This Tuesday is a physical Tuesday… Didn’t you notice that some days are seeing-through while others have the density and the warmth of flesh ‘n blood? … The good days and the bad days come from the inside; they hit the world’s wall and break into pieces, bounce back to where they came from or splash into sunbeams … There’s no such thing as Monday, Friday or Sunday, it’s just me pressing against the world, with sometimes more and sometimes less strength. I stick with my goose bumps theory as the best method of measuring the liveness held by the minutes and the hours of our life. This last day of spring is hanging in the light; just as Velvet Underground’s “Chelsea Girls”; which is, for the first time in my life, a positive song.

Art. Big word. Everybody uses it. My friends, my colleagues, my neighbors, the VJ’s, the DJ’s, the V.I.P.’s, the writers I read, the singers I listen to, the painters I like, the columnists I love and the columnists I hate, the poor and the rich, the fool and the smart, the beauty and the beast, everybody’s fond of this word. Even me. If you say you’re an “artist”, you’ve said it all. It generally means that you’re linked up to Extraordinary and detached from Ordinary. And that you take yourself seriously. Do I find anything bad in it? No. I find it nice. The creators are bound to take themselves seriously, they can’t even do otherwise. I once read that Rilke said “if it’s in your power NOT to write, then don’t write”; which says it all about the true pressing importance of doing something creative; which, once again, says it all about the uselessness of any kind of unnatural pushing of one’s self towards artful activities. There is naturally-occured art and forced art, there is big art and small art and lame art and strained art and non-art; and they are all called the same: art. That’s why everybody’s fond of this word – there is always a meaning waiting for everyone; art is generous and polite, making room for all of us. And we won’t even know what room we entered and “how” artful we are; until the Future will get amazed keeping our room as a sample of beauty; …. or until the Future will get rude puking us back in dirt and disgrace. Long live the artful artists!

Radio is warm. And decent. It just flows discretely through you; it doesn’t tear your clothes off, it doesn’t prank, it doesn’t nudge, it knows no flip-flops. Wait a minute. I don’t listen to the radio. I once did, for 1 hour, and I came back to it no more.
The DJ’s of our lives are tearing your clothes off, pranking, nudging, making sumersaults and flip-flops, shouting, heehawing, faking all the same way. The last blessed DJ (that Petty sung about four years ago) is probably retired nowdays; if not plainly dead. The ones I get to hear are talking fast and loud; their playlists haress me, their voices embarrass me.
Still, radio is warm. And decent. And it should have flown discretely through your veins. John Peel’s last “Perfumed Garden” from 14th of August 1967 aired just before the closing of Radio London is in my stereo right now; 5 cd’s and an amazing playlist; the newly appeared witty Sgt Pepper, the sexy Marc Bolan, the tender Tim Buckley, the sweet Byrds, the tumultuos Mothers of Invention, the intriguing Velvet Underground with their even more intriguing “Venus in Furs”, Dylan the poet and the happy S & G; and Peels’ steady wise words, flowing poems and reassuring voice.
I don’t necessarily feel confortable in the nostalgist’s shoes. I don’t even have the “required” age. But when a present radio channel hits my ears by mistake, I get the feeling of loss. Once the vibe is gone, the DJ’s and their sounds become merciless executioners for my senses.

ps: …and don’t ask these people to play a love-song. They don’t know any.

Monday is a good day. I am mean enough for not feeling too much compassion, but rather enjoying to see how people are trying hard to reach for their jobs, catching buses in the last moment, losing trains, carrying empty bags, trying to buy croissants but ending up by losing temper and leaving the queue, nightmarelike traffic jams, heat, dust, cursing, bird flu rumors grazing the ground, a restless, dizzy, routeless, hardly breathable Bucharest. Still, Monday is better than Sunday. At least you know that everything has started. And you’re bound to keep up.
As for my little world, it starts and it collapses with my coffee. When there’s no coffee left in my cup, there is really nothing left except adaptation; never-ending adjustments to the daily requirements. And some thoughts.
Like these: death always tends to gain in objectivity. Why is that? Because people tend to resort to good recipes when it comes to death. A made-up death, “dying your very way”, is a real adventure. There is something about “subjectively dying” that I simply don’t get. But everybody (well, at least the sociologists) talk about “subjective death” in our days. We are the ones picking the rituals, we are the ones picking between heaven and hell; we also pick between an Other World and a Void, we pick, we pick, we pick. Beneath a commun expression like „subjective death” hides a whole and impossible to circumscribe social, religious and psychological commotion of recent times. There is moral avulsion and political principles, Church recessions and wholenesses invoked through their parts, personal struggles and public futilities, political corectness and fear of political corectness etc. etc. etc. Organizing one’s end is, in ourdays, an art. And once again, organizing death is the most important life-matter. Good luck to you all.

Sunday morning. Noises all around. People are working hard cleaning, washing, hammering, vacuuming, buying, selling, cooking. Under pressure. Yesterday evening I was reading Jean Delumeau’s recent book Guetter l’aurore. Un christianisme pour demain: 70% of the French people do not treat Sundays as being different from the other days of the week. So, for most of the people, a week might just as well consist in four, five, six or even seven Thursdays. A difference in the name of a day makes no difference.
Is this the spirit of the Western World? If yes, does it come from religiousness-less or does it come (what a fascinating paradox!) from an inner ( half-unconscious) Protestant spirit? Partially misleading Max Weber’s idea, I would say that we are all threatened today by the “danger of relaxation” as Richard Baxter used to cry it out for his puritan audience. The permanent (once sinful) temptation of “wasting time”, as seen by the protestant eye of all times, has sent Western people back to their offices, factories and farms two centuries ago. So even before connecting the meaning of time with money, the meaning of time was rightly and straightly dealing with a working routine; the more you socialize, the more exposed to sinful conjectures you are. From contemplation to piffling inactivity there is just a very little step to go; no use to re-echo here the very well-known Weber’s theses concerning the blessed, tangible meanings of hard-working and so the blessed connotations of wealth in the Western World. So Sunday – with or without God – is money.
The protestant spirit is slowly dying, but its ghost is still here to justify our running for wealth and to vindicate our running out of time.ps: Sunday-game: four song-titles are hidden in the above text. Try to find them! Or come back later in the afternoon for finding out the answers.

ps2: picture by mighty Tavi.

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Highly, warmly, definitely recommended listenings for today: David Bowie’s “Everyone says HI” (Heathen), George Harrison’s “Just for Today” (Cloud 9), Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting for You” (Backtrackin’, vol. I).
…and Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers are touring for the last time this summer; and once again without me. They’re turning 30. OK, I couldn’t have made it to their debut shows in 1976, but what did I do in the following 28 years and a half? If you’re not waiting for their new album in June, then you’re probably wrong.

It’s humanly to wait for help from Above; it’s humanly to relate your failing to the lack of Grace; but your only suitable, divine gesture is your hoping while experiencing the divine absence. I know no other sense of the word “faith”.
There are plenty of writings talking about the silence of God; coming or not coming from mystical areas. Just a few going through my mind right now: Father George Remete, the carmelite monk Wilfrid Stinissen (thank you, Thomas!! Thank you!), yet another carmelite Teresa of Avila, Gustave Thibon and, of course, Simone Weil. God is not responsive in the way in which the world wants Him to be. He surely has nothing to give as the world gives. We have such an irrepresible trading reflex that we naturally and genuinely tend to do business with God without thinking for a second of how absurd a heavenly transaction could be. A transaction involves two parties; how do we know that God will put His signature next to ours? we drag Him in petty, dirty business and we feel betrayed when He seems not to “honor His contract”. Bloody trade-instinct!
Between me and you everything has a cost. Between you and Him, everything is free…. As I live, I feel like everything’s in spite of.

Does a blog count? God, no! It’s risibly useless.
The most welcomed (but probably the worst) thing happening in our modern world (specifically within a heterogeneous, yet homogenous internet) is the blight of our need for excellence. As I recently told someone in a letter, who the hell needs any kind of excellence anymore? Excellence brings discrimination; that is one golden winner and one hundred idiots/losers; not good! Everyone should write a book, write a poem, keep a blog, sing a song, draw a cat and therefore grab an award in ourdays. I literally bump into artists when going to the supermarket. Hurray. And so I probably bump into bloggers every other minute. And they should all win a Pulitzer…Including me.
This blog-thing is a subtle, yet everlasting temptation for every vain and non-talkative person with a fast internet connection. The problem with the less-talkative human beings is that (hi, Adler!) they are always self-believed writers. The problem with the vain human beings is that (hi, Freud!) they are always trying to cover with an endless number of words an endless number of repressed weaknesses. The problem with the human beings having a fast internet connection is that (hi, dad!) they already tend to have a biased perception on time and space: they count the hours in GB of downloaded material and measure the space in links. For them, keeping a blog is like sitting under an oak-tree having a lazy lunch. So why not keeping it? Everybody needs a break.
Do I have something against bloggers? No way! How could I? Beginning with now, I am a blogger myself. You don’t feel like fitting in the mean, tight pattern I have just invoked above? Neither do I! We’re all part of the same widespread exception. Hallelujah. A blog more or a blog less doesn’t really count for Mr. Mammoth, the internet. He is not even aware of the exceptions, he treats all his flies the same way; it is you hoping to make a difference, it is me failing to get you; and we both want to be THE fly-on-the-mammoth’s-eye while both sharing a little piece of his back-leg. Flies shouldn’t afford to be vain, talkative and demanding…But still, they are nothing but these.Welcome to my blog. I am the kind of fly who can handle comments in English, French, Swedish and Romanian.