Musical Interlude
Day 182 of Writing
One of the continuing challenges for my characters is that they have brains that are subject to dysfunction at any random moment. The problems they have are all based on real neurological problems, and as the writer, I get to pick out some strange ones.
I was just rewatching the first Jumanji sequel in preparation for watching the next in the series, and they had Karen Gillan, who played the Ruby Roundhouse avatar, demonstrating her skill in dance fighting. That amused me because I have a scene that is similar to dance fighting. It was primarily based on a neurological case study I read, although I suppose a little of Jumanji could have been dancing around in my head. Figuring out all of the sources of inspiration can be difficult.
There are neurological problems that can cause you to just lock up. The most famous case of that is the post-encephalitic patients described by Dr. Oliver Sacks in his book Awakenings. He discovered that these patients could become unlocked a little bit under certain stimuli.
What I was inspired by was reports in Dr. Sacks’ amazing book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. He has an entire chapter devoted to how music and movement could go together for people who had little to no voluntary movement. Music has an amazing ability to kickstart a damaged or inhibited motor system.
In my story, Maggie is injured in a way that inhibits her ability to move due to neurological damage. She is locked into a jail cell and the bad guys are coming to question and torture her. Things are going to go badly for her, unless she is able to fight back. Music comes to the rescue, and her fighting skills are unlocked.
Maggie is a deadly killing machine when she is unleashed, and the scene contrasts her brutality with the ridiculousness of doing it all to a popular dance song from 1990. I believe I have come up with the perfect song for it. I spent a lot of time visualizing fight sequences to various music from the 90s when Maggie would have been in her 20s. It is one that Maggie listens to when she works out.
Doing the research for this sequence revealed to me something about myself and about music that I never understood until I read about it. My parents seldom listened to music, so I had very little exposure. I never developed much musical sophistication, even though, unlike my parents, I enjoyed music.
The only musical I went to in my entire childhood was Jesus Christ Superstar. Many years later my wife was working for Actor’s Equity, and Ted Neeley, who played Jesus in the movie and in the version I saw, was still playing Jesus twenty years later and continued playing the role when he was decades older than Jesus was said to have been when he died. It is claimed that he played Jesus more than 5,000 times.
In Sacks’ book, I learned about the complex systems we have for understanding and interpreting music. I don’t have these systems working very well, so my brain has to work especially hard to decode music and I don’t get all of it. For me, listening to music is tiring as it takes so much concentration.
The big shocker for me was that music, by itself, communicates emotion. I know, probably obvious to you and everyone else, but I had no idea. I assumed that you decoded the emotional content in music either from the lyrics or by having certain types of music become conventions for certain types of emotion. That you could know the emotional content of music without having someone explain it to you or through repeated contextual exposure was not something that had ever occurred to me.
I did sing on stage in musicals, but I knew that I just did not have what it took to become a singer. The full breadth of music was just not attainable for me.
What’s Up with Us
The temperature the other day in nearby Woodland Hills was 110. California may have just set the record for the hottest place on Earth at 130 degrees in the Mojave Desert. California has been on fire from thousands of dry lightning strikes. The weather service now officially reporting fire tornadoes. So, yes, it is hot enough for me.
The great tomato experiment has come to an end. We picked the last ones off of already quite dead stems. We learned that it was possible to grow container tomatoes without enough daylight and with the assist of a grow light. The yield was not that high, and usually we keep them going until October. Even so, the tomatoes we did get were quite tasty. Next time we will have much larger growing containers.
It seems like we have been going through the corona virus lockdown forever, and there is literally no hope or end in sight. Things are actually much much worse than in the early days. We have a steady loss of at least 1,000 people a day, and many people in this country, according to polls, say that is an acceptable level of loss.
The only federal plan, literally, is for a miracle. Somehow we’ll get a vaccine faster than it has ever been done in history. There also does not seem to be the proper planning for delivering massive numbers of doses. Even with a miracle, it is unlikely that we can get ahead of this thing anytime soon. There is also the concern that an ineffective vaccine will be rushed out, giving people,e a false sense of security that will spread the disease even faster.
The talk of herd immunity is resurfacing. That is where you just let everyone get sick and develop an immunity. This is not the flu. While it is easy on some, it is absolutely brutal for many, and deadly to many others. Because of the intensive hospitalization required for so many patients, letting Covid run wild will overwhelm our hospitals. Many who might have survived will die for lack of medical care. Even worse, we do not even know if getting it gives you immunity.
These nightmares all come down to rejecting science. We are dying because our government has chosen to ignore science. Never before have I seen our government just throw up its hands and walk away from a deadly health crises, but that is what is happening. We have been left on our own, with the exception of those of us who are lucky enough to have governors who take this seriously.
There are currently 16 states with no mask mandate, and that puts the states surrounding them at risk. Those surrounding states will be unable to get ahead of things because of cross border contamination. Even states with mask mandates find it nearly impossible to enforce. Anti-maskers are violent and dangerous. Asking them to leave could get you injured, and many people have been.
There is only one way out of this. I never wanted this blog to be overly partisan, but it is my duty as an American to say something. The current administration has failed in a historic and epic way. They are incapable of solving the problem because they reject science. The only hope we have is to remove the current administration, and the only way to do that is to have a massive turnout to throw them out. I never thought that voting would be life or death, but in this case, it is.