I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: LOREENA McKENNITT-A Winter Garden (1995).

Loreena McKennitt has a beautiful voice.  This EP is a beautiful holiday selection (not really Christmas exactly, so that’s fine).  There’s five songs, one of them is from one of her albums as well.

“Coventry Carol” has an excellent full sound–McKennitt’s beautiful voice fits this olde song quite nicely.  “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” opens with Indian sounding drums and a cool fretless bass.  When the fiddles come in it retains a vaguely middle Eastern sound.  It’s a bit long, but very cool.

“Good King Wenceslas” has flutes and cello and nice percussion.  It’s a lovely version.  “Snow” opens with a pretty flute (that has since been co-opted by Titanic).  It’s a pleasant song if bordering on a wee bit too much.  “Seeds of Love” is a pretty song, but it doesn’t feel very seasonal to me.

Overall this is a nice winter record.  It’s not so much Christmasey as pagan.  It’s very pretty and the traditional instruments sound great.  The fact that it’s only 22 minutes is also nice.

[READ: December 19, 2014] Tune: Still Life

So I didn’t spoil the first book, but I can now safely reveal that Andy Go has signed up to be a human living in an alien zoo. He gets $250,000 for his year of service and he gets to go home for the weekends.  Not bad.  He is bummed that he didn’t get to tell Yumi that he loved her, but he can always go tell her this weekend, right?

In the meantime, he gets to enjoy that everything has been perfectly re-created to his specifications.  In fact, the aliens downloaded his memory and replicated everything exactly as he remembered it–his favorite foods, his favorite TV shows, even the magazines under his bed (wow).  Now he just has to learn to pee in front of gawkers and it will be the best job ever.

It even turns out that his bosses are nice.  Well, the one boss is.  She is young (and, yes, sexy even is she has no facial features) and pleasant to him.  She is also amazed by his art.  Sadly, her father is a mean ballbuster.  He hates his art.  In fact, he hates all art.  Their version of reality has done away with art and has ensured that no one has any creativity of any kind.  They even have news feeds piped into their heads 24 hours a day (or however long their day lasts).

Andy also learns that he has a neighbor–Mo.  He and Mo communicate through the air vents.  Mo is an amusing, teasing guy who gives Andy a hard time.  He also tells Andy two things that change Andy’s perception of his job.  The first is that they will send him a female eventually and the second is that the contract he signed stipulates that he will be in the zoo for life, not for a year.  Thud.

Dash (the female alien) confirms this.  They didn’t try to fool him, they just assumed he’d actually read the contract.  They really don’t have any guile on the planet, just good business sense.

Andy basically gives up.  He stops bathing, his house is a sty and he is mean to Dash whenever she comes by.  Until, that is, he comes up with a plan.  Since Dash in interested in drawing, if he teaches her to draw then she will agree to bring Yumi to stay with him.  And it goes exactly as planned.

Well, except for one small, hilarious detail.  This was a great surprise.  But nothing was as surprising as the great reveal of Mo at the end of the book.

The only thing I didn’t like about this book was that it doesn’t end with book two!  And, even though this was done in 2013, there’s no sign of a book three.  There is even an online site for this comic (where you can read the whole thing), but it also stops at the end of book two.  Waaah.  I need to know what happened!

Also, this book was illustrated by Les McClaine, although Derek did continue to write it.  There are some minor differences, but McClaine is quite faithful to Kim’s style.