BYE / HI !!!

Dear Readers,

Beginning with tomorrow, I will blog at this address. This lovely blog will, of course, remain as it is, but it won't be updated anymore. Don't be nostalgic. I have imported every single text and comment in the new blog as well. Hope to meet you all there in a minute. Spread the Word(press)!!

Oh, and don't forget to make some small changes in the bookmarks bar.

Yours, truly as always,
Adela.

Basically Essential

The best thing about intelligent people is their being genuinely interested in simple matters and fundamental structures. They are drawn to essentials. To whom they react naturally and efficiently.
The more self-evident and common sensical a thing is, the more we need an intelligent mind to bring forth the "degenerated" relevance of that thing. We have reasons to believe that a commonplace is actually a relevant thing that, due to its routine usage, "has fallen from grace".
I have no intention to get ridiculous by approaching philosophical matters that are largely beyond me; just wanted to stress that our life stands and falls with our ability to discern between essential and unessential things. It's a matter of self-discipline with immediate consequences for our insomnia, for our moral life, daily routine, sex behaviour and art-making. Really.

PS: I am told to transform all my old paintings so that I can integrate them in a coherent collection for some future exhibition. You have a couple of examples below this post. And another one above. The above one is called "Hot Citynight": a claustrophobic, hot and monotonous, unspecific atmosphere. Nothing's for real, nothing stands for itself except the feeling of heat - a supreme, heavy, suffocating heat. I've tried to paint a sensation, not a silhouette looking through a window.

PS2: Do me a favour and watch this girl again (terrific video, much better than Roy Andersson's latest film) and again! I am so proud of my musical intuition. I have recommended her before she even started to make it big inside or outside Sweden. Why is Lykke Li so convincing? I don't know. She just turns out to be so. She's so "self-evident". She didn't sing anything I could have listened to gladly. But she has a very... sophisticated way of proving her essentialness. She's an attitude. Congratulations, Lykke Li!

F-f-f-f-fashion

Fashion is not a joke. Fashion is real. It's a serious, insidious and mature matter, like war, sex or architecture.
Its power is absolute. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Fashion has become our favorite dictator which means that we honor and obey its norms, especially those that contradict our personal taste. Fashion is in such a manner that, by being, it simply paralyzes our free aesthetic will. Those bad-clothed guys, the dissidents who refuse to obey, are sent in concentration camps, to form, while expecting their social death, some sort of weird peripheral structure together with voodoo practicers, overweight seniors, freaks from Russian circuses, and Michael Jackson. The despotism of fashion has gone beyond limits lately. Have you heard of the babyboom (not the post-war one, but the XXIst century's one, widely spread all over the Hollywood Hills)? Sure you did. We read it in People every single day. And in lots of serious anthropological and sociological publications. The phenomenon is frightening, the popular taste and lifestyle has been, all of a sudden, massively redirected towards having as many babies as possible. Nothing wrong with the babies, of course. But EVERYTHING is wrong with the MOTIVATIONS of those dedicated followers of fashion who decide to have babies only because is a hip thing to do. Nothing is more vulgar (and humanly destructive) than mixing our existential choices with fashion edicts. But that's EXACTLY what we do. We desperately ran into the stores looking for those horrible and disadvantageous high-waisted pants (for God's sake, we don't even know how to wear those pants correctly!); and then went home in a rush and made yet another baby with our best friend, or neighbor, or whoever came our way.
I've seen girls crying because they found themselves in the "worst dressed" category of some worthless magazine. The same girls use to sob for two days whenever they see a gorgeous "maternity-style" dress.
Fashion has the power to force upon us the most inhuman ideas EVER without meeting any resistance. Since I have invoked the vulgar mixing between existential matters, human choice and fashion trends, I guess the logic conclusion is this : the autocracy, the uniformity of fashion is an indicator of how frail we've become as human beings and HOW LITTLE we are in touch with our inner selves. We're no more and no less than what we wear. We're so alike and so many, half of us could just as well be dead and God won't even notice.

PS: And now please excuse me, I have, like every Friday, a DVD to watch: End Of The Century - The Story Of Ramones. Who wants to join?

On Evil, Lies, and My Cup of Coffee

I am reading a book about evil in general and lying one's self in particular. While reading, I am constantly underestimating it. Strange, isn't it? At the end of every chapter I say to my self: "I shouldn't read the next one, it can't be as relevant as the one I've finished". But every chapter proves to have at least two pages that amaze me, upset me and challenge my reasoning.

It's that kind of book I could have never bought it myself because it is written by an American psychiatrist who wants to make himself understood at any price. And it has a couple of case studies; so the little theoretician (or devil) in me wonders after every impressive dialogue: did this guy actually tape all these? or rewritten the discussion after the patient went home? how did he pick this particular case, or dream, or discussion? how did he know, at that point, which dialogue was illustrative enough for being written down? do I really need to read all these (sometimes cheap) therapeutic tricks instead of getting back to my "serious" treatises? don't we all know everything about lying ourselves anyway? and why do I have to read commonsensical observations about evil that I've already met in fairytales (the famous definition of evil = life in reverse), theological and philosophical writings, novels and real life?
I'm honestly wondering all these right now, while blogging. The book is 5 centimetres away from my left hand and my cup of coffee is on it and every shrink in the world would tell me that I had a "secret" intention of "instrumentalizing" this book in a "desperate" attempt to diminish its relevance. The book is, yes, to some extend, disturbing; and yes, to some extend, worthless. If you leave it, you feel guilty. If you keep it, you feel like wasting time. So I've decided to put my cup of coffee on it and see what happens down the road.

OK. I am reading...
The book is called People of the Lie and its author is M. Scott Peck. As we're already told in the beginning of the book, the evil is often discussed in highly abstract contexts that easily make it irrelevant. I agree. This book is a radiography of its very concrete, everyday forms. That's its decisive advantage. Recommended.

PS: New canvas above called "Pseudo II". Yesterday night, when finished it, I hated it with all my heart. Today, I feel nothing.

PS2: If you'd care at all about rock 'n roll, punk and women, you should have a complete Blondie discography somewhere in the house. Absolute favourites today and always: "I'm Gonna Love You Too" (from Blonde and Beyond), "Diamond Bridge" (The Curse of Blondie) and the way-too-cool "Hanging on the Telephone" (from whatever Best of you might have at hand).

1000 Cats

Yesterday I've read an article on how to define religion scientifically. Written by an evolutionist. It is not sure, he said, that humans are the only ones who can relate to unseenable realities; animals perhaps can do it too; they have rites, they live in communities, so they may be religious after all. He mostly quoted Darwin. And other "rigorous" scholars from the modern evolutionist caste.
The author is a reputable anthropologist, professor at a reputable university as we speak. Believe me, he is. The article is written in what I usually call "cognitivist style" (a couple of insipid definitions taking the place of captatio benevolentiae, short paragraphs separated by spaces each of them forming an independent idea, the avoidance of complement clauses, adjectives and parentheses, a couple of colourful schemas and diagrams for illustrating matters that have been previously explained in words, a summary written in a military tone and a quick conclusion repeating, almost word by word, the first paragraph.) He doesn't tell you opinions, he tells you facts. Scientific, useful facts. You couldn't do without them. You find out, for instance, that your religious impulse has to do with your wanting to mate or earn more money. Everything stands and falls with the understanding of religion in terms of irrational adaptation to the world within. To cut a very long story short, the article is grotesquely narrow. There's a sort of burlesque dignity in all that (however false) rigour that leaves you speechless. If you happen to come from a different school of thinking, you find out you've been a plain idiot, no better than the worst religious fanatic. Paraphrasing - out in the blue - Charles Bukowski, the way to end a post like this is to become suddenly quiet...

PS: My iPod can't stop from playing Petty's "One More Day, One More Night" from Echo album. Why, I don't know. Another thing I don't know is this: how religious Lizzy, my cat, is? Mr. Anthropologist, how ir/rational her adaptation to a warm keyboard is? And another question for you, Mr. Scientist: can 1000 cats type a psalm in 1000 years?

Jungle Rules

It's harder and harder to humiliate a woman nowadays. She won't let you. You will pay with your head for the slightest intention to make her feel bad. By contrast, it is easier and easier to make fools out of men. The act of falling (in love) has never been more popular and more feared in the men's world. Once you fall, you're a dying person. And you'll soon notice you're alone on that lonely road. No one joined you down there. Your helplessness and wounds stir the flies and the crows. The sky is getting darker. The storm's coming closer.
Someone I know is getting a divorce. In many ways, I am witnessing a funeral. In many others, I am witnessing an Eugène Ionesco play. It is, of course, unfair to judge people by their moments of crises. I have a deep understanding (and respect) for any moment of failure, for those "charged" situations that, in an instant, can make your life turn to stardust or mud.
There's something else that I would like to point out; something that is just as old as the institution of marriage itself: the irrepressible tendency of the woman to marry that man who can make the more attractive socio-economical offer. She makes an almost genuine connection between his social status and his testosterone level. If you suggest it's all about her mind tricks, she won't believe you. She's in love. That's right, she is in love, without previously falling in it; she jumped on it. And she would make everything that's womanly possible to make him fall for her. If she succeeds (and she often does), he's a lost cause. A woman has no mercy for victims; at the same time, no one knows better than her to get the victim out of the cruelest tyrant, and show it to the whole world. A woman can convince every man in the world that he needs her help. Badly.
The man, at his turn, lost his focus. A heavily career-oriented guy will get the blame for his computer addicted kids and for his wife's love affairs. A family father will get the blame for every single luxury car the family couldn't afford, as well as for a badly done laundry.
I am not a specialist in the history of domestic ideas, but my guess would be that there have never been so many contradictions in the social institution of marriage as there are today. On one hand, we experience a crisis of marital conventions, and on the other hand, nothing scares us most than the freestyle-marriage. We deny the rules, but we can't get personal either. Fewer and fewer married people feel responsible for each other's weaknesses. Whenever a weak point comes out, they prefer to lick their wounds in solitude; on the other side of the bed, they suspect a half-sleeping hunter.
Marriage has become a jungle. And the only rule in use is, of course, the jungle rule. You are not supposed to fall, get weak, get drunk or get sick. Unless you want to get killed or, worse, mutilated and shown in the market place as an handicapped freak, on Sundays, when people come back from church.
What a woman wants from a man after she marries him, is unforeseeable, even to herself. Her desires change from day to day, from trend to trend. She has never been more unpredictable; or more feared. What a man wants, it's irrelevant. He just tries to react, run or rage against. He might not look like a natural born victim, but with a little help from her friends, he will discover deep in himself some amazing innate abilities for turning into one.

Epilogue: I don't expect my readers to agree with me. Each of us have access to different truths and realities, don't we? At least that's what the postmodern philosophy tells us. I am a little bit tired of all this hysterical, overexposed subjectivity, to be honest. It's a worn out perspective. It gets weaker, and more ridiculous, with every day. As Leon Wieseltier wrote, you just can't understand the world from the perspective of a personal wound. We perhaps need an "objectivizer". And a little bit of honesty; not much, about a teardrop-size would be just enough.
The other day I thought of a definition of truth (and I honestly apologize for being so daring): the truth is a scale representation of a certain dimension of the world. If I was a bad cartographer of the woman's role in modern marriage, I'm sorry. That's the geography I had access to.

PS: New drawing above: "What Am I Thinking Of".

PS2: Yesterday evening I've watched the Rolling Stone's dvd Bridges to Babylon (1997). Deeply impressed. It might be the best RS dvd ever. And Keith has his biggest fan in me. Can he read these days, I wonder? :)

The 2 Big "F"

I often talk to people that tell me how much they hate definitions, logics, rules and regulations. They want "freedom". They think with their "hearts", not with their brains. They are guided by their "souls", not by their reason. They shut your mouth by telling you "that's how I feel, and you can't contradict my feelings". Sure, who'd mess with one's feelings?!...

I can't tell you how much I despise this empty discourse on "freedom" and "feeling". It is a perverted understanding of both.

And it conceals just about everything that's hard to admit: lack of commitment, laziness of the reason, social misleading, (or better said, an intricate hide 'n seek with one's own social tasks), emotional tergiversation, an unstoppable desire to do some wrong things without taking the responsibility for them (or better said, an arbitrary morality), an approximate understanding of what's important for one's self, a fundamental lack of existential honesty and, finally, an absolutely chaotic and discretionary knowledge of history, religion, literature, art and daily living.

The world's not at one's will. You can't take the liberty to understand liberty in whatever sense you like. Freedom has its own routine, rules and regulations. And rituals. And of course a long and well-defined tradition. So no inner freedom operates in a social, historical, cultural and emotional void. Or vice versa. And therefore, freedom also deals - we like it or not - with a harmonious living. And it's mostly about 1. a very sharp sense of initiative (intended to fit the outside world) and 2. an updated version of the self (intended to meet the most subtle requirements of self-evaluation).

Neither the "freedom" nor any other "humanistic concept" can make you somebody that matters. Take any possible liberty and you will soon hate yourself. Learn every possible definition and you will hate knowledge for good and all. Follow your egoistic heart till the end of the road and you'll lose your friends and family in less than one year. Stick to rigorous logics and see yourself losing the precious sense of spiritual and emotional nebulousness.

The rules and regulations are not the antonyms of "freedom" and "feeling". That might sound commonsensical for a well-intended philosopher. But this is certainly something hard to instill for most of the people around me who arrogantly reject the logical thinking. Well, to be honest, just one thing can be more harmful and inopportune than the excess of logics: the complete lack of logics. And that's precisely what I see everywhere, every single damn day: a frantic exposure of chaotic thinking and a circus of crisscrossing bouncy feelings. It's a mad-house of free clowns out there...

PS: Music? No iPod today. I will play and sing. I've just learned to play Wainwright's "Going To A Town" and Hegarty's "Hope There's Someone". On the piano. Oh it's lovely to be at my parents'. Not to mention all those home-made cakes…And somebody please stop my father from playing those "Hotel California" country variants...

We The Living

God is anything but autistic. We are all invited to extroversion.

PS: A canvas becomes the canvas only after being painted the second time. And so, after 20 more hours of work, "Diana with the black sun" has become "Diana with the black rabbit". I'm proud of her.

PS2: I've just seen Du levande ("You the living") , the new Roy Andersson movie. Apart from the fact that it could have been just as well named Sånger från andra våningen (which is "the other" movie he has made in 2000), and that one could have been easily named Du levande, there's not much left to say about it. Everything has been already said back then. However, some scenes were good. But some were bad. And most of them were banal. Just banal. No wonder about it, Andersson didn't want to make a banal film, but to make some art out of daily Swedish banalities. Which is theoretically possible. And practically doable if he'd only have Bergman's artistic intelligence. Unfortunately he doesn't. So watching this film has been - for me at least - close to a complete waste of time. At the same time, I admit it might have been the perfect Friday evening catch for the grossest snobs. Those who (genuinely?) believe that the right measure for an art movie is the amount of boredom per minute. Today's artists must understand that the simple reproduction of the banal is NOT automatically interesting and certainly NOT automatically art. Now you'll reply that Andersson doesn't reproduce any banal reality, not without previously distorting it, not without transforming it into a paroxysmal attack. I agree, that's what he does. How? Stereotyping the stereotypes, banalizing the banal, reducing to silence the silence, reducing to tears the tears, and killing the dead. Why? Because this is supposed to generate metaphors of existential insecurity. Well, believe me, it doesn't. It's just a slideshow of depressing and - way too obvious - scenes of quotidian decomposition. Every single word and every single image in this film is flat. And tautological. It is that kind of film you'd like to overestimate, just to justify the great effort you've laid in trying to find deeper meanings behind all those obvious connections: Anna's (however beautiful) dream and the lack of the Swedish emotional commitment; the electric chair scene and the typical Swedish conformism and fear of open conflicts; etc. The movie is a rhetorical parade of just about everything that's wrong and Swedish. A slideshow of self-obvious images. And all of them are exceedingly moralizing - another symptom of pretentiousness. The prayer-scene and the psychiatrist's monologue ended up by being embarrassing. However, I'd like to salute the humor. It was good humor.

