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I don't think I have posted this before, but for those of you who grew up on Dungeons and Dragons and Dragon Magazine in particular, you might remember a certain cartoonist called Phil Foglio. While I have moved very far indeed from gaming, he's kept one foot in it and does lots of illustrations for fantasy card games. But he always did a few other projects on the side, including Buck Godot, a funny SF series, and the illustrations to many of the Myth Inc. novels by Robert Aspirin. His website is Studio Foglio Anyway, a few years back he and his wife started a new comic called Girl Genius, which I think is pretty clever and funny. I won't go into details, which you can find out for yourself, though basically it is about a quasi-Medieval Europe where "sparks" (mad scientists) are in charge. It's in a fairly new genre called gaslamp fantasy, though it reminds me a fair bit of the "Lord Darcy" fantasy series by Randall Garrett (haven't read those in ages). What's very cool is that they have started putting the old comics on line for free (though I do own them all already) and the new pages go up three times a week here: Girl Genius If you poke around you'll find there is even a link to a Yahoo group discussing the comic and offspins. The posts are generally amusing, but are made by people still very much in the gaming community.

I mentioned this on the Yourmusic thread, but it can go here as well. Yourmusic.com has both Consummation and Central Park North for $5.99 each. I'm still kicking myself (a little bit) for paying $10 for CPN at the B*%&rds.

Anyone know whether Monday Night! will be released as a single CD? I recall someone posting that MC says everything eventually gets rereleased. Second, if a CD issue isn't in the near (3 year) horizon, does the LP have as much reverb as some of the other dates? I would hope not, being a live (or "live") show, but don't have any way to verify. Thanks!

It's been a long time coming, but according to Ebert, Harold Lloyd's work will be coming out soon in a DVD package, including Safety Last, which I saw on television years ago. As far what's out there now, it is just the public domain films, with probably the best one from Kino called The Harold Lloyd Collection (Slapstick Symposium). Included in this Kino collection are the feature Grandma's Boy (1922), plus the shorts Bumping Into Broadway (1919), An Eastern Westerner (1920), His Royal Slyness (1921), Just Neighbors (1919), I Do (1918), and Number Please (1920). I probably will continue to rank Lloyd below Chaplin and Keaton, but it is great that this will be coming out, now that the Lloyd family has restored the films and gotten a deal they could live with.

Young or old, I wouldn't play music so loud you can hear it down the street and send the browsing public running for cover.

I'm going to have to clear out my queue, which is down to Mobley's Hi Voltage. I added Lewis/Jones Consummation (and am more than a little bummed they also have Central Park North, since I paid more this afternoon) and Peggy Lee's Black Coffee.

Great news! Best of luck with the new job.

When the last human checks out on planet earth. My thoughts and condolences as well. This is terrible. I haven't been in London a lot, but I almost always come through Kings Cross, so this definitely hits home for me. It really is an almost impossible dilemma -- really worse than air travel -- since to add the security that would prevent such bombings to the London (or NYC or Paris) undergrounds would make them all but unusable. But maybe some clever people will think up something.

I have found some great things there that were officially OOP at the time, like McLean's Demon Dance and Bout Soul. But I don't like going in nearly as much now that they have moved into the smaller space. I rarely find anything I want in the used CD section (I know, just wait until the next estate sale). But the clerks are pretty knowledgable. They do have a very large selection of box sets, jazz DVDs and jazz VHS tapes. Pretty much one of everything in print, and you won't find that most places. If I am looking for a Delmark CD, I almost always buy it there (sort of like buying direct from Mosaic when possible).

There was an omnibus with 4 Ambler novels in it that I read 5 or 6 years ago. I do remember Coffin was in there. It was pretty entertaining at the time, but I can't recall any of it now. Yes, a definite European flavor, sort of like The Third Man. At least one (maybe Coffin) has the narrator get sucked into this shadowy world, i.e. he doesn't start out as a spy. I think that was my favorite. Sorry I can't be more helpful, but the neurons aren't firing this afternoon.

