Thank You for the Music

Wednesday, December 15, 10:05 am

I had another peaceful, perfect moment this morning.  Holding my coffee under my nose, looking out the back window at my snow covered yard, beautiful music on the stereo, the remains of an egg omelet that I had made myself on the table and everything was in place.   The universe had become balanced and I felt contentment at a great level.   It is hard to go to a place like that because they are so fragile.  Once you step out of the moment, they are gone, sending you back to an inferior place.

I think about these those beautiful moments of contentment and tried to make a list of what was so satisfying to me; there is the coffee, being in my own house, and the music.

Music is one of the reasons I enjoy being home alone.  I set my iPod on shuffle and crank op the stereo. Glorious, sensual music pours out of the speakers in a warm, glowing stream filling the air from the floor to the ceiling, with tiny, sparkling bits of sound.  

The Scream

My collection is very diverse, like several different collections combined.  I never know what will catch my ear. Sometimes  something will reach out and transform me, changing my feelings or perspective and it is not so much the genre, or lyrical quality or a specific artist;  sometimes it is just the sound.

The first time that happened was 1983, when I heard Siouxsie and the Banshees' first  album, The Scream (1978).  "Pure," the opening track is a spooky,  instrumental.  The weeping guitars,  baying moans and thunderous, rhythm less percussion caught my attention like nothing I had heard before.  Even now, nearly 30 years after I first heard it, it still makes me grin.

In my head, I saw the musicians recording the song in a dimly lit studio, wearing dark clothes, their movements slow and spare, music spilling out into the darkened corners.  "Jigsaw Feeling," the next track continued in the same way; but this time, the mood was one of barely contained energy; the slashing, squealing guitar mimicked the sound of a psychic jigsaw,  cutting someone's personality to pieces;  "One day I'm feeling total, the next I'm split in two."  A perfect reflection of the fragmentation I was feeling as a freshman in college.  By the time the final chord of the final song played, the universe had gone dark.

I had never heard anything like it before, because, you know, there was very little punk rock in small, mid-western towns like Norwalk, Ohio thirty years ago.

People who know me know I like to inflict my music choices on others-if you haven't received a mix CD from me, let me know and I will make you one today. I have no idea what will be on it or why, other than it sounded good to me.  It will be a learning experience for me.

Feeling the music in this new way gave me a new appreciation for the sounds I was hearing.  So dear Siouxsie, thank you for the music because it made my life so much richer.

Friday, December 17th, 2010 10:08 AM

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

Monday, December 6, 2010 09:43 AM

NB: The film version of the seventh and final Harry Potter book,  Harry Potter and the Something something, part one,  has opened and I feel duty bound to watch  it.   In preparation for the final film chapters of the Harry Potter Saga, I will watch the six previous films and write about the experience.  There will be SPOILERS !

There isn't much to say about Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince except there could have been a bigger parallel what was going on in the wizarding world and what was happening in George W. Bush's America; that is, the Post September 11 debate on safety versus civil rights.

Voldemorte and his minions excellently exploited the wizarding world's fear to further his cause, which is to end the world.

And of course there is quidditch, confrontations with Malfoy, some riddles to be solved, classroom mishaps and the usual growing pains. I am now officially ready for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny and Dumbleodre  all face big changes at Hogwarts this year.

 

Monday, December 13, 2010 05:48 AM

Sometimes you have to take one for the team-Love and Other Drugs

Monday, December 6, 2010 08:02 AM

Sunday I settled my “Meg Ryan” debt. That is, the number of movies made for women that I owed my wife for putting up with my movie selections. We watched Love and Other Drugs instead going to see Deathly Hallows.   Love and Other Drugs is a story of a young man's transition obnoxious jack ass to self important  jack ass and then fulfilling his true destiny by become a doctor jack ass, due to his falling in love with dying woman.  Despite some bright spots, the movie collapsed under the weight of its own inaneness.

Jake Gyllenhaall plays Jamie Randall, a narcissistic pharmaceutical representative and self proclaimed shit head. In the last minute or two, he suddenly transforms from a womanizing, self centered pharmacy rep to caring nurturer and medical student.

Maggie Murdoch, adroitly portrayed by Anne Hathaway, is the crucible that provides the catalytic fire responsible for Randall's 180 degree change. Maggie has early onset Parkinson's Disease. She faces life with a indomitable, yet vulnerable, Hollywood damaged heroine way.  Her character is by far the more interesting character and I was grateful we got to see so much of her (wink wink, nudge nudge). By not concentrating more on her and concentrating too 

much on Gyllenhaal's unfunny and un-interesting character, Love and Other Drugs missed an opportunity to be a much better film.

There is a touching sequence in the middle of the film that resonated with me personally; while attending a sales conference in Chicago with Randall, Maggie finds herself in a survivors group. She leaves the survivors group with a new sense of empowerment only to encounter Jamie, who has become convinced that if they try hard enough, they could find a cure for her Parkinson's. As she tries to flourish, his well intended efforts push her back into the box of being defined by her illness.

For me, it is the difference between a sign that reads “Parking for People with Disabilities,” and one that says “Handicapped Only,” as if there were some sort of apartheid between the TAB (temporarily able bodied) and the handicapped or disabled. Because of my illness, I often need help; sometimes, to accept that help I have to surrender the undisabled part of me. Maggie does not wish to be consumed by her illness and struggles to retain her personality beyond her illness.

