I'm really truckin' on this song of mine! I had in mind that I wanted to record something before we left on this Christmas trip, but I wasn't sure how realistic that was. I got a lot of practice this morning, and I made adjustments to the drum track that not only make it a lot more exciting, but also help me play along with it better on guitar!
And yeah, I actually recorded today! The guitar's a little sloppy (but could be much worse), and I messed up in a couple of places, so I'm not going to let anyone hear it. Probably better if no one hears this song until it's a finished product with vocals and everything. But man, it rocks! It's only a minute and ten seconds long, but it's definitely the most complicated and hardest rocking thing I've ever created. Goodbye pop music, I'm a real rock musician now.
Speaking of vocals, I've been thinking of using an amped-up, post-hardcore, sing/shout style, similar to Fugazi but more intense. I think I'm a decent singer, so I don't want all the music I create in the next year to have nothing but yelling. Should be something in-between.
On Friday I finally watched The Last Gun, an early European western that, to my pleasant surprise, featured a masked vigilante. I thought I knew his secret identity; I thought they had made it obvious, but when it was revealed at the end, I had it wrong. Then I read other people's reviews of the film online, and apparently I was the only viewer in the world who had it wrong. Very strange. I wonder if it's because I watched the first ten minutes two weeks before I saw the rest of the movie. Everyone else seemed to see a slightly different film than what I saw, except one person who questioned how the vigilante could have been that person every time due to an apparently very fast costume change.
Most of the reviews I found of The Last Gun were negative, but I enjoyed it very much. Did that ten-minute splice make such a difference? Anyway, the guitar player that I thought was the vigilante, but wasn't (at least not the whole time), was so pleasant, cheerful and fun that I was inspired. I tried to be like him the rest of the weekend, but I lost my cool a few times. I've made up for it since then, I hope. I do want to be more like him consistently. And I do think he was the vigilante much of the time, and the Spaghetti Western DataBase seems to agree: "The mysterious legendary masked rider, Jim Hart, reappears to protect the locals and a guitar playing, gun-toting balladeer, who like Jim Hart shoots left-handed, coincidentally arrives with the bandits." I didn't even notice the left-handed thing!
We also watched The Bishop's Wife (1947) that evening--two movies in one day!--which I thought I'd seen before, but I definitely hadn't. I'm a big fan of both Carey Grant and David Niven, and that was one great movie. I think it's one of Tara's favorite Christmas movies now, and mine, too.
Last night occurred the Christmas Chocolate Laundry Disaster of Two Thousand Eleven, for which I was entirely responsible. Santa gave me a piece of chocolate at the mall, which I never removed from my shirt pocket. Now a bunch of our clothes, including two of my most expensive shirts, have chocolate stains, which they got inthe dryer. So I stayed up an extra hour and am still working on getting stains out of all those clothes. I slept an extra hour this morning but managed to get some guitar practice in. I played all the way through my new song once without looking at my chord/rhythm sheet. Progress!
Tomorrow will be my last time to work on music for a while, since we're leaving for Alabama on Friday and will be gone for two-and-a-half weeks. But one never knows how creative one can get on the road, and I will have my laptop. I'll probably leave my guitar at home, though.
Since it's Christmastime, and since my reading over the last six months has consisted mostly of comic books, anti-government essays and an action novel based on a video game, I decided to read Athanasius's short 4th-century book On the Incarnation before I jump into Smiley's People. Athanasius liked talking about Jesus' incarnation so much, it's what he was talking about when he died. This guy was way into Christmas! I got through the first two chapters this morning and am enjoying it very much so far.
And yes, I'm still reading G.I. Joe comics when I get a chance. Hopefully I'll finish On the Incarnation by the time we leave for the holidays in two weeks. Then I can start on Smiley's People in Alabama, which is where I started reading my last novel.
On a related note, here's the new trailer for G.I. Joe: Retaliation. Looks like more dumb fun. At least Snake Eyes's mask doesn't have lips this time. We just watched Phillip Noyce's Salt last night, and I bet this won't be nearly as good. The director, John Chu, has mostly directed little movies about dancing until now. But the parts with Bruce Willis, as the original G.I. Joe, do look really fun.
Man, my life is fun sometimes. I decided to place the main character of my novel in a more commercial atmosphere versus a university, so now he works at Research Park in Oklahoma City, a facility I got to know a bit in its early stages (I met with faculty and had classes there three years after its first building opened). I quickly found an old classmate after just a few minutes of searching the Web for what's new at Research Park. She's the managing director at several start-up biotech companies founded by her mentor, who taught a few of my classes in grad school. I had to write her and congratulate her--that's pretty impressive. I won't put her in my novel, of course, but some of my characters will work in her building.
