Velkommen hjem til Oslo, Martin!

Jeg gikk av båten for to timer siden, og for 13 minutter siden slo en mann meg, fullstendig ut av det blå, utenfor Oslo City.

Jeg skriver ned hva som skjedde her så jeg ikke glemmer det:

En høy mann, godt over 1.90, utenlandsk opprinnelse, blek, så ut som om han kom fra enten middelhavsregionen eller Sør-Amerika. Ansikt: pen, kraftige, mørke øyenbryn, snau- eller kortklippet, fyldige lepper, ubarbert, mørke øyne. Muskuløs og veltrent, bevegde seg elegant - jeg tenkte på dansing eller capoeira. Kledd i det jeg tror var mørke bukser med hvite striper og en meget tydelig, lys blå boblejakke med hette.

Dette er slik jeg husker det:

Jeg kom gående langs Oslo City i Steners gate da jeg så mannen. Han kom gående imot meg fra Lybekkergata. Han gikk litt rart, bakoverlent, med hetten halvveis nedover ansiktet sitt som om han prøvde å skjule seg. Jeg fikk blikkontakt med ham, fordi jeg syntes han oppførte seg merkelig. Vi går ganske tett, og idet han går forbi meg hopper han fram og slår meg med sin høyre neve, med all sin styrke, og treffer meg i høyre biceps. Slaget var overdramatisk, som når man markerer i kampsport. Jeg klarer å reagere raskt nok til at jeg vrir skulderen min bakover for å dempe styrken i slaget, og griper ham idet han er på vei til å trekke neven til seg. Jeg får et svakt tak med venstre hånd rundt hans høyre albue, og med høyre hånd rundt hans håndledd og jeg vrir. Han er allerede på vei til å spinne rundt meg, så vi trekker begge i samme retning. Vi får blikkontakt igjen når vi har rotert 180 grader. Han frigjør seg, sier noe uforståelig, og begynner å gå videre.

Klokken 11:23 ringer jeg 112. Det tar en stund før jeg får svar, og en asiatisk mann med en barnevogn står og venter sammen med meg. Han sier ingenting, bare rister på hodet. Når han ser at jeg får kontakt med politiet går han sin vei veldig fort, som om han ikke vil bli innblandet.

Min arm er stadig nummen.

I forgot to say

that we're in Denmark on idyllic vacation. We were supposed to go bicycling, but R busted up her knee two days before we left. But we don't let trivial matters like ligaments stop us!

Anyway, I'm not very reachable by mail or blog until July 1st. I'm going to be working at Klassekampen all of July and some of August.

If you really need to get a hold of me, try my cell phone:

+47 986 20 468.

10 paths to painless pizza-making. Man, I'm hungry.

Also: no-knead bread. I have to try this. Even though I have no need for no-knead breed, the idea does make me weak-kneed.

Godhet & mildhet

I en bloggpost hos Kapitalismus skriver "Anonymous" en kommentar som er så vanvittig, at jeg gjengir den her til skrekk og advarsel:

forøvrig må jeg si at det er overraskende hvor "redd" vi er blitt for hva islamister og deres trosfeller kan finne på. deres voldsbruk går for det meste utover deres egne landsmenn. få vestlige rammes relativt sett, likevel sitter mange og er redd.

en annen ting er jo at den vestlige verden besitter et enormt atomarsenal samt missiler som kan treffe ethvert punkt på kloden. om de vestlige atommaktene ønsket kunne midtøstens store befolkningssentre utryddes uten at oljereservene ble nevneverdig påvirket. at vi ikke har gjort viser jo ikke bare annet enn vestens godhet og mildhet. og vi frykter "dem"? de lever jo på vestens nåde!

Jeg vet ikke om dette er islamkritikkens indre mål som avslører seg her (jeg håper virkelig ikke det), men jeg argumenterer i svaret mitt lenger ned i tråden for at islamkritikk inngår i en bevisst eller ubevisst rasistisk struktur, eller diskurs. Det at det har blitt legitimt å angripe medlemmer av en ideologi før den ideologien har fått et uttrykk i en politisk handling er det motsatte av demokrati.

Hvorfor gidder jeg å bruke lunsjpausen min på disse greiene? Ok - tilbake til matfatet.

Nicely informative article about how the Bush administration tried to make war crimes legal.

Via Øystein:

Mitt navn er Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer. Jeg ble født 20. mars 1954. Jeg bor på et lite tettsted kalt Liden i Nord-Sverige. Jeg er objektseksuell. Dette er mannen min. Hans navn er Berlinmuren, og han ble født 13. august 1961. Du har sikkert hørt om ham; han er ganske berømt. Han bor i Berlin. Jeg pleide å jobbe i et apotek. Nå eier jeg et museum. Jobben til mannen min var å dele Øst- og Vest-Berlin. Han er pensjonert nå.

