Music Trap
Oct. 8th, 2003 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miko2Yesterday was payday. I had a plan for yesterday, and it went like this:
1. I should get some of those really good donuts that they sell at Ballard Market and take them to work. (This has been an unrealized plan of mine since Gene introduced me to these donunts).
2. I should stop at Texas Manna Barbeque and get sandwiches not only for me but for Jim and Nancy at work also. (This has been another unrealized plan of mine for a while... although really it's "plan b" since "plan a" would be getting up early enough to stop at Pecos Pit Barbeque down on First Avenue in the Sodo Dist.)
3. BIG PLAN: I'll leave early enough that I can drive down to the Credit Union in Magnolia first, and then come back up through Ballard and hit both places!
(It's important to note that my credit union, Cascade Federal, has about four branches total. One, in Magnolia, is fairly close to where I live although not exactly on the way to work. The second (main) branch is in Kent/Renton a block from Ikea, which means it's fairly convenient to stop by on the way to work. The third is a couple of blocks from Sky's house... I haven't used it much, but it's convenient to another place I visit. ^_^ The fourth is down in Vancouver somewhere.)
So I left early and drove to my credit union, deposited my check, paid my credit card, got cash, and I was set. And please note, the ONLY reason I went to the Magnolia credit union was so I could then execute the other two parts of my plan.
SO what did I do next? I drove straight into town, without a thought in my head. I was already down by the PI building before I remembered my plan.
Oh well, too late to turn around at that point.
So I headed on down to Southcenter and decided that I had some extra time so I might as well hit Silver Platters. Eh, it's payday... I haven't bought a new cd in almost two weeks! Ack! Mayday mayday!
So my new big plan was to buy the soundtrack to "Spinal Tap", and maybe something with the ABC song "How to be a Millionaire" on it. ^_^ I stopped at Half Price first... was also looking for Paul Simon's Graceland cd, but no luck on any of that. Next SIlver Platters... but they didn't have any Spinal Tap cds (although I just now realized I didn't look in soundtracks... but they had a spot for them in rock music and there was nothing there). I found a cd of ABC's greatest hits but it was $18. I don't need to spend that much for one song that I only kind of like. :P
(The third part of this new plan was to stop at Taco Del Mar and get a burrito before heading off to work... but I ran out of time so this plan fell through too.)
So anyway I bought another Me First and the Gimme Gimme's cd (all covers of soul songs, like Seal's "Crazy", "Nothing Compares 2 U", Lionel Ritchie's "Hello", Stevie Wonder's "Isn't She Lovely"... very weird collection of songs all transformed into punk rock).
I also picked up "The Legend of Tommy Johnson" by Chris Thomas King. This is the young blues musician who was in "O Brother Where Art Thou". I had thought that his character in the movie was meant to be a hommage to Robert Johnson, one of the most famous of Delta Bluesmen who had supposedly sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads for musical prowess, but as it turns out Tommy Johnson was an earlier (and a bit more obscure) Delta Bluesman who also told this story about himself. In fact Robert Johnson probably borrowed the story from Tommy, who (for all we know) may have got it from an earlier musician now long forgotten.
Anyway, this cd is part showcase for Chris Thomas King, and part a sort of history of the rise of the blues (he starts off with country blues and finishes with modern electric blues). It pretends to represent the career of Tommy Johnson, but this version of Tommy Johnson is the one from the movie... so the liner notes about him are completely made up and a kind of parody on every "how I discovered the blues" article ever written.
But he does a cover of an actual Tommy Johnson song... "Canned Heat Blues", which is about Johnson's alcohol addiction. This was so bad that Johnson was often seen drinking Sterno-denatured alcohol or shoe polish strained through bread, when he couldn't afford whiskey or was in a dry county. This meant that Tommy Johnson did not live a long life.
I'm kind of curious about Chris Thomas King's other work now... his normal stuff is a fusion of rap and blues. At first I kind of bristled at the suggestion (from AMG) that he treats blues as "a living African American art with a more contemporary approach and adamantly refusing to treat it as a museum piece whose "authentic" forms needed careful preservation." It always galls me, this attitude that you have to be on the cutting edge of art and doing something completely new to be legitimate. I'm in love with any number of artists who play authentic old music styles and still sound pretty vibrant and creative to me. But then again, what King is doing in fusing blues and rap is really no different than what bands like Steeleye Span, Varttina, Yat-Kha and Garmarna do in fusing ancient folk music to modern rock... fusions of that sort are always interesting to me, and often lead to things unlike anything heard before. ^_^ So I guess I see both sides of the argument.
So anyway both cds I got were pretty cool... and now I'm on another blues kick, and I think I need to get a Tommy Johnson cd. And maybe Lonnie Johnson or Bukka White or Blind Blake or Blind Willie McTell... my approach to blues so far has mostly been to find a best of or definitive cd for each artist I'm interested in. In most cases when dealing with the early Delta blues and country blues artists, you can pretty easily get a cd of ALL their known recordings, or at least the most essential ones. So for Bukka White and Tommy Johnson I can get 1 cd of each that will cover everything we know about them.
I did manage to do some writing yesterday... no full scenes, just conversations that take place later in the story that were in my head. I'm trying to resist the urge to rework the first three scenes yet again... I have a strong feeling that there's a lot of fun dialogue "filler" and not enough plot so far. But it would be better for me to finish the story before trying to rework the start of it, which I've already done at least twice now.
