Telecommuniculturey

Thank you, Mrs. Hopkins, wherever you are.

2011-11-06T14:17:00.002-06:00

I am grading papers. I will be grading papers. I look forward to the time, many moons from now, when I will be able to say that I was grading papers.

Some are good. Many are bad. Some have the goodness buried beneath really terrible writing. Those make me the saddest, for my sake and for theirs. For my sake because I have not learned the art of skating through and assigning a grade, so I often spend hours and hours trying to unearth the good and make comments that I hope will help the student let the good shine through. And I don't have that kind of time. For their sake because with the size of my intro classes getting bigger and bigger and bigger all the time, I just can't help them as much as I'd like to. Neither of us has that kind of time.

Grading always makes me think of Mrs. Hopkins, my Honors English teacher, Junior year, British Literature. She was fun. She was disorganized. She was zany. (As a class, we bought her a rubber chicken for Christmas, because she wanted one for her props box.) She loved the material and made us love it, too. But most of all, she taught us how to write.

I think my very first paper for her was on Hamlet. I got a B-- (yes, minus minus). I was shocked. I was appalled. I was disbelieving. I had always gotten As. Always. I soon learned that mine was the highest grade in the class. Fs abounded. Fs! Can you believe it?

And then she spent several class periods teaching us How to Write—the mechanics: "That" is for things, "Who" is for people. Punctuation generally goes inside quotation marks in American English. If you put a comma before "which" and the sentence sounds funny, you probably meant "that." She taught us how to outline (and better still, WHY to outline, rather than giving us a busy work assignment forcing us to do it): For every I, there must be at least a II. For every A, at least a B. For every 1, at least a 2, and so on. If any topic level doesn't have at least one partner, it's either not part of the fabric of the paper, or it should be organized with some other point under an existing topic level.

She taught us that there was real joy in bringing order out of the chaos of our own thoughts, of disparate sources, of scattered notes that we thought we'd never be able to make sense of. She made us work hard, she gave us the tools to work hard, and she showed us the rewards for hard work—elegant, persuasive writing.

She was awesome.

Love's Bitch, Poet Enough to Admit It: Tales of Hoffman, Opening Night @ Lyric Opera

2011-10-02T01:59:00.000-05:00

Opening night of the 2011 season. FINALLY. Especially as I was deprived of avant garde opera earlier this week.

I'm always well and truly ready for opening night by the time it rolls around, but especially so this year as it was a brand new (to me) production of an opera I know little about. My pre-show nerding out was somewhat disrupted by the fact that someone's coat and program were ON MY SEAT when I arrived early with the full intention of completely digesting the pompous program before curtain.

Unwilling to compound the problem by sitting in someone else's seat, I just sort of hung around in the lobby until I couldn't stand it anymore about 10 minutes before curtain. Of course when the owner of the things showed up, it turned out to be a very nice woman who had mistaken a 3 for a 1 because she didn't have her reading glasses, and then I felt like a jerk for being so huffy. (I wasn't huffy to her, I was just huffy on the inside, but I have an overdeveloped guilt-generating machine.)

In any case, I only just had time to skim the synopsis before the lights went to half. And stayed at half for, like, 10 minutes while people filtered in veeeerrryyy slowly and in chattily, which returned me to the brink of huffiness. (This is partly post-traumatic stress from a couple weeks ago when The Paramount Theatre production of My Fair Lady used the overture for old school purposes and people talked all the way through it. I admit that this is my baggage.)

But I need not have feared: Butts were in seats (or outside the doors) when the curtain rose on James Morris in his Ringmaster Ned get up in front of yet another curtain painted like oversized circus ads, featuring the "Mistress of the Writhing Monsters" front and center. It's not that Morris does not rock the tall boots as Lindorf, and it's not that I don't appreciate an Eve metaphor as much as the next gal, but this was the moment of the design that I didn't really "get." I loved the look and feel, but it's really out of step with everything else in a really tight, wonderful design, and even in a work that is pastiche within pastiche . . . I don't get it.

Of course, I hadn't SEEN the rest of the design at this point, so I was enjoying the old timey circus goodness and tall boots on their own merits, when a very terrible thing happened: James Morris sang . . . badly. It was downright creaky, no depth. Unpleasant. Now, as mentioned above, I am not terribly familiar with Tales of Hoffman. So, thought I, perhaps "Dans les rôles d'amoureux langoureux" is just an ugly piece not to my taste. Well, I've just watched my Welsh bass-baritone boyfriend, Bryn Terfel, sing it, and let's just say that's not the problem. I am very, very fond of James Morris, so this weirded me out a great deal. Fortunately, whatever was going on seemed confined to the opening scene.

The circus curtain rises on Luther's tavern and Ezio Frigerio's gorgeous, GORGEOUS set. It's framed by a metal skeleton that suggests a mammoth clock face just settling into the earth. At center stage, the top half of the "clock" forms a second proscenium, stained glass alternating with metallic ribs. The upstage wall is translucent wall of more delicately traced arches converging on a rose window. Beautiful. Plus! Barbie townhouse elevators at stage right and left.

These are all static elements of the set that are accentuated or downplayed as appropriate by Jason Brown's amazing lighting design. The tale-within-a-play-within-a-fable nature of the opera calls for a fluid, but easily understood, sense of time and space. Brown's lighting answers the call and keeps an already-long opera moving along.

The moveable pieces are equally wonderful. Luther's tavern is established with bright brass wagon-top still that buildings on Frigerio's steampunk cathedral aesthetic. Something inside one of the still's elements turns merrily all the while, suggesting both a calliope (hmm . . . am I going to have to rethink my position on the circus theme?) and Modern Times.

If I'm picking on the circus thing, I should probably wonder why there's a train in Spalanzani's living room. But the answer is obvious: There is a train in Spalanzani's living because (a) it's an awesomely cold, industrial thing that is still somehow rodent-like and (b) it sets off James Morris's superfly steampunk get up to its greatest advantage.

Train or no train Spalanzani doesn't know how good he has it, because dude, Crespel's living room is totally haunted. Haunted with incredibly creepy self-playing instruments (to say nothing of James Morris's steampunk pony cart—which, RUDE driving that into a man's living room, particularly after having [probably] killed his wife and [definitely] plotting to kill his daughter), his late wife, who may or may not be stuck inside a pipe organ (it might have been intended as a window, but the frosted vertical lines read pipe organ). Act III: Magnificently creepy gondolas, candelabras (nerve wracking in juxtaposition to a large chorus), and extremely well-managed fog.

Cannot say enough good things about the set design. Lovely to look at, excellent framing device (literally and metaphorically), and easy to block a large chorus on it.

I don't know who to credit with two other notable marvels: The design for Olympia, the automaton, and the ghostly instruments. The self-playing instruments only merit second mention in that their motion is simpler and more repetitive. But it's still really, REALLY freakin' cool.

But Olympia? Olympia glides—and I mean literally glides—hither and yon around the stage while every blessed cast member (or near enough) is on stage. Hell, she WALTZES with Hoffman at one point. She's clearly on some kind of rolling platform, but how it moves I have absolutely no idea. Stupdendous.

Of course the technically amazing movement is only part of what amazes about Olympia. Her make up and costume are wonderfully false and terrible (also, kudos to whomever affixed that wig!). And Anna Christy is quite simply amazing. Her physicality is the perfect mix of photo op princess and golem. And, of course, her voice is sublime.

In this production, Lyric deviates slightly from the usual (if there is any usual for an opera whose composer died long before orchestration was finished) in casting 4 different principals to play Hoffman's loves. I have no beef with this. As pompous essayist Roger Pines notes, "Olympia, Antonia, and Giulietta are radically different (how remarkable that any one singer has ever been able to take on all three in one evening)." Also, I got to see both Anna Christy and Erin Wall, as well as Alyson Cambridge for the first time.

Wall bears the burden of pathos with Antonia, and she bears it beautifully, both in her arias and singing with Matthew Polenzani. Dramatically, she plays the material—up to and including her death from vaguest villainy—for all its worth. As for Cambridge, I really enjoyed her voice (and isn't that Barcarolle delicious), but didn't get much of a sense of her dramatically.

Other than the split casting for the love interests, the rest of the production is fairly typical: Morris plays all four villains (deliciously); Rodell Rosel plays the servants (I didn't much care for the overly hammy Harpo Marx schtick as Cochenille in Act I, but I loved deaf, dumb, and Frantz); and Nicklausse is a trouser role. A trouser role played BRILLIANTLY by Emily Fons. Her comic timing is flawless, her voice is divine. I am so unendingly grateful that Lyric decided to insert her Act II aria, which is to die for.

Perhaps the best part of Fons' performance is her pairing with Matthew Polenzani, who plays Hoffman so very earnestly and without an iota of irony. He relies on her rendition of Nicklausse to play the perfectly over-the-top exasperation with him just so, rendering any self-awareness on his part completely unnecessary.

I love what this take on the role does for the ending, which could easily descend into pat-yet-awkward opera ending #532. The Muse of Poetry, also played by Fons (and I wish—oh, how I wish!—they'd dispensed with the awkward 11th hour costume change; it's FUNNIER if it's Nicklausse [or the muse, if you prefer] all along!), shows the folly inherent in the pursuit of love and urges him, instead, to dedicate himself to her. But what lends brilliance to Hoffman's tales—what makes him a poet—is his ability to fall in love, wholly and sincerely, every time. Polenzani's Hoffman is wrecked and ruined at the end, a slow, gratifying burn, but you wouldn't be surprised to find tomorrow to be another day, another declaration of undying love.

SUCH a satisfying opening night.

HOLD THE PHONE! I'm editing to add that I cannot believe I neglected to mention David Cangelosi and Christian Van Horn! Cangelosi is always amazing, but he's particularly satisfying as the mad scientist. Christian Van Horn is just right in how he plays both the comedy with Frantz and the fear and eventual heartbreak over Antonia. The trio in Act II with Morris, Polenzani, and Van Horn . . . I don't have words for it.

You are All My Children

2011-09-24T17:19:00.001-05:00

I was more or less born watching All My Children. I stopped watching regularly several years ago, although it's like the mob (wrong soap, but I also watch that one): You're never really out. I used to write the Tuesday AMC recaps for rec.arts.tv.soaps.abc (remember USENET? Then you are old, as am I). I'll be giving the show a send-off with friends I made on RATSA, some of my very first imaginary internet friends. I think I'll have more to say on the slow death of the genre when I'm slightly less over-committed than I am right now. But for now, here's what was happening in Pine Valley on 9/23/1997. WE HAVE AN OPENING FOR A MISTRESSSkye toodles around Weirdwynd hummingly and grabs a nostril-full of some garment of Ed's. He pops in and watches her. She spies him and he tells her not to stop as it happily reminds her of Maria. They discuss the kids in a very couple-like manner. Ed wants to pitch the shirt of her olfactory dreams because it's covered with paint. She urges him to save it. He agrees, saying it's another nice memory. Ed wants to take her out to dinner for all her help.She tries to plead work. Ed urges her, she accepts. They opt for Holidays over the Valley Inn. Ed calls Mary in to brief her. She asks if he's up to it and asks about his hand. He urges her to call if the kids wake up. She agrees. They bail, she picks up the phone and reaches out to the Count to deliver the bad news: Ed is better. Ed walks in and catches her in the act. I haven't seen him glower like that in ages. He rips the phone from her hand, but Dimp is so upset that he's broken the connection. Ed harangues Mary who claims Dimp was concerned for his health. Mary admits she told him about Sea City et al. Skye gets in on the act. Mary weeps and wails. Ed kicks her out, telling her she betrayed him and his wife and is out of there tonight. Skye and Ed discuss damage control. Ed is irate that Mary turned on Maria who was good to her when she was ill. Ed wonders who else Dimp has bought. Skye is astonished that loyalty means nothing to Dimp. Ed says Loyalty, love, trust and any other human emotion is just a word to Dimp. He'll stop at nothing to get what he wants. Skye comes in with an apron and a cookbook with flour all over her face. She's going to make dinner. Ed tries not to be giggle as Skye mulls over the cookbook. They look up how to fold and egg. Ed takes the book from her, and says he knows what she's up to and it won't work. Skye looks incredibly guilty. Ed says she can't distract him from the Dimp/Mary/ Maddie debacle. He appreciates it, and wants to repay her. He's letting her go. Skye is stricken and begs for her job at Tempo. He tells her to go forth, be fruitful and multiply. Skye grits her teeth and insists she's having fun. Ed doesn't want her her to give up her life for him. Skye refuses to let him go through the fight of his life alone. She tells him that armed forces won't remove her from Wildwind. Ed relents and is shocked to find that he just laughed. He feels like it's a sign: if he can laugh, he can win. Skye runs out to deal with the souffle. Ed and Skye are finishing the dinner. Ed refuses more. They joke about her cooking abilities. He asks about the tune she was humming. Sky reminisces about Althea getting ready to go out as she watched when she was a little girl. She had repressed the memory before tonight. The bell rings. Ed goes to answer. It's a cop serving Edmund papers to appear in court re: Maddy's custody. SHE HAS AN OPENING, SHE'S A PRINCESS Rewind to Laura interrupting Scott's slipping virginity. Gillian scolds her for not knocking and then for her guttersnipe language in explaining that she knows what's going on. All the blood has clearly abandoned Scott's brain as he defends Gillian from Laura who tells him she's oh so sorry that she thought sex should mean something. Gillian burbles something about it being fun. Laura seems primed to scratch her eyes out, but settles for calling trash trash regardless of which side of the tracks it's from. Scott lackidaisically berates her for such language. He yells at her for barging in. Laura suggests closing the door next time. Scott rather irrelevantly tells her that Gillian's performance is a command one and wonders why Laura is there. She claims Stu offered bad info and urges them to pick up where they left off. Gillian tells her it's not th th that seempew. Laura wonders how many men of different nationalities have fallen for the faux party girl act. Gillian wonders why Laura doesn't like games. Laura goes off on phonies. Gillian throws it back saying Laura lied to Scott for months. Scott doesnt like that either. Gillian urges Laura to admit she's jealous and hangs on Scott. Scott tells her to back off. Her voice leaps several octaves as she sneers that she didn't realize Scott was only interested in her mind. More unintelligible stuff and she flounces out after some advice to Laura about not starving? Laura apologizes and humbly admits she had no right to barge in on them. She says he has the right to bed whomever he wants. Scott is either the quintessential tease or suffering from Alzheimer's. In spite of the fact that he was playing down comforter to the princess in the bra, he claims he wouldn't do that when Stu might walk in. The long and the short of it is, it's none of Laura's business, he's a guy with needs and Gillian is a veritable Galaxy of Mailbox Fulfillments. Scott, with no trace of irony, is indignant that she should think him so cheap. Scott tells her again that sex was not the issue and can't believe she really thinks that's why they broke up. Scott says that Gillian's assets help him forget what he misses most: Laura. The Luuuv doctor has prescribed defunct royalty for what ails him. Laura doesn't trust him and therefore doesn't love him and that's the bottom line. He tells her to look him up if she decides to trust him. THE MAGICAL MELTDOWN TOUR At WRCW Liza looks on as Tad is in the throes of another successful interview with Jane and her magazine. Pitch pitch pitch, verbal spar verbal spar verbal spar and yes . . . ladies and germs . . . I do believe there's a ratty orange haze on the meadow. Brooke rushes the set and tells Tad that they have to tell the public together. She raves, she rambles, Tad tries to reason and Liza orders the crew to catch every minute of the breakdown. Liza directs the camera crew. Tad continues to try to talk her down. Jane Pratt comes over for no particular reason and reminds Brooke that they met the month before at the Women in Media (snicker) conference. Brooke alternates for a few moments between apologizing and continuing to rave at Tad. Jane slowly backs away and Tad asks her to reschedule. My heart about stops as Brooke utters the words that strike fear into the hearts of BABES around the world: I want to do it here. I wanna do it here for the cameras.She assures him that this could happen to anyone! (Don't you threaten me, woman) They tried to put her in jail for telling the truth. Tad, at long last, is the first person, including hospital personnel, to ask her for a blow by blow of the plane incident. She says she tried to warn innocent people. Tad tries to ask sensible questions and she barks that they don't want to deal with her (no one does, Brooke, no one does). She explains that she took a big scary flying thingy, but it was ok because Jim was with heranitwasokuntilthebigbadnoiseandthepressureandthethingand the oh Ladyyyeeeee.She makes weird hamster noises when she comes to the part about the flight attendant restraining her from opening the Emergency exit. She says Jim defended her, apparently having sublimated ths slap. Tad gently suggests a short sharp trip to hospital land. Brooke promises us all that she isn't going to go away and Tad has to help her. Jim creeps in on little cat feet. Tad tries to reassure Brooke that if the airline is hiding something it will come to light. He tells her it was natural for her to panic so soon after the crash. She screeches that the threat was real, not her panic. Tad tries to present the possibility that she'll never have a satisfactory answer. Brooke whines that Jim is the only one who understands, knows etc. Tad suggests that she talk to someone. Brooke spies Jim and gets positively banshee-like demanding that Jim explain things. Tad finally clues in that they're being taped and tells everyone to knock off. Liza slinks around taking notes as Tad demands Brooke go back to the hospital if the police are involved. Derrick shows up to escort her back to rubber land. Jim get sin his face . Liza looks pleased as punch. She watches the back of Brooke's head through a monitor. Jim tells Derrick this doesn't have to get ugly. Derrick suggests it already has. JT winds down and asks for a private word with his detectiveness. JT points out that this could be a double-edged PR nightmare. Derrick can't let her walk, but JT isn't suggesting that. He promises to take Brooke on a date down to HQ on the morrow. Derrick caves, but still tries to sound threatening as he promises an APB if she's a no show. Brooke throws looks of death at Brooke, then rolls over to have her belly-scratched as JT approaches. As they bail, she babbles about having won Tad over to their side. Liza smiles.She hands the tape off to a lackey instructing him to rush it to editing and suggesting that problems be addressed to her, not to Tad. He re-enters. She plays innocent when he asks after the tape. She flat out lies that it has probably been erased. Tad plays the baby card: is she gonna teach Coco to lie in utero? Liza says it was fascinating and he's too close to the issue. He begs her as a friend to give the tape up. She says she has sympathy but she can't back off every big name loony who throws herself in camera range for him. Tad begs again, for her to do it for him. Doing the right thing is more important than a 30 share. Liza says responsibility to audience out ways responsibility to the mother of his child and she will report the meltdown. Tad blames this coldness on Adam hurting her. Liza appears to consider this. Back at Casa Destiny Brooke tries to thank Jim. He assures her it's nothing. Brooke wants to make a list and check it twice. Jack tops the list of pressure folk. Jim rips the pen and paper from her hand. She whinges to him to back off. She turns on him, telling him he sold out and asking the dollar amount. He denies taking a dime (hmmm . . . didn't they discuss him taking a settlement earlier? Wasn't Brooke sure he could do no wrong?) Brooke says that the concern everyone is playing at is a smoke screen. JT tells her she's hiding behind her anger so she doesn't have to deal with the crash. He kneels in front of her and urges her to let what is inside of her out. I predict the CDC is all over his pornographing butt in minutes. Brooke stares at him, fiddles with her ear. Then her chin. Hauls herself to her feet and vows not to give into fear because it's what THEY want. She won't be trapped in the past. She will face each day head on, she squeaks. No body is the boss of her or her feelings. She trounces to the stairs, looks back over her shoulder at him, then heads up. JT looks put out.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 27, In Which I Write a Cheerful Song About a Dead Person

2011-08-17T15:38:00.002-05:00

Extraordinarily frustrating and messed up recording.

Argh.

This is one of those songs where I failed completely to capture any of the interesting things that were in my head. The rhythm is all wrong, the melody line wanders away from what it should be at multiple points, and boy did I screw up the B sections. I'm really disappointed in it.

This was the last assignment that I was in class to receive: Write a song with "summer" in it and write in one of the "bright" keys with sharps—E or B, capoing ok, because only crazy people write in B on the guitar.

When I missed class because I was sick, I had intended to go to a Sunday make-up class. My grandmother then died on Saturday and I felt like it was wise to go up to hang with the family on Sunday instead. On Monday, I beat my head against the wall trying to do the assignment that would be due on the coming Tuesday, which was a "Turn the Page" song in 3/4 or some variant thereof. Late in the head-beating-against-the-wall process, I thought about playing around with the summer assignment instead, and the line "Let's spend the summer in the big, yellow house" popped into my head. My grandmother was, of course, on my mind, and the house they lived in when I was a kid suggested itself. I spent a lot of time there as a kid, often with my cousin, who is the same age.

I threw my capo on the second fret and started playing around with chord shapes in the key of D. (Yes, a normal person probably would have just written it uncapoed in E. Have we met?) The melody of that line popped in and stayed there, and I could feel that there was a kind of sotto voce tail end to the line (what the heck do you call that, when there's lyric, but it's kind of filler . . . oh, hell, I am deeply stupid today. Anyway, in the first couple of A sections, it's "You and me.").

Why did the line "chasing helicopter daisies" suggest itself? I could not begin to tell you. I don't even really know what it means, although I'm pretty sure it refers to samaras, which are those helicopter seeds that maples produce. For a while, the line was "chasing helicopter daisies down the street," but then the song told me that, no, there wasn't that tail end to the second line, and furthermore there wasn't a hard AABB rhyme scheme, but rather some loose, suggestive assonance running through the lines instead.

The second half of the first A section ended up being about my grandmother's car—a pea green Nova, probably a 1971 or 1972. The vinyl interior was a busy houndstooth pattern that was always, always hot and had a crackly texture (at the time, both my grandparents smoked, which no doubt contributed). The back seat was always filled with bingo chips and coupons, which suggested some images for later. I fought with the phrasing of the second half of the verse, but it ended up thus:

[A] Let’s spend the [G] summer in the [D] big, yellow house, [D]
You and [A] me, chasing [G] helicopter [D] daisies [D]
[A] Let’s feel the [G] houndstooth burn the [D] backs of our [D] knees in the
[A] Back seat of the [G] car behind the [D] big, yellow [A] house

And this is where I started to ruin the song. Using the refrain at the beginning and ending of the A section doesn't work, particularly as the chord progression is the same throughout. I tried to tell myself that I could vary the melody and fix it, but no . . .

After I wrote this verse, I sat with it for probably 4 or 5 hours trying to write more. I tried coming at if from a stream-of-consciousness perspective, writing down images and memories associated with the house and that time of my life in my notebook. I tried crafting sentences in the same rhythmic template as "Let's spend the summer in the big, yellow house." I tried thinking of words that have the same rhythm as "helicopter," thinking that maybe that second line was the lynchpin of the A sections, given that it was an unusual choice. I had a melodramatic hissy fit during which I declared that I was obviously OBVIOUSLY never ever ever going to write another song EVER again.

Part of my trouble stemmed from the fact that the song was very much about my cousin and me staying over at our grandparents' house, but I'd introduced the back seat of a car in the first A section, which suggests clandestine nookie and maybe a romantic relationship. Those kinds of ideas kept creeping in, and I have "Let's live together" and things like that. In other words, I had a brain divided.

I'd brought my songwriting notebook on the morning of the funeral, because I didn't really know how the day was going to go, if I'd be in a position to go to class that night, and so on. In the car, it suddenly became clear to me that the second A section started with "Let's find adventure in the big, yellow house" and involved hiding in the pantry (neither my house nor my cousin's had anything as cool and exotic as a pantry, and we loved the one at Mimi & Papa's). Back-seat nookie be damned! Nothing says childhood like finding adventure! What I wrote down in my notebook as the second A section actually morphed into part A section, part B section, but I wouldn't know that until the following week, when I picked the song back up to work on.

Here's the second A section:

[A] Let’s find [G] adventure in the [D] big, yellow house, [D]
You and [A] me, secret [G] hideout in the [D] pantry [D]
[A] Cold cream [G] disguises, and [D] cloak-and-dagger [D] schemes on the
[A] Dirt-floor [G] in the basement of the [D] big, yellow [A] house

Did we ever disguise ourselves with cold cream? You bet we did! Mimi had a big old white glass tub of ponds on her dresser, and she was foolish enough to give up her bedroom to us when we stayed over. We totally caught hell for using all the cold cream once. I'm not sure that the basement, strictly speaking, had a dirt floor, but it was unfinished and dark and scary with unreliable old light-switches. We both loved sneaking down there and feared getting stuck.

B section! What the what? So, I had two long A sections with repetitive lyrics and repetitive chord structure. Just how many songwriting rules can I break at once? The B section . . . sort of has different chords. I completely fucked the B section up in the recording, because I was trying to follow a suggestion about removing this long, awkward pause at the end of the first line and I just screwed the pooch big time. I guess the B section is more free-form images:

[E] On the checkerboard floor, in the [D] claw-foot [A] tub, we’ll sail away [E] [D]
Down the [A] green stamp [A7] river to the [D] bingo-chip sea [A] to save the [E7] day

Being a big, old-fashioned frame house, it naturally had a big, claw-foot tub and black-and-white tiles in the bathroom. They might have been octagonal, rather than checkerboard, but another strong memory associated with Mimi was the fact that she would never, NEVER let you win at checkers. If you beat her, you beat her on your own merits. I had originally written the second line as "coupon river," in reference to the aforementioned back-seat coupons, but as S pointed out, that's a lousy, lousy word to sing. I think green stamp works because it evokes the same kind of thing. (Does anyone but me even remember what green stamps are?) I'm still murderizing the melody in the B section, and the timing problems I introduced in recording ain't helping.

I had hoped I'd be able to work the story about locking my uncle into his bedroom into the song. (Come on! It's an old house with brass keys in the locks. You're two 7-year-old girls. You're annoyed with the 17-year-old uncle who is not delighted to have you around. Tell me that you wouldn't try turning the key in the door to his room just once.) It didn't work out quite that way, but this A section got filled up with things we weren't supposed to do.

The attic was really just more bedrooms. I'm not exactly sure why weren't supposed to go up there. The screen door on the front of the house was heavy wood on an ancient spring. It shook the whole house when one left it to slam. At the back of the house, there was a weird arrangement of a kind of mudroom and then a very small bedroom, which was my grandfather's. They kept their "frigidaire" (as Mimi always, always called it) back there. Like the pantry, we just thought it was cool and would often set up shop there:

[A] Bet we’ll find [G] trouble [D] big, yellow house, [D]
You and [A] me, we’ll play it cool, [G] we’ll get off [D] easy [D]
[A] Ransack the [G] attic, slam the [D] front door, [D] use the back porch as our
[A] Technicolor [G] stage by the [D] big, yellow [A] house

I thought I was going to go right into a B section, then end on a tag, but as I was leaving the house, another A section cropped up:

[A] We’ll keep our [G] secrets in the [D] big, yellow house, [D]
Safe and [A] sound, locked up [G] tight with a [D] brass key [D]
[A] No one will [G] know, we’ll never [D] tell, they’ll [D] find out what we
[A] Whispered [G] in the dark in the [D] big, yellow [A] house

As for the second B section, I owe a debt to my cousin. She made a collage for the funeral that had pictures and images that she associated with the house and our sleepovers there: Bingo chips (natch), jell-o (didn't make the cut), and a transistor radio. I had forgotten that we were in the habit of sneaking the radio into bed at night and surreptitiously (I'm sure) listening to it.

[E] In our throw-pillow fort on the [A] front room floor, we’ll sing along [E]
To the [A] transistor popping, [D] crackling through our favorite [E7] song

So. You can't end on the B section, you know. So what the hell? How about a schmaltzy taggy thing:

[A] Make me a [G] promise in the [D] big yellow house, [D]
cross your [A] heart, never [G] grow up, never [D] change

I really did try to edit out some of the repetition and work on other suggestions that would have improved this, but nothing was willing to come together. At. All. I'm sorry, little song. You deserved better.

Re-Seduced: Minnesota Fringe Festival, Day 2.

2011-08-11T12:59:00.002-05:00

On Sunday, we once again rearranged dinner plans slightly to accommodate our theatre schedule. Also, Saturday was just a leeettle overindulgent on the food and booze front, so a later dinner was not a bad idea.

First up, Steampunk! Anyone who knows anything about me knows that a show called Robot Lincoln: The Revengeance (The Musical) is like crack tailored to my specific nerd receptors, so that was our first show on Saturday, back at the Thrust (STOLL!) stage at the Rarig Center. (See previous entry for bitching about the building, but liking the actual space.) As we waited in the traditional second of 2 lines, I tweeted gleefully about the warning sign outside the theatre (guns, strobe lights, adult language, and violence), and broke the rules about no photography (only realized that I was breaking a rule in retrospect; also I'm not sure taking a picture of my program counts as rule breaking, even though I was in the theatre) to capture the Best. Dramatis. Personae. Evar.

Sadly, the show itself was pretty disappointing. The "plot" was convoluted and there wasn't much in the way of fun dialogue. The performers were singing to taped music, which led to a lot of problems. (I feel like an utter shit mentioning that—my homeless, underfunded theatre group had to do the same with a production of Mother Courage and Her Children, and it was a nightmare.) On the plus side, the group seems to have paid a lot of attention to the design, and that paid off. Robot Lincoln's costume was terrific, and there were a number of other great visual touches.

The "love duet" between Booth and Robot Lincoln was everything I think the show could have been with more time and stability for the production. Jason Garton was terrific as Booth, and Libby Slater was hilarious as Mary Todd Lincoln (less so as "Uncle Samantha," but that character was a very sketchy).

From the Rarig Center we were off to the Gremlin Theatre in St. Paul for The Duties and Responsibilities of Being a Sidekick by The Barkada Theatre Project. Other than being a sucker for superhero stuff, we hadn't chosen this show for any particular reason, but I'm so glad we did. The show was really well written (an interesting, compact story—no mean feat with a maximum of 60 minutes), had great fight choreography, and the cast (featuring Randy Reyes, whom we'd loved in Brain Fighters on Saturday) was just great from top to bottom. Also, great pre-show and entr'acte music, even if they DID cut us off on the theme from The Greatest American Hero just when we were taking it to the bridge.

From the Gremlin back to Theatre Garage for Those Were the Days by Blue Umbrella Productions. TV themes arranged swing-choir style with a minimal, but well-done framing story? Yes please! Really great arrangements, great ensemble and solo work from the whole cast (I forgive the mishap with the Jem theme, though it is dear to my heart), fun choreography. I'm not sure I would have done the whole Eight is Enough theme, but it's not my show, now is it? Shutting up, sir.

And finally, back to the Thrust at the Rarig Center for The Smothers Brothers Grimm., by Comedy Suitcase. This was the show we'd rearranged our dinner plans for. It had some great highlights, especially the closing "silent film," but the whole show was uneven.

The framing premise involves Milton, a young boy (wonderful work by Andrew Moy) who has recently lost his comedy-obsessed grandfather, and whose parents are convinced that he is not dealing with the loss. The parents try to get him to sleep by telling fairy tales, but Milton insists on "punching them up like grandpa would." We get Hansel & Gretel as told by Laurel & Hardy. Our group was divided on this. I mostly liked it, but felt it went on a bit long (then again, it's Laurel & Hardy . . .). Next was Rapunzel a la I Love Lucy, which just felt awkward and as if there weren't a lot of there there. Bob Newhart responding to the 911 call from the Three Bears, suffered from not enough Bob Newharty goodness. Some of the interstitial stuff with the parents and lovable drunk uncle were really good, and some fell a bit flat. The epic silent Sleeping Beauty segment was epic.

I was hit really hard by the realization that my fun at Fringe was over. I'm still trying to talk myself off the ledge of crazy renewal of my involvement in theatre.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 26, In Which I Write a Happy Song About Eschewing Unhappiness

2011-08-10T16:02:00.001-05:00

Recording (I'm out of practice at everything. Be gentle.)

Behind again. Got a summer cold. (And I am a giant baby.) Then my grandmother died. (She was 94, lived independently until about 2 weeks before her death, and was fully with it until about 12 hours before the end—so, as ways to go go, not bad.)
This leaves me not just temporally behind, but 2 songs short for the session, striking fear into my heart.

The Kernel gave us a bunch of "-ing" phrases (e.g., "standing on the corner of bitter and fine">) to use in our lyrics, or we could make up our own "ing" phrase to use. For musical requirements, we were to establish a pattern of 2 or 3 chords, then move the same pattern up a step, a 3rd, or a 4th.

I got a "participant" trophy on this one. I misunderstood the instruction about the portable chord pattern. We were supposed to keep the same tonality, so if the pattern was major chords like C to F, then the moved chords should also be major (e.g., C to F, then D to G), so that the song would have an interval-based pattern, rather than being tied to a key. My song was all in 4ths, but the way I used them resulted in it being a boring old song in C. I also didn't use any of the provided phrases, nor did I really "get" that the "-ing" phrase was meant to be the hook.

It's been nearly a month since I wrote this, so it's challenging to recall how the lyrics came together. Looking at my notebook, I note that this started from a SUPER-EMO place with the image of an open door looking like a square of blackness on a very bright summer day. I was certainly working the -ing words, as I have dozens written down. I guess the phrase "wasting light" came early, and I've just remembered that initially the "hook" was going to be "wasting light on the likes of you."

Oh, yes. Now I remember.

So I mentioned during the dark days of Hall and Oates that I had unwelcome communication from someone and was toying with the freeing sensation of torching one's identity and escaping such things. That situation from the past has been on my mind (and showing up in my anxiety dreams). The responsibility for the unpleasantness that ensued (and apparently continues to ensue) is on someone else, but I wondered if I had handled things differently . . . well, you know the drill. Without telling a long, boring story that even I don't want to revisit: I was very unhappy for a while, something happened that reminded me that being happy is pretty cool, and I decided to stop being unhappy. That's how the story really goes, even if I thought it went differently in the past.

As soon as I started to revisit that sensation of suddenly remembering what it felt like not to be unhappy, though, the "on the likes of you" part seemed out of place in the song, but it kept trying to creep back in. That was interesting in and of itself, because the music that started to take shape was very light and tripping. Bright and lots of motion. And it started to feel like the song was like THIS < instead of like THIS >. That will make sense to no one except my classmates, but Paul Simon talks about the necessity of writing FROM a specific point in such a way that you have lots of possibilities for what can be included in the song, rather than progressively shutting down possibilities by trying to write TO a specific point. Including the line "on the likes of you" was personal, petty, closed off, and not that interesting.

The first verse:

Breathing in the dawning day (chords are [SHOCKER!] a split measure C-to-F vamp)
Tilting back my head to catch (full measure each of Em and Am with the chord change coming on the body part [See, that's I-to-IV, too, but minor and therefore missing the point of the assignment]).
The moment spilling brilliantly (return to the C-to-F vamp)
Everlasting resolution to (Dm to G vamp [I-to-iv vamp])
Stop (Ascending C to G in split meausures, so C, Dm, Em, F, G)

So, having patted myself on the back for writing to the possibility, rather than the specific point, let me admit that I got locked into several things. I became stubborn and insistent that the second line of the verse had to have a body part. Why? Who knows. If I wanted to justify it, I suppose I'd say that I wanted to convey the sense of being so completely out of practice at something that your body feels awkward and alien. Hmm . . . that actually makes some sense.

Verse 2:

Sounding out forgotten words
Lifting up my palms, to gather
Fleeting joys and passing fancies
Making good on good intentions to
Stop wasting light

So the second verse is very like the first, structurally. Body part in line 2 and every line beginning with a gerund, save the last, where the gerund "wasting" is drawn out over the ascending chord line. I never do that drawn-out vowel sound thing, though I like it in lots of the music I consume. For some reason it scares me. Anyway, I like it here. Profound? No. Pleasing? At least to me.

Verse 3:

Stumbling through what might have been
Falling to my knees, to thank
Yesterday for moving on
Singing out my resolution to
Stop wasting light

Ooh, I broke my own rules! No gerund starting line 3. What's this verse about? Gratitude to chance, I guess. Above, I said I decided to stop being unhappy. I suppose that's true, but I don't know that I would have (or if I would have, how long I would have remained mired in the unhappy situation) without the precipitating event, for which I can't claim a lot of credit.

