Category Archives: writing

The taste of youth, the taste of you, dear

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Okay, I’m finally going to take the plunge.

Next week will be the first of many entries for the Walk in Silence blog series…and of course, I’ll be letting you know all about that over the next week and a half.

But that’s not the plunge I’m talking about.

When I was first planning out the WiS project, I always had the timeframe in the back of my mind: should I focus just on my own personal connection with college radio (1986-1989)?  Should I talk about its history (197? – 199?)?  Or should I just come up with an arbitrary time?  Eventually I chose the third entry, that way I could focus mostly on my own personal history, but also include the time before I connected with the genre, thus 1984 – 1989.

The plunge I’m thinking of now is the college and post-college years.  They weren’t exactly the happiest years of my life, for various reasons, but they were interesting musically.  College rock, at least with American radio, gave way to grunge and Britpop as it became more popular, and changed genre names numerous times before deciding on the all-encompassing ‘alternative rock’.  A schism grew: those who felt alternative rock was selling out and followed the most obscure bands possible, and those who really didn’t mind either way, as long as the prefabricated crap currently in the charts went away.

I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a sequel to Walk in Silence for quite some time.  There’s no name to it yet, nor is there any concrete schedule or plan for it at this time (all my focus is currently on posting WiS and publishing the Bridgetown trilogy), but I do have a few ideas floating around…it’ll focus mostly on the years from late 1989 (when I left for college) to late 1995 (when I left Boston and moved back home).  And it will most likely continue the WiS theme of both personal story and music history.

Some albums from that era still get heavy airplay on the radio: you’ll still hear tracks from Nevermind and Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Loveless and Definitely Maybe and Achtung Baby and Violator and so on.  But there are so many more albums I’ve ignored for one reason or another, forgotten about or couldn’t make myself listen to for personal reasons.  Songs that radio let pass into history, even forgetting to play them on Throwback Thursday.  But as with Walk in Silence and the 80s, it’s been nigh on twenty-plus years for most of these.  It’s well past time to revisit them again.

So starting today I’m going to start listening to some of these albums in my collection, give them a once-over they haven’t had in quite some time, and see where I can go with it.

Should be an interesting ride, to say the least.

Weekend Fly-By

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Oof!  Yeah, still working on the final revision/edit of The Persistence of Memories, and it’ll be another few weeks before I can give myself a breather.  The soft release date at the moment is “sometime mid-April”, but I’ll let you all know more as soon as I have more concrete plans!  At present I’m THISCLOSE (translation: about forty or so pages) to finishing the revision/edit, I’ve made a quick mock-up of the cover (which you can see at Welcome to Bridgetown).  Once the edit’s done, then comes the formatting and the uploading.   And then FINALLY I can get back to a normal schedule again.  [That is, until I start the same process once more with The Balance of Light.  Whee!]

In the meantime, I’ve been on a School of Seven Bells kick lately, partly due to their release of their last album, SVIIB (recorded just before Benjamin Curtis passed away).  Jangly shoegazey goodness that kind of reminds me of Lush with a bit of Stereolab mixed in.  Enjoy!

See you soon!

News on Walk In Silence (the book)

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Hey all,

Some news on the Walk in Silence book project.  I shared this on my LiveJournal a short time ago (edited for clarity):

I think I may set aside Walk in Silence, the book.

I’ll finish it of course, for my own reasons, but I don’t think I’ll be releasing it as a self-published book, at least not for the foreseeable future. It’s a tough decision, but it’s one I’ve been thinking of ever since the start of the year, maybe even before then.

There are a few reasons…one is that it started feeling less like a book worth publishing and more of a vanity project. On a more personal note, writing this memoir version really felt like I was really just trying to finally purge it from my system once and for all so I could move on. While on a personal and emotional level this can be a good thing, and I may even be proud of the end result, it’s not something I’d be happy with on a professional level. I wouldn’t be embarrassed about it…I just don’t think it would be something worth putting out there professionally. As I said, it’s become a vanity project — it’s a story I want to tell, but I’m doubting there’s a significant audience for it. Maybe I’ll put it out there as a serial on [this] blog at some point. It feels that would be the best home for it, when all is said and done.

Do I feel sad about this? Not entirely. A bit let down, of course. That nagging feeling that I’ve wasted a few thousand hours of writing time on something that may or may not see the light of day. But I’ve had a hell of a fun time reading all those music bios and reference books for research, and I’ve come to appreciate and understand music a hell of a lot more over the years. Totally worth it just for that alone. I may also feel a bit embarrassed, having bloviated the idea and everything else about it over the last three or four years online, much to your wavering patience and tolerance, but I think I’ll get over it.

But really…the main thing is that I think I’ve outgrown the project. My heart and mind have moved on, probably some time ago, and it was high time for me to accept that.

…

…so yeah.  At this time, it’s no longer going to be an e-book/physical book project.

On a more professional level, I think it would have been problematic as a book, especially a self-published one.  There’s only so far I can go with Fair Use in regards to copyrighted music, and I don’t think I’d have done the project justice (to my standards, anyway) if I had to hold back for legal reasons.  Doing it as a blog series would give me more leeway and make it more interactive, as I’d be able to provide links, audio and/or video.

SO.

What’s in store for this project?  Well!  Glad you asked!

I’ve already gotten a good ways into it (it focuses mostly between 1984 to 1989, and I’m currently writing about late 1988), so instead of trunking it and erasing it from my mind, I will use my collected notes and writings for it and do a serial much along the lines of my Blogging the Beatles series from a few years ago.  It may start out as a once-a-week entry, but if time permits and I get myself into the groove, I may post more than that.

