| Last autumn.. |
[Jul. 16th, 2009|05:38 am] |
(too dark or too light ? New computer, so i don't have any control on the gamma..)
And the backstory.. last day of the past year when we went swimming. We were supposed to only take a walk, but it was so sunny we thought we could as well give it a try. Beautiful crisp waves, an almost empty beach and the exhilarating sentiment to do be stretching our luck, so out season it was to be bodyboarding almost into november.
The evening we were driving to Paris, flying to L.A. the day after - and winter started for good. |
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| And now i'm home.. |
[May. 24th, 2009|03:10 am] |
So... back here. We didn't die today. Close call, Fight Club style, a screw on the stove getting loser and loser with time, didn't go up in flames in the end. One thing i wish i knew : if this kind of things happens to others as often as it does to us ? Because it doesn't seem to.
Anyway, that's a perfect reason to return. I haven't been here in ages, tried coming back, always failed - the unfinished stories, the saved drafts, the entries that the browser ate... Telling where i am, and what i'm at, here and now, would feel so stupidly self-important, and yet failing at it makes it feel self-important even more, because if it wasn't so serious, there wouldn't be even matter to fail, right ?
So.. let's do the ego-thing, and be done with it once and for a while. I am good, i really am, and have been so for.. probably more than two months now. In the meantime, i could even tell what happiness is about - i have a definition for it, "a truly marvelous one, but this page is too small to contain it." Things started looking up sometime in early march, then we worked in Paris, then traveled around for a bit, as the world was becoming that enchanted place again. Then back home, a lot of annoying issues to deal with (including not having one working computer for several weeks on end), but we're here, still alive, and not at all the tiny heap of ashes as we could now be.
Just as i had spent the winter months choking on the depth and intensity of how i could hurt (i never cry and tell, that's never ever), i spent the whole of april losing my breath on how overwhelming happiness could be. And what is there left to say, when you feel that every single instant of the day would be worth celebrating, while you know at the same time that no one in their sane mind would or should care about that moment of your life ? So i shut up, and i'm here still, wishing i had the world to share..
If you don't count all that i shot at concerts, i barely took any pictures over those months, but here you go - all from the cellphone, and with that ridiculously low resolution. But i learnt to love how little technical control you have on them, and the fact that i've got it with myself almost at all times.
Not sure i ever posted a picture of a cat before - but that one had found the best place in the world. I pass that garden almost everyday when i go shopping. The shed behind doesn't have any windows anymore, and there are holes in the roof. The house behind is inhabited, but everything grows at random in the garden, and it's full of flowers and butterflies and birds. I was in a rush when i passed the cat on his wall on my way to the shop, and he was still there when i came back - you don't say no to second chances.
( From Paris to Amsterdam and back to the beach ) |
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| All zeroes and ones.. |
[Mar. 5th, 2009|09:26 am] |
-. --- / - .... .- -. -.- ...
AND.. in other high tech news, does anyone around have any experience with dotster ?
Thanks a lot, guys.. |
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| A pretty good year. |
[Feb. 5th, 2009|03:42 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | right, "other". | ] |
First Ron Asheton, then Patrick McGoohan, now Lux Interior. Gotta love 2009 too, really. |
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| "It's really true how nothin' matters.." |
[Jan. 30th, 2009|03:45 am] |
I have been toying in my mind with the idea of a post about happiness and pleasure and beauty, but i'm obviously not having enough time to make it real - be fearful though, because it still might happen some day, complete with mandatory Nietzsche quote and all. Be very fearful.
