playground love



for christmas, i bought erik the original score for "The Virgin Suicides," written and performed by the fabulous Air. it's been in my car since boxing day.

jeffrey eugenides is one of my favorite writers. the virgin suicides is in my top 5 list of favorite books. sofia coppola is one of my favorite filmmakers. the virgin suicides is in my top 5 list of favorite films. air is one of my favorite bands. the VS original score is now probably in my top 5 list of favorite albums.

it's seamless. fluid. beautiful. the pulsing undertones of the theme melody sneak into your blood, and before you know it, you're ready to let go of the steering wheel and float through the buildings and the neon signs and the brake lights in front of you. you're ready to be a movie dream sequence or a movie death sequence, where it's just beautiful photography, intense ethereal sounds, and you're flying or falling or crashing or sinking.

and, it's really just two main chords. one interval. back and forth.
genius.

the last track includes some key narration, verbatim from eugenides, slowed down and thus deepened to fit the steady pounding beat. the narrator is only known as the plural "we," a group of boys obsessed with the lisbon girls, the suicides, and just the need for something deeper and more beautiful than their lives beforehand.

i got home and stayed up until 2 or so, plowing through the book i've already read countless times. i couldn't get enough. the music - that interval - ran through my head as i read. i'm in love with the town, with the decade, with the dying trees, with the lisbon girls. but most of all, i'm in love with those boys across the street: the narrating "we." they're so innocent and broken at the same time. so real, so ripe, so expectant. they weren't cool. they weren't important. we know little about them except how they tell the lisbon sisters' story. and i'd say they're some of the best characters ever written.

it's not very often you find a book, a movie, and a score that don't fight each other. the whole package just owns me.

"It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together."