Lately

So, "enjoying" my retirement?

I have maybe half the energy I used to. I'm definitely not 55 anymore.

But I "musicked-out" twice in the past week, more than usual lately. Recently I've been playing two or three hours of music maybe once a month, if that often.

Last music session yesterday was mostly new-to-me or overlooked stuff on CD.

Previous session was mostly recently-purchased 45rpm singles I'd recently tracked down -- but eventually I got to a first listen to Stevie Wonder's 1973 album "Innervisions," which I found to be pretty great. Seven of its nine songs were well worth hearing, and the new ones that especially grabbed me were "All in Love is Fair" and "Golden Lady."

Of course "Higher Ground" has always been great, and I've loved "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing" ever since I first heard it way back in 1974. I hadn't heard "Living for the City" in *years,* and had forgotten how passionately Stevie sang it. And I'd never heard the long version before.

But for me, "All in Love is Fair" and "Golden Lady" were the standouts. When Stevie gets into a groove he's really amazing.

Of course I should have known all this already, but there are many gaps in my listening. I've loved many of Stevie's hits over the years and have three of his studio albums and a couple of best-of's in the house. But I sure haven't heard everything.

Anyway, "Innervisions" is the best thing I've heard in awhile.

Awhile back I also heard Harmonium's 1977 album "The Five Seasons" -- very nice melodic progressive rock from Canada, very pretty. Nice moods, and parts were exuberant enough to make me laugh -- even if I couldn't tell what the guys were singing. They sang in French, because they were from Quebec.

These days I'm doing good if I can get through three albums in a sitting. After that, my mind starts to wander or I'm worn out.

Awhile back I went on a sort of crusade with old Van Morrison albums after I found his "Best of Volume 2" CD and was charmed despite the old-fashionedness of some of it.

Think I did five Van albums in a row -- most were only average. "Inarticulate Speech of the Heart," "Beautiful Vision," "Into the Music," "A Period of Transition" -- "Wavelength" was the best of these. Most of the albums had maybe one good track and a lot of filler. OK, pleasant, decent, but nothing stunning. Mood music at best. Linda said it was like Van just couldn't do it anymore -- "it" being the magical spell he weaved on "St. Dominic's Preview," "Moondance" and "Tupelo Honey" -- and on "Best of Volume 2," even though to me the jury was out for a long time on that one until he finally convinced me with the brief "Coney Island" and the live "Rave On, John Donne."

My mind wandering has been an issue with reading fiction lately, too. I can read a few short stories and then I get bored with fiction. I can't remember the last novel I made it all the way through. Best short stories I've read lately are Joyce Carol Oates's brilliant and spooky "Six Hypotheses" and Dan Simmons' dark and creepy "My Personal Memoirs of the Hoffer Stigmata Epidemic" -- both cosmic-horror short stories.

I've been reading a lot of non-fiction -- for months now -- but I don't have that much new non-fiction in the house, so have mostly been re-reading old stuff. Was on a binge of science fiction writers' autobiographies and biographies for awhile -- Alec Nevala-Lee's "Astounding," Julie Phillips' great biography of SF writer James Tiptree Jr., Robert Silverberg's "Other Places, Other Times," Damon Knight's excellent history of "The Futurians," "Hell's Cartographers," stuff like that. But there isn't enough of it. SF-author bios and autobios didn't become "a thing" until recent years, unfortunately.

Have been doing a little bit of writing, though of course I should be doing more. Wrote an entire 2,500-word ghost story a couple of weeks ago, but have held off going back to re-read it until it "cools off" a little. Started another science-fiction story the next day, and got down some ideas for a third new story a few days ago, but I don't seem to have much drive to finish any of them.

Added a couple scenes over the last couple days to a trashy '80s/'90s-style horror novel I originally had the idea to write a couple of years ago. I wrote maybe 7,500 words of it in a few days right after I first had the idea a couple years back, then backed away from it because -- although the words were coming out way easily -- it meant nothing to me personally. It was just a thing I was doing, it didn't actually involve me.

A couple mornings ago it occurred to me that if the words were coming and it was fun to do, why not just continue on with it? Writing used to be fun for me, so why not roll with it as long as I'm having a good time and not having to force it?

So we'll see where that goes.

Otherwise, I don't feel terrible, but my energy level comes and goes. On cloudy, rainy days it feels like I never really wake up. Each winter seems to get longer. This is a problem for me because the first 80-degree day we had here in western Washington was in the last week of June. The first 70-degree day we had was sometime in early May.

