July | 2013 | Run-DMSteve

Archive for July, 2013

Write-a-thon, Day 34: I got blisters on me fingers!

Posted: July 26, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
Tags: 3 Doors Down, Arthur Krystal, Bill Haley, Chapter After Chapter, Clarion West, Donald Rumsfeld, Elvis Presley, Gloria Jones, Heather Sellers, Johnny Darrell, The Leaves, The Troggs, Thomas Mann, You Heard It Here First!

“Let’s face it, some boys and girls become writers because the only workplace they’re willing to visit is the one inside their heads. And even then it’s a tough commute.” (Arthur Krystal)

“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” (Thomas Mann)

I don’t find writing difficult. I write all the time. Stories, blog posts, music reviews, love letters, flame mail, and whatever they throw at me at work. When I have work.

The difficulty for me is concentrating on something as large and as made-up as a novel. Heather Sellers, in her excellent how-to book Chapter After Chapter, reminds us that, in general, we humans lack experience in long-range projects. At our core we’re hunter/gatherers who are still concerned with today and how we’re going to get through it. Which is also how we often live our harried modern lives.

Ms. Sellers writes:

Writing a book is going to annoy the hell out of your brain. What you are asking it to do – to always move toward the unknown – goes against thousands of years of successful survival. But that’s how we evolve. We move toward the unknown.

Today in the Write-a-thon I spent 90 minutes moving toward the unknown in the window of my favorite coffee shop. Flannery O’Connor said, “I write to discover what I know,” and I discovered a little more tonight. I’d rather discover a lot rather than a little but I guess my brain is too annoyed to cooperate.

I’ll let former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have the final word on the known and the unknown:

There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.

Random Pick of the Day
Various Artists, You Heard It Here First! (2008)
What makes a hit record a hit? Talent, timing, personality? You Heard It Here First!, a collection of “26 classics from the 50s and 60s, heard here in their original, pre-hit versions,” leans toward talent, but it’s a close and interesting race.

For example, Elvis Presley had a hit with “Suspicious Minds,” but the musical arrangement is almost exactly the same as Mark James’ original. The only difference is Elvis Presley. Soft Cell had a hit with “Tainted Love,” but the original, by Gloria Jones, has all the menace Soft Cell was too soft to deliver. And The Troggs had a hit with “Wild Thing,” besting the original by The Wild Ones. If you’re going to call yourselves wild and make a song about being wild, you should at least try to sound like you’re wild.

Johnny Darrell’s “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” almost had me in tears. Kenny Rogers & The First Edition raked in the cash after applying their Purell hand sanitizer to it. And The Leaves, with the first “Hey Joe,” turn in a surprisingly strong and genuinely wild performance, even though it’s obvious after the first minute that the only thing they know how to do is play wicked fast.

Some songs I thought were ties – “Louie, Louie” is “Louie, Louie” no matter who plays it – and then there are the hit songs that I will always hate no matter who sings them: “My Boy Lollipop” and “Something Stupid” head that list.

The main things I learned from this disc are 1) The Raindrops (“Hanky Panky”) may have been the worst singers in the history of singing; and 2) Bill Haley took a nothing of a song called “Rock Around the Clock” (“Put some glad rags on and join me hon/we’re gonna have some fun when the clock strikes one” is the only halfway decent line), added some catchy musicianship and a delivery that made sex seem goofy, and got the first rock song to break the Top 40. And if you think an 87-word sentence like the one I just wrote is lengthy, the record, held by Victor Hugo, is 400+. Gonna write, gonna write, gonna write around the clock tonight.

Random Pan of the Day
3 Doors Down, The Better Life (2000)
They had a hit with “Kryptonite,” which is still a nice song, but they’re basically interchangeable with Candlebox, Nickelback, Creed, and most other hard rock/fake grunge acts of the 1990s. None of them are as good as Cream or even Stone Temple Pilots. The boys in 3DD try harder than most, but their limitations are cruelly exposed when they attempt a ballad and immediately enter Kansas and Styx country.

