Showing posts with label Stephen King. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stephen King. Show all posts

Saturday, 10 April 2021

... on a Magic Swirling Ship

More weird dreaming yesterday except as usual everything in the dream was mundane , like being in people houses , going for a drink in a small field , being in Oswestry (Oswestry? I don't think I've ever been or ever need to go , not that I have anything against Oswestry). Dreams can be boring at times.

Today I went to get a bit of shopping and now I have a painful shoulder / chest. I did have t take off my rucksack part of the way back, but at a quick estimate the weight of the shopping was about 15Kg which I carried for around two miles. It's amazing how bottles of milk , water and Prosecco do carry some weight.

Anyway this is a short post mainly inspired by the title line that came into my mind. I have been listening to Bob Dylan's "Biograph" this week and I first heard the line when The Byrds played it on "Thank Your Lucky Stars", and that hooked me. When I first heard the Bob Dylan version I was less impressed thanking he couldn't sing or play. I persevered and Dylan's delivery grew on me. The early stiuff sounded rough but the words took you into magic.

Lot's of people still don't rate Dylan, but like Terry Pratchett his sales must be a huge comfort to him. I only ever liked "Mort" by Terry Pratchett , but that's just me , and people tell me that I am missing so much. I did enjoy the TV adaptations and am similar about Stephen King , find most of his books a grind but TV and film adaptations are great and I think the guy is great.

The "Magic Swirling Ship" is a great analogy for our dreams and the places books and music take us and for me that is just a brilliant image. In itself it's meaningless, but let your mind loose on it and it can be anything you want.

Saturday, 7 November 2020

Here Comes The Sun

Waiting for the Election Results in the USA is like watching a very slow sunrise , we have had four years of darkness in the USA (and ten in the UK) but it looks like things will start to take a turn for the better in the next week or so. I keep checking the news feeds and nothing seems to have changed with lots of childish "not fair" whinings from the the "we won you lost , suck it up crowd".

Today's early morning fog has burned off and it is now a very bright day.

This week, thanks to working from home , I have worked my way through the first seven Bruce Springsteen albums , his five disc live 75-85 release and more surprisingly the Blue Oyster Cult Columbia boxed set , which is an excellent listen. I think it is one of th ebiggest boxes I have and certainly the largest one I have listened to end to end.

There are lots of high points but the jewel in the crown is the final album "Imaginos"with a Lovecraftian libretto ,  an (unused) intro (to "Astronomy" by Stephen King  which reads thus:

The Soft Doctrines of Imaginos: A Bedtime Story for the Children of the Damned


From a dream world paralleling our Earth in time and space, The Invisible Ones
have sent an agent who will dream the dream of history. With limitless power,
he becomes the greatest actor of the 19th century. Taking on many disguises,
he places himself at pivotal junctures in history, continually altering its
course and testing our ability to respond to the challenge of evil.

His name is Imaginos.


It's worth following the links if this is tempting to you.

So I'm not going to share any version of The Beatles "Here Comes The Sun" but the "Imaginos" version of "Astronomy" , listen and appreciate. I found a "Wild King" mix which grafts the Stephen King intro the "Imaginos" version. Apparently there was some issue with Albert Bouchard around the release of the album , and he has released "Re-Imaginos"  which is on my to buy list, and songs like this have decided me to track more of his solo work.

Wednesday, 27 May 2020

On Demand


Yesterday I didn't even listen to the live radio, because now you can listen to shows on demand. I was using the BBC Sounds app on my Kindle Fire. I noticed there was something featuring Stephen King , who , like Terry Pratchett, I don't really like his books , but I like him as a person and like the TV and film dramatisations of his stories.

First up was the 6Music "Paperback Writers" show and the listing didn't include The Rolling Stones song "Dance Little Sister" which came between Jan & Dean's "New Girl In School" and KC & The Sunshine Band's "That's The Way (I Like It)" . King's attitude to disco is the same as mine, and we both love it.

I was looking forward to following this with his "Desert Island Discs" but it ran into Irvine Welsh's show and as I am an admirer of Irvine Welsh I let it run , and his music choices were stuff that I would have played , listened to and maybe even picked.

Both authors' shows were illuminating and gave a good insight into them and their tastes. The only slight black mark for me was Stephen King closing with "My Sharona" by The Knack , but each to his hown and when the other choices were so good you have to allow some leeway. Irvine Welsh's choices were all more than acceptable to me.

I then went back to "Desert Island Discs"  which was more talking and less music but a decent listen nonetheless.

The thing is you can cherrypick what you want to listen to these days and that means that live radio is up against a formidable library of sound, so my listening to live radio is about to get a little less. I think I will share "It Came Out Of The Sky" by Creedence Clearwater Revival" because it is on Stephen King's list and it has the "It" connection too.

Sunday, 12 April 2020

Ishtar X


It's a lockdown Easter Weekend. Easter Sunday is one of the two days a year that everything is shut, so most retail staff actually get a rest.  Easter has been linked with Ishtar and Eostre (see this article) and a lot of Christian festivals have been appropriated from non Christian festivals but it's something that doesn't trouble me too much I'm hardly the most religious person in the world and when Christians and Pagan start arguing about things like this they come out as bad as each other.

