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Archives: 'Play For Today'
27 February 2009 | 10:44 PM
Slowly but surely I’m getting back into the swing of things around here. And while that doesn’t mean that I can boast that I’m now attending to my allegedly daily creative ritual, well, daily, it does mean that I’m at least thinking about doing it daily: didn’t Gandhi say something about being the change you wish to see or something? Yeah, I’m doing that. Ahem. Anyway, for this edition, I thought I’d flex some of my old film criticism skills again, if for no other reason than I feel a small sense of obligation to periodically demonstrate to my parents that my college experience brought me something other than canonical knowledge of all things Animaniacs. Enjoy:
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Posted by Andy in Play For Today |
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24 February 2009 | 9:46 PM
Wow. It’s been, like, a thousand years (read, a week) since I’ve last posted anything here and even longer since I belched out anything remotely creative. In my defense, I should tell you that I’m notoriously lazy. Be that as it may, today has thankfully provided me with a golden opportunity to create, or at the very least get back in the saddle and live up to the letter (if not the spirit) of my New Year’s resolution. My darling daughter turned four years of age today, and as part of the festivities I decided to make this cake in her honor.
All right, you say, big fucking deal – so you can follow a recipe. But take heart, friend: I managed to flip the script a bit and change it up. See, the original recipe as it were was very health-conscious, which is admirable to be sure but left me a little afraid of just how bad the thing might taste, given that it eschewed conventional ingredients such as flour, baking soda and eggs for store-bought cake mix and a liter of Diet Sprite. In any event, I elected to apply the recipe’s cool rainbowing effect to a traditional, from-scratch white cake.
- 1.5 sticks softened, unsalted butter
- 2t baking powder
- 2C flour (all-purpose)
- 1.5C sugar
- 6 egg whites
- 3t vanilla
- 3/4C 2% milk
- Pinch of salt
Combine the dry and wet ingredients separately. Then slowly add the wets to the drys, mixing the whole way. Divide the resulting batter into six evenly-sized portions, plunking some serious food coloring of your choice in each one. The brighter the better. Mix each color thoroughly. Grease and line two 8″ cake pans. Take three of the colors and put them into the first pan, one after the other, forming concentric circles. Repeat with the other three colors in the remaining pan. Bake both for 35 minutes at 350 degrees, or until they both pass a toothpick test. Once cooled a bit, pop both cakes out of their pans and let them cool entirely down to room temperature. Trim and frost as desired.
I should mention, I did follow the original recipe’s directions for the frosting and am pleased to say it actually turned out quite well – it oddly enough tastes a bit like buttercream, but without any of the nutritive holocaust that buttercream usually brings with it.
Anyhoo, since I’ve been out of the habit of being creative for a good couple of weeks now, I’m prepared to credit myself with a successful opus. Bon Appetit!
Posted by Andy in Play For Today |
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9 February 2009 | 11:57 PM
For tonight’s edition of Ye Olde Creative Void Theater, I thought I’d whip up some lists. Normally, this is an activity I perform elsewhere, but I think it’s creative in its own way, and can and will do for tonight. On your mark….get.set…..bullet!
Favorite Band Names Of All Time
- The Gaza Strippers
- Anus The Menace
- 2 Live Jews
- Jesus Chrysler Supercar
- Debbie Harry’s Armpit Crew
- Eve’s Plum
- Vegetarian Meat
- Lesbian Dopeheads on Mopeds
- …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead
- Ronnie James Deodorant
- Bonus: Best fictitious band name? Everyone Gets Laid” from PCU
Favorite John Hughes-ian Movies From The ’80s
- Better Off Dead
- Weird Science
- Fast Times At Ridgemont High*
- Real Genius
- Say Anything
- The Breakfast Club
- Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
- Just One Of The Guys
- My Tutor
- Risky Business
Yes, I know it’s kind of a stretch lumping this in with those films since it’s technically a teen sex comedy, but just roll with it.
Words, Place Names Or Proper Names Which Make Me Giggle
- pasty
- sesquipedalian
- Lake Titicaca
- shuttlecock
- onomatopoeia
- coccyx
- Balzac
- defenestrate
- moist
- pantaloon
All right, I’ve done enough damage to the English language for one night. Adieu!
Posted by Andy in Play For Today |
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6 February 2009 | 11:38 PM
For some reason – perhaps because it doesn’t involve a ton of effort on my part – I keep coming back to the concept of the lyrical mashup. I don’t know how well they translate to other people but I find them kind of strangely satisfying. For tonight’s opus, I’ve elected to take a playlist I’ve created of songs with the most ridonkulously oddball lyrics, pull out the weirdest phrase from each and then string them together for your gawking pleasure. Let’s give it a go, shall we?
Damn them sonsabitches with their gill-nets set afloat
In the lap of your mama you land
Amassed resentment counting ounce and pound
Hope is a letter that’s never delivered by the postman of my fear
Tarzan I’m pleading stop your fucking screaming
Don’t tell me that you didn’t try and check out my bum
Suck, suck your teenage thumb
Or leave it senseless like a suck on a gun?
