note to self:

* there is a good reason why you hate windows: there are no standards, no accountibillity, you get pushed between vendors who point the finger at the other one, your browser plugin might interefere with the copy-past function in a sound application that doesn’t install properly anyway.

* the main reason why you hate windows is because you don’t know how it works and it makes you feel like a stupid child.

* if you’ve lost the 9$ you had invested in online poker, the first impulse should not be to transfer more money unless you plan on learning from your mistakes and not go all-in with two pairs against an obvious flush. fuck.

in progress

i don’t want to sweat the poster too much. currently it’s six different variations along the same punky theme. i need to spice it up a bit, twist it a bit, and tweak it a bit, but i’m hoping to be more or less done tomorrow.

two colours + paper white works. less colours, less mess – i’m silkscreening this and the alignment is never perfect.

feedback is much appreciated. oh, and would you buy this for yourself or someone else? what price point? i could go the limited edition, signed prints way, or the hey, a cute & bitter & trashy poster way, and the price will change accordingly.

i’ve already spotted one spelling error, and i’m sure there are others. lemme know.

and going through my music library i found this: DJ nono / Fuck Happy

[audio:http://www.monocultured.com/audio/Happy_Happy_Joy_Joy.mp3]

cold. so cold. (#34)

winter arrived officially in gothenburg yesterday. it’s now really fucking cold™ and i should start wearing longjohns and a big thermo-coverall and not leave the house unless there’s a lifethreatening situation.

so. past couple of days using images:



uno) i’m fiddling with the layout of the “what i’ve learned…” poster, and might go for a more gender neutral title to allow both sexes to enjoy the bitterness.
dos) i woke up yesterday and this was the view outside the window
quarter) some sassy sources claim that my hair is now quite close in appearance to “brandon” in beverly hills.
zink) i drink a lot of coffee. too much to bother washing the cup in between refills days months, and this is how it looks sideways (for example, if you’re laying with your head on the desk while gently hyperventilating, this image is a fair representation).

i’m modelling later today. in two hours in fact. i’m getting slightly freaked. only ever so slightly.

Bastards & models

A stupid part of my brain agreed to do nude modelling this thursday. so i’m reading up on this whole pose thing. I found a good article about someone whose experience I might soon be sharing: Slinky-linky

Earlier today I tried to stand still for fifteen minutes. I got so focused on holding still that any tremors I had made me feel like an epileptic seizure victim.

More linky:
Swedish organisation for models: www.kyo.se

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This was fun. I actually smiled and chuckled and then got the wow, this was kool reaction. Control a bunch of lights in Stockholm by using your cellphone, and watch the change through a live video feed here. The project is called “colour by numbers” and isn’t all that original (CCC has done similar things as well as a ton of other groups) but it’s very well executed and you can see the results almost instantly.

I made it all red. Then all green. Then all blue, and finally mixed the blue and green. Ooooh – shiny.

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Here’s a good example of making me want something: nuance.com.
it’s a video demo of a speech recognition software, with a follow up “keep up with me by typing” challange. And just to mess with me, they used “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog…” – which is meant to use all the letters of the alphabet and is a bitch to type fast.

On a good day I get 80 wpm, but even though that’s quite ok for a non-professional, their demo really got me re-evaluating my skillz. Good for them, sucky for me. Too bad it’s a pc only app.

A week of friendship and statements

Past week:
Friends that are not on friendly terms which makes me feel like a child caught between divorcing parents again, one friend I’m slightly pissed off at, one woman who made my heart go ouch and one woman who might be un-ouching it, while other people have privacy issues with the blog, and I’m slowly but surely running out of money.

Seen in relative terms, I really have no cause for complaints. I’m even coming to grips with some sort of life artistique, in that I might be able to put together one of those hated artist statements.

Artist statement in short: The process is the interesting bit. Learning lockpicking and reading about the esthetic of hate and global social movements seen from a non-west point of view, and fixing our leaking faucet using wax instead of a bought plastic drainpipe.

On the project description of guiltyguiltyguilty.org I wrote that I’d like to be a superhero known as the facilitator, and the image has stuck in my mind. It’s not that I’m only passing on information or helping people find stuff, I like to scrutinize ideas and debate things and even though I often end up going for the lowest common denominator (e.g. ending up in existentialism territory, what with personal morals and relativity) I’m good. Seriously.

It’s not the facilitating itself that I’m into. It’s seeing my behaviour as a valid approach to art practice: It’s not the end product, it’s not the documentation or anything tangible (necessarly) that is the art, it’s the combination of seeking things out and manifesting the combination of those as new queries – occasionly producing a work of art, but not striving towards it.

Actually, this is the closest thing to an artist statement that I’ve gotten.

Of course I could write that i’m fascinated by all the things that make up human existence. But that’s just so lame and filler. There needs to be a boundry of my interests. How about I’m interested in people as a phenomena, but not interested in the people themselves. Is that good enough? That would mirror my approach to an artistic practice, even though it’s still somewhat fuzzy around the edges (and slightly sociapathic).

