there's nothin' there. The best-case scenario would be UNTOLD MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN, THROUGH SOME COMICALLY UNLIKELY CIRCUMSTANCE, MY NAME.

Meh.

In other news, RIP Sen. Kennedy. You had your virtues and your faults -- but chief among your virtues was a passion for the common good and a tenacity in seeking it.

Words: Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay
Sounds & Images: Facing the Mirror by the Dave Rivello Ensemble
State O'Mind: Too sleepy to be all that curious

* Cross-posted from Facebook. Are any of all y'all on there whom I haven't friended yet?*


OK. This is just an impression on my part, and I might be completely off. I'm just wondering if anyone else has the same impression, and if so, any thoughts on why it is. Or if you think it's completely wrong ... and can speak to *that*.

My impression: While both George W. Bush (past) and Barack Obama (present) have as presidents inspired fierce, intense criticism and opposition ... vitriol directed at Bush seems to have been attached to specific actions and policies of his administration; whereas vitriol directed at Obama seems to be something of a visceral reaction to and hatred of the man himself.

In other words, it seems that those who hated Bush hated him because of Bush-administration foreign and domestic policies ... whereas for many who hate Obama, the hatred seems to come *first* ... and then they look around to find reasons. Which seems why for many of these folks, it's not enough to say "I oppose the president's preferred health-care proposal for the following reasons" -- they feel the need to call him a Nazi and spread outrageous rhetoric about "death panels" and such.

I'm not saying that Bush didn't, and doesn't have some rabid critics who froth and foam at the mere mention of his name (and yup, there was a lot of "Bushitler" nonsense then, too) ... nor am I saying Obama doesn't have reasonable, sensible opponents who raise reasonable, sensible objections to his policies. (Some are, in fact, among my FB friends.) I'm just saying that the hatred of Obama seen in some quarters seems to transcend political differences. Seems to transcend *race*, though for a small number that might be a factor. Maybe I'm imagining it, but it seems like it's *there*, almost a tangible mass of hatred ... more so than seen for Reagan or Clinton or Carter or even GWB. And I'm wondering what it is and where it comes from.

And I'm curious as to whether any of all y'all get the same impression ... and what you think might be happening here. (And I'd love to hear from any of all y'all who disagree as well. And when did I start saying "all y'all?")

Sounds & Images: "I Got Drunk" by Uncle Tupelo
State O'Mind: Reflective

As it's nearly two weeks past by now, I really should get around to posting about Confluence, the science-fiction convention in Pittsburgh that pretty much always ends up one of my favorite weekends of just about any year, this year being no exception.

A large part of that is due, of course, to the tireless efforts of mrgoodwraith, who has built the filk track up to the point where, to me and many others, Confluence is for all intents and purposes a filkcon that just happens to have a really good literary track (and good booksellers, not that I could afford any). All the way around, it's a well-run con -- still small enough not to be daunting; large enough that there's always at least three somethings happening; a generally relaxing vibe; and a first-rate con suite thanks to Greg (blanking on surname).

So ... a few highlights from the weekend:

* Hearing Rin Barton for the first time. She's an excellent songwriter with a lovely voice, and enough presence that she was able to counteract a number of moments of forgetting lyrics and turn those moments into charming schtick. The accompanying photo shows her "initiation" into the filk community by markbernstein -- yep, she got Madiera'd. I think it's great to see younger people, like Rin or the women in Sassafrass, coming into the filk community -- since the vast majority of filkers of whom I'm aware are my age or older (and I've officially hit Middle Age, turning 40 right before Confluence). Good to see it's going to continue to be a vibrant, and evolving, concern.

* While John Scalzi's GOH hour wasn't all that Meaty and Profound, as these things go, it was a fun, enjoyable hour of hearing Scalzi's stories about his family, his early writing, living in rural Ohio, etc. Kind of like a live "Whatever" column.

* Toyboat! I love this group's bar-band take on various classics of filkdom, such as "Uplift," "Mary O'Meara" and, of course, "Banned From Argo" -- they've made that latter song listenable again. It was great having them in open filk as well -- the Saturday night open filk had a wonderful panoply of excellent musicians, with them, maugorn, Cedric from the Bedlam Bards, T.J. Burnside-Clapp, lemmozine and others in the room at various times (and a pretty fair a cappella contingent as well, with Rin, Mark, Randy, almeda and, I suppose, me, among others.

