Things are all right.

As of thirteen minutes ago as of writing, this blog is now five years old. To celebrate, i will proceed to pack my bags and go across the country to work at a big music festival. And then i will cross a sea wearing only clothes that will be very, very dirty by then and visit a nearby island i've never been to but that people have been asking me to visit for the past twelve years already. Who knows, i might even tell those people i'm coming.

The first part of the project vaguely described above is Italia Wave Love Festival which, as Pitchfork (oy) wrote recently, has one of the best festival names around. Vinicio Capossela sort of said the same thing when he played there ("there" being another town completely) and i prefer the way he said it, even if i don't remember the exact wording. Amusingly, in a way i would never be working there if it wasn't for this blog, which gave me visibility among certain particularly illuminated web people. For this website and the very-healthy-despite-not-updating-much eelst.splinder.com blog. Coincidentally both that blog and this one were born from the cinders of disastrous relationships, and both blogs brought me a great amount of luck both professionally and otherwise. I think this is a good thing, and at the same time i hope not to have to open any further blogs. I feel lucky enough as it is, thank you.

A couple of words about which way i see this web stuff going. I'm currently online on several different platforms both for personal and professional reasons. This has brought to less output on this blog, mainly due to lack of time (partially also due to nagging perfectionism, as the staggering amount of post drafts in my blogger dashboad can testify). I still hope to find more time to post here, because i still see this page as my online home. And i don't mean homepage, i mean "home" as in "place you can lie down on the sofa and take your shoes off and leave them on the floor and just relax".*
I have for example resolved to write less on twitter, and blog more. i've got the "write less on twitter" part figured out, it's the second bit that still fails me a little. The tone of my past month or so of tweets has been positively Gonzo, and it goes without saying that i have enjoyed it immensely and that considering what the past month was like it could not have been otherwise. From tomorrow it enters travel mode, like last year in Guča, and i will probably be updating via mobile again. Unless i find a way to sms my way to this blog, which i'm probably tech-savvy enough to do but definitely not nerdy enough.
Also, over the next week i'm one of the people in charge of the official ItaliaWave twitter. I suggest keeping an eye on that, too.
Tracklistmagazine is currently on brief hiatus while we refurbish it a little turning it into something different but similar at the same time. There will be shakeups. There will be music. There might even be updates. It's gonna be fun. Meanwhile, feel free to go back there and enjoy the archived content, there's some stuff there i'm still quite proud of.
I'm still covering the role of privileged guestblogger on VuotoSpinto.it, where i tend to go for a more political edge. Some examples can be found clicking here, but by all means read the other two guys' stuff too.
El Blog De Fidel, which more than one person has actually believed to be legit, is sort of retired although some people say it's still controlling everything from behind the scenes.
Cat Walking On A Keyboard is happy and purring and has shown interest to start blogging again. He has shown this interest by sitting on my laptop in random moments and blocking stuff.
The dreaded MySpace page is only there because it's there and i sort of loathe its being there. The less said about it the better.
Flickr is now Pro and will continue to be updated. I didn't have time to lately but there's loads of stuff i'm aching to put on.
All my personal networking is currently pretty much on FaceBook and if you've tried to add me even if i don't know you you are either very stupid, or very italian, or very both.

As for this blog, it will continue the way it always has, intermittently but intensely. I don't mention this page much in public but one time i did i was asked the question "Oh, you have a blog? What about?" which made me realize i'd never really thought blogs were supposed to be about anything, i always thought they were just there. It will however continue to be about what it is about, whatever that is. From what i recall in these past five years, it's a blog about how much Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica is absolutely wierd and reassuringly natural at the same time, it's about pictures of my cat taking a beauty nap on my bed, it's about me struggling not to write a post justifying my love for Pizzicato Five because guilty pleasures aren't fun if you take away the "guilty" and put in a "justified", it's about weekend downloads being given out on weekdays, it's about music videos from classic black and white comedies found on youtube, it's about whatever the wind brought through the window that morning and whichever shape the birds were flying in. I don't know what it's about but it's here. And now, it's five years old. Happy birthday to it.


*i would like to use this opportunity to divulge the definition of "home" which i personally coined in Pala Dayroom oh so many years ago: "Home is where you don't need to smell the carton before drinking the milk".

Snippet

The players: Myself, M. (i know a ridiculous amount of M's, so it doesn't really make any difference)
The place: online.

Her: on the other hand, did you make your blog's layout unreadable on purpose?
Me: Funny story actually, 'cause you can see everything perfectly from my laptop. But then one day, months after changing template, many months after, i opened the page from my home computer and realized you can't understand a word.
Her: hahahaa
Me: What happened next is that i laughed for about ten minutes, then said "perfect" and turned everything off.

