Dungeons and Dragons is undergoing another rules revision. That makes D&D 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, 4.0-plus-more-Players-Handbooks, and now D&D Essentials all in the span of a decade.
Here’s an interesting blog post about the potential good of “internet nonsense”. I tend to side with the techno-optimists on these things, naturally.
It’s pretty great that Pitchfork allows their writers to maintain individual voice and creatively express themselves in their record reviews. It is also true that the Chicago-based “small business pop music” publication’s editorial staff wields considerable power in both the numerical scores for their reviews as well as the thrust of the Pitchfork aesthetic narrative.
There’s a group in Uniontown, Indiana hell-bent on exposing the patrons of the local sex shop. The problem is that their targets don’t seem to be ashamed.
My area prostrema has confused its own organ for the stomach, and as a result my gray matter has an unyielding — nay, I say autonomic — need to vomit… somewhere. I’m letting this blog post catch the ejected contents, which I anticipate will be quite messy. Stand back. You’ve been warned. Continue reading…
For months I’ve promised to chronicle my journey through screenwriting and my thoughts regarding the craft on this blog. Here’s the first post: a bunch of autoblogigraphical nonsense, if you like that sort of thing. (Worry not, music blogging will continue simultaneously.)
My short term career goals are to continue to learn new things about the entertainment industry; to meet people that can help me and whom I want to help.
My mid-term goal is to get an agent.
My long-term career goal is to sell some screenplays and / or obtain a staff position writing for television. That’s hard. Thousands of hours with slim chances of a return on the investment. It requires some luck. It’s not pie-in-the-sky though. Every week, it happens to someone. Someones like me, often.
A brief retrospective of my career aspirations:
Excepting a couple outliers, there are some obvious thru-lines there. Almost everything is creative. Most involve the invention of characters. A lot of them are performance oriented.
I spent the first half of college immersed in the world of improvisational comedy. I believed I’d found my calling. Unlike stage acting or film acting, improvisational comedy is pure philosophy. It felt like an intellectual pursuit to me. I won’t bore you with the details of my tragic fall from the kingdom of Absolunacy. I’ll say that when you’re 20, you think you know everything. One thing I did not know was how to work well with others. I’m still learning.
I was a minor on-campus celebrity at Ball State because of the comedy troupe and my weekly newspaper column. When I quit the troupe my junior year (maybe a couple months before I would have been kicked out) I became immensely depressed. Someone who is now one of my best friends in the world invited me to hold shotgun mic on his student film. I fell in love with filmmaking.
After graduation I moved to LA dreaming of being the next Robert Rodriguez. When you are 22, you think you know everything. There were a couple detours (sketch production, blog writing) but in general my career aim since coming to LA has been a through line, if still a process of elimination.
My excuse for Year One was that I didn’t have a camera. Then I bought $6,000 worth of gear. During Year Three, my friends and I made a lot of comedy shorts. I still think we mined some nuggets of genius. (My finest achievement.) Sometime in Year Three or Four I shot a music video produced by an acquaintance. It didn’t go as I wanted. I tried segueing this blog into video production, too. I felt inadequate.
What I came to realize was 1) painting with light did not come naturally to me and 2) there were way more guys with way more talent who wanted it way more than I did. That my efforts found no audience beyond my friends didn’t help.
That cut me down to writer / producer. My last “real” job helped me eliminate the producer aspect. I don’t have the alpha male gene for it. I’m a collaborator and an inventor, not a schmoozer of agency folks.
What it came down to, for me, is that I’ve written my entire life. I didn’t run around with a photo camera taking pictures. I did dabble in making movies as a little kid, but only for amusement.
No, I spent all day making-up new stories for my Ninja Turtle figures. (NO MIXING OF TOYS. Continuity was king. Splinter could never fight Lion-O.) I loved the essay assignments in school. I took every creative writing course I could. I wrote short stories. Stories where government agents that flew on the backs of baby dragons would execute citizens who took photographs. Stories where right-wing terrorists waged war on mass transit in a Utopian future. Even my student filmmaking in college was, ultimately, just a different expression of my desire not to tell stories, but to create stories.
But I’m also a product of the 80′s and 90′s; my brain was programmed with visual stimuli. Teevee, movies, and video games. I still work on short stories from time to time, but writing for the screen, writing with images, suits me.
I dabbled in music writing, but I can’t hang with the true music aficionados. Amongst my music-loving peers, I often feel like the poseur. I’m comfortable with that now.
So that’s how I got to this point. A little less than a year ago, I “got serious” about screenwriting. Since college I’ve had a gajillion ideas for scripts. Many of them made it to about page seven or seventeen. Last year, I grew-up enough to discipline myself. It’s been immensely rewarding already. Back in December I made it to the final page of a draft for the first time.
