Wherein I rewrite the musical “Rent”

Back in 2002, my friend Sean and I wanted to make a collection of songs from the musical Rent. This was shortly after P2P filesharing had come into vogue and we used Kazaa to get a lot of the songs. Sean had seen the musical and heard the soundtrack but I had only heard a few songs. We got what songs we could and put them willy-nilly onto a CD. The following is more or less how Rent would be performed if Jonathan Larson had written it based on our setlist.

The show begins with Mark’s mother consoling him on the answering machine. Mark’s girlfriend, Maureen, has dumped him for a woman. Then, the company sings the eponymous title song, where they bemoan the paying of their rent and back-rent. Everything falls apart with everyone, and the group sings “Goodbye Love,” wherein Mimi is dating Benny, Roger is leaving for Santa Fe, Maureen and Joanne fight, Roger and Mark fight, Mimi gets deathly sick and Benny pays for her clinic. Mimi decides to be honest with Roger and sings “I Should Tell You” and the two of them bond over their HIV/AIDS. Sensing the sadness in the air, Angel does an impromptu show with “Today 4 U” and everyone has a great time. Sadly, Mimi and Roger break up in “Without You.” Roger decides he needs to make his mark on the world and vows to achieve it musically in “One Song Glory.”

In what we can only assume is a flashback, Mimi and Roger meet for the first time, as Mimi asks him, “Light My Candle.” He does so, she recovers her drugs (not a candy bar wrapper) and then we all sing “Seasons of Love,” thinking about laughter, sunsets and cups of coffee.

While everyone is thinking about how many minutes are in a year, Collins professes his love for Angel and vice-versa and they sing “I’ll Cover You.” However, not everyone is having such a good time. Maureen demands that Joanne accepts who she is (and vice-versa) as the two sing “Take Me or Leave Me.” The citizens of the city wonder if someone will care when they die, and they sing “Will I?” together, in an interesting show of support for a song about being alone.

Angel dies. Evidently (s)he was much more sick than (s)he let on. Collins feels lied to and betrayed but plans a pretty funeral, nonetheless, and sings their favorite song, “I’ll Cover You” as a reprise. Benny tells the guys they don’t have to pay rent if they can get Maureen to cancel her protest and the ghost of Angel invites the boys to a Life Support meeting in “You’ll See.” Roger and Mark struggle with who they are in this crazy world and sing “What You Own.” Marius and Cossette then introduce themselves to each other, already knowing they must be together forever in “A Heart Full of Love,” and Eponine laments losing Marius’ love, even though she knows she never had it to begin with.

I don’t really have a band.

…but if I did, this would be our first album:

Thanks, Josh.

1. Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2. Go to http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3. Go to http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4. Use Photoshop (or something else!) to put it all together.
5. Post a link to it and share with your friends!

photo copyright Zdyie, all rights reserved.

full version of “The Carnival”

A full version of “The Carnival” is now available for download. Keep in mind this is a rough-ish draft, but I wanted to get it out there for my faithful readers. Also available, the full text of “Into the Black,” of which “The Carnival” is the prequel.

I’d read “Into the Black” first, if you haven’t already.

Into the Black
The Carnival

Into the Black by Jeremy Kerr is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The Carnival by Jeremy Kerr is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

a VERY short piece

Here’s something I wrote on my flight to London back in 2003. I was reading Faulkner’s “Intruder in the Dusk” for a second time and wanted to see if I could pick up on his style. It’s not that long, so you have no excuse to not read it.

His grandfather had dug graves long before backhoes, in a time where your casket was a box solely; handles, yes, but still a box: no velvet, no padding for the comfort of the living who had to see you lying on hard wood, thinking, “Well, that can’t be comfortable,” and lowered by ropes with strained effort to keep it level, lest it should tilt and the body shift, inertia and gravity taking control and bringing the box to a crash six feet below and even people who didn’t believe in padding would think, “Well, that can’t be comfortable.” It was never six feet, of course, because his grandfather himself had stood six feet tall before age had robbed him of a few inches, time and gravity pushing down on his vertebrates, and he and his partner, James, who kept a flask of bourbon in the back, left pocket of his overalls to help “keep him warm” even though the task of digging into the hard North Carolina red clay should have and in fact actually did keep him warm enough, would dig until his grandfather, standing up straight, was just barely looking out over the concrete slab pocked lawn, eyes at ground level. So all of the graves in the Broad River Baptist Church cemetery were just inches shy of six feet, but of course no one ever noticed, or would have cared if they had noticed. But, at the age of seventy, those days were long gone. It was almost twenty years since he had worked in the green lawn covered by flowers put there not by God, but by man to pacify the fact that flowers had never been bought for the loved one when alive, and he was very aware of the fact that the next fresh grave he got himself into he would not be climbing out of. Now there were not only backhoes that dug perfectly six feet deep holes, not a few inches shy or a few inches over, but also machines attached to synthetic-fiber straps that slowly, levelly lowered the wardrobe-sized box that only held one suit, one dress, to the final but oh-so-comfortable rest, a rest better than the hospital bed the occupant had slept in only three nights before had ever been able to offer. The comfortable box was only used once though; it was built, it sat, it was loaded, it was lowered. No previous occupation, and, save keeping elements of the underground from doing exactly what it was Man put the body into the ground for: decomposition, it would have no other occupation ever again.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a confusing read, but I love Faulkner and love wandering through his stories.

The birth of a story

Over the summer, Ian asked me (we were of course at The Coffee Break), “If you could pick your own crew for a spaceship, who would you pick?” We had been watching a lot of “Firefly” at the time and most of our conversations centered around Joss Whedon, the crew he created and the stories he told. My original line-up at the coffee shop included Fezzik from The Princess Bride as my “heavy” or “muscle” or whatever you wanna call him. I don’t remember who my pilot was…or my first mate, for that matter. Odd.

Anyway, the next day I refined my list, replacing all trademarked characters such as Fezzik with new creations. For example, for my new “muscle” I created a cyclops character named Outis (which is Greek, look it up) and for my first mate I chose to clone the early 19th century female Chinese pirate Ching Shih. I certainly haven’t seen her or her clone in any fiction.

So I took those characters and a few others (mechanic, doctor, pilot) and started a little short story for fun. What began as a “short” story ended up being 20 pages as a Word document (weighing in at over 7700 words). I posted it as I went on two different web-sites devoted to fiction and received an amazing amount of feedback.

Now I offer the piece to you here as a PDF file.

Into the Black right click to save

Into the Black by Jeremy Kerr is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

ENJOY!