Yesterday's post summoned the chorus to this song:
I can see them, they can't see me, I feel out of sight, I can see them, they can't see me, Much to my delight.
I always imagined the singer hiding up a tree or in a thicket, concealed from the view of these færie-like animals dancing and playing music. But now I'm envisioning the animals in this song all wearing dark glasses beyond which they can see little or nothing.
After all, there have been songs about blind mice.
Who's to say that any of these animals can see?
In 2004 I went on a retreat co-led by Marc Grossman, a functional optometrist who also practices Chinese medicine. Everyone at the retreat had some sort of visual condition (mostly presbyopia) that they wanted to alleviate, and my own cone dystrophy was perhaps the most severe condition in the room, even though I was the youngest person there. I was also the only male, aside from the facilitators.
Over the course of the week we did eye exercises, some meditating and journaling, and practiced a daily yoga sequence designed to stimulate meridians associated with vision. At week's end everyone was eager to receive Dr. Grossman's herbal and dietary prescriptions tailored to our specific eye troubles. But the moment that brought the greatest elation was when he put on a CD and this song played:
I love Johnny Nash's original version because it gradually introduces dissonant elements that build tension in an otherwise "everything-is-just-hunky-dory" type song: An out-of-tune accordion kicks in on the second verse, a Moog synthesizer takes over the bridge, and lyrics about blue skies shift into foreboding minor keys because we know that life's not really gonna be all bright and sunshiny every day, right? But we can hope, just like a roomful of middle-aged ladies who smile and dance along at a yoga studio in the Berkshires, ready to drive back to Long Island, to their homes and their husbands, maybe to try on their miracle cures.
PS: I absolutely recommend taking a workshop with Marc, and I have lots to say about functional optometry, acupuncture, herbal medicine and yoga as methods for improving vision. If you're curious, leave me a comment below.
In an age when it's cool to say that this band sucks, I say that this song is incredible.
I wonder what Gene Simmons was inspired by when he wrote this more than 40 years ago. My theory is that he was 23 at the time and writing about a teenage girl, but by making the protagonist 93-year-old man who's losing his vision attempts to swap some of the creepiness for absurdity. Does it succeed?
Also look for all the ways that "blind" could be applied to the crowd—there's a patriotic fervor to their fandom. Also the hallucinatory quality created by the replicated makeup on the members of Melbourne's Symphony backing up the band is reminiscent of the black-and-white dazzle camouflage used by Britain's navy during World War I, and by zebras for as long as zebras have been zebras:
Right up there with Mason's earlier post featuring Christine Ha, the video for Lionel Richie's grammy-winning hit "Hello" always got me. Laura Carrington, a fully sighted actor, stars as a blind art student stalked by the love-struck Richie.
"Hello," he croons on an anonymous late-nite phone call, "is it me you're looking for?"
It falls somewhere between tearjerkingly touching and completely creepy, especially when Carrington turns the tables on Richie at the end:
The bust of Richie featured in the video has been the subject of derision in many media. Here's Scottish art student Dylan McCaughtry with his own Lionel bust that he made while blindfolded:
A more appetizing version is this 20-pounder, rendered in chocolate:
"Would you rather go blind,
or see someone you love walk away from you?"
It's an intense proposition, and Beyoncé gets to amp up the melodrama in this cover version—Thanks Hollywood:
What about you? Would you rather go blind than see someone you love walk away from you? If not, you'd be sighted and single, otherwise you'd be blind…and single? Or do you get to keep your relationship in exchange for losing your vision? Leave your answers in the comments below.
When we put together a playlist for our Blind Games workshop, we found that depictions of blindness fell into a handful of archetypes. A fascinating one is when blindness gets linked to the supernatural.
In songs of love or devotion, being blinded is usually a metaphor for being struck by some higher power: Tom Waits' "Blind Love", Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science", and Springsteen's "Blinded By The Light" are all examples.
Beyond pop songs, in many literary and theatrical traditions, lacking a sense of sight often comes with special abilities attached: Tiresias the blind oracle of Thebes, the blind swordsman in the Zatochi franchise of samurai films, and Marvel Comics' Daredevil all fit into that category of "blind superheroes".
In 1969, The Who brought these theatrical and pop traditions together in their rock opera Tommy, recreated for the screen in 1975. Here Elton John takes a scornful look at Roger Daltrey's superpowers in one of the film's many pivotal scenes:
One of the people who came to all three sessions of Blind Games this weekend sent us this musical number from the 2000 film Dancer in the Dark. The first time I saw that film, I sobbed my brains out and then spent two days in bed recovering. No joke.
As a kid whose parents debated whether or not to have a child for risk of passing an eye disease onto him (me), my reaction was a personal one: Björk plays a woman who's losing her vision and trying to raise funds to save her own son from going blind. She faces oppression at every turn—for being disabled, for being a woman, for being an artist, for being an immigrant, for being a single mom, and she also has these lapses into an illusory world that are on one hand a decay of mental health, and on the other hand a fantastic alternate reality filled with color, music and dancing.
I have rarely felt as mortified as I did at the end of Dancer in the Dark when all of Björk's hardships come to a head. It's one of my favorite films and I've avoided it ever since seeing it. Here's to facing fear:
Tonight we hosted the first of three public workshops toward developing this theatre project. For two hours, 32 people interacted through a series of games where some or all of the participants had their eyes closed. These blind games get us in touch with our ability to trust and also to be uncomfortable, and specific games dynamize specific senses. Many of the games worked with the sense of touch, and also with spatial awareness, proprioception and teleception. We played some games to a musical soundtrack, and one game had a soundscape created by half the people in the room guiding the other half through animal-like sounds. But really, this song was everyone's favorite part of the evening:
Like all good nursery rhymes, this ditty's roots are politically charged and a tad violent. The first 007 flick brings us full circle and manages to further ridicule blindness:
