I got stuck in rain a million times, every time I unlocked my bike this weekend it started pouring. Like someone upstairs was sitting, patiently and with great determination, and let all hell loose just when I got going. There was no end to the poring, I tried to move in the night but the weather kept me at bay. Plans were scrapped and in the middle of it all my phone batteries gave up on me. Fall is here and it is wearing its usual mix of aggressive storms and horizontal rain fall. There is no need for surprise or anger really, we all knew it would come, and all we need to do is dress accordingly and not get upset about it. But of course we do get upset, cause we are emotional people, and all rationality in the world does not help when your head is covered by cold rain and your wet jeans grasp your thighs.
In all this weather that worked full time against me I, and the rest of Amsterdam Agents, managed to destroy Amersfoort's floorball team (7-1) in front of a very energetic home crowd. I got send off for roughing and was responsible for the only goal we let in but otherwise I had a good game as a defender. Today I watched another trumping, when Chelsea went to Arsenal and showed who's boss in London and the Premier League. Drogba was magnificent, with two fantastic goals, and Mikel, Essien and the whole back four were perfect throughout the game. Former Arsenal left back Ashley Cole was behind two of the goals and was accordingly booed when he was substituted. Ah how nice it is to win away against a hostile crowd. That goes both in the Premier League and in the 1st Division of the Dutch Floorball League.
Here is a song that has this airy jazzy feel and combines it with 60s polka-dots cuteness that confidently flows through the sun cats it paints on the walls in your heart when you listen to it.
Thanksgiving is here but this is Europe so very few people care about this. This does not mean that it is a bad time to be thankful, so today I will try and think about the good things: about friends I have dotted around the world, who send me emails, text messages, who calls me from thunderstorms in Singapore, who write messages on cards, who comment on this blog, who give me space on couches and drive me in their cars, who make mix cds with music I send them, who buy me sushi, who give their time to my strange projects, and tell me that I am good when I question myself. It is a beautiful thing and now is as good as any day to give it up for you. I hope you think that I give something back, I hope that you occasionally take something from the music I send you, from the the short stories with spelling mistakes I give you, from my ears that listen to you concerns, and from the scribbles on this blog. We all fly different directions but hopefully we rub of each other, hopefully we make each other better people, give each other greater perspectives, and that, my friends, is something that I am very thankful for.
Where are your friends tonight? If I could see all my friends tonight
Listening to Most Def's 2009 album The Ecstatic and I am surprised how good it is, Mos Def hasn't really delivered anything noteworthy in book book in a while now. Airportline welcomes him back to the rap scene with open arms after a first listen to this album in my newly isolated room. The beat on Twilite Speedball is one of the best I've heard this year and those of you that counted out The Neptunes can take a break now.
This is the third part of the Airportline founder and CEO answers random questions from a questionnaire that he has adapted from a Swedish blog and answered three weeks ago
Do you rather receive emails or letters? There is something very nice with hand written letters, but since I receive more letters than I send I do feel a bit guilty about this. My mom send me letters with cows sometimes, I like that. But the message is more important than the medium.
Do you believe in love at first sight? Yes, although it is a matter of definition because the love you feel at first sight is very different from the love you feel after getting to know someone. But they are both beautiful feelings and I believe in them both.
Have you puked in public? Yes, in a friends lap on a bus in Karlstad. To my defence I told him I really needed to get of, but he assumed that I didn’t know what I was talking about. Never assume.
Are you satisfied with your life? Yes, I am living it the only way I know how. Even though I lack some things which I might perhaps would have liked to have at this stage there are many positives in all the uncertainty I walk around in.
Are you spoiled? I used to complain that I wasn’t but considering the people I've met and the places I've had the possibility to visit I think the only acceptable answer would be yes. Then again, I have no bed or money. But that is of course (partly) my own making.
What do you do tomorrow? What I do everyday, do some work, do some writing, maybe meet a friend, make some food, do some reading. Listen to some music. I find amazing reward in some of these activities.
What is the worst thing you know? People who only think of themselves. People who are not uninterested to meet new people or learn new things, people who complain that their life is boring but refuse to change even if they can, people who don’t know what they are talking about but still feel like they need to have an opinion, people who question art from a economic point of view, old ignorant people who claim that my generation is lazy and not willing to work hard, teenagers listening to bad commercial hip hop with their phone-speakers on busses and trains.
How much money do you waste during a week? Depends on how you define waste, since I have very little money I feel that most of it goes to things I really value.
What celebrity do you think is a good role model? Joyce Carol Oates
This is the second part of the questionnaire I answered about two weeks ago.
Do you own a pair of Converse? I did buy a bootleg pair in Bangkok at one point but I believe they broke. I need more comfort than Converese can bring my feed anyway.
Do you usually get too drunk? It happens, this I will not deny. I tend to blame the company I am in and my national origin.
Are you allergic to anything: Yes, cats, dust, kiwi (not sure anymore), lack of sleep.
Have you had sex today: No
Next goal in your life: Finish the book project that I have been working on for 1,5 years. And get a permanent job, of course.
How do you answer in your cell phone? ‘Yeah its Patrik.’ I don’t know why, and I do not think it sounds especially nice, but that is what I say. When one of my Italian contacts call I occasionally say ‘pronto’. And when someone in my family calls I sometime answer ‘Tjänsteutveckling I Karlstad AB’ which is the old name for my dad’s company.
Who did you last call? A person who will participate in a study I am conducting
What did the person you last spoke to say? No problem, I can help you with this.
Numbers of hours you slept last night? 8.
Did you sleep alone? Yes
Are you usually on time? Yes. It is indescribably frustrating because no one else (or very few) I know is.
When do you feel good? When I am in the sauna, when I have showered after working out, when I like what I write, when I read something I like, just after I have booked a trip I look forward to, after, during and before sex, when I have conversations that are good, when I hear a song for the first time and have to listen to it five times in a row.
When were you photographed last? A few weeks ago while working, I looked focused.
How do you feel right now? Tired, shoulders hurt, ears are warm and a headache is looming, but I’ve become totally consumed with answering these questions so can’t stop now.
Most common colour of your clothes? Blue
What do you think about feet? I have no problems with them. I don’t love them either. But they are good to have, in case you want to run, or walk.
What do you lack? Money, a plan, a bed, a comfortable office chair.
Did you have a good night last night? Not really, I had floorball practice and I was awful. Had to throw my stick in the wall at some point to release all the anger I had built up.
Favourite thing to drink in the morning? Tea or orange juice
Do you shave your legs? No
When do you usually go to bed? Between twelve and one.
Are you shy? No
Do you do any sports? Yes, I am quite the sporty character. I play floorball, jog, bike, snowboard and cross country ski. The latter two very sporadically since I live in a country without snow or mountains.
This blog says nothing about my life. It is a bit cryptic and I think that was the plan. I think that is what I wanted. But, as a road to the person behind the words I will present a three legged series of posts that might shed some light on the individual that hides behind these words. Inspired by a questionnaire in one of the Swedish blogs I read I have made an Airportline version of it. So those of you that will be near a computer with an internet connection this weekend can follow this as it evolves. Here is part one, about sad songs and nicknames. Please note that the answers are about two weeks old. Can't let you get too close.
Nickname: I’m not a fan of nicknames, except the one I created about a year ago: Dr. Mike Freedom. Calling it a nick name might be strong, its more of an alter ego, but it was a nice alter ego. Some of the nick names I’ve had include: Edvard, patte, hypotetisk and Patrix (a nickname me and two other Patrik shared, yes, it was around the time of the first Matrix movie). Lately P Diddy has been suggested and I’m sure there are many more but which I have repressed to a dark corner of my memory.
Songs that you mourn with when you are sad? Have You Forgotten / Song For A Blue Guitar – Red House Painters, Ryan Adams – Call Me On Your Way Back Home (see video above), Aimee Mann – Wise Up, Bright Eyes – Lua, The National – About Today, Hets! – Du Är Också Dum, Håkan Hellström – Nu Kan Du Få Mig Så Lätt, Coldplay – Fix You, Frida Hyvönen – N.Y. and yeah, I have tons of great songs to be sad together with.
What do people think of you? I think people have an ambivalent view of me. I think some people find me serious, driven and ambitious. Generally I think people struggle to pinpoint me but I hope most people find me kind, caring, unselfish and quite funny. This idea might be as far from the truth as the ‘serious, driven, ambitious’ idea. Maybe people describe me as calm; this is probably one of the defining things about me. This all goes out the window after a few beers though as I tend to be one of the most intense drunk persons that people have met.
Is this correct? I think there is some truth to all these things, I enjoy being serious and not so serious. And I am a calm person.
What do you most often receive compliments for? I think it is that I am funny, and that I have good taste in music. I respect both those opinions of course. Although it is worrying that the funny compliments often are highly correlated with alcohol consumption. I guess it is the curse of the Nordic man.
What do you tell people that you try to impress? I make jokes about myself. Works surprisingly well since the world is full of self congratulatory motherfuckers. Yeah, I said it. I also enjoy showcasing my knowledge and interest in rap music since people find this highly unlikely based on my appearance.
How does one impress you? By winning an argument. It might sound strange but I enjoy people that ague with me and win. Otherwise I am impressed by people that have qualities that I do not posses; for example, I am very impressed with people who have a good memory. I’m also impressed with people that have taken a chance and failed and who stand by it. The least impressive people are those that never risk anything.
Do you laugh on your own? Yes, when I watch the Daily Show, when I read something online and watch youtube.
What does your last incoming text message say?: I forgot my phone so can’t check, but it might have been regarding a police stake out in out apartment from my flatmate.
Where do you live? In de Baarsjes in Amsterdam, apparently right by a major drug trafficking operation
It is a bit difficult to pin-point exactly what it is that is happening when Bradford Cox, member of Deerhunter and the headmaster of his soloproject Atlas Sound, team up with Banda Bear's Noah Lennox in this song from the album Logos. Being two of the most inventive musicians in the indie world it might not come as a giant surprise that this song is characterized by loose dreamy edges, but I was pleasantly surprised by the fantastic sun in the eye pop that jump out in this song. Walkabout sounds like the natural connection with the popier side of Animal Collective and the 'I want to dance all night feel' of those MGMT hits no one ever stops listening to. You can go and dream now.
A few months ago, or maybe more, I saw an interview with the Israeli writer Amos Oz. He stroke me as being brilliant, his understanding of the world, the way he reasoned about life and his striking life which he usually began with a walk in the desert at five in the morning followed by very focused writing. I've never read anything by him and soon forgot that I was suppose to, until this weekend, when browsing the amazingly stuffed shelves in Dublin's The Secret Book And Record Store. There, among pages and pages turned by unknown people, I found 'Black Box'. 4 Euros later I greeted Dublin's Sunday sun with a paper bag containing that very book. Now I am reading it simultaneously with Ulf Lundell's Swedish coming of age novel Jack and some coffee. So far they are both amazing, with Amos Oz employing a practical and focused tone that feels almost judicial but somehow also very passionate. And then Lundell, with his airy and often hilarious spoken language and conversations combined with his philosophical and poignant metaphors that paints a Swedish summer landscape with endless beauty. Two books I highly recommend after reading about 100 pages in each.
The CEO and founder of Airportline Inc. wanted to leave the internet and the world which was attached to it. 'My whole world is online!', he screamed one day in an empty café while finishing his third chai latté to the sound of his now upset stomach. He was a man in despair, so attached to his computer screen that his eyes could no longer focus on anything not digital. Even in the middle of the night while he was sleepwalking he found himself next to his laptop, hunching as if is was a cup of rice and he was a poor child in some African war zone.
