Music – Page 48 – A Piece, of the Sky

Song: “Never Let Me Down Again” by Depeche Mode

An alternate music video, similar to the original, would be done in sepia, with two guys in jeans and jean jackets and an old car. There would be one scene of them lying in a field of grass watching the clouds float above them, the shadows falling on the earth. The original video, in black and white, also features rolling fields and lying down, facing the sky, in tall grass.

endless possibilities

The Flower Dies; its Beauty is Forever

“Mono aware” is translated as the “pathos of things.” The cherry blossom is beautiful but exists for a relatively short period of time. Traditionally, the Japanese participate in “hanami,” or cherry-blossom viewing parties.

One such event that synchronizes with the appearance of the cherry blossoms, each spring, is the Kuzu Genjin Cherry Blossom Jubilee. The celebration takes place in Kuzu, Tochigi, “the Oldest Town in Japan,” located on the Kantō Plain. The town is now incorporated into the city of Sano.

Kuzu is also the name of an ancient people in Japan, who may be the origin of the name of the kudzu plant, or Japanese arrowroot, whose roots and starch they harvested. However, the Kuzu are from a different prefecture.

Kuzu Genjin is Japan’s Lucy, the oldest human remains found in Japan – long before the Jōmon period, with its Dogū (distinctive clay statues) and cord-patterned pottery, the oldest such craft in East Asia, and the world.

The essence of the “Sakura,” or the cherry blossom, is the eternity encapsulated in a moment.

See Also:
Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival by David Pilling

Learning to Bow: An American Teacher in a Japanese School by Bruce Feiler

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“Key,” in Minecraft’s Volume Alpha, is a song straight out of the liminal boundary between waking and sleeping, the real world and the dream world / dreamscape. It evokes floating on your back in water or drifting in blue-purple outer space, out to some distant star. Although other songs evoke nighttime, sleeping and dreaming (“Minecraft,” “Subwoofer Lullaby”), “Key” is important as the first track and for the metaphor of someone unlocking a new world, especially in light of Minecraft’s The End Poem, where Minecraft, and life itself, are implied to be the long dream.

By the end of “Key,” you are transported to your new world. The second track, aptly named “Door,” seamlessly continues the positive liminal theme. In imagining “Door,” I think of when I restored my old world after the Adventure Update. I slept in my old bed, in my old base, before waking up, opening the front door, going out and exploring the world. “Door” evokes that dramatic arc, and then closes with the first day ending, making camp and going to sleep.