Half past four in the morning, Lucas woke to screaming. A drawn out, grinding, animal scream. A fanatical scream. It was muffled and distant, impossible to fix directionally: the floor above? below? In the alley? Two blocks away? As a vague sound blur it was even more arresting than if it had been clearly delineated.

    Abruptly the screaming stopped. Lucas lay still, listening hard for a follow-up, for other noises — ambulances, police cars, shocked weeping relatives, roommates. Silence.

    What makes a man scream like that? Dismemberment? PCP? It sounded like the screamer’s bones were on fire, as if his skeleton was one long oiled wick, snaking flame through his body as it burned, charring nerve ends in its wake.

    Lucas stared at the ceiling, aware of his blinking, of his heartbeat, of his rising and falling chest. At this point it could even have been a dream, he thought. He shifted under his comforter, reassured a little by the thought. Dream residue. Leftover drops of unprocessed R.E.M. data spilling over into reality.

    The screaming began again, lacerating & almost obscene. Lucas felt his stomach knot up. He thought of rising, opening the drapes, walking out into the hall. But he couldn’t bring himself to move.

    It must be upstairs, he thought. And yet no foot-stomping? No other attendant noises? The family would be galvanized by all this, surely, shocked into frenzied action, knocking things over, weeping & yelling at 911. Lucas lay still and puzzled it over, conjuring up stills: a man on fire, or with his hands cut off, or dying of some ruptured internal organ, or in the midst of exorcism, or howling from the hell-pit of nightmare, his wife next to him staring in shock and desperately trying to wake him from his state.

    Again the screaming ended abruptly, again the silence which Lucas found even more unbearable this time. Unbearable because it left him with more time to think, plan, act; criticize himself for thinking and planning too much, for not acting enough. He sat up with enormous effort, sleep still thickening his blood & dulling his nerves.

    Lucas tried to picture the screamer who in his mind was no longer fixed to the upstairs apartment. A dominican family man, wild-eyed and mangled, his wife shot nearby? A nervous white bachelor, trying to find his severed tongue in a trash-heap? A black pastor trying to blot out God’s flashlight, God’s sudden midnight audit? Who screams like that? The thought that it may not be related to any physical injury thrilled Lucas, then terrified him, then thrilled him again. A noise of such extremity, a sound so brutal that it shattered the paltry vase of what Lucas had known of pain and anger and guilt and fear. He felt he was peeking into an entirely new world of experience, one of kaleidoscopic alien vividness, and he felt his own troubles and preoccupations to be ridiculous and drab & monochrome in comparison.

    Lucas shifted and then sank back to bed, closing his eyes. Who? Why? Where’s the siren? Where’s the ambulance? Where are the noises of people lifting stuck windows to stare out into alleys, stomping around and hollering on cellphones? Was everyone petrified under blankets like Lucas? A wave of shame passed over him, then relief, sheer animal relief at not being the one picked to be maimed, shot, strangled, mutilated: the base gibbering hurried meat-prayer, the trite obsequious gratitude of the flesh, disguised as spiritual penitence: “Thank you God thank you God thank you, I’ll change, I’ll do things differently now, it’s a new morning, I’m new, thank you so much for sparing me, undeserving me, this was the opportunity I was waiting for, this moment, this moment to show you I deserved being spared, that I deserve your mercy, thankyouthankyouthankyou fucking Christ thank you–”

    Blocks away, a siren, that little comforting helix of sound.

    Some knot in Lucas loosened. It was all being taken care. Cops, EMTs. He felt sleep start to course warmly through his blood like a gentle poison. Back to the cradle of dream, the coffin of dream. Would he remember the screamer in the morning? He’d look it up online, on some news site, link it back to some crime. Make sense of it all. A double homicide. Hit and run.

    Or he wouldn’t find a thing. It would just get filed under items not newsworthy enough for online indexing — a homeless man having heroin withdrawals. A performance artist. Some basement torture, the bones & stains of which won’t be discovered for 15 years.

