Lazy sunday...
Feb. 27th, 2005 03:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatAll attempts to actually work on a story keep getting thwarted by this inane desire to soak up the lazy flow of a bright sunny Sunday. Trekked through my neighborhood, cool, bright, with a few couples here and there trekking a similar path, to Barnes & Noble to hunt down some music. Peeked in the windows of realty agencies along the way as well as various furniture stores and patisseries. On the way homewards, I pass an old black man with a knitted cap, dirty coat, and faded black jeans, singing mockingly "Old MacDonald Had A Farm" to a picture of richly clothed children on the window of The Montessori School. An apt illustration I think of how the neighborhood has gradually changed over the years.
At Barnes and Nobel - I get the Green Day album - "American Idiot", which I've been curious about for a while now.
Been sort of pondering the Green Day album all weekend. Listening to it at home, over a snack of chocolat macroon, hazelnut linzer cookie, and two home-made chocolat truffles - I'm hit by how depressing and angry it is. The lyrics in the small booklet that comes with the CD - look like the angry scribbles of a stoned teen. I may be too old for this, I think, until Bouvelard of Broken Dreams rolls on and I find myself oddly moved and happy with it. Identifying with the lyric: " I walk alone, my shadow's the only one that walks beside me, my shallow heart's the only thing that's beating, sometimes I wish someone out there will find me.." The lyric has a reverse effect on my mood, reassuring in its tone and instrumentals, bluesy as opposed to electric, it makes me feel less alone somehow, less adrift, and less marginalized. To be honest - Green Day's album works in spite of it's angry lyrics or maybe because the instruments offset them? Nice. Haven't ever listened to Green Day before now, so am enjoying the discovery.
At the moment, I listening to "The Devil's Jukebox" Music that influenced the Rolling Stones - from Uncut magazine. The CD came free with the magazine - which was about $8.00, I think. The Magazine is a British Music and Movie Review deal - very "guy" centric with articles about Dennis Hopper, Brian Wilson, and reviews focusing on male writers and male films. I enjoy the movie reviewer - who appears to have the same taste I do. His take on DiCaprio is perfect, he states regarding the Aviator- much will depend on your opinion of DiCaprio, who's at the center of every moment, busting a gut to convey irrepressible optimism, then arrogant swagger, then neurotic crack-up, then a revival of pioneering spirit. For this reviewer, as in Gangs of New York, he sucks the air from a scene, too narcissistic to really engage with subtle spitfires like Blanchett or Alda, to plainly thinking about what he's doing. For other, he's the most electric, promising actor alive. Unfortunately, I'm in the sucks energy from the screen camp. I honestly do not see the appeal. But the comment fascinates me - because he's right people see it one of two ways, which goes to show you how truly subjective movie watching is. This is one of the few reviewers I've seen admit that.
The CD that comes with the Magazine, is quite different than the Green Day one, in some aspects, yet I prefer it and it is amazingly good for a free CD compilation - but comparing the two is impossible. Number one - I prefer compilations, which may be why I should look into an MP3 player - but not being a tech geek - I'm veering away from it. Sounds like a giant pain the butt - you need a high speed internet connection, you need software, you need to download and copy everything - and hey, expensive. So still sticking with my CDs for the time being.
Songs on this baby include: Elmore James - Dust My Broom, Jimmy Reed - Bright Lights, Big City, Buddy Holly - Bo Diddly, Big Joe Williams - Baby Please Don't Go, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee - Whooping the Blues, Albert King - Born Under a Bad Sign, Muddy Watters - I Got my Mojo Working, Ike and Tina Turner - It's Gonna Work out Fine...amongst others. In case you haven't noticed yet - I have ecletic tast when it comes to music and I'm not overly critical.
Speaking of critical - realized recently that I have issues with "critical" men. Not as friends. But I cannot be romantically involved with men who are critical. Dad - isn't. Mom's the critic in the family. May be that I fear criticism, because I'm so critical of myself. If you are highly self-critical the last thing you need is someone else who is equally so. You want the opposite, I think. Just an aside...a tangent.
The other thing I picked up from Barnes and Noble, was a book I've been lusting over for a while now. Little Black Book by A.S. Byatt. It's basically a series of short somewhat unnerving tales. Each one a dark take on the concept of the fairy tale, except for adults. Fairy tales fascinate me.
