Movies Enhancing Music

When geezerhood brings a man one step from the glue factory, it's natural
for him to fantasize about being young again. If he were to step into that time-machine and return to youth, what would his greatest pleasure be?

No, not that one. For my part it would be sleeping -- deeply and uninterruptedly -- all night long. Bereft of that sweet pleasure, geezerhood
has at least granted me the post-lunch nap. I'll never tire of saying that half of the reason for being retired is the freedom to lie down for a few minutes after lunch.

Although this blog occasionally throws mud pies at the Idol of Progress, the
modern mp3 player represents true progress. Sometimes lying down for a nap after lunch with music of your own choosing is the best time of the day. What makes it especially sweet is the half-consciousness and dreaminess of it all.

Earlier a friend had introduced me to the Portuguese musical group, Madredeus. They were featured in the movie, The Lisbon Story, by Wim Wenders, which I finally saw. (Wenders is supposed to be a German movie auteur. I'm not familiar enough with his oeuvre to agree or disagree.) The group consisted of male instrumentalists topped off with a lovely young female vocalist. That's probably the ideal demographic for a musical group.

She probably wouldn't be too popular in American pop culture. For one thing she has a feminine voice, not the raunchy, androgynous voice of the modern pop/country diva. Few teenagers would care for her attractive and traditional appearance, or for her lack of "dancing", that is, the lewd pelvic thrusts and hip grinding that are an integral part of MTV culture or boob toob commercials.

In slipping off into half-consciousness while listening to Madredeus, it really helped to imagine them visually as they were in the movie. This isn't the first time that a movie has enhanced my enjoyment of music that wasn't written for a movie. Perhaps I'm a part of music-video culture, after all.
 

Maybe some kind of visual context is necessary for the remarkable concreteness which, together with transcendence, becomes the glory of a dreamy state of mind. By transcendence I mean a type of "travel" experience: listening to Madredeus while snoozing lets you travel through time, and escape the sterile confines of gringo, Yankee, northern European, Protestant culture. Imagine her as a sculpture from classical times, or better yet, a Renaissance Pieta; as stationary as marble, but evoking with her voice and eyes the sad beauty of the older civilization of the Mediterranean.