Richard Dansky's Blog, page 14

How to Burn a Circular Hole In Your Deck

Here is how you burn a hole in your deck.

First, you buy a chicken. You go to the local farmer's market, swing by the booth of one of your favorite merchants, and purchase a whole, locally farmed, actually-tastes-like-chicken chicken. It's expensive as all dickens, but, as previously noted, it tastes like chicken, which most things that supposedly taste like chicken, including supermarket chicken, do not.

Then, you take the chicken home and decided, since it's already defrosted, to smoke it. You do this because you have a smoker, and because you don't want to freeze the chicken, and because you've been watching too many episodes of horrible bbq-themed reality shows on a basic cable network that seems to be all about eating yourself to death while going through the crap in your neighbor's attic.

You get out your smoker, and clean it and prep it. Then you notice that the spot where you normally set your smoker up is entirely too close to the lawn, which, because of local drought conditions that cover a significant portion of the country, has turned into something that looks like a matte painting from The Lion King. You know, the bad parts, where Jeremy Irons is in charge, and everything is on fire or dead or voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin. Setting up the smoker there, you decide, would be a bad thing, as it would probably set the lawn on fire. Setting the lawn on fire, in turn, would set the house, the neighborhood, and possibly the zip code on fire, and this would be bad.

So, you take the smoker up to your deck. You do this knowing that your deck is made of wood, and yet you do this knowing that you have successfully smoked stuff on your deck before without setting anything the slightest bit on fire. You carefully set up the smoker. You start the coals. You check the temperature carefully, and frequently. You set up the chicken, which you have prepared, and you check the coals again. And again. And again.

No fire.

Then some friends stop by for lunch. You go inside. You have lunch, confident that things are not on fire. You finish lunch, in leisurely fashion, and you walk back out onto your deck.

Which is on fire.

You notice a few things. One, the fire is in a circle around the base of the smoker. Two, the rest of the deck is not on fire. Three, nobody else seems to have noticed this. You say, "Oh, shit. The deck's on fire." At this point, people notice this. You run to the sink to get a pitcher of water to throw on the flames, and do so. The flames do not go out. You run past the smoker, down the steps, around the deck and into a bush to get the hose, which you then toss onto the deck and turn on. Then you run back around the deck and up the stairs, grabbing the hose and lugging it over before spraying the burning deck around the smoker. You notice at this time that the smoker is noticeably lower than it was when you went to run past it, down the stairs and around the deck to get the hose, and you surmise that if you had taken much longer to run past the smoker, down the stairs and around the deck to get the hose, the deck might have burned through, dropping the smoker onto the ground below and spilling the coals everywhere, which then would have ignited the lawn, the house, the neighborhood, the zip code, and possibly the east coast, in that order.

Luckily, this does not come to pass. You put out the fire. You move the still-warm smoker, gingerly, and notice the large, circular hole underneath it.

And you rescue the chicken. Which is delicious.

