When Gilly died.

I came across a note I made when Gil Scott-Heron died. Have read The Nigger Factory, but still not The Volture. It's on the "To read list". And please, if you haven't heard "The Revolution will not be televised", youtube it, spotify it, whatever, just check it out.

"Gilly is, like, dead now. But Gilly knew how to, you know, write and shit, so, you know, Gilly is dead now. At 62, in a New York Hospital. Dead. Now. Gilly is sleeping, and Gilly is, like, not among us, but all his stuff is still available. The Great Gil Scott-Heron, passed away, now. The Revolution will not be televised. Sleep tight, Gilly. Sleep tight."

Project Urban Study.

Where I work we build to many «cages», with windows to display mammals, primates and office workers in general. So I decided to honor this in my own way. Below is what I hung on one of the walls, the one closes to where I work.

The Hoax of the Gay Girl Wanting Freedom.

“Now freedom must be fundamental, in Johannesburg or South Central” Rage Against the Machine sang on their debut album from 1992.
Or should we say; in Syria, Egypt, Iran, Libya and in every other regime governed by narcissistic madmen. But also in any country where democracy stands on the town square as a pillar of truth.

A hoax or not, people are still being persecuted for wanting freedom, for demanding democracy and for their different views or sexual orientations. You have to fit the bill or else you're out.

But then again, in a democratic county they killed of Socrates some 2000 yrs ago.

Thoughts on the missing girl of Damascus.

What freedom exists when the words of A Gay Girl in Damascus sends madmen into the street searching for her? What freedom exists when you can’t open your heart and tell the world how you feel? But then again, who wants freedom when Totalitarianism is working so well? The Savage Beasts roam the fields in search of naughty sheep’s to barbecue on the fire of innocence. The scavengers of the ‘regimish’ mind peck on the bones of live prey, tearing the freedom child apart. Gay Girl in Damascus, may freedom find you before the hyenas get hungry. Today my words go out to you, wherever you are. Stay safe.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/07/damascus-blogger-syria-detained

http://damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com/

Few post in 2011, but have a nice summer.

2011 has not been a blog year for me. I am currently enjoying my writing too much. A publication should be complete sometime during June, and I am writing on a new story, so blogging falls down the list. But I hope what I have written in the past might be worth reading. Dave at the Octoberfest and The Savage beast… are some of those I had the most fun writing.

Have a nice summer.

Ida Maria and the Gainsbourg connection.

I’m diving head first into a dream of fresh lunacy on a night of no writing at all. At best this is what comes out on a stretch of wordless beats at the keyboard. I’d like to use the word typewriter here, it seems like such a warmer, more nostalgic word when it stands beside the cold, sterile Keyboard. But what can I do, we’re no longer in the days of Hemingway now are we. It’s the time of broken hard disks that’s upon us, just wait; your fucker will soon crash too.

Enough of the nonsense, get to the business, stop twitching and get the words going.

Visiting the fortress of Ida Maria is nothing like going to the Norwegian pop oriented meat market displaying fresh but oh so sour meat on retail. The mill that produces music in this country is grinding the corn, but the bread isn’t always that tasty when you slice it up. Ham won’t make the bread better, but mustard may drown the bad taste.

An artist that don’t need to be drowned in mustard or mayonnaise to get the taste-buds going is our, yeah I say our, Ida Maria, born and raised in some nowhere town in Norway called Nesna, far off from the so called hip community and beggar capital Oslo. They do know how to make music elsewhere too.

The moat that surrounds her fortress is filled with attitude and the birds flying over the walls are colorful creatures. The town folks sing-along to “I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked” and on her throne she sits like the evil queen, offering an apple like a fairytale witch. And by God do I let myself slip into that realm of hers, longing to sink my teeth into that apple.

I do want to be naked with her when the town folks sing her song, and aren’t we all “just another guy”? Don’t we all want to be that guy when we hear that song? Well, it’s a song showing how to dress up with a sexy attitude without almost showing “some mo’ pink” like every other female artists out there are doing, fronting the F**k-fantasy concept just to get the shallow flash of the spotlight in their direction. And again, mustard and mayonnaise is not needed here as we speak of Ida Mari.

The next song the troubadour lines up for us on the stage at the market square is Oh My God. Like some acid inspired frenzy he screams the lyrics into the air, spits each word out at you like it’s a chameleon tongue hunting insects. Beside him a fiddler stumps his feet on the stage floor and rips at the stings like the damned thing is trying to escape his cutting bow. But it’s all for fun, Oh yes it is, fun for the madman as the town folks try to analyze the song to death, but there is nothing to understand here folks, just sing along to the words and scream at the end.

From the tower another song crawls down the brick wall like a spider, another song is scratching its claws on the stone wall. Bad Karma is its name and I try to catch it like the little devil was a butterfly instead of this creature sticking its tongue out and smiling like a Joker.

At the end it’s the Homage I appreciate the most. Gainsey, sweet old “Rest in Peace” Gainsey, stains the song with his greasy voice on Cherry Red and I remember, or would like to remember, his escapades with Brigitte Bardot, lying naked on a grand piano in some Paris hotel, fucking, singing, creating, throwing great pieces of music into the air, pieces those tabloid gulls can choke on as they try to stir up yet another fake scandal. IT’S JUST A SONG, god damn it! When Cherry Red enters the Gainsey zone, I flash back to a time and place I’ve never visited but if you saw the movie it is a substitute, if nothing else. Watch it, the man with the nose is hysterical.

One thing is for sure, the castle makes me hungry. I wander inside the dream looking for a place to eat but weirdness comes blending in like watercolor on a blank sheet of paper. A bistro materialize before me and all I can think is; Give me a Rob Zombie on a stick, give me a plate of little kittens swimming in grease, a glass of piss smelling beer and couple of Chinese Baluts to top the dinner off. Boiled embryos inside the eggshell, that’s what I call a treat. The speakers inside the bistro is blasting all my favorite tunes, bare breasted women serve raw meat and the dream ends with the awakening sound of the alarm; The Black Keys’ Next Girl drags me into the post-sleep phase and all I can think is: Whatta fuck was that dream all about? Man, I gotta get some rest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balut_(egg)

I once said about writing...

I once wrote that writing is my medicine. That is not like a psychology thing where I lay my head in the Fraudian lap, but it makes me happy and at the same time it’s hard shit to write, or at least writing good stuff. It’s a great experience and it’s a freaking hell. It lifts you up in the air like you’re on an albatross and it drags you to hell like a bad horror movie rip-off. Writing is the most important activity in my life, regardless of how the product is received in the end. The process of writing is what matters. Anything after that is pure bonus.

The Epic Run of Charlie.

Everything is epic now, after Charlie said it. Every lip out there is quoting the fella who said “The run I was on”. More than 2 million people grabbed the bandwagon with both hands, gripping the railing like it was the Ark of All Time, clinging to his profile on the “Haiku”-site of personal messages; Twitter. The way to salvation goes through the Bi-Winning freight train philosophy roaring past the Establishment Town Hall like a mental patient on meth.

Man, the Charlie Sheen saga is that kind of reality show we all have been waiting for since the lame, castrated The Osbornes, At the Hogans or At Runs House tried to cash in on late fame. What we want is some pure, hardcore, mental stuff presented in a Henry Miller/Hunter Thompson-ish way, mad but entertaining babble that you almost can relate to.

I do raise my flag of Sheen-mania on my boat, ‘cause this “Epic”-run of his is pretty hilarious from a distance, I would not like to be on his little island when he starts going but I sure can take a seat on the stand and cheer this crazy horse down the track.

Ustream it, interview it, buy a freaking Go-Pro cam and get yourself a High Definition broadcast when you call up the poor bastards surrounding you, man. Compose fabulous Tweets for the Haiku people. Serve 15 minutes of Sheenish rambling, put your anecdotes on silver plates and stir it up with that mescaline, coked up energy we see wherever you pop up. Come on, we’re having fun here. This kind of entertainment haven’t been broadcasted since the nation was populated with one channel-people, when the shots rang out in Dallas. TV has become a dead, boring medium, the internet is overflowing with so-called social networking pages like Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin and all that crap. And then, in the middle of internet porn, world catastrophes and civil war broadcasts, revolution marches and sport controversies, a self-proclaimed Rock Star of an actor pops up with what will be called the Event of 2011. An event that will overshadow everything else, because people low a celebrity field day.

The seagulls follow the trawler to sea, the jackals lurk around what they hope is a soon to be decaying party and flies are waiting to lay their eggs in the meat. Toothless sharks wag their fishy tails, almost dead dogs crawl to the dry waterhole.

Me, I gotta get of the bandwagon now, end this opportunistic effort of a post, dig my claws into fresher meat without coming across as some kind of ruminant out on the plain. But you sure did put a smile on my face, Charlie, you sure did.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5aSa4tmVNM
http://www.ustream.tv/charliesheen

I am not one of you.

I’m no sensationalist, god damn it, and I do not identify with the tabloid driven news desks drooling for more virgin blood on the stakes like a hungry Vlad Tepes clone. Take that shit to the field and burn it like a witch in the heights of the Middle ages. Burn that news desk, baby, burn it to the ground before the Savage Beast comes along. I do not walk among you. I stand on higher ground, looking down on the plains where you hyenas hunt small pray. I am on the boat when you flock around the trawler for fish guts. I want to tell a story, while you want to make everybody believe the Shock-factor is a part of every story. I am not one of you.

The village idiot.

The village idiot has an epiphany
and sees as clear as water flowing down the stream,
just what it is he has become.
He closes all borders,
becomes a tongueless mute and
withdraws into himself like a hermit.

Like a regime hitting its communistic peak,
the idiot rolls out the barbed wire.
Hammering the bolts into the woodwork
just seems like such a good idea.

I am that idiot
I am that tongueless mute
I am the Hermit
I am that regime at its communistic peak
I am the one hammering the bolts into the woodwork
I am that idiot and
I am the one closing all borders.
Let the barbed wire roll into the sunset
Let the idiot walk blindly into the sun
like the idiot he is.

Choking on my own overdramatic melancholia.

