video – Page 58 – Wis[s]e Words

The Captain America of rock

Published on February 19, 2012Leave a comment

I can’t wait for Bruce Springsteen’s new album:

Indeed, it is as angry a cry from the belly of a wounded America as has been heard since the dustbowl and Woody Guthrie, a thundering blow of New Jersey pig iron down on the heads of Wall Street and all who have sold his country down the swanny. Springsteen has gone to the great American canon for ammunition, borrowing from folk, civil war anthems, Irish rebel songs and gospel. The result is a howl of pain and disbelief as visceral as anything he has ever produced, that segues into a search for redemption: “Hold tight to your anger/ And don’t fall to your fears … Bring on your wrecking ball.”

“I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream,” Springsteen told the conference, where the album was aired for the first time. It was written, he claimed, not just out of fury but out of patriotism, a patriotism traduced.

“What was done to our country was wrong and unpatriotic and un-American and nobody has been held to account,” he later told the Guardian. “There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism.”

A large portion of Springsteen’s appeal for me is the same as Captain America’s: they’re both symbols of the American Dream who aren’t blind for the American Reality. Despite his multimillionaire status, Springsteen never has lost sight of his roots, never forgotten what it’s like to be a working stiff. He still has his heart in the right place.

Don’t you worry ’bout a thing…

Published on February 16, 2012Leave a comment

As I said last year, that old Bob Marley song kept going round and round my head during the darkest days of Sandra’s illness. What I didn’t say then was how it came into my head, which also why it’s back now. I hate to admit it, but it’s all Ajax’s fault.

I’m not an Ajax fan even if I live in Amsterdam, as I long ago gave my loyalty to Feijenoord, though for most part this has been academic, as I never followed football all that much other than during European or World championships. But when Sandra got ill and kept being ill, football was one of the things I fled into, something that I could absorb myself in, something that in the long run doesn’t really matter, but which can get me worked up enough not to think too much about what could happen; perhaps most importantly, football was and is something that doesn’t remind me of Sandra, something I don’t associate with her. And so I found myself watching games I never would’ve in normal times, including Ajax playing European matches. Which meant, as in the video above, hearing Ajax supporters singing their songs, of which “Three Little Birds” is a particulate favourite of theirs and it burned itself in my mind, damn them.

Then of course it was a song that embodied a sort of slightly cynical optimism to me; now it just reminds me of better times and I can’t help but get a bit choked up hearing it. So much for finding escape in football…

Happy Bloody Valentine

Published on February 14, 20123 Comments

So yeah, one of the ways in which I miss Sandra this Valentine, apart from the obvious ones, is in sharing music. Between the two of us, I was always the obsessive compulsive High Fidelity gotta catch them all collecting nerd, while she was more the cool saw Blondie in Plymouth back before anybody in Europe knew who they were, used to dance at the Wigan Casino, used to have a shedload of hard to find imports when finding music was still difficult, but it’s all gone now type. She was into funk and soul, hip-hop, good, intelligent pop music, punk and jaz and everything else as long as it was mellifluous, I was more into metal and prog rock — still am, but she influenced me a lot. Not that I didn’t listen to some soul or funk or whatever before she came along, but it was she who pointed me to a lot of the artists that I couldn’t live without now.

And I’m still discovering “new” bands and artists that she knew long ago and probably saw live. Like Heatwave, that British-Swiss-American group whose greatest hit you surely recognise:

Somewhat more obscure: Brick, an Atlanta band she must’ve heard or seen when she lived there in the early eighties, but it’s too late to ask her now. They play disco-jazz, or Dazz, as seen below:

Here’s another well known song from a fairly obscure band: Lakeside, who do deserve to be better known than just for this fantastic slab of early eighties funk:

Let’s end with an old favourite of the two of us I knew she really liked a lot: Strawberry Letter 23 by the Brothers Johnson.

How to raise your daughter right

Published on February 10, 20123 Comments

Let this insecure, borderline psychotic manchild with anger issues explain. Soon you too can gain the respect of your daughter your big gun entitles you to.

The real wtf is how many people agree with/excuse this douchenozzle.

Three months on — it still hurts

Published on February 7, 20121 Comment

Sandra would’ve loved this weather. Not the cold so much, as her kidney troubles and other health problems leaving her vulnerable to colder temperatures just like my more proportioned build left me cursing milder weather. Besides which, she always was nesh, stemming from a childhood when winters were routinely bitter cold and central heating non-existing. But despite this, she’d still rather have cold, crisp, clear winter days like today was, then the endless grey and wet misery that’s the usual Dutch winter, when the country draws into itself from November to long into April if you’re unlucky. She had been spoiled with winters in Plymouth, Devon and Cornwall’s relatively southern latitude and gentle caress of the Gulf Stream ensuring almost sub-tropical winters. I remember being there with her in November one year, still walking around in t-shirt when I had had to wear a wintercoat and gloves in Amsterdam the day before…

She’s beyond such cares now of course, today making it exactly three months since she died. Sometimes I wonder if the prospect of another long, grey Dutch winter didn’t help her make the decision not to fight on anymore. I can’t blame her if true, but I do miss her. Especially when something like the video below happens. Four months ago I would’ve rung her to share its awwness, or shown it to her on Youtube the next day, now there’s nobody to share it with, well, expect all y’all:

Adorable, isn’t it? The kitten that is, not Kenny Dalgliesh.