The summer when I was twenty, I lived in a big old mansion on Riverside Drive in New York, in a room I had rented out from a friend. I was remarkably cut off from everything in the beginning of that season; the house’s thick walls and old carpeting were relics of a dead gilded age, and moving from that environment into the “real world” made me feel like a human prolepsis, not to mention I had lost my cell phone and broken my computer and had no television and very few people were living in the building at the time. My one source of entertainment for these particular three weeks was a) Tropic of Cancer and b) a stray CD given to this friend of mine by another friend’s boyfriend, who had very eclectic taste in music and went on to meet with some great success as the front man of a cheery, ironically (?) preppy indie band.
I can only remember two songs on the CD. One was 4 by Aphex Twin, and the other was a song by Kate Bush, the title of which I never knew UNTIL yesterday, when I managed to find it by Googling what I what was able to discern from the lyrics as “I don’t know why I’m crying” (a feat, if any of you listen to Kate Bush.) Though much of Kate Bush’s library is available on iTunes, this particular song, “Suspended in Gaffa,” is not. It is discordant and odd and haunting and energetic all at the same time. The lyrics are eerie…definitely contain some Biblical allusions that were always beyond me, or I’ve forgotten (aside from the camel and the eye and fitting through it thing. That one I got.) Below is the link. Enjoy!
The Savoy
a typical “Southern Plantation,” retrieved from GoogleImages. (What else?)
