Things is the name of a piano piece that my sixteen-year-old just wrote for his end-of-semester recital at the local junior college. He was somewhat hesitant about taking the class when we discussed it back in August, but he seems to have mostly enjoyed it, now that the semester is in the rear view mirror.
Anyway, the event was last night… so here’s Jesse at the recital. As you can probably detect (if you have a few threads of Sherlock Holmesian DNA woven into your deerstalker cap), I’m immensely proud of him.
I’m not sure what the relevance of the name is to the music, but it is undeniable that music is made up of things. Math, frequencies, emotion, sound waves, patterns, vibrations, timbre, pitch, the displacement of air, strange organizations and arrangements of wood, metal, fibre, etc that are sculpted together into various instruments. And creativity, of course.
Music is a strange one. It’s decidedly odd that we (the humans) find it collectively appealing, attractive, inspiring, haunting–all manners of responses that are common to vast multiples of people. True, I might not find certain tonal patterns and scales of other cultures appealing, but it is equally true that vast numbers of those cultures genuinely find them appealing.
Music and sunsets. The affable golden retriever is impressed by neither. Which really does beg a few questions about what exactly we are as humans. And what we are not, seeing that we aren’t golden retrievers, rhinos, gerbils, etc.
All the world’s a stage, as the bard remarked. That was in As You Like It, and the ironic thing is that the world truly is a stage, whether you like it or not, so that particular truth does not exist as you like it. Truth simply exists.
There’s no other way to argue existence. There are only two views when you peel back the onion layers, weeping copious tears over the futility of your individual power when it comes to determining truth.
“But, alack and alas!” you cry, “there must be sparkly unicorns in my world! I demand it, as I am the captain of my fate!”
Well, sorry, no. No sparkly unicorns for you. Thankfully, one saving grace is that you are free to write stories or draw pictures full of sparkly unicorns. Go for it.
Anyway the first view is that blind chance is responsible for the existence and various arrangements and rearrangements of atoms that comprise the universe. That’s a tough one, as blind chance cannot produce meaning and meaningfulness. So, best of luck finding validation if you subscribe to that view. This might be one reason why people self-medicate (one reason among many, many reasons); it’s much easier to deal with the concept of universal meaninglessness if you are sozzled to the gills.
The second view is that there was a universe maker of some kind — a prime mover. This can range from prime mover concepts like the Greco-Titans, the Hindu pantheon, etc., all the way through to the big monotheistic concepts of the Judeo-Christian God and Allah.
Interesting thing about truth is that it is binary at its core: something is either right or wrong. It cannot be both at the same time. Which means that one of those views above is correct, and all the others are incorrect.
At any rate, what I really wanted to muse about is the stage and what’s the role of AI in terms of that stage. Is AI going to be doing some of the scriptwriting? Or will AI itself start acting on the stage? Perhaps it’ll start writing some of the soundtrack?
I recently started experimenting with Gemini. It is powerful, to say the least. Somewhat unsettling. I expect, given the rate of AI evolution, much of our entertainment content will be either completely AI-generated or AI will have a significant role in it.
One of my experiments was asking it to draw a rabbit dressed in a suit. Because, why not? Also, I have an affinity for rabbits as my family’s farming company lettuce label is Bunny and features a rabbit sitting sedately on the ground. Dreaming of lettuce, no doubt.
I then asked Gemini to take the rabbit drawing and animate it. Specifically, have the rabbit walk off-screen. Off the mini world stage that it found itself on. You can see the result here for yourself.
Of course, one of our goals now will be to avoid the Wall-E scenario.
…and the fields are stripped bare of all they wear.
“October” October–U2 1981.
I’m not much of a fan of the more recent U2 albums, but I do like their first five albums, from Boy through The Joshua Tree. After that, not so much. Rattle and Hum was their sixth album, and it felt like to me that they lost their raw, earnest soul from that point on. It’s hard to say exactly what happened. Perhaps a mixture of the more poisonous effects of extreme success combined with a change of perspective about God?
Pure conjecture on my part, of course. None of us have the ability to peer into someone else’s soul and definitely diagnose what’s happening within. True, you can make some pretty safe assumptions based on an individual’s fruit. “By their fruit you shall know them,” and all that sort of thing. On the extreme end of behavior, if someone is rushing about beheading people in the name of their religion, you can probably make a fairly dependable diagnosis of the state of their soul and where they’re ultimately heading if they don’t make an abrupt u-turn.
However, most people don’t behave in ways that, from the vantage point of others, precisely and irrefutably correlate to the state of their soul.
Frankly, I’m relieved that I’m not the Judge.
I’m just an aspiring writer with very little time to write. And getting older. It feels like I’m in the October of my earthly existence. If one believes in eternity–and I do–then the earthly stretch of years is quite short, and there’s really not much of a difference between January and October, let alone December. But, while we’re here on Earth, the months feel heavy and valuable with potential. Time feels important, as if there are many things that still can be done and should be done.
Speaking of that, a few writing updates.