His computer had become his altar, the tool which his life was lived through. 'This has to stop' he continued in the empty cafe, with only a black cat who was hunting mice acknowledging this somewhat unusual event. He rushed out from the cafe, out into the street where people lived without a computer in front of their eyes. They all looked depressed as they were pacing down the street in the spiky rain that fell. Like Forest Gump he began running through small town and villages where old men were reading newspapers. 'Why aren't you reading them for free online!' he yelled at them. Unfortunately for him they found the latest football scores more interesting than listening to a running CEO of a non-profit blog.
He kept on going although the worlds ears seemed deaf. Like a Duracell rabbit escaping the laptop which tormented him he cut thought the countryside like a knife cutting through a Christmas ham until he finally made it to the ocean. In a great salute to this man's quest the ocean bowed and drew itself back, showing its red carpet. Which happened to be brown and muddy. There he stood, with the wind blowing through every hole in his second hand jacked and starred out into the distance. A man finally free from his computer.
After a few minutes he returned to his everyday life and wrote a blog post about it. Unclear about the effect of his Forest Gump running he opened up an old newspaper which he had stolen from an old man which he passed by and read that the sea bows for anyone who walks there at the right time. This information pissed him off.
I know you're expecting words here, in this space, in this blog. Me too, I expect that they should just come out and put them self in order, make sentences that makes sense to you. Sentences that you can bring with you when you leave your computer and go out in that other world. That is why you come here, maybe. That is why I come here. I come here to read my own words. Sometimes they frustrate me, sometimes they anger me, sometimes they are misspelled or grammatically wrong.
In my head there is no grammar that is wrong, there are no spelling mistakes. Where do they come from? In that space between my mind and my fingers, why do they appear? I do not know and maybe that is the conflict that everyone that writes anything always have to struggle with, the words in your mind versus the words that you write. It would be convenient if my fingers that hammer these keys were completely controlled by my mind, it would even be something I would expect. But that cannot be true cause sometimes things come across as so much better in my head than on paper, or on a computer screen. Something is lost and I do not know where it is going.
Todays story and music tip is Melody Gardot. She got run over by a car, was advised to use music as a way to get back, and is now a ridiculously successful jazz singer. Read this and listen to this and you will see the beauty of life.
'I know its just the season' The Dodos sing in their song The Season from their somewhat disappointing 2009 sophomore album Visiter. There is no denying that the season is fall at this moment. The dark clouds hang over Amsterdam like overweight fruit just waiting to fall down on us and our bikes. I check my weather radar before I leave my house, time the small gaps without rain. In yesterdays the Daily Show Serena Williams sat with her powerful arms and claimed that she didn't know any 'child friendly dances'. I only know child friendly dances, maybe that is why Serena is sitting in a studio with John Stewart and I am sitting in a University library next to an abundance of Mac nerds and dress shoes wearing 21 year olds. I know its just the seasons. But it does not make it less real.
I know it's just the season I sense no time or reason The sky falls down; it's evening The feeling goes; it's leaving
From the slowly progressing short story Love in the ruins:
'This is like that Pedro The Lion song Bad Diary Days,' he told her as she handed him his coffee. 'You know, when he sings: the breakfast cereal talked more than we did all day long'. He suddenly felt a wave of hopelessness coming over him. Who is going to pour the exact right amount of milk into my coffee, he wondered as he blew on the steam that was slowly rising from his cup. She disregarded his music quote and the symbolism he found in it. 'So do you have any plans for the weekend.' she asked him in an attempt to not make the situation worse than it already was. She came across sounding like a business associate that just came out of the last meeting before the weekend, not really interested in the answer. 'I don't know,' he said, both to the question she asked and to the question he asked himself: How did we end up like this?
