Dancing with Heavy Machinery

Did I say I never get to watch movies? Well, not entirely true. I love movies so much that I generally won't watch them if I can't arrange to sit through a film in its entirety. But some movies (like light comedies) don't suffer too much from being viewed over the course of 2 or more sittings.

So, my wife and I watched a variously inventive and charming film over a couple of nights last week: "Across the Universe". Although I'm a huge fan of the Beatles' music, the film had gotten lukewarm reviews, and I'd had no intention of seeing it. But a friend recommended it so highly that we rolled the Netflix dice and took a chance.

Firstly, I was very impressed, sometimes jaw-droppingly so, with the re-imagining of the Beatles's music. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" had always struck me as insipid faux-teenage puppy-love kind of stuff, with a melody that just wasn't their best. In the film it's done as a heart-wrenching ballad, and the lyrics, when divorced from the original bouncy beat, have a beautiful yearning in them that I'd never recognized before. There were many such moments in the film, where the depth of the Beatles music is revealed by audacious and brilliant arrangements.

Secondly, the visuals were often stunning (directed by Julie Taymor, of Lion King fame). The legendary puppet street-theatre troupe Bread and Puppet is used, and there was choreography that was grounded in the drama, not pasted on as it is so often in musicals. It reminded me very much of the work of ISO, the dance troupe that The Bobs did shows with in the 80's. As the film rolled on, more and more of the choreography was SO brilliant, in a way that I have never seen outside of ISO. I was beaming to see such great work. And when the credits rolled by, why, surprise! - the Choreographer was indeed Danny Ezralow, from ISO. I'm so glad that some of his work has made it to the big screen, in such a fine way.

I searched for youtube examples of his work - there are some, but I would say just see "Across the Universe". It's not a perfect movie, but it is full of beauty.

And, 2 other members of ISO, Jamey Hampton and Ashley Roland, have their own dance company called BODYVOX (in Portland, OR). They, too, have that powerful, witty ISO style that is so unique. I highly recommend catching them in Portland or on tour. And, they do happen to have a couple of youtube videos that are worth watching. They are short films, featuring dancing with heavy machinery. Do take a moment to watch:)

 

 

TV shows that are better than movies?

We've been watching a lot of TV lately. Well, not TV, not stuff that comes on a cable or over the airwaves, but shows we're renting from Netflix. We miss watching full-length movies, but by the time Q goes to bed we're exhausted, and need just a mere 25 minutes of chill out time before we're ready to hit the hay. And I'm sorry, but life is just too darn short to spend any of it watching commercials :) So, TV shows on DVD have been a godsend for us.

Some favorites we've been watching?

Slings and Arrows. Wow. This is truly better than just about any movie out there. The writing is so real, the cast is so true, it's so funny and so heartbreaking at the same time. It's from Canada, so chances are you've never even heard of it, but I'm telling you, this is the real deal. Rent it NOW! What's it about? Oh, golly, it's too much to encapsulate - Read about it on Netflix, for goshsakes! But it is kind of a "Waiting for Guffman" thing set at a Shakespearean theatre company.

Freaks and Geeks. So many great shows seem doomed to early extinction. This one focuses on high school years, and is one of the best explorations of the reality of high school I've seen. The parents are rather 2-dimensional, but the kids are very real. Funny and true.

WonderFalls. Only one season, so if you fall in love with it, know that it's doomed to end too soon. The heroine is a marvelously mixed-up college grad who has taken a deadening job in a souvenir shop at Niagara Falls, as a place to kind of 'drop out', only to find that various souvenirs 'talk' to her and convince her to do things which complicate her life terribly. Kind of like Joan of Arc, only funny. Or maybe Joan of Arc was funny, but this is funny in a different way.

Arrested Development. Best thing I've found on U.S. TV. A mixture of humor - reminds me of what Woody Allen would be doing if he hadn't gotten so darn serious. If you haven't seen it, give it a try. Better than so many movies (really!).

