Most recently I have began dating a professional musician; besides doing the typical gigging and being a session artist he also scores video games-he writes the music you hear in the background of mobile media games. His job requires him to write around 40 hours of a music for each project and he doesn't like to repeat songs so how do you come up with all of that music? And not repeat?

Naturally watching game film and imagining what music you would expect to hear in each world during each task would give you ideas but that still leaves much to be desired.
As corny as it sounds I was told his most recent method to attaining to much inspiration-I'm his muse.

(cue all the awwwws and gagging noises and blah blah blah)


Every great artist at one point or another has a muse whether it's their significant other, someone they worship from afar, a family member and maybe even just an idea. Jim Morrison had Pamela Courson, Dante had Beatrice, Chagall had Bella, and Patti Boyd inspired the Beatles as well as Eric Clapton and Valerie Bertenelli inspired David Lee Roth. We all remember from the Odyssey how the muses were three goddesses of the arts. Since then the term muse has evolved to mean any source of great inspiration. Muses play a great role in the arts;  unyielding love is quite an emotion and can be joyous, sad, tortuous, and can drive quite a plotline which is why almost every story involves love right?

I used to be really annoyed and ticked off at how everything had to have some type of theme of love but once you experience how all consuming it is it's hard to NOT see why. Love is an emotion we all experience at some point in our lives no matter how black and dull you believe your soul is. We may not all experience the driving inspiration of a muse but a lot of us will, and again, a muse doesn't have to be your significant other.

Nursery Rhymes and Mutilation

So as I sit here at my laptop realizing my blog post is 2 days late I search the corners of my mind for inspiration to write about. My rabbit is in the cage beside me eating like a horse and it's very loud but comical because he's a bunny and he's so obnoxious when he eats and  he's a bunny and it's cute. I glance over at him and admire his cute little flufflebuttle (proper rabbit anatomy term for butt) and his luxurious yet subtle poofloof(proper rabbit anatomy term for tail). I start to sing this stupid little nursery rhyme like song I wrote for him:

"You have a fluffy buttle, yes you have a fluffy buttle, 
bunnies have fluffy buttles and you have a fluffy buttle,
who has a cute little poof loof, you have a cute little poof loof,
and if that poof loof gets cut off, you still have a fluffy buttle..."

There are more verses but that's the important one, now why did I sing about my rabbit having his tail cut off? Well, his "cousin" Rella -who's my friend Julie's bunny- used to live in a chicken coop; Rella only has a half a tail. Her tail was bit off by one of the chickens when she was younger-Rella still has a fluffy buttle.

I sang about his tail getting cut off for another reason too, do you remember the famous nursery rhyme game thing "Ring Around the Rosey?" We know it was about the plague yes? If you don't now you do.

"Ring around the rosie
pocket full of posie
ashes, ashes, we all fall down..."

Most nursery rhymes and children's stories are pretty gruesome and morbid. "Rock-a-bye baby" has the cradle falling from the tree, and Cinderella's sisters cut their feet off to feet in the glass slipper, that's not rated G! Why are these rhymes-and the Grimm Faerie tales- that way??



Probably because us humans are morbid and many of the popular nursery rhymes are derived from history. Even at that though, why do we sing them to our kids I just don't understand?
I guess that's why we're so creeped out by nursery rhyme sounding music in horror movies, it's just so innocent that it's creepy. So bizarre. What do you think?

The Language of the Future, an appropriate post for the 5th of November.

This idea for my very late blog post came to me, this idea is well worth the one week overdue-ness of this post. I have read "1984" about as many times as I've read "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," "Go Ask Alice," and watched "The Big Lebowski." For those of you who don't know me personally that would be upwards of about 20 times (this is a hyperbole)...((so more like 10)). In George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984" -just read the link to know the plot that's what it's there for-they use this new language-called newspeak-, that changes yearly just about, that is extremely basic in order to inhibit and discourage free thought. There is an entire science behind this language that you can find in the back of my mangled copy of "1984", I will explain some of it here...or I would if I hadn't lent my book to my ex-boyfriend. Anyway I was able to find some of it here...which I will explain below.

The language follows the same grammatical rules as English except much more compressed. Many synonyms and antonyms deemed unnecessary are eliminated as well as any concepts and ideas that the Party disapproves of. "The aim of Newspeak is to remove all shades of meaning from language, leaving simple concepts (pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, goodthink and crimethink) that reinforce the total dominance of the State. Newspeak root words serve as both nouns and verbs, further reducing the total number of words; for example, "think" is both noun and verb, so the word thought is not required and can be abolished. The party also intends that Newspeak be spoken in staccato rhythms with syllables that are easy to pronounce. This will make speech more automatic and unconscious and reduce the likelihood of thought." Another interesting fact that I found is: "Newspeak's contracted forms, such as Ingsoc and Minitrue, are inspired by the Russian syllabic abbreviations used for concepts relating to the government and society of the USSR, such as politburo, Comintern, kolkhoz (collective farm) and Komsomol (Young Communists' League), many of which found their way into the speech of Communists in other countries."

