Here’s Your Chance to Support a Great Workshop

I’m participating in a Write-a-thon this summer, to raise money to support and continue the existence of the workshop that helped me achieved what I have as a write. I pledge ot write like hell. You pledge to support the workshop. If you have a little spare cash, it’s a fine charity (and tax-deductible, in the USA at least). It’s a great workshop that has helped along the careers of countless SF, fantasy, and horror writers, so if you feel like you should be supporting the arts, here’s a great chance!

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On My Practicing: An Update

Original Post (updated at end of post): I have stopped posting here regularly about what’s going on with my return to playing the saxophone (because my practice log notebook, though no longer daily, is publicly available to anyone interested), but I’m in a contemplative mood about it all now, so I figured I’d post. In exciting news, the overtone exercises I’ve been doing at the advice of Phil Barone had been paying off. I really am a lot happier with my tone than I have ever been, and I’m getting a richer sound. Not only that, but I’m getting pretty …

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Chico and Rita (2010)

There’s a saying that in an SF story, the science should be one of the characters. Well, that’s also true in a jazz story: in any film about music, the music needs to be so present, so powerful, that it ends up being one of the characters itself. Happily, Chico and Rita gets that right–along with a lot of other things. It’s a tragedy, of course, but a tragedy of a specific kind. You could come at it from any number of angles, and of course the film itself suggests some of them: the opening suggests the tragedy of the …

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Jazz/SF Intersection: Nichelle Nichols and Duke Ellington

It’s more often than you might expect that I find intersections between the worlds of jazz music and SF. John Coltrane read Flash Gordon and other pulps and comics as a kid, and as I discuss in that same post, Sun Ra (and several other jazz musicians) talked about life from the point of view of an alien from another world who was visiting the Earth. (Some others talked more in terms of being “trapped” on the Earth, and there, the sad root of the metaphor probably lies.) But in happier, more exciting news: my latest find, which maybe is …

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