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A math guy's random thoughts. |
| A math guy's random thoughts. |
| Why I got nothing done yesterday, as in excuses for not writing. The day started with an early morning dental appointment--a routine cleaning that took longer than expected since I'd rescheduled due to an anticipated blizzard that didn't happen. My next stop was to replace my phone. I've been using a Samsung Z-flip phone. I like the phone because of its small size: it doesn't fall out of my shirt pocket when I stoop over. However, the folding screen technology doesn't appear to be quite ready for prime time. This is my second flip phone, and they have both started to have dead spots in the middle of the screen where the fold happens. I've been barraged with promotions from my provider, T-Mobile, with upgrade offers to the new Samsung S25. Since there are substantial discounts available and since my current phone was fast-becoming dysfunctional, I went to the T-Mobile store to investigate the new phone. Since most technology is made abroad, it's also likely that the barrage of tariffs from he-that-will-remain-nameless will soon make technology much more expensive. assuming it's available at all. If you need a new phone or computer, now might be the time to do it. Anyway, the phone is impressive and will fit in my shirt pocket, so I decided to get one. Rather than ordering online (my usual practice), I went ahead and purchased one at the store because there are a number of freebies that come with the phone when you purchase in a store and because they would do (most) of the transfer for me. That wound up taking over two hours. I also stopped to pick up essentials (i.e., coffee), so it was after 2PM when I got home. That commenced about six hours of typing in passwords and otherwise configuring the new phone so that it worked the way I wanted. In between, I fixed dinner. I spent another couple of hours researching incredibly obscure defaults (why are the default settings always wrong?) that stopped me from doing simple but necessary things, but by 10AM today, I'd finally finished configuring the new phone. I think. Until I open another app that doesn't work the way it should. Anyway, basically, all of yesterday got used up, and most of my allotted work time for today as well. Afternnoons are "me-time" (i.e., nap time in the media room), so today is shot, too. The new phone? Now that it's configured, I like it. I put the free cover on it, so when it falls out of my pocket, it won't break. That means no wireless charging, but that's ok by me. I could write a detailed list of how to turn off the many annoying defaults if anyone is interested. EDIT: add another two hours to get my University account working in Outlook instead of Gmail. Another idiot default set incorrectly. |
| Up to now, I've selected songs that inspired stories. This one's a little different: the story inspired the song choice. The story involved is the third of my "Lauderdale Tales"  , "Ozzie's Tale" . In both this story and in the source material, betrayal plays a roll, so I wanted a "theme song" that was about betrayal. The perfect choice, of course, is the Alberto Domínguez Spanish-language song "Perfidia." For the language-impaired--that would include me!--"perfidia" is Spanish for "betrayal." The song was a 1940 Xavier Cugat hit in the US, but I chose the Trini Lopez rendition, partly because the Youtube video includes the lyrics and partly because, well, Trini.The melody will be familiar to most. It certainly was to me, once I heard it, although I couldn't have named the song from just hearing the melody. It's appeared in many places, ranging from films like Casablanca and The Mambo Kings to TV series like Dexter and Sense8. Desi Arnaz sang the Spanish version in the 1941 film The Farmer Takes a Wife, a movie that featured Gloria Swanson's return to movies after a seven year absence. In my story, the song is referenced at the beginning and the end. At the beginning, it's playing in the gift shop at Graceland and at the end it's playing on the radio at the B&B where Ozzie, the protagonist, spent an accidentally perfidious night. The lyrics actually match the story's plot pretty well. |
| Billy Joel's first album, the 1971 release Cold Spring Harbor, was a commercial failure. He left New York for Los Angeles, and spent the next two years working as a lounge musician. During this time, he wrote "Piano Man," which became his breakout hit and his signature song. The song narrates his real-life experience, and includes people he encountered at the lounge. The combination of the haunting tone of the music and the undercurrent of hopelessness in the lyrics make the song a particularly powerful. The people of the song have broken dreams and broken lives. They use the lounge to escape the harsh reality of the outside world. The song brought to mind an old Poul Anderson story I'd read ages ago, "My Object All Sublime." Anderson's story was about a fugitive--a time traveller--hiding in the present from the crimes he'd committed in another era. It tells the story his capture in a bar. I'd just finished a time travel novel of my own--Timekeepers --and so I had time travel on my mind.I wrote a story inspired by Poul Anderson's, but also by the mood of Joel's song. It's "Amazing Grace" . While the title of the story refers the famous hymn, only the lyrics and not the music play role in the story. The story does specifically reference a Joel song, "The Stranger," but the opening paragraph was wholly inspired by "The Piano Man." I hope that that short paragraph captures the mood of Joel's masterpiece. Overall, it's not a very good story--Poul's story is much better. I never submitted "Amazing Grace" publication, but did find it a worthwhile writing exercise. Here's the official video of "The Piano Man." |