I also found out how some of these start-up biotechs get access to taxpayer dollars, in the form of NIH funding as well as tax credits from the state. That will be a key point of my story. According to Biotechnology: Law, Business and Regulation (2001 supplement, pp. 7-146 – 7-147) by Michael J. Malinowski (thank you, Google Books!), Oklahoma provides a 20% tax credit to capital investors in small business investment companies and a 20% tax credit for investments made in R&D ventures in conjunction with these companies. The Oklahoma City Investment Board invests in venture capital firms that take equity positions in biotech firms. The Urban Renewal Authority and Presbyterian Health Foundation offer incubator space at no or below-market cost to early stage companies at Research Park.
That's probably no big deal to the average reader, but for those of us concerned about market manipulation by the state, it's an issue. In Maryland, nearly a quarter of a million dollars in tax credits is offered by the state as incentive for investment in biotech companies. It's an investment by government officials, using taxpayer dollars, for which they expect a return, to be distributed as they see fit. Hopefully I can write about this clearly in my book, and anyone who reads it can form their own judgment.
I started giving more thought to the "dirty cop" of my story, too. He needs a way to justify what he does so that he's not a cardboard evil dude. I've had plenty of conversations about police on Facebook, so I'm pretty familiar with the justifications for their actions! But of course this cop will take things a step too far. Still many readers may find his actions totally acceptable, and that's fine. It should be up to the audience to decide which actions are right and which are wrong.
This morning I felt pretty lousy. Tara had a sore throat and stayed in bed. Could be related. But I went to the basement and practiced my new song for a while. The first time through I was almost perfect on the guitar, but the more I played, the worse I felt, especially when I tried to play with the drum track. I went up and ate a banana--no help. I knew it wasn't the song that was getting me down, because I still like it, and I've been thinking of different ways to sing with it that make me even more excited about it. But developing the skill to play it is hard on me mentally for some reason.
Then I remembered that I can slow the drum track down and work on the fundamentals of the complicated rhythm. I had to slow it way down in order to count along. I can do it well, and I can build up from here. I can thank last week's film, Master of the Flying Guillotine, for this idea. The main character hops onto the rim of an empty wicker basket and walks along its circumference. I read more about this online, and there are old teachings for how to build up to this ability by starting with a big stone pot full of stones. Once you get good at walking along its rim, you remove one stone at a time until you can do it without any weight inside. Then you switch to a wicker basket full of stones and go on from there until you seem lighter than air. It's all fantasy, of course, and wires were used in the movie, but it's a good way to approach a difficult skill one wishes to develop, as I do.
Starting next week I hope to gradually speed up the drum track until I can play along with it more comfortably at normal speed. Then I can record the rhythm guitar part and move on, and I'll have developed a great skill for the rest of the songs I hope to come up with. I knew kung fu would be useful for this album somehow.
I met and exceeded my goals for my new song this morning. I got some really good guitar practice in, starting slow and then building up until I could play a section fairly well. I can now play the theme and the long bridge without too much trouble, but it will probably be a couple of weeks before I can play this solidly along with the percussion, and maybe another couple of weeks before I can play it well enough to record it!
Next I added cymbals and other sounds and effects to my drum track. It's pretty much done already, and I'm happy with it. Once my rhythm guitar is solid, I can then add lead guitar and bass, and maybe some keyboard, tambourine, etc. And finally I'll write some lyrics and figure out how I want to sing this thing. At this point I wouldn't call this a "song" so much as just a piece of music that wants to be a song someday. I can hardly wait to hear it all come together! Then I'll just write a bunch more and I'll have an album, heh.
On Tuesday I worked on electronic percussion for my new song, and I got all the way through it with snare and kick drum. I didn't add any other percussion, but I did add an ugly-sounding "distorted guitar" synth sound, using the root note of each chord. It sounds terrible, but it will be great for practicing with. Before I do anything else with the percussion, I want to take my beats to the basement and play along with my guitar. I need to make sure I'm developing the skills to play the song as I create the recording, before I get too deep into adding things like cymbals and toms. The rhythm guitar part is only four chords, but it's a crazy, haphazard composition, and I'll have to play it rather fast. But playing punk riffs quickly is my biggest strength on electric guitar, so I'm playing to my strengths.
For Wednesday my goal was to create some character profiles for my novel, and while I felt like didn't get very far, I then gave Tara a lot of information about my main character, so I got some good work done. I know where he grew up, where he trained as a scientist, what he does in his spare time, and what he's working on in the lab. I found a scientific article by a group in India that helped a great deal and fit in extremely well with my story. That was a great find. I know what he looks like, too, because he's related to an actual person, a football player in the '60s.
And the female love interest had been changing from a white girl to one who's part Mexican. But then I came across a name in my project at work that turned out to be a common Brazilian name. It just happens to be the last name of the man who was shot seven times in the head by London policemen, who wrongly suspected him of bombing a tube station there in 2005. Since my story involves villainous policemen, I just had to use that name and make her part Brazilian. There's a Brazilian cafe in Oklahoma City, so there must be Brazilians in the area. Anyway, I visited a Brazilian community in Massachusetts last year, so they're not a total mystery to me.
