strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Sep 30 05: shaggadelia
Tonight Paul and I joined the Fabulous Chorus Babes for a little post-work theatrical experience. We saw a show I would never have imagined possible: a musical biography of The Shaggs.
The Shaggs, for those of you who are unfamiliar with their work, were the Wiggin sisters of Freemont, New Hampshire. I’ve written about them before. Their father was convinced that his daughters were destined to lift their family out of small-town blue-collar desperation, and that forming a rock band was the way they’d do it. He turned out to be wrong. Their single album, Philosophy of the World (1968), is said to be the worst rock album ever made. On the other hand, it was also rediscovered a decade later and declared a milestone in ‘outsider art,’ or at least its musical equivalent. Rolling Stone declared the 1980 reissue the “comeback album of the year.” In 1999 Susan Orlean (author of The Orchid Thief) wrote an article abut them for the New Yorker.
Maybe that article planted the seed for the musical. The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World is part of the NY Musical Theatre Festival, which is currently bouncing around the city and will continue to do so through the weekend. The program says it has been workshopped four or five times in Chicago and LA as well. When Darcy told us about it I knew I had to go see. Not just because once you’ve heard the anti-musical stylings of the Shaggs, you’ll never be the same, but because Gunnar Madsen wrote the music. And Gunnar and me, we go way back. Sort of. Gunnar Madsen, whether he knows it or not, made me the man I am today.
However, that’s a story for another time. Let’s talk about the show. It’s almost entirely faboo. The book takes a few dramatic liberties with the Wiggins’ story, but it works. The killer score ranges from gospel through pop to doo-wop and beyond. There’s also some wild-ass a capella stuff that demonstrates definitively that the actresses playing Helen and Betty and Dot can sing. In a couple of very clever scenes when we hear what the Shaggs’ songs really sounded like, it’s via a cut from the original recordings. No, trust me, it works. My two complaints were technical. First, the air conditioning in the theatre was glacial. Apparently its only other setting was “off,” and if they went that route then the cast died of heatstroke well before intermission. Second, the sound system was seriously wonky. It’s a tiny house, but the actors had to be miked, and the mikes cut in and out on more than a few occasions. But neither of these are deal-breakers. Oh, and perhaps best of all: Fifteen bucks! Cheap!
Go see it, if you get the chance. It runs through Sunday.
Sep 28 05: cool things
1. Kate Bush has a new album coming out on November 8: a two-disc extravaganza by name of Aerial. Her last one, The Red Shoes, came out in 1993. One journalist has already described the delay from that album to this as ‘the longest maternity leave in history.’ Anyway, the first single, “King of the Mountain,” went up on the iTunes store yesterday, and even after 13 years of waiting I couldn’t handle another month of suspense. If the rest of the album is this fun, well, I’ll be really glad I bought it, won’t I?
2. We just got us some SERENITY tickets for Friday night.
W00t.
Sep 27 05: sucker punch
Hail, Architeuthis! Hail, many-tentacled emperor of the depths! Hail, beak and arm, eye and mantle, ghostly and terrible all!
A team of Japanese scientists announced today that they had taken the world’s first photographs of a live giant squid. It attacked a bag of shrimp hanging in nearly 3,000 feet of water as a remote camera watched. It then spent something like 45 minutes disentangling itself from the hooked bait. It left behind an 18-foot tentacle and some spectacular images.
Go see.
Sep 19 05: shiver me timbers!
Today be International Talk Like A Pirate Day!
Arrrrrr, says I; arrrrr.
Sep 18 05: baby steps
Huh. Okay, so I just got accepted into an SF/fantasy writer’s group here in the city. Meets once a month, that kind of thing. This is kind of exciting. (Thanks to Dave Kirtley, who is off doing big exciting things on the West Coast, for vacating the chair.) Joining such a group has been high on the to-do list for, oh, months and months. And now that I’m starting this new project, I think it’ll be especially helpful to have regular contact with other writers.
See, I turned 35 a couple of weeks ago, and I decided that it was time to stop screwing around. My plan for the upcoming year is to write a novel. Right now it’s just a pile of random notes and a catchy title—but I’ve been going back and forth along the general track of it in my head for weeks, and I think it’s a winner.
On the other hand, the idea of this makes me want to hide under the bed and cry. I’ve never done anything on this kind of scale before. I look at Charlie Stross’s livejournal postings as he bangs out truckloads of words every day, and I think, Andrew, you’re delusional. What can I do, though? I’ll start at the beginning, and we’ll see what happens. Right now I’m trying to get myself up to speed on a couple of specific fields of information (alchemy; shamanism; the NYC blackout of 1977). And then I figure I’ll take the crazy pile of notes, and string it out into a kind of order, and chop that string into twenty-or-so bits, and then. And then I start putting one foot in front of another. Light a candle for me, my friends. Two, if you got ‘em. Tonight I painted an eye on the Daruma on my desk with black ink and a Q-tip.
I’ll let you know how things go.
Sep 14 05: science moment, &c.
Let it be known far and wide: the science behind hiccups and how to make them stop, posted to the indispensible and increasingly famous Making Light by Diane Duane, who is One Who Knows. It’s one of many comments to a posting about habanero chiles, and what to do with them, and how not to injure yourself in the process, which is worth reading for its own sake. Just head to the top of the page; you’ll thank me later.
Any time I think about hiccups my mind’s eye turns inevitably to the Great Thinking Contest—and if you are a person of truly discerning tastes then so do you—so now I am snickering at random intervals here at my desk. “Halp! My powerful brain is blowed itself up!”
You know, if I had put that line on a t-shirt back in college, I bet I woulda made a skillion dollars.
Sep 11 05: waaaaah.
But Mummy, I don’t want to go back to work tomorrow. I want to stay on vacation forever.
While still drawing a paycheck and health benefits and suchlike, of course.
No, fuck it. It’s time for the Summer of Slack to come to an end. Tomorrow we begin to Get Things Done again.
ps: I grew a beard while I was gone, because it’s one of those things you can do when you’re flobbing around a beach house. It is unlikely to see the far side of Tuesday.
Sep 4 05: ahhhhhhh
After a brief interlude of, you know, going to work and stuff, we are again on vacation. This time we’re in some little town near Naragansett, Rhode Island. A bunch of friends, a rented house, the water at the bottom of the sloping lawn.
I intend to avoid any media sources that will remind me that the world is rapidly going to hell in a handbasket. Instead: beer, cards, homemade ice cream. Yes, that sounds much better.