{"id":4249,"date":"2013-07-31T00:27:14","date_gmt":"2013-07-31T04:27:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/?p=4249"},"modified":"2013-07-31T07:23:58","modified_gmt":"2013-07-31T11:23:58","slug":"celebrate-the-small-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/?p=4249","title":{"rendered":"celebrate the small things, like a faulty memory"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maggie over at Maggie Madly Writing wrote a post called “Celebrate the Small Things<\/a>.” I liked the idea so much that I decided to do my own. <\/p>\n

However, now that I go back to reread Maggie’s post, I remember that it’s actually about celebrating victories, which is not actually what I wrote about. I wrote about things that are giving me pleasure right now.<\/p>\n

Hmmm. Well, that’s good to write about, too.<\/p>\n

And my most recent small victories are things I wouldn’t write about on the blog anyway.<\/p>\n

And my current story (#2 in the list below) is going well, so that’s sort of victory-ish. <\/p>\n

So, here we go. Only slightly off-topic. <\/p>\n

1) Willy DeVille<\/strong>. When I used to spend all of my free time (and money) at CBGBs (late 1970s, early 1980s), I saw a lot of great bands. Pretty much none of them really took off and became what we thought they could be.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

But one band that never fit in there was Mink DeVille. They were not punks or new wavers or whatever else.\u00a0 They were pop classicists, in sharp suits and huge pompadours, and Willy DeVille, their leader, may have been the coolest guy ever to be on a stage.<\/p>\n

But the rest of the band wasn’t up to him (not good enough, and not flexible enough to cover all the kinds of music he wanted to play). So, after a decade or two, it was such a pleasure to see the DVD Willy DeVille \u2013 Live in the Lowlands<\/em>. <\/p>\n

As somebody said on Amazon, “Back at his good old Paradiso venue, he appears onstage with a limp, a cane, a mouthful of something that may have once been teeth and a nose that veers stage right. Then he opens his mouth to sing and he becomes the most beautiful man on Earth.” I could not have imagined Willy DeVille ending up better than he is on this DVD, and he finally had the perfect musicians around him. Here’s just a sample:
\nyoutube.com\/watch?v=vkfD9AMzNxQ<\/a><\/p>\n

2. My new story<\/strong>. I’m happy with how it’s going. It’s apparently going to be looser than Stevie One<\/a><\/em>, but pretty much everything I’ve written has been looser than Stevie One<\/em>, which is a 42,000-word story told in 30,000 words. In X-Files<\/em> terms, Stevie One<\/em> is more of a “monster-of-the-week” story, and this one is more of a “mythology” story. <\/p>\n

Oh, and for everybody who was curious about (and\/or skeeved out by) Daphne the dog, this is where you’ll find out more about her. And Jan Sleet’s parents. And maybe even starling.<\/p>\n

3. BlueTooth<\/strong>. As I’ve said before, I’m working almost entirely in Android these days, but two things were not satisfactory. One was doing a lot of text input.\u00a0 The other was transferring files directly between Android devices. <\/p>\n

Well, I got an Android BlueTooth keyboard (on which I’m writing this) and it works great.\u00a0 I was afraid that the keyboard would be cheesy, like a couple of Palm keyboards I used back in the day, but it’s a good keyboard. <\/p>\n

I had tried one BlueTooth file transfer program and it didn’t work, but I decided to try another, and it works great. It’s called BlueTooth Transfer Any File. So, problems solved.<\/p>\n

4. Gail Simone<\/strong>. She writes comics. She started out with a website called Women in Refrigerators, which documented the dismal things which were happening to a lot of women in superhero comics. Raped, killed, de-powered, and, yes, stuffed into refrigerators. <\/p>\n

She’s gone on to write some of the most interesting female characters in superhero comics, and none of them are simplistic, brightly-colored role models for young girls, that’s for sure. (I think good role models for young girls are really important, but, not being a young girl, I tend to prefer characters with a bit more complexity.)<\/p>\n

When my long-time comic book store was about to close I considered stopping buying comics, but it was one of Simone’s books that was the one I knew I couldn’t quit. Then the book was cancelled anyway, but that’s how it goes in comics.\u00a0 And Simone took advantage of the cancelation to end the series with what must be the first polygamous lesbian marriage in mainstream superhero comics.<\/p>\n

Simone was writing Batgirl<\/em> recently (a character she is very attached to) and then she was fired from the book (by an email, if I remember correctly). I stopped reading it immediately. I gather I wasn’t the only one, because now she’s back writing it again, and the last issue was tremendous \u2013 page after page of good, solid writing.<\/p>\n

Now she’s started to write Red Sonja<\/em>. I always thought Red Sonja was a silly character \u2013 a fierce barbarian warrior dressed in a tiny chain-mail bikini \u2013 but I’m curious to see where Simone will go with this.<\/p>\n

5) Oh, and speaking of Les Miserables<\/strong><\/em> (I was, wasn’t I?), I really like the 25th anniversary concert DVD. I’ll spare you any detailed comparison between that and the the tenth anniversary concert DVD, but one highlight that I particularly enjoy is the encore. <\/p>\n

After everybody has taken their bows, the performers move to the sides of the stage to make room for…\u00a0 the original cast, pretty much all of them, from 25 years earlier. It’s sort of like going to see the world’s best Rolling Stones tribute band, and then for an encore Mick & Keith and rest come out to play a few numbers. <\/p>\n

I can only imagine what it must have been like to be there in the arena that night.<\/p>\n

So, Colm Wilkinson, the original Jean Valjean, sings “Bring Him Home” (which was written for him \u2013 it was not part of the original score), and then they all sing “One Day More.” It’s a really great sequence.<\/p>\n

I’d link to it, but it doesn’t seem to be on YouTube. Yet.<\/p>\n

And I had a very specific revelation when watching it, too. Seeing Michael Ball and Rebecca Caine (both now in their forties, at least) singing the parts of Marius and Cosette, I thought, “Wow, I would totally watch a love story with those two.” <\/p>\n

I feel sometimes that I’m not interested in romance stories, but it’s really that I’m not interested in romance stories about kids.<\/p>\n

Which might apply to my current story, of course.<\/p>\n

\"image_pdf\"<\/a>\"image_print\"<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maggie over at Maggie Madly Writing wrote a post called “Celebrate the Small Things.” I liked the idea so much that I decided to do my own. However, now that I go back to reread Maggie’s post, I remember that it’s actually about celebrating victories, which is not actually what I wrote about. I wrote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4249"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4254,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4249\/revisions\/4254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}