But This Is Wondrous Strange | 24.01
The Return of the Curse of the Creature's Ghost
a metaphor for brain fog
It's been a few years.
Time is still weird, but not as weird as the last time I wrote a newsletter. I've changed jobs twice and moved three times, most recently into a condo we bought. I still don't have all my books up on shelves. Perhaps this failure for all my faits to be accompli is comforting? I am still figuring out how to do this—or anything, really—and not be exceptionally pretentious.
I rebooted my website! It's now at pronolagus.com. All creative projects will end up there in some form.
April in Portland means shifting bouts of sun and rain, and warm and cold.
God is the sun. Clouds are her messengers. Rain—is only rain.
(If you've not read Dave Eggers's wonderful book The Eyes and the Impossible, whence that mantra originates, please put down this device and go do that.)
🌳🐕🌳 🌳🌳 🌳 🌳 🌳 🌳🌳
SITUATION: WEARY
The Main Monkey Business
I've been inspired by several "here's what I've been consuming lately" newsletters and blogs, notably those from Austin Kleon, Hello From the Magic Tavern, and Mark Larson. I want to try pontificating less and enthusing more, so here are some things I enjoyed recently, arranged by categories of media.
VIDEO
I watched the usual pile of videos this week, and noticed that I spend too much time watching shorts. It's the new doomscrolling. Catscrolling. Clipscrolling. It's becoming a placeholder for doing/making something and usually too short for actually engaging with. Which is bad for me and I'm trying to cut back on that.
I finished part 2 of Kids in the Hall troupe members Bruce McCulloch & Kevin MacDonald's 06/26/2023 show at The Rivoli in Toronto. They giddily ran through sketches and monologues old and new, and they're both still funny and a joy to behold. Unsurprising revelation regarding their rebooted KITH show: apparently, Amazon sucked to work with.
Part I:
Part II:
🌳
My new favorite philosopher, specializing in art—especially film, particularly horror—is Noël Carroll. He's changed how I view Death of the Author, and I'm just starting to dig into his work. This video was about the reasons we seek out fictional horror despite what would normally be emotions and sensations we avoid.
🌳
Steve Hackett was interviewed by Warren Huart on his YouTube channel. Fortuitously, I was reading Geddy Lee's autobiography just a week before I saw this and he mentions meeting Steve at an event that Rush and Genesis played (IIRC). Geddy was a little starstruck, but said Steve came over and gave him a big hug in welcome. That brought Steve up a lot in my estimation, even though I was neutral in my opinion of him as a person before. I don't think I'd ever heard him speak before this interview! He seems like he'd be fun to know. His enthusiasm for his music and his instrument is charming and infectious.
🌳
The end of this next one is really the important part of it, to me. Jordan Klepper offers trenchant insight on why it's not so important to change someone's mind immediately, and how to think about the bigger picture.
🌳
Funny but Poignant Dept.: From s5e07 of Bojack Horseman; Mr. Peanutbutter suddenly realizes his Mom is dead after relating the story that she was sent to a farm when she got old. If you don't know the show, this might all seem incredibly flippant, but it fits in context. Ironically, Paul F. Tompkins, who voiced the character, has done a similar gag before, on Mr. Show, having a breakthrough while testing a lie detector. And I laughed, it's dark humor in a show famous for it. But I do sort of feel a similar thing now and then. I sometimes am forced to suddenly remember that my own mom, who was such an amazing person and huge part of my life, is gone. It's often a jolt.
MPB: You know, I never really questioned the logic? My brother set the whole thing up. I haven't been able to visit, but everyone in my family goes to that farm eventually.
GINO: Aw, dude, your mom's dead.
MPB: What? No! She's at a farm. After a prolonged bout with Parkinson's. Where they don't have telephones, or internet, and oh my god she's dead! [sobbing] My mom's dead!
MUSIC
I'm really trying not to get caught in the nostalgia trap this year, but this Oingo Boingo live show from 1985 (possibly abridged, according to the uploader) is overwhelmingly wonderful. The band was super tight: some of these songs are played insanely fast, maybe to fit into their allotted time. Or maybe because musicians get bored playing the same songs a zillion times and look for ways to make it challenging again. Danny Elfman looks like he's having just the best time.
🌳
This lovely song, played on an improvised oud, randomly showed up. Google translates the subtitle as "Creative artist Ola Al-Shabha Al-Qabati."
🌳
Can Jack Stratton do no wrong with his solo Vulfmon project? I'm starting to think so. I put several tracks from last year's Vulfmon album, Vulfnik, on my Best-of-2023 playlist, and the latest singles from the next album have been excellent. "Tokyo Night" follows in the tradition of Vulfpeck single-take living room video shoots.
