Hallelujah.
I have been listening to Jeff Buckley's "Grace" lately. Like probably 95% of the western world, I have this intense adoration for the song "Hallelujah," so that regardless of who is covering it I just completely shut out the rest of the world and hide inside the lines, sometimes repetitively. On the morning of 9/11, I was in fact repeating the song over and over again for my entire commute to work, so I had no idea of what had happened that morning until I got to work and found everyone frantically trying to get internet news sites to load. In a cowardly, escapist way, I was glad to have found this psychic, preemptive solace in the song.
But my renewed affection for "Grace" had me randomly hunting around on the internets, and I found this, via Slightly Lively. When Leonard Cohen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March, two of my favorite things collided: Damien Rice and Hallelujah. Watch it on full screen when he sings "her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you." That is music.
Behold:
And I can't embed this one, but while we're treating ourselves with our song, why not watch Jeff Buckley sing it, too?
9.26.2008
9.23.2008
Haystacks, the most beautiful place yet.
Haystacks, the most beautiful place yet.
I haven't blogged much about our England trip yet, mostly because it's taking me months to upload all of the pictures. The Flickr uploader and I have a turbulent, on-again, off-again relationship, you see.
But I have to break the silence to tell you about Haystacks. Haystacks is a mountain above Buttermere, a lake in The Lake District National Park in northern England (my birthplace).
a cairn marking the summit of Haystacks
Our hiking party included Erik, Ollie, me, my dad, my uncle, my brother-in-law, and one of my dad's old friends. I'm going to have to be very vague about this because they got back in touch this year due entirely to google, and holy goodness, if my parents found this blog I might throw up. But this friend happened to be a long-time member of a certain highly esteemed local volunteer mountain rescue squad. Note: try to always hike with your own personal mountain rescue personnel. He had been involved with the rescue squad since before his parents had a telephone, and the local policeman would go knocking on doors of fellow squad members to gather them for the rescue. Awesome.
It's almost impossible to think about Haystacks without invoking the name of one Alfred Wainwright, hand-written trail guide writer/legend. He once described it as the best of all the lakeland fells. Wainwright wrote in "Memoirs of a Fellwalker":
tarn, potentially the innominate one. that bump of a mountain right in the middle, the most distant peak, is Sca Fell, the highest mountain in England
Wainwright's ashes were indeed scattered at the top of Haystacks, by the Innominate Tarn, after his death in 1991. Haystacks is quite a detour from the traditional Coast-to-Coast route (devised and written by Wainwright himself), but many hikers make the pilgrimage to see its glory and pay homage to their rambling hero.
I didn't read that passage or learn about Wainwright's ashes and the fame of Haystacks until a few days later, which in a way helped me better experience Haystacks and the breathtaking Innominate Tarn. I saw it fresh; I felt this crazy energy like I might have been the only person to have ever noticed it and decided it was beautiful.
Haystacks, from the way down, looking out into the Buttermere valley
Speaking of paying homage, I'm going to cheapen up my post here by including this picture, where apparently Tommy himself scrambled up this exact little river in the movie version of the Rock!Opera Tommy. I filled up my water bottle right there and drank in a little Roger Daltrey.
Also-apparently, my dad once camped out in those fields in the valley there in the above picture, just before the lake, for months and months one year with a buddy. It was right after college and they drove in to work every day, for no reason other than to do it. They had otherwise perfectly good housing available to them. The guy we hiked with even summoned this when introducing us to people like the local farmer and his kin. Like, "he was one of the two who camped here for the summer and drove in to [company name]," AND EVERYONE REMEMBERED, without ceremony. We're talking, what, 35, 40 years ago? Greatness.
Ollie at the top, more Sca Fell in the distance
My instinct is to announce that Haystacks is probably the most beautiful place I can remember, and maybe only from my lens of history in the Lake District did it manage to eke out the Yosemite Valley on your right and Half Dome on your left as you head out from Glacier Point on the Panorama Trail at sunrise. But maybe nowhere is more beautiful or more resplendent than any other sacred natural place, and our attempts to compare them are entirely in vain. I certainly thought of nothing else, nowhere else as I wandered over Haystacks, fingertips grazing dewy ferns and skin and soul warmed by the summer sun. Nothing compares to that place, nothing.
I haven't blogged much about our England trip yet, mostly because it's taking me months to upload all of the pictures. The Flickr uploader and I have a turbulent, on-again, off-again relationship, you see.
But I have to break the silence to tell you about Haystacks. Haystacks is a mountain above Buttermere, a lake in The Lake District National Park in northern England (my birthplace).
a cairn marking the summit of Haystacks
Our hiking party included Erik, Ollie, me, my dad, my uncle, my brother-in-law, and one of my dad's old friends. I'm going to have to be very vague about this because they got back in touch this year due entirely to google, and holy goodness, if my parents found this blog I might throw up. But this friend happened to be a long-time member of a certain highly esteemed local volunteer mountain rescue squad. Note: try to always hike with your own personal mountain rescue personnel. He had been involved with the rescue squad since before his parents had a telephone, and the local policeman would go knocking on doors of fellow squad members to gather them for the rescue. Awesome.
It's almost impossible to think about Haystacks without invoking the name of one Alfred Wainwright, hand-written trail guide writer/legend. He once described it as the best of all the lakeland fells. Wainwright wrote in "Memoirs of a Fellwalker":
"All I ask for, at the end, is a last long resting place by the side of Innominate Tarn, on Haystacks, where the water gently laps the gravelly shore and the heather blooms and Pillar and Gable keep unfailing watch. A quiet place, a lonely place. I shall go to it, for the last time, and be carried: someone who knew me in life will take me and empty me out of a little box and leave me there alone. And if you, dear reader, should get a bit of grit in your boot as you are crossing Haystacks in the years to come, please treat it with respect. It might be me."
tarn, potentially the innominate one. that bump of a mountain right in the middle, the most distant peak, is Sca Fell, the highest mountain in England
Wainwright's ashes were indeed scattered at the top of Haystacks, by the Innominate Tarn, after his death in 1991. Haystacks is quite a detour from the traditional Coast-to-Coast route (devised and written by Wainwright himself), but many hikers make the pilgrimage to see its glory and pay homage to their rambling hero.
I didn't read that passage or learn about Wainwright's ashes and the fame of Haystacks until a few days later, which in a way helped me better experience Haystacks and the breathtaking Innominate Tarn. I saw it fresh; I felt this crazy energy like I might have been the only person to have ever noticed it and decided it was beautiful.
Haystacks, from the way down, looking out into the Buttermere valley
Speaking of paying homage, I'm going to cheapen up my post here by including this picture, where apparently Tommy himself scrambled up this exact little river in the movie version of the Rock!Opera Tommy. I filled up my water bottle right there and drank in a little Roger Daltrey.
Also-apparently, my dad once camped out in those fields in the valley there in the above picture, just before the lake, for months and months one year with a buddy. It was right after college and they drove in to work every day, for no reason other than to do it. They had otherwise perfectly good housing available to them. The guy we hiked with even summoned this when introducing us to people like the local farmer and his kin. Like, "he was one of the two who camped here for the summer and drove in to [company name]," AND EVERYONE REMEMBERED, without ceremony. We're talking, what, 35, 40 years ago? Greatness.
Ollie at the top, more Sca Fell in the distance
My instinct is to announce that Haystacks is probably the most beautiful place I can remember, and maybe only from my lens of history in the Lake District did it manage to eke out the Yosemite Valley on your right and Half Dome on your left as you head out from Glacier Point on the Panorama Trail at sunrise. But maybe nowhere is more beautiful or more resplendent than any other sacred natural place, and our attempts to compare them are entirely in vain. I certainly thought of nothing else, nowhere else as I wandered over Haystacks, fingertips grazing dewy ferns and skin and soul warmed by the summer sun. Nothing compares to that place, nothing.
9.11.2008
The Bell Jar
The Bell Jar
My favorite part of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath:
"Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York."
I bought my copy (first American edition!) in a used book store in San Francisco, back in my slightly-publicized hunt for an authentically used copy of The Dharma Bums. I bought that copy of The Bell Jar not necessarily for the fact that it is a first edition, but because it had DAWN MERCER written in giant lettering on the first page, but then, slipped between the pages, a newspaper clipping announcing that DAWN MERCER and her boyfriend had finally broken up. I'm assuming DAWN MERCER'S boyfriend had some better ideas for her beloved antiquated book collection and they ended up at goodwill with a little calling card. Dawn, what did you DO to him?!
The Bell Jar was a sad, sad read, but when she floats her entire wardrobe off the top of the building, it's such this beautiful, freeing, lunatic moment.
If Jeremy Davies' character in Million Dollar Hotel, Tom-Tom, jumped off a building in his triumphant lunacy moment to a soundtrack of U2, then Esther Greenwood threw her clothes to some scratchy, dark, bass clarinet number with a tired, lilty soulful voice breathing a descant and I might have felt something like hope as I read or watched. But there was none.
My favorite part of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath:
"Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York."
I bought my copy (first American edition!) in a used book store in San Francisco, back in my slightly-publicized hunt for an authentically used copy of The Dharma Bums. I bought that copy of The Bell Jar not necessarily for the fact that it is a first edition, but because it had DAWN MERCER written in giant lettering on the first page, but then, slipped between the pages, a newspaper clipping announcing that DAWN MERCER and her boyfriend had finally broken up. I'm assuming DAWN MERCER'S boyfriend had some better ideas for her beloved antiquated book collection and they ended up at goodwill with a little calling card. Dawn, what did you DO to him?!
The Bell Jar was a sad, sad read, but when she floats her entire wardrobe off the top of the building, it's such this beautiful, freeing, lunatic moment.
If Jeremy Davies' character in Million Dollar Hotel, Tom-Tom, jumped off a building in his triumphant lunacy moment to a soundtrack of U2, then Esther Greenwood threw her clothes to some scratchy, dark, bass clarinet number with a tired, lilty soulful voice breathing a descant and I might have felt something like hope as I read or watched. But there was none.
9.04.2008
Still I'd be on my feet.
Still I'd be on my feet.
I've been listening to Joni Mitchell's "Blue" this week, pretty much constantly while in the car. It replaced the new Sigur Ros after I had to finally return my spare copy to its rightful owner, and so now I only have one rightful copy of that, and am listening to it pretty much constantly in the house. But, Blue. Ah, Blue. Such a solid album. However, Today I started skipping the depressing songs, so it's a pretty fast listen. A really fast listen.
Blue is undeniably my Number 1 All Time Most Influential Album, ever, and I'm sure I've blogged about it ad nauseum. I was introduced to Joni by my high school friend Zwickler's dad one day when we were in his car the summer after graduation. Zwickler's dad said something like, "Oh, you'll love this. I can't believe you haven't heard of her, Julia." And I felt happy knowing that people cared enough about me to consider my musical tastes. And especially to consider that they were good tastes. Anyway, Zwickler's dad was right and I entered into a decade plus of adoring, worshiping that album.
Since that afternoon, I have also held track 9, "Case of You," as my favorite song ever. Number One All Time. This is occasionally replaced, depending on my mood, with Sufjan Stevens "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us!" or Iron & Wine "Upwards Over The Mountain," or Sigur Ros "Glosoli," but I always, always come back to "Case of You." I hate having a favorite song, because I feel like professing favorites is just a way to be all: hi, I am really exceptional because I picked out something exceptional that someone else created. But I can't help it.
With all this High Fidelityesque chatter about my All Time Top lists, I'm going to have to describe the song autobiographically to you. I had a strange urge to tell you what the lyrics meant to me, but then I envisioned someone scrolling down the page(s) on their google search results for "Case of You lyrics meaning" and finding this post and invading my thoughts, my version of the song, and that made me feel dirty and stolen. So autobiographical it is. Although "Case of You" has been very timeless to me, making me feel sometimes like I'm not even myself, not the person sitting there listening to it, it still has always had a tremendous hold in my real life. Mostly, in one particular instance.
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, not too long after first discovering Blue, I fell in love with a boy who lived in Kentucky, and I put "Case of You" on one of the many mix tapes I calculatedly constructed for him. I painstakingly figured out how to play it on my beat up guitar so I could sing it to him over the phone. And when he came to visit me or I went to visit him, I'd play it for him in person. He was a much better guitarist than I, but he managed to humor my barely-mediocre arrangement. I mean, wouldn't you? The song is hauntingly beautiful and all tricksy up the neck of the guitar and various octaves and I think I might fall over if someone ever played it for me.
Once, at a restaurant in Cincinnati, I laughed out loud at him and he said, "you know, I've never seen you laugh before," and he sat back and soaked me in for a while but I think he must have realized right then that we couldn't really stay together, apart, if we weren't going to see each other laugh for months at a time, and I must have agreed with him. A couple of weeks later I went home and never saw him again.
Don't get me wrong, the song also went on every other mix tape or CD I made for every other boy I might have been remotely interested in, and maybe even that one I made for my friend Katie, but it was always in a sort of recreation of what that song meant for me in that single strange relationship. I wouldn't even say we shared any special connection to the song; it was just me and Case of You, all aimed at that guy.
But a not so very long time ago, thanks to the Internets, he randomly and unrelated-to-me recited a line of the song: "I'm frightened by the devil, and I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid," and I thought something like, "Oh god, I think my heart just skipped a beat hearing you say a line from that song," but said something a little more put-together, and he said something coolly like, "Oh yeah, didn't you introduce me to that album?" and I wondered what else I had clung to in that relationship and after that relationship that hadn't even phased him, that he'd forgotten.
In a way, it's as if that little interaction has freed the song from his hold, and now it's just mine again, a crazily poetic, glorious song with a distant suggestion of my old sad but pretty story in the background. I am as constant as a northern star.
Sorry my writing is such a disaster. I've been reading Sylvia Plath so I'm feeling all 1960s hurriedly tortured. Which is probably why I dug up the CD in the first place.
lyrics here.
I've been listening to Joni Mitchell's "Blue" this week, pretty much constantly while in the car. It replaced the new Sigur Ros after I had to finally return my spare copy to its rightful owner, and so now I only have one rightful copy of that, and am listening to it pretty much constantly in the house. But, Blue. Ah, Blue. Such a solid album. However, Today I started skipping the depressing songs, so it's a pretty fast listen. A really fast listen.
Blue is undeniably my Number 1 All Time Most Influential Album, ever, and I'm sure I've blogged about it ad nauseum. I was introduced to Joni by my high school friend Zwickler's dad one day when we were in his car the summer after graduation. Zwickler's dad said something like, "Oh, you'll love this. I can't believe you haven't heard of her, Julia." And I felt happy knowing that people cared enough about me to consider my musical tastes. And especially to consider that they were good tastes. Anyway, Zwickler's dad was right and I entered into a decade plus of adoring, worshiping that album.
Since that afternoon, I have also held track 9, "Case of You," as my favorite song ever. Number One All Time. This is occasionally replaced, depending on my mood, with Sufjan Stevens "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us!" or Iron & Wine "Upwards Over The Mountain," or Sigur Ros "Glosoli," but I always, always come back to "Case of You." I hate having a favorite song, because I feel like professing favorites is just a way to be all: hi, I am really exceptional because I picked out something exceptional that someone else created. But I can't help it.
With all this High Fidelityesque chatter about my All Time Top lists, I'm going to have to describe the song autobiographically to you. I had a strange urge to tell you what the lyrics meant to me, but then I envisioned someone scrolling down the page(s) on their google search results for "Case of You lyrics meaning" and finding this post and invading my thoughts, my version of the song, and that made me feel dirty and stolen. So autobiographical it is. Although "Case of You" has been very timeless to me, making me feel sometimes like I'm not even myself, not the person sitting there listening to it, it still has always had a tremendous hold in my real life. Mostly, in one particular instance.
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, not too long after first discovering Blue, I fell in love with a boy who lived in Kentucky, and I put "Case of You" on one of the many mix tapes I calculatedly constructed for him. I painstakingly figured out how to play it on my beat up guitar so I could sing it to him over the phone. And when he came to visit me or I went to visit him, I'd play it for him in person. He was a much better guitarist than I, but he managed to humor my barely-mediocre arrangement. I mean, wouldn't you? The song is hauntingly beautiful and all tricksy up the neck of the guitar and various octaves and I think I might fall over if someone ever played it for me.
Once, at a restaurant in Cincinnati, I laughed out loud at him and he said, "you know, I've never seen you laugh before," and he sat back and soaked me in for a while but I think he must have realized right then that we couldn't really stay together, apart, if we weren't going to see each other laugh for months at a time, and I must have agreed with him. A couple of weeks later I went home and never saw him again.
Don't get me wrong, the song also went on every other mix tape or CD I made for every other boy I might have been remotely interested in, and maybe even that one I made for my friend Katie, but it was always in a sort of recreation of what that song meant for me in that single strange relationship. I wouldn't even say we shared any special connection to the song; it was just me and Case of You, all aimed at that guy.
But a not so very long time ago, thanks to the Internets, he randomly and unrelated-to-me recited a line of the song: "I'm frightened by the devil, and I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid," and I thought something like, "Oh god, I think my heart just skipped a beat hearing you say a line from that song," but said something a little more put-together, and he said something coolly like, "Oh yeah, didn't you introduce me to that album?" and I wondered what else I had clung to in that relationship and after that relationship that hadn't even phased him, that he'd forgotten.
In a way, it's as if that little interaction has freed the song from his hold, and now it's just mine again, a crazily poetic, glorious song with a distant suggestion of my old sad but pretty story in the background. I am as constant as a northern star.
Sorry my writing is such a disaster. I've been reading Sylvia Plath so I'm feeling all 1960s hurriedly tortured. Which is probably why I dug up the CD in the first place.
lyrics here.
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