I love the atmospheric Huntsville hiphop of G-Side and Block Beataz. Even more so after hearing an hour-long documentary about the Huntsville scene on Swedish radio. It’s mostly in English with lots of interviews, so make sure to check it out (hit the “LYSSNA”-link at bottom of post to listen, it’s available until April 14).

I especially found the explanation of how the city’s space industry has influenced the sound fascinating:

»Space science and hiphop absolutely go together in Huntsville. It’s actually what Huntsville hiphop is. Everyday we ride down the Interstate, and we look at the big Saturn 5 rocket. That’s the space. It’s about Huntsville, it’s about a movement, it’s a sound, it’s a whole village of people trying to get across our struggle.«

As someone who has a high chance of appreciating idealised dreams of space as well as great hiphop, I naturally love this.

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As I go to bed at night, there are new problems with the cooling at Fukushima. When I wake up, there’s a new fire. No matter what the outcome of this will be, these have been truly terrifying days.

In the midst of the disaster, what I think about is how things must be for the fifty or so people that are still there, trying to get the thing under control.

There’s a documentary called »Battle of Chernobyl«, dealing with the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster and the race against time with the efforts to try and stop it from getting even worse. There are lots and lots of unsung heroes in that one.

People who gave their lives trying to do prevent burning graphite to do more damage, and to stop the core from melting into the groundwater.

You should watch it. It’s available on YouTube. And other places.

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Someone once told me that the hardest character an actor can play is a believable portrait of a bad actor. I don’t doubt it, but I wonder if it isn’t even harder to be a great actor and do a meaningless character? Like Olivia Dunham was in »Fringe«. Who’s there to see you’re really good when the character is bleak?

When »Fringe« premiered as a hyped J.J. Abrams show, I was so disappointed in the casting for the Olivia character. I thought that Anna Torv was utterly dull.

Except for when playing with her niece, she was perpetually concerned and sad, and her plain FBI clothes didn’t do much to improve the impression. »Why didn’t they find someone better,« I thought.

Fast-forward about 20 or so episodes. Dunham’s dark past begins to surface, for the viewers and for herself. Suddenly, it becomes clear why her mood only shifts in grayscales. It dawns on me that all other characteristics than worried resignation would have been ridiculous for her.

Fast-forward again. The alternate universe. The Dunham there is bad-ass. Leather jacket, self-confidence, takes no prisoners. The way Anna Torv handles the transitions between alternate Olivia and »our« Olivia is brilliant.

I can’t stop thinking: How hard mustn’t it have been for Anna, who wasn’t a particularly well-known actress when »Fringe« started airing, to portray the dull Olivia Dunham for all those episodes, appearing to do a bleak performance to millions of tv-junkies worldwide just because her character unknowingly carried around dark demons from the past.

It’s performances like Glenn Close’s Patty Hewes in »Damages« that win awards, but I think delivering dialogue in Dunham-esque season 1 dullness is more of an impressing performance. Really.

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While my laptop is older, greasier and more used than Hollis Henry’s, I had to take a photo of my workspace to create the desktop wallpaper that Milgrim imagines.

“Hollis’s desktop was a digital representation of interstellar space. Mauve galactic clouds. Was she interested in astronomy, he wondered, or was this something from Apple? He imagined the laptop displaying an image of itself instead, and of the tea press, on the white laminate. And in that imagined screen, another, identical image. Tunneling down, Escher-style, to a few pixels.”

William Gibson, »Zero History«

The only downside is I’ll never be able to move the things on my desk without losing symmetry.

EDIT: I didn’t put the wallpaper full-size here because I didn’t think anyone would be interested in it. After all, the concept is about having a representation of one’s own workspace repeated on the display. But since it was requested by some people, here is the 1200×800 wallpaper for download. Sorry, I don’t have the original image left so I can’t make it for higher resolutions.

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Who could guess an accidental simultaneous playback of Istanbul field recordings and Nick Cave’s soundtrack for “The Road” would lead to the creation of an ambient track? One rainy night, it just happened.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a segment on Swedish national radio where they played field recordings reporter Sara Lundin had captured in Istanbul. I recorded and saved the clips on my harddrive, as I always do with good ambience, figuring that sooner or later they’d come to good use.

