Gina Harris's Blog, page 185

The Road Not Traveled

I've told parts of this story before, though possibly not since 2008.
My second year in college, I fell in love hard. At first I saw a picture and couldn't stop thinking of him. I tried to shake it off, but he kept turning up in person, and then we started talking. For each stage, I was more into him than seemed reasonable or logical, based on the level of contact we'd had. With every contact in person, I felt like there was electricity flowing between us, though, and I had never felt that with anyone else. It wasn't easy to shake off.
I did not tell him that I loved him then. A big part of that was how ridiculous it would have sounded, but I believe I could have dealt with that if I had believed it to be at all possible that he could return my feelings, or that I could deserve to have good things happen to me. Sometimes I would get very angry with myself for being a coward or being lazy, but I wasn't either of those things. When courage or exertion were required for other people, or for things I felt responsible for, I had them. I just couldn't make that effort for me.
I did an in-depth self-examination back in 2008, and I came away with a few specific regrets most of which dealt with him, but I think the most significant one was for our first conversation. He said something about working on goals, and I should have asked him about that. I knew I wanted to write. I didn't know he wanted to act.
It was the sort of thing that could have bonded us. I remember at times thinking about how I wanted to make movies, and wondering if he would be interested in that. I didn't find out that in fact he already was until after the last time I saw him, in 1993.
He has been in more movies than I have had screenplays produced, though it probably hasn't been everything he wanted either. For a time, I did imagine this life where we could have helped each other. Because we were coming at the same fields from different sides, we could build connections and contribute. I didn't see us becoming a top Hollywood power couple or anything, but I imagined that we could alternate between working for hire on bigger projects and making our own independent movies, and that it would be a really satisfying life.
That life could have been good. There are no guarantees of course, but I really wanted it.
I also want the life that I have now. It has some really hard parts, but there are people I have met and experiences I have had that are good, and they might not have been able to happen any other way.
I do hate that the biggest impediment to the other life was my own inability to value myself. If I had told him I loved him, or taken the less radical but still bold move of simply asking him out, he could easily have said no, but it would have been done. I could still have been the girl who believed in myself, so dated other people, or pushed harder on other opportunities. I could have been reconciled to being me much earlier, which is sometimes still pretty hard.
I do not only blame myself, because I feel like it must have been pretty obvious that I loved him, and he never acted on it either, so maybe my self-esteem issues didn't even matter for that, but they mattered for everything else.
So writing about this is perhaps mourning that life that was lost. After all, if you don't let yourself acknowledge your own pain, it leads to all kinds of problems - this week has been all about that.
Also, and this is the really important part, I need to not do that again. I don't want to miss other good possibilities simply because I don't believe that I can have good things. To say, "Yes, I deserve to be happy and successful" is a radical first step, but actually acting upon it, and changing established habits, is much harder.
The road I am on has it's good spots, but for whatever is ahead if I need to turn or merge or speed up or slow down, I want to be able to do it. I want to be aware of what is going on, and make good choices. That's my wish for 2015 and beyond.

