Lusciousity

October continued to get off to an excellent early start today as The Wild Bunch gathered to take in some music by the sea at the Hollywood Beach Clambake. We went with the most ravenous of intentions, but after some satisfying pre-beach gnoshing on some cheese, bread, and Tres Picos Garnacha and an apparent lack of actual baked clams when we arrived at the beach, we decided to pass on the fried seafood and concentrate on Ms. Edie Brickell (the singer we came to see) and some Sam Adams (fittingly, two of us even went for their seasonal brew Oktoberfest). It was a chillaxed, delightfully economical way to spend a night on the beach under the half-full moon. And while I don’t regret not buying a just-baked 1/2 pound chocolate chip cookie, it sure has given me something to dream about.
On a thematic note, I realize that while October has started early this year, September officially ends today, which means we at Lusciousity shall be bidding a bittersweet adieu to our monthly theme, nostalgia. I’m sure some extended reminiscing about childhood experiences will still pop up from time to time, but it won’t be the main event. But I’ve enjoyed this themed month, so maybe we’ll try to come up with a new theme for ever-luscious October.

And now for another Friday night movie filled with jazz and emotional turbulence: last year’s Sundance Grand Prize Winner, Forty Shades of Blue. As much as Love Song for Bobby Long just lays out there in rheams of dialogue and exposition, this movie keeps so far inside you’re not sure you’re actually meant to be watching. It’s one of those ones that gives you the eerie, often sad feeling that you are visually eavesdropping on people’s actual lives. Sometimes you wish you hadn’t, but by that time you are involved so you can’t very well look away. If I try to summarize the plot, it will make even less sense, but let’s just say it involves an aging country/rock’n'roll musician (Rip Torn–INCREDIBLE), his much younger Russian lover (Dina Korzun–EVEN BETTER) and his visiting son (Bonus points for me for recognizing the son as the guy who used to play Ed on Northern Exposure!). See, that is already giving you a certain idea, which is probably both close to and very far from the story this movie tells. The performances are uniformly excellent and the photography is often arresting without really calling too much attention to itself. It will probably take a couple of days to really kick in.

Technology has done a lot to enable us to integrate funky cool music into every nook and cranny of our hypermediated lives: iPod, iTunes, Pandora, gotta love it all. There is, however, something missing: cover art and the multi-sensory experience of flipping through album covers to find what you are looking for. There’s a couple of technological aids to relieve this problem that I just thought I’d mention in case you are hankering to get more album art into your life. First, as you probably know, is the new iTunes software that puts cover art into your music library so that you can see it as a song from the album plays. I hear it is really cool, but alas I have not downloaded it yet so I can’t personally vouch for it. Here is what I can personally vouch for, tool number 2, Sabadaba. This is a link passed on to me way too long ago by Diego, and only recently perused. I should have gone there long ago! This site is a fantastic collection of information about Brazilian albums in the 60’s and 70’s, with special attention to archiving cover art images. And I don’t know about you, but everything about Brasil pretty much says luscious to me.

How did I come around to thinking about this topic on today of all days? It all started when I thought up the idea of passing along some Marisa Monte albums to friends, and I remembered a long ago day when Daniel and I had only been dating a little while and he showed me some MM liner notes that were, well… check out this cover art image yourself to get my drift! Good thing MM was safely living in Brazil at the time, or this here future wife might have been more than a little intimidated by her, um, talent!

The severe unlusciousness of being stood up by an author that I had driven over an hour in heavy I-95 traffic just to hear read was, luckily, alleviated by being able to rock out to an album that has been shared with me by the ever-luscious Frida and Diego, Yo La Tengo’s (latest?) I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass. Now, for some reason I had always assumed that a band w/ a name like YLT had to be some cheesy Latin type group. How wrong I was. Groovy stuff. Maybe I’ll just have to drive to Miami and get stood up by another last-minute-cancelling author to have an excuse to listen to it all again.

PS With God as my witness, if I ever become the kind of author that gets to do readings on a regular basis, I will never cancel my readings unless I am dead.

This film is about two ballet companies assembled in Paris in the 30’s and exported to the Western hemisphere when the war broke out. It’s amazing the cultural history that can be seen and heard in the couple of hours I spent watching this DVD. From a sheer filmmaking point of view, there’s not a whole lot to it, but the material is such that it seems like a smart move for the directors to just get out of the way and let the surviving dancers tell their story. I’m not sure what is most luscious about this documentary: watching articulate, funny 80-something year olds reminisce about the athletic prowess and artistic ambition they had when they were teenagers and 20-somethings, realizing what a wealth of talent was assembled these ballet companies in the 1930’s and 40’s and how despite a world war they managed to keep performing and producing ballet innovation at a prodigious rate, or simply hearing such personal stories of the play and personalities and passion behind the dance that you feel like you can smell the rosin burning off the toe shoes as teenagers make beauty look easy even though it was, and always is, anything but.

