General

Judit is a happy, babbling brook from Martin Sunnerdahl on Vimeo.

This was childhood.

For a while there, back in 2004, I used Movable Type, which then went commercial, as well as incompatible with my server at the time. Now, I finally moved the whole shebang into WP, and I event took care to keep all time stamps.
Ain’t I the little Miss Goodie Two Shoes.

And it was almost a fucking year since I last posted. What in the name of god have I been doing?

I just moved to another host, instead of running this site on one of my work servers. The new host is the brilliant bitfuse.net! Thanks to Jonas & Johan for putting up with my shenanigans!

It was bound to happen. They said that Yahoo buying Flickr wouldn’t amount to much, that it would basically be the same. Well, guess again. Flickr has now started a censorship drive aimed toward it’s German users. I won’t write about it, and what started it, but here’s a link, and here’s another.
Suffice it to say I’m disappointed in many ways. I just hope last.fm won’t start doing similar shit now that it’s been bought by CBS.

So I went to bed at 5 Sunday morning, only to be awoken three hours later by a strange fluttering sound. It made me kind of nauseated, the same way I get when I hear the flutters of a crane fly in the dark. But now it was bright morning, and the sound was louder. I walked towards the kitchen, suspicious and slovenly, only to face a magpie in hysterics. It flew back and forth, seemingly not finding the wide open window it had used to come inside. My immediate reaction was to raise my arms and scream “Ka!” loudly in the face of the flying terror, quickly running into the living room, and opening all windows, then making a semi circular movement back into the kitchen, once again screaming “KA!,” causing the magpie to leave the premises, leaving some shit on my window and my hallway carpet (which I put my bare foot in). The rest of the morning was ill spent with nightmares about magpies.
I’m such a fuckin’ pussy!

Ja, well, this is promising to be the longest hiatus since I started to write shizz on the web. Who knows how long it will last & who cares? I recently read an interview with Lisa Carver where she addresses the poor quality of the blogosphere. She basically thinks that the easiness of web publishing has almost done away with personal criticism. When one dealt with printed matter, a poor product meant a financial loss, so you did your utmost to review what you had done BEFORE publishing it. And I agree, but part of what attracted me to writing on the web WAS that directness, you know to put it out there damn-the-consequences-and-damn-the spelling. However, seeing that everyone and their parents has a blog these days, we have a reality where it’s too fucking hard to find the GOOD stuff, so basically it becomes a cabal of backslappers, where you link to your fucking peers or idols.

When I started with what came to be known as blogging, I didn’t feel bad about mailing those who were considered the superstars of the then burgeoning blogosphere: Derek Powazek, Miss Melty, Loobilu, Mimi Nguyen and so on. It felt like a pretty new world and it was fun. With blogspot/blogger, myspace, flickr etc, it takes so little to become acquaintances that I wonder if it’s of any value at-effin-all. It has become like a collectors game, where you want to link to as many as possible, or to have as many my$pace friends as humanly possible. Who gives a sweet FA if you have many people on your friends list? Do you really think it’s sane to flaunt your icq buddy lists with your 500 “pals”.

Anyhoo, what made me open the admin interface again was actually because I have OD’d on TV series the past two days, more specifically Arrested Develoment: on wednesday, I watched all 18 episodes from season 2, and yesterday, I watched the final 13 of season 3. How’s that for insane? Lying on the couch for HOURS UPON HOURS, ALONE, and laughing a great deal of the time. To tell you the truth, it felt great, but my protestant work ethic (yeah, right, but there is a wee bit of it still lurking in the membranes) made me feel vaguely ashamed. Also, it was like eating all the best candy of the world in one single sitting. I’m slowly becoming aware that talking about TV series (or comics for that matter) often becomes really boring to the other party if they havent seen/read it. So now I feel midly irritated that I have noone to discuss it with, especially since I thought it’s truly one of the finest comedies ever. Sure, Curb is great, and Frasier, but Arrested Development is like Parker Lewis Can’t Lose for a more mature audience, with better acting and everything - well - better. It is super fast, with no pauses for laughter, the comedy is in word as well as in action, and goddammit I love the series. Now I have to force it upon a fitting friend or two so I have someone to talk to about what has made me laugh more than I have in a long time. As usual, some nitwits dumped the series, but at the same time I’m pretty grateful for series that actually end when they’re still on their top game. So long, Arrested Development, and thanks for all the laughter!
So there you have it: it actually became a post and it became a post about one of the most blogged about things, namely TV. Boy do I suck. Back to hiatus.

Well, the silence here is massive. So why? Well, mainly because I haven’t felt that I have anything to say.
The past months it’s been World of Warcraft (not as much since the 2.x patch of course), TV series, music & movies en masse. Downloading, buying, sorting, tagging, watching, listening. And frankly, I’m getting media saturated. TV truly is the boob-tube. One of these days, I gotta take a break and start tinking again.

I’m 3 years older, and you can see it too. Swollen eyes, balder, more unkempt.

Iorxhscimtor, my first WoW character - who was once hiatus’d for a month, then resurrected - now finally has reached level 60. I was a bit disappointed that there was no drums & salutes, but it felt pretty damn nice anyway. Screenshot from Twin Colossals, in Feralas. Click image for bigger version at Flickr. My profile is at Allakhazam, btw.

This saturday, I picked up the latest book by comic book genius Tony Millionaire (who, to quote Peter Bagge, “is so good he should be called Tony Billionaire”), Billy Hazelnuts. Billy Hazelnuts, like many of Millionaire’s books, leans heavily on old children’s books, and older literature in general, with its slightly horrid imagery and olden language. This, more than Maakies, would actually be possible to read for children, even though the book is likely to disturb them at least as much as the Grimm Brothers’ tales, or the scarier H.C. Andersen. Still, in the end, it is not the scariness that lingers but the insane inventions, the sweet melancholy and the spirit of forgiveness no matter what.

OK, I’m sitting here watching the first season of Hill Street Blues, and the subtitling is just plain crap at times! I mean, it’s for the hard of hearing, an English release and all, but shouldn’t English know US colloquialisms better than a SWEDE such as I? Anyway, this being an 80s series and whatnot, surely Bobby Hill brings RIPPLE and not RED BULL to a party? For shame, subtitlers, for shame.
Other than that, this series from my youth has lasted better than expected, although I believe I see totally different details now. This should have been re-released YEARS ago, if you ask me. Solid television from 25 years ago.

• This picture is taken from the first shot of Black Angel, a 1946 film noir. I can’t help but wondering: who’d name a hotel “Gaylord” these days?

Changed the header to a variant of the standard Binary Bonsai Kubrick theme one, this one featuring Martin Fredrikson Core’s brand new Borgstrand Stencil, part of the “Top of the Notch” Fontpak^TM from Fountain. As always with Core, an extremely well-made font! Check the picture to the right for a real life application. Photo by Finsta.
I also changed from justified to aligned, and added a link back to the front page from the header. I’ll probably adapt Kubrick some more, since there are some things that could be better, or at least more individualized. Or perhaps I’ll try Binary Bonsai’s K2 theme. Problem is I gotta move this server to another computer first. Damn you, Red Hat! This time I’ll go OS X.

The below is the unedited basis for an article I wrote for now defunct free magazine Monitor. The original printed in Swedish of course, and was edited to look like a real interview. I also put up the PDF of the printed article, for posterity or some such thing. Here goes (Derek, if you by some odd reason should see this and in some way feel embarrassed, please come forth and say so):

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in 1999, I did a mail interview with Derek Powazek, who at the time was one of the first bloggers (before it was even called “blog”), and, I daresay, one of the main players behind the blogging r-/evolution. His work with fray and other projects was one of the main inspirations behind things I did at the time, like the little text I wrote about 10 days in France, the summer of 1999. That page is a graphic homage to the stuff that was on fray at the time, albeit not nearly as good. If I remember correctly, Powazek was also one of the founders of blogger, which was probably the earliest good free blogging service. At least it was via PowazekI first heard about it.
Anyway, once again, Powazek enters the fray (ho-ho) with a SXSW commentary, wherein he adresses that pet peeve of mine: semi-corporate entities that does nothing but trying to maintain a company-artist status quo, where the artist is constantly manacled, hampered and used up. Powazek, as an artist-of-sorts, puts it in plain text:

Until we (users, industry groups, lawyers, and politicians) finally make a clear legal and procedural distinction between copying a work for noncommercial creation of new works (like mashups or backups) and wholesale piracy for profit (like duplicating a work for the purpose of resale), we’re just going to keep shouting at each other in conference rooms and newspapers, and real innovation will never get made.

