It is the hour of purple before red.
I, awake, slide beside your warmth
for the first sleep.
You breathe a question about the light,
wondering if the shadows still lurk
in my darkness.
I listen. I watch.
It is the hour you know when tears dry.
I, falling, try not to speak my secrets
into your dreams.
Please keep breathing, sleeping,
It is the hour of enclosing arms
It is the hour when reds turn to purple streaks.
I curl. You kiss.
I heal.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Rain... it's that time
For those of you who still think a-ha got it right... cheers
I'll never let you see
The way my broken heart is hurting me
I've got my pride and I know how to hide
All the sorrow and pain
I'll do my crying in the rain
If I wait for stormy skies
You won't know the rain from the tears in my eyes
You'll never know that I still love you so
Though the heartaches remain
I'll do my crying in the rain
Raindrops falling from heaven
Will never take away my misery
But since we're not together
I'll wait for stormy weather
To hide these tears I hope you'll never see
Someday when my crying's done
I'm gonna wear a smile and walk in the sun
I may be a fool
But till then, darling, you'll never see me complain
I'll do my crying in the rain
I'll do my crying in the rain
Crying In The Rain - The Everly Brothers (1962), cover by a-ha (1990)
I'll never let you see
The way my broken heart is hurting me
I've got my pride and I know how to hide
All the sorrow and pain
I'll do my crying in the rain
If I wait for stormy skies
You won't know the rain from the tears in my eyes
You'll never know that I still love you so
Though the heartaches remain
I'll do my crying in the rain
Raindrops falling from heaven
Will never take away my misery
But since we're not together
I'll wait for stormy weather
To hide these tears I hope you'll never see
Someday when my crying's done
I'm gonna wear a smile and walk in the sun
I may be a fool
But till then, darling, you'll never see me complain
I'll do my crying in the rain
I'll do my crying in the rain
Crying In The Rain - The Everly Brothers (1962), cover by a-ha (1990)
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Love, Loss, Music, and Alternate Realities - Part 2
Making music and making love - it's a bit too easy an equation.
And so it seems in Vikram Seth's An Equal Music, another tale of love and loss entangled in a world of music. Sentimental and saccharine to a point of instilling diabetic coma in the reader, this book does have its moments. These are the sonic images of locations and the aural descriptions of making music that transport us into an another dimension. The story itself is ordinary - man in love with a ghost of his past, man finds ghost, rekindles old passions, gets burnt again. There are things that happen in between all that of course, but that is just the back beat.
Seth does not provide run-of-the-mill descriptions for his characters - these are musicians in a quartet and a lot can be deduced from the instruments they play, their music and their individual reactions to a shared music. As our Orpheus ponders: ..."ours is an odd quadripartite marriage with six relationships, any of which, at any given time, could be cordial or neutral or strained."
What the novel excels in is the meditation on the complexity of two profound loves: of music and of the beloved. Our narrator loses both at inopportune times - first his love through some unexplained form of behavior on his part, then his music at some concert. He is a calamity Jane of the high-strung type, but is somewhat redeemed because finally it is the music that counts.
And it is this music that saves us all from the loss of love, to gather some semblance of living in our otherwise ruined worlds.
And so it seems in Vikram Seth's An Equal Music, another tale of love and loss entangled in a world of music. Sentimental and saccharine to a point of instilling diabetic coma in the reader, this book does have its moments. These are the sonic images of locations and the aural descriptions of making music that transport us into an another dimension. The story itself is ordinary - man in love with a ghost of his past, man finds ghost, rekindles old passions, gets burnt again. There are things that happen in between all that of course, but that is just the back beat.
Seth does not provide run-of-the-mill descriptions for his characters - these are musicians in a quartet and a lot can be deduced from the instruments they play, their music and their individual reactions to a shared music. As our Orpheus ponders: ..."ours is an odd quadripartite marriage with six relationships, any of which, at any given time, could be cordial or neutral or strained."