Still pretty sad

There was another memory that led to a song of the day. In this case, the song was part of the memory. My song for 1981 was "Baby Mine" from Dumbo. That was not when it came out, or when I first heard it, but it is from my most vivid memory of 1981.
That was the year my father cheated on my mother for the first time. I did not understand what adultery was. I knew it was shameful, because I was always attuned to that. There was a sense that we had been rejected, because he was spending time with a family other than us. (She had a son. I don't know how much time my father spent with the son, which would really be pretty irresponsible, but at least once when he went "out" he gave the son's name as the person he was going to see, not knowing that we knew.)
I am sure there are people who will think that Mom should not have told us. I know she didn't really tell us that much, but there were two ways in which knowing helped. Dad completely stopped going to church at that point. That would have been pretty abrupt, and confusing, but knowing that was going on did explain it and kept us from pressing the issue. Sometimes I think maybe we should have pressed the issue more, but he was always hard to talk to. That only got worse.
The other thing is that Mom was really sad. I'm not sure it would have been possible for her to hide that, or that it would be fair to ask her to hide it, but I do suspect that unexplained sadness would have been more unsettling for all of us. Yes, we were upset by what was going on, but we weren't left wondering what we did, or if there was something even worse happening.
The memory I have is one night she was sitting in the living room, and very sad, and I wanted to comfort her. I started crooning to her. I guess crooning is the word. I wasn't singing words, but it wasn't humming either, just notes, and the tune had some improvisation but was mainly "Baby Mine".
I believe the reason that I remember it so clearly was the feeling of helplessness, but then it was also this pattern for my life, where I would focus on other people's needs, and trying to help them.
I do not hate this about myself. Kindness and consideration of others are beautiful things. It does feel good to help someone. It just feels like it was also dangerous in conjunction with the lesson that my emotions didn't matter. For one thing, you can actually be much more useful to your fellow man if you practice self-care too, but I didn't.
So let's say ages 3-6 was learning not to let people see you cry, which really meant not to cry, and age 9 was learning that the way to cope with that was by putting others first. Written about some time ago, there was also learning at 6 that I was fat and disconnecting from my body, and at 14 that boys wouldn't like me. All of those lessons were wrong to some extent, but they shaped me. Given that, it's really not surprising that some things played out the way they did.
In retrospect, I believe the most damaging lesson was not to cry, because it kept me from examining the other things, when I really needed to not accept them at face value. There are good reasons against wallowing in self-pity, and it is totally true that some of the things that would make me cry when I was a little girl wouldn't now, but that wasn't the message I heard.
I saw a quote recently from Mr. Rogers:
People have said "Don't cry" to other people for years and years, and all it has ever meant is "I'm too uncomfortable when you show your feelings: Don't cry." I'd rather have them say, "Go ahead and cry. I'm here to be with you."
When we don't want someone to cry, I don't think it has to be all selfishness, because we probably also don't want them to be sad, which can be altruistic. But if the message is not to show the sadness, rather than to help with the sadness, we fail. It fails some people more than others.

A week of sad things

I wanted this week to consist of uplifting Christmas spirit posts. I was going to write about all of the sad things, but do it next week as a way of symbolically leaving them in 2014. It sounded like a reasonable plan but, maybe because I am feeling pretty sad now, this is the was to go.
I am going over different years by song in a countdown to my birthday. 1979 was "Don't Cry Out Loud" by Melissa Manchester. The reason I picked it was because of three memories, all of which happened before then, but that was the year the song charted. I do remember being moved by it, even though I would never run off with clowns.
Sometimes we have memories that stand really clear, like snapshots. There have been times when I have wondered why certain things stuck with me so much. With some, I have later understood that it was a moment that was forming my worldview. I have three strong memories of crying.
I know that there were other times when I cried. I don't remember why I was crying for any of them. That's not what the memories are about. I think they all happened between the ages of 3 and 6.
The earliest was crying in a store, and my father spanked me. He spanked me because I was crying; I wasn't crying because I was spanked. I know that could make sense in the "I'll give you something to cry about" way, but I specifically had to stop crying after that, so no.
The second was with my older sister. She was watching me for a few minutes while our mother stepped out. We were supposed to go to Wildlife Safari that weekend, and I started crying about something, probably that she did. She was afraid if Mom came back and found me crying the trip would be off, so she got a knife and threatened me with it so I would stop crying. I am mostly positive now that she would not really have stabbed me, because she would have gotten in worse trouble for that than for a crying sibling, but I was really scared at the time.
Finally, my brother once offered me a candy bar to stop crying. It's not as bad, except in reinforcing food as a helpful form of comfort.
I don't think I spent an unusual amount of time crying as a child, but every specific memory I have of it basically boiled down to "Don't; no one wants to hear that." Maybe they are embarrassed because it's in public, or because it looks like a personal failure on their part, or maybe it is just annoying. Maybe they will hurt you, or threaten you, or be nice enough to get rid of you, but seriously just shut up already!
Just keep it inside, learn how to hide your feelings.
And I did. I got very good at hiding my feelings. Another thing that I learned from my father (and it was false, but a lot of these worldview moments were false) was that you can't really show any weaknesses or people will look down on you, so it made sense. Crying or being hurt or sad was a weakness, and you needed to hide it.
There were a couple of side affects. One is that I always cried in movies. It didn't even have to be a particularly sad movie, but at some point some music would swell or something, and I would be gone. Well, it's in the dark, and it's not about you, so that's a safe place.
Also, about twice a year I would lose it. Too much pain would build up and I would have a very depressed and difficult weekend, and frustrate my mother. It was never really that it passed, but then things would be back under control until the next time. Of course, years later when it all came out, it took me months to recover.
I think the real problem was beyond thinking that crying was bad. If the expression of the emotions was invalid, then the emotions had to be invalid too. I didn't get to where I would sneak off by myself to deal with the things that hurt me; I tried to not feel them at all.
Surprisingly, this did not make my sorrows magically disappear. Instead, I got more distant from understanding myself. There were things that hurt a lot that could have been changed - things I should have objected to or reconciled with - and it left me with a lot of ground to make up.
I probably over analyze things now. There are also things that I still don't know how to deal with well. I am trying.