    Lucas sank, consciousness floating away like balloons, a dream scene already forming: himself underground, mouth full of soil, beetles, root tendrils and fossils. He’s relaxed and cocooned in this dream, his full lungs tremendous & bloated & waiting, his throat a cannon. Then the sudden exhalations, blasting out into open sunlit air with ecstatic grinning gusts.
   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2007

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2007

   

    Still trying to understand why everyone creams giant buckets over Richter.
    Cupfuls maybe. Possibly mugfuls. But not buckets.
    I’ve owned the 1958 Sofia Recital on disc for a few years. The Mussorgsky is rightfully praised — the “Great Gates” is epic and always tremendously moving. The Liszt is sublime: athletic and deft and heroic.
    But his version of Chopin’s Etude in E is awful. True, there’s the requisite stately tenderness. And in terms of rubato, pacing, much of it succeeds. But the middle section, where *measured* hunger & ardor are called for — just as in the middle passages of many of the composer’s Nocturnes — Richter instead delivers a spastic and methed-up blitz that’s practically ridiculous. It’s as if he couldn’t wait to get to the four Liszt pieces immediately after in the programme.
    (I suddenly feel a little silly and petty carping on the flaws of a legend like this. I mean christ, the guy achieved a level of intimacy and virtuosity with his instrument that most of us can’t even dream of, let alone come close to even if we spent the next 100 seasons toiling in study.
    But this is the internet after all. Where any silly & petty humbug like me can armchair-quarterback about subjects minute & profound to everyone (& no one’s) irritation. So back to the carp.)
    I love Richter’s strength, intellect and passion, but there are lots of moments across his recorded works where I feel like his emotional radar is just flat-out off. In the case of the Etude in E, it can lead to bewildering results (based on this, I’d hate to hear him in the Ballades).
    Now if we’re talking loose & impetuous interpretations of Chopin, I much prefer an Argerich, or a Cortot — pianists who take emotional risks in their interpretations but who would never — and physically, perhaps, *could* never — pummel and throttle a score like Richter does in the Etude in E.

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2007
   

“Away From Her” is set in Canada & based on an Alice Munro short story called “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” A woman, Fiona, (Julie Christie, pictured, radiant) starts exhibiting signs of Alzheimer’s; she & her husband, Grant, cope with what follows.

The movie, like Munro’s best stories, is so honest and virtuosic in its exploration of human relations that it takes the wind out of you, like a slap to the chest. This is Munro territory — the complex & occasionally frightening range of emotions that live between people, never sentimentalized — and this movie maps that tract with the precision of detectives combing forests for boot prints.

The film does so many things well. For instance, the jagged sunken hull of the husband’s old infidelities hauled up and out of the deep by Fiona, glaring, rusted & clear, even while her other memories and faculties drift down deeper into murk. You’re never quite sure — as her condition worsens and she’s committed to a nursing home — how much of her discomfort around his visits is due to the pain of being reminded of her lost memory or the instinctive gut-reminder (divorced now from facts, made more primal for it) of pure pain this man, dimly remembered, caused her.

And then there’s the relationship she creates with a male patient, Aubrey, wheelchair bound and grumpy, not long after being committed. It’s a supporting & loving bond we watch develop, one whose intimacies the husband is forced to endure — and gradually accept and even encourage — with each of his bouquet-laden visits. As viewers we feel the tug of conflicting emotion, loyalties. First the husband, faithful & steadfast now but hurtful in the past. Then the wife, transferring affection to a new partner now that her old one belongs to another reality. No absolutes, no right or wrong, just the past and the present heaped together indissolubly and nothing to do but mortar new hearthstones atop the earth’s upheaval.

This is a rare kind of emotional portraiture so vivid & unsparing it hurts to keep your eyes on it for too long. And it only gets more blinding when Aubrey’s wife and Grant become involved — for reasons that are as much altruistic as they are emotionally & physically practical.

But for now I want to talk about Fiona. About Julie. About where she goes & what she leaves behind.

 (Read More . . .)

red

death orbs red death orbs,
orbs red death,
death orbs of red,
red orb death,
dark red death orb,
maroon death orb,

falling red orb, orb death,

dead falling,
orb rain death,
red orb rain,

death orbs, red death orbs,
raining death in orbs of red death rain,
reath drain orbs,
rorb drain death,
reath of drain rorb,

oreath drorb reth,
reath rain,
dain,
beath

1957 clip of Billie Holiday singing with a band.

There are moments — at 2:55; at 3:53 — where the language of mouth, brow and eye rival and sometimes sing down anything that could come from throats or be blown through brass.

Where so much is untranslatably sung through skin — her lip half-sucked, her head jauntily cocked a half second before a dark note sounds.

Where her face, her dark liquid eyes seem barely able to boundary whole countries of emotion; barely able to fence sharded feelings jostling against each other behind and ahead of the beat.

Where lip-bites & pursings, languid head-shakes, coy half-smiles shuffle spectra of emotion — loss, joy, hunger, demureness, wistfulness, regret, swagger, nerve — everything & everything; Where skin, contour, wrinkle, tissue and muscle are all barely able to keep up with what the heart has to say –

& so over and over I watch her, the sound off, & she’s so vividly there it hurts to watch, clips the breath while you wait for hers to pour.