Grey Gardens

Request par Jady, since a moment ago we were chatting about Rufus Wainwright. I see the future of Les Ukuleles - it'll be inadvertantly flooded with posts on Mr. Wainwright. So I've warned you.

Rufus Wainwright - Grey Gardens
(click for savefile link, beware of porn ads)
from album 'Poses'

Honey I’m a roller concrete clover
Tadzio, Tadzio

Arm wrestle your mother
Simply over
Tadzio, over you

But beware my heart can be a pin
A sharp silver dragonfly
Trying to get my mansions green
After I’ve grey gardens seen

In betweeen tonight and my tomorrows
Tadzio where have you been
In between tonight I know it’s Tadzio
Tadzio don’t you fight

Honey can you hear me
In between been dragging a dragonfly
Trying to get my mansions green
After I’ve grey gardens seen

Honey won’t you hold me tight
Get me through grey gardens tonight

Tadzio, Tadzio
Tadzio, Tadzio

Trying to get my mansions green
After I’ve grey gardens seen
Honey won’t you hold me tight
Get me through grey gardens tonight

Tadzio, Tadzio
Tadzio, Tadzio

I got distracted by the sound of Tadzio. I don't understand the lyrics in the first place and was bothered by the repetitive hissing sound coming from my earphone.(You might be right in saying 'he's got an expiring voice', ET-sama...)Tadzio here, Tadzio there... Out of curiosity I googled and found the original source of this mysterious name. Tadzio, an extremely beautiful Polish boy from Thomas Mann's novel 'Death in Venice'.

Summary of the novel(quoted from here)
The central character is the greatly respected, but ageing professor Von Achenbach, who at the turn of the century leaves his native Germany for a holiday in Venice. Once installed in a comfortable hotel he notices among the guests an almost unaturally beautiful Polish boy, Tadzio. Von Aschenbach is slowly but surely obsessed and although he watches Tadzio, he dare not speak to him. Although married and heterosexual he finds that the beauty of a young boy and his ensuing obsession disturbs him deeply and results in a re-awakening of his emotions that we find are dormant through a series of flashbacks.Despite warnings of a cholera epidemic Aschenbach stays in Venice; he sacrifices his dignity and well-being to the immediate experience of beauty as embodied by Tadzio. After exchanging a significant look with the boy on the day of Tadzio's scheduled departure, Aschenbach dies of cholera.







It was adapted into a movie in 1971. Movie shots of Tadzio
I'm making it sound like a movie review. I'll leave the lyrics interpretation to Jady. Enjoy!

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Continues Jady…(I got to complain about the way Zhu habitually chucks unfinished posts to me, very funny, HMPF!)

M. Rufus has proved to us that he’s one well-read, deep-thinking modern poet (with an ‘expiring’ voice, sure) with all the alternatively dense or abstract lyrics he writes. Thomas May’s review of Poses says of Wainwright as having the ‘the singular, unclassifiable, ranging gift of singer/songwriter’. (See the full review at the bottom.) But appreciating the music is one thing, interpreting lyrics is another—which is particularly difficult with monsieur Wainwright who writes with such personal, almost cryptic voice. What’s ‘roller concrete clover?’ What’s ‘in between been dragging a dragonfly’? and what could ‘grey gardens’ possibly mean, apart from a barren, withered heart?

Updates: after some avid searching by Mlle. Zhu, we now have some interesting bg info about Grey Gardens, a 1975 documentary telling ‘the story of the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and their everyday life at Grey Gardens, a decrepit 28-room mansion located in East Hampton, New York. Edith Bouvier Beale and her mother (also named Edith) lived together there for over twenty years in squalor and almost total isolation.’—so Grey Gardens is in part literally a desolate place, and in other part probably a metaphor for all that it stands for.

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Thomas May's review on Poses

The scrutiny of success that came early on--being named Best New Artist by Rolling Stone in 1998, the year of his debut album, for example--would have smothered many another emerging talent. But it failed to stopper the singular, unclassifiable, ranging gift of singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright. His sophomore album, Poses, advances beyond the earlier, cabaret-inspired effort with a suite of songs marvelously varied in arrangement and texture but linked by Wainwright's characteristic theatrical panache. "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" catalogs excess with playful self-censure, but Wainwright's whimsical ironies often take a bruising, poignant turn, whether in the pseudo-upbeat "California" or, most movingly, on the title track. The dying fall of Wainwright's lusher melodies--echoes of "Across the Universe" as well as ultrachic Beatles tunes such as "Michelle"--meshes remarkably with the poetic substance here as he explores a landscape of wistful self-knowledge caught between longing and decadence. Yet even through all the layers of picturesque, postmod observation, Wainwright conveys a sense-filtered experience that gives urgency to his hauntingly mumbled opacities. With Poses, the young artist proves his authenticity.