Great list. I've read a bit by most of the writers mentioned. Actually it's interesting that Ray Bradbury came up because he is the other writer, other than Niffenegger, that really started me thinking on these lines. I just read The Cat's Pajamas, which is a recent collection of non-SF stories that span his entire writing career -- and the writing is really bad. So I'm a little worried to go back through some of his classic books. Would I find that the writing just isn't that great, but the ideas carry the books (fairly likely) or does he become a better writer when grappling with major ideas? Again, I am probably setting the bar quite high. Genre writing is generally pretty bad. So the first hurdle is 1) are the ideas interesting, then 2) do I care about the characters and is the dialogue at least somewhat plausible (and many of the writers I return to fall into this camp), then finally 3) can they really write well and approach a literary standard. Here we might demand that different characters actually speak differently from each other and letting plots unfold without being forced. I feel most SF writers (heck, most writers) stumble here. I do give extra points for writers who can convincely put together an entire alien civilization, which is the main reason for Cherryh and Le Guin being on my initial list. Zelazny is on there for Roadmarks and good use of mythic material in Jack of Shadows and Eye of Cat and a couple others. Actually, Ellison is one of the more literary SF writers, but he is usually lacking in the science fiction department with a few exceptions. I'm sort of on the fence with Philip K Dick. I typically don't find his characters convincing at all, and often his endings are whoa it was all a drug trip. But Man in the High Castle is great. I'll add some more as I think of them.

Perhaps a somewhat misleading title. I read tons of science fiction as a young adult and still indulge from time to time. I am often enthralled at the really interesting ideas embedded in science fiction novels, though some of them do end up being stupid retreads on the world mind concept or what have you. But much of the time, these are plot-driven works with fairly flat characters and dialogue. Not all the time of course. Anyway, I was struck about how Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife takes the science fiction convention of a time traveler and puts it into a literary framework. Margarat Atwood sometimes does this as well. Also, Dorris Lessing, though I am not terribly satisfied with her science fiction efforts. So I thought I would start a list of the science fiction authors that can really write well, in addition to grappling with interesting concepts. Ian McDonald Roger Zelazny Ursula LeGuin C. J. Cherryh - Wave without a Shore That's it for now. I really do like many authors not on the list (Asimov, Clarke, etc. etc. etc.) but they generally fall pretty short on a (fairly arbitrary) literary scale.

Tokyo Cancelled by Rana Dasgupta This is a series of stories (fables really) told by international travelers all stranded because the Tokyo airport is snowed in. It's much closer to Boccaccio's Decameron than the Canterbury Tales, regardless of what the publisher's blurb says. The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (I went to school with her sister). This is a really engaging love story about a man who keeps slipping around in time, usually for just a couple of hours at a time, who keeps running into this young girl, who eventually becomes his wife. Once they are united in "the present," they struggle to find a way to keep him there. After this, I am going to read McEwan's Saturday, which is a meditation on Sept. 11 and has gotten really good reviews. Then I will read Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which was a runner up for the Booker Prize. I wasn't blown away by his previous novel numberninedream, but I've heard this is better. The opening scene is good at least. Anyway, this is a summer for more "serious" books.

Well, to hijack this thread a bit, on the Eurotrip DVD (don't ask), they have a special feature where they bootleg the boots. Sure, Zappa did the same thing, but the point here was not to clean up the bootlegs but to show how bad (and yet funny) some of the boots were with someone's head in the middle of the screen or someone going by to get popcorn.

I think it is awfully hard to win. The chains are really obnoxious and play a lot of rap, though Borders does keep the volume down. A lot of indy store clerks are still living out their music snob dreams from High Fidelity, so only play obscure punk or something equally awful with vocal yelping, but at very high volumes. Reckless Records in Chicago is particularly bad for this, as was one of my favorite* stores on Belmont (that closed last year). I suppose it won't be much of a problem, since there won't be more than one indy stores per city in another 5 years. 4 music stores in Lakeview/Lincoln Park alone closed in the last two years, and another one looks to be well on its way towards closing. * Very good selection in multiple genres despite the jerk clerks.

