I'm back in the news again, diving through texts about the EU-elections. There are people trying to get horse riders to vote, political parties that does not know how to tackle the pirate party, and commissioners who write tedious debate articles which have been translated into the most bureaucratic Swedish since Gustav Vasa (this is just to check if Flo Mo reads this). I am living in a parrarell time zone, it is not the last day of August here, it is just before June. Summer has just started and in one article Thomas Di Leva, maybe the most famous Swedish space/hippie/male wearer of dresses/fruit deliverer at concerts/cosmic pothead around, says that you have to take care of democracy like a garden, to nurture and take care of. I thought that was beautiful.
I lived in a circus wagon in the countryside 5 kilometers from Germany, I biked through the wind and rain in Amsterdam and printed my thesis without my name on it, I rented a car and drove west listening to Whitest Boy Alive, I drove the same car east with Lykke Li in the cd player, and I held flowers in a graduation ceremony and had cool white wine and met someone who knew my name from seeing my picture on facebook, and I biked through rain again, and walked in the wind and picked someone up at a train-station and left someone at a train-station and I listen to Stars - Your-Ex Lover Is Dead while biking. I ate Turkish food so late that almost everyone else had left. There was no time and all of the time at the same time. Now its Sunday and yeah, it is Sunday and today there will be less movement.
Things are breaking. My headset, my right big toe, my bike, my jeans pocket, my cell phone and somewhere in this destruction of personal possessions I am drinking coffee. Cup after cup, I am afraid to ask if it is due to my thesis or lack of sleep. Had to go and get more coffee, walk out on the streets, by my new canal, past the Romanian accordion player outside Aldi and then into Aldi. I end up buying 12 hamburgers and eight muffins. When I walked back I wondered, why? Then the zipper on my jacket broke and things were back to normal.
This is for those of you who speak Swedish. An amazing live performance by old school bad boy rapper (yes, Sweden does have some, and this is the original!) Ken Ring singing about his big sister getting breast cancer. He has tears coming down his eyes but it's like he doesn't even notice. Dagens Nyheters hip hop dude Calle Fleur asks if this might have been the most beautiful performance in Swedish television? I don't think so, but I don't know when I heard such a devastatingly honesty song last time. Most of the times there is no use for people to learn Swedish. This is not one of those times.
The distance between me and my blog. It is not because I am out in the sunshine, it is not because I am in a jungle and lack an internet connection. The boring answer is that I have been working, all through the week, and the weekend. And I hear that I am boring, that I should be out, among the commotion and the people. And friends are drinking like Vikings in Sweden, or dancing and getting drunk in the east and I didn't move at all during the whole weekend. So while I continue with my activities which kills creative minds, you can go and listen to new Moshi Moshi band, über trendy (and quite nice) NYC-band The Drums, or you can watch this great video of Italian master film maker Roberto Benigini vinning an Oscar and becoming exactly as happy and confused and and the same time well spoken as can be. Or why not listen to the wonderful Swedish band Isolation Years and the title track to their album Cover The Distance. If you also feel distant.
One of the musical heroes in my world comes from Norway and has curly red hair. He made his name with another, less curly and red haired Norwegian, as the duo Kings Of Convenience in 2001. Erlend Öye now resides in Berlin, where he sometimes plays hipster funk with some Germans under the name The Whitest Boy Alive. They are amazing. But, it will always be for Kings Of Convenience that he will get his acclaim, and rightly so. After two amazing albums of hazy summery, Simon and Garfunkel sounding dreamy singer/songwriter pop the two Norwegians are lining up another album in October. One of the songs from that is called Mrs Cold, and it sounds just like you want it to sound. Like a summer setting on a warm evening the duo tip toe with their guitars over sand castles, lovers kissing and a few careful string swing by as well. Fantastic.
Amsterdam is many things. This is what I have always said. It is not the truth, but it is what I say. Bill O'Reilly says his own thing, has his own idea.
And then we have another view, a somewhat more positive:
What is the truth, you ask? Well, the only truth is yours. So go and get one.
