Our Moms Think We’re Talented, So Surely You Will Too
Published by Quin November 12th, 2008 in A Punkass Original Production, Jazz is Dead, MusicWe’ve got a fairly large percentage of our writers who actually create things in various media on a fairly regular basis. From what I’ve been able to glean, at the very least Marc makes movies, Violet is a designer, Sabotabby is a cartoonist, and I do theater and music. I’m sure most of us have other mad skillz we’ve been keeping secret– and that goes for you commenters too.
But at the moment, this here friendly little blog doesn’t appear to have an audience very hungry for our creative works. I dream of a day when an appearance by The Patriarchy gathers a hundred comments, and a brilliant bit of comedy writing can draw in referral links from a dozen other blogs.
Not that I’m seriously expecting that to ever happen, but part of it is that we don’t share often enough. In other words, if people don’t ever start to expect it, they’re not going to come here looking for it. So what the hell, I’ve decided I’m going to try to help us grow an audience that likes us for our creative stuff too, by posting some of my own stuff on a regular basis. If you don’t want to check it out, just don’t click on these posts!
Like most of the stuff I intend to start bringing here, this piece is completely devoid of any political content. It’s a piece I wrote and recorded twelve or thirteen years ago for one of my small college jazz groups. I named it “Pass/Fail”, after a silly rule at UT Austin where I was allowed to take up to three courses without receiving a grade for them, as long as I passed them. Way to incentivize the slackitude, UT! But, I certainly was happy to take advantage of it at the time.
It’s me on piano, by the way. Enjoy!
Download link: Pass-Fail
Pass Fail by Quin Arbeitman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Is the embedded media player working for anyone? It worked fine for me when I previewed the post, but now it doesn’t seem to work. Any tech-y folks know what’s going on there? Oh well. At least the download link still works– I guess people can still catch it that way.
It works perfectly for me…(sigh) it makes me wish I was wearing something black and slinky and sipping some fine wine in a shadowy corner of a hole-in-the-wall jazz club.
Ha, now I can share my artistic aspirations and hopefully nobody will laugh. I just finished my first short story (science fiction) for submission for publication! Mailing it out to three places tomorrow. I would rather be skinned alive slowly than even post so much as a teeny excerpt of it where anybody I know can see it, but wish me luck!
It’s not working for me, except the first few seconds. But it’s probably a problem on my end.
Who knows what’s going on with it. I’ll try fiddling with embedding a different media player when I get a few minutes late tonight. Not that I really know what I’m doing.
Lisa, good luck with the story! And if you ever feel like sharing any stuff here– or even sharing privately by e-mail– I’d love to read it. I always enjoy checking out the stuff my friends create. (Well, nearly always. There was one night of “performance art” that some of my physical theatre friends did in London that I found particularly painful.)
It’s working fine for me. More jazz!
Quin, it worked fine for me too. Nice song!
And Lisa Kansas, good luck!
Thanks, Erin and mustelid!
I think I’ve got the problem sussed. According to my googly sources, the Windows Media Player I used won’t work with Firefox (which is my preferred browser), but it works fine with Internet Explorer (and indeed, when I load up with IE, it works fine). Evidently to use a player that works on all platforms I’ll need to load a special Wordpress Plugin, but I do believe I need Marc’s help as big boss administrator for that. And he told me he’s crazy busy until Monday. So I’ll leave it as is for now, and edit it in a few days.
Any poor Firefox users out there, just download the file and play it with your own media player. You’ll like it! Or your money back.
mustelid–thank you! I NEED it.
*claps* for growing audiences. I think you’re talented too!
And I liked the music very much. Please do post more.
Lisa, good luck! I love sci-fi and fantasy novels but have just recently been reading short stories, they’re an interesting and frustrating format (I think).
Thanks for the good words, everyone. I intend to keep on sharing one music piece of mine per week from this point forward, at least until I run out of stuff I think is worth sharing. (Which may not take TOO terribly long!)
I love sci-fi short stories, probably more than novels. It’s where all the coolest what-if ideas really get to run wild and find a nice distilled supertight reductio ad absurdum. Of course, I haven’t read a sci-fi book in, like, five years. (That’s probably a lie, but I truly can’t think of the last one I’ve read.) What ever happened to me? There was a time I was a huge sci-fi geek, and then suddenly I just stopped for some reason. Must’ve had some kind of internal biological change.