Spare parts and raw materials

October 6, 2011 / Debo posted in Thoughts / 6 Comments

I’m writing a book.

But that’s not the subject of this post, it’s just the backdrop.

The subject of this post is raw materials.

So hear this: I wanted one of my characters to be a musician, a mixed-media artist with a musical focus. But, as previous album and concert reviews on this blog will indicate, I am a neanderthal when it comes to things artistic.

Yesterday I spent some time at the Toronto Reference Library reading the compilation book “Arcana”, a John Zorn project. In it, I found an essay written by someone who exactly fits the mold of the character I wanted in my book.

How did this essay end up in my bucket of spare parts?

I can tell you how it happened. In 1985, I occasionally visited my youngest uncle. He had a Texas Instruments computer that ran on audio tapes. This introduced me to video games. Specifically, though, it introduced me to computer games. Atari and Nintendo were cute, but I still wanted a keyboard in front of me.

I suspect that this is the reason I became a computer scientist. But that’s a different story.

Back to me liking computer games. Computer games are sometimes hard. They are so hard, in fact, that there are communities of people out there who write up guides on how to beat them. In 2001, I was tinkering on GameFaqs.com, the largest such community, presumably looking up FAQs on how to beat one of these hard games. I was also a fan of heavy metal music, and I noticed that there was a heavy metal message board on the site.

I clicked around and discovered that quite a few people were raving about a small “astral metal” band called “maudlin of the Well”. Someone posted lyrics from one of the songs, and I almost gagged at their cheesy-gothicness.

Back then, I was in the habit of actively seeking out things to deride. So, I went to their label’s website. (At the time, this was the label “Dark Symphonies”.)

Lo and behold, they were selling all of motWs discography at a massive discount. (I noticed this with little surprise.) I bought their entire discography of 3 albums for something like $10, shipping included.

It arrived at Christmas of that year. I listened to it obsessively for the following three years. It was really captivating, and I quickly forgot my initial impression of the band. I was a convert.

maudlin of the Well eventually became the band “Kayo Dot”. The lead influencer of Kayo Dot, Toby Driver, also eventually signed with Tzadik Records, John Zorn’s label.

Some years later, (in 2009 or so, I think) Toby Driver wrote an essay for a John Zorn compilation book called “Arcana IV: Musicians on Music”, or something like this. I knew this because I was on his mailing list. I was curious, because I’d read a few interviews by Toby, and I was always inspired by his words.

Since the book was labeled “Arcana IV”, I inferred that there should also be an “Arcana I”, an “Arcana II”, and an “Arcana III”. (Possibly even an “Arcana V”.) I looked them up, and they were available on Amazon for prices that more or less overcame my curiosity about them. So, I never got around to buying any of them.

Fast-forward to this month, where I found myself reading bad interviews of art school grads and dancers, and thinking to myself, “What would be the next best source of inspiration for this character?” I suddenly remembered the Arcana book I’d wanted to read, and so looked it up on the Toronto Public Library website. The very next day I was pulling it off of the Performing Arts shelves in the reference library, and discovered exactly what I was looking for.

I’m not sure what provoked me to share this story, other than that it was sort of brewing in the back of my brain while cycling around the city. Hopefully someone out there finds something to take from it — perhaps in 20 years or so, some trace of it will even appear in a bad novel somewhere.

“Marjorie’s Missile” book review

August 2, 2011 / Debo posted in Books / No Comments

I have a minor obsession with things that I can’t find on the WWW.

I was recently traveling in Nova Scotia, and I stopped in at a used bookstore in Halifax. My eyes alighted on a strange, thin book that almost appeared to be self-published. Called “Marjorie’s Missile”, it was printed in 1986 and typeset in fixed-width Courier.

It was written by a computer science teacher who was teaching programming to young “Indian” (I guess they were still calling them that then) students on a reserve in Alberta. Envisioning something like Neuromancer meets Dances with Wolves, I was piqued. I immediately searched for it on the web.

I couldn’t find anything. As in, not a single hit for the search term “Marjorie’s Missile”. I suspected that Bing was simply being obtuse (there is the occasional disadvantage to WP7), but the prospect of potentially owning a book that hadn’t fallen under the gaze of the WWW was enough to make me buy the book on the spot.

When I ran the term through Google later, I did turn up a single hit, but it was simply that of an antique bookseller. I just searched again now, and there is an entire page of hits today (including one on Amazon.com), but again, they are only from booksellers liquidating inventory. There isn’t a single review to be found. The author doesn’t seem to have any Web presence, either.

So now, I am a bit curious. What happened to Colin McKinlay, the author? He obviously had an early predilection for computers. Did he die young? Disappear into the North? Publish Marjorie’s Missile under a pen name? I hope that someone who knows the answer will someday stumble across this post and tell me. Until then, all I can do is briefly summarize the book for you.

Marjorie’s Missile reads sort of like a Kurt Vonnegut-style novel, in that the setting is very plausible but the events that occur in that setting verge on fantastical. The main character Marjorie is a computer programmer who works a cushy job for the CIA. When a cruise missile is lost during testing in an Alberta Native reserve, she is offered a field job to retrieve it. If she succeeds, she will be given 1 million dollars and the option to retire. She accepts.

