Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Christmas Music

This is sort of a follow-up to the last post I made about music in the workplace, so the first thing I want to say is that, while it hasn’t gotten better by any stretch of the imagination, it also hasn’t really gotten any worse. I can narrow down the songs I don’t particularly enjoy down to a select few, noticed and appreciated a few more, and the rest I can easily tune out at this point.

But of course, all that gets thrown out the window once the holiday season rolls around. The Saturday after Thanksgiving, I walked into work and was immediately greeted by what I can only describe as somebody drunkenly mumbling their way through Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

This has happened for three Christmas seasons in a row and it still catches me off guard. Like, I know our playlist is bad, but the sudden (if not unexpected) addition of holiday cheer still finds new ways to disappoint. I can’t even give a good example of the type of music they play there; just looking for it would probably make me want to one-up Van Gogh and chop off both ears.

So far, I have been able to identify two leading factors in why this is the case (that is, why not just normal-people Christmas songs?). The first is that repetition would probably breed contempt for just about anything. It hasn’t happened to the songs I do like in the playlist because they only come up so often.

The second is that, as I learned recently, the playlist is actually a Youtube Music playlist, which means it’s curated by someone, and the someone that puts together the normal music set probably also picks the Christmas songs. So really, the entire store has to suffer because of one person’s bad taste.

Well, that’s not entirely fair. There’s no Carol of the Bells on there to terrify me, for example, and some good songs do make it through. But just like the rest of the list, the ratio of good songs to bad is very lopsided.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe our music is designed this way so that the good songs stand out more. I doubt it, but that’s one of the ways I keep hope alive in this minimum-wage world, I guess. It’s certainly a better thought than the alternative.

-F

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Blue Curtains

There’s a movie I can’t get out of my head. Not because I think it’s a great movie (though it very well may be (I’d have to get back to you on that)); it’s more like when you’ve got a song in your head and all you can remember is the chorus and maybe a riff or two, and if you don’t sing about it (or, in this case, talk kind of adjacent to it), it’s just going to get worse.

The movie in question is The Other Side of the Wind, the last film by Orson Welles (now available on Neflix!). It’s a frenetic piece; its conceit is that it’s footage from a bunch of cameras all trying to get a hot new scoop on a Hollywood director on the night of his seventy-fifth birthday. What I can’t get over is how prescient it is for being shot in the 1970s.

But let’s take a step back for a moment. The title of this post is based off a tired joke that goes a little something like this:

An author, in a fit of self-indulgence, decides to sit in on a class teaching his own work. The professor goes into a long, impassioned speech about the curtains in a scene. “The author made the curtains blue here,” the professor says, “because it symbolizes the purity of the scene, while also foreshadowing the tragedy to come.”

Upon hearing this, the author shouts “The curtains are blue because I like the color blue!”

This was also at the heart of The Beginner’s Guide, the subject of a Raindrops on Roses post I made a few months back. In that game, Davey, for as much as he tried to demonstrate his understanding of Coda’s games, didn’t know Coda as well as he thought he did and so ruined their friendship because of it.

But there’s something wrong with both of those conclusions, right? The term “Death of the Author” still has meaning, right? Like, I remember discussing the briefcase in Pulp Fiction with a friend. We were both talking about what we thought was in it and I said, “Well, Quentin Tarantino says…”

He interrupted me with “I really don’t care what Quentin Tarantino says.”

I feel much the same way about The Other Side of the Wind. Taking it as a 2018 movie about 1970’s Hollywood makes it very much a period piece in the same way that Barton Fink (directed by Joel and Ethan Coen) is. It certainly helps that many of the characters are played by their inspirations up to and including John Huston in the lead role.

What makes it prescient, though, is how little some things have changed in the intervening years between filming and release. For example, sex and sexuality is one of the themes that permeates throughout the movie; one of the things all the cameras are trying to figure out is the relationship the main character has with the women in his life. But as the movie goes on, it’s revealed that not only is that kind of a touchy subject, but shades of modern-day’s difficulties with sexual assault begin to crop up as well.

Another example would be the opening monolog, especially as this one was added near the end of the arduous editing process and by making mention of otherwise anachronistic items like cell phones, it only adds to this bridge between the old and the modern.

But, again, these interpretations on certain contexts were certainly not Orson Welles’ intention. Sometimes the curtains are just a nice shade of blue. But I never really liked how that joke villainized the professor. They’ve presumably developed their own context for the piece after years of study, and suddenly someone shouts back a retort with nothing but some perceived authority. And in most cases, I find it actually weakens the piece. The Other Side of the Wind goes from a period piece spanning multiple periods to its own inside joke that the audience can never be a part of.

-F

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

A Follow-Up

With better planning, this would have been last week’s topic, but there were ah, more pressing issues. Though, to be fair, this also gave me a bit more time to reflect on the writing experience. This is something I actually don’t get to talk about much. Normally all my fictional pieces go through the college workshop-level process, where authors are specifically not allowed to talk about their work.

So now, two weeks later, let’s talk a little bit more about Write What You Know.

