“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… and the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”
«Η πολιτική ανυπακοή δεν είναι το προβλημά μας. Το πρόβλημα μας είναι η πολιτική υπακοή. Το πρόβλημα μας είναι πως άνθρωποι σε όλον τον κόσμο έχουν υπακούσε σε προσταγές ηγετών. Το πρόβλημα μας είναι πως άνθρωποι είναι υπάκουοι σε όλοκληρο τον κόσμο ακόμα και όντας αντιμέτωποι με την φτώχεια, την πείνα, την ανοησία, τον πόλεμο, την σκληρότητα. Το πρόβλημα μας είναι πως οι άνθρωποι είναι υπάκουοι όταν οι φυλακές είναι γεμάτες με μικροκλέφτες και οι μεγάλοι και τρανοί κλέφτες διοικούν την χώρα. Αυτό είναι το πρόβλημα μας.»
~Howard Zinn (author of A People’s History of the United States. He died last year…)
~Χάουαρντ Ζιν (συγγραφέας του «Ιστορία του Λαού των ΗΠΑ». Πέθανε πέρσι…)
This film tells the story of a drug dealer-addict in Tokyo that dies while tripping on DMT. He subsequently has the “longest and biggest trip of his life”, together with an Out of Body Experience. After his death, he flies around in Tokyo, watching his sister and close people and how they have dealt with his death.
Some say Enter the Void is meant to be an experience, like a LSD or DMT trip would (even if some say DMT is misrepresented in the film) and is not made to make the audience feel empathy, serenity or any kind of feeling apart from disturbance or boredom. This movie had way too much needless sex — I mean, if you had died, why would you go around looking at your sister fucking? Yes, our… hero does that a lot. And other people fucking of course, lots and lots of them. Then, the question arises: has he really died, or is it just the biggest DMT trip of his life? For starters, it is said (and stressed in the film) that DMT is secreted in every person’s brains when they die. Apart from those unlucky few who have their heads pulverised by a shotgun or something, of course. We get a good look at Tokyo’s underground (strip) club and drug scene and many emotional or startling moments from which we feel detached.
I cannot decide what to think about this movie. It’s way too long and the last part is a long, redundant, boring trip (some compare it with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Just throw some sex in there). The technical aspect of it though is top-notch. I asked myself “how the hell did they film that?!” many, many times over.
HOW THE HELL DID THEY FILM THAT?!
The psychedelic effects are also very intense (if you suffer from any kind of epilepsy, avoid ever EVER watching this film. You will probably have several fits, possibly at the same time). For the rest of us, it’s quite a trip.
Which leaves me wondering: is the whole point of the film merely to emulate a psychedelic trip? It sort of succeeds doing that. But it fails being a cohesive cinematic experience. If you want to look at this as an experience –no added adjectives–, you might find it enjoyable. If you’d rather look at it as a film with a particular structure, the common meaning of the word, you’ll be itching to press the fast forward button.
I don’t know what to make of this. It’s a film you can’t not feel strongly about, one way or the other. It’s so unlike anything I’ve ever seen but I wouldn’t feel like watching again some parts of it which were absolutely frustrating in their repetitiveness. A part of me hated it. Another part of me hates to kind of liked it. And another part of me absolutely loved it. This trichotomy, for me, is an indication that at least there’s something about this movie that might be easy to miss or you just need to be in the right (very possibly altered) state of mind to fully appreciate.
Atom Heart Mother is a good case, I think, for being thrown into the dustbin and never listened to by anyone ever again!… It was pretty kind of pompous, it wasn’t really about anything.
– Roger Waters — Rock Over London Radio Station, 15 March 1985, for broadcast 7 April/14 April 1985.
I think both [Atom Heart Mother and Ummagumma] are pretty horrible. Well, the live disc of Ummagumma might be all right, but even that isn’t recorded well.
I didn’t have anything, really, to do with the start of Atom Heart Mother, and when I asked them what it was about, they said they didn’t know themselves. It’s a conglomeration of pieces that weren’t related, or didn’t seem to be at the time. The picture isn’t related either; in fact, it was an attempt to do a picture that was unrelated, consciously unrelated.
[Atom Heart Mother] was a good idea but it was dreadful. I listened to that album recently: God, it’s shit, possibly our lowest point artistically. Atom Heart Mother sounds like we didn’t have any idea between us, but we became much more prolific after it.
