I’ve been struggling to put together this next post in a witty, smart, cohesive way, but at this point, I already gave up. I’m sorry for the following dump.
Here are some of the best notes coincidences omens from the past few days:
I recently discovered by accident this weird project by the photographer Jeff Mermelstein where he took and collected a series of pictures from people’s texts. He took these pictures without people knowing, keeping their anonymity intact as part of the core of this project. These pictures are collected in an art book that I already tried to find and purchase online, to only later find out that it costs something equivalent to a kidney and/or your first-born child.
Still, it’s possible to find a lot of these pictures online. They all look the same: Close-up, low-quality captures of someone’s phone screen. I like how the angle suggests the implicit voyeurism that is unavoidably attached to the core concept, and how it implies that the photographer is a sneaky, nosy little man, just like us.
So, listen up:
here's a story
About a little guy
That lives in a blue world
And all day and all night
And everything he sees is just blue
Like him inside and outside
Blue his house
With a blue little window
And a blue corvette
And everything is blue for him
And himself and everybody around
Cause he ain't got nobody to listen to
The little guy:
and
There’s this radio show that I listen to every week. They play a lot of different songs, most of them new to me, but sometimes I’m surprised with songs that I know and that I haven’t heard in a while. Such as:
I never cared much about this track until it came up on the show, the same way I had never noticed this one, from the same album (it only makes sense if you listen until the very end):
I’ve listened to and played I Will on my guitar so many times but now I prefer this stupid demo to anything else in the world.
Anyway, lastly, searching for its chords, I found out that there’s a beautiful version of Blue Moon by Amália Rodrigues, probably the most famous Portuguese fado singer. I had never heard her sing in any other language besides Portuguese until now.
When I was doing my Master’s, we had a class called Narrative Techniques. Our teacher once gave us a copy of Why Don’t We Dance by Raymond Carver as a prompt for some exercise that I don’t even remember because that short story was simply, directly love at first word. He also told us that Raymond Carver was an alcoholic and a lousy husband and his stories somehow reflect his depressing lifestyle but also his redemptive posture towards his doomed past. And, at some point, he wrote this to his wife:
