(x) Rocky Horror Picture Show

2.     Song from your childhood or song that makes you think of your childhood because of the lyrics: The Bee Gees - What A Fool Believes. Largely because as a kid I had no idea what the lyrics were, so I just made some up. At the time I was living in farm country and taking horseback riding lessons, so I decided the song was about an aging horse with worn out teeth.

3.     X-Mas song - The Pogues - Fairytale of New York. also too easy! come to think of it, this one satisfies question #1 as well!

4.     Song that makes you think of a person that means a lot to you: Live - Lightning Crashes. This past year, my grandma had a health scare and spent some time in hospital, and here I was thousands of miles away feeling powerless and very upset. This song just popped into my head out of the blue because of the lyric "The angel closes her eyes ..." and then I remembered the video where the old lady dies ... and then I bawled my eyes out.

5.     Male/female duet: Iggy Pop and Peaches - Kick It. Kind of like a nasty lovers' quarrel, with guitars.

6.     Song you've formerly misunderstood the lyrics to: Safety Dance. For starters, I thought it was called "Safe To Dance" ... and then there's the poetic lyric, "Everybody look at your pants."

7.     Song with 'rock n roll' or 'rock' or 'roll' in the title: The Donnas - You're No Rock N' Roll Fun. A song about overly intellectual musicians who would rather sit around writing songs than party with other bands.

8.     Song that comforts you: Loreena McKennitt - Cymbeline/Fear No More. One of those funereal Celtic ballads about how the dead have passed beyond this world's pain. I like to sing it at memorial ceremonies.

9.     Song with a hidden meaning (like sex, drugs etc): Come On Eileen - Dexy's Midnight Runners. Okay, so maybe the song itself has no hidden meaning, but the band name ... I have it on good authority that dexedrine was the poor man's drug of choice in the British Isles in the 70s & 80s, and musicians used to smuggle it over to Ireland while on tour.

10.   Cover song (that you like more than the original): definitely not Route 66. How about ... Alien Ant Farm's Smooth Criminal. Definitely.

11.   Song you used to hate/not like but grew to love/like: hmm ... this is a tough one ... usually it's the other way around for me, where a song I liked on first listen turned out to be painful after a few more listens. I guess any of the "new" Radiohead ... Kid A, Amnesiac and In Rainbows, were all hard to get into, but I stuck at it because I knew I would love the music once I understood it. and I do!

And for extra credit ...

12. An instrumental song: Fatima Mansions - More Smack, Vicar? It sounds ... like it sounds.

Alas, the link for actual listenables will have to come later ... I had to go to a public computer to publish this journal because for some reason they don't always publish from home ... and now I have to go home and make you guys a playlist.

The Tyee

The photo on Flickr

Picking up where I left off last time I submitted to this group: I read a novel by Robert J. Sawyer called Rollback, in which there is a new and very expensive treatment that causes people to revert to a much younger age.  An elderly couple receives the treatment ... but for some reason it only works on the man! So here he is, chronologically amost 90 years old but physically 30, living with his 90-year-old wife and trying desperately to find a way for her to "roll back" her age as well. Sadly, it does't work and she dies.

I have read Robert Sawyer before and really liked his work - he has some wonderful ideas, for example "What would it be like if we discovered an alternate universe where Neanderthals never died out?" He pulled that one off admirably with a compulsively readable trilogy ... but sometimes I find him a little ... PC maybe? or maybe a little milquetoast. Perhaps it's because Sawyer is from Toronto and a real family man; it's just too close to home to be exciting to me. Reminds me of my dad. And sometimes he seems to belabour his point of how morally upright his heroes are, and how thoroughly pathetic his villains; not enough conflict. So in Rollback, while I liked the story, I often wanted to say "oh yeah, riiiight" to the characters, ironically because they are too true to life!

Okay, so next I read The Margarets, by Sheri S. Tepper. This novel features a young woman named (wait for it) Margaret, who grew up in a place where she was the only child, and so had a lot of imaginary friends. Somehow, over the years as she grows up, her imaginary friends split off from her one by one and become real people who all go to live on different planets. (It's all "explained" in the end.)

I really like Sheri Tepper ... but I find her books are like Stephen King's: I like the beginning and setup of her stories, but am often unmoved by the endings.  So in this case we had a really compelling setup where Earth's ecology has broken down so thoroughly (Tepper often writes about the effects of environmental degradation) that all Earth has to trade with other planets is excess population, ie. slaves. This explains how all the poor Margarets end up living all over the known galaxy, each one on a different planet. And in the end, due to some vast astrological alignment, all the Margarets must come together and perform a ritual to save the galaxy from evil. So, er ... yeah.

Next I read a book of short stories by Iain M. Banks (WHY do SF writers always have to have that middle initial???) called The State of the Art. A few of the stories are set in the fictional universe of the Culture, an advanced society where the spaceships have hilarious names and most of the people are as sheltered and spoiled as Paris Hilton ... but the people who are not born into the Culture are largely barbarous. There's also a tale called Odd Attachment that points out how very difficult it can be to understand an alien that drops from the sky into your world. Heaps of fun. Banks has a wicked sense of humour. He's one of my new fave SF writers. I've only read one of his novels so far (The Algebraist) but I will be hitting up the library for more ASAP.

Then I moved on to a sequel by C.J. Cherryh, Invader. I had read the first book (Foreigner)in this (very long) series last year. At the time I didn't know what I was getting into: there are now nine books in the series, arranged into 3 trilogies, and from the dust jackets it's hard to tell what order to read them in. So one day last month I came home from the library, thrilled because I thought I had found book 2 and book 3 of the first trilogy, but after finishing Invader, discovered I had the wrong book 3. Just when the lead characters were about to get it on!!! So now I am jonesing, and pestering the librarian, waiting for book 3 to become available. Maybe I should just buy it for fuck's sake.

