j. and i watched my favorite movie, harold and maude, last night. i think it's the only movie i've ever seen more than twice... and worth every minute.
on yahoo!, harold and maude is listed under the "forbidden love" subcatagory of the "romance" section. cute, eh? blockbuster listed it as a comedy (j. found it while i was searching through the "drama" section.) in the end, i think it's largely uncatagorizable, which might be why i like it so much.
also, of course, it's beautifully directed (by hal ashby,) full of quirky cat stevens music, and a perfect vehicle for bud cort and ruth gordon. it seems like they just did some things right in 1971 that they don't do quite so well any more. not that i would know, of course. ;)
let me start further back: sometimes i think that the media is robbing me of my capacity for awe. i see photographs of far-off places (alien undergrowth, foreign wildlife) and i become accustomed to them from four thousand miles away. they do not take my breath away; i've never touched them with my hands, but i've seen them hundreds of times before.
&so... i thought that experiencing hawaii would be like seeing it in pictures. orange sunset over green ocean is so cliched, and transparent ocean waves grace the margins of the new yorker magazine. i can flip through the national geographic and see photographs of trees that canopy so tightly they cover the sky. i didn't see why the real things should be any different.
i was wrong, though. when i got there, it was more of a balance. some of it i'd seen before, but some of it was more experiential -- stuff you can't understand from pictures. yes, the tree canopies were just tree canopies; but i watched the sunset from a cliff, with the wind blowing so hard that it undid the braids in my hair and sent the ribbons whirling down to the ocean below. i slid off high rocks with my best friends, landed in warm water and climbed up to do it again. i buried myself in white sand, let my hands burn red, wore linen and straw hats. i sat on a rock while three-foot sea turtles dipped and rose around my feet. there's something about these things that doesn't come across until you've experienced them yourself.
and... i did take two hundred photographs. but the parts of hawaii that are mine -- the parts that i can't reconcile into cliche -- aren't really in the pictures. i couldn't do those moments justice, and i don't think i'd want to. i can't think of anything more valuable than capacity for awe.
