I usually spend the first months of each year trying to catch up with the year before. Yesterday a friend of mine suggested Local Natives (A band for you Fleet Foxes fans out there, just played in Amsterdam without me realizing it) and for the past few days I've been deep down the melancholic songwriting of Cass McCombs, a traveling man who've lived everywhere in the US it seems, and now holds it down in Baltimore (where Beach House, who has created the best album this year so far, is also from). I like Cass McCombs for his dreaminess, his romantic shimmer and contained country influences. He is not doing something terribly unique, but there is something that moves me with this music, maybe it is the sounds of fleetingness, or moving, changing locations that is reflected in the music, and in me. This song reminds me of a music festival and makes me want to go to the US and drink beer from a plastic cup and stare into the sun.
Airportline was recently encouraged to write a short presentation message that would be sent to his new colleagues. This is what he wrote:
I’m originally from Karlstad, Sweden but have lived in Malaysia, the United States and The Netherlands. I really enjoy working and studying in an international environment and appreciate the fact that I will be able to continue to do this at Spark. I finished my Masters degree in European Communication Studies at UvA in October last year, in my master thesis I researched the role of organizational culture and core values in Greenpeace International and Philips. At SPARK I will mainly work with communication aspects and try and develop the newsletter and website and figure out how we can use social media to make an even bigger impact and hopefully intensify the community around our projects. On my spare time I am an aspiring fiction writer, floorball (kind of indoor hockey) player, music nerd and excellent meatballs chef.
For a brief period during Obama's inauguration speech I had a feeling someone might shoot him in the head. I started worrying about the lack of glass covering his face. I started thinking what an anti-climax it would have been if Biden would be the new president of the United States. But nothing happened and as we speak commentators all over the world are trying to analyse what he said. While I was bracing myself for a presidential murder.
