! The Sound Of Cities

Turn on again, that old, once new film of your life - it's called the 'establishing shot'; and as it pans across your once-favourite city, corny in the sunshine, arty in the dusk and rain, the home to all your dreams, the music slides in, takes the reins, the heartstrings of recall... New York: for some of certain age, the needle hiss before the recording studio draws in, lung-deep the low lights, the clink of glasses, murmur, - the film's in blackandwhite, the evening suits, the faces too - as the silky rhythm, the syncopated beat tells the old old story of a love that's sour or sweet.. Pacific Coast: a background seethe of waves; the studio's Zen-silent; reminiscent saxophone, a dreaming horn, a rhythm barely sketched; is it the silence that draws out the sounds, or sounds (as in the haunting - plink - of Japan's films) that serve to paint the silence? ... Paris: rooftops in the rain; and yes, its blackandwhite again: accordeon plays first, a cardboard lung wheezing out a memory of the dance of love or barrel-organ, cranking out a background like an old toothpaste tube; it's only half-believed like some street-beggar's story; but you both know that memory's longing for this sweet dipped madeleine of romance and the words of love, from that endless source and flow of Seine, its quays, its honest poverty, its silver-grey and words of love...