The Airportline: Observations

From my short story 'Will you love me in the morning?'

They went to the crowded bar to try and get the attention of a big latino bartender. He was occupied with a group of students engaged in a Sambuca race, abruptly ending twenty minutes later when one of the contestants threw up on the bar.

- You will need to show some skills to get his attention, he told her.

- Just flash a breast or two, you know, give the guy some incentive, he continued. I mean, it’s just a breast for you, but look at this bartender, he might not see nice breasts that often!

Why did this always happen? Why am I making a breast joke with a girl I barely know? He was a truly tactless individual, something that had gotten him in trouble several times before. She didn’t mind though. Instead she laughed and jokingly pulled down the right shoulder string of her top, making it look as if she was actually going to pull it down all the way. She stopped though, as the waiter approached them, happy to get a break from the Sambuca gang on the other side of the bar.

So I went to a sauna with some people from floorball. Before the sauna we ran around like idiots in a small white box, it's called Squash by some people. The guy I played against called it 'a shit sport' instead. This was after I defeated him and his racket, which broke. Dutch saunas are interesting, they often choose to combine the men and women sections into one liberal combination of naked people. So we sat there and I complained about the Swedish krona which is at it's lowest point against the Euro since the Euro was introduced. When we came down to the showers someone had stolen everyone's shampoo except for mine, maybe since I carried mine in a executive traveler looking bag with the text 'Star Alliance – The airline network for Earth.' You don't mess with people with that kind of statement. Now I'm listening to the beautiful song Hollow Talk by the Danish band Choir Of Young Believers. If you want to join me, go here. Last year Jannis Noya Makrigiannis (who is the band) released a cd titled This Is For The White In Your Eyes, maybe the best album title of 2008.

Probably the best rap song from last year, with a pregnant M.I.A. Thursday morning 'get me out of bed' music.

A plane just crashed at Schiphol. The pictures shows a broken Turkish Airlines airplane on a field. The sky looks grey behind it. To bad that Amsterdam looks so gray on the pictures, I think for my self as I eat my breakfast in front of my laptop. I pull open my curtains and look outside, I see the same gray as the people crashing maybe saw. A normal Wednesday for most people, except for those in the airplane on the field. They didn't even see the sun. All we have is a gray day and a plane crash, here in Amsterdam.

I'm a big fan of French pop. Especially sunshine-poppy bands like Phoenix and Tahiti 80 which managed to combine guitar-pop with soul and funk long before anyone else did. I guess Daft Punk had something to do with it. One of my favourite pop orchestras Phoenix is now getting ready to follow up their wonderful The Strokes meets Shout Out Louds sounding 2006 album It's Never Been Like That, with Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (out in May). That is one crazy name for a record, but the first song from their album which is called 1901 shows that we do not need to worry. Sofia Coppola's boyfriend (singer Thomas Mars) and his friends still know how to craft a perfect pop-tune, now with some opportunistic electronic influences not far away from Cut Copy. For a free dose of sunshine pop that will put a smile on your face, go here!

From my notepad:

And there are Spanish people in the bike lane, and I can’t ring my bell at them, cause the ‘I love my bike’ bell my friend bought me in September has still not been installed by me. So I yell: ‘hey!’ with a strict Dutch sounding voice, the Spaniards open the sea of road for me with jumpy movements. It must have been how Jesus felt when he walked on the ocean floor, I think when the paved, Spaniard-less, road opens up in front of me. In a triumphant fashion I bike past them, and keep on travelling, like I was a very important and busy person with no time to spare on uncoordinated groups of Spanish tourists. And a few blocks later my tire goes flat. And I am forced up on the sidewalk, with all the other bikeless people. It’s about as pleasant as riding the bus in San Francisco through the Tenderloin. My life is not adjusted for the side walk, I think, as a Dutch man rings his bell at me when I try and cross the street.