Mass pathology

Speaking of the Apocalypse, media numbness and actual threats, artist Chris Jordan talks about unconscious and repressed mass pathologies in his work. Awesome shit:

Apo-calypso!

George Saunders has a great piece in the New Yorker in which suddenly people everywhere start developing superpowers. Except, they don't, they just think they do, causing an "apocalypse of ineptitude". This reminded me of the plot in M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening in which people start behaving suicidally because of airborne something-or-other (I haven't seen the film).

Which reminded me: I was thinking today about how the Apocalypse, or just a sudden failing of society in the face of catastrophic change, has become a huge theme in US film, post 9-11. Movies like Cloverfield, Signs, The Day After Tomorrow, The Road, I Am Legend, 28 Days/Weeks Later (UK film, but still), War of the Worlds, Children of Men, or most recently The Happening . These are just the ones I could think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there are loads more (feel free to leave your least favourite in the comments).

Saunder's piece seems to perfectly capture the sense I sometimes get, watching these films. Apocalyptic fiction gives us great metaphors for little disasters in our own lives (as JJ Abrams, who, by the way, made Cloverfield, says in this clip, "Die Hard" isn't a film about terrorism, it's a film about divorce). Actually, most apocalypse films are about divorce. So is The Happening, from what I can tell (the main character uses the death of millions of people as an opportunity to reconnect with his estranged wife, as do almost anyone in any apocalypse movie evah).

But it always seems to me, now, that after 9-11, people are not seeing the metaphors anymore. After the spectacular, Technicolour, Indepence Day¨-turned-into-reality mayhem of 9-11, people have lost the ability to not see the disaster flick as a rehearsal for an actual threat, or a way of dealing with the psychological strain of actual threats.

That's one of the things that lead to the apocalypse of ineptitude of, say, the current security policy in the west. We've mistaken our stories about small, personal disasters for actual, looming apocalypses. It happened once, right? And then there was the tsunami and Katrina, and oh, look, Cedar Rapids is underwater and anthrax and, and, and... All it took was a few nightmare scenarios to become real. Now suddenly you can't carry hair conditioner onto airplanes, even though this does not make you any safer.

I wonder if this wasn't something that would have happened anyway. I can't help thinking that if it wasn't 9-11, it would have been something else. After the global, mediated interconnectedness was a fact, after our entertainment industry had gone into hyperdrive. It had to happen. Sooner or later, the proliferation of narratives in fiction would meet up with the proliferation of reporting, of connection with other people. Maybe it had to happen eventually that some unlikely apocalyptic scenario became real in some hugely mediated way. Maybe another Tunguska event. Maybe a nuclear bomb in LA out of 24. (I'm thinking up scenarios like this constantly.) 9-11 wasn't a killer that was anything close to, say, world hunger or the war in Iraq. And we seem already to have forgotten that we still live in a world that has enough nuclear weapons to kill everyone. As it turns out, we're the apocalypse.

I Sing the Dylan Electric

Man, people really got bent out of shape when Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in '65. The story of what happened is the stuff of legends. From the wonderful Wikipedia article "Electric Dylan Controversy":

In the documentary footage, the sound of loud booing and sporadic cheering begins just a few bars into Dylan's first song, "Maggie's Farm", and continues throughout the second, Like A Rolling Stone and "Phantom Engineer", (which evolved into "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry " released on Highway 61 Revisited).

After playing "Phantom Engineer", Dylan told the band, "Let's go, man. That's all", and walked off-stage. The sound of loud booing and clapping can be heard in the background. Peter Yarrow returned to the microphone and begged Dylan to continue performing. Apparently desperate to appease the audience, he assured them that Dylan was "just getting his axe" even before it was clear whether or not he was willing to return solo.

Dylan was, by some accounts, highly distressed. Eventually coaxed back onstage by Yarrow and Joan Baez, he realized he didn't have the right harmonica, and lashed out at Yarrow--"What are you doing to me," he demanded. [4] It was a reasonable question. Yarrow's public hectoring of Dylan to return to the stage was clearly a spur of the moment ploy to soothe the crowd. The band couldn't return (Kooper admitted they had only mastered the three songs they played[5]), so Dylan was essentially being forced to perform an impromptu acoustic set on a night when plugging in was a major artistic statement. And Dylan, his voice betraying real nervousness and distress, had to beg the audience for 'an E harmonica'. Within a few moments a clatter of harmonicas hit the stage. He snapped one up out the darkness and returned to the spotlight with a Chaplinesque flourish that got a laugh, but certainly the atmosphere was still tense. He then sang two songs to the now-silent audience, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and "Mr. Tambourine Man", clearly relishing the kiss-off theme of the former. The crowd exploded with applause at the end, calling for more. Dylan did not return to the Newport festival for 37 years, and in an oblique nod to the events that transpired in 1965, his 2002 appearance was the only time he's performed in a wig and fake beard.
[emphasis mine]

This just in

Mikkel changes his mind about Obama:

"OK, I change my mind. I'm all for Obama. But the little fucker better not let me down."

