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Farming, Art, Music, Life, and Fish |
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Spring In The Country |
April 26, 2008 10:18am |
Settling back in here on the farm after visiting some of my dear beast friends for two weeks this month in Western NORTH CAROLINA. what a terrific trip! Such beautiful country there. It truly is one of the more beautiful places I've been to in the USA. Did some lovely hiking, camping and playing music and singing. Worked on clearing areas of their newly-acquired and still somewhat overgrown property, and dug some garden beds. Steep mountains! Deep hollers! Hmmmm, I could totally live there, very nice indeed.
Current reading list for April: for the airport I brought "The Golden Apples Of The Sun"/Ray Bradbury, re-reading after probably 30 or so years, and I enjoyed it much more than some of his other work that I'd re-read in the last decade. VERY nice collection of stories, and many of them had no fantasy or SF elements at all, just wonderful little mood/emotion/character pieces. This is the book that reprinted his famous "The Lighthouse" tale (one of the best in the book)which was the nominal source for the cool Ray Harryhausen film "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms", although the story is an awful lot more moving than the movie!
Also took along: An obligatory ALAN MOORE hardbound comic book collection: "Smax", a very very funny offshoot/sequel to his "Top 10" comic series, from around 2001 or so, it was a bit too soon after the last time I re-read this series, but I'd just gone through all of the TOP 10 stories again and I wanted some graphic novel material for the airplane and airport. I'm a HUGE fan of Alan Moore and enjoy everything of his. Speaking of which- I just re-read "THE WATCHMEN" after more than ten years, and was re-impressed with how well done it was. It has dated well, although I'm sure some of it would probably make Alan cringe, as he grew a lot as a writer since it was first published back in 1986-87. Wow, it was so long ago that I read that novel for the first time, and what an impression it made back then. The mid-to-late '80's was a fantastic time for new style comics.
And lastly from my "travel reading": "LOWLIFE" / Luc Sante. Recommended.
A study of Manhattan from 1840-1919. Once again a re-read. It's huge so I didn't really get through it on this trip and it's currently put aside while I read library books checked-out since I got back:
FOXFIRE volume 2, since my friend in North Carolina had acquired a set of the Foxfire books and as I browsed them I realized that I needed to read a bunch of stuff in them---I'd always kind of ignored them over the years, but no matter, as they fit my life much better NOW, than they would have before.
Also some vintage comic-book reprint indulgences, since I'm a historian of that stuff: "The SPIRIT Archives, vol. 12"/Will Eisner, I have always dug anything Eisner, and bought loads of reprint magazines of his stuff in the 1970's and through the '80's, however I wish that I'd been able to save them all, as DC COMICS did terrible job on these reprint editions! And they have the nerve to brag about the clarity of the new reprints! I remember how sharp and terrific his art looked in the old black-and-white editions that I used to have, and I can't understand why their editions are always so muddy. Such a shame! It's nice to have them all in order and in color and hard cover, but I've seen this over and over with Marvel and DC-- their expensive color reprint books look terrible! All of the fine line definition is gone! There are a few exceptions--I have a very nice two-volume set of JACK KIRBY's "Challengers Of The Unknown" stories (HIGHLY recommended), that DC put out years ago, and those are nice and sharp; but that's the exception. I would love to get more of their books, such as the SPECTRE one--he's so cool, but not if they look like hell.
Also discovered that my library had a book that I almost bought back in San Francisco on two occasions: "The Golden Age Of DC Comics-365 Days" / Les Daniels/Chip Kidd. I've collected a lot of Chip Kidd's comic-book related work over the years, but when I flipped through this in the store, I wasn't impressed; however sitting down and really going through it it is a lot of fun to see such nice reproductions of so many obscure 1937-to-1955 comic book images. I wish now that I had bought one, as I'll want to got through it again sometime...maybe a used one'll turn up. My only caveat on this one- Geoff Spear's photography, usually first-rate, on this project he seems to have only used ONE light fixture to shoot his images by, and there's a shadowy area on almost every shot! I don't understand why he didn't use two sources, like is normally done-- I like the "raking light" effect produced by one strong source (which I think was the idea), but he needed some fill lighting, as there is far too much dark area on many shots--even when they're cropped down heavily! It may have had something to do with the fact they were in DC's cramped vaults and he didn't want to lug too much gear. At least this volume does demonstrate yet AGAIN how much better vintage comic book and newspaper material looks when simply shot from the originals as opposed to the horrid "restorations" that so many companies do, and spoil the look of the artwork entirely.
Can you tell that I'm a geek about this stuff yet-?? LOL
I also read Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas" for the first time, at my friend's house in NC. I had showed them the Terry Gilliam film version, and since she had a copy of the book, I was curious to see how similar they were. Well, good grief, they practically took the text of the novel AS the screenplay! It was one of the closest transfers I've ever seen! Very minimal adaptation. And I loved the book, I'd never gotten around to Thompson's writings yet, and now am an instant fan.
I'm tickled to see spring coming on here in Missouri, they had a lead on us in North Carolina, and thank goodness it's leafing out here nicely now. I just spent several days rebuilding our front screen-porch here, which had been trashed by a wild untrained dawg that my mom had been stuck with temporarily a year and a half ago, he had run through a bunch of screens, plus there was some rotting lumber to replace. Perfect setup---some kind of light carpentry, not too tough, basically a fun project, and completed just in time for some warm porch-sitting weather- yay!
Still too wet to mow the lawn or do much garden work, though. Just as well, in a way, as I still have a portrait-commission to finish up, plus I'm still trying to craft a piece of music that Mr Man in New York will bite on and hopefully use; I did one already, it didn't satisfy, and now I've prepped another one- but it will require many hours of editing to put it together on the laptop, I did some interesting mandolin recording for it, and wrote a couple of nice bass lines, so I hope it'll be swell. Anyhoo-- I have inside-work to get done!
The Ticks are on the march---I got eaten alive while working on the porch out in the front yard. ICK! This is SUCH a drawback with living in Missouri, in this part of the country--the TICK PLAGUE. It's SO much worse than when I grew up here in the 70's. That was ONE nice thing about living in California: I could walk through the grass barefoot and not be attacked by chiggers and ticks and end up looking like a raspberry.
Until next time,
Cheers
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