What the novel excels in is the meditation on the complexity of two profound loves: of music and of the beloved. Our narrator loses both at inopportune times - first his love through some unexplained form of behavior on his part, then his music at some concert. He is a calamity Jane of the high-strung type, but is somewhat redeemed because finally it is the music that counts.
And it is this music that saves us all from the loss of love, to gather some semblance of living in our otherwise ruined worlds.
Love, Loss, Music, and Alternate Realities - Part 1
What is a world without myths? Just mundane reality with its drudgery. And so we turn to works of art. Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a paean to works of creation - to rock 'n' roll, to love and death; treading the line between reality and fiction, a riff rising through the rifts in our memories.
Death is more than love or is it. Art is more than love or is it. Love is more than death and art, or not. This is the subject. This is the subject. This is it.
These thoughts and more trouble the narrator (Rai) in his telling of the doomed love story of rock 'n' roll stars, Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara. Rushdie's version of the Orpheus-Eurydice myth begins with an earthquake that takes the life of the music diva, leaving more than a couple of shattered souls. It prompts Rai - her friend / photographer / part-time lover - to meander through the fault lines of their shared pasts to wonder if it could've been any different. It causes the love of her life to lose his altered vision, the part that created scrambled versions of 'I Got You Babe' and 'Like a Rolling Stone' before they were released in the West. Rushdie's world is a collision of realities and crazed visions where the music is constant, and shifting all at once.
This is a violent story - of unstable love; love lost, sought, and found only to lose over and over again, marked with the irreversible stamp of death - of murders and suicides and slaughter. And death is not the only kind of loss. It is a loss of home, of never finding a place to call home, as Rai keeps repeating "disorientation is a loss of the East". It is a loss of the ground beneath a lover's feet, the ground we worship.
Beyond the parallels with the Orpheus story, is its inversion through the Indian myth of Kama and Rati. It is a Rati figure that gets Ormus back to life twice, but then in the end, Ormus fails to bring his Eurydice back from Hades. Is music or love not sufficient to get her back? Is music not enough to defeat death? Questions abound. And through it all, the music slips between realities and time, still singing its siren song to the grave.
Between the self and the other, between the visionary and the psychopath, between the lover and his love, between the overworld and the underworld, falls the shadow.
Death is more than love or is it. Art is more than love or is it. Love is more than death and art, or not. This is the subject. This is the subject. This is it.
These thoughts and more trouble the narrator (Rai) in his telling of the doomed love story of rock 'n' roll stars, Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara. Rushdie's version of the Orpheus-Eurydice myth begins with an earthquake that takes the life of the music diva, leaving more than a couple of shattered souls. It prompts Rai - her friend / photographer / part-time lover - to meander through the fault lines of their shared pasts to wonder if it could've been any different. It causes the love of her life to lose his altered vision, the part that created scrambled versions of 'I Got You Babe' and 'Like a Rolling Stone' before they were released in the West. Rushdie's world is a collision of realities and crazed visions where the music is constant, and shifting all at once.
This is a violent story - of unstable love; love lost, sought, and found only to lose over and over again, marked with the irreversible stamp of death - of murders and suicides and slaughter. And death is not the only kind of loss. It is a loss of home, of never finding a place to call home, as Rai keeps repeating "disorientation is a loss of the East". It is a loss of the ground beneath a lover's feet, the ground we worship.
Beyond the parallels with the Orpheus story, is its inversion through the Indian myth of Kama and Rati. It is a Rati figure that gets Ormus back to life twice, but then in the end, Ormus fails to bring his Eurydice back from Hades. Is music or love not sufficient to get her back? Is music not enough to defeat death? Questions abound. And through it all, the music slips between realities and time, still singing its siren song to the grave.
Between the self and the other, between the visionary and the psychopath, between the lover and his love, between the overworld and the underworld, falls the shadow.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Anyone listening?
There are songs and there are songs. What you shouldn't do is associate them with someone, some time, some place or something. Definitely don't play them on repeat when you're alone and sipping that drink. If you do, turn off the phone or leave it behind somewhere else. And try not to sleep sober because then the images will haunt you and you're awake anyway.