The hardest thing is the format and the structure. Poets have no such concerns, really. Magazine writers have some leeway. Novelists are free to tinker with format and structure. Blogging is whatever you want it to be.
But in writing for the screen, the proven structures are religion and the format is law. No one who can help you wants you to be “creative” about the format. Hollywood readers worship the tried-and-true beats. It takes near-meditative mental discipline to teach yourself to love that. For me, forcing myself into the box is a zen exercise. The reward comes from flourishing in a box. You can fill the same box with an infinite number of different things.
Something I learned this year: the first step towards knowledge is to humbly admit there is something you do not understand. It would be a dream to have a writing career. But I write for myself. It makes for the best personal journey, the best stories.
I wrote this for a 100 word story contest. I didn’t win. Thought I’d share. This is undedited, but man I’d edit it considerably now.
“Higgs-Boson, you bastard!”
Fletcher Darion-McCrea was moments from completing his life’s work. Those moments then passed. He pulled the ripcord and the seven sextillion-dollar quantum taser sent a shockwave of vomit-inducing gobbledy-gook across the Crab Nebula.
The Higgs-Boson particle howled in defeat. Time farted.
“Got ‘im,” Fletcher proclaimed into his com, smiling so large his face hurt.
Down on earth, almost immediately, after two millennia of delays, the Large Hadron Collider fired-up. Wiz-pow!
“Now that I’ve killed the bugger, lets see if you brains can prove it.” McCrea was thinking about pecan pie, richly deserved.
And then, nothing. Forever.
Shit.
His Bloggership Mouse @ Pehrspace 03-12-10
I just wanted to give a big thanks to everyone who came to the show last night. And everyone else in general.
In all likelihood, that will be the last show I put-on. There’s one more dangler out there that may come together in a few months, but other than that, my days as a hobbyist showmaker are behind me. I’ve never liked the stress of being partly responsible for how many people come through the door.
(Want some wistful reminiscing? You’re getting it!)
“Classical Geek Theatre” was the name of my newspaper column in college. I relaunched the “brand” in the summer of 2007. I was bored and lonely. So I started going to see live music. I was by myself; I didn’t talk to anybody. I just stood there and watched. I saw some shows I enjoyed and posted about them on my personal myspace page.
At the same time, I wasn’t writing screenplays like I was supposed to. I knew you’re supposed to “write every day”. Since I was writing about music on my myspace every time I went out and saw it, I decided to commit myself publicly. That way, I’d have to write every day. CGT the blog was born.
It wasn’t long before bands started finding my reviews of their shows. Other bloggers took notice. I met them and made a lot of terrific friends. I started meeting and become friends with the people in the bands, too. Going to Ball State for college, I had a hard time finding people “like me”. I found them at The Echo and Spaceland. Much of the past few years, for me, was having the experience I wanted but could never find in high school and college.
Eventually I started working directly with the bands to promote their stuff. I knew how to do this already because I did it for Entertainment Tonight, so that came naturally. I got listed for the holy grail, The Free Stuff, which was great. I put on some amazing shows. I tour blogged some. I flirted with trying to write about music professionally, but I lacked the drive, connections, and (to some degree) sufficient knowledge base.
Through all of it, I’ve never viewed CGT as a “music blog”. I was never aspiring to be the next Gorilla vs. Bear. I never accepted advertising. World domination through blogging was never the idea. CGT has been, and will always be, the homebase for my voice as a writer — whatever sort of writing career I manage to obtain.
If it were 30 years ago, I wouldn’t have a blog. I’d have been at a newspaper. I would have (hopefully) had an editor that would have taken me under his wing and helped develop me as a writer. My worst writing would have never been seen by anyone. Instead, as a blogger, everything is seen. (Everything is scene?) My development as a writer has been transparent and out in the open. I’ve made all my (many) mistakes in the public eye.
(To that point, I still haven’t forgiven myself for how I responded to The Mae Shi split. Failing to get comment from the guys in Signals before posting is without question the most egregious error I’ve made on this blog.)
Last night it struck me how fortunate I am to have so many musicians as friends. I’m not really like them. I’m an outsider, and I feel grateful for having been tolerated. I entered this community acting like an outsider. I wrote a lot of critical things about other people my age who were, like me, making all of their mistakes in the public eye. And I made those mistakes even more public for them. I’m not always certain it was the right thing to do. Never mind that my ideas about technology and progress are usually in direct conflict with most musicians’ ideas about their art and craft.