Late one night, I accidentally played one of them at the same time as starting Nick Cave’s soundtrack for “The Road” (that’s the beauty of the Mac OSX play-button: it triggers both iTunes and Spotify).

I sounded beautiful. I had to experiment with it.

The ingredients: Sara’s field recordings, “Home” from “The Road” soundtrack, granulator, distortion, a couple of old piano recordings from music sessions past and five hours with rain beating on my windows, a night in May 2010.

The result: 10 minutes of humble ambient.

Download as mp3 here or play it directly in your browser:

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Going through a second hand shop today, I found this LP. What first caught my eye was the beautiful design, but a moment later I frooze and realized: I really had no idea that The Comedian recorded an album in Poland 1984 under the moniker of Jan Dietrzak.

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Across the park from where I live is an office building. And best believe something fishy is afoot on the top floor in the nighttime. But what are they doing?

During evenings and nights, a room in the building is flashing peculiarly. Not every night, but more often than not. Sometimes it does this with a repetetive pattern, like in the clip below, and sometimes it’s more irregular.

It’s very Lovecraftian. Or maybe this is where Maximillian Cohen resides?

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Syd Mead was concept designer for movies like »Blade Runner«, »Aliens« and »Tron«, flicks that were groundbreaking in the visual portrayal of their universes. I came across the mini-documentary “2019: A Future Imagined” where he says something very clever that is applicable to all kinds of creative work:

“Here’s the core thing about creativity. You have to be three people: You have to be the person who’s creating the idea. You have to be the technician who can solve the problem technically in a format that’s useable. And you have to be a third person who’s off-stage, watching the other persons do what they do. If you can’t detach yourself from what you’re doing in a surveillance überperson mentality, you’re not going to do good work because you’re going to be too fascinated with what you’re doing. Hubris kills.”

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Yesterday, there was news that a manga translator who had downloaded Japanese comics for use in his work was found guilty of possessing child pornography. His case will surely not be the last and the RIAA, IFPI et al are having a field day with it. Why? Because when you can’t get legislators to understand your stance, just use child pornography. It’s been like that since the dawn of the computer age. No really, it has. Here are some examples of the debate in Sweden during the early 90s, when teenagers traded warez with 14.4k modems on BBS:s and the parents were at a total loss of understanding the scene culture of the day.

I spent most of my teenage years sitting at home, in front of my Amiga, logged on to a BBS, a Bulletin Board System. Those were places that you dialed up with your modem to write on forums, upload/download files or just hang out and chat with someone on another node. Because yeah, some of the better boards, like “Guru’s Dream” where Snuskis was sysop, had multiple phone lines so more than one user could be online at the same time. Sometimes as many as six, but more often two or three. In the early 90s, the busy tone was king.

Anyway. My parents had no clue what happened on the bulletin boards and my mum was a bit shocked when national TV ran a piece on the evening news where they showed a post from a forum on one of the boards: “For sale: 800 gallons of fuel (truck included)”.

Of course, the bulletin board systems were like websites are today. You can go to Facebook, Slashdot or 4chan without being able to tell what the internet is just by looking at one of them. The difference here was that no one over 25 years of age understood the online world, unless they were computer experts.

Things kicked off after that news piece ran. Here’s from a story in “Aftonbladet”, Sweden’s largest daily, on June 13, 1994:

FOR SALE: WEAPONS, DRUGS AND CHILD PORN – VIA COMPUTER
Enter the computer world and you end up in an electronic Wild West. Here there are no laws, no police. Thousands of teenagers sit day in and day out in front of their screens, trying to outdo eachother in committing crimes.

This is just the headline and three first sentences in a full spread story. They are interviewing some guy with the handle Shadow, whom they portray:

“In the computer world, Shadow has made himself a reputation of being a cool bomb expert and hardcore racist. In reality, he’s a jobless, lost and beer-drinking 22-year-old that has been found guily of several petty crimes: fencing, bomb threats and illegal bomb experiments. The crimes are actually the only things he’s proud of.”

From this character, they paint a picture of a shadowy (no pun intended) sub-culture, where seemingly harmless young men (“most of them wouldn’t handle real criminal life, many are bullied and with social problems”) sit in their rooms, conspiring.

