random updates

June 12th, 2009 1:59pm by rusty-halo | 16 Comments »

I’ve been hibernating. Sick for two weeks, tired, depressed. I canceled my cable TV to save money, which is actually good because it means I’m getting stuff done for SuperVegan and am reading books instead of watching Futurama reruns. And I can get Colbert, Stewart, and Rachel Maddow online for free, so there’s no reason to pay $70/month for cable. But it’s kind of depressing, anyway.

We’re going to be adding more cities to SuperVegan’s restaurant guide (right now it’s just NYC). So I’ve been very busy working on the programming for that. Of course, once the programming’s done we have to actually enter the data… um, any vegans out there want to volunteer? I guess the ideal is to get local people on the ground in each city to keep the information accurate and up-to-date, but I don’t know how feasible that’ll be. We’re having enough trouble keeping NYC up-to-date, and we all live here!

I read a couple of books. I finished Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander after leaving it half-read on a shelf for a year. I didn’t like it. Like Dunnett, it’s full of historically accurate jargon that’s difficult for a modern reader to parse; unlike Dunnett, the story and characters were just not compelling enough for me to want to put in the effort. I basically just finished it to get it out of the way. I bought more books in Forester’s Hornblower series instead; I found that one much more readable and the main character so much funnier (inadvertently) and more interesting.

I also read Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book because I got a free copy at BEA. It was cute, although typical of Gaiman in that none of it really made sense. He tells stories on the level of metaphor, which is nice, but he doesn’t have the plots or logic to back them up. I always want to know hows and whys that he never provides. This isn’t really a criticism, because it’s a perfectly legitimate way of writing, it’s just not one that appeals to me personally. (I have the same problem with most Stephen King.)

I’m currently reading Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon, but it’s slow going. I’m only 50 pages in, but I just… so don’t care about dragons. I find them creepy and silly and unpleasant to read about, actually; it’s a credit to grrm that I love A Song of Ice and Fire despite the dragons. (It probably helps that I was already totally into the story by the very late point that he finally introduced the dragons, and he slipped them in very slowly.) But I’ll try to finish this book; I want to give it a fair shot since I think the author is doing awesome things for fandom via her involvement with the OTW.

Oh yeah, and Writercon is still happening. Come hang out and talk about fanfic for a few days. It’ll be great.

Update on my continuing Bowie obsession: I skipped ahead 15 years after Scary Monsters and am now listening to 1. Outside. I’m just not quite ready to face 80s Bowie yet. Or Tin Machine. (I finished two Bowie bios and most of the encyclopedia and none of them had anything nice to say about Tin Machine.)

I like Outside (does it actually need the 1 now that there’s no 2? apparently it was supposed to be part of a series that never happened). Strangely, my strongest reaction to it is deja vu. I’ve been approaching this Bowie obsession as a fascinating glimpse into the pop culture world of the past–England in the 70s was a long time ago and very far away. But Outside is not only from the era when I was most into music–it’s actually part of the genre that I was listening to at the time. I know several of these songs! I even knew they were by Bowie, but I never thought about it, which is a bit strange since the default Bowie image in my head is cheesy 80s Bowie, and these songs are pretty antithetical to that.

Anyway, so I know “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” because it was all over MTV at the time (remember when MTV actually showed videos???) and it was in the movie Seven, and I know “I’m Deranged” because it was in Lost Highway and was on the Lost Highway soundtrack, which I apparently listened to quite a bit as a kid since it was produced by Trent Reznor. Smashing Pumpkins’ “Eye” is on there too, which I totally forgot about–I love that song! And Manson’s “Apple of Sodom,” and of course NIN’s “Perfect Drug.” I’m going to have to dig that album out and just immerse myself in a fit of 90s nostalgia. (I never thought I would be nostalgic for the 1990s!)

So anyway, Bowie’s Outside is really good. It’s less of a stretch for me than other Bowie works have been–it’s basically the default genre that I expect myself to like, 90s mainstream goth/industrial/whatever. In addition to the other Lost Highway songs, it also reminds me of Depeche Mode’s Ultra and (most especially) KMFDM’s Adios (over and over I find myself thinking, “Wow, this reminds me of Adios“). Although this is better than Adios–I spent a month or so listening to that album when it came out, and it’s got some good moments, but I never particularly warmed to it and wouldn’t dig it out these days.

Outside feels rather like a progression from Diamond Dogs–it’s a futuristic dystopia populated by an array of strange characters. I’d say Bowie takes it too far here, though; Diamond Dogs has a spoken word intro and its songs are full of characters, but Outside goes beyond eerie to plain old cheesy with its repeated spoken word interludes done by Bowie in the voices of the characters. It’s… too literal, maybe? And a bit silly–David Bowie is too well-known a personality for me to think anything other than “LOL that’s David Bowie” even when he’s doing the voice of a detective or a 14-year-old girl or whatever.

But the songs themselves are very strong–dark and eerie and interesting. The opener, “Outside,” is fascinating, and the use of piano throughout the record adds a distinctive touch that you wouldn’t normally get from this genre. The concept is so 90s, a futuristic nostalgic noir dystopia, very Dark City or Strange Days. And like I said, the overall nostalgic feeling is quite a draw. I’m glad I like this, because I was worried that I wouldn’t like anything at all after 1980. So, the Bowie obsession continues a bit longer.

Current Mood: blah