I wouldn’t dream of performing anything that embarrassed me. If somebody said to me now: “Right…here’s a million pounds, go out and play ‘Atom Heart Mother'”, I’d say: “You must be fucking joking… I’m not playing that rubbish!”. ‘Cause then I really would be embarrassed.
– Roger Waters — interviewed by Richard Skinner on BBC Radio 1, originally broadcast: Saturday 9 June 1984
Very thought-provoking documentary about the implications of “technology” (read: web) in mass culture, communication, wars (maybe the C-130 mission in Modern War was closer to reality than comfort), “multitasking”… The mere fact that you will probably not watch this because it’s too long and people suggested another couple of movies for you to watch today already is pretty much the point.What’s the last time you switched off your PC? That you really focused on reading, or doing something else without having the urge to mess around? That you went out without your smart-phone? How long can you go without Internet? Come join me in sad realisations…
I might just love Skyward Sword because it’s the first Zelda with a fully orchestrated OST! The main theme is already etched in my head (maybe because it’s Zelda’s Lullaby in reverse? That alone brings me goose-bumps!)
I don’t mind though because I have eyes firmly set on this.
I will only get to play it a whole month after it comes out. Maybe for the better: I wouldn’t want to spend my last month in Denmark playing Zelda… would I? If I don’t, I’m going to spend all Christmas avoiding friends that persistently will want to see me after 5 months.
Maybe, in the Information & Media Studies library, where they said they’d put some consoles for people to… do research… maybe there I can…*barely audible, almost insane laughter*
But no, no, I must not make these thoughts now, I have to finish A Link to the Past on ZSNES. I must be a good Zelda fan. Yes, that’s what I’m going to do.
Until November 18th, feast your eyes on this:
September’s GamesMaster had a 1,5m poster of this as a freebie. Did I buy the issue just for the poster when I found it in a Presbyrån in Stockholm? Did I? *another very scary bout of silent laughter*
I can’t remember for how long it’s been a dream of mine to see the Northern Lights. To be overwhelmed by their sheer other-worldliness, to lose myself in this phantasmagoria, the proof that magic is nothing supernatural, nothing more “super” than nature at its very best.
This dream of mine was never closer to being fulfilled than now. From the moment I learned that I would be coming to Denmark I started planning my Great Pilgrimage to Hyperborea. The cheapest, if by far the most time-consuming, way to get as close to the Arctic Circle as possible was, I soon found out, to InterRail all the way up from Denmark to Northern Norway. It was not hard to find two other people that shared my dream and felt like joining me. These are some of our stories, of three travellers hungry for adventure, out to see the magic of the world and finding it. Even if not exactly as we expected it when we first set off…
Ana and me woke up early on the 13th day of October. We had a train to catch — the first of many. We packed our bags full of food like bread, carrots, apples, La Vache Qui Rit-type cheese, baked beans… we had heard legends of people going to Norway and dying of starvation because supermarkets were too expensive. We definitely did not want to suffer the same fate. After we made sure that our bags would weigh less than half as much on our way back, we set off. We saw the sun rise over the lazy cow-dotted plains of Jutland, passed to Fyn and before we knew it we had already crossed Zealand and were in Copenhagen Central Station. This was our rendezvous point with Cedric. We didn’t have difficulty spotting him coming out from the train from Hamburg, he was sporting a backpack almost one and a half times larger than my own. If my own bag contained roughly equal parts clothes and food, Cedric’s was almost bursting at the seems from the weight of several tins of ravioli, bottles of wine and beer. We would soon be very thankful he had been extra mindful when it came to food… And so it began.
What will stay with me from this trip:
• We did not see the Northern Lights. Mission failed. All of our nights north of the Arctic Circle were beautifully overcast. But even if they hadn’t been, people told us that it wasn’t a good time of the year to see them. “The aurora is at its most impressive after a big drop in temperature… The best time is in January or February, when it’s really cold and there aren’t so many clouds”. Then why do so many sites say that October is a good time? As far as the Lights go, this is indeed our theme song for the trip.
Play us off Keyboard Cat!
• Cedric’s cool. Riding from Malmö to Göteborg, the city in which, in a parallel universe, we would have changed trains for Oslo, Cedric realised that something was missing from his otherwise stuffed backpack. It was his wallet. Of all places, it had to be Sweden where we would find our pick-pocket. How many of us think of Sweden when we hear about pick-pocketing? I’m beginning to get tired of Nordic nimble fingers. Of course we couldn’t just leave Göteborg and ride into the unknown before Cedric had exhausted all possibilities regarding the whereabouts of his wallet and, most importantly, its contents. He had lost his money, his bank card and his ID. What would you, dear reader, do if this had happened to you on the first day of a long-awaited trip? Ana and I agreed that, for one, we would be freaking out badly. Cedric, however, kept his characteristic cool during all stages of grief. “I’ll get by, I’ll survive. I’m just annoyed that we had to miss the train to Oslo and our plans got messed up”. The next day, in Oslo, when the German embassy told him that at least he could take the next train back home, he didn’t hesitate even for a minute to follow us through. Again, “what’s the worst thing they can do to me? At most they’ll just send me back to Germany. It’s where I’m going eventually anyway.”
• Jan. He was our host in Bodø, the small town we stayed the longest in Norway. He took us to lots of very Norwegian places around the town in his car (including Saltstraumen, even though it was at high tide and wasn’t at all impressive), showed us some new for us electronic music (he was a big fan!) and some documentaries about Life, the Universe and Everything with him, one of them he had made himself. W even talked a little bit about video games.
He helped us a lot by taking us to Fauske where we begun our…
• Hitch-hiking. On the 5th day, we had to hitch-hike from Fauske to Narvik (οur CouchHost Jan was so good as to drive us from Bodø to Fauske. In retrospect, if he hadn’t done so we might not have made it through to Narvik at all). With good spirits we prepared our cardboard sign. On one side it read “NARVIK” and on the other “N↑”. For hours we tried and tried on the side of the E6, aka the Arctic Highway — a name that makes it sound much more majestic than it really is. We jumped around at incoming cars, thumbs outstretched, our best smiles as bright as tiny flashlights in the afternoon light.
Tens, hundreds of cars passed us by, few drivers gave us any kind of sign, let alone stopped. Later, we realised that the reason was probably because no-one wanted, or had enough space to carry three extra passengers. We were in the middle of nowhere, 100klm north of the Arctic Circle, moose crossing signs around us, Narvik was 250klm away. Disappointment set in. We began to make our way back to Fauske where we would make our way back to Bodø by train, our ultimate Plan B. And then the unexpected, the unreal happened. A car stopped in front of us after we had already started walking back. A big man in a blue sweater came out.
“Do you want to go to Narvik?”
“Yes!”, I said. This was strange. We were going to the opposite direction, with Narvik facing our backsides and already half-empty backpacks. How did he know that we wanted to go there?
“We will take you there. We will take you to Narvik!”
I froze. I did not know what to make of it. These two people — this man and his wife — were obviously not going to Narvik. However, they wanted to make a detour, a 10-hour one both ways at that, to help us out. In my mind appeared a pair of scales. Weighing down the one side was fear, disbelief, the kind of feeling that would never let you hitch-hike, the feeling people transmit to you when they tell you that in every CouchSurfer lies a hidden serial killer just waiting to kill you in the most tortuous of ways; on the other side there was trust, willingness, adventure, the sense that everything can happen if you just give it a chance. It didn’t take long at all for the latter side to win this recurring internal battle.
Enter Lisbeth and Finn-Ove. They saw us trying to hitch a ride while they were going back home after shopping. “I feel sorry for them”, said Finn-Ove. “How sorry?”, asked Lisbeth. They turned around, picked us up, filled the tanks in Fauske and stopped home to leave the stuff they had just bought before setting out for the road trip. What they had just went out to shop were huge boxes of kitty litter. Turned out that Lisbeth and Finn-Ove are professional cat-breeders. My cat-loving side went a little awry at the thought (mind: it’s the same side that feeds my distaste for small dogs) but once I saw the care they put into their pocket felines, my heart melted. Their house was situated in a small Norwegian village under craggy mountains, over delicious fjords and next to deep forest that serves as a home for curious moose… AND a houseful of beautiful and tame cats, a large home cinema and a fresh box-set of Star Wars in Blu-ray (Finn-Ove’s been a fan “ever since he saw the films on Norwegian TV”). What else might a man want?
The next five hours we spent in their car, talking about life, hitch-hiking, cats and their group hierarchy (“fertile females are the leaders”), Star Wars and Norway while outside the windows, fantastic mountains, forests and fjords (and a few moose we stopped to see) were being greeted by the Arctic October dusk that slowly but surely painted the skies black…
Finn-Ove and Lisbeth saved us out of nowhere. We hitched a ride with them for over 250klm of Norwegian countryside. They were an inspiration and a delight to meet and helped me add another experience to fight my fearful and cynic side, a much-needed one: semi long-distance hitch-hiking.
