More curious costumes here.
(Via Eve Tushnet.)
*****
Madan no Ou to Vanadis is doing a lot of things right and is probably the best show currently airing. Nevertheless, there are still mistakes, such as the use of swords in an era of plate armor.
Author: Don
Anti-gravitas
Today is the centenary of the birth of possibly the most original and imaginative writer of the twentieth century, R.A. Lafferty. I’ve been collecting his books ever since I read “Continued on Next Rock” in one of the Carr/Wollheim anthologies back in ancient times. I could try to explain why Lafferty is extraordinary, but it’s easier just to refer you to the short stories that are available online.
Nearly everything Lafferty wrote is long out of print, which is a scandal. If you ever spot one of his collections in a used book store, grab it.
Some websites devoted to the cranky old man from Tulsa:
I want a death and resurrection of the thing
The Ants of God Are Queer Fish
The R.A. Lafferty Devotional Page
Lafferty, incidentally, is partly responsible for the career of Neil Gaiman:
Lafferty was his favorite author in the world, he said. “His stories brimmed with ideas that no one had ever thought before. The use of language was uniquely his own —a Lafferty sentence is instantly utterly recognizable,” Gaiman wrote of Lafferty, in an introduction to the story in Martin H. Greenberg’s My Favorite Fantasy Story. “The cockeyed, strange, and wonderful world he painted in his tales often seems nearer to our own, more joyful and more recognizable than many a more worthy or more literal account by other authors the world stopped to notice.”
When he was 19, Gaiman dug Lafferty’s address out of the back of a library book and wrote to him, asking for advice on becoming an author. Tulsa, thanks to Lafferty, is for him a place of literary magic. “He told me how to become an author, and his advice was very good advice, and so I did. It left me quite certain that the finest literary advice in the world came from Tulsa, Oklahoma, for it did in my case,” Gaiman said.
Oranges and reds
It’s been a mediocre fall so far here, but there is some color out there if you look for it.
Vexed
There are all kinds of strange things on YouTube. For instance, this recording of Erik Satie’s notorious “Vexations.” Normally a complete performance runs from 14 to 24 hours. Nicholas Horvath plays the 840 repeats in less than ten hours, which is blazingly fast for a piece marked “très lent.” (No, I’m not counting them, and I don’t expect to listen to the whole thing.) On another occasion, Horvath took 35 hours to play the piece. That performance was probably closer to the proper tempo.
Not every pianist who attempts a solo “Vexations” succeeds. From The New Yorker:
An Australian pianist named Peter Evans abandoned a 1970 solo performance after five hundred and ninety-five repetitions because he claimed he was being overtaken by evil thoughts and noticed strange creatures emerging from the sheet music. “People who play it do so at their own peril,” he said afterward.
The problem with elections …
… is that only half of the candidates lose.
Update: An interesting footnote to yesterday.
Update II: A footnote to the footnote.
Another one gone
Today it’s Tom Magliozzi, half of the last radio show worth listening to. I don’t have a car, but it didn’t matter.
Garish and bizarre
A few more pictures from this weekend. Click to greatly embiggenify.
Calling Brenda Starr
I hoped to take a picture of Dracula at the orchid show today, but there weren’t any there this time. However, I did find a black orchid for Basil St. John.
Boo, boo, etc.
It’s Halloween today, right? Time to get the bag of chocolate out of the freezer.
There’s a fine line between spooky and silly, as Frëd illustrates in this footnote to American history.
*****
There’s a lot of anime suitable for Halloween, from the many iterations of Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro (including in particular Hakaba Kitaro) to Soul Eater and Hozuki no Reitetsu. If I had to pick just one, though, it would be Kenji Nakamura’s Mononoke. Here’s one of the two-episode stories:
The entire show is on YouTube, but it’s available for such a reasonable price that there’s no excuse not to buy your own copy of this probable classic. ((I don’t declare anything a “classic” until it’s at least ten years old, and Mononoke is from anime’s year of wonder, 2007.))
*****
*****
If you’re looking for a proper Halloween post, Isegoria has a bunch of them.
Grumble, grumble
First Steven, now me. It’s hard to maintain a secret identity these days.
Morning serenade
Pin-ups
Memo to those watching Madan no Ou to Vanadis: Jusuchin has saved me the trouble of stitching together full-length portraits of the new war maidens. I have to say that, while I don’t mind tasteful fanservice, Sophia’s attributes are well past the point of diminishing returns.
The execution could have been better …
1941-2014
Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, a colleague of my father’s years ago on Triumph magazine, passed away this week. Lorenzo was an interesting guy, charming, intelligent, funny and a pleasure to talk with and be around. He lead an interesting life. Trained as a physicist, he was ordained a priest and obtained a doctorate in theology. One of his friends was a certain Karol Wojtyla, better known these days as Pope John Paul II. He wrote for a surprising range of publications, such as The New Yorker and The New York Times, and often appeared on television, once debating Christopher Hitchens. He was deeply involved with the Communion and Liberation lay ecclesial movement.
I snapped the above picture when Lorenzo visited Wichita not quite ten years ago.
Arriving at Harmony Row
I early acquired the habit of listening to music from the bottom up. A tune with an energetic bass line is far more likely to catch my attention than one in which the bass merely marks chord changes. I took to Cream immediately, partly because of Clapton and Baker, but mainly because of bassist, singer and songwriter Jack Bruce. There are many musicians whose bass playing I’ve enjoyed, but Bruce has always been my favorite.
Jack Bruce passed away today. R.I.P.
Here’s Bruce with Ginger Baker and Eric Clapton:
Never mind
The moment I lost interest in Yuki Yuna wa Yusha de Aru, a pale pastel imitation of Madoka Magica.
There are a number of other current shows I’m not watching, which I may or may not discuss when I have more time. Until then, here’s a safety video from Air New Zealand.
(Via Bayou Renaissance Man.)
Hooks, blurs and frogs
Recently I’ve been going through my older pictures, taken back in the age of film, and putting some of the better ones on my Flickr page. Here are a few recent examples. Click to embiggenify.
Transplanting the seedlings of Mammillaria pennispinosa into individual pots requires an unusual technique. With the hooked spines embedded in your left thumb and index finger, hold the plant in position as you fill the pot with the potting soil with your right hand. Using a pair of embroidery scissors, free the plant from your fingers by snipping off the tips of the spines. Then extract the hooks from your fingers.
Quote of the day
I’m not great with children – I’m ideologically in favor of them, but they can be kind of hard to talk to.
— Eve Tushnet, via Josh
Check
In addition to the usual nendoroids, figmas, keychains and the like, I expect that there will also be Madan no Ou to Vanadis chess sets available soon.
As of episode three, Vanadis looks to be the keeper of the fall season.
Seeing red
“Is She U.N. Owen?” is probably the best-known piece of music from the vast Touhou Project, ((except possibly for “Bad Apple“)) and you can find innumerable versions in every style, from orchestral to nightcore, on YouTube. I stumbled across the one above recently while looking for something else.
Another version of the tune, impressive yet ridiculous.
Incidentally, “U.N. Owen” is not “Death Waltz.” This is “Death Waltz:”
Update: Yet another version of “U.N. Owen,” this one by Floating Cloud.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VpNvGNRlFaE