Write-a-thon, Day 33: Someone left a train out in the rain

Posted: July 25, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
Tags: Bananarama, Bob Dylan, David Byrne, Filth Pig, Fun Boy Three, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lay Lady Lay, Ministry, Robert Louis Stevenson, The B-52s

Robert Louis Stevenson drew a map of an island and was inspired to write Treasure Island. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about a Hobbit and from there drew a map of Middle-Earth. Many writers start writing after being captivated by a drawing or a photo. Others cut pictures out of magazines to help them visualize their characters or some aspect of their stories. Writing is surprisingly visual.

For my book, I bought 10 irregular sheets of poster board at an art supply store. The biggest is about 2’x3’. I took all the book covers, magazine photos, and old postcards I’d collected with a mountainous, railroady theme and spray-mounted them on these boards. I glued a balsa-wood frame to the back of each to keep them from warping, then hung them on the walls around my corner desk. This way I write while looking at the physical setting my characters are moving through.

I also drew a map of the where the action is, but my illustration skills are stuck in the sixth grade, when I struggled to draw a creditable starship Enterprise. (Still working on that one.) I keep redrawing the map for practice but I’m not getting better at it. I know the look I want and at some point I’m going to hire an actual artist to do it.

Meanwhile, it occurred to be that I could one-up Tolkien and RLS. (Boy, I never thought I’d get to say that.) I love building models. My book is full of trains. Why not build a model of something I’m writing about?

Nature is always trying to come indoors and take over. If you leave your car parked too long, nature will grow under it and eventually over it. Same with trains. Open-top cars left on a siding will eventually support enough wind-blown dirt and weeds to initiate agriculture. I’ve hiked past abandoned bridges that were turning into gardens way up in the middle of the air. Look at what happened to the High Line in New York:

I thought I was going to have one such bridge in my book, with an abandoned gondola astride it. So I made one. (This was also a way to sneak a garden railroad into my wife’s garden.) The wood came from an old dish drainer. The plants are a type of sedum that’s pretty much indestructible. It all lives outside; I’ll bring it in when winter comes.

I tried to sell these photos to Classic Toy Trains, but for some reason they weren’t enthused about showing their readers how to destroy their classic toy trains. They were very nice about it, though.

After further thought I decided to put this bridge in my second book. At least I’m thinking ahead. For my next construction project, I considered a half-size caboose replica, but I had some doubts I could secure trackage rights for the backyard. Maybe I’ll build that miniature Cape Cod lighthouse after all. It could double as a doghouse.

Today I went to the gym for the first time since the Write-a-thon started, so I’m feeling particularly virtuous this evening. My new mantra is short and intense workouts rather than lengthy and laid-back. Blood, not just contusions.

Random Pick of the Day
Ministry, Filth Pig (1995)
Sometime in the early 1980s I saw The B-52s at Kane Hall at the University of Washington. The opening act was a Seattle band called The Blackouts. It was an unlikely pairing, as The Blackouts were dark and noisy and The B-52s are light and zany. But it’s a rock-concert tradition to pair like with unlike. A tavern here in Portland just had Wicked Sin opening for The Punctuals. I didn’t go. I knew it was wrong.

The Blackouts eventually met a heavy-metal industrialist named Al Jourgensen and under his leadership formed Ministry and became even darker and noiser. Filth Pig is a good example. On this disc, Ministry did everything it could to clear the dance floor. The album name was thought up by a 16-year-old boy with bad skin and no hope of getting laid. The cover art is grotesque. The track listing is unreadable. Most of the songs are as listenable as a space shuttle in need of a new muffler. The singing is not so much singing as it is screaming at Orcs.

But! This album has their cover of “Lay, Lady, Lay” (track 9, since you’ll never decipher the info on the CD). The first time I heard it, I thought it was a joke. I listened a second time because I was looking forward to the laugh, but I didn’t laugh. I just listened. Now I’ve heard it many times and I think it’s beautiful. (Dylan does it again.) “Lay, Lady, Lay,” and tracks 1, 2, and 10 redeem Filth Pig for me.