Another plus for me morphing it into a blog series is that I get to return to my originally planned release date again!  Yay!  It’s still in the planning stages, but I’m thinking a soft start date of April 19 or thereabouts, to celebrate thirty years of me obsessing over this damn genre.

April vacation, 1986, when a dorky teenage kid from a small town discovered a college radio station for the first time, and how it completely changed his life.

Thanks again for sticking by, folks.  🙂

Où sont tes héros aux corps d’athlètes?

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I’ve been listening to Air over the past few days…the band just popped into my head unbidden, and I’ve been searching for a good, laid-back soundtrack for my extended editing sessions lately, so it was a perfect fit.  Their debut Moon Safari was released on this day back in 1998 (which puts it right in the middle of my HMV years), but it’s so retro in its sound that you swear it came out in 1972 on some budget label and got played at K-Mart when you were a kid.  It of course ended up on heavy rotation during my writing sessions down in the basement.

In 2000 they released the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, based on the Jeffrey Eugenides book.  That too got heavy rotation for me, with its spooky, dark passages.  [Trivia: I didn’t know this until many years later that the singer for “Playground Love” is none other than the singer for Phoenix, going under the name Gordon Tracks.]  It kind of fit the mood I was in at the time as well, considering I’d just been shuffled out of the HMV job and wasn’t exactly sure where my next step was going to be.

They may have lost me a bit on album two (three?), 10,000 Hz Legend, but I think that’s because they’d chosen to update their sound a bit, bring the melodies forward a decade or two.  It took me a few years to get used to this one, and it’s got some great tracks on it, including a cameo vocal from Beck on “The Vagabond”.

Now the next album, Talkie Walkie, is probably my favorite of theirs, even over Moon Safari.  They hit their stride here, balancing their retro-synth sound perfectly with some lovely modern melodies.  They also provided an absolutely gorgeous track called “Alone in Kyoto” for Sofia Coppola’s next film Lost in Translation:

I’m still trying to get used to the next couple of albums (2007’s Pocket Symphony and 2009’s Love 2), most likely because my mind was elsewhere at the time, adjusting to our lives here in SF.  Eventually they’ll come to me.  Their most recent album, Le Voyage Dans la Lune from 2012, is fascinating in that it’s a soundtrack for Georges Méliès’ 1902 film of the same name.  And Nicolas Godin (the fair-haired one of the duo) just released a solo album of Bach-inspired songs called Contrepoint, which I’m hoping will eventually see release stateside sometime this year.

[WiS] I started something…

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About a year and a half ago, I’d decided to take a few days off writing to get all my writing (and other things hiding away in file boxes) sorted and arranged.  It took much longer than usual, I think I kicked up enough dust to give me allergies, and I was sore afterwards.  But I had a much more organized bookshelf and filing cabinet in the process.

The best part?  On Saturday when I was looking for all the printouts, outtakes and notes for Walk in Silence (and pretty much every other project related to it dating back to 1988 or so), it took me all of a half hour.  Boom, done.  Which gave me even more time to actually sit down and read through some of these things this weekend.  Bonus!

I’m also returning to my beloved 80s album collection again.  As you can probably guess, I’m listening to the Smiths’ Strangeways, Here We Come from 1987 as I write this.  I always found it kind of sadly amusing that I finally got into the band just as they were breaking up.  Also, I’m enjoying the weekly radio show The 80s Underground (which I listen to via KSCU.com, but is also available via podcast) which plays on Wednesday afternoons.  It’s a great show because the DJ does what he can to play the less-familiar tracks from great bands instead of the same ‘hits of yesteryear’.  Worth checking out.

You might have guessed that I’m looking forward to getting this project done, even despite all the other writing projects I have surrounding it.  I have all the resources at my fingertips now, and most other things I can easily find online, so it’s mostly just a matter of keeping focused and knowing the trail I need to follow.  It’ll be tricky, but I think I can do it.

More to come!

Current Book Status: Oh wow I thought I’d be outta here by now

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I kind of hinted at this on my LJ yesterday, but I may as well make it semi-official here: I’m planning on releasing Walk in Silence, the book, in April of 2016.

So, what does this mean?  Well, for me, it means that I have six months to get my sh*t together, get a final version written, edited, formatted and ready for publication.  Yes, I will be doing the same as ADoS and self-releasing it through Smashwords and Amazon.  This, on top of working on the final revision and edit of The Persistence of Memories, other projects, and the Day Job.

Why April 2016?  Because that will mark thirty years (April vacation 1986, to be precise) since I’d discovered college radio and kickstarted an obsession that hasn’t gone away. I think an anniversary release would work nicely.  It’ll be tough, but I think I can do it.  It’s not a strict deadline, but that’s the one I’m aiming for.

So what’s the current status of the book, anyway?   That’s…a good question.  I have about six or seven different versions in various states of (in)completion, copious notes, a hell of a lot of reference material, but nothing actually complete.  Sure, it’s kind of crazy for me to think I can get it from complete disarray into a finished product in six months.  Especially when the theme of the book kept changing — I was originally going to write about the ‘college rock’ sound of the mid to late 80s.  Then I was going to write just about my obsession with it.  Then I was going to compile a history of the sound.  And then I realized that none of them really quite connected with what I wanted to write in the first place.  So while I distanced myself from it and worked on the ADoS release in the interim, I kept the project in the back of my mind and let it percolate.  What did I really want to do with it?

I can’t rightly say what it’ll exactly be about at this time, but now that I have time and inclination to complete this project, I’m happy to say I have a much clearer idea, and will be starting in on it this weekend.

In the meantime, don’t be surprised if you start seeing more 80s-themed posts and videos here within the next few months!  🙂