Edward's September 2017 Mix

Better grab a cup of hot tea, your favorite beer, or cup of Cappuccino because this one’s going to take you a while. This one blows all previous records out of the water. A whole lot of stuff this month. And indeed, it’s been a busy month for me being I went back to work after being ill for the past few months. In truth, it’s not been so bad, and it’s nice to be able to make money again. Having two months off seems nothing short of ideal, but I discovered having all of that time off I really didn’t accomplish much I wanted to, and now I’m back working again I utilize every moment away from work to diligently work through everything I need to get done. It’s funny how that works. We humans can be such wastrels!

1. Black Hawk Down on Blu Ray: My review of the notable book by Mark Bowden insisted this is a must see film for fans of Call of Duty or the Battlefield series of games put out by EA. The book chronicles modern urban combat like no other, and for a film directed by Ridley Scott this vehicle does it with equal enthusiasm. Featuring an all star cast, this is the tragic story of a real life event I vaguely remember happening in 1993 because I was busy with events in my own life. This is one of those movies that made me wish I could have been there in the real thing just to participate in some fashion. (My own military service was grossly lackluster compared to depictions of the modern US Army we see in this movie.) The underlying tone is the helplessness these soldiers feel in the big picture of things in trying to do something that will benefit the people they are there to help. And  this is consummated by the movie’s end in which the whole operation is swallowed up in loss due to poor planning and lack of needed resources inevitably denied by the powers that were in Washington at the time. The Blu Ray transfer is excellent, crisp but gritty in all of the right ways. I immediately compared it to my DVD version after watching it on Blu Ray, and the Blu Ray is definitely the keeper.

2. Euro Truck Simulator 2 on PC: This game is my garden of zen. This is the reason I picked up a Logitech G27 Wheel/pedal set that you see intruding in so many of my mix pictures. Like I mentioned in my Steam review of the game, there is nothing like rolling down a Dutch rural highway and having the night sky suddenly aglow with sheets of lightning and looking over to see a windmill in a field, plucked from a Van Gogh painting . . . all while listening to EDM on the radio. Yes, unbelievably, this simulator hosts an in-cab radio that streams real time European radio stations. I’ve recently upgraded to a 750 HP Mercedes Benz semi and it makes me want to move to Germany and do the real thing.

3. Apsaras Apsaras on CD: Back in 1989 when I was living in Austin, TX and working on my first novel I used to listen to a late Sunday night radio program hosted by New Mexico’s Frank Forest entitled “Musical Star Streams.” The show was my first exposure to New Age music, and boy was I turned on! One of the first bands I listened to was a Japanese band called Apsaras. They only released one album before disbanding, but that album has been part of the soundtrack of my life since. Their titular, “Apsaras,” is an assemblage of happy dulcimer, bass, and flute. It’s the perfect song to listen to while driving through Indiana woods with autumn turning leaves. It's the song I listened to when my youngest daughter was born and I was driving home from the hospital. The album is long out of print, and I’ve seen it go for $60 or more on Amazon or on eBay. I consider myself lucky to have scored one many moons ago. I still bring it along on road trips. It may not be constantly residing in my CD player, but it’s never far from arm’s reach. And the song is so beautiful it can still move me to tears as if it’s the first time I’ve listened to it.

4. Brian Eno/Harold Budd The Pearl  on CD: You know me, I’m the king of sad stuff. Gloom and despair is how I like my music, my books, and my movies. Hey, you gotta be true to your school! Brian Eno was an inspiration to so many musical artists back in the 1970’s, and he did pretty well on his own as well. Who can forget “An Ending,” featured in the zombie movie, 28 Days Later? It’s a dirge capable of turning a funeral into something majestic and hopeful. It’s not often I buy an album for one song, but this is one of those albums. “Late October” is that song on this album. I defy you to give it a listen without reaching for a Kleenex tissue. And the icing on the cake? Daniel Lanois is featured on this album as well. This is an album featuring piano and guitar used not only as beautiful instruments appealing to your aural senses, but as tools to render your heart totally defenseless.

