Every path you take leads further than you think.

Mondays are the the most honest days. In the beginning of the working week, the arriviste in us is still a junior, the feeling of importance is still under construction, we lie less, we listen more. So on Mondays, we’re still learning how to put our guard up; on Tuesdays, we’re starting to get dogmatic; Wednesdays – we lose our sense of hearing, touch and truth; on Thursdays, we swank; on Fridays, we’re recovering from anesthesia.
We spend the weekends trying to cope with the pain of being ourselves, counting calories, money, chances, and blood cells.

PS: Helena Josefsson has just started recording a new solo-album. Fingers crossed, prayers, chants and hurrah’s for the last honest musician in our feather-light music world.

Enthusiasm. We couldn’t do without it. We would be giving up our work, our family, our pets, our life, our selves. Enthusiasm in our living economy is like the sun in the photosyntheses process. Without it, we’d fade away and die.
Enthusiasm alone. Well, we couldn’t do a single thing with it. It’s counterproductive, unreliable, unscrupulous and failing. Enthusiasm deludes; that is, it deceives your mind and your judgment and supports your paranoid tendencies by making you think you can do it so much better than you actually can. Being over-enthusiastic easily turns into being disappointed over the very thing that once stirred up your enthusiasm. It’s one step to depression. Moreover, being non-enthusiastic often recommends you as a “cool, dispassionate professional”. Therefore, many of us simulate the lack of passion just to make it to the top of the hierarchy, while many of us simulate the enthusiasm just to make it to the next morning.
The hypocrisy of the overplayed enthusiast is just as popular as the hypocrisy of the overplayed nonenthusiast: the two wonderful extremes keep us away from social disgrace. Between these two popular situations, we can hardly say what is the “real” quantity of apathy (or passion) one can hold. These days, it’s all about finding their “social spectacle”-value and acting it out properly. Who cares if you’re a maniac or a depressive, or – oh, so often – both? Just stick to that damned scenery honey, will you???

PS: new canvas above called “Pseudo”. I tried to “overplay” an Orthodox icon.

PS2: Kent’s “Tillbaka till samtiden” got better and better with time. My first review, as you probably remember, was reserved. Today, I think that “Våga vara rädd” and “Sömnen” are modern masterpieces.

Each day we lose innumerable occasions to do and say stupid things. If you think you didn’t miss any occasion to be silly, you’re very wrong. You’re always so much better than you imagine; you struggle more than you would ever know, you love your parents more than you could ever admit to yourself, you never lie as much as it’d have to, you never laugh enough at other’s trouble, you always talk less than you could, you always care more than you show, you give almost just as much as you take, you are more grateful than ungrateful, more polite than lovesick.
What do you think would happen if someone would cast the demons, the geniuses and the idiots out of us, and would make them play, work and talk in our place?

PS: Antony Hegarty is preparing a solo-album. Some songs are going to be “normal”, as he said, while others are going to be more experimental. I would just add that no Antony-song can ever be “normal”. His vocal delivery and his texts are excellently uncommon and “abnormal” without lacking “expectancy” and harmony. And here’s the paradox of his music: unlike, say, Björk’s works, Antony’s are both expected and unexpected, accessible and hermetic.
I am so waiting for it.

so frustrating when the phone rings and rings in your upstairs neighbor’s flat nobody’s home really nobody’s there to pick up the phone and you realize how little can be done in this world

PS: ink and charcoal at the left, Antony and the Johnsons in the player, I’m sorry for this long break, imagine you have to write a dead-important project while being trampled down by the worst flu ever.

We underestimate ourselves. We think we can’t understand how, for instance, a theoretical system works, we think we don’t get the ambivalent matters, we think we shouldn’t bother with Bach, Joyce, Llosa or Laurie Anderson, we dismiss a seemingly complex explanation by calling it “studied”, we only answer the simple questions that don’t question any of the questionable matters inside or around us.

On the other hand, we overestimate our capacity of producing and receiving simplicity. It should be obvious that the clear stark things – starting with a physics formula and ending with a 3-chord-hit – have to do with the human potency of raising above the seeming intricacy of things. Simplicity is about far-sightedness and not about the cult of surface, it’s about wisdom and not about those quotidian mental tricks that make us look ridiculously self-contented while often bordering on imbecility.
…because simplicity is by all means a luxury, while complication is a daily must.

PS: New canvas with a Van Gogh-feeling: “The Water and the Sleep”.

PS2: Regina Spektor, as I often wrote it myself, is one of the most consistent examples of rigorous, yet charming complexity. But Lefsetz always says it better. Scroll down till you’ll see his review to Regina’s Begin to Hope.

…and yes, the flu got me eventually.

Our days are counted. But we don’t need the time, we need the relevance.
Live yourself up, play your clock down.

PS: Faulkner’s The Sound And the Fury was rated high during this two-week holiday. The snow and the cold were rated badly, but that’s just me I suppose. Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, Françoise Hardy and lots of strong Kenyan tea made wonders all through the long nights of mandatory relaxation. Cohen’s Book of Longing, the white wines and a psychoanalysis book on the Swedes’ reasons for committing suicide were all fun and merry.
Sketching my relatives was interesting, but completely unethical.
Ink and charcoal above.

PS2: …and by the way, it’s good to be back.