So last night I was again allowed to share in their endeavors. I was, again, touched. Sometimes I wish I’d aspired for CGT to be more so I could do more to help these people out. I’ve had so much free music, so many free memories, and I will never be in a position to repay the debt.
I’ve finally “grown-up” enough to write screenplays, which is what I moved 3,000 miles away in 2004 to do. I wrote every day, I never stopped writing, and now I’m writing what I am supposed to be writing; the experiment worked. I owe a great deal of it to the music community, because every band I’ve ever covered has given me an opportunity to be engaged in living. They’ve given me an opportunity to write every day.
That writing, my relationship with my girlfriend (hopefully the last girlfriend I ever have), and my professional aspirations feel like they’re on another planet from late night residencies and DIY drunkfests. I still like to go see music, I will still go see music, and I will still occasionally blog about music. I’ll still do some album reviews, because they flex a different muscle. There’s not likely to be a tangible change on CGT from the post before this one and the post after.
But I’m not the same guy I was at Sweater Fest ’07. I can’t do five nights of shows a week any more. I have more than enough music for every moment of my life. The Mae Shi are on indefinite hiatus, The Airborne Toxic Event has moved-on to bigger and better things, and The Henry Clay People and The Happy Hollows aren’t far from a similar fate. I don’t feel burnt-out, just full. I’m not sick of new music, I just feel like new music is intended for someone else. It took a lot of passion to follow those bands to this point. I can’t do it again with the next batch.
Thanks again for your continued readership. I’m hoping to add some posts about my screenwriting into the mix. (Been meaning to do that anyway.) I have about 100 collected thoughts links to collate. Might break ‘em down into categories per post; I’d like to write more about each individual link in the future. The Singularity is near!
Paste Magazine asks: Is indie dead?
Well, what’s in a word?
In terms of pure music knowledge, most of my peers outclass me. But what I feel gives me my meaningful voice, what I’d wager most my fellow music geeks lack, is:
Those understandings are a big part of the foundation in the narrative my blog tries to propose.
That Paste article hits hard on the point that “indie” used to be a business model. I believe all genres begin as business models; jazz distributed in jazz clubs, punk distributed on the London underground, arena rock distributed in… well, arenas. The medium is the message and a genre is born when one method of distribution, usually specific to an up-and-coming subculture, spawns a family tree of bands for generations to come.
Green Day is punk because the meaning of “punk” has evolved. The old punk lifestyle (distribution method), though long “dead”, spawned a collection of musical tropes of which, for better or for worse, a corporate band like Green Day is descendant (Descendents?) from. Sorry, Steve Jones. White suburban rappers, though having no connection to the old hip-hop world, make music descendant from those tropes. Sorry, Arsenio.
“Indie” will never be a meaningless term, it will never mean “nothing”. A person who proclaims it as such is expressing exasperation that the word no longer holds the meaning they once cherished. Sorry, the word changed while you were out.
“Indie” was always consumerist. The value in “indie” was its rare commodity. Look folks, this is the same for your precious vinyl records. You love the experience of digging in crates, talking to the store manager, and finding that very special record because the all-encompassing experience is a rare commodity. I preach the abandonment of vinyl (and brick and mortar stores) in large part because I think it’s a great way to combat our materialistic natures. (Realistically, the damaged ears of music geeks can’t hear the discrepencies in a digital file sampled at a high rate. It’s all placebo effect.)
The same is true with clothing styles that come with music subculture. Consumers treasure the rarity of a vintage hat or rare internet tshirt print.
The information networks we use have democratized music. It is not depressing that no one will ever again be as big as Prince or U2. Those are great acts, but they were products of a different era; we need to embrace our own time. Nobody is lamenting the passing of those good ol’ days where everyone who drove a car drove a Ford Model T. (Well, maybe the Ford board of directors is wishing for those days.) I know that’s a tough pill to swallow for the older sect, but it’s mostly tough because it reminds us that the world moves on. It does for everyone. Nostolgia is death.
But I digress.
No, “indie” isn’t dead. Indie has just become a genre. And I’d like us to make a distinction between the “indie” of Belle and Sebastian or Vampire Weekend and the “indie rock” of Pavement or Superchunk, thank you very much.
As a side note, the “badge of honor” of being “true punk” or “true indie” is silly. It’s a distraction from the real, meaningful questions: Is the music good? Is the music truthful? (From the heart, inspired by experience, informed by a viewpoint; authenticty.) Do people like it? Does it improve their lives? Does it inspire them to be greater?
Whether the music comes from a bedroom or a boardroom does not singularly determine the answers to those questions.
No, indie isn’t dead. But what’s next?
Flickr
LinkedIn
Twitter