Hey! I hope you all had a great summer. Mine was wonderful — good times with friends and family, plus a really grounding two weeks back in Canada. I’m all recharged (“upgraded and graduated to better drugs and updated”), and I’ve got a lot of new posts coming up that I’m excited to share with you. Sherlock, Gotye, sushi, other trochaic words…It’s gonna be awesome.
But first, I want to share with you some videos that make me happy. Continue reading
Every two to four weeks, I’ll share my thoughts on that day’s iTunes Top 10. This is the first installment! Welcome.
Song titles link to the associated (usually) official music videos.
Songs marked “this one!” are songs I really liked.
#1 Whistle (Flo Rida) -
Seems cute at first, with its whistling hook, but it turns out the ‘whistling’ going on here is, um…well, hear for yourself:
“Can you blow my whistle, baby, whistle, baby? Let me know;
Girl, I’m gonna show you how to do it, and we start real slow:
You just put your lips together, and you come real close,
Can you blow my whistle, baby, whistle, baby? — Here we go”
One verse begins, “It’s like, everywhere I go, my whistle’s ready to blow”. Right. Continue reading
Being arty is terrifying. Although, inside myself, I’m proud of my creativity and happy with my thoughts, I crumble at the thought of sharing them with others. A switch flips. Pride evaporates. I think:
I’m not really that interesting. I don’t have much to add. The world will get on fine without me. Why clutter people’s lives with my ‘insights’? Great. Another mediocre blogger. Another clever kid who thinks he’s got something to say.
And so I don’t post my posts; I don’t sing my songs (“Great. Another clever softie with a guitar.”); I don’t write my writings (“Ooh, another college kid thinks he can write?”). Sometimes I don’t do much of anything (“Another kid trying to self-actualize. Thank god.”).
And you know what? That sucks.
Unfortunately, it’s not even unusual (“Another depressed young artist!”, lol! ). I spoke today with one of my best friends — a brilliant musician and a sparkling soul (a champagne of a person!), who told me of her own struggles with these same fears. More than that — two web artists I admire very much, Ze Frank and Tycho Brahe, recently posted about their own self-doubts.
How do these great creators deal with these fears? These people who are so obviously talented, with so much to offer — how do they explain them? How do they resolve them? Continue reading
Oh man.
So, you remember how I told you about the Ontario Youth Choir?
Well, I auditioned again this year, and I once again I got to send in recordings. (Yesss.) I decided I’d stick with the same formula as last time: two ‘normal’ recordings and one multitrack thrown in for fun. Here are two out of the three, both Beatles songs: a full performance of ‘For No One’, from Revolver, and the first few verses of ‘Nowhere Man’, from Rubber Soul. (I wish I could give you a full ‘Nowhere Man’, but the second half got sloppy and I didn’t have a chance to fix it before the audition was due.) I’m pretty happy with both of these. They’re not perfect, but I think they’re a decent record of what I can do right now.
Crank them up if you can – since this was a vocal audition, I mixed the instruments pretty far back, but they’re definitely there, and they add a lot!
I had a really hard time getting a vocal I was happy with on ‘For No One’. Paul McCartney’s performance on the original is breathtaking: it’s extremely restrained but very expressive — very painful, very bitter and ironic, but also very distant, grim, and almost exhausted. How does he do it? How do you sing numb?
Well, search me. I had a hell of time. Every take I recorded went too far in one direction — either too bland or too hammy. Finally, I sang one take I was pretty happy with — it was maybe a little dramatic, but not bad — and then, bam! I flubbed the last line. The punchline of the whole song. Okay. Fine. Served me right for singing from memory. So I pulled out my Beatles book and, without thinking, laid down a new vocal, just reading the lyrics off the page and focusing on getting the words right.
And…it was so much better.
Huh.
Isn’t that interesting? I performed much better when I wasn’t trying to perform.
It reminds me of how screen actors make blank faces on important close-ups, trusting that the audience will project the appropriate emotion onto them. ‘Devastated’ expressions, especially, are no expression at all. Anything more than that — anything that feels like a-sad-face — reads like farce or melodrama.
Consider that these are both 'dramatic' expressions. Bergman especially isn't doing a thing. Bogart is...'stern'?
Maybe the same thing’s true of recordings? Just sing it right, with focus and some sensitivity, and your audience will fill in the rest. The more I think about it, the truer that sounds. And it’s something all the Beatles were superb at, John and Paul especially. You can check out John’s vocal on ‘No Reply’, where he’s by turns cool, accusatory, sarcastic, angry, and pleading, but…it sounds like nothing. Effortless, grounded, and understated.
