First page, writing prompt, whatever

On a blog that I read, a challenge was issued to write what's considered a forbidden scene in fiction: your character looking at themselves in the mirror and describing what they see.  Forbidden probably because it's an overused and amateurish device for describing your character.  

Here's what I wrote:

"Is it a mirror or a window? I used to wonder. Is a mirror just one of a billion tiny connections between this world and the next, where everything is almost exactly the same as this one, atom by atom and moment by moment? 

She'd look at me and wonder the same thing. We had lived every moment of our lives in parallel, in lock step. We had looked into each other's eyes a thousand times and known... known? Yes, known... that we were not the same person and yet no random act, no sudden movement, no lunge forward, fade back, sudden drop to the ground, punch at the glass or bizarre face could break the illusion that we were the same. 


I knew that one day we would be different, and she knew it too. I had tried to imagine what it would be, the clue that would prove it. A pimple on my cheek instead of my chin? A slightly different shade of red on my lips? A single hair falling across my eyes while my reflection's remained in place? 


But I had never imagined this."


I kind of like it, and I've been thinking about it since, imagining what the change could be.  Given that the mirror world can only be minutely different from this world, what could have happened that would have caused a change in the Other's appearance without deflecting them from the lockstep path they're on with the girl on this side?

Here's some things I imagine:

1. Someone shot at her - in this universe they missed, in the other universe, they grazed her cheek.  In both universes there was a scramble for cover, a search for the shooter, and fleeing to the safety of home.  No cops, no doctors.

2. Some kind of flesh eating disease, just starting.

3. A person in the room behind the Other.

4. A message on the mirror, but no Other.

Hm...

Weekend listening party

I went to my brother's place for dinner this weekend, and we spent most of the evening listening to records.  That's actually normal for an evening there, but in this case we were on some kind of record listening adventure, playing single sides and digging deep into the collection.  As a result, my daughter now has 3 new albums atop her must-have list of vinyl:

I was about 16 I think when I heard this the first time, and really loved it.  Back then I had it on cassette and I think I just listened to the first side and rewound it over and over again.  Listening to both sides, I was pleasantly surprised at how good the second side was.  Maybe "pleasant" is the wrong word to associate with MLWTTKK, but you know what I mean.

Ah, INXS.  I know every song on this album by heart. "Never Tear Us Apart."  So many tears shed, quietly, by myself.  SHUT UP!

There's a lot of familiar material on this album, even for people who've never listened to it - parts have shown up in movies, commercials, tv shows, etc.  This album is solid gold, and worth listening to in its entirety.  On vinyl, it's a double album.  We started with the second side of the first record, which kind of threw me for a loop.  Do you ever have that experience, being jarred out of the normal order of things and having to reorient?  Kind of like seeing someone you know from work when you're at the grocery store.

Rock stars solving problems

One of the interesting stories I uncovered during the writing to Gilly Frank was in regards to various tour difficulties Yes experienced in the early 1970s.  In one case, they had to cancel a show in Scotland because the van with their equipment broke down, and then the van that came to replace it also broke down, as did the third van.  In my mind, I can imagine this all playing out as an episode of some Spinal Tap style sit-com.

Actually, that would be an incredible sit-com, now that I think about it.  Just imagine:  It's 1971.  A rather eclectic prog rock group suddenly finds themselves rocketing to stardom.  The sit-com would follow their adventures.  Not like a mock-documentary, though.  I think that's over done, and would be too close to Spinal Tap.  No, just good storytelling, drawing on the rich heritage of rock history, with it's endless supply of bizarre antics and absurd situations.

Okay, so the other key event in Yes's history that I put into the book was that the first concert of their American tour in 1971 was cancelled because someone stole their sound equipment.  They had 9 shows scheduled for California for about a 10 day stretch, and the first show was cancelled because a bunch of their equipment was stolen.  That's a story that I love imagining - not the event itself, but the ripple effect from the event, the response from the band and the crew, the scramble to find replacement equipment, etc.

