jake – Page 57 – The Jake of All Trades

Monthly Music – February

In the efforts to add on one more thing I want to do, I’ve decided to start a mini review of music here. Why is that? I love music. I listen to it most of my day. But I’ve noticed my recent purchasing to be sporadic and, well, safe.

So here is the plan. Each month I’ll buy two albums and post a mini review here. Only rule is that one has to be fairly new. No limits on genre or theme, which is good. My taste in music is pretty much all over the place.

I’ll be tagging this monthlymusic if you want to follow along at home.

-j

Eminem – Recovery (Rap / Hip Hop)

I’ll admit, while I have always liked Eminem, this is the first album of his I have bought. While the radio songs and the bits of albums I’d heard at other’s houses were good, they just didn’t grab me in that “I must have this!” sort of way. I do own the 8 Mile soundtrack. “Lose yourself” was the Eminem song that I’d been waiting for since I heard the Slim Shady LP. After hearing that song I wanted more Marshall, less Shady.

So I suspect it is a bit funny then that the first album of his I buy I didn’t even listen to first. Rather I just got it on impulse. And it is good. There is still a bit of the humor side in the work, but for the most part it is angry and more personal than simply making fun of boy bands.

The story told is one of someone picking themselves back up from getting off of drugs, of stepping back up. The album talks about making up for things in the past, as well as leaving some things behind.

And the lyrics are cutting, angry and fantastic. One of my favorite is “the last thing you want to do is have me spit out a rhyme and say when I wrote this I was thinking of you.” And you know it is true. Shady or Marshall, Eminem is wrong in all the right ways.

So if you are not easily offended, turn it up. If you are, turn it up louder, it will be good for you.

All That Remains – For We Are Many (Metal)

I got Overcome by ATR at a suggestion of a friend (funny enough, I can’t seem to remember who…) and it sat unlistened for quite a bit on my shelf. Sure I played it on the way home and put it on iTunes, but for the most part ignored it. If memory serves I was on a huge Tupac kick at the time, so that may have contributed to the delay.

Anyway, after its slow start, Overcome has been played quite a bit. And I am grateful to whomever it was that suggested it.

I saw “For We Are Many” come up on my Amazon suggestions, and grabbed it. It was listened to more immediately. The album is solid metal and great driving music. I’m still listening a bit to it, but I’ll admit I do like Overcome a bit more. This album is good, but there is just something a bit tighter about the other album.

Still it was well worth it and it lives in the current album rotation.

Bonus (since it is the first month…)
Norah Jones – …Featuring (Jazz / All Over The Place)

I’ve been in love with Norah Jones since I found her first album in a Borders. She wasn’t famous yet, no Grammy, just a pretty face on a discounted CD and I thought “what the hell.” Turned out to be one of the better choices I have made in my life.

…Featuring is a guest CD but with a twist. From Willie Nelson and Ray Charles, to the Foo Fighters and Q Tip, the guest on each song is Norah herself.

And it is a good album. Norah steps out of her box for a bit and lets the other artists introduce her other genres. The genre’s on the album are all over the place, from jazz, country, rock and hip hop.

So while the experimentations were fun, where she really shines is in the jazz and old country western sounds.

On Fan Fiction, and an Announcment

Fan fiction has a strange place in the realm of ‘real writing’. To say that it isn’t real is like claiming remixing isn’t music or that what I do on at a club is called ‘dancing’. It is reader fantasy. It is the big “what if?” that we take after we have seen a movie or read a book that didn’t give all the answers we wanted.

I spent a good portion of time doing fan fiction of sorts. I was a part of the ‘hunter list’, which was an email list for White Wolf’s Hunter: the Reckoning. We posted stories about what our characters were doing, interacted through email and wrote. We wrote. At one point i was posted 1500 to 3000 words a day on this list.

And in that time I learned a lot about myself, about writing. I learned that I love an audience. I found the restrictions (and there were restrictions, this is a roll playing game with RULES after all) to almost be freeing. How do vampires work? Are there ghosts? Can my character survive a conflict with a werewolf? These things were answered. My job was to write the story inside of this box.

Admittedly this is different from the type of fan fiction where you deal both in the world and the characters that are there. I feel i’d have to turn in my geek card if I didn’t have an idea for a Star Wars novel, or a Star Trek serial. Now we are talking about not just the setting, but also the characters that belong to someone, or some-corporation. As a writer, how do you work under the confines of Han Solo, or Mickey Mouse, or Harry Potter? How do you work where there is already a canon, and you are, well, just dreaming?

Does it matter?

Fan fiction is beat up on as immature, or unprofessional, or what not. Is it? Sure, why not. Just as we draw things we see, or just as we sing songs during karaoke, we are still practicing art, even if it is with the greater help of someone else. It is a stepping stone, sometimes one that people stay on, but a step none-the-less. How many writers started out by saying “I wonder what happened afterwards…” and even if we didn’t write it down, those thoughts shaped into plots and characters, turning into afternoons with legos and transformers, or friends with swords and jungle gyms.

I found myself back in fan fiction recently. I started having dreams, vivid dreams that I would write down each morning of fantastic adventures across time. I was bemused at first, curious as time went on, and then it happened. I got the fever, the urge, and my figures found a keyboard and I started to write. Still the dreams came and still they fueled me.

Doctor Who is something I came to much later in my geekedness than I should admit to. Sure I’d heard of this dude with a long scarf, but it wasn’t until a few years ago I’d seen even one episode. SInce then I have consumed and consumed, wearing out my Netflix streaming with Tom Baker, Christopher Eccleston, and David Tennant.

Now I have these dreams, now I have these words, what should I do with them? I am not going to stop writing them. I had been in a lull, in a bind, this awkward place where the words just weren’t coming. Sure you force yourself, but those are the ones that get left behind I find. These words, these tales of a Doctor that showed up in my dreams were not forced. They just start as I place my hands on the keyboard.

So I am going to post them, episodically, of course, here. Not for fame or glory, but to share an adventure with some friends. I hope they are as much fun to read as they were to write.

A Month in the Life, January

Here is my first monthly update on the 365 project.

First off, I survived. Which is always a good way to start. There were nights where I was fully prepared to fall into the deep sleep, and realized I had not yet posted something. There were other days where I posted several things before noon. But I did make each day of January (well, minus the first few where I had not yet decided to start, but I made up for them throughout the month)

There was a bit of a range, tweets, photos, drawings. I wrote in my journal; I posted on my blog; I played violin; I danced.

So what did we get? A pink elephant seems to take the prize of the month. I purchased SketchBook Pro for the Macintosh, as well as Sketchbook Mobile for my phone and have enjoyed doodling. Who knows, by the end of the year I may be good at drawing. As of now, I am still at the “display on my mother’s fridge” level.

Oh, and the train is on my mother’s fridge.

I have worked on poems too, but I find them still hidden away. There will be another post about this once I collect all of my thoughts. Also on some stories, but that is part of something you’ll seen soon enough. Rules for a Godzilla Movie was one of my favorite posts in a while. Somedays, however, it was a struggle to find even those 140 characters to post.

I suspect that at some point this project has a danger of slipping from ‘art project’ to ‘work’ and I will fight that. This is about habit, not repetition. This is about behavior and passion, not ‘forcing’ or ‘bribing’. I do this because I love it.

Ok, February, let’s see what you have.

As always, follow the 365 project here : https://jacobhaddon.com/blog/art365/