Though the current project started as a series of posts charting my grief journey after the death of my mother, I am no longer actively grieving. Now, the blog charts a conversation in living, mainly whatever I want it to be. This is an activity that goes well with the theme of this blog (updated 2018). The Sense of Doubt blog is dedicated to my motto: EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. I promote questioning everything because just when I think I know something is concrete, I find out that it’s not.
Hey, Mom! The Explanation.
Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1029 - Savage - Musical Monday for 1804.30
Hi Mom,
Just one selection for Musical Monday today, which was brought to my attention by my good friend Walt Curley: Savage by Eurythmics.
I loved this album when it came out, but then I kind of forgot about it.
This is a quick post because I am a day behind and have tons to do.
I am just going to revel in the wonder of Annie Lennox, though this is the same day that I discovered local artist from Astoria, Oregon - Grouper. This alone will be the focus of a future Musical Monday. OH MY!!
But for now, enjoy Savage by Eurythmics. Track listing[edit]
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1804.30 - 10:10
NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.
I am a little behind on sharing that Amazon is making a TV series of one of my all time favorite novels: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, and when they announced that news, the company also announced developing other favorites: Larry Niven's Ringworld and a recent comic book called Lazarus by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark.
I have been meaning to write more about Snow Crash. A newsletter I follow by Dan Hon also wrote about Snow Crash recently, which is content that may be worth sharing here (it's worth sharing, empirically). Wow... I just noticed that Dan Hon lives in Portland. So does Greg Rucka, actually. Maybe I could be friends with these blokes.
Anyway, this is a day late, Mom, so it's a share of Chuck Wendig's article on Snow Crash from TOR.com. Wendig is also a super cool author. So many writers...
Authors, I think, are the sum of many parts. One component that makes up our narrative DNA is surely who we are, what we think, where we come from. It’s us. But another part of it isn’t us—just as our own real genetic makeup features DNA that has come from others far beyond and before us, so too does our narrative DNA comprise voices that are explicitly not our own.
What I’m trying to say is: Writers are made up of other writers.
We’re formed, Voltron-like, of other storytellers who we’ve loved and whose words and characters have inspired us, challenged us, stayed with us in some formative way. We read books. We love them. They stay with us. Each is a thread, woven into our fabric.
But here’s the trick with that: The voices that we subsume can be a strength, but they can also be a weakness. We read books and we see how things are done, or how they’ve been done, and unconsciously, even unwittingly, we let those voices form a fence. And we learn to stay inside that fence. Here, we think, are our borders. These voices make up a boundary for us to stay in—or they form a brand, if you will, a brand in the advertising way, but also in the way that you burn a sigil into a cow’s hide to tell everybody who the cow belongs to.
So, those voices, those authors, they can be good. But they can also trap us and limit us and make us think, This is how it is. This is how it must be.
Snow Crash, from the first sentence, bursts through the fence of expectations. It obliterates everything you think you know. Or, at least, it did for me. Opening up Snow Crash and reading that perfect (and perfectly gonzo bananapants) opening chapter was like the first time I connected to the Internet. It’s like the first time using proper VR. You get the sense of—what is this place?It’s something new. The rules are unknown. The laws remain undetermined. It is wild and ill-mannered.
For a writer, that’s gold. Because suddenly, everything I thought I knew about writing, about books, about what books could even be, was so far out the window it was now careening off satellites in outer fucking space.
Let’s dice it up and see what this book did and does, yeah?
First, present tense. Snow Crash hasn’t happened. It’s happening now, as you read it. I’d never read anything in present tense before. A lot of stories read like there’s an old storyteller on a porch, and you’re pulling up a bit of real estate as you sit and hear the tale told. Stephenson’s Snow Crashis like a guy on speed and ayahuasca who grabs you, pulls you into a matte black car, then drives your ass at top speed on a pizza delivery mission through a cyberpunk dystopia. You’re not looking at a painting with this book. You’re watching the painter paint. Frenetically. Madly. With great swoops and swipes of color and ink—you have no idea what it’s going to look like when he’s done, but sweet hot hell you want to find out.