Random Pan of the Day
Fun Boy Three, Waiting (1982)
The musical equivalent of the plastic garbage floating around in the Pacific Ocean. David Byrne produced this thing, after producing another inept record earlier in the year, The B-52s’ Mesopotamia. But 1982 also saw Talking Heads’ first live album, the excellent The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads. Strange year for David Byrne…The only FB3 song worth its weight in vinyl is one of their two collaborations with Bananarama, “Really Saying Something,” and in that one they let the girls sing the leads.

I know I said I wasn’t going to do anymore music reviewing while the Write-a-thon was on, but I can’t seem to rein myself in. So many bands to insult, so little time.

Write-a-thon, Day 32: My family and other animals

Posted: July 24, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
Tags: 2 Live Crew, As Nasty As They Wanna Be, Chelsea Handler, Clarion West, David Sedaris, Deodato, Dizzy Gillespie, Erma Bombeck, Phyllis Diller, Prelude, Tim Burton

I put an hour and a half of today into the Write-a-thon, though I had to use most of my lunch hour to do it. It was the most interesting part of my work day, that’s for sure!

“Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else’s dreams?” (Tim Burton)

I’ve been writing most of my life; at least since I was 12, when my sixth-grade English teacher gave us a writing assignment every Friday. I’d been reading like crazy, but I don’t remember trying to write anything before Mr. Gray made us do it. Some Fridays he had a topic and some Fridays he said the sky was the limit; the only rules were that you had to finish in a set period of time and then you had to read what you’d written in front of the class. That last part might’ve been voluntary.

Most of what I wrote was about my family. My sister, who was 4, was the frequent star, but my brother, parents, and grandparents all made an appearance. The stories often had a science-fictional bent, but I didn’t realize they were funny until the first time I read my work out loud. Turns out, my family is hilarious, and without being taught I somehow knew just which details to use and how to use them to get those laughs.

Of course, if my family was truly dysfunctional, I would’ve written Angela’s Ashes by now. Instead they’re merely aggravating.* This places me closer to Erma Bombeck and Phyllis Diller than to Chelsea Handler or David Sedaris. Or the guy I just read about who’s a recovering meth addict who’s written a novel about meth addicts and zombies fighting for world domination. But my family gave me my start, and though it’s taken me years to figure out what this start has meant, it’s the only one I’ve got.

“It took me my whole life to learn what not to play.” (Dizzy Gillespie)

* Certain parties who are married to me might offer a different perspective.

Random Pick of the Day
Deodato, Prelude (1972)
Brazillian child-prodigy keyboardist Eumir Deodato (why wasn’t I born with an awesome name like that?) can play just about anything he feels like playing. His jazz-fusion records are a mixed lot, though I’ll take his Top 40 hit “Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001)” over anything by Weather Report or Chick Corea.

Prelude shines when Deodato brings on his guitarist, John Tropea, a man who can play jazz and imitate Santana, Jimmy Page, and some funky Motown. They shortened “2001” sufficiently to fit on a 45 by removing Tropea’s 4-minute solo. “2001” will live forever; “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” and “September 13” are pretty good. The band’s cover of Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” is inferior to Frank Zappa’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Sexually Aroused Gas Mask.”

Random Pan of the Day
2 Live Crew, As Nasty As They Wanna Be (1989)
They want to have sex. Big deal. I want to have sex. I don’t think this is scary at all. (Shut up!) If this music was a latex toy, it’d be the one at the bottom of the bargain bin the day after Christmas.

Write-a-thon, Day 31: Faster than a bullet that has yet to leave the barrel

Posted: July 23, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
Tags: Bruce Springsteen, Clarion West, In Between, John Updike, One Direction, Paul Van Dyk, Up All Night

There are 11 days left to go in the Write-a-thon and though I wrote again today I have to admit that my original goal of hitting 50,000 words by August 2 was just a wee bit optimistic. I’ll be lucky if I get to 30,000. I do wish I wrote fiction faster, but I don’t. Marketing writing – that I can do fast. Advertising, editorials, web copy – I’m a speed merchant. These blog posts? Warp factor 6! But when I have to invent characters and situations and see how they play out, I move one. step. at. a. time. Sort of like the way the first primitive Mariners played baseball.

