30 November 2009

lowest point


The crisis mixtape blasts Ace of Base; I eat Ballerina cookies while pondering the question: what is the difference between thick and thin ethical concepts, really? Wikipedia knows, I didn't. And then I struggle with a new question. So what did Marx say about the bees and human work? Wikipedia. Marx. Search: bee. Found it. I have another cookie. KISS on the mixtape now. Life is tragic & meaningless and we all know it. Eat a cookie while you can.

29 November 2009

on fillmore - endless vacation (2009)

The flu has gone nowhere. I drink tea and prepare myself for a night of frenzy reading & writing & coughing. On Filmore's Extended Vacation is a perfect soundtrack. Hazy vibraphone & xylophone, upright bass / ambience high in the mix (too high according to some reviewers, nicely high according to me - it dodges tacky spa music, or what I imagine to be spa music - and creates creepy nightmare music with birds, rumbles and stuff instead). Associations: silent movie soundtracks / early American analog set / Cal Tjader / ECM stuff / Tom Waits during the eighties / Sjtjekn. Nice. A blend of cheesy references & otherwordliness - gotta love it.

Bok.

Åh, jag vill läsa! Perfekt titel. Och omslaget talar sitt eget språk. Jag ser fram emot fina stunder med Toffe och hans vänner.

28 November 2009

slimy madeleine cookies

I am sick. Running nose / spinning head / a slight headache / a cough. This state has a certain proustian impact on me. All of a sudden, I remember lots of things. I remember the Twin Peaks Christmas when I was a kid. We ate home-made fudge and I was sick throughout the festivities. Dale Cooper and The Log lady, Jerry Horne and the man from another planet. We attended the obligatory (it still is) visit at our Aunt's and then we watched four more episodes. Our grandmother was still alive then and she was visiting but at that point she was mostly quiet or she was in a hazy, nervous state. I listened to The Beatles, early Beatles. I remember the cold winter almost ten years ago when I attended religious studies courses. I bought myself a pair of sturdy boots and headed out in the snow. A crowd of drowsy people might or might not have gotten their heads around Hjalmar Sundén's role theory or Nathan Söderblom's distinctions with regard to mystic experiences or the relation between the inner and the external symbolic order. (I have never been able to forget, obviously.) After the eloquent Prof. N.G.H. called it a day I shambled home. I took a nap. I lived next to the hospital. The sound of ambulances and helicopters. There was always some repair work in the building. I got used to the sounds. In the afternoon, I sometimes headed for Humanisticum, where philosophy lived at the time. There were always people to talk to there and some of them were just sort of hanging out amongst those mouldy coffee cups and all the rubble, among the books, in that purple sofa or in those green chairs. So did I. I remember the days in Hong Kong when I was sick and it was hot and I forced myself to do things even though my head felt like it was absconding towards a sphere of its own. We were walking along the harbor, gazing at the movie star strip and the barge boats with colorful containers. Some signs read: "Mind your head". I tried the best I could. I coughed and looked at the skyscrapers with a feeling of unreality in my stomach. We walked up a hill, the market area, the hipster area. The perspectives were tumbling around and my shirt was covered with nice patches of sweat (I fitted perfectly into the picture of groaning colonialist). We argued wordlessly. The same jokes repeated over and over again, both of us sounding like broken records, both of us irritatedly and placidly and amusedly anticipating what the other was to say. I ate an English fudge cake but couldn't feel any taste. I remember having a severe cold, being twelve years old, spending the day in a quiet house, walking from room to room, sinking in to that peculiar stillness that transformed the house into something rather magical. Reading books in bed / cat in lap / checking out the contents of the refrigerator: saarioinen's pizza / watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for the 15th time / half-heartedly executing a parent's order: fetching logs from the shed, cursing the fluffy snow drowning the wheelbarrow into its white depths / watching the afternoon light through the dirty bedroom window, watching patches of sunlight and dust dance on the green wall-to-wall carpet. I remember high school afternoons. Boring lectures. Too sick to focus. Lolling around in the endless corridors. Talking shit with friends, listening to other kids talking about innebandy games and the latest trip to Stockholm and the secret crush on Markus or Andreas or Björn. Guys referred to each other by family name. GrünérMattsonIsakssonPenttinen. Girls never did. They were dressed in white jeans and so was I, but I had no clue so I wore them with a nice orange shirt. Attending another lecture, centripetal force, shmentripetal force. Learning new words in Russian, different species of fish and a thousand aspects of going and coming and returning. A vague feeling of unease and dread, intermingled with comfort and the narcotic conviction that nothing special will happen anyways. After school we walked a few blocks to our favoirite café, the Black Cat. Coffee in giant mugs. Talking shit about teachers, the Dragon (who taught Finnish and was feared and respected by all for her stern ways with konditionalis and illatives, no joking matter, that), new words in latin, the UFO, the latest gossip, the old gossip, the cruel gossip. Listening to other kids talking shit about their teachers. You drove us home and B.B King was always playing in your car. Always. When I got home my grandmother made me dinner and it was sjömansbiff or kotlett or kalops.

Now: essays I should write but I don't / I venture out; after a few steps my heart is beating and my head is pounding / Fritz Lang / Julee Cruise / barrels of coffee / glögg / more movies, crappier movies / For Carnation / yes memory serves for the flies / bad conscience for the essay / Joseph Condrad: Heart of Darkness / the voice of Mr Kurtz / the snot wriggling and swelling inside the head / ailing conscience xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx / Fazer's Christmas chocolate.

27 November 2009

Tre roliga.

1) År 1985 utkom en vänbok till PG Gyllenhammar. Den heter Arbete och värdighet.
2) I en bok om arbete beskrivs den nuvarande kapitalismens verklighetsuppfattning som "psykedelisk". Det tycker jag med.
3) Citat ur en artikel om prostitution: "Although this is a gross simplification, for the purpose of this paper, we shall argue that a prostitute sells nonreproductive sex, which we shall call “commercial sex,” whereas a wife sells reproductive sex (i.e., sex plus children). Note that the two activities thus defined are mutually exclusive."
"Humans not only mate but also marry. We argue that men pay a premium for mating opportunities in wedlock. The basic idea is that in addition to biological parenthood, people might be interested in a social affiliation, for example, in a role as recognized parent and custodian."
"A central feature of our argument is that prostitution compromises female marriage market prospects."
"A crucial element in our model will be that married men also consult prostitutes. This begs the question why married men go to prostitutes (rather than buying from their wives, who presumably would be low-cost providers considering that they can sell nonreproductive sex
without compromising their marriage)"
"The child is a public good to both parents if they are married; otherwise, only the mother derives utility from the child."
"We assume that men obtain utility from child quality, k, conditional on marriage, m; commercial sex, s; and a third, exogenously supplied, consumption good, c, which also serves as the numeraire: u = u(k(m), s, c). All goods are assumed normal, with the proviso that commercial
sex is normal conditional on marital status."
"Women do not care for sex, but derive utility from their children (independently of marital status) and consumption. Hence, we write female utility as v = v(k, c). A woman can either work in a regular job or be a prostitute. If she holds a regular job, she marries; if a prostitute, she does not. Hence, the female choice is couched in terms of whether to be a wife or a prostitute."
"Marriages are matched in a competitive market, where women sell and men buy."
Utbud och efterfrågan, serrö. Psykedeliskt är ordet.