I think there's something interesting to explore with bands: when the persona that band members use on stage and in public is compromised by situations gone wrong, where responding as a rock star would respond doesn't do anything to solve the problem and only makes it worse.  On the other hand, responding in a practical way and getting things fixed might destroy your rock star mystique and diminish your image in the eyes of fans.

The Psychology of Song Selection Among Friends in Karaoke Environments

One of the musical topics of the day revolved around songs people sing at karaoke, and at open mic type events.  I imagine there's a psychology dissertation to be written around karaoke music selection.

Let's see... there's Positive Psychological and Interpersonal Effects of Karaoke, which was presented at the 12 Annual Conference on Music Perception and Cognition.  Sounds like a party.  But my ten second use of Google Scholar did not return results that suggested there's been a serious study of the psychology of song choice in karaoke situations compared to open mic night situations.

Here's my theory:  Most people who sing karaoke don't take karaoke very seriously.  But most people who sign up for an open mic night take open mic night seriously.  Most people who sing karaoke look at it as a way to have fun with friends, blow off steam, and belt out songs they love or hate.  People who do open mics are looking for approval from the audience.

So the result is people choose different songs for karaoke than they would if they were trying to impress people.

5 Songs I Would Karaoke If I Ever Got Around To Going Out To Karaoke:

Separate Ways (Worlds Apart) - Journey

The Final Countdown - Europe

You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman - Aretha Franklin

Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen

We Built This City - Starship

I also might choose any other song by Journey, plus most songs off the first Cars album, and Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'"

Cluster and the Cars

I've been listening to some early experimental electronic music from 1972 by Cluster.  The album is called "II," and is filled with cycling, rolling, loops of electric sound, wave upon wave, minute after minute.  While it's not the kind of thing I'd throw on a turntable at a party, it is the kind of thing I'd listen to and think about the kinds of sonic imagery that can be created with electronic devices in music.  I can imagine moments of this album serving as a springboard for more accessible works - it's the kind of thing that might inspire other musicians to push their boundaries a bit in this direction, and add pieces of this crazy landscape to their music.  Maybe.

Oddly enough, this makes me think of the first Cars album.  It's full of great power pop classics.  At the time, people used to joke with the band that they should have named their first album "The Cars Greatest Hits" because so many of the songs were huge hits.  What's cool about the album was that the band loved to experiment with new technology and equipment on their songs.  They'd find some new thing and just start fiddling with it, and add some new sounds to the song they were working on.  So no, they didn't make anything like Cluster, but they're a good example I think of a more mainstream band using experimentation in their work to push their own boundaries and expand the abilities of their fans to listen to new sounds.

Listen to the first moments of "Let The Good Times Roll."  Or the whole song of "I'm In Touch With Your World."  I love that song - so zany.  The guitar and drum are just a backdrop to an endless array of weird things they must have found lying around the recording studio.  That's what I imagine anyway.

Mellow Mellow Mellotron

One of the subtler throughlines of my novel Gilly Frank's Record Collection involves an early piece of musical equipment, a Mellotron.  Leading up to and during the writing of GFRC, I learned a lot about electronic music of the late 60s and early 70s, and it's been a lot of fun picking out the sound of different electronic instruments.  Before, my concept of a synthesizer was pretty basic - I thought it was an electric keyboard that could make other sounds, too.  Like one of those little Casio keyboards everyone had in the 80s, with four drum machine buttons and buttons for "Trumpet" and "Xylophone" or whatever.  That's not actually the case, and the more I learn, the more I really love these fascinating musical instruments and the impact they've had on modern music.

Anyway, have fun exploring old electronic prog - there's a wealth of rock music history just in the instruments.  Go over to wikipedia and read up on mellotrons, check out this list of the Top 10 Mellotron songs, and listen to a few tracks to pick out it's unique qualities.  Here's a couple of my favorites:

What are those opening notes in "Strawberry Fields Forever?"  A mellotron:

Here it is again, sounding very different, in "And You And I," by Yes.  It comes in at about 1:27, but there's another great use of it at around 4:25 or so.

Playwrighting: It keeps you up at night

This doesn't happen to me very often, but there are times when I'm writing where I am unable to sleep because I can't stop trying to figure out some piece of the puzzle I'm trying to solve.  A lot of writing is about solving puzzles, at least for me.  Here's this complex set of circumstances, characters, relationships, desires, places and things, and I want to find an elegant solution, something that accounts for the variables and provides a way forward.  It's a little like mathematics, only the goal is to solve each problem in a new way, and achieve a different outcome.

Anyway, last night I finally got to bed and I was staring at the ceiling thinking about the last moment of the full-length play I just finished writing.  It's a haunted house play, and I'm hoping to appeal to high school drama departments with it. Here's the funny thing about high school drama departments - they have the one thing that very few other theatres have, which is a large number of participants. Sure, there are thousands of actors who would like to be involved in larger, professional productions, but those theatres can't afford to produce plays with 20 actors in them.  Or even 12.  Or 8. Most of the time, the criteria for new plays to be considered by most theatres is 6 or fewer actors, with the emphasis on fewer.

For playwrights, this just means adjusting how and what you write to appeal to the market - so there are a lot more plays being written that have casts of 2, 3, or 4 people.

This doesn't work super well for high schools, which generally have anywhere between 15 and 50 kids who want to participate in some way in a production.  So large ensemble cast plays appeal greatly to them.  Older plays tend to have less of what we would call adult content, so those appeal as well.  

So my goal right now is to see if I can write great plays within these parameters:

• Ensemble cast with between 15 - 25 distinct parts
• More than half of the characters are female
• PG rated in terms of swearing, sex, and violence
• Most of the major characters are high school aged
• Not too serious

So I've just finished my first attempt:  "The Haunting of Blairmont House," which has 19 distinct characters.  There are 6 'main' characters - 4 girls and 2 guys that tell each other ghost stories about the Blairmont House and then decide to break in and spend the night.  The other 13 roles are members of a ghost chorus that plays various bit parts in the ghost stories, haunts the house, and as a chorus, makes low-level moaning sounds.

Once I get it into a little bit tidier format and order, I have a couple of people that I can send it to who are looking for high school plays for their schools, and see what they think.  Keeping my fingers crossed.

Covers, covered

Fun thought experiment:

Which songs would you like to hear covered by which bands/artists?

Examples:

"I'd love to hear The Damned - Shadow Of Love, covered by Michael Buble."

Or

"You know what would be great, dude?  Simon & Garfunkel - Sound of Silence, covered by Deafheaven."

It seems like a lot of bands will cover one song or another during a concert.  Sometimes, if I'm feeling like an idiot during whatever concert I'm at, I'll request "Hot For Teacher," as a kind of long-running joke that only I appreciate anymore.  It goes back to college, and a friend of mine who was a guitarist in a band called Kruster's Kronomid.  I tried to get him to play Hot For Teacher at almost every gig.  People do dumb things in college, don't you know?  Fun fact:  The drummer for Kruster's Kronomid was Jason McGerr of Death Cab For Cutie.

Some of my favorite covers that already exist include:

or this old favorite from my youthful explorations of punk:

And how could I forget this one, which is guaranteed to bring a tear to your eye unless you have no soul:

This one is... different:

 

3 more Prog album discoveries

Looking down the barrel of a long day of number crunching means plugging in the headphones and surfing youtube for prog albums I haven't heard yet.  I listened to Druid last week, and Eloy a couple weeks ago, and of course there's an endless supply of Yes to discover and rediscover, but the magic of youtube is the sidebar of suggestions that comes up.  Half of it is a bizarre hodgepodge of video suggestions based on the viewing habits of my kids, and the other half is music.  Here's what I discovered during my work day today:

Gryphon - Red Queen to Gryphon Three

There's 4 songs on this album, and the back of the cover shows a picture of each of the band members playing their instrument.  One of the guys - Brian Gulland - is playing a bassoon.  There's some great keyboard progressions in the songs, and some unexpected bassoon breakdowns that take the album down a road that makes me think of trippy cartoon soundtracks of the 70s.  That's not a bad thing.  These guys were exploring something.


