Ho hum. I dimly recall, a while ago, writing something to the effect of sorely needing to update the blog more often. This intention clearly falls into a category labelled ”ideas somewhat removed from actual everyday reality”. Although it’s not been exactly hectic of late, I’ve still been moderately busy, or at least busy enough not to have felt like sitting down to see what comes out once I start typing. The days are taken by the dayjob, not irritatingly but time- and energy-consumingly enough to prevent any longer periods of sitting down and doing some thinking (often required to some extent before actual writing). And since I finally got around to acting upon my long-time resolution to get a drivers’ licence any year now, the evenings are engulfed by theory lessons on the knacks of steering a motorised vehicle, and a nervous-ish anticipation of actually getting behind the wheel of one (this will happen tomorrow, for the first time).

So apart from driving school textbooks I haven’t read anything much lately. I ordered a couple of books by Stephen Fry from Amazon.co.uk, as well as several other books too, to frown at me accusingly from the bookshelf, looking pointedly unread and forlorn. I will deal with these books in due time. I was forced to turn off Amazons’ ”e-mail notifications on special offers”-option to put an end to ex tempore purchases, but not before facing the fact that it would be impossible for me to carry on without Stephen Fry’s guide to writing proper verse, called "The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within". My inner poet has peered cautiously from behind the sturdy bars of its’ dank and unlit cell for years already, and occasionally I’ve thrown in a half-gnawed bone, or a loaf of stale bread, maybe a small cup of sour wine, thus keeping the poet from withering away completely. There wouldn’t be much point in keeping a dead poet locked up within. But now, at some point, after having carefully consulted the guide book first, I might serve the inner poet a proper meal for a change, and maybe even let it briefly glance at the sun.

Actually I already had An Idea For An Epic Poem, this morning while sitting at my Throne Of Poesy (i.e. toilet) at 6 o’clock, which has often proved to be an excellent time (and a place) for coming up with declamatory off-the-wall ideas. At 6 o’clock my corpus may already be partially animated but my thought patterns most definitely have not reached their normal dull functionality yet so fruitful are those precious and frail morning moments when it comes to unexpected springing up of ideas. Many a song title has descended upon me on similar moments in the past (like ”My Sweet Nothing” and ”Closely Guarded Distance”). This mornings’ idea was ludicrous enough to require further development, a twelve-song cycle involving months of the year and days of the week randomly combined (”February Monday”, ”October Sunday”, etc.) and the outcome of such combinations. February Monday differs greatly from, say, July Monday and the colours and emotions contained within should provide interesting contrasts and a lot of unintelligible poetic blather and general redundancy. If I ever get around to constructing it properly.

But now this here August Thursday is delicately starting to settle into slumber, waning and lessening into the inevitable August Friday and a lot I planned on saying remains unsaid. Like the adequate and elegant use of swearwords, and Finlands’ Second Greatest Poet of all time. Maybe next time, or the time after that.

Hmm. This didn't have much to do with the title of the post. Oh well.

My last post, advertising the magnificent new IQ album, sparked response from various people who contacted me using various methods, just to tell me they liked it too. I appreciate this and am aware that enabling comments on this blog would make it easier to leave feedback on such matters. Still, since I like to maintain the illusion that I’m only writing to myself and don’t really want to find out who or how many people actually read this blog, the option to comment will remain unavailable. It’s easier to voice opinions to an audience unseen. But I’m always glad to share something I enjoy, which, when it comes to music, isn’t very often.

I finally got around to reading ”Paperweight” by Stephen Fry. Mr. Leinonen thrust the book upon me sometime last year and have refused to take it back on the several occasions I’ve tried to return it on the grounds that I’m absolutely never going to read it no matter what. Now that I actually am reading it, I’m very glad that in this case my definition of ”never” turned out wildly inaccurate. The kind of language mr. Fry uses is a pleasure to read even though I have to consult my dictionary every dozen or so words which is at times frustrating since looking a word up doesn’t automatically add it to my vocabulary. Sometimes I check up the same word for several days in a row, only to forget the meaning by the time I come across it again the next day. This can be very exasperating, but repetitio est mater studiorum, as the latin-speaking folks of times gone by were supposedly in the habit of saying in certain situations, most astutely.

I don’t know if they had a latin equivalent to ”forgetting is the father of frustration” but if they didn’t they clearly hadn’t thought things through properly and weren’t so astute after all. Examining the writings discovered on the walls in Pompeii might shed some light on this topic. Maybe they were too busy depicting various scenarios of sexual intercourse on their walls and had no time to think up witty and quibbly follow-ups to proverbs already established, those lusty latin libertines.


