I continue to be moderately open to new ideas and things, although, as I’m writing this, the spring has severely retreated and took a very very bad turn. This setback manifests itself in the form of heavy snowing that’s been going on for several hours now with no signs of relenting. It effectively prevents me from practising one of the new things I picked up in a recent paroxysm of Opening Myself Up For Novel Ideas Because It’s Springtime. Actually it’s the only new thing I’ve picked up so far and might remain so for the time being, but most rewarding it is, and not entirely unhealthy too because it’s jogging. Or in my case, running , a bit too fast to keep it up for very long. I need to learn to control and tune down my speed to be able to still maintain my vital functions and keep my heart from bursting out of my ribcage after the first kilometre. But it’s fun and the ache in the muscles afterwards reminds me that too many years have passed since I lost interest in keeping myself in a decent shape. But now I’m back at it, with intent! And momentarily prevented from going at it because of the snow filling the outside world. And therefore halfway pissed off and grumpy and bored and will put this picture (by Delphine Durand) here because it aptly reflects my current mood and thoughts about springtime postponement.
It also reflects the agony of trying to fit together the timetables and make everyone magically appear at the same time at the Sinisthra rehearsals tomorrow. It’s a losing battle already, with a faint but fading hope of having at least five of the six people needed there. We have too many members in the band, with too many confilcting rotas and not enough babysitters with free time. Sometimes I long for the times when the average age of a band member was below 20 and everyone was single and unemployed. Or at least not married with children and/ or working in three shifts. But not very often.

And speaking of Delphine Durand. I leafed through his book Bob & Co at the gift shop of Tate Gallery London when I visited there and was quite fascinated by it and now regret I didn’t buy it. Watching the drawings and other things on his Flickr Photostream cheers me up a bit, but it doesn’t stop the snowing outside and it doesn’t take away the difficulties of arranging a Sinisthra rehearsal. Fortunately there’s a bottle of good albarino in the fridge, waiting for the evening.

Vernal Equinox is here and a much more welcome occasion it is than Winter Solstice was. It’s a very liberating feeling indeed to once again be located in this spot in the cycle of seasons. The mornings look lighter and everything feels brighter. I’m open (ok, moderately open) to new ideas and thoughts. This often happens on springtime and gradually wears off by midsummer when it’s usually too hot to get excited by new things, especially if they require effort and concentration. But for the moment I’m inflating with new energy and The Need To Make Plans. The flights to Spain are booked now and I’m feverishly looking forward to doing nothing much non stop for two weeks on July, on the (presumably) sunny hills of Los Pacos (where my future Father-in-law’s villa is located), and adjoining areas.

Booked also is the place to hold our wedding celebrations at, next year. Because the wedding date is set now but still so far ahead in the future, this means we have the opportunity to celebrate a kind of inverted wedding anniversary next August, a year before the actual wedding, and for this I’m thinking of booking a flight to London for an extended weekend. London in August should be a bit more appealing than London in January was.

Yet another booking, located in the startlingly near future, involves Sinisthra in a novel band-playing-live-on-an-actual-open-to-public-situation. In other words, a proper gig, like real bands sometimes go and do. More of this later.

Oh, and a modern folk-notion claims that on the March equinox day, one can balance an egg on its point. A lesser known folk-notion claims that on a certain mythical and clandestine date one can balance a banana on the apex of its’ curve, with the ends pointing up. This requires a deep understanding of esoterica, however, and cannot be attempted by any other oik. Therefore I won’t provide any links for it whatsoever.

RECENT SOURCES OF MUSICAL DELIGHT:
The Gathering is back with a new album (soon) and a new singer, and with three new songs playing on their MySpace page. Nothing much has changed, surprisingly little in fact. The new singer has a sound very similar to the previous singer Anneke van Giersbergen, the songs tend to float past much in the same manner as in their past two or three albums, and the ”delight”-part doesn’t really kick in until the third song, ”The West Pole”. Judging by these three songs, it’s all very beautiful and soothing but seriously lacking in departments of weirdness, drama and the overall force so plentifully evident in an album like ”How To Measure A Planet?”. Then again, that was ten years ago. I wouldn’t want my own music to always consist of exactly the same elements, no matter how much time passes, and I’d imagine the people in The Gathering might think in much the same way. Still, I enjoyed their new songs.