"In addition, words with negative meanings are removed as redundant, so "bad" becomes "ungood". Words with comparative and superlative meanings are also simplified, so "better" becomes "plusgood", and "best" becomes "doubleplus good". Intensifiers can be added, so "great" became "plusgood", and "excellent" and "splendid" become "doubleplus good". This ambiguity between comparative/superlative forms and intensified forms is one of the few examples of ambiguity in Newspeak."

Wikipedia did a nice job of explaining Newspeak and how it's formatted so I figured I'd just paste it there. 

So why did I decide to mention Newspeak, a fictional language in an Orwell novel?

I constantly hear all the time about people griping over vocabulary sheets and wondering why we have so many words for the same exact thing. Naturally, writers love it because you can add color and flavor to your writing and because some words can take the place of 5. Education is power, and having a large vocabulary not only makes you sound smart but frees you because you have the ability to express independent thought and self expression. Newspeak exists to rob the population of their ability to have that power, which is the point Orwell was creating with that language. When I first read the book I never quite understood the concept of Newspeak and why it was so scary, I was disturbed by it but it took me a few years to understand just how serious that is. 

We all know our language is shrinking because certain eloquent words have become less common and instead of have been replaced by "basic bi**" vocabulary and abbreviations such as YOLO, Facebook lingo such as "friending and unfriending" "liking and unlking" having an amount of "likes" on something? Sound like Newspeak? Everyday we are slowly becoming a monotonous culture losing our freedom of expression simply because we are not using it. I am on the verge of a political rant which is no appropriate right now so I will leave you with that to think about. Remember, language is power! Don't take it for granted. 

p.s.-HAPPY GUY FAWKES DAY EVERYBODY!

Remember, remember, the 5th of November...

Let's Talk about Star Wars...

 To be completely honest I had NO IDEA what I was going to write about this week, but Star Wars seemed like a good direction to head in. I guess a good place to start in talking about Star Wars is why is it such a big deal? Well from my own knowledge it was the first film of it's kind with it's advanced technology and story line. Star Wars had special effects that revolutionized the film industry; not to mention when it came out we had just visited the moon not even ten years prior so the "space age" was still all the rage. Another reason I assume Star Wars is such a big deal is because of how Lucas created these crazy new worlds--hm, so did JL Rowling, I guess Harry Potter has this same draw?--, the names for the characters, the character's themselves, and most of all the language and politics of this galaxy far far away.



Now what if I told you that Star Wars, although super cool with the Millenium Falcon, the exploding of the Death Star, Darth Vader and Tatooine wasn't all that ground breaking? It's not! Obviously. No story is really that original, everything's been written before no? Star Wars certainly has it's own story line-enough to make 6 going on 7 movies plus television series like the Clone Wars and all that jazz-but alas it's nothing more than variations of various different OTHER stories written before.


One of Star Wars' most obvious characteristic is it's representation of fantastical archetypes such as knighthood, chivalry, princesses, royalty and the typical "epic hero". You could find elements of Julius Caesar, The Odyssey and maybe even Beowulf within Star Wars. The climax of the series' plot is influenced by the fall of the Roman Republic and rise of the Empire; although that's not a story, it's still a historical event that's happened and not made up out of Lucas' head necessarily. Lucas has been noted saying that he was also influenced by the Lord of the Rings trilogy which has a lot of biblical influence in regards to plot. Lucas was also admittedly heavily influenced by Akira Kurosawa's work such as The Hidden Fortress as well as Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  This is not to say Lucas is a plagiarist, just that he-like all writers-has only written a variation of stories told before him.


I was only able to present you with the influences I was able to source although I have have heard people speculate that Star Wars is based on stories in the bible, or government events, etc...which nobody's here to say it was or wasn't but none the less it was a groundbreaking, impressive film deserving of it's praise. It had more appeal than Star Trek due to it's more romantic, human, hero's as opposed to militaristic types. Star Wars also was less typical science fiction and more mythological and fantastical. So, in a way, Star Wars had more appeal due to it's more traditional less groundbreaking epicness. Guess it's better to recreate the old in a crazy new impressive way than to take too many risks?



P.S.-I met Princess Leia. I have Carrie Fisher's autograph, someday I want a real, movie prop quality, light sabre. I get the nerd points this week.


P.P.S.-I suggest you watch this, it's actually pretty factual, and if you like LOTR you will enjoy this even more...I must warn you it has some rough language.....definite Parental Advisory rated R for language.

