This is one of my personal theme songs. It pretty much captures what I sound like when someone asks me what I do. “I don’t know… but I do it every day….”
And while we’re on the subject, here’s a quote I saved from the recent obituary of pianist Jörg Demus. To be honest I’d never heard of him before that, but he sounds like my kind of guy.
I do not have a career. I’m a person who had a life to live. I am leaving “careers” to other people. A career is like a racetrack for horses — I’m neither a horse nor am I running on a racetrack.
A few days ago I started J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, a 1975 dystopian novel set in a London apartment tower. A paragraph in I was nodding to myself and mumbling, “Now that’s one hell of an opening.”
Imagine my surprise at scrolling the Twitter today and seeing it again, but in a new context.
Somehow or other I mostly missed Blur when they were happening. My first Blur album was their fifth, the self-titled one that came out in 1997. It was only later that I went back and explored their earlier stuff, and some of it fell through the cracks… like this one from 1995’s The Great Escape.
What a smashing number. I particularly like the unconventional structure, the way what appears to be the chorus — “there must be more to life/than stereotypes” — shifts into a chorus-within-the-chorus, the “all your life you’re dreaming” part, and then back. I listened to this song at least once every day this week, and I’m not tired of it yet.
