Trombones, and Other Things Your Mother May Have Warned You About

So!  This is a belated birthday present for a friend (and surprise reader!) who asked for an update.

First of all, the hiatus was unintended and the result of a bunch of things, some of which look a little bit like this, except with less video store and a lot more mismatched socks.  (It's the little things.)  More on that later someday, maybe.

So I'm hoping to start writing a little more regularly in this space, and to start with, I want to post about screenwriter John August's post about music education.  John August had a column about screenwriting on IMDB, which I really enjoyed reading back when I first started writing (not that I was doing screenwriting, but I found his posts about the process and the business really interesting).  But I'm bothered by this recent post about teaching kids piano and guitar instead of traditional band instruments.  Since he invited folks who disagreed to respond on their own blogs, I thought I'd take him up on it.

So, first, a little background.  My mom started me on piano lessons with a high school girl who lived up the street from us when I was six or so, and my brother followed when he was old enough.  This particular high school girl had a voice like an angel, a cat named Ten Speed, a mother who was a professional violinist, and a dance studio in her basement.  I took piano lessons from her for about eight years, and then took lessons on and off through high school, where I played  piano in the jazz band for a couple of years.  I?  Was not good at the piano.  And I was really not good at jazz piano.  I haven't touched a piano in at least eleven years.  My parents still own one, but I probably never will, and even if I wanted one (...and I do, sort of), it'd be incredibly unlikely I'd have a place to keep it.

In fourth grade, I picked the flute, because it was the least expensive instrument to rent.  (True story.  I was a strange little kid.)  I don't know what it's like other places, but where I grew up they start you in fourth grade on the recorder, and then you can pick an instrument or not.  Most kids eventually drop out between the end of fourth grade and the start of high school, but there were a fair number of kids who stuck with it through eighth grade.  And our bands were, no question, terrible.  Our teacher was a harried guy who, I think, viewed his job as making sure we could make semi-coherent noise with our instruments.  And, to be fair, he was one guy, responsible for teaching music to four hundred kids and mounting a Christmas concert and a spring concert every year with tiny kids singing and fourth and fifth grade and middle school bands, all of which had exactly one 43-minute period a week in which to rehearse.  Hence the harried.  We didn't learn scales, or how to play in tune, or how to make things sound nice.  We learned to read music and make sound, period.  On some level I pity the parents who had to sit through that shit; on the other hand, you get what you pay for.

I played the flute through high school and college.  In high school, I learned to play clarinet (not well) for pep band and vibraphone (also not well) for jazz band.  In college I picked up the baritone horn because our band was short on low brass, and I taught myself how to play the bassoon, just for funsies.  I still play the flute in a community band and have done so in most of the places I've lived since college.    

Anyway, I get what John August is saying.  It is not fun to listen to your kid learn to play an instrument.  I expect that the piano is actually not really much less painful than listening to a kid manhandle a trombone or a violin or whatever.  So is that a good reason to switch from the model I grew up with (which I gather is reasonably similar to what happens in most places in the U.S.) to something like what he proposes, like group piano lessons or group guitar lessons?  Well, I don't think so.  Part of the reason why is that so many of the good things that have happened to me and that I've done in my life have been because of band - trips, friendships, meeting interesting and sometimes famous people, confidence, my love affair with vodka.  (Okay, maybe not that last thing.)  I learned how to work together with a group of people to make something that was bigger than the sum of our individual contributions, how to push myself to do things beyond my confidence level and skill set, how to play foosball, and how to presort bulk mailings to be sent via U.S. Postal Service.   Some of these are useful in my daily life; others, not so much.

I'm not sure you get that kind of experience from group instrument lessons, even lessons in instruments you could in theory continue to play by yourself to make actual music once you're out of a school band environment.  There's not a lot out there written for twelve pianos, or fifteen guitars.  This isn't to say that learning those instruments is a waste of time or anything, but it's a different kind of thing.  And there are a lot fewer institutional opportunities to make music on either of those instruments than there are for people who play a band instrument.  There are no pep bands made of pianos.  It's extraordinarily difficult to march with one.