I’m working on a poster entitled “twenty things i’ve learned from women i’ve been together with in a more or less chronological order & in a horribly simplified fashion”. I’m thinking about going about this thing much the same way i did the relationship evaluation form a couple of years ago: I sat down with different friends at different times and jotted down their suggestions, ending up with a two page questionére.

Obviously, if I’m soliciting suggestions from others, then the whole biographical overtone might seem diluted. I’d argue that it’s more or less stilistic help – most people have had a couple of relationships, and been both the asshole and the one being assholed and all shades of shit in between, and I’m quite certain that barring extreme gender role experiences men and women have similar experiences.

So see this as an invitation to post comments with sentences or sentiments pertaining to what you’ve learned from relationships. Bitter, honest and funny are key words here.

As a sidenote, of course this project was born out of bitterness and an emotional trainwreck, but it’s flexing it’s legs and moving about on it’s own by now, and I’ll want to have this as a finished poster in two weeks time or so. I’m thinking like one of those cabare type posters: Different typefaces, all scribbly and crap, and some hand lettering and my horrendous drawings as well.

The above idea has an imposed time limit because I’d like to finish it before a sell-your-soul art fair in a couple of weeks. The second thing I’d like to do is to finally use those 9GB of xmas songs i downloaded last year. A one hour horrendous mix containing all the songs, running simultaniously but within different freaquency ranges. I did a small scale version of this a while back, and it’s just as nauseating as it sounds – nightmarish low AM-radio type ambient. Just the thing to set the correct christmas spirit, I’d say.

Jolly fuck. Just had another uplifting msn chat. MSN is turning into this goddam minefield. About the only person left in my 40-something list that I’m actually talking to is my dad. And that’s mostly business. I’m gonna bloody print all the chat-logs and use those as a diary. Maybe i should take a hint and fake my own death and start over: Too many things on my to-do list regarding people.

Fun with your body:
I think I’ve lost almost all the subcutanious fat on my legs. As a result, my legs look like they’re bending inwards. Hum. All pain, no gain?

I link, you blink!

Todays sentiments:

1) Yes, everyone and everything is against you.
2) Friends are few and far between.
3) You are born, you live, and you will die alone. Get used to it.

Findagrave.com: Find out where people are buried, both famous and not. There’s a spyware thingy that might try to install itself on your computer if you’re running windows and javascript (don’t know if it applies to all browsers) that’s emanating from errorsafe.com. Block any traffic to that site if you can, or just use the firefox browser with high security settings.
(version 2.0 of firefox is officially appearing tomorrow, so wait a few days before setting out – there are always some bugs. I just downloaded it for shit and giggles)

• In the usa, tax lawyers have started to patent different ways of managing your taxes. Not tax applications or forms, but the actual combination of tax deductions you can do. Awesome. If i lived there I’d patent a way of breathing. Imagine the money I’d be making!
International herald tribune article here.

Image A) If this is what your to-do list looks like, you might want to act on that.
Image B) If you buy another pack before the old one runs out, you might want to focus on your to-do list instead of smoking.

• Speaking of nothing in particular: Remember when North Korea was trying out their intercontinental ballistic missiles a while back and the western leaders had a fit? How the fuck is it possible for south korea to test an ICBM and I can’t even find it on google.com/news? C’mon people! we know NK is evil and there’s no love lost on Kim Jong II, but do you seriously have to be so obvious?

Money is the stuff, work is the pimp.

I should:

a) Be working on my quite interesting master thesis that will somehow include Leibniz monadologie.
b) Be doing at least one art-work a day.
c) Be happy to be alive.
d) Write that goddam grant application!
e) Throw a party?
f) Appreciate my friends more, I think.

I should not:

a) Worry about money.
b) Being utterly crushed by the sinking sensation that even those horrible rent-a-worker places might not have any use for me.
d) Consider medical testing or prison a viable solutions.

General mood indicator:

Pity of self —78%
Shame ——–60%
Physique —– Pretty good, getting awesome.

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.

Sista dagen. Oh the humanity!

det har gått för fort! Jag har inte snackat med tillräckligt många människor, har inte gjort några intervjuer, har knappt några recensionsexemplar och föreläsningarna jag gått på har nästan uteslutande varit mediokra! omtagning!

Sista dagen på mässan. Ska se Richard Morgans föreläsning klockan 1400, tills dess improviserar vi:

1) Miffy has a possy!
2) Här har vi ett exempel på författarporträtt. De här porträtten är tänkta att skapa förtroende och intresse hos läsaren för att maximera försäljning. Och ett halvt bröst på bilden måste väl innebära ett helt bröst i boken, på samma sätt som en spion på omslaget innebär en massa spionerande i själva boken. logiskt
3) Det här gjorde att jag skrattade för mig själv.

En bra hemsida förresten: www.freemuse.org som listar förtryck och censur musiker utsätts för. På mässan fokuserar de på Vitryssland, men om du kollar in hemsidan så är de globala. Intressant. Lite som reportrar utan gränser för musiker.

Fria fackföreningsinternationalen kommer att publicera en rapport om de svåra förhållandena för fackligt aktiva världen över. 115 personer blev dödade förra året; Bara i Colombia blev 70 fackligt aktiva mördade pga sina aktiviteter. Rapporten finns att ladda ner här: www.lotcobistand.org.