Writer's DVD commentary for " Five Tracks on John Sheppard's iPod
This piece turned out to really help me get a John voice settled in my head, which is good as I've been flailing a bit because he's hard to get a handle on. Again, as with the Rodney piece, I'm assuming that John is the same age as Joe. Also, for some reason, John's benefiting from some of my lifetime experiences here, so this may contain a mild amount of TMI.
1. Obviously, I'm working with the information from Sunday. So yeah, this is John's wife leaving him, but of course it's about John and not the marriage. "You Oughta Know" came out before my own ugly divorce, but later, while there were break-up songs that upset me, this one just made me laugh.
2. John's too young for the glam era, which is a pity really...because damn, glam boy John looking like he just stepped out of Velvet Goldmine, listening to Bowie and T. Rex and....what was I talking about? Anyway, I figured a gay bar in Europe in '84 would still be playing Roxy Music when they wanted to slow things down, since they were in '83.
I've noticed that fanon seems to bounce teen!John all over the US, but I figured why not send him overseas where it's even easier for a kid who isn't being supervised all that much to find all sort of rebellious things to do? My German clubbing days were a few years earlier than John's would have been and I was no longer in high school, but yes, buying beer in McDonalds does get old and "hey this is a gay bar because those girls are guys" does come out of my own experience. Not so much with the blowjob/bukkake weekend.
This is my favorite section in the John piece and not just because the idea of John spending a weekend learning to suck cock is hot, although, yeah I'm on board with the fandom's love of cocksucking!John. I like the idea that nothing bad happened to him when he stumbled into the bar, that he fell in with some nice guys who didn't push him into anything he didn't want. I don't mind angsting up John's teen-aged years, but I'm not gonna torture the guy either.
3..This one started with the idea that John would happily talk about any of the Sinatra on his iPod except for the one song. In the end, the transition didn't work and I scrapped the first paragraph. But it's kind of a cool John bit, so I thought I'd put it here as a poor little abandoned paragraph.
John has a fair amount of cocktail era music on his iPod. He thinks it's cool in a sort of hip, ironic way. Underneath the hip irony, he likes it because it harkens back to a time when fighter pilots were still heroes. It doesn't matter that he doesn't smoke and thinks that gin martinis taste like jet fuel, he just likes the idea of the lifestyle. Not that he'd ever let anyone know that.
This is even more me than #2 was; my earliest memory is very much like this except I have no idea how the conversation went and I was with my dad and not my mom. The visuals and the rain and the music, though, yeah I remember that. I didn't do this to turn John into me or vice versa, though. I wanted to look at a time when John's family was a fairly normal, happy family. I think one of the interesting things about the fanon/canon backgrounds we have for the guys is that as near as I've been able to tell, Rodney's family was fucked from the get go, while John's was OK until he lost his mom. Really I don't know which would be worse.
4. I wanted the mirror here with Rodney's gay song, but really, "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" isn't the gay anthem that "Everybody Dance Now" is. It's just, to my mind, not a particularly John song, and so he feels like having it on his iPod isn't so much gay as it is him being like a 15 year old girl. And really, who wouldn't have done Cyndi Lauper back in the day?
5. I really wanted John to have decided that the U2 special edition iPod looked cool, and that would have been why he had the full catalog even though he's not that big of fan of the band. Sadly, it came out in October of '04 and that was just a little too late. Sometimes I can't believe the petty details I get hung up on.
I know this section is even more with the "awwwww" than the corresponding section is in the Rodney piece; it just worked out that way. Also I felt like after the childhood I'd constructed for John, he needed some "awwww." The tense shifting is deliberate; I've always liked the idea of past-present-future done that way and have fooled around with the style before.
Thanks for listening!
1. Obviously, I'm working with the information from Sunday. So yeah, this is John's wife leaving him, but of course it's about John and not the marriage. "You Oughta Know" came out before my own ugly divorce, but later, while there were break-up songs that upset me, this one just made me laugh.
2. John's too young for the glam era, which is a pity really...because damn, glam boy John looking like he just stepped out of Velvet Goldmine, listening to Bowie and T. Rex and....what was I talking about? Anyway, I figured a gay bar in Europe in '84 would still be playing Roxy Music when they wanted to slow things down, since they were in '83.
I've noticed that fanon seems to bounce teen!John all over the US, but I figured why not send him overseas where it's even easier for a kid who isn't being supervised all that much to find all sort of rebellious things to do? My German clubbing days were a few years earlier than John's would have been and I was no longer in high school, but yes, buying beer in McDonalds does get old and "hey this is a gay bar because those girls are guys" does come out of my own experience. Not so much with the blowjob/bukkake weekend.
This is my favorite section in the John piece and not just because the idea of John spending a weekend learning to suck cock is hot, although, yeah I'm on board with the fandom's love of cocksucking!John. I like the idea that nothing bad happened to him when he stumbled into the bar, that he fell in with some nice guys who didn't push him into anything he didn't want. I don't mind angsting up John's teen-aged years, but I'm not gonna torture the guy either.
3..This one started with the idea that John would happily talk about any of the Sinatra on his iPod except for the one song. In the end, the transition didn't work and I scrapped the first paragraph. But it's kind of a cool John bit, so I thought I'd put it here as a poor little abandoned paragraph.
John has a fair amount of cocktail era music on his iPod. He thinks it's cool in a sort of hip, ironic way. Underneath the hip irony, he likes it because it harkens back to a time when fighter pilots were still heroes. It doesn't matter that he doesn't smoke and thinks that gin martinis taste like jet fuel, he just likes the idea of the lifestyle. Not that he'd ever let anyone know that.
This is even more me than #2 was; my earliest memory is very much like this except I have no idea how the conversation went and I was with my dad and not my mom. The visuals and the rain and the music, though, yeah I remember that. I didn't do this to turn John into me or vice versa, though. I wanted to look at a time when John's family was a fairly normal, happy family. I think one of the interesting things about the fanon/canon backgrounds we have for the guys is that as near as I've been able to tell, Rodney's family was fucked from the get go, while John's was OK until he lost his mom. Really I don't know which would be worse.
4. I wanted the mirror here with Rodney's gay song, but really, "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" isn't the gay anthem that "Everybody Dance Now" is. It's just, to my mind, not a particularly John song, and so he feels like having it on his iPod isn't so much gay as it is him being like a 15 year old girl. And really, who wouldn't have done Cyndi Lauper back in the day?
5. I really wanted John to have decided that the U2 special edition iPod looked cool, and that would have been why he had the full catalog even though he's not that big of fan of the band. Sadly, it came out in October of '04 and that was just a little too late. Sometimes I can't believe the petty details I get hung up on.
I know this section is even more with the "awwwww" than the corresponding section is in the Rodney piece; it just worked out that way. Also I felt like after the childhood I'd constructed for John, he needed some "awwww." The tense shifting is deliberate; I've always liked the idea of past-present-future done that way and have fooled around with the style before.
Thanks for listening!