RECENT BOOKS OF CHOICE:
”Her Name Was Lola” by Russell Hoban. Once again, utterly enjoyable reading, as always with a Russell Hoban novel, and once again, the link explains the plot of the book much better than I would. The protagonist is a writer of successful children’s novels who can’t come up with a new novel for adults, and as his writers block solidifies, even the novel for children refuses to appear. Apart from ”real”, actual people, he has (mostly fruitless and contradicting) conversations with his characters and his mind. He is dating two women at the same time and both of them get pregnant at the same time, with disastrous results. The entire book can be read here, although I wouldn’t, since most of Hoban’s books can be bought, most puzzlingly and inexplicably, from Amazon at a very reasonable starting price of 0.01GBP plus postage. This, in my opinion, is a bargain of magnificent proportions and I have shamelessly exploited the option to trample on the dignity of this excellent writer of excellent books.

I’ve always been fond of books that describe London, my favourite town, in a very graphic and detailed way like Hoban is in the habit of, mentioning places the characters go to and the streets they walk by to get there. This method somehow infuses a dose of reality into a plot that otherwise might have outrageously fantastical elements in it, like Neil Gaiman’s ”Neverwhere”, and err I can’t think of anything else that might qualify as a fitting example. Douglas Adams’ ”So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish”, perhaps. And definitely the book I just started reading, taking place in Victorian era London. But more of this later.

Here’s a link to a blog listing Russell Hoban quotations, among other things.

RECENT BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
Blondel Brut Carte d'Or. And so it came to pass that the time was ripe for me to buy my first ever bottle of champagne after a lenghty period of to and fro-ing. Casting all hesitation and dithering aside, I went out (and down) in a blaze of glory and immortal-deeds-in-the-making, buying the cheapest brand of champagne available in Finland. Although price was not the main reason for buying Blondel, I liked the label of it quite a bit and proceeded according to one of the three basic laws of buying wine ("if you don’t know what you want go for the one with a nice label"). Naturally I’m very much out of my depth when it comes to buying champagne so I thought it’s best to start with the moderately priced ones.

The problem with the moderately priced ones isn’t very hard to figure out: the quality is also very moderate. It’s impossible to objectively compare this to other sparkling wines because, it’s, you know, champagne after all and anyway and the sheer idea of it being champagne gives it a more regal air, deservedly or not. But I found myself thinking ”this is nothing special” because honestly it wasn’t. It was a worthy companion to a three course dinner, from starters to dessert.

Pasqua Prosecco was opened after the champagne ran out and stood it’s ground surprisingly well after such a prestigious pacemaker. It’s a ”semi-sparkling” (frizzante) wine from Italy I assumed to be somehow similar to vinho verdes from Portugal. Well it wasn’t but I didn’t mind because it was pleasant anyway, light, very dry and giving out the aroma of pears and vaguely unhurried moments in some sunny and warm location. A simple, straight forward and quite a one dimensional wine but enjoyable anyway. Unlike Blondel, this might well be bought again. The bottle and the label looked very good too.

Castellblanch Rosado Semi Seco, a pink cava, was bought on a whim (because it was new and looked nice) and opened on returning home from a long dinner at a restaurant, after numerous glasses of various wines and several additional drinks at a cocktail lounge. So my vigilance might have been a bit compromised. I didn’t expect much of this and was therefore pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be very decent indeed. The ”roseness” I’m not able to deal with very well was mostly in the colour and not in the taste, and the sweetness suggested by ”semi seco” was very much on the non-sweetness side. So it tasted like regular dry cava and I liked it. And will buy it again, probably. If I don’t buy something else instead.

Yesterday I talked with my friend and Sinisthra guitarist mr. Mäkinen about remembering, both of us having recently read ”The Heroin Diaries” by Nikki Sixx, and he took a most sceptical view on the authenticity of some of the tales told in autobiographies of rock musicians with matching lifestyles, i.e. of those who practised what they preached. His argument was this: if a person really was as out of it as he claims then how can he remember so many graphic details? This was a good argument in my opinion, although he continued with a counter-argument: heroin supposedly sharpens your memory and the ability to absorb facts and remember them later on, no matter how trivial they might be. This argument is based on the stories told by ex-heroin addicts, how they supposedly have committed to memory all kinds of manuals for devices that they have no use for and still remember those manuals word-to-word.

I scoured the net briefly and found no facts to support this claim but if it is true, then it proves with absolute certainty that me and mr. Mäkinen have never dabbled with heroin. Because we both agree that we can’t remember shit about the years gone by. Which is kind of liberating but also a bit frustrating. Maybe we just never got up to enough mischief to leave a lasting memory? We started our first band back in 1982 so it’s been 27 years of not-remembering-much. The first half of 1990’s in particular is a hazy period of time, when we had moved from Lohja to Helsinki and joined Protected Illusion, a proper band with gigs and actual recording sessions in actual studios. A lot of can-you-recall-what-we-were-up-to-back-then-because-I-can’t surrounding that era. Of course we were young lions in our early twenties back then so it’s understandable if things got a little hectic now and then (and then again), but it doesn’t get much better in the remembering front even though we grew older and settled down a bit, he more permanently than me (I took another plunge into the deep end after I turned 30 and didn’t properly get myself back together until I was 35 or so).

Maybe this inability to remember is a blessing. At one point a lot of the forthcoming Sinisthra album lyrics were based on the idea of an ”everlasting Now”, where anything that’s significant happens in this here moment and everything else is meaningless. Then I sort of forgot to keep that concept up and only remembered it again much later.

After the phone call to mr. Mäkinen I went home and bought a bottle of champagne on my way, to celebrate the fact that I met my fiancee three years ago. As I got home it turned out I had remembered the date incorrectly.

HAZILY REMEMBERED ROCK’N ROLL MOMENTS part 1
Of course there have been several things that stuck to my mind during the years of ploughing the stony and uneventful field reserved for unsuccessful musicians. The champagne mentioned above brought forth this one:

Back in 2005 the debut Sinisthra album was released and we played some gigs around that time too. I had tried my best to promote the dates, sending out e-mails and putting up posters, but this was before the time of MySpace and Facebook and the effective devices of promotion they provide. Plus there wasn’t too much interest on yet another never-heard melancholy metal band coming up with an album and playing in small clubs in Helsinki in the middle of the week, no matter how encouraging reviews the album had got and the fact of having a singer who had also recently joined Amorphis. So I fumed and sulked in backstages before and after getting out and playing to a handful of people, and swore never to play gigs anymore unless there was a real and actual demand for it. And I haven’t played any gigs since then.

Anyway, the final gig was in our hometown Lohja where we eventually drew a decent crowd so the spirits were a bit higher. Mr. Korkkinen our bass player had talked for years of the champagne bottle he had got as a gift from work and how we’d open it if the band ever got a record deal. So now we had a record out and sat backstage after having played a rewarding gig to a receptive and responsive audience. It also happened to be mr. Korkkinen’s birthday, which we others had coldly pretended to ignore for the whole of the day (hopefully not breaking his heart entirely) but announced on stage during our set and went on to ceremoniously and solemnly present him with a golden-looking prize cup with words to the effect of ”Lord Of The Lower Frequencies” inscribed on it.

So we had smuggled the bottle of champagne inside the club but had no means to chill it down, the staff at the club strictly refusing to give us any coolers or even ice cubes. Cowering in the darkness and secrecy of a cramped and unpleasant backstage pit we corked the room temperatured bottle and poured it on small disposable plastic cups. It tasted awful. When I think of it now, my heart weeps bitter tears, for although I have no idea of the vintage it doesn’t make that much difference since the champagne is question was Dom Pérignon.