Band Review: Alkaline Trio

Yesterday I referred to bands being around for a while having a lot to go through. Alkaline Trio has amazing output, even considering their nearly two decades together. Because of this I have not been able to cover everything in the depth that I would have liked.
It was still a pretty good trip. My disclaimer is that my introduction to the band was with "Mercy Me" - one of my favorite songs - off of Crimson from 2005. I heard it in 2013, so was late to the party anyway, but it was still a product of a band that had been together for almost a decade, and had grown.
What I am getting at is that it is a recent discovery how gloriously, refreshingly punk they were at the beginning. Based on the time period for when it was happening, that makes sense, but it was still fun to find. I'm sorry I missed it then.
That being said, they can still do punk, but they have really broadened their sound, where you can hear other things as well. I think it shows a nice deepening over time. I like the straightforward rock, but then there are touches of synth on "Prevent This Tragedy", and "Emma" reminds me a bit of Elvis Costello, and so extended sequences of listening to them (hypothetically where you are trying to cover everything in a week) do not get boring.
I am also impressed with the newest album, My Shame Is True from 2013. Despite now having almost two decades of experience, there is a yearning in the tracks that sounds youthful and fresh, where it could be very easy to get jaded. With Matt Skiba and Dan Andriano doing solo work, the band members continue to challenge their selves. It's not going to get stale.
There are currently no dates scheduled for Portland, but they do have some dates in California in June, so this review is filled with positive thinking that they will hop up north as well.
http://alkalinetrio.com/
https://www.facebook.com/alkalinetrio
https://www.youtube.com/user/AlkalineTrioOfficial
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqubUTGL-Gq8yIYeug2TQog
https://twitter.com/Alkaline_Trio
***And with this I have now reviewed my 200th band. So far the main takeaway is that music and bands are awesome, which makes sense because they go together. It's not really profound, but I feel strongly about it.

