Will the 80’s save the day?

25 April 2008 | 5 Comments

I am on a serious screenplay deadline today. I have a lot of work to do, much of it only requested yesterday.

I need a miracle.

And so I have pulled out one of my secret writing weapons — the playlist I like to call “The 80’s and Their Friends.” Although most of them aren’t even 80’s songs…. they are basically songs I like from about 1969 through 1992, but they’ve all got that certain something, and besides, I like calling the playlist that. So that’s what I call it.

I don’t have time to list them all for you (because I’m on a deadline!) but they include:

Midnight at the Oasis
Relax
Born To Be Wild
Black Water
Brother Louie
That Lady
Rock On
Suffragette City
Radar Love
Kitty’s Back (extra credit points if you know who did this song without having to look it up)
Hungry Like the Wolf
Bad Medicine
and my favoritest song in the world if I could only pick one, The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys

Now let’s see if this set of supersongs can save the day….

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, music, screenwriting

Not this year(2) - 30th reunion

22 April 2008 | 2 Comments

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.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, life, music, reading, virtual pint archives

Vid it

10 April 2008 | 2 Comments

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.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, movies, music

Like a Song: Elevation

17 February 2008 | Leave a Comment

A new Like a Song essay for @U2. You can find my other work for @U2 here.

Enjoy.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, music, news

Girls rock

12 February 2008 | Leave a Comment

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.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, movies, music

Sweeney Todd…

8 January 2008 | Leave a Comment

…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.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, movies, music

EW thinks @U2 rocks!

21 December 2007 | Leave a Comment

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!

Waiting in the GA line to see U2

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.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, music, news, writing

Sounds like Paradise to me

19 December 2007 | 2 Comments

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.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, music