Word: soulfulness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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MICHAEL BOLTON: SOUL PROVIDER (Columbia). Singer-songwriter Bolton, a white rhythm-and-bluesman from New Haven, Conn., finally hits his stride here. High point: Georgia on My Mind, on which his uncanny four-octave range and gut- wrenching phrasing give Ray Charles a serious run for the money...
...Where We Belong" at a screening of An Officer and A Gentleman. Of Course, these were all soft and fragile pieces of vinyl not meant to last a lifetime, maybe only worthy of one smudgy play, but they were still nice surprise samplers in odd corners of culture. The soul--or the lack thereof--of the compact disc is such a technological boy wonder that it will never be simplified into fun forms that you find near those ever-annoying subscription cards in magazine centerfolds...
Balzac had a "vague dread" of being photographed. Like some primitive peoples, he thought the camera steals something of the soul -- that, as he told a friend "every body in its natural state is made up of a series of ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, wrapped in infinitesimal films." Each time a photograph was made, he believed, another thin layer of the subject's being would be stripped off to become not life as before but a membrane of memory in a sort of translucent antiworld...
Klores avoids putting the two brothers into direct conflict over Diamond by making Frank happily married with children. The movie instead focuses on a battle for Jack's soul. On one side is Suzie, representing a passionate love of jazz, the extreme, the bold and the dangerous. On the other is Frank--safe, married, dependable, boring...
...ravages of time and our own folly. In that sense, the "technological fix" that is often wishfully fantasized -- cold fusion, anyone? -- has already appeared. The genius of technology has already saved us, as surely as the Ghost of Christmas Future saved Scrooge by rattling the miser's tight soul until it cracked. A satellite photograph is technology, and so are the differential equations spinning inside a Cray supercomputer. There is technology in the wobbly rising trace on a piece of graph paper. There is technology in a handful of numbers...