Today’s Vibe

We’ve brought back the Today’s Vibe feature again, featuring the usual clickable tunes that kinda put you on the same page we’re on, wherever we are, whenever it may be.  It’s Autumn One now, still in the Pre-Game thanks to the brightwarm days, but definitely ON thanks to the sweaterweather evenings.  When that dry leaf falls on your head you’ll be right there with us.  It’s happening alright, and not a soul is complaining.  If it seems, tonight, as you make your way to wherever it is you go, that there’s more stars in the sky than there were last week, it’s because there are.  If you believe it, we will too.

Fort Saint Davids Loves Fall TV, Part One

FSD: heroes was SOOOO good

sarah: nooooo kiddding!

i could NOT beleive what that fucking syler did to clairs head!!!!!!!

FSD: SRSLY

On Our Way To Fall

Things are a little nuts around these here parts.  We’re packing, sorta.  Well not really.  But we’re relocating to SW Portland on October 1.  Do you have advice, regarding packing?  How soon do you pack?  Does anyone actually pack a week in advance and then go to bed, every night, in a room full of packed boxes and naked shelves?  We don’t.  Should we?

Then there’s our trip, a month from now, to the Delaware Valley.  Pencil us into your schedule.

There’s new music, which we’re always listening to.  Right now it’s Fabulous Diamonds, Vivian Girls, Blank Dogs on the new, and Ludwig Von on the old — the late, late quartets.  The new Mercury Rev is pretty.  The new TV on the Radio left us cold, but I guess that’s the point?  High Places sounded like a coffee shop, a cool coffee shop but a coffee shop nonetheless.  We’ve been watching films, although nothing in the theater, have we missed anything the theater?  I mean I’m sure we’ll go catch Hellboy 2 for a couple bucks at the Laurelhurst sometime this week.  But new movies?  Again, let us know.

You’re saying Deadwood gets better?  Disc one back in its Netflix sleeve and we just kinda shrugged.  Ok we’ll get it one more disc.  Of course with Queue that includes Conan the Barbarian, The Last Starfighter, Willow, Clash of the Titans, and motherfuckin’ Krull, well, it’s got some stiff competition.

As always, be well, read great literature, draw pictures and scan and email them to us, and please don’t fly around in a helicopter shooting wolves.  If they could shoot laserbeams from their eyes, they would.  Believe it.

FSD Weekend News Edition

Hello all you readers out there in Miltonianland, and welcome to another edition of FSD Weekend News Edition, with your host, Fort Saint Davids.

NEWSFLASH: The FSD Team will be visiting the City of Brotherly Love October 21-28. Mark your calendars, schedule your vacations, and prepare to spend a good deal of your time with our Team in a crisp, autumnal Rittenhouse Square on brisk wind-whisked afternoons, dryleaves crunching under boots, snug in sweaters and warmed from hot cups of La Colombe.

NEWSFLASH: It’s just couple days until the first day of Autumn. This means two things for you, our Reader, our Friend. For starters, it means that you are going to throw Summer Parties like it’s nobody’s business. You will drink only cold bottles of root beer. You will carry a beach blanket with you wherever you go. You will also carry a small folding chair, and your friends will do the same, so that when you run into your friends, at a street corner, where it’s busy, where you want to talk but the crowds are noisy and standing is tiring because you’ve been Summer Partying All Day, you and your good friend can now unfold your conveniently on-hand folding chairs, right there on the sidewalk, near the noisy street and the silent potted plants, and you will sit and have a conversation. Relax. Enjoy your root beer. It’s still summer.

But only for two more days. Which is why once Autumn officially begins you will put away the beach blanket and stop drinking Coca-Cola for breakfast and instead switch to Toaster Pastries. Look, the mornings are a little chillier now. They’re gray. You want to sleep in — and we say that you can. But with that extra snooze button sleep comes a sacrifice: a hot breakfast. It’s not eggs that are scrambling — it’s you, out the door, late to work. That’s where your Toaster Pastries (TPs) come in. Slip that silver foil-wrapped 2xPack of TPs into your pocket, hop on bike, get to work. While in the Staff Kitchen getting that important first cup of coffee, unwrap the TPs. Drop into the toaster oven. In just a few minutes, POP, ready to go. A hot breakfast that tastes great. As always, you’re welcome.

