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[wpaudio url="http://www.werenotbroken.com/wp-content/uploads/mp3s/TheChemicalBrothers_TheState WereIn.mp3" text="The Chemical Brothers - The State We're In"]

Bob is alone but he is about to be hit by a windfall. Rolling down her little web, she presents him with friendship; a warm voice.

He knocks on her door with haste and meets his new friend, Charlotte, who offers to show him Tokyo. Bob comes in wearing a funny orange-and-yellow camouflage t-shirt. “I kept telling myself that I just wanted to be ready in case we go to war tonight,” he says.

The shirt alone suggests something; he wants to protect her as swain, father or both. The scene has a little moment that ties to the ambiguousness of their relationship, like Charlotte gesturing to take a peek while Bob’s in her bathroom turning his shirt inside-out.

But I think we’re supposed to see the playfulness between them in this scene as something between a father and daughter. The childlike observances – “My bathroom is messier than yours” – or the way Bob reminds Charlotte of things she may forget to bring, her giggles.

Then you get to a heartfelt moment like the one where Bob discovers the tape: “A Soul’s Seach: Finding Your True Calling” and Charlotte embarrassed to claim it. And right at that moment, we’re gently led back to their realities; they’re alone. And for Charlotte or anyone else in times of doubt, being there with someone who feels like a parent figure is what makes us children.

The scene fades to a disco. A dreamy scene filled with neon lights, a big round balloon with fireworks illuminated onto it while the song “The State We’re In” plays in the background. They enjoy their freedom on a whim and their relationship goes a little further. Charlie Brown leads us further into the fiction – the war, getting chased in the middle of Tokyo and being shot by lasers.

And back at their hotel, Bob tucks Charlotte into bed and there’s a moment, a possibility of tumbling down a web, to go a little further to where it becomes a little more complicated.

Doug Smith’s latest blog entry following another loss by the Toronto Raptors is titled, “Tell me you were surprised by a bad game following a good one”.

It is the Raptors sixth loss, where they have been beaten by more than twenty points. The Raptors are predictable. Pay attention to their efforts in the first quarter and the remainder of the game can be determined.

“It’s a good team, a playoff team. Probably fifth best in the East. But I have no idea why they can’t play hard every night. If you get them down, they go away.”¹

The Raptors are “a good team” on paper, but unfortunately the “good” materializes in reality in snippets. Chris Bosh continues to flourish, but his individual effort cannot bail out the uninspired collective.

“The Magic offered a three-year deal for almost $24-million (US) and Toronto gave me five years and ($53)-million,” Turkoglu said, “They gave me that kind of money and Orlando did not want to pay”.²

It is never right to fault individual players. But when the second highest paid player struts around on court, while another player like Sonny Weems who barely makes a full million, grinds his heart out, then one is forced to speak out.

“On today’s Raptors ‘You ain’t going nowhere with 7-footers shooting three-pointers. You can’t put four or five scorers on the floor at one time. You can, but you ain’t going nowhere. You got four or five scorers on the floor, ain’t enough shots in a game, in a quarter, for everybody to be consistent. You need your two scorers, outside threat and a post-up threat. You need your sixth man who can score. You need another guy that can just be an all-around energy guy, and you need another guy who can just, you know, play basketball.” – Charles Oakley³

Tell me again how the team’s problem is not rooted in toughness and I will continually disagree. Explain to me how it is about ’selflessness’, yet how many times do I have to sit and watch Bargnani or Belinelli launch a shot early in to the shotclock when not one of our players is in position to rebound?? And why even worry about selflessness when problems are coming from the defensive end?

Toughness, especially at the defensive end wins games. And the toughness I speak of is one, based on a symmetry of the mental and physical. The Raptors are an NBA best, 8-0 when they hold their opponents to less than a hundred points.

I look back at one particular year when the Raptors were 47-35 with a line-up that epitomized effort/heart: Alvin Williams, Vince Carter, Morris Peterson, Charles Oakley and Antonio Davis. Then you have Jerome Williams and Dell Curry on the bench, which gave you both energy and a sixth man, who can score.

Look at the present Raptors roster and the rest will speak for itself.

[wpaudio url="http://www.werenotbroken.com/wp-content/uploads/mp3s/BeachHouse_Zebra.mp3" text="Beach House - Zebra"]

I came across “Zebra” this morning; the first song that opens the corridor to the third album by Beach House. I followed with ears, the curious and exact tunnel of tiny doors built like a house of cards – Alex Scully and Victoria Legrand’s rabbit hole.

“You don’t gotta worry now, honey”. Legrand’s words indicate a maternal protectiveness of a young zebra, the Teen Dream, like a “black and white horse”, who loves to “stand in the white sand”. The attentive eyes of a mare look on: “Anyway you run, you run before us”.

“Don’t I know you better than the rest?” Legrand makes her zebra singular; stripes to each their own, a rare discovery to marvel on.

The zebra, the white sand or to isolate the color white itself is to recognize a procession of more cards that make up a bedroom dream; the sand that runs out where the song fades, the cards and everything, falls apart.

There is a photo of Raquel Welch wearing the Chelsea kit and she looks good in it. She tucks herself in short shorts with the emblematic number nine. The effect of her lips and the follow-through in her eyes assembles perfectly in the shot.

Priced at £40million, Sergio Agüero seems fated to fill in the emblematic number nine – a striker’s number. The same one Peter Osgood wore, who is arguably Chelsea’s most celebrated marksman.

And despite Carlo Ancelotti’s desire not to spend lavishly as he faces the exodus of key players, such as Didier Drogba and Michael Essien for the Africa Cup of Nations, the idea of having twenty-one year old Argentine Sergio Aguero at the bow of his diamond formation is tempting.

The Argentine possesses abilities that could be essential to the diamond and Aguero would be welcomed into a system by a manager who emphasizes creativity.

“And then we thought about this funny video the band posted on July 14th on their blog, where they play “1901″ with an awful iChat wallpaper as a background. Eh, why don’t we do it again, but for real this time?” – Vincent Moon

I originally wanted to write about Phoenix, but now I feel I must go in two directions. I heard Thomas Mars’s voice for the first time in Lost in Translation. His vocals are natural, unembellished. And after I learned how Sofia Coppola, my crush at the time, was hooked on the band. Well, I had to be hooked too.

“Too Young” became part of my high-school soundtrack. I rented Lost in Translation and in my room, displaced myself through mesmerism, amidst the blurry lights and the layers of atmosphere.

Then there is Vincent Moon, a filmmaker, director and photographer, also from Paris. His most notable works are his Les Concerts a Emporter or Take Away Shows from La Blogotheque, where he films in one-shot, musicians performing in different locations.

Moon’s collection rounds up close to a hundred from Montreal’s Arcade Fire to his most recent, Phoenix. His videos are enhanced with contrast, usually dominated by black, white and a sepia tone.

“He perfected a style immediately recognizable of intimate, fragile, dancing and shadowing long shows, and at the same time changed the whole idea of what should be a music video”.¹

It is easy to become displaced amidst the shadows of cascading colors: black, white, gray. The sky is a colorless background to enhance his subject. Skins turn coarse-grain, faces glow. Crowds, passersby are focused on, and then blurred. Eyes and mouths darken to mere shadows.

When Vincent Moon creates a music video, he distances himself from everything else, while still being a part of it. The direction to which he gestures to, although I have no idea where it is, is there.

The art of fighting is poetry; a skill, a craft, developed carefully. There are different techniques, such as “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”. Fighting depends on the symmetry between physical and mental, strength and will.

I am inspired by Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, in particular the fight between Douglass and the slave-breaker, Covey. In a well-recognized scene titled, “The Last Flogging” Douglass rises and says, “I now forgot my roots, and remembered my pledge to stand up in my own defense”.

“Whence came the daring spirit necessary to grapple with a man who, eight-and-forty hours before, could, with his slightest word have made me tremble like a leaf in a storm, I do not know; at any rate, I was resolved to fight, and, what was better still, I was actually hard at it”.

The fighter with moderation acquires the “daring spirit”, and notice the emphasis on the transition from passive – “a leaf in a storm” – to active desire of the “I”.

In When We Were Kings, Leon Gast focuses on Muhammad Ali’s unorthodox training of purposefully placing himself on the ropes to be pummelled by his sparring partners almost “as if he wanted to train his body to receive these messages of punishment”.

The art of fighting so much depends on the beauty of attack and defense; the bringing together of the physical and the mental as illustrated in Douglass’s dramatic fight against Covey:

“I felt as supple as a cat, and was ready for the snakish creature at every turn. Every blow of his parried, though I dealt no blows in return. I was strictly on the defensive, preventing him from injuring me, rather than trying to injure him. I flung him on the ground several times, when he meant to have hurled me there. I held him so firmly by the throat, that his blood followed my nails. He held me, and I held him”.

In their famous fight in Zaire, 1974, Ali fights “rope-a-dope” style to defeat George Foreman. It is an art of self-defense where the fighter allows his opponent to attack him continuously. Meanwhile, the fighter waits for his opponent to become weary enough to exploit, at which point the defender unleashes a counterattack.

And in his protective stance, Ali’s eyes peers through the middle of his boxing gloves, throwing poetry at Foreman; throwing all he can say in his art.

