The Fredösphere

Item One The gentlemen of SFF Audio become my heroes as they generously, lavishly, gratuitously link once again to my sci-fi jazz chamber opera They're Made Out of Meat.

Item Two (Or maybe that should be Item-a Two-a.) Cosh strikes again with a fresh take on the ol' see ourselves as others see us thing: Italian comedian Adriano Celentano sings very convincing, but fake, English. My best experience on this topic was meeting an Brit with the gift for imitation. I asked him to talk like an American, and his instant response—"Hey, you guys!"—gave me more self-knowledge in one second that a lifetime of experience.

Item Three Alex Ross mentions his The Rest Is Noise tour, which includes Ann Arbor. I'll be there, bud, me 'n' the Wifeösphere.

Item Four Terry Teachout quotes H.L. Mencken on the topic of book intoxication. I think I may be addicted to politics. Without much serious thought, I gave up my political blogs for Lent. I experienced a dramatic sharpening of my wits.* Suddenly, there was this to-do list in my head that was never there before. I found it impossible to ignore the tasks necessary to achieve my ambitions. I noticed that, when one is lazy, it takes forever to get anything done! An amazing discovery. It's sort of the reverse of that conservative kid in that Woody Allen movie who is cured of his political leanings when a brain tumor is removed.


*Although, to be honest, maybe it isn't the political fast that's doing it. Maybe it's fish oil.

Labels: Culture, They're Made Out Of Meat

That scraping sound you hear is my lazy rear end dragging itself to the keyboard to feed sweet wordlets to the loyal fans of Der Pfredöspher. (Hi, Tante Gertie!) Today, I bring a handful of webcandy; I hope soon to offer something more substantial.

Item One. Blogger Allen H. Simon describes a nifty programming idea: a concert of nothing but misattributed works. (I.e., Pseudo-Buxtehude, etc.) Then he goes and steps in it by attacking the Cult of the Composer. Yes, comments are open, and yes, the powdered wigs are flying. I'm sympathetic to the urge to demystify. Ultimately, composers are at the mercy of performers (especially dead composers!) and a stupid but well-researched performance cannot come close to an intelligently ideosyncratic one, in my opinion. Note the bad faith, or simple failure to understand the argument, of the purists who comment, and yet, I understand their fear as well. If only there were a way to prevent HIP (Historically Ignorant Performance) while letting the smart people have free reign. Perhaps a license of some kind could be issued. Shoot, if it were to be had from the Michigan Secretary of State's office, the long wait itself would weed out the lazy. Another problem: Solved! By the Fredösphere!

Item Two. I loved this quote found by Eve Tushnet:

Uyeda says that his approach to cocktail-making is grounded in the Japanese tea ceremony. It is an "adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order."
--"Tokyo, Cocktail Capital of the World," Hugh Garvey, in Best Food Writing 2009

Those words "adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence" ripped me out of, well, the sordid facts of my everyday existence, and wonderfully expresses exactly why I make art. Like the setting of the words of the Christmas angels, "Fear not! For behold. . . ." Or for that matter, the fantasy story about neurotic chiropractors that I wrote last week. (No; really.)

Item Three. Ten thousand thanks to David Price, my new best friend that I don't know. He gave me a very kindly review of my chamber jazz space opera They're Made Out of Meat, available as an electronic download for 89 lousy cents at Amazon. (Go buy the thing! Now! What are you waiting for?) He said my opera is "[p]layed absolutely straight by The Fredosphere, which is what makes it so great. The best $0.89 I spent all day." No notice has given me quite such a thrill, since so far as I know David is utterly unconnected to me (other than that whole "All Men are Brothers" thing everyone's talking about). Even Alex Ross linking to me, back in the pioneer days, although far more flattering, seems less shocking, since we are brothers of the blog, after all.

Labels: Creativity, Culture, Performance, They're Made Out Of Meat

My friend and fellow StarShipSofa podcast groupie Matthew Sanborn Smith has started his own podcast called Beware the Hairy Mango. It's micro-casting with a focus on Matt's own flash fiction. (Matt specializes in flash to facilitate his goal of writing 1000 stories before his 50th birthday.)

