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Long, Random, Meaningless Lists and Stats
Aug. 12th, 2006 12:10 pmA break from transcribing Havel's Temptation into digital form to put it in the format I prefer to work in as a director. I also like typing in the text myself, as the action of retyping the play I'm about to direct somehow brings the text into myself with more clarity -- you have to actually process each word in a new way; think about it rather than just "read" it when you do this, so I do this as much as possible with my shows. Berit does spell me in the typing, though -- she likes to do as much work on the shows as she can, so . . . I guess I don't "know" those sections of the text as well as the ones I do myself.
While typing the last few days, I've been downloading lots of files in the background from various blogs I've discovered that specialize in out-of-print, obscure comps of some kinds of music I really like -- lounge/exotica; bubblegum pop singles; late-60s Japanese garage-psychedelia; Italian movie soundtracks; French ye-ye; American hit singles sung in foreign languages by the original artists; whatever, etc. If you're interested, I'll publish my revised blogroll sometime soon, and you can find the blogs there to get this stuff. This is also partially research, as Havel calls for music in the play, "a particular piece of rock music of the 'cosmic' or 'astral' type may be heard" in the pre-show, scene changes, and intermission. So I'm slightly looking for that, or inspiration for the possibility of creating the music myself (if I can do it, a better idea, as I'd like more of a "theme and variations" quality to the music than I could find anywhere else, I'm sure).
So then I've been loading the new tracks into iTunes, which now stands at 12,321 songs, 41.6 gigs. Berit and I went through all of our CDs and loaded in all the tracks we wanted in iTunes, which we defined as "anything we might possibly want to hear if it came up in a random shuffle." This wound up eliminating quite a few tracks that we may have loved, but were generally too "slow," "dissonant," or "long" to work in a random shuffle -- though those qualities could be overcome for tracks especially loved; the longer, more dissonant, or slower they are, the more love must redeem them for the library -- the longest left in now are Frank Zappa's "The Adventures of Gregory Peccary" (21:00), Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band's "Tarotplane" (19:09), The Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray" (17:31), and Bob Dylan's "Highlands" (16:31). Once they get over seven minutes, they'd better be special.
Luckily, B and I have mostly overlapping musical tastes -- an important part of our relationship, I think, that and near-identical senses of humor and devotion to theatre -- so there hasn't been a huge amount of disagreement on what belongs in the library. Still. There is occasional friction, mostly on the side of my music and Berit's tastes, as there's really nothing she likes that I don't (she's much more fond of PJ Harvey and Throwing Muses than I am, but I like them), and there's a handful of artists that I revere, and therefore have put in large amounts of their catalog, that she either likes only in small doses or can't stand at all (Elvis Costello, Richard Thompson, Captain Beefheart, The Residents, Frank Zappa). The big surprise once we loaded all our music in was at how much blues and especially folk music we had and loved -- we would of thought of ourselves as vastly more into electric guitar-based punk and garage rock, but damn do we like us our blues and folk, as it turns out.
Once the CDs were all in, we spent some time playing it all on random -- enjoying the strange transitions that come from our combined wide tastes all distilled into this one library -- Buell Kazee to Todd Rundgren to Rodd Keith to Laibach to The Kingston Trio to Stravinsky to Jacques Dutronc to The Misfits to The Hudson Brothers to R.L. Burnside and on and on . . . I just keep thinking of that moment in Twelve Monkeys when Bruce Willis, time traveler from a dystopian future to our time, listens to Link Wray's "Comanche" on a car radio and says, with great feeling, "I love the music of the twentieth century!"
