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Dead Sound? Change Your Strings!

I know so many amateur guitar players who spend thousands of dollars buying a great axe, but they won’t spend a few dollars on a regular basis to put fresh strings on their guitar!  The one thing that will improve the sound and the heart of your guitar when it sings for you is always making sure you have new strings on the instrument.  Dirty strings are dead strings.  Dead strings depress you.  When you’re feeling disappointed in your musical sound, you practice less, and you avoid playing more.

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From Ten Words to Ten Sentences

When we started this 10txt blog two years ago, we wanted a creative outlet that would challenge our use of sparse words to tell interesting stories.  We limited ourselves to “10 words only.  No more.  No less.”  We even limited our comments to Ten Words Only just to be evenly odd and challenging.  Last week, we celebrated the publication our 100th Ten Word Story.  This week, we announce a change in our mission.

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Honoring the Born-On Strings Gauge

If you’ve been following this Boles Blues blog for any length of time, you’ve seen me do many guitar strings reviews with varying gauges and technologies.  In my article — Why Can’t You Pick a Strings Gauge? — I endeavored to explain the madness of setting up my guitars with different strings sets.

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Intention and Want

Intention and want are undervalued, yet powerful, acts of
character that define people in their place.  Both actor and audience must have clear wants and intentions to perform and follow — or the dramatic tension will collapse.

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The Doctrine of Irrevocable Change

When I invented “The Doctrine of Irrevocable Change” for my Playwriting students, they were not happy with that indoctrination because my doctrine conflicted with their simpler wishes and wants to flatly relate the stories of their lives.

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All Drama is Conflict

One of the hardest things for any new Playwright to master is the notion of the requirement that — all drama is conflict — and that any scene between two people must be packed with conflict in order to move the plot forward.

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The Dying Artful Adaptation

Adapting one piece of art from one thing into another is a dying craft because too many people believe they are capable of making that transition seamless and artistically irrevocable when they are really only able to serve their own selfish aesthetic.

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The Unbearable Lightness of Sammy

Baseball player and steroid user Sammy Sosa appears to now be hiding from his crimes against the game by changing his Race.  The dark-skinned Sosa is now the bright white Sammy.  Say it ain’t so, Sammy, say it ain’t so:

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The Harbinger of Renewal

As we age, and as we realize there are more days behind us than ahead of us, it becomes necessary to pay more attention to the wild terms of living a dangerous life.  The change of season from Winter to Spring is a harbinger of renewal — and you cannot have new beginnings without the onslaught of death.  Watch for the harbinger.  Weigh the harbinger.  Fight the harbinger.

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Sheffield Hallam University

I am pleased to announce my paper, Creating Aristotelian Irrevocable Change in Tourists Touching Down at Newark Liberty International Airport, has been accepted as a part of “Tourism & Performance: Scripts, Stages and Stories” series for the 2005 Tourism Cultural Exchange Conference held at the Sheffield Hallam University School of Sport and Leisure Management, United Kingdom, 14-18 July 2005.

My paper argues every move a tourist makes through the airport is actually orchestrated and directed in an aesthetic way using Aristotle’s theory of dramatic construction: Plot, Character, Thought, Diction, Music and Spectacle.