My eye has been twitching, or rather the eyelid. I don't know why, it just does. I'm putting it down to stress, it's happened before at various times in my existence and it's started up again. I've been watching American Beauty. Still the eye has intermittent twitches. No matter how cool Kevin Spacey is, how he confronts his life and decides to leave the rat race, my eye still twitches. Maybe it's eye strain as well. Spacey's character wants to feel alive again and he goes through a second childhood, blackmailing his boss as he leaves, smoking dope and then taking up weights to impress a teenage girl, a friend of his daughter. His relationship with his wife played by Annette Bening deteriorates a little more each day. At one point in a scene where he is on a couch and trying to reconcile things with her she then tells him not to spill his beer. It's another pivotal point of break down. He's fighting against the machine of normality, breaking free and wanting to be different. To feel how he used to as a growing up teenager. We can never go back. For the moment my eye has stopped twitching. What is it all about Spacey? The need to live, to feel alive and not dulled like an overused instrument. Every now and again we need tuning and only then can we get on the dull drudgery and tedium of routine. It's routine which pays the bills, a necessary, unavoidable reality of reality.
I asked a colleague at the Fish Factory who is a serious musician, what's the easiest stringed instrument is to learn. He says it's the ukulele, it only has four strings, is small so can be easily carried about and it don't cost a great deal to get a reasonably good one. Once you learn how to use it, it's then a stepping stone onto something else. The uke doesn't seem particularly exciting though. It's not as if a lot of people carry them about. There's no famous uke players which come to mind. It has no reputation at all as far as I know. But easy to learn does have it's advantages, and it wouldn't be such a commitment. Hell, learning something from scratch no matter what it is, is a commitment. Truth is, beginning anything it will sound like crap to start with, just like an old clarinet I have hidden away, I once tried to play it but it was frustratingly slow and I didn't have the commitment. What makes me think it would be any different with a uke. Besides the fact with a clarinet you need good teeth, once I'm old and mine have fallen out playing it wont be an option. A uke doesn't need good teeth to be played. Maybe I'm just looking for a change. Something different. Something to rock the boat. The uke is small, it will hardly rock the boat, but, if I were up the river in a canoe without a paddle but did have a uke, it might be of some usefulness.
The film must of done something, because my eye's stopped twitching, either that or the thought of life with a uke.
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