Tuesday, September 09, 2008

And You, My Love, Won't You Take My Hand?

Welcome, beautiful traveler. May your day have had fewer frustrations than mine had!

One of the things I love about the movie This is Spinal Tap is the way it portrays its group of addled, hedonistic neanderthals as somehow managing to hit upon true beauty every once in a while in spite of themselves.

The line above, from "Stonehenge," is so wonderful and sincere, and the music that accompanies it so momentarily ethereal, that I can't help but smile every time I hear it. And it's a real smile of contentment, not just of humor. The mandolin solo later in the song affects me the same way. The rest of the song is terrific too, for its silliness and bombast. But it's that line that always strikes me true.

Thank you, goddess of love, for reminders that even in parody there can be purity, and that even the least of us has a spark of wisdom now and again.*

Lovingly yours,

A devotee

(*And by "the least," I am of course referring to the fictional band members' level of intelligence, not the talent of the geniuses who put the movie together.)

7 comments:

Spoony Quine said...

I think you aren't giving neandertals enough credit....

Devotee said...

That's why I spelled it with an "h". "Neanderthal" is a word with several meanings, one of which denotes a brutish person lacking in refinement. "Neandertal," on the other hand, refers exclusively to an extinct hominid species that, by all indications, was pretty intelligent.

(I just knew there was a reason I was spelling it with an "h" when I typed that post ... )

Spoony Quine said...

Oh, well there ya go! Perhaps in the future, the word 'Neandertal' and 'Neanderthal' will be less similar to one another, and people will be shocked to look in history books and see that they sprang from the same word?
` Just a thought.

Devotee said...

Now I'm daydreaming about this blog garnering a footnote in some etymological treatise from a thousand years in the future.

Spoony Quine said...

Wow. I wonder if they'll have anything like blogs a thousand years from now?

Devotee said...

Yes, but they will be called bnogs because your brain will be hooked directly into the web, making them web-brain-logs instead of web-logs.

This will cause much inadvertent humor due to the regularity with which people will make mental typos and write "bong" instead of "bnog."

Spoony Quine said...

LOL!
<<
>>
^^
ROTFL!