SOME WESTERN MEMORIES

I just added, courtesy of my new Netflix account, several Western movies to my recently watched list. Not exactly Westerns (compared to my ongoing festival of Easterns which I tend to purchase), but interesting topics.

A respected traveling companion recommended The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to me, something I had avoided, not being a big Brad Pitt fan, but its association with F. Scott Fitzgerald lent it some credibility. It poses interesting questions about aging and time and relationships. From there I went to The Time Traveler's Wife, more Indie than literary, but produced by Mr. Pitt, it plays with a vaguely silly sci-fi time-travel topic in which a man with some kind of genetic disorder spontaneously pops in and out of the present in both directions. It would be like having memories at the same time as having premonitions, never knowing which was which. Like real life in a way. Confusing.

I don't remember putting the next film in my queue...maybe I did it in the future. But the next red envelope was Crazy Heart with Jeff Bridges playing, quite exquisitely, an alcoholic country-western singer/songwriter who becomes involved with a younger woman, a journalist, in an affair that changes his life. It precipitates his rehab and recovery. They don't get together in the end, but it was a nice story, with very good music. I didn't know Jeff Bridges could sing.

The movie was like a memory, because for a time, many years ago I worked as an entertainment columnist for a local newspaper in Idaho. There were always guys like the Jeff Bridges character, and a lot of young rock and rollers, coming through town on the way to Seattle or Portland or San Francisco, stopping at our local Holiday Inn or country bar for a weekend gig to pay their way further west. I never had any kind of an affair with any of them, but there were some memorable characters. (Like an attractive Greek who resembled Cat Stevens and advised me that playing the harmonica was simple: "All you need to do is blow and suck.") So, watching Crazy Heart felt like time traveling. I could REALLY hear the music, smell the booze, sense the sadness and frustration of a creative life steeped in beer and bourbon. I'd been there.

While considering these films, today I revisited in detail, for the first time really, my little Moleskine notebook of jottings from my trip. Two months down the road, I was amazed not only at how much we crammed into each day, but at the details I would have forgotten if I hadn't written them down. They were more poignant and vivid to me than other times when I kept my notes on my laptop. I remember wondering if I should take a video camera with me (in the end I didn't) to record memories, but instead I relied on my little Casio (for which I had to buy a lot of extra SD cards). But even the photos fail to trigger the same breadth of recall than my handwritten observation or note does. The written memory opens up some other path in my brain: the photo seems to limit it. Like the difference between reading a book and watching a video. Maybe it's the difference Marshall McLuhan was getting at between hot and cool media. I think my journal notes are cool (requiring more participation) and my photos are hot, although it's probably not useful to make this "binary" distinction. Just like yin and yang, they combine to establish a vivid memory....which is hardly distinguishable from my vision of the future. It's all dreams anyway. But as Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) says in Crazy Heart, "Ain't rememberin' wonderful?"