SOUNDTRACK: CHELSEA LIGHT MOVING-“The Ecstasy” (2013).
When Chelsea Light Moving played at KEXP, they went out for a break before playing live on air. One of the DJs had a chocolate bar. And Thurston was inspired. According to the NPR [page:
The Sonic Youth veteran and his bandmates in Chelsea Light Moving had been jamming off-air in the KEXP studios. When they stepped outside to get some fresh air, KEXP’s DJ Sharlese followed, offering them some of her chocolate bar. At first, Moore politely declined, but as the candy got eaten away, piece by piece, a poem (John Donne’s “The Ecstasy”) was revealed underneath, printed on the candy wrapper.
“Can I have that?” he asked, and the next thing we knew, he was sprinting back into the studio, taping the tattered wrapper to a mic stand, and belting out his own version of the poem against discordant guitar chords.
The music is great. It works perfectly with the meter of Donne’s poem and, the way Thurston delivers it, it sounds like he could have written it. There’s some great screaming guitars, a very cool discordant chord or two and wailing solo. I really enjoyed that Thurston doesn’t play guitar through much of the song (he leaves that to the other guitarist), he just comes in when some wildness is needed. Awesome.
It’s a great song and hard to believe it was tossed off so easily.
Check it out here.
The lyrics are indeed from Donne’s poem, which begins:
WHERE, like a pillow on a bed,
A pregnant bank swell’d up, to rest
The violet’s reclining head,
Sat we two, one another’s best.[You can read the rest here].
[READ: April 14, 2013] The Heart of Thomas
I brought this home from work because Sarah loves boarding school books. But this is a manga book, and it is set up to be read right to left. Sarah admitted that she can’t easily get her mind to work that way. Which I understand. So I gave it a go. I found it rough going, but after about 20 pages it became pretty natural.
The Heart of Thomas is an early example of Shōjo manga (少女漫画) which is manga marketed to a female audience roughly between the ages of 10 and 18. The name romanizes the Japanese 少女 (shōjo), literally “little female”. Shōjo manga covers many subjects with a strong focus on human and romantic relationships and emotions. Shōjo manga does not comprise a style or a genre per se, but rather indicates a target demographic. shōnen-ai. The stories were published mostly in magazines targeted at girls–which had a huge audience. And that is where The Heart of Thomas was originally published in 1974.
The Heart of Thomas is a fascinating story—it’s set in a German boys boarding school (written by a Japanese woman!). The story opens with the death of a character named Thomas. He falls off a bridge and the story is predicated upon wondering whether he jumped or he fell. There are a lot of clues that he committed suicide because of his unrequited love for Juli, the prefect of boys at the school. Juli is quite different from the other boys, he has dark hair and Greek features, he is not golden haired and blue eyed like so many of the other boys. This makes him stand out. Indeed, he even stands out in his own home, where he lives with his mother and grandmother. His grandmother is disgusted by his coloring and believes him to have impure genes (yikes!). She even tells him as much! But Juli is a serious student and a hard worker, with no time for nonsense from his grandmother or his classmates. He also has no time for farce.
The farce refers to a game that Thomas and Ante created in which they would both vie for Juli’s love. Thomas pursued this heavily but was never successful. And that may be why he killed himself (if indeed he did). (more…)
I Just Read About That... 