The Small Black Cat and the Sucker

Once upon a time, there was a small black cat and a sucker. The black cat, who was not really a cat yet, but getting too big to be called a kitten, lived in the parking lot of the sucker's apartment building, and began making his way up to the second floor through a door that was always open, there to plant himself in front of the sucker's humble apartment door and commence yowling with hunger.
The sucker, being a sucker, could only put up with this treatment for so long. Despite the fact that he told everyone, including himself, that he was not a cat person, he eventually opened the door and let the small black cat into his apartment. He told everyone this was because there were short-tempered drug dealers living downstairs, which was true, and that he was afraid they would get tired of the yowling and just shoot the cat, which was less true. 
But, since he had told everyone, including himself, that he was not a cat person and had no intention of adopting a cat, he only fed the cat on occasions when the cat seemed too piteous to do without food, which was to say, most nights. He also refused to let the cat into his bedroom, on the grounds that if the cat had fleas, surely they'd have the manners to stay out in the living room. Furthermore, since the cat was small and affectionate and purred very loudly whenever he got near, he decided to sleep on the ancient sofa bed in the living room on those nights when the cat was there. To keep an eye on it, he told himself. And the fact that the cat would curl up on his pillow next to him and purr him to sleep had nothing to do with it.
This went on for a little while, until the sucker realized that he was getting to the point where the cat had become an actual responsibility instead of an occasional good deed, at which point he freaked out and decided that the next time he saw the cat, it would be going to a no-kill shelter. This was because the sucker had told everyone he didn't like cats, and because the sucker had student loans and was working in the tabletop roleplaying industry, where one grows to become rich in anecdotes and not in dollars, he realized that there was no way on God's green earth he could afford a cat - not even one who slept on his pillow.
That night, instead of his usual hearty meow, the cat reached the sucker's doorstep and let out a strangled wheeze. The sucker, who had been steeling himself all day, immediately broke. He threw the door open, picked up the cat, and realized that the poor creature was sick, feverish, and weak. Not having a cat carrier handy (because, as he told everyone, he didn't like cats), he took a cardboard box, poked some holes in it, put a towel and a bowl full of water in it, and put the cat inside for immediate transportation to a 24 animal hospital in the heart of Atlanta. He took the box with the cat to his car, which then refused to start. Fortunately, a young lady of his acquaintance claimed to be very fond of cats, and she drove him and the sick cat to the vet.
The vet, who knew a sucker when she saw one, examined the cat and quickly determined that he'd been in a fight with another, larger cat. He'd taken some damage and gotten an infection, but it was nothing a little subcutaneous fluid and some antibiotics couldn't cure. And, she told the sucker, she would make him a bargain bundle on all the things required to adopt a cat, such as a basic course of shots, removing his tiny cat wonton of love, and otherwise turning him from a feral parking lot kitty into a pet. 
But the sucker protested, and said it wasn't his cat, and he was just taking it to the vet in the middle of the night because, well, it wasn't a very good excuse and we'll leave it at that. The vet looked at the sucker, and then looked at the cat, who lay, sprawled out and panting, on the examining table. As she watched, the cat picked itself up, dragged itself over the edge, hauled itself across the room, and jumped up into the sucker's lap. There, it lay purring, a puddle of fuzzy inky blackness, utterly content.
"Not your cat. Right. I'll leave you two here to discuss it," she said, and left the room for a minute. 
And the sucker looked down at the giant purring blob of kitty fur in his lap and realized, without a doubt, he was a sucker. Because suckers were the sorts of people who drove cats halfway across Atlanta in the middle of the night claiming they were just being good samaritans to local strays, and who let stray cats from the parking lot sleep on their pillows, and so on and so forth.  So, having discovered his inner sucker, he decided to embrace it, adopted the cat, and lived happily with said cat, who it turned out was named Ember, for a very long time.
****
And that, boys and girls, is the mostly true story of how I met my cat Ember, who grew to be a very large cat indeed, and how he adopted me. That was in early 1996; he had been with me or my parents ever since. He's had some utterly ridiculous adventures, many of them involving household appliances that cats are not supposed to be smart enough to operate, he has defended his ever-growing tribe of humans from any threats that he could, and he has spent more time sprawled across my shoulder or my wife's than would seem anywhere reasonable to anyone who did not own a Giant Evil Cat Of Evil (large purring kitty division). He watched over my mother when she was ill, and he walked with her when she began the slow road to recovery. He sat still for my niece and nephew's first fumbling attempts to pet a real kitty, even when they were awkward and still learning to be gentle. He made friends and purred like a madman and always found a spot on the floor at the center of every party we ever threw.
And today was his last day. He could barely walk any more, setting down to rest after fifteen or so steps. He couldn't leap onto the couch without help, and he nearly fell off it when trying to get down. He was skin and bones, and while he still looked sleek and cool, it was clear he had slowed down past the point where he could go on without 24 hour nursemaiding. To keep a beloved pet in those circumstances is, I think, a selfish act.  For a long time, I was willing to be selfish. Every possible sign of improvement, I seized on. I wanted to believe in miracle recoveries. 
But he had already used up his miracles, it seemed, and today we had to have him put to sleep. Farewell, Ember. It was a magnificent run. The German shepherds of the wold will not forget you, and will always tremble at your name.
And we miss you already.

No Spidey For Me

So here's why I didn't go see the new Spider-Man movie.

It's not that it didn't look shiny. It's not that it looked bad. It's that it was sold, relentlessly, as being about the dark secrets of Peter Parker's parents (say THAT three times fast) and how that led to...some Welsh guy turning into a lizard. Or something. 

And that's not what I want out of Spider-Man. Spider-Man, to me, was interesting precisely because he didn't come from a background that was fraught with all kinds of fraughtness. He wasn't a billionaire, like Bruce Wayne. He wasn't the last survivor of a dying world. He wasn't part of a super-secret science team. He was just a guy, with a not-perfect home and a not-perfect life, and something happened to him that he wasn't quite sure how to deal with. And he did the best he could, and he screwed up, and he kept trying to do the best he could anyway, even when it screwed him to do so.

Because deep down, the interesting thing about Spider-Man is Peter Parker. A smart, bullied kid from a broken home who finds that getting the thing that all bullied, smart kids dream about - the proof positive that he really is special - doesn't actually help solve any of his problems. Instead, it just creates new ones. 

You get the same vibe from his villains, too. Look at these guys. They wear turtlenecks. They're pudgy. They answer want ads to become supervillains. They get grafted into supervillain suits and can't get out again. Honestly, if any of these turkeys ever actually robbed a bank successfully, you know they'd blow it all over the weekend and be dead broke again on Monday. With very few exceptions, they're not world-beaters or megalomaniacs. And they're appropriate guys for Peter Parker to fight, because they're all the same guy, give or take a few breaks and an Aunt May and Uncle Ben.

You know what you don't see in there? Secret legacies. Conspiracies. Dark shadows of the past reaching forward. Fraughtness, whatever that might be. My Spider-Man's just a guy trying to get by, and I like him that way just fine.

Things I Have Learned About Sorbet Recently

Strawberry-peach works really, really well.Strawberry-cherry works great as sorbet, but not so well as soda flavoring.Blueberry-peach also works really well, but nobody will believe you when you tell them that's what it is.You can in fact make sorbet pops. The trick is A) to leave the booze out of the mix, so it crystallizes harder, and B)scooping the finished product into molds REALLY DAMN FAST.Finding actual popsicle sticks, as opposed to lollipop sticks, to put them on, is also a good idea. Lollipop sticks work, more or less, but they don't have a whole helluva lot of surface area pressed up against the sorbet portion of the affair, and that tends to produce sliding lumps of sorbet making their way slowly down lollipop sticks, and no one wants that.Sorbet pops are very difficult to put out for presentation at a party. Especially a party with lots of people. In July. When it's hot. So, uh, thank you to all the people who ate fast.

NEARFest Apocalypse: A Sort of Travelogue

I’m not a huge prog fan. I mean, I like it, and some of my favorite bands are prog bands, but I’m not a fanatic. I don’t know the difference between post-prog and Rock in Opposition (or if there even is one). I don’t own any Magma albums. I am not consumed with envy at the sight of a Chapman Stick. You get the idea.

I do go to Prog Day, which is a local progressive rock festival based out of Chapel Hill over Labor Day weekend. I go because I do like the music, even if I’ve generally never heard of any of the bands, and because it’s a nice, relaxing couple of days out in the middle of a field where I can drink some beers and read some books and make a reasonable attempt at relaxing.

But then my friend Steve, who introduced me to Prog Day, pings me with a note about something called NEARFest, mainly because one of the headliners is going to be Van Der Graaf Generator. Now, I may be a casual prog fan, but I’m a serious VDGG fan. Never mind that they make music that sounds like an octopus having sex with a mellotron inside a cotton candy machine. Never mind that I’ve had more than one girlfriend refuse to be in the room when I played any of their stuff. Never mind the fact that they do 22 minute songs with names like “A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers”. I dig ‘em, and I find that in the midst of their dissonance and complexity and bellowed, abstruse lyrics there’s real emotional power. 

In short, it works for me.

And Steve says, “It’s the last one they’re doing. Want to go?”

I scan the rest of the band list. The other headliners are Renaissance, whom I’ve heard a few songs from, and Eloy, whom I wouldn’t know from Adam. (They later pull out over a medical issue, the issue being “one of the band members got hit by a van”. Their replacement is late-70s King Crimson spinoff U.K.) The remaining bands on the list are uniformly entirely outside my experience; I can’t tell if “Helmet of Gnats” is a band or a condition you get if you forget your Deep Woods Off. Two of the names I can’t even pronounce. 

I think about it. Think about driving up to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where the concert is held, to pay a pile of cash to see mostly bands I’ve never heard of and who, for all I know, do note-for-note recreations of Tarkus.  