Second, the protagonist hero’s name is literally Hiro Protagonist. It’s amazingly on the nose, and you probably shouldn’t do it, unless you’re Neal Stephenson and your book is Snow Crash, which it isn’t. It works because it works. In fact, everything in this book works because it works. The second sentence of the novel—which is describing Hiro but could also be describing the author or even the book itself—is: “He’s got esprit up to here.” It’s the kind of sentence that a judicious editor would label a darling, a preening peacock in need of murdering. The argument is that it adds nothing—it stands on its own. But that’s not true. It adds character. It adds life. It self-defines—“got esprit up to here” is a description that has, appropriately enough, esprit up to here. It’s like the word sesquipedalian, which is a very long word that means ‘very long word.’ It is exactly what it is.
Third, the pacing is relentless. It’s not to say there’s no rhythm, but it’s a stomping romp, a hard drive, an armor-piercing bullet. It’s swords and cars and skateboards. It’s uranium flechettes from a railgun. It’s poor impulse control tattooed backward on someone’s forehead.
Fourth, it mashes up—well, everything it damn well wants to. Computer coding, sure. Linguistics, why not? Gods and religion, fuck yeah, okay. I had at this point already read a lot of cyberpunk, and this was something different, something more, something far stranger. Like it pulped cyberpunk and smashed the juicy leavings into weirder, bigger ideas.
Fifth, it’s either satire that takes itself incredibly seriously or a serious book that wears the raiment of satire. It’s madcap metatext that sometimes feels like instead of a book, it’s something that should be downloadable or injectable.
All this stuff adds up to one thing:
It’s a book that doesn’t give a fuck.
Nary a single fuck. It is what it is. It’s gonna do what it’s gonna do. It doesn’t care if you like it. And as a foundling writer in the early 1990s, I read that and I instantly became an endless animated GIF of that guy from Scanners with the exploding head. It blew me away. It was the first time I’d read something where it felt like the rules didn’t matter, where it became clear that inside the story was a lawless place where you could do whatever the hell you wanted—as long as you did it well, and you did it without flinching. No compromise. No hesitation.
(SMOOTH MOVE, EXLAX.)
Sometimes, we let the voices in our head become a wall.
And, sometimes, you need a voice like Neal Stephenson’s in Snow Crash to drive a car clean through that wall.
Early on in the book, upon learning Hiro’s name, the character Y.T. says, “Stupid name.” And Hiro responds with: “But you’ll never forget it.”
And that’s Snow Crash. Some of it sounds absurd on the surface. It breaks nearly all the rules.
And it really doesn’t matter.
Because you’ll never forget it.
Chuck Wendig is a novelist, screenwriter, and game designer. He’s the author of many published novels, including but not limited to the New York Times bestselling series Star Wars: Aftermath and the Miriam Black books. He is co-writer of the short film Pandemic and the Emmy Award–nominated digital narrative Collapsus. Wendig has contributed over two million words to the game industry. His collaborative comic book project, The Sovereigns, will be released from Dynamite in April. He is also well known for his profane-yet-practical advice to writers, which he dispenses at his blog, TerribleMinds.com, and through several popular ebooks, including The Kick-Ass Writer, published by Writers Digest. He currently lives in the forests of Pennsyltucky with wife, tiny human, and dog.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1804.29 - 10:10
NOTE on time: When I post late, I had been posting at 7:10 a.m. because Google is on Pacific Time, and so this is really 10:10 EDT. However, it still shows up on the blog in Pacific time. So, I am going to start posting at 10:10 a.m. Pacific time, intending this to be 10:10 Eastern time. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom. But I am not going back and changing all the 7:10 a.m. times. But I will run this note for a while. Mom, you know that I am posting at 10:10 a.m. often because this is the time of your death.
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1027 - Meteorologist
Hi Mom,
Past due time for a random xkcd comic. Actually, I did not press the random button for this one. Instead I went to the current comic and then back one day and when I saw it was about the weather, I was sold on it as my choice.
