February 26, 2007
I need to get out more...
Last evening, I embarked on a trip one neighborhood over with LK to Sun Set Park for a little Oscar party. It was a tough year for my pickings, seeing very few of the movies this year. For the first time in I don't remember how long, I bombed for both the Sound Editing and Sound Mixing award, which I usually prided myself in choosing--though I had only seen one of the movies.
Fortunately, most of the films are still showing on the big screen here in the City. departed is definitely on my list. It's been on my list since it came out last fall. But I still haven't gotten to it. Hopefully on Wednesday night.
Part of me could argue that I haven't seen too many films as I've been falling into more traditional forms of entertainment; ie, the stage over the screen. However, that would be a lie. I did, though, jump back into the world of sound designing this past month, after a friend needed help with an Off Off Off Off Broadway play called Coming or Going. It was the first play by a new company in town called Pretty Little Heads. It turned out to be an excellent play, LK continually saying, "Wow, this is actually pretty good."
For those in the city, it shows through the rest of this week at the Manhattan source Theatre in the Village. Tickets are only $18, which LK said was much better than the $45 she spent at TKTS for the musical Company last week, which wasn't nearly as good, according to LK.
Now that my stage fame has quietly fallen back beneath the tides, I'm off to finish writing more query letters to agents, hoping to get twenty out this week.
Fortunately, most of the films are still showing on the big screen here in the City. departed is definitely on my list. It's been on my list since it came out last fall. But I still haven't gotten to it. Hopefully on Wednesday night.
Part of me could argue that I haven't seen too many films as I've been falling into more traditional forms of entertainment; ie, the stage over the screen. However, that would be a lie. I did, though, jump back into the world of sound designing this past month, after a friend needed help with an Off Off Off Off Broadway play called Coming or Going. It was the first play by a new company in town called Pretty Little Heads. It turned out to be an excellent play, LK continually saying, "Wow, this is actually pretty good."
For those in the city, it shows through the rest of this week at the Manhattan source Theatre in the Village. Tickets are only $18, which LK said was much better than the $45 she spent at TKTS for the musical Company last week, which wasn't nearly as good, according to LK.
Now that my stage fame has quietly fallen back beneath the tides, I'm off to finish writing more query letters to agents, hoping to get twenty out this week.
February 22, 2007
The Longest Weekend
Taken from Anthony's Web Site.
In the summer of 1994, while still getting comfortable with my first apartment outside of the dorms at Berry College, my roommate and I welcomed a friend of a friend who was moving to Rome, Georgia. He had confided to his friend that he had received a vision where God told him to moveto Rome. He needed a place to crash for a couple of days, and who were we to quell his vision. He did, after-all, come with a pretty high reference. Though we wondered if maybe he had accidentally received one of St. Peter’s dreams by mistake. Those kind of things often happen, you know; like when a cashier at an Eat ‘n Park in Greensburg, PA got a dream crossed with St. Francis of Assisi and was picked up naked at the children’s zoo on Route 30, trying to persuade the water buffalo and a few llamas to give up their worldly possessions.
My roommate and I never met the guy,, but thought we were quite welcoming and generous, trying to imagine what it would be like to move somewhere and not know anybody in town, have no money, and then have to put up with the fact that my roommate saw no problem with constantly walking around with no clothes on his body. I, fortunately, was still totally blind at the time. Our guest, on the other hand, landed into the perfect situation.
Nevertheless, we charged him nothing for the board, or the free peep show, since it was only for a couple of days. He had gotten a job washing dishes at Po Folks (may they rest in peace), and we were told that he wanted to get set up in his own place pretty quick. That was fine with us, as the smell from the Po Folks dish tub hung in our kitchen like marsh of dying onions.
Five weeks later, my roommate leaned over to me and said, "You know, I don't think he's going to leave."
He had, after-all, been living on our sofa for five weeks, hanging his dirty Po Folks uniform on my newly inherited tower speakers (sacred gems to a college student just out of the dorms), and we had already started to get his mail delivered to our place, most interesting were the evangelic lecture series he got from a friend on how to combat catholics.
"What, I thought as I mistook his taped sermon for Led zeppelin IV.
I couldn't help but think of our visitor everytime a friend of a friend would ask to stay over for a couple of nights that eventually became the longest weekend ever. we've all experienced it, even with close friends or family, that point when you just know its time to say so long, farewell, etc...
One extra day can be excitingg, the idea of unplanned adventures, thanks to airline cancelations or other mishaps. two days go by, and you tell them to just make his or her self at home, and you go about as if business is usual. After three days, and you begin to notice the little things that reminded you why you decided to find another roomate after that first year of college. You know, that "I think we should just explore all our options..." Anything after four days, you begin to walk around reciting biblical verses from the Old Testament--fire and brimstone kind of stuff--which clearly has the word "test" right in front of you.
