Today's Listening: Charles Mingus & Genesis

I'm glad I listened to this on my Rhapsody account and didn't spring for it on Amazon. I'm always keen to check out really old jazz recordings that are newly released on CD or just newly released "from the vaults", but if this were a movie I'd rate it a "rental".

Amid nuggets of live virtuosity there are clearly some trainwreck moments that, while they give the CD a bit of a playful charm, make this recording more suited for diehard fans of Mingus.

After the Mingus, I cranked up the Genesis. Having been a real big fan for the Phil Collins years, I started listening to the their earlier prog/art rock albums with Peter Gabriel. I think I have all their albums now, including their two Archives box sets. But I listened to this collection on Rhapsody because it's organized so that the tracks are arranged in reverse chronological order from their more recent to their oldest. That's kind of like the way I began listening to them. Last night I saw a rockumentary on them on VH1 Classic, and so today I had what I needed to listen to while filling out online appications. I'm looking forward to their remasters boxsets that will begin to come out this year.

The Scarlet Pimpernel

Wow, this was a surprisingly good and easy read.

For fans of Zorro and Batman and the whole playboy-by-day/hero-by-night genre of fiction, whether it be in movies, books, or comics, you need to read this. It's one of the originals and an inspiration for a lot of those more current popular works.

Orczy does a great job of educating the reader about the manners of speech, customs, and modes of behavior for the period without bogging down the reader with it and preventing them from enjoying the plot and story. And while the story started off slowly for the first chapter or two, during which I got a quick clinic on the previously mentioned dialect and customs of the time, once underway it really drew me in and I found it hard to put the book down.

I also recommend reading the forward which provides some biography of Baroness Orczy and some commentary on the book and how it's been received by readers from back when it was published until recent times.

I hear there are sequels...

Hellboy: The God Machine

Not a bad read at all. A very quick read, too.

The dialogue, characterizations, and settings all follow those established in the original Mignola comics, and also add to the collective canon of the Hellboy and BPRD "world".

I definitely recommend it for those sleepless nights when you want to stay awake.

Mozart: The Complete Works

So last fall I bought this 170-disc collection of everything Mozart composed ($120, Amazon), and since then I've pretty much sampled a few discs here and there every now and then. Let's face it, 170 takes time to go through, and while I consider myself a fan and own many smaller compilations of his works, I've got stuff to do and other things I also want to listen to.

It wasn't until this past January and February that I decided to take a more academic approach to listening to old Wolfgang. I'd started to listen to a 2-disc set of some of his works at night while driving in the cold (or relative cold of where I'm at). It was relaxing, like in the car commercial kind of way. And I developed some favorite parts. But when you've got tracks of varying length for compositions whose structure you're still unfamiliar with, well, all I'm saying is that I can't drive and keep my eyes on the CD player to mark my favorite track and times. Here I was appreciating something, and I couldn't even identify it to look for it elsewhere or name it to anyone if we were talking about it. Yes, I'm sure I could play the "match game" at home with the disc liner notes and a fast-forward button, but that wasn't the point. When you hear a Rolling Stones song on the radio, you know it's them. When you hear Eric Clapton, you know it's him. I wanted to at least be able to know Mozart when I heard him.

Then I found myself wanting to learn more about the man. When I was a kid, parts of "Amadeus" scared the daylights of me, but it was just a movie based on a series of very "creative" plays that just plain made a lot of stuff up. Plus, I knew there were stories about his compositions, too. He was a child prodigy, after all, as well as one of the leading composers both of and after his time. I guess it came down to my wanting to know as much as I could.

The Compleat Mozart is just the book I was looking for, and I got a used copy on Amazon. There's basically a blurb on every composition of Mozart's on a track-by-track basis. I can literally read about a specific composition as I listen to it, because both books use the Kochel notation method to identify Mozart's works, some of whom are named or numbered or have similarities among their names. What's good for me is that includes some biographical information about each piece as well as some discussion about Mozart's possible influences and how the respective piece was critiqued during Mozart's time and since. What's bad for me is that other parts of the discussion are too technical. They're clearly by musical scholars for other musical scholars.

That's where The NPR Classical Music Companion comes in. It's basically the encyclopedia I use to understand the esoteric (to me, granted) musical terms and concepts that are used throughout the book. It's a good thing I got it, too. I couldn't read one passage about Mozart's 1st symphony without referring to the guide after almost EVERY sentence. But I'm coming along. Soon I hope to retain some definitions and move up into concepts. While I do that, I'm also going to look into a book on music theory. Do those come in "book-on-tape" format?

I guess I'll start at CD 1, which also begins the Symphonies section, and list the tracks I've heard. It'll be nice to start the week this way.

Is This Thing On?

Well, it's been awhile, but don't worry, I have excuses.

Actually, my personal routine, or, as close a thing to one that I may have, was altered in the past few weeks by my mother getting a new job. She now works from 3pm to 8pm, but with her commute and settling down after getting home, calls me at 10pm. Every. Night. And guess what time of day your humble blogger used to set aside for his personal blogging therapy? Precisely, 10pm to midnight. While I guess I could sit down and type after that, it wouldn't be about anything that I wanted this blog to be about. It'd be about my Mom's day at work and about who she likes, who she hates, and who's out to destroy her. I forget which comedian(s) said it, but every woman knows one woman who she thinks is out to destroy her. Just a fact.

So after that inescapable emotional tampon work, it's all I can do to just watch something on TV in order to go to sleep easily.

I've also picked up the pace on my job search and really hit the phones and web postings hard. Some leads, but nothing promising yet.

I've also picked up steam on my book proposal. I'm almost done filling in the figurative blanks of each section right now, and within a week I'll start polishing the contents.

While I haven't really posted in the past 3 weeks, I haven't stopped writing down stuff that I would type. The old notebook has a few things in it. I even snapped a few pictures. Perhaps this weekend I'll type all of them up at one sitting.

And then I'll alter my routine to blog after lunch or some other consistent new time. Until then.

The Parker JOTTER (pt. 2)

So the Stainless Steel Jotter was a workhorse for me both in and outside the office for a lot of years. I can't remember exactly when, but it was on eBay that I saw a lot of used Parker jotters while shopping around for some mechanical pencils. Among the stainless steel ones and those with acrylic bodies I saw some that were stainless steel with gold tone clips and trimming. Gold tone? Really? Some bling to my SS Jotter? Cool. I got the lot for a song, and the SS Jotter with the gold trim became my new Ace. And through eBay I found a means to get more.

There's a handful of sellers on eBay who sell Jotters in trays of te.. Be they overseas or domestic, I usually get trays with the newest colors for about $35-45 shipped. For the older more common colors you can usually find trays for $25-30. When everything's said and done I get the new colors at domestic retail and the older colors at a discount. I own most of the colors available and multiple ten-packs of the SS Jotters. Lately a lot of different colors, old and new, have also come out with gold trimming. There are also now translucent bodies in red, blue, green, and purple.

In a personal note, there are also Parker Jotters out there with clear acrylic bodies and gold trim. I have one, but I'd love to find out where I can get more.

In 2004, Parker put out a line of 50th Anniversary Jotters that featured a new set of 5 bright colors and a retro look to the trim of the pen. Gone were the fletching and fine line detailing in the arrow clip. The ridged crown of the pushbutton was replaced with rounded edges and featured a "50" on the top in place of the new Parker "P" logo. Older Jotter users would actually find this "new" look reminiscent of the first Jotters' design. And the best thing yet: their cartridges now had gel ink. The same cartridge shape and size, only with a gel rollerball? I swear, Parker, you must be reading my diary.

Nothing compares to a SS Jotter with a gel cartridge, and very little approaches being able to beat it.

From as best as I can figure, the 50th Anniversary Jotters were only available in Europe. I didn't really find out about them until 2005, along with information on additional models of all steel bodies with two tone blue, black, and gold bodies, respectively. There were even some SS Jotters released that had yellow and gray plastic lugs, respectively, all along the length of their bodies. The price of all but the blue and black metallic Jotters have been too high for me so far. The gold and "lugged" models for for $30+ on eBay still, while the blue and black metallic ones go for $10-20 approximately.

Soon after, new Jotters were released that incorporated the rounded-corner pushbuttons of the Anniversary editions. More and more colors came out along with gold trim for more colors. Recenlty, as in a few weeks ago, I started seeing new Jotters on eBay that had all the features of the Anniversary editions, only in richer dark colors and with the newer Parker logo in place of the "50". With this new line, the Jotter continues to sustain its popularity as an elegantly practical instrument that one can easily acquire and confidently use anywhere.