* mrgoodwraith's efforts to bring the various streams of fannish music together make for a highly eclectic, and much fun, filk track: He managed to put together a weekend that reunited members of a classic traditional filk group, Technical Difficulties, as filk GOH ("More Difficulties") and had a lineup featuring FUMP/dementia (Power Salad), Celtic/world (Heather Dale and Ben Deschamps), filk-friendly acoustic covers of Yes, Donovan and such (maugorn, who does a lovely rendition of Yes' "Wondrous Stories," a song I'd kind of bypassed before); rock & roll (Toyboat), other veteran trad-filkers (Clif Flynt -- whose concert I sadly missed; same with almeda). There have been a few dust-ups on LJ about divides and conflicts between these various streams; Randy is doing as much as anybody, it seems to me, to stitch 'em together.

* Some lovely open-filking both nights, plus the dead dog Sunday and the undead-dog housefilk. It was good hearing stevemb a couple times; he sings all too infrequently. And markbernstein broke quite a few brains with "Punfinished Symphony," including mine -- even if you've heard it before, it still sparks groans and whimpers in all the right places. I trotted out a few things I hadn't done in a while, like my Fablesfilk "Let Me In," or ever, like Joel Polowin's "Flies," which I happened to have in my book after once printing it out on a whim. There was this one perfect moment at the Saturday night open filk: Someone did a Muppet-themed song, and immediately thereafter, someone did a parody of Stan Rogers' "Lies" -- which meant "Flies" was a follower on two fronts and could not go unsung.

This is the second straight convention in which someone has complimented me on my voice -- it happened at Concertino as well -- which probably doesn't seem like much to some of the more veteran or accomplished performers among ye; but for someone who's still something of a neophyte, who only began singing in public a few years back and whose delivery has occasionally shown it ... that was a big deal. I think I have improved markedly, in that I've taken seriously input people have offered about breath control, staying within key, pitch, volume, etc. (Sometimes I still do silly stuff like launch into a hard song like Julia Ecklar's "The Phoenix" with no practice or much of any vocal prep, like I did at "Confluence ... or write a song with key shifts and lyrical twists that are beyond my vocal abilities. I once wrote a song that included the line "... while fat and pasty tourists drink tequila by the pool." That line is impossible to sing without it coming out "fat and tasty purists.") Anyway, to quote John & Paul, "it's getting better all the time."

* Anecdote Time: At one point, when looking at starmalachite's "Doctor Mews" shirt -- depicting 10 cats garbed as the 10 incarnations of the Doctor from Dr. Who -- I tried to make a reference to the feline representing the Eighth Doctor ... but instead of "Paul McGann," it exited my lips as "Gary McGath." Which raises mental images of madfilkentist manning the TARDIS. I mentioned this as the undead-dog housefilk, which, of course, started a brief exchange about what filkers would make a good incarnation of the Doctor. Names tossed out included gorgeousgary, thatcrazycajun and, most intriguingly, talis_kimberley. Though, as filkferengi noted, "Bin there, dun that" -- mrgoodwraith had ably portrayed #10 the night before at the PARSEC play. Still and all ... I could see, say, Rand Bellavia in the role. For that matter, though I've never really interacted with him, from everything I've heard, gfish actually is the Doctor.

* In a sheepish moment after the con, I read a post by an LJ friend, amergina, who I know mostly through her efforts co-modding the christianity community ... and realized we were at the same con and didn't know it. Whoops. Had I remembered, I could've told her to keep her eyes open for a big guy with a big beard, but then again in fandom settings that doesn't do too much to narrow things down.

There are assuredly other highlights -- like Randy's sister Wendy just plain rockin' as River Tam in PARSEC's mashup of Firefly, Dr. Who and Annie Get Your Gun; it'd been too long since I'd seen Wendy -- but it be late. As ever, a wondrous weekend.

I've returned safely from Confluence, which was its customary excellent weekend: mrgoodwraith and his concom colleagues are once again to be commended. I'll write in detail about the weekend, eh, one of these days ... I still haven't finished my posts about last month's vacation.

Back to work tonight, but once more refreshed. This year I finally started actually taking my vacation days rather than letting them pile up toward the end of the year and leaving about 10 or 12 of 'em unused. (No carry-over, sigh.) Not a-hap'nin' this year.

Words: I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Sounds & Images: "Music, Sex and Cookies" by maugorn (written by George Uetz)
State O'Mind: Content

Couple million errands to finish, then on the road to Confluence. So adieu.

Post title swiped, of course, from "Mal's Song" by vixyish (and Joss Whedon, he obligatorily added).

