That’s Massive Attack’s “Paradise Circus” featuring Hope Sandoval (whom you might know from her Warm Inventions or, of course, Mazzy Fucking Star), from their last album, Heligoland. The person who posted that song the other day, Sarah Lynn Knowles, had previously listed Heligoland as one of her favorite albums of this year so far and mentioned that “Paradise Circus” was probably her favorite track of the year.
It was so weird to me, seeing those words from another person, which basically forced me to realize that this is also my favorite song from this year. I had wanted this song to my song of the summer, and what a great summer that would’ve been, but instead “Paradise Circus” became, if not the song I most identified with in some sad way over the summer, than certainly the song I probably listened to the most.
Months and months ago Conrad Noir had sent me a link to the original promotional video that went with the song, directed by Toby Dye, and I had enjoyed it, thought it was the usual amusing and charming NSFW stab at internet marketing that a serious musical artist with cred usually takes (think Sigur Rós’ “Gobbledigook” previously), but, while I loved the song, and thought that promotional video really fit it, I think something about the novelty of it just… lost me. I forgot about the song.
Not shocking. It’s been a busy year for me, and the summer has been especially crazy. Crazier than I usually am, and that’s a pretty astounding feat. Plus, I cram a lot of new music into my head. It’s a sponge most times, sucking in all the good and the bad and the everything in between, but sometimes things go in one ear and bypass the chewy center and slip right out the other ear…
But then somewhere in the past few months this song worked it’s way back into my life, back into my head, as songs are wont to do. Something about that first hearing (second, actually) was amazing, and it was probably due to my having heard it before, but either way, the song started to grow on me. I downloaded it somewhere, possessed it, played it whenever I wanted, commanding it like a snake charmer, summoning it like a genie in a musical bottle. And, like I said, it became the song of my summer, if you will. And if it wasn’t that, then it was certainly, as my itunes will certainly attest to, the song I listened to the most.
And when I started to slowly realize that, that was when the universe started throwing it in my face. As the universe is wont to do, of course. First it’s used in an episode of True Blood from this past season…
…and it’s used perfectly. And the dancer in that video is absolutely right when she mentions that she knows the secret to life and it’s simply this: “A hell I’ll never get out of alive.” And then Bill the vampire tells her, “No one ever does.” And then he adds, SOOKEH IS MAHN!”
And again, the song is used perfectly there. It’s the perfect song to be playing during a particular poignant moment with a stripper in a darkened club somewhere. It’s also the perfect song to be playing on a show about vampires and werewolves, with all the metaphors for darkness between humans at play there, and all that dirty, raunchy, wonderful sex. “Paradise Circus” is just a song that evokes something in you, something twisted but smooth, something sexy but hidden away from light. It reminds you of a time in your life that you had something nasty but wonderful going on, of when you related in a way to parts of season 6 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and you have a hard time putting that resonance in words.
Or maybe not. Maybe that’s just me.
As I was sitting down to write this, just browsing around the wildways of the internet, as I am always so wont to do, I found another video that someone made, somewhat amateur-ish, but a glossy production.
Then, the other day I’m laying in bed watching something on my ipod, watching the first episode of Luther, the police drama that Idris Elba (Stringer Bell!) did back in his native country not too long ago, and of course “Paradise Circus” is the theme song to that song. Of course.
But, again, it fits perfectly. Luther is a dark, sexy show about a brilliant cop who’s always walking just little bit more than just a little across the dark side. I truly wish that American cop shows had not just the weight and intensity of a show like this, not just the style, but the intellect. And it’s nice to see Idris Elba (who is soon to take over the role of Alex Cross from Morgan Freeman, in addition to starring in both Kenneth Branagh’s upcoming Thor and the new Nic Cage/Ghost Rider movie) in a role where he sacrifices nothing of his presence but does shed the cleanness that we’ve seen from him on The Wire or on The Office a year or two ago, whenever it was.
