I got robbed yesterday. In front of a bank automat. After getting my cash. Right in the middle of the city. Dozens of people on the boulevard, a crowded terrace across the street, big parking, big bank, university at the right, Orthodox church at the left. It wasn’t funny. Later on, I was sad.

You must have heard of Anton Corbijn. It’s impossible not to; everybody’s a Depeche or a U2 fan; well, except me; but still, I am painfully aware of most of Corbijn’s works.
This sober, amazing photographer (that turns the background into a character, men into trees, black into red, tunnels into bodies and rock into visual art) is doing not a video, not an album cover, not yet another U2 book, but – surprise! – a real movie. Oh, so you knew it.
About Ian Curtis from Joy Division, based on his biography that was written by his widow Deborah Woodruff-Curtis who, by the way, is also co-producing the movie. It is possible to be done in black and white, not only to fit the director’s personal style (and taste), but also to fit the protagonist’s mood and the late 70’s Manchester post-punk atmosphere. OK, so you knew that too. I give up. Everybody knew it for months. The good news are almost as fast as the bad ones. The thing I hope you don’t know yet is that Bowie, Roxy Music and Iggy Pop will also join New Order for conceiving the soundtrack; it cannot be but a brilliant add-on, completing the old Joy Division, Lou Reed and Buzzcocks tracks.
I usually don’t feel anything when a new movie’s on its way. For me, Cannes is just a cozy town and Oscar just a nice name. I would always choose a good album or a 400-page book over a non-Woody Allen movie. Once the pictures start to move, there’s nothing you can do anymore. You’re stuck. And it’s like getting tired while being lazy. Terrible feeling.
But Corbijn’s “Control” is definitely something that I really need to see. And hear. I swear I’m inpatient.Foto: Ian Curtis, by Anton Corbijn, short before his committing suicide in 1980.
Links you may want to be linked to: Anton Corbijn‘s website and the one and only NME.

OK. You probably don’t like Morrissey. He puts that – well, – let’s call it “failing-feeling” in his songs that might annoy all those people who cannot put up with an ambiguous pop-message. And then, Morrissey the public person, always does those counter moves that make him terribly un-pop-ular. Not to mention his physical appearance that some find it disturbing, if not straightly irritating.
But we’re oh, so wrong. His latest Ringleader of the Tormentors (c’mon, you must listen to at least his first single „You Have Killed Me”) is produced by no other than THE Tony Visconti. The guys I am praising here in my blog all the time, like T. Rex, Moody Blues, an A-to-Z David Bowie were all shaped and re-shaped by him. All in all, Morrissey’s latest album has a very definite rock sound that you might enjoy; he tells his obscure stories in catchy ways, with thick guitars. Give it a try. You then may want to taste the 2004’s You Are A Quarry as well (with the very beautiful „Let Me Kiss You”… God bless Nancy Sinatra…)
This artist has something that makes me gravitate around. He goes well with this ambiguous summer of mine when I’m finally realizing that the Sun itself is biased. The Sun frees from fear only the ones that are already fearless. Help me, Morrissey!

What does SHE have and we don’t?
She has, just like David Bowie, the secure musical ground beneath her feet that allowed her getting through changes without losing her coherence; some people manage to “get low” without compromising: from the hide ‘n seek with the musical styles and arrangements, from psychedelic rock to glamor and techno, from “Dimond Dogs” to “Bring Me the Disco King”, from “Heart of Glass” to “Dirty and Deep” (you gotta listen to this, it’s neither deep nor dirty, it’s just … Debbie Harry).
It’d be just too commonsensical to talk about a daring Deborah, early Blondie, late Maria’s success or the latest Hollywood’s RockWalk induction. I, personally, only treasure the classic Blondie; and maybe there should be more to say about 89′s Debbie with her Def, Dumb & Blonde which has all the valuable 80′s clichés that today’s artists, blinded by a more obvious 80′s glamor, simply fail to regain. “I want that man” and “Lovelight” have the beat, “Kiss it better” and “Sweet and low” sound like the classic overproduced Roxette demos, “End of the Run” holds the perfection, “I’ll never fall in love again” is so committed to past musical times that we wouldn’t know what to do with it in ourdays. This kind of Debbie is less known to the world. Listening to her today, we get mixed feelings – it’s like an old, completely forgotten love-letter we’ve just found in a box in the attic – totally meaningless for the kids, totally pointless for matures, no jealousy rising among wives and husbands, but a faint turmoil and a dusty sexual thrill grows on the addressee. Only he knows where it came from. Only he knows how to hold it; … and make it meaningful for today’s sensibility.
Don’t you dare to underestimate Debbie Harry’s clever musical spontaneity!