It was at FilKONtario -- in 2005, I believe, fairly late in the night in the cavernous Alderwood room -- when Jordan Sears shyly announced she had a song. And then she launched into a beautiful delivery of an amazing, haunting song of a young woman tormented by memories -- false? true? -- of being Alice, as in Alice in Wonderland.

... Hold a steady job somehow;
three months clean and sober now --
oh, the ways I've tried to get back there again ...

I had no idea where that song came from -- and at that point, I think it was new to most people (it may have actually been new then) -- but I knew this was going to be one of The Classics.

A few months later, I went to Confluence in Pittsburgh, where mrgoodwraith has assembled one of his usual exhaustively packed filk tracks (because he's quite mad, you know, but in a very good way). And the guest of honor was this trio from Seattle called "Escape Key." All three were excellent, of course, and at the center was ... this voice, this rich, warm voice capable of conveying joy, loss, rage, ambivalence, fear, acceptance, sorrow, mirth. And in one of those happy juxtapositions, that voice was attached to a genuinely nice person, and someone who radiated a joy in the new people and experiences she was coming to know through this "filk" universe.

This was, of course, vixyish, who celebrates her birthday today.

They did a lot of their songs, and others at that Confluence -- including "No Hurry," an atypical postapocalyptic song that remains my favorite of the Vixy catalog (though it has heavy competition from "Persephone," "Thirteen," "Strange Messenger," etc.) ... and they did this song called "The Girl That's Never Been." Which I'd heard before -- from Jordan at FKO. Yup ... that was one of Vixy's, too.

Last year, when fanboying out on my LJ about Vixy and Tony's Thirteen album, I suggested that Vixy is incapable of writing a bad song. Looking back, I shouldn't have worded it that way (and she gently refuted that statement on their Web site, as I recall) ... because that statement suggests, however unintentionally, that the ability is somehow something innate or "natural" or whatever rather than the result of a lot of hard work, not only crafting the songs, but pruning them, rejecting ideas that don't work, etc. ... Selection of what to present is as much a part of the process as the writing and performance itself. So perhaps what I should have written is something about her (and Tony's, and others in the production process) impeccable craft and musical integrity and such ... so, OK, she may have written a bad song or two, but we've never heard 'em.

That's Vixy the writer/performer/artist -- with whom I've had much more contact than Vixy the person, 'cause we live on different sides of the country. But I'll say that whenever I've spent any time with her, Vixy has radiated a warmth and a welcoming, a sense that she is genuinely happy to see you, to be sharing Earth-space with you. (There are a few others in the filk community who are like that as well -- ohiblather leaps to mind.) From my end, as someone who until a few years ago barely knew much of anybody in the community and was slowly dipping my feet in with my songs about presidential ghosts and Charlie Brown-Paul Simon hybrids ... that means a lot.

The preceding has been a really long-winded way of saying: Happy birthday, Vixy! May the happiness you've found continue to blossom and grow!

Had you been a girl that's never been ... that would've been kind of sad for planet Earth.

Sounds & Images: In my head, "Thirteen." Which is a pretty good segue to encourage the uninitated to give the Thirteen album by vixyish and tfabris a try -- it's on CDBaby -- or at least check 'em out here. I have a feeling you'll thank me.

As noted at the bottom of my last entry, I've recently started Isaac Asimov's I, Robot -- one of Many, Many Major Classics of Science Fiction That Ldwheeler Hasn't Read.

I thing some two-thirds to three-quarters of my friends-list are SF fans to some degree or another. The filk crowd, certainly -- plus, my old colleague and roommate michaelhinman runs the Airlock Alpha SF Web site; shaunathan has been known to post reviews of literary SF from time to time; normaltrouble has written about her various fandoms; amergina, hazmatplaytime and seanan_mcguire, among others, write SF and fantasy (I've long thought Marcy (Hazmat) was one of Seanan's lost clones, and I'm sort of hoping they'll meet up at ComiCon next week; looking forward to seeing if the universe survives); and so forth and so on.

However, unlike most SF/fantasy fans I know ... I didn't really get into the genre in early adolescence, which many people consider the ideal time for it to take hold (and when some of the seminal writers became active in fandom, creating zines or writing to Campbell or so forth). I'd read the Narnia books, of course, and the first two Oz books. (Though I didn't read The Hobbit until I was 20 and the Ring trilogy the year after.) I read Wells' The Time Machine in a gifted/talented class at school. I read The Martian Chronicles and Cat's Cradle in 11th grade English. I did read lots of comics, which were inspired in large part by SF/F, and I'd seen a few of the movies (the Star Wars flicks and some of Spielberg's takes -- Close Encounters, E.T. and such -- and probably read a stray SF book or so. But it actually wasn't until I got to college and met mrgoodwraith -- who kept bugging me to join this SF group he'd started called "Radiance" -- that I started more seriously looking into the genre and liking what I saw. I already knew SF could be "literary" from reading Wells and Bradbury -- then, after taking a lit course from Charles Bressler about Oxford's "Inklings" (Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, etc.) and their influences (Macdonald, Chesterton, etc.), I started taking it more seriously. Long about that time, mrgoodwraith had dragged me into organized fandom -- mostly by talking me into driving the Radiance crew to a couple cons senior year (the pre-Confluence Pitt con and my one and only I-Con).