Matt's stories are characterized by zany non sequiturs delivered via fire hose. If that isn't incentive enough for you to subscribe, perhaps your devotion to my science fiction jazz chamber opera They're Made Out of Meat will drive you into Matt's hairy, mango-y arms, since TMOOM is a subject of the Hairy Mango's episode 25.

Labels: Podcast, They're Made Out Of Meat

Once again my good friend Tony C. Smith comes through in the StarShipSofa podcast by running a six-minute-long commercial for They're Made Out of Meat, or what Tony so affectionately refers to as my "meat opera." Listen to the whole thing, or better, subscribe to the podcast . . . or best, head over to Amazon with 89 cents in your hand and BUY THE MEAT!

Labels: Starship Sofa, They're Made Out Of Meat

Audio omnivores Jesse and Scott of the SFF Audio Podcast (SFF means Science Fiction and Fantasy) have very kindly and enthusiastically mentioned my science fiction jazz chamber opera They're Made Out of Meat (on sale at Amazon et al.) during their December 21 podcast. Thanks, guys. You da mensch.

Labels: Podcast, sci-fi, They're Made Out Of Meat

My good friend Tony C. Smith of the StarShipSofa podcast has very kindly agreed to run a commercial for my science fiction jazz chamber opera, They're Made Out of Meat. You, my faithful readership (Hi, Aunt Virginia!) are about to be rewarded with a Christmas gift. Among the privileges of membership here are an early hearing of the audio I prepared for Tony. That's right, folks: you get to listen to a commercial ahead of everyone else!

Enjoy:

Labels: Composition, SoundClip, They're Made Out Of Meat

Yesterday around supper time my good friend Thad phoned me, sounding exhausted and desperate. It seemed he and his family were stuck in the family van somewhere south of the Maryland/Pennsylvania border in a huge parking lot commonly referred to as Interstate 70.  He had been essentially motionless for an hour and wanted any information I could find on the internet about the extent of the traffic jam he was in.

This I was happy to do, happy, that is, until I found that neither Triple-A nor the official government websites of Pennsylvania or Maryland had any current traffic information. They had websites that described themselves as traffic information sites--but which were empty. They also contained links to other, equally worthless, non-governmental traffic-monitoring websites.  In those cases, the links came with amusing warnings that the government could not be responsible blah blah blah and that the user was at risk blah blah blah and that you might go blind blah blah blah. Sheesh, so stupid, so. . .so. . .nineties.

Then suddenly a little light went off in my mind, and I went over to Google maps and turned on the Traffic option. Immediately the highways were color-coded with the information I needed. I called Thad back and told him to expect traffic to clear up right around the state line. He said he had just done that and he confirmed the accuracy of Google's information. Apparently Google has taken over this function on the internet completely, and I am among the last to find out.

In any event, Thad took a moment on the phone to tell me his whole family was enjoying listening to They're Made Out of Meat, my new science-fiction jazz chamber opera I told you about a while back. He said his youngest daughter, who is the Maharincess' best friend, is the biggest fan of them all. (Oooh, good, I can market this thing to children, the most gullible demographic there is!) They all love the part that says, "They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."

Thad told me, "it's not only entertaining, it's also philosophically interesting," and immediately I sensed I was witnessing the birthing of a blurb.  With Thad's permission, here it is:

THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT. Text by Terry Bisson, Music by the Fredösphere
"Not only entertaining, it's also philosophically interesting."  -Fred's friend Thad

No, not quite right.  Let's try this:

THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT. Text by Terry Bisson, Music by the Fredösphere
"Not only entertaining, it's also philosophically interesting."  -Dr. Thaddeus Polk, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan, and Co-Editor of Cognitive Modeling

Muuuuuch better.  They're Made Out of Meat, the opera, is on sale at iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster, eMusic, and Amazon, where you can get it for a lousy 89 cents.  C'mon, people: get your clicky finger busy and buy the dang thang!

Labels: They're Made Out Of Meat

Well, bless my little heart: I'm on sale at Amazon. For only $0.89 you can own your very own Fredösphere! And I am coming soon to an iTunes near you, as well as Rhapsody and Napster.