Now. Nobody called me on this, but look! It's a bridge after 3 full verses, with only one verse after that! Any fool knows the bridge should come earlier in the song. I don't know. It felt like it should go here.

Drifting past such simple gladness (Am to D split-measure vamp)
Slipping into sorrow, passing through (Em to Bm split measure vamp)
At last (End on full measure of Am to full measure of F)

I did get caught on the bridge not sounding distinct enough from the verses, and that was a fair cop by my classmates. I tried to remedy that in the way I recorded it, but I think it still needs something more. Oh, I just also remembered that I distracted everyone from questioning the placement of the bridge by cleverly questioning its length. In the process, I made the Kernel feel bad for implying that bridges had to be a specific length. He's never implied any such thing, although he has noted that individual bridges I have written are too brief. I suck at bridges. (He has also never said that, just so we're clear.)

Final verse!

Wandering, I am wandering
Slipping off the path, to chase
Laughter tripping off my tongue
Pressing on, no hesitation, and I
Stop wasting light, I
Stop wasting light, I
Stop

Oh, right! I had another rule. That "-tion" word near the end of the 4th line. I'm a wreck of rules.

Re-Seduced: Minnesota Fringe Festival, Day 1

2011-08-08T18:55:00.003-05:00

So, I used to do theatre, right? And then, quite a while ago, I broke up with it. Mostly. I mean, sure, I have been doing reviews, but that's safe, right? I mean, it's not like I'd go crazy and see 7 plays in two days and then desperately miss doing theatre, right? RIGHT?

Insert insane cackle here.

So I went to Minneapolis for my bunny-faced friend's birthday, and this just so happens to coincide with the first weekend of the Minnesota Fringe Festival: 168 plays, each no more than 1 hour long, running in rotation at 18 different venues. Um . . . ok, when I write that out, I don't sound like someone committed to recovery and breaking with my codependent ways . . .

BUT NEVER YOU MIND THAT.

We were set up with a 10-show pass and 3 buttons initially, and on Saturday, we were headed to Intermedia Arts for I'm Making This Up as I Go on Saturday afternoon. It was not the most auspicious beginning. The crowd was small and the sets were . . . of uneven quality . . . however, the last comedian, Mike Lester, was bizarre and quite funny.

Next, we were off to the Minneapolis Theatre Garage for Vampire Lesbians of Sodom by Brazen Theatre. I'm pretty sure I saw this show in Chicago more than a dozen years ago, but couldn't remember much about it. Having refreshed my memory, that's not surprising—it's a funny concept with a lot of potential, but the show itself is a bit ho-hum. As for the production: Its wigs were truly magnificent and Mark Hooker/Margo Caprice was fantastic as one of the titular sinners. In fact, he was so fantastic, I nearly failed to suppress my fan-girl-itude when we saw him 112 Eatery later that night. (Fear not, my pathological introversion raced to the rescue once again, and he and his companion were left in peace.)

The highlight of Saturday was definitely Brain Fighters by Joking Envelope on the Thrust stage (aka STOLL!) at the Rarig Center on the U of M's campus. As you can see from the linked photo, this building was forged in the bowels of architectural hell.

When we arrived, there was a line out the door for securing tickets (the system for multi-show pass holders was to hand over the pass for the appropriate number of punches in exchange for tickets), and then we had to trudge through the belly of the beast to wait in a second line into the theater. With no real sense of how big the venue was, we were worried—so worried that we did not get ice cream from the ice cream truck, despite my having loudly yelled "ICE CREAM TRUCK!" upon seeing it. I had tweeted a couple of pictures of the lines and made public my fear of missing the show, but the lovely Sara Stevenson Scrimshaw responded to say that we should not fear, as the theater was large.

And it was! Despite the building being ugly and having nothing resembling a plan for flow of actual people, the space was great and the show was greater. It's a three-person, all-ages show written by Joseph Scrimshaw, whom you may remember from such awesome cruises as JoCoCruise Crazy. (Can someone please tell me why Joseph Scrimshaw is not superextradoublefudgey famous?)

The script was funny and wonderfully paced. The three actors (JS himself, Randy Reyes [whom we'd have the pleasure of seeing in another great show on Sunday], and Mo Perry) worked flawlessly together and nailed the physical requirements of the story (ok, that sounds weird unless you know the plot, which involves being able to turn yourself into anything you can convincingly imagine). Oh, just go see it if you possibly can.

We'd initially had a dinner reservation that would have conflicted with Brain Fighters, but we rearranged our schedule to support our local Sea Monkey. This left us with a 9:30 reservation at the aforementioned 112 Eatery (and I would like to note once again that I DID NOT fangirl all over anyone there) and time to kill in between. We'd intended to go to Moto-I on Friday night, but we were seduced by champagne cocktails, chocolate chip cookies, yoga pants, and Ike, who thinks he is a lap dog.

The downtime between theater and dinner on Saturday gave us, as a group, time for sake and snacks at Moto-I, and me, as an individual, time to contemplate breaking and entering so that I could pet Casper the Great Pyrenees, who IS SO FLUFFY! Really enjoyed the sake flight at Moto-I (Junmai Nama Genshu was the best!), and the many yummy snacks we had that are lost to the mists of the sake flight and the Ginger Mistress.

Fear not, puppy lovers, I did eventually get to cuddle Casper (who, as previously mentioned, IS SO FLUFFY!), however briefly, before we headed to 112.
A word about 112 itself before getting to the good parts: Loud loud loud loud loud. LOUD. I wish that it weren't so loud.

We shared a bottle of a Turley Old Vines Zinfandel and continued our communist ways all through the meal. We had truly amazing scallops with oyster mushrooms, frog legs that are very nearly as good as those at Brigtsen's (I do not say this lightly), the 112 steak tartare (which kind of buried the lede, if one assumes the steak is the lede—it was weirdly chicken salad–like, and we wished we'd gotten it "unprepared"), and fried Shishito peppers (we liked Moto-I's version better). For our mains, we shared the prociutto ahi tuna (amazing), the stringozzi w/ lamb sugo (amazing fresh pasta, but the lamb didn't shine through), and the nori encrusted sirloin w/ ponzu (good . . . not great, though).

For dessert, the butterscotch budino (I don't like butterscotch at all, but this was relatively tasty), the lemon cheesecake, and . . . ~~this is not good: I cannot for the life of me remember what I had. It was good. It was probably chocolate based. it is not on the menu they have up online.~~ Olive oil chocolate cake! (Thank you, bunny-faced one!)

Ok, this is already a bit long, so I'll do Day 2 later on.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 25, In Which I Crack Myself Up

2011-07-14T13:12:00.002-05:00

Two recordings.
Megaphone vocals. (Because I hear there's a man who'll pay you fifty dollars to sing into a can.)
Live performance vocals.
(Because some people prefer less silliness to more silliness.)

I'm not going to lie to you, Marge: I had fun writing this.

A few weeks ago, we had a discussion of "fun" in class. The Kernel, who may have been exaggerating for comedic effect, or may have been giving us a glimpse into the lives of quiet desperation that musicians lead, declared that there was too much pressure to have fun, that he couldn't remember the last time he'd had "fun," and that both songwriting and performing were hard work, rather than fun.

Although this treads on my desire for OTSFM to fulfill my workplace pr0n needs, I get the point*: Songwriting is scary, often frustrating, difficult, and sometimes satisfying, but "fun" isn't a word that usually springs to mind. I mean, it's "fun" for me in the same way that having my intellectual ass kicked for 4 years as a U of C undergrad was fun, but it's not . . . amusement park fun.

Except writing this song was TOTALLY fun. Pretty minimal requirements this week: Use a diminished chord and the song should include someone's name. Early in the week, I joked that the front runners for the subject of the song were "Lothian" and "James Victor, King of Croatia." A robust and hilarious comment thread ensued.

I then spent Thursday and Friday with the King himself.

I defy you to look at that face and not write a song about it.** In addition to the powerful cuteness field pulling me in that direction, I suddenly thought it would be really funny to write a talking blues from the point of view of a baby, particularly one whose face is so expressive, he constantly looks as though he's deeply frustrated by his inability to share his deep thoughts with the world.

From there, it was just a matter of setting down a rhythm and filling in details from my visit. I listened to a little bit of Woodie Guthrie and Townes Van Zandt to get a feel for how to do a talking blues. To be honest, though, it was pretty easy to get going.

The first verse was just about how waking up in the morning looks to a baby. On Friday, Jamie was inclined to sleep in a bit, but was woken up by the dogs of the household having a fight over food. My brother had come into the guest room probably 20 minutes before and waved me back into the bed as I started to get up, saying "I don't have the baby!" After the dog fight, he came in again to change him and said, sadly, "Now I have the baby." My brother is big and bald. I'm certain he loves having this pointed out in song form.

[C] Woke up of a morning, but it wasn’t the heat
[G] Dogs snappin’ and a-snarlin’ over something to eat
[F] With my big, bald daddy leanin’ over my crib
[G] Told him good mornin’ with my toothless . . . grin

The second verse is a bit of filler (other than a diaper change definitely being the first order of business each morning—Jamie is an Olympic peer, a detail I'm sure he'll be delighted to have memorialized in blog format), but I needed to go into the chorus in such a way that it reads like the message the baby is trying to communicate.

Wasn’t but a minute, I was clean and dry
And my giggle put a twinkle in my mama’s eye
She kissed me and she asked, “How’s mama’s little man?”
Took a deep breath and answered, . . . the only way a baby can

Up until the chorus, the chords are some what irrelevant, and C does as well as any key. It figures, then, that trying to hammer out the melody and chord progression in the chorus was a real pain in the ass.

I got the [C] blues, I got the [G] blues
I got the [F] baby blues, ‘cause [F#dim] I can’t sing the [G] blues
I got the [C] blues, I got the [Gdim] baby blues
I call ‘em [F] Jamie’s not-talking blues [C]

In particularly the melody over the second line was giving me fits, possibly because that's not really an F#dim in the second position, but a D7 with an F# in the bass. (I swear at some point, I tried it as a D7, but it didn't seem like it worked. Fortunately, my Check-Plus grade for the assignment was not jeopardized, because I had a back-up diminished chord, and the Gdim was the genuine article. (On a side note, Jamie likes when I play guitar and talk music theory to him. I kept playing diminished chords and singing, "There's a baby on the train tracks!" and he would giggle.)

Continuing in the "things that are only amusing to me" vein, I thought it was funny to turn his time spent on his play mat into a kind of business meeting. There is a big elephant dangling from the mat, which sometimes sits on his head, and let's face it, "pachyderm" might be an outdated taxonomic category, but it's a great word for lyrics. Moose, with its oooooo sound, ditto. And Monster needed to be included, not just because it was a gift from me. I'm sorry to malign monster's work ethic, but the rhythm of the words dictated that he be mentioned third, and "late" rhymes with "eight."

First meeting of the morning starts round about eight
With my pachyderm and moose, but my monster’s always late
I call things to order on the jungle mat
Monster reads the minutes in a minute . . . flat

Jamie is, generally, a happy little guy, but it's true that Tummy Time sends him into a rage—a highly illogical rage, given that he can flip from tummy to back and back to tummy more or less at will. Also, the threat about blowing this joint makes me laugh, both on its own merits and because it would involve tummy time, given that his mobility is limited to the army crawl at the moment. It's also funny, because when we speak in Jamie's voice, he sounds a lot like a Jim Henson's William Faulkner Baby.

New business, first item is the heinous crime
That mama and daddy call “tummy time”
Sure, I can roll over, but that ain’t the point
If they keep that up, I’m gonna blow this . . . joint

So we do nicknames in our family. Lots and lots of nicknames. Many of them terrible, inappropriate, and carried through life with no expiration date. (Example: One of my sisters had no hair until she was nearly 3. My uncles still call her "Moonie." Klassee with a k and two es, that's us.) Jamie has nicknames to suit his moods, most of which come out when he is pointedly NOT. TIRED. I'm pretty proud of having worked the most common into this verse. Herr Professor Big Eyes gave me some trouble until I realized that it had to be at the beginning of the line (despite its being a near rhyme for "tired"), and I hit on "real live wire" for a little bit of Talking Heads flavor.

Round about nine, James Victor rolls in
He’s the King of Croatia, he’s Anger Piggs
He’s Herr Professor Big Eyes, and a real live wire
With one thing to tell you all, he’s not . . . tired

And finally, I had to work in "baby ennui," which a concept I have long embraced. Let's face it, Dr. Spock, T. Berry Brazelton, and all those other LIARS tell you that babies always have a solvable problem when they're crying. SHENANIGANS. Sometimes babies feel suffocated by and bored with the sweet baby life: Baby Ennui.

No, he’s not tired, he don’t need to sleep
This is nothing but a case of baby ennui
That was an itch, he wasn’t rubbin’ his eyes
How many times can he tell you, he’s not . . .

I made an extremely rough recording of the song on my phone and sent it, along with the lyrics, to my brother and sister-in-law so that they got first listen. (It seemed only right.) Per good suggestions from E, my voice and guitar teacher, I'd like to work on how I play this, hopefully getting to the point where I can do a stumbling, irregular finger-picking pattern instead of the Carter-family strum which is boring (and I'm not very good at).

*No, not the kind of workplace porn that has coworkers having a doubly adulterous affair on your shared desk ('cause, been there. Neither fun nor porny): Workplace pr0n involves a workplace that one does not absolutely hate the thought of going to each and every day.
**That specific face happens to have resulted from me singing "Moo moo moo moo moo moo moose" (vocal exercise) and making his moose toy dance. He thought this was hilarious.

Thugnificient: Attack the Block

2011-07-13T23:36:00.001-05:00

Won some passes from Hollywood Chicago for an advanced screening of Attack the Block at Landmark Century Centre tonight.

And OMG OMG OMG! I am sooo glad we did.

This was released in the UK back in May. It'll have a limited US release starting July 29. (And since that slashfilm link already goes there, let me just say that Super 8, which was fine, is not fit to sift through Attack the Block's poo. In fact, I said to the ZK as we came out of the theater, "And THAT's how you do Goonies in 2011.")

I can't think of a single thing I didn't love about this movie. (Oh, wait. There's the dog. Hrumph.) The cast is wonderful. The script has exactly the right balance of humor, horror, character development, and a nice story arc. The pacing is excellent, and the exposition is flawless. A car that's destroyed in the first scene is later revealed to belong to a supporting character; a British flag visible in every exterior shot of the block . . . well, that would be telling.

The "block" in question is estate housing in South London (roughly equivalent to housing projects in the US). Moses is the leader of a group from the block that's just on the verge of graduating to gang. In fact, the movie opens with them mugging a young nurse (Sam, who is later revealed to also live in the block).

Baby's first mugging (later revealed to have been carefully planned by the group to minimize their chances of pissing themselves) is interrupted by a ball of fire from the sky, destroying the aforementioned car. When they go to investigate, Moses is attacked by something mysterious. He puffs himself up and vows to hunt it down. They do (in grisly, foley-tastic fashion) and drag their trophy back to the block, where they decide to hide it in Ron's weed room ("It's a room. And it's full of weed. And it's Ron's.") until they decide how best to make a profit from it.

At Ron's (beautifully, disgustingly played by Nick Frost in a deeply, deeply wrong leather jumpsuit), we meet High-Hatz, the local gang boss (or the Moses of Christmas Future, if you'd like to rock the Judeo-Christian-Dickensian canon). High-Hatz decides that it's time to accelerate Moses along his career path and hands off some product to him, specifying how much profit he expects. Moses is elated, terrified, and uncertain all at the same time, but doesn't neglect to swagger for his ecstatic followers.

Just then, though, they notice more and more great balls of fire streaking to earth. Although none of the "grown ups" believes them, they recognize the situation as a full-blown invasion. There's a lovely series of scenes of each member of the group turning back into the little boy he is as he gathers weapons and makes excuses to his family, pleads for 10 more minutes, or gets stuck taking the dog out. We pointedly do not see the inside of Moses's home until a very nicely done scene late in the movie. That scene is understated, but conveys a wealth of information about how Moses has gotten to the tipping point we see at the beginning of the movie.

I don't need to do a blow-by-blow plot synoosis, because I KNOW YOU ARE ALL GOING TO SEE THIS, but it just unfolds beautifully. Having seen what Moses is on the road to becoming in High-Hatz, we also see what he was or might have been in "Probs" and "Mayhem," the would-be gangstas with their cap pistols and supersoakers. And as the group gets into deeper and deeper shit along the way, we get to see how race, class, gender, circumstance, and yes, personal responsibility contribute to their highly localized apocalypse.

Ok, I know I ragged on Super 8 above, so that bears some comment. It's true, I lack some, but not all, critical J.J. Abrams receptors: Thought Cloverfield was a boring-ass piece of shit. You can see for yourself what I thought of Star Trek. On the other hand, I enjoyed many things about Lost, and I absolutely love Fringe (granted, I refer to it as the All-Denethor Comedy Power Hour). I liked Super 8 ok, or at least the first 2/3 of it. And I certainly was impressed that they'd assembled a cast of really solid young actors.

What. Ever. The cast of Attack the Block blows them away. John Boyega is just outstanding as Moses. Alex Esmail and Luke Treadaway are the pinnacle of comic relief as Little Stoner (Pest) and Big Stoner (Brewis). As Sam, the victim-turned-ally-turned-White-Street-Cred-With-The-Po-Po, Jodie Whittaker gets to be profane, bitchy, concerned, brave, selfish . . . . you know, a real human being. (Although it's worth noting that the movie probably passes the Bechdel-Wallace test, but only just, thanks to a conversation between Sam and a helpful neighbor just after she's mugged.) The female counterparts of Moses et al. also get to try their hand at saving themselves, saving the blokes, and leaving the blokes behind because their tired of the trouble they bring.

Love. Just lots of love for this movie. Might be the best horror movie I've seen since The Host.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 24, In Which The Narrator May Be Cutting Veins Of Indeterminate Origin

2011-07-13T12:23:00.001-05:00

Recording. This song is goofy, and the recording reflects that in playing with the vocals. Believe it or not I dialed back the drama.

A subideal week for songwriting.

The assignment itself sort of hamstrung me, because we were to explore our own "cheese line"—the highly individual point at which we roll our eyes, rather than being moved or wiping a tear away. This is not my strong suit to begin with, and worse, the Kernel suggested that a shortcut to the cheese line was writing about a pet. Given that (a) I had tears rolling down my face during the TRAILER of Marley and Me, (b) I wept through 9/10 of Children of Men because of a dog, and (c) I'm still wont to unexpectedly burst into tears after the recent loss of our foamy cat, this was dangerous, dangerous territory. I knew that there was no way I could write about a pet.

We were also out of town for the holiday weekend, so I was shorter on time than usual. Please ignore the fact that I have started writing the last several songs on Tuesday morning AND that I actually had a bit more time because I did not have a private lesson last week. Add in another stumbling block in the form of a false lead as soon as I started writing, and you have the recipe for a not-very-good song.

In addition to exploring the cheese line, we had to use root motion only in 4ths, 5ths, or steps (or half steps, as it turned out in class, but I had not interpreted the instructions in that way). I started writing from this requirement, which resulted in the false lead into a completely different type of song. I thought I'd saved that effort, which was something like 3 lines of what I was fairly sure was going to be a chorus, but I can't seem to find it. It was something along the lines of:

Darkness falls on strange, strange houses
Like (simile lost to the mists of time, but it had the word "beneath" in it and internal assonance)
Like the vein beneath the blade

Ouch, check out that last line. I'm not sure it's cheese, per se, but it's certainly melodrama. Naturally that shouldered its way into the song I actually wrote. Why? I like the way it sounds. I like the long as. I like going from the v to the bl. But it's a terrible line, and it rightly dogged me.

I had the chords for this chorus-y thing, and I kind of liked the melody and pace I'd set down. It took its time over "darkness" and "falls." I liked the repetition of "strange." But I Could. Not. find anything to finish out the chorus.

In desperation, I picked the guitar back up and started playing around with root motion. Suddenly I had an Em-Bm vamp and a verse just kind of spilled out.

You should’ve known better
You should’ve read the writing on the wall
You should’ve seen it coming from a
Mile away, now darkness falls

Lines 1 and 3 are a simple, split-measure Em-Bm vamp repeated twice. Line 2 is one split measure of Em Bm, then Am to Bm. Line 4 hangs out on Am for 2 full measures, then hits a split measure of G-D and back to the vamp. Initially, I'd had a full measure of D at the end of the verse. The Kernel advised going right back into the vamp. It's musically the right move (and that's what I recorded), but my brain and fingers have a hard time jumping back to that right away. I've since come to think of that D as the panic measure.

Content-wise, I feel like this kind of writing is such a cheat on the one hand, but on the other, I'm inclined not to be too hard on it. It's conceptually a blues form: Three different ways of saying the same thing, then some kind of "stinger" at the end. It shows up in all kinds of songs that I like, and Ba'al knows it's the stumped songwriter's friend. Also, in the case of this song, which shaped up immediately to be a revenge song, the repetition of the same idea feels conversationally real. It feels like an argument, like one of the all-time greatest scenes in cinema, right?

The last line of this verse gave me trouble. Initially, it was just "darkness falls" scavenged from the false start. It went through an awkward adolescent phase where it was "but you thought you had it all" (which ended up on the lyric sheet I printed out before racing out of the house to try to get to OTS early enough to vomit up a third verse), and I ended up singing "You were heading for a fall." More on why I ended up reverting to the original in a minute.

The second verse is more of the same technique and problems of the first:

What were you after back then?
What kind of fool did you take me for?
What kind games were you playing with
Me? I’m not playing any more

Many of these lines were harvested from a false start song from about a year and a half ago. Strangely, that song was intended to tell a funny story. Again, not really anything profound here. I kept swapping the "fool" line and the "games" line, trying to come up with an ending rhyme I didn't hate. I suppose what I ended up with is serviceable, but I kind of hate it.

By the end of the second verse, I was oh so tired of the vamping, so I needed a chorus, bridge, or ambiguous B section. Both the chords and words fought me pretty hard, and that shows.

[Am] I see the [D] lie beneath your [Em] smile (darkness falls) [Bm]
[Am] Like the | [Em] vein be- [D] neath | the [C] blade (darkness falls) [G]
[D]

I messed around with this six ways from Sunday. I left off the last measures of each line (the Bm and the G, respectively). I added them back in. I played them while singing "darkness falls." I played them with no lyric over them. I tried to rewrite the "vein" line so it didn't inappropriately imply that the narrator was suicidal. And finally, I was just sick of it, so I wrote the "darkness falls" in as echoes.

I left the house not knowing whether this was a bridge, a chorus, or something else, and hastily rewrote the end of the first verse so that I wasn't using "darkness falls" there. In class, the verdict was that I was trying to force "Darkness Falls" as the title, but that it came out of nowhere (because, let's face it, whatever this section is, it doesn't fit at all with the verses). Ending the first verse with it is a half-assed attempt to remedy that.

And oh the veins. The Kernel was on board with it, saying that he did not take it as the narrator being suicidal, but my classmates were not convinced. S commented that I satisfied the cheese requirement, because this was literally a "corte de las venas" (vein-cutting) song; L interpreted it as the narrator being so angry that she was going to kill herself—a sentiment that doesn't make any emotional sense to me, so I certainly didn't want to convey it. For now, it's just sitting there, making the song un-performable. I'm not sure it's a good enough song to spend time remedying the B section.

I hand wrote Verse 3 in the wings of the balcony at OTS. I think I squandered all my melodramatic simile power earlier in the day, because I kept coming out with incredibly literal lines like, "They will never find the body." What I ended up with is not exactly far advanced from that problematic literalism:

Nowhere you can hide now
Nowhere that's safe to rest your bones
No one will shed a single tear
For you. No one'll miss you when you're gone

I also had originally written "no place safe to rest your head," which too obviously wants "dead" for its rhyme. I suppose one solution to the B section is rewriting this verse to be less explicitly threatening to the person addressed, but the truth is, as little as I like this verse, I like it better than that B section.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 23, In Which I Do Not Write A Hall & Oates Song

2011-06-30T11:29:00.003-05:00

Audio proof that I do not need to adopt either a mullet or cheesy pr0n 'stache. Like Michael J. Nelson, I'm immune to hockey hair, as I had it from 1987 to 1990.

So, I did not know this song. Thus, it was somewhat unnerving when I passed out my lead sheets to the class and the Kernel declared "This is a Hall & Oates song." Before I realized that he just meant that my uninventive title was also the title of an H&O song, I stared in horror. Truthfully, I had worried that this sounded like Bon Jovi song, or worse, like "Every Rose Has Its Thorn." (That's right, I Hannah Montana-rolled you. If I have to live with awareness of that cover, so do you.) But never in my darkest moments, had I considered Hall & Oates.

But let's not dwell. The assignment this week was to tell a story in the course of the song and employ the line of fourths (i.e., to use root motion in fourths to spice up the chord progression and borrow from outside the key). I started tossing around story ideas in my head, as usual going first to a couple of stories that I want to tell and have tried and failed to tell before, just to get that out of the way. I then had the image of a woman pulling a wilted flower out of her hair and tossing it away, and the song suddenly became about escape.

Why that and why now? Hmmm . . . a couple of things. My niece recently went to prom. This is very strange, because I'm pretty sure she's, like, 3 or something. They're also letting her take SATs and AP classes. What's that about? Anyway, she really hadn't wanted to go, but a friend pressured her into going as a group of female friends. When I asked if she'd had fun, she said, "Not really. It's kind of a couples thing." I laughed and told her that having gone to three proms as part of a couple, it kind of always sucks. Bad music, bad food, in my case, thanks to single-sex Catholic schooling, the awkwardness of all the members of one sex or the other not knowing each other well. Lots of build-up and expense for inevitable disappointment, which is true of a number of those kinds of events.

The third of the proms I went to was the ONB's—he hadn't gone to his junior prom; I was so comprehensively done with high school and the first 18 years of my life that there was no way in hell I was going to my senior prom (ESPECIALLY after democracy was subverted and they would not let us have "Paint it Black" as the theme), and because people spew all that "Memories that last a lifetime, blah, you'll never be young again, blah" bullshit, he seemed to want to go to his. It was a disaster starting with the limo getting sideswiped on the way there. So. Proms are not fun.

But I was also thinking more broadly about extricating oneself more comprehensively. Not just from the messed romantic comedy low expectations that prom is the magically delicious best night of your life (Although I cannot stress enough: No, no it's not. If it is, you are seriously, seriously doing it wrong. (See Patton Oswalt on Arch Campbell, starting around 7:30 of this clip.), but from the life that's handed to you as a kid, as opposed to the life you make when you become an adult. Also, truth be told, the story started to be about setting fire to an identity in general, thanks to an extremely unwelcome blast from the past recently.

Moving on, though. Verse 1!

| [E] Late-night [Asus2] creases in a | | [B] borrowed [A] dress |
| [E] Careless satin [Asus2] shoes | | [D] cast a- | [A] side like |
| [E] White [Asus2] lies | | [E] [Asus2] |
| A [E] kiss to [Asus2] seal, her | | [B] past to [A] press between |
| [E] Pages, [Asus2] people, | | [Dsus4] places, and [G] times of her |
[C] Life

The content isn't especially profound: As it happens, I borrowed the dress I wore to the first prom I went to. It was fine as dresses go, my boyfriend's cousin loaned it to me, and the experience was not traumatic or terrible in any way, so it's sort of cheap, dishonest shorthand to include the "borrowed" here, but I didn't want to describe the dress in any kind of specific way, I needed the syllables, and it invites the listener to form their own assumptions about why the dress is borrowed—Is it because of money? Does it suggest the woman is not invested in the occasion?

Adding "late-night" before creases was, to me anyway, sort of interesting. Early on, I'd been thinking about this scene as the woman carefully undressing, so I had her smoothing the creases and lining up the shoes. I have a persistent problem when writing narrative that I become obsessed with minutely describing a person's actions. All I want to say is the person went out the front door, but I get hung up with every step along the way. It struck me that in a song, there is NO TIME, LEAVE THE BABY! I didn't want to waste time talking about meaningless actions, I wanted the images of the dress and the shoes to convey something about mood or character. I'd thought about "angry creases," "careworn," "lonely," and the terrible cop out "thousand." I don't know why "late night" occurred to me (I suppose the pressure to stay out all night whooping it up after prom might've suggested it), but I decided I liked it. Again, I feel like it suggests and invites, but doesn't direct.

The other thing that was sort of interesting about writing this verse was the addition of "like white lies" after the shoes. Frankly, I don't know what that line means, and I didn't know that I needed anything after "cast aside," but when I started trying to set chords to the verse, it suddenly seemed necessary to have a simile and a slight extension of that line. I had a bitch of a time coming up with the simile, though. I knew the phrase needed a long I sound, and I had thinkings like "dice," "time," "silence," "childhood" (UGH) . . . I like white lies well enough, even though it's sloppy and I don't know what it means.

The second half of the verse took the place of the image of the flower. I already had a dress and shoes. I didn't want to have to talk about the flower, so I took the image of pressing the flower and spun out a few things that I hope suggest a scrapbook or box of mementoes, implying that the woman is either trying to decide what to take with her or tossing out the whole lot or whatever.

Oh, I should talk about the magic of the line of fourths. The little E to Asus2 figure was certainly suggested by my practicing this for the showcase last Sunday. So that split measure started off the verse, and I initially went Bm to a resolved A major in the second half. I can only hope I was singing a slightly different melody over the Bm, because as it is now, that chord is surely a plain old B, which seems to put the song in E until we get to the D in the second line, but it's cool, baby, because that D is just from the line of fourths. But was the song line-of-fourthsy enough? No, it was not until the second half of the verse, when it all goes crazy! I absolutely would have just done exactly the same thing in the first and second half of the verse otherwise. I like this trick. I like ending on the C in the verse and then heading into the chorus on a D, and look! The chorus is actually in A, isn't it?

Chorus!

Now she’s | [D] standing on the [A] outskirts, |
| [Bm] Balanced on her [A] toes |
Half a [C#m] breath before the [E] dawn
A one-way | [D] ticket in her [A] fist, |
And a [Bm] Name that no one knows at [E] all,
And she’s [D] gone

My favorite line in the chorus is "Balanced on her toes." I don't think anything else about the chorus works without it, and I completely stole it from Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games: She describes Rue as standing "tilted up on her toes with her arms slightly extended to her sides, as if ready to take wing at the slightest sound." The idea of using the word "breath" came from problems rhyming "dress" in verse 1, and I admit I also kind of like "half a breath before the dawn." Liminality, man! Go, go gadget Victor Turner! I'm a lot less crazy about the rest of the chorus, but I became attached to the idea that she's not just leaving, she doesn't want anyone ever to find her.

Verse 2 gave me fits. I sort of had the idea that it was about her leaving behind a few things on the porch, propped inside the screen door. Again, this is the kind of thing that you just don't have time to spell out in a song, and I was trying to do that, so I suppose I deserved the fits. I didn't want to talk about a ring, nor did I even necessarily want the thing she leaves behind to BE a ring, so the velvet box got me out of that. Certainly it's most likely a ring, right, but for all YOU know it could be a human head. Or it could be filled with chocolate, ok?

I also got myself stuck on the idea of her leaving a letter or a note. First of all, cliché city. Second of all, as I went on writing the song, I became more and more convinced that she was not sad or uncertain about leaving, but celebratory, so a letter apologizing or explaining was not her style. The dress and shoes in verse 1, I know, suggest that she's running from a wedding (after it's already happened, presumably), and the velvet box and the word "vow" aren't helping there. Going back to the theme of prom, adolescence and the stupid things we think we'll be attached to FOREVER when we don't know any better . . . I guess I was thinking of it as a childhood sweetheart sort of thing and the woman realizing that children pick terrible partners for the rest of our lives. Don't put your childhood-self in charge of the adult you, friends! So the vow became threadbare, and the second part of the verse became celebratory in an impressionistic way. Probably I am the only one who is cheering this woman on at this point. What can I say? I wouldn't run away from my current life in a million years, but I should have run away from a lot of things a lot earlier. (I'm going to spare you the dark hours when the key "die[d] with the sunlight." VAMPIRE KEY!)

| [E] Velvet [Asus2] box and a | | [B7] threadbare [A] vow |
| [E] Memory and a [Asus2] spare key | | [D] she leaves be- [A] hind in the |
| [E] Mo- [Asus2] ment | | [E] [Asus2] |
| The [E] Screen door [Asus2] hisses, | | the [B7] front porch [A] sighs |
| [E] In the distance, [Asus2] promise, | | [Dsus4] tomorrow [G] bright on her |
[C] Shoulders

As usual, I was recording rough drafts along the way, so as not to lose the melody and timing. I knew that with 2 verses and 2 choruses, the song was just under 2 minutes, which is usually my "long enough" mark. But as is happening more and more lately, the song insisted it had a third verse at like 1:30. (I try to leave the house by 2 PM to avoid traffic or leave enough time to sit in it so I'm not late for my lesson.)

I thought that verse 3 would have her at least far away, but no, she was content to barely make it off the front porch. I actually wrote the second half of this verse first, but it became clear that the "nowhere, nothing, no one" part was better supported by the escalating line of 4ths. The lines in the first half are still clunky, and the "milkweed" seems clunky and inauthentic to me. I wanted the idea of dropping the picture (or note, or flower, or whatever the hell it was going to be) into a ditch. Ditch. Ditch. Not a singable word. Weeds gave the same impression of neglect, but was too vague. Milkweed's fine, I suppose. Turning her back on the pay phone was ridiculously hard to get into a line, and it's still not quite there, but inserting the idea of a familiar, childish touchstone (i.e., the swing set) helped a bit.

| [E] Drops a faded [Asus2] picture and her | | [B7] last [A] regret |
| In the [E] milkweed [Asus2] by the swing set, turns her | | [D] back [A] to the |
| [E] Pay [Asus2] phone | | [E] [Asus2] |
| [E] Dusty [Asus2] miles on an | | [B7] outbound [A] road |
| [E] To nowhere, to [Asus2] nothing, | | [Dsus4] to no one | [G] she’s ever |
[C] Known

And there you have it: First song of the new session.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 22, In Which I Catch Up And Completely Miss The Mark

2011-06-24T18:23:00.001-05:00

Recording of the last song of the previous session. I'm glad to be caught up and glad to be done with those songs, as I don't feel like I produced much of anything good.

But new leaf, yo!

The final assignment was to write a song in the style of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. You, like I was, might be saying "Who the frilly heck are Felice and Boudleaux Bryant?" So glad you asked, because they wrote every song that ever has been or ever will be written. (Also, check out Felice's sweet 70s threads.) Ok, not quite, but they DID write, "Wake Up, Little Susie," and a shit-ton of Everly Brothers songs, including "Love Hurts," which I will admit I did not know the Everly Brothers had recorded, because I am a Philistine.

They also wrote a song called, "Hey Joe," which could not be any less THAT "Hey, Joe" if it tried, for Carl Smith is no Jimi Hendrix, and Jimi Hendrix is no Carl Smith. My appetite for the absurd and silly made me latch on to "Hey, Joe," because the "jolly dolly"-type lyrics and obsessive-compulsive internal rhyming are right up my alley.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote "Boy meets girl, and there's blood everywhere" in my notebook. I'm not sure that I didn't steal it from a song we were talking about in class, or worse, from a classmate. I'm worried about that, but not so worried that I didn't use that line as the starting point for this song.

The line I started with got chopped up in the process, and I knew that the last line of the first verse was something along the lines of "a case of girl meets boy." The last word of the verse ended up being "boy," which needed to rhyme with line 2, and lines one and 3 ended up having internal rhymes, but not rhyming with one another.