(end of anecdote)

(pause)

(announcement)

On Monday, July 14th this blog will be five years old. It was created on Monday, July 14th 2003. I don't know how it's still on a monday and even if you explained i wouldn't understand it. Coincidentally, on that same day (of 2008, not of 2003) i shall be departing for yet another Adventure. Updates from said Adventure shall be quite frequent, 'cause i'm even sort of getting paid to do it. To do the Adventure.
Hopefully i will manage to post again before that, perhaps rehashing one of those 22 (!) post drafts i just found in the blogger basement.

Oh, and i've had a new template for this blog sort of ready approximately since november. I'll actually install it one of these days. Hopefully before 2009.

Cheating.

As you probably won't notice, there are still some slight changes going on in this here blog's appearance. I made some minimal changes to the template color and also didn't change the color of certain bits of the sidebar. I'm pointing this out because i had actually *tried* to make things look better but had ended up with one single big ugly mess and had to fight through the teeth to get things back how they were originally, which brought me to decide that hey, those particular bits didn't look that bad in the first place.

What you will see changing are the colors of the template: starting tomorrow, i'll be cycling them around to see how they fit better, which combination i like the most, and if i manage to not make a big ugly mess of things for a change. This you will notice, and please feel free to point out your preferences in the comments bin.

It would make no sense to make these changes if there were no updates, as it has been for quite a while in these whereabouts. Which is why in the past week i've forced myself to update every. single. day. and will try to keep going like this for as long as i can. I have a small backlog of posts for quieter/busier days and will concentrate my online thoughts and commentaries here instead of dispersing them here and there as profile updates, twitter updates or whatnots.
Except for today, of course. Today i'm just rambling about the template which does not at all count as an update. As a matter of fact, it counts as exactly what the title of this post is.

Old and familiar faces 3 - Mitko

Location: somewhere between Duino and Turin (or vice versa).
Time: sometime between 1am Tuesday morning and 6pm Wednesday evening.

Him: Now I understand why you don't update your blog so often. Every time you try to do it some wierd bulgarian shows up and kidnaps you away in his car.
Me: It's funny because it's true.

Later, or earlier that night/morning/evening. Oh whatever, SUMMER.

Me: I really needed this, i haven't had a road trip in ages.
Him: When was the last time?
Me: On my birthday, a friend of mine was playing with his band in some place 5 hours away from home, and the night before we just decided to surprise them, filled two cars up with people and drinks and drove over.
Him: That's strange.
Me: Not really...
Him: No, i mean it's strange i don't remember you writing about it on your blog.

(Actually, the second conversation might have occurred immediately before the first one. My memory, as always, is not in any way helpful in reconstructing the events.)

Where i spent the past couple of months

The Blues Busters live with Byron Lee & The Dragonairs at The Sombrero Club, 1962. (via)

(spoiler: chicken and potatoes)

The players: My Father, The Webmaster.
The time: two days ago, lunchtime.
Him: We're running off to the lawyer, but i left something to eat in the fridge. Don't know what it is though.
Me: You don't? Who made it?
Him: Oh, I did.

New Post

Good morning. This is, i suppose, officially the first post of the new year. Funny thing is, i still haven't had the time to write the traditional end-of-2006 post. So traditional that at one point of our new year's dinner somebody asked "have you all written your end-of-year posts?", and everybody answered in the affirmative. That's 2006 to you, all but one of the people i was celebrating with have one or more blogs, or at least an internet presence. The one without, an increasingly rare plus, has my eternal admirement.
Certain things have been somewhat changing in the online world in the meantime. I woke up yesterday to find Blogger, Last.fm and Myspace functioning entirely in italian. In wrong italian. In Babelfish-translated italian. I now have nightmares of living in a world where everybody speaks a profoundly incorrect and rebabelfished version of their own languages, and where writing doesn't fit on street signs because nobody bothered to modify the template.

(Wrong Italian is, i assume, in the same linguistic family as Drunk English)

Luckily, some backstage fiddling and jiggledypokery fixed all that. And as a consequence, we now have tags. And if one of these days i feel crazy or suicidal enough, i might even try to start improving the template using all these beautiful new Blogger tools which quite frankly terrify me to the bone. Meanwhile, tags have been added to most recent posts for your enjoyment. Chances of me going back and tagging the entire archives: Yeah right. Good one.

So, that's all. Enjoy your 2007(which i certainly didn't ask for, 2006 was being particularly good for me already), expect new stuff on this page sometime soonish.