I crossed the great divide last week and now view the world from the other side of my 65th birthday. It was a nice, low-key day with friends and family, and I’m happy with that. I feel exactly the same as I did this time last week, yet also have a vague sense of difference that I can’t really put my finger on, as though I’ve entered another room. It’s not that long ago I would have got my State Pension as well, but that won’t now come until next October. I did get offered free Flu and Covid boosters, though, which I’ve had.
In all other respects life goes on as it always does. I enjoyed Kaos on Netflix, featuring Jeff Goldblum as Zeus, and I think I’m enjoying Agatha All Alongon Disney, though the latter is very American in its sensibilities and I haven’t quite made up my mind. As for reading, I enjoyed Irmgard Keun’s The Artificial Silk Girl (1932), though the modern translation hit one or two off notes, and I’m enjoying Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper (1936). Philip Kerr’s final novel, Metropolis (2019, posthumous) was decent but read in parts like a near-final draft rather than the finished article, though that’s hardly his fault.
Meantime, I’m going through notes for the next novels and expanding my research – soon to involve several days in the newspaper archives once one or two things in the garden are sorted. My targets are the Scotsman, the Edinburgh Evening News and the Edinburgh Evening Despatch, primarily for 1933, 1936 and 1939.
The elements of this photo – the bread, the damson jam and the butter, were all made by right here in the kitchen where I’m writing this. Imagine that!
I’ve made jam and bread for years but butter is a new one for me. This was my second attempt and I’m please with it. The style is French – I cultured the cream with some live yogurt overnight before churning – but also American in that there is a little salt in it. The churning was done with a food mixer and the only other equipment I bought was muslin to strain off the buttermilk.
The buttermilk quite quickly became blueberry muffins and the blueberry muffins quickly became crumbs.
I don’t have the temperament or the need to do this every day and I make no pretence to self-sufficiency. I have no desire to romanticise the drudgery of daily labour when, for the most part, I can go to a local shop and buy the same stuff. Nevertheless, I’m feeling quite pleased with myself. Also, I know exactly what is in all three products and, more to the point, what isn’t. The bread is made from 100% organic spelt flour and live yeast, the jam is fruit from my garden with sugar water and a little lemon juice and the butter is live yogurt, double cream and half a teaspoon of salt. There are no other additives, flavourings, or preservatives.
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Who do I think I am?
I’ve watched a reasonable amount of TV in the last week in the sense that I’ve binged on some series. One that has interested me particularly was on BBC – DNA Family Secrets. The programme is relatively formulaic and revolves around people who, for one reason or another, want to trace their family. Very often these are people who have been adopted or people with family mysteries to solve using DNA samples.
The thing that strikes me about almost all of the people who participate is that they are looking for some kind of anchor for their identity, for a broader sense of belonging in a more abstract sense than the family that brought them up. It’s something that I can empathise with, albeit that my knowledge of my social lineage is pretty secure, going back in several to the mid-eighteenth century.
Even so, I’d like to map what I know of my social background onto what appears to be my genetic background. This is probably a losing battle as the genetic markers trace to dates before secure social records for many of my family ‘lines. Specifically, my Y-DNA through Dad is stuck at 1744 in the pits of County Durham with William Burdon, a pitman, and Ann Hepple and my mtDNA through Mum in Southwark with Ann Tomkins, whose maiden name I haven’t yet found. These don’t really carry any existential payload but are a continuing puzzle to crack – as is that 10% French DNA. What is common to many of my nineteenth century ancestors, though, is deprivation and abject poverty, whether in mining villages or Southwark or dying of typhus in Maryport or in a pit roof collapse.
My point is that I first began to look at my family tree when my daughters were young precisely to give them some grounding identity and, cliché alert, some sense of deep roots.
A friend recommended Bodies on Netflix. The link is to the trailer which tells you everything you need to know. It is clever and involving with each time period well-resolved and each detective well-drawn and individual. Recommended.
I caught a snippet of Halo on line and was intrigued. It seems that fans of the games and books on which it is based do a lot of griping about it, but coming to it free of that baggage I found it diverting and entertaining. It doesn’t break any new ground, but it does what it does well.
Similarly, though for different reasons, Ad Astra had it’s critics. It is also sci-fi, but closer to Solaris, Arrival and 2001 in tone than to Star Wars. It features an excellent performance from Brad Pitt doing that hardest of things, delivering the lines with simplicity and clarity with no apparent attempt at ‘acting’. It sets out its metaphorical stall fairly explicitly and takes its time with its narrative, but it still held me rapt for 2 hours. Hans Richter’s score is superb.
