EPISODE 152: Groovy Kind of Love
This is about increasing your love, especially when you don’t feel that much of it in relation to “certain people”.
It takes off on a comment Gerald Heard made, from his deathbed, to Christopher Isherwood on August 3, 1967. Heard’s love, the further he moved away from “life”, was increasing rather than decreasing. He said something amazing to his old friend, and his friend recorded his amazement.
The cast is also a meditation on the old saw: All cats are grey in the dark. I used to not believe that, and thought it damaged the individuality of persons. But I changed my mind. I now think it’s true. Accordingly, I’ve become a cat lover. Aren’t you?
Hope the music will pump you this time: “She’s a Fool” and “Groovy Kind of Love”. LOL.
EPISODE 153: Love in the 40s
Things get heavy in your 40s. Actually, they get heavy around age 35 and continue heavy for almost 20 years. It’s a fun period.
Also, when it unravels during that stage of your life, it really unravels.
This is a meditation on love and career when you’re in your 40s. It began as a kind of musing on the music of Miami Vice by Jan Hammer.
Quite a bit of that heavy and exquisite music is incidental to romances, almost of them tragic romances, in which the two lead characters become involved. They are “star-crossed” romances, and the music that goes with them is lyrical, poignant, compassionate, and soaked in dread.
Would that the person I am now could have talked to the person I was then, at the time. He would not have listened. But I still want to.
Oh, and there’s a section at the end of the cast, for anyone who is involved in ministry, about the nature of your antagonist. There is almost always one, max two. And he or she is not in their 70s, and not in their 20s. She or he is in their 40s.
EPISODE 154: Kramer
Kramer is my word for inherited family dis-function and disease.
Sometimes when you find out about your parents or your grand-parents, you discover a couple curious resemblances between present problems and problems of the distant past. As in, your grand-father turns out to have been an alcoholic. Or your mother was married another time, and you never knew. Or you have a step-sister that you didn’t know about until you were 35. (And you still haven’t met her.)
S
uddenly sometimes, your own life starts to make more “sense”: your uncontrollable feelings and nightmares and habits.
Kramer is my word for inherited dis-function. It’s a way of talking about “the sins of the fathers visited upon the children, through the third and fourth generation”. Kramer is in the Bible.
How to reduce Kramer? How to draw it down?
Well, The Contraption is our little Rock of Ages, and you’ve been hearing about him. There’s hope for your Kramer, tho’ there may be a little moment of truth, or even of courage, that’s required.
“Listen to the Music” (Doobie Brothers). It’s here to give you a little Faith. Percy Faith.
EPISODE 155: Mandy
This is the further “elucubrations d’Antoine” concerning ministers, marriages, and Morning Prayer — in short, “The Episcopals”.
I was dumbfounded, once again for the ten thousandth time, by the way Hollywood illuminates the Church, and particularly my own, when I read Sloan Wilson’s 1958 novel A Summer Place. It was made into a pretty good movie, which came out in l960. It starred Sandra Dee, among others, who gives a poignant performance. (There is one wrenching scene.)
And the Episcopal Church comes into it, too, both the movie and the book. And what a Church it was, with always “the minister” on hand at the right moment, and surplices (not albs); and just a proper sense of being taken for granted — even being on the right side — pastorally.
Then I remembered Irving Berlin’s song, which you can hear in the musical White Christmas (1954), entitled “Mandy, Mandy, there’s a minister handy/And it sure would be dandy/If we’d let him make a fee.”
“Things have changed” (Dylan), both in good ways and in bad ways. Let’s think about this for a half hour.
There are two lessons I derive from A Summer Place, at least for the Christian future. Isn’t it good when the movies can instruct us?
Next, let’s do Soylent Green.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoyB8Ps2nmE&w=600
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