Category: Media

This is a container category for media reviews and related drivel.

  • Planes. Trains. No automobiles.

    I ignore this journal for weeks on end, and then I decide to post an epic. Go figure, eh? (more…)

  • Music Meme: 5 Songs

    I picked this up from this guy, who acquired it from that guy… and so on. And I (block)quote:

    1. If you’d like to play along, reply to this post and I’ll assign you a letter.
    2. You then list (and upload or link to the video, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter.
    3. Then, as I’m doing here, you’ll post the list to your journal with the instructions.

    I was given… “H”. And since I can do this, I’m embedding tracks in WordPress. Hah!

    • Home By The Sea / Second Home By The Sea (Genesis) – I love this piece. I just plain love it. Especially the various live renditions with the dual drummers. This sort of thing is what I love about Genesis.
    • Hallo Spaceboy (David Bowie w/ Pet Shop Boys) – Two great tastes that go great together.
    • Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (Daft Punk) – Let’s be honest: They’re probably never going to top this.
    • Hyperactive (Thomas Dolby) – This is one of those love-it-or-hate-it songs from Mr. Dolby, and I happen to love it. I can see why some people don’t enjoy it as much, though.
    • Heat (Jethro Tull) – Speaking of love-or-hate, this is from the Tull album which is the most “electronic” they ever released, and it drove the die-hard fans batty. One of the things I like about it is that nearly the entire album could be used as the soundtrack to a cheesy 80’s spy caper flick… especially this track.

    And there you go. Anybody want a letter of their own to run with?

  • Iain M. Banks’ “Consider Phlebas”

    One of the names I keep bumping into when I read recommendations about what author to check into next is that of Iain M. Banks. Since I was at one of the awesome Powells Books locations in town a couple of weeks ago, and what seems to be the first of the “Culture” books was available for a reasonable price, I decided to check it out. Or, rather, purchase it since I wasn’t in a library.

    Ha, ha. That’s what passes for humor today, folks.

    Let’s start with the good stuff, which is considerable: There are many good and interesting and clever ideas in this book. As science fiction goes, it certainly qualifies as good speculative material, and less twee than a number of writers’ efforts I’ve seen in the past decade. (Note that “Phlebas” first saw print in the late 1980s.) Charles Stross, by comparison, is a clever fellow with a number of interesting ideas, but sometimes his writing comes off as being a bit taken with its own cleverness. Banks doesn’t give me that impression; in fact, he may have gone too far in the other direction. Some of the meaty speculative stuff sits apart from the main narrative, pulling you out of the story to bury you in concepts and navel-gazing. Interesting navel-gazing, sure, but still.

    I’m impressed that our erstwhile protagonist is clearly opposed to the Culture society that Banks makes no bones about casting as the smarter, more valuable faction in the interstellar war portrayed in the book. At no point does he back down from his stance that the Culture is a path down which humanity should not further tread, and he’s not a raving lunatic or delusional or anything so trite: He holds well-reasoned beliefs that place him on the opposing side. It’s an interesting and effective way to frame the conflict.

    But. And you knew there had to be one.

    One of the big problems I have with the idea of writing a novel is that I’m lousy when it comes time to provide descriptive detail. Well, this book set my mind at ease… somewhat. It turns out that you could probably tell a better story if you leave out, say, two-thirds to three-quarters of the descriptive detail that Banks puts into “Phlebas.” Much of the fight choreography is… exceedingly precise, more often than not, for instance. I found myself skimming entire large paragraphs throughout most of the back half of the book, and I couldn’t honestly tell you precisely how the various combatants on Schar’s World end up getting from where they start to where they lay at the end. A lot was going on, and I was expected to track every aspect of it all. Never mind figuring out what happened at the Megaship, earlier in the story.

    Maybe I’m just not smart enough, but you know, I’d rather expend my brainpower on absorbing the high-concept stuff. Call me crazy.

    A story can win or lose me on the ending, however, and “Consider Phlebas” bears quite an ending. Lots of endings, in fact.

    (Look, this book’s older than my kids. So here’s all the spoiler warning you get. Thpppt.)

    I don’t mean “lots of endings” in the “Return of the King movie version” sort of way. No, I mean that pretty much everybody dies. Actually, everybody does die. Maybe not in the story proper, but what we’re given after the story is a bunch of, “And here’s what happens to the survivors, years later. So and so? Went into cold sleep, revived, then killed themselves. This other person? Dead. Everyone else who got through this? Dead. Oh, the Machine Mind survived, that’s good, right?”

    Why tell me this?

