Malcolm McLaren takes a dive.

Punk, it finally broke the barriers in the late seventies with a spurt of white kids from the gutter roaming into every scene in society, from music to fashion, newspapers and TV. Every label wanted to sign a punk band, because it was the new thing, the fashion wave and the flavor of the moment, anti-establishment with lack of respect for the authorities mixed up with what seemed to be their own ideology. What started with the beat generation was overlapped by the hippies and passed on to the Punk scene. Punk bands who had just played a couple of gigs got signed right away, even if they sucked as musicians, but got hyped up and made into a musical institution. The Clash, The Sex Pistols, Ramones and the Buzzcocks, famed bands who got the ball rolling, but the one guy who stands out in the history of punk, are written in stone; Malcolm McLaren.

At the age of 64 he packed up his bags for the last time and passed on to the other side of life, long after Sid took his final breath. He was the man responsible for the biggest hype in music history, The Sex Pistols. A lousy band on the lowest level of music, trashy and complete mental, but was the perfect spawn of the new swing in music. Led by Johnny Rotten on vocals and the worst bass player in history, Sid Vicious, they managed to kick the punk genre into heavy rotation. The band was far from good, and the worst thing is when you listen to the songs and look back in time, is that what was made was a handful of songs that worked perfectly, songs that provided an attitude, provided musicians and crowds from the same level, people that wanted exactly the same thing, that came from exactly the same place and understood just perfectly what it all was about. They was unemployed, dropout-kids and white trash trying to make their way in life. In a way what the punk movement accomplished was a highly beautiful thing; against all odds this terrible shit actually was made legitimate because it was made by the same scrubby people that was hopping around in the crowd. It was not Titans travelling around with a huge stadium rock show, it was shit bands playing at shit holes and trashing about. It was raw, unpolished and sour, but it was their music, their scene and they dived into that pit like it was the garden itself.

You cannot deny punk its place in history and you cannot deny McLaren his place in history either. And you cannot deny, even how crappy they were, The Sex Pistols their place in the history of music. They led the way, the adolescence age of the genre, born with the likes of The New York Dolls and MC5, Iggy Pop and the Queen of the lot; Patti Smith. When punk became the thing, it was more or less a second wave. The Pioneers was either broken up, beat down or rolling on. The pioneers of punk has to watch the Pistols on the throne, but the throne is not what it’s all about. Who cares about the leader of the pack, punk is just a bunch of rats crawling around and got housebroken in the early nineties with bands such as Green Day and The Offspring, Bad Religion and Blink 182. Today punk is a more pop oriented and cleaned up version of what it started out as. In some ways it’s for the best, in other ways it’s a loss of that horrific edge that punk sprung out of. If you love music, and I don’t mean just a general liking, but love music, punk is one of those rare moments in time you have to treasure. Punk provided latitude in the geography and terrain of music. And as they bury Malcolm McLaren his contribution to music will live on.

The ragged flag of punk is waving in the wind and the flag pole has stood its ground. Today we lower that flag and salute the late Malcolm McLaren with the remains of the flag he helped rise.

http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/uriks/article3597851.ece

The universe and the ant.

I’m not going to reveal any grand philosophical answer in this post, simply because I can’t. No one can actually give a correct answer to the content of this blog post and the answer to that is pretty easy; We do not know the complexity of the universe. We can only guess and assume.

What I asked myself was two things. How can we determine that the universe is expanding, and what is the universe expanding into, over or crushing in its way? This is a hard nut to crack. If something is expanding, it needs room to expand in. So instead of trying to solve a problem I have no capability of figuring out, I found a way to explain my own lack of ability. The reason why we, or at least I, have such a problem grasping the ways and size of the universe can be explained with an ant.

The ant will never be able to comprehend how vast the earth is. It can only run around and imagine how big it is. The reason for why the ant can’t understand this is because it can never explore the far corners of the earth. It can only explore the area near to it. It can of course explore vast areas compared to its size, in the same way as humans can go into space and travel great distances, but not remotely as far into space we have to go to understand its full potential. To see the grand suite of the universe we are a part of, we have to explore space in the same way we have explored earth. The ant can’t understand the vastness of the earth of the same reasons we can’t understand the universe.

