Asakiyume mita

Neptune Frost is now available (for pay) through these streaming services (link includes Amazon and Apple, plus several others).

In addition, the soundtrack, Unanimous Goldmine, is also available.

This song, Mbere y'Intambara (Before the War), is my favorite. It's sung by Cécile Kayirebwa, a well-known, well-loved Rwandan singer, making her screen debut in this film.

And this piece, Terambere Ry'igihugu, shows the amazing, propulsive drumming--Himbaza Club, the drum collective that performs it, portray coltan miners in the film and are refugees from Burundi.

This film is such an aural/visual/linguistic tapestry--at moments crushing, but ultimately so very hopeful, and with so much moving poetry. I'll have a review of it coming out soon, but the long and the short of it is, I RECOMMEND IT!

Here's a new clip from the movie that the distributor made available on Youtube. It gives a good feel for the music, poetry, and cinematography.

Time held a mirror and reflected a world of parallels,
of fear and longing, with no sense of belonging.
But that dissonance became a song in me,
what should have destroyed me,
what attempted to gender or "boy" me,
set me free

I read a play, Our Lady of Kibeho, by Katori Hall. It's about three girls in a Catholic secondary school in Kibeho, Rwanda, in 1981, who have visions of the Virgin Mary. The play is beautiful--sharp and funny and light and deep and sad and true and profound, but not at all pretentious, if you can believe it. Here's just one quote, from one of the visionaries:

I saw a girl. Running down a hill. She had legs so long they could take her into tomorrow. She had feet so quick they could cut down blades of grass.

The girl is herself, but the vision gets grim, as she sees her own death. That was one of the striking things about the visions of Kibeho for the rest of the world--that they predicted the genocide of 1995. But even though the play does go there--not to the genocide, but to that prophecy--it's not an oh-my-gosh-they-predicted-the-future thing, not at all. It's more about what the intrusion of something as big and strange and extradimensional as a vision does for everyone in the circle of the visionaries. It made me think about how hard it is, actually, to accommodate that intrusion. Krishna may be able to fit the whole universe in his throat but we mortal types have a harder time with that stuff.

ETA: I forgot to mention that the play is based on historical fact. Our Lady of Kibeho is an approved Marian apparition.

* * *

In totally other news, my dad sometimes reminisces, when we're on the phone together, and some of those reminiscences can be wonderful. Even really brief ones. He was talking about a friend of his from high school: the friend lived in East Lexington and my dad lived more in the center of Lexington. They would bike to meet each other at some middle spot... "We'd sit there, smoking Parliaments," he said. That detail. My dad as a teenager, smoking Parliament cigarettes.

Okay folks, that's it for tonight. I just wanted to post *something* because it's been more than a week.