Recently heard

Heard all of these in a four-hour musicking-out session a week ago and have yet to report on them here:

* Henry Cow with Slapp Happy: "In Praise of Learning" (1975) -- Loud, screechy, sometimes annoying, but not completely terrible. One track, "Beautiful as the Moon - Terrible as an Army With Banners" actually gets its political message across in a compelling portrait of The End Times. Most annoying thing about this band is Dagmar Krause's sing-song vocals, like some kind of German music-hall. Occasional nice piano, screechy guitar, wayward horns, but overall not too far from National Health or Hatfield and the North. I might even keep it.

* Badfinger: "Straight Up" (1972) -- "Perfection" is the hidden gem on this album, but even so it doesn't measure up to the awesome "Baby Blue" and the gorgeous "Day After Day," or even "Name of the Game" -- a stronger version of which is included on Apple's Badfinger best-of. The best of this is pleasant enough, but it comes nowhere near hitting as hard as the two hit singles.

* David Bowie: "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars" (1972) -- Heard this once or twice before over the years and always thought it sounded cramped, pinched, uncomfortable. Listened to the whole thing from start to finish this time around, relaxed and enjoyed all of it, was no longer distracted by whatever Bowie was up to. Nor did I feel a need to connect the dots to make it all "make sense." Maybe I've finally gotten used to him?

* Bruce Springsteen: "Born to Run" (1975) -- I've loved the title hit since back in '75. I was the only person I knew who bought the single back in the day. But I'd never heard the whole album, so.... The title song's a classic of course, and I loved "She's the One." "Thunder Road"'s a good, solid opener and "Meeting Across the River" is a nice moody change of pace. But I admit I was starting to drift a bit by the time I got to "Backstreets" ... or whatever it was.

I also finished listening to Mott the Hoople's first album and "Brain Capers," both feature good, solid stuff on their Side 2's, but I admit the surprise and enjoyment I experienced when first hearing their early work awhile back has since worn off a little.

More soon!

New additions

Picked up during yesterday's trip to my favorite used-record store in the world, Hi-Voltage Records in Tacoma, Washington:

* Fanny's first album and "Mother's Pride."

* Family's "Old Songs, New Songs."

* David Sancious's solo-piano-jazz "The Bridge."

* Stevie Wonder's "Innervisions."

* Spirit's "Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus." I sold this off a few years back when money got tight, and I missed it.

* Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bayou Country."

* The Association's first album "And Then, Along Comes...."

* The Lovin' Spoonful's "Daydream."

* Wall of Voodoo's "Call of the West."

* John Denver's "Farewell Andromeda."

* K-Tel's "20 Explosive Original Hits" by various artists, from around 1970.

Overall, an average visit to Hi-Voltage, nothing too shocking or surprising. I'll be reporting on all of these here, eventually....

Addicted to feedback

Hey there, I'm still winding down after my books-and-CD's-scanning job came to an end last Tuesday morning. My boss, who had been running a selling-books-and-CD's-on-line business for the last 18 months, suddenly realized he couldn't make enough money at it to keep it going plus cover his overhead and pay his three employees.

So I am now Officially Retired.

I dunno, it SHOULD have worked. My boss said a change in policies at Amazon regarding warehousing space and buying books from us was part of what put him into negative income. He hadn't paid himself in two months.

So I'm mildly bummed. I liked the job and I learned a lot -- it seemed like a perfect retirement job for me, just a little something to keep a few $$$'s coming in. But it did beat me up a bit, physically. I'm not 55 anymore.

Anyway, I'm now hoping to write more, read more, listen to music more. Musicked-out for four hours last weekend, my first serious music session in a month. Am watching a lot more movies in the evenings -- God knows I have a lot to catch up on there.

Read three long stories by fantasist Tom Reamy yesterday afternoon, all horror stories -- "Twilla," "The Detweiler Boy" and "Insects in Amber." Reamy, who died way back in 1977, was certainly no stylist, but his stories work. He won a Nebula Award for his 1975 novelette "San Diego Lightfoot Sue," a story I read more than 40 years ago, but maybe it's time for a re-read because I didn't really "get it" the first time around.

Hoping to find some more good short stories to get into before trying to read another novel. These days my mind seems to wander with long fiction. But I had no trouble reading Reamy's chillers yesterday.

Despite what I posted here previously, I am still posting on Facebook. I'm addicted to the quick feedback there, which is way more than I get here. Maybe I'll post the obvious stuff there and the more personal stuff here, who knows?

