Barbara Kingsolver and Cameron Crowe

... and Johnny Cash, and Martin Scorcese, and Alfred Kazin, and Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray, and Elliott Smith, and the White Stripes, and my friend Jared Horowitz's songs, and the dear departed Dusky Silo...
whenever I'm away from home for a long time I get so attached to sincerely American art. My rehearsal ended early today so I went to an 11:30 AM showing of Elizabethtown. By technical standards a pretty bad movie, but everyone in it is so likeable, and the music's so good (headline from The Onion: "Cameron Crowe to release only soundtracks from now on") and it has the BEST roadtrip idea ever in it, and it's such a satisfying girl flick. sigh. Whenever I see Kirsten Dunst in a movie I don't want to be here so much as have her wardrobe. Why is she always the best costumed actress?? Wanted to run immediately and get her magenta sandals. Or maybe it was just the super-girly feeling the movie gave me. Cameron Crowe movies always make me feel afterwards like I could be a heroine in a Cameron Crowe movie. As i rode my bike home, viola on my back, huge grocery-store crate teeter-tottering on the back, with my Kirsten-inspired purchase in a plastic bag below my music stand (they were on sale! undies with pictures of mopeds all over them and the words "My Vespa!" on the front) I imagined making mix CD's for all the guys I've ever had crushes on.
There's not enough time in the world for that!!
I should amend the sentence "our rehearsal ended early." Actually we decided this morning to postpone the premier of our Elvis Costello "Juliet Letters" project from January till April. We've been running ourselves ragged accomodating the needs of the director, a famous fringe-theater dude and professor here, and the singer, a TV comedian famous for the Israeli version of "Whose Line is it Anyway?" And we were just getting sick of the music. We've done more than 30 (!!!!) rehearsals since July, and they started demanding even more time leading up to the premier. And kept using my trip to Mexico at the end of the month against us, even though I told them about it in August. It's such good music, and we've done some really amazing things with it, but if we were going to do it in January, I'd be hating it, we all would in the quartet, and Tomer, the singer, wouldn't be ready. Anyway, it's good news cause we're getting Death and the Maiden ready to record for auditions for residencies in the states, and I've never played it before.. enough complaining.
I'm listening to Johnny Cash's version of "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" and I feel like I'm in the movie White Christmas, it's so warm here, I feel like I can't even remember what snow feels like. It's a million miles away.
Oh, I titled this also with Barbara Kingsolver's name cause last year when I left school to try out living with my friend Aurelie in Bruxelles (you'll have to ask for that story another time) and everything sort of went wrong really quickly, I fell deeply in love with Kingsolver's book "Prodigal Summer" and eastern Appalachia along with it. I would read for hours at a time, listening to the CD by Dusky Silo, country-ish music by guys from NEC which I'd never even gone to hear while I was in school there. I started writing Mike, DS's lead singer and songwriter, and we had a fun, short-lived very talkative email friendship. The twang of Dusky Silo's guitars, Mike's mellow voice, and Kingsolver's green lushness... she describes beautiful women like noone I know, and there's no doubt about her sexuality, she just gets what makes some women amazing.
Earlier this year, when I first got to Israel, the equivalent obsession of the DS-BK combination was Scorcese's "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore." I even met someone in Tel Aviv by seeing on Friendster who else in Israel liked that movie! I figured anyone who was into it was worth knowing. Turned out to not be so exactly true.