Waxwing Year :-)

Sighting a group of Waxwings on rowan berries outside work on 14th January 2005 reawakened my childhood love of nature... and they are back apparently this year.

Interesting that I dreamed in early October - and even asked a friend who was off to Norway to look out for them - that a low berry harvest was going to make this a waxwing year!

Thriller - Funk saves the world! - Happy Halloween

Whoseever shall be found

Without the soul for getting down

Must stand and face the hounds of hell

And rot inside a corpses shell...

The foulest stench is in the air

The funk of 40,000 years

And grizzly gouls from every tomb

Are closing in to seal your doom;

And tho you fight to stay alive

Your body starts to shiver

For no mear mortal can resist

The evil of the triller.

And here it is at 8:28 the inception of something that changed the face of popular American music forever ... roll forward 17 years and it animates Britney Spears or today any number of R&B acts and even perhaps further afield Bollywood. That is 508 seconds into an 821 second piece of art, or 1:1.616 the Golden Ratio: perfect proportions.

In true Romero style Jackson's funky bass awakes the dead slumbering in mass putrifaction to the sounds of souless commercial pop; animates a culture that was dying.

But is is wholly ironical. The walking dead hypnotised by a new tune join just another mass movement soon to become commercialised, the heart beat of that unforgettable bass now familiar as the highest grossing album of all time.

But deep down Jackson was dying. His hatred of the flesh, his hatred of sexuality, his hatred of himself driving him away from the living into the oblivion of the once living. Is it profound that the bass can animate these diseased dying bodies that we have, breath soul into skin and bones; or is it tragic that Jackson cannot face himself and allow himself to live as he is, rather trying to transform this skin to become someone else; rejecting sexual maturity and the body that he lives and dances through?

Maybe this is harder for me to discover because maybe I too suffer with this same issue. Awoken in this direction by the book "The Outsider" recommended to me 5 years ago and finally time to read. Undecided on this issue of the physical: is it noble or ignoble to be physical? Do we die when we identify with what will die, or do we live when we accept it and work with it? ... dunno yet...