Fight Club 1

The dressing room of the swimming club. No one in there. Except me and a 35-and-something lady looking irritated. I was about to undress, she was about to get dressed. Have you met that woman who tries to ignore your presence by looking pissed off? Well, it's her. She throws her things in her sport bag, she combs her hair as if she'd want to pull off her head, with every look, she's telling "and now YOU, as if I haven't got enough to put up with!" You reduce your moves to the minimum necessary. You feel however guilty for breathing. You just don't walk here and there through the room for no reason, you find the safest corner and you undress there, silently, carefully. You hate the plastic bag where you keep your flip-flops because it makes uncontrollable annoying sounds that immediately reaches the oversensitive auditive receptors of the lady who turns right to you for 2 intense seconds with that look in her eyes "oh, so it's YOU again!?" You excuse yourself with a smile, but a smile never works for a woman, and it's an absolute "DON'T" in a dressing room when the only rule seems to be hate-and/or-ignore. You should have learned that by now, you're 30. Stop trying to make other women like you. It's against nature.

I found a good moment when she was looking down busy to double-knot shoelaces and I've found my way to the mirror trying to hide as much hair as possible under a swim cap. I've seen her in the mirror leaving the dressing room, without a single "bye", just a door slapped and a breeze of fruity perfume that I've always found unacceptable for a grown-up woman trying to get by in this highly competitive world. God, it felt good to be alone. I've started my usual dressing room- humming that I particularly enjoy because of the nice echo I get from the empty lodge. This time I got considerable pleasure from the "shhh" of Bowie's "China Girl".
Back to my corner, ready to put my swimming glasses on and find my way to the pool. Surprise. My brand glasses were missing. They were right there, on the bench, before my moving 5-meters away, to the mirror. I checked my sport bag knowing for sure I ain't gonna find them in there. I didn't. I looked under the bench. No. Suddenly I knew that my life, from that point on, won't be the same. I had two possibilities, both extreme, both unacceptable for a socially phobic AND narcissistic human like me: 1. Go and swim without the swimming glasses and ruin my contact lenses that cost me a fortune, or 2. Go and find the pissed-off-lady - unless she didn't find her way to the parking place and drove home for good - and humiliate myself by asking her to give back what's mine. For a second or two, none of these two options seemed probable to me. But a few moments later, there I was, rushing down the corridor in my swimsuit, having people looking at me, excusing myself for bumping into a bunch of kids, freezing, trembling, slipping, and there she was, waiting for her guy to get dressed in the cloakroom. She looked all shined up, smiling and talking to the guy who was still fumbling with his pants down under his knees. She looked like someone else. Could you imagine the embarrassment, the guilt, the humiliation I was going through while trying to open my mouth and explain my presence there? When she saw me, she became once again irritated. This time she finally had a reason to study me and declare herself unsatisfied right away. I could see how deeply she detested me. My words could only make things worse. I looked like a victim, I behaved like a victim, I talked like a hopeless lamb caught by an wolf. I could hardly hear my own voice explaining, excusing myself "by mistake, if only by mistake, I mean of course you didn't intend to...erhm...you know...if only by mistake, I'm very shortsighted you know I wear contact lenses, without my swimming glasses...is a disaster...would you...please...check...if...by mistake...", etc., etc. My speech lasted an eternity. She smelled blood immediately. She raised her voice like a thunder. "How dare you..." and such. Her (still pantless) boyfriend seemed to enjoy the moment. He just sat there and stared. She pulled out her own swimming glasses. She had them in her bag. Good brand, I have to admit. They weren't mine, I admitted that too. She was all red with anger. I was red too, mostly because of my red swimsuit, because I was however ready to faint with shame, I could however guess that my natural color was white. She was about to make a point and leave the room (leaving her pantless boyfriend there, in disdain) when I've spotted my swim glasses in the pocket of her bag. I must admit I couldn't believe my eyes, because I was just beginning to accept the fact that some extraterrestrial powers have made my glasses disappear. The guilt is a strange mechanism, isn't it? In that moment, I would have given ANYTHING for her to be right and me to be wrong, and simply acknowledge the unfortunate paranormal event. I felt comfortable with my being silly and irrational and suspicious. I felt completely lost now that there was no doubt about her culpability. Like a Messiah, I would have taken everything upon me, just to know her clean and innocent. Crucified, yes, if needed. I even loved her for a moment. I forgot how she made me feel unwelcomed in the dressing room, how she left without a bloody greeting, how she took my swimming glasses and put them in her pocket while I was fixing my cap in the mirror. I wanted to free her. She murmured something between her teeth that could have been a "sorry". I am not sure. I took my glasses and left.
I might have got drowned as well.

PS: Music? Well, that's a hard one. As I will be heading for the super market in a few minutes, I will make my option for a well-balanced Rolling Stone playlist. Something new and something old. Something cheap and something exquisite. Something borrowed ("Paint it Black"?) and something original. The perfect bride for a Friday wedding.

Low Tide Zone

Not everybody's able to learn from mistakes and bad lucks. To some of us, the consequences of a mistake can be paralyzing. At the same time, I have to mention that people who get a kick-start from something they've done wrong would have get kicked anyway sooner or later, out in the blue, or for any other reason.
Learning from your mistakes is actually a rare thing, a real inner adventure. Some have died on the way. Some returned empty-handed. Some gave up. But most of us never tried.
The process through which one's life evolves from a misfortune to a bright future is extremely complex and more rare than journalists and biographers actually believe. One would be a fool to assume that one's weaknesses, mistakes and misfortunes will, just like that, become qualities and luckiness. Everything's possible when it comes to humans, except magic and alchemy. That is, trash will never turn to gold. Disguising weaknesses into qualities and errors into triumphs is an extremely popular move among humans. But no alchemy is involved here, just a mental subterfuge and some drama education; however, disguising is just one of the many ways of digesting indigestible happenings in one's life.
Another one is - you wouldn't believe it - giving up. More exactly, some people simply decide they cannot live "up" to their own mistake standards. So they walk out on themselves, this way hoping to escape the self-reproductive capacity of their errors. Here we deal with the - literally - "pathetic losers"; such losers make no difference between themselves and their mistake; so they end up denying the whole package instead, and take considerable pleasure from whining and cursing themselves for failing again. And they'd just love you to pity them too.
But how many of the people you know actually dare to confront their own mistakes and misfortunes, and then act accordingly to this confrontation? Very, very few. And they are not alchemists. They're "oceanologists". When a misfortune happens, when the whole world falls down into pieces, then, and only then, everything will become clear and stark for a couple of hours; days maybe. This is the low tide. The moment when you can finally look below and find animals hiding there, shells and seaweed sticking out of the sand, the slippery stones, and all that golden mud... It's an otherworldly silence down there. And you finally understand. There's no sense in hoping to turn a bad luck into diamonds and pearls. It's mud and you don't even have to take my word for it. Just kneel down and look closely. It's low tide. And you're the oceanologist.

PS: new canvas above. I really love this canvas. It's called "Sleeping drunk" and I think is among my most underrated paintings :).

PS2: I've been extremely musical through the whole weekend. I don't even know what music to mention and what to leave out. However, among other exciting listenings and watchings, I've spent a whole Saturday evening looking (for the 100000002nd time) at Bowie's Reality Tour DVD. I cannot think of any other better performer right now. The stage design, the outfit, the voice, the moves, the band, the playlist, the audience - how perfect can one be and still be human, I wonder??? And later came The Animals and some of their rare TV-shows. And then came the latest Cave & Bad Seeds album Dig, Lazarus, dig! that I absolutely enjoy but I absolutely don't love it (except, perhaps, the song "Dig, Lazarus..."). What I always disliked in Cave's writing and singing is the excess of pathos. I am not too impressed with his decadent lyrics, I am not necessarily moved by his comedowns...He's simply too...obvious. There's a sort of gratuity in all his music that, from time to time, makes me yawn.

PS3:...and please don't call me or expect me to mail you back. I'm sick. I still don't know how I managed to finish this post.

...and then came the Cook

There will be a kitchen in every room of the house. That's what I've read in a design magazine about the future design trends.

Nowadays, people love to cook; most importantly, they love the fact that they love to cook. If you're a good cook, there's only one thing which is more important than cooking: tell people about it. Live upon the gift of being handy in the kitchen! Make friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, get rich, get famous, get married. Look at all those famous handsome (dear Anthony Bourdain, would you have a drink with me?...) cooks on Travel & Living channel, look at all those spicy adventurous men - tough look, smooth feel - effusive and fluent, emotional and empathic, looking urban in the middle of nowhere, looking exotic in the heart of the city, they cook as they'd dance, they talk as they'd sing, they eat as they'd have sex.
As for the female cooks, have you ever seen one, just one, wearing boring white cook's shirt? No way to spot a sloppy, sweaty or stuffy woman cooking. Oh, and the way they pick the wine, the way they hold the glass in their beautiful hand, the way they talk about it, you could swear they've just experienced their one and only authentic orgasm. The behavior in the kitchen has become a prolongation of the behavior in the bedroom. Cleverly moving the pan around the stove, spreading the spicy ginger, the whispering noise made by the opening bottle of wine, the candles, the glossy shells, the rosy lobster, the bon appetite. Cooking is not for housekeepers anymore, but for cosmopolitan people willing to mate! Knowing how to match a wine and some pasta has become an important chapter from the How-to-survive-in-the-sophisticated-urban-jungle handbook.
Those (modern) times when both men and women proudly admitted being helpless in the kitchen are gone. If you don't care about cooking, you're not only old-fashioned, but also passionless and indolent. You're a waste of someone's time! A disgrace.
We're in the post-cooking-ignorance era. The pizza-guy is dying. And so are McDonald's chicken salads. Baking your own bread is definitely hip. Eating well is one of the most distinguishable unwritten laws of our late-modernity: the excess of individuality (including the "do-it-yourself" trend), the obsession for health (including the "green" reasons) and the fashionable return to basics come first on the agendas of today's supermen and superwomen. The ultimate luxury is not a banquet in an exquisite restaurant, but an intimate dinner at home within 4 fully-equipped kitchen walls. Not the expensive conformism, but the creative difference. So cook or die, my friend, cook or die...

PS: New laborious canvas above which, I must say, looks a whole lot better in reality than in the picture. It's called "Ambiguous Thoughts".

PS2: When it comes to after-dinner music, one could never go wrong with Serge Gainsbourg's BO Cannabis. Not too sweet, not too obvious, not too definite. "Avant de mourir", my favorite track, reminds me of a revelatory book of Georges Bataille that I have read about 7 years ago, L'Erotisme et la fascination de la mort - a reason to love or hate French philosophy and literature... However, Gainsbourg's Cannabis stays the best half-instrumental album ever heard by my humble ear...

The Non-Conflict-Generating Generation

I am not going to write about the conflict between generations. No. On the contrary. I am going to write about a scandalous way of making peace between generations: by limiting - or even erasing - the responsibility of the young individual for his or her own doings. The sympathetic smile of the grown-up confronted with the youngster's aplomb. That's the modern trend.

There's something special about one's mistakes that has been completely forgotten nowadays: their having concrete causes and concrete consequences. A mistake is "on its own"; amendable, but also repairable. A mistake is about acknowledging intricate human interactions: more blushing, more explaining, more learning, more restoring, more adjusting, more repenting; less excusing, less accusing.
Let's have an example. Recently, someone I (kind of) know, has made one of the most perplexing statements ever made by a 35-and-something woman-therapist living in a post-psychoanalytic century: the youngster cannot be guilty of anything; if there's someone to be blamed, blame the adult. But how can you possibly have so little respect for a young human being? How can you not count on his/her own living mind and living reasons for doing good, doing bad, or doing nothing?
When you're young and you struggle to avoid juvenile behaviours, your effort is actually nothing more than a juvenile attempt. As a matter of fact, there's no way to escape your age. Nothing is too paradoxical or too weird for the wise grey-haired people, they seem to have seen and heard everything, you're just their replica after all, they've once had precisely your thoughts, your ideas, your amazements. Set back, it has been done before. Don't matter what you do and how good you do it, you're doomed to be "undeveloped". If you're overenthusiastic, your enthusiasm is a "lovely juvenile endeavour". If you're lazy and under-motivated , your disinterest is a "normal juvenile resistance".
The adults' warm understanding and their kind openness are truly overwhelming. You just have to be thankful. They just don't think you are responsible for your freaky opinions, devastating ideas, sound decisions, long-term commitments, bold statements and hysterical yellings: these are nothing more and nothing less than passing symptoms. Nothing to worry about and nothing to be taken into account. They will talk down to your amazing initiatives and your goofy questions. They will excuse you. Till heaven and back. Don't matter what you do, you ain't gonna be a "safe bet" or a "guilty bastard".
...Not until you reach a decent age of, say, 29. They've waited for so long in order to afford an open conflict! Everyone will queue to slap your face, and they will take considerable pleasure in doing it. Your enthusiasm will suddenly be called "mania", your laziness will suddenly be called "social apathy" and your interest in punk music will be a sign of sexual retardation.
If the conflict between generations has been proved to be uncivilized and ridiculous, the conflicts within the same generation is not only allowed, but also encouraged. And no scruples in sight. No meaningful interactions. No place to hide. Kafka's back in town. That's it, you're guilty, you're sick, a bad model for your kids. I'm 30. Please kill me.

PS: By the way, try some Ramones for a change. Say, the 2nd album, Leave Home. Just to make sure you've heard some classics. A few years back I was completely addicted to "Suzy is a Headbanger". It still has a strong effect on me.

Between Me and Her

Sitting here with one of Simone Weil's books on my knees. It is a collection of letters written to Reverend Father Perrin. I must have read this correspondence three or four times during my ambivalent young life, during my latest 10 scandalously schizophrenic years as a writer, scholar, artist, woman and child. I can see the signs of my old crayons everywhere on its pages: brown, red, black. Signs of old coffee too. Signs of old thoughts, disagreements, amazements, fury, aversion, disrespect, contempt, envy, love and an old bus ticket from Paris.

I have nothing to do with this woman, so ridiculously rigid, so passionately austere (like all her fellow-mystics), so rigorously irrational, too close to God, too far from Him. But I have read her works constantly. No other woman, dead or alive, could possibly be this faraway from me. But I choose her over all the others. I choose her. I choose her for having been everything but what I am. I reject myself for being everything but what she was.
I couldn't bear to see the world through Simone Weil's eyes, not even for one day. And I don't expect my feebleness to be forgiven.

PS: New canvas above. It took me about a month to bring it to this shape. I had serious problems with making the wind blow from within. It's called "Almost Gone With the Wind". Oil on canvas, as usual.