And don't write about it ever, never.
Don't write.
If you must, make copious notes on chord progressions and picking patterns instead. Don't try to think of a happy song, b'cuz chances are after 15 minutes of hard thinking, you still won't be able to name one. Then you'd go back to that playlist with untoward outcomes.
Don't write. About the songs. Or the places, or the times and associations that come with their music. Don't write with Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough in the background. Or Queen, Floyd, McLachlan, U2, Evanescence.
The songs are not it. It's your ears messing with your head messing with your heart. Though Dido wonders if you're alive if your heart is a shield; just just don't let it down. Your heart.
Don't write about this heart when the music's in your head. Please. Don't.
And don't write about it ever, never.
Don't write.
If you must, make copious notes on chord progressions and picking patterns instead. Don't try to think of a happy song, b'cuz chances are after 15 minutes of hard thinking, you still won't be able to name one. Then you'd go back to that playlist with untoward outcomes.
Don't write. About the songs. Or the places, or the times and associations that come with their music. Don't write with Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough in the background. Or Queen, Floyd, McLachlan, U2, Evanescence.
The songs are not it. It's your ears messing with your head messing with your heart. Though Dido wonders if you're alive if your heart is a shield; just just don't let it down. Your heart.
Don't write about this heart when the music's in your head. Please. Don't.
The Angel's Game - not a review
A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.
The Angel's Game, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
So begins the burden of the story, though the protagonist, David Martin, has no trouble churning words by the minute, page after page, year after year. Faust this is not, though there is a Luciferesque character in the guise of a publisher waving a deal (read lots of dough and no fame) for a story. Tickles the imagination of many an aspiring writer on a moral high-horse. Wouldn't we like to think that we'd jump at a contract that says you've got to crank out 6.66 pages a day in exchange for our lives? With this blatant clue to the identity of the publisher supplied by the overactive imagination of our hero, it is no surprise his deadly illness vanishes once he agrees to write. Oh happy day.
In The Angel's Game, Zafon toys with the idea that the act of narrating a story could be diabolical. The devil-publisher Andreas Corelli enlists David to write a literary project, 'a narrative that awakens the soul', 'a fable that will make the unwary fall on their knees and persuade them that they have seen the light, that there is something to believe in, something to live and die for - even to kill for.'
Beyond this, there is much rambling and schoolboy detective work, omens, violent deaths. All this to create a religion through words. Similar to The Shadow of the Wind, for which this is a prequel; the characters share a pervasive sense of the gothic and the macabre. The Cemetery of Forgotten Books and the Sempere and Sons bookshop make an appearance here, as is the sinister city of Barcelona, a character fit to contain the dark elements spun by Zafon.
The spooky epilogue and narrative rhythm notwithstanding (and the superb translation by Lucia Graves), The Angel's Game is at best a guilty pleasure for a rainy afternoon. Apart from the hyperbolic first page and subsequent forays into the art of literary creation for the benefit of the voyeuristic among us, the story becomes a victim of its own making - a casualty in the impressive number of bodies that pile up in the second half of the book. Seems like something written for a movie, fast-paced, dark, and instant gratification for our illogical natures.
Sometimes pulp is best left in orange juice. Go watch a movie.
(And yes, I bought the book after reading the first page. I always do. Read the first page that is.)
The Angel's Game, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
So begins the burden of the story, though the protagonist, David Martin, has no trouble churning words by the minute, page after page, year after year. Faust this is not, though there is a Luciferesque character in the guise of a publisher waving a deal (read lots of dough and no fame) for a story. Tickles the imagination of many an aspiring writer on a moral high-horse. Wouldn't we like to think that we'd jump at a contract that says you've got to crank out 6.66 pages a day in exchange for our lives? With this blatant clue to the identity of the publisher supplied by the overactive imagination of our hero, it is no surprise his deadly illness vanishes once he agrees to write. Oh happy day.