The show starts with Luther tracking down his prey, a killer of women and children, and quite possibly letting the man fall to his death intentionally without helping him. The first episode, trying to avoid spoilers as much as i can here, ends with Luther’s new antagonist, whose nothing that he’s faced before or can predict, finding that killer of women and children, who survived the fall and ended up in a coma. Somewhere between those two points, Luther went a little crazy from what he did, took some time off from the job and was separated from his wife for a while. When he’s cleared of all wrong doing (oh, you foolish police inquiry boards) and returns to the job, he decides that he’s well enough to return to his wife…
When it finally happens, we’re dreading it because we know that his wife will have some bad news for him and Idris Elba’s Luther is a big and ferocious guy. The moments after she tells him her bad news in the living room of the house they once shared, the screen is absolutely charged. It feels for a moment as if no room will ever be big enough to hold his rage and sadness.As he storms off into the night away from her, I heard the echoes of the Massive Attack song just pinging around in my brain.
And then I saw the thing there on tumblr, from SarahSpy, and all of this coalesced together in my brain. But that’s okay. It’s a great song, one to be appreciated by people who have great taste in music, but also those identify with a certain something, maybe. A kind of long ago sadness or darkness, and an appreciation of that time in their life. You only see connections and links after the fact and pain, suffering, and/or sadness can only really be learned from far removed from the infliction of the wounds. And it’s all so much better when it’s set to music.
Okay, for today, let’s start at something we know and go somewhere we don’t and end up… who knows?
1. This man:
Sawyer from Lost. Remember him?
2. This is a picture of Sawyer reading a book:
That’s in “Eggtown.” How odd was it that Sawyer was the most prolific reader on the show? And Ben came in second place. We saw lots of glimpses of Ben’s and Jack’s bookshelves but Sawyer was the one we always saw actually reading (and Ben just occasionally). I wonder if Sawyer and Juliet (re)started a book club somewhere in their three years in the 1970s DHARMA Initiative… Hmm.
Go ahead, say it with me now: “Zipless fuck.” That felt good, didn’t it?
2 3/4. Like I said…
Ben actually read sometimes. In his mind, it goes like this: James Joyce > Stephen King. And I’d have to agree with him.
Sorry, Juliet.
3. Anyway, that book that Sawyer happens to be reading there is this:
The Invention Of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, written in 1940. It’s about a fugitive who ends up on a mysterious island where strange things are happening…
4. That particular cover above is based on the fact that the lead female role of the book, a character called Faustine, is based on silent film star Louise Brooks, whom is on the cover. This is another picture of her:
It’s also been said that the book was written, in part, as a reaction to the decline of her career at the time.
5. The plot, rather roughly, is: a man hiding from the authorities ends up on a mysterious island. Eventually a group of people come and the fugitive falls in love with one of the women with them. He keeps a diary, in which he talks about observing these people and their actions all the while trying to not be discovered by them, and how they seem to repeat some of the same conversations over and over, and then disappear. The fugitive tries to confront the woman, Faustine, and tell her how he feels about her but, as Wikipedia puts it, “an anomalous phenomenon keeps them apart.”
6. This is the original first edition cover of the book:
And another:
…which were designed by Norah Borges, the sister of Jorge Luis Borges, one of the author’s closest friends and a serious advocate of this novel. Borges even wrote a prologue for the book in which he said: “To classify it [the novel] as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole.”
7. Supposedly the novel was inspired in part by earlier novels, such as 1934′s XYZ, by Clemente Palma, which I don’t know much about, but also the much more popular novel, The Island Of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells.
8. This is an image from the 1996 film version of the movie:
9. And below is a joke that was inspired by that little detail:
Yeah, that’s right.
10. I only saw that 1996 version of The Island Of Dr. Moreau once, which was directed by John Frakenheimer, and it was incredibly long ago, probably not long after it came out, but I love hearing accounts of the considerably rocky production, which suffered all kinds of shake ups, script rewrites almost daily, the original director being fired just three days into shooting on location in the tropical wilderness of North Queesland, Australia and, of course, the perfect storm that is Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando.
Anyway, so just a day or two after they got to their tropical location shoot, Kilmer decided that he wanted his role (as the lead character who happens upon the unethical villainy of the mad Dr. Moreau) cut by 40%. Some of this was because, yes, Val Kilmer is insane, but it was also right around the time he was going through a painful divorce. And after quite a bit of examination, it was discovered that there was no way to cut down the role Kilmer had been hired for, so he’d have to trade roles with David Thewlis, who had been cast as one of Moreau’s creepy flunkies.
12. Val Kilmer, even at your greatest heights, you’re still no Charlie Sheen. That’s a fact to both be ashamed of and to take pride in.
13. Speaking of weird actor bullshit on the set of a movie, if you ever get a chance, and are bored enough, you should go read up on the crazy demands that Marlon Brando came up with on the set of 2001′s The Score starring Rober De Niro, Edward Norton, and Angela Bassett. It’s some great stuff like not wanting to wear pants (so therefore a majority of his scenes are shot from the waist up) or refusing to take direction from director Frank Oz, whom he would only refer to as “Miss Piggy,” which lead to Oz having to sit in a van outside the set with a monitor and relaying direction via walkie talkie to De Niro to give to Brando.
Honestly, it’s enough to make you want to get really huge (mostly in a fame and talent sort of way, but possibly also in physical size) and just go really splendidly crazy, you know?
14. Getting somewhat back to our original topic… The Invention Of Morel. Interestingly enough, it was adapted into film in 1974 and starred the lovely Anna Karina, famous from so many Jean-Luc Godard films, and who was also in the film adaptation of The Magus. But that shouldn’t be held against her, should it?
Many a person hate the film, which has inspired so much satire and so very many attempts at deciphering it, at finding meaning in it’s voluptuous qualities, but that’s an almost impossible task to do definitively.
16. If you’ve never seen it, shame on you. But if that’s true, I’ll try to sum the film up succinctly as best I can:
At a European château, a man approaches a woman. He claims to know her, but she doesn’t seem to know him. He tells her that they had met last year at Marienbad and that she had told him that she’d be waiting here for him now. He’s positive of this but again, she doesn’t remember. Her husband shows up. There’s a question of dominance at play, a power struggle, and the continuing effort to try and convince the woman of what the first man says is the truth. The characters have no names, but in the screenplay, the first man is X, the woman is A, and her husband’s name is M. Conversations happen again and again throughout the château, and reality seems to be a changing whim and there are many a haunting, cryptic voiceover hanging over lush, ambiguous tracking shots.
This is a very necessary film if you have any plans of calling yourself a pretentious film buff or a lover of the French New Wave.
17. The film is a thrill for guessing at, for surrendering yourself over to it’s masterful pace and tone, and then for pondering over with enlightened friends after a viewing.
18. Trust me, the film becomes a lot more fun and the guess work far more potent if you take on the assumption that it’s a science fiction story. Or a ghost story. Wander through that same mesmerizing landscape as the characters in the story and you’ll have a fun time.
19. Of course this all kind of ties into Lost, with certain echos of similar scenarios throughout the show and it’s mysterious island setting.
One example of that would be: Horace appearing to John and talking about Jacob’s cabin while chopping wood in a continuous loop. Of course, this was in a dream, but it’s an interesting visual representation of stone tape theory.
Remember back in the early, glory days of Lost theories, there was always stuff like “The Monster is nanotechnology,” which took a long time to fade after repeated denials from the producers, but that I always liked was holograms. Like “Jack’s dad is a hologram” or “Eko’s brother is a hologram,” meaning that they weren’t ghosts in the classic supernatural sense.
20.Last Year At Marienbad inspired the video for “To The End,” a 1994 single by Blur from their album Parklife…
22. A year after “To The End” Blur would use another film as fuel for pastiche in a music video with “The Universal” from The Great Escape. Viddy well:
The film this time being Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, interesting enough. And the single’s cover was reminiscent of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
23. It should be pointed out that these both songs that I like quite a bit, as well as their videos. It was a smart move on Blur’s part, I think in doing these pastiches, not only because it makes them appear more stylistically interesting and intellectual (or as intellectually far as an homage can take one these days), but it really reinforced the strong roots that the 1960s held within the foundations of Britpop.
24. Going back to Last Year At Marienbad, another video:
This short film, called “The Arranged Time,” by a filmmaker named Scott Johnston, clearly owes a debt to the mysterious dream logic of Resnais’ classic, but is also it’s own intriguing thing. It’s well worth the viewing, but if you don’t want to favor the tip of the hat to Last Year At Marienbad, I can always offer you the hipster version of a reference: It’s remarkably David Lynch-ian.
25. I should probably loop this thing back around somewhat, back to where we started…
28. I like Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne, but I also really liked Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne.
28A. It’s kind of like how I’d rather watch a Tony Stark movie than an Iron Man movie.
29. Staying mostly on target here… Don’t forget: They originally wanted Michael Keaton to be Jack on Lost. Granted, had that happened, they would’ve killed him off in the pilot (to shock you!) and Kate would’ve become the lead of the show, but had they kept him, I feel confident that he would’ve mustered up a decent quota of Jackface on a regular basis.
The problem with casting a seasoned film actor like Michael Keaton in the role of Jack would’ve been that he just wouldn’t have taken the chances that a seasoned and angry television actor like Matthew Fox (who always seemed to have something of a chip on his shoulder, a kind of unresolved anger residing within him after Party Of Five) would have and did end up taking. It’s shocking to think and say this in a way, but I just don’t think that Michael Keaton would’ve matched Matthew Fox’s intensity.
30.I made mention the other day, somewhat jokingly, that I kind of assumed that The Venture Bros. would end with the titular characters’ father, Rusty, putting himself out of his own misery (which is a much larger conversation, of course), but in thinking about that in the days since I typed those words, I couldn’t think of a moment in Lost where we saw Jack actually reading a book. Which makes sense for a lost of reasons, one being that Jack always had shit to do, was always on the move. He wasn’t a lounger like Sawyer or Ben or Locke. But, speaking of Locke, that was the only instance I could think of where Jack had a seat and read something rather significant…
…that item being Locke’s suicide note. That’s heavy, right?
31. This picture is funny:
32. It’s a nice thought, thinking back to the humble, mysterious beginnings of Lost…
I’d love to someday see a book from Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse talking about all the various things they had wanted to do on the show that didn’t work out. On one hand, obviously, it wouldn’t matter. The show is the final product and that’s all that really matters, but even still, from the perspective of creating and writing and running a big show, one as ambitious as the one they produced, I’d be dying to know tricks they had up their sleeves that didn’t work out (Nikki and Paulo), how things would’ve gone if certain tricks hadn’t worked out so well (the character that became Benjamin Linus was only supposed to be around for three episodes and wasn’t intended to be the leader of the Others but Michael Emerson was just too good), and how they got to where they did.
Just imagine all those creative ghosts that are alive and wandering around the Island of Ideas.
33. All of that said, right now I’d figure this would be the last time that we really talk about Lost on this blog, but I can’t commit to that notion, not fully. To me personally, the show was such a broad, interesting thing that I feel like something can always come along that has relevance with the show. Especially, if you’ve noticed so far, since I have a particular interest in the way things align and connect with each other.
Who knows, maybe we’ll never talk about Lost again here. Or maybe we’ll be talking about it again tomorrow. Memories and locations intertwine differently for all of us and we can only bring our own unique meaning to them. The past has an amazing power over us, a constant hold, but it’s different for everyone. I would love to have a new show come along that inspires and interests us and ignites our imagination just like Lost did, but right now I’m not holding my breath. Maybe we’ll never leave the place we made together.
I was all set to fill in for Marco and write up a Mad Men recap, but then I noticed that OS X now blocks screenshots of protected content. I don’t know when they worked in that wrinkle, but well done sirs. I’m far too lazy to search for screencaps online, so I’ll just drop some general thoughts.
Don: Is it a problem that I now root for Don Draper the same way I do for Jason Stackhouse? I’m like, “Attaboy, Draper! For an encore, do your neighbor!” Probably. I don’t know if television has ever given us one character, let alone two, who deal with this kind of “pussy overflow” on such a regular basis. Old Don would be hopelessly drawn to to the self-assured marketing analyst, because just like Rachel Mencken, girls who say no turn him on. New Don… well, we’ll see how much he’s really changed. He’s single now, so women are viewing him as a potential partner instead of just a fling now, and he’s having trouble getting used to it.
Peggy: Her talk with Freddy was a little “on the nose,” as they say, but we get the picture. Peggy knows this dork isn’t marriage material, so she’ll fuck him for now, knowing this will hasten his exit. While we’ve certainly gotten hints of feminist angst from her before, I think this episode was the closest she’s come to outright voicing them. I liked the half-grimace she, Joan and the marketing chick all seemed to share when White Pants were brought up in the meeting.
Roger: I think SCDP will not end the season with Lucky Strike as a client.
Betty: Fuck Betty.
Glen: Him too. Creep. The world, August Bravo aside, was not asking for more Glen.
——-
But what’s really on my mind tonight/this morning is the new Arcade Fire album: The Suburbs.
As soon as I read about the title of this LP, I had a feeling I’d like it. I’ve always had a complex connection with suburbia, and it sounds like Win Butler does too. I’m only on my second listen-through, but I can tell that this is an album that’s going to keep growing on me.
It’s a sort of choppy, stream of consciousness series of vignettes on the love/hate relationships between the suburbs and the city. The sprawl is an inescapable malaise of crushed dreams, but go downtown and maybe those shallow hipsters aren’t your kind either. Two years into an economic catastrophe and a lot of those downtown bohemia promises can start to sound like so much happy bullshit. Something fascinating about the line, “Now that San Francisco’s gone, I guess I’ll just pack it in.” There’s a theme of weary resignation here. But in The Suburbs, resignation feels a lot like growing up, and who says that’s a good thing, even if it’s unavoidable.
Most of the kids in my generation — if they could afford to, if they didn’t get shackled with a burdensome spouse or child, or military service — they moved to the city as soon as they could get away. Me, I moved back to the suburbs. I guess I’ve always felt there was something important going on here. Something that, if I came to understand it, would understand everything about modern American life. I don’t think I do yet, but I’m getting closer.
I’m confident that one day I will, and then I’ll leave.
I had this dream the other night: Picture the protagonist of some indie film as he drives in a car on a plain road in the middle of the nowhere. Either a cool new song by a not well known hip band is playing through the car’s speakers, or there’s an older song, at least 10 to 15 years old, equally hip and recognizable and slightly “ironic” and catchy is playing. The sun is low, the sky is dim. It’s either just after sunrise or just before sunset. The character is driving for a few moments before something happens…
The pictures in today’s post by Weegee, otherwise known as Arthur Fellig, an Austrian-born photographer/photojournalist from the mid-1900s, best known for documenting the grim beauty that was the seedy life on the streets of New York City. His nickname came from a phonetic tendering of the word “ouija,” which he got because of his eerily prescient ability to appear at the scene of a crime or a fire or emergency of another kind moments after it happened or was reported to the authorities.
To me, his pictures walk a very fine, very fascinating line between going too far and perfectly capturing the beauty of the worse sides of life, the raw and wounded aspects. Looking back at his pictures now, there’s just something unmistakably real and authentic about them, something that maybe you wouldn’t see as much now?
Fellig was married to Margaret Atwood from 1947 to 1950 before he went to Hollywood and began working in film. He became friends with Stanley Kubrick (the two of them are pictured together above) and did the still photography for Dr. Strangelove, and it was his accent that Peter Sellers copied for the title character of the film.