Very closely tied to it, but much easier and faster to get through, is the following fact. I've been spending a lot of time in the past days listening to The Lovin' Spoonful, and reached the conclusion (after about half a song) that i'd die fairly at peace if some of these songs were the last thing i'd hear ever. I keep reading everywhere how underrated the band is/was, which is quite hard to buy seeing how much chart success they gathered, unless this would be about their lack of recognition amongst peers. And yet, pop songs as they are, and even if they're not backed up by the studio wizardry of a George Martin or a Brian Wilson, these songs are brimming with so many delicious musical details, and display such masterful songwriting it seems impossible to pass them by. My faves, as of today, and out of their two last "proper" albums, "Daydream" and "Hums of the Lovin' Spoonful" : "Warm Baby" (warning : bizarrely tinny sound); "Daydream"; "Summer In The City" (partial yet impossible not to mention), and the magical "Coconut Grove" :
(i would slap these together somewhere, but till then, youtube remains the best music archive around, it seems.) |
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| Two or three stories i know about them (that would be The Byrds) |
[Jan. 26th, 2009|05:53 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | keepin' fallin' | ] |
We've been watching that documentary about The Byrds before falling asleep in the past days. "Before" is a bit of an exaggeration, since one of us (more often me) would crash just a few minutes after being put horizontal in the dark. It's pretty thorough, and casts quite a revealing light about the music. But for now, a couple of little stories from there :
Terry Melcher, producer of the Byrds, asked by a journalist, who was the most confrontational human being he ever met, answers "David Crosby" - then, the journalist, embarassed by the answer and trying to deflect its impact, asks "so, who's the second most confrontational human being you've ever met ?" And Terry Melcher "Charles Manson."
A journalist, mocking the Byrds by the time they released "Fifth Dimension" (the album) : "so we did Coltrane (that was Eight Miles High, single off the album), now let's do Einstein. The kids will love it."
A guy of the Wrecking Crew, sessions musicians of the time and who worked a lot with The Byrds - and Charles Manson : "I was part of the sessions with Charlie. We did several takes, the vocals were here, and the lyrics were there, and there was no way it would turn into a hit record. It was Terry Melcher who had to forward these news to Charlie (...). About by that time Terry moved out of the house, which very soon got another tenant, Sharon Tate."
And since we live in a synchronous world, all of that has been mirrored on some music blogs i regularly check (1); (2).
Also, pretty obviously, i so wished we had a twelve string. |
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| A little bit of laughs to take the pain away.. |
[Jan. 25th, 2009|05:00 pm] |
"Everywhere we look, the visible spectrum is rainbows. This cannot be natural."
I've had that on repeat for a bunch of times now. If it wasn't complete baloney (and blindness to very plain phenomena) it would almost be literature, especially at the beginning. Still hilarious, though.
(edit : i take the subversion of natural phenomena as a very proper theme for fiction. J.H. Rosny Ainé makes a very impressive case for it in L'Averse Astrale and La Force Mystérieuse - or that other one i lent away and never got back and can't seem to find a trace of in bibliographies.) |
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| Despatches from the Paris underground |
[Jan. 23rd, 2009|06:50 am] |
Everyone knows about the Bastille prison - but few people know of its contemporaries the Grande Force and the Petite Force (named after the Duc de force who owned and ran them) and in which such people as Choderlos de Laclos, author of the Liaisons Dangereuses was once incarcerated. What fewer people even know is that parts of these jails still exist in the underground of Paris, where they survived the buildings themselves, and got converted into cellars when Hausmannian apartment buildings rose on their foundations - sandstone and beautiful vaulted ceilings, the parting walls assembled with a sand-based mortar. Our flats are in one of these buildings, and we've been spending some time reclaiming the cellar space from cobwebs, saltpetre and decayed wood in the past days. S even found a skull, which crumbled under her fingers - it had once belonged to a rat, by the size.
When the world was all plastic and all entrepreneurial goodness was coming from America, in the 80' i mean, a new supermarket opened shop not far from here, near Les Halles. Not only was it (and is it still) pretty uncommon for supermarkets to be set in such a place, but it was also priding itself of its 24/7 opening scheme. You would enter through some ugly courtyard, the best approximation of a medieval village in concrete-blocks urbanism, while the shop itself would be all underground, the only way for it to accommodate the already sky-high estate prices in downtown Paris. A few years later it reverted to more conservative time schedules, as it turned out the generous around-the-clock opening hours really weren't profitable, while still maintaining somewhat longer opening hours than most grocery shops around - i became a bit of a regular there, after whole days spent reading or studying at the nearby BPI library. It closed for good at some point, when i had already stopped frequenting the library or the area altogether.
