Month: April 2003

The Blofeld-to-my-James-Bond engaged in some introspection the other day. He ranks himself on ten categories:

1. Intelligence.

2. Sense of humor.

3. Passion.

4. Consideration.

5. Honesty.

6. Flexibility.

7. Serenity.

8. Balance.

9. Ambition.

10. Attentiveness.

So, everyone’s probably wondering: how do I stack myself up?

1. Intelligence. Hmmm….I guess I’d give myself a 7 here. I think I’m smarter than the average person, but my approach is more “know a little bit about a lot of stuff” as opposed to knowing any one thing particularly deeply. I guess.

2. Sense of humor. I’m not sure how I’d rank myself here. Sometimes I think I’m pretty funny, but other times I wonder if my sense of humor isn’t too obscure or abstract. I’ll call it a 7, I suppose.

3. Passion. Well, do I rank how I show my passions, or how I feel them? This I ask because I tend to put up a look of imperturbability (is that a word? nah, don’t ask), when on the inside I’m all a-flutter. I’m with Carlin here: “I don’t have pet peeves, I have major fucking psychotic hatreds.” But I don’t get on stage and share them, much. Call it a 6.

4. Consideration. Another 7. I think I’m mostly considerate, but occasionally I can be a clod.

5. Honesty. Zero. I’m actually a Republican. (Just kidding. Another 7 — I think I’m mostly honest, but I’m willing to “color the facts” a bit if I see the need, or a downside to blunt honesty. I think it comes from years in management and sales, two fields where lying is too often the tool of choice.)

6. Flexibility. Again, I’m not sure what’s being measured here, but I’ll give myself a 10 for going with the flow in two moves in six months.

7. Serenity. In some ways, I’m pretty serene. In other ways, I’m off the walls. So….another 7.

8. Balance. In the past, I’d give myself low marks here — 4 or 5, at best, because I’ve generally been one to rank family and my writing way ahead of things like work and getting the oil changed. But I think this may go up as I take measures to make writing into my work. The problem with balance is that you first have to find the things you want to balance in the first place. We’re constantly told to seek balance, but we tend to not consider the likelihood that we actively detest at least one or two of the things we’re balancing. So I’ll split the difference and take another 7.

9. Ambition. In my previous jobs, I’d probably get ranked pretty low, because I was never one to obsess over “moving up the ladder”. This, of course, is because I saw the people who had moved up the ladder and generally found them to be insufferable cretins. But now that I’m doing what I want to do (or at least starting to), my ambition’s going up. Yep — another 7!

10. Attentiveness. Gotta be honest here: 4, at best. My attention span is lousy-lousy-lousy; “what’s next?” is the phrase most often on my lips. Sometimes I can be almost Homeric — and not the Greek poet, but the Simpsons patriarch: “And now, we play the waiting game! (beat) Awww, the waiting game sucks. Let’s play Hungry Hungry Hippos.” I can focus when I really feel the need to do so, but the things on which I decide to focus tend to not be the things most other folks would focus on.

Adding it up, I get a 68, so at first glance I’m not that impressive a specimen. But I also get 30 bonus points for liking cats, which makes me just irresistable.

Yeah….

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FILM MUSIC EXCURSIONS, part the second.

Generally speaking, a film music fan does not think it necessary to actually see the film before buying the filmscore CD, listening to it, and appraising it. To people outside the film music circle, this is very odd behavior. I’ve had the conversation a lot of times:

Me: I picked up the score to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon today.

Them: Great movie!

Me: Never saw it. But the music’s terrific!

Them: Whoa! You didn’t see the movie?

Me: Nope.

Them: Then why on earth would you buy the soundtrack?

Me: Well, the music’s by Tan Dun, a classical composer I’ve liked before.

Them: But you didn’t see the movie! Why would you buy a soundtrack without seeing the movie? That’s crazy!

Me: Nah. It’s music, isn’t it?