Fruup - Future Legends

Whoa.  There's some serious jamming going on here.  Some screaming too.  Frantic moments interspersed with ethereal calm, followed by some more great jams.  I like these guys.

Nihonjin - Far Out

This is pretty sweet prog rock out of Japan from 1973.  I hear a lot of Pink Floyd's influence in here, but it's definitely got its own sound overall, drawing from some traditional Japanese music in places.

Earth + Wind + Fire = Awesome

I ran a 10K this morning.  I know, I know.  Not the best way to spend a morning.  I've been out of practice for a couple months, and it kind of snuck up on me, so it wasn't the most pleasant of fun runs for me.  But, I got through it and enjoyed some orange slices and free beer afterward.  Also, there were some live bands who played during the after-race festivities.  They were fine, but what caught my attention was the music being played between the acts - Earth, Wind and Fire.  So when I got home I very naturally went down the rabbit hole of disco funk and had a very pleasant journey.  I don't remember which EWF song was being played at the race now, but here's one of my favorites from the 'research' I did today:

Torche it

Work work work.

Lots and lots of work today.  No time to chat.

Listening to the new Torche album helps me stay focused.

Yelle makes music that makes Sam think

My daughter and I went to a concert last night at the Hawthorne Theatre in Portland: Yelle.  We saw her a few months ago, and decided after that show they we would see them any time they came to Portland.  Going to shows in the last year, I've added a layer to the way I engage a concert.  Writing a book in which a character is obsessed with music, and which may in the future involve live performances of music, I've started looking at shows through that lens.  How would my character view this experience?  Which people in the crowd would she pick out and think about?  How would she respond if the crowd did this, or if that happened during her show?

For example, there's this song that Yelle does called "Ba$$in" which as the title implies, has some bass in it.  The band is a female lead singer and two drummers, both men, who wear matching coveralls.  During "Ba$$in," both men came out from behind their drum sets to so some funky French dance moves involving rotating their hips with their backs to the crowd.  While they're rotating, Julie Budet is dancing around like a crazy person, alternating between hip shaking and a kind of exaggerating zombie-like stomping.

During this sequence, several members of the audience threw dollar bills on the stage, which I thought was peculiar. Was it supposed to be a compliment?  Was it ironic?  Being a rock star, she probably is greeted with many strange expressions of esteem from her fans, and I'm sure this wasn't terribly strange as far as all that goes.

But it got me thinking about my character Gilly Frank.  If she were in a band, how would she respond to something like that?  If she were in the crowd and someone she knew threw dollar bills at a female lead singer, what would that look like to her?

Here's a live version of "Ba$$in" from a different concert, but it gives you the general idea, I think:

What do you think of a band named "Druid"?

I listened to this album today.  Druid.  Toward The Sun. It was nice.  I mean, it sounded nice, and was great to have in the background.  There's some real great 'Prog Rock' moments periodically through the album, and it reminded me of some of my favorite old Yes tracks.  Long, rambling, striving, searching music.

But here's the thing: Their name is "Druid."  So I pretty much think about that Spinal Tap song about the druids the whole time, recalling the snafu with the 18 inch model of Stonehenge:

The Spinal Tap Stonehenge Scene

"No one ones who they were.  Or what they were doing."

Wizard of Oz Disco Trumpet Creepy Singing Weirdos

I've been debating whether to pick this up on vinyl.  It's for sale on ebay right now for a dollar, with four dollars shipping.  Sale ends in less than an hour.  What should I do?  What. Should. I. Do.

Here's the listing, in case you're interested.

A chorus of ghosts sounds like...

I was thinking about how to describe, in the stage directions for a play, the sound I would like the chorus of ghosts to make.

Here are some options:

"A Chorus of ghosts is heard...

1. Droning in a minor key
2. Chanting atonally
3. Droning atonally
4. Humming atonally in a minor key
5. Creating funerary harmonies
6. Creating an atonal but multi-layered harmony

"...sustained over a period of several minutes."

What's your vote?