Yeah, it sucks when you want a book that's out of print. That happens to me a lot. I don't love buying used books, just an idiosyncrasy of mine, but sometimes it has to be done. But I've been burned and gotten some really shitty books when I buy them used sometimes.
Library Additions, 1991
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 On 06/13/2020 at 09:18 AM by KnightDriver See More From This User » |
I'm revisiting 1990-94 this month. I spent a lot of time researching media for each year and trying to remember what I saw, heard, played. I came up with one item from each genre that I would save from a fire, or some like thing. Here's what I'm adding to my permanent virtual (hopefully matterial someday) library for 1991.
TV:
Remember when MTV started to branch out from just music? Well, this was their animation show. It featured series like Aeon Flux, Beavis and Butthead and lots of cool animated short films. I was fine with this sort of content on my music television station but what they got to later totally lost me. Reality TV was of no interest to me, and I promptly stopped watching.
Film:
This film haunts me, and I feel I have to watch it again to see if I'm one of the characters. At the present I only remember the guy with the collection of tvs all playing at the same time. I've seen this scene in other things like in the movie Serenity where the information guy is alone in a space station with a large collection of screens, and in Watchmen where Ozimandius watches a wall of screens to decide where to move his funds to the best effect. Perhaps this scene in Slacker was borrowed from the Watchmen comic which came out in '86? In any case, this character in Slacker certainly wasn't the smartest man in the world like Ozimandius, or was he?
Games:
There are a lot of cool games from this year, but Shining in the Darkness still remains topmost in my memory. It's a wizardry style game - wireframe dungeons, turn-based combat - but you get vivid images of the enemies and the castle and town you return to. The music is memorable too. I distinctly remember a room with a musical puzzle that I thought was innovative at the time. It was simple but you had a room full of tunning forks and had to copy a melody to open a door or something like that. It quite delighted me. I tried to replay the game recently and started drawing a map of level one of the dungeon when the internal battery failed, and I couldn't load the game anymore (at least, that's my guess as to why it kept crashing). I'll have to do a complete set of maps for it when I get it back up and working.
Music:
I couldn't help but pick two this year. Both I got into by playing games. Many of the tracks from Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger are on the Road Rash 3D game for Playstation and 3DO, and the song, "Pure Evil" on Iced Earth's Night of the Stormrider was part of the Brutal Legend soundtrack for Xbox 360 and PS3. I don't have either album at the moment, but I have many of their tracks from greatest hits and live albums. What makes a great album to me is consistency. All the tracks on both of these albums are solid and enjoyable. You can play them start to finish and never feel like skipping anything. If I could get these on vinyl, I would so I could frame them on my wall.
Books:
I considered Timothy Zahn's Heir to Empire, the first Star Wars book featuring general Thrawn, but I wasn't that enthusiastic about the idea. So I dug a little and found this little dream on a New York Times page listing great books from 1991. I'm desperate to read it but am having trouble finding a copy anywhere but Amazon. That's what you get when you like literary studies; they are off the mainstream and often out of print. Dream at the End of the World by Michelle Green is about Paul Bowles, a writer and composer living in self imposed exile in Tangier North Africa starting in 1947. It's also about other writers inspired to do the same; most notablly, many of the beat writers of the 50s like William S. Burroughs. Paul Bowles also began recording traditional Moroccan music, which influenced musicians in the U.S.. This 50s period in American literature is somewhat new to me. I studied mostly pre-twentieth century works at school. So I'm excited to know more about it.
As a side note, the King Crimson 1982 album Beat is all about this literary period, and there is a song called "Sartori in Tangier" on that album. For some reason, I never made the connection until recently. I've got to find out more.
Next time, 1992.
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