Am I Becoming A Tourist?

I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy. -Anais Nin

All the things I love and get geeky seem to be about are the stories that people tell and the journey those stories take to be told. For example a few months ago I listened to the musical Spring Awakening for the first time and to say it affected me would be an understatement, it got put on immediate repeat.

This it turns out it just the beginning, I am now a huge fan of the people who created the show and acted in it and it feels like tumbling down a rabbit hole trying to keep up and find out all the other things that they have been involved with. It continues to be a fantastic way of finding new music and stories and lives being lived but as much as I have connected to it and to other people through the Internet and am so glad it exist it has caused me to question something. How much this enthusiasm for something such as this is actually a stunting force in my life if I find it has become something that is not shared by those directly in my life? And is the observance and admiration of people and their work only beneficial if I take that energy and enthusiasm and fuel it to do something myself in that field? Can you get so lost in the joy of something created by others that you lose the opportunity to do something yourself?

Do you find that enthusiasm for something brings you together or sets you apart? If you find your ecstasy in the deeds in others is it merely an opiate for what if clear headed you could achieve yourself? I chase the creeping shadows of my depression away with the stories of others but does it leave me with no story of my own?

1 Oddbill

Blue Wind

I haven't posted in so long and I'm sorry about that. I've mentioned before my issues in the past with depression and most of the time I feel that it IS in the past. Sometimes, however, it creeps back in; all the bad feelings and thoughts. It is all I can do to try and keep them from consuming the ground that I have won from it. It's been a .....dark couple of weeks but the slipping feeling is getting less and less.

Also in the mean time one the things that has happened was me turning into something of a Gleek! I never really watched the first part of the season but the back nine episodes have got me tuning in and it has nothing whatsoever to do with this guy...... honest!

(or the fact that these two are very cute on the show and off it)
All pictures from here
http://fuckyeahjonathangroff.tumblr.com/

Plus they got me addicted to listening to this:-




1. http://www.umass.edu/rso/guild/spring%20awakening.jpg
2. http://i139.photobucket.com/albums/q286/punbandhu/SAwallpaper2.jpg

A Musing

It is funny how living in the city makes you so aware of the coming of the spring.

Before I moved here I lived surrounded by green fields and never noticed the changing of the seasons as keenly as I do now. Maybe it is that the tiny buds of green are so stark a contrast to the concrete but the darkened courtyard at work is creeping towards the spring and on the bus ride to work shocks of white and pink are waving in the morning air of redbrick suburbia.

.


1. http://weheartit.com/entry/1880691
2. http://weheartit.com/entry/1894365
3. http://weheartit.com/entry/1890031

The Red Shoes

As a ballet obsessed child The Red Shoes was a much beloved movie of mine, although not as much as Singing In The Rain, and my lasting memory of it was the vivid colours, the 15 minutes ballet segment and the company director Lermontov being very Mephistopheles-like. My local independant cinema screened a restored print recently and I went to see it hoping to relive my childhood. Instead it all got a little murky!

Lermontov: A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts ofhuman love can never be a great dancer.

With the simplicity of the childhood Lermontov was a creep, Julian was the friend (separate beds) and Vicky was just fantastic and the red pointe shoes moved her feet in the end. However, my recent re-viewing changed one vital element. Vicky is still amazing, she is determined and lovely, talented and polite. Julian is still bland as her lover/husband, but Lermontov was a revelation to me! He was suave and distant but the underlying passion and vision was like an ocean next to Julian's well. The man lived his life in pursuit of an ideal and in Vicky saw the possibility of it's realisation, he asked her she was capable of dedicating herself to it as he had and having promised and later renegaded on this promise he trusted that she would remember herself. All he did was hold the door open for her return and it was Julian who forced her to choose. He is by no means likable or blameless; he has sublimated his connection to other humans on a personal level, is harsh and but is a wonderful example of an artist holding to the highest standards in order to fulfil his vision.

Lermontov: When we first met...you asked me a question to which I gave a stupid answer, you asked me whether I wanted to live and I said "Yes". Actually, Miss Page, I want more, much more. I want to create, to make something big out of
something little - to make a great dancer out of you. But first, I must ask you
the same question, what do you want from life? To live?

Vicky: To dance.

• Brian de Palma and Martin Scorsese have both said this is their favourite film.

• Jack Cardiff, the cinematographer, broke the rules laid down by Technicolour to create the wonderful and vivid colours.

• Hein Heckroth was both production and costume design and both are spectacular.
  

• Most of those acting as dancers were professional actors rather than actors with some knowledge of dance and Robert Helpmann, who danced as lead dancer of the company, chorepgraphed most of the work. Leonide Massine is the exception, he choreographed his own role of the Shoemaker.
  

• Moira Shearer was second to Margot Fonteyn at Sadler's Wells at the time she was approached and was not struck on the idea of working in film; it took her a year to agree to it.
  

Lermontov: Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the Red Shoes go on


Pictures from:-
1.http://www.silverwhistle.co.uk
2. Ibid
3. http://www.bard.edu/