I Wish It Was More Sordid

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):

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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.

Today: Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – Pretending to See the Future
Now, back in 1982-83, I think, I bought Architecture & Morality by OMD (as they are usually called). I must have been about 15 at the time. At any rate, they were kind of grouped together with bands like Ultravox, Depeche Mode, Simple Minds and such. And the genre in Sweden was called, broadly, “synth”. A much besmirched genre it was, too, later on with dubious connections to the New Romantics genre (a genre that generally encompassed what we called “synth”). But unlike the aforementioned bands, OMD sounded murky and glum. Possibly, this had to do with the use of the first Emulator or some such beast, generating lo-fi choral backgrounds. I’m not sure I really liked them, but being 15, it was nice being difficult.
But now, more than 20 years later, I hear those songs differently: like moody punk played on synthesizers, like post punk without the aggro, but with the emo. The earliest OMD songs has not only aged well, they have matured, and in the Peel sessions version that I listened to when biking thru the snow, the roughness of live mixes oh-so-well with the remains of ’77 punk and the emergence of the synthesizer as a pop instrument.

Today: Who Made Who – Green Days

Review: it worked perfectly as bike musik. A bit pumpin’ and humpin’, which made my sub-zero huffing more forgettable.

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.

If things are clearly defined – I gotta do this, I gotta do that! – then I do them. Before deadline, or on. But if it’s about leisure time, and I don’t have to do anything, some things take precedence. In this case World of Warcraft.
When I first installed that 10 day trial I said to friends: Uh-uh, no, I’m not gonna get hooked, I’m just gonna play these 10 days, and then maybe later on, I will buy the thing if I have time for and feel like it.

So, what happened? The same day the 10 day demo was over, I went out and bought it. And since then, I have played most days. Sometimes just 10 minutes, to check if some pals are online, sometimes 8 hours inna row. It’s weird: I play with real life friends, in the same city, but we’re doing it online. Strange. Sometimes, like yesterday, it’s like deciding we’re gonna meet at a specific place, only it’s on a specific server, in a specific place of the WoW world. But the past week, especially mornings, I dream about the game, the game world, just like I dreamt Deadwood when I watched it 10 hours in one sitting.

Just a word of advice: if you’re trying World of Warcraft, don’t plan to be able to quit it. It just ain’t easily quittable… [WoW portrait gallery]