What I might need to do to start understanding some of this greatness, this cold darkness called space, I feel the need to study the thinking of Nassim Haramein. “Crossing the Event Horizon” might help opening ways of seeing the Universe in a new way. I don’t know what his theory is all about yet, but I’m looking forward watching it. When I’m done I’ll let you know.

http://www.theresonanceproject.org/

PS. Nassim, you disappointed me in a grand scale. Sorry, but this just seems cultish.

Is the planet nothing more than an enormous waste bin?

Watching WALL-E was such a funny experience, not just because Pixar are fantastic in the business of animation but of the simple fact that they pictured the way we contaminate and litter the planet so perfectly, and Pixar probably wanted to shed light on this topic. The movie was like a beautiful glimpse into the future, a very believable future indeed. What else is earth becoming but a large fuse dump. Just take a look around you, as the snow is melting garbage are popping up faster than the crocus and coltsfoot. And that is just on the local scale.

Let’s take a wider look and where we dump shit:

We ship electric waste to Africa for recycling, but only 20% is usable, the rest is burned on open fields.
Ships are sent to India for chopping.
We got junk floating around the earth like an asteroid field. How are we even going to attack this problem?
And the sea is treated like a waste bin, like, “Out of sight, out of mind”.

We produce and waste. We consume like crazy. We treat the planet, our home, like it’s a hotel room we can fuck up, check out of and leave the cleaning for someone else. Have we forgot the fact that no one will come to clean up our mess? What do you teach your kids at home? To tidy up their room or do you do it for them? When the kids are moving out, do you go to their home to clean up their flat or do they have to take responsibility for their own filth?

When it comes to garbage we have to change the enormous consuming mentality, we have to make the most of our resources rather than dump and burn everything. Plastic, oil based products… some day, maybe not in fifty yrs, maybe not in a hundred yrs, but some day the resources will be all used up. The future generations will be the victim of our squandering. Hopefully our kids and grandchildren will find a way to change the death of a planet. Or at least the horrible buss we’re on will take a better turn.

A colleague said, when talking about the dumping problem: Can’t we just send it into space, if the universe is infinite won’t it be space enough to dump it in?
I said: Well, that’s the problem, the mentality of dumping. We must change that, ‘cause if we send all the junk into space we will throw away all our resources. We must recycle and take better care of what we got.

But what can I say, micro plastic is killing life in the sea. A flake of paint orbiting around the planet will make a pretty good dent in a space shuttle.
Nature is nothing more than a fridge with food moving around. We rearrange or kill whatever is in our way, may it be humans or animals.

We are a bunch of dirty bastards, the human race. All we can hope for is a revolution of the kind that will reprogram the very perception and values we have when it comes to our Mother, the planet earth.

http://www.aftenposten.no/fakta/innsikt/article3574592.ece

Ah am a writer, said a-this fool.

It has taken me years to come over my problem with this term. I really had to work with that, a mental wall blocking up my ability to define what I was when it came to writing. When people asked me if I was a writer I just said –No, I am just a guy who likes to write-. In fact, when I write it is the only time I let myself go completely, when I just let everything flow and follow the stream of my imagination, let characters grow, let scenarios unfold and create fictional landscapes. It has not been easy for me to accept myself as a writer. I had to climb that huge wall in my mind and come to terms with what I am.

What I enjoy the most about writing is the freedom it provides, freedom to harvest whatever my mind dreams up, the freedom to follow weird paths and strange highways. I peek through narrow chinks and grand canyons, I walk through wild forests and long forgotten deserts, I paddle down rivers and cut my way through wilderness. The journey is always about the story, to tell a tale, to entertain myself with the hope of someone else also enjoying what I do.

It doesn’t mean that writing is always easy. Some days it’s like fishing for words in a well, if you’ve tried it you know nothing will bit down in that dark hole. Every effort to find the right words bounce around in your mind like something uncatchable, something slippery or thin as air. But some days it’s pouring out of your head like a flooded dam. Those days are like euphoria, an ecstatic sensation flows through my mind and everything feels magic. Everything feels right and every word fits like a perfect piece in a puzzle.

I know I am a writer. I have been for a long time, it just that it took me a long time to accept the term. Hopefully you will enjoy some of the things I write, not the stuff in this awful bucket, but the published stories or what you can google up when you enter my name. Have a great day and read a lot, read a lot.