The lure would prove too much ...
Saturday, 13 January, 2007
First week back at work and I'm already stressed enough to long for holidays. Initial tasks included wading through all the feedback from the Hillsong Briefing, logging and assessing all the material that's come in since December, fixing stuff in the online store (did anyone notice the new font?), writing a CHN (which wasn't essential but I was in a writing mood), compiling e-news for January, starting work on The Daily Reading Bible (Volume 11) (and discovered we were 7 studies short of a full complement of 60) and trying to make some headway with the MTS handbook. The latter project is starting to become a Big Problem (and a Big Stress); to me, it's looking like far more than a sub-editing job and I need to talk to the boss about it when he comes back from leave.
Because I just didn't know what to do with it on Friday, I spent my day adding more stuff to our web extras online archive. I'm now halfway through Homosexuality. There's some excellent material there—real gems that I didn't even know about until I started going through the stuff with a fine tooth comb to convert them over to Movable Type:
- “Homosexuality is a choice” by Andrew Lansdown which, in part, traces the progression from homosexual people declaring that you can choose to be homosexual to their insistence that homosexuality is innate;
- “Devotions and Dads” by Phil Wheeler;
- “Philosophy helped my evangelism” by Mike Russell;
- “The Good Drover or the Good Shepherd?” by Phillip Jensen which discusses whether being culturally relevant is necessary for evangelism.
Meanwhile all sorts of things have been happening around the traps. On the 5th January, Momofuku Ando, the inventor of the instant noodle, died (and Piled High and Deeper did a comic strip tribute). The Federal Court has started cracking down on people who link to copyrighted material that has been uploaded illegally (so be careful, my fellow bloggers!). Australia Post keeps delivering us other people's mail so I complained. I won a double pass to a preview screening of Miss Potter (the one about Beatrix Potter [did you know that Diana Wynne Jones {who wrote Howl's Moving Castle} lived near Beatrix Potter as a child?]) courtesy of the Sydney Symphony mailing list I don't remember subscribing to (maybe it was after seeing Katie Noonan at the Opera House). And tonight Ben and I are going to see The Twilight Singers at the Metro.
I can't remember the last time I went to a rock concert. Maybe it was Rebecca St. James back in 2003. I love music but I don't really get motivated to see the bands I adore. But The Twilight Singers are different and I'm not sure why. Ben exposed me to Powder Burns earlier this year (and also used “Underneath the Waves” as his Word by Word writing exercise), and after playing it in the car on a number of occasions (with me saying things like, “What's that about a snake?” and “Isn't that line from The Beatles' ‘She Loves You’?”), I got hooked on it and played it to death. Ben found Twilight somewhere (which is probably the only album we own in physical form), eMusic added A Stitch in Time (the EP with “The Lure Would Prove Too Much”) and then, gradually, the rest of their back catalogue—Blackberry Belle, She Loves You (the covers album which features a rather interesting version of Björk's “Hyperballad”) and Greg Dulli's solo album, Amber Headlights. (I discovered recently that one of Greg Dulli's songs [from when he was with The Afghan Whigs] is on the soundtrack to She's All That: “66”. And he was in the band for Backbeat, the biopic of The Beatles.) Powder Burns is their best so far, in my humble opinion—it was recorded in New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina and it features backing vocals by Ani DiFranco.
The Twilight Singers were pretty much a constant soundtrack for me from October until the present day. In a way, their music wasn't a conventionally choice for me (but then neither were The Stone Temple Pilots). Yet musically they managed to express exactly what I've been feeling over the past couple of months—sadness, despair, anger, resignation, joy—in exactly the right way. When you can't translate the way you feel into words (nor do you wish to), the next best thing is to hear it.
Of course, the way I feel about Greg Dulli's songs is probably nowhere close to the way that Greg Dulli feels about them—I've always been more of a music person than a lyric person when it comes to listening to music—but I don't suppose that matters. I hope I enjoy tonight and that other Twilight Singers fans don't scare me off.
Speaking of going to rock concerts, I had the trivial dilemma of what to wear (I even asked Elsie and she wasn't sure but she told me to tie up my hair because she felt like people who pulling on it at the last rock concert she went to). Once again the Internet comes up with all the answers: How to Dress and Look Like You Belong at a Rock Concert (mostly for Girls) is rather amusing (e.g. “Scream a lot, but do not overdo it. It will only make you hoarse and make you look bad if you are the only one screaming.”), as well as the forum on TeenHelp.
Blinks:
A way of funding writing in the future: pitch and idea and get people to support it.
Place where you can hire play equipment for parties, etc.
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
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I’ve been to quite a few gigs over the past few years, and it never occurred to me to secure my bra with duct tape. Gosh.
Yeah, that one made me giggle too!