Today I know nothing about anything. The world was outside and I assume that it was moving as any other day. But I did not participate. I sat inside and I am sure something happened outside. But it was not for me. I read news but non were from today. But I am very up to date with events occurring at the end of May, especially regarding the EU election. Some kind of Pirate Party was causing headlines in my home country apparently. I pretend that my work is like crack, but a friend with as little crack experience as myself suggests that bad posture and pain in shoulders are not the most common effects of crack smoking. But what do I know? I am not here. I am here. Not participating.
No one is trying to sue me for crashing into a car anymore. There are still stupid people in the world, they are just not trying to get money from me. Right now. I write fast but I listen to slow music. Spiritualized does not rush, instead they sound like they are standing in the middle of a late summer haze on the American west coast. It so sound heavy and light at the same time, and I am not sure that is what I am looking for in music but right now it feels pretty good. I've been running, through documents, through cities, through my mind and here on the other side the sun is shining and the summer I declared being over exactly two weeks ago is still here. I just never paid attention to it. But it stayed, throwing sunbeams at me, trying to get me out to a park. But I said no. But on Wednesday it is suppose to be 28 degrees. Then me and summer will hang out again. Like old friends that passed each other by to many times without giving each other time.
Its Sunday but no one is resting. People are out, I was out, biking through the crowds. With music loud in my ears. Going past yellow bikes, past red ones, past the boutiques on Negen Straatjes where the yuppies sip their coffee. I pass them all by, I am going to the library, to the fifth floor, to a chair. I sit with my computer, read, edit, my document turns red, turns confusing, I move, shift location. I read and sometimes I like it, get proud, and then I get angry, wounder what I was thinking. Wounder what I was meaning. How can I not understand my own arguments? My thesis period is nearing its end and my head is filled with interviews, with theoretical ideas that needs connection. I am trying to pull a red thread through it all, make it coherent, tight, understandable, relevant. I bike back and keep writing, and some Dutch idiot is trying to sue me for crashing into his car and a lawyer is sending letters to Sweden and I wounder, where did all the idiots come from? Then I put on Sebastien Tellier and take a deep: Breath. Sunday, and resting is further away than my heart.
When I was in Copenhagen I felt that I had to write to Bodil Malmsten. She is a Swedish author and I eat her books like they are chocolate. So I wrote an email to someone in charge of her webpage and asked if she could forward it to her. How to find Bodil’s email I could never understand. What I wrote I can’t remember either, it was morning and I was confused and just wrote. And pushed send. It had to do with how amazing I think she is, although I of course phrased it much better than that. It is good to tell people that are good that they are good. To not take them for granted. On the internet there is a culture of finding problems and complaining. There is nothing inherently wrong in that. But sometimes people seem to forget to mention the good stuff, the nice things, all that beauty that you stumble across. Because I do hope you stumble across beauty at times. Anyway, recently Bodil thanked all the nice comments she got for the radio program she did in Swedish radio this past weekend. All the nice bloggers. She wrote it under the heading ‘Tack’ (Thank you in Swedish). She also thanked that no one got back to her and told her that she would burn in the everlasting fire and die slowly for something she said.
Yesterday evening. Training game in the Hague with Amsterdam Agents. I play great, two assists and one goal and not on the field on any of the five goals we let in. Game finishes 5-5. Return to Amsterdam with Johan the race car driver who floors his company car through the lights on the highway. We fly under Schiphol and the Surinam Airways Boeing 747 is as always parked next to the highway. Things feel good. But you can't have the good without the sour, so during the evening I am attacked by mosquitoes while trying to sleep and have to go up and eat at three in the morning. Wake up confused around ten with my legs hurting from the floorball game. Go out to get a plug to fix internet, get the plug but loose a chord. Go out again to get a new chord, it starts to rain, my legs hurt, no one has the chord I need. I bike longer, in the rain, haven't had breakfast yet. Get the chord from a disgustingly happy and social Dutch man, bike back in rain and wind. Eat breakfast while not getting the internet to work. Cancel lunch with friends cause my legs hurt too much. Overdose on chocolate muffins and coffee instead. Read Jonas Hassem Khemiri. Feel a bit better. Then realize I should write on my thesis, and work. Feel a bit less better.