It’s early morning and the sun is rolling over the horizon, as if Sisyphus had changed to something new, kicked the dung beetle of the hill and grabbed the glowing ball with fresh enthusiasm. But somehow it’s hard to get out of bed, to put my feet on the rug free floor. Outside a flock of birds has gathered on the wire, singing tunes unknown to any man, songs only found on radio stations unreachable to us all. Flakes of paint are hanging from the sealing, ready to fall to the floor and the autumn is preparing a subpoena for plagiarism as we speak. It tells the story of undone work. If I don’t get up soon, the flakes will cover me up like leaves on a dead squirrel in the park. I sit up and a breeze caresses my feet like a pestering kitten, horny for attention. But I manage. I do get out of bed.

The next scene is filled with the smell of poorly grinded coffee and even though I enjoy the smell, I can’t drink it, I don’t have the will to poor it down my throat. I light a cigarette as the caffeine filled brew is getting cold and my cat starts to play with my feet, still trying to seduce me without any luck. I just sit there, smoking, trying to decide what to do, trying to not sit around all day and when the time comes I slip out of my fluffy slippers and step outside, into the sun, into the sweating heat. I don’t have no place to go really, all I do is walk slowly down the road and try to look casual, as if this stroll is of importance but this pace fools no one, I have nowhere to go to.

The road to nowhere is going slow, dirty dogs bark at my slow pacing, they don’t understand me at all, but I’m not bothered by them, I just have no place to go to. At the end of the dry road I stop and wait, can’t decide what I’m supposed to do, have no will to decide. So instead I lay down under a tree to catch some shade, light another cigarette and search the clouds for hope, for comic strips, for newsworthy bullshit. A car comes by and asks if I need a ride but all I want to do is catch some shade. All day I stay under this tree, entertained by the nothing happening in front of me. It’s hard, actually, be entertained outside my head these days and when my head feels this empty, I mean, what else is there. I just listen to the birds singing, the dogs barking and the cars vrooming by, staying here forever, in this dried up hole of a place, under the tree, with no feelings at all, having made no decision, made no plans. I have nowhere to go, there are no more roads to be walked, no more shades to be sought. This place, where I sit right now, is all that is left of the world.

The Test.

I often ask Maggie if she knows what makes a person crazy. And Maggie says she donno, so I made this here test you see, to help me tell what makes a person crazy. The idea is to ask the folks back yonder what makes a person crazy, 'cause I really don't know myself. But I'm not so sure my test is that good, and the people back home is not that bright, like less educated kind of folks, but that don't mean they can't tell what makes a person crazy. The thing that makes the people from back home qualified for this here kind of test is that they do have a lot of crazies livin' around, you know, just some old farts livin' in shacks and stuff. These crazy people are the ones that the folks back home have to compare with and I think they will be just fine in that department, telling what makes a person crazy.

But I had a really hard time making this here test, 'cause whenever I asked someone what they thought of my test, they just said I was crazy, and I don't wanna be crazy, I wanna be just like everyone else. Being from Hicksville and living in the big city makes it kind of hard for me being like everyone else, but I try, I try real hard but still I don't know how to be like everyone else and not being crazy 'cause I don't know what makes a person crazy. It hurts my feelings is what it does and I don't like that. So this here test is gonna help med determine what makes a fella like me crazy, as they say.

Some people don't think I am crazy, I know that, but they don't count. My mama, she don't think I am crazy. The priest don't think I am crazy and Maggie she currently don't think I am crazy 'cause she don't know what makes a person crazy in the first place. It's just everyone else that keep saying this here hick is a crazy person and I don't wanna be. So this here test is like gonna help me find out.

So when I get back from the hospital, or the institution, I will know a little better what a crazy person is, even if they don't understand this here test that I have made. Even the kind doctors will have to answer them, even God will have to help me with this here test and I hope he can help this here poor fella, 'cause I don't wanna go asking the devil this here kind of questions 'cause I think he is mighty crazy in the first place, burning souls the way he is. No, I put ma trust in God in the end, after the doctors are through with me and then I will know what a crazy person is. But I hope they will say I am not a crazy person. Who wanna be one anyway? Can ya tell this here hick from back yonder, can ya? Well, at least I have this here test with me and that will be just fine. I know it will, 'cause I ain't crazy.

Feeling depressed and paranoid.

I have an appointment today and somehow the thought of a draft is in my head, you know, that kind young men get before they are called out to war. Somewhere in the future we all face the Grim-faced fella leaning on his scythe, that guy calling our names like a herdsman, like a nightmare version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. I know, this is paranoia and like painting the walls with catastrophes and bad premonitions. But what can I say, it gets me rambling and hoping my time ain’t running out sooner then I’d expected (don’t we all expect to live until our kids put us in the old folks home?). Most probably it’s nothing at all, but when you sit there waiting, not knowing, it’s like hell, like being in purgatory, in the limbo hoping to be sent out with a leave of absence slip in your hands. A deep voice, stereotypic like a bad comedy says “Not yet,” and the door closes as cold hands push you onto the doorstep.

Well, I might be overdramatic and seeing devils in every shadow now, peeing my pants like a sissy and I can take that kind of blow to my masculinity, but a date with the bastard is a case that would be hard to swallow.

End of Blog-yr.

Some beast has wrapped its claws around the right side of my brain with ”the intent to cause damage”. The pain originates from my neck and it sends beams of anguish to the command center. As I write this my stomach threatens to start some projectile protesting against this neck-based antagonist, the eye below the pain area will soon flee from its socket and leave me half blind. That’s what it feels like. I hate these headaches. Too much time spent in front of the computer and too little time (non in fact) spent at the massage parlor to fix the source of the neck problem that haunts me with the sensation a coming explosion. Fuck, I gotta do something about this before the breakdown, or meltdown, is complete.

Christmas is coming up, reading Bulgakov and trying to keep the house warm. -20 degrees Celsius outside. The tree is up and the gifts are honking their horns behind the cheesy red paper with Santa-, snow flake- and reindeer decorations. I’ll be cramming down as much fat food as possible over the next nine days. Gaining a couple of weights that I’ll need to run of sometime next year. Have to end this now, Mr K is here and his Talk Bonanza is on. The fucker talks like an amphetamine fueled engine. Enjoy the rest of the year (I’m being neutral here), folks, I’m locking down for the holydays. Next yr. 2011.

All I ever wanted to do is write.

I’ve reached a point in my life where all I wanna do is write. If I can’t, well, drops of depression drips on my head like a Chinese water torture. But I guess it’s not as bad as waterboarding, these drops just keeps feeding me with a desperate need to write and to keep writing. Waterboarding is after all a drowning experience, so it ain’t that bad to have these drops hitting my head like a constant reminder of what drives me forward every day.

I’d like to walk away for this dusty desk and get the hell out of here, burn every bridge and lock myself up in my study. I’d like to bolt the doors like Renton did in Trainspotting, do a cold turkey form the world and just “concentrate on me writing”. But I can’t. Life is so full of details, so many crappy obstacles that trips me over on my En Route to the Path of Narcissus.

When I write I have fun, even when the words gather around on the surface of this blog I know that this is all I ever wanna do. Since I was a kid I liked to create stories, loved to write essay and exercises in school when I was in my teens, wrote poems and thought a poet was my way. I finally grew out of the poetry style, or maybe it was all the drugs I crammed into my body in my late teens that killed the whole poet thing of, I don’t know. But the stories still had its space to grow in my mind, characters came to life, scenarios unfolded in my mind and I began working on them.

Since my early twenties and up until this point I guess I needed to mature a bit, to evolve and to find my place inside the writers booth in my mind. Still probably need some more growing before I reach a spot where people will appreciate my writing, but it’s good to know you can do better, to know you still have time to explore the wheat fields, that harvest time is in front of you.

So how do you get to that point, to the place where you are good enough for people to want to read what you write? What can I say? I read as much as I can, write as much as I can, even in a foreign language and keep working to become the best writer I can be. With best I don’t mean compared to others, you can only reach as high as what you have within you, but try to move forward, have fun, be honest and don’t deceive yourself. If you write stuff you don’t believe in, dishonesty will shine through it.

Well, this is what I believe at least. I know that I have evolved since my first attempts to write a serious story and I know I still have some miles to go on that desert road before you reach the crowded cities with your text, but what a joy it is to walk those empty and dusty roads, where only the wind and singing birds are your companion. I hope it’s a city that sticks it spires and steeples up on the horizon, but you never know until you get there, it might after all just be a mirage waiting to drag your hopes down.

But as long as you have fun when you write it doesn’t really matter if you are published or not. The time you spend doing it is all that matters. If you are published and people like your stuff, well, that’s a bonus.

The savage beast on "Being Him"; A man with contempt for journalism.

We met the savage freak of nature at his hide-out around midnight on a not so particular night. The moon bathed the scene with cold light and the whole crew was freezing like flamingos taking a wrong turn and ending up at the North Pole. No one was dressed for this weather and no one kept their mouth shut about it. It was like working with whiners straight out of kindergarten. I was nervous enough already and this bickering bunch of unprofessionals did not make my evening any better.

Four guards loaded with ammo was each holding a Kalashnikov and staring at us without even trying to conceal their disgust. I would not be surprised if they wanted to rally us up for some execution practice. That sort of thing is good for moral, The Savage would later tell us as he escorted us to the other side of camp for an exit through the back door.

When we entered the room of the interview the setup was ready; a beat-up chair, much like the ones used in classrooms sometime in the late forties, stood under a lamp hanging from the sealing as a poor excuse for a spotlight. The Commander, as he like to be refered to, greeted us with a bleached smile that nearly blinded me on the spot and shook my hand with the strength of a professional heavy weight boxer. I was not allowed to say my name, he would maybe have to kill me later if the interview made him come across as an “imbecilious”, as he put it, and not knowing my name would make it more of an effort to locate me to execute the smalltime assassination. It would not be newsworthy, he said, and no one would care at all.

Then he sat down on the chair under the lamp and tried to look like a mean bastard but he looked more like he was copied on a broken Xerox machine, the image of him was distorted and made you feel uneasy. My photographer started to do his thing with the camera, the light guy was kicked in the stomach and my makeup girl was thrown out of the room with threats of multiple rape and long hours of sodomizing if she ever tried such physical slander on The Commander again. Somehow I knew that we had to get this over with fast.

