hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed? he just grinned and shook my hand, and "no!", was all he said....

wilco, nick lowe & mavis staples rehearse "the weight" backstage at the civic opera house in chicago in december 2011. filmed by zoran orlic.
just about one of the most perfect songs ever written. it always makes me think of milan kundera's unbearable lightness of being: (one of the most perfect books ever written)
...but is heaviness truly deplorable & lightness splendid? the heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. but in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. the heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. the heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real & truthful they become.
conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be light than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth & his earthly being, & become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
what then shall we choose? weight or lightness?
parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before christ. he saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being. one half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. we might find this division into positive & negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?