Books, Music, and Radio

Authors

In elementary and high school I was a voracious reader but that tapered off through my university years. Although one of my favourite places to be at the time was UBC's Main Library where during spare blocks I'd happily read technical journals on whatever topic was of interest to me that day. Being a reader when I was young left me with many juvenile works that are high up on my list of favourites. Among other works H. P. Lovecraft is my favourite author of the weird. Poe, Burroughs, Heinlein, and Tolkien are also favourites.

I have a great fondness for The Three Investigators series of childrens novels, created by Robert Arthur. They have some unknown something that makes them special to me; something that the more common Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew series' don't have. Perhaps it was the presence of Alfred Hitchcock as a character in the books who introduced and concluded each of the stories which gave it a sense of realness that the other series were missing, or perhaps they're just very well written and feel more realistic.

Mystery book alert! If you recognize the following story please let me know the author and/or title; I bought a copy in the mid-1970's and loved the story but the book went missing and I've been wracking my brains to remember enough to identify it.

The story is science fiction. The protagonist is a detective who becomes, or already is, a semi-cyborg who ends up being transported to some planet where his brain is transplanted into a gigantic mechanism that serves as a new body for some purpose that I can't remember; there are a large number of such transplant victims, each in its own mechanism. The other thing I remember is that at one point on earth the protagonist is captured by the Bad Guys and is a prisoner on a boat, where he uses his cybernetic parts to affect an escape; how he does this I don't remember. Help!

Comic Books

I will always remember learning to read with the help of my dad's comic books. Before being able to read the written word I would read a comic book by following the art, and I remember the fairly quick shift to also being able to understand the words as I learned to read. This is a memory I'll always treasure because it's such a vivid memory of myself learning something when I was very young.

Unlike many people I like both 60's Marvel and DC Comics; my dad collected both and I enjoyed reading them all, accepting the different storytelling styles as they were. DC had the simple self-contained story per issue that one could quickly read and then move on to something else, and Marvel had the multi-issue arc that could be read when one had more time to invest. Simple stories and complex stories both have their place.

In Grade 3 I discovered Tintin serialized in issues of Cricket magazine. Those adventure stories became my favourite at the time and they still hold a special spot today. It was a few years later that I discovered Asterix which, probably thanks to the similar format, became a sort of companion book to Tintin. I can still read these adventure stories with the same sense of joy I had when I read them the first time.

I've always been around comics; my dad's when I was growing up and my own collection later. However, sometime in the late 90's economic pressures forced me to give up reading comics. I could no longer justify making the monthly trip to the comic store to spend up to $4.25 per issue for the increasingly smaller number of good comics that my budget would allow. The bang for the buck just wasn't there anymore, so I moved on.

Out of all the comics I've read it's Carl Barks' duck works that are my number-one favourite. Other favourites include the first half of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, along with Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol. Alan Moore's Watchmen and V for Vendetta are must-reads.

Music

I grew up mostly listening to 70's and 80's hard rock but I was also exposed to a lot of other genres that I like. Western music is a favourite of my father and there's lots of material there that I like too. There are Pop hits I love. Listening to shortwave radio gave me a chance to hear a lot of different music from outside North America, and now Internet radio does the same.

The Who is a favourite (especially live stuff from the late 60's and early 70's), plus assorted selections by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, AC/DC, U2, Tom Petty, Blondie, and many others, but I'll listen to anything when the mood hits (native Ecuadorian and African musics happen to be favourites that shortwave radio gave me).

Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill kept me sane during my employment in Ottawa in 1996.

The soundtrack to Vampyros Lesbos (1970) has the very unusual property that I can put it on auto-repeat and listen to it forever! Paired with a few tracks from the Deep Red (1975) soundtrack, it was playing in my office all day each day for more than a year.

Ever wonder why some modern CDs sound bad? Perhaps it's The Loudness War.

Radio

Years ago, in the days before the distractions of the digital era of the 2000's, I used to listen to the radio all the time when at home; just as many people leave the television on, I left the radio on. In addition to generally listening to music on FM radio, my interests extended to shortwave listening as well as shortwave and mediumwave DX. Sadly there's nowhere near enough time for that anymore.

Here's an essay about my 1982 search for a new radio station to listen to when I became disenchanted with the one I was listening to. There's even a number of airchecks which are appropriate to the story, found when I made digital transfers of the cassette tapes I'd recorded in the 80's.

Old Time Radio

OTR is like all of the above subjects in that they all take place in the Theatre of the Mind. Unlike movies or television we all experience the visuals of these stories in our own imagination, which can be much more vivid and appropriate than what the visual media have to provide. Comics come close but their images aren't in motion, our minds are still filling in the holes in the action.

The show I most love is I Love a Mystery. Great serialized adventure stories with enough episodes per story to make it interesting. I also like The Shadow, X Minus One, Dimension X, and hard-boiled detective stories like Richard Diamond. Gunsmoke is a great Western.