Today marks my dive back into the eternally confounding, illuminating, and generally epic pages of Moby Dick. I unexpectedly fell in love with this book back in my undergrad days, in a challenging but rewarding sophomore year class called American Fiction. Looking back at the reading list, we covered a lot of ground: The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and a lesser known but wonderful novel about Russian immigrants called The Bread Givers. Oh, and of course, MD.

There are many thoughts that one has about MD after reading it, so I’m not going to talk about the book, at least, not right now, but instead I’m going to focus on what I remember about where I read it. First off, the class was in the seminar room of a place called Sunset Cottage, a big old house with swollen windows and slamming doors that is home to the entire English department at Kenyon. The seminar room was the perfect place to spend having your brain whipped into shape by Prof. Smith, with floor to ceiling built-in bookshelves, enormous windows, and a door that closed so imposingly that you never ever showed up late for class. The other place I remember doing most of my reading was in the third floor of the humanities building known as Ascenscion Hall. The middle of the third floor was devoted to another imposing and scholarly reading room with one important addition: fluffy furniture of all varieties. You had to drink your coffee before you tried to read anything there or you would find yourself asleep in no time at all. It was to this room, well-caffeinated, that I settled in for the late late night marathon reading session that brought me to the end of Ahab’s chase and but alas not really any closer that “ungraspable phantom.” Of course us English majors like it that way.

But in the language known as Liz it means “darn tasty pinot noir.” Les Jamelles pinot is further proof that one should judge books by their covers and wines by their labels. This glass sipped quite nicely in the courtyard of Books & Books this evening as the Wild Bunch convened for a friend’s reading and generally catching up. Resolved: our next meeting shall involve oboe, guitar, and an empty peanut butter jar that can pass for a bongo.

Neither Daniel nor I remember exactly how this movie ended up on our Netflix queue, but we watched it any way and it slowly won us over, probably due to the convergence of three key luscious factors:

1) Location: New Orleans, before Katrina obviously, so the simple but amazing old house the most of the story revolves around was still quite intact. Threw in a few shots of the French Quarter just for us tourists.
2) Music: a lovely blend of jazz, folk, and a little bit of rock. There’s a song for almost every scene; the music credits just went on and on. Memorable without calling attention to itself.

3) Cast: includes one Scarlett J, who is, after all, the patron saint of Lusciousity.

Don’t consider this a burning, urgent recommendation, but if you give this one a chance I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. (Try to withhold your judgment of John Travolta in the lead role until at least halfway in.)

Frida and I had a conversation a couple of months back about whether or not a song could be directly responsible for prolonging certain moods, good or bad, although at the time I was mostly thinking about bad. At least, bad-ish, as when you keep listening to a certain song over and over again because you are feeling kind of bittersweet about how friendships change and you change and time keeps moving along. You give up any pretension of listening to other music and just put the song on repeat. For hours. Days. You get the picture. Is the song a function of your mood or is your mood a function of the song you won’t make yourself stop listening to? Are there times in one’s life when one should simply be cut off from the Keane, the Ben Harper, the Sarah McLachlan, the Nirvana, the what have you?

The closest we came to a conclusion on the question was that yes, probably listening to certain songs obsessively does nothing good for your mood. I think Lee Ann Brown, the poet who wrote the following poem, would agree:

Short Talk on Revenants

after Anne Carson

Zombies walk the hills waiting for a ballad to jump out of their eyes. Pay attention to what song is going through your head. It means something for your life. Change your tune–Change your fate.

So, if the song going through my head right now is Jesse McCartney’s Beautiful Soul, what does that mean for my fate? Next track!!

Jericho + Six Degrees = two series premiere featured montages for the Goo Goo Dolls’ song “Better Days.” I’m not kidding. It was not my imagination. It was the same song in the background as the characters in two different new shows in two days moved meaningfully yet silently through the motions of their fictional lives, tugging on our heart strings and letting us know just how very meaningful they are.

Now, the question is, what’s up with this combination music video/season premiere promo thing Grey’s Anatomy has going on with The Fray’s “How to Save a Life”? In five years, will our 1 hour seriocomedies morph entirely into music videos? I think the OC could definitely use a music vid or two.