I first came across Glenn Copeland's music via the ever-impressive Listen to This! blog, who posted his 1986 masterpiece "Keyboard Fantasies" last year. Go check it out over there if you haven't heard it, or, better yet, buy it here or here (just rereleased on vinyl by Invisible City).
I just got finished watching Loving. It messed me up. Most everything I see and hear about my country these days messes me up. Imagining the brutality of daily existence for the Loving family, living in a place whose local police and legislators didn't want them, the legal body that was them, yet furtively inhabiting that space, a space that was always under threat of being violated, shattered in the night... it burns me up, but their defiance and intractable will to go on assuages any pain I feel, sitting in a room thousands of miles from home, a home that terrifies me more and more each day. The persistence of love assuages terror.
I think Glenn Copeland's music would have made a perfect compliment to the soundtrack of Loving, which, like so much of Jeff Nichols' work, is so much about the silent strain of human contact, about what should come bursting out of people in hot words but instead lingers painfully in faces, in Southern eyes sometimes welling with tears. Copeland calls out to his love, lamenting their (permanent?) absence from their home become a house, a ghost house. So much of Loving revolves around homes, those intimate spaces we so often taken for granted as private; however, history can shatter one's sense of propriety with the brusqueness of a flashlight on a marital bed. When Copeland wails, "My flesh a naked window here waits for you," he offers up the leap of faith that is love, the possibility of reunion to-come (in that tradition of Derrida's wonderful coinage, à-venir, the future as always to-come and thus never closed, an idea I need to keep close at heart now, always).
Rather than post Copeland's album for download, I've provided her song above. The whole album is beautiful and can be bought directly from the artist here.
