I love this clip. I was so taken with it that I now, months later, have watched the rest of the movie. It’s a really strange piece of work. The kids go up with Mark Twain in this fanciful hot-air balloon-ship thing to find Halley’s comet. There’s a teleportation device, unicorns, Mr. Hyde alter-egos… Strange movie.

The “Mysterious Stranger” bit is still undeniably the best (and creepiest) part, but the whole thing is worth a view. I do, however, raise a quizzical eyebrow at the idea of marketing this to children. I am no fan of watering things down to a mush of inoffensiveness (I dearly miss the edgy “Sesame Street” of my childhood and lament the new direction the show has taken), but this is some serious grit for a kid to stomach.

A couple of weeks ago, I was walking downtown and spotted this block of ice/snow on the outside window pane of a café. It amused me. It looked to me like a woman sitting in a chair, taking part in the scene behind her.

Literature, from the very beginning, has had a single enemy, and that is the restriction of the expressed idea. It turns out, however, that freedom of expression sometimes presents a greater threat to an idea, because forbidden thoughts may circulate in secret, but what can be done when an important fact is lost in a flood of impostors, and the voice of truth becomes drowned out in an ungodly din? When that voice, though freely resounding, cannot be heard, because the technologies of information have led to a situation in which one can receive best the message of him who shouts the loudest, even when the most falsely?

The rest of their album is freely (and legally) downloadable at the Free Music Archive.

The Third & The Seventh

I finally hunkered down and gave the gloomy little disk a go tonight. “Au hasard Balthazar” is beautiful. It is Art, but it’s the stirring, living, breathing kind, not the dead, passive, “analyze me” kind. It’s about the parallel lives of a donkey and a young girl named Marie, but of course it’s not really about that at all.

I love how the narrative was approached. The storyline is not hurled at your face like it’s the only thing that matters, but it’s also not ignored or obfuscated. It pieces itself together slowly as though you, the viewer, were living in the small town where the movie takes place, listening to gossip and spying through windows. Here, a murder hangs half-unresolved in the narrative’s periphery while the camera focuses on the foreground of the two lives it’s charting — the broken bottles, the kicked-up dirt, the hands and the feet, and the sad donkey eyes.

Incidentally, I never realized before just how beautiful and expressive a donkey’s eyes are.

This movie guided me towards that place that is the closest approximation of “religious” this not-so-religious girl experiences. I probably would have shed a tear or two, but I don’t cry during movies unless they’re “Stand By Me.”

*Okay, okay. Upon re-reading this post, I want to make it clear that I do think Schubert is bad-ass.

I marvel at the power of a song that manages to pack into just four minutes the roaring gush of thought/emotion that follows a person’s preteen behind all the way up to their eighty-seventh birthday, somehow managing to adapt to the changing terrain and stay relevant though the notes, rhythms, and (if they’re present) words never change.

Although Prince quotes litter my Facebook profile, I was Prince for Halloween one year, I have a fantastically gaudy pair of love symbol earrings, and “uh, I like Prince a lot” is my standard answer when asked what type of music I listen to (so that I can avoid telling them more than they probably want to hear), for me this musician would be Kristin Hersh — Kristin Hersh’s solo career and her work with the band Throwing Muses, more specifically.

The emotions carried by the pitch of the voice and the snakelike guitar have always made sense intuitively and I could spot patches of meaning peeking in the spaces between those dark impenetrable words I couldn’t understand. Paradoxically, the abstract waftiness clung to my twelve-year-old self, but the concrete foundations it was built on floated away. Only as I get older am I really learning what the songs are “about.”

Anyway. I love this woman’s music a lot. I also love that reading interviews with her got me into ’80s punk and old country. I also-also respect that she cut all her ties with record companies and has been innovating a new business model that works better for her.

Meandering thoughts aside, I thought I’d post some Youtube links.

Hearing this song when I was twelve was what got me into them.

I love how there’s just three chords here but it sounds so full. The man in the video is REM’s Michael Stipe. That’s sort of cool, but I find his voice distracting and wish it weren’t there.

This is one of my favorite songs of hers.

I need to figure out a way to look at my art through the eye of a casual viewer. Though I like the over all feel of this, I keep looking at it and focusing on the too-brown shadows under the lips and left eye, the slightly-off shape of the lips, the white patches in the hair, the flatness of the left eye, and so on. Sadly, with colored pencil there is a limit to the amount you can go back in and fix things.

The Naked Face. Basically, it describes the science of decoding facial expressions and the career of psychologist Paul Ekman who has traveled around the world, analyzing and documenting them.