| Roy Orbison was a truly amazing songwriter and vocalist. His four-octave range made him the "Caruso of pop." Indeed, among twentieth-century male tenors, only Orbison and Caruso were capable of hitting E over high C. After topping the charts with hits like "Only the Lonely" and "Pretty Woman" in the sixties, by the seventies his career had faded. In the eighties, David Lynch featured Orbison's songs in two of his autier masterpieces, which launched renewed interest in the singer's work. In Blue Velvet, Dean Stockwell's rendition "In Dreams" gives it a surreal new meaning, while in Mullholland Drive, Rebecca del Rio renders "Crying" in Spanish (as "Llorando") at the film's critical turning point. Some---myself included--consider the latter to be the one of the most perfect scenes ever committed to film, and the song has much to do with that evaluation. We'll see Roy Orbison again, later in this blog, but I wanted to include "You Got It," since it's one of my personal favorites. I first heard this when it was used near the end of Boys On the Side, where it provides a deeply emotional conclusion to the movie. I only learned much later it was by Orbison. He wrote this song in 1987 during the Christmas season, recording it in a friend's garage with George Harrison providing some of the background music. His only public performance was on November 19, 1988, just seventeen days before his untimely death. This performance was incorporated into the official music video linked below. Following the theme of this blog, this song is one of several mentioned in my Halloween-in-the-time-of-Covid story, "The Selfie" . |
| Bobbie Gentry's 1967 release of "Ode to Billie Joe" took just five weeks to top the Billboard 100's pop chart. The lyrics are a first person narrative, almost cinematic in character, about family sharing a meal. It's not the meal that make the narrative so memorable, but rather the emotional subtext--or lack thereof--to the conversation. The song is a paean to the cruelty of indifference. The lyrics recount the casual conversation the vocalist's family has over dinner. In the course of the conversation, they mention that an acquaintance, Billie Joe McAllister, committed suicide by jumping off the Tallahatchie bridge. The mother mentions that their pastor saw him the day before, with someone who looks like the singer, throwing something off the bridge. The song's first person narrative continues, with none of the family showing any empathy for Billie Joe, or for each other. Indeed, while the mother notices the singer doesn't finish her meal, she doesn't care enough to wonder why. When the lyrics recount events from a year later, after the death of the father, the singer also seems indifferent to her mother's grief, so the cruel indifference goes both ways, reinforcing the song's theme. Part of the song's ongoing appeal is the mystery of exactly what was thrown off that bridge, and what it had to do with Billie Joe's suicide. Gentry said she had something in mind when she wrote the lyrics, but has consistently refused to reveal what it was, saying it was unimportant to the song itself. Her purpose was rather to establish a connection between Billie Joe, the song's narrator, and the suicide, a connection that the other family members didn't bother to pursue. That both fits with and reinforces the song's purpose and theme. I remember thinking what was thrown off the bridge must have been the remains of a covert abortion, although equally plausible explanations are a wedding ring or drugs. Later, the song was made into a movie that provided its own explanation, but in my view it's more powerful to leave it open. Certainly, the family's lack of curiosity about why he committed suicide and about the the possible connection to someone sitting at the table reinforce the theme of the song. Answering the question would change the focus to the reason, not the indifference. The lyrics are cinematic, but they also are the perfect frame for a short story. They inspired this one, set in Oklahoma instead of Missippi:
Here's Gentry singing the song in a 1967 performance on the Smothers Brothers TV show. That was my first encounter with this song, and I still remember this haunting performance and staging. |
| In 1957, two teenagers, Santo and Johnie Farina, spent a sleepless night in their parent's garage writing an instrumental song. Their tools were steel guitars and a Webcor tape recorder their father had purchased for them. They were sure they'd written a pretty good song, but it took them a year and half to find a publisher willing to record their song. Eventually, the persuaded Ed Burton of Trinity Music, and their song released in 1959. By August of that year, "Sleep Walk" entered Billboard's top forty and, by mid-September, rose to number one on the charts. It remained number one until the second week of November, an impressive run for their pretty good song. In my the first chapter of my novella "Dreamin' Life Away" , "Chapter 1. Sleep Walk" , the song is playing on a radio program reprising the number one hits of bygone times and serves as foreshadowing for the journey to the past the protagonist, Dante, is about to take. And, yes, his name suggests where he's going metaphorically. Specifically, however, he's headed to the 1950s in this slipstream tale. Every chapter of the novella has one or more songs from the 1950s that inspired it, so get ready for a list of a dozen more songs. Here's the today's song. It also inspired the surreal mood of the chapter and the novella. |
| I seem to spend an enormous amount of time in Google Holes. It always starts with me researching some obscure topic for a story I'm writing. It might be anything: the Elysian Mystery Cult, or maybe Old English cuss words, or the gay scene in 1933 London, but while sniffing about, my mental nose scents something interesting, something tangential to my original search, and I click on it. That leads to another irrersistable scent and, like a dog following his nose, I'm off into a Google Hole. I might come up anywhere. The other day, I started reading about the Acubierre drive--a hypothetical faster-than-light drive--and, four hours later, wound up reading about Chaucer's The Knight's Tale. I don't recall the convoluted path from hither to yon. The point is, that's just one example of a Google Hole. They're digital black holes, with the same kind of irresistable pull as the physical ones Einstein predicted. Sometimes, though, there's a wormhole at the bottom that leads