The Fredösphere

Starship Sofa is my favorite podcast.  Two blokes from northern England, Tony C. Smith and Ciaran O'Carrol, wing it on the subject of one sci-fi author each week.  Their unscripted approach (and these guys blaze new trails in unscripted--wow, are they unscripted) makes commercial radio, or the podcasts that emulate it, seem clotted and pompous by comparison.

Because I was an early, vocal fan, and for who-knows what other reasons, Tony and Ciaran have adopted me.  They read every email I send them on the podcast.  Although they haven't yet asked me to don a giant chicken suit (probably because this is an audio cast, not video) they do seem to view me as some kind of mascot.

It is the Starship Sofa (hereafter, SSS) podcast that is the outlet for my new venture in sci-fi authorship.  I have recorded myself reading my second story, Sofa God, and it will be included in a future SSS podcast.  I'm working on writing a bit of incidental music to accompany the reading.  This experience confirms what I found earlier:  writing music is laborious and frustrating; writing prose is easy.  Easy.

There's no point publishing Sofa God here on this website, since the story is merely one extended inside joke, written for fans of the SSS podcast.  My first story, however, is of general interest, and I'm trying to decide if I should publish it is sections, within blog posts, or perhaps record it with incidental music or even a mini-sound track, and post it here or distribute it as a free podcast.  In any even, I don't see that I have a chance selling it to any sci-fi magazine, because of its length and not-quite-sci-fi subject matter, but I'm not disappointed with it as a first attempt.  (This is the Emperor Augustus In The 21st Century story I mentioned before.)  It's titled In the Shape of a Man.  Anyone who wants to read and critique it can get it in a pdf file by emailing me.  (Lynn?  Are you interested?)

I'm working now on my first "real" story, the test of whether I'm wasting my time by writing sci-fi.  It's an alien abduction story involving a kid named Israel... well, never mind for now what his last name is.  It's controversial.  The wifeösphere has ordered me to change it.  Negotiations are at a delicate stage at the moment.  I'll get back to you.

Labels: sci-fi

Via Cosh, it's the Greatest Classical CD Covers Ever.  Two by two, hands of blue!

Yesterday we had an installation service for the new pastor of the campus chapel.  With all those guest pastors present, and with each pastor wanting to top the others with "brief comments" and "sermonettes," installing a pastor can take a long time, although it ends up taking about 54 hours less time than installing any piece of hardware on a computer running Windows Vista.  (We didn't have to call a help line even once during the service.)

Anyway, my choir achieved one of my life goals by singing Bruckner's Inveni David, for men's choir accompanied by trombone choir.  The first tenor part includes several high B-flats, some of them soft, so to sing that part I brought in my old friend Karl Schmidt, the guy with the ethnically pure name (something that all the people on earth named Frederic Gero Himebaugh are bound to envy).  Karl is the tenor you hear in the quartet that recorded my Superstitious Ghost.

I had a great time with the Bruckner, and other people seemed to enjoy it.  As usual, the large ensemble made for administrative complications, and I was in a foul mood all week as the worries gnawed at me.  I was well to worry, but we made some last-minute adjustments to cover for a missing member, and pulled it off fine.  Still.  I hate the administrative work.  Bottom line:  performing is always almost not worth it.

Labels: Choral

My darling, 5-year-old Maharincess is learning to read and write, and naturally revels in her growing mastery.  I found this piece art she made, and wondered at the mysterious, yet probably profound message upon it:

Yes, rosepist.  I haven't probed her mind to learn what rosepist means, not wanting to embarrass her.  I will leave that job for others.  In fact, I can imagine a time, many years in the future, when my daughter has come to the end of her life.  She will be filthy rich.  She will be utterly isolated, completely estranged from all her friends and family members. She will be known as "Citizen Maharincess."  She will be ensconced in a sprawling mansion with a name like "Physical," or "Grease," or perhaps it will be named after yet another one of Olivia Newton John's albums.  Just before her tragic death, a nurse will overhear her whisper one last, ambiguous word:

R O S E P I S T

and an army of journalists will be dispatched on a vain mission to learn the meaning of her final utterance.

Labels: fun

When nuns are outlawed, only outlaws will become nuns.

This link is via Mystic Chords, an excellent website I should have mentioned earlier, which obsesses over classical music, right-wing politics, and the manifest innocence of Barry Bonds.  (If the Mystic Chords link is down, keep trying; I'm sure it's correct.)

Also:  robot infestation!

Labels: fun

Minnesota Public Radio caught Chanticleer on video asking the eternal question, and my friend Alan sent me the link.  Don't overlook the other great performances on video.

Labels: VideoClip, vocal

I'm not angry, I'm hurt.  The Washington Post ran an entire article on the exotic appeal of the name "Fred" without once mentioning this website.  Instead, they focused on some bozo politician from some state nobody ever even heard of, a guy with a last name of "Thompson."  Ridiculous.

The phonetics of the name seem integral to its image problem: On Urbandictionary.com, a "Fred" is defined as "a person who does stupid, annoying, or idiotic things" (Fred Flintstone, Fred Mertz). The best-case descriptors a Fred can hope for are terms like well-intentioned, predictable, benign (Fred Rogers).

