Really Moving Out

If you look in a dictionary under the phrase moving out, this is the picture that should appear. The aircraft is the Bell X-2, which had the ill fortune of being just fast enough to fly itself inertial coupling at the bottom of the thermal barrier, killing Captain Mel Apt in the process. I believe the pilot in this picture to be Iven Kincheloe, the Air Force's golden boy and Original Astronaut, and what makes this picture for me are those gawdawful mach diamonds in the exhaust plume. We also note with a mild thrill that the XLR-25 main engine has been fitted with expansion nozzles.

That's moving out, when your two-chamber over-and-under XLR-25 is producing more mach diamonds than you can count. Yikes!

But there's another kind of moving out.

Today was payday (technically, the day after payday) and I decided to spend some time and money on iTunes. It was a good haul. One of the albums I bought was the "remastered" album Bridge of Sighs by Robin Trower. Normally the word "remastered" has about the same connotation for me as the word "colonoscopy", but in this case they either flat skipped the remastering or managed to keep the changes down to a bare minimum. It sounds like I remember it sounding, remastered or otherwise.

And now we get to the other sort of moving out. Holy crap Robin Trower can jam! I forgot just how fast he could be when the mood was upon him, and how tasteful he could be even when moving out. But he doesn't always move out. The song "Bridge of Sighs" itself is almost a dirge, and it's hard to describe "In This Place" as speedy. But then he smokes the paint right off his geetar with songs like "Little Bit of Sympathy" and "Too Rolling Stoned" and "The Fool and Me." Heavens.

I haven't listened to Trower in a serious way in at least a couple of decades - I didn't much like the album Victims of the Fury and sort of wrote him off. But as I come back this album after twenty years, I can only shake my head because if anything he seems to have gotten better with time. I wish I could say the same thing of myself.

What else did I buy?

Billy Joel, "We Didn't Start The Fire" and "Movin' Out"

Thin Lizzy, "The Cowboy Song"

Eddie Money, "Gimme Some Water"

Bruce Springsteen, most Born in the USA

Brujeria, "Marijuana"

The Vapors, "Turning Japanese"

Neil Young, "Old Man"

Alan Parsons Project, "Genesis Ch. 1 V. 32"

Shadows Fall, Threads of Life

Pink Floyd, "Comfortably Numb" and "Mother" (I figure I'll chip away at The Wall)

Authority Zero, "Mexican Radio"

Meredith Brooks, "Bitch"

And finally, At The Gates, Slaughter of the Soul (the expanded version, no less)

Well, that's not too bad. One death metal album (At The Gates), one metalcore album (Shadows Fall) and one piece of peculiar metal (Brujeria). The rest is actually normal, kinda sorta.