Thursday I woke up late but managed to read another chapter of Ghost Recon. I'm pretty close to the end now. That was a good chapter, and I don't know if the main character survived it. Pretty safe gamble he did, though. Although when I play him in the video game, he dies every time, so you never know.
I also managed to squeeze in G.I. Joe #72, wherein starts the Cobra civil war (or so I hear). It was really cool to finally see the inside of Pit III, but disappointing to see how lax the security is there! I guess when you're in the middle of a Utah desert, some things go by the wayside. Our heroes are in deep doodoo now, though.
On a separate note, I just heard the trailer for the G.I. Joe sequel will be out next Tuesday! Will Snake Eyes' mask still have lips? Tune in next week! Looks like Roadblock, Lady Jaye and Flint will be in this one, which is nice. Roadblock will be played by The Rock! Also, RZA plays the Blind Master! And the guy who played Thor is Firefly. And Bruce Willis is the original G.I. Joe! Rock on! But a character named Mouse will be in it too, whom I never even heard of before, played by one of the guys in Social Network (the kid from Jurassic Park!). Ridiculous. Also, no Scarlett or Cobra Commander, but that's not the film creators' fault. The actors didn't want to play those parts again, apparently. Can't say I blame them.
Finally, this morning I finally watched a kung fu film I've wanted to see for ages, Master of the Flying Guillotine (1975). And what a pleasant surprise. It's the best kung fu movie I've seen so far, and one of the best martial arts films I've seen. The action, the story, the costumes, the fighting styles, the weapons and even the music were great fun. It certainly must have inspired the King of Fighters video game series that I love so much. What a great film. I think it may help inspire the sound of my album in some way.
I got excited this week about a tiny college in Idaho called New St. Andrews. I like what they're doing, and my favorite reformed pastor is a faculty member there. I found their required reading list, and I want to make it part of mine after I finish Smiley's People. I've read a few things on this list (crossed out below), but not much (I found out this morning that Tara read a lot of it in college, much of which I'd never heard of!). I definitely want to add some Hemingway novels to this list, too.
Since there's no guarantee the list will stay on that Web site, I'll paste it here:
THEOLOGY
(Lordship) Anselm, selections (read The Proslogion) Athanasius, On the Incarnation
Augustine, City of God
Augustine, Confessions
Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion
Irenaeus, Against Heresies
Luther, Bondage of the Will
(Principia) Luther, 1520 tracts
New Testament Old Testament
(History) St. Benedict, Rule
(Traditio) Anselm, Proslogion and Monologion
Aquinas, Selections from the Summa
NATURAL SCIENCE
(Lordship) Darwin, Origin of Species
(Nat. Phil.) Euclid, Elements
Newton, Principia (selections)
SOCIAL & POLITICAL SCIENCE
(Traditio) Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
Aristotle, Ethics and Politics
Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers
Hobbes, Leviathan
John of Salisbury, Policraticus
Locke, On Civil Government
Machiavelli, Prince
Marsiglius de Padua, Defensor Pacis (selections)
Marx, Das Capital or Communist Manifesto
Plato, Republic
Rousseau, Social Contract
U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence
Weber, Protestant Ethic
HISTORY
(History) Bede, Ecclesiastical History
Herodotus, Histories
Plutarch, select lives
Thucydides, Peloponnesian War
William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum
Henry of Huntington, Historia Anglorum
(Traditio)Austen, representative title
Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress Cervantes, Don Quixote
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe Dickens, representative title
Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov
Faulkner, The Sound and The Fury Goethe, Faust
Melville, Moby Dick
LETTERS
(Rhetoric) Aristotle, On Rhetoric
Plato, Gorgias or Phaedrus
Pseudo-Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium
Cicero, De Inventione
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria
(Traditio) Aristotle, Poetics
Montaigne, selections
Plutarch, Moralia (selections)
ART & ARCHITECTURE
(Traditio) Palladio, The Four Books of Architecture
Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture
Suger, Abbot of St. Denis, On the Abbey of the Church of St. Denis and its Art Treasures
Vitruvius, On Architecture
PHILOSOPHY
(Traditio) Aquinas, selections fromSumma
Aristotle, selections
Berkeley, selections
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
Duns Scotus, selections
Derrida, selections
Descartes, Meditations
Hume, selections
Kant, selections
Leibnitz, selections
Locke, selections
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Plato, selections
Russell, selections
Plotinus, selections
William of Ockham, selections
Wittgenstein, selections
To cap this off, Melt-Banana has been a huge influence on my musical creativity lately. Here they are playing "Lost Parts Stinging Me So Cold" in England a couple of years ago:
I just composed my first math-rock song! I really didn't set out to do so, and that makes it all the sweeter.
Luckily, I was just as inspired this morning as I was last Tuesday. I took my laptop to the basement, turned on my amp, put my tambourine on the floor, hit record and started rocking. I played with complex time signatures for 2 1/2 minutes. Then I switched to the keyboard and started playing fake drums with my recorded guitar. It ended up a terrible mess, but an inspirational one.
