Transreal is Sixteen!

Transreal is Sixteen!

Originally uploaded by miketransreal

I just don’t seem to get around to keeping this as up to date as I’d like.
The important thing is that my business turned sixteen back in April and has settled down nicely in it’s new location.The photo is a small poster Madeleine designed for the occasion. And the new shop’s 2nd anniversary is now fast approaching! Less than 6 weeks away!

We’ve been to a couple of gigs – Pere Ubu at Mono in Glasgow was great fun, with support by Variety Lights, and then The Zombies at the Queen’s Hall was equally good – as was their support, The Merrylees. I had seen the Zombies twice before but M had missed them both times so it was a first for her. But we’ve both seen David Thomas with or without Pere Ubu loads of times!

Outdoor excursions included various walks, and a trip last weekend to the aquarum at Balloch on Loch Lomond. Great variety of fishes, with an octopus, some colour-changing jellyfish (well, Pacific Sea Nettles) a large turtle and many more! The weather might have been nicer for our loch cruise, but never mind!
I’m way behind on mentioning books, but they include two by Eric Brown and several more of varying interest. Details in my Flickr set.
And, finally, the sad news that finally spurred me back to Semaphore (apart from guilt at neglecting it!) was the death of Ray Manzarek of the Doors.
I first paid attention to them back when L.A. Woman was released and I was in a record department (downstairs at John Menzies on Princes Street maybe. Or along at Woolworths?) when they played the full length Riders on the Storm. Great suff, although I never did buy the album! (I finally got round to getitng it on cd some years ago)
I eventually picked up Absolutely Live and then the double cassette of Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine. Eventually withdrawn, I was told, because it was just too good value for a greatest hits compilation and replaced with two separate releases!
Other purchases followed, including Ray’s solo releases – The Golden Scareb (still got the lyric sheet!) and The Whole Thing Started with Rock and Roll, Now it’s out of Control (great title!).He always seemed to supply the most interesting parts of the Doors songs and even stood in on vocals for Jim when he was feeling ‘under the weather’ and couldn’t perform.
The other Doors were broadly the same age as the four Beatles but started playing a few years later, but Ray was older than any of them (born in 1939), which I hadn’t realised, as the Doors seemed to be from the next generation of musicians and inspired by the Beatles, not their contemporaries… Oh, well.

No safety or surprise, the end.

Officially Spring, or even Summer!

The clocks change tonight, and we’re still getting snow overnight, and sometimes sleet/snow through the day as well.

What better thing to have done than stay in and read!?
Which is what I’ve done a fair amount of since I last mentioned books.

I think the last title I mentioned was Dominion, the 1950s alternate history novel. Set in the 1950s, that is.
Next up was a new author to me (he’s written under another name but this is his first book under this name), writing a big new fantasy series very loosely based on some aspects of Arthurian myth, The Red Knight by Miles Cameron.  Very chivalrous knights, etc. fighting the encroaching Wild.
After that was the soap-opera-ish Supervolcano: All Fall Down by Harry Turtledove. In this 2nd volume, the disaster continues but society is adapting to life after the eruption and the goings-on of the lead character’s family are as important as any of the ‘disaster’ aspects. But they’re so intertwined it would be hard to tease them apart. In War Time by Kathleen Anne Goonan is another alternate history, but should have been better. The ‘magic beans’ supercomputer plot device became too unbelievable for me but the jazz gig descriptions were good!
Dinosaur Thunder by James F. David is the 3rd in a very slow-to-appear series – it’s taken 17 years, I think for the three books to be published! The paperback of Footprints of Thunder came out not long after I opened Transreal Fiction back in 1997! This one is more of the same, with dinosaurs and time-travel and a tale of high adventure and derring-do! And, in this one, Mars!

