Log of Smallship One - Passionate and Confused

Thought so!

2009-07-17T11:15:57Z

The exterior of the Centre building in The Pretender, and the Genomex HQ in Mutant X, were the same water treatment plant in Toronto. It's a nice location--looks far too good to be a water treatment plant. I guess that's Canada for you.

In other news, having been on hold to the DWP for long stretches of the past two days trying to sort out the Countess's benefit, I can't help wondering about Vivaldi concerts. When the orchestra strikes up that particular movement of the Four Seasons ("Dum-dum-dum-dum-diddle-dum, diddle-dum-dum-dum-diddle-dum...") does its use as "on hold for ever" music affect the audience reaction? Do people find themselves subconsciously feeling depressed? I think there should be a study. For one thing, it's not fair on poor old Vivaldi.

A difficult word

2009-07-17T01:34:44Z

A recent LJ exchange between me and a friend:

Friend: Fans are [this that and the other, none of it complimentary]
Me: Can we please make that "some fans"?
Friend: Of course. That goes without saying. [...]

I have no doubt that my friend believes this to be true, but I believe s/he is mistaken. It really doesn't go without saying that when someone says "fans" everyone automatically reads it as "some fans." In fact I'd go so far as to say that this word "some" tends to get left out rather more often than it should, generally speaking. My friend is not the first commenter I've found doing this, and s/he won't be the last.

It's an interesting word. I have no idea what language it comes from. I could find out if my eyes were up to deciphering the tiny print in my OED, but under an energy saving bulb when I've been awake for twenty hours, no chance. It's not French ("quelques") or German ("manche") or Latin as far as I know, so presumably some ancient variant of Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse. It sounds as though it might be kin to "sum" or "summer," but I don't see how it can be.

Anyway, it's jolly useful. It's almost never true, when dealing with people at any level above the basic biological, that all A is B, but on the other hand you can usually bet that some A is any B you care to name. Some fans are whiny attention whores, some fans are paranoid megalomaniacs, some fans are probably serial killers for all I know...and some fans are ordinary sane people who like to express their opinions, even their strongly negative ones, without being lumped in with the louder and more offensive idiots because someone left out the word "some."

Just a thought, anyway.

smallship1 @ 2009-07-15T10:35:00

2009-07-15T10:12:56Z

jblum links to Children of Earth viewers donate to Children in Need, which is one good thing that has come out of this. However you feel about it, if you haven't already, you might wish to consider donating. Or not. I merely offer the link.

I gather some fans have been personally abusing and threatening the creators. I do not condone this at all. While I believe that Children of Earth was in many ways abominable, it was my choice to watch, so I am complicit in my own distress, and the same goes for everyone else. I wish everyone involved in the making of Children of Earth well, and I hope they go on to do better things. Much better things. Please.

Watching The Pretender...

2009-07-13T07:38:59Z

I like this series a lot. Jarod's ability plays into a lot of what I have imagined for my Nyronds. I wish they had made more of it. I'm also very fond of the way Sydney, Miss Parker and Broots are gradually led to the realisation that what they are doing week after week is helping Jarod, and that this is both the right thing to do and what they want; and the contrast between the Centre's obsession with "focus" and the emotions that exclude (anger, hate, greed, ambition) and Jarod's championing of the inclusive emotions (love, hope, forgiveness).

I do see a moral ambiguity here, though, that I hadn't noticed before. Jarod's standard MO, when dealing with the people he punishes, is to put them in what seems to them like the situation they put their victims in. The deadly element is not present, but they don't know that, and Jarod fosters the assumption on their part that he is like them, has done to them as they did to their victims, and that forces them to confess.

And we know what this is, don't we? This is torture.

I suppose I ought to be grateful to George W Bush, for clarifying my thinking on this. (If at any point President Obama locates his spine and does something substantive to outlaw torture for the future, it will be thanks to Bush that it happened.) It's a shame, though, that that clarification has shadowed my enjoyment of this series, because I now realise that anyone, put into the position of one of Jarod's victims and told what it was s/he had supposedly done, would confess just to make it stop. And that this never actually happened in the show is dishonesty on the part of the writers. And that, even if that weren't true, the fact that he does not kill his victims is not enough to make what he does morally acceptable. Understandable, certainly, since it shows the effect of his upbringing by the Centre, but not just or right.

The unregenerate subhuman inside me which glories in seeing retribution meted out to the evil will continue to enjoy those scenes. But I shall never do that with a whole heart again. Le sigh.

Still more on Torchwood (bear with me; exorcism is a long and painful process)

2009-07-12T02:18:58Z

Okay, now that the tumult and the shouting has died down a bit I'm starting to see people saying how good this Torchwood was.

And that's fine. Really, if you enjoyed it and thought it was good, more power to you. Skip merrily on and ignore me for a moment, because I'm going to go into some details

Here's a storyline.

"Once upon a time there was a big rock going to crash into the earth and everybody was going to die and there was nothing anybody could do and it was all really really sad and then somebody found an even bigger rock and threw it at the big rock and the big rock went away. The End."

This is the kind of story I wrote at the age of seven. Well, actually, I think I was a bit more capable than that even then. This is the kind of story Russell T Davies writes *all the time*. I can't swear to it that he starts writing with no idea how he's going to finish (he's said as much, but then he lies all the time as well), but that's certainly how it feels when he pulls another stupid rabbit out of his stupid hat at the last minute. And while, for a dilettante like myself or a natural genius like the Countess, this is perfectly okay, for a writer who is being paid to entertain millions it is lazy and it is sloppy and it is unprofessional.

If you plan your story, then you know what your antagonist's fatal weakness is going to be from the outset and you drop clues. They don't have to be immediately understandable--one of the best feelings in the world is looking back on a story and seeing how all the pieces fit into place and show the way forward from where you are--but they have to be there. It's called playing fair with the audience and it's a mark of respect.

We knew very little about the 456. We knew that they could transmit through children, but not how or why. There was never at any point, till halfway through the last episode, any suggestion that it might be possible to send a signal the other way, let alone how or why. It would, I would think, have necessitated the 456's equipment or whatever being set up for receiving as well as transmitting, and why would they bother to do that? How would the government, or Torchwood, know that they possessed any technology that could achieve it, let alone have it all together in one place and in working order at the right time and in the right place?

Plotting: zero out of ten.

Add to this the fact that the gratuitous emotional manipulation to an insanely excessive degree was present in full force, that the final two episodes were so completely opposed to fun that at the moment they were broadcast an equal amount of fun spontaneously annihilated itself, and that he pressed the damn stupid reset button at the end despite the fact that he had just made it excruciatingly clear that no way was western civilisation coming out the other end of this whole...

...and I can't help wondering what the people who think this Torchwood was good, who talk about "compelling writing" and "coherent plotting" and "he actually pulled it off this time"...what they were actually watching.

But whatever it was, I'm glad they enjoyed it.

smallship1 @ 2009-07-10T22:02:00

2009-07-10T21:02:48Z

Well, I watched it, and the best thing I can find to say is that I shall never have to watch it again.

Looking around my little corner of the blogosphere, it gives me no pleasure at all to see lots of posts by people who, like me, were sucked into the hype one more damn time and actually thought RTD would do something good, only to have him pull the damn football away again. I hate being right about things like this. I do. But I saw it from the first season of nuWho, and nothing that's happened since has given me any reason to change my mind.

I believe that RTD is a typical conflicted fanboy. (I don't like that term, and I like him even less for giving me a reason to use it.) He hates the fact that he loves the original Doctor Who (and it ruined his life and made him ridiculous at school and stopped him being one of the cool kids and so on), so he ends up hating (at the same time) the original Doctor Who and everyone else who loves it. He will have spent his time in fandom, as so many fans do, being bloody-minded and argumentative and hacking people off and being hacked off by them, and now that he has achieved the fanboy's dream and is actually creating the stuff round which fandoms are made, he is going to use his power to hack off absolutely everybody who dares to be a fan. I thought Torchwood might be different, being his own creation, but from the evidence so far it seems not.

The alternative is that he's a bloody useless storyteller who can do good dialogue. See my flesh and bones analogy a couple of posts back. I could live with that.

Incidentally, if anyone were going to watch the whole thing again, I would suggest a drinking game, if someone hasn't already: one shot every time a single tear courses down someone's cheek. It's an overused device at the best of times, but in this atrocity it was taken to the point of utter blatant derision. ha HA, says Russell, you humans with your pathetic emotions, see how I mock you. Other than that, my advice would be "don't."

As I said in a comment elsewhere, it was refreshing to get away from it and watch something clean, and decent, and sane, like Dexter.

Goodbye, Mr Davies. Don't bother coming back.

More on Torchwood

2009-07-10T09:31:13Z

This post, by someone I do not know, has prompted further thoughts.

For those who do not click, the thesis is that Ianto's death was a dramatic illustration of the proposition that it is wrong to value one person over another. The politicians automatically exempting their own children from the cull were supposed to be equated with Jack suddenly caving and being willing to negotiate with the thingies if they spared Ianto. The writer goes on to say that this is equivalent to valuing one race over another, one class over another, one gender over another.

I think this is completely wrong, but it sheds a new light on the soup of reality that we try to cut up with the forks of our words.

