Writer | Number Cruncher | Yoga Teacher | Community Citizen | Nature Lover | Asker of Questions (etc)
I’m off to the climate strike in Auckland today, with all my intersecting identities, mixed feelings, and no sign, because what words could ever be… right?
I love that sometimes a piece of music, words that aren’t organized in the usual fashion, and/or movements of the body can express those ineffable so effectively. More Love indeed. May all beings be well!
Thanks to my colleague, friend, and most-committed yoga student Daniel for sharing these ❤
Scott very rarely plays songs more than once in a sitting, so the fact that we’ve now listened to Loma‘s Black Willow six times in a row is no small endorsement. I agree: it’s infectiously beautiful, darkly haunting, the lyrics are provocative… definitely worth playing over and over, and there’s something about the album cover art, too.
I finally decided to look for a video and Lo, not only does one exist, it’s in a similar vein as the ones I have posted twice before:
And the plot thickens! The video’s first comment on YouTube is from (actor, producer, and writer) Daniel Martine, who points out that the song sounds eerily similar to a song called “Mississippi Mud,” a Black Blood and the Chocolate Pickles song with a grim history:
In his comment to the Black Willow video, Daniel continues:
The story is about the death of black students who protesting [sic] at Jackson State in Mississippi in ’70. Not long after Kent State shootings happened. But it didn’t get the press of Kent State, because they were black students.
I can google up no evidence that Loma may have meant Black Willow to be a straight up homage to the song and/or a rememberance of the events that took place at Jackson State, not to mention the inequality of the response thereafter compared to shootings of white students. But I could understand that the band could have gone there Continue reading “Clear as mud: Black Willow, Mississippi Mud, and FBI informants”
There are a lot of things that art, broadly speaking, does for me. During tough times especially, I appreciate the opportunity to get beyond words and into something deeper, vaster, and paradoxically more accessible, if less explicable.
Here are four dance performances that illuminate the challenge of staying on one’s own path, which to me often feels a lot like going against the grain. The differences, gross or subtle, between what I believe and what I value, and how I live. The various arguing inner voices, the wrestling-with-angels, the sleepless nights.
I highly recommend watching full-screen with a good headset or speakers. I have to believe the third was inspired by the second, but who knows? The last one gives me the most hope, though I reject the implication that we need to buy anything in order to liberate ourselves, as it were.
I’d love to hear how you interpret any or all of these performances, how the lyrics resonate with you (or not – honestly I’m so moved by the physical performances it’s hard for me to pay attention to the lyrics!), and/or to see any art you’ve made to represent the struggle of remaining true to yourself when it feels like you’re supposed to stay within the lines. ❤
I’ve convinced myself that Feist’s I Feel It All video (I am in awe, I love it) influenced the first two thirds of Maggie Rogers’ video for Alaska… after which it’s no longer one take and falls apart for me, but I still love the song. I can find no evidence to support my hunch other than Maggie’s mention of Feist in this interview from 2013, have a look anyway.
I found this video sometime in March or April and I’ve been meaning to post it since then, though there’s so much more about it that hits home now:
So many reasons to love someone; so many people to love for specific, incomplete reasons; so much hair-pulling over whether or not the “right person” (if there even is one) can ever meet all expectations; the combination of fear and relief inherent in choosing to extract oneself from that binary way of thinking; and wide-eyed wonder at the paradoxical experience of feeling simultaneously so free and so committed.
But mostly it delights me that my Dancing, Philosophy model human (see 0.33-0.36 in the video) doesn’t come in a box, that he doesn’t have an off button, and that he is moving with me to New Zealand.
Elizabeth Ü 