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Nobel Prize for Literature, 2007

It went to Dorrs Lessing, the 88-year-old British writer.
It's time to enrich my lybrary with a new author (new for me).
Lessing is the second British writer to win the prize in three years. In 2005, Harold Pinter received the award. Last year, the academy gave the prize to Turkey's Orhan Pamuk.
"When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s," she told The Associated Press in an interview last year ago. "What I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire -- nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?"


The literature award was the fourth of this year's Nobel Prizes to be announced. On Wednesday, Gerhard Ertl of Germany won the 2007 Nobel Prize in chemistry for studies of chemical reactions on solid surfaces, which are key to understanding such questions as why the ozone layer is thinning.
Tuesday, France's Albert Fert and German Peter Gruenberg won the physics award for discovering a phenomenon that lets computers and digital music players store reams of data on ever-shrinking hard disks.
Americans Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, and Briton Sir Martin J. Evans, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for groundbreaking discoveries that led to a powerful technique for manipulating mouse genes.
Prizes for peace and economics will be announced through Oct. 15.
The awards -- each worth $1.5 million -- will be handed out by Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.

Rain

This is the video of the song "Dozd" (Rain) from the Russian band DDT. I want to share it for I like it so much.



The text is something like this in English:

Rain draped the sky in a twinkling shroud. May's rain.
Thunder hammered along the rooftops, scared all the cats away. Thunder.
I opened the window, and a merry wind scattered everything on my desk -
Silly poems that I wrote in a clammy and miserable emptiness.

May's thunder roared, and joy, in a sweeping, drunkening wave,
Rolled over: "Hey, get up, and jump in after me!
Get out into the yard and hop around the puddles till morning, if you want, -
Look at how the funny, blessed children are running about.

Droplets on my face - it's only the rain, or maybe it's me crying;
The rain cleansed everything, and my soul, sobbing, suddenly felt soaked through, -
It rolled down in a creek, away from home and towards the sunny, unsown plains,
Turning into vapor, it flew with the wind towards unknown, undiscovered worlds.

And then I imagined: the city suddenly filled with merry people.
Everyone came out into the rain and sang, and laughed… dammit!...
Having forgotten about all shame, and the possibility to fall sick with complications,
The people in the rain greeted thunder like fireworks; the very first spring thunder.

Cartoons and their music in my head

Just a quick thought that stroke me today, it's about compatibility. I'm translating a cartoon, "Dive, Olly, Dive", it's for very small kids. Very cute and so on.


And I was translating while listening to... "Rammstein". Huh, it just keeps me going. Now it's "Muse". And the cartoons are so colourful and cheerful, though.

That's how life mixes up things.

Do you have a ticket, by chance?

I feel a little sad

Yamato

Yamato
This was almost a week ago - one wonderful musical experience in a warm Saturday night.
The performance was amazing. I think I'm not able to describe it in English. It was a brilliant mixture of very deeply traditional music, bringing the sense of Japanese culture, and marvellous interaction with the public, making the audience laugh and become part of the performance thus coming closer to the heart of the Japanese music/culture/art/soul/spirit. And it was true - every beat was like a heartbeat. I enjoyed the show very, very much.
This is a part of it:


And some information:

Yamato’s drummers must first find the ‘heart tone’ of the sound. We try to expose the very heart of life, which is beating inside our bodies and is the origin of performance energy. It is the heartbeat of a lonely runner, beating hard in his smooth flesh, and the embodiment of the soul that strongly supports it. You can’t see it with your eyes, or touch with your hands, but it exists beyond a doubt.
Our intensive training helps us make this heartbeat reverberate the world over, sometimes with gentleness, sometimes with overpowering force. For the drummers of Yamato, it is a celebration of the sound inherited by humankind at the beginning of time.

Placebo

A lot of concerts are coming and a lot of concerts I was to last week, so I'll try to catch up. And Placebo deserves a separate post.
I decided to go to this concert because I have once listened to "Every Me Every You" and I liked it. At the time I was listening to Suede (not only a song, but a whole album, yeah!) so Placebo were labelled "cool".
And that was it. And now - a concert. Well, OK, I'm going.

What was that sentence about the good intentions and the road to Hell? My good intention to listen to the music of a performer before going to their concert hasn't lead me to Hell (yet) but I never manage to do that (the listening).

I'm a photographer this time. The sticker given to the photojournalists is very clever - looks like a prescription. I like it.

The sound was not good enough most of the time. I liked the bass player - very intensive attitude, nasty look, punk behaviour - well done!




In the beginning I was bored. All the songs sounded the same to me. Poor sound quality... no contact between the artists and the public... great whim: video screen behind the musicians made as the one is broken:


The encore was amazing. It was a completely different story. There was the yellow light, flooding the hall and the thumping music that made me feel... just feel the music. And I like that feeling. When the music starts travelling through the veins and clears the dark and misty corners of the brain like a witch cleaning her closet in Spring. Then I didn't care anymore about the absence of contact between the musicians and the audience - it was all right, everything was all right and I was just feeling happy only because I could feel the music.
See, I didn't want to listen to Placebo when I got home (I'd rather play Suede), I didn't become bigger fan after the concert but now I can label the concert "success". Because a concert is not only listening to the performers' music.





Set list:
Placebo, Winter palace of Sports, Sofia, 18 June 2007

1. Infra-Red
2. Because I Want You
3. Meds
4. Drag
5. Soulmates
6. I Know
7. Song To Say Goodbye
8. Cops
9. Every You Every Me
10. Special Needs
11. One Of a Kind
12. Without You
13. Bionic
14. Blind
15. Special K
16. Bitter End

Encore:
17. Running Up That Hill
18. Taste in Men
19. Twenty Years