A new song; Junior Extravaganza

I keep threatening to post a demo of the thing and keep putting it off. So here are the lyrics, anyway. Names are named; everyone is implicated. Which is, as you'll see, the point.

As many local readers will know, the Junior Extravaganza is a prom fundraiser arranged and performed annually by Juniors at my high school alma mater. I've been feeling kind of nostalgic in a creative sense lately, so this song is about some of the things that happened around our Junior Extravaganza, with, as always, a little poetic license exercised (although this time it isn't for drama; all the drama was there without any help at all from me). It also occurred to me that this could probably still work for anybody who doesn't know what the Junior Extravaganza is, as I think that phrase is a pretty apt metaphor for the horrible things 16-17 year-olds are liable to do to each other anyway.

So here's one for the 06-ers. I'm not sure you guys will thank me for it...

"Junior Extravaganza"

I had a secret Screwdriver at Vanessa's house
Made with vodka that my cousin Tanya bought for me
"Junior Extravaganza" nominal practice - son, I wasn't the only one
I wasn't the only one
Jill said that she was in love with me
But the way she kissed me, I could never have known back then
She saw the bottle, boy, and she left the house with me
I got her drinking - son, I wasn't the only one
I wasn't the only one
On stage in the school cafeteria;
The room is filled with mostly old folks that can't let go
It's hot with bodies, all the chairs and the catacombs
My heart got lazy - son, I wasn't the only one
Look there - there's a girl in a brand new light,
A budding, slutty sort of princess that can't slow down
She took the bottle to the end of the world with me
I left her out there - son, I wasn't the only one
I wasn't the only one
Cloth seats with the stains and the chicken bones;
Huge bed without a toolbox to hold us down
Beneath the stars, you'd think it'd be something beautiful
But it was not the way I pictured it before - she wasn't the only one
Drive home with no music, the windows down
Fingers smell of spit and pussy in the midnight wind
She lied and told me that she's never been touched before
Relativity, I guess - it's such a mess; "What a whore," we say
Cause it's a sin to seek a respite from loneliness;
It ain't God's will that we should all feel alive

And I will convict us all
It's criminal that no one flipped and set the prom on fire
We are the Judases and Pilates and Jesuses;
We are the victims and the murderers of our friends

Zac saw the bra through the window there
Some girls were changing, shall we say, in more ways than one
And some guys were in there, too - we said, Let's all be mature
I said I wouldn't look - I lied; I wasn't the only one
And that guy, he was never all right, you know
So he had it harder once he started to feel that burn
And wasn't it natural how we all made it harder still?
These days he's sedated - son, I wasn't the only one
I wasn't the only one
I swear, I wasn't the only one...

Expatriate post

Just an update for its own sake, really. I don't have the time to think of anything clever or interesting; I'm at my mom's house, borrowing online time because our internet has been shut down for two weeks. If it persists, I will hunt koala bears to extinction.

James and I began filming for www.pianoanytime.com today. His content is brilliant, but we'll have to reshoot everything from today because I apparently have this nigh-undetectable mini form of Parkinson's which renders me completely unable to hold a camera still. And it wouldn't hurt us to have more lights either. We need a taller tripod for sure, and we'll resume tomorrow. I hope no one who subscribes to the site ever reads this and discovers its humble-bordering-on-the-ludicrous beginnings.

But I think it'll be awesome. I really do.

Rehearsal for The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) is lots of fun. We've had seven sessions now and are making huge progress. I encourage you all to see it; we open July 10th-ish, I think. All the information is at www.nacc.edu/nacctheatre/abouttheshowshkspr.htm

Also, my group The Clever Animals will be playing a concert with the talented singer/songwriter Ms. Katrina Barclay at the DeKalb Theatre in Fort Payne on the 24th of July. Kyle Putman's band will be there, too (are you out there, Kyle? I don't know the name of your band yet). I think it'll be like five bucks at the door, to cover our rental cost and whatnot. But we plan to debut as many new songs as possible, and it will be our drummer Ashton's first show with us. And in fact, our first show with a drummer. Yikes. Anyway, it should be lots of fun. Come out and support local art, then talk to me after the show. We'll hang out.

I've been writing a crap-ton of fiction lately, staying up all night and sleeping during the late morning and early afternoon. There's a short story called "Gold in the Hills," which is in no way about the West, or gold, or prospectors, or, God forbid, cowboys. It's set in a fictionalized version of Fort Payne/Sand Mountain, and I quite like it. If I can find a way to post it here in .pdf so nobody can get in and edit the text, I'll post a link to it.

(Christ. How paranoid I am. Why would anyone want to edit the text? But still.)

