So I’ve decided to do a series concerning my five favourite albums, this is the first in the series.
5. Foo Fighters – Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace
First things first, this album kind of has to be on the list, seeing as I do not by any means like this band anymore. Regardless this album has made a huge impact on my life being the first album I bought and the one that spurned my interest in music generally. It’s very diverse, but the overall tone of it contributes to everything about it. The album’s cover is in a neutral, vintage black and white colouring. It builds this feeling of uniformity and boring confinement. This goes directly against the images within the album’s lyric booklet which holds contradictory images, such as an umbrella with a lit stick of dynamite for the handle. Something that provides little protection but is useless against something it has no power against. Just like the imagery contradicts the colouration of the album, the music also contradicts the uniformity of the world, which is, as we all know, rebellion – one of the most common themes in music. The lyrics from “The Pretender,” one of the more notable songs by the band, says, “What if I say that I’ll never surrender? So who are you?” Dave Grohl, frontman, shouts these words with the fervor of a mob ready to throw molotov cocktails at a line of police with riot shields, batons, and tear gas. The album starts out with a heavy, overdriven alt/rock sound, that slowly turns into a softer alternative sound near the end. The distortion in the guitars is toned way down and Grohl’s voice gets softer. Right before the album’s turning point, an acoustic instrumental piece, “Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners,” serves as an obvious transition in the album’s voicing. Sidenote – this particular work was the earliest influence on me as an acoustic guitar player.
The entire album is just one big contradiction it might seem, but as you listen you realize that it’s actually one big transition. Let’s say you were to take the first song on the album, “The Pretender”, and listened to the last, “Home” – which the entire album is named for, you would notice a huge difference in their sounds and would misinterpret the entire album as a contradiction. Now, if you listened to the whole album in the order it is set:
- The Pretender
- Let It Die
- Erase/Replace
- Long Road to Ruin
- Come Alive
- Stranger Things Have Happened
- Cheer Up, Boys (Your Make Up is Running)
- Summer’s End
- Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners
- Statues
- But, Honestly
- Home
You would see that the album flows like a river. The beginning being the rushing white waters and then deepening into the calm, flowing stretches at the end when the distortion of the electric guitars is replaced with the simple, elegant sound of a grand piano.
That is why this album make number five on my list.
Later. 🙂
So awhile back I was complaining about a novel; here is the resulting essay of having read previously said novel.
The Necessities of Having Not Very Much Information
Imagine you are thrown right into the middle of an event, knowing nothing about any of the people you are with. This is the situation with one of the most beloved classics of all time, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s style leaves out a plethora of background information that is never provided for the vast majority of his characters. The characters lack a comprehensive history that might shed more light on their personality and help explain the way they act. However, if this were to be the case, a massive portion of the message Hemingway wanted to convey to his audience would be left out and/or nullified. As a matter of fact the lack of historical information for Hemingway’s characters is valuable to the novel as a whole; it is a massive contributor to the story and the foundation for it. It does seem odd that Hemingway does this, but it provides the characters even more room to grow and develop so the reader is always learning more about them. As these characters grow and show more of their personalities in the story, the reader starts to become attached to them having, in a way, grown with them. Hemingway’s form of writing (which is rife with existentialistic ideas) is reinforced even more so with the absence of general a background for his characters; so much so that the work itself seems to look you straight in the eye and unwaveringly say, “It doesn’t matter what happened to these people in the past, all that matters is what’s happening right now. So carpe diem.” It is a necessity that Hemingway leaves out that overabundance of knowledge.
As Hemingway leaves out information for his characters, he leaves even more room for them to develop and gain more depth. The protagonist, Henry, is proven many times over that he is a stoic, “manly man” type of person. But as the plot thickens, Henry’s stolid demeanor is torn apart, revealing more to him than formerly appears. An example of this is Henry’s actions that he takes when the Italian army retreats from the German/Austrian forces; he is obviously shaken by the quick deterioration of the Italian army. When he chooses to pull out from the crowded line of cars and civilians and his own vehicle becomes stuck in the mud, he becomes enraged and shoots one of the engineers that refuse to help with their small group of refugees. (204) Hemingway gives no indication that Henry might ever be provoked to do something such as this beforehand, he even goes so far as to tell the reader that Henry thought it was ridiculous that he was even required to have a gun. (29) Hemingway’s shortage of background information is not exclusive to Henry, but extends to other characters such as Catherine. While Hemingway provides only necessary (and only absolutely necessary) knowledge about Catherine’s past, the knowledge being the fact of her late fiancé’s death in the war, you see her character develop greatly. In Book I of the novel, you can see that Catherine is definitely an unstable person. She makes Henry pretend to be her dead fiancé and she suddenly stops kissing Henry and cries into his arms. As the story progresses Catherine seems to find stability in her relationship with Henry. At one point she says, “I want what you want. There isn’t any me any more. Just what you want.” (106) This shows her growing love and commitment – if not obsession – with Henry, and this illustrates her reliance on him.
