Ash Wednesday on a Palm Sunday

As I was talking to my friend Jaspal today, I was hit with an interesting sync.  It is holy week, and I've been seeing 9:11 everywhere.  I tried to make sense of this and could only come up with the fact that it has something to do with my mother as 9/11 is her birthday.

Keeping Holy Week in mind though, I thought of Elvis Perkins, son of Psycho, Anthony Perkins.  Elvis has a brother named Oz and their mother died in flight 11 on 9/11.  The album Ash Wednesday is a musical response by Elvis Perkins to his mother's death.  If you recall 9/11 was a Tuesday.  Ash Wednesday is also the beginning Lent, the time of repentance prior to Easter.  The palm crosses from the previous year's Palm Sunday are burnt for the symbolic Ash Wednesday ashes.

Palm Sunday is a Christian moveable feast which always falls on the Sunday before Easter Sunday. The feast commemorates an event mentioned by all four Canonical Gospels Mark 11:1-11, Matthew 21:1-11, Luke 19:28-44, and John 12:12-19: the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem in the days before his Passion. . . Wikipedia

One of my musing this Easter Season has been the inextricable link between sex & death in religion.  Jesus is the seed placed into the Earth (mother) and is resurrected. This is the meaning of planting bodies.  The earth is mother and we plant our seed in her, but the universe is also her womb.  This causes me to think about The Black Hole.  Anthony Perkins died before going into the black hole.  I suppose I need to rewatch this film now.  I thought Matrix Revolutions was enough to understand the meaning of the season, but perhaps I need The Black Hole as well.  This time I will watch the robots/zombies more closely in association w/ the huddle I saw in the Will Smith films that I mentioned in my 10:01 post.

Perkins is the son of actor Anthony Perkins and photographer Berry Berenson, whose work appeared regularly in Life magazine. He was raised in Los Angeles, California, and New York City with his older brother, actor Oz Perkins. Perkins is a great-grandson of the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli and a nephew of the actress Marisa Berenson. His paternal grandfather Osgood Perkins, was also an actor. Perkins attended Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island.

Perkins' father was well known Elvis Presley aficionado and thus named his son Elvis; it is not a moniker he pointedly adopted. Perkins took to music at an early age, briefly learning the saxophone before picking up the guitar in high school and taking lessons with Prescott Niles, one-time bassist for The Knack. While he played in rock bands, Perkins also developed an interest in the classical guitar, and began to compose music in both idioms. He also wrote poetry, and that gradually morphed into lyrics. After a short stint at college, he began to cultivate the idiosyncratic, highly personalized style that distinguishes Ash Wednesday.

"It's been a long journey, long in the coming," Perkins admits, when he discusses the album, and it took a serious detour on September 11, 2001, when his mother, a passenger on the ill-fated American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles, perished in the attack on New York City's twin towers, a day before the ninth anniversary of his father's death. Ash Wednesday has been shaped in part by this tragic event and its aftermath. . . Wikipedia

Jerusalem!