For once, I wish to channel my musical esthetics and talk about one of the absolute most sought-after albums I have ever pined for. Which is to say, when it was released I was just starting a new job and on a tight budget, but by the time I’d established myself, it was already grossly out of print.
To be sure, as a musician, I don’t know if I could ever play any of Tristram Cary‘s music, but like Delia Derbyshire, I find the kind of organic sound they used in the mid 1960s was unique and something I’d love to try. I would love to have high-fidelity digital tape loops of ordinary, everyday sounds.
Cary’s music was itself bombastic and brutal in a fresh, naturally bassal way. I was reminded of this, but didn’t have a chance to cover it, during my discussion of Doctor Who: The Ark. The Ark is filled with the classic themes and tones from Cary’s earlier work on The Daleks. Cary actually contributed music to a number of Doctor Who stories during the Hartnell era of the show, as well as in the early 1970s with the Pertwee story, The Mutants.
The album is so rare, it often goes for, from $80–$130, which is well beyond my price range. Especially considering it originally retailed for about a quarter of that. It’s not that I don’t think it’s worth it, but it’s not the media I care about, it’s the music and surely if it was just a digital copy of the music, it could be re-released as streaming for little to no cost, and thus all profit to the Cary estate.
Tristram Cary died in 2008, so he was around when the album was released. I can only assume he was happy with it. I hope he would want more people to hear it, but I am hesitant to look into the grey recesses of the Internet to procure his music. I want so badly to buy a legal copy. I just wish I could get it for a fair price.
I got in to cosplay a number of years ago. I was aware of it for quite a while but I really started to take an interest on a trip up to Connecticut to visit me mum. Back then I was in #CO2Fre3 or #CO2Fre2 and in those Nissan LEAFs, I had to stop a number of times to get enough electricity to get to my destination.
So, I stopped a Hotel in Baltimore to use the CHAdeMO charger and get some fuel when I passed some cosplayers going to a convention. I asked to get a picture and kept it as part of my trip log memories on Swarm, as I used to do back then.
Of course I was intrigued so when I heard about this new group, D.C. Cosplay Photo Shoot, forming on Facebook, I joined right away, getting in on the ground floor. I remember that phone call very well as I was driving #CO2Fre home from work. Sarah Brice, an amazing cosplayer in her own right, was there with the other founders. That’s when we planned out what the group would be and how it would be organized. In those early years I was more of a lurker rather than a participant.
I started going to a local Doctor Who convention, ReGeneration Who, now defunct. Seeing all those Whovian cosplays, I decided it was time for me to start building my own cosplays. That’s where I met one of my very best friends in the entire world, Ilona Hull Berberich, who is a dead-ringer for Susan [Foreman].
I was finally ready to attend my first D.C. Cosplay Photo Shoot event. I invided Ilona so I would have someone I met there and we made a great team, having a number of photos taken of us.
From that point I attended a number of D.C. Cosplay Photo Shoot events, building my cosplay database up from a since Doctor Who companion to various other media franchises, getting some great photos and making some great friends.
One of the best parts of all from those events was the Munchie Squad. After an afternoon of posing and snapping picture, we’d all gather and have a friendly meal together. I so enjoyed chatting with my very dear friends Rachael S. Norberg, an amazing cosplayer, and Kevin K. Nguyen, an outstanding photographer, and so many others! It was the perfect capstone to a great event.
I was going to do a Tegan crossplay for the convention. Ilona was coming and would be in a Turlough crossplay. We were both very excited.
I had commissioned a Tegan crossplay months before the convention. I obtained all the COTS elements of the cosplay: blouse, pantyhose, pumps, wig, and purse. I just asked the commissioner for a skirt, a belt, a jacket, and the pill-box hat. I hoped it wouldn’t be too hard. I would have done it myself but I didn’t feel up to the measuring and sewing, especially by hand.
Days before the convention my commissioner said she couldn’t do it. She really, valiantly tried, but it was just beyond her. I hold no ill will and have not asked for my money back but the whole event soured me to cosplay. I prepared and prepped for this perhaps once in a lifetime photoshoot and to come up short. It still hurts, to this day.
Today there was a D.C. Cosplay Photo Shoots event in Leesburg, VA. I haven’t been to a photoshoot in years because I have no new cosplays to share but I really wanted to go to the Munchie Squad! I miss all my cosplay and photographer friends, like Rachael, and I go to Leesburg at least once every fortnight, so it would have been no big deal.
But I forgot.
I really miss cosplay. What will you see me as next?
I started writing web pages in 1993, months after Tim Burners-Lee published the first HTML specification. The first page I created was dedicated to my love of the Quiet Beatle, George Harrison, and the Roger Damon Price science fiction series, The Tomorrow People. The Tomorrow people was ITV‘s answer to the highly successful Doctor Who series on BBC.
When I created it, I was still at McGill University and so for a while it was hosted on the university web servers. When I left the school I was allowed to download the page and installed it on my work computer, then brought the code home, eventually letting it settle on my official web server.
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