“Many bulletin board systems offer copyrighted computer games and software. Some of them are in eternal competition of offering the latest releases. Through insider contacts, games can show up in Swedish pirate systems only hours after coding is complete in USA. The pirate operation undermines the whole market. One example is the computer giant Amiga that recently went bankrupt – in spite of their games being sold all over the world.”

OK. Amiga was a computer manufacturer, not a game developer. They crashed because PCs became increasingly suitable for home use and Amiga couldn’t keep up. Ah, anyway. Let’s get to the point:

“Some of the bulletin board systems only have a dozen or so users. Others have hundreds. The rule is that the more edgy content in the BBS, the more users it has. Since child pornography is some of the worst content there is, one would think there is a lot of that.”

So, one would think that? Well, if you weren’t in the scene, it was ridiculously hard to get accounts at the elite boards. And once in, the ratios were killers. Getting invites to cool webstartups or obscure torrent sites is a walk in the park compared to getting into a top notch BBS unless you knew the sysop.

What is interesting is that the child porn card has been played with these very same arguments several times over the last few years, against sites like The Pirate Bay and filesharing in general.

Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party writes on his blog about what Johan Schlüter, head of the legal department at Danish Anti Pirate Group said during a speech in May 2007:

“We need to filter the internet in order to solve the problem of filesharing. But politicians don’t understand filesharing and that’s a problem for us. That’s why we must associate filesharing with child pornography. That, politicians understand.”

But let’s go back to the early 90s. In Swedish morning daily “Svenska Dagbladet”, there’s an interesting story from January 1, 1994. It’s about the problem of teenagers using fake AT&T calling cards to connect to the boards (a common practice, since normal call rates applied to data traffic too and it was expensive trading warez with 14.4k modems). Hans Wranghult, chief of police in Malmö (“who has worked with computer security for 20 years”) said that the problem was soon to be over:

“The problem is that decades of neglected security has resulted in ridiculously simple passwords and ID verifiers that intruders easily can get through. Hackers meet increasingly tougher security in form of biometric protection that is now becoming common for high level computer systems. The user’s identity can be confirmed by fingerprints, voiceprints, retina scans and other identities that are difficult to fake.”

An unknown, digital force lures in the darkness and will ruin the world as we know it – unless we boost the security. I don’t know how Wanghult, with his 20 years of experience, could make such a terrible prediction that biometric security would be commonplace in a few years after 1994.

But I do know his contemporaries still believe it’s possible to protect onself against the faceless enemy by increasing control when the solution is something different entirely.

Oh yes, there is a solution. On November 26, 1993, the “Arbetet” newspaper ran a story on the same problem. The readers were told about the weapons’ market and how you had to hack Swedish telco Telia in order to get access. Stefan Kronqvist, electronic detective at the Swedish Police, was asked what parents would do if their kid had wished a PC and a modem for Christmas.

“A computer is ok, but I wouldn’t recommend a modem.”

That’s it! Let’s everyone go offline now. Case closed.

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A robbery that didn’t turn out according to plan, a disturbed person reaching out for help – or a vampire hunt gone wrong? A couple of weeks ago there was a hold-up at a bank in downtown Stockholm, only the offender wasn’t your usual hoodlum. Dressed in some kind of robe and with a sharpened stick as only weapon, one must wonder what his business really was.

At noon, a man entered the bank office near Östermalmstorg in Stockholm. Bank employees were taken hostages and following several hours of negotiations, police stormed with stun grenades, putting an end to the drama.

Newspaper reports of the incident leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

“The man was escorted from the bank by four policemen with a blanket over his head. He was dressed in some kind of robe and his identity is still unknown. Minutes later the man’s weapon, a sharpened staff, was brought out of the bank office.”

Later reports said he was homeless Norwegian man, which, as we all know, is one of the best cover identities when going on important missions.

What everyone know wonders is: What did this guy know about the bank manager that we’re not allowed to know? What did he try to save us from? And what do they keep in the safety boxes in that bank? It’s obvious there’s something fishy with this whole event. Please let the public know so that we can take matters in our own hands. Or at least call Van Helsing to get the job done properly.

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A Swedish manga translator and expert of Japanese comics has been found guilty of possessing child pornography. Police found 51 drawings with nudity on the man’s harddrive following a raid, images the translator told the court was research for him to stay updated within his expert field.

The translator was found guilty by the district court and was sentenced to pay 24800 Swedish Crowns (approximately €2650 or §3400) in fines.

