quote

i want this george orwell quote on a t-shirt.

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

90s fantastic

as you may have noticed, i've started a new blog next to this one. it's called 90s geeks - surviving in the future, and it's a music and culture blog. sergio jumped on the train and is also contributing material, which is awesome. please check it out. and if you feel you've got something to contribute, let me know and i'll let you get on board. thanks!

when i grow up

i hope you've seen i put a save bitch banner up to the left, but in case you use a feeder and never actually see my pretty little display of fun info and links, here's one more, just for you! (it almost fits too!)



i read bitch magazine as often as i can get my hands on it, which is not always cos they don't sell it in too many places here (pressbyrån centralen!) and i'm not as organized as i may seem (ahem), but i do love it. so i support it! cos the thing is, they have problems with funding and we all know what it's like in the world of publication; small, narrow magazines get put out of business while big, "broad" magazines thrive. this is why all magazines are the same.

don't tell me you haven't noticed.

so i'm putting my 5 cents in. buy the magazine, or give them a few bucks, ok? thanks!

now.

for something equally important. you know what i got in the mail today? this!



juliana hatfield's brand new memoir! it's called when i grow up and it's pretty! here, see for your self! [här på adlibris.se] now, i'm off to read it. see you when i'm done! (look! it's in the ny times.)

shining on

today's mail included the highly anticipated package from ye olde records containing juliana hatfield's new album plus a poster and a limited edition demos cd. i couldn't be happier!

the album how to walk away, the second to be released on her own label and officially released 19 august, is sweet, much softer than her latest (made in china, that i wrote about here). the songs feel familiar and mature. it sounds like she's shed a lot of the anger she's expressed in earlier recordings. after two listens i've fallen for the opening track the fact remains and the beautiful remember november.

also recently, it was brought to my attention that juliana's putting out a book. her memoir when i grow up is set to be released in september, and, according to amazon.com it

takes readers behind the scenes of rock life as Hatfield recounts her best and worst days, the origins of her songs, the source of her woes, and her quest to find a new purpose in life. Writing with the same talent for lyricism and poetry found in her songs, Hatfield has produced an engaging literary memoir that will resonate with anyone who's lost faith in a dream.

as you can imagine, i can hardly wait.

also, here's the in my room spread she did in spin magazine recently.

the france post

ok, so france was nice. and by nice i mean warm, still, relaxing and a whole lot of non-s; non-home, non-stress, non-.. well, you get the picture.

i've uploaded a bunch of the photos i took onto my flickr page if you want graphics.

we didn't really do much. we were mostly just hanging out. we did visit the city of narbonne one day and had a look at their 700 year old cathedral, which was no match for st peter's in rome, but still pretty awesome, and older. for that matter, there isn't much on this planet that IS a match for st peter's - it's fucking huge! that would be the pyramids in egypt or something in their league. i'm so not religious, but there's something really awesome about cathedrals that i can't help but be pulled into totally. i saw st peter's 3 years ago and i still haven't quite grasped its awesomeness - and by awesome i mean the original meaning of the word, not the hot dog.

i read a lot, since i wasn't interrupted by the gizmos of the modern world. i especially loved two of the novels i read, this book will save your life by a.m. homes, and garnethill by denise mina. two very different novels but oh so good. read them!

the former takes you to the world of richard novac, a retired stock market person (what the fuck do i know about that?), who finds himself being cut off of the world in his fancy los angeles house only seeing his housekeeper, his personal trainer and dietist, and he's in pain, excruciating pain. was it there before and he didn't notice or did it just come? he can't tell, he doesn't know, but he feels an enormous urge to connect. so he does, in his own way. the novel is full of odd characters and a lot of warmth, but also harsh reality, though seen through richard's eyes. homes' use of language is captivating in a simple way and her characters, though odd, feels very real. i really loved this one.

the latter is actually a crime novel, oddly enough, cos generally i don't care for crime novels, but garnethill i found extraordinary. for once the protagonist isn't a middle aged alcoholic divorcee ex-cop man, but a young woman with a strike of bad luck. and it is gender aware!

maureen's an incest "surviver" with a fucked-up family; dad gone, mom alcoholic and in denial about the abuse, brother a drug-dealer, one sister pretending they're a happy family and one sister escaped to london. she's also been a patient at a psychiatric hospital a couple of years back. taking place in glasgow, scotland (which, i guess, is part of its appeal to me since i've been there) it starts with maureen, one morning after coming home late drunk and passing out the night before, finding her married therapist boyfriend dead in her livingroom with his throat cut. the police seems interested in pinning it on her and.. damn, i'm really bad at making whodunnit-stories sound interesting. here's what someone else has written;

