FROM ANDROMEDA AND BACK

  From Left: Sync24; Adriatique; Sesen; Astropilot You know how it is. People always ask "What are you listening to?" Or "How or where can you hear new sounds?" It's a daunting question yet there are answers or at least answers that I can scramble up and present to you as vehicles that helped to undergird Terra Firma an alien horror story fueled by music of all types. It's a 400 page novel yes, but all the time music of some type was filling my own soundscape.  So we come to EDM the most wide ranging of all modern music. You can go to the Spotify, Apple Music or Soundcloud suggestion lists but I gotta tell you, I'm out driving through Silver Lake in the City of Angels at 3 am eternal and my phone is on KCRW's Music / KCRW selections. You can choose your genre and they will take you on a journey, trust me! It's free (I subscribe but you don't have to unless you really benefit from source an extraordinary resource)! Listen 'till your heart...

  From the alien glass prison to a humanoid. This will take Elizabeth's true breakthrough from prisoner into becoming. The Liberators. From left: Maurice Ravel; Claude Debussy; Bertrand Chamayou; Pierre Boulez 1. Shattering into life: Ravel's extraordinary "Une barque sur l'océan" from Miroirs. She breaks up as she breaks out, all fueled by the love she detects in the man who has dared to aim his most exquisite passions towards her once he finds out that though she may appear as simply a "thing," she is a real, live being. Bertrand Chamayou's sublime survey of Ravel's piano works is, in my opinion electrifying. Ravel's inventive keyboard writing, invoking waves and the ocean itself is sublime. This is the music that moves like light. Hearing it you can see how the two lovers, one human and one alien, spiritually invoke (here we go again) Gwen Harwood's penetrating insight:  "...though words can never contain, as music does, the uns...

Building a life from scratch. Elizabeth, trapped in a glass pane for thousands of years, is liberated by love. What is the soundtrack that will free her? From Left: George and Ira Gershwin; The Delfonics; Smokey Robinson and The Miracles 1. "Can one kiss, do all of this...?" The Gershwins live in that world where love literally spills over and takes command. Perhaps you might not even get the full import of their music until you hear the fabulous  Ella Fitzgerald Sings The George and Ira Gershwin Songbook or until you see Audrey Hepburn caress the song to perfection in Funny Face but once you do, once you get a chance to hear "How Long As This Been Going On?" You will see the restorative power of love and get a glimpse of Gwen Harwood's sublime observation that  " Words cannot express as music does, that unsayable grace which cannot be defined. It leaps like light from mind to mind."  But when words are so melded to the music that both words and mus...

THE KNOCKOUTZ    L to R: Jennifer Rocker aka Gunz; Samantha Plantagenet aka Lucky 1. THE KNOCKOUTZ: A two women wrecking crew. Undercover cops but also a duo serious about their music!          Lucky's DJ set:       Eminem's "Business." Why? Easy swing. Music that sounds familiar no matter what. Slim's voice, Dre's beats smooth. Not overly aggressive. Fun.     The Game and 50 Cents' "How We Do." Why? Again easy swing and two master voices riding the beat. Fun.     House of Pain's "Put Your Head Out." Why? Lucky has to get home for the wealthy men who rarely dance so the key was getting to their women without antagonizing the men. Yet, even the men might feel the urge to bob along. Familiar voices sail over DJ Mugg's beat. Fun.     LL Cool J's "Eat 'Em Up L. " Why? Marley Marl's floor rattling tune compels even the reluctant to come forward. Lucky's idea was to put on tunes that though not known, pe...

1. Mirror, Mirror 2. Balance of Terror 3. The City on The Edge of Forever 4. The Deadly Years 5. Wolf in The Fold (starring the great John Fielding) 6. The Deadly Years 7. The Tholian Web 8. All Our Yesterdays 9. Space Seed 10. Court Martial (starring the great Elisha Cook Jr. and the fabulous Percy Rodriquez).  Lists like these are fluid. I liked both of the Mudd adventures but less so as I grew older. Others come in and out of memory but these ten have cemented their place in my pantheon.

  Terra Firma! Finally! I know, I know. They say "genius matures late," at least that is what Shelby Foote said when talking about Abraham Lincoln. I hope it carries over into dreamers like me. God willing, right? God is the God of late bloomers and losers and scrape-graces and those under slight regard and so I feel I am in good hands seeing as how those are some of my finer labels. To publish a book at this stage of life and not some memoir either but a full out pedal-to-the-metal Sci-fi work with aliens and monsters and goblins and furious gunplay--I mean! What was I thinking, right? Alas, there is no help for it and I'm not about to complain to the Father in heaven and ask "Why has Thou made me thus?" I gotta tell you I'm happy in this very skin I'm in, wrinkled though it may be. SO SOME LOVES: Buckeyes, Bruins, the Cavs, the B1G, Jorge Luis Borges, Antony Beevor,  Rachmaninoff, Anna Applebaum, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jay Z, Shelby Foote, George O...