Arcade Fire have released an interactive video directed by Chris Milk for their new single 'We Used To Wait' which I cannot stop playing.
It opens like any other browser window, but you're invited to enter the address of the house you grew up in. Be patient, and close other windows, because this baby is 'processor intensive'. Then the video starts with a child of indiscriminate gender in jeans, all-stars and hoodie (grey marl, of course) running down a suburban street and progressively new browser windows open showing views of your old neighbourhood, your old street and your old house. All this climaxes at a rhythmic bridge when you're asked to write a message to the kid who used to live there, the younger you, which, because you're using a mouse, appears on the screen as a child-like scrawl. At the end you can send your message to others, or respond to someone else's message.
I'm glad I'm not too much of a cynic to enjoy something so obviously contrived to wrangle feelings of nostalgia out of you. A little sepia wash of the google maps views is all it would have taken for me to out-and-out bawl, I think.
Funny that a song expressing longing for a time before emails, facebook and mobiles (and blogs for that matter), when we used to write letters and wait for letters in return, needed the interweb and google chrome and HTML5 (whatever that is) to communicate that sentiment to so many, so effectively. Yup, that's deep.
Anyway, I hope you have fun taking a trip down memory lane.
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