Watched my "Spirit of Wonder" dvd last night. This is a different story from the first Spirit of Wonder dvd... but the same characters are involved. It's a pretty funny little story... well, one long story and two short ones. ^_^
1. I should get some of those really good donuts that they sell at Ballard Market and take them to work. (This has been an unrealized plan of mine since Gene introduced me to these donunts).
2. I should stop at Texas Manna Barbeque and get sandwiches not only for me but for Jim and Nancy at work also. (This has been another unrealized plan of mine for a while... although really it's "plan b" since "plan a" would be getting up early enough to stop at Pecos Pit Barbeque down on First Avenue in the Sodo Dist.)
3. BIG PLAN: I'll leave early enough that I can drive down to the Credit Union in Magnolia first, and then come back up through Ballard and hit both places!
(It's important to note that my credit union, Cascade Federal, has about four branches total. One, in Magnolia, is fairly close to where I live although not exactly on the way to work. The second (main) branch is in Kent/Renton a block from Ikea, which means it's fairly convenient to stop by on the way to work. The third is a couple of blocks from Sky's house... I haven't used it much, but it's convenient to another place I visit. ^_^ The fourth is down in Vancouver somewhere.)
So I left early and drove to my credit union, deposited my check, paid my credit card, got cash, and I was set. And please note, the ONLY reason I went to the Magnolia credit union was so I could then execute the other two parts of my plan.
SO what did I do next? I drove straight into town, without a thought in my head. I was already down by the PI building before I remembered my plan.
Oh well, too late to turn around at that point.
So I headed on down to Southcenter and decided that I had some extra time so I might as well hit Silver Platters. Eh, it's payday... I haven't bought a new cd in almost two weeks! Ack! Mayday mayday!
So my new big plan was to buy the soundtrack to "Spinal Tap", and maybe something with the ABC song "How to be a Millionaire" on it. ^_^ I stopped at Half Price first... was also looking for Paul Simon's Graceland cd, but no luck on any of that. Next SIlver Platters... but they didn't have any Spinal Tap cds (although I just now realized I didn't look in soundtracks... but they had a spot for them in rock music and there was nothing there). I found a cd of ABC's greatest hits but it was $18. I don't need to spend that much for one song that I only kind of like. :P
(The third part of this new plan was to stop at Taco Del Mar and get a burrito before heading off to work... but I ran out of time so this plan fell through too.)
So anyway I bought another Me First and the Gimme Gimme's cd (all covers of soul songs, like Seal's "Crazy", "Nothing Compares 2 U", Lionel Ritchie's "Hello", Stevie Wonder's "Isn't She Lovely"... very weird collection of songs all transformed into punk rock).
I also picked up "The Legend of Tommy Johnson" by Chris Thomas King. This is the young blues musician who was in "O Brother Where Art Thou". I had thought that his character in the movie was meant to be a hommage to Robert Johnson, one of the most famous of Delta Bluesmen who had supposedly sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads for musical prowess, but as it turns out Tommy Johnson was an earlier (and a bit more obscure) Delta Bluesman who also told this story about himself. In fact Robert Johnson probably borrowed the story from Tommy, who (for all we know) may have got it from an earlier musician now long forgotten.
Anyway, this cd is part showcase for Chris Thomas King, and part a sort of history of the rise of the blues (he starts off with country blues and finishes with modern electric blues). It pretends to represent the career of Tommy Johnson, but this version of Tommy Johnson is the one from the movie... so the liner notes about him are completely made up and a kind of parody on every "how I discovered the blues" article ever written.
But he does a cover of an actual Tommy Johnson song... "Canned Heat Blues", which is about Johnson's alcohol addiction. This was so bad that Johnson was often seen drinking Sterno-denatured alcohol or shoe polish strained through bread, when he couldn't afford whiskey or was in a dry county. This meant that Tommy Johnson did not live a long life.
I'm kind of curious about Chris Thomas King's other work now... his normal stuff is a fusion of rap and blues. At first I kind of bristled at the suggestion (from AMG) that he treats blues as "a living African American art with a more contemporary approach and adamantly refusing to treat it as a museum piece whose "authentic" forms needed careful preservation." It always galls me, this attitude that you have to be on the cutting edge of art and doing something completely new to be legitimate. I'm in love with any number of artists who play authentic old music styles and still sound pretty vibrant and creative to me. But then again, what King is doing in fusing blues and rap is really no different than what bands like Steeleye Span, Varttina, Yat-Kha and Garmarna do in fusing ancient folk music to modern rock... fusions of that sort are always interesting to me, and often lead to things unlike anything heard before. ^_^ So I guess I see both sides of the argument.
So anyway both cds I got were pretty cool... and now I'm on another blues kick, and I think I need to get a Tommy Johnson cd. And maybe Lonnie Johnson or Bukka White or Blind Blake or Blind Willie McTell... my approach to blues so far has mostly been to find a best of or definitive cd for each artist I'm interested in. In most cases when dealing with the early Delta blues and country blues artists, you can pretty easily get a cd of ALL their known recordings, or at least the most essential ones. So for Bukka White and Tommy Johnson I can get 1 cd of each that will cover everything we know about them.
I did manage to do some writing yesterday... no full scenes, just conversations that take place later in the story that were in my head. I'm trying to resist the urge to rework the first three scenes yet again... I have a strong feeling that there's a lot of fun dialogue "filler" and not enough plot so far. But it would be better for me to finish the story before trying to rework the start of it, which I've already done at least twice now.
Watched my "Spirit of Wonder" dvd last night. This is a different story from the first Spirit of Wonder dvd... but the same characters are involved. It's a pretty funny little story... well, one long story and two short ones. ^_^
