Places Named After Numbers

There is a song by Frank Black that I like, even though the lyrics don't really make that much sense. Maybe it was just the phrase "places named after numbers, different kind of love", which caught my attention. It puzzled me, but somehow sounded true...
Far from being a maths genius, I did have a fascination with numbers as a child. I had an imaginary football club where each player was represented by a marble, with his own stats for stamina, skill and fitness. And yet later, I would employ that system to rate the girls in my class by character, looks and overall score. It was an attempt to hold on to a childhood dreamworld in the face of hard hitting puberty. As a child counting was my drive for many things - walking in the mountains ("let's reach 3000 meters altitude!!"), running the 50 meters as fast as possible, imagining the size of population of my imaginary planet (yes! I did have an imaginary planet! Ha!) and, of course - the stairs: When I was six or so, I had an obsession with counting steps on stairs during walks with my father. I remember reaching the number 10,000 after a week of counting and it made me increadibly proud. I loved counting. And felt like the count, until there was some maths wizz-kid in our primary school class who really was the count for all of us - he would always win at maths games against the whole rest of the class and later even participate in the German school maths olympics. But also him was just a puny shadow compared this man:
Yesterday, I came across a documentary about Daniel Tammet, a prodigious savant who was diagnosed with epilepsy as a child and Asperger's syndrome later. Recently, he learned German within a week - as he did with Icelandic a few years ago. He can remember the number
Pi up to the 25,000th digit and he can do the most difficult and intricate calculations in his head.
The special thing about him, however, is that he is able to communicate much of his inner life to the outside world, unlike other prodigious Asperger's. I'm deeply impressed by how he describes his inner life, his days are literally numbered. Calculations become imaginary landscapes and when he talks about it, it is quite poetic.
I have my own memory of what it is or was like to have a private imaginary world. But while my fascination with numbers, like that of many kids, was actually counting, Daniel Tammet seems to be doing something else - he reads them and wields the results like a poet would do with a phrase. In his world, language, numbers and emotion are intertwined. Numbers are actually living things, beautiful, intriguing or scary. For him numbers are an integral, necessary part of everything. Like in that Frank Black song -

Beyond below above
A gravity that slumbers
At the center of
Places named after numbers
A different kind of love

Thank you for the picture, Heidi Rettig.

Rock that Candy Shop!

This morning I woke up to a burning candy shop on the radio. It is also the day when I'll be heading into a four day luscious holiday with a very special woman. And so I say:

1. It will all come down before the fires of hell
2. You let me in your house with a hammer
3. Rock that candy shop, set it on fire

Here comes the song - "Candy Shop" by "Fatima Spar und die Freedom Fries", an austrian band...

Samson

Here is a balad that was recently played to us by a good friend in a session with other good friends. Each of us brought a few songs that meant something to us. My friend brought "Samson" by Regina Spektor and think it is really special. It basically tells the biblical story of Samson and Delila from Delila's perspective - Samson wasn't tricked into cutting his hair, but chose so himself, out of love. I think her story is so credible and such a good alternative to the biblical story - after all Samson's uncontrolled anger was also the source of his invincibility, but how could he truely love with an anger like that? So she cut his hair out of love and she did rightly so. Yet their ensuing true love was only meant for a night: After all Samson, as a major political leader, could not afford to be in love, with enemies waiting for him to pounce upon the sign of weakness - and then they wrote history, blaming it all on Delila.
There is a lot in this song and if you read up on the biblical narrative, it makes you think - about feminism, politics, the politics of religion, the lies that may well be hidden within the biblical narrative if you think that Delila might just as well have been a political scapegoat --- and primarily a great lover.

Thank you Julianna for the picture of Delila and Samson from St. Trophime in Arles and thank you K. and P. for the song...

André Heller

I went out to buy a jumper for winter yesterday and came back with five forgotten LP records instead. It was a good tradeoff. I do have a soft spot for 60s-70s poetic songs (as in "chanson" or "Lied") with good lyrics. I consider this the crucial part of the first generation of pop song writing. Sung poetry can be such a drug, amplifying a thousand times what may be lost between bookends.