August makes a good point about the value of learning about chords and chord progression, which is much harder to do when you're learning an instrument that only plays one note at a time, but it's not impossible.  There are theory courses, and kids who study with a good band director will learn something about those concepts as part of making music in a group environment.  (My understanding is that this is much more true if you sing in a good choir, but I can't sing, so I don't have a lot of experience there.)  I didn't pick up a lot of this from either piano or band, but I'm not an arranger and I don't play guitar, so I don't feel that lack, so much.

I want to be clear that it isn't that I don't think there's any value to having kids learn guitar or piano instead of or in addition to band instruments.  But it's a very different thing, and I think you do lose something important if that's the way you choose to educate kids about music.  I don't know what effect either of these courses has on whether people continue to play music as adults.  I'm not sure you could sort it out, either, because everyone is different, and adults who want to play music I think usually find some way of doing that, whether it's a community band or a garage band or a fife and drum corps or at their church or in a cover band, or what.  The opportunities are out there, and you can make your own, too.  I think it's important for kids to learn, even if they don't really want to, but that it's okay for them to decide not to stick with it or pursue it as adults.

I think there's a lot of room to talk about how music education could be better, how it could serve kids better and teach them more and be more integrated into kids' overall educational experiences.  But I don't think the end of band is the answer, however much parents hate listening to what comes out of a French horn with a 10-year-old on the other end of it.

WTF TV: Twin Peaks and other things

So I watched the entire run of Twin Peaks recently, because you can stream it on Netflix, and I've always been sort of curious what the fuss was all about, plus, Mulder in drag.  So I watched all 30 episodes in, like, the last two weeks, and it was definitely some profoundly weird TV, but it's left me so sad, and I'm not sure why.  I'm not sure what intelligent things I can say about it, even, that don't come across as boring and hopelessly late-to-the-party.  It starts with the body of a girl washed up on a beach and drives right straight off into crazytown and never comes back.

I keep trying to imagine what it would have been like to watch this show when it aired.  There's so much about it that would be unusual on television even today, even with the original shows that are being produced by cable networks now, and I'm not just talking about the weird dreams and the whole White Lodge/Black Lodge/vision quest/evil-in-the-woods/top-secret Air Force crap, either.  (I wonder how much weirder that stuff seemed to people who hadn't yet experienced The X-Files, though.)  It's surprisingly frank for its time period about sex and drugs in the high-school set, and the women in it are remarkably well-drawn.  It's also very, very funny, in ways that read as entirely intentional.  It's been a long time since I watched a show that consistently made me feel like I could not wait to know what happened next, though, and I'm wondering what it was like to sustain that feeling watching the episodes a week apart rather than gorging yourself on four (...or twelve) at a time on Netflix the way I just did. 

If you look the show up on Wikipedia and various other sites, it talks about how the original plan might have been to sort of never solve Laura Palmer's murder, but how ABC forced David Lynch's hand and made him wrap up that storyline halfway through the second season, and that after that people sort of stopped caring about the show (possibly also because ABC moved the show to a Saturday night slot at 10 PM, a move which defies explanation but which seems to be par for the course for critically-acclaimed but low-rated shows).

This is interesting to me for three reasons.  One is that the show seems to be mostly Dale Cooper's story, and I'm curious to see how they would have kept him in Twin Peaks indefinitely as the murder case got colder and colder, or, failing that, if he would have left the town and the show, and how that would have played out.  One assumes that even in this universe the FBI would have eventually felt its resources would be better spent on something other that vision quests and land deals and cold-case prom-queen murders.  The second is that even though the show was obviously driven by the murder investigation, there was plenty of other seriously shady shit going down in Twin Peaks, plus, the whole forest-dwelling evil plotline is pretty fascinating, if only from a sort of analytical perspective, though I think it made pretty great TV.  Cooper's a pretty complicated character, and I'm sort of surprised that that wasn't enough to sustain an audience's interest, though see above re: how much blame the network should maybe shoulder for that.  I also sort of can't imagine who wouldn't have wanted to stare at Kyle MacLachlan for an hour every week, but, you know, I tend to have a limited imagination when it comes to things like this.   

