Stop the World, I Want to Get Off

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off 1

Poster Boy for Post-lexia








A guy who thinks Shakespeare is "the geezer who directed that Romeo & Juliet movie with Leo DiCaprio in it" wins Big Brother. Imbecility is a vote-winner. Brian is the perfect poster boy for our media-corrupted, post-lexic society.

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off 2

McCann Mania

The McCanns guilt, like the Portuguese police's competence, is still to be established. It should be transparently obvious, as its the axiomatic principle that our (and the Portuguese) legal system is based upon, that they're innocent until proven guilty, but the burden of proof, in the popular mindset at least, seems to have switched to the McCanns to prove their innocence.

The media-led lynch mob mentality metastasises exponentially. Trial by media, innuendo and, with the advent of the blogosphere, global gossip, is now commonplace. The media pendulum inevitably swings from hype to backlash. Rumour, conjecture, speculation and misinformation served up as truth, devoured by a voracious public's seemingly insatiable appetite for schadenfreude.

The Portuguese police don't seem to have much of a case, and appear to think that using their lackeys in the Portuguese press to spread vicious innuendos about the McCanns is a dignified way to discharge their duties. This is a tragic situation with far too many people rushing to judgement. The McCanns were, certainly, guilty of a terrible error of judgement in leaving their kids alone in that apartment, but some of the conspiracy theories, rumours and conjecture that are emanating from the press, both British and Portuguese, are patently absurd, not to mention libelous. The media, collectively, seem to be convulsing in pernicious paroxysms of hallucinatory hysteria.

I'll warrant the Keystone Cops could have conducted a more thorough investigation than the PJ and the misinformation being leaked to the press by "sources close to the investigation" is scandalous. If they devoted as much time to looking for Madeleine (or her body), securing crime scenes and handling such evidence as does exist more responsibly (than they seem to spend leaking salacious "information" to the Portuguese media) then they might have cracked the case long before now.

Once upon a time there was a maxim, "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." In today's "idiocracy", every yob with a keyboard thinks they have a right to lob verbal boulders at whoever they please.

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off 3

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Concerned investors queue round the block to withdraw their funds from "impecunious" Northern Rock. Material Girl Madonna needs to get hip to the postmodern zeitgeist: "We're living in a media-led miasma."

An "It" Girl's Guide to the Idiocracy

Big Brother's blatant favouritism towards vile, name-dropping narcissist/wannabe WAG, Charley Uchea is producing a plethora of conspiracy theories, but there is an inexorable logic behind Endemol's decision to turn their decreasingly-popular "reality" tv show, BB, into the grotesque soap opera now known as The Charley Show.

The spin-off series is, allegedly, a “done deal.” Tentatively titled, “The “It” Girl’s Guide to International Diplomacy” it’ll see our newest reality tv “star” use her streetwise Sarf-London conflict-resolution strategies to solve a few of the world’s most sensitive political impasses.

First stop is Moscow, where Miss Uchea plans to put Putin in his place, once she finally gets the message that The Litvinenko Affair didn’t involve Chelsea’s new Russian striker getting a BJ under a table in Stringfellow’s VIP lounge. Well, they did send us Polonium-210, so sending them the equally toxic Charley could certainly be viewed as a proportionate response under international law.

Has the novel been murdered by the mob?

From TheGuardian.co.uk

For the last month, a deep, almost mournful, silence has hovered over New York publishing circles. After eight years and 86 episodes, The Sopranos is finished. No longer will it be acceptable to veer mid-conversation from Don DeLillo into David Chase's fictional New Jersey, where Cadillac-driving mobsters hack at each other with Homeric style. No more will we speculate on where Carmela Soprano buys her teal pantsuits.

From coast to coast, from white-wine sipping yuppies to real life mobsters, The Sopranos has had Americans talking - even those of us not familiar with the difficulty of illegal interstate trucking or how to bury a body in packed snow. While the New York Times called upon Michael Chabon, Elmore Leonard and Michael Connelly to resurrect the serial novel in its Sunday Magazine, critics were calling Chase the Dickens of our time. The final episode roped in some 11.9 million viewers. One major question, though, remains. Has Tony Soprano whacked the American novel?

