From Room to Room

 
 

The video features actor Robert Downey Jr. lip-synching the song in one long shot as he walks from room to room of a large empty house (Greystone Mansion, a estate designed by architect Gordon Kaufmann, which is popular as a filming location due to its beauty, manicured grounds and Beverly Hills location). Director Sam Taylor-Wood came up with the idea and Elton felt Downey was a perfect choice. At the time, Downey was in drug rehab and the lyrics were pertinent to what he was going through. It seems a reminiscence of Lisa Loeb‘s Stay music video.

 
 

 
 

In 1990 Loeb formed a full band called Nine Stories. The band, which was named after the book by J.D. Salinger, included Tim Bright on guitar, Jonathan Feinberg on drums, and Joe Quigley on bass. Loeb began working with producer Juan Patiño to make the cassette Purple Tape in 1992.

Her big break came through her friendship with actor Ethan Hawke, who lived in an apartment across the street from her in New York City. They met through mutual friends in the NYC theater community. Loeb gave Hawke the Juan Patiño-produced version of Stay (I Missed You), who in turn gave it to director Ben Stiller during the making of the 1994 film Reality Bites, with Stacy Sher. Stiller subsequently decided to use the song in the film’s ending credits, and it was included by Ron Fair on the soundtrack on RCA records. Hawke also directed a rare one-take video on film, a continuous Steadicam shot operated by Robin Buerki.

 
 

The Eternal Recurrence of All Things

Photographs by Chema Madoz

 
 

“Whoever thou mayest be, beloved stranger, whom I meet here for the first time, avail thyself of this happy hour and of the stillness around us, and above us, and let me tell thee something of the thought which has suddenly risen before me like a star which would fain shed down its rays upon thee and every one, as befits the nature of light. – Fellow man! Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again, – a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process. And then you will find every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more, and the whole fabric of things which make up your life. This ring in which you are but a grain will glitter afresh forever. And in every one of these cycles of human life there will be one hour where, for the first time one man, and then many, will perceive the mighty thought of the eternal recurrence of all things:- and for mankind this is always the hour of Noon”.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science)*

 
 

*The book’s title uses a phrase that was well-known at the time. It was derived from a Provençal expression (gai saber) for the technical skill required for poetry-writing that had already been used by Ralph Waldo Emerson and E. S. Dallas and, in inverted form, by Thomas Carlyle in “the dismal science”. The book’s title was first translated into English as The Joyous Wisdom, but The Gay Science has become the common translation since Walter Kaufmann‘s version in the 1960s. Kaufmann cites The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1955) that lists “The gay science (Provençal gai saber): the art of poetry”.