Sunday, May 24, 2009

Friday, May 15, 2009

Get Out Of That Garden EP

Here is the uncompleted album. I will call it an EP. Now that I am back working again, I am not sure when I will get time to write the second half.
Download it from mediafire below.

www.mediafire.com/?2yzjmnwzliz

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

My Favourite Films - Happiness

"People who can be shocked should be shocked more often." - Mae West

If you like to be surprised...

If you thought there were no more taboos to be broken...

My Favourite Film - The Purple Rose Of Cairo

Text below is taken from http://filmchatblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/purple-rose-of-cairo-close-ups-and.html

The movie is set in New Jersey during the Great Depression, and it concerns a woman named Cecilia (Mia Farrow) who frequently escapes from her dreary job and her abusive, cheating husband by going to the movies. Indeed, she loves movies so much that, one day, a character named Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) steps right off the movie screen to be with her. This sends the people who made the movie into a panic; if Tom were to commit any crimes while running around in the real world, the studio that created him and the movie in which he appears might be held responsible.

Gil Shepherd (also Daniels), the actor who played Tom, comes to New Jersey and woos Cecilia away from Tom by promising to take her away with him to Hollywood. Cecilia, believing that Gil represents the "real world" while Tom is only imaginary, falls for this and breaks up with Tom. Tom, heartbroken, returns to the movie that he had left -- presumably unaware that the studio will destroy all copies of the film once he is back on the screen, to ensure that something like this never happens again.Cecilia goes home to pack her bags, tells her husband she is going to Hollywood, and runs to the movie theatre to meet Gil. But there, she learns that Gil has already left, and left her behind.

Her "real world" solution was, itself, an illusion. Saddened, she does what she always does: she steps into the movie theatre -- where she watches the scene from Top Hat (1935) in which Fred Astaire sings 'Cheek to Cheek' while dancing with Ginger Rogers.And there, Cecilia falls in love with the movies all over again.The scene hinges entirely on the subtle transformation in Cecilia's face as she watches Top Hat. When she enters the theatre, at the back of a long-ish shot, she is pretty sad and dejected. Within that same shot, she walks down the aisle until she is fairly close to the camera, at which point she picks a seat and settles into it. The rest of the scene is shot from this angle, looking at Cecilia's face.

The fact that the final scene keeps our focus on Cecilia's face and the "face" of the movie screen makes us more intimately involved in the relationship between Cecilia and Top Hat than we were in the relationship between Cecilia and the movie featuring Tom Baxter. We have been primed to expect bigger things. And as the music swells to its climax, we feel that anything can happen.A side note about the music. The lyrics we hear run like so:


"Heaven, I'm in Heaven And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak

And I seem to find the happiness I seek When we're out together dancing cheek-to-cheek

Heaven, I'm in Heaven And the cares that hung around me through the week

Seem to vanish like a gambler's lucky streak When we're out together dancing cheek-to-cheek

Oh I love to climb a mountain And to reach the highest peak

But it doesn't thrill me half as much As dancing cheek-to-cheek"

Two points. First, the middle verse resonates with Woody Allen's own belief -- expressed most recently and uncompromisingly in Match Point (2005) -- that it is luck, rather than fate or design, that steers our lives, and that blind chance can be very capricious indeed. It is striking how Astaire compares his good fortune to a gambler's loss, without drawing any sort of obvious contrast.Second, there is a theological subtext to this film as a whole, and to this scene in particular. The song -- and its refrain of "Heaven, I'm in Heaven" -- is heard at the beginning of the film as Cecilia stares transfixed at a movie poster, and it is heard again here at the end as Cecilia rediscovers her faith in the movies. In between, she takes Tom to a church and they stand beneath a crucifix:


"Tom: It's beautiful. I'm not sure exactly what it is.

Cecilia: This is a church. You do believe in God, don't you?

Tom: Meaning...Cecilia: The reason for everything, the world, the universe.

Tom: Oh, I think I know what you mean. The two men who wrote The Purple Rose of Cairo, Irving Sachs and R.H. Levine. They're writers who collaborate on films.

Cecilia: No, no, I'm talking about something much bigger than that. No, think for a minute. A reason for everything. Otherwise, it'd be like a movie with no point, and no happy ending."

Having ditched Tom Baxter and inadvertently sentenced him to oblivion, and having been ditched by Gil Shepherd and left behind in Depression-era New Jersey, Cecilia has lost not just one possible happy ending but two. In this way, Woody Allen draws a contrast between "real life" and the movies -- and, implicitly, between "real life" and the promises made by religion.But he still needs, or at least wants, the illusion of those promises. Everything we do will end in death; even movies end, and when they do, the projector is turned off, which prompts one of the "movie" characters in the clip above to say, "You don't understand what it's like to disappear, to be nothing, to be annihilated." And because he believes everything will end in death and oblivion, Woody is skeptical of the efforts made by art and religion to help us believe that there is some sort of meaning to this life.The best we can do, he suggests -- here and in other films -- is to create the illusion of meaning. Hence the final close-up on Cecilia's sad, subtle smile, as she once again comes under the spell of an escapist movie. Someone once asked Woody why he didn't give his film a happy ending. He replied, "That was the happy ending."