I have been thinking a lot about music in the past few weeks. How it makes me feel, gives me impetus to act, how it has always been a constant. I have spent a lot of time listening to it, old stuff and new, oddly watching a number of films about it and for some reason, this quote kept coming back to me it. It is from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night - a play admittedly I do not know very very well but this quote and the remainder of it was something that has always stuck with me.
The entire quote reads:
If music be the food of love, play on
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
It is said by Orsino - the very definition of a hopeless romantic who is more in love with love than he actually loves. He craves it, needs it but has a hard time actually having it as a real thing in his life. This is perhaps a digression but the main point is that he loves love so much and is so full of desire for it that he will die - literally and figuratively for it. Is that passion or insanity? I have never really been able to tell but I know that feeling - that sense of heady bliss that a piece of music or a scene in a film or the performance of an actor gives me. I have felt it Not sure if I would be willing to die for it, but I would certainly go to as great as lengths as I had to to always be able to have it.
I had an experience last week that was a confirmation of all of this blathering about Shakespeare, passion and insanity.
A friend of mine unbeknownst to me signed me up to something called mobile clubbing. It is a sort of flash mobbing that was, I am told, very popular here in London a few years ago. The idea is to get a "mob" of strangers together in a location and have them do something collectively. Back in the day, this was in the form of warehouse parties where you would get a secret code and location, show up and dance until all hours of the night with random other people.
This "mobile club" occurred at the Liverpool Street Tube station at 7pm last Thursday. I received an email to arrive at the location a few minutes before the witching hour with my ipod. I arrived about 6:45 with said ipod not really sure what to expect. I saw lots of people around but it is a pretty busy station so was not sure if it was all a big hoax. BUT, at 6:55 everything changed. People were all taking out their ipods and scrolling for music. I did the same. We all were looking at each other with a sense of anticipation and to be honest, pure excitement. At 7:00pm, people with ipods (and some without) started to dance. Not just swaying tapping to the music dancing but full on - 50 Cent's In Da Club (the song I chose) dancing. It was fucking awesome. It lasted for about 15 or 20 minutes with commuters joining in or staring but it was awesome. Then, people just started to back to the business of their evenings.
After the absolute high of that experience, I started to think about the fact that film gives me and countless other people all together in a dark theater the same sort of experience as mobile clubbing. We are not all listening to our own music but watching the same thing on the screen. Yet, we all bring and take away our own experience. Our reactions can all be the same - we all laugh, we all feel sick but the way character walks or talks or flips their hair may bring to mind a different thing all together that is not related to what the film is about. It is about life - our lives, the lives of the writer, the director, the characters in the story. It is passion, insanity, reality, fantasy, and despair all in 120 minutes.
Film is the food of life.
For more info on mobile clubbing, check out this website - http://www.mobile-clubbing.com/
Keeping it indie,
Julie
The entire quote reads:
If music be the food of love, play on
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
It is said by Orsino - the very definition of a hopeless romantic who is more in love with love than he actually loves. He craves it, needs it but has a hard time actually having it as a real thing in his life. This is perhaps a digression but the main point is that he loves love so much and is so full of desire for it that he will die - literally and figuratively for it. Is that passion or insanity? I have never really been able to tell but I know that feeling - that sense of heady bliss that a piece of music or a scene in a film or the performance of an actor gives me. I have felt it Not sure if I would be willing to die for it, but I would certainly go to as great as lengths as I had to to always be able to have it.
I had an experience last week that was a confirmation of all of this blathering about Shakespeare, passion and insanity.
A friend of mine unbeknownst to me signed me up to something called mobile clubbing. It is a sort of flash mobbing that was, I am told, very popular here in London a few years ago. The idea is to get a "mob" of strangers together in a location and have them do something collectively. Back in the day, this was in the form of warehouse parties where you would get a secret code and location, show up and dance until all hours of the night with random other people.
This "mobile club" occurred at the Liverpool Street Tube station at 7pm last Thursday. I received an email to arrive at the location a few minutes before the witching hour with my ipod. I arrived about 6:45 with said ipod not really sure what to expect. I saw lots of people around but it is a pretty busy station so was not sure if it was all a big hoax. BUT, at 6:55 everything changed. People were all taking out their ipods and scrolling for music. I did the same. We all were looking at each other with a sense of anticipation and to be honest, pure excitement. At 7:00pm, people with ipods (and some without) started to dance. Not just swaying tapping to the music dancing but full on - 50 Cent's In Da Club (the song I chose) dancing. It was fucking awesome. It lasted for about 15 or 20 minutes with commuters joining in or staring but it was awesome. Then, people just started to back to the business of their evenings.
After the absolute high of that experience, I started to think about the fact that film gives me and countless other people all together in a dark theater the same sort of experience as mobile clubbing. We are not all listening to our own music but watching the same thing on the screen. Yet, we all bring and take away our own experience. Our reactions can all be the same - we all laugh, we all feel sick but the way character walks or talks or flips their hair may bring to mind a different thing all together that is not related to what the film is about. It is about life - our lives, the lives of the writer, the director, the characters in the story. It is passion, insanity, reality, fantasy, and despair all in 120 minutes.
Film is the food of life.
For more info on mobile clubbing, check out this website - http://www.mobile-clubbing.com/
Keeping it indie,
Julie
posted by indieIN | 11:55 AM
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