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I’ve seen two very different movies in the past two days that have one thing in common: the actors were also musicians, and the films worked music into the stories in such brilliant ways that the performers could look perfectly natural and pleased to be playing their music. And I saw something in these two movies and their use of music that has been sadly missing from many a story these days.
The first film was the new indie flick Once that has the obvious music plot of two starving musicians trying to make music. Sure, you can read that and think it sounds pretty cliché – I did, too – but the movie is beautiful in its simplicity. And the music is … sad and happy. I really liked it.
We didn’t watch the second movie for its music but for its connection to the famous Groucho Marx letter to Warner Brothers. The movie is, of course, A Night in Casablanca. I’ve never been a big Marx Brothers fan, too much slapstick for my taste. This movie had two magical scenes, however, that both involved music. First we have Chico covering for a bandleader at the piano. You know a musician is good when he makes it look so easy. Chico plays as though he’s just doodling on a piano, improvising a little something for the camera, teasing his audience with a little Liszt. Later on, Harpo is alone with a Rembrandt of a lovely woman and a harp. He plays to his Rembrandt mistress, but it’s the only time in the whole film when he’s absolutely serious. That is what struck me most about Chico’s and Harpo’s performances – the way their faces completely change while they’re playing. For those few moments, all the slapstick is finally gone and the over-the-top pranks are put aside and they just play. They just make music, and it’s downright beautiful music. For me, I feel like I had to put up with the rest of the 85 minutes just to see those two performances.
But the song in my head for the past two days is “Romeo and Juliet” by Indigo Girls, which has nothing to do with either movie… except perhaps the line “it’s just that the time was wrong” which would fit into Once perfectly.
I just finished Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: a family tragicomic, my first graphic novel. Many of you might already be familiar with Alison’s work in lesbian-librarian comic strips, and if you are a fan, you’ll love the book Fun Home. It’s like an autobiographical prequel to the comics. And better.
One of my favorite parts of the book was the recurrence of James Joyce toward the end, but the other thing I really liked was how she used her childhood diaries as a reference work, a primary source for her history, even though many of those childhood diaries had glaring omissions and simplified her days to “We had ice cream.” The diary-keeping reminded me of the black-and-white marbled-cover composition books I used when I was in high school — I called them my “journals” in the same way I say I wear “underwear” … words like “diary” and “panties” have always sounded horribly pretentious and affected to me. But I never felt free enough to simply write an entry like “We had ice cream.” And I think that restraint is bleeding over now into my blogs. So many bloggers have wrote about this, the need to “say something” … the self-imposed pressure to come up with something important/ clever/ original, when all we should really be doing is writing for the sake of writing. Ray Bradbury said the only way to be a writer is to write 300 words a day. Every day. As much as I enjoy the nature of blog writing, I am missing my journal days, too. But I haven’t been keeping a paper journal for almost a year now, and I think this is part of the reason my blog writing is suffering, too.
I keep eyeing the black-and-white marbled-cover composition books in the campus bookstore. I do love the texture of the finer blank books, with proper binding, thick creamy unlined paper, a smell of wood when you flip the pages… but those old marbled comp books speak to a nostalgia that means a lot to me of late. They even have the old “class schedule” table on the inside of the front cover and the multiplication table in back, just as I remember. Oh, did I fill up those books. I wrote and wrote and wrote when I had those old notebooks. I haven’t gone back and read any of it. I’m worried I’ll be too embarrassed still. At some point, I’ll be ready to read all that stuff and have a good laugh at myself, but I don’t know if I’m there yet.
Content, Content, Content
Where, oh where, is my Content?
“I have fled,” she said,
“to the precarious edge
of haystacks, needles,
and tongue tips.”
– An Ode to Writer’s Block
by me
