Words are inadequate

[David Lynch] was a boomer who made his name by being weird and transgressive, and instead of using that as a license to behave like an asshole at all times, he was fundamentally full of joy and a profound love of his craft. He wasn't afraid of being earnest or uncool, of looking at the brokenness of the world and sitting with your sadness about it. And he felt no obligation to explain himself or suit his work to any tastes, high or low."
--Abigail Nussbaum, "Lynch"

In the late nineties, Jonathan had the entire run of Twin Peaks on VHS, and he and I watched it over the course of a few months. It's stuck with me in a way that a lot of what I watched in college didn't. Slow, meandering, confusing, incredibly visual: the only thing I'd seen even vaguely like it before was 2001. And Twin Peaks had a much broader range of human experiences and emotions to support and magnify its surreality and paranormality. I'm not sure I'd rewatch it; I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anyone else. But it certainly changed me.

Around the same time I watched Blue Velvet and Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway (at least twice), and understood more or less none of them. With Lost Highway at least I quite enjoyed being swept away in the strangeness of it all. I never got around to seeing Mulholland Falls, or the Twin Peaks revival series. A few years ago I watched about half of Dune but stalled out after the massacre. Mostly I've enjoyed the existence of David Lynch, for being so very much who he is, and having such a strong sense of artistic (and personal?) vision.

So it goes.

INTERVIEWER: Elaborate on that.
DAVID LYNCH: No.

Prison Break is five[1] seasons of low-quality pulp television. I am watching it because a) Media Of Little Brain is apparently what I'm after and b) it stars Wentworth Miller, whose Leonard Snart / Captain Cold was hands-down the best thing about season 1 of Legends of Tomorrow and who has not been in nearly enough other stuff.

[1] Two full-length seasons, one half-length presumably due to the 2008 writers strike, a fourth full-length, a finale movie, and then a half-length fifth season a decade later. Also I have only seen up til nearly the end of the second season, so maybe it improves.

What I didn't realise is that starting in season 2 they added William Fichtner to the cast. Fichtner is among my favourite character actors, for no reason that I can pinpoint other than "we share a birthday". Season 2 is "The Fugitive" so they needed someone to play Tommy Lee Jones to Miller et al's Harrison Ford, and Fichtner delivers. It's just fun watching him put pieces together, and start to crack under the strain of the overly complicated conspiracy. (His assistant Barbara Eve Harris and his superior/antagonist Reggie Lee are also great.)

I suspect that later seasons will collapse under their own ridiculousness, but so far I'm enjoying the ride.

As alluded yesterday, there have been books.

What are you reading right now?

Finally getting back into the ebook of Moving Pictures. What I actually want to be reading is either The Ten Thousand Doors Of January (Harrow) or The Poppy War (Kuang), because I have fancy SubPress editions of both waiting for me. But I'm reluctant to take those to work with me, so they await a stretch of time when I'll be Not Working for a bit. Maybe this weekend.

Anyway, Moving Pictures is a bit of a slog, which surprises me. If you had told twelve-year-old me that there was a forty-plus-book fantasy series that was more like a bunch of interlocking serieses, as funny and readable as Douglas Adams but with actual plots, but the subseries I'd like least was the one about all the wizards, well. I would have thought you were entirely out to lunch.

What did you just finish reading?

Mm. First reread of Ann Leckie's Ancillary books. Still excellent. These prefigure Murderbot in some ways, which I had forgotten but which I greatly appreciate. Also the line "We're not cousins anymore" late in Ancillary Mercy remains the funniest line on the funniest page of anything I have read in quite some time. (I note with some excitement that Leckie has a new Radch book out next year, heavily featuring a Presger translator.)

Also read the first two of Walter Jon Williams's new space opera trilogy, sequel to his previous excellent Dread Empire's Fall trilogy. I outsource my commentary to paraphrasing Marissa Lingen, who said of the first "it's more of the same, space battles and space empire politics, it's still good but start with the first trilogy," and of the second "it's MORE OF THE SAME, stupid awful interpersonal stuff with the leads hooking up and breaking up, and i may be done with it now." I note that she hasn't reviewed the third, which came out a month or two ago.

And reread Gibson's The Peripheral and read Agency, which ... these are weird, but I like them. In both roughly the first third is sort of orientation, getting you used to the world(s) of the novel, and then most of the rest is ... nothing really happens, but you get a lot of nice character and worldbuilding and dialogue moments, and then in like the last thirty pages there is suddenly PLOT! and then it's over. Spook Country did this as well. It is very much not my normal reading mode. And Gibson's characters are... they're sort of emotionally muted, which contributes to the sense of not much really happening. I'm not describing this well at all. I think I liked them? Keeping them around, at the very least.