When a woman craves, everything falls in ludicrousness. When a man craves, everything craves along with him. The world’s a devoted backup vocalist and he’s the lead singer. His eyes and hands know all the ways and the subways, they’re oh so shy, but the big big world nods with a smile, in great understanding, and softly pushes him from behind. Go you little one. When a woman craves, she stands and sits she sits and stands alone and ridiculous, like a drunk hen that has just been shaken up from hatching, she craves, she cackles and she swallows more gravel in the backyard.
The impuissance provokes. Her irrelevant hocus pocus embarrasses you, you look away, but then you change your mind, take the hen under your arm and you think about give it a try, but then you change your mind once again. This hen, this hen does not know how to begin, she only knows how to carry on, this hen has lust but she’s not sad enough, she should have been told how to honor her lust and her sadness so that she could find her ways without looking, without cackling, what a pity and the whole world goes la, la, la, la, la …

PS: Today, the world sings along with Nick Lowe, “The Beast in Me”, Charles Mingus, “Heart’s Beat and Shades in Physical Embraces”, Elvis Costello, “I Want You”, T.Rex, “Jeepster”, Tom Petty, “Counting on You”, Antony and the Johnsons, “Cripple and the Starfish” and Velvet Underground “Venus in Furs”…

1. I am waiting impatiently for this big big world to give up.2. Lots of awful things are happening because of us; almost just as many as those happening because of others.

Zappa. A working machine. Or better a perpetuum mobile. Maybe that’s why he tends to be annoying. The automatisms – the creative ones – scare me and attract me like no other things. His writing skills have long intrigued me and I have soon realized that I have probably never understood much from Mothers’ collages or from his later solo hot rats. I should accept, once for all, the fact that the only Zappa-matter fitting my untrained ear is Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water”.
And now bring out some early ’80s glamour; but make it true, like Debbie Harry…

1. I wish I was a father with a son, but I am just a woman having none.

2. Shut up and simulate!

3. All men ever conquered by lust make me sick, except you who make me wonder.

4. You can’t compare all with nothing.

1. Another day, another illusion.

2. No answer, no question!

3. Listening to “Freak out!” (Zappa & Mothers of Invention), talking on the phone with mom and writing on a piece of paper: “I cry
Deep
over you.”

4. The most distasteful indiscretion of all times: spying yourself while you’re dying.

1. The Truth is often indulgent with the contented one, and cruel with the miserable one.

2. God is good, but restrained.

3. The illusions suck up the reality’s sap.

4. Many people see through hearing, especially we – the beautiful, routeless married ones.

The total lack of frivolity is somehow dubious. There are gestures, words, moves, songs, looks, steps, smiles, shoes, matters that do not need to be solemn. Or deep. Lacking the “sense of surface” deals with an unfortunate lack of the sense of humour. A stiff seriousness condemns everything you do, feel and say to grave consequences – no side-slips, no tongue-in-cheek, that is no general charm.
Delightning and charm are not (and can’t be) the central issues of our miserable existences; and Simone Weil, with her tragic heaviness, with her human, intellectual and spiritual density was here to stress it once for all. I couldn’t condemn her absolute gravity, she was keeping herself away from any earthly affair with passion and enthusiasm (which could be seen as frivolity in reverse). But, while reading her writings, I could never stop myself from missing the fascinating trivial worldly matters; our daily playing hide ‘n seek with God, with Hazard, with sorrows, with opportunities – sweet nuthin’, sweet disappointment, sweet estrangement.
Sitting (or laying in the sun) at the topmost boundaries of things or dwelling deep down right in their core, are, I believe, the two faces of the same human coin. Wisely going from one to another and back again with a faint smile in the corner of your mouth is one of the hardest things in our little world. Fooling around without being a clown but a man with the sense of both surface and deepness is not about wearing masks, but learning to deal with our own ambiguous impulses. Yes, I have my definite frivolous nuances, yes, the summer condemns us to even more frivolity than generally accepted, yes, June, July and August make us the prisoners of our own frivolity PLUS the frivolity of our – suddenly very playful – friends, yes, we “stoically” bear them all, yes, I am reading Simone Weil’s letter to Father Perrin while singing in my head the most lighthearted song ever written – Edison Lighthouse, “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes”!! It grows indeed, oh, God knows how it keeps growing…

