It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

On August 13th I'm gong to be performing at the Lake Poway Campout. August 13th happens to be the peak of the Perseid Meteor Shower.

The story of Perseus is near and dear to me. When I was a very young boy we had a book fair at the school. My teacher saved a copy of D'Aulaire's Greek Myths especially for me, she said I would enjoy it. I bought it and I was hooked! I read and re-read that book a hundred times (I just re-read it again a couple of months ago), I made family trees of the greeks, and I wrote myths about the gods who weren't represented.

Then, in 1981 Clash of the Titans came to our tiny, local movie theater. The theater was only 50 cents for double-feature and when a new movie was out, we would go in the morning and stay all day. I remember it like it was yesterday, it played with Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, a Charles Schneer/ Ray Harihausen extravaganza. I could have died at 12 years old and my life would've been complete - I had seen all that was right with the world.

When I visited Florence twenty years later, I required a picture with Cellini's Persesus.

Now, I like to inject some learnin' into my campfires, and I've learned to find the constellation of Persesus so I can point out the nexus of the meteor storm, and I've learned the source of the storm. It's a terribly gloomy story:

Each year, in August, we pass through the orbit of comet Swift-Tuttle. Swift-Tuttle orbits the sun once every 130 years, leaving behind a trail of debris, that from our perspective, appears to originate in the direction of the constellation Perseus. The comet was first discovered, in the second half of the 19th century, by two different atronomers: Swift and Tuttle. Much like Edmund Halley, they calculated the course of the comet and predicted when it would appear in 1992.
When astronomers looked for the comet in 1992, it was 17 days late. Scientists adjusted all calculations for the 17 day difference and discovered that the comet will slam into the earth in 2126.
The comet Swift-Tuttle is 27 kilometers in diamters, the comet that killed the dinosaurs (affectionately referred to as "The K-T Impactor") was only 10 km in diameter. Swift-Tuttle travels at 60 km per second and will impact with a force 27 times greater than the K-T Impactor - effectively killing all multi-cellular life on Earth. Ahh, good times.
 So, of course scientist launched all their super-computers and studied the notes of ancient Chinese atronomers who had documented the comet and eventually determined that it will miss us, but it's going to be close and will appear in the sky as spectacularly as Hale-Bopp did in 1997 (we married in May of '97 at the edge of Grand Canyon, with Hale-Bopp hanging in the sky above us).
Now, they're saying that Swift-Tuttle will make its closest approach in Spetember of 4479, at which point it may indeed slam in the Earth.

All this gives Swift-Tuttle the title of "The most dangerous object known to humanity"

Cellini's Perseus in Florence

Everybody was Kung Fu Fightin!

As a musician, I will often work on "tools" instead of whole pieces of music. I'll practice arpeggios, scales or chords, the building blocks of music so that when I dive into a song it's easier, I just use the tools I have already developed to help me put the song together.
The same is true of storytelling.
Earlier today I was practicing depicting personal martial combat - it's not that easy.
There's an iconic scene in King Kong where Kong wrestles a T. Rex while Ann Darrow watches. The scene is so iconic that Peter Jackson recreated Willis O'brien's original stop-motion scene move-for-move. I wanted to depict the same action, the violence and power of two giant monsters grappling.
Remember Jurassic Park? When the T. Rex was walking the ground shook so hard that water rippled in a puddle, imagine the same Rex locked in combat with an equally massive gorilla and the two beasts fall to the ground.
Describing action like that - the wrestling moves, the grabs and throws, punching and biting with so much speed, violence and size is difficult to convey to the audience clearly and still keep that wild frenetic feeling.
And that's why I practice telling fight scenes.
This week I'm presenting my summer reading program: Land of the Giants, one of the stories I'm going to tell is The Goblin Spider, from Robert Sans Souci's Short and Shivery. The story contains no less than two epic sword battles, the Samurais Raiko and Tsuna battle an army of demons, back to back, in the pouring rain, from dusk to dawn, each one wielding a pair of flashing swords, slashing down demons and goblins with all the style of a Hong-Kong wuxia film, all the while throwing out action movie one-liners: "The sun will be leaving us soon." "Then we shall have to kill this monster in the dark!"

It's good to practice this kind of thing without the context of a story. Just imagine two gladiators thrown into a pit with various weapons, and/or an acid spitting giant cobra. And describe the action, what happens? How does it happen? How do you describe all the detail with a fast enough pace to convey the savagery of combat?

This of course applies to all sorts of tools.

I have trouble portraying love scenes in a manner that doesn't feel corny to me. At heart I'm a ten-year-old boy who likes action and adventure, but a big part of that is rescuing fair maidens, ghostly wives forever watching for their sea-captain husbands, and lantern-jawed lugs confessing their love to starlets with heart of gold.
And so I practice these too.