Never known why - maybe it's that in an odd way they are psychological horror tales? Or comforting fables? Or both? And it is the mix of opposites that enthralls? Don't know.
On my walk back...I get lost in my thoughts. Pondering what grips me in a story and how I want to write my own and why I cower from it. Possibly because there is a weird romance, and I fear romances, I fear I suck at them. Also the male character is an odd hybrid of male characters that have intrigued either in reality or in fiction. So I shy away, terrified the book will become at heart a me book - with my own fantasies and failings inter-woven within. Have I lost the art of creating characters outside myself? Did I ever have it? Is livejournal the culprit - this constant contemplating of my navel and everyone else's as my brother would undoubtly state - were he so inclined. (Not at the moment, my brother and I in recent years have become increasingly careful around each other - as if we are both or individually made of glass, close to shattering.)
The stories that grip me - that play with my head, are odd ones...for instance after not even being tempted by a fanfic in months, I'd grown bored of the tales, I checked out![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
herself_nyc's (if that didn't work - try just hunting herself_nyc in the livejournal box or better yet hit on her response below) latest and was engrossed.
What intrigued me about herself's piece was the setting or set-up, a lost soul in a lost country, drinking himself to death. Upon this scene, pops up a woman who for all intents and purposes appears to have recently discovered herself, found a cause, yet at the same time is oddly uncomfortable in her own skin and uncomfortable with the changes life has wrought and where her life is going. Does it have a purpose any more? Who is she? And her own guilt regarding how she has or hasn't treated the people she cares about. I can identify. Discovering this lost soul from her past, she is shaken, how to handle him. Especially when he does not want her help. Then the writer throws another monkey wrench into the pot - the character discovers that her lover, her first love, the one she believed would always be there - is gone. He did not survive. This guy, this lost soul did instead. And who shows her this world?
But a very self-possessed, together soul, with few words - who only shows up long enough to tell her about it, then disappears just as quickly, leaving her gasping - wait, wait, how do I handle this? The set-up fascinates. Not for the reasons you'd think and not because it is new, because it's not, but because the heroine is not a care-giver, has no clue how to help others in this way, and the hero who had been, is the one who is lost. It's prickly. It's two lost souls who fit on the inside, but not on the outside. Also herself is a deft writer when it comes to the interplay between descriptive prose and dialogue.
One wonderful interchange comes to mind - it's between Buffy and Oz, Oz informs Buffy that the Vietnamese nursing staff told him that Spike should have died, but the Lord spared him. Buffy states something to the effect that of course he did, he has no clue what to do with him and certainly doesn't need that responsibility right now. Wonderful. Not sure I'll stay with it, all fanfic tends to fall apart for me somewhere towards the middle to end and fitters out, particularly WIP's. What I have yet to see done in fanfic and would like to, course I haven't read that much - so it's more than possible it is out there - is the following:
1. Giles as a vampire or villian. He would be amazing. Explore the dark side
of this guy.
2. The shanshu but from the perspective, that a) Angel discovers much to his emotional confusion that he is *not* the vampire of the prophecy. Never was. That Wesely had interpreted it wrong and W&H had as well. A miscalculation.
b) Spike is actually - Angel's role was in causing Spike to become that vampire. c) No one discovers this until Spike actually shanshus or maybe before. d) The tale is never in Spike's point of view, but rather in Angel's, Wesely's, Fred's, Gunn's, Ann's, Dru's, Connor's, and possibly Buffy's further down the line. But mostly Angel's. And the story is about how Angel deals with it, what it means to him and how Spike deals with it. How do we deal with the idea that we aren't the chosen one, not the one of prophecy, not the most important? That someone else, someone close to us, a sibling is?
Just read an interview with Dennis Hopper that touched on this - Hopper wanted to be the next James Dean, instead he just unraveled. But so many fanfic writers are obsessed with Angel getting a happy ending or a shanshu or the one-upmanship between the two characters - that I never see an honest examination of both of them. I wonder if ME were the only who could do it? Suppose I could try - but I know my own biases.
Okay...enough procrastinating. Running out of daylight and Sunday. Must mosey off....
At Barnes and Nobel - I get the Green Day album - "American Idiot", which I've been curious about for a while now.