The weather is frustrating me. Actually, the weather itself has been fine. I should say the forecasting has been frustrating me, specifically the KOIN-6 local CBS affiliate's radar's future cast, which showed me this morning that I had an optimum DRY window for a walk with my dogs from 10:30-12:30, and it RAINED ON ME. Granted not a lot of rain, but when I arrived home and looked at the radar, the weather HAD NOT moved in the pattern predicted in the model. I rely on these models to help me keep the dogs dry. I don't mind so much about walking in the rain -- though I would have worn different shoes had I known I would be rained on -- but wet dogs are... well, WET. And that's an easy thing for any of us: me, them, passers-by getting soaked by their droplet shaking sprays.
Anyway, this comic amused me.
And it's raining now, but then, that's what the radar predicted.
That's all folks (and Mom). I needed a quickie as I am allegedly grading like a fiend. Or at least that's what I am putting here in case any of my students look!! Ha! Kidding.
I am grading, but I also had to do normal life things: dog walking, grocery shopping, taking the dogs to be groomed...
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1804.28 - 10:10
NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1026 - Conversations - Be Question Driven
Hi Mom,
So, I have mentioned before that I subscribe to many newsletters. I am sharing content here from one of them. e180's We Seek newsletter.
It's always an informative collection of curated articles related to learning. As the site proclaims: "Every couple of weeks, we release a digital issue of We Seek that assembles interviews and learnings for individuals, organizations, events and our greater Human community."
There's always thought provoking content, such as "There is a big difference between education as something that’s being done to you in comparison to learning, as something you can only do to yourself, no matter how hard anyone else tries to teach you. You just can’t help a flower to grow by pulling on it, as they say."
This quote connects to something I was recently teaching the class room in examining Paulo Friere's "banking" concept of education from The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and an article by Mark Edmundson from Harper’s Magazine: ON THE USES OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students. Both writings question the nature of education versus learning much like the quote above and conclude that learning happens in a participatory and communicative process NOT as a system of information dump deposits or a TV show, as one of my favorite professors of all time -- Robert Trenary at WMU -- said all the time: "I am not your TV."
I have always been fond of questions. This is the secret to conversation. People like to talk about themselves and the things that interest them. If you ask enough questions and can draw out responses, then great conversations happen.
Questions are powerful as a process to drive idea creation and work in the world, but a process must be in place to generate better questions as the text here relates. Read on.
I also like the extra links -- especially the Ursula K. LeGuin one -- exploring listening, collaboration, and innovation through conversation.
This stuff may not be all my content, but there is GREAT content here that's very useful and edifying.
e180 is a social business from Montreal that seeks to unlock human greatness by helping people learn from each other. We are the inventors of braindates—intentional knowledge sharing conversations between people, face-to-face. Since 2011, e180 has helped thousands of humans harness the potential of the people around them, and we won't stop until we reach millions.
Conversations • Be Question Driven
As soon as you start getting interested in learning at work, in careers, you start finding articles, books, and conferences on skills, on the future of work, on ways for workers to stay relevant in a changing marketplace and, soon, working alongside more automation and AIs. What are some of those skills? What are some things one can work on to be better equipped in such an environment? Or even, what are some “meta skills”? Things one can be better at to help them in acquiring those other future-ready skills?
As is the case with many of those aptitudes, one thing to do is look back at what makes us uniquely human, what can’t be automated, what can be useful in a broad spectrum of jobs. In this issue and the next, we are looking at something we do every day, yet for most of us remains unexplored, unperfected. Conversations.
What is the importance of conversations? What kinds of jobs, companies, projects, tasks can be made clearer, better, more innovative by simply talking and listening? By having clear, open, trusting conversations? The better question might be; which doesn’t? Are there any workplaces where better communication, more meaningful conversations, better questions, aren’t masterful tools to yield? We’re guessing there aren’t many.
“We often learn through conversations with others. They say ‘the best way to learn is to teach,’ which can usually be understood to mean that in the process of organizing your thoughts to explain something you know, you discover more; you progress, you learn yourself. It is much the same way with questions, formulating one to draw out a good answer, is a form of learning and, of course, so is the answer itself.”
SOME SNIPPETS FROM THE MEDIUM ARTICLE:
Be Curious
Curiosity is one of the most useful ‘skills’ to have and develop, it’s how you can be a lifelong learner and keep advancing in your work and interests. And, as Ian Sanders put it; “All it takes is a commitment to ask questions, to explore new possibilities, to embark on a journey of discovery.” Be open to the new, be humble, don’t hesitate to say “I don’t know,” take notes, sketch, write, share. Cultivate the three types of curiosity; diversive, epistemic, and empathic.
Finally, is empathic curiosity. This curiosity makes us wonder about the thoughts and feelings of other people. Empathic curiosity is a conscious practice. As Leslie said, “Diversive curiosity might make you wonder what a person does for a living; empathic curiosity makes you wonder why they do it.”
— Paul Jun / Ian Leslie
Better Questions
The art, and acceptance of, asking questions should be something we all think about and work on. In today’s workplaces, there is an emphasis on developing critical thinking, on being creative and innovative, on becoming better collaborators. All of these can be accelerated by asking good questions. In fact, it’s essential. Challenge the established and think critically by probing and questioning; to create something new, understand the existing; to collaborate, understand who you are working with.
“Yet something impels us to hold these possibilities in both hands and go on surrendering to the beauty and terror of conversation, that ancient and abiding human gift. And the most magical thing, the most sacred thing, is that whichever the outcome, we end up having transformed one another in this vulnerable-making process of speaking and listening.”
Suarez explains that we should start seeing collaboration as having a series of conversations, in person and online. We can then stop worrying that we are spending too much time collaborating; instead we can start understanding everyone’s needs and changing our mindset to realize that collaboration is not only “a physical activity happening while we are at the office, but mostly a state of mind.”
On the thinking, organizing, and wonderfulness of conversation dinners, where random people meet one on one to discuss a menu of questions on thought-provoking topics.
“When two people talk with mutual respect and listen with a real interest in understanding another point of view, when they try to put themselves in the place of another, to get inside their skin, they change the world, even if it is only by a minute amount, because they are establishing equality between two human beings.”
How conversations, the meeting of minds, can propel creativity and innovation. With examples from Bo Diddley and Fats Domino, to the B-52 bomber, to Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin.
“Conversations have the power to short-circuit time, to share tacit knowledge that is not to be found in reference books, or online; to change the world, or at least the way we think about the world.”
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1804.27 - 10:10
NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1025 - 1804.26 - Throwback Thursday
Hi Mom,
As I was sharing yesterday about work-life balance, I am constantly trying to do what's right for my life and my family, and I am too often behind schedule.
This one's going to be short because I have a lot of grading to do and not a full day anymore to do it.
I just applied for a job.
It's always a good day when I apply for a job. I feel like I am making progress and taking care of business.
It's all priorities, right?
BTW, as for this photo, I think I have shared it before. The blog has grown quite enormous, and I did not put a good enough system in place to track photo use. So, this may repeat and yet I think of all my photos this is one worth repeating.
I mention the job thing because I applied for a writing job, and I gave this address. It's conceivable that this post might be the first thing a prospective employer sees.
Hey, it's not always amazing, you know?
But it's daily. Even when I am late, look back, and you will see: there's one posted for every day since July 6th 2015 - 1025 consecutive days. Of all that content, some of it's very original, some is a share with a substantive note, some of it is a share with very little content by me, some of it was on my T-shirt blog, and some is just pictures. Lots of it is stream of consciousness-esque. Not all of it is strictly composed or even edited. Hey, it's a blog. It's meant to be conversational and free and fun, though it started with my grief process, which was hardly "fun."
I have logged over 136,000 page views all the time on this blog, which doubles T-shirts and its 62,000+ page views. And that's views with almost no active promotion. Sure, I send through Twitter to Facebook. I post some of the blog stuff to Linked In, too. But beyond a few hash tags here and there, I don't really promote. I have never made an effort to attract more readers.
This is my all time most viewed post from before the Hey Mom days and back before I lost my women's studies job. It was one of my very first blog posts, actually, my second.
But it looks like it was hit by some bot as there's 104 junk comments that I just noticed for the first time.
I have known for some time that my blog has often been spidered by bots, but this is the first absolute confirmation I have had of this fact.
In any case, if you're a new reader, or a prospective employer, I am proud of what I do here. It's a necessary outlet for me. Thanks for tuning in.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1804.26 - 10:10
NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1024 - Work and Writing - Henry Miller's Daily Routine
Hi Mom,
So, on Wednesday when thinking about my post to make, I skimmed through the deep and dark archives of the SENSE OF DOUBT blog. I may have mentioned before that I have 358 draft posts saved in my online queue. Granted, about 30-36 of those are about the comic books for the month going back to 2015, which was the last time I posted one. Okay, 69 monthly comic posts, assuming they are all labeled, and so maybe my total drafts minus the comic books ones is very close to 300. Still, I have been trying to post some of these drafts at a faster rate than I make new ones.
Often my selection process when pressed for time has to do with what post looks mostly finished, one I could bring to completion fairly quickly.
So this is an old one. I actually had to change the footer as the boilerplate text had changed since I saved this post initially. I reached deep into the abyss of the archive to pull this one into the light. It did not kick and scream very much at all, though I can imagine the banner art up top could be better.
Also, this comes from Brain Pickings, though I did not preserve the format. However, the link still works.
Then Wednesday ended, and it's Thursday. I try to practice good work ethic by earning a break to work on the blog rather than investing time in it early in the day. Also, my emails to friends and family often suffer, and I wonder if some of them think, "gee, he posted a blog but can't write me back?" I am just trying to balance things, and this post is about balance.
How I would love Henry Miller's ex-pat life of writing, reading, and contemplation. What an idyllic, pastoral dream!
But there's wisdom here, too. I like the commandments for writing and for work. I try to find good work-life balance. It can be a struggle, but I am making good progress.
Henry Miller’s 11 Commandments of Writing and Daily Creative Routine “When you can’t create you can work.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
After David Ogilvy’s wildly popular 10 tips on writing and a selection of advice from modernity’s greatest writers, here comes some from iconic writer and painter Henry Miller.
In 1932-1933, while working on what would become his first published novel, Tropic of Cancer, Miller devised and adhered to a stringent daily routine to propel his writing. Among it was this list of eleven commandments, found in Henry Miller on Writing — a fine addition to these 9 essential books on reading and writing, part of this year’s resolution to read more and write better.
COMMANDMENTS
Work on one thing at a time until finished.
Start no more new books, add no more new material to ‘Black Spring.’
Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
When you can’t create you can work.
Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
Under a part titled Daily Program, his routine also featured the following wonderful blueprint for productivity, inspiration, and mental health:
MORNINGS:
If groggy, type notes and allocate, as stimulus.
If in fine fettle, write.
AFTERNOONS:
Work of section in hand, following plan of section scrupulously. No intrusions, no diversions. Write to finish one section at a time, for good and all.
EVENINGS:
See friends. Read in cafés.
Explore unfamiliar sections — on foot if wet, on bicycle if dry.
Write, if in mood, but only on Minor program.
Paint if empty or tired.
Make Notes. Make Charts, Plans. Make corrections of MS.
Note: Allow sufficient time during daylight to make an occasional visit to museums or an occasional sketch or an occasional bike ride. Sketch in cafés and trains and streets. Cut the movies! Library for references once a week.
For more of Miller’s obsessive recipes for creative rigor, dig into Henry Miller on Writing.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - date - 1804.25 - 10:10
NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.
hautepopGable Crag, the north face of Great Gable and home of the Lake District’s hardest winter climbing route, Snicker Snap (VIII 9). Though I took the ridge route over Grey Knotts, Brandreth and Green Gable, the common walk-in to this mountain is by a path named Moses Trod.
The path is named for Moses Rigg, an 18th-century quarryman who, before there were proper roads in the Lakes, established the route as the shortest way to carry slate from the Honister mines over to Wasdale and thence down the valley road to the port at Ravenglass.
Word is, slate was not the only thing Moses was transporting over the fells. He was also smuggling wadd - then also called black lead, or plumbago, though now we know it as pure graphite. First discovered near Seathwaite in 1555, its many uses (from medicine to gun lubricant to pencils) made it highly lucrative, worth £70,000 a pony-load in today’s money. Smugglers‘ deals in the back rooms of Keswick may have given rise to the term “black market”, for the stains it’d have left on their hands.
