Stance

The Man of Steel

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 10:18:22 +0800

“Awesome!” exclaimed Una right after we walked out of theater.
***
I do not go out on Friday nights. Not in the same context as most people do. But for a story from my generation with Christopher Nolan’s touch, whose brilliance has been put through paces, I’d brave a rainy night and encourage those dear to me to take a break. Movies like this don’t come along often. I understand better than anyone the business behind entertainment. Of course! It’s not esoteric! But I doubt a lot of watchers understood what the movie truly meant.
***
I love Superman. My Mom could attest I once believed myself to be him. As a purist/disciple of Detective Comics (DC), I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hurt with the deviation from the original storyline but I must say it was a riveting story. (Really, just who could play Superboy to free Zod? Justine Beiber? Justine Timberlake?)

Back to the point...yes it is riveting. Like The Batman Trilogy, it has all the Nolanish non-linear, gradual building up of the character. It requires empathy, intelligence, and true art appreciation to be enthralled by the plot. This is why those who watched the crap that recently preceded this shouldn’t have been allowed to set foot anywhere near it.
***
What’s special about the movie?

IV. The Acting. Russell Crowe. Kevin Costner. Ayalet Zurer (whew hot!). Michael Shannon. Diane Lane (Really HOT! I don’t know if it’s just my inclination toward older women but she gets hotter as she ages)? They gave the movie life in an otherwise badly scripted and casted movie (Really Amy Adams for Lois Lane? What moron even remotely considered someone who can’t act to save her life let alone portray Lois Lane?).

III. The Storyline. (I won’t say anything about the deep-dyed message on the environment. I’d leave that to the common minds). It says a lot about our reason for adulation and casting aspersions...why we call anything right, wrong, good or bad. As blatantly, it says a lot about aspirations of technology today (1) the amalgamation of software and hardware: hardware not being hard, software not being soft (2) science’s next big thing: mastery of consciousness.

II. Superman’s humanity. This was faithful to Jerry Siegel’s story. Kal-el/Clark Kent knew of and has experienced his extraterrestrial powers but he didn’t know how to fly when he attempted the first time. So initially, it wasn’t so much as flying as it was jumping/elevating. So when he finally got it, he was just thrilled.

Imagine flying? At that speed? Do you have any clue where you’d “be” now?

Me? In places I’ll never forget. Mountain View. Bern. Serengeti. ☺. Some places are just etched in your soul because they just make: (1) you believe you can fly (2) you want to fly. The reminder of such gives wings on your feet.

I. Mother’s Love. (There’s nothing monumentally romantic here to merit my writing. None.) I was struck at how the two mothers refused to let their son go: Lara just weeks before Krypton died and Martha upon learning Clark learned of his beginnings. For all the feats Superman showed, I can think of no force greater than a Mother’s love.

***
I can’t wait to watch the sequel. Or maybe the prequel. But I’d definitely watch this again.

Soon ;-)

***

Her Pilgrim Soul

Sun, 9 Jun 2013 16:15:08 +0800

This is the entry I finished writing about midnight of May 24, on a hammock in Pearl Farm.
***

Save for National Geographic and some shows on History channel, there is nothing on TV today--- and I mean nothing --- that provides thought-provoking, insightful entertainment. Those who say that I don’t watch TV enough to pass such harsh judgement are missing the point. The time I spend/waste on TV dwindled because there has been no material good enough to entertain me with.

Internet’s the culprit here. As great as it has been for humankind, we can ascribe the deterioration of people’s taste to the Internet. Studies have shown that the Internet has provided people a lot of short cuts including getting to the crux of a story. And Writers and Producers know this. This is why they give what people (most people that is) expect and are willing to eat: CRAP.

I am proud to belong to a generation with a zeitgeist that is characterized by intelligence, class, and romance. Not the content that’s crass or toilet-humored or violent or sexualized that’s predominant these days. And thanks to the Internet, it’s relatively easy to leave crapdom and go back in time.