Some days it takes an act of Congress to get me out of the house, even if the sun is out.

What bothers me is, sometimes Linda feels the same way. And usually she was the one who got me to get up and get out even if I didn't want to. Now we both have to make an effort to get something rolling.

Did go see my daughter in Seattle for Father's Day, which was a real step out of my comfort zone. Visiting somewhere new? Riding a ferry across Puget Sound? Braving the Seattle traffic? Actually sort of getting lost for a bit? Pretty daring, for me. But my daughter was awesome as usual, and I got to meet her boyfriend and see their cute, tiny apartment, and had a wonderful couple of hours. So it was all good.

And that's what's been going on lately. More soon.

An annoying autobiographical pause

I used to be obsessed with fiction. Now most of the time I'm hung up on what goes on behind the scenes: Who are the people who write this stuff? What did they think they were doing? What are their lives like?
Been reading a lot of old science fiction fanzines lately, thanks to the nice folks at eBay. (This was before I found out you can read a lot of old SF fanzines for free at efanzines.com.) These privately-produced, small magazines -- often published by someone cranking a mysterious printing machine made out of bubble gum, Scotch tape and dead frogs, usually located in someone's dimly-lit basement -- have been part of science fiction since its earliest days. SF fans felt strongly enough about the stuff they were reading that they created their own "magazines," printed them, traded them with other fans, communicated.
I stumbled over fanzines in high school. The first issue I ever read was SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW 15, edited by Richard E. Geis. (More about him in a bit.) I thought his mag was OK -- but on the back-cover was an ad for Bill Bowers' OUTWORLDS. I sent away for some samples -- the first of which turned out to be a hilarious 40-page letter-column ... and then I was hooked!
OUTWORLDS had great, funny writing, gorgeous artwork and graphics, and everybody seemed so friendly ... if not crazy. In a good way. Though SFR had stronger content and harder-hitting opinions, OUTWORLDS was a flashier package.
Found a few more copies of SFR over the years and enjoyed it -- especially the behind-the-scenes peeks into the minds of SF writers, the arguments, the feuds, the horror stories about publishing that most readers never hear.
Thanks to eBay, I've recently piled up a pretty good stack of '70s and '80s fanzines. Along with taking a 40-years-ago look back with LOCUS -- "The newspaper of the science fiction field" -- I've gotten mildly acquainted with "fannish" fanzines, which are more like walking into the middle of a conversation and trying to figure out what the current comments in an issue were commenting ON in the first place....
Some of these little mags are charming, some are just silly. And you never know when a piece of great writing is going to slap you upside the head. In that stack from eBay are articles like one fan describing how she overdosed on anti-depressants FOUR TIMES before her doctors finally got her meds right (from the zine BANANA WINGS); Bruce Gillespie admitting in his METAPHYSICAL REVIEW that he'll have to do a low-budget no-art zine until he can AFFORD to print another issue of his epic zine SF COMMENTARY; former AMAZING/FANTASTIC and HEAVY METAL magazine editor Ted White writing about the months he spent in jail after being arrested for (I assume) pot-possession with intent to sell, and admitting to embezzling money from a well-known SF writer when he got into personal cash-flow problems; Dick Geis on the death of his father; Bruce Gillespie on the unexpected death of a close friend, and a LONG write-up on Philip K. Dick's half-dozen mainstream non-SF novels....
Several of these came from Dick Geis's long-running fanzine SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW/THE ALIEN CRITIC. I think Geis, who died in 2013 at age 85, could star in a book of his own. How this cranky recluse single-handedly put out a small magazine every three months for YEARS and even managed to live on the proceeds is a heckuva story. (It also helped pay the bills that he wrote more than 100 soft-core porn novels -- some of them even got published under his real name.) Maybe this isn't a story everybody would want to read, but still....
Back in the mid-'70s, Geis predicted a massive computer network on which you'd be able to read your daily newspaper -- or his monthly outpourings. He even eventually moved to posting on the Internet, after his accumulating health problems wouldn't let him work 50 hours a week on his magazines anymore.
Geis predicted at least as far back as 1974 that the U.S. economy was going to collapse due to massive debt and over-use of credit. Despite his health problems, Geis kept writing through 2011, but I haven't yet read how he felt about seeing his predictions of massive financial ruin come true....

Is it just me?

