Physical pain is old fashioned. There’s nothing more tasteless and more dubious  than the image of a modern man contorted with cramps.

We think that physical pain is not only a sign of decay but also an agent of decay. 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.

So we thoughtfully decided to take some safe distance from our physical suffering before it shakes us up from our dream of durability.

Being relatively pain-free (there’s an efficient painkiller for everyone…) is part of the luxury of the modern life, together with rigorous hygienic practices and the iPhone 4.

We, the late moderns, posses an excellent, disconcerting ability to lead a good life. And when it’ll happen to lose it, we will be tweeting for an ambulance.

PS: I’ve recently started to cope with Regina Spektor’s 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 used to find slightly inappropriate for the pop-culture world she tried to fit in. But time has passed. Today I came to actually enjoy her blend of urban tenderness, existential  thrills, tasteful eroticism, and  stark intelligence. Today I give the red-haired Regina a lot of credit. And oh, how well she hides her shyness!

PS2 : sorry for the long blog-break. Just got back from a most fruitful death and dying conference, put a glorious end to my Danish exhibition, wrote some studies, signed some amazing art contracts, traveled around, made some sketches, cooked some pies. Now it’s time for fixing the fall courses, do some serious painting, gather all my courage and try to finish the novel. The summer was tough. The autumn is tougher. The winter is out of reach and far beyond my imagination.

What you can see above is one of the first ink drawings I’ve ever made. All gone now.

A great illusion is born by sheer flair and maintained by stark wisdom.

And then it takes a God to kill it.

PS: I used to love The Raconteurs. I always believed they deserve more attention than, say, White Stripes. Not because they’re better (because they’re not), but because White and Benson’s musical experiment was/is utterly fun! A most charming compromise between guitar riffs, blues, and bubblegum. Try this (no, it’s not “Steady As She Goes”).

Writing sweeps life away, pushing it in the four corners of your roomy mind. And maybe that’s  exactly where life belongs: together with dust, dirt and spiderwebs, forming gray, elaborated structures, pulsing like hearts, wakening you up in the middle of the night with snake hissing sounds.

PS: the best end-of-summer track I could come up with is McCartney’s “You Tell Me”. As a matter of fact, the whole Memory Almost Full (2007) was quite touching. I still can’t believe this is not the summer of 2007. Where did three years go?

You cannot undo what has been done. And this might be the worst thing about living on planet earth: the possibility of repair is dramatically limited; the will of having things repaired, even smaller.

After so many years of conducting interviews and studies about the way people relate to death and dying, I’m not at all sure they’re paralysed with fear.

In the latest, say, 30-35 years, life has been dramatically – and hysterically – overrated.

The mechanisms of modernity have enforced the discipline of “living well”. This commandment is not objectionable. It’s been, in fact, so dictatorially imposed, that people started to grow suspicious and – what a paradox! -  began to feel unsafe.

The conspiracy of silence (“no death-talking , please!”), the firm edicts condemning people to never-ending youth and continuous health led to growing feeling of guilt of those unable to fulfil such  “dictatorial” precepts.

Therefore, a poisonous  thought popped up in people’s minds: what if my sense of adventure is sabotaged? what if they kill my thought of death so they could take away my freedom?

And, all of a sudden, fantasizing about beyond-this-life ventures or simply feeling comfortable with speaking about The End has become a matter of self-dignity and existential rectitude; a way of rejecting the seemingly unlimited, autocratic power of life.

I have a hunch that late modern people no longer believe in playing safe by rejecting death; just as they never really believed in betting everything for immortality. They’d rather play both ends against the middle.

PS: Splendid evening, splendid song by Eels. Now you’re really living.

All through the summer, you can’t tell who’s old and who’s young, who’s healthy and who’s sick, who’s a gentleman and who’s a lady, who’s both and who’s none.

Everyone wears sunglasses; the greatest invention of the XIIIth century. When you wear them, you’re anyone you wanna be. Even yourself. You stare where you want to stare, and as long as you feel like. Your smile is more enigmatic, your pose – more solemn, your voice – full-hearted.

In spite of poets’ preconceptions, the “mirror of soul” is really of no use nowadays; anyways. Why not admitting it’s human nature to cover up a mistake? No need to show your dark circles,  your vulnerable look, your nervous blinking, your tears or your disdain.  Let the bright teeth and the sporty arms do the small talking, too much honesty never did anyone any good.

