JIBBA JABBA
personal ramblings
TEXTS
published writings
[mostly in swedish]
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good links on security
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GRAFFITI
by Swedish writers
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Maybe it's no big surprise, but let me indulge in pesky quasi psychology for a wee bit, now...
I was born in 1967, maybe on the cusp of the world-wide wave of leftism. I don't know. It doesn't really matter, except that the year we are born in some way defines us. As we grow older, at least some us are fascinated about the time we were born. I was no exception, nor my little brother. One delved into old magazine articles and photos. I clearly remember that the newspaper articles that immediately stuck with me were those portraying the space program (i am, after all, a quintessential boy) and those portraying the Vietnam war.
Somewhere, there is a photo of me, maybe 3, 4 years old holding an FNL flag in a May Day demonstration. I've been looking for it several times, but I can't seem to find it again. I think I was sitting in a pushchair. Here in Sweden it was no biggie flyin' an FNL flag, I think. My parents were vanilla social democrats, albeit somewhat engaged in the party as well as the union. May day demonstrations were big back then. And in Sweden, all social democrats, communists and a whole bunch of liberals protested against the Vietnam war. As I said, no biggie.
But one does not grow up without retaining at least a modicum of what one learned as a kid. When I was maybe 13 years old, in 1980, I was into some kinda prep look, donning the fashion threads of the conservative youth of the day. Still, I went to the movies showed by the communist youth just a year before that. And I think that my heart was still to the left, somehow. All I saw in my childhood, all I read, somehow taught me that one should help people in need, regardless of colour or creed. I looked like a fucking preppie, but I wrote "poems" about Umkonto We Sizwe.
So there I was: too late to be a punk, to wimpy to define my own style. By the time I was 15 I had started wearing black suits & pointy shoes, scorning visible brand names. I was working at a non-profit music club. I was reading existentialists and beats. I was Littletoned a bit, called commie by the conservatives and conservative by the machine shop posse. I went to meetings with BSB (Keep Sweden Mixed, an organization with close ties to Ne Touché A Mon Pôte from France) and was asked to calm down by a black south african. I was probably the most self-righteous dweeb you ever saw. I scorned people who told "racist" jokes, I went head to head with older people who romanticized native americans. For some reason, it was always the race issue that got my motor really up and running.
And now? Am I still a pinko? An insufferable little PC whelp? No. But I still have a basic ethos that makes me anti-capitalist. pro-environmentalist, anti-racist. But I'd like to think that I'm much more tolerant these days. You know, I'm not sure if it's always a good thing being too literal in the race issue. People don't and won't change. What the fuck do I care if the guy I'm talking to at a party sucks cocks? Do I mind? No. Do I care? Well, maybe I'm just a little curious. Same thing with "race" (although I prefer the word "colour"). You may think - you, blacks, whites, yellows, reds, browns - that it matters. I don't fucking care. And I don't mind.
Let me get somewhat personal about the ethno concept. When I was 14 or 15 I shoplifted my first skin mag. It was an all-black vanilla mag. The second I shoplifted was an all-asian one. Does that make me an exoticist? Hell no, not in my book...
Some people like redheads a little bit more than blondes... well, I like people of colour a little bit more than people without colour. I don't dream about little chinese gals in cheong-sams or lithe japanese hyperobedient geishas. It's just that I look one extra time if I pass someone who looks a bit different, whether that person be black, asian, punk, nude or supertall. I hadn't thought about the reason for it a lot, until I read Mimi Nguyen writing about exoticism and fetishizing asians on her homepage. I felt a bit scorned by that article. To add insult to injury, another article, published in Salon, stated that men who was turned on by orientals were closet-paedophiles.
I felt angry, victimized. There I was, a flaming anti racist who had been in anti racist riots, being chased by german shepherds and cops on horsebacks. And now I was just a fucked up racist sex freak. Strangely enough, I found solace in an interview with Slantgirl/Nguyen in V/Search's Zines! Vol. 2. There she stated that her attraction to the punk movement had started with the 80s punxploitation: "Here I was, Asian with slanted eyes, feeling visually out-of-synch. so seeing punks on TV being visually out-of-synch struck a chord."
Well, I think it was the same with me: feeling alienated and seeing someone that looks very different caused some bond to form, I think. I've also been very attracted to Modesty Blaise-kind of women. I'm talking fantasy, of course, but it permeates into the real world, I'm afraid. Thus, I think it's really cool with girls who could kick anyone's ass. I'm not even sure that it's a sexual thing; it's just something I think is really interesting. So I dig Hong-Kong heroines, such as Maggie Cheung, Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Khan. Does that make me bad? Well, if it does, then digging boss film makers "Beat" Takeshi and Akira Kurosawa, and actors such as Leung Ga Fai and Chow Yun-fat must make me bad too? It's not a matter of colour; it's just a matter of coolness and skill.
I think it would be a good thing if people in all camps just didn't think so much about such a non-issue (I'm not trying to be play it down, since I know it is a real issue, but it is an issue that needn't exist) as race. Again: people are stupid. That's the way the world is. They won't change. They still want neighbours who knows how to fit in. They still wan't neighbours that don't use garlic in their cooking. It's fucked up. But you know what? I can't bother to be bothered by them. If they want to stay stupid and ignorant, so be it. Their lives will be a lot more meaningless than they'd need to be. Fuck them. FUCK THEM!
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Fuel: Deerhoof, Console: 14 Zero Zero, Lalo Shifrin, Loud, Fast And Out Of Control, The Tinklers, Company Flow, ALGERap, Kid Koala, L'Usine, Ramones, Supersuckers, Ethiopiques, Ghost Dog, Bullitt, George Jones, Fong Sai Yuk, Kahimie Karie, Robert Johnson & The Punchdrunks, Speak, Puncture, Patsy Cline, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Solex, Stereo Total, Le Tigre, Punk Planet, Rushmore, Osso Buco, The Electronic Privacy Papers, Information Warfare, Suck, Hot Snakes, Office Space and some banghra.