My ‘turn of the year book’ was quite brief: Take Mary to the Pictures by Alan ‘Kit’ Kitley. It was a memoir of a ww2 fighter ace fromhis childhood and joining the RAF to leading squadrons of Hurricanes against Japanese positions and convoys, etc, all across the Burma front, from Idia to Malaya. Quite moving at times, and a fascinating read.
And so into 2013! So far I have 16 covers in this year’s Flickr set of books I’ve read, including Jack Vance, Stephen Lawhead, Ben Bova, Kij Johnston, Steven Gould, D. G. Compton, Nevil Shute, and more!
And, to bring things up to date, I’m currently I’m reading a fat historical adventure called Hawk Quest by Robert Lyndon. A motley set of characters end up on a perilous expedition to obtain 4 rare white gyrfalcons to pay a ransom demanded by the Persians for an Norman-English nobleman captured at the battle of The Battle of Manzikert. A fairly tight cast of central characters, but a huge geographic sweep, from Greenland to Byzantium, and beyond!

Winter’s Still Here!

Well, it’s been a while!

Once you fall behind, it gets more and more difficult to catch up again. So, I think two or three themed posts is probably the easiest way to cover a lot of ground…

Films I’ve seen recently, or at least since the last post, seems a fair way to start. Towards the end of the year we went to see, of course, The Hobbit in 3-D with HFR. Great fun, and the scenes I had been told went on too long didn’t seem to for me, although I must admit a little less of them being chased by dwargs wouldn’t have harmed it!
The High Frame Rate was fine from the very beginning; I’ve read about people hating it, or taking an hour to get used to it – no problem for either of us.
It’s great fun to watch but it is essentially a big children’s movie. But it’s based on a children’s book, so I can’t complain!
Baraka was rereleased in a crisp new 70mm print for it’s 20th anniversary. It’s a glorious look at the world and it’s people and problems.
Our final film of the year was the low-budget Safety Not Guaranteed. A jaded magazine reporter and two interns go looking for a story based on his coming across an advert placed by someone looking for a time-travel companion!! ‘Safety not guaranteed. Must supply own weapons‘
The bloke lives in a little seaside town on the Washington coast and is a little odd, with strange ideas. One of the reporters gradually gains his confidence and the film twists and turns to a satisfying conclusion.
After the success of this low-budget film, the director has  been picked to direct the new Jurassic Park IV film! Bit more of a budget there!!

Getting into this year, our first outing was to see Life of Pi. Excellent. Even had a tapir at the beginning.
Big Man Japan was very silly! The Traverse Theatre showed it as part of a strand of the their 50th anniversary celebrations for some reason!
A semi-retired super hero battles to protect Japan from various bizarre monsters, etc.
After that it was the more serious Cloud Atlas (although it still had it’s humour). Six story strands, connected across the centuries; sometimes literally, sometimes more by theme, as far as I could tell. And by the same actors having multiple roles!
After that, it was the low-budget horror, Bubba-Ho-Tep, about life in an old folks home in rural Texas. Is there really an undead mummy on the loose, sucking the life-force from the residents? They include an aging Elvis impersonator who claims he really is Elvis (and they switched identities so Elvis could escape to a quieter life without the fame) and an even more unlikely black JFK! It’s horror, but not really very scary! Funny, though!
Ninja Kids was a live-action Japanese film based on a popular cartoon about some very young ninja trainees who have to prove their worth in a plot which is too convoluted to explain! I thought it was good fun, but apparently tru-fans of the original think it’s not very good. No matter, it’s silly and quite slapstick, with some very childish jokes, etc!

Finally, Robot and Frank is set in the near future; it’s a low budget comedy about an elderly man who subverts the robot his son buys him to help him cope. A couple of niggles, but well worth seeing.
We also saw Repo Man, which I hadn’t seen much of before, only a few scenes on tv over the years.  Strange goings-on in the car re-possession trade, with a mysterious, fatal car involved. Also aliens.

So that’s ten films and now I’m up to date. Unless I decide that I should consider last year’s list and decide which I liked most.
Hmm. Probably not!

Winter’s Coming!

Apart from getting out for a lot of fresh air, I haven’t really done that much recently!

