Instead of political bullshit — surfed the InterWebs this afternoon/early evening, but nothing odd or significant to catch the eye  — I instead listened to the main title of one of my way-most-favorite movies, “Lawrence of Arabia,” with the music by the great Maurice Jarre. The scene of the film opening and bits of the music have rambled for some reason around in my head all week.

I saw the movie in 1964 and it blew my ninth-grade brain. Immersed myself in TE Lawrence, even tried to read Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” but it was a bit too heavy-worded for my intellectual sensibilities in those days. However, I did get into journalist Lowell Thomas’ “With Lawrence in Arabia,” on which the David Lean movie is based. I saw the nearly four-hour movie four times in less than a month — four hours each, nearly 16 hours of the romance of desert war.

No, I wasn’t strange at all.

Maurice Jarre was an enormous talent — I happened to see this, “Doctor Zhivago,” on a giant screen in a downtown Philidephia theater in 1966, and the main title tune is a wondrous stitching “Lara’s Theme” into the music. This was Lean and Jarre’s next film together after ‘Lawrence.’

Tone and mood of the movie woven into the first few minutes:

Bonus track — main-title music on a way-step down from the David Lean epics and to a black-n-white classic, which also set the stage that was already set for The Beatles in “A Hard Day’s Night,” a scream fest when I first saw it in the summer of 1964.
The screaming was so loud that day in the theater, we couldn’t hear all the dialogue and quips from the lads as they ran from car to train to car and down the street. However, like ‘Lawrence,’ I’ve seen ‘Hard Day’s Night‘ a shitload of times since first viewing back in the way-day.

The boys were themselves the product of more than an extreme-popular song;  Richard Lester  froze them forever:

Another day as once again, here we are…

(Illustration out front: M.C Escher’s ‘Three Spheres II,’ found here).