“The first thing I have to ask you, Commander, is how you managed to get an interview with such a prestigious magazine as (……).” (Red.- We are not allowed to mention the magazines name due to ongoing allegation and upcoming court dates).

“Well, it was a pure case of a hostile takeover of the newsdesk with AK-47s pointing in every direction,” The Commander says and puts his hands on his knees. “Then I simply said; It’s time for an interview boys, let’s get it over with, shall we.”

“Very impressive and innovating indeed, Commander. What was the reaction in the room at that point?” I felt a need to play my cards in favor of his ego to get some points in his good book.

“A couple fainted, one guy urinated on himself and the chief editor seemed to have a stutter problem. They all looked scared or maybe star struck, it’s hard to tell sometimes.” Yes, indeed, I thought.

The Commander has a history of slaying, excessive murdering and having a trigger happy troop at his command. If you want to stay alive around the savage bastard, you better stay in line and follow orders.

“What was the reason for this, shall we say unexpected, demand for an interview?”

“I had a need to put these people back where they belonged, scared shitless and getting a piece of the action, how it feels to actually be on the brink of being killed. I would say they have a very boring life and this kind of experience will make any man appreciate the fact that he is alive.”

“Why was a staff member executed before the interview started?”

He looked a bit dejected at this question and he set his tone of voice as if he was about to correct a naughty wild boor of a child on how to wipe his ass.

“If you don’t start of by killing an innocent bystander you will be treated disrespectfully from the start and no one will take you seriously. And besides, it’s good for the moral of the company to loosen their tight fingers once in a while. ”

For some strange, hypnotic reason The Commander has a way of getting into your brain and every bit of information seems like divine messages. He tries to cover up his thuggish ways with a plastic personality and the “Made in Taiwan” imprint is labeled on the backside of his skull like a warning in neon.

“Do you feel that nervous tick in your brain right now or do you have a sensation of euphoria,” The Commander asks me and this sets me a bit off. Is this a test? Can I answer this wrong? How do I get out of here alive and why didn’t I bring any hand grenades or wire myself up like a suicide bomber? Sweat starts to trickle down my forehead and my vocal cord malfunctions with every effort to sound normal.

“I most certainly feel the need to pee and get some fresh air right now,” I answer and the scrutiny begins with the hopes of finding a good prayer for my last minutes on this earth.

“What made you feel this way?”

“To be honest, you had the effect on me.”

I never learnt any good prayers as a child so I hope my imagination won’t go out on me and not be able to come up with a substitute.

“There you go. Another journalist cured.”

Next his gang of hoodlums shuffle us up and push the butts of their AKs in our backs in a gentle effort to show us the door. At the gate The Savage Commander, the mad hellhound or plainly put; Mad Bastard (I can’t say bastard enough about this guy) shakes my hand and flash his way too white teeth at me and says, “I sure hope we won’t meet again.” Me too, I think to myself and start to rummage through my list of secure houses to spend the rest of my life in after this not so charming piece of extreme journalism has come out.

On being and not being gay.

When it comes to "being gay" it seems like I come across as a clear cut case, but I'm not; I love the female body too much to give it up. I could probably slide into a Bi-thing and surfs both waves if I was attracted to men, it's just that I find cock&balls a very horrible set of tools. Men are hairy and bony, with a smelly hole as the only point of penetration. I could sure fuck a woman up the ass but not a point of entry who would need a Brazilian wax before it was neat. Blowjob? Getting one yeah, but not giving. There are no issues about going down and getting busy on a chick in my book. On a guy? Not likely.

Some people are sitting on the sideline just waiting for me to burst out of the infamous closet like a spring flower, becoming one of those flamboyant and colorful gay men they see sprawling down the street. These people are mostly homophobic and, I guess, pretty scared of gay men. I am not scared of gays. I have no problem with them. Some have even made a pass at me and I take that as a compliment. I mean, what else can ya do? It’s not like you have to give a complimentary hand job because someone finds you attractive, all you have to do is politely make it clear that it won’t be no ball game between you but hell, you are welcome to share my table anyhow. There’s no reason to be a mean bastard, they won’t rape you in a back alley or in the toilet booth, just share those lines and say “Thanks dude”.

If you are self-conscious, know who you are and secure about your sexuality, homophobia is the least of your concerns. What is there to worry about? I’d be more scared of my sons coming home announcing a career in politics then coming out as gay. All that matters is how you contribute as a fellow-being. Be kind to thy neighbor, give a helping hand. Try your best to make everyday a little better for the people around you. I don’t find that too much to ask. Do you?

Well, I don’t want to go into a long tirade on this subject. It’s just that I find homophobia so weird. I don’t like big dogs or flying, but that doesn’t mean I’m cruel to dogs or try to ban flying. Those are my problems which I have to work out. Try to get friendly with the dog, learn to know the barking menace and, like Zakk Wylde sings in “Fire it up”; Face you fears. That’s all man, Face to Face with Fear. Take the bull by its horns and learn to love it. OK, love might be too much, accept is more like it. And a bit of respect for one and other also helps.

Alice Glass and her broken ankle.

Alice Glass and her broken ankle taking swigs form the Whisky bottle on stage, the chick is my kind of half-fucked crazed artist. You don’t have to be a rockstar to have that weird attitude, to be able to do the hard core version of the being-an-artist shit we all have seen so many times made soft and puny. Nothing about Glassy is puny, she project that fun-dog, animal-on-stage personality and what else can you expect. She is an animal and please do bite me, tear out my flesh and stare into my eyes with a blank, Whisky-fueled gaze as you swallow me whole. And no, I am not talking in a creepy sex oriented metaphor here, or a wannabe-cannibal freak. It’s just that what we see through the cellophane of fame is a barely human thing hitting the bells on the stage with an almighty personality fit for a real Iron Man, paranoid and blind, but as dangerous as a hungry shark.

Or it might be that the crystal castle Alice Glass is projected through creates an optical illusion. But that really doesn’t matter, what we see on the stage is a performance. To make that image stick, and not seem fake, it always helps if it resembles at least some of the sources personality. If Pete Doherty was a swell fella living as a 9 to 5 family guy who’s rotting away in an office every day, his drug fueled appearance would seem more like a come-on then a lunatic. Yeah-yeah, I know I’ve used the Pete Doherty reference before, and I could have used Amy Winehouse as well, it’s just that I prefer Pete.

All this is of course based on a single concert observation, what is “googleable” and my objective views. It’s not based on interviews, conversations or real shit of any kind. It might just be a dreamlike version influenced by fake facts swirling around in the vortex of the internet. Sometimes the legend works better than the actual truth. Not everybody is as fun as Keith Richards, you know. Not everybody has a vault of madness and crazy stories, but some crazy bastard on the way has potential to build a fun-closet of anecdotes for the tea-party, stuff for entertainment by the bar, or more likely over a mirror used for chopping, whatever your choice is. I used to prefer the mirrors but I guess my time at the fun-house is over. Now all I can do is put on a Mad Hatter approach and fool around.

I had a mission when I first started writing this empty nonsense of a post. Landing on jibberish was like not the intention, but I enjoy getting sidetracked into lunacy on most occasions. What I did wanted to go into was Crystal Castles and that little love affair I’ve had with their music lately. First of all the debut album, but Baptism is a regular tune on my playlist as well. I actually used to play the Commodore 64 game Crystal Castles as a kid, so listening to the songs on the first album is something of a flashback. Even though they are electronic, experimental and noisy, CC fit into the rock genre as well; this kind of bands are at times more rock that rock bands tend to be. The anti-establishment, the anti-star thing and the “Fuck it”- attitude is a vanishing element in rock music. Grunge had some of that pure punk feeling of shaking up the establishment, but behind the walls, most of the “Fuck-it”s are more an image then a guideline.

Sometimes, just on the rare occasions of melting particles and coincidental mixing; those little anarchy kids are spawned in utter perfection.

Jokke; the giant poet who fell by the hand of the poppy.

To define a number 1 can indeed be a hard nut to crack. Not every genre is as easy to define as reggae where Bobby is the definitive master, the God of his forever loving followers, me included. But to me, the man who stands out larger than life when it comes to his craft, within the borders of hickey Norway, is no other then the late Joachim Nielsen. Jokke & Valentinerne (Jokke and the Valentines) is without a doubt one of the most cherished artist Norway has ever produced.

There is hardly an artist, a critic, a lover of music or a living soul in the boring streets of NoWay that doesn’t have a favorite Jokke song. Everybody, form beggars to aristocrats, high tide to low tide, from shadowy street corners to shiny solariums with naked chicks in the fake sun, anywhere you’ll find a punk or a princess who has fucked, partied, laught or cried to one of the many everyday, beat down poetic lyrics and appealing melodies from the diamond mine of Mr Nielsen. Jokke did not just write a song, he wrote a story. He created characters, people you could believe was a reflection from his own life; people around him. Dirty lowlifes and have nots, drunk lunatics and seedy bastards, people that crawl with the cockroaches and fighting among the hyenas. But most of all the lyrics feels like unpolished reality, truth spoken with bad breath and yellow teeth.

There are memories of concerts where the audience sing the lyrics better then the man himself, who had to fill his belly with beer before his nerves was able to cope with the stage. Memories of a concert being canceled and nobody wanted to refund their tickets; after all Jokke was drunk out of his mind and they loved him for all his faults and glory. These are the kind of stories that made you wonder who emulated who; was Jokke living the songs or was the songs living off of him? Whatever it was, the lyrics was a pure strike of genuine poetry, a drunken Dylan on the jet to destruction. Behind this façade a hard working fella created magic.

What really sent him to the fields to harvest the comings was the juice of that damned poppy. It was not supposed to be his way, he was not bound to walk down that road, but still he did. The most notorious and hailed killer on the buffet claims street whores and generals alike, it has no compassion and kills indiscriminately like a creature from the old testament, it swings its ax like a raving Viking tripping on toadstool and is as unstoppable as a freight train of incurable diseases. Junk is a plague and we produce it ourselves. It’s the Mother of all drugs, the king of the heap. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you start down that path, the parasite will dig its way into your brain and stay there till the day you die. Either OD’ed or of old age. But it stays there all your life and spends its time reminding you of the horrific pleasures you experience on your way to the last, decomposed station of life; death and it’s horrid smile.