And I think about the fact that VDGG, to this point, have played something like 2 concerts in the US in their 40 year career. That lead singer Peter Hammill suffered a heart attack a while back. That it’s been nearly a decade since my last insane road trip to see a band (Fish, Washington DC, the 9:30 Club). 

I say to Steve, “What the hell.”

###

There are ten bands playing at NEARFest. Two on Friday, including VDGG, and then four and four the next two nights. Steve and I roll into Bethlehem with maybe an hour to spare before showtime on the first act, Belgian chamber prog group Aranis, and grab dinner at the first spot we can find. It’s a locovore burger bar named Horns, and it’s amazingly good. The french fries come in trenchers bigger than a man’s head; Steve and I don’t know this when we order, and end up with something like six pounds of extra potato.

The next night, we’ll go back there for dinner with old friend and former coworker Rich Thomas, who’s relocated to the Lehigh Valley area. We warn him about the fries, and split one order between the three of us. We also find ourselves talking with Gentle Giant guitarist Gary Green about various strategies for obtaining beer in there - it’s a BYO kind of place - and the assorted eating options within walking distance of the venue.

We’ll run into Green again multiple times over the course of the weekend. He’s polite, funny, and a genuine pleasure to chat with. On Sunday night, as Steve and I are making our escape from the afterparty, we see him one last time, getting into the shuttle van that’s presumably taking him to the airport. He turns around and bids us farewell. “Be well, be safe, be gone,” he says, grinning. “Now fuck off.”

I throw him a salute. “Fucking off, sir.” 

We can hear his laughter all the way back to the car.

###

When we pull into the garage for the first time, it’s full of people tailgating. They’re tucked into corners with coolers and beach chairs and grills, and massive sound setups so they can get into the mood. It’s friendly, it’s warm, it’s not the uber-serious atmosphere I’d been warned to expect.

We park the car and get out, chatting with the folks who pulled in next to us. They’re friends of Steve, of course. Steve knows everyone, or so it seems, and even if this is his first NEARFest, he’s not a stranger.

We hear someone whooping. A tall gentleman as stalking through the garage, chanting “VAN! DER! GRAAF! VAN! DER! GRAAF!” He homes in on us. “YOU EXCITED FOR VAN DER GRAAF?” I nod. “IT’S GOING TO BE AWESOME!” He stalks off again, still whooping.

I did not know such things were possible.

###

Mark Wilkinson is at NEARFest.

He’s been their official artist for a while, talking over from the legendary Roger Dean (who is also here). Wilkinson, a tall, affable gent, did all of the Marillion album covers back in the Fish days, and I’ve collected the lot of ‘em. 12” singles, too. Loved those covers, I did. I still do.

I tell him this when I meet him in the dealers’ room, saying something very adult about how I have enjoyed his work. He thanks me, and I goob a bit and mention that I have all those old 12” singles.

“Didn’t pack them, though,” I add. “I figure they would have turned to soup in the car”. 

Mr. Wilkinson nods thoughtfully. “Probably for the best,” he agrees. I cringe a little inside, picturing the sorts of fans liable to assault him with Assassing record sleeves and silver paint pens, demanding a signature.

To cover up, I look at his book, which means I buy his book, which means he autographs it for me. 

Steve buys a print of a Wicker Man-themed Iron Maiden wraparound record sleeve. Later, he’ll pick up the book as well.

The dealer’s room, it is dangerous place to be.

###

It takes about six tries before I can actually nail the name of Il Tempio Delle Clessidre, the Italian band scheduled for Saturday afternoon. They’re an astonishing Frankenstein monster of a band; guitarist and bassist in pure rock star attire (leather and zebra-striped pants, respectively), keyboardist and vocalist Elisa Montaldo gothed up to the nines, and the grizzled lead singer, “Lupo” Galifi, wearing a military jacket, sunglasses and a beret. Their sound is pure classic prog, arpeggiated within an inch of its life, delicate keyboard runs slammed up against heavy riffs and vocals that invoke the operatic. Galifi’s best known for his work with Italian prog legends Museo Rosenbach, and the band does a take on their epic “Zarathustra”. They also do a piece about witches, “Danza Esoterica de Datura”, which is impetus for the band to don capes and masks and perform with their faces hidden.