So since then, I've been making my way, piecemeal, through the SF/fantasy literary universe, interspersing with my other lit-passions: classic lit (Dostoevsky, Dickens, etc.); history; theology/religion; selected modern lit (Marquez, Greene). I've read and enjoyed A Canticle for Liebowitz, A Case of Conscience, The Door Into Summer, A Fire Upon the Deep and various other SF classics (didn't really enjoy Stapledon's Star Maker as much as I respected it) ... but there are several Major Works I Have Yet To Read. So I ask the Gallery: Which of these would you say are Absolute Musts and Should Be Moved To The Top of the Stack Post Haste? And what would you add to the Absolute Must Etc. pile?

THE UNREAD LIST
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
The Foundation series by Isaac Asimov
The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
the Enderverse books by Orson Scott Card (I know how Ender's Game ends, which kinda puts me off them)
Slan by A.E. Van Vogt
Pretty much anything by Bujold, LeGuin, Sturgeon, Cherryh or Zelazny
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
Kindred by Octavia Butler
Dune by Frank Herbert (I've started it once, but only got about 90-100 pages in)
Ringworld by Larry Niven
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series


Suggest away!

The other night I was in one of those Big BoxMart department stores, picking up some medicine and groceries for my mother. As I passed by the media section, browsing the DVDs and whatnot, I heard what sounded like an 8- or 9-year-old girl's voice saying, "Look, it's Michael Jackson!" She wasn't referring to me, of course -- that's one celebrity I've never been confused with (as opposed to Rasputin, Dostoevsky, Sam Beam from Iron and Wine, Rupert from Survivor of around five years ago, one of Maurice Sendak's Wild Things, etc.) -- she was no doubt referring to some Jackson product or display or another.

But that got me thinking about the pervasiveness and power of mass media. Because I rather doubt an 8- or 9-year-old would really have heard much at all about Michael Jackson before his recent death and the ensuing media barrage of saturation coverage, retrospectives, analyses, tabloidage and so forth. I mean, the man's era of ubiquity (not counting his earlier, childhood work with his brothers) was in the 1980s and early 1990s -- and in the 1990s it was more for personal pecadillos and scandals and such like. At any rate, I don't think he was a Ubiquitous Major Star anymore after, say 1995 or 1997 or such -- I don't think a girl who's 8 or 9 or so would have picked him up through our cultural osmosis, the way she would have picked up Britney Spears or the Jonas Brothers or maybe Justin Timberlake and his peers. It's possible one of her parents or other older relatives are Jackson fans, and she was exposed to him that way -- after all, my friend Jamie's young-teenage kids are probably conversant in Dylan and Bowie; and wormquartet's young son no doubt knows the whole Weird Al catalog. But I think it more likely that over the past several weeks, the mass-media culture has driven the iconography of Michael Jackson into the kid's brain, not unlike a high-power drill.

I'm not saying that's necessarily a good or bad thing, and I'm probably doing way too much riffing over the fact that a child recognized Michael Jackson's face after he's been in the news for about a month post-mortem. But it's a reminder of the psychological and sociological power of mass media. Could it be Bad? Could it be Dangerous? I can't say. So I'll just Beat It.

Words: Recently finished Stephen Lawhead's Avalon and started Isaac Asimov's I, Robot
Sounds & Images: Music of My Mind (Stevie Wonder)
State O' Mind: It's a thriller, thriller night

Holy flaming pickled persimmons, it's been at least a week and a half since I've posted. Partly busy -- the last couple weeks have included some interesting interviews for the A&E section, including Chubby Checker and Judas Priest's Ian Hill. (Chubby was fun -- very soft-spoken over the phone even while making grandiose claims about pretty much inventing dancing for the last half-century ... and he may have a point.) Also overhauling the apartment. (Yeah, I know -- again. But it's starting to look really nice. At least one room. Four to go! Also somewhat tired due partly to a minor stomach bug that hasn't sickened me so much as given me intermittent bursts of quease.

