Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 119

Nite 2

I saw fewer new acts the second night of Globalquerque, but that’s because some of the first night’s performers returned. I’ll skip over those and get straight to the folks I hadn’t seen before.

Tony Duncan is one of the talented Duncan brothers, all hoop dancers, and has won the World Champion Hoop Dancer award five times. I didn’t actually see him dance at Globalquerque, he played the flute and also shared the stage with a storyteller, but the hoop dancing is awesomely cool and that’s the...

First Night of the Festival

More music from Globalquerque, New Mexico’s annual celebration of music from all over the world. There were three stages going on at once, so I didn’t see everybody, and for several of the bands I only saw a few minutes. Here are some of the highlights.

Cimmarón was advertised as a cowboy band from Colombia, but they seem a lot more than that. It’s a band where you can hear jazz and flamenco and Andalusia and more. And they still wear cowboy hats.

EastRiver Ensemblewas formed from Chinese m...

A Band of One

I’ve been frantically busy and with little time for posting. I’ve spent the last two nights at Globalquerque, the annual festival of world music, and will post more on that when I have a few free hours But in the meantime here’s a video of Maarja Nuut, who I saw the other night. She’s an Estonian folk singer who plays solo. Except that she brought a band with her. Except that her band is her. Entirely her. She carries electronic gear I’ve seen used by other performers, in which she can reco...

Big Bundle, Big Books, Big Savings

So StoryBundle has a deal for you. They’ve bundled six novels, each of them nominated for the Philip K Dick Award, and by Elizabeth Hand, Pat Murphy, K.W. Jeter, Gwyneth Jones, Lisa Mason, and Kathy Koja. These ebooks are completely free of DRM and can be read on any device. And the best part is:you decide what you want to pay. It’s entirely up to you. Also, you get to decide how much of that payment goes to the authors, and how much to support StoryBundle. Plus, you can give 10% to charity....

Why I Am Not a Farmer

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Here I am, age 14, on a hot, humid, miserable July day, helping my Uncle Monty make hay. Or: Why I never joined the Future Farmers of America.

Dragging It Out

Dish Network gave me a free premium channel the other week, and so I watchedThe Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part I. Which was a kind of masterpiece, because in a film over two hours long nothing really happened. What’s going on is that the success of theTwilight films, in which the final volume of the trilogy was broken up into two separate films, has created a new paradigm— Two movies! Twice the money! I haven’t read the book on which the film was based, and so I don’t know how closely the act...

Dreaming of the Lost City

So why am I dreaming of the City by the Bay? Which is to say, Duluth? It’s been over a month since I returned from my childhood haunts in Minnesota. When I was there, I found myself dealing with a tangible, material place, which however pleasant was substantially changed from the terrain where I grew up. It was like visiting someplace new, with just enough of the old remaining to make it a little bit sad. I could find my way around, but wherever I went, I found it strange or diminished. When...

Room to Roar

This one’s been echoing in my skull all the day. I have to say it’s just the sort of song you need to get you out of bed in the morning. This is “Give Us Room to Roar” by Ruth MacKenzie, from her albumKalevala: Dream of the Salmon Maiden. I can’t seem to find out much about MacKenzie, which is odd for someone who recorded an album as recently as 1998, but so far as I can tell she’s a singer raised in the Celtic tradition who went to Finland and was gobsmacked by their poetic tradition, and w...

Staying Busy

I seem to be having a busy week, with little time for posting here or indeed anywhere. If I weren’t actually accomplishing stuff, I’d probably be annoyed. Please enjoy this picture of some 3500-year-old martial artists engaging in their daily practice. Remember: exercise keeps you young!

Refugee Mario

So when I was a young, callous person, I designed a board game calledThe An Loc Survival Game. An Loc, for the young folks among you, was a town in Vietnam that was the centerpiece of a 66-day battle of mutual annihilation between North and South Vietnamese forces, the latter assisted by insane amounts of American air power, including at one point a B-52 strike flattening whole acres of ground every 55 minutes. It was bad enough being a soldier in this fight, but being a civilian was far wors...