I couldn’t agree more. Piracy for profit is near-accepted, whereas small-time downloaders are hunted down. And god-damn the poor bastard who dare sample without clearance: onto him/her shall the hounds be released. Exchange should be easier, and whatever MPAA & RIAA might say: they are NOT there to protect the rights of the artists; they are there to protect the assets of the industry.

In 1972, the year of the olympic games in Munich, I was just four. I kind of remember the year, since my dad who was on the local rowing team went to Germany (Berlin, I think) and came home with a gift for me and a gift for my brother: I got a plastic car track, the one where the car is catapulted through a loop, and my brother got an “Olympia Waldi” teddy dog. We loved those gifts, and I think they are still somewhere at my parents’ house. Now, Olympia Waldi was the official mascot of the Munich olympics, a rainbow coloured dachshund. This was slightly before the games, but I have a vague vague memory of the Black September attack. If one, like me, grew up in Europe in the seventies, terrorism, hostages and cold war threats were highly valid, and I doubt that those born in the 80s has the vaguest of ideas of what it was like. Of course, it is material that could fill a 1000 blog posts, but I’ll just give one concrete example: in the mid 70s, one palestinian terrorist group announced that it had injected Israeli Jaffa oranges (I think it was the only brand of oranges that existed in sweden at the time) with quicksilver. I remember being at the local store with a friend looking through all oranges for signs of injection. If we found an orange that was slightly soft, we announced, aghast, that it was probably poisoned. At least for a very short time, I ate oranges but reluctantly. It was sometimes the feeling of the era: that we were close to very dangerous events.

Anyway! The reason for this post is that I went to see Spielberg’s Munich yesterday. For the record, I think that Spielberg’s so-called serious career is inferiour to his early genre-defining action/thrillers. But this one did not suck. On the contrary, it was a very nice time capsule of that era: clothing, scenography - it all felt very authentic. And the cast was great, especially Eric Bana, who I first saw in Chopper a few years ago. Strange to compare the two characters. What marred the movie, though, was the fact that some fucking punks in the audience were annoying beyond recognition. Sure, the loud talking was irksome, but when the fuckers started to smoke, it was just the most ignorant thing to happen to me in a movie theatre ever. A while after the smoking, and consequent telling-to, they left through the emergency exit, and just before that standing in front of the screen, hands in the air, doing the V-sign. Thirty minutes later, there was some pounding on the emergency exit, someone opened it and enter the morons once again. They were not loud for the rest of the movie, but still, the anticipation that they would once again do stupid things disturbed me. Still, a good movie that brought back memories of the 70s, as well as providing a pretty balanced view of that era of Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

I’m just making this post to test the flickr connexion with a blog. Now, what would be the reason for a system like this instead of upping directly onto the server containing the blog? Well, for one thing, the resizing capabilities of flicker is pretty damn good, and with the use of kungfoo’s 1001, uploading fotos is pretty darn nifty. The styles need some working on, though…

Mark Mothersbaugh is a great man, I tells ya. Not only was he in DEVO, one of the hep-est bands in the history of the universe, but he’s also a highly insightful chap who makes film music. This morning, before going to work, I read an interview with the man in Believer, McSweeney’s brill textmag. Buy it if you can find it! As I’m always looking for reasons to slag the major media corporations, here’s a quote:

Because today, if a record company collapsed, who the hell would be losing, except the people who were out of jobs? Consumers aren’t going to be losers. And if you’re in music just to become a big, fat rock star, then probably I don’t like your music to begin with. [...] And if you get rid of a lot of the poseurs by destroying record companies, maybe it’s a good trade-off.

