A Midlake watershed.
Current mood: contemplative

I don't know about you, but sometimes I'll read a book or listen to some music and it will take me to an intense memory or feeling from another time. Its as close as I'll probably get to a synesthesia-like experience. (I wish I had synesthesia, my childhood memories are laced with weird psychedelic experiences but that's another story...).

Anyway, it hasn't happened to me for ages, probably 'cause I've been trying hard to stay in the real world (for the benefit of those around me), but when I started listening to Midlake's "...Van Occupanther" album, it brought me right back to the beautiful, florid, poetic universe of my favourite author, the psychedelic Richard Brautigan. The first book I ever read of his was "A Confederate General From Big Sur". I read it 10 years ago and I truly entered another place and time. ("In Watermelon Sugar" is an amazing book too. Its more like a painted world than literature. It makes little sense but it gives you another universe to hang out in (if you're tuned for that sort of thing of course.))

Midlake brought me back there, to that beautiful place.

I was so excited about going to see them at the Corner last week. I haven't been that excited to see a band for a long time, but I SAW them, and I think that was the main problem.

They weren't 17th century western pioneers running from bandits with their foxes and oxen, there were no leaking roofs, no snowshoes and hunters, no rations, no boats. Hell, there wasn't even any smoke in the sky! (Being at the Corner and all.)

There WAS that beautiful melancholy, delicate and fragile music, but no-one else around me seemed to want to move to it. They seemed too self-conscious or dislocated from it to let it stream through their bodies. And that dislocated me too, 'cause there were so many people surrounding me so closely, standing so still, that I couldn't really even dance. So Melbourne.

When I got home and Jay asked me about it, I blamed the mixer and where I was standing in the room and that I was tired, but those things have never, and I will say, RUINED the experience of seeing a band that I love so much playing live.

Sometimes reality just isn't where I want things I guess.

I haven't listened to the album since. But I am reading "A Confederate General..." again. Could be a bad move.

3:13 PM - 2 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment