Neutral Milk Hotel's opus turns ten this Sunday. Feel old? If you love it, it's one of those albums that imprints itself on your psyche. One of us remembers exactly where he was when he brought it home from the record store the week it came out, sat down and listened to it next to a piano in a girlfriend's father's house ... and those first rushed, hushed lines of 'King Of Carrot Flowers Part 1' were enough to choke a person up, even when they barely knew what was going on, hadn't gotten the Anne Frank thematics. Right then, it was just this quick, gorgeous snapshot of innocence lost in a surrealist, sad atmosphere: 'And your mom would stick a fork right into daddy's shoulder / And your dad would throw the garbage all across the floor / As we would lay and learn what each other's bodies were for...' And it went from there.
Also learned from this post: NMH frontman Jeff Mangum's wife is Astra Taylor, who directed Žižek!, surely the most entertaining film about literary theory ever made. Why not read one, watch the other, and feel warm and brainy and a little strange and inhuman all over?
It's kind of creepy because I fired up this album on my iTunes just before unwittingly reading this post. Coincidence? Or has Mangum, in his long musical absence, become pure energy and infiltrated my head and computer?
ReplyDeleteWhen Jeff Mangum's spirit left his body, how it split the sky.
ReplyDeleteNow he's a little boy in Spain, playing pianos filled with flames... in your brain.