for your critiquing... my song.

hey there, little red riding hood

I’m a big fan of psychobilly music, which is kind of the bastard son of rockabilly and punk. One of the major tenants of psychobilly is paying homage to one’s roots, and often that manifests itself in cover songs. One of my absolute favorite songs by a band called The Meteors is actually a cover of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ song Little Red Riding Hood. The lyrical content of the two songs is the same. At no point do The Meteors alter the actual lyrics. The song is a slightly more sinister, sexual take on the Little Red Riding hood story. It’s sung from the Big Bad Wolf’s perspective as he tries to convince Red that he can be trusted and that she should stray from the path and walk with him through the woods. Both songs utilize the lyrics in the same way--playing up the innuendo and suggestiveness of it all. It is my opinion, however, that The Meteors version is much more effective in relating this suggestive, sexual message with its vastly different musical quality.

As the name might portend, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs are a slightly more gimmicky rock and roll act than The Meteors. The overall intensity is lessened greatly by the almost comical approach the band has to the song. The intensity is broken in parts by the wolf-like noises the lead singer makes, and the breaks in the song where he chooses to speak instead of sing. The sound is slightly dated, mostly due to the tambourine present that gives the entire song a sort of 60s vibe. The speed is fairly similar to the cover The Meteors did, as is the overall timbre and organization. As with the intensity, however, the rhythm varies to a large degree, with Sam the Sham creating a slightly more upbeat sound. This is due largely to the instrumentation and lack of intensity.

The Meteors, on the other hand, create a much darker, more intense version of Little Red Riding Hood. The song is driven by heavy, electric guitar that drives the entire song. The vocals of the lead singer, P. Paul French, varies greatly from Sam the Sham. He hits the higher pitch that Sam the Sham does, but for the most part, his voice stays at a low, guttural growl, making him sound more like the Big Bad Wolf in the song. The instrumentation adds to the dark intensity of the song. The electric guitar, double bass and drums are simple but compliment each other well, without the tambourine or anything else to distract from the song. The overall rhythm is far less upbeat and is instead dark and seductive, with the lead singer’s vocals sounding evil enough to believe that he might be the Big Bad Wolf he’s singing about.

Just because The Meteors are one of my favorite bands doesn’t automatically make them win out in this scenario, but, I do happen to enjoy their version of Little Red Riding Hood a lot more. The original song is a fun, almost campy kind of novelty song, but what P. Paul French’s vocals do for characterizing the Big Bad Wolf is helped so much by the driving guitar and heavy rhythm brought on by the drums and bass. What results is a much darker, more interesting song than the original and one of my all-time favorite songs.

an apathetic soundscape

Note: I have no clue why the divshare player is acting so wonky. There's no image, but you can hear the soundscape if you let it play.

the two I critiqued are Shannon McAdoo's and Haley Posey's.

finding your howl or: Jessi mumbles on audacity for about six minutes

Find Your Howl

ways to get ideas

Mitch Ditkoff's article, "14 Ways to Get Ideas" presents, as the title would portend, a number of ways in which a person looking to create (no matter what the product) can find inspiration and get that extra push. Fourteen separate approaches are presented to the reader, each with an explanation, ways to go about enacting the plan, and some prompts to get started. Some suggestions seem more helpful than most and here I'll outline three of the plans presented in the article and examine their validity as a practical means of finding inspiration.

7. Listen To Your Subconscious
In the article, Ditkoff encourages a focus on the subconscious mind as opposed to the conscious. That is, the thoughts that occur to us without us realizing it--almost like automatic reactions, or the sort of thoughts that might occur in a sleep-like state. I find this particularly interesting as a fan of surrealism, an entire art movement born out of the subconscious mind. I believe that limiting your thought processes to simply those we work through when completely aware is silly. Daydreaming, automatic writing, and other exercises to unlock the subconscious can be incredibly helpful when it comes to generating ideas, even if it means that you'll have to unscramble and decode your subconscious mind to make anything coherent out of it.