Been sort of pondering the Green Day album all weekend. Listening to it at home, over a snack of chocolat macroon, hazelnut linzer cookie, and two home-made chocolat truffles - I'm hit by how depressing and angry it is. The lyrics in the small booklet that comes with the CD - look like the angry scribbles of a stoned teen. I may be too old for this, I think, until Bouvelard of Broken Dreams rolls on and I find myself oddly moved and happy with it. Identifying with the lyric: " I walk alone, my shadow's the only one that walks beside me, my shallow heart's the only thing that's beating, sometimes I wish someone out there will find me.." The lyric has a reverse effect on my mood, reassuring in its tone and instrumentals, bluesy as opposed to electric, it makes me feel less alone somehow, less adrift, and less marginalized. To be honest - Green Day's album works in spite of it's angry lyrics or maybe because the instruments offset them? Nice. Haven't ever listened to Green Day before now, so am enjoying the discovery.
At the moment, I listening to "The Devil's Jukebox" Music that influenced the Rolling Stones - from Uncut magazine. The CD came free with the magazine - which was about $8.00, I think. The Magazine is a British Music and Movie Review deal - very "guy" centric with articles about Dennis Hopper, Brian Wilson, and reviews focusing on male writers and male films. I enjoy the movie reviewer - who appears to have the same taste I do. His take on DiCaprio is perfect, he states regarding the Aviator- much will depend on your opinion of DiCaprio, who's at the center of every moment, busting a gut to convey irrepressible optimism, then arrogant swagger, then neurotic crack-up, then a revival of pioneering spirit. For this reviewer, as in Gangs of New York, he sucks the air from a scene, too narcissistic to really engage with subtle spitfires like Blanchett or Alda, to plainly thinking about what he's doing. For other, he's the most electric, promising actor alive. Unfortunately, I'm in the sucks energy from the screen camp. I honestly do not see the appeal. But the comment fascinates me - because he's right people see it one of two ways, which goes to show you how truly subjective movie watching is. This is one of the few reviewers I've seen admit that.
The CD that comes with the Magazine, is quite different than the Green Day one, in some aspects, yet I prefer it and it is amazingly good for a free CD compilation - but comparing the two is impossible. Number one - I prefer compilations, which may be why I should look into an MP3 player - but not being a tech geek - I'm veering away from it. Sounds like a giant pain the butt - you need a high speed internet connection, you need software, you need to download and copy everything - and hey, expensive. So still sticking with my CDs for the time being.
Songs on this baby include: Elmore James - Dust My Broom, Jimmy Reed - Bright Lights, Big City, Buddy Holly - Bo Diddly, Big Joe Williams - Baby Please Don't Go, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee - Whooping the Blues, Albert King - Born Under a Bad Sign, Muddy Watters - I Got my Mojo Working, Ike and Tina Turner - It's Gonna Work out Fine...amongst others. In case you haven't noticed yet - I have ecletic tast when it comes to music and I'm not overly critical.
Speaking of critical - realized recently that I have issues with "critical" men. Not as friends. But I cannot be romantically involved with men who are critical. Dad - isn't. Mom's the critic in the family. May be that I fear criticism, because I'm so critical of myself. If you are highly self-critical the last thing you need is someone else who is equally so. You want the opposite, I think. Just an aside...a tangent.
The other thing I picked up from Barnes and Noble, was a book I've been lusting over for a while now. Little Black Book by A.S. Byatt. It's basically a series of short somewhat unnerving tales. Each one a dark take on the concept of the fairy tale, except for adults. Fairy tales fascinate me.
Never known why - maybe it's that in an odd way they are psychological horror tales? Or comforting fables? Or both? And it is the mix of opposites that enthralls? Don't know.
On my walk back...I get lost in my thoughts. Pondering what grips me in a story and how I want to write my own and why I cower from it. Possibly because there is a weird romance, and I fear romances, I fear I suck at them. Also the male character is an odd hybrid of male characters that have intrigued either in reality or in fiction. So I shy away, terrified the book will become at heart a me book - with my own fantasies and failings inter-woven within. Have I lost the art of creating characters outside myself? Did I ever have it? Is livejournal the culprit - this constant contemplating of my navel and everyone else's as my brother would undoubtly state - were he so inclined. (Not at the moment, my brother and I in recent years have become increasingly careful around each other - as if we are both or individually made of glass, close to shattering.)
