I just noticed this on Blogger's list of notable blogs. It's written by a "homeless guy", who seems (I've read about a dozen entries so far) to be sensible, interesting, and very articulate. I guess he's been getting a lot of press recently, and no wonder. My brother William chose to be homeless for 15 years, even though he always had high-paying jobs, and I always want to hear more stories about it. It's such an admirable thing, to be able to survive without luxury and keep your presence of mind during long periods of great discomfort and general disrespect. This guy, obviously, has a different sort of life; he's got no job and very little money. But he thinks, and he writes. Definitely worthy of being listened to.
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(3)
01:30:22 AM,Saturday 12 October 2002
Naxos, Naxos Man! I want to be a Naxos Man!
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11:54:06 PM,Friday 11 October 2002
Hey, I almost forgot -- Happy National Coming Out Day, everybody!
Repeat after me:
I'm an Urning!
I'm a Sodomite!
I'm a Polymorphous Pervert!
I'm a Lewd Vagrant!
I'm a Cultivated Pederast!
I'm a Congenital Invert!
I'm a Degenerate!
I'm a Mannish Deviant!
Whoopie!
(Thanks to gayhistory.com for the words)
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(18)
03:57:30 PM,Friday 11 October 2002
Holy homunculi. I've been here for hours.
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03:39:47 PM,Friday 11 October 2002
Today's popular music is basically folk music. It's built off of simple, traditional harmonic structures, and you can dance to it. You occasionally get a great virtuosos performing it, but most of it requires only modest talents to write and perform effectively. It's usually about the same few themes: love, sorrow, joy, and silliness. Sometimes it produces brilliant and universally effective songs that are destined to be remembered and sung forever, but a lot of it is just pleasant and fun and familiar. It tends to be segregated by style instead of by region the way folk music was, there's a lot more money in it than there used to be, and recording allows it to last longer and be heard more widely than village bands ever could, but I think it's still basically the same thing.
Classical music is different because it's more complex and because you have to have a lot of specialized technical knowledge to write it and perform it. It began with religious music but fairly early on it combined with secular folk music -- the stuff you can dance to -- and for several hundred years, it was more popular (in the sense of being heard and enjoyed by all classes of people... welll, all urban classes, I suppose. Popular in the way Shakespeare was popular.) than folk music mostly because it was funded by wealthy patrons, because it was a tradition shared across Europe and its colonies, and because it was really, objectively, good.
Then, for some reason, probably because it started getting corrupted by all sorts of highblown ideology, it started dying. It was diluted by operetta and music hall and parlor music on one side and twisted into horrifying discordant shapes on the other. Finally, no one could listen to it and most people stopped writing it. The old classical music, though it's dead, is only still performed and listened to over and over because it's good.
Jazz seemed as if it was going to be a new classical music, but it died prematurely when it stopped being pop music sometime in the 40's. Whether that was because it started becoming too obscure and discordant the way classical music had, or because the drippy bouncy power of swing was too much for it... I don't know. But we desperately need a new classical music. It's got to have the same satisfying eternal harmonies that pop music uses only a small fraction of, and it's got to be as complex and rich as it used to be. I don't know what it should sound like or where it's going to come out of, but we're dying for it. It won't erase pop music -- folk music kept going strong all the way through, and classical music never stopped stealing from it, because it's vital and democratic in a way that classical music never can be. But we need to have both the simple fun music everyone can play and write and sing along to and the sublime impossible music that you can only listen to and be overwhelmed by.
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(8)
10:16:09 AM,Friday 11 October 2002
Fifteen hours later...
Good morning!
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08:25:34 AM,Friday 11 October 2002
Really good Early Music and really bad Progressive Rock -- all from the same 70's British cult band! Well, bligh me.
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07:38:19 AM,Thursday 10 October 2002
An awesome (and very long) review of a dictionary on American English usage by some famous novelist guy who I've heard of but never read. But it's great. Seriously.
From the Johnnylist.
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(4)
04:48:35 AM,Thursday 10 October 2002
Take:
One obscure Haydn opera buffa.
One famous Rossini opera seria.
Rip to mp3 format and combine in playlist.
Remove recitatives.
Randomize.
Turn on Visualization Studio.
Turn off room lights.
Dream.
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(1)
01:07:49 AM,Thursday 10 October 2002
God, I love typing in random domain names.
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(9)
12:04:47 AM,Thursday 10 October 2002
I just got a double-yolked egg! I don't think I've ever gotten one of those before.
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(3)
11:14:21 PM,Wednesday 9 October 2002
Uncle Joe's family FunLand! (from Comrade Martin, upstanding proletariat youth of the very first order.)
I felt the need to link to it here because of that letter I got from the salt mines when I was eight. I apologize to the blogmass for its extreme redundancy.
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10:03:39 PM,Wednesday 9 October 2002
So I'm doing NaNoWriMo, along with all the cool kids on the blogmass. I'm trying to stay true to the spirit of the thing and not think about plots or characters or anything else beforehand, and I've managed not to come up with anything specific, but the idea of genre is weighing on my mind. I really like genre books -- always have. Science fiction most of all, but also horror, mystery, fantasy (though I'm more particular about my trashy fantasies; their particular flaws have a way of bugging me more than the other ones do), utter silliness, filthy porn... but then I got a dose of Real Books for four years and started seeing how lovely they could be. So what's the best sort of total tripe to hammer out in a month? Should I aim at an intimate contemporary psychological novel? Or a balls-out apocalyptic potboiler? Or a tricky mystery? Or a snide-ass satire? Or a flowery period melodrama? The thing is, I'm kinda scared at the thought of having to think up jokes at short notice, so I'm wary of anything that demands too much humor. I just wonder whether you have to know the formula to write any passable genre fiction, or, on the other hand, whether non-genre "serious" novels are the dullest of the godawful dull when they're bad, while genre novels can be perfectly satisfying even when they're dreadful through and through.
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(16)
08:50:48 PM,Wednesday 9 October 2002
Fuck. I went to a place where they give you a free piece of pizza for every sock puppet you make. I put my backpack down. I made a sock puppet. I got a piece of pizza. I picked my backpack up. Someone had stepped on my cornetto and broken off two pieces from the top. Fuck.
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(6)
08:18:22 PM,Wednesday 9 October 2002
Bah! on tenors singing Idamante. And faugh! And pah!
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(6)
08:42:29 PM,Tuesday 8 October 2002
Woooo!!! I'm getting a cornetto of my very own! For cheap! From the chick who played trumpet and arranged the brass on Mary Prankster's new album! {unspeakable delirium of joy}
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(7)
07:14:07 PM,Tuesday 8 October 2002
Things to do in my free time, now that I don't have to do homework or study for tests anymore:
Keep my room clean
Construct furniture out of boxes, duct tape, and pretty green cloth
Learn virtuoso cornetto music
Learn Vivaldi flautino concerti
Rip juicy opera CDs from the library
Go to seedy bars and tea dances
Write a novel
Read fairy tales, great works of literature, and trash
Memorize poetry
Learn how to cook
Write a webcomic
Write lyrics for all the songs I wrote in the Rock Star Game
Finish writing the Looking-Glass Songs
Record multi-track music on computer
Burn CDs for mother, nephew, and random friends
Write long overdue thank you cards
Go swimming
Play video games
Lift weights
Explore the city
Visit Annapolis for Storytellers
Be on AIM more
Meet actual groovy people in real life
Watch movies
Perfect my drag act
Email my mother
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(6)
11:33:49 PM,Monday 7 October 2002