So, I've seen a few people here and there in the blogs do a "Random 10 for Friday" list of songs in their library that come up. Here's my "Random 10 for Saturday Afternoon:
1. "Later That Night" - The Mothers of Invention - from Cruisin' with Ruben and the Jets
2. "The Unbreakable Chain" - Daniel Lanois - For the Love of Wynona
3. "Beach Boys" - David Thomas & 2 Pale Boys - Meadville
4. "Brighton Rock" - Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra - Ubiquity Studio Sessions 2: Moods and Grooves
5. "It Gets Me" - The Rezillos - Can't Stand the Rezillos: The (Almost) Complete Rezillos
6. "Strange Times in Casablanca" - John Cale - Seducing Down the Door: A Collection 1970-1990
7. "Oye Negre" - Esquivel - Four Corners of the World
8. "Chow Mein and Bowling" - Michael Nesmith - The Newer Stuff
9. "The Girls on the Beach" - The Beach Boys - Endless Summer
10. "Come Back When You Grow Up" - Bobby Vee - Rato's Nostalgia Collection 16
Hmmn. Well, as Isaac said about his list (the inspiration for mine), not terribly representative of my tastes, but not unrepresentative, either . . . okay, I'm self-indulgent, what comes up as the next 10?
11. "I'm Your Witchdoctor" - The Chants R&B - Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From The British Empire And Beyond
12. "Cafe Bohemian" - The Enchanters - Jungle Exotica
13. "80%" - Q'65 - Nederbeat: The B-Sides 4
14. "That's the Way It's Got to Be" - The Poets - Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From The British Empire And Beyond
15. "This Little Girl of Mine" - The Righteous Brothers - Anthology (1962-1974)
16. "Numb as a Statue" - Warren Zevon - MOJO Sampler: Piece of Cake (20 Years of Ryko)
17. "Sleep Angel" - Jerry Harrison & Casual Gods - Walk on Water
18. "Jane" - Alessandro Blonksteiner - Cannibal Apocalypse (original soundtrack)
19. "Over the Moon" - Pere Ubu - Worlds in Collision
20. "Forever" - The Beach Boys - Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of The Beach Boys
Okay, that's more like it . . . god, I love the music of the twentieth century . . .
(a show here somewhere . . ? where? what? haven't I decided that popular music is too big, too much its own thing -- I have too much love for it in and of itself -- to be dealt with as a subject for a theatre piece? what's the in . . ?)
Having all this stuff all organized in one place on iTunes is a horrible temptation for an inveterate listmaker/organizer/trainspotter like myself -- always interested in groups, sets, combinations of no use at all but to satisfy my own obsessive curiosity. For example, I was interested, once all the music was in, in seeing what songs I had the most cover versions of.
The Winner, hands down, with six versions, "The Ballad of Mac the Knife." It would be beaten by "Fever" if I had all the versions I wanted available digitally (I only have Brian Eno's, Little Willie John's, and Elvis Presley's on cassette). And I have six versions of "Satisfaction," but two of them are by Devo (regular and muzak versions) so I don't know if that counts. So five versions of "Fever," as well as "The James Bond Theme," "Begin the Beguine," "Caravan" (with a 'drum sola'), "Ebb Tide," "Harlem Nocturne," "Long Tall Sally" (why? I don't really even like that song!), "Miserlou," "Speak Low," "Surabaya Johnny" (yeah, Weill's very popular in our household), and maybe "Night and Day" (one of my very favorite songs, but one version I have, by Raymond Scott, is so far from the original I'm not sure it's even meant to be the same song). Oh, and "You Don't Love Me (Yes I Know)" -- how the hell did that happen? I'd never think of that song if you asked me, and it turns out I have five good versions of it.
Huh. Pretty standard "standards," as it turns out -- though I'm stunned to see I don't even have one version of "Stardust," another favorite song of mine. Again, how the hell did that happen?
Also of interest to me -- I have four different songs each with the titles "Imagination," "Little Girl," "I Want You," "Good Times," "Guilty," and "The River." You could structure a story from those titles in that order . . . how many combinations of those songs -- four songs each under each title -- could be made? What stories would each combination inspire? Reshuffle, replay, remake, remodel.
Why does B.B. King only have a "Key to the Highway" in his version of the same song where John Hammond has all the "Keys to the Highway?" What would a mix made up of all the songs that start with the word "Shake" or "Shakin'" sound like? Youth wants to know.
A shuffle pop play . . . scenes as pop songs in disc or MP3 player -- scenes in a life like pop songs -- a real "jukebox musical" -- Berit shuffles the scenes in the booth, calls out the scene number/song on god-mic and actors jump in to do it -- each scene needs to be able to be a beginning or an ending -- a life fragmented -- similar to 70 Scenes of Halloween but unplanned, kinda Neo-Futurist, but an honest-to-goodness play, still -- think about it . . .