22 November 2009

Moon (2009)

Moon (2009) contains little of what we expect from the typical Hollywood sci-fi movie. Moon prides itself on leaving out end-of-the-world scenarios and excessive technical mumbo-jumbo. That's certainly a good thing. This is far from a flawless movie, but a nicely executed idea nonetheless. What speaks for it is the focus on psychological tension and the dazzling absence of characters (strictly speaking, there's only one character in the movie but everything hinges on how you define "character") and action. It's a quiet little film that contains one reference to 2001: a space odyssey after another. Hell, Moon has a HAL of its own (with Kevin Spacey's voice). It's hard to say anything about the themes of the film without spoiling the twists of the story. Let's say it revolves around the inner struggles of Sam Bell, operator of a space station on the moon. He's an astronaut on a 3-year shift. The purpose of the base is to mine rocks for energy which is sent to earth. It's a lonely existence that is only aggravated throughout the film...
What bugged me at times about Moon is its slightly conventional aesthetics. It doesn't feel like a very original film. We've seen the same thing in the first part of Sunshine and in other contemporary sci-fi movies too. Don't get me wrong, visually, it's a truly a good-looking film (the details of the base etc.) and some images have a mind-chilling quality. The problem is perhaps that the pictures are a bit shallow - there's nothing really surprising about them. There's the obligatory 5-10 second cuts and the obligatory "eerie stillness" that we've learned to expect from this type of movie. All in all - the film is perhaps too pretty for its own best. That problem is only deepened by the use of sentimental, tv-drama piano music.
On the level of character excavation, the film is a positive experience in that it dodges the worst clichés. That said, I was still a bit disappointed. What I presume to have been an interesting script with some interesting ideas has not really transformed into a movie that digs deep enough, or let's say it isn't very clear into what depths it sets out to dig.
It's a good film, but not a great one.

19 November 2009

Fantastiskt.


Hittade det här omslaget på den här sidan. Jag blir så glad.

18 November 2009

I LOVE YOU DIANE CLUCK!



This song is so damn nice. I listen to it all the time. It's a shame there's no "real" version on YouTube.

(It's hard not to love somebody who chooses the title "My virtue's gone (hooray, hooray)" for a song!)

mörda män

"Dessutom har hon blivit chefredaktör för ett nytt fanzine, Pervers Kroki. – Det är en tecknad, pornografisk tidskrift för män. Innehåller bilreportage med tillhörande lättklädda kvinnor. Och så mord då.– Mord?– Ja, först tänkte jag visa bilder av mördade män, i stället för kvinnor eftersom kvinnor alltid framställs som offer. Men så kom jag på att det inte skulle funka. Män vill inte se på mördade män."

(jag vill i förbigående nämna seriemagasinet Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist som gjorde stort intryck på min filosofiska och estetiska bildning i tiden.)

14 November 2009

"en god gammal berättelse"

En sak driver mig till vansinne. Det är när det börjar tindra i ögonen på ett visst slags kulturmänniska genast då ordet "berättelse" kommer på tal. För de här människorna signalerar "berättelse" något alldeles underbart mänskligt och något alldeles underbart traditionsbärande och något alldeles underbart stort och vackert. Kort sagt: berättelsens kraft ska rädda oss från samhällets förfall, själslig atomisering och rå individualism. Genom berättelserna ska vi föras samman kring brasan och den spontana lusten att berätta och berätta vittnar om en djupt liggande kärna av mänsklighet som inga konsumistiska eller cyniska samhällssystem råder sig på.

Nä. Det förhåller sig helt tvärtom. Det vi ska räddas från är i första hand sentimentala kulturtomtar som talar sig rödkindade om litteraturens och berättelsens storhet, som alltid blir lite andäktiga när Berättelser kommer på tal.

