Good intentions move me to tears.

Those little gestures you encounter in quotidian life may turn your day into a little hell or a little heaven. You suddenly realize that, as a poor, faded human being living in a hopelessly crowded city, your wellbeing entirely depends on those tiny bits of benevolence or hostility emitted by the “social body”.

Days, weeks, or even months may pass without even a single benevolent gesture to radiate from this huge, increasingly hostile and increasingly hopeless mass of people. It looks like my co-citizens have no idea how to metabolize the otherness, let alone produce favorable gestures that could ease everybody’s pain of being in the traffic, in a queue at a post office, in one’s own flat. No, there is nowhere to hide from an actively produced hatred and a killing bass pumping up through the walls.

I am, you may think, pathetic and immature because I see a sufficient reason for crying in the slightest sign of human generosity. OK, perhaps I tend to misuse my inclination for drama (for a “lousy” purpose like writing a Monday blog article). But I dare say I’m not immature. The most prominent feature of maturity is a wise management of the self, and a (minimal) courage of being in the world. And yes, asking for (and producing) a benevolent gesture has really become a matter of courage. And an unique sign of responsible maturity.

I’m not talking about resonant charity actions, goodwill organizations and other pompous evidence of agape; all these can surely guarantee a happier humankind, but will never change the tiniest bit of my/your being in the everyday world. No philanthropic act can ever bring a non-professional smile on the cashier’s face. She has this grotesque grimace on her face for weeks. No, for months. She seems to be in great pain. This morning, I was brave enough to smile to her. I helped her with the exchange. She was greatly vexed. She felt harassed. I gave up.

An – either defensive or offensive – indifference is the newly discovered art of being in the world. It fits the modern (coward, egomaniacal and superficial) man like a glove. Actually is a trademark of the late modern cosmology. Meanwhile, I trade this useless, banal blog post for one single tiny brave gesture of kindness produced right now, right here, in my dusty, overheated, crowded, asphyxiated neighborhood. I trade the entire rhetorics of loving kindness for a glass of water.

PS: New canvas above. I got used with painting on very large canvases. It takes considerable time and energy, but, what the hack, I’ve never been an energy-savior. It’s called “Selfportrait with Dead Hare”. Fortunately, the actual canvas looks considerably better than the picture.

PS2: And this one comes straightly from the Gods of Rock. Nothing you haven’t seen yet, but certainly something you’ll be happy to see again.

PS3: If someone wonders, the title of this post is also known as a lovely song by Nick Lowe…

I’ve recently read an interview with Gianni Vattimo. He said that he would gladly let his kids in the care of someone who has read the same books as he did. I liked the statement. I immediately embraced it. Why? Well, mostly because everything I know I’ve learned from books. Life has been a terrible teacher to me. And I, in response, have been a lousy pupil, trying to do as little homework as possible.

I’m not a bookworm, no. And I don’t normally trust a bibliophile, particularly because I find his (or her) way of approaching books 1. too compulsive, 2. too submissive, and 3. too much of an alibi for overlooking his or her existential commitments. Excessive reading is, at the end of the day, an excess. Like any other excess, is not only dishonourable and embarrassing, but also the sign of some psychological mismanagement.

So who am I to put books before life and still escape from “bookworm” label? I dare say I make an intimate, deliberate option for every single book I read. I refuse to “feed” myself with books (as I often hear people saying), I refuse to “pass time” with reading, I refuse to “devour” good literature and essential theoretical writings with the guilty appetite of a lady on diet who has just found the chocolate cake well-hidden in the fridge, in a hot, lonely summer night. I say NO to chaotic reading. For me, a book is an existential choice; neither an abstract, nor a compulsive requirement. It may sound like a lousy slogan, but a well-read good book is a chance for a better and more meaningful living. It’s the right antidote not only for a lazy mind, but also for a lethargic spirit that couldn’t, perhaps, prove itself in the warm, comforting mediocrity of day-to-day living. This is another commonsensical observation, I know. But no less important.

