A Week With Luke Temple's "Snowbeast": Day 4
17 January 2007
tell your friends...
Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Ryan Baker
I’m terrible with blood. I can’t look at it. I can’t give it. I can’t feel its warmth on the outside of my skin without passing out cold. What’s interesting is that even just thinking about the stuff — visualizing the word in my upstairs — is enough sometimes to get me woozy, knobby kneed and flush. There aren’t many other words that have the power that the word blood does on me. When a television show or movie gets to the red stuff, I turn away as if someone had just vomited right in front of me. It’s that repulsive and, my conditioned response doesn’t care that it serves such an important life function. The interesting things here (finally! and yet, that’s debatable) is that no other word in the English language evokes images and truths as radiant as the word “blood” does. There can be bloodshed and that’s dramatic as all get out. Just the color of it, like a black cherry and crude oil, encourages strength in emotions. It could be just that it’s the one thing that if you lose too much of at one time, it can be fatal. You can lose skin. You can lose love, lose your cool, lose track of time, lose hair and you’re still alive. Luke Temple, I think, understands the power of this word, this fluid. On numerous occasions on Snowbeast, he sings about the liquid and each time it comes off as being appropriately valuable. One song has the protagonist bringing bags of bone and blood (we’ve talked about this lyric already). In another, a clown is going to the beach, dressed in black to sell blood and it sounds like a great day for banana fish. Still later, a character is drinking morning blood as if it were orange juice, complementing some toast and some cream of wheat or a syrupy waffle. The references could be about renewal and rebirth, the making of a different life, using the same parts. It would explain the kind of sensual, downtrodden vibrancy to everything on this record that rewards further and more completely with each listen. The sensuousness comes from this blood and it reminds me of a story that I once clipped out of a Chicago Sun-Times. I’ve saved it for a number of years. It was a story about a little boy, no older than 12 or so. He had a failing heart and needed a transplant to survive, but he turned one down, saying that he didn’t want to live with someone else’s heart. Blood is close to us. We lose it and it freaks us out. It does me and Temple’s more than conserving it on Snowbeast.
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