dream

I dreamed I met Tilda Swinton, she was working in an ice cream shop in a small town. She was a very courteous and friendly ice cream server.

Smoke Monster and other curiosities

There is a big, thick wormlike band of smoke just to the South of us.

It is coming from a new forest fire in 4 mile canyon. My dad called earlier wondering if the smoke was passing over us... he lives further North. It's hard to guage distance on the plains. If the wind shifts it'll smother us, yes, it's only about 30 or 40 miles South. I'm not looking forward to burning eyes & nose & throat, but I can suffer that because I feel worse for the people who are being evacuated from their houses.

Considering what we saw in the mountains last weekend, even though we took in a HUGE haul of mushrooms, things are drying out up there alarmingly fast, and no rain has fallen lately. I am guessing the early (and wonderful) mushroom season is probably over by now. I'm glad we didn't take the time to travel up to the high country this weekend, even if we might've fought off the insidious commercial mushroom pickers for a few good caps, it probably wouldn't have been worth the stress. We have plenty in the fridge anyway.

Some of the matsutakes are being dried now, in the garage, I reckon we'd better do some more soon, because we've picked more than we can eat quickly.

Tonight we grilled a few more of them along with some veggies from the farmer's market, an ear of corn, a yellow squash, a turnip...

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Roundhouse gin. This is probably the best gin I've ever had. It's 28 bucks a bottle, so it's on the expensive side. Colorado seems like the perfect place to make gin, since juniper does so damned well here. There's lots of beautiful wild mountain juniper everywhere. We've been relishing this distillation very appreciatively. I recommend it very strongly to anyone who likes gin. Yes, I am looking at you general_jinjur.

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My Last.FM recommended music player has been hilarious lately. It's been playing a ton of prog (I'm on a prog kick to beat the band) interspersed with netlabel stuff and the occasional Merzbow-ish noise thing.

I'm just discovering Genesis, which is funny because I've always liked prog, and I've always liked the early Peter Gabriel solo records, but I've never heard any of the early Genesis things until this year. Funny. Haha.

The few prog albums I've really been loving lately are:

Genesis - Trespass

Genesis - Nursery Cryme (minus the first & last tracks which I think are wankery)

Premiata Forneria Marconi - Per Un Amico (Italian '70s prog)

Gentle Giant - Three Friends

Gentle Giant - Interview

Egg - Polite Force

Egg - Civil Surface

Henry Cow - Unrest

Yes - Fragile

Anglagard - Epilog

Anglagard - Hybris

5uu's - Regarding Purgatories

Thinking Plague - In Extremis (we just saw 80% of this band live doing improv in Denver)

A few bands I am interested to look more into after listening on Last.FM's radio:

Art Bears

Gryphon

Gaupo

Camel

Hatfield and the North

Koenjihyakkei

Miriodor

Cedric Vuille

Renaissance (can't decide if I like them or not, the singer reminds me of Giles, Giles & Fripp)

I cannot find the one Magma album I have, which is a pity because I like them. I need to get some more.

I find that I generally like the Canterbury scene quite a lot, except that I feel very ambivalent about Caravan.

Jethro Tull, when they were good, were very good, when they were bad, they were VERY, VERY, VERY bad. They were better at being bad than they were at being good.

There's a site called Prog Archives. I've been visiting it a lot, but I can't decide if it's helpful or hurtful. There are a lot of really crappy albums that are highly recommended. Take everything with a grain of salt and see if you can extract some helpful info here and there.

Prog reminds me of the 70s, which I thought were a pretty cool decade. I was under ten years old then, though, so my experience is probably different from some people's. I like a lot of music from then, even the crappy music has a certain feel to it that I like. That doesn't mean I will be jamming out to all of those bad Yes albums though.

Anyway, I am aware of people's perception of prog, and how it's an uncool thing to like, but I am accepting of the prospect of being uncool. I've seen what being cool requires, and it looks like an unpleasant grind.

Also, I'll probably only be in a mania for prog for another month or so, and I won't want to listen to it for another three years.

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LOST. We're on the fifth season now. Little bro Jordan is lending us episodes on his USB stick. The show finally hit a good storytelling vein in the third season. Somewhere in the middle of this season though it seems 'off' somehow. The plot is still interesting, but the directing is weird or something... the pacing is peculiar, the shows don't build any suspense. Hopefully it'll snap out of it soon. The last show we saw was S05E08 LaFleur. I remembered that Locke got something out the pocket of a jumpsuit that had the name LaFleur on it in the mass grave back in season... three was it?

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I have been neglecting the music making & the site for a little while. I have a cool new recording that I need to put out soon, it's part of a bigger project... but with my head mired in the prog vein, I can't see fit to work on abstract music at the moment.

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The drawing class is going alright. I find the other people in class to be not people I can relate to, but I suppose that doesn't matter. So far I haven't learned a lot, but I appreciate the structure and demands of the class, where I'm required to draw 10 or 12 hours per week. That ought to get my chops up significantly by the time the class has ended, I reckon.

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Unless we get a freak frost, we're about to harvest a bunch of big, beautiful heirloom tomatoes. MMMMMMMMM. Can't wait.