Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

Write-a-thon, Day 40: Time has come today

Posted: August 1, 2013 in music, Writing
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I’ve been noticing the passing of time more than I usually do. It’s been a crowded season with a lot of lessons.

Participating in the Write-a-thon while Clarion West runs in Seattle reminds me of the six weeks I spent at Clarion in 1986, when every day and night could turn into a write-a-thon. There are about 18 students in this year’s class, a cross-section of scribbling humanity. What are they feeling right now, besides exhaustion?

I just had a birthday. That always makes me stop and think (after I’ve opened my presents).

I just saw my sister’s kids. They’re in the early moves of their lives.

I just saw my parents. They’re playing out their endgame.

I just lost two of my aunts. They both lived into their 90s.

But the daily reminder of the passing of time is an absence. Our dog Teddy (aka Storm Small) died in June. The life he lived in that area we humans simply walk through, the first 12 inches above the floor, is empty. I think of this whenever I don’t walk into him or trip over him or look at him fondly as he takes yet another nap in a high-traffic area. Maybe I should grab a pillow and lie down there as an homage to this small dog who got us past the death of our senior dog, Emma, who helped us establish ourselves in Portland, and who was willing to bark at just about anything that walked through the front door.

I’ve had very few dreams that I could remember on awakening. Most of my dreams are about dinosaurs or cheerleaders. No, not in the same dream. A few of the dreams I do remember have been about dogs. A few nights ago, I dreamed about a summer morning in Seattle in 1993 or ’94. There was a park we used to take Emma to, on the ridge overlooking a beach called Golden Gardens. For lack of a better name, we called this park Upper Golden. There was a wide field and a forest with trails and great views of Puget Sound.

Golden Gardens
The view from Upper Golden on an old postcard mailed before WWI.

This dream was more like a recalled memory or a replay than a dream. There was no plot and no dialog, except for barking. There were several dozen owners and dogs there. I couldn’t remember any of the owners’ names, but I knew some of the dogs’ names. (People at dog parks call out dog names, not people names.)

A light brown lab named Mocha chased a stick with utter single-mindedness. Emma and some other small dogs chased Mocha. They did that all the time but they never caught her. Mocha never acknowledged their existence, in my dream or in the real world. There was a dalmation named Ruby whom Emma always tried to herd. She must’ve thought Ruby was a cow. There was an old corgi named Casey who belonged to a garrulous old guy. Casey looked like an overstuffed footstool and didn’t move much faster. Both Casey and the garrulous old guy had been hit by a train years before. I think they both had steel plates in their heads.

(A year before this morning I was dreaming of, when Emma was a puppy, she tried to take something from Casey. The ancient corgi lifted one lip slightly, uttered a short “Errr” as if he were the King of England, and Emma dropped to the ground, her ears flattened against her head.)

The dogs played. The people chatted. Someone brought out water bowls and the dogs had a drink. People and dogs left, other people and dogs arrived. That was probably the whole experience that summer morning. That was the whole dream.

Emma on TV
Emma was ready for her close-up the day King-5 TV came to Upper Golden.

The odd thing to me, given how vividly I recall that experience, is that all of those dogs who brought so much life to that grassy field are now gone. Long gone. Other generations of dogs play on that field, and the people from back then who haven’t moved away or moved on or moved to wherever it is the dogs go when they die, and new people who never met Ruby or Mocha or Casey or Emma, throw sticks and balls and frisbees and laugh at canine capers that have been going on since forever but always seem new when it’s your dog doing them.

Eventually we’ll get another dog and fill the first 12 inches above the floor and then we’ll be the new people at the park and we’ll restart this wonderful cycle. My dream was a gift, a painless trip back in time. I just wish I could’ve really gone back to 1993 and given myself a two-word message: “search engines.”

Lining up my next project
Thanks to my Seriously Loyal Readers (see comments to yesterday’s post), I now have the following list of bands with numbers in their names. I have the feeling some of these are spoofs, but with the Write-a-thon still on I don’t have time to check your work against Allmusic.com. Whether you’re conning me or not, this is going to be fun!