Coincidentally this weekend I started rereading "Behold The Man" by Michael Moorcock , which is basically about a conflicted time traveller who goes back in time (28 AD) and , well , you can guess what happens. This book is an award winning novel and clocks in at 124 pages (definitely not unusual for Moorcock) and is possibly one of the reasons I though that "The Stand"  by Stephen King could have been told in 300 pages rather than the thousand in the version that I read (I believe there was an extended version as well). Stephen King is an author I never got into, although I like him as a person and love most of the TV and film adaptations of his work (I feel the same about Terry Pratchett)

So I am enjoying "Behold The Man" but will finish it fairly rapidly, and then need to choose a next book to read, so am open to any suggestions but have a huge pile of "worth revisiting" books.

The post title is an obvious wordplay on "Easter Eggs" rather than anything meaningful, so we will go with "Easter" by Marillion which was a great post Fish song, a band that sort of mirrored Genesis, but are still producing some excellent music and never fell into the mainstream pop like Genesis , with the odd exception did.

Thursday, 20 December 2018

Xeronius


Another made up word, although it may be real. Sometimes Google is a positive. Turns out there are bands, artists , twitter users with that name but no definition, but a name wouldn't have a definition.

I heard some lyrics to a "Christmas" song on 6Music this morning which were essentially:

"I Hate This Time of Year
 It's Dark and it's Cold
And I Feel I'm Getting Old.."

To me that doesn't exactly give me positive vibes, quite the opposite. I don't think it'll be on my Christmas playlist. The song is "Home Alone, Too" by The Staves and can be listened to here (a radio session).

I decided to watch the final episodes of "Electric Dreams" Channel4's series based on Philip K Dicks' short stories, and"The Father Figure" played like and excellent Stephen King story, "Autofac" featured the wonderful Janelle Monae (her "Dirty Computer" is my album of 2018) in a post apocalyptic Amazon scenario which featured, for me, a brilliant twist. I am currently watching "Safe and Sound", with the chilling exchange:

Q: "Have your ever seen a terrorist attack?"
A: "They're on the news feed all the time"

You can see them on all 4 here.

So I think to accompanty this pre Christmas post we got to have more Janelle Monae, haven't we.



Sunday, 14 October 2018

This Strange Thing Called Life


No it's not anything deep. I find it strange that Facebook keeps suggesting friends because they're friends of people who would probably wish I wasn't their Facebook Friend anyway. Sometimes I spend a couple of minutes removing these suggestions and then let it revert to what it was. Basically I respect others privacy and they certainly wouldn't want  me intruding on them.

I've also regressed to my teenage years in my reading, revisiting Michael Moorcock's "History of the Runestaff" and while the writing is a bit clunky the storytelling more than stands up for me but it's probably not up to GRR Martin's standard, but Moorcock is both influential and a cracking story teller. I have six hundred pages in this book then another twelve hundred pages of a couple of related volumes that I want to revisit so we are talking Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings" and Stephen King's "The Stand" in sheer volume, And at some point I want to revisit the former, I always found "The Stand" a bit bloated and could have been wrapped up in three hundred pages.

So it's Sunday night and today, among other things I ripped the live Springsteen 15 CD set so I can listen to it on my travels, and I have been impressed with what I have heard so far,

I'm going to choose another Moorcock / Blue Oyster Cult collaboration "The Great Sun Jester" from "Mirrors" based on the novel "The Winds of Limbo", it is a wonderful song and I still play it regularly, though when I first got the album this was the only song I liked, but the album has since grown on me as I posted here.


Wednesday, 7 June 2017

Stranger Things When It Rains


Yesterday it just sheeted down with rain. I was surprised I managed to get 2.5K stems in given that the cottage is quite small and the opportunity to go outside was almost non existent. You can check it out here and it is extremely comfortable and quiet with options to walk (weather permitting).

Today will entail a trip to Whitby (as the skies are blue and there's only huge puddles and the odd pummelled plant to remind us of yesterday's awful weather). There was rain on Monday but an umbrella was enough to keep me mostly dry, yesterday and umbrella would have been just irrelevant, today the weather looks fine.

The Whitby trip might enable me to make up some of the steps I missed yesterday, but to fully make them up I'd have to hit 20K, but we shall see. Overall I'm still ahead of the game and I know I can make up the steps.

We are now up to episode six of the excellent "Stranger Things" so I expect to finish that tonight. The series is excellent and Fiona reckons it's a cross between Stephen King and "Outnumbered" which is an accurate analogy. As well as being an excellent series the soundtrack lives up to it, and I am going to include Joy Division's Atmosphere which opened the last episode. I've used this video before but think it fits in with the sometimes nightmarish episodes of "Stranger Things".

Have a great day everybody


Friday, 11 October 2013

Book or TED?



I'm currently enjoying the new excellent John Niven novel Single White Male. The thing is because I'm reading that on the train I've not really had time to watch any TED talks which I also enjoy and find inspiring. Sometimes you can only to one thing you enjoy at once , this is a situation where multi tasking is definitely not an option. So I thought I'd include a book related TED talk.

The books about a writer and in one passage about planning or outlining a book comes up with an interesting observation about Stephen King, which may or may not be true. The protagonist doesn't outline his own novels , citing Stephen King's reason being "If I don't know what's going to happen next, then the chances are the reader won't either". That seems to me like a good reason for not necessarily planning you novel. I actually know the structure of my own book so it's just a case of putting flesh on the bones of the framework that is already there in my head.

Well I'm glad the weekend is here, and looking forward to being able to relax and enjoy myself. Anyway I hope you enjoy the talk and have a brilliant weekend.