The Ice Queen

So my belly dancing troupe did this performance this past Sunday, September 30th, to this song called the "Ice Queen". Originally the instructor had this storyline she made up in her  head she wanted to recreate through dance. She had everyone in the dance cast as some sort of character in the story about this princess who has this gift that these two evil women are trying to get from her but these angels are trying to protect her but get defeated by the evil ones. She never quite finished the story because by then I was added in the dance and messed up the story, plus the dance wasn't completed and she didn't quite figure out how to end the story in the form of dance. I wanted to examine how we perceive story through movement in a very simple way. Was movement the first way we told story? Was movement and spoken word the original storytelling way? Is that way we have "body language?"

Upon trying to research the answers to the questions I only ran into that "dance has told stories for thousands of years," and  ballets. Ballets (in the work sense of the word) essentially are plays with nothing but movement just as operas are nothing but music. I suppose you could say that the answers to those questions respectively is yes, yes, and yes. A lot of what we know about  body language (consider clicking the link I found it quite interesting but not able to mention a lot of the stuff in this single post) when communicating on a daily basis is greatly used in dancing. Body language is almost used more than spoken word when you think about it, how do we understand our pets and how they feel since they can't communicate in our language?I know I can only pick up on what my rabbit says by his body language because he doesn't make noises. We are getting off track here, sorry.

When doing a dance you are trying to express your story without words; you use your facial expressions and movement vocabulary over all else. If you stick your fist in the air you can convey either anger, success, joy, or maybe you won a battle but that all depends on your face. I find it unique how dance contrasts writing so much; in writing you are trying to convey a point without inflections of the voice, body language, or any visual aid of any kind. In dance you are doing the exact opposite, you are using the music and it's tone in sync with your body and that is all. So much can be told in a dance with no words at all. I guess it's so hard to elaborate on such a topic because most of it can only be explained by experiencing it.

Does Anybody Remember Concept Albums?

Being that my favorite band is Pink Floyd-if that's even fair to say since it's so hard to pick one-I am no stranger to (arguably) their most famous album, "The Wall". We've all heard the song with the iconic lyrics "We don't need know education, we don't need no thought control." What some may not have noticed was that that song was only a microcosm of the entire masterpiece; it's merely a chapter in the novel. "The Wall"  is what's known in the music world as a concept album. The question is why are concept albums so amazing? And why aren't they as popular today?

     The Beatles were the first to make the concept album so iconic with "Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band," the concept being the time period and the lifestyle of that time, which is quite different from the apparent story line in "The Wall." Concept albums vary, some like "The Wall" and The Who's "Quadrophenia" have very blatant plot lines while others are more abstract and are left up to the listener to determine the story. In the 60's and 70's concept albums were very popular and made by artist's such as Pink Floyd and The Who as well as Meatloaf, David Bowie, Rush, Styx and Queen. As a songwriter, concept albums can be very fun to create because it gives you a basis on what to write on but they also lock you in. As a listener they are fun to imagine the story as if listening to a movie; when I first heard "The Wall" I was under the impression it had much to do with the Cold War, that's a theme in the album but it was not the central concept. Listening to a concept album and trying to find the concept is like it's own little Easter egg hunt. Concept albums added a whole new artistic element to song writing;  they made the vinyl worth the buy rather than the single as well. So again, why did they seem to die out?

Off the top of my head the only band that I know of today that releases concept albums with distinct story lines would be Coheed and Cambria; they release albums with graphic novels tied together with them. Radiohead is another band that creates concept albums but their's are more abstract such as "Sgt. Pepper's." Some theories are that artist's today don't have enough talent to pull of a concept album, other's say that with iTunes and the ability to download track by track that the concept album would be pointless and lost if people just bought the fraction of the masterpiece. Then there's the argument that concept albums didn't really die, they still exist but as this blog here puts it, they just take a collection of songs they wrote when they wrote when they were sad and throw "depression" a the concept. I suppose you could make an album, find a theme, and THEN make it a concept album, that would be the backwards way to do it. In reference to that blog I linked to you, maybe the concept albums died about because people do see it as a cop out and may not be too fond of an album with a theme to it; from experience, sometimes listening to a concept album becomes grueling because some of the songs represent those chapters in books we've all read that are merely there to fill in plot holes but not much really goes on. So what am I getting at here?

I'm not entirely sure, I just felt like enlightening some of you on some music I guess and I suppose I am reiterating that music is slowly becoming less about art and more about greed. Concept albums barely exist, quality music is fading, and everything's been done before really. Good music doesn't die, so let's all listen to "Animal's" by "Pink Floyd" and relive George Orwell's Animal Farm.