The third is that the same thing happened to Veronica Mars, which is basically Twin Peaks set in San Diego and without any supernatural crap mitigating how shitty human beings can be.  Once Lilly Kane's killer was revealed, the show sort of never got its legs back because there wasn't anything else going on, storyline-wise, for Veronica to get her teeth into and figure out (until the very, very end of the show, where she once again had a mystery to solve and a personal stake in solving it, and it was awesome, even though everyone also knew the show was doomed).  So I wonder if there's a limit to what you can do when the premise of the show is the need to solve a single murder, assuming a massive captive audience and free rein from network interference.  How long can you go without solving it?  And what do you do once you have? 

Anyway, from a mechanics-of-storytelling perspective, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on.  One is the pace.  Lynch takes his time, particularly in the very early episodes, leaving the audience to stew in some really long moments that don't necessarily tell us much.  (Mrs. Palmer's keening in the first episode or two is a bit of verisimilitude I could have done well without, I think.)  I think especially now we're used to much faster television, and it's a little hard not to get impatient with that when you know how short the run of the show is and how much information never gets revealed to the audience.  Realistically, it's irrational to feel like the time available isn't being used efficiently, when the person using it doesn't even know how much of it he has.  Still, the endless opening credits come to look a lot like a missed opportunity.

On the other hand, there's a lot of awesome going on, and not just with the quirky characters that manage to be more than just personified quirks.  Even the Log Lady has more going on than just thinking that her chunk of tree is sentient.  Plus, there's Michael Ontkean's hair.  Stacks and stacks of donuts.  David Duchovny in drag.  (He hasn't aged the greatest but he was just as hot a lady as he was a dude back in the day.  Holy cow.)  Show tunes.  The little headbands that go with the waitress uniforms at the diner.  A very, very young Miguel Ferrer playing, possibly, the bluntest character in the history of television and awesome-ing the hell out of it.  The skinny freckly girl who would grow up to be Lara Flynn Boyle.  A guy who turns his office into a plaster-of-paris battle of Gettysburg. 

If you can believe what you read on Wikipedia, Lynch deliberately chose to end Twin Peaks without wrapping up any of the storylines introduced in the second season, instead throwing more questions (and more bodies) into the plans for the town's sawmill and a bunch of undeveloped land, and not throwing the audience even the tiniest bone with respect to the Black Lodge or the evil-that-lives-in-the-woods.  What's left is a world in which all the characters are trapped in perpetual unhappiness, and we'll never know whether they find their way out of it.  Something I read, which I can't find now, describes the series finale as being deliberately audience-bating, and suggested that it was an attempt to get the show renewed for a third season.  The link to Wikipedia above quotes Lynch as basically saying, "Fuck it, I'm not ending this thing," which is a legitimate personal reaction but ultimately an unsatisfying one from a story perspective.  It's hard not to feel a little toyed with.

After the show was cancelled, they made a movie called Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me that wound up being about Laura Palmer's last days.  (The DVD extras suggest that there was enough film to make two movies, one of which would've featured more of the series characters.  The film itself clocks in at 2:15, which is looong, but see above re: Lynch making the audience sit in uncomfortable moments.)  It's really different from the show in a lot of ways (more cursing and titties, for one thing; Moira Kelly failing to be Lara Flynn Boyle for another) but I think the biggest difference is that the show wasn't really about Laura Palmer at all.  The film was notoriously poorly-received, but it wasn't that bad, really.  I didn't care for it, but I think that's partly because it doesn't offer much of anything that the audience wouldn't already know from having watched the show, though getting to see those things in scene was sometimes interesting.

I also was hoping it would offer some explanation for other things that went unresolved in the series, which it for the most part did not.  From the Netflix sleeve: "Originally filmed as a prequel to director David Lynch's cult television series 'Twin Peaks' this movie appeared in theaters after the show was cancelled.  Lynch attempts to answer the big questions for diehard fans" including the question of who would have wanted to kill Laura Palmer, but, of course, we already know the answer to that, and it's everyone and no one, kind of.  I wonder how much of the reaction was to wanting the film to be something else (more Cooper!) than it was to the film itself.