Band Review: Lit

When a band spans a long time they can be harder to review because there is just so much there. Members of Lit, a rock band from Fullerton, California, have been connected musically since 1986. Even if they didn't become well-known until 1999 there is a lot there. Because of that this post is going to be a bit random, hitting on reactions to different songs.
"No Turning Back" - This was unfamiliar to me, but it is a track on Hey That's What I Call Sludge, and it surprised me because I had never thought of Lit as sludge. I wondered if it could be a mistake, because there is also this Techno-Dub thing where every track sounds the same that got included under their Spotify, and I am quite sure it is not Lit.
Two things about the Sludge though. One is that a lot of the bands on it are not traditionally sludge, and it could be fun just to do sometimes. Also, as I was thinking about the band stylistically, it came to mind that Lit makes really effective use of fuzz and feedback without overdoing it. I appreciate that.
"Zip-Lock" - On that note, while the guitars do sometimes get harder and thicker, there's a good balance in their range, sometimes getting softer (especially "She Don't Know") and more melodic, and incorporating other influences. "Zip-Lock" may be the best example of a song construction that shows their different sides, but you can hear traces of techno on the intro to "Quicksand", a little country on "The Wall", and quite a bit of funk on "Happy".
"Miserable" - I like the switch they do here, where it is completely reasonable to think that he is going to sing "You make me complete" which sounds romantic (if a little codependent), and then it ends up being "You make me completely miserable." While thematically the song isn't super upbeat, it nonetheless does show that the band is clever, and has a sense of humor. You could guess that from the music videos, but it comes up in the lyrics too.
"The Broken" - This was the song that hit me the most personally this time around. I had heard it before, but hadn't really listened a lot, and checking it out again, it is powerful.
Some of that may be timing. This week for me has largely been about getting my book(where a musician dies) up, and my head is still very much in that, and in the continuation as his band and his sister deal with it. It may be that, because of this, the song for me pulled up this grief over drummer Allen Shellenberger's death, and the loss there but also the need to go on.
Mentally I know that the song doesn't have to be only about that, and that in some ways "The Wall" and "Here's To Us" seem to be more specifically about him. It is also true that the specific circumstances that go into the writing of a song do not have to perfectly match your life for there to be an emotional connection. I say the song is strong and powerful, and deserves repeated listens.
Overall the key message of reviewing Lit is that they have a lot to offer, and it's good that they are still around. And I want them to come to Portland.
http://www.litband.com/
https://www.facebook.com/LitLounge
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4LqZQKKG0g3pQH0bJmKl-Q
https://www.youtube.com/user/LitVEVO
https://twitter.com/LitBandOfficial

Free Book Alert! Family Blood is here

I believe I had already detailed my cunning plans book-wise, but there had already been some modifications, and now there are more.
One thing I had decided with Cara was that I shouldn't spend a lot of time promoting it. I am glad I went through it again, and that it is out there, but it is old, and appeals to a fairly specific audience. I wanted to go through the process of getting some reviews for it so I knew how to do that, and realized I should save that for Family Blood. I love Cara, and writing it has been an important part of my life. If through my other work people come to it, that's a reasonable path.
That left me free to focus on getting Family Blood out the door, and I had a plan. I would release it for the $2.99 price, but then when the sequel, Family Ghosts, came out, I would make it free, and that would send some people back for the first one, and then they would be ready for the third one, Family Reunion. Crafty!
As I got closer to completion, I started thinking about others who have influenced me in the writing. There is a really horrible mother in the book, and there are ways in which that has damaged her daughter. She is not my mother - I want to be really clear on that. She came out as her own person, like all of the characters did, no matter how they started (mostly as the All American Rejects).
However, about the same time that I was writing Family Blood as a screenplay, which I have now adapted into this novel, my world started really expanding it terms of finding and connecting with hurting girls, some of whom have pretty difficult mothers. I wanted them to read it. Yes, Sarah is a fictional character, but her problems are real, and she will still get through them, and fiction is important for that. It shows us that problems can be overcome, and that we are not alone.
I started thinking that I just needed to give the book to them. At first that was just seven, and that list started expanding, but if I could figure out how to give a free copy, doing it more than once wasn't a big deal.
And then I started to have other doubts, like what if people who pay for the book don't like it. The ending is ultimately life-affirming, but it could also be viewed as kind of a downer. There are some losses that are going to reverberate for a while, which is honestly part of how it became a series, because the ending wasn't the ending. I'm not even sure if after the third book it will be the ending, but for now it's just three.
And I started thinking about other people, because for a lot of the people I care about, the problem is not their mothers, but there might still be something for them in the book. And many of them are young, and don't have credit cards, so really, offering it free large scale was the only option. The way to do that is to enroll in the program that allows me five free days, so today through Sunday, basically, then it's back to $2.99, unless you have Kindle Unlimited:
http://www.amazon.com/Family-Blood-Gi...
Obviously my plans to make writing financially sustainable aren't really on track right now, but maybe some people will write me good reviews, and then other people will buy it. I mean, there is an audience for vampires and musicians, right? This has both!
So, that's where I'm at. I don't know if Family Ghosts will be free now. A part of me just wants to go right into writing them, and healing the wounds that were there at the end of Family Blood, because good things happen too, and I know it.
However, I am very ambitiously planning to complete another screenplay before the end of the year, and one more before my birthday. That will have me hitting my magic number of nine feature length screenplays written only by me (thus not counting the comic book, the series pilot, the collaborated upon adaptation, or the 31 6-page screenplays).
Ultimately, I did not want to be that person making post after post about how great my book was, and please buy it, but I can tell people to go get a free book. I guess it's a Christmas present.
Related posts:http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2013/03/kids-in-street-week.htmlhttp://sporkful.blogspot.com/2013/03/all-about-family-blood.htmlhttp://sporkful.blogspot.com/2014/10/cara.html