That's how I've felt these past weeks whenever I think of the looming presidential election, which at present is more than twenty months away. For some strange reason, I feel like I'm going to be well beyond day four when the elections actually get here. Already, debates are being planned, and dirty laundry is being thrown around like soiled Po Folks uniforms. And what makes it so difficult is that your guests just walked in the front door. How much are we going to love them after nineteen more months? That's twice as long as the castaways from Mexico were lost at sea last year. And reading their story in this weeks New Yorker, I felt like I was thrown into their eternity at sea. And I'm a diehard Democrat who finds great pleasure in watching C-SPAN on a rainy afternoon, a political junkie who doesn't ask much of his guests, except not to talk during presidential debates. But by the time they're here, I won't be able to stop screaming..."Oh, the pain...Oh, the pain..."
In the summer of 1994, while still getting comfortable with my first apartment outside of the dorms at Berry College, my roommate and I welcomed a friend of a friend who was moving to Rome, Georgia. He had confided to his friend that he had received a vision where God told him to moveto Rome. He needed a place to crash for a couple of days, and who were we to quell his vision. He did, after-all, come with a pretty high reference. Though we wondered if maybe he had accidentally received one of St. Peter’s dreams by mistake. Those kind of things often happen, you know; like when a cashier at an Eat ‘n Park in Greensburg, PA got a dream crossed with St. Francis of Assisi and was picked up naked at the children’s zoo on Route 30, trying to persuade the water buffalo and a few llamas to give up their worldly possessions.
My roommate and I never met the guy,, but thought we were quite welcoming and generous, trying to imagine what it would be like to move somewhere and not know anybody in town, have no money, and then have to put up with the fact that my roommate saw no problem with constantly walking around with no clothes on his body. I, fortunately, was still totally blind at the time. Our guest, on the other hand, landed into the perfect situation.
Nevertheless, we charged him nothing for the board, or the free peep show, since it was only for a couple of days. He had gotten a job washing dishes at Po Folks (may they rest in peace), and we were told that he wanted to get set up in his own place pretty quick. That was fine with us, as the smell from the Po Folks dish tub hung in our kitchen like marsh of dying onions.
Five weeks later, my roommate leaned over to me and said, "You know, I don't think he's going to leave."
He had, after-all, been living on our sofa for five weeks, hanging his dirty Po Folks uniform on my newly inherited tower speakers (sacred gems to a college student just out of the dorms), and we had already started to get his mail delivered to our place, most interesting were the evangelic lecture series he got from a friend on how to combat catholics.
"What, I thought as I mistook his taped sermon for Led zeppelin IV.
I couldn't help but think of our visitor everytime a friend of a friend would ask to stay over for a couple of nights that eventually became the longest weekend ever. we've all experienced it, even with close friends or family, that point when you just know its time to say so long, farewell, etc...
One extra day can be excitingg, the idea of unplanned adventures, thanks to airline cancelations or other mishaps. two days go by, and you tell them to just make his or her self at home, and you go about as if business is usual. After three days, and you begin to notice the little things that reminded you why you decided to find another roomate after that first year of college. You know, that "I think we should just explore all our options..." Anything after four days, you begin to walk around reciting biblical verses from the Old Testament--fire and brimstone kind of stuff--which clearly has the word "test" right in front of you.
That's how I've felt these past weeks whenever I think of the looming presidential election, which at present is more than twenty months away. For some strange reason, I feel like I'm going to be well beyond day four when the elections actually get here. Already, debates are being planned, and dirty laundry is being thrown around like soiled Po Folks uniforms. And what makes it so difficult is that your guests just walked in the front door. How much are we going to love them after nineteen more months? That's twice as long as the castaways from Mexico were lost at sea last year. And reading their story in this weeks New Yorker, I felt like I was thrown into their eternity at sea. And I'm a diehard Democrat who finds great pleasure in watching C-SPAN on a rainy afternoon, a political junkie who doesn't ask much of his guests, except not to talk during presidential debates. But by the time they're here, I won't be able to stop screaming..."Oh, the pain...Oh, the pain..."
we're on a carousel...
There's little place for a renaissance man in the 21st century. I see it quite a bit when I go through my daily routine of researching literary agents who might actually be inspired by my query letters and ask to see a few chapters from whatever book I'm trying to push.
The query letter is part of the process in getting published, a sort of pitch letter that you write to agents, who then represent you before the publishers. Hardly no publishers take unsolicited work from authors, the bulk of the mainstream book industry comprised of a complex network of go-betweens. The process makes sense from the publishers angle, in that there are so many people out there who dream of being a writer, most thinking that it's a glam life that lets you call up Oprah or John Stewart and just chat about the literary world of fancy dinners and high profile interviews on tv, especially after the movie rights have been sold.