At any rate, I'm going to pick up that vacation account before the memories recede into the, uh, recesses of, uh, memory.

DAY FIVE (TUESDAY, JUNE 15)
I wanted to make sure I got into the city proper at least once, so Marcy and I took the T in to Boston Commons. Meandered around there a bit; Marcy took a lot of flower photos; and we came across the incongruous site of someone lugging around a life-size cardboard cutout of Fabio in his prime. Ambled by the waterfront, along a bit of the Freedom Trail (the cemetery where Revere and the Boston Massacre dead are buried -- and yow, there are headstones right flush against the adjacent office building windows; that's what happens when a fairly compact modern city is build on historicity) and the business district where Marcy used to work. And had lunch at the Green Dragon, which was reportedly (according to the placemats, anyway) a favored haunt of many of the Sons of Liberty. It may well be true -- kayt663 in Salem advises me that local Boston lore is often fairly reliable. Local Salem lore, on the other hand ...

In the evening, I hied to East Brookfield to pay a visit to my friends from college, Jamie and Kelly and their seven kids. They have three teenagers, and four Taiwanese special-needs children they've adopted, the fourth only a couple weeks before my visit. And they're, to my eyes anyway, ideal parents -- kind while firm, attentive to the kids' activities while letting them learn through their own discoveries and interactions; handling life through faith, wisdom and humor. (Jamie is probably among the most conservative of my friends, and he's the person this moderate keeps in mind whenever I'm tempted to paint The Right with one brush.)

They gave me much better directions back to Arlington than the ones I'd followed to East Brookfield thanks to GoogleMaps -- their directions, thankfully, did not involve going through the heart of Worcester, or actually going anywhere near Worcester, yay.

DAY SIX (WEDNESDAY, JUNE 16)
Made my way to Wellesley around lunchtime to meet another friend from college, Bill King -- had a decent in unexceptional lunch at someplace called Papa Razi -- and he took me on a Jeep tour of Wellesley and vicinity. There was some large-scale roadwork being done on the Wellesley campus, so he couldn't take me through ... just drove by and invited me to imagine the youthful Hillary Rodham thereabouts. Bill knew some interesting local history, including that of a hamlet/village that had been a Christian Indian community in the late 1600s/early 1700s and a decent model of inter-tribal and white/native harmony ... before it was scuttled by greed, as usual. I've forgotten most of the details, but it was an interesting account.

Then I hooked around the north of Boston to make my way to Salem -- got a bit lost, as a lot of people apparently do on their first visit to Salem (I have a colleague who never could find the House of the Seven Gables, even with all the signs) -- to visit kayt663, a friend I'd met online a few years back, hung out with a bit when I was last in Boston, for the 2004 Worldcon, and then gradually fell out of touch with until the Facebook Era. (For all FB's various annoyances and perversities, I have it to thank for bringing some excellent people back into my life. That goes for you too, mswewh.) We wandered around a secluded local garden, where a stranger promptly gave her a tree; then headed over to Lynn, got ice cream and strolled by the seaside. All things considered, the best of days. (When we got to some large rocks jutting out into the surf, Therese decided she wanted to take some dramatic shots of me in various poses lookin' all windswept and stuff. My FB friends among you have probably seen some of 'em; I may post a couple here sometime.) That evening she made Thai chicken and rice with asparagus, and we tried to jointly improv a story -- like that tandem writers'-group assignment hazmatplaytime had the Hacks do once (which, as I've mentioned in this LJ, led in a roundabout way to my song "Casa Blanca"), only orally. I learned I'm pretty miserable at improv. And her cat tried to lovingly munch on my fingers several times, but apparently she does that to everyone.

And speaking of improv, upon arriving back at the Mahoneys, I saw they had Marcy's keyboard out -- they were at one point thinking of coming to part of Concertino, before Bryan got word of weekend auditions for Deal or No Deal -- and were improvising songs to backing tracks programmed in ... like a song about a worm to the tune of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition." At one point I threw out the topic ("Beans!") and Marcy picked the melody ("Danny Boy"), and Bryan launched into a song more about gas than actual beans but in a traditional Irish style o' lament. This sort of thing is why I keep wanting to get this people into a filkroom.

Ach, that's enough for tonight.

