Daily Archives: June 3, 2013

Jun 3

The Greatest Moment in Country Music

I’m not talking about the greatest song (though, for the record, that is “Long Black Veil”). I’m talking about the best moment. And, for me, it’s the very beginning of this song. It’s the kind of hokey steel guitar. I’m not sure it sounded cheesy back in the day, but it does now. And I think it works better as slightly hokey, because hope is a kind of hokey emotion.

And then, there’s Don Williams, with his beautiful, beautiful voice, “I’ve been lonesome.” And forget it. We should all just go home. It is never going to get any better than that. It just sounds like a man being as vulnerable as they come right in front of you.

Every time I hear it, I wonder, how does this song not change the world?

Jun 3

To the Wolves

We’ve been rewatching Buffy–the Butcher, the Red-Headed Kid, and I–and I must say that I like it even better now than I did when it first aired. Part of it is that watching it in big gulps lets you see how things are connected. But the other thing is that it’s just so much better than, say, True Blood. The truth is that we still don’t have a good grown-up story about vampires on our televisions.

We’re also having fun IMDb-ing guest stars who look familiar.

It’s funny, too, knowing how much we love Warehouse 13, and that the two folks share creative people behind the scenes, because there’s really something similar about the writing, about how the long arcs are created.

I’ve also been writing. I think part of the problem I had, without knowing it, is that I was writing the story like it was a trip to Oz–lone person shows up in strange land, accumulates a group of rag-tag friends, and conquers the bad guy. And yet, even rereading it, I have so many references to Inanna in it. So, I must have known, at some level, that the shape of the story was wrong.

It must be the story of a girl who loses everything. If the only way out is through, the only way through is down.