Point-of-View seems to have been the problem of the session for me. I started out thinking that the narrator of the song was "the boy" in question—a man who'd gotten embroiled in a bad relationship. This gave me an incredibly shitty line "By the time I got there, there was blood everywhere." What the hell kind of line is that? You have the back-to-back theres and a sentence that is boring as all get out when spoken, let alone sung. Songwriting is about killing your children, though, so once I had killed off the other problematic character on the canvas, things started to shape up:

Just a [D] small-time stop on her [A] way to the top
She’s on a [A7] mission to search and destroy [D7]
Her look [D] is devil may care, but there’s [A] blood everywhere
Another [A7] classic case of girl meets [D-->Db] boy after boy after boy after boy

Ok, so the lyrics started to come together. The melody started out being boring, derivative, and altogether blah, and it never really improved. The best thing I can say is that I at least figured out (after beating my head against the wall in the OTSFM balcony wing and alerting the world to the fact that there are, apparently, foil lasagna pans in the ceiling there) that a D7 at the end of line 2 (rather than a plain old D), would at least make it sound slightly less like a rip off of Paul Thorn's fantastic "Great Day (To Whoop Somebody's Ass)"

After I had the first verse down, the other verses just became sort of wordplay challenges. And since no song by me is complete without Judeo-Christian allusions, I give you verse 2:

She goes from [D] town to town, she’s [A] makin’ the rounds
She’s the [A7] fire and they’re gonna get burned [D]
She’s a [D] Delilah, you see, she’s a [A] downright Eve
But [A7] Samson and Adam never learn

The only songwriting award I'm ever likely to win is for most religious content generated by a complete heathen. But in this case, it's only partly my fault! I know that I didn't want to go to the chorus until after the second verse, as the chorus is not particularly strong, and the verses are short. I wanted something about rules or learning to lead into it, so I figured the verse would end with "never learn." From there, well, I'm sorry: Can I help it that Delilah and Eve just happen to be two singable vixens whose beaux are not very smart?

Initially, I'd thought of ending the verses that led into the chorus with an Ab7->A7 slide, echoing the Db->D slide at the end of the first verse. It just ended up sounding stupid. The dramatic arpeggio sounds stupid, too, I know.

The chorus is still the weakest part of this, despite harmonic help from the Kernel. My original chord progression did not have the F#, went to F#m after the Bm, and just went from G to G7 before ending on the D. This is better, but the lyrics are bad; I already have a song called "Close Enough"; and that song sounds suspiciously like this one these days.

Look but [D] don’t touch [F#]
You see her [Bm] baby blues
Across a [Bm/A] crowded room
Don’t you [G] think that’s close enough [G#dim]?
Look but don’t touch [D]

Being lazy, I couldn't help but notice that I had used "learn," but not "rule." Sweet! I knew what verse 3 ended with. Remember how I said that songwriting is about killing your children? Sometimes we fail at that. And by "we," I mean "I." See, I had a whole Helen of Troy/Face that launched a thousand ships thing that i wanted to work in well after it was clear that it was not going to work at all. And still it made it in here.

She’s all [D] chantilly lace with a [A] dangerous face
Launched a [A7] thousand ships filled with fools [D]
Just a [D] cryin’ shame they keep on [A] playin’ her game
Keep gettin’ taken [A7], they keep breakin’ the rule

Once I got that atrocity down on paper, I thought I was all done. While I was literally in the act of putting on pants to leave the house, this damned song insisted on another verse. WTF, man?

She ain’t the [D] girl next door, she’s nothing [A] you’ve seen before
She’s a [A7] drive-by she’s a hit and run [D]
She ain’t [D] nobody’s gal, she’s a [A] femme fatale
A Mata Hari [A7->Ab7], she’s a smoking gun

There you have it. Eight weeks, 7 song equivalents. Here's to moving on to better things this session.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 21, In Which There Is A Questionable Bb And Dangerous Levels of Drama!

2011-06-23T15:39:00.001-05:00

Recording. (I know the drama is unforgivable. Please forgive me anyway.)

Given the choice between Doomsday and cocktails, you might expect me to choose the latter. I expect me to choose the latter. But Doomsday it was. This week's assignment was to write about our favorite Doomsday scenario.

Doomsday it, apparently, is.

Given that the song started to go in a Doomsday-y direction immediately, I at least thought I knew what I'd write about: Nostradamus, obviously. IMDB insists that The Man Who Saw Tomorrow came out in 1981, but my memory is equally insistent that I saw this several years earlier than this. In any case, it freaked me the fuck out and I resigned myself to not seeing the age of 14, thanks to the impending nuclear holocaust.

I jotted down a lot of detailed memories from watching this: how we watched on our cutting edge OnTv box, the nightgown I had at the time and the way that the elastic pulled at the skin on my wrists and neck, the detailed inventory of the dolls and stuffed animals that I would pile up over my heart when I went to bed at night—to prevent me from being stabbed to death by the maniac afflicted with ADD who was obviously going to climb in my bedroom window, but only try to stab me once— and the order of dearness to me in which they were piled. And, of course, my nightly prayers, which always ended with "and let the world never end and let no one ever die again."

I think that I have grown into a remarkably well-adjusted adult, if we're grading on a curve.

Anyway. Having gotten a bunch of that stuff down, I wrote in my notebook:

It is a single moment.
It was a million moments.

I guess that got me thinking about absenting thee from felicity awhile, yadda yadda, drawing one's breath in pain to tell my story and what have you. And I thought to myself, "Who cares? Who WOULD care, even if there were anyone to care?" And, you know, all that "whimper, not a bang" astronomical Sagan-y stuff.
Which naturally lends itself to metaphors about light traveling through great distances of space.

And then it turned into a Roger Whittaker song. Ok, my classmates say that it did not, but they are nice people and I'm pretty sure they're lying.

But let's see how this all actually came together into a melodramatic mess.

[Em] When the light arrives
[D] Light of a [Am] single moment
[D] Shadow of a [Am] million moments
[Em] Trapped in the [D] teeth of [Em] time
Rhyme and [Bm] reason [D] died on the [Em] doorstep

Most of that's pretty straightforward from the stream of consciousness outlined above. "Trapped in the teeth of time" took a while to get. I ended up feeling like that fourth line needed to at least quasi-rhyme with line 1, and I stuck myself with "time." The metaphor is ZOMG melodramatic, but I wanted some hard, closed consonants after all the sibilance and mmm sounds. I also don't like the use of the phrase "rhyme and reason," but I did want something that would convey the idea that whatever "reasoning" led us to finally blowing ourselves completely apart would be lost before the initial pulse of light had even finished.

Verse 2 continued on in a similar, "Seriously, chuckleheads, no. one. will care." No one will care what outraged you, there will be nothing there to sympathize with your fear. Nada. Yeah, that's a recipe for more DRAMA!

[Em] When the light arrives
[D] Who will taste the [Am] steel of malice
[D] Press the fear from [Am] every atom
[Em] Snatch the future [D] from [Em] the sky
Speak the [Bm] final [D] lines of the [Em] fable

Oh, a note on the chord progression and how it's executed. It all started with the pinch-fingerpick on the Em. Initially, I carried that throughout the whole song. In my lesson, E quite rightly pointed out the wrongheadedness of this. Given that there's a whole bunch of split measures running into one another in the verse, and that my fingerpicking is erratic and unreliable, this left almost no harmonic support underneath the melody (which was obvious as I kept losing the damned melody).

She suggested using it as an intro and then strategically in the course of the song. Despite my distaste for this song, it's probably one that I'll play at the showcase on Sunday (which says more about the crap I've churned out this session than anything positive about the song), and when we worked on it again this Tuesday, we'd decided on carrying the strum through the verses and returning to the fingerpicking before the chorus-B-section-whatever-the-hell-that-is. Not sure that's the right call, but that's the way I recorded it for the moment.

Speaking of the odious B section. The Em-driven verses felt overbearing after 2, so I originally wrote a new section that more or less replaced each chord in the verse with its relative major (if it was minor in the verse) or relative minor (if it was major in the verse). Super. Duper. Roger. Whittaker. Naturally, this became a chorus by consensus and to spite me. Here it is as originally written:

[G] When the light [D] arrives
[C] Keen and cold and [D] silent
Not a [Em] breath to [Bm] bear the [Em] cries
[G] When the light [D] arrives
[C] Passionless and [D] violent
From the [Em] void to [Bm] paint the [Em] night

The ever-wise Kernel commanded "When in doubt, reharmonize!"

So what I recorded was:

[G] When the light [Bb] arrives
[Am] Keen and cold and [Bm] silent
Not a [Em] breath to [D] bear the [Em] cries
[G] When the light [B] arrives
[Am] Passionless and [Bm] violent
From the [Em] void to [D] paint the [Em] night

That Bb sounds incredibly strange to me. In fact, it sounds so strange that I meant to ask the Kernel if I had possibly written it down wrong twice. Of course, I forgot to do that Tuesday, so the weird Bb is immortalized.

Content-wise, I think it's clear that whatever Brenda says, it is irresponsible of me not to keep the drama and emotion shackled. The only line I'll even make an argument for is "Not a breath to bear the cries." 'Cause there ain't no air in space.

Several times this session, my brain has tricked me into writing songs that are too long. I wrote what became the fourth verse and then all of a sudden the old brain was like, "Oh, you know what? There's a another verse before this one." What the hell, brain?

[Em] When the light arrives
[D] Casting off the [Am] mighty and
[D] Meek and every [Am] story of the
[Em] Foolish [D] of the wicked [Em] of the wise
None of [Bm] these will [D] rise from the [Em] ashes

[Em] When the light arrives
[D] Sleek and fleeting, [Am] rarefied
[D] Stone faced and [Am] hollow eyed
[Em] Callous as the [D] rising [Em] tide
As the [Bm] sinless [D] mind of the [Em] ages

In retrospect, I guess I get what the brain was getting at. The last verse is the "In summary, morons, no one gives a ballistic fuck about your issues. Congratulations on killing 7 billion people and ruining a perfectly nice planet" verse. But before that the song wanted a "I'm looking at YOU" verse, in the spirit of "And finally, Christians? Christians? Yes, I'm sorry, I'm afraid the Jews were right."

Songwriter's Navel: Week 20, In Which I Rely On The Assumption That Non One Listens To The Words

2011-06-16T15:50:00.001-05:00

Recording

Another ZOMG! It's longer than 3 minutes! song.

Occasionally, the Kernel will cruelly force us to talk about our songwriting strengths. I can't be 100% certain that I have always first uttered something along the lines of "I don't have any," before mumbling, "Well, words are usually easier for me than music," but my response is always in that ballpark. In a similar vein, my friend E asked me a few weeks ago if I ever suddenly had the feeling that I would never be able to write another song. I told her quite truthfully that I feel like that every week.

And yet . . .

Anyway, this week was one of the weeks I should really like. Our assignment was to write a I-V-vi-IV song and start the melody on beat 3 of the first measure of each verse. Although funny (and mind bending, thanks to the OCD adjustment of tempo and key), that medley video is actually soothing to my songwriting soul: Some of those are good songs, some are bad; there's quite a diversity of genres represented; and they don't necessarily all sound the same. Of course, once you know to listen for it, you hear the progression everywhere—for example in the IHOP in Crestwood when your husband is just trying to be thankful that, for once, Delilah is not on.

I really didn't have a lyrical concept for this song when I started working on it, which probably accounts for serious content problems two weeks in a row. I don't remember why I started out with the image of a bar at closing time. For no earthly reason, I think it started with me remembering an episode of Alice that opens and closes with Mel mopping himself into a corner. Anyway the image suggested the first verse (oh, and after much dinking around, I decided that D was my key of choice):

[D] This place has [A] seen [Bm] better days than [G] these
[D] I wish I could [A] say the same [Bm] [G]
[D] Behind the [A] door, [Bm] drink myself in- [G] to a corner
[D] Trying to [A] forget every [Bm] letter of your [G] name
For [D] tonight, [A] just for tonight [Bm] [G]

For the longest time, the first line was "These chairs have seen," because I was still thinking that the narrator was working in a bar at closing time, turning the chairs upside down on the tables. Of course, that person is not a very responsible employee if sie is "drink[ing hir]self into a corner" while on the clock. I worked with "paint," "mop," "talk," and some other verbs in place of "drink," and spent a lot of time trying to figure out if the person was walking through the door, locking the door, watching others walk through the door, and so on. In other words, I really didn't know who this person was or what was happening. More responsible songwriters probably would have tried to figure that out before moving on to verse 2.

My lyrical attention snagged on the short second line of the verse, and I liked the idea of carrying the "I wish" sentiment through the verses, so I had the line "I wish I could say I cared" for the second verse before I knew what else was going on. And then all of a sudden things got out of control. The character was a songwriter. OH NOES!

[D] Another [A] song, [Bm] tale of woe, [G] love gone wrong
[D] I wish I could [A] say I care [Bm] [G]
[D] I fill the [A] page, knock [Bm] one more back, [G] take the stage
[D] Remember to [A] pretend this [Bm] then, and I am [G] there [G]
For one more [D] night, [A] just one more night [Bm] [G]

Oh, I've just remembered that it wasn't until I had written the second verse that I went back in and added the fifth line of the verses, bringing in the word "night." I'm generally symmetry gal, so I don't know where the need for an odd number of lines came from, particularly given that the last line isn't really a refrain and the damned song has a chorus anyway, so it doesn't need a refrain.

Speaking of choruses, brace yourself for one that makes no sense whatsoever in the context of the song.

[D] No [A] ali- [Bm] bi [G]
[D] I’m [A] behind the [Bm] yellow [G] line
[D] No [A] ali- [Bm] bi [G] tonight
[D] I [A] am the [Bm] scene of your [G] crime

And repeats exactly the same chord progression from the verses. But hold up! I'm not going to beat myself up over that fact (or at least not too much). Because, you see, I am fascinated by songs that manage to have really distinct A and B parts, and then you realize that they use exactly the same chord progression. I do think the chorus sounds different (or at least different adjacent) here. Originally, I was drawing out the Bm in the last line and had a big pause between "scene" and "of your crime." The Kernel pointed out quite rightly that this kills the momentum of possibly the only good line in the song. (Um, of course, he just referred to it as a good line, not the only good line in the song. BUT WHAT DOES HE KNOW?)

OH DEAR SWEET FANCY JEEBUS. I just realized that I recorded this in the wrong form. The recording goes:

Verse
Verse
Chorus
Verse
Chorus
Bridge
Chorus

And normal people with any inkling of songwriting ability would put the bridge . . . after the first chorus? Oh hell. Anyway here's the bridge and verse 3. Oh, and a tag, which is slightly less than a half verse.

[D] Bar after [A] bar, the [Bm] same old tune, the [G] same old sorrow
[D] I wish there were some [A] other [Bm] way [G]
[D] I work the [A] crowd, [Bm] smile and nod, [G] laugh out loud
[D] Down another [A] drink, I’m not [Bm] thinking too [G] straight
Tonight, [D] no [A] not tonight [Bm] [G]

Bridge
Last [Bm] call, same as [A] last night
I’ll [G] have myself the [D] usual a- [Bm] gain
Another [A] regular to [Bm] spend [A] the night

Tag
[D] Back then I [A] knew [Bm] better men than [G] you
[D] Wishing [A] that you [Bm] were here [G]

Kindly, as always, classmates asked what the song is about and noted that there are two threads that never quite meet. They are perfectly, 100% right. I didn't want this to be about a songwriter/performer, but once it was, I got to thinking about where the subjects of songs come from. As I've noted before, I almost never write songs about the ZK. As Steve Earle says, "Some girls are better for writing songs about," which probably means they're not the girl you want to be married to, they're the ones who done you wrong, amiright?

So that got me thinking about songwriter-as-crime scene and performance as reenactment, which . . . oh hell, it's just too dense and unworkable.

Which did not stop me from a game-time decision to play this on the 6th when me set was too short. It was a disaster, as everything was that night.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 19, In Which I Am An Intentional And Unintentional Scofflaw

2011-06-09T14:53:00.003-05:00

Recording (a very sloppy one; read on for excuses galore!)

This is me, getting back on the horse.

So, I played out this past Monday night, and it was awful. I know, it's a Peter and the Wolf thing with me, because my bar for success is "No one died." I am not sure no one died this time. I really don't want to dwell on it, but I did very badly. Guitar playing was awful, singing was all over the map. Ugh! Ok, that is me not dwelling, but leading into this recording and write-up.

I really didn't want to record this song, both because I'm still wanting to dig a hole, climb in, and pull the hole in after me and because I don't think much of this song. Again, that's not exactly odd for me, but what IS odd is the fact that others pointed out both strengths and weaknesses of this song that were mostly below my radar.

The assignment was to use at least five words from the following list (the ones I ended up using are in bold):

Reflex (or Reflux)
Embargo
Formaldehyde
Embrace
Reciprocate
Investigate
Condescend
Cruel
Dynasty
Impassioned
Messed-up
Coagulate
Venture
Replace
Kind
Gruel
Valid
Sneaky
Troubled
Violate
Concentrate
Vinegar
Grasp
Whirl
Fecund
Zimmerman

Musically, we also had to stick the following chords: D, Em, G, A, Am7, C, Dm, B7, F, Dmaj7, F#m, Esus4, and E.

Starting with the words, I knew right away that I wanted to start with some kind of play on "Nothing ventured, nothing gained," but my mind was being especially slow and dull that morning. It took me forever to come up with the opening line of verse 1, which is kind of an exercise in South Side rhyming slang or something ("pain" rhymes with "gain" and . . . that's all I've got). At the time I also liked playing with the juxtaposition of "cruel" and "kind," with "kind" having a different meaning in this case. I'm less crazy about that in retrospect.:

[Esus4]* Nothing ventured, nothing [E] painfully obvious
[D] No one can replace you if you [Dmaj7] hide yourself a-[E] way
Far a- [Esus4] way from the cruel from the [E] kind of troubled waters that the
[F] Foolish weather never real- [G] izing nothing violates the [E7]** rule

Um. Yes, it's a lead sheet with footnotes. I'll get to that in just a moment, because I just remembered something about this song that I had completely forgotten. I spent easily an hour with completely different and, in retrospect, horribly wrong chords over the first 2 lines. I think it was C, D, Em, F or something ascending like that, and it was all Carter strummy and nightmarish until I looked up an Esus4 on my iPad's chord finder.

Oh, you troublesome Esus4. As soon as I played it, the whole character of the song changed. (In my opinion, the change was at best a tiny improvement on the original nightmare. I'm not a fan of this song.) Back to the footnote indicators. Even though I knew that the song now started on what GuitarToolkit assured me was an Esus4 (and what my rudimentary music theory knowledge backed up), my ear knew that it was really an Asus2 or at least some flavor of A.

How does my ear know this? Can my ear explain itself? No, it cannot. It's like having a sliver you can't find. The Kernel confirmed that I am a complete whackadoo and that one would never ever call that chord Esus4 in this context, even though it has all the notes of an Esus4 chord. Oh, and the E7 is just flat out completely illegal, but I couldn't make any of the legal chords work there for love or money.

In terms of where the song was going theme wise, things snuck up on me. I say "That will end in tears" a lot. For example, a few years ago, my frontier sister bought one of her sons a Jack Sparrow costume for Halloween, with "Real working shackles!" Given that her two sons would cheerfully murder one another if there were a reasonable chance of getting away with it . . . well, you get the picture. I wasn't aware that I say it a lot until a friend used the phrase and claimed to be quoting me.

Anyway, that struck me as a workable chorus, and I started thinking about the song as being about someone who is emotionally cautious to the point of pathology, and someone else trying to gently or not-so-gently point out that it's perfectly true that you can't get hurt if you never risk anything, but you also can't experience anything at all. Yeah, that's when the song started to go off the thematic rails. Anyway, here's the chorus and verse 2.

Chorus:
This will [Am7] end in [F] tears
[C] Every fond embrace
Each im- [Em] passioned state of grace
Will [F] end, in tears [Esus4]*

Verse 2:
[Esus4]* You’ll never miss what you [E] never had, never
[D] Know the pain and sorrow when the [Dmaj7] love bleeds a- [E] way
You keep a- [Esus4]* way from the precipice and the [E] dangerous romantics and the
[F] Happiness they grasp for but a [G] moment, don’t they know it cannot [E7]** last?

When I played this for E (guitar/voice teacher), she warily pointed out that the melody in this kept returning to the F# (when I'm playing this, I'm capo 2, so it's the open high E string) and that this was a note that I seemed to sing clearly and without effort. We worked a bit on studying the feeling of singing that and trying to pull that up and down in my register. As she suspected, calling attention to it made me extremely self conscious about it. When I listened to a recording of the song I made on the phone after my lesson, my pitch and tone were absolutely painfully terrible, a problem that persists on the recording I made today, despite the pop vocals magic.

Finally the bridge:

[Dmaj7] No ambrosia, no hopeless devotion for you
No [A] ecstasy, no breathless delight
[F] No tears of joy, nothing [Dm] touching the heart of you
Every [G] emotion denied [E7]**

The bridge complicates the thematic issues. Part of the problem is that I sort of hear the song as the narrator humoring the person addressed in the song, saying, "Yes, you're absolutely right. People who risk things emotionally are crazy and in denial," but with the subtext of, "Yes, everything—EVERYTHING—ends in tears, because everything ends. But strong emotion, even pain, is what makes anything worth while." I tried, fairly unsuccessfully, to throw this around in class with K and others who were rightly noting the problems with message and POV. I slightly changed the wording of the chorus when recording, but I am both lazy and so lukewarm about this song that I'm not sure how much more work it really deserves.

Uh, this is kind of obvious now, but this is kind of all about not wanting the balloon because I couldn't deal with the knowledge that it would eventually break. Way to get over things, kid!

Songwriter's Navel: Week 18, In Which I Write a Throw-Away Song That Is Too Long

2011-06-03T17:25:00.006-05:00

Recording

I seriously just yelled: "WHAT THE HELL? THIS IS NEARLY 4 MINUTES LONG?!" Just as the mail person came up the steps.

This assignment comes to you courtesy of Richard Hugo, a poet who urges writers to not let the "triggering subject" for a creative work be the boss of what the work ends up being about, to avoid journalistic language and instead embrace imagery and the sound of words, resulting in being "foolish like a trout." I am not even making that last bit up. The other hoops for the assignment were writing in 6/8 and in a minor key.

The Hugo (I'm just going to call him Hugo, because he has mistakenly been called "Victor Hugo" [who, given that he has a tragically journalistic chapter title "Love Under a Rock," seems not to be following the other Hugo's advice] and "Hugo Boss" in class. This amuses me to no end.) part of the assignment was relatively easy for me, as it's how I tend to write anyway. Or at least how I tend to write now. I will never forget back when I was in Songwriting I and really struggling with telling a story in a song and the Kernel said, "You have no obligation to the truth." Bloody obvious, in retrospect, but it was a huge "Ah ha" moment for me, and now, for good or for ill, I tend to work much more with sounds, sentiments, and images that link together at least in my head.

The time signature requirement was a bit of a challenge for me, because I almost never write in 3/4 or 6/8. It's how you know I'm not a real singer-songwriter! Also, being fairly rhythmically challenged, I can't reliably distinguish between 3/4 and 6/8. But the hoop I ended up missing entirely? Minor key. Ended up writing in D Dorian mode (at least I think that's what we decided?).

In some ways, this song was tremendously difficult to write. In others, I feel like it just fell out of me. And I do mean fell. And landed in some pretty unattractive ways.

I decided pretty early that the song would be about Christmas Day, 1978, which is the day that my grandmother died. I was 6 at the time, and I figured that Christmas, death, and the imperfect understanding of same by a 6-year-old wouldn't lack for images. I had lots of memories of that day and of visiting my grandmother (she had Parkinson's Disease and was in a nursing home attached to Oak Forest hospital for as long as I can remember) that I thought would make it in, as well as what I thought were three great material objects to include: Dancerella and my Playdoh Fuzzy Pumper Barber Shop (wow that sounds dirty written out), my two big gifts from that Christmas, and this music box that my dad had uncharacteristically let me by for my grandmother from the gift shop in the nursing home (). It was a small, red hemisphere with a mirror on top and little magnetic ice skaters. I thought it was the coolest thing.

Then, of course, I ended up writing from the perspective of my Great Aunt Elsa (my grandmother's sister, and after my grandmother's death, the only surviving sibling). This is the second time Elsa has showed up in a song. This perhaps is my destiny manifesting: I am doomed to look like Elsa

So, feeling pretty smug that the avoidance of journalistic language would be no problem for me, Queen not only of Zombies, but of Rococo Lack of Clarity, I ran immediately and at full force into obstacles. For example, what does one say when one canNOT say, "And the phone rang just as we were sitting down to Christmas dinner"? At any rate, although the song is not very good (certainly not good enough to drone on for nearly 4 minutes), the exercise made me very aware of how directive I am in my writing. Given that I REALLY dislike this as a consumer of songs, I am chagrined to say the least.

It was also an interesting exercise from a memory-mining perspective. For example, I'm pretty sure that my Aunt Elsa was actually at our house on Christmas Day that year (the picture linked above supports that), but I'm not positive that she didn't arrive some time after Christmas for the funeral. Many of the narrative details that are implied (e.g., my Aunt signing for my grandmother's effects and going through them) are certainly not true. It would have been my dad who did this, and although he never really talks about her death, my mother remarked recently that the staff at Oak Forest were very cold and unsympathetic during the process. Anyway, what came out is all very dissatisfying, but hopefully at least the process yielded some results that are mineable for future songs.

Verse 1 is relatively generic images of the living room on Christmas morning, the combination of crumpled wrapping paper, scattered packaging, and the big, black plastic bags awaiting the clean-up. The phone in our kitchen was an enormous, bright yellow, rotary-dial phone. As you can see my solution to the "no journalistic language" problem is pretty gag worthy:

[D] Bright paper morning, [Em] light chasing shadows on
|[Bm] Faces, un- [D]| noticed and [Em] wise
[D] Black plastic corners, [Em] sagging and hollow the
|[Bm] Last of her [D]| patience un- [G] winds
The |[Em] bright yellow [G]| mouth in the |[C] wall sings [D]| out
|[Em] Brass angels [C]| chime and [D] sway
[C] Blue [D] December, [Bm] January gray

In the penultimate line, I'd initially written "Brass angels chime on the table" (we had one of those candle centerpieces on which the angles would spin and strike little chimes once the candles were lit; cheesy and tacky, yes, but the physics of it was fascinating to me). The Kernel pointed out that I had much stronger rhymes for "gray" in every other verse, so I rewrote it. I absolutely agree with his point, but I really hate the rewritten rhyme.

Verse 2, mostly just physical description of Elsa, whose personal style froze somewhere around 1958:

[D] Silver-white memory, [Em] twisted and pinned
|[Bm] Shoulders set [D]| sharp as a [Em] knife
[D] Neat fingers fumbling, [Em] stitches and buttons
|[Bm] Pictures un- [D]| troubled by [G] time
In the |[Em] checkerboard [G]| hallway they |[C] turn and [D]| wait
|[Em] She traces the [C]| shape of her [D] name
[C] Blue [D] December, [Bm] January gray

Throughout the writing of this song, I had to juggle words that I needed descriptively with words that I needed for rhymes to avoid reusing the same words. (Although guess what? Hadn't noticed until now that I used "bright" twice in verse 1. Kill me.) I can't remember what I had originally written for the "Shoulders" line, but the rewrite employing "knife" was certainly better—more evocative, less directive. Also really hard to sing with the Ss and Shs running into one another.

I wrote the final verse with the idea that Elsa was alone with a box and a bag or two containing everything left of my grandmother's life. I also was picturing her having to get them home on public transit. (Elsa lived most of her adult life in San Francisco, and as far as I know, never learned to drive.) I wasn't able to get that additional note of loneliness into the verse. Probably would have been able to if I were less lazy and had started on the song earlier.

[D] Dark wooden boxes and [Em] brown paper bags
|[Bm] Rattle and [D]| rasp on her [Em] knee
[D] Images knotted [Em], bitter regrets
|[Bm] Dropping like [D]| late autumn [G] leaves
The |[Em] bleak edge of [G]| winter in- |[C] scribed in her [D]| palms
These |[Em] last minutes [C]| bleeding [D] away
[C] Blue [D] December, [Bm] January gray
[C] Blue [D] December, January gray [Bm]

After looking at the solid wall of emo text with an extremely clunky refrain, it became obvious that the damned thing needed at least a bridge to relieve the tedium.

Oh, I guess the Fuzzy Pumper Barber Shop did sort of make it into the bridge in suggesting "clay" anyway:

[Am] Breath solid in her [C] ears
[G] Grief turns like clay in her [D] hands
[Am] Scolding and straight-backed, she [C] travels their years
[G] Heartsore, defiant she [Bm] stands

Still two weeks behind now, and a set on Monday to prepare for. The grim realization that I might not have two songs I want to play at the showcase is settling in . . .

Songwriter's Navel: Week 17, Which Cribs from JoCo and JoWhe

2011-05-27T15:53:00.001-05:00

Recording

So I had 48 hours to turn around the assignment following the "sincere love song.". For this one, the main criterion was a "one-line chorus" (e.g., "Keep On Rockin' Me, Baby," "Band On the Run," etc.). I say "main criterion," because as it turned out, I was not supposed to use the I chord until I got to the chorus (if I were following the Tuesday class's rubric) OR I was supposed to employ root motion in fourths (if I were following the Sunday class's rubric): I didn't know about the Tuesday criterion, and I plain old forgot about the Sunday criterion. Also, I cheated slightly on the chorus.

I started on this one by going through my songwriting notebook from the beginning (this one is very nearly spent) and pulling out lines and concepts that I liked but that hadn't made it into songs yet. I was about to say that none of those made it into the song, but I see that at least a couple have close cousins in what I eventually wrote. But the real jumping off point was the song that I had started on and abandoned a few weeks ago. (Ha, in dredging up that link I see that I felt that I abandoned it because "it's TRYING to be a sardonic, tongue-in-cheek song, and it was just getting more and more labored at every turn"—I kind of didn't solve that problem before writing this song.)

The line for my chorus became "It's all about you," and I'm not exactly sure why. I mean, certainly everyone has someone in their lives who constantly sucks the air and will to live from everyone. Behold! One of my very very very very favorite Jonathan Coulton songs that he did NOT play on JoCo Cruise Crazy: "Someone Is Crazy" (Come on: "Is Bitter there?/I'd rather talk to her than Disappointed/Though she's not quite as fun as Good and Mad" is a fucking. brilliant. opening lyric.) But there was no one incident or person at that time prompting this song, so who knows?

I did actually write the chorus first, which was bad news for me, because the chorus looked me in the eye and said, "Yeah, that's right, it's another song FILLED with barre chords, bitch."

Observe:

And it’s [D] all a- [C#m] bout you
It’s [A] all [D] a- [D] bout [E] you
Yes, it’s [D] all a- [C#m] bout you
It is [A] all, it is all [C#m], it is [D] all
About you [A]

So, little box of barre chords down there at the 5th fret, we meet again.

The first two lines of verse 1 were exactly what I wrote a few weeks ago. The second two lines are a tortured attempt to get my original idea of "You're nothing but a heart, and everywhere you look is a sleeve." Oh, ouch! Awkward even when I try to translate for my inside-my-head voice. Not improved by being made into a lyric:

[A] You are made of [A] buttons, I am
[E] Nothing but a [D] fingertip, it seems [A]
You’re [A] all made up of [A] aching heart and
[E] Every time you [D] look at me you
[Bm] See nothing [D] more than a [E] sleeve

The phrasing ends up giving that extra bonus image of your friendly neighborhood narcissist actually using you as a Kleenex. So there's that. Ew.

In an earlier draft of verse 2, I actually had on paper for a while the line "tragedy of being you" and genuinely did not realize that it was a direct rip off from "Someone's Crazy." It just goes to show you that no matter how paranoid a songwriter is about inadvertently plagiarizing, it's not paranoid enough. On that note, "must be Tuesday," in verse 3 is ripped off directly from Joss Whedon. I did not recall until this very moment that it is actually ripped off from the musical episode "Once More, With Feeling." Too bad, Whedon! It's not a lyric, you can spare it, so you can suck it! The rest of verse three was pretty much lifted from the abandoned song from a few weeks ago.

Now you’re [A] up in arms, we’re [A] up in smoke
[E] Up in flames [D] again, it must be Tuesday [A]
It’s the [A] matter-of-fact [A] tragedy of
[E] Histrionic [D] games you like to
[Bm] Play, but I’m [D] pushing back [D] from the [E] table

Raise your hand if you're not tired of the awkward chunka-chunka in A major to disguise my terrible guitar playing. No hands? I thought so. Here, have a bridge that is also lousy with barre chords. E didn't know what a klaxon was. The class was confused by "It's all bat signals with you." My gift for unintentional obfuscation is legend.

It’s all [F#m] bat signals [F#m] klaxons with [D] you
It’s all [C#m] guns blazing, [C#m] shoot first [D] and I’m through

And then verse 3 into the final, slightly altered chorus (will the cheating NEVER END?):

I might [A] miss the bells and [A] whistles, but
[E] Not the Chicken [D] Little midnight [A] scenes
When you [A] hear that busy [A] signal buzz
[E] Humming down the [D] line will you
[Bm] Get the picture [D] then, will you [E] see?

It’s not [D] all a- [C#m] bout you
It is [A] not [D] all [D] about [E] you
It’s not [D] all a- [C#m] bout you
It is [A] not, it is not [C#m], it is [D] not
All about you [A]

The Kernel suggested that I go with "It's NOT all about you" for all of the choruses; having recorded it, I suspect he's probably right. Speaking of the recording, it's got ridiculous Garage Band filtering on both guitar and vocals. Haven't had a good day and I was not up for beating my head against it any longer, so heavy, inappropriate processing!

Songwriter's Navel: Week 16, Which Is Shockingly Late

2011-05-26T17:14:00.005-05:00

Recording

Cat died. House guests. Sloth. What can I say?

I did not make my scheduled Tuesday night class on May 3, which was the second week of the new session (and the first due date for an assignment), but I did a make-up the following Sunday. Missing class honestly had nothing to do with the assignment, although it was a daunting one: The dreaded Sincere Love Song.

In acting, it may be that tragedy is easy and comedy is hard, but in songwriting the opposite is true: It's much, much easier to write a heartbreak song, an angry "piss off" song, or what have you, to write sincerely about something you love. Is it because we are convinced that creative people are creative because they have suffered/do suffer in a way or to an extent that noncreative people don't? (Well, that begs the question of there BEING noncreative people, but let's skip that for the moment.) That's certainly a story we hear and tell over and over again, right? But there's also the fact that it's uncool to like anything anymore. As Hodgman says: Internet = most efficient pure disgruntlement engine in history."

This isn't the first time we've had this assignment. The last time it came up, I violated the spirit of the assignment by writing a song called "Never Get to Nashville" about how the ZK is terrible for writing songs about. Which, of course, brings up the trope about creativity emanating solely from pain and drama. But, hey, it's not like I'm the first person to go to that well.

Anyway, I ended up writing my second song for/about the ZK for this assignment. Time decay is my enemy, and it looks like I took an uncharacteristically small number of notes by hand for this one. The notes I did take were from a completely different angle that was fond and sincere, but not without sarcasm, which is my preferred crutch both in songwriting and out of it. Funnily enough, though, looking at the handwritten notes, I see:

Silent, with you
Still
I am still
I am with you

I hadn't remembered until now that I had been playing with the idea of being "still with you" (i.e., "I remain with you") and "still, with you" (i.e., "I am motionless, I am with you"), but that was certainly an important initial spark for the song. I was thinking of being utterly comfortable when I'm with the ZK in general, but also thinking about the utter quiet at our friend M's country house in the Catskills, where we used to have these big, fun house parties every other summer. I had actually tried to write about the Catskills house a while ago, right after her family sold the house (and it was featured on the incredibly odious American Pickers). I'm pretty sure I burned it down in that song.

I also had notes about sleep, which is not surprising, because I really like sleep and I'm really, really bad at it, especially lately. I had "fold the day away," "sheets fall like silence upon my skin from your fingertips" ('Cause, like, dude, someone fixing the covers while you'er already in bed? Awesome.)

