a worrying thing.

tonight, dear reader, your favourite blogger has finished reading an absolutely awful ethnomusicological book about chinese musique concrete. there is nothing even remotely interesting about chinese musique concrete, so it shall remain a mystery how the kraut lesbo author managed to write 400 pages’ worth of pseudo-intellectual ranting about it.

there also isn’t anything even remotely interesting about me, which is far worse in the grand scheme of things. nothing ever happens, and the nothingness of these recent months makes me think that, perhaps, nothing ever really happened in the past either. was i ever happy? was i ever ’so happy together’ with someone? was my life once, if not exciting, at least moderately appealing?

in the end, though, these questions are not of grand importance either. some say all we have is now, and i’d politely advise them to get out of my sight before hell breaks loose. some say all we have is the past, but the past is just that, and maybe i have already spent too much time with blurring visions of how things, possibly, once used to be, of how i used to live.

so if we don’t take the past into account and evaluate the present for what it is (an endless succession of ‘now’s that never really come to be), we are left with the assumption that all we have is, indeed, the future. and that, dear reader, is a worrying thing.

i somehow do not think there will be much of a future to enjoy for me. the likelihood of things staying the way they are is astronomically high, which is better than, say, having to herd cows in the darfur flatlands for a living, but still incrementally worse than other people’s lives and, consequently, fates.

i do not see what could change the way things are right now; i do not see how i am going to keep myself from going really insane (not the milquetoast insanity of last autumn, that might well just have been a teaser for things yet to come); i do not see what could stop me from becoming a spinster; i do not see how i could ever keep any job that goes beyond cauliflower quality control at a dinky, albanian-run entrepot in darkest norfolk; and, worst of all, i do not see how i can do anything about all these inevitable, stone-cast certainties anymore.

i probably could have turned things around a while ago; it might still have been possible around october or november, but now, dear reader, it is much too late. so, take my hand and off we stride, sha la la. i’m a girl and you’re a boy, sha la la la la. the rest of ’sheila take a bow’ is much too painful to write down here, and i’m not going to find the one i love (and he’ll love me-e-e-e) by going out, if at all.

oh, things have undoubtedly been worse. but when things were worse i usually wasn’t resigned to the course of events. the whole situation might not look bad on the surface, but if i was less well-raised and inhibited, and would show real emotions, you’d carry me off to the museum edvard munch’s the scream was stolen from, greedy for rewards and all, before i could say ‘i think i’m going to stay monumentally depressed for the rest of my life’.

***

wouldn’t it be ironic if i went insane right after writing the first half-decent nouveau roman about a flemish suburban spinster going bonkers? it’s exactly the kind of laughable, pathetic coincidence that would have a chance to happen in real life.

 

psychocandy by david shrigley.

“only love can pull you through
the way you have been feeling
but there is no love
there is just interior design
and furniture.”

kim hiorthoy and other games we play.

so on thursday evening we went to this free kim hiorthoy concert. it was surprisingly good, accompanied by strange visuals (at least the support act was; there was this old girl painting aquarels to the beat of this music, and some weird camera contraption somehow captured the images live and projected them on two really big screens on both sides of the concert hall. tres arty.)

apart from that, i don’t seem to remember much (indian cigarettes, eh), but hiorthoy sure put on really groovy versions of my last day’s eleven indietronica masterpieces. and we danced, dear reader, oh, how we danced!

the light effects were pretty too. then i crashed on charlotte’s couch and somehow woke up there after a horrible dream in which i stole a big yacht with the malicious intent to sail it to the spice islands, and start a new life there under another name, surrounded by indigenous surfer boys of loose morale (and scarcely dressed in miu miu’s summer collection).

however, and predictably, that’s not the way things went. my yacht got caught up in a typhoon, and when the storm had passed i found myself on a rather desolate ryukyu island with only one inhabitant, king kong’s nastier cousin.

even in dreams my escapism is fatally flawed.

distortion, bloody distortion.

sad, bouncy songs. insanity. battleaxes. zsa zsa gabor. when liquor is what’s for breakfast, lunch and dinner. shirley simms singing like she’s just had twenty quaaludes and was dragged to the studio by her hair (at gunpoint). a lot of distortion.
yes, reader love, the magnetic fields have a new album. and it’s good. and it’s the first thing to surface from stephin merritt’s main (and best) project in four years.

disclaimer: i still wish stephin would kidnap susan amway, persuade her growing cranberries isn’t the best she can do and make her sing his beautiful songs again, but all in all and nevertheless, distortion deserved a small celebratory photoshoot.

doom and gloom and dirges.

it’s easy to see why some like their opiates served up in church (naive), others get obsessed with money and a ‘career’ (loathsome), and others still turn to family life (ill-advised). i myself fancy real opiates, but anyway…

our collective insignificance is just so overwhelming. there is nothing to be gained by going down this road, i know, and i should turn back at once, i know that too; but what i don’t know is what i’m still doing here when i’m not even… not even moderately amused or pleased by it all.

once upon a time, in a long-gone land far from the western european seaboard, anyone who wanted to ponder about the meaning of life was cordially invited to perch him-/herself on top of a handsome, tall pillar for the remainder of his/her existence, and start pondering away. in return, the locals would assure a steady stream of cakes and tea (or rather olives and retsina wine, this is the byzantine empire we’re talking about).

now this sounds alluring. why should one still get out of bed each morning, try to dress agreeably, try to be friendly to a rather large collection of asinine, inane strangers over the course of that very day, try not to be too tired after a day at the university and try to spend the evening in a nice enough way? why? i don’t see why, really. is there really anything gained by going down this socially condoned road? anything lasting?

i would rather not spend my energy pointlessly and instead devote my life to… em. building a handsome, old-fashioned, doric column? check! reading the collected works of rosamond lehmann and her literary school of 1920s spinsters on top of the pillar i wrought with my own hands? check! gazing down contemptuously on the very villagers who provide me with frangipane cakes and earl grey tea? check!

the road to insanity is steep and slippery, and i seem to have a bobsled. i can’t even seem to describe this dreaded feeling of insignificance that makes me want to pursue a, hopefully fruitful, career in the noble building trade. ta for now, dear reader. i’m going to pretend it’s 1920. laudanum is still sold over the counter and the twenty-first century was just a hysterical nightmare i once had (tres david mitchell, that).
.

all things bright and beautiful.

exams finished and all. i think they were a complete disaster, but then again, the last time i thought i did even remotely well at anything was probably in 1997.

so, your hero is feeling the heat of his seemingly perpetual depression again. i am waiting for a force majeure to come crashing in; a nuclear holocaust would be particularly welcome.

it’s a pity there aren’t any square-jawed soviets sitting in front of dangerous-looking red buttons and those odd, flimsy computers the communist bloc had around anymore. right now life would seem somewhat more tolerable if there was a fair possibility of it being abruptly ended by something out of a glum, run-down siberian silo.

oh well. foucault said it, and said it well: il y a des moments dans la vie où la question de savoir si on peut penser autrement qu’on ne pense et percevoir autrement qu’on ne voit est indispensable pour continuer à regarder ou à réfléchir… and this is definitely one of those. (la question est bien celle-ci: si bien je pouvais penser autrement que je ne pense, cher michel, et ce soit honteux qu’on aura jamais une quelconque réponse, ou bien qu’elle me parviendrait trop tard de toute facon.)

a portrait of a web 2.0 child wrapped up in jackets:

i shall leave you, for now, with these sybilline words. hopefully they mean more to you than they do to me (that is, not one iota). i might quite possibly need… some sleep and a bit less doom and gloom.