This week, we get three more chapters of The Courts of Chaos. When last we left our intrepid hero(?), Corwin and Brand were going to talk. I'll admit we're in the part of the saga that tends to bore me a little plotwise, as a lot of it is hellride descriptions. That's part of why I'm doing about 20 pages at a time.

( Brand is a talking bear one more time. )

Next time we'll start out with more travelling and see how far we get. Apart from the usual reasons that I've been delaying the tail end of this series, this is my least favorite sections of the story (lots of people being jackasses, not always in a particularly entertaining way, and lots of hellriding/travel). It looks like I'm two or three sections from the end, though, and I'd like to manage that this month.

One of the things the externalized headshrinking that is Corwin's hellriding in this section made me think about was the relationship between Inception and the Corwin Chronicles, which I think is actually quite strong. It's an adventure story with caper elements, with stock-type characters and a lot of psychological metaphor inherent in the physical setting for reasons that make in-canon sense. It's not surprising that I feel the same way (loving but sometimes frustrated) about both of them.

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Books:
- The Sacred Band, by David Anthony Durham. Finished this in a pretty short fell swoop. I was glad all the stories got sorted but the ending was a little neat, except for the things where it felt like it wasn't (one particular plot arc only had an implied ending). A bit disappointing, but not enough that I wouldn't read more by the same author.

Movies/TV:
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Season 4, Episodes 19-22 (of 22). Finishing off the fourth season, with things getting grimmer. This arc opens with a massacre and things went downhill from there. In the penultimate episode, we get Darth Maul resurrected, and Savage Opress has him, which is bad news for Obi-Wan. The final four-way battle with the brothers, Obi-Wan and Asajj Ventress was great, and the season ended on a good note. Looking forward to S5!
- Green Lantern: The Animated Series Season 1, Episodes 2 (of 26?). Time to get back into this after the Clone Wars series. (It's basically DC Animated Clone Wars.) This episode is setting up for adding the character who was the bad guy in the premiere to the team. The animation's not as good as Clone Wars but this is only S1. Also iTunes says there are 26 episodes and Wikipedia says there are 13, so I don't know how many I'm getting.
- One for the Money. Watched ten minutes of this, declared it lame, and sent it back to Netflix. Clearly it's time to clear our queue again.

Music:
- Airiel, Kid Games EP. Shoegaze has melodies. Who knew? I actually like melodic shoegaze better than the whole wall of sound thing, as it turns out.
- Ane Brun Do You Remember? EP. The rest of it wasn't as good as the title song, which is fantastic, but I'm definitely checking out the new album.
- Queen of Hearts, The Arrival EP. British girl electronic dance music, one of my favorite genres. I liked this enough to buy her second EP/single.
- Dead Can Dance, Live Happenings V. I've really liked all these EPs of live DCD performances and they're definitely doing their job of whetting my appetite for the future concert.
- Mirrorring, Fell Sound EP. The song I heard and bought this on the basis of was clearly the best song on the EP. I love the instrumental portions but the vocals are not as good.

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Things we did on the last weekend of Michael's class break:

Houston's Downtown Aquarium was a huge disappointment after the aquarium in Atlanta. The shark exhibit was the best thing about it, and you had to sit in the train and get moved along through it instead of just standing under the sharks. The creatures were impressive, though. The inside exhibits were meh, and the white tigers (which don't belong in an aquarium) were in a faux ruined maharajah's palace that left me icked on a cultural appropriation level. I can't recommend it and have hopes for the Dallas Aquarium, which doesn't appear to be run by Landry's.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science, by contrast, costs an arm and a leg as always, but they have some great exhibits this summer. We saw the Titanic artifact exhibit, which was very well done if somewhat creepy, the Chinese tomb artifact exhibit, which was smaller but also very informative, and the members preview of the Paleontology Hall, which was amazing. Once it's open, later this summer, we'll be heading down to simply spend a whole day wandering through it instead of breezing in and out the way we did today. There's also a small, and free with exhibit halls, exhibition of carved gemstones that's worth your time. I really do feel nickled and dimed when I go there, even with a membership (yesterday cost us $43 as members) but I felt like we got 4+ hours of entertainment easily.

Other things we did: attended a birthday party for one of the people I'm gaming with online, had lunch with Greg and Elizabeth, visited my favorite jewelry shop, and had the least competent waiter I think I've ever had. Overall, it was a great weekend. I'm glad we have another day off before returning to our regular schedule and getting back to school this weekend.

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Vacation means never catching up on your to-read pile

Books:
- Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Finished this finally and I'm glad I read it but I found it really problematic. I can't recommend it to someone not already into meditation.

Movies/TV:
- None!

Music:
- Little Boots, Illuminations EP. Includes two songs from her album but the other three are great, including a cover of Freddie Mercury's Love Kills.
- Garbage, Not Your Kind of People. It's a Garbage album. To me, they've evolved their sound a little, but it's definitely an evolution rather than an abandonment of their last couple of albums, with an emphasis on more modern production (surprise!). A lot of people don't like their third and fourth albums and therefore think an evolution from them isn't any good; I liked them fine and enjoyed this album quite a bit.
- Carolina Chocolate Drops, Leaving Eden. I can't figure out why I didn't listen to this sooner. I really like the cover of You Be Illin but the rest of it is pretty good too.

