Yes, a weekly update to guilt me into making progress at least once every seven days or face the self-imposed shame of having not done so*.
My current task is to finally set down the actual stories to include based on how well they fit together, quality (fewer and better is preferable to the alternative), current state (third draft vs. unfinished, etc.) and so forth. Here’s how they stand now:
Definitely in:
Learning to Die
Slice of Life
The Cobalt Sensation
The Chicago 8 vs. Time
The Chicago 8 vs. Armageddon
Hello?
The Lunch Gnome
The Dream of the Buckford County Church
Possibly in:
Cervidae
The Sometimes Island
At the Door
Killing Time
Laura
The Graffiti Avenger
Lily Tries to Go Shopping
Follow the Tracks
Sammy Takes a Dive
Would require re-working/additional drafts:
The Broken Bridge
Stop That Cow!
Rainy Day
Trolling for Fun and Profit
The Invisible Weekend
Unfinished:
Dented World
The Box on the Bench
Not written:
Regina and the Shortcut with Teeth
Sanity Road/Bent Metal
The Capitol Dome
Swimmers and Fog
Picture This
Not included:
Green Revolution
Hot Dog
Noises
Sing, Toaster, Sing
The Downside
Transformations
The Amorphous Baby
A Pod with a View
Big Green Monster That Sat on Cleveland
Downside
The Little Boy Who Rode a Green Bike
The “Not Written” category consists of story ideas and in some cases actual scenes. I’d probably only include something from this group if I really felt the collection was going to be too short. The chance of the collection being too short is zero, however, so these are really more “ideas to pursue at some vague time in the future.”
The “Not Included” stories are unfinished, don’t fit well or are just plain not very good, but I wrote them and considered them.
Having a solid base of eight stories to start with is encouraging. The next weekly update will be The Great Winnowing and Final Selection. After that, maybe some actual writing.
* given the microscopically tiny readership of this blog, it would definitely be self-imposed shame. The Jetpack plugin informs me that yesterday, September 11, 2015, this site had zero visitors. According to science you can’t get lower views than that without some kind of quantum trickery.
When I was 20 I didn’t really look back at the previous two decades of my life. I didn’t really look forward. Thirty seemed very old, in its own way. I didn’t even need to watch Logan’s Run to sense that. I just lived in the moment and stumbled along with youthful exuberance.
I remember being mildly traumatized when I turned 26, struck at how most of my 20s were behind me, that I was inescapably an adult and I would probably need to start acting like one. Three years later I grew a beard.
I never looked much into the future or thought about getting older much since the mini-crisis of turning 26. Turning 30 didn’t phase me and neither did 40. I started running at age 44 and by 50 I’d logged over 3,100 km jogging. At the same time I never really got into long term planning, never managing to successfully move beyond the stumbling approach of my youth. The difference now is if I stumble I have an increased chance of breaking a hip [old person joke].
What I have found in the last few years is an increasing tendency to look back to my youth and the things I enjoyed back then. This is nothing unusual, most of us do it as it brings a sense of comfort and familiarity as we grapple with the dawning realization that we are, in fact, mortal, and our time is limited, barring reincarnation as someone famous, spiffy or perhaps just a beetle that gets eaten by a curious cat. Or maybe post-death is some truly fabulous thing and no one ever comes back to offer concrete proof of this because our mortal minds could not handle that level of fabulousness.
All of this is to say that tonight I ended up on one of those nostalgia treks that led me to listening to the song “Something About You”, the 1985 hit from Level 42. It was a catchy song. I put the album its from, World Machine, on my wishlist in iTunes (not Groove, which, if it has a wishlist, probably adds random albums and songs that it determines are what you really want, not the ones you’ve selected, then deletes the list at some random point in the future, anyway). I continued my trek, listening to a smidgen of Cyndi Lauper, Roxy Music, Hole and yes, Nazareth. I found myself hovering over the Play button on Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” but had to draw the line somewhere. If you could wear out YouTube videos, I’d be close on that one.
I may have wishlisted the self-titled Boston album, though.
Most of my nostalgia is music-related because music is so of its time and is great at invoking memories in ways that TV shows, movies and books simply don’t. I’m re-reading Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, for instance, but I couldn’t tell you when or where exactly I had read the book before, except that it was when I was young. I’m actually kind of shocked at how little I remember of the book (it’s quite good). But there are things I do sometimes look back on wistfully. I will reminisce about them soon in another post that pushes me that much closer to “old man yells at cloud” territory.
Yesterday (September 9) Apple unveiled its latest assortment of new devices (minus Macs, which are typically announced at a separate event). Nothing genuinely new, but lots of upgrades on existing products and new form factors for some. This post was originally made on Broken Forum.
While the event was filled with non-surprises thanks to weeks of persistent, detailed and pretty much accurate rumors, here are my thoughts on the announced products:
iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus: Nice improvements all around but two small steps backward, with both phones being slightly heavier than last year’s and equipped with smaller batteries. The latter is unsurprising as Apple has previously shown it’s willing to shave down battery size to make its devices thinner.
These phones are outrageously priced in Canada, as if we have all won the Lotto 6/49 (I won $10 on it once). It’s interesting to reflect that the original iPhone retailed for $499 U.S. (that was a 4 GB model). Here are the prices for the 16 GB models as listed on the US and Canadian Apple sites:
US
Canada
iPhone 6s
$649
$899
iPhone 6s Plus
$749
$1029
Both phones are priced about 38% higher in Canada. The difference in exchange rate between the US and Canadian dollar right now is around 24%. Apple must hate moose or something. Boo to these prices, I say. There’s the “Apple premium” and then there’s just plain old soaking ’em for all they’re worth.
I’m unconvinced by Force Touch as a truly useful feature. Maybe when they add Force Choke to phones. I’d like to use Force Choke to hang up on spam calls. I don’t feel there’s anything about these phones to really swing more people Apple’s way. They’ll still sell a billion of ’em because they’re perfectly fine phones.
Apple TV: Since Apple TV hasn’t been updated for three years, this hardware refresh basically gets Apple caught up to the interfaces on other streaming devices. I’m not sure where the upper price point is for these things so I have no idea if the reaction to the new Apple TV will be “Must have!” or “Must wait for the price to come down.” The app store and gaming are nice additions but I don’t think they’ll convince a lot of people to buy or upgrade that may not have otherwise. Also, why does the base model come with 32 GB of storage while the phones still come with 16 GB? Bad, Apple.
Apple Watch: The updated watchOS finally gives third party apps a little more flexibility but it remains to be seen how performance and battery life are affected, as even Apple’s first party stuff has issues with responsiveness/lag. Perhaps more than any other Apple product in recent years, the Watch really seems best to hold off on until the second generation hardware arrives. Also, I saw a student at the college this week wearing an Apple Watch. Because the display is normally off when not in use, I was struck at how it looks like a very nice digital watch with a dead battery. Also that student could have spent the same money to buy enough Kraft Dinner for the entire school year. That would be super-gross to eat and maybe even fatal, but still.
iPad mini 4: After trying for a year to convince people to buy the iPad mini 3, which was the exact same hardware as the previous year’s iPad mini 2, only with Touch ID and a $100 higher price, Apple has announced the iPad mini 4 and quietly escorted the iPad mini 3 out back and had it shot. This is basically the iPad Air 2 shrunk down to iPad mini dimensions. Thinner, lighter, all that good stuff. It starts at $399, not a cheap price but not overly outrageous for the specs and quality of build. My iPad mini 2 died so I’d seriously getting this as a replacement over anther mini 2 (which had its price reduced). Except it costs $2 million in Canada.
The iPad Air 2 was not updated because Apple apparently needs at least one flagship product to bypass every year. But wait, maybe the iPad Air 2 isn’t the iPad flagship anymore, Maybe it’s the…
iPad Pro: This is kind of interesting but in the end it’s still just a very big iPad. It would be great for reading comics, which I rarely do. It would be nice for reading magazines, which I do more often, but I don’t need to drop [Canadian price redacted due to local obscenity laws] dollars on a magazine reader. The Apple Pencil seems like a decent stylus but initial impressions and specs suggest it may be good but not great for doodling. I’m not going to spend [Canadian price redacted due to local obscenity laws] for a doodling device, either. Or if I were I’d probably buy a Cintiq instead, but win the lottery first. As expensive as it will be, I still find it intriguing. I’m one of those nutty people who actually like large tablets (for certain tasks) and one that’s thinner and lighter than a Surface Pro has some appeal (I say, as an owner of a Surface Pro 3). Not being able to run “real” programs is a downer, though, even if iOS is getting better multi-tasking and the like in iOS 9.
Tim Cook’s Hair: This isn’t a new product but it still kind of scares me. I am waiting for Tim Cook’s Hair 2.0 to launch. Come on, Jon Ivy, you can do it. Make Tim’s hair the fastest, lightest, thinnest (er, maybe not thinnest) hair it can be.
Overall I am enjoying the improvements of Windows 10. Its quirks and issues have been minor irritants at best. I tried most of the included apps but they have so far proven too limiting in one way or another, even if they do include some nice/handy features (it’s not a good sign when the outlook.com web mail has more features than the dedicated Windows 10 mail app). There was one app in particular that I really wanted to commit to: Groove.
Groove is the current incarnation of Microsoft’s music app (see also: Xbox Music, Zune, etc. etc.) Like iTunes it will play your local music and let you buy more from a digital store. I wanted Groove to be groovy because while the name is dumb (even Edge is better) iTunes is a bit of a mess and I’m quite willing to move away from it as my primary music player should a better option present itself.
On the plus side Groove is minimal. You will not be overwhelmed with options. You will barely be whelmed with options. It has a light theme and a dark theme. It can import your iTunes or Google Music library. It will play your music. That covers most of its features.
I import my iTunes library. A lot of the artist pictures are weird and scary, a strange mix of artists when they were young and artists as they are at age 150. The artist pictures are all presented in circles, which is a UI convention I really don’t care for and I can’t say why, exactly. Album covers are mercifully presented as squares instead of, say, trapezoids. The importing of my iTunes library initially seems fine. I play some tracks. I like that Groove has large controls. It does what I want it to. It will even let me pin music to the Start menu if for some reason I absolutely need to listen to Pink Floyd in as few clicks as possible.
Then I decide to listen to 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields. This is a triple album that came out in 1999, when CDs were not yet considered quaint. As such it really was originally released as three physical discs. The iTunes version preserves this format, even labeling each Disc 1, Disc 2 and Disc 3. Groove preserves the notion of the songs spanning three discs, but it sorts the songs like so: 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, etc. Yes, it wants to play the first song from each disc, then the second song from each disc and so on. This is, of course, madness.
I order it to find album info and it comes up with a lengthy list of choices, all of which contain fewer than the album’s 69 songs (most often because each only contains one disc’s worth of music). There is one entry that has all 69 songs and as a bonus has the correct cover art. I choose it, content that although Groove was bad, this fix is simple and painless.
I look over the copious collection of songs and something seems amiss. Closer study reveals Groove has duplicated a number of tracks. Further inspection shows the duplicates are in fact different songs that have been mislabeled. There is no way to edit the properties of a song from within Groove. Undeterred, I ordered Groove to find the album info again and when I choose the same album as before it highlights “problem” tracks and allows me to “fix” them by choosing other tracks to take their place. After carefully matching everything up–by checking the album in iTunes–I confirm my changes and am presented with the same garbled list of duplicates. Well, not entirely the same. On its second attempt Groove has garbled a slightly different set of songs, possibly for variety. The only option now is to delete the album from my library. This also deletes the files from my iTunes folder. This is what you call sub-optimal.
I gave up. I will probably try Groove again because I’m silly and stubborn about these things, but it’s unlikely I will ever really use it again because I have no confidence that the great mangling of songs is something that will ever be fixed (and to be fair to iTunes–how the very utterance grates–when it mucks up some songs it happily lets you dive into the track’s info and edit to your delight to set things right).
I’ll offer more detailed thoughts on Windows 10 later but here’s a bullet list of the good, bad and ugly I’ve found so far. I updated my Surface Pro 3 the day of release (July 29) and my main PC a few days later and so far don’t regret updating either.
The Good:
refined look to windows–drop shadows are back, thick borders of Win8 are gone, widgets are thinner, classier-looking
ALT-TAB presents all open windows in a grid, making it easier to see and switch between them
the thin line underneath running programs on the taskbar is easier to see than the old glowing effect
ditto for the effect showing multiple windows open for the same program
Start menu is back and offers a balance between Win 7 functionality and the advantages of Win 8’s live tiles (with the option to turn them off)
File Explorer now has an optional Quick Access feature that makes it simple to find files you use most often
you don’t need to dip into Control Panel to change most settings anymore
a bigger, better calculator
a bigger, better date/time setting
built-in calendar, mail and store apps are better than before
redesigned Action Center has better notifications and handy quick task options
Modern (Metro) apps now run in windows and can be moved around and closed like regular programs
Cortana works decently though I rarely have need to use it (her?)
The Bad:
rearranging tiles in the Start menu is still needlessly fiddly (though not as bad as Windows 8)
requires rebooting to fix most issues (in my experience so far)
really wants you to sign in with a Microsoft account (I have one so no biggie but others may object)
the calendar and mail apps may be better but still aren’t good enough to replace better alternatives
ditto for Edge, a decent (and speedy) browser but way too barebones to replace something like Firefox or Chrome
the store is still filled with tons of junk
some parts of the UI feel unfinished (Settings is still not a full replacement for Control Panel)
Solitaire is not included and now features a yearly subscription (!)
you can’t change the color of title bars in windows without some hackery. Hope you like white!
The Ugly:
the Groove music app a) has a dumb name b) is also barebones c) will happily mangle your music library when you import it
probably more stuff but my ire hasn’t been sufficiently raised to be able to think of anything else off the top of my head
I am having brain freeze tonight, unable to decide what to write. I’ve done all the easy stuff on the blog lately:
written a haiku
made up dumb writing prompts
scanned in random photos from way back
made multiple lists
It’s time to wing it.
Today is Labour Day, one of those self-ironic holidays (“Celebrate labour with a day off”) and I’m tending to a mild cold, feeling a bit down about things beyond my control, lamenting the sudden demise of summer after the big windstorm (seriously, it’s like someone flipped a switch. We’ve had nice days since, including today, but it feels all different, like fall jumped in a month ahead of schedule the same way summer did. It’s all this new-fangled climate change, I’m sure, but that doesn’t make me feel any better about it) and generally feeling blah and writing run-on sentences as a result.
My neck is itchy. I shaved my head today (I do this every two to three weeks, not because I’ve suddenly joined a cult) and touched up my neck, to keep the neckbeard thing at bay, but I apparently did it all wrong because the neck, as I said, is itchy. I can’t blame this on climate change but at least I started a new paragraph to whine about it.
Here’s a picture from either 1974 or 1975 of mom and a goat at Knott’s Berry Farm, I think. Farms often have goats so that seems right. Mom is clearly not impressed by the goat’s attempt at self-emasculation. This is really one of those “Write your own caption” things, so go ahead, write your own!
I did a search using the phrase “best alternative career for IT.” Here are some of the results.
TechRepublic offers 10 alternative careers for burned-out IT workers. The title holds promise but the first suggestion is “Auto repair” and the last is “Farming,” with “Cosmetology” (hair design) somewhere in the middle. I don’t drive, I like farms best when I see them on TV and don’t have to smell them, and I don’t have any hair, making me a poor expert on the subject. To be fair, the author also suggests writing, teaching and other more obvious choices but somehow the list ended up leaving me mildly depressed.
I don’t dislike IT but I find as time marches on in that way it has a habit of doing I want less and less to spend my time fixing tech problems (mine or others) and more time making things. Creating things. Designing things (but not hair).
ZDNet has Five alternative careers for IT pros. This list may not be for me. I’m not a fancypants pro, just some schmuck offering tier one and two support. But I read on and…technology insurance underwriter? Equity analyst? Account executive? I have clearly found the difference between IT and IT pro because these occupations are about as appealing to me as rolling in honey and napping on a fire ant nest. I’m not saying these would be bad jobs for someone, but just uttering the phrase “technology insurance underwriter” comes close to inducing narcolepsy for me.
I looked at some of the less IT-specific searches and found 7 Alternatives to Working a Regular Job You Don’t Like. The title is a bit harsh as applied to me (I don’t actively dislike my job), but let’s see what bold ideas the Happier Abroad blog has:
Self-employment doing what you love. For me the best fit here would be writing. If you like this post please send me $10,000 to get started on making this dream happen.
Adopt a more minimalist lifestyle focused more on spirituality, interpersonal relationships, frugality and richness of experiences, rather than on materialism and status. Or, be happy being poor. I tried this before, it didn’t work.
Find a rich partner to date or marry. Direct, but not really practical. I’m already in a happy relationship and while money is nice and poverty sucks, I prefer a balance. My substitute option would be Win the lottery.
Live with your parents. My dad died 24 years ago. This would be awkward.
In the end the easiest thing to change is my attitude but I don’t think lobotomies are legal anymore so I’m probably stuck with mine for awhile yet. At least my hip doesn’t hurt anymore.
I’ve created a contest for myself. As I have done before, I am going to make up a bunch of inane writing prompts, with my ultimate goal being to write fifty of these prompts. When I achieve this goal I will have won the contest. The prize is to take one of the prompts and actually use it. I am not entirely sure how well this contest will go. Winning may turn out to be losing. All I know for sure is if I move to Quebec I will be ineligible to participate.
Writing Prompts, Part 3: Follow at Your Peril (prompts 23-32)
Why would a speaker be afraid of catsup?
Start your story with this: “She touched the litterbox in her pocket and smiled.”
In 250 words write from the point of view of a dangling participle.
One day you keep eating Bits & Bites until you weigh 1,000 pounds. You sue the company for making them too delicious but you’re too big to get to the phone and call your lawyer so instead you eat more Bits & Bites. Describe the color and shape of your phone or lawyer.
You are ordered to press the Big Red Button. When you do the whole world blows up. Or does it? No, it doesn’t. Don’t be stupid. Write something that isn’t stupid.
A man and a woman–let’s call them Adam and Eve–suddenly find themselves kicked out of a magical garden with only the clothes on their backs but they actually don’t have any clothes, they’re completely naked. Explain in 500 words why you are a pervert who writes about naked people.
A woman applies for a job in tech support because she has suddenly gone mad. She is told she can only use the words “Hi”, “Did you check the cable?” and “Try rebooting” when speaking to customers. Describe how she becomes Employee of the Year.
You can be any mineral in the world. What mineral will you be?
Write a story that uses the following words: witches, vampires, fairies. Then self-publish the story on Amazon and trick your friends into posting five-star reviews.
The only problem with the short novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane is just that–it’s short. The ending almost feels abrupt and though it comes at the end of an act, the story overall feels like it could serve as the opening to a longer tale.
But in a way it’s better by being so short. Rather than feeling slight, Gaiman’s story of a young boy inadvertently tangling himself between worlds in early 1970s Sussex feels neat and proper. In the author’s notes Gaiman recalls that he read the story aloud as he wrote it and how it benefited from this. You can see the evidence in the sturdy and somewhat melancholic narration of the protagonist, struggling to deal with situations seven year olds regularly have trouble with–parents, younger sisters, getting picked on at school–let alone having to grapple with the more supernatural elements that swirl in and around the matriarchal Hempstock farm where the titular “ocean” is situated.
By turns amusing, terrifying and nostalgic, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is Gaiman in fine form. Anyone who enjoys his work will not go wrong here.
Long ago, in the days of yore, or more specifically, on December 31 2013 I announced my intention to gather a bunch of short stories into a collection I would self-publish. Here is the relevant part of that post as a refresher:
In 2014 (one day from now, though this is not something that will actually be happening tomorrow, barring some kind of time travel trickery) I will be self-publishing my first short story collection. After looking over the collected stories I have written and weeding out those either not ready or not up to par I have settled on twenty for a collection that will be titled 10 Pairs of Shorts. Clever, eh?
And now, here is an update as of September 3, 2015, in convenient list form:
I have not published the collection
20 stories is a lot of stories to read, revise and in some cases, also write
I still like the title
I still intend on doing this, however scaled down the effort might be
The good news is enough of the stories are ready to give me a little momentum. Apart from that I promise nothing except to report back in exactly one year with a progress report. Actually, I have offer one more promise: a more detailed status report sometime in the next few days, barring illness (I am in fact, not feeling well. I blame mass transit as always).
You know how some people look better when they’re younger and some look better when they’re older after they’ve grown into their bodies, gotten sensible haircuts and no longer treat fashion as alien science? This photo of me going out for my grad ceremony in June 1982 clearly demonstrates I am in the latter group.
I did my best to fix the photo in Lightroom (it had a lot of noise thanks to the 1890s camera technology used) but there is no image manipulation program that can fix the hair, glasses or all of those dismembered heads on the wall behind me.
Between 1976 and 1987 The Alan Parsons Project released ten albums, not bad for a band that was never really a band. As so often in my youth I was late to the scene of this prog rock outfit that featured catchy pop songs often backed by a full orchestra, coming in on their seventh album, 1984’s Ammonia Avenue (thanks to the video for “Don’t Answer Me”.) I bought their next three albums and then the project broke up, with Parsons going off to actually tour the songs he’d been recording for the past decade and his partner Eric Woolfson turning to musicals. I always kind of hoped they’d reunite one last time for another project but that never happened before Woolfson’s death in 2009.
I’ve also been a sucker for pop music backed by an orchestra, but it can be done well and it can be done very badly. The Alan Parsons Project, thanks in large part to Andrew Powell’s orchestrations, managed to wed the two types of music together in a complementary manner. I’m not a musicologist so I can’t really describe it better than that.
In any case, here’s how I rank their ten albums.
Eye in the Sky (1982). The first half of this album is a seamless, perfect blend of every strength the project had, opening with the evocative (and to sports fans, very familiar) instrumental “Sirius” before moving on to the hit “Eye in the Sky” and closing with the semi-epic “Silence and I.” For an example of how effective Powell’s orchestrations were, listen to the guide vocal by Eric Woolfson of the same track on the remastered album, which doesn’t include the orchestration. The second half of the album is less substantial but still includes the excellent instrumental “Mammagamma” and closer “Old and Wise.”
The Turn of a Friendly Card (1980). This album serves as a kind of blueprint for Eye in the Sky, but the strengths of the albums are reversed, with the latter half of Turn being the stronger. There is a tone of melancholy and regret that flows through the songs, even if they are sometimes close to danceable (“Games People Play”). The opener “May Be a Price to Pay” opens with a stirring trumpet fanfare. How can you not like that?
Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1976). Many would consider it heresy to not put this at #1 (including Parsons himself) but I feel this album doesn’t quite line up all the pieces of the project as effectively as later albums would. Still, it carries the theme of Poe’s work effectively and the remastered version that restores Orson Welle’s narration and adds a bridging “cathedral organ” turns the effort into a whole rather than two halves. While the project would never mount an epic instrumental like “The Fall of the House of Usher” again, it’s interesting to have here, even if it doesn’t mesh overly well with the other more pop-oriented songs.
Ammonia Avenue (1984). This is more or less Eye in the Sky, Part 2, but it’s such an incredibly slick effort you can’t deny the attempt to recapture the previous album. There are standout tracks, from the wall of sound of “Don’t Answer Me” to the stirring title track. Maybe one of the strengths of the album is that none of the songs particularly feel like filler.
Pyramid (1978). Some consider this effort slight but I’m a sucker for the theme and like Ammonia Avenue, I don’t feel there are any weak tracks. Perhaps to its detriment there also aren’t any real standouts, either, but the whole album is less than 38 minutes long, so it’s never a major commitment. My favorite songs here are opposites: the dramatic (melodramatic?) instrumental “In the Lap of the Gods,” complete with shouting choir and the utterly silly “Pyramania,” featuring the project’s only tuba solo.
Eve (1979). This is an odd album in that most of the songs are openly hostile to women, yet the album ends with two sung by female vocalists that come across as apologies for everything before them. I doubt the album would be recorded with the same lyrics today. That said, the instrumentals are again excellent, with “Secret Garden” featuring an effervescent Beach Boys-inspired harmonizing and the opener “Lucifer” setting an appropriately dark tone for what’s to come.
I Robot (1977). More heresy, as this is often ranked as one of the project’s top albums but I’ve always found some of the tracks too meandering and unfocused, particularly the instrumentals (excepting the title track). “Don’t Let It Show” (later covered by Pat Benatar, of all people) and “Breakdown” are my favorites here.
Stereotomy (1986). By the mid-80s the project seems like it’s running out of steam. Powell’s orchestrations are minimal here and while the title track and instrumental “Where’s the Walrus?” are fine, a lot of the remainder, like “In the Real World,” feel by the numbers.
Gaudi (1987). Again the orchestrations are very light here, though deployed effectively, especially the horns on the closing instrumental “Paseo de Gracia” and the opener “La Sagrada Familia.” The theme of Gaudi’s work and life elevates the album somewhat but it feels more like flourishes here and there rather than part of a cohesive whole. Some of the songs are slick but forgettable (“Too Late”, “Money Talks.”)
Vulture Culture (1985). Andrew Powell was working with a number of project members on the music for the film Ladyhawke and as a result this is the only project album that features no orchestration. In its place is keyboards. Lots and lots of keyboards. The songs are solid but unspectacular, the whole thing feels nothing more than “nice.” The remastered re-release includes the acoustic track “No Answers Only Questions,” a song that would have rounded out the rest of the album on original release.