• Betty and her Brain Balancing. Day 7 found us in Stockholm. As usual, nowhere to stay, hey, at least we had a train station to fall back to if all else failed, or at least we hoped that a train station in a capital city would stay open through the night. We sent out an SOS to the world, aka a Last Minute CouchRequest. And voila, one hour later Betty sent us a message telling us she can host us. Off we went to meet this lady that was to be our host in Stockholm, a city which from the two nights we spent there I can say that I loved. It’s a city made of bridges connecting its many islands, with parks and cliffs right next to the river/lake/sea in between. And would you imagine? We saw deer grazing in Betty’s backyard in the morning. Stockholm: breath-taking to walk around in, both at night and during the day.
Back to Betty. Born in Sweden by Hungarian parents, had a daughter (our age) with a man from The Gambia. And I thought I was a child of multi-culturalism… After a much-needed dinner consisting of bread, butter, raspberry jam and Nugatti (read: Norwegian Nutella, only like 10 times better than Nutella), Betty revealed her current profession to us. She is a Brain Balancer. “A psychologist?”, ready to ask was I, but she was quick to add: “Literally, what I do is balance brains. Every brain is to some extent unbalanced. What I do is let the brain listen to its own brainwaves and correct itself in order to move out of ruts and behavioural vicious cycles that activate in situations of stress and fear. This balancing will not alter your personality whatsoever, just open up your possibilities and allow you to step back from your own behaviour in order to be able to observe and modify it.” She invited us to try it ourselves. There is a system monitoring and recording your brainwaves and playing tones into earphones that create a feedback loop for the brain. It is actually very hard to put into words but from what Betty described and from what I can see it looks like a mighty interesting idea. It might sound completely crazy but if I had the money I would try it (ten 90-minute sessions that should be enough to have a permanent effect carry a price tag of close to €2000). I asked her if there is a way to obtain the same results for free and without the brain balancer. She answered that if I purposefully observe myself in weird or dangerous situations and the way I react in order to first be able to witness behaviours programmed into me (do I freeze or go into fight and flight mode?), with some meditation and inner silence I should be able to create the same effects as brain balancing would. Read more here. The interesting thing is that Betty found about this a few years ago through a CouchSurfer of hers and was obviously thrilled. Before that she was a textile designer. Now we learned about this also through CouchSurfing… Around, goes the world.
• Karlstad and Narvik. Two of the nights in the North we had nowhere to stay. No Couchhosts, no money, nothing. I can tell you this: Sweden and Norway are NOT good places to try your life as a homeless person — even though I think that if you have no home, in Denmark at least, the state provides you with shelter. So, in this respect and for a few hours we were far worse off than any Nordic homeless would be. Train stations locked tight, shops and bars closing early, even MacDonald’s providing only temporary shelter and franchise coffee until midnight. A bit of Cinderella magic there. These town were public spaces that after 11PM became non-spaces… In both cases we were outside until the early hours, walking around the city, having our usual incredibly long, deep and often pointless discussions with Cedric (to Ana’s probable annoyance), playing football with plastic coffee cups or trying to sleep at temperatures very close or under 0 °C. Layering clothes didn’t help much to keep warm, nor did running around on the brightly lit but oh, so cold and inhospitable station platforms — the appearance of a semi-friendly fox in Karlstad station, though, at least cheered us up a lot.
But let me tell you, for all the shivering and biting cold, the moments of salvation more than made up for it. When our train from Karlstad to Oslo arrived, all warm and cozy inside, or when the station master in Narvik opened the doors half an hour earlier than we expected, at 6:30 instead of 7AM… It was happiness, the same kind of lizard-brain happiness you see in your dog’s or cat’s face when they lie curled up at your feet.
In Lizbeth’s and Finn-Ove’s car, I told Cedric: “When we get to Narvik, we have nowhere to stay…” -“I know…”, he replied, “I look forward to it.”
• In Oslo, outside the central train station, we asked some police people (how would you call a police man together with a police woman?) where we could find the police station. They kindly drove us there in their police van, putting us in the little cage they have in the trunk reserved for criminals, hand-cuffs and all. We went crazy. Made me want to steal something so that I could travel in this thing again. Guaranteed nice views.