5. The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll/The Gorgon on Blu-Ray: This is an interesting set Hammer Films put together. The Dr. Jekyll movie is an interesting (and risque for its time) movie that gloriously manifests the 1950’s technicolor technology and an envelope push against scruples. There are many lusty scenes of dancing girls bending over flashing their bloomers, and Hammer’s famous buxom cleavage shots. And then we have an Edward Hyde that instead of becoming Robert Louis Stephenson’s cruel and hideous monster that hides under the shadows of streetlamps and alleyways, we have a cuckolded husband oblivious to his life by losing himself in his scientific research. And then becoming Edward   a charismatic ladies’ man who outdoes his wife tenfold. This movie is the evil grandfather of Jerry Lewis’s The Nutty Professor and Eddie Murphy’s seminal remake. The second movie, based on Greek mythology concerning a small village losing its citizens to a murderous Medusa who turns her victims to stone, is a movie where its parts are greater than the sum of the movie itself. The Medusa  with her hair of rubber snakes looks almost laughable by today’s CGI standards, and her green makeup looks on par with some she-alien from a classic Star Trek episode. But the village’s rendition and the set of the creepy old decrepit castle where the Gorgon lives, those are spot on Hammer trademarks. Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, the real Hammer trademarks, play interesting roles that go against their usual grain, and perhaps they weren’t cast in their best roles, but this movie is worth a watch anyway, if anything, just to soak up that Hammer atmosphere.

6. Dog Soldiers on DVD: This is a cheesy werewolf movie that plays out like a high school play performed by Academy Award winners who gather for a nostalgic reunion. The effects are hammy, and the werewolves themselves are probably the hokiest lycanthropes I’ve seen in any movie, but the characters, a band of Special Force British soldiers messing about the woods in a weekend of training exercises turned nightmare as they are attacked by men who turn into hairy beasts under the full moon, are what save the day. This movie comes off like a late night made for cable movie with a budget of $300, but like I said, the characters’ performances are what pull in the bucks. I don’t know how this got into my collection. This will be the second time I’ve watched it over the years, and I doubt I watch it again. There is some good suspense and lots of gun play if you like modern day paramilitary weapons. So, there’s that.

7. The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy on Kindle: Here is a steal from my very own Goodreads.com review: This was nowhere nearly as compelling as Tom Clancy's The Hunt for for Red October, which in my opinion is his magnum opus. But it's in line with Clancy's technological style of writing. Jack Ryan is as consistent as ever, and we sense his frustration as his job begins to overwhelm him to the point of crumbling his marriage and his personal health, but ultimately redeems him as his intelligence and his hunches save us from World War III in the book's taut climax. I'm not so much a fan of Tom Clancy's characters as I am Clancy's ability to tell great techno-thriller stories. This novel slowed to the point of stagnation, but suddenly in the last quarter of the book it picked up speed at a breakneck pace and I was holding on for life until the end.  

8. The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy: This was gifted to me by my dear friend, Steven Rogers. The novel concerns the misadventures of an American, Sebastian Dangerfield, who just after a stint in the Navy during WWII, uses his GI Bill to attend university in Dublin, Ireland. He takes an English wife and all too soon they have a baby. But instead of being the responsible family man and the good student, our protagonist is intent on flunking every test and pilfering enough money to get drunk on, and attempting to bed anything on two legs. This book was banned in the United States in the 1950s when it was written due to its lecherous tones. I may discover the book to be a bit over the top, but I’m only in the first half of the book. I detest Dangerfield, but Donleavy’s writing is compelling. He writes not unlike Ernest Hemingway. Not a sentence nor a word is wasted.