I just got this mini-review from DMG, and it certainly sounds promising. I didn't realize Iyer had a second project going, in addition to his work with Mahathappa (which I really like, particularly Reimagining). Has anyone heard either this new disk or the previous one? Any thoughts or comparisons to his other CDs?

I finally listened to my copy. Great, great stuff. I concur with other poster who hope that the Garner material is ultimately released. I know that Uptown did it's best to get this out there, and it looks like we need to wait for the estate to change hands. What a shame. It is so weird to read contemporary reviewers say that Dizzy and co. played too fast, since many of the swing bands played tunes just as fast, though maybe not with such complicated changes.

Not even close -- I would choose Shakira over Celine Dion any day of the week.

Just a comment that tomorrow is the last day to get the discount on the 2005 SF Jazz set, which features Coltrane compositions, as well as new compositions by Hutcherson, Rosnes, Redman, etc. As mentioned above, they do ship outside the US, though it is best to drop them an email and explain the situation, especially if billing is going to be tricky. Basically, they told me to put the foreign address in the comments section of the order form. SF Jazz Store

While most people don't think this will hurt his career (this new outspokeness about Scientology, etc.) I think the jury is still out. I expect War of Worlds won't be affected, but some of his smaller, more romantic movies will take a big hit. My wife says in no uncertain terms she will never watch another Tom Cruise movie, including WoWs (which I was planning on seeing) because of his ignorant comments about pharmaceuticals and somewhat indirect cruelty towards post-partum depression sufferers.

I have no idea what you can download at Walmart.com, but I would certainly look for some Public Enemy and Tribe Called Quest. As far as what the (smarter) kids are listening to today, you might try Interpol, Tool, A Perfect Circle or Dredg (the last is probably not at Walmart either). Weird trippy stuff that I like: early Brian Eno, Robyn Hitchcock, Magnetic Fields, Flaming Lips. One of my favorite bands of the mid 1990s was Everclear -- they've kind of dropped off the map...

What was the one set in New Orleans - Frank's Cafe? I didn't watch that but would probably enjoy it. I hope they put Days and Nights of Molly Dodd out, it sort of covered the same territory as Ally McBeal but much, much better.

That may be true, though according to Travolta, he gained fame after joining Scientology, including his Vinny role, so he certainly would not have been in a position to opt out at that point. Don't know about the other celebs. Has anyone seen Bowfinger -- the Steve Martin/Eddie Murphy flick? It's actually pretty funny (even funnier now that Chappelle has clued us in that Murphy does have a brother) and it has a major slam of some Hollywood cult that is obviously Scientology.

I actually missed a couple I've got, including The Young Ones and Fawlty Towers. Father Ted is great, but if you have thin skin regarding shows that poke fun at priests you wouldn't like it. Definitely akin to Fawlty Towers in spirit. The set up is three priests are assigned to this awful little island (Craggy Island) off the coast of Ireland. It's where the Church sends their no-hope priests. One is old, alcoholic "dirty old man" priest who often has daydreams of what he got up to as a younger priest. The youngest is impossibly thick. The middle one, Father Ted, seems the most normal, but he has some strong quirks himself, including a bit of a gambling problem. He's the only one who is self-aware enough to understand the crazy situations they get up to. There's also a strong willed housekeeper who is classic. If you're not sure you would like it, try to rent the DVD with "Kicking Bishop Brennan Up the Arse" - a two-parter which is howlingly funny.

Re: the Knitting Factory. I could never hate a place where I got to read my own poetry (in the Red Room of the old Knitting Factory) or saw a great, great, great reunion gig - Camper Van Beethoven in 2003 (I think). But to each his or her own. On the locally banned list, there is a Wendy's in the Chicago Loop that I never go in any more. There was an extremely aggressive panhandler in there who threatened me when I refused (twice) to give him any money. The management and staff did nothing to try to clear the guy out. Ironically, being a vegetarian I really do avoid fast food restaurants, and Wendy's is about the only one I ever go in, since you can get a real salad or potato.