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At the risk of being too soon about this, I’ve been reflecting on the death of Matthew Perry at aged 54 that was announced today. Perry knew that he would be remembered for Friends although he would have preferred to be remembered for his other work. He was right: the bulk of the eulogies I’ve seen today were for Friends. What has been on my mind is that I didn’t like Friends at all, apart from the theme song, and was never able to watch a complete episode. I found it neither engaging or funny. What I’ve been reflecting on is how, for whatever reason, I’ve been unable to share in what appears to be genuine grief on the part of many. Is it a generational thing?
All quiet here because there hasn’t been much to report. The principal excitement was receiving my Flu and Covid booster vaccinations for the year and, let me tell you, the Pfizer Covid booster packed quite a punch. That was exactly a week ago and the feeling continues to linger a little.
Other odds and ends have included turning several kilos of damsons and plums into jam and looking out of the kitchen window at all the apples and wondering what to do with them. The shed has had a fresh coat of preservative ahead of winter, and we had a good visit to family in East Kilbride.
I continue to run, although I took time out after the vaccinations. I also now need to focus more on running during the day (because the nights are fair drawing in) and looking at clothing choices as the weather changes. I have no problem running at night, btw, except that Edinburgh’s roads and pavements are in such a state that the chances of injury increase markedly when you can’t see where you’re putting your feet.
Hmmm … am I a Star Wars character or a protagonist in my own right?
On the writing front, work continues on the stories that follow up/complete Coyote in the Corner and I really need to motivate myself to get cracking on that.
In the background, I have a side project of a Star Wars story that I’m going to work up into a novella at some point (although I could divorce it from Star Wars and make it a stand-alone novella free of Lucas/Disney copyright restrictions), an urban fantasy novel set in Edinburgh that has been on the back burner for a while, and I’ve had the first inklings of aspects of concluding the Sanctuary sequence of novels.
Above all, I’ve procrastinated by watching assorted stuff on TV. Notably, I’ve warmed a lot more to Ahsoka and, on a whim, rewatched Obi-Wan Kenobi. I originally found the latter disappointing, but it stood up well on a binge rewatch, albeit that it has issues with it’s core story. My earworms from Star Trek’s Subspace Rhapsody haven’t gone away.
On the tech front, all of my laptops are ancient and my habit is to use them until they stop working to get the most value out of them. The one in the shed is a 13-year-old Windows 7 machine that works but takes longer and longer to boot up. Unusually for me, I’m toying with replacing it with a reconditioned Macbook Air to get into the Apple ecosystem. My requirements are fairly minimal – I need a robust and reliable keyboard, I need to be able to load Office Home and Student onto it and I need it to work with Dropbox.
As of this morning, I have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Instagram and Bluesky as well as an account on TikTok that I rarely, if ever, look at, and also a Substack presence for diabetes-related stuff. The sudden proliferation (Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky particularly) is to try to fit out a lifeboat for when Twitter goes under and also to open channels to promote my books. I may be doing the socials wrong, but I haven’t noticed a particular upswing in sales as a result of engagement on social media – maybe one or two copies at best – so it’s a questionable strategy.
Impressions:
Facebook is great for family photos. Twitter is great for focused lists. Mastodon is for people who find accountancy a bit racy and would probably ban me from their server for saying so. Substack Notes is full of writers trying to turn a coin or two, mostly from each other. Threads is a bit of a nothing. Bluesky is potentially more interesting – I like the interface – but is still invitation only and thus busy creating and reinforcing bubbles and echo chambers. All of the new sites currently skew towards always-online Americans who post bad takes about politics and culture wars.
I stick with Twitter for the most part, because of the ability to create and use lists for focused analysis and breaking news. For me, the first of the alternatives that attracts a critical mass of users and lets me put together lists of users that I don’t also have to ‘follow’ will likely be my new home.
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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds finished on a cliffhanger made more dramatic by the writers and actors strikes that delay the resolution by another year. Subspace Rhapsody is still under my skin, and my liking of it has been amplified by the reaction of the fanboys whose world view has been challenged. In other viewing:
Foundation is back for season 2 and is going nowhere. Invasion is also back for season 2. It was slow and methodical in its storytelling in season 1 by design and I liked it a lot. S2 has had a promising start. Ahsoka is with us and … I’m reserving judgement. I was surprised by how slow the pacing was, and not in a good way. It helps if you’ve watched previous animated series by Dave Filoni, especially Star Wars: Rebels.
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I posted this on the socials a while ago but not here. This is a boost for the soul while writing and looking at book sales that can charitably be described as sluggish. Ethan comments that to express yourself you first have to know yourself. I’d caveat that by saying that expressing yourself in writing or the other arts is a way of getting to know yourself. The two are intertwined.
More than six years ago, I wrote of Once More With Feeling, the magnificent season 6 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that,
it isn’t, in one sense, a standalone “musical episode”: it is a normal episode that just happens to have an oratorio and score.
