Morning Pages Progress, La Ronde, and WE
A progress report on morning pages, some movie thoughts, and music!
Here we are at the front gates of the “Holiday Season.” I’m ready for it. This year I’m celebrating gratitude, and life on this Earth, and so my holidays are the new moons in November and December, Thanksgiving, the Winter Solstice, and New Year’s. The longer I live and experience this Earth, the more I realize that our physical form is inextricably entwined with this planet. We may or may not have a spiritual side, but we definitely have a physical side, and that physical side is the Earth. We are not only residents of this orb, we are this orb. We have this illusion of being independent of it because we can walk around and jump around and fly in planes and spaceships. And yet, our bodies are polyps on the surface of Earth. We came from Earth, and our form will go back to Earth. Our current state is extremely temporary given the time the elements that make up our body existed previous to us, and how long our elements will survive after us. Our body is continually exchanging elements with Earth - we’re a walking machine that draws Earth in and exhales Earth out. Despite Star Trek, Star Wars, Mars missions, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, we’ll never leave Earth, because we are Earth. And thus, my celebration. I hope you’ll join me.
I. Morning Pages Progress
Even though I haven’t posted here since the end of July, I have continued writing my Morning Pages every morning, with the current count 282 straight days. There have been days I had to interrupt an entry and come back to it later, and some days I started later than I should have, and some days I thought “what’s the point?” but wrote them anyway. Mostly, I look foreward to doing them, and the benefits I wrote about have continued.
One change I did make was that I moved from my ballpoint Spacepen to a fountain pen, namely a Pilot Custom 823 medium nib pen. A good friend recommended the book “Becoming a Writer: Staying a Writer” by Michael Straczynsky, and there was a section on the benefits of writing in longhand, and on using a great pen to do it. Neil Gaiman recommended the Pilot pen to Straczynski, and Straczynski recommended it in the book - and who am I to say no to that?
I tend to geek out about things, about which I will be writing in later posts. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, I went down the fountain pen rabbit hole. There are advocates of every single thing you can think of on YouTube, and so many people post a variety of how-tos and general information videos. So it is with fountain pens. The Pilot Custom 823 is highly praised by fountain pen aficionados. The pen is a bit “spendy,” as we Oregonians say, but I am a firm believer in investing in the the right tools for the job. I am glad I did. It is a smooth pen, and it makes writing by hand a joy.
I’ve been getting into ritual as well, and there is a ritual to using this pen. The pen has a vacuum filling system in which you dip the pen in a bottle of ink and use the built-in plunger to create a vacuum that pulls the ink into the barrel. After a lifetime of using disposal pens and cartridges, the novel way this pen gets reinked is just fun. It is a joy to use such a great tool, and I get to do it daily.
I am working on finding a different paper or notebook, however. I love the Moleskine Cahiers, but the ink slightly bleeds through the pages. But then, the morning pages are write-once and not really meant to be read, so it is not a big deal.
I bought the pen from Gouletpens.com. I love the customer service and information they provided, including many videos about how and why to use fountain pens. You can tell it is a labor of love for them.
II. Film: La Ronde
I love movies, and I especially love coming across wonderful films that somehow managed to escape my notice. I wrote about one such movie, “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” last year:
Thank God for streaming services. It wasn’t that long ago that the only way to find these movies was to know someone who knew about it, and then dive into the shelves of specialized video rental stores, like Vidiots in Santa Monica, to find it. Movies like these were not usually in your local Blockbusters. Streaming makes films like these available, even if streaming itself scatters movies across multiple services.
I love HBO Max. One of its “hubs” is TCM (Turner Classic Movies). TCM curates classic movies going back to the silents, and uncovers not only wonderful movies from Hollywood, but movies from all over the world. I found the 1950 French film “La Ronde” there.
