Any Influence on Me

Emily re: Sinead at a concert post pope tearing on SNL "Can you imagine the giant iron-clad balls it would take to stand there and scream at the top of your lungs as that many people boo and jeer?" Perhaps they are akin to the balls it takes to say, on a widely read blog that a country is bullshit for the way it treats its female citizens. A whole country! And I agree, it is bullshit. I like to imagine Morocco reading Emilymag and being like "Huh...a better sewage system...so crazy it just might work!" In fact this is really gonna be nothing more than a response to Emily's post cuz I just had so many things to write I thought it would be an obnoxious comment. Is there a special internet word for a post that is a scattered, lengthy response to some other blog post?

When I was in 5th grade "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got" was the first album I ever owned, on tape. I wonder if my mom bought it for me after the whole SNL debacle. I think she did, because she's a firestarter like that.

Mind google is similar to an improv warm-up game we used alot in my last class called Musical Hot-Spot or just Hot Spot. In it, a person jumps in to the middle of a circle of players and sings a few bars of a song, and someone tags them out as soon as possible with a song that relates in some way, thematically or verbally to the one being sung. They replace the person in the middle and sing their song, and so on. This game can be excruciating to new improvisers or really anyone with any sense of dignity. I always felt like it was incredibly pointless, because to me it never seemed like you were flexing a part of your brain that was useful, just the part that remembers lots of song lyrics. Also, I could never seem to get my mind to stop trying to sing along with the song being sung and to start "mind googling" other songs that might relate. You always end up thinking of other songs by that artist or from that genre, and that's not the point. Eventually, with practice, I learned that the game is more about forcing yourself to trust your subconscious by just tagging in whenever you feel a subliminal impulse to do so (even if it feels wrong and counter intuitive at first). You end up coming up with really odd songs that do relate in ways that you didn't imagine you could. Most of the time. I've gotten to the point with my training where I have to figure out how to relax my brain and allow it to come up with query results without the query. Like last night, I was in a scene where I needed to think of slang words, any current slang would have worked. I probably know thousands of colloquialisms, we all do, but when I was on stage I could barely remember one of them, because I was on the spot and I was hammering on the mind google.

Also, there is nothing that bad about watching Everybody Loves Raymond. I was telling Shawn that his impression of Telly from kids sounds a lot like Ray Romano, and to prove it I always make him say "Whaaaat?" in the Telly voice. Well last night we turned on the TV and ELR was on and the first line of dialogue was Ray saying "Whaaaat?" Classic.