Okay, so this series is about a planet where humans have become stranded due to a broken down spaceship. They share the planet with its indigenous race, the Atevi, who are intelligent but less technologically advanced. There has already been a war between the two groups, which the Atevi won, so now there is a treaty requiring humans to share their technology while remaining confined to a single island, all except for one lone human who is allowed to live in the capital city and serve the Atevi government as translator. The books are about his rather stressful work trying to stay afloat in a foreign environment, dealing with unstable politics he doesn't really understand, and having to explain all this to his own government on the island. Oh and the Atevi are kind of like the Klingons or Cardassians on Star Trek - big and nasty and intimidating. You never know when someone's going to get assassinated or strung up by the thumbs. I just love this series, it's a blast!

Ad then finally, while I was in Victoria (where the vintage shops are cheaper) I bought this huge coffee table book called Science Fiction: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, by John Clute, which covers the history of SF from Frankenstein (1818) to the mid-90s. Sure, it has pictures, but it has lots of words too - essays on dominant SF themes over the years, articles on it musta been more than 100 authors, reviews of 50 or so classic works, and timelines of pulp magazines, books, movies and comics. Among other things. And this book was hard to read! it's a really huge and unwieldy thing, the pages measuring 12" by 12" easily. And now that I have read it, I have a list of about a dozen novels that I must find and read ASAP. Maybe I'll make it to 25 books this year after all!

From the International Mix Trading Group: "...whatever your favorite songs are from the moment. Whatever you've had in heavy rotation this month you're gonna slap it on a mix & send it your partner's way."

Here it is!

1. CSS - Let's Make Love And Listen to Death From Above (there isn't much in the world funkier than this)

2. Daddy Yankee - Gasolina

3. Tetsuo - Hot Sex (I don't even remember where I found this song ... I don't know anything about this band ... but check out the guitar in the second half! How awesome is that!!)

4. Eagles of Death Metal - I Like To Move In The Night (this makes me want to boogie with my cowboy hat on!)

5. Pavement - Two States

6. Santogold - L.E.S. Artistes

7. Sonic Youth - Becuz

8. Stereolab - Brakhage (no, I don't know how to pronounce the title or what it means ... but cool song eh!)

9. Placebo - Pure Morning (I seem to have a high tolerance for depressing lyrics)

10. Tom Waits - Black Wings

11. Queens of the Stone Age - Someone's In The Wolf

12. Heart - Magic Man (I included this one because I had to learn it for an audition recently - didn't get a callback)

13. Radiohead - All I Need (I love the new Radiohead. I love the old Radiohead too!)

14. Rammstein - Du Riechst So Gut (yeah I know this one doesn't really fit with the rest ... but Rammstein is my guilty pleasure)

Link!

This month's theme is: Current Picks, ie. whatever you are into at the moment. Your fellow Buzznet music lovers want to know what that is! Come and trade with us!

So anyway I have already polished off 3. All entertaining, all very different. The first I read was called Debatable Space by Philip Palmer, a high-energy tale of space pirates (I loves me some space pirates) who kidnap a very important personage, a woman named Lena, and use her as leverage to extort the dictator of the galaxy. Lena turns out to be one messed-up dame, and she makes life pretty crazy for her space pirate captors. Eventually, though, she develops Stockholm syndrome and joins their cause. This novel is very fast-paced, racing from rousing space battles to salty banter to gratuitous sex, with the occasional sidetrip into lurid tragedy. It was lots of fun to read.

Next I read Joe Haldeman's Old Twentieth, a more run-of-the-mill SF novel, but a very good one. The setting is maybe 100 years onto the future, and humanity has developed a treatment that seems to prevent aging. The people all happily call themselves "immortals," even though no-one knows how long the treatment will work. Also, they have all survived a catastrophic class war between those who could afford the treatment and those who could not. The title refers to an immersive virtual reality program that is popular among the characters, one that lets them experience the staid and placid twentieth century (a selection of wars, jazz clubs, epidemics and social upheaval). Yes, these people are so messed up, they have fond nostalgia for this stuff! But the twist comes when, for the first time in a century, someone dies! and they seem to have been killed by the virtual reality machine.

There were some really well-written scenes in this book. The autopsy performed by a robot was pretty freaky. Also, chasing ducks in zero-G sounds like a pile of fun. Joe Haldeman is really damn good at writing piles of good, solid SF.

Finally, I read J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World. J.G. Ballard is the Hemingway of SF ... he goes beyond mere exploration of new scientific ideas and simply writes amazingly good literature. This one was first published in 1962, but (I love it when this happens) he has created such a believable future world that you forget as you read that the book is almost 50 years old. In this book Ballard writes about an Earth where climate change has caused sea levels to rise several metres and temperatures to go up (Ballard is one of those SF geniuses who are like Nostradamus. He also predicted back in the 60s that Reagan would become president!)

We meet a scientist called Kerans in a drowned city, and he's not even sure which one. His team have come south from Greenland with some military guys to study the rate of climate change in Europe, but the landscape is unrecognizable: buildings stick up out of the water and silt, half submerged; the jungle has encroached; and oversized iguanas roam the earth. In this surreal environment, Kerans and some of his fellow scientists begin to lose their minds, perhaps because they know the temperature is still rising and maybe humanity is doomed. They begin to have dreams of returning to the primordial swamp. Their military friends are oblivious to this; they prepare to return to Greenland when their work is done, but Kerans and a few of his pals go AWOL and stay behind to watch the former human world disappear into a new triassic age.

If you liked Heart of Darkness, you should DEFINITELY read this book.

Alrighty! I'm moving on to reading The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper.