Of Cabbies And Capes.

Apart from riding in a cab with a senile citizen who kept asking all the other unsuspecting cab riders what they thought about the elections just so he could say that the government, to him, is just like the French Occupation; “They have to be removed”. My “And where are you gonna put em?” quip was not appreciated. Life Lesson #152: When arguing with old people, it’s highly advisable to go with their version of the plot.

Cab rides are becoming almost the most entertaining faction of my, recently commuting-enhanced, day-to-day life. I gotta say, finding my mom singing the chorus to “a7eb el nas el ray2a” that she’d picked up on our way home from Arabic Class was one hell of a sight. I haven’t laughed that hard since I overheard her singing Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” all the way from the kitchen to the living room.

Did you ever notice that in folkloric Arabic songs, the musical instruments used are almost always of an unidentifiable origin? You can hear the tune, yes, but where is the tune coming from? Think about it, how else could one mix the sound of a stringed instrument with that of a wind instrument? There’s a sound, yes. But what is it?

It was mum’s birthday yesterday. It was nice because I don’t usually get to spend a lot of time with her, so we hung out most of the day, had yoghurt and vanilla ice cream and saw Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows. Yes, my mom’s cool enough for a half centenarian to see a cinematic alteration of a children’s book series on her birthday and still have fun, thank you.

On an unrelated note, ever noticed that despite the fact that all movie series, a different composer is almost always hired to transcribe the track but it’s only in the Harry Potter series that the track is different variations of the same idiosyncratic tune even though the composers come and go like pawns?  In the Twilight series, each movie of the three that have been released has had a different musical background, except for Carter Burwell’s Bella’s Lullaby off the first  movie that is somehow now still stuck in everybody’s head as the official soundtrack, even though it’s hardly there in the second and third movie. If my memory has not betrayed me, I don’t think it was there at all. Alexandre Desplat, the composer of the soundtrack of New Moon  and Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Pt.1, changed the entirety of the logo-worth musical body to the former while sticking to the same outlines of John William’s “Hedwig’s Theme” in the latter, which means that there’s a segment in the contract of the Harry Potter movies that states the tune should not be altered over the transcribing process for marketing purposes, thus limiting the composer’s freelancing power over it, quite outrageously to the work of another’s; which is a hard contract term for supposedly renowned composers to agree to unless the production is big enough that they have to overlook it to be a part of the produced body of work. Come to think of it though, it’s only when the music is constant that the fairytale is somehow..tangible, wouldn’t you say? I was thinking it could be a marketing legerdemain to contribute the rooting of the Harry-Potterism in the history of cinema as well as the minds of the beguiled audience as somehow a body of its own. Too many variables to one thing is fidgety whereas unvarying aspect, albeit transfixed, are grounded.