The great thing about Jokke, like any dead musician, is the legacy he left behind when he died. He made music who will be played, loved, remembered and applauded forever more. He sang his way into the heart of a generation and he will continue to do so. We love our Jokke and may he have found peace where ever he is; in that Grand Hall among Great musicians who stand in the beating wind like statues of ancient Egypt, like totems of our Gods. Jokke, you are the greatest man to grace this hillbilly outpost of Europe with music. Thank you.

Alt kan repeteres:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYGzz8a67cs

Kneggen og Knugern:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2kOv1Rm8eU

May-Iren og Terje Engen snakker om Jokke:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ARtUNdDEkU

A sad fool off the happy train.

I woke up this morning with the memories of a dream still tumbling around in my head, making me feel sad. It reminded me of what I can’t have. I mean, how can I not crave what makes my blood warm, how can I help but feel like it’s killing me every time I close my eyes and the sweet fruit is bound to some other future. It makes me wanna cry and brings out that self-pitying melancholic drama, but it’s true, it’s tearing me to pieces that I can’t stand my ground and be a man, that I can’t commit to the right path without longing for release. I’d like to, you know, find happiness at just where I am, but the door is locked and I can’t find the key, I can’t even open a window. I sit in that locked room with every argument coming down at me like a mental hailstorm and every word is nailing me to the floor like the sad fucker I am. I feel both mentally and physically like a wreck here, with Lil Waynes “I feel like dying” ringing inside my head like a soundtrack set to break my bones. No, don’t get me wrong now, I ain’t set to leave this plane, that’s not what I'm saying. It’s just that not even writing will chase away the depression growing in my mind. The bolts have locked the chains to the floor, life can’t be lived in any other way; the timeline is set and to break that I’d have to be something so much more than a thieving bastard. I’d have to be an idiot staring into the face of Narcissus and discovering my own image mocking me with self-destructive satisfaction. Man, not even half a Jäger will cure this bitch. Maybe it fades in a couple of days. We’ll see.

Fossils from the Grunge Era; Excavating the cave of a beast.

If I’m the one to pick the three most important figures from the long buried grunge era, my names would read as follows: Andrew Wood, Layne Staley and Kurt Cobain.

Capitan Kurt
Kurt might be the populist choice, but he somehow got the whole Leader Badge shoved down his throat with Nevermind and I don’t think he intended to go that far. But what can you do when the ball gets rolling, except blowing your brains out. There might be a lot of reasons for Kurt Cobain to go into the heroin thing, flooding the Seattle scene like a pre-historic locus, wiping out so much talent in its way. More likely the kid had problems he needed to work out, but junk don’t want to solve anything, it just wants you to keep feeding your body like there is some parasite in there feeding off of addiction. But Nirvana became the flagship of the grunge fleet when the kids started to return the Michael Jackson album they got for Christmas for a bluish album with a naked infant under water, swimming towards a dollar bill. It landed Nevermind on top of the album chart and skyrocketed the band into the Elite Hall of the music business with something new, something that reminded the kids of where they were; in the middle of adolescence; in Adolescentia, a place where grownups don’t understand shit. That album blew my mind when I heard it the first time and sent my brainwaves from post-MC Hammer/Vanilla Ice and into rock forever. That time in history is in many ways one of the high watermarks where every new album was yet another explosion; Nevermind, Dirt, Vulgar Display of Power, Ten, Core, Siamese Dream, Rage Against the Machine. The list goes on and on and I probably missed some important albums here, but the point is; the early nineties left a musical void when grunge collapsed and MTV got more and more pop oriented. The rest of the nineties never managed to live up to the musical expectation created by this new line of hard core, anti star mentality. And what mostly blew the scene apart was junk, that potent drug who send you on the way to self destruction. That is a bad thing when you look at it from most angles, but it also created some haunting albums.

When Lane is gone what is left of Alice in Chains?
Take a look at Alice in Chains for instance. Dirt is the stronghold in grunge and an album pervaded with junk, in almost every song. Where would the album be without heroin? The creativity within the band would have found some other channel to project their dirty rays through, but it would never have been something as special and rare as this gem of an album. But you have to pay a price when you launch headfirst into that contaminated lake smelling of decomposed bodies, wasted youth and humiliation; that lake of blood, dirty water and poppy juice. Layne paid the price with his life, like so many others did. Junk does that to you, it makes you go all the way to the lid of the coffin where you lay down voluntary and slams it shut. There are survivors of course, like Keith Richards, Anthony Kiedis and Slash, but not all escapes from this daredevil game. And Layne certainly did not escape from the lake, instead it ended his career and claimed his life, but he marked history with his seal. When he finally died, Alice in Chains officially disbanded and floated around until they reemerged with another album in 2009; Black Gives Way To Blue. The album was a huge disappointment, if you experienced the band at its heights. The band, with William DuVall clinging to the batton, performs strong enough but those who are too young to remember the early nineties, might not be as convinced of the band’s sound as the cult members are. DuVall is not a poor substitute but we do miss the edge Layne brought along with his voice. It’s such a shame Black Gives Way To Blue isn’t a kick ass mindblower of an album. I’d love to see them delivering something unforgettable as Dirt. But you can’t get it all, can you. You get to see the band live, minus Layne, but this is as close to the original thing we’ll ever get.

Malfunkshun
Andrew Wood on the other hand died just as Mother Love Bone was about to be the next thing. From the ashes of his death rose Pearl Jam, but that’s another story. For me Andrew Wood, L’Andrew the Love Child, begun when I picked up an album by a band called Malfunkshun in 1996. By that time it was six years since the Love Child died of a classic case called Heroin Overdose. Just like Sublime’s Bradley Nowell, Andrew died when the sun was about to bless his band, Mother Love Bone, with success. As many musicians do Andrew played with more than one band, and Malfunkshun might be one of the more special albums to be released in the post-grunge period, when the memories was still fresh. He never recorded an album with Malfunkshun, as he did with Mother Love Bone, but unreleased tracks became the self-titled album Malfunkshun in 1995. Chris Cornell and the soon-to-be Pearl Jam paid homage to Andrew with a band project called Temple of the Dog and that again inspired filmmaker Scot Barbour to make the documentary Malfunkshun: The Andrew Wood Story. Andrews story is that of a persona inside grunge who died not only before the band had a chance to make it, but also before grunge broke through. He was a source of inspiration, a flamboyant fella with a facial kiss-like thing going and playing his love rock in a power trio who was unlike anything else on the scene. His death was another loss, a 24 yr old about to flash his feathers.

When the music’s over
Heroin took away some of the greatest personalities in a genre that ended up as a hype, a monster that crawled back into its cave and died with its belly full of talent. Heroin has been the ultimate anti hero for so long, and it is time this myth died in the shadow created by a mountain of dead bodies. Ain’t that enough? Yeah, I may want my rockers bad but the balance of a bad boy and a dead boy is hard to handle. Rock is dirty and druged out but in the havoc of death the monuments created by great music still stands and will continue to stand when earthquakes, floods and tornadoes sweep across the wasteland of half-forgotten rock stars. But they do live forever; in the music they created.

We are on the wrong train when nudity is such a sinful thing.

When I see discussions on the use of Burka, I wonder when in the history of man did we start to cover up. And why? Was it because of convenience or of shame, and when did shame enter the picture? No, don’t come with that fairytale about the Garden of Eden, that is just a picture to help describe the happening, trying to make people see that a change occurred. I mean, why do we have such a problem with nudity? Yeah, I know that church, human evolvement and so forth are a part of this answer, but why? We hid our genitals long before Christianity, before any religions, as we know them today, was established. All those cults are now cemented into the cultures of the world, but some place in history we felt a need to hide, to cover up. Even humans in tropical areas, untouched by missionaries cover up “the jewelry box”.

Around the world we have nude beaches, in Australia they have a nude bar where people show up naked and drink together. I would just fear a boner all night and probably getting one from all the tension, or my pecker would try to crawl back into my crotch as if I was in cold water, a reaction of fear. In France they have a nude village where you can go shopping nude, drive nude and flop your penis or breasts out in the open, like a natural thing. Elsewhere it’s like a social sin, or you are just a crazy streaker. And in other places women have to cover up and hide under a large blanket. Why do we have such a problem with naked bodies, is what I keep wondering.

If I took off all my cloths and roamed around naked, the police would pick me up and I guess a fine would be the reaction. People would stare, giggle, laugh out loud and point, “Look there, a crazy naked guy!” Yeah, crazy. Nakedness is a natural thing but somehow we have made it indecent. Shouldn’t we be more open about nakedness? Or would we just allow what’s considered a beautiful body to be naked? Imagine a sexy-as-hell person, depending on your sexual preferences, walk naked down the street. You would enjoy that. But if an obese person would follow nausea might be the reaction (but again, depending on your sexual preferences). So if nudity was full blown legal, would selection-of-the-sexy be the thing?

So whenever a celeb or whatever shows up naked someplace on the web, that is all fine by me. I’ve got no problem with seeing that. But 330 pounds of flesh, shallow minded or not, I do not want to see that.

Beauty is not based on body alone. A stubby girl, a bit overweight and all, who is truly happy, can be a much more sexy thing than a thin, cranky, so-called-sexy bitch with an attitude. Beauty comes from the inside, as lame as it sounds. But I am trailing of here. If ya wanna go with a nude-pic, fine, just make it classy.

http://www.vg.no/rampelys/artikkel.php?artid=10027455

http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/norsk-politikk/artikkel.php?artid=10003612

We dress up in slave made rags.

We walk up and about, flashing and turning, wearing cloths made in factories who exploit women in poor positions throughout Asia. It’s nothing more than a social rape orgy, and the poor are screwed without the sensation of being satisfied.

We want cheap pants with quality, we want our sweaters to last but at a low cost. We dump tons of textiles every year, shipping it off to the Grand Incinerator, thick heaps of black smoke rise to the sky as a symbol of our overconsumption, excessive in every way. Meanwhile, poor women in places as Bangalore or Cambodia work their asses off to produce these cloths we throw away long before the expiry date has a chance to flash its ragged colors over our heads. These women slave for us, they pay the price for our vanity, for our constant need for more, more, more. We walk into H&M, Wal-mart or a Nike store, depending on where in the world you live, with total ignorance on how the manufacturing of these products are. How are the working conditions for these women, trying to feed a bunch of kids, living in a place where birth control is not a part of the act, where they barely earn enough to feed the family, where they slave for your right to buy cheap cloths in a half-fancy low-cost store.

How can you define freedom under these conditions?

http://www.aftenposten.no/okonomi/utland/article3634967.ece
http://www.aftenposten.no/okonomi/utland/article3634971.ece

Dave and The Great American Mist.

Dave the yoghurt-boy had a thought but it disappeared into The Great American Mist. What about your yoghurt, I ask. I thought I had it with me this morning, he says as he’s fumbling around to find it. It probably got left behind like a dying solider on the battlefield or more likely on the kitchen unit. As I sit there watching this Returning-Mess-From-Oktoberfest of a man I wonder why every time they interview people on the streets of America it’s always the dum-dums that are standing in front of the camera like little children lost in the garden. It’s the ones with a complete lack of general knowledge that are interviewed, like someone is on the quest to mirror the dumbness of a nation, idiocy jaywalking across common sense. These are the ones picked out to represent the American nation.

I guess there are at least a couple of guys over there that know their home town is not the center of the earth, that America did now discover the world and with the understanding of Europe as not a county but a continent, or know what a continent is. It’s really scary to see these people walking around without a chaperon, without a legal guardian or any sort of support person to carry them with their lack of intelligence tucked away in a backpack. If I was a citizen of the US, I’d be pretty embarrassed of my fellow Americans.

Is the US nothing more than gun crazed, God loving lunatics, a nation of lost fools or can you make anyone seem mentally challenged through random interviews? I mean, is it right to represent 260 million, or what, citizens through these airheads, this knuckle draggers? For God sake, do something, electroshock ‘em, anything but let these people out of their homes and into the streets. And you let these poor bastards vote. They are clueless folks spinning the wheel and landing on whoever comes up on their front lawn with a bible in his hand and a gun in the waistband. These people voted for Bush Jr., twice! Or again, this is what it all seems like when in reality they are highly intelligent people. Who knows? It’s on youtube, anything can be faked and shaped to fit the glove.

I guess you can find these dimwits anywhere from Germany to Norway, from USA to England, but these people (see link below) are so far out there in the mist that you have to feel sorry for them. What about reading a book, google some shit you don’t know, try to learn -like- something every week. Study history and expand your horizon, throw away crappy magazines idolizing celebrity, turn off the TV overflowing with reality shows. If Trainspotting was written today Irvine Welsh would have written “Mind-numbing spirit-crushing reality shows” instead of game shows. Turn that shit of. If you fill your brain with shit, then shit is all you can project into the bucket between your legs. (And since this blog is called The Bucket, I guess shit comes to mind when you read most of these posts too). When “St Peter The Illusion” asks you “what you leant” on this planet during your brief time here, be sure to give him a good answer. Give him a good laugh, kick him in the nuts and hit that moaning face of his with a fat book called My Brain. Say, Yeah I learnt shit! Then walk proudly into heaven and talk to “God the Illusion” about shit that counts. I don’t think he’ll care much about TV shows and football scores, about Paris Hilton or who-fucked-who in rehab.

Dave did not find his yoghurt today. Instead he walked over to the coffee machine and pushed the Espresso button. Did we learn anything this morning? No, not much. The only thing that is sure, is that you can’t believe everything you see on TV, read in the papers or on the internet. Neither can you believe every video you see about stupid people to be true. But what we do know is a lot of Gods children are lost in the Great Mist. If you’ll measure the brain activity of these people you’ll mostly see a flatline.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJuNgBkloFE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27f0IimLQpU&feature=related

The wave of post-punk is surfed best by Green Day.

What I really enjoy about Green Day is how they have survived in the music industry. When they burst onto the scene in 1994-95 I got that inevitable feeling of this being a one-hit-album band, that Dookie was as good as it ever was gonna get for these guys. I mean, even how great the album was, it was such a cartoonish approach to the whole album that you didn’t believe this could go any further. And when I saw them playing at the Oslo Spektrum in 1995 it was 45 minutes of playing and then “We’re out”. There we stood wondering why this gig was over so fast. OK, until now this seems like a poor review, but we are on the turn here.

This trio are by all means a force to be reckoned with. They have earned their place on the highest level in music by delivering a hell of a lot of great songs, songs that are funny, that make you feel happy and so often have a message squeezed in between the lines. They have that seriousness underneath the layer of nineties fun-punk, punk that brought the sun into the adolescent bedrooms when Rock N Roll and Metal was banging it’s heads out with the post-Guns N Roses and Metallica period, after Kurt blew his brains out and Grunge crawled back into its cave and died like a pre-historic creature.

Green Day is the band I turn to when the clouds gather in my head with that feeling of longing for guitars mixed up with melancholia. Green Day tend to turn the smile back on and send messages of more than fun into my brain. It’s “don’t give a F**k” combined with a social conscience. Instead of being over pretentious and trying to be too smart the lyrics of Billie Joe seems more like paintings of everyday life of a white lower middleclass kid. Hanging around with nothing to do, no future, no plans, just a job with a nametag on the chest and carrying the upper class on his back. You are the legs of the table, kid, you are the carpet under my feet, the doormat and the bell calling the servants. What can you do about that? Go into unemployment. That’s a career worth waiting for.

But we have some great tunes for ya, kid. When punk broke out a bit of aggression was what the trashy kids of the UK needed to bang their heads in. Fun was what the post-punk wave of the early nineties needed with songs like “Welcome to paradise” and “When I come around”, overlapped by “Warning”, turning into “Know your enemy”, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and “American Idiot”. You can clearly see how Green Day are maturing along with their audience. It’s like they are walking hand in hand with the people the music was designed for. The big punk wave on the other hand died out or got weeded out with the trash bin when the garbage truck rolled by.

The first wave of punk started the movement, the main wave brought the tsunami wiping out the crowd but the post-wave was something you could surf on into the late nineties and all the way to the new millennium. Green Day is one of the bands that has surfed this wave of post-punk like a Kelly Slater, Laird Hamilton or Taj Burrow in the most outstanding way, people that make it all seem so easy.

Hate for the Romany people and love for our lazy bastards.

In the modern society nomads are not the kind of people who stands out in the crowd as “Wanted”. In some cases they are even kicked out of the land they wandered into.

France are on the field, lining up the busses, airplanes and the kick-out Generals are working overtime. The Gypsies are a wandering pack of beggars, hustlers and thief’s and France are shipping them off. Ok, this may seem a bit harsh, even stigmatic and racist. But look around and tell me what you see when you observe a Gypsy. It may, for all I know, be the outskirts of the Romany people that fits this description. Maybe I am completely wrong and a narrow minded bastard. Maybe I am a right-wing nutcase, a guy raised in suburbia, surrounded by nice white people who haven’t seen a foreigner since their last trip to the wrong side of town. Maybe I am the one who need to adjust my view. If so tell me I am wrong, but until then, I still see Gypsies on street corners and by parking meters begging for change and it comes out wrong in my head.

My attitude is that I’d rather give change to a drug addict than to a Gypsy. The drug addict has a problem, the Gypsy just don’t want to carry his own weight. But again, this might be all wrong. We live in a society overflowing with shit we don’t need, we are using money like it’s the only way to salvation, getting the newest 3D/HD-ready flatscreen TV, a new Blu-ray player and an Xbox in each kids room. A blender, you gotta have a blender, electrical heaven come to me, get me a laptop installed in the bathroom and by the toilet, save me from a technological impaired way of life. Shit, send me to the end of the universe just to have been there, waste money on a machine that will wipe my ass for me, so I can live better. Man, we live so good we look down on folks not on facebook, people who ain’t got a Spotify account. If you ain’t on the right buss, you won’t go to techno heaven.

So, if we can spend shitloads of money each year on all the gadgets we need to survive in the suburb jungle, why can’t we spare a few coins to the people who have made a career out of begging? Will you miss the few coins you throw in that paper cup? Not likely. So why do we disapprove of this? Why should we give away our hard earned money to some punk race that don’t wanna contribute to our wonderful society. When we waste like we don’t give a shit, why can’t we waste a few pennies to the Romany people? I guess it’s because of this thesis: Society works kind of like this, if you can’t walk we’ll carry you along the way. If you refuse to walk, you are left behind. Or maybe not. If you are the right kind of human, we will carry you, even if you are capable of walking. If you are of the wrong kind, well, you better get out of town and stretch out those tarpaulins somewhere else.

But if we just found some land for these people, helped start the first Gypsy State, would that work out for them? I just can’t stop wondering if that will be the first empty nation where all the inhabitant have immigrated, left the plains in waste to be among us with their accordions, paper cups and mobile phones. Have you seen a beggar with a phone? I have. We are doing a great job for these people, they are not on the Amish side of life, they are right here with us and we will never be rid of them. So start loving these thugs and hold on to your purses.

http://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/eu/artikkel.php?artid=10018641
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/19/france-sends-scores-of-gy_n_688465.html

A Marilyn Manson song floats by as I contemplate about the world economy.

“Next mothafucker’s gonna get my medal,” the intro goes. Yeah, my middle finger, I say and prepare for my departure. Next thing I know some punter has slid a comment up my crack and I gotta answer some shit-feedback. Man, you can’t even take a dump in peace in this town without having to answer a mail, in like, a nano second before your phone starts to ring like a virus is running wild. It used to be quiet around here but then the financial boat with the worlds money in its belly suddenly floated up again.

Some places have not been so lucky. People are losing jobs and houses, sleeping in their BMW, in tents or under some bush in the park, going to free meal programs and trying to hang on to the last threads of their former life. Society are facing something resembling the great depression and the nations without a safety net are the ones with the most casualties. Reports from the US shows us how wrong it all can go. The Great Nation surely got slapped across the chin by its own hand. There used to be a saying, “The new rich”. Now its “The new poor”, and these people are falling hard. Just think about how it must feel to pull up by the front door of charity in that black BMW just to get a meal, not to starve for the next 12-hours. That guy must feel the whirlpool tugging at his feet like a hungry monster, waiting to swallow him whole.