During the hearing, the translator told the court he had saved images he found on the internet as genre samples, for personal and professional use. In its verdict, the court said that it must be restrictive in allowing possession of child pornography as research material. For his purposes, the court argued, the man didn’t need all of the images.

A comment to the news story, presumably written by the translator himself though this isn’t verified, says:

“I have a collection of about three thousand manga books with millions of drawings, some of which are of erotic nature. Among those, there were about thirty (some duplicates) which the prosecutor believed to be criminal. And there were no hardcore images, mostly just nudity. This is NOT about drawings that depicts violent penetration if anyone thinks so. Simple nude drawings of cartoon characters are categorized as pornography.”

On the website of the Swedish police, one can read the following piece of information:

“The Police considers every image of child pornography a documented violation. [...] Digitalized drawings and animations that portray children in a pornographic context are considered child pornography. The ban against portraying and possessing is not applicable to the person who has drawn or painted the image as long as it isn’t made available to others.”

Of course! A drawing is a “documented violation” unless you draw it yourself. And don’t show anyone.

I’m as sickened and offended by child pornography as anyone, but this just seems ridiculous. On so many levels.

(via Vertigomannen)

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I know. I’m mocking the whole 8-bit scene here. And it’s not my intention. I love you guys for keeping the sound alive, it’s just that I’m old and picky, ok?

When legendary composer 4Mat recently released his new album “Decades”, however, it caught my ear. I loved what he was doing back in the late 80s/early 90s and so I listened. And was intrigued. Overwhelmed by nostalgia, I started thinking about what it was like, sitting in front of my Amiga and doing chipmusic.

Intoxicated by the blips and beeps (and maybe a little wine), I installed an emulator, fired up ProTracker 1.3b and killed off the night in front of it. I had lots of fun.

I’ll probably go there again.

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I came across this brilliant video of a guy improvising with bass over the drones of the vuvuzelas, nowadays known to (and feared by) billions of soccer fans. I’m not one to judge skill since I can’t handle any instrument, but I do love the Squarepusheresque feeling in this little clip.

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Following the volcano eruption on Iceland, all flights in northern Europe are cancelled and there’s a gloomy feeling everywhere about the ashcloud’s consequences. We might not have a summer because of this, you know. Well, all this stems from planes being grounded and travellers being forced to sleep in airport gates. It wouldn’t have happened if we’d gone for the airships.

Outside my windows is the silence of the apocalypse. I live right beneath the glidepath to a runway on one of Stockholm’s airports and it’s eerily silent. After two years, I normally never notice the passing planes, but tonight it’s the absence of them that bothers me. They say there’s a risk of all flights being grounded throughout the weekend and the sense of isolation is intense.

Swedish media is reporting on chaos at the airports and you get the sense of the city’s filling up with stranded commuters on scavanger hunt for something to call “a meal”.

Looking at online flight radars, there’s just emptiness where there should be a thousand dots in transit.

I feel like I’m in a disaster movie and what’s the reason for this foreboding mood?

Turbo jet engines. Of course.

We put our trust in an outdated technology. If we had cruised the skies in beautiful airships instead of rusty old fuselages, we wouldn’t have had this. No one would be forced to sleep in airports tonight. The volcano eruption had for us, far from Iceland, meant little more than eye candy for our computer desktop wallpapers.

I don’t like being right in a serious matter like this, but man… They should’ve listened and gone for the zeppelins a long time ago.

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In the latest episode of »Fringe«, we get a glimpse into the alternate universe where the Empire State Building observation deck is used for its original purpose: an airship landing mast.

Now, I don’t think I have to remind you about the coming airship renaissance I’ve predicted here? Or the the signs we’ve been seeing since? I tell you, I can feel there’s something in the air. No pun intended.

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I walk by this sculpture close to where I live from time to time. Everytime I do, it has me thinking: What is this? People walk their dogs here. Is this some kind of homage to the canine reproductivity? Or is it a giraffe mounting one of those giant vegetarians from »Jurassic Park«? Post your ideas – if you have any. I sure don’t.

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The chief investigator of the Swedish Accident Investigation Board blames the numbers for the crashlanding of SAS flight SK-751. No, really, it’s not »Lost«, he means it.

