no choice.

"there'll come a point when you'll think, i can't stand any more, but you'll have to because you won't have any choice." nina bawden - the birds on the trees

desert island discs.

it is only when they are guests in the radio programme 'desert island discs' (running continually since 1942) that the brits consider themselves truly successful. the show basically consists of debriefing on one's life experiences, accompanied by eight songs that bear some significance for the person in question. thousands of people make up their own lists, knowing they would never make it to the programme. i couldn't resist doing it myself :)

1. silver convention - fly robin fly

as soon as the song starts i am immediately taken back to my childhood apartment. the music has got interlaced in my mind with the feelings of warmth, happiness, openness. it stretches out to the beautiful park just a few meters away, where i loved to play and fly kites. it amazes me how deeply rooted and long-lasting some feelings are.




2. pussycat - georgie

this is another song from my early childhood that i was trying to find for years afterwards, although i didn't know who performed it or what it was called. i thought the title was 'jodie' :) but the melody frequently played in my mind. thanks to the hallowed youtube i bumped into it several years ago.




3. i santo california - tornero

i remember this song playing on the old clock radio, at night, and i am forever in love with it.





4. propaganda - duel

the whole album 'a secret wish' takes me back to my early teens, when i was trying to figure out so many things about myself. it's one of the records i treasure.




5. the crusaders - soul shadows

the song of my life. my cousin driving a comfortable mercedes, which felt rather like soaring. i was seventeen, it was a warm dalmatian winter, and we were going to the brand new dicoteque 'session'. this song has helped me maintain my sanity a few years later, when i was doing my military service, and when the country i lived in started to crack up.



6. steve miller band - window

a beautiful and warm song from a very dark period of my life. some friends and i used to love it. i still do.



7. nina simone - another spring

the part of the song when nina sings 'and then, one morning, another spring is there outside my door, things are blooming, birds are singing, and suddenly i am sad no more' is for me one of the most poignant moments in the history of music.



8. the last shadow puppets - my mistakes were made for you

when music is concerned, it is very difficult for me to be blown off my feet any longer. the last shadow puppets did just that in 2008. this is one of the most beautiful songs in the last ten years.

move on?

i am turning forty today. it doesn't feel bad at all. i felt worse when i was 26 or 27, it seemed so old to me then. now it's cool.
when i look back at the four decades that i have tread the earth, an unexpected question comes to my mind: is it time for me again to move to some other place? i ask this question because i have been living in the same apartment since 2004, which is seven years, and which is the longest i'd lived in a single place. let me try to name all the houses i've lived in since june 20th 1971.
- momici, croatia, 1971-1972
- mostar, bosnia and herzegovina 1972
- momici, croatia, 1972-1973
- munich, germany, june-september 1973
- momici 1973-1974
- munich 1974-1977
- balosave, montenegro june-december 1977
- rastoci, niksic 1977-1978
- zeljezara, niksic 1978-1980
- trebjesa, niksic (lalatovici) 1980-1982
- trebjesa (cerovici) 1982 - 1989
- palestina, niksic 1989-1990
- zeljezara, niksic may-june 1990
- nis, serbia 1990-1991
- pirot, serbia april-september 1991
- ostrovac, niksic 1991-1992
- hotel zeljezare 1992- 1998
- palestina, niksic 1998-2004
- 'desetka', niksic 2004-2013
plus, i would spend several months a year in croatia all until the war broke out in 1991. i also spent over a year and a half on scholarships in finland, norway, england, america, holland, denmark, italy.
it would be great to move again, to switch the country, maybe even the continent? i don't think my karma will allow for me to be stuck in a single place for more than seven years. so, next year i write this blog on my birthday i hope be somewhere else :)

seven years later: i am revisiting this blog, with more additions to the list. i lived in the 'desetka' apartment two more years before i did move. this is the current situation, excluding visits and stays under one month:

- stockholm, rinkeby, september-ctober 2013
- stockholm hornstull, november 2013-february 2014
- palestina, niksic 2014-2017
- london, ilford june-august 2017
- palestina, niksic 2017-2018
- dubrovnik, croatia november 2018-

expectations are biases.

