Yeasayer!

I never really listened to them before, but their new album is AMAzing:

Ke$ha makes $$$ off Uffie’s auto-tuner!

Okay, so in Spotify they’re currently spamming me with ads for this girl Ke$ha [sic x10000, wtf is up with that name?]. She’s apparently the new shit on the block. She has blatantly and totally ripped off Uffie’s awesome auto-tuner trademark-sound, and is now making hard $$$ on it. Judge for yourselves:

My year in music, too!

Enough emo posts for this year, Sebastian inspired me to describe my year in music instead (also, thanks to last.fm for refreshing my memory – all too much happened this year for me to remember it all, which goes for the accompanying music as well).

In 2009, I discovered bucket-loads of amazing Swedish music (slight redundancy there). Håkan Hellström, Emil Jensen, Detektivbyrån, the list goes on. Need anymore proof of Sweden’s superiority to mediocre Denmark?:

In 2009, I realised that evil occasionally produces good (read: Justin Vernon’s odic elegy to his ex-girlfriend, that is to say Bon Iver’s debut extraordinaire For Emma, Forever Ago) – by FAR the best album I discovered this year:

In 2009, my Balkan/gypsy/folk-affinity extended from Beirut (who had betrayed their debut and went for a cheesy romanticised French – but nevertheless good – sequel to The Gulag Orkestar) to encompass also A Hawk and A Hacksaw, Alaska in Winter and a few others:

In 2009, Vitalic came to rescue when the three above dangerously looked to overtake my liking of electronic music. Vitalic went from being a fairly cool alternative to Justice to a fucking awesome state of the art project by releasing this year’s best electronic album Flashmob:

2009 was a good music year. Not so much because of great releases, because most of the above is from around 2007, but because I discovered all this which had been waiting for me. Brilliant!

Superlative

Things are better. It’s all good. It will all be fine. More or less.

Fucking Great Pretenders

I’ve already written in brief about my willpower, or lack of. At least in certain situations, it’s lacking. I want to go home soon. The subject matter here is interesting, but I honestly don’t have a life. So no life to Fuck, and little lifeblood to suck, would anyone want that. Actually I hate vampire flicks and all that Twilight shit going on right now. Come on, vampire plots are not just deceptively meta-realistic, they’re also plainly pointless. They don’t contribute with anything to anything. Fine, if the riffraff get a laughter out of watching some random Ashton Kutcher romcom then who gives a fuck. But vampires, really? I don’t get it.

Then again, though, I’ve been told I only laugh at clever jokes. Which is kind of a compliment, at least in my world, but also a massive slap in the face… It means I don’t have as much fun as others, but my fun is perhaps higher quality than theirs. Although this is kind of like the medication-proportion-fallacy of people believing that if one benzo can stop their anxiety; two will invoke euphoria. Fallacious, that. Am I really that serious and impossible to entertain? I dislike comedy films as I think I hinted at earlier. And those allegedly ‘funny’ cartoon TV-series. I just don’t see the hilariousness of them, mi dispiache! A good joke, to me, has to be political but not trivial. This means that anything pertaining to George Bush is just out of the question… Don’t go there. It was meagrely amusing the first time, tedious at best the second time and plainly stupid the third time. Anyone joking about Bush is really just playing the populist card to gain social acceptance, nothing more. Okay, perhaps I over-analysed this a tad too much. The point still stands beautifully, however.

People I know are dropping out of college in the US. People from college in the US here are going back next year. It’s messed up. I kind of want to do something radical. But that’s irrational as well, right now. A friend of mine is dropping out here, too. When I went around putting up posters for my election campaign, I saw posters saying ‘Do you speak Japanese? Depressed? Contact our 24h hotline’ or something along those lines. It was basically asking Japanese kids not to commit suicide. This world is mad; nobody’s sincerely happy and satisfied. We’re all just fucking Great Pretenders, pretentious fucking great pretenders, myself included.

Oh yes, I’m the great pretender,
Pretending I’m doing well.
My need is such, I pretend too much.
I’m lonely but no one can tell.

Emotional standby

Emotions seem to be on standby here:

Wake up, shower, eat, study, walk, class, eat, study, lecture, walk, eat, study, sleep.

That’s it.

Emotionally on standby.
Academically on full throttle.