As a fan and collector, the different Parker Jotter models and colors are a prize well worth the pursuit.

Dynamic Forces' Earth X LOGAN Bust

Another item recently uncovered from my eBay "vaults" is this Eart X Logan mini-bust. Logan is the alter ego of the ubiquitous Marvel comics character Wolverine. What makes mini-busts of pop-culture fictional characters cool for me is that they're little nuggets of cool fun you can get away with displaying in the most serious and business-like environments. That this one comes with a wooden base complete with faux brass lettering makes it an even nicer item for the fanboy to display.

Before the rigors of moving to and from Maryland had completely upheaved any sense of style or organization to my DVD-, CD-, and bookshelves, I used to display a couple of mini-busts on my bookshelves placed in front of books I had in them. I had one of the Marvel comics character Deadpool (for a lot of the same reasons why I now have the Stormshadow bust, see post). The other two were of Wolverine in different costumes. As the enigmatic Canadian described succintly as "the best at what he does", his is a look that can be considered singularly iconic whether it be the flared wings on his cowl, the three admantium claws that extend out of the top of each of his hands, or even his 5' 3" stature. Forget Hugh Jackman, that's the movies and something else altogether.

At the same time, Wolverine is just as at home without the costume and has gone for entire story arcs and mini-series in regular clothes and of his own volition. Having your true identity known to the public has been commonplace for many Marvel characters, even before the recent "Civil War" comics event. But none of these other characters really do their adventuring in civilian clothes the way Logan does.

The two busts of Wolverine that I have are of his "first appearance" costume and of his more recent (as of 2000 and before his Astonishing X-Men look) brown costume. While there are plenty of other busts of Wolverine and of Logan out there to be had, I got the Earth X Logan bust next because it depicted an older version of the character who, in appearing to have tired of the whole costume thing (to me) and wholy adopting more practical everyday clothes, made a nice complement to his uniformed looks from different earlier time periods.

In the Earth X and subsequent Paradise X story lines, a possible future for the Marvel Universe is presented where heroes old and new, and villains as well, are called upon to save their entire reality from the "greatest menace they've ever faced". It was developed by multi-talented comic artist, painter, sculptor, and even writer Alex Ross. In this future, Logan and Jean Grey eventually got together and aged not-so-gracefully. I'll leave it to the many venerable websites devoted to the Earth X plots for you to learn more, True Believers. On with the sculpt description.

The sculpting by Alex Ross is phenomenal. It's as realistic as a character bust of its type has been, and that's saying something given Logan's notorious mane of hair in the comics. But then again, Ross has made quite a name for himself helping to flush out the reality of comic characters he draws and or paints through the detail he devotes to their respective anatomies, facial features, and uniforms, often rendering photorealistic depictions of actual humans and how they would look in costumes that had stiches and seams and footwear that had actual soles. He's also worked with many writers to apply the same kind of real-world "acid-test" to comics' story plotting and writing in an effort to deconstruct and then overhaul characters as well as their respective worlds or settings to appeal to an increasingly sophisticated and, sadly, less innocent audience. Back to the sculpt.

This Logan bust accurately depicts the older character from the comic series. He's got the graying hair and the wrinkles and looks distinguished. He's wearing the bomber jacket from the series as well, but I remember from being a longtime fan that the bomber has been a recurring part of his wardrobe for some time, especialy in the 80's. Reminds me of the whole "Days of Future Past" story arc in the X-Men comics of the time. It's a look for Logan that's so iconic as well that other statues and figures have been made as recently as this year that depict him in that look from that arc.

The expression on his face is incredible. Noble, sad, and wise all in one look. This is something that Alex Ross is also known for bringing to his depictions of older heroes: that realistic, for a superhero anyway, look of experience that's figuratively painted on their faces as well as literally. It almost makes one wish that thaey went through those tragedies, losses, and victories that Logan went through to get to where he is now. But then heroes are supposed to inspire us.

This Earth X Logan mini-bust really succeeds in bringing that heroic inspiration out of and beyond the pages of the comic books.