In The Angel's Game, Zafon toys with the idea that the act of narrating a story could be diabolical. The devil-publisher Andreas Corelli enlists David to write a literary project, 'a narrative that awakens the soul', 'a fable that will make the unwary fall on their knees and persuade them that they have seen the light, that there is something to believe in, something to live and die for - even to kill for.'
Beyond this, there is much rambling and schoolboy detective work, omens, violent deaths. All this to create a religion through words. Similar to The Shadow of the Wind, for which this is a prequel; the characters share a pervasive sense of the gothic and the macabre. The Cemetery of Forgotten Books and the Sempere and Sons bookshop make an appearance here, as is the sinister city of Barcelona, a character fit to contain the dark elements spun by Zafon.
The spooky epilogue and narrative rhythm notwithstanding (and the superb translation by Lucia Graves), The Angel's Game is at best a guilty pleasure for a rainy afternoon. Apart from the hyperbolic first page and subsequent forays into the art of literary creation for the benefit of the voyeuristic among us, the story becomes a victim of its own making - a casualty in the impressive number of bodies that pile up in the second half of the book. Seems like something written for a movie, fast-paced, dark, and instant gratification for our illogical natures.
Sometimes pulp is best left in orange juice. Go watch a movie.
(And yes, I bought the book after reading the first page. I always do. Read the first page that is.)
Sunday, August 22, 2010
On Breathing...or the lack thereof
Musicians are strange. Not that the rest of the population is any less weird. But singers / songwriters are strange when it comes to the choice of subject (song) matter. The case in point is their obsession with breathing - the process, the reason for, behind,... I could go on, but so have they.
#1. Breathe - Pink Floyd / Roger Waters
The dailiness and drudgery of it.
#2. Breathe in Breathe out - Matt Kearny
On the process... and as recommended by health practitioners for moving...moving on.
#3. Breathe - Taylor Swift
Oh the difficulty of it without someone... but you have to.
#4. Breathe No More - Evanescence
Someone about to stop..
#5. Keep Breathing - Ingrid Michaelson
Who cares what else is goin' on in the world as long as we keep breathing?
#6. Breathe - Melissa Etheridge
It only hurts when she's breathing apparently. Maybe Etheridge should consider treating her Ovation with a little love. (And I didn't quite get the connection between the song and music video, and I didn't care enough to check).
#7. Breathe (2 AM) - Anna Nalick
There's no rewind button, no taking back a breath that's already breathed. Just breathe.
(Also, why 2AM? The song mentions it just once apart from the title - it's the first word and that's it. Unlike the refrain 'just breeaaaathe'. Maybe another post about singers' obsession with 2 and 3 am in particular. Maybe not.)
And more... I've counted 34 songs about the intricacies of breathing so far. As Jimmy Page put it, the song remains the same.
Guess lung (dys)function fear is to singers as aphasia to writers. Guess I'm having trouble breathing...and writing.
#1. Breathe - Pink Floyd / Roger Waters
The dailiness and drudgery of it.
#2. Breathe in Breathe out - Matt Kearny
On the process... and as recommended by health practitioners for moving...moving on.
#3. Breathe - Taylor Swift
Oh the difficulty of it without someone... but you have to.
#4. Breathe No More - Evanescence
Someone about to stop..
#5. Keep Breathing - Ingrid Michaelson
Who cares what else is goin' on in the world as long as we keep breathing?
#6. Breathe - Melissa Etheridge
It only hurts when she's breathing apparently. Maybe Etheridge should consider treating her Ovation with a little love. (And I didn't quite get the connection between the song and music video, and I didn't care enough to check).
#7. Breathe (2 AM) - Anna Nalick
There's no rewind button, no taking back a breath that's already breathed. Just breathe.
(Also, why 2AM? The song mentions it just once apart from the title - it's the first word and that's it. Unlike the refrain 'just breeaaaathe'. Maybe another post about singers' obsession with 2 and 3 am in particular. Maybe not.)
And more... I've counted 34 songs about the intricacies of breathing so far. As Jimmy Page put it, the song remains the same.
Guess lung (dys)function fear is to singers as aphasia to writers. Guess I'm having trouble breathing...and writing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)