Those Beatles, eh? Pretty amazing.
Oh! So, one more thing — the kicker of this whole story. Today the conductor of this year’s OYC emails me and the other long-distance applicants to set up a Skype audition. I write back saying, I sent in recordings, do I still need to do a Skype audition? and he writes back, no, it’s cool, he shouldn’t have sent me the e-mail. And then he adds, on a new line –
“Your material is sufficient, even if a bit unorthodox.”
“Sufficient, Even If A Bit Unorthodox”. I’m going to treasure that. Put that on my headstone.
Something I will miss: high school girls telling me I looked like 'that guy in Twilight'.
I don’t know what you do when you’re sick. I think most people curl up in bed with a blanket and a cup of hot tea and watch movies or bad TV. But me? I…I make multitrack recordings of Baroque music.
I guess I’m just that sort of person. 
Here they are — two recordings, one acoustic, one electric, of the Allegro movement of Corelli’s Op.2/1, Trio Sonata in D major. They’re not perfect by any means — for one thing, the two melody parts should sound an octave higher than I played them — but they were very therapeutic. I’ll be curious which you prefer! I lean towards the electric, myself. I think the sound is nice and rich and the rhythms are tighter (I took it a bit slower). But the acoustics together sound a bit like a harpsichord, which is fun.
This is kind of a strange, taxing thing to do when you’re too sick to stand, but for some reason, it helps me get through these endless days of slow, tiresome recovery. It’s fun; it’s focusing; it’s something beautiful that I can do slumped in bed, with just my laptop and a guitar. And, for some reason, music has always helped me feel better when I’m sick. When I was younger, I’d sprawl in bed and watch The Beatles’ Help! on repeat. And when I was on tour with the Yale Glee Club, even during the worst bouts of Gleebola (in the Glee Club, everything was Glee-something, from Gleeple to Gleecest), singing, whether onstage or in rehearsal, would perk me up.
So yeah — I’ve been sick this last week, and this is what I’ve done with it. But I’m beginning to suspect that I’ve been sick in a more metaphorical sense for much of the past month. You who follow this blog and have checked up on it over the last few weeks and found, disappointed, that I hadn’t written anything since “Sherlock”, know this already: for almost a month now, I’ve been distinctly un-writing, un-creative, and that hasn’t been good for me. I remember how excited I was when I first launched this blog, and how alive I felt when it was starting to gain traction; I told my friend Kali that I finally felt there were more wonderful things in the world than I had time to do. That was a wonderful feeling. But I lost it somehow after that post on Sherlock.
It’s hard for me to know exactly how this happened. I’m not sure whether, to paraphrase a common antithesis, you stop writing because you get sick or you get sick because you stop writing.
But I think, paradoxically enough, a lot of it had to do with the success of that piece on Sherlock. Before it, I’d posted whatever crossed my mind, in a casual way, with the expectation that the only people who’d see it would be my close friends and whatever sympathetic readers happened to wander by. But when thousands of readers poured in to read that piece, and I agreed to write five more like it for Sherlockology, things changed.
“This is it!” I thought. “My chance to make it in the blogosphere! People are going to flood in from links to my site, and when they do, they’d better see something amazing. So everything has to be professional. And good. Really, really good. So…”
So I created Take Pop, found a suitably ‘professional’, if rather less personal design for it, and…didn’t write anything for a month.
Whoops.
It’s an old mistake, and one that I already knew better than. It’s what What It Is, that wonderful book by Lynda Barry, is all about: once creativity becomes about ‘making it good’, rather than just ‘making it’, creativity dies. And it did for me. I’ve been so pressured by thoughts of how to organize and structure my thoughts, whether they’re good enough or put-together enough for a ‘feature article’ or a ‘random thought’ or god knows what, that I just haven’t made anything. I created such a ‘professional’ space for myself at Take Pop that I didn’t feel comfortable just being myself the way I do back here.
And I felt so guilty about not making progress on the Sherlock articles, which slowly became a sort of dreaded homework assignment, rather than the tossed-off bit of fun that got all the attention in the first place, that I didn’t let myself write anything else until I finished those, and so nothing got written at all, etc.
Again, whoops. But! All is not lost.
I think this month has taught me how important staying creative is to my being Arden. It’s funny — I often hear artists talk about their passion as something they ‘have’ to do. Jeph Jacques, in a recent Q & A, said as much about Questionable Content:
[Q: ]Hey, Jeph! There’s something I’ve been wondering recently: a week from today I’ll have been working on my webcomic for a year. I’ve produced 125 comics and I love doing it, but it’s incredibly draining and I feel almost tapped out by continuing it. Was there ever a point in the early days of QC (before it became your job) in which the strain of doing the comic negatively affected the joy of making it? If so, how did you work through it?
