Lyrics: “Tough To Be A Dreamer” – Felix Hagan & The Family, 2017
As you can gather from the lack of posts these past few weeks, I still have not quite the idea / plan what to do with this space. It might indeed end up being a place where I archive some of fangirling activities.
Fangirling | Possibly about books and movies but let’s be honest mostly about Frank Turner probably. I’m still working on my post on the other song from the last album, which resonates with me so deeply: “Somewhere Inbetween.” It’s going to take a few more days; hopefully not weeks. I got a bit distracted this weekend because another of my favourite (sadly still not well known) artists – Felix Hagan – did an Insta Live on Friday. Like in the “(not really so) good old days” of lockdown 2020/2021 where we gathered on his Facebook for Felix Friday to hear him play all the songs from everyone. It was nice to do that again and he shared exciting news about a new band and potential tour or at least gigs. If that works out I really hope I can make the trip over to the UK for that. I also had to have a good “listen to all the Felix songs” session yesterday.
It’s always funny in a nice way when my entertainment / media interests collide. I’ve been reading the sixth book in the The Chronicles of St. Mary’s series recently, on of my favourite book series at the moment. And I came across an historical event that sounded familiar! Because Frank used it in one of my (many) favourites metaphors in a song. That needs to be added to my Lyrical History of course.
Funnily enough when I googled to fact-check, the first results lead me to the 1990 movie (and the novel it’s based on) with Bruce Willis, Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith. I knew of the movie, of course, though I hadn’t seen it. But I only knew it with the German title, because back in the day we only knew them with the German titles over here. So I never made the connection before.
Looking back know I feel like I chatted with another fan about that metaphor once and they mentioned the historical Bonfire of the Vanities to me, but it’s a very vague memory and it obviously didn’t come to my mind, when I first compiled the Lyrical History list.
Books & Language | I’ll try to post the “Books I’ve Read in June” post this evening, probably while watching the football. For some reason I planned to finally start with “James” by Percival Everett, which is a retelling of “Huckleberry Finn” from the point of view of the slave Jim, who is part of that story. I don’t always like retelling of classic stories, but this sounded interesting enough. I thought I should probably read the original first, because I have never done that. Now while I do, I vaguely recall some of the plot from what I now believe to have been a German translation for children (in a condensed form) of both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finns stories. Anyway, I started and am still reading Huckleberry Finn at the moment, but admit that I’m struggling with Twain’s writing a bit. I struggle with the meandering boy’s voice of the narrator and the – what I’ve learned from Wikipedia – vernacular language as the “informal, spoken, dialect” language. I admit I also struggle(d) with the regular use of racist terms, like the N-word, which I consider to be offensive even in the context of this “masterpiece of literature” (some call it). I know it was commonly used back then and I don’t say this novel should be revised to exclude the word now. I’m just telling you how I feel about it. I do think some (childrens) books could / should be revised thought to not use those offensive terms any more or at least should come with an explanation why they still do. But that’s just woke little me, I guess.
Football “Experts” | I’ve been watching the Germany – Denmark match last night with a bunch of guys in the room. I don’t care about football all that much to be honest and realized my main entertainment was hearing those armchair experts comment on the game, the moves, the players, the referees and so on. They had an opinion on everything and of course they were always right. To be fair, they also weren’t dead serious about it and knew their limits. But I was wondering if that is a football fan thing or a male thing? Do female football fans act the same in a group? Do fans of other sports do the same when they watch a game? I used to go to icehockey games for a while and it was similar: the men always had something to say about the the teams, the players, the moves etc. So maybe it’s a gender thing after all.
Mental Health | I’m doing mostly ok at the moment. Trying to practice a lot of self-compassion. Listening to some podcasts to help me get back on track with a more healthy behaviour or to just recap things I’ve learned before. Meditation. Self-care in form of doodling. One of the many postive aspects of that is, that I’ve learned to live and accept and just don’t give a fuck about imperfections. Mistakes. Messing up. We all do.
“All that really counts is how you live today…”
