Image of the month:

Posted by on March 1, 2015 No comments

2015 APR

FILMS – FEBRUARY 2015

Posted by on February 28, 2015 No comments

(Nyby 1951) The Thing [aka The Thing from Anoth­er World]
(Sav­age 1964) The Creep­ing Terror 
(Cold­stream 2004) Agin­court [BBC series “The World’s Worst Century”]
(McLeod 1931) Mon­key Business
(Katz­man 1964) Space Probe Taurus
(Dear­den 1950) The Blue Lamp
(Smith 2009) Mid­Somer Mur­ders: Ep.71 ― Small Mercies
(Pittman 2012) Shat­tered City: The Hal­i­fax Explo­sion Read more »

First-time listening for February 2015

Posted by on February 28, 2015 No comments

23153. (Delta Rae) Car­ry the Fire [deluxe version]
C’est Fun! Cajun Classics:
. . . . 23154. (Jam­bal­aya Cajun Band) “C’est Fun”
. . . . 23155. (Cajun Tra­di­tion­al Band) “Louisiana Two Step”
. . . . 23156. (Bal­fa Tou­jours) “L’anse Auix Paillies”
Read more »

READING – FEBRUARY 2015

Posted by on February 28, 2015 No comments

22391. (Jacques Futrelle) The Prob­lem of Cell 13 [sto­ry]
22392. (Andrew Armitage) Com­par­ing the Pol­i­cy of Abo­rig­i­nal Assim­i­la­tion: Australia,
. . . . . Cana­da, and New Zealand
22393. (Jean-Paul Gagnon) Democ­ra­cy and The­o­ret­i­cal Physics [arti­cle]
22394. (Natalia Loukache­va) The Arc­tic Promise — Legal and Polit­i­cal Auton­o­my of
. . . . . Green­land and Nunavut
Read more »

(Ed Bryant) Cinnabar

Posted by on February 18, 2015 No comments

Ed Bryant (not to be con­fused with the Ten­nessee politi­cian of the same name), is a savoured taste, one of those “minor” sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers, like Chad Oliv­er or Lloyd Big­gle, Jr., who make explor­ing the genre such a plea­sure. A read­er trea­sures an old copy of Cinnabar, with its moody, ele­gantly writ­ten sto­ries, with much more affec­tion than they can usu­ally sum­mon for any­thing by the big shots of the field. In the same way, a music fan will trea­sure vinyls of Tom Wait’s Rain Dogs, George Thoro­good & the Destroy­ers, or John Hyatt’s Rid­ing With the King. Ed Bryant may have been some­what influ­enced by Har­lan Elli­son, of whom he was some­thing of a pro­tegé, and with whom he some­times col­lab­o­rated, but I think his real styl­is­tic affin­ity is with Cord­wainer Smith. Raised on a Wyoming cat­tle ranch, he does not share Ellison’s urban aes­thetic, and his prose is not “con­tem­po­rary” and slangy in the way Ellison’s always was. Any­way, if you can dig up a copy of Cinnabar (pub­lished in 1975), not nec­es­sar­i­ly an easy task, you will be reward­ed with a series of inter­con­nected sto­ries, none of which seems to have an obvi­ous point, but which togeth­er cre­ate an atmos­phere which will cling in your mem­ory for decades. Read more »

Image of the month: ice storm, Lake Ontario

Posted by on February 1, 2015 No comments

2015 FEB

FILMS – JANUARY 2015

Posted by on January 31, 2015 No comments

(Kubrick 1968) 2001: A Space Odyssey
(Groen­ing / Avanzi­no 2002) Futu­ra­ma: Ep.57 ― Crimes of the Hot
(Groen­ing / Scott III i2002) Futu­ra­ma: Ep.58 ― Juras­sic Bark
(Groen­ing / Sheesley 2002) Futu­ra­ma: Ep.59 ― The Route of All Evil
(Groen­ing / Pur­dum 2002) Futu­ra­ma: Ep.60 ― A Taste of Freedom
(Groen­ing / Archer 2003) Futu­ra­ma: Ep.61 ― Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch
(Groen­ing / Deit­ter 2002) Futu­ra­ma: Ep.62 ― Less Than Hero
(Nguyen 2013) Bir­d­em­ic 2: The Resurrection
(Hig­gins 1989) Clean And Neat With Harv And Marv [Riff­Trax version]
(Dex­ter 1963) The Day Mars Invad­ed Earth Read more »

First-time listening for January 2015

Posted by on January 31, 2015 No comments

23115. (Camille Saint-Saëns) Pre­mière fan­taisie in E‑f for Organ
23116. (Camille Saint-Saëns) Béné­dic­tion nup­tiale for Organ, Op.9
23117. (Camille Saint-Saëns) Offer­toire in E for Organ
23118. (Camille Saint-Saëns) Elé­va­tion ou Com­mu­nion for Organ, Op.13
 Read more »

READING – JANUARY 2015

Posted by on January 31, 2015 No comments

22364. [3] (H. G. Wells) The Time Machine
22365. (H. G. Wells) The Chron­ic Arg­onauts [sto­ry]
22366. (Mark McCor­ma­ck) The Declin­ing Sig­nif­i­cance of Homo­pho­bia — How Teenage
. . . . . Boys are Redefin­ing Mas­culin­i­ty and Heterosexuality
22367. (W. W. Jacobs) The Well [sto­ry]
 Read more »

The Icicle Works

Posted by on January 24, 2015 No comments

This band was named after a short sto­ry by Fred­erik Pohl (“The Day the Ici­cle Works Closed”, Galaxy, Feb­ru­ary 1960). I read the sto­ry when I was a kid, in Pohl’s won­der­ful col­lec­tion The Man Who Ate the World. There was a revival of “psy­che­delic” rock in liv­er­pool in the ear­ly 1980’s, and this band was part of that move­ment. The front­man was Ian McN­abb, who remains today a vet­eran crafts­man in British rock, but isn’t well known in North Amer­ica. Drum­mer Chris Shar­rock and bassist Chris Lay­he formed the oth­er two legs of the tri­pod. The band stuck around for quite awhile, but it nev­er made it big, per­haps because the “neo-psy­che­del­ic” for­mula real­ly didn’t suit them. Despite a few trap­pings of that genre, it sounds to me like they real­ly want­ed to do good sol­id rock with clean, crisp arrange­ments. The only album I pos­sess is the epony­mous first (1984), which con­tains their biggest hit “Love is a Won­der­ful Colour”. But I pre­fer “Whis­per To a Scream (Birds Fly)”, which was a big­ger hit here in Cana­da, and I remem­ber it get­ting con­sid­er­able air­play on Toron­to sta­tions. Sharrock’s drum­work is fine in this one, lift­ing them out of the poten­tial wimpi­ness of the psy­che­delic for­mula (the cut pre­ced­ing it, “In the Caul­dron of Love” sounds too much like recy­cled Moody Blues).

Adden­dum: A friend informs me that the Cana­dian release was quite dif­fer­ent from the U.S. release, and reached much high­er in the Cana­dian charts than in either the U.K. or U.S. ones, con­firm­ing my impres­sion. Unfor­tu­nately, I don’t have the vari­a­tions to com­pare. Mine is the Canadian.