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I love the look of fierce concentration
on the faces of musicians,
playing live,
struggling to hear the foldback,
straining to keep within
the bounds of the beat...
The rush of performance
and I think of my own struggles
to live life,
playing live,
no click track.
This is not a recording.
The energy and passion,
with the bum notes,
make me... live.
is a wonderful film which I can't recommend highly enough. Dublin. A busker. A Czech pianist, selling roses on the street to scrape a living. Not a great deal else. Subtle, simple film-making hung around wonderful music.
Out of the same stable as The Believer, Wholphin is a short-story mag for short films. They mailed me today about a great-looking film, showing on IFC this Monday at 9pm EDT. (I'd love someone to record it for me ;-) The spiel goes:
Back in 2000, western pharmaceutical companies began a massive marketing campaign to introduce a new product to the good people of Japan: depression. Before 2000, the good people of Japan apparently did not even have a word to describe sadness as a debilitating biological illness. So the companies had to coin a new word, "utsu," and create an appropriately catchy ad slogan to help explain the concept. They chose the phrase, "Does Your Soul Have A Cold?" antidepressant sales have since quintupled.
Mike Mills (pictured), director of Thumbsucker, has made an incredibly intimate film documenting the human effects of America's latest cultural export to Japan.
Catch the trailer here.
Technorati: Believer | Depression | Japan | Wholphin
Still on holiday here, and doing some clearing jobs around the house/garden that have been building up for a while. Which means I've had to go to the dump today - one of the finest, most joyous experiences in the urban environment.
You go heavy loaded, driving slowly, suspension almost topping out... and leave it all behind. The priests who preside over this sacrament at our local place are fantastic too - helping you with the bigger stuff, directing you as to which skip to dump stuff in, advising whether something ought to be recycled. Everyone drives away feeling lighter, happier, going home to a simpler, less cluttered place. It is distinctly sacred.
This isn't, of course, to be naive about the problems of urban waste. It is incredible to see the stuff people do chuck, when most of it could very well be posted on a site like Freecycle. At least they sort stuff for recycling now, which they didn't a couple of years back.
Trees sense a moment when the balance between night and day changes. The shorter days trigger the development of a suicidal hormone in each leaf which creeps down the stem to the joint with the woody twig. Here it stimulates the growth of a sphincter of brittle, hard tissue that gradually closes in on itself, cutting off the supply of sap. Thus deprived of water, the chlorophyll in the leaf disintegrates, and the colours of the leaf's other underlying constituents are revealed, before the stem joint finally snaps and the leaf floats to the floor.
From Wildwood by Roger Deakin
I love autumn, and this passage really struck me. I'd somehow thought that it was the 'core' of the tree that got rid of the leaf, but it appears that it is the leaf that takes the decision to die, for the better of the whole organism.
Somehow this struck a chord. Heat. Life. Lowering sun. Falling temperatures. Ice. Thaw. New life. And so it cycles...
I'm in Ireland at the moment, finishing a novel, staying with a great friend who lives on the north coast. Yesterday evening we went surfing - one of those things I enjoy but do not well - and when I got back I'd had another email from a regal friend containing an article from Anne Lamott. She's a great writer, and in a piece about Easter had written "Life happens, death happens, and then new life happens"; a beautiful summary of Christianity.
But it was this poem by RS Thomas that really moved me. I've been playing with a poem about the ocean since a few lines came to me while out in the surf in Polzeath, Cornwall, over the summer. And, as I think I've written here before, there's a section in the book I'm writing where the protagonist looks out at the sea and muses that humanity is really no more than an irritant on the surface of the earth, and that, having climbed out of the oceans millennia ago, the oceans are simply going to rise and take us back.
But Thomas puts things so much better:
I have this that I must do
one day; overdraw on my balance
of air, and breaking the surface
of water go down into the green
darkness to search for the door
to myself in dumbness and blindness
and uproar of scared blood
at the eardrums. There are no signposts
there but bones of the dead
conger, no light but the pale
phosphorus, where the slow corpses
swag. I must go down with poor
purse of my body and buy courage,
paying for it with the coins of my breath.
Technorati: Ocean | Lamott | RS Thomas | Surf | White Rocks
Excellent article in The Observer yesterday:
"There is evidence to suggest that this generation of parents who were brought up on videos and instant visual gratification are not going through cooing routines. There are fewer nursery rhymes, less song, storytelling and reading. All this is taken over by TV, which leaves parents free to think about themselves and to work late."
Spot on.
Technorati: Children | Facebook | Observer | Television | Technology
The graduate with a Mathematics degree asks, "Why does it work?"
The graduate with a Science degree asks, "How does it work?"
The graduate with an Engineering degree asks, "How does one build it?"
The graduate with an Accounting degree asks, "How much will it cost?"
The graduate with an Arts degree asks, "Do you want fries with that?"
Technorati: Mathematics | Graduate
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