(Hat tip to Denise Doyen, in a comment at the Seven Impossible Things blog.)
What’s in a Song: Fever (1)
[This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with appeal across the generations. This post will be broken into two parts; Part 2 will appear in a few days is here.]
As a kid, I once read a “funny” comic-book episode in which aliens landed in mid-20th-century America and reported back to their home planet about all the strange things the natives did. The one which struck me the most was this: the lunatic creatures leave the comfort of their homes; climb into sheet-metal boxes each weighing several tons; move the metal boxes out amongst hundreds, thousands of others; and play a game whose object is to accelerate your metal box to screaming speed, aim it at all the others, and come as close as possible to all of them without actually hitting a single one — all without dying in the process.
Ha ha, I know: comic books. Can’t take ’em seriously. For in the real world, of course, the aliens are reporting back about the truly strange Earthling behavior: our fascination with sex.
We construct elaborate religious frameworks of abstention and lifelong celibacy, and equally elaborate ones of fetishism and promiscuity — and everything between. Both as societies and as individuals, we underwrite costly technological improvements to its experience. We try to cure ourselves of the obsession; we throw ourselves into it. We have ecstatic dreams about it and hair-raising nightmares. We write about it, and we write about everything but (in the process, creating a gigantic sex-shaped vacuum that’s awfully damned hard to ignore). We celebrate the level-headed old-timers who seem to do just fine without it… and cheer the friskier ones still nuts about it.
And oh boy, do we ever compose music about it — music explicit and implicit. (Some of this music doesn’t even have words.) We pay performers to entertain us with this music, to mime their having sex with us — even to mime the act with their voices, while their bodies barely move onstage.
Somewhere out there, a civilization of little green men and women is scratching their little green noggins about all this. Procreation, they concede: yes, very important. But truly civilized creatures of the universe, they will insist, focus their creative energies on the practice of xormling. You know, where you get either five or fourteen— Oh, never mind.
So we come to the song. Nearly every pop singer tries her hand with it at some point. You can pretty much count on at least one American Idol contestant each season, using it to establish his credentials as a bona-fide heartthrob. (God help us all if Robert Pattinson ever records it: the thud of all those bodies simultaneously swooning to the floor could set off shock waves around the world.)
Enter “Fever.”
Perfect Moments: The Boy, the Wintry Day, the Film, the Flash of Panic
On a recent wintry day, The Boy (Who Was No Longer a Boy) and The Missus decided to go to a movie.
Now, because the day was in fact wintry, and because “wintry” seldom applied to weather conditions where The Boy and The Missus lived, they needed to undertake certain careful preparations in advance. Warm clothing needed to be retrieved from dusty closet recesses. Human bodies needed to be tanked up with caffeine and/or cocoa.
And then there was the matter of The Boy’s hands.
Especially in chilly, dry conditions, the skin of The Boy’s hands — more precisely, his fingers — tended to dry and chap and split rather painfully. Depending on his mood and energy level and the available time, he might choose to ignore the problem; to “lotion up”; or to go the whole hog — applying ointment and BandAid(s) to the affected digit(s). On the afternoon in question, The Boy decided to go the whole hog. Indeed, not only did he swath his index finger in two BandAids, he actually sealed the edges and the fingertip with waterproof tape: the finger wasn’t merely bandaged, it was sheathed in what the Crayola people used to call (in benighted non-PC days of yore) “flesh-colored” plastic.
And then he and The Missus embarked.
Avatar and the Uncanny Valley
We saw Avatar the other day, and did the whole 3D, IMAX nine yards. It complicated things a little — there are many more showings of the plain-old 2D version, and for that matter of the 3D in non-IMAX theaters. But after all we’d heard about the experience, it seemed the only way to go.
My original intention with this post was just to provide a thumbnail review, along these lines:
James Cameron, damn him, has done exactly what he said he’d do: delivered a kickin’-good movie with mind-blowing special effects and cinematography. He may not be king of the world — any more than Orson Welles was in 1940 — but…
Etc., etc.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I was interested mostly in one thing: one facet in which the film didn’t disappoint, exactly, but also didn’t (probably couldn’t) quite succeed. Before getting into that, though, let me say:
- The 3D effects in Avatar — at least, as viewed in an IMAX theater — go way beyond the lame, unimaginative poke-the-audience-with-a-sword precursors. When little flies and moths beset the characters in the jungle, you may have to fight the impulse to try swatting the bugs away. Or, like me, you may find yourself looking over your shoulder to draw the projectionist’s attention to the need for an exterminator.
- Motion-capture technology, likewise, has leapt ahead since even the (justly) celebrated tools which Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis employed to bring Gollum to life in The Lord of the Rings — particularly in capturing facial expressions.
- Technology aside, you’ll recognize Avatar‘s plot and love story from numerous “civilized man goes native” films that came before (Dances with Wolves, anyone?)…
- Yet, you may still find yourself welling up from time to time.
- I thoroughly enjoyed every second of the film. Thoroughly. (At some moments, indeed, I felt that I may have been undercharged despite the almost $14-a-pop admission price.)
