Fiction at Work
A new novel, with the working title Uncertain Alchemy is my immediate absorption. Here's the first four chapters. You will need to use Adobe software to open these PDF's (Sorry Mac users -- Preview software won't work here.)
.Uncertain Alchemy , Chapter 1
.Uncertain Alchemy, Chapter 2
.Uncertain Alchemy, Chapter 3
.Uncertain Alchemy, Chapter 4
Uncertain Alchemy, Chapter 5
You will need to use Adobe software to open these PDF's (Sorry Mac users, Preview software won't work here.)


Heritage Interviews Project
I am coordinating an ongoing project to document the heritage and culture of the Roslyn-Ronald-Cle Elum area. Those interested are gathering interviews and soundscapes that will be both archives and selectively shaped into various products along the way. Some people are interviewing, some are technical editors, some are content editors. More....

Joined at the Throat

A prequel novel to Run Plant Fly.

Joined at the hip is two so close they function as one, bound together through thick and thin. Joined at the throat is to be bound by song, and also implies we may have a knife in one hand and each other's throat in the other.

Because song is not just the do-re-mi for the choir director-- it is all our utterances-- cheers and jeers, laughter and hissing and muttering, our mumbling repeats of what echoes within. One head nodding before the other's lips have finished, a bit of question, part of an answer, call-and-response and our voices build together, not always glad. Joined at the Throat is about intimacy, both violent and loving. A sample coming soon to this very location...

 


Hairstyles of the Damned

 

 

 

 

 

 


a scene from When We Were Kings

 

 

 

 


Charles Brunett, film maker

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Current Stimuli

Latest Good Read
s
Hairstyles of the Damned by Joe Meno (Punk Planet Books imprint, Aakashic Books, 2004) I heard him read from this a few years ago, when he came through the Northwest on a Perpetual Motion Roadshow. In case you have forgotten the pain and joy of stepping out into the adult world, you can read all about it.

Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is the kind of book that people who think they dislike history should take a poke at. Mann pieces together what the Americas may have been like as the Europeans arrived, and weaves in many of the current debates about specific ancient American societies and related human migrations. He works his way through numerous historical, anthropological, and ecological theories, managing to incorporate the changing politics and perspectives within these disciplines as he goes. I admire his actual writing because about 95% of the time he manages to keep it engaging, and because he lets his sources bluntly critique each other’s ideas.


Recent Movies
When We Were Kings (1996, Leon Gast, director) is a documentary about the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” between heavyweight champion George Forman and previous champ Mohammed Ali. I am not a boxing fan, but I was mesmerized and inspired as I watched the two US fighters, their entourage, and all the promotion and entertainment (B.B. King, James Brown, and Don King among others) that packed up and went to Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). The humanity of individual experience: Ali thinking out loud about the huge cultural difference between living in an almost entirely black country and what he has experienced as an African-American in the United States; the Zairians’ joy in seeing the charismatic Ali; the global politics and economics that brings the fight to the same Kinshasa stadium Dictator-President Mobutu used to for executions and torture until the floors ran red with blood.

I can’t remember now how I came across a reference to director Charles Burnett, but I have been watching everything I can find that he has had a part in. First I watched To Sleep with Anger (1990) in which Danny Glover shows up on the doorstep of a couple he vaguely knows from the small southern town they all grew up in. The older couple lives in a solid working-class black neighborhood of LA. They let Glover move in for an indefinite visit. Glover is Evil, far more complex than “evil incarnate” because his very nature is evil. As he explains to someone who challenges him, he is just being who and what he is, which means everything and everyone goes bad when he is present. Next up was Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2003), a consideration and enactment of various interpretations of Nat Turner, from William Styron’s to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s to that of the lawyer who interviewed Turner in jail before his hanging. My latest Burnett film is Warming By the Devil’s Fire (2003), a fictionalized tribute to numerous blues masters. It mixes live footage with a moody narrative about a young boy at the crossroads between the life and music of conservative Christian Gospel and the blues.

Daily Music
I guess I am currently a sucker for reasonably poetic lyrics set to pop style melodies. Challengers by the New Pornographers is a lovely album, full of plaintive vocals and catchy hooks. I only wish I could sing like Niko Case. For the record, I am less enamored with other albums by The New Pornographers.

I stumbled across Advice from the Happy Hippopotamus (2005) by Cloud Cult after hearing them do a Seattle studio version of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Pretty introverted lyrics, lots of mixed in electric and mechanical and digital sound, which is hard to sing by oneself in the bathtub. For a chilling and amusing example of how sound can be digitally edited to create a virtual voice, listen to Prez George saying things I don’t believe Prez George has ever said, in “State of the Union” on Aurora Borealis.

Duke Ellington’s recently released Piano in the Foreground is a sampling of the Duke’s brilliant musical reach. He fluidly blends all manner of riffs and traditions, including stride piano, minimalist chords, and the blues, to name a few. In one piece his piano is orchestral, in the next pure and private solo keyboard. What a master.





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