But in time man will prevail, society will rise and rebuild itself. It always does. Rome fell but man stood strong. Germany attacked its fellow Europeans but the continent survived yet another tyrant. Well, it was indeed with the help of the one nation always willing to stand up against madmen. Lot of shit can be said about USAs foreign politics today and in the recent past, but they rolled up their sleeves and gave us a lot of lives to help push the Hitler area down the drain. We must not forget that. Before I lose my track completely and get sidetracked like Alzheimer City; this is not about war, right or wrong. This is about money. About finances. About the piggy bank getting robbed by a kid high on sugar, ready for yet another trip to the candy store.

So as my working days are escalating again and I get more and more to do, I know that there are still people out there who struggle to even get by. White people from the upper class are experiencing what it’s like to lose big time. What it’s like to fall through the trapdoor and into the gutter, from mansions to trailer parks, living like a refugee in a tent camp in the middle of a big City, in modern society.

What this hour, in the human way, needs is yet another war. War always gets the money rolling. War always bring people together. War is good business. Always has been, always will be. The problem is, this is as wrong as it can get. When you go to sleep, watch the sky and be aware, someday shit will fall from the sky like the first snow of winter, and you’ll know a new pair of gloves won’t be enough to get you through that winter. And all this because some geezer see the potential in yet another war. Fuck it, I’m going to bed.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,712496,00.html

The bed bugs are on the march.

Don’t let the bed bugs bit you, they say. But how can you, like, not let them? The little pests are on the march, like Lazarus rising. The bloodsuckers where no longer an issue but somehow they are charging into our bedrooms, walls, sockets and random holes again. The stay of the radar, out of sight, but the shit stains are usually the hint to the mosquito bites you experience during the winter. What bites? Ah, the bed bugs. Nature is trying it’s best to wipe us of the map like it is gathering the troops and getting them ready for the battle. Bed bugs, madmen, diseases, quakes, floods, bees, sharks. Man, if nature was a bit smarter it would mutate every shark into land walking lunatics roaming the streets looking for a quick bite. If it was smarter it would turn the bees into wells of hyper potent poison. But nature has created madmen with shaking fingers over the buttons of the Grand A-bomb, men not mad enough to push the button, diseases not concentrated enough to kill us all, quakes merely strong enough to lay cities in ruin, floods killing only a handful of people while the virus-like man reproduces in ever larger numbers. It looks like nature is either softhearted or sloppy.

Or maybe the human race is a beautiful thing, capable of miracles of peace, love and understanding. The hippies got it, but the message floated into the ditch with too much acid, with a counterculture movement falling for the trap laid out by a Leary-cultish way of thinking. A great thought was generated in the minds of the flower children, but as usual it went too far and escalated into a nut-case wing far off the chart.

We are by all means a species out of balance with the rest of the world, but this can also be nothing more than an illusion, we might be in the bloom of our potential. We might have turned into exactly what we were supposed to be, a breed of builders, collectors, adventurers, artists and thinkers. Every scrap of nature might be a perfect thing, meant to balance it all out. Like the world is here for us and like we are here for the world. Every garden needs a gardener and man is plowing through the garden like a farmer on Meth. Man is weeding the garden like natures natural way of growing needs organizing, shit must be killed off, moved or fertilized, need more shade or more sun, it must all be neat, stones must be laid in patterns and trees lined up to fit into the I Ching flow of things.

I have no idea of what I am trying to say here, but for some reason the bed bugs are back. They are becoming a new problem and I am not looking forward to getting this buggers in between my sheets. Please, somebody kill ‘em all!

http://www.aftenposten.no/bolig/inspirasjon/article3687339.ece

But nature has put a couple of cute fellas out there to do the hard work, trying to keep our numbers down:
http://www.side3.no/article2997965.ece

The Mail.

Man, did I fuck up the other day. I sent, yes that's right, I sent an ANGRY MAIL to EVERYONE at work. Pissed off like a cranky, pre-menstrual mother off the happy pill. It was a short “fuck you mother fucking lazy motherfuckers” kind of thing. No, I did of course not use exactly those words, but the message of obscenity was in there. The funny thing was, like, it was so irrational, so goddamned fucked up. I was raving about in my head like a mental patient, like I wanted to be committed into the straight jacket, drugged out of my mind and strapped up in the padded room.

I felt so righteous about it all when I really should have felt ashamed. But you know, it's always afterwards that you figure out that you have, totally, taken a swim in the piss-lake, lost your shinny marbles and stumbled on the path of life. I am by no means a perfect man, so I easily forgive myself for my faults.

But, back to the mail, what was it about? Can you guess? Some of my colleagues did not know how to use a hanger. So I wrote that I understood it could be hard to use the hangers in the morning and that it “do take a MENSA polluted brain to figure it out, how to hang cloths on a hanger”. It was such a build up from all that stupid shit you encounter all fucking week long and I snapped. And you know what, that was soooooo good, to be such a bitch.

It did get some attention among the colleagues, of course, and the boss sent me a mail stating the unnecessary distribution of this mail. I said OK and surrendered right away. Was that wrong? I mean, when you have already pissed your pants, do you need to shit your pants too and throw your sanity away by hollering at the boss as well? My balls ain't that big so I went with the flow of things and joined the "You made a fool of yourself" wave going through the building like a cool breeze.

Did I learn anything from all this? I guess not but I can really recommend it. Maybe it will get you fired, you lucky bastard. I didn't get fired though, it's not a cynical place I am at... let me refrain that, my bosses aren't, but I probably am, cynical to the bone. When at a previous job, where the bastards buying the factory smashed the place up like a fragile house of cards, I also sent a not so happy mail.... does this begin to seem like a pattern? I hope not. I borrowed a little fun from Eminem and directed my anger at the American firm destroying our living. It was:

“Let's get down to business,
I don't got no time to play around, what is this,
must be a circus in town, let's shut the shit down on these clowns,
can I get a witness, {hell yeah}”

But I changed it to “Oh yeah”, my balls ain’t that big.

*Postscript: The mail was written and sent to everybody back in April or whatever, but I didn’t think it would be a good post so I moved it into the scribble folder and picked it up again this week. Like wine it might be a bit richer in flavor over time, or it tastes more like vinegar now. I don’t know, but anyhow, this is it; The Mail.*

Melancholy and self-pitying drama.

I tried to start a post
but all I could type was
some melancholic idiocy.

So what’s the point in that
self-pitying drama.

No, dude, I’ll find a new thing
for tomorrows entry.

Something fun, something totally
unessential shit.

But I guess it will be about
a mail.

Yeah, The Mail it will be.

Dave has computer problems.

Dave thinks the FBI is having him under surveillance. It’s kind of hard to say where this comes from, but Dave is as paranoid as only a genuine Yank can be. We observe his tense gaze at the monitor every morning when the same message appears on his screen; “Send to Bluetooth”. “I don’t send to no phone”, he mumbles to himself. He looks around, trying to figure out where the hidden cameras might be, his eyes wander as he sips coffee and I see his lips are still trying to mumble shit that don’t make sense.

What you need to know about Dave is that he no longer live in his native land. He has emigrated, left the premises, gone AWOL and found a new haven in a Norwegian cave. And Dave sits by his desk thinking the FBI is surveying him like a stray sheep in the wilderness. The Great Force of The Bureau, monitoring every Average Joe trying to blend in with the locales. Yeah, I’d like to believe that, but it sounds more like a bad Will Smith movie than a bite out of reality. But when Dave digs his teeth into reality, chews it a couple of times and spits the awful mess out beside his keyboard, it resembles nothing you have ever seen. It’s like a Picasso SLASH Dali version of the world seen through surrealism goggles, like a world without smell. This little monster of an idea lives inside his skull, manipulating the brainwaves and sending false signals throughout the paths between the parts of his brain. What the signals say? “Send to Bluetooth”.

Suddenly David says something out loud, to himself, and I sit there wondering; What? The message pops up on his screen and teases him like a virtual devil. I try to engage myself in a conversation with my friend, still smoking hot from the trip to the Bayern Sodom, not so much Gomorrah, but his eyes are fixed on the screen. I try to roll my chair over to him but there is snow on the cold shoulder, the breeze of paranoia makes me wanna find the closest sauna and bolt the door shut. I don’t want to sit in this post-Bush infested area. I wanna, like, be in the sun and shit, but what can I do?

The IT guy comes by and Dave shouts his name, making him come over to our little fortress of office walls.

- He needs a new PC, ‘cause it sounds like a lawnmower.
- Send a message to help desk, the IT guy says.
- I’m fine, I start saying before Dave cuts me of.
- No, you’re not. That thing is so annoying.

Our level of fatalism has never been that high, but we do believe it is the Yanks faith to walk blindly into the sun, like any immigrant in this country. We sit here, on office chairs from IKEA, ignorance as our aura and far away from any real danger, and with the impression of the world as a pretty far out place. To the great Dave the world is a place claimed by Team America of USA, aka all the evil bastards from Nixon to Bush, the League of demons, morons and assholes. Everybody else try to fight back, but the axis of evil are as black and white as any Sith-Lords system of belief. Like Patrick Swayze laid it out for us in Roadhouse: It’s our way or the highway. That is probably why Dave is using the paper shredder right now and sweating like a German pig before Oktoberfest.

My God, he is funny, that guy. I’m so glad he is locked in here with me. It would be a pretty boring place without him. My jacket might have beltbuckles on them, but he is freakin’ plugged into the system like a matrix clone and highjacked by the FBI paranoia. “Send to Bluetooth”. Some fuckers way or the Highway. Average Joe is on the loose. I? I am sitting on my IKEA chair and scribbling nonsense like it was news for the CNN. I probably got deeper problems than the immigrant beside me.

The Aulie trawler and the hungry gulls.