So what didn’t succeed?
What’s in a Song: Cry Me a River (1)
[Another in a series of occasional posts about popular American songs with long histories. And if you are seeking information on the Justin Timberlake song by the same name, believe me, you are 100% in the wrong place.]
On paper, it doesn’t appear to be a “big” song. Nearly always, the arrangement features a single vocalist and one or two background instruments. The lyrics aren’t even all that special, in one respect: very simple words (with one exception), in a more or less conventional order. At that, the title itself appears six times over the course of the three stanzas, and a slight variation of it thrice more.
But given the right singer, oh, how loudly this song speaks…
(Who’s “the right singer”? Hard to say. Wikipedia lists a sample of about 150 of them. Amazon’s MP3 download store includes over 600 hits — many duplicates, of course, but still… And if you go rummaging around on iTunes and elsewhere on the Web, you can quickly fill your hard drive with unique versions.)
Here’s the story:
When the Vampires Have Finally All Flitted Away
…at least until the next revival: are werewolves the next It Creatures?
I have not read the Twilight series of books. But as I understand it, the new film, New Moon, features some sort of apocalyptic face-off between the vampires — brooding Edward and his ilk — and the werewolves.
(This premise seems to me to have been lifted from the Underworld series, starring Kate Beckinsale — but those films no doubt lifted from some other source, and so on, and so on. For a genre so heavily featuring the uselessness of mirrors, the supernatural-near-human-monster films seem to indulge in an awful lot of self-reflection.)
Anyway, I just learned of the impending (February 2010) release of a remake of the old Universal Horror film The Wolf Man, starring Benicio del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, and Hugo Weaving.
Losing Our Heads Over Modest Gods
[Above, a set of miniature Egyptian canopic jars depicting, according to the retailer, “Anubis, Horus, Monkey God, Prince.”* Click image for original.]
From whiskey river (which this week celebrated eight years of bringing to the Web wisdom about things we generally know, but generally do not speak of):
Shinto
When sorrow lays us low
for a second we are saved
by humble windfalls
of the mindfulness or memory:
the taste of a fruit, the taste of water,
that face given back to us by a dream,
the first jasmine of November,
the endless yearning of the compass,
a book we thought was lost,
the throb of a hexameter,
the slight key that opens a house to us,
the smell of a library, or of sandalwood,
the former name of a street,
the colors of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date we were looking for,
the twelve dark bell-strokes, tolling as we count,
a sudden physical pain.Eight million Shinto deities **
travel secretly throughout the earth.
Those modest gods touch us —
touch us and move on.
(Jorge Luis Borges)
Lost in the Trees
[Image from Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak. Today seems like a good day to open with this, since it marks the official release of Spike Jonze’s film version.]
From whiskey river:
Threat
You can live for years next door
to a big pine tree, honored to have
so venerable a neighbor, even
when it sheds needles all over your flowers
or wakes you, dropping big cones
onto your deck at still of night.
Only when, before dawn one year
at the vernal equinox, the wind
rises and rises, raising images
of cockleshell boats tossed among huge
advancing walls of waves,
do you become aware that always,
under respect, under your faith
in the pine tree’s beauty, there lies
the fear it will crash someday
down on your house, on you in your bed,
on the fragility of the safe
dailiness you have almost
grown used to.
(Denise Levertov [source])
Starting and Restarting
[Image above is captioned: “Hoagy Carmichael* pretending to crank start a car.”
From the Hoagy Carmichael Collection at Indiana University.]
From whiskey river, still mining the William Stafford vein (and no complaints from this quarter):
The Gift
Time wants to show you a different country. It’s the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at
in her crochet design, the one almost found
over at the edge of the music, after the sermon.It’s the way life is, and you have it, a few years given.
You get killed now and then, violated
in various ways. (And sometimes it’s turn about.)
You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait
and pray, and maybe good things come — maybe
the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more.
You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness.It’s a balance, the taking and passing along,
the composting of where you’ve been and how people
and weather treated you. It’s a country where
you already are, bringing where you have been.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, “Here, take it, it’s yours.”
(William Stafford [source])
Off Balance
[Image by Jan Piller at redbubble.com. Click the image for the original/to purchase.]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
Taking a walk with you
lacking the wit and depth
that inform our dreams’
bright landscapes,
this countryside
through which we walk
is no less beautiful for being only what it seems.
rising from the dyed
pool of its shade,
the tree we lean against
was never made to stand
for something else,
let alone ourselves.
nor were these fields
and gullies planned
with us in mind.
we live unsettled lives
and stay in a place
only long enough to find
we don’t belong.
even the clouds, forming
noiselessly overhead,
are cloudy without
resembling us, and, storming
the vacant air,
don’t take into account
our present loneliness.
and yet, why should we care?
already we are walking off
as if to say,
we are not here,
we’ve always been away.
(Mark Strand [source])
…and:
Anyone whose goal is “something higher” must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
(Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being [source])
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