Virginia Is For Families

It’s Monday Morning and the sun is shining.  The Oscars are in the history books or at least on Youtube for another year.   I was happy to see Monique receive the Best Supporting Actress award.   She gave an awe inspiring performance in Precious.   Sandra Bullock won Best Actress and she really did a fantastic job as well.    Christoph Waltz won Best Supporting Actor for playing a Nazi in a way we have not seen before now.   Maybe Hogan’s Heroes was the starting point for his portrayal.   I don’t know.  But he went way beyond the cartoon character of Colonel Klink.

I didn’t see Jeff Bridges play the worn out country singer so I can’t really comment on his performance.  My favorite JB film will always be the movie Fearless.   The story is one that takes me to a place you may recognize if you read some of the poetry here.  And the music is the very original work of  Henryk Gorecki.   It also takes me to that place.   Right around minute 16 of part one is a good launching pad for “spiritual flight” in my opinion.  Want to  try it out?

Learn to fly. . .

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Play Symphony No. 3  Symphony of Sorrowful Songs  I

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I really must say that the show  was entertaining this year in a way that it often is not.  Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin were very funny as they made sure that nobody took themselves too seriously.   It should be an evening about art not politics and it was a success  in this regard although a film about Iraq won many of the major awards including Best Film.

You can argue whether it won because of its artistic merit including the performances of the actors or because it was about the war and our sons and daughters risking life and limb in that awful place.  Or perhaps we can say it was both of these things that brought the voters here.  In any case a record was set for the film with the lowest gross receipts winning Best Film.   That should change now.

More people will see the film.  Could that be a motivation?  Almost everyone has already seen Avatar.  Maybe the movie public needs more than fantasy at this point in time.  There’s some heavy thinking going on. . .

Craig Ferguson, the late night talk show host for CBS, was very tired from doing promotional work late one night when he landed at a party hosted by a friend, Jeffrey Scott Carroll. He and Jeffrey were talking when “the most incandescently shimmering vision of a woman” he had ever seen came over to them. He noted that at this point he lost his cool which as we know is an unusual occurrence for this outgoing Scottish lad. Craig had just met his future wife.

He reports that he said something like “Hello, you’re lovely, I love you, you have nice hair, let’s get married.” I’m sort of skeptical about that but who knows? Megan Wallace Cunningham is from a Scottish family. Her father emigrated from Edinburgh with little or no money as a young man and made his fortune here. She knew a great deal about Scotland and I’m sure Craig enjoyed filling in some of the details she may have not known or forgotten during the months of phone calls across the continent that followed.

Eventually they began living together and were married. Craig notes that Megan is “strong and patient and kind and nurturing and funny and knows about art”. Art is clearly important to Craig and he mentions it in this video interview with David Eisner. Art that celebrates humanity in some way is very important to him. I think we can see this in the way he writes and also in the way he does some things in his late night show. Is he thinking about someday moving to a larger stage to present his brand of creativity to a bigger audience? Certainly he seems ambivalent about it in this video. A move to 11:30 when Dave finally retires or has health issues during the upcoming trial might impinge upon his style.

But here is what he says in his book American On Purpose: “No one has remotely suggested to me, as I write this, that I should take over for David Letterman when he retires, but I would say it’s a little more likely than it was when I first visited the show, and I certainly would be more interested in the idea now than I was then. We’ll see.”

That sounds fairly contradictory to what he is saying to David Eisner and it looks like both the interview and the book were done in 2009. So we shall see.

As David Letterman says on the back of Craig’s book, “Craig Ferguson is so much more than a harmonic vibration of the stars, the universe the heavens, and eternity. Craig Ferguson is full of sh!t. Enjoy the book.”

A lot of us enjoy, admire and even love in some strange way this rogue-ish character with the Scottish charm and quick wit (inherited from his mother’s side of the family). We hope that he will someday soon inherit the mantle of CBS Late Night Host just so we can stop listening to him complain about the lighting where he is now.

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Here is a very comforting work that transcends our culture and talks about something far greater than romance in our modern sense. In India many feel the presence of the Divine Mother around them every day as they go about their work and other activities. They talk about her too. I imagine it is far more helpful than, for example, our soap operas on the television or magazines in the grocery store line. It would really help us here in the US to have daily conversations about The Divine in whatever way we might conceive of Him/Her/Them. Instead we have formulated rules of social conduct that pretty much prohibit discussion of spiritual subjects. Why? Well. . .

It really would be more helpful to have discussions that don’t follow the “my way is best” story line. The notion that you should be a follower of this one or that one or you will burn up for eternity is something that drives me crazy. Does that really sound like something God would do? Doesn’t it sound just a little bit like something a group of men would come up with?

This is such a lovely video. And the artist has perhaps learned from some of her previous experiences the importance of avoiding the confrontational approach. Thanks to Robin Easton for sharing it. It could be about her too