Travelmarx Winter 2025 Playlist – Heavy Air

36 album covers for Travelmarx Winter 2024 Playlist – Heavy Air

And so we end 2024 and start (Winter) 2025 with a playlist and a heavy sigh. There have been a lot of changes this year, some for the good and some for the not so good. We picked the title “Heavy Air” because this instrumental song by Pure X captures the what we are feeling. Happy listening. This playlist is here on Spotify.


Dream Sitch, Michael Nau, Floating Action - “Now On”
Radiotrónica - “Nodos”
Cloth - “Felt”
Jack Name - “The Devil Comes Inside”
Lætitia Sadier - “Find Me the Pulse of the Universe”
Pure X - “Heavy Air”

Laura Gibson - “Skin Warming Skin”
Leifur James - “Magic Seeds”
David O’Dowda - “Breathe Like Animals”
Terra Twin - “Eastern Boy”
Baby Alpaca - “Sea of Dreams (Turbotito Remix)”
Youth Lagoon - “Prizefighter”

Fable - “Orbiting”
Sam Evian - “Life Go Low”
Charlie Megira - “The Girl Who Was Frightened of Ashtrays”
Swing Slow - “Western Bolero”
O Terno, Shintaro Sakamoto, Devendra Banhart - “Volta e Meia”
Gregory Alan Isakov - “Big Black Car”

Cos - “Oostend, Oostend”
Ronald Langestraat - “You need to cry”
CV Vision - “Tropical (Tune In)”
Lesiman - “Messaggio”
Japan - “The Experience of Swiming”
The Budos Band - “T.I.B.W.F.”

Theodor - “Glades and Avenues” 

Langkamer - “So Long Little Rock”
Fhin - “A Song with My Dog”
Andrew Bird - “Hole in the Ocean Floor”
Felt - “Primitive Painters”
Baby Cool - “The Sea”

Lichen - “The End is Near”
Heather Woods Broderick - “From the Ground”
Douglas Dare - “Swim”
Sam Amidon - “Sugar Baby”
Peel Dream Magazine - “Central Park West”
Erland Cooper - “First of the Tide”

Le uova sode e sopracciglia finte

Microsoft Designer: hard-boiled eggs and eyebrows.

A nonsensical title – hard-boiled eggs and fake eyebrows – to show what we’ll talk about in this post: Italian nouns that are feminine but not ending in E as you might expect. We covered this topic extensively in the post A Rule of Thumb for Predicting the Gender of Italian Language Nouns. Here, we will talk about a few of those nouns and show them in interesting phrases you see in the Italian language. “Interesting” for those of us learning Italian in that they take a few seconds to process as correct.

I’m interested in those moments - call it a cognitive disconnect/reconnect - when learning a language because it means that some concepts are not yet hardwired as much as I’d like. In this case, when I see the E at the end of the adjective modifying one of these feminine nouns or the article with E in front of the noun, it stops me for a fraction of a second to ask, is that correct.

Being in Bergamo, I’ll use some examples we see:

• le mura veneziane di Bergamo
• le valli Bergamasche
• la neve nelle Prealpi Bergamasche

It’s not “le mure” or “le valle” or “le prealpe”.

Other examples:

l'alpe (monte) / le Alpi (catena montuosa europea)

• la neve sulle Alpi
• le cime delle Alpi

il muro (di casa, palazzo, ecc.) / le mura (cinta muraria)

• una passeggiata sulle mura
• le mura veneziane di Bergamo
• i baluardi delle mura di Bergamo

un'ala / le ali

• i biscotti alle ali d'angelo
• sulle ali di un angelo

il dito / le dita

• l'artrite delle dita
• il formicolio alle dita

una frase / le frasi

• le frasi fatte
• le frasi più belle e interessanti

il ginocchio / le ginocchia

• le ginocchia di una persona anziana
• le ginocchia sbucciate - “skinned knees”

un labbro / le labbra

• l'herpes alle labbra
• le labbra cucite - “my lips are sealed”
• le labbra screpolate

una mano / le mani

• a mani nude
• le mani vuote

una nube / le nubi

• le nubi estese
• la classificazione delle nubi

l'osso / le ossa

• le ossa del corpo umano
• il dolore alle ossa

il sopracciglio / le sopracciglia

• le sopracciglia finte nere naturali invisibili per uomo
• il colore delle tue sopracciglia

un uovo / le uova

• la caccia alle uova
• le uova strapazzate
• le uova sode

una valle / le valli

• le valli Bergamasche
• nelle valli Bolognesi

Hotlips is Gone

We called her Hotlips. We didn’t find out her real name until months after her passing. She was a fixture of the neighborhood, usually standing in front of the casa popolare (public housing) on Via Pignolo, waving and blowing kisses as we passed. If we should pass without her noticing, she’d call after us to get our attention and send those kisses less we think she forgot.

People said she smelled. That she was mean. To us, she was Hotlips who blew us kisses and brightened up our day. And boy did she wear the brightest lipstick we ever saw.

Specifically, she wore fluorescent pink lipstick that was completely out of sync with the rest of the greyness that was her. But in that grey, those bright lips and the kisses blown from them are what caught your attention. Did she approach her mirror every morning and say, “just a touch of lipstick and there, all done and ready to face the world!”? Or maybe she slept with the lipstick on?

She wasn’t always allowed in the cafe we frequented. She came in only when the owner was away and the barista — with a softer heart — let her in to give her a brioche. When the owner was there, Hotlips waited outside the cafe door and waved some money for the barista to bring out her brioche.

The cafe owner’s mother, perhaps sensing the unfairness of the situation, once offered 200 euros worth of brioches to Hotlips. Mom was discouraged from doing that, and in the end just donated 20 euros to fund Hotlips’ morning brioche.

We heard that Hotlips was the forgotten sister of one of the restaurant-empire-building families of Bergamo Città Alta. She clearly wasn’t enjoying much of the family’s success. In fact, there seemed to be some coded avoidance of her by other Italians in the neighborhood. Being strangers (can we say that now after 9 years?), we didn’t get the memo.

Sometimes when leaving our palazzo, we would see her in front of the tabaccheria, a sigaretta or gratta e vinci ticket in hand. In colder weather, she wore a bucket hat, which just seemed to accent those lips even more.

Once, we were walking by the large stone-arched entrance of the casa popolare where she often hung out and she called us over. The elevator in her building was out and she needed to get her groceries to the 3rd floor. She asked for help and we brought the groceries up and left them at the door. That was the closest we got to her. After exchanging pleasantries, we left. We didn’t even think to ask her name.

We miss you Hotlips and your air kisses.