But intrepid Moses did not stop at smuggling wadd. He also made bootleg whisky using water off Fleetwith Pike (bogwater makes the whisky taste better, he’s supposed to have claimed), distilled in a still hidden high on Gable Crag, accessible only by rock climbing, in an era before climbing was done for anything but direst emergency. A perfect location, then, for staying out of reach of the excise men. Wainwright, in his guides, made reference to a hut called Smuggler’s Retreat, “the highest site ever used for building in England” was “now completely in ruins.” Writing in 1999, veteran journalist and mountaineer Harry Griffin reported that the hut had “completely disappeared, its last stones swept down the crag by winter storms.” Gone.
Writing in the Fell and Rock Climbing Journal in 1924, RB Graham fretted that “Everybody has heard of him; everybody knows of him; everybody knows that the track was made by Moses, but who ever saw him in the flesh?” Thing is, official records of the man are non-existent. (cont. below)
hautepopIt turns out that all the stories about Moses Rigg stem from but one source: the testimony of Auld Will Ritson, proprietor of the Wastwater Inn in the mid-C19th, who remembered from his childhood an old man called Moses who would bring slate over the Trod in a pony trap which doubled as an illicit whisky shop.
Yet Auld Will himself was also a bit of a local legend: as a teller of tall tales. He started the World’s Greatest Liar contest, which continues to this day at the Wasdale Head pub. So perhaps the legend of Moses Rigg was nothing more than that.
But then in 2005 Guy Proctor, a writer with Trail magazine, heard a rambling story from his old man mountaineering editor Jeremy about a winter climb up Central Gully in 1983, and a strange ruined hut. He went to have a look, and to work out where on this rockface a hobnail-booted quarryman might have been able to climb.
Thirty metres down the rake and around a rocky promontory he found a shelter, still standing. A tiny shelf in the hut’s back wall. And on that shelf, two stones looking like “very old and weathered and slightly manky-looking potatoes. …A gentle rub with a thumbnail, and a small section of the mossy mank came off, revealing underneath a silky gleam. I gently rubbed my sample on the corner of my notepad. The soft black smudge said it all.”
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1804.24 - 10:10
NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1022 - Groundless in the ambient geoscape - Musical Monday
Hi Mom,
This all started Safir Nòu and the track "Land-escape" from the Groundless album. The whole album is a gorgeous thing to listen to, though beware that "Puppets' Waltz" is a bit outside of the style of the other tracks.
I started this mix way back in July of 2017, and then it became buried due to the move west.
Christina Vantzou is a recent addition as of Warren Ellis' Orbital Operations newsletter yesterday 1804.22, so I vaulted it to the first selection.
The last two selections also were recent additions via Warren's Twitter feed. I shared Michiru Aoyama in last week's Musical Monday dedicated to what Warren calls Spektrmodule, his infrequent music podcast. Not all of these tracks come from Warren, so this one is not named for the podcast. The same day Warren shared another Michiru Aoyama track, he also shared Leila Abdul-Rauf's beautiful and haunting album Diminution, which is the last offering on today's blog. This piece of music alone makes me so happy for the Internet and what it means for great artists to share their work and have it listened to and purchased. This is fantastic stuff.
By writing a few comments, I am attempting to curate the list. Vantzou's music is much like Abdul-Rauf's with a strong melancholy bent. I dig the melancholia. Christina Vantzou, whose web site is at that link, has a Bandcamp presence plus all the other major outlets. She describes herself as "a Missouri native of Greek descent who resides in Brussels, Belgium. She has explored sound for over a decade and also conducts ongoing visual research, mostly in animation, film, and highspeed photography. Her musical releases are largely associated with the American label Kranky and her performances are characterzied by a loosening of time."
I like the characterization as "loosening of time," which may not be melancholic, though it could be. I am eager to explore her other pieces. Associated by my recent purchase but also by the sounds involved, Abdul-Rauf describes herself in the following and mentions melancholy specifically: "Multi-instrumentalist and composer Leila Abdul-Rauf enters a world all of her own weaving brass, piano and various other textures into filmic soundscapes that echo the sounds of memories faded through time. Songs are not so much composed as captured from dreams. Time and space are distilled down to the remains of distant memories and hidden emotions, melded into a symphony of ethereal melancholy."