Just like Catherine becomes attached to Henry, and vice versa, Hemingway uses the subtraction of his characters’ history to cause the reader to become attached to the characters themselves. It is almost as if Hemingway doesn’t give the characters a past at all. He creates an illusion that he is creating or giving life to these characters and that all their life is inside the book, and thus subconsciously the reader is lured into an in depth involvement with the characters’ lives. The reader develops a close relationship with the characters and causes the events in the story to have a greater emotional impact on the reader. This makes the tragic events in this story that much more potent. So when Henry and the other drivers were shelled by a trench mortar, the reader feels his pain and his company’s (even if Henry only feels the physical pain and not the emotional because of his detached existentialist attitude and outlook) , and when Catherine died, the reader can tell that Henry started to feel pointless and lost. (55, 331) It makes the reader feel the hurt and turmoil he must have felt. Hemingway expertly leads the reader to have a much more integrated experience, even if his characters are not entirely attuned to their surroundings with much deep feeling.
Henry is a very stoic and impassive person through most of the novel. The particular traits that his character celebrates are of a very existential nature, existentialism being a foundation for the plot of the story. Hemingway uses his leaving out of the characters’ pasts to help illustrate this existentialist way of thinking. By leaving out that information of the past he is telling the reader that it really does not matter what happened before the story takes place but what happened before because all that matters, in the existentialist mind, is what is happening now. Hemingway even has his characters reference a poem by Andrew Marvell, “A Letter to His Coy Mistress.” The particular line is, “But at my back I always hear, time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” (154) This quote champions the idea of existentialism in that Henry never knows how much time he has left with Catherine so it makes him all the more eager to make the most of it. It revolves around the idea of seizing the day, carpe diem, and an “I don’t know, I don’t care” attitude towards everything. Often the reader sees Henry say the words, “I don’t care.” (22) After a while of reading the book, Henry’s, Catherine’s, and a multitude of other characters start to exhibit reoccurring mannerisms of the existentialist mindset, particularly when they are directly involved with all of the war efforts, which does tend to make sense do to the increased likelihood of having their lifespan shortened considerably. It is their insecurity that leads them to have such existentialist views. They want to make most of whatever time they might have left. Even though they try in many ways to make the most of their time, by drinking, having sex, etcetera, it all turns out to be void and purposeless at the end of the story. This is perhaps best shown by Henry’s immense feeling of emptiness after Catherine dies; because existentialism shows that when you have nothing to live for, you have no purpose. Henry’s purpose for living, or so it seemed, was Catherine. The novel, in essence, is about emptiness caused by not having a reason to exist, which caused by existentialism, which is shown through the lack of history of the characters, which makes it a necessary element to Hemingway’s work for the purpose he was hoping to achieve.
Though A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway is a book that contains virtually no history of its characters whatsoever, the novel would not have been considered such a great work and not as memorable had it not been that necessity called for novel to contain nothing but a few shreds of its characters’ past lives. Hemingway’s vagueness makes the novel whole. He crafted it in such a way that he left a vast of amount of room open to develop his characters; and that vastness leaves the characters growing and forming throughout the story, allowing the reader to become completely submersed in the plot line and the character’s lives that exist only in the book. Existentialism, a platform for which the novel has its foundations rooted, is strongly supported and upheld by Hemingway’s elusiveness to the characters’ various pasts. It goes without saying that if Hemingway had given his characters a past we would not be reading this great work of art to this day.