In the anglophone world there were Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, etc. In the francophone world there were Francoise Hardy, Jacques Brel, Renaud, Jane Birkin, etc. For a long time, however, and for very good reasons I kept a safe distance to German-singing songwriters, because German folk music generally sucks. A lot.

But yesterday I discovered a few gems which I think deserve to be mentioned alongside a Paul Simon, Janis Joplin or Jacques Brel and over the next couple of weeks I shall explore and share more of it. So today enters André Heller, a true poet and versatile artist involved in music, poetry, theatre, football, performance, and and and...

Die Hundertjährige ("The 100 year old woman")
...a song about a 100 year old woman and beauty in dignity.

Jetzt wo alles besprochen ist ("Now that everything has been talked about")
...actually the truest song I know in the category "what to say to a former lover".

Denn ich will ("Since I want")
...a beautiful song about freedom in love.

Sei Poet ("Be a Poet")
...my absolute favorite. You may want to learn German for this.

Autumn's Velvet Underground

This is officially subjectively the first day of autumn at my place, and I decided today that autumn will be my friend. I shall play with it, make fun of it, fool around with it and remember it dearly once it's dead and gone.
Only then shall I tune in to Winter Song.
This year, autumn will be my Fairest of the seasons and I shall be Beginning to see the light, ha!
After all, Who loves the sun? - definitely, not just anyone...
Yes, Somewhere there's a Feather and I shall be there to catch it!

Thank you Diana for that picture.

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…

Musical Life Cookery

When life did not feel right Martha started playing a game she called “musical life cookery”. It was an amazing, imaginative game where she could just about detach from her own life and let lyrics, sounds and all those fictional and non-fictional characters of popular music mingle and meet. That usually made her happy.
Martha liked weird, funny, poignant and occasionally touching connections switching and mixing issues, people, ideas and personalities between songs. Making up a musical movie in her mind allowed her to live other lives for a while until their experiences brought her back home.

One rainy Saturday night, Martha made Frank Zappa and Beth Gibbons accidentally bump into each other in an old funky jazz bar in Louisiana. Frank was just in the middle of a whacky Nixon impression, when Beth nearly ran him over.
"Blimey!", Beth said, not instantly noticing that very strange and weird change that happend as she spilled her drink amidst Frank's attentive audience - Frank and her had mixed personalities: Frank suddenly was Beth, or rather a Beth-like Frank, still retaining some aspects of his but with some of Beth’s personality traits - and vice versa. Frank felt curious. Not only had he never been to Portishead before, but he had also never felt that particular kind of serenity. Strangely inspired he grabbed a guitar and sang

“And the right and the wrong and insane
And the answers they cannot explain
Pulsate from my soul through my brain
in a spanish guitar“ (For a Spanish Guitar by the Byrds)

Beth, in the meantime, had gotten herself a glass of white port with lemon juice and was chatting up the band disrupted by Frank’s singing. When Frank had finished, Beth smiled and cracked a joke about the American guitar she had grabbed. Together with the band she played Egyptian Reggae by Jonathan Richman and even Frank joined in the dancing...

Martha was happy with the world where Frank Zappa and Beth Gibbons would become friends and people were happy with each other’s similarities and differences. Jacques Brel was sitting next to her on the sofa, gently stroking her hair and kissing her forehead. Martha took a sip of her tea. Outside, the rain was pouring down and her good friend Tanita Tikaram waived at her from under a large black umbrella. Distant music trickeled into her room -

“On a midnight voyage,
One that has no ending;
And it's sending me
The things that I need.
Far away from shore—
Further than I've been before;
But I feel the strength of the new sea.
(Of a midnight voyage for just what you need...)
Dreams come and go,
And I sift through them.
Love starts to grow
From the thoughts that I find within them.” (Midnight Voyage by the Mamas and Papas)

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!