The Airportline: Observations

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