JIBBA JABBA
personal ramblings
TEXTS
published writings
[mostly in swedish]
LINKS
links, the wild style
SECURITY
good links on security
TYPO
typography links
GRAFFITI
by Swedish writers
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pilgrim?
then mail me
I forget what to write. This weblog thing is getting a wee bit tired. People force themselves to write about things, mundane or not. What do people care about my doings? Whether I get up in the morning or not? Whether I cut my hair or not. It's just mental masturbation. Or maybe not.
I must admit, quite a few times I have felt comfort in reading about other people's experiences. What they feel about things. What books they have read. What things they love. How they feel when alone. Maybe it is silly and somewhat pathetic, finding comfort in alien people's feelings and thoughts. I don't know. Sometimes, it breaks open your heart. Cracks open your heart, just like a book, an in flesh person, a comic book, a movie. Maybe one learns a little, maybe one gets to be a better person, little by little by those experiences. Just because a thought or a feeling is initiated/sparked by a book, a movie, a dream or a hallucination, doesn't make it any less valid.
I, homunculi, verbal cripple, aching soul, feels not whole. Very few people do. Commercials flood my brain, filling me with anger. Stupid ideas, stupid people. On new years eve I got aggressive again, third time in a year. This time I jumped a guy and wrestled with him standing up, like two small boys on testosterone. He hassled me, mocked me, and made derogatory remarks on working people vis-à-vis the powers that be, the bosses, the moguls. Fuck him. I just wonder what will happen the next time I get angry. Fisticuffs & ruckus? I hope not.
Another year
So this new year was no more a brave new world than the last one. It's 2000, goddammit! & the world doesn't feel any different. People still prefer QWERTY over DVORAK. People still drive fossil-fuelled cars. People still don't fuck in the streets. Break open my heart.
Again, new years eve: I was home cooking with my friend Catta. She had bought a bottle of Pommery, booshwah luxury, I know, but what the heck! She made tapenade and tabouleh, I made a makeshift mulligatawney, quite spiceracked. We had the champagne at half past 7, savouring it before getting drunk. Then we brought the food to our friend Frans' flat, where a couple of friends of Frans, acquaintances of mine, waited. We ate, drank, chatted. We even huffed some laughing gas. Nice nice, drunk on the balcony, bubbly whine filling the air, fireworks going off all around us, hugs and kisses, euphoria in a bottled moment.
Later, I went to my friends' place, a bar filled with people and music. It all ended after closing ours, me talking to a nice skater gal of 20, drinking whisky&sodas. Music & movies, mostly. I went home at 7 AM, happy, tired, and thoroughly un-fucked. Not that I had foreseen anything else. I augured nothing of the sorts, not me, suh. Still, days after such bouts are hallucinogenic quasi-reality.
Another day
Sweet soul music. I went back to Frans' [where pal Slim Hel, Milwaukee Andy and Hans also lives. None of them were home, though]. Catta had slept there. Me and her went out and rented 2 movies: Life is Wonderful by Roberto Benigni and A Simple Plan. We watched the latter one, which was surprisingly good, not really surprisingly, really... I always had respect for Sam Raimi. Plus my man Honk said it's a good'n. We went back to Frans, watching E.T. on TV, and then Zombie Flesheaters by Lucio Fulci. One of Frans' friends was a purty & cool girl who slept her way thru zombie mayhem. Sometimes I watched her on the sly. I like watching nice people sleeping. Especially nice girls. It's not sexual, of course. Break open my heart. These days, I get very emotional when hung over or tired. I cried when watching A Simple Plan. At the end, a saddened Billy Bob Thornton demands his brother kill him, lest he commits suicide.
The next day, we continued watching movies. Me and Catta went out to buy some bread, made grilleed cheese, ham & tomato sandwiches. Then we watched Benigni's movie. I've always liked Benigni, since I first saw him in Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law, and then later in Night on Earth. Life is Wonderful was great: fun, sad & beautiful. In a way, kind of like an old James Stewart movie, but with more feelings. Then we went to the movies to see Fight Club, which just screened here.
Sure, maybe it's Susan Faludi-land. Or maybe it's Bly's Iron domain. My take on it was completely different. Maybe I'm in more of a target group than many of the reviewers. Sure, it was a little ditty, but there were a lot of things that I liked: being a movie buff and having worked in different movie clubs, I like when people play with the media, going a little bit meta. I like one frame cuts. But I'm jumpy here. What I thought was that I could actually relate to Edward Norton's schizoid character. Sure, I don't buy lots of coffee tables and other streamlined carpentry. Sure, I don't earn as much money. Sure, my job ain't quite as boring as his. But my life, as does his, feels like a scary fencing in of the ego. I am scared of a world where people care less and money matters more. I have no qualms about destroying the economic systems as they exist today. But I wouldn't like getting punched in the nose, kicked in the tacos, jabbed in the solar plexus.
Nor was my take on the movie that it was anti-women, testosterone jerk-off and practically misanthropic. Let's say that it was about men, sure. It was. But did Helena Bonham-Carter's character really look anywhere nearly as pathetic as the males? She was a sad person, true. She liked to fuck, even when it included plastic gloves, true. She, too, looked for something to hold on to, true. But, if I'm allowed to do a pop-mob-psychology thing, I'd say it was about men bent on destroying the male world. Not males wanting to go back to a society of explosive non-consensual sex and meat-eating. Just my take, my viewpoint. Destroy one's home, destroy one's culture and be free to build your own destiny, once again.
More movies, more movies
After we got home, I cooked big ass meatballs (filled with korean red pepper and roasted caraway) in tomato sauce with basmati rice. Then we sat down to watch a great movie called Election on my computer. The name of the director eludes me right now, but he's previously done another cool movie called Citizen Ruth, starring Laura Dern as a gas huffing pregnant girl. Quirky satire, deserving a big following. Election, too, is great & will probably go straight to video here in fucking Sweden. It's like this little self-contained world, very well done, very believable, great acting, nice characters. Just a fucking brilliant package, just the way I like it. Not like shockingly good, but very catchy, as it were. One of my all time fave movies, strangely, is War Games, for obviously nostalgic reasons. Thus, it was extra fun to see Matthew Broderick as a fattening teacher, stuck in a rut, still having a vivid memory of him feeding fat 8 inch floppies into a blinking external disc drive. Was it Dysan? Man!
That was the third time I saw Election. It's surely one of the movies I liked best in 1999. Catta liked it too. The day after, she went back to Stockholm. I like being visited by friends.
Yesterday I went to yet another movie, the much talked about Holy Smoke, by Jane Campion. Jane Campion has been dug by me since I saw her earlier efforts Sweetie and An Angel at My Table. Back then, she hadn't yet been recognised, at least not here in Sweden. Those two movies were distributed by small operators, and screened at cinemateques and small cinemas. They dealt very much with insanity, maybe as a metaphor for being an outsider, or an outcast, in general.
Maybe Campion's big breakthru, The Piano, was the same thing: a study of outsiders. I haven't watched The Piano, eventhough I have it on tape. It kinda backlashed on me, being so hailed, so quoted.... I just kind of got tired with it before even watching it. I will though. I really really like Holly Hunter. Do you think she would want to marry me? Do you? And I like Harvey "El Harvo" Keitel, too. He's in Holy Smoke as well, dig? Basically, it's featuring a searcher, an outsider, at odds with everyone, once again. Me, at least wanting to view myself as the odd man out, suck that up. Lap lap lap.
I must say that Kate Winslet does a great job, but it's no question who the real star of the movie is: Jane Campion rules fucking supreme her own cool universe. Let me lick her feet, man. I didn't think Holy Smoke as good as An Angel at My Table. Still, it's a must-see-pulse-of-the-youth-kinda deal. Use that as a blurb. It's cool to see that she writes with her sister.
Today: Saturday
I got a TV right before christmas. I don't know if it's a boon or a curse. I've watched a hella lotta TV the past week. Stupid commercials. American fucked up crash-close-to-death-suffering shit, narrated by Peter Coyote, puckering up to the lowest common denominator. I've watched Bill Cosby making a complete ass of himself on Kids Say The Darndest Things, I've seen chemically mentally castrated talking heads from CBS, NBC, TV4, TV3, TV5. I've seen Jeopardy. I hate it. It just fills my mind with noisy nonsense. I get sick of it. Why is it allowed?
Thus, it was a great moment when I watched a GREAT documentary on swedish public service TV today. Public service is great. No commercials and sometimes GREAT documentaries. This one was called Hammer Hill Click. It still sends a chill down my spine: in the (mostly) immigrant suburb of Gothenburg called Hammarkullen (Hammer Hill), there's a group of rappers called The Hammer Hill Click. They and their friends some years ago founded Club 88, 88 signifying the initials "HH" (for Hammer Hill" in an effort to "detourn" the letters from the neo nazis who're using them to mean "Heil Hitler". These kids, a truly multiethnic clique - latin americans (mostly from Chile and Argentina), Syrians, Kosovans, Bosnians, Koreans, Finns, Swedes, Angolans, Eritreans, etc. - pretty much kick ass! Latina chicks, b-boys, 88-tattooed, speaking a cool suburban variant of the Gothenburg dialect. Breaking, rapping, scratching.
Of course, the saddest part of the documentary is when two of the Hammer Hill Click members were burned to death in a fire at a youth disco in 1998. 60 kids, mostly second generation immigrant kids died that day. Several more were marred for life, arms burned off, no facial characteristics left. But they still had a lust for life I wish I possessed. At the funeral of the two Hammer Hill members, the rest of the click rapped their favourite rhymes, fighting back their tears, accompanied only by 2 turntables and a crying church. It was so incredibly touching and not tacky at all. In the interviews with the kids (done over several years) one met philosophers and humanists of the most earnest kind: unemployed, scorned by the "svennes" (the Joneses), maybe not really at home, they dreamt of a land without racism. They don't fear death, if that means being together and happy forever. I cried, but not a soppy cry. This was the real deal. This was reality, far from Peter Coyote and the shit shows from Hollyweird. Word. Respect. 88. I hope some of you will see this film.
/Pig Pig eating Pig
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Fuel: Boogie Down Productions, Elvis, Louis Riel, Champagne, habanero, Whisky&Soda, Caipirinha, M-Group, Tintin, Down & Out in Paris and London, Tuna sandwiches, Kinky Friedman, Roxanne Shante, KLF, Mantronix, Quark, New Scientist, Speak, watching Public Enemy live, watching T-Model Ford, getting hugged by pretty pretty girls, getting a robot by Jim, meeting my family over christmas, kicking back with my bro, learning that a pal got together with a sweet email pal, Gearhead, ID, getting a big ass graff painting by Core, hanging curtains, eating thai food, drinking miso soup, playing Racer, Quannum, Melvin Van Peebles. Respect to Club 88.