ThoughtSpurs

I remember smells, some of which I would sooner forget. For some reason when I catch a waft of opium perfume I associate it with a girl I used to date when I was in my late teens. She was convinced that Opium was the height of sophistication. All I knew was whenever I smelled it I wanted to have sex. Mind you I was in my late teens and needed very little provocation to want to have sex. Her mother called me The Prince of Darkness but I think it was out of affection. I remember music in a similar way-by association. Certain songs and genres represent specific times of my life, so much so that when I hear music that I associate with, say, the time I drove around the far north of New Zealand one summer (1984) in a tiny Suzuki delivery van, I find myself overcome with nostalgia - a time when I was as thin as a contraceptive, the sun was warmer but didn't burn, and I thought that my mullet was the height of good taste. I suppose the connection between smells and sounds is that they wor...

This is terrific. The web brought me down. The web cheered me up. Here's how I found this. A reader left a comment. I visited his blog ; and enjoyed it. Then I read a comment on one of the posts. And arrived here. There are some who think things are getting worse in the world. I'm not one of them.

I like this, The Blower's Daughter by Damian Rice, made famous by the film soundtrack Closer. Am I going soft in my old age? What is the difference between sentiment and nostalgia? For years I wanted to make a compilation of sad songs and call it 'Good Grief' (in the dot com era I even owned the URL). I'm sure it would be a hit. Who doesn't have favourite sad songs. Now it's just a playlist on my iTunes. I've had an idea. I found that a lot of the music I loved at different parts of my life are on YouTube. I thought it would be amusing to make a web page with a time line incorporate the clips and mae a matrix of associations with events that were hapeening at the time - for me, and in the wider world. Hard to describe…haven't thought it through completely.Who'd have thought that Rory Galagher's million miles away would be on video on he web. He was the first live act I ever saw. Auckland town hall, 1980 (if I remember rightly).