*ESPECIALLY FOR MUSICAL THEATER / POP CULTURE JUNKIES*
I just watched "Rent" the other night on DVD. I very much enjoyed the film, but something about the opening scene and thematic elements seemed eerily familiar to me...
And then it hit me. It's "Friends."
Seriously, think about it -- you've got a number of friends all living/congregating in NYC lofts, dealing with complex inter-relationships with each other, and even an initial character whose girlfriend/wife left him for another woman...!?
Coincidence???
Who knows -- I can't find anything online about this theory, but I thought it was pretty interesting.
I originally speculated that the creators of "Friends" borrowed some of the concepts from the musical, but the first episode of "Friends" was aired on September 22, 1994 whereas Rent's first dress rehearsal wasn't until January 24, 1996, so maybe it's the other way around...?
Maybe Jonathan Larson was a big fan of the TV show and wanted to bring in some of that Greenwich Village feel to his production... or maybe it's really just coincidence.
Just seems a bit strange...
If you know anything about this, please leave a comment below!
//
Every once in a great while I have these random moments of clarity; like suddenly everything makes sense and I have this peaceful, beautiful perspective of all that's in existence. They're always brief -- like a flash of lightening that burns a shadow on my mind's retina, leaving an imprint, a sense, much more lingering than the moment itself. They come and then they go, usually at strange times, and I'm left trying to stay in that moment -- or, rather, go back to it, because it was over almost before I realized it was happening. All I know is that somewhere inside that Presence is the way I want to live.
Well, maybe you know what I'm talking about and maybe you don't, but I had one of those moments today when I was taking out the trash at Starbucks -- a fairly hideous job (particularly on a wet, snowy, cold day like today), just below cleaning the bathrooms and just above cleaning the floor drains -- and as I was was dragging the heavy cart with two huge garbage cans filled to the brim with empty cups, leftover coffee, used napkins, and assorted pastry shards a strange thought entered my ever-brooding head: "Don't forget."
"Don't forget," it said again.
And I said, "Huh?"
And then it made sense.
"When you move on to a new job where you don't have to get dirty or serve coffee to bratty customers or drag two hundred pounds of waste a hundred yards to a stinky dumpster, don't forget what it was like when you did."
"Don't forget that there are people that still do this. And when you someday stand in line as a customer at the Green Empire with no employee discount, don't forget that some of the people behind the counter have Master's degrees. That some of them have kids and families. And that for one reason or another, they are all here because they need to be."
"So be kind to them. Appreciate them when they do a good job. When they give you coffee and make you smile, love them back because they are going out of their way to make your day a bit more special, in spite of the fact that nobody is paying them much of anything to do it."
I won't forget.
//
Sometimes I hear people criticize a movie or a TV show for not being realistic. But the truth is, we don't really want realistic, do we? I mean, if we really wanted REAL real life, we'd set our lawn chairs outside the neighbors' house and watch them every night.
Hm.
No, I think want we really want are romanticized snapshots of what real life can be. We want those ideal moments when life is beautiful and good (or just more exciting). We want a glimpse out of the confines of our own lives, with our 40 hours of work and our 2 hour commute and our 5 minutes of bliss, into "that" -- that something else that is interesting and funny and magical and dramatic and adventurous.
Maybe what we're looking for is meaning. Maybe well-done TV shows and movies are just condensed, time-wise, to the point where it's easier to find purpose in them, and so we gladly lose ourselves for a couple hours for the fair trade of belonging. It does make sense, I suppose; our beautiful real life "moments" are often so spaced out, it's hard to connect the dots, to make stars into constellations.
Maybe we just want "friends," or for "everyone [to] love ME" (instead of just Raymond), or maybe we're even just looking for drama -- to live in "The OC" or to be a "Survivor" of something exciting.
Maybe filmmakers and TV writers are just packagers of purpose. If they're guilty of anything, perhaps it's creating some kind of thematic gravity that pulls us in and allows us to see life at its most simple and refined -- life that actually makes sense, most of the time.
Or maybe I'm a complete whack-a-doo who thinks too much.
I suppose it could be both.
//
Today in Michigan it rained;
The sky turned a blue the shade
Of a deep, angry ocean
And the atmosphere cracked
Like someone quite large was
Ripping the sky in half.
It
Was
Beautiful.
//
(This post was mostly taken from a rare journal entry of mine back in August 26, 2003. It was just returned to my thoughts by this interview with Eugene Peterson.)
It seems to me that the masses of the American public, myself included, desire to live their lives in the magical moments of a movie scene. By this I mean that by our own creation of picturesque perfection and scripted scenes of everything from bliss to torture within films, our own hearts have learned to burn for the extreme experience and, at some mostly-ignored level, to scoff at the mundane day-to-day life that we generally exist in.
The romantic notions of an ideal moment: the memory recalled when you walk past a girl in a department store wearing the exact scent of your first love -- your high school crush -- and the lump that subsequently catches in your throat for a split second. Or a certain place that flashes an image onto your retinas and instantaneously pushes back through time into your childhood and the intense melancholy of a middle school memory. Or a line in a song... it was that very song you always danced to in his bedroom late at night, after his parents went to bed.
It's those moments that make us feel something and remember somewhere, and what we remember about that place always seems to feel just a little more right -- a little more like home, and a little more pleasant -- than whatever it is we're currently experiencing. And it feels like a movie, because for whatever reason, we remember it as being perfect.
Oftentimes, my life seems to be made up of endless droning moments of monotony spiked with occasional glimpses of something better. But these memories are never that; they are a kind of a romanticized version of my actual life, usually told with some phenomenal mental cinematography and soundtrack.
I wonder if it has to be that way. I wonder if, for some reason, human beings are indeed cursed by a need to be incessantly miserable, to not accept a reality that would be just a little more fulfilling. Sometimes I think we create our very own desert of the real, and we revel in our lonely, collective misery.
Also, are these magical perceptions contingent upon limited exposure? If I didn't have the mundane, would I appreciate the magic?
For example, I am totally enamored with the magic of New York City (a direct result of film, as I've only been there twice), especially in the winter with light snow falling and tall buildings jetting skyward on all sides. I can hardly even imagine anything more romantic. But if I lived in my very own dingy Manhattan apartment, would the city's movie mystique intrigue me so much? I'm not so sure it would.
Sometimes I think that when I'm walking down the street it sure would be a lot more meaningful if I could get some different camera angles and a good soundtrack playing in the background. Maybe one of those 360 degree sweeps around my oh-so-pensive facial expression and the way my brows are furrowed just-so, and a soft fade in of Josh Radin's song "Closer." Yes, that would almost be perfect... just perfect.
//