The Jungle Woman (song concept) part 1
[a semi-automatic-writing excerpt]…
The Capture of the Jungle Woman (from the point of view the jungle woman).
[…] who are you? what do you want? why are you here? where are you taking me? i didn’t consent. what right have you? i will resist. I will leave you. the moment you turn your back, I’m gone. i’ll never be a possession. you people, your society, all trying to possess each other. i live in a world that is wild and difficult. i live with beasts. i live alone and am not afraid. Not until this day. I’m afraid of you and your ’safe’ world of lies and control. you want to control me, not save me. disguise it however you like — as ’security’, as ‘help’, as ‘education’ — but leave me out. leave me. leave me. i’m not yours — not yours to save, not yours to help, not yours to ‘educate.’
i’ll give you an education, soon enough.
you are backwards people, i can tell. i don’t know your language, but i know when you’re telling lies, the look of deceit in your eyes, the clues you pretend not to see. you revel in being deceived. almost as much as you do in deceiving. i am not one of you. i am not confused. you will get no mixed messages from me. i will make my intentions clear, as i do now, as i cry out in protest, as i pull and fight. you have no right, no right, no right. you’ll be searching again by the fall of night.
what is this movement without feet? what is this, this unnatural beast? a lazy life. i feel nautious. but you don’t care. you only wish to possess. i’ll go back to my home, which is the wild, the earth and the sky. and one day i’ll return to my true home and so will you. we’ll meet again and maybe then, you’ll finally understand.
now is my chance. you’re dumber than i thought. and you project your naivity onto me — a wild animal and a free being! i don’t play by your rules. i never learned them. though i discerned them in under a day. and this is the way that you don’t see. the way is to discern but not to learn. to know but not to obey. i speak to all of you, not only the slaves. i speak to the slaves of the game itself.
now who lets out cries and yells? the ones who ignored mine from the start. i will always be free. don’t you see? it’s too late. you didn’t catch my mind in time, and now you never will. i return to the jungle and now I’m the wiser. thank you for this lesson in humanity, so called. thank you. and may you one day be free.
What Did Rhymes Ever Do?
Is it just me or has it become ‘cool’ these days for songwriters to go out of their way not to rhyme? I’ve never been terribly pro-rhyme, necessarily, but obviously there are both good and bad examples of very rhymy songs and very non-rhymy songs. I’m for a certain looseness and naturalness when it comes to these things.
But for those in the “It’s Way Cool Not To Rhyme”‘ camp, or anyone considering joining, just hold on a second. Just cool out! I bet you never thought of it this way before:
[the Tim said this in a recent email and I totally agree!]
“…That’s one of the things I took away from Kimya [Dawson]: periodic rhymes help push stories forward, create spaces and provide navigational anchors on the part of the listener who is being exposed to this massive stream of words.”
Three very important things mentioned in that one sentence that rhymes do. Think about it. If you’re averse to rhyming in your songs, maybe you’ve just been doing it badly?… Songwriting is a subtle art, after all. Don’t give up and don’t blame the rhymes.
Okay, I think we all know some Bruce Lee is in order:
” When one has reached maturity in the art, one will have a formless form. It is like ice dissolving in water. When one has no form, one can be all forms; when one has no style, he can fit in with any style.”
“In primary freedom, one utilizes all ways and is bound by none.”
Keeping Your Spark Lit
A wee niblet of good advice from Mr. Handy:
Little reminder about how to keep your spark lit without feeling overwhelmed, even though I’ve pontificated on this at greater length in my big ol’ SERIES: Forget that you have “work to do”. Just turn on the freaking software that you use, load something in, and listen to it. That’s your only requirement. It’s as easy as sitting around listening to iTunes, only instead of clicking on the iTunes icon, you click on the Tracktion icon. Or the Audacity icon. Or Logic, or Audition, or Pro Tools, or whatever you use. Don’t worry about getting work done; just go in like you’re there to listen. Be curious about it. The initiative to start monkeying with it will come on its own, and even if it doesn’t come immediately, that’s fine. You’re visiting that realm — that’s the most important thing!
Guida’s Guide to Tapping the Creative Unconscious
Recently a commenter named Guida was kind enough to share his creative writing process with me, here. Because it’s really cool and I’m going to try it right away, and because not everyone reads all the comments but might find it useful, I’m re-posting what he she wrote for the benefit of one and all.
So here it is! Give it up for Guida…
I’m sending you a method I used while writing a screenplay which had a deadline. It was really helpful in generating and gathering material.
The method itself consists of an attempt to communicate with your unconscious mind through free writing. Everyday you go to sleep. You sleep and you might have a weird dream, which you might recall, and you have precious minutes of partnership with your unconscious before your everyday-vigil state starts to take over. It is THOSE minutes we aim at. :)
[Note: for this process to work, you should write on only one side of the paper].
1. Write as soon as you wake up.
* You’re going on a date with yourself, so plan a day in the near future when you wake up one hour before your ‘usual’ hour.
* This means that if you want coffee, mini-snack, cigarettes while writing, prepare all you can the night before, for these minutes are precious.
* As soon as the alarm rings: you just write nonstop.
initially, one might have the tendency to complain about feeling tired, or describe the dream you were having, or even things you find silly. Don’t mind them; keep on writing; soon you will be getting specific thoughts, memories or fragments of a story, something just begging to be described. Write it all.
* After an hour has passed, immediately stop writing, and don’t read what you’ve written yet, no matter how tempting.
