Filed under: Moving Pictures | Tags: agathla, alan lomax, einsturzende neubauten, gorecki, kayenta, monument valley, swan lake, wikipedia
Some of the time spent driving I peopled with hands-free phone calls and podcasts and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (I’d just bought It’s Blitz!, and it struck me as pretty slick and the purists probably hate it, just as they hated PJ Harvey’s Stories From the City, Stories from the Sea, but I didn’t mind that it was slick, it’s a helluva good rock and roll album for a road trip), and then I started to let that shiny little 30 gig contraption decide what to play and in what order. This way I rediscovered a trove of songs I’d forgotten I had, from scratchy unnamed tracks recorded by a Brazilian version of Alan Lomax, to a whole weird Einsturzende Neubauten record and some 20-minute long Gorecki pieces from the “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.” And this is how I approached Agathla — the first rock formation on Route 163 that marks the beginning of Monument Valley — with Janine Jansen’s bow figure-skating across a violin in the “Danse Russe” from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (you can listen to the audio here). I’d left Kayenta just after sunrise and, needless to say, it was an arresting combination: the morning light, that music, and the gradual unfolding of a long anticipated stretch of road. It wasn’t really a suitable soundtrack, of course, because there is no way to go through that landscape except in profound and sustained silence, on foot or horseback, at the most. How could these two things be held in the same moment, the rough mountain and that sparkling violin, both reaching close to some pinnacle of beauty.
Of course, they had been held in the same moment, by history. Sometime in 1877, when Crazy Horse was fighting his last battle against the U.S. Cavalry and Rutherford B. Hayes was succeeding Ulysses S. Grant, Emile Berliner was inventing the microphone, Thomas Edison was inventing the phonograph, and Swan Lake debuted in Moscow (among other notable events of 1877: Romania declares independence from the Ottoman Empire; the Nez Perce defeat the U.S. Cavalry in the Idaho Territory; Billy the Kid kills his first man; Andre Maginot of the Maginot Line, Edgar Cayce and Herman Hesse are born; Cornelius Vanderbilt, Brigham Young, Crazy Horse and Gustave Courbet die). Agathla, or El Capitan, as it is also known, an eroded volcanic plume in the old fire fields of the Colorado Plateau, was covered in the fur of antelope and deer and brooded for the 25th billion year.
PBS and Wikipedia have made this expansion of my mind possible.
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