Songwriting COLLAB by Agner and Agner

Let the shades down a little longer
I just can't take the sun today.
No matter what she does,
I'm too afraid to put my guitar away.
I stuff last night's clothes into the closet
To forget about the hours gone past.
Too many worn out sails
On a broken down mast.

And to think it would be so easy
To let go.
To think it would be so easy,
If only you weren't smiling so.

There's no more room for love songs.
Not much room for love these days.
No more room inside my room
To give my blues away.

So I may scribble some words for you,
and put them over a sad sad tune
Old words sung by the cowboys and dreamers
All singing under a sad sad moon.

But what's the point in it, really?
Where here we are at the end.
My songs to you have yet to pull through
So I'll write this one to the trash bin.

And to think it would be so easy
To say goodbye and walk away
To think it would be so easy
If only I could say

That there's no more room for love songs
Not much room for love these days.
There's no more room inside my room
To let my blues just slide away.

Oh and now I'm starting to see
That writing to you is only an excuse
For myself to write to me.

I always looked for answers
Inside the creases of your skin
And now I'm left with the question:
Will this song come to an end
Where my life can begin again?

So here's another love song
One more love song to save the day
Here's another love song
To keep my blues at bay.

Failing miserably at updating movies/books/life

My time off has caused 2 things: Plenty of time watching movies, reading books, listening to music, staring idly at computer screens. But plenty of time has been wasted not writing things down that I'm really enjoying. As of right now I finished Seasons 4 and 5 of the Office in a record time. Season 4 continues to disappoint, but the payoffs come in season 5. I do have to keep reminding myself that Season 4 was sidetracked by the writer's strike. The end of season 5 is right on par with the cathartic ending of season 2. When the Office is good, it is hard to beat.

I have seen every Coen Brothers movie except their most recent. In the next few days, I hope to watch The Big Lebowski again. The humor in the movie is hilarious, but I still think the movie possibly fails as a whole. I saw it as a freshman and was bored by its incomprehensible plot and length, but that was before I had seen The Big Sleep, which the brothers based their movie off of. I was one of the main and only detractors of The Big Snooze in my class last year because the plot was so convoluted that it caused me not to care about any of the characters at all. I want to watch Lebowski again and focus on the absurd humor and possibly try and grasp some of the story. Unbelievably funny lines, however, are as follows:

Walter: Donnie, you're out of your element!

Donnie: Are these men Nazis, Walter?
Walter: No, Donnie, these men are nihilists, nothing to be afraid of.


Have also been watching movies on Best of Decade lists. Extremely impressed with David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, a 2.5 hour dreamscape. The bizarreness of Lynch's L.A. does not overwhelm the film's emotional center. The key to understanding the movie for me was the dedication to a woman who had died. I'm not even sure if she was related to the story, but that dedication made me think of Diane Selwyn's story as a sad dream of one who has gotten addicted to drugs in Hollywood and lost her chance at the good life. Sometimes you get the feeling that surrealists put in whatever they feel like just because they can get away with it. In Mulholland Drive, every bizarre choice feels right; we almost feel that we have seen some of these images in our own dreams and nightmares. One particular flourish is the Hollywood mafioso that exists in the dark room. Lynch used a dwarf actor's head and sat him in a regular sized body suit. The result is unsettling as we see the underbelly of Hollywood making choice decisions in seedy back rooms. One interesting and amateur observation about Lynch's work is his interest/fascination/detestation of the human body. Dwarves, amputees, bodily fluid, decrepit junkies, voodoo witch ladies, elephant men, absurd sexual situations frequent his movies. The very oddness of human flesh and bodily composition frequents Lynch's work.

The best movie, however, that I've seen in this span has been Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory. Only 87 minutes long, this is a depressing and harrowing tale of war and moral decay. Perhaps one of the first modernist interpretations of war on the screen. Early on, we sweep through these barren trenches, and the men line the walls like skeletal figures in a Bosch painting. These paths possess no glory, no fame, no honor. THey are hiding from the horrors of modern warfare upon no man's land. In one of the best war scenes I have ever seen (and I have an annual Saving Private Ryan screening every year)Kirk Douglas leads his men to battle across the wasteland as bombs drop from the sky. The sequence is a dazzling virtuoso of what Ebert refers to as shadows and shapes. Men hunched over spread out across the field. Many men die, and few men crawl over the bodies desperately trying to make headway. Their failure sends the movie into an unconventional path, a litiginous war between the soldiers and the beaurocrats. This leads to a conclusion that startled me with its unflinching cruelty. As three men walk to their execution, soldiers line up to form a pathway. This path reminds us of the trenches; these men can never get out. Their glory is used against them to their death. THe film's last scene involves the humanistic power of music. Listening to the German woman sing brings tears to the forlorn eyes of these weary men. There are no enemies anymore. Their war is against the shrapnel and the clouds of smoke and dust. These men have become bored with death and are more afraid of pain and suffering. Early on, there is a scene between two bards of the absurd talkign about pain and death. This movie has reinvigorated an interest in Kubrick that I thought I would never get.