Category: Discoveries

Bing bong bing

January 21, 2008 /

I downloaded LCD Soundsystem’s 45:33 because it’s the first album I’d heard of that was specifically designed to be run to. Unfortunately it’s way too slow for that, but it’s still pretty good music. I had been rating everything on it three or four stars on iTunes, and suddenly–halfway through a song I’d already rated–I found my mouse hovering over the five-star button. Because somebody had started playing chimes.

This is a serious problem and I don’t know what to do about it. As soon as a song incorporates chimes, handbells or tone bars of any kind–especially, as they are often used, in counterpoint–I will unconsciously decide that it is the greatest song ever and listen to it ten times in a row. I can’t help it!

I would say that this is a flaw in my musical taste, but it is widely agreed that my musical taste already consists largely of flaws. This is a crack in the very foundations of my aesthetic sensibilities. It is a metaflaw. Chimes are a sloppy exploit for the kernel of my brain.

Someone recommend a song that will ruin chimes for me forever. I want to change.

The Cryptid Epiphany

January 7, 2008 /

I know this is the kind of thing you’re supposed to smugly bury, when you’re writing, but I have this obsession with transparency? So here’s an example of how sometimes the world just drops stuff into your lap.

Almost a year ago I started writing stories about Proserpina, another name for Persephone, probably most well-known for the thing with Hades. In the very first one I threw in a remark about “her faded black tattoos.”

Later I decided to add an Australian of European descent, and only later did it occur to me that I’d set up her semi-suitor as an older man from “down there.” Right?

Then last week I decided to bring the tattoo thing back in, so I had to come up with a rationale for it. Poking around on Wikipedia led me to tā moko, traditional Maori tattooing; apparently New Zealand was becoming more economically entwined with Australia toward the end of the 19th century, so that’s a reasonable connection. Then I looked up the origin story of tā moko.

It’s about a man who descends into the underworld to find the wife he drove away. Persephone inverted.

I have traditionally viewed with skepticism the English-lit platform of divorcing the author from the work, but man, I could not have done this on purpose. The title of this entry comes from a discussion I had with Leonard a while back about his writing process; apparently this kind of thing happens to him all the damn time. I understood the sensation of epiphanic writing when he described it, but I couldn’t find any examples to hold up from my own corpus. This is about as close as I’ve come.

Mild ethical issues here: there’s a growing concern among Maori that moko is being appropriated by whites who have neither full grasp of nor entitlement to the art form, and, well, I’m kind of doing that. My defense is that I do plan to set it up with an explicit Maori connection, somehow, and to respect the source. I’m not sure whether recontextualization of a minority culture’s mythology is inherently evil or not, but I do think it’s inevitable. Origin stories are virulently memetic because they’re supposed to be. Eventually I’ll have to do a theme-post about how often I rip off and mash up mythology I don’t really understand.

Googlebombing Munson

June 3, 2007 /

As of this writing, NFD is the top Google result for Bryan Munson, which means I occasionally get emails from other former students of his wondering where he is now and how to contact him. While I certainly don’t mind that, I learned yesterday that Bryan Munson does in fact have his own site, and has since 2004! Bad Google! Admittedly, most of the content is surreal and discontented blog entries by his classroom doll-mascot, but it still deserves to be the top Munson for Munson Munson.

Anyway, Bryan Munson is currently headed out of Korea at last and on to, er, Saudi Arabia. Are there any other English teachers that adventurous? Is there Bryan Munson fanfiction yet?

Get a Facebook too, Bryan Munson.

April 14, 2007 /

I got spam today with the most intriguing subject line ever, so I googled it and bam, first result was Gordon Fay’s 24-hour RPG Blood Royal. The subject line, and its description: “A competitive game of fairy-tale intrigue and skulduggery in which players take the roles of a dying King’s children, each vying to be named successor at the end of the week.” How cool is that! Thanks, spam! Welcome to unintended consequences.