[A:] Drawing comics is frequently stressful, frustrating, and exhausting. But I can’t recall any point where I seriously thought about stopping. It’s always been something I Have To Do.
I’ve never really felt that there was anything I Have To Do. There are a lot of things I like a lot, but there’s almost nothing I feel a compulsion to do. I like to write, and I like to draw, and I like to play guitar, but I can get along without doing them. In fact, I often forget about them entirely for months. (I think the only things I never forget about are ethics, in a vague sense, and singing.) But I think my life is worse when I don’t do these things — I feel listless, bored, and disengaged from life. That’s definitely not the same as Having To Do These Things; in fact, I often need to force myself to do them. But it’s something along the same lines.
When I think about it, I realize that, for better or for worse, I measure my life in terms of the beautiful things I’ve created — the songs I’ve written, especially, but also the posts and pictures I’ve put together. And there is something very satisfying, not in a selfish but in a grounding way, in reading over this blog and recognizing in it the texture of my self. Just as my dear friend Kali’s self is so clearly reflected in every inch of her new Tumblr.
I’m not quite sure what the consequences of all this will be. It may mean I retreat from Take Pop back to here, where I can write as myself, which I think is what people want anyway. Or, maybe, once I start writing things over there and seeing that you-all are there with me, I’ll feel it’s a safe space as well. TBD. But either way, you’ll see more of me again — and I’m glad for that.
See you soon!
Arden
A Study In Sherlock
E1/S1: A Study in Pink
E2/S1: The Blind Banker
I’m a little late to the game in my enthusiasm for “Sherlock”, the BBC series transplanting the famous detective and his friend John Watson to contemporary London. Most of you have watched it longer, seen more of it, and maybe even enjoyed it more than I have! I certainly can’t pretend to introduce it to you. But I may able to deepen your appreciation of it.
It just so happens that I spent a lot of last summer working through the Complete Sherlock Holmes. It’s still fresh enough in my mind that, as I watched “A Study in Pink”, the first episode of the reboot, I recognized all sorts of wonderful details, names, places, and dialogue lifted word-for-word from Arthur Conan Doyle’s originals.
I thought that, since some of you may not be as familiar with the stories, it might be fun to share with you some of the parallels I found. The full list would be unreadably long — there are that many! — but you’ll get a sense of things from the scenes in which Sherlock “reads” Watson. They’re especially close, and lots of fun in themselves.
Here we go Old is bold; new’s askew.
[Note: I'll be quoting from the first episode of the reboot, "A Study in Pink", as well as from the beginnings of the first two Holmes novels, "A Study in Scarlet" and "The Sign of Four". If you can't stand reading bits of things you haven't seen or read, turn back now!]
The “high-functioning sociopath” and his sidekick, the everyman.
In both the novel “A Study in Scarlet” and the episode “A Study in Pink“, Watson is introduced to Holmes by a mutual friend who’s heard they’re both looking for apartment-mates. The friend brings Watson to “the chemical laboratory up at the hospital”/ditto, where Holmes is hard at work. Here is their first exchange:
Conan Doyle:
“How are you?” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”
“How on earth did you know that?” I asked in astonishment.
“Never mind,” said he, chuckling to himself.Moffat:
Sherlock: Afghanistan or Iraq?
John: Sorry?
Sherlock: Which was it, Afghanistan or Iraq?
John: (after a long pause) Afghanistan. Sorry, how did you know—
Sherlock: (cutting him off) Ah, Molly, coffee, thank you.
The next time we meet our heroes, in chapter 2, “The Science of Deduction”/the next day, Watson’s had a chance to read some of Holmes’ writing. It’s a newspaper article called “The Book of Life”/his website called “The Science of Deduction” (sound familiar?), and Watson is skeptical of the powers Holmes claims he has. Watson challenges Holmes, who reminds Watson of his remarkable guess about Afghanistan:
Conan Doyle:
“You appeared to be surprised when I told you, on our first meeting, that you had come from Afghanistan.”
“You were told, no doubt.”
“Nothing of the sort. I knew you came from Afghanistan. From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind, that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps. There were such steps, however. The train of reasoning ran, ‘Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.’ The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished.”Moffat:
Sherlock: When I met you for the first time yesterday, I said “Afghanistan or Iraq?” You looked surprised.
John: Yes. How did you know?
