maupuia calling

So I vacilate. Between wanting to blaze with fire and passion and actually make all these ideas I have happen, and sitting here, or there, struck mute and motionless and overwhelmed by all I have to do. Sitting here playing, of all things, online poker.

It is, of course, an ongoing thing. Something just above mediocrity snatched from the jaws of achievement.

I don’t know why. Afraid to succeed sound just too trite, but there’s an element of that. Don’t just do something, cos it has to be, you know, really really good, and it’s never really really good in the act of starting. I mean how could it be - it’s just a start.

Also, and this post is a prime example, an inability to actually concentrate on a single thing. It’s a post-modern, web-enabled and 2.0 thing. A not entirely welcome mash-up of distractions, siren-calling to me with the promise of something just a little more appealing than what I’m currently doing.

Occasionally though, something so godamm beautiful distracts you that it knocks mere earth-bound concerns from your mind.

And leaves you, eventually, able to finish at least this. And leaves you with the sense of someone so full and bursting - words, music, trumpets and static, tumbling and pushing and overunning each other - with whatever it is they can’t keep inside any longer. And leaves you with the sense of possibilities able to be rendered full and alive.

I’m been listening over the past few days to Pitchforkmedia’s “Top 200 songs of the 60s“. Actually, for some reason I can only find 199 of them - I haven’t quite got the ID3 tag down pat and so there’s one song floating around on my Ipod that I haven’t tagged like all the others. Oh well! (more…)

All the reviews I’ve read of Arcade Fire’s “Funeral” have had a kinda trite review of the last (stunning) album track, “In the back seat“. They’ve said things like, “it’s about remembering childhood and riding in the back seat” , and, “it’s a lovely song about being a child”.

It’s not. (more…)

The downside to downloading is that there’s nothing physical. You get bits stored on your computer, loaded into your iPod and that’s it. All of which is wonderful and transforming of course. In the past year I’ve downloaded thousands of songs from bands and singers I’d never heard, or only heard of, or always wanted to hear, or heard once but never again.  (more…)