    The story could’ve ended at the last chapter. I’d have been saddened but moderately satisfied, as the mission was complete and the couple of sadder-but-wiser protagonists who made it out could… I don’t know, go on with their lives, and so on. But no. We get appendices and epilogues, including an entire chunk of detail about how the galaxy-spanning war which provides the backdrop and impetus for the story ends, decades later, for reasons which have nothing to do with the events I’ve just spent hours reading about.

    What?!?

    What was the point? Our erstwhile hero manages to nearly complete his dangerous mission, and not only does he die at the point of completion but his efforts amounted to a hill of beans. Righto, then.

    Is it a good book? Arguably. Is it a good read? Only if you don’t care about a good ending, and if you don’t mind sometimes-obsessive levels of detail. Am I going to seek out more of Banks’ books…?

    Probably not.

  • The Birthday That Was

    My birthday celebration was stretched over several days…

    • On Friday, Lil’ took me on a trip to the Beaverton Powell’s store; I came home with several books and the yin/yang devil ducky.
    • On Saturday, Kylanath and Erica gave me cards and ducks (two more from the pastel Bath & Body Works line) and a sweater. Also? We ate… this delightful confection that Kylanath put together for me (and that Erica had way too much fun beheading, hmm…):

    • Later on Saturday, I bought a new pair of shoes. They’d better last a long while; Doc Martens charges a pretty penny. Still, they’re incredibly comfortable and they’ve got to be more durable than the “cheap” ($50+) shoes I’ve been buying at Fred Meyer lately…
    • On Sunday, well, that day mostly consisted of vegging out and doing laundry and playing games. Nothing to complain about, really.
    • On the day itself? I got up early, went to work, and received the traditional signed-by-the-office-staff birthday card. Oh, and The Roomie foraged some grub so I didn’t end up just making a sandwich for dinner tonight (on account of being too brain-fried to put any kind of effort into food preparations).

    All in all? My entry into “being 38” didn’t go too badly, no, not too badly at all…

  • Shelf Spacing

    While Kylanath and I were out and about yesterday we picked up a set of shelves for her (“What do you get the girl who loves books?”) and a set of shelves for me. Thankfully Ikea now offers $20 65-pound-capable handcarts for those of us who take the MAX to and fro.

    Tonight I assembled my set of shelves…

    …and filled them full within five minutes of assembly. The new one’s on the left. Sadly, the ducks on the right are just for show: I have another box of books to unpack. Eventually I won’t have any books remaining in boxes, they’ll all be shelved! I figure that’ll be about five minutes before I found out I’m moving again, but hey, whatever.

  • They Grew On Me

    As I listen to Midnight Oil’s Redneck Wonderland album through (chosen to be the background music while I work on a software upgrade… yes, at 9:30pm…) I realize that back when I first picked up the CD, I didn’t actually like it very much. I thought it was too rough, too hard, too different from the Oils’ sound of the previous several albums.

    Now, however, I think of it as among their strongest work. It’s still as musically dense as I like things, but it has more vim and vigor than the softer, twangier material they’d been putting out for a while there. Really, if Diesel and Dust is the only Midnight Oil album you own and you’re wondering what else to pick up, you could do far worse than RW. (Uh, avoid Capricornia, though. Subsequent listening sessions have not endeared that record to my ears.)

    What other albums sound better now than when I first listened to them?

    Duran Duran’s Astronaut, most assuredly. I wrote a pretentious, faint-praise lump of a review back when the album came out (and there’s a reason I don’t do those anymore), and after those initial few full-record sessions I determined that the first four tracks were all that was worthwhile, there.

    Oh, how wrong! “Nice,” “Finest Hour,” “Taste the Summer.” I’d put those up against anything Duran Duran have done before or since, never mind those first four cuts (which I still love). Even “Chains” is a fairly decent little piece. Mind you, I’m still not overly fond of “Bedroom Toys” or “Still Breathing,” but to have written off the entire back two-thirds of the album? What the hell was I thinking? What was wrong with my head? Wow.

    I only have the one album from Filter but somehow, some time over the last few years Title Of Record went from being “that record with ‘Take A Picture’ on it” to “this is one of the best rock albums I’ve ever heard.” No, I’m not kidding. I don’t love every song unreservedly, but there’s not a track on there that I’ll skip under any circumstances (random playlist action, playing the album through, whatever). “It’s Gonna Kill Me,” “I Will Lead You,” “Skinny,” the nearly eight minutes of “Welcome To The Fold” to start things off… yeah. Great damned album.

    So, if anyone’s still with me after all this time: What albums started out “meh” and grew on you to the point of being all-time favorites now?