Vulfmon Jack also gave us a breakdown of that song as a video tutorial.
🌳
The controversy over the lack of bottom end in Metallica's ...And Justice for All was raging soon after it came out in 1988. Remixes boosting the low frequencies were shared online years afterward. "Yeah!" I thought, when Justice for Jason showed up. "Lars and James did him dirty!" But. Jason Newsted says it's not as big a deal to him that his bass parts were lowered in the mix of AJfA. The big deal is that the mix that went out had the impact it had, and he was part of it.
🌳
These were my most recent Bandcamp purchases:
Carter Vail - The Interstellar Tennis Championship Vol. II
Benon Tape - Floating / Sinking
🌳
My last.fm profile will turn 20 this November. If you want to stalk my music listening (when I remember to turn on the Scrobbler plugin(s)), here's where the tracks show up.
https://www.last.fm/user/lepus
ARTICLES
This first one is probably better placed under video, but it's really a list of shows, not just one. Melody Simpson, writing for tor.com's Reactor, ran down 10 SF/F TV shows that have/had great 1st seasons. I'm pretty weary of superheroes and franchises—honestly, just long series of any media right now—but I've been wanting to see Severance since the trailers and Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur looks gorgeous and fun.
https://reactormag.com/10-sci-fi-and-fantasy-shows-with-stellar-freshman-seasons-to-watch-in-2024/
🌳
I didn't care much for the video that got me to look it up, but the Wikipedia article for metamodernism is a cornucopic jumping off point for exploring what it's all about. Essentially, it's an attempt at a synthesis of modernism and postmodernism: earnest sincerity and ironic relativism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamodernism
BOOKS
Improbably, I finished THREE books last month. I know it doesn't sound like much, especially in light of the voluminous inhalations of book influencers on social media, but for me it's a big shift. Like a lot of ADHDers who grew up with reading as their sole consistent focus, I read all the time. But it's scattered: broad as an ocean, shallow as a puddle. I'm on a quest to transfer more social media scrolling and distracted rabbit-holing toward books this year. Check back next January to see how I did, I guess.
First was A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers. This was the first book in a long time I made a point to read entirely as a physical dead tree version. It seemed in keeping with the book's back-to-basics, pastoral scenery and the inward-looking theme. Even as brief as it is, it took me a long time, since I had to not be on either my phone, tablet, or laptop to read it at all. I think the effort was worth it. It wasn't remotely as close a read as my return to Lord of the Rings, but I savored. As the corners got blunted and the loose pencil in my backpack marked up the edges, I sank into Chambers's lovely vision of a quieter future and started to treat it as a kind of active meditation.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-psalm-for-the-wild-built-becky-chambers/15125608
Geddy Lee's autobiography—My Effin' Life, referenced above—was the second. I checked the audiobook version out of my local library because not only was Ged the narrator, he has a few passages that are read by his Rush cohort, Alex Lifeson, and boy, do I love those guys. He's not the most polished writer (a mainstay of other musician bios I've read), but it's heartfelt and never seems self-aggrandizing, which isn't always the case with memoirs in general. And, as expected from one of the 3 dedicated goofballs who just happened to sideline as devoted musicians, it's often funny.
The sections about his parents' experiences through The Holocaust and his own terrible losses of family and friends display a deeply moving vulnerability. I was humbled and touched that he expressed his grief as resolutely and openly as he does. I was hoping for more recording and tour minutiae, but that's the quibble of a fan and musician who's itching to see not only how the sausage is made, but what the ratios of meats are, what kind of casing is used, and how long the links are cured in the warehouse. Geddy probably gets it just right for the non-obsessives.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/my-effin-life-geddy-lee/19021700
Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett is #26 of 41 in the Discworld published order, by my reckoning. I'm reading them in order because I started that way back in 1988 or '89, and did I mention I'm a bit obsessive? This one brings Death's granddaughter Susan back for her final appearance as a major character, and that saddens me a little, because she's one of my favorites.
This novel marks a noticeable jump in Pratchett's writing, ratcheting up an already staggering ability to create some of the most cogent commentary on the human condition I've ever read. Time and its problems are central to theme and story. It made me both ponder and wonder, about how my time will end and what it means. And it's not as dark as that may seem.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/thief-of-time-terry-pratchett/6433663
When Will This Madness End? Well, Right Now
back and forth, forth and back
Thank you for staying through to the end! Photos for this issue were taken on my daily commute. The title comes from a Mr. Show sketch:
Please enjoy your time.