Fiction Mondays: Button Classic

How is everyone doing? I’m very busy today, just a lot of things in the air. But the increasingly-misnamed Rainy September is winding down, and NaNoWriMo is chugging along (15,000-ish words. And some good ones in there!), and most importantly, graduate applications are coming together. So I’m going to go ahead and apologize for this post being short, but…well, it’s a busy day. They’re all busy days until Thanksgiving, I think. But stay tuned, because December will be appropriately holiday-themed. That's right, you can expect Musical Wednesdays about "Fairytale of New York" and Fiction Mondays about--well, that's a tough one. What are some great books that take place around the holidays?

But that doesn’t mean a reduction in posts (ignore the one I missed on Friday—I hadn’t seen any movies recently), it just means that the Short List is going to be right-sizing. Sorry, I had to use that one…my favorite corporate neologism of the day.

The article that links to seems like a joke from 30 Rock--not the article itself, just the way the CEO talks: "reduce our overall rent expense and lease-adjusted leverage and generate cash flow through sales and working capital reductions" sounds an awful lot like "Consuming Lunch and Simple Socializing" from the "Retreat to Move Forward."

"I don't know, I liked the old button."

Musical Wednesdays: Soundtrack for a Novel, Take Two

Okay, day four of NaNoWriMo and I am going strong. I am writing about pop music in the 1960s, and since starting, I've learned that pop music in that decade was, more than anything else, totally schizophrenic. You'd go from the Supremes to "Good Vibrations" to Johnny Rivers (of "Secret Agent Man" fame) in just over a month. The longest time anything spent at the top of the charts in 1966 was a four-week period where Frank and Nancy Sinatra had a duet in the number-one slot. So history gives one of my main characters, a record executive, a crisis. How do you sign the next big act if you have no idea what people are going to want in a week?

So in the spirit of the insane music of the 1960s, I'm expanding my playlist:

1. The Ronettes - Be My Baby
2. The Supremes - You Keep Me Hanging On
3. The Marvelettes - Twistin' Postman
4. The Crystals - He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)

5. 13th Floor Elevators - You're Gonna Miss Me

6. The Animals - Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

7. The Beatles - Penny Lane

8. Beach Boys - Good Vibrations

9. Otis Redding - Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay

10. Janis Joplin - Piece of My Heart

11. Nancy Sinatra - These Boots Are Made For Walking

12. Bob Dylan - Like a Rolling Stone

13. Pete Seeger - We Shall Overcome

This playlist will be expanded and revised as I go, but right now, this is the music that is acting as the soundtrack to writing right at this moment. I'm sure there are a million songs that capture the tumult and the sea changes going on in popular music and culture at the moment, so feel free to leave any suggestions!

Fiction Mondays: NaNoWriMo

If you're a regular here, you may have noticed the new picture to the right. That's right: "Participant." This month, I'm really doing it. I am going to tackle the one-month novel. I've thought about doing it before, but this month I'm not chickening out. I've written a first draft of a first novel, and I am not afraid of writing another. I have an idea that I really love--the 60s girl group I mentioned a few months ago--and a really vague idea of where it's heading. I know my two main characters and (kind of) the plot trajectory--a band that disappears into America. A desperate attempt to beat Motown in the Billboard Charts. The idealism of the Monterey Pop festival and the impending doom of the end of the decade. I can do this.

Now, I know I have enough on my plate, with work and graduate school applications, and if I was to pick a month to force myself to write 50,000 words, I would probably not pick this one. But I think I need it. Other than the short story I've been working on, my writing output has not been great the past few weeks. It's time for an emergency injection of month-long writing insanity. To quote Buster Bluth, "This might be just the shot in the arm our relationship needs!" And to further quote Buster, "Unlimited juice? This party is going to be off the hook!" I just threw that one in there because it amuses me.

So here we go. When this posts, I will have been working for one day, and will hopefully have some messy, ill-thought-out words on the page. But for now, I'm assembling a writing soundtrack. More on this Wednesday, but it contains:

1. The Ronettes - Be My Baby
2. The Supremes - You Keep Me Hanging On
3. The Marvelettes - Twistin' Postman
4. Paul McCartney & Wings - Band on the Run (yes, Wings. I know. But I like the story of a vanishing band, and it has ties to my plot.)

More on Wednesday. Happy Writing!

Friday Films: Where the Wild Things Are

After waiting for a really long time for it to come out--there was some delay because apparently the monsters were testing as too scary for little kids--I was really excited to finally see Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic book. I actually started getting really impatient a week or two before it was released, because the commercials would get me so excited that I wanted to go out and see it immediately. I'm happy to say that I was not disappointed. I absolutely loved it. It was dark, and complex, and everything seemed real, especially the danger. When Max was being chased (it happens twice in the movie, but I won't spoil any more), I actually felt my heart beating. It was a movie that was going for real emotional connection, and I loved that about it.

It was also a beautiful movie--it looks surreal because it uses a lot of natural light to convey a strange world. It looks like either the beginning or the end of the day for a lot of it, with the sun a certain kind of orange-yellow coming in through the trees. The scene changes from forest to desert to mountains without any kind of transition, exactly the way a young kid would imagine his own world. And then there were, of course, the monsters.