The only gig we’ve been to recently was Mike Nesmith‘s gig in Glasgow at Oran Mor. Very good ‘greatest hits’ trail through his back catalogue, with a song or two from each solo album (including 3 from The Prison). Played several of my favourites and, although it was a little weak at times, his voice was fine and improved as he went on.
We also saw several films, from Holy Motors (awful!) to Dredd (fun!), Skyfall (Bond!!) and Alita, Queen of Mars! (with live accompaniment, which was generally ok but it wrong a few times, I thought). Strange film with wonderful Martian costumes contrasted against scenes of Soviet life during their Civil War! Also Great Beasts of the Southern Wild. (v. good!)

Books I’ve read include
Stealing into Winter by Graeme K. Talboys; fantasy by a new author but the plot lacks body.
Helix Wars, the sequel to Helix by Eric Brown; not quite as good as Helix, I think, but still pretty good!
What I Found at Hoole by Jeffrey E. Barlough, which is possibly the final volume of his excellent Western Lights weird fantasy series
The Sun Grows Cold the only novel by Howard Berk; a 70s post-apocalypse dystopia, mainly set in a psychiatric hospital trying to help people recover from the trauma of the war. Better than it sounds!
The Five Gold Bands by Jack Vance; early rudimentary adventure novel, but showing the beginning of human differentiation as they spread out through the Galaxy. A theme he returns to a lot!
The Cassandra Project by Jack McDevitt & Mike Resnick; the truth behind some early Apollo missions! I like McDevitt a lot, but this had a terrible, cliched ending.
Dominion by C. J. Sansom; excellent alternate history crime thriller set in a faded, Nazi-dominated Britain…

Summer’s End

Downriver

Originally uploaded by miketransreal

There have been some very nice days since I last posted, but now it’s definitely moving into autumn and the last days of summer sun are past. One of our sunday excursions was a walk starting out by Penicuik and strolling back in towards town along cycle paths and through Roslin Glen and ending up having a pint in a beer garden at Roslin. Excellent weather, and marred only by my not feeling well for part of the walk – but I recovered! After the beer we took a bus from there ‘cross country’ to Portobello for a short stroll along the beach and then home for a late tea…
Last weekend was also nice, and the Hermitage of Braid was beautifully green and moist. It’s fungus season and I spotted some of the largest I’ve ever seen, although they looked well past their prime! Great bracket-like things, but sort of folded together and drooping down! After that we actually did something useful and went and bought new towel rails!

We only saw one exhibition, which was excellent – Catherine the Great at the NMS.
Apart from her life and times, it also left me wondering what history might have been like if Prince Potomkin hadn’t died and had continued to pursue Catherine’s aims to the south against the Ottomans…
Two films I saw were French – Untouchable, which was great and Holy Motors which certainly wasn’t. Very disappointing. Oh, and there was Looper, a time paradox movie with Bruce Willis. Still not entirely sure if the timelines hung together properly!

Acacia by David Anthony Durham turned out to be very good, although I’m taking a break before starting volume 2, and several other fairly short books also went done – by Blaylock, Scalzi, Lonsdale. Cyndi Lauper‘s Memoir was more substantial but still a faily quick read all the same, with interesting detail about both her early life and later fame, despite health and other issues seeming to have prevented her really capitalising on her initial success – but she does still seem able to do wnat she wants to despite not having achieved Madonna-like success. (The two were often compared in their ealy days)

Doors Open Day 2012

Time flies.
A month since the last post, mainly because there’s not been not so much going on…

Three weeks ago we got up reasonably early on Sunday and went along to the final day of the Edward Munch exhibition out at the Dean Gallery, or MOMA2 or whatever acronym it’s oficially called these days!
Some very good pieces, including  a small b&w Scream, although there was a lot more than that to see. As it was mainly prints, sometimes the repetitive sequences of minor differences in colour, etc. seemed a bit redundant but overall very good.
And afterwards the coffee & scone included in the price added to the experience!

After that we caught a bus down to Cramond and, M having already checked the tide times, walked out the causeway to Cramond Island. We hadn’t done that for years and enjoyed it a lot, although as a bird resere it seemed awfully short of birds! Some fascinating remnants of the wartime defences still remain, blocks to hold down submarine netting, etc. And huge mudflats making you think you could walk (very muddily) all the way across to Barnbogle Castle on the Dalmeny Estate. But the channel of the River Almond flows through them, so it’s obviously not feasible, and probably dangerous besides!
A nice day out, even if it was clouding over and getting a bit windy by the time we got back to the Cramond Inn for a pint and some rather late lunch!

