So I received this email from a friend of mine last night: "A Scanner Darkly is on HBO right now. What a bizarro - fest. Love this movie." Well hey, I'm doing some research for a review while ignoring whatever was on the tube (American Chopper, maybe), so why not?

Yes, "bizarro - fest" just about covers it. The only problem was that I turned it on about twenty minutes in and couldn't quite figure out what was going on. I decide that I have to get back to ignoring the tube. While going backwards through the chunk of HBO channels we receive, I pass American Beauty. It's the scene where the two kids are watching the film of the plastic bag twirling around on the sidewalk. I sort of remember that there's some pretty important dialog going on there but my attention has already faded — exactly like the first time I saw the film.

When I first saw American Beauty, I had restart it after about fifteen minutes because I'd more or less missed everything that was going on — the music was so engrossing that it drew my attention completely away from the visuals.

Yes, completely. I was gone.

Gone. For me, it's the true rule of thumb for "goodness" in music. If it pulls me away from my surroundings and into its own aural landscape then it has achieved perfect resonance. It's an interesting phenomenon, this resonance thing. Why do some people like musician A, but not others? The question extends beyond music into all other forms of entertainment.

Like the television show Twin Peaks. David Lynch's own (but not only) "bizarro-fest". I remember seeing the pilot and thinking, "What the hell was that?" The next day at work we burned a couple of hours arguing its merits. Some people thought it was a complete waste of time, that it made no sense. Others (myself included) were very happy to have something completely fresh and odd on the screen.

Of course, I'd already noticed the music. Angelo Badalamenti's compositions snaked their way around the actors and scenes in a near perfect dance. Some of the techniques were not so unusual: tense music for tense moments. At other times, the intentional usage of contrast served to twist what might have been 'normal' scenes over into the land of the surreal. Here I'm thinking of the floaty Julee Cruise ballad that accompanied a particularly nasty bar fight sequence. Really great stuff.

Long after the television show had gone away, the music still stands on its own, and it still has that transporting effect on me.

This all begs the question, why are we drawn to (or repelled from) a particular piece of music? I've never been able to figure out the 'why'. Maybe it doesn't matter.