I wonder if they have ever overestimated their time. They probably did. Like all of us.
I do, however, believe that there must be some kind of fitting between the time distributed to people and the amount of creativity people are gifted with. Meaning that we are given enough space to feel and enough time to unfold what we’ve felt. It is just that we should give up thinking that our vocation and our physical time are parallel matters, because they’re not. The illusion of perpetuity, especially when it comes to artists, is, I believe, a great danger for a wise, immediate handling of time. Dying at 30, like Bolan, dying at 51, like Lane or living on like Dylan and planning another album in the fall of the graceful year of 2006 is only a matter of perspective; and perception. It’s all about quality, which is, by the way, a bourgeois, exquisite matter. The quantity belongs to the parvenu. A life is a plain, highly accomplished life, regardless of its span. A brilliant song stays a brilliant song even if written at 16 or at 60.
I thank God for “Ride a White Swan”, “Jeepster”, “After Glow” and “Lazy Sunday”. And for “Desolation Row” as well. Just don’t fuck with your hours!foto: get this dvd!

This afternoon passes me by without even flaging its hand; it looks very much like a pregnant homeless cat that, driven by boredom, walks from roof to roof and back again, from roof to roof and back again.

Sometimes a day shapes a song, sometimes a song shapes a day; I could never understand what comes first in a more natural way; there must be a subtle chemistry between hours, minutes, feelings, tunes, sounds and daily troubles that you perceive “in block”, as if you’re suddenly struck by light at 8 o’clock in the morning when opening the window. None of them counts on its own, the light hits all of a sudden. Just as in quantum physics, all the discrete elements above seem to behave like photons. Do you remember the wave-particle duality from quantum mechanics? Nevermind. The photons act like classic particles AND like waves at the same time; no electric charge and no mass (well, more or less); the non-physicians have no reason to care about them; or about quantic physics; or about Max Planck. Why should we, as long as the transmitted, reflected or emitted light is something that can convince everyone’s retina? Just open the window and see for yourself! …
… Who on earth could figure out what is the range of electromagnetic radiation emitted by – ironically enough! – Velvet Underground’s “After Hours” as amazingly out-of-tunely sung by Moe Tucker … Things have happened to me lately. Good ones and bad ones. Doug Yule came into Velvet formula by the time when “After Hours” and “Pale Blue Eyes” were recorded (1969?), Cale was gone, what a pity, I am now overestimating my time, this Saturday is windy but sunny, “The Velvet Underground” (the album not the band) is a golden-mine of amazing ballads, they are slightly (but tenderly) sexual, I am translating a new book and I didn’t manage to work at my novel at all these days and I was on tv again it seems, I just got yet another confirmation notice from the post office that doesn’t even count anymore nothing compares with a waltz and Bowie’s “Little Bombardier” packed his bags, his heart in pain wiped a tear and caught a train not to be seen in town again, this little bombardier, Costello’s taking care of you, almost blue, and nothing can shape my day up better than a repetitive, “boring” Velvet Underground’s “We’re gonna have a real good time together”. Jesus, what a spectrum.

Women love sweets. You can read it in their eyes. No man, it seems, can spoil them better than sugar. Look at a woman eating a chocolate bar – as a man, you’ll feel humiliated beyond no human can endure. As it’s in the woman’s nature to exaggerate her reactions, you can’t really say what is the precise amount of pleasure produced by that chocolate, she is probably faking it ’til a certain extent, but the fact still remains: eating sweets is a womanish hobby; and a subtle way of emotionally controlling the men sitting around her. Does it look way too strategic for being true? Well, it’s not! Women have no problems with naturally building up sophisticated strategies for charmingly surviving in a male-ish milieu.