I’m almost done with my six-year-long book project. Actually, I might’ve started it seven years ago. I can’t exactly remember. It’s basically done and I’m avoiding publishing it by spending some of that precious time fiddling with characters and details and trying to settle on a map that shows just enough but not too much.
This one is another epic fantasy. Not as serious and as deliberate as The Hawk and His Boy trilogy, but definitely not as madcap as The Fury Clock, though there is a slight bit of cross-over with The Fury Clock in terms of some similar geographical locations, a few very quick references to several characters, and some threads of shared history.
Average Hollywood Executive
I also recently finished a job for an NBC/Universal project. A film script co-written with a small team for a pre-existing Universal property. We were paid for the project (always nice) but the powers that be ultimately decided to kill the project. I’ve been told that this is quite common in Hollywood. Studios will happily throw money around commissioning scripts and then just as happily kill those same scripts when finished.
I suppose there are many reasons for that, ranging from script quality to mental health issues on the part of studio executives, etc, but let me quite humbly say that script quality was not the issue with our particular project. No. I think the reason why they killed it was more off in the realm of the Bermuda Triangle, belief in a flat Earth, too much soy in one’s diet, and/or having had one’s brain harvested by space aliens.
Happily, I’ve been pulled back into another script project, so that’s good. What’s not good is that this means I have less time for my own projects, compounded by the fact that I’m still working a full-time job (feel free to ask me about California water policy and regulations and I will bore you to recyclable tears that must be first cleaned to drinking water quality standards before being injected into an aquifer that has any nexus with potable water supply).
I occasionally eat yogurt. I sometimes make yogurt from scratch. Quite easy, if you’ve never done it before.
Anyway, speaking of yogurt, a slightly puzzling thing happened yesterday at work. My office is in a renovated farmhouse on a ranch in the unincorporated area of our county. It’s a great old farmhouse, built in the 1890s and possesses all the original trim and architectural touches of that era.
Someone rang the front door in the morning. It was a pleasant enough lady who explained that she was working with a documentary film crew shooting just down the road on a strawberry ranch. She asked me if her crew could use our bathroom to satisfy the expected biological and digestive imperatives of life. Furthermore, she asked if they could use our office outlets to charge their various batteries.
The dual-questions caught me off-guard. Our farmhouse office is a private business that does not involve any interaction with the public (unless they’re stopping in to buy pies from our bakery in the off-season of winter).
I’m not a fast mental processor. In order to give myself time to think, I asked her what the crew was filming. She said they had come down from the San Francisco area and were filming a documentary on behalf of the Chobani yogurt company. Strawberries, you see.
I declined her request after she explained their reason of being. Cruel of me, yes? I don’t think so. Consider it tough love. There are plenty of porta-potties on that ranch for the strawberry harvesters. What’s more, the porta-potties are typically cleaned every day. Did the crew consider the porta-potties beneath them? As far as batteries, it’s simple enough to buy or rent a small generator if necessary for charging batteries. Or just bring extra batteries. Plan accordingly.
I don’t consider this kind of situation a Good Samaritan situation. Nope.
Yogurt daze. Sometimes I think most of California and half the country is in a yogurt daze.
I finally got around to reading The Way of Kings, the first book in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives series. I have a vague memory of picking it up about ten years ago, reading a few chapters and then not finishing it for some reason. Maybe got called to jury duty?
Anyway, I’m glad I opened the book again. Clear and engaging plot, fascinating (though slightly confusing) magic system, great world-building, intriguing mysteries built into the story that pulled me along, several compelling characters spread throughout the different threads, and a strong command of the English language.
All in all, that equates to a good book. As opposed to a tedious, dreary, poorly written book–of which there are many. Many, as in scads of ’em.
The other thing I appreciate about Sanderson is that he doesn’t present you with hero characters that are virtually indistinguishable from villains. Stories like that are dreary. Stories should not dip us into psychological middens due to the detestability of their heroes.
Don’t Get Me Wrong…
Yes, don’t get me wrong–I have no patience with perfect Mary Sue characters. Heroes need flaws, just as the flaw-filled life is inescapable for all of us. A hero with flaws is relatable and honest in terms of genuinely representing reality. But a so-called hero who is so overwhelmingly flawed that, after a few dozen pages, you realize, “Wait a second… this hero is actually Heinrich Himmler.” Or similar.
Sanderson doesn’t engage in that post-modern, nihilist nonsense with his heroes. Thank God for that. Otherwise, cats everywhere would be distressed. If they read books. If they are not fans of nihilism. And I don’t think cats are. Discuss further with your cat.
Kaladin, Dalinar and Shallan are the three characters that propel the threads through the overall weave of the story. All three of them are flawed, all three of them are admirable in different ways, all three of them compel empathy.
Obviously, as probably a lot of you know, Sanderson has a bit of a habit of killing off main characters (see: Mistborn). This makes me nervous, as there are still four more books in the Stormlight Archives series that I haven’t read. Four huge books. Do it if you must, but you better have a really good reason for doing so, and you had better have some other characters weaving in that command just as much empathy and respect from your reader. Which is me. And countless others.