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I chose to write about Elizabeth Barrett Browning to follow up on the poem I looked at last night, but also because the collection was a gift. And gifts should never be wasted, which is why she passes it onto you.

Sonnets from the Portuguese occupy a place in our library because gifts should be celebrated. Recollections are a kind of collection. And just as your Mimi received this gift from someone who loved her, well, “you have a gift” was her recollection of you.

Sonnet 43 reminds me a little of Alexander Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” because the speaker’s love seems tangled between God and the unknown subject (possibly Robert Browning).

I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

The ways of her love are both, a natural passion and of grace, solitude. I can’t help but think of Leonard Cohen’s “Days of Kindness” each time I come across candles or “candle-light”:

There was good light then
Oil lamps and candles
And those little flames
That floated on a cork in olive oil

Candles are ambiguous, as is the speaker’s love in Sonnet 43. “I love thee freely”, yet “if God choose, / I shall but love thee better after death”. We get a different kind of burning; something that cannot be quenched, which symbolizes her love here.

Your Mimi wrote you a letter enclosed inside this collection; along with words is also a gift to you that I am honoured to write about.

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We are promised the ability to unlock certain doors through our efforts. In our minds, sometimes these “doors” literally trap us, though they are illusions.

I found an old Penguin collection of Robert Browning’s poetry selected by W.E. Williams. The poems center on the behaviours of men and women as Browning collects aspects of human nature.

Room after room,
I hunt the house through
We inhabit together.

The speaker furnishes us in the middle of things, caught between rooms and a hunt. “Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her”. There is no mistaking the connection between the “I” and the heart”.

“Left in the curtain, the couch’s perfume”. Here is the conceit, where love is smeared everywhere, “as she brushed it”, but the “she” is nowhere to be found. She is a gleam.

Yet the day wears,
And door succeeds door;
I try the fresh fortune –

Doors are mysterious. Like windows, they offer a glimpse of things we can see, but cannot touch – “Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter”.

She is a gleam as the final lines fade, “But ‘tis twilight, you see, – with such suites to explore, / Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune”. We’re addressed to witness the mysterious transitional, of doors opening and closing, keys to a certain condition; love, like a game of hide and seek.

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I heard someone say that there is nothing like reading Brautigan with a glass of wine. Today, I decided to take Brautigan’s “An Unfortunate Woman” from our shelf to read the opening letter which was from Brautigan himself, addressed to a friend.

Brautigan’s words fall to silence between the lament for one, “N”, whom he dedicates the book to. His grief for this woman can have no excess. How can words express the loss of someone very close? There is a different kind of emotion involved for a different kind of loss.

“I just sat beside the telephone for a few moments, staring at it”, Brautigan explains, “and then I called a close neighbor M and asked her if she wanted some watermelon”. Brautigan seems to look at death with lightness. But the lightness – the watermelon, the interruption of lovemaking – veils his grief.

“The watermelon was just some kind of funny excuse to talk about my grief and to try to get some perspective on the fact that I can never call you again on the telephone and tell you something like I’ve just done that basically only your sense of humor could appreciate”.

Without the veil of lightness, there is only loss and pain. And I find that the lightness should never be taken for granted or else there would only be the silence, as Brautigan stares at his telephone, or bitterness of being unable to share the sweetness of a watermelon. I read Brautigan’s letter four times without the wine, the moment as bitter as it is sweet.

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Parisian band, Phoenix was at the Sound Academy last night to play for the second time in Toronto. The weather was cool by the lake, but at least we only shivered briefly to get in.

It was a young crowd. Parents dropped off their kids on the roundabout, teenage girls smoked in line and frat guys mixed their drinks in coke bottles at the parking lot. Behind us, stoned guys reflected on doubling the face value of their tickets.

The crowd buzzed as Phoenix opened their set with “Lisztomania”. People tossed their cups of alcohol onto the floor, raised cameras pointed towards the members of the band; flashing lights created blurry snapshots. I was caught up amongst floating bodies and echoes of choruses sung. At one point, a girl grabbed my hand and thought it was her boyfriend’s.

Thomas Mars, whom I always thought bashful, flirted modestly amongst the crowd. Girls purred at the messy creature, dressed in his usual folded up dress shirt.

It was obvious that most of the crowd were new fans, as the energy calmed when the band played older songs: “Run Run Run” and “Too Young”, a song a guy beside me also wanted to hear live.

“Lasso”, “Armistice” and “Consolation Prizes” roused the crowd and the well-chosen encore finale, “1901”, erupted in dance. People blissfully jumped in the air, chanting “fold it, fold it, fold it, fold it”. Phoenix did not miss the mark. The kids rushed to get their coats, couples tightly held hands through the exiting crowds, hotdog vendors met with the hungry ones and parents waited along the roundabout.