Remix the Ring

wow. well I'm feeling a whole helluva load off...

spent the last 10 days making two remixes of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries for a contest for CBC's Freestyle called "Remix the Ring"...first one (named "Brynhildr") took me about four days and still is not perfect, but I got to the point where I couldn't hear my way to fixing it. It's good, but probably won't win anything.

the second ("Sigrún"), ironically, took me 5 hours a couple days ago - got home, had dinner, then got to work and recorded from 6:30 to 11:30 - and is WAY better: more cohesive, more melodic, almost more clever (though version 1 is in 7/8, which was really hard to do)... has me playing muted trumpet against the melodic line of the Valkyries, which is reharmed - almost treating the recording like a backing orchestra for a Miles & Gil Evans session...

SO. at the end of the month, CBC judges will award 10 finalists $250, and then the public gets to vote on the best one, who is then awarded another $750.

We shall see. Going to have to work hard not to fret about it. and who knows... maybe I'll come up something brilliant in PEI too...

BT

The Corners of my Mind (part III)

...was just reading over past posts, and realized there are a couple of significant memories that pop up all the time that I have not yet committed to blog.

the first is really mortifying, which is perhaps why it plagues me:

in college, my girlfriend and I had some people over for dinner, and just before we ate I let out the most enormous fart. You could almost taste it. I apologized motifi-ed-ly and ran to the bathroom and got matches, while all other diners sat in catatonic silence. The way I remember it, though, it seems like everything slowed down, and almost like our two guests didn't notice at all, which simply is *not* possible unless they were really high or something, and in fact that's a distinct probability. So whenever this memory (/nightmare) crops up, I try to console myself with the idea that our guests were too far gone to notice anything.

a boy can dream.

I also regularly have a number of driving incident flashbacks, whereby I got in way way too deep with some insanely aggressive driver or another on the highway (NB yes, this has happened more than once) and I realize I was probably moments away from getting shot or rammed or something similarly horrible. In fact, in many of those cases, I'm not sure why something really awful didn't happen.

man.

Liquid fear

Ever see that Itchy and Scratchy short on the Simpsons where they fight against each other with bigger and bigger guns, until eventually they're firing six-shooters the size of the globe over the edge of the horizon at each other?

This morning I woke up at like 5:30 and couldn't get back to sleep. I tossed and turned and petted the cats and tossed some more and went to the bathroom and then finally at 7am, knowing I was done for and that I needed to get my blood going so I'd have energy to last the day, I went for a run. I got home (having only stopped to walk twice!), and as I was rehydrating furiously and stretching carefully I turned on the news, as I often like to do in the morning before work... get a sense of the shape of the world for the day.

What came up, of course, was the news of the terrorist plot to bomb planes leaving Heathrow airport in London that were bound for the US (from what I understand, primarily NY, DC, and LA). Switching alternately between CTV, CNN, and CBC (I like to try to get a balanced perspective), I discovered all the terrible details and the new restrictions imposed on travellers (i.e. no carry-on luggage and absolutely no liquid), and that it had been discovered that terrorists had now learned to mix together chemicals and come up with clear liquid explosives that might pass for hair gel or something, and could then be carried on and used to blow up planes.

You know all this, of course, but what I suddenly realized was that this "War on Terror" is really only so much rhetoric because terror, almost by definition, does not have a nationality or a governing body, and so even if you detroyed all the terrorists on the planet today, tomorrow twice as many would show up to take their place. And so we have this reactionary snowball effect... which serves the purposes of the US war machine perfectly, because from what I can tell this could be a perpetual threat: terrorists attack, nations react, terrorists attack again, nations react more... etc. In fact, it's all being played out rather metafictionally with Israel and Lebanon right now, like the play in Hamlet or the play within a play within a play in Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Or like actual Old Testament events being seen as a foreshadowing of things to come in the New Testament.

I'll say this: the "war on terror" is brilliant. Whoever suddenly realized the potential for the incredible longevity of the thing is genius, and then (whether or not it was purposely manufactured) 9/11 happened and made it possible for the wheels to be set in motion, and now here we are, 5 years on, with no end in sight (on the contrary, all we can foresee is declaration after declaration of new enemies in this war "against the enemies of freedom" e.g. North Korea, Iran, Syria...). Mine was the first generation in ages to grow up without war, and now - particularly now that our daughter will be born in October - I worry that the next generation will not know anything but.