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wshaffer

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Goth rock nostalgia is dead but dreaming...

Sep. 19th, 2011 10:23 am
wshaffer: (Default)
So, this series of postings is in serious danger of degenerating into "The Best Live Clips of The Mission/The Sisters of Mercy/Fields of the Nephilim, Lovingly Curated from Youtube by [livejournal.com profile] wshaffer". Because beyond those three bands, who were the Holy Goth Trinity of my youth, it's starting to get to be real work to find stuff that's high quality, allows embedding (I'm looking at you, Depeche Mode), and that I'm genuinely fond of enough to want to share with you all.

So, I think I will give this a rest for a while. I will probably continue to irregularly post music videos that I enjoy enough to want to share. Some of them might even not be goth. (I do listen to other things. Quite a lot of other things, really.)

To conclude, I'd like to share with you the song that was a large part of the reason I decided to unpack all the boxes in my garage: Fields of the Nephilim's "For Her Light". Some months ago, this song popped into my head and lodged itself there. I went to iTunes, only to discover that somehow, I hadn't ripped it from my copy of the CD. Where was my copy of the CD? In one of the many boxes in the garage. At that point, it became clear that there were three courses of action open to me: go mad, buy the MP3 from Amazon, or unpack the boxes in the garage. Given that I had "Unpack all the boxes in the garage" as a long-neglected to-do list item anyway, I decided that this was my brain's way of telling me to get on with it.

On Saturday, I located a box labelled "CDs", and retrieved this song, along with countless other musical gems that I'm now slowly adding to my iTunes library.

So, here it is. Fields of the Nephilim's "For Her Light". Be warned, it might get stuck in your head. Or cause you to tackle long-neglected projects. It also makes an unexpectedly good running song, as I discovered during Sunday's 10K.

  • Current Mood: accomplished
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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Nerd

Sep. 17th, 2011 05:48 pm
wshaffer: (fan)
The great "Unpack all the boxes in the garage" project continues. After several weekends of unpacking stuff that mostly went straight to the trash, recycling, or "Donate to Goodwill" pile, I unearthed some real goodies today. I found a box that contained some carefully hoarded relics of my early geekery, going back to elementary school.
( So I took some photos... )
  • Current Mood: nostalgic
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On the value of a classical education...

Sep. 5th, 2011 06:22 pm
wshaffer: (Default)
Today's best find from the great empty-the-boxes-in-the-garage project: nestled next to my copy of Tacitus, a much photocopied handout labeled "Fragment of a Greek Tragedy" by A. E. Housman. I was delighted to find it again.

This was given to me by a classical Greek prof in college, when we were reading Euripides's Ion. I think we had been complaining too much about Euripides's rather strained metaphors. Of course, now in the 21st century, it is available online.

Go and read it - it's really quite funny. (If you're not well-acquainted with classical Greek drama, let me assure you that it really is an awful lot like that.) Here's a sample to whet your appetite:


CHORUS: O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots
Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom
Whence by what way how purposed art thou come
To this well-nightingaled vicinity?
My object in inquiring is to know.
But if you happen to be deaf and dumb
And do not understand a word I say,
Then wave your hand, to signify as much.

ALCMAEON: I journeyed hither a Boetian road.
CHORUS: Sailing on horseback, or with feet for oars?
ALCMAEON: Plying with speed my partnership of legs.
CHORUS: Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?
ALCMAEON: Mud's sister, not himself, adorns my shoes.
CHORUS: To learn your name would not displease me much.
ALCMAEON: Not all that men desire do they obtain.
CHORUS: Might I then hear at what thy presence shoots.
ALCMAEON: A shepherd's questioned mouth informed me that--
CHORUS: What? for I know not yet what you will say.
ALCMAEON: Nor will you ever, if you interrupt.
CHORUS: Proceed, and I will hold my speechless tongue.
ALCMAEON: This house was Eriphyle's, no one else's.
CHORUS: Nor did he shame his throat with shameful lies.
ALCMAEON: May I then enter, passing through the door?
CHORUS: Go chase into the house a lucky foot.
And, O my son, be, on the one hand, good,
And do not, on the other hand, be bad;
For that is very much the safest plan.
ALCMAEON: I go into the house with heels and speed.
  • Current Mood: amused
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Buried Treasures

Jul. 4th, 2011 04:56 pm
wshaffer: (tea-or-book)
I decided that a holiday Monday was a good day to tackle unpacking some of the old boxes in the garage. Every time Daniel and I move, we pack up n boxes of stuff. And then we unpack n-k boxes, where k is generally a small single-digit number. So, we've ended up with this small cache of boxes, some of which appear to date back as far as when I started grad school.

When we moved into this house, I decided that as a homeowner, I was going to be a responsible adult and Unpack All the Things. Since we've been in this house for a year, and the task is not yet complete, you may deduce that I have approached this with the same dispatch, alacrity, and ruthless efficiency with which I approach many of the tasks of responsible adulthood. However, I have made progress.

Today I hit a particularly venerable set of boxes and unearthed a number of treasures, including:

A stash of much-loved paperbacks, including Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber (which I think I own in at least 2 other editions now), the well-worn copy of Pat Cadigan's Mindplayers that my sister and I must have read ten times over between us the year it came out, the Radical Utopias omnibus containing Joanna Russ's The Female Man that I've been hunting for since discussing it at WisCon this year, and a number of much-loved Doctor Who novels that I thought I'd long since lost or given away. (Andy Lane's All-Consuming Fire and Kate Orman's The Left-Handed Hummingbird were both in that box.)

The second-best scarf in the world: A Dutch postal-worker's scarf (blue with shocking green and red stripes) that saw me through 4 New Haven winters. It's appallingly warm, and I missed it terribly when I was stuck in New York in a blizzard this past December. (The best scarf in the world doesn't exist yet. It's the 4th Doctor scarf I'm going to knit myself someday when I get my butt in gear and learn how to knit.)

A curious squarish bag, with a belt allowing it to be worn around the waist. I stared at this for quite some time before realizing that it was a bag for carrying a portable CD player. Ah, yes, those things that I listened to music and audiobooks on in the brief stretch of technological time between the Walkman and the iPod. The bag has two zippered compartments: one which is for the player itself, and has a little port for the headphone cord to go through, and the other of which has a dozen plastic sleeves for holding CDs. On inspection, these proved to hold the four discs of Cleopatra Records's Goth Box compilation, which I'm now ripping to iTunes.

I wonder what I'll uncover next?
  • Current Mood: accomplished
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