Archive for September, 2009
5 items.
Was a lovely autumn day. H.o.p. is way in the background as bokeh filler.
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Planter, 2009
Lovely night to take a few photos.
So, I’m sitting in the chair at the dentist’s and I look up and see on the opposite wall a clock exactly like one we used to have at home. A cheap clock, with a white frame, from Ikea. That clock we had with the white frame eventually broke and we purchased another one of the same make and that one was always too fast so we purchased another one of the same make but with a navy frame and it also runs too fast.
Most clocks we get from Ikea run too fast. But we never think to get a good clock from somewhere else. We only think to get a clock when we’re at Ikea and see the cheap ones and decide to try again for one that will run on time.
“We have a clock just like that,” I say to the hygienist as she goes through her preparations.
“I like to have it right there so I can look up and see the time,” she replies.
“Our clocks like that always run fast. We get one and we replace it with another and then another.”
“I purchased that clock from Ikea,” she says.
“Yes, I know,” I say.
It’s Ikea’s Rusch clock.
What is funny is the reason we purchase the Rusch clock is for H.o.p. It has a minute hand and we put it up in the bathroom so he can tell from it how long he’s brushed his teeth.
The Rusch clock from Ikea seems to be the clock of choice in matters pertaining to teeth.
The other night I saw Ben Hur for the first time. Marty hadn’t seen it either and begged me several times to turn it off.
“Hnh? Gay!” I thought, watching Massalla (Stephen Boyd) and Ben Hur (Charlton Heston), or so it seemed to me, but this was crazy-making as I couldn’t see Charlton Heston knowingly playing gay subtext.
I also for some reason kept thinking, “Count of Monte Cristo.”
Afterwards I looked up Ben Hur, first the novel, which is a bad book that is composed of set-up and dialogue. Set-ups are down the order of “…Ben-Hur entered Ilderim’s tent. He had taken a plunge into the lake, and breakfasted, and appeared now in an under-tunic, sleeveless, and with skirt scarcely reaching to the knee.”
The kind of description that was passed off to me as writing when I was a kid, and it only makes sense that Ben-Hur reined supreme until Gone With the Wind, which at least added a little personality oomph.
The author, it seems, was partly inspired by “The Count of Monte Cristo” and had it in mind for much of the book.
Then I looked up the movie and found that Gore Vidal had been an uncredited screenwriter and that there was indeed a homosexual subtext and that Stephen Boyd was advised to play his part as a vengeful rejected lover while Charlton Heston was oblivious.
(I’ve not a clue when I originally saved this to post. Was moved up to the present unintentionally.)
Alan Watts on the Musical Life, School and Expectations
September 1st, 2009 |Posted In: Uncategorized
“Existence, the physical universe, is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn’t going anywhere. It doesn’t have a destination that it ought to arrive it. But it is best understood by analogy with music, because music, as an art form, is essentially playful. We say you play the piano, you don’t’ work the piano. Why? Music differs from, say, travel. When you travel you’re trying to get somewhere. And, of course, we, being a very compulsive and purposive culture, are busy getting everywhere faster and faster until we eliminate the distance between places…what happens as a result of that is the two ends of your journey became the same place. You eliminate the distance, you eliminate the journey. The fun of the journey is travel, not to obliterate travel. So then, in music, one doesn’t make the end of a composition the point of the composition. If so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest and there would be composers who only wrote finales. People would go to a concert just to hear one crackling chord because that’s the end! Same way with dancing. You don’t aim at a particular spot in the room because that’s where you will arrive. The whole point of dancing is the dance. But we don’t see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct. We have a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression. It’s all graded and what we do is put the child into the corridor of this grade system with a kind of, “Come on, kitty, kitty,” and you go to kindergarten and that’s a great thing because when you finish that you get into first grade…then you’ve got high school, and it’s revving up, the thing is coming, then you’re going to go to college…you go out to join the world, then you get into some racket where you’re selling insurance, and they’ve got that quota to make, and by god you’re going to make that, and all the time the thing is coming, it’s coming! It’s coming! That great thing. The success you’re working for. Then you wake up one day about 40 years old and you say, “My god, I’ve arrived. I’m there.” And you don’t feel very different from what you’ve always felt and there’s a slight letdown because you feel there’s a hoax. And there was a hoax! A dreadful hoax. They made you miss everything by expectation…we’ve cheated ourselves the whole way down the line. We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”