Sometimes I've been surprised, and even annoyed, at some women and what I have interpreted as an obsession with regards to their own appearance. The constant looking in the mirror always made me think that these people are a bit too vain for their own good. However, after reading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being recently, I found a passage that made me revise my opinion and realize that there might be a deeper quest to this, at first seemingly superficial, behavior. Kundera writes:
It was not vanity that drew her to the mirror; it was amazement at seeing her own `I`. She forgot she was looking at the instrument panel of her body mechanisms; she thought she saw her soul shining through the features of her face. (p. 38)
This is an interesting idea that might force me to reevaluate my disdain for all the fashion bloggers that showcase seemly selfobessed photos of spoiled teenage girls and their 'style of the day'. Maybe they are just looking at their own soul and trying to figure things out. Do I really have the right to ridicule that? Or is it an attempt to glorify and intellectualize a vain approach to life? I guess that is up to each one to decide for themselves.
What is a good memory you have involving 30 Field Music? I saw them at Paradiso in early 2007. I had a fever and felt high while I stood there with my head in the clouds and loved every minute of their quirky and ridiculously creative pop music. Field Music always felt like a band that wanted to have three songs in one. Some people probably found this frustrating. I however, loved it from the start. After the concert I went home and passed out, that might have been more due to the fever than their brilliance, but still. Its sad that they not longer exist, but nice that they became The Week That Was (who's song The Airportline gave this blog its name). Field Music is possibly one of the most underrated post millennium pop bands around.
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 seventh post in this series.
What is your favorite song by 10 (Billy The Vision & The Dancers)? I don't listen to this Swedish pop orchestra much anymore, but Nobel Square from their quirky titled album 'I was so unpopular in school and now they're giving me this beautiful bicycle' is still a great song for a summer afternoon when you want a positive perspective on things, and a chorus with some nananana.
Its Friday and the week that just started ended, or will end, at some point, in time. Time moves at the same speed as it always does. I move with it, or past it. I have no concept of time, this is something I've returned to often during the past couple of years. The fact that I have lost the feel for time, a concert a week ago can feel like it was a year ago and the smell from someone in my bed can feel like yesterday. But the clock on the wall (If I would have one) just keeps onticking , relentless in it's chronic movements into the unknown. Or the time is known, but what we fill it with is not.
As chronic as the time, so is the Swedish mentality towards Marijuana. When deciding to move to Amsterdam I was confronted with more Marijuana jokes per capita than anyone should encounter during a life time. Many Swedish people believe that the only thing the Dutch do is play beautiful football without winning any tournaments, and getting stoned. Thus, I was very pleased to see this article in the NRC International. There it was conclused that the Dutch does not smoke as much weed as my Nordic country men assume. They even smoke less than the EU average. Turns out that pizza baking Italy leads the chart before day sleeping Spain and hockey hair cut Czech Republic. Ah, how we in the editorial board of Airportline loves when national stereotypes crumble. With that said I will go and buy one kilo of hair gel, cause that is what we do here in the Netherlands.
I traveled north and south yesterday. North through the brown Swedish landscape and then south over the thick clouds. I fell asleep leaning on the train window as small Swedish towns passed me by. They stood still as if they wanted to hold time. I was in Sweden for a week. But it felt like a year. Or an hour. I told someone.
I left the light snowflakes behind at Stockholm Central and a few hours later I was walking from Amsterdam Lelylaan station towards my home in a thunder storm. I think we all struggle a bit when fall comes and steals all that energy that we recklessly threw around us this past summer. But the melancholia that seems forever built into the gray clouds, the cold rain, and the wind that blow through our clothes also evoke creativity. Two days ago you met Friday Hyvönen by a piano, today you meet Jens Lekman with a guitar. He is another amazing storyteller from Sweden who sings a heartwarming song about a love affair in the cold Swedish winter.
There was darkness and rain between Stockholm and Karlstad. I bought a sandwich with egg and we came home and I sat in the sauna before I found an old Joyce Carol Oates book. I walked by a lake and met friends. I got vaccinated and was given an expensive pen which I will write expensive words with. I took a train south, and a drunk teenage couple almost stopped the train while they were smoking at a stop, and Göteborg is where I laid my head yesterday and it is dark and gray and wet today. Tomorrow I go north and then south and when I lay down my head in the evening it will be in Amsterdam again. Right now I am in a sofa listening to Frida Hyvönen and I think that you should do the same.
