music – Page 7 – Kelley Eskridge

Not this year(2) – 30th reunion

A series of posts about things I thought or hoped or feared I would do in 2008.

At the end of May, when Nicola and I are in LA reading, drinking, meeting folks and taking the sun (at least I hope so — it just started snowing again here, clearly the weather is broken), my 30th high school reunion will happen on the campus of the boarding school in New Hampshire that I attended for four years. Since we don’t have transporters yet, I’ll miss it. (Note to Scientists: where is all the Star Trek technology that was supposed to make my life so convenient?)

I had a blast at my 25th reunion. I hope the 30th will be as great for the folks who are there.

Things I will miss about this reunion:

Seeing old friends — Nora, Holly, Els, John and Beret, Carolyn, Edie, Hobson.

Here are some pictures of some of us at the 25th reunion in 2003.

Seeing the school — So much beauty. But it’s a different place now, too, and that is both right and a bit hard. It’s not “my school” anymore. (Hmm. I seem to be doing a lot of thinking right now about things that are no longer mine… see previous post about Wiscon.) But my school is alive in me in the way of the best memory — so vibrant and integral that even the changed reality doesn’t dislodge it. I don’t know… it’s funny how being there for the 25th and seeing the graduating students made me so conscious of my age and at the same time feel like 17 again.

Being in the boat — I have to preface this by saying that I am the least athletic person I know. So it’s very funny that I have a JV and a Varsity letter in anything, especially crew. It’s even more funny when you know that I was the tallest cox in the world and therefore weighed more (even at 110 pounds I was at least 20 pounds heavier than a cox was supposed to be). But the women who rowed in my boats were amazing, strong, focused, and so gutsy… (no pun intended, since rowing is the kind of sport where people throw up over the side of the boat when the race is over, especially if they’ve been rowing hard enough to win).

We were a great crew, and at these reunions we gather whoever is there from the original crew, round up other willing folk to fill the open slots, and go out on the water together again. The faculty person in charge of the boats that day always looks nervous as hell in the repressed But we can’t piss off the alumni way. Nora, who was the stroke of our boat, always has to remind me of at least one vocabulary term. And every time, the women of the crew are so beautiful on the water. We had so many powerful moments in that boat, training and winning and learning to pull together. My experience with crew is still one of the Great Happy Anomalies of my life.

I’ve written about the 25th reunion and my experience at school at length over the years, and have imported those posts from the Virtual Pint section of my old website for anyone who’s interested.

In chronological and conversational order:

Enjoy. And if you’d like to start a conversation, please do so — it’s easy. Or come back later and use the link on the sidebar, and let’s talk. Some of the stories and realizations that have been most important to me over the years have come directly out of these online conversations, and I’m always grateful for them.

Vid it

Have you heard of vidding?

Buy the DVDs of your favorite TV show or movie. Get a kickass piece of music. Load up some software. And put together diverse images and brief clips to make a music video. Chart your love for a character or relationship, explore a theme or arc. Express your connection to the show.

Tell your own story about the story that you love. To music that you love. How cool is that?

We have the technology these days to allow pretty much anyone with a computer to respond to art if they choose — by blogging, creating fan websites and community, mashing up, posting fan fiction, costuming, vidding. I love this. What joy, to be able to respond to what moves us.

Although I’m a writer, I don’t find my kicks in fan fiction even when it involves characters or stories that I love. My heart belongs to mashups and vidding, and when I think of responding to someone else’s art, it almost always involves music. I think I love these forms so much because they give me indirect access to something I yearn to do directly, but cannot. I can play music well enough, but I’m not a musician. I’m not an artist. But if I cannot create my own music, I can still choose to create something original and meaningful (to me) with someone else’s music.

Some feel that using images and music in this way is stealing. And technically, in fact, it is. But although I am a hedgehog (very prickly) about many aspects of nicking someone else’s art (see this, for example), in the case of using art to respond to art, well, I’m all for it. Nicola talked recently about fan fiction, and I agree with her — we should all be free to play. We should all be free to show our joy. We shouldn’t steal unpublished work, and we shouldn’t steal the financial benefits of published work. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Any artist who believes they can maintain total control over every comma or pixel or note of their work is dreaming — and so why would anyone start that fight over a three-minute music video that does nothing but show love?

