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.
