Sigur Rós improvise a song on a stone marimba in the Surtshellir caves in western Iceland. They made the marimba themselves from stones collected there. From Heima.
It just so happens that we (fellow ahogados and I) were hiking through those caves not a month ago. It all seems warm and cozy in there from this video. Sweaters and smiles by the fireside. However, we had the opposite sensation — that it was haunted. Pitch, pitch black, three lanterns could barely light our immediate surroundings, and the cave floor was a deadly combination of slippery ice and jagged rocks. Full of strange noises and uneasy silences, and even cliffs overhead, it was definitely ruled by either unfriendly trolls or a clan of ice-loving ghouls. This video for me is a testament to how a bit of beautiful music (ok, and some torches) sends the darkness running, and can transform even a ghoul lair into a cheerful, welcoming refuge.
Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with Young Woman from Behind (1904)
A Danish painter. This student of Vermeer has stilled the world with images of poetic silence for ages. The most wonderful and melancholic exhibition I’ve ever seen in my life was of his works at the CCCB in Barcelona. It was combined with some of Dreyer’s works (a Danish filmmaker) but Hammershoi’s paintings stole the show.
They were presented individually in rows of short corridors in a dark, grey room with low ceilings. The walls were almost felt-like, so all echoes were muffled. On top of this painstaking effort to promote silence and stillness when viewing the work, all the paintings were softly lit according to how the light fell in the painting itself. Imagine viewing the painting above alone at the end of a mysterious grey felted hallway. Everything is quiet and dark, and angled in from the top-left side of the frame, a single, subtle, smoky light illuminates the work. The effect is so beautiful you spend a quarter-hour viewing in silence.
This was a man who knew the tempo of solitude.
HANDSOME DROWNED MEN
- Enjoy this. Click 'random' to get a new post, or check the archives. Leave a comment or an email at handsomedrownedmen [at] gmail to reach me among the deepest waves, where fish are blind and divers die of nostalgia.
- Lo cierto es que la felicidad no es como dicen, que solo dura un instante y no se sabe que se tuvo sino cuando ya se acabó. La verdad es que dura mientras dure el amor, porque con amor hasta morirse es bueno
