LOU REED: "Perfect Day"

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Motivation theory, named after its originator Abraham Maslow (1908-1970). The theory suggests five interdependent levels of basic human needs (motivators) that must be satisfied, starting with the lowest level. Physiological needs for survival (to stay alive and reproduce) and security (to feel safe) are the most fundamental and most pressing needs. They are followed by social needs (for love and belonging) and self-esteem needs (to feel worthy, respected, and have status). The final and highest level needs are self-actualization needs (self-fulfillment and achievement). Its underlying theme is that human beings are 'wanting' beings: as they satisfy one need the next emerges on its own and demands satisfaction, and so on, until the need for self-actualization that, by its very nature, cannot be fully satisfied and thus does not generate more needs. This theory states that once a need is satisfied, it stops being a motivator of human beings.

KINGS OF LEON: "Sex On Fire"

I wash ashore
in the tides of winds
carrying the falcon's wings
let silence be my companion
a fierce and restless stallion
crying at the skies
galloping restlessly
with hankering eyes

TELEPOPMUSIK: ”Breathe”

We speak to each other like actors address an audience that hides in the theater darkness. You need not see it, to know it’s there. You hear the reaction, the murmuring after a line, the laughter. You feel the warmth of its breath and smell the perspired wisdom that sunk into the velvet seats. Raise the curtains and step into the world. Play as if it’s your first time; live life as it is your only life. Imagine you are covered under a warm blanket on a chilly autumn morning, wondering how warm or cold it is outside. Then get up, put your clothes on and go out. Only then you will know. It may not change your life, but it can change your day.

DIANA ROSS: "Upside Down"

Amongst other things, yoga teaches you to be humble. I went to an advanced yoga class today, anxious to bring my practice to a higher level. It’s fair to say that I have reached a certain intermediate stage already, compared with where I ever started off. That’s one of the beauties of yoga: there’s always a possibility for further progress. Today I must have tried 10 or so new, unknown poses, which I had never tried before. I must say it puts you immediately with your feet back on the ground. Well, somewhere up in the air, rather…

KREZIP: "Happy Now"

Time shot a hole in my memory; it’s now a fugitive on the run, a gangster after a robbery. Years disappeared, and melted in the glowing of my life’s summer. There’s old news in the columns of a random newspaper. Gone are the times when they used it as wrapping paper. What was important, one day ever, turned out to be merely a wallpaper tune; a radio voice that chases the silence away.

A man whistles on his bicycle. Happiness ain’t written with capital letters. It doesn’t shout, it whispers. It smells like lavender. It’s a dimmed, soft-tone light, not a spotlight on a theatre stage.

It takes us quite a number of years to discover what we want to do in our life, to know what makes us happy. With each blow of yet another set of candles, we inflate the fire of our own personality, like igniting a camp fire in a moon-lit forest. Hesitant, at first, flaring up, eventually.
And then still, nostalgia may enter, like an unsolicited guest that knocks on the door, a tiny bee that spoils the picnic on a sunny afternoon. We’re confused ants crawling and crossing each other’s anonymous path; meaningless, yet o so busy. It’s hard to be consistent in this ever-changing world, where minutes seem to pass faster than they used to do a few decades ago. We run like a hurdle of restless gazelles in the savanna, desperately trying to keep up. Our biggest fear is to be left out, to be different. And yet it’s so much easier to realize that perfection is not of this world; there’s a production error in each of us.

GALA: "Freed From Desire"

"Pleasure is desire fulfilled."

(from an advertisement for Magnum ice cream)

JOHNNY LOGAN: "Hold Me Now"

A good friend is like a bra: close to your heart and always there to support.

JACQUES DUTRONC: "Paris s'éveille"

LOUIS ARMSTRONG: "What A Wonderful World"

"I did not tell half of what I saw, for no one would have believed me."

(Marco Polo, 1324)

BEACH BOYS: "Fun Fun Fun"

The landscape is captured in a frame of willows. They are sophisticated traitors, pretending to be part of a natural border, but ever planted there by man driven by the instinct to mark an individual territory on earth. We all need our own private spot. There’s the same gold-coloured carpet of wheat behind those glooming trees, invisible from this point. Still you know it is there, just like the shadows on the walls of the cave reveal that there’s a dancing torch light behind our back. Like the melody of a pop song, ancient wisdom is repeated in an endless number of variations.

Humongous white clouds roll over. I walk on. Do feet recognize the soil on which they stepped before? Can we literally walk back into memories? Like an uninvited guest coming in without knocking on the door, I see this flash of me and my childhood friends playing hide-and-seek in the corn field. I savour a taste of bread rolls and hot chocolate milk, which we used to spill all over the table when we laughed unstoppably for any silly reason and yet tried to drink from our cup. We raced on muddy roads with our bicycles, chasing each other until losing our breath, intoxicated by adrenaline and a sense of reckless freedom. We had not yet lost the gift of imagination and fantasy. We were many and any kind of people in one single day. A formula one racer in our go-kart; a radio DJ announcing the next song on our tape recorder; a circus artist jumping from the bunk bed on a floor full of cushions; a horse in the prairie. We played, on and on. We found 101 different ways to jump into the swimming pool from the side. We climbed trees like monkeys. We hunted insects. We put a cardboard box on our head, to protect it from the impact of chestnuts which the “enemy” was throwing at us from the other side of the attic. We had collected a bucket full of this natural ammunition in the forest earlier in the afternoon, after which we spent hours making our indoor camp to prepare for the battle. We were creative without even knowing there was a word for it.