14 January 2003, 10:07 p.m.

Fringing

back & forth

Music: Robert Morton: Le souvenir de vous me tue, on the amazing collection "The Castle of Fair Welcome" by the Gothic Voices. This album probably was the Road to Damascus of my conversion to Historically-Informed Performance Practice. Up until then, I had only ever heard the "Radio Baghdad" school of medieval music reconstructions, doumbeks and rebecks and shawms, o my! And then from a cheap battery-operated stereo system this pure, Occamist interpretation -- if the song is for three voices, let it be performed by three voices, and not by bells and tin whistles and the freaking Fairport Convention rhythm section. I bought it in tape form at a car boot sale one rainy summer and my life was ever changed for the better. It was only a step from that to Hogwood recordings of Handel, and then the hard stuff: Br�ggen, Staier, Savall ...

It is difficult for me to align an interest in SciFi/Fantasy culture with a truly snobbish taste in music and art history. I am already gritting my teeth in anticipation of the sorts of things I will have to se and hear when I go to *r*s**. *r*s**, for those of you who do not live in B*st*n or see ghost vowels, is the Con [sc. -vention] where, they say, "if you can't get laid [there], you can't get laid." I plan to acquire hard (cough) scientific (cough) proof of this. In this pursuit, though, I fear my sensibilities will take a slight kick in the kneecaps. Certain aspects of fandom will always leave me breathless: I read the stuff as a boy and it'll simply never leave me. I would dearly love to go into more depth defending the honor of speculative fictions [cf. JLH's commentary], but I'm afraid I'd be a little incoherent about it tonight. Let it suffice to say I'm going to a Con. Nevertheless, although an informed, joyful plundering of the past is the common ancestor to both Musica Antiqua K�ln and the Society for Creative Anachronism, I'm afraid that I can only extend my murrey organza favour to one of those gentle knights. I have the true historian's over-developed sense of acute embarrassment. As well I should have; it's a sign I've got my money's worth out of Sw*t.

SLB made me the most FWABULUSS! winter scarfmuffler for Winter Holiday and gave it to me last night. It is lime green and orange. It is, I repeat, no cause for alarm, FWABULUSS! and it is truly, truly, seventies decorator colors. It is full-on, pants-to-the-floor, citro-fag colors. It is over eight feet long, when fully extended, and it is FWABULUSS!