As you may already know, and it’s abundantly clear if you spend any time poking around here on my blog, I have a busy life. Sometimes it gets so busy, in fact, that I occasionally forget things. One of those things is my Favorite Songs series. I still need to work on a snappier title for it, but at least I remembered it, and here’s another song.
It’s by a German 80’s group called Freiheit (Germans probably know them as Münchener Freiheit), and it’s called “Keeping the Dream Alive.” I first heard the song on the soundtrack for the movie Say Anything, back in the day, and fell in love with it instantly.  To my ears, it’s the best Paul McCartney song that he never wrote.
The video does look a bit dated, but it fits nicely with the spirit of the song.
The song has apparently had a nice resurgence here in this country in recent years, thanks to its inclusion on American Idol. I watch precious little television, and have only seen that show a couple of times, but I can do internet research as well as anyone.
I was somewhat surprised to find out that the group are still active (dare I say it. . .keeping the dream alive?), and continue to put out new albums. I’ll have to check those out. Even if they hadn’t, though, they’d still be an incredible band in my book, based on this song alone.
I recently got the documentary Dark Days from InternetFlicks, and I wanted to share it with you. It tells the story of a few of the people who live in the abandoned train tunnels underneath New York City, and it’s absolutely one of the most gripping, heartfelt and memorable documentaries I’ve ever seen. I recommend it whole-heartedly.
Here’s a clip of the first ten minutes of the film.
You’re probably lucky that I wasn’t able to find a link to the complete movie online, because otherwise you’d have sat here and watched the entire movie, because it’s so compelling and unusual.
As a bonus, the music (composed by DJ Shadow) is particularly excellent. In fact, some of it may even sound familiar to you if you’re a regular listener to the radio show This American Life.
The other night I was supposed to get together with J, but she had a change of plans, so I scrounged around a bit to see what was happening in town. I called RockShowGirl to tell her about the movie Man on Wire, and how amazing it looked. She was too exhausted to go out, having spent the last few hours running around town and then cleaning her apartment, so I went from being double-booked to being zero-booked. The time was 7:22, and the movie started at 7:30. ‘I can still make it to the movie,’ I thought. ‘I don’t care if anybody else is free, I’m going.’ I grabbed my sweatshirt and my phone, jumped into the car that I’d borrowed from my neighbor for the evening, and raced over to the movie theater. I can’t even begin to tell you how glad I am that I did.
The movie was amazing, and I recommend it to all of you. It’s a documentary about the French guy who walked across a tightrope that he hung (secretly and illegally, I might add) between the towers of the World Trade Center. There have been many pictures taken of that famous act, but this documentary was based on Phillipe Petit’s book. The story and the individual characters were all fascinating and intriguing. It’s really one of the better documentaries I’ve seen in a long time, and I watch a lot of them. Here’s a trailer:
Incidentally, another of my recent favorite documentaries is Helvetica. Yes, it’s about the font. No, it’s not the least bit boring. It’s about art and design and culture and the ways that they are perceived over time. Go rent it. I promise you’ll enjoy it. But don’t take my word for it; Helvetica is sexy.
And since we’re on the subject of documentaries, I just rented and received Theremin; an Electronic Odyssey. A friend of mine wrote a play about Leon Theremin, and it inspired me to find out more about the supremely interesting inventor. His most famous invention is the instrument which bears his name:
Well, you now have your homework, and you know what to do, and now I have a favor to ask of you in return. What are some of your favorite documentaries that you’d like to recommend to me? Please leave a comment and let me know.
My Halloween was fun, but not exactly in the way I expected it would be. My Plan was that I would dress up as a grown-up Harry Potter, with a lightning-shaped forehead scar and a wand, but just dress the way I normally do, with no wig or anything. I thought that would’ve been very clever and hilarious, but I wasn’t able to find a makeup kit for the scar here locally, so that was the end of that.
At work, there were a whole bunch of people who dressed up, some of whom were very clever. One of my friends dressed up as the dead girl from the movie The Ring. I wanted to take a little video of her, and she asked if I wanted her to walk in a creepy way, and I said, “No way, it’s much creepier if you just walk normally.”
One guy covered himself in wrapping paper with a sign on his chest that said, “To: Women  From: GOD”. Get it? God’s Gift to Women? It was pretty hilarious, actually. I didn’t get a picture of him wearing the suit, but I was lucky enough to get an even better picture, because before he left work, he took the suit off and left it propped up on his friend’s chair. It looked like a golem sitting there, ready at any moment to come to life and start wandering around the office.
My supervisor was dressed in a purple-with-leopard-skin suit and hat, and was a very convincing pimp, which sparked my friend and I into a whole conversation about the fact that it’s interesting how bad people have become idealized in our society, and are now seen as positive role models, and we further extrapolated that at some point in the future (perhaps hundreds of years, but it WILL happen), children will glue little mustaches under their noses, with swastika bands around their arms, and goose-step through their neighborhoods dressed as little Hitlers.
I dunno. . .in my experience, Halloween is the time of year when women dress up either as cats or prostitutes (or the ‘sexy’ version of anything) and men dress up as women.
My brother, when he was in college, used to volunteer at a local cathedral to provide an ‘alternative’ Halloween celebration, in which kids of all ages could come and celebrate in a place without partying or drugs, but still have a good time. One kid apparently showed up wearing a skeleton mask and a nice suit, and when everyone asked what he was, he replied awkwardly, “Uhhh. . .Skeletal Pimp?”
Everyone laughed, and told him, “Dude. . .you’re in a church. . .you can’t wear that crap to a church. Besides, do you even know what a pimp is?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, what is it?”
“Uhh. . .it’s. . .uhh. . .I don’t know.”
They told him. “So it’s not the most acceptable thing to wear to a church, and not the most positive thing you could be wearing.”
I always find it interesting and telling to see the ways in which people choose to dress themselves up. It seems like a ‘no duh’ when a gay guy dresses up as a woman, but here’s an interesting twist on that theme that also comes from my workplace. It’s a gay girl who dressed up as an androgynous superhero, which I thought was completely brilliant. I love the sign on her cape and cummerbun.
Here’s another example of a costume that I think is absolutely brilliant. It’s Allanah, dressed as a Duracell battery. Pure genius.
And me? I spent the evening making dinner and walking my neighborhood with J. We made Smoked Salmon Alfredo and beet salad, and then walked the streets of Irvington, watching the kids in their costumes. We also inadvertently proved to be volunteer firefighters, when we noticed a strange smell on the next block over. We came around the corner and saw a pumpkin on fire, belching flames and acrid black smoke into the neighborhood. Without hesitating, we went up the steps and each ran to various doors of the duplex. J rang the doorbell to no avail, so she ran in the door and up the stairs, yelling, “Your pumpkin’s on fire!” The slightly stoned-looking frat guy came down the stairs, saying, “Oh, really?” He walked outside and tried to blow out the flaming pumpkin, which only fanned the flames and made it worse. He then went beside the house and grabbed a yellow plastic recycling tub and pushed the pumpkin into that, flames and all. I’m going to walk over there tomorrow during the day to see if any permanent damage was done to the building.
I went to bed at 10:15 and slept until 12:45 this afternoon, when I went downstairs and spent the next couple of hours reorganizing my stuff in the basement. It’s quite an improvement over the picture I took the other day, when the furnace removers piled all of our stuff into a big pile.
It was officially considered a suicide, but the possibility of ‘foul play’ was never really ruled out. I’m here today to pay a small tribute to someone whose music has moved me more than almost any other.
Although he had been living in L.A. for many years, those of us from Portland will always consider him one of our own, because Portland plays a large part in his songs, and there are a multitude of locations and references to the time he spent living here. He wrote very dark and honest songs, in a way that very few other people are brave enough to do. He’s most famous, probably, for his music being featured prominently in the movie Goodwill Hunting, and that early-to-middle period of his songwriting is my favorite.
The album “XO” was the first one that I bought. I heard the song Waltz #2 (XO) on the radio, but didn’t catch the name of the artist. The next time I heard it was about a month later, in Seattle. I was in the back seat of a car, riding around with two of my friends, and the song came on. I said, “I love this song. . .turn it up; I need to know who this is.” That afternoon, I drove straight to a record store in the University District and picked it up. I will always remember driving around Seattle in my little green Toyota truck, with the windows down, listening to that CD.
Elliott recorded many of his early songs and albums at Jackpot! Studios here in Portland, and his piano was at the studio for years after he had moved away, but it has since been donated to the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle. At the time he died, the band I was in (listen to the songs “Please Let Me”, “Shadow” and “Windows Down”) was in the process of recording our album at Jackpot, and all of the piano tracks were recorded on that piano. It was a haunting and surreal honor to be playing it, even moreso in retrospect.
Here’s one of Elliott’s earliest songs, “The Biggest Lie”, the video for which was filmed the day after he died. The location is the Solutions Wall in a neighborhood of L.A., which was the backdrop for Elliott’s album “Figure 8.”
Miss you, Elliott. This planet isn’t quite the same without you on it.
