I believe there’s something scary about women who cannot make decent sandwiches.
It’s just a sandwich, you’ll say. Exactly. Just a sandwich. Just a damned sandwich; too much bread, too much ketchup, almost no ham, wrong cheese, wet salad. A simple nature is actually of no help when it comes to putting small, simple things together; because small, simple things require fine gestures; and fine gestures require precision; and precision requires adequate level of detail, that is, strong intelligence skills.
A tasteless snack easily turns into a tasteless day. Seven bad sandwiches make you crawl through your week as through a dark tunnel. 365 awful sandwiches make you get an ambiguous feeling of loss and despair. It is just that you don’t know what you lost. Or when. Or how. You’d think it’s everything but the sandwich. When, in fact, it’s nothing but it.
PS: So beautiful, from his upcoming album All Days Are Nights.
We’re fundamentally alone; and many of us are caught in our selves as in traps. This imprisonment is the closest we can get to total dissolution.
On the other hand, The Significant Other is nothing but a most significant illusion. Nevertheless, persevering in significant illusions is the closest we can get to reality.
PS: Today’s most significant illusion is „Remember me, my friend” by Justin Hayward and John Lodge (from Moody Blues!) I hope you know Blue Jays album from 1975, with “Blue Guitar” as a bonus track, it’s plain beauty.
PS2: Yesterday’s sunset, seen from my kitchen table.
Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities” – have you ever taken the time to read it?…
…Or have you ever heard of those people not really making a distinction between facts and possible facts? Musil writes about the “constructive will” of those who have a sense of possibility, those who have something divine-like, working, I would say, in reality as in plasticine clay.
For such people, Musil says, reality is a mission and an invention. On the one hand, being “down to earth” is repulsive, annoying and, paradoxically, quite inefficient. On the other hand, being “a dreamer” is inefficient, embarrassing and, paradoxically, quite miserable. But when you’re actively involved in – let’s call it – “the making of reality” – you are bound to reinvent yourself; and your house and your hopes, your boss and your town, your passions and your kids, your wife and your expectations, your sorrows and your possibilities.
Because sometimes everything’s a possible truth.
A spare day that you started the wrong way loses its structure and freedom completely. There’s nothing you can do anymore. That day, you weren’t free, you were slave. That day served you no more; you served it instead: yes Master, and please Master, and right away Master.
The only way to deal with your spare day is win it or lose it right from its start.
A spare day – or even worse, a holiday – has no basis in reality, it’s a chimera, a most deceiving time-space configuration, a non-existent Promised Land which gets a lot of credit and raises a lot of interest precisely because of its implausibility. There’s nothing easier than missing the point of your holiday. There’s nothing more probable than collapsing in boredom, on your own money, in some far-away exotic place.
Waiting for your spare time to “do it for you” is like sitting and contemplating your wish lists; but wish lists don’t carry any inner qualities, just more or less improper ambitions, and a huge disappointment potential. If they make you, you lose. If you make them, there is hope for further strategic planning and action.
For a start, take into account the very essence of freedom: win over your spare day. Be the master of your weekend.
PS: I desperately tried to find Antony Hegarty‘s studio version of “Perfect Day” on YouTube. No success. I would however avoid recommending the live version (sung, of course, with Lou Reed) because the whole point with such a popular (and inevitably worn-out) song is to be heard in a wholly different context. Antony and The Johnsons version (with beautiful and totally unexpected arrangements) is out of this world. Take my word for it. For the moment, watch this instead. It’s the single “Aeon” from the latest highly pretentious (and cosmological) album The Crying Light. (personally, I still prefer their previous I am a bird now.)
Somebody told me it’s hard, if not impossible, to find a woman to sing about nowadays. I believed him.
It may sound politically incorrect, but there is a price to pay for the blossoming equality between genders: popular music has become free of great sung-about female figures. The dominant “pop narratives” about ladies are either way beyond the norm (that is excessively – and impersonally – sexual), or way beyond the limit of any listener’s patience (that is, not only boring, but also…external to the referent).
Where is crazy, money-less, messy-haired Rosemary and where is Queen Bitch who can always do it if she says she can do it? Where have all the Chelsea girls gone and what happened to the ladies of the road? And why not let Her Majesty remain silent since she doesn’t have a lot to say anyway?