• I had an amazing time with Cedric and Ana. I had never travelled for so long with anyone I had not been romantically involved with before. Many laughs, similar, relaxed and happy attitudes to things going very wrong. It’s true that travelling with people is the ultimate test of friendship and even though I’ve only been friends with these guys a few months I think we passed the test with flying colours.
• Avoid relying on trains if you want to take in the scenery. You will fall asleep more than you would like. You will also read much less than you expect.
• Most of our expenses in this trip were not for food or alcohol, but forcoffee (thank you, Seven Eleven). If you plan to take it cheap (or free), be sure to be able to find or make cheap coffee. We spent €0 on accommodation, if you exclude two of the nights we spent in trains. 5 days of travel in 10 cost us €169 each.
• If you want to go to Scandinavia to drink, you are probably much better off in every way in your own country.
• Catching trains while having a hangover at the same time is very possibly the definition of Not Fun.
• Who’s up for the next travel to Hyperborea? This time to really see the Lights?
In Life*, there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognize, but for which no words exist.
On the other hand, the world is littered with thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places.
Our job, as wee see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they can start earning their keep in everyday conversation and make a more positive contribution to society.
Douglas Adams
John Lloyd
*And, indeed, in Liff.
Some favourite picks:
OSHKOSH (n., vb.)
The noise made by someone who has just been grossly flattered and is trying to make light of it.
WIMBLEDON (n.)
That last drop which, no matter how much you shake it, always goes down your trouser leg.
SIMPRIM (n.)
The little movement of false modesty by which a girl with a cavernous visible cleavage pulls her skirt down over her knees.
SCROGGS (n.)
The stout pubic hairs which protrude from your helping of moussaka in a cheap Greek restaurant.
MOFFAT (n. tailoring term)
That part of your coat which is designed to be sat on by the person next of you on the bus.
HATHERSAGE (n.) The tiny snippets of beard which coat the inside of a washbasin after shaving in it.
AINDERBY STEEPLE (n.)
One who asks you a question with the apparent motive of wanting to hear your answer, but who cuts short your opening sentence by leaning forward and saying ‘and I’ll tell you why I ask…’ and then talking solidly for the next hour.
“Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.
…
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”
John Donne (1572-1631), Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII: Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris
1964, Berlin, Greater German Empire. A week from Adolf Hitler’s 75th birthday. No-one remembers what Germany was like before the war. What does it matter? The Führer is God, he saved Germany from mortal danger and raised her to become the world’s mightiest. All follow the Leader completely blindly, a Goebbelsian utopia come true. All? Gestapo officer Xavier “Zavi” March is the right man, at the right place, at the right time, and is about to catch a glimpse of the Third Reich’s best kept and most horrible secret…
1964 Nazi Berlin is very convincing. World politics following a Nazi victory in the War also make the mood for this alternate history fittingly gloomy. Albert Speer’s Germania plans for Berlin have all come to pass, including the awe-inspiring Great Hall. An illustration of the book’s timeline’s central Berlin welcomes the reader right at the beginning of the book setting up the climate quite “appropriately”.
Xavier March is a burdened man. His son, a result of his failed marriage, looks to the regime for a father figure instead of him. He’s been working for 10 years as a successful Sturmbannführer but with no promotion. “The Fox”, his work nickname, is a great lead character. He’s surprisingly clever (he’s an investigator and this is a thriller, after all!) but his weaknesses and mistakes are easy to spot throughout the story, grounding him and making him a realistic lead. I was rooting for him all the way.
A thing I liked about Fatherland and Robert Harris’s writing is that it had little details that made it easier to imagine each scene or situation. Insignificant descriptions, like the way some-one breathes or what he or she looks like while walking away, associations March makes with things he notices, hears, touches or smells give the story a much more personal feel, it makes it easier to identify with the –thankfully, unknown for us– circumstances. I could really feel as if I was actually there, as if I was — shudder– March myself .
The plot can be a bit confusing at first, reflecting the lead’s own confusion with the case of the murder by Lake Havel, but as it thickens, as no-one you think could be trusted comes through, as some things become apparent and others come as shocking revelations and turnarounds, everything is made clear and fits well. It took me maybe three weeks to read the first half of the book. I don’t have great experience with police mysteries, but this is more than that. It took me another three days to finish it. This should tell all.