There're so many tools to work on if you just think about it a little: fight scenes, love scenes, funny voices (what does a talking pig sound like?), describing objects, and settings.
Just like music, if you practice all of your tools separately, as part of a regimen, then when the time comes to play a new concerto, or tell a story about samurais battling a giant spider, you'll already have the tools to play all the parts, or tell every scene, so you can simply concentrate on the making the whole greater than the sum of its parts

What do you do?

I hate turning down work.
I kind of relish the old days when I didn't have as many bookings and I took every job that came my way. The problem with the entertainment biz is that  99% of work occurs on Fridays and Saturdays, so there's bound to be conflicts. But still, when you get a request for a show, especially one that's cooler than what you already have booked there, it's incredibly disappointing.
When that happens it just puts me in a funk. I know I'm s'posed to think, hey that's cool, I'm so in demand that people are lining up to get me, but all I can think of is the missed opportunity.

It's not about the violence

I talk a lot about action, violence and suspense, loud bangs and giant  monsters, but there's more, much more more to it than that.
There's a reason behind the violence, keeping the audience jumping out of their seat, wearing them down to the point of exhaustion, it's about stress - if you inflate a ballon, increasing the pressure, higher and higher, the skin gets thinner and thinner, until even the dullest of pricks will cause it to pop.

All of that action, excitement, explosions, loud noises, harrowing drama and violent scariness, when done right will literally wear an audience out, their adrenalin kept on a high for so long, that they're ready to pop.
And you have to do it, you can't just run that train at top speed without a big payoff.

Good jump stories are a perfect example of this, building suspense for the big pow.
When you do it right, the result is amazing. You have worn your audience out, their defenses are down, a jump is the easy solution, you can do better than that.

If you do it right, a jokes are great, if your audience is raw, even a bad joke gets a laugh.

When I worked the ghost tour, I would spend an hour telling ghost stories and corny jokes, but I always ended at the back of the Whaley House, where I saw the ghost of Anna Whaley. I start with the ghost story of Violet Whaley, the poor girl, abandoned by her husband, shot herslef in the heart - scary, heartbreaking, then I tell the scary story of how I saw Anna Whaley, which ends in humorous twist. By the time I get to the end, they're all on pins and needles, I could say "Buy my CD" and they would, but the ending is great, and gets a good laugh - and lots of tips.

Even better than humor, if you batter the audience until they're wide open, you can reach right in and touch their hearts.
The last scene of King Kong is all rattling airplanes, machine guns, explosions and blood, but it ends with Kong breathing his last breath, staring into the eyes of Ann Darrow as his bloody hand slips from the roof-top of the Empire State Building. And after ninety minutes of dinosaurs and gas bombs, airplanes and car crashes, the death of a giant ape, so far from his home, only wishing to save his beauty, literally brings the audience to tears.

And that's what it's all about, it's not violence for violence's sake, it's about openening your audience up, dropping their gaurd and giving them the goods when they least expect it.

How to fire a machine gun

One of the things I've been wanting to do for some time is create some videos in which I talk about storytelling, techniques, insights, feelings, opinions etc...
The first of these videos, one that I've been mulling over for a while is how to fire a maching gun...

June Gloom and Other Ghastly Tales

For the second year in a row we're putting on a scary story concert following the Annual Sam Hinton Festival in Poway. This year I'm in charge of organizing the thing and being the MC, and I'm taking some chances on some talent unknown to the rest of us.

Down in San Diego City (I live in North County - for those of you unfamiliar with the internal arangement of San Diego County, send me an email for a primer) there is a group of artists who tell personal stories in that moth style that's becoming so popular with the youngsters these days. And, because I wanted this year's concert to be different, and bring in some new faces I contacted these guys looking for talent. They turned me on to two guys who write horror and tell stories, and they seem like nice guys to me.

Of course this doesn't come without concern, people are worried about bad language and too much gore (I've gotten in trouble for beng too scary a couple of times last year) but I wanted to try something new. As I told Marilyn, this is either gong to be really good, or a violent train wreck!

Anyway, on to the important stuff - what I'll be telling: I'm going for a first-person twilight zoney feel, so I'm going with two short stories that I'll tell in each half of the show.
First up is Stephen King's Here there be Tygers, which I read in a book of scary stories while sitting on the toilet, and the very first line of the story is: "Charles had to go to the bathroom" so I made it my own.
Secondly, I just recently read Man From the South by Roald Dahl, which is a great suspense story (Alfred Hitchcock did an episode of it) but I've heavily modified it and unlike the original version the finger will come off!

Tie me Kangaroo Down Sport

I promised a recording of The Giant Who Had No heart in His Body this week, but I started a new class at UCSD, so it's gotta wait a bit. Maybe I'll just record it on my phone - I think this phone shoots video.

This week I've been listening to a lot of Australian bush music. It's great stuff, like a crossbreed of cowboy songs and sea chanteys played by a jug band. What's not to love?

I've started playing a few of my favorites and added about a dozen or so to my song book. They sound particularly good on my fluke, and I'm always looking for a reason to play my fluke more.

I will definitely bring them out at campfire in the near future.