Having beer with friends last night and talking, we reminisced about music and humor, so today is more about humor surrounding music. We came up with three of our favorites.
First, More Cowbell, from SNL, with Christopher Walken. The song they’re playing is Blue Oyster Cult’s ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’, a hit for BOC back in 1976. Oddly, I associate Blue Oyster Cult more with ‘Godzilla’, but whatever.
Next, of course, was the moment in ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ (1984) when Marty Dibergi (Rob Reiner) is interviewing Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest). Nigel is Spinal Tap’s lead guitarist, and he’s taking us through his instruments when he explains why his amp is special.
Last is just the classic rock issue of fans calling out, “Play ‘Freebird’.”‘Freebird’ is by Lynyrd Skynyrd, so here we go.
Keeping it simple today, and following a theme (rim shot). I’ve been dreaming a great deal, and remembering many dreams in the past ten days, more than I usually remember. Of course, it’s my experience that remembering dreams and thinking about them builds the ability to remember dreams and think about them, so it’s a natural function to remember more as I think more….
Sorry for the diversion. To return to the theme, it’s dreams, of course. There’s a lot of music featuring dreams but being a rockboy, I’m going straight to Van Halen. The song and video came out while I was stationed at Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan, so it ties in with my recent dreams. And we liked the video – nice beat, easy to play air guitar with it and sing along – although, ahem, they were Navy jets, and we were the Air Force. We didn’t hold that against Van Halen or the song.
Here is ‘Dreams’. Sing along if you know the words, or just make some up.
Update: after watching the above video, I didn’t think it was the one I knew. I believe the one below is the correct one. Same song, though, and, um…theme….
You may not have noticed but Monday has struck. Here we are, the first Monday of this week, probably the only one planned for this week, for all I know. I believe that might be true.
Here in ‘Merica, we’re planning hard for the Next Big Holiday. That’s right, Christmas! Woo-hoo! Between now and then, we’ll also celebrate Black Friday. YOU CAN GET YOUR BLACK FRIDAY PRICES NOW if you’re a smart shopper. But I’ll bet many smart shoppers are holding back, nodding (perhaps mentally), concluding, “They say these are Black Friday prices, but I’ll bet the prices will be lower on Black Friday. I’ll bet that if they’re offering these great deals this early, they’ll have a better deal on Friday. So I’ll wait.” Cuz they know the deal. They didn’t just start shoppin’ yesterday, ya know. They got their first credit card when they were five years old. Came in the mail, unsolicited, like.
To help pass time until Black Friday and Christmas, we’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving, in which a week’s worth of calories are consumed in one day. Many try to eat it all in one sitting, perhaps preparing themselves for the new Fox Reality Show, ‘How Much Can You Eat?’
Eat, as they’re calling it in the biz shorthand, pitch people agin one another in a celebration of food and eating. Each show focuses on one culture’s food, holiday meal or special occasion. We start with fifty-three contestants for this weekly extravaganza. We’ll include side-dishes about the contestants and what eating means to them and why they like to eat, along with fave dish recipes. Domino’s has signed up as a maj sponsor. Domino’s, where, “We love pizza so much, we’ve added salads.”
That’s all fer now. I’m gonna chug my ten shot mocha – “It’s decadent!” — and start writing like a fiend. Happy Monday, everyone!
I use the idea behind today’s theme music hours every day, every day of the year. Other fiction writers must do the same. Writing for myself, I look for change, I look for what could be and what might be misunderstood, and what we have missed. I look for insight, I look for fun and I look to understand and tell. I look for hope and I look for dreams. And I’m going to keep on looking, living up to the person I’ve become, to always look and always imagine. So here it is, ‘Imagine’.
Thanks, John Lennon. RIP, October, 1940 – December, 1980. And yes, I can tell you exactly where I was when I learned the news.
I used to sing this ditty in the evening during my corporate existence:
“What shall I wear tomorrow? What shall I wear tomorrow? What shirt should I don, what pants should I put on? Oh, what should I wear, what should I wear?” I added more verses over the months, and then some dance steps. It became a whole Gilbert and Sullivan thing.
My wife hated it. I don’t blame her. She has good taste. Her only lapse is me.
