Dragspelsvåld

I några år nu har man som flitig pendeltågsresenär kunnat åka tåg och råka ut för musik på tåget. Bara som en tanke....jag tycker personligen att man borde kunna få spela musik varsomhelst i stan för att liva upp det bittra och tråkiga offentliga rummet som Stockholm har ibland. Vill man stanna till och lyssna eller ge en slant så är det bara att slänga slanten i mynthögen och njuta, eller så kan man gå därifrån om man vill. Men så fort man kliver på ett pendel- eller tunnelbanatåg så finns det ingenstans att ta vägen. Efter att ha slitit på jobbet eller plugget så sätter man sig med en suck av lättnad i sätet och stänger ögonen för att vila de där dyrbara minuterna innan man ska ta sista delsträckan hem, men så fort man kopplar av så kommer någon med ett dragspel och hackar sönder ens förhoppningar att kunna unna sig den där dyrbara vilan. Eller så måste konversationen man har med nån sluta eller bli jäkligt ansträngd. Grrr.

Spela musik får man göra var man vill tycker jag, bara man inte våldför sig på andra med den. Så det så.

A deeper dish served best cold

(WARNING!!! This post reveals plot endings in Kill Bill pt 1 & 2. Those who haven't seen them yet and want to read this post at their own risk...)

On tv a few months ago in Sweden the two parts of Kill Bill were shown in their entirety. As well as reaffirming my opinion that these are two fantastic films I couldn't help thinking a little more about the story of revenge, other movies that show it, and who people are. That's why I just have write why I love these two movies, aside from the fact that they are cooler than hell, and hopefully without glorifying the rivers of bloodshed. You have to admit that Mr. Tarantino could make accounting look like the coolest job in the world.

You have to go almost all the way to the end of the second part to get to the core why Bill decided to bust a cap in The Bride's veiled head on the day of her wedding with her new guy and a baby on the way. In one of the more interesting pop-culture metaphors in the movie-world Bill makes a camparison between the Bride and Superman that suddenly makes every other story of revenge as shallow as the Bush Administration's reasons for shedding blood in Iraq. After shooting The Bride with a truth antidote Bill asks her about her quest to get to Bill and why she decided to leave her position as a world-class assassin to live the quiet life of being a mother and wife in a podunk town in the middle of nowhere.

Herein comes the Superman theory that Mr. Tarantino so eloquently scripted and David Carradine's Bill nailed. In the comic world Superman is the only character to have to have been born with his superpowers (comic book buffs are more than welcome to come with other ideas since I'm not really into comic books to begin with). Spiderman or any other superhero is not born with their superpowers but acquire them somehow after an accident or some incident. But Superman is born with his abilities and has to mask them behind a regular gray suit and thick black glasses to be normal in the real world. Clark Kent is the alias and Superman, or whatever his real name is on his home planet, is the real character. The same goes for The Bride, explains Bill while wielding a piece in his hand. The Bride is a born killer that for some reason masked herself behind a veil and lived as someone else. Based on this theory, Bill wants to know why she left him.

The Bride's answer was that once she found out she would be a mother she would have to leave the business and become someone else. But after she woke up from a bullet-induced coma and thinking she was no longer a mother, that's when she decided to beat a bloody path to Bill's door. Under the effects of the truth syrum she even admits that she enjoyed every dripping minute of it. When the The Bride wonders why Bill did what he did, he responds by saying he's also like her. That's what happens when you piss off a born killer.

After seeing the end of pt. 2 you can compare to other movies that have to with revenge and in that light they end up being flat. Take for example Princess, a Danish animated movie where a priest discovers that his sister, a porn starlet, dies in the throes of the industry and decides to take care of her five-year-old daughter. He then decides to take an equally bloody adenture to get to the man he holds responsible for his sister's death. There's no real explanation of why he does it, he just goes out and whacks people, sometimes even reluctantly with the little girl's help. There's an obvious moral here against the mainstream porn industry, but what about the story behind it? Is he trying to confront inner conflicts between christian values and lust for blood? Was he a killer before he became a priest? You just don't know. At least Bill and The Bride revealed for each other who they really are. Those who have seen other movies of revenge, like Old Boy, are more than welcome to voice their opinions in light of Tarantino's Superman theory.

