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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1nzcK05:
More on the music thing. I know, I should’ve waited until I posted the story maybe, so y’all could actually kind of follow along. Maybe I’ll get these up and then come back to ‘em after the thing’s up. Or maybe I’ll link from within the story itself. It’s hard to conceptualize, but here’s the thing to keep in mind as I do all this flailing: I’m so much better-organized and -disciplined on everything I’ve done for this book, that it’s leaving in the dust any other combination of things I’ve ever done. So. Enough foreword, on to this video.
The easy parallels break down here a little, and I can’t get quite into why Townes Van Zandt’s story is so resonant, but if you catch at the beginning of this video, he says, “I wrote this story about two Mexican bandits that I saw on the TV… two weeks after I wrote this song.” I feel the same way here, kinda; there are more parallels here with a character than I’d realized. I’ve loved this song for a decade now, and never looked into it much before starting this story. I was making a deliberate attempt to learn all the lyrics to sing to my insomniac toddler niece, and so– anyway.
There’s a lot going on. And the role this song is filling, well– there are repeated references to The Ballad of Han Solo, and I initially thought this would be a good model for it. On reflection, no, not at all; Solo is a popular figure and his legend overall would not at all reflect the bittersweetness of his actual life. He’d be The Ballad of Jesse James instead, which I had totally forgotten I learned in elementary school and know every word of without ever having examined the politics of it. (There must be politics, why would I learn a song about an 1870s bandit alongside God Bless America and America The Beautiful???)
So, this is not the Ballad of Han Solo, or anything like it. This song doesn’t appear in-text. But there is a song like this, and Poe sings it, but rarely. There’s a brain-damaged old smuggler on Yavin 4, who gave guitar lessons on the side, and taught Poe all the foundations of playing when he was a kid, and the community center’s music program director put up with his disreputableness because brain damage or no he was a sweet harmless man, and Poe has a deep inward terror that someday he’ll wind up damaged like that man. (Which ties in, somewhat, to his elsewhere remarked-upon apparent life ambition being to Die For Leia Organa, because he sort of seems to think those are his two options– die in glory or languish in obscurity. Fucked-up, and he knows that, but it’s not really in anyone’s interests to dissuade him from dying in glory when that’s pretty much what the Resistance actually needs from him.)
That man, the guitar teacher, is basically Lefty, only his long-term memory is shot to hell and his stories are an incomprehensible mixture of fact, fiction, and fantasy. And his songs are more melancholy than a child could really understand, but now that he’s an adult, Poe is sometimes creeped out by how perfect those songs really are.
More on the music thing. I know, I should’ve waited until I posted the story maybe, so y’all could actually kind of follow along. Maybe I’ll get these up and then come back to ‘em after the thing’s up. Or maybe I’ll link from within the story itself. It’s hard to conceptualize, but here’s the thing to keep in mind as I do all this flailing: I’m so much better-organized and -disciplined on everything I’ve done for this book, that it’s leaving in the dust any other combination of things I’ve ever done. So. Enough foreword, on to this video.
The easy parallels break down here a little, and I can’t get quite into why Townes Van Zandt’s story is so resonant, but if you catch at the beginning of this video, he says, “I wrote this story about two Mexican bandits that I saw on the TV… two weeks after I wrote this song.” I feel the same way here, kinda; there are more parallels here with a character than I’d realized. I’ve loved this song for a decade now, and never looked into it much before starting this story. I was making a deliberate attempt to learn all the lyrics to sing to my insomniac toddler niece, and so– anyway.
There’s a lot going on. And the role this song is filling, well– there are repeated references to The Ballad of Han Solo, and I initially thought this would be a good model for it. On reflection, no, not at all; Solo is a popular figure and his legend overall would not at all reflect the bittersweetness of his actual life. He’d be The Ballad of Jesse James instead, which I had totally forgotten I learned in elementary school and know every word of without ever having examined the politics of it. (There must be politics, why would I learn a song about an 1870s bandit alongside God Bless America and America The Beautiful???)
So, this is not the Ballad of Han Solo, or anything like it. This song doesn’t appear in-text. But there is a song like this, and Poe sings it, but rarely. There’s a brain-damaged old smuggler on Yavin 4, who gave guitar lessons on the side, and taught Poe all the foundations of playing when he was a kid, and the community center’s music program director put up with his disreputableness because brain damage or no he was a sweet harmless man, and Poe has a deep inward terror that someday he’ll wind up damaged like that man. (Which ties in, somewhat, to his elsewhere remarked-upon apparent life ambition being to Die For Leia Organa, because he sort of seems to think those are his two options– die in glory or languish in obscurity. Fucked-up, and he knows that, but it’s not really in anyone’s interests to dissuade him from dying in glory when that’s pretty much what the Resistance actually needs from him.)
That man, the guitar teacher, is basically Lefty, only his long-term memory is shot to hell and his stories are an incomprehensible mixture of fact, fiction, and fantasy. And his songs are more melancholy than a child could really understand, but now that he’s an adult, Poe is sometimes creeped out by how perfect those songs really are.