Newspapers, that is what they call themselves, but they are a sorry excuse of a media trying very hard to fall down the stairs, telling us what is happening in this world of ours. They are like hungry sharks biting and swallowing whatever is thrown into the sea. Take the Great Peacock Aulie, bless her sweet ass, all she has to do is posting a nude picture of herself on Twitter and the news desks are so hot you could have a barbecue in there. People are getting on the bandwagon and discussing (yea, me to it looks like), arguing, criticizing, parodying, having opinions and what-a-fuck! I mean, the picture is nice, like a fashion shoot. If a famous photographer had taken it and it was Kate Moss or someone in that league posing on that rooftop, it would be claimed as something else than a desperate attempt to get attention. The desperate ones are the “News”papers bored out of their minds, fishing for anything in the lake to show off as a big fish.

Whenever The Aulie trawler is cranking up the engine and heads out to sea, the seagulls are flocking around it, screaming and fighting for presentable scraps. And what does she do? Probably standing on deck laughing her cute ass off. I know I would, ‘cause it’s that easy getting attention and she rocks that boat of hers from side to side, stirring up water, making waves only seagulls flop around in waiting for fish heads to belch down like dishes from a five star restaurant.

I have nothing against seeing her naked, but I wouldn’t say it is newsworthy. A nude picture is anything but news. It is a body without cloths, nipples and a nice shave. Some ribs and high heels. A face with an attitude in a black & white presentation. It’s bait for the gulls and urban nudism. As long as the picture ain’t tacky, I say go for it.

http://www.vg.no/rampelys/artikkel.php?artid=10027455

Bobby at the front door.

When you discover reggae you have a choice, you can either follow Bobby through the door or you can stand on the door mat slapping hands with the biggest man in reggae. Bobby is a great fuckin’ artist, or was (may he rest in peace with Jah), but there are a lot of other great fellas inside that room too.

Me, I followed Bobby through that door and discovered the likes of Max Romeo, Eek-A-Mouse, Barrington Levy, Damien Marley, Clint Eastwood & General Saint, Dillinger, Beenie Man and Xavier Rudd, and let’s not forget the youngest Marley kid Ky-Mani (even though he is more rap than reggae). This is just a few names that I enjoy in the spirit of reggae, but the point is as follows; inside the reggae room there are a bunch of great bands and artists undiscovered by many because of the cherry at the front door. But inside you’ll discover great songs. Sweet feelings. Homophobic, yeah, but the music is not the less great. Every message out there can’t be perfect, but let’s be honest, reggae is a huge and wonderful thing.

Walk through that door, follow the man and keep slapping hands in every direction. Reggae is the freakin’ shit, I’m telling you!

The young Adonis’ and the modern Helen of Troy’s unveiling the world.

I can’t say I read much of what other bloggers write, not that I don’t care, it’s just that I hardly have time to even write anything on my own. So reading blogs is way down on my to-do list. I rather read a book, and I do read a lot in that department. Well, a lot might be an exaggeration, I read about 10-15 books a year, that’s what I have time for. Right now Papillon by Henri Carriere is on my bedside table and that is by far better reading than any blog. That is kind of a backstabbing thing to say for someone filling a webpage with crap himself, hoping that some poor sod will stumble onto it for a quick read. But I have made an observation when it comes to blogging and I have a Q for the people, those few who wander into The Bucket (of waste). OK, here it is, my question of the day: Why are most of the bloggers, or at least the top-bloggers, mostly beautiful young people, preferably girls? What drive readers to the young and beautiful? Are there no… sorry for the expression, ugly chicks on the blog-train?

Do you have to be a young Adonis or a modern Helen of Troy to be readable? Is it the thoughts of the young and beautiful we crave or are the ugly ones just shell-minded people not worthy any attention? I don’t know why this looks like such a weird fact or maybe it’s not, maybe I am so wrong about this, but whenever I encounter a blog mentioned in the newspapers on the web, it is ALWAYS some young hot chick writing about the importance of whatever. The next Q that popped into my mind was; Who read these blogs? I might already be too old to understand this shit, but I’d guess guys would be the answer. Has blogs, facebook and flickr become a substitute for porn surfing? When reality shows are such a huge thing, it looks like people want reality with a screenplay, storyboard and a director. And that is also the case for porn, with Voyeurism and some couple caught on camera and pix of girls gone wild and young drunk whoever caught naked or flashing boobs, being violated on some sleazy web page. Is reading the blogs of these young and beautiful nothing more than a way of masturbating?

I’d like to read the blog of some ugly, fat chick. I’d like to see her on top of the “10 top blogs” list. I’d like to read about her encounters with the world, her latest lay, trip to the movies or what she think is gonna be the next big thing. When young people, good looking or not, writes about something that matters more than shoes, shopping, a crazy in-party or posting pictures of a trip to the park, I say good, post some words for the world that is worth reading. But somehow they always seem to look like cover girls, like they were dumped from the latest video shoot of some new Lady Gaga video. I too like to look at beauty, but when I read, what she or he looks like doesn’t really matter.

So come on, find me a fat & ugly one that writes about the world and I’ll read her or his stuff right on.

http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/uriks/article3817041.ece

Dave at the Oktoberfest.

David returns from Oktoberfest with an accordion under his arm and the first few hairs of a mustache under his nose, lederhosen in his suitcase and THE hangover thundering inside the alcohol bombarded brain of his. It is easy to say that something has changed in David’s personality. It’s probably the ompa-ompa music that has gotten into his nerves system or it has reprogrammed his brainwaves. Anyhow, Dave is no longer Dave, now he is more like… Fritz or Heinrich or Wilhelm, something like that. It’s like a German clone has returned from Bayern, and the Yankee guy we knew was kidnapped and buried somewhere along the autobahn, under six feet of concrete like a post-war secret hushed down from the heights of the Nazi-era.

Big breasted women yodeling and serving to much beer, throwing Bratwurst and Frankfurters on your table, grilled swine in all its glory; Pork Knuckle, Pork Roast, Wiener Schnitzel and Nürnberger Roastbratwurst, Kasseler Rippchen and Mettwurst. A diet queen would die of instant fat poisoning within thirty minutes of devouring this bonanza of food and alcohol. And who wouldn’t love this? Fat food and rivers of beer, a social gathering fit for a last offering before leaving earth and ascending upon heaven. After Oktoberfest you can die happily and end life with the blast of a German Luger. Go out with a bang, enter the Pearly Gates with the ringing still in your ears. Man, what would St Peter say? What would God say to this massive gluttony, Capital Sin number 3. I’d say he’d have a case of sin number 6; Envy. Or more probably he would transform into a fat German guy and participate, cramming down as many sausages and Giant Mugs of beer as possible. I gotta say I’d like to be Gods sidekick or chaperon that day. A priest wouldn’t do any good on that event. No no, send in the little devils, the demons of gluttony, the fellas responsible for all the obese mountains of human fat walking around the streets of America. Or better, send those fat fuckers in with God at the Oktoberfest and cheat the clergy of the experience.

On David’s return to work after the somewhat special trip to Germany, we observe a huge change in his behavior. Not only is his dialect a new kind of sound, it is also the sound of trying too much at the same time as it gives the impression of being authentic. We have no idea how he pulls this off but when you hear him speak at first you think it sounds fake. Then your brain shifts and make you believe this it actually how a Bayern immigrant would speak. But nature has its tricks and David is definitely pulled out of the magic-sleeve. And David now has a new taste in music, and it pollutes our ears like toxic waste. His desk is filled with stacks and stacks of German ompa music, blasting out of his green and yellow Skullcandy Ti Stereo Headphones. Somehow the music and the headphones do not match at all, it seems wrong in every way. But this is the new Dave, the new man returning for the German Sodom, not so much Gomorrah, and the metamorphosis has left us all baffled, dumbstruck and flabbergasted. When a college comes home as a completely new person, like a computer with a new, strange software, you do feel a bit like the Twilight Zone has hit town.

But Oktoberfest may not be such a bad place. It sure looks like a hell of a lot of fun, like an event you should go to at least once in your life. Why not? It’s food, drink, happy people and maybe some yodeling. A friend sent me a song over Spotify by this Japanese guy named Takeo Ischi, Der Japanische Jodler. If you can get this kind of combination, or alienation, by going to Oktoberfest it must be some powerful shit they got down there. I’ll put this Bayern gathering on my bucket list and go down there when my prostate starts to grow, when my hair is all white, my face is covered in wrinkles, when bushes of hair sticks out of my ears and my eyebrows are like one huge rain gutter and making my face a strange or funny thing. I’ll go there someday, in the great mist of the future. I’ll drink gallons of beer, eat Bratwursts and Frankfurters, Pork Knuckle, Pork Roast, Wiener Schnitzel and Nürnberger Roastbratwurst, Kesseler Rippchen and Mettwurst, with Rotkraut and Kartoffelpuffer on the side, have a bowl of Leberknödel Suppe and drown myself in German milkmaids, I’ll wear lederhosen all week and roll into a river to end my days as happy as an old man can be. Then it will be farewell world and Hello God, how was your trip to Oktoberfest? And he’ll answer; It was just like heaven. Sorry for not believing in you when I was alive. And He’ll answer; That’s OK my son, have a nice journey to hell. Whatta bummer that will be after Oktoberfest.

An old breed is walking into the tar pit like a blind mammal.

Are the publishers the new dinosaurs to follow in the steps of the record companies and face extinction when the digital meteor hit the book market? Or are we, like, gonna witness a grand revolution in the field of book publishing?

Publishers are walking into a field of land mines and they don’t see the craters in the sand from an ancient time when the music business walked along this dying land of dead dinosaurs. Spreading .pdf documents in every direction as the new way of selling books just to be a part of the digital world is like walking into a trap built by your own hands while sleep walking and breaking a leg in the fall, being trapped in your own stupid hole just because you were an ignorant, naive fool. Nobody’s gonna keep their fingers of the Ctrl + C button follow by a push on Ctrl + V button, copy & paste it baby, do it, it’s that easy.

.PDF’s are a product not meant for book publishing but somehow the worst solution was chosen. I mean, how stupid are you? Haven’t you all learned from the music industry? Haven’t you seen what digital products are? It’s easy copying and easy sharing. Don’t even think for a second that people ain’t going to share shit, ‘cause they are.

“Hey man, you got the new Stephen King on eBook?”
“Yeah, just let me make you a copy.”