I think you could almost say the same for real people too...not revenge, but the fact that some people just are who they are, and the things they do and what happens to them depends a lot on what social context they're in (in a way kind of like what I've tried to explain about being chronically single in the first post of this blog.) You are who you are. Which is more than what could be said about other revenge movies.

Not dead yet

Don't give up hope for this blog yet, more random brain droppings and rants are on the way. I won't say they will be delivered in a blazing rapid-fire stream, but at least a little here and there to begin with.

Since this is officially the first post of the year on this blog, let's hope it's the beginning of a good year. In the meantime I'll enjoy everyone else's blogs as always...

Capital flows

Thank GOD someone from the financial office of some airline company thought "hmmm... we might just have some money left over this year for some humor" so that a painting team could be mobilized and accomplish this masterpiece, causing an unsuspecting victim in a random country to spray hot tea through his nose. One of capitalism's finer moments.

Calm as hindu cows

On the train doors on the subway and commuter trains here in Stockholm you can see a few small signs telling you among other things to mind the gap and that security cameras are watching, "for your safety" it says. Stockholm is by no means the only city that uses surveillance cameras in public space, all you have to do is look at London where a tourist can walk from Eastend to Westend and have several cameras watching every step of the way.

The thing that I think is most worrisome in the debate is the argument for having them in the first place: "for your safety". If cameras are there to catch the bag-snatcher, mugger, thief or anyone partaking in miscellanious street idiocy, then people won't do it for fear of being caught. But how does that add upp to being safe? It might protect against people trashing train cars, but what's important here is crime against people. Putting aside questions like the democratic legitimacy of assuming someone is guilty or Big Brother issues, I'd like to show just how transparent this argument of "safety" is.

It doesn't take a Ph D in criminology to say that people do stupid things whether they think they can be caught or not, and sometimes people are just plain ill. In Stockholm, like every other city, there are some very mentally disturbed or plain desperate people using public transport or walking around in public space. Sometimes there are gangs of young boys that have quite an intimidating presence late at night in the subway. Just like everywhere else, at night and on weekends, people get drunk. Fights break out. People get desperate for attention. It happens everywhere and it makes no difference if a camera is there or not. Sometimes people commit severe crimes with the full intention of being caught. Sometimes people are doped up, strung out or barely hanging on to their sanity. The point is that when these crimes are in progress on the subway and commuter trains and busses, all that security cameras do is watch them with an indifferent eye, recording everything and protecting precisely jack shit. It must be hard for victims of crime on the trains to see that sign, "for your protection", after being mugged or stabbed at by someone who slipped through the social security net (these are documented cases, shown on TV and captured of course by....violá...security cameras).

Maybe the only way to really prevent crime on public transport is to have security guards for every train car on the subway and commuter trains and every bus, but that's obviously out of the question. The real uses for security cameras, whether digitally storing every living soul in a superdatabase or not, will probably never be revealed. I just hope that poeple don't buy in to this illusion of safety.

P.S. It's not my intention to spread fear of violent crime. In my opinion it's a fact of life that can never be legitimized or prevented by signs, threat of imprisonment, punishment by being forced to listen to Rod Stewart or worse.

Reasons for a blog, part 2 - toilet trauma

Yeah, I know...it took awhile to get to the next post. But it was summer and a lot of things have happened, yadda yadda yadda, and now finally there's a little window of opportunity to write something down. And even though this summer I have broken the cycle of chronic singleness I stand by every word.

But there are obviously many other interesting things to talk about than really heavy quasi-scientific explanations of social phenomena, like the small things. Yes...the small details..

Like restrooms. This past summer I had the opportunity to visit one of Stockholm's very few public toilets (for some reason Stockholmers in power like to keep public restrooms uncomfortably few and far between) in a small park in the southern part of the city (den vid Bofilsbågen för alla svennar därute). Once inside it was easy to see that minimalism was the key word in design. After doing what I had to it was time to flush the toilet. Unfortunately, this is where the problems start.