And off Mothersbaugh goes to view an exclusive screening of the latest movie he scored, Herbie: Fully Loaded, with the words:

Listen, I better get going. It’s time for me to watch this screening. If you want, I could leave the phone on while I’m inside. that way, you can tape the soundtrack and put it on the black market in China. What do you think?

I think, “Kudos, Mark!”

Haunted House, the psychotronic movie club I used to run with my friends Honk, Buck, Werner, Empe and Björne 1993-1998, was one of those things that was an unproportionally big fixture in my life. Towards the end, it waned, but for quite a few years it was a not-gentlemen’s club that we used to force our idea of good (or at least interesting) movies to the interested populace of the city. In all fairness, they were few, but true, and for many years after we folded the whole shebang we were still asked if we were planning on starting it once again. But we declined. None of as had time, and the gusto was no longer there. Still, for more than five years tuesdays meant revelry and egg on the face of so-called good taste. Now, with MPAA and whatnot prowling the streets like a Stasi agent with a bludgeon, it would probably have been a legally risky behaviour. At the time, though, THE LAW WAS ON OUR FUCKING SIDE!

On August 8, Björn (Buck) and Lisa (Lisa) got hitched, and I had the fortune of being invited. We got wined and dined and well & drunk. Hard liquor makes you talk. I remember hassling an unknown girl with a nickname I thought too funny: Special K. Incidentally, I said it far too many times, damn my eyes. I woke up early the next day, still wearing my dress pants and shoes.

• Lisa & Buck, k.i.s.s.i.n.g.

• Lisa & Piotr. Piotr is a Robot and PhD to be.

• Married man Buck in full effect. At this moment in time (22:22.22 according to the camera, but it was actually an hour later), I was drunk as a skunk. Goddamn you, free booze!

Criminy! Most people who blog post every fucking day, stating their colour of socks and whatnot. Me, I stale completely and post nothing for ages, and then comes a short post which states very little but the obvious:

• yes, I’ve been watching movies,
• yes, I’ve been buying records,
• yes, I’ve been re-reading comics,
• no, I haven’t read a lot of books as of late,
• yes, I’ve been watching TV series galore,
• no, I haven’t been drinking a lot,
• yes, I’ve had vacation
• no, I didn’t do anything grandiose,
• yes, I’ve been to the flea market,
• yes, I climbed a roof,
• no, I didn’t like it particularily,
• yes, I’ve been babysitting,
• yes, I don’t believe the hype,

and so on. I’ll post a few pictures in the next post, so there. Currently: baking a cake. It smells delish. Listening to iPod connected to stereo. It’s some sort of metal, and how the fuck should I remember what it is?

I’m a devout believer in the crippling effect software patents will have on software development in general, and open source development in particular. Participate in the webdemo against the EU Software Patent Directive like WE do, and/or talk to anyone you might know that may be able to influence the politicians. The vote will take place between the 5th and 7th of July. Just say NO!
There is plenty of information about what sofware patents really would mean. Basically: no vlc, no mplayer, no ffmpeg, no gimp, no OpenOffice. The list goes on and on, and as you can clearly see, strong software patents WILL mean that software will be controlled by the few big companies that can afford patents and the lawyers to go with them. It just plain stinks!

First off, I moved back to the old theme. The reason? It looked like crap in IE. Again!
Now then: the massive open art project UbuWeb is no more. At any rate, it will no longer be updated:

The UbuWeb Project — a decade-long experiment in radical distribution of avant-garde materials — has finished. Founded in 1996, the project has been a success beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. As of Spring, 2005, it averaged over 10,000 visitors daily and hosts nearly a terabyte of artworks in all media by over 500 artists.
The site will be donated to a university shortly, where it will be archived intact for posterity. Please note that the site will no longer be updated. A URL linking to the archive will be posted on this page.

A big THANK-YOU goes out to the principals, as well as the artists. I know that much of the material was/is probably copyrighted, and infringed upon, but it seems most of the artists have been very supportive, and showed that sharing the wealth isn’t necessary something that will COST you money. Having followed UbuWeb since 1999 or so, I’m sad to see it staled. But there are other projects ahead, I’m sure. For example, you can still listen to Kenny G’s fine web radio shows on WMFU. You should. I’ve found lots of music through Ken, and I believe you might too.

