Just sublime!

Haven't been here for quite a while - but I had really nothing new to say until this week. I'd forgotten about something which is so important in my life - MUSIC! It's so easy to forget in the ins and outs of daily life how important it is to stop and listen. Not just to hear a piece of music over headphones while you work, or do something else. No, to actually stop, sit in a concert hall and just listen - to all the notes - just close your eyes - and hear the violinist bow into his violin, pick a note and dangle it in the air - just holding it in suspended disbelief for the audience. The sound lingers after it's stopped and you are transported for the tiniest moment into the sublime - into the wholeness of music, into the echoes of your soul, your life.
So, this is to share with you all a moment of just pure beauty - play the video, close your eyes and let it take you where you want to go.
This is what life is about - carrying this beautiful sound with you wherever you go - this is what happinness is about for me.

Books - Prospero's Books

Last week I was talking to my two friends Ricardo and Bruno about one of my all time favourite films - Peter Greenway's Prospero's Books (with the great John Gielgud)- an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, with a musical score by Michael Nyman. If you've never seen a Greenway film, this should be it - so rich in colour, text, texture, sound, smell - a delight.And as I thought of the film, I remembered so many things - my past - almost 16 years ago - a masterclass with Nyman on his composing process and then a premier performance of the Prospero's Books score - just very special - music you can sink into. Then about 10 years ago I presented bits of the film to my advanced students - what a laugh it was - I think Ildiko will remember! In fact, we both took a masterclass with Greenway here in Rio - what a wonderful day that was. And I rounded it off with a performance of his 100 Objects to represent the world - a prop opera based on the absurdity of the idea of 1 single culture (USA / nasa) selecting 117 objects to represent mankind in outerspace - the opera was an answer to this one sided view of culture. This was also simply devine and a great shared moment with my brother - we sat afterwards talking about it as people left and started dismantling the stage.
PS - A word of warning for those faint of heart - there's a lot of nudity in the video clip!

Things you can tell just by looking at her - really?

Guilherme lent me this film this weekend and I watched it right away on Friday evening. Amazing that I hadn't seen this film before - it's the second film I've seen that actually portrays for me the feeling of solitude women can feel. I have this theory that this feeling of solitude is so deep that only a woman can feel it. When I watched The Hours I felt that that was another film which also acurately portrayed the immensity of this feeling - the emptiness is often filled by so many superfluous and superficial things - we clutter up our lives in an attempt to escape from the emptiness in it. This feeling is so huge, so deep, so overwealwhing that I used to think that there was something missing in my life whenever I experienced this emptiness. I always thought that the fact I didn't have children accounted for this emptiness. Now that I have a son, I still have this feeling - so I've now reached the conclusion that it doesn't matter whether you are a daughter, woman, wife or mother - I think this feeling is something primitive, something which helps a woman re-focus her life and look at things from a new angle. A bit like the women in the film, searching for new ways of looking at things and seeing life as raw as it is (including the blind character). This sensation of there being nothing ahead does come and go every now and then. No use running away from it! I battle it out even wallow a bit in it. I have to breathe through it. It's a way of coming to terms and then facing everyone again the next day.....with a smile on your face.
Wonderful film - glad I saw it. It came at the right moment.

This is a bit odd, isn't it?

TV Reviews

Hello everyone,

Found this interesting add on to the blog - quite curious isn't it? So I decided to have a go. Does anyone know how this works? What intrigues me is how it labels the blogs - is it based on long words, complicated terms, what could it be?
My question is, why would anyone want to associate this to their blog?
Any thoughts?

Interview with Sebastian Faulks - author of Engelby

If you have a chance to read this, it is well worth it. Set in Cambridge in the 70's, it's quite a disturbing portrayal of a young man, Mike Engelby, who loses his way - or maybe he'd lost it a long time before in his childhood. Quite strong images at times - you want to sympathise with the character, but there's something slightly dark about him that distances him from you.
Strange this thing about trying to be part of something but ending up being slightly on the edge - as if you are constantly taking a tangent. Maybe what's disturbing about Engelby is that I can think of at least one or two moments during my life when I've had this distinct feeling I didn't really fit in with what was around me. Have you ever felt this? Ver odd - it comes and goes in a fleeting moment. A bit dark really.

Click on the book cover to watch part of an interview with the writer.

Why Serendipity?

This blog is dicated to discovery - fortuitous discovery, abit like the three Persian princes in the fairy tale. I have this tremendous urge to go out and see new things, listen to different people, find interesting places - one thing leading to the next and I hope to share this with you all. Who knows, this may lead to serendipitous ideas amongst us all - one thing leading onto the next (a bit like when we were children and looked things up in the dictionary or the encyclopaedia - you weren't ever able to stop - one entry lead to the other, didn't it?).