Tag: memories

The trauma, the betrayal, the realisation

I remember a trip our family took to Kraków when I was a young teenager: I sat for a portrait that turned out really poor, not looking the least like I but still being kept by my mom in a rolled up bunch somewhere, along with all other precious 2D-artwork any parent amasses. I also remember that I wanted one of those okarinas which were warbling so magically all over the place, and I got to pick whom to buy from.

I picked a seller pretty much on random — I valued warbling over personality — but still remember that the one I’d picked looked a bit on the natty side once I got close. My parents, lord bless their polite ambition to be non-judgemental, bought the bird-shaped ocarina from the young man with the bad teeth, red eyes and yesterdays cracking clown makeup, but even before I had the chance to pour some water into it and make noise — which probably would have been awesome, since I’d gotten the same okarina that the man had used — my mom took it away from me, making vague comments about perhaps buying one from someone else, which she did, discretely tossing the first one into a bin. I thought my parents were silly and stuck up, but as both instruments looked alike I didn’t care much.

But the event stuck with me, and I was reminded of it again this evening when we were sitting at one of the less reputable pubs in Majorna with Tura, and one of the barflies took a shine to her and wanted to join our table. Being generally tired, and weary of having to cushion the ramblings of a boisterous drunk in the company of a seven-year old, we declined the offer and she shambled away.

Unless the other party has been extremely annoying or otherwise deserving of your scorn, you tend to feel bourgeois and uptight at such moments, or at least I tend do, but Tura became upset because the situation was confusing, and we’d just been impolite to a stranger who wanted to sit down with us and was talkative.

Of course, Tura would entertain the company of Satan if she thought he’d give her attention (kids being lazy megalomaniacs) but even so our rejection of the very noisy but enthusiastic woman must have sent mixed signals about how to deal with people. Some people whom we interact with, and who interact with us, can’t help but to be assholes, confusing or inconsiderate, and we teach kids tolerance, understanding, acceptance and the importance of giving the benefit of a doubt. Others are just annoying — and we don’t think about that we’ll have to explain our dismissive as well as our tolerant behaviour, least we cause confusion.

Jakob Hellman, Foajébaren, Göteborg

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Regardless of how bland and uninspiring you find something — be it music, art, food, whatever — there will be some people for whom it was a defining moment of their lives. For example, Jakob Hellman had some hits twenty years ago and is still fondly remembered for his one and only album. He performed yesterday at the city theatre, and Sara got us on the guest list. The cover charge for this low key evening was 250 kronor, which is 200 more than I would have considered paying, but judging from the 200 odd people in attendance others aren’t as cheap as I.

Hearing a song live which you’ve been singing in the shower for a couple of years can be great fun, and there’s something to be said about seeing the original artist perform it. But I’m not sure if Hellman managed to rekindle the memories of youthful naïveté in his audience, or if he just piddled on the embers.

Here be flat country

The other week, I travelled with Sara to Copenhagen for a couple days, and boy is that city annoying when you don’t have a bike. I mean, the distances! The flattyness! The being-run-over-by-bikeiness! Other than that it’s rather pleasant, although the allure of moving there for a bit has diminished over the last couple of times I’ve been there, for some reason.

We stayed with photographer and all-round interesting person Kajsa Gullberg, which was terribly nice of her. Waking up to the smell of newly baked cinnamon buns was awesome, and would have been even more awesome if they’d been vegan; it was the pastry equivalent of cock-teasing. I did get to try oatmeal made with ginger though, which was really good.

I was a bit miffed when I couldn’t get vegan cake even in Christiania, bastion of alternative lifestyles that it is, when both Kajsa and Sara were stuffing their faces with banankage. The baker, probably knowing pretty well the tastes of his largely baked crowd, said he didn’t do vegan cakes “cause they’re crap” and I was this close to whipping out my phone and go all like Instructables Chocolate Cake, bitch! but thought better of it since the muscle-relaxed people behind me seemed rather eager to eat cake nom nom nom.

The city subway is all automatic, allowing you to sit in front and watch the tracks whizz by. Très cool. As an added bonus, any picture you take while in motion will come out as a wormhole tunnel / space anus combination, which looks fascinating.

Almost ten years ago I visited Gothenburg to cover the demonstrations against the EU ministers meeting. On the heels of that, in the fall of the same year, I visited Copenhagen during a workshop with Tone O Nielsen, this time as a participant in demonstrations and walks through the city. I didn’t pay attention to where I was at the time, my retention of street names being piss-poor at the best of times, but when we crossed a bridge and Kajsa mentioned that the building just across the wall was a prison, I realised that this was the place where I had marched with the black bloc, trying to push past the police to get to the people detained the previous night.

The push was half-hearted, and except the attempts at breaking up the demo by the police and their constant harassment, I remember freezing. The walk wasn’t all that long, but we were snaking our way through the city for the better part of four hours, and it was awfully cold. Once we reached Nørreport — iirc — there was collective release of pent up tension, and I felt exalted and happy. It’d odd how much you are affected by something as intangible as the collected stress and resolve of the people around you.

Thanks for the memories and storage.

It’s odd what will make you sad.

Between 1998 and 2004 I ran Hotline and KDX servers, dedicated to political material and whatever else I fancied. In a time when online storage was expensive and legally risky, running a small server with files on your home computer felt safe, and if you managed it well you got to know people who would log on to your computer regularly and chat for a bit. I still have chat-logs of conversations ranging from trite bullshit to discussions on abortion and propaganda…

What sets places like a KDX server apart from cloud-hosted communities (Facebook, MySpace, Betapet) is that you actually feel like you’re at someone’s place when you log in. When I was running the Tiny Socialist Server I had a rule that you had to greet everyone who was logged on before downloading anything; It’s common courtesy to at least say “hi” when entering a house, even if all you want to do is to sit on the couch, so I started to kick people out if they logged on and downloaded stuff without greeting the other users. Anarchism requires you to have some fucking manners.

The other day I needed to transfer 7 GB of video so I brought the KDX server back from retirement.

While I was at it, I decided to find an old KDX hangout on which I knew some people, the Documentary Archives. This server was a giant in its time, with scores of users, many of whom I considered some sort of friend. My old bookmarks didn’t work, so I logged into another server — one of the few remaining — to ask if anyone knew where I could find DA or what had happened to it. The response I got was:

[netfreak] I’ve heard of that place but never was on it

I felt both excited and depressed at the same time. Excited because something which I had been a part of now was considered “history” by the newcomers, and depressed because I missed the place; I’ll never find the fragmented, reformatted, erased or mothballed harddrive sectors I remember hanging out at.

Is this how people felt when FidoNet servers started to drop out in favour of WWW, or when their favourite MUD/MUSH shut down? Considering the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours I put in to make my server run smoothly, chatting with people from all over the world, and nesting in general, I feel a personal sense of betrayal that there isn’t even a Wikipedia page dedicated to KDX, to say nothing of the Documentary Archives, only a mention in the Hotline article.

For a time I nourished the idea that I should be logged in somewhere at all times. By running my own server, I could be online and present at a place where others could see me, and often I would log in to servers or join an IRC channel just to be somewhere while I slept. Even though you are not conscious of your surroundings when you sleep, you still exist; And it felt important to think of myself as existing online, not only to me, but as a proof of the possibilities that the net embodied.

This wasn’t about being connected 24/7, but rather an acknowledgement of that you belong at one place at a time — that even if you’re jumping across continents from server to server, your attention is still mediated through a sense of place; Running servers and visiting others’ servers helped me establish who I was — and still am — online.

The feeling of sadness and loss is pure nostalgia though; Today, my presence online isn’t defined by a logged in piece of software, but rather though the ubiquitous connectivity afforded me by my cellphone — alas, the nerd I has merged with the physical me, and we’re once again meat and fat wrapped in a sack of skin, only with a smartphone stuck to the side of the head.