What do you think you'll read next?

Maybe 10K Doors or Poppy War. Maybe Provenance, the sequel to the Ancillary books. Maybe the third of WJW's space opera books, it's on the shelf and then I can be done with them. (They /are/ well-written and fast-paced and well-plotted, it's just the relationship between the two leads that grinds my teeth.) Maybe whatever the next Discworld is.

---

And, from ironymaiden, the return of the Five Questions meme. Comment and ask and I'll ask you five questions of your own.

1. What has been the biggest surprise about life with Mr. Tuppert?

It's the sitting-on-shins thing. The way he's not hugely a People Cat is a bit of a surprise, and not being able to tempt him up onto the couch to sit next to me is a bit of a disappointment, but. Starting from the very first night he was here, when I get into bed he comes up on the bed with me, and he'll usually come up for a few scritches first. Then it's like a switch gets thrown in his tiny cat-brain, and he tries to position himself lengthwise on top of my shin, and kneads at the blanket and makes meowy-growly noises of discontent that he can't get situated comfortably there. This goes on for several minutes, usually until I shift a bit at the right time or in the right way to shake him out of it, and he'll either get comfortable on my feet or curl up next to them.

2. What did you think of the "bonus episode" of Sandman?

So, this is two questions, or maybe three. The "bonus episode" presentation in itself is kinda weird, though it makes sense: may as well at least try to tell the stories in something like the original order, and they want to seed 'Calliope' early to set up for the chain that leads to The Kindly Ones. So why not goose numbers with a bonus episode? Plus, they've already done the Hob Gadling story, and the Element Girl story is unfilmable without using DC's cosmos (and honestly skippable anyway), so why not give us all of Dream Country in its original place? Works for me.

'Dream of a Thousand Cats' was a basically perfect adaptation with a stellar voice cast. A+, no notes. The story itself is slight but fun.

I am perhaps overly sensitive to stories that revolve around sexual assault, so I hated 'Calliope' on my recent reread. I disliked it much less onscreen. And it's always nice to see Arthur Darvill getting work, and Derek Jacobi too.

3. What's your current favorite boardgame and why?

With the caveat that I've only played it once in the last year-plus, and that's not too likely to change before April: Sidereal Confluence. I doubt I can improve on what I wrote awhile ago:

SidCon is a trading game where the point isn't to make a few good (ie, lopsided-in-your-favour) trades, it's to make as many trades as possible. Everyone has a pile of Stuff, and everyone needs some Stuff to run their machines, but no one has the kinds of Stuff they need. So there's a mad flurry of exchanges and negotiations, and the more of those exchanges and negotiations you can be a part of the better off you are. Even if you're not technically "gaining" anything, you're getting more Stuff that you can actually use. Now add on to that what they call "variable player powers," where each player can break certain rules in certain extreme ways. The end result is an awful lot of busy chaotic noisy fun.

It is extremely interactive, it is surprisingly smooth-playing with low rules overhead despite the high emergent complexity, and it plays in under three hours. I adore it. I've only played with a full nine-player contingent once, and that was under highly nonoptimal conditions: multiple brand-new players that I had to hand-hold for the first couple of rounds, a loud room at a convention, a table setup that made it difficult for everyone to talk to everyone else. It was still a top boardgaming experience.

4. Still working through Discworld? What's your current favorite?

I am, but slowly. Partly I've been reading physical books instead of ebooks; partly I'm just finding Moving Pictures to be slower going. My favourite is definitely Pyramids, though I've a soft spot for Wyrd Sisters, and Mort is also wonderful.

5. What food of your childhood is unobtainable where you live now, and is that a good or bad thing?

Growing up an Army brat means I don't really have food 'of my childhood,' other than the stuff Mom made on the regular, and most if not all of that is replicable. Closest thing would be good Memphis-style barbecue, which we had whenever we went to see grandparents: both sets lived an hour and a half out of Memphis (different directions). That lack is unquestionably a Bad Thing. There's at least one okay barbecue joint in the Lower Mainland but it's not the same.

Twenty years ago, when prompted to "name an album that is perfect all the way through, no filler," I immediately responded "Songs for Drella."

I just listened to it for the first time in *mumble* years. I vaguely remembered it as being kind of slow and dragging in bits, and maybe not entirely to my taste anymore.

Wrong. It holds up.

---

This is a rock group called the Velvet Underground
We show movies on them, do you like their sound?

I only know Todd Haynes as the director of I'm Not There. I've not seen this but I am told it's sort of a biopic of Bob Dylan, with multiple actors, including Cate Blanchett, playing Dylan. So I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that he made a documentary on the Velvet Underground.

