I recently reviewed Afro Celt Sound System’s fine retrospective album Capture for Whisperin’ & Hollerin’ . The double album compiles tracks from their 15 year career to date.
One of the key tracks is When I’m Falling with vocals by Peter Gabriel, the story in song of a man in crisis to the point that he doesn’t know up from down.
When this song was released in 2001, the video featured , without any great originality….wait for it….. a man falling. Bad call.
He comes from the clouds, passes a plane (see those bemused pilots-one is Gabriel), then critically he is falling into a metropolis and down past skyscrpapers that look horribly like the twin towers and office workers (one is Gabriel) look to see him falling and wouldn’t you just know it, on the ground stands Peter Gabriel once more. It would have been a neat touch here if Gabriel had caught him but the man hits the ground, smashes through the sidewalk and keeps on going into the underworld.
Of course, now it’s impossible to watch this video without thinking of attack on the World Trade Center. Continue reading
A cursory glance at the Blog entries will reveal that I am a big admirer of David Foster Wallace. Critics generally represent him as a smart aleck (which is true) and often claim that his writing is superficial (which is way off the mark). The criticism probably partly stems from the fact that you have to concentrate to keep up with his observations and willing to accept that he will sometimes go off at tangents. At times he seems like someone with so much to say he can’t get the words down fast enough. He is so brimful of ideas and asides that his novels and essays are peppered with footnotes – sometimes these become mini essays in themselves. It may be tempting to skip these but I would urge newcomers to his work to ALWAYS read them . If you don’t, you’re liable to miss gems like this which is from the essay “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” in his ‘Consider The Lobster’ collection:
