Today I have been full of unexplained anxiety...maybe it was all the coffee I drank early this morning or the fact that I have quickly broken off my once beloved relationship with snow and feel I'm going to freak if I see one more flake of white. One thing I know for sure...the "Out of Africa" soundtrack always calms my soul as best it can:)...

Barry's score captures the beauty of Africa and the freedom of flying and I always feel so lifted after I listen to it...

Other terrific film scores include:
(also composed by John Barry)




(amazing!!!)








If you were going to musically score the biggest heartbreak of your life, this might be how it would sound. The sadness and pain would come not with an angry bang or a soft whimper, but rest instead in an understated dark beauty, evoking images of cold prairie nights or horse and rider moving through unblemished snow, no one else in sight.

One reviewer on allmusic.com referred to the album The Assassination of Jesse James as a "sophisticated undertaking, full of narrative." When I watched the movie for the first time, it wasn’t the acting that captivated me, but the sounds of such pieces as "Rather Lovely Thing." It sits low in your chest and refuses to leave, until you’re ready to release it. Part of the amazing atmosphere comes from Nick Cave’s willingness to experiment with different instruments such as the Hohner guitaret, which is closely associated with the harmonica and accordion.

A soundtrack as good as this one can only help the film it accompanies, taking something that already has simple majesty and making it even more lovely and breathtaking. I normally only like to listen to scores while I’m reading or resting quietly at home, but I’ve had this in my car lately because it helps me deal with the overwhelming madness of rush hour. It’s calming, but never lures you into a false sense of security…which is a must for anyone braving nasty traffic that even outlaws like Jesse James never could have handled.

I just got this album and can't stop listening to it...like its title would suggest, it's a little other-worldly and weird...but I like it!:)

Best tracks, by far,  include: "Night Court" (Mux Mool), "Disco Rout" (Legowelt), "My Radio" (Solvent), "Dots" (Lusine) and "Half Asleep" (School of Seven Bells")

Some of the songs are very trippy and others very danceable....for more info:

http://ghostly.com/releases/ghostly-essentials-avant-pop-one

also interesting (and free) is this lovely and relaxing MP3album; just click on the picture to 'buy' for free:

 

Valentine's Day is just a date on a calendar AND a holiday marketed exclusively by greeting card companies, but I do enjoy reading things like what follows below...it's nice to know that people still fall in love:) :

http://www.citypaper.com/cover.asp?issuedate=2/10/2010

thinking about how great it would be if Betty White hosted SNL:)


http://www.facebook.com/pages/Betty-White-to-Host-SNL-please/266442514828?ref=ts

How can a stuffy-looking man who lived in the nineteenth century reach out and touch me so? I'm moving into the third day of a snowed-in week-end and very much at peace (thanks to Snow Patrol and some really good herbs!) but still it can get a little lonely when you live by yourself and the apartment building is eerily empty...even out in the parking lot where I thought more people would be digging out their cars.

So many things John Stuart Mill writes in his Autobiography speak to me or the me that had lost her love for books until this very week-end:

.:...In vain I sought relief from my favorite books; those memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded that my love of mankind , and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out...

We all have gone through periods of empty sadness, where it's hard to want to do anything, much less read.  But whether it's depression or not is another matter and one I never really thought of as applying to any time before the 20th century, though of course why wouldn't it have?

 Mill also writes: My course of study had led me to  believe that all mental and moral feelings and qualities whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another, take pleasure in one sort of action or contemplation, and pain in another sort, through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience.

Funny how, except for some of the modern music I like and my strong belief in social and civil rights issues, I would much prefer to live in an earlier time when thinking and living could be done in quieter times and self-reflection was entirely possible.

I would give almost anything for a world without cellphones and other obnoxious noises. Occasionally I feel so out of time here...

But since I DO live in this century and certainly don't hate living here I love taking advantage of the easy access to all the great classics I love. One cause (I think) of my inability to read much over the past year was my conviction that everything I read was so blatantly false. I could not be tricked into forgetting that fiction was fiction.






Mill also wrote some wonderfully fitting things in _On Liberty_:

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the apelike one of imitation.

On Calvinist Theory (oh how I detest Calvinism):

It is so, on the Calvinistic theory. According to that, the one great offense of man is self-will. All the good of which humanity is capable is comprised of obedience. You have no choice; thus you must do, and no otherwise: 'whatever is not duty is sin.'

The thought of living under the thumb of a set of pre-determined guidelines terrifies me...Hell sounds so much better than any place where you have no control over your own actions and life.

It's weird: my mind has been mush and mellow lately, but it has also yearned for deeper meaning and maybe that's what I want to finally read again.