The movie starts with a deliciously French Master of Ceremonies introducing himself as “all of you,” and explains that we only see one side of stories - our side. He promises to show everything. I love the opening scene: He walks into the movie, and as he builds the story, the set changes, the dress changes, and even the time of year changes, until he (and we) are in 1900 Vienna. As he builds this out, a waltz starts playing, and finally, he breaks into song, complete with background singers and strings. I admit, I almost turned it off - it is pretty corny.
But boy, am I glad I stuck with it. As he sings the song, he introduces the “Merry-go-round of Love.” He announces the first story as “the girl and the soldier.” The girl referenced is a prostitute; the soldier is a soldier in a hurry to get back to the barracks. But not in too much in a hurry, as it turns out. It becomes clear fast that this film is about love-in-the-moment, lots of sex, and about how none of us are immune from l’amour.
Each vignette captures different sides of romantic and sexual entanglement, with the MC introducing each story, usually with sentimental song and quite a bit of inuendo. This is one of the lewdest movies I have ever seen, and yet there is no pornogaphy or nudity. Just situations of raw passion and desire.
This is a Disney Movie of Sin.
“La Ronde” was released in France in 1950, but it was banned in New York for being “immoral.” Imagine: something banned as immoral in New York! The producers took this up to the US Supreme Court, they won the case, and it was released in the US in 1954.
I loved it. It is really well done. It is funny as hell. I will say no more. Watch this movie.
III. Music: Arcade Fire’s “WE”
Man, do I listen to a lot of podcasts. Somehow or other, I came across the “Smartless” podcast, which is Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett shooting the shit and interviewing interesting people. They interviewed Win Butler and Régine Chassange of Arcade fire, who were promoting their new album (yes, album) “WE.” In the intro, Will Arnett spoke about how this record hit him just in the right place, and how he had to get Arcade Fire onto the podcast. I thought “well, I’ve got to hear this record!”
I grew up in the era of singles and albums (or LPs, for “Long Play” vinyl records). The term “album” is from the era of large 78 RPM records that were sold literally in an album of multiple discs in sleeves. Some of the albums were designed as “concept” albums, where the songs were chosen and sequenced on the record to tell a story. The songs melt into each other, and you could put on a side and have a 20-30 minute run of coordinated bliss. The Beatles “Abbey Road,” The Who’s “Tommy” and “Quadrophenia,” Jethro Tull’s “Thick as a Brick,” Traffic’s “Mr. Fantasy,” and many, many others were an experience in their own right. Napster and the iPod and eventually streaming services basically dismantled albums and treated music as songs, unrelated to which album they came from, let alone which position the song was on the album. Sure, you can find and play an album on Spotify or Apple Music, but everything defaults now to music units, i.e, songs. Even classical music, which is ridiculous.
“WE” is a modern concept album, which is what Will was experiencing. It is meant to be listened to in full, not only as individual songs. And as such, it is damned good. I guess because I grew up in Los Angeles, I usually listen to music in my car as opposed to at home. I’ve done a lot of driving this year, and I tell you, it is great to put on one album by one artist and listen all the way through, and it is really great that this is new music. And the theme of the album is to me: we are all anxious, things can and will happen, there is a future, and it will be okay, even great. It spoke to me the way it spoke to Will Arnett.
Two songs stood out to me: “End of the Empire IV (Sagitarius A*)” and “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid).” The first has the refrain “I unsubscribe” - which to me was to unsubscribe from the crazy and the bullshit. It is beautiful. And the second, “Lookout Kid,” well, if you are or want to be a parent, it will slay you. It can be extended to any of us older people telling the next generation: embrace life. It is perfect.
IV. Projects and Writing
As mentioned above, I have been writing every day in my morning pages, but I haven’t been putting things together for public consumption. I have a number of things in the queue, but I am formulating an idea for a larger project, about which I will talk later. In the mean time, I am coming across things I find interesting and would like to share with my tribe, and so I will share these out in this newsletter.
I hope you like the format and the recommendations. Let me know in the comments!
Cheers,
Mark