Welcome to the club, Mikkel. Here's your Kool-Aid.

This just in: people on the internet are not normal. And I mean that in the scientific sense of the word.

Esbjörn Svensson has died

I just got the terrible news that the Swedish jazz pianist Esbjörn Svensson of EST (the Esbjörn Svensson Trio) has died in a diving accident, only 44 years old.

I interviewed Svensson at least once. He struck me as a wonderfully friendly, articulate guy with a lot of humility about his work.

I'm not sure I always liked the direction they were taking the trio in the last couple of years (flirting with varying degrees of success with electonics, moving in a more pop/rock/easy listning direction – even though I'm not really much of a jazz purist, I never thought it worked when they got too "easy"). But I won't soon forget the concert they gave at USF in Bergen in 2002. I was having a bad month of epic, biblical proportions. (The kind of month where the bills pile up, you do badly on exams, a flock of locusts threaten your crops, barbarians pillage your tribe and hear the lamentation of your women, fire and brimstone fall from the sky, etc.) I came late, and walked in in the middle of "And God Created the Coffee Break":



And I felt my foot tapping, and then they segued into an extraordinary version of "Behind the Yashmak":



And after that it just got better and better. And seriously, I think that concert was the only time I felt really happy for like three months.

Zen and the art of nice little details which all directors should put in their motion pictures because they are really rewarding when you see them

Sometimes it's the nice, subtle details that make movies work for me.

Last night, I was watching Charlie Wilson's War and was skeptical about the lack of overview. The movie, a historically mostly accurate pic written by Aaron Sorkin, seemed to be told more or less as a West Wing-style funny/serious romp through the cold war-bureaucracy of Washington and the Middle East, told from within the ethical and ideological framework of the cold war itself. Killing Russians was treated as a joke (granted, the Russians were in the process of killing innocent civilians at the time, but still) and there was very little in the way skepticism about what Charlie Wilson was doing. Which, in case you haven't seen the film, was supplying the Afghan Mujahedin resistance with weapons and training. This actually happened.

Except suddenly, near the end, Wilson is throwing a party in his apartment. The CIA agent Gust Avrakotos and him are standing on the balcony of his apartment, and the agent holds the following little speech:

Gust Avrakotos
There's a little boy and on his 14th birthday he gets a horse... and everybody in the village says, "how wonderful. the boy got a horse" And the Zen master says, "we'll see." Two years later The boy falls off the horse, breaks his leg, and everybody in the village says, "how terrible." And the Zen master says, "We'll see." Then a war breaks out and all the young men have to go off and fight... except the boy can't, cause his leg's messed up. and everyone in the village says, "How wonderful."

Charlie Wilson
And the Zen master says, "We'll see."

And just as this line is spoken, the background noise of the scene becomes that of a jetliner crossing the sky.

Earlier in the movie, we have been delicately told that Wilson's apartment overlooks the Pentagon. It's all a nice, subtle wink and nod at 9/11 and the connection between the attacks and the Afhganistan situation and Bin Laden and everything, and it totally made the movie for me.

Indra Sinha, author of Animal's People, has begun a hunger strike in New Delhi to protest the neglect of Bhopal disaster survivors

"I hope that people will look at what's happening in Bhopal with new eyes"

Indra Sinha, author of a Booker-shortlisted novel about the impact of a loosely fictionalised version of the Bhopal chemical disaster, has begun an indefinite hunger strike in support of survivors still suffering from the effects of the devastating 1984 chemical leak.

Interesting article on sexist coverage of Hilary Clinton's primary campaign. Don't miss the graphic in the sidebar.

Fra selvangivelsen

1.5.11 Har du eid kraftverk i 2007?

Hjelpetekst:
1.5.11
Eier du eget kraftverk svarer du ja på spørsmålet.

*
1.6.2
I denne posten fører du beregnet positiv personinntekt fra enmannsforetak hvis du driver annen virksomhet enn fiske, dagmamma¹ eller deltakerliknet foretak.

*

Lønnsoppgavekode.

[401] Positivt ber. pers.innt. - annen næring
[402] Positivt ber. pers.innt. - annen næring

*

3.2.17 Fyll ut Tilleggsskjema for næringsdrivende innen jordbruk/gartneri, skogbruk, reindrift, pelsdyrnæring og skiferproduksjon i Nord-Troms og Finnmark (RF-1177), og beløpet blir overført til denne posten.

