Funk Babblings

Sorry chronarchy, the Neil Gaiman Oracle beats all.

Update: New URL.

This weekend we'll be heading to Columbus for Marcon. Every year at Marcon I end up buying a pile of books, usually stuff that's hard to find locally, and often rare or out of print stuff. Last year's take included my first real effort to get into graphic novels beyond Sandman.

( And also Elric... )

( My fictional influences )

Saturday I took nontacitare to the local comics shop. Between the two of us we bought six graphic novels, among them:
1 "Sandman" ("The Dream Hunters")
2 "Amazing Spider-Man"
1 Batman ("Arkham Asylum")
1 "Black Orchid"
1 "Promethea"
2 written by J. Michael Straczinski
2 written by Neil Gaiman
1 written by Alan Moore
2 drawn by Dave McKean

I was blown away by the second volume of Promethea (a series recommended by featherynscale). The first volume was an intelligent and off-kilter, yet in many ways typical, superhero origin story. But the second one includes a "hyper-reality" sequence with digitized actors, a magic lesson performed as a tantric sex scene, and finally a trip through the Tarot linking the major arcana with evolution and human history and mythology and kaballah and magic and science -- it's impossible to get it all in one reading.


After the comics shop we went to see an entertaining performance of the musical Pippin. That show includes some interesting theatrical elements, the most striking of them being the climactic stripping out of all theatrical elements, down to the bare bright lights shining down on a stage empty of everything but a few uncostumed actors. Another thing I noticed was a high proportion of red-headed actors in the cast -- about a third of them. I started wondering if that was part of an intentional red-themed color scheme going on.

Just a quick note to point at that Neil Gaiman is right: Pandora is addictive and really cool. It's like getting a personalized streaming radio station, wherever you are on the net.

It uses Flash to give you a streaming music player that plays (a) music you tell it you like (by artist or song title) and (b) music it thinks you'll like based on what you've told it you like. As far as I can tell, it uses musicological attributes rather than Amazon-style "others who like that also like this...", though there may be some of the latter going on as well. I think it may also try to play similar songs from different bands together.

Unfortunately, quite a few of my favorite bands are indie bands that aren't in their database, but I've also been surprised at some of the more obscure stuff that is in there, including Manda & the Marbles, Scrawl, and The Eyeliners. It's also interesting that it figured out that I'd like Dire Straits before I told it so.

It would be nice if I could specify albums rather than songs or artists. In some cases I like certain albums but dislike others. Though I can pick representative songs (or all of them) from the favored albums.

If you don't like something, you can skip it. If you skip a band twice it won't play that band again.

Apparently I'll soon start hearing ads in the stream, which will gradually increase in frequency until I decide to pay for a subscription. Sounds fair to me.

It's amusing that a favorite author is not only leading me to new written work, but also new music and new ways of getting my music.

http://www.pandora.com/

Update: According to Pandora, I seem to be rather consistent about liking music with vocal harmonies and mild rhythmic syncopation -- as well as, quite often, major key tonality and mixed acoustic/electic instrumentation. Just about every time I ask it why it chose a song, it tells me those (with varying levels of vocal harmonies), along with some other attributes. And the more I listen and look at those attributes, the more I think it's trying to keep similar songs together.

I keep intending to write about all the books I've been reading, but it's inching closer to a year's worth of books, and sadly I don't think I could do any of them justice at this point. I may still try (wading through an 845-page book means the read-books-pile isn't growing so quickly), but it's still getting less likely.

But what I can talk about is comics.

( Read more... )

Turkish coffee three hours before bedtime is not necessarily the smartest idea ever. Especially when the muck at the bottom of the cup is included.

I'm not sure whether adding 2/3 of "Anansi Boys" to the insomnia helped or hurt....


On a possibly related note, my fortune for today at MyWay.com is "Just slack off today."

Two weeks ago I started writing about a busy weekend, and got about halfway through it before putting it down. When I thought about continuing, I realized that my writeup was way too long and boring. Meanwhile, I had another (much quieter) weekend, and then a weekend together with my wife. But I still felt like I had unfinished business.

So, trashing the long writeup I attempted before, here's a quick rundown of the past three weekends....


( Busy )

( Quiet )

( Together )

Ah, now I feel better.... all is right in this part of the world again. :-)

Life and work have been crazy lately, and I haven't had the time to mention here some of the things I've wanted to. But this might be a good time to pull a brief one off the stack....

What happens when you assign high school juniors to read a 600+ page Neil Gaiman novel? That particular blog also demonstrates an amusing but fruitless proclivity I've occasionally noticed in myself -- upon being told that a person doesn't like a particular genre (in this case science fiction), suggesting examples of it for them to try.


By the way, I didn't discover Gaiman through a high school assignment. Instead it was through Douglas Adams. Way back in 1988 Gaiman, a journalist at the time, wrote a biography of Adams, which ended up leading me to lots of other authors for a while, such as Robert Sheckley and P.G. Wodehouse. About four or five years later I was informed that if I liked Adams I'd like this book Good Omens, co-written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (with whom I was not yet familiar). I loved that book, but it was a few more years before I read more from either author -- partly because I was totally unaware that Gaiman was busy getting famous in the comics world for Sandman. I think the next thing I read from him was his collection of short stories.

I just found out, via officialgaiman and IMDB's entry on Neil Gaiman, about a few more movies to watch for.

Mirrormask (January 2005) - Gaiman wrote this fantasy about "a 15 year old girl in a family of circus entertainers, who often wishes she could run off and join real life." Apparently it's supposed to be in the spirit of Labyrinth. "That was like Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast... on acid... for kids..."

Books Of Magic (2006?) - Based on Gaiman's comic book series of the same name. There are some surface similarities to Harry Potter, which could either help or hurt.

Death's Day (2006?) - Based on the graphic novel Death: The High Cost of Living, which in turn was a spinoff from his landmark Sandman comic book series. (And if anyone can explain to me the difference between a graphic novel and a bound comic book series, I'd be grateful.) This Death is a young goth girl. Gaiman may make his directorial debut on this. The title is tentative.

There were some other Gaiman movie projects announced, but they appear to be on hold now.