I sat at the desk for several minutes, trying to decide what my next steps should be. How could I create something more organized, something actually composed and written down, and something I could put a real beat to? I opened up a Word document and started typing out chords and beat structures:
Gm 3 stop 3 stop
Db 3 stop
Gm 3 stop 3 stop
Db 3 stop
Pause
Db 3 stop
F 3 + 4
Db 2 + 3
F 3 + 4
Db 2 + 3
Eb 3 + 4
Db 3
Eb 3 + 4
Db 3...
And on like that. I ended up with three columns of small text on a page, which will probably be a minute to a minute-and-a-half of music. It has an intro, a theme, a bridge, and an outro. It's complicated and will take a lot of practice. I can now build an entire percussion pattern for me to play to (it would take a really fantastic drummer to be able to play this, but if anyone wants to try, that would be really awesome). And now I have a model for my entire album. I'm pretty pleased!
It's actually going to be mathcore, because it will be very fast and crazy. But now that I have the structure down on paper, it will sound a lot more chaotic than it actually will be!
Tomorrow's job, then, is to create the beats on my computer. That will be fun now that I know exactly where everything should go. Then I'll just add instruments one channel at a time. I won't even worry about lyrics until the music is done, unless the Lord brings some to mind before then.
We've only been doing this early-morning stuff for a few weeks, and I'm already feeling pretty good about both my album and my novel. I'm having a great time.
No film today, sadly. I finally opened one of my spaghetti western collections, Ten Thousand Ways to Die, and watched 10 1/2 minutes of a film called The Last Gun (1964). But then Tara came downstairs with crying babies, and that was that. Maybe next week.
My newest musical discovery is an obscure rock band from Athens, Ohio, called God and Texas. They were active in the early '90s and released a few albums of crackin' post-hardcore alt/punk. Great stuff. Here's a tune from a 1994 album called Double Shot. Nice use of sax in this noisy, hard rockin' number.
The book I've been reading, slowly, for a few months now is Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon (2008), by David Michaels. And if that isn't confusing enough, "David Michaels" is a pseudonym for not one, but at least two authors writing stories for Ubisoft Entertainment. According to Wikipedia, this book was actually written by Grant Blackwood, a Navy vet who has co-authored novels with Clancy and Clive Cussler. And I just found out he wrote a sequel to this novel that was published in March.
If you didn't know or hadn't already guessed, this book is based on a popular video game. Why would someone like me be reading a novel like this? It started last year, when I started getting really nostalgic over G.I. Joe. I was a huge fan as a kid, and the magic all started coming back as I viewed some old episodes of the '80s cartoon on YouTube. Then I found a way to get the entire collection of Marvel's G.I. Joe and G.I. Joe Special Missions comics on my computer, which I'm still working my way through (I just finished #71 of the main series).
I've become anti-military over the past year, but I still enjoy military fiction. At least no one actually gets hurt. I found the Ghost Recon games and novel while searching for something that was like G.I. Joe but more realistic. Basically, I hate Cobra. They seem to have more fans than the Joes nowadays, but I always thought they were stupid. My brother had a Zartan figure and a Destro we found somewhere, but that's the only Cobra stuff we ever had as kids. Thank you, parents! It was that realistic-but-slightly-experimental Joe stuff that I always loved. And that's exactly what I get with Ghost Recon, minus the awful villains that Hasbro created for Cobra.
So how is the book? About what you'd expect from a novel based on a video game marketed to teenagers and young adults. It's candy fiction, but there aren't too many embarrassing one-liners or physics-bending stunts. Hard to say whether I'll get the sequel or not. I actually like this book better than a Cussler adventure novel I read recently, The Mediterranean Caper (1973), which had a lot of silliness. But that was his first novel, and a lot of people don't like it.
I just finished the climax of Ghost Recon, and the loose endings are beginning to be tied up now that the big assassination mission in China [SPOILER ALERT] has been successfully completed. I didn't expect them to fail, of course, but they have more wounded to take home than I expected. It's nice that they weren't made out to be supermen.
I'm looking forward to finally finishing this book and moving on to something more grown-up. Since I'm working on my own suspenseful story now, I might go ahead to the third book in John le Carré's Karla trilogy, Smiley's People (1979). It's about time, considering that I started reading the trilogy about a decade ago. It's not easy reading! But the second book, The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), is my favorite action novel of all time, so I have high expectations for this one.
Currently hearing: The Black Rose EP by Blindside (2007)
I slept in a bit today, but I did manage to add several interesting details to my story, including more bad guys and more death. This is becoming something I might even read myself! I even did a little research, deciding on a novel antioxidant produced by a rare phytoplankton as the story's MacGuffin.
Next week I plan to start making character profiles. I asked Tara what my main character's name should be, describing him as a boring scientist my age. She suggested Brian. I think that makes sense. Maybe I'll make him slightly eccentric and name him Bryan.
I came up with some good ideas for song creation in the last 24 hours, but I was totally thwarted by Neavey this morning. I was on my way to the basement to start recording something, but she woke up with an awful cough as soon as I got out of the shower at 6:15.
