Domenica 8 Nov 2009, 15:07
..From Jounal, Argentina 2008
..It’s been a long time since I listened to music whilst I am moving. I don’t know why, I remember my first walkman vividly. I just never got it sorted until now. Maybe I never got a serious enough commute to warrant it. I guess like most people, I have a kind of soundtrack in my mind most of the time, not always a welcome one (‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ was a recent one) but always a hovering, discrete one, regardless of whatever else I'm doing…
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I suppose in hindsight it is a rather obvious point of reference for a young man travelling around, but I had Nick Drake’s ‘Place To Be’ on mental loop throughout my time in Spain in the late 90’s, it was a kind of leveler, a lithium, a base point for any situation, a true muzak. This time it has been a song by Josephine Foster called ‘The Garden Of Earthly Delights’.
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In fact this song is so timelessly, spellbindingly brilliant I can’t get enough of it and, as I got increasingly crammed into an airless pocket of the subte (tube), it still made a kind of ironic sense. This is such a common experience for most people that I feel like an idiot for mentioning it but later, as I’m being hurtled out to Avellenada by this semi-psychotic bus driver, this incongruous combination of movement and sound is an utter revelation to me. Through abstinence, or negligence, I’d kind of forgotten.