Month: October 2006

karlstad & back

i blow donkey at keeping in touch with old friends. take albrecht for example: i’ve known him for twenty years and if we ever meet these days it’s cause he’s coming around. ok, fair enough, i’m way more broke than he is, but still. it leaves me with a tad bit of a guilty conscience.

the other week he got his doctorate (doctors hat?) in physics, or rather quantum mechanics, or rather in string theory, or rather, a two dimentional analysys of string theory? seriously, for two hours i sat giggling at the examination – these people use scientific theorems as adjectives fer crying out loud. i understood the language, i understood the seperate words, but i could not under any circumstance (except when they talked semantics) understand what they were talking about.

in short, it was awesome to watch and i’m way impressed by whatever-the-hell ali has been doing these past years. in my head, it’s rewarding to know that there are so many things still to learn, and that there’s no chance in hell i’ll ever learn even a smidgen of that.

my ambition has always been to know a little about a lot of things,i don’t know if ambition is the correct term. maybe predisposition or, well, symptoms of attention deficit disorder. but not to spend more than a month or two researching it . in contrast, ali has been doing this non-stop (as i recall it) since high-school. i was thrilled.

after two hours (ok, two hours was the upper limit of even my chuckling) i left the university and plodded around town for a bit. my date had fucked off on a train, leaving me with a crushed heart, so i proceded to the dinner thingy ali had gotten together. 20-odd people were at the bar/restaurant and to compensate for my mood i used what little i know of physics and made chatty with the people from alis’ university.

once you don’t live close to each other, it’s an odd sensation when you meet your old friends’ new friends. they have a different take on the person you think you know so well, and it’s disconcerning. on the other hand, they were all nice people and i ended up talking politics, radical activism and medical implantations until the bar closed. plopped down on a couch at alis and his girlfriends house (which was more tempting than my original plan of wandering the streets for six hours, wallowing in hate and self-pity and maybe getting into a fight) and was frightened the night through by their two cats that played “tag” on me.

next day: bought a ticket, went to the library and read up on futurist photography, saw a jenny holtz exhibition, sat on a train, then got slightly drunk in the company of friends. all in all, an enlightening trip.




Richard Morgan lecture

I’m not sure if I’ve gotten the whole embed-thing working, but below you should be able to watch the lecture Richard Morgan gave at this years (2006) bookfair in Gothenburg, Sweden. It’s approximately 45 minutes in lenght.

update: of course i screwed up the movie.
due to some caching issues it slowed the blog downturning it into a bog! nhja-nhja-nhja!, so i’ve removed the embedded video. the download link below still works though, and i’m currently setting the video up on revver (better quality than youtube, i hope). check back in a day or so.

update again: here’s the revver video. somehow i don’t have full confidence for revver – either they have a lot of traffic right now, or they only hang around the windowsxp crowd. either way, here’s the embeded video:

download it by right-clicking on it:
Richard_Morgan_BBM_2006.mov [210 mb]

His first book 7-11° Celsius was recently translated into Swedish, and I wrote a review (in Swedish) that’s appearing on Yelah.net, the anarchist magazine on whos behalf I was covering the bookfair.

pain and suffering, pain and suffering

i went to a concert yesterday, and thanks to alcohol and other circumstance i had a total and apeshit diatribe against the band that was playing, and i was venting like a maniac for a good twenty minutes before someone gave me enough beer to shut me the hell up for a while.

from wikipedia.org:
In psychology, psychological projection (or projection bias) is a defence mechanism in which one attributes (“projects”) to others, one’s own unacceptable or unwanted thoughts or/and emotions. Projection reduces anxiety by allowing the expression of the unwanted subconscious impulses/desires without letting the ego recognize them.

psychology is awesome.

the music itself was good. i like noise music (although i did overdo it ever so slightly shouting “i have hundreds of noise albums and listen to them all the time!”) and apart from playing too loud (it’s the quality of the decibels that matter, not the quantity) i liked it. it’s the pretentiousnes that i have a problem with – just because you have spasms while hammering the same three buttons on the keyboard doesn’t mean you’re doing anything else but hammering the same three buttons on the keyboard. i like it, just don’t make a fucking art-show performance out of it. and if you have a gaffa-tape cristian cross taped on your tshirt over your nipples and walk out into the audience holding a taperecorder up to my ear to let me savour the monotone coming out of it, this is not something that will be looked at benevolently. such behaviour, in fact, deserves a clip over the ear.

so the remixed plan for today (i had ambitions for this sunday. i like sundays) is:

1) hold my head in my hands and occasionaly moaning gently and manly.
2) ponder other circumstance and selfdestructive behaviour in general.
3) play computer games or watch teewee – can’t focus enough to read.
4) stuff my face with food.
5) not going to the gym.
6) coming up for a good plan as to what i’m going to do on my last year of art school. i’m on the final stretch of getting my MFA, and i need to sort my shit out. i started the day by trying to read up on leibniz die monadie, but needless to say it’s no use today.