Maybe I'm being stupid about this, but I have pretty-much given up reading fiction. I don't have the time or the patience for it.
I get bored quickly by fiction that doesn't at least TRY to be real, that is merely daydreaming, escapist junk-food for the brain, that fails to address the world I see around me every day -- millions of people out of work, who knows how many homeless people, stressed-out folks who never sleep, crazy people on the street every hour of the day and night, people who spend more time with their smartphones than with their spouse or kids, crimes and guns everywhere, terrorist attacks all over the place, people constantly yelling and screaming in frustration, people constantly drinking and drugging themselves because they can't take it....
You'd think the LAST thing I'd want would be more of this.
But it seems like any writing that doesn't at least notice that it's a big, ugly world out there doesn't work for me.
I can't remember the last time I made it all the way through a novel -- was it really Brian Aldiss's BRIGHTFOUNT DIARIES a couple years ago?
My favorite trick for years has been to get 50 to 100 pages into a novel and then give up because it isn't moving fast enough. Writers like Thomas Harris, Jack Ketchum and Kathe Koja spoiled me a long time ago. I didn't USED to have such a short attention span....
I recently got halfway through Paul Theroux's HOTEL HONOLULU, which I thought was a really great series of character sketches. Too bad he had to force a STORY in there.... True, I did re-read Theroux's novels MY SECRET HISTORY and MY OTHER LIFE this past fall, but those are almost like autobiographies, very direct.
Maybe I need to go back to Max Barry -- he was pretty edgy....
I used to read people like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling when I wanted to feel "caught up" with Reality. But I tried Gibson's IDORU and ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES and they just don't work for me. The last Sterling novels I was able to get through were ZEITGEIST and HEAVY WEATHER. Both four-star worthy. But I tried HOLY FIRE and DISTRACTION and ISLANDS IN THE NET -- no go.
Neal Stephenson? Well, SNOW CRASH was a lot of fun, had everything you'd ever want except a good ending. But I gave up 100 pages into CRYPTONOMICON. And since then he's written several books that are even LONGER. I'm about a decade past the point where I could get through a 1,000-page novel. Hell, it took me FOUR MONTHS to read Stephen King's IT back in 1987 -- and that was when I was INTERESTED. And I haven't been able to read King in YEARS....
I even read a couple short stories recently. Mildly interesting ideas, reasonably clever. But they were just notions -- they showed no signs of a real, lived-in life. And all I could think was that they were JUST LIKE something I might have written myself at age 19....
I tried reading some travel writing for awhile, and that worked out OK when Paul Theroux was writing it, or the silly J. Maarten Troost. But some other folks waste too much time for me. Redmond O'Hanlon is mildly funny, and I admire his adventurousness. But he needs an editor. And some others are even duller.
I LOVE to read. I WANT to be affected, impacted, have my face rubbed into something -- I WANT to be involved, I want to be ripped up by a story. And that hasn't happened to me in a long time.
Maybe this is just another sign that I should be writing my own fiction, that I'll never be satisfied until I do. Ghod help me. Wishing you had a story to write won't make it so.
My old buddy Rastro over at La Historia de la Musica Rock may have some comment on this -- he often seems to be reading current, cutting-edge stuff, and has reviewed a couple of fairly new novels over the last month.
I want to be grabbed by the throat. I want to be riveted. I'm sick of being bored. I just hope this isn't another one of the joys of GETTING OLDER.
Advice? Suggestions? Recommendations?

