Joyful Noise #2
/Here are some little things that have made me happy recently.
Reaction Video
In last Sunday’s post I mentioned reaction videos. I also mentioned how there is a bizarre amount of reaction videos for the Righteous Brothers, specifically for “You’re Lost That Loving Feeling.”
What follows is maybe my favorite moment from all reaction videos.
Modern Renaissance Man is watching the Righteous Brothers who, at the start of the video, are singing in silhouette. The lights go up on the singer. “A white dude?!” MRM says. Moments later the light goes up on the other Righteous Brother. “Two white dudes!” he says with astonished glee. His delivery is perfect.
The video below starts at 1 minute in. But watch until at least 1:45.
Horror Book
I found The Troop by Nick Cutter to be a pretty enjoyable read. Some people were grossed out by it, but I didn’t find it that bad. It came out a few years ago, but I just read it last year. If you like horror, I would check it out.
I’m going to spoil it a little in the next few paragraphs so skip to the next section if you think you might read it.
Ok. Let’s wait a minute for everyone to skip this paragraph. I’ll put a line from that Righteous Brothers song here to add some space before I tell you about my favorite scene in the book. You never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lips. And there's no tenderness like before in your fingertips. Okay, that should be enough. So the book is about a genetically modified strain of tapeworms that are extra ravenous and fairly quickly cause you to waste away because they devour anything you eat—you can’t possibly eat enough to satiate them. So soon your body is infested with these things and they are essentially eating you from the inside out. I want to share my favorite image in the book. It takes place on an island where boy scouts are on a weekend excursion. The scouts get infested. They only brought enough food for the weekend and they’re stuck on the island (for reasons that don’t matter for what I’m telling you). Because the tapeworms are absorbing anything they can from the body, the kids are withering away. The scene I can’t get out of my head is about this one kid. His gums are receding because of the hyper-malnutrition, and all but one of his teeth fall out. But, he has braces. Here is how it’s described in the book.
“The fleshless pinworms that were his lips skinned back to disclose a dizzying grotesquerie: his gums had been eaten back from his teeth, and all but one—his left front incisor—had loosened and fallen from their gum beds; yet they remained connected by Kent’s braces, gray teeth linked like charms on a gruesome bracelet, clicking and clacking in the dark vault of his mouth, all hanging by that one tenacious tooth . . . which, as Shelley watched, slid from Kent’s gums with a slick sucking sound, a bracelet of teeth bouncing over his lips, his chin, tumbling to the cellar steps. Kent stepped on them, oblivious to his own teeth shattering like ribbon candy.”
Supposedly they’re making a movie based on the book. I hope that scene is in it.
Live Performance Highlight
I’ve talked in the past about identifying particular moments of experiences that resonate with you.
Because this is the way I try and look at things, I tend to get caught up in specific small moments in things.
So I’m going to share with you one of my favorite moments from the Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense, a film I watched recently for the first time in a while.
It comes in the song, Once in a Lifetime. There’s a part near the end of the song where David Byrne isn’t singing. He’s sort of moving to the music and begins to lean back, limbo style. As he moves back his movements slow and become out of sync with the music, and his back is almost parallel to the ground. As this musical break comes to an end there is a drum fill, and in time with that drum fill, Byrne rises and whips the microphone out of the mic stand in one perfectly timed motion. Simultaneously the camera shot changes and we see that not only was Byrne doing that lean-back thing, but so were his back up singers. And we see these two singers slowly rise back up, almost as if they’re floating back into place. And there are two keyboard players coming out of the darkness above them. It’s a very striking moment. If you just saw a snapshot of it, you could maybe mistake it for an image from an old spiritualist ceremony.
It’s a great moment. It starts a little after 4:00 in to the clip below. But watch the whole thing, it’s worth it.