Archive for the ‘music’ Category

Write-a-thon, Day 15: As prolific as I wanna be

Posted: July 7, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
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On Company Time 1

I wrote 700 words this week. That is, I kept 700 words. I wrote many more than that. “Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer,” Colette said. “But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.”

Good call, Colette, but I have to pick up the pace or I’ll be working on this book on my deathbed. It’s time to embrace the advice of William Stafford: “Lower your standards and keep on writing.” I’m going to try that this week, as I have something coming up that I will reveal either late Friday night or early Saturday morning. Let’s see if I can work myself into a sprint, or at least a forthright trot.

“Be bold, thrust forward, and have the courage to fail. After all, it’s only writing. Nobody is going to die for our mistakes or even lose their teeth.” (Garrison Keillor)

Sunday Bargain Basement Sunday
Today I stepped out of the sunshine to attend the worst estate sale since the invention of capitalism. It was held in what I guess was a former fraternity house, a three-level shitbox that was a mouse’s maze filled with mattresses, mattress boxes, and wooden bureaus. It looked like an alternate-universe version of Sleep Country USA where Spock wears a beard, Uhura wears a knife, and the furniture is covered with generations of condensation rings from red plastic party cups.

Cool jazz all week
No more music reviews for a while. I gotta concentrate, and not on Queens of the Stone Age, who didn’t do much for me today. I will say that I also listened to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Four Way Street. Some of those songs ascend to a higher plane. But there’s something to be said for Crosby, Stills & Nash, which was recorded before they knew they were superstars.

I wonder why only Neil Young was able to change with the times and remain in the forefront of rock? David, Stephen, and Graham, as talented as they are, haven’t moved a millimeter past 1971. Though maybe that’s why they remain beloved while Neil seems unpredictable and not embraceable.

Consumer alert: There’s a string quartet and a bluegrass tribute to Four Way Street.

Box score
– I’ve written 15 days out of 15
– 19.5 total hours
– Current word total: 20,300
– Here’s the Clarion West Write-a-thon
– Here’s my first post on the Write-a-thon
– My video has stalled at 148 views. Going viral is harder than it looks!

My sponsors (all hail):
– Karen G. Anderson
– Mitch Katz
– Laurel Sercombe

As always, thanks for following along, even though you won’t win a 20-volume set of the Encyclopedia International, a case of Turtle Wax, or a year’s supply of Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco Treat. You don’t even get a lousy copy of our home game!

 

Write-a-thon, Day 14: Almost cut my hair

Posted: July 6, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
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OK chief

I get a progress report each week on the current Clarion West workshop and this week’s instructor:

“It’s week two of the writing part of the Write-a-thon for 345 writers all over the world and week two of the six-week workshop for 18 writers in Seattle. This week, Neil Gaiman went flat out, energized the students, read them bedtime stories, and took them to the movies. We all hope he gets a nap soon.”

Movies? Bedtime stories? I don’t remember any of that at my Clarion! At my Clarion, the big event during week two was they finally gave us pencils and paper. Until then we had to open a vein and use our fingers to write on the wall.

Would you know we’re riding on the Marrakesh Express?
Oh did I get a great book on my birthday: Slow Train to Yesterday by Archie Robertson (1945). What I love about this book is not the stuff about trains but about the U.S. home front during World War II. After Pearl Harbor, gasoline was rationed, and people had to turn to trains for transportation. Because it was often impossible to get a ticket on the mainline passenger trains, which were packed with soldiers, civilians turned to the wheezy old short-line railroads.

Our view of the past is monolithic. Most of us would probably assume that everyone in 1942 was familiar with train travel. Not so – Robertson, in his travels, keeps finding fellow passengers who had never been on a train. They were only there because they couldn’t gas up their cars.

Robertson is not the greatest writer around, but he fires off the occasional le mot juste. He observes a dinky old locomotive, at the appointed hour, “shaking itself like a dog coming out of the rain” and rolling down the track. He describes a 30-mile rural railroad as “a backwoodsman’s train with less polish and more spit.”

Helplessly hoping
This afternoon I went back and fattened up some existing chapters. That was satisfying but it’s not pushing me forward. I sense I’m hesitating because I have a difficult scene coming at me. I’m stalling for time, but frankly, I don’t have that kind of time. I’ll try to floor it tomorrow.

Random Pick of the Day
Crosby, Stills & Nash, Crosby, Stills & Nash (1969)
In junior high I loved this album so much that I dressed every day like the effortlessly cool, laid-back boys on the cover. Listening to it now, I became impatient over the course of the first three tracks. In fact, I wanted to run those boys over with a cement mixer. But I fell in love again with the fourth track, “You Don’t Have to Cry,” and believe me, I am not the kind of listener who rolls over just because you sing like angels.