I expected Florida to be hot, boring, plastic. My friend Scott had been trying to make me visit there for a few years, but it was only this month that I accepted his offer to stay in his condo in Fort Lauderdale. I wanted to go somewhere for a holiday, but not to spend a lot of money on it, so Scott's idea came in handy. The nine days in Florida just snapped away. I don't think I have ever enjoyed a more wonderful holiday, seen so much beauty around me, been in better company, indulged in all summer joys and laughs. From this day on I will never ever resist going any place because I have negative expectations about it. I hope the chances to travel are still ahead of me, and I will grab them, trying not to have any expectations. Perhaps some other place works magic on me like Florida has, or perhaps I go to the sunny state again :) So many things left unseen!

reading music.

i do not mean reading musical notes - i mean reading about music.
when i was growing up music was not as nearly available as it is now. i would buy a magazine ('dzuboks', 'rock' or 'itd') and read about new bands and albums, and i would decide whether i liked them or not based on the photos and on what was written about them. upon eventually hearing a song or a band, i would either get disappointed or fully embrace them. one of these songs, however, baffled me.
i was fourteen when sting's album 'the dream of the blue turtles' came out. since i had never been a huge 'police' fan, i did not pay much attention to this album. then i read an essay by david albahari titled 'the songs i never dance to', about sting's song 'moon over bourbon street'. it was a phenomenal essay. i read it over and over again. no wonder, since albahari's currently one of serbia's leading novelists, living in canada. but it didn't really make me buy the record and listen to it.
it so happened that my cousin bought this album, so i eventually listened to all the songs. they were not in my taste. i found the song 'russians' so tedious. but 'moon over bourbon street' had something in it, though i couldn't really figure out what. jazz sound was not awfully attractive to me then, the atmosphere of the song was too serious and gloomy, but for some reason i started liking it. and i still do, a lot. it's difficult for me to say whether it's because it takes me back to the time i was starting to grasp new meanings, or because it's a good song, but as soon as i hear its first notes, i walk bourbon street on a moonlit night.

the generation gap.

today my psych students in the second year were editing some interview questions, selecting interesting and discarding boring ones from the presented list. they were almost unanimous in dismissing the question about the generation gap (if it divides people) as uninteresting - what could the interviewee tell us about it we already haven't heard - they said. well, they are probably right, but for some reason the question got stuck in my mind and made me think about it for myself.
of course people of different generations differ, and of course we encounter those differences all of the time. this particularly holds true for those less individualistic, who fit into the traditionally prescribed roles characteristic of different walks of life. the more idiosyncratic, original and natural a person is, however, the less stereotypically 'generational' will he or she be.
the same can be applied to people of different nationality, religion, education, wealth, etc. the less their true selves they are, the more they identify with their outwardly personas.
they are so many younger people, even children, i stand in awe of, and so many elders i consider immature and underdeveloped. among all of them, as well as among peers, there are those we consider equal, superior or inferior. at least this is how i see the things. and this made me pose myself a question - does the generation gap actually exist? the answer is yes, it certainly and obviously does. but what do we of different generations differ by? whatever it be (tastes, habits, life pace, experience), i believe that we differ by outer, superfluous things, while the things that connect us and wipe the generation gap away are the things that matter - ideas, humanity, communication, laughter, spirit. i likewise think that all other differences among people are superfluous and ornamental, while the human core that we share makes the differences insignificant and fleeting.
so, although i cannot but admit that there is a generation gap that places us on different steps on life's ladder, i certainly do not agree that it divides us. anything can divide us as we so choose, but we also have the potential to transcend the countless barriers that are constantly setting us apart.

overlapping.

i was 13 in 1984. it was an apocalyptic year. the movie 1984 was shot that exact year, eurythmics made the soundtrack. i was slightly disappointed with this album, having loved the previous one, 'touch'. i am not sure how well i understood the whole dystopian idea, but at least i was driven to and intrigued by it. instead of sitting in the living room with my parents, watching miso kovac and lepa lukic on the tv, i was crouched in a distant bedroom corner by an old philips gramophone, listening to 'sex crime', 'i did it just the same', 'doubleplusgood', 'for the love of big brother', trying to figure out the sense of it all. although i did not manage to get the main point, i felt something was in there, still unpenetrable, prereflexive, but something meaningful, though gloomy. i don't think i was precocious, i was just inquisitive. and i felt that sharing my parents' taste in music would for some reason just not have been right.