Is it bad? I don’t know, ’cause there’s not really any time to wonder.

“Lagom ciderfull”

Eros Ramazzotti, great pasta dishes, horrible white wine, David Hume, early Christian rant, Kumar without Harold, WHSmith, eBay regret, lots of laundry, new credit card, Danish crime tv-series, Ryanair tickets, parents coming, essays, free drinks, translating for Simon Hix.

And a great quote from a friend of mine explains an often-encountered state of mind. It  doesn’t really translate very well but I can give it a try:

“…när man bara vill tillbaka till ett cabin party och vara sådär lagom ciderfull.”
(“…when you just want to be back at a cabin party being, like, lagom drunk from cider.”)

Running faster than my legs can take me
Shouting louder than my lungs allow me

Work

OCD

I find myself to be a rather rational person. I’m self-disciplined. But I’m also obsessed with reciprocating people contacting me. I guess that’s a fancy way of saying that I spend way too much time on Facebook and checking emails… Which is pretty unwise if you ask me. So, the point is that I found this awesome little program that blocks specified sites at specified times. I’m liberated!

Bloody animals

Blood dripped on Aristotle, a lot of blood. I was expecting the dreaded syncope, but it had mercy with me for once. My teacher had as well. A good dude, him. All I had to suffer from was vertigo and a failed attempt (thanks to the blood!) to account for why man is a political animal.  He’s a bloody animal, or at least I was…

“The rapture of vertigo
And letting go
Me myself I was never sure
Was it the liquor
Or was it my soul?”

Sweet Success

Yay! Things are going my way these days:

1. I finished my first serious assignment six days in advance.

2. I received the confirmation of my degree transfer, meaning official bye-bye to Skinner, Gaddis, and Trachtenberg and good-day to Voorhoeve, Nozick, and Nagel.

3. I secured a place on the LSE100 pilot course, Thinking as a Social Scientist.

4. I landed a big speaker for the Scandinavian Society to come in January.

5. I got my first article in the student newspaper published, and people seemed to like it.

6. I met a lot of new UWC people, and nice UWC people I knew but had never really spoken with.

Beavering

So, I got my first article in our student newspaper, The Beaver, published today:

http://thebeaveronline.co.uk/2009/10/27/just-spliffing/

 

Why?

I still remember that day in early August 2007 when I was not more than a few days from moving to Norway. It was peculiar. Why did I suddenly want to give everything up for an in many ways uncertain future? I used to be the lame kid who didn’t want to go for the week-trips with school, who couldn’t sleep with the lights off in fear of the dark, all that stuff overprotected kids suffer from, albeit I don’t feel I was overprotected. I probably was. Maybe just protected. In a good sense. I think. But again, why did I, the least adventurous leave? Possibly because I was caught in an educational system which breeds mediocrity. I was fed up. With Danish über-envy, schadenfreude, and laxity. Intolerance. Conservative narrow-mindedness.

Norway was a safe haven in all those respects. No envy. Schadenfreude, a bit, but it was alright. I partook in that as well. Laxity? Only in its best form. Some intolerance, but “fucking miles away” from back home. And anywhere else I have ever been. When I was in Switzerland this summer, it was everywhere. In Denmark it’s everywhere. Here in the UK it’s everywhere (Nick Griffin, anyone?). Conservative narrow-mindedness is more or less equal to intolerance, I suppose.

But then again, Norway was a safe haven. Not the real world. A construct. Like a social experiment without the anthropologists on the sideline (although I was never sure whether Alistair had been ‘observing vultures’ in the Kalahari or whether that was an apocalyptic lie-of-the-century covering up evil laboratory projects with idealistic, bipolar UWC students as the guinea pigs). It’s deeply ironic. There was really nothing to worry about, but we worried so much. I did, at least. Actually, there were things to worry about. Abstracts like our future, whether we really were social outcasts or (to quote Clement Kjersgaard) “the élite” , stupid but inevitable power struggles in EACs and in general, emails that shouldn’t have been sent, things that shouldn’t have been done, things I would have given up everything for had they happened, all that.