And now onto something else, seemingly unrelated but still cunningly interconnected to what I’ve been talking about so far. A year ago, everything was awesome as a new spring water called Plup was launched in Finland, with plenty of hullabaloo and expensive advertisement. Stefan Lindfors designed the container (it’s hard to call something like this a bottle) and a most exquisite and irresistible design it is too. This is what is says on their webpage, among other things: ”PLUP encourages consumers not to return the bottle, but rather to re-fill and re-use it. It’s highly durable and suitable for heavy use, such as hiking or boating.” Turns out Sunday afternoon picnicking doesn’t count as ”heavy use” but rather falls into a category of activities harder and more demanding than hiking or boating. And how do I know this? Because last Sunday, for a nice and cosy picnic in a sunny and lovely park, I had packed also a refilled Plup-bottle (or a container). After all the food and wine had been consumed, the refilled Plup-bottle (let’s agree it can be called a bottle, with certain reservations) remained untouched so back to the watertight picnic-basket it went, with other containers, and two paperback novels.

On returning home I discovered that all the 0,4 litres of water originally contained in the Plup-bottle were no longer in the Plup-bottle, due to a flimsy cork that clearly isn’t capable of holding liquids, but at the bottom of the watertight basket, with the paperback novels, one of which was this aforementioned ”Paperweight” by Stephen Fry, borrowed from mr. Leinonen. 4 dl is a surprisingly large amount of liquid when it’s in a pool somewhere it isn’t supposed to be, or in this case, absorbed into pages of a book. Plup might preserve the environment and the Baltic Sea but it failed to preserve the readability of a common paperback novel. So into the litter bin went the Plup-bottle and quickly towards Amazon.co.uk went I to get a new copy to replace the ruined one, shuddering at the prospect of mr. Leinonen finding out and wreaking merciless havoc upon my poor thoughtless person.

Summa summarum (as the romping Roman rascals of Pompeii might have said in between painting pictures of giant phalluses and reckless orgies on their walls): A new copy of ”Paperweight” was acquired for an excessively lucrative price of 0.01GBP plus postage (although the old copy, after having dried up, doesn’t look completely ruined either), I still like the design of Plup but will not buy another bottle of it (ungleefully sharing this resolution with a lot of other people too because according to this link Plup has flopped in a major way), the new IQ album continues to be excellent and I really need to find out more about the sensual way ancient Romans preferred to decorate their surroundings with.

My dayjob is at times a solitary affair and a whole day might go by without a single word exchanged with anyone. Sometimes a day might go by without any contact with other human beings. Which is absolutely fine by me because I can then indulge in old Genesis albums on my mp3 player, and, on occasion, gingerly check out some new music too. A while ago I bought a copy of a Classic Rock Presents Prog magazine on an airport newsstand to have something to read on the plane. It was ridiculously expensive, packed in a colourful cardboard wallet that went straight into the litter bin and including a sample cd of the artists featured in the magazine that almost went straight into the litter bin too. Almost, but not quite. Thinking that some of those bands might emit sounds to please my battered auditory organs I saved the album for later use.

This ”later use” normally means briefly listening to bits of the hapless cd with mr. Mäkinen the guitarist of Sinisthra, in a very prejudiced manner in a car while driving to band rehearsals, before tossing it out the window accompanied by disbelieving cries of god that was some crap excuse for music. Although recently we’ve become more environmentally aware and instead of throwing the cds out the window they now usually end up on the floor of the car, allowing easy access for wiping your boots on, spilling the overflow from cans of energy drink and sprinkling bits of potato crisps that miss the mouth or spray out of there because of the outrage caused by hearing bad music. Many an album full of undeniable musical aspirations and a large amount of effort clearly invested into making the grandiose artistic visions come true have received an unjust and hurried verdict of being utter garbage after a hasty listen to the first 30 seconds of some of the songs. And many an album undoubtedly will in the future too, in a bigoted and anxious-to-condemn circle of elitist know-it-all music critics contained in the car on its’ way to Sinisthra rehearsals.

The better way then, to get properly exposed to new music, is to listen to it alone in a peaceful place, in my case at work with the headphones. I seem to have misplaced the Classic Rock cd but, prompted by it, decided to finally check out Dream Theater and their new cd ”Black Clouds And Silver Linings”. I liked the title of the album and as the first song started it sounded reasonable enough but by the time the vocalist made his entrance I strongly disliked it already and as the song finally finished I firmly hated it, with all the unnecessary but somehow still very cliched and predictable twists and turns of the arrangement, mediocre metal riffs and vocal melodies and the ridiculous pretentiousness of the lyric that was probably supposed to be a touching story about a person surviving a car accident, or something like that. I listened to the album a few times and found nothing I could enjoy. All the ”prog metal”-stuff I’ve ever heard I’ve found repulsive to me and this definitely was no exception. I then decided to try out their ”Images And Words”-album and see if it would fare better in my ears, being heralded as their classic and best work. I hated it even more and after two songs saw no reason to waste my time any further on something that clearly is not suited to my tastes at all. Disillusioned, I didn’t listen to anything for days after that.

