Kate Bush covers have been turning up on talent shows every once in a while. This is the best one I've seen in a talent show context yet, even in its abridged form clocking in at 2:09 including the surrounding video jingles. In fact, it got praise from Kate Bush herself, saying she found it "really moving".

Two framing bricks too many, maybe. Trimming them, the road not taken.

What if Barre had played? What if Ryan'd sung all?

Then it might have been good.

Judge for yourself! Hear Ian Anderson's sequel to Thick As A Brick on Spotify

This is the feed URL: http://www.rocr.net/?p=rssmod. For use in an RSS reader app or an aggregation site like Google Reader. Not to be used for unauthorized reproduction of site content.

1 350-gram block of tofu

2 small onions

1 clove garlic

1 leek

3 carrots

4 cups (1 liter) of water

3 tomatoes

1 jar of pre-cooked lentils with added vegetables* (610 ml, containing 385 grams of lentils)

1 vegetable stock cube (optional for extra _umami_ and salt)

1 tb chana massala

1 tb hot curry powder

1 tsp lemongrass

Sunflower oil

__Procedure__

Cut the tofu, garlic and onions according to preference. In a large steel pot, fry the tofu, garlic and onions for about five minutes, starting at high heat and readjusting to medium as you go along. Add chana massala and hot curry powder. Meanwhile, cut the carrots and leek. Add these to the frying mix. Give this a bit of time, which you use to cut the tomatoes. Add lemongrass and cut tomatoes, add water and turn up the heat to bring the soup to a fast boil. Add stock cube if desired. Add lentils with the water in the jar (if using dried lentils, add an extra cup of water). Bring to boil again, briefly. Cook at low heat until you can't stand waiting anymore.

Serves four, or three with seconds for everyone. Suitable for vegetarians.

This was a recipe I improvised to test out the lentil product and use some tofu that needed to be eaten. Rona asked if it was from a book and when I said no, she said, with some regret, that that meant she'd probably never taste it like this again. So to preserve it for posterity and allow it to be made as close to exactly the same again as possible, I decided to type it up. Sometimes my improvised dishes don't turn out that good, but this one was a hit.

*) Or use dried lentils (suggested amount: 1 cup for a soup that's slightly thicker than this one, plus one cup of water). We'd normally do that, but the whole point of developing this recipe was to try and find a use for a jar of these lentils I'd picked up at a discounter.

Speaking of which, the other day I read Daniel Davies' The Christmas Sermon for the second time, a year after I'd first read it. Back then, I went as far as to read it aloud to Aggie. It's still hilarious a year later.

TARDIS Eruditorum: A Psychochronography in Blue does the same for every Doctor Who episode in existence and is, if anything, even more thorough, with the occasional piece that is nothing but historical/cultural context.

Bicycles are not instantly accessible so it's still possible to review and discuss them the old-fashioned way, and they don't really lend themselves to reviewing in historical sequence (though if anyone would give that a try, I'd read it), but Lovely Bicycle contextualises them anyway, and shows you how beautiful they can be.

No go forth and read!

In an effort to catch up with Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan's schedule without compromising the art quality, I asked Yonaka to do some backgrounds for me. She'd done this once before, and that was very satisfactory indeed. Working over the Internet meant I could get the page to and from Georgia (the U.S. state, not the former Soviet Republic), but at a price.

This is a scaled version of the scanned page that I sent to Yonaka. I put it on a web server and emailed her the URL plus instructions. I told her I wanted a realistic rendition of the space the scene was set in in all panels except the third and fourth, which should feature a historical narrative rendered in wood carving style, ca. 1000 AD. Yonaka knows from carving, and she knows her history, but I sent her a reference from a Norwegian stave church portal anyway.

Black and white line art without background. Click to enlarge

Yonaka simply prints the scanned page out on an inexpensive inkjet printer. The line quality suffers somewhat in this process, but because the scans are high-res to begin with, it doesn't really show in the final result, at least not on the Web. I may run into trouble if I try to make a print version, though.

Yonaka then simply drew the background in pencil, on the print-out. It's really low-budget.
Because the third panel was so much work, she posted the an intermediate version of the page on her website for me to check out, before continuing with panel 4. The third panel is in pencil, with pencil shading. The other panels, however, are in ink.

Line art with Yonaka's backgrounds. Click to enlarge.

Once I'd approved panel 3, which I did quite enthusiastically, Yonaka drew the background for panel 4. It's looking quite crowded now...

Final backgrounds including the fourth panel. Click to enlarge.

The final colored artwork, without the lettering. I didn't have to do much on panels 3 and 4. Even a flat color over the entire area brought out the relief in Yonaka's drawings.

Digital colours by me, as done in 2004. Click to enlarge.

After that, the page got its lettering, and with that done, the page was flattened (i.e. all the layers were reduced to a single layer), scaled to web size and posted. Eight years later, I revisited it as part of the remaster project, and this gives me an opportunity to show what sort of changes I've made. This is what the artwork looks like now, when its at the same stage as in the previous image, coloured but not lettered:

Artwork with 2012 revisions by me. Click to enlarge.