This conversation may seem a bit weak, but you get the idea. If the new way of selling books is a .PDF based system the product will be treated like an .mp3 file where the users share books among them self, and don’t even try to compare sharing with a library. If the library was giving away copies of a book to everybody that walked through the door you’d get close to what file sharing is.

And who wouldn’t share? Consumers are not faithful towards producers of material, they are loyal to other consumers, to their friends and family. If you ask a friend if he can send you a copy of this or that eBook and he says, like, “no way man, buy it”! You will think of him as a cheap bastard. And who want to be a cheap bastard? But sharing the digital products are not a phenomenon among people knowing each other, The Pirate Bay and its peers/siblings/equals provide the service of Wide Word Sharing. But is there a solution to this?

First of all; stop thinking of digital products as something you’ll get your hands on, start thinking license, start thinking fresh and new or the digital costumers will in time rip away your whole market.

Second step in this process is a system or platform in the realm of Spotify. If people are willing to stream music, they will stream books. iPad with free 3G, a spotifyish kind of platform where you pay a fee to open a license for the title you want to read, that is more likely a way to go. This is user friendly and it protects the interest of the writers.

Well, what can I say about myself? I freaking love books. I love to read, to put them on my book shelf and watch them standing there as a cabinet full of prizes, as a token or symbol of my own fake intellect. Books do that to me, probably, but I love the product, not just the words inside them. That’s why I don’t care much for a red and white adobe-icon on my laptop, or are tempted to by a hand held pad that will cheat me out of my experience with a book. And a lot of people are like that, but the generation growing up and the next will be more and more used to quite other ways of reading.

So, do something now, before it’s too late and find a better way to meet the market in the digital world. The answer it out there, just open your eyes and a new world will unfold before your eyes. Your future depends on it. It’s do or die. Fuck or be fucked. Kill or be killed. Drink from the fountain of prosperity before the meteor hits you in the face like an iron fist.

When this shit is taken care of I too will go digital. Until then I’ll swear to the old ways.

The Doors and Jim Morrison lovebug inside my head.

I was born about six months before the American Prayer album came out, and seven yrs after Jim Morrison died in that hotel room in Paris. Safe to say I did not experience The Doors during their heights, nor did I ever get to see Doors-like acts until I saw the movie about the band by Oliver Stone and it just hooked itself onto my main nerve and made me a Doors fan for life.

The poetry of Morrison had a huge impact on my life as a teenager, in that post-Doors movie area when it became cool to listen to and idealize the band once more in what seemed like a second coming. Well, it might not have been as that much like a new wave, Morrisonaries have made their pilgrimage to Peré Lachaise long before the movie came out, with that “going to Paris to write poetry” kind of thing being a mission in life for so many people, ever since his death. But to me, The Doors revelation was it, it was the first serious stone laid down in the foundation of my own writing.

I did not understand too much of what his lyrics or poems was about in those days, might not understand much of it today either, but it was the way he used his words as rhythm in a playing matter. It was fun to read the poems and American Prayer, when it was re-released on CD around 1995-96 or something, let me experience the poems with the power of one of my favorite albums of all time. It just lifted the words onto a new level.

Jim Morrison was so printed into my life as a teenager that I felt a psychic connection with Jim and a lot of my writing was inspired by his poems. A mental nutcase maybe, but that was what it was like. Jim was everything to me and he was in my head. I typed out his poems on an old typewriter, framed them and hang them on the wall, read The Lords and the New Creatures and the two collections of his poems in Wilderness and The American Night, read the biography “No one here get out alive”, saw the movie again and again. Then later, in my late teens, acid made me understand the concept of the movie way better and I reconnected with Jim in a totally new way, I felt like I had figured him out in a way you cannot do without letting your brain taste that meltdown of the brain. No, I do not believe in any opening of doors with acid, it felt more like burning bridges. But it was fun to get closer to him by trying to understand the acid experience.

But anyhow, I am waiting for the new movie, “When You’re Strange”, to hit town or to get released on DVD. But in the meantime, I am still a huge Doors fan, I listen to Ray Manzarek on Spotify, combined with the American Prayer album these days and it makes me send waves and waves of “thank you”s to the man on the keyboard . Listening to Ray tell his tale of the Doors and spinning off on the everlasting love and fame of Jim Morrison just makes my day a stroll down the old Jim-mania alley that I used to go down so many times in the past. I was even a pilgrim myself, taking a picture of his grave and hanging it on the wall, blown up to a full size poster.

I am not quite sure what this entry is actually about but it feels like a tribute to The Doors, to Jim Morrison and a thank you to Ray Manzarek for recording his story of The Doors and Morrison on the CD called “The Doors: Myth and Reality”. The band made a huge impact on my life and I am glad I discovered them when I was young enough to get totally sucked up in a Doors/Morrison zone that sent me on this journey that is my life. I guess everybody has their own trip with similarities and easy comparable elements, and it all seems genuine when you're in the midst of the intensity.

Roskilde 2010, looking back.

It was a week of weed and Jäger, total lack of paranoia and being sunburned with the look of a lobster during the high-season. It was great in every aspect of the word and the sweet pleasure of freedom grabbed me like a horny servant. Legions of crazy campers roamed around like mental patients on the loose, dressed up as Super Marios, in that famous Borat bathing suit or completely naked, dirty smelly bastards and grown children on the run from a birthday party where being dressed up as a cowboy was the thing.

By nighttime you fell asleep exhausted and fucked up, freezing and pulling the sleeping bag around you, dreaming the lucid dreams of a stoned teenager. When you woke up it was like a heat wave had struck your tent and all you could do was gasp for fresh air and pull franticly at the tent zipper to let piss infested oxygen flow into the sauna you were sleeping in. The first thing you notice when your lungs are filling up with that disgusting smell surrounding the tent area, is a broken deck chair, two used condoms with semen so fresh that sperm cells are still swimming around in it and some neighbors dick hanging out in the open, marking the owners territory.

I stepped out of the tent and looked around at the madness. It was camp flags and sex dolls waving in the air, drunk lunatics snoring in the surrounding tents. The whole place was like a gigantic havoc of yesterdays party, trash everywhere and tents blowing in the wind as far as the eye could see. Say what, like 70-75.000 campers, something around those numbers, where making the best of the situation by being as fucked up as possible. Beer for breakfast, joints for lunch and booze for supper, projectile vomiting as a reverse midnight snack.

Walking around on that grand field and observing this scene, you can hardly believe you are a part of it. I mean, who can? How can you believe that some weirdo has tried to give himself a haircut in the middle of the night and are now standing in front of you in the food cue, looking like he’s been manhandled by a hairdresser on acid? Whatta fuck is wrong with these people? Nothing, they're just letting everything from normal, stuck-up society go and releasing every went, letting steam out, having unconditioned fun. And I am digging the whole scene, the nakedness, the dressing up, the music, oh god, the music.

Dirty rockers from Iceland; Solstafir, and the gigantic monster of a prodution by Damien Alburn; Gorillaz, some chick holding down the preasure of vomit pushing its way up from an overfilled wine belly, nothing but a drunken swine, probably letting it all go in the crownd somewhere, the old grunge wave with Alice in Chains in front but lacking the overdosed and long gone Lane Staley and how I miss his voice, punk fun and insults at the NOFX gig and a huge disapontment watching Them Croocked Voltures, three men having spelled success for you in ever way up untill this point, the surprise gig being The Mexican Institute of Sound, tequilla infested party style and a jumping crowd, joints in the air and kisses in the wind, and at last the grand finale; Prince, the old hag making magic in the cold evening of a Danish summer night.

But of course some seen - some missed, like Motörhead and Prodigy, Staff Benda Billili, Speed Caravan and Moderat, Robyn, LCD Soundsystem and Jack Johnson. Well, you can't see 'em all, you just can't. 18 concerts was enough and what was seen. We spent a week at the Great Festival and crawled helpless home to the boring life of everyday, back to the dead ends, back to the vacuum created in our lifes after spending a week in Sodom, a week in Gomorrah, a week in heaven. Next year? Who knows, maybe we'll find a hole and dig our way down to hell. Who knows. Fuck it.

Ear drums blood beaten by Skambankt. Whatta pleasure!

The first time I heard Skambankt it was like a shot of heroin rushing through my veins, shooting a stream of ecstasy from ear to brain to body and soul. Far away from the realm of Kaizers Orchestra a distant cousin sledgehammered its way into the Norwegian platform of dull music and their demand to be heard was far more a seduction then a hostage situation. Or maybe like an erotic hostage scenario where your musical crouch was wet from pleasure and aching for more more more.

That’s kind of how it was for me the first time Dynasti blasted through my radio at work and blew me away. I just had to find out “who tha fuck” these guys were. What I found out was that the band, at that point, had two albums and an EP available. I got hold of all three and played them non-stop in the car. Even my son at age 4 or what he was at that time wanted to hear the music on the short drive to the kindergarten. He even commented on the dialect of the vocalist, saying he had something in his throat (you know, like when you’ve got a cold and slimy stuff is stuck down there), that’s how intense he listened to it.

I have had the pleasure of seeing the band live 3 times. Not many times if you compare to a travelling fan who have almost lost count but all three concerts have been an explosion in my ears. A wonderful supernova splitting sound molecules and leaving my heart pumping like a mad machine when the last tone has died out and the last syllable is uttered.

The only disappointment came with the last album, Hardt Regn from 2009. It sounded like too much of the autopilot was working overtime while the band just had a good time making music. It was down a notch, but that was just because they had delivered music on such a high level up to that point. It is quite natural to lose a bit of your pace when you run along the track. What’s important is that you gain speed again and pump that magical shit out like a canon shot, a shot that only can be found in the wilderness of Snowmobile Land where Skambankts sound belong.

If Skambankt is a new thing to you, which is close to unheard of today with the bands success, you should start with the debut album and work your way forward. Take your time with each album, listen to it like a pack of over-religious people listen to the priest and let your musical soul fall in love with a band that has no intention to be anything else but the best, a monument in Norwegian music history. If they can keep up the quality of the self-titled debut, the EP Skamania and the second album Eliksir, this will be one of the greatest rock bands Norway has produced. And yes, we can believe in that mania!