NEWSFLASH: We forgot to add Father Gibbs on our Twitter list, so here he is: twitter.com/jasongibbs. Also don’t forget to add the Daily Miltonian. We need you.

Lich King Release Date Revealed

It’s not every day that the Daily Miltonian succumbs to Pure Pop junk food news like the release date of a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game Expansion Pack (MMORPGEP, duh), but World of Warcraft has been a part of the FSD Family ever since our early days of posting about nothing else but hanging with Crooks, in the late Autumn rain, on South Street. It was Crooks, we now remember, who bought the game first. Never Forget.

So November 13th. That’s when this baby drops.

By all appearances the Expansion looks great. Even Mary, who doesn’t — with good reason! — like WoW has to admit that the Shovel Tusks look, well…kinda cool.

For the Horde!

Alas, Poor Yorick

All of us here at Fort Saint Davids are collectively mourning the death of American author David Foster Wallace, a writer whose massive influence we’d be the first to admit is one of the primary reasons we’re here right now, writing anything remotely clever, like, ever. I can’t tell you how many times fellow Miltonian Matthew K. and myself have sat around, agitated over cups of coffee, bemoaning the state of Letters Today and wishing that we had lived in the Fill in the Blank Epoch when, inevitably, our whining comes to a screeching halt when it nearly hits the big massive Be Thankful That There’s Still: David Foster Wallace, the writer we were proud — always proud — to say was our writer, the one we’d show our kids, the one that made us say hah take your big dick Mailers and Updikes and shove ‘em to our parents, our voice, our author. The world seems a lot quieter, and a lot lonelier, today. It feels emptier.

Here is Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address, in its entirety. We suggest giving it a read.

Letters from Art

Pal,
Recommended viewing: the newly rereleased Fire and Ice DVD which is an animated movie from 1982 by Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta.  With script by Marvel Comic’s own Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway!  Disc two is a full length Frazetta documentary!  Pretty cool treatment of Frazetta’s childhood as a (pretty nonthreatening) gang member in 1940’s Brooklyn, then a comic book penciller, and finally ultimate worldbeater fantasy artist.  Remember that all those Robert E. Howard stories had been around for decades, but when published with Frazetta covers, sold millions, and probably directory inspired killer rock and roll imagery, Dungeons & Dragons, and all our favorite 80’s barbarian flicks.
Lost in Hyborea,
Art.

FSD Items For September

ITEM: All of us here at Fort Saint Davids would like to collectively thank the month of September for such fine Northwestern weather. Surely you’ve been out there, among friends and family, showered in the lemonade-thin streams of gold coin light, basking resplendent whilst enjoying a cold bottle of root beer, reading poems to each other, rediscovering for the Nth time the works of Shelley, Keats, or even (hey why not) Robert “.My mind’s not right” Lowell, born back ceaselessly into the past.  Say what, you haven’t?  Slap that laptop closed, slip on the Vans, grab the keys and bust out that door, kiddo, because sunlight like this don’t last forever.  Go get yours now.  We’ll be waiting for you right here, like the rest of the Internet.

ITEM: Fringe started and now we can’t wait until next Tuesday. Or Wednesday, rather, since our Rabbit-Eared TV doesn’t really get Fox AT ALL, so we’re watching on the website. Lots of people love this freedom. We don’t. We like watching when YOU are watching, because we have these big crazy theories about “Collective Memory” about which Prime Time Television plays a huge part. Where were you when the Oceanic Six got off the island means a whole bunch of different things when you can watch the show whenever you want. But remember getting home from school? If the bus got you there on time, you’re warming up with the end of lame Thundercats. Getting INTO it when G.I. Joe comes on. And then…the main event…that’s right dudes and dudettes, it’s Transfuckinformers! And you and I can relate, because we both experienced that. But will…they?

