All Blues

Another week, another tune. This one’s a classic, and strictly speaking, it’s actually just a blues in concert G. But I was trying to capture some of the original Miles Davis version. (On which all the solos kill me, though I used to focus on the Coltrane; lately, I’ve reached a new appreciation of just how badass Cannonball Adderley was–that’s the first sax solo, for those who are curious.) These days, I’m trying to get better at walking the line between “inside” and “outside”: the more traditional, “tonal” sounding playing that I’ve been working on since picking up the horn …

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On the Lovecraftian Mode

A while back, I found myself in a kind of Lovecraftian mode. I was writing specifically stories that sort of merged my own version of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands setting with his Cthulhu stories, the stuff set in a world like ours, but with a horrifying alien-god conspiracy hidden in its shadows. I’ve long felt like this would be an interesting synthesis, something Lovecraft might have gotten around to himself if he’d lived longer–and there are hints of it, here and there, in the Dreamlands stories–but which is, nonetheless, very much my own take on things. My crit group at the time …

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Gauging the Problem

I’m still having hosting problems, behind the curtain of this website. My latest last-ditch effort is to try a new theme, in the hope that maybe that will make some kind of difference. I won’t know till tomorrow, so I’m going to have to leave this set up like it is. If the site looks a little unfamiliar, or maybe a little awkward–like with those tiny featured-post image thumbnails that show up above my posts, which I’m not about to “regenerate” to the proper size unless I decide to keep the theme change permanently–well, I don’t know what to say …

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Literary Easter Egg

I love finding literary easter eggs in unexpected places, as in this description of a drive up to a summer camp to drop off a boy dreading the experience to come: — They drove through a lot of beautiful scenery, for hours and hours and hours. The camp was far to the north. That was one of its special qualities. — Great forests now received the travelers, as they had once received the French; and the car passed though towns with historic churchyards followed by stony farms that bore witness to various sublethal crop diseases which had originated in Dunwich, …

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