Here we are, going at it.

RECENT BOOKS OF CHOICE:
”Complicity” by Iain Banks. Picking up a Iain Banks book is a bit of a safe bet for me since I always enjoy his books and I enjoyed this one too, although it didn’t quite reach the heights of “The Bridge”. Banks has a way of describing horrible things in a deadpan tone (reminding me of Neil Gaiman at times, or the other way round, and also Jonathan Carroll), especially evident in “Canal Dreams”, but well represented in “Complicity” too, resulting in a personal resolution to never again read an Iain Banks novel and have lunch at the same time. Some of the more graphic turns of this novel drastically lessened my appetite. Nevertheless, I gobbled the book up in several days and foolishly went on to the next one without a decent pause, resulting in a difficult situation where I’d like to enjoy “Gun, with Occasional Music” by Jonathan Lethem much more than I do and, some 100 pages into the book, am seriously considering of not finishing it. The SF and detective novel overtones in this, after the rough and unpretentious Banksian Scottishness, seem very silly and unispired. A shame, really, because a book with a title as brilliant as this couldn’t have been all bad.

Last Friday several things happened that very often fail to happen in my normal everyday life: I had a hangover and I signed a record deal (unfortunately not for Sinisthra though). It went like this. I woke up suffering from the aftereffects of drinking-more-than-was-needed and the unpleasantly clear awareness of having promised to do something of significance on a kind of day I usually don’t want to do anything at all. This something involved leaving the apartment and meeting up with people, to go and meet up with further people. I wasn’t very thrilled by this but then again going out the night before and acquiring this hangover hadn’t been an entirely compulsory move so I was in no position to complain. So out went a message to the person who I was to meet, asking at what time should we meet, and soon after, in came a message saying some rest was still needed (for he was hungover too) but rest assured, we would meet very shortly indeed. The novel usage of the word ”shortly” in this case turned out to mean that after having rushed into the shower and got hurriedly dressed I sat and waited for two hours before the next message arrived, stating the place of our meeting from where we would make haste to the Spinefarm Records office on the other side of town.

The meeting place was a pub around the corner where we feverishly set upon the task of sitting down to sip beer and talk toot in an unhurried fashion. Another two hours passed, with growing impatience and frustration from my side, of the shouldn’t-we-be-going-already fashion, and an occasional call to the record company manager to inform him that yes, we were still here but would leave any minute now. And then, finally, we miraculously did just that after I had repeatedly pointed out that we were running out of office hours and it was slightly impolite to keep people waiting in any case.

So, after much ado, we arrived at the Spinefarm offices where the receptionist let us in, in a somewhat bemused manner but asked no questions. Past the Universal (who own Spinefarm Records) rooms we marched, down the long and winding corridor lined with all kinds of record industry paraphernalia, past an empty room after empty room, past the room of the person we were supposed to meet (for it was empty too), and finally, at the end of the corridor, into the Official Conference Room. Which wasn’t empty as such, what with the posh wooden panelling, vast leather couches, ridiculously expensive looking multimedia sound system and walls covered with gold records and other awards, but empty anyway in the manner that it contained no living soul until we entered.

And settled upon the sofas. And looked around us, inquisitively. And spotted a drink cupboard, whereas my partner in all this, mr. Hynninen the singer and bass player, got up and took out two bottles of brandy and some pint-sized plastic cups. And I poured the drinks and he took out his phone and once again called the person we were supposed to meet, to tell him where we were now, getting a cautiously disbelieving response along the lines of ”get the fuck out of there this moment but sign the documents first”. So I located the copies of our contract in a certain drawer in a not-too-tidy office after the right co-ordinates were given over the phone. We casually and hastily eyed the contract through before signing our souls away, then returned the papers to the drawer and sat some more on the sofa.

