The Default State Is Broken

Last year I made a vow to myself that I would only read books written by authors who were not straight white men. By and large, with two explicit exceptions, I was successful in my goal. And I learned a bunch of things. The first (and most important) thing I learned is that my reading habits were already moderately diverse; I made a list of ten of my favourite authors and nine of them were women, so I didn't really have to give up on anyone that I was particularly invested in. The second thing I learned was that my "historical read" list is actually pretty white/straight/male, though; I often go back and read a book again for comfort's sake, to go over familiar territory and comfortable writing and try and find something new or at least interesting. That means I haven't been doing a bunch of rereading and that led to... The third thing I learned, which is there are a LOT of non-cishetwhitemale writers in SF, both historically and especially currently. Just l...

A thing that I like in music: switching instruments. I love listening to Andres Segovia playing Bach's Cello Suites on a Flamenco guitar. I really enjoy Two Cellos playing pop music, or Apocalyptica doing Metallica songs on a string quartet. I think a version of Danse Macabre for violin, viola, and cello is one of the best versions of that tune I've ever heard. I am also a big fan of human voice music. From the traditional choir a cappella and Jewish cantor, to barbershop quartet, to Tuvan Throat Singing, to Pentatonix,]; music that humans make with themselves alone (solo or in groups) makes the hair on my arms stand up. I love it unabashedly and unapologetically. So in steps Samuel Barber. In 1936 he writes what is possibly the most haunting piece of American Classical Music of the 20th Century, and in 1938 Arturo Toscanini records it with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. It's a big hit, and cements Barber's early career as composer par excellence . And then, in 1967, B...

So we were in raid chatting it up like one does when one is waiting for stuff to get going, and a friend of mine was talking about how on their podcast they were asking listeners to call in or email with which fandom they'd like to live in and why. Many people mentioned their favourite universes: Star Wars , Star Trek , Firefly , even World of Warcraft . And I tossed out Gilmore Girls . Yeah, that was the reaction of many of my friends, too. "Gilmore Girls? The TV show about the mother and the daughter?" Yes, that show. Exactly that show. That's the universe that I'd like to live in. Seriously. It's awesome there. It's pretty clearly a post-scarcity universe, since no one ever pays for anything or does any sort of work that they don't want to do. I mean, Lorelei manages a hotel and works pretty hard, but given the size of the house she lives in it's pretty clear that the money thing isn't really an issue (I mean, the crazy cat lady and the ...

My partner upgraded to the new Kindle Voyage, which is great and awesome and very slick. We're a reading household, so to my mind this is money well spent, in fact. I in turn received the hand-me-down Kindle Paperwhite and I've been experimenting with it over the last week or so. My go-to reading solution for the longest time has been my Nexus 7 tablet, which I bought on a whim and then it took over my life for a while, which was an unusual experience because I didn't expect to want or need it so much having lived without a tablet at all, and then getting an iPad for a while. The change from the full-size iPad to the N7 form factor sealed the deal for me, and I've never even considered a full-size tablet again. Plus, the latest generation N7 has a great screen, a beefy processor/RAM combo, and integration into the Google ecosystem which now basically acts as my adjutant brain. The downside of an N7 (or really any tablet) is that the screen light turns out to be exactl...

Feeling pretty poorly for health reasons, but every so often I trip over one of those classic tunes that doesn't fit into my "Angry Women With Guitars" patch and it gets stuck in my head. Like ELO, Dire Straits is one of those bands that I arguably shouldn't like, because they're everything I don't like about music: bunch of guys with a noodly guitar and an inflate idea of their own position in music. Except that Mark Knopfler is so damned talented  that it is undeniable how good the music is. Brothers in Arms is a slow ballad. It's a quiet, careful song, which is pretty different from most of the stuff that came out of Dire Straits, and it gets stuck . It has it's own gravity, and soon you're humming the deceptively simple melody and imagining the broken, almost-whisper of the lyrics in your head, and wondering if there is someone who can attempt a cover of this song and really do something special with it, like Lorde did with Tears for Fears. ...

It's often hard for me to recognize that I'm dealing with a depressive cycle from the inside, because as a general rule my depressive symptoms don't manifest as "being sad" (although there is a significant emotional content). More often, I'll look back over the last couple of weeks and realize that all of the energy just basically drained out of my life. I'm still joking around and punning on Twitter and being clever on G+ or even in person, but I'll suddenly notice that I haven't posted to my blog in two weeks, and I haven't washed any clothes, and I haven't done the dishes, and... you get the idea. The sudden realization that in fact, I haven't even read a book or listened to a podcast or even checked a news site. The sudden cognizance that I've been letting old movies play on Netflix in the background and I've done nothing but sit in front of my computer and poke at things, not even really engaging in the various and sundry...

So, remember when I talked about Angry Women With Guitars? I'm amazed I've gotten this far without talking about Sleater-Kinney. I got into them with their album The Woods  in 2005, which was their seventh album, and I scoured  the music stores both on and offline to find their back catalog. They were basically a band invented to play explicitly for me. And then I found out that they had broken up. Just about the time I got into them. Which is exactly my kind of luck. And then, last year, they announced they were getting back together. And then they started streaming music. And I hear that moment in an album when there's a song that just sings to you (no pun intended). That's what I felt when I heard No Cities to Love , which is the title track of the new album. The album drops January 20th, but you can stream it on NPR. Obligatory (non)-Youtube Link: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=376085344&m=3760862...