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I’m still up in the air about this one. Given it had certain comedic qualities about it. The really bad sexual puns. All of the inappropriate touching and fondling and sucking. I didn’t expect the plot to be Oscar worthy, but it was catchy.
So Mr. Rigby Reardon (Steve Martin) plays a detective who is hired by the beautiful Juliet Forrest to investigate her father’s untimely death. His investigation leads him to encounter several of the 1930’s best actors/actresses in edited format. Of course he falls in love with Juliet despite Marlowe’s warnings that you should never ever fall in love with a client and that falling in love with a client gets you killed. Classic plot line then of they fall in love, he tells her he’s ready to settle down after they solve the case, then she overhears him speaking to an ex using the same lines, except she doesn’t realize he’s talking about her! He drinks himself into a stupor until Marlowe calls with a lead and he flies off. The lead inevitably helps him solve the case, Rigby and Juliet are reunited and end with a big kiss finale. Not too brain tickling.
One thing kept making me roll my eyes and wondering what the hell. Seriously. When he was younger, his dad ran off with the cleaning lady and his mother died of a broken heart. From then on every time he heard the term ‘cleaning lady’ he went berserk and tried to strangle whomever said it. Ohhkay. I guess it comes into play and makes more sense at the end but whatever.
I thought it was hilarious when Juliet makes her debut appearance and faints at the sight of the newspaper headline. He looks around and then kisses her passionately, puts her on the couch and then fondles her breasts. She asks what he’s doing and innocently he responds “Your breasts fell into an awkward position when you fainted, I was adjusting them.” It was just such a random thing to do (and yes, terribly inappropriate). Later on in the movie Juliet is reading a name or acronym off of a sheet of paper her father left behind and asks “What’s fochs?” to which Steve Martin begins to explain “Well, it’s when a man and a woman who love each other become intimate and he puts his…” Hm, somebody’s got sex on the brain!
Overall I wasn’t terribly impressed with the movie. I didn’t laugh as hard or as much as I had expected to. So that was disappointing but I did enjoy the film to the extent that I’d probably be willing to watch it again.
I started reading “This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession” by Daniel J. Levitin and it has been fascinating. Needless to say I’ve been taking obscene notes and that’s why it’s taking me forever to get through it at a decent rate. Plus I can’t write inside my book if I expect my husband to read it too. I’ve been reciting passages to him that I find interesting and he thinks it sounds pretty awesome. So while I’m not that far into it, here are some of the things I’ve jotted down and what I think about it.
“Headphones opened up a world of sonic colors, a palette of nuances and details that went far beyond the chords and melody, the lyrics, or a particular singers voice.” p.2
This particular quotation reminds me of an essay I read in my multicultural lit class back in college. We were reading literature from the Harlem Renaissance and one of our homework assignments was to read an excerpt from this essay. I wish to God I still had those pamphlets because I cannot remember who wrote the essay or what it was titled or even where to find it at. Anyhow, the essay questioned if ‘white folks’ felt/listened to music the way ‘colored folk’ do. (That’s how it was worded in the essay; I really want to say that it was written by Zora Neale Hurston). Do we feel the rhythm and the pull of the music or do we just hear notes? Can we feel the passion and longing that comes with playing an instrument and expressing yourself via music?
“And what about the role of perception in all of this, the uncanny ability of great musicians and engineers to hear nuances that most of us don’t?” p.4
“For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies, and cultures change.” p.5
Come on, who still doesn’t love a good Beatles song? Aerosmith and The Rolling Stones have been around for decades and are still rockin’.
“Throughout most of the world and for most of human history, music making was as natural an activity as breathing and walking, and everyone participated.” p. 6
My grandpa is the WORST singer. He is terribly tone deaf but yet he belts out songs like he was Jim Morrison. Music has always been a big part of my family. My mom plays piano, clarinet and saxophone plus she sings; my dad sings and pretends to play the guitar; I’ve played the piano since I was about 4 or 5 and the saxophone (albeit not very well) and sing; then my little brother plays the piano and trumpet. While I was growing up my mom and I would play the piano and sing oldies together before supper and to pass the time on the weekends. We were part of church choir and then choir and band in high school. So music has pretty much been a huge thing in my life.
“…recent findings…showing us that music is distributed throughout the brain. …music listening, performance, and composition engage nearly every area of the brain…” p. 9
“Miles Davis famously described his improvisational technique as parallel to the way that Picasso described his use of a canvas: The most critical aspect of the work, both artists said, was not the objects themselves, but the space between objects.” p. 18
I think it is the silence in between notes or even phrases of music that creates anticipation. Whenever we play Rock Band at our house I’m the drummer (mostly because I’m a killer on drums) and love just thumping out the tunes. But it’s pretty intense waiting for your turn to play because you hear the bass and guitar going, the singer rockin’ out and you can’t wait to jump in. You want to fill that silence with something. When I listen to music, the silence makes me wonder what’s going to come next (if it’s a song I’ve never heard before) or makes me impatient if I know a good part is coming (like the infamous scream in “Who Are You?”).
“Virtually every culture and civilization considers movement to be an integral part of music making and listening. Rhythm is what we dance to, sway our bodies to, and tap our feet to.” p. 57
Rhythm refers to the length of notes; tempo refers to the pace of a piece of music; meter refers to when you tap your foot hard .vs. light and how hard and light taps group together to form larger units (p. 58)
“Whenever a note anticipates a beat-that is, when a musician plays a note a bit earlier than the strict beat would call for-this is called syncopation. This is a very important concept that relates to expectation, and ultimately to the emotional impact of a song. The syncopation catches us by surprise, and adds excitement.” p. 65
“This is another way that composers build excitement, by not giving us what we would normally expect.” p. 66
4/4, 2/4 and 3/4 time are the most common meters used in Western music (p. 68)
“…loudness is, like pitch, an entirely psychological phenomenon…loudness doesn’t exist in the world, it only exists in the mind. …loudness, like pitch, is logarithmic…” p. 69
My husband and I were kind of in a disagreement about this one. While you really do have to read the whole paragraph to understand the entirety of it, it makes sense on its own. At least in my head it does. Loud doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody. My mom is extremely sensitive to noises she deems loud. Whenever I’m driving and she’s in the car with me, I have to turn my radio off because it’s ‘too loud’ for her to talk over. At my parents’ house is a different story because my dad is going slightly deaf and so the volume is always turned up a few degrees louder than what I consider ‘normal’.
“…if a record has a dynamic range of 90 dB, it means that the difference between the softest parts on the record and the loudest parts on the record and the loudest parts is 90 dB-considered high fidelity by most experts…” p. 70
This was interesting to me because I don’t recall this ever being defined in John Cusack’s movie “High Fidelity”. I think I’ll have to watch this movie later tonight to make sure. But even if it was defined, I’m curious as to why this is the title of the movie and what the heck it all means.
“Another thing that most of us are expert in, even if we are non-musicians, is recognizing familiar chord progressions, even in the absence of the well-known melody.” p. 73
Is this how guys get so good at playing air guitar? 
“A single note cannot, by itself, be dissonant, but it can sound dissonant against the backdrop of certain chords particularly when the chord implies a key that the single note is not a part of.” p. 75
“The Gestaltists wondered how it is that a melody…could retain its identity, its recognizability, even when all of its pitches are changed.” p. 76
“One case of auditory grouping is the way that the many different sounds emanating from a single musical instrument cohere into a percept of a single instrument.” p. 79
This part was really interesting to me. How do we tell what the different instruments are if they’re all playing the same note?
