(no subject)
1. Leave me a comment saying anything random, like your favorite lyric to your current favorite song.
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be asked, you will ask them five questions.
1. Best book you've ever read and why?
I've read something like three thousand books so far, so this question is going to have a different answer every time it's asked.
One of my favourite books is Where the Heart is, by Billie Letts. It has one passage in it, as follows;
She was connected to those women she had read about. Untouchables. Black women. Arab women. She was connected to them just as she had been to girls in seventh-grade gym classes, and to make-believe women named Branda and to real ones named Lexie.
That's why I read a lot of the things I do. At the moment I'm rereading Sheri Tepper's Gibbon's Decline and Fall. It's fairly slapdash in the style of writing, unlike Beauty (another good one by the same author), where every sentence is carefully crafted. In this one, it seems she felt the idea itself and the dialogue was more important than the exact words used to move from scene to scene.
The book's, like most of Teppers, is very feminist. Feminist literature does leave me a bit angry and upset, but it also makes me feel connected to other women.
Another book I read recently was Shappi Khorsandi's The Art of Acting English. Her family moved to London from Iran when she was three-years-old, while my father's family moved here from India a few years after Partition. I don't know anything about Partition, not directly. My grandparents, quite apart from the usual generation gaps, don't speak very good English. So, I try to learn about what it was like from other sources, usually books. Like Meera Syal's Anita and Me, about a little Indian girl growing up in the black country, only a few miles from here. There's no one quite like me that I've found, not yet, but the children of people who've moved here, who come from a culture they've never known sometimes strike a chord.
One part of the book stood out to me - the part where she mentioned that her family had always meant to go back. It hadn't occured to me before, but that's probably what my grandparents thought. They were just going to be here for a few years until things settled down, and then they'd go back to India. But, their children grew up here, and their grandchildren are half Pakistani, and half English, and don't speak Gujerati, and they've never known any other home than this one.
When people leave their homes like that, especially after Partition, and they were in a foreign country with only the clothes on their back, they would claim strangers as family. Because they came from the same country, even if a very different part. Because they spoke the same language and had some of the same experiences.
I normally hate generalities - my brain can't quite cope with them. It's always coming up with exceptions. But, generally speaking, reading novels about other women makes me feel like that. That we all come from the same country, even if from very different parts. That I am connected.
2. If you could be on any T.V. show, what would it be?
Well, firstly I'm not photogenic.;p Pretty, but not in a way that translates easily. Then there's the fact that no one is ever shown as they truly are on TV - their image may become more positive or negative, but what it will never show is what they really are. That's hard enough to define over a lifetime, let alone in fifteen minutes of fame.
That said, I think I'd pick the BBC program Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum. It was a reality show which took eight 16-25 year olds, stuck them in a house together and left them to fend for themselves. Every week they got a task, and some of those looked really fun. The idea was to get them used to being adults, and working, and to win their parents approval - which is rather better than a record contract - and they had tasks like being teachers for a day (which is my intended career) and leading a redecorating project for a flat of someone who hadn't had parents there to spoil them. Plus, most of the stuff they found tricky wasn't difficult at all.
It's interesting that my mind jumped straight to reality TV. I'm not interested in pretending to be anyone but myself, really. Although I probably wouldn't say no to a cameo in the film of my unfinished novel.;p
3. If you could live anywhere ar anytime, where or when would it be?
Right here, right now.
4. If you could hang out with one fictional character for a day, who would it be?
Sophy of Tepper's Gibbon's Decline and Fall. But ask me again in a week.
5. Favorite type of music and favorite band? (It so counts as one question.)
I like quirky pop, and eighties power ballads and some dance stuff. I like weird bands like The Beautiful South. I love Stacy Orrico's I'm Not Missing You. It's interesting to contrast that with John Waite's I'm Not Missing You At All. Only a few words different, but such a different sentiment.
Then there's Big Girls Don't Cry. Very simple lyrically, but manages to get across a different meaning.
Good lyrics are very hard to write. It's different from a story or a poem. You need to come up with something evocative, that conjures up an image, within very words, and within a distinct pattern (that pattern is different in different songs, but there is always some restraints). I think Stone Sour's Through Glass does it very well;
I'm looking at you through the glass,
God knows how much time has passed,
Oh god, it feels like forever.
But no one ever tells you that forever feels like home,
Sitting all alone inside your head.
I just find that that chorus summons up a very strong image for me, even though it really is rather simple.
Then there are song's like American Boy, which includes the line;
Take me to New York, I'd love to see LA.
(It's on the CD at work, don't judge me). Now, I know what she means, but that really is very clumsy. The way she sings it, it sounds like one line rather than two seperate things.
The Beautiful South, much as I like them, are very clumsy lyricists. They tend to spell things out too much. Marina and the Diamonds (who is, in fact, one person) is very good at it. Her lyrics are, if you just read them, rather nonsensical, but in such a way that they can mean whatever you like, if that makes sense.
Then there are the very clever things some bands do with music. Like in The Four Seasons "Oh What a Night." Somewhere in the middle there's a long instrumental; a full on bom-chicka-wa-wa seventies porn bit. That's genius! It's clever, I think, and it made me laugh when I realised it was there.
Much as I dislike the song, Ride It also manages that. There's an instrumental halfway through that is not explicit in any way, and yet clearly shows that they're having sex (we won't even get into why all of the songs on the soundtrack at the McDs where I work are all sexual in nature).
Not enough people do that, I think, take advantage of things that can only be done in music. Same with films. There's a fantastic scene in Ps - I Love You. Theres no dialogue whatsoever. The heroine comes home from her husband's funeral and sits down on the bed, her back to the camera. She picks up her mobile and dials a number. The phone in the foreground rings, and then you hear her husbands voice on the answering machine. When the message ends, she hangs up and dials it again.
That was inspired by certain parts of the book, but it works so brilliantly visually, and I don't think it could be done in text. Then there's the dance class scene in Another Cinderella Story, which has the most brilliant usage of a one-way mirror ever. Go see. If you don't have much time, just go to 2:50 and watch about a minute.
Incidentally, that can't have been an easy movie to film. The actor playing the hero was twenty-five while the actress playing the heroine was fifteen (both characters are supposed to be, I think, respectively, nineteen and seventeen). It can't be easy filming love scenes in those circumstances - a part of your mind would always be thinking "okay, I know my character is attracted to her, but the crew must know that I have no thoughts of sleeping with a child". Or maybe that kind of thinking is why I can't act.
Wait, what was the question?