The truth is that writing is like being on a carousel. It's a job that involves a lot of routine, even though what you write might have never been seen before. The agent letters are just one example; one that has been on my mind as I start the second barrage of letter writing for the book I spent most of last year writing. The first time around it was exciting, and a bit alien, like seeing the other side of the carousel that you can't see from the entrance, your body leaning as you turn, feeling your stomach slide in time with the organ. That first time around, my stomach slid each time I opened the self addressed stamped envelope that had been returned. There's no need to open the letters, though I find myself still doing it. If an agent really wants you, then they won't waste time. They'll call or e-mail if they're really interested.
The second time around, you get a hang of the ride, knowing when to lean with the turns, when to close your eyes, when to wave to your parents who watch supportingly from just beyond the gated exit. I'm actually finding this second-go-round much more pleasant than the first. Not that I think the phone will be ringing off the hook in a couple of weeks. But you learn the process through error, learning how to better craft your letters, and which agents might be looking for your particular story.
In researching all the various agents, you begin to see just how great the world of published authors actually is. This is more true for writers who have a particular nitch. It seems like most books these days are written by experts. They might have met an editor at a conference, knew a friend in the field that got published, or simply put together a solid book proposal and outlined their target audience with exact percision. And then there are those of us who see ourselves as trying to be literary, to not just inform, but to take the reader somewhere he or she has never gone. It's a world of the unknown, like riding a ride for the first time. The difficulty is that the unknown is sometimes hardest to persuade people to invest with their time and energy. The first time I went to Disney world, I was much more in favor of riding the auto cars than Space Mountain. The cars I could see, while Space Mountain hid itself inside a great unknown. Publishers and Agents can feel the same way when looking at a query letter or proposal. People who know their cats whill probably be a shoe in for buying books about cats, making an expert felinologist an easy sell to the cat community. But what community does a memoirist belong to? It's not such an easy line to define.
A good memoirist doesn't just write about her or himself. Otherwise, the audience would consist of two people, the writer and the writer's mother--both of whom expect free advanced copies of the book. The memoirist sees not just the writing process as a carousel (writing, editing, query writing, starting a new book, editing, etc.). Life, rather, is a carousel. You don't see just one part of it, a nitch, that view you have when the ride has stopped and you only have your slice off the world to gaze upon. For myself, I try to see it from a variety of view points, all view points if possible. It's like when I got my sight back eleven years ago, and how I tried to take in everything I saw like it was new, the same way that the world looks so fresh from when you're flying high above the ground.
Writing is my passion. Though I'm some what blessed to also have such a passion for music and art, politics and culture, people and the towns they call home. I could always give up writing, maybe take up music instead. I've been working on the side for a few music projects, writing sound for a documentary and a play that started last night in the Village. There's definitely fewer musicians and composers in the world than would-be writers. However, there is still something stoic about the single word, the most fundamental expression of comunication put down on a simple parchment. The page is where most creative work begins--a sketch, an idea, a few words that fit like a well tailored suit.
I feel sorry for writers who have only their nitch, who might become so frustrated with the process, who feel like they might lose their corndog and cotton candy if they go around one more time. I on the other hand love the carousel. It's such a strong metaphor for life, and especially for the author, a strange breed who never seems to get sick of going around, around, and around.
The query letter is part of the process in getting published, a sort of pitch letter that you write to agents, who then represent you before the publishers. Hardly no publishers take unsolicited work from authors, the bulk of the mainstream book industry comprised of a complex network of go-betweens. The process makes sense from the publishers angle, in that there are so many people out there who dream of being a writer, most thinking that it's a glam life that lets you call up Oprah or John Stewart and just chat about the literary world of fancy dinners and high profile interviews on tv, especially after the movie rights have been sold.
The truth is that writing is like being on a carousel. It's a job that involves a lot of routine, even though what you write might have never been seen before. The agent letters are just one example; one that has been on my mind as I start the second barrage of letter writing for the book I spent most of last year writing. The first time around it was exciting, and a bit alien, like seeing the other side of the carousel that you can't see from the entrance, your body leaning as you turn, feeling your stomach slide in time with the organ. That first time around, my stomach slid each time I opened the self addressed stamped envelope that had been returned. There's no need to open the letters, though I find myself still doing it. If an agent really wants you, then they won't waste time. They'll call or e-mail if they're really interested.
The second time around, you get a hang of the ride, knowing when to lean with the turns, when to close your eyes, when to wave to your parents who watch supportingly from just beyond the gated exit. I'm actually finding this second-go-round much more pleasant than the first. Not that I think the phone will be ringing off the hook in a couple of weeks. But you learn the process through error, learning how to better craft your letters, and which agents might be looking for your particular story.
