Gary Numan: Cars - Song Meaning

I think of this song being about isolation. And using 'cars' as a metaphor. Gary Numan suffers from a form of Autism called Asperger's Disorder. A car could represent isolation and distance, being in a metaphysical cocoon inside the world, yet completely detached from it. I don't know but I do know I have analysed this song for ages today.

He talks about locking himself away, and how it makes him feel safe. Gives him time to himself, and time to think, but at the same time his constant isolation makes him miserable.

When all you're world becomes too much, sometimes you need to leave it, and isolate yourself. That way you can get yourself together, contemplate all that is making you feel the need to be alone. You don't have to give yourself out to all that stresses you, and you are able to once again collect yourself and stablize once more. But, at the same time you bottle things up, and you become dependent on your isolation. Slowly it kills you, and truly is what you need is someone to be there with you, that could be what he means when he says, "Will you visit me please, if I open my door?". Eventually, after all of your isolation, you start to think too much, and your thoughts turn in a direction where they really have no business being like depression and suicide etc..

Or it could be about feeling safe in your car. Simple as that. 

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldyx3KHOFXw

Tim Odell: Another Love - Song Meaning

• I hear the song being about him, him being with a new partner and then describing how he can't commit emotionally to that person because he was hurt so badly by his previous (another) love. The song repeats the line "all my tears have been used up on another love" and he describes scenarios that won't be the same as they were with his previous partner.
  
  This is quite a depressing song and therefore i think the second music video that was made, tried to capture that situation whilst adding a twist and happier ending.
  
  The video has him putting up missing posters of a woman which really just represents what's been missing from his life since his old partner. He then finds the woman who represents his new partner, he runs away, not realising that in front of him is everything he is missing from his previous partner... until the end when he finally holds hands with her realising that she is what he's been missing. Adding a link to this video...check it out.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e-aaencD-dY

The All American Rejects: Gives You Hell - Song Meaning

What a song by a fantastic band, I think it's obviously a direct message to someone who broke his heart, probably because she thought he wasn't going to make it anywhere in life, and left him for someone with a promising future. Now, he hardly has to do anything besides rock out every once in a while lol, and all in all has a much easier and exciting life than the so called "successful" person with that promising future she probably left him for. The singer wants to rub it in that he's successful, while the heartbreaker lives a mediocre life instead of what she could have had with him, still working that 9-5. I say it's a direct message because of the line, "When you hear this song, and sing along, but never tell. Hope it gives you hell...etc." I personally picture the "heartbreaker" singing the song with a stressed look on her face with her friends, knowing that the song is directly about her, but everyone around her thinks its just a song.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A6APxbBYnoo

One of those bloody days!!!

I was watching my usual Sunday morning programme 'Sunday Brunch' when i felt compelled to listen to my music and share what the song means to me, or share a life event of mine that the song reminds me of.

On another note, I'm starving!!

Movie review - Maniac

I watched the movie 'Maniac' again this morning, now I'm normally against the Hollywood remakes but this was very well done...even though I almost wrote it off due to the star casting...I mean Elijah Wood..Frodo as a homicidal psycho...WTF????

The two things that set 1981’s MANIAC apart from its murder-movie brethren , Joe Spinell’s performance, and the way William Lustig captured late 1970s Manhattan at its seedy worst can literally never be duplicated, which posed a challenge to anyone attempting an honorable remake. So it’s one of the new film’s achievements that it showcases a very different lead actor and setting while still feeling like the original MANIAC movie.

So a remake of the 1981 original starring Elijah Wood who reveals a whole new side of his talents as the 21st-century Frank, and does so with very limited screen time...could it work??? The gambit here is to present almost the entire story through Frank’s eyes, an extension of the killer’s point of view gimmick (think 1978's Halloween) and slasher-movie's of the early 1980s. Putting the audience in a murderer’s shoes risks identification with his horrible acts, but the approach is defensible in MANIAC because we see everything, not just the moments in which he stalks and slays his prey, which become just part of an overall subjective experience, rather than the only moments in which we are asked to step into the madman’s mind. From start to finish, it’s a portrait of a serial killer told from the inside, not the outside.

That said, watching the almost exclusively female victims panic, plead and scream before being horribly dispatched is certainly unnerving, and the payoffs are as grisly as they were back in 1981, with graphically extreme special makeup by Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger (Tom Savini's prodigy) and an abundance of wet, crunchy sound FX. The explicitness of the gore is all here, and of course Frank wouldn’t look away as he perpetrated his foul acts, so neither do we as the audience. One of the few times the camera detaches from his line of sight is during his most savage act of butchery. If MANIAC dares you to keep watching at times, it is well made enough to make you want to stick with it.

With Manhattan no longer the danger zone it was back in Lustig’s day, director Franck Khalfoun shift's the setting to an unnamed city represented by the danker sides of Los Angeles. Skilled cinematographer Maxime Alexandre turns the City of Angels into an urban hell, where the nighttime streets, subway, parking areas etc. are believably deserted and threatening. Though the location is recognisably American, Khalfoun and Alexandre grace the movie with a bleak European look, an atmosphere furthered by the terrific, vintage-sounding synthesizer score.