Given her willingness to do nude scenes and play a disabled person, excuse me, person with a disability, I am surprised there is no Oscar buzz around Anne Hathaway's performance. Perhaps there would have been if the movie had concentrated more on her character's story and less on the unfunny Viagra jokes.

 In fairness, I should mention that Jake Gyllenhaall looks pretty good naked too.

Feel free to leave your comments here on the blog page.

Friday, December 10, 2010 01:21 PM

30 Years Ago Today

Wednesday, December 8, 2010 10:41:02 AM

30 years ago, I was a freshman in high school. on Monday morning December 9th, 1980my clock radio clicked on and I heard for the first time, “Our fife together is so precious together, We have grown - we have grown” It was the first lines to “(Just Like) Starting Over,” the first single from Double Fantasy John Lennon first album of new material in five years.

My older brothers and sisters had left a pile of Beatles' 45's as a testament to their appreciation to the lads from Liverpool. There had always been the idea of John, Paul, George and Ringo in our house. Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was one of the first albums I bought (along with Joe Walsh's But Seriously Folks). Taking it home and listening to it put flesh and blood to that idea that I had known the Beatles all my life.

At age fifteen, John Lennon was only a former Beatle to me, I knew almost nothing of his work after the Beatles broke up.  On December 9, 1980, my joy at learning that John Lennon was still making music turned to sadness and horror as the details of his murder by a mentally ill young man became known. Stalked, hunted, and shot in the lobby his home, The Dakota, in New York City the previous night, Lennon's murder was irony at its cruelest to the excitement he sang about in that first single.

A nurse and I were talkng yesterday about him; she wondered where he would be if hje hadn't died.  I was thinking that world would be a better, less scary place if he were still with us. I thought of some of the things he had said:  "Imagine there's no countries,   Nothing to kill or die for,"  "Give peace a chance,"  "There's nothing you can make that can't be made, No one you can save that can't be saved, Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time- It's easy..."

All we need is love.

Thursday, December 9, 2010 05:31:32 PM

Enter the Void

Thursday, December 2, 2010 08:29 PM

Not being able to sleep can make me crazier than I already am.  I used to feel trapped by my  thoughts, imprisoned in my head.  And there be monsters in there.  Watching movies has been helpful at escaping, and writing has been even more effective.    Recently, I found myself thinking, “What better film to view in the predawn morning than Gaspar Noe's latest film, Enter the Void?"  I had been hearing about this movie that seemed to be more of a psychedelic journey than anything else for over a year and had been looking forward to watching it.

To say the movie is visually stunning is an understatement-it is amazingly trippy. Tokyo turns into a neon glowing fantasy world.  The line between what was shot with camera and what was computer generated graphics is so thin that the viewer is constantly off guard, trying to keep up with the sifting and changing scenery.

Oscar's hallucination

The story is told from the point of view of Oscar, a young American living in Tokyo with Linda, his sister. For most of the movie, the camera acts as his eyes, complete with blinking. He spends most of the film under the influence of powerful hallucinogens.  The sequence where he smokes DMT, a powerful hallucinogen,  is beautiful and eerie . The colors, shapes and lights swirl hypnotically, creating a constantly changing womb like galaxy.

Oscar needs to pull himself back when the phone rings, leaving little, dancing sparkles flitting about his periphery. That brought back some memories! After watching something transform into something new, then having to focus, there would often be little remainders of the dancing transformations, tendrils of light rising off the corners of a mouth, concentric lines like the age rings of a tree around their faces, still objects come to life as they breathed, growing and shrinking.  Colors would be brighter and the air would filled with glowing embers. A good computer generated approximation is the Electric Sheep Screensaver.

Oscar goes into the night

The night turns into a
 glowing, fantasy land

As Oscar and his friend, Alex go out later that night, Alex explains what happens to the soul after death, according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The dead rise up like ghosts and can see and hear what goes on in this plane of existence, but are unable to interact with it. Then they relive their lives, and can either move on the a higher level, or if they are too attached to move on, they stay here watching until eventually being reincarnated.

Alex's summation is useful for the viewer in understanding what happens in the rest of the movie. Oscar and the viewer go on that journey; we both look down on his memories and the present, stirred together in a confusing mixture. Oscar watches how his friends and sister struggle with the impact of his death from his ceiling vantage point, passing through walls and across the night sky. Occasionally he floats down, closely observing their lives. Sometimes what he witnesses is real, sometimes surreal. At one point, his soul travels through a Love Motel and observes the couples having sex. Phallic shaped glow sticks replace men's penises, and white, ectoplasmic smoke drifts out of the women's genitals.

In a memory, Oscar and Linda walk
through an already psychedelic Tokyo night

Always bewildering and maze like, Enter the Void is occasionally difficult watch. Linda spends so much of the film in hysterics that I found myself rooting for the sleeping pills when she attempted suicide.

Sometimes the best thing to be said about a movie is the illusion of motion, produced by a rapidly projected series of still images and that is certainly true with Enter the Void. I found myself completely immersed by the artistry and beauty as Oscar's night passed.  The last time I experienced anything as stunning was watching a sunset from a mountain top in Vermont; the colors became so intense they made their own sounds, filling the air around with light and music until the sun disappeared below the horizon, leaving me to find my way home in the dark.

Sunday, December 5, 2010 08:33 PM