The View from These United States

The weekly babbling brook of consciousness — music, videos, writings, projects, and people — that keep the lads at TUS tapping out tunes of their own.

This week, J. Tom Hnatow on childhood and nostalgia…

King Creosote & Jon Hopkins: Diamond Mine

During Captain Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific, it was written that the sailors, months at sea, “were now pretty far gone with the longing for home which the physicians have gone so far as to esteem a disease under the name of Nostalgia.”

With our interconnected, internet lives, the concept of “home” has become even more vague. Few of us live in the towns we are “from”. We rent, rather than own. Our friends live half a world away. We form our own little communities and tribes – and so, sometimes, we have a need for our own Nostalgia. A longing for a place and a time that never existed.

This record, created as a “soundtrack to a romanticized version of a life” could be the sound of this modern Nostalgia. Almost painfully beautiful, it feels like an imaginary childhood scrapbook – images of memories half-remembered, glimpsed through windows and screen doors, faded with time.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-Lr0igwLIY]

The Peanuts Theme is something so identifiable with childhood. The really beautiful slowed down music, barely moving,  sort of slows down time and makes you listen over the entire (long) 23 minutes. It reminds me of the Silvia Plath quote below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibi5ci_8hew]

So it all moves in the pageant toward the ending, it’s own ending. Everywhere, imperceptibly or otherwise, things are passing, ending, going. And there will be other summers, other band concerts, but never this one, never again, never as now. Next year I will not be the self of this year now. And that is why I laugh at the transient, the ephemeral; laugh, while clutching, holding, tenderly, like a fool his toy, cracked glass, water through fingers. – Sylvia Plath