ADORATION is an EP by Heidi Klum's Bangs.

To request a physical CD copy of the EP with hand-drawn/written words and pictures and things, please write: cindy.skips.my.trampoline@gmail.com
ms3abden@gmail.com
or visit facebook.com/heidiklumsbangs

For other inquiries or comments, please contact us at the above links. For anything else, please contact us at the above links.

Please write.

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All songs written by Zach Beck. All songs composed and mixed by Zach Beck and Dylan Beck. All words written by Zach Beck. Recorded November 2013 to May 2014 at Cubist Castle, the Frozen Lake, and the Bopper's Nantes Nook.

(For: M, D, J, B, D, C, N, K)

Patience. Belief. Love.

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Going out to eat with my family was always a special, memorable, particularly noteworthy event when I was younger. Dinners with my parents and siblings, special meals with all of us together when my grandparents visited -- or when we visited them --, Sunday brunch on those exceptionally rare instances: the images are illustrious, multi-dimensional; remain as bright and blinding as the moment the sun reflected off the white lines of the parking lot directly outside the restaurant window, bounded from the shiny silver nut of a recently erected lightpost, shot through the Venetian blind in one momentous plane of radiance, and intersected perpendicularly with one edge of my hexagonal water glass, catching my eye.

I was eight years old. My paternal grandparents had driven down from New Jersey to spend the Easter holiday with us. We were all in our “important occasion” church attire. I had on a green, short-sleeved, collared shirt and khaki pants -- light khaki, like the dry, sun-bleached sand we see on those idyllic, virginally untouched beaches in images of stereotypical ‘paradise’, in images which one might procure, might choose especially for some middle school English assignment: “choose, and present to the class, an image that represents to you the meaning of the word ‘tranquil’”, or serene, or peaceful; like the dry, sun-bleached sands of some tranquil beach that we can close our eyes and imagine the grains slipping under, and around, and between our toes as we walk upon it in measured beats: 1, 2, 3, 1, 2 -- 1, 2, 3,
1, 2 --.

My older brother stood in front of our house. He still had his natural hair color. He smiled in the grass; he laughed in the sun. My sister wore a nice dress and cardigan, most likely picked out by our mother. She danced in spontaneous circles; she put her hand on my shoulder. My younger brother’s blonde hair caught the warmth of the mid-morning sun and reflected its source. He yelled rowdily; he squealed happily; he echoed our words, parroted our phrases; he ran on his fresh, quick legs and hopped up and down on the balls of his pudgy little feet.

My father’s parents were never the stern, authoritative type -- or at least not around us. They drove a white car. They hung their clothes in our closet. They had an old analog alarm clock that sat near the side of their bed and ticked away the seconds of the passing day. My grandfather played golf, and would play with my father every time he came for a visit. If you told him something that you had just learned in school, or that you thought was particularly important or amazing, or that was blatantly untrue but you didn’t know because you lacked the worldliness or were too naive, he would feign surprise and astonishment in the classic, trademark style that he had -- he would open his eyes so wide that you could see the spherical edges of his eyeballs themselves, and his eyebrows would raise, and his forehead would wrinkle correspondingly, and he would throw his head back just noticeably enough and say, “ooooohhhh my gaaaaaahhhhhh!”

My grandmother wore glasses and always looked strange -- unfamiliar -- without them. She would put in hair-rollers before bed every night. That’s how we knew that she was going to sleep: when she had her hair-rollers in, we knew the night was drawing to a close. She walked with small, delicate steps. She made sandwiches. She rode in the passenger’s seat.

They were a pair. East Coast born and bred, they were true New Jerseyans -- not in what one might term the stereotypical way, perhaps, and maybe they weren’t actually at all, but in my eyes they were. They exuded that calm, metropolitan demeanor, and though a lot of people in the area in which I lived seemed of rather the opposite opinion -- it was always “that’s why I love living down here: it’s so relaxed; and life has such a nice, laid back pace” and “the people here are all so genteel and considerate, and they really care for each other” -- I thought that “big city people” were just as considerate and laid back and caring as the people “down here” -- which of course they were. Personal characteristics are not defined by geographic region, by demographic statistics. And anyway, how could you not be laid back living in some urban sprawl? I thought that it would probably make you more so. I thought that such people had a certain resignedness, a certain understanding and acceptance of the bare-bones facts of life -- each person simply that: a singular person in a sea of people, meeting people and placing faces and facing places; one life in an infinite cycle of life and death; one dream in the vast cloud of unconscious hope, packed to the brim and beyond, bursting with untold fate and misfortune, inching, creeping, striving, dense, enchanted, like the molecules in the helmet of some deep-sea diver that are sucked in and pushed out, that bounce and bump and spin and sluice, fighting for a place, fighting for prominence, but confined and enumerated, pushing fruitlessly. (It takes time to go places. It takes patience and a sense of understanding that is often overlooked. A single car in the street, and in that car a single person, and surrounding that car a blanket-stretch of bodies as far as the eye can see. The lights reflect on shirts, on heads, on arms; they rise and fall. The water crests, wripples, is still, thin as air. The sun is over, is far behind it. Do you breathe in; do you sink? Do you exhale; do you rise? What do you see?)

