Thursday 26 April 2007

Commune with the Dead



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I recently picked up Bright Eyes' new album Cassadaga.

Let's have a moments of silence to bask in it's goodness.

...

Okay sweet. It's named after a place in central Florida, a spiritualists commune - filled with mediums and psychics and mystics. A place of vortex maybe? I heard (herd) rumours. I have a very faint memory of when I lived in Florida as a kid, speaking to someone or overhearing the term vortex in relation to the landscape, and it being a faintly metaphysical thing of some sort. Energy portal. I was convinced if I stood on one I'd be sent to another world.

In the Seneca language Cassadaga means 'water beneath the rocks'. Hadn't we just been speaking about Navajo? People forget the water beneath the rocks. Until they're thirsty

Sometimes I wonder about Conor Oberst - he's from Omaha Nebraska (a haunting state in my eyes...) - and sometimes I wonder about who he is. I know he's a singer, of brilliant talent - but that's it. He embodies a sense of American sadness which I think is rare; a crumbling piece of paper, an old Indian treaty, muddy water in the Mississippi, dusty ground outside a Dairy Queen, scent of cotton in August, flat lands, marsh lands, wide open space and a sky that'll fall.

People say he's emo. I find that an alien concept -- he's not emo, he's emotional. Dead people. The obviousness for a bottle or any escape in an absurd, false, plastic landscape we build for ourselves. Forgetting about the dirt, thinking about how to market a land. Market an idea. Can you really blame anybody intelligent for being at all depressed?

We built our own reality, only to realise it was a prison.
(Postmodern isolation baby.)

Susette LaFlesche Tibbles was from the Omaha tribe. Her name was Inshata-Theumba. Bright Eyes.

It all makes sense to me now.

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Bright Eyes - Four Winds

Listen.
It's poetry.



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