I think I must have written those notes well before I tried to write the song. In fact, I think I might have written them while sitting in a coffee shop waiting to head over to my songwriting codependent's place to get in a last practice before we played on May 2. When I came back to it with a more or less blank page almost a week later, the sheets/fingertips image seemed like it was going to be the end of a thought, not the beginning, and it became connected with the idea of gestures like that creating comfort/stillness/silence, regardless of place. From there, it seemed clearly that the song was more about the road trip to the Catskills, and the refrain became "It feels like home." Not the most original sentiment, but one that's the heart of many songs that I love and think are wonderful, like Ellis Paul's beautiful "Home". I swear to you, I of course realized that my song had a lot in common with his, but had not at all—until this very moment—thought about the fact that he, too, fictionally torches a beloved place in it.

The first verse and refrain behaved well for the most part. The first two lines came easily, although the second is a bit wordy to cram in. I decided to go with the four-finger "Big G" shape and a Cadd9, rather than a regular C because I'd been playing around with hammer-ons. I'm really terrible at them unless I'm using this cheater position and letting my index finger do the work. From there, the whole song musically centered itself around strings 1 and 2 fretted at 3 throughout.

The [G] sun paints its shadows on the [Cadd9] backs of your hands
I’m keeping [Dsus4] time with my bare feet on the [Cadd9] dashboard
With the [G] windows open wide we drink the [Cadd9] breeze in while we can
On the [Dsus4] far side of Ohio stumbling [Cadd9] through this one-night door [G]

And it feels like [Cadd9] home,
When the [Dsus4] sheets leave your [Cadd9] fingers
And [Em] settle on my [G] skin
It feels like [Cadd9] home

To get to the Catskills from Chicago, one drives through Indiana, then Ohio, and then the parts of Pennsylvania that are affectionately known as the Alabama in between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. The first time we drove out together, the ZK had spent very little time anywhere East of the Mississippi other than Chicago. It rained all the way through Pennsylvania. The second time we drove out, the ZK decided to drive through the night. It rained all the way through Pennsylvania. It was raining in Pennsylvania when, on a dark, winding mountain road, I learned that the ZK had this on his iPod. In fact, until we went to State College for our friends' wedding in 2007, I'm pretty sure the ZK was convinced that it was never not raining in Pennsylvania.

I vacillate wildly between liking and hating this verse. I was not and still am not happy with the triteness of the "feels like home" refrain, so I decided not to have it repeat exactly each time, but rather to use an image evoking the "home away from home" sensation. I do think my very sincere love of the fact that the ZK will sing along with me gets me some points for the assignment.

Verse 2:

Now there’s [G] rain in Pennsylvania, there is [Cadd9] always rain
Like we’re [Dsus4] winding through the Allegheny [Cadd9] sorrow
The [G] sun is just memory, hard to [Cadd9] tell the night from day
Where the [Dsus4] blacktop flickers gold on the [Cadd9] road to tomorrow [G]

And it feels like [Cadd9] home,
When I [Dsus4] sing out in the [Cadd9] darkness
And [Em] your voice joins [G] in
It feels like [Cadd9] home

With a refrain song, particularly one that's as musically repetitive as this one, a bridge is kind of a must. Surely I've talked about my hatred for bridges before? I am so. very. terrible. at them. Here, I am especially terrible. I steal from Shakespeare (and for someone who claims not to like R & J very much, I sure go to that well often enough) AND I'm cribbing from someone else's memories. We didn't attend the very first Catskills house party, because I was in Peru at the time. But Mand others have talked many times about the night they lay in the grass around the house and looked up at the stars.

[Dsus4] Lying in the grass, the face of [Cadd9] night so fine
[Dsus4] The world turns overhead, I feel your [Em] breath in [Dsus4] time with [Cadd9] mine

The third verse proved quite hard to write. I had several different concepts I wanted to cram in there, and I was having trouble figuring out what was happening, when really it was very obvious: The ZK was sleeping and I was not. Because this is what happens all the time, and honestly, my not sleeping is much, much worse when he's not around.

When your [G] head hits the pillow, you're [Cadd9] already fast asleep
While my [Dsus4] mind runs away [Cadd9] in the silence
I feel your [G] dreams rise and fall, rise and [Cadd9] fall beneath my cheek
I count [Dsus4] your heartbeats, I count the stars, I [Cadd9] count the moments I am at peace [G]

And it feels like [Cadd9] home,
In the [Dsus4] unfamiliar [Cadd9] stillness
When [Em] you are by my [G] side
It feels like [Cadd9] home
It feels like [Cadd9] home
It feels like [G] home

So there you have it.

Monsters, Boobies, and OCD: Danny Boyle's Frankenstein at the National Theatre

2011-05-07T18:46:00.001-05:00

Sadly, we are not in the UK, but we did just return from The Music Box Theatre where we saw the last show they're broadcasting there. The title is the ZK's review.

This has been getting rave reviews, lines around the block for day-of tickets, and so on. In many ways, the production deserves that and more. I liked it, but did not love it.

Every element of the design and staging is incredible. The stage is round with a central revolve, and overhead, there's a fixture comprising hundreds of lightbulbs. They're gathered in bunches, hung at different lengths, and it's at once oozing and organic and cold and artificial, evoking forges, power plants, and circuses. To represent the creature's first stumble into a town, there's this gliding platform topped with huge gears that rotate. Extras hang from the front and sides, jerking, slamming, writhing, and do-si-do-ing to something too clanging and brittle to be music, too patterned and hypnotic not to be. It's like Steampunk and German Expressionism had a Marxist-informed Baby.

The blind scholar's hut is represented by four scrimmed walls with a few natural elements stenciled on them; the Frankenstein home is all stiff, stuffy windows and shadow, but it churns up from beneath the stage and sits at a subtle angle. Victor's hut in Scotland has an appropriately claustrophobic, subterranean feel.

The monster is scarred, sutured, scabby, and oozing. The development of his movement, command of language, and command of . . . consciousness and self-awareness . . . are all stunning. The production we saw had Jonny Lee Miller as the Creature and Benedict Cumberbatch as Victor (the two leads swap roles each night). Both occupied their roles in a way that signals and excellent director and a creative process that's hard to achieve where actor and character are constantly growing and stretching. Really fantastic.

Oh, look! It's my "but" face. Charitably, Nick Dear's script is uneven, which is not to say that there aren't brilliant parts of it where Mary Shelley's text is illuminated, enlarged, and brought to life by the adaptation. But then there are parts that are just . . . clunky as shit: Felix and Agatha (the blind scholar's son and daughter-in-law) have awkward Tolstovian orgasms about having cleared all the rocks from their field; the Scots resurrectionists have painfully stilted attempts at Shakespearian comic relief; and Elizabeth lectures Victor on the God-given, societally approved power of her uterus. No, really.

Elizabeth, in general, is a nightmare. Boyle casts all the Frankensteins, save Victor, as actors of color for no reason that is particularly apparent (which is not at all to say that I think the actors ought to have been all white in some misguided attempt at authenticity, but Victor's whiteness becomes pointed). George Harris was simply not very good as Victor's father, although I wonder if his wooden delivery was directed that way, so that we remain entirely within the mind of Victor/The Creature.

Naomie Harris's portrayal of Elizabeth is almost beside the point as a performance. Her character is the victim of the worst of the script and a choice that came within a hair of ruining the whole shebang for me. As through the vast majority of the play, the action stays with the Creature, who springs from Elizabeth's bridal bed and has a conversation with her that, at times, almost salvages an otherwise dreadful scene. Then, unlike the book in which Victor hears a scream and comes across Elizabeth's lifeless body, Dear/Boyle have Victor burst into the room, revolver drawn (if you will) only to flail around on the floor for no apparent reason while the creature rapes Elizabeth, achieves orgasm, snaps her neck, and declares, "Now I am a man."

W.
T.
F?

Extra special bonus points not just for going to the "Women Exist For Men to Use in Their Attempts to Exert Power Over Other Men" Well, but going the extra mile and making the woman non-White. Seriously, just what the fuck?

But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, it really, truly is a magnificent creative endeavor beautifully brought to life. But I'd consider nipping out for popcorn at strategic moments.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 15, Which Involves Procrastilaxing in a Nerdly Manner

2011-04-23T23:32:00.001-05:00

Procrastilaxing is a perfectly cromulent word.

This week's assignment was to pick a historical figure and write a song to him/her or from his/her perspective. Easy, right? Except that sly, sly Kernel then casually dropped, "Oh, and the music should somehow reference or be relevant to that person."

So, yeah.

I have work coming out of my nostrils, as it is the end of the semester. Partly as a result of this, I didn't get to work on the song until quite late Sunday night, and I knew that Monday my time would be limited because I was going to see my friend S. play a set. So, naturally, when I went up to my songwriting lair to get to work, I wound up reading chunks of several biographies.

Let me 'splain. I really hadn't given an iota of thought to whom I'd write about, but my eyeballs happily fell upon my copy of Amy Kass's American Lives: Cultural Differences, Individual Distinctions, which I picked up about 3 years ago, not coincidentally when I was thinking a lot about writing and had just started songwriting.

I spared a sigh or two for poor Henry Adams, whose absence is partially, if not entirely, my fault, and started to flip through the book. It's organized with paired autobiographies related through some theme of self-creation/invention. Individual's entry is introduced by an essay, followed by several excerpts from the autobiography itself, and that's followed by "thought questions" tying the individual to his or her partner.

I only realized in retrospect that I was looking almost exclusively at works by women, which I guess implies that I was intending from the start to write in my character's voice and thought that would be easier with . . . someone putatively of my own gender? Who the heck knows what goes on in my mind!

Certainly not I, because before I knew it, I was curled up reading the section on Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Her childhood "origin story," which centers around three memories related to her father that made her aware of her status as a second-class citizen and taught her that this was unchangeable. The autobiography itself breaks down nicely an has great language to mine, so after a couple hours of reading . . . well it was practically time for me to go to bed.

But before I did, I got a bit down on paper. I think I must only write songs in 3/4 or 6/8, strangely, in pairs. Other than a lullaby that was explicitly required to be in 3/4, I only have 2 other songs written in that time signature, and I wrote them in back-to-back weeks last summer. Last week's was in 6/8, and pretty much immediately, this week's started coming out in 3/4. Also in E-major again. What's up with that? I freaking hate that key. Stupid B chord.

Ok, I'll tell the truth about the key. Remember that the spectre of the music having to be "relevant" was hanging over me. Well, CONVENIENTLY, Ms. Cady Stanton wrote her autobiography in 1895, which CONVENIENTLY was the year that Katherine Lee Bates's poem "America the Beautiful" was first published. Of course the music is from a hymn, but I decided to see what that chord progression looked like.

It's simple as pie: Lots of I, IV, V, with the occasionally 7 thrown in. (And mysteriously, an Uncle Henry, which is a II or a V of V for those of you not in on our hipster Kernel Shibboleths.) The sheet I'd found was in G, I think, but I was just not feeling the love. I played around a bit, and a refrain-ish thing presented itself over I-V-IV, in 3/4 time. After fiddling with keys, it was obvious that this wanted to be in E.

I got the first two verses together before bed Sunday night:

[E] Four years of [A] fear, [B] night after [A] night by the
[E] Fire of the [A] everlasting [E] no [B] Such a
[E] Pity, they [A] say, such a [B] shame, can't they [A] see your
[E] Face in the [A] January [B] cold, I [A] see you [A]
[E] O, [B] beaut - [A] iful
[E] O, [B] beaut - [A] iful [E]

Seven years on, every frame draped in white, just
A looking glass stranger on your knee. I'm
No son of Adam, I know, can't I be your
Child can't I be all he was, can't I be
O, beautiful
O, beautiful

Most of the struggle with these was getting the words to fall around the chords in 3/4. "The everlasting no," though I hate to admit it, is Cady Stanton's, not mine. These two verses correspond to two of the three memories in which she grounds her origin story: Her younger sister's birth, at which time everyone's congratulations were mute by condolences that the Cadys had had yet another girl, and 7 years later, Elizabeth trying to comfort her father after her only brother had died, and her father's response that he wished she'd been a boy.

Before my lesson on Tuesday I worked somewhat feverishly to get down a third verse and a bridge. What I had by the time of my lesson was a third verse with some pretty punk-ass lyrics (and E totally called me on it, yodeling "block that metaphor!") and a bridge with some dodgy chords and a shaky melody.

I went back to the drawing board on verse 3 after my lesson. Most of the first part of it stayed the same, and it's so-so. The second half changed substantially. It's better, but I'm still not crazy about it. Although I'd finally worked out the melody of the bridge after my lesson, I naturally forgot it completely when playing in class.

The fourth verse is, again, so so. For Stanton's 80th birthday in 1895, Susan B. Anthony had organized a massive women's congress to honor Cady Standon. Her autobiography more or less ends with the congress and her reflections on where women had been and where they were going. The "star after star" line is a cheap one, but the fourth state in the union—Idaho, no less!—had just granted women suffrage, and she talked about this being a star added to the flag of American women. I like the image, I don't like my line, though.

Anyway:

First woman, now wife, now a bright, silent mind, now an
Ocean away from my home. Now
Mother now guide, discontented, alone
Sheltered by tyrants of old
O, beautiful
O, beautiful
O, beautiful
O, beautiful

My [C#m] mind, I have [C#m] honed, I have
[A] Tempered my [G#m] will with my
[F#m] Ear to the [A] door of the [G#m] world,
[F#m] I would [A] know

Eighty long years, eighty and more. Raise my
Face to the new day that dawns.
Star after star after star after star I
See, though the road will be long, I see
O, beautiful
O, beautiful
O, beautiful
O, beautiful
O, Beautiful [E]

The bridge position is wonky. I didn't really think about, because it's the right place for the conceptual break in the song. But it's definitely the wrong place for it in terms of form. Although the Kernel backed me up and said I'd made the right call, he also suggested that it would probably need to be arranged as a sort of slow build to make its placement work.

I gave myself fits trying to pull that off in recording, and what I basically ended up with is a mess of tempo and dynamics with a giant, obvious guitar error that I just couldn't bring myself to spend more time getting rid of.

This probably should have cowriting credits for both Cady Stanton and Kass. I won't tell if you won't.

O, Beautiful.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 14, Which Is a "Cowboy Song" Hot on the Heels of 13

2011-04-15T13:00:00.001-05:00

So when last we left our heroine, she'd finally managed to write a song for Sunday. And no good deed goes unpunished.

The Kernel handed me an insane-looking piece of paper with what he swore was a chord progression. Moreover, he swore it was a chord progression from a gospel song that Ray Charles had lifted for a song of his (I've forgotten the title). With no content prompts, we were to write a song to that music.

Here's the progression. I may be playing fast and loose with how long each chord is played, but Ray is not here to object:

|G G/B| |C C#dim|
|G/D D#dim| Em C
|G E7| A7 D7 D7/F#

|G G/B| |C C#dim|
|G/D D#dim| Em C
|G E7| |A7 D7|
|G C| G

D D7/F#
|G C| G
E7 A7
D D7/F#

|G G/B| |C C#dim|
|G/D D#dim| Em C
|G E7| |A7 D7|
|G C| G

I sat down Sunday night and played the progression through (slowly and awkwardly, it goes without saying) a number of times and recorded it on my iPad. It felt like 6/8 to me from minute one. A little odd, because I am the one "singer/songwriter" (yes, those are sarcastic quotemarks) in the northern hemisphere who does not write in 6/8 most of the time. I "schwee schwa-ed" a melody for a while, then started to think about lyrics.

The line "The lines around my eyes" dropped into my lap right away. (Quite possibly because it's the title of a Lucinda Williams song [which I cannot find a video of Lucinda Williams performing].) That determined the character of the song immediately. The "barroom rendition" came next, because I liked how it sang over those chords, and liking how it sang suggested "sung a time or two." Pretty quickly I had firmed up the first verse:

Oh the [G] lines around my [G7/B] eyes
[C] Drink in the [C#dim] light in this
[G/D] Barroom ren- [D#dim] dition of me [Em] [C]
That I've [G] sung a time or two [E7]
Since I said [A7] I was through [D] [D7/F#]

The structure of the chord progression lends itself to refrain rather than chorus. I felt like I should get to the refrain at the end of the first verse, despite the fact that (a) it's not resolving at the end of that verse and (b) I didn't know what the refrain was.

As easily as the first verse came, the second was not playing nicely. I sat down with my songwriting notebook, which is very nearly full, and I flipped through from the beginning. It's both sort of fun and bewildering to look at all the scrawling and try to remember what song I was writing at the time, what the assignment was, the things I tried to hammer in that weren't fitting, things that got cannibalized for other songs, and so on.

Last summer we'd had an assignment to write a song that had a narrative, but not one that filled in all the details for the listener. In other words, the song itself was more like a conversation with someone who knew the story about that story. I wrote down a story I've been wanting to work into a song for a while. I didn't end up writing my song about that story at the time, nor is this song about that story, but the phrase "tall tales" caught my eye, and I felt like "tall, tall tales" was going to be the refrain.

That helped me with the second verse:

Now every [G] night I go to [G7/B] bed
Not a [C] thought in my [C#dim] head
Not a [G/D] worry, not a [D#dim] whisper, not a word [Em] [C]
Not the [G] faintest hint of [E7] you
Since I said [A7] I was [D7] through
With [G] you and your tall [C], tall [G] tales

Because I am lazy an profoundly unmusical, I enjoyed having the music already written for me in this assignment, but beyond my sloth, what I found cool and interesting about writing to someone else's progression was the kind of leisurely way it gets to the refrain. If I'd been writing this from scratch, I almost certainly wouldn't have had that long line in the middle of the verse, breaking up the two couplets. But I really like that structure.

As of Sunday night, I still needed to write the bridge and final verse, which I'd planned to do Monday. But then on Monday, I wound up with a 1/4-inch-long splinter under the nail the middle finger on my right hand. After 5 hours at a walk-in clinic, the removed it WITHOUT ANESTHESIA by cutting away a large chunk of my nail WITHOUT ANESTHESIA and then digging around with forceps of varying sizes. WITHOUT ANESTHESIA. That was fun.

In the time before my lesson Tuesday, I managed to write the bridge and then the final verse:

Oh the [D] pictures you painted, the [D7/F#] tall tales you told
Of all you [G] were, all you [C] were gonna be [G]
Oh I [Em] drank it right in, I [A7] bought what you sold
Now [D] what's to become of [D7/F#] me?

Guess the [G] sun's still gonna rise [G7/B]
I'll make it [C] through another [C#dim] night
From the [G/D] bedroom to the [D#dim] barroom to the street [Em] [C]
When [G] the talk turns to you [E7]
I'll tell [A7] them all I am [D7] through
With [G] you and your [C] tall, tall [G] tales

Oh, the fickleness of the muse and self-confidence. Sunday night, I had gone to bed feeling pretty pleased with how the song was shaping up. On Tuesday, the lyrics felt stale, stupid, and obvious. The bridge, in particular, sounds like it was written via Mad Libs. But folks in class seemed to like it, so what are you going to do? And certainly it has its uses in being very different from most of the stuff I write, so that gives it potential to fill in gaps in a set or what have you.

Because the chord progression is much more demanding than what I would usually write, recording was especially hard, and I admit to using a lot of garage band snipping, pasting, and scotch tape to cobble this together. Originally, I only recorded the chord progression as originally given to us. When I tried to record the vocals, it was like "HELLO HERE IS MY VOICE ON THE ONE OF MEASURE ONE!" No good. You have to ease into my voice. With more scotch tape magic, I ran through the first verse as an instrumental, then added a "lead" (again with the sarcastic quote marks) over it on FrankeGibson. A lead that, of course, begins just a fraction of a second late. Go me.

But here it is.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 13, Which is Both Belated and Contains Ill-Advised Attempts at Harmony

2011-04-14T21:07:00.001-05:00

Before I lose my nerve, I'm linking this recording. This one was extremely difficult in many ways.

Our assignment hearkened back to the assignment before last, which was set when we were 14. This week, we were to write a song from our present-day perspective, addressing our 14-year-old selves, preferably in an upbeat way that might either congratulate or reassure them.

I tend to have trouble with these types of assignments because I have a weird absence of relationship with myself before I was 18. I'm not nostalgic for that part of my life certainly (it was miserable), but I also don't have pity for or empathize with my 14-year-old self (a lot of the misery was either inevitable or actively of my own making, so why bother?). I think we had an assignment a bit more than a year ago to write a song using 3rd or 4th grade and I ended up with something called "I Am Missing."

I'm equally bad at writing to myself in the future. During the "Shanghai the Pie Contest" session, we were supposed to write a song to ourselves in 5 years, and again, I had nothing to say. Strangely, though, I did end up writing a song to my nerdy nephew that has become kind of my Nerd Anthem, and I've played it in sets several times. (That recording is from the first time I ever played in public, so please be kind.)

We also had house guests up through the evening that this assignment was due, so my time to work on it was extremely limited. I did unexpectedly have Monday evening to myself, and I wrote two lines of what I thought was a chorus and then the first two lines of what I thought was going to be the first verse. And I stalled. Hard. Had a little time before my lesson on Tuesday and remained stalled to the extent that I made two other starts on songs and stalled again.

I ended up skipping songwriting class Tuesday to have a last dinner out with our friends at Big Jones. That's right, I selflessly skipped my class, for which I had nothing to play, and ate oyster stew and ridiculously good scallops because I AM A GIVER.

The Kernel has another section of songwriting 2 on Sundays, and I'd checked to see if it was ok that I attended a make-up. That meant Saturday night I needed to stare down the barrel of the stalled song again. I checked in with what I had and it was still not going anywhere. For lack of any better ideas, I pulled some of the photo album/scrapbook things my mom has made for my various graduations.

In the back of one was a letter that I wrote the night before I left for U of C. It was addressed to the guy I was dating at the time (who, by the way, was a complete and total scumbag—way to go there, first incarnation of me). There were also numerous photos from my 8th grade graduation. I bawled through that entire graduation for reasons that I did not understand then and still do not understand now. For bonus points, the bawling was obvious in the photos. Not attractive to begin with, I am HIDEOUS when I cry. Again: Go me!

So I got to thinking about why it was that I was emotion at these two points when I really could not have been more eager to get on with things. It also sparked a memory of being inexplicably very upset when a girl from grammar school—whom I hated, as she'd always been a right shit to me—transferred away from my high school to a public school. I went so far as to write her a note saying that I would miss her. Even at the time, fully half of me felt like it was absolute suicide to show any kind of vulnerability to someone who delighted in making me feel small. Anyway, that whole "WTF was that about?" vibe ended up giving me the first verse.

It's the [C] strangest [F] time for [C] tears [F]
For the [G] knots in your [C] shoulders to let [G] go of the [C] grudges
That damned [Em] up all your [Am] lonel- [F] iness for years [C] [F] x 2

Initially I thought this verse would wrap around into the second verse by vamping on the motown-y I-IV split measure goodness, and after the second verse, I'd go into what I had written as the chorus. I can't remember now if I finished what I thought would be the chorus first, or if I had the second verse written. In any case, in the draft that I played on Sunday I had a second verse and then the chorus as follows:

Verse (same chords as above):
When the words build up in your mouth
They will spill through your teeth just to fall at the feet
Of the ones who can't see there's a way to get out

and:

Chorus
When you [G] feel like you're [F] falling [Dm] soundless- [Am] ly
Look [Dm] up and you'll [Am] see the [F] forest for the [C] trees
And [G] fall soundlessly [C] [F] vamp

That chorus was the only tiny piece salvaged from my initial foray into this song. More or less the chords I'd decided on, and I hadn't really hammered out the second half of it.

The second verse just kind of fell together in somewhat sloppy fashion. I was pulling from a list of phrases that had the same rhythm and "mouth feel" of "It's the strangest time for tears," and I kept thinking something along the lines of "There are words on the tip of my tongue." I was not enjoying trying to write to a rhyme for tongue, and then I realized that I wanted the phrase NOT to be a cliché. I wanted to give a sense of knowing that keeping my mouth shut was the smart thing to do, ending up blurting something out anyway, and having that be a frustrating nonevent.

Hmm, writing that down, it seems pretty obviously connected to the note to the nemesis, but I have been thinking about that verse as being more connected to the fact that this is around the time in my life that first started to notice people making fun of or being put off by the way that I talk. (In addition to the "This Garment Was Unsullied When I Left The House" placard that I've often contemplated getting, I sometimes want an "I'm Not Trying To Be Snooty, I Just Talk This Way" placard.)

I went to bed Saturday night with, something like those two verses and the chorus. Sunday morning would determine whether or not I'd make it to class with a song. When I sat down with it on Sunday morning, I was able to clear up a couple of problems straight away, and not long after I actually had the following verse:

It's the hardest truth to face
There is nothing you'll miss, not a single reminisce
There is nothing at all that you need from this place

Although it came pretty quickly on Sunday morning, it was very hard won. From early on, I'd had the sense that I wanted to say something about frantically grabbing up everything I needed, fleeing the scene, and only later realizing that my hands were completely empty. Extremely kludgey, so I guess unsurprising that it was hard to write. I was not and still am not in love with "The hardest truth to face," which feels stale, but it rhymes with place and . . . I got nothin'.

As soon as I wrote THAT verse, I felt like it was the last verse, and that there had to be another verse before it. It seemed like there had to be more realization and emotional distance after the second verse before I got to that one. What can I tell you? Verse three is just weird.

When you shout mirror, mirror on the wall
You will fear the familiar, see the face of the stranger
That you're bound and determined to be after all

I was trying to work in a clever PUNE OR PLAY ON WORDS about "fairest" and life being unfair and oh-thank-ba'al--that-didn't-make-the-cut-of-anything-performed-in-public.

So with something approaching a song that was finished enough for feedback, I did head up to OTS. A total aside, but a funny story. Traffic was terrible and it was very hot. As I was sitting on the Ryan with the windows rolled down, Delta Dawn came on the iPod. And you have to sing along to Delta Dawn. Loudly. So I did. And I hear from the car next to me: "SHE'S 41 AND HER DADDY STILL CALLS HER BABY!" By the time the chorus came around both the folks in that car and the one on the other side of me were singing along in something approximating 3-part harmony. I declare that the most fun you can have on the Dan Ryan.

Annnyyyway.

I played the song in class, and the Kernel complimented the melody and said that he had a suggestion that might be "Rad." (Yes, he actually said "Rad.") What I had positioned as the 4th verse ("It's the hardest truth to face.") was actually the chorus, whereas what I'd positioned as the chorus was actually the bridge. After I thought about it for half a second, it seemed that at the very least I had put this thing together in the wrong form, which likely contributed to getting stalled. It's absolutely true that the "Tree falling in the woods" sentiment is kind of a passing thought, not the main message.

Not one to do my own work if I don't have to, I demanded that the Kernel tell me what the music should sound like over the new chorus. He said, "Why not just the same chords, and the repetition will be what makes it the chorus." Which, as you know, is totally crazy. Oh, wait. It's not. Because there are like 1 million great songs that take the same damned chord progression and make the sections distinct.

On Tuesday, I played the song for my guitar/voice teacher, E, first the way I wrote it, then again with Verse 4 as the chorus and the chorus as the bridge. She agreed this was the way to go, so I asked for HER advice on how to make the chorus a chorus and she said, "Oh, you'd just produce it so that it's a chorus. Are we producing this? Let's produce this. You'd add harmony, and that right away makes this the chorus." So she sang harmony et voila! Fun!

Oh, except that for recording purposes that left me having to do scary things. Although E singing harmony definitely made the chorus chorus-y, I knew my thin, uncertain harmony wouldn't, so I also changed the chords at the end of each verse leading into the chorus. Rather than vamping on C to F, I just went right up the scale in split measures: C to Dm to Em to F to G and into the same verse chords.

My harmony is AWFUL, but it just had to be good enough to get this up a week late.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 12, In Which I Feel Both Very Sad and Very Weird

2011-04-02T14:59:00.002-05:00

When I first started songwriting classes, I embarrassed myself mightily on 2 occasions by crying in class. I am both a crier and not a crier. During that time, life really kind of sucked. The ZK had spent the first few months of 2008 mostly dead and entirely unemployed. I was woefully underemployed and we were both discovering how bad the job scene was. (Lest you question my priorities, I use my volunteer points to pay for my songwriting classes.) At the time of both crimes, I really had no idea I was going to cry until I was actually crying, and the tears were only loosely connected to the songs. I am sitting here on my couch nearly 3 years later, cringing and seriously considering fleeing the country.

I would like to say for the record that I DID NOT CRY this week in class, although it was a very close thing. On March 26, Diana Wynne Jones died. She'd been diagnosed with lung cancer a few years ago, and had recently stopped treatment for a recurrence, after her doctors deemed it ineffective.

Having always been a nerd and a reader, I have many, many authors that I love, but I can't really think of one more important to me than Diana Wynne Jones. When I was about 9, I checked Witch Week out of the library and read it probably 4 times before it was due again. I was over the moon when I found Charmed Life in a second hand bookstore and my mother let me use some of her store credit to buy it. And then it was the library again for Fire and Hemlock.

So many of the things that I used to make and define myself come from her: I became fascinated by England and scared up a British pen pal (who, sadly, proved to be rather boring and annoyed by my incessant questions). I decided that, like Polly, I wanted to like classical music, and it turned out that I did. And I identified with her characters: With Polly and her broken parents and their invasions into the life she was trying to make. Maybe most importantly, Diana Wynne Jones showed me that escape was possible—through books, through school, through art, and through sheer force of will.

Of course, my obsession with DWJ and other fantasy forms wasn't always easy. At some point, I started to experiment with writing a little of my own fantasy. Around the same time, I was also falling in love with Jean Webster and her epistolary pastiche, so most of my writing was "homage" in the form of letters and diary entries. My mother found and read my notebooks in one of her routine violations of my fourth amendment rights and decided that I had had a break with reality. There was a particularly epic fight in which I essentially invited her to fax me the rules to her little game about what was real and what wasn't.

Passing over that unpleasantness, about 10 years ago, I was chatting on a Buffy the Vampire Slayer IRC channel with an acquaintance. She revealed that she was going on the London Eye with an author of hers as part of some World Book Day Event. I asked her the author's name, and she said something along the lines of "Oh, you probably won't have heard of her, it's Diana Wynne Jones." I exclaimed, "The silken skin of his back!" and she responded, "Sentimental drivel." And oh, what a renaissance! Such riches that I hadn't known existed: I'd never read Howl's Moving Castle or The Homeward Bounders or or or or or . . . wonderful. And, of course, I got a dear friend out f the deal who managed to convince my sister that the bust of Giles as a Fyarl demon that she'd given us as a wedding present was, in fact, a juicer.

Our assignment for this week had actually been to rewatch a movie that was important to us, choose a character we identified with, and write a song (in first person) from that character's perspective at the end of the movie. As soon as I read the news about DWJ I thought, "I am going to need to write my song about her." Immediately after that, I thought, "Ugh, you pathetic feeb. You can't possibly write a song about her! How dare you!?" Hmm . . . mom might not have been ENTIRELY off base about that break with reality.

Sunday night I was more or less trying to sneak up on my songwriting self, if such a self exists. I had really not had any time to rewatch a movie, and anyway, only strange Japanese movies kept presenting themselves. We didn't technically have any musical requirements except the Kernel's parting shot "It should sound like what it sounds like," which, you know, complicates the Japanese thing.

Kikujiro was the movie that kept most insistently presenting itself for consideration, and I did actually watch the last 7 minutes or so. Masao's dream on a field of stars led me to what would eventually become my bridge/B section/whatever you want to call it.

[Dsus4] How can I [G7/F] sleep I am [Csus2] closing in [G]
On the [Gsus2/A] name [Csus2] of the [G7/F] last of the [Dsus4] stars

Initially that second G7/F (if in fact that is the name of that chord—I neglected to get confirmation in class, possibly because I was trying not to cry). was actually an Ebmaj7, which was very weird and dissonant, but I kind of liked it. When this section had that chord and was standing alone, I thought, "Ok, I am not writing a DWJ song after all." It seemed too firmly tied to the Kikujiro ending.

And then I started writing verses that were very clearly DWJ verses, as the phrase "I am going nowhere" struck me as a not terrible opening line. (Playing with the word nowhere is central to the plot of Fire and Hemlock and "alternative wheres" are at the center of many of DWJ's works.) Parts of verses started to come to me pretty quickly, then, and I just left the bridge on the page under them, figuring I'd separate it out into its own document later.

Initially, Verse 1 was purely references to DWJ's books and characters, which kind of left me nowhere to go. So I had a version of Verse 1 and the bridge sitting on the page. I realized that the verses needed to mix things about her books and characters with a more immediately present moment. It shortly became obvious that the moment had to be connected to the fact of her death. And then I remembered this lovely piece that Neil Gaiman wrote about seeing Diana for the last time.

Suddenly, the bridge fit with the verses that were shaping up, if I changed the word sleep to "rest" and got rid of the aggressively weird Ebmaj7. The second half I had for Verse 1 became the second half of verse 2. Without too much trouble the lyric for the second half of Verse 1 got roughed out along with the first half of Verse 2. By Sunday night had the chords for those as well.

[Dm] I am going nowhere, I have [F] been there in the dreams
Of a [Gm] silver-haired woman and the [F] child she has been [Dm]
[Dm] I hear them say it's [F] safe to rest, the [Gm] light is paper thin
Now, [Fadd9] here I am [Am] waiting while the [C] stone vases spin [Dm]

[Dm] Another time, another place, [F] another life consumed
By the [Gm] white, hot, bloodless fires I [F] walked through in my youth [Dm]
[Dm] I have braved the [F] ghosts, the mothers, [Gm] worlds away from mine
Now, [Fadd9] here I'm going [Am] nowhere, [C] running out of time [Dm]

[Dm] [Dsus2]

Verse 1 is almost entirely drawn from Fire & Hemlock; Verse 2 could also be a reference to the Undying Laurel from that book, but also to Christopher, Cat, and the other 9-lived enchanters from that series. For once, I didn't struggle too much with rules about what the verses must be or do. It felt like thinking out loud about the themes in all her books, which of course deal with a lot of the good and not so good in her own life.

I'm not in love with the verse's chord progression. It is more mournful than I wanted it to be, although changes I made to the melody as late as Tuesday afternoon alleviated that, at least to some extent. The progression in the bridge is one of those weird things that came all by itself and insisted that I figure out how to play it. When I had originally written it with the Ebmaj7 in it, whatever wrote it insisted that was right. After I grafted it to the verses, though, it was content to ascend, then descent. I kind of like its ambiguous character, but I'm still not sure it's right for this song.

I wrote the third verse on Monday evening before rushing up north to practice, then play at Silvie's. . There's a brief shout out to Calcifer and Howl's Moving Castle, then just generic reflections (that I have no right to make) on life and all that. The long second line dogged me when playing it in class, but it also was resistant to change. I really don't like the last line of this verse.

[Dm] Stars must fall to earth we cannot [F] catch them in our hands
Anchored [Gm] heartless like these hours slipping [F] by like grains of sand [Dm]
[Dm] I have sown a [F] paper garden, [Gm] sons and daughters grown
Now, [Fadd9] here in the [Am] arms of nowhere, [C] I am not alone [Dm]

I was really unsure if I could go back to the bridge/B part, but it felt abrupt just ending on the third verse. As it turned out, R wanted to hear the B part again, hence the repetition at the end. I didn't tell my classmates what the song was about before playing it, and they had funny guesses. D said something that I really liked about how the narrator seemed like this ephemeral being dipping in and out of the scenes, which I guess is not a terrible way to describe the relationship between author and characters.

Very hard pressed for recording time, as we have house guests and I have work coming out of my bottom. There are incredibly dead spaces where I just keep hanging out on Dminor for no good reason other than I didn't have time to do another take. Probably there could be short melodic passages there. Or something. Um, you'll also hear the tippy tappy of hound dog nails over the vocal track.

As the title notes, I feel really weird about this song and was tempted not to record it, but here it is anyway.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 11, Which Is Surprisingly Chipper and E-Majory

2011-03-24T23:01:00.002-05:00

What E-major is doing in a song about adolescence I do not know.

First, an epilogue to last week's entry: So after my guitar/voice teacher asked why my songs are so creepy and weird, I explained that it the E-minor cliché's fault (this is before I realized it was Catholicism's fault), and gave her the backstory about it starting in a good place. We got to talking about big families, sharing rooms, and so on.

So this week she looks at me very seriously and says, "I've been thinking about your song. And I'm wondering: Would it have been better if it was just your younger brother you had to share a room with?" I said that, no, it really would still have been strange and problematic, because it basically meant that from the age of 7.5, I was getting up with a baby in the middle of the night. She then looked worried and murmured, "Well, V is only 4 years older than S. . ." So now I have my poor beleaguered teacher worrying about how sharing a room is messing up her kids. Go me!

This week's assignment was to start with a personal timeline, filling in our first memory and all the striking memories that crowd childhood, because it seems like an eternity. We were also supposed to thinking about how big events overlap imperfectly, even if the memories seem separated. Then we were to write a song using age 14 as a jumping-off point.

Like most human beings, I was miserable when I was 14. It was Freshman year of high school. I got the mumps. I read Gone With the Wind. Several times. Back to back. See above, re: the mumps. The piano teacher I actually liked got divorced and moved away. I met D, who is on the very short list of people from the first 18 years of my life that I still talk to, and we amused each other and ourselves by exploring the rococo art of telling time in German.

But 14 is post-12, and so the Odd-Numbered Boyfriend dominates the scene. There had been torturous Circling and communication and miscommunication through friends. There was liking, Liking, not liking or Liking, liking but not Liking. And so on. And finally, very late one Sunday night in September, we kissed for the first time. (Well, the first time that counted.) I hadn't necessarily intended to write about the ONB.

I sat down with the guitar and nothing much was happening. I pulled out a Kate Wolf song I'd been working on in my lesson for alternative strum patterns and played with that a bit. I practiced a song I'm going to play this coming Monday with my songwriting codependent. Then the stalling officially started, as I sat there muting the strings and just playing around with different strums and rhythms. I hit on the kind of poor-man's reggae thing, and started to play around with that and some A-shaped barre chords.

I was trying to do this in conjunction with memories in the hopes that music and lyrics would fit together better than they usually do for me. My main theory about why the ONB IS the ONB is diabolical hormonal imprinting of some kind. We certainly had nothing in common, never got along, had temperaments that were very different in some ways, and very much the same in the most destructive and difficult ways. I was never happy with him (and it's not a stretch to say he was never happy with me), but I was very often happy (or a teenage-approximation thereof) at his house.

It was bigger than mine. His sisters shared the upstairs room at the front of the house and he had his own room at the back. But even better than its size was the fact that I liked his mom, she liked me, and she lacked my own mother's "guilty until proven innocent" approach, so she left us all more or less to our own devices. Our whole group of friends hung out at his house a lot.

While I was playing around with the barre chords, I remembered hanging out in his room for an afternoon that was more amicable than most. He was teaching me to play chess and ended up having to cheat to beat me. Later, we did crawl out the window of his room to sit on a bit of roof overhanging the backdoor.

That got me to thinking about my neighborhood in general. About five years ago, without meaning to, I wrote something about my neighborhood that turned out to be one of those things that people respond to that you don’t know how you created. I thought I’d actually transferred it over to this blog, but apparently not. Not very long, so here it is:

It's also June. But we are, nominally, grown ups (although I'd like to take this opportunity to any accusation-hurling Bunnyfaces lurking about that I am spouseless, childless, and the house is really the Zombie King's. Neener.) so the month doesn't hold the magic that it once did. There aren't long months of delicious school-lessness stretching out in front of me.

Free time and welcome breaks come in smaller packages now, with stretches of hard work and long "to-do" lists zigzagging along between them. That's not a complaint. I'd traveled to 41 out of 50 states, Canada, and Mexico before I was 16, all of them on the modified endless summer deal that is a cop's furlough. But I've only really been to a small fraction of those—all on my own, piecemeal adult time, summer and otherwise. And that's ok. The places I'll go are farther, richer, grander, and altogether more rewarding than the little world open to me in summers past: A trip to the country hand in hand with one to the Big City, the Big Easy to make wedding plans, indubitably a trip or two to check the corruption levels on the godless child.

But for a whole segment of the population, the world changes in these few weeks, with the heat and with the month. When I drive home now, it's light, no matter how late Castle Demented has kept me in its clutches. And the heat and the month mean that there are children everywhere, because that's the kind of neighborhood we live in now. I'm an interloper—because I'm a an adult, because, mostly, I drive my car down our streets. I'm off the sidewalks, off the porches, off the asphalt, which is where you are as often as possible, for as long as possible if you're part of the swinging under-12 set.

So as I was making way for a gaggle tonight (hey, they're their streets for now; I can wait), I was wondering who we are to them. When I think back to when I was them, we knew where to go--whose houses were fair game, who'd freak out if you stepped on their lawn, let alone cut through their yard or used their porch as a base or glue. It was a pretty simple blueprint: Most of the houses had yielded one or more of the pack, so we'd have a man with the inside line—someone who knew what influence shift and seasonal work might be having on the would-be killjoys within.

Even without an insider, we had a feel for what we could and couldn't get away with, and when we didn't need to try:The Lynchs were grinches, their own kids grown and gone, they had no interest in giving an inch more of ground to anyone else's. Worse still, they were our parents' friends and there was no argument we could win, no complaint against which we could defend.

But for every Lynch, there was a Mrs. Zelko. Her yard was off limits, because she had big dogs—an Irish Setter named Freedom and, later, a Doberman whose name I've forgotten, but her porch, her tree, and her front lawn were fair game. When she ventured out to do work in the yard, we'd descend on her in a swarm, begging to help. No matter how many of us showed, she'd find a job for each and buy us ice cream, either from a passing truck, or by taking us on an illicit walk to The Drugstore (across 63rd street and definitely verboten) where she worked. Her grandkids, Seamus and Allison, visited infrequently enough that they were always novelties: Hours of entertainment even when half of us were on the run from babysitting duty for sibs their age.

I know there were mysteries. Exotic people like the Hidalgos, who got superbonus points for being Hispanic (the only non-white people I'm aware of living within a half mile of us), of unknown profession, and living in the upstairs apartment of the two-flat next door.

Unknown quantities like the Medullas (yes, the Medullas)—two ancient sisters living with their even more ancient brother, who would walk three house lengths twice a day, every day.

Mrs. Manus, a widow with two adult (relative to the pack) daughters, one with Down Syndrome. She initially replaced the Hidalgos when they move. Before I think I really understood what a widow was, she most scandalously wound up remarrying an old man who lived in a house across the street. I never knew his name. He lived in one of the few houses set far back on the lot, leaving too much of his yard visible from the house to be of much use to us, and anyway, Mrs. Manus she remained to everyone.

But people like us aren't on my childhood block—no kids, strange jobs, odd hours. And my block is not my childhood block. I can't guess what these kids' parents do for a living. There are probably nearly as many cops, more firemen, fewer carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and so on. Lord knows there's more diversity, racially, ethnically, culturally, however you want to slice it. There's no particular reason that they should know the lay of the land in the same way we did, except that the kids are so much the same, it seems like the adults must be too. We're in there somewhere. I wonder where.

So, I had a sort of pleasant vibe thinking about the neighborhood and sitting out on that roof. And then I was thinking about how terrible Sundays always were when I was 14, particularly September Sundays, when I wasn’t really resigned to being back in school. It always felt like I couldn’t stave off that sinking feeling that came with Sunday evenings.

I wasn’t getting anywhere interesting trying to strum off-beat barre chords on my acoustic, so I picked up FrankenGibson. All of a sudden with the off-beat strum, a B to A to E thing came together with a little padder split measure of E and A. And the lyrics started to just fall on to the page in a very specific way. Wrote the first verse in about 3 minutes.

[B] Upstairs in the back room there's a
[A] Window that we crawl through just to
[E] Chase the Sunday moments slipping
[B] Down the [A] September [E] sky [A] [E] [A]
[B] For once I bit my tongue and so it
[A] Figures that you're listening as the
[E] Time we have is slipping, slipping
[B] Down the Sept- [A] ember [E] sky [A] [E] [A]

For the second verse, I ended up borrowing an image that I hadn’t used in “Small, Dark Room in Blue.” A friend of my older brother’s lived directly across the street from us. His parents were older and on the odd side even for our neighborhood. His mother, Rose, would stand at the front door and yell “Steeeeeevvveeennn” when she wanted him to come home. Everyone’s mom did this, but somehow Rose sticks in your mind. For me that, might be because when my younger brother (whose name happens to be Stephen) was a toddler, he’d press his face to the screen door and yell, “WHAT?” in response. Rose was rather deaf, so she never heard him.

Three doors down the street we both hear
Rose call out for Steven, hear his
Footsteps on the pavement down be-
Low the September sky
I listen close, you hold your breath, we
Both try not to show we know that
My name could be next from down be-
Low the September sky

I had to work the reference to Rose and Steve several times to make it fit, partly because I was trying to make every refrain be “Down the September sky.” By the time I got done with the second verse, I knew I’d need a bridge, and I was dreading it. I always dread bridges, because I suck at them. But my dread was UNFOUNDED because the other part of the assignment was to try substitutions from the world’s MOST MAGICAL, UNICORN-KISSED chart of substitutions from the Kernel.

So, structurally, my verses go:

V, IV, I
A kind of split measure-y thing that goes V, IV, I again
Then the padder split measure of I, IV, I, IV

The bridge is the same chord progression, just with viable substitutions:

iii-minor
ii-minor
vi-minor
I
ii-minor
And back into the padder measure of I, IV, I IV

Could not have been easier and for once it wasn’t like stopping and starting on the red line.

Even before I wrote the second verse, had the end of the third verse written (and in retrospect, it’s quite obvious that the song ends on that moment). I had quite a bit of trouble with the top of verse 3, although I knew that I wanted one more image suggesting how late it was getting.

I had something brewing about “houses two by two” (most houses in my neighborhood were identical to one of the houses next door) and things growing darker. Windows? No, although I worked on something about windows as eyes that just turned out creepy and not E-majory at all. Streetlights? No, the street lights would be coming ON, not going OFF. Finally, porch lights came to me. (Shoot: Just realized that I’ve used porch light in another song, so now I’ll have to retire the image.)

Then I had a hell of a time with the preposition. I had written in my notebook, “I am shaking, I am half undone,” which I liked, but I couldn’t get DONE to lead into 2 concepts so that the halves of the verse would be parallel. I also was having trouble cramming “by the” or “by something” into that space. Finally, I gave myself permission for this verse not to match exactly as the other two had. (Fear not, I’m still very disappointed with myself. But I do think I get points because Dorothy was actually the mother of my friend who HAPPENED to live right next door to the ONB so I very well COULD have seen her bringing the laundry in late one Sunday night, although I don’t recall actually doing so.) I also decided that I’d just have to work harder to cram the syllables in:

Two by two the porchlights dim
Dorothy brings the laundry in, the
Minutes tick away, tick a-
Way this September sky
Lean my head against your shoulder and you
Let me, so I let you see that
I am shaking, I am half un-
Done by my September sky
Oh, the September sky

During my lesson, my voice teacher pointed out that my padder measure was weird and stilted, partly because I was trying to play 16th notes at the end of the measure, but not at the front, so it sounded clunky. She tried very very hard to figure out something that was less clunky, but I just ended up playing what I’d practiced when I got to class. As I was practicing the song before class, it became increasingly clear that I had left myself exactly nowhere to breath. The Kernel fixed that right up with a full measure of B allowing me to pause dramatically (and breathe deeply) right before “the September sky.”

My time for doing this is quite limited this week, so there’s even more sloppiness in the recordings than usual. I recorded the guitar part on FrankenGibson and I’ve put two versions of my pitch-y, crappy vocals, one “Live Performance” and one “Female Rock” effects on the track. The guitar effect is “Big Wheels,” mostly because it makes me laugh.

Live Performance doesn’t do enough to disguise my uncertain pitch.
Rock Vocals is more forgiving, but I think it destroys some of the rhythm of the lyrics because of the echo effect.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 10, In Which Depression Hurts Everywhere

2011-03-18T16:04:00.003-05:00

I'm not sure this was the ideal activity for this afternoon. I should find thinking about songwriting and recording rewarding in some way, but as I was commiserating with my songwriting codependent this week, mostly it just seems to erodes my self image, even though I know there are things about it that are helpful.

Two requirements for this week: Employ an E-minor cliché in the music (movement from Em to Em(maj7) to Em7 to Em6—See Aimee Mann's "Save Me," "My Funny Valentine," and one meellion other songs if you think you're not familiar with this) and write "Neil Style." The Kernel is reading Neil Young's biography at the moment and shared with us Neil's comments on his process. Probably most of you know that I hate Neil Young (or you do now), so there was a healthy dose of chagrin when it turned out that his process is pretty similar to mine, meaning there is really no process. So that has me worried that all my songs sound like chaotic, self-indulgent shite. Oh well, at least I don't sound like Tiny Tim while singing them, right? RIGHT?

Lyric-wise, I actually started in a fairly good place. There's some silly melodrama going on in my natal family lately, and my sibs and I have been trying to make the best of it. During the action-packed part of this, my older brother was texting me to keep me up to date. The two of us don't have much of a relationship for a number of reasons, not least of which is that we do not see eye-to-eye on anything. However, in the last year or so, we've been more in touch with each other than we probably have been our whole lives. He texts me pictures and funny stories about his kids and pets, I do the same. Not exactly something to end a feel-good movie on, but it's pleasant.

So I got to thinking about the fact that the two of us shared a room for much of our childhood, although he's 5 years older than I am, and we later added our younger brother (8 years my junior) to the room when he was a baby. Our mother denies that we shared a room that long, but the bedroom math in our 3-bedroom house doesn't work out any other way.

On the train on Monday morning, I started to jot down some memories of the room. I wanted to capture the odd juxtaposition of someone that I certainly don't know very well now having the same kind of specific, intimate memories of the room. I knew that the opening image would have to do with the walls, which were painted blue but had this horrible white wallpaper with hockey players in primary colors on it. The next thing that was snagging my attention was the sliding panel to the attic crawlspace, which was in the closet. It always scared me for vague reasons. It's possible that I associated it with sudden death because the "emergency sacraments kit" was on the closet shelf right beneath it. Hmm . . . I've been blaming the fact that this song came out very creepy on the E-minor cliché, but maybe it's Catholicism's fault as usual.

By Monday night, I had 2 verses that were nearly done and I knew that I needed a bridge. I had no clue what the bridge was going to sound like either lyrically or harmonically. Here's verse 1:

There's a small, dark room in blue
And I know just where the wallpaper peels (E-minor cliché over these 2 lines, ending on Em again).
I fit my [G] fingernails into every [D] scar
And the [Em] past still [Em(maj7)] shatters me [Em7]
[Em7] Into [Em6] shards of you [A]

The cliché started to feel a bit relentless pretty quickly, in part because I was giving a full measure to each chord. Musically, though, that really pulls the ear, and for a long time, it kept feeling like there would be two runs through the cliché before hitting the G and D chords. Given the dark lyrical tone, though, that just seemed like overkill, so I dragged myself into making the third line play over major chords.

With the help and encouragement of my guitar/voice teacher, I've been trying to be less rhythmically boring, hence the strange strum pattern. I'm not sure that it really serves this song all that well, unfortunately, but it's a baby step away from my beloved downbeat. The split measure sandwich with the full measure of the Em7 in the established pattern was something was killing me when I was practicing to play it in class. I like the way it breaks the strum pattern briefly, then returns to it. I should probably strive to put more variation in, generally speaking.

My classmates and the Kernel were, as usual, very kind about my warbly, off-pitch performance, kindly calling the melody "floating" and comparing it to a Joni Mitchell song. Unsurprisingly, most of this was much easier when i was recording the guitar track without singing, then recording vocals without playing. But who knows? Maybe that killed what they liked about it?

The peeling wallpaper and the fingernails in verse 1 were eyebrow raising for me, given that, as I said, this actually started out in a positive place. Yeah, that was blown up by verse 2.

There's a small, dark room in blue
The bare floor buckles, cold beneath my feet
And the shadows drink the copper streaming
Through the window from the street
Like a shade of you

Hey, check it out! "There's a small, dark room in blue" is a beginning refrain! Who knew? Certainly not me. Although I was relieved to find that working out. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach as I was thinking about trying to put a chorus to this. Soooo not a chorus-having song.

The third verse that I wrote Monday night turned out to be very much a placeholder. In fact, I can remember very little of how it originally went, except that I kept trying to cram the word "trapdoor" into it. Good word! Does not work in the verses At. All.

There's a small, dark room in blue
Where the corners sigh forgotten, whispered fears
And the doorway yawns and the ceiling falls
All is gone without a tear
I remember you

When in doubt, blow up your song's setting. Or burn it down. This is the second time I've done that in a song. In fact, it's the second time I've started a song from a set of positive memories, then written something really creepy that implies the destruction of the thing that prompted the good memories. In the first one, I burned down 's Catskills house!

On the one hand, I feel like ending with "I remember you" is kind of cheap. On the other, it neatly gives the song a narrative arc, right? The narrator is visiting (in actuality or in memory) a place important to both him/her and the subject of the song. The first two verses are about that being sort of emotionally destructive, and by the third, the narrator has achieved at least movement if not closure.

When I played the song for my lesson, I didn't know what the bridge was doing yet. I had dummy lyrics and chords that turned out to be so egregiously wrong, I spent at least 90 minutes on a terrible harmonic treadmill. Part of the issue was that I'd ended verse 2 on a G major chord to get into the bridge. I knew it was wrong, but I really thought the first chord of the bridge was a D (the melody note is F# on "Palm"). In 11th hour desperation, I just strummed the guitar entirely open to get into the bridge, which the kernel tells me is an Em11. What I ended up with for the bridge . . . I still don't know about it:

[Am] Palm against the [Em] door
[Bm] Proof against what [Em] comes
I have [Am] gone before [Bm]
[Em] Yet to feel the [B7] sun

I'd had a coda that went back to the first two lines of the song. (Ok, I admit it, I like the wallpaper line and was looking for any excuse to go back to it.) The Kernel rightly pointed out, though, that ending on the A major chord and the line "I remember you" fits the mood of the song much better and doesn't wear out my weird refrain as much.

The recording. I was going to try to record a little bit of lead guitar over this, but today's not been a good day. My voice sounds thick and stuffy. The melody does not actually climb that high, but for some reason I'm very afraid of it, which shows in the absence of breath support and confidence.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 09, For Which I Have No Clever Title

2011-03-10T17:33:00.000-06:00

I should remember to write before I record. If I do things the other way around I tend to be embittered about the song. I am certainly embittered about this one.

The source of my bitterness is thrown into sharp relief by quotations from my guitar/voice teacher and The Kernel:

E: "Wow, that's pretty. And that's . . . a lot of chord changes. Why would you do that to yourself?"
TK: "That's . . . some fancy guitar playin' you wrote there."

And as any fool knows "Fancy Guitar Playing" is not something that one associates with me. "Guitar Playing" is, in fact, not something that one associates with me.

But let me back up. Our assignment this week was part lyrical, part musical and/or lyrical. We had a 3-column table of words and for each verse, we were to include one word from each column in the lyrics. Musically and/or lyrically, we were supposed to work on contrast: Establishing a pattern, then subverting the listener's expectations by deviating from it.

I started in my usual disorganized fashion on Monday with no real sense of what I was going to do. I picked up the guitar and started playing around with a D chord and a descending bass line (we had also talked about inversions quite a bit last week and the various ways in which they are used). I had a very strong sense of a melody over this, and then the second line revealed itself to be an Fmaj7 walking itself back down to a D.

I guess at some point I must have gone to the notebook and started to think about lyrics. The first thing I have written down are a number of sentences or sentence-like lyrics constructed from the table's columns. These had little or nothing to do with the chords and melody that I'd been playing around with. In fact, only one of them eventually made it into the song, partly because it suggested a strange line that also ended up making it into the song.

I then abandoned this approach because it suddenly became obvious that the melody and the moving bass lines I'd established called for short lines. I picked the guitar back up and the first 3 lines of the verse just kind of fell right into place:

You are certain [D, with a descending bass line]
[Fmaj7] It is [Am7] written [D]
In the [Bm7] hard [Bm7/A] right [B7/D#] angles of your jaw [Bm7 to Bm7/A to Bm7/D x 2]

You might ask where the HELL the chords under that third line came from. I wish I knew. I could hear them in my head from the first time I tried to play the line. It probably took me 10 minutes to figure out how to replicate what I was hearing: 1 spent picking it out on the guitar, 2 spent looking up what the hell one calls the chords. and the other 7 arguing with myself about the D#. It sounds SO weird. But the voices in my head insisted on it.

The next two lines marked a return to the notebook and a new variation on the descending bass line pattern (although I didn't realize that I WAS doing a variation on that first pattern until The Kernel pointed out to me that I had misnamed the chords over this part of the verse, and really what I was playing was just half of the descending bass line over the D):

I remember
Your hopeless fingers [These two are just the D pattern, then the Fmaj7 pattern]
Pressing white against the door [Here I'm just alternating between D/C and D/B]
Against the letters of my name [On "letters" I just go to the regular D]
Against the wall [Fmaj7 to Am7 to D twice starting on name]

After writing this verse, warning bells started to sound. Looking at the verse as a whole, it's pretty clear this is some kind of a break-up song (aren't they all?). But I wasn't sure what other ground I'd be covering or what their WAS to cover. Warning bells are still kind of sounding. This doesn't have a title, which reflects the lack of repetition, something I surprisingly didn't get dinged for in class. I don't know why it doesn't have much lyrical repetition—I guess maybe because the music is kind of buzzing around the same basic motifs?

I dithered a lot over verse 2 until I realized that it didn't start with "You," it started with "I." Even then, though, I kept having to discard opening lines like "I am finished," "I am ruined," "I have fallen."

I wrote "I am hollow," and it was almost right, but not quite. It wouldn't sing over the top of the verse, no matter what I did. After trying to force it for a while, I went back to the notebook and immediately wrote, "I am empty," which I fought for a while, even though I had a strong sense that it was right. I like the word hollow better and I was reluctant to let it go.

In working with empty and a "close rhyme" (really, my rhymes in this song are more "moderately far" rhymes, if that), I kept coming up with "surrounds me." I kept thinking that verb tense was wrong, and that was gnawing at me, but it was really that it was the wrong kind of verb. I wanted something active and something that conveyed the idea that the narrator might be emotionally done, but that didn't make him/her vulnerable. I dropped in "I draw around me" as a working concept, telling myself that it could work with drawing boundaries or something that protects, like armor or a mantle. As is typical, the placeholder got codified in the song.

For the long third line, I went to the word table and immediately hit on "dangerous," "smile," and "reach." Then I had a happy little moment, as I realized that "hollow" clearly fit in the second half of the verse AND I would be able to use a lyric I'd abandoned long ago in my moleskine (the concept, anyway) about footsteps sounding just as hollow, whether they were coming or going. Verse 2 became:

I am empty
I draw around me
Ev’ry dangerous smile that reached my eyes
You are hollow
You are an echo
You are one footstep in the hallway
Ringing fainter everyday
Inside my mind

I really don't know what that third line means, but for some reason, I rather like it.
In this verse, the Fmaj7 pattern doesn't repeat a second time. Instead, it goes to a G major chord and the melody rises with that chord, leading into the B section, which is pareve—neither a chorus, nor a bridge, just a B section.

"Inside my mind" was loosely suggested by something that approximately rhymes (or at least doesn't not rhyme ) with "eyes." That assonance and the word table gave me a nice short B section:

Can't [D7] find an honest word
Don't you [C7] tell me this won't hurt
A bit
[chromatic walk down back to D]

Folks in class did not like the hanging "a bit." I agree with them that it's weird in a formal sense. I also suspect that if I keep it there should be a chord change under it, rather than it just hanging on to the tail end of the C7. But my brain is being very stubborn about this music. I did try in recording to leave it off, to double it, to find another chord under it, and nothing would work.

By the time I needed to leave for our Lundi Gras dinner on Monday, I had the two verses and the B section squared away. On Tuesday, the third verse decided to be a delightful combination of easy and hard to write. I got the first 2 lines immediately, once I realized they started with "we." Way back when I was doing the sentence writing from the word table, I'd written "Skip the hopeless rain" in the notebook and rejected it as sux0rz. But something about "skip the" kept snagging on my brain, even though I was sure that the long third line was something about pretending. Why I thought that, I do not know, as "pretend" implies some kind of fondness, wistfulness, or what have you, and this was clearly shaping up to be a "Screw you, I'm going home" song.

SKIP, you idiot! Once I accepted skip as my lord and master, it was totally obvious that the line was "skip the long goodbye of the blind."

Third verse (musically the same as verse 2):

We are strangers
We are over
Can’t we skip the long goodbye of the blind
I am unbroken
I am in motion
I have gathered, I have salvaged
Every fragment that you claimed
And scattered wide

I had originally written "I am broken" to launch the second half of the verse, which has the same problems as "pretend." The narrator is clearly telling the other person that s/he is done, has moved on, has reassembled him/herself from component atoms.

Not entirely crazy about the cheap semi-repeat of the B section, but that's where this ends:

’m giving you my honest word
I’m telling you this doesn’t hurt
a bit

So this was definitely a weird song for me in that the the music really came first, almost entirely unaccompanied by lyrics, and at least until the second half of the second verse, the lyrics were driven by the demands of the music, helped along by the requirements of the assignment. Oh, I also didn't realize that it absolutely needed to be fingerpicked, not strummed, until right before my lesson on Tuesday.

Recording this was extremely difficult. E had given me 2 things that I must do so as to do justice to music itself: Emphasize the bass line, and as often as possible, let the high E string ring out (all the D stuff is really Dsus2) as often as possible as I was fingerpicking. She's certainly right, but my sloppy playing made this a real challenge. In fact, you can probably hear that I ended up recording in sections, rather than eventually achieving a continuous guitar track (or something resembling one). The vocals were also hard to record, as the timing is slightly odd.

Recording has "sixties texture" to smooth out some of my rotten guitar playing and "female rock vocals" applied, though helping out my pitch would be past the power of magic on this one:
Untitled

Songwriter's Navel: Week 08, Live From the Archives

2011-03-04T16:26:00.001-06:00

Hoping that WXRT doesn't have that phrase copyrighted.

So this is the first week of the new session at the Old Town School of Folk Music, which means that I did not have an assignment last week. I had thought about what I might do this week, given that I suck at writing without an assignment.

Naturally, taking the week off was the first thing that occurred to me. The second thing that occurred to me was putting up recordings of the songs I'd done for the showcase, which usually would have been last Sunday. When I knew that the showcase had been moved to this coming Sunday, I thought I'd perhaps just talk about the songs I'd decided on and perhaps how arrangements of them had developed. The problem is that I still haven't really decided and given that I have a cold I probably should save any singing (or singing-adjacent) voice in the hopes of being well enough on Sunday.

As I've mentioned before, taking time off is sure to lead to the total collapse of this endeavor, so I decided to go with something from the archives. I don't have all that many recordings of when I've performed with the exception of the first time that I did a slot of my own at the Acoustic Explosion. In a moment of panic, I'd promised my mother a video recording of that show as her Christmas gift. Nothing has ever been more painful than editing that video and audio. It took me 7 months. (That is literal, not exaggeration for comedic effect.)

I led off with this song on a shaky premise. Its unofficial title is "Laffy Taffy Hanukkah." I was also doing a cover of "Hard Candy Christmas" at that show because I'd promised myself that I would if I ever played out and because the show was very close to Christmas. Thus, I thought ALSO playing "Laffy Taffy Hanukkah" was hilarious inside my head. Ahem.

Why, you might ask, is the song called "Laffy Taffy Hanukkah," even unofficially? Well, we'd been given the assignment to write a "character" song along the lines of Patty Griffin's "Sweet Lorraine," Paul Simon's "Duncan," and so on. I seem to remember that I ended up working on this song over 2 weeks. I'd showed up with only one verse and part of a chorus and volunteered to skip performing it in class until the next week when we ran out of time.

I'd had a hard time deliberately writing in the direction of a character, not because I don't know some great ones about whom I'd like to write a song, and not because my brain isn't occupied by a bunch of fictional crazies who would be great subjects. I think it boiled down to trying too hard to be clever or profound.

At this time, I was reading Tom Robbins' Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates and having a hard time with it, as I increasingly do with Mr. Robbins. I love—venerate, even—Jitterbug Perfume and Skinny Legs and All, and the repulsiveness of his other novels offends me on the behalf of the wonderful heroines from those two.

Annnnyyyway. I got to thinking about characters that deserve better authors, and we'd just gotten around to hanging some of the art that we'd bought from the set of the Strange Tree Group's production of Mr. Spacky, the Man Who Was Continuously Followed by Wolves. That production, its artwork, and underwritten female characters naturally brings to mind Dickens and particularly poor Rosa Bud of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Dickens, of course, died while writing TMoED, and I thought how that was liberating for his characters, who were not trapped by his hackery. So I started to run with this idea lyrically and the first verse came out as sort of an admonishment of the author, leading into a chorus where the narrator gets to write herself.

[G] In these pages I have [C] sung just [C/B] like a bird [Am]
I have [Fmaj7] blushed and bloomed and [D] paled
As you [C] set down every word [G]
I’ve [G]sighed and sulked and simpered [C] and all [C/B] but disappeared [Am]
Your [F] pen left me an [Dsus2] afterthought
Bereft [C] of voice and [G] tears

One of the strange things to me about this song is that the music came to me . . . well, easily is not the right word. Very specifically and as a whole. In the verse, that first instance of an F chord (which implies the song is in C) was very definitely an Fmaj7, leaving the high E string ringing. And it was very definitely followed by a D-major chord, which contradicts the F by implying that the song is in G. In contrast, the second F was definitely an F and the second D was definitely a Dsus2.

This continued into the chorus where the G changed to a "Big G" (four-finger G chord where you play [from high to low] G-D-G-D-B-G), which theoretically sounds so much like a G played with two Bs, rather than two Ds, that people use them interchangeably all the time. Mr. Crankypants Music was having none of this: It was a 3-finger G in the verse and a 4-finger G in the chorus. This not-quite-descending bass line in the chorus was also very specific. It goes G-F#-C-B-C-B-D-E over the G to Cadd9 to A7sus4 progression.

It's also worth noting that this song insisted on being fingerpicked. At the time I wrote it I sucked at fingerpicking even more than I do now.

I am [G] more than a [Cadd9] painted rose, [A7sus4] more than a tale untold
Your [Am] pen cannot [Fmaj7] imagine all the [D] things I’m bound to [Dsus2] be
I am [G] fierce and I am [Cadd9] reckless, I have [A7sus4] dreams both dark and wild
Your [Fmaj7] story ends, here [D] I begin, and I’ll [C] be nobody’s [G]child

Oh, I was talking about the secret title. In trying to write the second verse, I'd sort of been promising my brain that it would get to insert the "great ideas" it had been coming p with into that verse, because they kept not quite making it into Verse 1 and the Chorus. I was certain at the time that the second verse would end up being all about what the narrator would do now that she was able to write herself. So I had a bunch of "I can/I will" statements in my notebook. At some point, I wrote the phrase "Laffy Taffy Hanukkah" in the margin to remind myself that Carol Hall had already gone to the trouble of writing "Hard Candy Christmas." Et voila! Incidentally, the Kernel hated (and presumably still hates) this title something fierce.

My brain ended up getting no satisfaction in the second verse, which became about how the author wrote his male characters:

Your men you make of dust, and to dust they shall return
Your pen breathes life into their minds
Inside a fire burns
Though you gave them feet of clay
They tread a path that’s all their own
You arm them well with words and will
In flesh and blood and bone

Oh, the clunky phrasing and awkward images! But what are you going to do? Write a third verse, I suppose . . . . But no. Both the verses and the chorus are rather long, the lyrics are dense, and everyone is like "For the love of god, please stop now!"

Anyway, here's the recording. There's actually video, too, but I'll spare myself that.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 07, I Write an Analytical Section for the GRE in Song Form

2011-02-25T15:14:00.002-06:00

Is there no end to my tediousness? No, there is not.

So Tommi left us with fairly loose instructions for an assignment. We were to do some variation on a "List" song, beginning each line of the verse with the same phrase. (Some examples: The Flaming Lips "Do You Realize?", Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows") Other criteria were ending the verses with a refrain and trying to write up tempo. I can't remember if I mentioned that last week's song was also supposed to be "up tempo." Obviously mine was not.

I had a pretty serious time crunch again this week. We were up at my sister's to hang out with my other sister (visiting from the frontier) and my brother and my adorable new nephew, who just gets adorabler every second. Monday, my friend and songwriting codependent was playing the 'splosion. On top of all that, I had mountains of grading to do.

Nonetheless I got a bit of time on the train on the way home from school to think about lyrics, and then I carved out about an hour and a half before heading up to Silvie's to write a bit.

In a situation that's somewhat unusual for me, I was not having much luck with a phrase I wanted to repeat. However, on the train, I suddenly got obsessed with a concept: Words that are antonyms of two words that are unrelated to each other (e.g., Right Wrong Left; Hard Easy Soft; Now Then Later, and so on). I began thinking that this kind of word play might advance the song that had stalled on me last week.

Not so much. In fact, if anything, it kicked that poor song while it was down by stealing part of its chorus. I think by the time we had to leave for the 'splosion, I had the first verse and the first part of the (pilfered) chorus:

It was [A] light when we got here
Now it's [D] too dark to see [Bm] clearly
And it's [A] all too [D] heavy for [A] me
I was [A] right from the start
You went [D] wrong in the end, [Em] truly
And what's [Bm] left can't be [Em] mended [A] again

Chorus

[G] Up in [A] smoke we go
We [D] go down [G] swinging

Something interesting—and by "interesting" I mean "annoying"—has occurred to me now that I am thinking more about the process of songwriting. When I set something down on paper thinking that it's just broad strokes to be refined later, I find when I do return to it that there are obvious structural things that I then feel married to. For example, I have this kind of ratcheted rhyme scheme "clearly" has an assonant connection to "here," and I'd been thinking of making the third line simply "it's far too heavy." When I tried to truncate the line, my ear kept insisting on "for me" because it hearkened back to "to see." Likewise, I kept trying to excise "mended" from the last line (because it sounds strange and dated), but the rhyme with "end" (and close rhyme with "again") kept asserting itself.

By some miracle, my private lesson room was unlocked when I got to OTSFM about an hour and a half before my lesson time. Despite having privacy and not having to worry about having my space usurped, I don't think I made any progress at all on the song before my lesson. From there, it was to the wings of the balcony to begin the truly desperate scramble time.

I think shortly after I started this phase, what turned out to be the rest of the chorus dropped in my lap. I swear at the time, I did not make the playground association of "see-saw" and "slide" with "swinging," but it seems like swinging must have suggested the rest, at least subconsciously. The chorus became:

[G] Up in [A] smoke we go
We [D] go down [G] swinging
[A] You saw a see-saw, I see a [Bm] slide

Where the Bm is quite obviously one of those "You have no idea what chord really goes there, DO YOU?" things.

Writing the second verse was painful. I got down what I thought would be the first half of that verse and had an obsessive-compulsive, rule-following crisis. Personally, I blame Catholicism.

Here's what happened. I was trying to employ the "Old New Young" triad and having a bitch of a time. The conceptual pattern that had asserted itself in the first verse was: Linking Word, First Antonym, Second Antonym (which has nothing to do with First Antonym)—light, dark, heavy and right, wrong, left.

I actually had written something I sort of liked, but then suddenly realized that OH NOES! New and Young are actually sort of synonymous. I went so far as to obliterate what I had written and liked because of some psychotic attachment to a pattern that ONLY I KNEW ABOUT. And I worked and I worked and I wrote out how the patterns were supposed to go in my notebook, and I started to panic.