It’s rather strange -- and rather problematic, too -- the way in which one tends not to think of a person’s past, of a person’s history, of a person different from how he or she is today. I know I certainly never did. My parents, my grandparents, my teachers, the cashier at the grocery store, the Santa Claus at the mall -- all of them materialized out of nowhere, just as they were: my parents “grown-up”, worldly, knowledgeable; my grandparents old, deliberate, prone to falling asleep on the couch in broad daylight; my teachers chock-full of instructions and information, capable of doing impressive long division; the cashier adept, quick, making products beep for eons before, eons after; the Santa Claus bearded, twinkle-eyed, inquisitive. I was completely oblivious to time and experience, to maturation and personal evolution.

My grandparents did not exist prior to my newfound consciousness of them. My grandfather was in the Navy, fought in the Second World War, did carpentry, sold real estate, cast the critically decisive vote to elect a new Board member of the Middlesex County Freeholders, picketed in support of fair wages for New Jersey nursing home workers, carved his initials into the old ferry docks at Liberty State Park -- did all of these things; did none of them.

My grandmother was homecoming queen her senior year of high school, was one of the first people to cross over the Rainbow Bridge at Niagara Falls one chilly autumn morning, was awarded volunteer of the month honors at RWJUH Rahway for her quick, appropriate action concerning a man who stumbled in one sweltering June afternoon, claiming to have swallowed 32 Tylenol a few minutes earlier -- did all of these things; did none of them.

Things are often immaterial that seem so substantial; a concrete form that sits displaced in the crushed bedrock of time; an immovable headstone dictating, “this is the end of this; this is the culmination of acts and thoughts and decisions and interpretations; this is what prevails now -- this is what survives.” Not this lace tablecloth or this wood table; not the starched white apron of the omelette chef; not the creased black pants of the scurrying servers; not my green collared shirt; not my light khaki pants; not the swirling lights and darks of the food in front of me -- the heavy umber of the syrup, the calming brown of the waffle, the white dollops of whipped cream. Not the flashing silver of the forks, spoons, and knives; not this building -- not one stone upon another; not any of us in this room, between these walls; not a single person under this vast canopy of sky, in this incomprehensible Universe of folds and creases.

It’s a strange thing to grow up with and around these people and know veritably nothing about them -- or to know only the briefest details, the most quickly glossed fragments, like a record that skips, that jumps, that exclaims here and there one random, surprising word, one disconnected phrase, nonsensical, foreign, impossible to comprehend without context. Perhaps there isn’t enough time to know entirely another’s life, another’s thoughts, another’s motives -- of course there isn’t. And such knowledge is ultimately inconsequential regardless. Any one life, any one person is an unfathomable conglomeration of causes-and-effects, of feedback loops and tape hiss and radio static. Perhaps it is a testament to the human psyche that we have the ability to recognize that we don’t -- and can’t -- know anyone else, that we can accept our solitude and isolation as a single transient entity, terminally bound to be encapsulated within two sets of dates in parentheses: and all that we were and all that we did contained therein.

But at some especially beautiful, brilliant moments in the perpetual vortex of time, an image stands out, becomes clear, is made real and tangible for all eternity. And even as our bodies fail and brains perish, we stand firm in faith, in wholehearted belief that this image will persist, will transcend its physical reins, its mental confines, and elevate, integrate itself into the very fabric of our inherently shared consciousness -- to fly, to be free, to exist independently of its own accord, in its own reality:

The reflection of the sun on my glass, the faces of my family around me in harmony, in happiness, as united in love as we could ever hope to be. My chemistry teacher in my junior year of high school standing in front of the class before a lesson and exclaiming sarcastically, sincerely, spontaneously, “well, at least it’s only three months until Christmas!” Running around the front lawn on a particularly blustery October day, trying to catch the swirling leaves falling from the towering trees. Walking on a seaside boardwalk, watching waves break, tossing flower petals, hugging in front of a taco shop. Sitting on a step, feeling the wind blow through my hair, seeing the lights stretch out, blinking, on the pier, Ferris wheel spinning alight, hearing the distant screams of pleasure rend the air, grabbing a departing hand.

This is what we are. This is what we hold and keep and love. This is our everlasting.

Life stand still here.

So it does.

All of it. None of it.