When I first watched this video, I couldn't decide if I had wasted eight minutes of my life or not. I really do love the song, though many have complained about the four minute intro and the somewhat simplistic lyrics. This is why I like it:

Many of Gibbard's songs have distance as a common theme. ("The New Year", "Blacking Out the Friction", "Passenger Seat", "Marching Bands of Manhattan", and "Such Great Heights", to name a few.) Such songs either express a yearning to close the distance between the speaker and the subject, offering poetic but impossible solutions to the problem, or they admonish the subject for assuming "that making changes to your window's view will give a new perspective" ("Blacking Out the Friction"), mocking the idea that one can achieve complacency by merely moving someplace else. I think that "I Will Possess Your Heart" falls into the second category, but the video suggests that the speaker feels pity for the subject, rather than disdain. In this case, the subject is a pale redhead (who, at first glance, I assumed to be Jenny Lewis), and she is shown in various methods of transit to both suburban and exotic places, while shots of her traveling are interspersed with the band in some sort of meat cooler, jamming on their various instruments. While bundled up in a scarf and coat, one can see Gibbard's breath in the icy air as he repeats the lines "You've gotta spend some time, love/You've gotta spend some time with me/And I know that you'll find, love, I will possess your heart". I believe that the speaker in the song is not only a man pining for (presumably) the redhead as a love interest, but the speaker is also a place (be it a city, town, state or country) that is urging her to give them a chance.

The redhead is constantly on the move, traveling from place to place. If she stops, she doesn't stop for long. She's in a shuttle, on a plane, a subway, a boat, a carriage, a train, an escalator, a taxi, etc. The montage of her on the moving platform, the escalators, and on the subway imply that she spends most all of her time in transit and hardly any time experiencing the cities. When she's walking around all of those places, she looks vaguely interested, but unsettled and dissatisfied. She only looks at something for a second or two before moving on.

I believe that the speaker (referred to as "me" and "I") is not only a love interest, but also the places she visits. Perhaps her traveling habits are indicative of the pattern of her behavior in her relationships- always moving from one person to the next, never spending the time to know or love someone, resulting in boredom, dissatisfaction, and frustration.

The speaker laments that she cannot "see the potential" of both a relationship with him and perhaps a sort of "relationship" with a city (or any particular PLACE, really).


The minor tonality of the song connotes darkness and tensionOH GOD I NEED TO STOP.


-Katherine Gehl Donovan.

Transatlanticism

Photoshoot with Rebecca went rather well, I'd say. See more images from the shoot here.

The amazing Ryan Condron has been helping me with the katherinegehl.net site for my music and photography. It should be up and running as soon as I get together the verbiage for each section.

Spaghetti Squash

I made spaghetti squash for dinner tonight and it was so delicious.

I'm getting ready for tomorrow's photoshoot with Rebbecca Eddy(pictured here- I did not take the picture); we're going to Peter's Canyon in the morning with our arms full of apples, umbrellas, dresses, rocking chairs, blankets, fake canaries, and a snake.

I have a few ideas about what we're going to do, but we'll see what happens with it. Stephanie, who's helping out with this, suggested a sort of Eve/Eden theme with her snake and the apple. (Don't worry; it'll be probably a few close ups of her hand, the apple, and the snake. No nudity, thank you very much.)

It'll be an interesting shoot, I think.
I'll post up pictures as soon as i have them edited and whatnot.

Go see him!

A Need Fulfilled

Hooray! Joel surprised me at work with red sunflowers! They are beautiful.

Katherine needs...

-Black ink cartridges for a Epson Stylus CX3810 printer.
-A back massage.
-New, uncrushed beans for her depressed bean bag.
-A raise!
-Someone to clean the interior of her car. (It's not messy, really. Just dusty and a little grimy.)
-Another bouquet of flowers. (My lilies are wilting...)
-"The Lost Bean" to find their damn bean and return Katherine's boyfriend.
-Feta cheese.
-To pin up my matted photography.
-Pins.
-A bonsai tree that is not made of plastic.