From an August Night

Image: While the sun is still blazing: 29 July, Umeå, 23:07, by me

Hello from these parts, dear reader, where the sun keeps shining until eleven,

Today the cabbage I had already chopped and thrown into the fridge, and the tuna I bought for no reason on the morning after our pyjama party, found themselves inside a lovely Mediterranean salad.

Then I saw green grapes in the fridge, and I looked at my salad.

I called Başak Karataş and asked:

Should I put them in the salad?

I got a clear and sharp "Başak no".

Eat them on the side, she said.

That was what I had planned anyway while taking them out of the fridge.

But then I thought, am I really too much of a coward to put my grapes in my salad, cut in half at that?

Whatever I have been sulking about lately, I took it out on the grapes. Then I neither put them in nor ate them on the side, I left the grapes for another day and another moment. Instead I brought them here, so let us eat their fruit together.

Then Başak started telling a story:

A guest had left cheese behind in the fridge at their guesthouse. After the message saying "please pass my cheese to the person I am sending" went unanswered and nobody came, the cheese was thrown out at the guesthouse. The guest then rained curses on Başak by text message and, assuming they had eaten the cheese, expressed deep wishes that it "bring them no pleasure".

After that Başak and her family set out for the gendarmerie, and with the cheese in hand.

Because the cheese had never been thrown out in the first place.

But Başak, her limit of respect worn through, hung up so as not to be in contact with the woman.

Then Başak and her family, disturbed by the very existence of this cheese, carried it to the gendarmerie, and the story ended with the gendarme laughing.

This story is practically a work of art.

Now put yourselves in the place of that cheese, dear values. What could it be: something you are disturbed by seeing all the time and that is cursed over, something you could throw away, something at risk of spoiling and still in demand.

Cheese..

With Any Luck, Dropout Plan

With any luck, I have started singing clean vocals in a Swedish metal band called Dropout Plan, very talented musicians they are.

They have a rather nice setlist of their own.

The band is made up of Luna the French statistics doctor, Arvid the computer guy, Axel of physics engineering, and Adele the screamer with a lizard.

We are at rehearsal every week.

(let me note in this parenthesis that since Shawn, the lyricist and actual clean vocalist, went to Hong Kong on an exchange programme, they took me on as the stage substitute)

Heisinberg

-I will be looking after Adel's lizard for two weeks while she is away.

Image: My little Heisenberg, I can see you are alive.. no need to act..

Its name is Heisinberg. Its gender is unknown. Its tongue is blue, it is not very social, but you may pet it on the head.

So very cute and so very shy.

The other day we also went to a music quiz, and what a fun thing it turned out to be.

This week's theme was "water".

And there were plenty of side questions too.

We were tested in all sorts of interesting areas: the rivers of Umeå (yes, I really did read it as "umeo"), making words out of scrambled letters, trying to find songs somehow related to water, finding a film where we know the main character is also the villain, the capital of the Republic of South Africa.

But what surprised me most was that the track I was certain was "The Cardigans" turned out to be PJ Harvey, Down by the Water.

Good grief..

This was unbelievable.

Since when has PJ Harvey been using those explosive, bass heavy backing effects?

Though I should have understood from the singer's syrupy voice that it could not be the Cardigans..

Even so, being able to build that tiny rope bridge between the two was one of this week's groundbreaking discoveries.

To sum up the quiz briefly, the songs:

Robert Broberon, Vatten (from the 1969 album Tjejer: to the question of whether it is about a boat (the sea related kind) or about a woman, we said boat. Arvid, our very dear guitarist, mentioned that boat names in Sweden usually run parallel to women's names and that this could be a veiled question, and we were smitten with the idea) but the answer was plainly a woman..
ABBA, Waterloo (the whole quiz felt like it existed so this song would play in the bar)
Justin Timberland (our announcer lady preferred to announce his surname this way), Cry Me a River
TLC, Waterfall

Then, to the question of which film features a lonely cleaner in a top secret research facility in the 1960s forming a singular bond with a captive amphibious creature, we answered

"Shape of Water".

Then a lovely Swedish band, Kent, came up too.

So as you can tell, it was a very good quiz.

It entertained.. but while entertaining, it taught ...

Value piled upon value, and what else could it be?

Right before going to this music quiz, while slowly eating my ice cream with strawberry pieces in it, I felt like looking at album covers through the window of Umeå's precious record shop, as a spice for my ice cream.

Then an older brother of ours must have caught me looking at the album ZOOLOOK by our brother Jean Micheal Jarre, because he said:

"that thing you are looking at is the most wonderful thing that happened to us in the 80s",

he said.

(my parents will ask, oh, was it in Turkish: no dear mother, he said it in Swedish)

Then he talked about how little the word Levant is used, and how the image of the queen of Mongolia was inspired by Star Wars, and about fashion choices and traditions.

I did not actually know the album at all, I had only found it very funny that the guy on the cover made the two O's into his glasses, and I was busy doing justice to my ice cream, which was rather prone to melting anyway.

I learned later that Jean Micheal Jarre is a name who worked with ethnographers, chopping and chopping recordings from many different languages of the world into his songs with the human voice, loading them into the Fairlight CMI, the synthesizer of the era, and turning them into his own rhythm and melody.

Quite a feat..

Then I listened to the album Oxygen, and I could not tell what I felt, a little uneasy, a little touched.

But French electronic music artists always give the same feeling at first.

Music that first acts on my whole body, down into the deepest of my brain cells, into my amygdala and my medulla oblongata, then leaves the body alone and starts speaking only to my soul.

(the band AIR, for instance, is unbelievable. When I discovered them with their song "La soleil ese pres de moi" I thought they might be a mixture of Daft Punk and Camel.)

Then I played pool with Arvid and Axel.

My experimental approach to pool has been going on for the last two years.

Once that day comes, nobody will be able to stop me.

Pool will obey me

(fOR A MOMENT, because I was listening to the song Ethnicolor from the album, I could not take control of my turn into a bad character. You forgave me. But go on, you listen to it too. While reading this piece.)

If you have made it this far, let me not send you off without offering my thanks. Tell me what you think, and if you would like to look at my songs of inspiration these days, or add to them, I will leave the link, dear friends and readers, go like water, come like water.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5GiOUWdUZMLsbCDcK36hug?si=46d5d8a4a1ba4340

Suyan Alara Abacı