PS2: When it comes to music, "Mrs. Bartolozzi" from Kate's Aerial is a safe bet today. Not exactly an April Fool's Day starter, but what a lovely contrast after all. How can I make it up to you guys for having the patience to read a personal post instead of the standard text you've all waited for? Take this song wisely sung by two lovely creatures. A pretty fair reward, don't you think?

Between You and Me

Generally speaking, we don't tell the truth.
Our ways of dealing with people consist of a variety of - let's call them - "operable statements" that facilitate our emotional and social non-implication. Should we call these "operable statements" lies? Not really. We wouldn't even bother to lie. We just stick to the standard talking that prevents us from getting involved, getting wrong, or getting to the point.
We compliment each other, yes, but we couldn't say a single warm thing to anyone without immediately being perceived as "obtrusive". We turn our back to each other, yes, but we couldn't say a single harsh thing to anyone without immediately being accused of annihilating his/her identity.
We went to a very bad school of Management of Fear. We haven't been taught to handle our panic and our embarrassment, but we have surely learnt all our lessons of emotional inactivity. Moreover, we were taught that the sense of reflection is ridiculous, and the in-deep approach of other people has to be scary or vulgar.

Do I encourage a barbaric vehemence? Not at all. But a normal social life involves taking the risk of getting specific. There is no other way of getting advantage of our living in a living world.
We are risk capable, we are feed-back capable, we are empathy capable, we are horseplay capable, we are goof-up capable; and blushing is allowed. For God's sake. Get specific, get wrong, get real.

PS: New canvas. Sort of. "The Dog of the World". Some say it's good and everybody agrees that the real painting looks much better than the picture.

PS2: Antony Hegarty is part of a new project. I suppose you already know about it. You have probably heard it as well. It's more the DJ Andrew Butler's project. I've heard about Andy B. before, while passing time by reading reviews I wasn't really interested in. So no wonder I never paid attention to his name or his deeds. Once his name appeared close to Antony's, my neglecting attitude towards him has turned into humble consideration. You are correct, I am talking about Hercules & Love Affair. Which I am downloading right now from iTunes, piece by piece. I only heard snippets by now, after noticing the "Blind" video on VH1, not long before Easter. So there's not much to say yet, except from this quick note and an overall feeling of having to face a purely classic disco project that I will perhaps love it in the iPod while jogging, but never really putting it in the stereo, on Fridays, when home with my boyfriend. But that's just me. And I haven't even downloaded it integrally, and I'm simply too married for having a boyfriend.

Lola

I don't understand feminism but I won't complain.
I know a woman who addresses all men in low tones and calls them "Mr.", and all women in high-pitched voice and calls them "yo". Now you decide whether she's a feminist or an anti-feminist.
The poor woman using discriminatory appellatives, as well as feminism in general is full of tragic paradoxes of this kind. Another tragically funny paradox is that modern woman ended up copying man's weak points rather than his more valuable attributes. She's clumsy, egomaniacal, vulgar, ill-mannered, tactless and kitchen-phobic. She's like the worst man ever; without the testosterone aura that makes even a nasty man looking adorable now and again.
Of course, being ourselves is a luxury nowadays, we all know it, we all feel it. We live in a largely shared absence of specific qualities - sometimes out of fear, sometimes out of snobbery, sometimes out of sheer small-mindedness, sometimes out of...feminism.
I'd avoid getting commonsensical on this topic, since everybody's quite aware of the qualities and limitations of women movements nowadays. I would only like to stress out the totally uncool blend of tragedy and comedy of turning women into men and viceversa, so that none of them is really coherent, none of them is really doing "serious business" and none of them is looking really "finished".
I would even say that each aspiring person to the facilities of the other sex (I mean gender) will sooner or later get stuck in the tragic conflict of having to worship what they once used to hate most. None of these persons will EVER have access to the others' elite representatives. So most of them will look like JOKES. The sophisticated privileges of being a man/woman are VERY unlikely to be transfered from one gender to another. No woman will EVER become a record-breaking man. And no man will EVER know what a woman knows and viceversa. In spite of whatever Mel Gibson might believe.
On the other hand, no woman and no man will ever get back to their very own primal and serene idiocy. Which is of course something to be thankful for. So we won't go back, but we can't go on either. As long as the woman and the man are uncapable of legitimating each other, we're bound to linger on, looking and acting like mutants. Mutants suffering from social insecurity and sexual fright. But how tactless of me to say it!

PS: New drawing above. I haven't drawn in months because I don't particularly like it. But I'm out of oil colors, my espresso machine is out of order, so I felt like having no conditions at all for shouldering a 36-hour-long painting session. Anyone knowing unconventional ways of descaling espresso machines? (apart from vinegar, pulp-free lemon juice that haven't helped at all)? And by the way, the drawing is called "In Wonder".

PS2: The musical recommendations below stay actual for this week as well. No one competes with Merz.

PS3: If anyone's wondering about the title of this post, I should probably add it's a song by The Kinks that never leaves my iPod. The lyrics are closely connected to the blog theme.
And happy Easter all. Mind the weather.

"Siesta"

Friday's coming down on us, all wrong and warm, just like someone's body. Friday's not like the other days of the week, it can't be ignored, it can't be pushed aside, it can't be worked away at the office, it just has to be embraced. Friday is so alive, it is almost human. It weakens our sense of time, it stirs our sense of eternity. Friday is (religiously) heavy, (socially) relieving, (astrologically) erotic, (superstitiously) frigid, (culturally) equivocal. It is "somebody" to challenge. Somebody to conquer and take over. Or somebody to surrender to. Either way, Friday requires a personal treatment; the holy, disharmonious "bodily contact". So can you feel it?

PS: Was this Friday post a pretext for introducing as soon as possible the very-very new Merz album Moi et Mon Camion? Perhaps it was. But this music is, nevertheless, just like a Friday: ambivalent, heavy, evocative. And it has become, under the latest 36 hours, stronger than me. Merz has an unique gift of making the complexity and simplicity meet within a 4-minute track. His music is just as much folk-music and rock-music, as it is ambient music. And it opens and closes, like a rhythmic, untiring valve; the oriental touch, which I find annoying in others' music, is something that I totally embrace in all Merz albums. I have never heard such a multidetermined music that is also brilliantly coherent, technically perfect but still very warm and emotionally charged. His sophistication simply borders on Beatle-genius.
Does these lines sound to you like empty, inarticulated words maybe? Check for yourself his myspace and pay particular attention to "Lucky Adam", "Malcom", "Cover Me" and "Call Me". And don't forget to buy his previous album Loveheart as well.
Such music makes you take the risk and blame the present music industry for all the human failures of our poor anorexic and bipolarly disordered century.

PS2: For those wondering about the picture: taken in our very beautiful central Europe, Teplitz, Czech Republic that is.

Bees

Time's like a bee. Flying, fuzzing, buzzing, nagging, stinging, honeycombing. Everything it touches turns into cells, lumps, caves, hollows, riddles, wax and honey.
Time's the eternal pollinator. Haven't you noticed your time-adherence? Haven't you felt the thrill of having your stamina touched by its little hind-feet, and seen your memories bursting into honey? Haven't you witnessed its overwhelming fertilizing power? Haven't you looked back into your life and realized how sweet the sting of time was every so often? How weirdly attached you've become to its cataclysmic effects, how dangerously dependent on its rigid nest architecture? Time is all about meeting your life's pollination needs. And look at all these seconds, minutes and hours pouring down like honey...

PS: Check out the re-done canvas above: "The Nap". It needed more significant colours. And a fancy blanket. As a bonus.

PS2: Have you seen Anton Corbijn's Control? You really have to. To me, it was THE Cannes movie of 2007. Way better than Mungiu's acclaimed masterpiece. Perhaps more subtle and more tender. The film grows from minute to minute. It is, yes, a little bit out of focus in the beginning, but it gains in relevance and intensity, just like a rolling snowball. The film is also a delight for the admirers of Corbijn's photographic work - you will feel the need to pause the DVD player every other second and worship the still frames. Sam Riley makes a devastating Ian Curtis, the ladies (Samantha Morton and Alexandra Maria Lara) are not as good as expected, but they were however meant to be played down by Ian's profile. If you care about rock, Manchester, art devotion and the late 70s, this film is a must.

Time is just as poisonous as an Apis mellifera tonight. I am strongly needed at the pool. I spent the whole day sitting. Can you imagine anything worse?

Dear Santa

What is it that we want? None of us would admit wanting extravagant things, none of us would mention the moon or the lottery luck, the Rolls Royce or the private jet, the Brad or the Angelina, the Nobel or the Grammy. When asked, we answer decently, predictably, rightfully: we want love, health, peace in the world and good schools for our children. Which is, of course, nothing but the truth, nothing but the proof of our sticking to the right clichés, those blessed and beautiful clichés that are always able to refresh our sense of reality.
Vulgarity - in all its known and/or suspected forms - is completely absent from our wishing lists. The same goes for any self-gratulatory initiative; or for a supposable "sympathy for the devil".

According to our (public) wishing lists, everybody loves and nobody hates, everybody's reasonable, nobody's fooling around with the green projects, with the marriage institute or with the children rights. We live in a fundamentally good world, we don't even discuss anymore the causality of the evil, our goodwill ambassadors know exactly where to go and whom to feed, we have magazines that tell us (see the 1st - or was it the 2nd?... - issue of the Intelligent Life, the newborn child of The Economist) how to make efficient charity, we have entire academic departments lecturing and discussing religious pluralism, we have hundreds of militating NGO's that teach us positive discrimination in three steps; who said the progress doesn't exist and who said the world can't be saved from collapse by some wonderful wishing lists put together by our thoughtful fellow-humans?

There is one little problem still: we are not our wishing lists. Would you really want to have access to the uncensured to-do's lists of your fellow humans? I don't think so. We are not what we want. We are what we crave. And when it comes to craving, we're no better than the children and the pets we have in care. Craving has a space of its own, a lawless space. We often give a righteous action for an illicit attempt. Two years of reasonable public glory for a moment of completely ridiculous intimacy. We raise two children and make four abortions. We buy wooden toys and waste 4 gallons of water washing the asphalt yard. And all these because we have a very...labyrinthine way of interpreting the rules of the games we play. We have troubles with seeing things in their full dimensions. We're born with a fascination for our own deficiencies, just like the 3-year old kid's fascination for his own poop. We're interested in corruption, in losers, in adultery and warcraft. We're interested in crowds, in total power, in depression and weakness, as well as in the whole process of finding an alibi. We fix this, we break that. And viceversa. And so we have an ambivalent relationship with our own wishing lists. It is not easy to make relevant, practicable and efficient distinctions between aspirations and cravings. We'd rather go for a "dialectical" understanding of both. So that our paradoxical ego can grow bigger, darker, greener, worse.

PS: New canvas above. It is called "Gone Fishing". Hope you like it.

PS2: Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed were the kings of the weekend. I know I have written before about Reed's "Coney Island Baby", but I just keep noticing how my heart is racing when this song is playing. Plain beauty in terms of both music and lyrics.

If anyone can find the interview that Cohen gave for The Word magazine in the July 2007 issue, please give me a call. I have been looking for it all over the internet, Amazon and eBay. No luck.

Us vs. ...

Most of us add nothing to their lives. It is our life that lives us, it is not us living our life. We do everything we can for prolonging our lifespan, but extremely little, if anything at all, for improving our capacity to live. 

We're colonized by our sorrows and hopes, fears and ambitions; they will rule us and put us to work: less talk, more action. We look efficient - hectic doings, speedy thoughts, but our deeds and reasonings are essentially truth-value-free, essentially inconclusive, essentially inessential. Our children and our parents came into this world, they're passed by, they pass by, hard to say which one is which, hard to say if they were born at all, hard to say whether they're males or females, lonely or popular, dead or alive. Am I my brother's keeper?

PS: The usual Monday-canvas. This one is called "Wannabe". I had no day and no night because of this one. Still not sure whether it was worth it.

PS2: Check this absolutely wonderful Merz song. So full of heart, yet un-pathetic, so technical, yet so tender. 

Have a bright week all. 

...therefore I am

You are what you can't do. Look at your left hand, look at your inelegance, look at your weakness, vulnerability, helplessness, emotional handicaps and disqualification, look at your unbelief, look at your distrust, look at your off-tune singing, look at your ignorance and your clumsy dancing, look at your brain fade, torpor and inertia, look at your failures, mistakes and omissions, look at your regrets, look at those you disappointed, look at that dinner you didn't cook, look at the word you didn't say, and look at the kiss you never shared. You're so heavy with all these, your name couldn't be other than You.

PS: One of the most recent sketches at the left. Not a favorite, but I lost all the others in an unfortunate hard disk formatting procedure.

PS2: Still interested in Lykke Li's (French-ed) music. She is however less original than one might think after a first listening. But then again, she worked at her own uniqueness in a way that I tend - not to necessarily like - but to enjoy. I noticed her once on TV, long before her full album was launched, and she did get my attention. She can get yours as well with her myspace, or maybe with this, this, this or this.

Dustpan

Writing sweeps life out of the way.   

PS: New canvas at the left. It is called "Family's Floating Blood". I like it.

PS2: New music in my iPod: Lykke Li's album "Youth Novel". The real deal.

PS3: Long time no hear, my apologies. I guess I need a dust mop refill.

  

Precisionwise

Human being is a vague being. Utterly obscure and exhaustively illogical. A master of tergiversation and inaccuracy. If God created the earth and the sky, the humans came up with the fog.

The humans are very committed to their both innate and cultivated negligence. Several slip-ups, a blind fury and a blind date can make anyone's day. With or without Freud, the humans are however inclined to fail, forget and fumble on purpose. 

This mean very much more than the fact that we have a good deal of evasiveness instinct. More importantly, trickery and nebulosity is a necessary condition of our self-defense mechanisms. It's just as much in our blood as it is in our culture(s). If the Swiss-made engines would have ruled the world, we would have been all sentenced to death. The day we'll stop failing, the world will stop turning.

PS: New canvas above: "Sega". We're lucky enough to be seeing him taking the plane to India once for all.

PS2: A propos de taking off's, Milos Forman's Taking off (1971) is something to be seen at least twice. 

On Base Players

There's an enigmatic connection between stupidity and immorality. You knew it, didn't you? And if you didn't know it, you felt it.
It's hard to admit openly (that is, without feeling odd and guilty) that stupidity often borders on evilness. But it's true, for God's sake! One might claim that Dostoevsky created the morally perfect man and called it "the idiot". And, before that, Cervantes called it Quixote. But we are certainly not talking about Myshkin or windmills here. We are not talking about the oh so many subtle ways of turning morality into a wonderful (and absolutely necessary!) paradox. For more of these, just read the Bible.
We're talking here about that feeble-minded man next door who lacks the perspective. So he cheats on his wife over and over again without really intending to harm her, he lies for his own good over and over again without really intending to be dishonest, he's not sophisticatedly evil, but plainly lousy. He can't place his deeds nowhere in the intricate chain of causes and effects. His notion of "consequence" is distorted, vague or inexistent. The imbecile ignores or violates the rules - out of imbecility (one may call it unawareness), but also out of disinterest and lack of comprehensiveness. Not having an extensive mental range, he simply can't see the point in doing things that contradicts or diminish his immediate well-being. His non-programmatic approach of life makes him weak as an ant, stupid as a turkey, and abject as a despot. He's not a "holy fool" unable to adjust to the versatile rules of society, but a base player who plays his way don't matter how horrific his music sounds; after all, he has no sense of music, just an instinct for rhythm.
We can't make much of this world without an exercised comprehensiveness. Kindness is comprehensive, dynamic, and very much aware of itself. The dialectics of morality is more complicated than astrophysics. It's an abyssal affair we often get lost in, but a guarantee that we haven't quite fallen out of grace.

PS: New canvas above, as you have probably noticed. It's called "Mismatch". I thought I will never finish it. It took me a while to create clashing effects and still keep it somehow coherent.

PS2: I promised a review to the absolutely amazing Cat Power's Jukebox, but this post has gotten way too long and boring, so I was afraid I couldn't count on your attention anymore. Meanwhile listen to the latest Laleh: "Snö", the theme song made for the Arn movie. Plain, plain beauty.

Fiddle-Faddle

Every path you take leads further than you think.

PS: The new canvas is done; it's a personal attempt to exorcise my fear of dogs, while trying my hand in self-caricaturing.
PS2: Best reading lately: Pär Lagerkvist's Onda Sagor.
PS3: Best listening: Cat Power's latest Jukebox. If time will be kind to me in the near future, I'll get it reviewed.
PS4: Documentary? Art? Advertising? Funny stuff? Have your choice...

The Insides Of A Week

Mondays are the the most honest days. In the beginning of the working week, the arriviste in us is still a junior, the feeling of importance is still under construction, we lie less, we listen more. So on Mondays, we're still learning how to put our guard up; on Tuesdays, we're starting to get dogmatic; Wednesdays - we lose our sense of hearing, touch and truth; on Thursdays, we swank; on Fridays, we're recovering from anesthesia.
We spend the weekends trying to cope with the pain of being ourselves, counting calories, money, chances, and blood cells.

PS: Helena Josefsson has just started recording a new solo-album. Fingers crossed, prayers, chants and hurrah's for the last honest musician in our feather-light music world.

With Or Without It

Enthusiasm. We couldn't do without it. We would be giving up our work, our family, our pets, our life, our selves. Enthusiasm in our living economy is like the sun in the photosyntheses process. Without it, we'd fade away and die.
Enthusiasm alone. Well, we couldn't do a single thing with it. It's counterproductive, unreliable, unscrupulous and failing. Enthusiasm deludes; that is, it deceives your mind and your judgment and supports your paranoid tendencies by making you think you can do it so much better than you actually can. Being over-enthusiastic easily turns into being disappointed over the very thing that once stirred up your enthusiasm. It's one step to depression. Moreover, being non-enthusiastic often recommends you as a "cool, dispassionate professional". Therefore, many of us simulate the lack of passion just to make it to the top of the hierarchy, while many of us simulate the enthusiasm just to make it to the next morning.
The hypocrisy of the overplayed enthusiast is just as popular as the hypocrisy of the overplayed nonenthusiast: the two wonderful extremes keep us away from social disgrace. Between these two popular situations, we can hardly say what is the "real" quantity of apathy (or passion) one can hold. These days, it's all about finding their "social spectacle"-value and acting it out properly. Who cares if you're a maniac or a depressive, or - oh, so often - both? Just stick to that damned scenery honey, will you???

PS: new canvas above called "Pseudo". I tried to "overplay" an Orthodox icon.

PS2: Kent's "Tillbaka till samtiden" got better and better with time. My first review, as you probably remember, was reserved. Today, I think that "Våga vara rädd" and "Sömnen" are modern masterpieces.

Better Is No Good

Each day we lose innumerable occasions to do and say stupid things. If you think you didn't miss any occasion to be silly, you're very wrong. You're always so much better than you imagine; you struggle more than you would ever know, you love your parents more than you could ever admit to yourself, you never lie as much as it'd have to, you never laugh enough at other's trouble, you always talk less than you could, you always care more than you show, you give almost just as much as you take, you are more grateful than ungrateful, more polite than lovesick.
What do you think would happen if someone would cast the demons, the geniuses and the idiots out of us, and would make them play, work and talk in our place?

PS: Antony Hegarty is preparing a solo-album. Some songs are going to be "normal", as he said, while others are going to be more experimental. I would just add that no Antony-song can ever be "normal". His vocal delivery and his texts are excellently uncommon and "abnormal" without lacking "expectancy" and harmony. And here's the paradox of his music: unlike, say, Björk's works, Antony's are both expected and unexpected, accessible and hermetic.
I am so waiting for it.

Fragmentarium

so frustrating when the phone rings and rings in your upstairs neighbor's flat nobody's home really nobody's there to pick up the phone and you realize how little can be done in this world


PS: ink and charcoal at the left, Antony and the Johnsons in the player, I'm sorry for this long break, imagine you have to write a dead-important project while being trampled down by the worst flu ever.

A,B,C

We underestimate ourselves. We think we can't understand how, for instance, a theoretical system works, we think we don't get the ambivalent matters, we think we shouldn't bother with Bach, Joyce, Llosa or Laurie Anderson, we dismiss a seemingly complex explanation by calling it "studied", we only answer the simple questions that don't question any of the questionable matters inside or around us.

On the other hand, we overestimate our capacity of producing and receiving simplicity. It should be obvious that the clear stark things - starting with a physics formula and ending with a 3-chord-hit - have to do with the human potency of raising above the seeming intricacy of things. Simplicity is about far-sightedness and not about the cult of surface, it's about wisdom and not about those quotidian mental tricks that make us look ridiculously self-contented while often bordering on imbecility.
...because simplicity is by all means a luxury, while complication is a daily must.

PS: New canvas with a Van Gogh-feeling: "The Water and the Sleep".

PS2: Regina Spektor, as I often wrote it myself, is one of the most consistent examples of rigorous, yet charming complexity. But Lefsetz always says it better. Scroll down till you'll see his review to Regina's Begin to Hope.

...and yes, the flu got me eventually.

The Acknowledgment 2008

Our days are counted. But we don't need the time, we need the relevance.
Live yourself up, play your clock down.

PS: Faulkner's The Sound And the Fury was rated high during this two-week holiday. The snow and the cold were rated badly, but that's just me I suppose. Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, Françoise Hardy and lots of strong Kenyan tea made wonders all through the long nights of mandatory relaxation. Cohen's Book of Longing, the white wines and a psychoanalysis book on the Swedes' reasons for committing suicide were all fun and merry.
Sketching my relatives was interesting, but completely unethical.
Ink and charcoal above.

PS2: ...and by the way, it's good to be back.

Frenched

We lost the ability to lose. And we lost the ability to cope with a loser. A loser inhibits us; and irritates us. He's a contre-jour photo, a contre-vie device, something that keeps us from breathing the fresh air of our ongoing projects, something that exudes the fetid smell of death and reminds us vaguely of our own unhygienic ways of following our goals. We're taught to think positively. To be optimistic. To genuinely believe that things will go our way, and if they won't, to genuinely destroy those that seem to stand in our way. Losing is not shameful, losing is dying. Losing is showing bad Google results and bad media, losing is having bad breath and bad credit history, losing is entering an abrupt process of social necrosis. We're born with a fatal, annihilating sense of competition. That's one of the reasons why we, the moderns, are in very bad terms with Alterity. If there's a winner, there's a loser. And if there's a wish, there's a Freud. And so one of his patients said to his wife: "If one of us is gonna die before the other, I'm gonna move to Paris".
Joyeux Noël to all of you, beautiful losers!

PS:...and take some Roberta Flack in your iPod while wandering through Galeries Lafayette...

Ho. Ho. Ho

Old blog, new face. Old enemies, new teeth. Old friends, new hearts. Old sorrows, new Christmas.
Let the snow fall on your old and your new, and see them turning into a white weird-shaped still thing called everything but you.

PS: Leonard Cohen today. In print, with The Book of Longing, and in mp3, with Death Of A Ladies' Man. Try him. For my sake.

More Is Too Much

Being the puddle's daughter and only feeling close to those things that tend to linger, no wonder I have a secret weakness for perpetual motion. And for those people having a sense of disorder.

In other words, I secretly love big cities. If you'll ever hear me saying otherwise, you should know I will be lying. I love the way people walk on the streets and queue for cash or food, I love how they proceed to mutual ignoring, I love ladies' defensive way of carrying their bags and oh those gentlemen in their crumpled suits talking on the phone and eating their mayonnaise sandwiches at the same time, and those bunches of teenagers hanging around during school time, those beggars eating icecream and popcorn, those hurried compulsive women walking into and getting out of every store within 3 minutes; mingling among this crowd see those fast 'n slim pizza guys on their bikes looking like depressive Supermen, and see the mail men in their worn-out suits lingering around with their takeaway coffee, stiff doormen, thick policemen, husky newspaper boys, sleepy bodyguards, emphatic TV crews, chubby schoolgirls giggling sobbing pushing, LV-logoed infatuated middle-aged nymphs.
A big city reaches its ultimate limits each day during the rush hours and each time you think it's irreversible. You think that car parks, clubs, subways, phone boxes and malls are going to burst into flames, tears, ketchup, gasoline and Christmas ornaments and everyone would have to run away and throw themselves into the sea.

But obviously, the urban living has nine lives and ears stuffed with headphones. It can manage up to 5 years of queuing in traffic.

PS: Have you ever tried Dusty Springfield? She has one of the very few feminine voices that I could listen to all day long. So emotional, so sensual, so heavy. With "Anyone Who Had a Heart", "You Don't Own Me","Yesterday When I Was Young", "In Private", and, of course, the splendid "The Look of Love" I have good reason to rely on her all through the coming weekend.

Inventory

Some things shouldn't be taken too seriously; these things are: progress, people's names, psychoanalysis, mascara on eyelashes, social democracy, gardening, women's naivety, men's pride, bras, blogs, success, and the iPod Touch. The whole rest of the things found in this world require your constant and acute attention, skepticism, love and hate.

PS: New Monday, new canvas: "Thinking of All Those Forbidden Cities".
Click it.

PS2: The silliest song could leave a world of wised-up spoken words behind. A beautiful song could tell a mountain "go, throw yourself into the sea", and it will be done. This is Leonard Cohen's "Alexandra Leaving".

Feeding the Multitude

Someone I know asked her guests: "so you're 8, right?". And she cooked 8 meatballs. They were brought at the table together with 8 slices of bread. A while later, she asked once again: "so I see you're 8...". And she baked 8 pieces of cake. Later on she looked at us and said: "8 people, that must mean 8 cups of coffee...If someone's not willing to have it, tell me now while you can."

So I see you're two reading this text...

PS: Today, best in the iPod: Rosie Thomas and all her albums - lovely voice, steady message, classic harmonies, lots of heart. Today, best in my computer: Velvet Underground's "All Tomorrow's Parties" (demo version, album version and single version - worth having them all).

On Crucial Matters

There are many crucial things that are completely ignored these days. Among others, I would mention the kiss. No, nothing's wrong with your eyes, and yes, you've read it alright: the kiss. It's ignored, it's forgotten, it's held unimportant, irrelevant and boring. It never stands for itself. It's like a highway, it's like route 66 leading to hell or to heaven (or to some peripheral park nobody heard of).

A kiss can mean anything from nothing to a promise. But never a standalone system. That's a pity because it holds a world in nuce; it's a terrifying, enigmatic, serious matter that the whole mind or the whole body couldn't comprise, for the whole mind and the whole body - which are tools made for sheer continuity - are left powerless when having to deal with queer contiguity. A kiss is not about knowing or feeling the otherness, but about having the intuition of the otherness in his or her most unknown substance. The kissers let out hints about their innermost essence while holding themselves off, a fluid back-and-forth between autonomy and succumbing, self-absorption and free-giving, denial and readiness. This is an essentially committed and highly insightful business when you'll get to know the other's words without hearing or understanding any, only by breathing them all. Kissing is when two souls initiate a mysteries-exchange.

PS: to me, a redone canvas is a new canvas; the message changes, the technique becomes more definite. I cease to consider its previous look as being more than a shapeless state of latency, something that, in time, works on my imagination, something that gets on my nerves and makes me wonder how many lives a painting can have? how many imperfect skins one can change before make it to the ball? Anyway, the above canvas is ready for the party, so to say. One wouldn't agree, but that's what artistic paradoxes are all about. Title: "Neither Dead, Nor Alive". Click it.

PS2: I am totally caught into Plant's and Krauss's Raising Sand. Two words, in my opinion, could define it best: coherence and class. "Fortune Teller", "Polly Come Home" and "Stick With Me Baby" are today's favorites, they're strong and fluid at the same time. This cover album will last forever. It's essentially and genuinely music. That's what professionals do.

Trappin' and Plantin'

Some people never take a single step without setting a trap first.
We are our own perfect victims and detractors. But we still kiss ourselves goodnight.


PS: OK. I am SO excited about the event, I bought each track at a time and I had to listen to each one twice before downloading the following. Such a wild impatience I didn't experience since...well, since exactly two years ago.
While caught in the holy moment of the 2nd continuous playing, I can't quite say many rational things about this amazing, unexpected Raising Sand. I tend to like "Fortune Teller", the happy Everly Brothers "Gone, Gone, Gone", "Polly Come Home", "Stick with me Baby" and "Nothin'", but that's really just not relevant at the moment. One couldn't need more to make a Christmas Eve work. One should come back later with more objective judgments though...

"Will you still...?"

It's not that, after a certain age, we can't do certain things anymore; it's that we are so overwhelmed by this generic incapacitation that we never know for sure what exactly are those things that can't be done anymore. So we end up fumbling and crumbling for anything at all; well, not without a certain subtle, intimate pleasure of spreading confusion and irritation amongst mates.

PS: new canvas at the left; it is called "No Name". Give it a click.

PS2: and this is a Lefsetz post on McCartney, written in June. It makes you wanna be older and milder.

Living Costs

Yesterday evening I've read that kindness marks the end of innocence.
I must have thought about it myself, but never in such simple words. I must have read it before, but never out of an entangled context.
It's a tragedy and it's a relief: we, the grownups, are given the chance to be kind. We seldom take it. Playing the innocent or exalting the lost innocence is a thousand times easier. What we love most about innocence is its being "duty-free": the innocent child is nontaxable; a grownup playing the innocent hopes he won't be subject of taxation - that's one mundane trick for solving perplexing spiritual affairs; something we always preferred over kindness which is, by the way, a damn hard thing to do. Kindness obliges. It's all about awareness, understanding, self-sacrifice, empathy and courage; and all these are highly taxed commodities; like cigarettes, alcohol and gasoline.

PS: Sometimes I want the old David Bowie back. Some evenings I can't cope with his chameleonic twisted musical personality. "The Prettiest Star" stays one of his most beautiful songs.
And Fleetwood Mac's "Beautiful Child" is a quintessence of their best clichés. And one of those songs you could play over and over again when the night gets thick and mellow and the traffic outside your window slows down.

Teeny Thoughts

I always thought that the notion of "possible" is like chewing gum: it stretches and it grows if you soften it enough. Then you can experience the flavor losing. Or make your own bubbles.


PS: New canvas called "Diana With The Black Sun". I tried a few techniques that I've always wanted to use, but never had the courage. Till yesterday.

PS2: I was stuck into "Whole Lotta Love" and "Tangerine" this weekend. Who can beat Zeppelin? OK, OK: Small Faces.

