juvenile-HA

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 12:58:03 GMT

this is the great juvenile video featuring the magnolia projects, some Lamborghini cars and a 15 year old lil wayne

On Ys, by Joanna Newsom

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 00:18:33 GMT

Pitchfork: Let's talk about Ys and its themes a bit more. There's an old Breton folktale where Ys is a sunken city very similar to Atlantis. The sea figures prominently on the album but there's nothing too overt about a sunken city. Did you draw the title from another source, or is it used more loosely, to allude to the mythological spaces the album inhabits?

JN: [The title] was the last thing that I chose, after all the songs and the cover art were finished. So none of the songs directly allude to that myth. But the main themes that emerge out of that myth are really close to the themes on the record-- mortality, decadence, an excess of water, isolation, rebirth. The myth is also significant to me because of the way that I encountered it, which relates to one of the huge events the record is about.

I also liked the power of the word itself. I liked how violent and cryptic it felt; it's such a daunting word to encounter. I like how it contrasted this finely rendered, carefully composed front cover-- the painting is information-dense, formal, and stylized; it looks the way something looks when a painter spends a year on it, which is what Benjamin [Vierling] did. So it has all this detail and carefulness to it, which was really important to me and relates very closely to the record. But I also felt like it needed some sort of ballast, or balance, next to it, to reflect the other elements of the record; its innate violence. I wanted a word that was like throwing a brick at the visual on the front cover; I liked that whenever someone looked at that cover they also had to encounter this short, weird word.

Pitchfork: So the ostensible resonance between your choice of "Ys" and the flooding of New Orleans and Indonesia is a coincidence?

JN: I wouldn't necessarily say that; those things probably did factor into my choice even if they weren't the central reasoning behind it. But I do feel that the image of the flood in general resonated more with me; I was coding a lot of my experience in terms of excess of water, and it was something that was seeping into my consciousness from all around at the time when I was writing some of these things.

Pitchfork: The cover seems like a good symbolic digest of the album's themes. There's a moth, which can symbolize transformation; a sickle, which can stand for depletion and renewal; an open window standing for entrapment and release, framing a bird, which, according to folklore, symbolizes bad luck or death when it lands in a window. So the album seems very taken up with binary, metaphysical transformations. Can you talk about the literary or musical traditions from which you derived this very classical interpretation of art, which seems to privilege the beauty of natural cycles over man-made beauty, and which seeks to root human experience in these cycles?

JN: I don't necessarily see the elements that I invoke on the cover and in the songs as being in binary opposition. I know certain binary tensions emerge between these elements, but a lot of times they're more like archetypal elements; these free-standing, huge forces. Mortality, standing alone, as a thing; as opposed to, "Over here's life; over here's death. Here's bad luck, but here's blessing and redemption. Here's water; here's fire." Certainly those things come up again and again in the songs, but it's not intentional, and probably has more to do with the fact that those things emerge in real life, without any effort on our part whatsoever, than they are derived from any classical tradition. I think classicism in general might reflect more closely the natural order of human life, while postmodernism is somehow removed from the natural order, more cerebral and sterile, removed from real life on some level. So what seems like classicism in some of these songs might be just what I view as an accurate reflection of real life on this planet.

Pitchfork: You don't perceive postmodernism as mirroring the disruption wrought by technology on these natural cycles-- effectively, a reflection of modern life, however unnatural it may be?

JN: I wouldn't necessarily argue against that; of course I rely on a lot of postmodern forms myself within the narrative of these songs. I can't call them linear narratives, and I can't call them chronological in a traditional, classical sense; I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I borrow more from William Faulkner than William Shakespeare. I just find it funny that at this point, we see a collection of highly charged, highly potent symbols as referring back to a classical aesthetic, because to me they seem deeply connected to the pedestrian actuality of real life.

"
[Excerpt from an interview between Pitchfork and Joanna Newsom] http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/39700/Interview_Interview_Joanna_Newsom

of course the last question that pitchfork poses is simultaneously great and ridiculous.

defeat of the popcorn

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 23:34:34 GMT

+

=

after various hours of trying, multiple occasions of brushing and swishing with scope and all of that, i finally got a piece of a popcorn out from between two of my upper right molars. thank god.

my day so far

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 23:15:14 GMT

pretty good:

woke up, played scrabble with my little brother, ate, hung out with my parents.

then i went to go get some running gear with mashi. she convinced me to get sushi and we ate at bonsai.

then i came back to my house. gaby called, we might go to stake and shake and then to play some wii. i'd like a wii.

i like hokusai.

this one's for my baby

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 22:23:23 GMT

here i will write about my day. this one's for mashi.

delvid_writes

juvenile-HA

On Ys, by Joanna Newsom

defeat of the popcorn

my day so far

this one's for my baby