A personal and futile list of overrated stuff

• Barcelona: just thanks to Mirò and the seaside there is no way you can become a world city, though yoga lovers, mozzarella exporters, shallow fashion parade monkeys, a couple of Scandinavians and horny Erasmus students love you. 
• XX (Band): the riffs of a 13 years old guitarist with an affinity for triplets (mus) became the "song" to worship: it is so sad and depressing that it is enough. You can listen to it on Spotify, though... 
• Lasagne: please stop eating crappy food, if not cooked by a close relative (Michelin chefs do not apply either). 
• Pepsi: oh come on. 
• Carmelo Anthony: you'll never get to become crucial 
• Manu Chao: your flavor for global politics cannot hide the fact your music is boring as hell
• Iphone: yeah, get the membership to the club of those retarded owning a phone you cannot make phone calls with (note the repetition, please) and let the US GDP grow by 0.5%. 
• Beck (the singer): No comment
• French design for cars: please make up your own mind by observing the shape of a Twingo or a Megane

Grizzly Bear´s new album on Streaming: guess where? On NPR!

My answer for the one email too much from Airbnb Berlin

Leave my neighbourhood alone, please and let us Berliners in peace. Discoveries, even more the best ones, require dedication, curiosity and luck. You take care of tourists, right? Let them do that with the thousands of platforms already existing and stop with this over parolous, superficial crap you sent way too often per email.

My thoughts on the spotification of music listening: a bad thing for us all

The idea looks simple and sounds catchy: get on board with us, share your tastes, activities, photos and so on (music) and you will be by default be considered cooler, reach a higher stand in front of your (digitally speaking) friends and (for the few ranking high on Klout) subscribers. The content of these possible great achievements is taken for granted by those offering you their platform (only if not respectful, will it be questioned and eventually erased), shared by those interested in it, ignored by the most, either since they don´t agree or don't care. The drive for getting some digital reward makes us focus on one cool something, on looking for a catchy phrase and/or motive, on sharing a overwhelmingly colorful pic so that the other express their acknowledgment of our digital worthiness. This spiral of expiring moments of "kloutness" (neul.) is bad for arts, for ideas, for exchange and, to me currently the dearest thing, to music. We people living in GErMAny were very happy to have finally access to Spotify early this year, after all our Scandinavian friends dragged (sic) about it for years. But, dear fellows, is Spotify or are its copycats and very similar contenders so cool? …. Really?! We focus on catchy gingles more than we had already done before, we are constantly asked to make a playlist out of songs we listen to (most of the time not halfway through the track anyway) and we are finally rather unspectacularly made into sharing this bunch of stuff socially. But where does the music stay in this equation? Where is the drive (again) of taking some "quality" time with ourselves and listen a damn song from 0´00´´to 4´55´´and maybe consider it as part of an artistic creation (that old fashioned thing called album), put into a chronological order as thought by it composers and its producers? There is no way Spotify & friends can possibly come out as the advocates of music and the artists behind it. But they want you to believe so. They want you to tell them as fast as possible which song would be the catchiest, so that somebody may use that information to sell even more of the same crap. They do not reward artists directly (they admit so) and could not care less how this happens. We need to move away from a business model where the medium of sharing content becomes the thing counting the most and where the content slowly disappears and becomes cool only if shared and not on its own merit. A great antidote are all those album streaming chances you can enjoy lately: serious portals made by awesome journalists, music lovers and great people who make an album available online in its whole for a while. They ask for your best asset actually, so you should watch out: your attention and passion for stuff, your curiosity and love for new artistic creations. More of NPR and Guardian and so on then, please, and let Spotify go to hell and survive thanks to those geeky and massified nerds, who would listen to MTV crap over their overpriced smartphones anyway.

Der Email-Verkehr ist der einzige Verkehr zurzeit

....ho fatto oggi ´sta gara di nuoto di 1,7Km e ho cercato di andare piú forte che potevo, invece delle serate in giro e della marotta faccio così ultimamente. Son arrivato primo, e son andato 4 minuti piú veloce di 2 settimane fà, quando due giorni prima della gara - il giovedí - avevo fatto le sei con una tipa (e dormito 2 ore) ed il venerdì ero stato a cena da amici a base di carbonara e drinks.....oggi invece uscito dall´acqua sembravo un armadio e peccato che lo sappia solo io; mi hanno dato il premio che mi son portato a casa e devo riportare l´ánno che viene; ero solo tutto il tempo. Son tornato a casa e ho deciso di uscire alle 11. Per fortuna dopo qualche drinks son finito in un bar dove lavora un mio vecchio amico barman e mi son dato il colpo di grazia, vista la prestazione sportiva odierna ci è voluto poco...in ogni caso credo di essere l´unico che dopo la fatica di oggi si sia dato alla uscita serale...ci giuro....

Talk talk in silence

The "Laughing Stock" Album by Talk Talk is amazing and this morning, listening to it one more time, I remembered of 2008 and that beautiful late spring and (now looking backwards) lonely summer with a sense of missed sweeping declarations. My favourite track is indeed "Ascension Day".