Riding the White Bull; Catlin R. Kiernan (@auntbeast) has kicked my ass again

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CRK is an artist I have grown to love over the past year or two. Her recent collection “Two Worlds and In Between” shows her remarkable strength writing in shorter format.

The collection includes “Riding the White Bull,” which I just finished this evening. I am simply amazed by how this intensely dense tale retains a poetic grace while still being jammed with details, plot points and descriptions. The rawness of Dietrich’s whole predicament as a Blade Runner-esque special agent who has been to the edge of the abyss, quite literally, and looked over, is truly powerful stuff.

I have no problem bringing my influences to picture this story as it unfolds in multiple times, spaces and dreams. Even if the author owes nothing to Blade Runner or Alien in conjuring such riveting fiction, these crutches helped and only reinforce the weight of emotion and loneliness.

One place where they author does acknowledge her influence is with a chilling quote from Charles Fort about the unlikely nature of contact with an alien race:

Of course, there’s nothing to that mystery if we don’t take so seriously the notion – that we must be interesting. It’s probably for moral reasons that they stay away – but even so, there must be some degraded ones among them.

Squarepusher on whether he’s “going back to his roots”

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There are numerous ways in which I’m concerned with this music that a listener just wouldn’t be. So I think that kind of assessment is really public domain. I don’t know what I can offer in that respect. I can certainly say the idea of trying to replicate something I’ve done in the past is quite offensive to me. Trying to recapture something I was doing 15 years ago, that’s certainly a long way from my intentions.

Read the entire Spin Magazine Q&A.

Squarepusher ups the ante with Ufabulum.

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So far, I am very pleased with the new Squarepusher record.  I’m also enjoying how some critics can’t get a handle on it.  That means he’s doing his job properly.  As the artist predicted, it is both melodic and aggressive.  The grooves devolve to an almost unrecognizable digital mash, but are buoyed by the composer’s sense of melodic narrative.  The destructive decoration is the point, but it is anchored to very human sounding notes.

Here is the artist’s own track by track discussion.

Ramsey Campbell’s ‘The Grin of the Dark’

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This book shocked me. I had no idea how Cambpell would rope me in with mundane human drama of an academic struggling to publish his research, moving in with his girlfriend who has a seven-year old and excessively wealth parents who hate him. And in this context, an unspeakable evil will venture forth into our world, latched to the legend of an obscure silent-film star whose antics caused his movies to be banned. Campbell’s otherworldly view of the internet is just off enough for me to forgive its somewhat awkward role in the story’s conclusion.

The true gift is the nameless, soul-destroying dread that Campbell conjures. This has nothing to do with how creepy clowns are, that’s just the icing on the cake. I’ve never been that frightened of clowns, nor did I seek them out. Now, I’m definitely frightened of clowns

I’m going back to @6Wunderkinder for task management

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The more complicated my life becomes, the more I absolutely depend on task management.  That is not specific to software of any particular kind.  Its about making lists of specific, bite-sized, action items that can be accomplished in an orderly fashion.  The theory is that, with the formation of well-managed lists, the brain is freed up for unbound creativity.

Countless software developers seek to exploit the absolute right-ness of lists and GTD theory with varying success.  The benefit for me is that the excitement of gadgetry and the beauty of design will draw me in to interacting with my lists and promote focus and productivity.  The apps, in short, can be a major boon to getting things done.

At work, I am forced to use Microsoft Outlook.  If it were my business, I would implement a different, customizable solution, instead of the one-size-fits all approach of Outlook Tasks.  But I’m not that high up in the food chain.

In my personal life, which includes a zillion things i need to keep track of for the new baby, music, taxes and finance, social gatherings, and other stuff, I can go whatever direction I please.  My requirements, however, are rigid – cross-platform and cloud-based.  Google would seem a natural, but their task management application is simply a poor appendage grafted onto Gmail.  Astonishingly disappointing.

Before I got forced into Outlook, I used Wunderlist and it was brilliant, though not terribly pleasing to the eye.  After Outlook, I left poor Wunderlist on the side of the road and started with Any.Do.  The latter is a gorgeous Android app that alleges sync with Google tasks.  I love love love the design of Any.Do, but the sync is questionable at best, and there is no app for iOS or Chrome or Mac or Windows.  They say it’s coming, but I’m not seeing any product development or even app updates.

I’m going back to Berlin.  Wunderlist really does have it all, and the appearance is somewhat custimazable to make it a little more pleasing.  I realize the interface may never be ‘slick’, and maybe that’s just not the German way, but this company is going places and they’re delivering everything I need to get things done.