You would think that the flush button, pulley, lever, chain or whatever would be close to the toilet, but nowhere near was any discernable thing of the sort. After realizing that this might take a second or two to figure out someone knocked on the door outside, which was strange since I hadn't been in there for more than a couple of minutes. I noticed then a series of illustrations which you see above (just because it's so easy with digital cameras) to show how confusing this was. The first three show how to use the sink to wash your hands, which is easy enough. The fourth shows how to flush the toilet. I'll let you guess for a little while before I tell you the answer.

Since it showed a hand pointing to some mystical dot with waves coming from it situated above the toilet I thought it meant a sensor was somewhere nearby, like above the toilet. So there I was, waving my hands wildly over the toilet seat in hope of accidentally setting off the sensor to trigger a flush and someone was still knocking on the door to come in. There was a fleeting thought that it must have been staged so that a hidden camera would show someone wildly flailing about, looking for a sensor to flush the damn thing while someone was about to knock the door down, like a sick practical joke. I even carefully stuck my foot inside the toilet seat in hope of finding the magical hidden dot, but the toilet remained silent. Sooo....have you figured out what the magic might be?



Here it is...


After stopping to think about it for a few seconds, I finally pushed the actual illustration and then came the beautiful whoosh of water. After washing my hands, with the cunning help of the other three illustrations you see above, I walked out to find (of course) nobody there. Does it have to be this difficult to figure out how to flush a toilet? Who's the idiot here, me or the crack design team? Has anyone else had such a traumatic experience before because of strange and confusing signs? I believe in creating discussion, so let's hear it!

Reasons for a blog, part 1

So here it is, folks, the long-awaited debut. One of the reasons for doing this blog is to spank some well-needed sense into a society that indulges in idiotic and arrogant behavior. Not to be negative, but we can't ignore the occaisional bump-in with the common street-idiot or even idiocy hiding out in the netherstructures of large scale social behavior. I have to admit, I'm a nice guy, really. But things just get out of hand sometimes and when it does you have to put your foot down. Or get your fingers moving.

Like when it comes to relationships. Or rather lack thereof.

You can be chronically sick or have chronic conditions with your back, but you can also be chronically single. You know when you meet someone for the first time and you can gaze into his/her eyes, comb your fingers through your beloved's hair and feel all warm inside because your feelings are mutual? You know the feeling. That hasn't happened to me in Stockholm. Being in a relationship is not a necessary function for living and everyone has their ups and downs. But not in seven years of living in this city have I succeeded in breaking chronic singleness. And why? Because people in this city (I know at least many women, I have no idea about swedish men) have a nasty habit of being cold, heartless and arrogant. And how do I know it's not because of me? Because I have no problems meeting women anywhere else.

Here's my explanation: for some reason people have this idea that you can be "choosy". You live in a big city and you think that there's a big sea of people out there, so you can allow yourself to be choosy if you ever find yourself fishing. If someone doesn't fullfill this criteria for an ideal partner then you can ignore that person and keep looking, without even stopping to consider there might be some real chemistry going on. Or this person will just ignore you altogether. These criteria usually involve some strange notion of what a "real" man or woman is, which more or less bars anyone not living up to these norms to life of chronic singleness. And being chronically single is a main cause for severe heart atrophy. Repeated and prolonged disappointment eats away at your heart until there's nothing left but a cold, hard, black clump. Yes, there are friends and you can by sheer willpower choose to not live in a social vacuum, but you can't force people's feelings.

I don't think I'm alone on this thought either.

This dark feeling doesn't come from the fact that I've never been in a relationship in Stockholm, but rather the fact that EVERY single time I've been interested in anyone I wind up being flatly ignored. I'm not creepy or mean, so I have no idea how I would deserve to be treated this way. Nobody does.

Life isn't fair and people are idiots, but nobody deserves to be chronically single.