Valuing one thing or one person over another is the only way we can function. We do it all the time, we compare, we assess, we judge...we love. Valuing one race or class or IQ level over another is a different thing, a lazy shortcut at best, an abdication of reason at worst...but it is a very human thing.

The politicians round their table were, up to a very specific point, doing what they had to, what you or I would ultimately do in that position. The aliens were all-powerful and unassailable. They were not going to negotiate. They were evidently both able and willing to wipe out the entire human race without hesitation or qualm if their demands were not met, and nothing could be done to stop them. In those circumstances, knowing all that, not trying to find a way to meet those demands would have been the act of a lunatic, or someone who did not care about the children or anyone else either. (And yes, in this case, Torchwood were the lunatics. They knew everything the politicians knew and they still tried to fight something they couldn't even touch, let alone threaten. That is not heroic, it's just stupid.) The way the politicians chose was horrible, but so would any other way be. Whether it was horrible in a right-wing way (selecting those who would not be missed, the less able, the blind, the deaf, the Jews, whatever) or horrible in a left-wing way (completely random selection) was the only choice available, and the choice they made was quite believable for the sort of government we have today.
Then they reached the point of "just not my kids," and they all agreed to it, and so would I have. Because we're human. Because anyone who says that, given the responsibility for doing that thing, they would not love their own children enough to try to save them, is, I believe, mistaken. That, right there, was the most human thing those characters did in that whole scene, and while I wouldn't applaud them for it, I can certainly understand it, and I am not going to put myself up as the kind of dispassionate moral paragon who would never be that weak. Is anyone?

I do not like this story. I was with it right up to last night's episode, waiting for the aliens' weakness to be revealed, waiting for some hint that Torchwood stood a chance of beating them and saving the world and being worthwhile, and none came. The final episode can be a depressing anticlimax in which the world gives in and the children vanish and Jack sets his jaw and says something like "Next time we'll be ready," or a classic RTD lepus ex galea ending in which all the kids clap their hands and a giant twinkly faery chases the monsters away. Either way, I have that taste in my mouth again and I'm quietly wishing I'd not bothered, because now I have to watch the damn thing to see which way he cops out.

But he did make me think.

More about writing

2009-07-10T08:54:43Z

There are at least two separate sides to writing, and you have to be good at both of them to make a good story.

There's the stringing together of words in a pleasing fashion, producing the gags and quips and the stirring speeches and the heartwarming lines that reveal oh so much about the hidden depths of the character you invented five minutes ago. This is the flesh and the features, the skin and hair and eyes and mouth of storytelling, and some writers do this very well.

And there's the construction of story, bolting together of incident and character, sinking massive piles of logic into the soft ground of unreality and testing them to make sure they hold firm, swinging girders of causality through the air on the crane of your imagination and snugging them firmly and precisely into the right place, and every so often stepping back a hundred miles or so to make sure your structure is neat, symmetrical and above all safe, because your readers will be stepping and climbing and swinging about on it, and not all of them will be wearing the personal antigravity belts of the willing suspension of disbelief...

...oookay, that metaphor's probably about as strained as it's going to get, but you get the idea. Stories need bones as well as flesh. Some writers are great at the bones, and can produce these gaunt, raw-boned monsters with the barest minimum of flesh on them. Other writers create pulsating globs of flesh that just lie there and pant, or (if they're slightly better) creatures that look perfectly human and even beautiful till they move and you notice their legs bend the wrong way. Or till you get to the head and discover a clown mask grinning at you because the writer couldn't be bothered to finish off the skeleton with a skull.

And now I have to end this because something else has just been brought home to me.

Torchwood

2009-07-10T00:58:42Z

And there, ladies and gentlemen, goes the ball game.

I shall be watching tomorrow, just to see (a) if the unnecessary and unpopular character death* is going to be undone and rendered pointless (smart money says not) and (b) what level of cheating RTD resorts to in order to encompass the defeat of an enemy who is completely unreachable and can materialise deadly germs inside your Y-fronts. Clue for writers: don't make your bad guys unbeatable. Stories are about the good guys winning; anything else is what's called Real Life. Also, character death is in many cases the last resort of a writer who doesn't know any other way to make it exciting, which in my opinion could be said to describe almost anyone working on nuWho or TW these past years.

I was expecting him to blow it. Still disappointing, though. It started out quite promisingly.

*I mean the death is unnecessary and unpopular, not the character (though opinions may differ on this).

