“And if you think that our dance was all in the hips
Oh well, then do the twist”
BELLFLUR’s ‘Country’ and a meandering quandary
by Pablo D’Stair
BELLFLUR’s ‘Country’ and a meandering quandary
For sundry reasons, of late, my mind has been occupied by questions of artistic collaboration, in one form or another, the video above, for me, a particularized intersecting of versions of these considerations. A written word piece by me gave title to the album the video is for one song from (Twelve Vagrant Monologues From The Last Living Star, by D.C. based band Bellflur) and a spoken word version of my writing, over interpretative instrumentals, is the entire B-side of the vinyl. My connection, though, to the music, the album, the live performances is almost entirely peripheral and, in turn, my connection to Rich Bernett’s video basically a semantic one. Yet I nonetheless find myself, in viewing the piece, considering ‘me’ a part of the collaboration it is artifact of, and in so find my response to it curiously knotted about in rhetorical considerations of what is what and by whom and wherefore and all that.
Now of course, flat fact, the artistry of the video speaks for itself and needs (as is the case with all cinema, but most certainly Short Film and Music Video) no commentary, merely reaction—click to view it if you have not, already, and you will find it perhaps, as I do, something that could well be a filmic interpretation by Michel Gondry of one of Samuel Beckett’s Fizzles, or a staging by Patrick McGoohan of a piece of Knut Hamsun’s writing through a script treatment by Philip K. Dick. It is a statement, singular, but rife with its influence (whose influence? influences, plural?) and one that, for all its obviously auteured precision, is built of as many conventions of its form (the Music Video) as it breaks from (or at least riffs urgently out of a clean hold of).
…Let me digress, a paragraph:
To me, as a writer, music has always been a visual medium (yes, let’s work through that sentence a minute, right?). While I drive, for example, music plays, and to each song a distinct, entirely (or multiple distinct and entirely) visual progression of what the song ‘is’ not only occurs to me, but I daresay has become necessity. No, not in a ‘six foot five and full of muscles’ so I think of just that image (thank you Men At Work) sort of way, and certainly not in a ‘here I am imagining some images of Matchbox Twenty and Rob Thomas crooning away inter-spliced with some moody, interpretative, thematically heavy still photography’ et cetera—but song is visual to me, and honed visual, as precise as it is able to change on each listen. A onetwothreeFOUR drum beat clearly, to me, means every fourth beat a ‘camera angle’ changes, a new visual input becomes appropriate, for example—I have a visual language for music, and the tonality of any piece, the lyrical content serve only as touchstones to cast anchor from, the images containing (in my mind alone as they may be) the emotional content of Sex Pistols, Dylan, The Redwalls, They Might Be Giants, Rod Stewart.
…So with that in mind, I return to what I was saying:
That is, for all of the individual nuances of the video, I cannot help myself seeing it as a ‘kind,’ as having distinct brethren, being of a certain aesthetic ‘shared’ and ‘borrowed’ and ‘built on’—collective unconsciously, somewhat, pick-and-chose, somewhat as well—and even, bit-by-bit, ‘defined’ by those who ‘do music videos’ (I cannot think of a term there, writer though I claim to be).
I hasten to interject a self-interrogatory ‘You don’t mean that as a disparagement, though, I’d hope?’ and to just as hastily insist, ‘No, I don’t—no, no not at all.’
Why it is such a presence in my thoughts is that my reaction to music, visual based (as above clumsily elaborated on) has no root in the visual interpretations of music I have come across by others (other Music Videos, other sequences in films etc.). And so a part of me, as viewer, could not help but look for my particular ‘visual-less visual aesthetic’ (my ‘mind’s eye’ does not count as actual) in something that, at least partly, I feel I share ownership to.
Having a ‘kind’ is something I generally am resistant to, artistically, as usually it means something is seeking participation, if not shared birth-canal (or will have some root foist on it) in something else. Better to be ‘kindless,’ I tend to think even it means to also be ‘ remorseless, treacherous, lecherous,’ and ‘villain.’
And here, because of the (to me) supremacy of a kind of Visual in music, it is the sight-aspect of the video that has the reins—the music, the lyrics (and…down the line…me) are things that I, in seeing a ‘kind,’ feel are untethered, are things I find myself wondering if are, of necessity, a part of the single object of Video (that is, I wonder would the visual aesthetic, perhaps even the content of video, be able to exist, and exist exactly as it does, with some other music beneath it).
Of course, perhaps it is to inquiry too particularly to inquire so and, certainly, there is no harm in seeing a type of aesthetic that could be on display in other videos for other songs by other bands as something that has been amoebaed by Bellflur, one and all—I care not to know interpersonal history of filmmaker, art designer, bandmates, and all, nor to know what went on and was initiated by whom in the brainstorm rooms of the actual collaborative efforts (of which, truly, I am no part of) so my inquiries are ones self-thrust and conscientiously answerless.
Which is good, because the answers would be immaterial.
My mind in being occupied with collaboration of late, as I began this all by saying, is pressurized just now in such a manner that elements functioning in tandem cannot be pulled clean apart enough to be looked at in pieces with whole and individual import—I am forcing a need for monovoice (for ‘supremacy’ and ‘component part,’) where my gut knows that polyvoice would serve my soul far better—in that, my curious predicament of being in love, completely, with each and every cut of stained glass that forms the above mosaic, but in quandary as to how to send prayers through he window, to not get stuck in the aperture move through to the sky it prostrates itself to.
That, of course, is just me—fortunately for music, video, cinema, and the world at large.
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