a bit of insight into how my mind is working today:

got up fairly early, hoping something may happen later, but otherwise resigned to a day of music and reading as the summer often brings. i'm getting through martin dressler rather quickly. then i'm browsing through the music collection when suddenly an unexplained urge to listen to some madonna comes over me. but there's none on there.

as i'm loading patty's madonna cd's into my itunes, i flip on the tv and see that tnt is running several x-files episodes. i check through which ones will be on and notice the last one showing is the controversial season four episode "home." then i remember taping that episode one of the times it was on in syndication to show other people who aren't fans of the series how well done that particular episode was. there's a scene where the peacock brothers kill the sheriff and his wife while a love song blares from the speakers of their car outside in a grotesque juxtaposition.

which turns my thoughts to that other chris carter series, millennium. i didn't watch it regularly, but i can remember this one rather compelling episode, which featured a particularly enchanting song, an instrumental, as an integral element of the plot. so i went looking through episode guides in one of those little quests that suddenly takes on a momentarily monumental importance (like my simultaneous search for ghv2, a success, and a new ever-so-slight itch to find that tape with "home" on it, which won't happen because we have no system for keeping track of video tapes, my family insists in some ways that labels were never invented) and found it.

it was called "a room with no view," and i don't seem to be alone in remembering the music:

"Trivia: 'A Room With No View' is the second Millennium story to feature Frank Black's arch nemesis, Lucy Butler. Actress Sarah-Jane Redmond would appear once per season in the memorable role.

Inside Lucy Butler's house her prisoners are repeatedly subjected to the sounds of 'Love is Blue.' The instrumental version of the song by French conductor Paul Mauriat, heard in the episode, was the number one song on the Billboard Music Chart for five weeks in 1968. For many Millennium fans, this episode's use of the song has forever altered their emotional response to the music."

now, i saw this episode only once, on the night it premiered, april 24, 1998, and still remembered it quite vividly with just a little bit of prompting. i immediately acquired a copy of the song and commenced playing it on repeat, feeling myself entirely elsewhere. then i read the passage from the episode guide quoted above again. they are so right. that's well-made television, don't you think?

so that was the music of the rest of the day: "love is blue" (repeated over and over in long blocks) and the immaculate collection. not much else happened.