YouTube Weekend: Mazzy Star, Fade Into You

There is so much that I love about this video. First there is the song: haunting, dreamy, beautiful, sad, but hopeful - though it seems to be constantly bending down whenever you think it might lift up. Then, of course, there is lead singer Hope Sandoval, whose voice has the same qualities I previously attributed to Bilinda Butcher of My Bloody Valentine. (According to the Wikipedia entry on Mazzy Star, there is a MS/MBV connection: Hope Sandoval once collaborated with MBV drummer Colm O'Ciosoig.)

And then there is the shot of the Moon starting at about 2:15. This image always reminded me of a Sunday morning when I was about 9, when the waning gibbous Moon shone in the Western sky above the rooftops across the street just after sunrise, framed by utility lines much like in the video. We explored it using what we had at hand, various toy telescopes and a ridiculously clear and powerful one-piece telescope from a box of Cap'n Crunch. (I can't find this particular scope online. It wasn't a folding telescope, more like a rifle sight, actually. I still have it somewhere.) Through this little toy scope I wandered all over the "seas" of the Moon until it sank behind the houses across the street.

I let this memory get the better of me. I didn't notice until I watched this video on YouTube earlier this week, seeing it for the first time in many years, that the location of the terminator on the Moon (the edge of light and shadow) indicates that this is a waxing gibbous Moon at sunset, not a waning gibbous Moon at sunrise - unless this Moon happened to be being observed in the Southern hemisphere. (This is based on the relative positions of the Moon and the Sun: for an observer North of the Tropic of Cancer in the Northern Hemisphere, the Sun always appears in the South, while for an observer South of the Tropic of Capricorn in the Southern Hemisphere it always appears in the North.) But what really clued me in are the markings on the Moon, the Maria, or lunar seas; their orientations appear almost identical to my picture from last week, which was taken right around sunset.

This song appeared on Mazzy Star's album So Tonight That I Might See. I fell asleep to their follow-up album, Among My Swan, the night that my grandmother died.

This song featured prominently, and bizarrely, in Paul Verhoeven's imperfect adaptation of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers. As two testosterone-fuelled characters begin the foreplay of a fistfight, this song can be heard in the background. As the fight commences, the song fades up to drown out all other audio. Best fistfight music ever.

Oh, and Hope Sandoval is totally hot. Did I mention that? It kinda goes without saying.