"Please Remain on the Line" by Joshua Notaro
"Please Remain on the Line" by Joshua Notaro
Biography.
Joshua Mordechai Leibowitz (4 April 1960—16 March 1999), better known by his alias "Kenji Notaro", was a production music composer from upstate New York. He married his wife, Catherine Notaro, in 1985 and, in a somewhat nontraditional decision, took Catherine's family name, rather than the other way around. Their first daughter, Esther, was born the following year, and their second daughter, Rachel, was born in 1988.
His first production album, Music for Phone Lines came from a project at work in 1989. His employer, Glenallen Assurity, had recently installed a computerised telephone switching system and was using a Votrax speech synthesiser programmed with the Book of Genesis to keep callers engaged during holdtime. However, customers were complaining about the religious overtones from an otherwise agnostic company, so computer technician Joshua suggested they replace the Votrax with a Roland MT-32. He'd been using an MT-32 connected up to his Roland S-50 at home, so he was familiar with the hardware. Having difficulty finding any MT-32 compatible song files, he wrote 5 songs himself in Cakewalk on his Atari ST. Presenting them to his boss, he was told to disconnect the Votrax and connect the MT-32. Rather than using Joshua's own MT-32, he managed to convince his boss to buy one on the company. Joshua later learned that his boss liked the music so much that he copied the disk and sent the files to all the regional managers, claiming to have written them himself. The duplicity was later uncovered at a company function, after the company's CFO requested that he play one of the songs on the piano and he could not. The CFO put out a memo requesting the identity of the composer and Joshua responded that he had, proving it by playing as much of 03SYNTH1 and 06JAZZ2 that he could remember on the baby grand piano in the 5th-floor lobby. After this, he took some vacation time and wrote 6 more songs; he recorded them onto cassettes and sold them through the Chicago Tribune's classified ads. He would go on to write 12 more albums, each with 11 tracks.
Despite his early success with the MT-32, he followed the development of the SoundCanvas-55 in trade magazines and was one of the first people in the state of Illinois to buy one. He said the SoundBrush sequencer allowed him to streamline the composing process by cutting the computer out of the picture altogether. Most of his work contains only the sounds made by the SC-55, though he did record one final song with the MT-32 in 1997. He adopted the name "Kenji Notaro" for his first SC-55 record, attempting to capitalise on the popularity of Japanese music in the '90s.
In 1999, Joshua was taken hostage in a botched bank robbery. He, two other hostages, and one robber were killed when the Chicago PD stormed the building; the investigation showed the deaths were caused by the 9mm bullets in the police officers' Beretta M9's, as opposed to the .45 ACP ammo in the weapons carried by the robbers. The City of Chicago paid the hostages' families a $100,000 settlement, of which the Notaro's received $25,000. Catherine and the kids had expected $33,333,34, but it turned out that the City accidentally also paid the family of the robber by mistake. Joshua was buried at Mt. Sinai Cemetery in his hometown of Oakman, New York. To this day, the issue with recompensation for the missing $8,333.34 is still outstanding, but no one Catherine has spoken to is interested in pursuing the matter any further.
About the character.
Ordinarily, I use The Sims 4 to visualise my OCs, since it's so easy to customise certain key things about their appearance. But, well, EA Desktop.
So, I had to draw Joshua on a post-it. Since he's supposed to be from the early '90s, I gave him a late '80s hairstyle, interrupted by his yarmulke. Basically, I needed a model for a '90s guy and I searched Memory Alpha for Rob Bowman. Joshua has Rob's hair and mustache from when he was working on The Next Generation. I decided to draw him like he was just getting ready for temple; he doesn't wear the yarmulke full-time and he hasn't put his blazer on yet.
I decided to "kill him", as it were, because I have plenty of OCs who are alive, but none who are dead. I didn't want him to die for any particular cause, because there's a lot of tropes surrounding Jewish characters, and one of those is being killed for being Jewish. I decided to kill him in a demonstration of police ineptitude, so the obvious solution was "botched bank robbery". It's a tragic story, but it repeats without end in the United States. So, if you aren't familiar with the intricacies of American government, having your husband killed by the police by accident while storming a building, then being promised $33,333 but only receiving $25,000 because the City accidentally included the family of the dead robber in the settlement, and your having to spend the next 25 years trying to get the rest of the money you were promised is not infeasible for America. That's just how bureaucracy works here. I imagine that the $25,000 that went to the robber's family was recovered, but City Hall considered the matter closed and didn't bother to fix any errors. That, too, is feasible for America.
Don't worry, his daughters grew up to be successful artists in their own right; Esther started writing goth poetry, met a scene girl with a child from a previous relationship, got married, and taught her step-son how to torrent stuff. Rachel picked up her dad's studio tech and is a videogame composer, radio host, and doting aunt.
--22 April 2024--