![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The new Morrissey album, based on two listens, is deeply patchy, and the new Anthony & the Johnsons is basically the same as the last one, but slightly less so. More to my surprise, given I liked You Could Have It So Much Better, first impressions of the new Franz Ferdinand are that for the most part, it's a bloody mess. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
icecoldinalex, this means that thus far you're still Album of the Year.
I know BSG's Number Six Cylon was named in honour of The Prisoner, but I'd never thought the parallels went much beyond that. I'm reconsidering in light of Season Three, where as with my Prisoner DVD, all the faintly pointless episodes seem to be contained on Disc Four. Homage!
Anyway, I have now finished the third season. Frakking Hell.
Finished The Worm Ouroboros and...well, I'm not cutting this, it was written near 90 years ago, but if you're planning to read it for the plot then look away now. I know the title should have given this away, but in some senses I have never read a more pointless book. Our heroes break the power of Witchland utterly - and then sit around moping, worrying that life will never again offer them anything so awesome as that war. This a war in which, aside from the danger to themselves and the deaths of their men, their land was despoiled and one of their sisters damn near raped. This in a book written by an Englishman mere years after the War To End All Wars might even seem, at terrible cost, to have succeeded. So by calling in a boon from the gods - they resurrect Witchland and take us right back to the start! I've seen the idea of Valhallan eternal war crop up a few times for examination in art - Grant Morrison was intrigued by it in early days, from his climactic Zoids to the Warner Bros deconstruction of 'The Coyote Gospel'. But I'm hard pressed to think of anything else written since the Middle Ages which quite so unambiguously celebrates that idea, particularly when the conflict encompasses innocents as well as the protagonists.
As a palate cleanser, have now moved on to the charming eccentricity of Dry Store Room No. 1. This has already been extensively blogged of late by my friendslist, so I shall restrain myself to mentioning how glad I am that I started this *after* my recent return visit to the Natural History Museum, such that when Richard Fortey says:
"There are still galleries in the Natural History Museum displaying minerals, the objects themselves - a kind of museum of a museum, preserved in aspic from the days of such systematic rather than thematic exhibits. Few people now find their way to these galleries."
- and think, after the Great Hall, that was the first place I went! And I got to surreptitiously touch a thing from another world, some witch-iron! It wouldn't be nearly so much fun if that had happened the other way round; I'd feel like I was being worthy, being watched, rather than naturally doing the right thing.
icecoldinalex, this means that thus far you're still Album of the Year. I know BSG's Number Six Cylon was named in honour of The Prisoner, but I'd never thought the parallels went much beyond that. I'm reconsidering in light of Season Three, where as with my Prisoner DVD, all the faintly pointless episodes seem to be contained on Disc Four. Homage!
Anyway, I have now finished the third season. Frakking Hell.
Finished The Worm Ouroboros and...well, I'm not cutting this, it was written near 90 years ago, but if you're planning to read it for the plot then look away now. I know the title should have given this away, but in some senses I have never read a more pointless book. Our heroes break the power of Witchland utterly - and then sit around moping, worrying that life will never again offer them anything so awesome as that war. This a war in which, aside from the danger to themselves and the deaths of their men, their land was despoiled and one of their sisters damn near raped. This in a book written by an Englishman mere years after the War To End All Wars might even seem, at terrible cost, to have succeeded. So by calling in a boon from the gods - they resurrect Witchland and take us right back to the start! I've seen the idea of Valhallan eternal war crop up a few times for examination in art - Grant Morrison was intrigued by it in early days, from his climactic Zoids to the Warner Bros deconstruction of 'The Coyote Gospel'. But I'm hard pressed to think of anything else written since the Middle Ages which quite so unambiguously celebrates that idea, particularly when the conflict encompasses innocents as well as the protagonists.
As a palate cleanser, have now moved on to the charming eccentricity of Dry Store Room No. 1. This has already been extensively blogged of late by my friendslist, so I shall restrain myself to mentioning how glad I am that I started this *after* my recent return visit to the Natural History Museum, such that when Richard Fortey says:
"There are still galleries in the Natural History Museum displaying minerals, the objects themselves - a kind of museum of a museum, preserved in aspic from the days of such systematic rather than thematic exhibits. Few people now find their way to these galleries."
- and think, after the Great Hall, that was the first place I went! And I got to surreptitiously touch a thing from another world, some witch-iron! It wouldn't be nearly so much fun if that had happened the other way round; I'd feel like I was being worthy, being watched, rather than naturally doing the right thing.
