Category: About Bob

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Fourth ND no go

well, fourth time I’ve applied to New Dramatists and not gotten that happy letter. I really like those guys, and wish I could count myself among them, but not this time, alas. This just after, the day before, I got a rejection from ATL for a 10 min piece. I thought they liked my work, I even got a Heideman nod last year, but apparently they’ve changed the literary staff over and I have to start again. That’s how it is every year with ND; you never get the same group deciding who gets in year to year.

Can’t say I’m that familiar with most of those who *did* get in either… but I’m sure they’re wonderful.

Next year this time, if all goes well – and there’s no way to tell if it will, but – I’ll have more time to work on marketing.

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The Aural Memory Project

When the future looks bleak…

People turn to the past. Perhaps that’s the driving force behind the aural memory project, something I’ve been doing since 2000… hm… interesting… since Bush was elected. Well, our sitting president – tempted to add an H to that at risk of being childish – represents a lookback philosophically, but aside from that it’s just advancing age or whatever.

Nut of it is to recapture the soundscapes of various periods of my past… pop and non-pop music, soundtracks, theme songs, sometimes even ad jingles… to reproduce mental states long trod over by newer engrams. Theory is that within each of us is every alien person through which we phased as we grew, and using secondary sensory tools (since vision is “primary”) we can sneak up on our minds and recapture our previous alien mental states. Useful for writing.

The actual performance would be to assemble the old songs and sounds package them together to typify a particular moment in personal time. Then play them and regenerate the old mental state, or at least a simulacrum of it, and using that old me for a writing purpose.