This is the best vid I know of, made by y-fish. It uses clips from Firefly and Serenity, and the song “Defying Gravity” from the Broadway show Wicked. I think it’s great. If you like it, let her know.

(And if you visit y-fish’s LiveJournal, be sure to note that the first comment on this vid is from Joss Whedon, the creator (along with Tim Minear) of Firefly and Serenity, who is totally non-grumpy about this use of his work. About this love.)

I wish there were a way to respond like this to a novel or short story. Imagine. Wow. If someone did something like this in response to my work, I would cry like a baby and count myself blessed.

Like a Song: Elevation

This is an essay I wrote for @U2, where I am a staff writer. It’s part of an @U2 series called Like a Song, in which staff members offer personal reflections on U2 songs.

Let’s talk about joy.

I am standing in front of the stage with a heart like a jackhammer and a soul ready to take off, a kite that only wants a strong wind. The power of music: to make us fly. I’ve sat on a cold Seattle sidewalk for 12 hours and stood crammed in this crowd for another three, waiting, waiting, wanting to soar. The power of music: to make us feel. And now the crowd is roaring: we are a hurricane of noise, and the eye of our storm is U2, taking the stage, taking a scan of the arena, and then taking us all to the places we all want to go. The power of music: to show me myself in a song. To remind me tonight that I am large inside, so much bigger than the tiny boxes that everyday life sometimes tries to squeeze me into. Tonight I am a creature of hope and love and joy, and there is no better song than “Elevation.”

High
Higher than the sun
You shoot me from a gun
I need you to elevate me here

I listen to U2’s music at different times for different reasons â to feel the fierce abandon of “The Fly,” the anger of “Mofo,” the yearning of “Streets.” Because a song describes a desire so private that I can’t, or won’t, seek it anywhere except inside the music. Or because I need to put a name to some specific pain so I can cry over it, and begin to be healed. The power of music: a stranger sings our innermost self. I put U2 in my headphones to hear myself, and the songs I like best are the ones that are most about me.

But I come to the concerts to see four men make the music happen right in front of me, and here the songs I like best are the ones that are most about them. Forget about being pulled up to dance, or getting the autograph outside the stage door. That’s not where the real juice is. If you want to meet the band, then watch them make their music, because in the instant when they give themselves over to it you will see their souls. You will know all about them in those moments. I have seen their fierceness and their anger and their yearning. And I have seen “Elevation” live, and know that whatever else they may be, Adam, Larry, Edge and Bono are people of joy.

See for yourself.

This is the 2001 Slane performance of “Elevation,” full of joy. The power of love to bring us out of the dark of ourselves into the sun. The jazz of the four-way relationship, the heightened awareness of each other that comes from 25 years of playing together: you can feel it when they share a look, when they lean toward each other for a note.

And above all, there is the sheer joy of making music. Bono can’t wait: he howls it out as the audience quivers in the moment, and then Larry counts them in tap tap tap tap, brings his sticks down BLAM and the lights come up and Bono leaps into the song. Watch it fill him so completely that it propels him around the stage and makes his body move, move, move. Watch Adam lean into the music and smile that private smile. Watch Edge dance with his guitar as Bono sings about jubilation. Watch for that twirl of Larry’s drumsticks at the end. And look at Bono smile as he walks back toward his band. That, my friends, is the joy of U2.

You make me feel like I can fly
So high
Elevation

The power of music: our worlds collide and I am sharing soul with my Irish brothers, whom I never love so much as in these moments when they sing themselves and take me with them. Not let’s get naked love or some kind of worship, but the electric connection of shared humanity: they are full of joy, and so I am too. It’s such a human thing to do, to show our souls and make joy for each other. And that’s why I come. That’s why I wait in line and stand until my back is frozen and offer up my heart. I come to see U2 be human and make music. I come for the joy of it.

Girls rock

Everyone is beautiful in their own way, and they get even more beautiful when they start to be powerful and they decide to rock. —from Girls Rock!

Go watch some beautiful powerful girls.

Sweeney Todd…

…absolutely rocks.

