Wednesday, August 12, 2020

Raymond Chandler Project

My academic colleague Gina Arnold (one of the editors of The Oxford Handbook of Punk and a pedigree rock music writer) has initiated a project that is inspired by the discovery of a list of story titles that Raymond Chandler never used. People have written stories already, and you subscribe via email to receive regular stories, songs and so on. I've aways been a big Chandler fan like a lot of others, so this instantly stood out as a brilliant concept.
It was so hot yesterday I browsed through the list... so many of them are song titles begging for a song. Last week's song that I wrote for Song Circle felt like a flop but I liked the chorus, and as soon as I alighted on The Porter Rose At Dawn from the list, the song rewrote itself and I recorded it in the simmering heat of late afternoon. It's rough (the edits scream out at you, the vocal takes are at wildly different volumes) but I sent it off and Gina likes it.
It was a good feeling to rescue and reshape a song and it was a great thing to do as the temperature pushed my head steadily groundwards.
Three drops of rain last night! I am so worried about the geese!
I slept partly on the floor downstairs because it was boiling upstairs, and next door were having an all-night carouse in their garden that involved a lot of loud shrieking laughter and shouting. When I awoke this morning, I could hear sparrows arguing in the back yard. Just now both a blackbird and a wren guiltily fled something close to the back door that they were investigating. I have to stop worrying about the geese. The remaining one with broken wings that can't fly away appears to have got themselves a mate, and none of the water fowl seem to mind that the pond is disappearing in front of their eyes. I suppose they don't have foresight, so they? The trouble with being close to nature is that you have to let it take it's course, wherever that may be. And of course the problem with humans is that they have to interfere, and can't let nature take it's course.
I'm afraid that if anyone else says to me that sociopaths make good leaders ever again in my entire life, I will hit them extremely hard. Almost sociopathically, in fact, except it will be in my head.
Brazil, China, the USA, the UK, Hungary, Russia, Belarus: all of them.
With our schooling in British exceptionalism when I was a child, we used to gasp at the terrible antics of despotic leaders elsewhere in the globe, and now we are elsewhere too. Is this really how it's all going to end, with vain, pompous, selfish, corrupt liars in charge of our delicate ecosystem, our culture, our humanity? For too long, stone age politics has been seen as the ideal. I detest Darwin and the whole idea of survival of the fittest.
When they get to Mars, they will all kill each other anyway, because they are so aggressive and competitive. In fact they will probably even kill each other on the way there, in either Richard Branson or Elon Musk's rocket.

How did I get here from writing about music? Oh yes- a link to Gina's website so you can subscribe and /or contribute.
As for the others: let them eat money.

https://ginaarnold.substack.com/?fbclid=IwAR1uX2MgaIWkUTusCCFe_DdCcd-GgRwB9phJSOgX0BE505HKFwI1cSvCtZw

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