muddy waters & james cotton. got my mojo working. [blues]

love this.

hiking and the magical tree. [travels]

two and a half years ago, my friend jess and i were hiking a trail along the coast near ucluelet and when we came across this tree we sat down a couple of feet away from it, enjoyed the sunlight that made its way through the branches and talked for quite a while. we talked about our dreams, our desire to break out of the confined space of everyday life, our shared dislike of the conventions that determine how we are supposed to live our lives and our (unconventional) hopes for the future. i like to think that this tree, magical, as it seemed to us somehow, is the keeper of the wishes it heard that day and that it will magically open up possibilities and new paths that we do not see yet but exist already. 

keepsakes that make me happy. [travels]

while i love traveling just for the sake of traveling i also love traveling because it always makes me aware of how much i love coming home and spending time with my family and my friends again. surrounding me with random things from my travels at home somehow helps me during times when i have what i call the "itchy-feet-syndrom" and just want to leave everything behind. i can look at everything and daydream wonderfully and, therefore, include my travel memories into everyday life, intertwining the two. 

more mississippi john hurt. [blues]

some of the loveliest live recordings:

the ballad of stagger lee:



avalon blues:



since i've laid my burdens down:

maps. planning. counting down days. [travels]

it's not the most ideal situation when your best friend in the world lives in vancouver. not generally speaking of course but if you yourself are living in zurich and the both of you do not have loads of money to throw out of the window for flights this is a bit of a problem. however, i was able to find a flight that i can actually afford and therefore i will be hanging out with my lovely faerie of the forests for three weeks. well, hanging out is not quite accurate. we will be finding out how far away from vancouver we can get on our bikes. the plan is to be near the ocean every single day since the ocean is our favourite thing ever and since the world is quite unfair sometimes, there is no ocean near zurich anywhere. so, we will be spending our days on our bikes, out in nature, camping out on beaches, collecting beach treasures, making bonfires and singing on the top of our voices together because that is another favourite thing of ours. for now, i will just occupy myself with studying maps, in anticipation of this overload of summer happiness. we will also be weird together, have insanely long talks about just virtually anything we can think of and do everything that can only be done with best friends. now, we just have to find a way to teach the bestest dog in the world to run next to a bike. although i have to say, if she is equally stubborn in this regard as she is with her refusal to ever learn how to swim this might prove to be really difficult. anyway, with or without dog, these three weeks will be amazing and i am sure that it won't rain. ever. not a single time during those weeks. ever.

 umarmig. du fehlsch da.    

aabig-sunne. [good things]

just before sunset is my favourite time of the day. 

evening sun.

wintersleep. listen [listen, listen]. [songs]

and even if the words don't sound right,
i will love you to the day my heart dies,
till the day my heart dies. 

and even of this ain't the right light,
you're prettier than anything,
you're prettier than anything that i'd
prettier than anything that i'd write.

there's something in the way our lips touch,
there's something in the way we're stuck together
and they don't build love like that no more.

you said you'd like it when the thunderstorms came,
said you'd like it if the thunderstorm just
pulled you piece by piece away.

mamma's jewellery. [memories]

is there quite something that, for a little girl, equals going through her mom's jewellery box and imagine herself all grown up, wearing stuff just like mom's? 

i always liked the color of this necklace so much...

anna aaron. nothing left & sparkle and blood. [songs]

while i think that anna aaron is slightly insane (for some reason she wore war paint in her face when i first saw her live and her "dancing" was... let's say ...very unique) she seems to be incredibly passionate about what she's doing and she has this intense energy when she is on the stage, which is quite rare, and she doesn't show not an awful lot of inhibition. however, at times she appears to have a certain shyness as well which seems to contradict what i just said but in a weird way it does not.
i love her voice, i love her songs and to see her live is amazing. i love weird people.
<3

grosmama und -papa. [memories]

when my grandparents moved to the retirement home, we had to clean out their entire apartment, go through everything they owned and decide what was going to happen with every single object. what was worth keeping and what was to be thrown away. this process is a very hard one for every family i am sure. my parents were the ones who had to carry most of the weight of it, since they were always very involved in taking care of my grandparents. my mom basically made it possible for them to stay in their home for well into their nineties by looking after them regularly and my father, even though he was their youngest child, ended up managing everything that needed managing.
for me, the entire process was quite different than for the rest of my family because i decided that i wanted to move into their apartment if no one else in the family showed interest in doing so. their apartment is a very special place to me, there are so many memories attached to those rooms and i just couldn't stand the thought of someone else living there. i have carefully reintegrated so many of their things and belongings into the apartment that now seems so different to what it was before. often my sight stumbles over some keepsake and it makes me happy that my grandparents, who sadly both passed a way last year, still inhabit this place by virtue of the things they loved and valued finding a new home here.
my grandparents were extraordinarily awesome. my granddad was the storyteller and the joker, always entertaining everyone, doing crossword puzzles with the clock nearby in order to see how fast he was able to solve it. he was extremely smart, very knowledgable and loved card games more than anything else, much to the chagrin of my dad, who to that day refuses to ever play cards ever again. grandpa was very excited when i had to learn latin, which gave him the chance to boast with everything he still knew, and when i decided to study english, his first reaction was to look for the two english books that he owned and give it to me as a present: pearl s. buck's the good earth (an edition from 1932) and katherine mansfield's the garden party (an edition from 1937). he liked to tell me stories like the one about how he attempted to drive back home with his car with twenty kilometres per hour after getting drunk when he was young. he was an avid photographer and left us boxes full of old slides of my grandma and his travels.
traveling. my grandma loved nothing more than traveling, she was always beaming with joy when i told her that i was going to travel to some part of the world and she looked through photos of my adventures with me for hours and hours... when she was at my age, she was not able to travel because there was the second world war and when that was over she had four little children and that makes it difficult in a whole other way... she traveled much later on but there is another quality to traveling when you are young and have no obligations or commitments at all and that was something she was well aware of. however, it was not something she was bitter about. she was always insanely excited for me and the possibilities i had. 
she was the person that i admired most. she was the best person she could be: kind, generous, content and caring. if i only manage to be half the person she was i will be proud. she loved yellow roses... and here i am crying over these words because i automatically wrote "loves" instead of "loved"... she hated it when people wore black clothes and she never, to my knowledge, put food on the table without explaining exactly what was not okay with it. no, she did not like cooking.
my favourite thing, however, about my grandparents was that they loved me, unconditionally. i always felt inadequate in comparison to my brother and my sister. i was never extremely smart nor was i very pretty and in a way, i always felt like a failure and like i was being judged from everyone else in the family (even though i now know that was never the case) but never from them. they were always so obviously thrilled when i spent time with them, i just knew they did not care in the least about unimportant stuff like that.
although i am at the moment embarking on a minimalist lifestyle, i will never throw anything away that i got from them. there are boundaries. i will, most certainly, not ever let go of their books. 
i will always love them. always.

blues musicians. [blues]

there is nothing that i love more than blues music. it all started when i most randomly stumbled across a youtube video of mississippi john hurt which sparked first an interest, then a deep appreciation and finally a full blown obsession with all things blues. 

#1 mississippi john hurt

mississippi john hurt's voice has one of the most wonderful tone of all the voices i have ever heard if not the most wonderful of all. i could listen to his music all day, every day. his life story is quite exceptional as well and even tough i am very happy that he was rediscovered after all those years being a farm hand and finally got the appreciation he deserved i am inconsolable that this great musician's talent was in a way wasted and if i only think of what could have been... in a better world, things would have been different and we would have much more musical output of this true genius to look back on and so many more grand songs to listen to. <3


#2 skip james
i first started to listen to skip james's music after i fell in love with a few of his songs on a recording of a radio show where he and mississippi john hurt both were guests. 
i love the unique way he sings, i love his fingerpicking style and just about everything else about his music. again, i think it is unbelievable  that for most of his life he was not more successful. 
here the link for the radio recording with mississippi john hurt:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX908Qi-7DE


#3 elizabeth cotten
her way of playing the guitar is just stunning (cotton picking rules!). apparently she taught herself to play when she was just a little girl by sneaking into her older brother's room to practice on his self-made banjo and eventually earned herself the money she needed to buy a guitar. when she wrote "freight train" she was eleven or twelve.
i also think it is cool that she kept using a normal guitar even though she was left-handed and just flipped it around.
love her always. 

#4 john lee hooker
john lee hooker. well, the first blues record i bought on a rainy afternoon in a tiny secondhand bookstore near the railway club in vancouver along with a book about living in a newfoundland outport is the john lee hooker, coast to coast blues band, any where / any time / any place record. 
oh memories. 
to this day that record is my most listened record because it is just perfect in every regard. and that voice. he is just pure awesomeness. period. 

#5 alberta hunter
now, she was just the coolest lady in the entire world (she returned to singing, being well over eighty, because she was bored by retirement). looking through old videos of her performances, it just seems like she always enjoyed being on stage, having an absolute blast, and her connection to the audience must have been extraordinary. 
best entertainer ever. 
if only i had a time-machine to go see her live. 

and yes, she wrote the downhearted blues.