EDIT of January 4th, 2010: I have expanded the short last sentences of this post.
Waking up in the early hours of the morning I turned on the TV and saw the end of The Pianist, a mostly silent journey through towns in spectacular states of destruction, before the arrival of the Russions. The closing credits feature a close up of a pianist playing what I thought was a concerto... it's a chopin polanaise for piano and orchestra. The first words spoken thereafter on this IFC channel were announcing an upcoming show... Someone in the ad asked, "Isn't masturbation a form of prayer?" reminding me of the play I'd seen earlier, Viral by Mac Rogers, a Gideon Production. Playwright Mac Rogers articulately takes his audience on a descent into a realm we'd never imagine entering. As it confronts someone's need for suicide, it addresses the state of mind of one who is there... In fact, I thought that state of mind would pervade into others, but no, it is unique to the one character, and the transformed character is a woman who grasps her own identity by rejecting the temptation of the soon-to-be-deceased. I so respect and admire the ambitous scope and risk of the work. Last year's Hail Satan was uniquely humourous in its conviction. Here again there is attention to boss helper domination, but the whole viral enterprise is so enobled that I was forced to confront my general confusion about suicide... The one thing I know in my life is that I'm going to die, so the need for acceleration escapes me. Our material presence exists as a blip in time, although I'm sure it's eternal in some other dimension...Moving right along to the standard fare that inspires me as I attempt a musical coherency for A Question of Solitude was the further return on TV of the Kubrick film, Lolita... You can turn to a Turner Classic movie on demand menu and press play... I always identify Lolita as containing the great example of a real time scene... the diary discovery into the car accident... Seeing th 20 mintues last night I remembered the forbidden nature of human attraction surpassing unhindered attraction. Then I thought, oh, yes, of course, Pianist Director Roman Polanski suffered some euro-ostracism in America for a collision similar to Humbert's... My exposure to Lolita was at an age of, well, 15. At for the quote from the IFC channel that "masturbation is a form of prayer," as it relates to the play, "Viral:" Viral addresses that the collective observation of an event (a suicide) can be achieved through the use of RECORDING EQUIPMENT. It announces a market for recordings documenting the passing from the body of life. The willing participant in a documented suicide is the gold mine. With not a hint of cancer or some other slow torture to rationalize the death decision, the decider decides on suicide... We confront the right to die against the right to life... Our presence or absence makes a great difference in the material world...