Montaldo demurely removes her hat before putting on her mask. She plays with an elegant, exaggerated formality, even as the song’s vocals swoop and rise and fall. The rest of the band hammers at it like it’s 1986 at the Whiskey, clearly exulting in the sheer joy of rocking out.

 

###

Sunday afternoon in one of the dealers’ rooms. Gosta Berlings’ Saga has abandoned their table. All that’s left are clipboard with signup sheets for their mailing list, and a few t-shirts duct-taped to the wall. I hear someone saying, “No, they took off already. They sold everything they had. Everything except those shirts. I can take them off the wall and sell them to you, but I’m not sure I’m allowed to.”

###

Sunday night, the after-show party. The legendary NEARFest jam session is going strong at the front of the ballroom at the Comfort Suites, Mike Kenneally and the drummer from Anglagard whaling away with one of the guys from The Yellow Box (I think) on what appears to be a Jeff Beck tune. (I’m several beers in and bleary eyed at this point, and my powers of musical discernment have become limited.) Most of the crowd is milling around, standing or seated at tables, concentrating mostly on the 9.8 percent double IPA brewed specially for the occasion by the folks at the Bethlehem Beer Works. 

Two guys sit on the floor watching the stage intently. The dance floor between them and the musicians is empty. One of them shouts something. It takes a minute for me to realize what he said.

“Play some Camel!”

Only at NEARFest.

###

Every lineup has a clunker. For me, it was the Mike Kenneally Band. An hour late to start, they were technically impressive but none of their songs grabbed me. “Noodly as all crap” is how one person described them. There’s a snafu in the middle of the set, am audience participation bit where the band’s supposed to pick up on riffs provided by the punters. Kenneally’s suggested riff is half the  length of the ones the rest of the band pick up.

The math, it causes problems. 

They run long, too.

###

Helmet of Gnats are from Connecticut. The drummer is the lead guitarist’s brother-in-law; every Sunday, they “go to church, and the church is prog”. Like roughly half the bands here, they’re all instrumental; outside, after their set, I hear someone call them “post-prog”, as their music occasionally remembers it’s supposed to have massive key and time signature changes at semi-regular intervals to still qualify as prog. 

The same guy outside talks about their set, and about their latest disc, and closes with a sad note that “they’ve all got day jobs”. Not for them is the life of the itinerant musician.

Day jobs. Rehearsal on Sunday. It’s as if they’ve created their own subgenre, garage prog. They thrash away merrily, the perfect opener for the first full day of the festival. Loud, energetic, and clearly enjoying the hell out of themselves, which is about all you can ask out of the morning slot.

###

Twelfth Night was clearly at the wrong festival. Definitely the most polarizing act of the event, they walked onstage straight from the late 80s and the neo-prog revival, drummer jacket and all. Technically, they had a rough time of it - their sound tech apparently sliced himself open on something just before they went on and had to go to the hospital for a couple of dozen stitches - but really, audience and band expectations weren’t in the same ballpark on this one. The band’s arena rock-style bravado - you don’t wave a Union Jack around at a prog festival unless you mean it - ran straight into a crowd that had just gotten its collective face melted by a rampaging collective of Swedish instrumentalists amuck in 13/8 time, and first contact didn’t go well. Loreley, this was not, and the sorts of theatrics that would bring that crowd to its feet were pretty much lost in the more rarefied atmosphere in Bethlehem.

Later, I spent time chatting with various members of the band at the hotel bar. It was their first time in the US, let alone playing there, and they were largely and mainly surprised by the quality of American beer as it related to them getting stinko with astonishing speed. They’d been told about Budweiser, apparently, and instead had gotten a faceful of two-fisted microbrew culture in a pint glass. Once again, expectations got trumped by collision with local reality.

###

Later, the drummer from Twelfth Night and I got into a debate over whether Blue Oyster Cult could be considered prog, an outgrowth of the question of where the big American prog bands were. (Answer: not in Bethlehem, at least not this weekend, and then a long digression about how the American mainstream co-opts anything genre that reaches a certain level of success.) I figured BOC was prog because they sang at extended length about nosferatu and Elric, had collaborated with Michael Moorcock, and wrote long, involved, classically informed songs. My new friend countered with “But they sold a ton of records.”

###

Anglagard is a Swedish five-piece instrumental lineup, fronted by a sax/flute player. It’s been 18 years since their last album, but they’re finally about to release a new one, and between-song banter is all about how they could do a NEARfest live album after that to sort of pick up the pace between discs.