PS3: I couldn't keep it to myself: I've made two deep intramuscular injections without having any previous knowledge in the field. I've exercised my moves with an orange for about 3 minutes and then paah. The "victim" was extremely pleased and happy and felt no pain at all (which wasn't exactly what he experienced with a professional medical assistant) and yes, you can call me "Handy".

Season Closed

Long-long time ago, gentlemen used to hunt the ladies they liked. Just a while go, the ladies went out hunting the gentlemen they found appealing. Nevertheless, today nobody's hunting anybody. People of both sexes sit and wait. Sometimes, during weekends, people take other people for granted, as they come their way.
Ladies and gentlemen of all ages, colors and social conditions don't bother to invest energy in hunting. Chasing is ridiculous and shooting is forbidden. Nobody's wanting somebody else that much to consider chasing, nobody's wanting a stable relationship that much to consider shooting.
Just as we say that we're living in the (post-)postmodernist age, or that we're coping with a post-Derridean ethics, or that we're experiencing a postclimating crisis, we can also say that we're directly engaged in post-relationships. People already live with the disillusion of the disengagement without ever being emotionally or officially tied to another person.
But why should we hunt really? Isn't hunting degrading after all? No. Hunting is flattering. And healthy. For both, the hunter and the hunted. Hunting is a commitment in itself. And a paradoxical partnership between the "venturer" and the "victim". Even if for a short time - if we talk about "professional romantics" - the hunting brings exclusivity: one hunter, one prey; and also brings very specific desirability-criteria that holds the prey valuable and the hunter all wised up and tuned in.
People should dare and should bother doing their worst and their best for the one they could love. Otherwise, they might as well hang their weapons on the wall and buy a good popcorn machine.

PS: New canvas above: "Androgyny with an attitude and rabbit". Want to see it better, try it with a click.

PS2: Dare to see Christian Mungiu's (prized with Palme d'Or) movie "4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days" . It might speak to you at the long last. Don't try it with popcorn though.
As for the music, some old and new Nancy Sinatra could make a difference. Especially when it rains and it snows and you're out of Earl Grey.

Natural-Born Thinkers

Everybody has sparkling thoughts and intuitions, but not everybody's used with taking these sparks seriously. This is what I have written, out of convincement, a couple of days ago.

Then I gave this generous statement a second thought. Thuswise a new intuition rose upon me like a full moon: well, not really everybody. There is a certain caste of people that are less endowed with dynamic thinking: the academics; the scholars. I live among them. I know them. They're right here working their tails off, counting, lecturing, re-writing things that others wrote, borrowing formulations, learning theories by heart, workshop-ping, networking, suspecting behind the shallowest judgment a dangerous abysmal depth, taking for granted research trends, systems of thinking and schools, despising ambiguity, ignoring incongruity, detesting art and a profession de foi in general, misunderstanding Kuhn, using impossibly rigid words that nobody can follow, googling their sources, reading the first five and the last five pages of every book, badly juggling with concepts, overtrusting their research methods, making the worst out of the worst academic writing, never re-thinking their conclusions (because it's not really them who produced such final judgments), sanctioning, disbelieving, simulating. They look smart and crafty simply because they operate within a safe paradigm while in fact their capacity of comprehension and discernment is vastly atrophied. They have a predictable and amazingly boring nature. These intuition-free, dispassionate beings are skeptical to reasoning, and reluctant to vigilance, vigor and verve.

PS: ...and they probably despise Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" or Ramones' "Rock 'n Roll High School"; that's why I will dedicate Dave Edmunds' "Queen Of Hearts" to them.

On Success . A Side-Story

People who believe in success are not necessarily the same ones who believe in themselves. Success is one thing; man is another thing. At the end of the day, they're two different affairs.

Lots of men who work hard for their triumph can barely look at themselves in the mirror, thinking they're incompetent, ugly and thick. As the success grows, the turbulence and anxiety grow, the self-esteem goes down, the superstition goes up. Unable to master their own boom, people fear they can't repeat it. And whenever they do repeat it, they don't quite know how they did it. So they fear anyway; while desperately needing it again, and desperately trying to ritualize the gestures that once proved to be auspicious... Thuswise, the success is held sacred. And treated as such. The mysterium tremendum. The archaic people feared and worshiped the thunder; many modern people fear and worship their triumphal moments. In other words, they lose to their own success. Poor dear successful losers...

PS: very new canvas (95cm-95cm!) called "The Nap (And All The Wrong Things)". Click on it for a bigger view (unfortunately, the picture is horribly taken; a better one will be uploaded on the future website.)

PS2: As for the music, today I would go for the new and the old Rufus Wainwright. "Old Whore's Diet" (from Want Two) sung with Antony is brilliant. Just as it is the good old "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk". And the new "Tulsa", "Between My Legs" and "Going to a Town" that I have already suggested some time ago.

PS3: Free access to Sage Journals (over 485!!) till November 30! Now that's just great. Hurry up, click here.

The Art of Compromising

Explanation: Earlier this morning, while googling something and eating my daily muesli, I came across my own old article about compromising. Since I never think twice before writing a blog text, it often happens to strongly dislike it the next day. In terms of one's "literary" discipline, that's inadmissible.
I know very well that a good text I have written (or a good painting I have done) is held valuable in the next day (or in the next years), when I manage to look at it with a cool eye. As a rule, I never check my blog archives because I need my daily peace of mind for concentrating on my (held serious for some reason) non-online projects; and the faulty lines found on this site may be a serious threat to my obsessive belief in perfection. Therefore, when I accidentally came across the text below, I was surprised not to be disappointed with it. So I thought of sharing it again. Since you, the ones reading my blog today, aren't here from time immemorial...Repetition is good. Repetition makes life look safe. So:

There are many ways of getting yourself compromised. And none of them is easy. As a matter of fact, making a good compromise is an art. You are supposed to know exactly where you stand; then to design every single step you need for "getting low"; and finally to have a very good preview-idea about how the compromised outcome should look like. Does any of these steps sound easy to you? A self-awarness, a suitable perspective on yourself, as an artist, is so rare that one simply can conclude right from the start that compromising is actually a too difficult job for ourdays artists. Because, as a premise, they first need to be valuable; you can't come downstairs without previously finding yourself upstairs. When Bowie danced down the street in 1983 he knew the steps very well. He was actually a brilliant dancer. He artfully compromised his (dead by that time) Ziggy which makes me wonder if a commercial turning-point in one's art, as long as it is made with highly valuable tools, can really be called "compromise". It goes just the same with Cohen's making use of synthesizers in the 80's. He changed the beat, he kept the heart. As for us, the objective listeners, we just had to attest and accept the change of the musical tools while going on with worshiping the inner vibe.
I would say that a compromise is a fruitful compromise as long as 1. the artist did it on purpose, 2. it's reversible, 3. it came straightly from an un-compromised past, 4. it leads to good outcome instead of sounding and looking ridiculous.
I would like to add a few comments regarding condition no. 1 and condition no. 4.
There is one thing to say concerning the 1st condition: I think that the very wise Sgt Pepper shows us a sort of "compromise in reverse". Suddenly the whole previous Beatles's "easy way" of making music was wonderfully relativized. Because only the mighty guys can "get dynamic", sliding back and forth, making an impressive swerving and juggling. The "usual" guys are bound to walk their tight path over and over again.
As for the last 4th condition, there are many things to add. Some souls are so talented that, in the end, regardless of their style of singing/writing/painting, they cannot be but suitable and artful. I will give you one particular example from literature. Did you hear about Fernando Pessoa? He was a Portuguese poet that has published his works under three different names; moreover, behind the three names seemed to hide three totally different personalities: Alberto Caeiro was an apparently simple, symbolist poet, Ricardo Reis was a follower of the classical ancient style while Alvaro de Campos was a pure modernist. The three men were all brilliant. Pessoa handled his "multiple" personality with an infinite awareness. He needed Caeiro, de Campos and Reis for solving out all his creative moves that happened to be definite alike and valuable alike. Then Picasso himself had a particular creation period (around 1925) when he got more abstract than could anyone imagine by that time. Chagall got to learn how to make lithographs at a very late moment of his life and he earn good money by working in a printing studio. His prints are no less valuable than his paintings. A good artist is bound to create good art, regardless the topic, regardless the means, regardless the tools. A good compromise is, in this sense, a non-sense. A good compromise is, in this sense, a fine, dynamic art.

PS: I've recently read that Marie Fredriksson (from Roxette) said that she, from now on, doesn't want to compromise anymore in her solo work. And I suddenly remembered that there is a certain category of artists that always talk about compromising more or compromising less even though they never really got low; or high. Not every life/art changing decision implies a slalom between compromise and uncompromise. I'm afraid one needs to go with one's art from A to Z in order to gain the right to invoke or reject compromising...

PS2: foto taken from bowiewonderworld.com

Forty Winks and Sixty Years

Sometimes one feels like finally waking up, but then one sinks back into sleep. This never ending drowsing - what a nightmare!...We were born tired. We're lethargic beings taking care of lethargic pets.
Good night all.

PS: Leonard Cohen's "Memories", "Paper-Thin Hotel", "Alexandra Leaving" and "The Letters" are standing out today. I must have listened to these songs hundreds and hundreds of times through years. You should try them as well. It's like heaven and hell. It's like looking down from a plane in a glorious April morning; and see the ocean below and the sun next to you; and knowing you don't belong up there.

A Question of Temperature

The scents, the odors, the smells, the perfumes, the emanations.

Best way to distinguish ourselves from others. Physically and culturally. And emotionally. Our odors make us wanted, unwanted or indulged. They often say "yes" when we say "no", they talk when we're silent, they conspire with or against us, they bite, caress, incite or deceive. Our odors create a world around us, a world that is suddenly charged with a certain humidity, a certain altitude, latitude and climate.
As people get closer to each other, they will be reciprocally writing an olfactory geography. So they could forecast the weather and other inner moves.

PS: Another redone canvas. More color was needed. As you can see, it's still wet. And still on the easel.

PS2: And watch this, for God's sake. No other song can beat Patti & Bruce's fine, classic "Because The Night". No other tandem performance can bring more vibe as Stipe-Springsteen does.
And here is Nick Lowe, another hero keeping up with our times but saving his good old rock 'n roll moods. One of the best performers in the world if you ask me. I know I have already talked about his latest album At My Age, but in case you didn't buy it yet, please do so: it's refined, it's subtle, it's clear, it's harmonious, impeccable, nostalgic...

It's Cool To Be Smart And Viceversa

We often mime indifference. Especially when it comes to the things we care most about. Somehow, we think that detachment and dispassion are socially desirable, while enthusiasm and excitement are socially suspected as disruptive and barbarian. Indifference is an unwritten social norm. It introduces you as a reliable, cool-minded person with a certain inner sobriety, self-distance and no vices.
Now that's a farce of course. Grownups are often just as emotional and "deranged" as teenagers are. But the mature people took upon themselves the task of reducing the percentage of socially awkward episodes; so that everybody can live in peace, unconcern, disinterest, and neutrality.
I'm neither fair nor cool. I'm crazy about my work and my work is crazy about me.

PS: One needs more restorative music these days. The times are dark, the will is weak. So I'll take, for instance, Velvet Underground's "After Hours" and "Venus in Furs", then Moody Blues's "The Voice", and finally Humble Pie with "79th Street Blues" and "Hallelujah (I love Her So)".

"Pardon me"

One cannot undo what has been done. This might be the worst thing on planet earth. The possibility of repair is dramatically limited. The will of having things repaired is even smaller.

In a way, it's a miracle that we live, love, laugh and work in spite of our inability to repair our wrong deeds. We always manage to survive our mistakes and find ways to elude their consequences. Whenever we'd want ourselves to feel restored, we gladly notice that "a past is a past" therefore we're better found our happiness on present matters.
Both psychology and religion teach us how to live with our mistakes. A crisis of consciousness is always welcomed and encouraged. It makes us feel vulnerable and kind. Once an error is confirmed and explained, we're applicable for a better future (and new errors.)
But the idiotic acts I've once done, will never turn sane. And the people of Burma will not rise from the dead.

PS: One of the very few things I was able to repair was the above canvas once called "REA", today called "Mismatch". Click on it.

PS2: Restorative music: Tom Waits with "You Can Never Hold Back Spring" and Dave Edmunds with "Girs Talk". I cannot imagine anything better for a late October midweek day.

On Bodies And Other Events

We want our body to mirror our social image. We don't like our body to betray our dreams of power, beauty, charisma, sexiness and youth. Our flesh is our social identity. It's us as we know ourselves: beautiful, restless, well-educated, well-manicured, well-known and well-smelling. We don't like delays. When we want to be polite, we expect our mouth to say "hello", when we're slightly tired, we would like us to sit down, when we feel like chatting, we would like to give our interlocutor a nice-looking cross legging.
But an aged body never comes in time. Its timetables are different from ours. It can't talk when we want it to talk. It can't dance when we want it to dance. An aged body is one, two or three minutes late; and it cops out on us, sabotaging our social image. It makes us look like fools or, even worse, like impostors. Our sense of Self becomes unbearably subjective. Our image in the mirror becomes unbearably objective and yet unrecognizable. If we're not in the mirror, then where are we? If we cease to live graciously, do we live at all? For us, moderns, the social death is often worse than the physical death. Once we run out of beauty, we run out of living ideas. And we become nobody's rotting shell.

PS: New canvas above: "Dolls Go To Heaven". You can make it bigger with a click.

PS2: I finally bought Kent's new album (Tillbaka till Samtiden) after getting bored with a commonly-written single "Ingenting".
I listened to the album twice and tried not to let myself influenced by the raving reviews I've read here and there. Honestly? It's overrated. Apart from "Elefanter" and "Sömnen", it tends to be repetitive. The abuse of synthesizers made everything sound...dehydrated. The classic valuable Kent clichés became cheap (exception: "Våga Vara Rädd"). I admit, it's a thick album. It might take time to feel it and love it. But for today I find it unimaginative and disarranged.
... And talking about recent Swedish music: has anyone heard ANYTHING WORSE than Uggla's new single "Pärlor åt svin"?

The Truth About Us

The lies. We all live with them. Depending on the occasion, social preferences and spiritual availabilities, we tolerate them, we ridicule them, we ignore them, we underestimate them, we detest them, we cherish them, we refine them and we fight them. And we usually take all the above psychological actions at the same time. No one has a comfortable relationship with one's lies, yet we're grotesquely profuse in fables, misstatements, disinformation, near-truths, partial-truths, exaggerations, calumnies, tricks, well-intentioned untruths, subterfuges, false colors and other stories.
We're a breathtaking parade of voluntary and involuntary distortions. We display a fascinating representation of misery and excess, an irresistible lack of equilibrium and dignity, a tumultuous propensity to dissipation and abuse. Indeed, we often are what we lie. Just as we are best defined by our goals (that is, by our "yet to be" 's), we are also defined by our lies, that is, by our most synthetic "could be" 's.
...and we're all gonna live our lie as if it'd be our most painful truth...

PS: Somewhat new canvas above called "City Nightlife With River". Click on it. See it better. Since my available daytime gets shorter and shorter, I had to use the nighttime for painting. And so the matter became gloomy...

PS2: Check out Thomas Nydahl's review (in Swedish) on Peter Lindforss 's book "Mannen som förstörde mitt liv. En Bok om Leonard Cohen". It does contain the truth...

A Vocation Of One's Own

Women are capable of all the horrors of life; men are capable of all the horrors of spirit.

