–M. J. Young

I’ve been addressing some other matters as well, but I will post on them when I reach milestones worth mentioning.

–M. J. Young

That was when I realized I was out of my element, and in several ways.

The most obvious is that I am not an aficionado of graphic novels.  It is not quite that I have not read them since they were called comic books.  I did read one by another friend, C. J. Henderson.  However, I still think of them as comic books.  I did not find C. J.’s graphic novel to be on par with his other books.[1]  I realize even comic books need to be taken seriously within the rules of their own genre, but my limited exposure makes it difficult to identify those rules.

Then there is the additional problem that the story is, at least to my eyes, clearly allegorical, but I know that I am missing bits of the allegory.  Aubuchon’s background includes an extensive understanding of occult practices which I lack.  Even the title, Third Eye Shut, is a reference to an occult concept of opening a third eye to see spiritual things.  The story asserts that to the degree our third eyes are open we are blinded by the illusion created by the enemy, and it is only by closing our third eye against that illusion that we can see reality as it truly is.  The spirits we see when we open our third eye to the spirit world are intent on deceiving us, and so the more we open that eye the less clearly we see reality.

In the end, though, on my first reading I could not find the point.  The story made a significant issue about how important the young heroine Amber is to the plans of “The Leader”.  However, we never see her do anything successfully.  She rejects the Third Eye Open teaching, learns to close her third eye, and sees the world as it really is, and then goes into training to fight with the forces of The Leader against the evil of “The Warlord”.  Next she is part of a failed mission to save her family, and then she attempts to rescue another of The Leader’s warriors from the fortress of The Warlord, and gets captured and is held prisoner for a long time until others rescue her, The Warlord is defeated, and she renews her promise to fight against The Warlord in other cities around the world–presumably in the next issue.  She never actually succeeds at anything that matters.

I was having trouble understanding the point.

I set aside the book, read something else, and after several months picked it up afresh.

To risk a pun, the second reading was a real eye-opener to me.  I realized that this was the point.  Amber is important not because she is going to bring down The Warlord or accomplish great tasks herself, but because when she fails and is captured she becomes the reason for the rest of the forces of The Leader to mobilize and destroy The Warlord’s fortress to set her free.  She is not the heroine in the traditional sense of the one who wins the victory, but in the sense of the one who inspires others to win the victory because she is in need.  In an excellent display of understanding of spiritual battles, Aubuchon has given his heroine the role we all take, the failure who needs salvation, for whom heaven is mobilized to deliver us.

All of which is to fail to speak of the experience of the novel itself, which is certainly worth recognition.  Aubuchon weaves realities seamlessly.  The little old retired missionary widow across the street is also the powerful armored warrior when you can see the reality.  The apartment where Amber lives with her useless boyfriend is simultaneously a cell within The Warlord’s fortress.  The messages in television, advertising, school, and elsewhere are all ultimately about rejecting The Leader once the veneer of appearances is removed.  It is in many ways reminiscent of a master of the blending of realities, Charles Williams,[2] as city streets become battlefields against the invisible enemy using the invisible weapons.  Kudos to Rob Ewing, Atlantis Studios, Noval Hernawan, and Oscar Yanez for illustrations which captured this blending of worlds.  However, with the changing of artists, some of the characters were a bit inconsistent in appearance such that I once or twice had to check who was speaking.  Amber’s hair color and sometimes her facial structure changes according to who is rendering her, and some of the minor characters when they recur in subsequent chapters are only clearly identified by being named in the dialogue.  The lettering is always legibile, and although there were a couple of errors in the spelling these were rare and minor; overall it is an excellent book in that regard, for which again Atlantis Studios and also Khari Sampson, KJ Media, and Terminus Media share credit.

Overall, I wish to commend Jim for his very clever story and insightful execution, creating a fantasy world in the midst of our own, in which warriors combining elements of swords & sorcery, mecha, and video game are hidden from most of us by the illusion we call reality.  It is an excellent book.

_____

1  The Things That Are Not There is an excellent fantasy horror novel from him.

2  Descent Into Hell is probably his best in this area.

In any case, when I cut the call short at forty minutes (I believe two and a half hours is closer to his typical conversation, and on one of the first calls we went nearly twice that) I promised that I would somehow let him know the outcome of today’s tech work.  Gray Vanaman of Audio-clear, to whom we already owe so much, took a couple hours out of his afternoon to help me fix a few problems.  I was right about the problem with the P.A.:  it was something simple and stupid that I just did not know about the mixer, which was that all channels have to be assigned to a secondary or they don’t get to the mains.  In other words, we have a functional P.A. now.  Since that took him all of five minutes and he was there anyway, he also tackled the problem with the Ampeg V4s–beautiful classic bass guitar speaker cabinets, four twelve-inch woofers in each, but they have the old four-pin amphenols Ampeg used on all its speakers back in the day.  He replaced these with these newfangled connectors–NL4s, I think he calls them–and made me a pair of patch cords that will connect from the standard phone outputs of my amplifiers to the NL4 inputs.

Already several people have been impressed by Adam’s bass guitar set-up, as he has the classic Ampeg B-15, one of the best portable bass amps ever made, fifteen inch woofer in the cabinet, paired with the external Ampeg V4 bass speaker column, and it sounds wonderful.  I’ll be using the other V4 with my amp; I’ve a few things to set up to get that working, but it should be good to go maybe even by tomorrow evening.  I expect to have more trouble fixing the vacuum cleaner than I will setting up my equipment, although I’ve lost a needed switchbox and am going to have to buy the components to build another (something of my own invention that no one else has).  But I can work without it for the moment.  I’m just hoping I have enough patch cords to connect everything.