* You repeat this process 5, 6 times during 2 weeks, always identifying your papers by date.2. Writing during the day:
This phase is less demanding, for you can choose to write wherever you are. The only rule is the pre-established date with yourself (day and hour determined beforehand). This also means you don’t judge yourself yet, so take advantage of your 1-hour dates with creativity; abolish censorship just for the meantime (you’re not supposed to censor what you have’t read, right?)
3. Read your texts for the first time and go through the motions of the process.
A) Enjoy the ride of the first reading (finally allowed to see your “work”). When reading for the 2nd time, try to name your papers with what seems more semantically coherent (this is your stuff, so you can name it as you understand it).
B) The process: take all your papers and spread them on the floor, and in a way so you can clearly see their names/themes, and if ever 2 or 3 subjects come up on the same page, take your scissors and separate them.
* Don´t throw any papers away,even if they seem crap or useless (they might give you hints later, for better things, in ways you couldn’t suspect at the time).
* There might be a paper connected to several themes; don’t worry if you don’t know what to do with it yet (give everything the benefit of the doubt). You might find personnal themes mixed with what seems less recognizable from your individuality — it’s okay.
* You now can start to find patterns and similarities between papers. Some might be enticing or mysterious, others less…
* Now you have fun doing permutations with your papers, exploring the potential each time you switch the order. (I find this part hillarious!)
* After this, you take the papers and new ideas onto the next stage (dismiss what you want, but keep them for a rainy day).4. Go back to free writing.
* Set specific hours to write beforehand (like steps 1 & 2).
* You might want to further develop some of the themes discovered, but keep a “door” open for new unconscious material.
* You might have several different themes and feel divided, but remember all material gathered until now can be the basis for different songs.The good thing about this is you can repeat it if you feel the material is not sufficient … I’m not imposing the method on you, I just know by experience (and I’m not in the music business) how castrating being a perfectionist can be. All the best to you, to yours and to your temperamental vampires…
Less Delirious But Random As Ever
Dang. I guess it’s the flu, after all. I refused to jump on the flu-shot bandwagon last month or whenever it was, fully confident in my super-awesome immune system, which hasn’t let me down in almost three years! Maybe it was just time for a good rest and detoxification. Prob’ly. I don’t regret my decision and it will be the same next year.
It is nice in situations like this to have the sweetest boss in the land. It’s the busiest week of the month, when the newspaper is about to be printed and everything’s crazy and she needs all the help she can get, and she insists I stay home - for the whole week if need be. She even asked if I need anything. She would have made a house call if I’d said yes. How bizarro is that!? I need to give her a present.
Speaking of presents, for the next week, until I fly to Michigan with my husband for Christmas, I’m going to try and post a present here every day. Hooray!
Album news: As you might have guessed from my absence around here, I’ve been quite a busy camper, making songs n such. New song seeds just keep coming (close to 60 recorded now), and I’ve completed (not recorded, but written) two song-songs I’m happy enough with to call finished. A few more are getting very close. I’m thinking this will be an EP, so I only need about 7 good songs and then I’ll let her go. It will probably be in the Spring. The recording phase is where the real fun (and time intensiveness) will begin for me, I thinks. Playing with layers is something I can definitely see myself getting carried away with. A fun way to be starting out the new year!
Some rather unlikely collaborations are in the works as well, like a hip hop cover of “Lil Red Riding Hood” with my ‘new black friend’*, Pharoah Snefru from NY. But I’ll let these things speak for themselves when they happen, because who really knows they will until they do.
Win Wenger of Project Renaissance asked me to write an article for his site about my use of his ‘Improvitape’ method, an approach I’ve had a lot of success with. I’ll post that article here too (probably in January).
Some cool news which has had my mind bouncing all over the place lately is the infamous Tim Boucher’s recent announcement that he has released all of his work (at least his entire blog contents, past, present and future) into the public domain. Pretty awesome. He encourages derivative works, and it’s a great (as in vast and as in awesome) body of work to draw from, so go look at it, you creative bastards.
Speaking of cool news and awesome people, here’s the coolest news of all for me. My little brother just celebrated his first “Clean Day” at AA (that means clean for a whole year). I wish I could share the entire account my dad and step-mom sent me of the event because it blew my mind and had me in tears, but I want to respect his privacy and the whole ‘annonymous’ part of Alcoholics Annonymous. I think I can get away with this little bit, though: “We listened to person after person get up and tell how much [your brother] has had an affect on their life over this past year… people from late teens, 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and even an elderly woman in a walker! Your brother has been an inspiration to so many, he is loved by so many, and he is making a huge impact in other peoples lives.” That’s an amazing thing to say about anyone, but if you knew my brother as a kid, you’d know why I was in tears reading it about him. He’s gone from someone I, at times, feared and despised (when we were kids) to possibly the person I admire more than anyone else I know (no offense to everyone else I know). I only wish I could have been there to celebrate with him. Needless to say but I’ll say it anyway — anyone who claims that “people never change” or “once a ___, always a ___.” — They is wrong.
And now I forget what else I was going to talk about… oh well.
Present time! First present:
I found this little jackpot the other day. It’s full of awesome MP3s! …like the entire 5 volumes of Sufjan Stevens’ “Songs for Christmas”, the soundtrack to “The Fountain”, Elevator’s “Parts 1-3″… and tons more.
See you tomorrow, kiddies.