THE GARDEN OF IZZIE KLINGELS
September 28, 2008
I’ve never met Izzie Klingels but I have a great fondness for Garden. In fact if it wasn’t for dear Izzie I wouldn’t even be aware of Garden. It was she who brought me ‘into the garden’….I’m listening to Agnes Bernelle as I write this , she’s spinning around on my record deck and it seems appropriate that I should be listening to her when writing of Izzie…
I am , I suppose , what might be best described as a sad old man with no friends….that’s not self pity just simple plain fact. I live on my own and sleep on the floor of a one room flat here in Dublin. I have better things to do with my money than buy a bed and apart from that I have not got the room for one and so I sleep on the floor…..and I sleep like an innocent……
When I get out of bed every morning , which is to say when I get up off the floor and have my morning coffee I find that I have nothing to do so I wander out my front door and head for the record shops of Dublin.. If it wasn’t for the record shops I would go mad…. I put one foot in front of the other and eventually end up in one of the few vinyl emporiums left in this city. I’m an old time record collector….My hair is grey and as the song has it ,” I ache in the places where I used to play”. My clothes are all worn and shabby as all my spare money goes on vinyl and I am I suppose well known in these shops…..and I’m always on my own. But then again , who needs friends when you’ve got the vinyl ? But who cares about any of this…
To get to what I wanted to tell you…There is a shop in Dublin called Road Records which specalises in independant (!!) record labels and I was in there one day about a year ago ( I’m in there every day of course ). It’s a small shop which sells a lot of unremarkable modern music. And it sells this to unremarkable people. People who live in modern apartment blocks on the river. You know the sort I mean. No lost rebels here . No rebels without a cause or otherwise. The economy is doing well (even with the recession) and so are they….they all want to be just like daddy ( and they are , they are ).
Well , like I say , I was in there one day looking for something special. I was leafing through the shelves of Indie (!!!!!) vinyl as I had done a thousand times when I came acrosss this 12 inch ep by someone called Garden. It was the cover that caught my attention of course. I held it in my hand. I turned it around and looked at it from different angles. I put it down and then picked it up……and then I looked at it again.
I bought the record needless to say. Four hippy/psych type songs that might have been THE hippy anthem if the record had been made 40 years ago. It’s a gem. A classic of the first order. Four wonderfull songs with titles like , Yew Tree and Dandelions…..
” I am the yew tree
I am the yew tree
I am the yew tree
yes.”
I play it over and over. And when I’m not actually playing it I’m holding it in my hand , wondering who that girl is. She has her back to us and yet seems somehow sad…… She’s the child , the brainchild of Izzie Klingels. She came out of Izzie Klingels head. How long was she there ? And how did she get there in the first place ? When Izzie was going about her business , standing in the supermarket checkout , chatting with her facebook friends , was this little girl locked up in her head all the time. And late at night when Izzie was asleep and all was dark and quiet was the little girl gently tapping , tapping … “Let me out , let me out “
And why Izzie , why do you abandon your children in indie record shops. There is a myspace and web site but these tell us nothing. Why have you sent this sad garden child out into such a cruel cruel world ?
September 30, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Silly Old Twit,
You seem like a nice guy. you are interested in things and you are observant, unlike most people even half your age. I can’t believe you have no friends. Unless it is your choice to have no friends. Is that the case? If you dislike talking with people why do you keep a blog? I don’t know. Do you want to go for a pint some time. I feel sad after reading your post… waking up,a lone, no friends, no reason to live…..
Mongie
October 1, 2008 at 1:27 am
Mongie,
Like most things in life you just drift into the situation..it just sort of happens. So you wake up one day and that’s the way it is. It becomes normal. And of course it’s next to impossible to get back to the place that everyone is at.
But it could be worse. At least that’s what my mother always used to say. “There’s always someone worse off”…..I don’t drink ….I never really liked the pub scene. I did have a small band of good friends but they are all dead. To be honest , my situation has a lot to do with being very very lazy. Making new friends involves a certain amount of efford or even hard work…..
But I’ve got Jethro Tull, Charlie Parker and Amy Winehouse to keep me company….and my blog of course. It’s now just 1:15 am and I’m listening to Deodato on my record deck . I could just switch it off and walk out the door and go to some late night coffee house. I suppose I could do that and just talk to the late night people…..but like I say , I’m lazy.
By the way. If I woke up tommorow to a room full of people around me it would be the same as every other day apart from the room being full of people…
October 4, 2008 at 2:18 pm
ahhhhhhhhhhhh go have a fuckin pint——– or a glass with the man-wake up
October 10, 2008 at 9:55 am
I don’t know – Mark’s comment, is it supposed to be funny or what? Some people react to everything with jokes, sincerity is alien to them. I find it weird that he’d write what he did.
In general, I think that today there is a pressure on people to conform and therefore an intolerance of anyone who thinks for himslf.
Mark you are an unwitting policemean of banality.
I have some questions for you SillyOldTwit. Sometimes in your blog a lot of people leave comments. Do you check comments every day? Are you surprised by what interests people? Are they usually written by different people or is there a sort of community, or steady audience? In short, what is your relation to your comment-writers?
Thanks
Mongie
October 12, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Mongie ,
I do read the comments that people leave (at least most of them ) but beyond that you know as much as I do about the people who leave them there. I blog in part because I don’t have anything better to do…It doesn’t have any deep meaning..
It’s a lot like Facebook. I don’t understand Facebook and never have. When I ask what it’s for I get the same stock answers about networking etc..I even joined it for a while but could not understand why people wish to list me as a ‘friend’ or why indeed so many people want to stay in contact with , it seems , every human being they come in contact with.
The one good thing about a blog is that it’s a very democratic kind of thing. Most of those who ‘talk’ to me through their comments wound ignore me in real life. In fact they do this every day of the week. But there is nothing important going on here. There’s no great meaning to any of it. It is no more and no less than entertainment….and there’s nothing wrong with that. If the truth be known most journalism is just that , entertainment and nothing more…
I get a certain pleasure when I do it well. I don’t moderate comments and never remove posts I’ve put up even when they reflect badly on me. I think there is something dishonest about editing a blog after the fact so to speak. I often look back at stuff I’ve written in haste and wish I had never posted it. I often wonder why I do it. What the point is. I will probably deal with that issue in some future post. My ‘audience’ is quite small , no more than a couple of hundred each day but I keep hoping that somebody in The Irish Times will mention me and push my traffic up but it’s not likely to happen…..
But why should I want more people to visit my blog ? As I say , that’s a topic for a future post.
October 15, 2008 at 9:47 am
Hello,
I got curious about what you looked like. So I looked you up on youtube. I liked the piece where you do a voiceover over the clip of you doing nothing at home. But why do you title it The Man Who Failed. ??? In what way have you failed? Failed at what? Did you want to be a sportstar and not make it? Did you want to manage a multinational company? What did you try to do that you failed at? It seems to me that in a sense you live successfully. YOu don’t have any illusions. You’re not caught up in the delusions of the age. You think about your life. In philosophical terms you are an authentic subject. I think that your idea of being a failure comes from retaining one last stubborn delusions – that happiness, plenitude, full realisation is possible, is nearby even, lies in some room which you didn’t manage to unlock.
If you want to know about failure come with me Sillyoldtwit, come look at the multitudes in jobs that destroy them, telling so many lies to so many people day after that truth itself gets lost to them, look at them caught in one wave after another. Watching the movies, reading about the budget, giving opinions, talking to the wife: maintaining a surface that covers the void inside them, as they wait for the next wave to come and take them up again.
You haven’t failed. However bad it seems, that’s as good as it gets.