The real lives are not always designed to challenge their owners. Some don’t know how to change that. However most people wouldn’t dare life to their limits. A few have tried though. And most of them failed. And here comes the right book or the right author. Like, for instance, exposing yourself to virtues and vices through Dostoevsky’s writings. Or get to the core of love with Shakespeare and y Gasset. Get lost with Kafka and Nietzsche, or experience women’s labyrinthine reasoning with Balzac and de Montherlant. You’d have to live long and painfully in order to experience (and turn to good use!) all those “living tricks” available in books.

An “uncultivated” person is, before anything else, someone who fails to recognize the subtleties of the world he lives in. Someone who, generically, does not understand. Someone who cannot put his finger on his less obvious experiences, and however cannot imagine anything that’s not obvious. He betrays himself by ignoring all those ingenious hints that life throws at him. He, instead, thinks that life is worth living when someone throws something tangible to him, something like a bone, a stone, or a party. All in all, he does not know how to handle the infinitesimal quantities of daily grace.

To come to an end, I think that people these days learn, read and write enormously – from blogs to treatises, from huge exam materials to desiccated scientific magazines. It’s a kind of sick, static and fanatic interest for all possible “intellectual” actions. But any vocation is gone. And what a painful lack of criteria! Indeed, the moment we forgot how to live, we forgot how to read.

PS1: I went to bed 4.30 am this morning because I had to finish the above painting. After a couple of weeks of work. For someone with an advanced age and tight schedule like me, this is a plain disaster. A bad week starter. A nightmare at 34 degrees. The painting is larger than me and it is called “Bad Morning”. Obviously…

PS: I get mad whenever I play good music for someone – and I expect that music to change a tiny bit of his life – while he suddenly starts talking over my playlist. It’s like he’d trample his chance for a better living…I know, I know, the tyranny of good intentions… However, give up to lovely Mitchell performing “Case of You”.

Le relatif, c’est les autres.

(which means, in English: l’objectivité, c’est nous-mêmes).

PS: a self-made-Sega at the left. Straight from a wet – and surely enigmatic – India.

PS2: “I’m Good, I’m Gone”, acoustic. Wonderful. Heja Lykke Li.

People these days want to get a tan at any price. It’s like it won’t be officially summer until they’ll officially have it on their skin. They would do literally anything to become tanned. From carrots, pills, self-tanning lotions and tanning salons to laying down in the sun where and when you least expect it. The more UV exposure you’re getting, the more popular (ergo: wanted) you become.

Hard to say where the tanning-religion comes from. Perhaps it was brought by the Baywatch gods who taught the mortals a couple of tricks about how to get by in this world of loisir (to put it otherwise, how to save your emotional life on a beach). However, the despair, the panic, the anxiety of those who fail to get a tan equals the terror of archaic people who fail to fulfill their deities commands. They expect more interdictions to follow, they expect physical punishment, they expect a mortal disease or, worse, they expect excommunication. I can easily imagine the ghostly silhouette of a pale young girl, protecting her freckled face and shoulders, being excommunicated from a sunny terrace by the sea in the booing of her own religious kinship group who venerates sun and string bikini.

Nothing compares to the force of the prejudices vehiculated within your cultural and historical context. NO cognitive endeavor, don’t matter how well endorsed, can EVER offer existential certainties. You feel safe as long as you’re in good terms with what’s happening under THIS sun. You live or die to the terms of this summer. So get your sunscreen NOW, or move on Pluto.

PS: “It’s Not Only Rock ‘n Roll, Baby!”, a story of art and music, is an art show held at Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, beginning with this Friday. I would so want to attend this event featuring David Byrne, Antony (Hegarty), Pattie Smith, Yoko Ono and so many other artists I love!

I went biking through town this afternoon. And guess what I saw. A housemaid! You know, like those you see in 4-star hotels, carrying a fancy dust pan, wearing a black mini skirt, white maid apron, and high coiffure. Like FRAN, THE NANNY!

First, I couldn’t believe my eyes. She was slowly walking through the little yard in front of a nice – but rather average house – gracefully carrying her dust pan, checking the bushes, contemplating the sky, enjoying the lime-tree scent, and well, just like a real maid, taking her time. I was overwhelmed. Impressed. Deeply moved. I thought it’s indelicate to slow down and stare, so I didn’t. But I couldn’t take my mind off her.