“Pre-Road Downs” is so good, it foreshadows Paul Simon’s solo career. By the time I got to “Wooden Ships” I was impressed by the melodic hard rock and suddenly understood a) why Jimi Hendrix had so much respect for this band, and b) the incredible musicianship on display here. “Long Time Gone” and the closer, “49 Bye-Byes,” sealed the deal for me.

It’s difficult to listen to famous albums you’ve heard a billion times and get anything new out of them. You have to peel back the layers of history and nostalgia and the discarded skins of your former self. Some of the songs in this lineup make me cringe – for example, the soporific “Lady of the Island” (“The brownness of your body in the fire glow/Except the places where the sun refused to go”). But this is, after all, an aural snapshot of its time. I wouldn’t want to read a transcript of my dialog from any day in junior high.

Crosby, Stills & Nash may be the first mature rock album. Whether that’s good or bad is beyond me.

Write-a-thon, Lucky Day 13: I still haven’t found what I’m writing for

Posted: July 5, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
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Nap nap 1

I started building models when I was a kid. At first I built cars and ships, but my sister, who was a tiny Megatron, would play with them and break them. I finally started building planes and spaceships because I could hang them from the ceiling. Some of them survive in my parents’ basement, forever suspended in mid-flight. My system worked!

After a few years of model-building and before I discovered the existence of that mysterious other gender, I tried mixing parts from different kits to make one model. It was fun to spread everything out on a table or on the floor and look for ways to rearrange the pieces. Actually, the fun was in the unexpected combinations, like adding the engines from the starship Enterprise to the wings of Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane. I also did some experimenting with Army tanks and Rat Fink hot rods before switching to aviation.

Today in Write-a-thon World, I spent a lot of time rearranging my notes and some episodes I’d already written. I was fired up by some unexpected combinations. This has always been a good way for me to break out of a stall.

Actually, I have found what I’m writing for
I’m writing about working for a living in a place where your comrades are competent and engaged and your leaders are inspiring. It’s a fantasy novel.

Today in Deborah World
Special D rescued a lost dog named Rudy. Rudy is safely home this evening after his unexpected dinner-time adventure.

Random Pick of the Day
Fred Neil, The Many Sides of Fred Neil (1998)
As always, I am indebted to my loyal readers (all three of ’em). Loyal Readers Laurel and Darwin have entered a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young phase. Their neighbors are either mystified, repelled, or rocking along with them.

Is it time for a re-evaluation? The stars are lining up! CSNY’s brand of folk-rock isn’t at the top of my list, but my readers have rarely steered me wrong, and I can’t deny the band’s signficance. Sure, it’s easy to laugh at these geriatrics. But everyone who stays around in rock for more than a generation becomes laughable. It goes with the territory. Rock is a young person’s game. (The same thing is true of idiot bloggers.)

I hesitated before plunging into the CSNY catalog. I love lots of those songs, but I wasn’t sure I could again face the sticky-sweet “Guinnevere,” or “Love the One You’re With,” which was ruined for me by the Ewoks who sing it at the end of Return of the Jedi, or “Marrakesh Express,” which should’ve been recorded by Muppets. How was I going to do this?

The way I do almost everything: by reading first. I almost immediately discovered something I didn’t know, rescued from the Citizen Kane-like warehouse of things I don’t know: the existence of folk-rocker Fred Neil (1936-2001). Stephen Stills cited him as a major influence. While I worked on my book today I listened to the 36 tracks on The Many Sides of Fred Neil, and wow, am I impressed. These songs, almost all of them from the ’60s, are almost all of them timeless. Add some instruments beyond Neil’s lone guitar and you could almost hear CSNY. On one song, “Look Over Yonder,”  an eight-minute jam in which Neil is essentially jamming with himself, you can hear the foundation of Neil Young’s “Down By the River”/“Cowgirl in the Sand.”

I’m not dissing other doomed male folksingers of the ’60s, but I like Fred Neil better than Tim Hardin, Tim Buckley, and Phil Ochs. And those are three interesting guys.

Neil’s biggest success was someone else’s: he wrote “Everybody’s Talkin’ ” (1966), the hit by Harry Nilsson from Midnight Cowboy. This afternoon, almost 50 years later, I finally heard the original. It’s raw, it’s powerful, I played it three times.

I’m ready for “Love the One You’re With.” As the Lone Ranger says to Tonto in their stupid new movie, “Let’s do this.”

