Sounds: Tristeza - Golden Hill

What's to say? One of the local post-rock bands I listened to while in high-school and college, along with Tarentel and From Monument to Masses, that left a lasting impression on me and my music. (What happened to the Bay Area post-rock scene?) They toured hard for years, incessantly, up and down the coast and around the world. I never got over you guys!

Trizteza.

But The Lemonade Means Sex, Mostly

Picked up from GhettoGenius.com

Sounds: Royksopp - So Easy

I actually love this song solely for the ending. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the rest of the song, but it trods along pretty harmlessly, a pretty forgettable if groovy track. Until the end exchange:

"Four-hundred."

"Four-hundred?"

"Yeah."

"I'm coming over."

"Do that."

It's like it own little mini-story.

What You Should Do This Saturday

I don't know what you're doing this Saturday, October 13th, but there is some shit going down:

First, you should come watch me read as part of Lit Crawl. Owl Magazine and Lit Crawl: MUSIC+BEATS. It's all writers who are musicians reading from their works. It'll be short, I promise. I'm ready for less than 8 minutes. And I'm reading with Blag Dahlia/Ripper/Jesus of the Dwarves.

It's at some place call Creativity Explored which I've never heard of, but is apparently up the street from 16th and Mission:

For the line up and more info check here.

For the FB event, if that's how you roll, check here.

The location is pretty convenient because right after that you can pop over a few blocks and see my band, Al Lover & The Haters, play the Moon Block Party show at the Brick & Mortar.

Set it going to be killer. Come and check it out!

And, as if that wasn't enough, if you can't make either one of those this Saturday, I also did sound design and collage for the talented Jessica Noodle/Rabbit for her immersive/interactive theater performance piece over at the Isle of the Noises.

I did some Metaphonic recordings. It's pretty dope. Come out and see her performance and listen to my sound design! There will be corsets involved! Corsets! As in more than one! Tickets here.

HOLY SHIT!!! I know, that's a lot of stuff. You best show your face at one of these events. There's no reason you can't make it out to one of these. You can even be home before 9 in the p and still have seen me.

Book Report: Near+Far by Cat Rambo (Part II): Far

Part I is here.

Part II is here:

Whoa. This collection, Far, brings the guns just like Near did. This time around, though, we are in the future. And if anything, things seem to have gotten worse, even if they are brighter and better lit by to the overhead halogen lights of your cubicle-home.

Cat Rambo's exploration of advertising, products, commercialism, and consumerism are only exacerbated in stories like "Surrogates", "Seeking Nothing", "Amid the Words of War", and "Zeppelin Follies", the last of which Rambo claims was her attempt at slapstick comedy. It's not that it wasn't funny, it's just that standing back, looking at the world of commercialism she created, where writers write by managing software that spits out endless variations of the same story for every conceivable market niche and everyone wears malleable Bodies that keep the actual world at arms length, well, it's pretty frightening from my standpoint because it's a dystopia where the depicted society isn't all that unhappy, like in Brave New World. Often cited as the model dystopia, Brave New World is really a social satire or even utopian satire (Huxley called it a "negative utopia": the drugged out disconnected world is, by and large, "happy"). It is implied in "Surrogates" and "Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain" that the rich are happy because they've built a world of consumerism based on picking the fruits of lower caste's labors, which implies that the rest of the world could indeed be a dystopia. How is this different from our current world? Blood diamonds and oil shales anyone? In Rambo's "Zeppelin Follies" everyone seems pretty content with their hyperconsumerism, which to me is just an extrapolation of where we are headed. Both "Surrogates" and "Zeppelin Follies" reminded me of David Mitchell's Nea So Corpocracy in the "An Orison of Sonmi~451" chapter of Cloud Atlas, a fantastic book.

If the last collection touched from time to time on the themes of relationships and intimacy, then this collection   is the inverse. We're still talking about relationships, but Far is about the inability to find connections and how far we will go to connect. I mean, the protag of "Angry Rose's Lament", a drug addict trying to find some kind of connection to replace his drug craving, contemplates letting an intelligent wasp eat his brain so he can join an immortal group-mind. Yeah, that's what it's about.

After that we have "Seeking Nothing" which is a fucking HAUNTING tale about a young man who is desperate to connect with anyone, absolutely anyone. He's a social outcast managing clones working on a distant planet, who cannot seem to connect with the few non-clone coworkers or his past. It is a frightening tale of utter loneliness. This was by far one of my favorite stories in this collection. The protag's loneliness still lingers in my mind.

"A Querulous Flute of Bone" was also about seeking out a relationship: romantic love. I could see the plot coming a mile away, which was fine, because the story was really an exercise in beautiful world-building. What I loved so much from the first story in the Near collection, "Mermaids Singing Each to Each", and about the near-future exploration of commercialism of "RealFur", "Vocobox(TM)", and "Therapy Buddha", was the effortless world-building Cat dropped into those stories. And here we see even more of that. "A Querulous Flute of Bone" is like world-building idea after another, though never overwhelming. It left me hungry for more. In the afternotes, Cat says that this story is part of a shared world project started by Philip Athans, so perhaps there's more.

"Surrogates" seemed a bit like the Far version of "Not Waving, but Drowning", 'cept in a far future society. The protag has an Insanity Chip in her head, which allows her to edit the world she senses. It's a touch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but from a great angle. And her descriptions of the edits the protag sees are immersive.

I'd say that, for me, hands down, the best story in both collections was "Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain". Most stories about falling in love turn me off immediately. It's been done so much. But this story was intimate, beautiful, tragic, and told as smoothly as the character's porcelain skin. I'm pretty shocked it was original to this collection. Original stories tend to be stinkers or just perfectly fine stories, never having gone through the vetting processes of editor crits (I'm sure Hydra House had the story edited, but I mean in the marketplace). Whatever the case, this is my favorite story of the collection. 

There are afternotes for the stories in both collections, which is one of my favorite parts to read. It's like the context of the context.

On its own, Far is a strong collection of stories. Together in one book, both collections, Near+Far, represent a selection of Cat Rambo's work over the last five years and show that she is a writer able to capture the human perspective on life and relationships in the most imaginative environments.