Joe R. Lansdale ~ The Thicket
just finished reading Joe R. Lansdale‘s latest and greatest, The Thicket, this righteous revenge quest replete with his unmatched level of humor and horror, the wonder of youth against the cynicism of a cold hard world, characters that you’d want to spend a few years with, dialogue and meditation in the Charles Portis/Cormac McCarthy mode,…
Blair Tindall ~ Mozart in the Jungle
just finished reading Blair Tindall‘s devastating memoir of her life as a freelance oboist in NYC, Mozart in the Jungle. she’s spot-on in portraying the miserable hamster-wheel lives of her colleagues, but lost importantly, Blair slips in an essential history of arts funding in America, in particular the Ford Foundation-led largesse of the 60’s,…
Thomas Pynchon ~ Bleeding Edge
just finished reading Thomas Pynchon’s latest shaggy-dog novel, Bleeding Edge. he’s always happiest, it seems, steeped in byzantine webs of paranoiac conspiracies, and never more so than here, where he out-cyberpunks William Gibson while trawling through not the near future, but the recent past. 9/11 is the centerpoint of an anum of virtual reality technology,…
Philip K. Dick ~ I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon
just finished reading another collection of Philip K. Dick short stories, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, compiled by a former executor of the PKD estate, and certainly the most sympathetic of his advocates, Paul Williams, who wrote the exemplary piece on PKD for Rolling Stone. much darker than The Golden Man collection, and more…
Beethoven ~ ‘Waldstein’ Sonata, 1st mvt. on a ~1815 Anton Martin Thym fortepiano @ National Music Museum, Vermillion, SD_2013.09.15
From the Top did a live taping to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the National Music Museum in Vermillion, SD this past Sunday. The kids played a Gamelan orchestra together, our young guitarist got to sample some of Gibson’s earliest guitars, and I got to play on two beautiful fortepianos, one Schantz reproduction, for a…
Philip K. Dick ~ Clans of the Alphane Moon
just finished reading Philip K. Dick’s novel Clans of the Alphane Moon. the lunatics have taken over the asylum; actually a rock in the Alpha system has been abandoned, the inhabitants all certifiable psychotics, left to fend for themselves and become a viable community. the satellite becomes a chit in an intergalactic supremacy battle, each…
Philip K. Dick ~ Game Players of Titan
just finished reading Philip K. Dick’s novel of irreality and the ultimate bluff: interplanetary gamesmanship, stakes unknown. one of the most dizzying of PKD’s denouements PKD is the best.
Philip K. Dick ~ Confessions of a Crap Artist
just finished reading one of Philip K. Dick’s rare non-sci-fi novels, Confessions of a Crap Artist. a domestic drama of a crackpot family and their friends in 50’s Marin, told by a quartet of narrators (a device more often used by the various contemporary overrated New Yorker fiction writers, but here used much more deftly…
Philip K. Dick ~ Vulcan’s Hammer
just finished reading Philip K. Dick’s novel Vulcan’s Hammer, and early action/sci-fi book about the early version of Skynet, contemporaneous struggles by the oppressed hopefully successful without the need for Arnold Schwartzenegger. a really great thrill-ride PKD is the best.
Philip K. Dick ~ We Can Build You
just finished reading Philip K. Dick’s We Can Build You. a novel about mental health revolving around a progressively delusional March/September romance complete with a Woody Allen-esque neurotic narrator, co-owner of a keyboard instrument company that gets involved with fully-functional simulacra of Abraham Lincoln, et al. the art is in the dialogue. one of PKD’s…