In the past, my mother has told me that I have a way of writing that makes things sound better than they actually are. I laugh and wonder to myself if this is because I was a voracious reader of cereal boxes and other everyday snippets of marketing. It is true that what I create with words at once attempts to embody but also transcend that to which I refer.
With this in mind, I sadly must state my disappointment with the movie Salt. As much as I love Angelina Jolie, and as happy as I am about her breaking through the action movie gender barrier, I wish Hollywood could come up with a better quality script than that. We have come to the point where we are merely telegraphing ideas and going through the motions. Mainstream movies are getting longer, but not deeper! Well, there's still Inception. I'm excited to see if the film has any effect on my lucid dreaming explorations.
Speaking of better than reality, I was mildly shocked to see recent pictures of Megan Fox looking a little too plastic at a movie premiere. My first thought was she has succumbed to the pressures of Hollywood and dipped into Botox and other procedures. A quick google search revealed the truth: that the woman we know as Megan Fox is an almost completely artificial, surgically-induced creation. Not happy with her girl-next-door good looks, she has repeatedly gone under the knife to give her the vampish, high glamour appearance of an Angelina Jolie lookalike. I'm not one to censure such actions, as obviously her plastic pursuits got her this far. Yet it seems like she does not know when to stop, and as such has pulled the curtains away from the illusion. The next self-created star will hopefully also be able to act.
To make matters worse, I left my phone in the movie theater! Some part of me is even relieved. These smart phones begin to eat away at our existence, separating us from the immediacy of the physical world. It reminds me of the 1991 Wim Wenders film Until the End of the World, in which people become addicted to hand-held devices which capture their dreams. Eventually, the addicts do not want to do anything else but stare at their dreams, growing lethargic, neglecting to eat or sleep as their red-rimmed eyes stay glued to the tiny screens. In many ways, a prescient movie.
The disembodied effect of new media fascinates me. How awareness of time itself can disappear as we merge with the endless stream of data coming our way. In this era, I feel that it is even more vital to stay connected with the physical plane.
Recently, I had one of those intangible and highly internalized revelations which are hard to describe or fully make sense of with words. It was during some treasured alone time, when the exterior trappings of our self concept are allowed to fall away and we can attune ourselves with a greater consciousness. I sang from my soul and allowed my spirit to dance, loving and rediscovering myself. It was then, as I faced the mirror, that I began to sense my body in a different way. Not simply as a vehicle to be used by my thinking self, but a full-fledged complimentary intelligence residing within me. A body-centered intelligence which we all too often neglect and suppress, if not completely ignore. The duality of our existence is nested within us all.
