I watched ‘Memories of Matsuko’ a while ago, together with T & M during M’s visit in London. I watch ‘One Million Yen Girl’ with M last time she visited in the winter I remember. One simple thing I learned from the ‘Memories of Matsuko’ is that, no matter how poor, how miserable you are, no matter how bad things happen to you, you have to stay warm and big hearted, keep on fighting and do not get depress. Of course this is simple to understand but not easy to do. Matsuko’s song stuck in my head for a while, sometime I hum the melody of the song while I am walking alone.

x



I went to Queen Elizabeth hall to watch Ólafur Arnalds’ concert. He was telling some stories behind of some of his music, he was unexpectedly humorous unlike his quiet sad songs. This is what he said about the song ‘Poland’:

Ólafur and his friends were doing road trip in Eastern Poland, he asked us have we been there before, if we did we would know that the road are no good at all. The bus was bumping all the way whole night long that they all couldn’t get sleep, then they gave up sleeping and decided to start drinking, they thought drinking could help them to finally get sleep. They ended up feeling even more sick after drinking and thought that wasn’t an good idea as well to drink on a bumping bus. Ólafur wrote the sad song next morning when everyone is feeling so sad of being sick and he named it ‘Poland’.

It’s a funny story for a beautiful, sentimental, instrumental song like this. Ólafur concluded that not all the stories behind a sad songs are about heart-breaking.

When everyone is sitting still and quiet like a stone after another beautiful song ended, no one was clapping because everyone was still drowning in the melody, and also there were no lights focus on stage at all, but Ólafur said in the dark in a sudden waking everyone up:“Can I have the clap? I want to tell the story.”, and then everyone was laughing and clapping loudly. He then said that to start his story without the clapping is weird so he has to ask, and that he was feeling funny that 900 people in the hall sitting in an awkward silence. I love how friendly and not pretentious his personalities are.

He then told us about a song named ‘Bus stop’. He was working in an advertising company back then, he was assigned to come up a song about bus stop, he was in no clue of a song about bus stop but he agreed and he composed the song. They didn’t like the song he made, complaining that it wasn’t stupid enough. Ólafur decided to share it in youtube (he has his video blog in youtube and you can see he loves sharing his stories!) and he got lots of feed back, he said that the comments in internet is always ‘dramatic’. Everyone was saying that must be Icelandic beautiful great landscape that inspired him and so, but the fact that the song is merely about boring bus stops, he couldn’t help laughing to read all these comments.

I do appreciate a lot when people are not trying to be mysterious, like saying something sound deep and hidden, trying hard to be even more special and unique, especially when ones is a great artist or designer or actor or just someone who is pretty or talented enough that attract people attention.

(Iceland is facing bankruptcy, and Ólafur was making joke about that too. It’s kind of ‘good news’ for people who wanted to travel there because everything gets cheaper, but hopefully everything gets alright soon everywhere in the world:)