Jag var på ett litteraturseminarium idag i min egen hemtrakt. Där uppträdde ett antal mer eller mindre kända finlandssvenska författare. Kulturtanter och -gubbar bänkade sig förväntansfullt. Temat var kärlek och författarna var rörande överens om att ämnet bäst greppas genom att tala om just berättelser. Tanken som återkom gång på gång var att vi vet vad kärlek är eftersom vi hör berättelser om den. Ibland kom det förnöjda suckar från publiken som bekräftade att berättelser är något synnerligen fint och ädelt. Visserligen berättade de här författarna saker som var fina och intressanta. Men sedan punkterades för det mesta den ärlighet som eventuellt fanns i det dom sa genom att de insisterade på att se det som de just sagt som en Berättelse som på något sätt ska göra oss visa och kloka och kärleksfulla. Det finns goda berättelser, sades det. De goda berättelserna innefattar inte slasherfilmen som sänds på teve klockan fyra på morgonen. De bra berättelserna ska helst ta ställning mot dassig litteratur. De bra berättelserna ska föra oss samman på det där fina sättet (d.v.s. inte det dåliga och billiga). Gubbarna och tanterna i publiken kippade efter andan. Ja-a, visst är det underbart med lite kultur ibland eller hur?

Bilden av den där arkaiska lägerelden (myter med lite orientaliska inslag kanske som en extra krydda) ger mig vaga obehagskänslor. Jag fattar inte alls varför samhället skulle behöva "berättelser". Inte heller förstår jag varför det måste finnas något som "binder oss samman" i den bemärkelse som man verkar tänka sig här. Den bild jag ser för mig här är ärkeförfattaren Björn Ranelid som står i en predikstol nånstans i Ångermanland Småland och myser vältaligt om berättelsens Storhet (speciellt kärlekshistorien) och hur vi blir mänskliga genom berättandet.

Ja och det är ju från början symptomatiskt att oroa sig för samhällets sönderfall och att det är en sammanbindande kraft som borde till. Alisdair Macintyres bok After Virtue representerar tycker jag det här perspektivet. För honom är det ett narrativitetsperspektiv som borgar för mening, både personligt och i samhället. Allt handlar för honom om att skapa ett "sammanhang". Livet är en berättelse och genom detta finns det ett meningsperspektiv. Mina obehagskänslor lämnar mig inte ifred.

Jag kommer också att tänka på litteraturmanifestet som ett antal författare slungade ut i den svenska kulturdebatten för ett tag sedan. Jag förstår i och för sig syftet: det finns en helvetes massa klichéer om konstaplar med magsår och kvinnor som äter choklad och skvallrar med sina väninnor. Men så ska man återta Berättelsen. Den realistiska. Ja, t.o.m. det "renodlade". Form & språk mot Berättelse. En berättelse är tillgänglig och substantiell och inte ytlig och intern.

I kulturdebatt och t.o.m. i en del moralfilosofi framhävs litteraturen som hisnande existentiell och fin och framför allt framhålls vad vi kan lära oss av den. Jag tror det är en dålig tendens. Man kan förstås säga - och det vill jag också säga - att vi blir något specifikt genom det vi läser och genom de sätt som vi berörs av eller låter oss dras med av litterära verk. Det är en viktig dimension av vad det är att tala om att läsa skönlitterära texter. Men den poängen pekar ju mot att litteraturen själv är varken moralisk eller omoralisk. Det finns inget sånt som litteraturens potentiella kraft att skildra det Existentiella. Det finns ingen "berättelsens form" som skulle baxa upp en sån potential. Åtminstone kan jag inte se det. Därmed inte sagt att litterära verk inte kan ställa oss inför oss själva på ett antal olika sätt. Men väldigt lite handlar om att det skulle röra sig om "berättelser". Perspektivet "vad vi kan lära oss genom litteraturen" finner jag en smula moraliserande. Det blir lätt svulstigt och innehållslöst. Att klä litteraturen i högtidsdräkt.

"Men vad är det för fel med en enkel kärlekshistoria då?"
Svar: allt.
(loggar ut för att ägna sig åt a- och omoralisk, fragmentarisk fulkultur.)

12 November 2009

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

It's 11:37. The office. A rumbling stomach. I want to GO HOME. I am so tired of this shit.

