Monday, August 25, 2008

l'histoire

For a while now, I've had a steadily growing desire to learn the violin. Owen Pallett is probably the guy who's responsible for first kindling my desire. Final Fantasy Has a Good Home really got me excited about the possibilities of the violin. When we saw Horse Feathers I felt the prickle of that desire growing. Or maybe I left my cell phone on vibrate, you can't expect me to remember everything. But what has finally made me decide it must be done?



Okay, before you get your mustache in a twist, I know Gaspar Claus here is playing a cello but the techniques are similar and he is making sounds come out of it that don't even seem possible. That shit is like some shoegaze cello. I am so serious that I intend to abstain from the purchase of any new frocks until I have a violin in my hands and lessons funded, which shouldn't be too hard actually considering everyone I work with just went back to school and I didn't. Overtime, here I come!

Gaspar Claus did a series of videos for La Blogotheque with flamenco guitarist Pedro Soler. The two of them drive around the border between Spain and France looking for lonely places to sit down and play music together. In the first two videos, they kind of chat with each other about music and shit and it's really cool to see how they each bring the perspective of their generation but without getting into a really intense "kids these days"/"shut up dad" kind of fight (I think it's called "respect"?). But it's in this last video where they visit the cemetery where Walter Benjamin was buried that I really feel the melancholy power of their collaboration and the importance of art, of music, of ideas. You have to have eight minutes somewhere in your life that you can dedicate to watching this.



Human history is so big and terrible. How could you not care? How could you not want to make some noise?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I plaid the celo bbak in scool. Essy peasy.

'stina said...

I don't believe this ostentatious claim about not purchasing frocks one bit.

megan elizabeth said...

You're going to have to believe it when you see it.