The cats also weren’t pleased, giving me the look shared when they deem the food in their bowls unworthy of being eaten.
A confrontation is happening on the Wrinkle. I’m dressing my aliens as part of the scene, as it’s their first full on appearance, forcing me to regurgitate my old song. What do my aliens wear? Novel and movie aliens I’ve known, loved and despised darted through my thinking. My aliens are pretty uniform, partly be genetic exercise, so should they be uniformed? How much clothing is sufficient clothing for these travelin’ space people?
(Could Travelin’ Space People be a punk folk group? “She was on my ship; I shot from the hip. She had four eyes; they were full of surprise.”)
Dressing aliens isn’t an easy exercise, requiring thought about the many roles clothing can play an how these roles are parlayed into their mighty structure.
I think I need more coffee for this. Add some Irish whiskey to the four shots of espresso, please. It’s time to write like mad.
I dreamed last night about the power of eight. That is literally and explicitly what the dream was about, no B.S. I remember all of this thanks to a cat.
I know that will surprise you.
In the dream, I was in a class with others but not a classroom. I don’t know who the others were. Someone unknown was explaining that the power of eight shapes everything. Basically in a ‘Matrix’ reveal, I was shown how streaming digits make up reality. Then we were told, “If you can find the power of eight in the numbers, you’ll unlock the power of creation.” Then, as we all talked and looked, I grasped that within the threads were sequences that added up to eight. As I realized the implications and began bubbling with the thrill of knowledge, I began showing them to the rest of the class and elaborating on the instructor’s explanation about how to see and capture the power of eight. As example, I explained, laughing, “Like this one.” I captured a sequence. “That’s eight hundred thousand dollars.”
At that point, whiskers, licking and kneading awakened me. Quinn the Black Paw was hungry. The food in the bowls didn’t suit his mood. It didn’t matter that it was oh dark A.M. Resigning myself the power of the cat, I fed him, and then used the opportunity to pee and ponder the dream.
I was pretty much at a loss about what it meant then. Like, what was I supposed to do? Take a pill and find an eight? Returning to bed, I resumed sleeping.
The lessons about the power of eight continued with further dreaming.They were explaining how the power of eight was part of a balance. But now, instead of being in a class room, I was standing atop stairs. Others, like my wife, accompanied me, but they were incidentals. Dark, dark, dark cheery red, these steps were worn smooth. Like contoured hillsides of rice paddies, they extended in either direction, leading down to something that I couldn’t see. In fact, the only other thing seen was a blue grey sky.
I knew I was to go down the stairs, and I did. This was a learning expedition, and I felt pretty good about the whole thing. My wife and a few others accompanied me. At the bottom was a land, and people who…well, they identified themselves as the common people. They explained I was to kill two of them.
That shocked me. It could not be right. But no, they were comfortable with my intentions. I’d done it before and others did it, too. They liked the way I killed them, demonstrating empathy and kindness when I did. Besides, they told me, I often gave others gifts. Which was true, I remembered then, as I absorbed it all. On the way down, I’d left and given packages as gifts.
Then, my instructions were to return to the top of the stairs and resume my lessons in the power of eight. I returned to the top of the stairs and awoke, confused.
What in the hell is the power of eight, and how am I supposed to harness any of that dream information in this real existence?
At that point, I wanted to return to dream with instructions to myself to provide further explanation. But sleep eluded me. Instead, I thought about my recent state of mind.
It’s been that time of month, when I’m coping with my darkness. Essentially, my darkness has a mission statement that I’m to feel so depressed and miserable that I question, why the hell am I even alive? Arriving in this depressed state, I become all, J’accuse: Thou art a shite writer writing shite fiction. Nobody wants to read the hot sloppy piles that you write, so why do you torture myself with this pursuit?
I know, intellectually, I’m coping with an emotional state that affect huge swaths of population. None of that really helps. I’d been reading to manage it. In the marvelous way that the world works, I’d come across a T.C. Boyle interview and a John Scalzi post. Both helped bolster my resistance to quit.
