der mann ohne eigenschaften

You know I watched the first two episodes of netflix's Cocaine cowboys. One thing was that they mentioned Gloria Estefan, Miami Sound Machine with the song Conga. So of course I remembered Mitchell and Webb Jane Austin sketch there Robert Webb as Mr Darcy informed us that: “A gentleman does not conga”. (Then he starts dancing to some Britney/ Max Martin tones instead, because anachronisms are always funny.) Just thought I should share.





Well on the same site I also saw Rhythm & flow. I grew up in North Sweden,. I want to write that I grew up by a forest, that I grew up in the frozen north, in the land of reindeers. But with other words I grew up in an upper, academic middle class neighbourhood. And hip hop wasn’t a big part of that. Hip hop somehow told me that “911 is a joke, in your town”, but not much more. However, it's very a creative - and I think I dare to write flamboyan - culture. I like that.

So I’m taking a short course. That's why I have downloaded Zoom. Before that I only had used Teams. Perhaps it’s noteworthy that I previously have seen one of the women behind the course, she’s in a short clip presenting Umeå for European capital of innovation 2018. That’s a thing with my hometown, it was a runner up for European capital of innovation 2018. Being a runner up for that must be as big as being a runner up for Eurovision Song Contest. Haha

Otherwise lately I have watched the movies Independence day, Deep impact and Close encounter of the third kind. Old movies about space are great escapism. Partly I am ridiculously nostalgic. Partly space simply is the ultimate escapism. Or as the poets in Red hot chili pepper said it: “Space may be the final frontier but it’s made in a Hollywood basement”, in the song Californication. And Californication, that’s a thing with my hometown. According to a backside of a book my parents have in a bookshelf, the local university is built in "Californian campus style". (Here's a blog post I found with winter photos of the town and campus, if you want to see a Californian campus in snow.)

So nostalgia, I grew up in a neighbourhood , built in the 1970, with low and dense buildings, inspired by ideas from Denmark. A neighbourhood on the edge of a Feno-Scandinavian boreal forest, growing on podzol. A neighbourhood close to an apparently Californian campus from the 1960s. Then I could find patterns. Our university has reindeer heads as a logo. The company Caribou Biosciences also has a reindeer head as its logo. Caribou bioscience was founded by Jennifer Doudna (university of California). Last year she shared a Nobel Prize with Emmanuelle Charpentier, the Frenchwoman who made her Nobel prize winning research at this university. Coincidence? On the roads outside the town you in the winter still can see domesticated reindeers licking road salt from the roads.  A third thing about reindeers. There’s a Venice beach in California, but to compare us to the original. Venice has a lion with wings in their civic heraldry. We, this county, have a reindeer without wings in our. But it was us, not Venice, that can take credit for the gene scissor that can be used for making fabulous animals.

Btw. some wording here are shoehorned in from poems I used when applying to a writing course last year. (I wasn’t accepted to that.)

Netflix recommend me the movie The ninth gate, directed by Roman Polanski (starring Johnny Depp, Lena Olin, etc, not important). So what’s that phrase I keep reading: “cancel culture”. Now I also remember that dad thought The fearless vampire killers (same director) was one of the funnies movies he seen growing up. I don’t think he knows about Polanski, and that guys story. Dad isn’t interested in international celebrities or their life, in this case their crimes. Ok, maybe it's silly but I would not like to tell dad that one of his favorite movie was made by a convicted child rapist. You know how I mean.

Nor did I know about Polanski when I saw The ninth gate. I did worked with used books when I saw it. That made the movie more interesting, but well, that’s not important.

One band that I sometimes can't help myself but listen to is Sabaton. I can write about them and end up writing about transhumanism. For those who don’t know Sabatons nich is heavy metal songs about historical war. Songs with war like lyric like “On the quietest night in the darkest hour, / The kriegsmarine appear”, or “August in black, b-29 coming back, prepare for nuclear attack” or to take a non second world war example: “Cannonballs are coming down from the sky / Janissaries are you ready to die?”, the last being about the siege of Vienna 1683. Apparently the singer has said that they do not glamorous war, just tells it how it was. The problem is that young men and boys sees every war description as glamorous? Example: correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Full metal jacket, Apocalypse now and The Platoon meant to be anti-war movies but young guys still thought those movies celebrated the Vietnam war as a glamorous adventure (if all girls in the world got the anti-war message is another question)? So the same could happen with Sabatons songs. Because we guys are that screwed up in the head when we are young and we should consider surgery on parts of the lizard brain?

The last might not be a bad idea. Food, sex, to say nothing about fear, violence and aggression makes life harder. So we can live without those parts of the brain. Beside eternal youth, isn’t transhumanism about getting away from the pain of being human?

One other song I have been listen to is Wind of change by Scorpions, and that I have no reason to be a shame over, right? Those lines:
"Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow share their dreams (share their dreams)
With you and me
Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night (the glory night)
Where the children of tomorrow dream away (dream away)
In the wind of change (the wind of change)
The wind of change
Blows straight into the face of time
Like a stormwind that will ring the freedom bell"

That’s 1990s nostalgia. The end of the cold war. The optimistism, I am glad I got to live thro that. And if the last songs made me think about transhumanism, this makes me think about football. Logic because before the world cup in football 1994, the ruling world champion Germany parted with Scorpions. So my question is 1994 when Bill Clinton opened the world championship in football (it was in the US that year), did he say “football” or “soccer”?

Endnote. The last weeks I have been writing three or four entries that I haven’t posted. Perhaps this should have been one of them I didn’t post, or not.