Moving through it all is Wood, whose brief self-glimpses in mirrors and other reflective surfaces and running voiceovers are more than enough to imprint Frank’s disturbed psyche on our own minds. As unbalanced as we know he is, Wood’s unimposing stature and big blue eyes make it plausible that his soon to be victims don’t initially perceive him as a threat, and one area in which this MANIAC significantly improves on its predecessor is that it’s a lot more credible that this Frank could forge the tentative beginnings of a relationship with a woman, in this case photographer Anna (Nora Arnezeder), who’s fascinated by the mannequins that Frank makes a living at restoring. Their courtship even allows for a couple of moments of genuine humor (“Give me a hand”) that leave's the uneasy certainty that it can’t come to a good end.

While adding such modern references such as the online dating service Frank uses, this MANIAC still feels very much in the rough, gritty tradition of horror films past. There are places when a little more reinvention might have been welcome, yet MANIAC is one of those rare genre remakes that stands as its own movie while recapturing the original’s spirit.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD02QssnO7w

New direction for my blog...

I'm taking my blog in a new direction that I hope you all stick around for. I'm sick of typing about my illness so I am going to turn my page into a review site.

Throughout my life music and movie have played an important part in my life...especially music where it serves as a diary to me, bringing me back to certain points in my life, both good and bad, I also use music to document things in my life, by concentrating on a certain song...bookmarking a specific event that a song will take me right back too.

So first song up is Dice by Finley Quaye ft William Orbit...I love this song.

To me the lyrics take on a few meanings,
One being about losing someone you love, but the meaning of the dice...I almost think it could be about the past with the person that was lost, to the time when they were actually together and another explanation could be that the dice rolling is hypothetical/optimistic/wishful thinking...looking back on a situation and idealising it to the point of, "I've lost you, but nothing would compare to you coming back to me, taking the chance and saying you love me" I dunno, maybe it's a stretch....

The song is probably intended it to be about taking the gamble to tell someone how you feel. But it fits so beautifully to mean what i first took it to mean, so let me throw in this curve ball....

The song (at least to me) is about losing the one you love, so "I was crying over you" is the grieving" and "i am smiling, i think of you. Where your gardens have no walls" is the peace of mind they get from thinking of there loved one in a better place, where they are happy and free (no walls). And "breath in the air, if you care, you compare, dont say farewell" is the writers advice to others to just stop and realise that there still with them.

Then to be really interesting "When you roll the dice and swear your love for me". My first thought when i had this theme in my head was of the fortune teller type thing of asking a question and using the dice to give an answer (with the belief that the dead can manipulate the roll) so on asking the question, they got an answer that can put them at peace. Which nothing can compaire to.

The line "Virtuous sensibility, escape velocity" says to me how there good life means in death the can find peace, escape the velocity of every day life.


Of course I see it also as wishing for a certain loved one, a loved,
 one has gotten under your skin, controls your thoughts and only having your wishes that you will hear those words, that it will all work out. See below for the song.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RcxQxh6J83I

Acceptance

Finding acceptance

I thought seeing as I have just reached my 37th birthday, I thought i would reflect on my time with MS. I have tried to make it my bitch to no avail, so I have went down the route of acceptance, a route I fought like most sufferers.

I understand now, it's the lifestyle changes you make, that you have to make that keep you a bit more comfortable, these changes have to be embraced. I don’t do the whole getting wasted anymore, I’m a bit too old for that now.  I do however, enjoy my takeaway food...basically all that's bad for you if you read Dr Wahls books but I have cut down but struggling to stop completely. My walking has went to the dogs, so has my muscle tone or lack not to mention not being able to sleep. So gone are the rides in my Mustang of late and hello to spending some good quality time with my track suit bottoms....I swear I feel my life blood being sucked out of me when I pull these mothers on!!

So on reflection, I realised there is a very specific theme present throughout the entirety of my thoughts.  Acceptance.  Yes, just that one oh-so-simple word… Acceptance.

What did I need to accept in my life?

Let me give you some background to this…

Ok, so I walk funny, and yeah I talk funny sometimes, too.  Did you notice those massive intention tremors?  I also have a thing now that I nickname the 'Death Grip', mainly just noticed this week, on picking things up sometimes, I struggle to release my grip. My balance is non existent, restless legs, pins and needles....are you still here?

That is not an extensive list of symptoms but it gives you an insight, I maybe can't do all I did before, so I guess just because my super powers make certain things in my life more difficult, it doesn’t mean I can’t live a full life

Acceptance...

I have accepted my abilities.  I do embrace what my body can do.  I try to push my own limits and test my fears while still respecting my abilities.  My acceptance comes not only from other individuals surrounding me but also from within myself.

I guess that’s what this journey is all about anyway, right?  Finding peace from within?  I suppose my journey began to show me ways in which I needed to grow in order to not become complacent.  I probably needed my ego shot down a few notches as well but that’s beside the point!

Although I always said I accepted myself the way I was no matter what happened, did I really?  Nah.  So I was placed on a journey. I was placed on the road that was a bit rockier than the road I envisioned.

My road sure as hell isn't easy…

But at least I’m finding that peace and acceptance!

But of course I have many things to be thankful for...and we all should not loose sight of the fact...whenever you feel life has dealt you a curve ball or everything seems to be going wrong...things could always be a lot worse!!