Sherlock: I didn’t know, I saw. Your haircut, the way you hold yourself, says military. The conversation as you entered the room — said trained at Bart’s, so army doctor. Obvious. Your face is tanned, but no tan above the wrists — you’ve been abroad but not sunbathing. The limp’s really bad when you walk, but you don’t ask for a chair when you stand, like you’ve forgotten about it, so it’s at least partly psychosomatic. That suggests the original circumstances of the injury were probably traumatic — wounded in action, then. Wounded in action, suntan — Afghanistan or Iraq.
The science of deduction, at work! As it happens, the second Sherlock Holmes novel, “The Sign of Four”, opens with a chapter also called “The Science of Deduction”, and Moffat draws heavily on this as well.
This chapter is where Watson sees Holmes shooting up cocaine/wearing three nicotine patches, which Holmes claims is “transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind”/“helps [him] think”. In the original, Watson decides to put this claim to the test, and hands Holmes a pocket-watch, saying, “Now, I have here a watch which has recently come into my possession. Would you have the kindness to let me have an opinion upon the character or habits of the late owner?” In Moffat’s adaptation, Sherlock borrows John’s cellphone when they first meet in the lab.
Holmes examines the watch/phone and eventually declares,
Conan Doyle:
I should judge that the watch belonged to your elder brother, who inherited it from your father. [...] He was a man of untidy habits — very untidy and careless. He was left with good prospects, but he threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty with occasional short intervals of prosperity, and finally, taking to drink, he died. That is all I can gather.”Moffat:
Sherlock: I know you’ve got a brother who’s worried about you but you won’t go to him for help ’cause you don’t approve of him, possibly because he’s an alcoholic…more likely because he recently walked out on his wife [...]
And here’s how Holmes explains his deductions in each version. I’m going to switch it up here and start with the Moffat conversation, showing the sources of each line. (Whee! It gets really fun here.)
Moffat:
Sherlock: Your phone — it’s expensive, email enabled, MP3 player. But you’re looking for a flat-share, you wouldn’t waste money on this. It’s a gift, then. Scratches — not one, many over time. It’s been in the same pocket as keys and coins. The man sitting next to me wouldn’t treat his one luxury item like this, so it’s had a previous owner.Conan Doyle:
“I began by stating that your brother was careless. When you observe the lower part of that watch-case you notice that it is not only dinted in two places but it is cut and marked all over from the habit of keeping other hard objects, such as coins or keys, in the same pocket. Surely it is no great feat to assume that a man who treats a fifty-guinea watch so cavalierly must be a careless man. Neither is it a very far-fetched inference that a man who inherits one article of such value is pretty well provided for in other respects.”
Moffat:
Sherlock: The next bit’s easy, you know it already. (video cuts to a close-up of the back of the phone, which has been engraved “Harry Watson — from Clara xxx”.)
John: The engraving?
Sherlock: Harry Watson — clearly a family member who’s given you his old phone. Not your father — this is a young man’s gadget. Could be a cousin, but you’re a war hero who can’t find a place to live. Unlikely you’ve got an extended family, certainly not one you’re close to, so brother it is.Conan Doyle:
“I should judge that the watch belonged to your elder brother, who inherited it from your father.”
“That you gather, no doubt, from the H. W. upon the back?”
“Quite so. The W. suggests your own name. The date of the watch is nearly fifty years back, and the initials are as old as the watch: so it was made for the last generation. Jewellery usually descends to the eldest son, and he is most likely to have the same name as the father. Your father has, if I remember right, been dead many years. It has, therefore, been in the hands of your eldest brother.”
Moffat:
Sherlock: Now, Clara — who’s Clara? Three kisses says romantic attachment. Expensive phone says wife, not girlfriend. Must’ve given it to him recently — this model’s only six months old. Marriage in trouble, then — six months on, and already he’s giving it away? If she’d left him, he would’ve kept it. People do, sentiment. But no, he wanted rid of it — he left her. He gave the phone to you, that says he wants you to stay in touch. You’re looking for cheap accommodation and you’re not going to your brother for help? That says you’ve got problems with him. Maybe you liked his wife, maybe you don’t like his drinking.Conan Doyle:
“He was a man of untidy habits — very untidy and careless. He was left with good prospects, but he threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty with occasional short intervals of prosperity, and finally, taking to drink, he died. That is all I can gather.” [...]
Here Watson freaks out a bit; in the original, he leaps out of his chair and accuses Holmes of doing research on him. In the adaptation, he just exclaims, “How could you possibly know about the drinking?”