1. Jeg foretrekker termen "dagperson".

Top 10 home cooking mistakes. I don't do any of these.

Well, actually, it's more of a top 10 things that you should do while cooking, so put that way, I do all of these. Maybe except for the knife which, I found out too late, had an uncomfortable meeting with the home sharpener.

Back in the day – you know, when presidential candidates were respectably white – news organizations called potential First Ladies “wives.” But now that black folks are running, we can get all funky fresh with the lingo, yo. So it’s basically fine for Fox News to use “Baby Mama” for Michelle Obama, slang that implies a married 44-year-old Princeton-educated lawyer is, to use an Urban Dictionary definition of the term, “some chick you knocked up on accident during a fling who you can’t stand but you have to tolerate cuz she got your baby now.” Because the Obamas are black! And the blacks, they’re all relaxed about that shit, yo. Word up. And anyway, as the caption clearly indicates, it’s not Fox News that’s calling Michelle Obama “Baby Mama,” it’s outraged liberals. Fox News is just telling you what those outraged liberals are saying. They didn’t want to use the term “Baby Mama.” But clearly they had no choice.

John Scalzi rants up after Fox "News" called Michelle Obama "baby mama".

Personally, I think the boy is clean, fresh. Very articulate... for a black guy.

Y'know what I mean?

The New York Times discovers that women and men could share the work load of bearing children, dedicating 10 pages to this astounding information. Gasp! Shock!

interviews sight unseen

I have a limited amount of free time to my day in the next few days, and would prefer this time to be spent eating and sleeping and maybe taking the occasional bathroom break. This is why I am putting links to four long, great interviews with spectacularly interesting people which I want to check out later when I'm through dangling my modifiers. These interviews just sort of stumbled across my path today during my lunch break and I had no time to read them:

1. Barack Obama. Because this blog just can't get enough of Barack Obama.

2. Cory Doctorow gives a long interview to the Onion A/V Club, about his latest novel Little Brother, Creative Commons, technology, etc.

3. William Gibson is interviewed at Io9 about draft dodging, G*dzilla, etc.

4. Talking radioheads David Byrne and Thom Yorke are interviewed at Wired about the value of music, copyright and the digital age.

Between these, and yesterday's post on Solstad, I should have something to do once I get some time on my hands again.

Dagens beste aforisme (og ikke bare fra en hvilken som helst noksagt, neida, denne kommer fra en statsautorisert og prisbelønnet forfatter):

– En roman er en bro. En novelle er en brygge.

Post post post Post post post post.

Og forresten så må det være et tyvetalls blogger jeg går med planer om å legge over i sidebaren. Snart, snart skal jeg gjøre det, jeg lover. Inntil videre to venner:

* Markus Johansen, kunstviterlærling, barnehageassistent og all-round smart funnyman/funny wise guy, bor i New York for tiden og er i a New York state of mind.

* Rune Hjemås delte en gang brus med oss, nå har han sluttet med sukkervann og slått seg til ro på Jeg bor her.

Præter Quantum Satis

Dette gikk meg fullstendig hus forbi, men Festspillene lagde en video av samtalen mellom Dag Solstad, Jonas Gahr Støre og Harald Stanghelle om Brand. De er Festspill Caritatis!

De siste par dager har jeg okket meg over hvor mange gode debatter som går tapt for ettertiden, fordi folk ikke tar dem opp. På den annen side så hender det oftere og oftere at man føler seg som Brand i siste akt:

Brand
(krymper sig under den styrtende skred og siger opad):
Svar mig, Gud, i dødens slug! –
gælder ej et frelsens fnug
mandeviljens qvantum satis –?
(Skreden begraver ham; hele dalen fyldes.)

En røst
(råber gennem tordenbragene):
Han er deus caritatis!

Når skal man få tid til å se alle disse debattene, da?!

For se, her kommer neste Solstaddebatt rekende på den proverbiale fjølen: Human Rights Service har, selv om det gir meg litt dårlig smak i munnen å lenke til dem, gjort oss den tjenesten å YouTube omfattende deler av debatten mellom Dag Solstad, Bjørgulv Braanen, Per Edgar Kokkvold og Lars Gule. Jeg mistenker at de har redigert ut noen av de interessante bitene, men men. Om du holder deg for nesen, og lar være med å se på resten av siten, så går det sikkert fint.

(Forresten så er intromelodien til HRS utrolig komisk. Hør! Vi har dramatisk syntetisert hornmusikk! Da må vi være skikkelig seriøse).

Obama wins the nomination

You already knew that, but I'm psyched that it's finally finished. Looking forward to 8 years of things getting better.