Echoes of Flavio's Ghost Dreaming

Wow. The Brazilian kids next door (next building, garden flat) are having a party again . 😮 Last time they lasted around 30 hours or so. They seem to have a very good sound system -by 'good' I mean 'extremely loud'. And, as I may have mentioned before, the current standards of popular Brazilian music have declined to some sort of reggaeton-like thing. Mercifully not loud inside my flat 😃 (different story if I open the door..)

My Bank Holiday Week-end, by Flavio, age -(no, not that, please forget about it)

Saturday brought the first Hampstead Alternative Picnic of the year. The weather was not promising, it looked like it was going to rain but it never did, so that's a win. Good company in the grounds of Kenwood House also was. Later that evening I went to Aces & Eights for Nathan's 'Dancing & Laughing' night. Couldn't dance much (foot still painful) but I enjoyed the band (Staatseinde) and catching up with peeps. Sunday -I can't even remember what I did, apart from going to Elephant & Castle to the Colombian shops to get some Venezuelan foodstuffs. On Monday I went to far away Peckham for the last day of Jane's showing at the Now Arts Fair -her work is amazing and I'm glad I went. Later I went to Walthamstow for Raven's celebration of birthday and graduation. All written like this it doesn't sound like much but bearing in mind how quickly I get tired these days and I still had (have) a painful foot, it was quite a bit.

That was a good week-end. Apart from lessons and a walk around Hampstead Heath, Saturday saw the return of 'Dead & Buried' the club night at the new-old venue in Archway (what used to be 'Tiki Bar' and was covered in bamboo and bits of palm tree, an effort to make it a 'latin' bar, now very refurbished as a modern dance venue), which was excellent, Sunday a small but perfectly formed 64th birthday celebration of a friend in remote Enfield. Slightly weird that it takes longer to get to Enfield from here (Kentish Town) than it did to get to Stevenage the other day.

Why do I always come down with something when I have a holiday?

Spent most of the half term coughing my lungs out and feeling tired and out of sorts -enormous brain-fog. Seems to always happen; maybe because you relax, stop being fuelled onwards by stress.

On that note, getting up at 9 is so much better than getting up at 5 like today...

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Difficult, this one. Hardly a novel, with barely a threadbare plot that just keeps going in circles (sorry..). At the same time, it is a lovely, lovely prose poem with at times gripping and touching imagery (mostly that of the planet below). I finished it and left without still really knowing what to make of it. Come for the descriptions, the images. Don't come expecting a conventional novel, plot.



View all my reviews

There have been a fair few attempts at a FB replacement app, which all have failed probably because your friends, your family etc. weren't there. After tthe twittercalypse there are now a couple of seemingly viable Twitter alternatives (BlueSky and Mastodon) but no FB alt yet. Apart from reach, for me at least there would need to be events, pages and groups but most of all events. Maybe now with the latest emanations (yes, I did mean that) from Meta HQ there will be more of a market for one and people interested in creating something. Here's to hoping.

Interesting how BlueSky suddenly seems to bloom -so many people signing up, apparently most moving from X-Twitter, that apparently the servers couldn't cope at some point. I haven't deleted my twitter accounts yet but I only am keeping them for a while as placeholders for my handle, just in case. It is kind of a pity that one single megalomaniac narcissist could destroy what was a useful tool, in so little time.

In any case, there's also Mastodon although at the moment BlueSky seems to be gaining more traction. And there's Threads but that's potentially problematic as it is part of Meta/Facebook's Zuckerberg's empire of dirt.

I'm on all three, FWIW:

BlueSky:
https://bsky.app/profile/fflavio.bsky.social

Mastodon:
https://mastodon.social/deck/@fflavio/

Threads:
https://www.threads.net/@flaviomatani

Been a bit quiet here (again).

The end of summer and the coming of autumn has hit me a bit this year. It feels like my world is getting narrower and a little more difficult to navigate with each day. Partly it is the precariousness of my way of earning a living, which may be beginning to catch up with me -I am of pensionable age by now (how did that happen) but apparently many of my qualifying years didn't have all the NI contributions paid (no idea how that happened) and therefore don't count, so I only get a paltry one that is probably less than I spend in coffee in the month. Can I carry on doing private music teaching? Of course, while I have health but -odd things are happening: there are a few times im the year when I normally get a number of enquiries and some of those become pupils -which makes up for the ones that move away or the more casual ones that give up for whatever reason. The main of those times of the year is when the new school year starts, in September. Well, this year I didn't get one single enquiry. Not one phone call. This had never happened in the many years I've lived in the UK. It may be due to the cost of living crisis or maybe the patterns of how people look for an instrumental teacher have changed... no idea.

Social life still ok, although I have already missed quite a few gigs I would have like to have attended. Lack of energy, sometimes lack of money or just not having been aware they were happening. I still go to the little alternative club nights at Aces and the Albany but I can only take a couple of hours of that now. Still good to see people and catch up and dance a bit.

A pupil who is a lecturer at UCL has suggested the possibility of doing a recital (probably a lunch time one) there. It has to be some sort of lecture-recital, I am tempted to do one themed on Spanish and English Renaissance lute (and vihuela) music, tracing the parallel lines between the two styles of music between two nations perennially at war in those times. Probably would play the 'Canción del Emperador' by Luys de Narváez (link to a performance of mine of this work, below) and the ever popular (in a very narrow segment of the population, alas) 'Lachrimae Pavan' by John Dowland. I wish I was a little better at promoting my 'product'! but, still...

Canción del Emperador:
https://flaviomatani.dreamwidth.org/1547157.html

Lachrimae Pavan:
https://youtu.be/IEeL2e9y3b0

As I get old my world seems to shrink, become smaller and ever more circumscribed. All the all clichés -can't stray very far from a loo, money also a factor so the rounds of festivals I see my friends doing -WGT, M'era Luna, etc- are a bit out of my reach -although, having said this, I'm going to Infest this year but I did find it is turning out way too expensive for me. I still go to club nights and dance for a bit and catch up with friends but come midnight I've had enough. Everything seems to take a tiny bit more effort every day -keeping up my guitar playing level, keeping my school teaching commitments and putting up with the schools' bizarre foibles, even actually getting up. I have to eat with less salt because of high blood pressure (and everything I like has salt in it, apart from ice cream which soon may become a problem because of the sugar, albeit not yet).

I still want to do so many things but time and energy seem to both dwindle, uncertainty principle notwithstanding.

But of course the alternative would be worse -that is, there isn't one.

And I do still go out and dance and still can play the guitar, so there's that.

Lovely day so went to Hampstead Heath to do my guitar practice in the park, instead of in a stuffy flat. Many people and dogs went past, the dogs showing more interest. Two little children did stop to see me playing, their mouth and eyes very open ini amazement. Two young women smiled as they went past and saw me playing. Ice cream. A good afternoon.