Recent media

seishonagon was visiting all this week, which was awesome, and so the portions of Sassafrass present spent very large amounts of time working on stuff for the next album, Firebrand, which if I do say so myself is going to be very good indeed, and which will be out Real Soon Now (I'll let you know). However the conditions of our deluxe home recording studio, which looks just exactly like our living room only full of microphones cleverly attached to bits of string and other household objects (ribbon strung from the ceiling-- mailing tubes-- extension cords), and also the vagaries of mic intake and background noise etc., mean that there have to be 57386 takes of most things. On Friday we recorded three whole tracks and hence I am glad of my foresight in not going off on the take-seishonagon-to-NYC expedition the rest of the household has gone on because it means I have the entire weekend not to speak even a single word aloud to anybody. B. called, but I asked him to monologue.

Speaking of B., when I was visiting him last weekend we went to see Wall-E, which is either half a brilliant movie or two halves of a good movie, I can't decide which. The first half is lovely, at any rate, beautiful and quiet and desolate, nostalgic but not overly so; I was unsurprised to see Shaun Tan in the credits as a conceptual artist. The second half was much more the sort of thing Pixar usually does, and I would have liked it much better had I not been so blown away by the earlier bit, because it is perfectly good Pixar, it is just they outdid themselves earlier. Recommended, though.

And then this weekend I holed up with the second volume of Catherynne Valente's Orphan's Tales, and that has been a good way to spend hermit-time. The Orphan's Tales are packed more densely page-to-page with cool stuff than most other things I can think of; as they are a Chinese-box structure, tales within tales within tales, they have more freedom to roam about a wide world and wider cast of characters than most other things I can think of, because they are not stuck to the amount of interesting things that the protagonist can personally visit. Also they have the freedom to be tragic and then reverse it later in the background, or to be comic and reverse that, or to have people reappear unexpectedly in odd situations. I kept a running tally in my head of questions I wanted answered and stories I wanted finished, and I believe I've only maybe two left of each, which is quite impressive for a thousand-odd pages of Chinese box. In addition their form of cool bit is one I have always liked, namely the sort that reminds me of a medieval bestiary which tells you that in the Antipodes lives x gorgeous creature which has y peculiar habits and does z utterly inexplicable and never-explained thing, and then moves on to the next creature, heraldic and mysterious. The Orphan's Tales are the sort of books where I am utterly positive that barnacle geese do come out of barnacles. They can be tiring to read, for one has to accustom oneself to so many new characters and settings so suddenly; and I do not know why they won the Tiptree, unless it is for 'book it would have been very easy to make anti-feminist which wasn't', which is a fair cop, but; and they do several things I had thought up independently earlier and hoped to use in something of mine and now can't, which it is manifestly and vastly unfair for me to complain about, but. Highly recommended.

And then I went to the comics store and managed to pick up a copy of volume one of Silver Diamond, by Shiho Sugiura, and that also makes me very happy. I had originally known Sugiura through Koori no Mamono no Monogatari, which I read portions of with the aid and abetment of foleyartist1, and which I desperately want licensed because I want to read it the way one can only want to read things one has read parts of in multiple languages one does not entirely understand (I think that particular series hit three, none of them English). But then they licensed this and I had missed it in scanlation and I really like it. It has striking imagery, which is rarer in manga than it ought to be, and it avoids and touches on cliches with a knowing and gentle hand, and it has what I think is Sugiura's main theme, in which someone who is or thinks he has become a monster is brought closer to being a human being by others treating him as one. Dimensional-transfer portal/intrusion fantasy, weird magic powers, vague homoeroticism, pretty art, linguistic puns. Highly recommended.

Now I will find something to eat, and then come home and do whatever I want, and did I mention without speaking to anybody? Yay.

Recent media

seishonagon was visiting all this week, which was awesome, and so the portions of Sassafrass present spent very large amounts of time working on stuff for the next album, Firebrand, which if I do say so myself is going to be very good indeed, and which will be out Real Soon Now (I'll let you know). However the conditions of our deluxe home recording studio, which looks just exactly like our living room only full of microphones cleverly attached to bits of string and other household objects (ribbon strung from the ceiling-- mailing tubes-- extension cords), and also the vagaries of mic intake and background noise etc., mean that there have to be 57386 takes of most things. On Friday we recorded three whole tracks and hence I am glad of my foresight in not going off on the take-seishonagon-to-NYC expedition the rest of the household has gone on because it means I have the entire weekend not to speak even a single word aloud to anybody. B. called, but I asked him to monologue.

Speaking of B., when I was visiting him last weekend we went to see Wall-E, which is either half a brilliant movie or two halves of a good movie, I can't decide which. The first half is lovely, at any rate, beautiful and quiet and desolate, nostalgic but not overly so; I was unsurprised to see Shaun Tan in the credits as a conceptual artist. The second half was much more the sort of thing Pixar usually does, and I would have liked it much better had I not been so blown away by the earlier bit, because it is perfectly good Pixar, it is just they outdid themselves earlier. Recommended, though.

And then this weekend I holed up with the second volume of Catherynne Valente's Orphan's Tales, and that has been a good way to spend hermit-time. The Orphan's Tales are packed more densely page-to-page with cool stuff than most other things I can think of; as they are a Chinese-box structure, tales within tales within tales, they have more freedom to roam about a wide world and wider cast of characters than most other things I can think of, because they are not stuck to the amount of interesting things that the protagonist can personally visit. Also they have the freedom to be tragic and then reverse it later in the background, or to be comic and reverse that, or to have people reappear unexpectedly in odd situations. I kept a running tally in my head of questions I wanted answered and stories I wanted finished, and I believe I've only maybe two left of each, which is quite impressive for a thousand-odd pages of Chinese box. In addition their form of cool bit is one I have always liked, namely the sort that reminds me of a medieval bestiary which tells you that in the Antipodes lives x gorgeous creature which has y peculiar habits and does z utterly inexplicable and never-explained thing, and then moves on to the next creature, heraldic and mysterious. The Orphan's Tales are the sort of books where I am utterly positive that barnacle geese do come out of barnacles. They can be tiring to read, for one has to accustom oneself to so many new characters and settings so suddenly; and I do not know why they won the Tiptree, unless it is for 'book it would have been very easy to make anti-feminist which wasn't', which is a fair cop, but; and they do several things I had thought up independently earlier and hoped to use in something of mine and now can't, which it is manifestly and vastly unfair for me to complain about, but. Highly recommended.

And then I went to the comics store and managed to pick up a copy of volume one of Silver Diamond, by Shiho Sugiura, and that also makes me very happy. I had originally known Sugiura through Koori no Mamono no Monogatari, which I read portions of with the aid and abetment of foleyartist1, and which I desperately want licensed because I want to read it the way one can only want to read things one has read parts of in multiple languages one does not entirely understand (I think that particular series hit three, none of them English). But then they licensed this and I had missed it in scanlation and I really like it. It has striking imagery, which is rarer in manga than it ought to be, and it avoids and touches on cliches with a knowing and gentle hand, and it has what I think is Sugiura's main theme, in which someone who is or thinks he has become a monster is brought closer to being a human being by others treating him as one. Dimensional-transfer portal/intrusion fantasy, weird magic powers, vague homoeroticism, pretty art, linguistic puns. Highly recommended.

Now I will find something to eat, and then come home and do whatever I want, and did I mention without speaking to anybody? Yay.