Remember You’ve Got Mail? That movie about a couple who meets anonymously over the internet? At the time critics hailed it as “amusingly attuned to its time” (New York Times) with its commentary on love and technology. Yet, and many critics also have mentioned this, the Nora Ephron confection wasn’t the firstmovie to focus a love story on a communication device or new technology. As much as people bemoan the dehumanizing effect of technology, there is also a fascination for it and this fascination shows up in the strangest places such as romantic stories. Let’s go back in time and review some examples.

Many refer to the Jimmy Stewart/Margaret Sullavan when talking about You’ve Got Mail a supposed remake of the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch film. To me saying Mail is a remake is a bit of a stretch. Shop has a much more serious undercurrent with plot twists of adultery, economic downturns and suicide. Compare that to the upbeat New York landscapes and problems of urban New York yuppies and you get an entirely different movie. The constant is the mode courting through anonymous communication. Now you may not think of letters as a technology like email is, but just like email it was an innovation of communication especially as delivery got better and social networks began to change in the global culture. This movie like Mail and the other films I’ll talk about use this technology as an integral device in the plot and in the characters lives thus reflecting the current communication trend.

Pillow Talk is another example of this. Sure the phone wasn’t a new technology but innovations of party lines and rotary dial were. The device used here to bring together the two romantic leads again lends itself to the fascination of how modern technology changed the way people communicated illustrating both the drawbacks of virtual relationships as well as the advantages.

And let’s go even further back before movies themselves to a book called Wired Love. In it a lady telegraph operator, lonely and depressed by her boring, dingy circumstances, strikes up a virtual courtship with another operator who goes by the name “C” living in a distant town. Just as in the previous examples there are mix-ups and finally a happy ending with the communication technology as a romantic device.

What’s interesting is that all of these modes of communication were lamented at one point or another as dehumanizing and isolating. I guess these stories prove them wrong. That being said, all these stories end with the virtual meeting the actual in a happy ending. One might say these stories while using technology also eventually have actual reality trump it in the end. Yet if you read Wired Love the ending it explores the interesting premise that maybe virtual reality has its advantages over actual reality.

Which leads me to my final technology love story, the new Spike Jonze movie starring Joaquin Phoenix about a man who falls in love with his computer. Sure not exactly a romantic comedy, but it still focuses on that fascination between technology and relationships using romantic love as its own device. It will be interesting to see what Jonze ultimately decides for his character. Will he realize the virtual reality is all glitter but not gold? Or will he decide he’d rather have a combination of both.

Perhaps no one could have summed up the correlation of love and technology better than Kip Dynamite in his ode to his beloved at their wedding.

On a sidenote, it looks like Gwyneth Paltrow is jumping on the “technology is dehumanizing us!” bandwagon judging from the commentary she published on her site.

Bret McKenzie of the Flight of the Conchords is making a Labyrinth-like musical!

Drop Dead Diva — Can’t get enough!

10 Famous Artists Using Different Mediums (including Marilyn Monroe writing poetry, Jim Henson producing experimental film, Andy Warhol illustrating children’s books)

What does Texas, the Beatles and singing at sports events have in common?

Well, I’ll tell you.

This song — 

Native Texan, Bruce Channel, wrote it and recorded it in Fort Worth. An obscure musician, he was pleasantly shocked when it soon scored #1 in the Billboards. Soon he and his band including harmonica man, Delbert McClinton, also a Texan, were touring their sound to as far flung places as England.

It is there that another obscure band at that time opened for them — the Beatles. One of the group’s guitarist, John Lennon, was intrigued by McClinton’s sound and asked him to teach him the harmonica part. Lennon then took what he learned and stuck it in his own song that soon went #1 itself becoming the Beatles first single.

The song not only inspired Lennon but also countless soccer fans when it became the unofficial FIFA World Cup song in 2002. Today it has become a favorite to sing in stadium settings.

So once again we see what starts in Texas truly does change the world.

So . . . last week I went to a dear friend’s wedding which was happily in the same blessed city I served my mission in — Toronto, Canada.

I have always thought of Canada as a kind of parellel universe to the US. Familiar but just different enough to make things feel surreal. I found this description to be even more pertinent to Toronto this time around but more in regards to my life than countries. As I walked and drove the streets of my old stomping grounds, it was like I had been reincarnated and was traversing the past a former self had traveled. In a way I suppose that’s true. The person I saw in my head all those years ago is me but isn’t me at the same time. That’s not to say I’m a completely different person or even that I’m a new and improved version of myself, but somehow I felt detached.

Maybe everyone feels like this when they revisit an old haunt of theirs. Still it had a big impact on me. It made me especially ponder what I had done with my life since my time as a scared but hopeful missionary. What would my old self think of me now? Would she be impressed? Would she be disappointed? Would we like each other? I’m not sure. In many respects I feel I’ve come a long way, a looooong way. In other ways I feel I might have regressed or perhaps have not progressed as much as I should have. I guess I’ll never know. That is unless I somehow go through a time warp created by a worm hole . . . but enough of this self-pondering blabbering. Let’s look at pictures from then and now! Hover over the pictures to see descriptions of the photos.

Purpose: Preach the Gospel!

Purpose: Witness a beautiful wedding of a beautiful friend!

We lived in the tiny upstairs apartment.

For some reason it seemed a lot smaller when I saw it again.

At the City Centre–yes I spelled that right.

Back as a tourist soaking up the city night life.

Puffy coat, grimy boots, boo.

Shorts and sandals! Yay!

Windows in the CN Tower overlooking my area.

Either the windows got larger or I got smaller.

Visiting with my family then

. . . later with my friends, Sara . . .

and Brooke.

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PS

Also on this trip I was finally able to see some Anne of Green Gables sights! Few people know this but Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea were largely shot not in Prince Edward Island, where the book is set, but in Ontario near and within Toronto, which is known as the “Hollywood of the North.” Thanks to a fan site and our semi-trusty GPS we were able to find Maplehurst and the Lake of Shining Water which includes the foot bridge where so many pivotal events occurred including the ending! Again things felt surreal. The places were familiar but . . . different. It’s amazing what a movie crew can do to a location to make it look like it’s in the middle of nowhere even though it is smack dab in midst of a huge city or just off a country highway next to a lumber yard.

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So . . . remember Selena? Not the upstart, Disney-girl-turned-hoochie but the mononymous, bilingual singer from the 90s. I do. I never was a true, hard core fan but growing up in Gallup, New Mexico where she had a strong fan base definitely exposed her music to me. I only own one cd of hers–her last one, Dreaming of You. I don’t listen to it often, not even once a year, but it is still one my favorites. To me its nostalgic for different reasons all of which involve loss. The most obvious is that behind the syrupy music and lyrics is the tragic death of a girl who had worked hard and dreamed hard only to be snuffed out in her youth. It also takes me back to my lost adolescence–middle school dances filled with unrealized hopes, dusty summer nights singing along with my two best friends on the back of an old car, the Selena-look-alike girls in my classes with huge red lips and skin-tight clothes, Bidi Bidi Bom Bom blasting from low-riders going down Route 66.

My favorite track is God’s Child, which is the unlikely duet between Selena and David Byrne of the Talking Heads. It’s different from the rest of her songs. I still react to it the same way I did when I was 13. I stop and listen and am haunted by the dogged beat and enigmatic lyrics.

On a side note . . . after I looked up this youtube video, all the commercials turned into Spanish. Weird, non?