#standed

[monothemovie]

When you're at a banger but your phone died and your ride home left. 

[anothermanonthemoon]

“They make glorious shipwreck who are lost in seeking worlds.” - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

[libertinagens]

The Saints - Standed

[galazywanderer]

Well fuck I'm really fucking stranded in sea isle. Where is everyone

[opinionsareforming]

Transfixed between pure rapture and anguish. Wondering if they may not be the same thing, or at least possessed of an intimate relationship. In "T.B. Sheets", his last extended narrative before making this record, Van Morrison watched a girl he loved die of tuberculosis. The song was claustrophobic, suffocating, monstrously powerful: "innuendos, inadequacies, foreign bodies." A lot of people couldn't take it; the editor of this book has said that it's garbage, but I think it made him squeamish. Anyway, the point is that certain parts of Astral Weeks - "Madame George," "Cyprus Avenue" - take the pain in "T.B. Sheets" and root the world in it. Because the pain of watching a loved one die of however dread a disease may be awful, but it is at least something known, in a way understood, in a way measurable and even leading somewhere, because there is a process: sickness, decay, death, mourning, some emotional recovery. But the beautiful horror of "Madame George" and "Cyprus Avenue" is precisely that the people in these songs are not dying: we are looking at life, in its fullest, and what these people are suffering from is not disease but nature, unless nature is a disease.

Lester Bangs, in his famous essay on Van Morrison's masterpiece Astral Weeks, from the Stranded essay collection

Funny that the two passages that stood out tome so far were both about Van Morrison.  Here is an example of art criticism as art itself: incredibly perceptive, able to capture a small piece of the human existence and convey it to others.  The whole essay is worth reading and can easily be found online.  The album, too, is of course worth many listens.

[kodykohlman]

Derek Tracy / Leupp 2011