Yesterday I held a presentation about Web 2.0 and what impact and possibilities it has on the relationship between the business world and the user/consumer. Here is a small part of what I was talking about:

Who is controlling this trend and who is benefiting from it? According to Deuze the internet is some kind of battle ground where ‘symbolic, financial, and cultural battles are fought.’ (p. 27) Jenkins describe the development of web 2.0 as a two-way process where a top-down corporate driven process meets a bottom-up consumer driven process which burrs the previous clear line between producers and consumers of media. It gives the user more freedom. A second perspective focus on the making and sharing of content on social network sites such as Youtube, Myspace and Facebook. Jenkins claim that this development mean that companies can increase revenue and that it enables people to ‘enact some kind of agency regarding the omnipresent messages and commodities of this industry.’ An example of this trend where both sides benefit through collaboration is Authonomy. This is social network site for writers. The idea is that you publish your novel or part of a novel and then people interested in reading can read and comment on it. This gives writers a good arena to interact with each other and to improve their writing. It also gives Harper Collins a fast lane to find talented writers that people like. Three authors were recently offered publishing deals based on their work on the website.

And as Deuze points out, web 2.0 ‘opens up new platforms and services for participatory or collective storytelling and exchange, yet also closes down the market for intellectual property in walled enclaves patrolled by business watchdogs.’ An example of the latter phenomenon, where companies try and retain some of the control which they have lost during this development is Warner Music’s decision to leave youtube late last year. Warner did not think they received enough money from the deal and have now pulled a lot of content of the site from stars such as Madonna, Linkin Park and Red Hot Chili Peppers (La Times, 21st of December, 2008). Thus, companies participate when there is a profit incentive, or when the profit incentive is built around interaction.

You can now enter the weekend a bit more knowledgeable.

Dam Square Scare II from Streetprov on Vimeo.

The sun was hiding behind the clouds and the rain was lingering in the air, as if it was unsure where to go. It was Sunday and hang overs were present together with some sandwiches and drinks. We meet at Nieuwmarkt, a group of different people who wanted to scare some people in Amsterdam. These kind of collective activities goes under the name of a Flash Mob, the most famous one is perhaps the one where a bunch of people suddenly stopped moving at Grand Central in New York. Our spectacle was maybe not as visually appealing, but it was fun. Click at the video above to view the results. The Airportline is turning in to some kind of video blog, that was not really my intention, hope you like it anyways.

Today I was supposed to be a wonder of efficiency. After securing a supervisor for my thesis, not falling once in yoga, and getting praise for an outstanding performance during floorball practice on Monday I decided that Tuesday would be a day of productivity as well. It started well with me getting up at 9.30 (sadly this is early for me these days), but now, three hours later not much has come out of this early rise. All I’ve done is to watch a Cot Copy concert on pitchfork.tv, read about the Swedish governments cultural proposition, watched the video to M. Ward’s Hold Time three times, read the Swedish author Bodil Malmstens blog where she writes ‘never trust anyone over 30’ and boiled porridge which floated out all over the microwave. And now I’m writing this. I’m great at dodging the OECD-report I have to have read before a meeting at 2.30. I’m great at being productive in the wrong places.

So I subscribe to The Economist and I dive into the world of international politics and economics with their free trade liberal agenda all over the place every week. I enjoy it quite a lot actually, even though they have a tendency to get a bit too dogmatic about their principles at times. But even the sun has it's spots, as some might say. A section I'm enjoying more and more is 'Letters'. Here people can comment on previous stories, and Foreign Ministers and other random people that eat taxpayer money enjoy writing here as they sometimes get agitated by the dry and brute writing of the Economist journalists. Most of the letters are serious and well written, but sometimes the comments also showcase a rare bit of comedic timing. As in this weeks issue when Azmat Malik from Hillsborough Californa writes in and bashes the financial bubble with its, in his opinion, 'make beliefe prosperity.' This is a fair view to have, but it is the closing statement that earns him this post: 'Finance must be reined in like a runaway ass, or we will remain in this hole.'

Azmat, you have just won the airportline monday quote award.

‘Spill your guts and throw it on the page of your pussy notepad that you are obsessively writing in. But really, all we ever wanted was to lie here and hear this music and watch the candle with an unknown scent of something chemical that is dressing up in a Swedish forest-like costume of Nordic berries.’

It was late as the Friday night came crashing down on us. But somehow it all made sense.

Also, I'm not gonna write about the tennis cause everything I promise in blogs never come true. I find no reason to diverge from that factual arrangement. Do you?

I’m reading Roberto Savianos Gomorrah in my bed. As you probably know it’s about the mafia in Naples. He is now living under house arrest, and a Swedish columnist wrote that it’s a bit sad that his life story has been more highlighted than the content in the actual book. I get her point, even though they are highly interrelated. I started reading Gomorrah after Christmas but never managed to finish it since I for some reason began to read five books simultaneously. But now I’m back in the depressed and violent streets of Naples with my guide Saviano. We pass through family wars with depressing outcomes as Saviano explains the crushingly cold capitalist system which governs the logic among the Camorra. Everything is about money, and power. Even love relationships are built on financial agreements:

‘Around here fa ammore does not mean “to make love”, but to go steady or to be engaged. Angelo had recently entered the System, and it didn’t look as if he was just doing little jobs, so the janitor concluded that he’d soon end up at the Poggioreale jail. Francesca, instead of defending her boyfriend, had her answer ready: “And what’s the problem as long as he gives me my monthly allowance? He really loves me.” ‘ (p. 138)

And just like Valentine’s Day is a sad attempt to make money of something so much bigger than a one day spending spree, so is the life of the woman involved with the mafia in Naples. But even in the darkest corners one can find something which appears to be an empowerment movement among women:

‘The typical image of the Camorra woman is of a female who does nothing but echo the pain and will of her men – her brothers, husbands, and sons. But it’s not like that. The transformation of the Camorra in recent years has also meant a metamorphosis of the woman’s role, which has gone from that of a maternal figure and helper in times of misfortune to a serious manager who concerns herself almost exclusively with the business and financial ends of things, delegating the fighting and illegal trafficking to others.’ (p. 141)

A feminist liberation movement based on free market ideals, blood and a lack of taste. Those of you who haven’t read Gomorrah really should. Tomorrow I’ll explain what happened yesterday when a Dutch presenter asked Rafael Nadal: What the hell happened?!

So I’m going to Rotterdam, where the boats are bigger and the houses taller than in old school Amsterdam. Some people don’t like it, others do. I’m going for tennis, for Rafael Nadal against Dimtrov and for the French basketball player look alike Tsonga against Tursunov. The ABN AMRO tennis tournament is going on this week and since my flatmate is something of a tennis freak (even though I beat him in a nerve wrecking tennis match on the hard asphalt courts of Westerpark this fall) we decided to go. So we are getting on a train to head south, where the concrete has more rust, and where the tennis balls fly a little faster. A Thursday adventure into the ATP tour in tennis, I’ll bring my camera to take some poorly focused pictures of balls flying around, and other tennis related activities, come back tomorrow and you’ll see the results. If your not going to a tennis tournament, I suggest you go here and download the Friendly Fires remix of the Lykke Li song I'm Goon I'm Gone. It's pretty amazing.

You might remember the poster containing a rooster on fire dressed in a Priest outfit, hanging over my bed, I told you about before. On another wall in my little room I have a poster where an old picture of George Washington is half covered by an image of a transvestite(?). You can see it in this post. I bought it at the very nice De Jong Museum in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. I’m not sure why I enjoy it so much, maybe it’s the black underwear, or the great ideas one gets if imagining George Washington as a transvestite. Here you can see all of Deborah Oropallo’s pictures in this series, mine is the one titled ’George’. There is also a great one of Napoleon, he had good calf muscles. This blog is a certified Oropallo fan.

It’s raining and snowing outside. The weather can’t make up its mind so it’s awkwardly in between, sleet they call it. I’m reading Dagens Nyheter about why people blog: The conclusion is that we are obsessed with reality, with ‘based on a real story’, but also because we living in a monologue society where people write more but discuss and listen less. This is nothing new and the author, Gertrud Hellbrand, fails to make a contribution (except trying to interpret blogs about everyday life as a feminist uprising since 80 percent of the diary bloggers are women. This must be the most toothless uprising in history!) when she clumsily finish the article my stating that ‘one sits down at the compute. Taking things in once own hand.’ (oh, what a revolutionary move! I will write about my dinner and add some photos!) I am contemplating going out in the sleet instead. There’s made up activism movements on a culture section in Sweden and ambivalent weather in Amsterdam. I’ll take a coffee on that.