I realized when I went to bed last night that the rhythm I want to use for a lot of the album is a really fast snare-kick-snare-kick pattern, similar to what XBXRX and Melt-Banana use a lot. The jungle rhythms can be used too, but not as much as what I'd been thinking before. I also realized last night that I can start creating these songs by stomping on my tambourine as I play my guitar. I can even shout nonsense words or rhythm counts as I play. Then I can come back and recreate it all, once I have an actual song. And each song will only be a minute or two long, with little space in between.
And I don't have to use my tracker for every bit of rhythm. Not only do I have a tambourine, but I also have the percussion sounds on my keyboard, which I can play loudly and distortedly through my amps (I don't have neighbors underneath me anymore), using my fingers on the keyboard. I remembered that in the shower this morning. That might make the creation process a lot easier. The thing I haven't quite figured out yet is whether I should try to add drum loops to what I create organically, after the fact. It won't be easy, even if I use a click track, because my rhythms are going to be very sporadic, even spontaneous. A click track might only hold me back.
One thing I might do is interrupt the more organic parts of the song with rhythmic electronic parts. I could do a whole spontaneous recording, totally improvised, add all the organic percussion, and then insert drum loops with overlaid guitar and bass into certain parts of the song. So something like last week's clip, which was mostly structured ahead of time, could come between parts of a song that were created spontaneously. It could all fit together into something extraordinary. Or it could all be a big mess. But maybe a brilliant mess?
Anyway, the next step, as I was going to do this morning, is to press record and start playing, stomping and shouting, using the chords that I used for the clip last week in various creative ways. Then I can figure out what to do next. This could actually be fun. Too bad it will have to wait until next week. I hope Neavey doesn't make a habit of waking up before 6:30!
We came home last night from a Thanksgiving trip to St. Louis. I didn't do anything inspiring, but we did watch Horrible Bosses. It was fun, but not really funny. It was sort of a modern-day Three Stooges story, and I didn't find much there to inspire me.
I got up this morning to continue work on this new song idea, if you can call it that. I listened to a couple of XBXRX songs for inspiration, I listened to the clip I made last week, and I practiced the guitar parts I learned. I even worked on a few more guitar parts. But I was totally stumped creatively. I wasn't sure how to proceed. Luckily, poor Neavey coughed herself awake, and I had to get her up and spend some time with her, saving me from my creative black hole. I wonder if publishing that clip on this blog (and then copying the post to Facebook) was a psychological mistake.
Fortunately none of the songs on my future album will be very long, and none of them need to be a completely composed masterpiece from the very start. Maybe what I need tomorrow is just a jam session to spark some ideas. I already have a riff, a pattern, a rhythm. Maybe I should just hit "record" and start playing around on the guitar. Then I can come back fresh next week with some new ideas and start creating more rhythms to play to. Perhaps a new bass line will help, maybe for the song's verses. Maybe if I create a bass line along with a drum loop in my tracker, I can then recreate it with my guitar and make a complete verse. This is why I have this journal!
I created 15 seconds of new music this week! I did the beats and synth yesterday and the guitars this morning. Learning and recording the guitar parts wore me out, and this is all I have to show for it, but it's something. There are two guitar parts and a bass line here (the bass is my guitar pitched down an octave).
I still don't know how to count this thing, which is a little embarrassing since I composed it, but it's not the first time. If anyone remembers a song I created back in 2004 called "Can I Love Again?"--I still don't know how to count that thing! I need a music theorist or a big fan of math rock. Or maybe a drummer. [EDIT: Ok, now I'm thinking maybe this new one is 4/4, 2/4, 6/4, repeat. Which is why I said 12/4 yesterday.]
This will come somewhere in the middle of a song. The "lyrics" are just for a demo.
I let Tara hear this soon after it was finished, just to get her impression. She hasn't been reading this blog, and I haven't been telling her what I'm doing, so she had no idea. After laughing at my silly nonlyrics, her first impression was that it feels like the '80s because of the synth. I told her I was thinking of removing it, and she said I shouldn't. She liked that it combines an '80s synth with a '90s dance rhythm and emo shouting from the '00s. It's supposed to be hardcore-punk shouting, but it definitely doesn't come off that way.
I'm not sure where this will go from here, but just getting something respectable on the speakers should propel and motivate me to continue. Feels good!
I built a couple of long measures of experimental dance beat this morning, based on hip hop but sped way up. They're in 12/4 time, I think, but I'll put a measure of 7/4 or something in-between to break up the rhythm even more. It already sounds crazy. I added a synth sound to help me know how the lead guitar riff should go. Tomorrow will be my first morning in the basement working on guitar for this project. Yes, of course I'll take the baby monitor with me!
I'm not sure how I feel about the rhythm line so far. I'm not sure there's anything I could do that would make me feel really good about it until I add guitar. But I have to have something to play guitar to, so it's a catch-22. But there's always the option of switching out the rhythm for another one after I've recorded guitars. That's the great thing about recording in multiple channels.
