A personal recount of a life within Berlin, Venice and the EU

Saturday, December 06, 2008

It is not so easy to keep yourself updated with music when (1) your apple is so full that there is no place left for any extra torrent file, (2) you earn less money i.e. cannot buy so much new stuff...

So a small section of this blog, without title and completely personal, used to host a almost weekly top five of albums I had checked; now it turns into a songwise thing:
I guess the price goes to "Murder by Mistletoe" by The Felice Brothers this week...I almost cried on my wayback home on wednesday afternoon with this song, but I am very empfindlich lately...
Last week has been my "Misery is a Butterfly" week. The song "Melody" had the power to hypnotize me over and over again...
The week before that was all about this song by E.Smith and Pete Krebs: an astonishing concentrate of sadness...the way Marco likes it, you know.
Before that I guess it had been again about my personal Jesus, E. Smith, with his Demo of "Twilight"...
I had my quarter of an hour of E.Smith at the restaurant thursday and yesterday too (maybe even longer)...with the first try one girl actually started to weep a bit...too bad..but no way I am going to play Kaiser Chiefs because of that...

I thank people who post stuff or show in some other ways interest for this small blog.
Even if I am kind of skeptical of those who believe they can talk about everything because they know, I. Kant having been the very last and only one who truly could do it, I thank the anonymous about the Zizek contribution. I am listening to it.
I kindly recommend everybody to give a try to the chain of interviews George William Bush will have in the next weeks: he actually already started...you know, just for a record nowadays of what he would be able to say in 5 years.

What happens in Italy is so out of touch of any "rather functioning than not" system that I do not bother you any longer...The German Press is pretty good and objective in analyzing the Boot-country: if you know German you should read some analysis and then boycott the country (some other solutions?) and go for holiday somewhere... but I guess Croatia is not heaven as we would love to think.

I quit one job...you know in times of financial crisis I thought it was time to find myself some other form of occupation...it is going to be fine, isn`t it?

3 comments:

katy daus said...

There are many people out there who identify with the unhappiness. Supposedly you're either born one way or another (happy or sad) but I think to some extent misery is a choice, as is not letting go of the past. A few paragraphs from a few years ago...

I think it was Proust who said that smell is the sense most apt to bring back distant memories—especially those we consider insignificant, like a particular feeling we experienced at a given moment during childhood or a gesture made by some adult who might have died not long after. It can even be something as simple as a strong wind, which reminds me of the falling of leaves in autumn and the changing of seasons that determined the way I experienced time and that, since living in a season-less place, becomes a source of nostalgia as well as a dreary reminder of the sort of flat, homogenous time unmarked by those cycles that make you think that something is always about to happen.

But then I think that maybe I confuse this with a sense of resignation that comes with maturity. Isn’t the idealization of youthful memories a well-known construct?

There are certain songs that remind me of those seemingly banal moments—the kinds of memories that make you happy and sad at the same time: Goodbye Stranger (Supertramp): diving off the diving board at the pool in mid-August with the local radio station playing over the loudspeakers; All Cats are Grey (The Cure): turning right onto my street from the back road that led out to the mall and feeling isolated and superior and not realizing that it was all one huge cliché; All through the Night (Cyndi Lauper): sitting in my mom’s white volvo thinking about the original boy not knowing that it would drag out over the next decade only to conclude in the most insignificant manner that I can’t even really remember now.

I still have a box of mixed tapes and until recently (when my tape player stopped working), I would drive around listening to those tapes and thinking how much better the 70s and even 80s were and how everything became predictable and boring in the 90s and how sad it is for all these kids who never experienced what it was like to receive a mixed tape made especially for them which involved hours of selecting and cuing and taping and decorating the tape cover (drawing or photocopying)—all of which constituted a gesture of friendship or, better yet, seduction. And how glad I am that looking back now, everything I thought was so fucked up at the time seems so great alongside how uneventful everything seems now and that it’s all just part of a continuous cycle of idealizing the past while regretting the present.

Unknown said...

I guess that you are right somehow, when you say that misery is a choice...
I keep on making wonderful compilations every once in a while though..and I do believe the meaning of stuff is much more fundamental than the medium...so welcome to cd compilations, digital compilations or any other one, as long as they are sincerely thought and made for somebody...
Take care.

katy daus said...

I agree. The fetishization of the medium is a romanticization of the past and inability to enjoy the present and positively anticipate the future. Better to keep the mixed tapes in a box in a closet and just close the door.