And if you have taste, you’ll search for and find works of geniuses that are rarefied today. Sadly, thats a big if among 95% of people today.

***
On March 27 ;-) I sauntered down memory lane and watched Her Pilgrim Soul, one of the episodes of Twilight Zone. So beautiful I think even William Butler Yeats wouldn’t have raised a stink his poem was used for this 1985 masterpiece. To this day, reviews on the episode’s message are being written. These reviews are great. It somehow guides common minds to the scientific basis of the story. Also, it’s a reminder that once upon a life, there were materials that fused romance, spirituality, and quantum physics all in a beautiful 40-minute story.

It begins with Dr. Kevin Drayton and Dr. Dan who developed a holographic machine, the first of its kind that shows not only awesome holographic images but demonstrates real-life behavior of what it is programmed to do like planets, stars, and whatnot. The machine was working as expected until one hopeless night, an image of a nine-month fetus inexplicably formed.

The two were baffled. It shouldn’t have been there for any reason. But it was. Thinking it was a system glitch, they did a hard reset.

Of the two, Kevin worked obsessively. People who do not know any better would describe him as one who “does not have a life outside of work”. Carol, his wife, has been doing everything to keep their marriage which was falling apart. Meanwhile, Kevin who is becoming more and more uncommunicative, spends more time in the laboratory than he ever has where he seems to experience solace and finds answers to the emptiness that is manifesting in his life.

The one question that remains unanswered, which was deepening the wedge between the couple was his anxiety over having a baby. While he loves children, he couldn’t seem to get his head wrap around having his own .

The next day at the lab, Kevin was astonished. It was no system glitch.The fetus that formed, despite the hard reset, “grew” and is now 6-7 years old.

Alone, the child was crying so Kevin programmed the machine and created balls and other toys to appease her. The “holographic girl” responded and played the way any child would. She’s aging about * 5 months an hour or 10 years a day. When asked what she was doing there (in the holographic machine), the girl simply responded “this is where I am supposed to be”.

She told them her name and where she was from. Nola Granville from Westchester, New York.
***
What Kevin was experiencing at the lab was an unprecedented phenomena. He knew it won’t last forever and he wasn’t to miss a second of it. He decided to stay there for “a few days” at the risk of losing his already unstable marriage.

Nola’s getting older not enjoying toys anymore.

Before long, she was in her twenties and she and Kevin hit it off. Their fondness of one another grew by the day from exchanging stories and playing chess. Nola shared just about everything...her childhood, defiance of her father, her passion and her romance with Robert Goldstone who was “nothing like the polo-playing dunderheads I grew up with”.

Kevin listened with an intense fixation and unusual fondness with Nola who was charming, funny, smart, CLASSY, elegant and so inquisitive, even asking the proverbial “why am I here?”

Nola was having a wonderful time recalling the highs of her life until she remembered a low of point (to say the least). She was screaming in obvious, unbearable pain. It was the memory of her miscarriage. So painful, she had to disappear for some time.

***
Meanwhile, Dan learned from a blind man, an acquaintance of the couple, that Nola died giving birth. Robert was never the same. Distraught throughout his life.

***
They say someday we’ll all figure life out.

For Nola, that time was now. On the 6th or 7th day, all 70, she used a voice synthesizer to make her voice sound like Kevin’s and called Carol to come to the lab and pick “me” up.

The visibly exhausted Kevin was roused in his sleep by Nola who was now saying goodbye. She explained that, having figured out what she came to Kevin’s life for, it was time to leave. Kevin didn’t get any of this and asked her to stay.

When she said “I have no choice”, he started yelling “No! I have lost you before and I wouldn’t lose you again.”

(Note: As I reach this part, I am having goosebumps and trying very hard to fight off tears)

Realizing now that he is Robert-incarnated, Nola explained that just because “I left you too soon my darling”, he should have lived his life. She came back for him to help him realize that he carried his grief in his life and into the next (in Kevin’s) and that now, he has a life to live out which he must not let pass him by.

Before Nola disappeared for good, Robert (in Kevin’s body) grabbed a book a read out the second stanza of Yeats’ “When You Are Old” :

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

With that, Nola said “Goodbye, Robert. I love you.”

A few seconds after, Carol came in to “pick her husband up”. They hugged each other and knew beyond doubt that what they’ve lost, was found again.

Then, Carol noticed a ball from the machine where Nola “lived” for about a week. Carol asked what it was. Before Robert could answer, the ball bounced into their direction.

They caught it. Held it.
***
Judging from our periodic exchanges, a lot---if not most---of the people who read mycorrectview are intelligent individuals (I’ve always done things, including writing, to please myself. But knowing that you read the stuff I write adds sunshine to my day.☺). But because sharing anything on the Internet is effortless, this could end up in the wrong hands...meaning people whose appreciation of the arts is within the scope of garbage shared in social media sites.

And because I do not want to be bothered by conscience for having shared a material put together by people of preternatural talent and insatiable passion, I deem it my duty to direct the minds of those obsessed with taking pictures of their food to a few of the salient parts of the episode:

- Karma. The ineffable belief of Hindus and Buddhists which is now reduced to “what goes around comes around” by imbeciles is presented scientifically.
- A person’s awakening to spirituality demonstrated when the child Nola said with all her naiveté “This is where I’m supposed to be” when asked what she was doing there and the wakeful Nola in her inquisitive 20s asked “Why am I here?”
- “If all darkness is all that’s ahead of me, I think I can make the best of it” said the blind old man who was a friend of the couple.
- “That’s what we fall in love with when we fall in love. The spirit.” said Dan after he alleged and Kevin ridiculed that he’s falling for Nola.
- And of course, the music.
***
There are so many diagrams and symbols used to show space-time continuum but the one I like best is Einstein’s cone, the illusion that makes the observer and the observed think they are two separate entities. That there is a past and a future when all there is here and now. People truly in love intuitively know that true love is not bound by time and space. Nola and Robert are two of them. Without a doubt, what they had/have is so meaningful and important. Unlike any other. Their love is so strong they opened the cone.

If you leave something for yourself, it’s not true love. The paradox is this: In love, only in losing yourself completely in and for the other will you see your true self.

This one’s for those who have found, lost and are looking for a cone opener.

***

March 19, 1995

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 23:24:35 +0800

“My love for the game is so strong. I don't see myself doing anything other than play the game of basketball".

That’s what he said drenched in champagne after winning the NBA Finals, a series he masterfully dominated averaging an NBA record 41 points per game, earning his third straight Finals MVP.

1993 was a historic year for the NBA. The Chicago Bulls became only the third team to win three titles in a row. Having done it in an era of 28 teams of parity and defense incomparably more sophisticated, the feat was more Herculean and gave Chicago Bulls credence as one of the best teams in History. But regardless of the opinion of pundits and laymen, the NBA was being celebrated unlike before.

Then it started to happen.

It was easy to get lost in the celebration, debates and marketing in the months that ensued after clinching the title but the most glaring telltale that something was going on in his head happened much earlier. Amidst the hysteria in the locker room, moments prior to the obligatory interview, he asked “Do I have to do this? Can I be alone for a few moments?”.

Whatever he couldn’t come to terms with at the time perhaps was put in perspective when James Jordan, his father and best friend, was found dead in August in what later was proven to be a result of indiscriminate shooting.

All quiet. The media whom he had withdrawn from during the playoffs because of their innuendo that he gambled compulsively gave him the time and space for his grief.

In late September, whispers were getting louder that he was hanging up his Air Jordans. For good. Consistently voted as one of the “press-friendly athletes” for years, people knew that he dodged reporters for a different reason after he did the ceremonial pitch during the major leagues opening day.

And then it happened.

***

The world entered a dark age on Oct 6, 1993.

In a press conference attended by hundreds of reporters, watched by everyone on the planet, Michael Jordan, all of 30,---at the apex of his career---shocked the world at the announcement of his retirement from the game he alone is perfect for.

