As the year draws to a close
my attention is drawn to my nose
and whether I’ve kept it clean!

Was the year filled with lows?
an endless succession of blows?
nay, ‘twas the best I’ve ever seen!

All in all not much wailing arose
the sun shone upon me and my toes
and my olfactory parts, all agleam!

Meaning the past year was very nice indeed thank you very much. The highly confidential talks between me and The Loved One at about 3AM on New Years’ Eve a year ago (“let’s make this a good year ok?”) lead to a carrying out of certain plans and coming to fruitition of several expectations. Resulting in an enjoyable and happy year and without a doubt the best one I’ve experienced so far. I’m looking forward to having more years of this kind in the future. The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul spanning the barely illuminated and now only scarcely remembered night between the years 2001 and 2006 is now firmly behind me for the time being and will not be missed much.

“Hedonism” was the word for 2008, with travelling and focusing on little pleasures of life, made easier by the comfortable rise in my income. The word for 2009 seems to be “Recession”, with yet more travelling and further focusing on the pleasures of life, made a bit uneasier by the recent drop in my income. Being out of work at the moment naturally means an unexpected amount of free time, all of which has gone on to raise the quality of my life so far. Of course this won’t be the case if my unemployment goes on for months but for now I’m enjoying my leisure after having worked very hard for the whole year. And there’s no need to lower the overall quality of life just yet. Next week we’ll head for London and since 1 GBP is now virtually synonymous to 1 EUR it might be wise to bring along as large a suitcase as possible.

And now to other things. I’ve been reading and researching the work of John Milton for the past few years, because of a certain lyrical project. The project is now finished, at long bloody last one might say, and I’m not going to open up “Paradise Lost” for some time if ever again (I feel the same about “Kalevala” too but that might pass, given time). Deciphering the meanings behind some of those sentences is like juggling bricks. Really understanding them is next to impossible, with my limited intelligence, and from my limited modern day viewpoint. Interpreting the things contained in there and trying to infiltrate them into your own work, avoiding sheer plagiarism, is, well, not exactly a walk in the park. Therefore I’m very relieved to put John Milton aside for now and shed some light on John Melton instead. I happened upon him when reading about the English folklore of the face and features, as a gentleman is prone to do upon times of not knowing what to read, and since I’ve now seriously strayed from my topic if I had one to start with, and can’t convincingly draw comparisons between the two Johns apart from similarities in name and both of them existing in roughly the same time in roughly the same city, it might be best if I conclude this with an insightful quote from mr. Melton and move on:

‘When a man's nose itcheth, it is a signe he shall drink wine’.

I checked back on what I wrote back in 2002 on a similar year-drawing-to-a-close situation as this in the original Pressure Valve and found an entry with an half-assed attempt at humorousness and jollity and Douglas Adamsian style of putting together of words. O how times change and o how “now” is so much better than “then”.

30.12.2002 From The Pressure Valve

As the year draws to a close and a new one looms ahead, it's time to look back and find out what went wrong, in order to make the same mistakes again. Whoops. I mean in order not to make the same mistakes again.

As everyone surely agrees, the biggest mistake was to get out of bed in the first place. After that things went mostly downhill. So it's really important to remember this time not to get out of bed. At all. However, if by some sort of misunderstanding you were to find yourself getting out of bed anyway, it's essential to get back to bed as quickly as possible. And stay there. Until the year is finished. That's the best advice I can give.

But of course there's always people who refuse to play it safe and still get out of bed on the first of January, making lame excuses like I really need to use the toilet, or I'm fucking starving or my back hurts for staying in bed for too long. Poor bastards and lost causes.

If you really want to face a new year and make it a good one, then at least keep in mind a few simple rules:

1. Don't shower or shave too often. Nobody likes clean people, they arouse suspicions.
2. Smoke and drink as much as possible. Gives you credibility.
3. When meeting up with strangers, never plan anything you might want to say. Just open your mouth and see what comes out. It's called spontaneous discussion and you're bound to make an impression. Instead of telling a girl that her tits look real nice you can ask her what she thinks of your false moustache.
4. Consider the option of getting back to bed. It's not too late.
5. Tell everyone you're from Sweden. Gives you an mysterious air, being foreigner and all. Or just simply gives you air.
6. Go somewhere you didn't want to be in the first place and then refuse to leave.
7. Go back to bed. Please.
8. Smoke and drink as much as possible. Gives you additional credibility.
9. Use the Force if you have to. Guaranteed to make you look ridiculous.

THIS WEEKS’ BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
Château Sénilhac 2003, red wine from France. My first attempt at tasting bordeaux and not a very successful one. I chose this because it was rated very high in its’ price range but didn’t find much to enjoy. An hour after decanting it was sharp and bitterish, with a sourness to it I didn’t like at all. The others at the table didn’t complain so the wine was fine but not to my tastes. Maybe my taste buds haven’t evolved far enough to appreciate the wine of bordeaux just yet. Or maybe they are just calibrated differently and will never enjoy things like this. At a Christmas Eve dinner several days earlier the white wine was riesling from Alsace, costing three times as much as the white wines I usually buy and occasionally also enjoy, but I didn’t find much difference in the taste, and certainly it didn’t taste three times better... so, maybe my taste buds are still in budding phase. Or whatever. Happy New Year.

The year draws to a close, and not entirely surprisingly, it turned out to be another year with no new Sinisthra album. Third one in a row in fact. The recording of the forthcoming album has been going on since last summer, more or less steadily, and now it seems that only circumstances of the force majeure variety can prevent it from being released next year. And about time too. Although this year saw the release of two compilation cd’s of my other/former bands (Lithium Gates by The Puritan and Watching The Wake by Protected Illusion) I find it very hard to be at my ease until the long due Sinisthra album has seen the light of day. It’s been on the works since the dawn of time (2005 to be more precise) and I will do everything I can to never again end up in a situation where it takes this long to put out a handful of songs. Unfortunately there’s still some major obstacles to overcome before the project can be finished, and actually I’m not keen to even think about it now. Here comes a major change in subject, signalled by a seasonally appropriate picture of a pagan Father Winter.

Yesterday was Winter Solstice and the day was at its’ shortest, here in Helsinki a little under 6 hours and for the unfortunate buggers north from here, a lot shorter. Although from personal viewpoint this night seems to have lasted for several weeks now. Occasionally the darkness outside gets a little paler only to quickly deepen again. The ground is barren and free of snow and the icing of this cake is the flu that’s been slowly draining me of life for the past week or so. The waking hours differ from the time spent asleep only very slightly, or not at all. The perpetual dusk has wrapped everything in its’ shroud of slowness and since all the activities involving any kind of concentration, like reading, are out of the question, I’ve been whiling away my time in the company of a computer game called Bookworm Adventures. This was my favourite pastime last Christmas and this seems to be the best way to spend the loose hours this year too. Here’s an online version of the game. It’s astonishingly addictive and outrageously rewarding, too, at least if you happen to be a kind of person who enjoys putting together lenghty words and then hurling them around. I know I am.

Another favourite pastime of late has been trying to find and book reasonably priced flights to Spain for next summer. This kind of behaviour may seem like a clutching-at-straws- type of thing to do but it gives something to look forward to and effectively expels the darkness for awhile, leafing through the magazines and local newspapers the Loved Ones’ father brought along as he came from Spain to Finland for the Christmas and feeling frustrated for being unwisely located both in time and space at the moment. This needs to be rectified as soon as possible. A consolation prize-type of emergency solution is the shortish trip to London in a few weeks’ time, and after that, and fortified by that, it should be an easy glide towards the springtime. Says the optimist in me, with an overtly reassuring voice. And advises me to avoid that certain level of perception mentioned in the title of this post. But not to the point of not enjoying the following video of Johnny The Painter and his complicated relationship with the colour black.


THIS WEEKS’ BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
The Loved Ones’ father and uncle came over for dinner and a lovely evening of talking on top of each other, about themselves, their ancestors and significant moments in the history of their family, at times contradicting each other colourfully but always in an entertaining way and a very lovely evening it was indeed. I have a very high respect for both of these gentlemen and I always enjoy their company immensely. The dinner was prepared in a haste and feeling slightly hungover and mightily tired after the previous evenings’ activities but no one complained much, or at all in fact.

