Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids, which released with a Bigfoot-sized thud last Friday on Bandcamp, is out on all streaming services today, Friday, 13 October 2023.
Readers should be able to find the album in the following places:
Happy Listening!
—TPP
Earlier this week our senior cryptid correspondent Audre Myers sent me an intriguing video that seems to depict a Bigfoot sauntering along the side of a Canadian lake near Toronto. If anyone’s going to be hanging out in Canada, it’s Bigfoot!
Audre makes an interesting point: could every sighting of the hairy lug really be a guy in a gorilla costume? That does stretch credulity—except that it’s entirely possible, albeit a tad implausible, that everyone filming is in cahoots with a fellow hoaxer. The Spiritualist Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced more charlatans than ghosts.
Regardless, we simply can’t know. As with everything with Bigfoot, we’re always talking in possibilities, probabilities, likelihoods, etc. This footage is intriguing, but it’s so easy to doctor video footage, how can we be sure? Until we have a Bigfoot in captivity or dead on a lab table, we really can’t.
With that, here is Audre with a little note on perspective:
Growing up, I remember pastors championing the King James Version of the Bible as the only reliable translation. It is, indeed, exceptional—and, even for a hyperintelligent Übermensch like yours portly, exceptionally difficult to read. I now primarily use the New King James Version, which retains the KJV’s accuracy, while updating the syntax and language for modern readers.
That said, the NKJV still loses some of the poetry of the KJV. Christianity is a reading religion, but it’s also a spoken one, and like all poetry, the Bible is meant to be read aloud. Not many of us do it well. When it’s done right, however, it pierces our souls.
Audre Myers graciously wrote this beautiful piece about the recorded King James Version, available on YouTube. Actor Alexander Scourby reads the entire Bible, and from the videos I’ve listened to so far, it’s gorgeous.
Okay, admittedly, this week’s edition of Open Mic Adventures is a bit of a cop-out. Actually, a pretty big one: it’s the same song as last week’s installment, but on BASS!
The first “week” of the new school years is nearly in the books, and yours portly is probably a puddle of exhaustion by this point. After a summer of sleeping in late, taking afternoon naps, and sitting around in air-conditioning, getting back on the move is certainly good for my physical health, but not necessarily for my sleep-deprived mind. Will I finally develop healthy habits during the school year? Probably not.
But what better time (and pretext) for another installment of Phone it in Friday: YouTube Roundup Edition? I’ve actually got quite a bit of new stuff on my YouTube channel, to which you should definitely subscribe (I know for many readers, “subscribe” is a dirty word—God forbid we support our favorite content creators!—but trust me, it’s totally free to subscribe to my YouTube channel).
So, all preambles and bitterness aside, here are some of my recent uploads:
As a people genetically and spiritually descended from the English, we Americans love nature. The United States is a land known for its natural splendor and beauty, and our entire history is one of constantly encountering, subduing, conquering, and/or making our peace with nature. Frederick Jackson Turner in his famous “Frontier Thesis” argued that our young nation’s constant struggle against nature—the frontier—reinvigorated our democratic and republican spirit and institutions, as we constantly adapted concepts like liberty and constitutionalism to new, often hostile environments.
Yet we retain something of the (perhaps naïve) English notion of nature as fundamentally benign, a bounteous garden for our enjoyment and leisure, not to mention our sustenance. We imagine rolling hills of lush greenery, absent of any nasty critters or conditions that might interrupt our bucolic stroll through the countryside. Our conception of nature is thoroughly Romantic at times, feeling more like Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony than Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (although, to be fair, both feature massive thunderstorms!).
Of course, we Americans also know something our Anglo-Scottish-Irish friends don’t: nature is a b*tch.
June is nearly over, and July starts tomorrow. I’ll be hitting the road for a week in Indianapolis to visit my older brother, which means I’ll probably get another poorly-selling travel book out of the deal—maybe something like Midwestern Musings, Washingtonian Woes. Of course, I need to finish my series on the wild, stressful trip to Washington, D.C., from this March. For whatever reason, I just haven’t had it in me to continue writing that saga, even though the best (and, at the time they occurred, the worst) parts are yet to come.
But I digress. In the spirit of shameless self-promotion, here’s another edition if YouTube Roundup, in which I showcase some of my recent YouTube uploads. Feel free to follow my YouTube page. Watch a video, like it, leave a comment—whatever you’d like. I upload approximately once a week, sometimes more.
It’s been refreshing to get back out to open mic nights and to do some live performances again. In the spirit of getting back out and playing again, I’m digging deep into my back catalog and playing some really obscure originals.
My mind is also percolating for the first time in years with ideas for new songs. Here’s hoping I have some time to sit down at the keyboard and do some actual writing and composing. Sure, I’ve been composing a great deal of instrumental music lately, mostly for the piano, but I haven’t written a proper song since about 2019.
That said, at last week’s open mic I decided to pull out a really old piece, one I wrote way back in 2010, called “Quasi-Date.”
Thanks to the gentle prodding of Audre Myers, I’ve decided to upload videos actively to my YouTube channel. I’ve had this channel for almost fifteen years (apparently), but only used it to upload a short video from the video game Spore in 2008 and some footage of my old group Brass to the Future playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” on Independence Day 2010.
I’ll mostly upload original music. There are plenty of songs I love to cover, but uploading those covers to YouTube without obtaining permission from the original songwriters is technically a violation of copyright law. I’m a big believer in the protection of intellectual property, and I’d rather not run afoul of the YouTube police, at least not for something legitimate.
That said, readers are welcome to cover my tunes, just let me know about it.
So, I thought I’d periodically post a digest of some recent uploads for readers who want to dive deeper into my music—for free!
Okay, okay—I know I shared “The Rings of Saturn” last Tuesday. However, I went out that Tuesday night to open mic night, and—with all humility—I knocked it out of the park. As such, I had to share footage of this live performance.
The Portly Politico 