“…our auditory system is exquisitely sensitive to what constitutes simultaneous in this sense, being able to detect differences in onset times as short as a few milliseconds.” p. 80
“…attributes work with or against each other when they combine in particular ways, and we also know that experience and attention can have an influence on grouping…” p. 82
“For cognitive scientists, the word mind refers to that part of each of us that embodies our thoughts, hopes, desires, memories, beliefs, and experiences. The brain…is an organ of the body…Activity in the brain gives rise to the contents of the mind.” p. 83
“The dominant view today is that that the sum total of your thoughts, beliefs, and experiences is represented in patterns of firings…if the brain ceases to function, the mind is gone, but the brain can still exist…” p. 84
“Damage to an area of the brain just above and behind the left ear-Wernicke’s area-causes difficulty in understanding spoken language; damage to a region at the very top of the head-the motor cortex-causes difficulty moving your fingers; damage to an area in the center of the brain-the hippocampal complex-can block the ability to form new memories; while leaving old memories still intact.” p. 84-5
“Damage to an area just behind your forehead can cause drastic changes in personality…Such localization of mental function is a strong scientific argument for the involvement of the brain in thought, and the thesis that thoughts come from the brain.” p. 85
These last two quotes were interesting because I think it means that these kind of damages to your brain can affect your ability to comprehend music. Whether it’s performing or listening to music because you need to understand the language to sing or to understand the meaning behind a song (or just to sing along) . There’s quite a bit more in the book about what other parts of your brain are responsible for doing which makes sense in their relation to music.
“The cerebellum is involved in emotions and the planning of movements…” p. 85
“Performing music-regardless of what instrument you play, or whether you sing, or conduct-involves the frontal lobes again for the planning of your behavior, as well as the motor cortex in the posterior part of the frontal lobe…and the sensory cortex, which provides the tactile feedback that you have pressed the right key on your instrument…” p. 86
“…the emotions we experience in response to music involve structures deep in the primitive, reptilian regions of the cerebellar vermis, and the amygdala-the heart of emotional processing in the cortex.” p. 87
“Not all neurons are equally active at one time, however-this would cause a cacophony of images and sensations in our heads (in fact, this is what happens in epilepsy).” p. 90
“…there is a great deal of interpersonal variation, we are born with a predisposition toward interpreting sounds in particular ways” p. 92
“The point for me isn’t to develop a map of the brain, but to understand how it works, how the different regions coordinate their activity together, how the simple firing of neurons and shuttling around of neurotransmitters leads to thoughts, laughter, feelings of profound joy or sadness, and how all these, in turn, can lead us to create lasting, meaningful works of art.” p. 96
“Many people, even trained scientists in other disciplines, have the strong intuition that inside the brain there is a strictly isomorphic representation of the world around us.” p. 97
I think this is actually ridiculous. But then again, we did once think the world was flat instead of round.
“Our perceptions are the end product of a long chain of neural events that give us the illusion of an instantaneous image. … The intuition that our senses give us an undistorted view of the world is another.” p. 98
“…perception is a process of inference..” p. 101
“The brain extracts basic, low-level features from the music, using specialized neural networks that decompose the signal into information about pitch, timbre, spatial location, loudness, reverberant environment, tone durations, and the onset times for different notes…” p. 103
“High-level processing is where it all comes together, where our minds come to an understanding of form and content.”p. 104
So that’s what I’ve got so far. It isn’t very coherent, but hopefully by the end of the book I can put together a more cognitive view point. 
Last night we watched the anime film “Paprika”. The concept sounded pretty cool. A device has been made so that people can enter other people’s dreams and they can be used to help cure diseases or for therapy. Someone has stolen the device so that all dreams merge together causing chaos and destruction in the natural world. Parpika, the alter ego of a scientist, is on a mission to retrieve the stolen apparatus and restore the natural order of things. Pretty interesting so far, right?
The movie was impossible for me to follow. And perhaps it was because I was mildly paying attention, but even so, with the use of subtitles it was very convoluted. Nothing in the movie made sense and trying to connect the dots was impossible. The ending made zero sense even in that abstract way of thinking.
I’ve always thought that dreams and sci-fi mix well together. Since how and why dreams happen is still a mystery, it’s easy to mold it into just about anything your imagination wants it to be. But here in the movie, it feels like a random array of thoughts thrown together and then drawn into animation.
