That's it. I'm putting my quill back in my goose.

Obviously, I needed humbling today. It seems there's this young drummer named Sara with a gift for polyrhythm and an ear for prog.

Here she is at 12, doing "Red."

And at 13, doing "YYZ."

That there is pure joy. I should live so long as to infuse all my work with as much.

(Via TNH, on BoingBoing.)

I Was Half the Way Down, Treading the Sand

For anyone still watching this space, a placeholder post; lo, I am not gone forever, but my last couple of months have been a heady mix of the very good and the almost comically dreadful, with little in-between except my suddenly inflated commute. Some of the high end, at least, I may feel inclined to elaborate on soon, but for the moment I'm far more out of blogging steam than I've been in a while.

In the meantime, in the spirit of catching up: those of you who missed OVO's February performance at the College Perk can now hear the whole thing, in almost the right order, on our virb.com site here.

In Poses Keen from Bygone Days

The blogosphere is awash in art of late, it would seem:

First, those of you who are fans of my late grandfather's work should check out this stuff that Tony found in one of the many recent attic excavations. Some of it's the abstract expressionism that he was known best for, but there's lots of atypical pieces there too. (I, of course, like the one that looks like a Great Old One, but YM, naturally, MV.)

Second, Spyder got tapped again to do some artwork for the award-winning RPG Burning Wheel, and is showcasing her fine illos for the upcoming magic-focused book here. (In case you didn't know, she previously did some interiors and the back cover painting for the acclaimed Monster Burner volume, which is a level of coolness I could barely have contemplated so few degrees of separation from when thumbing through the Fiend Folio in my fevered youth.) A great big hurrah to her for this new gig and another tally mark on her Srs Profeshunul Artist board. (Also: Mmmm. Wizards.)

Third, Elly (who is a colleague from my late place of employment and otherwise fellow-traveler, for those of you who have been wondering whence she came to the blogroll) has embarked on the ambitious project of a series of works inspired in part by Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and chronicling the progress (of that, and other stuff too). Aeroplane is a work that's at the very least on my shortlist of Desert Island Albums: compelling, labyrinthine, bizarre, unsettling, and chockablock with strange earworms, which is why I sometimes find myself singing "When you were young you were the king of carrot flowerrrrrs" while I'm doing the dishes or some damn thing. (I recall reading that NMH's aesthetic was once summed up as "like Syd Barrett, but with more sex," and that's about right.) It's exactly the kind of effort I applaud, in part because it's the kind of thing I wish I'd thought of first, though my version would no doubt have more of a Mark Ryden sort of vibe going; I look forward to seeing what she does with it.

So that's at least a couple of you out there who have some catching up to do with the mini-zeitgeist, if you've been neglecting pen and palette of late. Show us yer canvases, baby! Whoohoo! (And this would have been an excellent place to note the official launch of Trixie Magpie, except the site's not up yet, nudge nudge, so you're just going to have to Watch This Space.)

The Moth in God's Eye

Here's something happy for all you wyrdfolk fans: a short and very sweet interview with Timothy Renner of Stone Breath and Crow Tongue, wherein he talks about music and family and the uneasy balance of work and life. It's awfully nice to discover that some of the folks I admire, who make the creation seem so effortless, talk about struggling with their art, especially since "like blood from stone" is a pretty accurate description of what the music's been like for me lately.

On that note, I've begun the outlining process for the rewrite of The Vasty Deep, my 2003 NaNo project whose abortive first draft had some good bits in it but was, I think, fatally broken in ways I can't bring myself to fuss with. I'm hoping this time around the cool shit will be cooler, the pulp will be pulpier, and the dumb parts will be less egregiously dumb. Plus this version will be in first person present, which makes the wordings of the story more better with the reading. Not much to show for it yet, but it's a start, a start.