My birthday is this Saturday, which means I'm going to be celebrating from Sunday through Tuesday, which means I need to cram as much work into the next five days as humanly possible. Therefore, today's piece is going to be more in the form of a digital diary than anything substantial. Here we go.
Agony Rats Episode 6 is fairly solid, but 7 needs a giant rewrite. So there's that. I'm planning to do a blog post about AR either next week or the week after, depending on whether there're any Agony Rats brain juices left over after this week wrings them out. Anyway, I plan to talk a little about what goes into the creation of such a series.
Got a poolish going this morning for French baguettes. I've only tried making baguettes once. I don't remember how they turned out, which tells me they were most likely un échec colossal.
And speaking of things worth remembering, have you checked out Things Worth Remembering?
The brilliant Douglas Murray writes a column about poetry every Sunday for The Free Press. (Have you subscribed to The Free Press?) My Sunday mornings are for Things Worth Remembering. This morning's piece was about Ted Hughes, the haunted husband of Sylvia Plath. Haunting indeed. The only way to do any justice to the effect Murray's piece had on me is to quote the whole of it directly. Therefore, you'll have to check it out for yourself. (If I'm not mistaken, the piece is located behind a paywall. Not sure if they have a free trial. At any rate, it's 8 bucks a month. None too shabby for a weekly allotment of mental nourishment. The other articles are great too.)
Next week I'm going to see Madonna live. Yes, that Madonna. I've been joking nastily that my wife got us tickets for herself to see Madonna live for my birthday. This, of course, is a malicious lie. We were supposed to see Madge back in—oh, August?—when she threw out a hip or something and had to reschedule the show. It just so happened that it was rescheduled during the time when we were going to be in NYC for the celebration of m'birth. So there. I have a cousin who's going to be in Nicaragua during the next couple of weeks. I'm taking bets on which of us has a worse time. OH I'M KIDDING.
Now, flip the disc over. You simply must see In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50, the (relatively) new documentary about King Crimson's 50th anniversary tour.
For those who are unaware (which is most people with a deeply fulfilling social circle) King Crimson is a band. More than a band, they're a concept. If that sounds pretentious, it is, because King Crimson is a progressive rock band, and progressive rock bands are pretentious as a rule. Snobby, talented-and-they-know-it, grandiose, experimental-to-the-point-of-nerve-shattering... dear god it's everything I love.
It's difficult to define what progressive rock (or “prog”, to those of us who sat alone at the lunch table) actually is. I usually default to the editor Damon Knight's definition of science fiction: "Science fiction is what I point to when I say, 'that's science fiction.’" Therefore, prog is what I point to...
But back to the doc. The genius behind King Crimson is Robert Fripp. For 50 years now, Fripp has had an idea of what King Crimson should be, and that was, by turns: something that was greater than the sum of its parts, a live experience bordering on the religious, a rock band, a pushing of musical boundaries, a one-sided relationship between performer and audience, and most importantly, what Robert Fripp points to when he says, "that's King Crimson".
You don't have to be a fan of the music to enjoy the film. It's a peek into the mind of a musical visionary and his maniacally endless quest to match reality to what he sees and hears in his head.
That's all for now, I'm afraid. I'll be back soon with more interesting things to say. Baguettes ahoy!