Wait a minute, while I finish wiping my eyes. Which is always what happens when I listen to this, the most beautiful thing I've ever heard sung by a man who was beautiful and doomed.
Shouldn't say that, of course, because he DID live for 60 years and have a career and a loving wife and two fine sons and an endless parade of male lovers, some of them serious. His was a restless questing mercurial nature, anger and lightning in a bottle, a storm focused through a magnifying glass that would burn holes in people if he didn't like them.
I get obsessed, then unobsessed with Anthony Perkins, see him occasionally on Turner Classics (most recently in Goodbye, Again, in which he plays the most charming and doomed young man, someone you can't take your eyes off of though there is something about him that is always passing strange).
He comes around and over again, planetary, apogee, perigee, apogee. A few moons have sifted out of him by now and whirl around him in ebony-polished space, deep dimensional. Has he found his wife yet? Is that the way it happens? Berry Berenson was one of the doomed airline passengers on 9-11, and I cannot imagine a more horrible way to end a bittersweet life, the plane dropping lower and lower, people screaming and praying, the Trade Centre building getting closer and closer as everyone moans with the sickening realization that this can only end one way.
Never mind all that. You can tell what sortofa quirky following someone has on the internet by how many gifs you can find. Look up Gregory Peck, you won't find any. George Clooney? Forgetaboutit. But Perkins, hey. I have a whole storehouse of them and since I feel him in the room right now, as I always do when I listen to the devastating pure sincere notes of his transcendent singing, I want to try them out to see if they move now.
They didn't use-da before. Does this mean anything, I wonder?
This is one fine sentence: His was a restless questing mercurial nature, anger and lightning in a bottle, a storm focused through a magnifying glass that would burn holes in people if he didn't like them.
ReplyDeleteI am convinced it is better if you do this when your conscious mind has already fallen asleep. Which is why I try to free-associate those images and slam them down as fast as I can without "thinking".
ReplyDeleteMe, too, but I've also learned that my inner editor can save me from some excruciating embarrassment now and again. I like to wait at least ten minutes before the critical read. Even then, after I've signed off on something and hit the publish button, I keep going back for a tweak here and twack there. Never completely satisfied.
ReplyDeleteYes, I always do a "tuning draft" later on. I always tell myself, oh, it's good enough the way it is, but it probably isn't.
ReplyDelete