Everything You Do Is A Balloon
For the cover of a CD I made the other day (thus driving the final nail into the coffin of the music industry) I used a page from a Monty Python desktop diary, which happens to fit nicely into the CD case. March 14 features an illustration of a bent-double figure carrying a collective noun of balloons. It's not familiar piece to me, perhaps one of the animated Terry Gilliam sections that I never liked much back when I liked Python, which now seems to work more as surrealism than comedy although perhaps that was always the case. The text accompanying the balloon man reads as follows:
"...all you think about is balloons... all you talk about is balloons. Your beautiful house is full of bits and pieces of balloons... your books are all about balloons... every time you sing a song, it is in some way obliquely connected with balloons... everything you eat has to have 'balloon' incorporated in the title... your dogs are all called 'balloono'... you tie balloons to your ankles in the evenings."
As someone who has always had a 'thing' about balloons, I admired this obsessive balloonism, while recognising the core of sadness at the heart of the balloon man, dragging his burden through a barren landscape.
And, of course, there was the room filled with large silver helium balloons at the Tate Modern recently, where the Andy Warhol show was on. It was my favourite room, and I wondered how mental it would seem if I filled my front room with silver helium balloons. I'd wanted to live in a world full of balloons years ago when I first moved to London and felt lost and overwhelmed and, studying the Python desktop diary picture more closely, a possible reason for balloonism why stared me in the face. The balloon man is walking through breast-shaped sand dunes towards a huge, naked sand mother with her hands in the clouds! Blimey Charlie! Still, as Freud said, sometimes breast-shaped sand dunes and huge naked sand mothers with their hands in the clouds are merely breast-shaped sand dunes etc...
It also made me remember Donald Barthelme's story about balloons, which I have just whipped out and find contains the insight that the balloon is a 'spontaneous autobiographical disclosure' to do with unease and sexual deprivation. It ends with the balloon being taken away on trailer trucks until the narrator's next bout of unhappiness and anger. Now, I may have dubbed myself the Wisdom Goof, although this was merely a pointless pun on wisdom tooth, but I recognise few sources of wisdom and eternal truth in this world of charlatans and fruitcakes, but Donald Barthelme is one teacher whose words and vision I trust.
The balloon, then, is like a guardian angel that reappears in times of stress and misery to remind us of lighter, bouncier times. There's the ee cummings poem, too, where the balloon man is a vaguely tragic figure, kept earthbound (the past/present) by his airborne trinkets yet yearning to be released, to ascend into the ether (the future) by a flight of fancy not unlike this one I'm having. I haven't read that poem for 15 years so I'm just projecting, but I think I'm curing myself of this 'thing' about balloons. Listen to them, they are whispering with their rubbery nipples 'it's time to move on.'
And, as this is a music-related weblog stroke journal, and not a place to randomly spit out shards of my disintegrating psyche, I will play the following bloon choon: Everything You Do Is A Balloon by Boards of Canada. To trot out the BOC received wisdom, their music is suffused with nostalgia for an imagined childhood, a past where balloons loom large and conjure up birthday parties and trips to the fair, representing the carefree, weightless aspect of childhood. And today, after months working in my underground bunker on top secret projects which are so top secret that even I don't know what they are, I will venture out into central London for lunch and to spend money I haven't got on new CDs, and top of the list will be the new(ish) Boards of Canada, Geogaddi.
For the cover of a CD I made the other day (thus driving the final nail into the coffin of the music industry) I used a page from a Monty Python desktop diary, which happens to fit nicely into the CD case. March 14 features an illustration of a bent-double figure carrying a collective noun of balloons. It's not familiar piece to me, perhaps one of the animated Terry Gilliam sections that I never liked much back when I liked Python, which now seems to work more as surrealism than comedy although perhaps that was always the case. The text accompanying the balloon man reads as follows:
"...all you think about is balloons... all you talk about is balloons. Your beautiful house is full of bits and pieces of balloons... your books are all about balloons... every time you sing a song, it is in some way obliquely connected with balloons... everything you eat has to have 'balloon' incorporated in the title... your dogs are all called 'balloono'... you tie balloons to your ankles in the evenings."
As someone who has always had a 'thing' about balloons, I admired this obsessive balloonism, while recognising the core of sadness at the heart of the balloon man, dragging his burden through a barren landscape.
And, of course, there was the room filled with large silver helium balloons at the Tate Modern recently, where the Andy Warhol show was on. It was my favourite room, and I wondered how mental it would seem if I filled my front room with silver helium balloons. I'd wanted to live in a world full of balloons years ago when I first moved to London and felt lost and overwhelmed and, studying the Python desktop diary picture more closely, a possible reason for balloonism why stared me in the face. The balloon man is walking through breast-shaped sand dunes towards a huge, naked sand mother with her hands in the clouds! Blimey Charlie! Still, as Freud said, sometimes breast-shaped sand dunes and huge naked sand mothers with their hands in the clouds are merely breast-shaped sand dunes etc...
It also made me remember Donald Barthelme's story about balloons, which I have just whipped out and find contains the insight that the balloon is a 'spontaneous autobiographical disclosure' to do with unease and sexual deprivation. It ends with the balloon being taken away on trailer trucks until the narrator's next bout of unhappiness and anger. Now, I may have dubbed myself the Wisdom Goof, although this was merely a pointless pun on wisdom tooth, but I recognise few sources of wisdom and eternal truth in this world of charlatans and fruitcakes, but Donald Barthelme is one teacher whose words and vision I trust.
The balloon, then, is like a guardian angel that reappears in times of stress and misery to remind us of lighter, bouncier times. There's the ee cummings poem, too, where the balloon man is a vaguely tragic figure, kept earthbound (the past/present) by his airborne trinkets yet yearning to be released, to ascend into the ether (the future) by a flight of fancy not unlike this one I'm having. I haven't read that poem for 15 years so I'm just projecting, but I think I'm curing myself of this 'thing' about balloons. Listen to them, they are whispering with their rubbery nipples 'it's time to move on.'
And, as this is a music-related weblog stroke journal, and not a place to randomly spit out shards of my disintegrating psyche, I will play the following bloon choon: Everything You Do Is A Balloon by Boards of Canada. To trot out the BOC received wisdom, their music is suffused with nostalgia for an imagined childhood, a past where balloons loom large and conjure up birthday parties and trips to the fair, representing the carefree, weightless aspect of childhood. And today, after months working in my underground bunker on top secret projects which are so top secret that even I don't know what they are, I will venture out into central London for lunch and to spend money I haven't got on new CDs, and top of the list will be the new(ish) Boards of Canada, Geogaddi.
posted by joe k 11:49 AM
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