Yesterday, I put on the new IQ album called ”Frequency”. It’s being hailed as their best album by the critics, and this is curious for a band that’s been in existence for some 25 years. I dimly recall giving their 1985 album ”The Wake” a spin years ago, not liking it at all and dismissing IQ as another forgettable neoprog band that never amounted to much, with a slightly irritating vocalist and very outdated-sounding material, like Pallas and Pendragon. All this has changed on ”Frequency”, and as I gather, on all their albums for the past 10 or so years. As soon as the store on their website is up again I will order some of their older cd’s because this new one is simply superb and it really made my day. The last time I was this impressed by an album was probably when The Mars Volta released ”Bedlam In Goliath” and ”Frequency” by far surpasses the impact made by that album. It has all the elements of classic prog that hit the soft spot in me but possess an individual voice strong enough to lift it above bands like The Watch who, despite putting the all-too-familiar pieces together in a way cunning enough to make them enjoyable to me, still only put together pieces originally invented by someone else, mostly Genesis in their case. The influence of Genesis is quite evident in what IQ does as well, but they have the advantage of having been at it for so long that they clearly know what they do, how to infuse the influences into your own stuff without sounding too familiar but not too obscure either.

Listen to yourself. Wonderful stuff, and I’m really looking forward to getting their previous albums now.

The risks of listening to new music are undisputable. One never knows what one might hear. More often than not it sadly is something one would have done perfectly well never hearing in the first place, but on a rare occasion good things pop up and make listening to music worthwhile again.

Sometimes selecting a book to read and actually starting to read it seems to require a lot more than I have in me. The pros and cons must to be carefully weighed out in advance, prior to taking action. Ramifications need to be considered, and often reconsidered as well. Is the effort worth pursuing? There are no waterproof guarantees of quality. A reading experience may start pleasantly enough and then suddenly go sour. What if it’s just not a very good book and I find out too late? Maybe I mistake it for a slow starter and just fight my way through the first 100 pages, hoping it will pick up speed as it goes along, and then it doesn’t? Rarely have I had the nerve to abandon a book if I’m already some 100 pages in, no matter how boring it turns out to be. Then I’ll just have to finish it because it’s too late to quit, and this tribulation might drag on for weeks at worst. It might be one of those ”every serious book needs to have at least 750 pages”-kind of special tribulations, with every even vaguely interesting detail of the plot already given up and spilled out on the back cover blurb.

To avoid these tragedies I usually like to do some research before purchasing a book. Usually but not always. I’ve had some books by Umberto Eco and Roberto Calasso lurking in the bookshelf for several months now, unread and peering at me accusingly every time I’ve approached the shelf. ”The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony” by Calasso felt insanely interesting because of the review, and turned out to be so horribly long-winded a non-starter that I was forced to drop it before its’ tediousness had crushed me beyond redemption, after having read only 15 pages. We clearly didn’t meet up under favourable stars, me and the book, and I plead guilty. Maybe some other time, but most definitely not during high summer and a therefore radically shortened attention span.

Warm climate calls for easy reading, so mostly it’s been wine magazines and autobiographies lately, of Tori Amos, Rene Magritte and H.R. Giger, respectively, with only the Tori book digging a bit deeper into the artists’ background. Giger’s images brought welcome shivers to a hot summer day in their feverish yet chilling depiction of unpleasant things but failed to impress me deeper. Actually I found some of his concepts, like a sexually insatiable biomechanoid with only one leg, one arm and not much else, a bit silly rather than chilling and that’s probably not what the artist intended in the first place. Magritte’s paintings, on the other hand, tend to captivate me for long, long moments and I enjoy their drier coldness and dispassionate objectiveness immensely.

”How to Travel with a Salmon” by Umberto Eco I was able to wade through, a complete book, taking a lot of time and skipping only a few chapters here and there, but then again it’s a collection of light and satirical columns he used to write for a newspaper so there was not much effort or concentration needed (on my part). Unfortunately I found the essays to be of highly variable quality, with sharp insight and astoundingly aptly crafted and entertaining sentences and witty observations giving way, as the book progresses, to what feels like empty banter and tiresome prattling too closely associated with local (Italian)culture and bygone (late 70’s-early 80’s) times (when the texts were originally written) to be universally interesting anymore. The outrageously exaggerated remarks and over-the-top satire at times felt brilliantly timeless and the next moment horribly dated but the marvellous moments still outweighed the yawn-moments. Somewhat.

Since it’s technically still summer and novels with actual storyline are still out of the question I now juggle with Michael Palin’s diary ”The Python Years” and Stephen Fry’s collection of radio broadcasts and whatnot called ”Paperweight” and remain undecided on which one to let fall open in my hands.

Oh well. Here’s an Emergency Yodel Button (in Case of Emergency I suppose), and below is a picture of my wee nephew and namesake, mr. E.Virta of two and a half years of age, in an extremely focused state of concentration, determined to explore the contents of his nostril as thoroughly and as exhaustively as he deems necessary. With numerous blissful years of not having to worry about reading matters still ahead of him.