God damn you Robert Plant, I am trying to image google “70s + plants”

MLBRGSMMR

I said I’d bring some music to the midsummer’s party I went to. I ended up making one mixtape in three minutes, called it MLBRGSMMR and rushed out the door to catch the last bus in time for herring.

It got a lot of old tunes on there, some new, plenty of Paul.
Joni, you gotta have Joni (with Jaco so discretely on bass).

Anyways, even though I did in such a rush I quite like how it ended up.

I guess it sounds like this summer to me.

Enjoy. xx

Wings	                Wino Junko
Odyssey	                Who*
Mourning Sun	        Where's Love Gone Today
Richard Henry	        Oh Girl*
Joni Mitchell	        Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
Headstone	        Turn Your Head*
The Weeknd	        Rolling Stone
Inc.	                Swear
Paul McCartney	        Check My Machine
Woods	                Who Do I Think I Am?
Sage	                I Found My Music
Eddie Callahan	        Santa Cruz Mountains
Barbara Mason	        Yes I'm ready
UB40	                Where Did I Go Wrong?
Paul McCartney & Wings	Love Is Strange
Frank Ocean	        American Wedding

*stolen from a brilliant CD called “Fill your head with pop – Inside the home of Bob Stanley” (which is exactly what it says on the tin).

(Oh and here is last summer’s mixtape. It takes me back in the strangest way.
And Paul is the missing link.)

Bottoms up

Friday was midsummer’s eve in Sweden. It manifests itself like most Swedish holidays: we drink a  lot of schnapps and eat pickled herring.
There is also dancing – around a massive penis-resembling thing. (No accident, it’s meant to be a penis-resembling thing. It’s something to do with fertility and what the land has to offer etc.)  We call it a midsummer’s pole.

It’s one of my favourite holidays.

The food is great, the weather at least could be (but usually isn’t) (but actually was this time, at least where I was) and if you go to the right party there is horseradish schnapps. It is the best.

Simply peel and chop into chip-sized bits two big pieces of horseradish.
Pop them in a nice bottle of vodka.
Let it rest. Preferably for two weeks or so but a couple of hours works too. If you use enough horseradish.

And voilà, the best schnapps ever.
If you like horseradish.

xx

Aspects of summer

If I don’t control myself, every other song I write ends up with the word summer in it.
It holds such promise.

A promise that is unnervingly evident in the beautiful photographic series of Massimo Vitali – beaches literally crumbling under that very notion.

This in turn makes me think of some of Joseph Szabo‘s wonderful pictures – of youth, summer and Jones Beach, one of the busiest beaches in the world.

Yet Vitali’s and Szabo’s work are each other’s opposites in many ways.
Vitali’s anonymous mass – colourful and pretty as an abstract pattern, very unsettling if you look too closely  – versus the warm black and white imagery of Szabo, where inside every chest there is a heart and inside every head there is a mind.
The crowd versus its’ individuals.

But this – and beach raves and smiles – aside, there is a deep melancholy running through every single one of their pictures.

Summer, it holds such promise.

(They both have several books published, get them.)

Step Into My Gloom

image borrowed from Carly Scott

I’ve had an awful day. It seems I have those of late.
I tell you this so you don’t go looking for a catchy groove. But I’ve made a mix.
11 beautiful songs – old, new, deep blue.

Including my two favourite songs* of the year so far, as well as the best new voice** I’ve heard in a long time…

So, you know, if you want to, by all means, STEP INTO MY GLOOM.

Tracklisting:

1. Pure X           Heavy Air 
2. Ela Orleans      She Who Could Bin You
3. Frank Ocean**    We all try
4. Marvin Gaye      You're the one for me
5. Al Wilson        By The Time I Get To Phoenix
6. Woods            Wouldn't Waste
7. Cass McCombs     County Line*
8. Nico             Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams
9. Dirty Beaches    Lord Knows Best*
10. The Memories    Baby (You're Totally Crazy)
11. Paul McCartney  Waterfalls

One more cup for coffee

I can’t get enough of this.

Curves and promise

“This is the body part most moving, made up of curves and promise. The one who remembers, looking backwards when we go inexorably forward”
– Jeanloup Sieff

Jeanloup Sieff

John Kacere

Lost In Translation, Sofia Coppola

Michael G Magin

Calle Stoltz

Guy Bourdin

unkown (to me)

Aubrey Beardsley

The Two Friends, Tamara Limpicka

Sowing The Seeds Of Sanity, Rikki Kasso

Minerva dressing, Lavinia Fontana

Nude With Calla Lillies, Diego Rivera

Hilo Chen

美撒-GUO

David Palumbo

Nude in the water, Salvador Dali

We were painting leaves green

A really wonderful piece on Badlands and Terrence Mallick, told entirely through quotes.
And every quote paints the brightest picture.

(I had so many thoughts reading this. I felt strangely liberated learning Sheen knew what he knew that day in his Mazda. It seems a rare thing, that kind of clarity in the midst of the now.)

SPACEK:
When Terry learned I could twirl, we went straight down to Hollywood Boulevard to a music store and bought a Starline baton. Lo and behold, I was in his back yard twirling my baton, never having imagined that that talent of mine would be useful in any way.

SHEEN:
Terry called one night and said, “I want you to play the part.” I had to get up very early the next morning to go to work, and I was driving along the Pacific Coast Highway in a little Mazda. I was listening to a Dylan album I was fond of, and the song “Desolation Row” was playing, and the sun was rising, and it hit me that I was going to play the role of my life. I had been a professional actor since I was eighteen. I was thirty-one, I had four children, I was struggling, doing a lot of television—a lot of bad, silly work just to make ends meet—and I wasn’t having any luck in features to speak of, and here was the part of my life. And I was overwhelmed, and I pulled off to the side of the road, and I wept uncontrollably.

JOAN MOCINE (art department):
He even knew what kind of linoleum he wanted in Sissy’s father’s house.

DOUG KNAPP (best boy):
On days they shot in shady areas, there was almost no lighting to be done. Terry would tell me, “Here, take the camera, go off and have fun! Just get pretty pictures!” He said he was looking for the shape of the land. The cloud cover in Colorado is sparse, and it moves quickly, and if you’re high enough and the land’s irregular enough, you get these patterns of shadow moving across the land.

MOCINE:
I remember there were people trying to take advantage of Terry because he’d never done a movie before. They would say, “You can’t do this,” or “There’s not enough light for that.” Terry would say, “I want to do it anyway.”

JACK FISK (art director):
Every time we finished shooting on a location or a set, he would say, “I might come back here and shoot something.” That meant we couldn’t do away with it. We had to maintain it. I remember at the end of the film, it had gotten to autumn and we were painting leaves green, because they had turned color.

DAVID THOMSON (film critic):
They’re a little bit like dogs that attack people and the film says: Well, yeah, dogs attack people sometimes. After all, the dog is close to the wolf and it’s in the breed’s history. Not much you can do about it—of course, you’re gonna have to shoot the dog someday. And the dog sort of knows that.

(tip from Ambrose Heron)

Knock knock

On keeping 22 notebooks.

I’ve been going through my notebooks today. I found 22 semi-active ones and decided it was a few too many. So I looked through them and got rid of stuff that no longer applies, shopping lists bought and consumed, lyrics I know by heart by now, addresses where no one I want to reach can by reached no more.

I have a huge soft spot for notebooks. Cheap, expensive, panda-shaped, colorful, plain.
Which explains why I have so many.

Usually when I flick through them I know exactly what I wrote where and why.
(But sometimes I have no idea. My hand must have been possessed.)

So it’s lyrics, shopping lists and addresses.
It’s also bumper stickers, quotes, thoughts.
Wish lists, book and music tips.
To do lists, appointments and drawings of dogs, trees, my own name in swirls.
The usual stuff.

Here are some of today’s finds.
Some brought me back, some brought tears to my eyes (Yahtzee scores), some brought pink to my cheeks and some made a lot of sense of things.

More than anything though they made me realize I am a sucker for a handwritten note.
And I will always have 22 semi-active notebooks at any given time.

These three are by my friend Kyle. There were loads of them and they made an entire trip we made come tumbling back into my mind.

Thank god for these notes.

Oh are they now.

This is the best thing I have ever read on the subject of notebooks.
By Joan Didion, of course.