Well! Yesterday, my brother Surgubben complained that his blog looked like crap in IE. Go figure. I totally forgot that Explorer sucks so nicely at showing CSS. Anyway, I hooked him up with a new theme that worked significantly better, and right now, I switched theme as well, to Patricia Miller’s winning contribution to Alex King’s theme competition. I think my brother’s looks much sweeter, actually. One of these days, I’ll make my own theme. Word.

Two days ago, I received the 4th season of Homicide from Amazon. I LOVE season boxes! Or boxes of any kind, including sweetness like this. I’m not going to delve on Homicide now, because I’m hungry & need to get my lunch soon-ish, but let me tell you: it’s one fucking awesome series! Season 3 is probably the best so far, but season 4 shows promise & more. The only problems are

• That I’m a goddamned junkie when it comes to boxes
• That the DVDs lack subtitles (being a swede, having English subtitles really helps)
• That I will have watched all episodes by monday evening
• That I will need to buy a new box pretty damn soon

And that’s about it. And, oh, tomorrow I’m going to the Kontra-Musik festival. 12 hours of blip blap drööööön! Will be interesting: vegan food & Jason Forrest.

Last week, premiere TV BitTorrent site btefnet was taken offline, and their channel on efnet now states “BT will no longer be releasing any torrents or have a website| thanks everybody | Don’t forget your towel”. Apparently, MPAA sued btefnet & several other torrent repositories, and of course no one wants to battle MPAA in court. Now, the thing with btefnet was that it was a TV episode only torrent site, that - I daresay - PROMOTED TV programs rather than causing the producers any revenue. Most TV series are, AFAIK, bought by other TV channels, who get money from their viewers, or from some other sort of funding. Sometimes, people record popular series to VHS, or DVD when they are aired. I’ve done it in the past: The Simpsons, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Star Trek, Sopranos, Twin Peaks, to mention a few. Nothing strange there.
Now, through btefnet, one could download the latest TV series without having to wait a few years for them to air here. I’ve discovered quite a few TV series through btefnet. Quite a few. And this past year I’ve bought 8 or so DVD boxes of TV series. More than ever before TV torrent sites popped up. As a matter of fact, I never bought ONE TV series DVD before bittorrent. I wonder, is the loss of revenue on sold TV programs that significant, compared to the huge fan base that the TV torrent sites has generated? Not to mention that MPAA’s “vigilance” is pushing file sharers into increasingly secure models of file distribution. I can understand going after movie torrent sites much better, since they are undoubtedly responsible for at least a decline in video rentals (I, on the other hand, still rent 4 or so DVDs per week).
I mean, get with the fucking program, you goddamned losers. Understand that alienating fans is something you do NOT want to do. Period.

A totally uncalled for picture. It’s just that I like the name. I guess it’s only funny to me and a few others. The picture is from the documentary about soccer hero Johan Cruijff, Nummer 14 Johan Cruijff, from 1973. It looks awesome, but unfortunately, I have no subtitles…

Two weeks ago, me and old compadre Björn was in Copenhagen. Jollities, smørrebrød, mooning, aquavit & beer was the flava of the trip. A trip to Eiffel Bar is mandatory!

Hiphoporama.net was a swedish only site that me & a couple of friends (Phat Pat, Hel & Frans) did back in 2000. It was a series of interviews with writers, emcees and deejays from this wee city of Lund. It was taken offline 2003, when the City stopped paying the server hotel fee. It’s a pity, and albeit old, it still have some great texts and pictures. Although all text is in Swedish, of course, it still looks pretty nice, for a site made in 2000. so: here’s the hiphoporama.net archive for all you “peeps”! Remember that it’s an archive, so many links and few email addresses still work.

I came to think about a thing earlier today, upon reading a new post by my brother: why on earth am I writing in English? I used to be better, you know, but these days my written English flows slower, and I’m constantly watching myself do grammatical errors. Maybe I should start writing in Swedish, breaking a decade-long tradition of publishing on the web. or maybe not. Maybe I should do both, mixing it up. Nar. This is, after all, a good exercise, and I would probably spam my own blog if I were to shift to a language that lets me babble to my hearts content. Still, I’d like to write in Swedish again. My brother’s newly started blog made me yearn for cursing in Swedish words again. It’s entertainment. Rantertainment.

