Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Radio Karavansara


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Without a Blog: the Earphones Diaries

And so I’ve gone and invented me another thing, a game of sorts to keep my brain going and get away from writing and reading 24/7.
It will be called The Earphone Diaries, and it will live only on my social networks: my Facebook profile, my Instagram page, my Pinterest boards and my Twitter. Much as I love blogging, there will be no blog supporting this guerrilla project.

The Earphones Diaries will be a series of daily post, presenting a record I am currently listening to. I’m going at this without a plan, the course is once again uncharted: no genre tags or other hang-ups, just the music that’s currently playing in my earphones, presented in short, less-than-2000 characters posts.
Just for the fun of it.

The first post will go online in a few hours.


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Turntable: In Phil Marlowe’s Shoes

The first post in the Turntable series was so consistently ignored, one would be tempted to just close the lid of the record player and forget about the whole thing, but I actually like the idea of talking, here on my blog, of a different form of storytelling… and then I prepared a banner for the series!
I can’t use the banner just once, right?
I might as well do another post and see if something changes…

The old Ricordi music store in Via Roma/Piazza CLN, Turin, was on three floors – at ground floor they had pop and rock records, downstairs in the basement they had classic and opera, and upstairs they kept jazz and blues. If you happened to visit the store on a Saturday afternoon, you’d get crowded in the pop and rock section, but in the classic and jazz departments there would be precious little people, and air conditioning.

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Palace intrigue and zombies

I am not particularly fond of the zombie craze of these last few years. I watched the classics, I do enjoy the occasional recent movie, I even wrote a story set in a post-apocalyptic sorta-zombie story, a long time ago, as part of a shared universe a friend created, but I find it damn hard to do something new and cool and meaningful with zombies.
On the other hand, when I find someone that’s actually able to do something new and cool and meaningful, I like it a lot.

Case in point: Kingdom, a South Korean TV/Netflix TV series that pits its main characters against a horde of zombies in 15th century Korea.
And weirdly enough, it’s based on a true story.

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Turntable: Across America by Train

I sometimes mention music on this blog, but I never thought of doing a proper series of posts about music that somehow intersects my interests and the themes of this blog: travel and exploration, the Orient and the old pulps, fiction and writing.
Who knows, maybe someone would be interested…

It would be sort of an extension of my Radio Karavansara tag. I’d cover jazz and soundtracks, ethnic music from the Silk Road, and the occasional storyteller-turned-singer (or viceversa). I could call it Turntable, and the typical post in such a series would probably look like this…

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Kim Newman on Drachenfels

Curiously enough in the last two nights I suffered from a ferocious attack of insomnia, and so I grabbed the first book on my bedside table and started reading. The book is The Vampire Genevieve omnibus, by Kim Newman writing as Jack Yeovil, to me still the best RPG tie-in book aver, and a great example of horror/sword & sorcery crossover.
The first novel in the omnibus is, of course, Drachenfels.

And here is a lengthy interview with Kim Newman about the novel, and what he was intending to do when he wrote it – the influences, the twists and everything else.
Quite interesting.