Metafilm, Music & More - Narrative Madness

A Self-Reflective Song: “Your Song” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin

June 8, 2013June 8, 2013Ronald B RichardsonLeave a comment

Songwriters love to write songs about songs, meditating on the meaning and power of music. You can listen to my playlist Metamusic: Songs about Songs on RDIO as you read about “Your Song,” lyrics by Bernie Taupin and music by Elton John, the first of a series of posts on metamusic.

The song begins “It’s a little bit funny this feeling inside.” The feeling, of course, is love. “I don’t have much money,” John sings, “but boy if I did / I’d buy a big house where we both could live.” The songwriters, longtime collaborators, may not have had much money when they wrote the song, but it became their first pop hit and is now worth a fortune, enough to buy two or three houses.

Like This!: The Liking of the Liking of Liking

March 25, 2012January 16, 2023Ronald B Richardson5 Comments

I just liked a new Facebook page called, “Liking.” I liked it before I liked it and I still like it. You should like it too. Why not?

The “Like” button on Facebook has changed the verb. Before Facebook, “like” was a positive emotion one felt towards a person or object, but now “liking” means pressing a button. Doing so means you like something in the traditional sense, so the like button refers back to the furry and friendly emotion. The button hasn’t replaced the feeling, so there is no reason not to like it.

Don’t Invalidate My Existence: A Meta-Dream

March 24, 2012January 16, 2023Ronald B Richardson2 Comments

Sometimes I realize I am dreaming. Once, my college friend Robert Lochner and I were in line at the check-out counter of a grocery store. I told Robert I was dreaming as the cashier began to ring me up and that everyone in my dream was a figment of my imagination and that they would cease to exist as soon as I woke up. Robert, who was familiar with my philosophical posturing, rolled his eyes, but kept quiet, waiting for his turn at the register. The cashier, however, got very upset.

“I don’t care what you believe,” she said, pointing at me, “but don’t you invalidate my existence! You hear me? You can think whatever you want–I don’t care–but it is extremely, extremely rude to tell someone they don’t exist. How would you feel if I told you were just a character in my dream? A figment of my imagination? How would you like that?”

That is all I remember. I woke up. My friend Robert survived the dream although I haven’t heard from him in years. I was about to say that the cashier did not survive, but I have told this story several times and now I have written it down and sent it out into the cloud. The cashier doggedly continues her existence in spite of my insensitive comments. She exists. She is real.

(To read more about the reality of fiction, read my book Narrative Madness, available at narrativemadness.com or on Amazon.)

Registering the Registering of the Fact of Registering: Jean Paul’s Definition of Philosophy

November 2, 2010November 2, 2010Ronald B RichardsonLeave a comment

German Romantic writer Jean Paul defined philosophy in metaterms:

Whereas the entire Witz of philosophy is to make the subject “I” into an object and vice versa, the philosophy of the Witz nowadays is one that similarly tries to ensure that the ideas of this subject-object are treated sub-objectively; in other words, I am being profound and serious if I say, “I am registering the registering of the fact of registering the fact of registering’, or ‘I am reflecting on the fact of reflecting on the reflexion of a reflexion on a brush.’ These are serious sentences, which reveal infinite reflexion (‘Widerschein ins Unendliche’)! Such depths are certainly beyond the reach of some people! I’ll go further: only he who shows himself able to write, several times in a row, the genitive of the same infinitive of whatever verb, can be allowed to say: I am philosophizing . . .

Dallenbach, Lucien. The Mirror in the Text. Trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1989.

Metamusic and Metasongs: Music about Music, Songs about Songs

October 11, 2010October 11, 2010Ronald B RichardsonLeave a comment

Metamusic is music about music: songs that reference themselves, the singer, other songs, other singers, musical instruments, the process of writing or recording a song, the music industry, or anything else that is related to music.

You’d think that the world would have had enough of silly meta-songs. I look around me and see it isn’t so. Singers love to sing about singing!

In the first half of this post, we’ll look closely at some passages from metasongs, examining what makes them meta. In the second half, I present a longer list of metamusic for you to explore. Whenever possible, I have linked to the song on YouTube, preferably a music video. Most songs are available on Spotify and Pandora.

Bad Music by Blectum from Blechdom

The singer of this soulful meta-song, Kevin Blechdom, slips in and out of tune, as she sings about bad music. (Click on the link and listen to it as you read).

“There’s bad music everywhere. There’s bad music everywhere. There’s bad music in the air.”

Metafilms: an Introduction

September 29, 2010January 16, 2023omarrrLeave a comment

Metafilms are to movies what metafiction is to literature. It is a style of cinematography whose main subject is the act of film production itself, exposing to the audience the inner workings of the art.

Still from 1960’s Peeping Tom

Metafilm Categories

This style of movie making can be categorized in two distinct groups and a third one containing all the movies that fall in between.

The Conventions of Unconventionality: An Overview of Metafiction

May 23, 2010May 23, 2010Ronald B Richardson1 Comment

An overview of major themes I found while studying metafiction for the Metaclass, a self-study course for a masters of literature at San Francisco State University. This summary will also serve as a guide to the posts I have written over the last four months (with notes about a few others I intend to write). It is not meant to be a comprehensive list of meta conventions, but an addition to the the list found under Meta-Meta and Metafiction. (Nor is this intended to be a summary of themes I developed about writing and teaching, the metaclass aspect. Those themes may be found in Putting It All Together: Collaborative and Integrated Reading and Writing.)

Two Kinds of People

April 30, 2010April 30, 2010Ronald B Richardson2 Comments

There are two kinds of people in the world:

those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.

Tag: Metafilm, Music & More