(For the twilight generation who bastardize art because they know nothing about it, Google the word “Genius”. It’s the one word you cannot use to describe anyone from your time.)

It’s a moment in history people couldn’t fathom. At least not immediately. We’ve lost geniuses to death throughout centuries. In MJ, however, we had a Beethoven who could still compose drifting music or a Michaelangelo who’s yet to paint his Sistine Chapel and he opted to call it quits.

“When I lose the sense of motivation and the sense of to prove something to myself as a basketball player, then it’s time for me to walk away from the game of basketball.” cited Jordan as his principal reason for leaving. Later, there were conspiracy theories on his sudden retirement but it’s nothing more than that. A bunch of idle minds stringing and twisting “facts’. No one could say anything against his reason. And because of his unparalleled mastery of the game, what he said was no rhetoric.

As he has been the past 9 years, MJ was his immaculate self in handling the press. Even romantic. When asked what he’d do from that point forward, he just said “Watch the grass grow and cut it.”

Challenge has dissipated. The thrill is gone.

And so was The Maestro.
***
I’ve always been in full, unconditional support of anyone who knows exactly what he wants and is in fervent pursuit of it. You don’t want to be an impediment to the realization of one’s personal legend or the discovery of one’s genius. I know of no one who does things half-assed. I can smell them a mile away and refuse to have anything to do with them.

This is why I gravitate to geniuses. They do what they do only because of love.

So when I caught wind of MJ--a genius (have you googled the term?)--- making a go for Baseball, I didn’t just follow it. I documented his baseball journey. Yes, documented. His practices. The day he signed the contract. His first game. His next. His first bat. Every swing. Every hit. More misses. Strike outs. The Bus he bought his team. The first and only home run he had that happened before his Father’s birthday.

For all the love he was exuding in baseball, basketball followed him. And you could tell he still wanted to lace ‘em up! In an interview, a reporter nonchalantly asked him if he feels an itch to return which he abruptly dismissed but not without saying “I can always come back and average 32 points a game.” His baseball teammates who played pick up games against him was subjected in his wrath. After making a jump shot with Jordan in his face, one celebrated by saying “now I can tell my grandchildren that I kicked Jordan’s ass”. No sooner did he defend again than MJ dunked on his face saying “Michael Jordan kicked your ass! That’s all you’re gonna be telling them.”

He never passed up the chance to show that he’s still the best. At Scottie Pippen’s All Star Charity game, he scored 52 points on array of fadeaways, dazzling dunks and gorgeous reverse layups.

After the game, he said “I had a lot of fun but there’s another game that’s waiting for me”.

Was there?
***
I don’t cheat. I’d like to believe I don’t lie. But for MJ, I’d steal.  
It was January 1995. This was right around when the Internet was nowhere near its prevalence today. I was at Manila Penninsula Hotel having breakfast. The Greatest Ever was on the cover of Newsweek Magazine. Unfortunately, it was a US edition and there was no way to get copy. There were two detailed articles on the impending lockout in Major League Baseball and how it affects Jordan’s stint.

But it was too lengthy. I thought of tearing it but it was in different sections of the magazine. So I decided to continue reading at home ;-).

One writer, who perhaps lived under a rock and knew nothing of MJ, noted the “opportunity” it would give Jordan to play in the majors. (Dumb, isn’t it?). The other, however, cited that MJ will not let anyone to use him and lure people to buy tickets. There was no way he’d be some side show. He was in baseball for the purity of it.

The NBA, meanwhile, was a grotesque game played by brats. As talented as the new players, they were all in it for the money. Teams didn’t have genuine leadership. The league was in dire need of a hero.

***

“I’m back.”
---Michael Jordan, March 19, 1995

Two words set the world on fire!

And my pager---yes, I’m nearly 40 years old---was beeping incessantly with messages even from people I didn’t know. It read “I feel you...you’re the happiest man on the planet” or “I told you he’d return” from my Taekwondo coach, Stephen Fernandez.

Wearing no. 45, Michael Jordan is back!

That 17-game span before the playoffs was as memorable as anything in my life. The buzzer beater game against Atlanta. The double nickel against the Knicks. His first game in the United Center. They were all breath-taking moments for me.

The Bulls would eventually lose to the young guns of Orlando Magic in the second round of the Playoffs. After that series, everyone called him slow and old. He’s lost this, he’s lost that.

Doubting MJ? Questioning his decision? Challenging him?

Big mistake!

Each season, thereafter, he added to the legend. Starting with leading the Bulls to a historic 72-10 season. The Flu Game in Game 5 of 1997 NBA Finals. Who can forget the score-steal-score at the end of Game 6 1998 NBA Finals? Each of the last three seasons he played wearing a Bulls uniform, MJ was the last man standing in June.

***
For all the highlights, what stands out is one that happened in the locker room and told by his Croatian teammate Toni Kukoc.

He found MJ sitting on the floor, playing a game on his Mac placed on his lap. Kukoc asked him “Is that all you use that for?”. MJ, ever so focused, didn’t say a word as though he heard nothing.

To catch his attention, Kukoc needled him saying “you’re losing”. And each time, MJ would say “Don’t give up on me just yet.”

To that point, MJ’s shooting game to game went from spectacular to horrendous. He was inconsistent.

“You’re losing.” “Don’t give up on me just yet.” “You’re losing.” “Don’t give up on me just yet.”

The game against Atlanta went down the wire. With 5.9 seconds left on the clock, the Bulls were down by a point. Pippen inbounded the ball to MJ who dribbled three quarters of the court as Steve Smith defended him backpedaling.

From the foul line, MJ pulled up and swished at the buzzer.

MJ pounded the floor three times.

Just before he went to the locker room, he looked for Toni Kukoc and said what’s he’s been telling him an hour earlier.

“Don’t give up on me just yet.”

***

On Forgiveness

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 14:05:41 +0800

It never fails to keep her in stitches and I even get a periodic reminder when the loosely related opportunity presents itself. I made a mistake of telling Jen about how my Lola Manang would prepare merienda for the kids in the neighborhood just so they’d have reason to come to our house and play with me. And when we started playing---be it a game or some make-believe---I'd dominate it, which isn’t everyone’s idea of fun but mine. In time, not even Lola Manang’s legendary ginataang halo halo would get them to play with me.

“Jack, they’re here.” Lola Manang said delightfully. Maybe they missed me or wanted to get back at me, but they came back looking for me (with no carrot whatsoever).

With a huge pride you didn’t want to mess with, it hurt that I didn’t belong. I forgot what I acerbically said to Lola but it amounted to “they’re not worth my time”.

With all her 70+ years of wisdom, Lola would say "you have to forgive them".
***
A lot of people are stupid (I guess that’s not newsflash anymore especially in this generation)! They claim to have forgiven when all they do is file away the wrongs and retrieve it when necessary (either during an argument or to justify their imprudence).

I was a kid but I knew what forgiveness really means. There are so many definitions but the tenet I’ve always lived by is that genuine forgiveness entails forgetting. Really forgetting. Not in the amnesiac sense but giving up the hope that the past could have been different.

This I do. And, as in anything, I do it in spades. Not the disingenuous “filing away”. I do not wish those who have wronged me ill. I forgive them which means I don't just forget or give up the hope for a different and better past. I do myself a huge favor by leading my life the way I did before they came into my life. There’s not a space in my brain for them. I may take notice of a rare colorful bug I see in my garden but there’s not too long a second of my life unimportant people hold.

My Mom always says that bearing grudges is bad for the skin. But I think the benefits of forgiveness is best illustrated by Josemaria in the great 2011 movie “There Be Dragons” when he said “When you forgive you set someone free. Yourself.” (I don’t expect more than a few thousands to know about this movie because it is meant for those with taste).
***
But there are people in life that you don’t want to set yourself free from. Why? Just one word: History. You have meaningful history with them. Like any history, your present is more meaningful when they are around and the future becomes more hopeful with them.

