Everything old is new again

Watching old films is like going on a journey. Last week I happened to watch a TCM classic and began to think that the 1950s are full of movies that are masterpieces.  Vertigo, Rear Window, Diabolique, Strangers on a Train, The African Queen, La Strada, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Ben-Hur and Some Like it Hot, among others are just a few of the best-known examples of this kind of quality. 

The treachery of time — the unwelcome intrusion of the past, the empty languor of the present, the terrifying uncertainty of the future — are many of these old film themes, and part of what makes them good, for all its charming glimpses of a bygone era, they often feel unnervingly contemporary.

And yet the reality of the postwar is often visible in these films as a strong intimation of the direction of cinema in the coming years. With time, these films represent the arrival of something new, and even now they can feel like a bulletin from the future.

The way Directors dissolved narrative into atmosphere, of locating drama in the unspoken inner lives of his characters, one might anticipate the plot.  And the characters manners and modes of dress mark them as creatures of another, perhaps more refined age, are immediately recognizable in their loneliness, their cynicism and their thwarted desire to connect and to feel.

Some of us will never tire of these stories, with their black-tied gloom and elegant suffering, and will therefore relish the beauty and melancholy of the voyage, along with what looks like tourist snapshots in black and white and heart-tugging music.  

What about you? Are you a romantic that reveres old movies or a realist that appreciates contemporary?

The Power of the Word

It’s crucial for a writer to feel whatever issue or emotion you’re writing about. The best way to do this is to identify with a character and be moved by their sorrows and be concerned about their situation. Also, be excited with them, afraid with them, happy with them.  Get inside their head to have them become real. Otherwise they will become a wooden mouthpiece that readers cannot respond to.

Sometimes it means to feel emotions that you may not be comfortable with.  Take panic for example. If I had to write about panic, I would close my eyes and feel that I were in a dark, claustrophobic space, holding my breath while I hear footsteps approaching.  If I were writing on hunger, I would write on an empty stomach to find the right descriptions to invoke a level of desperation that a character experiences.

That sounds easy enough, right. But here’ a more complex tidbit.  As you write a story— it has to develop in some kind of unexpected way. It is important to let your short story unfold organically so that this can happen. Often we plan the scenes, the dialogue, the rising action, the climax, very meticulously. I encourage and believe we have to do that to a certain extent if not, we are going to get lost. As architects and builders we need to have a vision and plan in mind. But we also need to allow the work to manifest its power, to allow characters to do unexpected things, to approach the fictional world we are creating with a sense of child-like wonder, and to be ready to see what might happen. As things come up out of our subconscious when we write—we have to let them breathe and trust when it happens.  Sometimes this means not knowing the end until we get there, and being fine with that.

Sometimes those unexpected moments when shapes loom out of the dark as we're driving through unknown territory turn out to be the richest in our writing. When this process works, it creates a powerful moment of discovery in the reader, echoing the discovery we felt as we were writing. 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp16CKQqMAA

St. George and the dragon

Today I read about recording artist Lauryn Hill’s tax case.  I liked her rendition of the song, Killing Me Softly http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KpeCk6NyZU and never did care for the original done by Roberta Flack. But I’ll save my musical comments for later.

Just a few days ago I mentioned how rich Americans don’t pay taxes.  Instead of investing their money in our country they find ways to hide it and sit on their gains. Meanwhile our country is going to the dogs.

Speaking of which, does anyone remember hotelier Leona Hemsley nicknamed the Queen of Mean?  At the time of her death she left millions in a trust fund to her dog. She was notorious for, among other things, reportedly having said that “only the little people pay taxes.”

Last November Mitt Romney didn’t get my vote in part because he represented the rich that don’t pay their fair share. How can someone like that run our country objectively? It would have enforced a hierarchy; like voting for a feudal system; where the serfs spend all of their time working for the lord. No one likes paying taxes, and as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, taxes are the price we pay for civilized society. However, in recent decades, the burden for paying for civilization has been distributed in increasingly unfair ways.

Our government plays an important role not just in social protection, but in making investments in infrastructure, technology, education and health. Without such investments, our economy will be weaker, and our economic growth slower.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We could have a much simpler tax system without the distortions — a society where someone who earns his income from saving companies pays the same tax as a doctor who makes income by saving lives; where someone who earns his income from financial innovations pays the same taxes as a someone who does research to create innovations that transform our economy and society. We could have a tax system that encourages things like hard work and thrift and discourages gambling, financial speculation and pollution. Then we might just be in a sound fiscal position.

Now back to music. Here are two oldies; that I can’t listen to without feeling good all over. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYi7uEvEEmk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8AtyaxgtOU

My Sweet Lord

Those who read my blog regularly know that my posts aim to uplift and inspire but in the light of what happened this week for me to discuss any of my regular topics seems frivolous. I have a sensitive heart and those like me feel the failures of the world.

