Category: Arts & letters

Doing it old school, or ‘Yeah! Science (fiction)!’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
A script from the Before-Time, possibly written by Dr. Eleven. Or that “Mad Blog” fella.

I always liked science fiction. Science, not so much.

Science always seemed rigid and impersonal. But science fiction, or speculative fiction, if you prefer — especially of the apocalyptic variety — spoke to the gloomy bog-trotter in my DNA.

So I studied the fiction instead of the science, with predictable results. When it came time for me to go to college, there was only one in the state that would accept me with my miserable GPA. However, the institution excused me from freshman comp because I was a fool for words, as long as there were no equations to solve.

SF seems best to me when the future isn’t pretty, but people manage to muddle through somehow. “A Clockwork Orange.” “Alas, Babylon.” Or “Station Eleven.”

We watched the “Station Eleven” TV series on Max, recently watched it again, and afterward I finally got around to reading the book, which as usual is considerably different. Author Emily St. John Mandel was gracious about the changes, though, saying she thought the series “deepened the story in a lot of really interesting ways.”

I doubt that I’m adding any significant depth with this latest episode of Radio Free Dogpatch, but the notions contained therein have been taking up space in my head for a while now and the Voices would like them to leave. They’re your problem now.

• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a wash and brushup. NASA noises, starship flyby, countryside ambience and appreciative audience come from Zapsplat. “Wernher von Braun” is the work of the inimitable Tom Lehrer. The Celtic tune is from Freesound. And the outro clip is from The Firesign Theatre’s “I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus,” which remains all too relevant. All other evil racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.

Thanks to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke for “2001,” Gene Roddenberry for “Star Trek,” Emily St. John Mandel for “Station Eleven,” Pat Frank for “Alas, Babylon,” Stephen King for “The Stand,” and The Firesign Theatre for … well, for everything.

His name is not ‘Archie’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
Say hello to Archimedes.

We’ve unwrapped a solstice present a wee bit early.

Herself recently stumbled across a chainsaw sculptor hawking his wares and he delivered this lovely fella to us yesterday. We’d long admired another owl sculpture in Sandia Heights and she thought, “Why not?”

I immediately named him Archimedes for the owl in T.H. White’s wonderful “The Once and Future King.”

But we dassn’t call him “Archie” for short. Remember your Merlyn, young Warts:

[O]wls are the most courteous, single-hearted and faithful creatures living. You must never be familiar, rude or vulgar with them, or make them look ridiculous. Their mother is Athene, the goddess of wisdom, and, although they are often ready to play the buffoon to amuse you, such conduct is the prerogative of the truly wise. No owl can possibly be called Archie.

Time

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Happy 75th birthday to Tom Waits. The gravel swirling round in his pan always has a trace of gold in it.

Oh and the things you can’t remember 
Tell the things you can’t forget
That history puts a saint 
In every dream

The winter of our dissed content

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Extry, extry, read all about it … or not.

At The Atlantic, Noah “Fargo” Hawley advises us that too many reporters are writing fiction.

In a fund-raising email from Mother Jones, David Corn warns us (with one hand casually searching our wallet pockets and purses) that the legacy media’s value-neutral, highly inaccurate reviews of the various hams auditioning for parts in the Pestilence-Erect’s latest play are a form of “sanewashing.’

And at Radio Free Dogpatch, well — our little purse pooch of a podcast may not lift the biggest leg on the block, but it dearly loves a good pissing contest. Why not squeak in a little squirt of our own?

So lend an ear to the latest, massively hydrated edition of Radio Free Dogpatch, even though it may be, as The Bard had Richard declaim:

Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before [its] time

Into this breathing world, scarce half made up. …

Shit, now that I think of it, the title may be the best part of the whole damn thing. …

• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a sonic colonic. The music, “Black Fedora” and “On the Job,” and the people networking and chanting all come from Zapsplat. All other evil racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.

Bigger even than I had feared

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
Some turds just won’t go down and stay down.

The headline is an inside joke among family and friends, a line of dialogue lifted from the 1978 novel “Panama,” by Thomas McGuane.

And now it’s the title of a Radio Free Dogpatch podcast, an unsubtle bit of misdirection concerning an oversized orange turd that has proven impossible for a confused and bilious nation to flush.

There was no such turd when Chet Pomeroy spoke the line in McGuane’s book. But there is in the podcast. My apologies to Mr. McGuane. I hope he thinks of me, if he thinks of me at all, as having conducted myself with some forethought “as a screaming misfit, a little on the laid-back side.”

Meanwhile, always flush at least twice. It’s a long way to Mar-a-Lago.

• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a sonic colonic. Sly and The Family Stone come to you from their YouTube channel. From Freesound we get a dog whining, a power failure, an Internet outage, a garbage truck, and an elephant trumpeting. Judge Dredd issues his opinions via YouTube. All the other evil racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.