Castellblanch Cristal is Spanish cava served as an aperitif and it didn’t taste nearly as good as I remembered. So, back to the drawingboard with ”my favourite sparkling wine”. Maybe I shouldn’t bother with cavas at all since none of them seem to fit my tastes.

Espíritu de Chile Chardonnay Gewürztraminer is white wine from Chile, served with a starter of tunafish tartar and although it tasted quite adventurous and an interesting combination of grapes at first, the Traminers’ aroma of cheap perfume soon pushed through and trampled the chardonnay part in a wild stampede of overweight flowers. Not my kind of thing at all. This falls into the same category of ”daring and innovative” wines as the Pfaffenheim Black Tie Pinot Gris Riesling I had recently, although it fared way better in my mouth with surprising hints of pear in the taste.

Escudo Rojo is red wine from Chile, widely praised at least in Finland and probably quite rightfully so. It went well with the stew of beef and vegetables and had clearly opened up during the aeration of several hours. It was enjoyable but not exceptional and since the conversation at the table was at full swing I didn’t really focus on the qualities of this wine and now it's kind of too late. Maybe I’ll buy another bottle sometime, for closer inspection. Or maybe not.

Nieto Senetiner Reserva Malbec is red wine from Argentina, opened too hastily because the other bottles were empty and the glasses needed to be refilled. The taste was extremely full-bodied but somehow strangled and this clearly would have needed decanting. The colour was very deep red, almost black one might say. It also painted lips, teeth and tongues black which rarely happens to me with wines these days, although a few years ago this occurred regularly and I put it down to the cheap and low quality of those wines. This was an otherwise classy offering and I’m going to try it again in a more favourable and peaceful situation.

How irritating can be a gentle tiny sound of water dripping on irregular intervals? Based on my recent experience I can only say pretty fucking irritating and not calming or soothing at all, on the contrary. It keeps me effectively from falling asleep in the evening and wakes me up on an unearthly hour in the morning. It comes from a water pipe panelled inside our bedroom wall, everytime someone takes a shower in some other apartment of our block of flats. And some people like to take showers at three AM it seems. The silence that usually cradles the nighttime often serves to amplify any little noise to improbable levels and in this case every single drop that leaks from the pipe and falls to some as-of-yet inexplicable location somewhere within these walls sounds deafeningly like, well, a waterdrop falling several metres before landing on hard surface. Not very dramatic when described like this, I know, but when all your senses are focused on waiting when the next drop falls, in the silence and in the darkness, it’s hard not to think of what Chinese water torture must be like. With the interrogational and other such aspects removed, of course, as well as the ground zero of the fall relocated from one’s forehead to somewhere else. But still. The situation is utterly unbearable and steps have been taken to rectify it as soon as possible.

This reminded me of something I wrote on my previous blog, the original Pressure Valve back in 2003, when I was hearing a lot more voices than I’m hearing nowadays, especially of the kind others were unable to hear and me talking about my notions and voices resulted in people giving me very uneasy looks. I can’t remember where this one came from, probably some ordinary nightly noises reshaped into something else by an avid imagination, too much freetime and feeling a bit cuckoo and lost in life. I used to just spew out the text back then and upload it immediately, not really concentrating on anything bigger that might be forming in the background and with a little more thought could have been developed into a proper storyline. I’ve always been hesitant to retouch something written a long time ago, so I’m just going to post it here the way it is. There’s a certain absurd charm in it.

5.3.2003 From The Pressure Valve

And thus came the day when I finally decided to find out what the noises were and who made them. Countless nights had I been lying awake in my bed, listening to the quiet sniffling and shuffling of feet, hesitant sniffing and scratching. I had located the source of the sounds. The wardrobe had been attached to the wall by some long forgotten previous owner of my home and that's where the sounds came from. No problem there, except there was nothing in there but my clothes and the wall was a solid outer wall of the building, made of stone.

I took all the stuff out of the wardrobe and examined it's backpanel a bit closer, tapping it with my knuckles. It returned a hollow sound and slightly gave way to my pushing. The scratching grew louder and more determined behind it, like claws trying to penetrate wood. It was disturbing but I wasn't particularly afraid, only eager to find out what was causing all this.

So I withdrew from the closet for a moment to get my chainsaw. For some reason I thought it appropriate to turn off all the lights before revving up the saw. The noise was deafening in the still of the night as I applied the saw to the backpanel, expecting to hit stone any time. I cut through the wood with ease, noting with slight surprise that there was nothing resembling stone at all behind the wardrobe, only a thin layer of wood and then an empty space.

I put down the saw when the hole was big enough for me to go through. There was a dimly lit room behind the wardrobe. The air was stale and felt strange in my lungs, as if it had been used up ages ago and there was no need for it to be breathable anymore. Something was moving in the far corner of the room, wrapped in shadows. I stepped closer and suddenly a huge black dog emerged from somewhere. It gave me a long sad look and sniffed my hand. I patted it on the head and it sat down and absent-mindedly started to scratch itself.

There was a rocking chair in the corner, softly creaking, and an old pale man sitting on it, watching me in silence. He had clearly been dead for a very long time. I didn't know what to say so I just stood there. He gestured me to move closer. I felt I had to apologise somehow for ruining his wall with my saw.

"Err. Sorry about the hole on your wall", I said with a stifled voice. There was much less oxygen in the air than I was used to and my lungs felt like they were filled with thick liquid. The old man looked over my shoulder towards the wall where I had come from.

"What hole?", he replied.

I turned around and noticed that there was no hole on the wall anymore, only flawless brickwork. The old man got up from his chair. "Would you care for a cup of tea, young man?", he asked in a friendly voice. I was very confused by now but remembered my manners.

"Yes, please."

The black dog had fallen asleep and was snoring gently on the floor.


THIS WEEKS’ BOOKS OF CHOICE:
“Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal” by Christopher Moore. I saw this on a second hand bookstore and had no other option than to pick it up. The title of the book made me do it. I love slightly blasphemous takes on religion and this looked promising, despite the off-putting picture of the author on the back. Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter. I gets a lot better after the first chapter and I’m glad I didn’t go with my first instinct and quit reading because at first the book seemed to be All Crap. I ended up immensely enjoying the story of young Jesus and what he gets up to with his best pal. Towards the end it gets more serious, dealing with the days leading up to crucifixion, and although the ending is disappointing and cheap I still think it was a good novel and I had a good time reading it and chuckling to it in trains and buses filled with people, not minding the stares they might have given me.

THIS WEEKS’ BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
Hécula, red wine from Spain, made from to-me-previously-unheard-of Monastrell grape and not making a very strong impression. An average red, full bodied and nice but nothing much more. The most outstanding quality of it was the astoundingly short taste. I sipped it and it tasted and felt rewarding, but then it just sort of stopped, when I expected the lingering aftertaste to kick in. That was quite extraordinary. A worthy companion to meatballs and the bottle emptied eventually but, well, you know. Average.

Château de la Jaubertie, white wine from France and a grand disappointment with too much of the heavy pungentness I dislike very much. I’m not sure what I expected, maybe something similar to the wonderful experience with Petit Bourgeois. I contemplated between this and a bottle of albarino for the pike-perch I had prepared and maybe the disappointment was partly because I chose unwisely. Still, average, or below average, and won’t be bought again.

Somehow, during the past few years, seeing live performances of Amorphis have become closely associated with a heightened state of intoxication on my part. In other words, attending their gig leads to excessive drinking, more often than not. I’m unsure about the reasons behind this phenomenon. Why am I unable to witness them sober? Is it something they do or fail to do? The lack of musicianship? The appalling quality of songs they churn out? The way they look on stage? Probably not, since it’s impossible to fit both “lack of musicianship” and “Amorphis” into the same sentence, the terms effectively canceling each other out. And the overall quality of the songs they churn out is way above the average I’d say and I fluently listen to them going at it. Watching them go at it on stage doesn’t hurt the eye, either. So, why? Me go gig=me be drunk. Me end up wasted, plastered, loaded, pissed, rat-arsed, smashed, et cetera.

Maybe the reason lies somewhere within the fact that Amorphis gigs are virtually the only gigs I regularly go to nowadays. Can’t think of any other band in Finland I’d like to go and see several times a year. Well, maybe CMX but going to their gig would be much more complicated, involving all kinds of tiring activities like purchasing the tickets in advance and then actually feeling compelled to watch the whole show after having paid for the ticket. With Amorphis gigs it’s much more straight forward, watching a few songs here and there and not feeling guilty for missing other songs after having had enough after half an hour or so, because I’ve heard and seen them a zillion times before.

They played a short set at an indoors rock festival in Jäähalli Helsinki last Friday and after that I went to a nearby bar and accidentally got so drunk that the following day I was visited not-very-briefly-at-all by the kind of hangover I haven’t had for years. I was planning on describing the magnitude of it in detail here but thinking of it now I don’t really feel the need to delve on it. It was utterly utterly unpleasant, keeping me all pale and wobbly and dying in bed all day and I can’t understand how I was able to survive similar hangovers on a weekly basis several years ago when I was single and got unreasonably drunk every weekend. I don’t even like the feeling of being drunk, have never liked it that much, and I sure don’t like the feeling of being hungover and am not going to experience that again in a hurry. I can’t blame this entirely on Amorphis but surely they’re partly responsible for my misery.

Well actually I can’t blame it on Amorphis at all. And I’m quite thankful of this reminder of how not to deal with alcohol in the future.

THIS WEEKS ALBUM OF CHOICE:
“The Way Of All Flesh” by Gojira. Yes a heavy metal album (from France, of all places) and apart from Opeth’s latest one probably the only one that’s impressed me this year. Of course I very seldomly bother with metal albums so I can’t know what I’m possibly missing out on but I’m not very interested in rectifying the situation either. Not flooding my ears with metal makes me appreciate the occasional high class metal album so much more, and this one undeniably is an offering of the highest class. Everything fits together perfectly, the songwriting is imaginative, the playing impressive, especially on the drumming front, the sound is crushing and brutal in just the right way, and the lyrics are probably thought-provoking and well constructed too, judging on what I’m hearing, can’t be sure because I usually am not that interested in checking out the lyrical content of metal bands and this is no exception. I’ve found myself continuously listening to this album lately. The only downside is the excessive lenght of it which makes it a bit too much to take in one go. Albums shouldn’t be allowed to last over 50 minutes in my opinion.

THIS WEEKS’ BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
On a previous post I mentioned having a good feeling about bottles having hippos and elephants on the labels. I’ve fallen victim to this before and am sure I will fall victim to it in the future as well. Putting pictures of animals on the label is a well-established practise, especially in South Africa it seems, when the need arises to divert the attention from the actual quality (or the lack thereof) of the wine itself. But it’s sometimes impossible for me to resist when a bottle looks like the one pictured here.

Fat Bastard is a very strong brand and a concept that has caught my attention in the past, so when I unexpectedly saw their Sauvignon Blanc in Finnish Alko there was no other option than to buy a bottle. The story in the back of the bottle and in their webpage is entertaining and probably total bullshit as well, not even specifying what type of their wines was the experimental kind that changed everything, but that’s beside the point. The sauv blanc is very average, forgettable and one-dimensional in a way probably closely resembling similar new world wines. It’s from France but has none of the subtlety and nuances of some of the more traditional French white wines I’ve tasted. I’d like to like all kinds of wines but these loud and straight forward types just don’t live up to what I expect of nice wines. It performed well enough as a companion to braised whitefish but didn’t really stand alone and two glasses of it was more than enough.

Here’s an exceptional one: half a glass of this was more than enough and the rest of the bottle went down the kitchen sink: Balance Sauvignon Blanc Brut, sparkling wine from South Africa, with an elephant on the label balancing itself on a tiny stool, supposedly in a humorous way. And yes, the label was the reason why I bought it and yes, it was most horrible of taste and aroma and will not ever be bought again. Dank, fetid and musty, with a vivacious blurb on the back label having nothing whatsoever to do with the reality of the wine. This was also the first time I’ve had sparkling wine made from sauvignon blanc and it doesn’t seem an ideal grape for this kind of wine. I haven’t liked anything I’ve tasted from South Africa, the reds have been too thick and crushing, the whites too thin and watery, and now this. Oh my God. Avoid at all costs.

Château Causse, on the other hand, is classy red wine from France, nicer and more inexpensive than the last French one tried, Cuvee Mythique. Maybe because I decanted it several hours before drinking, giving it time to properly open up, as it clearly did too, or maybe because it was such a lovely companion to Tajarin al Ragú I prepared with great care, or maybe because it just is a nicer wine. I will remember this wine in the future and might buy it again. My list of good and reasonably priced red wines could use a few additions.

Hi ho and towards the christmas we go, no matter the precautions, inhibitions and general disapproval. None of which, I might add, are among the personal attributes I like to decorate my idea of christmas with. Meaning I like most aspects of the forthcoming celebration of lights’ triumph over darkness (with the exception of the heightened economic activity and agony of mandatory gift-giving I’m not going to partake in this year), it’s something to look forward to in these weeks leading up to it that are without a doubt the gloomiest of the whole year. The snow-covered landscape I mentioned in the last post proved to be fleeting like a slice of ham placed in the dog’s bowl, well not actually gone in a second like the ham usually is, but on an, um, planetary scale amounting to pretty much the same, with all traces of whiteness having disappeared completely within a week and the world having resumed it’s cosy “let’s keep the light at minimum and the rainfall at maximum”-mode.

I’m not complaining though. There’s a certain charm in this perpetual dusk and the best way to appreciate it is to observe it with casual glances out the kitchen window. It’s relatively warm here at home and I’m relatively free of any obligations of daily work at the moment, so leisure is the new diligence, much in the same way as black seems to be the new black. Or "togetherness is the new singularity",as Robert Rankin so indisputably stated in a recent novel of his.

Leisure can manifest itself in multiple ways and one of its’ dulcet forms is the vacant and unhurried inactivity I embraced yesterday, all day. I spent the whole day doing absolutely nothing and feeling very fine about it. Among this “nothing” I count also the long due project of formatting the hard drive of my computer and re-installing the operating system but it doesn’t really count as proper activity, mostly involving just sitting down and idly clicking on a mouse and taking some twelve hours to complete the process. It was dark outside when I started and it was dark outside when I finished, with probably a lot of darkness outside included in between as well. The wading in a quicksand of using my PC recently has given way to lightfootedly frolicking across the park of using my PC now, with the only downfall in transition being the loss of all the bookmarks in my web browser. I backed them up but seemingly not thoroughly enough since the file I tried to restore them from refused to open in the newly installed browser and in the end there was nothing I could do but to open the file in Notepad and one by one locate the links under and amongst the wreckage and endless lines of seemingly gibberish code, then copy and paste them on the browser to bookmark again. And only the first hundred or so of several hundred had survived. Not every one of those were crucially important but each one was bookmarked at a time with the firm resolution of a closer scrutiny some day. Now that day never comes and many a fascinating trinket of trivia will never enter my mind now, only to end up in some crowded dusty shelf in a seldom if ever visited storage area of my long term memory.

Still, the loss is devastating(ish), and would be more devastating if I could remember (or had, in the first place, had deeper knowledge of) what I’ve lost. Much bigger disasters have taken place in the past in similar formatting-of-the-hard-drive occasions, with probably the biggest and most shattering being the time when, due to a misunderstanding regarding the actual location of “My Documents”-folder, I lost all the lyrics and other text I had on my computer. The lyrics I was able to restore from web pages and my memory, but all the other stuff, the unfinished lyrics and poetry both in English and Finnish, was lost forever.

That was a bit of a bummer.

Anyway, no personal texts lost this time, and there’s always going to be new astonishingly interesting web pages for me to bookmark and never return to. Here’s a few examples of the wide array of wildly differing Wikipedia pages I’ve been meaning to examine as soon as time permits. It haven’t permitted so far but maybe it will at some point.

THIS WEEKS’ BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
Cava Vallformosa Brut Vintage, sparkling wine from Spain and apparently the only ”extra brut” available in Finland. Well dry it was, extremely so, and sparkling to the point of seemingly retaining its’ sparkliness ad infinitum, or at least for as long as it took to finish the glass unhurriedly. The bottle and the label looked nice and I’m sure it’s a fine and classy cava but one glass of this kind normally is enough for me. Waiting in the freezer now are several bottles of wines having hippos and elephants on the labels and I have a good feeling about them and am going to partake of them as soon as possible. There’s also a bagful of English and French cider bottles for a Tasting Of Traditional Ciders will take place tomorrow.