There’s probably not a soul on this planet that hasn’t at least once in his life heard about The Doors or listened one of their songs.

I’ve discovered them when I started discovering all the music: in the early 90’s after the Revolution.

I remember buying a “Best Of” tape whose cover showed Jim Morrison’s naked chest (from the famous naked series); I’m sure everyone will understand my urge to get my hands on that, since a (straight) guy I once knew said Jim was probably the only guy in the world that he would have fucked.

I liked the songs they became famous for, but I take pride in discovering the overlooked masterpieces of every artist, and so many times the best songs (and the ones I come to love most) are the ones previously unreleased on single/video.

Everything’s clear til here. What about The Doors of the 21st century, huh? A while ago the Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger started touring as The Doors of the 21st Century, but they were recently forced to disassociate themselves from the “Doors” name after a legal battle with their former drummer, John Densmore.

Okay, okay, but who had the balls to walk in Jim Morrison’s shoes?! None other than Ian Astbury.

What do you mean who the hell is Ian Astbury?! The answer is somewhat simple: if you ever listened to the “Gone in 60 seconds” original soundtrack, you might have come across “Painted on my heart”, a mind haunting ballad from The Cult.

I know, I know, who the hell is The Cult…

Well, I’ve discovered them in 1993, when I recorded “Wild Flower” from MTV’s “Headbanger’s Ball”. I loved their wild energy and the way this band performed on stage. Honestly, I couldn’t sit down while watching this video. Back then I thought it was a new album, but in fact “Electric” was released in 1987. I began collecting their albums and also found out they have been around for quite a while, initially as “The Southern Death Cult”, then as “The Death Cult”. I have these albums as well, although they are quite hard to come by these days. Success finally came after shortening their name to “The Cult” and recording their 1985 effort – “Love”.

As a long time follower of their career, I noticed their style evolving from the garage days, Sisters of Mercy like tracks to more mature songs, with a distinctive sound of their own, a catchy line, a sensual, unmistakable voice, and the charismatic presence of their front man, Ian Astbury.

If you want an album to get acquainted with a great band, you should definitely get your hands on “Pure Cult”, a collection of their most popular songs. There was a time when I would play it every day, from start to finish. That time lasted very long, and for someone who gets easily bored, that should say something.

Anyway, nothing can be done about the Doors, but the good news is that The Cult is reformed. According to Rolling Stone Magazine, Astbury insists that we not call it a comeback. “This run of dates is called A Return to Wild – not Resurrection, Insurrection, Sonic Interjection, Revival. It’s fucking authentically real,” he says. “I like the idea that we’re men with guitars, and it is rock but it’s not rawwwkkk. It’s strong and it’s virile and it’s kind of like big boys playing with big-boy toys.”

I don’t know about you guys, but I am so looking forward for a new Cult album…

After being a source of inspiration and a partner for Sugababes, Madonna, Pink and other, William Orbit comes back with a new album, “Hello Waveforms“….just released a few days ago.

Excelent relaxation music, a nice combination of house and atmosphere styles, you should find it as a great listening experience. It is meant to bring a state of peace to the mind, while being an esthetically beautiful music.

Highly recommended !

Here you can listen a preview of one of the tracks on the album, Spiral, with vocals performed by Kenna, from Sugababes.

Awaken.com provides quite an interesting and innovative service…they take your CD collection and convert it in MP3, WMA or similar formats, for you to listen on the iPod or computer.

Quite innovative, as they are addressing themselves to some niche customers, who have been collecting CDs for a long time and now they want to move to more recent technology benefits.

Also, they somehow manage to earn their customer’s trust in transporting and handling the provided CDs. Of course, they provide a full money-back guarantee if you are not satisfied with their service.

Could we expect this in Romania soon? I would love to have my cassettes converted into MP3 :)

I finally managed to get my hands-and-eyes on the Led Zeppelin Live in 1973 DVD. I wanted to get this for quite some time now, and I went quite happy when the “let me know when it is bak in store” alert service from Videomax sent me an SMS to announce me.

First of all, I must say Videomax is great. The site is has a high usability, the ordering system is simple and effective, and their service is great. They come and bring you the stuff, they come and take it from you, and the prices are extremely resonable. As a Christian said yesterday, “you can’t get this good service in Germany”. Finally, we are better at something. And the feeling of getting the DVD delivered in the Lounge while having a beer in it’s awesome !

Next, it came the experience of watching it. Even though it was so late in the night, after over 14 hours of work and even though we did not manage to see it all, I really apreciated the live performance of one of the greatest rock bands of all times.

With a simple show (no match for the Pink Floyd ones), classical songs and quite a nice performance, “The Songs Remains The Same” proved to be a real must-see. Highly recommended !

Ever wondered what music are they listening on those far-away islands in Hawaii?

Well, exepct for the party music you can here in the clubs and discos there, you could search for some of the following typical hawaiian-music bands: The Brothers Cazimero, The Pahinui Brothers, The Mahaka Sons (it seems music is a family-thing there…) or Don Ho.

If you are in the mood for some calm, mellow and yet cheerful music, with deep vocals, nice classical guitar parts and an overall bluesy atmosphere, this kind of music will suit you just fine.

What would you listen while snowboarding? My current playlist is this.

Please leave your suggestions as comments to this post.