I said ‘oh’ in my hopeless youth, just so uncouth
I try to sing it funny like Beck but it’s bringing me down
I Brazilian wax poetic so hypothetically I don’t wanna beat around the bush
So why is it I’m happy when there’s tears down in your eye
Heh, well if nothing else, at least I entertain myself. G’night.
Posted by Andy in Play For Today |
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5 February 2009 | 11:02 PM
Even though I get to see my kids practically every day, it often seems like they’ve grown up in the time I’m away during the day at work. Tonight was a good instance of this phenomenon, with both of my children seeming like little adults when just hours before they’d been goofballs. Anyway, color me inspired:
Fingertips
Every day your world expands,
your empires of independence
subsume old challenges
and make them old hat.
Every day your discoveries mount,
your rivers of interest
flood over their banks and crest
where imagination and reality become one.
Every day I hold your hands fast in mine
and wonder if you feel like
I am trying to hold you back,
when really all I want is for you
to drag me along for the ride.
That was either transcendental or completely unintelligible. Given the amount of cold medicine I’ve got coursing through my brain, I’m going to go with the latter. G’night.
Posted by Andy in Play For Today |
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4 February 2009 | 11:30 PM
I’ve been working on a couple of more zygotic musical bits I’d hoped to have formed well enough into manageable pieces that I’d be able to post at least one of tonight, but alas it is not to be. I can’t tell if the length of time I’m spending fiddling with them represents a desire for perfection or perhaps is merely a stalling tactic to keep from having to let them see the light of (blog) day. In any case, I’ve been thinking a lot this evening about the creative process in general, and why it seemed to come so easily for me in my youth while now it feels like pulling splinters out of the palms of my hands. I’ve not come up with any answers, but at least I was able to package my lack of insight into a haiku or three:
honestly?
if it’s the journey
and not the destination
why even set out?
faith
’round every corner
lies not the promised land but
another corner
clarity
I’ve so often heard
stories of artists gone mad
now I understand
OK, that’s about as deep and introspective as I get on three hours’ sleep. I’m cashing in my chips for the night.
Posted by Andy in Play For Today |
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2 February 2009 | 11:45 PM
Before you give me that look, just hear me out. Sure, I did just skip several days’ worth of entries, but I did manage to concoct two bedtime stories out of thin air, as well as make seemingly my 10th and 11th billion variations on the recipe for tacos over the weekend: I’ve been creative, just not creative here. Ahem.
Be that as it may, I happened to read through Erica Jong’s newest book of poetry, Love Comes First, while slurping down a dreadfully necessary cup of coffee at the bookstore today. I’ve never been a huge Jong fan – even her fiction always seems gimmicky to me – but the woman’s an acclaimed writer so I figured it was worth a look. What I found were tons of good ideas that never bore any fruit. I once heard an American sportscaster explain why he never really took to soccer: he said, “It’s like watching a football game where every pass is just barely incomplete.” His point was, sure there’s a lot of running around, wild gesticulating and tension, but ninety minutes later you’re exactly where you were to begin with, namely nil-nil and preparing to kiss your sister. This sort of crystallizes how I felt about Jong’s poems: the concepts all seemed to be really inventive, but she was never able to draw them out into anything that made them stand up by themselves. Instead, despite the errant beautiful turn-of-phrase here or there, her poems seem to collapse onto themselves from their own weight (or perhaps the weight of her ego which, I was able to glean from her efforts, is ponderous indeed).
In any case, I came away from reading the book with a new-found sense of pride in my own mediocrity. After all, my poetry’s utter shite, not to put too fine a point on it, but my stuff’s no more treacly or self-indulgent than the all-hat-no-cattle stuff that Jong’s just published, and I don’t have the formal training, awards or confidence as a writer that she does to give me courage in the face of ineptitude. To that end, I’ve resolved to continue to write bad poems and terrible lyrics, and better yet, subject you to them. And….scene!
Fatherhood #38
There was a time,
when my children asked ‘why’,
that I would blanch and stammer,
steer them toward ‘how’ and ‘what’
and hope their curiosity
would rest its flickering gaze
on some other line of inquisition.
(After all it’s an enormous responsibility,
explaining the world to a child.
Fuck it up and its therapy and night-sweats forever.)
Nowadays, though, I’m unafraid,
and finally see that
it’s not mine
to explain the world to them,
but rather to give them a compass
and let them explore it themselves.
Now I realize that the answer
to all of their ‘why’ questions
is simply ‘why not?’
I can’t tell if it’s the wearying effect Jong’s writing had on me or the fact that I’m coming down off of about fourteen cups of coffee today, but I’m beat. G’night.
Posted by Andy in Play For Today |
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29 January 2009 | 1:13 AM
Fresh of the heels of my marginally successful attempt at a poetry mashup, I’ve decided to take another stab at the art form tonight. Once again, I’ve picked a fairly random playlist from my music collection, and once again I will cull one line from each song listed therein. This time, though, rather than rely solely on the first line of each ditty, I’ll instead choose the line or lyric that I think is the best that each song has to offer. Here goes:
Experiment #2
Poetry is no place for a heart that’s a whore
Tangled too tight and too long to fight
It’s love that leaves and breaks the seal of always thinking you would be real
All these things we’ll one day swallow whole
Was there a voice, unkind, in the back of your mind?
It’s a helping hand that makes you feel wonderfully bland
I can never say “no” to anyone but you
And here I rest where disappointment and regret collide
Its okay, the struggle for things not to say
You were an island to discover
But where I’m headed, you just don’t know the way
I cannot find the heart I gave to you
Again, it almost works. There’s a strained quality to it – I can’t tell if that’s because the novelty of this form has worn off already or if it’s because the simple act of me having to critically decide which phrases from the songs move me most requires more creativity than I can muster. Oh well, it’s too late for me to quibble with it – it is done.
Oh, and because I know it’ll come up, here’s the track listing, in order of the lines above:
- “B.M.F.A.” – Martha Wainwright
- “He Lays In The Reigns” – Iron & Wine with Calexico
- “Where Does The Good Go?” – Tegan & Sara
- “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” – Radiohead
- “Last Goodbye” – Jeff Buckley
- “Country House” – Blur
- “The Figurehead” – The Cure
- “Title and Registration” – Death Cab For Cutie
- “If You Wear That Velvet Dress” – U2
- “A Warning Sign” – Coldplay
- “Turn On Me” – The Shins
- “Glass” – Ingrid MIchaelson
G’night.
Posted by Andy in Play For Today |
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28 January 2009 | 12:26 AM
It seems that my “Play For Today” experiment would be more aptly titled “Play For Every Other Day” given my output of late, but I’ve been swamped. Plus, in case I haven’t mentioned this, manufacturing creativity is really fucking hard. In fact, I’m not altogether certain that what I’m doing is creative, per se, or merely my own Bataan Death March of personal expression. Either way, because I’ve slacked a bit recently, I’ve decided to whip out two haikus. Ready….get set….emote!
five am
Slowly, quietly
tiny footsteps, wooden floors
wake up, tired old man
the usual
Same table each time
we wouldn’t know how to eat
anywhere else, huh?
Good night, poetry-lovers – too bad you didn’t get to read any poetry!
Posted by Andy in Play For Today |
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26 January 2009 | 12:46 AM
After another brief hiatus from my little experiment in creative schadenfreude – this time due to some actual work I which, much to my chagrin, I couldn’t avoid tackling any longer – I’m back and better than ever. Well, I’m back, at least. For tonight’s installment, I’m going to give a go at something I’ve been curious about trying for a week or two now – namely, creating a lyrical mashup. I’ve long been a fan of traditional audio mashups, in which DJ’s take tracks from two disparate songs and figure out how to meld them into one ditty (for an amazing example of the art-form, give this a listen), so I wondered if taking the aural piece out of the equation might still leave us with something, well, worthwhile. To give myself a little bit of a structure to leap off from, I’m borrowing an idea from a blog I came across a million years ago, First Lines, which (briefly) compiled a list of the the opening lines of works of literature. In my case, I’ll focus on opening lines of songs, and just to bring a bit of sanity to this (so I don’t spend all night listening to every song in my collection), I will grab a single playlist that I’ve already created and use only the songs in it as fodder. Keep in mind that the concept of what constitutes an “opening line” is pretty vague – perhaps the only creative part of this exercise is deciding where to snip? It’s a bit choppy, I’ll grant you, but I was a little surprised at how well it (almost) works:
Experiment #1
I was friendly with this girl who insisted on touching my face
Nobody’s perfect, and that’s something that I’m sure she’ll know.
‘I might be old but I’m someone new,’ she said.
She’s so strange
This is the moment that you know that you told her that you loved her but you don’t.
God that was strange to see you again
Bright, just like the stars above me
On my picture shelf, statues mocking me.
I heard you cry aloud all the way across town.
There’s still a little bit of your taste in my mouth.
You sure you want to be with me? I’ve nothing to give.
Please remember me happily by the rosebush laughing.
This is how it works, it feels a little worse
How does it feel like to wake up in the sun?
I live at the top of a mountain.
Every day I wake up and it’s Sunday.
I want to crawl back inside my mother’s womb.
Give it to me, don’t give it away.
You want to know why I hate you? Well I’ll try and explain
You said I’d wake up, dead drunk, alone in the park.
And I’m not going back into rags or in the hole.
Why should he come back through the park?
Extra credit to those of you who can name all of the songs in question without Googling the lyrics.
Posted by Andy in Play For Today |
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