Nowadays, we use to shop for home improvement supplies in another kind of shop, located as well a stonethrow away from the Centre Beaubourg. Turn your back to the Centre, pass the interior "design" section, get down through the gardening stuff, and you can find us buying tiles and drill heads and electric cable and special wood primers or having the wall slotter replaced, because it has just died on us at the worst moment. We're there almost everyday, since, as the german counterpart of that chain would say, "es gibt immer 'was zu tun". And it's only last saturday that i got aware that our new hangout was the place where i had scored my late hour food so many times - i don't know which idea disturbs me the most : that it took so many times there for me to acknowledge the fact that the local is the same. Or that with a life that has so drastically changed, i still seem condemned to haunt the same place under its new incarnation - without even knowing it. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 22nd, 2009|07:46 am] |
Dear New People Whom I'm A Friend Of,
I can't call you friends (even in the at times somewhat stretched acception this term takes on the internet), because i don't have a clue who you are or what the hell you're about. As a matter of fact, i couldn't even if i wanted to, because whatever you write is in a language i cannot read or understand, and barely can translitterate, at best, and if the right connections are made into my brain - which doesn't happen often, if at all. Even worse, i don't even know how many you are - what's with having three or five journals but under different usernames, and that display exactly the same entries, and exactly the same list of people you've friended, and who, just like me, never added you as a friend, so that the only friend you can display is yourself ? because not talking to anyone ever is not going to make anyone of the hundred or so you've friended consider you as any sort of "friend." Plus it's making me nervous, and has me thinking of all sort of short stories by Silverberg that you wouldn't want to see happening to you in real life.
Thank you for your attention,
V.
EDIT : manifest and speak, or be banned ! |
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| Transparent radiation.. |
[Jan. 12th, 2009|04:23 am] |
Best story of the year (past and so far) :
Russian Northern coast is a vast territory lays for a few thousand of miles and all this coastline is inside the Polar Circle. Long polar winters mean no daylight at all, just one day changes another without any sign of the Sun rising above the horizon. There is only polar night for 100 day a year(...).
So, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided to build a chain of lighthouses to guide ships finding their way in the dark polar night across uninhabited shores of the Soviet Russian Empire. So it has been done and a series of such lighthouses has been erected. They had to be fully autonomous, because they were situated hundreds and hundreds miles aways from any populated areas. After reviewing different ideas on how to make them work for a years without service and any external power supply, Soviet engineers decided to implement atomic energy to power up those structures. So, special lightweight small atomic reactors were produced in limited series to be delivered to the Polar Circle lands and to be installed on the lighthouses. Those small reactors could work in the independent mode for years and didn’t require any human interference, so it was very handy in the situation like this. It was a kind of robot-lighthouse which counted itself the time of the year and the length of the daylight, turned on its lights when it was needed and sent radio signals to near by ships to warn them on their journey. |
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| I think i wanna tell the world.. |
[Dec. 13th, 2008|03:33 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | other ! | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Roky Erickson and the Black Angels - Don't Fall Down | ] |
..about The Black Angels, who are so good it's not even funny any more.
They should be straight up your street, you psychedelia-loving, alternate-states-of-consciousness-seeking, sixties-digging and altogether excellent-music-worshiping people out there, and you might not know about them yet - they eluded us for quite a while. I had heard of them through many angles and it looked like we really should check them out, but somehow there was always other music on our mind, until the day it turned out they were supporting/backing up Roky Erickson for his West Coast tour and his Halloween show at the El Rey. I was totally thrilled at the idea of finally being able to watch The Man perform, but when the Black Angels were done with their opening set, i could have gone straight back home already, and skipped what i had come for. And when they came back to support Roky, i barely saw him at all so thrilled i was with what they were doing, even if it wasn't their own material.