Erin and I watched it last week. It's good, I think. Lots of neat split-screening, sometimes with the sound of a recorded interview rolling (sometimes from the sixties, sometimes contemporary) and a Warhol movie portrait of the speaker on one side of the screen.

I'm a John Cale fan from way back and got into the Velvets as a result of that, so there weren't a whole bunch of surprises. The doc spends a lot of time on Cale and on Lou Reed, where they came from, how they got together, how they made that first amazing album as part of Andy Warhol's Factory. It's got less to say about White Light/White Heat, and after Reed fired Cale even less to say about the last two albums as the Velvets turned into The Lou Reed Backing Band. But, you know, the Warhol and Cale stuff is what I'm interested in, and that was well done and neat.

I came into this with a belief that Lou Reed was an egomanic asshole, and I was not disabused of this notion.

---

The trouble with personalities, they're too wrapped up in style
It's too personal, they're in love with their own guile

After Andy died, Lou Reed and John Cale collaborated (their first collaboration since White Light/White Heat) on a 1990 album called Songs For Drella, subtitled A Fiction. It's sort of a bio of Andy in bits and pieces, and sort of Lou and John processing their grief and anger and pain at Andy. It's a bare-bones production: Lou, John, Lou's guitar, John's piano and occasionally viola.

There exists a video for the album, which I guess is a concert film; it was released on VHS and is available here on Youtube. The description reads in part "Cale is fantastic on keyboards and viola and for once Reed actually sings and plays well," which is accurate.

I dunno. I don't know how to talk about music, even less than I know how to talk about books or movies. It works for me. It is my favourite John Cale album, narrowly edging out his other 1990 collaboration, Wrong Way Up with Brian Eno. I don't listen to it often but it's maybe more effective for that.

Lou, apparently, remained an egomanic asshole and control freak. He and John kept civil long enough to do the Velvet Underground reunion concert in 1993, and then never worked together again.

---

It's a Czechoslovakian custom my mother passed on to me
The way to make friends, Andy, is to invite them in for tea

Twenty-five years ago this past summer, Steph and I showed up late to the movie theatre in Dupont Circle. We clumsily made our way past seated moviegoers to our seats, where I proceeded to explode a packet of Reese's Pieces all over the place. We were there to see Basquiat, because it had David Bowie playing Andy Warhol, and we came in in the middle of the "suicide hotline" montage, so we had basically no idea what was going on.

That movie... that movie. It is probably not, objectively, a good movie; it's certainly not an accurate depiction of Jean-Michel Basquiat's life. But it's still compelling. It's why I started following Jeffrey Wright and Claire Forlani, it got me interested in Warhol. And the soundtrack... the last track was Cale's cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," which was enough to send me down the John Cale rabbit hole.

He's been prolific since leaving the Velvets but his stuff tends to be obscure and go in and out of print. So it was another few years before I tracked down a copy of Songs For Drella.

Listening to the album again just feels like the late nineties, living in a rundown four-bedroom apartment with Mandy and Justin and Kym later replaced by Vond, next door to Emily who basically never slept at her place. Late nights with Jonathan and Stephen, role-playing games with whoever run by whoever. Road trips to DC or Origins, a box of CDs to hand, making other people listen to Cale's "Pablo Picasso" or "Heartbreak Hotel" (yes). And sometimes, just sometimes, putting on "Songs for Drella" and listening to it all the way through.

I'm not that guy anymore, and I'm mostly glad for that, but sometimes he had really good taste.

I am not sure who it was who got me started on The Strange Case of the Starship Iris ... ah, of course, it was skygiants, with this review. Which review I can enthusiastically second all of except that my personal favourite character is not the laid-back trans linguist but the exceedingly uptight and stressed-out sharpshooter who doesn't show up until fairly late. It is TOTALLY IRRELEVANT that she sounds a lot like Peridot from Steven Universe, which makes me think of Sarah.

Anyway, while I adored the framing device and the way it slowly becomes central to the plot of season 1, and am enjoying S2 while not feeling quite as compelled about it (good thing too, since I am now almost caught up and the season's not over), I am so far most entranced by episode 2.05.25, "Cultural Enrichment," a filler ep devoted to four of the cast watching/rewatching an episode of their favourite alien soap opera, and frequently pausing to discuss translation issues and weird cultural things. It's just fun, is all. Turns out to be a way I enjoy watching/analysing things, and it's neat to see other people doing that too.

---

In other news, I got my second shot on Saturday. This one was about as bad as a flu shot, maybe worse: I spent much of Sunday napping or dozing because doing anything at all was Just Too Much. But at least that's done, and maybe the Gathering etc will happen after all.