The breakout star of the show is their drummer,  Mattias Olsson, who is, I suspect while watching him, not entirely human. He assaults his kit with such fury that it looks like he’s got six arms; his riser shakes so violently I’m convinced he’s going to pound it to pieces. Then he’s up and off and playing the side of a vibraphone with what looks like a cello bow, and, well, wow.

No human being has six arms, right? Just checking.

###

Van Der Graaf Generator opens with “Scorched Earth”, which is about as gentle and soothing as you’d expect with a title like that. At the end, the crowd needs a moment to come back to itself, and then it roars. 

Hammill isn’t quite what I expect. Funny, cheerful, self-deprecating, he admonishes the audience with a grin about how not every song can be “mayhem”. It comes back at him later, when someone in the balcony bellows “More mayhem!” before they launch into “Your Time Starts Now”. He laughs.

It doesn’t maintain that perfect, transcendent level of the first song all the way through. Hammill keeps checking lyrics sheets, adding a slightly nervous quality to his performance. They play material from their recent post-reunion albums when the crowd was clearly hungering for a particular subset of the long-titled classics. But they do unveil a version of the Hammill solo piece “Flight”, a 23-minute beast that’s utterly unlike anything else I’ve heard before or since. 

For that alone, the trip was worth it.

For their encore, Hammill sets up the song with a discussion about how once they knew this was the last NEARFest, there really was only one choice for the encore. Because all things, he noted, have their time and their run, and now this one was ending. 

And so we got a live version of “Refugees”, four decades old and the closest thing to a hit VDGG ever had, and the closest thing to wistful, too. 

When the last note fades away and the last of the applause dies, Steve turns to me. He’s concerned about my work schedule, which currently calls for us to drive back all the way to Raleigh on Monday, in time for me to catch a 6 AM flight out Tuesday for work. “We can go back home now, if you want. Now that you’ve seen that.”

“No, no,” I tell him. “We can stay. We should stay.”

###

If Olsson is the breakout star of the show, Gosta Berlings Saga is the breakout band. They own the crowd from the second they bound onstage, four guys in black who create music that’s the soundtrack to all the horror novels I haven’t gotten around to writing yet. It’s off kilter, it’s hypnotic, it’s relentless. After each number, the crowd roars. Olsson comes out to join them for the end of the set and it’s eruptive, jaw-dropping.

And they do a song about 20-sided dice. I think I’ve found my tribe.

###

Outside the Zoellner Center, where the concert is being held, we run into VAN! DER! GRAAF! guy and a friend of his for the second time. The first time, they’d shown me and Steve tickets they had to a Van Der Graaf Generator gig in nearby Sellersville, one that was apparently being recorded for local PBS station WHYYY, and they were skipping out on Saturday headliner Renaissance to see it. They’re serious VDGG fans, and after some chatting about Helmet of Gnats and Gosta Berlings Saga and Anglagard, they start talking about VDGG.

They, it would seem, are the keepers of the answer to a mystery that’s been plaguing the band’s fans for years. Why did saxophonist David Jackson depart the band after the last tour? In not-at-all hushed voices, they tell us a story, and claim responsibility. Toys were involved, it would seem. Toys that one of them had made a habit of delivering. 

It’s a great story. On the surface, it’s wildly unbelievable, and that’s what makes it perfect.

And probably true.

###

Last night of the show. Last act. Last NEARFest. And the delay before the doors open for U.K. feels endless. Steve and I had bolted out of the restaurant where we were having dinner basically unserved in order not to miss it - Steve’s a huge Crimson fan, and I was driving - sandwiches in hand. As we hit the garage, we saw people still out there, hanging out, waiting. Not the last minute rush inside one would expect, really.

So we pulled up on the top floor, in a spot with a view of the old Bethlehem Steel works. Next to us, a bunch of guys were tailgating, drinking beers and arguing over Zep. Our sandwiches were overcooked and underseasoned, but the view was great and the conversation was good. And it was clear that U.K. was running a little behind.

We finished and went inside. The doors were shut, people milling around and diving in and out of the dealers’ rooms (all four of them) in search of last minute bargains. 

“Makes sense,” we decided. After all, Kenneally had run late, and U.K. is apparently notorious about controlling the parameters of their performance. We could hear the booming sounds of sound check behind closed doors; outside, everyone just circulated, and talked, and waited. Families with younger kids - and there were a few of those - debated nervously whether they should head home. Time stretched on. Steve and I fell into conversation with a couple from Winston-Salem whom he knew. Announcements came over the P.A., warning us that there would be absolutely no flash photography allowed during the show, presumably on pain of being drummed senseless by Mattias Olsson. 

Time Stretched. Bargain hunters scurried to their cars with giant stacks of swag. Dealers took piles of leftover mech from bands.  Tables shut down, one by one by one.

Finally, the doors opened. The crowd shuffled in excitedly, to the sound of more P.A. announcements. The winner of the raffle for a handcrafted Moog guitar was announced; the farewells and final thank-yous to the folks who put the show on were given amidst thunderous applause and tears. 

And then NEARFest’s founders introduce U.K. and leave the stage. The house lights go down. The stage lights fade to a lush purple. There is silence.

Someone coughs. Someone else whispers something. Someone else gives a “shhhh!”. This gets picked up, and wave of “Shhhh!” goes around the room, accompanied by hilarity. More coughing. A few catcalls. Time stretches. The “Shhhhh!” makes its way from balcony to orchestra and back again, and there’s more laughter. We hit the ten minute mark. One of the NEARFest organizers finally gets up and tells the crowd, in no uncertain terms, that they’ve waited thirty years to hear U.K., they can wait five more minutes, and to just calm the hell down already.

A minute after that, they come onstage. U.K., at this point, is Eddie Jobson and John Wetton and a couple of other guys, and the pecking order is very clear. Jobson looks like a steampunk villain, an angular clockwork man wtih smoked John Lennon glasses and a flowing white mane of  hair that makes him look uncanny under the blue lights above. Wetton looks more like the leader of a friendly village in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi cheapie; the guy who’s determined to stand and fight against the ravening bad guy hordes even though the attempt is doomed. 

But he can still bend a bass to his will, and he can still sing the walls down. Jobson’s keyboards are thunderous, and the things he does to his violin are probably illegal in seventeen states. This is the last show of their tour, an add-on date by happy accident when Eloy had to pull out of NEARFest, and the band approaches it with easy mastery. 

They mine their material, and they mine King Crimson’s. They play “Starless”. Steve is nearly quivering with excitement. I had my moment when Van Der Graaf played “Scorched Earth”; this is his.

U.K. closes out the encores with a clean, simple arrangement of “Rendezvous 6:02”, with just Wetton and Jobson onstage. The last note hangs in the air, the whispered lyric, and then the lights come up and it’s all over, for always.

This Is True

If your waking day starts with finding a dead bat hanging onto your porch light, odds are that the rest of your day may in fact include some combination of A) accidentally setting your deck on fire B) having the glucose meter for the ancient diabetic cat break C) you get the idea D) dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. It may not get better for you. It definitely isn't getting any better for the bat.

Today I Am The InterWebs

Or at least a couple of parts of them.

At Kotaku, there's an article on systemic dialog in games that quotes me fairly extensively. You can find it here.

Meanwhile, over at Booklife Now, there's my ruminations on Killing the Goddamn Vulture, which does not mean what you think it means, but which is worth reading anyway.

No new reviews posted this week, but the fine folks at Stone Skin Press have more details on The New Hero (vol 1) here. Also, the ToC for Dark Faith 2 , which is not from Stone Skin but rather from an entirely different set of kind and talented folks, is here.

