Here is a short story I wrote about a year ago. It is unedited, so be aware of poor spelling. But, I like it. I hope you will too. If you do I hope you tell your friends. If you don't like it, you are free to leave your friends out of it.
Throwing a heart against the wall by Patrik Edvardsson
When he walked through his small town he made no impression - as if he seamlessly blended in with the brick houses – a moving reflection of the quietness surrounding him. He saw a girl on the other side of the street and suddenly he was carrying his heart in his hand. He tried to throw it towards her. A young man's fleeing heart moved silently across the street. The girl stumbled when she tried to dodged it. He threw it with the determination of an honest soul and it raced against her with great purpose, as if it suddenly had a goal with it's existence. It left a red mark in front of her as it crashed into the brick wall.
What are you doing? She asked with a quiet voice as the heart slowly made its way towards the pavement after its crash landing into the brick wall that belonged to the local super market. You can't throw your heart at me like I'm a slot machine that will spit out a price for you. I'm not ready for something like that!
They looked at each other in silence: one young man who released all his love across the street and one girl too afraid to catch it. He looked down towards the sidewalk, his thin brown hair covering his face down to his pointy nose. She stroke his hair so that she could see his eyes. She picked up his badly bruised heart that was lying on the sidewalk like a terrible accident had just happened. A terrible accident had just happened.
Here, she said.
Save this for someone that is ready for the love you have to give. I'm not that person, she said as she walked away, leaving the boy with his heart in his hand. He stared at the brick wall, there was nothing indicating that a young heart had just been thrown against it by mistake. He zipped up his jacked and walked across the small town: a gentle boy that had showcased his soul, who made an impression.
Girls were wounderful last night. Singer and Curt Cobain look a like Christopher Owens moved his way through his debut album, easily jumping from fuzzy Beach Boys sounds via sun drenched No Age punk and pulled of an amazing version of their breakthrough ballad Hellhole Ratrace. Someone in the audience told him 'your so dreamy' and Owens answered, 'your mom is dreamy'. It was all very cosy and the second guitarists hair was epic.
Then we sneaked in to see Patrick Wolf (picture) in the big hall. I'm still trying to process that event. But just let me say that if Patrick Wolf happens to come to a town near you, I think you should go. He has one of those voices that makes the hair on your arms stand up like they were soldiers in the army. He also professed his love for Amsterdam, being the gay icon that he is, and when he left the scene in a gold covered outfit after several costume changes and recklessly throwing himself and his songs through everything from epic balladry to industrial metal (!) I biked home feeling I just witnessed something very special.
Tonight I am back in Paradiso to witness The Tallest Man On Earth. Or Bob Dylan junior, as I like to call him.
Airportline is going to see what is one of the most talked about bands (apart from The XX of course) in indie circles tonight here in Amsterdam. Pitchfork gave their album, which is called 'album', a glowing review and shed some light on their remarkable background: Girls frontman Christopher Owens grew up in the Children of God cult. His older brother died as a baby because the cult didn't believe in medical attention. His dad left. He and his mother lived around the world, and the cult sometimes forced his mother to prostitute herself. As a teenager, Owens fled and lived as a Texas gutter-punk for a while. Then a local millionaire took Owens under his wing, and Owens moved to San Francisco. There, he and Chet "JR" White formed Girls, and recorded Album, their debut album, under the influence of just about every kind of pill they could find.
The new Jay-Z album has gotten quite humid reviews. I can't say cause I have not heard it yet. But, the songs I've heard so far are all great, and this one is such a fantastic New York Tribute. According to one of my media sources it is impossible to be in New York without hearing this song at the moment. I've never been more tempted to by a one way ticket to NYC. Saturday night love.
Oh, I played a part in defeating The Hague's floorball team today. First loss they have had in two years. We celebrated accordingly. By drinking highly masculine beers out in the Amsterdam sun.