I didn't realize until we were driving home from church yesterday that Blindside has a 2011 album. Their new hit is on rotation on Radio U. I must be the last Christian-who-loves-rock-music on Earth to hear about Blindside. I wouldn't have even paid attention to them if Pandora.com hadn't played me one of their older songs on Friday. Unfortunately the new hit is nothing like their old stuff, just like Skillet and all these other bands that have gone so far downhill in the last decade. It's so sad to see. Is it fame, is it growing older, is it running out of good ideas and not realizing it? Is it some combination of these?
You would think that Internet file sharing would make these bands want to work harder to stand out and not sound like everyone else, but maybe they're mainstreaming to get the biggest possible audience rather than ostracizing the mainstream listener with experimentation and innovation. So far the only band of Christians I've found that are experimenting at all with the standard rock/punk/metal sounds is Children 18:3. And they seem to be doing quite well. Thank God for them.
My ongoing search for good, creatively aggressive rock music by Christians paid off again today. I just downloaded the first album by the Swedish band Blindside called A Thought Crushed My Mind (2000). I think it's probably post-hardcore, but I don't know a lot about those things. This is way better than everything Skillet, Thousand Foot Krutch and all those other bands of Christians are putting out these days, though some of that is pretty good. I'll have to look for Blindside's other albums and see how they've been evolving since 2000. But this is a very promising start. They have a very genuine sound compared to most of the music I've heard Christians making lately.
Check out the song I'm hearing right now, "Act":
My film this morning was Carlito's Way (1993), that is, the first two-thirds of it. It's a great story, though it seems like I've seen the bad-guy-trying-to-make-good-but-no-one-lets-him story a few times before. Maybe this was the first of its kind? Can't wait to see the rest of it. We just saw Luis Guzmán guest-star on Community last night, so it was funny to see him in one of his biggest films this morning. I have to admit I didn't even know who he was until last night.
I didn't get to read any fiction at all this week. I slept an extra hour yesterday to try to get healthy. If I'm still sick on Monday, I'd better call the doctor. I haven't had a chest cold like this in years, though I used to get them every year before I met Tara. I've been sleeping in my office for days so she can sleep, so I'm spending at least 80% of my time, waking and sleeping, in this little room. Good thing I like this room.
I didn't get a lot of time to take down notes for my novel today, since the girls woke up really early. But I've been doing some of my best thinking in the shower lately. I've added a couple of important characters, more shooting and more dying. I also altered the ending so it's not quite so depressing. Now it's a western. But I've also added a layer of mystery by deciding why the evil city folk in the book want to keep their activities secret. Now the reader will have to figure it out along with the main character. Now we have a story of western intrigue!
The one-sentence description hasn't changed since last week: A scientist goes up against a dirty cop and a crooked politician to defend a rural landowner. I'm very happy with how this is going so far. I even thought of a potential title this morning: "Ten Acres of Blood". Eh, it's a working title.
I keep feeling like today's Sunday, even though I'm working. It's really weird. I guess it's because I was sick with a cold on Sunday and stayed home so I wouldn't get people at church sick.
Man, England's Ox Scapula rocks. I found them weeks ago while searching Last.fm for "math punk" bands. I just heard this song "Taking Liberties", and it's great. Here's a live version:
This is from their EP called Hands Out. I just downloaded it here. And I found a cool review of it here. The last paragraph talks about the genre but never names the genre. I'd like to know what genre they mean! The only clue I can get from Last.fm is math punk, which is how I found them in the first place. Time to hear the rest of this thing now and put it on my Dell DJ.
I'm almost done converting all those electronica samples, so next week I will definitely begin creating some new music!
Song that rocked me today: "A Waste of Time and Space" (2008), from the album of the same name, by Michigan duo Man at Arms. Can't find a stream, but here's a video of a song from the same album. Pretty cool!
Man at Arms - "Swamp Things"
Yojimbo was so great this morning. I had always heard that A Fistful of Dollars was a total ripoff, but you can't know how total until you've seen them both. It's the same movie with swords instead of guns. And it even has one gun. I guess Sergio Leone just hoped no one would notice, or that when they did it would be way too late for anyone to care. He just wanted to make a cool movie and a little money; he had no idea what a legend he had created or that he had birthed an entire subgenre of westerns with his little ripped-off movie.
Clearly there never would have been spaghetti westerns if not for Akira Kurosawa and Yojimbo! Of course, there would be no Star Wars without Kurosawa's influence, either, and therefore possibly no summer blockbusters, so where would we be? Who could've known that one Japanese director with a fondness for samurais would have such a huge influence on Western filmmaking!
As I watched the film, I realized that the novel shaping in my head would be a lot better with more violence. I need more characters, because a few people gotta die. I really want it to be a western clashing with a story of city corruption, with the main character caught up in the middle.
