Project TROIKA
This weekend, the lead singer of Real Can of Yams is visiting K. Steeze at B.T.WesTwo (articulated B-T-W-West-Two) in Los Angeles to record the vocals for R.C.Y.'s long anticipated sophomore album, CODENAME: Koala! So that they may make the most of this time, I have proposed that we cancel this weekend's Sunday phone confab, and Steeze has assented; we shall resume next Sunday, 7 September.

I had the mildly wicked thought then to take this weekend as a holiday from Project TROIKA, a chance to play with all the other ideas that my magpie mind has been forced to ignore due to TROIKA's primacy and looming deadline. Please do not think by this that I am in any way tired of Project TROIKA, it is just that my brain has always flitted from idea to idea to idea like a demented hummingbird, and has bristled at TROIKA's jealous monopolization on my creative energy. Bristled, I might add, at the very time it has reveled in the complexity and vitality of the Project. (My mind is often of two minds like that.)

And yet now that I have given myself liberty to explore the corridors of my mind beyond Project TROIKA, my thoughts are ambling mostly through those same corridors it has trod during the long months of the Project's exclusivity. I suppose my brain's beef genuinely was with the limits imposed on its freedom by Project TROIKA, not with the thoroughly rewarding work of Project TROIKA itself.

TROIKA Holiday
I am, though, to a minor degree, playing with the previously mentioned science fiction idea based on Rudyard Kiling's poem "The White Man's Burden," specifically these lines:

"The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead."

Actually, let us not neglect the first half of that stanza:

"Take up the White Man's Burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead."

The specific tale, conceived as a science fiction novel entitled Man's Burden, involves the colonization of an alien world, one inhabited by a sentient, but technologically primitive alien species, borrowing elements from Pizarro's conquest of the Inca Empire, Jamestown and the Plymouth Colony, and the Anglo-Zulu War. The larger background of Man's Burden is the rising tensions and brewing conflict between two human interstellar empires, the vast, bureaucratic Mandate, centered around Earth and encompassing the vast majority of the far-flung human population, and the upstart/breakaway Commonwealth, a highly ideological experiment based on certain principles from Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil. And whereas "the Mandate," derived from the ancient Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven, is a nickname for a not-yet-formally named polity, a polity that disdains the Commonwealth as "so-called" and rebellious, the Commonwealth styles itself officially the Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, and considers itself very much a sovereign state.

And in the background of the great game between the Commonwealth and the Mandate, and the ethical and physical struggles of Man's Burden, would be a spate of undersea excavations on disparate worlds all across the heavens discovering enormous, long-abandoned starships, and the gradual revelation of a vanished, aquatic alien civilization whose vast dominion spanned the galaxy before Man stood erect. Though spread across a thousand thousands worlds, whenever an Oceanic died his body would be ferried back to the primordial seas that had given birth to his forebears. What became of the Oceanic Empire and the unfulfilled journey of its vast, mysterious Deathships?

More than that I do not know. Whenever a Man's Burden idea would come bubbling up from the Muses, I would always set it aside unexamined in deference to Project TROIKA's precedence. Mayhap more will be devised this long weekend, but already I feel the tug of Project TROIKA's exotic locations, madcap vagabonds, and rollicking adventure.

The Rebel Black Dot Songs of the Day
Less Than Jake, "The Science of Selling Yourself Short" from Anthem (T.L.A.M.)

Donnerstag, 28 August
Barenaked Ladies, "Everything Old is New Again" from Maybe You Should Drive (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary: With the B.T.W. South Song of the Day, there was a inviolable policy of non-repetition; this was all well and good as each of us only got to select half the songs and the period of B.T.W. South's existence was finite. I intend the Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day as an ongoing feature of The Secret Base, continuing into the indefinite future. And that is why, though I am wary of selecting the same songs over and over and over again, a given tune may be chosen as the R.B.D.S.O.T.D. an unlimited number of times. Merit will be the determining factor, and that is the case with "Everything Old is New Again," a superb song that was previously the R.B.D.S.O.T.D. in January of this year.

Mittwoch, 27 August
Blink-182, "Going Away to College" from Enema of the State (T.L.A.M.)