Meme

2009-07-08T10:41:51Z

From la_marquise_de:

My LiveJournal Sitcom
Living With smallship1 (TBS, 10:30): smallship1 (Laura Dern) finds a coat in scendan (Emma Thompson)'s sock drawer. That weekend, tigerbright (Samuel L. Jackson) makes lots of money playing guitar on the street and makes billroper (Jennifer Connelly) jealous. That same day, braider (Tiffani-Amber Thiessen) gets lost on the way to lily_c (Dennis Rodman)'s house and spends the night in a Broadway show. Also, bardling (Kevin Bacon) and kajafoglio (Sheena Easton) collaborate on writing a romance novel. Nearby, folkmew (Tom Waits) and filkerdave (Jenna Elfman) perform slapstick at a playground. Everyone learns a valuable lesson.
What's Your LiveJournal Sitcom? (by rfreebern)

My LiveJournal Sitcom

Living With smallship1 (TBS, 10:30): smallship1 (Laura Dern) finds a coat in scendan (Emma Thompson)'s sock drawer. That weekend, tigerbright (Samuel L. Jackson) makes lots of money playing guitar on the street and makes billroper (Jennifer Connelly) jealous. That same day, braider (Tiffani-Amber Thiessen) gets lost on the way to lily_c (Dennis Rodman)'s house and spends the night in a Broadway show. Also, bardling (Kevin Bacon) and kajafoglio (Sheena Easton) collaborate on writing a romance novel. Nearby, folkmew (Tom Waits) and filkerdave (Jenna Elfman) perform slapstick at a playground. Everyone learns a valuable lesson.

What's Your LiveJournal Sitcom? (by rfreebern)

Personally, I'm not sure of the casting here, but I've been wrong before...

smallship1 @ 2009-07-08T08:04:00

2009-07-08T08:11:40Z

I promised more on Charmed, but my brain is useless. Suffice to say that we enjoyed it.

We are now doing The Pretender, which I'm enjoying more (and imagining a Big Finish Unbound audio which I will probably never write even for fun: "There are Time Lords among us. Geniuses who can travel anywhere in time and space. In 1963, an organisation known as UNIT isolated a Time Lord called the Doctor and exploited his genius for their research. Then one day, their Time Lord ran away..." In this version, Susan would have got away in the TARDIS with Ian and Barbara, the Doc would have regenerated at least once in captivity, and the world would be mostly ruled by Britain using advanced technology extracted from the Doc under torture. UNIT would have been formed a lot earlier, obviously, and been a much more hawkish outfit. Ah well.)

Today I have a Richmond Fellowship appointment, forward to which I am not looking. EDIT: the Richmond Fellowship helps people with health problems get back into work. Unfortunately for them to do this the idiot in question has to be there at the right time for the appointment. We have now rescheduled to Friday morning. Gahhh.

We are watching the Torchwood thing (I have no grudge against Torchwood, because while it has largely been rubbish, it is not trying to usurp the place of something I loved) and finding this version quite enjoyable, though I am confirmed in my suspicion that RTD has not an original thought in his head ("we're building this thing and we don't know what it is"? A For Andromeda, anybody?). He can do snatches of comedy in the midst of drama, though, and we laughed a few times.

smallship1 @ 2009-07-07T09:17:00

2009-07-07T09:10:36Z

I would like to place it on the record that I officially cannot stand the heat. Unfortunately, getting out of the kitchen doesn't help.

Many and many upon my flist are going through various brands of hell at this time, such that I could spend the entire morning going through and sending hugs and good wishes here and there across the globe. I hope they will not take it unkindly if I simply send each and all of them hugs and good wishes from here.

Thanks to all for slug suggestions, some or all of which I shall implement.

Now on with the motley, the thingummy and the whatnot, and off to get more painkillers...

smallship1 @ 2009-07-06T10:09:00

2009-07-06T09:41:44Z

When the Countess is on a roll, she doesn't like to be stopped.

So it was that, at six o' clock this morning, we finally watched the last episode of Charmed. On which more when I have finished processing.

I then went out into the garden, to which we have made further additions, and started picking slugs off the plants. I stopped counting at twenty. The slug traps don't attract them as much as the plants do, and the 100% organic granules that are supposed to stop them moving don't.

I hate slugs. The constant reappearance of more and more and more slugs, their casual assumption that our purpose in life was to find them new plants to destroy, was what mostly put me off trying to do anything in the garden last time. They are the physical embodiment of depression in a horticultural context, as if it needed one.

I will not be beaten. But I think we may have to give up on being jog-friendly and get something that actually kills the buggers. Too late for the garden lilies, the rhubarb and too many other things, though.

Whither the funny voice?