Half an hour later, I thought it’s safe and decent to come back. Apparently the “master” and his BMW came home. He was busy getting stuff out of his black car. The radio was on. He was short, stuffed and bold, but rather young. He wore shorts and flip-flops and some mobile wireless headphones. So this guy has a maid? OK. Nothing to argue about. Nothing unusual. Bucharest has it all and I’ve definitely seen worse. But this guy really wants his maid to dress like a maid and wear sophisticated coiffures and walk around through the yard carrying her dust pan so that every passerby could see her and have lamentable sexual fantasies featuring a maid apron? Now that‘s unusual. And obscene. And frightening. The most exquisite bad taste ever encountered. One of the most hilarious forms of political correctness fiasco. A hit below the belt of common sense. A phantasm, in the most Freudian sense of the word, and a joke, in the most “Seinfeldian” sense of the word. A nonsense and a failure, from any other perspective.

While the maid was bringing the garbage cans in from the road, I was watching her. And he was watching her. The garbage cans and her maid apron were both shining in the sun. Her coiffure was firm though. It’s essential for the readers to remember that the lime-tree scent was intense. And that the radio was on.

Nevertheless, they may forget I was raptured and sad. Just like, I assume, a non-professional voyeur.

PS: I had a deep Beatles-feeling today. I’ll keep it alive all through the weekend. Revolver and Sgt. Pepper stay on top.

…as one of my characters puts it: “who cares about facts and weather forecast when I have my opinion?“

PS: With Velvet Underground in the iPod, a Rorty book in my hand and plenty of doubt in my heart, I throw myself against this day of mid-June, as if I’d throw myself against a wall. I’ll tear it down eventually.

The pathology of confidence. We all suffer from it. We distrust everybody; especially the opposite sex; and primarily our mothers; and ourselves.

Here in my world people get a divorce, leave Europe for India, never follow doctor’s advice, live in bizarre love triangles, don’t go voting, underestimate their children, overestimate their pets, always check their bills twice, distrust everybody who doesn’t have a 9-to-5 job, never rely on a second-hand car, always carry a large amount of cash, never count on their parents’ help or on anybody’s words whatsoever, doubt the winner and discredit the virtues, fear death and despise time.

Everywhere you look, love and trust are being drawn aside, just like a curtain, leaving open access to a frightening landscape of latent hostility; a twisting knife in the heart of a puzzled, dislocated modernity.

PS1: “Asia” above. A charcoal recently done.

PS 2: I wish I have more time for music. Unfortunately I don’t. My ambitious “stag-project” (part of it can be seen in a picture below) is far from being finished. My painting is slow. My writing is slow. I am, by nature, too dynamic to put up with myself these days. I can’t forgive my lack of inspiration. So no iPod today. Just an obsessive hum, a contagious Donna Summer chorus heard on the radio some time ago. It haunted me the whole morning: a convincing hint of holyday that somehow reached my worn out sensibility.

PS 3: Oh, but how could I forget about Scarlett Johansson’s cover album?! Lend an eye and an ear. She came as a wonderful musical surprise. For me at least.

Time spins frighteningly fast. Yes, it spins. Haven’t you got the carousel-feeling ? Same words, same faces, same thoughts, same sounds, but faster. Over and over again. Till you get nausea. Till you drop. Then something new comes up – a story or a man or a song or a disaster, and, just like a stick placed in a spinning wheel, it makes the mechanism hesitate.

But minutes after such accident happens, the wheel will go on spinning; time has no time for distinctive, isolated events that make certain moments look important and static; time makes everything look inessential, dispensable, worn out. A never ending, irrelevant déjà vécu. Faster, faster. Over and over again.

We have less and less power over this spinning carousel; or over anything else around us and inside us. We won’t even survive the systems of daily relations we entered in. It’s not that we’re existentially humble or socially unskillful by nature, it is just that we’ve lost the sense of sight. Of contemplation.

Therefore we spin on. Till time will drop us. Half way down, we’ll perhaps finally get a grip on all those distinct, exquisite moments we’ve once run through.

PS: I was running through my Kent collection lately. And through the latest Rufus Wainwright. I like Release the Stars (2007) more and more. Every new listening brings a new impression. Take “Tulsa” for instance. Such emphatic sophistication, such pose, such pomp, such sensitivity. Wainwright is my hero.