That's all for now. Hope you all are well.

Disappearing act

Tim O'Brien's "In the Lake of the Woods" (1994) is a murder mystery. Maybe.

It's also so hypnotic and compelling that I read the whole 300-page book yesterday morning -- the first time in ages that I've read straight through a novel.

In it, a guy running for U.S. senator gets stomped after the media learn that he'd witnessed an atrocity in Vietnam back in 1968. He never told anyone about it, including his wife. He'd even gone to some lengths to erase the fact that he'd ever been there.

He and his wife retreat to a cabin at the Lake of the Woods in northern Minnesota after the election, in an attempt to repair their marriage.

That's where the murder happens. Maybe.

O'Brien's pretty tricky about this from the start. "Maybe" is the word used most often in the novel, and most of the last half of the book is purely speculative -- what may have happened to the guy and his wife at the cabin in the woods, and after.

The only problem is that the murder scene is much more compelling and believable than the other chapters that speculate about what happened to the man and his wife, both of whom end up disappearing.

I never doubted for a second that the wife was murdered. The husband does, though -- at one point he dives into the lake to search for her ... but he looks in the wrong place, and some part of him must realize this. Then he pulls his own disappearing act.

In terms of its grip on the reader, this is one of the best Vietnam-aftermath novels I've ever read -- right up there with Peter Straub's "Koko." O'Brien not only gets inside his characters, he also reminds us that human motivation is often a complete mystery -- just as Straub often does.

But if you're looking for a novel where everything is resolved, and all your questions are answered at the end, you won't find that here. As O'Brien reminds us, sometimes the mystery at the heart of the story is what keeps us interested.

I have two other O'Brien novels in the house -- the Vietnam novels "The Things They Carried" and "Going After Cacciato." I'll be checking them out.

Recently read and heard

Before we go any further, here's a list of new-to-me stuff I've been reading and listening to lately. This list covers my music and book intake back to June. Funny, I thought there was more:

BOOKS:

* Paul Theroux -- Figures in a Landscape. Theroux's third collection of essays, covering everything from a profile of Robin Williams to slabs of family history and autobiography. Theroux claims he'll never write a full autobiography or memoir, but he's already written at least one -- the brilliant history of a friendship "Sir Vidia's Shadow."

* The Best of Rolling Stone. This 400-page collection of nonfiction pieces was originally published as a special issue of the magazine back in 1992. There's some great stuff here (all cut for space), but the writers' introductions are the best part. Daisann McLane's awesome "The Girl in the Tweed Jacket" is maybe the best, most personal peek behind the scenes, but I wish McLane's wonderful 1979 portrait of Fleetwood Mac, "Five Not-So-Easy Pieces," had been included.

* Gene Sculatti and others -- The 100 Best-Selling Albums of the '60s/'70s/'80s/90s. Dull, unsurprising and full of errors, this low-budget rush-job series was a big disappointment. The only surprises come from learning what kind of crap music most people buy. Gene Sculatti's a good rock critic, but the editors gave him no room to write, and the editing and proofreading are hideous. Avoid.

* Michael Lesy -- Wisconsin Death Trip, The Forbidden Zone. "Forbidden Zone" is about people who deal with death every day -- homicide detectives, undertakers, pathologists, etc. Some of them are such odd characters that they deserved to be in a book. "Wisconsin Death Trip" is about what happened in a small rural Wisconsin town between 1890 and 1910, when an agricultural failure and depression followed outbreaks of diphtheria, dysentery, smallpox and more. People went crazy. Eerie, odd, depressing, one of a kind.

* David Leigh and Luke Harding -- WikiLeaks. Covers the frantic early days of the WikiLeaks classified-information-leak site, but for the rest of the story you'll have to consult Wikipedia.

* Judy Pasternak -- Yellow Dirt. Follows what happens when Navajos start mining uranium on their reservation in Arizona, and the U.S. government stonewalls the tribe about the effects of uranium exposure and radiation for the next 60 years....

* Barbara Moran -- The Day We Lost the H-Bomb. Recounts how the U.S. Air Force accidentally dropped three unactivated atomic bombs on a small town in southern Spain back in 1966. A fourth bomb fell into the Mediterranean Sea and took two months to find.

* Nicholas A. Basbane -- A Gentle Madness. About *extreme* book-collectors. One great long chapter is about a man who stole more than 5,000 rare books from libraries and universities over a 20-year period. Most of the schools never realized the books were missing.