Rehearsal tomorrow; hopefully it will go well.

–M. J. Young

Speaking of file size problems, I ran into one in connection with the cover of Do You Trust Me?  Yes, the good news is I have the front cover; I’m working on the back.  It was delivered to me last night on paper, and I scanned it this afternoon.  I used the very best quality scanning my scanner would provide–and the result was a file so large than none of my art programs could resize it.  I wound up scanning it again at lower resolution, and it is now ready.  I had a couple of quotes I wanted to include on the back from a couple of ministers who read it a few months back; I’ll have to hunt for their letters.  I have been getting eager to the point of antsy to get this in print.

Yesterday, though, I encountered a problem.  I had saved my files as CD-quality audio “wav” files.  For some reason, since the upgrade to Windows XP the audio software I use has lost the capability of saving in “mp3″ format, which is what I was sending in the past.  The audio quality of the mp3 is considerably poorer than that of the wav file; however, the file size is also much smaller.  I had not realized just how much smaller until yesterday, when my e-mail program balked at handling even one attached two-and-a-half minute file because of the size, and then my ftp program took several hours to upload the four programs, ten minutes of audio information, to store on my web site for the station to download.  I trust they will be able to download it more swiftly, as I am using a dial-up account and they have the capacity for streaming audio.  However, I am going to have to examine lower-quality files.  After all, there’s no music in the program, and my voice quality does not have to be that good.

I’ve completed a few other scripts for the show, but the seventh column is proving to have too much in it to make a single week’s program.  I’m contemplating how to split it, and whether to combine part of it with the eighth column, which is on a related subject (the one on magic and the other on religion), but I haven’t really given up hope of paring it to fit yet.  Part of my concern is that once I’ve done it once, I’ll be more likely to do it for future columns, and I would rather maintain the one article to one column relationship as much as possible–particularly since it is uncommon for the successive columns to be so closely related as this.  But I might have to succumb.

–M. J. Young

That is now technically yesterday’s work, and I have to be up in a few hours to start today.  I am thinking that I will tackle today’s work, or yesterday’s, or whatever it is, tomorrow, or tonight, or whenever it will be.

However, my poking and prodding was not unproductive.  I finished at least six scripts and started a seventh for the Quick Word radio show, and got two of them recorded–that is, two weeks worth of programs, four shows.  The ones I recorded I did last night; the other five were done in bits and pieces today.  I haven’t sent them yet (I want to give the snail mail message that the program is being continued time to reach the right department before I start transfering audio files to them), but progress is progress.

I could offer the excuse that I am a bit sore today.  It comes from climbing around in the attic hauling down heavy and bulky audio equipment through a ceiling door down a stepladder.  I did not get it working, but I know the first few diagnostic steps I need to make, and I should find time to make them eventually.

–M. J. Young

For those who do not know, A Quick Word comes on in two segments of one hundred fifty seconds each, on Sunday afternoon between five thirty and six o’clock on Lift FM, which you can hear locally in Bridgeton and Hopewell at 98.5 FM, and on a different frequency I do not remember out at the New Jersey shore southern regions such as Cape May and Wildwood, and over the Internet from their web site at www.LiftFM.com.  It is in a half hour block of music by local artists sandwiched between two local preachers.  I strongly suspect that my dearth of response is because I am in that broadcasting ghetto–I know others who advertise on the station who have gotten good response, but their ads fall during the week when it’s almost all music.

That means I have to write and record a few scripts based on the first chapters of that book, but at least I have an outline of what I plan to do for most of the next year.

I have just sat down with dinner after frantically racing about attempting to set up equipment for a Collision rehearsal which is not going to happen.  It seems that Brittany pinched a nerve trying to lift something and can’t stand, and Baxter couldn’t call me because he is out of minutes on his cell phone but managed to let Brittany know that he was sick.  Adam is, I believe, here, but exhausted.  His girlfriend had minor surgury yesterday, and he spent the night at her grandparents’ house caring for her, came home to shower and change and asked if he could go back, then fell asleep.  I will probably wake him in a bit, insist that he eat some dinner, go over a part or two with him that I think are important, and then let him go back to caring for his girlfriend.  She is important to him, and that makes her important to us, too.

Of course, I have more equipment in the living room than I’ve had yet, and the fact that we did not wind up rehearsing makes it less justifiable–but I will finish setting up what I have, and make certain it is all functional, and that will be good for something.  I am distressed that I cannot find the nice pair of self-powered monitors which I have long known were probably the one solid piece of the sound system on which I could depend.  I have searched the attic (where I put some things) and the basement (where the people who helped my wife clean her kitchen and living room put more things) and am rather concerned that I don’t know where they went.  I might have to give Tyler a shout, to see whether I left them at his place at some point, but I’m pretty certain I didn’t.

Anyway, it gives me more time to work on stuff here, so I’d better use it wisely.

–M. J. Young

What it was was I went to the Collision MySpace and did a bit of site editing.  In particular, I added a “story behind the song” blog entry, and rearranged a few new friends.

I am thinking that it also ought to have some background stuff about the band–like, why the name–and bios of the members; but I don’t want mine to be the first bio, so I’m going to have to chat with everyone tomorrow at practice.

Which reminds me, I have to get that equipment down from the attic.

–M. J. Young

It is ironic that I have had vans for many years, but none of them when I also had a band.  I always wanted a van particularly so that I could transport equipment for the band, but the two have never managed to fall together.  Ah, well–better to haul equipment in a pickup than to haul trash in a van, I suppose.

–M. J. Young