“When people tell us that their families give a wonderful meaning to their lives, we usually refrain from asking them to justify this claim and the attitude expressed thereby …. Asking for justification for such a claim challenges people’s right to find their lives wonderfully meaningful in their own personal ways, even without having any proper justification for their attitudes.”

Yeah, right.

The worst part of this job is that there are several days when I don't have a clue what I am doing or why am doing it. But I guess that's how it is.

9 November 2009

Go Sture!

I dagens DN finns en text om en undersökning av textanalysföretaget Saplo som handlar om vad arbetsgivarna söker efter i sina arbetsannonser. Som arbetssökande ska man vara initiativrik och säljinriktad. Och:

Saplos vd Mattias Tyrberg tror att även den som söker arbete måste våga "sälja sig själv".

- Det kan exempelvis handla om att göra en annorlunda typ av CV, kanske en video-CV, föreslår han.

Sture Allén, språkvetare och ledamot i Svenska Akademien, menar att flera av de listade orden för tanken till reseannonsers beskrivningar av "det idealiska resmålet".

- Man får ju ha gott självförtroende om man söker en sådan tjänst, säger professorn med en aning torr ironi i rösten.

Sture är bäst!

8 November 2009

The sun (2005)


Aleksandr Sokurov is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting contemporary directors. He made the impressive The Russian Ark (that is a long take!) and he has made the shimmering little film Mother and Son. The Sun (2005) is just as impressive, even though it is a deceivingly simple film without aesthetic pretense. With the exception of one or two surreals breaks, this could be a stage play. The story is equally simple. World war II is drawing to an end. The Japanese Emperor contemplates his future. We see him mostly alone in his chamber: writing poetry, fiddling with biological research, dressing. He meets general MacArthur. They dine. MacArthur offers him a deal. They smoke cigars.

The performance of Issei Ogata, who plays the Emperor, is magnificent. His frailty and his tics are just as important as his lines. This is not a historical drama in the traditional sense. What this is: it's a movie about political bodies stripped down to flesh and bones. The presence of the very few characters are remarkably physical. This is of course something that sets the film apart from almost every film made today (even those who do their best to appear "sensual"). The almost insurmountable tension of every small scene is all the more surprising as the cinematography and color setting are so mundane - no flares, no tricks, no nothing. In this setting, lines that easily turn into predictable clichés actually work (when the Emperor talks about his supposedly divine nature). What makes The Sun such an extraordinary film is that it transcends every conventional concept of what it means to "know" a character. We learn nothing about the Emperor. He is an utterly elusive character - but the film seems to open up for the perspective that it is not very clear what it means to "know" here at all. For this reason, it is slightly misleading to say that the film attempts to present the "human" side of the Emperor. The film explores "viewing somebody as a human being" - that is true - but the disparate images it ends up with are an open-ended affair. No "humanistic message".

The Sun is the third part of a trilogy. I haven't seen the first two films - Moloch and Telets - but I hope I will get a chance to see them soon.

feminism, "the female body", violence.

I listen to a story on Swedish radio ("Radiokorrespondenterna"). A journalist talks about a hospital in eastern (Democratic republic of) Congo. The hospital treats a huge amount of women who have been raped by men; soldiers, ex-soldiers, rebels... Some women's families have been murdered. The journalist talks about how women come there, their lives torn to pieces, and their bodies, too. Some of them have been raped by weapons, one woman shows her leg that was burned with hot knives. When leaving the hospital, many of them are likely to be faced with rejection by their families. Stigmatization.

Over 40 women are raped in Congo - EVERY DAY.
A source from 2007 talks about 12,000 women having been raped during the time span of 6 months.... and: "In 2004–05, the UN and non-governmental organizations estimated that as many as 100,000 women had been raped in the entire eastern DRC." from here.

