longtemps

It's a slow snowing-in this Saturday. Not really snowed in, yet, but I'm pretending. Co-worker R was disappointed another storm was expected for a Saturday, a big weather event wasted, providing no day off work. I liked the idea, though. A premise, a pretense. Play/faux necessity. Psychic permission. A way for it to be a luxury to stay in.

I did some dishes and will attend to some laundry, maybe. There's the DVR, with its build-up, which happens if I let days of it go by insufficiently attended. I really must delete some of the routine recordings it's doing. They make it a veritable obligation. They make it call my name too loudly. TV is dangerous. Even if it's surely not as dangerous as I sometimes fear, it's dangerous.

And the Celebrity Rehab gang, at Sober House, did a lot to turn me off to it this last week, majorly getting on my nerves, as edited and presented. Especially obvious drama-love around self-inflicted drama for drama love. I need to see another kind of love these days. I do. Throw in their celebrity and L.A. senses of Self, and, I don't know, it was, itself, poison. The whole thing. I had to fast-forward through Dr. Drew's bit of "theraputic" theater, driving Rodney King back to where he was beaten, as they haven't been getting enough sound bites out of the man---not pulling his gawk-worthy weight. It's not that it's tawdry or exploitive or concocted in its packaging as edu-tainment. It's that it's hollow. It has false humanity. It's phony. They're phony, and it's phony.

So maybe not the TV very much today. I have a big pile of library books, and I might just read, in sessions longer than I'm in the bathroom, or waiting for the kettle to boil. First up: something in the middle of The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation. It's part of a conversation I'm having, very badly. At least badly. Well, definitely not fluidly.

I also have a hunk of library CDs. Last night I ripped this cut from bigfinedaddy's library CD:

   .mp3  --->   Somewhere Over the Rainbow -- Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

A great song, that song is; better the older you get; best realized when it feels the bittersweetness of its hopeless beauty, its beautiful hopelessness. The melody longs along with the lyric, and then really does take us there. The whole octave. Somewhere. All the way there, wherever it is we aren't, wherever it is we can't be. Why, oh why? We'll never know, but we ask. We're alive.

One of my library CDs is the Charlie Haden Quartet West's super-lush Haunted Heart, which I'm listening to now. Wanted to hear their "Deep Song," not knowing it would incorporate Billie Holiday's vocals. That was a happy surprise, but its does rather, oh, background the Quartet.


I went to the cinema last night for the second night in a row. Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt were in the main theater, but McG and I didn't crash that party, though we looked through the doors at them and got a little "neat-o" out of it. But then it was the screening room for Il Y a Longtemps que Je T'aime (I've Loved You So Long).

Some critic said something like it'll leave you entirely changed forever and always, and I'll allow as how that's broad, to say the least, not to mention presumptuous about its audience. But I'll say this: if you like movies, go see it. It might even do something for you if you don't so much like movies. In any case, the film takes us to agony, where it is good to go, sometimes, when it's not your agony, because you have agony, and it does it with humanity. It does it with the kind of love I need to see these days. It does it with playacting, with directing and cinematography and calculated lighting and editing, and it does it with fiction, which some fundamentalists insist we acknowledge is not the God's-honest real, as if that makes it false, as if that makes it bullshit, as if that makes it blasphemy. But when a movie is good, the calculation falls away. The fabrication is in service of truth. It's the opposite of a lie.

So this film tells a story, kind of like a mystery, and if you see it you sit in a chair a lot of the time watching this actress's face, and she's not mugging for the camera, babies. There ain't no mugging. There are eyes, and a mouth, and flesh covered in skin. Sometimes she and her sister are in a pool. Sometimes people are in a house, which is sort of a character too. Sometimes they're outside. There are other faces. They walk. They talk, and you read the words if you don't speak French. When finally there is yelling, it is not frightening at all.

This is my movie review for you.

longtemps

It's a slow snowing-in this Saturday. Not really snowed in, yet, but I'm pretending. Co-worker R was disappointed another storm was expected for a Saturday, a big weather event wasted, providing no day off work. I liked the idea, though. A premise, a pretense. Play/faux necessity. Psychic permission. A way for it to be a luxury to stay in.

I did some dishes and will attend to some laundry, maybe. There's the DVR, with its build-up, which happens if I let days of it go by insufficiently attended. I really must delete some of the routine recordings it's doing. They make it a veritable obligation. They make it call my name too loudly. TV is dangerous. Even if it's surely not as dangerous as I sometimes fear, it's dangerous.

And the Celebrity Rehab gang, at Sober House, did a lot to turn me off to it this last week, majorly getting on my nerves, as edited and presented. Especially obvious drama-love around self-inflicted drama for drama love. I need to see another kind of love these days. I do. Throw in their celebrity and L.A. senses of Self, and, I don't know, it was, itself, poison. The whole thing. I had to fast-forward through Dr. Drew's bit of "theraputic" theater, driving Rodney King back to where he was beaten, as they haven't been getting enough sound bites out of the man---not pulling his gawk-worthy weight. It's not that it's tawdry or exploitive or concocted in its packaging as edu-tainment. It's that it's hollow. It has false humanity. It's phony. They're phony, and it's phony.

So maybe not the TV very much today. I have a big pile of library books, and I might just read, in sessions longer than I'm in the bathroom, or waiting for the kettle to boil. First up: something in the middle of The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation. It's part of a conversation I'm having, very badly. At least badly. Well, definitely not fluidly.

I also have a hunk of library CDs. Last night I ripped this cut from bigfinedaddy's library CD:

   .mp3  --->   Somewhere Over the Rainbow -- Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

A great song, that song is; better the older you get; best realized when it feels the bittersweetness of its hopeless beauty, its beautiful hopelessness. The melody longs along with the lyric, and then really does take us there. The whole octave. Somewhere. All the way there, wherever it is we aren't, wherever it is we can't be. Why, oh why? We'll never know, but we ask. We're alive.

One of my library CDs is the Charlie Haden Quartet West's super-lush Haunted Heart, which I'm listening to now. Wanted to hear their "Deep Song," not knowing it would incorporate Billie Holiday's vocals. That was a happy surprise, but its does rather, oh, background the Quartet.


I went to the cinema last night for the second night in a row. Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt were in the main theater, but McG and I didn't crash that party, though we looked through the doors at them and got a little "neat-o" out of it. But then it was the screening room for Il Y a Longtemps que Je T'aime (I've Loved You So Long).

Some critic said something like it'll leave you entirely changed forever and always, and I'll allow as how that's broad, to say the least, not to mention presumptuous about its audience. But I'll say this: if you like movies, go see it. It might even do something for you if you don't so much like movies. In any case, the film takes us to agony, where it is good to go, sometimes, when it's not your agony, because you have agony, and it does it with humanity. It does it with the kind of love I need to see these days. It does it with playacting, with directing and cinematography and calculated lighting and editing, and it does it with fiction, which some fundamentalists insist we acknowledge is not the God's-honest real, as if that makes it false, as if that makes it bullshit, as if that makes it blasphemy. But when a movie is good, the calculation falls away. The fabrication is in service of truth. It's the opposite of a lie.

So this film tells a story, kind of like a mystery, and if you see it you sit in a chair a lot of the time watching this actress's face, and she's not mugging for the camera, babies. There ain't no mugging. There are eyes, and a mouth, and flesh covered in skin. Sometimes she and her sister are in a pool. Sometimes people are in a house, which is sort of a character too. Sometimes they're outside. There are other faces. They walk. They talk, and you read the words if you don't speak French. When finally there is yelling, it is not frightening at all.

This is my movie review for you.