* Six science fiction writers -- Hell's Cartographers. Writers like Robert Silverberg, Frederik Pohl, Brian Aldiss and Alfred Bester talk about what got them hooked on reading and writing science fiction.

* Nine more science fiction writers -- Fantastic Lives. This is more scattershot than "Hell's Cartographers" and much less interesting. Still, some good stuff by Barry Malzberg, Norman Spinrad, R.A. Lafferty.

* James Gunn -- The Listeners. This 1972 science-fiction novel has a great idea at its center, and the first chapter's pretty good. Then the absurd and insignificant "human drama" gets more and more in the way and the book gets sillier and sillier. Gave up halfway through.

MUSIC:

* Mott the Hoople -- first album, side 1. Brain Capers, side 1. Rock and Roll Queen early-best-of. "Rock and Roll Queen" sucked me in. Early Mott was great when they roared. Side 1 of their first album is mostly a great Bob Dylan impersonation. Side 1 of "Brain Capers" features more greatness. I'll be getting back to these guys soon.

* Funkadelic -- Maggot Brain. Loud and chaotic, with an awesome Hendrixy 10-minute guitar solo on the title track. Some throwback R&B-type cuts in the middle, leading to the crazed "Super Stupid" and the sound collage "Wars of Armageddon" -- which along with a steady beat includes protests, chanting, screaming, a mooing cow, and cosmic farts. "Revolution 9" should have sounded like this.

* Tim Buckley -- Happy Sad. Perfect music for lounging around all day in bed with your Significant Other.

* Amazing Blondel -- Evensong. Cute fake-15th-Century English folk music, but nowhere near as good as their later "Fantasia Lindum" and "England."

* The Kinks -- Arthur. Each song turns into real basic bash-it-out English rock'n'roll, and thank God. Includes the glorious "Shangri-La" and rockin' "Victoria," and nice bits like the hilarious "Yes Sir, No Sir" and "She Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina."

* Three songs from Magazine's "Real Life." More listening required.

More soon!

I'm back.

Hey there.

Facebook has become a toilet. Jokes and outrage get the biggest reactions, constant unavoidable advertisements crowd out the "real" content (if there is any), and the platform's multi-millions of users have become the product that Facebook is selling.

And that's not even counting the racists and conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers and political crazies.

So I'm back here.

Nice to see ya.

I posted more than 350 music and book reviews and nostalgia pieces on FB over the past three and a half years, and at one point I had more than 200 friends and other folks following me. But I've slowed down recently. I don't have as much to say, and I don't have as much energy as I did three years ago.

Plus, maybe I've gotten a little stale for folks over there. Recently I posted a book review there that I spent a couple of hours on, trying to get the words right, trying to get the message and meaning of a challenging book across without turning anyone off.

Only two people noticed.

Plus I seem to have lost a lot of my sense of humor lately. Or at least what I think of as humor doesn't match the silly crap I see on FB.

Most of all, I'm tired of the silly, pointless arguing. I started dropping "friends" when I realized some of them just wanted to argue, that they only commented on something when they wanted to play "devil's advocate" on some political post I passed along. And who the hell needs that?

Some folks out there just make it really hard for me to stay in the 1972 fantasy world I'd prefer.

Enough whining. Some good news: I'm working, have been working since last December after an unintended year off. Am helping sort used books, CD's and DVD's for a guy who re-sells items on eBay and Amazon. It's only 20 hours a week, and that's fine, because I'm 62 years old now and more and more often I think about retiring.

In terms of my interests, it's a perfect job for me. Most of the time it doesn't require much of a brain or even much attention. But there's some physical labor, and my year off didn't do me any good. The repetitive motions of digging through a huge box of books or media often has my back talking to me by lunchtime, and often by the end of my four-hour work day I have to sit for a bit and let my body rest. I truly am not 55 anymore.

But I remind myself that jobs don't get any easier than this one, and I keep going. If I get fired for being too slow I'll likely retire. That's my plan right now, anyway.

Obviously I'm still writing, and I haven't given up trying to find good music and books that are new to me. I spend much more time reading than listening these days, though.

I don't think I'm "written out" yet and there's a lot more I'd like to write about -- I have a list -- and that writing will likely happen here, where I don't have to worry so much about the length of these essays.

I will warn anyone reading this that if you think I leaned toward being nostalgic and overly personal here in the past, I've done nothing but get more nostalgic and more personal in the last three years.

It should be interesting to see how many people actually read this post. I figure anything more than the two blogging regulars who always used to comment here is a bonus.

Feel free to comment below. More soon.