I have seen NEW MOON. I went with Katie, last Saturday. It was her idea, but I admit the prospect of eating sushi then going to an Actual Theatre to watch a movie overwhelmed my squeamishness on seeing that Particular movie. After all, I'd watched the first with her, last year. There was a kind of continuity.
I've not beheld so many abs since 300 came out.
I'm not going to write and slam it. I have many disparate thoughts on the entire industry of Twilight, and I wish I could untangle them all. I know that, for instance, I kept laughing into my sleeve when around me women and girls soaked crumpled up Kleenexes with their tears.
I did enjoy the shirtless boys, wolves and vamps alike. Who wouldn't? "I'm a woman. I function."
But for myself, I had to conjure some antithesis to the Gospel of Masochistic Adoration that those movies and books perpetuate. I found it in Leonard Cohen.
The kind of love I've witnessed and experienced in THIS world, in MY world, goes more like this and less like Romeo and Juliet meets Glittery Unicorn Vegetarian Vampires:
"I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were famous -- your heart was a legend
You told me again you preferred handsome men
But for me you would make an exception
And shaking your fists at the ones like us
Who are oppressed by figures of beauty
You fixed yourself
You said, 'Well, never mind it.
We are ugly -- but we have the music.'"
The TWILIGHT SAGA is very pretty. It is so pretty I feel old and frumpy and unlovable and full of longing for beautiful, deathly things I am not permitted. Nor should I be permitted them, for my own health and sanity! BAD CANDY!!! It took a day to shake the effects; my mind kept turning back to red mouths and heaving chests. It was like a heroin shot to the endocrine system.
And then Leonard Cohen came to my rescue. I thought to myself, "So I may not be a figure of beauty. But I might have the music. I might have the music."
The box office records show that Twilight has its own kind of music. But it's Brittany Spears.
***
And Samu came over on Sunday night.
He gave me his notes on The Big Bah-Ha... At last! And such notes! And I HEARD one of the SONGS he's been recording. It is fierce DOOM METAL, and, looking at his notations, I am astonished at how musically complicated it is. Astonished, yes, but not surprised, for his brain is one of the most tortuous, lovely, incomprehensible things I have ever encountered. So many things going on at once!
Musically, he's borrowed everything from 14th century chants to Finnish folk melodies. His lyrics are exquisite... Of course, you can't actually HEAR them as the singer screams them out in paroxysms of despair and agony. Articulation is not high on the lead singer's list of priorities. I believe it ranks after "torment," "murder," "drowning," and "being eaten by giant sea-things," which, as you can imagine, distorts the voice somewhat. But you can just catch the drift of those lyrics in the monster's roar. Phrases like flashes of light, or gasps for air. The singer's ragged screams seem just one more instrument in the symphonic cacophony.
The EP, entitled, "Raise the Cairn," follows a sea-voyage, ending in death.
It could be very silly. But it is not.
And those moments of lonely acoustic solos, before that typhoon of sound rushes back to smother them in distortion and drumbeats? Slaughter me.
In retaliation, I made Samu listen to Talis Kimberley's "Archetype Cafe" and "Santa Lucia." I read him the first chapter of my new novel and had his reactions. Mostly we spoke of our heart's work -- music and words -- and towards the end, as we sat at my kitchen table, with his feet propped up on a chair and my head resting in my arms, we talked of other, deeper things, which I will not repeat here.
He'd been fighting a cold. His voice was almost half an octave deeper and jagged at the edges. It was very sexy, and I told him so, to which he replied in a typically Samu fashion, "Such things do not concern me."
And yet, despite being at the very last shred of a growl, he offered to read me pages and pages of reviews he'd written. He could have just emailed them, and I knew it, and he knew it. I said, "Well, I've no objection. I'm very much enjoying the sound of your voice."
I think, really, that's why he offered.
***
44006 words, as of this morning. The novel's almost done.