A couple of entries later I wrote a long analysis of why I love the episode. You can find that here: Like There Were Only Three Walls
There have been other attempts at the same thing since then, but never, until this week, on Star Trek. On Thursday Star Trek Strange New Worlds season 2 episode 9, Subspace Rhapsody dropped to almost instant acclaim from most viewers. I watched it, rapt, then downloaded it and have watched it multiple times since.
Subspace Rhapsody takes cues from Once More With Feeling and makes a couple of respectful tips of the hat along the way. It is also structurally similar – an event causes the characters to reveal their emotional secrets in song while trying hard to work out what is happening and how to stop it. Both episodes move along the emotional and narrative arcs of the show. Subspace Rhapsody is also a normal episode that happens to have an oratorio and score, in which characters are forced to reveal, and confront, aspects of themselves they’d prefer to keep hidden, through the medium of song and dance. That’s a very ancient theatrical tradition and I have no problem with Star Trek or any other programme playing with the idea.
So how do they compare?
The question is in some respects unfair; they should each be taken on their own considerable merits for what they are. For the most part, the things I like about Once More With Feeling are present and correct in Subspace Rhapsody too, and I like the rearrangement of the Star Trek main theme for the modern equivalent of the Mike Sammes Singers. But they are, I think, different in important ways.
The most obvious difference is that they have very different musical palettes. Subspace Rhapsody is centred on modern stage musicals and musical theatre; a lot of the songs sound tonally similar. Once More With Feeling, by contrast, is closer to, dare I say it, a rock opera in feel, with a lot of melodic, rhythmic and tonal variation.
But the other difference – and the most important one – is one that took me a while to figure out. Subspace Rhapsody being Star Trek, builds – via some excellent set pieces and power ballads – to a big production number celebrating crew unity. The finale is like a big dish of cheese and corn with extra cheese and a side helping of more corn. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ve watched it frequently and lapped it up, but it is still cheese and corn and it’s hard not to empathise with the Klingons singing
Your eternal torture is every Klingon’s dream.
Once More With Feeling, starts out with that view – what can’t we face if we’re together? Buffy sings. But the episode proceeds systematically to subvert and dissect that positivity until the cast conclude with an ensemble performance of Where Do We Go From Here?
Understand we’ll go hand in hand but we’ll walk alone in fear…
And that’s why Buffy still keeps it’s place at the top of the heap for me – it has a much deeper psychological sensibility that elevates it beyond mere drama and entertainment. Well, that and the fact that Emma Caulfield isn’t on Star Trek.
After taking that tumble last week, I gave it five days before I went out for a run and spent most of the time listening to what my body was telling me and alert for reaction. It went fine, and I gave myself a couple more days until going out again, which I did this morning. The aim today wasn’t about distance and it wasn’t about speed: my aim today was to run for a continuous 45 minutes, which I achieved. I did a little more than that, but by then I was on our hill and gritting my teeth.
Assuming no more accidents or illness, I’m back on my leisurely track towards 10k fitness. Sometime in the next couple of days, I’m going to follow a reasonably flat route and aim for 7k, then focus on short runs through next week. This would put me on a path to 10k fitness sometime in early to mid August. If I get there, I’ll look for a couple of 10k runs to enter and reward myself with a T-shirt and a medal 🙂
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TV has livened up again with the appearance of season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. After bailing on season 3 of Star Trek Discovery and putting Picard on pause, I was sceptical about any new shows in the franchise, but I’m enjoying Strange New Worlds a lot. I don’t think it’s groundbreaking, but it has a good cast and tells its stories well, even if the stories are familiar.
The Witcher is back for season 3 and has started strongly. I’m also enjoying Star Wars Visions on Disney+ – anime shorts from the Star Wars universe (well, except for the Ardman mashup of the pod race from The Phantom Menace and Chicken Run.)
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For reasons not unrelated to the acoustic bass guitar that I’m currently grappling with, I’ve been listening to a lot of The Beatles. I haven’t listened to a lot of their stuff for a while and it’s fascinating to come back to them with fresh ears. The journey from a hot band playing rock’n’roll standards in Hamburg and Liverpool to the emergence of their own writing talent is one I’m going to have to think about more, but something happened in 1963. It might have been meeting George Martin, but there was something else going on: the emergent repertoire of Lennon/McCartney originals is qualitatively different to the Hamburg/Cavern material.
At the same time, McCartney begins to emerge as a creative and influential bass player, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. He has said that a big influence was James Jamerson of Motown, but there is more to it than that. The bass line of All My Loving is rooted in neither rock’n’roll nor Jamerson. By the time of Michelle (1965) he’s a long way from roots and triads or walking basslines.
There was more to the Beatles than just Macca, of course, but I can’t help but think his restless creativity was the catalyst for what the band became.
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