By Jav Rivera

Music is miraculous for the mind.  It can produce extraordinary images in dreams and help recall past memories.  My life is full of music and I honestly don’t know who I would be or how I would handle my day-to-day without it.

L-R: Mark Hart, Paul Hester, Neil Finn, Nick Seymour

Moss (Richard Ayoade), Jen (Katherine Parkinson), Roy (Chris O'Dowd)

Moss (Richard Ayoade), Roy (Chris O'Dowd), Jen (Katherine Parkinson), Douglas (Matt Berry)

Denholm (Christopher Morris) and Douglas (Matt Berry)

Richmond (Noel Fielding)

Jen (Katherine Parkinson)

Moss on The Final Countdown

Douglas and Jen

Judy (Cheryl Fergison)

"The Internet"

Roy, Jen, Moss and Douglas

by Lisa Adamowicz Kless



I was absolutely mesmerized by The NeverEnding Story as a little girl.  Directed by Wolfgang Petersen, the film was released in 1984 and starred a talented young cast: Noah Hathaway as Atreyu, Barret Oliver as Bastian, and Tami Stronach as the Empress. Shot largely in Germany during one of their hottest summers in decades, the story revolves mainly around these three characters.  Bastian is a young boy coping with his mom’s death.  On his way to school one day, he’s chased by bullies and ducks into a book shop, where he happens upon a book with a strange symbol on the cover. The shop owner warns him that it’s no ordinary book; unlike other stories where you leave the action as soon as you stop reading, this one is not as easy to walk away from.  With an incredible backstory like that, Bastian caves to temptation, of course, and “borrows” the book as soon as the shop keeper is distracted by a phone call.  Arriving at school after the first bell has rung, he goes up into the school’s delightfully creepy and cobwebby attic to take a look at the mysterious book.  As a storm starts to rage outside, Bastian becomes engrossed in the saga of Atreyu, a young warrior, and his struggle to defeat the Nothing, a mysterious force that’s destroying the land of Fantasia.  Atreyu is given the Auryn by the Empress of Fantasia; the same symbol on the front of the book Bastian is reading.  As Atreyu and his horse Artax journey through Fantasia, searching for the Nothing so that it can be stopped, Bastian realizes that the shop owner was right: this is one story that he’s become part of in more ways than one.
 
The NeverEnding Story is filled to bursting with captivating characters.  Near the beginning, Atreyu meets a group of Fantasia residents fleeing the Nothing, including the appropriately named Rockbiter, who has a taste for limestone.  Deep Roy (who, through modern special effects, later starred as all of the Oompla-Loompas alongside Johnny Depp in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory“) is Teeny Weeny, whose traveling companion is a racing snail.  There’s also the nervous Night Hob and his giant bat.  As Atreyu continues on, he meets Morla, the Ancient One (who speaks only in the third person and resembles a gigantic tortoise), and the constantly bickering duo Engywook and Urgl, who direct him to the Oracles, hoping he can find answers to aid him in his quest.  However, it’s Falkor, the “luck dragon”, and G’mork, an evil creature that has secretly been trailing Atreyu throughout his journey, that really add another dimension of good versus evil to the storyline.




Trailer for The NeverEnding Story

As a little girl, I was following in Bastian’s footsteps when I watched this movie; I was so enmeshed in the world of Fantasia that I felt like I became part of the story too.  I’m sure that I identified with Bastian, content to curl up with a book and lose himself in imagination, longed to be brave and fearless like Atreyu when confronted with terror the likes of G‘mork and the Nothing, and sympathized with the Empress, who could only sit and watch as her world literally crumbled around her.  It was that promise of something  magical being just on the horizon that appealed to me too though, and the idea that even a regular kid could do amazing things.  Looking back, the film probably even helped shape some of the things that I still believe in: hope, faith, and the power of loving family and friends to help one through the most grueling challenges.  As an adult, I was almost afraid to watch the movie again.  I didn’t want to break the spell.  The film had had such an impact on me and was such a truly fond memory that I hated to risk ruining that by seeing it through grownup eyes.  I finally caved a couple of years ago, and I’m not sorry that I did.  Yes, the special effects that once were so powerfully magical pale in our current world of CGI illusions.  It was also a little strange to remember what a big crush I had on Atreyu when I was younger.  I flatly refuse to watch any of the sequels, but my fascination with the original film has lingered after all of these years, and there’s still so much of its enchantment that hasn’t worn off.  In fact, I hope that there’s always at least a tiny part of me that forever believes the Empress when she says that things “can arise anew from your dreams and wishes.”

                                               The Empress and Bastian

{If you decide to watch the film, see if you can decipher what Bastian yells out into the storm when he throws open the window in the attic (I didn't figure it out until I was an adult). Also, check out The NeverEnding Story’s page on IMDb.com for a lot of fun trivia from the film.}

Davy Hughes, John Douglas, Francis "Frank" Reader, Paul Livingston, Stephen Douglas

by Lisa Adamowicz Kless

It’s always a happy surprise when I discover wonderful art in unexpected places.  The poetry of Pablo Neruda was one of those discoveries for me, tucked into a rerun of a '90s era TV show that I watched every once in a while.  I just so happened to catch an episode in which a character recited a few lines of a beautiful Neruda love poem.  My interest piqued by that small excerpt, I was on a search to find the entire piece.  Oddly enough, I don’t know that I’ve run across it yet, all these years later; by now, I‘ve forgotten the lines recited.  It’s not important any more though.  Lucky for me, someone writing an episode of a TV show was a fan of his work, and I was introduced to it in turn.


Pablo Neruda was born in Chile in 1904, and had already become an accomplished poet by the time he was seventeen.  In adulthood, he was appointed as a Chilean Consular and spent time in Asian countries.  He also traveled to Spain, where he became friends with Spanish poets, including Frederico Garcia Lorca.  When his friend Lorca was killed by Facist forces in the Spanish Civil War of 1936, Neruda was pulled into political activity.  A decade later, back home in Chile in 1947, Neruda published a letter that accused the Chilean president of betrayal, and Neruda was forced to go into hiding because he was being pursued by the police.  During this time in hiding, he wrote Canto General, one of his most celebrated pieces of work.  In following years, he would travel, continue to write and eventually became a Chilean ambassador to Europe in 1971.  It was that year that Neruda also won the Nobel Prize for Poetry.  Not long after, having battled cancer, Neruda passed away in 1973.

Ever a writer, bits and pieces of his life and feelings found their way into Neruda’s work, even as the possibility of cancer was beginning to creep in, as shown in “Fear“:

“Everyone is spotting oddnesses/ in my innards, suddenly shocked/ by radio awful diagrams./ I don’t agree with them…I am afraid of the whole world,/ afraid of cold water, afraid of death./ I am as all mortals are,/ unable to be patient.”

It’s that lyrical honesty that’s part of why Neruda’s work appeals to me so much.  He also had a wry sense of humor that makes it even more endearing.  A good example of this is in his poem “Bestiary”:

“Fleas interest me so much/ that I let them bite me for hours./ They are perfect, ancient as Sanskrit,/ relentless as machines.”

The one regret I have is that I’m not quite able to read Neruda in his own words.  The volumes of his poetry that I have are the original Spanish, side by side with English translations.  It’s torturous to be able to read just enough Spanish to know that certain lines aren’t translated exactly verbatim.  This hasn’t stopped me from enjoying his poetry over the years though, and to keep going back to it like a visit to an old friend.