Musical Magical Thinking

You probably don't know this, but my heart has been breaking a little bit lately. It is because there are concerts that I want to go to but am missing, for the usual combination of financial and logistical issues.
November 24th, Circa SurviveDecember 9th, Billy IdolDecember 10th, WeezerDecember 16th, Reggie and the Full EffectDecember 20th. Dandy Warhols
Yes, I have already seen Weezer and Billy Idol, though that was before I was doing music reviews.
Yes, I have also already seen Reggie, and in fact have written three different reviews (general, album, and concert - more than any other act). However, tonight is with Say Anything and Saves The Day, which could be a valuable addition to my study of emo, and he has Pentimento backing him up, which would be a different side of them too, and they have been incorporating holiday aspects into this show, but okay, fine. It's just kind of frustrating.
One reason that show would have been especially cool for this week is that Friday will be my 200th band reviewed, and so 199 and 200 could have been for a live show. When #99 and #100 were for the Third Eye Blind show, with TEAM, that was special.
(And #199 and #200 would have been for Say Anything and Saves the Day, because I count bands, not reviews, so whether I wrote about them the following week or not, #28 Reggie and #113 Pentimento would be repeats and not go into the tally.)
So I have decided that this week's music reviews will be about hope instead, like that Dave Hause (#85) review, where I couldn't go to the one show, but I reviewed him anyway, and then he came back and I got to see him.
This sent me to my list of bands that I want to see, but haven't.
Of course, I have already reviewed Torche (#115), but they have promised to come. I think this is a good sign, and bodes well. I have also already written a review for Gerard Way (#180), so while I do want to see him, if he can be summoned, it has already been done. Therefore I turn my summoning powers to Lit and Alkaline Trio.
That is how I will close out my second hundred bands. I may start my third hundred in a similar note, or I may go straight to Drum Week. No, wait, I wouldn't do Drum Week the same week as Christmas. Setting a blog schedule that feels right is harder than you think.

Much ado-ooh-ooh-ooh

Today has been a very busy day, and the thing that I want to link to is still processing, so I thought I would take a moment to appreciate the McLoughlin Auto Mall commercials with Robin Lopez and LaMarcus Aldridge.
I have not found a good chronology of the whole story. The first commercial that I saw had them singing the "McLoughlin, ooh ooh ooh ooh", and maybe it wasn't terribly on-key, but I found it charming.
I am predisposed to like things that Robin Lopez does anyway. I had read that he loves comic books and Disney; I mean, talk about your perfect man! With both of them, though, they seemed to be having a good time, it was light-hearted, and I enjoyed it.
I guess there was a lot of guff about the singing, so the next version I saw had only the "McLoughlins", and muzak over the ooh's. I thought that lost something, but then they kept coming up with more variations. If I do online searches now I primarily come up with the fake new conferences. I kind of miss the singing, but you still get Lopez's surprised face, and it's fun.
The series has gotten some impressive mileage. Now they have video footage of people giving their opinions on the singing, and Lopez and Aldridge coming up behind them. Yes, I can see how that would be awkward, and it wouldn't matter which one came out, they would almost certainly have the height advantage, which can be intimidating. But how nice would it be if you had just been saying that you had found the commercial utterly charming?
Be careful of the words you say,Keep them soft and sweet,You never know, from day to day, Which ones you'll have to eat.
I would not be against them singing again.