You want to be around them because you know you make a difference in their lives more than you or they realize. Regardless of the magnitude, your two cents on anything is priceless. You’ll never let them get the wrong specs to replace their mac with or deal with a career problem without insisting on doing it as you would yourself. And you’ve earned it! You’ve proven that Macbook Pro suits their lifestyle best and assured them that taking that sales position is the best thing they could do after doing and knowing marketing like the back of their hands all their life.

And you need them around you because they make a difference in your life more than you or they realize. You couldn’t have been with better people during your epiphanic moment. Someone really must care a huge deal to say “you must have a signature look, an identifier of a get up in your speaking engagements” and even go through your shoes and shirts and say “this is it”. In more ways than one, they’re happier for your feats than you are for yourself.

But as I’ve said before “pride is a bitch”. It makes you believe that walking away and getting on the elevator is the right thing to do after an “all important” brabble. Despite the obvious void that drifts you to priceless shared moments of coffee, lunch, laughing, arguing, crying, shopping, and teasing for 8 “short” years, pride dwarfs its value and even rationalizes and justifies why you should turn your back and move on.

Before you know it, it’s already been two million years. You can blame it on the rain, on your pride, or even the failed SMS birthday greeting that could have shortened it all but your nostalgia that takes you that time on the elevator 8 years ago won’t do anything.

You lost. You’re lost. It’s your loss.

***
But it doesn’t have to be that way. You right your wrongs by driving up on a humdrum Sunday night for 20 minutes to remove what two million years of pride deprived you of.

Instantly, you feel your life is never the same because nothing has changed. You picked up right where you left off. Literally. The same and new stories you share could only mean that no one knows you like they do. No one makes a difference in their lives as much as you do.

If only for the proverbial best medicine, you need them because no one makes you laugh the way they do.

Yes, when you forgive you set yourself free. But for some people, it’s not enough to just forgive them. You need to do more. You have to welcome them back.

Time for celebration.
***

Sting

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 23:48:12 +0800

This generation has absolutely no taste. Class and elegance are missing in their style. And what makes humankind’s destiny for deterioration certain is evidenced by how people of earlier generations begin to succumb to the virus that kids today carry. They are “morphing” into like them.

Media businesses see this. They are making a killing off people’s degradation from a customer to a consumer: one who will consume just about whatever one is offered. The more appropriate term is actually garbage collector: they patronize media because everyone else does, keep them for a while and dispose of them when they want to select from a new heap of garbage. They are irreproachable for their lack of loyalty/faithfulness because they didn’t know what got them started in the first place. They listen and watch for any and every reason save for the message and poetry.

The whole ecosystem gets worse. Since no one cares about the quality of content, musicians and writers will continue to give them crap because they will pay for and consume err collect them anyway. Justin Beiber? Gangnam Style? Twilight? Can humankind’s mournful intellectual regression be any more blatant?

It’s sad that we don’t have pure artists anymore. Those who care about the authenticity, purity, and poetry of the message. Artists like Kipling, Emily Grayson, Graham Greene, The Beatles, Righteous Brothers, Bill Withers, Basil Valdez to name a few.

But we still have Sting.
***
About two years ago, I talked to a client about the lack of art in today’s entertainment and even said “No one can pay me enough to endure bad artists”. What I said struck a chord and ever since, she---holding key marketing position in a company that organizes mark-on-your-calendar events in the country---would regularly offer me tickets which I as frequently turn down politely and passed up including a couple to Jennifer Lopez’s recent concert.

I don’t go for mediocrity or even patronize good. I am an apostle of greatness.

In 1994 when I was on my Junior year in the corporate world, I made sure I had a great spot at the Ultra Football Field where Sting held his first concert in the Philippines.

The venue was packed. Sting performed just about every song everyone expected and more. The audience, from start to finish, was on its feet singing with Sting.

