The Film Noir Experience

I have put together the weirdest mix CD ever.

Tell it to the Volcano
Everybody Hurts
Both Sides Now
Songbird
God Only Knows
This Tornado Loves you
Divorce Song
Take it Back
Eleanor
Holy Now

So, usually when you put together a mix CD, you try to have a theme. Or, at least I do. I try to put together a cohesive unit of music that say something (often to someone) about a topic. Not to get all Rob Gordon here (although, its probably too late for that) but music moves you, it speaks to your soul, or maybe just your head, but there is something about the power of music that is amazing. I’m not a musician, I can’t write songs or play an instrument (well), so my only opportunities to use music to let someone know something, to influence how they feel through the power of song is a mix tape. And, this mix seems to be about love and unhappiness. I wonder what that says about me?

Back in the day (it feels like I’m saying that a lot lately), I went through this phase in which when I read a book, as a little review of it I would put together a mix CD. It was a fun little exercise that brought together two of my favorite activities, reading and listening to music.

Right now, I’m reading Constructions for a class (this is not likely to receive mix tape treatment), The Battle of the Labyrinth, and The Crimson Petal and the White. These last two may very well get their own mix tapes. Percy Jackson is a demigod, the son of Poseidon, and quite the little badass. His adventures are fast reads (reading teen fiction will do that for you) and are terribly entertaining. This one is book four. And, the Crimson Petal and the White is a look at Victorian England from multiple perspectives. Its seven hundred…thousand (hyperbole) pages long but so far its been terribly interesting. It starts off following a prostitute and then moves its way up through society. The mix tape potential is astounding. I could possibly do a song for each person that is followed!

Now, why am I bringing this up now? Well, when the NaBloPoMo people sent me an email to say that February’s topic for anyone up to the challenge of blogging everyday of the shortest month of the year was “love”, I thought, “Hey, wouldn’t it be interesting to come up with a mix tape representation of the many different kinds of love at there in the world?” (Even more interesting when one considers how odd and awfully awkward I am when it comes to any kind of human interaction.)

You may have noticed that I’ve been ending entries with songs. I am collecting these things into a list so that I can put them together as a mix. So, you’ve been warned.

I’ve been thinking a lot about running lately. And, I’ve been doing a lot of running in place (in my office with the door shut or with my curtains drawn in my flat.) How’s that for a mental image? If you met me after, say, 2007, this is going to sound ridiculous, but I assure you that I have not always been built like a weeble. My friend Tom, awhile back, decided that he was going to run a ultramarathon. I thought, hey, if he can train to run 100 miles, that I could train to run a portion of that and I could pace him. (He was looking for pacers at the time.)

So, I used to wait until sun went down and run around my neighborhood. And, sometimes I would meet Tom at the track and run with him. Tom is an incredibly patient and wonderful human being. He’d run with me, at my speed, and then when I was done he’d do his real training. You can tell someone really loves something when they take the time to share that love with people who are nowhere near their level.

About that time, Arcade Fire’s Funeral came out. My other friend, Jonathon, who is also a runner recommended that I pick it up and do my jogging to it. Jonathon and I have always had similar workout music taste and I already had picked up Funeral, so it was worth going out for a jog to it. (On an unrelated note: if when you hit a plateau with your workout program, I recommend Iron Maiden.)

So, yesterday I was sitting on my sofa, winding down at the end of the day when “Crown of Love” popped into my head by Arcade Fire. Sometimes, songs stand all on their own and I think “Crown of Love” is a good example of that. It is a good song all by itself. But, I remember there being something special about the album Funeral as a whole. So, I got it out and I listened to it. It is theatrical and exciting. This album was an impulse buy when I first bought it. I had read a little about the band and I wanted to see what everyone was talking about, so on an impulse I picked it up. At the time I had been listening to a bunch hardcore bands and this was such a change of pace with melodies, strings, a story. Given that I’ve been jogging in place and trying to blog about love this month, it isn’t a surprise that this song popped into my head. Maybe I’m wrong about it, but I feel like this song as a “Send in the Clowns” feel to it. A sort of “I let it fade and it turns out I was wrong to do that.” I just have this thought attached to this song, this notion that you have to be careful with love. And, sometimes it dies and sometimes it grows and sometimes you fuck up and have to be taken into receivership until you can sort things out.

Right, I’m going to go jog in place some more.

Album: Funeral
Band: Arcade Fire
Song: Crown of Love

So, a soundtrack can really make (or break) a film. Love Actually is one of my favorite films (and, yes, I realize its a Christmas film, but I could watch it at any time in the year). And, I was thinking about it the today; it would be a completely different film without its soundtrack.