Words: Fables: War and Pieces by Bill Willingham et al. Not quite as compelling as the last collection -- surprising, considering this represented a climax of sorts -- but still solid, with some great moments.
Sounds & Images: "C is for Lettuce" by Worm Quartet
State O'Mind: Content

Haven't had a chance to post since returning home from vacation Monday night. Not that work has been anywhere near as overwhelmingly busy as I had expected: The editor who served as my backup was the Dream Backup, and she had everything ready for me to finish this week's A&E section ... so much so that I was able to get out early (for me) on Wednesday and hie to the Bug Jar for a fairly rare local wormquartet show with Devo Spice (he's on LJ, right?) and Seth Faerglozia of Dufus. However, I do have several hundred e-mails to plow through (fortunately, that works its way down to about 40 once the spam and junk are cleared out), plus I decided to overhaul my entire apartment. Said inspiration struck me Thursday at around, oh, 11 p.m., as usual.

So, in the interests of getting caught up sometime, we resume the vacation posts:

DAY THREE (SUNDAY, JUNE 14)
Travel day, so nothing much to report here. Didn't get on the road until past noon, but made it to the Arlington home of Bryan and Marcy by 8:30 p.m., even with a couple stops and with slowed traffic on the Mass Pike due to what turned out to be a Flaming Car (!) with absolutely nobody making any effort to put it out. Upon informing my hosts of this circumstance, I was told, "Oh yeah, there's four or five flaming cars on the Mass Pike every week." Um, OK.

Avid readers of this LJ (heh) will have read of Marcy and Bryan Mahoney before; they're former colleagues of mine at The Company, fine writers and human beings and among the Mostest Fun people I know. (Marcy very occasionally shows up here as hazmatplaytime.) They had been asking me to pay 'em a visit since they moved to greater Boston in 2006. Finally, this year, I noticed that the northeast's Floating Filkcon was in Worcester. Plus, I had reunited via Facebook with my friend kayt663, who lives in Salem. Plus, my friends Jamie and Kelly were in the process of expanding their family to seven. (They've adopted four children with special needs from Taiwan.) And there were at least a couple other friends in Boston. So I figured to go ahead and use vacation time en masse -- as in, a week and a half -- instead of my usual dribs-and-drabs usage, a weekend here, a couple days there, and so forth. It was a good move; I hadn't been so refreshed and renewed in quite a while, and it's carried over into the work week through to This Very Moment. (Heh, that's not always how vacations work.)

Marcy and Bryan put me up in their guest room on a couple precarious air mattresses -- moving much at all precipates a fall, but it's a small enough room that there's nowhere to fall. And it's the room with the bookshelves! I love being put up in book rooms. A couple years ago, I went to Pittsburgh a day early for Confluence -- there was a housefilk the hosts of which I absolutely forget (one's a harper) and was hosted at the home of Jim and Laurie Mann, in a room with floor to ceiling bookshelves lining all the walls ... and I realized, with admiration, that this was the auxiliary book room, housing anthologies, compilations, periodicals, graphic novels and the like. Heh. Anyway, I made my way through a few of the Mahoneys' graphic novels -- including the first three volumes of Y: The Last Man, which promptly hooked me.

DAY FOUR (MONDAY, JUNE 15)
Bryan worked days through the week -- he's editor of The Lexington Minuteman -- so it fell to Marcy to show me around and about. On Monday, we more or less wandered about Arlington and Lexington. Had an excellent lunch at the Arlington franchise of Not Your Average Joe's (if you're ever there, I would highly recommend their mustard-crusted chicken); browsed about in Newbury Comics (really, a pop-culture mecca in general, with season DVD box sets of pretty much everything that had ever been released); walked about in the memorial park in Lexington on the site of the battle that more or less began the Revolution, with Marcy serving ably as a tour guide; paid a visit to Bryan at his office, which is within spitting distance of the park; wandered into the visitor's center, where I resisted the urge to buy a tri-corner hat; and maneuvered around in the Worst Parking Lot Ever to pay a visit, my first, to Trader Joe's. I want a Trader Joe's in Rochester now. Sadly, the only ones in New York are all downstate.

That evening, the Mahoneys invited their friend Meghan over and introduced me to the ways of the Wii, specifically Boomblox. Much fun, though it would take a lot more Wii-ing to be able to get a complete handle on how to, uh, handle it. (Did respectably, though.)

That's enough for this installment. Now I'm only 12 days behind!!

Sounds & Images: Crowded House on Austin City Limits
State O'Mind: Content

Vacation is winding down -- writing from my friend kayt663's home in Salem -- with plans to get on the road ere 4 p.m. to arrive home while it's still Monday, and get to work Tuesday morning. A visit to the House of the Seven Gables awaits in the meantime, though. (I never knew that was a real place.

So, in the interest of catching up sometime, we resume my account o' vacationness.

