He Rests. He Has Traveled.

Berit™ and I have wound up taking more time this week to lie back post-August triad of shows and do nothing.

It was nice at first, but has become boring. At the same time, my body still doesn't want to move much, so it's my mind that's all antsy.

We have work to do on getting The Brick ready for the Clown Festival, but as there will be help for us on Saturday, we may wait to handle the lion's share of it until then (I was planning on going in and starting yesterday, and maybe even surprising the rest of the staff with how much was done already when they came in, but, well, the body doesn't want to move, even as I'm kept up at night, lying in bed thinking of all the improvements I wanna make to the space, and the best, cheapest ways to do them).

So Berit™ stays up all night playing games on one or the other computer while I sleep and then she sleeps all day while I putter around on here, but there hasn't been enough content to keep me occupied right now. So I find myself doing odd things like looking up my favorite Los Angeles movie locations on Google Earth and wandering around in "street view" (I found the street where David Lynch has his three houses in a row, one of which was designed by Lloyd Wright - Frank's son - and another was used as Fred Madison's house in Lost Highway and looks the same in Google as it does in the film).

Oh, one thing I found out, courtesy of imomus, was the extent to which David Bowie's unreleased Toy album was an actual finished project, not a barely-started idea. This album would have come after 'hours' and before Heathen, and bits of it have showed up on the latter album, as well as on bonus disks and b-sides for that and Reality.

Toy was meant to be a mix of new songs combined with re-recordings of some earlier, fairly-obscure to very-obscure 1960s songs (with one apparently from as late as 1971). And most of it is pretty damned good, even if, in the end, it doesn't sound like it quite hangs together like both Heathen and Reality do (which B & I spend a lot of time trying to tell people). The overall feel of the sound is also half way between 'hours' and Heathen, without a distinctive style of its own, which doesn't altogether help.

In any case, this pretty good "lost" album can be somewhat reconstructed as a YouTube playlist from the bits that have been released, or leaked, or performed live. So, behind this cut, a streaming version of the album . . .

( TOY by David Bowie )

I've also spent this week rereading Greil Marcus' Like a Rolling Stone book, Gore Vidal's Point To Point Navigation, and am almost done revisiting David Halberstam's The Fifties.

Rewatched some movies and other video . . . The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Gremlins, the new Futurama DVD - The Beast With a Billion Backs, Stardust Memories, THX-1138, A Prairie Home Companion (had that sitting on the shelf for a while, and finally got to it; it's pretty good, enjoyed it), Pink Floyd The Wall, The Best of Ernie Kovacs, and the first couple of DVDs from the two ex-MST3K splinter groups, The Film Crew and Cinematic Titanic.

Tonight? I dunno. Maybe a bunch of films by either Leone or Bava or Roeg. Maybe Ken Russell's Tommy. Maybe the first season of Rocky & Bullwinkle.

Okay, food time. Berit (who has expressed her desire to see the "™" bit vanish now, okay?) is up and we can think about the rest of the day. And the week. And I can try and force myself to relax.