2009-07-05T21:40:12Z

I grew up with funny voices. The Goon Show, Round the Horne, The Navy Lark and their ilk shaped my juvenile imagination: Grytpype and Gruntfuttock, Bluebottle and Burwasher, and of course Julian and Sandy, Lalkaka and Banerjee, and Leading Seaman Goldstein who was Welsh and talked about his Auntie Gwenny from Abergavenny. It was my joy, as my vocal chords developed, to discover that I could do these voices too, that almost anything that Peter Sellers could do I could pretty much do (I still haven't mastered how he managed to produce a completely convincing female voice, and I expect I never will). Funny voices became my constant companions, and they're still a vital tool in my social interactions. I'd be lost without them.

But the world has changed, and the changes are for the most part vastly beneficial. Equality between races, between sexes, between gender orientations, is still a long, long way off, but at least certain brave souls have planted a signpost that points to what might be the beginning of a path that leads in what looks like the right direction, and sooner or later the world will take that path; not to sameness, not to homogeneity, but to the embrace and celebration of diversity and the wonder of the human race in all its forms. Let's hope that not too many of those forms have perished from the world, or been subsumed into the norm, in the meantime.

But it's sad for me as well. Half my beloved funny voices would now be anathematised as racially or sexually offensive. The rest will follow, because the essence of a funny voice is to excite laughter, and so sensitive have we become that we do not differentiate between the pure emotion of laughter and the poisoned sneer of derision. Lalkaka and Banerjee are not allowed to be funny because they may offend genuine Asians. Julian and Sandy made me laugh before I knew what sex was, let alone that there might be more than one way of doing it, but now we know so much that we cannot laugh at them without wondering if we are laughing for the wrong reasons.

And the trend could continue. I can see it happening. Jon Pertwee's Somerset postman voice, that he reused for Worzel Gummidge, will become inadmissible as the people of the South West of England demand the respect that is their due. The amusement that Southerners derive from the accents of Morecambe and Wise, Arkwright and Granville, Compo and Clegg, will become tinged with guilt as we realise just how we have mistreated the North. Cockneys will rise up and insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that they are not funny. The much-maligned BBC accent will make a triumphant return in England as the only accent it's safe to be comical in. If any minority is so sensitive that they cannot endure to have anything about them mocked, then the same rule in simple fairness must, and will in time, be applied to all.

Some there are who buck the trend. Sacha Baron Cohen, who I think would dearly have loved to be Peter Sellers had he not (like me) been born too late and without discernible comic ability, continues to evoke various stereotypes with more or less success. Kit and the Widow do the occasional song in a funny voice, and one can only speculate as to how much agonising they do about whether it would be advisable to include it in their act. But they are skating on thin ice. The humour of funny voices is on the way out, and nothing nearly as funny has come up to replace it.

Or perhaps I exaggerate. Maybe there is a middle ground. Maybe when we have moved an appreciable distance closer to real equality; maybe when the presence of other races and cultures and genders is so well developed and acknowledged across the globe that no rational person could imagine them being marginalised or devalued; maybe when we have grown up enough to realise, on the one hand that only a fool laughs at that which he does not understand, and on the other that being laughed at is not the end of the world; maybe then it will become morally unobjectionable to laugh at a funny voice again. Only time will tell.

smallship1 @ 2009-07-01T09:18:00

2009-07-01T08:35:01Z

Our town used to have a main post office.

Then it was closed.

And moved into the town's local supermarket.

Which has also now closed.

To reopen in October as a branch of Morrisons.

Who do not plan to have a post office in their branch.

The privatised company that runs the post office are looking at possible locations.

There is a very real possibility that they will decide not to bother.

Because providing this service is just too expensive and not profitable enough.

This epitomises everything that has gone wrong with this fucking country in the past three decades.

We need some sort of central organisation whose job is to spend the money we pay to it on the things that we need. Not to make money, not to be profitable, not to be competitive in the fucking free market. We need a fucking government. And it needs to be responsible for the post office, and the maintenance of the water supply, and the same for gas, and electricity, and the fucking railways and the fucking roads and the provision of houses for people to fucking well live in. All the rest we can work out for ourselves. I'll even let them off the telephones, since that seems to be working all right at the moment, but for the things I have listed we need a body that will provide them because it has NO FUCKING CHOICE but to provide them. Because that is what it's FOR.

I fucking want my world back. And I want it NOW.

She asked me to see her home, she lived on Bleaker Street

2009-06-30T09:31:01Z

jblum posts here on a series I haven't managed to see much of for various reasons (War Of The Worlds) but manages to say most if not all of the things that fan critics of today are supposed to say.

"The fans hated it [the second season of WotW as opposed to the first], of course..."

This is obligatory whenever a show changes in a way of which the writer approves. "The fans" here are not "people who watch the show"--they're "the fans." You know. Them. Those fat spotty immature unemployed male still-living-with-their-parents yada yada yada--none of that has to be mentioned, it's all conjured up by the simple phrase "the fans," uttered in that particular tone and context. "The fans" are "the fans who are not Us." The ones who just don't get it the way we do. It would be nice if, just once in a while, it was "some of the fans." Because it usually is, you know.

