Saturday Sounds - New Riders of the Purple Sage - Powerglide

I first discovered the New Riders of The Purple Sage through their association with the Grateful Dead, who they opened for when I saw the Dead in 1970 and 1971. I enjoyed their music; I guess you could say they were my gateway to country and western.

From a post by Peter Christiansen in the Grateful Dead group on Facebook

"Powerglide".  Second album by the New Riders of the Purple Sage.  Wonderful followup to that most excellent first album.  Buddy Cage replaces Jerry Garcia on pedal steel.  A number of guest appearances including Jerry Garcia (banjo) and Bill Kreutzmann (percussion) from the Grateful Dead, and noted session player Nicky Hopkins (piano).  Another fun, sing along, toe tapping collection of songs. Covers "Hello Mary Lou",  "Willie and the Hand Jive",  "I Don't Need No Doctor" "Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (And Loud, Loud Music)" take on the energy of the band while original writing on the others contributes significantly.  Another important part of my high school days.

Of their albums, Powerglide was my favourite. It still holds up well after more than fifty years.

Avoiding a Lockout of Your Google Account

If you had to pick an account that getting locked out of would cause the most headaches, your Google account would probably be up near the top of the list. That is assuming that you have a Windows PC and use Google Chrome, or an Android phone. Mac users may be able to skip this article.

Google, rightly. doesn't make it simple to get back into a locked out account. But they do provide more than one way of restoring your account access, including a new one mentioned in this article.

We'll start with the newest feature for account recovery, which is Recovery Contacts. This is a list of up to 10 people you specify, and when you're trying to get back into your Google account, they can be asked to confirm access in the same way that you might normally approve a prompt on your own phone (which is helpful if your phone is lost, for example).

I have a friend whose phone was stolen while travelling. He was not able to recover his account and lost access to many valuable photos and a YouTube account he used to promote his business. If he'd followed some of the steps in this article, that wouldn't have happened. 

It may take some time and be a bit of a hassle to get your account set up so you can recover it, but it's worth it. 

 

Review: The Mandalorian and Grogu

Nancy and I went to see The Mandalorian and Grogu last night at the IMAX theatre in Whitby. I didn't enjoy it. There was enough plot to fill out an average episode of the TV show, padded into a 2-hour-plus movie with a lot of pointless action scenes. No character development at all. The Mandalorian might as well have been a 2nd-tier Marvel superhero. Even in the IMAX format, much of the movie was dark and hard to follow. 

Wait for it to show up on Disney+ if you want to see it. (That may be a general reaction; the theatre was maybe 10 percent full). 

Modern Movies: The Dark Ages

I've been having a lot of trouble watching movies, and some TV shows, these days. Part of that is due to my eyes lacking enough rods to give me proper vision in dim light, but that's only part. I've talked about this with my family and friends and they agree that a lot of what their watching is darker than it used to be. 

The New York Times has a feature article (gift link) about this. It starts with a reference to the recent movie, The Devil Wears Prada 2. 

“The heartbreaking story of a woman who can no longer afford lamps in her office,” read one viral post, showing Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly of yore alongside a screenshot from the new dimly-lit trailer. “So did we just forget how to light movies?” asked another, above bright images from the 2006 film beside shadowy, shrouded shots from the sequel. Noting that the sequel employs the same director and cinematographer as the original, one poster lamented “that isn’t a skill issue it’s a choice. So why DO new movies insist on looking like that. Absolutely lifeless.”

That's someting I noticed when I saw Project Hail Mary recently; it was dim, even in the IMAX format. But there are other things going on. 

The article goes on to reference a YouTube video titled 'Why Movies Just Don't Feel 'Real' Any More" by Tom van der Linden. It's a bit on the nerdy side but I highly recommended. He talks about the various factors influencing the look of modern movies and makes some very incisive points, including the lack of depth-of-field in many shots. 

 

From the Times: 

For van der Linden, the blurry-background conundrum is exacerbated by “fake-looking C.G.I. elements.” He pointed to 2025’s “Jurassic World Rebirth”: Compared to the technically-jankier but actually-superior “Jurassic Park” (1993), the latest installment’s backgrounds are constantly out of focus. The environments — even in scenes shot on location — are rendered “faker” through digital visual effects that undermine the world-building. “Subconsciously, I’m not registering that landscape as a real place, and that detracts from the reality of the movie as a whole,” he said.

I've watched the video and found it quite illuminating (pun intended). It's definitely worth half and hour of your time, though it may make you a lot more ciritical about what you're seeing on screen.  

 

 

Phish Have Transformed The Sphere

Phish were one of the first bands to play Las Vegas' futuristic venu, The Sphere. Given the band's penchant for theatrical extravaganzas as seen at their New Years concerts, fans expected quite a bit fromt he band's performances there and they weren't disappointed. But with their latest residency there in Apri, they've taken the visual elements offered by The Sphere's technology to a new level, as described in this article from GQ (archive link). 

Most bands have used The Sphere's immense screen to display various images and computerized animations. Phish have done something different and new; they've created a virtual version of their touring lighting rig and expanded it many times over to fill the screen, then added effects that aren't possible with a physical rig. The results are stunning. 