I deplore people’s looks in wintertime. The excess of identity is confusing. We’re old, sad, sick  and shamed. When the darkness falls  over the town, there’s nothing we can do about it: we’ve been found out.

PS: Something to disguise?  Try The look of love . Perhaps Dusty’s most beautiful.

The fascinating thing about high hopes is that you’re never really able to keep up with them. They move full speed ahead on the racetrack of your mind, and all you can do is find a good tribune to view the full circuit from various vantage points. You never drive. You’re just a race fan; with a flag and a cap.

PS: Just rediscovered Small Faces‘ Small Faces (1966) playlist and remembered the tenebrous history of “You Need Love/Loving”. As you know, Willie Dixon who actually penned Muddy Waters’ hit, sued Led Zepp for stealing  “Whole Lotta Love”; but I’ve also read that Plant was an enthusiastic attender of Small Faces gigs (and “You Need Loving”  was on every concert playlist!) . This is what the Small Faces did before curly hair and tight jeans came to justify Led Zeppelin’s breakthrough.

The absence, the waiting, the silence,  the missed, the omitted, the removed,  the vacant, the minus, the lack, and the loss are more  sophisticated than a most animated presence.

PS: I hope you have all seen Leonard Cohen‘s I’m Your Man DVD (2005) by now. It might be the most graceful documentary ever made about an artist. You cannot watch it only with your eyes, you are bound to watch it with your heart.

No exhibitory nostalgia (it’s so laudable that director Lian Lunson succeeded in not speculating something so obvious…); no emphatic contributions (Bono was, for the first time in his life, an example of adequate humility…); no displaced performances (Rufus Wainwright, Beth Orton, Antony Hegarty, Nick Cave seemed all immersed in Cohen’s harmonies and then reborn with a sharper sense of themselves).

And Leonard Cohen, well, he is like an effect of light-and-shade; he is mysterious bits of everything; he is the warm embracer of all our human questions and the troubled possessor of a few tremendously important answers. Coda…

PS2: I had to take some distance from my buck-obsession before starting a new series of paintings called “The Comfort of Being Small”. And the break looked like the above painting: “Washed Away”, oil on canvas, 38 X 46 cm. A no-man’s-land image of a man in the shower;  letting himself be swept away, decomposing,  becoming no more than  an agglomeration of white undertones. Like all my “no-man’s land” pieces, it can be purchased directly from the webshop.

There are no come back’s, just go back’s.

So I’m going back to my “summer desk” where – accidentally or not – all my important studies were written;  I’m going back to my sketch notebooks,  back to disgrace, back to those terrifying moments of doubt; back to everything, back to nothing.

I should claim immunity against the devastating effects of my own self-evaluation tools.

PS: …and Lykke Li is walking poetry.

Nowadays, it’s not easy not to succumb to existential passivity or to some kind of  “hysterical derangement”. We’re insistently invited t0  serene dullness or to… self-branding.

In order to escape the above highly-mediated extremes, some people had to make excessive use of their sense of clownishness; or even develop their sense of immorality. In today’s world, clowns and immoralists are the only ones still capable of natural fluctuation, the only ones still succeeding in being spontaneously kind, or spontaneously atrocious.

All the rest got into the habit of  either being on antidepressants or embracing non-conformism in a conformist way (this is the paradoxical definition of today’s “freak”).

We’re “cool”, “laid-back” and “open”; we embrace all values, principles and beliefs yet to be given; because how else could we maintain the  collective phantasm of a “difference-free” world, full of wonder-men, wonder-women, lethargics and  zealots?

You clowns and immoralists, help us decolonize the Monster- Future we’re living in!

PS: The track of the day is Leonard Cohen‘s “The Letters” from Dear Heather album (2004). A most beautiful song built on two “extremes”: a prophetic feeling and an underrated love memory. One of my favourites on this album.

When I was very little, I believed in theater, music and my father.

I knew things. I could sense things. I could taste them with my mind, measure them with my sense of smell, predict them in my dreams.

I very soon understood that the world was much bigger than my 3-person family. Before falling asleep, I felt how huge it was; and I felt like knowing it all.

I could sniff the intentions of the grown-up ones. I could guess their hidden thoughts by only looking at their hands.

I rigorously knew all the things that I never saw and, by only closing my eyes, I was able to contemplate all the human mistakes and flaws and weaknesses that I could ever gather with my ear, eye and imagination.

I could tell the shape and the size of the fingers of all people that I have ever met, even if only for a minute; I could tell the shape of their teeth and I could guess the shape of their toes and the depth of their fantasies.