I am tired a lot. So I feel unmotivated to do things a lot. Like, for example, I’m in the middle of recording one of my songs right now, and I’m switching to writing for the moment because my mind when it’s tired has an attention span of, at best, 7 minutes. And I just looked over at my PSP and thought, “It might be fun to play that- wait. Stay focused: write.” Also, holding on to one idea for very long is hard. Unless I’m very awake and very focused. In which case I feel like going camping, writing a novel, becoming a rockstar… well, that’s also assuming I’m happy. And happiness hasn’t felt like reaching out and taking my hand lately or for awhile anyway.
I just kind of have to push through and trudge through life and stuff. It’s probably why I’m so tired. I just have to force myself to look at the bright side every morning, and I usually find something to look forward to about that day, like conversations with people that I know will brighten my day and not even know it. Sometimes there’s a beautiful sunrise peaking through my window that automatically makes me a morning person. It is so often little things that I find in life that motivate me to be fully aware most days.
But anyways, I wrote a poem last year that got published in the 2012 Arkansas Anthology, so here it is:
Painting darkness
with your brush of light
Capturing images unseen,
night after
night.
In the endless night
The evil do stalk,
Running
In the wrong direction
with the
way they talk.
They plead innocent with
blood,
chains,
and
money,
gripped in greedy, gluttonous
shaking palms
Their guilt is all too visible,
don’t you see?
No
They go Free!
They go Free!
Their cruelty is in need
Of a cure
If we don’t help them,
Who will then?
The fame
Oh, yes, that fame;
Coveted prize,
a thorned surprise.
An obsession
of self-
destruction.
With wild
eyes,
Behold
The sand of futility
is all you
have
grasped.
It runs,
Mindless
out of reach,
Perhaps
it falls
into the waking
tide
of a beach.
And it ends
to begin
again in
someone
else’s hands.
There are many things in life we have hoped to achieve and still hope to achieve. And what do we do to achieve these hopes?
Plan.
What do plans do?
Fail.
What do we do when our plans fail?
Freak out.
Then after we freak out?
Plan again.
This might sound silly, but I notice so many people doing things like this every day. They plan and their plans fail, then they get frustrated and sad and plan some more. The truth is that so many things in life can’t be planned to the last detail or planned at all. Most people do not want to except that their lives don’t have much structure, and that things will almost DEFINITELY go wrong on a daily basis. They generally don’t account for the normal mishaps of daily life or for long term goals. You have to have breathing room, or at least away to overcome obstacles that disrupt or obliterate your plans. While most often our plans fall apart when they get messed up, we do have the ability to change our outlook on how things appear when your plans fall apart.
So, at about this point I’m going to drastically change subjects having realized I got way in over my head when I started thinking about burning houses. Stream of consciousness, sorry.
Stories. I like stories. Deep things with rich detail and beautiful colours and extravagant plot twists that make you fall in love or throw up. I personally prefer the ones so intense they make you vomit, your brain vomit actually, never literal vomit because that would be gross or if it did make you vomit for real, it might be the most insane plot twist ever and I most definitely want to know this book that will make me actually throw up. Stream of consciousness, no apology. I have always been fascinated with stories. Their composition, their life. What about a story makes it so delicious? The dialogue? Character’s personality? Setting? The words used to describe everything? The title? The length of the chapters? Perhaps the first chapter? You know they say a first impression is everything. But whatever it is, I love stories.
Later.
http://www.soundcloud.com/westonmalone
As some of you may know, I am a musician. I figured that for those who are curious I should post a link to my SoundCloud page. Currently, the vast majority of my songs and works are unfinished. I mostly sing and play acoustic guitar in an almost indie/folk style. This is not all that I do as I occasionally create electronic pieces when given the chance. Those works are particularly sketchy because I don’t get the opportunity to make it much (me not having a computer and all). My music is generally recorded on my Android, which is, sadly, all that I have at my disposal right now.
Already being on the subject, I would like to talk about music. Since I started playing guitar and singing, I fell in love with music even further. It widened my appreciation of various genres greatly. I always loved music but had remained closed off from listening to all but a few very specific genres, such as punk and post hardcore. As I learned to play with just my brother’s Alvarez acoustic guitar, I started to search for music that suited that instrument. As I started to listen to artists like Iron and Wine and Andrew Bird, I began to enjoy those styles not only because of how they sounded on the acoustic but because I began to find beauty in their artistry. As my musical tastes grew, I discovered artists like Deadmau5 and Gold Panda and decided I wanted to make electronic music (which is more complicated than most people want to believe). I have only been an artist for about three years, but I love music just as much as I love writing. It’s something I know that will stick with me forever and I can always continue to grow in.