I love the film because you are so happy when Sam (played by Thomas Sangster) and Jamie (Colin Firth) triumph in love. You’re touched by Daniel’s (Liam Neeson) devotion to his recently passed spouse. You want to smack Sarah (Laura Linney) for letting Karl’s (Rodrigo Santoro) hot, mostly naked (Brazilian) personage go. You feel a sense of catharsis when Mark (Andrew Lincoln) finally says what he needs to say and moves on. You’re touched when Billy Mac tells his manager, whom he calls Chubs, that he’s come to realize that he’s spent his whole life with his fat employee, and in truth, “The People I love is, in fact, you.” And, you are devastated when Karen (Emma Thompson) is herself devastated after discovering her husband’s possible infidelity. (Oh, and the Prime minister/Natalie stuff is hilarious and wonderful.) But, you feel all of these things because of the soundtrack.

Karen tells Harry near the beginning of the film, after he asks why she still listens to Joni Mitchell, “I love her and true love lasts a lifetime. Joni Mitchell is the woman who taught your cold English wife how to feel.” And, Joni Mitchell sets the tone of their relationship. Her heartbrokenness is set against the background of Mitchell’s hauntingly beautiful “Both Sides Now” (which by the way, if you’re never actually listen to the lyrics, I really recommend it). Her heart breaks and so does yours while Joni Mitchell croons about having looked at love from both sides and after this coming to realize that she really doesn’t know love at all.

Karl and Sarah are set to Eva Cassidy’s “Songbird”. This was apparently the filmmaker’s second choice. He had imagined the scene to Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Come on Come on”. But, this tune really does end up being perfect and fitting in completely with the feel of the scene.

And, the ending of the film gets me every time, calling back to its beginning with the arrivals at Heathrow while “God Only Knows” plays on in the background. “God Only Knows what I’d be without you” the Beach Boys tell us as we see image after image of husbands, wives, daughters, sons, brothers, mothers, sisters fathers, friends reunite. Its such a powerful and all encompassing sentiment, What would we be without the people in our lives who love us? What would we be without the people in our lives that we love?

Its a good film, but how the music plays into the action really makes it remarkable.

Song: Both Sides Now
Performer: Joni Mitchell
Album: Both Sides Now

Song: Songbird
Performer: Eva Cassidy
Album: Songbird

Song: God Only Knows
Performer: The Beach Boys
Album: Love to Love

So, I feel like I had a little victory yesterday. I was walking from one part of campus to another with new of the students in the class I’m teaching on the history of English and we were chatting. In the first class we talked bout the history of three different words in English that are synonymous (or at least partially so): ersatz, faux and fake. We looked at the earliest cited usage and some collocates and their roots. They both said that they had never seen ersatz before I wrote it up on the board in class.

And, then one of them said that she was reading a book for fun and came across it. She was pleased that she knew what it meant. And, I am pleased that I’m a nerd who likes words and that I was able to share it with her. It is a little thing, I know, but sometimes little things make you smile.

I feel like an orphan today. Well, its not an apt metaphor. I don’t feel abandoned or alone. Actually, I have dinner plans I’m pretty excited about. I just feel like I have broken the connection between the part of me that functions in the world and the part of me responsible for synthesizing and critically analyzing things I connect in the world. This is problematic since, as a graduate student, my job is pretty much to synthesize and analyze things. It is an unpleasant feeling.

In an effort to jump start things, to find this lost bit of me or to reconnect with this abandoned piece of my, I started iTunes and put it on random. The first song that was played was the first song from Neko Case’s album Middle Cyclone. Its a pretty song, its melodic and a little soft. And, then you listen to the lyrics. “My Love, I am the speed of sound/ I left them Motherless, fatherless” Neko Case croons in the opening two lines. And, the imagery gets increasingly gory. “Their souls dangling inside-out from their mouths…” Yet, it remains the same, lovely melodic little tune. “I carved your name across three counties/and ground it in with bloody hides.”

Life has this way of being brutal and beautiful at the same time. And, obsessive and destructive. I mean, no one really wants a companion who will literally rip the world to shreds for them. Well, “no one” is a pretty bold statement. Most people, perhaps? I don’t know what the song is about. As I said, the part of me responsible for synthesis is AWOL. Nope, don’t know what it is about. But, I like it.

Song: This Tornado Loves You
Performer: Neko Case
Album: Middle Cyclone

So, I’m teaching a class on the Roots of English. Today, we looked at the morphology of English. One of the books I’m using is English Vocabulary Elements. And, at some point in the book it mentions that the morpheme “phile” in “bibliophile” and “pedophile” both mean “love”. They come from the same place. But, the words take that meaning in different directions. People who are bibliophiles really enjoy books. They love them. People who are pedophiles…well, they really enjoy children; they love them. *shiver*. They just love them in a way that is illegal and, in my humble opinion, wrong (and more than a little gross.)

And, this made me think. “phil” is a root we get from Greek, and I thought it meant a “brotherly sort of love”. The kind of love that is romantic is “eros”, where we get our word for “erotic”. So, shouldn’t “pedophile” be “pedoerotic” or “eroped” or something like that?

Elements of vocabulary…English Vocabulary.

Apparently, the good people at NaBloPoMo have declared February the month to talk about (or bitch about) love. I have decided to take them up on the offer.