There's also a novella in the works, tentativly titled "God's Stomp." Yes, I realize the word is actually supposed to be "stamp," but as it is also set in my mythical Fort Payne/Sand Mountain area, you can imagine that regional vernacular certainly plays its part. And "God's Stamp" sounds terrible. Like a postage stamp, not a skull-crushing footfall. Which is what my story hints at.

So I'm off to work at the studio a bit, then tonight, the Campsite. Sounds great.

Ooh yeah, here's some stuff. You should see: The Hangover, Drag Me to Hell. Both worth a few chuckles in very different ways. I love adult comedies and fictional hell, so both these were right up my alley. Enjoy. And tell your friends about the shows, both of them. I'll post more often once they get our internet working again.

Quickie #1

My sleep cycle has already reverted to its natural vampiric incongruity with that of most mortals, and I still have two days of work left. After partying Friday night, I had breakfast and then went back to bed at ten, then slept until 5:30 yesterday afternoon. I haven't been back to sleep since then. My friend James cooked, so my brother and I went over to eat and watch S. Darko (skip it), then I came home, read for a while, and have been writing since then. I'm so fucking exhilirated... I don't even know. I don't have much to say. I just went for a walk in the rain, and I'm wearing this long-sleeve tee so it retained all the droplets and cooled me off and eventually I was just running. And I guess I just wanted to say that this is what it's supposed to feel like. I think it's going to be a good summer.

I ought to be cleaning out the space that will eventually be the studio. And I did some of that earlier, I promise. But now, I'm not. I'll get back to it. It is, as they say, all about the journey.

But it's totally not in this case.

The pure volume of shit five people can accrue over twenty years is ridiculous. We have so much stuff in the house that most of the work in fixing it up the way Jake and I will like it is intellectual; it's like a puzzle, where we just have to find the best way to arrange all this stuff in a space too small for all of it. Plus I still have another week of work, and fuck working twelve hour days when eight of those are in retail.

My Life's too short attitude fascinates me. For anyone who's heard this spill already, you can go ahead and skip a paragraph. Okay, so I know the way my mind works, which everybody knows doesn't necessarily mean I can go inside my mind and fix it. I must enjoy my life; I can't make myself do it any other way. You see, your parents are the boundary between you and your own mortality. When one of them dies, it's broken in your subconscious, especially when it's something potentially hereditary like lymphoma. I have this weird, irrational, but quite potent idea in my head that I could die at any moment, so there's only so much hard work I'll even allow myself to do, which is why I hope I can work in music once this thing gets going. Music never feels like work.

One more note on my idea that I could die at any time, in my defense: I could. So could you. No foolin. Do some stuff you like.

I wrote a new song the other day. It's called "Junior Extravaganza" and isn't nearly as lame as it sounds. I'll try to get a rough demo made pretty soon and put it up here (I'd like to use this page as an initial feedback song tester along with everything else).

It's easy for me to get lost in things, and to forget how they work. So sometimes I have to strip the richer subtleties away and look at the bones, so I remember.

Usually I'll start by going to Visions in Huntsville, which is the only gentleman's club worth going to in that town. Lots of nice/funny/interesting girls there, many of them quite beautiful. But I like to watch human desire at its crudest and most explicit: the men there need to feel less lonely, to use whatever means necessary to pursue something curvy and bright and lovely, and to be rewarded at least in some small way. They need to believe that there's a point to the chase. And by they, of couse I mean we. I was there, too.

And the girls. They need money, and they will use their curviness and brightness and loveliness to get it. Maybe they even enjoy dancing for the occasional man. No one there resents anyone else there for such displays of selfish motivation; everyone knows exactly where they stand, because you don't have to constantly keep in mind that this is how it works. And that's totally okay; I just forget it sometimes.

Really, I've only been struck by this "bones of things" ideas because it occurred to me two nights in a row in two wildly unrelated contexts. Tonight I went to Cornerstone Christian Academy's (Rainsville, AL) spring musical that the kids put on because my sister Joy attends there, and because in it she performed her debut speaking role. I might add, as a piece of free information, that she was by far the most wonderful excellent marvelous kid there. FYI.

Anyway, I love how the bones of theatre (and by extension, all English language entertainment) show through in kids' productions. The characters are broadly written enough so that kids can understand them at least thoroughly enough to portray them, so the "lead" and the "sidekick" and the "comic relief" are so aggressively obvious as to be violent. Songs and dances are arranged in only the most perfunctory of ways; without the distraction of being much entertained, we can see why things which are entertaining manage to be so. There's even a nod in-script to prima-donnaism: each character is named, even if they have only a single throw-away line. Each child's character is called by name so that the audience can know them, notice them, that they are there. All in all, quite the engaging theatrical experience.

