#mr-chatterboxs-column

[alltangledupinblue]

The moon is everywhere

[copperbadge]

Answers About Music

MY GOODNESS the musicians and the Italians came out in force. I probably should have made separate posts. Thank you all who answered, though, all of this is grist for my mill! A few cherrypicked music comments to respond to, Italian responses pending: 

mr-chatterboxs-column

It's pretty normal to be able to approximate a time signature by ear but there may be a lot of equivalent options so in many cases it would be more natural to comment on the function of the time signature than to use numbers -- in this case, when you said 9/8 I assumed you were describing a slip jig, but listening to that song, which I didn't know, I would just call it a waltz or an air with very distinctive Scottish rhythm patterns

I love that it sounds like a waltz to people who know what they’re doing, because the waltz as both social activity and active threat is a throughline in the books, particularly for Michaelis, who threatens Gregory with a waltz in book one and then falls in love during a waltz lesson in book two. 

thearubigin

Not sure if this matters to the scene, but Mingulay Boat Song is, like, aggressively IN NINE. I'm a fairly amateur musician but I could tell that pretty much instantly

agentreynard

There’s no way to tell the denominator by listening, because the same thing can be written with any note at all getting the beat, but it doesn’t matter, so that’s all right. If there are 9 beats to the bar it’s probably 9/8 rather than 9/4, but your character might just ask “is that in nine?”

Noted the “This is very NINE” and edited to reflect! 

Michaelis tapped out a beat on the table, and Caleb tilted his head, listening interestedly.

"Is that in nine?" he asked Jerry, surprised by it.

"Nine what?" Jerry replied, but he was joining in with the drummers, who were thumping tables or pounding feet.

I don’t think most people will catch the nuance, but it’s a book specifically about musicians and music so I’d like to at least placate the musicians if not actively please them :D 

(Also @cedarsparrow the infodump was super interesting reading, thank you! Jerry hasn’t retained enough of his Institute Alpin music lessons to understand the question but he’s still enjoying himself hugely, he’s the one who cajoled Michaelis, who does have a reasonable level of musical skill, into singing. :D ) 

[pencilscratchins]

OBVIOUSLY we want to know more about the spn time travel to 2010 au 👀👀👀👀

okay i cant promise this is at all coherent, but enjoy an idea dump google doc about this

[kbsd]

Wait a second... wait a second... does everything in some large section of Supernatural end up having to have *three* reasons for happening: Doylist, Watsonian, and uh Chuckist? The reason the CW made it that way, the reason the characters think they made their terrible choices, and the personal reason the terrible-choice-making character who is also all-powerful made all the other characters make their own terrible choices?

oooh that’s very interesting, i like that!

so for dean suddenly being good at singing, it’s (in order) because 1. jensen wanted to show off, 2. prev anon’s theory that he was always a good singer and just hid it bc he was…embarrassed? idk, and 3. because chuck went through an acoustic guitar phase

[beggars-opera]

@mr-chatterboxs-column YES

I hate, hate, HATE the term “affordable housing.” I hate that we’ve normalized it. I hate that we just accept that the majority of housing, a basic human right, is unaffordable to much of the population. Housing should be affordable as a baseline. If rich people want to add arcades and gold-plated hot tubs on top so be it, but everyone, everyone, regardless of income level, should have access to a clean, comfortable home with enough light and space to make life worth living.

[notbecauseofvictories]

mr-chatterboxs-column replied to your post: “Chicago Fringe Opera has a series of nine...”

Oh! I haven't seen it yet so I can't comment as to its quality etc but MN Opera is doing a free Britten opera streaming through June 5!

Look at that! Albert Herring is one of Britten’s best-loved comic operas, even though Britten himself is frequently associated with more serious works---or Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, that perennial favorite.

MN Opera describes it as “a rollicking comedy about a shy, innocent boy who, frustrated with small-town conventions, breaks free from the expectations of society. Gently laced with Britten’s musical wit and gifts for parody and caricature, this story about the world’s reaction to an outsider is joyfully brought to life in this springtime presentation.” Which....sold.

[samyazaz]

For the love meme, in honor of Ted Lasso, tea and/or coffee?

Ooh! Poor Ted, how can he like coffee and yet think tea is garbage water?

I just! Tea is probably 90% of what I drink. I love the caffeine, let’s be real, I love how many varieties there are to suit whatever mood you might be in, I love how much tea has leaned into Flavors. I love how accessible it is, all you need is a kettle maybe an infuser if you feel like making loose leaf, and both of those you can work around if you don’t have them. I love holding a warm mug of tea in my hands and inhaling the aroma of the steam coming off of it. I love when circumstances align and you manage to nail the preparation and the timing of everything and that first sip of tea is just Perfect, the platonic ideal of how you like that tea to be. I love how much room there is to have good tea just from a box you picked up at the grocery store, but also to deep dive if you feel so inclined.