Very late in the game, "One, Many, Few" suggested itself. Out of desperation, I set down the beginning of Verse 2 with that in mind and resurrected the cruelly executed trio (in a form I like less, but the form that I did like is lost to the mists of songs written electronically). I probably finished this verse at 7:15 or so:

Many times you said you knew
That I was the one for you, truly
Guess you said the same to more than a few
I was young, you were foolish
Nothing new under the sun, truly
It's all old, blue, borrowed, and done

You might notice that I pilfered again, this time from my own first verse. I needed "truly" for the assonance in this verse. I did not feel like peppering the song with adverbs that would stick out like sore thumbs, so I decided to just repeat "clearly" in verse 1 and keep "truly" for this verse. I kind of like "old, blue, borrowed, and done" for no particular reason.

I kept recording versions of this on my phone so that I didn't lose the melody entirely. Those recordings sent up a red flag about length. With 2 verses and a short chorus, this was going to be another song under 2 minutes. I see a pattern emerging: I only write bridges if it's an explicit instruction or in a panic. (Oh, and once when that mean old Kernel made me write a bridge even though my song already had 3 verses. What's worse is that he was right.) This is probably not unrelated to the sucktastic nature of my bridges.

I had a couple of trios that I'd wanted to get into the song, so I just kind of threw hem down on the page with not-very-different chords. And then I promptly forgot the melody just in time for class:

This is [G] now, that was [A] then, and it's [D] later than you know
You have to [Bm] go, I cannot [Em] stay, this has to [A] stop

In class, Tommi suggested playing around with tempo. Initially he played it much slower, which sounded cool (because he was playing it); when I said I'd tried to force a faster tempo on it because it was a suggestion, he then played something faster and very cool. Naturally, I cannot replicate this. He also suggested playing around with suspended chords and minor 7ths a bit. K then said that she felt like the chorus left things hanging and that she'd like to hear it repeated each time, perhaps with slightly altered words.

In recording this, I did play around with making the progression more interesting and Lord knows I tried to play with rhythm, but the only change that ended up sticking was the doubling of the chorus. BUT I did make what is for me a giant advance. On this recording there are TWO—count em TWO—guitar parts. I originally wanted to record the main guitar part with FrankenGibson, but quickly realized that I'm just too much of a spazz. Thus, I recorded with my acoustic as usual, then added a little (A VERY LITTLE) ornamentation with Frank. Mostly just arpeggiating here and there, but it was good practice for me. Vocals. Blegh, as usual. I sound so choppy and off key.

But here you go.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 06, Hurtling Toward Failure

2011-02-18T15:05:00.002-06:00

A new low in this project: I Tweeted my contemplation of seppuku by guitar headstock during the recording. What's it called when your self loathing makes you loathe yourself?

This was a rough week for my creative inner child. Initially our assignment was to write a song called "Thriving on Rejection" around a provided (lyrics and chords) chorus. The Kernel, who is jaunting about the continent this week and next, was consumed by second thoughts and sent an e-mail telling us we could just write a song around the general theme of rejection.

I gave writing to the chorus a try, but I admit I wasn't getting much of anywhere, so I started on the rejection-themed assignment. Unfortunately, I had nothing but half a verse and part of a chorus before I started feeling quite sick on Sunday night, courtesy of ridiculous food-and-drink-based overindulgence on Saturday. I tried to keep working, but it eventually got to the point where I couldn't concentrate at all. I scrawled down what I was doing on guitar (it was capo 3, and was doing some funky stuff with moveable shapes) and recorded the very brief snippets I thought I might now.

Monday morning, I worked on lyrics on the train, and I could see myself heading to a corner, full steam ahead, but did I try to turn things around? I did not. Of course, Monday was also Valentine's Day, which the ZK and I always use as an excuse to go out to a favorite restaurant. In this case, we had the phenomenal Valentine's Day menu at Big Jones Chicago. Om nom nom. As it turned out, I didn't get a chance to work on anything Monday night.

On Tuesdays, my commute is complex, so there's really no hope of working on the train. I had a student who needed to make up an exam, so I couldn't even plunk away during my office hours. I got to OTSFM and hied away to my bat cave, where I eventually accepted that this song was not going anywhere at all at this juncture. Partly it's because it's TRYING to be a sardonic, tongue-in-cheek song, and it was just getting more and more labored at every turn.

In the back of my head, my inner slacker kept whispering that I already HAD a song to play! (We never performed our "hook" songs in class.) My sloth and my fear of my sloth had a Bergmanesque chess game for my soul. While that was going on, I started playing around with a line that had made it into my notebook: "Black-Eyed Susan by the wall, in the corner, overlooked."

My private lesson time was fast approaching, but all of a sudden I had a melody and chords for a at least the first line of a chorus in my head. I very quickly hammered that out and cobbled together the rest of a chorus with some placeholder chords and recorded it on my phone:

Chorus
[F] Black-eyed [C]Susan of the [G] walls, oh [Am] won't you please
Pray for [F] these lost [C] souls, Oh [G] grant them [F] peace
Show your [Am] mercy to the [F] children of the [G] corners
[F] Black-eyed [G] Susan of the [C] walls

Lyrically I roll my eyes. I am more tired than anyone of the fact that religious metaphors are the first to present themselves. That said, I love the way "Black-Eyed Susan" sings, and hack that I am, I feel like the concept of the patron Saint of Wallflowers is kind of an interesting idea.

On the musical front, in my rush to get things down on the iPad, the melody stayed relatively solid in my mind (other than the last line), but the chords kept being interchangeable, which is never a good sign.

I went to my lesson, then quickly grabbed something to eat, then camped out on the floor in one of the wings of the balcony (the later in the day it gets, the more impossible it is to find any place quiet enough to really do any writing). I had a little over 2 hours to work, and the first verse ate up most of that time, as everything in it was more or less new, not something that I was poaching from the notebook or passing thoughts. I think that shows. It's conceptually loose, doesn't have much in the way of appealing imagery, and the melody is very blah.

[C] She dips her fingertips [F]into the dawn
[C] Lights an offering to the [F] saint of the unseen [G]
[C] Steels herself against the [F] day yet to come
[C] Draws the [C/B] shutters over [Am] all she must not [G] be

The second verse went more quickly, because it derived from an idea I had kicked around as early as Sunday night. I was thinking about rejection that brings relief, rather than pain, when it marks the end of a relationship (or a period at the end of a previously functional relationship) where one person is constantly picking at and digging into the other to find faults. I had initially written "flaw" in my notebook, then crossed it out and replaced it with "fault," which suggested a geological fault and what happens when you mess with one of those—something tectonic, volcanic, earth shaking. Again, conceptually I rather like that, but in the rush I damaged a lot of what I do like about it:

She sinks her roots into the lightless ground
Prying fingers leave no stone of her unturned
Bedrock trembles, her foundations tumble down
Along every fault line she can see the fires burn

Relatively short verses. Relatively short chorus. Feeling of failure given the sub-2-minute song from last week. I made an ill-advised attempt to build a bridge. The recurring theme of "I like this concept. Why am I fucking it up so very badly in the lyrics" returned. Lots of wallflower fantasy revolves around getting the world to see you. Being a mega-introvert, this fantasy is utterly alien to me. For a good 10 years of my life, my fondest wish every single day was that people would just leave me alone. So, that's where this came from:

[Am Our lady of the overl- [Em]ooked
We do beseech thee for the [F] bliss
Of one more [B7] day un- [Em] seen [G]

I wrote that at probably 7:43 (class starts at 8), finished scrawling my hand-written version to photocopy, and raced up to class. The fearless Tommi Zender was subbing this week.

Unsurprisingly given my near-nil practice time and the newness of the song, I butchered it in class, particularly the bridge. (Genius had failed to record it when she got the chords down.) But lots of helpful feedback. The chorus sounds a lot better, as I followed the suggestions not to switch chords quite so often. Today when prepping to record, I also found chords for the final line that I'm happier with than the misleading resolved progression that I had originally. Chords go like so now:

[F] Black-eyed [C]Susan of the [G] walls, oh [Am] won't you please
Pray for [F] these lost [C] souls, Oh [Am] grant them peace
Show your [Am] mercy to the [F] children of the edges
[Em] Black-eyed [G] Susan of the [Am] walls

Also changed the word at the end of line three to "edges," as a classmate pointed out to me the unfortunate "Children of the Corn[ers]" problem. Not really crazy about edges there, but certainly better than evoking Malachi.

Although I had originally worked out timing at the end of verse 2 so that "along the fault lines" worked, I could not make that sing either Tuesday or today so I rewrote as "Through every fissure she can see the fires burn." Meh, it's ok.

Tommi had suggested considering a wordless or shortened bridge. (He knows not my fear of the wordless bridge.) I feel confident that he's right, but I was really reluctant to lose the sentiment in the bridge. I experimented a bit with just a syllables sung over the bridge and a few other things. Ultimately, though, I was able to make what I had been hearing over that bizarre B7 chord happen again, so I just went with that in the recording.

As usual, recording was extremely frustrating. Guitar is mediocre at best and the vocals were fighting, fighting, fighting me. Trying to tell myself it's that it's a fresh melody I don't know yet, but I think it's most likely that this is just a terminally ill song that will be shipped off to my Parts: The Clonus Horror Daisy Hill Song Farm.

Anyway, the recording

Songwriter's Navel: Week 05, Mediocrity in Less Than 2 Minutes Or Your Money Back

2011-02-12T11:04:00.001-06:00

Coulton's Thing a Week Redux this week resonates.

Jeepers: writing hurts. It sucks and I hate it. That’s not completely true, I love it looking back on it, and in particular the day I just spent in the studio recording them was extremely fun and rewarding. But the time leading up to writing, and most of the time the writing itself, feels terrible. You get these moments of glory along the way, but they are against a background of pain and self-loathing. Jeez, that sounds terrible. But since I’m still so close to the process I just went through, I can tell you that it is in fact, ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE. Maybe some of you disagree, but that’s how it feels to me most of the time.

Well, it does and it doesn't. Writing really does hurt a ton of the time. I'm really fortunate in having the structure of my songwriting class and UNSPEAKABLY fortunate to have the class itself. I need the accountability and structure for sure, but I also need the support and perspective of other people whose work I like and respect. Otherwise it would be all infanticide all the time chez me. Case in point to follow.

Despite the fact that we did not meet last week, courtesy of #SNOMG, the Kernel e-mailed us all an assignment to write a "straight up classic country song":
1. 3 or 4 chords
2. economy of language
3. short verses

What I do write tends to be country-ish, but with few or none of the strengths of classic country songs. Merle Haggard is at the top of my "Die Happy" list (i.e., "If I could write a Merle Haggard song, I could die happy.") I have written two pretty straight-up country songs: One for the ZK called "Never Get to Nashville" and a jokey one called "Ode to Chris Matthews." Both are AABA with the A sections ending with a refrain and the B section being a bridge that introduces some new chords.

As I was digging out the car last week, I was thinking about the assignment and suddenly the phrase "Close Enough" occurred to me, and I thought, "Ooh, that's a good country song," in the same vein as "It's Not Love (But It's Not Bad)." (It's just possible that I have an unhealthy Merle fixation.)

On Saturday, though, we were watching American Masters—Jeff Bridges: The Dude Abides, and someone (Karen Allen, I think as I'm pretty sure this was in reference to Starman) said: "He's not afraid to play the fool." All songwriters are thieves and I thought that a variation on that line would be good steal for a 6/8-y songwriter-y country song instead.

When I sat down to write after the Superbowl, despite having two separate ideas (or maybe BECAUSE had two), nothing was happening immediately. I spent a little time "researching" the examples the Kernel had suggested:
Patsy doing "I Fall to Pieces"
Buck's "My Heart Skips a Beat" (The headstock on that 12 string is so comically large! It looks like it was lifted from a Hitchcock set.) and
Skeeter Davis doing "The End of the World" (Oh, how I want that hair!)
among a few others.

I sort of had my first verse done by the end of Sunday night. I say "sort of" because I was having a really hard time nailing down the rhyme and rhythmic structure of the verse. I knew that "Close Enough" would be an end refrain, and I was hoping that I could set it up so that I was not doomed to rhyming "enough" each time. I spent a lot of time on "I Fall To Pieces," which pulls this off, but no dice!

Early on, the phrase "Cracking wise, knocking back" made it on to the notebook page. I like the comedy Ks (who doesn't), and that gave me a hint on tone as well as some direction on the content of verses. Even if the structure was still fighting me, it seemed like I'd be setting a bar scene. The word "clock" suggested itself on the comedy K grounds, so I thought, "Ah ha, the first verse is about the moment that the subject of the song comes in."

Not sure why "10" presented itself, but the first line became some variant on: "Just as the clock was striking 10, you stumbled in." Obviously that doesn't work as a lyric because it sets up a rhyme and the second half is too short. "Your reputation stumbled in" worked syllabically and I liked the idea of playing with "Your reputation proceeds you." I then slipped something lame along the lines of "There was no doubt in my mind, you'd stumble in a step behind" to fill out the verse.

Trying to move on to the second verse, I spent some time circling the drain of other bar-related images like barmaids and jukeboxes. At some point, there was also something about either "Always on my Mind" or "Georgia on my Mind." But ultimately when I steal, I like to steal from the best, and one of the best bar-related songs is, of course, "Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night" by Tom Waits:

Is it the crack of the pool balls, neon buzzin'
Telephone ringin', it's your second cousin
Is it the barmaid that's smilin' from the corner of her eye?
Magic of the melancholy tear in your eye

I became obsessed with "Buzzing" "Busted" and "Neon sign." I also realized it was already the second verse and the dude hadn't even gotten in the door yet. Hurray! It's a problem that I also struggle with in prose: I get fixated on describing something and end up with paragraphs describing how, exactly, someone unfolds a napkin. (Actually, one of the things I find satisfying about songwriting is that the form is demanding about being pared down and forces you to chuck your pet images over your shoulder.) I eventually realized that the neon sign was not what happened in the second verse, but in the first.

So Sunday night, I at least had one verse:

Just as the [A] clock was striking ten, your repu- [G] tation sidled in
Cracking [D] wise, kicking back and acting [A] tough
Like a [A] busted neon sign, you buzzed on [G] in a step behind
And I [D] said to myself, that's close [A] enough

On the train the next morning, without benefit of guitar, I had second thoughts about a 4-line verse and wondered if I could just do an AAB, ending on a non-rhyming "Close Enough." I think I was resisting having to rhyme "enough" in each verse and ended up taking two steps back and a dubious step diagonally. I got a feel for the B section with "Close enough for comfort" and "Close enough for government work." Then I felt all brilliant because I was SURE that I could somehow work in "Horseshoes and hand grenades" as well.

Monday night, of course the song was all like, "Bitch, please. That is not happening." The first problem that presented itself was how to get in to the B section (and later how to get back out of it). I was not too proud to deviate from the "stick to 3 or 4 chords" criterion, but I did spend a lot of time cursing Harlan Howard and Hank Cochran over chord sheets for "I Fall to Pieces" asking myself how the hell they get a completely different tone and color out of the same freaking chords just in a different progression.

In addition to not being Harlan or Hank (or, as aforementioned, Merle), I was having a problem that is not infrequent with me: The astute reader will note that the chords in verse 1 are D, G, and A. Superficially, this puts the song in the key of D—D is the I chord, G is the IV, and A is the V. But A is the I. The A is TOTALLY the I. So D is actually the IV and G is . . . a flat VII? I don't know what the hell the G is, frankly, but I'll tell you what. Those Gs would not—WOULD NOT—turn into Es so that the song could just be in A. I ended up settling for getting the lines to the B section down on the page and moving on to trying to write another verse.

Yeah that's [D] close enough for comfort
Close en- [G] ough for government work
This ain't [D] horseshoes, this ain't [D] hand grenades
Believe me when I [G] say
That's close [A] enough

At this point, I thought that the song was still going to wind up with the narrator eventually settling for the doofus who is the subject of the song with the punch line being very similar to a certain Mr. Haggard's song. In that vein, I thought the second verse would be the narrator telling the doof that she had his number and, no, this was not happening. By the end of Monday night I had:

Don't you know I know your kind, could get a dozen for a dime
Every single one a diamond in the rough
Every one misunderstood, every one just no damned good
So I'm telling you right now, that's close enough

I sort of liked the play on "dime a dozen," because I like playing with clichés and metaphors (and I love songs that do that), but my satisfaction with it is probably overinflated. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to parlay "I'm on to you/I know your type" into a verse.

Class is, of course, Tuesday night. My brain was riddled with anxiety over having only 2 verses, a B section that did not work, and several aspects of the lyrics that Did Not Work for me, namely "sidled" and the "ain'ts." Believe it or not, I don't really care about grammar in others' songs, nor am I usually concerned about vetting authenticity. But I feel like there are some things I have no business trying to pull off. Sidled and ain't come to mind, for example.

Chicago is still dealing with the sequelae of #SNOMG, so I didn't get up to OTSFM until a bit later than usual, eating into my time to finish up the song. My evil inner sloth kept whispering that it was no big deal, I had a song from last week, and so on. But I plowed on through. I got the B section into plausible shape by messing with the melody so that that I could hang out on D for most of it, and sort of push against that chord melodically.

Then, all of a sudden, I realized that the second verse was actually the third. I felt really stupid, because it was so obvious. The epiphany was all well and good, but this left me with a big hole before the B section. I had no idea what should happen in the second verse other than realizing that the doofus needed to approach the narrator or vice versa. After a long time discarding all kinds of words about selection, pursuit, making picks, a dark time with a thesaurus and the super-sexy idea of culling the herd, I finally came up with "called your shot."

At first I didn't really like rhyming that with "on the dot," but I think it works ok, conveying more of that sense of "Loser with unwarranted self confidence." Also, not crazy about "called your bluff," because it kind of comes out of nowhere. But, hell, it rhymes with enough. I like the third line ok, I guess. This verse is not a lyrical masterpiece, but hallelujah, it actually moves the "plot" along.

Ten oh one the dot, you caught my eye, you called your shot
I stared you down, I held my ground, I called your bluff
Don't wanna dance, don't need a drink, sure don't need no time to think
I'm telling you right now, that's close enough

A couple final notes on the actual writing of this. I think part of the reason that I was clinging to the idea that the two characters would end up in a pathetic "close enough" situation is a "write what you know" thing. Hanging on to a half-assed, sad relationship on "better than nothing" grounds? Oh yeah. Shutting down some loser trying to hit on me? Alien concept. People don't hit on me. Or if they do or did, I am/was too obtuse to realize it. So that throws yet another log on the inauthentic fire.

(True story: I was at Hopleaf with a [male] friend, and we were trading off buying rounds. At some point, I said, "What the heck? The bartender hasn't charged me for like 3 rounds!" My friend gave me a look usually reserved for those who've suffered recent head trauma and said, "He's hitting on you." "Nuh uh!" I scoffed. The bar tender turned around and gave me the same look my friend had and said, "I was TOTALLY hitting on you.")

I copied out the song into my notebook to make copies for class. It's sort of telling that I also made a point of copying out the song from last week. I played both songs for my guitar/voice teacher, and I was more nervous than usual. I am always ALWAYS nervous playing in front of others, even my songwriting compatriots, who are the world's best and most supportive audience, but this was bad. By the time my turn was about to come up in class, I was very much considering not playing anything at all.

I did a lousy job performing in class for multiple reasons: The authenticity beast, I'd changed my capo position at the last moment, I didn't go until near the end of the class, so anxiety had a chance to build. As always I got some good feedback, including a way to eliminate at least one ain't from K (in the recording, I do 2 ain'ts on one pass through the B section, and just 1 the second time; I do like the 1 ain't better, not just for authenticity, either).

The Kernel had a particularly brilliant suggestion, which is to funk the guitar part up, so that it's less Carter family and more Bobbie Gentry. He played a bit of it this way, and it sounds 1000 times cooler. I said I'd never be able to play that, unfortunately, and he pooh-poohed this. All morning yesterday, I recovered from writing an e-mail to my mother by watching Bobbie (what—WHAT I ask you—is going on behind her in that video?) and various other videos on the YouTube. My brain gets how to do this. My fingers simply will not. But I'm motivated to make them do so. Current plan is to talk to guitar/voice teacher about how to work on this.

Recording is just Carter family strum with the "Heavy Funk" effect in Garage Band. I'm trying not to be paranoid about the fact that the Male Vocal effects seem to work better on my voice. I think I still used one of the Female Vocal effects on this? Or maybe the Live Performance.

Anyway, boring recording of a song that is probably for someone else.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 04, Which May or May Not Have Fewer Casualties Than Week 03

2011-02-05T13:28:00.002-06:00

Don't think of this as late. No, seriously, don't think of it as late. I actually did work on recording this yesterday, but I had limited time, as I had to dig the ZK's car out of the snow, and then had opera (Girl of the Golden West at Lyric; absolutely wonderful and a bona fide Spaghetti Western!). In any case, I scrapped yesterday's attempt and started again today. Please do not infer that the second attempt is in any way kwality.

I did contemplate giving myself a pass this week. We did not actually have class, because of the Michael Bay–Level Blizzard, nor did I have my private lesson. However, I went ahead and worked on this anyway, both because I have a new assignment due next week, and because someone as lazy as I am cannot afford to fuck with inertia.

Working on a song without benefit of my compatriots' feedback was instructive in and of itself. Certainly trying to get the vocals recorded revealed that my voice/guitar teacher is a saint who is worth my weight in gold (my weight, rather than hers, because she is very tiny).

The assignment on which this song is based had a few different components. First, we had to draw 5 words out of a bowl (as a white elephant-type gift, the Kernel had gotten a jewelry-making kit, so the words were on beads). Mine were: Please, Kiss, Sky, Us Yours. Curse you, Jimi Hendrix! No, I will NOT excuse you while you kiss this guy.

The second requirement was related to tempo. In the verses, chord changes would only come once per measure until the last line of the verse when each measure would be split (2 chords per measure). In the chorus, we were allowed to change between split and un-split measures.

And then there were the two requirements that struck fear into my doggedly mediocre heart: We had to have a musical hook to lead off each verse, and there had to be a musical bridge that either shifted keys or changed up chords within the existing key. I suck at hooks. I suck at bridges. I epic suck at musical bridges, because they leave my shitty, shitty guitar playing out there, naked, sad, and exposed.

Moving on from my self loathing, fascinating though it is. I first sat down with the guitar and played around with hooks a bit. In my guitar lessons, we've been working on creating leads and melodies just using the major and pentatonic scales, with special emphasis on getting my hands to be less inept at doing this with hammer-ons and pull-offs, so I had a basic idea of what KIND of hook I was going to use.

Lyrically, the words I'd drawn from the bowl obviously suggested some kind of relationship song. (Well, all songs are relationship songs, but you know what I mean.) I had a left-over concept from my song last week that had not ultimately made it into that song: During the most recent full moon, we were experiencing that optical illusion where the moon appears larger than usual.

Because I'm a nerd who does NOT hate Neil Degrasse Tyson, I love both the illusion and the fact that it can be dispelled by looking at the moon upside down. The latter appeals to me on the evolutionary level (What is UP with the way our vision works?) and a couple of good personal memories (Having lunch with Madeleine at the Jackson Harbor restaurant and talking about what is UP with the way our vision works and a favorite book—although now that I think about it, the book that comes immediately to mind [Margaret Mahy's Catalogue of the Universe] is not the book in which a character demonstrates dispelling the effect [It might be in Kate Atkinson's Human Croquet. Or one of A.S. Byatt's? Gonna bug me now.]).

When I sat down to work on lyrics, I had my 5 words at the top of the page and a vague intention to write about pleasant illusions or dispelling same. Almost immediately, the first two lines of the chorus suggested themselves along with the basic contours of their melody:

Please can't you see me upside down
Can't you kiss how it is goodbye

My immediate reaction was to argue with myself: No, that's not right! If the narrator is asking the listener to buy into a pleasant illusion, then s/he is asking him/her NOT to look at the situation upside down! For good or for ill, I was able to assure myself that Neil DeGrasse Tyson was probably not grading me on the accuracy of my lyrics, and those two lines remained intact.

I went back to try to write a verse and was fixated on describing the moon, a treacherous task for a songwriter, to be sure. I kept thinking. The moon is big. The moon is round. The moon looks kind of orange. The moon is only big when it's close to the horizon. Not exactly poetic or inspiring. When frustration set in, I decided to just try to set down the basic rhythm of the lyrics some chords and I was working with something along the lines of there being a large brass grin on the horizon.

Vomit worthy, to be sure, but setting it on the page and playing chords suddenly made it clear that the narrator was using the illusion as a metaphor and I didn't need to describe the moon at all, really. I wound up with I'm capo 2 on this, so it's really in B, not A):

I see a [A] brass ring climbing high
[D] Larger than life
I see a [A] gift to me and you
From the [E] man in the moon
Might be a [A] trick of the light
[D] Might not last the night
But I see [F#m] you and me and [E] us and I'm [D] reaching for the [Bm] sky

Now, I have never in my life actually seen a brass ring on a merry-go-round. Has anyone? And yet . . .

I kind of ended up feeling like this verse was good enough. It certainly was an improvement over failed attempts to describe the moon, the imagery turned out sort of playful. Part of me sneered at the simplicity of the lyrics and the overused phrases, but on the other hand, with the chords and the rhythm, it was shaping up to be a poppy love song, so they were at least not a disservice to something musically complex. (Not that I've ever written anything musically complex.)

Speaking of music, I'm pretty sure that the chords over the last line of the verse are wrong, wrongitty, wrong, wrong, wrong and I will cop to the fact that I said to myself, "The class/Kernel will help me figure out what they should be." Oops.

As is traditional, I struggled with the rest of the chorus, even though the first 2 lines pretty much dropped in my lap. With verse 1 and the first 2 lines of the chorus, I had knocked off all of my words except for "yours." That wound up in line 3 of the chorus:

[D] Please can't you [E] see me [F#m] upside down
Can't you [C#m] kiss how it is [E] goodbye
[D] All this could be [A] yours if you'd [E] just look [F#m] now
You could [D] see me like I [E] see you, ~~[A] upside down~~

I go back and forth on how I feel about that third line. On the one hand, if feels like it should be "could be ours," and I was hammering "yours" in there out of Catholic Schoolism. On the other, I like that it evokes cheesy commercials that—like optical illusions—promise things that they can't deliver. The second half of that line is purely a place holder for the rhyme. Initially, I had it as "but don't look now"; however, though my inner critic was willing (to some extent) to let me off the hook on the nonsense in the first two lines, it was tapping its foot impatiently over that. I ended up with "if you'd just look now." Meh. Again, I would have benefitted from feedback.

The text that is struck out indicates that I had originally intended to resolve the chorus by repeating "upside down." When playing around with the music, though, the hook ended up resolving to an A chord, so I decided to just end on "see you" and then the hook. Not sure how I feel about that.

In a song chock full of my ambivalence, I am ambivalentiest about the second verse. In my copy of the lead sheet, it says "[Hateful. So, very hateful.]" next to "Verse 2." I really do hate the contents for many of the same reason that I have issues with verse 1. On the other hand, I rather like how the lines play out rhythmically, even if the words are sucky and predictable:

It's an illusion, so you say
Try to explain it all away
Bend over backwards, break the spell
But we both already fell
It might well be a fantasy
But you might like what you see
Like I see you and me and us and I swear it's meant to be

Something I'm not ambivalent about? The bridge. The hate for the bridge flows through me. On an earlier recording, you can here me snort derisively on the vocals track when the bridge comes around. Anyway, here are the chords:

B E G#m C#m
B E A B

I just remembered that the instructions required us to repeat the chorus twice after the bridge, then end on the hook. Um . . . I ended on the hook?

Overall, I am not in love with this song, to be sure, but it's always a good exercise to write something more up tempo so that not everything is a fingerpicked, modal dirge. Likewise, lightening up on the lyrics gets me out of my usual rut.

I'm forcing myself to link to the recording, which is worse than usual. I did go over and over and over the parts of the melody that you'll hear me miss badly. I'm unsure that I should be playing a D on the penultimate line of the verse where I go up high, but the real problem is likely that I'm just shying away from that as the highest part, even though it's technically in my "range." I also am flailing trying to get to the melody over the last line because I'm unsure of those chords and I'm floundering in the wake of the previous line's pitch panic.

The guitar sucks, too, as always, but I did pull out my lovely, neglected semi–hollow body, which badly needs new strings and possibly some adjustment to the action. I think I applied the pop vocals filter to my vocals? Can't remember now, but it does not do enough to make up for my lousy pitch.

Here you go.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 03, In Which I Kill And Eat My Young For The Greater Good

2011-01-27T23:57:00.001-06:00

The Gra'er Gude!

I really ought to have been writing this entry before I tried to record the song, because I have just spent about 4 hours creating something totally awful and in the course of doing so, I have come to hate, loathe, and despise this song. I wasn't in love with it before, but probably it doesn't quite deserve my utter contempt.

Let me try to think about how I wrote this.

Ok, assignment first: The harmonic criteria were to have an A part and a B part and to use a major key for one part and its parallel minor for the other. The lyrical prompt was violence: To think about how routinely violence occurs today and use that as a jumping off point for the song.

Class is on Tuesday nights, and then I volunteer at OTSFM on Wednesday nights. To get back to my car, I can either take a long bus ride or take one train to another. I'd decided on the train route on the grounds that the bus just has a higher weirdness/drama ratio than the train as a rule.

So assume that karma is on the job. I get on the Brown line (the LEAST drama-prone line in all Chicago), and there is a man who is screaming—no, really SCREAMING—into his phone at a woman. He seemed to be trying to get her to put money in his account. And he was just absolutely vile to her. Calling her "fucking bitch" in every single sentence. Telling her to "stop her fucking whining and make it happen." Then he got on the phone with someone else—a male friend, I think, from context—and explained that because of that "fucking cunt" he was screwed. And that he had "stopped fucking her, so she's frustrated," and on and on.

On the one hand, there's obviously nothing I could do. On the other, it's impossible not to think about what I might, could, should, or shouldn't have done if the woman had been there with him. And the answer is, most likely, nothing. For good reasons and bad ones and ones that are inarguable.

So. Yeah.

I started trying to wrangle this into song form on Sunday night. I think I came away with nothing more than the first two lines of verse 1 and a vague idea that I wanted to make reference to Clem Snide's "Moment in the Sun", not because it was playing, but because I'm a hack. I worked on the lyrics on the Metra the next morning and a night of percolation, apparently, was fruitful, because I came away with, more or less, the first verse:

[A] Backward through the city
Tracing [D] flowers in my breath
I am alone*
With a [Em] song about a [G] moment in the [A] sun
The [A] fury winds around me
Flicks its [D] tongue against my skin
I turn to [Bm] stone
I stop my [G] ears I close my eyes**

*I'd started out with a G chord on "alone" in the third line, but I was singing an odd note against the chord. Although I kind of liked it, the consensus was that I needed to support the melody note in the chord, so I changed it to a C#m7(b5). I admit that now I like that chord choice better, though it sounded hella weird when I first used it.

**I was having real trouble shifting into the parallel minor. Despite the downer content, the song kept feeling very melodically up. I realized that I was probably going to want to start on an F chord. For no particularly good reason, I ended the verse on Em. The Kernel advised going to C there (although that's not in the original key of D, and I went to Catholic school . . .). In any case, C it was. That meant changing the melody note, and as is obvious in the recording.

The chorus and second verse come from other images drawn from riding the train (not the same train ride, I don't think). When the Brown line goes around the Loop, it's parallel with about the 3rd floor of a number of buildings. Through one window, I saw a room full of easels with works in progress on them. I liked both the sense of looking through 2 windows at once and the idea of art interrupted that would be continued. A few moments later, I was looking into an empty, dark cafeteria, and the sight of all those tables without people sharing food around them struck me as very sad.

The chorus fought me terribly. I got down "Through a window, through a window," and two things happened immediately: I decided that I really hated that line and it completely killed what I was trying to capture, and I could not expunge it from the song no matter how I tried.

I experimented with a couple of lines related to the easels/art. I ended up with "beauty" being the word encapsulating the image. I also decided I hated that. It also wouldn't leave. I tried out "Beauty interrupted," "Beauty in progress," and ended up with "Beauty yet to be."

Then the thing started to get bloated and impossible. The image about the tables kept trying to get in there. So did the word "easels." I eventually had to hack it down to just two lines. Two terrible, repetitive lines.

Through the [F] window, through the [Gm] window
There is [Am] beauty yet to be, yet to [Dm] be [Am] [Em]

Yes, a terribly awkward transition from Dm back into D. Oh, I'd also forgotten that the Kernel suggested "taking a Powter" (meaning do 2 verses before the chorus), which undoubtedly would have sounded better and kept me from having to sing the chorus more than twice.

The only good part about disemboweling the chorus is that I was able to move the table imagery into verse 2. Of course the image is a hard one to wrangle. I kept coming back to wanting to say something about friendship, sharing meals and so on, and decided on "breaking bread." If there's anything that I don't hate completely in the song, it's that line in this verse (my feeling about it is merely ASYMPTOTIC to hate; chords are the same as over verse 1):

A hundred empty tables
Where the future breaks its bread
Without a sound
And the anguish falls like embers to the ground
Casting paint upon the canvas
Sinking fingertips in clay
I break the vow
To stop my ears to close my eyes

The third, fourth and seventh lines gave me a lot of problems. Despite the fact that the third and fourth lines in the first verse don't really rhyme, they're sonically similar. And my ear would not accept just any old word at the end of line 4. And that made the need for the rhyme with line 7 even more dire. To fill out the verse, I wanted art images. Not wild about the paint on canvas line, but I kind of like the visceral nature of the fingertips in clay line. Mostly out of self preservation (given that the verses are rather long I kept the final line of the verse as a variation on a theme.

The last verse came the easiest, I suppose, because there was, by then, very limited room for me to screw with it. I'd thought that I wanted something about polaris/the north star. I had my new little nephew in mind (I drove up to Wisconsin last week to meet him) and the kind of world we want to leave for those yet to come and so on. Rather generic sentiment, unfortunately:

Contrails from the streetlights
Tease the raindrops on the glass
And taste the moon
An outline in my breath on darkest blue
By the north star like a promise
With tomorrow closing in
I think of you
And my eyes are open wide

End on the chorus with a few Canadian tragipop repeats of "yet to be" modulating between Dm and D, with a cheater C major thrown in for good measure.

As previously mentioned, recording this very nearly killed me. I had decided to try playing it on the nylon string as it's fingerpicked, and the wider neck is sometimes more forgiving. Of course he wider neck and less practice on that guitar meant that I screwed things up over and over. I ended up using my regular guitar and opting for Garage Band's "shimmer" effect to mute the sound of my sucking. I also recorded my vocals with the basic effects for female vocals. I'd started to add a second vocal track with some ornamentation and echoing, but I'm so freaking inconsistent with my pitch, I UGGGH!

Ok, the self loathing is boring me perhaps more than anyone (I know, reader: FAT CHANCE!), so here it is.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 02

2011-01-20T18:02:00.002-06:00

Doing this today, as tomorrow, I am driving up into enemy territory to meet my adorable new nephew in person!

I'll say up front that I think of my song for this week as a pretty definite throw-away. That's ok. I learn by writing, and I would have learned more from this assignment if I'd taken more time with it. That's probably true of every assignment, but I can see quite obvious places that would have been strength building for me if I'd worked on them more.

The assignment was quite hate making (deliberate on the Kernel's part). He gave us a chart for Daniel ~~Brad~~ (not sure when I decided his name was Brad) Powter's "Bad Day." Yes, you do know it. No, really, I thought I didn't either.