More here

INLAND EMPIRE

David Lynch's wonderful Inland Empire is due to be released on DVD on 20th August. The 2-disc special edition is rumoured to contain up to 90 minutes of deleted scenes. I've been wanting to write a review of IE for months, but it was a forbidding prospect. It would be unforgiveable to reduce such a complex work of art to mere words, the temptation would be to expand upon it, but translating the movie into the verbal realm, even if the tribute were of biblical proportions, would still seem unforgiveably reductive. A saxophone solo from an intinerant musician, or perhaps an elongated groan from a performance artist, would constitute an equally effective tribute. Extemporisation is the only option. As Jim Emerson said on RogerEbert.com:

"Inland Empire" opens and contracts in your imagination while you watch it -- and you're still watching it well after it's left the screen. It's a long but thoroughly absorbing three hours (perhaps necessary for a movie that continually readjusts perceptions of time), but I feel like it's not over yet. It's still playing in my head, like a downloaded compressed file that's expanding and installing itself in my brain.

Nevertheless, here are a few disparate, loosely-connected, poorly-constructed thoughts on why I love it so much:

Inland Empire is an experience. It's Lynch's most experimental movie since Eraserhead and, in my opinion, his greatest work to date.

I love aspects of every David Lynch movie, with the exception of the turgid sci-fi epic Dune, but rarely have these great moments, scenes and ideas combined to constitute a coherent whole (though, I guess, coherence isn't really the point with Lynch). I love the way he uses sound and his affinity for music, I love his "painterly" compositional style and I love the way he eschews conventional narrative and linear plot development in favour of a more impressionistic "dream-logic." I also like the way in which the identities of his characters fragment and, often, fuse with eachother and the way in which time seems to fold in on itself during his movies, leaving the audience adrift, without a map and with very few clues, lost in Lynch's rich and strange multiverse.

Nevertheless, I was often frustrated by the more whimsical, sentimental, faux-naive aspects of Lynch's work (evident in Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart and the majority of Mulholland Dr.) I always thought Lynch had the potential to create a true surrealist masterpiece, but felt that his tendency to leaven his uncompromising vision, and the intensity of his insight into the human condition, with self-consciously "wacky" humour and cloying sentiment undermined his credentials as, potentially, the most gifted and challenging artist working within the medium of film. Much as I adored and admired Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr., there were always clumsy interludes, heavy-handed humour that fell flat, irrelevant and inconsequential plot strands that went nowhere, kitsch indulgences, scenes where Lynch seemed to be parodying himself and sentimental, pseudo-moralistic subtext. Though undeniably brilliant, Mulholland Dr. was, structurally, a mess: understandably so as it began as a pilot for a tv series that was never made (it was rejected by the US tv network ABC) and Lynch grafted the last third of the movie on to his tv pilot at a later date, after securing funding from the French studio Canal Plus.

~Despite his pedigree and reputation, Lynch is far too much of a maverick to secure significant funding and, perhaps most importantly, final cut, from within the conservative, risk-averse Hollywood system: I suspect financial imperatives, flexibility and creative control were critical factors in his decision to switch to DV on IE. ~

However, I thought MD really kicked into gear from Naomi Watts' pivotal, and brilliant, "audition" scene onwards. What started out as a predictable, if cryptically told, tale of a naive neophyte being chewed up and spat out by the Hollywood system (a metaphor for Lynch himself, no doubt), metamorphosed into a much more impressionistic odyssey into the dark heart of Hollywood. It was this last third of MD and my, hitherto, favourite Lynch movie, Lost Highway (a virtually uncategorisable, but genuinely scary movie ~ "horror noir"?) that made me think that Lynch was capable of being a truly unique and subversive influence in contemporary cinema.

Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. seem like basic arithmetic compared to the quantum physics of Inland Empire.

Inland Empire (Lynch insists on referring to it as "INLAND EMPIRE", but I think that's just another ironic affectation: Lynch works his magic incrementally, by stealth ~ unlike his character (Agent Gordon Cole) in Twin Peaks, he doesn't need to shout) is the movie I've been waiting for Lynch to make for the last 20 years. It's surreal, scary, impressionistic, intuitive, labyrinthine, erotic, entrancing, exhilirating, enigmatic, frustrating, confusing, disturbing, terrifying...it makes no sense, yet it seems to resonate coherently several layers beneath the sophisticated, and perhaps obfuscatory, Apollonian constructs of language and culture, deep within the Dionysian subconscious.

Inland Empire is completely unlike anything else I've ever seen (or, I should say, experienced: it is truly synaesthetic art, not merely a visual stimulant). If the last third of Mulholland Dr. was an exercise in disorientation, following an ostensibly conventional introduction, then Inland Empire starts by depositing us in an unfamiliar location, stripped of any reassuringly recognisable landmarks, forgoes any preliminary pretence of orientation and propels us, blindfold, into a series of ever-more alien landscapes. I won't even attempt to summarise the plot, but, in general terms, Inland Empire is a movie about the process of making (or rather re-making) a "cursed" movie based on a Polish gypsy folk tale. The remake ("On High in Blue Tomorrows"), the original, the supernatural folk tale, the participants' "real" identities and the identities of the characters they play and the identities (and roles) of the participants in the original movie (and even the "meta-movie", "Inland Empire") fuse to confusing and bemusing effect.

Time, like narrative, doesn't unfold in a conventional linear fashion in Inland Empire, characters and identities conflate confusingly. Like a William Burroughs novel, Inland Empire is a chaotic kaleidoscope of cut-ups, fold-ins, wild extemporisations, impressionistic elaborations and surreal non-sequitors.

At least a quarter of the movie is in Polish and, on the most recent occasion that I saw it (I've seen it 3 times now), the cinema, accidentally, showed a print without the English subtitles. I felt genuinely sorry for those who were sitting through the movie for the first time, labouring under the understandable misapprehension that Lynch had simply decided to make sections of the 3-hour-long movie even more incomprehensible by decreeing that the characters should converse in, defiantly un-subtitled, Polish (if I remember rightly, he pulled a similar stunt in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, by including a long scene, at the "Bang Bang Bar", in which the dialogue was rendered almost completely inaudible by loud music, and he only included, much-needed, subtitles in a later print, or perhaps only on the subsequent DVD release, so, it was, at least, plausible that the unwary might have thought that Lynch had omitted the subtitles in IE by design).

Anyway, suffice to say, Inland Empire is a truly unique experience. The way in which Lynch merges and melts scenes into subsequent scenes is amazing. Early on in the movie, he, quite derivatively, uses a trick that the Monty Python first used back in the 70s ~ the one where a character is watching a show on tv, the camera glides "into" the tv and the tv show itself becomes the dominant narrative for a while before fusing with the "meta"-narrative to produce a new synthetic narrative, but that's just the starting point: there are scenes that literally seem to bleed into the next and others that seamlessly segue into the subsequent scene primarily through judicious mixing and editing of sound and music rather than image (sometimes accompanying dissonant visual juxtapositions) or sometimes the visual transition is smooth, but the soundtrack provides a jarring, ironic counterpoint.

The grainy, murky "texture" of DV seems to be conducive to Lynch's surealist flourishes. In IE, the medium is an accessory to Lynch's misdirection: it conceals more than it reveals ~ the shadows seem more ominous and amorphous. Ill-defined shapes seem to shift in a more supernatural way and a ghostly residue of the previous scene often seems to linger, and eventually, dissipate after the transition to the next scene. In Inland Empire, DV is used to both ugly and beautiful effect, but, it seems to me, that's wholly consistent with Lynch's dualistic modus operandi.

I don't want to prioritise any particular scene or try to rationalise a defiantly irrational plot, but the ending of Inland Empire is wonderful. It's light, playful and uplifting and it contrasts beautifully (some might say inexplicably) with the dark, foreboding tone of the rest of the movie. Without giving too much away for those who haven't seen it, it's a cool musical routine to a Nina Simone song ("Sinnerman") and Lynch even drops characters/ideas from Mulholland Dr. & Twin Peaks into the mix.

That final scene in IE is probably the loosest, funkiest thing he's ever done and it ends the movie on an audaciously upbeat note. It's a bit like The Exorcist ending with a song and dance routine, though, needless to say, there are moments throughout the movie where Lynch leavens the intensity of his vision with characteristically idiosyncratic humour and surreal musical interludes, but the context is always so unremittingly sinister that those "lighter" moments are eviscerated of their conventional significance, like the ironic laughter track attached to a bleak, ominous "sitcom" (featuring humans dressed as rabbits) that the movie keeps "sampling"/segueing into.

