Author: Alan

New Reads?

For 2004, I know I need some new blogs to read. Right now my reads generally and quite happily fall into these categories:

  • People I have met or know people I have met;
  • People who are yapping about blogs and how they are the future and will have us all eating food from tubes someday undefined but surely soon;
  • People with a connection to Kingston, Atlantic Canada or Scotland;
  • People who have linked to me;
  • People talking about food and drink.

I know I do not want to read blogs mainly about my job – law – as the lawyers who write blogs mainly about law tend to be the lawyers you drift away from at gatherings of lawyers. I do not want to read blogs about US politics as they have that thick veneer about “liberal” and “right” that defies either comprehension or perhaps only extra-territorial translation. Are there gems out there based on other themes? I am really pleased how Switching to Glide has begun to develop from an idea – are there other music based group blogs, for example?

And how do you find new reading?

Rocket Lord of the Rings

Happy kids asleep. A few good feeds in jammies, then new clothes. Choral music on CBC radio all day. Missed the Queen… but, really, she missed me as well, didn’t she.    It has been unusually warm here and Saturday may hit a sunny ten above. I don’t miss the snow – only wish I had a patch of garlic growing in this weather. 

With a bit of an achy cold starting I felt little compulsion to move off the couch despite Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 two hour cartoon of Lord of the Rings being on the TV. I saw it when it first came out at the Centennial Twin Cinemas in downtown Truro when I was in grade 10, the scene of many of my Friday nights in those years.     I had read the Tolkien books when I was about 12 and, although I never took to playing/worshiping Dungeons and Dragons and all the other pre-Internet outlets for nerdy fantasty geeks, I was not then utterly offended by the movie. I do recall, though, that hopes were high in the era of Close Encounters and Star Wars – and that we expected something new and important. For the first moments, we thought that the cartooning was imaginative. Soon it was repetitive. Then tedious. The Orcs are creepy if you think the bad guys – Cylons? – in Battlestar Galactica were as well. This review captures the disappointment. Watching it tonight it strikes me that it certainly owes a lot to the genre of Spiderman and Rocket Robin Hood, without, though, the benefit of the voices of Paul Soles and other Wayne and Shuster regulars but, sadly, with the tell tale repetition of short scenes over differing backgrounds a few minutes apart. The ending is the best crap bit:

The orchestra now begins playing Christmas music as Gandalf rides Shadowfax through the Orcs, slaying at will. He begins killing them in hideous detail, and in gruesome slow motion at that. Two Orcs fall dead over the camera, the backs of their heads spraying blood. What the hell! Since they’ve already gone this far, they may as well make Lord of the Rings into a slasher flick too! Why not just give Gandalf a chainsaw and be done with it?

Watching tonight, I remembered this last bit from when I was 16, how creepy the choice of image compared to the accompanying stirring-to-a-private-schoolboy music, how at that age I believed (as English teachers told you) that story endings with slo-mo mass slaughter was really bad art… as opposed to now – since Columbine – when it is also cause for preventative arrest.

Why would Bravo show this on Christmas night? It is so embarrassingly bad  it defies camp. It is not even a welcome antidote even to a fifth hour of the Kings College Boys choir singing “Once in Royal David’s City”. And, yet, I watched it again. Christ was born to give me a day off to watch Bakshi.

Signs of Christmas

Well it is time for some kind of obligatory post for Yule from GX40 HQ. Signs of the season seen today:

  • LCBO line ups and emptying shelves. Panicy staff asking who had driven to the Bath and Gan stores looking for fluidy back-up.  Fortunately the Walnut Brown oloroso was there for grannie;
  • The three year old boy of the house getting seriously freaked out out over the Santa and naugthy thing. He is convinced he is off the list. I am close to letting him know that the whole thing is a fraud put on by the eastern corporate establishment;
  • Quiet roads first thing. Largely a half day in K’town so cruising about for last minute things listening to Guitar Picking Martyrs was quite pleasant – skip “Broken Fuckin’ Heart” (track 5) if the kiddies are in the back row;
  • Although Kingston is a military town and a university town like Halifax, the bars are dead. Must be a difference between army and navy. Co-worker happy happy joy joy pint o’ Guinness was in an echo chamber with, oddly, M. Pied Lourd for a bartender.
  • Fox Sport World Canada once again has that weird Egyptian indoor soccer championship – the Egypt International Futsal Tournament – on TV all through the dark days of mid-noon the 24th to the dawn of the 27th. Check here for soccer listings to get you through the entire bleak mid-winter.

So there you go. Happy Christmas to all you readers, to those who have done something worth writing about and to my favorite bloggers to the right – with special best wishes to the silverorange guys for providing the juice and space and the guys at Switching to Glide for running with that idea.