After awhile (this time ”awhile” wasn’t synonymous with ”two hours”) we felt that we’d seen the place now and left the premises to join the record company manager and his cohorts in a dimly lit pub nearby.

Now I should probably mention that mr. Hynninen has been signed to Spinefarm for years (with his former band Reverend Bizarre) so he wasn’t a total stranger, and the album we signed our contract for was already released last November. Which somewhat spoils the story.

RECENT SOURCES OF FRUSTRATION:
Another bloody expensive Riedel wine glass broken in the bloody washing machine. Entirely my own fault though since I can’t be bothered to wash them by hand anymore. Still, a major source of frustration everytime it happens.
A bigger and more relevant source of frustration is the bloody sinisthra dot com that’s been down for several days again when I’m writing this. By the time anyone reads this it’s bound to be up and running again since I wouldn’t be able to upload this entry if it wasn’t. But for now it isn’t, it being a Sunday afternoon, and my e-mail isn’t working because of this, and the operator’s phone-in help desk isn’t open on weekends, and no one seemingly bothers to check the help desk e-mails either because no one has responded in any way to my requests to rectify the situation. This is hugely irritating, since it’s not the first time this happens and since it’s in no way our fault. Luckily the operator is located in Finland and not somewhere on the other side of the globe which would make it a lot more complicated.

RECENT SOURCES OF DELIGHT:
Yesterday I saw my first ever movie in 3D and although I was kind of hoping my virgin experience on such matters would be the forthcoming Neil Gaiman’s “Coraline” it turned out to be Disney’s “Bolt” instead because Coraline won’t premiere in Finland until next June and Bolt was already here. And totally awesome it was, and utterly excellent too. Not to mention extremely brilliant, to avoid superlatives as much as possible. I don’t know how impressed I would have been had it not been the 3D version but since it was it was very cool indeed and quite stupendous as well. To further avoid superlatives.

RECENT BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
Freixenet Cordon Rosado Brut, red cava from Spain. A bewildering taste with something that reminded me of strawberries but is supposed to be raspberries. Very dry, with a very moderate amount of bubbles. Only a curiosity in my opinion, nice to sample once but very unlikely to be sampled again. Especially since I have decided upon my favourite cava for the time being and it’s definitely not this one.

Castillo Perelada Brut Reserva is my current number one choice when it comes to reasonably priced cavas available in Finland. I can’t really describe how I arrived upon this conclusion, I just found this definite sureness in me as soon as I had a sip of this. There was nothing to complain about the taste here, as there’s usually been with a lot of other cavas (”I wish it tasted just a tad different, then it would be great in my opinion”). This one is perfectly fine, with a smooth dryness that fills the mouth pleasantly and er, sparklingly and irresistibly lifts your spirits, whether you wanted it or not. It is often said that good cava can be enjoyed at any time of the day and in any kind of situation and I have to agree with that. Although I do not intend to start enjoying it too much outside my normal wine-enjoying points in time, i.e. on Friday and Saturday evenings.

Torres Gran Viña Sol, white wine from Spain and another fine example of Chardonnay I’m quite unable to enjoy. Hints of butter and peach, with a certain denseness and a streak of bitterness I especially disliked. It was ok with food, actually it was more than ok with food but on its’ own it didn’t work for me at all.

Libaio Chardonnay, white wine from Italy falls in the same category as the above. I chose it because it was recommended for the recipe containing zucchini and salmon with sesame seed covering and it did go with the flavours of the food nicely, but without the food the sourness and the thickness of the taste pressed forth and further fortified my not-very-elevated opinion of Chardonnays. Both of these wines were unoaked and I don’t think I’ve ever tasted oaked Chardonnays and, in the light of this, probably won’t either.

Trapiche Reserva Malbec Bonarda is a meat and potatos type of uncomplicated red wine from Argentina, that went well with, well, meatballs and potatos. And that’s about all I can say about it. It’s Argentinean Malbec, so it can’t be all bad, but there was nothing very remarkable in it and I can think of several more enticing wines to buy if I want Malbec.