The ending betrays a genuine lightness of touch/beguiling sweetness though. While it could certainly be interpreted as an ironic comment on cinematic happy endings, it feels authentic and, almost, recontextualises the rest of the movie, though there are so many different layers to this movie that it would be unwise to attribute any greater level of "authenticity" to any individual scene than any other. Nevertheless, it's a cathartic moment and you end up leaving the cinema with a feeling of exhilarating release from a nightmarish journey.

Swingin' Sounds for Hipsters vol.5

My latest iMix is now available at the following link, for those with iTunes:

Swingin' Sounds for Hipsters vol. 5

This one's subtitled "Hip Bop, Voodoo Grooves and Galactic Jazz."

My IHIQS Members' Spotlight Interview

From time to time, I've been asked why my blog reveals little or nothing about the "real" me. Why is the name vaguely Spanish-sounding and why do I take refuge behind the pseudonym of a dead Romanian playwright? Well, my modus operandi is misdirection: post-modern prestidigitation rather than pop revelation.

Nevertheless, my friend Laura recently asked me to do an interview for a society she helps to run, the IHIQS , and, with uncharacteristic candour, I agreed to reveal a little of "myself." I figured I might as well reproduce it here. It's out there anyway so it might as well be in here:

Where are you from – originally and at present?

Originally, I’m from a small town in southwest Scotland called Dumfries. Like many small Scottish towns, Dumfries is a net exporter of mediocre students to institutions of further education in central Scotland. Once seduced by the bright lights and hedonistic delights of the big city, the finest young provincial minds rarely return. Consequently, I’ve been mining an ever-diminishing seam of faux-sophistication in Edinburgh for over a quarter of a century.

What is your current occupation? What is your fantasy occupation?

DJ/music promoter/club proprietor/entrepreneur. I’ve always done exactly what I’ve wanted to do, so there is no disparity between my real and my fantasy occupation. I wouldn’t swap my job for anyone else’s. Having said that, when the Jacuzzi Attendant at the Playboy Mansion finally retires, “Hef” could probably persuade me to “flip a career 180.”

How do you like to spend your free time?

I have very little time, and none of it is free. Time is an idling assassin, but I like to spend as much of my dwindling allocation as possible with my 3-year-old daughter. Every moment with her is a precious pearl smuggled away from an unsuspecting oyster.

Share an unexpected but life-changing event in your past.

My mother died suddenly and unexpectedly when I was a few weeks old. I have no recollection of her. I’ve often wondered how different my life, and that of my father, would have been had she lived. Perhaps I’ve over-estimated the effect of her absence. It’s possible that we’d have turned out just as bad had she stuck around.

What subjects interest you in particular?

Booze, broads, blackjack, big band music, bacchanalia, burlesque, bossa nova. That’s just the “b”s. Trust me, you wouldn’t want to know about the “c”s.

Name one thing about you that would surprise people.

Surprise is an anomalous brushstroke on a canvas of familiarity. It’s hard to gauge how surprised others could possibly be about someone they know nothing about. Few inmates of this virtual penitentiary will know anything of me, though a couple of old-timers might experience a flicker of recognition as the long-incarcerated, increasingly-emaciated ghost that passes for my virtual persona manifests itself pathetically in the dead of night.

The capacity to be surprised varies wildly: some might regard the news that I used to be an enforcer for the Genovese crime family as a mundane revelation, while others would be shocked that I once dated a mud wrestler. Needless to say, only one of those confessions is true, the other merely a figment of my over-productive imagination.

In a solipsistic, artificial world such as this it’s presumptuous to assume that other virtual entities are sufficiently interested in, engaged by, or enamoured with any other as to be startled by an unexpectedly anomalous characteristic displayed by it. The heightened virtual realm is subject to the inexorable arithmetic of escalation: the things that pass for surprising developments or shocking revelations in the real world merely constitute a regular day in cyberspace, such are the exaggerated virtual personae we present in lieu of our authentic selves in this milieu.

