Chris has recently posted about Moulin Rouge. Betsy and I saw Moulin Rouge when it came out, and I thought the movie was pretty good for what it was -- a kind of crazy art piece set to music.

I admit that I don't get out much, and am generally easily entertained. But seeing M.R. on the big screen with decent sound was an interesting sensory experience.

I had a deeper such experience years ago whew I first moved to New York. There was a Philip Glass score for a movie directed by Coppola (I think), and the movie was Koyaanisqatsi, which is a Hopi Indian phrase meaning "life out of balance", "crazy life", "a way of life that calls for another way of living". I had seen the movie shown in a campus lecture hall when I was a grad student at UIUC , and I found the experience very moving. In New York, there was a screening at Lincoln Center (Avery Fisher Hall), with the movie shown as usual, but with live music instead of the soundtrack. There was a choir and all the requisite instruments, and a conductor with headphones who kept the whole thing together. This was a religious experience. To this day, if I put on the sound track to Koyaanisquatsi, it takes me somewhere else.

I named my 16' Hobie Cat after the movie, using a trilingual pun: "The Koyaanis Katze". A Hopi Cat, sailing out of balance, a crazy life.

Posted by: James at February 17, 2003 12:24 AM