Anywho, how do you feel about the end of Analog TV? I believe the date is February, when the airwaves cease to be, and all television goes digital. You know about this, right? It’s weird. What will occupy all those airwaves once TV has left the room? Will there be a new rise in Insane Pirate Television, 99 stations of wild, free, uncontrollable anarchic freakout TV? Let’s fuggin hope so.

ITEM: Speaking of Prime Time Television, maaaan how excited are you about September 25?

ITEM: We hope you like the photographs that we share with you, here at the Daily Miltonian. We take ‘em ourselves. Today’s batch were all snapped within the borders of the unbelievably beautiful state of Montana.  Big Sky Country: believe it.

ITEM: We’re Twittering. Not just the Daily Miltonian contributers, but the Miltonian itself, who answers not the question of “What are you doing?” but rather explains “What yo are doing”. The ultimate culmination of the Hi-Rise experiment, we wholeheartedly suggest adding it to your Following list or at least checking in on its URL as often as possible. It’s just beginning, and we’re all extremely excited to see where it goes.

Here’s the team:

Miltonian: http://twitter.com/dailymiltonian

Bader: http://twitter.com/erikbader

Z-Rad: http://twitter.com/alexzahradnik

Carr: http://twitter.com/joshcarr

Brady: http://twitter.com/bradydale

Get on it!

Classic

Former Dryadian and newly minted Miltonian Josh Carr has provided us with a kind of “End Hits” jam-package of meaty Classical goodness, along with his own specialized form of commentary.  He suggests letting each piece breath and unfold for proper enjoyment.  Patience, as always, is the key.  September marks the final month for Fort Saint Davids current office location (the NW/NW Office / Nob Hill / Alphabet District) and as we settle into our newer digs (Goose Hollow / Kings Hill / SW / Ski Lodge) we fully intend to let the following compositions be our soundtrack(s).  As always with everything offered here on the Daily Miltonian, we wholeheartedly invite you to join us.

Ligeti: Violin Concerto
Ligeti demonstrates the continued relevance and importance of the concerto form in the 1990s. Beauty and dissonance: arm in arm, tete a tete, eye for an eye. And a return to the improvised cadenza, yes.

Xenakis: Jonchaies
Wild piercing strings, clouds of sound and tone, big percussion, the towering twentieth century:

Debussy: Sonata for Cello & Piano
Benjamin Britten and Mstislav Rostropovich, haunting, rhythmic, two friends exercising their love of music and eachother:

Vivaldi: Concerto for Two Oboes and Strings in D minor, RV 535
Yes, the strings churn and chug and this is NO Four Seasons, thank god, leave that piece be. O! the second movement with just bassoon and the two oboes, wow. Vivaldi writes BAD ASS bass lines.

Mozart: Sonata for Piano No. 10 in C, K 330
Approaching perfection, keyboard music at its apex? Music to start your day with.

Bartok: String Quartet No. 4
Extended technique, wild pizzicato movement, string quartet writing matures into the twentieth century. Ideally, and eventually, you will want to know Bartok’s six quartets as a collection. You won’t be dissatisfied starting here, though.

Gorecki: Symphony No. 3
Beautiful, haunting, extremely reflective, late-night-sadness ruminations. We don’t have it this bad. We might have it this bad.

Couperin: Les Goûts-réunis
French Baroque chamber music with emphasis on the word ‘chamber.’ This is sexy, sultry summer music, to be heard with friends and lovers.

Handel: Keyboard Suites
Keith Jarrett renders Handel in all its crystalline beauty. This is funky music. Perfect tunes for your evening commute, the melodies will be stuck in yr stroll or shuffle upon first hearing.

Bach: Cello Suite No. 6
You want Pablo Casals playing this, recorded in the 1930s, they just don’t make sounds like he can coax from a cello anymore. Think Mississippi Records fidelity, Casals anticipates Jimi Hendrix in his renderings and in the warm break up of pre-integrated amplifier tube distortion. Be prepared, for all who bask in this shall be affected.

A Very Miltonian Birthday

All of us here at the Daily Miltonian would like to wish Fort Saint Davids co-founder Erik Bader a Very Happy Birthday.  Please join us today in Portland, Oregon as we celebrate this important moment in American History.  Awesome.