They really have it all.. totally gorgeous sound.. exquisite musicianship.. amazing songwriting.. (at least) two spellbinding guitarists - and in totally different and perfectly complementary ways.. hands down the most compelling and expressive vocalist i've ever seen (the singing thing is usually not what catches me, ever).. a really kickass drummer (drumeress actually).. And they keep twisting the songs, throwing new ones in their sets, swapping their instruments.. we tried counting, but in five people, that makes four guitarists, five bass players, four drummers, two vocalists and two keyboard players. Every single of them is packed with talents, and yet when they play together, no one's overshadowing any other - you could just spend a whole set paying attention to one of them, and be perfectly thrilled, but letting yourself be carried by the sound from one to the other is even better.
When they're having an average day, it's just beautiful songs, performed by an really amazing band. But when they're having a good day.. well, don't think i have started ranting yet. And we wouldn't want me starting to sound like an enthusiastic, delighted, and generally reconciled person, would we ? |
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| "Did you have a good life before you died, enough to base a movie on ?" |
[Nov. 25th, 2008|09:44 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | other | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | The Blakck Angels - Young Men Dead | ] |
Not dead yet - probably even less than ever.. is that a good thing ? But, in case anyone cares, i'll be back.. someday. For now : too many things to make and do to indulge in the luxury of words.
We were in the UK - thngs were good, things were bad. we were home. We were in Rome. We were in California, slept in the desert, woke up before dawn and looked at the moon. We were in Amsterdam and the east and Belgium, where it's already winter. We're home again - and the present is only that, a present, not a given, something to be thankful for. I survived, again - quite astounding. |
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| Jubilee, Ivy, Snick and Little Mo |
[Aug. 21st, 2008|06:20 pm] |
We're busy a lot.. but most of all i got into that thing of never posting about what i hold dear. Which pretty much led to me never posting at all.
Even i am annoyed with that. So..
Jubilee : Founded by Aaron North (once in the Icarus Line and more recently with nin ) and Mike Shuman (of Wires on Fire/QOTSA fame), and now joined by Jeff Lynn (not ELO-Lynne) and Troy Petrey. You don't even want to get me started about how awesome they are - but if you need to have an idea, you can check there : isolate by the hour. S and me have been putting quite some time and love, and A LOT of closing and opening oblique brackets in it. Plus it's been garnering some praise in high places, so it must be good somehow.
Ivy : We're a full family again. Ivy is beautiful, black, sleek and syrian. More of the cage-rattling than of the cuddling type, cannot bear a door to be closed, and thinks that bread is much better than cake. She's really strong, and can wreck a car/room/scarf in less time than it takes to even look
Snick : was actually called Supersonic (for many reasons starting with the Oasis song, and with how ridiculously FAST she is) but is always gone running before you can utter her whole name. She's a roborovski hamster, meaning she's even tinier than a russian, much more wrigly and speedy, and with random death pulsions (like jumping off your hands when you're standing.) We love her and wish she would consider us as friends - maybe if we were Edwin van der Saar, whom she considers to be the only worthy human on earth.
Little Mo : aka Tremolo Mo.. would be obvious why he's named this way if you saw what he does with his right paw while drinking. He's so tiny.. aside from that, all black with white paws, just like Ivy. He's buzzed up like all hamster kids, never bit us even once, and a total darling.
I would need more time to post pictures, which will happen in time. It's an insane summer so far.. we were in the UK in june, then back home, then in Scandinavia two weeks ago. And now in Cardiff, where Jubilee are kicking off the first show of their new tour. And in between : swimming at home and catching waves, and trying to make this summer really count. And we've got so many stories to tell..
Till then, don't waste the sun. |
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