The Job Search v.2.0

To whom it may concern:

I only use this phrase because it is what I was taught in third grade when we covered formal letter writing, alhough you will notice that I did not place your address at the top right-hand corner across from mine, which is supposed to be at the top left-hand corner. That’s because you’re receiving this cover letter via e-mail in response to your post on Craigslist and I don’t actually know your mailing address.

I am interested in blindly applying for the position available as a job seeker with your company whose mailing address I do not know. Thank you very much for considering my application. As you will see in my resume, I have experience as a human being who enjoys dealing with language, though please don’t let this limit your perception of me. I also enjoy making money – let’s refer to that as the muse who inspired this letter (yes, “who,” if money can talk then s/he can be a personal pronoun).

Thank you for considering my application. I am an experienced job seeker, and I have too many professional job-seeking references to list here. Suffice it to say: If you reject my application materials, you will be joining a healthy crowd of businesses, agencies, and educational establishments. Getting a job is more and more resembling getting published, and the rarity of which could be just as discouraging, if it wasn’t for that whole “roof” and “food to eat” and “insurance to pay” thing. As a job seeker, I am not allowed to get so discouraged that I cease to write this gorgeous cover letter. In fact, my Dostoyevsky-ish desperation makes these letters that much more vivid, like a famous painter’s use of eyeliner like lines over a farm landscape.

As you can see, I am so proficient at job seeking, I do it even when I am not being paid. That is the mark of a true work ethic, and with this economy, it helps to have a hobby.

Thank you for your time and patience, and I hope to hear from you soon.

Sincerely.

Ode to a Blight

Ode to Christmas Music

O Xmas music
you are so boring.
No one listens to you anymore.
They listen to their peppermint bark memories,
fabricated reindeer hooves above pillows,
disappearing tree-side cookies.
Carol of the Bells, you are winter’s
hellfire and damnation
for the adult and child.
Jesus, Mary, and
a heart, attacked by:
Bacon-wrapped chestnuts,
Salvation Army hecklers,
Greetings from Afghanistan,
A conversation with Dad:
“When I die,
sue my siblings for your inheritance—
they’ll understand.”
So, merry granulomas to him
and to all else, a short blight.

just answer the question

are you hung over? is this sash sexy? do I appear elementary to you? where were you when I died? am I still dying? have you paid the race car driver yet? has the priest given CNN its last rites? is my shirt dry? does this lighting scheme hurt your eyes? do you want more coffee? did I get beer on your pants? have you considered joining the national guard? did you check the pot roast? are we out of toilet paper? does your tooth hurt from all that candy? did you pay your parking ticket? have you heard the new Sonic Youth album? where did you buy that sweater? is your community service finished yet? what did you think about the president's speech last night? did you ever get more lead for your pencil? did you ever get tired of answering the door? were there enough paper clips to go around? how's the Red Sox treating you? was there a discount on 3-ring-binders after all? did you ever decide which version of creepy you are? what did that online quiz say about your personality? does spicy mustard have anything to do with it? what about the way that dog paused when I whistled? will we ever get back to the Grand Canyon? how many more leaves are there to rake? did you buy enough butter for the fondue? did you ever decide what "duende" means? how is your dad's detached retina doing? did you catch the last episode of Jeopardy? when will it stop raining? does the thought of running out of water frighten you? is your neck feeling any better? what was the last part of that man's question? do you have any quarters? do you have anything in mauve? do you like red sauce or white? neither? where do you think the geese flew off to? does Julie Andrews piss you off as much as she does me? what will you do when the mail gets here? how will we ever get that tea stain out of the carpet? am I losing my touch? is it a small world after all? really? what did you say to her when she congratulated you for being in first place? do you ever feel trapped? do you mind if I call you Alistair from now on? why does that girl put socks in her backpack? is your headache gone? do you want to get an ice cream cone? are you feeling any better?

solar-powered glasses

me: are we still young?

him: yeah




me: where's our optimism?

him: we're not that young

The park at noon on Wednesday

The bells of the Lutheran church rang a hymn
by Martin Luther at noon on Wednesday
when I ran through the park on concrete paths
laid by union workers; for example, one
blew leaves from the patio of the over-
priced park eatery. We both saw each other
but neither smiled; no one smiles in this park
because most are strangers running around
on concrete paths laid by union workers
who definitely aren’t smiling because they
are on the clock in the heat, trying to fathom
the amount of leisure it takes to go for a run
on a Wednesday in July.

Lost Dogs Found

Dog Reunited with Owners 10 Months After Hurricane Ike.

Quote: “Kathy Bauer late Thursday whistled for the pet. She says Daizy came running and ‘lifted her paw for a handshake.’”

This is important: Dog Reunited with Family After Catastrophe. It’s a story of loss brought on by an accident or nature and the reunion of a bond that apparently couldn’t be blown away. Even though a dog isn’t human, we have anthropomorphized these animals to the point where we are positive they will return to us and not some other loving family of a closer proximity. It's why this story keeps making the news.

I’m sure the people who post Lost Dog flyers around my neighborhood eat this shit UP. Yes! Your dog will not rest until it finds you again. No! Your dog does not just love you for your food and warm blanket, and no your dog won’t settle for another loving home with the same food and warm blanket, because you are singular with your dog and it’s singular with you.

These stories are important today, “especially with this economy.”

Dog Lost for Six Months Reunited with Family.

