I was not yet 18 and though I had gone to music camp...
for several years at VOPU in Mudville & knew the campus...
this, "wasn't Kansas anymore"...
I had officially entered "Oz"...
being around hundreds of other people my age...
adjusting musical tastes... poetry... booze...
smoking [not pot, I'm allergic...]...
love beads, psychedelia, flowers...
and Tolkien...
these 4 paperbacks were standard issue along with "The Prophet"...
Rod McKueon's poems and a few radical spews against the war...
everybody owned them... I did too...
carried them around for years... and never got into them...
that's my confession [other than that I've never done any drugs...too chicken...]
I never read the Tolkien books... not one...
by that first college summer, which was the official,"Summer of Love"...
I was too busy being free of the parental restraints...
to really read much [my 2nd year grades reflected that...]
I listened to pop music, read poetry & mostly went to class...
being a music major, I often had 10 or 12 classes [many performing groups...]
where other non-musicians might have 4 at the most...
they had the time to be absorbed by Middle Earth, I didn't...
besides, I was in my "hopeless romantic phase"...
and getting involved in complicated adventures in complicated societies...
was just too time-consuming...
as my academic career continued, I had less time...
and by the time I went back to Chicagoland, in 1973, for post Master's work...
the moment to become absorbed in Tolkien's Middle Earth had passed...
although I did visit Narnia for the first time in Chicagoland...
in 1977, the first Star Wars film came out...
to be followed by the rest at a couple of years intervals...
I remember thinking how I wished that I could see them all at once...
[like a successive performance of the 4 Wagnerian "Ring" operas...
which I actually did attend in SF in 1979...]
the addition of the 3 prequels of the Star Wars only exacerbated this desire...
so as DVD's became widely available in the last 10 years or so...
[I avoided collecting VHS tapes due to the lack of "storage life"...]
I've "collected" sets...
I've spent a couple of days, twice, immersed in the 6 Star Wars films...
watching them, "in order"... satisfying my anal urge for "order"...
and along the way, I've collected the DVD's of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy...
but had never watched them...
I own & have enjoyed the recent Narnia films...
as well as several of the Harry Potter series...
I have most of the HP books & do plan to add the last...
as well as fill-in my film collection, then I'll watch them sequentially...
[I've only seen the first 2 & read the first book...]
since giving up my TV at the end of April...
I've been working my way through my DVD collection...
and decided that as cold as it's been, [it's cold in my bedroom]
that it was time to make a fire & watch the trilogy on my big TV...
so Thursday evening, I watched the first 2...
and last night, the final one...
I'm glad I waited to see them in order...
having not read the books...
I would have forgotten the names & details...
from one film to the next...
they are very Celtic...
the music, the cultures, clothing, language...
all quite Celtic & very romantic...
[these films could have never been made during the anti war years...]
the battle scenes got to be a bit long...
but like the Narnia films & the Star Wars battles...
the computer animation makes the supernatural things seem real...
although I'm fairly certain that my Celtic ancestors...
[Irish & Scottish Highlanders]
more resembled Braveheart's blue faced crazies in kilts...
mooning the enemy to the skirling of the pipes...
hacking at each other with broadswords & stabbing with pikes...
than they did the noble armored warriors on horseback...
fighting the zombie armies of the evil witch...
with the help of ghosts & other magical beings...
[which was also true of the Narnia sagas as well...]
did I enjoy them ? oh yes... the kitties could tell you...
[when I'm rocking fast, I'm into it...& I was...]
and owning them so that I can watch them again is good...
I'm sure it will take several screenings to get everything...
if I was the kind of person who made "life lists"...
I could now cross this off...
I wonder what I'll discover on my shelf next...?
5 comments:
I smiled when you said you had never read the Tolkein trilogy. My roommate in college (my sophomore one, who was cool, not the freshman one, who was slightly psychotic) gave it to me for Christmas and that spring I dug in. Boy, I was in for a ride. I left little notes to myself as bookmarks to remind myself of names and places, after a pause of more than a few days I had to reread a chunk before my stopping place to get back into the thing. It was enjoyable but torturous. When the first movie was released, a critic made the comment in his review that these weren't novels, they were a swamp ready to suck you in and watch you die. And that's kind of what I felt like during my long slog through the trilogy. Having said that, I must say I loved the movies and found them very true to the books, as much as you can be without filming a 40 hour monstrosity. And many of the characters were pretty much as I had envisioned them. I think the orcs were even scarier than I had imagined. The director and production designer did an excellent job.
...hi Calico... I was hoping to hear from a Middle Earth "denizen" that the films were true to the books... I did really enjoy these films & will enjoy watching them over & over again...
Oh, scarcely a "denizen"! I read it once and finished with a sigh of relief, kind of like completing a difficult job you won't have to repeat!
...had I had the stick-to-it-iveness to actually read them, I think that I would have been more like you, slogging through it once... not like some of my fantasy fiend friends who loved it, re-read it & practically moved there...;P
it'll take me several more viewings to get the character's names straight...
interestingly enough, since I'm a big C.S.Lewis fan, I know that he & Tolkien were not only friends but shared their writings during the creation phases, I see a lot of cross-over between certain aspects of Narnia & Middle Earth... [especially the "there will always be an England-ness" of it all...]
the time in which they were created being so fraught with a foreboding presence of pure evil & the ultimate triumph of "good", though Tolkien's is much more temporal and Lewis' is spiritual...
BTW... my freshman roommate WAS psychotic... I once woke up with a start to discover her watching me...after that, I lived alone...
Post a Comment