Them: But—

Me: If a lover of classical music listens to Nielsen’s first two symphonies and likes them, isn’t it normal for them to pick up his third and fourth symphonies out of expectation that they may like them as well?

Them: Well, yeah, but—

Me: And if you love Eminem’s music, then is it weird for you to buy his new album the day it comes out, even if you’ve never heard a single track of it?

Them: It may be so, Socrates.

Me: If you’ve never heard any of some band’s songs, but then a friend comes to you and gushes about how great it is, might you not try it out on that basis?

Them: Yes, I may, Socrates.

Me: Then if I’ve discovered that I admire a great deal of Miklos Rozsa’s filmscores and even some of his concert works, isn’t it reasonable for me to pick up the CD of his score to King of Kings, even if I’ve never seen the film?

Them: Shut up and drink this.

Me: Ooooh, hemlock!

And so it goes.

The prevailing view is that a filmscore CD is much like, say, an action figure or a movie poster or a novelization: it’s an artifact of the film, meant to recapture something of the experience of the film itself. This is definitely true to a point, and for a lot of film music lovers, it started precisely this way. When I was a young Star Wars fan growing up, home video was in its infancy, movies on tape didn’t exist, et cetera. So there was no way to re-experience the film between re-releases except to do it vicariously: reading the book or the comics, staging scenes with action figures, and listening to the soundtrack LP. I’d listen to the tracks on the album and envision the derring-do going on while John Williams’s music was playing, and I’d do the same for other score albums to other films.

For most casual listeners of film music, it pretty much stays at that level. These are the people who made the Titanic album a multi-platinum item, despite the fact that no film music fan I’ve ever met considers Titanic to be James Horner’s best work, or even close. (In fact, I think that the Beyond Titanic CD is a better listen, because that first album just gets so damned repetitive after about fifteen of its seventy-five minutes…but that’s for another time.) For most people, the music is intimately connected to the film, and to separate them seems foolish and weird.

But for people like me, eventually the music starts to take on a life of its own. I think it starts when connections between different scores by the same composer become noticeable, when the ear becomes refined enough to pick up on these things. For me, this was probably when I heard similarities between Star Wars and Superman, both by John Williams. And the more filmscore albums I acquired, the more the music took on this “extra life” outside the films. In my case, it helped that my sister was (and still is) a lover of classical music; the lines were pretty much blurred very early on. Eventually I started buying filmscore albums to films I planned to eventually see, and it was only a matter of time to my current attitude: where I often don’t care if I ever see the film before I buy the album. (In the case of Jerry Goldsmith, this attitude results in listening to a lot of wonderful music whilst avoiding a lot of terrible movies. Not so much lately, though, as Goldsmith seems to me to be running out of steam.)

And that, inevitably, leads to a discussion of the connection between music and visuals, which in turn has implications for classical music’s long distinction between “absolute” and “program” music. Which will require another essay….

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If any of my readers should happen to have a spare $30,000,000 sitting around, would you mind donating it to the City of Buffalo?

That’s roughly the sum the city was expecting to receive from the New York State government this week, without which the city is facing some very serious financial problems — we’re talking about not paying vendors and possibly missing payroll. This stuff has been brewing for years, as Buffalo’s once-prosperous tax base has eroded over the years following the decline of manufacturing in the area and the mass exodus to the suburbs by families who once lived within the city limits. Many other cities that faced the “suburbanization” problem dealt with it by simply annexing the suburbs, so that people living there still ended up paying their taxes to the city, but for various reasons — just about all of them political — this solution isn’t viable in Buffalo.

So the city keeps its hand out to the state, when the state’s own budget is a train wreck (which somehow never seemed to come up during last fall’s election, fancy that). This is during a time when most states are facing big-time budget problems, which are exacerbated by New York State’s annual budget problems. (It’s been something like two decades since Albany actually passed the budget by its legally-mandated date, a problem caused in part by monolithic institutional problems in the State Legislature, something I remember every time some anti-Federalist waxes poetic about state governments.)