"It[ditto]'s not trying to be the kind of show that fans fall in love with, its priority is to be a show that works as drama."

Well, I certainly have seen shows that looked as if they weren't made with any notion of attracting an audience, but that isn't usually a good thing. "Fans" here, of course, refers again to "the fans," who are categorised as a tiny minority of the audience as a whole...and yet, paradoxically, it's "the fans" that get the blame when a show doesn't live up to a critic's expectations. The programme makers apparently woke up one morning and decided they were going to forget about making "something that works as drama" and churn out something calculated to appeal to less than half a per cent of the people watching. I really don't think that happens very often, no matter how vocal "the fans" are said to be.

And then we have the buzzphrase that guarantees approval by any critic. See if you can spot it in this quote:

"Still, it's hard to think of another mass-audience TV show ever that's so determinedly bleak..."

Did you get it?

It's funny, though, because I can think of scads of the buggers, even if I limit myself to our genre. From Quatermass and The Prisoner through The Invaders and Blake's Seven itself, 1990-the-series, V in at least one of its incarnations, Forever Knight, Angel, and on to The X-Files, Brimstone, and of course the new BSG...many of which jblum actually namechecks in the post, bringing a touch of what-have-the-Romans-done-for-us to the proceedings. Bleak is everywhere in modern sf and fantasy telly, and has been for the past forty years at least. You can't get away from it. I've spent weeks watching shows like this and wishing that just for once the heroes would actually win. And as for the rest of the televisual landscape, well, why do you think I like sf and fantasy if not because just occasionally it provides an alternative to the unrelenting bleakness of the world I live in?

I admire people who have what it takes to wallow in darkness, doom and defeat on a weekly basis for pleasure. It must be something admirable about them, if only because I haven't got it. I like to see some sunshine. I like to feel hopeful, even if I know it's only an illusion. And I like to see the people I'm rooting for get what they want because (in the terms of the show) they've deserved it. I don't go for bleak. And I don't think that makes me one of "the fans" (although I probably am). I think it makes me another kind of normal.

jblum is a good writer and entitled to his opinion, and I would never try to imply otherwise. I just don't like it when fans take cheap shots at (possibly hypothetical) other fans, and I don't believe that Bleaker Street is the only street in town, and I don't think that pleasing an audience is an unworthy goal for people who work in the entertainment business.

Aladdin's mum's telegraphic address

2009-06-29T08:58:03Z

Okay, I'm back six pages (correction: FOURTEEN) on my flist and it's just occurred to me that I'm not actually taking anything in here...if I've missed anything important, please let me know.

We had valydiarosada and the_magician down for the first time in far too long this weekend, and it was wonderful to see them. The joy was compromised a bit by the fact that V did not make it to the Eric Bogle gig that was her other reason for making the journey, and we only got Chris for about a day for most of which I was too wiped and/or busy being domestic to make much music. We did do some, though, and worked on two recent songs of mine inspired by the Countess's Mershane stories, which I'm trying to get her to let me put on Lulu (there, I said it! The secret is out, ha-ha!) cos they're good. And we got to show off our still a bit work-in-progressy but starting to come together garden.

(EDIT: Oh, and we also watched a recording of the nMC's last set, which was wonderful and fun and full of people who are a lot more talented than me and do more with it. Not that this is a surprise.)

There's a thing with me, which may be the depression or the CFS or something else I don't know about, but it was starting to come out in the last few Nycons we had. I love my friends and I want to see and talk to them and hug them and make music with them, but I need frequent alone times in among. This feels horribly selfish when people have driven miles to see us, and it isn't anything to do with anything but my own internal workings, and I am hoping that it will get better. Especially if we do this more often, which I hope we will.

So, a good weekend all round, and we have two more planned, gods willing.

smallship1 @ 2009-06-29T08:37:00

2009-06-29T07:43:03Z

Internet down for four days. Sorry about the enforced silence. Back now and endeavouring to float my distinctly subprime knickerbockers.

The lies we tell ourselves: two unrelated instances

2009-06-24T09:25:59Z

The Dowager Countess used to say "God (or Life, or Whatever) never puts anything on you that you can't handle," or words to that effect.

At least two people whom I know and love are currently ill as a result of having had put on them way more than they can handle, and I'm not even counting the Countess. So that comforting platitude is simply that, a meaningless noise, a tune we whistle in the dark to keep each other quiet.