Missing Dog Reunited with Family.

Missing Dog Reunited with Family after Ohio Turnpike Crash.

Dog Reunited with Family after Fire Destroys Farmhouse.

I’m reminded of a poem by Pablo Neruda:

A Dog Has Died

My dog has died. I buried him in the garden next to a rusted old machine. Some day I'll join him right there, but now he's gone with his shaggy coat, his bad manners and his cold nose, and I, the materialist, who never believed in any promised heaven in the sky for any human being, I believe in a heaven I'll never enter. Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom where my dog waits for my arrival waving his fan-like tail in friendship. Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth, of having lost a companion who was never servile. His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine withholding its authority, was the friendship of a star, aloof, with no more intimacy than was called for, with no exaggerations: he never climbed all over my clothes filling me full of his hair or his mange, he never rubbed up against my knee like other dogs obsessed with sex. No, my dog used to gaze at me, paying me the attention I need, the attention required to make a vain person like me understand that, being a dog, he was wasting time, but, with those eyes so much purer than mine, he'd keep on gazing at me with a look that reserved for me alone all his sweet and shaggy life, always near me, never troubling me, and asking nothing. Ai, how many times have I envied his tail as we walked together on the shores of the sea in the lonely winter of Isla Negra where the wintering birds filled the sky and my hairy dog was jumping about full of the voltage of the sea's movement: my wandering dog, sniffing away with his golden tail held high, face to face with the ocean's spray. Joyful, joyful, joyful, as only dogs know how to be happy with only the autonomy of their shameless spirit. There are no good-byes for my dog who has died, and we don't now and never did lie to each other. So now he's gone and I buried him, and that's all there is to it.

This is the clarinet duck

I must have read in a book on soundtrack theory that chromaticism in movie music is often used to accompany an unstable brain. To be honest, many books I’ve looked at on soundtrack theory were so dry and focused too much on specific examples, I ended up skimming them. Books like Listening to Movies: The Film Lover’s Guide to Film Music and Changing Music: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film had a few good points to make, in my opinion, but most of the text became too much like a catalog for which movies used which music, and that specific director’s habits, etc. I guess I should have known from the academic-ness of the titles (it's not a title unless it has a colon) that they would be dry. Back to the point: Chromaticism = Instability. I watched Sybil (Sallie Field plays a young woman with multiple personalities formed to cope with her abusive childhood) for the first time yesterday, and was not surprised in terms of the soundtrack. As the audience is introduced to her first psychotic episode during the first fifteen minutes of the film, she is running up flights of stairs trying to escape a neighbor’s piano playing. The piece is Chopin’ Etude op.25 no.11, known as the “Winter Wind” etude, and it involves complex descending chromatics on the part of the right hand while the left hand plays a minor melody:



Sybil runs up four or five flights, the camera above her focused on her head simulating a feeling of a whirlwind, until she enters her apartment and closes the door. The viewer is left outside the door but hears her talking to herself, changing her voice and way of speaking. The music was not the catalyst for her episode, but instead, foreshadowing for the audience. However, chromaticism is not always used to initiate a feeling of instability. Alfred Hitchcock used one composer for most of his films, Bernard Hermann, and while chromatics were involved in much of the thematic structure, chromaticism did not take the front seat. For example, Vertigo’s theme consists of dissonant arpeggios going up and down, up and down, creating a sense of – you guessed it – vertigo.



The effect of the spatial arrangement of the notes plays a big role in the listener’s “feelings,” but even if the notes didn’t fully accomplish this, those spiraling images placed over the woman’s eyes complete the job.

I guess these two instances of spatiality can be easily tied together. Chromatic piano for climbing up stairs (ascending and descending "steps" in the music mirroring physical step-climbing), vertiginous arpeggios and spiral images initiating dizzying heights. Yes, and Queen has "word painting" in their song "Bohemian Rhapsody" that includes the sound of a xylophone when they sing, "Sent a shiver down my spine," and Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" and Saint-Saen's "Carnival of the Animals" imitating animals and Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf," this is the clarinet-duck, this is the french horn-wolf, blah blah.

This is an old idea that has been appropriated for the screen during the last 100 years after a long history of appropriating music with the stage via opera, plays, circus acts, etc. I suppose tricks like these always seem lame during the age of (though I thought the Sybil scene seemed pretty cool but I'm partial to piano); even Debussy writes:

Wagner has set us a number of precedents in how to fashion music for the theater. One day we shall see how useless they all are. For his own benefit he invented the "leitmotiv guide" to aid those who cannot read a score. It's perfect: it enables the listener to get through all the more quickly...But what is more serious, he has accustomed us to making the music servile, in being responsible for the development of the characters. I feel I should try to explain this, for it seems to me to be the main trouble with dramatic music these days. Music has a rhythm whose secret force shapes the development. The rhythm of a soul, however, is quite different---more instinctive, more general, and controlled by many events. From the incompatibility of these two rhythms a perpetual conflict arises, for the two do not move at the same speed. Either the music stifles itself by chasing after a character, or the character has to sit on a note to allow the music to catch up with him. Nonetheless, there are miraculous moments where the two are in harmony, and Wagner has the honor of being responsible for some of these. But they are for the most part due to chance, and more often than not awkward and deceptive. All in all, the application of symphonic form to dramatic action succeeds in killing dramatic music rather than saving it, as was proclaimed when Wagner was crowned king of opera.

Well, everyone's a critic.