Listen Up!

For this post I visited field artist, Aaron Ximm's website. I started listening to a few of the field recordings and there were a couple that stuck out leaving a timely impression on me. Personally I really enjoy the sound of water and/or the sounds that certain liquids make. Water itself, to me has always had a very tranquil connection to it. In most occasions no matter the intensity, to some extent, water has always felt soothing or relaxing, either while sitting inside listening to the pitter-patter of rain drops hitting the window pain, or in a car during a down pour, as the the windshield wipers flip back and forth unable to wipe away the constant blur of the rain-covered glass. One of Ximm's pieces I listened to was entitled, "Beach Rain." The description says, "Rain on my poncho as I stroll on the Nha Trang beahces." As I listened to the recording it felt as though the microphones were placed at about ear level when the recording took place. As I listened to it with my headphones on, giving the piece all the more dedication and personalizing it in a way, it felt as though my head was actually under a poncho, as the rain came down, and my body was actually walking along the beach's shore. The sounds of waves crashing down in the surf almost sound like thunder clashing in a storm, accompanied by the rain I was hearing, and almost felt. The repetition and generality of water sounds like this keep one's mind from focusing too closely on one particular sound, but rather allows your mind to think and drift with no restrictions, just nature's ambient soundtrack. Another piece I enjoyed alot in conversation with the theme of liquid sounds, was the work entitled, "Faucet," which was described as the ominous gurgling from the faucet in room 402. Different from the previous water sound, the gurgling of this faucet almost in some ways sound like a monologue of some sort. The faucet's own language. Maybe asking for attention. Something is obviously wrong or unkept otherwise it wouldn't gargle. This piece sparked an amusing tone for me while listening. It was almost entertaining to sit back and listen to it talk.

Hitchcock and Hume: Stage Fight (Article Analysis)

Stage Fight (1950) has a structural complexity, a narrative coherence, and a textual density that's missing from Hitchcock's 1930's films such as "Young and Innocent." In other words, it brings back in the 1950s the innovating aspects of Hitchcock's Hollywood aesthetic of the 1940s.
The acting fell a bit short, but as John Orr, the author of the article, says if one were to watch the film again for a second time, it appears that the plot and motive deepen. The stage becomes more clearly a metaphor for, "the drama of the film."

The film is about a man on the run for being accused of murder. He turns to his friend Eve for help. He informs her of the situation which is shown through a flashback of the murder which starts the film, but begins to take advantage of her assistance and innocence. The movie plays on the idea of recall and recollection, even furthermore the idea of a reliable and unbiased memory. While Hitchcock still has his familiar "sly and calculated" humorous antics in the works, he pushed his structural theme of lost identities in new and unexpected ways.

Now if one thinks about David Hume and the way he accounts reliable memory in "A Treatise of Human Nature," he puts it that the senses always depend on the force and vivacity of the evidence recalled and the mind applies its reasoning to them. Orr says "event-recall outweighs, therefore, the power of imagination or fancy, which invents things that did not happen at all."
Here, in Stage Fight with these ideas on the table, Hitchcock dissects the strangeness of the familiar, the evil within that we least suspect.