Meanwhile, we have moved from Roswell through Andromeda to Charmed, and I've come up against another one. To be fair, there are practical reasons for this one; when writing a series about magic (or sufficiently advanced technology, for that matter), there is always the danger of making the magic too powerful and removing the possibility of tension. After all, if magic can solve any problem, if all your witches have to do is go shallamy-gallamy-zoop and everything's all right, what kind of drama could they ever come up against? So writers try to introduce a sort of "game balance" concept into their stories, to make magic weak in as many ways as possible, or to make it prohibitively expensive to use. I think this may be why Peter Jackson and other storytellers don't actually like magic. And mostly I'm okay with this. I mean, strict fairness of this sort is still an improvement on the staggering iniquity of real life.

But there's that one thing that nags, and it comes up in the episode where one of the sisters meets the Angel of Death (who, like most bad guys in Charmed, is British) and finds she can't save anyone from him.

"It was his time," says the British guy.

Oh gee, was it? Well, that's good to know. Maybe that guy on the operating table, maybe it's his time. Maybe the surgeon should just back away from the table and watch density--er, sorry, I mean destiny taking its course. That woman crossing the road in front of me without looking, maybe it's her time. All those people who've died in wars they didn't start and didn't want, maybe it was their time, maybe that makes the wars all right. Maybe it's my time, right now.

Death is not evil, because only things that people do can be good or evil, and death isn't actually a people. But that doesn't mean you don't fight it. It's your time when you want it to be your time. When you have actually wrung out of life all the sweetness it can possibly hold and there's nothing left but greyness and failure and pain and not even the tiniest spark of hope anywhere. When you're ready. And even then you might be wrong. There are circumstances under which that good night can be the only place to go, and I understand that...but anyone other than me making that decision for me, even after the fact, is dead wrong. Er, to coin a phrase.

So while I understand the dramatic reason for this little bit of quietism in the face of the ultimate reality, it still bugs me, and I can't help feeling that writers could find ways of keeping it dramatic without having to kill off characters and say "it was their time." Because, as with technology, if magic can't stop people dying, then what the hell good is it?

smallship1 @ 2009-06-20T18:49:00

2009-06-20T18:18:26Z

I am currently joyfully immersed in the writing of a lady whose imagination leaves me awestruck, whose seemingly effortless command of character and plot beggars description, and whose use of language brings me to happy tears more often than anyone else's.

And I happen to be married to her.

I feel immensely proud and privileged.

smallship1 @ 2009-06-19T08:18:00

2009-06-19T08:36:09Z

Followed a link to Language Log, and discovered once again that I am one of the bad guys, a "prescriptivist." Apparently insisting that there are, or should be, rules in the use of language, that following those rules means the language works better--that language is (as I've said many times) a tool, in other words, not some amorphous glob of living, breathing, ever-choobling and evisculating culture-stuff--is bad, because great writers (they say) don't follow these rules, because the rules were only imposed in the last couple of centuries by self-appointed authorities like Dryden and Doctor Johnson (who they?), and because mentioning that there are rules upsets people and how dare I.

So this is what I have just posted as a comment:

Okay. Looking around me, I see that very many people walk across the street without bothering to look both ways, or even one way. I seem to remember being taught some sort of a rule against that, because of cars being forced to stop to avoid running me over, but this is a fairly recent thing, put about during the last century by self-appointed "authorities," and clearly the rule is outmoded and invalid, because these days even quite well-off people--even people who drive cars themselves--do it. So, as long as the speed limit is low enough that cars should be able to see me in time to stop, I don't have to worry about that silly rule. If anyone honks at me, or even worse, hits me, I shall call them a prescriptivist and rest secure in the knowledge that I am in the right.

Well, no I won't, obviously, because that would be stupid. So why is it not stupid to deny the validity of the rules that make language clearer and more universally understood?

The ordinary split infinitive is not something I get overheated about. Some rules are merely guidelines, and this guideline, I think, is intended to as far as is possible under normal circumstances discourage usages like that one right there, because if you can stick a word in between the "to" and the actual verb, what's to stop you sticking an entire subordinate clause in there?

If the rule just causes you to momentarily stop and think whether you want to do it or not, that's it doing its job. (And yes, that one was deliberate.) Quoting great writers who use split infinitives is not to the purpose, not "because they're great and you aren't," but because by definition (having become great writers) they always think about the language they're using. Rules help people to do this, to think--and to learn to think--about what they want to do. I honestly don't see any reason why anyone would have a problem with that.

PSA

2009-06-19T01:46:38Z

In case anyone hasn't checked the top post, I've lowered the prices on my books, because I'd really like to sell a few more. It means I won't be making much on them, but then, I wasn't exactly making a fortune on them before, and I'd rather more people got to read them. I'm learning as I go here.