The Office. This is a funny series, but it can make you squirm uncomfortably. So, be forewarned, it may not be for you. If you've EVER worked in an office, however, you should be required to see it. (NB, I found the British series to be too acidic for my tastes - I just couldn't handle that much copper in my mouth. The U.S. version is somewhat lighter)

Sorry, gotta go. Time for more TV.

Crowing, crowing...gone

Goodbye, little crow...

On the ides of May, I found the little crow dead. The parents had already gotten the news, and though they still hung around in the trees for a couple of days, they no longer cawed or circled overhead. I missed their fierce protectiveness. I picked up the crow with a plastic bag, it was so very light. It's gone now.

An amazing couple of weeks. On May 1 I was out jogging, and about 25 minutes into my jog I had a brief zzzt, a blip where I lost consciousness. I remember turning my head to the right as I came to a cross street to check for traffic, and then the briefest moment of 'static', and when I came to I felt like I'd missed a moment of life. Very strange feeling. Heck, I'm wired differently from most people, my fibromyalgia sends electricity shooting up and down my body from time to time, my thoughts are often a little out of left field, but this was a totally new sensation.

Anyway, I kept jogging, but the same thing happened again. So I walked the rest of the way home, felt light-headed. For a few days felt kind of dizzy, so I went to the doctor. She listened to my heart, sounded fine. She explained what it probably was, an electrical misfiring of the heart. Then she had an EKG machine rolled in, just to check and see if everything was okay.

NOT, apparently. She said it looked like I'd had a heart attack. Whoa. But I always take everything with a grain of salt (metaphorically speaking only- I've got to watch my blood pressure!), so I chilled on the freak-out, left that all to her. She was freaked, I'll tell you. So I was sent for a bunch more testing. Carotid artery free and clear, stress test checked out normal, cardiologist says it doesn't look like a heart attack, looks like I'm fine. Whatever happened while jogging was just 'something'. Nothing to worry about.

Okay. I'm cool. Still, it was a couple of weeks of uncertainty. And much of that time I had crows cawing and swooping at me. Enough to give a guy a heart attack!

I'm Crowing

I've had a few days of being hectored and cawed at by nervous, anxious parental crows. Their fledgling disappeared the day after it was found here, and the Mom and Dad have kept a hawk-like watch on me ever since. They think I stole it.

Whenever I go near the windows of the studio, they Kraw out a loud alarm. When I cross the yard, they swoop down from the redwood tree where they're keeping watch. But their baby was, until today, nowhere to be seen. I searched the yard for the stray feathers that cats and other crow-eaters leave behind after a meal, but there were none. Still, the chances of the little crow's survival seemed dim, as the parents still seemed to think I had it hidden away somewhere.

Then, this morning as I came home from Choir, the fledgling was in the road in front of my house. I tried to shoo it to safety, but its parents came swooping when I threatened to get near it. I was heartened to find it alive - I was starting to feel really bad being yelled at by crows all day long for the kidnapping of their child. Now they could see their young one was alive, and would leave me alone.

Not so fast. The fledge found its way back to my backyard - it can fly well enough to get over fences, but still not so well to return to its 75-foot high nest. Now its been in the backyard for a few hours, and it caws in its little crow voice, and its parents caw back from their redwood tree, and I have to cover my head and run for it every time I leave the studio - the parents are VERY protective now.

Sheesh. Life with crow.

Crows in my yard

This morning there's a pair of crows cawing raucously all around my studio. Here's why...

As I was about to open the door to my back stoop yesterday morning, I noticed a small crow sitting there. On the doormat. A strange sight. I considered if it might have hurt itself, but there were no windows it would have crashed into, and it's an odd area for a bird to land in. But when I opened the door, the crow merely blinked, looked at me, and apparently wasn't about to move.

My first thought was "Sick bird? West Nile Virus?", so I called their hotline. They told me that unless the bird was dead, they weren't interested. They told me to call back if it died, and they'd be happy to help. Well...uh, okay.

I'd seen injured birds perk up and fly away, so I decided to give it a few hours and see what happened. Maybe as the sun moved onto the stoop, the warmth would help the bird.

A couple hours later, the bird had moved just enough to get itself out of the sun and into the shade. I went up to it to say hello and to see if I could determine any obvious injury, but a loud cawing went up from the surrounding trees, and a couple of crows came swooping over, so I retreated.

I called the local Animal Control to see what they could do. Almost immediately a guy came out, armed with a net, a box and some gloves. I led him to the back yard, and as he picked up the small crow, the 2 vigilant crows from the trees swooped around us. "Get under cover", he said, "they might peck at you."

He examined the bird, and found no injuries. He explained it was a fledge, and he quickly spotted the nest it came from, in a very tall tree a few hundred feet away. He said that often Crow fledglings didn't make it far on their first flight, and sometimes took a day or two to finally get the strength and gumption to fly back up to the nest. There was a risk of the young crow being eaten by a cat or some such, but that risk was better than taking the fledge somewhere 'safe', as the handling by humans would imprint it and doom its ultimate survival chances. So, he told me to leave the young crow alone, and that it should be off and flying in a couple of days. Sure, I'm cool with that.

This morning, I wondered if the young crow had already made its way home. As I opened my back door to go to my studio, however, loud and very close Crow Caws attacked my ears. I backed into the house. They were being very vigilant. I put on a hat, let them swoop out of sight, and dashed under the shade trees to my studio door. As I type, the Mom and Dad crows continue to caw. I can't see the fledge anywhere from my windows, but I suppose the parents are making a noise to urge their young one to fly. Crows never sounded so sweet!

45's were sleazy, mp3s are...?

Early on (like, when I was 10 years old) I had a moral judgment against 45 singles. They were a ripoff (LPs had a much better song-per-dollar ratio); they were a shallow glimpse into an artist's work (way too short); they were the sound-bites of their day. I don't know how my little 10-year old brain came to this judgment, but there it was.

This is odd, as I loved AM radio at the time, and AM radio is nothing but 3 minute songs, all artfully done, all hugely appreciated by me.

I suppose part of the distinction is that radio goes on and on. A song is played in a context - a context of other hits songs, a dj with a personality, advertisements, weather reports, etc. When you put a 45 on a record player, it begins playing, and 2 or 3 minutes later it's over. That's it. Empty silence. The song feels small and cheap when it's laid bare like that. An LP included and embraced the song with others, all by the same artist, in a large canvas of sound that went on and on... (for 15 minutes). I Loved, and still Love, an album of songs.

Okay, and there was one other thing that made me dislike 45s. When I was an immensely shy 11 year old, I'd somehow managed to land a girlfriend while in summer school. We went on a double-date to this guy's house. He had a make-out room in his garage, with a record player that played a stack of 45s. The music was dumb, it was make-out music intended to make girls somehow melt. But I was frozen in fear-of-kissing-a-girl land, and the sound of this gawdawful music along with my cold-sweat fear made my stomach turn. I loved music too much to have it used in such a way. It was sleazy. Cheap. Tawdry, even.

But, like I say, my general dislike of 45's predated that experience.

Another 45 vs. LP experience involved discovering the one-hit-wonder phenomenon. A hit song of '70 was "Spirit in the Sky" by Norman Greenbaum. I liked it. Still like it. A friend of mine had the LP which contained the song, and one day at his house he put it on. Bad LP. One good song on the whole thing. I didn't know that there were artists who made such good and bad music at the same time. I was used to the Beatles, the Doors, Led Zeppelin - people who made good LPs.

So, what about mp3s? Are they the 45 singles of today?

Being a lover of albums of songs, the playlist "revolution" that we're currently in is not my bag. I still love to hear a group of songs by an artist, all of a high caliber of artistic integrity, in an album format. One-hit wonders are okay, but just okay. But mp3s are not sleazy. Unlike a 45, they offer good value for the money. And, it's so easy to put them in a playlist and surround them with other good stuff .It's like having your very own jukebox. Which, I must admit, I did rather like when I was a lad (even if they offered very poor value for the money).