This is a really terrible, wildly popular song. No, no, I've taken off my postmodern hat. My De Gustibus boots are off duty. I don't want to hear, "But it's so hooky!" Yes. Yes it is. It is hooky because it takes a 2-second melodic motif and beats it to death with putrid lyrics over the course of 4 agonizing minutes. Don't believe me? Here are the lyrics:

A section:

Where is the moment we needed the most ?
You kick up the leaves and the magic is lost [ed. — I'm no Jimmy Webb, but this does not rhyme even in Canadian]
You tell me your blue skies fade to grey
You tell me your passion's gone away and I don't need no carryin' on
[ed. — Dear Sir: This is the gerund form of the verb "carry." It has three syllables. It is not a woman's name.]

Repeat A section, make them wait for that chorus!

You stand in the line just to hit a new low
You're faking a smile with the coffee to go
You tell me your life's been way off line
You're falling to pieces every time and I don't need no carryin' on

Please note the douchey passive-aggressive, yet nonsensical content.

B section:

Because you had a bad day, you're taking one down
You sing a sad song just to turn it around
You say you don't know, you tell me don't lie
You work at a smile and you go for a ride
You had a bad day, the camera don't lie
You're coming back down and you really don't mind
You had a bad day, you had a bad day

A' section (instrumental over first half of verse, lyrics over second):

Well, you need a blue sky holiday
The point is they laugh at what you say
And I don't need no carryin' on

Repeat B Section because you've had 15 seconds to miss that motif.

C Section (Bridge, modulates up a minor third):

Sometimes the system goes on the blink
And the whole thing turns out wrong
You might not make it back and you know
That you could be well oh that strong and I'm not wrong, ahhh...

Is this inspirational? More passive-aggressive dick-bagging? I JUST DON'T KNOW!!

A'' (Truncated verse):

So where is the passion when you need it the most ?
Oh, you and I, you kick up the leaves and the magic is lost

Yeah, 'cause the first verse was poetic gold, so I might as well basically repeat that shit!

Return to B section with very minor changes. Abusively repeat the end of the B section.

I hate this song. Its shoes interfere with my breathing.

Anyway, the assignment was to follow the song form exactly (A A B A' C A'' B BBBBBBBBBBB) and write a response song. Alternatively we were invited to write this as a song that did not suck.

I went with the response song, and like I said it's a throw away. On Sunday I worked on it for a while and ended up with nothing more than a single verse with a chord vamp and rhythm. I figured it would be in A or E, which always feel bright and pop-ish to me. I think at the end of Sunday I had:

[A] I [E] took a [D] number
[A] I [E] got in [D] line
[D] Would you [A] believe I [G] believed you
[D] After [A] all this [G] time you've kept me on hold

I liked the sound of the I-V-IV movement, as it seemed to be familiar enough in using direct-from-factory folky chords, but going to the V right away in a split measure, then ending the line on the IV had a slightly off-kilter sound to it. Rhythmically, I was picking the root on 1 and 3 for the split measure and then on the 1 of the next measure. In between I was doing quick single strums of I and V on beats 2 and 4. For the full measure it was still root, strum, and the measure finished out with slightly syncopated strums.

I think I didn't get any further lyrically on Sunday because the first verse did not end up leaving me much of anywhere to go. In fact, I ended up ditching the lyrics of the first verse and not modulating between A and D. So the only thing retained was the initial chord progression.

I had a real bitch of a time filling out the lyrics, even though the original covers so very little conceptual territory and recycles words and metaphors over and over. I wanted to capture the fury that comes from someone dismissing your genuine aggravation (especially if you've been bending over backward to keep calm, be fair, etc.), and I found myself thinking about the mother of a friend from High School. She was diabetic and sometimes had the behavioral swings that go with missteps in controlling blood sugar. I remember being at the friend's house one time when some member of the family started talking to her in slow, loud English during an argument, and suddenly her mom shouted, "If you tell me I need to eat something I am GOING TO TEAR YOUR EARS OFF!"

Anyway, the lyrics are shite, but here they are:

A section (the AED riff just repeats throughout the verse until the turnaround at the end of the 4th line going into the 5th where it's all down strums of A and then E):
[A] I [E] took a [D] deep breath
Counted from one to ten
Walked a mile in your shoes
Counted down to one again and [A] then
[E] You had to go and say

Repeat A section:
Thought I'd let it slide
Thought I might let this one go
Thought I'd be the bigger person
Enjoy the view from the high road, but no
You had to go and say

B section:
It's just a [A] bad [E] day, just like the [D] day before
Was just a [A] bad [E] day, [D] too
It's been a [A] bad [D] day for a [F#m] month of Sundays
It's been a [D] bad, bad [A] day for [E] me since I met you

I will say this for Powter's merciless repetition: You are so desperate for something, ANYTHING to change that any minor change (the I-IV-vi in the third line of the B section, complete with a high note in the melody that I reliably miss)sounds like super dramatic.

I set myself up for a problem in the A' section by having the chords repeat all the way through the verse. Powter does a I-IV-V over the first 2 lines, goes to the vi on line 3, and then I-ii-V at the end. Without that harmonic difference, my stubby verse suffers even more.

A':
|A E| D repeated 4 times.
Don't treat me like a drama queen
I'm not saying it's a tragedy
But see, you had to go and say

Repeat B section and then into the Bridge/C section. Oh hellz. This is just awful. I lifted Powter's harmonic trick entirely by modulating up to C (the minor third up from A) and reproducing his chord progression exactly, which is just I-IV and then dropping down a half step from the IV to get back into the original key:

Bridge/C section:
[C] You don't want me [F]carrying on
You don't want me making a fuss
You wondering where the magic's gone
You're wondering why I can't see that it's just [E]

A'' (see above re: suffering stubby verses):
Not one more word
Not one more day

I could not stand repeating my crappy chorus one more time, so I changed up the words a bit and edited down the repeats.

B' section (same chords as B section until the repeats come in):
Not one more bad day, no not one more
All my bad days are through
No more bad days, I'm done with bad days
Done with [D] bad, bad, [A] bad, bad [E] days
Done with bad, bad, bad, bad days
Done with [A] bad, bad, [D] bad, bad [Bm] days
I'm done with you |A E| D repeat

I told myself that I would play around with arranging and recording this, given that the song itself is destined for the circular file. I DID play around with my bass a bit, but in the end, just getting the guitar and vocals synced up was challenging enough. I had recorded a bass track, but it just wasn't adding much. Felt good to get the Bad Badtz out, though. Crappy recording #2.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 01

2011-01-14T15:43:00.003-06:00

So, this blog has been sorely neglected, and truth be told, my writing in general is likewise sorely neglected.

It's probably not coincidental that other things like my commitment to being mindful of my diet and exercise also have a decidedly unhealthy layer of dust on them. I realize it's already mid-January, and I have very little hope of catching up with the resolution bandwagon. Nonetheless, I'm going to try to reintroduce some method and some madness to my life. This is partly inspired by my own impatience with myself, but mostly by the knowledge that Jonathan Coulton's Thing A Week project just turned 5 and he's reliving it. His present-day
insights are interesting and useful.

Pause for a bit of backstory. I take songwriting classes (among other music classes) at the amazing Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. I started in March of 2008 and have continued with a few brief interruptions. At the tail end of 2009, I did something I swore I would never, EVER do: Perform in public. Since December of 2009, I've played several times as Acoustic Explosion hosted by John Kuczaj. Yes, I just wrote that down and I still don't believe it.

Anyway, the songwriting thing seems to have stuck, and I've decided that I'm going to try to write every week about my songwriting assignment. I'm hoping that this will serve as a record of my process (which is, shall we say, chaotic) and some motivation to practice the guitar and play around with recording (I got this for Christmas, and I'm anxious to play around). Without further ado: Week 01.

I missed the first week of class, because I was on JoCoCruiseCrazy (Dear Mr. Coulton: I am not stalking you, I promise), but the Kernel and my classmates sent the assignment along. They created a melody, note by note, in class. Our task was to add "chords, words, and magic*" (*magic optional, per Steve).

We didn't get home until Saturday night. I had to prep my classes for Monday, so I didn't get a start on this until Monday night. (Please ignore the fact that I pretty much never get a start on things until Monday night, won't you?) I listened to the melody a number of times, played it on the guitar (courtesy of the music and tab also provided: My ear is totally for shit) and eventually coaxed some chords out of the guitar that fit of over the melody:

Bm F#m Bm Bm F#m (Technically, it should be an F# major to hit the melody note, but let's face it: The way I play that barre chord, it's generous to characterize it as a power chord, so what's up with the third hardly matters.)

Over the second part of the melody, I came up with a little D-based figure (Steve told me what they were [and characterized it as "Very Neil Young" just to get my goat!], but I've forgotten, and it seems to be stumping all-guitar-chords). Basically it's playing the alternating bass notes for D, with strums of these strings in between:
4/0, 3/2, 2/3, 1/0
4/0, 3/2, 2/2, 1/0
4/0, 3/2, 2/0, 1/2

[Ed.: Duh, figured it out. It's Dsus2, Dmaj9 {no 3rd}, D6]

then
bass, strum 4/0, 3/2, 2/3, 1/0
bass, strum 4/0, 3/2, 2/2, 1/0
And end on Em

[Ed.: Also known as Dsus2, Dmaj9 {no 3rd}, D6]

And for the final part of the melody back to the beginning:
Bm F#m Bm

Having figured out the chords, I then realized that I didn't fully understand the assignment. Was I meant to use this melody exclusively for the whole assignment? I sent up the Kernel signal and learned that it should be the "main theme" but I could deviate from it somewhat.

This was convenient, as I'd already started to work on a verse that did not fit to the assigned melody. Monday morning on the train, I'd made a half-assed attempt to do some creatively mindful observation of my surroundings and pretty much came up with: Potholes. Ugly potholes filled with snow. It's Chicago in winter, what do you want from me? Besides, Smuggy McSmuggerpants, this did inspire the first words of the song: White-bottomed gouges.

That might not sound like much to go on, but I have always found the blank page the worst thing about writing anything. Once I have something on it, even if it's utter shit, the task becomes much less intimidating. In the context of songwriting, once I know how the first line of a verse starts, I usually write it down, then just spitball phrases that fit the same rhythm in my notebook. I then came up with the phrase "Naked and faceless" to start the second half of the verse, and without too much struggle, the follow-up lines for the two halves of the verse fell into place.

[Em White-bottomed gouges in the [D]coal-tar tissue
We [Em] stumble on
To a [Am] tuneless, to a [D] plaintive, distant [Em song
[Em] Naked and faceless under [D] sun-splintered skies
Beyond the [Em] grave
On our [Am] knees, palm to [D] palm, as though we're [Em] brave

"Sun-splintered skies" worked with the winter imagery. Wasn't crazy about "beyond the grave" (Emo alert!) but it suggested the image of defeat and prayer (on our knees), which allowed me to swipe "Palm to palm" from The Bard. R&J is way down on my list of favorite Shakespeare plays (although it moved up, courtesy of my tenor boyfriend), but the "holy palmers' kiss" exchange is a million different kinds of brilliant.

For once, the words, chords and melody came more or less together on this verse. I wasn't crazy about the bass-strum, bass-strum rhythm that asserted itself (I'm rhythmically challenged and end up doing the same things over and over), but experimentation with some alternatives threatened to unravel the whole shebang so I left it.

The next problem up was transitioning from the verse into the chorus, which gave me fits. I ultimately ended up going with the cheap move of playing single strums on the first line of the chorus, then returning to the bass-strum rhythm for the remaining lines. Coming out of the chorus was (and still is . . . oops) even worse. Thus far I've wound up hanging out on the Bm until I panic and jump back to Em.

Words did not want to come for the chorus and I ended up doing the Scrambled Eggs trick and simply writing down some true dreck (I'd share those, but I typed over them in the file and my brain, for once is protecting me from remembering them) and at least figuring out how I would sing the melody over the chords before giving up for the night.

Tuesday, I made it up to OTSFM with about an hour and a half to spare before my guitar/voice lesson. I scored a quiet room and pulled out the iPad. I was shocked to find that I did not completely hate the first verse. The chorus was another story so I held my nose and waded in by thinking about the headspace from which the first verse was coming. Please accompany me on a psychological Ox-Bow.

I am not the happiest person you'll ever meet, but I am very fortunate (particularly given that 99 out of 100 of the balls in my genetic lottery are stamped CRAZY) in not really suffering from depression. Recently, however, I became aware that I was worried about whether I MIGHT get depressed upon going back to work this January: Our winter break was much shorter than usual, and the cruise meant that I essentially got no down time over it, and if I dug a little deeper, I realized that I associate going back to work so early in the year with my former job, which I hated, and which did make me depressed.

So I got to thinking about cyclicality, seasons, calendars, inevitability, and things like that and I jotted down some words related to inevitability in my notebook. Layered on top of that was the memory of the ridiculously low standards I had to maintain when I was still in that job—for what I could accomplish, for how much satisfaction I could get out of my work there, what I could expect from my students, and so on. So I had the ouroboros of inevitable desire and suppression of it, leading to hopelessness, destruction, devastation. Um, I don't really have a title for the song, but I've been calling it the "Seasonal Affective Disorder" song. (I don't suffer from SAD. In fact, I hate spring and summer and often joke that I have reverse SAD.)

Here's how the chorus eventually shook out:

And the [Bm] clockwork hunger [F#m] goes to ground [Bm] again
And the [F#m] wind-up longing [F#m] bleeds away
Like [Dsus2] tears in [Dmaj9] to the sea [D6]
Like can- [Dsus2] dlelight [Dmaj9] by day [Em]
And the [Bm] clockwork hunger [F#m] goes to ground again [Bm]

The second verse came together through a combination of sonically/rhythmically fitting stuff and more winter/industrial (hated job was in northwest Indiana, which is direct-from-factory postindustrial apocalypse territory) imagery. And then the return to something physical/gestural worked ok, so I guess I have to thank Bill S. for that, too.

[Em] Dead-winter weeks on the [D] iron-grey face
That we call [Em] home
Until the [Am] thunder
Crashes [D] over all we [Em] own
[Em] Cold like a knife through the [Em] rust-colored grief
Between our [Em] hands
Fingers [Am] folded
To en- [D] close what light we can [Em]

Back to the chorus. Repeat the last line a few times, and OUT!

Now pray for me as I try to record this.

Ok. I have recorded 2 versions that are "good enough" for my purposes here. Guitar playing is incredibly rough, as are the vocals.

An attempt with Garage Band, replete with ridiculous echoes and a only a passing acquaintance with pitch (to say nothing of the fact that I am hopeless at laying down a guitar track that any human could sing to). And then a "live" version just sung into my iPhone. Sorry, no real improvement on pitch there.

That is all.

Pizza. French Fry. Pizza. French Fry. Stripper Pole? Damnation of Faust at Lyric Opera

2010-02-21T12:48:00.001-06:00

So, Damnation of Faust (Berlioz) wasn't in my opera season, but Faust (Gounod) was. Not exactly sure why, as I saw the latter a few years back. Which isn't to say that this year's rendition wasn't lovely, but new material is always nice. And boy howdy was THIS new.

First of all, let's talk about Berlioz: Martian, time traveler, or what? Nineteen scenes born of his obsession with Goethe's characters, heavenly vocal pieces strung together with even better orchestral passages. Sir Andrew and the orchestra were absolutely superb.

This is the first time Lyric has staged Damnation, the production is new, and tonight was opening night. Being spoiler-phobic (yes, even when the source material is 160 years old), I have no idea what buzz, if any, there is surrounding this, but I'm going to make a prediction that there'll be praise for the performers and white-hot, searing hatred for the production.

I'll start from the top: The blacker-than-black stage curtains retract in multiple directions to unveil Faust's study, which is a square about 1/6 the size of the stage in the three-dimensional center of the field (i.e., the floor is raised above the stage's floor). The study is stark white and rigidly bounded by the masking curtains as well as walls flown in upstage of the curtain. It evokes snapping on an old tube television and waiting for its pinpoint of light to expand to the corners of the screen. And Berlioz's music, for all the world, has suggests the hum of it warming up.

Faust is hunched over a small computer cart, typing, writing, writing, typing, until suddenly the white walls confining him erupt with text—hand written notes, overlapped with monospaced computer fonts, sliding, scrolling, spilling out from him and over him to the audience as he darts around in the cramped space, scrawling on paper, typing madly.

A for effort on the part of Stage Director Stephen Langridge, but unfortunately Cish in execution: The computer cart is about 10x too crowded with what appears to be an Apple IIe, and a clamp-on desk lamp. Faust's stool is several inches taller than the cart (and has wheels), so when he's meant to be sitting on it, he looks for all the world like he's hovering over a gas station toilet seat. There's no space to write on the desk, so Paul Groves is forced to doodle against his own thigh. And thus the awesome mood was partially squandered.

Until scene 2! Because the curtains draw back entirely, and Faust's study is suspended in midair over an army clones hell-bent on picnicking. No, wait! It's very cool!

First, just the curtains draw back, and the only lighting for the chorus was the projections, which by now were shapes and pulses of light. But then Faust's study begins to descend, and eventually he is on the ground, surrounded by these groups, each of which has an older woman in a pale green 2-piece suit, a youngish man in a sport coat and tie, and a youngish woman in a skirt and twin set. Each group unfurled a red-and-white checked picnic blanket and settled on to the ground.

Around the margins, some of the skirt/twinset women were, instead, passionately kissing soldiers about to go off to war. (The soldiers, alas, were in some motley camouflage and would be undetectable only in my grandmother's living room, I think.)

Later, these women are pushing prams through the picnickers, then children of various ages appear and chase one another through the scene. Occasionally, another woman pushes one of the older women across the stage in a wheel chair. Eventually, the unattached women serve as flag bearers, and the projection across the whole stage becomes a German-adjacent flag (red, gold, and black, but with a complex A-based emblem in the center; I think it was made up, but my ignorance may be showing).

All the while, Faust is in the thick of the scene, yet wholly apart. The design, the blocking, choreography, everything contributes to the eternal, absolute sense of his isolation. And still, there is nothing about the use of the chorus that relegates them to propping up the main character: Despite their absolute identity with one another, they are people forming relationships, taking risks, making mistakes, loving, going to war, aging, maturing, not maturing. Exceptionalism and universalism together. Neat.

In the fourth scene, we're briefly returned to Faust's study where he contemplates his own navel and decides to end it all. As usual, some old time church music stays the killing hand. But as the curtains retract again, the hymn is not quite what you expect: At stage left is a series of flag-draped caskets with the funeral congregation at stage right.

The reveal is effective, but again some problematic design elements crept in during this scene. First of all, although I think the flags were the same color and design as those in the previous scene, under the lighting at the top of scene 4, they read as orange, yellow, and white, and I don't think they were going for candy corns.

But a bigger problem presented itself. From the ceiling a wall-to-wall beam was flown in. Based on further developments, I think that the beam itself was covered in reflective material so that its color could be changed with lighting alone. However, at this point it was bright yellow and it looked like a french fry. THEN a floor-to-ceiling pole was lowered in, intersecting the french fry close to the stage right proscenium, and I thought, "Oh dear, it's a stripper pole." For the first 10 minutes or so that these elements were on set—until they were flooded with yellow—I really didn't get that they were supposed to represent the cross inside the church.

So hold the french-fry-intersecting-stripper-pole in mind for just a moment. Perhaps you're eagerly awaiting the arrival of Mephistopheles on the scene? Fear not: This is where he comes in. The reveal and costuming here, I'm afraid to say, were disappointing. It turns out, of course, that he's the priest officiating at the mass funeral. When he reveals himself (umm . . . ok, I'll leave it) to Faust, he tears off his collar and doffs his cassock to reveal—a shiny royal blue/purple suit and black turtleneck?

I get that this is well-tread ground. I get that you don't want to go cliché (although what, I ask you, is ZOMG! DEVIL AS PRIEST!) I get that you don't want to put him in bright red. (For what it's worth, my annoyingly chatty neighbor INSISTED not only on bright red, she wanted a tail and horns.) But the shiny suit just made him look like he shops Liberace cast-offs.

So back to the french fry–stripper pole nexus. As Méphistophélès begins his seduction of Faust, his attention is drawn inexorably to the stripper pole and, well, he pretty much gives it a hand job. Remember, at this point, I am still thinking this is a tragic design accident, so I am basically in the shoes of Emma Thompson in the Tall Guy as she's watching Elephant! unfold.

But it's intentional. Because scene 6 is set in a strip club. The single yellow french fry is flown out and lo! The ACTUAL stripper pole is left behind. Vertically staggered neon-pink french fries are flown in to provide a sparkly backdrop, and strippers in corset-based rat costumes tumble out of two of the coffins.

COME BACK! It was actually really neat!

Ok, I admit that I cannot stop laughing when I think about the design meetings and the uphill battle, the passionate arguments in favor of, the decision to die on the hill of the stripper pole. But still, I was absolutely delighted at the way they handled the transition.

It's in this scene that we meet the only other major character in the opera, Brander, who enters into a "Devil Went Down In Georgia"-esque singing contest with Méphistophélès. As much as I (ultimately) loved the devotion-to-debauchery transition, though, I am wondering who, other than me, is paying attention to two—admittedly rockstar—bass-baritones and their dick-waving competition when they are AT A STRIP CLUB?

To compound this logistical flaw in the design, there is no getting around the fact that Branden's make-up and costume design goes well beyond homage and into plagiarism. Plagiarism of Riff Raff. Apparently neither strippers, nor songs about vermin, nor even the Rocky Horror Picture Show can satisfy Faust, who insists they leave.

Marguerite, of course, is the next trick up Méphistophélèseses's sleeve. As he and Faust wander through a field of roses and canoodling lovers, the upstage wall parts slightly to reveal Marguerite's bedroom, which is straight out of a 1950s sitcom: A chest of drawers, a bedside lamp, and a narrow twin bed with a crucifix hanging over it. As Méphistophélès lures Faust into the dream, Marguerite—who we now recognize as the woman pushing the wheelchair in earlier scenes—repeatedly enters and leaves the scene, each time curling, fully clothed, on the very edge of the bed.

So we've gotten to intermission without actually meeting Marguerite. And when Marguerite is Susan Graham, you have to sort of resent that, because she just gets better and better. But resentment aside, the set for Marguerite's home and the staging therein are wonderful. The bedroom set turns out to be the center of three panels. At stage right, the bedroom opens on to a patio with a cafe table and chairs. At stage left, Marguerite's mother sits in an armchair, facing an upstage television. Her folded wheelchair leans against the wall next to the door.

Méphistophélès urges Faust to hide under the bed as Marguerite serially attends to her mother, enters her bedroom and wearily sheds her coat, and slips out on the patio to enjoy an illicit cigarette. She sings about a legend of unending love and her dreams of Faust.

As her simply gorgeous ballad (through almost all of which the guy behind me was coughing, a guy up and to my left was coughing, and my annoyingly chatty neighbor decided that the way to remedy the coughing was to dig through a GIANT HOBO BAG APPARENTLY FILLED WITH SILVERWARE AND BROKEN GLASS to find a cough drop, which she then unwrapped as loudly as possible, then loudly and rudely offered it to the guy behind us, WHO HAD ALREADY UNWRAPPED HIS OWN COUGH DROP [and who was really making a heroic effort to suppress the coughing]) gives way to orchestral music, doubles for Marguerite enter and exit the various areas of her house, repeating her earlier actions. Soon, these are joined by Faust doubles and the pace accelerates into a cascade of mundane domestic scenes and tantalizing foreplay. As with the opening scenes, it's breathtaking the way the staging plays with time, despair, sparks of connection. And oh! The magnificent line it treads between farce and tragedy! Just lovely.

As with the earlier scenes, the design, although effective, isn't perfect. While Faust is infiltrating Marguerite's reality as thoroughly as he has infiltrated her dreams, Méphistophélès and his spirits are providing seductive backup. Marguerite's house, like Faust's study, is elevated above the stage floor, and the spirits appear in male–female, soldier–twinset pairs on the apron. The choreography echoes, but doesn't faithfully mimic the movements playing out above. Not that I yearn for rigid logical cohesion, but this element just ended up being confused and not especially seductive.

Just as Marguerite and Faust get down to business, Méphistophélès, King of Cock Blockers, arrives to announce the gathering mob. This time, the whole chorus appears from doors below the house. The men are in wife beaters and suspenders, wielding cleavers, axes, and hammers, while the women sport aprons and rolling pins, beating down the romance with the weight of parochial domesticity. It's nice, but everyone's wearing blue rubber gloves. So I'm thinking that either George Souglides (set and costume designer) is either a big cult SciFi fan, or the victim of an unfortunate series of pop culture coincidences.

Marguerite's fallen status and eventual imprisonment are signaled by a costume change: Rather than the dull-patterned wrap dress of filial duty, she wears a peignoir. Initially, we see only her severely framed bedroom as she obsesses about Faust. Eventually the curtains draw back to reveal her mother's sheet-draped body on the living room floor as uniformed investigators collect evidence from the scene. On the patio, a female jailer stands by.

From here, the story demands a return to Faust's study, the expected blood contract, a hell-bent ride through a forest of demons to save Marguerite, the damnation of the former and redemption of the latter. Faust signs a square of floor with end-of-broadcast snow projected on to it, scrawling barely recognizable letters into a broad jet of red. To signal the ride, the rat/strippers return to kind of tie him to his lab chair and put . . . goggles? . . . on him? Not my favorite narrative choice, especially as a series of blue french fries descends in a kind of pick-up-stix formation to suggest a forest canopy. As Faust descends into a narrow trench in the center of the stage, the chorus of demons sets down their hammers, which was a little too on-the-nose Communism.

But Marguerite's redemption was beautiful, despite multi-colored french fries and the return of the stripper-pole cross. It's the same old set from the earlier funerals, but this time the chorus is arranged on either side of an aisle, facing the audience. Marguerite herself sits on a set of upstage stairs, observing. The adult chorus is joined by children attired in an array of patterns that are remarkable after army-of-clones approach that deliberately dominated the costume design up to this point.

As the heavenly chorus calls to Marguerite, she makes her way downstage to the splash of Faust's blood. She lays a single rose on it, then turns to—ok, I guess you have to do it—walk into the light.

If I haven't mentioned the performers (other than Graham) it is not meant as any kind of slight. Groves (Faust), Relyea (Méphistophélès), and Van Horn (Brander), are magnificent individually and in concert. The chorus is stupendous.

Hmmm . . . I guess I'm pretty critical at points here, but make no mistake: With all its flaws, I really loved this production. It's such a wonderful canvas for Berlioz's music. It underscores how unlike anything contemporary this work is, musically, formally, and conceptually. And I would rather see a dozen fresh, ambitious, insightful productions like this than that dusty-ass old Tosca. And strangely enough, the same audience that walked out of The Cunning Little Vixen (seriously, your loss, assholes) stayed to the end and applauded wildly for this. Yes, I heard some boos when the design team came out, but they were far outnumbered by the sighs, laughter, and appreciative noises I heard throughout, to say nothing of the thunderous applause for the performers.

You Don't Bring Me Fruit, Flowers, Appliances, Ideas or Symbols Any More: Robbie Fulks' Year-End Wra

2009-12-27T14:53:00.000-06:00

Snow all the way down home from 'Tosa and no lights on 294 tried to keep us from Fitzgerald's and Robbie's year-end show last night. Fools! Not even a full-fledged Mayan Apocalypse could have kept us away from our 4th Anniversary with the Half Man, Half Horse. Unfortunately, it DID leave my friend E standing alone at the bar for like 40 minutes . . .

E texted me upon her arrival to give us the heads up: Bill had removed ALL tables and seating for the night. When we were paying the cover, the door guy advised us that they were expecting a VERY full house indeed and suggested we check our coats. Despite lack of seating, E had secured the ideal place for leaning against the curve of the bar. She was also talking to a woman. Said woman:

was rocking an awesome 40s look,
had a rockin' skull bag after which I have often lusted in my heart (she reciprocated by lusting for my Lexie Barnes skull bag), and
turned out to be with the bass player for the Long Gone Lonesome Boys, who were once again opening!

Neither Fitzgerald's nor Robbie's websites noted that they were opening (or, indeed, that anyone was opening), so this was an extremely pleasant surprise. The place indeed began filling up early, putting to rest any fears that the weather would be keeping anyone away.

The LGLB got started just a few minutes after nine. Sadly, they were missing multi-instrumentalist master Pat Keiner, although they had a friend sitting in on the third harmony part (he was very good, but I didn't catch his name, alas. They opened

with "Small Batch Bourbon" (or "Small Batch Whiskey"?), which I thought was new. The ZK believed that he'd heard it before, but I don't see it on either of their current CDs. Next up (or soon after: they had a special on Blue Moon and I'm only human) was "I Go Commando," which John Milne announced is the title of their soon-to-be-released CD. AWESOME! For 12 months we have repeatedly lamented that there was no recorded version of this available (although I lucked out having heard John perform it solo at the Acoustic Explosion last January).

We also got "King of Beers," "Burning Blue" (a Patrick Penny song that apparently doesn't come up a lot on the iPod [I thought it was new as well]; loved it!), "Wasn't That A Day" (probably my favorite song of theirs, but I reserve judgment until I hear "Knifer Biker" live), "www.lonesome.com," and "I'm Sober and My Woman's True to Me." I'm probably missing a few (see above re: Blue Moon). The set was awesome, which was convenient for me, as I'd talked them up a great deal to E, and she was suitably impressed. The LGLB had a very good crowd (and many folks seemed to be familiar with them if not flat out there to see them), but the place did continue to fill in throughout the break.

Last year, you may recall, there was some unpleasantness at Robbie's year-end show. This year, the overall mood seemed more contented, and it seemed that most of the crowd knew that they were not in for a simple, straightforward Robbie show. In addition, though, it seemed as if Robbie and the band had scaled back the "bits." There was nothing on the year's music (which may be explained by this blog entry), and Robbie later revealed that someone who was supposed to be playing Michael Jackson had to drop out because he'd gotten a corporate gig, and apparently the good people at Walgreen's didn't think that the two performances were compatible.

The beginning of the set was front loaded with what seemed like more music, including "Tears Only Run One Way," "Mad at a Girl," "Georgia Hard," "Cigarette State," "Took a Lot of Pills and Died." Not sure which song ended the first part of the show, but Robbie thanked the crowd for the enthusiastic applause and warned them that they'd put their hands together for the last time—for a while at least. Everyone except Gerald and Robbie beat feet offstage, and the two of them launched into "Rap of the Dead." Awesome as always, although Robbie seemed to struggle more early on than I recall in previous years. Superbonus points for working in "And Then There's Maude" this year.

The political satire was bookended by a wackidy-schmackidy-dooo musical theme "The Year that Everything Changed," which was kicked off by Mike, a delightfully squashy old man hat, and an honest-to-Baal corn cob pipe. It featured a seasonal set up for teabaggers (played by Donna and Beth Kathan) "Do You You Want Some Healthcare? (Yes, We Want Some Healthcare!)." The teabaggers' list of complaints provided the segue into a bit featuring Gerald as a recent immigrant to the US.

(I probably should raise an outcry against typecasting Gerald: Just because the man clearly has to shave out eye and nose holes from his lush facial hair, he shouldn't be doomed to such roles. I probably should do that, but damn, slap a newsy cap on the boy and he's an immigrant from Anyplace, Wide World.)

Robbie, in a lab coat and Buddy Holly glasses served as Gerald's immigrant guide in a number called "The Land of Unmerited Acclaim." Grant, as an AIG executive, Donna as Sarah Palin, and Beth as Paris Hilton helped Robbie to explain to our wide-eyed newcomer that "do" and "make" are really third world concepts.

Just when I was about to lean back to the ZK and say, "Paris Hilton jokes? Really?" Immigrant!Gerald said: "Paris Hilton jokes? Really?" Robbie then explained his fool-proof suburban comedy formula: One subtracts six months of time for every half mile outside of the city; thus, in Berwyn time, Paris Hilton is just now entering the LA county jail.

Robbie and Gerald continued to vamp on the theme of unmerited acclaim for . . . some time. Enough time, in fact, that Robbie had to hang a lantern on the length of time a certain costume change was taking. But it was all worth it when Beth emerged in an uncanny Michael Jackson costume to join Scott Ligon as Roman Polanski on a deeply, deeply wrong number called "We All Have a Child Inside." A number SO WRONG in fact, that this was certainly what caused everyone to leave the stage after Scott harangued Robbie for his cynicism about a year in which real change had been realized. (Of course, Gerald only left because he's a born follower.)

Via internal monologue, Robbie reflected on why he always goes too far. He ended by vowing to not dwell on THAT WAR, but instead to juice himself up to get invested in THIS WAR. It was at this point that the pinnacle of the show was reached with Grant in a metal!hair wig ROCKING THE FUCK out to "War Cry of the Moderates." Far before the end of it, I was in full-on Muttley mode, pounding the bar and trying to retain control of my Blue-Moon-filled bladder. (I'm sorry, but I overshare because I love.)

At this point, it was all over but the audience participation. In years past, the trivia game did tend to drag a bit. Robbie remedied that this year with a game called "Stump Scottie." Gerald wandered through the audience, calling on people to name a band, trying to find one that Scott Ligon would not be able to break into on the keyboards. I was rubbing my hands in glee when they threw a wrench into the works: Pre-1980.

The first couple attempts were weak (ELO, I think . . . and something equally obvious), next someone stumped him with X, which flabbergasted me. If he has that big a punk blindspot, I could have EASILY named a dozen bands. But the biggest fail came with Ready For the World. Bitch, please. "Oh Sheila," was sooooo post-1980. But the props were distributed to the winners, the review was wrapped up, and the band launched into the second half of the set.

This included "Goodbye, Cruel Girl" (I estimate that the opening held note exceeded 12 parsecs [yes, nerdlingers, I know]), "Can't Win For Losing You," "Busy Not Cryin'," and "Parallel Bars." Once again, "I Wanna Be Mama'd," was a phish-adjacent 15 minute jam. Last year, Chris Neville was made into Robbie's keyboard-playing monkey; this year, Scott Ligon had refused this role in an earlier song when Robbie demanded some Thelonious Monk. During "I Wanna Be Mama'd," though, he at last provided the Monk.

Robbie then called on Gerald for a solo. This was not ideally timed, as Gerald was playing with brushes and thus was hard to hear. The bar actually quieted down to near silence while Robbie handed out drumsticks to all the other band members. They then wandered the stage, using all available surfaces and objects as drums. This included their own microphones, which may have angered sound man. (Trust me when I say that you do not want to anger any sound man, but particularly not Fitzgerald's Sound Man.)

I'm not sure if it was before or after this that something dire was going on with Robbie's guitar. The middle basically dropped out of it, leaving a strange hole in his sound that reminded me of my burr coffee grinder. He then proceeded to break a string during, "Let's Kill Saturday night."

Obviously none of this impeded the end-of-show improv during the first encore. Scott Ligon immediately fled for the green room, and Mike was offstage because bassist Brett Simons had reunited with Robbie for an end of the year humbling. This left Gerald as the first victim, but Grant returned to get in on the action as well. And despite his recalcitrant guitar, Robbie he made a valiant attempt to start out "The Buck Starts Here," on Ligon's ukulele and produced something solo adjacent on it.

Bill was sending some seriously mixed signals after the first encore: The lights flicked on briefly, then were immediately dimmed to half. At one point we were sure that we heard the house music come on, but nonetheless, they pulled off Gordon Terry's "Lotta Lotta Women" for their final FINAL encore, during which the ukulele was further abused.

Great show, 100% less drama than last year. Rock star!

Review: Marriott Theatre's My Fair Lady

2009-12-22T11:52:00.001-06:00

My review for EDGE Chicago.

Review: Silent Theatre Company's Carnival Nocturne

2009-11-23T22:19:00.001-06:00

My review for EDGE Chicago.

Review: Young Frankenstein at the Cadillac Palace Theatre

2009-11-10T14:43:00.001-06:00

My review for EDGE Chicago

Review: The Walworth Farce, Druid at Chicago Shakespeare Theater's World Theater Series

2009-11-05T09:13:00.003-06:00

My review for EDGE Chicago. Great stuff, despite the interference of the Navy Pier fireworks show.