Okay, save that for the future, back to Temptation now, and craftsman work, making this Havel play live for me, become mine.
While typing the last few days, I've been downloading lots of files in the background from various blogs I've discovered that specialize in out-of-print, obscure comps of some kinds of music I really like -- lounge/exotica; bubblegum pop singles; late-60s Japanese garage-psychedelia; Italian movie soundtracks; French ye-ye; American hit singles sung in foreign languages by the original artists; whatever, etc. If you're interested, I'll publish my revised blogroll sometime soon, and you can find the blogs there to get this stuff. This is also partially research, as Havel calls for music in the play, "a particular piece of rock music of the 'cosmic' or 'astral' type may be heard" in the pre-show, scene changes, and intermission. So I'm slightly looking for that, or inspiration for the possibility of creating the music myself (if I can do it, a better idea, as I'd like more of a "theme and variations" quality to the music than I could find anywhere else, I'm sure).
So then I've been loading the new tracks into iTunes, which now stands at 12,321 songs, 41.6 gigs. Berit and I went through all of our CDs and loaded in all the tracks we wanted in iTunes, which we defined as "anything we might possibly want to hear if it came up in a random shuffle." This wound up eliminating quite a few tracks that we may have loved, but were generally too "slow," "dissonant," or "long" to work in a random shuffle -- though those qualities could be overcome for tracks especially loved; the longer, more dissonant, or slower they are, the more love must redeem them for the library -- the longest left in now are Frank Zappa's "The Adventures of Gregory Peccary" (21:00), Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band's "Tarotplane" (19:09), The Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray" (17:31), and Bob Dylan's "Highlands" (16:31). Once they get over seven minutes, they'd better be special.
Luckily, B and I have mostly overlapping musical tastes -- an important part of our relationship, I think, that and near-identical senses of humor and devotion to theatre -- so there hasn't been a huge amount of disagreement on what belongs in the library. Still. There is occasional friction, mostly on the side of my music and Berit's tastes, as there's really nothing she likes that I don't (she's much more fond of PJ Harvey and Throwing Muses than I am, but I like them), and there's a handful of artists that I revere, and therefore have put in large amounts of their catalog, that she either likes only in small doses or can't stand at all (Elvis Costello, Richard Thompson, Captain Beefheart, The Residents, Frank Zappa). The big surprise once we loaded all our music in was at how much blues and especially folk music we had and loved -- we would of thought of ourselves as vastly more into electric guitar-based punk and garage rock, but damn do we like us our blues and folk, as it turns out.
Once the CDs were all in, we spent some time playing it all on random -- enjoying the strange transitions that come from our combined wide tastes all distilled into this one library -- Buell Kazee to Todd Rundgren to Rodd Keith to Laibach to The Kingston Trio to Stravinsky to Jacques Dutronc to The Misfits to The Hudson Brothers to R.L. Burnside and on and on . . . I just keep thinking of that moment in Twelve Monkeys when Bruce Willis, time traveler from a dystopian future to our time, listens to Link Wray's "Comanche" on a car radio and says, with great feeling, "I love the music of the twentieth century!"
So, I've seen a few people here and there in the blogs do a "Random 10 for Friday" list of songs in their library that come up. Here's my "Random 10 for Saturday Afternoon:
1. "Later That Night" - The Mothers of Invention - from Cruisin' with Ruben and the Jets
2. "The Unbreakable Chain" - Daniel Lanois - For the Love of Wynona
3. "Beach Boys" - David Thomas & 2 Pale Boys - Meadville
4. "Brighton Rock" - Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra - Ubiquity Studio Sessions 2: Moods and Grooves
5. "It Gets Me" - The Rezillos - Can't Stand the Rezillos: The (Almost) Complete Rezillos
6. "Strange Times in Casablanca" - John Cale - Seducing Down the Door: A Collection 1970-1990
7. "Oye Negre" - Esquivel - Four Corners of the World
8. "Chow Mein and Bowling" - Michael Nesmith - The Newer Stuff
9. "The Girls on the Beach" - The Beach Boys - Endless Summer
10. "Come Back When You Grow Up" - Bobby Vee - Rato's Nostalgia Collection 16
Hmmn. Well, as Isaac said about his list (the inspiration for mine), not terribly representative of my tastes, but not unrepresentative, either . . . okay, I'm self-indulgent, what comes up as the next 10?
