Just do it !
We posted up most the England 2012 stuff in Large. We're going back to Normal. We just are. This is not open for discussion. If it's too small for ya, CTL + increases your browser font. CTL - decreases it.
Did you know that? Try it.
You can also use CTL mousewheelforward or CTL mousewheelback.
Large looks stupid. I thought so all along, but I'm finally doing something about it.
Friday, September 20, 2013
Thursday, September 19, 2013
But first...
Out of some inexplicable need to help Jeff Bezos lose a few cents, I purchased Gate of Saturn: Tangerine Dream Live at the Lowry, Manchester a few days ago. It arrived today.
Being a diehard, BITD TD fan, I had no illusions about how different the German synth franchise sounds today. Full band, two percussionists, a fulltime guitarist...little left of the heady, dizzying, all-synth forays into ambiguous cosmology that characterized their early seventies work. But what the hell, I was in the mood for some upbeat electronic music (maybe I should have tried Daft Punk's new one...) and I thought Edgar might appreciate a little legal tender from a longtime Dreamhead.
Initial run thru: eh, if you don't expect Phaedra, you can find a way to like this. Only just scratched surface, but my fears about it being truly horrid seem allayed for now. More on it later.
Hey, looks like there's enough water for a Pumphouse float this weekend. Is it just a tease?
Being a diehard, BITD TD fan, I had no illusions about how different the German synth franchise sounds today. Full band, two percussionists, a fulltime guitarist...little left of the heady, dizzying, all-synth forays into ambiguous cosmology that characterized their early seventies work. But what the hell, I was in the mood for some upbeat electronic music (maybe I should have tried Daft Punk's new one...) and I thought Edgar might appreciate a little legal tender from a longtime Dreamhead.
Initial run thru: eh, if you don't expect Phaedra, you can find a way to like this. Only just scratched surface, but my fears about it being truly horrid seem allayed for now. More on it later.
Hey, looks like there's enough water for a Pumphouse float this weekend. Is it just a tease?
Sheepishly returns...
Yeah, well, our determined effort to finish off last year's Dead Englishmen Tour before this year's Dead Englishmen Tour (which, after careful consideration, we dubbed Dead Englishmen Tour II - see what we did there?) was unsuccessful, primarily due to an intervening and embarrassingly lavish wedding in Telluride and a variety of other distractions which mercilessly compressed our free time to Newton-defying dimensions and robbed us all of a succinct and deeply fulfilling rendition of our last two days in London in September 2012.
We know you've been waiting. So...here. Sorry for the brevity.
We saw the Tower of London on Thursday, and Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace on Friday.
Thursday. Sunny day, windy. We minded the gap to the Tower. The place was crowded and labyrinthine, crawling with tourists; after several meditative and varyingly pastoral strolls through skeletal castles and abbeys over the prior week and a half, the Tower was something of a jolt to the system. We'd recommend it as a tourist must-see, but we were conditioned to a much different vibe. Cool torture stuff.
Friday: Westminster Abbey, kind of the same deal. There were plenty of dead-king tombs, which unsurprisingly twirled our batons a little, and some of the other memorials were breathtakingly cool. There's something vaguely reverential about standing in front of Darwin's tomb (especially as we had spent a night in his hometown a week earlier). But the place doesn't (or, at least, didn't) allow photography. We bought the book, but it just isn't the same. Come to think of it, maybe we didn't buy the book. I'll get back to you on that.
Parliament is just across the street, place is huge. You're not invited in to look around. Police and barricades all over. I guess it's like that all the time.
Buckingham Palace had a half mile long line in front of it, so we lingered at the square, took some pics, and walked back to Chelsea.
On the way, near Eaton Square, we saw Aqualung. The guy on the album cover. No really: stooped, bearded, "shabby clothes", shuffling along with wobbly determination. Had a cane, but uncertain if his leg was hurtin' bad. He was on the other side of the street, hobbling glacially past the immense Italian Embassy.
I had my hand on my camera, but how do you tell some phlegmy, doddering, down-n-out street geezer that he looks just like a Jethro Tull album cover and could we take a picture? Short answer: you don't.
So we didn't.
Saturday, we got a car to Heathrow and flew home. We knew we wanted to come back. (We did - more on that later.)
Coming up in the next post: a few notes on the 100-year flood that raged through Boulder and the Front Range a week ago, and off we go post-blogging about DETII.