In researching all the various agents, you begin to see just how great the world of published authors actually is. This is more true for writers who have a particular nitch. It seems like most books these days are written by experts. They might have met an editor at a conference, knew a friend in the field that got published, or simply put together a solid book proposal and outlined their target audience with exact percision. And then there are those of us who see ourselves as trying to be literary, to not just inform, but to take the reader somewhere he or she has never gone. It's a world of the unknown, like riding a ride for the first time. The difficulty is that the unknown is sometimes hardest to persuade people to invest with their time and energy. The first time I went to Disney world, I was much more in favor of riding the auto cars than Space Mountain. The cars I could see, while Space Mountain hid itself inside a great unknown. Publishers and Agents can feel the same way when looking at a query letter or proposal. People who know their cats whill probably be a shoe in for buying books about cats, making an expert felinologist an easy sell to the cat community. But what community does a memoirist belong to? It's not such an easy line to define.
A good memoirist doesn't just write about her or himself. Otherwise, the audience would consist of two people, the writer and the writer's mother--both of whom expect free advanced copies of the book. The memoirist sees not just the writing process as a carousel (writing, editing, query writing, starting a new book, editing, etc.). Life, rather, is a carousel. You don't see just one part of it, a nitch, that view you have when the ride has stopped and you only have your slice off the world to gaze upon. For myself, I try to see it from a variety of view points, all view points if possible. It's like when I got my sight back eleven years ago, and how I tried to take in everything I saw like it was new, the same way that the world looks so fresh from when you're flying high above the ground.
Writing is my passion. Though I'm some what blessed to also have such a passion for music and art, politics and culture, people and the towns they call home. I could always give up writing, maybe take up music instead. I've been working on the side for a few music projects, writing sound for a documentary and a play that started last night in the Village. There's definitely fewer musicians and composers in the world than would-be writers. However, there is still something stoic about the single word, the most fundamental expression of comunication put down on a simple parchment. The page is where most creative work begins--a sketch, an idea, a few words that fit like a well tailored suit.
I feel sorry for writers who have only their nitch, who might become so frustrated with the process, who feel like they might lose their corndog and cotton candy if they go around one more time. I on the other hand love the carousel. It's such a strong metaphor for life, and especially for the author, a strange breed who never seems to get sick of going around, around, and around.
February 15, 2007
Link to new song
Hi all,
I've yet to figure out how to get RSS feeds for subscribing on the new Off The Cybershelf, found on my web site I've been slowly working on. I just posted a song I wrote a while back but rerecorded on Garage Band yesturday for LK... So, I thought I'd put the link on this one that redirects you to my site.
Enjoy,
web.mac.com/awstephens
I've yet to figure out how to get RSS feeds for subscribing on the new Off The Cybershelf, found on my web site I've been slowly working on. I just posted a song I wrote a while back but rerecorded on Garage Band yesturday for LK... So, I thought I'd put the link on this one that redirects you to my site.
Enjoy,
web.mac.com/awstephens
February 04, 2007
Call the Police
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First off, I guess I should start with a retraction from the last post. The more I thought about it, the more I realized maybe just how powerful the Internet truly is (thanks to Strata). My main point, not to try to explain myself, was that I think Bill Gates is out of focus when trying to plot out the future of the human race. In the big picture, the Internet isn't so much a technical revoultion as a conceptual one. That, in it's own way, is something that might raise more questions or debate. But I don't want to make this blog boring with lots of theory talk. So, I'll post more on this debate on the media blog: Off the Media . Though I will say, when reflecting over it, that the Internet was a pretty amazing revolution for a 21-year-old college student (1994) who use to love to go into the library before he went totaly blind (June 11, 1989); when I logged onto the Internet for the first time to the Gutenburgh Project and listened to my computer read through the complete works of Plato and Aristotle, for the first time in six years listening to something other than the limited selection that Recordings for the blind recorded for my classess, mostly liberated by the fact that I could choose at will what I could read. Anyways, enough for now, as there's much more important news to share.
This past week I learned of a reunion that I had been looking forward to since the news of their break-up. Rumors seem to have more wieght as The Police have started running through their old set list.
When I think back to my life before I went blind, there are few images that have withstood the laps of time. One of those images was watching Stewart Copeland, Police drummer, through his head in the air as his hands moved like a ballet over the heads of his four-piece Tama drum set. In Christmas of 1987, I had asked my father for a set of drums. Instead, I got my first electric guitar. Those who know The Police, know that Andy Summers lacks in theflash appeal like Copeland. I eventually setteled for the second best, as I saw it, and I started playing the bass (no need for a Wiki link).
I've spent much effort in trying to convince one of my music students that there was a time when Sting actually could rock to a younger generation. That generation has, of course, all grown up now. But some of us would still like to think that we can still rock, so long as "New Rock" stations still play The Clash, Iggy Pop or The Police.