Viewed in turn by the police as a suspect and as an uncooperative, unstable witness, Maureen is even suspected by her alcoholic mother and self-serving sisters of being involved. Worse than that, the police won't tell her anything about Douglas's death.
Panic-stricken and feeling betrayed by friends and family, Maureen begins to doubt her own version of events. She retraces Douglas's desperate last days and picks up a horrifying trail of rape, deception...and suppressed scandal at a local psychiatric hospital where she had been an inmate. But the patients won't talk and the staff are afraid, and when a second brutalized corpse is discovered, Maureen realises that unless she gets to the killer first, her life is in danger.

ok, so you really have to read these ones. promise!

ok, so i really have to sleep now.

anniversary

i didn't realize, but thanks to sergio for pointing it out; today is the one year anniversary of this blog! yay! for the coming year i want more inspiration and more comments. there. you can all congratulate me now.

as for myself, i'm off to wrap the gifts for my sister who i'll be celebrating tomorrow on her 25th birthday.

it's a mystery how i seem to be something less than myself

juliana's not been lazy with her posts on myspace about her songs.

12. daniel (off of beautiful creature)
13. little pieces (off of become what you are)
14. outsider (off of only everything)

if there's still any of you who has yet to discover the sheer greatness of juliana hatfield, rest assured that i will never give up trying to get you hooked. i'll just keep on nagging about her, so you might as well do it and get it over with right now. there are songs over at her myspace (those she's written about, or at least a few of them), or why not see some of the 90-licious videos?

daddy

inspired by the fine people over at pretending to be japanese (my new internet-crush) who argues about who's dad is the coolest, i felt an urge to post a tribute to my dad. since my memory still occasionally works and recycling is the shit, i pulled up an old piece i wrote about him two years ago. it's a bit sentimental, and if it doesn't make you see how cool he is, this might: his record collection is still bigger than mine (and i'm really trying here!). among his favorite bands/artists are the doors, the who, the beatles, rollings stones, the moody blues, bryan ferry/roxy music and elton john.

originally written in april 2006 and posted on my old blog. slightly revised.

when it comes to listening to music, i've always had my dad to look up to and be inspired by. i went through his record collection often as a kid, and while i was still young enough to not know better, anything that looked or sounded, shall we say, age appropriate, was the pick of the day.

i used to listen to his 60's collections. status quo. my dad loved status quo - he told me over and over about seeing them live back in the day. i listened to beatles. rolling stones. i know every roxy music cover still. although dad's love for bryan ferry never rubbed off on me, he still tries.

though the biggest moment i remember is when i realized he had rocket to russia. he must have had it since it came out but i'd never paid much attention to it before (after all, in the late 80's, four guys with ridiculously tight jeans and an american 70's punk attitude didn't do it for this pre-teen girl). it must have been around 7th grade, cos i'd just started listening to nirvana and guns n' roses. i had a friend who loved the ramones, so imagine the coolness of finding this record. (when i moved out many years later i brought it with me. the only thing i've ever really stolen from my parents.)

i learned to appreciate the doors through my dad's headphones. he had all the albums. his favorite one is the soft parade. my favorite one was waiting for the sun (although i think i'd go or strange days nowadays). i noticed once when looking through his old photo album from his youth, that he used to have a drawing of a man, in a uniform, without a face, on his wall in his parent's house, that said the unknown soldier.

he's told me stories about listening to radio luxemburg, that played rock n roll on the air, the thrill of it, just like the stories you hear in movies about those magic years. back then he played guitar in his parent's basement when he was in high school, he had long hair and wore jeans to school even though he studied to be an engineer (think late 60's small town sweden, nice haircuts and suits!), he didn't care what people thought of him and he liked awesome music.

when in my most pretentious teenage years and early twenties, i wondered why, with such good taste in music, he listened to elton john. cos elton john for me has always been 80's elton john and piano ballads elton john. until a few years ago. cos being exposed to early 70's elton john through movies like almost famous and elizabethtown i must admit that i'm hooked. i guess i should thank mr crowe for it.

i was the first person in my class and among my friends to have a cd-player in my house. i can still find records in my dad's collection that i didn't know he had. that way it's easier to accept that he grew out of the style, that he nowadays looks like any other 50+ guy; perhaps a bit younger, a bit more groomed and a bit more handsome. cos he still, of course, listens to awesome music.

and he still doesn't care what people think of him. it runs in the family.

sun anyone?

i'm not feeling too funky, so no real interest in writing anything. except maybe that i've become cynical and even more sarcastic since watching a season and a half of house md. for the last week or two. and that this time of year is the worst for teachers. especially the ones that grade. who wants summer vacation?!

juliana has updated with two more songs

10. fleur de lys
11. hole in the sky

bad day

a new blog post from lovely juliana today! this time about one of my favorite song of her's, so i'll only leave you with this link here so i can get to it myself. enjoy!