Matthew Taheri, Jake Harris, and myself began rehearsing last night for our upcoming reboot of our The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) which we performed at Northeast Alabama Community College theatre two years ago. It's one of the most brilliant fucking plays ever written, and I'll tell you why: because it's only partly written.

The only reason theatre still exists is that each performance has little nuances which are completely unique, which will exist only in the moment they happen, sparkle up, then fade away and be gone forever. This show takes that to its extreme by demanding that its performers adapt the script to their current respective sociopolitical climates. Issues and references which were current when we did the show in the summer of 2007 simply won't work anymore. There's been quite the historic election, Heath Ledger died, there's swine flu. We'll be joking about that stuff now, with the cheerful consent of the authors. And I think that's awesome.

Last night, we rehearsed at Matthew's parents' house in Rainsville, and his father, Bejan, cooked a magnificent dinner, of rice and meat kebobs and fruit and salad. We'll be rehearsing, as last night, on our own time in our own spaces this week, as the director of theatre at NACC (Mark Webb, a scholar and a gentleman) is on well-deserved vacation. I like starting with such a feeling of unity, of three people conspiring as if to commit a crime. Except it's to stage a hilarious play.

The power went out a little while ago. I went out on the porch and drank my first sixer of Samuel Adam's Boston Lager. I've been resisting it for some time, probably something about my ridiculous aversion to overly popular things. But it really is delicious, credit where it's due. I'd love to taste a hefeweizen made by this company.

Speaking of which, anybody out there with thoughts on the wheat beer? Eh?

I have to go to Railroad Bazaar in the morning. My two weeks will be up a week from Wednesday, and then I'll be more free. Until then I'll still have to go to sleep early and post blogs which aren't very well thought-out or edited much. Adieu, adieu.

Testing, testing... the mic? the mic?

Hear ye.

You've come here, so you know what this is. Here, I'll concern myself chiefly with personal information, with various breeds of self-promotion, with talking about dead animals I find while taking walks on the farm, and with media I like and/or dislike or would like to discuss (said medias including books, films, TV shows, plays, music both live and on record, comedians, video games, and jokes I hear people tell), as well as a few things I'll do my best to post at least weekly. I'll try out these weekly ideas, see if they work. If not, I may move on to other things.

The first of my weekly post ideas: Finnegan's Wake excerpt of the week.

James Joyce spent seventeen years in the early twentieth century writing a novel (the word here used quite loosely) that almost nobody reads and of which many readers interested in highbrow literature develop a snarling contempt. Mostly nobody can even decide what the thing is about, although there are many schools of thought. Among the folks who manage to agree, the Wake is a dream, chronicled more or less in English: of all the world's history and languages; of a giant which is the city of Doublin, asleep by the river Liffey, its wife; of the nighttime concerns of the family which are the core characters, HCE the Father, ALP his wife, Issy their daughter, and Shem and Shaun, their twin sons. The prose is saturated with poetic device, multilingual puns and double meanings, and aggressive ambiguity of every imaginable sort.

If anyone asks, I'm not a fan of Finnegan's Wake. But between the two of us I've almost never been so fascinated by anything in my life.

Much has been written about the Wake elsewhere, and I'm a bit of a noob, I'm afraid, so I won't attempt to treat on it at length. Not yet. But I thought it might be fun to open the book and choose a phrase every seven days or so to sink our collective teeth into.

For example:

"Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you're going to be Mister Finnagain! Comeday morm and, O, you're vine! Sendday's eve and, ah, you're vinegar! Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you're going to be fined again!"

-pg. 5 of Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition, 1999.

You can't read it the way you read anything else. Any ideas on this? I have a few. Ball's in your court.

Also, a fantastic resource and a place to read Finnegan's Wake for free online, annotated Wikipedia, clicky internet style: http://www.finnegansweb.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

The second of my weekly post ideas: horror story/novel/movie/album/etc. of the week.

I always divide my "Favorites" lists on Facebook and mySpace and everything into columns: one for horror, and one for everything else. Horror has ever been my favorite flavor of story; it seems to me the most honest, the most true to nature. I'll write about the first weekly pick as soon as I decide what I want it to be. Which brings me to...

...The third of my weekly post ideas: story/novel/movie/album/etc. of the week.

For things like American Beauty or the music of Counting Crows or the show "Squidbillies." And everything. You know.

Which are all the weekly post ideas I have, for now. I'm sure I'll think of more, or some or all of these won't work and they'll have to change, or whatever. I'd be thrilled to hear suggestions. :)