JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

When we sat down to brunch someone who looked like Fernando Torres was sitting outside. We should’ve taken the photo immediately because he was replaced by not Jason Statham.

Who knows what happens in my murky subconscious, but I woke up the other day thinking: I have to form a band.

So I told my friend Aye, who had an all-girl band called Chain Gang, and she said, “Let’s!” Aye plays bass and can hum the bassline of anything. In college she was our supplier of Rolling Stone and cassette bootlegs. I have no musical ability, but I have excellent training in how not to manage a band. Also I used to hang around bands and volunteer to write their liner notes. I love liner notes, if I had my way albums would look like Criterion Collection packages. (Kids, look up “albums”.)

First I have to catch up, because I stopped listening to new music in the early 2000s. At which point my musical tastes started moving backwards in time (Tom Waits, Steely Dan, bop). Aye made me a playlist which includes An Army of Lights, Bombay Bicycle Club, and Yuck. While I’m cramming, we’re waiting for a name to come to us.

– What’s Naomi (Chain Gang’s vocalist) doing now?
– She’s a voice talent for dubbed Korean TV series.
– You mean like The Prince of Boazania?
– Yup.
– Maybe we should call ourselves The Prince of Boazania.

Or Our Feline Overlords. Or Keanu Reeves.

Obviously we have to find instrumentalists. I’m thinking open auditions in June. Prince (in denial), Wendy, Johnny Marr, Peter Buck, Annie Clark and The Edge need not audition.

I’m still thinking of ground rules, but off the top of my head:
1. We just want to play.
2. Implosion is inevitable, but we’d like to delay it as long as possible.

Your thoughts?

Not long ago I was in very good spirits when I met someone who proceeded to cast a black cloud over my mood. She probably meant well—it is always useful to prepare for the obstacles one might encounter—but it was not what I needed to hear. Please, I’m a raving neurotic overanalyzer, I already get in my own way.

We parted on cordial terms, and I thought I was fine, but as the evening wore on I got angrier and angrier. I refuse to be told that there are things I can never do. Sure, I’ll never win Wimbledon, but I do not like it when people try to get in my head using the fear of disappointment. (I will not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.)

I went to bed seething, and at 2am I sat bolt upright. I had to do something to clear my mind of this fear other people had tried to plant in it. I cleaned my house, but I knew I had to do more. That’s when I had the sudden urge to listen to Nirvana. I had not listened to grunge in years, but I needed to purge myself of bad thoughts, and very loud guitar rock has always done that for me.

So at 3am Nirvana was blasting in my ears. On headphones, because one must be considerate to the neighbors. That certainly cleared my head. I realized then that Kurt Cobain is my patron saint—well, one of them. The music couldn’t save him, but many are alive today because of his music. (And Layne’s, and Chris’s, and others we never met.)

Here’s the softer stuff.

April 5 is the 24th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death. Man, I’m old.

Say Anything is one of my favorite movies not just because I wish I had a Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack’s character), but because I envied Diane Court (Ione Skye) her very supportive, understanding dad (John Mahoney) and was wrenched when Mr Court turned out to be a criminal.

Always loved this singing-in-the-car bit. (Context: Mr Court had just learned that Diane got a scholarship to Oxford.) John Mahoney also starred in Frasier as the down-to-earth dad of those pretentious twits Frasier and Niles. Goodbye and thanks, Mr. Mahoney.

From my classmates I picked up indie rock, and from musician friends I picked up jazz (Hard bop, so I was thrilled to meet Patrick de K, whose mom was the patron of Thelonious Monk and other greats). From my audiophile friend I learned this specialized burn: “Eh, that’s a lifestyle product.”

When I got my first apartment I had two housemates: one loved Broadway, and one collected recordings of early music (“classical” from 1600-1800). So I got to know the work of Stephen Sondheim, but I’ve never done a deep dive into early music. Recently I discovered that the albums he ordered from European record companies are all available online on music streaming sites. No more excuses—time to plug in the gaps in my education.

I asked Leo to make a list of essential early music, say 25 works. Little did I know that the resulting playlist would come to almost 40 hours of early music. Listen to these playlists and feed your dendrites.

Early Music Essential Playlist: Orchestral

(more…)

My solution: I’m away for two weeks, and then I’m going to hole up in my house in December with my feline overlords because I have two manuscripts to prepare for printing. (I’ve stocked up enough cat food and litter till the New Year.)

From 2014, the 2017 Nobel Prize winner on how he wrote his Booker Prize winner. By the time you embark on The Crash, you should have done all your research. You will need 1. Absolutely no distractions. 2. Pen and paper. 3. The right playlist.

How I wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks
by Kazuo Ishiguro

Many people have to work long hours. When it comes to the writing of novels, however, the consensus seems to be that after four hours or so of continuous writing, diminishing returns set in. I’d always more or less gone along with this view, but as the summer of 1987 approached I became convinced a drastic approach was needed. Lorna, my wife, agreed.

Until that point, since giving up the day job five years earlier, I’d managed reasonably well to maintain a steady rhythm of work and productivity. But my first flurry of public success following my second novel had brought with it many distractions. Potentially career-enhancing proposals, dinner and party invitations, alluring foreign trips and mountains of mail had all but put an end to my “proper” work. I’d written an opening chapter to a new novel the previous summer, but now, almost a year later, I was no further forward.

So Lorna and I came up with a plan. I would, for a four-week period, ruthlessly clear my diary and go on what we somewhat mysteriously called a “Crash”. During the Crash, I would do nothing but write from 9am to 10.30pm, Monday through Saturday. I’d get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone. No one would come to the house. Lorna, despite her own busy schedule, would for this period do my share of the cooking and housework. In this way, so we hoped, I’d not only complete more work quantitatively, but reach a mental state in which my fictional world was more real to me than the actual one.

Continue reading.