I can't remember now what, a few weeks ago, got me thinking about 'Golden Hours' from Brian Eno's 1974 Another Green World, which I often cite as my favorite album. I think I went on a youtube tear watching Hilsinger and Beatty's Enorchestra, and they had done a cover of it.
That song in particular has a bad visceral memory for me of being a third wheel as a two high school friends and I tried to perform it, and there was an uncomfortable sexual tension going on between them. (Uncomfortable for me, at any rate.)
Anyway, the lyrics are about time, and getting older, and losing one's faculties:
The passage of time Is flicking dimly up on the screen I can't see the lines I used to think i could read between Perhaps my brains have turned to sand.
...the next stanza ends with "Perhaps my brains are old and scrambled." Sentiments I have always related with, and am now finally physically embodying.
Then the lyrics talk about the day sliding away, and there's a phonetically-consonant evocation of 'turning water in to wine' (which I find curiously left-field), and this stanza closer is subsequently echoed with 'putting grapes back on the vine.'
I had been anticipating an upcoming lecture on Lewis Carroll and Flann O'Brien on the nature of Time, and I expect the surre-ality of the treatment of time in those two authors' works (the historical context of which being the consideration in the lecture) was what pinged my brain on this line, 'putting grapes back on the vine'.
I had been listening to this song for nearly forty years, and had never before noticed this weird subject change in the song, this introduction of going backwards, in a song that until that point was about fading away.
It's not left-field considering Eno's larger work. His music explores the generative process of creating art, and how cycles echo and fade; the fading itself layering through echo to become the body of the piece.
Anyway, that's as far as my fatigued brain took it - I just got intrigued by the idea of a simple cartoon depicting step-by-step reversal of order from left to right. Grapes. Going. Back. On. The. Vine.
Well, stem. Is the stem a vine?
Simple cartoon, line drawings. And, of course, in practice it becomes less simple, and then muddied, and then muddled. In GIMP I accidentally paint bucketed a range that created a luminescent wireframe interpretation of my drawing, and I guess I just immediately took to it. As if that's where I had been all along.
Which, in a way, kind of matched my interpretation of the song. Getting older, fading away, but also going backwards to the start.
I can't remember now what, a few weeks ago, got me thinking about 'Golden Hours' from Brian Eno's 1974 Another Green World, which I often cite as my favorite album. I think I went on a youtube tear watching Hilsinger and Beatty's Enorchestra, and they had done a cover of it.
ReplyDeleteThat song in particular has a bad visceral memory for me of being a third wheel as a two high school friends and I tried to perform it, and there was an uncomfortable sexual tension going on between them. (Uncomfortable for me, at any rate.)
Anyway, the lyrics are about time, and getting older, and losing one's faculties:
The passage of time
Is flicking dimly up on the screen
I can't see the lines
I used to think i could read between
Perhaps my brains have turned to sand.
...the next stanza ends with "Perhaps my brains are old and scrambled." Sentiments I have always related with, and am now finally physically embodying.
Then the lyrics talk about the day sliding away, and there's a phonetically-consonant evocation of 'turning water in to wine' (which I find curiously left-field), and this stanza closer is subsequently echoed with 'putting grapes back on the vine.'
I had been anticipating an upcoming lecture on Lewis Carroll and Flann O'Brien on the nature of Time, and I expect the surre-ality of the treatment of time in those two authors' works (the historical context of which being the consideration in the lecture) was what pinged my brain on this line, 'putting grapes back on the vine'.
I had been listening to this song for nearly forty years, and had never before noticed this weird subject change in the song, this introduction of going backwards, in a song that until that point was about fading away.
It's not left-field considering Eno's larger work. His music explores the generative process of creating art, and how cycles echo and fade; the fading itself layering through echo to become the body of the piece.
Anyway, that's as far as my fatigued brain took it - I just got intrigued by the idea of a simple cartoon depicting step-by-step reversal of order from left to right. Grapes. Going. Back. On. The. Vine.
Well, stem. Is the stem a vine?
Simple cartoon, line drawings. And, of course, in practice it becomes less simple, and then muddied, and then muddled. In GIMP I accidentally paint bucketed a range that created a luminescent wireframe interpretation of my drawing, and I guess I just immediately took to it. As if that's where I had been all along.
Which, in a way, kind of matched my interpretation of the song. Getting older, fading away, but also going backwards to the start.
8 out of 10 on this one. Happy with it.