My hero, John Updike, wrote that “There’s a kind of tautness that you should feel within yourself no matter how slow or fast you’re spinning out the reel,” and though I gave up fishing in 1967 when my brother took three bass and all I hooked was a lousy starfish, I take heart from these words.

Right now there’s a kind of tautness in the back of my brain, or a bubbling. All day long, and often just before I wake, something back there is working on this book. Objects and actions bubble to the surface, things I can use on a page I’ve already written or one I have yet to write, like a bird finding the right-shaped stick for its nest. (We saw an osprey nest on Cape Cod that looked as if the occupants had built it out of firewood.) I’m mixing my metaphors here but I’ll trust that you get what I’m driving at. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Esteban esta caliente, but I do feel kinda warm.

Random Pick of the Day
Paul Van Dyk, In Between (2007)
In my house we have this divide over anything that isn’t rock ’n’ roll. Trance (or techno), for example, is not only not Special D’s thing, she classes it with The Thing, The Thing From Another World, The Thing with Two Heads, 10 Things I Hate About You, and Thing. Despite the constant scorn I live with, I like this stuff. The dance-floor anthem on this disc is “Far Away.”

Random Pan of the Day
One Direction, Up All Night (2011)
Boy bands sure have deteriorated since The Beatles. Today they’re all strip-mined from the same barren earth. Bruce Springsteen could use One Direction for dental floss.

I’m going to start Randoming bands with numbers in their names. We’ll see which one becomes the first to move from Pan to Pick.

Write-a-thon, Day 30: Do ya think I’m texty?

Posted: July 22, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
Tags: Clarion West, Live At Leeds, Octavia Butler, Parnassus Book Service, The Who, The Who Sings My Generation

The biggest challenge for me when returning to my regular life following a vacation that includes my family is food. I just spent a week ingesting 22,000 calories per day, including anything that swims and whatever comes out of an ice cream scoop. Basically, someone stepped on my foot, I opened my mouth, they shoveled food in. But today I ate streamlined meals that included a number of vegetables. What’s up with that?

I rallied despite these hardships. I impressed everyone at a job interview, including me; helped put our household back together; and spent another hour in the Write-a-thon, working my way through everything I scribbled last week. I remember this now. This is the easy part: Typing up my notes, editing as I go along, making changes in previous chapters that occurred to me on the plane. It’s as if someone else did all that work and all I have to do now is supervise. But I’ll finish with the last page of hand-written work in a day or two. Then it’s back to the blank page on the screen and just my imagination, which, hopefully, will run away with me.

Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice. (Octavia Butler)

Random Pick of the Day
The Who, The Who Sings My Generation (1965)
They certainly sang “My Generation” as well as “A Legal Matter,” but those might not be the best songs on their raucous debut – “The Good’s Gone” and “The Ox” are still rock at its finest (and messiest).

Random Pan of the Day
The Who, Live At Leeds (1970)
I love this album! If Led Zeppelin had tried this they would’ve gotten a concussion. But what I love is the original six-song release. Here’s what I’m panning: The 14-song version of 1995 (“The Big One”), the 33-song version of 2001 (“The Deluxe”), and the four-CD, 55-song version of 2010 (“The 40th Anniversary Collectors’ Edition That Makes The Big One Look Like a Weenie”), which includes 32 songs from a concert in Hull. No offense to anyone living in Hull, but as I understand it, that’s not Leeds.

The expanded editions give you about three days’ worth of new music, but also what feels like years of stage banter that’s almost indecipherable and adds nothing to the experience even when you can decipher it. Pete is out of breath from all that windmilling? Roger thinks something is funny? Was that Keith who just hacked up a hairball? Would you please just fucking play?

The producers picked out the best songs 40 years ago: “Young Man Blues,” “Substitute,” “Summertime Blues,” “Shakin’ All Over” (my favorite), “My Generation,” and “Magic Bus.” I don’t know about you, but they are all that I need.

This is the Cape Cod bookstore where I discovered Lord of the Rings in 1970. I was 15 and all I was trying to do was go for a walk to escape the chaos in our vacation cabin. You never know when or where books are going to strike.

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