Mar. 10th, 2013

stoutfellow: Joker (Joker)
Album Title: The Definitive Collection, Tommy James and the Shondells

Why I Bought It: I'm not altogether sure. I've always loved "Crimson and Clover", though.

What I Like (Groovy): "Crimson and Clover". The shimmery vocal effects and hallucinatory imagery of this one - and "Crystal Blue Persuasion" fits in here too - are the selling points.

What I Like (Two Points): "Draggin' the Line". There are two specific things about this song that appeal to me. First is the echoing chorus, with the title words foregrounded in tenor and backgrounded, a measure later, an octave lower. The other is one line: "My dog Sam eats purple flowers." Apart from the silliness, it evokes one vivid image from Blish's A Life for the Stars, when Chris is watching Scranton prepare to take off and his brother's dog suddenly appears in a clump of flowers. (What happens afterward is very sad, but that scene still pleases me.)

What I Like (Peace Out): "Sweet Cherry Wine". A protest song about peace, leavened with a somewhat heterodox Christianity. (The title's reference seems to be sacramental.)

What I Like (Hail Amon-Ra): "Ball of Fire". This one has religious tones, too, this time of a rather undeveloped paganism. (Not that one expects nuance....) Very energetic.

Overall: This is a two-disc set, with thirty songs. The majority of them are pretty stock teen angst pieces - "I Think We're Alone Now", "Run, Run, Baby, Run", "(I'm) Taken" - but the music is generally lush, which is a point in its favor. The WILs are the standouts for me, but I like a lot of this album.
stoutfellow: Joker (Joker)
One of the things the break supplied was time to finish Reamde; I'll probably do at least a mini-review later this week. I then went on to Steven Utley's The 400 Million Year Itch; it's a collection of short stories, based on the idea of a space-time anomaly giving limited access to a point near the boundary between the Silurian and the Devonian. Life was just beginning to spread onto the land at that point; land plants reached only a short distance - measurable in feet - from the ocean, and didn't even have roots yet. Utley's focus is on people: what kind of people would have their lives affected by this discovery, and how? It's far closer to mainstream fiction than to SF, but for that one big maguffin. I enjoyed it; I understand that there's a second volume in the same timeline, which I'll probably look for.

I've run out of unread F/SF for the moment, so I'm diving into Joseph Conrad's Nostromo now. I approach Conrad a little warily these days, ever since I saw Chinua Achebe dissect a scene from Heart of Darkness as seen through African eyes. Still, he's undeniably a great writer, and I look forward to the read.

I'm not making much progress with Les Miz as yet; I'm still bogged down in the early going, about the bishop who was later to be Valjean's benefactor. I hope to go faster when summer comes, since I won't be teaching.

Profile

stoutfellow: Joker (Default)
stoutfellow

April 2020

S M T W T F S
    1 2 34
5 6 789 1011
12 13 14 1516 17 18
19202122232425
2627282930  

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 6th, 2025 01:47 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios