Tilting at Windmills
Windmill, the nom de guerre of Matthew Thomas Dillon, is a rhythmic journey into the coldness of modernity. It’s cold marble and plastic; a life lived divorced from emotion. Events of the world, affecting millions, are just pictures on a tv screen, tinted unrecognizable with the glare of a morning winter sun.
One of the big name automakers recently released a commercial featuring a woman staring transfixed through a moonroof as her friends, party bound on a Saturday night, drove through an unnamed city. So mesmerized by the constellations of lights in the office buildings above, she completely missed the fact that her friends had all disembarked. This is what this song conveys: the calmness of drifting through a crowd, detached and aloof, yet in touch with the atoms colliding around you, people, sounds, lights, steel and plastic.
In my ever-increasing search to ensure that I’m doing this legally, I’m trying out Seeqpod. I’m not sure I like how it displays (which is what has kept me from using it before), so anyone reading, let me know what you think.
A Song and a Site Update
It’s a 2 for 1 deal around here today, as I talk about the fact that I haven’t posted in a while, and some visual changes around here.
Yesterday, I finally tweaked Tumblr enough to allow my posts to magically show up here. Basically, I have an embedded tumblog to the right thanks to this site. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s getting there. I also converted part of my Google Reader blogroll to WP blogroll (which you’ll see if you scroll down). I also fixed some errors I found in the theme, plus some nice google ads it snuck in to provide it some revenue. Finally, I added a Flash player for the mp3s, so when you click on the link, it will automatically show the little Flash dealie. Pretty neat.
There’s still a lot of housekeeping that needs to be done; I’d like to create a more meaningful footer, adjust some names and such on the blogroll, and fix some of the css that doesn’t make sense. The hardest thing will be the footer, I think, because that will require me to create my own widget friendly areas in the footer, which I don’t yet know how to do. Anyway, so that’s what’s coming up. In theory.
Meanwhile, a lot of great music has been coming out. One of my favorites has come from a surprising source: Spiritualized. Back when they came out somewhere around the beginning of this decade, I dismissed the band as overwrought, much like I later dismissed the Polyphonic Spree (but for different reasons). I’d largely forgotten about them until I heard today’s track, “Death Take Your Fiddle”, which is available on the Songs in A&E disc that came out May 27.
Spiritualized – Death Take Your Fiddle
This song haunts you. Its respirator rhythm and Jason Pierce’s cracking voice evoke the precipice, that moment standing in the tunnel uncertain whether to turn into the light or turn back. Death, the fiddle player at the mouth of the cave, is an old friend you’ve run into before: every time you flew off the swing as a kid unsure how you’d fall, or the moment before impact on the highway, when your car is careening between and bouncing off everything around it; each of those times, Death has played a song to lull you. But sometimes your life is just pain – you continue to pinball down life’s highway, never finding the escape that Death offers. And you yearn for it; despite all of your survival instincts, you want to meet your end just so you can be reassured that it will arrive.
It is most likely an homage to Pierce’s fight with cellulitis and pneumonia, which left him in a hospital for much of 2005 and guided him by the hand to the shore of death. (Doctors had to revive him twice during the treatment.) I imagine the pain of recovery occasionally pushed him back to his friend.