Listening to a Swedish radio documentary on the SK-751 crash where 122 passengers and 7 crew miraculously survived on December 27, 1991, one passage especially caught my attention.

Chief investigator Nils Benker of the Swedish Accident Investigation Board seems to have been cursed by the numbers in pretty much the same way as Hurley:

“The crash occurred on 7:51 UTC and the clocks inside cockpit had stopped on that. The flight number was 751. I was born on 7/51. My membership number is 751. When I walked the dogs the morning after there was a Volvo parked there with registration number »MDC 751«, MDC for McDonald Douglas Company 751. So… I was probably the cause of the accident.”

Shouldn’t all air crash investigations use numerology in their search for clues?

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I watched “Shutter Island” yesterday. It was a decent film with one huge problem: It was released in 2010. Had it been released in the 70s it would’ve been a classic but its plot just can’t measure up today. Why? Because of “Lost”.

Early on in “Lost”, there was an instruction film that said “careful observation in the only key to true and complete awareness”.

It was a meta-moment.

These words of wisdom was primarily aimed at the viewers in regards to the series. “Lost” have consistently used flaws and mistakes actively to take clues about the story arc. What people generally would think of as continuity errors or prop department misses cannot be written off as such in “Lost”.

And it was with this baggage I started watching “Shutter Island”. We’ve learned in “Lost” that photo, details and dialogue can contain meta-information about the show and now we look for it.

With “Shutter Island” it was obvious to me already at the very first scene.

(Minor spoiler ahead.)

When they approach the island on the ferry, the scene is blatantly filmed with greenscreen. Blatantly. Real badly done. No director would in 2010 do such thing unless he/she had something to convey with the images. And so, already at the very first lines of dialogue, Martin Scorsese gives it away. Of course we, The “Lost” Generation, conclude there and then that it’s all smoke and mirrors.

It’s hardwired in us all now.

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Nothing taunts the human mind like a censored map. We simply can’t resist the urge of filling in the blanks, wondering what’s wrong, getting the eerie feeling someone is trying to cover up. It all comes back to our belief in that maps is a represenation of reality, which rarely is the case.

“That was the first I ever heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any reference to a town not shown on common maps or listed in recent guidebooks would have interested me, and the agent’s odd manner of allusion roused something like real curiosity.”

H.P. Lovecraft, »The Shadow Over Innsmouth«

At a wedding dinner, I was told a fascinating story. A guy at my table was a photographer and has a special interest in taking shots of airplanes in settings where they shouldn’t be. A narrow genre, but not without objects to shoot.

One day, a friend of his e-mailed him Google Map coordinates of an abandonded Swedish military aircraft in the middle of a forest. He printed the map and drove the same weekend to take photos.

After a few hours, he took an exit off the highway and drove on roads that became narrower and narrower until he turned onto a small dirtroad in the middle of nowhere. Then the map started to become inaccurate.

Although it was dense forest on the map, the road suddenly opened up into a field, and in the middle of the field there was a wired fence blocking the way, complete with floodlights and cameras. There was nothing for him to do but turn back and go home.

I got a chill down my spine when he told this. Of course, the explanation is simple and nothing like the “X-Files” mystery it appears like.

Naturally, this is just a military installation of some kind that has been censored on the maps (clone tool works nicely with forests). The plane was probably abandoned somewhere well away from the buildings and they missed removing it.

However, since we want to view maps as actual representations of reality, we instantly start building theories. “Hey, what’s wrong here?”

Every cat-owner knows that the worst thing you can do to a cat is closing the door behind you in a room. They go crazy from not knowing what’s happening in there. Humans are pretty much the same way when it comes to stuff that’s been removed from maps.

This is an efficient storytelling technique. If you want the reader to dwell on a setting’s mysteries, just make sure to point out that’s it not on any maps. The reader automatically goes, “hey, what’s wrong here?”

Last week, there were reports on a Soviet ghost town, Skrunda-1 in Latvia. It was abandoned in the 90s. Since it was home to two gargantual radar stations during the Cold War, the town wasn’t on any maps.

That the sale of this Skrunda-1 was noted in international media (AP and Reuters had stories on it that were picked up) is because it had a veil of secrecy to it. This was not a special case as no Soviet military facilities were marked on maps, but just by pointing out this fact, people go “Hey, what’s wrong with Skrunda-1″?