It was late April, the fourth night of a nine-show run at Sphere in Las Vegas, and the band had just begun its second set. As they slid from a thin boogie into an atonal blur, the screen that swallowed them took the sold-audience of about 17,000 on a grisly animated tour of a damaged body—teeth pocked with fillings, a tummy laden with plastic toys, lungs puffing hard. As the camera wormed its way up and out of the body and back to the mouth, a wrecking ball swung toward the teeth, smashing them with three terrifying hits. The image faded. The room went dark. The band kept playing. The crowd erupted.

The screen needed to go black because a fleet of video teams with a squadron of computers and servers at their command needed time to load a system that has forever reinvented the way Sphere can work: a physics-defying virtual model of Phish’s famous light rig, programmed and run by a pair of technicians so legendary in lighting and jam circles that they have been profiled by The New York Times. The system, the most expensive visual element of Phish’s two Sphere residences, allows Chris Kuroda and Andrew Giffin to control 7,080 individual sources of light, all designed to look like they’re part of physical light fixtures flying above the band. Because it is not mechanical, it can move in directions and with a nimbleness that traditional lighting rigs could never match. It can charge the audience like a bull or pull back into a bright vanishing point.

WATCH

I've included some videos of their performance that show off the new capabilities. The first includes the songs mentioned in the above quote.

  

And here's one more that gives a sense of the scale of the venue.

Finally, here's a review of one of the concerts from the April residency. The author isn't a Phish fan but he was impressed by the visuals and has some advice about the best seating locations if you are planning to attend a concert at The Sphere. 

Photo of the Week

 This week's photo is from one of the few warm days we've had in the last couple of weeks. It was warm enough to go for an evening walk down to the lakefront; an activity that we gladly shared with many other people who crowded the waterfront area. This picture is from my Pixel 8 Pro and was slightly cropped and touched up in Google Photos. 

Sunset at the marina

Saturday Sounds - Rahsaan Roland Kirk - Bright Moments and More

More and more, I'm finding that jazz is the music that gives me the most comfort and enjoyment right now. This week's musical treat is a from an artist that I've not listened to much, Rahsaan Roland Kirk. I've known about him since I started listening to jazz and I knew he was a multi-instrumentalist (sax and flute, mostly) but for some reason never paid much attentin to his music.

One night recently, I was listening to the jazz channel on Sirius XM, as I often do at bedtime, and was blown away by what I was hearing. It was "You'll Never Get to Heaven" from Kirk's live album, Bright Moments. From Wikipedia: 

Rahsaan Roland Kirk (born Ronald Theodore Kirk; August 7, 1935[1] – December 5, 1977),[2] known earlier in his career simply as Roland Kirk, was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist who played tenor saxophone, flute, and many other instruments. He was renowned for his onstage vitality; in his shows, virtuoso improvisation was accompanied by comic banter, political ranting, and the simultaneous playing of several instruments.

Bright Moments seems to be a good representation of Kirk's music. It was recorded in 1973, just a couple of years before a stroke restricted his playing and four years before his untimely death. I regret not paying more attention to his music before this, an oversight that I will be trying to rectify. 

Here's something I didn't expect to find; a performance from the Montreux Jazz Festival, filmed in 1972. As you might expect given the period, the video quality isn't great but the audio is fine. It's an energetic  performance and fascinating to see his multi-instrument technique in action.

 

Finally, here's a short (27 minute) documentary about his life.

Interview with Ray Nayler

I've become a big fan of SF author Ray Nayler since reading his first novel, The Mountain in the Sea. It's a near-future thriller about first contact with an alien species: octopuses. It's one of the best SF novels I've read in the last few years and a far more polished work than you'd expect for a first novel. 

Since then I've read several short stories by him and two longer works, the novella, The Tusks of Extinction and a novel, Where the Axe Is Buried. Both are excellent. 

I haven't been able to find out much about Nayler until recently, when I read a long interview with him published in Andrew Liptak's Transfer Orbit blog. Nayler has an unusual and interesting background and the interview is quite fascinating. 

When I was going to university, I thought I was going to be a writer. I was then rejected from the creative writing program and went into the straight literature program. The process of trying to get published over the next 10 or 15 years, I think killed any idea that I was going to be able to be a writer as a profession. But that didn't affect my desire to continue to write and publish. So I just got up in the morning and then wrote, then went to to whatever job I had and I never stopped thinking of myself as a writer, but I did stop thinking of it as a career.

I also saw what writers did in general, that a great number of them taught at universities. I have no interest in doing that. That a lot of people have MFAs, which I had no interest in getting. That they treated writing as a group activity, which I had no interest in. You know, there were there was really very little attraction to the other things around writing that typically constitute what being a professional writer is.

And so once I became a Foreign Service officer, I had a fascinating job that was really interesting to me, where I got to learn new things every couple of years. And, I was constantly moving from one place to another and learning a lot, and I felt that it was really also feeding my writing very well with new information and new ideas and, and so I thought "well, this is, good. I can continue to just be a Foreign Service officer and write on the side and publish in Asimovs and Clarkesworld and get some nice feedback from my work and talk about the things I'm interested in, but I don't have to worry about making money on it." And so that's been good.

His new novel, Palaces of the Crow, has just been published. It's a bit different from his other books, being set in World War II, but has a speculative element.