So, anyway, I just came home from a cup of coffee with my friends Buck & Werner. Buck, I hadn’t seen in years. We used to do drunken online word-battle way back when. Sparring partners in cusswords. Today, we came to discuss music distribution. It came to my knowledge that a Swedish record store pays 100 Swedish crowns + VAT for a CD. That means that a store pays about 13 euros per CD! No wonder records are expensive in regular record stores. If you’re using an independent distributor, you (the record label) get maybe 55 crowns per CD. Then the distributor adds maybe 45 crowns. The store adds taxes, and another 30-60 crowns. If it was not so bad, I’d call it hilarious. But now? Maybe preposterous? Or just plain silly. This means that bigger companies with their own distribution makes 100 crowns per CD, BAM! into their pockets. Of those, maybe 5, 10, 15 goes to the artist. The rest goes to something else. The corporate machine. The beast. The husk, as I called it before. Something needs to be done, and done now, and it has nothing to do with punitive measures. If not, I fear that much of the music industry, including independents, will have a hard time surviving. That would be a pity, indeed, but it has little to do with piracy per se, but with silly price tags and too many stratas involved. Someone ought to clean that biz up, but good.

These past few weeks has seen the start of a battle between Swedish anti-piracy groups/Corporate shills/general numbnuts and pro-piracy interests/hackers/general law dilettantes. My take? Shove it, you big corps, you! I think it’s pretty clear that I think artists should get paid, and companies who work for artists as well. But what I don’t think, is that it’s a good thing to stigmatize file sharers.
Sure, I’ve downloaded my share. Let’s see, what movies did I last “steal” from those companies? Last of England and Jubilee by Derek Jarman, 12 Stories About John Zorn by Claudia Heuermann and finally La Société du spectacle by Guy Debord. Oh, and that Bruce Haack documentary by Philip Anagnos. I ask you, why the FUCK would I spend time downloading mainstream crapola that I can rent in any store for 2 bucks. And why the fuck would YOU do anything of the sort, either? Forgive me, but clogging the networks with readily available Hollywood schlock is just plain insipid & boring. I’d rather go to archive.org and dl some ephemera without being stigmatized by the “Biz”. That said, I actually rented a Hollywood movie yesterday. Not for the first time, not for the last, I’m sure, but the shenanigans of the movie industry will make me think twice before renting or buying from them again.
Did I mention I just ordered yet another TV series today?

Basically: die, you dinosaurs, die. An industry that was once exciting and happening (Columbia’s Odyssey branch even tried to sell Stockhausen and musique concrète to HIPPIES in the late 60s, for chrissakes!) is now but a qliphoth. A husk, void of what was once good.

This is totally irrelevant, basically, but I replanted a flower today, and took some pictures, basically to test out my new Canon Ixus 40. Sure, the pics could be better, but I’m trying to take photos manually, mostly, and the light sensitivity of most cheaper digital cameras are for shit. Anyway, here goes a little pop-up series of photos. Javascript needs to be on, because I didn’t feel inspired to do it any other way. Poo poo on my juju. Click here, yo.

Yup. I just upgraded to the BRAND SPANKING NEW WordPress 1.5, which means that the standard template is used. & it’s looking good, yo! It’s based on Binary Bonsai’s “Kubrick” theme. Pretty sober & stylish, so I will stick for it for a while. I must admit that I don’t honestly don’t understand the inner workings of em as compared to px. Or I do, but it takes some gettin’ used to it. So visual change = soon. Ish. First I have to finish this dry-ass sandwich:

Since Movable Type decided to take a big dump, I haven’t written. The reason has been, in short, That I haven’t had time to find an alternative & set it up. Finally: WordPress. It is a bit different, and far from as pretty out of the box, which means I will try a couple of different looks and methods when it comes to posting/updating/whatnot. I’ve started to feel like writing again, too. Ranting, if you will. Anyway, I’ll let this first post end here. Please check back…