Ghost World

There's a new cult film in our house.  I found it accidentally in the bargain bin at Best Buy right after Thanksgiving, only unwrapping it and popping it into the dvd player last week.  It was at that point, my life was transformed.

I'm totally serious.  I glom onto movies I like, as a dog to a bone, ending in but a saliva spot on the linoleum.  I watch them over and over and of my loved ones, require the same.  I watched the thing twice that day and ordered the soundtrack before the credits were over on the second viewing.  It arrived today!  Perfect timing as I'm snowed in and needed something to focus upon other than the new Candy Cane Twist sandwich cookies a neighbor left here last night to get them out of her own house.  (I now understand why she carried them half a block, trudging through the snow in the dark last night.)

Listening to tracks such as Skip James' Devil Got My Woman, Little Hat Jones' Bye Bye Baby Blues, Dallas String Band's So Tired  and Lionel Balasco's Venezuela I feel I'm again 4-years-old watching those jerky old WWII cartoons in the tv room at Merry Manor Nursery School in Lincoln, Nebraska.  I have entered Ghost World. 

Ghost World, and this is just my interpretation, is that place, a parallel universe, where people like me and my people (as Enid refers to them) live with the sights and sounds and memories of things dying away; holding them closely, revering them, mourning their passing.

And then there's this fucking thing.


A film clip from an Indian movie, Gumnaam (yes, I already ordered it for my collection) in which an interestingly edentated Indian male clutches a 1940's-style microphone with a bony dark complected, hand and emits a mesmerizing auditory funk to a roomful of fringed, masked young Indian men and women in shiny dresses and gold lame' flats twisting and gyrating unnaturally for a particularly extended period of time.  Enid (played by Thora Birch) watches this in her bedroom in the opening scene of Ghost World on an old tv set, shaking her head and outstretched hands to the rhythm as I, too, have done since first viewing it.  What's not to love about this clip?  From the crazy smile on the female choreographer's face to her chubby knees, I am smitten.  If loving this dance sequence is wrong, I tell you, I don't wanna be right.  I have to learn how to do this.  I suspect I'll be on muscle relaxants before it's mastered but it's gotta be attempted.  Can you imagine the shape you'd be in if you did this once a day?  Eeeeeeiiiiiiiiiii  ei ei ei!!!!