8. Take a Break
This piece of advice is a little iffy to me. On one hand, I do understand that mental exhaustion can lead one to think or work in circles, which really does nothing to further creative endeavors. However, everyone's lives are hectic and multi-faceted, and as soon as you step away from a piece of work and put it to rest for a while, you run the risk of losing it altogether. Admittedly, you might return to a project weeks, months, maybe years later with a new perspective which may help bring some more light to the situation, but it's still risky to avoid immersion in favor of taking a break, in my opinion.

14. Suspend Logic
This is one of my favorites, which shouldn't be surprising since it's in a similar vein as listening to your subconscious. One of the major issues that comes with being a student and feeling relatively underpowered in actualizing our creative visions is that we are so painfully aware of the lack of resources we have--whether that's money, equipment, or any other manner of things. Rather than drowning in these kinds of limitations, I think it's better to let your mind go nuts. This doesn't just have to be in terms of limitations of actualization, either. You shouldn't be afraid of thinking outside the box--far, far outside. Dream as big as you'd like, regardless of whether or not you have the means to make any of it happen. After you have everything worked out as being ideal, that's when you can let yourself start to worry about how to pull it all together.

In a separate bullet point, Ditkoff recommends that the reader look for "happy accidents" in order to gain creative ideas. The question he poses actually fits fairly well into a current situation I find myself in, which is: What “failed experiment” or unexpected outcome might be interesting for you to reconsider? Who else might you invite to participate in this effort?

Very often, I find myself partaking in creative endeavors that are not my own. They are ideas hatched by someone else that I elect to help with, lending my expertise (which, apparently, falls under art direction more often than not) and generally helping to see the product to the end. While on one such project (which will remain anonymous, since I'm not a total jerk), both myself and a friend (also nameless) found ourselves so incredibly stifled by the people around us that all we could do was discuss how much better our set would be run. While enduring the unprofessional way in which the director and producer carried themselves, creating needlessly long shoots and no room for input outside their own, both my friend and myself found ourselves noting every single mistake. Having endured these hardships ourselves, commiserating all the while, we vowed not to run our productions in such a fashion, and, more than that, began to plan a project of our own wherein we could exercise our own creative freedom that had been otherwise stifled during this project. I, personally, feel it's important not to be discouraged entirely by the negative experiences one inevitably encounters while undertaking creative endeavors. Chances are, you're going to fail a hell of a lot more than you'll succeed.

And with that happy thought, I guess I've reached the end of this wall of text.

questionable role models

JOHN WATERS

John Waters earned my respect and admiration when I first saw Pink Flamingos in high school. I was fairly jaded and, particularly as a horror fan, was under the impression that I had seen all there was to be seen. John Waters, the "Prince of Puke," based his entire career on shocking audiences and giving them something they'd never, ever seen before. Not only was he successful in doing so, he managed to launch a mainstream career off it. By setting up a reality of his own creation in which the audience's perceptions of what is normal and what isn't are turned on their sides, Waters manages to make (almost) endearing characters out of complete freaks and degenerates with the help of really hilarious and subversive writing.

This is your protagonist.

His storytelling is much more active than it is didactic, which is part of what makes it so shocking. The audience isn't given the privilege of being told it's okay to hate these people or that it's okay to love them, nor does Waters care to explain why such bizarre behavior is seemingly commonplace--like, say, Edith Massey spending most of the film in that skin-tight get-up wailing at the top of her lungs in Female Trouble. The audience is simply left alone with this veritable freak show and has to decide whether to laugh, feel repulsed, or a bit of both. The worst thing for a filmmaker is for someone to walk away from their film without inspiring any strong feelings and to have your work be forgotten. I admire John Waters most for his assurance that no matter what, you will never be able to forget what you saw in his films.

QUENTIN TARANTINO

aka "Mr. Shit"

Quentin Tarantino's movies, for me, are all about subtext. Looking at Kill Bill, Vol. 1 the text of the film is simply that a woman scorned seeks revenge from those who once tried to kill her. It's fairly standard. Looking at the subtext, though, the film becomes such a rich experience and, really, all of Tarantino's films are partly storytelling and partly his love letter to the films that inspired him. As an aspiring filmmaker, I identify with him because of his obvious identity as a film fan before being a filmmaker. If I'm sitting in a theatre watching Inglourious Basterds and I hear a music cue from A Fistful of Dollars, I'm going to smile and instantly understand the tone that Tarantino is pulling for by knowing that piece of score in its original context. It's like some strange, exclusive club where you're rewarded for being a giant nerd, which I'm all for. In a creative environment, it's important to recognize and embrace your influences and build from them to create. No one does that better (or more blatantly) than Tarantino.

 

 The text of this scene is fairly simple. It's a big crazy fight sequence to act as the centerpiece of the film. Looking at it more closely, however, this entire scene is Tarantino paying homage (or ripping off, depending on who you ask) his inspirations in film. The Bride's trademark jumpsuit is the same worn by Bruce Lee in his last film, Game of Death. Axe to the head? Just like Navajo Joe. Yakuza split down the middle with a sword? Looks like Ichi the Killer. Shadow sword-play from Samurai Fiction, plucking out someone's eye looks an awful lot like The Five Fingers of death--this entire piece is constructed from countless sources, from Kurosawa to Leone. Uma Thurman is a blonde-haired warrior with no name--she might as well be "Blondie" in The Good the Bad and the Ugly. From the cinematography to the score to costuming and set pieces, Tarantino creates a kind of film mash-up of some of the greatest films, then puts his own particular spin on it to make it appeal to a modern audience. It's a celebration of cult and camp and filmmaking in general and a testament to his ability to make the old new and fresh.

No, but seriously, I kind of love Tarantino.

JOHN CARPENTER

Oh, sweet JESUS what is that?

I am, at heart, a horror fangirl. If I could spend the rest of my life dumping fake blood on people and making schlocky movies, I'd die a happy girl. John Carpenter is one of my main inspirations as a horror director, primarily because, better than anyone else, Carpenter knows how to ratchet tension right to the breaking point before finally giving audiences a terrifying release. In his remake of The Thing (one of the few movies to really surpass and really make the original almost forgettable), Carpenter presents us with a research team alone in their arctic base in the midst of an outbreak of some kind of alien force looking to assimilate each and every one of them by turning them into nightmarish aliens so horrible that not even Kurt Russell can save them. It's a bleak, quiet film with a minimalistic soundtrack that creates a feeling of tense claustrophobia which is then given release through a series of terrifying, cathartic scenes of WTF.

 

In one of the aforementioned scenes of WTF, Kurt Russell, playing R.J. MacReady, has learned that this alien reacts violently to fire. In order to determine who among them is still themselves and who has been taken over by "the thing," he proceeds to systematically test a blood sample from each by applying heat to it. It starts slow, with MacReady explaining and setting up the expectation for the audience: something terrible is coming out of this. He tests sample after sample and nothing happens, building tension with quiet deliberation until finally, he hits Palmer's sample, which sets off a chaotic scene of shock and horror so strongly contrasted against the earlier quiet of the film. The release of knowing who is really "the thing" and who is not is instantly overtaken by more tension as the rest of the crew are tied down and totally helpless against the monster, as both MacReady and Windows' flamethrowers fail them. The second release finally comes with the explosion of the dynamite that ultimately kills the monster. Carpenter was the master with this kind of thing, no pun intended. Halloween is the most obvious example of his prowess in creating tension in horror, but The Thing holds a special place in my heart for having such mind-blowing practical make-up effects and, of course, Kurt Russell.

a regular Tom Savini

photo credit Rachel Hohenfeld


On the set of A Human Condition, spring quarter of 2010 
One of my favorite photos of me, despite how terrible and faded my hair was at that point.
Obviously, nothing delights me more than playing with gore.