Some people who are suspicious of "feminism" believe that the only thing feminists fight for is power, that feminists are power-crazed women the only political goal of whom is to humiliate and rob men of power.*

Feminism is about this: all over the world, there are people who are reduced to the potential of being fucked by men, reduced to tools for enhancing male power.

Paradoxically, one aspect of oppression and violence is the image of women as fundamentally frail beings, frail because they have something that can be violated. 'This is part of the CONDITION of the female LIFE.'

Why are women seen as inherently frail beings?
Only in a particular form of world will women and frailty become synonymous; only against a particular background of sexual violence and oppressive practices will this be so.
There is a common view of what a "woman" is.
: A woman is somebody who can be raped. The world is always dangerous for women, be it peace or war - women need always be prepared for violence and abuse because these belong to the set-up of reality. This is just the way it is.
Women & children become the Frail group in need of protection, sometimes military protection.
[I can't articulate this better than this, and I know it is unclear.]

That there is a huge group of Congolese women who get raped is no natural occurance that somehow flows out of their being women in a dangerous world of conflicts and war. Rape & war are sometimes depicted that way. The frailty of women is often implicitly understood to be a "natural expression of war". Noody states it that way perhaps. Violence against women in the context of war is naturalized as a side effect. Women become faceless victims of an anonymous War or Conflict. Rapists are conceived as an anonymous force that can be explained in terms x or y or z (and of course this view of war is just as problematic).

It is important not to naturalize violence - or war, for that matter.
Women's sexuality is used as a weapon in war - but how is this to be understood?

One question is rightly asked by a doctor at the hospital visited by the journalist in the radio program: why is there not a mass movement reacting to violence against women in DRC?


* In the same program, it is noted that Carl Bildt rarely talks about women, sex/gender in his speeches and comments. Carl Bildt's response: he doesn't comment on "these things".

read more here ('I'll be a post feminist in post patriarchy') and here.

7 November 2009

Harlan County U.S.A. (1976)


I was first acquainted with the documentary Harlan County U.S.A. (1976) when hearing Hazel Dickens singing a song called "Black lung" which is included in the film and on its soundtrack. Watching the film was quite a weird experience. It evokes a world I am not familiar with. Hard, physical work, political struggle, a society in which conflicts and class struggles are openly acknowledged and brought forward. It's a film about a community for which the word "Union" stands for real political hope. I have very limited knowledge about the union movement in the US so this movie taught me many things. Two more interesting things about the film. The director - Barbara Kopple - is a woman, and a quite large part of the staff are women, too (this is interesting because there are few famous female documentary directors). The other interesting thing is that the film won an Oscar. I don't know how it was regarded then, but at least when watching it now, in 2009, the film is obviously political and it accounts for events with a clear political committment. This is not to say that Kopple made an overstated, simplified movie, like Michael Moore's. Kelpe takes her subject seriously and she take seriously the people she chronicles, too. A telling fact revealed in the film is the huge gap between the company's profits & the very modest increase in workers' salaries. A few other telling scenes include footage of corrupt union leaders promising that they will stay in power for a very long time.

Harlan County follows a miner strike against Eastover Mining Company in 1973. Harlan is a community in Kentucky. The strikers fight for safety; better labor conditions, fair salary and fair treatment of workers. Later on, they fight for the right to strike, too (the company threatens to assert a no-strike clause). Kopple bravely follows the action on the picket line and the debates on union meetings. A large part of the movie is dedicated to female activists who apparently were very important in this strike and very outspoken about the injustice that they witnessed (an Eastover company boss complains that is not the sort of behavior he desires from American women). There are also statements by union bosses and power company bosses. The strike drags on and gradually it gets violent; the tension between striking miners, their wives, mothers and daughters, the police and the "scabs" (company representatives, strikebreakers) endend in several violent encounters. One striker was murdered.

