Decemberists Meet David Foster Wallace

Some of you may not know this about me, but I love The Decemberists. I've seen them in concert twice (not a lot, I know, but for me that's a big deal!) and have a guitar pick of theirs that I caught at one of said concerts. I saw them as recently as this past June.

So when I saw them pop up on GalleyCat today, naturally I was intrigued. Their lyrics in themselves are poetic and powerful--maybe they're doing a book? I thought at first. But no. No, they have put out a video of one of their hits...and based it off Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

GalleyCat tells us more:

The new video for “Calamity Song” by The Decemberists reenacts a scene from David Foster Wallace‘s masterpiece, Infinite Jest. We’ve embedded the video above–what do you think?

In the video, a group of teenagers play Wallace’s imaginary Eschaton game, a combination of tennis match and computer simulation for nuclear war. Follow this link if you want to play the game in real life. Singer and novelist Colin Meloy told NPR he had just finished reading Infinite Jest and wanted the video to be a tribute to the late novelist.

Check it out: “I had this funny idea that a good video for the song would be a re-creation of the Enfield Tennis Academy’s round of Eschaton — basically, a global thermonuclear crisis re-created on a tennis court — that’s played about a third of the way into the book. Thankfully, after having a good many people balk at the idea, I found a kindred spirit in Michael Schur, a man with an even greater enthusiasm for Wallace’s work than my own. With much adoration and respect to this seminal, genius book, this is what we’ve come up with. I can only hope DFW would be proud.”

See the original post HERE

I'm not going to lie: I've never read David Foster Wallace. Thus I don't have much of an opinion on this, but I thought it was cool anyway. ;)