highlyeccentric | Weekend Listening Post (Reply)

Been a while since I did one of these, hmm?

Music:

Jolie Holland, Escondida albumA. Jolie appeared on a podcast I was listening to (see below), and some lines from "Old Fashioned Morphine" were quoted and I suddenly remembered knowing her music (or at least this album) very well. Either I had a pirated copy once or K listened to it a lot.

Watch on YouTube

Aysendiz Gokcin, Pink Flloyd Classical Concept. I love me some "things played on genre-inappropriate instruments" covers and this is fantastic. It's not a parody, it's a re-arrangement which really brings out some of the elements of the original - especially the tracks taken from Dark Side of the Moon.

Watch on YouTube

Audio fiction:

The October Man and What Abigail Did That Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch. I really enjoyed the October Man - loved the deep dive into A New Niche Thing (in this case, Rhineland wine production). On the flip side, I might have enjoyed it less but think What Abigail Did That Summer is perhaps a better book. It was a nice change to be in the perspective of someone who rightly mistrusts the metropolitan police, and I'm intrigued by the set-up for Abigail-led content with a different (though lbr not less Problematique) set of authority. I particularly admired the way that, instead of having a single foil to Abigail's brother, we got two characters, and one of them was also a foil to Abigail herself. I like refractions of characterisation through clusters, I suppose.

I've resumed The Magnus Archives, with a couple of episodes from s3 the other night

New podcast discovery: Monstrous Agonies. Conceit: a late night radio segment for the supernatural, with the host taking listener letters for advice (actually listener submitted, so it's a sort of collaborative fiction). I link to episode 77, of which I particularly enjoyed the second letter. The mid-episode ads are great, too.

Kehkashan Khalid, The petticoat government, in Fantasy Magazine

L Chan, Re/union in Clarkesworld. A dutiful daughter attends New Year celebrations with the AI figures of her ancestors

Non-fiction audio:

Loremen Pod, as ever. I particularly enjoyed this week's episode on The Great Bed of Ware

Hakai Magazine, which delivers "Coastal news". It's based in Victoria, BC, so a lot of content from the Puget Sound/Salish Sea kind of area, but by no means exclusively. For instance, I enjoyed this episode, in which we learn that a fake beach was accidentally good for sharks.

The History Listen, by Australian ABC radio. I was fascinated by an episode on the 1930s craze for Hawaiian steel-string guitar in Australia, not least because it made sense of some of the things my grandfather had said about liking "Hawaiian" music in his youth. I wish the episode had explored the racial dynamics a little more - most of the people they spoke about were white, but at one point a white interviewee learned (in Australia, if I recall correctly) from a Maori family - I'd love to know more about that. And about other factors in the makeup of the 4,000 students of Hawaiian guitar in Sydney: apparently a small majority were women, but the episode didn't touch on class, or interaction with employment categories, or much on the Great Depression at all.

Sports Greatest Crimes, a BBC podcast, specifically the sub-series on Shergar the racehorse which is inexplicably hosted by Vanilla Ice.

Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, hosted by Margaret Killjoy. I particularly loved the two-parter on Isabelle Eberhardt, but I really admired Margaret's historical research work on The Battle of Cable Street, where she starts a decade and change beforehand, looking at labour solidarity between Jewish tailors and Irish dockworkers. One of her key arguments - and she doesn't push it to a "great originary point" line, but it's the stronger for not being over-sensationalised - is that the Irish dockworkers around Cable Street were *particularly* disinclined toward Oswald Moseley's anti-semitic recruiting tactics, not because they were particularly noble, but because a great many of them had in fact grown up in Jewish homes for a few years - because part of the turnabout of solidarity between the two unions had involved two teenage Jewish girls in the 20s organising to take the children of dockworkers into Jewish homes during a prolonged strike. Radical childcare in action!

Betwixt the Sheets, On dick picks: the history. I enjoyed this a lot - it's actually mostly a modern sociological look at dick picks, and the relationship between solicited nudes as part of modern erotic life and the unsolicited dick pic phenomenon. Still, I had some baffled moments listening to two straight cis women talk about dicks, which I should post about in a separate and probably locked post.