Trevor Paglen is a photographer that has modded the lens mount on his standard Canon to accept high-powered telescope lense. This way, he can photograph secret locations from miles away, taking shots that weren’t meant to exist. He’s also written Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World”.

He’s the cat that’s clawing behind the closed door, and we’re standing just behind him trying to get a peek inside – only because we’re not allowed to see it.

Humans are trained to solve puzzles and recognize patterns. A spot that’s removed from the map drives us insane since we don’t get enough information to decode what we’re seeing. Then we must compensate the lack of information by completing the image ourselves, and just like conspiracy theorists deep in Montana we begin by asking ourslves: “Hey, what’s wrong here?”

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Eleven years ago I had a temporary employment at a government agency, answering e-mail and faxes. Most of it regarded delicate issues which I wasn’t allowed to answer other than replying they would receive a decision later. I still remember one epic e-mail.

Today, I read on io9 that German scientists have found a relation between what your e-mail address is and your personality. That made me remember one of the e-mails I received at that job.

The mail came from thefalcon@blabla.com.

“Oh”, I thought, “must be terrible for him having to use that e-mail address.”

Because it felt like someone who believed he had thought up a cool user name a long time ago when he registered and then got stuck with it. Kind of like registering “hotdude16@blabla.com” and then having to use it when applying for a job at 24.

Anyway.

I read the e-mail which was written with the serious, formal approach that befits government correspondence. And then, at the end, it said:

Joe Smith, a.k.a THE FALCON

I don’t know… I guess today he has the title “Social Media Expert”?

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Except for Peter Gabriel’s “Birdy”, I can’t remember writing anything about film scores during my years as a music journalist. Well, I probably mentioned something about Tindersticks‘ soundtrack to “Nénette et Boni” and maybe Explosions In The Sky’s ditto for “Friday Night Lights”, but never the “regular” score. Hearing the soundtrack for Electronic Art’s “Mirror’s Edge” in a clothing store, I realize why.

I love many soundtracks, but that in itself doesn’t justify writing about them. For example, my heart breaks in a million pieces when I listen to Clint Mansell’s score for Darren Aronofsky’s “The Fountain”, but I don’t see what I could add to it in written text. It just doesn’t feel right, although that particular score is not different in spirit from the work of Max Richter or other piano/string/digital noise composer that I don’t hesitate to comment on.

I think it comes from the story’s already being told. The music has already been placed in context.

And I think that’s the reason too why I’ve never written a word about videogame music.

When “Play! – A Video Game Symphony” is touring, gamers fill the venues to listen to how famous game soundtracks sound when being performed by a “proper” orchestra (that sounds unintentionally conservative, but you get my drift).

Without having been to such an event, I assume that the experience is not so much about the music as about what the music represents. The boys and girls who are faced with the pompous renderings of the music from “Halo” are touched because they carry fond memories of the game rather than the music.

The melodies trigger memories of all-night struggles against level bosses and everyone walks away smiling.

My first really strong memory of computer game music was Matt Gray’s epic score for “Last Ninja II”. It took ages to load the first level from Commodore 64 cassette tape but it was worth it when you could listen to Gray’s tune. Ocean also excelled in the field of loading music (my favourite was Jonathan Dunn’s for “Target Renegade”).

I thought such nostalgic feelings for game music could only come about for a grown man remembering his youth, but a recent incident made me glad to find that in fact it wasn’t, that in-game music can still make its mark.

These days, I don’t have time to game as much as I would like to, but last summer I played through “Mirror’s Edge”. Not without difficulty, as my skills have miserably degraded over the years. The chase sequences were stressful and frustrating. The music’s high tempo got to me. Faith’s running from all the heat got my adrenaline pumping. And then…

Cut scene to the rooftops, a moment of quiet in the middle of the storm. The soothing track, light as air, a gentle piano playing with the same kind of flow that I try so hard to achieve in the parkour moves.

A short time after, I was in a store, shopping for clothes. Suddenly I heard the very same piano melody from the loudspeakers.

Time stopped.

I had to look it up and found it was Lisa Miskovsky’s title track for “Mirror’s Edge”. Normally, her made-for-FM-radio-pop leaves me completely blank. It’s just not my thing. But hearing her track “Still Alive” now, especially in its instrumental version, I realise it’s claimed its relevance as a moment of peace in a chaotic world.