How many albums by 13 (The Shins) do you own? All of them. Back in May I listened to Chutes Too Narrow (where this songs i taken from) again in a car going from Spreewald to Berlin while watching the clouds of a thunder storm in the distance. A wonderful pop album and James Mercer's lyrics never ceases to amaze me, rightfully seen as one of the best lyricists in modern pop music. The Shins are one of the most important band in the transition of indie music from something only The Smiths t-shirt wearing nerds with a hate for team sports listened to into everyone’s favorite music genre. The movie Garden State of course also had a major role to play in their coming to fame. I haven't listened a lot of this band during the past year but they sure know how to craft their pop numbers.
I feel a bit melancholic today. Not in the sad way, more in the in tune with your emotions kind of way. I have these days, when I read, see and listen to things and they all leave great impressions in me. Sometimes you are more receptive to art than other days. Today is one of those days. It is not ideal when i am suppose to group academic methods for a forthcoming article. But it can't be helped, so I am trying to multi-task as good as I can. But art always takes over, and even though I just went downstairs to get a Speculaas Torondo cookie (the girl selling it to me thought that I should be ashamed for not having tried it yet even though I've been in the Netherlands for so long) the focus which has served me so well throughout the week is nowhere to be found. That is why I give you my favorite Noah And The Whale song. They were here in Amsterdam this Monday but I was not.
What was the first song you ever heard by 22 (Bloc Party)? Banquet, I remember not liking it that much at first, maybe since the hype machine around the band was quite intense in Sweden. I grew to love it though, since it by all means will be a future classic as a symbol for that post punk trend that Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand among others kicked off around 2004. I saw them on a few occasions early in their career and they were always brilliant. Their new stuff is way to pompous for my taste however. I like my Bloc Party like this, minimalistic, dry, and desperately reaching for something. Reaching is better than have reached.
A few months ago I was encouraged to answer various questions concerning the 30 most listened to artists on my last.fm profile. During a feverish June evening I wrote more or less thoughtful answers to these questions which I amid to publish on Facebook at some point. That point never came, since I never do what I intend on doing. So, now I will make a new plan (which I most likely will fail to adhere to as well) and publish some of these short texts on airportline instead. With videos. Here is the first post in this new series which I will give the extremely boring and informational name: Last.fm top 30. For those of you who wants to be friends with airtportline on last.fm, just search for hypotetisk. Ok, lets go!
1. How did you get into 29 (Band Of Horses)? Found them on Myspace when I was working for my former Swedish University in the boring summer of 2004. I was calling new students to still their concerns with their forthcoming student life. I also had too much free coffee. I heard the song The Funeral (see above), put the phone down and listened to it five times in a row. Not kidding. Music does that to me sometimes, just stop things, movements. It made me feel alive again, even though I was trapped in an office of a feminist PhD researcher with an Almodovar DVD on the table.
Sometimes you sit at Dublin Airport, drinking your over priced African fair trade Starbucks coffee while reading a book review about the financial crisis. A friend sends you a text and tells you that he has an extra ticket to West Side Story the same evening in Amsterdam. When this happens you can either consult your red moleskin agenda which is filled with so called 'things to take care off' or you can say, fuck it, I never go to musicals, so why not. Needless to say, on this occasion Airportline choose alternative number 2.
We want to be loved; failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. Our soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.
Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Söderberg. Just finished it and if you need a book to read I can not see any reason that you would not run out and buy this very book right. Now.
And then he forced us to go the the Anne Franke house but we were all stoned. The Irish are famous for being story tellers and I will not debate that fact after hearing this inside the campus of Trinity College a few hours ago. Stories are shed all over the place, often in company with a creamy Guiness, just as expected. In celebration of the storyteller tradition I bought the collected plays of Samuel Beckett for too much money for a someone who has no money. Tomorrow Airportline returns to Amsterdam again where the coming days look packed with more or less difficult tasks. Its the first day of fall today so I guess I can now finally say that summer is over and not retract on that statement. Oh happy days.
