{"id":11405,"date":"2014-07-27T23:59:08","date_gmt":"2014-07-28T03:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=11405"},"modified":"2014-07-28T00:23:29","modified_gmt":"2014-07-28T04:23:29","slug":"sunday-came-and-trashed-me-out-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=11405","title":{"rendered":"Sunday came and trashed me out again"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_0488\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It was a quiet weekend, spent mostly writing or failing to write. (Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.) The word count is slow to increase, but I did make some progress on a short story I’ve been writing. Maybe not enough to meet the deadline I’m trying to write it against, but I’m hoping the deadline itself will light a fire under me. I’ve entertained more ridiculous hopes.<\/p>\n

Writing at my weekly group didn’t go terrifically well, thanks at least in part to a half-assed prompt I was responsible for providing. In fairness, I delegated — “you give a subject, you give a verb, I’ll give an object” — but that probably explains the Frankenstein’s monster of the prompt we eventually wound up with, and the unsatisfying nature of my “story.” I share it partly for filler, and partly because it’s useful for me to remember the free-writing isn’t about creating finely tuned prose, or even necessarily about generating great ideas. It’s about just writing. And like I said up above, sometimes writing is indistinguishable from failing to write:<\/p>\n

The airplane transformed the final note. They hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t heard it live, but in playback, with the rest of the background noise scrubbed from the track, it was obvious that the jetliner had done something strange to the sound. This wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just interference, Max thought. The more he listened, the more he realized that weird background hum started early, messed with the overlay of vocals, pretty much ruined the whole song. If they couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t clean the recording, isolate and excise, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have to dump the whole thing and start over. And the talent wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t going to like that.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the airplane that crashed?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Ben asked. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d flipped the volume down on the boards, but the hum was still there, ringing in Max\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ears.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Disappeared,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153They don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know yet that if it crashed. Or at least they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not saying.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He reached over Ben\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s shoulder and shut the sound off. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153But yeah, it happened later that night. But it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make sense. When we were rolling, the thing was just parked there, sitting on the tarmac.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153And who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s idea was it to record way out there?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d asked Ben.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Who do you think?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Max. He glanced up at the poster tacked to the studio wall. The rest of the band was visible in the background, just barely, but it was obvious who he meant. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Gustav insisted. You wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t believe the hoops we had to jump through with the FAA just to get half an hour at that place.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He sighed. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153But the man loves airplanes. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have done the video there if they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d let us truck in the lights.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Well,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Ben said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know what to tell you. The sound was never going to be clean, but this… Whoever you had with you, they did an okay job rigging the mikes, but… You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re sure there weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a lot of planes flying overhead?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Just the one. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a busy airport, mostly joyriders out on a sunny weekend afternoon. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the only reason we got the permit. I mean, we saw the guy who was heading out on the plane, but he didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even come out of the airport until we left.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Well it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s definitely mechanical,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Ben said, starting the sound back up. You can hear it most at the end, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all over the track. Still, if the plane was shut down and there wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t any other equipment running…\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Just the recording gear,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Max. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The guy, I mean, he had some equipment with him, a couple of crates he was waiting to cart out to the plane. Stuff looked mechanical, maybe. He didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want anybody near them. I dunno, maybe there was something loaded already that was making that sound.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153You say you didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hear it day-of, though.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Ben pointed at the boards. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Something big enough to pump out this, I gotta say you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d probably hear it on the ground.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He listened for a moment, as if lost in a trance. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It sound kind of rhythmic to you?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153What?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Max asked. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153No, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just — \u00e2\u20ac\u0153 But the more he, too, listened, the more he had to admit there did<\/i> seem to be some kind of rhythm to the hum, some kind of pattern, repeating, beyond the background noise. He couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t quite place it — hell, he hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t heard it at all before — but yeah, it might just be there.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Can you pull out the rest?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he asked. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I know you said we couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t wipe the noise, but could we dampen everything else?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153We could try,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Ben said. He reached for the levers, adjusting here and there, with the kind of engineering alchemy that Max had hired him for. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be pretty,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he finally said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153but here it is.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t pretty. It was still too high-pitched, too difficult to really decipher, too much like a hum that rattled angrily in his head. But yes, Max thought, it was something all right, something more than just noise.<\/p>\n

It was a voice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some of that — too much, probably, in fact — owes itself (in a roundabout way) to my having watched the second episode of The Strain<\/i> earlier that morning (while I tried and failed to do the Sunday crossword). It remains, two episodes in, not a very good show, although there also remain elements that work quite well, just obscured by all the stuff that doesn’t work at all. The stuff that doesn’t work, like the creepy vampire designs and the conspiratorial machinations of that storyline, make me want to keep giving it a chance. But man, there are a lot of characters I really don’t care about at all<\/i> in the show, and most of them are supposed to be our heroes.<\/p>\n

Last night, I watched 1947’s Black Narcissus<\/i>, which maybe looks a little better than it actually is. It was a pioneering film in the use of Technicolor, and it (probably deservedly) won an Oscar for Best Cinematography, but I’m not convinced the story was as impressive as the visuals. It also takes a slightly weird turn near the end, becoming almost a horror movie, and while Deborah Kerr and David Farrar are both good, Kathleen Byron may lay on the Sister Crazy Eyes act a little too thick.<\/p>\n

Then this afternoon, after the writing group, we went to see Lucy<\/i>. Did you know, as humans, we make use of only 10% of our ridiculous plot-driven magical powers? It’s true! The movie was a little dumb, but interesting, probably neither as smart as it thought it was nor as silly and entertaining as it might have been. (Like the AV Club’s insightful review<\/a> says: “Calling the whole thing dumb would be a disservice, but not because there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s anything especially smart going on under the movie\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s surface.”) It wasn’t brilliant, but I enjoyed it. Scarlett Johansson is in a surprisingly interesting phase of her career, and if you’re going to get somebody to lend a certain gravitas to dopey pseudoscience<\/a>, you could do a lot<\/i> worse than Morgan Freeman.<\/p>\n

Anyway, that was about it as far as my weekend goes. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was a quiet weekend, spent mostly writing or failing to write. (Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.) The word count is slow to increase, but I did make some progress on a short story I’ve been writing. Maybe not enough to meet the deadline I’m trying to write it against, but I’m hoping … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14,28,17,12],"class_list":["post-11405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-movies","tag-personal","tag-tv","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11405"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11405"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11407,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11405\/revisions\/11407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}