I recently went through my phone and cleared out a bunch of old contacts. It was mostly people from jobs long gone, either coworkers or external people like vendors. Some dated back to grad school. There were a few from my softball playing days, people I’d call if I needed subs. And there were a surprising number who’d passed away.
Don’t Dream It’s Over // Crowded House
Amazing how a three-day work week ends with exactly the same crashing thud as a fiver. There’s a finite amount of bullshit that flows your way every week, and it’s a concept that lives entirely in three-space. There is no compression of the bullshit, nor dilution, nor time stretching. There’s just a big, dense chunk of it, and the universe delivers it, uncaring.
So you put a 2.5 hour block of time on your Exchange calendar entitled “FUCK YOU” and make it public for all to see, forward the phone to voice mail, close the office door, and turn off all applications that beep or boop or flash when stuff goes boom somewhere in the swamps of Jersey or just east of Chinatown. If there’s a real problem, they’ll find you. Because you have to write a big, painful recap of a technology and PR disaster that you “own” (in the purely corporate sense of the word). Doesn’t matter that you weren’t there when it happened; doesn’t matter that you blew through 1.5 of your 2 PTO days to manage said crisis via email, so I guess you were there anyway, sucker; doesn’t matter that if you had been there, it’d have had the same outcome and at about the same pace.
You write the absolutely unironically named “post mortem.” After the death. You write it good and hard. Proofread it, even. Take pride in the words, at least.
But while you do, bust out the good earphones, the block-out-the-world buds that in retrospect you paid too much for, as far as their audio quality goes. You definitely got value for the aural insulating properties, though. Two hundred angry traders could simultaneously have phone-smashing “FIRE SOMEONE WHO’S TWICE AS SMART AS ME RIGHT NOW!” tantrums and you’d never even know, unless a bit of VoIP-ready shrapnel strayed into your field of view.
And, importantly, cause those headphones to render only things of pure beauty. Surf through your library, not relying on existing playlists that you’re tired of or the capriciousness of the random number generator. Enough of that this week elsewhere, right? No—find what speaks straight to your soul via a high-bandwidth, low-latency, dually-redundant, multivendor-provided circuit connecting your eardrum to your heart or your balls or whatever points are otherwise capable of eliciting tingles and sentiment and sadness and remembrance and joy and bittersweet regret. Choose only those songs. You can let the other part of your brain parallel process the bits on the screen like you have a hundred times before. Be sure to let the other side, the one with different colored scar tissue, work on its own.
Don’t let it atrophy. They can’t have it.
Warning, somewhat unstructured mind dump to follow, candidate for deletion, etc.
I’ve been thinking (for about twenty years, really) of writing a bigger piece of music, something scored for orchestra. Trying to avoid the “s-word” here since that seems ludicrous for some reason.
I find myself, finally, with the technology to be able to do this. I’d never be able to get a piece performed by an orchestra, but I have software at my disposal that can be a fair proxy.
Beyond the tools, I know how to attack the problem in the large and I know the details: I know the sonata form, how to take a motif and develop it, how to recapitulate. I know how to arrange and score. I understand counterpoint and harmony. I have 100% of the tools I need at my disposal, both tangible and academic.
And yet I find myself completely trapped by my own mind at the start. I don’t have an idea I’m comfortable with yet. I’m not sure what I want to say or in what style to say it. I find myself still under the influence of a Composition professor at Northwestern whose disdain for Classical and Romantic notions of tonality was legendary. He’d go on and on about Schoenberg and Webern and their brilliant algorithmic approaches to composition, using generating functions and the like, and I felt like I was in the wrong building. I took music classes to get away from the engineering drudgery that was the rest of my educational experience. It was miserable.
I remember as we sat there one day, all of us students critiquing each other’s tone rows as assigned, and his scoffing at the traditionally modal and melodic entry of one guy in the class, a horn major. “Why did you do that?” he demanded of the student. “Because it sounds good?” came the reply.
Herr Professor told him to get out of his classroom. We never saw that kid again.
Now, this guy was obviously a first-order tool, yet I find myself at the trailhead of this little project and I hear him mocking my motif and kicking me out of his classroom, too. I realize this is completely irrational. Maybe I’m making an excuse and/or sabotaging myself before I start. I’ve been known to do both. But I can’t shake the idea that it’s not good enough before I even launch. What the fuck is that? Where’s 20-year-old me when I need him, the kid who knew everything and was sure of the outcome even when he was wrong? At least he started stuff, and mostly finished. If it sucked, he dragged it into the trash can.
Maybe that’s the problem, the knowledge that this is going to take a long time, and to sit back at the end and to be less than thrilled about it would really suck. I dunno.
Anyway. I have half a mind to document this as I go, if I go. This may be the last you ever hear of it, of course. I have a lot of unfinished projects.
