Prologue to history

Faraway, So Close! won the jury prize at Cannes in 1993. It is the sequel to Wim Wenders‘ Wings of Desire -or Der Himmel über Berlin (The Sky over Berlin)- which we watched in class this year. Amazon customer reviews on the sequel bring me to this:

Do not forget to entertain strangers, for some people have entertained angels without knowing it. -Hebrews 13:2

I’m not so tight with the bible, so don’t ask me about its context. I just liked it… or how it was translated… This is how tangents work: I just watched a creepy early episode of Law & Order: SVU featuring a creepy French professor stalking a student.
→ This reminds me of Alanis Morissette’s song Hands Clean (though there it seems more of a two-way relationship).
→ Then I listen to Uninvited and Goo Goo Dolls‘ Iris.
→ Uninvited and Iris are both on the City of Angels soundtrack.
→ City of Angels was inspired by/based on Wings of Desire.

A similar tangent worked when I first saw the movie, cutting out the SVU reference. Another worked out when Bethan linked me a video featuring the Goo Goo Dolls on Sesame Street singing with Elmo about pride, to the tune of Slide (see below). It’s crazy cute. And then Goo Goo Dolls to City of Angels to Wings of Desire.

Anyways, it was a good film. I did fall asleep for about 10 minutes because I was really tired, but after that short nap, I really enjoyed the rest of the film. It takes place in pre-unification Berlin. There are angels and Berliners. The film was supposed to be inspired by the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke who was only mentionned briefly in our course on modern/early 20th century Germany in favour of people like Paul Celan and Walter Benjamin. But they were pretty cool too. My only exposure to Rilke is from Pullman -<a smile for Philip Pullman>- who cites an excerpt from Rilke’s Third Elegy before The Amber Spyglass:

O stars, isn’t it from you that the lover’s desire for the face
Of his beloved arises? Doesn’t his secret insight
Into her pure features come from the pure constellations

Pretty in English but I wonder what it might sound like in German. It makes me want to read him… but Amazon doesn’t appear to have any of his literature, not in even a collection*. It’s available on Project Gutenberg, but only in German. =/ Anyways, this was just tangents and unfulfilled wishes to read things that I don’t have the time or patience to understand to their full value. I’ve ordered the book on Trudeau’s early life where he’s a fascist, a separatist, and wrote an anti-semetic play in high school. An he’s my favourite pm in Canadian history (probably because I’m a Trudeau-baby**/child of Trudeau immigrants. Umm… here’s some Goo Goo Dolls.

*They actually do it turns out, but I don’t feel like editting that paragraph. What they don’t have is DVDs on Rilke.

**Next year I’m taking a course on post-confederation Canadian history. The professor guest lectured in our first year course when we were studying Quebec history. He talked about the Quiet Revolution (and tobacco) and called himself a Trudeau-baby (my words) but it was funny when he specified that in Trudeaumania, the pm wasn’t running around sleeping with lots of women and that just because his parents were in that Liberal boat, it didn’t mean they were having sex with him and literally making Trudeau-babies. They just put him into all those cultural/language-exchange programs fostered by the Trudeau governments…

…speaking of which, Stars mention -in an interview on Irish public television***- how they and their peers (ie. Arts & Crafts labelmates and bandmates Broken Social Scene) are the product of Trudeau-fostered cultural programs (likely something like Canada Arts Council). People have been complaining about government-funded television, film, and music for years and saying how it’s not all that great and the stupid laws protecting Canadian content against Manifest Destiny, but Amy Milan (an I’m Feeling Lucky link) seems to think after 20 or so years, the results are coming around. I might agree, but I love public funding for things like the arts. =D

***I still want to get ahold of RTE’s radioplay adaption of Northern Lights… unless it’s in Irish of course, ’cause then it’d be useless to me… except that Irish is pretty I guess.