Today I was minding my own business and this song came on:
That’s Phil Collins’ “In The Air Tonight.” But you’d have to know that, right? The people who don’t know that are probably these same weird people that I keep running into lately that have never seen Back To The Future or have NEVER HEARD (lower case wtf?) of The Empire Strikes Back. Anyway. Hearing this song today reminded me of four things:
2. The first time I did the air drums at the exact right time that they came into the song when I was a stupid little kid when one of those amazing moments of victories that you experience as a stupid little kid. I felt invincible.
3. I had a friend named Steve, who… well, that’s a long story for another time. But Steve was a drama major once upon a time and I remember him telling me once over a few drinks how it was his dream to do the lyrics to this song as a monologue on stage at some point in his life. I’m sure by now that Steve has awarded himself quite a few Oscars for performances so far only witnessed by the bathroom mirror.
4. I’ve said this many a time before, but I miss this era in Phil Collins’ career. He was just likable and a simple pop star, but he really mined a dark corner of the human psyche and added synthesizer and that’s what the top 40 looked like back then. Just listen to songs like “Mama,” which he did with Genesis, or “I Don’t Care Anymore,” or even the classic “Against All Odds,” they’re just so sad and desperate and dark and… amazing. There’s this grand urban legend built up about the lyrical content of “In The Air Tonight,” which people take quite literally, assuming that Phil Collins perhaps watched a person drown while singling out the guilty party at a concert during the performance of the hit song he wrote about it, which is a little insane, but is fascinating to watch it grow over the years, mostly by what we call “Telephone” here in America, but they call “Chinese Whispers” in England. It just seems so strange and appealing to me, that period of keyboard and lack of… flash. I mean, seriously, back in the day this guy…
…was one of the leading pop stars of the day and age. This guy…
No joke, that. And yet, pre-Disney soundtracks, he was like the Bob Hoskins of pop.
Some of the best posts that Maria and I have ever done have honestly just come out of long nights conversing on gmail, working on the various things we work on, and trying to fight off the late night boredom and punchiness that invariably works it’s way in. We’ve come up with some pretty twisted notions in those late night conversations, but some of them I could not be more fond of.
I was going to post one such bit of late night brilliance we had conjured together, but being awesome as she frequently is, Maria totally beat me to it, so you should click here to read our “Tribute to Akon,” one of the hardest working men in this business we call show. And love. And life. And the making of paper and winding and grinding.
It’s somewhat similar, if you will, to that game of catch a falling star that we have done before when talking about celebrities. In fact, if I’m lucky, some day I’ll finally be able to talk Maria into starting a blog with me of nothing but chronicling the erotically mundane and perversely fascinating real life adventures of celebrities as we see them. Maybe some day. Until then… click.
It’s late where I am, or maybe early, depending on how you look at it. Maybe where you are it’s late at night or early in the morning, who knows. But I know I’m several months (at least) late to this…
Carl Sagan “A Glorious Dawn” (featuring StephenHawking), wonderfully autotuned and as part of something called “Symphony Of Science” on youtube. That’s just… ridiculous. And brilliant. I love it. It’s exactly how I want to end my night/start my day on this planet.
Everyone who loves Lost loves the little bits of trivia from behind the scenes of the show, especially it’s inception. And one of the most talked about is the original notion that the Jack character should die in the pilot, that he should be played by a more famous actor (think Michael Keaton rather than the guy from Party Of Five), and that he should die, letting everyone know that this was a show in which anything could happen.
Had that been the case, the producers’ plan was for another castaway to step up and become the de facto leader of the castaways from Oceanic 815, to lead them through their trials and tribulations on this mysterious Island. That particular passenger? One Kate Austen, of course.
greetings peeps! i’m just sitting here on this chilly evening, pondering some interesting ponderings. do you even find yourself just drifting off into your own microcosm and think, “what if…?” yeah, me neither. but tonight was clearly a special night! and my little peanut brain went down all sorts of avenues……
yes. money. “cash rules everything around me” or c.r.e.a.m. as the wu-tang clan stamps on their cd. and it does. or at least, it seems to. but does it? does it really?
mmhmm
yes, evidence does seem to point to the fact that cash/currency is a commodity that people desire. it is a resource. it is why people go to college, try to get better jobs, lie, cheat, steal, kill even. but why? what does currency really mean anyway? does it mean you’ve achieved some sort of status?
i make it rain.
some people look at a LRG bank balance to mean that you’ve “made it.” others would look at food stamps and think =( this is all relative. your pluses or minuses are a magical number given to you by an Automated Teller Machine or from your porn box that may from time to time deliver something with the name “red headed” your way. you fucking ginger lover!!!
it doesn’t seem to mean too much. not really. little (or largely) known fact, Ms St Cosmo is a college student. and being in a history class, Dr. Bro tells us we’ve been off this gold standard business for a looooong time. where does that leave money? a lot like it did back in the days of Alexander Hamilton and his federal plan. in short, (translation= could not find link to explain to you. i have no kung fu. frown.) around 1790ish, hamilton was the secretary of state and the US was in a bad spot. the central government was weak, there was no national currency, there was no trade overseas as there was a massive debt due to the american revolution. in order to get the US back on the right track, hamilton began paying war bonds (and others stuffs) in a new federal currency. the currency would only hold value as long as the US government stayed strong. therefore, currency was faith based. this happens again later in history…..
paper? paper?? sorry, i said i wanted gold bricks!
according to internets research, the official term for our money system today is “fiat.” so what does that mean to you? to me? to the rest of our monetary hungry world?
doom. maybe?
yeah maybe. if faith in currency fails, it indicates faith in our central government will not be far behind. and if that happens, i’m thinking good old anarchy might show it’s head. would this be a good or a bad thing? hmmm….back to reality i guess….
The other day as I was wasting time away on the internet, as I’m typically wont to do, someone posted this song for all the world to hear and join in on appreciating…
It was so weird to me, seeing those words from another person, which basically forced me to realize that this is also my favorite song from this year. I had wanted this song to my song of the summer, and what a great summer that would’ve been, but instead “Paradise Circus” became, if not the song I most identified with in some sad way over the summer, than certainly the song I probably listened to the most.
Months and months ago Conrad Noir had sent me a link to the original promotional video that went with the song, directed by Toby Dye, and I had enjoyed it, thought it was the usual amusing and charming NSFW stab at internet marketing that a serious musical artist with cred usually takes (think Sigur Rós’ “Gobbledigook” previously), but, while I loved the song, and thought that promotional video really fit it, I think something about the novelty of it just… lost me. I forgot about the song.
Not shocking. It’s been a busy year for me, and the summer has been especially crazy. Crazier than I usually am, and that’s a pretty astounding feat. Plus, I cram a lot of new music into my head. It’s a sponge most times, sucking in all the good and the bad and the everything in between, but sometimes things go in one ear and bypass the chewy center and slip right out the other ear…
As I was sitting down to write this, just browsing around the wildways of the internet, as I am always so wont to do, I found another video that someone made, somewhat amateur-ish, but a glossy production.
The show starts with Luther tracking down his prey, a killer of women and children, and quite possibly letting the man fall to his death intentionally without helping him. The first episode, trying to avoid spoilers as much as i can here, ends with Luther’s new antagonist, whose nothing that he’s faced before or can predict, finding that killer of women and children, who survived the fall and ended up in a coma. Somewhere between those two points, Luther went a little crazy from what he did, took some time off from the job and was separated from his wife for a while. When he’s cleared of all wrong doing (oh, you foolish police inquiry boards) and returns to the job, he decides that he’s well enough to return to his wife…
And then I saw the thing there on tumblr, from SarahSpy, and all of this coalesced together in my brain. But that’s okay. It’s a great song, one to be appreciated by people who have great taste in music, but also those identify with a certain something, maybe. A kind of long ago sadness or darkness, and an appreciation of that time in their life. You only see connections and links after the fact and pain, suffering, and/or sadness can only really be learned from far removed from the infliction of the wounds. And it’s all so much better when it’s set to music.
The male gaze
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