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OK, that works well enough. I plan to write more blog posts again, but write them offline in an external editor, so I'm more focused. I recently downloaded two full-screen editors for Mac, [IAwriter](http://www.iawriter.com/) and [Ulysses](http://www.the-soulmen.com/ulysses/), both of which have full-screen modes that allow for writing with minimal distraction. Of these, IAwriter works with [Markdown](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown "Wikipedia entry for Markdown") syntax, and I've found that using Markdown is an excellent way to perform essential markup without breaking my train of thought, so I've added it to this blog in the hope of finally getting some reviews written. Watch this space.

[To the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan site](http://www.rocr.net/ "ROCR")

And in the age of Spotify, that's what you need! There is no point in anyone writing a review based on two or three listens when you can just link the reader to the Spotify URL. Indeed I've already heard most of 50 Words for Snow through the NPR First Listen stream. For a quick first impression, the album itself will do quite nicely, thank you very much. But living with the songs for months and giving a considered opinion on them, is still useful.

Let it be known than that I've found Director's Cut alternately uplifting and infuriating. I would hate it on one listen, then put it on again a day later and find it not so bad, then put it on again and hate it again. Over time, most of the songs grew on me, but some utterly fell flat over time.

The fact that these are songs I've lived with in their original form for much longer doesn't help. Every change in nuance gets filtered through the comparison with the originals. Where Kate's voice is a bit weaker, where a favorite bit of instrumentation is missing, the new version is the one that suffers. Only over time did I find that stripping down the old layers of instruments gave the remaining ones more time to shine, and that the vocal changes, while sometimes highlighting a loss of range and power compared to the original versions of the songs from 1989 and 1993, were largely well-considered and the work of an artist very much in control of what she wants out of her instrument.

The bad
That isn't to say it always works. "Flower of the Mountain" continues to suffer from the comparison with the original "The Sensual World" - the lyrics Kate wrote when she wasn't allowed to use the Molly Bloom soliloquy in 1989 fit and flowed better, her voice was (not to put too fine a point on it) sexier and the production didn't have a hair out of place. On "Deeper Understanding", Kate articulates like K9 from the classic Doctor Who series and the track doesn't get off the ground until after the vocal part is over. And let's not get started on "Rubberband Girl": there is a decent musical jam hidden under the mumbled vocals, with drummer Steve Gadd and bass player Danny Thompson giving it their best, but it's hardly audible under the muffled production.

The good
The rest of the album, though, is pretty good, and once I made an abbreviated playlist of it without the songs that didn't work, I found myself playing it regularly over a sustained period of time. "Lily" sounds less urgent but more claustrophobic and builds up its energy slowly over the course of the track. "The Red Shoes" now sounds like something you actually want to dance to. "Never be Mine" has layers of artifice stripped from it, all the way down to simplifying the chorus. It wears its emotion on its sleeve instead of dancing around it. "Top of the City" and "And So Is Love" are more subtly reworked and are musically hard to tell apart from the originals (even after seven months!), but do appear to have a little more breathing room to them.

The great
"This Woman's Work", one of three completely re-recorded songs, is a completely different song now. With its chiming, reverberating, minimal keyboard accompaniment and desperate, yearning vocals it sounds bleak, raw like an open wound. "Moments of Pleasure", on the other hand, has been changed to be more uplifting - compared to the original, it is like a scar that has healed up. Kate's vocal on this new version is jazzier, and looser, sounding like she's singing for the joy of singing. These two tracks must have been where things started to fall into place for the next album. The same glee can be found in "Song of Solomon", my favorite from the album. It's lost a little in subtlety, but it's gained in momentum, with Kate pushing herself through an abrupt sonic shift in the bridge to that raucous "Wop-bam-boom". Here, Kate's aged voice is sexy, succeeding where "Flower of the Mountain" didn't do the trick.

Taken as a whole, Director's Cut is a fine record in its own right that has proven to be a grower. I now rate it above Aerial, reversing a twenty-five-year trend in which each new Kate Bush album did less for me than the previous one (to be fair, she only released three albums during that period). But did it need to be made at all?

Back in April/May, that question was a real poser. Knowing what we know now, it's easier to answer. Director's Cut was a dry run, a test for Kate's new studio setup and record label. It also scratched an itch that needed to be dealt with before she could move on to the next record. From interviews, it turns out that Director's Cut was very difficult to make, but once Kate was done, the next album was very easy. Recording this album jumpstarted the creative process and resulted in a new album within a year. As new Kate Bush records are normally so rare, that alone should make it worthwhile. That the actual album is listenable at all is a bonus - that 75% of it is this good is a blesssing.

Listen to Director's Cut on Spotify

However, it pays to be vigilant, and I just found this, which I shall fix in an instance. But with that out of the way, the benefits should outweigh the disadvantages. Please let me know if there are other aspects that I need to look into, or if you think there are better alternatives available that fit my criteria better.