Sweltering heat or torrential rains. We get one or the other every day here. All I have to do is leave my car windows and guess what? Even more rain! I think my car spelled the demise of Indian rain dances. They simply passed out of necessity. I read an article the other day that affirmed I’m a lucky man. In the past 2.5 years I’ve not had Covid 19, despite being exposed numerous times (and undergoing two separate tests). And now there’s Monkeypox. Oh boy, that sounds like fun. Not fatal, but painful and temporarily changing your look until you resemble one of the poor underground dwellers in the 1950s B movie, The Mole People. I may have avoided Covid 19, but was it luck? My sister claims her prayers played a part. Perhaps. If it was luck, well, luck runs out eventually. Maybe it was my own safeguarding, staying in, listening to good music, playing games and reading fine literature like what we see in this month’s mix.
Hunt Showdown on PC: I can’t put this one down. It’s like playing a crafty one-arm bandit slot machine in Vegas less the expensive flight ticket and airport checkpoint shenanigans. Completing a bout in the game is richly rewarded with perks and levels added to your character. But death is permanent. Your next bout could very well be your last and all that you gained is lost; you start over again from scratch. Often against my better judgement I dive in like a sky jumper without a parachute. And then there’s that golden time in the wee hours of the morning when you go in, kill all the bosses by yourself, dispatch a gazillion zombies and make it out free and clear simply because you were the only person on the map. This is a game so compelling that me and my buddy, David “Drakarion” Tidwell talk about it at work. No stone is unturned, no strategy not tried.
One Shot (Jack Reacher #8) by Lee Child: Child’s 8th foray into his Jack Reacher adventures. This novel was actually what the first Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) movie was based on. The movie occurs in Pittsburgh, PA. The novel is set in Indianapolis, Indiana and some southern bigger Indiana city. Vincennes? Being quite familiar with Indiana’s capital city, there are several out of place locations mentioned in the book. Tobacco barns and an NBC media building complete with NBC’s colorful peacock symbol, and a cloverleaf multilevel highway circling the city, enveloping that NBC building in Indianapolis? Nah, no such place. Still, malapropos notwithstanding, this is a roller coaster read. It goes into so much more detail than the movie did (though the movie was quite entertaining.) I can safely say, if you’ve not read a Jack Reacher book and you want to start, you could start with this one.
Rush Hemispheres on vinyl: My wonderful guitar teacher, Michael Stevens, gifted me this album from his personal collection and said I looked like a kid at Christmas getting a much desired present when he did so. I often listen to my HD Tracks hi-res FLAC of this album for the sake of convenience, but when I dropped the needle on this one and cut the lights, lying back on the couch allowing its softness to engulf me, stray light from streetlights casting everything into a mellow sheen of white-yellow, I went into another world with this incredible album. It’s technically on point. The timing is perfectly tight in every song. You can “feel” the effort that went into it. Personally, I think it’s Rush’s most beautiful album from a soundscape point of view. If you want to turn one of the youngsters onto Rush give them a listen to “La Villa Strangiato (An Exercise in Self-Indulgence.) And let’s not forget “The Trees,” which was Neil Peart having fun with something almost deemed a limerick. The Internet is abounded with hidden meanings and implications concerning this song. Peart would laugh about it in interviews and always reply, “No, nothing doing. It was just having fun with funny lyrics.” It turns out the song has a deeply sad interlude that about moves me to tears every time I hear it. Talk about an irony!
Alex Blest Fragments of Bliss on 44.1kHz/16bit mp3: I came across this on a Chicane compilation album that was played on an Internet based Chill radio station and sought long and hard to track down the original source. Praise be to the almighty Amazon for delivering the goods. Alex Blest who hails from Ukraine and whose real name is hard to pronounce Cyrillic is a DJ who’s been around for some time (unbeknownst to me.) This EP consists of four ethereal versions of the same song, different, but samey enough to realize it IS the same song. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful, and begs the question how something so hauntingly blissful could emanate from a country that is currently seeing some of the darkest events in modern history. Hit up YouTube and search for this gem. You’ll become entranced too.
