Still in L.A., couple of days left until I come home to the Bay. Meanwhile, I saw “Once” tonight with my sister and her husband, and loved it. It’s a modern musical (as so many of the reviews say) about two singer/songwriters, a guy and a girl (never named to the audience), who meet on the streets in Dublin, become friends, and write music together. It’s not really a traditional love story so much as a collection of love stories that the composers intertwine and reveal through their music.

The charm of “Once” lies in its simplicity and in the compelling songs, which the lead actor and actress actually wrote and performed themselves. The actors share a real friendship outside the realm of the movie, and it showed in the chemistry between them. The movie felt particularly powerful to me because it renders on film a very specific joining of two different sorts of relationships, musical and personal, that would very possibly constitute my ideal.

So, needless to say, after the movie, I picked up a copy of the soundtrack at the Virgin Megastore downstairs (thank you, late night hours), and I’m sure I’ll be listening to it often in coming days. If it inspires me to write, all the more power to it.

- Jake