I fell in love with the play in the 80’s. I’m not a huge fan of what I think of as typical Broadway musicals or Broadway singing — if I hear one more orange-haired moppet belt out “Tomorrow” in a size 20 voice, I will absolutely run screaming from the room. But Sweeney Todd worked because the songs work as story, not just as vehicles for voice.

And now we have Tim Burton and his vision for Sweeney, and it’s fantastic. Dark, sophisticated, visceral in a way that is both cartoonish and gut-churning (seriously, when the first guy lands on the pavement, I just about lost my popcorn…). This is a streamlined Sweeney, and it’s a naturalistic one. Many of the talented cast don’t have trained voices, and the ones who do are forgoing Broadway-belt-it-out in favor of showing us who and where they are, and why. Telling us a story of themselves, or giving us a window into themselves at a moment of crisis. I love this naturalistic approach to music. I’d much rather watch an actor sell a song than simply sing it to the back row.

In particular, I think the duets benefit from this approach, as well as from the intimacy of the camera. If songs are story, then duets are relationship, and these are so nuanced and compelling… great stuff. A grownup movie with strong performances and all the grand guignol that Sweeney Todd demands.

*****

And while we’re at it, I am so so so so excited about this. Heath Ledger is going to be amazing, I can just tell.

God, I love the movies.

22 January

Edited to add: And now he’ll never be amazing in anything again. God damn it, anyway.

EW thinks @U2 rocks!

Entertainment Weekly has just published its list of the 25 Essential Fan Sites of 2007, and I’m totally jazzed that @U2, the U2 fan website I write for, is #4. We are the highest-rated music website on the list. Congratulations to the amazing @U2 staff. I’m proud to be among you.

If you’re interested, you can read my @U2 articles here. But don’t stop there — stay at @U2 for great interviews, essays, news reports, album and concert reviews, and more.

@U2 is special not just for its content, but for the quality of the writing, the wonderful sense of teamwork among the staff, and the great leadership of our founder and editor, Matt McGee. I’ve said before that Matt is one of two or three people on the planet that I’d actually consider working for in a real job… and I’m pretty picky these days.

And Matt’s writing a very cool book!

My total fangirl goobiness is revealed.
I waited in this line for 12 hours to see U2 in Seattle in 2005. And once inside, I got supremely lucky and ended up in the front row, 8 feet from the band. There is nothing like seeing the music being made, nothing like it. It was a beautiful night.

Sounds like Paradise to me

I love music, and this is my love letter to Radio Paradise. I feel like I just wandered into a party where all my favorite music showed up and brought its friends. I have been hanging out in the space between my headphones with album cuts from The Cure, David Bowie, Golden Earring (Radar Love!), Ani DiFranco, Pearl Jam, The Shins, Jeff Beck, John Martyn, Thievery Corporation, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Morcheeba, Cocteau Twins, Beth Orton….

Amazing programming by Bill Goldsmith. It’s nice to be in the hands of an expert. Go check out the playlist for yourself. Go have a listen.

When was the last time you heard something on commercial radio that you had to have right now? Stations like Radio Paradise and sites like Pandora, along with MySpace, are where most people find their new music these days. And then they go the band website to check it out, listen to the tracks, download a few for free from the site or for pennies from the million music services out there. They watch the videos and sign up on the fan club lists. They trade bootlegs of live shows on torrent sites. And they pretty much utterly ignore the music labels’ circus-pony marketing campaigns, the print ads in Rolling Stone and the MTV appearances and the pay-to-play arrangements with commercial radio. The labels are starting to figure out they aren’t in charge of music anymore…

And here’s Radio Paradise, a seriously cool 21st-century operation: a human touch on music and a high-tech delivery system that offers a wide variety of streaming options and handles programming through multiple server locations that can be controlled by a laptop from anywhere in the world. They’re building interactive community around music (and that’s so important, because art is not a one-way street). They don’t accept advertisers. The whole shebang is run by two people who clearly know music, really know music and love it. They do it all on listener support, and they certainly have mine — I’ve heard more amazing music in the last couple of weeks on RP than in the last five years of radio in my car.

I have found my party, and now I can go back anytime I want.

You’re invited too.

Edited to add: Traffic! And Michelle Shocked, Suzanne Vega’s Blood Makes Noise, and Pearl Jam’s live Black! And that’s just in the last 6 hours… I love this station.