The year 2013 will go down in history as a year of global unrest. I do not see the violence of our era abating any time soon. We have allowed a global elite to come into being that has decided the existence of the middle class is a mistake. And a class struggle persists as our nation makes money off of firing people, foreclosing on their homes, and even off of their deaths. In the meantime, the country’s rich get richer and escape from not paying taxes.  

Countries that once imitated our best behaviors now imitate our worst.  

I was talking to an elderly lady the day I heard about the Boston bombs, killing and injuring many people while the massacres in Syria continue without the intervention of the United Nations. I was transfixed for a moment in time, as a girl in the fourth grade (coincidentally that’s when I first learned about Boston http://lindalaroche.com/blog/home-to-americas-camelot.html) .  During an afternoon recess, I took a grievance that I had with another kid to a yard supervisor who responded with, “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Her philosophical message is one I think others need to hear today.     

 

This past Monday once at home, turning on my television set, I was alarmed by the massive amount of combat and swat teams tearing into Boston, prepared to fight a war. The same loathsome images of violence I see on television shows and immediately turn-off, because the excessive force and stand-offs, is a reminder of not seeing the bigger issues.  It’s hideous to create what seems to me a permanent war. America has become a people asleep on top of something we both know and don’t know as an enormous weapon aimed at the whole world, including every one of us.

What I see happening underlining this chaos is a coordination of the established powers to keep things at the status quo while the incoming energies of the new and far more humanitarian archetypes try to force their way into the collective consciousness. Some issues have made it—gay marriage for example, which is really a statement about human equality and true social justice.

But the intense mundane struggles between the political, religious, and economic forces of polarity and exclusivity versus the unfolding paradigm of political and economic inclusivity backed by a secular “religion” of right human relations, take their toll in lives and the destruction of human and animal habitats. This battling of paradigms manifest in the form of terrorism, fierce economic competitiveness, and greed and so… violence in all forms, continue. 

My hope is what I and other individuals and groups are actively working for—a time when the soul of man descends, expanding into daily life and expressing as the consciousness of unity and wholeness as one human race lives together on planet earth. This may not happen and probably won’t happen in my lifetime.  But each of us still carries a responsibility to continue planting the seeds and make a lighted path for the children of tomorrow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMgCpb1nli4

Olé

There was a time in my life if I couldn’t afford to buy Stuart Weitzman, Sergio Rossi, Calvin Klein, Kate Spade or Via Spiga shoes, I wouldn’t buy anything at all. At that time Nine West came into being and was practical for my budget, but I have never been a practical shopper and prefer quality over quantity.  It’s easy to spend money when you have it, but I made it an art to live like I had it when I didn’t. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t give in and kept my principles—you can skimp somewhere else but never on your feet. 

This week I was in a department store buying cosmetics—and passed the shoe dept.  You’re probably wondering what this has to do with writing.  Hold on, I’m getting there. I breezed by and saw a pair of Nine West strappy high heel black suede sandals that were a knock-out.  I consider the brand cheap; I’m not talking merely price but because they are made from hard, stiff synthetic materials. I have a high arch and good feet that rarely tire, and like to stand and walk for great lengths of time, and I can, because I buy high quality shoes.  I’m of the mind-set that a good pair of shoes you won’t feel and worth a financial sacrifice over physical pain.  I didn’t stop to try the heels on, but there was something about them that took hold. I couldn’t stop thinking about them.

In a mist, later it came to me.  In Berlin, having signed up for a two month dance class in  beginner’s flamenco at the Centro be Baile with a red-headed Austrian teacher named Karin, who acted as a welcome committee for all the beginner dancers, she introduced students to teachers and to one another. Friendly, I thought, and I liked her and admired her black shoes.  Turns out she married a Spaniard and thus began to dance and began her love of all things Español.  On the battered wooden dance floor, I stood in the third row beside a shy computer programmer and a group of Danish librarians who yearned to tap their inner fire. Behind us in the fourth row of dancers were a lithe Japanese office girl and Lola, a Yugoslavian transvestite a head taller than the other girls with shiny black hair and short flouncy skirts who already stoked the flames.

I went through the eight weeks—long enough to master a few steps and I mimicked the teacher with as much emotion as I could muster. At one point Karin commanded, (Austrians like Germans are fond of commands) that I hold my head up high, “like you just took a bite out of a lemon.” I stiffened my spine and continued to attack the floor.

Have you ever taken a class and a fellow student turned out to be a sketch for a character study?  

Share your comments—I’d love to hear your stories.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FDXPYE0nVw