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Well, my Europe detox officially ends today as I fly back to the US. *Sigh* it was nice while it lasted.
The other day I met a whole group of Brits at a conference in Berlin, and I kid you not, EVERY SINGLE PERSON AT THAT TABLE (except me) had an awful tattoo they got on a drunk night out in a Spanish beach resort that they now regret.
I guess there are some upsides to me having been too socially awkward in my teens to go on a lads’ holiday in Magaluf. But on the flipside, why isn’t this shit regulated? Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against people getting thoughtful tattoos that mean something to them (though I’d never get one myself as there’s nothing in my life that means enough to me that I know would still mean something to me in 10 years time), but surely it can’t be legal to tattoo blackout drunk people who clearly aren’t properly consenting to it?
So… after doing a deepdive into my King in Yellow project, I found out that this is an existing fictional character that was created by an American author who was inspired by this book who was inspired by that story who based his writing on that myth from there and the whole thing was later incorporated by Lovecraft into the Cthulhu mythos. I have the original King in Yellow book, which I will read, but I don’t think I am going to read everything else.
Having said that, I figured out that the whole thing was tied closely to the late 19th Century French Decadent movement. I am not super familiar with it (I did try to read some Rimbaud in my early twenties but couldn’t quite get into it). BUT I finally have an idea about how my King in Yellow could look like. Let’s see if I can pull it off.
Anyhow, tell me about the recent rabbit holes you’ve fallen into.
I got a free ticket to this Lord of the Rings theatre-ish-show-thing, it was last night. Four hours long… i have also never read the books, and I’ve only seen the movies once back in the early 00s when they were new. I did remember the plot though.
It was fine, but language is what I want to mostly write about. It was completely in standardised Finnish, which practically nobody actually speaks. I get that it’s a fantasy setting, and having the characters speak in any Finnish dialect would immediately tie them to a real life geographic location, but the standardised language just sounds so unnatural. It doesn’t just dissociate the dialogue from any real life location, but also from any real life interaction.
I think I would have maybe used some eastern Finnish dialects like Karelian dialects, since LOTR is anyway partly inspired by Lönnrot’s Kalevala which itself consists of poems from the Karelian oral tradition. Granted, maybe watching theatre in a Karelian dialect here in the heart of Tavastian dialects would have been equally dissociating.
Anyway, I managed to come up with an ending for a tango song I complained about the other day. I moved from F minor to C minor, came up with this chord progression that has a feeling of going perpetually downwards inspired by the descending progressions in Jobim tunes like Corcovado or Águas de Março, then put string parts on top of that mimicing a falling Shepard tone à la Georg Freidrich Haas’ In Vain, and finally ended with the relative major with a classic Ebsus4 to Eb major.
Point being, just steal ideas.