Your Rocky Spine

   

  

#42

02.11.10

 

Photo

 
You know how annoyed you get when you're on a flight and you see some buffoon snapping photos through the grimy plastic windows?  
 
Well, meet me / get to know me.  I'm that buffoon.
  

If you really line up your shot and try angling your iPhone camera in different ways... you can actually get stunning images.  Well, I think so, anyway.  And the 3 other members of Inflight Photographers Anonymous with whom I meet every Wednesday night for hugs and tears feel the same way (only one of whom attends wearing a straight jacket and has an armed escort).


Most of our flights to the lower 48 out of Anchorage are on Delta Airlines, usually around 1 a.m.  It's a pity, because there is some spectacular land covered in those flights.  When we fly Alaska Airline (Best. Airline. Ever.) to Seattle or Portland we get better day flights, and get to look out over the endless glacier streaked mountains with impossibly high and rugged peaks.  On a flight home from Ketchikan a few years back I managed to capture this image featured today.  The image fits the smoothness and seductiveness of the musical track.
 
I like this black and white version of the photo, and think it almost fits the music better:
  

 
Here is an image of a "rocky spine" that I captured last autumn near Las Vegas where I hooked up with brothers and friends for a fantasy football draft:
  

Not quite Alaska... but beautiful just the same.

  

Music
 

Your Rocky Spine is an astoundingly beautiful song by my favorite musical discovery in the past year; Great Lake Swimmers.  They hail from Canada, and have that ideal folk sound that I crave.  I think the lead vocalist / guitarist / lyricist / writer Tony Dekker is simply brilliant.  The first song I heard them play, yet again off SomaFM, leveled me with it's simple beauty.  That was the song that I was trying to hook up the other night but couldn't figure it out.  I won't post that blog / photo until I can match it to the song.
   

I hadn't even finished listening to that first GLS track on SomaFM before I had the album downloading off iTunes.  By the time I had listened to the first downloaded song, I was downloading the entire Great Lake Swimmers catalog.  Interestingly, this band has slowly but surely supplanted Cannonball Adderley's 'Somethin' Else' and Miles Davis' 'Round About Midnight', and 'Kind of Blue' as my routine Saturday morning soundtrack.

Today's featured song can be interpreted in one of two ways.  The different interpretations won't be obscure to you, and I'll simply propose the following to those of you who like one interpretation, but not the other:
  

1.  If it makes you uncomfortable to hear a sensual song about exploring the beauty of your partner's body... then never fear.  It's not about that at all.  It's just about exploring the beauty of Nature's mountains, streams, lakes, etc.
  

2.  If it makes you uncomfortable to hear a sensual song about exploring the beauty of Nature's mountains, streams, lakes, etc.... then never fear.  It's not about that at all.  It's just about exploring the beauty of your partner's body.

 

There.  It has been dealt with.  Now we can all be happy in our own interpretations, right?  And I shudder to think what it means if you like BOTH interpretations! In the parlance of my Jr. High School youth... I'd have to ask... "are you 'Bi'?"

 

Sorry.  Just trying to amuse myself here.  I hope my idiocy doesn't detract too much from this gorgeous song.  

Finally, let's give some attention to the lovely Sarah Harmer on backing vocals... she's a great folk singer in her own right and one post soon I'll feature her music.

  

I was lost in the lakes

And the shape that your body makes
That your body makes
 
And the mountains said I could find you here
They whisper the snow and the leaves in my ear
I traced my finger along your trails
Your body was the map
I was lost in there
 
Floating over your rocky spine
The glaciers made you and now you're mine 
Floating over your rocky spine
The glaciers made you and now you're mine
 
I was moving across your frozen veneer
The sky was dark
But you were clear
Could you feel my footsteps?
And would you shatter, would you shatter?
Would you?
 
Your soft fingers between my claws
Like purity against resolve
I could tell then there that we were formed from the clay
And came from the rocks for the earth to display
 
They told me to be careful up there
Where the wind blows a venomous rage through your hair
 
They told me to be careful up there
Where the wind rages through your hair

Parting Comments

When I decided to feature this song in the blog, I excitedly asked my wife T to pose for a photo with her back exposed; "I'd shine a light in such a way as to create shadows o'er your spinous processes.  Your Rocky Spine.  You know, for art's sake."

She not-so-politely* declined.

I decided to go with the photos of mountains posted above.

Until tomorrow... thank you for looking, listening and reading.  CCE

*She pulled a shiv from her pj's and asked if I'd like to try asking the same question just one... more... time... with a menacing look in her eyes.