As for coffee, I fucking love the smell of coffee, walking down the coffee aisle at the store is always the best thing, and I love that the preponderance of Starbuckses and Peetses and other coffee houses mean that it can be very easy to get your fix wherever you might happen to be. And while I haven’t usually tried them much, because I am much pickier about my coffee than my tea and therefore I like the predictability of the chains, this September I did a road trip across the country and most of my hotels were in tiny towns in the middle of nowhere, and so I visited a handful of independent local coffee houses because the towns were too small to have a Starbucks, and let me tell you, every single one was absolutely charming, and it was so neat to get such a sense of character from each of them, even just in the few minutes it took me to pop in and order coffee and a breakfast sandwich.

[milfsisyphus]

This is unsolicited information but every time I see that you've posted a new one of the vintage collage series I get a little bit so excited that the saturation levels on the inside of my skull get turned up, in a good way

this is SO SWEET thank you!! i'm having a terrible day and this was so nice to see <33 i'm so happy people are enjoying the series! i wish redacted chemical company had hired those 1950s artists for 100 more ads tbh.

[silentwalrus1]

cabloom replied to your post “Hey so i absolutly love all your writing and have read all your Marvel...”

Also same, i knew absolutely nothing about it but liked maes and roy so much and i needed to know more about this very angry competent shouting man. And now i know things i can never unknow

cabloom replied to your post “Hey so i absolutly love all your writing and have read all your Marvel...”

Omg i need to watch the opening and closing credits????

aninconvenientruth1976 replied to your post “Hey so i absolutly love all your writing and have read all your Marvel...”

I was resisting snipers on the same basis but I just binged the whole thing and it totally didn’t matter. 100% worth the time investment!

mr-chatterboxs-column replied to your post “Hey so i absolutly love all your writing and have read all your Marvel...”

Warning, if you do that you will quickly get real emotional about every single opening and closing credits theme and Netflix will not let you automatically set them to play all the way through! You have to click "play credits" every time!

mr-chatterboxs-column replied to your post “Hey so i absolutly love all your writing and have read all your Marvel...”

I knew nothing about FMA before I started reading, other than that I'd been ignoring everyone saying how great it was for years, and a few chapters into snipers I was so into it I had to immediately start reading the manga as fast as my library holds will come in and simultaneously watching the corresponding episodes of FMA:B

skarabrae-stone replied to your post “Hey so i absolutly love all your writing and have read all your Marvel...”

I knew absolutely nothing about FMA before I started reading this fic, and I'm enjoying the heck out of it.

THE REVIEWS, FROM PEOPLE WITH MUCH SANER MEDIA CONSUMPTION HABITS THAN ME

[pilferingapples]

@mr-chatterboxs-column replied to your post “Hey all! I’m going to be hosting a couple showings of the 2012 Les...”

Hey, is this what the slack groupwatch shifted to? I used to be on that pretty often, but then I had schedule conflicts for a while and lost track of it when it moved. Is it ok to rejoin? :)

Hey!:D This is its own thing, started up in 2019, but you’ll find some familiar people I’m sure! And yes! New and Returning watch friends are Welcome!

[idiopathicsmile]

What change (plot, character, whatever you like) have you made to WAR during the redrafting that you think would have most surprised you when you'd just finished writing the original fic?

ooh this is a great question

probably the extent to which i’ve compressed the members of the social justice club. like, combeferre is pretty much gone. to some extent, he’s been absorbed into courfeyrac, who is now a girl. i guess if i ever write a sequel, combeferre can be the new new kid.

also, i uh cut the entire part where they chastely share a bed and talk about scientific studies on monkeys etc etc, even though that was one of my favorite parts to write, because it contributed pretty much nothing to the plot. i cut a lot of things that took a really long time to write (the break-in to the library, for instance), but i don’t regret writing it. the first time i took the trip, i had to take the longest possible route to get there.

[aporeticelenchus]

mr-chatterboxs-column replied to your post: I will be curious to hear whether the Ruddigore AU...

The short summary worked for me! If I’ve seen Ruddigore it was long enough ago that I didn’t remember any of the plot. I visualized the ghosts as an amalgam of a Greek chorus with Mulan’s ancestors and the portrait galley with the headmasters of Hogwarts?

Yep, that’s pretty much it! They are in fact literally a portrait gallery - they come out of their portraits at night to be judgey at the current baronet.

[kcrabb88]

@justparabatrying replied to your text post: Every time you talk about getting your books published my heart starts jumping up and down!!!!! I can't wait to read them!!!!!!

Aw you are lovely and this made me smile :D I am trying hard! Fingers crossed these agents like the pages I send! If not, I will try again with others! But it was great to get positive feedback on my first try at pitching. 

@mr-chatterboxs-column replied to your text post:I'm so glad it went so well! It absolutely makes sense that pitching a trilogy that's already written would go better than pitching just one book of a trilogy that isn't done. Thanks for sharing all the cool inside baseball publishing stuff you're learning!

Thank you! I was a bit floored! The third agent was ehhhh (like, don’t tell me I started my book in the wrong place after a 6 minute pitch) but the first two were super nice and encouraging and interested and I just didn’t expect that my first time at all. Weirdly I had read advice online where some people were like “they don’t care if you’ve written more than one book!” but then when I got to the conference everyone said “if you’ve written more than one, please tell us!” because it indicates dedication and longevity so that was great advice. I told people who were like “you already wrote all three???” that there was no way I was going in there as an aspiring author saying I had a trilogy I couldn’t deliver on. I’ve learned a lot though! One big thing I learned was that you need comparative titles (they don’t have to be exact, but like, a feeling that’s similar and close to or in your genre) and also the word “upmarket” which means a cross between literary fiction and commercial fiction, and I was like OH that applies to me. So it was all very interesting!

[copperbadge]

lestrade-london replied to your post “This is a minor consideration in the scheme of things and not a...”

What happened last time, in 1918? There must be some info on how things opened up again.

Honestly, a couple of times I’ve gone looking for books or articles about recovery from the pandemic and I haven’t really found much. Part of it is I wasn’t looking SUPER hard; part that I no longer have the extended access to a lot of databases I did, like EBSCOhost and Jstor; part that everyone’s writing so much about what happened IN the pandemic that it’s hard to find signal in all the noise. But it’s very rare to read about pandemic recovery. The last you really see of casual, easily-found scholarship about it is the climax of it.  

mr-chatterboxs-column replied to your post “This is a minor consideration in the scheme of things and not a...”

This is so huge, yeah. I know some things can be scaled down or done in a social distancing way (e.g., my orchestra is doing chamber music instead, my circus studio isn't performing but is doing ultra-small no-hands-on-spotting classes), but entire communal art forms are just... impossible, currently. Normally most of my artistic income (as a vague measure of value) is from playing fiddle in established or pickup bands for social folk dancing, and one of my main hobbies is swing dancing. They're both off the table in their most integrated forms, indefinitely. As a musicologist I was already stressed about the trend of modern society towards a performer/observer dichotomy instead of intuitive integration of tiers of participation, and that's speeding up dramatically

Though that might be an interesting key to recovery -- interactive arts and interaction with arts. Broadening that binary back out from performer/observer would be a really good way of reintegrating everyone post-covid, without the risky crush of stuff like massive concerts. Which at least puts one at a starting point in terms of “What could I make happen.” 

fruitgoat replied to your post “This is a minor consideration in the scheme of things and not a...”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this as well. I’ve got a few underdeveloped ideas that I’ll probably be writing about in the next week or so.

When you do, if you remember, please tag me! I’d love to see your ideas. 

kneesntoess replied to your post “This is a minor consideration in the scheme of things and not a...”

we went to a drive through cinema (which are not really a thing in the uk) and that was so much fun, tbh. esp because it was lion king, so there was lots of singing and dancing

Yeah, there’s been some of those in the US (they haven’t really been a thing here since the 80s, although they never vanished entirely). I was thinking about those but while they’ve had a revival they still haven’t quite “caught on” the way I would have thought they might. 

bomberqueen17 replied to your post “This is a minor consideration in the scheme of things and not a...”

bail out all the lil museums and historical societies and historic sites and roadside attractions :(   just a lil slush fund for all the Priceless Little Bits Of Local Color that will be gone forever

I actually really like the idea of pop-up “roadside” attractions and museums. I wonder if there’s a way to make that function. (I mean also yes, funding small entertainment business and nonprofits is also something we should definitely do, but I wish I could do more than throw money at it.)

[the-march-hair]

mr-chatterboxs-column replied to your post “Watching PRIDE… again… I love this film too much.”

IMPOSSIBLE

It’s the film I watch when I want to watch Les Mis but don’t want to bawl my eyes out :P

[kbsd]

As a very low-key caps fan who lives in Minnesota I love all your hockey posts bc they are so guaranteed to be not only perspectives I will not encounter intentionally online or accidentally in person BUT ALSO almost entirely unrelated to any thoughts I have even considered having. It's like that podcast of fake baseball games to fall asleep to but occasionally I recognize a name. I assume all your opinions are correct of course

hahaha yes they ARE all extremely correct, thank you

i have very few strong opinions abt the caps tbh bc i grew up an atlantic division girl so i’ve been historically indifferent to most metropolitan division teams, but they seem fun! i was very excited to see ovechkin finally get a cup!! are you also a wild fan?

also. FELLOW NORTHWOODS BASEBALL LISTENER??? 💍💍💍💍💍