Come on baby
Take my hand
Stick with me
Make a plan
Where we going
Brighter days
Handsome heavens
Truer ways
The road’s ahead
It knows our song
Ain’t no right path
Ain’t no wrong
It screams us forward
Yells and shouts
Does the boogie
Turns it out
One hand in
And then the other
Come on sister
Shake it brother
You know this dance
You’ve seen it done
Dark days over
Hello sun
***
Welcome to The ALIVE hour.
Illustration: Shannon Colon
Audio mixing: Chloe Riley
Music + Narrative: Michael Ervin
Things found in real life
This question from Louie Anderson’s book “Hey Mom: Stories for My Mother, But You Can Read Them Too”:
This construction man, with a smattering of gold glitter:
Things found on the internet
This piece from New Yorker critic Richard Brody looking at the use of archival materials in film — how a director can choose life (or not) through their relationship to the very materials they work with:
By eliding themselves from the process—by putting voices on the soundtrack untethered to the recording device, images without regard to their source—filmmakers render their relationship to archival materials impersonal and inanimate.
What’s missing from most approaches to the archive is filmmakers’ own sense of discovery, of experience, of being in the presence of a miracle.
The film Swan Song, about a retired gay hairdresser who leaves his retirement home to style a demanding former client who has passed away. Read my friend Steve Nelson’s review here, as well as this interview here with director Todd Stephens:
I kind of wrote "Swan Song" in a way as like — in order to tell myself that I could still do what I loved. Pat has lost his purpose at the beginning of the film, and he's just kind of, like, passing the time till he passes away. And, you know, life is short, and we need to dance while we can.
Magic things
Like the music from today’s episode? Want to listen to the whole piece sans words? Head over to The ALIVE hour, *magic edition* here. ✨
***
And thank you — every one of you — for listening.
We need to dance while we can.
<3 C
The ALIVE hour