lundi 28 mars 2005

When does life return to normal? What came of it all? A weekend which began with a four-leafed clover of no coincidence and a shaman, saw another strange but true scene completed in the LP, a pun on "draft" intended as such, and a public opening ceremony more open than planned? Ellie chose a raspberry one, stirred up the fruit I like leaving to the end and enjoyed it her way. I eat those yoghurts chilled late at night, a DVD dinner, especially good with the X-Files, when not seeking more Scullies to my Mulder. That she didn't pinch my own favourite was surprise n° 3 of Easter Monday. N° 1 could have started a bad day. "I was a little taken aback" was among international reactions awaiting me at the Factory, about the previous huge entry. Nobody, thanks, was nasty though about my True Confessions, because me, I was gobsmacked. Yes, you were to get the fuller story of how my two new big creative ventures began. Before leaving home, I checked for typos again, reposted it and left the Mac delivering the whole site up to the server in the States after work on it, for later release. No way did I mean to splash El's picture and some ... unusual details across the Front Page. Now it's done, take heed: those who've had comments to make on the sex I wrote about have seen nothing yet. The worst -- or the best, certainly the funniest I can remember -- is still to come. The film's packed with it and still I have almost all the really hard work to do. The first I knew of the size of today's "accident" came in a comment from more than halfway round the world. In my haste, I forgot to look at the "category" boxes used to send log entries. Surprise n° 2 was a shock: the rota. Eleanor, it told me, would be making one of her occasional trips in to work within a couple of hours this very day. I could hardly rush home to put the marathon saga of how "Ellie's film" came to be -- with all the rest -- back "in the orchard" and break it gently, just as you were to be given the big "back door" key rather later. Oh well, "in for a penny, in for a pound." Once she was there, I confessed to my latest sin as soon as I dared. You know what? All she asked, unflustered, was: "Which photo did you use?" "The nicest I've got," I replied. It was taken, as it happens, in a hurry at Monoprix the day we first had lunch together, she was a little bit tired, which shows, and she went off to work with a smile. I remember she left me so mind-blown and heart-smitten that the bus I caught home was one going in the wrong direction, a detail I failed to notice for several stops. Well, here I still am, head still on shoulders. El got her share of the chocolate ration and a choice of yoghurt. She charitably warned me about the dangers of not shaking the pot like a maniac to avoid a sugar overdose at the end. But sometimes you need high blood sugar levels to take the X-Files before bed, let alone Mulder's jokes, worse than mine. In the Métro this morning, before realising what I'd done, the woman's voice was 'A Girl called Eddy', to say more, maybe, about why it pleases me once I've further explored it -- it certainly does. Coming home, there was going to be the rest of Eddy until I noticed 'Anastasia' (Amazon Fr.) in the playlist, and remembered how the Kid and me loved Don Bluth's (IMDb bio) unlikely musical animation story of the stray Romanov princess, orphaned by the Russian revolution and wanted dead by the nastily living corpse Rasputin. Call us sentimental (or wildly romantic) but we must have seen it at least three times in 1998. On the last, in a small but favourite art cinema in Ellie's part of town, we had the smallest of the salles, whimsically named Vasco de Gama, has the fewest seats and a small screen but the greatest surround sound system of all four explorers' theatres. That wasn't the only time we enjoyed a "private showing", since we go to the cinema when most people are doing other stuff. The soundtrack is superb. Often witty songs and lyrics by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, with a full orchestral score by one of the lesser known veterans of sometimes offbeat movies, David Newman, in whose 'Anastasia' music I enjoy a tip of the hat to Prokofiev, Rachmaninov and other stars of the Russian romantic firmament. I'm glad to note that at Amazon both in France and the UK, 'Anastasia' gets the full five-star treatment from almost everybody, and won't pick up the DVD now on offer for nine euros round the corner because it's the French version only. The original voice cast includes the likes of John Cusack, Meg Ryan, Angela Lansbury and it is a film for grown-up kids. I agree with two comments, though not the capital letters, in Sarita Dutta's Amazon UK review, when she says "elements [that] truly separate this ... from any other animated movie [are] heart, emotion, sacrifice, depth and feeling." That