Mrs. Dalloway's Coffee Break

Tomorrow is Alien Day, and you’ll forgive me for using a line from the sequel, Aliens, in the title, honoring the great actor Bill Paxton, whom we, the cinephile community of the world, recently, and quite devastatingly, lost. Besides, with the Alien universe, there really are no awkward or humiliating sequels, but every film has its place and can stand on their own two feet, as part of the unending succession of stories still left to be told about our most beloved and feared – ok, second best in my book, but then who really can compete with the primal scare Jaws inflicted in me as a young kid? – movie monster. Alien universe is not unlike the multiverse of Star Wars. The fans are quite fanatic, the trivia knowledge to be obtained is beyond measure, and the tee-shirts are getting better by the year. A customer at my work place was standing in line once, wearing a Weyland-Yutani Corporation tee, and when I complemented his taste, he asked me if I knew what it meant. I told him ...

She first called him Merman when there were words written, it must be love. One And the sun sparkled on the kitchen tiles, they weren’t very clean, but it seemed as if two fireflies were chasing each other, but he had tears in his eyes, she never found out why, because it was one of those moments when you just can’t ask. But she held him, and his hair was warm in the sun, and she saw the lake in the distance, a little, and the bacon was frying on the pan. She was listening to Debussy’s compositions for the piano a lot on her portable CD-player that spring, and sometimes she would put it on when they were home, getting to know each other. It was hard, they were both changing so much it seemed as though every day they were new and strange people, and it was sometimes frightening. She used to go for long walks through the different neighborhoods, by the lake, in the old woods, where on a good day it seemed as if the whole town was walking towards her. They were going to the...

The day you realize you had just been rambling on about five k, when what the amount really was, was seven, nearing already eight, and should that happen, you could might as well give up. Practicing writing down itemized descriptions of all your meals, but then you go shopping for food related planner book stickers to make it more fun, and end up getting the kind that says things like Favorite Recipe and Delicious! instead of warnings, or pep. Breakfast: one apple, in penance for eating the entire chocolate bar yesterday, and four cups of coffee. Favorite Recipe. Delicious! Fuck it. Or maybe not. Then you put on some electro with a beat and go for a two-and-a-half-hour power walk. After that, you go straight to the grocery store, where you shop for tomatoes. Because if you have to get something, get the thing that won’t make you feel bad. Shopping for clothes is out of the question. When you open the door to you clothes rack, the sight is beyond depressing. The yel...

A snow storm claimed the city on the Easter weekend. The temperature dived to almost minus ten in the morning, and although it was sunny, it remained very cold outside. Alexandra bought a whole chicken for Easter dinner, and she and her husband ate almost the entire bird in one sitting on Good Friday. It was the mother of all overeating, and the enormous bowl of fruit salad, accompanied by a five-deciliter double cream as dessert, whipped into a delicious white cloud almost double the liquid’s volume, physics one-o’-one, didn’t help. Some people drink at an open bar as if alcohol as substance is about to evaporate from the universe. Well, that is how Alexandra and her husband eat. She urged him to rub what was left of the basil onto the chicken, and prepared a cardiovascular-unfriendly side dish of carrots and potatoes and onions, cut roughly in twos or fours, in more double cream and a chunk of butter the size of a basketball, gave it all a good toss or two, and chucked it in the...

Why, Father John, still? Some 10-verse chorus-less diatribe/Plays as they all jump ship, “I used to like this guy/This new shit really kinda makes me wanna die.” Well, sort of, yes. I read a good while ago, in the music magazine Uncut I think, that Father John Misty originally wanted to leave Fleet Foxes to write a novel, an attempt doomed to wither and turn into a fully-fledged first solo album, Fear Fun, under this new, assumed identity. There was the beginning of a written work in the liner notes, and it was a fun way of looking at the act of writing, and how each and one of us has to think for ourselves what it is going to mean in our specific case. Scott Walker. David Crosby. Harry Nilsson. Paul Simon. Sufjan Stevens. Even as remote as an influence as the British story-telling band Pulp, and the quintessential indie-art-pop master Belle and Sebastian come to mind with what Father John Misty is doing. Songs are stories, always, and some tell these stories more eloquen...

When I was little, I spent most of my leisure time in front of the TV. We were one of the first families in my neighborhood to own a video recorder; it was an obscure model, Video Recorder 2000, a giant chunk of a machine, about twice the size of its smaller cousin, the VHS, comparable now to those gigantic first portable phones that looked like a suitcase. The 2000 was brought to our house by my father, who had bought it from Germany, when he went there on business. It was an outstanding machine, the tapes looked like gigantic c-cassettes, and you could turn the tape around, just like a cassette, and record on both sides. I used to make fancy notebooks with a ruler and a pen and a pencil, using the sticker sets with numbers that came with the tapes, to write down what was on each of the tapes, on both sides. On a quick glance, the notebook looked like a long pro-con -list. I loved to make organized lines of the many grey container cases, carefully placing the number on the top qu...