I’ve written about these:
One Direction
2 Live Crew
3 Doors Down
Three Dog Night
Bobby Fuller Four
Dave Clark Five

These are still to come:
Less Than Zero
.38 Special
Kenny Rogers and the First Edition
2 Tribes
Amon Duul II
U2
Boyz II Men
World War III
Classics IV
4 Non Blondes
The Four Horsemen
The Four Seasons
The Four Tops
MC5
The 5th Dimension
The Jackson 5
Maroon 5
Five Man Electrical Band
Five for Fighting
The Five Satins
Ben Folds Five
We Five
Q5
Six By Seven
Temperance Seven
7 Seconds
8-Ball
Nine Inch Nails
10cc
Ten Years After
East 17
Heaven 17
Matchbox Twenty
UB40
The B-52s
MX80
M83
The Old 97s
Haircut 100
101 Strings
blink-182
Galaxie 500
Area Code 615
1000 Homo DJs
1910 Fruitgum Company
10,000 Maniacs

If you can think of any more, let me know! I’ll be back tomorrow night for the Write-a-thon wrap-up, if I’m still conscious.

 

Write-a-thon, Day 39: Two days to go!

Posted: July 31, 2013 in Writing
Tags:
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After holding a job for the third consecutive day and continuing the Write-a-thon after I got home – I’ve got nothing. So I’m going to do something easy: Call for help!

Loyal Reader Verlierer got me started on reviewing bands with a number in their names. The following list comes mostly from Mr. V and Accused of Lurking. I only thought of a few. (How did I overlook U2??) My question for the rest of you: Can you think of any bands we’ve missed? Bands are named in ascending numerical order.

I’ve written about these:
One Direction
2 Live Crew
3 Doors Down
Three Dog Night
Bobby Fuller Four
Dave Clark Five

These are still to come:
.38 Special
Kenny Rogers and the First Edition
U2
Classics IV
4 Non Blondes
The Four Tops
The 5th Dimension
The Jackson 5
Maroon 5
Five Man Electrical Band
Five for Fighting
The Five Satins
Ben Folds Five
Heaven 17
Matchbox Twenty
UB40
The B-52s
MX80
M83
The Old 97s
Haircut 100
blink-182
1000 Homo DJs
1910 Fruitgum Company
10,000 Maniacs

Your assistance is appreciated as I stagger toward Friday and the end of the Write-a-thon!

 

Write-a-thon, Day 38: Go back, Jack, and do it again

Posted: July 30, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
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Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. (Colette)

When I was a pre-bar mitzvah sprout in Hebrew school, I was at the mercy of a teacher who came from the Old World with some old skool Old World characteristics, including teeth and fingernails yellow from chain-smoking and a tendency in any academic situation to fall back on his main teaching tool: violence.

I’m not going to tell you this man’s name, or the nickname we children gave him, or the songs we sang about him, because I don’t want his descendants to track me down and torture me the way he did. And anyway, maybe he behaved so badly because he had survived the Holocaust and journeyed to America and in his declining years ended up marooned in our declining, uninteresting city, teaching Hebrew to a bunch of youthful dumbshits. Whatever his motivations, when he called one of us up to the front of the class to recite and we couldn’t deliver, he always screamed, “Go back to your seat and study!!!”

This evening at the end of my Write-a-thon hour I wanted to send myself back to my seat to study. What I wrote was definitely not worth reciting at the front of a classroom or anywhere else. There’s a character I have yet to understand, and my subconscious writer brain refuses to let him walk through these pages as valiant, virtuous, and virtually flawless. Unlike my former Hebrew school teacher, who is long gone, I can figure out what makes this guy tick and why anyone should care.

Maybe that was my old teacher’s real problem. He cared too much.

The 10-year-old inside me just ducked and covered.

Random Pick of the Day
Three Dog Night, Cyan (1973)
Loyal Reader Accused of Lurking has pointed out my math error. Before I so blithely skipped to the Dave Clark Five, I should’ve stopped at Three Dog Night! I also skipped 4 Non Blondes. I’m rectifying the first error tonight.

I find Three Dog Night interesting because almost everything they sang was written by someone else. The original was practically unrecognizable after 3DN finished rearranging it. Look at their first record, Three Dog Night (1969). The composers on this disc include Tim Hardin, Stevie Winwood, Harry Nilsson, Lennon & McCartney, Randy Newman, Neil Young, and Johnnie “Guitar” Watson. Their second album, Suitable for Framing (also 1969), adds Laura Nyro, Dave Mason, Sam Cooke, and Elton John. I wish 3DN had lasted as far as 1980 because I would’ve loved to have heard what they did with songs by, for example, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Joan Armatrading, and Michael Jackson.

