Flash Back

This one is for my good friend James, who despite his ample intelligence and otherwise decent taste in music, continues to denigrate Billy Corgan in favour of STP.

Knickers Ablaze?

A question for you, readers. From the deepest, darkest, most pessimistic corner of my consciousness: Are we lying to our children when we tell them they can be anything they want? If not: Really?! If so: Is this a bad thing?

In Motion

He may not be as mysterious as James' man crush, the pseudonymed Kim Jong-Il, but I very much enjoy Pablo Neruda's poetry. I've always fancied myself more Latin than Asian, and between his works and my new favourite radio station, I'm swiftly approaching the point in my life where I need to break down and add Spanish to my repertoire to retain a modicum of authenticity. This is an excerpt from Walking Around which grabs me every time:

Just the same, it would be delicious
To scare a notary with a cut lily,
Or knock a nun stone dead with one blow of an ear.
It would be beautiful
To go through the streets with a green knife
Shouting until I died of cold.

I do not want to go on
Being a root in the dark
Hesitating, stretched out
Shivering with dreams
Downward in the wet tripe of the earth
Soaking it up and thinking
Eating every day

I do not want to be the inheritor
Of so many misfortunes
I do not want to continue as a root
As a tomb, a sollitary tunnel
As a cellar full of corpses
Stiff with cold
Dying with pain.

Though I am sure that in the mouth of someone like Antonio Banderas the spanish reading of this piece would melt me entirely, Sam Jackson's English redention is pretty sweet. I also recently heard Sam recite another piece of poetry:

You want my blood,
Take my blood.

Double Trouble

I’ve got a few films stacked up on me, so I’m pulling out the Drive-In classic double feature . . . and as far as double features go, this one’s a doosey. Both have stanch rebels against authority, wily women, shifting alliances and onerous villains. And now on to our feature presentation: Casablanca, followed by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest!

Casablanca was everything I thought it might be, plus some unexpected bonuses. I suppose this betrays a bit more of me than I’d like, but I’m always pleasantly surprised when I find old movies are crisp and poignant. Set in 1940’s Morocco, Casablanca follows suave cantina owner Rick as he attempts to make an honest living in a crooked world. Confronted with ghosts of his past and specters of the present, the film lets is characters struggle, showing their humanity and their desperate attempts not to loose it in what is ultimately constituted as a rich tapestry of history and character. Featuring lines like ‘Here’s lookin’ at you, kid’ ‘Play it again, Sam’ and ‘Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship’ which have become strayed towards cliché in American cinema, Casablanca is much more than a collection of classic movie quotes. If you like movies at all, give Casablanca 102 minutes of your life and enjoy a film made when Hollywood still wore the glow of youth.

Grade: A

Pirates of the Caribbean was everything you hope a sequel won’t be. Sequels are notoriously difficult to do well, with successful ones comprising a short list: The Empire Strikes Back, Temple of Doom, Weekend at Bernie’s 2. Maybe a few others. Presenting new material, continuing to grow characters and referencing the previous film tastefully are all very difficult tasks, and Pirates II seems to have had moderate to severe trouble with them all. The film have the flavour of a shameless remora, banking on the success of its predecessor and hoping to just enjoy the ride while doing as little work as possible, a poorly conceived follow up to a tight and witty first installment. Jokes were recycled ad nauseam, characters stagnated and plot lines were pressed thinner than Kiera Knightly’s waifish form. What could have been an interesting film with plot devices like confronting the immortal Davy Jones and reconciling Will to his father Bill, the film bogged down for me in some places and flew by at others, leaving me feeling confused and generally uninterested in the plot or characters. The special effects were impressive at times, and new characters such as Jones and the Fortune Teller showed glimpses of original thought and shine which garnered the first film its accolades, but as a whole it is a disappointing installment to an enjoyable franchise. I was left wishing the whole affair had ended with the first film in 2003.

Grade: C

Sound Stage

Ok, so I love sound. Yes, I’m glad that I can physically hear and cognitively decode the mechanical waves into chemical signals my brain then interprets, and I’m fairly confident that if you can hear whether you’ve thought about it or not you’re thankful for the ability. That’s not what I’m talking about, though. What I’m talking about is some subjective, intimately subtle and barely noticeable quality of certain sounds.

Leprechauns that only make themselves known on blue moons when Democrats are in office, the sounds I love require just the right conditions to be detected, and may likely never be detected again. They aren’t everyday honks or bangs or screeches but minute vibrations of atmosphere which are to be captured and relished in memory, not in the prostitution of recording. They are the naked sound of cigarette paper and tobacco crackling as the smoker inhales. The unsullied sound of a knife being whet, grinding viscously and then emitting a slight ephemeral ring as stone releases steel. The felt more than heard sound of a bat’s super-sonic squeal just behind my ears at 3:47 am above Little Yosemite. These are the sounds that I love and with them I am never alone, and rarely bored.

My favourite sound, however, is found in College Station, TX. Rudder Auditorium still sports a very fashionable décor from 1972, and as such is usually as silent as a tomb. While outside the darkened neo-Stalinistic glass walls the free speech area throngs and sizzles with fish and fools, inside you can feel 68^o F silence as you move through the cool stillness like a gauze curtain you can’t quite make out. There is one exception, however. The air conditioning ducts lightly ping, a hollow resonance which somehow only enhanced the quiet. Rudder Auditorium is the best place in the entire world to take a nap. I used to walk through Rudder for a distance of perhaps 87 yards between classes, cherishing every step and trying my best to muffle every thunderous footfall, stifle every hurricane gale breath, shoe-lace ends intermittently providing staccato artillery blasts to my heresy. The sound of Rudder’s silence still takes my breath away.

Sing a Song of . . .

A visited a friend’s church last Sunday night; it was a very different and very enjoyable experience. The people who gathered to worship in this church’s basement in a small rural California town sang with passion and reckless abandon, shared their lives openly and intimately with everyone there, and took the immanent stirring of God in their lives very seriously. While their service was full of joy and thankfulness, an outpouring of many of the Body’s experience with God throughout the week, I couldn’t help but think of the Biblical witness to the lives of people who are called to follow Christ. Starvation, explusion, inverted crucifixion. I couldn’t keep the words of the Psalmists out of my head, cursing their enemies. Expressing confusion. Crying out in pain and abandonment. Then I tried to think of songs the Body sings to express these emotions, and the list was very short. This, however, is my favourite. The expression of hopefull injury is something that I think could benefit many if sang from the loft and preached from the pulpit a good deal more than it is.

Come let us return
He has torn us into pieces
He has injured us
Come let us return to the Lord
He will heal us
He will bandage our wounds
In just a short time He'll restore us
In just a short time He'll restore His church
So we might live
We might live in His presence
In His presence

Oh that we might know the Lord
Oh that we might know the Lord
Oh that we might know the Lord
Let us press on to know Him
Let us press hard into Him
Then as surely as the coming of the dawn
He will respond

- Hosea; Shane Barnard