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If we're going to live as one, let's get this straight
Having taken a shower and at least stopped shivering so badly (I think my fever may be coming back), I am attempting to de-Wittgenstein the previous post slightly with an addendum of reasons I like the music videos I listed. Click back to watch. Exorcism performed, I am going to bed.
Pet Shop Boys, "It's a Sin." Derek Jarman in painterly tableau mode, calling back to Caravaggio (1986) and anticipating War Requiem (1989) and especially Edward II (1991). I love the little flashes of the Seven Deadly Sins: green-lit Envy clawing miserably at his own face, Avarice with a tongueful of gold coin, Pride preening with her peacock's fan.
Fatboy Slim, "Weapon of Choice." Christopher Walken dancing. I said so already. Do you need to know anything else?
The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, "Wuthering Heights." Firstly because it's a jazzy crooner's version of the song performed in an unflappably mellow baritone secondly while stalking the unfortunate modern-day Heathcliff all over London. I am never going to get over how gleefully so many ukulele players can burst into a room at once.
Kate Bush, "Hounds of Love." Many of her music videos do not work for me: either they're too distractingly literal, or they're abstract in ways that don't enhance the story for me, or like "Experiment IV" they clarify aspects that are more effective when left shadowy. Here the stone-faced, swiftly graceful stranger who pulls Bush's shy protagonist into a Hitchcockian run from the authorities must be the "fox caught by dogs" who "let me take him in my hands . . . I'm ashamed of running away," and indeed the two of them are saved only when they turn their backs on their drab, trenchoat-clad hunters and enact a deliberate, risk-taking pas de deux on the dance floor, but nothing is being spelled out for the viewer. They do run through some trees at one point. The rest is symbol and suggestion.
PJ Harvey, "Man-Size." It's intimate and goofy and sexy and not about the viewer, a woman addressing the camera as if singing along to herself in a mirror, although she does know we're here. Harvey headbangs so hard her earring goes flying and she cracks herself up. It's brilliant.
16 Horsepower, "Black Soul Choir." The rare case of a song I discovered through its video, courtesy of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks in 2009. It still unsettles me. David Eugene Edwards clog-dancing like a ghost in the dust with his hair in those tight little braids would be absurd if he didn't look like a man possessed: not by demons, but by faith.
Orbital, "The Box." Tilda Swinton as an alien visitor with frail, birdlike, curious movements, exploring East London—Earth—for a time-stuttered day and night. Enough said.
Hole, "Celebrity Skin." Nothing in the video is a direct illustration of the lyrics, but Courtney Love (along with Melissa Auf der Maur) is working her beauty so hard it takes itself apart right in front of your eyes, acidly colorized like a curdled MGM musical. It's beautifully corrosive.
Rob Zombie, "Living Dead Girl." Because it is a perfect pastiche of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), lacking only Conrad Veidt.
Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling, "Episode 1: Arrival." Because it is a perfect pastiche of the opening sequence of The Prisoner (1967–68), lacking only Patrick McGoohan.
The Magnetic Fields, "Andrew in Drag." The genderbending. And the cleverness of allowing the audience only a single full rotation of that tall blond-curled woman and that cocky ginger-parted boy, as brief and tantalizing as the narrator's one sight of the woman he'll spend the rest of his life pining for. I love the blank nametag that looks at first like a bow to the safe-for-work censors and then is no such thing.
The Pack a.d., "Sirens" and "Positronic." Unpersons is an album of monsters—sirens, androids, demons, ghosts, perfectly human people who hurt one another terribly. The music videos are short genre films. The depiction of siren song in the first is not actually one I have seen before, puppeting the hapless protagonist from the inside out in flailing, comical, upsetting ways, his look of confusion turning to an irritated kind of terror as he can't stop lip-synching the words fretting in his ear like a blood-tide. The second is more conventional in its handling of tropes (with some smart callbacks to James Cameron), but it twists as nicely at the end as a Twilight Zone.
David Bowie, "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)." David Bowie and Tilda Swinton in the same music video. David Bowie and Tilda Swinton in the same music video as Andrej Pejić, Saskia de Brauw, and Iselin Steiro, genderfluid all. Why are you not watching this already? You've already seen it? That's no excuse.
Pet Shop Boys, "It's a Sin." Derek Jarman in painterly tableau mode, calling back to Caravaggio (1986) and anticipating War Requiem (1989) and especially Edward II (1991). I love the little flashes of the Seven Deadly Sins: green-lit Envy clawing miserably at his own face, Avarice with a tongueful of gold coin, Pride preening with her peacock's fan.
Fatboy Slim, "Weapon of Choice." Christopher Walken dancing. I said so already. Do you need to know anything else?
The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, "Wuthering Heights." Firstly because it's a jazzy crooner's version of the song performed in an unflappably mellow baritone secondly while stalking the unfortunate modern-day Heathcliff all over London. I am never going to get over how gleefully so many ukulele players can burst into a room at once.
Kate Bush, "Hounds of Love." Many of her music videos do not work for me: either they're too distractingly literal, or they're abstract in ways that don't enhance the story for me, or like "Experiment IV" they clarify aspects that are more effective when left shadowy. Here the stone-faced, swiftly graceful stranger who pulls Bush's shy protagonist into a Hitchcockian run from the authorities must be the "fox caught by dogs" who "let me take him in my hands . . . I'm ashamed of running away," and indeed the two of them are saved only when they turn their backs on their drab, trenchoat-clad hunters and enact a deliberate, risk-taking pas de deux on the dance floor, but nothing is being spelled out for the viewer. They do run through some trees at one point. The rest is symbol and suggestion.
PJ Harvey, "Man-Size." It's intimate and goofy and sexy and not about the viewer, a woman addressing the camera as if singing along to herself in a mirror, although she does know we're here. Harvey headbangs so hard her earring goes flying and she cracks herself up. It's brilliant.
16 Horsepower, "Black Soul Choir." The rare case of a song I discovered through its video, courtesy of
rushthatspeaks in 2009. It still unsettles me. David Eugene Edwards clog-dancing like a ghost in the dust with his hair in those tight little braids would be absurd if he didn't look like a man possessed: not by demons, but by faith. Orbital, "The Box." Tilda Swinton as an alien visitor with frail, birdlike, curious movements, exploring East London—Earth—for a time-stuttered day and night. Enough said.
Hole, "Celebrity Skin." Nothing in the video is a direct illustration of the lyrics, but Courtney Love (along with Melissa Auf der Maur) is working her beauty so hard it takes itself apart right in front of your eyes, acidly colorized like a curdled MGM musical. It's beautifully corrosive.
Rob Zombie, "Living Dead Girl." Because it is a perfect pastiche of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), lacking only Conrad Veidt.
Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling, "Episode 1: Arrival." Because it is a perfect pastiche of the opening sequence of The Prisoner (1967–68), lacking only Patrick McGoohan.
The Magnetic Fields, "Andrew in Drag." The genderbending. And the cleverness of allowing the audience only a single full rotation of that tall blond-curled woman and that cocky ginger-parted boy, as brief and tantalizing as the narrator's one sight of the woman he'll spend the rest of his life pining for. I love the blank nametag that looks at first like a bow to the safe-for-work censors and then is no such thing.
The Pack a.d., "Sirens" and "Positronic." Unpersons is an album of monsters—sirens, androids, demons, ghosts, perfectly human people who hurt one another terribly. The music videos are short genre films. The depiction of siren song in the first is not actually one I have seen before, puppeting the hapless protagonist from the inside out in flailing, comical, upsetting ways, his look of confusion turning to an irritated kind of terror as he can't stop lip-synching the words fretting in his ear like a blood-tide. The second is more conventional in its handling of tropes (with some smart callbacks to James Cameron), but it twists as nicely at the end as a Twilight Zone.
David Bowie, "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)." David Bowie and Tilda Swinton in the same music video. David Bowie and Tilda Swinton in the same music video as Andrej Pejić, Saskia de Brauw, and Iselin Steiro, genderfluid all. Why are you not watching this already? You've already seen it? That's no excuse.
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Agreed. I'd have watched them.
. . . Okay, did I know that "Black Soul Choir" was directed by the Brothers Quay? Because that makes a lot of sense, but it still feels like news to me.
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And the "Hounds of Love" video is interesting for me because the story you describe, and which the video very beautifully shows (I love the guy's face, and hers with him), because it objectifies the pursuit itself, and the terror of that, apart from the terror of submitting to, and letting yourself be overcome by, love. *That* element is shown first when the woman [lets herself be?] is pulled away by the fugitive, but definitively when she and he turn their backs on the authorities and dance. Fascinating!
Okay, and I still haven't yet made it to the "Black Soul Choir" video. That one's up next.
**Like the Lorde version of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World"!
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I like almost everything the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain (accept no substitutes!) does, but that video is what I discovered them with and I still think it's a high point. That particular version is not currently available on CD/mp3 as far as I can tell, but I have a live recording with the same vocalist I am very fond of. Their "Life on Mars" and "Psycho Killer" are also things of beauty.
Okay, and I still haven't yet made it to the "Black Soul Choir" video. That one's up next.
I will be very curious to hear what you think. That song directly inspired writing in both
Black Soul Choir
Re: Black Soul Choir
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I'm glad for the exorcism and the lessening of shivering, and I hope you've slept. I hope the fever isn't coming back.
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Enjoy! The things that resonate with you about them may not be the ones I describe!
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There have been some weird viruses going around lately. I had a throat that looked like I should have had step, and the swollen glands to match, for about 4 days after we got home from NY in the middle of October. Chills, but no fever (though the thermometer did die not long after, so the readings may just have been faulty.) Then I was better for about 4 days and swiftly descended into a cold that didn't knock me on my butt, or really make me feel all that bad, but lingered for over a week. Cait got it much harder than I, and spent a day lying in bed.
If you're not taking it already, Elderberry extract is a wonderful thing. My illnesses may have been much milder than Cait's because I was being religious about taking it, as well as much hot pepper infused honey in hot cider or lemon ginger tea.
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Yeah, I think that's the version Rob and I are dealing with. I came down with it first and now I think he's following, but we've both had days we were just immobilized. I had to cancel my singing lesson twice in two weeks.
If you're not taking it already, Elderberry extract is a wonderful thing. My illnesses may have been much milder than Cait's because I was being religious about taking it, as well as much hot pepper infused honey in hot cider or lemon ginger tea.
No one has recommended elderberry extract at all, so I will look into some. I've been drinking a lot of hot tea (some lemon ginger, some apple cinnamon) and honey; Rob has been putting Fire Cider in everything. Hot pepper infused honey in cider sounds like the logical next step.
Thanks!