Dance of the Dawn
Chance found me listening to the first track on Yes’ 1973 album, Tales from Topographic Oceans and realising that it was a song from my childhood that I’d been trying to find for a great deal of my adult life. The Revealing Science of God: Dance of the Dawn. The album was one that my mum had at home and I would listen to mesmerised by the eerie opening of the song. For a while I’d confused it with another album of my mum’s, Argus by Wishbone Ash. Things like this are windows into my past.
Here We Are
Impressed and enjoying the first season of HBO’s Perry Mason. Almost at the end of The Two Towers. Have been reading a great deal about the development of the Romance and Spenser’s Fairie Queene. Started Adrian Tchaicovsky’s Shards of Earth. Not reading many comics at the moment other than recent X-Men. Listening to: Van der Graaf Generator (first time ever) and Metallica’s 72 Seasons (better with each listen). Someone said that they felt unstuck in time today and I found myself agreeing.
Reading Memories
I’m almost finished reading The Fellowship of the Ring. Alongside the novel, I’m listening to Phil Dragash’s soundscape recording which I highly recommend. The novel has encouraged lots of memories of the copy of Fellowship I read when I was eleven and took with me to school. It was a large hardback copy without a dust jacket. I remember my puzzlement with the Tom Bombadil and Barrow-Wights chapters which hadn’t appeared in the Bakshi animated movie I adored (there was once a massive falling-out between my friends and me over whether we should go to the cinema to see Buck Rogers or LotR). I can visualise where I sat in the sunny Summer classroom reading after lunchtime. All those years ago.
Found This, Out
Found this when out. It’s an old sign that’s been quite violently shredded by a vandal.
72 Seasons
Have to say that I’m enjoying the new Metallica album, 72 Seasons, a great deal. Metallica are a dangerous band for me musically as they encourage me to listen to thrashy, heavy metal at a time in my life where my inclination is far more still, gentle music or catching up with interesting stuff I really should have listened to earlier in life (said looking at the Throbbing Gristle playlist I’m putting together). Anyhow, I’ve spent this evening listening to the new album then revisiting past albums. For a band producing metal for 40+ years they are sounding magnificent.
This is LotR
My later primary school days were dominated by LotR and I was given this poster by one of my mum’s friends who had glued it to a poster-sized piece of heavy wood. It remained propped up in my bedroom through my teenage years. It’s by Jimmy Caulty who drew it at the age of seventeen in 1976! (More details.) As much as I liked the Ralph Bakshi animated adaptation, it’s the styling – and tone particularly – that influenced how I visualised Tolkien’s world (those pale, forlorn characters, the pointed mountains and castles, the weariness and fragility of it all). The Jackson movies never quite managed to evoke the weirdness of Middle Earth in quite the same way.
Medway Fifties SF Club
Just discovered that a group of SF enthusiasts formed the Medway Science and Fantasy Club in the early 1950s with a bookshop in Gillingham, a fanzine and even hosted its own convention, Medcon. Ron Hansen maintains incredibly interesting pages documenting the history of the group and the FANAC Fan History Project hosts pdfs of their fanzine, The Medway Journal. The photos of the group are really of a more innocent age.
The Best-Kept Secret
Being an easy pushover for a good UFO book (something I’ve not shaken since my childhood), I’ve just read Jacques Vallée’s and Paola Harris’ Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret. It’s an account of a hitherto unknown UFO crash in San Antonio in 1945 very close to Ground Zero where the Manhattan Project had tested the first atomic bomb just days before. In reality, other than the testimony of old men who saw the crash as small children and a piece of aluminium, there’s not a great deal of physical evidence. Nevertheless Vallée and Harris link the first wave of UFO phenomena with the use of nuclear weapons and with the 1964 Zamora close encounter in nearby Socorro and the similar 1965 Valensole, France close encounter. Vallée’s approach is open-minded and investigative and he is as interested in the psychic effect of anomalous incidents as their physical. Though it’s never entirely clear what Vallée believes, he seems to interpret the UFO phenomena as a form of communication or signal to influence human society.
Goodbye, Things
Just read Goodbye, Things by Fumio Sasaki which advocates an extreme form of extreme ascetic minimalism. Fumio argues that through discarding material possessions other than those that are absolutely essential is the path to happiness. I can’t disagree with most of Sasaki’s advice but feel that it’s aimed at much younger adults without families. He’s clear about a need to shift priorities. For example: “There’s no point in putting up with a terrible job or working yourself to death just to maintain your standard of living. By having less and lowering your minimum living costs, you can go anywhere you want. Minimalism can really be liberating.“
UK Grim
But what’s gone on, what can I see?
You’re all getting mugged by the aristocracy
But what’s gone on, what can I see?
You’re all getting mugged by the right wing beast.
I had a long car journey today which gave me the chance to listen to UK Grim, Sleaford Mods’ new release. Aside from the bleak portrait it paints of Britain, it’s wretchedly – absurdly – funny. The Mods’ appear to have both personal and political hypocrisy in their sights. Andrew Fearn’s synths seem to me to be the soundtrack to the days we are living through here in the UK. (Oh, and without any sense of irony, The Daily Telegraph made UK Grim album of the week with a perfect score!)
Whither the Woes of Winter?
On our walk today we notice the first signs of Spring: the early flowerings, the reddish tips of bushes regrowing after being cut back. It’s still cold, though. My hands are still sore from not wearing gloves. It’s an age thing.
Star Wars-level dismemberment
Alas, Luigi seems to suffer Skywalker degrees of injury in our house lately. He’s been glued several times. He always has that complex shocked-but-resigned-to-suffer expression.