If you ignore the confusing typos (I think "image problem" should read "image advantage," for example) you are still faced with the big question that goes begging:  what famous Fred is the most sublime, butt-kickingly bestest choral music blogger on the planet?  >Sigh.<  The news blackout continues.

There's a hint the author wanted to mention me, but could not.  She used the neologism "fredophile" but stopped short of mentioning "sphere" and, of course, the diacritic is missing.  I suspect tampering on the part of upper management.

Also:  Ann Althouse reacts to the article.

Labels: fun

Saturday we arrived in Traverse City, Michigan, for a week-long vacation.  I learned a few new things that day:

The CDC kills children.  That one came from a bumper sticker I saw on I-75.  It was news to me.

There is no rule that says a dog cannot play on a high school basketball team.  In light of all the Disney movies made involving various dogs, chimps, pigs, cats, donkeys, etc. that play sports, you'd think they would have covered that contingency by now, but apparently not.

That late stage of drunkenness sometimes depicted in movies from the 50s and 60s, where everyone becomes sentimental and gemütlich and sings a cappella together at length, and badly out of tune?  That really happens, at the 3:30am stage of a drunken party. Before that (2:00-3:00am) comes the loud stereo fading in and out stage, and before that comes the 1:30am shooting off fireworks and applauding stage. (Impressive, illegal fireworks that shower your neighbor's yard with burning embers. Your neighbor's drought-stricken, dry-as-tinder yard.)  I confess my research is incomplete regarding the earliest stages of drunkenness, because before the fireworks display, I was irresponsibly asleep.

More fun facts:  The Leelanau Peninsula is the pinkie on the hand of Michigan.   It's ideal vineyard country, or as ideal as the Midwest can hope for.  I was pleased to learn of Leelanau Natural Beef, which "offers grass-fed hormone and antibiotic free premium ground beef" at a "unique self-serve site."  Wow. Self-serve grass-fed beef. You don't find that just anywhere. Grab a big ol' knife from the rack, walk out to the pasture, pick out a cow that looks good, and as it stands there, chewing its cud, carve a chunk of self-serve beef right out of her backside. Mmm, mmm, good!

The kids are old enough to be deeply impressed with Traverse City, with its miles of beaches and its light years of tourist traps. They will have fun, I predict. I'm having fun just knowing we made it:  four months ago, I would not have guessed Julie would be healthy enough to pull it off. She tires more quickly that the rest of us, because of the whole-brain radiation she received back in December, but otherwise, she's doing okay, thank God.

I'm posting this from Horizon Books on Front Street in the heart of the retail district.  I'm using some kind of community-provided free wifi via my new laptop.  (The operating system, which shall remain nameless, but which [hint, hint] is new, sucks.)  Get this:  wifi is a system for communicating with the internet by means of invisible rays of energy!  Amazing!

I spent yesterday in the company of Lutheran choral directors, yet survived.  Brian Altevogt hosted a Sacred Choral Symposium at Concordia University here in Ann Arbor.  These events are enjoyable, not the least because of the vespers service we sang together at the end of the day, in the lush sonic environment of the Chapel of the Holy Trinity.  A choir of choral directors is the best kind of choir; I suppose you could say a choir director is the ideal chorister in the way a prison guard is the ideal death row inmate, although if you said it you would be insane.

As a bonus, I present the strange world of vintage pulp science fiction novels ... in French.  Here's a page devoted to author Vargo Statten, who has books translated into many languages, and was "notorious" for cranking out streams of action-packed, but otherwise brainless, prose. There's something endearing about novels with titles like La Flamme Cosmique and La Bombe 'G' and Le Martien Vengeur (and I dig the vivid artwork too).  As in the case of French jazz, one feels the urge to speak patronizingly of French science fiction.  Heck, they deserve pity points just for giving the world Planet of the Apes.

(You can read up on John Russell Fearn, who wrote under pseudonyms like Vargo Statten, Volstead Gridban, and even Vector Magroon, here.)

Labels: PlanetOfTheApes, sci-fi, vocal

Don't miss Trailers From Hell, a link I got from 2Blowhards. It's old trailers from films good and so-bad-their-good. It's got the trailer for Colossus: The Forbin Project, a sci-fi movie I'm fond of because I stumbled across it by accident on TV one Sunday afternoon. I found the evil computer to be hilarious; my experience as a programmer told me no giant hardware/software development project done with minimal testing will ever, ever result in a system that has more capability than the designer intended. No, not more, and almost certainly much less. I'm more forgiving now of these sci-fi classics, being more aware of how bad the truly bad stuff is, so I'd like to see the movie again.

In other artsy-geeksy news, Alex Ross links to nerdcore artist Bad Spellah and his take on that classic of speculative fiction, Wagner's Ring.

I met yesterday with choral conductor Brian Altevogt of Concordia University here in Ann Arbor. He gave me a fresh round of suggestions for improving my latest opus, The Prophet, a setting of a poem by Pushkin (translated with verve and élan by Babette Deutsch). Brian's ideas were all good as usual, and it's a privilege to work with an interpreter so deeply engaged in the creative process from beginning to end. It's also nice to hear my music played with feeling, something I don't get from my midi keyboard. Thanks to Brian's play-throughs, I come away from these meetings with increased optimism. Brian's latest plan is to perform The Prophet with his choir on November 4, at the Chapel of the Holy Trinity on Concordia's campus. Mark your calendars.

Labels: Composition, sci-fi