Happy Late Sunday Night, Sweet Baby,
Not much to report today, though there was good singin' in church. After that I was home for most of the rest of the day, due to..............wait for it..........more rain! Yessiree, I bet you can imagine how thrilled I was, especially as it was accompanied by fruh-HEEZ-ing cold temperatures for what seems like the 1000th straight day. I did manage to go for a half-walk during a break in the rain this afternoon, but mostly it was just reading & playing guitar, learning Bowie's "TVC15" (just cause I heard it on the radio) and once again the chords are deceptively easy. The deceptive part, as always, comes in the genius of the way the chords back up the vocal line, and also in the way Bowie, and all the best songwriters, would use accents, like 7th chords or minors, not as major mood changers (which is a legit strategy too, depending on the song) but just as little "flavorizers", to very briefly change things up. Thus, instead of ending a verse on an F major chord, he might use an F7 because it will trick out the movement of the vocal line just a pinch more.......and also create a slightly "unresolved" feel to the turnaround into the next verse. Then, when perhaps the second verse is gonna resolve into the chorus, he will use a major chord to fully resolve it, and thus create a dynamic hook.
These genius songwriters never complicate things. Their chordings are often simple, but they know just when to accent them, and they first and foremost create extraordinary vocal lines.
Well anyhow, just observations on music. I also listened to my new Mike Oldfield cd, just received in the mail yesterday. He is the composer of the famed Exorcist Theme from his "Tubular Bells" album, but he has done quite a lot more than that, and his new album is fantastic, as I mentioned on FB.
Finally, I watched a movie : "Salvatore Giuliano" (Criterion) made in 1962 by Italian director Francesco Rosi. It is the true story of a charismatic young Sicilian hoodlum who is recruited by politicians and Mafia to form a resistance army to fight for Sicily's independence from Fascist Italy at the end of WW2. Italy had been defeated in the war, but the Fascists still had enough power to dominate the poverty-stricken Sicilians, and the Mafia saw the battle as a way to gain even more political influence for themselves.
It is a convoluted film, and I was only watching half-heartedly for the first 45 minutes because it got a bit confusing, with all the different characters and their allegiances. Also, it wavers in style between trying for a documentary feel, and the Neorealism that was prominent at the time, and which directors such as Rosi and Roberto Rosselini used to such great effect. So for the first hour, you almost feel as if you are watching newsreel footage of a historic event. Then in the second hour, the plot kicks in, and a terrific actor named Mark Wolff (whom I had never heard of) takes center stage. He was an American, playing Italian, but you'd never know it, and his performance boosts the film into a gripping courtroom drama for the second half. On the dvd box, there are liner notes which state that "Salvatore Giuliano" was a favorite film of both Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola, and you can be sure they were influenced for their own Mafia films years later. This is a movie I will need to watch again, just to fully appreciate the complex connections in the plot, but it was quite good on first viewing at any rate.
I hope your day was good and that all projects are going well.
Tomorrow morning I am back on the job, with The Crew. Pray for sunshine, and heat. See you then.
I Love You. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
No comments:
Post a Comment