But, as bad as things are today, there are some very small bits of news that may be seeds for a better future. First, some former industrial real estate has just been converted to loft apartments in downtown. If successful, this kind of project should lead to a new community of people actually living in downtown Buffalo, which should stimulate business growth much more than the people who head downtown for just a few hours at a time, for a show at Shea’s or clubbing on Chippewa or whatever. Buffalo’s efforts at downtown-revitalization have been founded, for many years, on getting businesses to open up in hopes that people would go where the businesses are. After years of very mixed results, they’re trying the opposite approach: bringing in the people first, in hopes that businesses will follow. This seems to me a far more sensible track to follow.

The other good news has less to do directly with the City of Buffalo, but more to do with the entire Niagara Frontier region. It’s the steps being taken to convert the Niagara Falls International Airport into a hub for cargo transport. The NFIA has sat unused for a number of years now, and now the facility is being investigated for its possibilities in cargo and freight handling. This is because many cargo-handling airports in the Northeast and in Canada are currently “maxed out” in the amount of cargo they can handle; a new cargo hub is needed, and the NFIA may fill the bill. The facility is just sitting there, and it has a very large runway that can handle the largest cargo planes in use. (These planes cannot land at the Buffalo-Niagara International Airport, because that facility’s runways aren’t big enough. The NFIA’s runway is shared with a United States Air Force Base; that’s why it’s such a big runway.)

Air cargo has been suggested as an industry that could revitalize Niagara Falls, NY, what with the city’s proximity to Canada and the general need for a new air cargo facility in the Northeast.

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Congratulations to Sean on the occasion of his new job.

But Sean, if you ever vote for this guy, I’ll dispatch the Birds of Doom to cover your house with pigeon-poop.

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Shortly before we moved from Syracuse, I finally finished the rough draft of my Arthurian fantasy novel, The Promised King, Book One: The Welcomer. I’ve been working on this novel, in one form or another, for a little more than six years. The current rough draft is actually the third draft I’ve generated in this story, but this is the one where the story’s shape is finally the way I want it. The earliest version was my first real attempt at writing prose, and it showed as I succumbed to just about every possible “rookie mistake” that exists in writing: the first third was one gigantic infodump, akin to if The Lord of the Rings had started with “The Council of Elrond” and taken 150 pages to do it and complete with “As you know, Bob” bits of exposition that embarrass me to this day when I happen to re-read them.

(An “As you know, Bob” is when one character tells another character something that they both already know, purely for the benefit of the reader:

GANDALF: Ah, the ring. As you know, Frodo, your uncle Bilbo found it and took it from Gollum. (stands up, bangs head on ceiling) Ouch!

FRODO: Yes, Gandalf, I remember the ring. And as you know, Gandalf, we hobbits are really short and live in holes in the ground….

You get the idea. The problem, of course, is that people generally don’t sit around telling each other things they already know. Outside the White House Press Corps, that is.)

In addition to all the extraneous infodumps, I also had a very large-scale subplot — actually a parallel plot that was to have little to do with the main plot until the very end — that simply didn’t belong. So I excised it and saved that material in another place, for use in a later book.

Then, when I bought a new computer a year and a half ago, I found that half the original files had been corrupted — so I had to actually re-type the entire thing. This actually made things better, because there were spots in the original narrative where I’d left notes to myself like “Flesh this out later” or “Make up the background for this”. All that got tightened up and dealt with, particularly the backgrounds for one set of supporting characters.

So now, I’m onto the last set of revisions before this thing goes off to publishers. In the novel’s current state, I have twenty-two chapters with a short epilogue. (No prologue. I was once ambivalent about prologues, but now I pretty much hate them.) The current word-count is just over 187,000 words, which translates to between 400 and 500 pages in a mass-market paperback, depending on the typeface and page-density. (Or, in other terms, it’s just a bit shorter than Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.) I’m hoping to edit that total down by roughly 18,000 words for the final draft.