The Amazon.com price has gone down as well.

I never had a career, only work

2009-06-18T19:14:52Z

A friend posts about hir journey through various careers and how satisfying it's been to change course every now and then and do what looks interesting.

I find myself happy for hir, but saddened for me, because what looks interesting to me, what has always looked far more interesting than anything else, is what I'm doing right now: writing. I don't know if this is what's called having a vocation, but if it is it should come with a big black-edged health warning.

Some writers go through a squillion different jobs before they end up writing, and it looks good on the back blurb ("Fenton Squinge has been a plumber, security guard, brain surgeon, trapeze artist, hedgehog sexer and saggar maker's bottom knocker...") and I always wonder how, because all jobs these days require you to have umpteen years' proven experience in the same job. Me? Shop assistant and office drone. And every moment of every day I spent in those jobs I would rather have been writing (indeed, tell it not in Gath, but sometimes I was). I don't have any urge to sail to Cairo and become a camel wrangler, or join the Army and learn to mend jeeps, or go back to college to study modern architecture. I want to write. And maybe do some music. And getting paid for it would be nice if possible.

I know, I know, I've already moaned at length about this and I really don't want to repeat myself (I'm not repeating myself! I'm not repeating myself! Oh God, I'm repeating myself!) so I should cut this short.

Time for another music post

2009-06-18T13:44:47Z

Silent admiration for the boys in the Beatle groups
Who turned me on to C, F and G...
(Stackridge, "Dangerous Bacon")

I don't know what chords the boys in the Beatle groups actually played, but I'd be willing to bet that song was written by a keyboard player. I would expect a beginning guitarist to be turned on to G, C and D, or maybe A, D and E. C, F and G is the set of three chords that's easiest to find on the piano keyboard, because all their notes are on the white keys (the black keys play a bit louder than the white ones, you know).

I discovered C, F and G quite early on, and I found B flat on my own shortly thereafter. Relative minor chords followed (Am, Dm and Em: also all on the white notes) and I noodled about with those quite happily. I've mentioned in a previous post how Bach's Fantasia in G minor introduced me to the circle of fifths and contrary motion (where the right hand goes up while the left hand goes down). But this was all still fairly basic and limiting, and I found the limits quite quickly--I wasn't inventing melodies at this point, still one of my major weaknesses, and without a distinctive melody any chord sequence that's limited to tonic, subdominant and dominant sounds much like any other.

Musical jargon sidebar: tonic is the "home" chord of a song, say C, dominant is the one four notes down, G in this case, and subdominant is the one four notes up (F). The easiest way for chords to move is between these three, and as long as the song starts and finishes in the tonic, you can pretty much do what you like in between. Take "Ode to Joy." The chords for that, at their simplest, go C C G G C C G G C C G G Am Am G C, or in other words:

tonic
dominant
tonic
dominant
tonic
dominant
relative minor tonic (whoops--well, this is Beethoven we're talking about, and even he gets bored sometimes)
dominant, tonic.

Or take "Anarchy in the UK." This being a punk song, it's legally obliged to use only the three main chords.

tonic, subdominant
tonic, subdominant
tonic, subdominant
tonic, tonic
dominant
subdominant
tonic.

So, six chords, including the relative minors, and you can describe vast numbers of popular songs. But it wasn't enough for me. I wanted more. And this is where World War II comes in.

War is an abomination, and a nightmare for those who live through it, and I hate it...but among its many consequences is war movies, and from those come war movie themes, and from those came another of those cheap and cheerful long-playing records put out by Music For Pleasure in the seventies, possibly called The Greatest War Movie Themes. (This was before the fad for tacking "...Ever!!" or "...Of All Time!!!" on to every single title in the vain hope people might actually believe it. Look out for my new release, "The Best Fourth Album By Zander Nyrond...Ever!!!1!"*) And on that album were the themes to "Battle Of Britain" and "Where Eagles Dare."

They both have great tunes at either end, and in between there are chordal passages which, as I painstakingly picked out the notes by ear on our old piano, gave me some new transitions between chords. F to D major? C to E major? G to E flat? For the first time I began to see that you didn't have to stick to the main three (and my daring addition of B flat). You could go almost anywhere with chords. The second one showed me that a fugue didn't have to be played on a church organ by someone with eight hands. I still couldn't play one, but I started to think that one day I might be able to write one.

If there were no war, would I still have found these things out? Certainly. But as things are, in the real world, it was martial music that opened the door of intermediate harmony to me. And that was a very good thing.

*Not really.

smallship1 @ 2009-06-17T11:44:00

2009-06-17T18:27:36Z

If there is one person or more on your friends list who makes your world a better place just because they exist and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.

Far more than I deserve.