9.15

Been too long since I’ve posted here, but I’ve been busy with other stuff. July and August I had a lot of extra time with Louisa, and then more recently I’ve just had a lot of work to do. I’ve started volunteering at WPFW on Monday, as I mentioned before, doing the local newscasts at 1 and 3 p.m. It’s fun being back on the air and trying to get comfortable with the whole thing. I feel so much more attuned to my voice than I did when I was last on the air, in 1999, because I’m more in touch with my body now. So I’m trying to bring that awareness and combine it with the simultaneous mental side of what’s going on, the communicating the written word, the thought, the idea. And trying to communicate helpful ideas. It’s funny, the more time passes and the more I evolve, the more I question the function of most media, and it follows that I also have to question my place in that whole game. My pursuit of meditation and Buddhism has involved questioning the value of speech and communication. So much of what I hear and see strikes me as unnecessary. We become wrapped up in national and world news while being almost entirely ignorant of, say, what goes on so much closer to home every day, in the soil, the water, among the people who cross our paths. I see “we” but perhaps I mean “I.” I guess ultimately that’s what I want to avoid. I don’t want to be sucked into all that. On the one hand maybe we find comfort in it because it connects us, gives us things to talk about with each other. We can talk about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or Hurricane Ike. But these concerns all come and go and we’re still left with our selves and our minds and our bodies and our homes, our friends and children and families. How well do we equip ourselves each day to deal with these basic elements of life? Do we look into them deeply? Do we question our attachments and our highs and lows? Or do we just let ourselves be whipped around in the frenzy of things that mass communication media tell us we should be concerned about?

What is the purpose of my doing radio? Of writing? How can they be put to “good” ends? (What is “good” in that case?)

Can I, through my newscasts, reorient people to engage directly with each other and their communities? To think differently? To wake up a little?

Maybe I shouldn’t be writing the articles I write and doing the things I do. Why do I do it? Because I need to earn money and it’s the easiest or most convenient way at the moment to do that. What if I did not need to earn money? What would I do?

Other things:

Tonight I got home from taking Louisa back to Winchester to meet her mom. Bob, my roommate, had received Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain from Netflix. I heard the theme music to The Simpsons as I sat in my bedroom and was lured to the living room, but The Simpsons weren’t on, and Bob put on the Jodorowsky. Wow. It would be impossible for me to summarize all the thoughts and reactions I had as I was watching it. Just see it. It really complemented my recent meanderings through Buddhist practice, “spiritual” contemplation, etc. And a remarkable artistic statement. Packed with more artistic invention than nearly any movie I’ve seen — just the work that must have gone into conceiving and creating so many of the sets and props and stagings. To me it drives home how so much of Hollywood’s crap is just toying with superficial tokens of reality, all with the goal of eliciting easy emotional reactions from us, making us feel as if we’ve actually experienced something we haven’t — rather than directing our thoughts to other possibilities, to understanding ourselves or our actual world or reality — funny, I guess this sort of comes back to what I was talking about above even though I didn’t intend it that way.

Some gleanings from Web research: Don Cherry, who played cornet with Ornette Coleman, collaborated on the soundtrack for the film, along with the keyboardist for … the Archies? Of “Sugar, Sugar”? WTF? John Lennon and Yoko Ono financed the film, and it was produced by the Beatles’ manager.

Also (this is my own observation) — the ending very much reminded me of the ending to Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry, among my favorite movie endings. Kiarostami’s ending is much more sly, of course, as is the rest of his film. But yes, similar. Of course, the ending of Holy Mountain is in a way entirely predictable if you catch on to what sort of spiritual realization Jodorowsky is building up to. I love the fact (which is in the Deleted Scene features on the DVD) that he wanted to end the movie in a Mexican restuarant (in Mexico, mind you) because that was his idea of Paradise! Ha! I would not have guessed that after watching this entire film of gore and sex and archetypal imagery. Which makes it all the better. Now, when I eat at a Mexican restaurant, I will think of Holy Mountain and savor the juxtaposition.

OK, I really ought to go to bed. I need to go to WPFW tomorrow. Plus I have a Retail Traffic article due Tuesday that I’m anxious about getting done. Gnashing of teeth.

Posted by nedlog at September 15, 2008 12:40 AM | TrackBack