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M83 with I Break Horses at Stubb's. May 18, 2012.

This was a disappointing show for us despite the good reviews elsewhere. We were both wiped out and Stubb's, which is at best a mediocre venue, was full of douchebags and smokers, plus the heat was making me ill and couldn't be doing any better for Michael, who's more vulnerable to it than I am.

I really liked I Break Horses' album and was very annoyed that the sound was so crap for us even in our usual spot by the sound booth. The bass was high enough that I had earplugs in from the first song, and the vocals were so low in the mix that they were inaudible with the earplugs. Given that the problem solved itself when M83 came on, it was clearly an engineering issue of setting the board up for the main act. The fact that I couldn't get any enthusiasm up for a band whose music I already knew and enjoyed is an indictment of the live performance, but I don't think it was the band's fault.

Because we were so tired and fried, and because the band came on late (15 minutes, not too bad as band times go) we only caught the first half-hour of M83. If I could have sat down, I would have managed the whole show, but we ended up in the back on the hill to get out of the press of the crowd, listening to the douches yammer on about bodily functions. The light show from the stage was great, particularly compared to the LZR-epilepsy-inspiring lights for I Break Horses, and the band seemed. The sound was much improved, too. The physical conditions were just too bad for us to stay on, though.

I am very much looking forward to seeing M83 again at ACL, although by then I hope to have concert binoculars. I wish the conditions could have been better this time. Also, unrelated: M83 completes my 25 new bands requirement for this bucket list, so I've marked off one more item in my 101 in 1001.

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This is about the art portion of the weekend. I'm going to write about M83 and I Break Horses tomorrow.

Andy Warhol: Fame and Misfortune and Roualt's Miserere at the McNay: We went down to the McNay last Thursday to see the Warhol exhibit, which was pretty interesting. What I realized as I went through the exhibition was that it was about a phenomenon of modern life that I really don't like. Also, for all that I think Warhol's art is interesting enough and all right aesthetically, his overall themes don't make the sort of art I want to live with every day. Rouault’s Miserere, by contrast, was unexpected and fascinating and really worth my time. I wish I'd had longer to sit with it and hope I can get back before it closes at the end of July.

Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties: This was the exhibition we went to the DMA for. Again, a lot of it was interesting, but for me it was more about the historical artifacts than the aesthetics of a lot of the paintings, which I didn't care for. I did like the photographs and sculpture as groups better than a lot of the paintings, though. Overall it was worth seeing, and I wish I'd had more time to poke around in the museum.

The Age of Impressionism: Great French Paintings from the Clark is the current exhibition at the Kimbell and we liked it well enough that we joined when we got there on Sunday. I had gotten pretty burned out on Impressionism for a while, but this was a good enough exhibition to overcome my feelings of "been there, done that, seen it before". We also wandered through the permanent collection at the Kimbell, which had rotated paintings through since the last time we'd been. The Kimbell is a real treasure and I'm glad we've started visiting it.

We didn't join the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth but we did have brunch there (recommended, especially the artwork-inspired cocktails) and took a docent-led tour of the permanent collection, which I recommend if you get a chance. The building is also gorgeous and worth the tour simply to explore. It's walking distance from the Kimbell (and the Amon Carter, which we didn't have time for) so there's a day's worth of excellent museums in the area.

Our last stop on Sunday was The Crow Collection of Asian Art, which is across the street from the DMA. There are several exhibitions right now: a fabled journeys exhibition, which had some fascinating artifacts, a tantric arts exhibition that didn't do much for me, a jade exhibition which has fantastic objects but the curatorial direction seemed a little high school aimed for my taste, and a fantastic exhibition of digital photographs from the subcontinent with almost painterly lighting and details. The last exhibit was the unexpected winner and a nice close for the weekend's worth of art.

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Books:
- Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Another Ask Metafilter recommendation, this one based around the eight-week program of a pain clinic centered on yoga and meditation. I have some serious meta thoughts about this, but it really boils down to this program not suiting my personality and belief system at all. I'm going to finish the book but with a plan of picking out things from it and getting the most I can while ignoring the things that make me side-eye.
- The Sacred Band, by David Anthony Durham. Third in a fantasy trilogy I've been reading for a while. Good thing it started out with a recap of book two so I could remember who all these people are!

Movies/TV:
- Pirates: Band of Misfits. The current Aardman animation, featuring a Victorian pirate (yeah I know, run with it), Charles Darwin, and Queen Victoria in various plots to get Pirate and Scientist of the year, plus a surprise contest that you should have seen coming. Voice talent was stellar: Hugh Grant, Martin Freeman, David Tennant, and Imelda "Dolores Umbridge" Staunton as the queen. After the first five minutes, I was picking out anachronisms only for laughs. Hilarious if you like Aardman, probably not for you if you don't.
- In Time. Watched for Cillian Murphy in a leather duster. The suspension of disbelief meter broke about five minutes in. I watched until the point where my boy died and then turned it off in the middle of the climax. Unless you have a thing for one of the actors, really not worth your time. (Cillian is delicious and the only thing worth watching in the movie, and it's not his best. I hope he got a big paycheck.)