With every song’s message imbued in people who were “one with” the artist, the concert was a smashing success.
***
December 9, 2012
Sting: Back to Bass Tour
Manila
Almost twenty years later, Sting was back in Manila for his Back to Bass Tour. Droves and droves went to Araneta Coliseum (I didn’t learn of the show until tickets were sold out. I got the third best seats for more than the price of the best (suckers!)). His energy onstage belies his 60 years of age. His songs are more enlightened. More relevant today than they ever were.

What’s missing was the kind audience in 1994. I’m estimating that about 20,000 were in attendance but less than half a tenth of a percent had genuine understanding and appreciation for his poetry.

It was predominantly a pissant crowd. Im not exaggerating. Nor am I disparaging. How else would you describe an audience busier reading comments on their social media accounts than watching the concert?

More than once, I heard people “ “...my reaction:

“What’s your name?” “what’s your facebook?” “add me” “sure”... Pathetic!

“Can you comment on my Instagram?”...Deplorable!

“The lights are making my pictures of Sting look bad”...Imbecile! (Outside it says “Taking pictures and video is prohibited”)

“Shit! I wrote a Sting caption on the photos we had for dinner earlier” said two caucasian teenyboppers ...People’s involuntary need to take photos of their food and drinks is lamentable. Inserting the inappropriate caption takes brainlessness to new heights!

***
PHOTOS: I’m not fond of taking photos but because Sting is an exceptional musician, I had to make an exception to capture the night’s magic.

***
Sting is a genius. His songs are right up there with The Beatles and Bob Dylan. The message and poetry of his songs are a rarity. A few of them are:

Every Breath You Take
Only a mad man can relate to this song. It’s this kind of love that’s been missing these days and that’s why romance, genuine romance is moribund. True love is obsessive and immortal.

Since you've gone I been lost without a trace
I dream at night I can only see your face
I look around but it's you I can't replace
I feel so cold and I long for your embrace
I keep crying baby, baby please

Englishman In New York
Sting was once interviewed about this. He made this song for those who lived in foreign land. And he said “there’s virtue in learning a new language but it’s unforgivable to aspire to become a native. If you think sounding like a local who cannot speak one’s real mother-tongue is charming, you’re wrong and need to wake up. You’re only fooling yourself.”

Modesty, propriety can lead to notoriety
You could end up as the only one
Gentleness, sobriety are rare in this society
At night a candle's brighter than the sun

Takes more than combat gear to make a man
Takes more than a license for a gun
Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can
A gentleman will walk but never run

If, "Manners maketh man" as someone said
Then he's the hero of the day
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say

If I Ever Lose My Faith In You
Faith is something that is so hard to define. But we all know the one absolute thing we have faith in. We need to have someone or something to stake our faith on because it gets us to the path of enlightenment. Things may unravel but we don’t lose faith.

I never saw no miracle of science
That didn't go from a blessing to a curse
I never saw no military solution
That didn't always end up as something worse but
Let me say this first

If I ever lose my faith in you
There'd be nothing left for me to do

Desert Rose
This is perhaps Sting’s perfect song. I love it. The musicality. How he coalesced violin and orchestra is magical. And of course the message of the song. We still believe and are haunted by the apple.

I wake in vain
I dream of love as time runs through my hand

Sweet desert rose
Each of her veils, a secret promise
This desert flower
No sweet perfume ever tortured me more than this

Sweet desert rose
This memory of Eden haunts us all
This desert flower
This rare perfume, is the sweet intoxication of the fall

***
I think the proverbial “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” was concocted by a con economist to make people without taste feel good about themselves.

No. Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. It is not subjective. It is not a matter of opinion. It is art. It stands the test of time because it is timeless. It is the immortal love in an undying romance.

Many will disagree and I understand. I don’t expect much from people who are too busy “friending” those whom they have tenuous relationship with yet in “just married” photos to ruminate about this. I don’t want to bother them from being so much as intellectually challenged by what caption to put on photos of their food or drinks.