Tuesday, April 26, 2011

the dusty attics of the internet present...

...a wonderful interior view of The Chapel of The Chimes, which I have mentioned here before, in all its magic and glory, courtesy of this amazingly weird video I had completely forgotten I made my junior year of high school until I googled myself today. (Googling oneself regularly is very useful sometimes, even if you are a relatively boring person as far internet fame goes...) The particular voice of the textual intertitles in the movie bear an eerie resemblance to the stories I wrote around the ages of maybe five to ten, in which a lot of tragic things happened to a lot of bee-yoo-tee-full princesses and unicorns...especially the last card, which has a really wonderful and probably completely unironic twist to it that seems totally typical of seven-year-old me.


The slight cringe factor of the video notwithstanding, I'm delighted that this exists, because simply image searching the Chapel turns up really disappointing results; it's almost impossible to get a feel for the intimate, mystical, reverent silence of the place, strange garden-labyrinth-library full of ashes that it is, unless you've been there, and I think the video does give it something of its peculiar and haunting shape.

Miguel Frasconi
The song that bookends the movie, "Desert Melody," is from an album full of wild music called Song + Distance by Miguel Frasconi -- whom I first heard, in fact, in the Chapel of the Chimes itself, playing an astonishing array of glass vessels, wineglasses and bowls at a summer solstice event held there each year called "The Garden of Memory," in which dozens of local musicians take over the nooks and crannies of the interlocking stone chapels to play wondrous midsummer music you can wander in and out of, lost as our poor princess in the transfiguring fairytale dream of it all. If you're in Oakland come this Midsummer Night, go...

No comments:

Post a Comment