1. Bridgit, Diane, Bill and I talked about a lot of different topics today in our ZOOM meeting. Diane is very happy already as a newly retired person especially since she has more time and energy to have fun cooking. I was fascinated to learn (or learn again) that Diane and Bill both work two days a week at a naturopathic practice fairly near where they live, helping out the two doctors with checking in patients and doing clerical work. Diane is a highly talented organizer and is helping the two doctors get their business running more smoothly.
Bridgit updated us on how the early days of her challenging new job as a supervisor are going and it turns out that, more than she originally knew, she got hired into a situation that needs repair and so she will be exercising her talents as a fixer.
Talking about work and jobs, including the news that Debbie accepted a position at Pinehurst Elementary, got us talking about labor unions and movies about labor. Diane played a five minute clip from John Sayles' 1987 movie, Matewan, featuring Chris Cooper's monologue to his fellow miners about the merits of union organizing. Afterward, I talked up the great 1976 documentary, Harlan County, USA and mentioned that on the Criterion Channel catalog there's a short interview with John Sayles talking about Harlan County, USA.
2. I didn't come into our ZOOM time together expecting to defend the habit of speech I began to notice over thirty years ago in which people speak declarative sentences with their voices rising up near the sentence's end, as if they were asking a question. Diane played a video of Taylor Mali performing a poem that urges people (I'd say especially young people) to speak declaratively, not to use that upswing, as if the upswing suggested a lack of confidence or self-doubt or a lack of conviction or certainty.
From the get go, starting, I think, either in my early days teaching at LCC or possibly when I was involved in an activist group back in the mid-1980s, I enjoyed hearing this way of speaking -- and still do -- even though I don't practice it. Others I worked with didn't enjoy it -- in fact, it grated on some of my colleagues. I don't know, maybe I related this speaking sentences as if they were questions to being around young people at WOW Hall and I associated this practice with jam band music. I think my enjoyment had to do with my affection for my students and that I enjoyed their ways of doing things that were theirs, not mine, and I decided to let it make me happy.
Hard to say. But it was fun today when this came up and that poem actually triggered a lot of great memories of teaching, working with a lot of people younger than me in the classroom and the theater, and, of course, all those shows at WOW Hall.
3. For ZOOMing today, I mixed myself a couple of fresh squeezed tangerine juice and gin screwdrivers. When we ended our discussion, I needed some time to let the effects of the gin wear off. Once I felt more clear-headed again, I started watching another Martin Scorsese documentary. I've already watched his movie about the impact Italian movies had on him as a young man, but he was watching movies made in the USA, too, and in 1995 he released a documentary about three hours long entitled, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies.
I found this movie over at Internet Archives and, as I might have expected, in the early part of the movie I watched tonight, Scorsese discusses and shows clips from a variety of movies from his youth that I'm unfamiliar with. It's time to get out my Vizio University notebook and start jotting down more titles!
More important than the titles, though, are Scorsese's comments about what excited him about these movies -- and it wasn't just the story. From an early age, Scorsese was highly receptive to panorama, vivid colors, how directors and cinematographers framed different shots, and how all of these more technical aspects of the movie helped tell the picture's story.
As I listen to Scorsese talk about, say, the vivid colors in King Vidor's western, Duel in the Sun (and others), my mind travels frequently to Scorsese's period movie, Age of Innocence (1993). As I remember, Age of Innocence opens in an opera house during a production of an opera. In listening to Scorsese talk about movies, he often refers to movies featuring bold colors and heightened passions as being "operatic" and I remember as Age of Innocence opened in the plush theater with wealthy New Yorkers dressed in spectacular costumes and the camera's motion intensified the action on the stage that I found the pageantry on the screen more arresting than the story that was developing. Now, as I listen to Scorsese talk about movies he loved in his youth, I'm seeing how the ways he was struck dumb by cinematic pageantry clearly influenced the kinds of visual effects he brought into being as a director.
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