Last weekend we were back at the zoo, for the first time in months, and saw some great giant anteater action, as one of them bounded about, and close-ups of the two aardwolves out in their enclosure.
Sadly, several critters seem to have moveed on; the Red River Hogs have gone off to a private collection, but the Bongos, Stanley’s Cranes, the Cloud Rats and the Cuscus all seem to have gone too. We did see Sofus the Sealion briefly – but we would have spent longer watching him if we had known he was about to be crated up and shipped to Poland within a couple of days!  No more sealions at Edinburgh Zoo; having only one is frowned on, and if they have more apparently these days they should have two pools so that one can be isolated from the others for whatever reason…
And apparently the Wolverines might be on their way to Aviemore – another of our favourites going north!

This Sunday was Doors Open Day (in fact Saturday was as well, and M was on duty at ICMS all day coping with the hordes wanting to know arout the converted church they’re based in) and we managed to visit three pretty interesting, but quite different, buildings.
The first was Summerhall, which we have already been to quite a lot in the past couple of months! This time some of the artists’ studios were open and we got to see a bit more of the complex, from empty basements with giant cuddly toys waiting to be served  in a deserted and defunct cafeteria, to looking out over the roofs several stories up, and seeing all sorts of stuff in between (including coffee and a muffin on their terrace). Then it was a stroll through the Meadows to St. Michael & All Saints’ Church on Brougham Place.
Fascinating, with incense burners, candles, icons, centuries old pulpits, etc. It’s a nice, airy space, with a great high roof and, considering that it was originally built to cater for the more disreputable masses of the Tollcross area, rather than the gentry of St Johns at the West End (who paid towards it building costs originally) it’s really rather nice!
Onwards again, down Lothian Road, through an underpass I had never been through to Rutland Square (where I worked for years, but before the area was anything like as developed) and on to Melville Street and the Trades Maiden Hospital building opposite St Mary’s Cathedral.
It’s the current centre of the various ancient Edinburgh Guilds and the three rooms open to the public had loads of history on show!
The little procession for the Kirking of the Deacon of the Candlemakers that I saw recently was mentioned here, and the lantern which was part of the ceremony was on display. As were all sorts of other letters and artifacts, including the Blue Blanket, a flag brought back from the disasterous Battle of Flodden in 1513.
Also portraits, crests, banners, a Breeches Bible(!) and more. The only drawback was that it was completely mobbed, with easily a hundred people there all the time we were there. And it had been that busy all day apparently! After that, along to the West Room for a rather expensive drink and a light and very late lunch, followed by coffee up at Filmhouse on our way home…

The only film we’ve seen this month was Dredd! Good fun, and true to the spirit of the comic strip. He and a rookie Judge (Judge Anderson) get  trapped in a megablock with all hands against them as they try to take down a crimelord!
I thought they might have done more with the slo-mo effects, especially when the slo-mo lab blew up, but, in any case, it was ation all the way!

I read various other books, including A Winter’s Night by Valerio Massimo Manfredi, a historical novel which covers a very tumultous period of Italian history, from around 1910 to 1950, covering 2 wars, the rise and fall of fascism and the post-war troubles between the socialists and the right as they fought for control after the war. As the initial brothers die off and their sons and daughters take over the plot (such as it is) it seems rather perfunctory at times, with a recitation of how they’re all doing rather than more involving prose. Interesting to see the development of modern Italy though.
A  bit of  a change from his classical period historical novels, such as the lightweight (but fun) The Last Legion, about the last Emperor of Rome and his relation to Arthur King of the Britons! It was turned into a film a few years ago, which was also quite fun. John Varley‘s latest, Slow Apocalypse and a Scarlett Thomas reprint, Bright Young Things also got read.
Currently, though, I’m making my way through Acacia, the 1st volume of a trilogy (another trilogy!) by David Anthony Durham, which seems very good so far. I met him a few months ago and have been meaning to check it out ever since…

It’s All Fringished

So the Fringe and Book Festival are over and the Festival events I might have wanted to go to are sold out..