I’m assuming, therefore, that this ostensibly innocuous question is really a subversive attempt to disclose the dissonance between the artificial and “authentic” personae we present as ourselves in, respectively, our virtual and real lives. It’s a sugar-coated invitation and the temptation for members to divest their virtual veils under the glare of the spotlight is almost irresistible: striptease is invariably motivated by a combination of vanity and insecurity and, of course, these traits are almost as alien to this society as beach volleyball is to Siberia. Needless to say, I’m just another egocentric exhibitionist, but, unlike some, I won’t go all the way. Burlesque, rather than pole dancing, is my revelatory medium of choice.

Cutting to the synthetic chase: My “authentic” self bears little or no resemblance to the fictional construct. I’m told that I’m “surprisingly” laid-back in real life so, I guess, the answer to the question is that I’m surprisingly dull. I know it would be sexier to be consistently surprising, but I just don’t have the energy to keep it up.

What do you consider to be your greatest achievement?

My daughter is my only achievement capable of aspiring to greatness. The remainder of my output is merely the ill-conceived, retarded product of a shotgun marriage between limited talent and laziness.

If you could travel back in time, to what era and location would you go, and why?

The Sands Casino, Las Vegas in the early 60s: On stage, Sinatra accompanied by The Count Basie Orchestra. Sweet parcels of sound couriered directly to your table courtesy of The Chairman of the Board/Present Day: The Presidential Suite at The Bellagio. The Holy Trinity: Marvin Gaye’s music, a showgirl and room service/ March 28 1968: Bobby Darin at the Copacabana Club, New York. Backed by the Joseph Merle Orchestra, Darin delivers Mack The Knife with the all precision, confidence and authority of a Mafia hitman conveying a bullet straight into his victim’s cerebellum/The Cote d’Azur, July 1966: Ellington, Ella, Espresso, El Ninos & Elle/Swingin’ Sixties, Sergio Mendes, Caipirinhas on Copacabana Beach, a gorgeous girl from Ipanema, bossa nova on the boomin’ system. Jobim’s mellifluous melodies, “tender like two-day lobster-red Rio sunburn”/Midnight in Manhattan, mid-90s, martinis, dancing and romancing at The Rainbow Room/Club Hi-Ho, somewhere off the Reefs of Gizmar, sometime in the future, in the last light of a dying sun: Extra-terrestrial Earth Wind & Ice doppelgangers jammin' Siberian-style; snare drum sounding crisp and dry as winter in Tunguska, tighter than security at a Presidential motorcade. Tomorrow’s Girls ~ “a virus wearing pumps and pearls” ~ polymorphous perversity on the permafrost/Beat-era San Francisco, some subterranean jazz joint, Jack Kerouac talkin’ all that jazz. Slim Gaillard’s drivin’ that Groove Juice Special /A smoky club in Montemarte, discussing Derrida, impressing the chicks with a working knowledge of French Symbolism, drinking Absinthe and smoking jazz cigarettes while some impromptu bebop combo on a cartographic tip valiantly attempts to map the mysterious contours of John Coltane’s A Love Supreme . A slinky piece of homework in Givenchy shades is giving me the Hepburn stare and I’m floating on air….

In other words…. Anywhere, anytime: “ When in Rome…”

Truthfully, I don’t much care if it’s the Rome of the Empire, The Renaissance or La Dolce Vita. Just give me a hot chick, a bottle of booze & some good music and I’m in clover.

What do you consider to be your best trait?

I’m generous to a fault. I always buy the first round of drinks.

What trait do you deplore in other people?

I always buy the first round of drinks.

What skill do you lack that you’d love to have?

I used to lack the skill to love. Then my daughter arrived. Now I need a dimmer switch to turn down the intensity.

Which superhero would you be and why?

My “rugged” looks ensure that I’d be much more likely to be cast in the role of a villain than a hero. I’d style myself as a subversive super-villain. From behind a deceptively evil façade, deep within my super-villain’s remote tropical island lair, I’d devote a significant proportion of my time to doing good, just to confound the expectations of others.

If you could choose to have either the ability to be invisible or the ability to read minds, which would you choose and why?

The ability to read minds sounds like a camp, kitschy, retro-futuristic concept from a bad science fiction novel: simultaneously far-fetched and quaintly reductive. The concept “mind-reading” implies that the participants would have to be drearily literal-minded for such a talent to yield a comprehensive insight. One could suggest, with equal absurdity, that the ability to audit minds might be sufficient to exhaustively elucidate and illuminate the mental processes of the business-minded.

