Travelling a bit further

    This is my second lesson on the Blog highway or byway or wherever/which way one might choose... I'm learning to click on icons and not fear they'll explode (as my grandson Will predicted would happen after we'd played Fortunately/Unfortunately; the exploding face a favourite misfortune occasioning much amusement for Will and Finn...I guess a face suddenly changing emotion does seem to explode...I empathise)...
...and some time later, after those few lines of text, and life's intervening and slipping away - after Film Festival joys and social catch-ups and a poem to revise, I'm gratefully in touch with JJ to guide me through this app's intricacies. Enough to add something and get out of the site safely without an exploding face....
   Of the films I saw, Faith Connection, made at a Hindu religious festival when a hundred million people come to celebrate at the confluence of three rivers, was overwhelming. How to describe it further...still meditating. The sheer magnitude of locale and people, the joyfulness, the odd and sometimes weird skills of the Saddhu, "holy men", whose apparent philosophical likeness to may have made them the models for, western hippy communes; similarities of people everywhere despite enormous material differences, the misogyny, here mostly "slant", in that most participants are men, and women mostly absent (except for a girl child's loss of a toy in favour of a boy child's want), the beauty of place, of people...
  Later Shireen, Karen and I went to dinner at Piko, the restaurant for the Hospitality students at AUT; nice tapas, pleasant people, before going to Reaching for the Moon. A beautifully made film, and again, hard to disentangle one's revulsion at the politics from amazement at the beauty of the locale, the insouciance of the privileged, identification - sometimes rueful - with the passion of great love mixed with melancholia, pain and winces and shudders at frailities of human/women's/lovers' behaviours. Brazil looked somewhat different from glimpses of it during Football World Cup fever; the beautiful parks and outlooks supposedly planned by architect Lota de Macedo Soares, the retreat she built for poet Elizabeth Bishop to write in...and the acting's great too. Gloria Pires is superb as Lota; mostly I liked Miranda Otto's driven Bishop but was distracted by wondering whether she was channelling Streep or the poet. But Bishop's poem is a haunting theme to start and end with..."the art of losing isn't hard to master"...
   Sun today! Time to go enjoy it.
 

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