PS: The good-lookin' red 'n rabbit series continues with a new canvas: "The Bad Leg And The Rabbit". Click on it, see it a little better (no proper light for a proper picture today unfortunately; I'll upload a better one when the new website will be finished.)

PS2: My brand new iPod loves Kate Bush, especially the old classic The Kick Inside.

..." 'Cause I Missed Myself This Year"

I don't believe in cultivating morality. I don't believe in cultivating vices either. Virtue and vice are equally boring and equally worthless as long as they are constantly encouraged and nurtured. Decent or depraved, a person who never lost or gain any balance is reduced to compulsiveness. The mechanics of evil is not much different than the mechanics of rectitude. They're monstrously monotonous. And they'll never make room for doubt, freedom, love, or Dostoevsky.

You can't lose your heart unless you had one.

PS: Best in my player today: Crosby Stills Nash & Young, "Amost Cut My Hair". In case you don't have the Déjà Vu album, you can still hear the song on YouTube.

PS2: Mount Athos above, in Greece. Photo taken by Mighty Sega.

Affairs

Both extreme poverty and extreme luxury are obscene.

And everything in between has an appealing vulgarity so that our relationship with money remains melodramatic: the dependability of a marriage, the voracity of a romance.

PS: New finished canvas called "Two Men". A technical success if you ask me. Click on it for a better view.

PS2: Devote a few minutes to Antony and the Johnsons's cello player, Julia Kent. Julia's very new solo album Delay translates airports into feelings. A disconcerting (and surely subjective) experience of both intimacy and disquietude, harmony and chaos. An appropriate October starter.

Wrong Woman, Right Book

Heaven forbid a man become discomfited in front of the wrong woman...

PS: If you're fluent in Swedish, you may want to read Peter Lindforss's new book about his old friend Leonard Cohen, Mannen Som Förstörde Mitt Liv. En Bok Om Leonard Cohen (The Man Who Ruined My Life. A Book About Leonard Cohen) which has just been published by Ellerströms Förlag.

Open/Closed Principle

The illusion of gaining a smashing social capital determines people to get open to anything and anybody.
We smile at every single person, we bring compliments for everything, we're bond to make best friends out of passerbys. In other words, we trained our inability to notice a difference and to make a difference. "Paradoxically", this is the perfect built-in drive towards alienation of both the accepter and the accepted.
Every person longs for exclusivity. It's natural. Every person wants to play either with you or against you. To be on everybody's side is a serious insult at people's ability of being unique, and certainly at your evaluation criteria.
We've never been less different and less kindhearted. But we've never smiled more.

PS: Very new canvas: "Woman With Rabbit". It took me a long and intense time to finish it. Click on it, make it bigger.

PS2: I choose Lou Reed over Velvet Underground. What's the purpose of an album like Squeeze (1973) (in spite of the song "Louise" which I actually find very charming)? Doug Yule got it all wrong...

Their Time Is Now

The old age is a vague notion of a nebulous something that makes people cease willing to even think about death.
How on earth do they do that, you might ask? Simple. They are fully motivated to finally accomplish what the younger ones are unable to achieve: living for today, refusing to think ahead.
Have you ever opened a geriatrics magazine? Even NME is more pessimistic. Old age and health are redefined year after year. A deep and fascinating mentality (and demographic) revolution has started. The old age is not the old age anymore, it's the new age. Old people make great patients, great consumers of fine hotels, great owners of luxury cars, great seekers of comfortable houses, great clients in general and great hedonists in particular. Furthermore, they are retired; so they have all the time in the world. And all their time is now. A never ending present.

PS: My newest (and most seizable) canvas: "Man with Rabbit". Unfortunately, because of the size, I couldn't take a better picture. Click on it for a (hardly) better view.

PS2: A ferociously good blog here.

PS3: Best on the new Springsteen album: "Radio Nowhere" (hmm...this single gives me a familiar feeling), "Girls In Their Summer Clothes" (wonderfully written and arranged), "You'll Be Comin' Down" (a classical Springsteen) and "Last To Die" (the most complex yet the most convincing track on the album in my opinion).

Diarism

Cesare Pavese's The business of living: Diaries 1935-1950: thick, uneasy, imperative. Unlike Julien Green's, Pavese's diary ideas, intentions and interpretations cut like a knife. The whole book is bleeding. Even the most theoretical pages perpetuate a turmoiled sense of sharpness that one usually saves for life matters only. But what did "a life matter" really mean for Pavese?

PS: These days, my player plays the latest Bruce Springsteen.

PS2: ...by the way, what are your plans for mid-January 2008?

So you wanna be a...

People keep telling me that my recent texts are no fun, no friendly, no gentle, no way to go on like this once you've got a modest journalistic sense.
But Lady Luck has smiled on me and some anonymous reader recently inflamed my unexcessive knowledge on rock stars and dared me to answer the following question:
you've made rock stars look a little silly with this post, like kids who don't know who they are, as if corbijn is not only their photographer but also their mentor. does bono look like a kid to you? like someone who's a stranger to himself? or gahan? or others?
I answered merrily and promptly, using the comment function. Then I realized this could be the next text written under a fictional label called "Easygoing Wednesday's growing". Enough argumentation, let's get down to gibberish.
To me (an outsider), rock stars are grown-up people constrained by their living conditions (and standards and values) to act and react like kids; sometimes in spite of their (basic) will, they came to the point where they are not quite sure when, where and if the surreality ends.
Those who weren't kids from the start, necessarily become kids along the way. A kid/star's life hints at the following privileges and restrictions: he is taken care of, his acts are always encouraged and applauded, he relies on other people when it comes to vital needs like food, drink and shelter, he is however told what to do but he is easily forgiven if he doesn't, his playing is encouraged by everybody and protected by law, he's free of everyday worries, he is not responsible for not honoring his commitments, he breaks up like a little... boy, he is not always responsible for his looks, he is protected from strangers, violence, rain and other calamities, he receives free promotional items as well as toys, godis, a driver and an upright person to comb their hair.
When you're talking with a kid, you find it hard to disagree with him, no wonder he gets mad whenever he hears a "no" while expecting a "yes"; therefore he's pretty sure the earth moves precisely around him and not at all around the sun. He sometimes falls from coconut palm trees or takes to bed the wrong doll, but it's all written in books of pedagogy: little kids hardly make a distinction between possible and impossible.
Occasionally, not too often, the kid grows up and becomes a teenager. And like all teenagers, he has big ideals: 1. he wants to be different, 2. he wants to - first - conquer and then save the world, 3. he wants others to make books, documentaries and movies about his life and consequently to become the hero of at least three generations, 4. he wants to owe the copyright to all the good songs ever written, and 5. he has absolutely no clue how to go down out of this carousel.
But I like them all. Supposing they weren't chronically kids, they'd make kind-hearted people.

PS: Watercolors and ink above. I have re-done an old theme of mine and thought it fits the text.

PS2: I dedicate this post to my father who turns 55 today. He could have been one of these kids.

On Corbijn and His Poser

Anton Corbijn does something that no other rock photographer thought of doing: charging the individual (who, accidentally, has the apparent quality/qualification of being a rock star) with a new, vehement energy that pulls him off the limelight, de-constructs his notorious identity and rebuilds him anew on different, uncontaminated premises, within a recalibrated reality. Corbijn never bets on the rockstar's ability of being a rockstar; he bets instead on his ability to fall out of "grace", to gradually disappear from view as a transient celebrity so that he can slowly emerge as an everlasting personality. Think about the following contrast: Corbijn has an instinct for essence, intensity and autonomy. Today's entertainment industry has an instinct for haste, hysteria and hecticticness. An audience is never allowed to have a closer look on anything, the upcoming show is diminishing itself in the actual process of consumption.
Today, a man-with-a-guitar is advertising his own transience, he will never get an autonomous fame (as he used to get 25-35 years ago), he hardly gets a volatile, and somehow comical notoriety. Paradoxically, his own audience is inhumanly indifferent to his human potential; moreover, he is a stranger and totally incomprehensible to himself as well. Therefore, what Anton Corbijn does is somehow contradictory and, indirectly, borders on sarcasm: with a tremendous delicacy, he manages to set up a genuine durability and a self-referentiality for this or that notorious character. In a way, he sabotages the one-project-oriented entertainment business by working less for the sake of today's applauder and more for the atemporal witness : he kills the idol and saves the man. It's like he'd use abrasive tools (raw, black-and-white takes) for "exfoliating" the hotshot tissue and reach the genuine person beneath; once the essence is grasped, he turns it into a metaphor. From here on, the new reality stays for itself: the light gets dark and the dark gains (a spectral) light, just like in Bergman's movies; the individual gets rigid and the still object behind him gains humanity - together, they are assigned a new autonomous identity which stirs up an alarming combination of nervous excitement, artistic delight, existential concerns and metaphysical distress.
In a contemporary art world that compulsory seeks for abstraction, I know no other artist to be so focused on the human expression and on the quality of being distinctively human. And one is simply amazed to discover together with Corbijn the frightening human potential behind all those paper guys with flatulent looks and kinky doings. He treats them so gently, breaking down the shell, building up the soul.

PS: Official photo from the making of his highly acclaimed film Control; taken from the French movie site www.allocine.fr. I also suggest a Google walk among his photos. His official site worths a visit as well.

PS2: Tonight, from my couch: Warhol's documentary The Velvet Underground & Nico (1966). Never really loved Warhol, but I always loved Reed and Cale and Nico and Mo. Tonight's the right time to come to terms with their manager.

Ffff-fashion

The abstract painting is (back) here to stay. The ARTnews writes it and I believe it. The main cause, one may read, is the computer-based thinking/imagination/worldview of today's artists as well as the need for an universal, distilled, contemplative language. But hey, we are given the same reasons ever since the early 90s. The same call for scientific visual musing managed to back up every single abstraction tendency that took place in the latest 20 years, from some thoughtful decision of de-objectification to the incredibly common practice of using Photoshop for creating spellbounding decorative models and then transfer them on the canvas. To be very honest, I hardly believe in the abstraction reasons claimed by 85% of the contemporary artists. I'd rather believe in trends and political winds. For instance, a New York-based art dealer recently wrote that he suspects a certain "maturation" of the present art market to be involved in the abstract art revival. More exactly, the increasing number of new art collectors finally trained their eye and managed to feel more comfortable with their choices; and so they "dared" to move "on" from representative to abstract art and nonchalantly discuss their acquisitions at dinner. Voilà. Once the sales (pardon me, the trends) are going up, there are plenty of reasons to assist them.
Don't get me wrong. I respect abstract painting and its fundamental reasons. I really deeply do. To my opinion, it was the "visible" force and, at the same time, the "visible" effect of desubstantialization of the subject in modernity and late modernity. The triumph of the "micro-emotions" to the detriment of the rudimental thrill (someday, when I'll get a more gentle time-treatment, I will write about the avant-garde artists and the modern perception of death). The gradual disappearance of the object, the liberating attitude towards representation and towards existence in general, the "talking" painting medium as a new emerging artistic truth are plain judgments on abstract art that go beyond fashions and sales. But abstraction easily falls into banal strategies, compulsive techniques, visual tribulations, figurative tricks that often cannot raise beyond the boring standards of a boring everyday postmodernity. However, I believe that abstract art has the qualified tools to go beyond the premises that generated it and move its roots in the sky. Otherwise it will never manage to show distinct signs of durability. Meanwhile, mind the fashion.

PS: New canvas above. It's called "The Death". Click on it for a full-sized view.

PS2: Kate Bush's Aerial is coming back to me. "Mrs. Bartolozzi" and "King of the Mountain" have their roots in the sky. Refined, painful musical pleasure that lasts an eternity.

A small tribute to some women

So many women I know: casual, impassible, heartless, handling their children and husbands with the dexterity of an old bored juggler. They can easily make people cringe with embarrassment. They cultivated in husbands' and neighbours' hearts a nebulous fear, yes, most men are deadly afraid of their wives, and most neighbours wouldn't mess with "her" for anything in the world.

She never begged and she never will, she never sinned and she never will, she never did foolish things and she never will, she always smiles but she never smiled; hard to amuse her, easy to make her say "you're so funny"; and you will never know, no, never-never, how irritated she was. She is. She'll be.

PS: The pink series of canvasses continued with the above painting. I have redone it lately and now definitely looks like a David Hockney left-over. But it is still called "Freud" and you can still click on it to see it full-sized.

PS2: The album of the week is Moody Blues's lovely A Question of Balance from 1970. "Melancholy Man" is a sublime, straightly touching song that every songwriter should envy and every man should listen on Thursdays. When the kids are in schools and the wives in beauty saloons.

Analgesia

The physical pain is old fashioned. There's nothing more tasteless and suspicious than the image of a modern man contorted with pain. And so there's an efficient painkiller for everyone. Moreover, if, say, one has to kill one's migraine pain daily, one is confronted on a daily basis with teeny-tiny side effects like strokes, heart attacks, kidney damage, addiction or, even worse, erectile dysfunction.
Physical pain is thought to be the main agent of decline. It distracts the brain, keeping us from making poetry, films, architecture, music and maths. It reminds us that the world is funereal, the right place for diseases and holocausts. And so we decided we should take a secured distance from our physical suffering before it shakes us up from our dream of durability.
Being pain-free is part of the luxury of the modern life, together the with scrupulous hygienic practices and the 8GB iPhone. We posses a wonderful, disconcerting technical ability to lead a good life. When we happen to lose it, we might as well call the ambulance with an old Motorola brick phone. As a self-scrutinizing attempt.

PS: I kept coming back to Regina Spektor's music. Remember my moderate review of her latest Begin to Hope? Meanwhile, I myself have begun to hope in her very twisted musical geniality. There was a time when the "demonstrative" side of her music annoyed me. She "hybridized" her songs (both lyrically and musically) following sophisticated rules that I have found slightly inappropriate for the pop-culture world she tried to fit in. As the time passed and my ear got trained I found her music more sensitive than erotic or rebellious or intricate. There is an urban tenderness hidden behind her defying musical (and literary) instinct that is not easily forgettable. My heart and my musical sense gives this red-haired Regina a lot of credit. And oh, how well she hides her shyness.

The School of Ocean Sailing

When, alone and awake at 3 a.m., we pass the hand across our forehead, we immediately learn that beneath our crust of freedom lies an ocean of servility and constraint; we take long, peculiar divings there; and sometimes we go fishing, biting our lip. We learn quite fast that the most important sailing rule for the beginners is rather pleasant: let one's weaknesses get stronger than one's self and one shall become a capable sailor. The bigger the weakness, the smaller the ego: one shall be weak against and beyond one's will, one shall develop an exquisite obsessional taste for measuring one's self against one's powerlessness, one shall learn to overpass the exasperation of not falling (ergo: sailing) like rebels, but like slaves. Most importantly, one shall believe that one cannot be slave enough until one becomes his very own slave.

PS: Mea culpa. Long time no hear. I've been learning - against my will - new (dreadful) things about one of my computers while trying to go on with one my projects (concerning death and dying); I've been cooking sushi; I've been reading Cartarescu (and criticizing his writing); been watching a few materials with Martha Wainwright, and bewilderingly followed Bergman's Viskningar och Rop twice (the second time, for the sake of a couple of still images); moreover, a few more sketches need to be transferred on the canvas, while Dave Edmund's Repeat When Necessary (1979) is impatiently waiting to be played. Meanwhile, my dear friend Thomas caught my attention with a song slowly sung by Linda Thompson (feat. my favorite Antony Hegarty), and slowly written by Rufus Wainwright himself: "Beauty". It came from Linda's new album Versatile Hearts. And it breaks your will.