to a productive end. The one I mentioned above, the one that led the Chaucer, is one of those. It led led to the first of my "Lauderdale Tales" .I found today's song at the end of another Google Hole. Rolling Stone called the 1930s blues artist Robert Johnson, "possibly the first ever rock star." At first glance, that seems like a curious statement. Johnson released exactly two recordings in his career, and neither got wide release. Indeed, in his lifetime, he was barely known outside the Missippi Delta, where he was one of the founding artists for the Delta Blues style. While the general public and the recording industry largely ignored him, other musicians took note of his musical genius. His recording of "The Cross Roads Blues," in particular, had signficant influence on blues musicians of later decades. Over time, that influence broadened and, eventually, rock stars like Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Bob Dylan cited his work as a critical influence. In his own time, his genius was so evident that a legend grew up that his song "The Cross Roads Blues" was about a Faustian bargain he made at a cross roads, acquiring musical talent in exchange for his soul. I find that, shall we say, doubtful. More likely, the the legend arose in part because, at the time in the American South, crossroads were seen as the location for such devlish encounters. Couple that with his untimely death and the fact that religious groups regarded the blues as the devil's work, and you've got the seeds for the legend. I see I've gone down a Google Hole here in this blog, so, back to the point. I don't remember where I started, but one day about a year ago I wound up reading about Robert Johnson, "The Cross Roads Blues," and that Faustian legend. The result was this story: "At the Crossroads" . The song itself doesn't appear in the story, nor does the devil, but the song and the legend were what influenced the story. That's the connection to the theme of this blog, so here we are.Here's Johnson, performing "The Cross Roads Blues." You may be more familiar with Eric Clapton's version. |
| I've been working on a sequence of stories, "Lauderdale Tales" , about a dysfunctional group of travellers on a journey from Oklahoma to Fort Lauderdale for Spring Break. As they travel, they have adventures at various places along the way, and these are the "tales" I'm writing. If this setup sounds familiar, you're not wrong. The four tales I've got so far more or less follow the structure of the source material, although thematically the stories are quite different. The adventure in the story I wrote yesterday, "Briney's Tale" , involved attending a ballet in Memphis. I wanted to find a song with a scifi element that the ballet might have used to for their performance. I settled on today's piece, a 1977 release by Styx:Dennis DeYoung of Styx both wrote the song and was the lead vocalist. Lyrically, the song uses sailing as a metaphor for achieving one's dreams, a metaphor that happend to also dovetail with a theme of story. In the song, a "gathering of angels" appears with an invitation to "come sail away with me." But, to vocalist's surprise, "we climbed aboard their starship and headed to the skies." That's the line that gives the song the desired SciFi flavor and foreshadowing that I wanted. I had one of the characters mention that specific line early in the story to establish the desired foreshadowing. The song has been used in other places. It appears in The Virgin Suicides, for example. On television, it's been used in series as varied as South Park and ER. It's a great song, but it's part of my soundtrack because of "Briney's Tale" .If you want to read any of the "Lauderdale Tales" , drop me a note and I'll send you the passkey. |
For today, I've got a song I bet no one knows. Continuing with the notion of connecting songs to things I've written, this one appears in my story:
This story, which is a post-modern commentary on modernity (how's that for lit-babble?), is about a modern-day real estate developer looking over a fin de siècle mansion located at 666 Zeno Lane. It seems the place is haunted, and includes a slipstream passage to 1908 where he hears this song playing. The story is rife with metaphors and symbolism, staring with the address and the title. The latter references fictional frogs croaking away on the house's decayed grounds and Aristophanes because why else have frogs in a story? I'm not sure the story works as a ghost story or as an extended metaphor, but it was kind of fun to write. For sure I jammed in as many obscure references as I could. Here's a link to the song, taken from a 1908 recording. It's kind of scratchy. |
| Today's song is Leonard Cohen's brilliant song Hallelujah. For a link to the song, I'm going to include the single most moving performance I can remember, the cold opening to Saturday Night Live following the 2016 US Presidential election: In terms of the "soundtrack of my life," this is the proper link. However, the theme for this blog is supposed to connect to stories I've written or am writing. I used this song as an inspiration for a chapter of a yet-to-be-released novel, so that's the current connection:
I've temporarily made this chapter public, although without context it probably won't make sense. The real reason I wanted to include this song relates to the mystifying lyrics--the secret chord mentioned in the first verse. What's that about? It's a secret chord that David played. The next verse refers to the story of David and Bathsheba, the married woman with whom he had an affair--an affair with disastrous consequences. So, the "secret chord" must have something to do with that, but what? Well, it turns out there's at least one possible answer, one rooted not only in the the music itself but in scripture as well. Indeed, the explanation identifies the secret chord musically, but also metaphorically, and in a way that provides a deep, spiritual understanding of this song. The real reason for including it in my soundtrack is this understanding of the music and the lyrics. Watch the analysis. It's well worth your time. |
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