Acest post va fi in romana, pentru ca se pare ca asa e traditia. Been tagged, so, nu e frumos sa refuzi :) Deci, sa incepem….

4 filme: Kill Bill (1 si 2), Beautiful Mind, Natural Born Killers (we’re not killing anybody on our wedding day :D) si … si …. Avocatul Diavolului. Grea alegere, mai erau multe pe lista.

4 seriale: Famila Bundy, Fantozzi (so old, so good), Seinfeld si oh, da, Oz

4 carti: Neitzsche – Zarathustra, Poe – Principiul Poetic, Wittgenstein – Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus, Papini – Gog.

4 mancaruri: Ciuperci umplute cu ciuperci, Pizza, Supa alpina, Penne carbonara.

4 locuri in care as vrea sa fiu acum: Pe partie la Solden, Pe partie, Goteborg – Suedia, Rossignol – in Poiana (pe partie).

4 locuri in vacanta: 2 Mai, Hungaroring, Suedia (aproape vacanta), uichendu’ ala la Moeciu…(cu P.)

4 pagini web zilnice: Google.com, Wall-street.ro, DealBook-ul de la NY Times, diverse bloguri.

4 joburi: “muncitor pe santier”, HR Manager, Account Manager, Consultant.

4 locuri in care am locuit: Galati, Oltenita, Bucuresti – Titulescu, camin (Tei si Moxa).

4 pe care-i tag-uiesc: Sece, NpunctC, Andrei, Cristi.

si sa mai adaugam una….

4 bauturi: Jack Daniels, Absolut Pepper, Heineken, Remy Martin.

I really want to start this post with a big Thank You and Congrats to Bob Geldorf, for his great initiative on the Live 8 concert.

Apart from being a great musical manifesto, apart from being an extraordinary effort to put together and organize in such an excellent manner, he managed to get together some of the guys who had a deep impact on me and my musical taste….. Pink Floyd.

Not being able to see it live, I watched today 20 minutes of that concert, where Roger Waters (63 y.o), David Gilmour (60 y.o), Nick Mason (62) and Rick Wright (61) managed to put together a great show, despite being officialy separated as a band and having a certain age….few could perform live in such conditions and with such deep passion.

Pink Floyd have not performed together since almost 25 years now and I was thinking it should take a miracle to see them back again. And seing them, specially with that “No More Excuses” banner above the stage, really made my day (actually…evening).

Even though they denied any plans of reuniting (David Gilmour recently declared “I think I’ve had enough. I am 60. I don’t want to work much anymore. It’s an important part of my life, I have had enormous satisfactions, but now it’s enough. It’s much more comfortable to work on my own“), they still have a rich solo career. You should be looking forward for Gilmour’s future album, “On An Island“, which should be released in early March and Waters’ album “Heartland”, to be released in the first part on this year.

Finally, some Pink Floyd trivia for your passionates:
- Longest track – Shine on you crazy diamond, 25:40, split in 2 parts.
- The Delicate Sound Of Thunder is the first rock music to be played outside of Planet Earth, when some cosmonauts took the cassette with them in a mission.
- The cough in the beginning of Wish Your Are Here song made David Gilmour quit smoking :)
- As a sign of appreciation, Pink Floyd have an asteroid named after them. It is located between Mars and Jupiter

After the recent switch to Neogen, I also decided to switch to WordPress. This is why you now see a different design. But you also see some nice functionalities, like Categories, which blogger did not support previously.

As I promissed to some people I would share my experiences with WordPress, let’s make a quick “executive summary” :)

- Installation – very easy, just under 5 minutes, like they say in their presentation.
- Interface – very easy to work with, lot of functionalities that come handy.
- Support – bad. Even though I would expect a the big wordpress community to write various FAQ and articles about everything, it seems they did not manage to properly cover even the basic things, like troubleshooting on the import. Even though I did everything they said, the import from blogger just didn’t work. So I wimported everything manually :(
- Templates – quite hard to edit, it’s more like PHP, so a simple HTML “beginner” like myself had a hard time adjusting the template. This is why I decided for a more out-of-the-box one, with some minor changes.
- Functionality – well, it supports almost everything you need, from Categories to Plug-ins, from Users management to password-protection for posts and comments and so on. You really have to play around with it to get a feeling of everything.

Well, it’s time to get back to tweaking now, so I will update this after some more testing of what wordpress can and can’t do.

Did you experience any problems so far with it? What should I be careful about ?

P.S. Thanks, Christina, for the help!

…you name them Carla Bruni. So beautiful you can easily fall for her in less than 15 seconds, so talented that you can easily ask her for marriage, and so beautiful and talented you wonder if it’s really true.

Another love story, just like the Diana Krall one, started out when Irina opened my ears to her music and my eyes to her beauty (Thanks, fata!)

Comming from quite a rich family, she was born in France and, due to her beauty (and fame), in 1988 she was one of the best-payed models around the world.

She worked for designers such as Valentino, Christian Dior, Paco Rabanne, Chanel, Givenchy and Yves Saint Laurent. After several affairs with Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and others, she finally married Raphael Enthoven. Maybe this is the reason why one of her best songs is called Raphael.

She quit the fashion stage in 1998 and in 2002 she released her greatest success so far, the Quelqu’un m’a dit album.

Here you can listen to the Raphael song, which is one of her best in my opinion.