PS2: A few short stories of Dostoevsky have caught my attention again. Never again will I read so good, invulnerable prose.

Beneath the Words

Ortega y Gasset once said that everything we write should be "two-horned". I would say, subversive. Uncomfortable. If not even troublesome. Writing with no stake, writing for the sake of agreement and harmony, avoiding the slightest element of discord is a deplorable self-forgetting gesture. No theoretical studies, no sms-es, no blogs, no essays, no novels, no scripts, no lyrics and no love letters will be remembered as long as they fail to deal with less manageable problems. Empty words fade quite easily. They rarefy themselves. In order to make them count, they should fall as heavy as stones, or they should stand right up like aspens. They should lead to nothingness, ecstasy or a better future.

PS: I've always liked the first single from Morrissey's Ringleader of the Tormentors (2006), "You Have Killed Me". I even talked about the whole album, in a - somehow - tumultuous manner, remember? As a rule, what I liked once, I will certainly like twice, three times, ten thousand times, 'till death do us part. I am awfully repetitive and incapable of getting bored. This album has never left my hard disks ever since 2006. "Dear God Please Help Me", "Life is a Pigsty", "I Will See You In Far Off Places" are refined samples of how Morrissey's disconsolate lyrics and Visconti's sense of "harmonized noise" can breath the breath of tormented life into the nostrils of today's Pop. Take a look. Lend an ear. Watch out for his words: "You Have Killed Me".

...

...those ladies who talk in high, sweet voice when they're out, and in low, churlish voice when they're home. September is here. Getting bitter is allowed.

PS: Ask a tender-voiced Nick Lowe to guide you around.

Natural law

The far ones get further, the fat ones get fatter, the funny ones get funnier, the fancy ones get (lost in) fool's paradise and the married ones get married.

PS: My latest horrid canvas above: "She's my man" (as far as I know, unconnected to Scissor Sisters). Click on the picture for a full-sized view.

Back to School (Fragment About Poets)

Each day, you waste the things you learn. You did the same in the past. And you’re also the kind who is most likely to waste what will learn in the future. You never say much, just the very necessary words to get by; sometimes a password, sometimes a curse, sometimes a yawn, but most often a verse. And you never argue. Nothing seems right anyway. Everything is rotten. Better leave. Words are short-legged and the ones you have learned never fit the world, they only fit the mail sacks and the blank pages of a book. Each page proudly carries its very own word."I can't relate theory to practice and I'm afraid of flying" you use to say. Somehow proud. The thing you like most is to look hurt or incomprehensible. Everyone thinks you prefer to save the words for better purposes, "he has the right words right there, hidden in his sleeve" people say respectfully. And they all nod. They understand. You like the pretty ones, the humble ones who learned their lessons well. You love to tutor them and your willing to teach has nothing in it that is not noble. Your ability to waste time, ideas, feelings, principles is indeed remarkable, "it does take a lot of myself, you know". And people stare at you in amazement: "man, he does waste stuff, doesn't he?", and then "Teach us how to get rid of what we know and be like you". And you taught them everything beginning with the unwashed socks, ending with the plenary powers that Love has over you, knowing they'll learn everything so well that they will, in the end, of course, fail. They don't know that words come and go. Never mind the words.

PS: new drawing (watercolors and pen) above. It's called "The Tree of Life" and you can click it for making it bigger.

PS2: Tom Waits's CD-set Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (2006) is a masterpiece. You know, I like the tango and the waltz. I have always been old enough to like these rhythms, to instill them. And I like avantgarde and jazz as well. And Waits's personality and his eclectic way of writing (remember Bone Machine? What an astonishing nightmare!). Today, I choose "Little Man" and "Little Drop of Poison". Worths a listening.

I Blog,Therefore I Slump

Blogging mania. I read many bad things about it. And, believe it or not, I tend to agree with what the critics say. Even with the terribly boring ones repeating the same good old clichés about the intriguing contrast between the hypertrophied individuality of the blogger and the comfortable anonymity offered by a nickname (and, of course, by a secret IP address) of the forumer.
Nowadays, there's is nothing so bad or so obscure that an on-line community cannot make it worse. Give the registered user (or worse: the uncommitted visitor) a powerful, problematic word like, say, "religion"; or "death"; or "fan"; or "discrimination"; or "sex"; or "bush"; or "nutrition"; or "cancer"; or "education"; or "anonymity". Within no more than two days, the most sophisticated - technically and psychologically - replication strategies will be put into practice by obscure minds who want to built solid reputations based on obscure needs and nicks. And each persona, based on his or her likes, dislikes, moods, and foods, will use a couple of on-line identities in order to satisfy each and every instance of his or her consciousness.
What does the blogger have to do with the visitor of some secret virtual land, you might ask? OK, you're right. Unlike the forumer who, sometimes, is ashamed of his or her "multiple personality disorder", the blogger is probably a lost case; too vain to see that there's nothing more obscure than a tiny Ego making private (ergo: common, indistinct) statements on its life course; too aggressive and pompous to realize that there is nothing more out of sight than a public family album. Thinking in extremes, one could say that both the blogger and the forumer have a "handling problem": they can't manage their own nothingness, they ended up by dealing with their intimacy in anomalous, "aberrant" ways. Due to the "privacy deprivation" and the unspecific on-line exposure, their virtues and their vices easily drift into irrelevance. Now that's a commonsensical statement you'd say. It is, indeed. Admitting it, doesn't make it any special. Actually the only special thing about our intimacy (which includes our very own madness and our most sound judgment) is its... basically private character. And the only special thing about a statement as such is its silly tautological force.
If it's easy to lie in everyday life, lying on line is ten thousand times easier. It goes the same with telling the truth. And following the reasoning: if, in real life, it's quite easy to make opposite affirmations about one and the same thing, doing it on line is ten thousand times easier. And so on. The internet is as light as a feather. Its users must be ten thousand times lighter. A refined thinking is one click away from an obtuse debate. No sane human can survive to such a contrasting neighbourhood unless he or she leaves behind his or her natural thickness and goes for a conscious process of losing weight, substance and credit.
Happy blogging/posting everybody.

PS: No specific musical recommendations today; just a generic thought: "Strawberry fields forever". Amen.

Stimulus

Oh, but please, ladies and gentlemen, don't be afraid to be unhappy!

PS: New canvas: "Porn Curtains. Woman".

About One's Place

I say: I sit on my leather sofa, drinking ginger tea, I've just watched Bergman's "Aus dem Leben der Marionetten" and I am about to start reading the latest Cartarescu; from time to time, I will split a fig in four and I'll try to eat it avoiding the mess; the living room is warm and shady, the bee-like city noise is constant, uniform, intrusive and I like it, it could make a grown-up man sleepy, but it could surely keep a child awake. The latest (re-done) canvas has a funky smell and a hideous look, it lies on the floor next to a thick candle and an anti-tobacco bottle of room fragrance, no one is smoking of course, but I like to pretend I do. And all these are the basic concepts of my summer afternoon life. They measure the duration of domestic things and they give my existence a synthetical unity, they, at the long last, belong to me in a rather inscrutable way: I can hardly recognize them as being mine, but I can easily recognize myself in them. There is something in this red-and-black pillows, in this magazine, in these books and these canvases hanging on the walls or sitting on the floor, in this cup of tea, in the hysterical car alarm down in the parking place - I said - there is something in all these that is insufficiently mine. Something unconvincing and inadequate, something so remarkably aberrant that I simply feel like being thrown away from my own flat.
In some summer afternoons, when everything is music, peace, fragrance and harmony, from condition to condition, from cause to cause, from effect to effect, people suddenly feel they are no longer able to satisfy their own requirements, so they frown to themselves, shake their heads in amused contempt and, politely, ask themselves to leave.

PS: One falls back in one's safe matrix with tracks like Dolly Parton's "To Know Him Is To Love Him" (what a wonderful intro!) and one of my Velvet Underground's favorites, "Venus in Furs". Speaking about Cale, his collaboration with Brian Eno led to a refined album called Wrong Way Up. Rather harmonic and uptempo, to my surprise.Today I'd go for "Cordoba". And I can't help but adding to my playlist one more tune: the poor, beloved "Rocky Raccoon".

PS2: The re-done canvas is what you can see above. The title stays the same ("They're my men"), the vibe leads to a different direction though. I spoiled the earlier idea in a "Bacon fashion", I dare say.

Pirouettes

The day we'll stop lying, the world will stop turning.

How little we know of ourselves if we think we actually avoid to deliver evasive answers, to have misconceptions, or to take actions in the name of our illusions! No. This is exactly what we do: we cleverly avoid the situations in which we are forced to cooperate with the rough reality. We don't want to cooperate. We just love the seeming autonomy offered by our lies and mis/disbelieving. We allow ourselves the liberty of seizing our world, often freeing ourselves from the condition of time and knowledge. Some avoid the future tense. Some the past tense. Some love to play the fool or the ignorant. Some others, like me, never wanted to learn what causality actually means. Artful self-entertainment. That's why the sun stays still, while we keep spinning.

PS: This painting, "Two Worlds And No Reality", is finally done. It has been the most time and energy-taking canvas ever. I've changed the style, the expression, the color palette, the premises etc. Click on it for a better view.

PS2: My love-and-hate relationship with Rufus Wainwright's songs is still actual. Back to the latest Release the Stars; "Going to a Town" and "Between my legs" keep winning. Antidotes: Merz's "Dangerous Heady Love Scheme" (from the amazing album Loveheart) and T-Rex "Get it on (Bang a gong)" which is, of course, the ringtone to my mobile.

The Mirror And The Flat Canvas. Back'n forth's

Is there any hope for the future of realistic art? People from Art Renewal Center have a positive (but highly combative) thinking. They complain about students not being taught the basic drawing skills which, of course, condemns them to enrol in the modern (abstract) movement forever and ever amen. Each one with his or her own version of reality that is. No talent, no perspective, no technique, no studies, no nude models, no evaluation tools, just a gaily, ostentatious freedom. Be it impressionism, cubism (help!), pop-art, a devilish Hockney who discredited the old masters's skills or simply the post modern minimalism, they call it brainwashing; the dictatorial, intimidating pressure of the subjective thinking.
We all know, deep in our hearts, that their hysterical claims are not completely out of line. We all know that independent modern thinking is not that independent. On the contrary. Lacking some objective evaluation tools, the only thing we can do to figure out the value of a modern painting is by confronting it with the "trends". Today's taste-makers and trend-setters make aleatory statements about aleatory themes, they have a high-hat attitude towards anything that looks or feels like academic thinking, they love the chic and the ugly, they can easily embarrass you and they live in New York. And so we all had troubles in making a difference between a successful abstraction and a common cadmium red deep spot placed in a common ocean of ivory black. That is, we all have been suspected of lacking "the vision", "the sensibility" or "the intelligence" required for appraising or contemplating a prestigious work of modern art. The stark contradiction between two simultaneous and fundamentally modern "requirements": 1. being a liberating, authentic, visionary artist/art consumer and 2. being a goer along so that you won't be rejected by the self-sufficient modern movement, makes you either hypocrite or schizophrenic. The traditionalists want us back to bird painting, crystal drawings and study of waves. They complain about Matisse's flatness, Renoir's lack of grace, Picasso's ill intended narrowness, Francis Bacon's rude approach of the traditional figures, and, of course, David Hockney's damned make-up mirrors and prisms. Their comments about the importance of reason, proportions and light are usually irrational, unbalanced, obscure. They might be the green-eyed academist monsters who have troubles in seeing the refined continuity between the classic tradition and Cezanne, Matisse or Picasso who only made "motivated" and innovative artistic moves, who knew what artistic freedom and control mean, who never took a transaction between sheer reality and sheer inspiration for granted. Even Miro kept his feet on the ground and, in a way or another, he based his art in reality. As for a very modern Bacon, Hockney, Freud or Balthus, they've certainly brought back a certain (twisted) taste for realistic painting and highly specific working techniques. Then what are those guys from Art Renewal Center talking about? How green one can be for treating one century and a half of modern painting as if it'd be signed by Pollock only? Behind a biased, but understandable defensive thinking of a minority talking about the oppressive power of majority, we couldn't miss a rather naked - therefore timid - truth: no skills, no standards; no talent, no freedom.

PS: I got back to McCartney's latest album Memory Almost Full and I claim "Only Mama Knows" and "You Tell Me" to be the best tracks I've heard this year; together, of course, with Helena Josefsson's "Pirate King", "Never, Never (reprise)" and "Fire", the B side of the single with the same name from the world-class album Dynamo. Now you can also hear it on her myspace.

Apollinaire, Picasso, Jacob and the Six Slices of Sausage

"Apollinaire was very careful with money, too. One night he invited Max and me over to his place. Marie Laurencin was with him. He had bought a good-sized sausage and had cut off eight slices - two for each of us I suppose - but he didn't offer us any. He and Marie Laurencin had been drinking and were pretty high. After we'd been there a few minutes they left the room to be alone together. Since it looked to us as though that sausage was going to be a long time coming, Max and I each ate one of the slices Apollinaire had cut off. When Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin came back into the room, the first thing Apolllinaire did was count the slices. When he saw there were only six he looked at us suspiciously, but he didn't say anything; he just cut off two more. In a few minutes they left the room again and Max and I ate those two. We had hardly got them down before Apollinaire was back again, counting the ones that remained. Still six. He looked puzzled but cut off two more and left again. By the time he came back for good, the whole sausage had gone, two slices at the time."

(From "Life with Picasso" by lovely Françoise Gilot, pages 74, 75).

PS: New canvas above: "Show Attendance". Click on it for a full-sized view.

PS2: What was wrong with Laleh's interview at "Stina" really? NOTHING WAS WRONG. The answers were far more suitable than the questions. Stina was a monument of inadequateness, obstinateness and false, emphatic empathy. In spite of her realizing the "catastrophe", she kept on approaching Laleh in the same way, unable to adjust her questions and expectations. Laleh, of course, didn't sing instead of answering questions, as reported; she was singing off inhuman, Oprah-like interrogatory ("what happened with your brother and father?"????). Generally speaking, I deplore people's lack of flexibility and the target audience of Stina's show.

The Master Plan. And Ingmar Bergman

We are obsessed with solutions. Ever since we are very little, we are taught to reject the hopeless tasks. There is nothing so distressing as a solution-free problem. There is nothing so intimidating as an ambiguous signal we get from a life situation, from a friend, or from a stranger. We want our life events to be legitimate, solvable, predictable, controllable, structured and, if experienced in public, politically correct. Those who failed to come up with a solution for their own problems are labeled as "unprofessional", "inferior", "sick", or, even worse, "irrational". Moreover, it is abnormal to set a hopeless task. The - often painful - awareness of having a non-practicable plan is, according to modern (clinical) thinking, close to either paranoia or to severe anxiety. However, we no longer like to talk about separating the real from the illusive, we are hypocrite enough for only talking about feasible and non-feasible plans. The more evident the lack of solution for a certain problem, the less likely for that problem to appear on "healthy", "reasonable", "successful" persons's agenda.
None of Ingmar Bergman's characters ever found a solution. None of them had a "master-idea". Some of them survived by mistake. Some others, by will. Some died or got mad of exactly the same causes. Or for the same reasons. They moved through a medium of intentions, suppositions, illusions and needs without having the slightest sense of direction. They had no civic consciousness. They promoted nothing and nobody except themselves and their solution-free problems. The hopeless Elisabeth Vogler is the last honest woman known by modernity. And Anna's irrational passion is the last passion to be experienced by a modern human. Bergman, at his turn, is the last reliable director who suggested warm, distinct, non-viable solutions.