Totally unrelated to all this, I note that AMC has started airing a new drama called The Killing, where a high-school girl is murdered in Seattle, and the show follows the investigation into her death as well as its effect on her family, friends, and local politics.  It's based on a Danish television series called Forbrydelsen, which apparently chooses to solve the problem of working on a single mystery over multiple episodes by starting a new mystery each season.  AMC very generously lets you stream the episodes (the first two are available until this weekend) if, like me, you cannot remember to set your DVR or to watch what it records.  I'm enjoying it so far.  Early in the Pilot, a woman who we later learn is our lead detective, discovers a body washed up on a beach.  It's the body of a seal.

Missing Your Target Audience

So I've been seeing a lot of commercials for this horrible-looking Easter movie, Hop, on USA while I've been busy ogling Mark Harmon, and evidently the main character is the prodigal-son heir to the Easter Bunny Throne or some shit, but every couple of commercial breaks there will be an ad for an NCIS marathon and the picture will be all full of lines and kind of wavy, and... then they make a rabbit ears joke, with this fratty little rabbit. 

So what I'm wondering is, who are they trying to pull in with that joke?  Is the entire idea that it will make the parents who get forced to accompany their young fry on this misadventure will assume that the movie thus contains jokes for them?  Jokes that do not consist of comparing bunny poop to jelly beans?  Is it just some sort of marketing failure, like, "you know what would be really, really funny" in a room full of people who all have the same sense of humor?  So confusing! 

Other

So my work involves asking all kinds of invasive and sometimes insultingly obvious questions including my very favorite, "How do you identify yourself in terms of race?" People have a tendency to get really offended by this question, but occasionally I get a good snappy answer. This morning a guy told me, "Human," without missing a beat, and the other day a woman said, "Other," but then kind of dithered instead of owning it, which made it a little less awesome.

Of course, then I spent the rest of the interview trying to imagine how I was going to put that in the report.

All of this is to say, I spend a little more time than the average person thinking about how people define themselves, about what's "other," about what any given person thinks is "other," than your average bear. I've talked ineptly about this before. It's an awkward subject, one that makes me conscious of my whiteness in relentlessly uncomfortable way that's probably really good for me on some level.

I'm taking another writing class, and we had a discussion last night about identifying the race of our characters - about when and why you should or shouldn't make it explicit or implicit. What you choose as an author can say something about the way you view the world, and what your characters observe or your narrator tells the reader says something about the way that person views the world.

The question came up because one of the writers had submitted a story in which he had deliberately chosen not to remark on the race of his main character, which was different from his own, and wondered whether he should have done so. We talked about ways of doing that - stating it point blank, giving clues to the race of a close relative, giving clues about his work or neighborhood - and how it helps or hurts the story.

My instinct is to avoid describing my characters, partly because it's hard to do naturally. A first person narrator, which is what I seem to wind up using most of the time, going on about her own green eyes and golden hair or whatever is usually boring and stagy, and I think even if you eliminate that obstacle by using a third person narrator, it winds up reading like overwritten romance with the hair-color adjectives and the blah blah blah. (It's possible that my aversion stems from having read, repeatedly, every Babysitters Club book published before 1993, including the endless identical descriptions of each of the girls. Shut up, Kristy's one zit.)

Anyway, one of the things we talked about was how much you want your reader to identify with the person who's telling them the story - that you want your reader to see what your narrator or main character sees, and that when you do things that limit the reader's ability to identify in that way, you change the experience of reading the story. It's a conversation I haven't been part of since I started really writing, and it's one that I think is really important.

Sex, Lies, and PBS

I just saw a teaser for NPR on my local PBS station which stated that Garrison Keillor is, and I quote, "Caffeine for your ears."  Y'all, that is a flat lie.

In other PBS news, I have been watching Sherlock, which is so awesome it pretty much melted my face off.  Not only does Benedict Cumberbatch have the most outrageously made-up English name of all time, he's also awesome, and not at all displeasing to look upon. 

I also recently finished reading Tinkers by Paul Harding, which was lovely but not as substantial as I was expecting for a Pulitzer winner.  I've also been coughing my little brains out and once again plotting (heh) out how to fail at NaNoWriMo for the fifth straight year.  I rule!