So I’m late in seeing this (blame my small town for never getting cool films like this). But we did receive it yesterday in the mail via Netflix and watched it tonight as part of our Valentine’s Day celebration. I have to say, I am absolutely in love with this film and am sure to buy it at Best Buy (assuming they have it) this weekend.
My parents are big oldies fans. So I grew up loving the goodies and baddies of the 60’s and 70’s. I knew all of the words to “Come Together” before I knew what kind of awesome song it was. The best part about watching this movie, was just listening to my husband and I belt out the words while cuddling our son in between us. It was touching in that Kodak moment kind of way.
For the entire movie I eagerly anticipated the precipice of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and it never came. Until I said for the millionth time “I’m so disappointed they didn’t sing that song” when the credits start rolling in playing my tune. The other song I wish they had sung and they didn’t was “When I’m sixty-four” but they certainly made an allusion to it when Jude was getting ready to ship out of England. I love how this movie is like other musicals but at the same time is not. It isn’t like musicals in that it doesn’t completely rely on the music to tell the story. Or at least that is how I viewed it. The subtlety in the dialogue and even the names carry the film in terms of plot. And although I was fairly certain of plot twists and where this movie was headed, I was not disappointed. It was a film where despite its obviousness, I enjoyed it thoroughly through its creativity.
Wikipedia has a great source of Beatles’ reference and other pop culture references within the movie. Some I knew and others I was not aware of. Obviously the character Sadie was meant to represent Janis Joplin (holy hell those vocals were amazing) and JoJo meant to be Jimi Hendrix (sans the left handed guitar mode). I read about the movie from a blog when it first released and was aware that it was based on Beatles’ tunes and therefore was prepared for the name and song relations. Jude would subsequently inspire the song “Hey Jude” to be sung as was Lucy and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”. “Dear, Prudence” was a new one to me that they sing to Prudence who has locked herself in the closet overnight.
A lot of songs I recognized from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band which I watched repeatedly (and listened to religiously on record) for probably a year straight. “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”, “She’s So Heavy” and “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” . I adored Aerosmith as the evil band brainwashing people in the film and was tinkled pink in watching the songs being recreated in “Across the Universe”.
I never really truly understood the song “Strawberry Fields Forever”. As per Wikipedia it is more about John Lennon’s nostalgia for childhood mixed with some powerful hallucinogens and bad timing. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_Fields_Forever) In “Across the Universe” I understood it to be a reflection of the senseless death that was happening in Vietnam. When Jude pinned the strawberries up on the board, they looked like stabbed hearts bleeding all over the canvas, much like dead bodies on a battlefield might look like. When Lucy walks in to their room and sees it, I think she is more disturbed by its reality than Jude sees it as in his artwork.
Jude breaks into the headquarters of resistance singing “Revolution” and I think it’s a great commentary on certain idealists. Because idealism doesn’t change the world.
” You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right
all right, all right “
Who doesn’t want to change the world? Violence isn’t the answer even if it’s for a peaceful demonstration. I believe Lucy finally realizes this when she discovers Paco & two other men making pipe bombs and says “I thought only the other side drops bombs”. Later it is revealed that a Greenwich Village townhouse has been blown up on accident due to bombs. Even though Jude is an outsider looking in, he has a lot at stake here too. His friend Max has gone to war for something he appears to know nothing about. In the clips of him at war, you can see on his face that all he knows is killing; there’s no rhyme nor reason behind it.
My hubby isn’t too sneaky when it comes to getting gifts for me via the internet. Actually, he isn’t real sneaky at all about these things. Anyhow, for Valentine’s Day I asked for Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”. Our tiny bookstore in town doesn’t really carry a large array of books. So it wasn’t a big surprise that they didn’t have it and I was beginning to think that we’d just pick it up at Barnes & Noble when we visited our family next. Well, instead he ordered it for me via Amazon and also got me “What the Dickens” by Gregory Maguire.
