Pogled sa margine

As memories of Italy drift back, which by the way I always see in sunlit colors, and as a new summer arrived bringing along warm summer nights, just the thought of the recent rains we've left behind, the first feeling I experience is melancholy and like in the song, a thought comes to mind about the “sensuality of desperate lives”… However, the upcoming happiness of summer freedom and the ease of summer being, outweighs all dark associations – I take out colorful pearls, pull the suitcase from the basement. Even in winter, when I just think about the taste of summer, I manage to rise and overcome the despair due to cold winds and rainy days. Because this person hates winter in the city and finds anything below 25°C serious winter. 😉

16th June...

Even though they are often unnoticed, small moments carry a special kind of beauty. This can be the smell of freshly baked bread drifting from the small bakery in your street, or the clatter of wooden clogs down the stairs of a house in a Dalmatian village. Although small, those things have the power to remind us of the simplicity of life and how these “small things” can fulfill us. I personally can look for hours at plants sprouting from cracks in the concrete, telling a quiet story about how incredible the strength of life can be when it finds its way even in impossible circumstances.

One hot summer afternoon, about 15 years ago, on the corner of my street, next to a dumpster, stood a box full of old records. I was stunned that someone was capable of throwing records in the trash! Come on, to throw away music! Unbelievable☹Looking at the assortment of records stashed in the cardboard box, the whole period of the ‘50s and ‘60s was discarded in the street. Someone’s life, youth was kicked out next to a dumpster!!

January 1st. Morning, time of waking up unknown. You’re waking up, due to open blinds, light is your number 1 enemy. You squint. The room looks like a cross between a storage unit and a NASA hangar assembling Apollo—or maybe like a post-nuclear landscape, to the left. You’re fighting your pillow; bloodshot eyes are stinging while you ask yourself „What kind of madness is this? “ ☹ But you realize you’re the crazy one… For the first time this year, you looked at yourself in the bathroom mirror with both regret and pride.

"As the music is, so is the state." – Plato

What would the world be like without music? If there wasn’t music, would life be a mistake, as Nietzsche used to say, or would we have a way to cope with pain, as Bob Marley claimed? Music has marked my upbringing, generally my life, and I can’t imagine a day without it. Not just a day, but a mere moment. And truly, nothing in this world can be as wonderful to fill the silence as music, and I can also state, on a personal level, that it heals too, but that’s a completely different story.

Music makes things better “,Nick Cave once said and explained what had always happened in my life: things that seemed unbearable at times in life always became better with music. Looking back, music was like salt, an indispensable spice to everything that was happening in my “better past”.  Someone once said that a better past doesn’t exist, but rather that those are simply years in which we had more opportunities to explore the world around us, and the time in which it all happened. I don’t know…

What can I tell you, since I can remember Mexico has been present in my life through movies and music. In the country where I lived, which was created by a revolution, closeness to Mexico due to its revolutionary history was inevitable. Later, we added to that closeness the crazy paintings of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, their even crazier love story and lives and Trotsky, of course, whose words "Only revolution ends war", in the form of graffiti, decorate a wall somewhere on the Lower East Side in New York.

From the textbook

At the age of 5, my mother took me to “Dom Pionira” (the "Home of Pioneers") to learn English, and although I had to sacrifice playing in the yard, it was not difficult at all, on the contrary, I loved it. “My name is Mary. I am Mery Bell. I am a pupil” were the first English sentences I learned from an English textbook for children, which I inherited from my sister, who, of course, had learnt English before me at the same place.

From the radio

This June/July English saga in a red triptych about strawberries brings us closer to Wimbledon, Liverpool and of course the Beatles, whose music I grew up listening to, whose songs I knew by heart, whose language I learned. They taught me that love was all I needed, how to let go when I had a problem - "let it be", and that I didn't have to carry all the burden of this world on my shoulders alone...

Fields forever

Ok, we've leant it by heart: strawberries must come with whipped cream and they're the tastiest in England, at Wimbledon. In order for the lucky ones who manage to enter the All-England Club complex to enjoy their beauty, more than 170,000 strawberries a day must be transported to the nine Wimbledon bars every day during the tournament. Visitors then wait in queues for hours to buy them and enjoy tennis, strawberries and the essential champagne under the warm Wimbledon sun. 

I don’t know about you, but often in my spare time, if I’m not at the gym or out for coffee somewhere, or if I'm not reading a book or cracking nuts on some occasion, I have the habit of imagining where I would escape from a rainy day like the one today, while I'm writing this. What view would I choose to replace this landscape that I know like the back of my hand and is a bit boring to me? I must admit, I’m drawn to everything: to the sky that is upside down in Australia and to the aurora borealis at both poles, but also to the walls of some ancient city that are all over the world.

All my friends know that I cheered for Argentina in the World Cup Final between France and Argentina. That watching took place in a Belgrade cafe on Vračar, it was raining, the game went to overtime, then to penalties, there was yelling and it was tense. The cafe was divided by fans: there were more of them for the Europeans. Even my football comrades with whom I watched the match were cheering for the Europeans. And I, as always, cheered for Argentina..