That’s about it. Haha. 🙂
Later.
I am a writer, therefore I write. As a writer I enjoy writing poetry. Here is a poem that may or may not be good.
My muscles protest,
I grow weary
From constant
Struggle.
Sleep is too eager
Or reluctant;
Bipolar
Lover.
I fear a venture
Into my mind,
Covering,
My truth.
I am held
Away,
Far away,
In this cage
Made of flesh
And fool.
(That’s my notebook with my woodburned Deathly Hallows symbol.)
So I’m eighteen, I don’t have my license, and in four months I’m off to my first semester in college. This prospect thoroughly aggravates me and perpetually annoys me. Today, I woke up with hope that I would be freed at last from my loserdom of not being able to drive. I went to take my driving test after having postponed it long enough. I had waited until my learner’s permit had one day until it expired. I was nervous beyond belief. I hadn’t had the appropriate amount of practice I needed and was ill prepared.
It started off rather well, I thought, while going through checking the vehicle’s lights and windshield wipers and such. But that’s where it ended. As I was pulling out of my parking space, I neglected to check behind me appropriately and the officer called me out on it. He had me drive through a nearby residential area with narrow roads. It was there where things really turned sour and I realized I wouldn’t pass my test. I didn’t look where I should have and did not stop soon enough for stop signs. This happened multiple times. On the drive back to the local DMV, I was angry and felt like bursting into tears and screaming. Which I did after after I left the DMV (minus the crying). I had failed.
Failure has always been something I have had trouble dealing with, despite my generally low self standards for adequacy. I felt weak and not in control of my life. I was a little kid that hadn’t lived up to his parent’s expectations. I felt as though my requirements for official adulthood had not been met and furthermore pushed away from reaching my goals. I knew I had not only disappointed my parents but myself. I was a complete failure in my mind because of one thing.
Just one little thing.
As I was moping around, I realized something. It started out as a tiny little thought amidst my self pity. I was dwelling on my percieved lack of control over my life, searching for something I had control over and had the ability to change. What I realized was this:
I have more control over my own situation than anyone else does.
I started to list off all the things I had control over. A few things were music, writing, my outlook on life, etc. The list continued to grow from those simple fetal thoughts into a beautiful, shining, living, breathing beacon of hope. I began to realize that this was a minor hiccup on my pathway to success. I could still take the written test very soon and come back after a month and take the driving test again. I could come back ten times better, I just have to put forth the effort to change my situation for the best. It’s just another chance to grow and learn and succeed. If I hadn’t have failed today I might not have been able to know what I do now. I just had to take a step back to examine my faults. I can honestly say now that in a strange, but wonderful, way I appreciate my failures and the chance to pick myself up and come back stronger than I was before. It’s all about perspective, and we all have the ability to change that. 🙂
Later.
So my last post was considerably negative and I am choosing to make a difference and be more positive, starting with this- 🙂
As well as being increasingly positive, I decided that now would be as good a time as any to inform any willing readers about myself… to some degree (don’t you think it’s respectable that I leave out information like what size pants I wear?? I think that makes sense.)
So, that being said, I like music. A lot. I suck at it but it’s my favourite hobby. Unfortunately, I didn’t get into it until my sophomore year of highschool when I started to play my brother’s guitar as a way to relieve boredom during my lazy summers. I also started to sing. A year later I discovered the musical anomaly that is the electronic genre via Garageband. After that I subsequently discovered SoundCloud. A wonderful place.
Anyhow, this brings me to the interest I have always held, and that is creative writing. I have always been able to find myself in a comfortable place when trying to write a poem or lyrics, and occasionally a short story or the beginnings of an unfinished novel. I just love the way little squiggles on paper magically turn into audible nonsense we understand and fall in love with in the irrational ways. Words are a fabulous and wonderful entity. So often I combine my love for words with music and begin to write lyrics.
Lyrics are perhaps the best form through which I communicate my thoughts and feelings most accurately. Recently I have decided to start entering contests to try and mostly motivate me to write.
Which brings me to goals. Setting goals is perhaps one of the most useful things you can do for yourself. This is such a wonder ro me simply because I am a massively ungoal oriented person. So a lot of the time I find no purpose for my God given talents. Having a purpose is nice.
Later. 🙂