The other main characters in the novel provide most of the interest. Lionel, Marjorie’s “temporary” husband for the mission, is an eccentric white Canadian man who has been accepted by the people on the Reserve. He teaches computer science to the kids there. (Sound familiar?) The main Native character in the book, “Earthman”, lives in a high-tech building that he has built for himself that he has called “High Rez”. He is also the ferryman for the Reserve. He claims to be over 100 years old. The main villain is a prototypical despotic American CIA agent who has gone rogue, and basically exemplifies North American greed and cronyism.

There is a smattering of other Native characters in the book, and they are all quite interesting as well. I found the Native characters and their stories to be the richest part of the novel by far — I’m guessing that a lot of the authors’ personal experience with the Natives on his reserve found its way directly into this book, and even though most of the stories are bizarre, they are believable in that “truth is stranger than fiction” sort of way.

The other white characters and the delivery of the story itself are thin, but still better than I expected. The bulk of the plot is progressed in one giant chunk through flashbacks, which are extracted by Marjorie when she adminsters truth serum to her “husband” and a Native companion of his. After that, the story dashes quickly towards its absurd but comical conclusion, which includes Marjorie falling predictably in love with the Natives she once considered to simply be fleshy obstacles between her and retirement.

The book is short enough and weird enough that I’m glad I read it. The question is, did anyone else? There was a page of reviews printed in the back of the book, the most significant of which was from the Edmonton Journal, but I can’t tell if these were falsified as a self-deprecating joke or not.

Assuming this was a first novel, there was enough potential here that I feel like the author could have made a career of writing. The answer is probably out there on the Internet somewhere…

On posting once a month…

May 31, 2011 / Debo posted in Thoughts / No Comments

I’m pretty terrible at it.

“The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” by Haruki Murakami

April 4, 2011 / Debo posted in Literature / No Comments

I finished up Haruki Murakami’s ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ the other day, and I felt like someone had snapped me out of a hypnotic trance. (Of course, that could have been the effects of the compound hangovers I was suffering.)

Murakami’s style is dreamy, riveting, and occasionally exasperating. For a book in which almost nothing happens (and at almost 700 pages, that is a lot of nothing), it is astonishingly hard to put it down. My favorite aspect of his writing is that you can’t tell what is fantasy and what is reality, and you quickly find yourself not caring, as this is obviously not of any real consequence to the characters involved.

All of this contributes to the feeling that you not really reading the book, but that you are instead meandering through a very lucid daydream. This is an impressive feat, given that the English version was actually a translation from the Japanese.

After turning the last page, I had the feeling that I had subconsciously learned some subtle lesson that I couldn’t specify in words. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that was simultaneously so raw and yet so … delicate, like cotton candy made from gossamer cowflesh.

If you have the patience for this sort of thing (e.g. You can read Nabokov for enjoyment), I’d strongly recommend it.

P.S. this is the first blogpost I’ve ever written from a smartphone. Big ups.

P.P.S. I’ve previously read ‘After Dark’ by Murakami as well, a good long time ago. I remember really enjoying that as well.

P.P.P.S.: This is one of the first books I’ve read where I had a hard time finding plot synopses / discussions online. Now I’m stuck using my own brain to interpret the significance of major plot events, which kinda sucks.

GridLink “Orphan” first impressions / mini review

April 1, 2011 / Debo posted in Music / No Comments

If I was to approach this mini-review in the same way that Jon Chang approaches musicmaking, it would read simply:

“HOLY FUCKING SHIT.”

I first discovered Chang & co when I downloaded the Hydrahead sampler, and one of the Hayaino Daisuki tracks appeared on it. HD is like, the distilled essence of everything I love about thrash. I personally prefer HD to GridLink, but only in the way that I prefer slightly better beer to beer.

What HD is to thrash, GridLink is to extreme metal. (Pick your genre preference, I don’t care — if your average Slayer fan would listen to it and say, “whoa, that sounds like noise”, I just label it as “extreme”.) It’s like Chang and company have extracted the essence of what makes extreme metal awesome, distilled it to toxic levels, and injected it into the best 12 minutes of your life.

When I first picked up Amber Gray, I could only listen to it once through before needing a break. In comparison, the tracks on Orphan have much more variety. There are a few songs where you can even identify a chorus among the verses, which is quite the feat for an album where the longest track clocks in at 1:28. I bought the digital download mere moments after it became available, and I listened to the album for a straight hour before finally hitting my saturation point.

As an added bonus, if you buy the Orphan + Amber Gray combo pak (or vinyl), you actually get the remastered edition of Amber Gray, which is totally ninja. When I first hit play on the remaster and the new, shiny snare fill ripped into my skull, I had the distinct feeling that this was the best thing I’ve ever spent money on.

I hope GridLink does well enough with this album that they can continue to churn stuff like this out. As for me, it’s time to get back to the grind.

\m/

Buy the digital download here

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