I'd Buy Anything By...King Crimson (If There Wasn't Anything Else Available That I Wanted More)

You can tell by the equivocal title that I'm not a BIG King Crimson fan...so why would I "buy anything?"

I don't so much ENJOY the band as I respect their MUSICIANSHIP. Much of their music is sheer wankery, but it is technically brilliant wankery, even if the spectacular fireworks are little more than ear-candy or flat-out "showing off."

There are many King Crimson songs that I like, of course, but for the most part I buy their albums to hear Robert Fripp and his hand-picked bandmates go "look at what we can do!" Crazy tempos, micro-managed song-structures, elaborate fret-picking, Chapman Stick, over-the-top production, unconventional instrumentation...well, that's all pretty nifty but it doesn't necessarily make for "great music."

They started off in the late '60s mixing prog rock and highly-structured jazz, occasionally dipping into saccharine psychedelic folk. In the '80s they picked up Adrian Belew -- have I mentioned that I'd Buy Anything by Adrian Belew? -- and started doing adult contemporary art pop that I find ultimately forgettable.

I like their subsequent music much more: extremely heavy, noisy, somewhat discordant angst that probably got them their gig opening (!) for Tool. Here's their "double trio" act from 1995 performing "B'Boom" and "THRAK." Warning: sheer noodling on display, but it's meticulously rehearsed and sort of awesome. I think Belew is using some sort of MIDI guitar device.



Albums to buy: "In the Court of the Crimson King" (their debut) is pretty darn good and probably the highlight of their early period, but I personally like "The Power to Believe." Albums to avoid: I'm not a fan of "Starless and Bible Black" but apparently I'm a minority. For fans only: I don't think you even dabble in King Crimson unless you're already a fan, but I think TRUE fandom would be to watch the '80s concert videos without getting distracted by Belew's terrible clothes. I am unable to do so.

The Trapezoidal, Slightly Flattened World

I have taken the car out for a few more trips, primarily to force myself to get accustomed to her. But I'm really having trouble getting accustomed to something else: my glasses.

In the past my decision has been to wear the glasses only for distance vision, and nobody has given me a good reason for why I shouldn't do so (besides a few silly, teasing comments in this blog). It seems to me that if I don't need the glasses for everyday life I probably shouldn't wear them, partly to avoid wear and tear on them, but also because there are times when I won't WANT to wear them, and I don't want to be blind at those times because my eyes EXPECT the glasses then.

But the thing is, even after ninety minutes of wearing my glasses at a stretch the world still looks and feels funny. The ground is never where it's supposed to be, my reach is slightly off, round objects are slightly ovoid, and reality REALLY warps when I pay attention to the way it hits the frames.

So I've begun to wonder if I NEED to wear them constantly, otherwise I'll never get used to them. Maybe after a certain amount of cumulative exposure my brain will know how to adjust to them faster when I put them on. For that reason I'm still wearing them as I type this, which is why the browser window is a disconcerting trapezoidal shape (maybe it always was and I just never noticed?)

I've done Google searches for "get accustomed to glasses," but I've found no information about how people actually do so. Is there a support group? Can I join a class where we learn to see things again?

Is this a problem with my prescription, I wonder? Is it my glasses that need fixing, or is it my head?

Learning French with Sol the Clown

Us kids had to watch a lot of extremely surreal Quebecois "instructional French" programs in public school, supposedly to teach us that French people are very strange. Seriously, there really did seem to be a "Quebecois style of humour" that relied more heavily on funny faces and slapstick than our "Southern Ontario" style did.

One of the shows we watched constantly was "Parlez-Moi" starring Marc Favreau, French hobo-clown. There are several complete episodes on YouTube, but I'm sad to say that the one where he eats Dracula's cheese cannot be embedded.

Watch just a bit of this program to understand why most English Canadians retained so little French into their adult years. As my co-worker Dave said when he saw these, "it's obvious that the French didn't want us to learn their language."

Chilton Pen Secrets

One reason I read so much pre-60s material is because I'm curious to see how women are represented and -- when they have the chance -- how they represent themselves.

After putting up with hundreds of 1920s New Yorker advertisements for executive pens, I've finally run across one that's specifically aimed at women. Do you think it takes a different approach from the others? Oh nelly.


It really IS about pens, HONEST.

It's about these new Twice the Ink Chilton Pens done in vanity leathers: natural ostrich, alligator, and lizard skin.

Really, they're the most fetching things...just the "utterly different" sort of pen for that sort of girl who knows how to make her briefest notes fairly leap out of the litter when the Morning Male begins to shuffle his nine o'clock letters...