You're like a book out of nowhere, being read all the time. It was the sound of Soundtrack of Our Lives, and I heard it on a Starbucks somwehere in Dublin. The sun managed to creep out of the clouds outside just about then. What does that exacly mean, a book out of nowehere being read all the time, I poundered while walking to a super market in Dublin's Dublin 4 area. Well behaved lawns and freshly cut tennis courts were resting in the setting sun and all seemed plesant. It is very plesant here in Dublin, people are plesantly drunk in the evening, talk plesantly when you ask where the night bus leaves (no one knows by the way) and the modern art museum is plesantly priced (free). I was gonna write something about all my balls of life being up in the air and that is why I have not have time to write. But I will not go into that analogy right now. I have a life to live and tomorrow it will take me to some kind of scenic lake. If the bus is on time that is, and so far, zero percent of the busses in this city has been on time. Hamburgers by the way. The whole city smells like hamburgers. Somewhat unsuspected.
My floorball team is occupied by hard working, beer drinking, money counting, bone cracking, men. As this year is getting started with some cup games this coming weekend (that I will miss since I am going to Dublin) it has been decided that we need to learn some tactics since some of last years game didn't really deliver on that point. So, enter the motivation why we should care and study tactics:
First- Please read the Playbook before Thursday training. Now all of our 17 players (except ***) have been told "live" some more tactics and I just thought to comment on it further.
See it like this: You are in a Bar and you see this beautiful girl...mmm. After a couple of beers (training) you dare to go up for a talk but unfortunately she is just about to leave so you have to improvise and be fast (pick it up fast and you will be awarded) so you ask if she does not want to meet for dinner/drinks/picknic (you figure it out) next afternoon. She says YES....at the date...after some nervous talks for an hour you go for the unexpected kiss....and YES she answers with a kiss back... 2 years later....you wake up with 2 kids, a dog, a volvo and you are so happy...
Summary: - Do not resist it, you will enjoy it so much when it all comes together and works well. :) - You will be awarded with some patience and hard work :)
Oh, yes, this is the reality of the floorball world. We are all simple minded, Volvo loving dog people. And, we use an abundance of smiley's in our mail correspondence.
I fell asleep four times today while reading. One time I accidentally painted on my white t-shirt with a blue ink pen. It was one of those Mondays where the energy level was just not charged enough after a hard weekend. I needed to get my bike fixed but my Portuguese bike guy with giant holes in his ears, chronically black fingers and a charming and unusual sincere love for bikes was not there. I biked around and did errands, the wind was going crazy and an equally crazy van guy almost ran me over in the intersection between Kinkerstraat and Bilderdijkstraat. I flipped him the finger and yelled in a poor attempt at making a gangster rapper interpretation in my stop light red American Apparel wind breaker. The van quickly drove off, if it was because he was fearing me I will never know. Then I put on Lil Wayne and kept riding low. As low as one can ride on a rusty lady bike with bags on the sides.
I ran out of time and into beer. I went with train to Brussels and back here, and I sat and watched people graduate, and I ran into beer. And I woke up and watched Will Farrel go into the wild with a crazy British SAS guy. I biked north and ran into more beer. One day I had hamburgers and fries for breakfast, and dinner. I sold my body to the devil and this Sunday it is payback time. You can only run on beer and unhealthy food for so long. I spend the money I don't have on printed paper, and yesterday I talked with a guy who works with communication for a big international company. I told him that I read The Economist. He said he thought the text was too small, and that is was too serious. I should have mentioned this small news from this weeks issue:
A Bolivian religious fanatic briefly hijacked a Mexican airliner, ordering it to circle Mexico city. He told the crew he had three accomplices, whom he later identified to the police as "the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost."
When time is present, take a closer look at Ottawa outfit The Acorn that The Concretes singer Lisa Millberg recently blogged about. After two listens to The Flood Pt. 1 you thought that it sounded like Fleet Foxes, Vampire Weekend and a sunset over Angola. And for those readers who felt offended by Fabolous raplyrics about dicks, you will love the all around playful hippie feel in this one.
Now I need to tape a head set, burn cds, read a report from China, have a skype meeting concerning a report from China, and then go and print some things.
US rapper Fabolous has released a theme album (Loco's Way) in the same fashion as Airportline house god Jay-Z did with his American Gangster. Fabulous is a great rapper and he shows it over and over on this album with clever rhymes that flow over dark beats. In the track Lullaby he raps 'Husstla lame niggas don't say a word, y'all don't know half, not even a third. Put a dick in your ear and fuck what you heard.'