Music:
- Foxy Shazam, The Church of Rock & Roll. Missed seeing these guys at SXSW, although I really wanted to see them. Bought the album on the cheap Amazon plan and was happy with it. These guys want to be Queen really badly, which is never a bad thing to say, especially when you manage to get the sound as nicely as they do.
- October Project, More Uncovered. Second process EP for the new October Project album, with the unplugged roughs of five album tracks plus another version of Eyes of Mercy.
- Teeth & Tongue, Tambourine. Another album we picked up during SXSW. (Still digging out of that backlog). She's what a singer-songwriter would look and sound like if she were all about the rock guitar and synths instead of that acoustic stuff. I think I liked her better live, but this was pretty good too.

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This fortnight, I had one declare-finished and progress on a couple of other items. I need to be doing more, but I'm not there yet.

( list under the cut )

The declare-finished was the gaming item; there's no way we can manage five times with a new group between now and September and the other half of our current group is moving. We also visited two museums, worked on the finances, and I read books and went to a concert, and so on.

I've decided to ditch the idea of awarding HOC experience because it's simply not realistic right now. Michael and I don't have the time and the energy to put into the game that experience awards require, which is frustrating. But this time it's not me; it's grad school. The break needs to be an actual break, not a time to work on other stuff. We may try experience in December, which will be the longest break Michael will get. If we don't finish until after the new year, it'll be the first item I knock off the next list.

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We caught the tail end of a spring exhibition at the Blanton today: American Scenery: Different Views in Hudson River School Painting. I'm not hugely familiar with the Hudson River School, but I've picked up enough from visiting American exhibitions at the Blanton and other museums here in Texas that I'm beginning to recognize things and pick up details that I might not otherwise have noticed. The curation was all about the symbolism of seasons, times of day, details of the landscape, and the impact of humans and human activity. I took a moment to sit down and found a board with a summary of the symbols used, which was useful for understanding the exhibition. My favorite part of the exhibition was the three groupings of paintings, each showing different approaches to the same place.

We also saw Go West! Representations of the American Frontier, which will be on until September. It incorporated some of the Hudson River School work and then moved on to Remington (only one, disappointing after MFAH's collection) and later subjects, all the way down to some clear WPA works from the thirties. The pieces were broken down into rooms, each of which had a theme, including a nice, if small, room representing views of Native Americans.

My favorite current installation is also still there: Paul Villinski's Passage, which is quite interesting to view up close, even out of context with the exhibition it was supporting. We also saw an interesting video installation about Princess Caroline of Monaco, which is unfortunately not described on the web site.

By the end of the month, we're hoping to have also visited the Andy Warhol exhibition at the McNay and the 20s exhibition at the DMA, both of which we've been putting off during the just-ended semester. One thing about grad school is that we'll be seeing a lot of things during Michael's time off.

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Books:
- The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering, by Melanie Thernstrom. Borrowed this from the library on an Ask Metafilter recommendation. Pretty interesting if you have pain issues and can cope with the overly self-interested NYT prose. Probably not for anyone who doesn't already have an interest in the subject or who finds the writing style off-putting.
- A Curtain Falls, by Stefanie Pintoff. Second in a series of turn-of-the-century New York mysteries, this one featuring murders in a theater. I enjoyed it but I identified the killer before the reveal. Still, I'm interested enough in the character progression of the team to pick up the next one.

Movies/TV:
- The Avengers. Did not think this could live up the hype but it did. I'm probably going to end up writing something about the whole Whedon feminism thing coming out of it, but I did really enjoy it despite some sticking points.

Music:
- Ronn McFarlane, Indigo Road. Modern lute compositions. No, for serious. We've really enjoyed his renaissance lute in the past, both solo and with the Baltimore Consort, and he put out a solo album of new compositions for lute last year. The compositions were very interesting live and hold up on the studio recording.
- Bryan Lavelle, Suburban Electrification. Atmospheric, ambient electronica.
- North Sea Radio Orchestra, I a Moon. Modern chamber music, bought on Bruce's recommendation. I liked it quite a bit.
- Brother, From the Dreamtime to the Meantime. EP mostly of older material from when Brother had brothers in it, with some live material as well. I'm a reasonably big Brother fan and I think it's good for the completist but not as a point of entry for the casual fan.
- Celtic Pink Floyd, Celtic Pink Floyd. Bought as a gift for Michael. I was hoping this would be less on-point than it proved out to be. The instrumentation choices are all appropriate to Celtic rock, but other than the instrumentation and the difference in the voices, the covers add nothing new. Not recommended: you can get better Floyd covers.
- Duncan Sheik, Cover 80s. Acoustic covers of 80s songs. 80s covers are getting old as a concept, but these are all pretty good and the artist here actually brings something to them as opposed to just trying to note-for-note reproduce them while subbing in different instrumentation.

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