The variety of art

Kelley – I read for a lot of reasons – some of which are – to learn, feel, experience, contemplate, confront, dream, and transcend. Sometimes I seek solace, a new way of approaching life, or the unexpected. The stories that have the most impact on me become a world unto themselves – these are my favorites and I will read everything I can get my hands on by that author [or musician or director in other mediums]. What they have written lives on forever in my psyche. Solitaire is one of those books.

You taught me something important. I am a solo and I need to do some [more] online editing. And I am fortunate to have my own web.

Jackal and her world have intersected mine and I am grateful.

I enjoy the links and referrals by you and your readers. I am looking forward to reading more. Thank you.

Chela

And thank you. I do this myself with books and music, and can’t imagine how I could be myself without them moving through me like tides. I’m honored that you would include Solitaire on your list of things that work in you this way.

It’s interesting to think about the difference for me between books, music, and visual media in this context.

I give my heart to a TV show every so often, one led by a really good writer/director whose vision shapes all aspects of the experience (Buffy, Firefly, The West Wing, My So-Called Life, and does anyone remember Wizards and Warriors from the early 80’s? I loved that show.)

Movies are different. I tend to think of them as a more singular experience rather than part of a spectrum of work. I have a few favorite actors whose work I will seek out, but I don’t make the same commitment to directors and screenwriters. I’m partial to some (Peter Weir, John Sayles) but I don’t form the same passionate attachments that I do to authors and musicians. Hmm, she said, thinking, thinking. I wonder if this is perhaps because I recognize movies as collaborative, and what I am talking about rightnow is being drawn to the work of the individual? Auteur television falls somewhere in the middle ground. And of course no artist is free of the influence of others: in some ways, we’re all collaborating with the world in general and our own lives in particular. We are all editing online, all the time.

I love movies and television and theatre: I love the total sensory experience, and the complexity of so many elements coming together. Successful collaboration is a particular thrill to participate in, and to witness, and I’ve had some amazing emotional experiences in these situations. But I find my most powerful connection and recognition with books and music, where I am more free to consider the experience from multiple perspectives. It fascinates me that movies are a collaborative effort to present a unified vision, and fiction is an individual effort to present an experience that can be entered into in multiple ways. At least, that’s how it works for me. And music: well, for me, it’s the express train to places sometimes too deep for words alone.

I am not a plant

There’s a discussion on Nicola’s website (scroll down to the last question) about the role of music in her work. I’m curious about how you use music in your writing? Thanks.

Anonymous

I’ve been enjoying that conversation. Music has always been essential to me, but it took that question and Nicola’s response to make me think in more detail about how I feel about music and how I use it in my work.

I’m a verbally-centered person. Language is my primary tool to ground myself, to express myself, to connect with others. That’s part of the writing deal, of course, but it can be limiting. Some things are not so easily expressed in words. Sometimes a person just has to dance, or cry, or throw their arms out and try to hug the world. Music is my conduit to this part of myself.

There are things I’ve learned about myself only through particular pieces of music that have taken hold of me throughout my life. Music is one of the few things in the world that I respond to by wanting to move, to feel, to think, all at the same time, instead of giving preference to thinking as I often do. And it has meaning for me beyond just the words and the beat. Some music has become a part of my self-identity in a way that’s hard to articulate – not just I like this or I get this but I am this: this particular intersection of rhythm and voice and word and sound is about me, for me, of me.

My work so far tends either to use music overtly in this way, or to pretty much ignore it as an emotional force and just treat it as another feature of the environment. Strings is an example of the former, as is my most recent (unpublished) story in which a woman imagines herself a rock star. Those stories are, in one particular way, the most revealing and personal pieces of fiction I have written. In Solitaire, music is background.

It’s hard for me to imagine using music in my work the way Nicola does in hers. We have a fair amount of overlap in our musical tastes, but we experience even the music in very different ways. What a surprise (ironic smile): Nicola and I are different. Different people, different writers. Segue to one of my hot buttons: I get grumpy sometimes at assumptions that my work must automatically always be informed by hers, as if she were the sun and all the rest of us are plants or something. Someone commented online a while ago that since Nicola and I are partners, I had clearly modeled Solitaire on the themes of Slow River. I find this more annoying than I can possibly express.

