the_coral_castle raze i've been thinking about edward leedskalnin. it's because of billy idol. if you know billy outside of serious fandom, you probably know him from "rebel yell", "white wedding", and his amusing cameo in "the wedding singer". but tucked away on a late 80s album is a song called "sweet sixteen" that you might not believe came from the same person. it's a four-minute melancholy whisper that mixes up crystalline guitar runs, the quiet clatter of a drum machine, smooth synthesizer washes, and a little bit of rockabilly. it shouldn't make any sense. but it's a great, effective little mood piece. and he wrote it himself. i always assumed it had to do with teenage lust. not so. the song was inspired edward leedskalnin's story. when he was twenty six years old, edward was engaged to a sixteen-year-old girl named agnes. she broke up with him the night before their wedding. born in latvia, he took work in north american lumber camps. then he moved to florida, hoping it would help his tuberculosis. there he spent twenty years building and living inside of something he called "rock gate park". he sculpted a monument out of more than a thousand tons of coral, using tools made from wood and recycled car parts. he made a gate so well-constructed, a child could open it with one finger. he built a house before he built the castle, and he built the castle for agnes. it was a tribute to the one that ran away. she never came back. you'd think if you spent the best years of your life creating something out of that kind of pain and obsession, you'd want to keep it to yourself. edward didn't do that. he gave a tour to anyone who wanted one. if they were hungry, he made them hot dogs. he lived off of the money he made giving tours and selling self-published pamphlets. in one pamphlet he invited the reader to use the blank space to write down their own opinions if they didn't like what he had to say. "you can destroy the body," he wrote, "but you cannot destroy the magnets that hold together the body. they go somewhere else." he died of a kidney infection half a lifetime after finishing his castle. his magnets went somewhere else. his coral castle stayed put. it's still there today for anyone who wants to visit, though the gate doesn't work as well as it used to. when asked how he managed to move and manipulate all that stone without any help, edward would only say he understood the secrets of the pyramids. he never explained what he meant. but there's a cheesy old song that says love can move mountains. maybe there's some truth in there. or maybe billy idol knew more than anyone gave him credit for. his music video for "sweet sixteen", filmed in the coral castle, opens with a picture of edward standing in the middle of the incredible thing he made. "love turned to stone", a handwritten title says. not love inured and atrophied. love made into something else. turned to stone. 150810 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Huh. That's a fascinating story. I'd kind of overlooked the song when I first heard it - he has a great voice but the style didn't interest me much - but this adds a new dimension. 150813 ... raze same here. i think it was somewhere between reading the music video was filmed in the coral castle itself and noticing billy giving the camera a subtle middle finger that i decided, "hey, this is a lot more interesting than i first thought it was!" 150813 what's it to you? who go blather from