Who is Kathy?

There was always something I loved about America by Simon and Garfunkel. The music is gorgeous and the lyrics really get to me. It is basically about a bus journey through America with Paul’s former girlfriend Kathy. It’s so full of friendship, love, longing and the search for some place where all these were actually possible, where one could truly be at home. It is about personal language between lovers and friends as well as unbridgeable distance – the sweet pain of being in love and alone, because there are places within ourselves which remain inaccessible however much we share.
I love it when songs become real. It happened to me before with the lyrics of Famous Blue Raincoat by Leonard Cohen – he describes the same story in his book The Favorite Game, so when I heard the song it really struck me – “yes”, I thought, “this must have really happened.”
I just accidentally found out that also Kathy’s Song is originally by Paul Simon. I had heard some cover version before, but now it makes so much more sense. Kathy just became real for me and the bus journey must have actually happened. Apparently Kathy is also referred to in Homeward Bound. Hence three of the best S&G songs are about the same girl! So what’s the real story here?
This is what the internet comes up with:
Kathleen Mary (Kathy) Chitty and Paul Simon met at the very first coffeehouse Paul played at when he arrived in England in 1964. She was three years younger than him. Kathy apparently rarely spoke and Paul referred to her as his “friendly haiku”.
They broke up in 1965, when The Sound of Silence became a big hit. Some say that Kathy wanted no part of the success and fame that awaited Paul. How painful the breakup was? I don't know, but in May 1991, when Paul was touring England, he received a letter from Kathy, much to his delight. Kathy was married with three children and living in a remote village in the Welsh mountains, working part-time at a technical college. Despite the great interest of the British tabloids, she did not talk to the press…

Treasure is everywhere

Record shops are full of treasure. Here is a great pasttime for a rainy afternoon: Find a friend with a sense of humor, go to a second hand record shop and spend ten minutes looking for the worst album cover you can find. You and your friend will most likely end up laughing your heads off. There was a time in the 60s, 70s and 80s when quirky layouters would come up with a vast range of breathtaking adsurdities...
Take a look at Slim Goodbody - can you imagine what his music may sound like? What may the "FREE full-color activity poster" look like and what on earth would it make you do? Discoveries like this can make your day, you can bottle them up for another rainy day, a shitty everyday moment of murkiness lightened up by their vivid memory.

The music video of "I Wanna Love You Tender" by Armi & Danny is another one of those peaches. Not only is the dancing choreography ridiculously awkward and the lyrics totally naft, but I think it is the grammar that adds a pinch of grandeur ("How can I be sure you're not pretender?") to a great artwork. I want Slim Goodbody and Armi & Danny to team up! I want a music industry that cherishes quirky detail and serendipidous crappiness! I want a museum for artists like Slim Goodbody and Armi & Danny!

Nightswimming in Zanzibar

Inspired by Katy's nightswimming meditation I remembered something beautiful. In august 2001 I stayed at a small hostel on the southern east coast of Zanzibar Island, trying to relax after two exciting, mind-altering and frustrating months in Tanzania.
Zanzibar had been a myth and wonder of my childhood years. There was a German popular song about it and I had starred at its shape and name on a map of my father's comprehensive atlas of the world.
Now I was in Zanzibar, but it wasn't what I had wanted. I couldn't stay on the beach, as I couldn't bear the begging children asking me for a pen for school (their parents probably send them to generate income). I couldn't stand the tourists (of which I was one), for their lack of courtesy towards the locals. And I couldn't get to know any Zanzibaris, due to the insurmountable cultural wall between us (human interaction stripped to its bone of survival and dissipation). So I decided to bugger off back to Dar and my beloved YWCA, where I had spend two weeks talking, chatting and mingling with all sorts of people - students, development workers, tanzanian politicians and two tanzanians who became my close acquaintances.
On one of my last nights on Zanzibar something beautiful happened. We, i.e. me plus three fellow aberdonian Students whom I had been on a workcamp with and again met in Zanzibar, listened to "Nightswimming" by REM. The song had never really been that important to me before, but that night it was suddenly clear - let's go nightswimming! While the others found the idea rather awkward and went to bed, I jumped out of bed to dress bathing gear.
It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen: The sea on Zanzibar's east coast is so shallow, that you can see kelp and white sand shimmering through from below the waterline for half a mile into the sea. The sea was calm and the moon nearly full. When I stepped onto the beach I was an only soul with a vast and surreal watery patchwork carpet of white and black right before me. The moon was bright enough to see fish swimming, as if the carpet was alive. It was low tide and I waded through lukewarm water for some time, standing in the watery carpet which was all around me. I wanted to swim and kept walking into the sea, but the carpet was endless.
When I got tired I turned around. I knew something special had happened and the image stayed with me, keeping a shred of the Zanzibar wonder of my childhood years alive. I happily went back and crawled into my bed, my companions already sleeping save and sound.

Smultronstället

This morning, right after getting up and scratching my bum while looking for mail I made a discovery. There are wild strawberries growing on the little patch of garden in front of my house! Four tiny plants right under my nose, merrily sitting under a rhododendron, taking roots and making oxygen. I wonder how they got there.
Incidentally, "Wild Strawberries" by Ingmar Bergman is also one of my favorite movies. Its orginal title is "Smultronstället". It is the story of an old, pedantic, emotionally cold and detached man, looking back on a life of work and studies. He is recalling his past while travelling from Stockholm to Lund to receive a honorary degree from Lund University. During the trip, he has nightmares and daydreams about his youth, family and impending death, forcing him to reevaluate his life in order to find peace of mind. It is a beautiful and bitter-sweet, but positive movie.
The swedish word "Smultronstället" describes a place, somewhere amidst the wilderness of the swedish forest, under birch or pine, where the sun quietly touches upon a soft mossy spot to ripen wild strawberries. It also refers to a place children treasure, where they share their secrets with their friends. Bergman uses it figuratively to describe a most private place in one's own mind, where some memories and secrets, bitter and sweet, are kept. Though the movie is black and white, it has brilliant mood and color, and some images are so beautiful, I wanted to cry.
So, I'll keep watch over these four little buggers. How could I not see them in three years?