Band Review: Amasic

Amasic is a Rock/Punk band based out of Montreal. They have been a pleasant surprise.
Most of my reviews come because the band followed me on Twitter, they were recommended by another musician, or I saw them live. In this case, I saw a link for a video of a punk version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer", checked it out, and it exceeded my expectations. That led me to listen more, and I'm glad.
The "Rudolph" cover is very punk, though many of the band's songs seem less traditionally so. They reference Green Day as the best band, but for many of the songs remind me more of All Time Low, especially with some resemblance between the lead vocalists.
I mention this as a way of getting to something that struck me about the band, but that I may not explain right. Starting with "Rudolph", one reason my expectations were low is that traditionally people have added a lot of repeats that are as annoying as they are common. (I hate "Like a lightbulb".)
The Amasic version uses a few of those - "it glows", "ho ho", and "yippee" - but without the overkill it enhances the energy of the song, which is really good. Punk guitar goes well with the original melody, which I wouldn't have expected and which makes me wonder about the rest of Johnny Marks' and Gene Autry's back catalogs.
I also found that they had other Christmas covers. It is common for Christmas covers to be awful, either stale or ridiculous and in the worst cases both, but that wasn't the case here. The versions sounded good, and that made December an excellent time to review them.
In addition, there was the album The Covers, Vol. 1, as well as several covers on the Youtube channel. Normally I focus more on original music, because I think it tells you more about the band, but I appreciated that they took some songs that many people view as cheesy and treated them respectfully. In addition, they did a reasonable cover of "Friday". I feel that song deserves disrespect, though maybe some of that came out at the end of the song.
My overall impression from that is that Amasic has a great deal of respect for music in general, and that it informs how they practice and how they record and how they view individual songs. It feels like you can rely on them to have good output. I respect that.
And all of that is not even getting into their original material, which is pretty good. They have a 7-track EP from this year, The Things We Say. My personal favorites from it are "All for Myself" and "You're a Freak", but the band is definitely worth checking out.
They have some availability on Amazon, but more on iTunes. No tour dates are currently listed, but there is supposed to be new music out in 2015.
https://www.facebook.com/AmasicOfficial
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClG1kIGreMCa_KR9Zhgb7yA
https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/amasic/id322726537
http://amasic.bigcartel.com/
https://twitter.com/amasic

Old post on why I hate "Friday":
http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2011/07/strange-case-of-rebecca-black.html

Band Review: Like Changing Seasons

Like Changing Seasons is a pop punk band from Western Massachusetts. It has been their turn for review for a few months now, but I was holding off until their EP was released, and I just saw that it was up this week. You can purchase Life Goes On at your own price from Bandcamp:
http://likechangingseasons.bandcamp.com/
The music is a little heavier than a lot of the pop punk I have heard, demonstrating more of a hardcore influence. One of the tracks makes a reference to "easycore". Apparently the term was coined by New Found Glory for one tour, and refers to the blend of pop punk and metalcore. You learn something new every day.
For what they are, I believe Like Changing Seasons delivers pretty well. I do question whether sometimes the "core" elements disrupt the message. For example, "Where Have You Been?" exhibits depth and has emotionally affecting lyrics, so at times when they are shout-growled, it seems to undercut. However, if anger is a part of what is being expressed, that can be a legitimate choice, and musically that track has one of my favorite intros. That and "You Look Like a 90s Roller Blader" were probably my favorite tracks.
With "Roller Blader" it can be interesting to compare how differently the line "I never thanked you for what you did for me" sounds compared to the same line in "Life Goes On", possibly the hardest track, but also the shortest. It could be gratitude, or it could not be, and it could legitimately be opposite emotions for the same situation. Again, they have some depth.
They have a few scheduled performances in the near future, and with the new release this looks like a good time for the band.
https://www.facebook.com/LikeChangingSeasons
http://likechangingseasons.bandcamp.com/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8VJ3eYXszcL9nnsmSp9_DA
https://twitter.com/LCSmass