But this is not the point of my little topic. My point is niggardly; and very mean: did you notice that, along with the summertime, the woman’s apetite for icecream grows bigger and bigger? … And bigger? … Did you ever followed with your eyes a middle-aged lady eating icecream while doing her shoppings? The older she is, the more avid she gets; in every single sense.
Or did you see her on her way home, struggling with two or three bags full of groceries just to keep her left hand available for the biggest (melting-) icecream that you’ve ever seen? She keeps licking her fingers holding the moist cornet, she sometimes goes even further by licking her watch and forearm …
Or even worse: she speeds up her eating because she has to get into the car, so you can see her leaning against the car door, crossed-eyed, focusing on the big pink ‘n green stuff on the cornet; the terrifying thing is that, in such cases, she gives up the somehow funny licking and straightly moves to taking big bites of solid ice …
… Or did you see her laying on her sofa at home, holding a huge icecream bucket and ALWAYS using the big spoon instead of the small one? You, men, think twice before deciding on what exactly from your women’s intentional and unintentional behaviours really keep you going! … Because women suffer of a drastical lack of coherence down at the essence and it’s not always clear ‘n stark ‘n exciting what they might do under the label “how low can you get in the summertime”. All ladies have a surface flexibility and adequacy because they long for being suitable and lovable; but behind a graceful appearance might hide a big mouth ready to receive a huge spoon filled with vanilla icecream. You, men, run as fast as you can! And you, women, bon appetit.
I wish you all a great summer.

The dream prosecutes, the reality acquits. It sounds like an extravagant paradox, but most of the paradoxical things of this world are nothing but commonsensical truths that we simply overlooked.
We can only find justification from A to Z within reality. Dreaming is slippery in every sense. Once you managed to dream, there’s nothing you can do anymore. Kafka must have been dreaming all his life. Wake up. Get real. Defend yourself, you bug!

Foto: Vladimir Nabokov’s depiction of Kafka’s beetle from “The Metamorphosis”.

… why so many people risking their decent lives by writing poems when nobody asked them to? … Poetry looks mild and graceful to the reader, but it treats its writer with extreme severity. Poetry is rigorous and exquisite; and there are light years to go from a lame poem to a magnificent one. I would even say that there is no way to connect the two extremes, they tend to even exclude each other. After reading, for instance, Rimbaud or Pessoa, all the other lines of the world seem nothing but awkward misunderstandings. Still, writing a poem is a quick gesture that suddenly promises to you the throne of a compact, familiar world. Writing a poem is more about ruling than about finding rhymes or rhythms or being an emotional nature. Dangers of all sort are spread throughout the whole route from feeling something to expressing something. Most of us, the undecent “writers” of “poetry”, will never successfully reach the finishing line; our graceful world won’t stand; it’ll fall apart or even vanish seconds after coming into existence.

Foto by Mighty Artful Tavi.

The world is tragically splitted into two: the male singers with a constant need for a woman-touch in their music and male singers enjoying themselves, singing completely on their own.

I am not sure if the option for/against one or more ladies doing backing vocals is about the producer/singer/composer’s personality or about the concrete “requirements” of the tune. There are way too many exceptions supporting both rules, a rigid analysis would lead nowhere. Let’s take two “extremes”- I couldn’t imagine Cohen without his Sharon Robinson, and on the other hand I couldn’t picture Petty using a gentle voice in the background (well, Stevie Nicks and yet The Bangles gave me a faint idea though). But then again, Petty owns one of the warmest and one of the most “human” voices, with lots of unexpected shades and his rock’n roll is mostly a men-thing (even though his solo stuff would have surely –at least theoretically – “endured” some more womanly touch-lines…). On the other hand, Cohen has an amazing (but maybe too predictable?) voice … so he probably tends to count more on the shades brought by Sharon…”Dear Heather” would be half-dead without her… But if I’d ask a composer, would he know what to answer when it comes to his need for gentle musical insertions? I live under the impression that the concrete reasons are meant to be blurred … If this need for a woman’s voice translates a lack of any kind in one’s own voice or it’s more about the decisions that made an artistic concept look distinct, would remain a mystery for me.The woman-touches of the day (not having anything to do with present duet inflation) :
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “Waiting for Tonight”; Leonard Cohen, “The Letters”; Elvis Costello and the Attractions, “Every Day I write the Book”, and speaking about Costello here comes Buddy Holly without the Crickets but with Ramona and Gary Tollet, “That’ll be the day”; and speaking about Costello and the Attraction and Buddy Holly, here comes Son of a Plumber with whatever you want from “Jo-Anna says” to “Making Love or expecting rain”.