Our last week was fairly mellow; we went for a picnic on Monday evening instead of trying to find something to go and see, and then the rest of the week ran out without our doing anything more than having a drink at George Square… Until Saturday, that is, when we met at Surgeon’s Hall for a drink and then went across the road the the Festival Theatre for some high culture!

The Leigh Warren dance troupe performed two pieces, the first with live accompaniment on stage from William Barton on guitar and didgeridoo! A bit too much was performed at the sides or towards the back of the stage, so we missed some of the performance but we moved to much more central seats for part two after the interval and got a much better view!
The second part had a string quartet live on stage, being danced around and themselves moving into different positions on stage – very good. This time the music was by Michael Nyman.

As a complete change to that, later that night we went to see a horror musical! It was Re-Animator: The Musical, based on the film of H.P.Lovecraft’s Herbert West, Re-animator story and was great fun!
It show signs of becomng a minor cult, with a ‘splashzone’ at the front and cheap waterproofs issued for the brave audience members sitting there and willing  (or eager!) to be splattered with copious amounts of fake blood, vomit and other bodily fluids, etc. Excellent cast, with big name appeal lent to the show with George Wendt (Norm from Cheers) as the Dean.

Re-Animator Stage Dooir!

On Sunday it was another change of pace, with a whimsical puppet-y thing at the Pleasance Attic called The Boy With the Cuckoo-Clock Heart (which is a little book I sell quite a lot of ion the shop).
Excellent cast relating this sad story of a little boy from Edinburgh who runs away from home in search of his true love, believed to have gone with a travelling show to Paris!
After that, down to the Dovecote tapestry centre, on the St Andrew Square to look though a telescope showing scenes of a romanicised Scotland and along George Street past their new this year Speigel Tent (too busy to get a seat) and back to the book festival in Charlotte Square for a snack.
We inadvertantly caught a story-telling session, but weren’t impressed at all by the story. But we didn’t walk out, like some of the audience appered to do! (It was about staff hi-jinks to relieve boredom at a morgue, to give you a clue… )
After that, back up to George Square to catch LadyNerd, a one-person (plus keyboard player) performance about being female and a nerd (obviously!) Quite fun, but the show lacked cohesion and was a bit short, made up by having a song from her new, incomplete show included at the end…
LadyNerd may have been a bit short, but it wasn’t nearly as short as Monday’s first offering! Having failed to get tickets for a physical theatre version of 1984, we went up to the Roman Lodge on Johnston Terrace for a pair of monologues by Gordon Russell – the 1st was On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco by Anton Chekov and the 2nd was a modern response to it written by Alison Carr. In the 1st Russell played an elderly, put-upon gentleman discoursing on everything except tobacco, but mainly about his unhappy life. The 2nd was as if by his wife (after a neat on-stage change of costume and character) at his funeral damning him with faint praise. The first part was dryly humourous, the second less so. Less funny was the fact that it was a full price show, billed to last 50 minutes, but in fact racing through the material in only 40.  Not good value, especially for a one man show!

After that it was off to another venue that we always try to see something at each year, The Zoo at Kirk o’ Field Church at St. Leonards.
Vitamin was an absurd one-man show by Carlo Jacucci, with very few words (although they were repeated a lot!) or substance that still managed to make the entire audience laugh! Some mime, some story-telling, a non-trick with some string, an excellent imitation of a caterpillar and some accordian playing! It hung together very well and was a suitably whimsical end to our August festivaling.

M is now off to London for a short craft course and even the cinemas don’t seem to have anything very appealing right now…no more entertainment until next month!

I finished the Northland Trilogy by Stephen Baxter; very good overall, although I was less taken with the middle volume, Bronze Summer, than with either Stone Spring or Iron Winter. Next up is probably either Jenny Diski‘s fairly autobiograhical What I Don’t Know About Animals (which is on the floor at home), or Alan Garner‘s new fantasy, Boneland – a sequel to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, which ought to arrive later today!