At this point I feel like I've plateaued, hard, on viola. It's possible that a round of actual lessons would help but I also may just be at the limit of my ability. Which is okay; I can keep up well enough with the fiddle group, and generally not embarrass myself too badly when other people are listening. But it does mean that I might be better served looking in another direction, musically.

Early last month I sold my bass and giant amp, so at least I won't have to move them again. Then I spent a week or two regretting that and bought a different bass when I was down in Vancouver a couple weekends ago. It's a 'short-scale,' which means it's closer to normal-human scale and I don't have to distort my left hand quite so far to play it, and it feels like my hand fits better around the neck in general. Will see whether I go anywhere with it.

Earlier today I had actual Inspiration for a story I want to write. I do not think I am at all the right person to write it but I don't think anyone else has bothered to, so maybe I will.

I dunno. May seems to have been a pretty bad month for me, for various reasons. Hoping the summer can turn that around.

The water in this apartment was terrible when I moved in. It was hard enough that the minerals in the water would bind to the tea and create this weird skin on top. That didn't taste bad but it looked really unpleasant and was hard to clean. So I got in the habit of using self-made teabags and having tea one (large) mug at a time.

Over the summer they did something to the water system and it's ... less bad. I'm still using a Brita but I no longer feel like it's absolutely required. And the tea doesn't skin over anymore. I'm still mostly making tea by the mug, though. Habits.

This morning I made myself a pot of Sikkim, a tea that's been my favourite since I picked it up on a lark from the Teavana in Tysons Corner. I'm slowly drinking it out of a small but gorgeous mug that Ellen gave me when Erin and I visited her on the island in 2019.

It's been a cold week here, down below -30 most nights. My heaters have been working overtime to keep up with the drafty windows, and I've been actually using both the quilts on the bed. I'm generally happy down to around -10 and fine at -20; much below that and I get cranky. Should be warming up later this week anyway. And it's plenty bright outside, which helps.

I'm watching Arrow, which is mostly enjoyable as a spine story for Flash and Legends... but in that sense it definitely is enjoyable. It weaves a complex network of character relationships, mostly for plot purposes but often enough there are interesting interactions there. It's nice to have this larger fictional world to immerse myself in.

Been cooking again, partly because running the stove / oven keeps the apartment a bit warmer. It's good to be back into feeding myself actual food. Later today I'll bake a couple loaves of sweetbread, and tomorrow breakfast shall be french toast.

I picked up the viola again this week as well, first time since July. I am of course incredibly out of practise but at least I know how to fix that. If it turns out to be something I stick with, I'm considering getting a set of octave strings, to make it sound like a cello, because I think that would be neat. Less useful for fiddle tunes, though.

Unrelated to any of the above: I wish the USPS were less hooped, but I've been wishing that for a decade now. Here's hoping last fall's damage is serious enough that fixing it will be something of a priority. (I also wish Canada Post were in better shape, but I don't know enough to even begin to speculate as to either causes or solutions there. Beyond the obvious "throw more money at it," of course.)

I appreciate that Hibernia, the Latin name for Ireland, means "Winterland," and that it shares a root with "hibernate." Dublin's at about the same latitude I am, too. I feel like I'm hibernating, this winter. This past year, I guess. Curious as to what spring will bring.

Today:

• Made Portuguese sweet bread, including making one loaf a cinnamon-swirl (worked okay; both loaves slightly overproofed)
  
• Ate three real meals (pancakes, leftover tenderloin with salad, parmelet with sweetbread toast)
  
• Exerbiked, to the Gravity Falls S1 finale (I do not particularly recommend this show, but it's diverting and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny)
  
• Took out several months of recycling
  
• Successfully plugged laptop into television, for ease of watching things
  
• Went for a brief walk down by the lake
  
• Oh yeah, also worked

To do this evening:

• Dishes
  
• Finish reading Seaward
  
• Maybe make overnight cinnamon rolls for breakfast?
  
• Maybe start watching the BBC Strange & Norrell?
  
• Lights out by eleven

On the one hand, "social distancing" / "self-quarantine" isn't that much different from how I live my life three weeks out of four. Erin and I are functionally quarantining as a unit despite maintaining separate households, but apart from that my encounters with human beings closer than three feet are limited to the grocery store anyhow. Yoga's out for the foreseeable; that makes me sad, but I can exerbike and watch Kipo and the Wonderbeasts, or whatever once I run out of Kipo (got lots of good suggestions both here and on the Book of Face). I have a sufficiency of stuff to cook, and stuff to bake. I sometimes talk to people online.