Other than the fact that I flee from any room where “Black & White” or “Joy to the World” is playing (the latter being the “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” song, which Hoyt Axton wrote to showcase the melody – the lyrics were a nonsensical placeholder), I’m OK with this band. They fit well on a road trip in-between the harder stuff. My favorite 3DN songs are “One” (Nilsson), “Eli’s Coming” (Nyro), “Easy to Be Hard” (the team that wrote Hair), and “Liar” (Russ Ballard). Except for “Easy to Be Hard,” these treatments are tougher than usual for them. They’re all from the first two albums.

Cyan (which includes the hit “Shambala”) is not 3DN’s best album (that would be their debut), but it’s their closest to the blue-eyed soul of Rare Earth. There’s also a gospel flavor to some of these tracks. (“Celebrate,” from Suitable for Framing, could easily have appeared on a Rare Earth album exactly as it is.)

For a few years back there in our rearview mirror, Three Dog Night was more powerful than the Van Allen radiation belt. According to Google, they ran up a string of 21 hit singles from 1969 through 1975. I’d rather revisit their music than that of their contemporaries Grand Funk Railroad, a band that rocks very hard for very little reason.

Write-a-thon, Day 37: More intense than ‘Pacific Rim’

Posted: July 29, 2013 in Writing
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There was a New Yorker cartoon right around the time we called up our first corgi from the minors. A puppy is writing a letter. “Dear Mom and Dad: My first day went really well. We went for a walk and I chased a rabbit and a ball. They think I’m cute, and now I’m guarding the house.”

That’s about how my first day on my new job went. I like the people, the work, the office culture, the building (views and stairs, my favorites), and the very walkable neighborhood. I went to two meetings and though they didn’t give me a rabbit or a ball to chase I still feel that I contributed to the overall effort. They think I’m useful, if not downright cute, and tomorrow I’m going to get up and do it again.

I just finished my Write-a-thon hour. It’s starting to feel like a book to me. Chapter 1 seems like it happened a long time ago. I keep getting ideas, messages from my subterranean self, even at the office. I scribble them down and work on them later. Sadly, listening to the Dave Clark Five today didn’t help. If ever there was a band that wanted to make people happy, it was the DCF. They had a string of hits in the ’60s and for about three weeks they were bigger than The Beatles, but time has not been kind to them. They’re not the kind of band I come back to.

Like Khan, I grow fatigued. This blog is going to go lie down. Good evening, and in case I don’t see ya, good morning, good afternoon, and good night!

Write-a-thon, Day 36: Not exactly a vision quest, but not bad

Posted: July 28, 2013 in Miscellaneous, Writing
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This is about as primeval as I get these days. At around 2pm we were sitting on a ridge in the Cascades under a clear blue dome of a sky, eating steak leftovers, cholla, apples, and a red pepper. We could see Mount Jefferson to the south, Hood looming above us on the west, and running across our northern horizon the flat-topped St. Helens, the ghostly Rainier, and Adams, which could easily play Rainier’s stunt double. And this gorgeous spot wasn’t even two miles from the trailhead!

Now it’s almost lights out. I’ve put in my Write-a-thon hour, packed my lunch, and lined up my music for the work week (the first 12 Dave Clark Five albums). I’ve been practicing phrases that might prove useful with my new co-workers:

“Oh, was that your lunch?”
“Stop spamming me.”
“I did not visit that site!”

Tomorrow morning, my first day, will no doubt begin with the usual sacred ceremonies: The Ritual Bestowal of the Temporary Passwords, the Pilgrimage to the Blessed Network Server, and the Holy Resetting of the Temporary Passwords. Then we get down to business. This is going to be a good week.

Wait! It’s the last week of the Write-a-thon!
This is going to be a good week with some crowded evenings. No music reviews this week. I gotta concentrate.

Mick Jagger just turned 70
This is freaking me out. In fact, I’m super-freaking. I distinctly remember in the spring of 1973, when I was in junior high, discussing Mick Jagger’s impending 30th birthday with a friend in the school library. I had just started reading Rolling Stone and one of their writers said that Jagger would no longer be relevant. I parroted this to my friend who scornfully asked, Why not?

I couldn’t answer him. This taught me not to parrot whatever I read in Rolling Stone or anywhere else, but that writer wasn’t far off. After Exile on Main Street (1972), things went downhill for the Stones (with one last hurrah in 1978 with Some Girls).

Happy birthday, Mick! You are seriously freaking me out.

Box score
– I’ve written 30 days out of 36
– 38 total hours
– Word count: 22,000. FWIW, I have a 5,000-word file of dialog, scenes, and notes on characters that will all (or mostly?) find their way into the book as I get to them.
– This was my first post on the Write-a-thon

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

 

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