Friday evening and I’m sitting with four newly showered floorball players in a car on the way from Amersfoort to Amsterdam. I like going between cities in the Netherlands during daytime cause it gives me the chance to see some cows. I tell this to the floorball men who are fogging the windows in the car. They laugh, no one tells me their favorite animal. Maybe they don’t have favorite animals? When I lived in Malaysia I spent a lot of time thinking about favorite animals. And now it’s Monday and I went to yoga for the first time ever and stepped out in the world a bit confused with all the movement. I put on King of Convenience in my mp3 player and biked to Albert Hein to get some food. But when I got there I forgot what I was suppose to buy, so I stood in the isle to try and figure it out, starring at some asian wook sauces. Then I went home and read in the Swedish authors Bodil Malmsten’s book ‘Hör bara hur ditt hjärta bultar i mig’ (Just hear how your heart is pounding in mine, if I try and translate the title) where she writes (once again my translation):

Only the dumbest think thats it exclusively glamorous to break up from a country you have been living in for 50 years and settle down in another culture.

I’m currently working (well, I was working on it but the development has not been that impressive lately) on a short story called And You People Just Live On Rails. It’s about an office man that meets a crazy guy with a microphone on Union Square in San Francisco. The office man has an interior decorator. So far, this is how I describe this character:

Your cell phone started to vibrate in your left pocket, a reminder of the outside world. You picked it up
‘Hey man, how’s my boy doing?’, and energetic voice on the other side of the line said.
‘Hey, good, I’m good,’ you respond distantly as you take a careful step into the real world when you realized that it’s your interior decorator; a narcissistic gym rat with free flowing brown hair and a fetish for minimalistic steel furniture designed in Denmark. When he fucks his blond assistant; a UCLA-student in love with the Parisian subway, Wes Anderson movie soundtracks and black Starbuck coffee, he fantasize about a 1964 limited edition arm chair from a carpenter in the Danish city of Helsingör. These were things he freely shared during their scattered phone calls, as if his detachment from the physical act of sex was a statement of post modern grandeur. Still, for all his obtrusiveness and his somewhat deranged interest in sharing sexual experiences, you liked him because he managed to be so removed from everyday expectations.

Last spring I formed a DJ-collective called Hypotetisk Fuck your brother sound system. Well, it only consisted of me, so a collective might have been pushing it. The first gig we (I) got was at a music festival at my old University in Sweden. I had spent several nights putting together a play list that would make people dance, smile and love during the extremely shitty time slot that I was given. I was visiting friends in Amsterdam at the time, and flew home, missing Queens Day, to play at the festival. When I land in Stockholm I call my friend who I will stay with. He tells me the festival is canceled due to slow ticket sales. Hypotetisk Fuck your brother soundsystem took this hard and without playing one single show the DJ-collective that would take the world with a storm dispersed into several displaced catacombs.

Now, almost a year later, it is time for me to DJ again. After being headhunted on Facebook I will play some music in a student corridor to what I assume will be a bunch of drunk internationals with questionable music taste. Save The Red Light is the even more questionable title of the party, the address is Weesperstraat 9. The Airportline will be spinning from around 11.30 and onwards for an hour or so, dancing included.

I’m currently working my way trough the 2007 Pulitzer Price winning novel ‘The Brief And Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao’ by Junot Díaz. It is an amazing book from a very unique writer who combine Puerto Rican ghetto slang with urban American life in New York. On the cover the Observer is quoted as saying: ‘Writing like this good comes along if we we’re lucky once or twice in a generation’. I don’t know if I am THAT impressed, but I really like this honest and creative story about a no ass getting nerd in Brooklyn. Díaz writing is both funny and poignant, often in a combination that makes you happy and sad at the same time. It's like a The Cure song, If The Cure would be funny and from Puerto Rico. An example:

‘And he even got – joys of joys! – the opportunity to meet the famous Manny, which was about as fun as being called a fag during school assembly (which had happened). (Twice).’

Or this, a few pages later when he realize that college maybe wouldn’t be all that he hoped for.

‘Before he even realized what had happened he had buried himself in what amounted to be the college version of what he had majored in throughout high school: getting no ass.’

Airportline suggest that you all go out and get this book.

Today I was awakened by the news that I got the lowest grade in the class on a take home exam I struggled with after returning to the city after Christmas. Well, the news didn’t awake me per se, but I woke up, turned on the computer and the grade was punched in my face when I looked on Blackboard. I’ve never really cared about grades, maybe since they most of the times turned out as expected, if I was happy with something I did, so would the teacher be. Now things have changed. No longer do the staff appreciate my exams and papers in the same way. Something has happened, “And don’t say I have changed, cause man, of course I have” to quote Of Montreal in their song Cato As A Pun. Perhaps my floorballing, short story writing, random weekday drinking, concert watching, magazine reading, blogposting, Chelsea game watching, Economist reading, raising eating lifestyle is finally affecting my academic performance. Or maybe I am becoming less intelligent? A balance I previously mastered now puts me on the bottom of the list in a class which I did not really care about, but still worked a fair amount on. A sad day for the airportline dynasty. And what is left is me and a brown plastic cow a friend bought me. It is lying on the floor, sleeping, as if he had never gotten a grade which he was not happy with.

I’m over consuming raisins. I wonder if it might give me any long term side effects. If there is some unknown version of cancer which attacks if you consume over 200 raisins a day? I remember when there was a call from a grant-needing research center in Sweden claiming that you could get cancer if you ate chips that had been burned. The consumption of chips in Sweden dived after this worrying information, and football fans all over the country had to sit with their beer and eat peanuts instead. Some people called it ‘the great depression’. After some time, after the research centre made sure it had gotten financing to look further into the matter, it was concluded that someone would have to eat several kilos of burned potatoes chips to get cancer. All chips lovers could go back to their nutritious habit. And out there, in the dark woods of Sweden a man in love with burned chips is weeping as he realizes what he has done. But I keep consuming raisins since no research center with a cash flow problem has told me not to.

Between the 24th of February and 1st of March The Noise Pop festival is hosting shows in San Francisco. The Airport Line has picked out some bands which you might want to see in case you happen to be in the city during these days.

Ra Ra Riot - Made one of the best cds of last year, popmusic in the same vain as The Shins, Cut Copy and New Pornographers, very nice indeed.
http://www.myspace.com/rarariot
For a free download of the remix of their song Ghost Under Rocks made by Passion Pit, go here:
http://stereogum.com/archives/mp3/new-ra-ra-riot-ghost-under-rocks-passion-pit-remix_048181.html

St. Vincent - Arty singer with a very unique style, a bit similar to Regina Spektor with a mean guitarr, her song Marry Me is really sweet, an artist for people looking for creative female role models. Some of her stuff is a bit too much out there for my taste, but I am but a conservative Swede.
http://www.myspace.com/stvincent

French Kicks - Their album Swimming is a bit weirdly produced, but the song Love In The Ruins is fantastic with it's Jens Lekman banjo and melancolic dreamy feeling.
http://www.myspace.com/frenchkicks

Antony And The Johnsons - Seems a bit expensive, but given that he has maybe the most unique and powerful voices in modern pop history, it might be a concert to look into. A truly unique artist that some people hate, some call pretentious, but most people love, and probably cry to when they are alone.
http://www.myspace.com/antonyandthejohnsons
Here he plays his most famous song Hope There's Someone:

On a KLM-flight from Helsinki to Amsterdam. The humming sound from the engine is quietly constant as shattered clouds slowly pass under us. Kofi Annan writes an opinion piece in the International Herald Tribune. He argues that it is the developing countries, chiefly in Africa, that are 'under threat' from the financial crisis. They cannot be forgotten, he writes as he also dive into global warming and the weak international effort during the Palestine conflict. Later in the paper Ban Ki-moon, the current UN secretary general, echoes this message as he claims that 'now more than ever the world's poor need your help'. Gordon Brown is more into number, of course, illustrating the problem by arguing that 'lending to emerging countries was dropping to $150 billion next year from $1 trillion two years ago.' I take a final sip of my coffee from my olive green KLM-paper cup and look out of the window. From here the world looks like a peacefull and calm place as we head south with two humming engines. 1,2 kilometers up in the air, over comforting clouds.

Kofi Annan http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/30/opinion/edannan.php
Gordon Brown and Ban Ki-Moon: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2009/01/30/news/Davos-Forum.php