from closer to near: Discos 2013

El primer disco que aparece en esta lista (ningún orden por cierto) contiene ocho canciones. Si entiende que “conocer” un disco es haberlo escuchado, digamos unas diez veces, necesitaría al menos escuchar (sin volver a repetir posteriormente) dos canciones ese número de veces cada día durante todo el año para lograrlo. El segundo volumen se publica el año que viene. Ni siquiera es la totalidad de lo publicado. En caso de sobrarle el tiempo, he añadido otros recopilatorios, que sin ser tan monumentales, todavía siguen siendo veintidós CDs llenos de música.

Este año he escuchado más de doscientos discos. He intentado escuchar diferentes emisoras de radio, descargar podcasts, escuchar mixes, horas y horas de videos en YouTube, streams en otras plataformas, leer libros, ver cine,…

Si han hecho las matemáticas del primer párrafo se darán cuenta de lo delirante que resulta este programa de actuación. Peor todavía: las listas son más ensimismadas, he cortado cualquier intento de pretender seguir la actualidad de multitud de escenas, descarto cosas no porque crea que sean buenas o no sino por saber que no van a adecuarse al modo de procesar los discos, etc. Completamente ridículo.

Algo que no puedo dejar de conectar con este extracto del libro de Frederico Campagna “The Last Night: Anti-work, Atheism, Adventure”:

“One night, not too long ago, I found myself lying on a hospital bed, saturated with morphine. I wasn’t sure what exactly was happening to me, but I knew it wasn’t good. The doctor kept walking in and out of the room, nervously checking my X-rays. He wouldn’t talk to me, and the nurse stuck to professional silence. Something was happening. It was happening to me. Was that it? Was it the end?

I used to believe the myth that upon one’s death, one was entitled to the short, condensed film of an entire lifetime flashing before one’s eyes. So I waited for the screening to begin on the cloudy surface of my morphined eyelids. But no visual recollection appeared to give me my share of cinematic existentialism. There were no images of my first girlfriend to bring a tear to my eyes, nor the slow-motion re-enactment of a long-forgotten hug with my father. I felt no nostalgia, no inner peace. There was only a sharp feeling of anger, ripping its way through the layers of sedatives.

Anger for the hours I spent at school, when I was a child. Anger for the morning sleepiness on the trains to work, while my life melted in a blur alongside that of all the other commuters. Anger for the summer days spent in the office, for the late shifts at work, for the cocktail parties, for the enforced fun. Anger for all I didn’t do, in the name of something that now was nowhere near to give me my pay back. Anger towards myself, for my unforgivable obedience. Why had I wasted so much of my life trying to believe in the ‘higher purpose’ of what I was doing? Why had I blindly poured so much of my energies in my studies, in my career, in my good behaviour, if everything was now coming to an end, with no possibility of return?

(…)

In the days that followed, the thought of my coming encounter with another such moment took hold of me completely. I didn’t want it to be like that again. I didn’t want to see myself aged, lying on a hospital bed, once again sedated, shivering for the anger of having wasted so many years, so many more then those I have wasted so far. If all the promises of the abstractions I have believed in have revealed themselves as utterly vacuous – if not as complete scams – the urgency of those thoughts were still vivid in front of me in their honest reality. Revolution might never happen, Progress might be just a line traced in the sand, Success a carrot at the end of a stick, but that anger, that desperate feeling of having wasted the little, precious time I had, was real, and it urged me to take action”.

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