This past week got to learn about cigar box banjos and harp guitars. Harp guitars are fantasy and scifi’s coolest baby instrument. It also dovetails into running into long-time Animazement friends who are putting together a show for Space Elf Burlesque. There seems to be a shift from larger scale events to smaller venues. It's fun to watch as summer hits its stride.
Along with music tours and vacations are beach reads. Generally into scifi, but wanted to take a moment to stop and talk about my favorite fantasy summer read: The Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty. The trilogy starts with City of Brass. It's free on Kindle and a fascinating look both into Egyptian culture and Djinn. You can just feel the pages itching to make a beautiful movie or tv series. You have to hope that someone in the Middle East will pick up funding because wow. Good job. The costumes, the storyline, and the acting required would polish the desert like a jewel. Unfortunately, there’s a number of strong male leads and romance subplots which seem to not be in fashion in Hollywood. Too bad. Still it’s a great series and worth a read since the entire book series takes place in 3-4 locations in the Middle East, it might be a really smart project provided the cast were ok with a lot of pain, suffering, and death because you would need a lot of practical effects to pull this off. A project that a talented scriptwriter would love to sink their teeth into.
But back to the live music tours because there’s no costumes in City of Brass yet, no matter how much we might like the book series and think the writer is brilliant. Our next music service to review is Apple Music. The cost ranges from $5.99-10.99/month and includes local stations for various cities near you. One of the unexpected gifts is it comes with Apple TV+ which gives us an excuse to watch For All Mankind. For anyone who is not familiar with the show, it’s an alternative to our modern space program in which the Soviets got to the moon first and the space program continued on to the moon and Mars. It’s really great acting and a treat for scifi nerds everywhere. One of the main leads was also in Altered Carbon, so there’s definitely casting crossovers from other scifi shows.
Like the Expanse, it’s a positive take on the future of mankind and given there’s 4 seasons, it will take a while to watch it. Apple seems to have a lot more to offer as a streaming service than we realized, in a good way. For music, scifi, and space nerds, we’ve also picked up Country Highway and Florida Weekly. These are two smaller newspapers offering interesting, diverse opinions. Florida Weekly just did a great feature on Infinite, a virtual space tour in the life of an astronaut available through September. All in all, we definitely recommend Apple Music and will be diving into it for July.