Not only is this movie interesting as a testimony of political events and as a very revealing account of union activism in the US. It is also a very well executed project (a project that apparently changed underway) in which people, ordinary people, are allowed to talk. The first part of the film features lots of music (I must admit sometimes too much), often performed by women. A moving moment includes Florence Reese at a meeting. She approaches the microphone, talks about the hardships, then and in the thirties, of "bloody Harlan". In a hoarse and unsteady voice, she sings "Which side are you on?" It's a thrilling moment of the film. The women portrayed in this movies are respected; their accounts and their solidarity seems to have been appreciated.

Aesthetically, the film also has lots that speaks for it (cinematography, a very nice way of using sound, lack of traditional "narrative"). All in all, it's a film well worth watching - for several reasons.

5 November 2009

Natasha (2006)

I am happy that a documentary like Natasha is shown on Finnish telly. Ulrike Gladik talks to a young woman who has left a small former industrial town in Bulgaria for a few weeks of hardships in Graz, Austria. She sits in a wheel-chair, repeating the words "bitte, Herr" and "bitte, Madam". Gladik's documentary is instructive in many ways. She talks to Natasha and her family and her friends. The film doesn't patronize and it is not sentimental either. It deals with hardships and povery in the context of everyday life. By means of interviews, Natasha's situation is explained. The film sheds light on racism and socio-economic changes in post-communist Bulgaria - poverty and unemployment (esp. for Roma people). Natasha talks about what it is like to beg, getting used to it, looking people in the eyes to get any money. Sometimes she gets a few euros and sometimes she doesn't. She talks about humiliation and what it is like to be made fun of, to be looked down on.
Stupid, racist Finnish politicians should watch this documentary and stupid, racist Finnish people should do the same.

The thick of it!


Weird Science har goda nyheter. Jag visste inte att det gjorts en film, In the loop, som grundar sig på den fantastiska brittiska serien The Thick of It. Inte heller visste jag att en ny säsong visas på BBC nu och att det tydligen finns en säsong två också.
Dammit!
Jag har sett en säsong av denna serie och den är fantastisk. The thick of it utspelar sig i ett fiktivt ministerium bland tjänstemän och politiker som befinner sig i ett apokalyptiskt kaos av politiska pseudohändelser och händelseförlopp som ingen begriper sig på men alla är lik förbannat övertygade om att man måste handla och man måste handla snabbt. Någon jävel måste kunna hållas ansvarig för att saker trasslat till sig. Som Malcolm Tucker, premiärministerns "all-seeing eye" beskriver det:
"If some cunt can fuck something up, that cunt will pick the worst possible time to fucking fuck it up cause that cunt's a cunt."
Tempot är högt och dialogerna helt fantastiska.
Som satir fungerar serien utmärkt. Efter att ha sett några episoder av denna briljanta serie ser man begreppet "policy" i ett helt nytt ljus.
Shit, jag måste se resten.

4 November 2009

Husisvisdom.

"Man jobbar på dagen och festar på kvällen - och dagarna är längre än kvällarna."

3 November 2009

Colleen: Les ondes silencieuses (2007)



Colleen, French multi-instrumentalist Celine Shott is an interesting artist. Her music veers between many different atmospheres but a sense of curious searching is always present in her records. Les ondes silencieuses was released in 2007. It's an austere, wintry collection of songs. The instruments are exciting (glass (!), classical guitar, clarinet, lute-like instruments, maybe cello). This is a contemplative record in the best sense of the word (not "meditation music").

2 November 2009

jEsus....fucking....chrIst.

Examples in philosophy

Bernard Williams gives the following example that is meant to show something about 'reasons'. A man treats his wife badly:

I say 'You have a reason to be nicer to her'. He says, 'What reason?' I say, 'Because she is your wife.' He says - and he is a very hard case - 'I don't care. Don't you understand? I really do not care.' I try various things on him, and try to involve him in the business; and I find that he really is a hard case: there is nothing in his motivational set that gives him a reason to be nicer to his wife as things are.

This is from an essay called "Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame."
This is....so weird.