I have played it throughout fall, whenever my heart is racing and deadline fever is coming upon me. It’s become a sedative, like David’s harp was to King Saul.

If “Still Alive” had been the ordinary run-of-the-mill radio ballad it would’ve completely passed me by, but the context and associations makes it possible for me to talk about the track’s harmonies, it’s soothing qualities, about why it’s the perfect track to accompany rooftop views over crowded cities.

But, the only way I can address those qualities is by first describing the associations themselves, i.e. the story of the game.

And that story has already been told.

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»Appointments NOT always necessary (You never know – you may be expected!)«

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You may remember that I recently praised the return of the airships?

Well, today I bought the new Alastair Reynolds novel “Terminal World” and discovered that the cover has no less than fifteen airships on it. I had no doubt this would be a cracking read before, but this certainly makes me even more eager.

Win!

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Hours after the Chile earthquake, there’s a drama unravelling in media that borrows its narrative from pop culture: The foreboding reporting. I’m not sure I feel comfortable with a tone borrowed from “The Day After Tomorrow” right after a major disaster.

As I’m writing this, media theorise on what may happen in a while rather than reporting what has happened. Is there a monsert wave in the depths of the ocean that will rise up and drown coastal towns in three hours? Five hours? Ten hours?

The mandatory scene in every virus movie is the briefing before the President, where some expert from Center for Disease Control shows projections on how many infections there will be in one day, three days, two weeks.

The same thing happens now, with charts showing the number of hours before the presumed wave reaches Hawaii, the Philippines, Japan.

It’s a dramatic narrative that leaves a bitter taste.

Just like the Twitter reporting from Iran this past summer, of course we do not follow it for our interest or concern for what’s actually happening. It’s the excitement of trying to piece together a puzzle from a distance that entices us.

The difference from Iran, where the suggestive drama lay only in the eye of the beholder, is that media actively pursues this line of reporting.

Naturally it has an impact. Daredevils, Formula 1 and luge attracts the public eye because we look up to anyone who tries to be as close to danger as possible. Of course, only as long as we do not have any responsibility and have no choice but to remain passive bystanders.

In its portrayal of the really real world, pop culture has created a number of narratives that signals to the viewer or reader when excitement lays ahead. Recently, the really real world has started using pop culture’s narrative to portray itself.

I’m not sure that feels ok.

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I usually argue that we’re waiting for a reaction in popular culture, that American Idol and the ongoing overdose of chewing gum pop will lead to people’s eventually being fed up and starting to dig deeper. I like to predict a slow-food movement within music that leads to noisy ambient and endless drones reach outside the inner circle of enthusiasts. I think Pan-American just disproved me.

I usually over-interpret the signs. Like morning daily’s writing full spreads on The Field, or the popularity of intelligent shows like “The Wire” or “Lost”, or that small-time experimental producers can go on world tours. Humble world tours, but still world tours.

Recently, I did an interview with Mark Nelson, more known as Pan-American, and I had to ask him about this, hoping he too saw the signs and could confirm this. I fished for arguments I could use next time I tried to make this point. Mark said:

“I think that as things are more stressful in peoples lives the more likely they are to return to what they know and trust already. There’s a small growth in quiet music or subtle music yes, but at the same time there’s a huge growth in reality tv shows and movies about comic book heros from the 50’s and 60’s! The speed with which culture is consumed is crazy. Most people have access to everything all the time and it’s a weird cultural wild fire, always needing more fuel to sustain itself. I expect at some point a reaction to this, but it also takes quite a bit of effort to surround one self with less. I’ve always felt that the listener was responsible for at least half the work to enjoy my records.”

Uhm, well. I don’t think my argument is valid anymore.

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I often argue that it’s ridiculous how grownups write children’s books, compose children’s songs and in other ways try to create culture for the young ones. It’s always done in a sophisticated way, with too much moral and lessons to be learned.

Children are the best creators there are. Nothing can measure up to their fantasies. They only need a good editor. Most of the time, a very good editor.

The webcomic “Axe Cop” is proof of this thesis. The twisted and violent comic is created by a five-year-old and illustrated by his 29-year-old brother. It’s nothing but brilliant.