9. bad day

you are the camera

my forever favorite musician juliana hatfield is blogging on her myspace page. i hope you know about this already, but if you didn't, she's blogging about her songs; what they mean and what she think about them now and this and that. it's interesting! and, i suppose, a way to get to know her a little better. so go read it!

for convenience, this is what she's posted about so far:

1. the introduction piece
2. you are the camera
3. make it home
4. simplicity is beautiful
5. mabel
6. sunshine
7. hotels
8. choose drugs
   

now i'm off to read the last one myself. enjoy!

calamity physics

i take it you've all heard the expression that goes something like "if you're gonna read one book this year, let it be this one". (my memory is a bit fuzzy here i admit.)

well. that book should be special topics in calamity physics (2006) by marisha pessl.

i just finished reading it and i can honestly say i've never read anything like it. it may not be the best book i've ever read, but it's certainly one of the most special books i've ever read. it had me at the first couple of pages and i just had to have more, right till the end. the characters and the plot - but also the language, her fantastic use of it - has been in my head 24-7 for the week it took to get through the 515 pages and i have no doubts as to them staying there a bit longer. i'm not quite ready to write a review yet, i'm still in a phase where i just want to throw adjectives at it. like fascinating. interesting. thrilling. heart-breaking. devouring. beautiful.

you get the idea. i'll try to gather my thoughts soon enough. here's some kind of official site i haven't quite figured out yet, and here's what some others thought of it.

on blogging

if i had a faq (which i obviously don't) the first question on it would ultimately be why i blog; to which i have no real answer. but! to question number two, i do! i thought i would share that with you. so;

2.
q: why do you blog in english, when you're a native swedish speaking person?

a: there are really two reasons to why i blog in english. the first is that since i have friends outside of sweden who doesn't speak swedish it's easier to just do it in english, cos everybody speaks english.

the second reason goes a few years back. when i started studying english at the university (as part of my teaching education) i almost at once felt i had to practice my writing in english and figured blogging would be a good way to do that. so i started my old blog - which is now shut down for several reasons, one being the content of it was a whole lot more personal than this one and i really wouldn't want any of my pupils finding it - and maintained it for about two and a half years, about a year longer than i studied. in retrospect i think it was a good thing i did it cos it did help me with my writing. just writing essays and reviews and stuff we did in the different courses is hard when you're not used to using a language that way. granted, i've studied english all through school since i was 10 (like everybody else) and have been reading mainly english and american literature since i was about 18, but writing is different. or, at least to me it was.

during that time i guess i just got used to writing in english, cos once i'd shut the old blog down i felt i needed to create a new one. i've also found it convenient keeping a blog to entertain my language skills, cos being out of college and nearly only speaking english to 9th graders has a damaging effect on them.

brave old world

poll closed. here's making sure the world never forgets;

(as for the two of you who haven't read it yet. READ IT! there.)
1 vote for "it's brilliant!"
1 vote for "well, the plot is dull but the idea is awesome!"
1 vote for "he needs to work on his characters that huxley."
1 vote for "it's ok"

no one thought it sucked. thanks, readers.

adding to that, i actually found another old short review i wrote just after finishing reading this book. i don't think i've written any more, so this is the last. dated february 2006.

i finished reading huxley's brave new world and i must say i'm kind of disappointed. after all, it's supposed to be a classic. (if you haven't read the book, maybe you should stop reading this post now.)

while i think the background is really good; the descriptions of society, all the details, and the whole idea that's, imho, very thought-out; the actual story is un-interesting and the characters flat. it feels as if novel was the wrong form for huxley's ideas. first, the only interesting parts of the actual story is the societal descriptions and some of the long conversations between some of the characters. the rest is a series of un-interesting drama without much empathy and situations that are strained to produce dialogue; interesting for the most part, but weird. as for the characters i find them very rigid and stereotypical. the thinkers, and also most of the people in respected positions, are (obviously) men, and the women characters are, despite the accepted promiscuity in both genders, the "every one belongs to every one else" slogan and the lack of domestic situations, still made out to be more sensitive, stupider and more suppressed than the men, even in the civilized world. also all the interesting conversations were carried out by men. (why is it so common btw, in dystopias, that even though the writers create a new, different society, women are still suppressed? doesn't imagination cover women? even orwell, who i love, describe women in an objectifying way.) i don't care that it was written in the 30s or earlier; i have to ask more of an obviously talented thinker.

i can clearly see why this is an important book, but having said that it feels as if huxley didn't know how to present his really good idea so he made up a story and a few characters to carry it, and failed. unfortunately. i had high expectations on the novel, so maybe that's why i'm disappointed.

coffee break with patti smith, read it, it's beautiful.

note

it seems i've lost my voice. literary that is.

i'm a bit excited about finding out that OiNK is coming back.