...But, honestly, that's so modestly moderate that it fairly makes a secret of the proven fact that any lady-size Chilton holds three-to-five times more ink than other lady-size pens. Stop and try one at the better pen-counters.

I'm trying to figure out if these pens are marketed to housewives or secretaries, and whether women back then actually spoke in this goofy, bouncy vernacular. I bet a lot of them did.

The Jolly Pleasure Pirates Return!

This follow-up to "An Early Queer Cruiseline?" doesn't seem half as gay as the other one, but it's nice to see that the "Jolly Pleasure Pirates" are still ranging the decks on November 10, 1928.

The Weekend

* At a house party, why am I hearing so much of MGMT, the day after that Good Friend Adrian played them for me in his car? Is it because they're wonderful?

* Losing at Boggle, winning at drinking, general confusion about the game where they stick a paper on your forehead.

* My new neighbour plays various bugle calls, very loudly, on his trumpet. I'm not sure exactly what this is supposed to mean but it's sort of wonderful.

* Who is who? I can't register more than one new name each night.

* Most significantly: why are the birds singing at 2:30am? This doesn't make any sense. When I hear birds singing I assume that it's daybreak, but in this case...no, it's the middle of the night. Crazy birds. Crazy singing.

"Harriet Said" by Beryl Bainbridge

Sometimes I pick up a book in order to fill a gap in my reading habits. Recently I have been buying and reading random books by female authors, because I've realized that a disproportionately large number of the books in my collection were written by men.

During one of these "expand my horizon" sprees I bought "Harriet Said" by Beryl Bainbridge, knowing nothing about the author or the book. I'm happy to say that the book was brilliant and that I'll DEFINITELY have to read more of her work.

While reading all of John Barth's books last year I finally understood the benefit of a "show, don't tell" approach...but I've been wondering exactly HOW skilled authors manage to "show" without "telling." Bainbridge's approach in "Harriet Said" is to give us an unreliable narrator -- a painfully awkward 13-year-old girl -- and subtly reveal the disconnect between her perception and her reality. Since we supposedly understand the world a little better than she does, we can draw our own conclusions about the story based on what she tells us. Sweet.

This girl is the perfect depiction of a type of confused, malleable teenager searching for identity, ready to be influenced by anybody strong enough to guide her. In this case her unfortunate guide is Harriet, a brilliant, manipulative, attractive, popular, and borderline sociopathic peer.

During a summer vacation in postwar England, Harriet proposes a secret project: to "humble" an unhappily married man who they call "The Tsar." We see everything that occurs -- including Harriet's ambiguous and multi-layered schemes -- through the eyes of the narrator as the three of them engage in increasingly dangerous games.

The brilliance of the book comes from the spot-on characterizations of all the characters, particularly as modified by the perception of the narrator herself. This girl's world is a terrible, changeable place, and though she herself doesn't understand the motivations of herself or others, WE do, and from this comes the sense of cloying menace that gradually builds and then -- at the climax -- crashes down. Particularly awful is the inability of the narrator to see the terrible events coming; she is far more concerned about other people's opinions about her than she is about the terrible things she's doing.

This book made me feel goosebumpy and sick, as it spells out all too clearly the reasons why certain types of people end up doing bad things. If you like a careful character study laid thickly over a thriller plotline, you should definitely find a copy of "Harriet Said."

But don't read it if you have a suspiciously-indrawn teenage daughter, or you might begin to wonder what sort of dark thoughts she's harbouring.

Neil Shubin Celebrates the Fish

During the past few years American scientists have been bemoaning the lack of accessible science literature, particularly in the field of biology. And they have a right to worry about this.

While biologists and paleontologists are going off and doing important things like researching, teaching, and studying, a group of other people are engaging skilled PR to convince the American public that evolution is somehow a "theory in crisis." Creationists (often camouflaged as "Intelligent Design Theorists") ARE churning out accessible literature about their theories, basically because their theories are so empty that they don't even BOTHER spending time to research them.

I suspect that this was the real motivation behind Neil Shubin's "Your Inner Fish" -- an attempt to quickly get an entertaining layperson's guide to evolution into the marketplace. By quietly revealing the mountain of evidence behind common descent, and by exposing the positively UNDESIGNED aspects of our bodies -- nobody would EVER deliberately build us this way, but it all makes sense if you go back and look at our fish ancestors -- Shubin fires a friendly salvo in a way that anybody can come along and appreciate.

And the book IS lots of fun. He draws on particularly bizarre aspects of our bodies to show why things sometimes go wrong -- hiccups, bed-spins, hemorrhoids -- interspersed with the "human element" of his personal thoughts while dissecting cadavers or searching for transitional fossils. His examples are clear-cut and the illustrations excellent. I've no doubt that this book will fulfill its intent as ammunition for countering the more prevalent creationist propaganda.