sounds overblown, but Sarita's right, as she probably is to reckon that had it not been for 'Titanic' -- which I enjoyed much less -- 'Anastasia' could have "come home with two most deserving Oscars for Best Song and Best Score." Too good for an Oscar in my rather cynical view of such awards. Tonight, after seeing Ellie again, another reason why this was one of my favourite films struck me. Given my own state in '98, compared with the place I've got to since she turned up, perhaps I was very susceptible to a tale about someone suffering from amnesia and seeking to get those childhood memories back. Mix in a little of the Big L, though in my own screenplay, this is no longer what I took it for at the time, an act of blind gods who hurl it down on us, and heavens, I was a sucker for Love. Now you know what happens if you "take the green pill" (henceforth a permanent link here) and go through that door, it remains only to say that the orchard is a work in progress, where you'll occasionally find entries about people and projects particularly dear to me. From a first few seedbeds well protected for one of those people, it's grown strong and is the place out back where I'll keep you up to date particularly on the 'Sting in the Lotus'. The rest of the Quiet Revolution and all those women's voices will remain right here, up front. 11:11:12 PM  link   your views? [] Quite a draft now the door's open The back door opens to a former secret garden, so watch your feet. Should you find strange matter or be alarmed, it's no place for you. Too many people are scared as it is of what they find bizarre and inexplicable in the "real world": [evening edit] this shared planet of ours, where from the eye of a quite a storm around her, I learned that while my favourite novelist may cover four in one of her books, there may be infinite ways to forgiveness. And understanding. Like the trees of the Master Patterner's grove on the island of Roke in Ursula's Earthsea books, fancies and people in the orchard have lives of their own. Nobody, including me, ever knows where they may be on waking up in the morning. The more alleyways I find in the garden, the bigger it is, with more paths to explore. Before going on, I should note that some of the details in this epic come from 'Real Life Dialogue Practice,' an unpublished imaginary conversation with the White Goddess, the first deity or a sub-atomic something. This unpublished material, mostly about real events, was originally intended for the amusement of friends. There's plenty more! But it now has a more public raison d'être. Long before the time came to tear down fences in my life, however, I seeded the first flowerbeds for Eleanor. What El makes of Easter I don't know, but to me it's a fine myth once divested of the trappings and accretions of millennia. Today's an appropriate Sunday to breathe new life into these pages without going to the trouble of being "born again". This first story of spring says just a little of the person she is, no longer the muse and life's dreams projected on to her, though part of me denied do so, when I took her for the woman in my life ... or "wimmel" as Tony called such people. My late friend has a place you may one day find down the end of a path. So do some others very special to me. There'll be a little about them, but I've had no occasion to speak to Ellie herself for weeks apart from adding a little spice to Factory cooking on rare occasions. She asked me to write her short e-mails. Several options come to mind, but it's hard to make up my own, so I'll bung three possible mails in ... later. After all, while Eleanor Beardsley tells us what's going down in France at NPR, in some of her regular public appearances as a Paris-based mainly radio journalist, I've no idea what's happening behind the scenes. If I had, you wouldn't be told. A mystery remains and the answer will always elude me. I've written before March 2004 how some people's paths cross our own and when they do, it changes us. Soon after starting this log, I described some who are particularly special to me ... even "gurus". Like most people, until recently I put such encounters down -- with reservations -- to hazard, fortuitous accident. Not any more. Once EB showed up, it was different. Rather like a day I spent with a shaman in Senegal in 1997, within less than an hour of meeting Ellie I knew I'd waited all my life for the encounter. Now a lot of people have enjoyed or endured, including me, the "surprise", "amazement," and other emotions heaped upon me in and out of the Factory when this marathon story stayed on the log's main page for the best part of today, the rest of it, is going where it was meant to stay in the first place, "in the orchard" out back. All I can say, since I'm still alive to say it, is "Thanks!" 9:54:54 PM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.