And then, it’s on to The Promised King, Book Two: The Finest Deed, in which the story concludes. (Nope, no trilogy.) I already have an initial draft in longhand form, but I already know of at least four major changes I’m going to have to make to the story. But I’m hoping to take roughly another year to get that one done.

So proceeds my plan for world domination.

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I often wish I’d attended college during the Internet Age, if only to be able to take advantage of certain online resources in important debates, when certain bits of information would have been incredibly handy. Case in point: this handy site (link filched from MeFi) that depicts all manner of buildings, aircraft, and fictional spaceships to scale (one pixel per meter). This is the kind of thing that would really help out in those beer-enhanced, two-in-the-morning “Could Captain Kirk’s Enterprise defeat Darth Vader’s Super-StarDestroyer in a space battle?” discussions. And keep scrolling across the top for a rather unexpected object….

(I’m curious, though, as to where the site’s author got his information for the CE3K mothership. Was this established somewhere, or did he extrapolate it somehow from the ship’s size in the film relative to Devil’s Tower? And the Death Star seems a bit of an omission, although it presumably would be really friggin’ big if drawn to scale.)

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Somehow, no matter how much I tell myself that I need to read more short fiction, I never actually end up doing so. Thus I keep acquiring short-fiction collections — especially the Year’s Best anthologies in fantasy and SF, as well as collections of classic SF and horror stories — and only managing to read a handful of these gems.

Steven R. Donaldson once suggested an analogy between novels and short stories: novels are beer, where short stories are wine. Of course, he’s assuming that beer is a more egalitarian beverage, whereas wine is more “craft-oriented” than beer, I think. (It’s been a long time since I read his words on this matter, so I might be doing him an injustice.) I’m not sure the analogy holds up, really — all those microbrews on the shelves these days seem to demonstrate otherwise — but in Donaldson’s defense, he came up with this analogy before the big microbrew craze that allowed beer consumption in America to move beyond “Tastes Great, Less Filling!”

Anyway, I’ve once again decided that I need to read more short fiction. This time, though, I’ve hatched a plan. Very simply: I’m going to make May “Short Fiction Month”. For the entire month of May (“It’s May, it’s May, the lusty month of May….”) I will read only short stories, novelets, and novellas. After I finish the two novels I’m currently reading (one of which is a review novel for GMR), I will read no more novels until June. I’m not sure I’ll review every short story I read here, but I’ll try to note the really good ones.

(I will, though, still maintain my rigorous non-fiction reading schedule. And no, Ari Fleischer’s daily press briefings do not qualify as “short fiction”.)

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Clear your oral cavity of beverages before reading this.

(If it doesn’t seem funny at first, just wait. Inevitably you will picture in your mind the act being described, and it’s all downhill from there.)

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Remember that one Far Side cartoon, where two deer are talking in the woods? One of them has a pattern on his chest roughly shaped like a target with a bull’s eye, and his buddy says, “Bummer of a birthmark, Hal.”

Well….

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ESPN’s Len Pasquarelli gives the Buffalo Bills a grade of C+ on their draft this year, primarily because of the cloud of uncertainty surrounding their first-round selection of Miami running back Willis McGahee. I’m still confused as to why they did this, but as Pasquarelli indicates, the Bills didn’t select anyone who is likely to crack the starting lineup this year, so it seems that GM Tom Donahoe is, in fact, thinking in terms of the future. This makes sense, I guess, since the Bills have used free-agency to fill many of the needs they had after last year (except for tight end, where the Bills still have a gaping hole). So I guess Donahoe’s approach this year was to pick quality players who could contribute in small roles for now but grow into starting roles when the current nucleus starts attaining free agency.

Still, I don’t know if I would have taken McGahee. But then, I’m sitting at home writing a blog entry about the draft, whereas Donahoe is being paid the big bucks to actually execute the draft. (And no, I’m not willing to make the same concession toward the current President of the United States.)

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