DAY TWO (SATURDAY, JUNE 13)
The first several hours of June 13 were spent, of course, on the Relay for Life track, alternately taking the inspiring walk amid the luminaria and chillin'. Once more, my thanks to all who donated, sponsored, walked or even thought about us. When I wonder why I put all the effort into it every year, I'm reminded every year when I watch the survivors take their lap.

After my traditional post-Relay Denny's omelet run and six or so hours of sleep, I took my mother on a circuit of Gananda yard sales, did a last load of laundry, did assorted packing and puttering ... and spent four or five hours at the office, Finishing Up Stuff. Yup, the vacation officially started the day before, but my assorted articles had to be finished: Curiously, I had done the ones for two weeks out, but not the ones that had to be done immediately: Oops. Finished pieces on an astrophotography show, on blues/world musician Taj Mahal (who opened our phone interview "Brother Wheel-ah!") and on Baldbox. And went home and packed. And washed dishes. And packed some more. And tumbled into bed about two hours later than I wanted, and realized there was no way I was getting on the road at 10 a.m. ...

DAY THREE (SUNDAY, JUNE 14)
... chiefly because that's about when I finally got up. *yawn*

The preliminaries done, the exciting stuff awaits (for varying values of the word "exciting"). In posts to come: ldwheeler drinks a Guinness float! ldwheeler buys a snood! ldwheeler wears said snood! ldwheeler is mystified by the layout of Worcester! ldwheeler is mystified by the pronunciation of Worcester! ldwheeler becomes the Golem of Good Fortune! ldwheeler starts an epic battle between two people who don't know each other! ldwheeler looks back and realizes he misspelled his own name three times in this very paragraph! (Since fixed, natch.)

Words: Read a bit of Whitman's Leaves of Grass last night
Sounds & Images: Just came from Concertino, so quite a lot is happily resonating and reverberating. Loved Sunday's Sassafrass concert -- sometime I'd like to see the full nine in a concert setting.
State O'Mind: Appreciative

Greetings to All The People. I haven't been on LJ much of late because there were two or three weeks of feverishly, furiously working to get a couple weeks' worth of work banked so I could go on vacation -- along with Relay For Life preparations -- followed by said vacation, of which I'm currently in the midst. And I've been too busy doing actual vacation-type stuff to spend much time at the keys. (Tomorrow: Concertino!) Major exhaustive post with pictures and stuff will ensue upon my return, of course.

But, as I have a few minutes before my hosts and I depart for dinner, drinks and such like thus, I'll try to begin the Series O' Vacation Posts.

DAY ONE: FRIDAY, JUNE 12
Relay for Life night, so I deliberately slept in -- not too hard, as I'd stayed late at the office filing articles to be used in my absence, including my interview with Cory Wells from Three Dog Night (interesting anecdote about the time the pre-3DN core tried to record with Brian Wilson, but were stymied by Wilson's eccentricity ("he took a walk one day and never came back," which was apparently true both metaphorically and literally) and Mike Love's possessiveness over the creative golden goose). Day was spent puttering, getting my oil and fluids checked, buying bottled water and a pedometer and such like thus, arriving at the Canandaigua Academy track almost exactly at 6 p.m.

Relay night was, for the first time in years, just right weather-wise for a 12-hour overnight meander around the track for the American Cancer Society. Last year, it was canceled by treacherous electrical storms. The year before, it was postponed by treacherous electrical storms. The year before that came gale-force winds, torrential downpours and March-like temps. The year before that, it was sweltering and muggy all evening. So this time -- roughly the 70s all nigh -- was perfect. I ended up with around 18 people on the office team I captained, "Messengers of Hope," and at last glance I think we've raised over $1,200 through registrations, sponsorships, donations and fundraisers. (Great moment of the night: The 4-year-olds in our entourage seeing the row of Port-A-Potties and deciding that they were freezers. To which the rest of us decided they were cryogenic chambers -- the people we watched go in will emerge in 2109, unaged and unchanged.

And this must be cut short, as there is food to be eaten and quality beer to be sipped. So farewell, I say, farewell.

Words: An unfinished manuscript by hazmatplaytime (good stuff), plus almost all the graphic novels in their apartment. I had the good fortune to be housed in the room with all the bookshelves.
Sounds & Images: Lots o' Jonathan Coulton, after introducing my hosts to his oeuvre. (They're particularly fond of "The Town Crotch."
State O'Mind: Grateful, and peaceful. I needed this vacation.