'I need a crowd of people, but I cant face them day to day'. Words of Neil Young, an artist I've never liked. I've been loud with my dislike of Neil Young. Just because it made people angry, made people go into long rants about how fabulous he is, how important for history he is, how it is impossible to like My Morning Jacket without liking Neil Young. All the roads led to Neil Young and my friends were paving it with gold. I laughed at them, told them history has no place in my heart of music (gold?). History is the past and the only thing that matters is now. And just now, when I sit in front of my computer in a oversized t-shirt and underwear, trying to write fiction that does not want to be written, he comes to me, with his voice and his guitar which aches with the knowledge, with the weight of lost love. And he sings about leaving, 'get out of town', cause 'the world is turning' and that is when Neil Young becomes relevant now. On the beach. The song I needed to end my crusade against Neil Young.
There have been many things I've been meaning to write here. Interesting things I've read during the weekend, that football game with Chelsea yesterday, Fareed's interview with Hillary Clinton on CNN, but since I don’t have internet at home I forget. Or I remember, but forget how to write interesting about it or how I would phrase it. I get thoughts and then they leave and if I don't write them down, they are gone. They don't even need wind. So I end up sitting in a computer lab where student fingers slowly hammer down on plastic keys while a poorly functioning AC is humming above us. This is not a place for inspiration, not a place for thoughts not included in my thesis. Soon internet will arrive in my home, or so we hope. But until then, I guess you will have to make due with uninspiring question marks and thoughts manufactured in a plastic brightly lit environment with an oxygen deficiency. Oh life, it is but a flower.
There is no internet in my home. That is what I blame it on. I am suppose to be productive, write words, not in this space, but in another space. I call it 'thesis' and it is slowly building itself up to a pile of, many words. Some of them misspelled. Some of them wrong. And in the middle of all these words ideas and thoughts will spur. This is the idea. So that is what I have been doing. And yesterday, in the open air cinema festival Pluk De Nacht, I saw Autumn Ball, a movie that was so nordic and so dark and funny at the same time. It hurt watching it cause even if it is based in Estonia, there is a lot of Sweden in it. The director Veiko Õunpuu has combined the harshness of Ingmar Bergman with the almost bizzare atmosphere of Roy Andersson and made a portray of the north that made my stomach hurt. Fantastic. And the acting and photography? Forget about it! World class.
Summer is over and it is here. Warm and sunny, blowing past the canals in Amsterdam. I am back again, I've been back many times now. I leave and I come back, and that is how I live, have been living. Am living. I'm eating Skolekridt, licorice candy that I bought at Copenhagen Airport for my last Danish money. I eat them without stopping, a constant flow of candy entering my mouth, like a chain smoker who makes love with a cigarette. I make love to licorice candy that look like small chalk board pens. I was gonna offer some to my friends that are helping me move today. But there is one hour left and only five pens. They're southerners anyway, what do they know about licorice?
Everybody is returning to work, someone in Stockholm writes. Summer is over and here in Copenhagen the sky fell down on me yesterday. I walked under my umbrella which I bought in Berlin when summer was beginning. Now it's over and the umbrella was falling down over me like a black plastic bag who's given up on life. I went to the Black Diamond Library (see picture) to study. Everybody is going to work in Stockholm but no one was going to the Black Diamond. Except for some tourists is cheap khaki pants and functional footwear. It was one of those days where the rain falls and then never stops, just keeps going, like the rush hour traffic back into Stockholm after the holidays. A slow moving gray mass of dreams about yesterday, when summer was still here, when the curving roads towards working life was still only something far away. But then you stand there, with the sky around you, and some illdressed tourists lining up to buy expensive coffee.
There was a gay parade in Copenhagen yesterday. Gay in that is was happy, but it was about Pride. A parade for Pride. A parade with gay, and some not that gay, people. I was one that was not that gay, but I walked there, next to a male Canadian water polo team with tiny swimming trunks and weird hats on their heads. I wore shorts and a t-shirt. Possibly the least pimped out person around. There we walked, side by side, waving rainbow colored flags given to us by some store eager to make money. Someone is always making money. Proud people can also spend. This was my third Pride parade in three years. I go places and they appear, with drugged up dancers, proud corporations, on boats, by foot or on pimped out trucks. Proud people, both in and outside the parade. 2007 in San Francisco, 2008 in Amsterdam, 2009 in Copenhagen, each time I surprise myself by how moved I get by these parades. Surprised that pride can be so beautiful, no matter where it is.