Review: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead at Writer's Theatre

2009-10-26T22:45:00.002-05:00

My review for EDGE Chicago.

Review: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom at Court Theatre

2009-10-20T09:46:00.002-05:00

My review for EDGE Chicago. Terrific production.

Review: Richard III at Chicago Shakespeare Theater

2009-10-06T09:32:00.001-05:00

My review for EDGE Chicago is here.

Review: Big Fan + Q & A with Robert Siegel and Patton Oswalt

2009-10-03T13:06:00.002-05:00

EATA: Awesome! Video of the Q & A.

ETA: Oops, I butchered the spelling of the director's name in my original post title. Sorry, Mr. Siegel, wherever you are!

I'm not defensive about being a Twitter user, but if I were I would defend it by pointing out the fact that I wouldn't have known that Patton was scheduled to be at yesterday's second showing of Big Fan at the Music Box Theatre. So THERE, STOOPID HEADS?!?! I AM EATING TWINKIES! LOLZ!

I actually didn't know much about the movie at all before we were standing in line for our 9:40 showing. Some of the promotional materials pointed out that Siegel (who wrote and directed this) was the writer of The Wrestler. The ZK then commented that he'd heard this wasn't a "Ha ha!" comedy, but I knew that like Apocalypse Now, BIg Fan was bound to be a gay romp.

Paul, played by Oswalt, is a fan boy. In many ways, the object of his desire seems irrelevant at first: He lives with his mother, has a sad sack job as an attendant in a parking garage. His entire social world comprises a single friend who is nearly as sad as he (Sal, played by the great Kevin Corrigan) and the listening audience of a local late-night sports radio program.

See how I slipped that in there? Anyone familiar with Oswalt and his comedy is probably inclined to call shenanigans at the thought of him as a sad, rabid sports fan. As he put it himself in the post-Q&A "I'm not a sports-waching mouth breather, I'm a Green-Lantern-shirt-wearing mouth breather." So in some sense, it certainly matters that sports is the character's obsession, and specifically that football is where he vicariously lives out his life.

After the Q&A the ZK and I both wished we'd asked how Oswalt had become attached to the project. Certainly sports makes Oswalt at once the perfect choice for the role and a very strange choice for it. On the perfect front, if you've never seen him, have a look. He is built on the Little Teapot model, short and stout. In his stand-up and last night, he's referred to himself as "hobbit," "troll," and so on. Physically juxtaposing him to his hero of heroes, a defensive lineman named Quantrell Davis, is visually hilarious and sad by turns.

On the strange front, as a comedian, writer, and actor, Oswalt is incredibly articulate, obviously a nerd, and if I'd been called on to do so, I'd have bet large wadges of cash against him being any kind of sports fan. Not, I might add, that I think it's impossible to be a nerd AND a rabid, foul-mouthed sports fan, as the significant sideways glances the ZK was shooting me throughout the movie demonstrate.

After the Q&A the ZK and I both wished we'd asked how Oswalt had become attached to the project. It may be that his total lack of affinity for sports is what slotted him perfectly into the role. (And make no mistake, he is perfect for it, and he gives a great performance. Not great for a comedian. Not great with any qualifications. It's a straight-up great performance.)

Not to go all Sapir-Whorf on the performance, but it's just possible that Oswalt's complete lack of vocabulary for the subject acted as a substantial aid to his performance. In the Q&A, there were the inevitable questions about how much of the script was improvised. I have the sense that some actors, particularly those coming from comedy, have a tendency to downplay those silly writer people and claim that they are brilliantly making things up on the fly. Siegel was actually fairly sanguine about the questions (which I've gotta imagine are annoying), saying that Patton was free to improvise when he liked, but both acknowledged that it was pretty much a disaster when he tried in Big Fan, as he'd either launch into something witty and articulate that was totally at odds with the character, or the scene would require sports chatter, and both he and Kevin Corrigan (also not a sports fan) would come up completely empty.

So Big Fan isn't the movie for those seeking out wacky Patton. Although very funny at times it's a pretty seriously dark movie. It's also quite quiet, depending heavily on location shoots in Staten Island as well as visual shorthand in his supporting cast. Siegel, a Long Islander, admitted that he'd always found the other boroughs and their denizens exotic. When accused of stereotyping in this movie, he claimed that Staten Island natives laughed at how well he'd captured them, whereas his own landsmen were offended on behalf of the defenseless white trash. Or something.

I tend to be on Seigel's side in the white stereotype debate, but I admit that there were things about the QB character that chafed a bit. On the one hand, it doesn't matter that he's black, as he's readily recognizable as any given high-profile athlete on a self-destructive binge. On the other hand, he didn't have to be black. On the gripping hand, particularly the handful of brief "fantasy sequences" that feature Jonathan Hamm looking manfully, somewhat homoerotically sportsy have a different cast to them, given his blackness and Paul's whiteness. Probably I'm overthinking it in my white, privileged way, but I also think Siegel was underthinking it in his white, privileged way.

As far as bromancery goes, it's not really the point of the movie. But that doesn't mean that the movie doesn't capitalize on the great work that Oswalt and Corrigan do together. In fact, the final scene between them is quite brilliant, not just because they play off one another beautifully, but because it's the ideal capstone (I won't say resolution, because that's also not what the movie is about) to a story that in retrospect could have ended with a giant fizzle.

For me, the evening DID end on a tragically indignant note, as Capone outed Patton as Neill Cumpston. I don't read Ain't It Cool News with any kind of regularity, but I had an epiphany as soon as Patton started to talk about the birth of this alter ego as he watched two 13-year-old boys so pumped by Blade 2 that they were physically beating on one another as they told each other how cool it was: He had perpetrated the infamous I totally camed in my pants review of Sin City. What can I say, except PATTON OSWALT, I TRUSTED YOU!

And while we're airing our dirty laundry, Mr. Oswalt, I do have to tell you that I was very touched when you talked about how Robert Ebert taught you that you didn't have to hate things to be cool, and how much his positive review meant to you. Sincerely, I may have wiped away a tear last night. But it's important to note that no one looks cool when they are enabling Joel Schumacher.

Ahem.

In conclusion: Big Fan is really good. Patton Oswalt is really good in it, and you should go see it and ensure that this movie has legs.

Review: Man of La Mancha At Ridgewood Arts' Theater at the Center.

2009-09-25T11:10:00.001-05:00

My review for EDGE Chicago.

Review: Eric Simonson's Honest at Steppenwolf's First Look Repertory of New Work

2009-08-05T19:01:00.001-05:00

This was a particularly interesting assignment, as it was part of Steppenwolf's First Look Repertory of New Work program. The play is a work under development, but the program is designed to help playwrights advance the work via staging. Added bonus of being a good play and a good production. Sadly, some copyediting errors got by me and by the copy editor. Oops.

Undead By Numbers: Dead Snow

2009-07-31T13:16:00.001-05:00

From the time that the very first previews for Død Snø popped up, there was never any doubt that the citizens of the Painful Acres would be taking in a film. We very nearly missed it at the Music Box Theatre, but not even our short attention spans could undermine our resolve, thanks to the fact that the run was extended, and off we went Wednesday night.

I know that you're all thinking "Of course that's what she was going to say!", but it's good! Wait! Shane! Come back! Mother wants you! I know she does!

Ahem.

No, seriously, it's good.

It's good as a zombie movie: Gross, but not too gross. Funny, but not too self-consciously funny. Filled with surprising moments and suspenseful moments in good balance with one another. (And if one is looking for further evidence that Tommy Wirkola has studied his Hitchcock, I'd swear that there's a scene or two where hand props are oversized.)

It's good as an homage to the horror genre, generally speaking, and to the zombie subgenre, something that is not easy to do. One character is a movie buff, and Wirkola and co-writer Stig Frode Henriksen (who also stars) lightly sprinkle the dialogue with references to other genre classics. There's very little that's unexpected as the plot unfolds, but Wirkola is very good at including shots or sequences so typical of the genre as to be mandated, and still making his own mark on them.

It's good as a movie, period. All the cast members are good, and there's no one in particular that you'd like to see chomped immediately. The screenplay is structurally successful. It starts with zombies. It ends with zombies. It capitalizes on the genre very well by having 99% of the exposition confined to "Monologue by Mysterious Stranger in Act II" (in this case delivered by Bjørn Sundquist, aka the Norwegian Harvey Keitel). And it moves along at a good clip, running just 90 minutes. It's filmed with considerable technical skill (no heavy-handed irony about inept filming techniques or subpar equipment), and it has considerable style.

For example, the opening sequence involves an outdoor chase through a snowy mountain forest. It's set to "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Peer Gynt: Not exactly a bold and new choice for horror music, right? But it's deployed in a really effective way. The music drops out entirely in midsequence, then returns, reaching its crescendo as the chase comes to its expected conclusion. Visually, we've been given the briefest of glimpses of the zombies, and even briefer peeks at a character that hardly appears at all, but who is nonetheless important to the plot. All we see of her unfortunate end, really, is bare, winter-blackened branches shaking wildly, but it's somehow a perfect distillation of the sex and violence mash-up that is the horror genre.

Certainly there are excesses and bits of silliness. As the ZK pointed out, someone seems to have gotten a bulk discount on pig intestines, and I was wondering what it is about this particular species of Norwegian tree that makes it crave entrails. In an otherwise pretty solid screenplay, Wirkola and Henriksen are perhaps a bit too casual about the plot mechanism driving the zombies. Toward the end, they also might veer slightly over the line into heavy-handed hilarity (then again, it's handled admirably by the actors).

So don't listen to Ebert and those other cranky butts. Many disembodied thumbs up!

Review: Collaboraction & Teatro Vista's El Grito del Bronx at the Goodman

2009-07-25T17:49:00.001-05:00

My review for Edge Chicago. I highly recommend this one.

Review: Hubris Productions' Bent at the Greenhouse Theater

2009-07-22T14:46:00.001-05:00

Once again, my review for EDGE Chicago.

Review: Footloose at Theater at the Center, Munster, IN

2009-07-21T10:00:00.001-05:00

My Review for EDGE Chicago.

De Trop: Transformers 2—Revenge of The Fallen

2009-07-07T12:24:00.001-05:00

There's really so little point in my attempting to review Transformers 2: Revenge of The Fallen, first because it is not really a movie, as such, second, because you can't top Topless Robot. But when have I ever left it at that?

In some ways, T2:RotF (hmmm, is that a 533kr1t message in the title's acronym?) is more successful than the first movie, because it does not make the mistake of shorting you, the viewer, on the Giant Robots Kicking The Asses Of Other Giant Robots front as the first "film" did. Even Optimus Prime's stabby, stabby swordfist makes a very early appearance in Shanghai.

Speaking of Shanghai . . . oh, damn, I was about deploy my Home Movies–based "shooting day-for-night, like Truffaut" joke ('cause the helpful War Games-era computer-y text at the bottom of the screen says "Shanghai, 22:15," but it's bright daylight), but I just realized that this could be a time-zone thing. Alas. Can I still quibble about the movie's deep confusion regarding to which branch of the military Josh Duhamel (still pretty, still charming) belongs? Can I note that I appreciate Rainn Wilson in . . . an opera cape? . . . as much as the next gal , but I have never, in my whole born life, been to a huge lecture class attended by "the Dean" or even "a Dean"? Yes, I think I can.

I'm not even going to have a go at this plot, because, really "Michael Bay does not understand what a robot is" and "Because... because FUCK YOU, that's why" pretty much sum it up. I'm not sure that these statements are any less true of the first movie, by which, you will recall, I was pretty charmed. I was not charmed by Transformers 2.

Despite the aforementioned stabby, stabby swordfist, despite the fact that Devastator is pretty freaking cool, despite the complete absence of the demented Australian Black Canary rip off from the first movie, and despite the fact that Michael Bay clearly stopped creaming himself long enough while watching The Incredible Hulk to write in a car boxing gloves scene of his own, I was really not charmed. Why?

Well, you've seen the trailer, right? So you, like everyone else in America, are qualified to comment on Megan Fox's pelvic health, courtesy of the scene of her dry humping the motorcycle. If that struck you as a bit much, let me tell you that the scene in the movie would have required lights, gels, and make-up for her freaking fallopian tubes. It is that extended and invasive. Even if I didn't think less than nothing of Megan Fox, to say that this is creepy doesn't begin to describe this sequence.

Of course, Fox has competition this time in the form of Isabel Lucas, the human-form Deceptislut planted at Sam's college for God Knows Why. At first, it simply seems that "Alice" is simply the most frequently objectified blip on the radar of Sam's web entrepreneurial roommate (I do have to be grateful to Michael Bay for NOT exploring the purpose of the serial killer wall of photos of young women in the cyberden). You see, women go to college to walk the hallways with washcloths wrapped around them, and Alice excels at fitting into this environment. But then she enters upon her campaign to show Sam that MF knows exactly jack about dry humping.

I find that here I really must pause—and I apologize, because I know you're excited about the humping—to address a "plot" element not covered in the Topless Robot FAQ. So Sam lives in LA, right? And it's mentioned several times that he is going to college "On the East Coast." There's a whole baked scene at his natal home with them all packing up the minivan before the appliances come to life in a scene that I'm pretty sure is just doctored footage from Gremlins.

(Here I pause in my pause to, once again, thank Michael Bay for NOT including one of Sam's mother's sex toys among the appliances come [so to speak] to life. Given your rock-bottom opinion of women, Michael, it must have KILLED you to skip the "ZOMG! Middle-aged women like sex! HOW GROSS IS THAT?" joke.)

ANYWAY. LA to East Coast, presumably by minivan. Except that all members of the Witwicky clan are wearing exactly the same things when they arrive at the college as they were when they left LA. Fine, whatever, they were loading up the minivan to head to the airport to pay another $40K in extra-baggage charges, rather than driving cross-country. BUT THEN Bumblebee, who was cruelly left behind by Cool!CollegeBound!Sam in move that smacks of Act III of any nerd-based 1980s classic, shows up on Sam's first night of college. Can he, like Jetfire, inexfuckingplicably teleport? AND WHY DO I CARE?

In truth, I do not. I want to get back to the Deceptislut for a moment. So Sam, who is having the world's least convincing quasi-epileptic episodes, courtesy of the Hellraiser shard, initially tries to fend off her advances. Bumblebee, like a true nerd!friend, is determined to save Sam and his relationship from Sam himself, so he drives up on the hedge of the fraternity house. Sam beats feet out of there, and Deceptislut calls shotgun. She starts talking car!pr0n to him, and Bumblebee deploys the possessed radio gag, beginning with "Your Cheatin' Heart." Funny! He then switches to "Superfreak." Still funny! And then he whips the passenger seat forward, slamming Alice's face into the dashboard. HILARIOUS, right?

You can certainly feel free to call me a hypocrite, because I enjoy violence-laden action movies. So what is it about this that really chaps my hide? It's a passing moment in a comic relief scene. It's hilarious that Sam is such an over-caffeinated boob! It's touchingly funny that Bumblebee is so devoted Sam, despite the fact that Sam has spent their time together in this movie being a complete prick, that he will totally put that bitch out of commission to protect Sam. So he—I have to say it again—slams her face into the dashboard for comic relief purposes. And, yes, I know she's a Bad Guy! (although Sam doesn't know that, and his reaction is so underwhelming that that's a huge part of what's disturbing about the scene).

Moving on. With all my sensitive girly worrying about misogyny here, I'd certainly be remiss if I did not give a WTF?!? shout out to racism in the movie as well. Recall, this is from the same director who included a scene of unbelievably old school racism with a human in the first movie, BUT STILL. Skidz and Mudflap both have giant, sticking out ears and buck teeth. Their dialogue out-Jar-Jars Jar-Jar by a loooong shot. Also, please note the gold pimp tooth. That's Klassy with a K, Mr. Bay.

Overall, the movie is just without charm. It's just as baked (literally in this case, and I'm with Topless Robot in wondering what the hell they were thinking with the pot brownie scene) and nonsensical as the first one, but there's very little that's fun about it. John Turturro seems sort of pissed off and slightly bitter. Also, though I love him, I did not need to see his butt crack being flossed by a Sector 7 thong (although that provided postproduction hilarity when the ZK asked me, "Did he say I wear it when I fuck?" No. No. he did not. He said, "I wear it when I'm in a funk.") The EBIL GOBERNMENT subplot makes no sense at all. The attempts to inject emotion into the relationships Sam has with MF and his parents were a tragic mistake.

This thing is One Hundred And Fifty Minutes Long. There is no excuse for that in a well-ordered society. A lot of the dead weight that the movie is carrying seems to be 12-year-old boy-directed humor. I do not begrudge my up-and-coming tween nerds their dumb comedy, but there has to be 20 minutes of ill-advised scenes like Johnny 5 or whatever the hell his name is humping MF's calf, and every one of those 20 minutes was met with dead silence in our theater, which was heavily populated with the presumed target demographic.

So I have to ask myself, as you should be asking yourself: At what price more hot robot-on-robot violence?

Review: Once On This Island at Porchlight Theatre

2009-06-10T16:16:00.002-05:00

For EDGE Chicago

Hot Off The Presses!

2009-06-08T18:33:00.002-05:00

I am now doing some reviews (theater and other live performances) for EDGE Chicago. My first review for Lookingglass Theatre's production of Arabian Nights came out today.

Welcome to the Bridge of the USS Crap You Already Knew: Star Trek

2009-05-14T13:10:00.001-05:00

First, everyone either looooooved or haaaaaateed Watchmen, and I thought it was ok at best. And now Star Trek—this would be the same Star Trek that has a 96% at Rotten Tomatoes—well, it was ok.

I mean are we getting the subpar Midwestern cuts?

I suppose I should begin by praising casting: They certainly prepared me to watch Chris Pine for a couple of hours by casting two astonishingly ugly people as his father and as his younger self. On the other hand, is wholly unbelievable that these eyebrows, this blank stare sprang forth from the loins of Jennifer Morrison, who is quite gorgeous. I'm not sure I'll ever feel the same about Cameron again, though.

We'll be kind and leave the aberration of casting Winona Ryder in any role for any reason and say that casting really did quite a good job.

Zachary Quinto as Spock is rather a no-brainer. I do wonder how many times daily they had to stop filming to remove his 11 o'clock, 11:15, 11:27, etc., supraorbital shadow. Also, the back of my mind kept screaming that Kirk had obviously stolen Sylar's eyebrows.
Zoë Saldana was a good Uhura, and she had a promising start in the movie. Actually, I'll reserve my reservations (ha, do you see what I did there?) on this front for later.
I like Anton Yelchin. Have liked him since !Huff, although he took a while to grow on me. Sadly, all Chekov is to Abrams is an ambulatory accent joke that, in retrospect, is kind of a slam on Walter Koenig.
I was not feeling the love for John Cho as Sulu. I didn't dislike him or anything about his performance, it was just kind of a void. And, yes, it bothers me that he's Korean not Japanese.
Simon Pegg was completely flawless and wonderful for the 8 minutes that he is actually in the movie.
Karl Urban. I can't remember if it was an Onion joke or something from Peter Sagal or others on the WWDTM crew, but I chuckled in my usual sophisticated manner at the thought of Karl Urban losing it and lapsing into Eomer. Whoever it was appears to have been joking on the square. Ok, so he wasn't Eomer in the scene where he and Kirk meet, but he was like some awful DeForest Kelley impersonator. Certainly he was better later, but I don't know what kind of director yells "Cut! Print! GOLDEN!" after those shenanigans. Oh, wait: I do.
Bruce Greenwood's good. He even manages to sell the line about Kirk being the only "genius-level repeat offender in the Midwest" while looking into the terrifyingly blank eyes of Chris Pine.
Pine. Other than cheap shots about how unattractive I think he is, how was his performance? Kind of irrelevant. Abrams' approach is to catapult Kirk through a series of masturbatory Adventure!Scenes! Really, a crash-test dummy could have played Kirk, so there's not a lot to judge Pine's performance by. I will say that most of the cast managed to have at least one moment of emotional reality, despite Abrams. Not Pine. Not even with Nimoy on ~~Hoth~~ the M-class planet near Vulcan.
Bana's Nero was exactly what I imagine they wanted. He outgrowls Bale in The Dark Knight; He yells SPOOOOOCKKK presumably until the entire crew reaches climax; he wears the prosthetics well. I thought maybe there would turn out to be something interesting about his relationship with Ayel (and you should totally go see Clifton Collins, Jr., in Sunshine Cleaning, by the way), but . . . no, they're really just two Romulan miners displaced from time hoping . . . well, I really have a better idea of what the Decepticons' goals were, I guess, because I was thinking that they deserved a trip to Disneyland after getting not one but two Spocks to witness the destruction of Vulcan.

I really should have liked the whole movie more, because the casting really was very good. Unfortunately, the script and direction weren't. Last fall, my sister, my niece, and I went to see the stage version of Dirty Dancing. It was a very strange experience. Not unenjoyable, but strange. The leads were made too look as much like Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze as possible. They were very good dancers. But other than a strange and misguided attempt to inject some more Civil Rights–Era weight into the script, it's basically a stage reenactment of the movie.

The dancer (I deliberately refrain from calling him an actor) playing Johnny had an extremely strange and heavy accent. I remember being very surprised that he was supposedly from Australia, because his delivery strongly suggested that he had learned his lines phonetically. This mattered not a whit. The crowd still went wild when he declared, "Nobody puts Baby in the corner." It's fortunate that this comes near the end, otherwise one senses that the place would have emptied faster than Springfield's Ghery-designed Concert Hall.

The script for Star Trek resembles nothing so much as a series of post-it notes, each with a "must-have" moment scribbled on it. You have the heavy-handed establishment of the "Bones" moniker in Urban's painfully unchecked DeForest Kelley impersonation, and later the mandatory "Dammit, Jim!" You have "I have been, and always will be, your friend," and I admit that Nimoy, as always, pulls it off despite Pine's resemblance to the world's most mentally challenged cocker spaniel. You have the tragically underused Simon Pegg "Givin' it all she's got!" You have the audience fairly shouting "Say it! Say it! Say it!" for Chekov's "Wictor Wictor" and later "Wessels."

I suppose sticking to the well-known territory was all for the best. From early on, when the script tried to be a script for the movie in progress, it was filled with "Wait, what now?" moments. It's true that I often have to consult my spousal unit to clarify certain issues about Trek. So when a Romulan shows up on screen and no one on the Kelvin has any reaction whatsoever to what I gather is supposed to be the first-ever sighting of a Romulan in this shiny new timeline, I figured I was misunderstanding something, but it seems not.

When big-handed Kirk (ok, I admit that I got deep satisfaction from McCoy chasing Kirk around and jabbing him in the neck repeatedly) busts on to the bridge and makes his big reveal to Pike, well correct me if I'm wrong here, but our Young Turk has just bust in and said Shit. That Everyone. Already. Knows. The only thing that he even arguably reveals is the transmission that Uhura intercepted, a little fact that would've been common knowledge if Abrams—as every watcher of Lost knows—didn't have some deep fear of periodic staff meetings in which information is added to the common pool.

As the ZK pointed out, I guess Kirk gets Pike to raise the shields before dropping out of warp (which, call me crazy, if I'm flying blind into a distress call–driven situation with no further information, I'm all about the shields). Starfleet really has lowered the bar if that's enough to get you bumped to first officer.

The ZK inadvertently preyed on my shaky Trek knowledge when he started flipping out about Spock's mother dying. I, for one, supporting killing Winona Ryder as often as possible on screen, particularly when she has been inexplicably mummified with half a pony keg over the front of her torso. (In general, my feeling is a giant WTF? about the costuming; nice slash-pocket Dockers on all the boys!) PLUS, I was all "Why is he worried about messing with the fact that Spock's mother is supposed to be alive and well when I am worried about the fact that, as far as I know, VULCAN has never been blowed up real good." But the ZK's Trek priorities, like Tim Conway, defy augury.

It's a shame that the script is such a shambles, because I don't think it had to be. I really like it being anchored in the extraordinary relationship between Kirk and Spock. (I liked it better before the unnecessary scene with Nimoy and Quinto that spelled this out, not because I begrudge either of these two screen time, but because it shattered my last hope for any kind of delicacy in this movie.) But I don't think that centering the movie on that relationship should involve sacrificing your other characters to campy "TCB now! No New Crap!" cameos." And if that IS the center of your movie, then maybe spend a little less time on the Wet Dream Adventures of James Tiberius Kirk and a little more time on WHY that relationship is important (and why it's crucial that Spock be the "bottom" in it).

Let's now talk completely extraneous crap:

~~Hoth~~ the M-class planet near Vulcan? In addition to being silly, what the hell's up with having Kirk climb out of the pod's crater in his Academy jammies? Couldn't help thinking that this looks like the kind of planet where exposure = death in seconds. Also, totally gratuitous use of Cloverfield leftovers. I would like to invite Mr. Abrams to get over himself.
I'm willing to give Abrams a pass on the "Why do we even have that cavernous central pit?" for the Romulan ship, because it's de rigeur for all space-faring movies at this point. But seriously, a ship designed entirely around catwalks?
I honestly don't know if the Uhura/Spock relationship is extraneous. Sadly, Uhura is practically extraneous, which is made worse by a promising start for the character. I don't particularly object to the relationship (although I don't buy them macking in plain sight on the transporter pad for a minute), but it highlights Star Trek's gender fail. I appreciate that the movie is stuck with a lot of the baggage of the 60s series (especially the costuming, and both the ZK and I agreed that female crew's uniforms were an area where the costuming succeeded pretty well), but I don't get the feeling it was a priority to work their way free of that baggage. I mean, seriously: A "Hope this hick isn't bothering you!" bar fight? Serial "lingually gifted" jokes? I liked the chemistry between Saldana and Quinto. I liked that she is supremely uninterested in Kirk. But it chafes that making her the girlfriend is all they could think to do with her.
The scene with the convertible—and again, I feel I must point out the incredibly ugly child.
Abrams' directorial "style." Bad bad bad bad bad bad bad and again BAD. Step away from the shakier-than-thou hand-held nonsense. And I SWEAR TO BA'AL if you dolly in and swing 270 degrees around a character's GIANT NOSTRIL HAIRS just one more time, I am going to give you such a pinch. Oddly enough, I had some hopes early on that he'd toned down some things. In retrospect, the directorial moments I didn't hate seem to have been cribbed from Battlestar Galactica.

I suppose that's about it. I could rant about the IMPLIED VIOLENCE AGAINST BEAGLES! But then I would never stop. I could spend some time on "It's a big red ball. I can't wait to tell my friends. None of them has a red ball this big." I could chide Abrams for stealing the Fire Swamp's Flame Spurt gag from The Princess Bride. But that would be piling on, now wouldn't it?

Breathers: A Zombie's Lament, by S. G. Browne

2009-04-22T09:38:00.002-05:00

I realize that my review of anything with the subtitle A Zombie's Lament will be considered suspect, but this is quite a good read. I'll try to keep this as free from substantive spoilers as possible.

The opening scene of Breathers—and I do not say this lightly—rivals the opening scene of Sunset Boulevard. It's quite an opening scene to live up to for better than 300 pages, but Browne pulls it off almost flawlessly. The whole novel is narrated in the first person, present tense, although about 2/3 of it is actually spent catching the reader up to the events in progress in the opening, so again, very much like SB, except our William Holden stand-in is available for another third of a novel. Aces!

Despite the opening nod to SB, Breathers is more Catcher in the Rye than it is Maltese Falcon. (Although Joe Gillis is more Holden Caulfield than Sam Spade,isn't he? Forgive me while I lurch my way out of this metaphor.) Sure, there are noirish elements to Breathers: Andy, our undead narrator, is quite the Everyzombie, and he neither courts nor consciously creates the interesting times in which which he's not living.

Most of the chapters are short, sleek vignettes. They're a series of funny, painful glimpses into a Day in the Life of a Zombie. Through them, Andy's individual story is revealed. There's not a lot of time spent on Browne's zombie mythos, which is fine, as it amounts to "Some people just reanimate, don't really know why. Probably genetic, but anyway, it's been happening for decades, if not centuries."

Browne wisely spends his time fleshing out (oh ho ho! I swear to you, I did not see that one coming until it was typed!) the unlived experience of Zombies, showing the reader how reviled and disempowered a segment of society they are (even in Santa Cruz—I suspect the vampires). He shows us, through Andy and his compatriots in an Undead Anonymous group (the only manifestation of Zombies' First Amendment rights, and these are monitored by a Breather), what human habits die hard and which ones slip away all too easily.

What else can I say? There's romance, fighting, dismemberment, fire, chases, escapes, porn, civil disobedience, disguises, and a self-actualized Zombie named Ray who turns out, strangely, to be a kind of Mary Poppins for Andy and his posse. (Actually, that would be one minor criticism of the book: Ray turns up, takes everyone by the shoulders, nudges them down a particular path, and then meets an ambiguous end off screen, so he's a touch Zombie ex machina.) It's funny—very funny—but like the best Zombie movies it's also social commentary and social commentary done deftly.

Without spoiling anything, I think I can say that the book ends with the Zombie Apocalypse (a very local one, at least) on he horizon, but leaves the door plausibly open for a sequel. And let's face it: If you could reanimate Joe Gillis for one (possibly) last hurrah, wouldn't you?

So Say . . . Well, I . . . Because "We All" Said So Some TIme Ago

2009-03-25T12:16:00.001-05:00

A handful of thoughts on the ending of Battlestar Galactica. 5p01l3rz, obviously!

I really liked Battlestar Galctica a lot, although I don't think I ever loved it. Just when I might've gotten to that point, the first season ended with the "1 Year Later" bullshit. I never quite got over that, which is unlike me. (I am, generally speaking, a very adaptable TV viewer.)

We were well behind in BSG viewing pretty much all season. I don't think I got spoiled for much of anything, which has a lot more to do with being out of the fandom than good behavior on anyone's part.

My interest really dipped to a low in "Revelations," as the nuked Earth seemed so very obvious. The byzantine explanation of the final five and their place in human–cylon history was not helping. When we picked back up "Sometimes a Great Notion," I was frustrated with all the shortcuts taken to Dee's end.

It isn't that I find a suicide at that time unbelievable. It isn't even that I didn't buy that Dee would take her own life. In fact, I pretty much knew from the moment we saw Dee's reaction shot on Earth that she was done for (didn't necessarily know it would be such an overt suicide). But her whole story line takes place against a kind of emotional green screen. By the time we have the bizarre scene with her romping with Hera, Helo, and Athena, I wondered if the problem wasn't Dee, but that everyone else in the main cast had suffered some kind of head injury that prevented them from seeing that she'd snapped. And, well, the best thing I can say about that episode is that Lucy freakin' Lawless and her nightmare hair finally got left behind.

I liked "The Oath" and "Blood on the Scales." It was good to have Gaeta finally do something—some culmination of behavior that had been bizarre and erratic since he served as President frakking Baltar's aide de camp. There was plenty of fury to go around on both sides. Zarek's slaughter of the quorum could be viewed as annoyingly directive (LOOK! LOOK! HE'S THE BAD GUY! DON'T ROOT FOR HIM!), but that gun was on the mantel when Zarek was introduced: Whether he's a guerrilla or a freedom fighter in today's paper, his tactics will always be brutal and uncompromising. Oh, and I loved the return of Starbuck—MY Starbuck, devoid of emo and bubblegum.

Unfortunately, "No Exit" killed any momentum that had been built, at least for me. Talky, talky. Obvious. Boring. Stale metaphors. Yes, I have couch trauma related to No Exit, specifically, but I don't think it was all in my head. "Deadlock" didn't do a great deal to pick up the pace, either. Part of the problem was poor Ellen's schizophrenia.

I've no idea when they decided that she was the final cylon, but boy was that decision covered in phlebotenum. I don't fault Kate Vernon, who did very well occupying an entirely new character we'd never seen before. I fault the whipsaw writing that tried to reconcile her as the real brains of the five with her long-running, completely-toxic-but-somehow-a-great-love relationship with Tigh.

But then I loved almost all of "Someone to Watch Over Me." Ok, I loved about half of "StWOM." Ok, I loved the Starbuck parts. The crushing monotony of the briefings. The sudden memory that the more fucked up things get, the funnier she gets.

But then there's Chief. What. the. Fuck? In addition to not buying for a frakking second that he is so completely undone by Boomer's reappearance that he can't think straight, I found it staggering that the script for the episode barely acknowledges the fact that Chief presumably beats another 8 unconscious to make the substitution in Boomer's cell. When we then add in the torture porn of inherent in juxtaposing the Boomer/Helo sex to the bruised, bloody, and bound Athena in the closet . . . UGH. Please, writers, work out your own mommy/woman-who-done-you-wrong issues on your own time.

I'm just going to skip "Islanded in a Stream of Stars." Honestly, I can't remember much about it, and the Boomer Beating/Beat Off material of "StWOM" leads pretty well into what I liked and disliked about "Daybreak."

The flashbacks to before the fall could have gone wrong, but on balance, I liked them and appreciated the pieces of characters that they slotted into place. On a technical note, using long shots in most of these flashbacks caused me a lot of "Is that Lee or is that Anders?" confusion.

I know there's a lot of dissatisfaction with the Kara/Lee nookie close encounter, and I appreciate and get the criticisms. However, it kind of worked for me. I buy the fact that Kara loved Zak in her fucked up, damaged way. But I also buy that Kara is and always has been exceptional, in both positive and negative ways, and so is Lee. In contrast, Zak is a nice guy, but plodding. Ordinary. Mediocre.

It's not particularly admirable in either Kara or Lee that in the moment, they'd forget about the little people (and it's a pretty tired, ethically suspect convention) but I believed it. Anders' monologue about perfection shed more light on both Kara and Lee than it did on him. (That's my bias, certainly. Michael Trucco's performance never elevated Anders to anything more than a Lee also-ran as far as I'm concerned.) Plus, I'm sorry, but no one's chemistry comes close to rivaling that off Bamber/Sackoff. I am shallow.

Beyond that, most of my likes/dislikes are bullet-pointable, and so I shall bullet-point:

Nice of the writers to leave Chief completely out of "Islanded in a Stream of Stars," and then casually reveal, "Oh yeah, Chief's complicity with Boomer? We knew about that." Um, what?
Hated Kara-as-Angel. Hated the Angels in general. Hate hate hate the tired SciFi (SyFy, syphilitic) trope of postcorporeality being the ultimate stage in unilinear human evolution.
Poor Cally's kid! (Does he even have a name?) Everyone forgets until the last moment that his mom got airlocked My Two Dads both go off on the suicide mission.
And speaking of our belated recall that Cally got airlocked. . . . I've been hating on Tory for a good long while for a variety of reasons, Cally's quickly forgotten death being chief amongst them, but I hate that her end came Tyrol's hands, given the events of "StWOM." Nice that Boomer buys it for her sins, Tory buys it for her sins, Dee buys it for . . . well, I don't especially know why Dee drew the suicide card, and Tyrol gets to finish the series with a manly act of violence against his former lover. In general, the clumsy inattention to gender in the last few episodes really annoyed me.
WTF? on Cavil deep throating his own gun.
Yes, I know that President Badger made no sense whatsofrakkin' ever, but it made me laugh. Plus the dog makes it, which means I don't have to hunt down and kill every last person associated with the show. A domesticated dog in the mix 150,000 years ago probably shouldn't screw with the timeline of animal domestication TOO much, and dogs do come first.
Not that anyone but me cares, but the setting of the fleet's arrival on Earth 150,000 years ago means that we might attribute the successful diaspora of anatomically modern humans at the expense of archaic Homo sapiens to interbreeding with the fleet. That's a pretty punk-ass unifactorial explanation. The ZK, at 1:26 into "Daybreak," paused the TiVo, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, "This may be hard for you." It's fortunate that the script didn't go too far down that road.
Mary McDonnell is such a star. I just loved her performance at every single moment in the series, even when the writing for her was shit. Like everyone else, I was completely undone by her scene with Cottle, and I just love her.
I'm glad that Helo survived, even though I'm not sure how he did. Helo may be the one character whose moral compass remained more or less intact through the whole series.

And that's about the it.