I've been thinking about this: is there some logical disconnect surrounding blogging after-the-fact on the Flood? As I write this, basically a week since the middle of the event, Boulder proper is largely back in business. A few street closures, some weird aftermath remnants of the storm around town, still-steady news coverage, although most of that is related to the mind-shattering devastation of places like Jamestown, Estes Park and Lyons.
I didn't blog or Facebook or tweet while it was happening - well, I don't tweet anyway, and I did spew a few FB posts and a video that we'll throw up in the next installment here. But despite my long association with Boulder and relatively close proximity to a natural disaster of significant proportion, I obviously missed my chance at being a real-time cyber-reporter. I'm not sure I would have been a very good one anyway. And honestly, apart from gawking like everyone else at the pictures, with the slightly surreal overlay of seeing familiar neighborhoods five feet deep in water on the national news, I felt curiously mute about the whole thing. People died, homes were destroyed. Maybe it's pointless now to say something about it. Hmmm....how does this thing work anyway?
But enough. More on the flood soon, and a recap of the DETII, which was in most respects more successful and more satisfying than last year's enterprise. And in some ways, a lot funnier.
Strange days, indeed. Most peculiar, momma.
We know you've been waiting. So...here. Sorry for the brevity.
We saw the Tower of London on Thursday, and Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace on Friday.
Thursday. Sunny day, windy. We minded the gap to the Tower. The place was crowded and labyrinthine, crawling with tourists; after several meditative and varyingly pastoral strolls through skeletal castles and abbeys over the prior week and a half, the Tower was something of a jolt to the system. We'd recommend it as a tourist must-see, but we were conditioned to a much different vibe. Cool torture stuff.
Friday: Westminster Abbey, kind of the same deal. There were plenty of dead-king tombs, which unsurprisingly twirled our batons a little, and some of the other memorials were breathtakingly cool. There's something vaguely reverential about standing in front of Darwin's tomb (especially as we had spent a night in his hometown a week earlier). But the place doesn't (or, at least, didn't) allow photography. We bought the book, but it just isn't the same. Come to think of it, maybe we didn't buy the book. I'll get back to you on that.
Parliament is just across the street, place is huge. You're not invited in to look around. Police and barricades all over. I guess it's like that all the time.
Buckingham Palace had a half mile long line in front of it, so we lingered at the square, took some pics, and walked back to Chelsea.
On the way, near Eaton Square, we saw Aqualung. The guy on the album cover. No really: stooped, bearded, "shabby clothes", shuffling along with wobbly determination. Had a cane, but uncertain if his leg was hurtin' bad. He was on the other side of the street, hobbling glacially past the immense Italian Embassy.
I had my hand on my camera, but how do you tell some phlegmy, doddering, down-n-out street geezer that he looks just like a Jethro Tull album cover and could we take a picture? Short answer: you don't.
So we didn't.
Saturday, we got a car to Heathrow and flew home. We knew we wanted to come back. (We did - more on that later.)
Coming up in the next post: a few notes on the 100-year flood that raged through Boulder and the Front Range a week ago, and off we go post-blogging about DETII.
I've been thinking about this: is there some logical disconnect surrounding blogging after-the-fact on the Flood? As I write this, basically a week since the middle of the event, Boulder proper is largely back in business. A few street closures, some weird aftermath remnants of the storm around town, still-steady news coverage, although most of that is related to the mind-shattering devastation of places like Jamestown, Estes Park and Lyons.
I didn't blog or Facebook or tweet while it was happening - well, I don't tweet anyway, and I did spew a few FB posts and a video that we'll throw up in the next installment here. But despite my long association with Boulder and relatively close proximity to a natural disaster of significant proportion, I obviously missed my chance at being a real-time cyber-reporter. I'm not sure I would have been a very good one anyway. And honestly, apart from gawking like everyone else at the pictures, with the slightly surreal overlay of seeing familiar neighborhoods five feet deep in water on the national news, I felt curiously mute about the whole thing. People died, homes were destroyed. Maybe it's pointless now to say something about it. Hmmm....how does this thing work anyway?
But enough. More on the flood soon, and a recap of the DETII, which was in most respects more successful and more satisfying than last year's enterprise. And in some ways, a lot funnier.
Strange days, indeed. Most peculiar, momma.
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