Oh, here's the one sentence I gave Tara last night for what the book will be about (subject to change, of course): A scientist goes up against a dirty cop and a crooked politician to defend a rural landowner. We'll see how much that morphs as I go along.
Monday morning, in the shower, I had a small idea for a song, mostly just a guitar/percussion riff. Just one measure, really, but not 4/4 (I haven't counted it yet). I spent the next hour-and-a-half converting electronica samples from 24-bit to 16-bit, sadly, since my old tracker won't interpret 24-bit samples.
But that came after an interesting moment when I was unable to install the latest version of Audacity to my new work laptop due to lack of administrator privileges. How could I possibly record and mix my music for free without Audacity? Options ran through my head for five to ten minutes: I could quit writing music altogether and focus on writing novels; I could forget recording and just perform acoustically at coffee shops and open-mic nights; I could save money and buy equipment or my own computer. At last I remembered that I had downloaded an older version of Audacity to my previous computer. I tried that on the new one, and it worked just fine. Whew!
Tuesday morning I devoted more time to converting samples. I still have a lot more to convert. But this week I've begun to understand how drum-'n'-bass/jungle samples are created. If I take a standard hip-hop sample and play it faster, poof, it's a jungle sample. So all I have to do is create a hip-hop beat in my tracker in which all sounds are played a few steps higher/faster, and then speed up the sample in the tracker. Piece of cake and will save a lot of time vs creating a hip-hop sample, speeding up the whole sample in Audacity and then bringing it back to my tracker. We're on our way now.
On to Wednesday morning. I sat staring at a blank Word file for a few minutes before I finally started jotting down ideas for my novel. I now have a basic premise and some characters! Essentially the story will be about a younger scientist and an older professor with very different ways of doing things. No, that's not it at all. It's about a corrupt city official who will stop at nothing to acquire fame and power. No, that's not quite it. It's a boy-meets-girl story in which tragic loss make the relationship ever stronger. Ok, it's all of those things, really. Hopefully next week I'll be better able to describe it in a sentence. And I also want to add some mysterious elements, which is why I don't want to give away too much here. Not that anyone's probably going to read this anytime soon.
I'm enjoying the process so far. It's not my first time to get serious about writing a novel, but it may be my best idea for a novel so far. Maybe I'll get past the first two chapters this time, since I respect the idea of the novel a little more.
And my reading this morning was the G.I. Joe Yearbook #4 (1988), the final Yearbook. It's an interesting story in which the man posing as Cobra Commander is found out. The best part for me was the use of the Joes' two SEALs, Wet-Suit and Torpedo. Wet-Suit is probably my favorite Joe, and it was great to see them perform a covert beach landing on Cobra Island, changing from scuba gear to camo gear, complete with face paint. They don't accomplish much, but they survive, and seeing them run into the October Guard and fight alongside them was great fun. Almost as much fun as G.I. Joe Special Missions #8 from a couple months earlier, in which several of the most interesting Joes, including Wet-Suit and Beach Head, parachute into Southeast Asia on an ambush mission!
In the morning I'll probably finally see Yojimbo,on loan from Netflix, unless Tara decides to watch it with me soon. She actually remembers the character Yojimbo in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! If she wants to see it, I'll watch something from my spaghetti western collection tomorrow.
No time for a full-length film today, but I just watched a two-minute action film shot in (and on) an office building in Oklahoma City three years ago. Not at all professional, but pretty fun. It's called Knockout, and it was made by teenagers, probably Christians since they used a song with obvious Christian lyrics by Skillet ("Invincible").
When I lived in OKC, I wrote a script for short action film, myself. It was a spy story centered around a highway car chase from the airport to my own office. I couldn't afford any kind of camera at the time, and it's too bad, because I even did the casting and chose the cars I wanted to use (my own and a friend's). Couldn't even borrow a camera, though. I think I lost the script years ago.
Anyway, here's Knockout. I'm interested in which building they used for this.
Still waiting for that Y to open, but last night I read Luke chapter 14. Still struggling my way through Luke, but this chapter could certainly be revisited for some good song lyrics.
I find it interesting that Jesus addresses the personal glory one receives when humbling oneself in order to receive glory here on Earth (v. 10). This makes total sense to a selfish human who wants to be esteemed among his peers. But then, when He addresses the man who invited them there, He encourages him to invite and serve those who can't pay him back. There's no immediate gain to be found here, but He says in verse 14 that "you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you; for you shall be repaid at the resurrection of the just." So there's still a selfish aspect to this kindness, but one whose rewards are far off in the future. As far as I can tell, the resurrection of all justified people is still in our future, though this is debated by a small minority of preterists.
I love the guy in verse 15 who blurts out something in an attempt to sound like Jesus! "Blessed is he who shall eat bread in the kingdom of God!" Which of course Jesus answers with a parable. This one definitely seems to be about the invited Jews vs the broken Gentiles (like me!) who actually get to attend Christ's Supper (v. 24).