One of the things I didn’t mention in my Raindrops on Roses post on creepypasta was how enamored I am with their structure. It’s a basic structure, sure, but I think that’s why it’s so easy to copy down and use. While The Hero’s Journey is used to mold longer stories, all a shorter story like a creepypasta needs is a series of spooks that slowly escalate, and an optional denouement at the end.

I knew I wanted to write a Halloween-y story for this blog, if only to prove that I could. That’s a feeling I get sometimes, often when a story has a false start and I end up dropping it. I started this blog for the same reason, to give another example of this. The next step, of course, was the subject matter.

I do have older false starts of horror stories, mostly involving weird sounds that keep showing up around me. Spotify glitching out was the one that I had actually part of an introduction written for but there was also this weird hum at work that I obsessed over for about a week before dismissing it as “worth noting, but maybe not worth writing more than a sentence or two about” (oh hey!).

But what I also have is a bunch of stories about “Nancy.” The “Finlay story” was the most memorable, and it took a little memory digging to find the other ones, but I mean, those aren’t that scary by themselves. Like, I’m fine now. I’m fine.

I’m fine.

So then all I needed was a conceit, and that one I concede I was a little less creative on. Demons and blood and pentagrams and all that are kind of cliche in creepypasta, but I mean, I have to convince people that my English teacher is a demon spawn somehow, right? The point was, these stories I had were the type.

The climax, of course, is where things diverge from reality. At some point, you just need to creep people out, real life be damned. I’m reminded of this line from Adaptation.:

“The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end and you’ve got a hit. You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit.”

So yeah! I had a lot of fun writing it, stringing events together like I did, and I do hope that everybody enjoyed reading it. Unless being scared isn’t your thing, in which case I do apologize. But I’d also want to know what you were expecting the day before Halloween.

-F

Tuesday, November 6, 2018

Your Vote Matters

Oof, this is going to come off a little cynical, isn’t it? I guess I should lead with this, then: Yes, I voted today. Despite all this essay might say, I still vote regularly. But…

In an online town hall, Bernie Sanders described this midterm as “the most important Midterm of our generation,” kind of like how two years ago was “the most important election of our generation” and while I don’t really remember the rhetoric of four years ago the midterms were probably important then too (not important enough, of course, to get the average American to vote but ehhh…).

Another common piece of rhetoric is “Your vote matters. Your vote always matters.” And yes, there are a myriad of examples where this is true. Anecdotes abound of ties and near-ties and coin flips and recounts, but where I think these go wrong is not providing examples of the other side of the coin: The times when it’s almost unanimous but not quite. Sure, these examples negate the general argument the “Voting Matters” people are trying to make (you can make a difference), but perhaps consider this alternative argument: “You should let your voice be heard.” This, I think, can be demonstrated very well with these sorts of overwhelming defeats.

So here’s my story. It’s nothing so dramatic as a federal or even state election; it was a high school student-level forum. Now, my high-school was a little different in that they tried to let their students have much more of a say in the goings-on of the school. Every one of these meetings, somebody tried to move the school’s dress code away from business casual, for example.

The big-name item on this particular meeting was the school’s schedule. The high school was in many ways an extension of the big-name college in the city. Seniors and even many Juniors took a lot of college-level classes and the high-school had a lot of oddities to accommodate that. The one most specific for this essay was the trimester-style scheduling, which itself mirrored the college experience at the time.

But times change. The college was moving to semesters, with an auxiliary “May-term” to accommodate missing any credit hours that might be lost in the schedule change. The proposal for the high school was a similar semester schedule, but with a “January term” or “J-term” for… reasons I don’t really remember anymore.

I remember Freshman-age me not being a particular fan of this change. The tentative schedule proposed still didn’t sync up all that well with the colleges, and J-term seemed needlessly complex. I also wasn’t really convinced by the arguments to change. The most egregious argument came from one then-Junior who really wanted to go sailing over summer break and this schedule would… cut into that I guess? By a week or two? The point was, I felt it was in my best interest if the school kept going with its trimester-styled schedule.

Voting was something of an embarrassing experience. Instead of counting “ayes” or ballots, they had all in favor of a particular motion stand up and those running the meeting would gauge the results from there. Voting in favor of trimesters went first, so up I went.

Nobody else stood up with me.

Some people laughed. I heard somebody yell “Sit down!”

The next morning, the results of the forum were announced. The semester schedule won in a unanimous fashion. Now, a quick google search of the word “unanimous” will yield this:

u·nan·i·mous
/yo͞oˈnanəməs/
[...]
2. (of an opinion, decision, or vote) held or carried by everyone involved.

Uh huh.

I tried not to cause too much of a disruption, but I do remember saying, “It wasn’t unanimous.”

The response was, “It was basically unanimous.”

These sorts of fora at my high school died out within a few years and I think this was one of the reasons why. Even at the level people reference when attempting to convince people to go to the polls, the most micro of levels, votes can get discounted.

Again, this is going to come off as cynical. One could easily read this as a cautionary tale against democracy. But to me, I think about this as trying my damnedest to get an opinion across. Sure I failed (and, as a schadenfreude-y aside, J-term did turn out to be a needlessly complex addition to an already weird high school), but I did try. And when I filled out my ballot today, that’s what I thought about.

-F