The detail Sherlock offers as explanation is, I think, my favourite parallel in the whole episode:
Moffat:
Sherlock: Power connection — tiny little scuff marks around the edge. Every night he goes to plug it in and charge but his hands are shaky. You never see those marks on a sober man’s phone, never see a drunk’s without them.Conan Doyle:
“I ask you to look at the inner plate, which contains the keyhole. Look at the thousands of scratches all round the hole — marks where the key has slipped. What sober man’s key could have scored those grooves? But you will never see a drunkard’s watch without them. He winds it at night, and he leaves these traces of his unsteady hand.”
I almost jumped out of my chair. What a brilliant substitution — phone charger for pocket-watch key. I’m blown away.
And, delightfully, the whole episode’s like that. Believe me when I say that from the very beginning of the show –
Conan Doyle:
(Stamford, the mutual friend:) “[Holmes] appears to have a passion for definite and exact knowledge.”
(Watson:) “Very right too.”
“Yes, but it may be pushed to excess. When it comes to beating the subjects in the dissecting-rooms with a stick, it is certainly taking rather a bizarre shape.”
“Beating the subjects!”
“Yes, to verify how far bruises may be produced after death. I saw him at it with my own eyes.”Moffat:
*WHAP!* *WHAP!* WHAP!*
– to smack in the middle –
Conan Doyle:
(Holmes:) “I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”
“The only unofficial detective?” I said, raising my eyebrows.
“The only unofficial consulting detective,” he answered. “I am the last and highest court of appeal in detection. When Gregson, or Lestrade, or Athelney Jones are out of their depths — which, by the way, is their normal state — the matter is laid before me.”Moffat:
Sherlock: I’m a consulting detective. The only one in the world. I invented the job.
John: What does that mean?
Sherlock: It means whenever the police are out of their depth — which is always — they consult me.
– to the very end –
Conan Doyle:
Watson: “But it was not mere guesswork?”
Holmes: “No, no: I never guess. It is a shocking habit — destructive to the logical faculty.”Moffat:
John: Lucky guess.
Sherlock: I never guess.
– it’s just packed with lines, scenes, and situations from the books.
It’s a wonderful feat on Moffat’s part to have created an adaptation both so believably contemporary and so faithful to the original text. Check the stories out if you love the show, or watch the show if you enjoy the stories; each will enrich your pleasure in the other.
Want more? Here’s the next episode – The Blind Banker.
(Script of “Sherlock” adapted from the transcriptions at Wikiquote. The original novels can be found at Project Gutenberg.)
I’m sure you know about this by now, but in case you don’t, here’s the deal.
Yeah. You saw that line at the end of the video? “And ordinary users could go to jail for up to five years for posting any copyrighted work — even just singing a pop song”?
Welp. So much for “Oh, Something Arty.” That post with my Beatles and Beach Boys covers? Bam!
And of course Twitter and Facebook would have to follow up on each of my links to this blog to make sure everything I’m doing is okay.
If you want a more in-depth analysis of the bills, I suggest you check out the articles at Gizmodo and especially Techdirt. They’re very thorough and a great explanation of why this is such a terrible idea. As well, this piece from Good, an active-citizenship website, lays out the “what if” scenario very clearly.
Fortunately, Handel’s safe. But he wouldn’t have been if he’d been posting today. And that sounds silly, but…it’s not!
Now, I’m not for piracy. I’m not against copyright (though I think current copyright laws are a liiittle too generous in their statutes of expiration…)
…Ahem.
But I do think this:
The media companies backing this legislation would be better served finding new methods of distribution that work WITH the internet than struggling against it. Netflix and Spotify are both fantastic services that give us amazing access to movies and music while making piracy or copying files impossible.
There’s a way to do this that doesn’t involve blacklisting websites,
or forcing Google & co. to police the web,
or letting a site be taken down on the basis of a “letter in good faith” and THEN actually looking into the details.
You’ll hear people saying that Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook and so on will be shut down by this legislation. They probably won’t; they’ve got a lot of money and a lot of lawyers, and they’ll work out a way to stay up. But the easiest way for them to do that is just kill any links that might be dangerous — like, say, any link you ever post to a video or a picture or a recording. And of course, websites like mine, without that sort of backing? They won’t — I won’t — stand a chance.
Piracy is a problem, but this isn’t the way to solve it. Please sign a petition like those hosted by Google and Reddit — heck, here’s one specially aimed at video gamers — and give your senators and representatives a call. I did! It was actually very pleasant. They have nice interns.
For all of our sakes, please take action. Every call makes a difference!
Thank you