Call me crazy, but now I’m back to having 3 books to read (yes at the same time) and I’m excited. Don’t be surprised if I finish these two books before I reach the end of “The History of Feminism” and “Of Human Bondage”. I knew I should have gotten the bigger print of the last one. Small print makes my head hurt and bores me. 
I’m officially finished with Elie Wiesel’s trilogy. The question I’m still left with after finishing “Day” is, can someone who suffers so much ever find peace in this lifetime? Or is suffering the only way he/she’ll ever be able to live?
Kathleen, the main character’s lover (the most accurate description of her role in his life) pretends to understand his suffering. When they first meet, she whisks him away up to her room after spending hours walking in silence. She begs him to tell her more of his life and who he is. With every story that reveals more and more of his unhappy life, she greedily soaks it up and begs for more. “But Kathleen was drinking in every one of my words as if she wanted to punish herself for not having suffered before. From time to time she insisted in the same eager voice that sounded so much like the old prostitute’s, ‘More…More…’ (pg. 42) Then later on in life when she does experience suffering, she becomes a broken remnant of herself. “She had changed. Kathleen was no longer free. She only imitated the other. Her marriage had destroyed her inside. She had lost all interest in life.” (pg. 91)
The main character and the prostitute Sarah evoke the image that by living in the past, you can avoid being hurt in the present. Sarah had become a sexual plaything used by the German soldiers in concentration camps. Because of her young age, she quickly became a favorite among the men and was abused over and over again. After the liberation of concentration camps, she continued to mindlessly give herself up to men. When the main character calls her a saint, she yells as him and recalls her previous sins to him screaming over and over again that she is not a saint and that he is mad for suggesting such a thing. But indeed her suffering must cause him to think back to his first conversation with Kathleen when she says “Only saints suffer a lot.” (pg. 40) and in turn calls him a saint.
Gyula, the main character’s closest friend, seems to be the only person who truly understands his predicament. The conditions of their friendship were severely drawn out. “We encouraged each other to stick it out, not to make compromises, not to come to terms with life, not to accept easy victories. Our conversation always sounded like banter. We detested sentimentality. We avoided people who took themselves seriously and particularly those who asked others to do so. We didn’t spare each other. Thus our friendship was healthy, simple, and mature.” (pgs. 100-101). Gyula refuses to listen to the main character’s reasons for why he has been in an accident and why he is lying in the hospital. He has no need for the words the main character wishes to speak; he is determined to “…discover everything for myself.” (pg. 102). “I was proud. Proud of him, of myself, of our friendship. Of the tough laws we had made for it. They protected us against the successes and the certainties of the weak. True exchanges take place where simple words are called for, where we set out to state the problem of the immortality of the soul in shockingly banal sentences.” (pg. 102) This is a huge part in why I think Gyula was so ready and able to hurt him in the end.
While our main character was laid up in the hospital, Gyula visited every afternoon. He insisted on painting his portrait and made him promise not to die until the painting was finished. The day that he is to be released, Gyula unveils his finished project. It was a dark reflection of the main character. Everywhere it was black with bits of gray, but his eyes were red. “They belonged to a man who had seen God commit the most unforgivable crime: to kill without a reason.” (pg. 106) After the painting has been revealed, Gyula tells him that he must whip his past back to where it belongs, in the past with the dead. The dead must stop bothering the living from truly living, it is no longer their place. In the end moments, the main character has one last conversation with his grandmother, promising not to miss the train. Gyula must know what his friend’s thoughts are for without warning he torches the painting and leaves, the ashes forgotten on the ground.
I wonder if the main character left the hospital the next day and truly started living his life with Kathleen or if he continued to live life as an empty shell of himself.
Awhile back (and by awhile, I mean probably last summer) I read “Night”, the first part of Elie Wiesel’s trilogy. It is the only part of the trilogy that is entirely autobiographical. At the time I didn’t realize it was part of a trilogy either and always felt that it needed something more than to just end the way it did.
On Monday I finished reading “Dawn” and realized that this is simply how his stories end. Although it did perpetuate his own life story in a touching way. You’ve suffered oppression in an incredibly inhumane way and find yourself in the middle of a political and religious movement. How could you not get involved? Especially when your faith is so central to your way of life and how you think, feel and act? My only disappointment with the book, is that I really really hoped that he would not go through with the murder.
The third book, “Day”, previously entitled “The Accident” seems to be an appropriate ending. He asks of himself, how do you let yourself be happy when all you’ve known is despair and sadness? In a couple of other books I’ve read about people post-Holocaust is that they refuse to eat and instead let themselves waste away because they are so accustomed to that state of nothingness.
I’m very curious as to how he actually feels about these situations? Because the last two books are very loosely autobiographical and are instead reflections on the questions. What would you do and how would you feel? How did he feel? How would I feel if I were in his shoes? I’m sure that I’d feel that death was the only way to survive a living hell.
Sorry I’m being pretty uninspiring in these posts. More later after I’m done reading and do some research!
When I was a senior in college, I wrote my senior capstone paper on Louise Erdrich. Exclusively about her tetraology Tracks, Love Medicine, The Bingo Palace, and The Beet Queen. And, to narrow it down further, I concentrated my presentation and paper on the characters of Fleur Pillager and Pauline Puyatt; old tradition .vs. new.
In my sophomore year of college, I took a women’s lit class and we read a short excerpt from Love Medicine and from there on out, I was in love with Louise Erdrich’s writing. And it’s simply amazing because usually I’ll tire myself out easily on a writer and rarely find myself picking up their books over and over again. That simply has not happened. I’ve easily read each book twice (except for The Beet Queen, I only recently finished that one) and go back over and over again.
My project for the summer is to re-read the entire tetraology and compare it to my notes and piece together each individual’s life. In addition to reading the four books, I would also re-read The Last Reports on the Miracles at Little No Horse because there is a ton of character development and background for Nanapush, Fleur Pillager and Pauline Puyatt.
I started off my English paper by stating “The struggle between good and evil is as old as time itself. But the bodies, forms, shapes, and cultures it manifests itself in differ.” This is true in each story that she tells. Everyone takes on a ‘good role’ and an ‘evil role’ at some point in their lives and each for different reasons. Some are truly evil (Pauline Puyatt, the Morrissey clan) while others are simply victims of circumstance. Lulu views her mother as the ultimate evil because she sent her to the government school while she exacted revenge upon the man who bought up her land. Fr. Damien himself could be seen as evil for it is later revealed that Fr. Damien is indeed a woman who has taken on this charade because she feels that she is more than ever doing God’s work than as a previous nun or lover.
Also in my introduction, I come to the conclusion that Fleur Pillager is the epitome of what it means to be a traditional Native American Indian while Pauline Puyatt is the colonized Indian, converted into a fanatic believer of Catholicism. Fleur, Nanapush and Moses are some of the last survivors who still believe in the old ways and take part in the traditions of their ancestors. The Morrissey’s have sold out, Pauline is in her own right confused about her mixed heritage, and even Mary Adare is more of a colonized Indian.
In summary for the moment, it’ll be interesting to me to trace everyone’s histories throughout the books that I have read and to see if my theories hold true.
I am a huge book junkie. Our house is filled with books by various authors and different styles. I’ve always had a passion for books and gobble them up as soon as I get them. My parents always tried to encourage me to borrow books from the library, but I love actually owning the books, not just borrowing them. And a big part of this is because in a lot of my books, I write in them. Plus I dog ear pages and hardcovers have a tendency to have their spines broken.
I graduated with a degree in English and didn’t discover until my senior year that having just an English degree is…well, pretty much useless. Ever hear of that Avenue Q song, “What do you do with a BA in English?”, yeah, that’s my life. Okay, not really, but I still get teased about it.
Expect lots of book reviews and thoughts on random pop culture things.
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