It’s hypothetical nonsense more than mere reflection to ask myself whether I would like to do it again. I’m in a different world now. Completely. It’s a good world; better than I thought. Much better. But I don’t really know… I’m possibly happier than I was 99 % of the time in Norway, but still, to me it’s not about being happy, it’s simply making sense out of things. Perhaps now it’s in a more academic form, there it was a social one. People here, whom I don’t even want to call real-world people, are ‘better humans’ than I thought they would be. Not all of them. Most. And it’s so so interesting here academically. But then again… The hour-long conversations on the island about people we despised and loved, or how to take over the world. Ciders on the E-building pier. På-effing-flukt. World Today. Student Council meetings that made me fucking furious, Student Council weekends that were wholly hilarious. Strange people from strange places.

That taught me about the world.

When Sun is shun and Love has run

With all it encompasses, moderation is  seen as a virtue. It seems, though, that I moderate what should not be and do not what should be.

I moderate Sun,

I moderate Zeal,/LOVE :(

I moderate schedules.

I should moderate ferments. I shouldn’t moderate that which makes me content, however, and it seems everything that makes me content is supervised and tried rationed although it cannot be rationed. If I have my good music and my good meals, my good knowledge and my good emotions, I am tranquil. I have nothing against bad emotions; I don’t see them as bad, just different. Right now I cannot recall the last time they existed. It leads to a sort of superficiality which I despise, you know – being blissfully alive, but I suppose it would be too spoilt to complain. Arghhhhh!

Will We Never See The Beautiful Burial Flowers?

It is indeed really rather strange that, in these first weeks where everything is rosy, restless, and reckless, the topics I’ve been dealing with in my course are death, death, and death. Socrates’ unsuccessful apology and Epicurus’ fearlessness of death, to name a few. And I love it. It’s such a fundamental question that I can’t believe I haven’t spent serious time considering it (apart from those near-suicidal pre-winter days in the wilderness of Norway that don’t count anyway, as it was half in desperation, half out of irrationality).

Brandon Bethancourt, above, seems to also have thought of the issue. I’m going to Alaska in winter, at least for a night.

When the revenant came down

I’m in London.

The nearest tube station is Angel, which has Western Europe’s longest escalator.

I have an American roomie.

I lost my boarding pass in the airport.

I also lost my voice, though it’s slowly returning.

I was seconds away from missing my plane.

There’s a pictogram next to the tap in the room saying ‘Not for drinking’.

I’m in the 21st century, yet I still have a land-line phone.

There’s a poster in front of my desk saying ‘Meningitis and septicaemia kill’. What a nice welcome!

It’s surprisingly dead here now, but tomorrow’s the official move-in day so that’s probably why.

I’ll update in detail later.

Pet sitting

Busy Doing Nothing

Never have I felt my existence being as pointless as it is these current days. Thank god, or… Well, thank destiny, or… Well, thank myself for the fact these days are on retreat.

Actually I do simple things at times. I stalk people on facebook. I also study Italian grammar. I find new music. I also try to read books, but it fails miserably. Perhaps it’s because I discovered my reading list for university; an absolute farce: it’s around as long as the accumulated list of ‘things I want to do’, which I keep partially on my notebook (the laptop) and partially in my notebook (the old-fashioned type). Wow, I can’t believe I’m living in the age of The Dying Notebook and Its Homonymous Successor. I think I should write a book about that. It’s such a catchy title. It fits my meta-pretentiousness as well. Perhaps a monochrome short film is better than a book? Too bad I sold my video camera when I realised the Von Trier in the making was dead long before he was born. And, by wanting to write the aforementioned book I just added another item to my list of things I want to do. Seems it’s going to take over the university’s reading list in length.

Detaching

I always used to get a terrible stomach ache when I lost some money or I bought something I never used, bought something that broke the second after, or turned out not to turn out as I expected. If a café would charge a pound too much by mistake. I know, it’s ridiculous.

Inexplicably, that isn’t the case anymore. And, it’s impossible for me to explain how relieving that is. It’s crazy, and it’s great.

Endless Irony

I’m moving to London partially because of its amazing cultural scene. Ironic it is, then, that one of my absolute favourite artists Emil Jensen is touring Sweden right after I leave for the Isles. Oh well, I can’t get everything I want, can I?

Some tasters for those who are unfamiliar with the Southern Swede:

Especially the middle track is extremely appropriate in these post-UWC times… Youtube him for more brilliant recordings.