The Witcher Season 2 on Netflix: I procrastinated long enough. Now I’m engaged in this compelling second season of the acclaimed show based on the stories of Andrzej Sapkowski. Back in the first season upon watching the show I commented I thought Henry Cavill was mis-cast. After having beat the first two games and reading the first two Sapkowski books I just thought Cavill was way too young for the role. Boy, was I wrong. It’s quite the opposite actually. I feel now as if Cavill was born to play Geralt! But despite Cavill’s added dialogue this time around, I think Freya Allan who plays Princess Cirilla of Cintra is stealing the show. She loses all of her glamour becoming a diamond into the rough to train as a Witcher alongside Geralt. It's heady entertainment for anyone who is a fan of the games or who is into medieval fantasy albeit with a slightly darker bent. It’s as if the color palate has almost been slightly muted for the show. Everything has a gray tone to it. It portrays a place that is always cold, bleak and on the verge of winter.
theHunter: Call of the Wild on
PC: Like Euro Truck Sim 2 this is another one of my garden of zen
games. I’ve brought it up here before, I’m not a hunter in real life. (I
castigate my wife for being the murderess of flies who make it into our house!)
But there’s something about this game, once you get past scoping a less than
graceful bull moose in your sights and squeezing the trigger, watching his tremendous
bulk lose its divine spark and thunder to the ground, that works like detox for
your fingers and your mind. I’ve read accounts of people who bought it just to
stroll through its wondrous woods and glens. There is a German map depicted in
autumn, complete with distant chainsaws and dogs barking. I’ve even heard a
Cessna flying over. It reminds me so much of Indiana in the fall it's almost
eerie. I’ve been revisiting the same mission over and again as of late in an
attempt to bag two coyotes in a specified area of the map. One wrong shift of
the foot, causing a coyote’s keen ears to take note, or a change in wind
direction, alerting their sense of smell, or firing your gun and realizing you
didn’t have a bullet in the chamber can blow the whole mission. Suddenly the
coyote steals away and it’s game over. But waiting in a clump of bushes,
hearing the night birds and watching the full moon rise, despite a failed mission
makes me realize this is a game where its parts are much greater than the sum of those parts.
The Convert by Edward C. Burton: This is my second novel manuscript, the first finally coming to fruition some years back (and available on Amazon.) This foray plumbed from the depths of my imagination involves a Stuka dive bomber pilot who gets shot down over an English reserve air field during the Battle of Britain. Captured and housed in a utility shed, he’s brought out by the Brits each time the field is buzzed by marauding German planes to clean up the resulting messes that occur. As the German prisoner works side by side with these British airmen he begins to wonder if he is in fact fighting for the wrong ideal. This is a story I was inspired to write, oddly, after playing the heck out of LucasFilm’s Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain way back in 1990. Nine months of research and 300 plus pages later I finished the manuscript and sent it to roughly forty NYC publishing houses. No takers. It nestled for years in a file cabinet. I’ve decided to take it out, revise it, and have another go at it. I’ve only gotten the first chapter done with many more to go. Now if I can just keep procrastination at bay.
Ric Ocasek This Side of Paradise on vinyl: I liked The Cars, but they certainly weren’t my favorite band back in the old days. The appeal with this album, however, is the presence of Steve Stevens. What I discovered with this record though is if you are a fan of The Cars, you will enjoy this album. Especially with the presence of The Cars members, Greg Hawkes, Benjamin Orr and Elliot Easton, one cannot help but feel he or she is listening to another product of The Cars. (Roland Orzabal from Tears for Fears is also featured on the album.) But like I said, Steve Stevens plays guitar on over half the album, and that was the draw for me. You can really hear his chops on “True Love” which he introduces with a nylon stringed classical guitar. “Emotion in Motion,” brought back memories being it was a big radio hit in 1986 when the album released.
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