Glosoli – Sigur Rós

“Glósóli” – (Icelandic for “Glowing sun”) is a song by Sigur Rós, released as part of their 2005 album Takk. Together with Sæglópur it was the first single released from the album, available as a download only release on iTunes in America and Europe respectively.

The name is a combination of gló- from the verb að glóa meaning “to glow, shine, glitter” and sóli meaning “sole.” The second element of the name, sóli, is homonymous with a declension of the word for “sun”, sól. However, sól, being a feminine noun, only appears as sóli in certain grammatical cases. In this instance, being the title of a song and declined for the nominative case, the form reveals it to be the masculine noun sóli.

The song is also praised for its artistic and highly cinematographic music video. The video consists of children dressed in old-fashioned Icelandic clothing, migrating towards an unknown destination somewhere in Iceland. The leader, a boy with a drum, directs the group through a land characterized by open fields and rocky hills, all the while picking up more and more children. The group then fall asleep and the video enters a dream-like state, signified by a change in hue. The song culminates at the end when the children reach a large hill and the leader starts beating his drum rapidly. When the song climaxes, the children start to run full speed up the hill. It is then shown that the hill is in fact a cliff, ending at the ocean. When the children reach the edge, they jump off and swim through the air. The video features a characteristic ambiguous ending, when the last and youngest child is shown jumping off the cliff in a cannon-ball style. The cinematographer has stated that to him the child definitely flies along with the rest, but ambiguity was the intention. The child naturally chose the cannon-ball style after a reluctance to jump whilst filming.

The video was directed by Arni & Kinski. Swedish director Ted Karlsson also directed a few parts and shot the movie. It is shot on an Arri S35 with lens from Panavision.

Personnel

* Jón Þór Birgisson – vocals, guitar
* Kjartan Sveinsson – keyboard
* Georg Hólm – bass
* Orri Páll Dýrason – drums

Scarecrow

You know how Gov. Rockefeller died, right?

I am so sick of sex scandals, they are just so fucking stupid. They only serve to wreck enourmously important governments and economies and are never there when you need them when people actually do act like cheap whores in their real lives.

Spitzer’s wife though, well. I think she’s cute. Poor lady, she probably believed in the power structure that gave her all of New York to play with, though maybe she’s just as cynical as anyone else. When Mitterand died there was a whole row of seats for all his girlfriends, they were all sobbing in their little veils, no one gave a shit, because it wasn’t important, and it’s not.

My friends list on livejournal is filled with pictures of this prostitute lady Spitzer found and it’s just making me sick about all the attention paid to this thing which is just so damn unworthy. Albany is a sleazy town, it is so corrupt that there are thousands of layers to it, no matter what station in life you have the will to do something illegal is the rule, it is expected. Prostitution isn’t shocking there, it’s a plague you have to run from if you’re caught outside late at night, it’s the norm, and it’s the basic food group of anyone in charge of anything. I have no idea how Cuomo got through with his soul intact. That guy was one of the very few exceptions to the sleaze rule in that town, perhaps the only exception.

If anything, Spitzer was brought down by the cheap standards of his surroundings, finding a girlfriend-for-hire on the internet is so AOL it’s funny, anyone could do better than this Emperor’s Club thing, and look at the name of that group anyway, playing on the client’s vanity to justify the hilarious overcharging involved. Sure sure, you’re not a scumbag, you’re an emperor, you’re Caesar, you’re not some loser trolling for Jersey chicks online.

Albany gets you by having such low standards, it’s one of the white trash capitals of the universe, anything of substance is eventually destroyed by imported greed or the tenacious denial of beauty. The whole place is polluted, the river is made of death, the food is made of old circuitboards, the schools are where brains get bruised and beaten by thugs, everything good there flees, everything.

All nice people are inevitably punished for their niceness, my fake family through Brendan’s Mom had their house burn down just because they were in danger of being happy. Both my brothers had serious birth defects because of environmental damage, all my relatives are corrupt or are being hidden from corruption by other relatives, all that’s left is television and a sense of ignorance so profound you can actually ignore how nasty everything is after just a few sips of water.

Albany cries whenever I leave, it says “no come back”! They need the new blood, they need any kind of inspiration at all and the State University there is so far the only way to get that stuff. So of course, the State University is thriving. Students find cheap rent in the abandoned downtown and the beer is almost free as long as you have college ID.

The State Legislature is there, so of course criminal lobbyists all over the place. The Courts are there, so the mafia does what it can to creep into every surrounding crevice. They’re paid by private interests and big business also to influence the electoral process, thugs on all levels hired by the elite on all levels to get whatever is needed at any time. The result is an army of disaffected poor people all across downtown, and toothless brain damaged freaks in every park and convenience store and available public place.

It is tempting to want to take the place over, this is the appeal of the Dark Side. It is tempting to look at the effect of Rockefeller’s wealth and the giant marble buildings and the sense of gravitas that lawmaking creates and want to just rule everyone there like the tiny bugs they are. But then when you give in to the Dark Side the Dark Side defeats you. If you rose to power fighting corruption you have to stay in that mode, aggressively, you can’t let the low culture drag you back to caveman status like what happened to Eliot.

Billions upon billions of dollars float through government channels in Albany, it is the home of much of the U.S. biowarfare safety net, it’s where the Articles of Confederation were first written before Philadelphia stole the show and gave birth to this country. Now except for this one dude Ryan it is all porn and bird shit and uncontrollable fires. The only person from Albany to ever win a Pulitzer did so by truthfully documenting the crime and desperate poverty that plagues the mind of that town, the foul thoughts so deeply rooted in Albany’s modern history. They made a movie of his book which launched the acting career of Tom Waits, what does that tell you? Who are you going to get to play a typical Albany resident? Fucking Freddie Prinze? What?

The people of Albany are absolutely apeshit with glee over the attention they’re getting now, and the new Governor Dave is the first African-American Governor New York has ever had, with his one good eye and amazing sense of patience.

The reason why he’ll be an admirable leader of that State is because he can’t see the ugliness that inevitably poisons everyone else around there. He can’t physically see the ads on cable and he can’t see the insulting Barbie Doll women on every television channel, he can’t be taken in by whatever pretty face organized crime puts in his path, he doesn’t have weaknesses like others do just because it’s physically impossible.

Stevie Wonder had a sex scandal too I guess, he promised a girlfriend money for giving her a virus and then never paid, she had to sue him to get any attention at all. So it’s not that blind people can’t have moments of weakness. I write to you from the Assistied Living lab at PSU this afternoon, the computer lab for students with physical handicaps, the wave of the future for all schools in this country where the genome is being worn to shit by pure greed and that mineral in cell phones.

None of the people in the lab here have ideas about the white collar crime or even that it should be stopped, none of them here can see past the pictures of the bikini babe the media finally located yesterday.

IBM has been poisoning Broom County for 80 years and making mutant babies crawl out of every hollow stump in the land, BASF and General Electric doing the same thing to Albany, the Technology Park in North Greenbush where I used to work alongside actual robots, everywhere in between now a biosphere for dollars to breed with each other, and even the dollars are dying out. The ironworks in Troy which brought that city down in the 80’s, the rustic homes of Loudonville now humming from the tritium sewage, the leaves turning red in the Autumn now due to actual metallic rust.

There are serious problems in this world, and few leaders capable of going after the wealthy who cause them, but instead the power falls on some chick who dots her i’s with little hearts.

This is where I grew up.

Hi Mom!