The Spruce Goose was in fact the plane discussed in The Aviator, and which flew only once. It’s no longer on display in Long Beach near the Queen Mary, having been moved in recent years to Oregon, so a field trip is a little more involved than just a drive down the 405. But if I’m ever touring Oregon one day, the museum that houses it would be a worthwhile stop.
Here’s a slightly silly sounding song segment. (I really wasn’t trying hard to alliterate that, I solemnly swear, it’s just that so many words start with ‘s’…) So anyway, as long as we’re on the parenthetically aforementioned subject, let’s take a little tangent. When I was little I used to have a Webster’s “Children’s Dictionary” in full color with photos and drawings illustrating the definitions of many words. It was by no means complete, but the section of the dictionary for words starting with each letter had a box that bled to the right edge of the page, in a slightly different vertical position moving down the edge. When the book was closed and viewed from the right, edge-on, the relative size of each letter’s section could clearly be seen. I remember the ‘s’ section being much larger than all the rest, and that’s how I happen to know that random fact.
I can also recite the alphabet very quickly backwards, but that’s because I was bored, one day, while taking a shower, and memorized it that way. Anyway, back to the original subject at hand, that synthesized song segment (sans singing): It’s part of a file I saved as “Videogame 2″, because the beginning (not included in this clip) sounded like old background music from a Nintendo game. Much higher fidelity, but the same style.
It’s silly, yes. If I won the lottery and didn’t have to work, I would spend my time drawing and composing and getting better at each.
I believe writing has a great deal to do with music, actually. Good writing has ebbs and flows and a certain balance to it which makes the experience of reading easier on the brain. Although I don’t claim to be a master of written communication, I observe that I’m continually faced with minute and seemingly unimportant choices such as whether or not to use a comma in a certain place, whether to use a contraction rather than a compound phrase, whether to break apart a long phrase (since as you observe, as is exemplified by the current sentence, I tend to use long phrases which grow longer as I seek a way to back out in a smoothly-flowing manner) and so on. (There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?) The choice between comma, colon, semicolon, or other standard punctuation often comes down to the length of the pause which I mentally insert when I read a passage under my breath and think about how it would sound were I to actually speak it aloud. That’s the close-up view of writing. Each sentence finely crafted, each sentence flowing into the next. Taking a look at the bigger picture, though, we have an arrangement of ideas and images, a paragraph or a chapter or an essay or a paper or a book (or a blog post) as a whole. My weakness in writing, as well as in music, is that I’m not good at orchestrating the whole out of the parts. I jump around and introduce new thoughts as they occur to me, because I tend to look at details, not big pictures. Yet both are important. Modern popular songs have a certain structure having to do with an introduction, a chorus, an in-between part that’s not as sweet-sounding as the chorus, a bridge that leads into the chorus, and a couple other parts. I don’t know the terminology or even how many different segments are present, because I’ve never thought closely about this or made a study of it. What I notice, though, is just that when I try to arrange these parts into a song, I don’t end up with something that sounds particularly self contained. Think of a circle or some other regular polygon. It starts in one place, goes around following a pattern, and comes back to where it started. What I end up with, however, is a jagged line that starts in one place, follows no particular direction, and ends up randomly somewhere else. When I proofread something I’ve written or rearrange a song, I smooth out the rough edges a little, but I’m still left with a randomly-curvy line that meanders off of its own accord. On one level, though, I like that freeform style. On another level, I see it as somewhat of a shortcoming; a manifestation of not being able to hold too many thoughts in my head at the same time.
But I’m busy being a programmer now, which is something different from writing or music. That’s why I can listen to music while I program, but I can’t listen to music while I write or read (while being able to hold much attention to the latter).
This post does end abruptly, doesn’t it?