The Love's Fool On The Hill

We are what we love. And I am not even invoking the popular sayings. Or sociobiology's reasons. Or Freud's. No. I invoke Ortega y Gasset's. We have, he says, microscopic, intimate reasons for falling in love with this man or this woman. We are completely blind and deaf when it comes to beautiful figures that don't meet our innermost requirements, but we respond euphorically to the slightest bit of similarity between the lines of one's lips and the generic mouth that is secretly engraved in our hearts as a mysterious result of our wills, needs and phantasms. Once we're in love, there's nothing "useful" or "diplomatic" or "reasonable" we can do about it. I would say that the act of falling in love with a certain someone is a supreme act of revealing our selves; we've been found out; no point in hiding behind artsy conversations and decent shirts and dresses as long as we're crazily in love with a disreputable fellow or with an indelicate lady. Shortly, our love may either save or sabotage our "image". When a discordant couple-in-love comes around, someone in there is not what he/she appears to be; the ill-matching is apparent, our choice may contradict our - always plausible - discourse, but never our - always shrouded - inner intention.
When you're blind, opaque, and close-mouthed, your love is eagle-eyed, transparent, and effusive; and holding under his arm a speaking-trumpet.

PS: I felt like going back to some old Tom Petty. To Full Moon Fever for instance. Particularly, to "I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better". Lovely song for a bright summer day. And Miles Davis's "The Ghetto Walk" is an effective counterbalance.

Timetables

As I grow old, the years start to come and go like trains. Chronology loses its meaning. Today it's 1998, tomorrow is '78, next week is 2008. The music I listen to, the people I talk to, the books I read, the streets I walk, the emails I write have blurred my sense of time and, all of a sudden, I don't know anymore how my personal history works. One day I start everything from scratch, next day I have to handle a thick, long, pitiful past. Each week has its own direction and philosophy. And my father's first guitar, bought in 1967, has been out of tune all day long; a brand new 40-year old guitar, without those female names scratched on its wood, with visible fret markers and intact tuning pegs might wait for me tomorrow morning in the next train to...

PS: Leonard Cohen's "The Letters" (from Dear Heather) has an esoteric touch. Today I can fully instil it. Armstrong and Fitzgerald's "Can Anyone Explain"? has a special kind of beauty unlikely to pour from modern mouths.

In The Corner Of Our Mind

We are not immune to most of the wrong, wicked, dangerous, or sinful incidents around us. Not infrequently, on the contrary. Imaginarily or literally, we choose to inhale them. Many of us, the "good conscience" - people, have an impressive adherence to situations and facts that could prove us weak, base, oppressed, or inane. Out of such abominable occurrences, we sometimes get a masochistic social feeling; and, probably more often, we get a good deal of (highly secret!) social approval.

Left alone, we cry less than when surrounded by an audience. In our solitude, we are seldom if ever grief-stricken. When being ashamed, we're taking the opportunity to look harmless and honest. When complaining, we are already formulating our hopes. When crying, we are already giving our tears a mission. When getting low, we are already preparing to be the subject of a hidden-camera video. When committing a sin, we are already hoping to be redeemed from the following one. So, what is it that he or she wants? Not much; to paraphrase Nietzsche: just to be a good dancer.

PS: Not a chance to get back to my canvasses in the next two weeks, but I am passing my time with some sketches and drawings instead. A pen and ink drawing above. No name though.

PS2: I don't pick music that goes "well" with my texts in the way I would pick a certain wine for a certain food. Quite often, my music tastes may "contradict" or "minimize" or even "annihilate" the "supposed-to-be-heavy" texts ideas. In my world, things go like this: the more apparent contradictions, the better. Today, for instance, nothing stirs me more than Nick Lowe's "She's Got Soul". Lovely one. Clear, stark harmonies.

Emotional Anomaly

Reciprocity. One no longer knows what it means. Love, hate, pity, joy became personal affairs that put a world between us. We don't share, we don't wait, we take or we give, and then we move on without creating any warm, secure space for an answer. We produce feelings that no one will ever consume. Better said, we secrete emotions that we immediately wipe away like grease or sweat.

And the most pitiful times are when we are passed by the ones who changed our lives. And the worst times are when we pass by the ones we miss. Help!

PS: Best in my player today Antony and the Johnsons' "Fell in love with a dead boy" and the hypersensual Prince's "Te Amo Corazon" (what a lovely arrangement!).
I try to move on from Ian McEwan's overrated Atonement to Heidegger's Being and Time; but the summer outside my window finds my attempt slightly ridiculous.

Sitting On A Backdoor Step Of A Gentlemen's Club VI

Modern (Western) women are awfully overrated. Their deeds, their roles, their daily existence, their rhetoric, their sensibility suddenly gained a transcendent value. The trick of the always unfulfilled emancipation, the on-going process of conquering the world needs funds, political activism, street protests, Cosmo-philosophy, and men's full understanding. I've heard women talking about men as if they'd be nobody's doing nothing's. I've heard men talking about women as if they'd be the most feared forces of the Universe, the ones that simultaneously provide and qualify; the only living creatures that can still afford to talk loud in a restaurant.

PS: And a hardcore, priceless cliché: Bob Dylan's performance of "Just Like A Woman" in the already mentioned Concert for Bangla Desh from August 1971. And let's add a controversial side note signed by Beatles: "Happiness Is A Warm Gun".

Ta-daaah

We make funny, touching confusions between spiritual things and practical things.
We became so genuinely skillful! Look at us, we manage to talk about money, music, love, food, God, limousines, will, lust, immortality and malls in one, just one single simple sentence. Of course, a suspicion of fraud glides above us all; which, again, we genuinely ignore. How to successfully mix up left and right, up and down, pure and impure is the best damned thing we ever learnt.
...and so we go on making love for a limo seat.

PS.: Nick Lowe's "The Beast In Me" should suit us all. And T Rex's "Misty Mist". Marc Bolan's lyrics and singing make me think of all those eternal, stone-like things we always thought them ephemeral and frail.

"Some more, yes, please, some more"

Time's here to screw us, not to serve us. Funny enough, we always seem to beg for more. And the more we get, the more we get used with not using it. There are piles of unused hours behind us, and piles of new, expecting ones ahead us. As we age, we become more and more unhandy in dealing with our spare hours. When our clumsiness in managing time will reach a worrying degree, Death will yawn, then will sigh, and then will chat us up.

PS: I got George Harrison's The Concert for Bangladesh from by beloved friend Thomas. Dylan's performance brought out the best in me. I became manageable and sentimental. And I smiled. And I had no regrets. A truly infrequent event.

The Ultimate Nature of Reality, Being and Shampoo

There are two types of wives: those who allow their husbands to use their shampoo, and those who don't.
This simple, uninteresting, easily forgettable domestic gesture may reflect en entire philosophy of marriage. What did I say? Philosophy of marriage?... Such words are like hair balm: they are supposed to make your life soft and silky, but they actually make it sour and sticky. Warning: shampoo discrimination, hair balm abuse and illegitimate use of philosophical terms may lead to disastrous family home evenings.

PS: Tonight I would try anything involving Leonard Cohen. From "Paper Thin Hotel" to "Villanelle For Our Time". I will therefore choose "Alexandra Leaving".

"New Skin For The Old Ceremony"

...be patient...I am working on a new face.

The Human Rights

A pet should be carefree. A woman should care. A man should be free.
But one day we woke up and we all claimed we're humans. From that day on, we mixed everything up and started to drop like flies.

PS: The tracks of the day: the new McCartney's "You Tell Me" - an extremely touching, sophisticated plainness; and the new Per Gessle's "Jag skulle vilja tänka en underbar tanke" - a plain plainness, but no less touching.
PS2: The picture of the day shows a lovely human being called Suzy who has just been sterilized. The photo, the sofa, the remote control, the sterilization decision and Suzy herself belong to Sega.

Certainties

Among the most predictable things in our lives one could mention: the chickenpox, the vacation in Spain, the traffic jam, the shock of Beatles breaking up, the falling in love with a teacher, the sofa from IKEA, the hangover, the second-rate wedding night, the second hand car, the visit to the Louvre, the 80 GB iPod, the panic, the unhappiness, the French fries and the goose-bumps.

PS: and let's not forget about Ramones' "Suzy Is A Headbenger".

Deco

I have a regrettable weakness for decorative life. I could spend hours over my dinner, lunch and breakfast as long as they are properly arranged on good-looking plates. Tragically enough, I get a weird sense of joy by only looking at a beautiful case (suitcase, bookcase, jewelry case, life case etc.) and I couldn't stand an ugly coffee-machine.
... And finally, my daily living is sometimes dramatically spoiled by the fact that a less handsome question would fail to call for my frank answer; a rough question desolates me; and I get lost in all those vulgar, ugly details that were left unsaid.
I have no noble reasons to celebrate my disposition to adorable settings and adorable talking; my refusing the harsh and the ugly things of the world could be, after all, a sort of pornography in reverse. It keeps me from disapproving, disagreeing, deviating, arguing, clashing, branching off, falling out. And my highest price for sometimes having decay, distortion, corruption and downfall dreams is a most frightening Self-denial.

PS: Paul McCartney's new album Memory Almost Full. It has all those faultless classy arrangements that may sound almost nonsensical when one doesn't have the gift of wrapping them around perfect pop hooks. And McCartney has re-written all those genial pop hooks you missed so much ever since Lady Madonna managed to make ends meet back in the '68. To my guess, this album beats Chaos And Creation In The Backyard . It has a certain retrospective feeling that touches me deeply. It has all the simplicity one has the right to ask from a pop manufacturing, but also all those sophisticated, sometimes slightly eccentric add-ons that assure the contemplative side of this album. Most people I know, Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper lovers, never really considered to pay exclusive attention to McCartney. Sometime at the beginning of this month, the most uncomfortable music critic, dear Mr. Lefsetz, couldn't even bear watching the new, disconcerting video for the single "Let's Dance". Which looked like a normal reaction. I had to let this song reach me a few times via headphones in order to appreciate the domestic beauty of mandolin, kick-drum and whistling and - well, - to forget about dancing. "Mr. Bellamy", "You Tell Me", "House of Wax" and "Only Mama Knows" came closer and closer without any specific effort. "See Your Sunshine" is, rather surprisingly for those used with the cute Beatle boy, a quite sexual song. (side-question to the connoiseurs: what happened with all these aging rockers singing more about sex and less about love?). "Nod Your Head" is - to my ear - the proud cousin of " Why Don't We Do It In The Road" while "Gratitude" reminds me once again of the 40th anniversary of the good old Sgt. Pepper. This album may not be the White Album, but it works for me. In all manner of ways.

PS2: Reading Between The Acts of poor Virginia (Woolf). In her books, things lose their shape and grandeur, they just melt and linger like a puddle. What happens when one doesn't look anywhere, not downwards, nor upwards, a reader might wonder? Oh, Virginia, better don't answer...

Sketching Sunday

Back to my sketch notebooks, back to disgrace, back to those terrifying moments of doubt. I should claim immunity against my own detrimental self-evaluation tools.

PS: The album of the weekend is Nick Lowe's At My Age. First thing to get astonished by: a wonderful, delicately caricatured cover. Second thing to get astonished by: his love songs are less cynical than expected (a cool exception: "I Trained Her To Love Me"). Everything else is just as I have imagined it: the mellow sound, the warm voice, easily recognizable Sixties aerated harmonies. Except from my mentioned favourite, "I Trained Her To Love Me", nothing really stands out though. But no one needs to face influential tracks on Sundays, so I count on my witty Nick to lay out a cooling, homogeneous atmosphere.

We, Who Came From Nowhere

We were taught to feel pity for the past, for those people who built it, and for those who still live in it. We were taught to look ahead and feel responsible for every unfulfillment of our needs, purposes and goals. We were taught to be the first ones to praise ourselves so that we could, later on, be others' object of praising. We were taught to forget about our origins so that we can build our own (open) sources of identity.

...and our dead have never been more dead, and our press has never been more yellow.

PS: Dare to go back in time and genuinely listen to Fleetwood Mac's "Need Your Love Tonight" and "I Held My Baby Last Night". If you think you need something else, you might be all wrong.

PS2: Photo by me and flower arrangement by Clompi. Subject: Sega playin' dead on the Danish grass.

Cold Sober Monday

Some had to cultivate either a sense of clownishness or a sense of immorality in order to get by in our uniform, castratory world. The clowns and immoralists - the only ones still radiating sympathy, kindliness, fluctuation; all the others got the perfidious habit of already embracing meanings and principles yet to be given; how else could they maintain the collective fantasy of a difference-free world? You clowns and immoralists, help us decolonize the Future!!

PS: The track of the day: Leonard Cohen's "The Letters" from his Dear Heather album (2004). A very harmonic, still heavy song merging a prophetic feeling with an underrated love memory. One of my favourites on the album.

A Friday 'Bout Good Women And Rufus Wainwright

Good women. They're nowhere to be found. As if they were all born to remain beyond reach. Or as if they have never been born at all.
There is a frightening uniformity of thought in today's female world which expresses anything but solidarity. And a frightening uniformity of look which expresses anything but aesthetic agreement. Over the years, women gained a sense of vanity, of competition, of familial apathy and of existential despair that were once specific to men. And what's wrong with that, you may ask? Nothing's wrong as long as it is an authentic expression of one's personality. It is just that the modern woman misunderstands not only her own body, but also her own inner will; as a result, she's too skinny (even) for her own taste, and she represses a great need of meeting you halfway; that's why her stiffness looks synthetic; her children - disordered gamers; her husband - porn-addicted; her friends - omitted; her dress - meaningless; and this post - a failure.

PS: Rufus Wainwright's Release the Stars (2007) is not an easy bet. It's hard to hate it and it's hard to love it. When Broadway meets Verdi things are far from being solved after one or two listenings. One needs lots of patience and commitment until one gets to understand "Tulsa" or "Between My Legs" or "Do I Disappoint You" or "Tiergarten". Bad rococo taste? Inimitable sophisticate arrangements embracing wonderful pop harmonies? Honestly, I don't know. Sensationalism and sensualism brought together? Certainly yes. My favourites: "Do I Disappoint You", "Between My Legs", "Not Ready To Love" and "Tulsa". Grab a bite before buying the album: truly amazing live performance; and the first official video. A snappy dresser, as we all know him.

PS2: photo by mighty Sega (one of the most enthusiastic Rufus-supporters).

Postmodern Amnesia

Three things we wholly forgot how to make:

1. history
2. music
3. love.

PS: Talking picture from Teplitz (Czech Republic) (massage included, she assured us in German) - one of the hundreds I have taken while riding throughout our historical, musical, lovely Europe. From the northern North to the southern South.

PS2: Have some sincere music. Nick Lowe for instance, "All Men Are Liars" and "Half A Boy, Half A Man". Or Scocco for the glad Swedes all over the world, "Bara En Drink Till". Nationaldagen is not that bad after all. Skål!

Time out for a week

I do not enjoy spare time, breaks and changes of any kind. Taking a week off is a severe surviving exercise. Wish me luck.