But then I grew up all wrong and narrow. I started to sort; then to ignore; then to forget; then to invent laws for my thoughts and theories for their content.

And here I am, a serious adult despising her seriousness, deploring her narrowness, away from her father, bored by theatre and sentenced to death by the sounds. Nothing moves me more, yet nothing frustrates me more than music. Music is here only to remind me of a lost Paradise, of an all-embracing childish “wisdom”. Nothing and nobody can bring that genuine sensitivity back to me, back to us. So here I am and here we are: struggling for every piece of decent life. Sorting, ignoring, forgetting.

Lies. We live with them.

Depending on the occasion, social circumstances 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, if we really must, we fight them. Often than we realize, we 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 colours 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 often end up living our lie as if it is our most painful and crucial truth. I’ve seen liars who would gladly let themselves be crucified for their lie. They would know all the answers to Pontius Pilate’s questions.

PS: there is really nothing slicker, better, cooler than David Bowie. Really nothing. Nothing really. Check out this live version of Rebel, Rebel.  I tend to be in a Bowie and Ian Hunter mood these days. There must be something in the Danish air; or in the French wine.

Yes,  we must all struggle individually and collectively for a decent…reality; otherwise the world would get ridiculously surreal, the dreams would take over, and all those decent, serious people would pack their things and leave. And we don’t want that, do we?

PS: My favorite from the new Tom Petty album Mojo: Something Good Coming.

The quality/ability of being extremely determined can often turn against the artist.

Persevering artists are restless human beings who don’t believe in luck. Yet, they act superstitiously. And they lose sleep for God-knows-what. The stronger their feeling of self-making, the easier they get hurt. If someone makes their achievements look doubtful, they can’t help but resorting to self-justificatory statements to meet the situation.

Having become highly self-aware individuals, they know very well what they lack: a firm grip of their own inspiration. Discipline is more reliable than talent, so they learned it’s easier to come to terms with themselves rather than having to come to terms with their Muse.

You can’t mess with inspiration. You never know where it comes from. Where it leads. Where it goes. And how long it will last. But you can always rely on your hard working. Long live Madonna and her perfect body.

PS: Do you know House of Love’s album Babe Rainbow from 1992? It’s nice, especially the first two tracks, “You don’t understand” and “Crush me”.  I’m totally unaware of the way their latest album sounds (yes, they got together again), but I used to like their early work: psychedelic threads sewed on an 80′-ish glam fabric.You can find one track here (press “listen”), and one here (press “listen”). Quite good, isn’t it?

An intimidatingly magnificent dream shouldn’t be dreamt to its ultimate consequences. Forget it or un-dream it before it brings the terror of perfection in the actual world and makes you lose all sense of petty contentment; which is the only kind of sense we, the mortals, seem able to handle  with dignity and professionalism.
And you, who enjoyed a fully-dreamt dream, DREAD!

PS: Lovely Martha and Rufus Wainwright, making every bit of sound count.

I asked for stones and snakes, but I got bread and fish instead.

PS: …and a  song .

Some people have to make consistent efforts to be able to, at least to some extent, delimit themselves from others. While other people can do nothing but delimit themselves from others. The ludicrous thing is that both crews live under the impression of their complete non-success in doing so.

PS: He‘s back!!!!

PS2: another day, another painting: “Crowded Dead End Street (An Experiment)”, oil on canvas, 60/70 cm.  You can see it in Århus (Gallery Florence), in three weeks from now.

We’re prisoners of our half-thought ideas; and of our half-done things; and of so many half-used freedoms; and of those people we adored, but only half-understood.

We could, yes, collapse under the burden of so many misunderstandings, unfinished missions, quasi-doings, and half-unfolded emotions. The insufficiencies, the hesitations, the grasp of not always being able to be enough of what we are, the short circuits of our most intimate wires are, after all, the decisive marks of being humans; the very many facts that make us frail and dramatically available.

Sooner or later, someone will lose interest; or strength; or faith. But what’s to fear?

PS: don’t rush to the conclusion that you’ve just heard a pathetic song; it comes from Regina Spektor, so you’re bound to read it in a sophisticated key. “The Sword and the Pen” is a bonus track from Far album (2008).

PS2: …new, completely unexpected series of paintings I’ve made yesterday. It’s called “Original Sin” (oil on cartoon, 21-30 cm) and it’s not going to make it to the exhibition in Århus this July. Just because I say so.