A while ago, fellow blogger Vanille and her husband Paprika came over from N.Z. for a visit and I met up with them. As we toured the city together, conversation turned to music. I’m always interested in what other people’s taste in music is and we pledged to swap some music that we like, to turn each other onto something new and not on commercial radio (in Oz and N.Z. at least).

Vanille is from France and Paprika is from Hungary, so I knew they’d send me some stuff I’d never heard before. Today as I pounded and grated for what seemed like hours, I listened to the Bobana Markovica Orchestra and it struck me how perfect the music was for what I was doing, even though I was preparing Asian food.

Sorry for not posting for so long. I’ve been sorting out my study and organising a trip to Bali. My disorganised and messy study has been driving me nuts for the last couple of years and I’ve finally gotten around to getting rid of a lot of old clutter and buying new office furniture.

At the moment, there seems to be so many other things to do besides blogging.

I’ll be back soon, and until then I give you this.

The first post that I saw on her blog contained the following quote by William Wordsworth, “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should see sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” With the text was a photo from the war in Cambodia of young Khmer Rouge soldiers. Although the post was fairly short, and on the surface, very simple, it put the finger on something I’ve been grappling with for some time.

I would say that one of the things that has characterised my life is poor impulse control.

I remember about 12 years ago, I was crossing a rather wide and busy road that had some construction work with low barriers in the middle. I quickly walked across, and as I neared the barriers I broke into a run to vault over them, but for some reason I hesitated and stopped at the barrier, which was a good thing because there was a 10 metre (about 30ft) drop onto the road of a tunnel that was being constructed below. Every now and again I remember this incident and it nearly makes me sick to think how close I came to either death or at the very least, serious harm.

It’s not just the near misses I’ve had with physical dangers that make me wince with horror, it’s also some of the thoughtless things that I’ve done socially. 

Over the last decade or so, I’ve been trying to control my urge to charge into judgement and conflict with other people, by holding back, and trying to think about another’s position. Once in a while my hesitation has saved me from embarrassment and anguish as further information has come to light. Just like the near miss at the road barrier, the thought of how close I’ve come to trampling over other people’s feelings has made me mentally groan with white hot shame at how my instincts can be so hair-triggered and so wrong.

In his very famous book,  ”How to Win Friends and Influence People”, Dale Carnegie uses as an example, Bruno Hauptmann’s (the guy that was sentenced to death for the abduction and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s baby back in 1932) opinion of himself as a basically decent person (it has been since argued by some, that he was innocent).  I suspect that the point that Carnegie was trying to make, was that for most people there is some kind of justification that they can use to rationalise their motivation to do things, that others would think of as wrong.

This takes me back to the Wordsworth quote at the beginning of this post and how it reminded me of how it can be instructive to try and see why other people have the “stance” that they do, and to try and figure out what their motivations are. 

As I was thinking about these matters, Depeche Mode’s song, “Walking in My Shoes” started to play in my mind.

“I would tell you about the things
They put me through
The pain I’ve been subjected to
But the Lord himself would blush
The countless feasts laid at my feet
Forbidden fruits for me to eat
But I think your pulse would start to rush

Now I’m not looking for absolution
Forgiveness for the things I do
But before you come to any conclusions
Try walking in my shoes
Try walking in my shoes

You’ll stumble in my footsteps
Keep the same appointments I kept
If you try walking in my shoes
If you try walking in my shoes

Morality would frown upon
Decency look down upon
The scapegoat fate’s made of me
But I promise now, my judge and jurors
My intentions couldn’t have been purer
My case is easy to see

I’m not looking for a clearer conscience
Peace of mind after what I’ve been through
And before we talk of any repentance
Try walking in my shoes
Try walking in my shoes”

I was discussing with Pat (via e-mail) how I like loud music, bright colours and spicy foods. In short, just about anything that couldn’t be described as moderate. We were also talking about consumerism, mental health (Pat is a retired psychologist) and cultural dissonance.

To me this song is a great adjunct to our conversation.

The singer Poly Styrene (real name, Marian Elliott) in the video below was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and sectioned (put in a mental hospital) after having a vision of a pink light in the sky and felt objects crackling when she touched them. Turned out she was bipolar.

Turn the sound up and brace youself for one of the best songs to come out of the whole punk movement!

I clambered over mounds and mounds
Of polystyrene foam
And fell into a swimming pool
Filled with fairy snow
And watched the world turn day-glo
you know you know
The world turned day-glo you know

I wrenched the nylon curtains back
As far as they would go
And peered through perspex window panes
At the acrylic road

I drove my polypropolene
Car on wheels of sponge
Then pulled into a wimpy bar
To have a rubber bun

The X-rays were penetrating
Through the laytex breeze
Synthetic fibre see-thru leaves
Fell from the rayon trees

Regular readers of this blog know I’m not a fan of palaces. Neuschwanstein, yet another monument to one man’s utter cluelessness and bad taste, left me cold, but I did enjoy the surroundings.

Say what you like about mad King Ludwig II, but he certainly owned some nice real estate.

As I looked out at the view from one Ludwigs balconies, I found myself thinking about Wagner and his music.

Anybody who knows anything about Wagner, knows he was an odious little creep as a human being, but as far as I’m concerned, he sure captured a sense of the landscape around Neuschwanstein in his music.

Here’s a two part video of Karajan conducting one of my favourite Wagner pieces, the overture from the opera Tannhäuser.

During breakfast this morning, I waded through the newspaper as I ate.

The front pages were full of the tragic news and images from the Haiti earthquake. Horrific things that seem so remote in distance and meaning when looked at in the context of my comfortable life. Each day as I make my way to the crosswords and sodoku, I expose myself to the world wide miseries that the media serves up to us to help feed our insatiable need to be in a constant state of schadenfreude.

Before I reach my puzzles, there is the last hurdle of the obituaries. With a mind that had been clubbed numb by the all the sad things that had been written about Haiti, I read this morning that one of my favourite singers, Lshasa de Sela had died of breast cancer on the 1st of January this year.

Translated lyrics of “De Cara a la Pared” ( Crying face to the wall)

Haiti left me feeling numb, but news of Lasha’s death brought tears to my eyes.

I haven’t posted for a week now because I’ve been giving my brain a rest from all the over stimulation it’s had over the last several months.

Yep, the silly season is upon us and the last couple of weeks have been a blur of socialisation as I’ve been catching up with friends I haven’t seen for awhile. I’ve thrown a few dinner parties since I’ve been back, but for some strange reason, I didn’t take any photos or put up some new recipes. I guess I’m a little, “blogged out”, but never fear (those of you who care), I’ll be putting up plenty of stuff over the next few days.

So in the meantime I want to share, “Sleep On Needles” by Sondre Lerche which I’ve been listening to at high volume in the car. It’s a bit folksy pop that goes grunge and then tips it’s hat to Phil Spector and Motown by a Norwegian baby faced kid!

It’s such a product of this post modern age we live in, that borrows from anywhere and doesn’t really care that much about context (which, by the way, is fine with me). 　

One video though, stands out and has caught our attention and it’s of the Barcelona band “Macaco” and their song “Tengo” which is on high rotation at the moment.

So I thought I’d share with you some contemporary music from Spain. The video shown here isn’t the original shown on TV but a video made by a guy called Chan Chan that has various people miming the words and having a generally good time.

The streets are crowded with revellers, hawkers and street performers. Last night we came across Pedro Collares playing the hang. The hang looks like cross between a gamelan and a wok but it sounds a like cross between a tim drum and a dulcimer. Here’s a video from Youtube showing Pedro playing in Barcelona. Unfortunately it doesn’t do justice to the musician or the instrument.