The The next track by Xerxes featuring Aleah proves a good follow up to the others with an ethereal, loopy lilting susurrus. It's beautiful and melodic yet haunting in a good way that invites repetitive listens.
Unlike the other tracks and the melancholy tones, Safir Nòu is pretty and hopeful. There's gratitude and the sounds of joy. See the liner notes I pasted below.
I am not sure if the Xerxes of the Bandcamp link is the same as the one from the You Tube video, but the music shares some similarity.
Hannah Peel shares this with her music: "We have a hundred billion neurons in our brains, as many as there are stars in a galaxy" Theoretical physicist and author, Carlo Rovelli.
INFO ON HANNAH PEEL:
With only a year following on from the release of her second album ‘Awake But Always Dreaming’ to widespread acclaim (Voted No.1 Album Of the Year – Electronic Sound Magazine), ‘Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia’, explores one person's journey to outer space, by recounting the story of an unknown, elderly, pioneering, electronic musical stargazer and her lifelong dream to leave her terraced home in the mining town of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, to see Cassiopeia for herself. With artwork by Grammy award winning designer Jonathan Barnbrook (David Bowie collaborator on albums ‘Blackstar’ and ‘The Next Day’ ) and the complete brass band and rhythm section recorded live on location in The Barnsley Civic Theatre with Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio team, this exclusive album combines Peel’s detailed, analogue synth layered production and her expressive flair for performance with ‘Tubular Brass’, featuring the top UK championship brass band players. It’s a wholly unique, collaborative sound and seemingly, a first of it’s kind both live and on record.
At the close of the album’s final song ‘The Planet of Passed Souls’, tutti brass jostle with the hiss and crackle of a 78rpm record. An emotionally charged, scratchy sample taken from a 1928 recording of Peel’s own choirboy grandfather in Manchester Cathedral leaves the listener questioning the reality of Mary’s connection with the stars… Did she ever make it to Cassiopeia? Is this all a daydream as she sits in a back garden shed tinkering with electronics and her telescope? Or maybe this is her final breath as her mind and body pass into another realm of life? Is this science or fantasy? And how much is there really a division between the two?
ALBUM TRACKS:
1. Goodbye Earth
2. Sunrise Through The Dusty Nebula
3. Deep Space Cluster
4. Andromeda M31
5. Life Is On The Horizon
6. Archid Orange Dwarf
7. The Planet Of Passed Souls
"Ruination, the New Dawn Cometh" is a synth piece of sword battle power chords and rangers in the Mirkwood battling evil. It's an interesting eight minute change of pace that fits somewhat with the other music despite its difference. It's not too caustic and maintains an austere and somber quality.
Konrad Sprenger is a music experimenter using a Euclidean algorithm to make music. Read more at Sprenger's Bandcamp page. Like the track before, neither of these may fit well with the rest in this collection, but I am not inclined to move them now.
Lastly before the Michiru Aoyama track I previously mentioned, Jeffrey Koepper's Tangerine Dream influenced electronica rushing like a rapid stream came to my attention because of track #8 "Equinox" played in episode 234 of the Hypnagogue podcast, and yet this may not be the track I wanted after all as the one I found, I thought, had some ethereal vocals and this does not. It's still good.
The final Michiru Aoyama track brings the sound flow back to things more in line with Safir Nòu and some of the first mentioned music.
I hope you find these collections enjoyable.
I am continuing my posts to Linked In as last week's post had over two dozen views, which I feel is a good sign.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1804.23 - 10:10
NOTE on time: When I post late, I had been posting at 7:10 a.m. because Google is on Pacific Time, and so this is really 10:10 EDT. However, it still shows up on the blog in Pacific time. So, I am going to start posting at 10:10 a.m. Pacific time, intending this to be 10:10 Eastern time. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom. But I am not going back and changing all the 7:10 a.m. times. But I will run this note for a while. Mom, you know that I am posting at 10:10 a.m. often because this is the time of your death.
