League of Inveterate Poets

By Mark Traphagen on May 17, 2009

I need to get this series done!

Video #8 from the Beirut album The Flying Club Cup is titled “In the Mausoleum.” Here’s the video:

The lyrics are very brief and sung only once in the song:

Time travels to learn
your secret life
in your mausoleum

And Berlin
is so ugly in the morning light
but with them
I could never feel so right

As with many of Zach Condon‘s lyrics, these seem to come from the middle of a context we can’t see. They are like words you might find on a scrap of paper found on the street that was ripped out of the middle of a letter. Or the babblings of someone just awakened from a vivid dream.

Perhaps the latter is most appropriate here. There is something distinctly dreamlike about these videos, and Condon’s drunk-slur singing only adds to that atmosphere. In previous posts in this series I’ve expounded on my theory (really, the context I’ve chosen in my head) on this video series, that we are being taken on a journey inside the artist’s head as he creates these songs. The various Brooklyn locations and the band members appearing there are just ways of him playing out the songs in his imagination to flesh them out before they are ready to be shared with the world.

According to Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas in The Memory Book, the ancient Greeks used a “familiar place” method to memorize long speeches. As they memorized each part of the oration, they visualized themselves on a part of a familiar trip. It could be through the rooms of their own house or perhaps along the familiar landmarks of a journey between two towns. When it came time to recite the speech, the orator would simply move from location to location in his mind, reciting in order the bit of the speech now associated with that spot.

I think something similar may be operative in the Flying Club Cup videos. Condon is anchoring each of his songs in his own mind with a familiar place around Brooklyn. It doesn’t matter that that place has nothing to do with the original context of the lyrics. In our present video, the lyrics specifically locate themselves in Berlin, but the video takes place in a cozily cramped Brooklyn row house.

As with many of the songs on Flying Club Cup, “In the Mausoleum” seems to be about living with regret. A mausoleum is a hard stop to a person’s life. There is no more moving forward; there are only “time travels” back through events now forever frozen and irredeemable. And now there is no stopping others from taking those time trips and discovering “your [once] secret life.”

Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops. – Luke 12:3

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• Beirut Music Hall of Williamsburg, New York | February 4, 2008 (idiomag.com)