On the other hand... that one week out of four was pretty important to my mental health and well-being, turns out, as were the semiregular semiannual distant-sweetheart visits.

Bah. Gonna be a rough spring all around.

What are you reading now?

Rereading Ha'penny by Jo Walton, because I decided that what I needed to distract me was a trip through an alt-history midcentury fascist England. I may yet regret this by the end of the book. I'm enjoying it thus far, though, and I have basically no memory of the ending (except for Viola's fate) so it's functionally a first read. As I recall I got irritated with the third book for its deus-ex-machina in the form of the Royals; will see if that holds up, I guess.

What did you just finish reading?

First reread of The Sorcerer's House by Gene Wolfe. What an odd book. It's nominally set present-day (well, 2010) but apart from a few references to email and cell phones it would feel more at home in, say, the late seventies. It's an enjoyable puzzle-box, and I'm sure there's more to it than I think, despite my feeling of smugness at having picked up on one of the key mysteries (the author of the last letter).

What do you think you'll read next?

Jeez, I don't know. Maybe Half A Crown, maybe A Mist Of Grit And Splinters, maybe something completely different. I seem to have spent last week binging on ebook sales so it's not like I'm starved for choice.

We stalled out on Doctor Who about halfway though S5 because Steven Moffat, or more specifically because Amy wanting to jump the Doctor gets old real fast, as does Rory being annoying and useless. I keep meaning to go back and pick it up again but haven't worked out how to watch all of them (my preference) while saving the good ones to watch with Erin.

Ranking Companions is a fool's game but I /think/ I liked Donna very very slightly more than Martha, and Martha very slightly more than Rose. I'm not unhappy with any of them, though.

That's not what this is about.

I have seen Good Omens, and it was pretty good but not perfect. Which is much less than I can say for Michael Sheen and David Tennant's transcendent performances as Aziraphale and Crowley.

That is not what this is about.

This is about the fact that there exists a recording of a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Much Ado About Nothing, my favourite of the comedies and possibly of the plays as a whole. (I imprinted on the Branagh version; Joss Whedon's film is inferior to Branagh's in every way except for Nathan Fillion's Dogberry.) This one has Tennant as Benedick and ... wait for it ...

CATHERINE TATE AS BEATRICE.

First half, and second half.

I am /so/ looking forward to this.

(h/t rydra_wong)

I have acquired a bed, my first new bed in, well, ever. Bought a mattress and boxspring from a place near work that delivered them, and went out to Abbotsford to buy a nice-looking new-to-me wood-and-iron bedframe. It's a touch large for the room it's in, which is likely to be true as long as I'm in a Vancouver apartment. But it's not a modern solid headboard, which I hate, and it looks nice with Pop Shackelford's dresser and bedside table. And the mattress is pretty comfy.

Been spending a stupendous amount of money on getting the household up to speed. I think it's more or less there at this point. Furnishing a kitchen can get expensive, I tell you what, and I'm deliberately staying away from (most of) the less-useful kitchen gadgetry. But one needs knives and pots and cooking implements and and and...

And I have a rescue plant. It was a buck at Canadian Tire. Apparently it likes indirect light and not being watered for a couple of weeks at a time, which ought to work out pretty well all around.

---

Erin came down last weekend for a day or so, which was lovely, and then we (I) drove her new-to-her car north through a blinding snowstorm. I have never had the experience of not being able to see the road in front of me while driving, which happened for several seconds any time someone passed me in either direction. I can't say as I much care for it. Or for highway driving at 50 kph.

On Sunday the falling snow had all but stopped, but there were plenty of piles on the shoulder and slick spots on the highway. We passed a section where cars had been deliberately driving into a ditch the night before to avoid an accident in the road, and said "Yep, there's some tire tracks on the shoulder and a couple bits of car," and the next thing I knew I was headed into the ditch myself. Near as I can tell I drifted just a bit into the deep snow on the shoulder, and that pulled me into the rest of it, and there we were. Still drivable but no way to drive out of a metre of snow, so we waited a couple hours for BCAA to send a tow truck, and were fine if a bit shaken.

Other than that, we started watching Star Trek (the original). I'm finding it a curious and enjoyable mix of "of its time" (visuals, styling, occasionally the minor characters) and just plain good. Pretty sure most of my Trek knowledge comes from the first five movies and cultural osmosis. Somehow SF TV never really made an impact on me when I was a kid. I'm sure I've seen episodes but the only one I can recall at all is "Amok Time."

---

And now I'm home again, with a list of things I'd like to take care of this week and some uncertainty as to how motivated I'll be to do any of them. We shall see.