litewave

Best American Record Damn this is a good song. In Lana's art, America is a symbol of God's creation, from the heavenly East Coast to the earthly West Coast, with the nostalgic 1950s-1960s period representing the garden of Eden/Paradise. In the beginning the music of creation unfolded harmoniously under God's benevolent guidance. But the ego of man tried to be too much like God and "write the next best American record", which was an obsession that led to man's extreme self-assertion, separation from God and soul, and falling out of universal harmony. The soul sings: My baby used to dance underneath my architecture The architecture here is the celestial firmament, the spiritual realm of the soul. The baby is the soul's individual expression, the ego, which went down to earth, to the material realm. In the beginning the ego was full of joy and energy, derived from its dynamic contact with the soul. This means that man's spiritual and material sides were in a healthy balance. To the "Houses of the Holy" "Houses of the Holy" is a Led Zeppelin song from the 1970s, where the singer courts his girl to let him take her "to the movies, to the show". It is a sexual song with spiritual overtones and also with references to Satan. The relationship between the ego and the soul has a masculine-feminine dynamic, which is reflected in human sexual relationships. Smoking on them cigarettes Turning white into black (innocence into experience), burning with passion, breathing the spirit of life. He was seventies in spirit, nineties in his frame of mind Although influenced by the 1960s hippie ideals, the mood of the 1970s turned from the hippie emphasis on community toward individualism (the "Me" decade). This individualistic trend continued in the 1980s and received a new boost in the 1990s from the collapse of communist governments in Eastern Europe and Soviet Union, even as the boundaries between countries and cultures further weakened and unification of the world accelerated. Individualism is the nature of the ego, while collectivism is the nature of the soul. The ego did need to distance itself from the soul - but only for a while, in order to build the mental and physical structures that the soul could infuse at their reunion. But the ego became "obsessed with writing the next best American record", for fame. Its focus on self-aggrandizement and self-gratification isolated it from the soul, from others, and from a larger reality. Man became trapped on earth, ran out of energy and ran out of life.

The Love video envisions a gentle flowering of the potential of human race. Lana speaks to the modern generation, yet they are the ancient children from the paradise, who passed through a darker age and emerged revived on the threshold of freedom. She reminds them of their original purpose, which has been largely forgotten since the fall. Their destiny is to enjoy and participate in universal creation. Limitations of the earth shall be transcended in love. And love is the eternal play of the masculine and the feminine, the never-ending process of analysis and synthesis (solve et coagula).

This video was released just in time for the NASA press conference on exoplanets tomorrow.

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Or maybe she is a Sophia and the dark cabin is a transcendental timeless perspective from which she "puts on the music". As she appears to be standing by a window, looking out and watching the "cult leader", she reminds me of Lady of Shalott. I imagine that a timeless point of view is sort of "mundane" too, in the sense that there isn't much going on lol. Everything is there, but it's dormant, hidden, unexpressed. "I am half sick of shadows," said the Lady of Shalott. Oh, the cabin scene is so murky that I didn't even think of reflections but it makes sense: the realm (or perspective) of time is like a moving reflection, or manifestation, of the timeless realm. Here is another nice picture that seems to portray this kind of idea: Bear looks like such a strong and down to earth animal, while owls are associated with wisdom and mystery. A duality seems to be symbolized here, and I also get vibes of masculinity and femininity. The bear is also on the flag of California, the land of materialism, individualism and time (golden gods, silver starlets, movies). But I am sure these animals have also other symbolic associations in various traditions.

Just for the record... shades of red dominate the first half of the Freak video, and shades of blue the second, with some white in between. Daylight, moonlight, and a moment of silence in between. Two worlds in one.

I suspected Lana was undergoing the Jungian process of integrating with the Self, but not like this...

The picture above portrays progressive differentiation of timeless, undifferentiated oneness into separate individuals. In the MTWBT video, Lana lying alone on the lounge chair represents the ultimate/universal soul, the kissing/embracing underwater girls represent the souls and the competing boys represent the egos, the peaks of individuation. She puts on the music, camera's on, time begins to flow. "This is what makes us girls, we don't stick together 'cause we put our love first" - as the souls individualize they eventually separate into the egos. The duality of differentiation and unification, or masculinity and femininity, produces the music (life) and seems to be represented by the two gramophones revolving in opposite directions. Lana also seems to suggest this duality by emphasizing her headphones with flowers, as the sound from the right ear is processed in the analytic left brain hemisphere and the sound from the left ear in the holistic right hemisphere (in general, each brain hemisphere is connected to the opposite half of the body). The colors or lack thereof in this video are apparently a deliberate symbolism too. There is the blue color of water that can be associated with heaven and (because of the underwater girls) femininity and there is the pink color of the flamingos. I think the flamingos represent masculinity: their long necks with heads and beaks on the end look like probes (analysis) and their pink/reddish color suggests earthly/carnal orientation (as the opposite of the heavenly blue). Flamingos are wading birds though, so they are in contact with water (egos in contact with souls). The black and white scenes represent the opposite extremes of reality: the undifferentiated oneness where everything is hidden in the timeless potential, including colors, and the purely earthly realm where differentiation reaches the point of maximum contrast, stark black and white, with no place for colors. Colors, vividness, life -- are to be found between the extremes...

She enters Badlands, in black and with short hair-masculine. Then wakes up above, in white and with long hair-feminine. Badass should do a collab with Crybaby tbh #ultraviolence

I have read Krauss's book and his "nothing" is not exactly nothing. It is absence of spacetime and energy but it presupposes the existence of physical laws that turn this "nothing" into spacetime and energy. He basically replaced God with physical laws, the existence of which he doesn't explain. I think Lana is curious about how physicists unveil the mystery of our existence but feels there may be more than they know or imagine.

I just meant a reference to light and dark. Solstice is the longest day and shortest night or vice versa, depending on whether it's the beginning of summer or winter. On equinox day and night are about the same length on the whole planet. Edit: Lana also posted a video on September 23 but took it down a while later. Most people probably missed it but some on this forum know. It was of herself watching a Youtube video of Joni Mitchell performing "Both Sides Now".

Solstice girl asked us to call her on equinox. Both sides now.

In early 1990s historian and philosopher Richard Tarnas summarized it as follows: http://www.gaiamind.org/Tarnas.html This synthesis is apparently facilitated by globalization, by communication and information technologies and generally increasing interconnectedness. It is taking place on many levels, from the interaction between the analytic/individualistic West and the holistic/collectivistic East through interaction between regional traditions, organizations and political orientations, between science/technology and religion/art, through male-female relationships, to the microcosm of each individual's mind, in the interaction between the analytic left brain hemisphere and the holistic right brain hemisphere. It involves tensions and perils but it is an opportunity for development and integration of complementary aspects of our nature. In a sense this could be interpreted as the realization of the prophecies about the coming of God's kingdom on earth: God enters earth as a fuller expression of the Trinity, as a deepening and integration of polarities in human life, reflecting the polarities of the analytic Logos and the holistic Pneuma (differentiation and unification) that are eternally present in the Father. I think this is encapsulated in the image on the cover of Pink Floyd's album The Division Bell:

I don't know exactly either, but it seems to me that Lana's art is a sign of a wider phenomenon - of an emerging spiritual awareness in our society.

Thank you Lorelei for the colorful description of the tension between masculinity and femininity and their integration in a woman. I am not sure what a perfect balance between the two would be, considering also the dispositions of one's body, but a certain degree of flexibility is surely desirable and healthy.

In a sense, Lana seems to have reenacted the three-part story of Tropico with her albums Born To Die/Paradise, Ultraviolence and Honeymoon. BTD/P was her birth on the world scene and had a heavenly lush production; Ultraviolence was grittier and extra dark, both musically and lyrically; and Honeymoon is softer again and despite the persistence of dark themes the title sounds like a climax of happiness. The Honeymoon booklet is pretty colorful too. Moreover, the three eras sort of correlated with Lana's personal life. She was in love with her then boyfriend in the first era; second era was rough for her - separation and the media troubles; now she seems in a better place again. It's like she's gone through Tropico in her real life...

I wonder, why Binah (the archetype of femininity)?

The image in the middle of the vinyl looks interesting: It also appears in the booklet: At first sight it is striking that the three flags are affixed on a cross of sorts, with the two smaller flags on the sides predominantly blue and red respectively, while the US flag on top is a more balanced combination of blue and red and of course white, which is the union of all colors. Again, connotations of political right wing (individualism/ego) and left wing (collectivism/soul), subsumed in the larger reality that is United States of America. These fundamental principles are also expressed in the Christian concept of the Holy Trinity, with the analytic Logos (Son) and the holistic Pneuma (Holy Spirit) being subsumed in their source, the Father. The predominantly blue flag appears to be of United States Navy and the predominantly red one of United States Marine Corps. The Navy and the Marines have a close relationship; they are both administered by the US Department of the Navy, and the Navy serves as a sea base for projecting the Marine soldiers onto the land or into the air. Which symbolically corresponds to a soul projecting its ego out of the soul's more unified/blended world into the more sharply differentiated world of the ego, or the ultimate soul projecting its egos.

The song sounds like an invitation to suicide. Love it

It seems like Lana has been gradually turning up the heat with those singles in a magnanimous effort to prepare me for the shock of hearing the biggest gems. God Knows I Tried, Art Deco and The Blackest Day currently on a loop.

I just realized that by voicing her interest in technology and cosmology Lana gave a more feminist answer than most feminists would.

I think that in her art, Lana is finishing not just Jim Morrison but the whole period of human history that is marked by separation between human and God. She reminds us of the glorious, vibrant but long forgotten beginning where we lived in harmony with the divine and to this end she invokes imagery of an early stage of a fateful romantic relationship, biblical paradise and idealized aspects of American past. She also recounts how this initial harmony was lost and we were plunged into darkness but holds out the hope for eventual reunion that now seems imminent ("Feet don't fail me now, take me to the finish line").

... plays the eternal game of differentiation and unification. Loving the Gnostic interpretations of The Lady of Shalott!

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"With Honeymoon, I got to feel a little more playful. I didn't feel the need to delve into personal issues that much, but to indulge in a more jazzy feel for the opening and closing of the record and then get a little bit grimier in the middle with some mid- to up-tempo songs." the swing of a pendulum