Things have settled down and I'm working on MATHEMATICIANS IN LOVE. Here's a piece of a scene I wrote yesterday that I like. The point of view is the mathematician and rock-singer Bela Kis, he's fronting a memorial concert for his bass player Cammy, who was murdered by a guy named Sandoval, who nearly cut her head off. The German metal rock star bassist Jutta Schreck of AntiCrystal is sitting in for Cammy.

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To get some energy, I led the band into our AntiCrystal cover, and that finally picked Jutta up. She bared her sharp teeth in a smile, left the smile in place, and growled the words of “Crying Chainsaw Clown,” her bass playing a funeral dirge that accelerated into a rocket launch, with Jen3 wailing and Naz sprinkling fireworks of percussion. It was very German, very metal, deeply good. Jutta plowed on past the final chorus, and we stretched out, turning the song into a jam, getting into a groove for the first time tonight, the music meshing like the wheels and levers of a locomotive, and winding up with multiple repetitions of the psychotic chorus.

Crying chainsaw clown �- her head is on the ground.

Crying chainsaw clown �- my head is on the ground.

Crying chainsaw clown �- your head is on the ground.

Crying chainsaw clown! Crying chainsaw clown! Crying chainsaw clown!

The crude, English-as-a-second-language lyrics seemed uncannily powerful to me tonight, and for the first time ever I was able to break my voice into the heavy-metal falsetto register, screaming my aching heart out. I even began to feel some compassion for Sandoval in his jail cell.

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Every post needs a picture, so here's a vaguely relevant painting by Robert Williams, a self-portrait with a starving clown in the upper right-hand corner.

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For the next scene, I get to blow up the Tang Fat Hotel in Chinatown with a prediction machine that violates the Margolus-Levitin computational density limit! (See also the slightly more readable paper.) Jabbering tenants scattering like chickens from a cherrybombed henhouse! Louche sex workers popping through soft meat walls into each others beds!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 12th, 2005 at 8:11 am and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.