#707: The other music mags

Back in the day, when ROLLING STONE got too boring or stuck-up, there was always TROUSER PRESS and MUSICIAN to fall back on.
TROUSER PRESS was home for just about anything British, New Wave, or Overlooked. Where else were you gonna find reviews of the newest Caravan album? (Nowhere!) Where else were you gonna learn that National Health was touring America? (Absolutely nowhere!)
At the time I didn't have much use for TP's coverage of Elvis Costello or The Ramones, but TP also ran great in-depth features like The 100 Greatest Rock Guitarists Of All Time (which gave me a renewed appreciation for Al Stewart's lead guitarist Tim Renwick, among others), & 70 Great Lost Rock Albums From The '70s (with wild forgotten stuff like World War 3 and Crabby Appleton and Michael Fennelly, and....)
They also had reviews of hard-to-get import albums, & even singles. They had a small stable of good writers like editor Ira Robbins and Scott Isler and Jim Green and....
The whole magazine was written and put-together with the kind of fanaticism and attention to detail that only real hard-core music fans (who were likely underpaid or unpaid) could bring to the job. It seemed like they did it all out of love.
And just as they were getting really good ... they vanished, sometime in the early '80s.
Some of the magazine's spirit has been carried on in Ira Robbins' TROUSER PRESS RECORD GUIDE, a huge volume of reviews that covers not only New Wave/Punk Rock stuff, but also harder-to-classify acts like Roxy Music, Sparks, The Residents, Can, Hawkwind and lots more. I still don't think I've made it all the way through the RECORD GUIDE, even after all these years. But Trouser Press also has a website where most of the RECORD GUIDE's reviews are carried and updated (at www.trouserpress.com/). That's where you can learn that Hawkwind has released something like 85 albums over the years....
The website's not the same as the old magazine, of course, but what is?
While TROUSER PRESS was fading away, MUSICIAN was coming on the scene, & for about 10 years I thought it was the very best music mag around. MUSICIAN started out being completely devoted to jazz ... but it slowly expanded into covering more popular artists -- first Miles Davis, then Steely Dan, then long pieces on Dire Straits and Roxy Music and the Dixie Dregs, with an occasional look back over their shoulder at John Coltrane....
There were always tons of album reviews and some GREAT interviews -- moments like when Steely Dan admitted they stole the tune for their great "Gaucho" from Keith Jarrett's "As Long As You Know You're Living Yours." ...Or when Sting finally admitted that maybe the other guys in The Police deserved just a little bit of credit, too....
All this good content took a ton of great writers -- people like the hilarious Charles M. Young, the great Vic Garbarini, Matt Resnicoff, Chip Stern, Rafi Zabor, Dave DiMartino, Jill Blardinelli, the late Lester Bangs, King Crimson's Robert Fripp, and many more.
When King Crimson hit the comeback trail in 1980, Fripp published his journals about the experience in MUSICIAN (& I would LOVE to see Fripp's journals published in book-form someday). Lester Bangs did a hilarious overview of The State Of Rock as 1980 dawned -- it was called "Rock in the '70s: Where Was It?" ("Synthesizers all over the place! Disco, you trashy thing!") Bangs included a list of The Most Depressing Music Of The '70s -- Miles Davis's GET UP WITH IT and ON THE CORNER were right up there....
Rafi Zabor published the first section of his long and wooly jazz novel THE BEAR COMES HOME in MUSICIAN, then stayed around to write reviews. Chip Stern wrote short, savage, hilarious jazz reviews that showed ABSOLUTELY NO PATIENCE for the frothy lite-jazz that started taking over the spotlight in the '70s and '80s. Charles M. Young once published a long hilarious review covering all the albums he received in the mail in ONE DAY....
MUSICIAN only got better as it turned into the '90s. Features covered everyone from Van Halen to Sinead O'Connor to The Replacements to Laurie Anderson. Dave DiMartino looked over a dozen Can albums in one review and called them The Most Overlooked And Ripped-Off Band In Rock History.
Somewhere in the middle of moving from Turkey back to the U.S., I lost track of MUSICIAN. Then I spent six years in Wyoming, which was almost as isolated as Turkey. The next time I saw a copy of MUSICIAN on the newsstand in 1998, it was a shadow of its old self. All the old writers were gone, and the mag had become a thin, technical, equipment-obsessed mag for Working Musicians. I don't know if it's even still in business.
But I sure miss the old mag....
I didn't have much use for the other music mags. Though CRAWDADDY/FEATURE ran some good stuff, it died early, before I could really appreciate it -- and about 3 months into my subscription. I always thought CREEM was just a little too silly -- which maybe shows I wasn't in tune with their party-hearty lifestyle. HIGH FIDELITY and PHONOGRAPH RECORD sometimes ran some good stuff -- HF had good, long CD-overviews of the Beatles & Stones, King Crimson, Frank Zappa & Todd Rundgren, plus a GREAT piece on Musical Guilty Pleasures. But their reviewers sometimes seemed kind of artificial and stuck-up.
And none of them matched MUSICIAN and TROUSER PRESS at their best. I'd do almost anything to get a complete run of both back in my hands -- especially TP. I miss those old mags. I miss those DAYS....