Off to Boston ere long, after coffee, shower and last minute packingishness. There's many a post I've meant to make, but my time has been consumed in trip-prep (mostly in getting a couple weeks' work done ahead of time to avoid overloading my backup). Suffice it to say, Relay for Life was fabulous, meaningful and fun, though I've reached the age where I don't bounce right back from staying awake all night, outside. (If I ever did.)

For those going to Concertino next week, see you there!

For those with Sox-Marlins tickets they'd like to just bestow upon a passing nomad, get in touch ...

There is no reason whatsoever for me to have "The Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo)" on an endless loop in my head today. No reason at all. None, zip, nada.

But everybody's building big ships and boats. Some are building monuments. Others jottin' down notes.

And in other news, a local newspaper ran a restaurant review of an Indian eatery. They headlined the article "Love me tandoor."

I think they're just trying to curry favor, myself.

Heh. I was proofing an article about a drug bust, and the writer meant to say "peddling heroin." Instead, it came out "pedaling heroine." Which would be Buffy on a mountain bike, or something like that.

That could perhaps be the new copy-editor expletive/oath: "Buffy on a bike!"

OK, I've been here too long.

Words: Recently finished Benighted by Kit Whitfield, of whom I first become aware due to the Skacktivist</b> blog where she comments regularly and I comment once every three or five months or so. Fascinating concept; a mostly fine execution of same.
State O'Mind: Buffy on a bike!

My thoughts on abortion are complicated and probably contradictory -- there's probably some element in 'em to offend everyone -- and quarter till 2 a.m. isn't the time to go into them. But there's one thing I'll say that I think will be fairly uncontroversial in all sane circles:

If you shoot a man dead, you pretty much abandon the right to be called "pro-life."

That is all.

A few observations from a recent shopping trip to Wegmans:

1. There's something conceptually wrong with the concept of "boneless ribs."

2. This amused me for some reason:
Aisle 18B: Cat food and beer
Aisle 19B: Dog food and beer
Aisle 20B: Bird food and beer

3. I'm disproportionately happy to see that the express-lane signs read "10 Items or Fewer" rather than, as in less classy establishments, "Less." We grammar totalitarians take what little victories we can get.

Ummm, Mr. Novelist, sir? I realize that you're one of the Giants of English Literature, and I also realize that you've been dead for at least 150 years or so, so my criticism will largely fall on deaf ears. And I really enjoyed the book otherwise, I did. But ...

Building up to a climax involving a major conflict and then having your main antagonist just ... drop dead?

Was that really what you wanted to do there?

Words: Well, I don't want to give it away. But it rhymes with "Strivin' Moe."
Sounds & Images: Thunder by S.M.V.
State O'Mind: Meh

As late-night variety/talk/comedy show hosts go, I tend to prefer Letterman to Jay Leno -- except on Mondays, when Leno does "Headlines," sharing odd, strange, unwittingly hilarious and/or unintentionally double-entendreds newspaper headlines, cutlines, text; menu items; church-bulletin items; ad copy; and such like thus. I think newspaper people secretly watch Leno Mondays just to see if anything they did made it onto the show. (An area newspaper -- not mine -- somehow escaped Lenofying a few years ago when they ran the headline "CLELAND STUMPS FOR MASSA" about the senator campaigning for a local congressional candidate, which would be an OK headline were Cleland not a triple amputee.)

But I'm one to talk. Because I have the, uh, honor, of having written a headline featured by Leno, roughly a decade ago. It was amid the whole Bill Clinton impeachment imbroglio, and we ran an Associated Press article based on an interview with the president in which he laid bare his soul about the difficulty of the whole situation and the havoc it was wreaking on his presidency and his family life. I used a pithy quote headline -- without even thinking of the double entendre, I wrote, "CLINTON: 'GOD, IT'S HARD.'"

Man, did I hear about that one the next week. Didn't get in trouble or anything; everybody thought it was funny. I was kinda mortified; or as close to mortified as I get, anyway, which means I mildly raised one eyebrow and gave a faint sigh.

So tonight, for his last Monday as host of The Tonight Show, Leno did something of a greatest hits of Headlines, re-presenting some of his favorites from the past 17-ish years. There was a Bush headline. (About his colonoscopy, accompanied by a picture of GWB with his mouth wide open.) There was a Gore headline. ("Gore wows 'em," accompanied by a photo of someone sleeping while Gore speaks.) And -- I have to admit -- I was partly hoping to see my silly Clinton headline again. But no such luck.

So went my brush with nationwide fame.

Words: Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
Sounds & Images: Synchronicity by The Police
State O'Mind: Silly