Everything is material

Readers' Reviews
MUSIC AND LYRICS
jayme792 said: "Who knew the music and fan fervor of the '80s could be mined for such great fun!" (Four Stars)
cherry1967 said: "The plot was nonsense and it was dull." (One Star)

These blurbs were posted on the New York Times Arts and Leisure email page sent this morning. They are Readers Reviews of the new Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore movie, which Lee and I are going to see because she likes Hugh Grant and I like Drew Barrymore and next week, at the imaginary interstice between February 28 and March 1, we will be having our 27th wedding anniversary. Next year, leap year, we get to have a real one. Anyway, as you must have noticed, the first reviewer, jayme792, gives the movie four stars, asks a question that he (or she) ends with an exclamation mark, and concludes that for him or her the movie is 'great fun.' This little review, as such, also tells me a little bit about the movie, that it must have plot elements related to the "music and fan fervor of the '80s". So, fine. This is like a little consumer report and I am going to see the movie anyway. I hope cherry1967 is not giving away her (or his) age. Maybe this reviewer has a mint condition 1967 Ford Mustang that is red. I hope that's it, because a 40-year-old who considers it meaningful to post this as a review, when it is nothing of the sort, must be deluded, sort of, to consider that her experience of the movie is definitive, that she could say so dismissively, using the past tense, as though the movie were a historical relic (it can't be a consumer review, because the words refer to something that happened in the past), and actually believe her words to be objective and true. Then, she rates it "one star." None of this is in any way meaningful, enlightening, or helpful and, as you know, it is one of my pet peeves, when people publish themselves without even attempting to conform to standards of critical understanding. (One could say that these kinds of comments reflect the writer more than the work in question, because clearly some people did not think the movie plot was nonsense, some people found sense in it, and some people did not think it was dull. That was merely the experience of cherry1967. Her comments tell us nothing whatsoever about the movie. Is it about astronomy perhaps? Ira Gershwin?) Maybe she is a virgin, too, a 40-year-old virgin. Because, and this is why I am writing this to you yet again, I am not sure she can help having this perspective on the world. For her to have written about this movie in the present tense would have to be giving more credence and validity and reality to a mere movie. She really experiences movies, not as works of art that the viewer participates in examining, but as an out-of-body transcendence that is solely reflected in her own emotional and sensational experience. Maybe she is to be envied. Maybe she is, as I said, a virgin, or a near-virgin. Maybe she is like the pure young girl at the end of Fellini's La Dolce Vita, trying to speak to the debauched revellers on the other side of the shore after their wild night, on the seaside where a huge bloated sea monster of some sort has beached itself up. The young girl signals to the party people, tries to speak to them, but they cannot hear or understand her words. Is it a warning? A prophecy? A one-star review? They live in different worlds, the jet set Italians and the poor and pure innocent one, unable to cross the ocean bay to speak the same language, or at least put it in the same tense, and there is no hope of seeing the truth, eye to eye. But Fellini, bless his heart, was able to use it, to turn that gap of morality, of communication, to span that distance across his artificially created sea, with Nino Rota no doubt plinking along some wonderful, transcendent music to patch it together, a vision. I haven't seen that movie in some time. I'm listening to Yoko Ono right now. They posted her new album, Yes I'm a Witch, on the Russian MP3 download site. I always liked Yoko, even when others didn't. I liked her sense of art, her radicalism. But deep down inside me, because of my Bible upbringing, I still have an aversion to the idea of witches, even in the title. When I first started going to the movies, I was afraid that Jesus would come while I was sitting in a darkened theatre and I'd miss it, because I was in a profane (although enthralling) place, doing something for which I should be ashamed, sinning. I couldn't even think the word "hell" and it took decades to train myself to allow language to be itself, although sometimes I wonder if I might not have more control over circumstances if I had more control over those words popping into my head or appearing on this screen when my fingers move. I no longer worry about Jesus coming while I'm at the movies, though. Maybe cherry1967 does, since she went through that experience and told us about it as though it were something she had escaped from, scathed somewhat apparently, and she is primarily concerned about her aesthetic soul, not the artwork in question. It was dull, she writes, and nonsense. Maybe her senses weren't tickled. It was non-sense. To her. So, good for her. She escaped the theatre. Jesus didn't come while she was there being bored and wasting her time. I should thank her for giving me the opportunity to ponder her life this morning, based on her one-line review. If she were here now, I'd ask her if she is a virgin or a near-virgin and if that is why she cannot see things through the perspective of others' eyes and then I would ask her if she wanted to pray, to get down on her knees with me, maybe in her Mustang, and pray together in the present tense, to implore the deity for a vision, for common ground, for a heretofore missing ability to communicate, for insight above judgment. Maybe she'd like to hear my description of some spectacular seven-minute tracking shot in an otherwise meaningless movie. But she might find that dull as well, since she wasn't there. Or, if she was, she probably missed it. So it didn't count. In her eyes. In one eye and out the other and gone in 60 seconds before Jesus comes. That's how it works.