Some Thoughts On Where A Story Came From

When I sat down to write the story the first time, it was pure Borscht Belt. Tip your waiters, the 9 o'clock show is completely different form the 5:30 show, and oy, the moaning and the geshrying and the random Yiddische profanity. There was a lot less buckling of swashes and a lot more pilpul, and maybe a dybbuk who wouldn't let the fact that he was dead keep him from being a pain in the ass.  There was, in short, shtick, and the entire thing sounded like it had been written by Jackie Mason's old anteater character from the Pink Panther cartoons.
It was, in a word, terrible, a one-joke bit that borrowed its central conceit from Joseph Heller's God Knows . And I threw it out, as any right-thinking author would, and spent a few days panicking about the upcoming deadline and the promised "Magical Pirate Rabbi" story, and my inability to deliver same.
I ended up figuring it out in a coffee shop, of all places. This is possibly noteworthy because A)I hate coffee B)I hate writing in coffee shops because there are too many other people there, there's music I don't like, and the tables are never the right height for my particular flavor of hunched-over compositional frenzy and C)I hate coffee. But there I was, at the Caribou in Brier Creek (largely so I could pillage their free wifi and assuage my guilt for doing same with an oddly composited hot chocolate), and I just sat down and started writing. 
Correction: I sat down and started tapping my finger against the tabletop as I tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do. And I realized, after a couple of what must have been intensely annoying minutes for anyone seated near me, that I wasn't really tapping, I was drumming out a rhythm, and that the rhythm felt like the sort of thing you got in movies where a drummer was coaxing rowers to work in unison, and that the language of the story really ought to be driven by that same rhythm, and...
...and I wrote the first line.
Still hate coffee, mind you. But I like that coffee shop a lot better now.

A Few Thoughts On Where A Hero Came From

So the main character in my story in Stone Skin Press’ upcoming anthology, The New Hero (vol. 1) is a Magical Pirate Rabbi. That’s how I describe him when people ask about the story, and that’s about as good a way as any to sum him up. Yes, he’s a pirate. Yes, he’s a rabbi. Yes, there is magic in the story, though how much magic, I’ll let you, dear reader, decide for yourself.

(The story, incidentally, is called “The Thirty-Ninth Labor of Reb Palache”. This implies that there are at least thirty-eight other labors, though to be completely truthful, at this pointl I’m only certain as to what about six of them might have been.)

And yes, people dig the Magical Pirate Rabbi. It’s a fun juxtaposition of characteristics – you hear “rabbi”, you think maybe an avuncular guy in a skullcap who’s a bit worried that someone accidentally scheduled the synagogue singles bowling tournament over Yom Kippur. You think “pirate”, you think Johnny Depp channeling Pepe Le Pew. Cognitive dissonance for the win, with the added fun of magic on top of it.

The funny thing is, then, that Reb Palache was based on a real guy. I found him in the pages of Edward Kritzler’s fascinating book Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean. The historical Samuel Palache was a pirate, a spy, a diplomat, a merchant, and depending on whom you believe, the first man to settle openly as a Jew in Amsterdam. On top of that, he negotiated the first treaty between a Christian country and a Muslim one, founded the first minyan in Amsterdam, and commanded a Moroccan fleet during wartime. I like to think that if they’d had internet memes in the days when he was stomping around the Iberian coastline, there would have been all sorts of Chuck Norris-style references to Reb Palache.  (In fact, the whole Palache family was full of this kind of awesomeness. Go check them out. I’ll wait.)

But in the end, that's the beside the point. The real Reb Palache was all kinds of interesting. Hopefully my fictional version does right by him. I'd like to think so.
And on Wednesday, you'll be able to tell me if I did.

Bits and Bobs

More reviews are up over at Sleeping Hedgehog (though why he continues to hog the hedges, I will never know).

In non-fiction, there's Boria Sax's City of Ravens , which is an attempt to get at the meat behind the myth of the ravens of the Tower of London. Then we go from birds to bats, with Death By Design . Neither of the two really did it for me; fortunately, there are some reviews of stuff that read a little better in the pipeline as well. And then there's strike three: The Angel of the Opera , a Sherlock Holmes pastiche that makes the critical blunder of bitching about the previous Sherlock Holmes material. If that's your opening play, you've got to be better than the source material, and this book...isn't.

In book news, I am exceedingly pleased to note that June 20th marks the first date when you will be able to get your hands on the long-awaited New Hero from Stone Skin Press, featuring my story "The 39th Labor of Reb Palache" and other tales of heroism, derring-do, and general awesomeness. Big thanks to the remarkable Robin Laws for letting me be a part of that project, as well as another one titled The Lion and the Aardvark . You can get a sneak peek at the cover here. I'll be writing a little more about where the Reb Palache character came from - you say the words "magical pirate rabbi" and people get curious - as we get closer to release date.

Congrats to everyone involved with Splinter Cell: Blacklist for knocking 'em dead last week at E3. 

And if you're one of those folks who was wondering when you could get your mitts on a hardcopy of the deliciously creepy Don't Read This Book , the wait is over. It's OK. You can read this book. I actively encourage you to do so.