Lachrymosa (Piers)

Dear Piers,

° No, not the most famous chorus Mozart never wrote.

° No, not the plaintive orcan cry of a ridden whale.

° No, not even the effect of autumn clematis pollen on my eyes, not to speak of the Cat's.

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° Quiz: What's the common thread in these four flicks?

Whale Rider

De-Lovely

The Saddest Music in the World

The Story of the Weeping Camel

Yes, little Pup, they're four movies I've seen, but let's just click on Advanced Search and run it through our brains one more time, miao!

° Yes, you have it: all the musick in 'em is sad.

° Why wouldn't the little Maori be sad, whether because her genius had been sexistly stifled so many years, or in the end because her triumph had put her for ever outside, even if for ever above?

° Why wouldn't Isabella Rossellini be sad, with a leading man left over from Kids in the Hall?

° Why wouldn't Dude be sad, with Ugna stealing every scene? And the camels--no wonder JudaeoChristianIslamists are archetypically so hangdog, such moans you never heard, worse than the Mongolian mistral itself.

° Why wouldn't Let's Misbehave be weeping its little eyes out, trapped in such a conventional, uptight, nearflop as it is?

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° There's another thread common to the four.

° No karaoke. ((Susyn Reeve--vide infra Susyn Reeve in Silence (Coz)--or just ask him as he slowly hands you your wakeup brew next Sunday--innocently advises simple singing as a technique for Present contentment. Her worthy interviewer at once remembers that karaoke machine she bought and never used. Susyn smiles, and I bite my tongue.)) That is, Musick is for real, it's not a dragqueen moviefake liveBritneyshow joke.

° De-Lovely commemorates my mother's music, for she was brought up to play showtunes--think Red Sails in the Sunset, think Merry Widow--and galops de salon around the homefires, for a shallow but genuinely appreciative audience.

° The Saddest Music in the World doesn't just make a pretty penny off competitive musickation, it actually does contain (from the hands of the Armenian cellist) the saddest music in the world, the music of the bereft Swan.

° Whale Rider gives us music that humans have imitated from that profounder race, Musick as spell and language.

° And The Weeping Camel gives us--

° --Simplified Anglican Chant, in Mongolese.

° You have to hear it to believe it.

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° A white camel colt, born in difficult presentation to its heifer mother, who, not unlike human mothers perhaps, rejects the baby that threatened her own death.

° I figure I was the only one in the audience, in any of its urban arthouse audiences, who had had firsthand experience with the problem. I speak of cattle, not of my own nearmurderous or of my brother's protracted breech birth. If a cow doesn't happen to smell and recognise her calf within a crucially short period, she'll kick him off when he comes to suck. Must be bottlefed, weaned as quickly as possible to Purina calfration, there's nothing else to do. If it's a heifer's first failure, she gets to live again till next season. Otherwise, whack--!

° Ugna's mother uses a leathernippled horn for the bottlefeeding. But she is dealing with some piece of camelflesh in little Albo. Something must be done.

° And what do they do?

° They search out a violinist--it's really a twostring cellino--to help them perform the Ritual of Reconciliation, don't bother looking it up in the Prayerbook.

° The instrument, tricked out in Buddhablue silk, is hung on the mother's front hump (these are Bactrians), where its strings vibrate sympathetically with her dissatisfied sobs, and with the everpresent wind. Then, taking that as the tonic, Ugna's mother begins to stroke the side of the Mother and to cantillate on a threenote up, fournote down melody, over and over. At times the violin joins, at times it proceeds alone. And yes, it's exactly like your accompaniments of the Simplified Chant, one feels the six or seven notes as home notes, one hears an arabesque garniture of ornamenting portamenti.

° Success. Reconciliation.

° I don't, as one of our tenantwomen used to say, know how that would be. But why not? Why shouldn't Orpheus still make stones sentient, Eurydices respirant?

° Afterwards, there's a singalong in the giant drum of a leatherskinned tent whose interior is all handwoven rugs, chinesered painted ceiling beams, brocade silk, hard rock candy, and milk served in a hundred cunning disguises. Camel milk, goat milk, sheep milk, yak milk, mare milk, floods and oceans of milk. Only a plastic potty lid, a pair of eyeglasses to jar the ageold scene.

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° Ah yes, the Prayerbook.

° Their religion? The grandmother sacrifices spoonfuls of milk to the Cardinal Points. The entire family tie Buddhablue silk to a Postintheground and sacrifice a dish of milk in thanksgiving for a successful calving season.

° No yammering sermon.

° Just spilt milk and blue silk.

° And plain chant.

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° I'm fixing to revisit Città Universitaria, come with?

° l'artist-ino.blogluogo.su. Just click on the ruddybrown--o Coz, who will deliver me from my utter linklessness?

° "I'm actually playing more since I quit lessons. My dad gave me two books of Haydn, the Bach keyboard transcriptions . . . ."

° What will he study? What will his life be? What organic place will music retain in his life?

° Or will he be seduced by the corner karaoke bar and wind up singing True Love, as mournful as a dromedary, as woebegone as Ashley Judd?

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° Rob Brezsny nailed Pisces this Summer (just ask Nathan about Mrs. Watling, vamoosed to Santa Barbara to become Fortuna's favourite; you don't hear even me whining). Rob Brezsny nailed Virgo this Summer (you should see what Sandy's achieved in revamping my mother's house).

° Rob Brezsny will've nailed Libra this Summer, and any day now I expect astoundingly good news from you. ((Holy Cross was on the rim of my coffee cup this morning, perhaps that's meant for you?))

° In full confidence that you will soon have your own magnificent whale to ride, or at least a spellbound white camel colt, I remain ever,

° Woofing, Giac.