And you want to travel blind.
There are lyrics that make me love music. Like Suzanne, by Leonard Cohen.
For me, it’s more about the lyrics than anything else. Understandable, for someone who hasn’t grown up with music but was forced to hear ten times a day “Hope of Deliverance” by Paul McCartney, which had my dad totaly obsessed for years.
I once wrote that I live some days to the rythm of Billie Holliday, the days I’m a good and organized girl that cooks next to a glass of martini. I’ve also lived to the rythm of The Killers, smoking like a truck driver, eating fries and drinking beer while organizing songs for the next party. Sade, along with an adult that tried pretty hard to convince me that he was still a kid, but that was never up for some playing. Compay Segundo, next to a fisiotherapist that tought me casual anatomy with one hand while refilling obsessively my glass of wine with the other, but never had hands left to touch me. Guns’n’Roses with a Robinson Crusoe that turned to be more of a patio chimp. And Leonard Cohen, specially Suzanne, with a climber that was afraid to get lost and had a dog I everyday loved a bit more than him. Also Peaches, Death Cab For Cutie, Jacques Trennet, Pixies and even some Brandenburg concert.
But back to Suzanne… you know that she’s half crazy, but that’s why you want to be there, and she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China. And just when you mean to tell her, hat you have no love to give her, then she gets you on her wavelength, and she lets the river answer that you’ve always been her lover. And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind. And you know that she will trust you, for you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind.
Web 2.0 suicide
“Unfriend” became Oxford’s Word of the Year 2009, and over the last week I can confirm many of my social network contacts have encountered virtual dilemmas, aware or not of Oxford’s choice. The trend dilemma seems to be:
- “I add someone as a friend” or “I confirm someone as a friend” (both, then, beeing active decisions).
- I feel annoyed by the fact that this people I now consider “friends” are not giving me as much feedback as they would in real life.
- Taking advantage of the pretended distance Internet gives, and the possibility to communicate massive messages, I post an incendiary status update threatening silent people in my news feed with a determined will to delete all those contacts that appear to be just watching my conversations instead of participating on them.
In my opinion, we haven’t had the time to think which use we want to give to, let’s say, Facebook. We love having lot’s of friends and being able to communicate with all of them easily, even to distribute an ideal self through tagged pictures and cool statuses. Most don’t master the art of privacy and ignore lists of friends related to a specific limited profile. We get to the point in which we believe people only add or accept us as friends in order to broaden the list.
Does it really matter? For me, what’s important is the connections you establish and how much access you give to them. A social network is not real life, and for instance, I don’t accept people I don’t know (in real of virtual life). I don’t have the need to talk to all of them, but the value for me is being able to easily contact them if I feel like it, or just be in the know. Of course one can choose to have a really closed and elitist network of real life close friends, but in my opinion that’s not Facebook in it’s full potential.
All those who get too much trouble with virtual dilemmas, can always commit virtual suicide and disappear completely from Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or Twitter. Grab the Ethernet rope an voilà! Disconnected.
Heathrow’s writer in residence
Last August, Heathrow Airport announced the incorporation to its busy hallways of Alain de Botton (author of “How Proust Can Change Your Life” or “The Art of Travel”) as “writer in residence” for a week. Concept we normally associate with DJs, Mr. Botton has given too some sort of a cappella ambient music to the airport’s busting Terminal 5 during his stay. Interviews with passengers, baggage handlers, airline executives and all sorts of moving creatures he spontaneously encountered for seven days before going back home to finish “A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary” which is now already published by Profile Books.
The nice thing, he could explain anything he wanted. A cockroach in the restaurant? Fine.
But his short residence was a total exchange between him and passengers: when not talking to someone, Alain was seated at a desk and tapping away at his laptop computer. His typing appeared in real time on a screen behind him.
Now that the book is published, Alain (that retains the rights of the book) has given away 10,000 copies to random passengers to read on their travels. But they are not the only ones to read. Mr. Botton just completed being the airport’s first ever reader-in-residence conducting unprompted readings to thousands of domestic and international travellers to mark the launch of the book.
But Mr. de Botton, in fact, is already fantasizing about more posts. “I’d like to be a writer in residence at a nuclear power station,” he said.