11. "I'm Your Witchdoctor" - The Chants R&B - Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From The British Empire And Beyond
12. "Cafe Bohemian" - The Enchanters - Jungle Exotica
13. "80%" - Q'65 - Nederbeat: The B-Sides 4
14. "That's the Way It's Got to Be" - The Poets - Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From The British Empire And Beyond
15. "This Little Girl of Mine" - The Righteous Brothers - Anthology (1962-1974)
16. "Numb as a Statue" - Warren Zevon - MOJO Sampler: Piece of Cake (20 Years of Ryko)
17. "Sleep Angel" - Jerry Harrison & Casual Gods - Walk on Water
18. "Jane" - Alessandro Blonksteiner - Cannibal Apocalypse (original soundtrack)
19. "Over the Moon" - Pere Ubu - Worlds in Collision
20. "Forever" - The Beach Boys - Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of The Beach Boys
Okay, that's more like it . . . god, I love the music of the twentieth century . . .
(a show here somewhere . . ? where? what? haven't I decided that popular music is too big, too much its own thing -- I have too much love for it in and of itself -- to be dealt with as a subject for a theatre piece? what's the in . . ?)
Having all this stuff all organized in one place on iTunes is a horrible temptation for an inveterate listmaker/organizer/trainspotter like myself -- always interested in groups, sets, combinations of no use at all but to satisfy my own obsessive curiosity. For example, I was interested, once all the music was in, in seeing what songs I had the most cover versions of.
The Winner, hands down, with six versions, "The Ballad of Mac the Knife." It would be beaten by "Fever" if I had all the versions I wanted available digitally (I only have Brian Eno's, Little Willie John's, and Elvis Presley's on cassette). And I have six versions of "Satisfaction," but two of them are by Devo (regular and muzak versions) so I don't know if that counts. So five versions of "Fever," as well as "The James Bond Theme," "Begin the Beguine," "Caravan" (with a 'drum sola'), "Ebb Tide," "Harlem Nocturne," "Long Tall Sally" (why? I don't really even like that song!), "Miserlou," "Speak Low," "Surabaya Johnny" (yeah, Weill's very popular in our household), and maybe "Night and Day" (one of my very favorite songs, but one version I have, by Raymond Scott, is so far from the original I'm not sure it's even meant to be the same song). Oh, and "You Don't Love Me (Yes I Know)" -- how the hell did that happen? I'd never think of that song if you asked me, and it turns out I have five good versions of it.
Huh. Pretty standard "standards," as it turns out -- though I'm stunned to see I don't even have one version of "Stardust," another favorite song of mine. Again, how the hell did that happen?
Also of interest to me -- I have four different songs each with the titles "Imagination," "Little Girl," "I Want You," "Good Times," "Guilty," and "The River." You could structure a story from those titles in that order . . . how many combinations of those songs -- four songs each under each title -- could be made? What stories would each combination inspire? Reshuffle, replay, remake, remodel.
Why does B.B. King only have a "Key to the Highway" in his version of the same song where John Hammond has all the "Keys to the Highway?" What would a mix made up of all the songs that start with the word "Shake" or "Shakin'" sound like? Youth wants to know.
A shuffle pop play . . . scenes as pop songs in disc or MP3 player -- scenes in a life like pop songs -- a real "jukebox musical" -- Berit shuffles the scenes in the booth, calls out the scene number/song on god-mic and actors jump in to do it -- each scene needs to be able to be a beginning or an ending -- a life fragmented -- similar to 70 Scenes of Halloween but unplanned, kinda Neo-Futurist, but an honest-to-goodness play, still -- think about it . . .
Okay, save that for the future, back to Temptation now, and craftsman work, making this Havel play live for me, become mine.
