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Post by rosabelbelieve on Mar 23, 2008 21:40:28 GMT
Okay, here goes... Sorry again about length, and general weirdness of ideas... this is a bit of a weird song. And we let the weirdness in, right? We just have to keep a balance between 'leaving it open' and 'keeping it shut.' With that in mind, read onward if you dare.. Bjork: Hyperballadwe live on a mountain right at the top there's a beautiful view from the top of the mountain every morning I walk towards the edge and throw little things off like: car-parts, bottles and cutlery or whatever I find lying around
it's become a habit a way to start the day
I go through all this before you wake up so I can feel happier to be safe up here with you
it's real early morning no-one is awake I'm back at my cliff, still throwing things off I listen to the sounds they make on their way down I follow with my eyes 'til they crash imagine what my body would sound like slamming against those rocks
and when it lands will my eyes be closed or open?
I go through all this before you wake up so I can feel happier to be safe up here with youThis song says so much to me about tragedy and ecstasy, risk and safety, salvation and damnation, mythology and morality, sorrow and joy, life and death... all of the horrific and beautiful opposite forces that, IMO, give life it's meaning. It juxtaposes these opposites so beautifully and dramatically that I think it also speaks for the necessity of them, and the poetry of the intense grandeur of life that permeates them. It speaks to me of what is almost the strange need people have for dark possibilities, the need for destruction, abandon, and dismemberment. The fantasy of their own body breaking against 'those rocks.' The verses, for me, document an imaginary journey through the underworld, through death and destruction, through being broken by the tragedy, the mythology, the immense horror of life. It is a complete surrender to the mystery of dismemberment, the unexplainable hunger and fascination for darkness, that I believe, at a very hidden level, we all have. The heroine walks to the very edge of her consciousness (the cliff) and channels all of her negative and destructive energy into 'throwing things off.' This is a very dangerous thing- like the trance of 'leaving it open' in The Dreaming that leads to unbalance and spiritual chaos, but also a certain mystical creativity, a plumbing of the unconscious for treasures and revelations. But again, I think it is a necessary thing. The heroine of Hyperballad needs to do this. I think it gives her some idea of the immensity of life- just the glory and enormity of all possibilities. This is juxtaposed to the chorus. And what I think is so amazing about the song is the utterly intense contrast between the two. "I go through all this before you wake up so I can feel happier to be safe again with you!" There's just such a feeling of sudden levitation in these words, of resurrection, salvation, the miraculous flame core of life still alight, exposed completely, amidst unspeakable grief and joy, and almost impossibly still alight. IMO, the song unites these two opposite things to illuminate a piece of the immense inexplicable poetry and lyricism of life. It is about horror and beauty, and the endless mystery, the endless regeneration of life in rhapsody beyond good and evil. It's very hard to express this, but I think that the essence of the song is about extremes, and the need, on such a basic level, for the intense experience of them to put the world into perspective. Maybe I'm not being very clear, but I thought I would give this a whirl anyway. It reminds me, also, of the NFE album cover, where bats and doves swirl equally from Kate's voluminous skirt. Hyperballad finds the beauty in both of them. Does this make any sense? I hope so.
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Post by rosabelbelieve on Mar 23, 2008 23:31:19 GMT
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Post by Al Truest on Mar 25, 2008 1:06:39 GMT
Okay, here goes... Sorry again about length, and general weirdness of ideas... this is a bit of a weird song. And we let the weirdness in, right? We just have to keep a balance between 'leaving it open' and 'keeping it shut.' With that in mind, read onward if you dare.. Bjork: Hyperballadwe live on a mountain right at the top there's a beautiful view from the top of the mountain every morning I walk towards the edge and throw little things off like: car-parts, bottles and cutlery or whatever I find lying around
it's become a habit a way to start the day
I go through all this before you wake up so I can feel happier to be safe up here with you
it's real early morning no-one is awake I'm back at my cliff, still throwing things off I listen to the sounds they make on their way down I follow with my eyes 'til they crash imagine what my body would sound like slamming against those rocks
and when it lands will my eyes be closed or open?
I go through all this before you wake up so I can feel happier to be safe up here with youThis song says so much to me about tragedy and ecstasy, risk and safety, salvation and damnation, mythology and morality, sorrow and joy, life and death... all of the horrific and beautiful opposite forces that, IMO, give life it's meaning. It juxtaposes these opposites so beautifully and dramatically that I think it also speaks for the necessity of them, and the poetry of the intense grandeur of life that permeates them. It speaks to me of what is almost the strange need people have for dark possibilities, the need for destruction, abandon, and dismemberment. The fantasy of their own body breaking against 'those rocks.' The verses, for me, document an imaginary journey through the underworld, through death and destruction, through being broken by the tragedy, the mythology, the immense horror of life. It is a complete surrender to the mystery of dismemberment, the unexplainable hunger and fascination for darkness, that I believe, at a very hidden level, we all have. The heroine walks to the very edge of her consciousness (the cliff) and channels all of her negative and destructive energy into 'throwing things off.' This is a very dangerous thing- like the trance of 'leaving it open' in The Dreaming that leads to unbalance and spiritual chaos, but also a certain mystical creativity, a plumbing of the unconscious for treasures and revelations. But again, I think it is a necessary thing. The heroine of Hyperballad needs to do this. I think it gives her some idea of the immensity of life- just the glory and enormity of all possibilities. This is juxtaposed to the chorus. And what I think is so amazing about the song is the utterly intense contrast between the two. "I go through all this before you wake up so I can feel happier to be safe again with you!" There's just such a feeling of sudden levitation in these words, of resurrection, salvation, the miraculous flame core of life still alight, exposed completely, amidst unspeakable grief and joy, and almost impossibly still alight. IMO, the song unites these two opposite things to illuminate a piece of the immense inexplicable poetry and lyricism of life. It is about horror and beauty, and the endless mystery, the endless regeneration of life in rhapsody beyond good and evil. It's very hard to express this, but I think that the essence of the song is about extremes, and the need, on such a basic level, for the intense experience of them to put the world into perspective. Maybe I'm not being very clear, but I thought I would give this a whirl anyway. It reminds me, also, of the NFE album cover, where bats and doves swirl equally from Kate's voluminous skirt. Hyperballad finds the beauty in both of them. Does this make any sense? I hope so. It makes sense to me. When I was in college people would go to the top floor of our dorm - most of them high or tripping - and flip (playing) cards off the rooftop just to watch them spiral to the ground. It was a similar death defying and symbolic exercise as you describe. Disenchantment, boredom and lack of direction for creative energy can propel dark forces against the establishment. Your post put this kind of evolution into context. I would never dream of doing that now. When we are young and creative, however, we seek the dark sometimes to rebel or to brighten the light by contrast.
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Post by rosabelbelieve on Mar 25, 2008 1:25:38 GMT
Exactly. It is a very strange song, and obviously not really a healthy one- but I think that it expresses something that we all feel. Something like the archetypal journey through the underworld before the goal can be attained, IMO. Hyperballad actually reminds me quite a bit of some of what Joseph Campbell says about mythology and morality and tragedy and comedy in 'The Hero With a Thousand Faces.' I might try and find some of the passages I'm talking about, stay tuned...
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Post by rosabelbelieve on Mar 25, 2008 1:28:35 GMT
Oh and Al, 6,500 posts, wow. Not really a milestone, but sort of. Do you think you can get to 7,000 before I get to 500?
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Post by rosabelbelieve on Mar 25, 2008 1:37:49 GMT
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Post by rosabelbelieve on Mar 26, 2008 2:32:19 GMT
This is the passage I was talking about. I know, I know, it's really long, but someone please read it 'cos I just spent half an hour typing it up. You will forever have my gratitude. Tragedy and Comedy (from Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces)"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in it's own way." With these fateful words, Count Leo Tolstoy opened the novel of the spiritual dismemberment of his modern heroine, Anna Karenina. During the seven decades that have elapsed since that distracted wife, mother, and blindly impassioned mistress threw herself beneath the wheels of a train- thus terminating, with a gesture symbolic of what had already happened to her soul, her tragedy of disorientation- a tumultuous and unremitting dithyramb of romances, news reports, and unrecorded cries of anguish has been going up to the honor of the bull-demon of the labyrinth: the wrathful, destructive, maddening aspect of the same god who, when benign, is the vivifying principle of the world. Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms we have loved,
"Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with it's secret cause." As Gilbert Murray has pointed out in his preface to Ingram Bywater's translation of the Poetics of Aristotle, tragic katharsis (i.e., the "purification" or "purgation" of the emotions of the spectator of tragedy through his experience of pity and terror) corresponds to an earlier ritual katharsis ("a purification of of the community from the taints and poisons of the past year , the old contagion of sin and death"), which was the function of the festival and mystery play of the dismembered bull-god, Dionysos. The meditating mind is united, in the mystery play, not with the body that is shown to die, but with the principle of continuous life that for a time inhabited it, and for that time was the reality clothed in the apparition (at once the sufferer and the secret cause), the substratum into which our selves dissolve when the 'tragedy that breaks man's face" has split, shattered, and dissolved our mortal frame.
Appear, appear whatso thy shape or name O Mountain Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads, Lion of the Burning Flame! O God, Beast, Mystery, come!
This death to logic and the emotional commitments of our chance moment in the world of space and time, this recognition of, and shift of emphasis to, the universal life which throbs and celebrates it's victory in the very kiss of our own annihilation, this amor fati, "love of fate," love of the fate that is inevitably death, constitutes the experience of the tragic art: therein the joy of it, the redeeming ecstasy:
"My days have run, the servant I, Initiate, of Idaean Jove Where midnight Zangreus roves, I rove; I have endured his thunder-cry; Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts; Held the Great Mother's mountain flame; I am Set Free and named by name A Bacchos of the Mailed Priests. "
Modern literature is devoted, in great measure, to a courageous and open-eyed observation of the sickeningly broken figurations that abound before us, around us, and within. Where the natural impulse to complain against the holocaust has been suppressed- to cry out blame, or to announce panaceas- the magnitude if an art of tragedy more potent (for us) than the Greek finds realization: the realistic, intimate, and variously interesting tragedy of democracy , where the god is beheld crucified in the catastrophes not of the great houses only but of every common home, every scourged and lacerated face. And there is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation, to alleviate the bitter majesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed forth from the womb only to fail.
In comparison with all this, our little stories of achievement seem pitiful. Too well we know the bitterness of failure, loss, disillusionment, and ironic unfulfillment galls the blood of even the envied of the world! Hence we are not disposed to assign to comedy the high rank of tragedy. Comedy as satire is acceptable, as fun it is a pleasant haven of escape, but the fairy tale of happiness ever after cannot be taken seriously; it belongs to the neverland of childhood, which is protected from the realities that will become terribly known soon enough; just as the myth of heaven ever after is for the old, whose lives are behind them and whose hearts have to be readied for the last portal of the transit into the night- which sober, Occidental judgment is founded on a total misunderstanding of the realities depicted in the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedies of redemption. These, in the ancient world were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy , of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and a revelation more complete.
The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed. Where formerly life and death contended, now enduring being is made manifest- as indifferent to the accidents of time as water boiling in a pot is to the destiny of a bubble, or as the cosmos to the appearance and disappearance of a galaxy of stars. Tragedy is the shattering of forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible. Thus the two are the terms of a single mythological theme and experience which includes them both and which they bound: the down-going and the up-coming (kathodos and anodos), which together constitute the totality of the revelation that is life, and which the individual must know and love if he is to be purged (katharsis=purgatorio) of the contagion of sin (disobedience to the divine will) and death (identification with this mortal form).
"All things are changing, nothing dies. The spirit wanders, comes now here, now there, and occupies whatever frame it pleases... For that which once existed is no more, and that which was not has come to be; and so the whole round of motion is gone through again." "Only the bodies, of which this eternal, imperishable, incomprehensible Self is the indweller, are said to have an end."
It is the business of mythology proper, and of the fairy tale, to reveal the specific dangers and techniques of the dark interior way from tragedy to comedy. Hence the incidents are fantastic and "unreal": they represent psychological, not physical, triumphs. Even when the legend is of an actual historical personage, the deeds of victory are rendered not in lifelike, but in a dreamlike, figurations; for the point is not that such-and-such was done on earth; the point is that, before such-and-such could be done on earth, this other, more important, primary thing had to be brought to pass within the labyrinth that we all know and visit in our dreams. The passage of the mythological hero may be overground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward - into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long-lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world. This deed accomplished, life no longer suffers hopelessly under the terrible mutilations of ubiquitous disaster, battered by time, hideous throughout space; but with it's horror visible still, it's cries of anguish still tumultuous, it becomes penetrated by an all-suffusing, all-sustaining love, and a knowledge of it's own unconquered power. Something of the light that blazes invisible within the abysses of its normally opaque materiality breaks forth with an increasing uproar. The dreadful mutilations are seen only as shadows, only, of an immanent, imperishable eternity ; time yields to glory; and the world sings with the prodigious, angelic, but perhaps finally monotonous, siren music of the spheres. Like happy families, the myths and the worlds redeemed are all alike."
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Post by tannis on Mar 26, 2008 4:21:28 GMT
Thus the two are the terms of a single mythological theme and experience which includes them both and which they bound: the down-going and the up-coming (kathodos and anodos), which together constitute the totality of the revelation that is life, and which the individual must know and love if he is to be purged (katharsis=purgatorio) of the contagion of sin (disobedience to the divine will) and death (identification with this mortal form). Lester: "Comedy is tragedy plus time!" ( Crimes and Misdemeanors, Woody Allen, 1989) ...and time allows for the "transcendence of the universal tragedy of man"! Thank you very much for posting this piece. I really enjoyed reading it!----- - THE RED SHOES - With Thanks To: Ma, Pa, Paddy, John, Lily, Haydn Bendall, Lisa Bradley, Hilary Sheffield, Stewart Arnold, Suzy Millais, Steve Sidwell, Shirley Parks, Phil Griffin, Laura Connor, Michael Powell, Danny McIntosh, Ken Townsend, Jim Jones, Anthony Yacomine, Garry Robson, Simon Quill, Alan Cundell, Gary Briley, Michael Skipwith, Deike Rich, Joe Boyd, Therese Stoulil, Malcolm Clark, Joseph Campbell, Mark Wilkinson & Del. Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1993 05:58:43 -0500 Subject: Re: Kate and Joseph Campbell In article <9312280211> you write: >Does anyone know about the relationship between Kate and Joseph Campbell? Is she talking about the real J.C. on the notes of TRS? Does Kate know J.C.? Can anyone enlighten me on this subject? Thank you. Joseph Campbell has been dead for a while, so I kind of doubt if they have a close relationship. Kate could have been reading JC's works and may have been impressed enough to credit him (posthumously) on the album. Or this could be another person named Joseph Campbell. Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1993 13:05:28 GMT Subject: Re: Kate and Joseph Campbell "The real?" Begs the question, dunnit? Well, I know *I* sent her some of Joseph Campbell's books a while back (might have been '87)--I would be surprised if I were the only person who ever thought she might be interested. gaffa.org/moments/1_6.html
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Post by rosabelbelieve on Mar 26, 2008 12:21:30 GMT
Oh hey, I had always wondered about that! It would be very cool if she were actually influenced by his ideas. And I'm glad you enjoyed reading it. I see a lot of connections to Kate's work, or at least similarities. Especially on The Dreaming, TRS, and Aerial.
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Post by rosabelbelieve on Mar 26, 2008 18:57:26 GMT
Anais Mitchell- Hadestown highlights www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjLhJyickbU&feature=relatedI started a thread about Anais a while ago, but it died rather quickly. This is the highlights of a folk opera which she wrote the lyrics for and played the lead female role in. The story is based on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. I was lucky enough to see it in real life, and it was so amazing.
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Post by tannis on Mar 26, 2008 21:40:52 GMT
A very enjoyable clip. Thank you... On the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, I have only seen Jean Cocteau's Orphée (1950). Orphée (1950) film trivia: For the scene in which Orphee passes his hand through a glass pane, Cocteau used a vat of mercury to create the effect... How To Be Invisible? ... Orphee's obsession with deciphering hidden messages contained in random radio noise is a direct nod to the coded messages that the BBC concealed in their wartime transmissions for the French Resistance... Aerial Pi? ...
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Post by rosabelbelieve on Mar 26, 2008 22:04:44 GMT
I'm glad you enjoyed it. It really only gives some idea of how wonderful the performance was, but I think the whole thing is supposed to be released eventually. I'm glad the very ending scene was left intact (the one with Anais singing acapella..) I think that was probably my favorite part of the whole thing. Live, it was absolutely beautiful.
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Post by tannis on Mar 26, 2008 22:38:57 GMT
Anais Mitchell - Hadestown: The Wall www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTDV-xzxzeQfrom wiki:In a short period of time, Anaïs made several trips to the Middle East, and also spent time in Europe and Latin America, studying languages and world politics... "In Mitchell’s universe, there is no light between the personal and the political, the venerable and the radical... she brilliantly intertwines the mundane and the profound, singing with the same intimacy about a carefree night on the town and wandering the warring towns of Israel. Her vivid snapshots of sweetly ordinary moments spin suddenly outward to bemoan the eternal woes of poverty and militarism." The Wall... the Israeli West Bank barrier... ?
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Post by rosabelbelieve on Mar 26, 2008 23:02:31 GMT
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Post by rosabelbelieve on Mar 28, 2008 1:12:17 GMT
Joanna Newsom: Sprout And Bean www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYl0uLrXP7UAnyone have any idea what this song is about? I love it, but the lyrics are quite mysterious. This is one of her earlier songs.
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