The stories that grip me - that play with my head, are odd ones...for instance after not even being tempted by a fanfic in months, I'd grown bored of the tales, I checked out
herself_nyc's (if that didn't work - try just hunting herself_nyc in the livejournal box or better yet hit on her response below) latest and was engrossed. What intrigued me about herself's piece was the setting or set-up, a lost soul in a lost country, drinking himself to death. Upon this scene, pops up a woman who for all intents and purposes appears to have recently discovered herself, found a cause, yet at the same time is oddly uncomfortable in her own skin and uncomfortable with the changes life has wrought and where her life is going. Does it have a purpose any more? Who is she? And her own guilt regarding how she has or hasn't treated the people she cares about. I can identify. Discovering this lost soul from her past, she is shaken, how to handle him. Especially when he does not want her help. Then the writer throws another monkey wrench into the pot - the character discovers that her lover, her first love, the one she believed would always be there - is gone. He did not survive. This guy, this lost soul did instead. And who shows her this world?
But a very self-possessed, together soul, with few words - who only shows up long enough to tell her about it, then disappears just as quickly, leaving her gasping - wait, wait, how do I handle this? The set-up fascinates. Not for the reasons you'd think and not because it is new, because it's not, but because the heroine is not a care-giver, has no clue how to help others in this way, and the hero who had been, is the one who is lost. It's prickly. It's two lost souls who fit on the inside, but not on the outside. Also herself is a deft writer when it comes to the interplay between descriptive prose and dialogue.
One wonderful interchange comes to mind - it's between Buffy and Oz, Oz informs Buffy that the Vietnamese nursing staff told him that Spike should have died, but the Lord spared him. Buffy states something to the effect that of course he did, he has no clue what to do with him and certainly doesn't need that responsibility right now. Wonderful. Not sure I'll stay with it, all fanfic tends to fall apart for me somewhere towards the middle to end and fitters out, particularly WIP's. What I have yet to see done in fanfic and would like to, course I haven't read that much - so it's more than possible it is out there - is the following:
1. Giles as a vampire or villian. He would be amazing. Explore the dark side
of this guy.
2. The shanshu but from the perspective, that a) Angel discovers much to his emotional confusion that he is *not* the vampire of the prophecy. Never was. That Wesely had interpreted it wrong and W&H had as well. A miscalculation.
b) Spike is actually - Angel's role was in causing Spike to become that vampire. c) No one discovers this until Spike actually shanshus or maybe before. d) The tale is never in Spike's point of view, but rather in Angel's, Wesely's, Fred's, Gunn's, Ann's, Dru's, Connor's, and possibly Buffy's further down the line. But mostly Angel's. And the story is about how Angel deals with it, what it means to him and how Spike deals with it. How do we deal with the idea that we aren't the chosen one, not the one of prophecy, not the most important? That someone else, someone close to us, a sibling is?
Just read an interview with Dennis Hopper that touched on this - Hopper wanted to be the next James Dean, instead he just unraveled. But so many fanfic writers are obsessed with Angel getting a happy ending or a shanshu or the one-upmanship between the two characters - that I never see an honest examination of both of them. I wonder if ME were the only who could do it? Suppose I could try - but I know my own biases.
Okay...enough procrastinating. Running out of daylight and Sunday. Must mosey off....
no subject
Date: 2005-02-27 03:31 pm (UTC)The story you're hoping to see would be a great one too--I'd like to see that myself!
no subject
Date: 2005-02-28 04:22 pm (UTC)The problem with writing is all you can do is write your tale and trust that your audience will enjoy it. No control over what the audience wants. I enjoy your tales partly due to the description, which is wonderful, and partly because you hit on some messy emotions that fascinate me. That scene between Buffy and OZ in the first two chapters - the awkwardness between them, that painful awkwardness - I adored. I also love the painful awkwardness between Spike and Buffy. She sees him as she left him, yet both have changed in the intervening time - he more than she in some ways. Also that bit when she finds out Angel is dead? Masterful. Most Spike fanfics want to make Angel out as not relevant to Buffy, I personally find it more interesting when the writer explores how much she did love him once, how that love changed with time, how it wasn't clearly resolved, and the messiness of it hanging there like a constant question mark. Which you did in that brief sequence in the rain. That's all you needed and it was done well.