2. The .357 Magnum. The second tip goes (if you’ll forgive me) hand-in-hand with the first. In recognition of the fact that all writers are manic-depressives, alcoholics, drug-addicts and fixedly specialized degenerates, it’s always helpful to keep a loaded pistol on your desk, perhaps located conveniently beside the ballpeen hammer, depending, of course, on the size of the desk. This acts as an aide-memoire, a spur to creativity and, of course, the ultimate solution to writers’ block.
The other post, by John Scalzi, was Rejection. He closed:
In the meantime, I’ve already sent a query off to another agent. You can’t sit around moping after a rejection, you have to rush into the arms of the next rejection. Because who knows? It might not be a rejection at all.
Heartening words, the words that every writer embraces, the essence being, who knows when you’ll get your break? It’s a strange brew where writers reside. As other writers have written, we’ve developed good taste about what we like to read, and we’re attempting to envelope that good taste in what we write in a difficult and often lonely, and solitary endeavor. And I, being of low self-esteem and a person who eschews attention, struggle with writing and wanting attention for what I write against being a solitary creature who is pretty happy writing in his isolation. It’s a messed up, strange brew. And again: I know I’m not alone.
I told my wife about my dream this morning.She suggested I hunt down meanings for the power of eight. Doing a web search, I came across Christine DeLorey’s website, Creative Numerology. She’d specifically written about ‘The Power of Eight’.
Reading her post reinforced my understanding of the dream. Frankly, I was startled by having such a dream and then discovering such explanation on the web. I’d wondered if I’d read about the power of eight before, and had simply regurgitated previously required knowledge.
I don’t know. My wife’s book club met last night. Their book in discussion was ‘Ordinary Grace’. As always, they investigated the author, William Kent Krueger. They’d discovered some good interviews with him that she shared with me, where he discussed his frustrations with writing novels and trying to become published. I mentioned that’s what writers, including me, are always seeking, that perfect strange brew where the good taste that we’ve acquired through reading is blended with the good taste we infuse in our writing, but also with the good taste that civilization displays by finding and reading our work. It’s a very, very strange brew, and none of us are sure of the exact ingredients.
But my wife closed, “Well, you can’t stop writing. Writing is part of the Perfect M. Writing is your drug, and it keeps you balanced.”
M is my private nickname, BTW, to clarify. I began using that initial to sign things like a zillion plus years ago and she adopted it as her term for me. But she’s right. I write because I need to write. Everything else is just the strange brew of being.
And now, since it’s the song that I sang to myself while walking down to write, here’s another shot at today’s theme song: ‘Strange Brew’, by Cream, 1967.
The ol’ mental juke box is full of songs today. Yes, I still use a juke box in my head. I like the sound of the coin dropping through the mechanism.
I was going to use ‘The Sky Is Crying’ but discovered this video of Stevie Ray Vaughn and Double Trouble and Jimmy Vaughn performing ‘Texas Flood’ at the 1989 Presidential Inauguration Concert. Funny seeing SRV in some semblance of a tux. And there he goes, showing off, playing his guitar behind his back.
I was torn between three songs. ‘Don’t Look Back’ and ‘Look Ahead’. But the third song won.
I’m worn out. This election campaigning in the U.S. has worn me out. Like many, I’m suffering from rhetoric burn-out. Today is November sixth. The election is on the eighth. Then, I’m sure, there will be howling, gnashing of teeth, victory proclamations, and accusations, no matter who wins. Meanwhile, it’s going to be really intense until winners are declared.
So, do you feel like I do? Peter Frampton asked the question, ‘Do You Feel Like We Do?’ which is sufficiently close. I know I’m not alone in my bubble of friends and family. Besides, although the song title says ‘we’, you’ll hear Peter consistently sing , “Do you feel like I do?”Here it is, from ‘Frampton Comes Alive’, from 1976.
Well, we’re into NaNoWriMo so I thought we’d bring up a classic.
“Dear sir, or madam, will you read my book? It took me years to write, would you take a look? It’s based on a novel by a man named Lear and I need a job, so I want to be a paperback writer.”
I looked up the lyrics to confirm I remembered them correctly and had one or two wrong, but then the song was a Beatles hit in 1966, fifty years ago, when I was ten.
To all you writers out there and in here, here is ‘Paperback Writer’. It’s not a great recording but it’ll do.