#670: Fall 1973

It's the Fall of 1973 in Boise, Idaho, & Life Is Good.
I'm in 9th grade at North Boise Junior High, just starting to figure out what I'm good at & what's ahead of me. I'm on the school newspaper staff, writing silly comedy columns for my mostly-silly classmates. I know I want to be a writer when I grow up.
I'm living in the basement of my parents' house on Bannock Street in the North End, just off of 23rd St., in a two-tone brown stucco house from the early '50s -- & for the first time ever I don't have to close my bedroom door to get some privacy, because except for calling me to dinner, nobody ever comes downstairs!
I'm writing in that basement -- short stories for English class & newspaper assignments mainly, & I'm playing the radio, & I'm reading constantly. Sometimes all three at once.
My Cousin Dave has joined the Navy, & somehow I've inherited several boxes full of his old science-fiction novels & short story collections, & old mid-'60s issues of GALAXY and WORLDS OF IF magazines, with stuff like Larry Niven's first stories, & classic old Harlan Ellison stories, Robert Silverberg, parts of Roger Zelazny's great CREATURES OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS, & LOTS more. I'd give anything to get those old magazines back now.
Among the books are Terry Carr's great BEST SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR anthologies (with Graeme Leman's hilarious "Conversational Mode" & Joe Haldeman's gritty "Hero"), & tons of novels, & story collections from the mid-'60s that I'll never see anywhere ever again -- Tom Boardman's ABC'S OF SCIENCE FICTION, CONISSEUR'S SCIENCE FICTION, & probably even Harlan Ellison's OFFBEAT CLASSICS OF SF. All this stuff is rare & priceless now, & it's all long gone.
I trade-off almost all of it at The Used Bookstore that's a 2-minute bike ride from my house. I spend DAYS there, picking up newer SF magazines & stuff that I'm more interested in. This starts a lifelong addiction to SF, kicked-off by discovering ANALOG magazine & reading George R.R. Martin's amazing & surprisingly erotic "A Song for Lya." & the thousands of paperbacks in the store are available for a 2-books-for-1 trade, or for 25 cents each.
Back home the radio is going through a golden autumn. KFXD is kicking butt among pop stations in the Boise Valley, as it always did. They're playing stuff like Steely Dan's "My Old School," 10 C.C.'s "Rubber Bullets," Emerson, Lake and Palmer's "Still ... You Turn Me On," Pratt and MacClain's "When My Ship Comes In," Cozy Powell's "Dance With the Devil," Austin Roberts' "One Word," The Sutherland Brothers and Quiver's "You've Got Me Anyway," Elton John's "Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding," "Grey Seal" & "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting," Matthew Fisher's "Interlude," Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells"....
Over on the FM dial there's signs of life, as KBBK uses their brand-new no-static-at-all computer-automated format to blast out Yes's "Starship Trooper," which I've never heard before -- though I soon obtain a copy of Yes's YESSONGS & start playing it over&over on my tape-player....
On the radio at night I can pick up Art Finley's talk-radio show from San Francisco, L.A. Kings hockey games from Los Angeles, oldies rock&roll from Vancouver B.C. Canada & Oklahoma City & El Paso, Texas, & all-news from Omaha. From right in town I get CBS's Radio Mystery Theater.
& if there's nothing good on the radio I've got dozens of cassettes filled with hits from the past few years & other silliness -- some of the hits go back to early 1971: The Wackers' "I Hardly Know Her Name," Kracker's "Because of You," Johnathan King's "A Tall Order for a Short Guy," Billy Lee Riley's "I've Got a Thing About You Baby," Manfred Mann's Earth Band's "Living Without You," Joni Mitchell's "Raised on Robbery" & loads more, stuff it takes me YEARS to find again after the tapes fall apart -- The Royal Guardsmen's "Snoopy's Christmas," The English Congregation's "Softly Whispering I Love You," Five Man Electrical Band's "Absolutely Right." Some I never find again -- like Heaven Bound's "Five Hundred Miles" & The Road Home's "Keep it in the Family."
My record collection at this point is Nothing Much -- lots of singles, but on albums only Neil Diamond, Bread, Lobo, The Carpenters, Three Dog Night, The Osmonds, Mike Oldfield. But when we visit my Cousin Jim's house, he's got a ton of albums left to him by Cousin Dave, & he puts on DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED and SGT. PEPPER and BEATLES '65 and The Monkees' HEADQUARTERS and The Turtles' HAPPY TOGETHER and Count Five's PSYCHOTIC REACTION and Tommy James & the Shondells' CRIMSON AND CLOVER, & tons more.
M*A*S*H and THE WALTONS are all I care about on TV -- MASH because it's so freakin' funny. & John-Boy Walton is my hero & role-model.
With Cousin Jim I ride my bike all over the city & never crash or get hit by cars. I somehow ride the bike all the way to the top of Highland View Drive -- halfway up the Boise Front, it seems like -- then turn & coast all the way back downhill, really picking up speed, & roll halfway across town through the North End, somehow avoiding cars & signal lights & stop signs & traffic cops.
I've just turned 14 years old, & I'm likely never going to have this much totally innocent fun ever again....