Summer!!! is here and it sure is fun. I have some great plans made and I'm slavishly going to follow them. They include as much lying around in the hammock, reading good books, listening to great music, camping out, walking in the nature, watching excellent movies and bicycling as possible. For starters. This summer, unlike the last one, I decided to have a proper holiday. Financially it could be a disaster - I'm forced to sell my trusty ol' Fender Bassman Ten amp to support my high-life - but man oh man does it beat working for the man in an (y)awning factory, like I did last summer. We got to go to Scotland, though, but this year I prefer the mental travels I'll be making with the pile of great books I got waiting for me. At the moment I'm reading The Eye of Spirit by the darling Ken Wilber. I am keeping my hands busy by working on a translation of Wilber's A Brief History of Everything into Finnish, writing a bit each day and looking out for a publisher. Idle hands are the devil's tools, as they say, so I try to keep one step ahead.

I put together a mixtape of my favourite music through a groovy new playlist tool called Finetune I found through Gagdad Bob's high quality blog. I am really excited by it. After I begun concentrating more on my studies a couple of years ago my previously very keen interest in music has waned. This summer I hope to finally get my act together and buy an iPod or a Creative player bigger than my current 128 MB MuVo that holds either two whole albums or some ten densely packed podcasts, like the ones from Integral Naked I listen to regularly. Having at least a fraction of a good record collection on the go might help my lazy ass out in getting out of my head and back to my ears.

After midsummer, which is a big party here in Finland - the sun doesn't really set at all! - me and my dear companion head out to the lighthouse island of Märket, far out in the sea of Åland. That's something I'm really looking forward to. It's supposed to be the stormiest place in all of Finland, as well as the westernmost point of the country. Having been automated in 1976 it's been opened again in May 2007. People are doing voluntary shifts of one week, repairing the place and stuff. If the weather sucks there's no going in or out of the island. Tractors have been known to wash off the island (which is really no more than a block of bedrock sticking out of the sea). When it was built in 1885 no one was thought to be able to live there due to its "horrible location". Well, it may not excactly be a realtor's dream but it's got lots of seals hanging on the surrounding rocks and maybe some ghosts too. Granted sufficient privacy from the other two people accompanying us on the island my possible future kid can be endlessly made sick by playing The Incredible String Band. Not exactly a hippie's dream, either. What a bummer ;)

All right, so that's how my very cool summer looks like from today, having just started by writing this blog. Go do something that makes you happy. It's really important, that, is it not?

Here's a song written + played by me. I play it through a Fender Bassman amp from the 70's. I wrote the song five years ago when there was nothing more valuable for me than making music.


The video is filmed in the bedroom of our apartment. You can see an old mandolin, probably from the 1950's, on top of the amplifier. It was supposed to keep my former girlfriend's grandfather from drinking. It didn't work.
  The banjo on the right was given to me by my sister Mia. Her friends found it in the garage of their house in a garbage can after moving in. I remember trying to fix the poor fella, sitting in an easy chair in front of my sister's house in Camargue, the sun shining, snakes hissing and the Mistral wind moving the tall grass in steady undulating waves. I was alone for the first time in another country, and my sister and her boyfriend were away from home working. I sat there plucking the rusty old strings, trying to make it sound as least annoying as I could with my meager talents and my garbage sale instrument. I remember a neighbour passing me by on the dirt road in front of the house. He looked unphased, probably having been used to people raising a ruckus in the midday Camargue sun. After all, Pastis was and still is a favourite drink to cool down from a morning's worth of riding horses, herding cattle or dealing with German tourists.
Coming back home I tried to retain something of the impressions of Camargue. I rarely played the banjo again, to be quite honest, but having it hang on the wall gave me certain confidence. You know, when you got something like that looking at you all day long it's got to give you an idea or two, at least on an occasion. I wouldn't know that for a fact, though. Having a heartbreak certainly gives you ideas. That's where this one comes from; of that I'm pretty damn sure.