I agree with most teachers on the meaning of verse 26. It's the concept of denying oneself so that total union with Christ can be possible. I wonder, though, why Jesus used the phrase "cannot be My disciple" in verses 27 and 33. Surely His twelve closest disciples didn't hate their families! Was He just making a point, as many teach? Can anyone truly be His disciple? And if I count the cost and decide it's too high, what shall become of me?
And what does it mean for salt to lose its flavor (v. 34)? I don't want to be thrown out. Is this what happens to those who count the cost and decide it's too high, or to those who fail to count the cost and can't finish what they've started? I've read this passage since childhood and still can't make heads or tails of it.
I'm encouraged by verse 32 somehow. If I decide my ten thousand can't stand up to the twenty thousand coming against me, can I send a delegation with conditions of peace? If I decide I'm not cut out to be Paul or Timothy, can I just be Luke or one of Paul's friends that gets a mention? Are these analogies meant to encourage us to be His disciples or to discourage us because it's too much to handle for most of us?
Just after going to bed last night I had an idea for a story that excited me. It would combine the ruggedness of a western with the intricate, weblike plot of a John le Carré novel. I would set it in modern day Oklahoma City, the city I'm most familiar with, creating characters in places I knew well when I lived there. It would contain corrupt government officials and police. One character would live in a rural area and would make his living from a natural resource. Someone would be lied to and cheated. The hero, whoever he is, would be shot at the climax, but not fatally. Perhaps he'd lose the use of his hand.
That's all I have so far. I'll need to chart out a bunch of nameless characters and figure out how they're all connected before I can even know what the story would actually be about, or whom the main character would be. One thing I like a lot about this idea is that it can't be nailed down to a genre. It would just be an American novel, which is exactly what I want to write. It would be gritty, suspenseful, character-driven and full of great dialogue (hopefully).
We went to Beehive Books yesterday, to get the girls books for their birthday--a new birthday tradition. I saw a novel from last year called A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan. It's about an aging punk rocker and a woman he employs, and it visits their interesting history. It reminds me very much of a crazy action story I had recently begun to write. I quit when I realized it was way too far-fetched to keep my interest, as my aging punk rocker was nearly immortal due to a serum he'd been given in the '60s. I had been keeping the idea of an aging punk rocker handy, though. So this Goon Squad novel interests me.
My new creative schedule was going to start today, but the new YMCA isn't quite open yet, so Tara and I slept a bit. I did get up a little early and spent some time listening to beat samples I downloaded free at Sample Magic. These will provide the audio I need for the percussion in my songs. I'll deconstruct the samples and make them into something totally new, of course.
I decided to go with a more electronica-influenced sound for this album, since my previous work using electronic drum sounds to mimic real drums sounds a bit weak. The percussion in my new songs will be influenced by Atari Teenage Riot and the
experimentalism of Amon Tobin, among others. And every now and then I
want to throw in a fat hip-hop beat, just enough. Audiences are used to electronic percussion that doesn't sound like real drumming, from disco to hip hop to jungle. But they aren't used to hearing it combined with noisy guitars and post-hardcore vocals in an experimental, math-rock-influenced style. This will be something new, particularly in Christian music. I haven't been able to find exactly the type of sound I'm planning anywhere.
And there will be more than guitars, percussion and vocals. I got a free organ when we moved here a year ago, and I still haven't used it. I figured, while I'm being experimental, why not throw in some organ? And some tambourine and Mellotron too, for an excellent mix of organic and digital. So what will I call this kind of music? I haven't actually heard it yet, but what I'm hearing in my head is something like electropsych noisecore. Google has no record of that term being used!
I'm still thinking about what I want to do lyrically. If I want my music to be as intense as possible, maybe I should dive into some of the darker passages of the Bible and explore those. A song about what the Bible says about false prophets might be interesting. A song exploring a wild Bible story you won't hear in Sunday school could be good. As a postmillennialist, I've got to have a song about Earth's awesome future the way I see it, so the album won't be totally dark--but totally intense.
I'm Scott. I've taken on various creative projects over the years, but I just took a year off to raise two baby girls up into beautiful one-year-olds. Now it's time to get those creative juices flowing again.
This journal is to keep track of ideas for my two creative projects and to chart my progress. It's also to note things that inspire me along the way.
My current music project is an album of intense, experimental noisecore songs with aggressive electronic percussion, avoidance of 4/4 time signatures, and lyrics inspired by the Bible. I want Christian teenagers to be able to experience a type of music they aren't currently hearing. The sound will be along the lines of XBXRX meets Atari Teenage Riot.
As for writing, all I know is that I'd like to write several realistic novels in a modern setting. Part of what I'll be journaling here is ideas for what those novels may be about.
I'll be getting started soon, when Tara starts exercising at the Y. We'll both be getting up at 5:30, while the girls are still asleep, and I'll be working in my upstairs office and my basement den.
Schedule:
Music Monday
Toosday's music too
Writing Wednesday
Reading Thurrrsday
Film-viewing Friday
Sleeping Saturday and Sunday
Feel free to ask questions, offer advice and interact however you like!
