Multimedia: Foxx January 22, 2023

I’m enjoying some smaller multimedia worlds lately. Sure, I still love the vast tangle of TV episodes, movies, books, comics, and more that make up Star Trek and Doctor Who, but it’s fun to follow something on a much smaller scale. So here’s one of my recent explorations, with more to come. Not really Facebook material.

John Foxx started writing Ballardian and surrealist short stories under the umbrella title The Quiet Man long ago; some of his lyrics from his early solo work and his Ultravox days tie in with them, in choices of imagery and phrases. In 2009 he released a spoken word (with ambient piano background music), The Quiet Man. That was followed by a book collecting the short stories, The Quiet Man (Rocket 88, 2020), a chapbook of a new short story, “The Lake” (Nightjar Press, 2020), and a second spoken word/piano reading of stories, The Marvellous Notebook (2022). I like the book, but nothing beats listening to Foxx read one of the stories. He chose to have Justin Barton read the ones on the earlier album, because the Quiet Man at the centre of some of the stories is meant to be relatively featureless, grey, unnoticed, and Foxx thought his northern accent might give a bit too much specificity to the character, so he went for a Londoner. From outside the UK, it hardly seems necessary; if anything, Foxx’s accent has softened enough over the years to be less noticeable to Canadian ears than a London accent. Or perhaps to Canadian ears that have heard a lot of northern accents on TV, from Coronation Street to Cracker to Doctor Who (McGann and Whitaker in particular). So I was glad Foxx chose to read the stories on The Marvellous Notebook. The stories, like the ambient underscore, tend to focus on isolation and strangeness. So reading the book in a couple of sittings, while certainly possible, dulls the impact of some of the stories, which, while not too much the same thing, tend to operate in similar shades of grey. Anyway, the tales here make overt the connections between decades of songs and instrumental music from Foxx’s prolific music career. More than worthwhile for fans, and possibly an entry point for new readers and listeners. “The Lake” sold out almost instantly but the rest is still available.

Shetland March 30, 2022

Taking a break from Criterion Channel movies to start another dismally scenic UK cop show, Shetland. I think Laura watched some of it. It’s right up her alley. Of course, this show’s cop’s malfunction is that his wife is dead. It’s not making too big a deal of it so far, at least, but still, enough already. Hmm. Based on novels by Ann Cleeves, who also created the character Vera Stanhope. Laura definitely watched a lot of Vera. She must have watched this, then. I didn’t have anything against these shows, but she binged so many UK cop shows, from Midsomer Murders to Death in Paradise to Happy Valley to Scott & Bailey, that I burned out and tuned out. Gives me something to watch now, I guess.

University days… well, nights, mainly March 28, 2022

I was in Halifax for my university years and didn’t see a lot of bands, but then not a lot of bands I was interested in seemed to play there. So I saw… Teenage Head, Blue Peter, the Tenants, 39 Steps, Katrina and the Waves, Skinny Puppy, Grapes of Wrath, Moev, and some local bands like (I think) Sebastopol, Euthenics, and the October Game, the last one memorable because it was Sarah Mclachlan’s first show in front of a live audience. I remember not bothering to go see the Beach Boys, Billy Idol, or Bryan Adams, but I don’t remember many other big names coming through.

I figure stuff that turns into posts too long for anyone to engage on Facebook might as well go here instead, where I expect no one will engage with it, but at least it’s out there.

Space: 1999 nerdity October 25, 2021

There’s an active Space: 1999 discussion on TrekBBS, and I mentioned the books as part of the discussion, then wondered how many books I have. I think this is all the ones I own. I included UFO because one of the books covers both shows and also why not.

So many audios September 21, 2021

I’ve been buying Big Finish’s Doctor Who audios for many years now. There’s sometimes several out in a single month, and most are an hour or two long, so you can imagine how much of a backlog you can build up if you don’t listen regularly. Mine’s several hundred hours of listening at least. So I’ve been trying to make myself catch up. For the last couple of weeks I’ve tried to get through one of the main range audios (two-hour long full-cast stories featuring either the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, or Eighth Doctor from pre-2005 comeback Doctor Who) a day, taking some time away from reading, Xboxing, or watching TV. I’ve got backlogs for each of those, too.

Anyway. Laura and I had listened to a fair number of the first one hundred main range audios during various road trips over the years, and I’d listened to a few by myself. But I didn’t start with any we’d skipped or with the point we left off. There are some stories with continuity elements from other stories I haven’t heard, or that are part of long character arcs. I wanted to ease back in. Also, because I can’t concentrate on audios while doing much of anything else, I decided to read audios for which I had script PDFs, which BF didn’t start doing until the 120s or 130s of the series.

So… I’ve listened to more than a dozen. But I did a couple of more-or-less one-offs, first.

There may be some SPOILERS ahead for Doctor Who audios from more than a decade ago,

First, 100, the 100th in the main range. Four short stories with the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn Smithe, by four writers. The first two are reasonably fun romps messing with history (not least in that the first story refers to an event in the second as something that’s already happened). The third is a much darker, more claustrophobic tale of a family with a dangerous secret. And the fourth is a sometimes meta tale of Sixie lurching frantically through his own past and future to find an assassin who at some point shot him with a viral weapon that will kill him in a hundred days. Not the only meta thing about this one. It’s fun, as Evelyn gets to see other incarnations of the Doctor in action. And Six proves that he’s capable of a devious plan or two. Enjoyable overall, but a more subtle anniversary celebration than might be expected.

Then The Girl Who Never Was. I thought I might have listened to this a long time ago. Laura and I listened to the Charlie Pollard arc then went into the Lucie Miller stories years back, but this one wasn’t flagged as already heard in my Doctor Who audio spreadsheet. And… I don’t think I’ve heard it before. I know we listened to the last C’rizz story and I thought I’d listened to this one, but it was not familiar. So, a lot of timey-wimey shenanigans, Cybermen, and a lot less time spent on big goodbyes than I’d expected. And a post-credits scene setting up what comes next. Well, that was reasonably entertaining, if not earth-shattering.

So on to the 120s. At this stage in the run of stories, BF was doing three-parters. Each story stood somewhat on its own while being part of a bigger story that would be resolved in the third. Good thing I’m listening to them this way, I guess, because going a month between stories would mean I’d forget a lot of what was going on. As for how good the stories, are, well, it varies.

Castle of Fear is the first part of the Stockbridge trilogy, with the Fifth Doctor visiting a town established in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip as a place where strange things happen. This one tries way too hard to be Monty Python. It’s one thing to bring a Pythonesque sense of humour to a story, but too often the writer of this comedic part-historical thinks it’s enough to throw in elements taken directly from Monty Python and the Holy Grail or wherever. Introducing French knights with outrageous accents and references to mothers and elderberries is just coasting on someone else’s work. The trilogy continues with The Eternal Summer and Plague of the Daleks. Eternal Summer had some good moments, showing Stockbridge as a town mysteriously sealed off where time passes at the wrong speed and repeats, a bit of Sapphire and Steel in the mix, until the story gets tangled in its technobabble, . As for Plague of the Daleks… well, it managed not to focus too much on the Daleks, which generally helps. In a far future Stockbridge, people are behaving strangely, because in fact they aren’t exactly people. It’s a tourist destination depicting old Earth life. But somewhere nearby, underground, long forgotten Daleks in suspended animation have begun to wake.

And I followed up with , the first of the Seventh Doctor stories bringing back alternate universe Nazi Elizabeth Klein. The first trilogy finds the Seventh Doctor encountering Elizabeth Klein, a Nazi scientist he’d encountered in a previous story, who finds herself in our universe, more or less, instead of the one where she’d helped the Third Reich win the war. A Thousand Tiny Wings is a pretty grim story, appropriate enough for a Doctor travelling alone post-Ace. A small group of white British colonial women — and Klein — are hiding in a farmhouse as the Mau Mau rebellion spreads through Kenya. That’s more than enough for a suspenseful story, but the stakes are raised with a dangerous alien threat. The story doesn’t lighten up. It may be that it actually is a fair bit shorter than the Davisons, but it certainly felt like I got through it more quickly. In Survival of the Fittest, the Doctor and Klein find themselves on a planet populated by strange aliens being killed off by unscrupulous humans, and Klein seems to be learning the lessons the Doctor is trying to teach her, becoming a better person. But no. In The Architects of History, time is wrong, due to Klein stealing the Doctor’s Tardis and trying to remake the universe as a Nazi dream. But it’s not a big time-spanning story, it’s mainly set on a moonbase attacked by the sharklike Selachians. Over the course of the three stories, we’re sometimes led to think there’s hope for Klein. But a Nazi is a Nazi.

The next trilogy features Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor. In City of Spires, the Doctor finds himself in a distorted version of Highlands Scotland. He encounters Jamie McCrimmon, whose memories of the Doctor were wiped by the Time Lords after The War Games. He’s a few decades older but still fighting the British and their strange monstrous assistants, who are drilling for oil and building a big city to refine it and do sinister things. But there are people there from different decades, and Scotland is not recognizable because of the mysterious villain’s activities. The Wreck of the Titan brings a lot of nautical adventure, with the Doctor and Jamie finding themselves on the sinking Titan, then the sinking Titanic, and then on Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, and the listener figures out where the Doctor is before he seems to. In Legend of the Cybermen, the Doctor, realizing he’s in the Land of Fiction, finds himself in a war with Cybermen determined to convert everyone in the Land of Fiction, and with help from Jamie, Zoe, and some of the land’s picturesque inhabitants, he has to find the Land’s Mistress. The thing is, once it’s clear they’re in the Land of Fiction, the story’s stakes seem a lot lower. There are good stretches of the story that are a lot of fun but they’re generally in the first two parts.

Next up: the Fifth Doctor, Tegan, Turlough, and an older Nyssa in what turns into a Mara trilogy. In Cobwebs, the Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough find themselves in an abandoned base — literally, as the skeletons in a medical suite are theirs. And they find Nyssa, who’s left Terminus and is researching a deadly disease. And there’s some jumping between the same place in two times. It’s a bit twisty and suspenseful. In The Whispering Forest, the gang find themselves on a planet with a small human colony living a low tech existence and obsessed with cleanliness and with the mysterious Takers, who kidnap their people but are never seen, and Shades, insubstantial whispering things in the woods. Yes, there’s a long ago crashed spaceship and the ship’s robots and a hidden medical facility and other complications. And I’m only a little way into the third, but the Mara’s made itself known already.

I can’t say I’ve been blown away by any of these. They’re generally competently entertaining but dont do as much for me as, say, some of the Eighth Doctor’s adventures with Lucie Miller, or the main Torchwood range stories. But for anyone who liked the classic series, they’re fun. If only there weren’t quite so many of them.

So what else is new? September 21, 2021

Here we are, almost in October, which means it’s been about a year and a half of pandemic and teleworking, and two and a half years of life without Laura.

I still find little surprises here and there. Just the other day I found a bunch of photos of her from 2004, for some work-related thing. Just different shots of the same thing, smiling, not smiling, that sort of thing. This is the one I liked the best.

Bass cadet April 15, 2021

One thing about telework: I can listen to whatever music I want to, as loud as I want to. Today I’m listening to some of Tempa’s Dubstep Allstars compilations from back when dubstep still mattered a bit, volume 09 by Silkie and Quest and volume 10 by Plastician. I’ve always liked electronic music, but for a long time that seemed to be the province of insipid New Agers or microgenre-obsessed UK dance music producers. Techstep? Darkstep? Glitch? What?

When I first read about dubstep in XLR8R magazine or wherever, it sounded interesting. And I had an eMusic account, and many of the key labels and distributors were there, so I could get a lot of it quickly, easily, inexpensively and legally. It’s always been about home listening for me, I have to admit. I would have been already over 40, married, and suburban when I first heard it, so late night clubbing wasn’t my thing. But dubstep at its best has a lot that worked for home listening. A lot of it is atmospheric; the music may be a long way from maximalism, but it can capture moods. The speed, at 140 bpm, is not sleep-inducing. More importantly, the syncopated rhythms are a lot more interesting than straightforward house or techno 4/4 rhythms. But most of it is also instrumental. So it works as background music without being boring, but it can also work as foreground music. Not all of it, of course. Sturgeon’s Law applies.

But a lot of things came together at the right time. Electronic music magazines were still producing print issues, record stores still existed, but there were also a lot of mp3 and wav sellers online and places like dubstepforum. There was a lot being produced, a lot of communication going on, and it was a scene anyone could follow along without having to be present. You could invisibly keep up with a lot of interesting developments. Buying mp3s from Boomkat or mail ordering Big Up magazine or buying Woofah at a record store meant you were making at least a financial contribution to the scene.

It came to an end, partly due to outsiders taking the sound and dumbing it down, partly due to insiders taking the sound and dumbing it down. It’s hardly the only music scene to crash and burn as a result of worldwide success. But a lot of that music still works for me.

Have to catch up one of these days. December 10, 2020

I need to blather about some shows. Maybe about some books and music. Loving all the new Star Trek, not getting all the fuss over The Mandalorian, disappointed in everyone who hasn’t watched Tales From the Loop. For a start. Facebook doesn’t lend itself to much more than banter, so I will probably spend more time here talking to myself.

Review: The Quiet Man: Short Stories by John Foxx November 24, 2020

John Foxx’s The Quiet Man short story collection seems strangely appropriate for this year, though it’s a culmination of forty years of writing. The stories often deal with people wandering through cities they’ve somehow become disconnected from, whether by making themselves anonymous, or being lone survivors in abandoned overgrown cities. There are people who become effectively invisible by choice, or by accident, people who become unable to find their way home and roam along canals and towpaths becoming gradually less real. Isolation, dislocation, and disconnection are routine here. So that works for 2020. I’ve been in this house alone, teleworking since March, widowed since May of last year. Isolation and disconnection are my life these days.

There’s a certain resemblance to some of JG Ballard’s work, as stories sometimes seem like they’re replaying the same basic sets of ideas in slightly different ways, but more vaguely and less clinically than Ballard. Foxx is a musical and visual artist much more than a prose writer, and some of the ideas and phrases here have been used in song lyrics going back to the late 1970s. So the book is an extension of the experience of listening to Foxx’s music, hearing lyrics, looking at record covers, reading interviews with him, seeing his visual art, picking up on recurring threads. The quiet man. The grey suit. The shifting city. London overgrown. Consequently, reading this as a newcomer would be a very different experience from mine, and possibly a frustrating one. There are no technobabble explanations, no plots, just repeating images playing out.

Still, if the anthology series The Best Weird Fiction of the Year hadn’t ended after only four or five volumes, there are stories here that would work well in that sort of context. The way the book’s been published, though, as a slightly expensive hardcover from a publisher that specializes in books about musicians with cult followings, will probably keep The Quiet Man from reaching an audience beyond Foxx’s existing fan base. It’d be interesting to read reactions from outside the bubble but I’m not sure that will happen. It’s a shame Mark Fisher isn’t around any more to review it, as his interests in Foxx, Ballard, hauntology, and psychogeography would all come into play, and he might be able to bring some new readers in.\

I’m glad to have this book but I look forward to revisiting it at some point when it isn’t so much of the moment, when life is vibrant and I’m not a grey figure dissolving into the dusty furniture of a quiet house.