Please don’t misunderstand me, I am not slamming your question – in fact, I appreciate the careful setting of context (“this discussion on Nicola’s website made me wonder…”) without the actual request to “please compare and contrast yourself to Nicola.” And of course I do compare and contrast myself to her, as she does to me. Maybe I should give her approach to music-in-fiction a whirl just to see how it goes. It’s good to stretch. But I’m not sure that I could assign specific pieces of music to a moment in the story without wanting to go all the way with it and turn it into the sort of experience for the character that it is for me. And that’s not always right for the work.

As I write this, I am listening to what I think of as the early Aerosmith “trilogy”: Get Your Wings, Toys in the Attic, and Rocks. Steven Tyler is wailing about being back in the saddle again. The bass line kicks ass. I am dancing in my chair. Time to go do some work.

Reunion

Greetings and cheers to everyone in the Dream Pub. This one is my round, while I explain where I’ve been – up to my ears in ASL studies and events, banging my head against the new book, and working on a project, more about which below. Lots of doing with not enough time for thinking or feeling or just being, until recently.

Some of it’s just timing, the conjunction of: end of the term in ASL school with the attendant papers and exams and commitments; the latest issue of the newsletter that I do layout for; a certain number of happy but inconvenient social activities; and emotional and practical preparations for a Big Event.

Last weekend I went to my 25th high school reunion at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. Exuberance alert: my years at school were an incredibly special time and place for me, and I am still bubbling from my reunion experience. I will not dwell on the relative unhappiness of grammar school, although if anyone really wants to hear the story of the 4th grade history teacher, just ask… And from that, I went to four years of living and learning and growing in a place of privilege and dreams. To this socially isolated low-income kid from the South, it was Narnia. I walked through an unexpected door into a magical place where I could dare to connect, learn how to think, practice autonomy, flex my imagination, use my brains. Challenge my assumptions. Invent a self I liked better. Change my prospects. A place where I had some measure of personal power. All of this tucked away in nearly 2,000 acres of old brick buildings and woods and lakes and sky, where it was dark enough at night to see the stars and I always felt safe.

Of course, it mattered that I didn’t have the right clothes or vacation destinations. I learned some hard lessons about different worlds, about class and status and behavior. I experienced the impact of other people’s assumptions. I made a lot of assumptions of my own. Blah, blah. Going there was one of the five best decisions I’ve ever made. It shaped me in ways I’m still learning to understand.

So: it’s 25 years later and here comes the reunion. There was no question about going: it’s been on my radar for a couple of years. I decided several months ago that I’d like to give a gift to my Form (i.e. my class, the Form of 1978) – a compilation CD of music that was playing in our dorms, our dances, in the Coffeehouse where we went to smoke cigarettes at night. The organizers liked the idea well enough that it became one of the official reunion mementos. So for the last couple of months I’ve been selecting music (my choices and suggestions from classmates), editing the mix into a 2-CD set, and making an insert booklet and labels. The booklet includes a high-school photo of everyone I could find, roughly 125 people.

I had a great time doing this. It was a huge amount of work, but that’s what makes it a gift. And it helped me be ready to go into the reunion with my arms and mind and heart wide open, and no expectations. Even though I didn’t exchange more than a few words with some of these folks for the entire time we were in school, we were still a part of the fabric of each other’s daily lives. We lived in dorms together. We ate our meals in each other’s company. We were on teams and in clubs and at the Coffeehouse together. We passed each other in various stages of inebriation on the way to or from the woods on Saturday nights. We grew up together, and what I learned this weekend is that it matters. In some ways these people are my family.

So here we came, more than half of us, mostly happy with ourselves, eager to see each other, with the adolescent divisions seemingly dissolved, or at least in abeyance. I heard so many fascinating stories and had a glimpse of such different lives. Some of the re-connections will last, and some will not survive the daily distractions of all our lives, but that’s just details: the bottom line is we had so much fucking fun that it makes me smile to write about it, and it was the kind of fun that comes from being connected, even on the most tenuous level, for more than half our lives. Another lesson: the wheel goes around.

Unreformed: SPS 1978 – Disc 1