Absence

My justification is work. Too much work and I could not find enough time to write. But I do have found time to spend 20 hours in games, some 25 hours reading, though a good part of that was in planes and airports, and two films, which is the same as the first half of the year. So no, the main reason should be that I am lazy and prefer to stay on the couch.

Maybe I am lazy about the blog, but certainly I have written more e-mails to friends, I have spent more time in our wargame club, and even more time with the group of friends, which are in most cases most my wife's circle of friends, so I am not too keen in spending too much time with them.

So, what else? Maybe I do not have anything to write about. I have been to Egypt, and had some weird experiences with taxi hiring, and even a wardrobe malfunction that had me showing my underwear to the whole Egypt International Exhibition Centre (when exiting a taxi, actually). Things have happened. Maybe I do not want to share the anecdote, but there are many things worthy of being written up.

The common sign is that I also stopped writing long e-mails to the two people that I have in mind when I think "Who could be reading this?" The problem is whether I do not have anything I want to share with them, or if I just that do not want to write to them.

Both are under a lot of stress right now, and that is when a good correspondent should write, even if they are too busy to reply. Distraction, support, just friendliness. Instead, I write short neutral phrases. It is not surprising I cannot stitch a few phrases together.

It hsd shown me two things. I need better mental readers, and I need more friends. It would be good to be a better friend, but it may be too late for that.

¶ 12:09 PM

 After Virtue, Revisited

One of the experiments in this blog that I enjoyed more, and that I still revisit, is the stream of consciousness reaction to Wim Mertens' After Virtue, brought back by his concert two weeks ago and my own excessive consumption of his music in the following days. I tried to avoid listening too much before the concert, to arrive fresh, but then I was trying to identify what music he played, and just trying to make the feeling of elation from the live performance last.

I suppose his favorite of the album is Humility, as he plays it very often live, though he has revisited the works a couple of times, with arrangements more complex than the piano and occasional voice of the original. It is also one of may favorites, but not the top. It is short, but easy to lengthen if necessary, so good for live audiences. My own favorite is the longest, Faith. Humility is not certainly one of my virtues, and while a self convinced atheist (with the help of a few books), I still think I have Faith, Faith as I defined it back in 2005. 

Faith. Usually associated to religious beliefs, how can an atheist have faith? And even more, why should it be a virtue.

The virtue lies in believing in something good that is beyond ourselves, no matter how you call it. Whether it is a moral requirement or an almighty God, it is a way to get us out of ourselves. To stop measuring all things to our own standard, and instead using a higher standard.

A bit pompous, but my position has not changed. 

Some  (six?) years ago I got rid of all the music in recorded tapes, which included my first version of it, a gift from my brother, who had got a tape from a friend, so a copy of a copy. It must have been 1989, so just released, as he also loaned me, but did not give me copies of The Belly of the Architect and Motives for Writing. 

I got it in CD when I got my post graduate grant money, after using most of the first month payment to get a new music center with a CD player, in 1990. Eventually I also got the other two as well, and A man of no Fortune and with a Name to come. Unfortunately, most people around me did not like his music and specially his singing, so it was a private pleasure. 

They were very helpful in keeping company the first months of my post-doc stay in France, and even helped me when I met another fan, a Belgian coworker. That helped with my French, that helped a lot making friends, so it all improved and I had less time for music listening, and I also started getting new one.

His music became a kind of curiosity in my collection, and I did not buy anything else from him, till the arrival of the iPod and then the music in the iPhone meant I had to pick and choose what to include in my playlist, which brought a huge revision of all my music, and decisions what to include. Combined with a car with a 6 CD player meant also that rather than the same scratchy tapes, I could revisit my CD collection in both short and long trips. And that meant a new interest in Mertens' music. 

It is in those circumstances that I made the piece on After Virtue, and when I also started buying his music again, though without the whole emotional baggage of the earlier pieces they have less impact. I still have four more records from him, till I stopped buying CDs around 2012.Now they are all in storage, but I do not intend to throw them away.

Going back to After Virtue, what I really liked was the idea of classical music snippets, connected but standing on their own feet. Most classical pieces are long, and it feels like cheating to take an excerpt or fragment. Here you could lose yourself in a few minutes and just do something else. It was a discovery that made me buy a lot of instrumental music, as no lyrics means, to me, that I can impose the meaning I want without interference. I also enjoy Lyrics as the Poetry of our time, but the message and the writer's intention is usually clear. Probably why I also enjoy human voice as an instrument without discernible or understandable lyrics. from Lisa Gerrard to Ella Fitzgerald, passing by Sigur Ros.

¶ 9:55 AM

 Struggle for pleasure, in Humility, with No Testament

That refers to Wim Mertens' songs titles, the ones I liked and recognized from his concert the past week.

It was the first concert I attended in many years, and it is not the first of his, though it was over twenty years ago. I even managed to get others interested enough to come with me, even knowing it would be from the "crybaby", as my brother calls him for his peculiar high-pitched singing. At seventy, a falsetto is no longer easy, but apparently, he still enjoys adding his voice to the whole. This was the first time I have seen or heard him with a brass quartet, though some searching found some recent videos in YouTube. He has used brass instruments, mainly sax and trumpet, but it feels strange without strings or some percussion. That made it hard to recognize some pieces, such as No Testament, where in the original the drums have a key role. It also happened to me with Humility, as the winds take some of the piano melodies and it was hard.

In fact, one of my problems with Mertens is the size of his works. With over sixty official records, and probably over 400 compositions, of which I own maybe 15% and have in my phone 10% (and it is still one of the most represented artists), it all sounds familiar, but it is hard to put name to it. I suspect that also happened to the critic that wrote the news report of the concert, as the only song they named besides the ones I did was Sappho, from a 2021 album that I do not have.

Struggle for Pleasure was the only one that brought a response from the public. Part was that the Theatre was a quite formal environment, so silence and waiting for the music end was the norm. But I also think that if he was playing alone, we would have had more response and more recognition. I have heard Struggle from Pleasure in many forms, both from Mertens and sampled in many ways, so the opening is probably what most people familiar with Mertens know. It was also the last piece, and we all were sure the concert could not end without it, so there was a certain feeling of joy and sadness. "Here it is", and "This is the end".

I will discuss another day about After Virtue and the rest of After Virtue, as it is still my favorite album, but I want to comment on the impact of No Testament, and how I enjoyed hearing it in the concert. 

It is probably his song I react the most. It has a weird reason why it is my favorite. When I was in my postdoc in France, the first weeks before I finally started to make some friends among my coworkers and the Spanish students at Bordeaux, I spent most evenings playing with my brand-new laptop (it was 1995, so a 486) and listening to the few CDs I had brought with me. The main game I played was the original first-person shooter, Doom, but I got tired of the tinny sounds and repetitive music, so I just added my own music. And the one that really put me in the whole demon shooting, corridor running mindset was Mertens' album Motives for Writing and specially No Testament, which after some checking he also must appreciate it, as he plays it in most concerts. It sounded a bit different with a brass quartet, till I realized the percussion was what I was missing. Now it makes the adrenaline flow and makes me feel I am in a labyrinth fighting for my life, and still having a great time.

Just so you can feel, here is a link to it. No Testament

¶ 9:14 AM