By John Fitzgerald
5
The week of my debut on earth, at number one was Mack the Knife. I came from the soundtrack I couldn’t help but hear. For
the first couple years I did little but listen, a language machine, osmosing sound, until at terrible two a history-of-self emerged.
There is no primal memory per se. But if there’s anything I remember more than words, it’s words set to music.
Some lyrics seem tailor-made for a child to remember. “It’s easy, like taking candy from a baby.” A child gets that. Big Girls Don’t Cry is a tune I’ve known since I was three. A manipulative guy
bluffs his girlfriend into thinking he wants to break up, ostensibly to test her, but she doesn’t react the way he’d hoped. He wanted to make her cry, but to his dismay, she doesn’t, at least not in front of him. When he learns she cried alone in bed, he calls her a liar. That’s where I came from.
Love Me Do rings a bit fickle. A song I’ve heard since I was two. I’m looking for someone new to love, someone exactly like you. I’ll always be true, just not to your predecessor. Doesn’t strike confidence in the listener. I think the Norwegian Wood bird gets her house burned down. Michelle is a lovely choon. A man tells a woman her name rhymes. How swell. And though he doesn’t speak her language and they’ve never had so much as a single conversation, he learned the words I love you in her mother tongue and is hoping that might be enough to get her into bed. I want you I want you I want you. I think you know by now. I came from The British Invasion. Rhonda, my girl just dumped me, and you’re pretty hot, what do you say you help me forget her, wink. That’s where I came from.
Short Film / Performing Arts Submissions:
<b>The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process</b><br> We’d love to hear your thoughts on the importance of the arts and humanities and how this project resonates with you.: No two humans are exactly alike. Each has an interior world that the outside world knows nothing about, except to the extent it can be expressed. That expression stretches along a continuum from utter falsity at its worst to absolute truth as its highest achievement, the search for perfection. To the extent one is able to communicate that highest inner expression of truth, that is art, and it is what lifts humanity above its baser, animalistic tendencies. Art gives meaning to an otherwise mundane existence. Life without art is no more than an unknowing fulfillment of some ecological niche, surviving off marrow sucked from the bones of the dead, with nothing loftier to strive for. And that striving for perfection is the only heaven the human mind can muster. We don’t even know we are here without it.
What was the inspiration for your creative work?: My first decade was the entirety of the sixties.
Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose.<br>What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation? : "From deep space, earth is a pale blue dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us." --Carl Sagan
Photo credit:: Charles Elliott