They looked like nothing else I've seen, some perfect combination of the monsters from the book and Henson Creature Shop productions (which they were). At first it was distracting to have one with Tony Soprano's voice, but for some reason it fit. I think because Tony Soprano was a complex monster anyway.

I don't want to go on and on, but I will say this--it isn't a kids' movie. It's dark, and has some scary parts, (little kids in the theater were terrified), and it doesn't fit into anything remotely resembling a neat package or moral. Instead, it's a movie about being a kid--about imagination and the loneliness of being young and misunderstood--and it really resonated with me because of that.

Most movies aimed at kids are pandering (honestly, the previews were terrible, and not only because The Rock is trying to become Dwayne Johnson) and rely on making jokes about pop culture, instead of actually being a movie, and the fact that Where the Wild Things Are did not do this at all was what really made it, for me, not a kids' movie. But it's a bold statement of what a kids' movie can be, and what a young audience can handle.

Musical Wednesdays: Pavement, Ten Years Later

I was driving home the other night, and Pavement's "Range Life" came on the radio. It's a great song, one of my favorites, but then the line, "Stone Temple Pilots are elegant bachelors" came on, and I thought, "Wow, this song just really dated itself." The Stone Temple Pilots broke up in 2003, which was four years after Pavement's last album. There's also a reference to a Walkman in that same song, which is of course, a device that played cassette tapes, which were...oh, you get where I'm going with this. Pavement has some reunion shows coming up, and what I'm wondering is: will they still be relevant?

I'd love them to be (although I didn't manage to get tickets to any of the four shows in Central Park), but still, I have to wonder: what generation will Malkmus, at 43 years old, be fighting? And is a leisure suit still nothing to be proud of in this early century? I don't mean to make fun of these songs--I really love "Harness Your Hopes" and "Cut Your Hair" and "Summer Babe"--but it is weird to think of a reunion after a ten-year hiatus.

But it's been done before, and it's not like the members of the band have been silent since Pavement broke up. Reissues, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, the Silver Jews--they've still been in the music business. I'm interested to hear how this reunion is, and whether they'll change any of the very-90s references in some of the song.

On the other hand, the Stone Temple Pilots apparently had a reunion tour this summer. I wonder if they're still elegant bachelors..

Fiction Mondays: I Don't Want an E-Book Reader

So last week, Barnes and Noble released the Nook, their new e-reader, to compete with Amazon's Kindle, the Que, and the Alex. I have to say that despite some good ideas (particularly the ability to "lend" an e-book to someone else's e-reader), I'm still not sold on these things. Not in the slightest. Of course, some publishing people think that these are the hope of the industry, but I'm not really clear on who wants these. Students? That would make sense, to keep all of your textbooks on one...But what about book people? You know, like constant readers (and book buyers)?

I love the feel of a book, and the design that goes into it, and the discovery of something from the shelf. But none of that matters on an e-book reader. The user experience is limited--no matter what book you're reading, it looks like a PDF. I also have some problems with the bells and whistles on these things. Do you need two screens on a dedicated e-reader? Doesn't that make it even less of a book than it already was?

Maybe I'm just becoming a cranky old man, but I'd much rather see someone do something really interesting or innovative or high-quality with print. Something like...this, maybe?

Of course, the man behind the San Francisco Panorama is also the man who said this:

"Nothing has changed! The written word—the love of it and the power of the written word—it hasn’t changed. It’s a matter of fostering it, fertilizing it, not giving up on it, and having faith. Don’t get down. If you ever have any doubt, e-mail me, and I will buck you up and prove to you that you’re wrong."

And that's the corner I'm standing in.

Musical Wednesdays: To Be a Rock, and Not to Roll

I guess this week's Monday and Wednesday posts are kind of interchangeable, as they both revolve around the story I mentioned Monday. I've gotten back into the story, and I feel like there's a lot of crisis in this disc jockey's life--the fear of being replaced by Clear Channel's machines, wondering whether a station format change will make him obsolete--and I think the real trick is going to be why being forced to play Led Zeppelin becomes the crisis that embodies all of this.

But here's the thing: to make it work, I need to find a Led Zeppelin song (or songs) that a guy whose taste tends toward the Modern Lovers and Velvet Underground would actually like. Nothing too well-known, I don't think--I mean, I'm running through songs in my head, and I might go with the ones I kind of like, "Misty Mountain Hop" and "Houses of the Holy." Maybe "Going to California"? What I'm saying is this: my knowledge of Zeppelin is pretty limited, and I would love to hear some suggestions.

Some quick Wikipedia-ing has turned up some interesting facts about Led Zeppelin, and I feel like my character in this story would love the fact that they wanted their fourth album to stand alone, without any indication that it's a Zeppelin album. This kind of belief in the strength of the music is something that the DJ character in this story would find really admirable. Maybe my answer is in there. I also decided, as I started writing this story, that the character is 32 years old, only to find out later that John Bonham was 32 when he died. Not something I'm planning on using in the story, but an interesting side-note.