Like a Rolling Stone

Bob Dylan said it -

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

The nights have been long. Filled with the chaos and enormity of music. Some nights I’ve been calm. Others have been premonitory with turbulence, and so they’ve been – trance-like, absurd and nihilist – and there’s only been the music.

And a fantastic journey its turning out to be. Fellow journeymen have been R.E.M. , Prince, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Nirvana, Elvis. And Janis Joplin – am not sure have experienced this rawness and honesty of emotion before. The Beatles have been there of course, intermittent, taking the centrestage as ever, omnipresent. Revolver, Rubber Soul, The White Album – no one can match them really.

Aldous Huxley famously said, “After silence, the thing that comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
Well I’ve chosen music for now.

New Year’s Day

All is quiet on New Year’s Day
A world in white gets underway
I want to be with you, be with you
night and day
Nothing changes on New Year’s Day
On New Year’s Day

It never ceases to amaze me when life can imitate art to the minutest detail. Driving back from a friend’s place having partied all night, U2’s New Year’s Day(from their 1983 album War) fitted the bill perfectly as I was struggling to drive through the foggy morning.

(I took this picture after an unplanned whistle stop on the way back home.)

Buenos Aires

Can you fall in love with cities you’ve never been to? Can you fall in love without smelling the odour of its streets, without breathing the air in its open spaces?

Then why do I have a strange fascination for the Argentine capital Buenos Aires. A fascination that Colm Toibin’s novel, The Story of the Night (set in Buenos Aires), did nothing to dissipate. It only made me believe that I knew its streets better, that I somehow had an intimate connection with the city.

That’s why I was stunned after reading Robert Elms’ observation in The Guardian. He writes,

The greatest surprise about Buenos Aires is that it’s so familiar. You’ve crossed continents to land in a misplaced shabby Milan or retro Madrid. You soon realise that this is not exotic South America. BA is not a colourful town of ancient indigenous cultures or African rhythms, but broad stately avenues adorned with a surfeit of statues, fountains, parks and an endless grid of apartment blocks with a newsstand and cafe on every corner. The whole feel of the place reflects the millions of Spaniards and Italians who left their homelands to start again in a new world, determined to make an even more grand facsimile of the towns they originated in. And they’ve succeeded.
Buenos Aires is one of the great American cities precisely because it tells the immigrant story, a place so potently yearning for the lands left behind.

Or is this familiarity not uncommon, or weird? As Roosevelt said, “Remember, remember always, that all of us… are descended from immigrants.”

(Also can’t help mentioning that from the fringes of this town, from its crowded streets, once upon a time a boy named Diego Armando Maradona rose to glory.)