Put a dick in your ear and fuck what you heard. That is just great creative writing.
You sit at home and work a little. You talk on the phone, make some toast, brew some coffee, burn your tongue on your coffee, you bike out and head north, for one minute. You sit in a sofa and watch Swedish players not score against Hungarian players. You see Zlatan score when time is up, how he falls down on the wet grass while the Hungarian audience who just minutes before were singing their hearts out walk out. They are quiet and green and you are loud and confused. You drink beer and wounder what happened. The beer gives you no clues. You bike back south for one minute, you change clothes, you run down the stairs out into the dark night. You wounder if Sweden really won that football game. An atm gives you 30 Euros but no receipt.
You bike again, small rain drops land on your hair, it does not matter. You stop in a Belgian bar and an Indian man is yelling at the bartender. 'He is my boss' he tells you. 'I just want a beer' you tell him while he hides behind your back. You meet people you know and talk about things that you now have forgotten, you have to go and get more people you know. You walk dark streets cause darkness is the only color of the night. More beer is arriving and people are moving places and you go to the bathroom. You take the girls toilet cause you see no difference. The light in the bar turns on and you walk out on the street and some Greek and Czech men are the group of people which you are one part of. No one knows where home is so we go to another bar. And beers are given to you and you drink them and new lights come on and the only thing to do is to bike home. And you walk up the stairs again and you drink water and eat rendang beef with rice and you watch the Daily Show. Then you fall asleep and when you wake up the first thing your head does is showing you the finger. Fuck you. He says and you go back to sleep.
You wake up again and now you sit and listen to Taken By Trees.
Rain is once again following us on the streets of Amsterdam. In the darkness of last night we cruised through the empty streets below the bright yellow street lights. Fall is here and Amsterdam is settling into it with the same ease as always. The facades of the old buildings look oddly well placed in the misty rain, as if they were waiting for it all summer and now can function again. With smaller tourist crowds and the stormy weather Amsterdam is back. For better and for worse this is what this city is about and even tonights football game between Hungary and Sweden won't impact that in any way.
I was gonna write that I am from a part in Sweden famous for its pine forest. How I never liked it and became happy this evening when I was reading Dr. Glas by Hjalmar Söderberg (one of the big classics in Swedish literature) and also Dr. Glas explains how he doesn't like pine trees. But, after visiting psl, and seeing two members of Magic Number discuss their third album and the collaboration with Valgeir Sigurðsson (who has produced Múm which I saw last week, and the more famous Sigur Ros) I finally stumbled upon this video. Yes, it is Hitlers reaction to the Oasis breakup. And yes, you can laugh now.
These are narcissistic times. Or so people say. It's all about 'me' and this trend is supposedly magnified by the existence of self-affirming communicative tools such as Facebook and Twitter where everything one person does is documented in various tedious updates. Fashion blogs are mushrooming left and right while people are taking pictures of themselves and putting online with 'today's outfit.' Whatever the reasons are, this 'trend' which several 'trendspotters' and 'columnists' have written about 'in the media' the last couple of years is always framed as something new. As if people in the past were unconcerned with the 'self' and only focused on, oh I don't know, gardening? In these narcissistic times it is comforting to know that this focus on the 'bodily self' (as Joyce Carol Oates puts it) is nothing new. In an entry dated November 20th, 1976 Joyce Carol Oates reads two psychology magazines and notes that: 'I came away fascinated by the emphasis placed now on the self, not the "self" in personality so much as in terms of the body. Narcissism: Giving people instructions in self-love, as if they really need it rather than instructions in the love of others/.../What does it matter if the world is disintegrating, if people are starving to death, so long as industrious young women with subscriptions to Ms. learn how to induce physical spasms in their bodies... and declare their gleeful independence of men. (The Journal Of Joyce Carol Oates 1973 - 1982 p. 149)
Narcissism and the independence of women. It's like 1976 never left!
