´You Will Bring Us... A Shiny Happy Shrubbery!´
Michael Stipe & The Holy Grail
The Holy Grail is the name given to the cup used by Jesus at the last supper and which caught some drops of his blood while he was being crucified. because of this, it is said that whoever drinks from the grail shall be granted everlasting life. after the whole walking out of the tomb thing, this bloke called Joseph of Arimathea supposedly brought it to britain. once on british soil, the grail got mixed up in all sorts of trouble because of that King Arthur bloke and his pals. especially merlin, who used to get teased at school with the chant ´you´re copying gandalf´
the grail vanished from history during the dark ages, as did pretty much everything else apart from evil, and the conservative party. the cup of Christ didn´t come to light again until it appeared in a film with the Monty Python team and got upstaged by a flying stuffed rabbit. Next, it popped up in the last film of the Indiana Jones trilogy, and at once both stole Harrison Ford´s heart (the two were an item for a dozen years afterwards) and, despite it being a wooden carpenter´s cup, still managed to act the socks off Sean Connery (a feat last achieved by a tin of ronseal)
from there, the grail was bestowed upon REM frontman Michael Stipe by an irritated world which believed the monster responsible for ´shiny happy people´ deserved an eternity of baldness. Stipe, afraid that his bandmates might put the cup to evil usage, hid the cup in a secret vault and encoded the exact location in the lyrics to the song ´stand´
´´stand in the place where you were, now face north, think about direction wonder why you haven´t before...´´ goes the song, a song so baffling that it only makes anything approaching sense if its taken to be a cryptic clue regarding the whereabouts of something mysterious, powerful, ancient. and let´s face it, would it have made any sense to go to all that hassle over Jimmy Hoffa?