I cling to the sentimental delusion that my mental multiverse is more like a synaesthetic symphony than a book, and that my words, expressed or not, are merely the polyrhythmic clatter of the percussion section.

So, I guess, I’ll continue to be El Hombre Invisible .

How did you find IHIQS?

The only possible excuses for Googling such an unwieldy acronym are design and dyslexia. Neither excuse is capable of boosting my “street cred” into warp drive, but dyslexic serendipity sounds like a moderately convincing plea in mitigation.

What forums do you find most interesting? Most maddening?

I find the question maddening, because my superficial knowledge of Latin (and consequent pedantic tendencies) compels me to observe that “forums” should really be “fora.” The truly maddening thing is that, shortly after pointing this out, I’ll be unable to resist the temptation to chastise myself for making an issue out of something so trivial. [Note from Laura: Ewan, if I'm going to be spanked by someone, I can think of no better person than you. Thank you. May I have another?]

It’s probably a good thing that I don’t immerse myself in the fora deeply enough to be able to tell the difference between the maddening and the interesting ones. I’d guess that all IHIQS fora contain at least a kernel of interest, buried deep beneath maddeningly obfuscatory layers of chatter and irrelevance.

Sum up your life philosophy in one sentence.

I’d rather regret something I have done than something I haven’t done.

The Voodoo Rooms ~ Sam Gambino

We've been away, but now we're back....

I've been otherwise engaged for a while. It seems we're still getting some traffic. OK, it's not exactly the New Jersey Turnpike, but we're marginally more popular than a cathouse in Christian Town, so I thought we might as well open for business again.

A lot has happened in the last few weeks:

I've seen David Lynch's Inland Empire three times and I still can't distill that demented, delirious synaesthetic experience into words. As Paul Morley said on Newsnight Review, "it was 3 hours long and at least 3 hours too short." Yeah, the jump from film to digital video involved an aesthetic trade- off, but I don't really give a shit how Dave delivers his art ~ just as long as he keeps on sending it my way I'll be in clover. He could drive his next magnus opus right over to my house on the back of a pick-up truck for all I care. This guy could dump a consignment of fertiliser on my lawn to greater artistic effect than half the hacks currently holed up in the City of Angels could produce even if they pooled their respective "talents" and annexed all the film stock and resources in Hollywood.

My friend, Will, from California, has just finished a novel and, knowing him, it will be wonderful. As yet, I haven't found the time to read it, but I'll post an extract here as soon as I locate an elusive spare hour.

Another good friend, Nathan, from New York, appeared, unexpectedly (well, to me at least) on Horizon the other night. I was taken aback to turn on and tune in to his familiar countenance in an unfamiliar context.

I noticed in the reports of the tragic Virginia Tech shootings that the shooter's English teacher was Nikki Giovanni. When I saw the shooter's dismal, delusional "Psycopathic Idol" audition on the news networks I was reminded of Nikki's poem "Ego Tripping."

I was born in the Congo
I walked to the fertile crescent and built
The Sphinx
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star
that only glows every one hundred years falls
into the center giving divine perfect light
I am bad

I sat on the throne
drinking nectar with Allah
I got hot and sent an ice age to Europe
to cool my thirst
My oldest daughter is Nefertiti
the tears from my birth pains
created the Nile
I am a beautiful woman

I gazed on the forest and burned
out the sahara desert
with a packet of goat's meat
and a change of clothes
I crossed it in two hours
I am a gazelle so swift
so swift you can't catch me

For a birthday present when he was three
I gave my son Hannibal an elephant
He gave me rome for mother's day
My strength flows ever on

My son Noah built New/ark and
I stood proudly at the helm
as we sailed on a soft summer day
I turned myself into myself and was
Jesus
men intone my loving name
All praises All praises
I am the one who would save

I sowed diamonds in my back yard
My bowels deliver uranium
the filings from my fingernails are
semi-precious jewels
On a trip north
I caught a cold and blew
My nose giving oil to the arab world
I am so hip even my errors are correct
I sailed west to reach east and had to round off
the earth as I went
The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid
across three continents

I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal
I cannot be comprehended except by my permission

I mean...I...can fly
like a bird in the sky...