You roll on day after day after day, purposeful, absorbed, determined, as if you’d know something essential about yourself. But but the truth is you don’t. You’ve got a pretty good knowledge of your goals and successes, so you expect them to validate you as an person, as a  citizen, as a hard-worker, but the truth is they don’t.

A most intimidating mystery lies between what you do, and what you are; and when you go to bed, you love to unfold “your story”, always starting from the end to the beginning, from the applause all the way to… Oh, you fall asleep before reaching the start.

PS: One of my favorites from the new Charlotte Gainsbourg‘s IRM: “Time of the Assassins”. Extremely well-written, balanced melody and so discretely – yet convincing- sung.

PS2: this post has a side-story. Here it is.

God bless delusions  and other deceptions.

Not everything – or everybody – is seriously real; which sometimes makes the game of living look like dancing with ghosts.

I have once read a great, “old-fashioned” (today underrated) book written by a penetrating French scholar coming from the old school of anthropology; Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was his name – and wait, don’t go away, it’s just a side-note! – he wrote about the mystical thinking of archaic people. The usual greeting among the members of a tribe (can’t remember its name) was the following one: “Are you dead or alive?”. You can imagine one could safely reply “I’m dead” and then go on chatting about the weather.

Now, we’re different. We don’t ask such questions. We live dangerously. We still don’t know who’s dead and who’s alive, who’s of flash and who’s of stone, but we, at least, grew accustomed with wearing similar clothes; and sunglasses. That helps a great deal in concealing one’s real living-degree.

Illusions, trees, birds, monsters, girls, guys, gentlemen and pets -we’re all taking it easy behind sunglasses from where we can safely love movies, French fries, sex, cars, and Prada.

PS: Kate Bush is unique. She makes “comprehensive” music so to speak. That takes some person. And some talent. Occasionally, I dare say, she’s too overwhelming. Other times, she’s straightly incomprehensible. And some others, it feels like she’d unwrap a musical miracle right in front of me. Vehement sensuality in “Feel it“ (from The Kick Inside) and ethereal hints “Mrs. Bartolozzi“ (from Aerial) I never seem to get tired of these two.

All things that didn’t happen are actually impossible.

PS: The whole EP collection of The Kinks is something that I can’t stop from playing.

…but  there are, of course, many other – oblique – ways of approaching emotionality.

Emotional inner turmoils often have a corroding impact over our daily social life.  It’s in the way we park cars, deliver lectures, perform songs, and pour coffee. And it’s not always pleasant to the eye. We are getting burlesque when we least expect it. Burlesque,  grotesque, and, after all, recognizable to anyone.

Our neighbors know a lot more about our inappropriate gestures and grimaces than we ourselves do; they must have seen it in our early gloomy “good morning”‘s and in our late hazy “good night”s. We’re unconventional, disturbing or subversive in innumerable, uncontrollable ways, and we’ve been unintentionally putting up embarrassing, personal shows for everyone out there. Such shows are of course beyond the audience’s  immediate understanding and acceptance; but it’s what people secretly love most: monkey business!

Everything that doesn’t fit, all the stuff resembling nothing so much as a tribute to frailty and failure is here to get the troubled monkey out of us.

PS: Something in my post sends me back to a reading I thought I have completely left behind in my very early twenties: Henri Bergson’s theory of laughter; and now I wonder whether that book is still considered useful; or interesting; or fun. And do I still have it somewhere?…

PS2: Everyone’s favorite combo at the moment: Lovett & Hiatt! The era of credible, brilliant singer-songwriters is fading away for good. I thought that popular culture and fashion are ultimately reversible, but are they really? Look at Lady Gaga and her – let’s call them – postpop attempts.  She “deconstructed” some trivial cliches, rearranged them in a shocking manner and called herself a freak. Some even called her a genius. She’s just a moderately smart (yet very talented and ambitious) musician who succeeded in getting the fools, the half-witted snobs, the high school drama queens and other accidental music lovers to believe that she delivers a complex and charmingly decadent perspective on music, fashion and art in general. I could have maybe enjoyed Gaga’s brilliant videos, live performances, and perfectly pathetic pop hooks had people been more moderate in their praise for her. Oh well.

A superb way to measure how much “life” a certain day holds: “count” your goose bumps.

My inner emotional counter, for instance, has recorded a November day in 2004 when the “down for you is up”-line from Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes” inspired my first charcoals.

Our emotional memorabilia is all we are allowed to keep. Our other days have already turned to sand; even those that are yet to be lived.

PS: Leonard Cohen singing “Memories” for the Germans, in 1979. I wish I was there!!

I made this pie on Saturday only to realize this is a typical Wednesday pie that has nothing to do with the weekend, but may look and taste as if heaven-sent during any of your bad weekdays. So make sure you add the following to your tomorrow’s grocery list: graham whole wheat flour, canned tuna fish, baking soda, butter, baby spinach, garlic, olive oil, basil, goat cheese or brie, 3 tomatoes, milk, eggs,  pepper.

Preparing the dough (just a thin layer):

Set the oven at 200 degrees. You basically mix in a bowl 3 cups and a half of flour, about 100 g of butter, one table spoon of baking soda, half cup of milk and half cup of water. Make sure the dough is soft enough to handle and stretch easily in a thin layer (see the pictures below). Keep it in the oven for 10 minutes.

So you have 10 minutes to prepare the first part of the filling:

Keep the spinach (200 g will do) for about 30 seconds in a bit of boiling water, add about 10 cloves of garlic (that’s a lot, I know…) finely chopped, olive oil, basil,  salt. Stir. Then add fish and tomatoes (chopped or sliced, whatever it works for you). Set aside.

Now it’s time to see what the pie crust is doing (it should be  yellow already). Take it off the oven anyway. Spread the spinach filling all over it. Put it back for 20 minutes more.

Mix in a bowl: 2 eggs, about 350g of goat cheese/brie, a bit of milk, pepper to taste. Add the mix on top of the pie and shove it back into the oven for yet another 10 minutes.

Eat it. You’ll love it; and you’ll never again long for the weekend to come.

Nothing is too childish for a grown-up person.

There just aren’t enough silly things on earth for men and for women to do. They would do them all. They would even go back to intrauterine habits, only if they could. If they can, they gladly skip normal nutrition and articulate words, “how do you do”s and normal walk, reasonable demands and discreet physiology.

The real fun starts from where they are however unable to forget the long, hard years spent with learning intricate social tricks and seduction devices involving dance, irony, mascara, refined lies, silk underwear, Calvin Klein perfumes, dismissing gestures, gastronomy, false naivetés and Kama Sutra.

…and the overlapping is hilarious, it’s beyond belief, it’s the drooling baby crawling on the floor euphorically babbling about sexual revolution and social democracy.

PS: And, of course, new painting is up. It’s called “Mind Games”, oil on canvas, 120 cm/100 cm.  It took me a month, 10 hours work/day to see it done. I never painted with such small, delicate strokes and I seriously question my ability (and will) to ever do it again. However, I dare say the real canvas looks better than the pictures I’ve taken. Don’t bid for this if you’re broke.

PS2: This fabulous video of The Sonics circulated gracefully on notorious social media a week ago. Can’t stop playing it since then.

PS3: The latest evening-ish phone picture is uploaded just for the sake of the trend; to be more specific, I was told it carries an “Avatar”-feeling. (Believe it or not, I saw the movie. It was so spectacularly bad, it made us all cringe and cry.)