But Shubin isn't a fantastic writer, and the book has a hurried quality to it: occasional grammatical and word-usage errors ("jerry-rigged" keeps being used, and others have criticized the books usage of the loaded term "primitive" to describe anything pre-mammal) and often Shubin's prose sounds a bit TOO informal to my ears. Plus, no doubt due to the intended audience of total science newbies, he tends to over-explain the things the rest of us already know, and then gloss over the more technical details that we'd really enjoy reading about. The section on the Bozo family was particularly gaggy.

So basically, "Your Inner Fish" is not intended to be read by anybody who is already -- say -- avidly reading Panda's Thumb and its offshoot blogs, though it does have some interesting new twists and turns, and it CERTAINLY gives a clear (though sort of flippant) description of its subjects. If you'd like a primer on common descent and evidence for evolution, however, this book is certainly for you.

Spring 2008!

A few weeks ago, Tanzi announced that spring had arrived based on certain metrics that she personally believes in (robins, Dairy Queen, hotdog vendors). I myself use a more scientific method of deciding when winter is truly over: the long-anticipated melting of famous Mount Hussey.

This occurred on April 20th of last year, and I'm pleased to announce that spring comes earlier this time: April 14th, by my best estimate. You are now allowed to put out your patio furniture without fear of frost or snowfall. I say this without consulting a weather forecast or an almanac; if I'm wrong, I'll eat my crow-feather hat.

I have to admit that there are other more subjective signs of spring besides Mount Hussey. The aforementioned robins can sometimes be counted on, and I had my first taste of street meat on the way home today.

More significantly, though, I notice the change in duck behaviour. They spend all winter huddled up on the edges of their frigid creeks, waiting to be fed by lonely old men from the Waterloo Legion, but when Spring approaches they start to forage afield, waddling nonchalantly across roads and looking for a place to lay their duck-spawn. Every year some dim-witted waterfowl decides to roost inside a planter at my workplace, not realizing that it is too high and too inaccessible for newly-hatched ducklings to escape from. Likewise, every year I end up rooting through the foliage to rescue baby ducks, while mama and papa dive-bomb me in a surprisingly threatening way. It's more fun than work.

You can also tell that Spring is coming when strangers yell things at you on the street, simply to express a feeling of warm and happy social connectedness. The United Church holds its fabulous book sale around this time every year, and the retreating snow reveals all the litter that had been thrown into it during the previous months (though this was the first time I've had the pleasure of finding a bag of petrified dog feces on my lawn). Blind people, old people, and people in wheelchairs become visible once again. The doves venture out from wherever they've been hiding -- perhaps in the laps of blind old paraplegics -- and they stand high up on telephone wires, staring at you, tiny heads a-bob.

Thunderstorms are beautiful.

But the real granddaddy of spring impressions, for me, is the smell of wet earth. All winter I do without any real odour, and then suddenly I'm assaulted by the rich, wormy smell of healthy earth being tilled and aerated. Having spent most of my life living beside both a farm and a river, this is my favourite thing about spring.

In the Kingdom of the Sighted, the Vision-Corrected Myopic is Peer

I understand that's not a very catchy title but I felt the need to stretch an old saying, maybe because conventional wisdom has always told me to "get glasses" and I just never have...until now.

About ten feet in front of my nose, objects begin to fuzz and blur. This is one reason why I ignore you when you walk towards me on a street or in a bar; unless you have a characteristic hairstyle I simply don't know it's you. Other than needing to sit near the front of lecture halls and movie theaters this hasn't really disrupted my life.

But there was no way I was going to drive a car in that state, so part of my "I'm driving again" regimen required buying my first two pairs of glasses.

It was surprisingly easy, though apparently cannot be done all at once. I walked back and forth to Hakim Optical far too many times in order to make a vision test appointment, actually TEST my vision, pick out frames, and return on two separate days to pick up the two pairs I ordered. None of this was actually fun.

But when I put the glasses on...wow! I can see every stain on the bricks of the apartment building across the street! My cat's dandruff is suddenly apparent! My carpet needs vacuuming! Maybe I should take the glasses off and return to blissful ignorance!

Vanilla makes fun of me when I say I plan to only wear them while driving, and I see her point: when I put the glasses on it takes about ten minutes for me to stop walking like there's an invisible pit in front of me, and when I take them off I'm virtually blind for another ten minutes or so. Plus I don't really want to spend the money on another pair if I fall over and break them.

So if you see me with glasses on (probably falling down a flight of stairs because I'm not used to the way they refract my vision yet), tell me that they look good. I don't want to be like Marilyn Monroe in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," implying by extension that I also don't want to die of a drug overdose, no way.