Writing & Music

When I write something, I've come to always rely on a consistent musical atmosphere to help focus my mind on the tone of the piece. It's shown me a strange part of my brain. First, I need to search out the perfect accompaniment. The moment I find it feels like a revelation. I come to depend on it entirely - playing it on loop throughout every writing session. 

The one I'm into now is helping me get through revising a short screenplay: Max Och's Ain't Nobody High Raga. Beautiful, meditative, and somehow playfully sad. 

Meanwhile, the screenplay I'm currently 20 pages into has been tougher. It's a comedy (outside my usual genre range) and I have yet to find the perfect album to listen to alongside it. It can't be serious, but instead energetic without becoming distracting. The main character is massively frenetic, so the music should match.... If you have any suggestions, I'm open! 

Who came before Alex DeLarge?

Here's a piece of flash fiction inspired by the idea of the Ludovico treatment: 

Ludovico Revised Procedure. Patient 1.           

Inspired by A Clockwork Orange                          

Prologue

I sit down in my chair. You look away from the window at me. I shoot and your hair and brain and everything else important astronomizes into the air, aligns on the walls.

Chapter 1

With no bars, they don’t call it prison. They wrangle me in tourniquet tubes. They hook me up and inject and the air smells like rage again. I sit back in my chair. You look away from the window. At me. I shoot and your hair and brain and everything else important screams into the air, pollacks on the walls.

Chapter 2

Still smirking. Still skillful injection. I double-back flip into my chair. You rush and try to kiss me. I shoot and your hair and brain and nothing else do a little jig. I laugh. Then they unhook me and I laugh out loud.

Chapter 3

White faced morning processions loop. I have always been in my chair. You only look out the window, your eyes soft through the glass. The trigger pops before I even move my index; hair, brain, and the same teleports to its rented spot on the wall. I try to react. I wheeze daily purpose. 

Chapter 4

Maybe I will die. This is not the intended effect, they tell me. I return to my chair. You look at me before I get to surprise you. Your face looks enormous through the barrel of a gun. You beg me to do it. I shoot you and nothing happens. I keep clicking the trigger and it sounds like a choking toddler. You leave so quietly I want to get up and listen to the touch of your socked soles on the hardwood. I cannot get up. The drugs have made my body into Osmium.

Epilogue

They untie me and shake my trigger hand. They help me up out of my chair. Pats on the back propel me out the door. 

"What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad – Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and – Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer."

... I prophesy a new work upon the waves, one built of wild madness 

:) 

The Impulse to Write

A few days ago, author James Salter passed away. I hadn't read any of his works before reading of his death - but I'm excited to start now. He had a lengthy interview with the Paris Review in which he explains the ultimate impulse to write. I think it's worth sharing: 

"To write? Because all this is going to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth."

Jurassic World (spoilers)

Brief thoughts on the recent box office behemoth...

Photo by Emissary_Filmworks/iStock / Getty Images

PROS:

- The spectacle is there in full force

- Showing us Hammond's dream realized on the biggest scale imaginable is great, and initially showing it to us through his desired audience (a regular boy) - also great. 

- Dinosaurs teaming up to take down a genetically designed monster is pretty cool, if a little contradictory (considering they are all genetically designed pseudo-dinosaurs to begin with)

CONS: 

- The story attempts to transform all the main characters in complex ways, but ends up doing a lot of telling & no showing. Do we really need two talky scenes confirming that one brother loves another brother even though he's going to college? The older one just saved the younger one's life several times - point proven already! 

- The evil military contractor subplot that becomes the main plot makes 0% sense. Velociraptors are better than drone missiles, apparently. 

- $26 trillion on a new dinosaur and: no roof built over it's cage, no safety features implanted in its body to stop it, no animal behaviorists brought in to study/implant it? How did the guy who payed our nation's debt for it not know anything about it? 

What I'm saying is - it's a gargantuan film built on the stilts of a story. All the logic is absent and any emotional rewards are lost in the jumble. The forerunner, Jurassic Park, had less than a dozen dinosaurs paired with simple, perfect foundations (chaos, nature, a few people trying to survive). Oh, and terror - there was real, exciting terror in that one too. 

Poetry for Parents

I consider myself a writer for the screen most of the time, and when I'm feeling especially powerful - straight fiction. But sometimes memories and feelings mix in such a way that you have to express them through a medium that you're not comfortable in.

The first one is a mix for my mother, the second for my father. 

At the Edge of the Dock, Looking In

Those hands are boiled tough,

brushing soot off an old steel grill.

The breakwater, blue and teeming,

is a forest of sunken pines and flaring moss.

Everything churns to softness,

muddied under the cool surface.

Working

to keep the hands

warm in the morning?

My mother glares

out to the waves

shivering the surface beneath me.

I don’t go in the lake when it’s cold,

her voice skims over the planks

to my feet,

I’m waiting

till we come back

for summer.

The Perch

The wind kills the tickle on my face, 

my tree perch creaks.

Air hisses through the naked canopy

carrying silence on its back.

My father’s face, stone-chipped and mossed;

his gun slung, a sharp slim branch across his chest. 

We wait in the swaying tree

for some burning life below to brazen by us.

I breathe slowly through shivers.

A leaf leaps down to my shoulder,

staunching glowing breath. 

Miscellany

Eventually, I'll scatter my thoughts right here.