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There’s nothing worse than conformity. At the point when everything starts to look and mean the same, it all loses relevance. That’s why SEO leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

When creative products are cast in the same mould and strive to accomplish similar things, the result in the end is just soulless nonsense. In all aspects, this blogpost is a disaster given what one “has” to do in order to make one’s voice heard in the digital abundance of information. But it’s a nice title, so it’s worth it.

Let me explain.

This July I sat in a gate at Charles de Gaulle airport. Waiting for my flight, I read Spanish newspaper El Pais and their reporting on the ongoing Tour de France. They had a story on Oscar Pereiro and his team Caisse d’…pargne with headline: “Chicos bien, moral alta”. (Approx: “They guys are well, morale is high”.)

When I read that I realized how dull titles optimized for search engines are. If that story had been on a blog trying to attract page impressions, the title surely would have been something like “Oscar Pereiro optimistic about Tour de France” or “Tour de France going well for Pereiro”.

This is where I have a huff.

SEO means everyone who is interested in driving traffic finds themselves having to use a specific template where the most important item becomes subject in the clause that is the title. The problem is that these titles lack all kinds of style and elegance.

“Chicos bien, moral alta” is a beautiful headline. It conveys feelings of unitedness, mutual goals and passion. It suggests the image of a team who may not have the best cyclists in the peleton but that will fight to survive.

“Oscar Pereiro optimistic about Tour de France” sounds like a clichÈ.

Of course, SEO hasn’t revolutionized information theori. Rule number one whenever you have to say something is to say the most relevant thing first. You have approximately 15 seconds from the reader’s laying eyes on the text until they stop unless you manage to capture them. That’s e-mails always should begin with the most important piece of information (Nigeria scammers would’ve earned much more if they wrote about the 1.000.000USD up for grabs in the introduction rather than the conclusion).

What I feel is sad about SEO is that it makes good reading institutionalized. No matter how well written, texts are not the same without a good title. As if random Death Cab For Cutie song would be entitled “Straight Forward Guitar Music With Lyrics About a Girl”.

Question: Would you have read this far if the title of this post was “SEO leads to rather dull blogpost titles”?

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Today, I read news that two politicians in the Swedish Left Party want to ban domestic flights and replace these with airships. Spontaneous thought: FINALLY! The dream of helium giants silently cruising above sleeping cities needs to be revived.

Few things have such close ties to Nazi esthetics as the airships. It’s there on the list of evil things next to polished boots, black uniforms and boxcars, but unlike those, the zeppelin’s guilt is only by association.

I do understand why it is like that. During World War 1, the Kaiser used his airships to bomb England. The sight of the majestic zeppelin became one of fear and terror. Following World War 2, it was no surprise that a vessel named after German military Ferdinand von Zeppelin was a hard sell.

The airship never survived the PR disaster that came along with the Hindenburg disaster in May 1937. Not only died 36 passengers on that fateful morning but also the dream of gasgiants in the sky.

That its sister ship Graf Zeppelin during a period of nine years had crossed the Atlantic no less than 144 times – and also flown non-stop between Los Angeles and Tokyo – without incident was easily forgotten as the Hindenburg craft became a burning inferno.

Anyway.

Where are we today?

When it comes to airplanes, we never got any further than the Concorde. The curtain came down and we forgot about it. The fantastic planes that would take us to the edge of weightlessness and then back again for super-fast transports between continents never happened. We never got any hovercars.

So, once again: FINALLY!

Airships deserve a renaissance. Their reputation deserves to be re-instated and not only be present as supporting roles in “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”, or as commercial blimps or police surveillance.

I can’t see why we should only ban domestic flights. Ban all airplanes! Visions, ladies and gentlemen. We need visions!

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I was watching the Winter Olympics from Vancouver and was confused by the starter’s gizmo in the speed skating event. It’s not only intriguingly futuristic but also a bit too similar to the weapons in “V” for me to just shake it off. And why does it flash when the starter press the button?

I had to get the facts by a real expert, so I contacted speedskating commentator Kenth Borgstrom of Eurosport who told me that starting pistols make too much noise indoors, so instead they use these things to create an artificial shot. And the flash is there in order to sync the manual timing which is always used (as a backup for the automatic) since you can’t start it accurately from the other side of the venue by ear (with normal starting pistols, you time with the muzzle flash).

There you go.

One mystery solved. So many to go.

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