(I'm amused and more than a little saddened to see I'm the #2 result when you search Amazon for They're Made Out of Meat, because that's a higher ranking than the Terry Bisson book that the original story comes in. Yow.)

And now, more about the making of They're Made Out of Meat:

For any work of art too large to fit in the creator's mind as a single flash of intuition, it's creation is really the discovery or invention of the appropriate creative process. After fumbling around for a bit, I found a time and place I could make headway.

Serendipitously, my son's basketball practices during the winter of 2008-2009 gave me an environment where I could work one hour a week utterly free of distraction. I sat on the stage of the gym at York Baptist Church with no one to talk to and nothing to do (because I deliberately left books and iPod at home). I found I could concentrate on the vocal lines and compose them in that noisy, but music-free, room, surrounded by other parents and motivated by the strange, vain frisson that came from knowing I was the only person in the place writing an opera about two alien beings trying to wrap their heads around the concept of a meat-based life form.

With the vocal lines in place, I could begin to see the general shape of the whole piece. That moment of intuiting the shape is an important one; once it occurs, one can confidently create various small sections of the work knowing how those sections relate to the whole.

Next time, I'll talk about musical motifs. Meanwhile, git yer li'l clicky finger busy and buy the dag-nabbed song!

Labels: They're Made Out Of Meat

In my previous post I asked you to go read Terry Bisson's marvelous story They're Made Out of Meat.  Today I'll tell you about my new relationship to the world of Meat.  Having noticed the story's unusual structure, that of pure dialog without a single word of narration, I realized the story worked as the script to a play, and needed absolutely no modification for dramatic adaptation.  From there, the next step should have been easy to see, but as is often the case, it took me a long time to understand:  namely that I could turn Meat into an opera.

A few things made me hesitate.  The size of the project was intimidating, as I estimated the resulting piece would be 10 minutes long.  (As it turned out, 15 minutes would have been closer to the truth:  more than twice the length of any piece previously written by me.)  The story was under copyright, and the thought of contacting/negotiating/wheedling/wrangling the author for permission was dismaying.  (Few things are better at sucking my will to live than asking a stranger for cooperation.)  Finally, I had recently decided upon another artistic project that seemed to me to be the thing I should be devoting the next several years of my life to and I didn't want a large distraction to delay it.

In the end, I couldn't say no to Meat although it did make chopped liver of an entire year of my life.  I contacted Terry Bisson by way of my good friend Tony C. Smith, he of the StarShipSofa podcast.  Terry turned out to be wonderfully, even miraculously, cooperative.  My first email to him was long and lawyerly, and was ignored.  My follow-up email was a couple of sentences, and Terry responded with a reasonableness and trust which still awes me whenever I think of it.  It's a model for how I should treat others when I become rich-slash-famous.

Tomorrow:  an opera is born.  Meanwhile, let me tease you with one minute of Meat:

Labels: Composition, They're Made Out Of Meat

My favorite SF short story is a very short story indeed by Terry Bisson entitled They're Made Out of Meat. The two minutes it takes you to read the whole thing will be the best possible use of your time. Do it. Now. I'll wait here 'til you're done.

Wasn't that fabulous? I've been re-reading that story for years and re-urging all my friends to read it, yet only recently (about a year ago) did I notice the secret of its brevity: it contains not one word of narration. The entire story is pure dialog. Not even a "he said" anywhere.

I meditated on that profundity for a while and finally noticed the story in its original form reads like a play, or a script for a movie. (Or—he said, trembling with excitement—the book for an opera.) Clearly I'm not the first person to have noticed this; someone has made a movie directly from the story:


They're Made Out Of Meat - The funniest movie is here. Find it

So now you ask, why is the Fredösphere talking about a short story that reads like a script, and could easily be made into a work of drama? Why, in short, is he talking about a science-fiction story that is practically begging for operatic treatment?

Keep asking yourself that question. Perhaps one day soon I will answer it.

Labels: Composition, Opera, They're Made Out Of Meat, VideoClip