Write-a-thon, Day 12: Writing on a thin line

Posted: July 4, 2013 in Miscellaneous, music, Writing
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The muse we really need

Today’s cartoon comes to us courtesy of noted Southern industrialist Jim Cobb. “Maybe you need this guy to help you finish your book,” Mr. Cobb says, and I can’t say I disagree. Duke Ellington once wrote, “I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline.” If I had a Muse like this one, or if I had a publisher waiting for a manuscript, I wouldn’t be struggling every day to turn out one good page. I wouldn’t be struggling at all, because I’d be terrified and the verb in the previous sentence would be “churn,” not “turn.”

Jim’s birthday was July 2, which is not a bad day for a birthday, though nowhere near as good as July 3.

I want a new drug
I had every intention of turning July 4 into a pretend-I’m-a-novelist day. I know that every novelist spends his or her working day (or night) differently, but here’s how I envisioned mine: Get up early, go for a brisk walk, eat a hearty breakfast, plow into my book for about four hours.

But it was my day off! And it was beautiful outside! The early part went out the window early, but we did manage the walk and the breakfast, along with a yard sale. I didn’t actually get going until 2. I eventually turned in 2.5 hours in the Write-a-thon.

If this is it
Just because you have a huge block of time ahead of you doesn’t mean you’ll use that huge block of time the way you’d originally planned. I’m accustomed to stealing time for my writing here and there. Like most writers, I do something else for a living, so my writing time is more hit-and-run than big productive blocks.

I wasn’t sure how to handle all those hours today. Writing is a muscle, and so is time management. You have to exercise them to keep them in shape. But by the time I got into the second hour I was getting my second wind. Overall, I’m happy with what I did today. I’m working a half-day tomorrow so I’ll try noveling for the other half. Get back in the zone, do some serious scaring, put up some big numbers.

You crack me up
Why am I using Huey Lewis & The Snooze songs for headlines? Because the Portland Mercury has produced one of the best bits of music journalism I’ve read this century. Granted, the bar in music journalism is set close to the floor, and taking Huey as your subject doesn’t help. But in “The Everyman Appeal of Huey Lewis,” Ned Lannamann and Ezra Ace Caraeff offer some real insight not just into that band but into the 1980s and pop music in general. If you like pop music, if you like Huey or like to laugh at Huey, you should read this.

 

Write-a-thon, Day 11: Happy birthday to you? Happy birthday to you? You call that a lyric? Happy birthday to you?

Posted: July 3, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
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Liverwurst 1

Despite the fact that I was entombed in an office in the middle of an industrial wasteland on a stunningly beautiful day, I had a great birthday. My one indulgence at work was french fries with lunch.

My sister called to remind me of several embarrassments that occurred at my third birthday. She wasn’t even there. Do I make fun of her for her various adolescent infatuations with substandard TV and singing stars of the 1970s? I do? Oh.

I spoke with my parents; for once they did not relive the night I was born. I reminded them that the hospital played the theme from Exodus in the delivery room, an old joke that always gets a laugh because I only use it on my birthday and they forget it from one year to the next. Dad was more interested in talking about his cat’s birthday. When my nephew Jared was born, I was replaced as The Prince, but when Dad got his cat last year, Jared became a non-person. At least I was replaced by a human.

Special D and I ate dinner at a neighborhood Greek place, then I opened my gifts in the back yard in the softly glowing twilight, and then we ate ice cream. This was what my strength coach called a “behavior day.” Tomorrow I get back to the business of training to become tall and thin and a successful novelist.

Somehow today I worked on my book and wrote what you’re reading: my 100th post since my first one in November 2010.

Today’s cartoon is one of the oldest writing cartoons I have. My girlfriend Judy gave it to me in 1979. Nobody knows where it came from. Tomorrow you’ll see another side of the Muse. Thanks as always for following along!

Random Pan of the Day
Hans Zimmer, Man of Steel (2013)
If you were as appalled as I was by Man of Steel (the only thing I liked in it was Kevin Costner), you’re probably wondering why I’m giving it any space at all. Zimmer’s score is dark, dreary, obvious, and unrelentingly thunderous. It’s Wagner’s Ring cycle compressed into a spin cycle. It sounds pretty much like the soundtracks of every other science fiction summer blockbuster of the past five years, and there are numerous places where the music could easily branch off into the darker moments of much better scores, including James Horner’s Glory (1989) and Randy Newman’s The Natural (1984).

However! The online version of the soundtrack includes a little number called “Man of Steel (Hans’ Original Sketchbook).” The running time is 28 minutes. This looks like a job for – Yes? No! I direct your attention to the 4-minute stretch that begins at about the 12-minute mark. This I like. To my ears, it’s the perfect musical theme to accompany Superman as he flies to the rescue. You can keep everything else.

The Jesus references in Man of Steel are hard to ignore. They were already present 35 years ago in Superman: The Movie. I see Superman as more of a Moses figure, but I may be biased here.

 

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