9. Dark City on Blu-Ray: I remember watching Saving Private Ryan at the movies and seeing the previews for this film. I thought it looked interesting, but then I was never someone who went to movies a lot so I ended up not seeing it. (Although I did return to see Saving Private Ryan two more times.) But now I wish I’d seen this movie. The movie involves a man who wakes up with amnesia to find himself in a hotel room with a freshly murdered prostitute. The cops are coming, along with tall mysterious pale men who seem to be behind the scenes of everything. So the main character must escape. And so begins a quest to prove his innocence and find out who he is. Some diehard fans believe the Wachowski brothers (who are actually not brothers at all, but sisters. Yeah, I don’t get it either) borrowed heavily from this film to script their venerable The Matrix. The Blu Ray transfer is excellent, and much like Blade Runner this is a movie to be watched on the biggest screen TV you can find with the lights turned off.

10. Rush Signals on CD: I’ve talked about this CD before. I purchased this on cassette in Singapore back in my Navy days. I got back to the ship and discovered it was a pirated copy, but sheesh, the packaging fooled me. Still, I played the cassette until it wore out. This will probably go down as my favorite Rush album of all time. No, wait . .that would be Moving Pictures but sheesh, there’s Grace Under Pressure. Shoot, truth be known all of them are my favorite. I love Rush. And what I love most about them is how much critics hated them. Rolling Stone Magazine, be damned. (I don’t think I ever agreed with anything that rag had to say. And have you looked at any of their stuff in recent times? I think someone tossed the keys to the king loony in the asylum and gave him complete control of the presses.) But anyway, back to the topic at hand. This album is where Rush heavily continued their move away from guitar based rock to synth and keyboard antics. Though they still bore their kick ass guitar roots, “The Analog Kid” and “Digital Man” are still two of  the coolest Rush songs out there and show off Neil Peart and Alex Lifeson at their best on any Rush album. And though many fans disliked it, I loved the band’s heavier reliance on synthesizers. I discovered Rush with their album Permanent Waves. I really started digging them with Moving Pictures, but I fell in love with them with this album.

11. Stacking on Steam: This Double Fine game is a piece of art which I grew to hate. The game involves Russian wooden dolls that roll and wobble around like “Weebles.” Each doll has the ability to stack inside a doll one size bigger which enables the player to activate certain abilities attributed to certain individual dolls, things like unlocking doors, activating devices, etc. And that part was fun, but some of the puzzles, especially if you were going for 100% Steam achievements, like me, were just impossible to discover without using a walk through guide. I hate playing games like that because I always feel like I’m cheating. Still, the game’s environment is a thing of utter beauty. Occurring in the early 1900s the game takes place on steamships, steam trains, zeppelins. And Double Fine did a “double fine” job of  capturing this time/place in the game.

12. Rush Power Windows on CD : This was probably the complete culmination of  Geddy Lee’s use of synthesizers. I bought this album when I got out of the Navy, and it heralded such a happy time in my life. I had just escaped a four year hell hole, bought my first vehicle (and had my first high dollar hi-fi system installed in that same vehicle.) MTV was the pinnacle of coolness, and I remember seeing the video of “Big Money,” and getting my parents to check out its coolness. Lifeson’s guitar solo in that song still gives me goosebumps. My collection of Rush music is the funniest thing: most fans climbed on board with their early stuff. But I’ve actually done it all in reverse. I started growing my collection with Power Windows and went backwards. I don’t have anything older than Moving Pictures but that will hopefully soon change. I’m lucky enough to have this on an analog CD (obviating the Sound Wars “remastered” version.) I put it on auto-repeat in my car CD system and it sounds pure and beautiful, exactly as the original producer intended. Oddly, and maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but thanks to Spotify I’ve gotten to listen to other Rush recordings I don’t own. I don’t quite know how to say this, but after their really big commercially successful song with Aimee Mann “Time Stand Still” on their next album after this one I don’t really like anything they made after. Isn’t that sad? Am I the only one who feels this way?