photos
bondage is progress
Oh, the things I'll do for my art.
Last night E tied me to a chair in the middle of our freshly painted dining room so I could research my novel.
You see, last night I was blasting out words at an amazing pace on the El when it came time for my protagonist to be cuffed to a chair.
Despite many contortions on the El, I couldn’t figure out how far he could stretch, or if he could stand up and walk. The lack of detail was killing me. My nonstop flow of words dried to a trickle.
I hurried down our street, rereading what I had written on my laptop, only twice stumbling off of the sidewalk and into hedges. I unlocked our front door, flung it open, and announced to E:
Honey, I need to you to tie me to a folding chair and take pictures of it!
**
I’ve always been afraid that I don’t know enough to be an author.
I’m obsessive about details. I always have been. As a kid I would compare stacks GI Joe file cards to make sure their stories were consistent.
Oh the irony: Gina the chemist is writing a book and a blog, and Peter the communicator is learning chemistry.
I love getting lost in the fictional histories other authors have created, but I never thought I could create one of my own. I mean, have you watched the special features on the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition DVD? Tolkien wrote entire history books about his fictional world. He wrote a frickin’ language!
Me? I’m not well-traveled. I don’t know much about history. I haven’t taken science class since the 90s. I don’t know how anything works or how to take it apart or how to turn it into a bomb. I don’t even know the right way to describe a lot of things, like architecture or clothes.
That’s why I like writing songs. Songs have their own internal logic. Sure, they might reference something in the real world, but only for a word or two.
We learned that I would have to make an excuse for the character's feet not to be secured, because I was a deadly weapon with the folding chair tied to me.
Late in September Gina challenged me to do National Novel Writing Month. I didn’t say yes right away. I spent all of October outlining my story and sketching the details of my characters. If I was going to join I wanted a mythology of my own.
While I outlined I hit a lot of gaps in my knowledge, but I didn’t let them stop me. I’m smart. I can acquire knowledge. Better to start out with ideas.
A few of my characters do things that involve some pretty intense knowledge of chemistry and physics. In my outline I glossed over the details, but now it’s time to write about them. I can’t always be asking Gina about every little detail, so to get started I bought Chemistry for Dummies.
And, last night I needed to find out how hard a character could swing a folding chair he was flexicuffed to in order to knock out another character, so I had E tie me up and take photographs of it.
Why? Because that’s what an author does.
Three Portraits from Paris
Your guitar plays great songs!
There’s a meme I keep seeing on Twitter to the effect of, “Telling a photographer their camera ‘takes good pictures’ is like telling a cook their oven bakes good cake.”
I will tell you, I got my back up a little about this. Sometimes your ability to do good work is truly limited by the quality of the tool of production.
I don’t know if a good cook could produce great work in my Sophomore year oven. Honestly, to this day I’m not conclusively sure the thing heated up past 200 degrees.
In my contrary angst I clicked through the meme to a delightful blog post from photographer Erin Farrell, who maybe was the patient zero of this wave of strident photogs? Erin put “takes good pictures” to the test – handing her pro camera to her amateur brother to shoot a friend’s daughter, and then shooting that same girl in the same location herself.
The results? You have to read her post to see, but the essence is that even her brother’s best shot with a heavy-hand of pro touch-up doesn’t compete with her middling shots directly out of camera.
Touché, Erin.
Then I thought about guitars. What if someone stopped me after a show and said, “your guitar plays great songs!”
I think that phrase is more illustrative of the photographer’s dilemma than the camera example, because the divisions are clearer. A guitar isn’t as smart as a camera – it has no automatic mode; it can’t focus on faces. As the songwriter, I’m the one who dreamed up the melody, wrote down the words, and decided on the arrangement and dynamics.
The guitar can’t do any of that for me. Like the photographer, it results from my skill and years of experience.
What the guitar did was give it tone. Depth. Credibility. If your favorite guitar player played your favorite song on a crappy guitar it would still be your favorite song, but it wouldn’t ring as true as their original. I am not a huge guitar snob, nor am I the best guitar player, but I categorically won’t play on other people’s guitars – my guitar is as much a part of my sound as my voice.
If an aspiring songwriter told me “your guitar plays great songs” (and they have, more or less, because I love to let other people play my guitar), I would thank them and tell them about Breedloves and why I like playing them. Because, even if my songs might be better than their song at the moment, the better tool is going to help level the playing field – and help them improve.
In short, the nicer guitar will play great songs.
That, in turn, made me think about cameras again. E is a degreed photographer, and I love her prosumer Pentax digital camera. In Paris she frequently let me shoot with it even though I also had a low-end “point and click” camera to shoot with.
Below are two photos of one of my favorite works of art, Cupid and Psyche, which lives in the Louvre. Both were taken by me with no coaching from E, though with different cameras on different days and with different light. Both are the best shot I took out of many with each of their respective camera, based on the limits thereof.
Which camera took the “great” picture? Click through for full size.
Bottom line? Some cameras take great pictures, and some guitars play great songs – but they need a certain alchemy from the taker and the player to do their magic.
Whuffaoke or Bust
I don’t have it in me to articulate today’s adventures quite yet, but:
Whuffaoke is a country-spanning karaoke tour based out of one amazing winnebago. They are also some of the sweetest people I have ever met. Over the course of seven hours I sang “Video Killed the Radio Star,” “Since U Been Gone,” “Semi-Charmed Life,” “Time Is Running Out,” “Don’t You Want Me,” and – amazingly, as I’ve never performed it before – “Here We Go Again” by Whitesnake.
In addition to not having it in me to articulate, I think I may have also lost the power of speech.
Whuffaoke continues on Monday at 13th and Sansom at 5pm sharp. Be there.